Skin Deep Read Free Page B

"There's a phone number here. Use it if he gives you a problem. You can call it anytime, day or night." I looked up at Roxanne. "You going to help out or not?"
    She shrugged. "I guess. I'll get her a cab."
    "Get her two if she wants them, they're on Prince Valiant here. Are you going to be here when I get back?" The siren was louder now.
    Roxanne gave me a dubious look and then a small shrug. "What the hell," she said.
    "See you then," I said. I put my arm around the hero's shoulders. "Come on, beautiful," I told him, "this is your exit."
    For the first twenty minutes or so after he told me to turn right—north, up toward the Malibu Colony—we shared your basic sullen silence. His fringe flapped in the breeze through the open window, and he sucked at his mangled tongue and fingered his jaw once in a while, but other than that he kept his conversational skills to himself.
    That was fine with me.
    Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway was light in both directions. The fireworks were about to start, and most people were staying put. Sweet Alice, the low-rider's special I'd won at cards from a glue-sodden card player named Jaime on a night of which I had only fragmentary memories because of Jaime's generosity with his glue, was chugging along in an exemplary fashion. She was in temporary remission from the tubercular cough that had plagued her recently. Maybe it was the carburetor, whatever that was.
    At any rate, that was the limit of my mechanical sophistication, a state I'd long considered remedying. My long-ago graduate adviser when I was taking my doctorate in English, a waspish and perfectly dressed Ph.D. named Miles Brand, maintained that there were people who were put on earth solely to tend to the health of carburetors, and that any attempt by the rest of us to penetrate those mysteries was nothing more or less than irresponsible monkeying with God's master plan. Miles's comfortable faith in the secure future of the upper classes was much greater than mine, probably a result of his lifelong love for Victorian novelists. Trollope, Dickens, Gissing, and Thackeray in the nineteenth century—and, for that matter, Miles in the twentieth—didn't seem to worry as much about gravity as I did. What happens to the top of the social pyramid when you pull out the bottom three or four layers? In all, it seemed to me that the people who understood carburetors could get along much better without the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray than the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray could get along without the people who understood carburetors.
    About twelve miles up the road, Mr. Beautiful stirred. He dabbed once or twice at his lip and then reached into his leather pocket and pulled out a small wad of tissue. "Don't hit any bumps," he said sulkily.
    I aimed for something that could have been a large tortoise or a small land mine and hit it. Alice bounced. "Anything else?" I said. Roxanne had given us some paper towels as we left, and he'd wadded a couple around his cut palm. They got in his way as he tried to unwrap the tissues. He swore sharply and pulled the paper towels loose from his hand, tossed them to the floor, and peeled open the tissue. In it were six white pills, four small ones and two that were larger.
    I've always had an active pharmaceutical curiosity, a vestige of several years of frequently terrifying experimentation. Against my will, I said, "What's that?"
    "A load," he said. "Hey, don't make me talk, I've got to get some spit together." He worked his mouth for a moment, then threw his head back and tossed down all six at once. They went down as though he'd oiled his throat. "One perfect world coming up," he said.
    "What's a load?" I'd never heard of it.
    "Four codeine—four grams each—and two Doriden. I don't like you very much right now, but I could be crazy about you in a few minutes."
    He swallowed hard a couple of times and leaned back. A mile glided by in the thickening dark. To our left, on