Read Grist 04 - Incinerator for Free Online Page A

her sister’s leash, and the bitch calls me and says everybody’s okay.
    “ ‘Everybody who?’ I say. ‘I’m not okay. I seen DOAs who are more okay than I am.’ And she laughs this pissy little laugh and says, honest to Christ, Simeon, she says, ‘Oh, you men. You don’t know when you’re well off.’
    “ ‘Well off,’ I say. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
    “ ‘Hazel told me how you swore,’ she says. ‘I must say, it’s not very becoming. Not in a grown man, anyway.’ ” Hammond finally registered the new drinks. He finished the one in his hand.
    “Drink, me hearty,” said Al the Red, hoisting the fuller of the two new ones.
    I drank. The room was beginning to waver as though I were seeing it over an active radiator.
    “Well off?” I asked.
    “Sure,” Hammond said in a voice that would have straightened the hair on a sheep. “After I apologized for my French and asked her real polite and genteel where they all were and she said she couldn’t tell me, then she said, and listening to it would have given Liberace diabetes, she said, ‘Wasn’t it sweet of little Al to go out and buy you those paper plates? He wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.’ ” He lowered his head onto his bulging forearms. “Little Al,” he repeated. “Holy Jesus, little Al.”
    Without thinking, I reached over and put my hand on top of his head. Sober, he’d have killed me. “Hey, Al the Red,” I said, “let’s go home.”
    He straightened up and looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. I yanked my hand back. Three feet from my nose, it smelled of hair oil.
    “Fuckin’ A,” he said. He threw the half-full glass to the floor. It splintered and splashed. Still no one looked at us. We were invisible.
    Hammond lurched to his feet. “To the ship,” he said, adjusting his kerchief. “And damn the torpedoes. Full fucking speed ahead. Whatever way ahead is.”
    After I drained my glass, I guided him unsteadily to the street, my arm around his Mount Rushmore shoulders, and steered him into Alice, my car. He snored all the way to his empty house and then refused help getting inside. I watched Al the Red go, and waited until the door was slammed shut and locked. A hot wind blew, and the air smelled of smoke. I had to make a detour on the way back to Topanga to avoid a fire area, a long-familiar profile of mountains now enveloped in flame.
    Between the beer and the whiskey, it took me only a few minutes to fall asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was famous.

4
    Fame
     
    The phone started in at eight o’clock. It rang several times, penetrating a rather large region of murky pain that turned out to be the inside of my head. When it became apparent that the phone had more stamina than I did, I rolled over and picked the damn thing up.
    “Hang up and call me tomorrow,” were my first words of the bright new day. I’d sweated into the sheets, and they were damp and wadded. They stank of whiskey and smoke and the Red Dog and something even ranker, something I couldn’t place.
    “This is Channel Five,” said the female voice on the other end, as though that explained everything.
    “I don’t care if it’s the Channel Islands,” I said. “Get the hell out of my ear.” I hung up, hard enough to crack the handset. Then I rolled over, clutched the dank pillow to me, and pretended that the pillow was my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan. Eleanor smelled better, but she wasn’t there. My eyelids scratched and closed over shards of broken glass, and I dozed instantly.
    I hadn’t even had time to work up an erotic dream when the phone screamed again. “What time is it?” I demanded.
    “Eight-twelve by my unreliable, mass-produced watch,” said a supernaturally cheerful voice, “Seventeen jewels, and all of them fakes. How you doing, Simeon?”
    “What a goddamn stupid question,” I said.
    “This is Pat.”
    In the whole world, I couldn’t think of a soul named Pat. Pat Nixon came