"So Rockland had written off Bruce Bundy, at least as far as any willing donation is concerned. So he decides to leave with the things that look most valuable, going on the basis that the Bundys of this world seldom blow the whistle. They would rather write off the loss than make it police business. But Bundy was too cute. And when Rockland tried to jump him, Bundy was too rough. Rockland got black-belted all to h.e.l.l. It probably made him pretty sick. But he had to get out of there on Sat.u.r.day to meet Minda."

"What would he be most worried about?" Meyer asked.

"I guess he would realize that if Wally McLeen located his daughter, that would end any chance of selling the information and delivering the girl to him for a price."

"So we have a gap in the sequence. Better than twenty-four hours, and we have Bix and an American up on that mountain Sunday afternoon, parked and both out of the car and talking. Because it was Bundy"s yellow car, we can a.s.sume it was Walter Rockland with Bix. He had to have a way to get down off the mountain. He could walk it after dark. But it would be full daylight before he could get down to the valley floor."

"Or somebody picked him up, by arrangement."

"He"d run out of people," Meyer said. "And if it was by arrangement, then there would have to be the a.s.sumption that he knew she would take off with the car and wouldn"t make it all the way down. How could he be sure she wouldn"t? What would the motive be?"

"Then there"s the next gap until Tuesday morning, when he took the camper out of Bundy"s shed." Meyer shook his head. "It doesn"t fit together: None of it. We just don"t have enough of the missing pieces to even be able to guess how many other pieces are missing. Unless Jerome Nesta is willing to talk freely, we might as well go home. And maybe even if he does talk it won"t be helpful."

Just then the Guadalajara sisters came clattering and squealing down upon us, laden with purchases, and there was much arrangement of girls and packages. They were still avid with the l.u.s.t and fury of shopping, and they made expensive burlesques of total exhaustion, then dived into the bags and bundles to open the small ones for the rea.s.sur ance of our admiration, and pluck open the corners of the big ones to show the pattern and texture of bright fabric.

And where is Lita? Ah, there was someone here in this city she had to call, an odd couple who were friends of her mother, and she had been putting it off, so at last she called and they had asked her to come to have lunch with them, and it seemed as good a time as any, so she had phoned Enelio and informed him and had gone to meet the old couple. So Enelio would not join us either.

The sisters were both thirsty and famished, so as soon as a drink came they ordered lunch, and then went chattering on up to their little hotel suite to drop their purchases and freshen up.

They had made crackling inquisition of the waiter, and so we had ordered what they had ordered. It was very, very good indeed, and not at all heavy.

After lunch Margarita, the one with the best command of English, said, "Meyer, I wish to ask of you one great favor, a very selfish thing, a very dull thing for you. I am silly. You can say no, please."

"I say yes. Okay."

"Without knowing, even! You remember at the place coming into Mitla at the right side, how I saw the mos" lovely color shawl and cried out to all to look? There is no such color in the market here. I must have, Meyer. I must go and buy it in Mitla or it will be gone forever and never, never will I see another one."

"So we will all go to Mitla. Right, Travis? No problem, ladies."

"Please, wissout Elena," said Elena. She put the back of her fist in front of a gigantic yawn. "You three are going. I am sitting and then up above sleeping, I think."

"Okay," I said. "Wissout McGee too, if you don"t mind."

They didn"t mind. They took a cab up the hill to the hotel after I told Meyer to look for the Falcon keys on my bureau. We watched the people, few and slow-moving in the time of siesta.

"Asking one favor too? Okay?"

"Sure, Elena."

"Maybe one little swimming in the so beautiful pool as before we were?"

I agreed. She went up and came down quickly with a little blue airline bag. We strolled over to the cab row on the post-office street and took a cab up to the hotel. She changed first in our cottage named Alicia, and came out in a narrow bikini that was a froth of rows of crisp horizontal white ruffles, and by the time I got up to the pool she was swimming, wearing a swim cap covered with vivid plastic daisies. People were baking in the sun, and except for some children in the shallow end, we had the pool to ourselves. She was an unskilled and earnest swimmer, rolling and thrashing too much, expending too much effort and trying to hold her head too high. I told her a few things that would help, and swam beside her. She learned quickly and was very pleased with herself and kept at it until she was winded and gasping. We climbed out and she pulled the cap off and said, "Now enough I think. Okay?"

We walked back down to Alicia, among the cottages below and beyond the pool, and I unlocked the door for her and sat on the porch while she went in to change. I heard the clatter as she closed the blinds.

"Tuh... rrrravis? Por favor, ayudarme? Thees dombo theeng is es-stock."

So if something is es-stock, one must go in and un-ea-stock it for the lady. She was between beds and bath, back toward me, still in bikini, and she looked over her shoulder and indicated the snap or fastening or whatever at the back of the bikini top was es-stock.

So I went to her. She pulled her long dark hair forward and stood with head bowed. She held the bikini top against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with her hands. There were two snaps hidden by ruffles. I put a thumbnail under one and it popped. I put a thumbnail under the other and it popped and the two straps fell, dangling down the side of her rib cage. She stood without moving. It was a lithe and lovely back. Droplets of water stood on her back and shoulders. Crease down the soft brown back. Pale down, paler than her skin, heaviest near the vertical furrow. The bikini bottom came around her just a little above the widest part of her hips, leaving bare that lovely duplicated tender concavity of the girl-waist, leaving bare two dimples in the sunhoneyed brown, half a handspan apart, below the base of her spine.

So the response is an acceptance, a dedication, a tenderness expressed by very slowly, very precisely, very carefully placing the male hands upon the slenderest part of the waist, thumbs resting against the back, aimed upward, parallel to the center division of the back, edges of the hands resting against that soft shelf where the hips begin to bloom. She shivered at the touch, then lifted her head and leaned back against me. I bent and kissed the top of her shoulder, close to her throat, felt the dampness of some tendrils of hair which the swim cap had not completely protected. She was breathing very steadily, audibly, deeply, and her eyes were heavy and almost closed when I turned her around and kissed her on the mouth.

"But... they might come back here," I said. She gave a little shake of her head and spoke through soft blurred lips. "No, no. She will taking Meyer to the Marques to see dresses she bought. She trying them on for him, no hurry. Ah, she bought one h.e.l.l of a lot of dresses, that sister mine." So you go over and bolt the door, and the room is golden with the sun through the tiny cracks of the closed slats. She wants to be looked at, yet is at the same time shy. She is avid and timorous. She is experienced to a small degree, yet unsure. There is a musky-sweet, pungent scent of herself in her heat, distinctively her own. She has a secret inward smile when the pleasure is good for her. She has a long strong belly and rubbery-powerful hips and thighs, yet there are no feats of astonishing muscle control, no researched ancient trickeries, and that is a sweet and simple relief. Approaching climax her body heats and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swell and her mouth sags. She deepens her strong and heavy beat and her eyes roll wild in the dim room, as if in panic, and she rolls her head from side to side and has the look of listening; and of being afraid of what is rolling up out of the depths of her, and then she is into all of it, making a very small and very sweet whimpering, and holding tight, like a child on a high scary place.

Siesta is sweet when the light is gold, and when the vivid young face on the pillow looks into yours, beside her, inches away, and smiles the woman-smile older than time, her exhalations warm against your mouth, as with slow fingers she traces your brows, lips, and the shape of cheek and jaw. There is nothing more es-stock. It has all been unfastened, all turned loose, with a guile that was so sweetly planned it could not be denied, even had there been any thought of denying it. Elena, you are the Mexican afternoons forever.

Fourteen.

AT ELEVEN On Wednesday morning Enelio Fuentes brought Jerome Nesta to our cottage at the Hotel Victoria. Nesta acted sullen, uncommunicative. He wore the same clothes, but otherwise I would not have recognized him.

Enelio said, "They gave him a choice with the big bushy beard. Take it off himself, or they"d strap him down and take it off with a dull knife. The haircut was done by a jailor with no talent, eh?"

"Have your laughs," Nesta mumbled. The area where the beard had been was blue-white and nicked in a half dozen places. His scalp shone pale through a half inch of black bristle. Without the beard he looked older. I remembered he was twenty-six. He looked thirty. There were deep lines bracketing his mouth. Also, without the beard he looked almost frail. His hands were big and heavily callused from the work with the mallet.

"One thing they forgot," Enelio said. "Out in the open if you stay upwind from him, it"s not bad. In the car you keep the window open and stay close to it, very important. In this room, this size, he is impossible. It cannot be endured."

"Screw yourself," Nesta, muttered, eyes downcast I went into the dressing-room closet and picked some tan slacks I"d never liked much, and the white sports shirt that had been, despite all instructions, starched, and some laundered jockey shorts and socks which had seen dutiful valiant service. I handed him the bundle and said, "Go in and scrub."

"Screw yourself," he said again.

"Enelio," I said, "can you give this thing back to the law, or don"t they want him either?"

"As a favor to me, they"ll give him his same cell back."

"Then take him along. Thanks for your trouble. I don"t need to talk to him. Not right now. Not this way. When they fly into Miami, I"ll have him picked up there."

"For what?" Nesta asked.

"We"ll think of something," I said.

"How about air pollution?" Meyer asked.

"Dade County loans able-bodied prisoners to Collier County for road work," I said. "Sheriff Doug Hendry"s people give a short course in manners and personal hygiene."

Nesta looked at me, then at Enelio. It was a quick, flickering glance of appraisal. Without the beard he had the con look, the loser look. He had been there before, and knew he would be back there again, and it didn"t make too much difference whether it was going to be a valid rap. He had the cronkey look, that flavor of upcoming trouble that alerts any cop anywhere. I don"t know what it is. It is a combination of facial expression, posture, gesture-and the experience of the cop who sees the stranger and sees that indefinable thing he has seen so many times before. The animal behavior experts report that something similar exists in those wild animals who have some form of community culture. Certain individuals will be run off by the others, will be killed, or will be left to roam alone.

He picked the clean clothing off the floor and went into the bathroom and slammed the door. Enelio said, "The shock yesterday opened him up. He talked pretty good, remember? So now he closed the doors and locked them. I don"t know if he"ll talk to you. I know d.a.m.n well he won"t talk if I"m here. The chemistry is not good. I better go. You know, one funny thing. You types from the Estados Unidos, too many talk about dirty Mexicans, right? Okay. Those little huts over there on that hill. Poor people. Carry water a h.e.l.l of a distance. And take a bath every day, and the women wash that long hair every day. Clean, clean, clean. So we talk about dirty heepies. There is an old dirty heepie in there, showering. But I have had the pleasure of knowing some of your little heepie crumpets, and they have been, my friend, deliciously fresh and sweet and clean. Clean and shining as the beards on some of their boyfriends. So, big conclusion. There are dirty Mexicans and dirty heepies. But it is not a characteristic, hey?"

"Thanks for getting him out."

"Use your judgment. If there"s a chance he"ll make trouble, we better stick him back inside fast. He looks to me as if he wants to take off."

"The bathroom window has bars on it too."

"I noticed. If you decide he"s trouble, take him in yourself and give him to Sergeant Martinez, okay?" We thanked him and he left.

Room service, as a concession to the standard issue American tourist, has hamburgers with everything all day, long. I phoned up for two for Nesta, and a pot of coffee. He showered for a long time. At last he came out. My stuff was big for him, except around the waist. He had to turn the bottoms of the slacks up. He had wadded his old clothes up. Meyer told him to stuff them into the wastebasket and put the wastebasket out on the porch. Nesta looked guarded and selfconscious. Before he had come out, antic.i.p.ating problems, I had told Meyer we had better go into the good-guy bad-guy routine if he seemed too uncooperative.

"Sit down, Jerry," I said. "I want you to start at the beginning. How did the five of you get together originally and decide to come to Mexico?"

"Maybe we answered an ad."

I glanced at Meyer. We"d have to try the routine. The hotel waiter arrived with the tray, and that gave me my opening.

"Did you order this stuff, Meyer? For him?"

"When you walked out with Enelio. Yes."

"Out of the goodness of your heart? Your motherly instinct? You want grat.i.tude from this dreary b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"

"I don"t imagine he got much to eat in jail, Travis."

"That"s one part of the hotel bill we don"t split down the middle. That little gesture is all yours." Nesta took a small, tentative bite, and then wolfed the two hamburgers down. He was taking a gulp of the coffee when I asked him the same question again.

"Maybe we had this real great travel agent," Nesta said.

I waited until he set the cup down, then took a long reach and backhanded him across the chops. It was quick and substantial. It rocked his head and emptied his eyes.

Meyer jumped up and yelled at me. "What are you trying to do? You"ve got no right to do that! Give him a little time. He"ll explain it all."

"I know he"ll explain it all. Because somewhere along the line the message is going to get through to him. He"s going to talk it all out or I am going to keep bending him until something breaks. And he is going to tell it straight because he doesn"t know how many ways I have to check it all out. I know this slob beat a possession indictment three years ago. I know he was inside the Bowie house at Cricket Bayou on several occasions. I know they all crossed in on the tenth, from Brownsville into Matamoros, and I know exactly when the Bowie girl got the money in Culiacan, and exactly how much. And I know a lot of other things that better match with what he says, and if they don"t match, you"d better take a long walk Meyer, because there are some things you don"t like to watch. They upset your stomach."

"That"s no way to talk to him!" Meyer said.

"Look at him! Look at the expression. It"s the only way to talk to this pot head."

"I think you better take the walk McGee," Meyer said.

"I"ll be right on the porch, because you"re going to need me, my friend."

I slammed the door. I sat in one of the porch chairs and put my heels up on the brick railing. Meyer would take it as far as he could, and then it would be my turn, and between the two of us we had a chance of whipsawing him.

From the porch I could hear the tone of their voices without being able to hear the words. I heard Meyer mostly, and then I began to hear more and more of Nesta"s voice. It was the Meyer magic at work. I looked through the window. Nesta sat on the end of Meyer"s bed, leaning over on one elbow. Meyer had turned the desk chair around and he sat facing Nesta.

They say that only a small portion of personal communication is verbal, and that the rest of it is posture, expression, gesture, those physical aspects of man which antedate his ability to speak. Meyer constructs somehow a small safe world, a place where anything can be said, anything can be understood, and all can be forgiven. We are all, every one, condemned to believe that if we could ever make another human understand everything that went into any act, we could be forgiven. The act of understanding bestows importance and meaning, encouraging confession.

After a half hour I knew he was going to get all of it, and so I went for the walk. I went up to the hotel and picked up a cold beer at the bar, which had just opened, and carried it out onto the porch overlooking all the cottages and the summer city beyond. The scent of flowers was heavy. Gardeners were working on the green lawns. Sprinkler heads were clicking their big slow circles, and birds hopped and preened in the falling mist. A lithe la.s.s, deeply sunbrowned and wearing a vivid orange bikini, stood alone on the diving tower, using the railing to practice the standard exercise of ballet. She was moist with her efforts, smooth skin gleaming in the sun. Her hair was tucked into a plastic swim cap cl.u.s.tered with plastic daisies.

The cold dark beer stopped halfway to my lips, and even before I could make the mental a.s.sociation-yes, that is the kind of swim cap Elena wore yesterday-there was such a violent surge of desire for the girl from Guadalajara that it startled me. Becky diminished need. Elena compounded it. Elena had, with a splendid earthiness spiced with innocent wonder, so emphatically superimposed herself on the memories of Becky, I would have to carry those memories into a bright light to see who the h.e.l.l they were about. After those dedicated decades striving to become the very best, thinking she had attained it, it would have crushed her to find out a sweet Latin amateur was, in the light of memory, by far the better of the two, more stirring, more fulfilling, and far more sensuous.

So make a note, McGee. There are some things which practice does not enhance: Thunderstorms never practice. Surf does not take graduate lessons in hydraulics. Deer and rabbits do not measure how high they have jumped and go back and try again. Violinists must work at it and study. And ballerinas. And goalies and shortstops and wingbacks and acrobats. But that business of acquiring expertise in s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g turns it into something it wasn"t meant to be.

Beer finished, I went back to the cottage to see how Meyer was doing. I was amused at Meyer and at myself. We were very formal with each other today. Remote, thoughtful, and formal. I had bought Elena a late dinner the night before at the hotel and sent her home in a cab-at her insistence on not being a nuisance. Meyer had arrived as I was getting ready for bed. Yes, he had eaten in town. Not had, actually. Car had run fine. Margarita had found the shawl. Sleep well. Good night.

I looked through the window. Nesta had a hand over his eyes. Meyer waved me away.

Back up the hill. Drifted around. Watched the happy vacationers at play. Kept out of the line of people taking happy pictures of each other. Admired shrubbery clipped into the shapes of animals. Elephant. Ostrich. Donkey. Tried to remember the name for that particular art form. Couldn"t.

Sat on a stone bench and tried to bring back some specific memory of Bix Bowie the day Meyer brought her aboard the Flush. Couldn"t. Brain apparently failing along with everything else. Premature instant senility. But Meyer had the vivid memories of the girl. Vivid and now painful. And some more painful images to put on top of the heap.

Finally went back. Meyer was on the porch, sitting in a kind of slack, dumpy solemnity. I looked through the window. Nesta was sprawled on Meyer"s bed, with a blanket over him.

I sat down beside Meyer. "So?"

"I feel sick."

"That bad?"

"Bad. Yes. And... pointless. Wasteful."

"Did you get all of it?"

"I don"t see how there could be anything more. He"s exhausted, physically and emotionally. And he"s not alone."

"How did the group get together?"

"Bix had some friends at the University of Miami, kids she went to public school with in Miami. After her mother died, she looked them up. She met Carl Sessions at a party. They started going around together. Carl knew Jerry Nesta. Jerry was Carl"s connection for marijuana. Jerry was living with Minda McLeen. And he also made deliveries out to the Beach, to Walter Rockland, as a go-between. He and Rockland talked about some way to make a big score someday. The four of them, Carl, Bix, Jerry and Minda began running around together. Rockland found out Bix had some money from her mother"s will. Rockland talked Nesta into helping him promote the Mexico trip. Sessions had already turned Bix on to pot, and she obviously took to it all too well, as some will. Rockland claimed to have a good contact in Mexico where they could buy pure heroin at Mexican wholesale prices. The idea was to get Bix down there, talk her into financing it, smuggle it across the line and peddle it to a wholesaler in Los Angeles. So Nesta helped Rocko develop some enthusiasm among the other three to take a Mexican vacation. Bix was willing to buy the camper and the supplies and pay expenses. She did not seem to care about the money one way or another, or really care much whether she went or stayed. So when Rocko was fired, they moved the timetable up and got ready and left, and there was absolutely nothing Harl Bowie could do about stopping her."

"But she didn"t know the real reason."

"Not until later. And by then I guess you could say it was too late for her to do anything about it. You see, Rockland was the only one of the five who was not a user of anything at all. In fact, not even liquor except very rarely and then too much. No cigarettes. A physical culture type. But he had a couple of mimeographed sheets he"d paid five dollars for in Miami. They give the trade and generic name of a list of pharmaceuticals available in the States on prescription only, but available over the counter in Mexico. Opposite each was the Spanish name and the phonetic p.r.o.nunciation. They bought good strong pot the minute they were over the border, and at Monterrey they loaded up with items off the list. Rockland was in charge, ostensibly to keep peohle from taking too much when they were too stoned to know what they were taking. He kept the drugs locked in the tool compartment of the truck, but the pot was available at any time. Rocko set a slow pace across Mexico. It was the cold season. He and Nesta shared the driving. When they found a good place to camp, they would stay two or three days. They went from Monterrey to Torreon to Du rango to Mazatlan. Nesta doesn"t know how long it took. He said it could have been a year or a week. He said it was all pretty blurred. Rockland would dole them out a mixed bag of opiates and stimulants, barbiturates and mescaline, and he said you didn"t know what kind of a high you were going into until you were there, and some of them were bad."

"It"s a wonder he didn"t kill somebody."

"I know. In the beginning Bix was paired off with Carl Sessions, and Minda McLeen with Jerry Nesta. Those relationships fragmented. It didn"t turn into some kind of orgy, even though repeating what he told me makes it sound that way. Apparently the first deviation was when Rocko made love to Bix. Carl was angry and upset about it at first, but he got over it when Minda slept with him because she felt sorry for him. Then Jerry Nesta fought with Minda, and then got even with her by sleeping with Bix. Except for the tension in the beginning, it seemed to all iron out into a kind of casual and, except for Rocko, infrequent thing. Nesta told me that Bix was totally placid and submissive. It didn"t matter to her which of the three had her. She seemed to accept and endure, with no evidence of either pleasure or displeasure. Once when Carl was still reasonably lucid Nesta asked him if Bix had ever been pa.s.sionate with him, and Carl said no. By then Minda was taking care of Bix. Unless prodded and helped she wouldn"t wash, brush her teeth, blow her nose, change her clothing. It was a process of disintegration for all of them. Except Rocko. Each was hooked in his or her own way. Rocko was the ground control. Sessions apparently became ever more hopelessly addicted to methadone, moving in a fumbling, stumbling, hazy dream, losing all s.e.xual drive. Nesta was on pot and mescaline. Minda McLeen was on stimulants, amphetamine and dexedrine compounds, getting ever more shaky and thin and nervous, and becoming ever more physically dependent on Rockland. Do you see the pattern, Travis?"

"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And a five way split is a lot of ways to split it."

"But Nesta apparently didn"t suspect. As they neared Culiacan, Rocko took Bix"s indispensible pot away from her, and so she behaved exactly as directed, sent for the money, cashed the draft, turned the money over to Rocko, and was rewarded with a half-dozen joints and swiftly sucked her way back into her waking dream. Rockland"s contact had been reliable. They got pure heroin in hill quant.i.ty. Rocko, working alone, transferred it Into small sacks made of thick transparent plastic tied with nylon cord, and took an inside panel off the camper and stowed it in the shallow s.p.a.ce between the inside and outside skin. He was nervous on the way up to Nogales. Sessions got on his nerves, playing the same chords over and over and over on the guitar, until one evening Rocko took the tin snips out of the tool box and cut the strings off. But Sessions kept playing as if nothing had happened. All they could hear were his fingernails on the frets and the box. Ten miles out of Nogales, Rocko decided that it had all been too easy. He decided to make a dry run. So he tied all the little bags up in a raincoat and buried it in the dirt near a flowering bush. He took Bix with him to the border, taking her off pot for a full day first. He left the three others with the supply of pills and pot in a cheap motel, with orders to wait until they crossed back in. They came back four days later. He had new papers on the truck and camper, and new tourist cards for himself and Bix. But Rocko was savagely angry. The sellers had apparently tipped the customs people: The total search took fifteen hours, and they had to rea.s.semble the truck and camper when it was over. The border people knew the names of the five of them, said they knew they had made a large buy, and said that no matter how they tried to bring it back across, they would be nailed, all together, or one at a time."

"Very thorough."

"They went back down Route Fifteen and recovered the heroin. Rocko concealed it in the camper. They made camp well off the road by a dry stream bed another ten or twenty miles down the road. Rocko was in a foul mood. Minda, humming and burning with energy, was doing the cooking, washing, laundry, mending, housekeeping, and taking care of Bix, her hair and her person. During the second day at that place, she began complaining to Rocko that they were neariy out of cooking gas, that the gauge was way down. When would he get it filled? She was sick of having to make fires with sticks when they were out of gas. He paid no attention. And then she said that at least the border people hadn"t let the gas out of the tank, and she should be grateful for that much. He jumped up and ran and examined the tank. The fill valve and the outlet valve were part of the bra.s.s a.s.sembly that was- fastened onto the top of the tank. They drove south and at Hermosillo he bought two small pipe wrenches and got the whole a.s.sembly off. The orifice was just large enough so that by rolling the plastic bags between his palms he could make them small enough to drop into the tank. He put one in the tank and had it refilled at Hermosillo. Three days later he let the gas escape and, with some difficulty apparently, got the bag out. It looked and tasted fresh and unharmed, so he loaded the bags into the tank and got it filled again. Nesta thought he would start for the border right away. But Rocko was unexpectedly relaxed and unhurried. There was a pretty good piece of Bix"s money left. They might as well see the country. He became very charming."

"Life of the party."

"Sure. He even had a special little treat for Carl Sessions. On the way south in Ciudad Obregon he picked up a hypo and some distilled water, some cotton swabs and some alcohol, and he fixed his good friend Sessions a nice little pop and injected it under the skin on the underside of his forearm. Sessions got very sick from it. But Rocko kept helping him out until finally Carl could inject himself and feel very good. Then when he had worked up to injecting it directly into the blood stream and felt very, very good, Rocko talked him into sharing his new talent with Bix."

"I know why you said you feel sick."

"That Walter Rockland is a real charmer. All heart. So our little caravan came wandering through the mountains on down here to Oaxaca. And the flavor changed, or, I might say, the alignment. Minda got sick. Nesta was appointed by Rocko to look after Bix. When he refused, Rocko beat the h.e.l.l out of him. He said he got to sort of like it after a while, scrubbing her and washing her hair. But he"d lost any physical desire for her. She and Carl Sessions had gone off into some country of their own, nodding and popping. Minda, scared by being sick, was stubbornly taking herself off the stimulants. I suppose as they are habituating rather than addicting, a person with enough will could do it. And she apparently, as if compensating, became ever more infatuated with Rocko in a purely physical way. After they were here a while, Rocko started to cut off the supply to Carl and Bix. He would let them get sick before he would dole out a very small amount. One day Nesta took Bix off somewhere on some errand. He had wanted to get out of Rocko"s way because Rocko was on one of his rare drunks, when he was inclined to get violent and nasty. When he came back, Carl wasn"t there. Rocko was asleep, snoring loudly. Minda was in some kind of shock. For a long time Nesta couldn"t find out what happened. Then he learned that Carl had come pleading and begging to Rocko. Rocko, in Minda"s presence, had asked Carl if he would do anything in the world for a fix. Carl said he would. And after he had stripped down, as Rocko asked, Rocko boosted him up into. the double bed over the cab and climbed up in there with him, and Minda went running out. She heard Carl crying. That apparently finished it for Minda. A few days later she left and took Bix with her. Nesta said Rocko seemed perfectly content to have them gone for good, all three of them. Nesta stayed on. But he began to have the feeling that Rocko was watching him and planning how to kill him. It could have been an induced paranoid hallucination. But he took off, by then in very bad shape, and gradually came out of it in Mifla, with the woman Luz taking care of him just the way he had taken care of Bix."