“Thrift,” he said, taking off his own coat. “French peasant thrift. Do you ever throw anything away? Do you keep pieces of string too short for any–”
“Someday,” Donna said, shaking her long black hair back as she slid out of her leather jacket, “I’m going to get married and I’ll need all that, that I’ve put away. When you get married you need everything there is. Like, we saw this big mirror in the yard next door; it took three of us over an hour to get it over the fence. Someday–”
“How much of what you’ve got put away did you buy,” he asked, “and how much did you steal?”
“_Buy?_” She studied his face uncertainly. “What do you mean by _buy?_”
“Like when you buy dope,” he said. “A dope deal. Like now.” He got out his wallet. “I give you money, right?”
Donna nodded, watching him obediently (actually, more out of politeness) but with dignity. With a certain reserve.
“And then you hand me a bunch of dope for it,” he said, holding out the bills. “What I mean by buy is an extension into the greater world of human business transactions of what we have present now, with us, as dope deals.”
“I think I see,” she said, her large dark eyes placid but alert. She was willing to learn.
“How many–like when you ripped off that Coca-Cola truck you were tailgating that day–how many bottles of Coke did you rip off? How many crates?”
“A month’s worth,” Donna said. “For me and my friends.”
He glared at her reprovingly.
“It’s a form of barter,” she said.
“What do–” He started to laugh. “What do you give back?”
“I give of myself.”
Now he laughed out loud. “To who? To the driver of the truck, who probably had to make good–”
“The Coca-Cola Company is a capitalist monopoly. No one else can make Coke but them, like the phone company does when you want to phone someone. They’re all capitalist monopolies. Do you know”–her dark eyes flashed–“that the formula for Coca-Cola is a carefully guarded secret handed down through the ages, known only to a few persons all in the same family, and when the last of them dies that’s memorized the formula, there will be no more Coke? So there’s a backup written formula in a safe somewhere,” she added meditatively. “I wonder where,” she ruminated to herself, her eyes flickering.
“You and your rip-off friends will never find the Coca-Cola formula, not in a million years.”
“WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO MANUFACTURE COKE ANYHOW WHEN YOU CAN RIP IT OFF THEIR TRUCKS? They’ve got a lot of trucks. You see them driving constantly, real slow. I tailgate them every chance I get; it makes them mad.” She smiled a secret, cunning, lovely little impish smile at him, as if trying to beguile him into her strange reality, where she tailgated and tailgated a slow truck and got madder and madder and more impatient and then, when it pulled off, instead of shooting on by like other drivers would, she pulled off too, and stole everything the truck had on it. Not so much because she was a thief on even for revenge but because by the time it finally pulled off she had looked at the crates of Coke so long that she had figured out what she could do with all of them. _Her impatience had returned to ingenuity_. She had loaded her car–not the MG but the larger Camaro she had been driving then, before she had totaled it–with crates and crates of Coke, and then for a month she and all her jerk friends had drunk all the free Coke they wanted to, and then after that–
She had turned the empties back in at different stores for the deposits.
“What’d you do with the bottle caps?” he once asked her. “Wrap them in muslin and store them away in your cedar chest?”
“I threw them away,” Donna said glumly. “There’s nothing you can do with Coke bottle caps. There’s no contests or anything any more.” Now she disappeared into the other room, returned presently with several polyethylene bags. “You wanta count these?” she inquired. “There’s a thousand _for sure_. I weighed them on my gram scale before I paid for them.”
“It’s okay,” he said. He accepted the bags and she accepted the money and he thought, Donna, once more I could send you up, but I probably never will no matter what you do even if you do it to me, because there is something wonderful and full of life about you and sweet and I would never destroy it. I don’t understand it, but there it is.
“Could I have ten?” she asked.
“Ten? Ten tabs back? Sure.” He opened one of the bags–it was hard to untie, but he had the skill–and counted her out precisely ten. And then ten for himself. And retied the bag. And then carried all the bags to his coat in the closet.
“You know what they do in cassette-tape stores now?” Donna said energetically when he returned. The ten tabs were nowhere in sight; she had already stashed them. “Regarding tapes?”
“They arrest you,” he said, “if you steal them.”
“They always did that. Now what they do–you know when you carry an LP or a tape to the counter and the clerk removes the little price tag that’s gummed on? Well, guess what. Guess what I found out almost the hard way.” She threw herself down in a chair, grinning in anticipation, and brought forth a foil-wrapped tiny cube, which he identified as a fragment of hash even before she unwrapped it. “That isn’t only a gummed-on price sticker. There’s also a tiny fragment of some kind of alloy in it, and if that sticker isn’t removed by the clerk at the counter, and you try to get out through the door with it, then an alarm goes off.”
“How did you find out almost the hard way?”
“Some teenybopper tried to walk out with one under her coat ahead of me and the alarm went off and they grabbed her and the pigs came.”
“How many did _you_ have under your coat?”
“Three.”
“Did you also have dope in your car?” he said. “Because once they got you for the tape rip-off, they’d impound your car, because you’d be downtown looking out, and the car would be routinely towed away and then they’d find the dope and send you up for that, too. I’ll bet that wasn’t locally, either; I’ll bet you did that where–” He had started to say, Where you don’t know anybody in law enforcement who would intervene. But he could not say that, because he meant himself; were Donna even busted, at least where he had any pull, he would work his ass off to help her. But he could do nothing, say, up in L.A. County. And if it ever happened, which eventually it would, there it would happen: too fan off for him to hear or help. He had a scenario start rolling in his head then, a horror fantasy: Donna, much like Luckman, dying with no one hearing or caring or doing anything; they might hear, but they, like Barris, would remain impassive and inert until for her it was all over. She would not literally die, as Luckman had–had? He meant _might_. But she, being an addict to Substance D, would not only be in jail but she would have to withdraw, cold turkey. And since she was dealing, not just using–and there was a rap for theft as well–she would be in for a while, and a lot of other things, dreadful things, would happen to her. So when she came back out she would be a different Donna. The soft, careful expression that he dug so much, the warmth–that would be altered into God knew what, anyhow something empty and too much used. Donna translated into a thing; and so it went, for all of them someday, but for Donna, he hoped, far and away beyond his own lifetime. And not where he couldn’t help.
“Spunky,” he said to her now, unhappily, “without Spooky.”
“What’s that?” After a moment she understood. “Oh, that TA therapy. But when I do hash . . .” She had gotten out her very own little round ceramic hash pipe, like a sand dollar, which she had made herself, and was lighting it. “Then I’m Sleepy.” Gazing up at him, bright-eyed and happy, she laughed and extended to him the precious hash pipe. “I’ll supercharge you,” she declared. “Sit down.”
As he seated himself, she rose to her feet, stood puffing the hash pipe into lively activity, then waddled at him, bent, and as he opened his mouth–like a baby bird, he thought, as he always thought when she did this–she exhaled great gray forceful jets of hash smoke into him, filling him with her own hot and bold and incorrigible energy, which was at the same time a pacifying agent that relaxed and mellowed them both out together: she who supercharged and Bob Arctor who received.