“Who?” he asks. “Who, man?”

“Who do you think I mean?”

He finally says, “Oh yeah. Mary. Sure.”

This girl is all passed out in the back of the van and she’s tan and dark with long blond hair, skinny because of drugs but in a good way and cute. She sleeps on the mattress the first night in my room and I sleep on the couch and Peter sits in the armchair watching late-night TV shows and I think he goes out once or twice for some food but I’m tired and pissed off and ignoring the situation.

The next morning Peter asks me for money.

“That’s a lot of money,” I say.

“What’s that mean?” he asks.

“That you’re out of your f**king mind,” I say. “That I don’t have any money.”

“Nothing?” he asks. He starts to giggle.

“You’re taking this pretty good,” I point out.

“I need to pay off some guy out here.”

“Sorry, dude,” I say. “I just don’t have it.”

He doesn’t say too much, just goes back into the dark room with Mary, and I go to the car wash in Reseda that I work at when I’m not doing anything else.

I come home after a fairly crappy day and Peter is in the armchair and Mary is still in the back room listening to the radio and I notice these two little shoes on the table next to the TV and I ask Peter, “Where did you get those two little shoes, man?”

Peter is wasted, out of it, a dumb scary grin on his balloon face, staring at cartoons, and I’m staring at the shoes and I hear something far off crying, bumping around somewhere, a humming from behind the bathroom door.

“Is this a … joke?” I ask him. “I mean, because I know what a f**ked-up guy you are, dude, and I know that this isn’t a joke and, man, oh shit.”

I open the door to the bathroom and see the kid, young, white, blond, maybe ten or eleven, wearing a shirt with a tiny horse on it, faded designer jeans, his hands tied up behind his back with a cord and his feet bound by rope and Peter has stuck something in the kid’s mouth and put duct tape over it and the kid’s eyes are wide and he’s crying, kicking at the sides of the bathtub that Peter stuck him in and I slam the door to the bathroom and run over to Peter and grab his shoulders and start shouting into his face, “What the f**k you think you’re doing shithead what the f**k have you done you f**king shithead?”

Peter is staring calmly into the TV screen.

“He’ll bring us money,” he mumbles, trying to brush me away.

I’m squeezing his fat-beefy shoulders harder and keep shouting “Why?” and I panic and it causes me to swing a fist at him, hitting Peter hard across the head and he doesn’t move. He starts laughing, the sounds coming out of his mouth don’t make sense, can’t be connected to anything else I’ve ever heard.

I punch his head harder and sometime after the sixth blow he grabs my arm, twisting it so hard I think it will snap in two, and I fall slowly to the floor, one knee at a time, and Peter keeps twisting harder and he’s not smiling anymore and he growls, low and slowly, four words: “Shut—the—fuck—up.”

He yanks my arm up, giving it one more hard twist, and I fall back, holding my arm, and just sit there for a long time until I finally get up and try to drink a beer and lay on the couch and my arm is sore and the kid stops making noises after a while.

I find out that the kid is skateboarding at the parking lot of the Galleria that Peter and Mary scoped out all morning long and Peter says they “made sure no one was looking” and Mary (this is the part I have the hardest time picturing, because I cannot imagine her in motion) drives up to the kid as he’s tying a shoelace and Peter opens the back door of the van and very simply, without any effort, lifts the kid up and calmly shoves him into the back of the van and Mary drives back here and Peter tells me that even though he was going to sell the kid to a vampire he knows who lives over in West Hollywood, he’d rather deal with the kid’s parents instead and that the money we receive will go to paying off a fag named Spin and then we’ll head for Las Vegas or Wyoming and I am so freaked out that I cannot say anything and I have no idea where Wyoming is and Peter has to show me in a book, on a map, a purple state that seems far away.

“Things do not work out like that,” I tell him.

“Man, your problem, the thing that screws you up, is that you don’t relax, man, you don’t lay back.”

“Is that right, man?”

“It’s bad for you. It’ll be bad for you, dude,” Peter says. “You’ve got to learn to flow, to float. To mellow out.”