“Jesus Christ,” Gardener said. He had heard stories like it before-one or two that were even worse-but still felt disgusted. He followed the bartender's glance and saw Arglebargle at the buffet, standing next to Patricia McCardle. Arglebargle had a stein of beer in one hand and was gesturing with it. His other hand was plowing potato chips through a bowl of clam dip and then conveying them to his mouth, which went right on talking as it slobbered them chips in. Gardener could not remember ever having seen anything so quintessentially disgusting. Yet the McCardle bitch's rapt attention suggested that she might at any moment drop to her knees and give the man a blowjob out of sheer adoration. Gardener thought, and the fat fuck would go right on eating while she did it, dropping potato-chip crumbs and globs of clam dip in her hair.

“Jesus wept,” he said, and slugged back half of his vodka-sans-tonic. It hardly burned at all… what burned was the evening's first real hostility-the first outrider of that mute and inexplicable rage that had plagued him almost since the time he began drinking. “Freshen this up, would you?”

The bartender dumped in more vodka and said shyly: “I thought your reading tonight was wonderful, Mr Gardener.”

Gardener was absurdly touched. “Leighton Street” had been dedicated to Bobbi Anderson, and this boy behind the bar-barely old enough to drink legally himself -reminded Gardener of Bobbi as she had been when she first came to the university.

“Thank you.”

You want to be a little careful of that vodka,” the bartender said. “It has a way of blindsiding you.”

“I'm in control,” Gardener said, and gave the bartender a reassuring wink. “Visibility ten miles to unlimited.”

He pushed off from the bar, glancing toward the beefy sonofawhore and McCardle again. She caught him looking at her and gazed back, cool and unsmiling, her blue eyes chips of ice. Bite my bag, you frigid bitch, he thought, and raised his drink to her in a boorish barrelhouse salute, at the same time favoring her with an insultingly wide grin.

“Just tonic, right? Pure tonic.”

He looked around. Ron Cummings had appeared at his side as suddenly as Satan. And his grin was properly satanic.

“Bugger off,” Gardener said, and more people turned around to look.

“Jim, old buddy-”

“I know, I know, turn down the volume control,” he mumbled, but he could feel that pulse in his head getting harder, more insistent. It wasn't like the headaches the doctor had predicted following his accident; it didn't come from the front of his head but rather from someplace deep in the back. And it didn't hurt.

It was, in fact, rather pleasant.

“You got it.” Cummings nodded almost imperceptibly toward McCardle. “She's got a down on you, Jim. She'd love to dump you off the tour. Don't give her a reason.”

“Fuck her.”

“You fuck her,” Cummings said. “Cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and brain damage are all statistically proven results of heavy drinking, so I can reasonably expect any of them in my future, and if one of them were to come down on my head, I'd have no one to blame but myself. Diabetes, glaucoma, and premature senility all run in my family. But hypothermia of the penis? That I can do without. Excuse me.”

Gardener stood still for a moment, puzzled, watching him go. Then he got it and brayed laughter. This time the tears did not just stand in his eyes; this time they actually rolled down his cheeks. For the third time that evening people were looking at him-a big man in rather shabby clothes with a glass full of what looked suspiciously like straight vodka, standing by himself and laughing at the top of his voice.

Put a lid on it, he thought. Turn down the volume, he thought. Hypothermia of the penis, he thought, and sprayed more laughter.

Little by little he managed to regain control. He headed for the stereo in the other room-that was where the most interesting people at a party were usually found. He grabbed a couple of canapes from a tray and swallowed them. He had a strong feeling that Arglebargle and McCarglebargle were looking at him still, and that McCarglebargle was giving the Arglebargle a complete rundown on him in neat phrases, that cool, maddening little smile never leaving her face. You didn't know? It's quite true-he shot her. Right through the face. She told him she wouldn't press charges if he would give her an uncontested divorce. Who knows if it was the right decision or not? He hasn't shot any more women… at least, not yet. But however well he might have read tonight-after that rather eccentric lapse, I mean-he is unstable, and as you can see, he's not able to control his drinking…

Better watch it, Gard, he thought, and for the second time that night a thought came in a voice that was very much like Bobbi's. Your paranoia's showing. They're not talking about you, for Chrissake.

At the doorway he turned and looked back.

They were looking directly at him.

He felt nasty, dismayed shock race through him… and then he forced another big, insulting grin and tipped his glass toward both of them.

Get out of here, Gard. This could be bad. You're drunk.

I'm in control, don't worry. She wants me to leave, that's why she keeps looking at me, that's why she's telling that fat fuck all about me-that I shot my wife, that I was busted at Seabrook with a loaded gun in my packsack-she wants to get rid of me because she doesn't think drunken wifeshooting commiesymp nuclear protestors should get the biggest motherfucking hand of the night. But I can be cool. No problem, baby. I'm just going to hang out, taper off on the firewater, grab some coffee, and go home early. No problem.

And although he didn't grab any coffee, didn't go home early, and most certainly didn't taper off on the firewater, he was okay for the next hour or so. He turned down the volume control every time he heard it start going up, and made himself quit every time he heard himself doing what his wife had called holding forth. “When you get drunk, Jim,” she had said, “not the least of your problems is a tendency to stop conversing and start holding forth.”

He stayed mostly in Arberg's living room, where the crowd was younger and not so cautiously pompous. Their conversation was lively, cheerful, and intelligent. The thought of the nukes rose in Gardener's mind-at hours such as this it always did, like a rotting body floating to the surface in response to cannonfire. At hours such as these-and at this stage of drunkenness-the certainty that he must alert these young men and women to the problem always floated up, trailing its heat of anger and irrationality like rotted waterweed. As always. The last eight years of his life had been bad, and the last three had been a nightmare time in which he had become inexplicable to himself and scary to almost all the people who really knew him. When he drank, this rage, this terror, and most of all, this inability to explain whatever had happened to Jimmy Gardener, to explain even to himself-found outlet in the subject of the nukes.

But tonight he had hardly raised the subject when Ron Cummings staggered into the parlor, his narrow, gaunt face glowing with feverish color. Drunk or not, Cummings was still perfectly able to see how the wind was blowing. He adroitly turned the conversation back toward poetry. Gardener was weakly grateful but also angry. It was irrational, but it was there: he had been denied his fix.

So, partly thanks to the tight checkrein he had imposed on himself and partly due to Ron Cummings's timely intervention, Gardener avoided trouble until Arberg's party was almost over. Another half-hour and Gardener might have avoided trouble completely… at least, for that night.

But when Ron Cummings began to hold forth on the beat poets with his customary cutting wit, Gardener wandered back into the dining room to get another drink and perhaps something to nosh on from the buffet. What followed might have been arranged by the devil with a particularly malignant sense of humor.