Innocents on the Lamb

    “How many more days until Christmas?” I asked, having lost all sense of time, fearful I might sleep through this holiday the way I had Thanksgiving. Dan sat cross-legged across from me at the low table as Louise stood in the kitchen behind him, cooking eggs and bacon for breakfast – the smell of which reminded me of just how hungry I was. “Four days,” Dan said. I rubbed my eyes to get the weariness out of them. “That’s all?” I said. “I suppose you have something special arranged?” “Actually, I’m going away today and won’t be back until the middle of next month.” “Really? Where are you going?” “Back east,” Dan said. “I have some business to attend to.” Louise came out with plates filled with scrambled eggs. “Where in the east are you going?” she asked. “New York,” Dan said, scooping some of the eggs from the pile onto his plate as well as two pieces of toast off the second plate Louise held. “What about your wife?” I asked. “That’s who I’m going to see,”

      Our small tree glistened in the corner of the barren living room overloaded with tinsel, still glowing with the unnatural light from the mescaline trip. Nothing seemed right after that, even though I hadn’t gone off the deep end the way Louise and the others had. I felt strange, changed, unable to think straight. Somehow taking that trip had steered me down some alternative path like had not meant me to take, and I couldn’t figure out how to get back onto the right one – if I could get there at all. I was on a path that seemed thick with obstacles, potholes and roots of trees that I feared would trip me up if I did not pay close attention to where I placed my feet, roots and potholes like Dan and before him, Tim. I kept thinking Louise was eyeing Dan as my possible replacement the way she had eyed me as her replacement for Tim. We gave him the spare room with the large closet and windows that looked out onto the stairway up from the street, a bright little room we had n

  Even as we strode back along Fountain to the Ranch Market, I couldn’t get one thought out of my head, details clicking inside me for the first time as to why Louise had taken up with me in the first place. I was like a stray dog, an animal in need of a good home. So was Tim and perhaps in some way every other man Louise ever took up with, needy in some important way and she had some inner sense that detected it. I kept thinking about Sledge Hammer Harry back at the print factory and how she condemned her for being the wrong kind of woman because she injected herself into his married nephew’s life, and how she seemed to give him, me, even the boys on the high school football team something she thought they needed not merely wanted. Her men weren’t the self-pitying kind, but the self-deceived, unaware of what was missing in their lives. She always found some important wound she thought she could help heal. Tim attracted her perhaps because of the testicle he’d lost in one

    Bitzy was gone. Vanished while we were at the model, perhaps slipping out of the apartment when the men two nights earlier when we were too stoned to notice. She had been acting strange since we brought her back from the airport, out of her element, as if she existed in the Mountain Time Zone of Colorado, and could not adjust to the change when we moved her here. We searched high and low, crawling through the apartment on our fours for a cat’s eye view of the world, she was nowhere to be found. Louise was as upset at the loss of the cat as she had been over Tim, crying on my shoulder, yet I could do nothing to comfort her. The whole effort to bring the cat here seemed wasted to me – after all we had done in the last hours in Boulder for a cat she refused to leave behind, only to have it abandon her here, another painful sign of a change the night of drugs had suggested, an ill omen that stirred up an unnamed terror in me as if I already knew things would get a lot dar