Part 1: The Fall
(1969)
Fritz Again
Jan Harper sat alone at a picnic table behind the office of the Sea Breeze Motel, under the spreading branches of a magnolia tree, staring at the thick, green leaves and lemon-white blossoms up above. She had been looking at them for the longest time, oblivious to the sounds of the city around her – the grumble of traffic, pulsing from red light to red light; the roar of a jet about to land; the caw of a seagull; a dog barking in the distance – and the fading light as her thoughts lost first their edge, and then their way. A joint, half-smoked, lay cold on the tabletop, ignored.
The blossoms were as big as Jan’s fist; some were close enough to touch. A rustling noise drew her attention and she watched a squirrel chase his mate among the lower branches, both of them leaping from limb to limb. They jarred a blossom loose and it landed, damp and trembling, before Jan’s astonished eyes.
She was reaching out to touch it when she heard the crunch of boots on dry leaves, and a shadow blotted out the sun.
The man’s face was sunburned. His long, curly blond hair was wind-blown. His jeans seemed glued to his skinny waist and stove-pipe legs like a second skin of denim. His sallow face parted to show brown, uneven teeth beneath a hawk’s nose as he tilted his head back in a slow-motion pantomime of laughter.
Jan began to breathe again.
“Fritz.”
“I blew your mind,” he said. “Oh-ho! Little girl, what have you been smoking?”
Fritz stuck the leftover half a joint between his lips, lit a match, ducked his head to the flame, and came back up blowing smoke.
“And what if I was a pig, huh? What would you have done then? Hey, maybe I am. You ever think of that?”
She lifted the blossom gently. The thick, cupped petals felt like little ears.
“I figured you got arrested back there,” Jan said without looking up. She brought it to her nose; it had a citrus smell.
“Never, ever count Fritz down until you see him fall. And even then he might be playing possum. Where’s Coy?”
They had left Fritz fighting with a gas pump jockey back in the piney woods – two hours ago? Six? Fritz fighting was nothing new. Fritz was always fighting. But Coy had heroin with him, and they couldn’t risk trouble with some backwater Barney Fife – not with a show to do. So they drove away. And hardly a minute later, they had passed – yup – the Barney Fife, speeding toward the gas station with his popcorn-maker flashing dull red in the sunshine.
No, no one was expecting to see Fritz again today. But here he was.
With Fritz, it was always something. He had been Coy’s sergeant in Vietnam. Now in his mind he was Night Rider’s manager. He had a surprise coming on that front. It was none of Jan’s business, though; she just wished he was gone.
Instead, Fritz sat down across from her, threading one long leg and then the other under the picnic table. His thin silk shirt with bell cuffs had parted at one shoulder. He had a cat scratch down one cheek, dark with clotted blood. His bony face split into another grin.
Jan’s feet skittered away from his beneath the table, unseen.
“Where’s Miss Fox?”
Jan shrugged. She and Pammie had quarrelled, and Jan had come out here to be alone. Fritz smoked the rest of the joint like a cigarette, casually, not holding it in, even blowing smoke rings. Jan smoked marijuana seldom. She felt trembly and there was a kind of sighing noise in her head, like wind through a hollow space. She sat up straighter to gain more separation from Fritz and flicked one hand vaguely backward, over her shoulder.
“In our room. What time is it?”
Fritz tossed away the roach, and the orange tip cartwheeled before coming to rest atop the stubbly grass, aglow; night was falling fast.
“Seven thirty.”
“For Pete’s sake.”
“Where’s Coy? He’ll be crying for his Papa Fritz.”
“Why didn’t you get arrested? We saw the police car.”
His eyes turned small above his crooked nose. Jan felt a twinge of fear; they had abandoned him, after all. He had a right to be mad. But then Fritz did his pantomime of laughter once again.
“Deputy car,” he corrected her. “A deputy’s different from a cop. A cop goes by the book. A deputy will negotiate.”
He stressed the word “negotiate.” The pantomime again; Jan hated it.
“Did it cost much?”
“All I had.”
“It serves you right.”
“I was just sticking up for you and Miss Fox. Somebody had to do it.”
“Not then and not there.”
Fritz was no gentleman. The night she met him – actually, before she met him – he groped her butt.
Jan was married, pregnant, in college and maybe no angel herself, at least not always. She knew she should be home in University City right now studying for her final exams, which were next week. Or if not that, answering her husband’s latest letter from Vietnam. She had only come here because Coy asked her to. Coy was a junkie – but he also saw into her soul.
“Anyway, the deputy was cool,” Fritz continued. “He’d been in ‘Nam. I told him nobody talks like that to the ladies while I’m around, and he dug it absolutely. The Gomers tried to lie, of course, but they couldn’t keep their stories straight. So he let me go. He was a head. We smoked a joint in his car. I would have been right behind you, but you guys split with the only map. So I took a wrong turn on some sorry-ass road to Bumfuq, and shredded a tire in a motherfucker of a chuckhole. Man, I thought I’d never get here.”
Six hours to fix a tire. . .Fritz nodded toward the rental truck, which was parked in a wide expanse of grass-chewed asphalt beyond the motel. It was a part of town where businesses died and were left to rot until somebody claimed them, and no one did.
“Where’s Coy? He’s gonna need this shit.”
“They got other – stuff, I think.” It was true. Fritz was too late. Night Rider had signed with a new manager this afternoon, a real one – not a tagalong like Fritz, but the actual promoter of tonight’s concert, a hippie businessman named Simon who wore glasses with Coke bottle-bottom lenses and a purple suit with wide lapels. Simon was already planning their East Coast tour. Coy was free of Fritz at last.
Yet here he was. . .
“Is he across the street?” Fritz asked again.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Jan put her blossom down. “I have to go in now, Fritz. I’m cold.” Indeed, she was shivering.
“Jannie.”
The voice, low, soft, urgent, turned both their heads. Pamela Eastbrook leaned far out over the motel balcony railing – all buckskin fringe and luxuriant blond hair and white teeth and cleavage in the gloom.
“Won’t you come back up? Please?”
“Miss Fox,” Fritz said under his breath. “Goddam.” He was in love with Pammie. All the boys were in love with Pammie. Jan forgotten, Fritz hurriedly extracted his skinny legs from beneath the table and ran over the sandy lawn, stumbling in his high-heeled boots, then leaping crazily as he recovered, stumbling and leaping, like a dog driven mad by fireflies. “Pammie, wait up,” he cried. “It’s Fritz.” He took the concrete steps to the second floor two at a time.
Out in the street, cars were stalled in a line that stretched all the way to the interstate exit. The gatekeepers in their little huts in the civic center parking lot were doing the slow work of making change and letting the cars in to park. While they waited, people with lots of hair poked their heads out of car windows to talk to people in other cars and pass what probably were not Marlboro cigarettes back and forth. Those gatekeepers would see plenty from their huts tonight, Jan guessed. A sign high atop a steel pole, lit up now by floodlights, read:
Night Rider. 8 p.m.
She hadn’t even noticed it before.
“I want to go home,” Jan said aloud to nobody – but she rose and followed Fritz upstairs.
-by Kevin Kittredge. All rights reserved.