Chapter 21
“Al!”
Marsha’s voice rang out over the din of the street, and she dismounted from the bus, hurrying to Sam A. “Do you need a hand?”
Sam smiled, passing the box to her. “Thanks. It’s a little cumbersome having these wheels on my shoulders.”
“What are you wearing?” Marsha continued, assessing Bobby’s clothing—which he’d neglected to change out of.
Sam glanced down, chuckling. “Oh, this? Just an effort to minimise harassment while I was running around.” He self-consciously undid a few of the shirt buttons, attempting to look like less of a square. “How did the protest go?”
Marsha groaned. “Six of us got arrested. We bailed ’em out, but the pigs have them on file now, which is a bummer.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Sam said as they reached the bus and climbed inside to a wave of cheers. He smiled brightly in response, unloading the wheels. “Evening, folks!”
“Looks like everyone made it back,” Danny said from the smoky haze in the back of the bus. By the smell of it, it wasn’t mere tobacco. “Let’s rock and roll.”
With that, the door of the bus shut, and Marsha and Sam hurried to take their seats as the sputtering engine came to life.
With the bus in motion and heading out of town, and the bus filled with Grateful Dead music, Sam surveyed the sea of faces, and zeroed in on Alicia, who was presently engaged in a bong hit. That, he thought, was a little discouraging, given the decision she was supposed to make soon.
Hanging on to the seats to steady himself, he moved to her.
“Hey. D’you mind if we talk?”
Alicia breathed out the smoke, nodding. “Sure thing, Al.” She shoved at the girl sitting next to her. “Move it, Ann-Marie. Make room for Al already!”
“Oh man, sorry Al!” the dark-haired woman said, her bloodshot eyes indicating she wasn’t firing on all cylinders. “I’ll get outta your hair. Sorry, I didn’t mean to take your seat, man. Sorry…”
“Hey, there’s no need to apologise,” Sam said as she shifted out of the seat and allowed him to take her place. “You did nothing wrong.”
“I didn’t?”
Sam chuckled. “No. Now, uh, you go sit with Marsha and just relax, okay? Don’t want to harsh your mellow, or whatever the lingo is.”
“Harsh my mellow with Marsha…” Ann-Marie mumbled, giggling as she made her way to Sam’s former seat. “Gosh, now I really wanna eat some marshmallows. Does anybody have marshmallows?”
Sam bit back laughter, turning his attention back to Alicia. “Are you… uh, as spaced out as her? Because I kinda need a proper conversation.”
Alicia snorted. “She’s pretty out of it, huh? Well don’t worry, I have a few precious wits about me. Maybe not as many as I did at the start of the day, of course.”
“Well, that’s good, because I wanted to talk to you about the vote tonight.” He looked pointedly at the glass bong in her lap. “You realise I’m proposing to do away with anything illegal, right?”
Alicia nodded, pursing her lips. “Yeah. And I still haven’t made up my mind.” She looked him in the eyes closely. “Hazel… Marsha was right…”
Sam flicked his eyes away from her penetrating stare. “Look, I get that everyone in the commune likes to get… ‘wiped out,’ and I wouldn’t be asking you all to do this if I wasn’t sure there was a drug bust imminent. You know, personally, I prefer a clear head—but I’m not a killjoy. It doesn’t even have to extend past the raid, you know? I guess it boils down to whether you believe me or not that this is going to happen.”
“That you know the future…?”
Sam nodded. “I guess so.”
Alicia crossed her arms, and stared out the window into the rapidly dimming sky. “Tell me some other things you know about the future.”
Sam licked his lips. “Uh, what kind of things?”
“I dunno…” she stroked her chin. “How ’bout this: when will the war be over?”
“Well, it’ll end officially in nineteen seventy-five,” Sam said, though he couldn’t think of the date. “Saigon will be taken by the North. By then, American forces will have been gone a couple of years. And lots of people will have died on both sides.” He clenched his jaw, trying to avoid thinking about the terrible things still to come. And a young Al Calavicci, over there right at that moment, trapped in a tiger cage and being fed a bowl of rice a day. Wasting away, and dreaming every night of a wife that, by this point, had moved on.
He had not successfully avoided thinking about it.
He wiped the tears from his eyes. “Sorry, I—”
Alicia simply took the moment to wrap him in her arms.
“You feel more emotion than humans, huh?” she murmured. “You feel all of humanity’s pain. That must be rough.”
Sam sniffled. “It’s slightly inconvenient,” he managed to choke out, favouring her with as much of a smile as he could muster.
As Alicia pulled away from the hug, she ran fingers over her bong silently, lost in thought.
Finally, she took it with both hands and offered it to Sam.
He looked down at it with confusion. “Uh, no thanks…” he said, raising an eyebrow. He’d just told her he preferred a clear head, hadn’t he?
“Take it,” she insisted. She pushed the paraphernalia into his hands. “I believe you, Al. So I’m giving it up.”
I did it. I tipped the scales.
Elated, Sam accepted the offering. “Thank you, Alicia. Believe me—come the twentieth, you won’t regret this.” He leaned over and planted a tender kiss on her forehead before standing to return to his place beside Marsha.
But as he looked over at the seat, he realised Ann-Marie had nodded off, and was sleeping against Marsha’s shoulder. He sat back down, grinning at Alicia.
“Guess here’s as good a seat as any, huh?”
* * *
Al was having difficulty taking his eyes off Sam B as he drove back to Bobby’s house.
When he’d told him he was worried about him, that had been an understatement. Something told him he was hanging by a thread.
“So what am I expecting back at the house?” he asked. “Is Brenda now putty in my hands, or did the other guy have no luck?”
“He said he left you some notes,” Al explained. “They’re in your nightstand. He said you gotta read them carefully. Oh, and he said to make sure you ditch the shirt before Brenda sees you, or she’ll think you’re Richie.”
“We should’ve just stayed switched,” Sam muttered.
Al frowned at this. “Sam, you can’t be serious. That would mean Richie might leap back to Vietnam. He’s not even trained, and you should see how scared he is of going. As soon as he found out I’m military, he had a Grade A freak-out.”
“I’m scared too, remember?” Sam sniffed. “Besides, Sam A would be able to handle the tour of duty for as long as he had to, right? He’s handled everything else.”
Al could hear Sam’s voice filling with resentment.
“Sam A might be good at the art of persuasion, but do you really think he’s capable of handling honest-to-god warfare? I doubt it. I don’t think the Vietcong’s going to jump out of the undergrowth and be down for a heart-to-heart, you know? Trust me.”
Sam’s eyes were focused on the road ahead, and his brows sat heavy over them. In the dim light that danced from street lamp to street lamp as his friend drove, Al saw deeply etched lines and fatigue in his face, and a pain he’d never seen so pronounced.
“Hang in there, Sam,” Al said in his most sympathetic tone.
Sam looked like he was about to respond, but let out a shallow sigh and said nothing, opting instead to run a hand through his hair.
Down in Al’s hand, the handlink gave a jingle, and he checked the reading with a frown. “Looks like I might lose my connection to you pretty soon, Sam. But the good news is, Verbena may have figured out how to focus the signal on one of you at a time. We just need to test it out.”
“Verbena?” Sam said, eyebrows raising in surprise. “How did Verbena figure that out? What does she know about holograms? Did I swiss-cheese something?”
Al squinted as he read the message.
“Well, turns out it’s some kinda psychological thing with the merged twins in the Waiting Room. Now that Ziggy knows there are two of you, she should be able to target which of you to send me to, and we just need to combine it with Beeks’s head-shrinking to make one twin more prominent than the other, which causes the signal to become solid—at least, I think that’s what the idea is. Team effort.”
“Huh.” Sam quirked a smile. “Well, good. Tell her ‘thanks’ for me.”
Al grinned. “That’s the spirit, Sam. See? It’s not all bad news.”
“Just mostly.”
Al wished he could argue with that.