The Search for the Dice Man Read online

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Larry.

  ‘You don’t have to agree to anything,’ Jake interrupted hastily. ‘I mean you can make fun of the guide and everything he says and does, that’s fine, but you have to undergo the brief training.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ Larry said. ‘I’m not hanging out here for a week even if I were sure it would let me find my father the next day.’

  ‘Nor I,’ announced Honoria. ‘We’re too old for die-per training.’ And she rolled her eyes at her bad pun.

  ‘It’s really not bad,’ Jake urged. ‘Just give it a try.’

  ‘No. I’d like to find my father, but I’m not going to give in to his sick ways to do it.’

  This time Jake was silent and Honoria began to move restlessly away.

  ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ said Larry, after he himself had begun to move towards the door. He came back towards Jake. ‘Say, Dr Ecstein …’ he began musingly.

  ‘Master Ecstein, please,’ Jake interrupted happily. ‘Or Father Ecstein, or Rabbi.’

  Larry shook his head.

  ‘Master Ecstein … you know I’m Luke’s son. You can see how important it is that I find my father. Can’t you make an exception?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘But why don’t you cast the dice to determine whether you make an exception or not?’

  Jake’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Mmmmm,’ he said.

  ‘You really should,’ Larry went on, smiling at his hoisting a diceperson with his own petard. ‘It’s an important decision and you ought to let the Lord Chance have an opportunity to speak.’

  ‘Mmmmm.’

  ‘Let’s go, Larry, we’ll find another way,’ said Honoria. She was watching Jake, who was staring at the floor, his hands again folded over his ample belly. She came up and took Larry’s hand and began to lead him out of the church.

  ‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘You got it. I’ll consult the dice.’

  Jake marched smartly up three steps to the stage and then over to the altar. There he picked up a large, four-inch per side green die with some sort of battery-operated light inside that made it glow eerily. Jake began to mumble something that sounded suspiciously like Latin being pronounced by a retarded aborigine. Then he announced: ‘Odd I’ll make an exception, even I won’t.’

  As he raised the green die above his head, he concluded with ‘Thy Will be done …’ then dropped the die on to the altar in front of him.

  He looked at it.

  ‘Nope, a six,’ he said. ‘You have to follow the two ground rules.’

  19

  I must admit that the meeting with Jake left me shaken. Somehow I must have imagined that it would he relatively simple to locate my father once I’d found Lukedom or Jake. I’d forgotten that my father believed that easy solutions never lead to growth: that life had to be hard in order to get interesting.

  Honoria was tired and irritable; all she wanted to do was leave as fast as possible, and I didn’t blame her. But when we got to the parking lot the Mercedes was gone. We stared in confusion at the empty spot.

  ‘The dice said he ought to borrow the car,’ the chubby man who’d initially greeted us explained. ‘Rick likes to give the dice that particular option.’

  ‘But I’ve got the keys,’ I said. ‘And the car’s got a sophisticated anti-theft device.’

  ‘Rick never uses keys,’ said the man. ‘Lack of challenge, he says. He used to instal those device things.’

  ‘You mean you just stood there while some hotwire artist broke into our car and took it off for a joy ride,’ said Honoria.

  ‘I don’t meddle,’ said the man.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Where’s the police station?’

  ‘Two blocks down on your left,’ said the man.

  The police station was no more than a two-room shack stuck between two larger clapboard houses. A man in a blue uniform with a star announced he was the chief, but when we stated our problem he shook his head sadly.

  ‘He’s a troublemaker, that one,’ he said. ‘I’ll arrest him soon’s he gets back.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ said Honoria. ‘When will that be?’

  ‘Before midnight,’ said the chief. ‘Those are the rules.’

  ‘He’s done this before?’ asked Honoria, like me still grappling with the abnormality of it all.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ the chief answered. ‘He’s got a record longer than Pretty Boy Floyd’s. ’Course he doesn’t mean any harm. Just a teenager trying to find himself.’

  ‘Well, tell him to find himself with someone else’s car,’ I said. ‘And if there’s the slightest scratch on it I’m suing your town.’

  ‘Yep,’ said the police chief. ‘Lots of luck.’

  We retreated from the police station and wandered down the street, both trying to control our frustration and anger.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ said Honoria.

  ‘Goddamn it, that cop acted as if stealing my car was some game.’

  ‘He didn’t act much like a cop.’

  ‘You don’t let people run off with a fifty-thousand-dollar car.’

  ‘If they let people steal,’ said Honoria, stopping and glaring at me as if I were personally responsible, ‘what else are they allowed to do until midnight?’

  ‘Ah, shit,’ I said, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. We don’t seem to be getting anyplace towards finding my father.’

  ‘We should leave.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Absolutely. All we need is my car.’

  Eventually we realized we were stuck and decided to spend the night at the local hotel. Assuming the car was returned as promised, we’d leave the next morning. It was possible we might still learn something before we left.

  The Do Dice Inn appeared to be a normal small country hotel. The sample room we were shown was large and comfortable with old furnishings that reminded me vaguely of those at Arlene’s. I was feeling irritable enough without this new reminder of my father.

  We had dinner in the hotel restaurant, where both the service and food varied from good to godawful. Although my roast beef was tender and juicy the ‘chef’s sauce’ was definitely Heinz ketchup. And the salad looked suspiciously as if it had been rescued from a garbage can.

  ‘Do you think someone might let the dice tell him to poison us?’ Honoria asked after we’d seen the salad and pushed it aside.

  ‘No, no, they couldn’t go that far,’ I assured her, but we both poked and prodded the rest of our meal as if looking for hidden razor blades.

  The bill was unique. Each item had a range of prices which were then chosen at random by the dieregister for each customer. My meal was: $0.15 for the soup, $13.50 for the garbage salad. $22.95 for the roast beef, and $4.00 for the coffee. Honoria’s bill for essentially the same meal was $2.25 for the soup, $0.50 for the salad, $3.00 for the roast beef, and $0.05 for the coffee. Thus I had to pay $40.60, while her meal cost only $5.80.

  ‘Do you take credit cards?’ I asked the waiter, then realized I wasn’t certain I wanted them to have my card in their hands for a single second.

  ‘Oh, no, sir.’ he said. ‘I’m afraid not. Only cash or work vouchers.’

  ‘Work vouchers?’

  ‘Yes, sir. In case you might want to clean the floors or do the dishes or prepare the salads.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He then made me cast a die to determine how much I tipped him.

  Later, as we were passing through the bar area on the way out of the restaurant we had a new encounter that didn’t help our dispositions.

  ‘H-e-e-a-y, sweetheart, don’t go,’ said a grinning young man in a black leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. He was seated at the end of the bar and holding open his arms as if in greeting.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Honoria, halting in front of him and tilting her head askance to give him a disdainful look. She was used to doubletakes and flattery, but not this type of approach from a rather crude-looking young
man.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to meet a fox like you all my life,’ the young man went on, sliding off his seat to look her up and down with a nervous leer. ‘Hi,’ he said turning to me, his large brown eyes sparkling. ‘You mind if I date her tonight?’

  ‘That’s very gallant, but Larry does not decide my fate just yet,’ said Honoria coldly.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, moving closer to Honoria. His smooth tanned skin, big brown eyes, mass of curly brown hair and babyish grin combined to make him look no more than seventeen or eighteen. ‘What shall we do then? You want to go for a drive?’

  ‘I’m on my way to bed,’ announced Honoria firmly.

  ‘All r-iiiight!! This is better than a wet dream. We’ll skip the car ride. You’re hot to trot, huh?’

  ‘Larry, how long are you going to let this high-school dropout insult me?’ Honoria asked me. ‘Get me out of here!’

  ‘I thought you were handling it,’ I said, taking her elbow and trying to lead her away.

  ‘Hey,’ said Rick. ‘I thought you were your own woman.’

  ‘I am!’ said Honoria, pulling away from me impatiently. ‘I’m in no mood for any of this. I don’t want to talk to you or see you, so just back off!’

  ‘High-strung,’ the young man said to me. ‘A real handful, I bet.’

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I said, again taking Honoria by the arm.

  ‘Hit him!’ she said, her voice rising.

  ‘What!?’

  ‘I said hit him! He’s insulting us both.’ She had her fists clenched and looked ready to hit him herself.

  I turned back reluctantly to the teenager.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.

  He was shaking his head sadly.

  ‘I can’t fight,’ he said, adjusting his leather jacket as if to show that his neatness reduced his threat. ‘I’m on probation. And all physical violence is against the rules here. You’ll get in trouble if you hit me.’

  ‘Hit him,’ Honoria hissed at me.

  ‘I’ve got to hit you,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘but don’t blame me when they kick you out.’

  ‘That’s fine. I want to leave,’ I said and, after a brief hesitation while I considered where and how hard to hit him, I swung a right fist in a short arc which ended striking the upper right part of the young man’s chest. Although rocked by the blow he looked down at the area as if a small fly had just landed there.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said to Honoria.

  ‘Are you free tomorrow night?!’ he called after Honoria as we marched off.

  By the time we made it to the room I was deeply depressed. First, I saw no way through the strange morass of Lukedom to find my father, and second, Honoria was livid. She was angry for coming to Lukedom, angry for my being so stupid as to want to come, and angry with the people of Lukedom for their concerted efforts to inconvenience or insult her.

  I knew that when Honoria was angry the least bad strategy – there were no good strategies – was to remain silent. So we exchanged not a single word from the encounter with the leather jacket to our room – our accommodations costing $48 for the night, roughly in the mid-range of the options the dice could have chosen.

  While Honoria marched off to soak in a hot bath in a huge old clawfoot bathtub, I lay down on one of the sagging twin beds and brooded. I hated my father for setting things up in such a way that I had either to conform to his ways or give up the quest to find him. I supposed I could get a few days’ leave out of Blair, Battle and Pike to stay on in Lukedom, but felt it would defeat the purpose of my quest if I compromised with Luke’s ways before finding him.

  If only there were some easier way to get Jake to tell us where he was. It still seemed logical that Luke might be hiding in Lukedom. The gate and guard might only be a camouflaged early-warning system to inform some central headquarters about who was trying to arrive. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I knew little about what might actually be going on here.

  Honoria came out of the bathroom and climbed quickly into the other bed, ostentatiously pulling up the covers and turning her back to me.

  ‘Please turn out the light,’ she said. ‘I just want to blot out everything.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, staring at the cracked ceiling.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Honoria. ‘I’d rather be buried in jello.’

  ‘I think we should stay here tomorrow and look around,’ I went on. ‘It’s Sunday, and a few more hours here can’t hurt us.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Honoria, her back still to me, ‘we’ve already lost the Mercedes, been overcharged for bed and board, and I’ve got a chance to date the local teenage werewolf.’

  FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL

  We sit in front of TV sets, we read the sacred tables of the baseball statistics, stock quotations, bank balances; we check the grades of children, loved ones, self: we measure salaries, complexions, grades, cars, penises. bosoms, square footage, frontage, savings, neighbourhoods, nations – everything but vitality, which can’t be measured and so is ignored. We measure and triumph or measure and fear; in either case we lose, for both are on a scale which is recognized as valid by only a few. Our triumphs and our tragedies are both mountains of the moment, to be turned at the toll of another hour to ant hills in the dust.

  20

  Agent Macavoy was doing his duty. He had followed Larry Rhinehart down Interstate 81, enjoying the lush motel Larry chose to stay in, the expense covered by the bureau, and then up and down that incredible dirt road, to the gate of Lukedom. There, however, he had encountered a setback. The guard. The password. The test questions.

  Agent Macavoy did not know the password. He flunked the test. Of course the questions, like the password, had changed in the ten minutes since Larry and Honoria had passed through, and the test may have been harder. One question had been how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Macavoy had hazarded a guess of six, shrewdly thinking it was dicepeople’s favourite number (page sixteen of his briefing on dicepeople), but had been told by the guard that the answer was ‘very few.’

  Agent Macavoy had been turned away from Lukedom, but he was too dedicated an agent to let this deter him for long. He drove about a half mile and then, spotting a little track leading off into the woods, pulled his car in and parked. Here he disencumbered himself of all documents that might identify him as an FBI agent, hiding them under the driver’s seat. Then, after locking the car and carrying only a small overnight bag with a single change of clothes, he marched back along the road towards Lukedom.

  When the gale came distantly into view he set off through the woods. In another ten minutes he came to a low, run-down stretch of barbed wire fence with a dilapidated sign off to his right which, on closer inspection, read simply: ‘Welcome. Abandon all ye who enter here.’

  Macavoy, who felt that in leaving his FBI identification he had abandoned quite enough, entered. In half an hour he was walking down the main road into the village.

  The bureau briefing file on Lukedom was not helpful. After all, only one of three agents sent to infiltrate it had ever returned. That agent’s report was described as a little hysterical and was not included. The summary by his superiors indicated that Lukedom was occupied by up to two thousand people, many of them hippies who smoked dope and were unreliable. They played games which caused confusion. They worshipped dice. Questioning any of them was an unproductive endeavour because one of their principles seemed to be always to lie. There was a police force which kept a kind of order, and normal life seemed to go on. Some respectable citizens seemed to exist. How they coped with the kooks was not clear. If Luke Rhinchart had been there when Agent F— had infiltrated, he had kept well hidden. Rumours of his presence were rife but unsubstantiated.

  As Macavoy strode down the centre of the main street – a dirt road still – his strongest impression was that this community was little different from the small North Carolina town in which he’d grown u
p.

  He decided to go into the nearest bar to get the lay of the land. Macavoy was convinced that, despite his business suit, he could blend into a bar better than most agents because of his Irish heritage. He felt he knew the lingo.

  The Lucky Seven Bar was not crowded on this summer afternoon and seemed as typical a small-town bar as any Macavoy had been in. He ordered a beer, a Bud to be exact. He then announced to the skinny old bartender: ‘Hot today.’

  ‘Yep,’ the old guy replied.

  ‘Nice little village you got here,’ Macavoy added nonchalantly, looking around the bar as if it were itself the village.

  ‘Yep,’ said the old guy.

  ‘I’m in real estate.’ Macavoy said. ‘Driving around looking for a way to make a buck.’

  ‘Yep,’ said the old guy.

  ‘Got any suggestions?’ Macavoy prompted.

  ‘Nope.’

  Macavoy wandered over to the corner where two guys were shooting pool with a young woman watching. Macavoy shot a pretty fair game himself and figured it would be a good way to break the ice. The bartender had not been a strong source of information.

  He watched. The two men moved around the table with a certain awkward macho swagger and it thus took Macavoy about a minute to realize what he was seeing: the two worst pool players in the history of the world. One shooter would announce ‘six ball in the side pocket’ and not even come close to touching the six ball, much less propelling it towards the side pocket. The next shooter would study the table while letting smoke ooze up around his face from a dangling cigarette and announce ‘four ball in corner pocket’ and proceed to smash into the centre of a cluster and scatter just about everything except the four ball. At the rate they were going Macavoy would reach retirement before they ever got around to the eight ball.

  ‘How they falling?’ he ventured to the younger of the two players.

  ‘Pretty shitty,’ he answered. ‘I’m not getting good caroms.’

  Shit, he could get the best caroms God made and still not sink a golf ball in the ocean from two feet up the beach.