Some smurfers sprayed Windex in their eyes, to make them water, as if in the grips of a major allergy. But you had to be careful. Too much window cleaner and my pupils could start bleeding. Personally, I didn’t need Windex because my eyes always watered anyway, which made me a convincing allergy sufferer. The trick was not to fake-sneeze. They’d seen it all, sneeze-wise, at Rite Aid.

The worse thing about Pontiac Man was his land. He had a little patch of land. A run–to shit horse ranch near Lancaster. High Desert. He’d neglected the place a little bit. Sometimes he cooked in a barn. He still had a horse. He named it Silver, like The Lone Ranger’s. But Silver always kept away from the barn. “How come?” I wanted to know. The Cooker didn’t like to talk. But he talked about Silver. “Happened last year,” he said, lighting a cigarette dangerously near a live rubber tube. He indicated a puddle by the falling down barn. “She drank from the run off.” Like she was waiting for her cue, Silver let out a strange whinny. “No biggy,” Pontiac said, “a horse can survive without a tongue. It’s not like they French kiss.” He told me this on the same day his wife—I couldn’t believe he had one—showed up with their kids, to get child support. (I think it was the same day. In a way it was one day. One long day. Lots of people do speed and no doubt come back with their synapses intact. I wasn’t one of them.) “Honey,” Pontiac hollered, raspy with a panic I hadn’t seen before, “you should have phoned ahead.” “I don’t have a fucking phone,” his ex said, sliding open the side door of a mud-colored minivan. I heard a little boy’s voice say, “Hi Daddy!” And before the kid was out of the car, two little beagle pups, cute as Snoopy, paddled off and started drinking from the puddle running out of the barn. “Oh shit. No!” The look on Pontiac’s face was somewhere between piteous and enraged. Either way it was too late. “That’s Benji, that’s Bobo,” the little boy squealed. But it was too late. Benji and Bobo slurped the red liquid and three seconds later they were on their backs, foaming. The cute pups died making noises like silverware in a garbage disposal. At first the child thought the puppies were laughing. Then the foam turned to bloody froth. Before anyone could stop him the boy ran right up to the doggies, squatted down, and, when they began to convulse, got some of the red splurk in his eyes, which instantly swelled and burned so badly the child began to scream. That was another tragedy.

Everything just went quiet. No insects, not even the chirping of a bird. (They’d all been killed, Pontiac told me later, from the lab smoke.) But I couldn’t undo the puppies. I thought I could see Silver looking in from the fucked up patch of dirt where it stood. I imagined I could see into its horse brain, hear it, in some kind of badass Mister Ed voice, promise that he was going to come after Pontiac and bite his face off. Everybody knows, horses can kick you. But when they really want to fuck you up, they bite.