A Scanner Darkly

“WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO MANUFACTURE COKE ANYHOW WHEN YOU CAN RIP IT OFF THEIR TRUCKS? They’ve got a lot of trucks. You see them driving constantly, real slow. I tailgate them every chance I get; it makes them mad.” She smiled a secret, cunning, lovely little impish smile at him, as if trying to beguile him into her strange reality, where she tailgated and tailgated a slow truck and got madder and madder and more impatient and then, when it pulled off, instead of shooting on by like other drivers would, she pulled off too, and stole everything the truck had on it. Not so much because she was a thief on even for revenge but because by the time it finally pulled off she had looked at the crates of Coke so long that she had figured out what she could do with all of them. Her impatience had returned to ingenuity. She had loaded her car—not the MG but the larger Camaro she had been driving then, before she had totaled it—with crates and crates of Coke, and then for a month she and all her jerk friends had drunk all the free Coke they wanted to, and then after that—

She had turned the empties back in at different stores for the deposits.

“What’d you do with the bottle caps?” he once asked her. “Wrap them in muslin and store them away in your cedar chest?”

“I threw them away,” Donna said glumly. “There’s nothing you can do with Coke bottle caps. There’s no contests or anything any more.” Now she disappeared into the other room, returned presently with several polyethylene bags. “You wanta count these?” she inquired. “There’s a thousand for sure. I weighed them on my gram scale before I paid for them.”

“It’s okay,” he said. He accepted the bags and she accepted the money and he thought, Donna, once more I could send you up, but I probably never will no matter what you do even if you do it to me, because there is something wonderful and full of life about you and sweet and I would never destroy it. I don’t understand it, but there it is.

“Could I have ten?” she asked.

“Ten? Ten tabs back? Sure.” He opened one of the bags—it was hard to untie, but he had the skill—and counted her out precisely ten. And then ten for himself. And retied the bag. And then carried all the bags to his coat in the closet.

“You know what they do in cassette-tape stores now?” Donna said energetically when he returned. The ten tabs were nowhere in sight; she had already stashed them. “Regarding tapes?”

“They arrest you,” he said, “if you steal them.”

“They always did that. Now what they do—you know when you carry an LP or a tape to the counter and the clerk removes the little price tag that’s gummed on? Well, guess what. Guess what I found out almost the hard way.” She threw herself down in a chair, grinning in anticipation, and brought forth a foil-wrapped tiny cube, which he identified as a fragment of hash even before she unwrapped it. “That isn’t only a gummed-on price sticker. There’s also a tiny fragment of some kind of alloy in it, and if that sticker isn’t removed by the clerk at the counter, and you try to get out through the door with it, then an alarm goes off.”

“How did you find out almost the hard way?”

“Some teenybopper tried to walk out with one under her coat ahead of me and the alarm went off and they grabbed her and the pigs came.”

“How many did you have under your coat?”

“Three.”