Dirtbags (6 page)

“Thank you very much,” Corrina said, her voice meek and unsure. “For those of you who are new, my name is Corrina, and I am lead counselor here at LifePath Rehabilitation Center. I have twelve months sober myself, and I—”

Calvin took a breath, quick and sudden.

5

Calvin sat in the dark, alone by the side of a road that must have been abandoned for some time. Chest-high weeds grew on both sides, and he made sure to keep to the middle of the road, for fear of snakes or chiggers or such. No light except the full moon, at least until the twin headlamps of Corrina’s car swept across the landscape. He stood and lifted his hand in a half-wave.

She parked flush against an overgrown ditch and leapt from the car. “Are you okay?”

She closed the gap between them and put the back of her hand to his forehead, her palm against his cheek. Calvin felt none too proud of himself, but touched the handle of the knife resting in the small of his back and got his head back into the game.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

“We all make mistakes,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “We just need to get you to a meeting. We need you to talk to your sponsor.”

“I don’t need a meeting,” Calvin said. He snatched away his hand. “I just wanted to get you alone.”

This was the most truth he’d told her to date. Over the past three days or so, he’d carried on as if he were some sort of drug abuser in her rehabilitation program, in hopes of isolating her. It had been harder than he’d figured, as he followed her from the clinic to her apartment and back again. The parking lot, her apartment commons, the bus . . . all of them had been too crowded. Afforded too many witnesses. Time, as well as Tom London’s money, was running out.

He had to act fast. He and Phillip agreed: Faking a relapse was the best he could do to get her by herself. The only thing they hadn't agreed on was Phillip remaining back at the motel, so as to allay suspicions. This, of all things, had sent Phillip to a tizzy.

“You can get the next one,” Calvin had promised.

He’d sounded convincing on the phone. He’d done cocaine once in his life—some shit his wife brought home from work back when they first met—so he could pass for half-crazed over the telephone. At Phillip's suggestion, he had pretended to cry. But out here, face-to-face, regardless of how dark it was, Calvin wasn’t pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes.

Corrina took a step back from him, and her arms dropped to her sides. She opened her mouth to speak, but words never formed, so she closed it again. She looked at her feet.

“I’m such a fool,” she said. All the wind left her sails. She collapsed to the asphalt, shook her head, then dropped it into her palms.

Calvin ran his hand to the knife handle again. His mind raced. Throat or heart? Would he punch the blade into her neck, or slice it cleanly across the windpipe? After it was done, then what? He had too much to think about and cursed himself for not having it already planned. He’d reckoned getting her alone was the hard part, and the rest would fall into place.

“You know what kills me the most?” Her voice, muffled, still sounded as sad.

Calvin removed the knife and kept it hidden at his thigh. In the moonlight, he saw the milky white of the back of her neck. He reckoned to get the knife in her six or seven times before she could lift her head. He hoped she wouldn’t struggle.

She continued: “I’ll have to admit all those assholes back at LifePath are right, that’s what kills me the most. They keep telling me I’m wasting my time with these community outreach programs. That goodwill don’t bring in good enough revenue. And the whole time, here I am, thinking I’m getting through to people. I ain’t getting through to nobody.”

He wondered if he would strip her of her clothes and leave her in the weeds. He wondered if he should take a souvenir, a memento. He had the drugs back in the car and wondered if he should put them into her arm or her thigh when he stuck her with the syringe.

She lifted her head, and he hid the knife behind his back.

“Have you ever wanted something really bad?” she asked him. “Something so bad, you could taste it?”

He nodded. “Yes. Yes, I have.” He stepped closer and knelt beside her. He decided he would yank back her head by the hair and slice her throat. The serrated edges of the knife would do her in with one strike.

“So do I,” she said. She sat straighter. “And Calvin, you have to want your sobriety more than anything else. You have to want this program to work for you, because no one else will.” She spouted off a series of clichés and buzzwords the folk back at her rehab center had bandied about over the past few days before she got to the meat of her point. “I made a series of bad choices a while ago, and because of that, I lost my only son. I know the only way to get him back is to work a serious program and dedicate myself to getting better. This is not a joke, and it can’t be treated like one.”

Calvin’s knife hand shook. He steadied it by pressing it against the small of his back. His breathing quickened.

“Listen,” she said, “I like you, too, Calvin. Really, I do. But you must realize that you will be experiencing new, confusing feelings during the first stages of your sobriety, and you are going to want to associate those feelings with old patterns.”

“Old patterns?”

“Yes,” she said. She put her hand atop his. “Like luring me out here all alone. I know why you brought me here.”

“You do?”

“Of course, I do,” she said. “And I’m flattered. Honest, I am. But there are boundaries to these kinds of relationships. We have to respect those boundaries. Like it or not. Because if we act on these feelings, then we’ll act on all our impulses. And isn’t controlling our impulses the key to our happiness?”

“I, uh—”

She turned up his chin so they were on eye level. “All I want for you is to be happy, Calvin.”

Calvin’s hand shook, and he dropped the knife. It fell to the road—metal on asphalt—and he reached out to pick it up, but in the darkness, couldn’t find it.

“What is that?” Corrina asked. She leaned around him and looked to the road. He dove forward to block her view from wherever in hell the knife had fallen, but misjudged his timing and fell splayed onto the road. She leaned over him and, rather than explain the knife, felt it easier to explain making an ass of himself, and he pulled her over atop him and put his mouth on hers.

“Calvin—” she started, but the mouthful of tongue kept her from saying more, and she struggled a bit, softly at first, but ended up slapping him good across the face. He let her free, and she pulled quickly away. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry,” he grumbled. “I thought I was receiving signals from you.”

“Signals?”

“Like you wanted it,” he said. He fingered the gravel behind him blindly for the knife. “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”

“What kind of person lures a woman out to some secluded place with a fake relapse, just to make time with her?” Corrina asked.

“What kind of person meets an addict out in the middle of nowhere?” Calvin shot back, more than a little defensively. He looked up and down the road. Still, no one for miles.

“I do it because no one else will,” Corrina said. “The people running that clinic don’t care about nothing except whether or not your insurance carrier will pay for treatment and how much. But sometimes I feel like I’m just wasting my time.”

“Maybe that’s what you get for putting so much faith in a bunch of junkies,” Calvin said. “I personally couldn’t be bothered to give half a shit about a person.”

“There are plenty people with that attitude already.” Corrina gazed best she could into his eyes. “I’m trying to do something different.”

Calvin’s fingertip found the blade, but he ignored it for the moment. He looked at Corrina and wondered what she was up to. She wasn’t much to look at, in his opinion. She had a good enough body, although undernourished, but her face betrayed her heritage. If her parents weren’t close kin, somebody in her immediate lineage was, and that sin had come to call upon her facial features. His own wife Rhonda—for all her faults—was perhaps more pleasing to the eye, but Calvin saw something more in Corrina. Something that caused his own breathing to stutter and his body to draw closer to hers as they sat there on that darkened road.

“You have a lot of anger inside you, Calvin,” she said. “That’s never done anyone any good.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I’m of the opinion that hate can be a good tool, in the right hands.”

“The right hands?”

“Sure. Somebody that knows how to use it.” For a second, his fingertip lost the knife blade, and he tensed, jerked himself closer to it, found it again.

She smiled. “That’s the easy way out, Calvin. To just give in and hate. And it may very well work for you, but I ain’t got time to focus on those kinds of things. I aim to get my son back, and all the hate in the world ain’t going to help me with that.” She tucked stringy strands of hair behind her ear and wiped below her nose. “Besides, what could you possibly have to hate so much?”

Calvin took a deep breath and opened his mouth and the words that vomited forth came with such ease that they shocked even him. He talked of hating people who had money, and those who didn’t. He hated blacks, Mexicans, foreigners and, just to keep things even, white people. He hated gay folks and straight folks and especially those who didn’t yet know which way they went. He hated people who asked for directions. He hated people with dogs, and those with cats. He said this, he said that, he named names. There was plenty he had to hate, he told her, and he aimed to do it right and complete.

“That’s a horrible shame,” Corrina said, “that you would carry so much hate inside you.”

“And you aim to tell me you ain’t got no one to hate?” Calvin said. Using his forefinger, he inched the knife closer to him. Slowly. Quietly. “You aim to tell me that and have me believe it?”

She shook her head. “Certainly not,” she said. “I can hate. I’m not perfect.”

“And what do you hate?”

“Liars,” she said. She puffed out her chest. “I hate liars and insurance companies. Liars, insurance companies . . . and my ex-husband.”

Calvin froze. “Your . . . your ex-husband?”

“Yes,” she said. “My son’s father. If he opened his mouth, it was to tell a lie. I—” She stopped, swallowed. Took a breath. Despite nothing more than the moon lighting the way, he could see her trembling. “I accept full responsibility for where I am today, but if it weren’t for him—”

To stop her hand from shaking, she grabbed fistfuls of gravel from the road and squeezed them so tight, Calvin thought she would release pearls.

“My son . . . ” was all she said before falling into choking sobs.

She bent forward in sorrowful agony, and Calvin watched her back heave up and down as she wept and wailed. He pulled close the knife and figured her back was just as good as her chest or neck and raised the blade to strike when it was her turn to fall atop him, wrapping him in a wild embrace. He felt her tears racing down his neck.

“It’s so hard,” she cried. “I don’t have anyone.”

Calvin lowered the knife and set it gently in the road. He lifted his arms, but didn’t seem to know what to do with them.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” she wept. “I just—I have this
feeling
about you . . . ”

She erupted in another fit of lament, and he put his arms around her, light and awkward at first, but then more firm and tight, and she fell into him and, almost immediately, climbed atop him, and soon they were lying in the road awash in passion and kissing and him fumbling like mad with the buttons of her shirt and her wrestling with his belt buckle. A mess of gasping and breathing and maybe panic. She helped him along, and suddenly they were silent, her sucking in a big gulp of air before they were at it, right there on the road.

After things were settled, they lay there a bit, smoking one of her cigarettes. They passed it back and forth, a red ember floating through the space between them and punctuated by long plumes of grey, moonlit smoke. Neither said a word. They lay in ridiculous and varying states of half-dressed, but neither cared there in the darkness.

“Could you imagine someone jogging upon us like this?” Corrina asked. “What kind of eyeful he would get?”

“I don’t care,” Calvin said. Although true, he also knew no one would be happening upon them. He literally could not have found a more isolated location if he tried. Earlier that day, he’d driven south of town, walked into the first bait-and-tackle shop, and asked the fat man behind the counter for the most secluded place he knew of. The fat man hitched a thumb over his shoulder and said, “Out Hangar Lowe Road,” as if no other directions were necessary. Calvin had scouted the location, approved, and made the call to Corrina, never expecting things to end up as thus.

“I don’t care, neither,” she said. She put out the cigarette and cozied up to him, putting her head on his chest. “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“Earlier, when you said you wanted something more than anything in the world, what was it?”

Calvin took a deep breath. Hadn’t anyone ever asked him something like that, so he had no idea how to go about answering it. He stared up into the sky at more stars than he ever knew were there and opened his mouth to let fly words he gave nary a thought to.

“To matter,” he said. “All I want to do is matter. Is to do something that someone cares a hill of beans about, in the long run.”

“That who cares about?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Calvin shrugged. “Anyone.”

They lay in silence a moment. She held him and whispered a little kiss here or there. Then he said:

“Tell me about this husband of yours. The one you said makes you real sore.”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. “He’s the worst kind of person there is.”

“What kind of person is that?”

“I believe there are two kinds of people in this world,” she said. Calvin felt an odd
déjà vu
pass through him. Hadn’t Tom London said those very words? Corrina continued: “Those who bring people down and those who lift them up. My ex-husband is the former.”