Last Call Lounge (3 page)

“Is that kid gone?” he asked. “The kid from the bathroom?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Everybody’s gone.”

Frank frowned. I unlocked the front door.

“Do you know him?” he asked.

“Why?” I asked.

He tilted his head.

“I ended up with his money,” he said. “But he didn’t get anything.”  Frank looked over my shoulder, like maybe Jeremy might have been hiding somewhere. I pushed him through the door.

“I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,” I said. I pulled the door shut and locked it. Through the glass, I saw Frank nod, look up the street, then cross over to the other side.

I sat down next to Tim. Tracy handed me a shot. The TV was still on, the storm still spinning over Cuba.  I flipped open my cigarette pack, but it was empty.

“Remember Kate?” Tim asked, although he was so drunk I didn’t think he even knew I was sitting next to him.

I took one of his cigarettes from the pack in front of him. Mitchell came and stood in front of me, a shot in his hand. The night was officially over when Mitchell poured himself a shot.

“What happened in there?” he asked.

“We talked,” I said.

Mitchell waited, but I didn’t offer anything.

“And?” he said finally.

I sighed, scratched my nose.

“And I guess I have to talk to Worm,” I said.

Mitchell rolled his eyes at me, shook his head and walked away. Mitchell knew Worm and hated him. Tracy watched Mitchell walk away, then came close.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. She was leaning over and her shirt was falling open a little. “If you talk to Worm, would you pick up an eight ball for me?  I’ll pay you back at Jenna’s.”

FRIDAY

THREE

It was hot outside, even at three a.m. The August-thick air streamed in through my open window and the cigarette smoke clung to my skin. The a/c in my little rice-burner truck didn’t work, but I had it cranked up to full anyway. At a red light, I pulled out my phone and called Sarah. She didn’t answer. She never did, when I called that late.

I stopped for gas and a pack of cigarettes at the gas station near the highway. It was three a.m. and all but one of the pumps were full.  I pulled up behind a guy in a jacked up 4-by-4 Bronco with big flood lights mounted across the roof.  He was filling up four red, plastic gas cans lined up on the concrete.  I swiped my credit card, started the gas pumping, and went inside.

The store was bright and loud and as cold as a walk-in refrigerator.  Two or three people waited in line, buying ice and bottled water. It took me a minute to realize they were stocking up – to evacuate, or to hunker down. I couldn't think of anything I needed, so I bought a carton of cigarettes.

Back out at my truck, the guy in the Bronco gave me a clenched-jaw grin.  He was a big guy with a security-guard haircut and a round gut hanging over the belt of his cargo shorts.

“You ready?” he asked.  I waggled my carton of cigarettes at him.  “You better get ready, son,” he said, loading the gas cans into the back of his truck.  “This shit’s coming right at us.”

Worm had agreed to meet me at my house without any question. I’d always been a pretty reliable customer and I’m sure he saw this as just another sale.

My house was cool and dark and smelled clean, like Freon. Most of the furniture was stuff I had inherited from my Dad. A long purple couch, a square recliner, a heavy dining room table. Nothing that matched, as far as I could ever tell. I kept the place neat, clean. Hospital corners, shoes in a row. I did almost three years of active duty, minus a little jail time, before my knee gave out. You don’t lose those habits easily.

I grabbed a beer and sat down on the couch. Under the couch was a carved wooden box that I pulled out, put on the coffee table in front of me. In it was a baggie of fairly good pot. I didn't smoked pot myself, but I always kept some around for guests. I rolled a tight joint, put it on the ashtray on the table. Like most drug dealers I had ever known, Worm was lonely. He could never be sure if his friends really liked him, or if they just liked him because he could get them high. You had to chat with him first. If you tried to jump right into business, he’d get his feelings hurt. He’d still sell you the coke, he’d just pout while he did it. I leaned back on the couch, closed my eyes, sipped my beer, thought about what I was going to say.

About three-thirty, I heard Worm pull up, a wobbly V-8 with some muffled rock anthem shaking the windows. Worm’s truck was his pride. A big white Chevy half-ton with an aluminum toolbox bolted in the bed and a winch on the front grill. Worm had worked construction for a year or so, right out of high school, kept a love for the trucks.

I opened the door before he knocked and we did our standard handshake-fist hug. At thirty-four, he was still dressing like a frat boy, like he pictured a frat boy would dress. White t-shirt, hemp necklace. Like a prep-school kid on a beach excursion. Girls often said we looked a lot a like, but he was shorter than me, a little thinner, and I was darker. He was wearing an Astros cap and it occurred to me that he might be going bald.

He was nervous. As I closed the door, he moved to the window and pulled the curtain back to look at his truck. He shuffled his fingers across his thumb, breathed through his teeth. He had dark rings under his big round eyes and his face was gray pale. He had a fresh scrape on his temple and purpling bruises around his neck. He was freshly showered, his hair wet. He looked unhealthy, even by drug-dealer standards. But he was excited, too. He was on the verge of giggling and kept smiling to himself.

He sat on the couch and picked up the joint. We’d done this so many times, he didn’t feel the need to ask me any more. I sat in the recliner, watched as he got the joint lit, took in a long drag. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and let the smoke out slowly.

“How’s Jacob?” he asked. His voice was high, thin. Constricted.  This was his standard small-talk, the stuff he said every time he came over, before he’d sell me anything.

“All right, I guess,” I said.

He leaned back on the couch, rolled his head around on his shoulders.

“Kids are crazy, you know?”  Worm’s wife had moved to California with their daughter about a year before. I didn’t ask about them.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I saw Sarah the other day,” he said. This wasn’t standard.

I chewed on my lip.  I knew what it meant, but didn’t want to. Sarah wasn’t as bad as me with coke, but we’d always had a lot in common. I got up to get myself another beer, got one for Worm.

“Man, we used to have some fun, huh?” Worm said when I came back in the room.

A drunken, blurred night, about a year after I got out of the Army.  I had gotten involved with Sarah before I got out, mostly long distance.  We’d been fighting a lot since I got back and that day, that morning, she had told me she was pregnant.  So I was drunk and alone when I ran into Worm at the Galaxy. 

Worm and I had known each other for a long time – grew up in the same neighborhood, worked the same jobs.

“I didn’t know you were back in town,” Worm said when he saw me.  “Awesome.”

When he offered me a line of coke in the bathroom, I didn’t feel any resistance to the idea. We ended up going back to Dad's bar, an hour or so after Dad had locked up and gone home.  Dad had slowed down a lot while I was in the Army and had started closing up early.

Worm and I drank draft beer, shot pool, and cut lines of coke on the pinball machine glass. As I was pouring us a couple drafts, Worm came behind the bar and put his hand on my shoulder. I turned and he was crying.

“It’s gonna be all right, man,” he said when I turned around.  “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

“Okay,” I said.  My head was sloshing around.  I tried to focus on the Lone Star clock on the wall.

“We’re gonna have fun and everything’s gonna be all right,” he said.  “Remember that.”

“Sure,” I said, because that’s what you say when your head is sloshing around and someone tells you to remember that everything is gonna be all right.  I wanted to tell him that I knew, that I would remember, but I couldn’t get those thoughts from the back of my head to my mouth and that’s when I realized I was crying.

“I’m okay,” I said finally.

He spun me to hug me.  I held the beers out at my sides, trying not to spill them on his button-down shirt.  I felt my head clearing a bit.  The room got a little lighter as the slightest sliver of sobriety crept back into my eyes.

“It’s okay, Ray,” I said, feeling stupid.  “I’m all right.”

We played another game of pool, finished our beers, then I said I had to go home.  Worm hugged me at the pool table, hugged me again at the front door.  When he called my cell phone an hour later, I let it slip over to voice mail.

In my living room, I put a beer on the coffee table in front of Worm, sat back in the square recliner.

“Yeah,” I said. “Good times.”

A car drove by, a low rumble and a squeal of a bad fan belt. Worm jumped, went to the window and pulled the curtain back slightly. He watched until the sound faded, the car passed. He let the curtain fall and sat back down on the couch.

“Did you hear what happened at the Galaxy?” I asked.

Worm was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, flicking a cigarette over the ashtray with his thumb. The joint was nowhere to be seen. His knee bopped up and down. Normally, I didn’t smoke in the house, but since he lit one, I lit one.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s fucked up.”

“Hmm,” I said in agreement, nodding.

I let it sit there for a minute, then asked, “That have anything to do with you?”

Worm put a hurt expression on his face and looked up at me.

“No,” he said.

“The raid?”

“No,” he said. “Fuck no.  I don’t sell like that. It’s stupid. I’ll tell you the truth. I only sell to people I know. I don’t even sell, really. But when I have some extra, I sell some of it off. To people I know.”

I could never remember why we started calling Ray Worm, but I had a pretty good idea. He had a way of answering questions, or just holding conversation, where he would keep talking, improvising, until he was happy with the answer he had come up with. He kept talking, not giving you a chance to get in a word, until you’d usually forgotten what started the whole conversation and he’d wormed his way out of any trouble he might have gotten into.

“Like Frank,” I said.

Worm tilted his chin out, smoked, and looked at the ceiling. I smoked and looked at Worm.

“Look,” he said after a minute. “I’ll be honest with you. To get what I get, the quality I get, and the prices, you know?  I have to buy more than I can use. Or my friends can use.” He looked at me as he sipped his beer, then leaned forward. “I used to buy from that Columbian guy you met, that guy I knew forever,” he said. “And he’d sell me just a bump if I wanted. But now I have to buy from this Mexican guy from the valley. And if I don’t buy enough, he gives me really shitty stuff. I don’t like it. You wouldn’t like it.” He stubbed out his cigarette and picked up his beer.  “Fucking Mexicans.”  He sipped his beer, then looked quickly at me and added, “No offense.”  My mom was Mexican, born and raised in Oaxaca. In high school, Worm thought it was hysterical to call me a wetback. He stopped when he found out mom had killed herself.

“The only Mexican in my family has been dead for 20 years,” I said.

Worm chuckled, and you could see him struggling to come up with a joke. His mouth was twisted into a smile and he nodded, but he just couldn’t come up with anything, so he shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Anyway,” he said. “Sometimes I end up with more than I need or my friends need. So I sell some to Frank and he sells it to his friends.” 

“Just Frank?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice rising with hurt. “I mean, sometimes one other guy. But really, just Frank. The other guy, I don’t even see him around any more. He’s gone. I think to Canada. Really. Some place like that.”

I took a deep breath through my nose, bit the tip of my thumb. Worm’s knee bopped up and down.

“Look,” I said in my best brotherly voice. “You know I don’t care about what you do. Hell, I appreciate it.” 

He nodded thoughtfully. I was trying to give him the ability to see himself as the good guy. If he thought I was lecturing him, he’d never listen to me.

“But, with the police out watching the bars and everything, I can’t take any chances, you know?” I said.

“Sure, sure,” he said.

“I got in trouble with the TABC already when I served that kid,” I said. “I can't afford to screw up.”

“Sure,” he said, his eyebrows pressed together in sympathy.

“Frank said that you told him it would be all right to sell in my bar.”

The eyebrows shot up and apart.

“He said what?” Worm asked, looking around the room to see if anybody else heard what he was hearing. There was no reaction from the furniture. “He said that? I never. I never said that.”

“No,” I said, waving my cigarette a little. “I know.”

“I would never say that.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” I said.

He shook his head some more, then sucked in his bottom lip and looked up at the ceiling.

“Maybe I said something like, ‘My friend John owns this cool little place. You should check it out.’ Maybe I said something like that,” he said, nodding. The eyebrows were still up. “I never meant for him to sell there. I never meant that at all. Never.”  With all the nodding and eyebrow raising, he had almost convinced himself.

“I know,” I said. I lit a cigarette. “But if you could do me a favor, and ask Frank and the other guys who buy from you, you know, not to do any business in my place, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

“You know,” I said. “With the cops all over the neighborhood and everything.”

“Sure,” Worm said. “No problem.”

I took a drag off my cigarette, felt it deep in my chest. Worm sat on the couch, nodding. I leaned back in the chair, drank my beer, and felt relief for the first time in hours. Then Worm stood up.

“I got a favor to ask you, too,” he said.

He stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and walked to the front door. He opened it a crack, stuck his head out, then stepped out and quickly shut the door behind him. I stood up and pulled the window curtain aside. The big truck glistened under the street light. Worm climbed in the cab of his truck and turned off the dome light. After a few seconds, the light came on again and Worm stepped out carrying a small black backpack. He shut the truck door and turned back toward the house. He hunched his head and looked, up and down the street, as he walked up the path. I sat back down in the chair.