Mule (25 page)

"Sounds good."

"Sam doesn't know I'm doing any driving. I told him you're the guy who brought it."

"That's fine."

"He's going to be nervous. He hasn't done anything like this before."

"It'll all work out."

We got stuck in traffic, the usual Austin snarl, and the cousin started calling: What were we doing, what were we doing? The dealer was expecting the shit at six. What if we pissed off the dealer? Emma said, "We'll be there in fifteen minutes, Sam. Just tell the guy to chill out."

The cousin was standing on the corner of 24th and Guadalupe, rooted in place like a telephone pole, a skinny, clean-faced kid in a Longhorns cap, his hands crammed deep in the pockets of his jeans. His face was white as he eyeballed the street. I could tell he was terrified. He jumped in the back of the car beside Bayleigh. He said, "You guys are late. You guys are late. He says he doesn't want to do it anymore."

I looked at Emma; Emma rolled her eyes at me. She glanced at Sam in the rearview, made a face. She said, "Fifteen minutes? What's wrong with this guy? Like he's never had to wait? Give me a fucking break." She wheeled us into the alley behind the Urban Outfitters. When she popped the trunk, the cousin looked around. He said, "Right here? Right here? What if somebody sees?" Emma rolled her eyes at me again.

Out in the alley, I grabbed the backpack, shut the trunk. Emma drove away. Then the cousin and I went around the corner and crossed Guadalupe over onto the UT campus. The weather was breezy, an early September day, laughing students were wearing backpacks around us everywhere. The cousin said to me under his breath, "Everyone's watching us, aren't they?"

"Nobody's watching us. Just get your chin off your chest, okay?"

Up in his dorm room, Sam called the dealer. The dealer didn't want to do it anymore. We were late. He'd scored a pound off somebody else in the meantime.

Scored a pound just like that? I shook my head. "Call this guy," I said. "Tell him he ordered it. It came across the country for him."

"You call him," Sam said, offering me the phone.

I put up my hand. "Emma's paying you, right?"

"Two hundred dollars."

"This is how you earn it."

He called the dealer while I looked around his room. It was so plain, textbooks and pencils, not much else, no posters on the walls, nothing colorful. Why was this frightened kid messing around with this? For two hundred dollars?

Sam hung up. Okay, okay, he said, the dealer said he'd look at a sample. Where did the dealer live? I asked him. He said, Upstairs, on a different floor.

I opened the backpack, pulled out the pound, popped it with my finger, fished out a pinecone bud. Sam stared at all the weed in the bag, got scared, went and put his ear against the door. Was he expecting anybody? I asked. No, his roommate had a night class, he said. So what was the deal with all this nervous shit? I said. He said, How could we be sure nobody knew?

I sighed. "Run this up there. Tell him I'm down here getting pissed off."

Sam put the bud in his pocket and left. Ten minutes went by. Then he was back, locking the door behind him. "He doesn't want it. He says it isn't good enough."

"Not good enough?"

"He says he isn't paying five and a half grand for something he can get for three."

I let that sink in, turned it over. Then I said, "He's lying. He can't get this for three."

"Well, he says he can."

"Call him. Tell him if he can get it for three, I'll buy it from him. This is what I do, Sam. And I know he can't get it for that."

Sam took out his phone, called him. He said quietly into the phone, "The guy says you can't get it for that price." He was listening. Then he said, "The guy says he'll buy it from you."

Sam hung up. "He doesn't want to do it."

I shoved the pound in the backpack, zipped the backpack shut, slung it over my shoulder. Take me up there, I said. Why, what were we going to do? Sam asked. We'd done a lot of work to get this here, I told him, we were going to go up there and talk to this guy.

We went up in the elevator. Sam shook his head. "I knew I wouldn't make that two hundred dollars."

"What are you talking about, Sam?"

"He's always bragging to everybody about what a big drug dealer he is. I'm not even sure he really is one."

On the floor the elevator opened at, there were guys in towels coming out of the showers, guys in soccer jerseys and cleats heading for the stairs. When Sam knocked, the drug dealer who could score kush for three opened the door of his dorm room. He had glasses, acne, slicked-back blond hair. He was wearing a puka-shell necklace with a wooden marijuana leaf hanging off of it. When he saw me, he turned pale.

"Where do you score kush for three?" I asked.

His eyes widened at how loud I'd said it. "Dude," he said to hush me, and looked up and down the hall, "not out here." He let us in. He had Bob Marley posters on the wall, a digital scale out in the open on his desk, bongs, pipes, baggies, all the paraphernalia. But I'd already figured everything out. He went and sat in his leather recliner, recovered himself, put on what I guessed he thought was a business face. Should I give him credit for being able to do that, at least? I said to him, "You just copped a pound from someone else?"

He cocked his chin at me. He said, "Sorry, man. You were late. The shit's already on its way over."

"Why'd you order it if you never really wanted it?"

"How was I supposed to know it would get here? From Sam? A guy like Sam? Man, I had to have my backup plan. I got a business to run, you know?"

I picked up a heavy textbook off his desk, looked at it. It was
Fundamentals of Cost Accounting.

I said, "This your book?"

He said, "Yeah."

I stepped across the room, swung the book as hard as I could and hit him in the face with it. I dropped the book, punched him over and over. Then he was on the floor, and I was stomping on his head. I knocked all the shit off his shelves, yanked out his drawers, tore down his posters. Was he crying? Good. Could I even piss on him? There was a roll of money on the floor; I grabbed it. The nickel bags of seedy Mexican yard weed of course I left behind. When I shut the door behind me, I saw Sam bolting away, already far down the hall. When he glanced back over his shoulder, I understood he was running away from me.

I took the elevator down, walked out. In the car, I noticed my knuckles were scuffed and bleeding. Emma didn't want the guy's money. She yelled at me, "What's the matter with you? That's my cousin! Don't you care about anything? Are you fucking crazy?"

At the airport, she threw the money after me onto the curb, pulled away. People were watching as I gathered up the money. I went through security, walked to my gate. Then I got on my plane. When I counted the money, it was $167. I stared out the window at nothing all the way home.

I
N MID-SEPTEMBER, I MANAGED
to put off Eric Deveny on his New York run one last time. Two days later, my mother called and said a letter had come to her house for me. She let me in when I arrived, went back to watching the news. "Are you following what's happening, James? The Lehman Brothers bank last week, and today this AIG."

"Sounds like more of the same to me, Ma."

"What a bunch of assholes."

The letter was in a plain white envelope, no return address, no postmark, no stamp. When I tore it open, there was a single sheet of paper folded inside; on it was a photocopied picture of a turn-of-the-century western pack mule. The mule was loaded with baggage and ready for travel. There was nothing else in the picture but the mule. Under the mule was printed: "Operators of working animals generally find mules preferable to horses. Mules show less impatience under the pressure of heavy weight. The stereotype of a mule as being stubborn is unfair and inaccurate."

Under that was a line of handwriting: "Stop being so fucking stubborn!!!"

"What'd you get?" my mother asked.

I rubbed my beard patches. "An invitation to this thing at work."

"Is your job safe? Are you and Kate worried about all of this?"

"We've been through it already. Besides, rich people still want their boats cleaned. I'm even managing my own crew over there now." I folded the letter into my pocket. Then I said to her, "You have a valid passport, by any chance?"

She nodded. "I had to get one for my cruise to Nassau."

"Maybe we'll all go on a trip together someday."

 

When the Cali load came in two Mondays later, I drove up to Tallahassee in the morning, met Emma at her hotel, grabbed the weight from her in the lot. I apologized again for what I'd done at UT, asked if her cousin Sam had taken the $500 I'd asked her to give him from me to say sorry to him, too. Emma shrugged. "He wouldn't touch it. He said he doesn't want our filthy drug money."

I nodded. "What about that stupid liar kid?"

"Stop worrying about it. He knows he can't say anything. Just keep an eye on your mental state, would you? You're getting to be as high-strung as Mason."

I gave her the cash for the next run, then drove the weight to Deveny's. His house was as dark and foreboding as always when I pulled up to it. I took my usual deep breaths, hopped out, and ran the duffel bags inside. Eric was standing in his wood-paneled den, dressed in white, his remote in his hand, watching the news on his projection TV. "Can you believe this shit?" he said, smiling when I walked in. "It gets crazier every day. It's down eight hundred points right now. What did they think would happen, wasting their money blowing up shithole countries? Who's laughing now, my man?"

I dropped the duffel bags on his couch, pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket, tossed it on his coffee table. The picture of the mule looked up at us in the dark room. When he noticed it, he picked it up and made a face like he was seeing it for the first time. Then he grinned at me and said, "An amazing animal, don't you think? Much better than a pig, for example."

"How'd it get down there?"

"My brother was passing through."

"You sent your brother to my mother's house?"

He turned back to his TV. He said, "Relax, my man. It's not like he knocked on her door. Sometimes people just need a kick in the pants. You're not the same guy who first came up here anymore, are you? That guy would've begged me for the chance to do some work. In fact, I think you did beg me, remember? Where is that guy now, that guy who was born in my house? Have you made enough money, James? Even with all this new shit that's going on? Fine with me. Give me your connection and go the fuck away. You'd make me very happy."

"You're not getting that."

"Then you're going to New York."

What could I say, No? Or better yet, Make me? I shrugged, said the only thing I knew I could: "How much are you going to pay me?"

He nodded as he watched the Dow Jones plunge. "Good news, my man. Great news, in fact. We've had such a productive working relationship, haven't we? Making money for each other. Getting our hands dirty for one another. Besides, I have this strong feeling you're going to enjoy yourself up there. All right, water under the bridge, back to business. Where are you taking me for lunch today? The restaurants are going to be fucking deserted I bet."

When I crawled into bed that night, Kate rolled over and whispered what she always did: "Everything going okay out there?"

I whispered back what I always did: "Everything's going just fine."

"Did you stop and see Nick?"

"Yeah, I picked up your money, Kate."

"How's Nick?"

"Nick's good."

"He doesn't want to stop working for us anymore?"

"No, he managed to get himself over that."

"What do you think was the matter with him?"

"People get frightened out there sometimes."

Kate said, "Did you look in at the babies?"

"You know I did."

"Aren't they getting big?"

"Yeah, so big."

"You're not going to see them grow up if you go on working like this, you know."

Then Kate asked, "Are you going to be home for a few days?"

"Why are you asking?"

"There's a function—"

"Take Cristina."

 

One part of my life really was going just fine: Jerome and Emma were conducting the cross-country runs from California like symphonies, bringing in the weight, taking out the money, passing JoJo Bear back and forth between them like a baton. I'd finally let Jerome and Billy meet in Sacramento, to save myself the hassle of having to fly out there. If they'd cut any side deals between them, which I assumed they had, I hadn't noticed yet. The dream of the Capital Cities Connection was up and running, tossing me eighteen to twenty Gs every two weeks for doing nothing more than putting up the cash. I should have been able to kick back, grow out my hair, get to know my kids, maybe even start writing again. But of course I couldn't do that. Now I was working for Eric Deveny.

The New York run was a three-day roundtrip up the eastern seaboard that took me through High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas in Jacksonville, Washington, D.C., and Trenton, and overnighted me in Richmond on the way up and Savannah on the way back. Eight more states to add to my muling résumé, 2,200 more miles, and lots of congested traffic to hide in—so much easier than anything I'd done before that I didn't mind that JoJo Bear wasn't riding along with me.

I was carrying twenty-five-pound loads, made up of a little of my Cali kush and a lot of Eric's Miami haze, in two big suitcases in the back of our old Forester. At Dulles, I'd switch out the car for a rental with New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania plates. When I reached Newark, I'd park in the short-term lot, catch a prearranged town car to the city, finish the run at a Manhattan address on the north side of Gramercy Park. The building was old and beautiful, the ceiling in the lobby paneled and high, the brass banisters polished and gleaming. The liveried doorman would hand me a heavy gym bag, I'd unzip it and see that it was packed with cash, then he'd whisk the suitcases away into the elevator. Should I hang out for a while in the city? Have a little fun like Deveny seemed to want me to? I'd just earned another eight Gs, after all. But I'd take the same town car back to Newark, hop in the rental, get myself back on the road. Down in Tallahassee, I'd give Eric his money and go home with mine: $58,000. I was having to wait to get my fifty Gs from him for the Cali pounds out of those New York gym bags now, too.