The Dope Thief (6 page)

Ray looked away, not ready for any of this, and his father looked down, talked to the tabletop.

“The guys put all kinds of shit in it, trying to make it taste like something.”

“Shit, Bart. What do they say?”

The old man shrugged. “Six months, a year. Over and out.”

“Did you talk to your lawyer? Maybe you can, you know . . .”

His father snorted, made a motion like throwing something over his shoulder. “Can what? Go where? It might as well be here as anywhere. Like you give a shit.”

Ray let that hang. He stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. His father grabbed the pack and tried to pinch one between his shaking fingers. Ray watched him for a minute, then took the pack and shook one out. Across the room, a man reached over to tousle the hair of a little girl, who slid away down the bench.

“What about Theresa? Does she know?”

Bart shrugged. “What do you think? She better off with me there, or here?”

Ray shook his head, things moving in this unaccountable direction. Why had he come? What did he need from the old man now?

“I keep remembering this thing,” he finally said. The old man looked at Ray, and he pulled his lighter out and fired up his cigarette for his father. “We’re in the old house on County Line, remember?”

His father nodded, looked at the tip of his cigarette.

“Anyway, I’m like seven or eight, I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night and I’m half asleep, but you got me down the kitchen in my pajamas. You been beating the old lady, showing her the errors of her ways. She’s crying, but what the hell. I don’t remember her doing nothing else. I’m out of it, and slow on the uptake anyway, like you used to point out. But after a while I get that I’m supposed to take a swing at her. You know, get in the habit. Learn how it’s done. Take a lesson.”

“Yeah, it was all me. I was the one ruined your life.”

“Did that happen, really? Like I remember it? Would you even admit it now, you old fuck?”

The old man’s breathing was shallow, his face red, the busted veins standing out on his cheeks. “She’d have ruined you.”

“Yeah, I was lucky you straightened me out. You straightened me out so good I live alone like a fucking animal in a cave. Scared if I even bring a woman home I’ll start beating the shit out of her.” His hands were shaking, and he stared at the table a long time.

He heard a rasping sound like laughter and looked up, but the old man was crying, his hand spread across his face and the tears squeezing out of the corners of his eyes.

“Don’t hate me no more. It was the drink, Ray, the drink. I wanted to be good, but I was weak. I couldn’t handle it. Working at that fucking quarry and breathing that shit all day and coming home to the water heater’s shot and the bills and you sick all the time. And her wanting me to be something I couldn’t. I couldn’t.” He put his hand across the table and touched Ray’s arm. The old man’s flesh was hot, and Ray wanted to pull away. “Do you think this is what I wanted? You think I didn’t want to be going home at night? I was weak. I was weak. You can’t be better than you are.”

“Yeah.” Ray lined up the cigarette packs in front of him and pulled back from the table. Nodding as if Bart had said something wise. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

RAY DROVE BACK
up 95, his head on fire. He had felt driven to see his father again, to try to sort out what was him and what his old man and the way he’d been raised. He had come up to the edge of something standing in the store with that girl with the glasses, and he wanted to know would he always come up to that edge and look out and away at something he’d never really get to, never live out. Now Bart was going to die, and he didn’t know if that mattered, if it meant he’d be free or stuck forever.

He remembered guys upstate drinking raisin jack, only the guys he knew called it chalk. Older guys, mostly, who’d been in for a de cade and more or were back for their third or fourth jolts. He remembered a guy named Long John keeping a plastic bag full of rotting fruit and dinner rolls under his bunk. He’d had a drink of thin, milky liquid from a glass jar and thought it tasted like orange- scented gasoline. He didn’t get the point, with weed and meth around most of the time.

He’d hated every second of prison but saw guys at home there. Guys who’d get out with the couple of bucks they gave you, what the old cellies called shotgun money because that was all it was enough to buy. They’d blow the money in a couple of days, stick up a 7- Eleven or a gas station and be back inside. Get in bar fights still wearing the Kmart jackets they got when they were gated out. They’d talk like it was bad luck or people on the outside fucking with them that brought them back, but the truth was they couldn’t make it outside.

One day upstate they took him off the laundry and sent him and a big convict named Merce outside to bury two guys who’d died within a couple of hours of each other in the infirmary. One from AIDS and one from old age. Merce spent the whole time telling him about the beef that got him locked up, killing a friend in the dope business.

“I went out to get my scratch tickets, I come back, the motherfucker’s drinking my last can of soda. You believe that shit?”

“Uh- huh.” They were standing in a field in the snow, watching a trusty scratch a trough in the frozen ground with a green backhoe. Ray kept his hands in the pockets of his thin jacket, and Merce smoked a cigarette, stabbing at Ray with the red end to make his points. Ray’s arms ached where they had been broken.

“That wasn’t Coke or Sprite, neither. That was Guarana, what my baby drinks.”

“It was what?”

“Guarana. It’s from Brazil. You can’t get that shit at the Wawa. You got to go to a Brazilian store like all the way the fuck up in Norristown. I said, you did not just drink my last soda.”

“Huh.” The trusty was taking his time, smacking the ground over and over to break up the frozen clay. Ray felt the ground under him shudder every time the bucket on the backhoe hit the ground.

“He said you just go to the store. I said, bullshit you go to the store. I went to the closet, got my crossbow.”

Ray looked at him, eyebrows up.

“You heard me. My baby didn’t like guns in the house.”

“Good compromise.”

Merce gave him convict eyes, his head lowered, smoke from his Newport streaming from his nose. Then he gave a snort and started a deep laugh that shook his frame and started him coughing and made his eyes tear. “Yeah, I guess you got to laugh now.”

There was a grinding snap, and the backhoe stuck fast in the frozen ground. The engine died, and they heard the trusty swear. Ray watched a thin film of frost materialize on the plywood coffins. Thought about it forming on the dead men inside the boxes. Merce’s eyes fixed on the middle distance.

Ray said, “Lesson learned, huh?”

“Yeah.” Merce bent to the stacked coffins, throwing the cigarette away in an arc of smoke like a plane going down in a war movie. “If only my baby had bought more soda, I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

THE NIGHT MANNY
picked him up it was raining, and they went for Rick, splashing through black streams covering the roads at every low intersection. Ray held the thickened bones in his arms, and under the dark clouds they sang to him, an eddying ache that made him wince and sigh. The van slewed in the water, and Manny cursed. “Christ, look at this. And it’s still a thousand degrees out, how is that possible?”

“I figure it’s good for us. Keeps the civilians indoors, watching TV.”

They slowed in front of a white house in Horsham fronted with crumbling asbestos tiles. Rick limped out under a sheet of newspaper and climbed in. “Look at that rain. I thought maybe you’d call it off.”

Ray shook his head. “Nah, neither rain nor dark of night. What happened to your leg?”

“Ah, I went around to my ex’s to get my fucking stereo back, and her asshole boyfriend was there. Like to take my fucking knee off with a monkey wrench.”

Manny put the van in gear. “Been there. You notice they always trade up for somebody with bigger shoulders than you?”

Ray watched Rick rubbing the knee. “You take something for that?”

“Ah, you know. I handled it.” Manny looked over at Ray and shook his head.

“Rick, you high right now?”

“No, man. Just took the edge off, you know.”

“If you aren’t a hundred percent it’s better you tell us now.”

“No, no way. I’m cool, really. It was hours ago, and I’m in the pink.”

Ray watched Rick, who looked out the window. He did seem all right. When he turned and saw Ray considering him, he smiled, held up his hands.

The car in front of them stopped short, and Manny stood on the brakes, the back of the van fishtailing. They all cursed, and Ray put a hand out to the dash. Rick slid forward and hit the back of Manny’s seat; he screwed up his face and grabbed his knee. “Mother . . . fuck.” He gritted his teeth and clenched his eyes shut.

After a minute they began to inch forward. Ray saw a cop, waving a flashlight, and a traffic barrier three cars ahead. They were being waved onto a side road. Far ahead a tree lay across the road, green leaves splayed out in the rain, pink shards of wood broken over the road looking like wet bone. Ray grabbed a map from the floor and began to try to orient himself.

Rick pointed at a road sign. “Left or right?”

“Left. No, right.”

They turned onto a smaller side street. Dark water streamed in a ditch by the road, and lightning illuminated low clouds that looked to be a few feet above the trees. Ray called the turns. Once they ended up in a cul- de- sac and had to backtrack. Eventually they came out on the right road a few miles beyond the tweaker farm and pulled over.

Manny and Ray climbed into the rear, and Ray pulled a duffel bag out of the back and put it on the rear seat. He opened it and pulled out the DEA windbreakers and Manny’s pump gun and handed them over. Next came a box of shells and a big Colt Python with a six- inch barrel. He held the gun out to Rick, opening the cylinder and spinning it to show him it was loaded. He pulled out three folded parkas and handed them around and then brought out two walkie- talkies and three heavy police flashlights. He flicked on one of the lights and pointed it at the walkie- talkies each in turn, tuning the dials to the same channel and then clicking them on. He adjusted the volume on both and handed one to Rick and clipped the other to his belt. He rummaged in the bag for a minute, pulling out items to show Rick and Manny and then dropping them back in the bag. Tape, the heavy wire wraps that they used as cuffs, a folding knife, a half pound of ground meat, bottles of water.

He took out his map and laid it on the seat and put the light on it.

“This side is me. I’m moving up from the street along these trees. You’re on this side, and we’re both moving parallel to the driveway in the middle. You two come to the side door here, I’m going to the front door. I’ll take care of the dog, if it’s out. Fucking thing barks nonstop anyway as far as I can tell, so it’s not a big deal.” He drew an arrow on the map.

“When you get to the side door here, key the button a couple of times. Don’t fucking say anything, just key the button.” He clicked it so they could hear the corresponding click and hiss on the other walkie- talkie. “I key you back and we go in.” Manny, loading the shotgun, nodded and gave him a thumbs- up.

Ray pointed at Rick. “Just take it fucking easy. If you’re clear when you get to the door, take off the parka so they can see the DEA jacket. They’ll piss and moan, maybe they’ll try to hide, but no one’s going to draw down on a Fed unless he’s fucking insane, and then we got a bigger problem.”

Manny smiled. “Which is how to get the hell out fast.”

“If they shoot, run. This’” Ray pointed at the Python in Rick’s hands. “This is for show. You’re not a Fed, you just play one on TV, get it? This ain’t worth nobody getting a bullet in the brainpan. Not even those shitbirds up the hill. Plus the whole fucking place is liable to burn like a furnace you shoot off a gun in there. They’re meth cookers. The fucking place is full of acetone and ether and Christ knows what- all.”

Manny laid the shotgun down on the floor and went into his pocket for a glass vial. He pulled an old piece of rearview mirror out from under the seat and shook out three rocky lines of off-white powder. He took a flat piece of cardboard out of his pocket and pulled a single- edged razor blade out of it. He chopped the three lines into six. He rolled up a twenty and handed it to Rick.

“Oh, man, thanks.” He did two lines and passed the twenty to Ray, who did the lines and then opened one of the water bottles and poured a little out into his palm and then snorted the water out of his hand.

“That is some nasty biker crank.”

When they were set, Ray got behind the wheel and drove slowly past the property, pointing up the tree line he’d be walking. “I’ll be heading straight up this way.” He drove past the driveway to the fence on the other side of the property and stopped. Manny and Rick got out, guns out of sight under their parkas. They slammed the doors, and Ray angled the van over to turn around, awkwardly jockeying it back and forth until it was headed back up the road.

He parked again in the little turnoff and looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Grabbing the bag, he turned off the ignition and dropped the keys under the seat. After a minute of running through things in his head, he took a deep breath and stepped out of the van. He stuck the Colt in his windbreaker pocket and made his way up the hill, moving slowly in the black.

HE KEPT SLIPPING
in the grass. He walked for what felt like forever and didn’t seem to be moving far from the van. The night and rain turned him around, and he had to keep looking back down the hill to get his bearings. The line of trees seemed wider somehow and the ground more uneven than he remembered it. In a couple of minutes he was struggling, his own breath roaring in his ears under the parka and sweat pouring down his back. The bag weighed a ton, and he looped the strap over his shoulder.

After what seemed like an hour, he crested the hill and saw the lights of the house. He couldn’t see the dog and thought that a good sign. He was panting now and dropped to one knee to catch his breath. There were lights in the house and one on upstairs in the barn, which he didn’t expect. He had thought the building was a padlocked wreck and hadn’t paid much attention to it. He took the binoculars out and put them on the barn window, but the dark made them about useless.