The Taste of Salt (17 page)

When he told Mom about losing the job, her mouth tightened and her eyes hollowed out. But she said nothing. She didn't ask him to leave and she didn't ask any questions, which surprised him.

Within a month, he almost wished she had put him out. Or screamed at him, or something. He wanted someone to react. He was drinking every day. Plus he had been thinking about the sweet sharp sting of coke up his nose for two days straight, and so he had decided to try that again. He'd never used it much, but he wanted it now. He hadn't been to an AA meeting since he lost his job. He carried the pocket-sized meeting schedule with him and, sometimes, he'd run his finger over the edge, but there was something that wouldn't let him go. Instead, he found himself rifling through his mother's top drawer, looking for money.

After he took the seventy-five dollars that he found and jammed it into his pocket, he went out to find a pay phone to call his old dealer. He'd take his mother's money but he still had a scruple or two left. He didn't want to call his
dealer from her phone. He wished he still had a cell. It was so damn hard to find a pay phone these days.

After a lot of driving around, he found a greasy pay phone at a decrepit convenience store. It had taken forever and it looked like it was going to rain and the wind had an edge. He was surprised at how easily Beenie's number came back to him, though. Like he'd never been away. Clearly kept in his head where the important stuff was. Beenie's voice, always slow and half asleep, answered.

“Yo.”

“Yo, Beenie, it's Tick.”

“Tick? Tick? Man, I thought you was walking the straight and narrow.”

“Yeah, well, it got a little too narrow, you know.” A song blasted tinnily from the little transistor behind the counter. The counterman—dark-eyed and dark-skinned but not black, Pakistani or something—eyed Tick suspiciously. Tick turned away and lowered his voice, like the criminal he had become. “Listen, are you holding?”

“Now, come on, man, when I ever do you wrong? I'm always holding. I got what you need, my brother.” He paused. “So you're back, huh?”

“Yeah.” Tick took a deep breath and stared at the graffiti-covered wall behind to the phone. “I'm back.”

• • •

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER,
he was standing on Beenie's porch, dripping wet from the downpour that had just begun. Actually, it was Beenie's aunt's house, about two blocks from where we grew up. Not far from where Tick used to ride bikes when he was a kid, before Dean, before all this, with his friends Kenny and Dwayne and Alan. All of them had gone off to do something with themselves after a few years of fooling around, acting like nothing wasn't ever gonna change, nothing wasn't ever gonna be good enough. And then they found good enough. Found good jobs and good women. Well, all but that knucklehead Dwayne—he was locked up in Mansfield for fifteen years. Armed robbery. And Tick. For a while, he thought he'd be like Kenny and Alan, that he'd be able to put the foolishness down someday. He'd even done it. He'd done it! Twice! But then he picked it up again, after a few clean months. He was gonna have to ride this train to the end. Because he couldn't put it down.

Beenie seemed happy to see him. As happy as he ever was to see anybody. He had on a black do-rag and a white tank top. He'd clearly been spending time at the gym—Beenie didn't use. He only sold. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. He was rubbing his face as he opened the door. “So, my man Tick. Welcome back. What can I do for you?”

What could Beenie do for him? Refuse to sell him anything and send him home, he thought bitterly, that's the
best thing Beenie could do for him. But he said, “I need to get straight and I ain't got that much money. What can you do for me with seventy-five dollars?”

Beenie told him. It wasn't much. But it was something. The deal was made, the money exchanged, the package in his hand. But he had nowhere to go with it—Mom's basement? No. No. Not there. He stood irresolute for a few minutes. Beenie's aunt kept her eyes and her mind closed to what was going on in her house. So Beenie had not only his own bedroom but a small off-to-the-side room for those who needed to cop immediately and had nowhere else to go. Tick had always thought that room was for the lowest of the low. He never thought he'd have to go to that room. Except now he did. He looked at Beenie for a minute. Beenie took a long drag on his cigarette and looked at Tick indifferently. “You need to go on back there, man? Get right? Well, go on. You know the deal. It's a girl back there but it's no one you know.”

Tick nodded, wordlessly. Beenie's aunt kept three or four cats that had the run of the place. The house smelled of old sweat and cat piss. He went to the back room, where the door was half open; he pushed on it lightly and entered.

There was a sofa that was all cotton-sprung and sagging, covered with what had once been brown corduroy, but now? Hard to say. It was moldering with sweat and spilled
stuff. There were a couple of broken-down, equally disgusting old easy chairs and a coffee table with a mirror for doing lines or setting up whatever you needed to set up whatever way you needed to set it up. There was a girl with her skirt pushed up and her legs thrown so wide open that he could see her black lace underwear. She was white, with brittle blond ends and long dark roots. She was maybe twenty-five. She had dark, dark circles under her eyes. Her head lolled back on the sofa and her works sat on the table. She was already long, long gone to wherever the heroin took her. It occurred to Tick—he didn't know why, he didn't really want to do it—that he probably could have climbed right on top of her there and had her and she never even would have known it. Her breathing seemed to fill the room.

Well. He had somewhere he needed to get to. Better get going. He poured out a little of the coke, cut it easily and expertly, and snorted it. It was, as they say, like riding a bike—one of those things you never truly forget how to do.

He kept going until he was so high that he couldn't keep still and so horny he couldn't think. Coke always got to him like that. He moved next to the girl and slid his hand up her exposed thigh. She stirred slightly but didn't come out of her nod and didn't move away. He unzipped his pants and reached in. He was too high even to feel horrified by what he was doing. He was very hard. It just took a few strokes of his
hand to bring him off. He wiped himself off with the girl's discarded sweatshirt. He felt relieved at first but then, for a second, everything became clear. He was so disgusted with himself that he had to do another line, so he could forget who he'd turned into. So he could forget all those meetings at Riverrun, the hope he'd had when he first came home. He finished the coke. Then he left the house and went to a bar. He wasn't going to stop until he had reached the end.

T
HE NEXT TIME HE
was aware of anything at all, he was sprawled across his bed in the basement. He was still fully dressed, and he smelled of alcohol. Mom stood over him, her face a stone. He'd never seen her look like that before. “So you're awake,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“That's good, because you need to pack and get out of here.”

“What?” Even as he said it, he couldn't really rouse any anger. This was the price of the ticket.

“I said, you've got to go. I can't. I won't watch you kill yourself in my house. I watched your father go down for too long. I watched you go down before. I'm not going to watch it again.”

Tick was silent for a moment. “Daddy stopped,” he said.

“Yes, he did.” She closed her eyes and finished speaking.

“Yes, he did. But only after I drew the line. I should have drawn it with you a long time ago.” Her voice wavered for the first time. “You have to go,” she finished.

Tick looked at her. She was immovable. “Are you just gonna stand there, Mom?”

“Until I see your bags packed and you out the door. I'll give you a little bit of money. Even though I know you've been stealing from me. Even though you'll probably just spend it on booze. But this will be the last you get from me.” She reached into her pocket. Her hands shook.

When he first woke up, Tick thought he felt as bad as it was possible to feel. But he felt even worse as he took the money from our mother. She watched him pack. She stood at the door as he left. She didn't speak again, even when he said, “Bye, Mom.” She nodded slightly. He looked down. Her hands were still shaking.

He wasn't sure where he would go. But he was going. He left the house, stepped out into the cool darkness, his eyes burning. His car was there but he didn't trust himself to drive. So he left his last earthly possession in the driveway. It was the least he could do. He'd take the bus. He'd take the bus to wherever he was going. He could hardly walk, he had the shakes so bad. But he wanted not to cop, not to get a drink. Not this time. He thought about how Daddy had quit after he left us. He got himself to the Greyhound
station on East Ninth Street. It was a very long walk from the house, but he had to save that money. He had to keep setting down his suitcase and sitting on it. Once he had to throw up. But he made it. He went to the window. He didn't know what he was going to say until he got there. But once he was there, he asked the man how much a ticket to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, was. And he bought a ticket to come to me. He hoped he could count on me one more time.

If I'd been kind enough or present enough to have listened to my father or asked him any questions during our rare, uncomfortable telephone conversations, I'd have known that, one day at a time, he truly had turned things around. He was sober and calm and even almost—dare he even think it?—happy. Well, maybe not happy. But at peace. Now that he was near seventy, he'd found that peace they talked about so much in the rooms. He hoped Tick could find it, too, but he knew it was something Tick had to do himself. Tick didn't talk to him much more than I did. He mourned the way he'd lost us, but he knew that he wasn't in control of our coming back. Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't. It was his job to be there and be sober either way. That's what he knew now. So he made his
own life as good as it could be. He'd been volunteering at the Hough branch of the public library for five years. He'd been retired for eight and he spent the first three years of his retirement reading and taking walks and seeing Natalie, a woman from the AA meeting he went to. He liked having his days completely free, but after a while, that got a little dull. That's when he started volunteering.

They say you're not supposed to date within the meetings. But he and Natalie had both been sober for a long time and they'd heard that A A slogan Take What You Like and Leave the Rest enough times that they decided they could take each other and leave the no-dating rule behind. After he committed to being sober one day at a time, he found that having someone to be with could help him keep that promise. Natalie was white. (Him with a white woman—who'da thunk it?) She was very smart and used to be a schoolteacher. They both loved to read. He especially treasured the evenings they sat together at opposite ends of the sofa, each with a book on their laps and their legs entangled, because he remembered how he had started to lose the ability to read thoughtfully at the end of his drinking days. Being able to do it again was a great gift. Natalie gave him a lot of pleasure and they had a lot of fun together, but he still missed my mother. He still thought about her laugh
sometimes or the curve of her hip. When he hung up the phone after one of their brief, difficult conversations about Tick, he always wanted to pick it up again and ask her to take him back. How he hated to part from her, even on the phone, even when she didn't love him anymore. What did it matter? He would always love her.

The other thing that disturbed his peace—didn't take it away but disturbed it—was the life of the city itself. It seemed as though everything was falling apart in slow motion. Take a look at St. Clair Avenue. It used to be a vibrant main drag, full of Slovenian shops and small factories and then later a mix of little stores and restaurants and whatnot, some black-owned, some white-owned. But busy and alive. Now? Drive five blocks, see one open business. Or for another example, take the kids who hung out at the library. They didn't read—they just seemed to see the library as a place out of the weather to hang out. They had no respect, no decorum, no sense of how to act about anything. All of them black, which broke his heart. They rolled in every afternoon, every other word out of their mouth “nigger” this and “nigger” that. They didn't seem to care about anything except whatever impulse they were having at the moment they had it. It was often a destructive or disruptive one. His job at the library was to staff the desks when the librarians
were on break, as the budget had been cut so severely that the library couldn't hire a lot of professional librarians. So he filled in. He answered questions and watched the scene. He had to call security about once a week about some bunch of kids or another. They made everything hard for the people who were trying to use the library properly, the little girls sitting and reading, their noses almost touching their books, the dreadlocked mothers trying to teach their kids the right way to act. He tried to talk to some of the young men sometimes, reason with them. But even if they quieted down, looked at the floor for a moment when he spoke to them, once they got back together and a little bit away from him, the noise and the raucousness and the rudeness would begin again.

So that was one sign of things falling apart. The other became clear to him when he went downtown on a weekday, something he didn't do often. He wanted to check something out from the main branch of the library, which was on Euclid, imposing and gray and beautiful like so many libraries built in the nineteenth century (I used to spend hours browsing the science shelves there). But now? The library echoed with quiet emptiness—in fact, the whole center of the city was empty. Not really—there were people there. But the push and throb that one associates with a healthy metropolis? Not there. The crowds—well,
groups of people really—who had to work down there or who chose to come there to shop all looked a little dispirited and confused. For lunch, he went into a food court across the street from the library and he was the only person in there. The yellowing lettuce in the salad bar was lonely, the sandwiches looked bereft, the cashier slumped at her station, bored. At noon on a Tuesday, when everyone in an office ought to be hungry, ought to be running out with their coworkers to get something to eat, and the cashier ought to feel annoyed because she was just too busy—nothing.