Tunnel Vision
Authors: Aric Davis
Also by Aric Davis
The Fort
Breaking Point
Rough Men
A Good and Useful Hurt
Nickel Plated
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Aric Davis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477824955
ISBN-10: 1477824952
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936467
Dedicated to the memory of Anne Loveland Low
CONTENTS
ONE
I have never been so angry in my entire life. I’m traveling south on a bus, with a trail of blood smeared behind me, bodies in my wake, and flashes of violence whenever I close my eyes, but none of it cuts through the rage. There are black marks on my neck, wrists, and ankles, cuts on my face and all over my even-leaner-than-normal body, and a furrow of ruined flesh from a gunshot wound on my left side. Packed gauze and stolen pharmaceuticals aren’t the only things keeping me held together. Rage is why I’m alive, and it’s carrying me south just as sure as this
bus is.
Making your living as a criminal comes with its own list of unique risks, but I never thought that I’d be the one coming down on the wrong side of a setup. Call it na
ï
veté or whatever else you want, but I was sure I had myself in a good place, and the only way I was going to get burned was by someone I trusted. I knew that was possible—there were no illusions for me—but when it happened even my black little soul was caught off guard.
“Sorry,” Gary said to me, like that mattered when I was staring down the barrel of a shotgun and getting cuffed and being sent in off the books to a crooked juvenile internment camp.
Gary was my dealer, the loser I’d transformed with money and bags of high-grade marijuana into a kid with confidence. Gary would never betray me—I was sure of it—but I was wrong. The money got bigger and bigger, and that was that. Gary sold me out for a truck full of dope and a connection to move as much as he could harvest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
I hope for his sake he enjoyed the money, because his luck is about to change.
In some ways, I should be thanking Gary. Dad always said situations needed to find the right people to emerge as heroes, and I think he’s probably right. Even though being a hero is the last thing I am, maybe I needed to end up at the Morton Correctional Camp more than almost anywhere else in the world. Though what I didn’t need was to be sent in naked and without a plan.
On the books, Morton functioned as a state-run “camp” to help rehabilitate out-of-control youths. In reality, it was a den of corruption where beatings, rape, and murder were covered up as a matter of routine, and where every day was a savage exercise in squeezing every possible drop of money from the facility and its captive horde of desperate kids.
Gary never could have put me somewhere like that without help, and the help in question came from a man named Spider, who we’d been brokering a deal with up north.
The setup took months, both the part I was involved with and the stuff I found out later, but I’m a lot more concerned with how it ended. Gary and I drove up together in a U-Haul stuffed with baled-up marijuana, but he left alone in an empty truck with a duffel bag full of cash. Spider, as it turned out, wasn’t just a white-trash drug dealer. He was also a guard at Morton, and his boss, Reginald Fillmore, was his coconspirator. Getting me out of the way was the plan from the beginning, but I bet they would have put me in the ground if they could do it all over again.
There were two types of people at Morton: those the guards favored and the rest of us. An average day would see us rented out to dig holes, shovel driveways, or perform other menial, usually backbreaking, local maintenance tasks—basically anything Fillmore and Spider could come up with to turn a dime. None of the prisoners were free of that work, but the ones in Spider’s favor got better bedding, better food, and the effective right to rape or beat whoever they wanted.
My friend Sam, a shy kid who could draw better than anyone I’ve ever met, was being abused by an older boy named Tim. When I showed Tim the error of his ways with some of the dirty tricks I’d learned over the years from training with Rhino, Sam and I both found ourselves on Spider’s shit list. Things only got worse from there.
Morton had been teetering on the edge of a full-scale rebellion for what felt like forever, and my beatdown of that bastard Tim sent a groundswell of confidence through the boys imprisoned there. But days later, Spider and Fillmore had put up with enough. Sam and I were brought out to the snow, where we were supposed to die. I didn’t die, but Sam did. The men who killed him died, too, but that doesn’t make up for wasting Sam’s life, for his broken body covered by snow and dirt in some anonymous field in Northern Michigan.
Thinking about it as I stare out the window brings the rage back full force. Gary doesn’t know I’m coming. He probably thinks I’m dead or locked away forever, but he should know better. Dad taught me to be resourceful and to help others whenever I could, but he also taught me to pay my debts in full. Spider and Fillmore are already dead. I made sure of that as I lay half-naked in the snow over the stock of a stolen M-14, my finger frozen to the trigger guard. But Gary isn’t. I ran while Sam bled out in the snow, bullets flying after me, but I came back. Sam’s grave was still being cut into the frozen earth, and even though two of Spider’s armed flunkies were there, they couldn’t kill me.
I smile at my reflection in the window, but my eyes tell the truth.
I’m coming for you, Gary, and I’m going to fucking kill you. Just like Spider and Fillmore.
They say the first time you sell your body is supposed to be the worst, but they were the same people that told me the first time that you chase the dragon is the best. I think they were wrong on both counts, because selling myself never got better, and heroin never lost its luster, even though all either of them makes me feel anymore is dead inside.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of it was supposed to turn out so broken, so fucked-up. I’ve fucked over literally every person that tried to do right by me. I just didn’t realize how much that was going to hurt, or how much those memories would just drive me back to using in the first place. I swear to God, if I could take it all back, I would. I hated being that broken girl at the record store, hated feeling like I was never going to escape my father’s house. I hated everything. I’d give anything to have those days back.
There was purity in my life before heroin, but I know that whatever false sense of sobriety I retain from writing this will be gone soon enough. I’ll be willing to do whatever D. says I have to in order for us to score—that’s just how it is. I still see some of my friends on the street sometimes, and I wonder how they’re doing, and I know that if I were clean I’d allow myself to ask them in person. Knowing that I’m a fucking junkie makes that impossible. All I’d do is get excited, and then get embarrassed, and then get high. By the time I finally saw Ben or any of those kids again I’d ask them for money until they gave it to me or I was told to leave, and I’d probably steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. And that’s not even the worst part. The part I hate the most is that I could do all of that and as long as I was high, I’d be happy. That’s all I really want, all any addict really wants.
So this is what heroin is like. People think it’s some crazy high, like being drunk and stoned, this crazy storm of wastedness, but it’s not. It’s better than that. Heroin is the perfect high, one awesome moment that’s there and then gone. Heroin is like that perfect second before you decide to dance on a table or beer-bong a forty-ounce, only it lasts for hours. Heroin is the best once your body gets over being sick, but it’s never that good again. Not that D. and I don’t try and find that moment. Not that I don’t get on my knees or spread my legs for the chance to get that feeling all over again. And what I get from that spike is just good enough to keep me going.
I don’t want you to feel bad for me. I don’t even expect anyone else to ever read this. I guess I’m writing this down so that if I ever do get myself out of this hole I dug, I’ll have something to remind me that even at my worst I was still a human, and that there are still good reasons for me to be alive. This isn’t about recovery, not yet, but maybe it can be someday.
I dream of summertime.
But when bright rays begin to flounder,
the ice is on my mind.
Now all I have is four cold walls,
some whiskey, and a pen.
A needle full of broken dreams,
and nights that never end.
It’s cold outside,
snow is raining down.
But all I have is loneliness,
and days that never end.
I’d give everything for some comfort,
the gift of a sleeping death.
The fear has left my body, love,
but I hate the parts he left.
Tonight I had sex with three different strangers so that D. could get right, but there wasn’t even enough dope for me to do a skin-pop, much less really groove on a spike for a little bit. Normally that would destroy me, but right now I feel good. Even in hell there are sweet spots, apparently. I know I’ll be on my back soon enough, though—that’s how this game works. I feel so bad about being a whore that I want to get high, or I want to get high so bad that I don’t care about being a whore. D. is yelling again and I can hear his boots on the stairs.
Kiss kiss,
Mandy