by William Poe
Snake led me to a record store called Big Man Blues. “I’ll have to go in with you,” he said. “Big Man won’t sell to white folk.”
Snake purchased a glass pipe with a three-inch globe that I selected. He just wanted a simple stem.
“Easier to hide,” he said, putting the stem inside his jacket.
Getting dope wasn’t as easy as buying the pipes. Snake ran from the car several times to talk to men hiding in the shadows. The first few told him they had run out earlier in the day.
“If you drive through this place alone,” Snake cautioned, “you might not get out.”
“I’ll be sure to come and find you,” I assured him, “that is, if you really can find something.”
Snake ground his teeth in response.
The streets were a maze. Some of the roads ended in cul-de-sacs while others went around apartment buildings, widening to become parking lots. It took knowledge of the layout to stay on the main road. The small row houses were nearly all covered in graffiti. The garbage bins overflowed with trash that reeked of rotted meat and rancid vegetables.
Snake finally gave up trying to score anything in Highland Court. He guided me to Rice Street, near the site of what had been Little Rock High School when Vivian and Lenny went there. Our bad luck followed us.
Next we went to College Street, once a middle-class neighborhood until people abandoned the area during the white flight of the late fifties. Now it was a neighborhood of crack houses and slumlords. Snake returned from each effort with a familiar tale. I began to grow suspicious. I had given Snake forty dollars when we first started. I wondered if he had been making deals during our various stops. I decided to call him on it.
“Snake, man, I can’t believe there’s nothing out there. What’s going on?”
“They got dope, but nothin’ you want,” Snake said, reaching into a shirt pocket and taking out a small rock. “You don’t want this yellow shit. Nothin’ good about it.”
“But you bought it with my money, right?”
“Been tryin’ to get the money back ever since. It ain’t no good, though, man. I’m tellin’ ya. Let’s go to the East End.”
Snake’s lampblack skin, coupled with his gemlike green eyes, made him as alluring as his Biblical namesake. His mesmerizing, lyrical voice made his statements sound believable even when it was clear he was lying. I wanted to place my hands on his cheeks and plant a kiss on his beautiful lips. If I did, I would be lucky to wake up in the hospital with a knife wound in my gut, and not dead in an alley. Snake asked me what I was chuckling about. I told him that I couldn’t believe I was driving around such dangerous areas of Little Rock. He just shrugged. They were his neighborhoods. He had always lived there.
We drove down Ninth Street, past an industrial park with scaffolding lit by unearthly searchlights. We went beneath an underpass and paralleled a Missouri-Pacific train yard. Bonfires flared from the tops of rusted barrels where homeless men were trying to keep warm.
The East End was laid out on a grid with rows of evenly spaced, Depression-style houses. Each had a small yard, but there were few trees. The community was built on Arkansas River bottomland. After the Civil War, it had been a refugee camp for former slaves. I supposed that some of the current inhabitants were their descendants.
A crowd of people was gathered at Harrington and Tenth Street in front of a blues club called Dante’s. The building was painted with dancing figures in silhouette.
“Park here,” Snake said, instructing me to pull into a self-service car wash. “You better give me whatever you want to spend.”
I took five twenties from my wallet. “You get me a hundred and keep the forty I gave you earlier.”
Snake tried to act cool, but I could almost see his brain cooking up a scheme.
The moment Snake took off toward the club, someone knocked on the window. I nearly swallowed my tongue with fright. The man peering in the window had a round, clean-shaven face. One of his front teeth was missing. The remaining one was capped in gold.
“Don’t be scared of BT,” the man said. “I ain’t goin’ to shoot you or nothin’. Roll down the window.”
If he was going to shoot me, I figured the glass wouldn’t do much good anyway.
“You give that crazy dude your money?” BT asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Oh, man. That’s Snake. Why do you think people calls him that? Snake in the Grass. That’s his full name. He’d take your time if you’d give it to him. Got you to drive him around town, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said, “something like that.”
“What you trying to get?”
I showed him the pipe I had tucked between my thighs so I could throw it out the window if the police showed up.
“Got what you want right here,” BT said, reaching into his bulky jacket and taking out five rocks. “Go ahead. Taste one.”
I rolled one around my tongue. The numbing effect told me it was the real thing.
“Hundred bucks. All five.”
As I reached for the cash, BT asked me if I’d drop him off down the street.
“I really ought to wait for Snake,” I said.
“Man, you gotta deal with it. Snake ain’t comin’ back. Next time you see him, he’ll be all about them excuses. ‘Oh, I got robbed, and I didn’t want to face you.’” BT laughed heartily as he thought about what Snake would say. “Ol’ BT won’t do that, man. I’m going to show you where I live. When you want something, you come to BT.”
BT lived in projects that I had never seen before, a community of one-story, red-brick buildings not far from the airport.
“Come off the freeway at the airport exit and keep going. You’ll find this place next time,” BT told me.
Two doors from the end of the first building, BT told me to pull over.
“Come on inside and try out a piece.”
“You don’t mind?” I asked.
“I ain’t prejudiced. I let white folks in my house.” He laughed.
“Why do they call you BT?” I asked on the way in.
BT grinned. “Because folks were always saying it’s ’bout time I showed up. I ain’t never in no hurry.”
The walls of BT’s apartment were made of unpainted cinder blocks. The floor was concrete. A woman in a nurse’s outfit sat on a couch with three children, a girl and two boys, snuggling close. The sole light source was the television set.
“This is my wife, Violet,” BT said. “And them’s my chillun.”
The little girl rushed toward BT and clung to his neck as he carried her back to the couch. The boys stared at me like they’d never seen a white man before. Violet barely raised her head as she greeted me with a tentative hello.
“Violet works down at Baptist Hospital,” BT said. “Just got off work. She walks from the freeway.”
“That’s probably three miles,” I noted.
“That’s why I ain’t getting up,” Violet said. “I don’t mean nothing rude. My dogs is tired.”
BT led me to a small bedroom. We sat on a rolled-out sleeping bag that reeked of sweat.
“I’m sorry the place ain’t so clean, or me neither,” BT said with an embarrassed chuckle. “Ain’t had no hot water for a week. But I gots fire.” BT took a pipe from a stack of shoeboxes that served as a chest of drawers and dropped on a sliver of rock. The flame from his lighter illuminated his face from below, turning it into a carnival mask. Letting out the smoke, BT yelled, “Boo-yah!”
Curious word, from bouillabaisse I supposed. People often used the word base instead of rock. I guessed that boo-yah-base made sense in the odd logic of drug abuse.
“Bouilla!” I repeated, placing a crumb on my new pipe. The sweet smoke was as pure as evaporated milk.
The next instant, I had no idea where I was, or who the man was sitting beside me. Why was I in a room of cinder-block walls and no windows? Had I landed in jail? Were guards about to show up because I’d just done drugs with my cellmate? I stared at t
he door without blinking until tears began to drip down my cheeks. I focused on the aluminum doorknob, finding a universe in the reflections cast upon it.
BT lit up a second piece of rock and motioned me to try another hit.
“I can’t,” I said, rising to consciousness. “I need to get going.”
BT slowly exhaled. The smoke crept up the sides of his mouth and covered his face so densely that I was reminded of the doctored séance photos that show ectoplasm flowing from the heads of the mediums.
“If I come back and you’re not here, should I drive around to look for you?” I asked.
“Naw, Holmes. You wait in your car out front. If Violet or one of the kids are here, they’ll let you in. Don’t go driving around. You’ll end up getting shot.”
BT walked me to the door and made sure Violet and the kids knew it would be okay if I came back without him. Heading for the car, I noticed two men in trench coats standing on the curb down the street. BT whistled from the apartment door, and they left. I made a U-turn in the middle of the street and drove toward the airport, following the route BT had described.
I drove mindlessly, unsure where I was going. I vaguely recalled the money from Spain that, by then, should have been deposited into my account. I gripped the steering wheel so hard my hands began to hurt, and I couldn’t stop grinding my teeth. I desperately wanted to fire up a rock.
By midnight, I found myself circling through the back roads around Sibley. I kept passing the mansion, trying to convince myself to pull into the drive, run to the door, and confess everything. I’d throw the damned drugs into the swamp.
Instead, I drove back to Dean’s house.
CHAPTER 39
Dean had fallen asleep on the couch with one leg dangling over the back and a socked foot propped on the armrest. I startled him when I turned the lock and unexpectedly burst into the room. He quickly realized it was me, as did Cicero, who crawled out from under the sofa.
“Cicero’s been pining away since you left,” Dean said.
I picked him up and got a tongue bath. “There anything to eat?” I asked, taking a seat beside Dean, who had sat up and put on his shoes.
“Spaghetti. Let me heat a plate in the microwave. There’s a present for you,” Dean pointed to a red box tied up with a green ribbon. “I was going to mail it to Los Angeles—then, voila, you came to town.”
The aroma from the microwave made my stomach growl, and I devoured the warmed-up pasta. The tiredness that had been pursuing me caught up with a vengeance. My eyes would hardly stay open.
“There are clean sheets on the bed,” Dean said, realizing that I was falling asleep. “Maybe you should lie down.”
“I’m so tired, I could sleep for a couple of days,” I said, but that wasn’t my plan.
Dean led me to the bedroom, with Cicero following close behind. I waited a couple of minutes until I heard Dean go into his room at the other end of the hall. It was an old house. Every footstep made the floorboards creak. I’d have to be careful not to make any noise that would betray the fact I was not, in fact, sleeping.
When he saw me take out a pipe, Cicero pinned his ears back and nuzzled the covers until I lifted the bedspread to let him scoot under the blankets.
Inhaling the first blast, panic struck me as I imagined the smoke seeping under the door into the hallway. Stars flashed in my field of vision as I held my breath and tried to make it to the window. The latch wouldn’t cooperate, and then, with the window finally unlocked, I could only manage to lift it three inches because of the heavily painted frames. I stuck my mouth in the opening and blew the smoke outside. Ghostly faces formed in the mist, each with a countenance that mocked and accused.
The aroma of frying bacon aroused my senses and enticed Cicero from beneath the covers. I opened the door and let him into the hallway.
“You want to go outside?” Dean asked, alerted by the castanet clicking of Cicero’s toenails on the hardwood floor.
By the time Dean and Cicero returned, I was lying on the bed with my eyes glued to a hole in the ceiling, convinced that someone was watching me through the tiny opening. The phone rang, and I went to listen at the door.
“Simon,” Dean called softly, tapping on the door. “Sean is on the phone. Can you take the phone? It’ll reach inside.”
I snuck back to the bed and made sounds as if I were just waking up and then went to the door and took the phone.
“Sean?” I said, hugging the receiver to my ear.
“Yeah, what’s up?” he responded in a droll voice. “We going to New York or what?”
My frazzled brain didn’t recall the plan.
“Come home,” I managed to say in a faltering voice.
“You going back to LA?”
“No, I mean, home to me, here in Little Rock.”
The deafening roar of an eighteen wheeler revving its engine nearly drowned out Sean’s voice, but I caught the words, “Be there tonight.”
I placed the phone on the floor outside the bedroom door. Cicero started to push his way through, but Dean called to him. Then I remembered that I needed to call Charlotte and took the phone back inside. I punched in the correct digits after getting numbers wrong on several attempts. The phone rang and rang. Charlotte never picked up.
Next I called the bank, slowly and deliberately punching in numbers I had written down on a card in my wallet. My balance would tell me if the Spaniards had come through with the money.
“Your current balance is five dollars.”
I swallowed hard, and punched in a few more codes to get a list of recent activity. Three hundred and sixty thousand had arrived by bank wire. The same day, four checks were cashed totaling all but the remaining five dollars.
“Goddamn it!” I screamed. Charlotte must have found the signed checks and stolen my money.
“Are you okay?” Dean asked, gently knocking on the door.
“Not really,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
I hid the pipes and stashed the remaining cocaine under a pile of junk in the closet. I got dressed and ran a brush through my hair. Unsteady on my feet, I bruised my thigh stumbling against the edge of the dresser. I went to the window for a dose of cold air so I wouldn’t pass out from the pain. Just beyond the window, an oak tree’s bare limbs grew into monstrous claws that seemed to scratch against the sky.
“You don’t look well,” Dean said when I emerged from the room.
“I don’t feel well.”
“How can I help?” Dean asked.
“Charlotte stole money from my bank account. I’m broke.”
“How much did she take?”
“It’s embarrassing,” I said. “Some clients in Spain recently wired money. Let’s just say it’s enough for her to stay hidden for quite a while.”
“You met her at the Spotlight, right?”
“Through someone I knew from there.”
Dean sipped his coffee. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. While he tried to hide his concern by reading the paper, I made some phone calls. My first was to the Oban.
An unfamiliar voice picked up the phone. “Is Rudy there?” I asked.
“He don’t work here no more,” the woman said.
“Know where I can reach him?”
“Ain’t around. Took off a few days ago. Said he didn’t have a forwarding address when I asked him.”
I told Dean the story about Rudy, and how he had introduced me to Charlotte. “Rudy’s part of it,” I said. “What am I going to do now?”
“You should call the police,” Dean suggested.
I turned pale at the suggestion. There would be plenty of evidence in my house that could land me in jail instead of Charlotte. A K-9 unit would surely find cocaine residue. Charlotte may even have planted a gram or two, hoping they’d be more interested in me than in her larceny.
“It’s my fault,” I said. “I left signed checks stashed in the apartment. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Dean cl
early wanted to give me advice but knew that I had to decide for myself what to do next.
“I’ll be there for you,” Dean said.
CHAPTER 40
That night, I actually slept, even though my mind was chaotic with worry, and the cocaine stash beckoned each time I happened to stir. Dean fixed me a fine breakfast waffle and sat with me until I had finished eating a bowl of various fruits.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Dean reminded me. “Maybe you should go see your mother.”
“I’m going to,” I said, sounding as though it had been my plan all along. The drugs hidden in the closet were like a siren calling to me and I didn’t want to spend the holiday in the grips of that particular demon.
“If Sean calls, will you go pick him up?”
“I’d be glad to go get him, Simon. Don’t worry about that. Spend time with your family.”
At four years old, I raced into the living room on Christmas morning to find a Lionel Train set mounted on a board with little houses, a terminal station, plastic trees, and a bridge that crossed a river made of blue putty. Lenny had resented not getting a train set when he was boy. Through my Christmas present, he now had one.
Don’t think about Lenny, I told myself as I neared the mansion. But it was Christmas—how could I avoid remembering? Lenny may as well have been sitting in the passenger seat beside me.
By the time I pulled into the driveway and parked behind Connie’s Buick, Ernie had taken over from the melancholy about Lenny. I recalled the last time I saw him alive, knowing that drugs would kill him, as they finally did. Now it was my turn.
Victoria was sitting in the tire swing attached to the limb of the oak tree where marauders hanged the family patriarch, an act remembered on Halloweens past with an effigy dangling where the tire now swayed.
The other recent times I had driven by the house, I had not noticed how badly weathered it had become, now more gray timbers than whitewash. The yard was in ruin. Dandelion husks had replaced the thick St. Augustine grass that once carpeted the front yard. Dried up Kudzu vines hung from the trellises. The gardens were full of dead Johnson grass that had smothered the remains of once glorious dahlia beds. The gardens had been Vivian’s pride, her escape from a multiyear sentence as dutiful and adoring wife.