by Karen Tucker
When Wilky had base duty one weekend, she decided it was her chance to go cold turkey. Made herself a kick-it kit of vitamin supplements, ibuprofen, lemon-lime Gatorade, Imodium. Put on one of the reality shows she loved to hate-watch and settled in on the couch. Friday and Saturday weren’t cakewalks by any stretch of the imagination, but Luce white-knuckled it through the cramps and nausea and terrible sleeping, and to her credit she didn’t have so much as a generic 5mg. But Day 3 is when all the nastiest withdrawals come calling—we’re talking full-blown fever, the shakes, liquid BMs, you name it—and suddenly things weren’t so easy.
“Maybe you should just have half a one,” I said at last. “To take the edge off.”
She was shivering on the couch, cocooned in a quilt, green-gilled and sweaty. Our mop bucket waited in arm’s reach. I was curled up on the recliner, still in my pj’s, scrolling through my phone and keeping her company.
“I’m okay,” she said, wincing.
“Well sure you are. Anyone has the strength to quit, it’s you. All I’m saying is I scored some sweet e8s at work last night, so just say the word and I’ll go crush one up for you. To get you through the worst part.”
When another freight train of cramps slammed into her, she ground her teeth so hard it sounded like she’d cracked a molar. She rolled over and faced the back of the couch, groaning softly.
I asked if she wanted me to do a little research, see what Day 4 was supposed to be like. Maybe it would give her something to look forward to.
She didn’t answer, just pulled the quilt tighter. I started typing stuff into my phone. “Whoa, really?” I said after a moment.
“What,” she said. “What is it.”
I hesitated. “Okay, don’t go freaking out, but WebMD has seizures and death listed under common withdrawal symptoms. I mean rare maybe, but common?”
With effort, Luce rolled over. “Let me see that.”
“Hold on, forget them.” I kept typing. “Let’s find someone who actually went through this. All right, here we go. On Reddit they’re saying Day 4’s not a complete nightmare. Far as I can see, nope, doesn’t look like anyone’s died. Mostly people are talking about never-ending barf-a-thons and stabbing pains in the belly. Napalm poops. Oh my god, fire-rhea this one guy calls it.”
At that, Luce made a grab for the mop bucket and puked up yellow liquid.
“See?” I said. “Compared to them, you’re doing great. Don’t worry, worst-case scenario I’ll call 911 and get you checked into the hospital. Better safe than sorry.”
“Can you hand me that washcloth?” she said.
I climbed off the recliner and knelt by the sofa. Took the washcloth out of the bowl of ice water I’d made earlier, wrung it out for her, watched as she struggled to wipe her mouth. “But I guess I am kind of wondering why you’re going cold turkey. Everyone says the best way is to stop little by little.”
“I don’t know,” she said, sniffling. “All the twelve-steppers swear by it.”
“I’m sure it works for some people. But I can show you a hundred threads right now that swear tapering’s the way to go. No fever, no runs, none of that gross vomity feeling.”
At the word vomity, Luce doubled over like someone had punched her right in the liver. I handed her the bucket (the slosh inside smelled something awful) and within seconds she was projectile hurling. You’d be surprised how much liquid the human body can hold. When she finished, she lifted her head and stared at me, and although the next day she would have purple bruises on her eyelids from throwing up with such violence, the only thing I noticed was her gaze, all shipwrecked and watery.
“Why don’t I go make you a pickle and cheese sandwich,” I said.
Since that idea only made her shudder a little instead of barfing, I figured her stomach was finally empty. I passed her the Gatorade and she took a cautious swallow. I reached in my back pocket, withdrew two blues, put them on the arm of the couch. “I’m going to leave these here just in case you need them. Be back in a second.” I went into the kitchen to give her some privacy. Let her think things over.
When I poked my head in a few minutes later, the pills were gone.
Soon we were laughing like school kids and blasting Master of Puppets and playing competitive air guitar to an imaginary stadium full of people who loved us. One good thing about going cold turkey is even if you just make it fifty-three hours, your tolerance plummets. Only took Luce 60mgs, 90 maybe, to feel better—and we’re not talking regular baseline well, but almost as good as it was back in the old days. It’s true your first high is always the best. When we finally wore ourselves out, we lay on the floor and ordered a pizza and chewed a couple more blues while we waited. Luce often got chatty when we were using and she couldn’t stop talking about what we should pick up next time. I gazed at the ceiling and let her words slide over me. All I could think of was how Wilky was about to be 86ed like all the others and soon the two of us could go back to our old perfect life together.
How very wrong I was.
What can I tell you about Wilky? I guess you could call him handsome, if classic good looks are what you’re into. Tall, fit, standard-issue buzz cut. A scruff of hair poking out of his shirt if he left the second button open. Hands that could open any jar no matter how tight the lid was screwed on. And sure, his eyes took on a funny sadness late at night as if he was too tired to pretend any longer, but aside from that they weren’t anything special. He never raised his voice, not even during the worst of it, and yet whenever he got upset or frustrated you could see his Adam’s apple start to jump around in his throat. He liked to play guitar—mournful, old-timey ballads that would rip your heart out by its roots if you listened too closely—and before I ever heard a single note come out of his fingers in person, Luce had hummed his lonesome melodies around our house so often I could have joined in if I’d wanted. I never did, of course.
I don’t know how Luce managed to hide it so well, but it took a couple more months before Wilky found out about her habit. It was the day before Valentine’s, which I remember because she couldn’t get the 14th off from work even though she’d put in the request way back in December. Our GM at the time, a weaselly little prick named Raymond, thought just because he had a college degree in hospitality he knew what it was like to actually work in a restaurant. Insisted we upsell at every possible moment and tracked our sales on a giant whiteboard he hung up in the bus station. Made servers do kitchen prepwork to save on cooks’ wages and then overstaffed us so bad we’d fight over tables. The sort of guy who liked to hide in his office during the rushes, watching trashy videos and updating his POF profile. Even though Luce was always one of the top sellers, since she could talk anyone into just about anything, he took a special pleasure in dicking her over. The two of us had been filling out applications for weeks in hopes of landing a better setup, but so far things hadn’t worked out in our favor. Turned out we were only a couple months away from getting fired, but we didn’t know that yet.
Anyway on the 13th, Wilky brought Luce an armful of roses, took her to dinner at some fancy place up in Durham, and while they waited for dessert he surprised her with a silver bracelet. The kind where you can keep adding dumb little charms if you want to. Hers already had a heart, and Wilky had gotten them to engrave TRUE LOVE on one side like one of those Valentine’s candies that taste like chalk dust. Luce being Luce got all teary-eyed when she saw it. Said she didn’t deserve it—not the gift, not the dinner, not the flowers, and certainly not Wilky. Ended up telling him all about her habit while the ten-dollar hot fudge sundae they’d ordered melted into a slimy pool. Wilky, being who he was, took hold of her hands and listened to everything she was saying. Reminded her that he’d found himself in the exact same trouble after wrecking his leg during his first week as an Airborne instructor. Even though he’d managed to put together a year-plus of clean time, he surprised her once again by promising to stick with her no matter what happened. Luce surprised herself by promising to qui
t.
She told me she was going to do it right this time and taper. After consulting our favorite subreddit, she came up with a jump-off plan that had her cutting her intake week by week, nice and steady. If everything went as scheduled, she’d be gliding into zero by April 1. Not wanting to be left out, I said I’d join her. Our farewell tour, as she liked to call it, wasn’t easy by any stretch but cigarettes and sugar helped a little. We even went to a couple meetings to see what the deal was. There really is something nice about circling up with a bunch of folks going through the same thing you are and for the first time in a long while I didn’t feel quite so lonely. Yet there we were, sailing straight toward April. Once Luce got clean, then what?
It was mid-March when the three of us crowded into Wilky’s trusty Subaru Outback and roared off to some no-name town on the edge of the mountain. Luce and I had decided to splurge on a bunch of pandas from an old woman who was supposed to be dying. Apparently she had an actual prescription due to her insides rotting and since she didn’t have any income except for a Social Security payout that covered next to nothing, she’d taken to selling her pain meds.
“This is going to be a serious jackpot,” Luce said, rocking back and forth in the passenger seat. “I can feel it.”
This was the week we’d planned to top out at 60mg a day and since Luce had chewed up her whole share of four IR 15s that morning, she was feeling a lot better than I was. I’d decided to spread mine out from breakfast to midnight, so I’d only eaten one and a half.
“Hope you’re right,” I said, adjusting my seat belt. I couldn’t get comfortable.
“I don’t know,” said Wilky, who’d eaten exactly nothing. “You sure there’s no one else you can buy from? They prescribe those kinds of pills for a reason.”
Luce turned to him. “Who are you kidding, Mr. Doctor Shopper? Mr. Pill Mill City. You know the reason. Cha-ching. This right here is what you call a win-win-win situation.”
“I don’t know,” Wilky said again. He glanced at me in the rearview. “Seems to me ten bucks a pop is red flag territory.”
Luce let out a guffaw of junky laughter. “You’ve been watching too many Vice videos.”
“Oh my god, Vice is the worst,” I said.
Despite his job teaching soldiers how to jump out of planes, or maybe because of it, Wilky was the sort of person who refused to take even the littlest risk unless he had to. Back when he was using, he wouldn’t eat anything unless it came straight out of a blister pack or at least one of those orange pharmacy bottles. Lucky for him, it hadn’t been hard to get multiple scripts since he had a legitimate injury and X-rays to go along with it, but when waiting in line at all the various Fayettenam pain clinics turned into a giant time suck, he still never went for the quick thrill of cold-copping at gas stations or dark web convenience or even trying the latest mystery pills from the local dgirl. So when Luce announced we were meeting some stranger she found on Craigslist? Wilky about lost his mind. He looked at me in the rearview again and I thought for sure he was going to pull a U and call the plan off altogether. “Just promise we’ll leave at the first sign of trouble.”
“Cross our hearts,” Luce said. “Right, Irene?”
“Of course,” I said, leaning back in my seat.
Soon we were pulling up to a dirty white bungalow, tucked way at the end of a gravel lane all rutty with potholes. A bunch of newspapers lay piled up on the front steps like the place was abandoned and a hopeful FOR SALE BY OWNER sign was posted next to the mailbox. The phone number had been rained on so much it had turned into an inky smear. Right away my bladder got tight, the way it always did when a deal felt sketchy.
“Guys?” I said. “You sure this is the right address?”
Luce frowned into her phone. “Great. No service.”
“Don’t worry,” said Wilky. “It’s not like we’re lost. This is one of those dead-end country roads. Only one way out of here.”
We climbed out of the car and gazed around at the landscape. Although I didn’t recall going downhill on our way over, we’d somehow ended up in a bleak little valley. There was hardly any grass, just a few patches of stubble. Bare, witchy-looking trees rose up all around us, their limbs reaching toward the sky like they wanted to rip holes in it or maybe yank it down once and for all. The wind had changed directions since we’d left and now it whistled in from the north, cold and metallic. On a nearby power line, a couple of scroungy yard birds huddled close together. You could see their tiny chests rising and falling.
“Smell that?” Wilky said. “Rain’ll be here within the hour.”
Luce zipped up her hoodie. “This fucker better show soon. It’s freezing.”
“You’re in luck,” said a nearby voice.
We swung around to find a scraggy middle-aged man watching us from behind a pair of giant tortoiseshell sunglasses. He had on camouflage coveralls, the effect of which was canceled out by a blaze-orange hunting vest. His blond hair was slicked back from his forehead and the way the long parts curled around his neck made me think of chicken feathers.
“Three of you, huh?” he said. “Was expecting just the ladies.”
Luce gave him one of the teasing grins she reserved for big tippers and guys who were holding. “Yeah and you got us too. Only reason he came is I didn’t know if my grandma’s car would make it all the way out to east nowhere.”
Chicken Feathers pressed his lips together so hard they turned purple. He walked over to Wilky’s car. “You wouldn’t be hiding anyone in here, would you?” He cupped his hands around his sunglasses and bent over to peer through the window—revealing a gun holstered on his hip. My chest got a weird skittery feeling, like one of those yard birds had gotten trapped in there and was trying to scratch its way out in a panic. Why hadn’t I gone for the full 60 at breakfast?
“Nice cannon,” Luce said. “Out hunting wabbits?”
Chicken Feathers turned back to face her, his jaw working in anger. “Do me a favor and cut the flirty crap. I hate that shit more than just about anything.”
Even Luce, who once bloodied a dude’s nose when he tried to short us, nervously shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
Maybe I could sneak another k8 out of my purse and eat it right there.
Wilky cleared his throat. “Look, if you’re busy, we can come back later. No problem.”
“What he means,” Luce said, “is let’s do this. You got what we came for, we’ll be out of your life in thirty seconds.”
“Brought cash?”
“Come on, dog.” Luce patted her handbag. “We look like a bunch of dumb college kids?”
“Just got to ask,” Chicken Feathers said. He explained that his mom had the pills, that it was her game and she wanted to run it. There were few rules we had to agree to. Head around the side of the house and go in the back way, since his mom didn’t care for strangers tramping through the front parlor. Wipe our feet on the mat. No foul language. Say please and thank you.
“Sunday school,” Luce said. “We get it.”
“One more thing. Ladies only.”
“Actually,” said Wilky. “I’m not thrilled about the idea of them heading into a strange house all alone. Hate to say it, but I’m going to have to tag along with them.”
Chicken Feathers unholstered his gun and aimed it at Wilky. “Hate to say it, but my mom insists.”
All around, the sky went a funny green color. A gust of wind kicked up out of nowhere, whipping my hair against my cheeks and forehead. The temperature dropped and the smell of rain was so sharp I could taste it: a faint vinegar smear at the back of my throat.
“Hey, it’s cool.” Wilky raised his hands. “We’re all cool here.”
“The fuck is your problem?” Luce said. “Ever occur to you that bowing up on your customers is about the stupidest move ever? How about you put your dick away and try and act normal.”
“At least point it somewhere else,” Wilky said, watching the barrel.
“No can
do,” Chicken Feathers said. “Just think of your driver here like a security deposit. You girls play nice with my mom, you get him back, nothing missing.”
Luce held his gaze for several long seconds. Her lungs were starting to whistle from all the excitement. She turned to Wilky. “You win. Let’s get going.”
“In through your nose and out through your mouth,” he told her. “Nice and slow, like we practiced.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Wilky hesitated. He ran his eyes over Chicken Feathers and then he turned and looked at me. “What do you think? Should we do this?”
What I thought was maybe Wilky had a bigger interest in ten-dollar pandas than he’d first let on.
I also thought the smart thing would be for us to cut our losses and head out before things blew up in our faces. When you got right down to it Chicken Feathers was frightened, and if there was anything I’d learned since getting into this racket it was frightened people were not to be trusted. You never know what they’re going to do. I was this close to agreeing to scrap the plan entirely—and then I snuck another glance at Luce. There was no mistaking what she wanted.
I turned back to Wilky. “We’ve already come this far.”
Soon Luce and I were standing at the rear of that miserable little cottage. While she knocked on the door, I crept over to a nearby window in hopes of getting a heads-up on what we were walking into. All the lights were off, but I could make out a few hazy objects. A refrigerator, two chairs, a kitchen table. Flashing digits on the microwave. I reminded myself this was only a sick old lady, no reason to worry. Seconds later the rumble of male voices rose up out of the dark. I hurried over to warn Luce right as the back door swung open. In its frame stood a skeletal old woman in a graying bathrobe. She had a familiar bottle of magnesium citrate in one hand and a remote control in the other. The voices, I realized, were part of a TV commercial.