Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  Sugar Grove was a sleepy little college town, a fact you’d never know from the side we lived on. Cruising from south to north was like going to a whole other town. Once we got there, Maddox would wheel into the park near the campus, next to the big splashing fountain, or in the lot by the pond with all the weeping willows around it, or near the brick bathrooms, and pretty soon some sleepy-looking guy would amble over. Different guys in each location, but the same long hair to his chest and same stars on his pants or rainbow on his shirt, and the same vacant smile on his face. They looked like they never had a worry in the world, and I found an appeal to that. It had to be more than the drugs. I hoped.

  I’d have the glove box open and as often as not Maddox had a better idea what the customer was after than the customer himself, so he’d tell me what to fish out.

  “Gimme the baggie with the little green footballs,” he’d say. Those were the chloral hydrate gel capsules.

  Or, “That one, with the little tiny ones, whites and yellows and blues.” Valium.

  Or, “The one with six of the big yellow round ones.” Percodan . . . the Cadillac of downers.

  All that, plus codeine, Darvocet, Darvon . . . Maddox carried it all. He had a guy inside a pharmacy, a part-timer named Jimbo, a year behind me in high school, who did deliveries and things like that. You couldn’t steal the good stuff outright. They’d notice that. But the system had a weakness ripe for exploiting. The pharmacy supplied two hospitals and several nursing homes, and they were always returning meds that had been prescribed but never used. Most of it could go back into circulation. But there were certain controlled classes of drugs that couldn’t. When those came back, they were supposed to be destroyed. Which was Jimbo work. It seemed like a huge waste, but that was the law. So Jimbo would pop them all out of their blister packs into a gallon-size plastic ice cream tub they kept in the back, and when that got full, it would be time to empty it into the outside dumpster. Only Jimbo got really good at skimming the cream of the keepers.

  Maddox would exchange the pills for cash, then we’d rumble along to meet the next customer while I sorted the money and kept the denominations arranged. We didn’t get away quite as clean with the day’s last one, a guy with a droopy mustache almost as long as his hair.

  “Hey man, what about those mushrooms I asked for?” He curled his fingers over the driver’s door. “Any luck with the shrooms?”

  “I’m working on it. I got a line on a source a couple nights ago.” Maddox gave the fingers a look as dirty as their nails. “Don’t make me peel those off.”

  The guy backed away looking nine kinds of surprised, like he didn’t even know what his fingers had been up to. As we drove away, he was all apologies, and looked that way in the mirror for as long as I could see him.

  Maddox grumbled and shook his head. “Holy Jesus, but I hate hippies.”

  “Then why do you sell to them?”

  “Cause their money spends better than they smell. And none of them ever tried to rip me off.” He looked across at me, a good half-acre of front seat between us. “Bikers, they’re the ones you have to watch out for. They’re not the ones buying downers, either. They’re speed freaks. You roll up to do business with a biker whose pupils are already down to black pinholes, there’s trouble brewing already.”

  “Then what are you complaining about the hippies for? Next to that, they don’t seem so bad.”

  Maddox had to grouse a little more, then relented. “They’re not, I guess. A bath might go a long way toward raising my opinion with most of them.”

  “The girls are cute. Them too?”

  Maddox uncorked his cigarette from the corner of his mouth and stuck it by the window so the slipstream would blow away the ashes. “They seem pretty free with the goodies, and that makes up a lot of ground for the b.o., but they’re not really all there when you bone ’em. Their heads are off in Middle Earth or someplace. It’s weird.”

  This sounded like a problem I wouldn’t mind trying to overcome.

  “Shitty music, too. I don’t know how they could listen to it if it wasn’t for the pills and the reefer. It doesn’t ever seem to end, or go anywhere in the middle. Holy Jesus, but I hate that music of theirs. Speaking of, let’s have something else.”

  Manning the eight-track player was another duty of mine. Maddox made tapes off his albums at home, and he never got tired of listening to anything, just eager to hear the next one, nothing but wall-to-wall twang and double-time stomp and crazy yelping vocals like the singer was ready to jump through the speakers. Give Maddox enough Charlie Feathers and Duane Eddy and Link Wray, and he’d run out of gas before he ever ran out of road he wanted to get down.

  We weren’t done for the day yet, though. Maddox hated frat boys most of all, but not so much he wouldn’t sell to them, too. Closer to campus he cruised a stretch of main drag with a lot of cheap restaurants and cheaper bars, then whipped into an alley and met a guy who looked like he was waiting for us, even if I didn’t recognize him and Maddox didn’t either. Preppy looking, Sigma Chi, not a hair out of place and creases on his slacks sharp enough to cut the hair.

  “Nice wheels,” the guy said, except I couldn’t tell if he really meant that or not. “It’s still from the twentieth century, right?”

  “Fifty-nine, motherfucker.” Maddox looked him up and down. “I don’t know you. Where’s Scott?”

  “I’m Heath. Scott has his necktie hanging from the doorknob to our room. Which means he’s having more fun right now than all three of us put together.”

  Heath dropped down for a look inside over at me, I guess to make sure I wasn’t having extra fun. He stared too long, like I knew he would, with a hoo-weee expression blooming across his face.

  “Hey kid! What time are you supposed to be back at the circus? I want to catch your act!”

  “Eight o’clock,” I told him. “But stick around. It’s nnn—” I hung stuck on the N, the way I sometimes still did, but sliding through it was less a giveaway than grinding at it like an engine that wouldn’t start. “—nnnot just the eyes. If you’re lllllucky, I’ll bite the head off a chicken, too.”

  Motherfucker was right.

  Maddox drummed his fingers on the top on his door, a galloping sound. “You bring Scott’s money with you or was this a wasted trip for me?”

  Heath slipped it from his pocket and handed it over. Maddox let the baggie of little green footballs slip from his fingers to the alley, with an “Oops, sorry.” When Heath bent over to pick it up, Maddox levered the door open and banged it into his head. As the frat boy tottered backward holding the top of his skull, Maddox slid out after him.

  Six lanky feet of gristle and bone with a pompadour—that was Maddox. When his little brother Hazel and I were still kids, I used to think Maddox was the coolest guy on earth. And I guess he was still up there in my estimation, but now it was more that I admired him for sticking to his guns. He was the last greaser in a world of hippies. Outnumbered 10,000-to-1 by bellbottoms, he wore pegged jeans so tight that, even if someone got in a lucky punch and knocked him out, the jeans might have kept him standing. I never knew how he could even move in them, let alone stash a bicycle chain in his back pocket, but he could, and did. He whipped the chain out and around and up from below into Heath’s balls. It got the expected reaction.

  “I’ve got a bigger chain in the trunk. Just right to fit around your ankles so I can drag you up and down this alley a few times, and then we’ll see who’s ready for the circus. I’ll make a lizard man out of you before sundown, you’ll look so scaly.” He grabbed onto an ear and dragged Heath over and slammed his head on top of the door. “Or you could apologize. It’s your choice.”

  Heath burbled and sputtered, but squeaked it out all right.

  Maddox peeked in across at me. “Does that cover it for you, Wyatt?”

  “It’ll do. Thanks.”

  Maddox yanked him away and pushed him aside. Skull, balls, and now his ear, Heath needed a third hand just to c
over all the hurt.

  “Have a good weekend,” Maddox told him. “And tell Scott I said for him to run his own errands from now on. If he sends you again, I’ll massacre you both faster than Sitting Bull on Custer.”

  We were a couple blocks away, and he was in a happy mood again, when he asked if I was okay for a detour before we got something to eat, and I asked where.

  “What I was saying earlier,” he told me. “I got a line on some magic mushrooms. Heavy on the magic, maybe.”

  ***

  I THOUGHT HE’D BEEN LYING, just to shut the hippie up or string him along, since I already knew good and well that a couple nights ago—which is when Maddox said he’d learned about the shrooms—he’d been spending a night in jail for drag-racing out on Route 44.

  Maddox didn’t see a contradiction. “Where do you think it was I got that line on them in the first place?”

  “Oh. Okay. I guess that makes sense.”

  “The trick to a successful night in the hoosegow is to keep the idiots talking while you don’t give up anything.”

  He made this sound like a pearl of wisdom I should hang onto for future reference. I supposed if I kept hanging around with Maddox, sooner or later I’d need it.

  Didn’t many people want me hanging around with them, but Maddox was always cool with it, now more than ever. His brother Hazel was the first friend I ever had, the two of us going back so long I don’t even remember meeting him. Hazel and I were tight before he knew better, that he was supposed to make fun of the same things about me that everybody else did, but by the time they tried to set him straight, it didn’t matter to him. Hazel took my crummiest years and made them better. Until he drew a bad number in the draft and got shipped over to Vietnam, so until he got back, I guess to Maddox I was the next best thing to having his kid brother around.

  I didn’t care what he did or what all mischief he got up to. Maddox stuck up for me, and there’d never been a line of people waiting to do that.

  From way back I had the lazy eye and the stutter, and because of the eye I could be clumsy. In school most everybody treated me like it was catching. And they were the nice ones. With the others, my spot in the pecking order was as one of the main tackling dummies for pecking practice. The day isn’t complete until you put the retard in his place. I mostly got over the stutter but the eye still did its own thing. By then, though, the damage was done and never going to get better. I could wear a big pair of Ray-Bans like Maddox’s and keep my mouth shut, and the past was all anybody else was ever going to see or hear.

  As we tooled back down to our side of the tracks, he told me the story of the other night, how after the cops had shut down him and Hunter Sykes, doing their Snake & Mongoose routine out on 44, he’d been cooling his heels in his cell for a couple hours when they brought in a sad, jabbering case of humanity starting to come down off what sounded like a pretty bonkers high, and deposited him in the next cell.

  “Jail’s just like study hall,” Maddox told me, “only your neighbor has better stories.”

  The guy had gobbled a few mushrooms earlier, and by half past nine, the cops had been called to come scoop him off the floor of the Voodoo Mama Lounge. He’d taken up permanent residence down there, but not like your average passed-out drunk. No, he was busily engaged in being an active weirdo, pressed out as flat on the wood as he could get, heaving and humping and splorching along through the night’s swamp of spilled drinks, trying to climb up people’s legs and telling anybody who’d listen, “I’m a blob! I’m a blob!”

  “Johnny Law assumed he was hopped up on goofballs and let it go at that, but I got the straight skinny out of him. It was homegrown he was on.”

  “Was he the one who grew it?”

  Maddox shook his head. “Nah. He just helped himself.”

  He drove us to where the southernmost edge of town petered out toward the river bottoms. The air always felt wetter and heavier down here than anywhere else around, and smelled like mud, and two minutes in you couldn’t help but break an extra sweat to flush the mucky feel back out of your skin. He pulled us up to a peeling bungalow set in a cluster of old trees that looked like they’d been gagging on the air for the past two hundred years.

  “This is where he said he got the mushrooms.” Maddox shut down the engine. “You know Sheena Halliday? She waitresses at the Voodoo.”

  “How would I? I’m not old enough to go in there yet, you know that.”

  Maddox sighed. “We gotta get you a fake I.D., that’s all there is to it.”

  He leaned on the horn to announce himself, then we got out and weren’t three steps away from the car when what had to be Sheena barged out through the bungalow’s front door. She was the realest unreal thing I’d ever seen, in a leopard print skirt and high heels and a busy lime green top and hair as red as anger piling around onto one shoulder. If they all dressed like that at the Voodoo Mama Lounge, I couldn’t get that fake I.D. fast enough.

  “Was hoping to talk some business,” Maddox said.

  “Could you pick a less terrible time? My shift starts in thirty.”

  “How about Erik? Is he here?”

  She hesitated just enough for the silence to catch my ear the wrong way. “Erik’s not seeing company right now.”

  Maddox must have noticed it too. “He was seeing company a couple days ago, for no good reason at all, it sounded like. At least I got a reason.”

  “Who? Who was here?” She looked suspicious now.

  “They call him Trenchfoot Tommy—you know who I mean?”

  “Oh, god. He was here? Was this before they hauled his loser ass in?”

  “Right. He said he came over in the afternoon to play something he called ‘booper balls.’” Maddox wasn’t the type to go uncomfortable and shuffle his feet, but now he did. “I, uh . . . I don’t know what that meant and didn’t want to ask.”

  Sheena nodded like she knew anyway, and didn’t like any of it. “Pong. It’s this stupid new game that connects to the TV. Like ping-pong, but on the screen. It makes a boop sound. It’s fun for about two minutes unless you’re brain dead.”

  Maddox and Sheena looked at each other for a second, then they both just nodded. Yup. Tommy.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  Maddox gave me a tap on the elbow and leaned in close enough to mutter, “Flash some greenbacks.” So I held up a shy fistful of everything we’d collected from the hippies and the frat boys.

  “It was more what he implied. That there might be an opportunity here for some mutual benefit. Supply and demand, and all.” Maddox poked me to raise my hand a little higher. “I figure you have a sweet little crop of something or other growing out back. This is a good place for it. I could always swing back by when you’re not here, but I don’t want to be that way. I may be a dirtbag, but I’m no thief.”

  Eyeing the cash, Sheena gave her head a big dramatic toss and whirled around with an impatient wave for us to follow. “Then get yourselves inside, you idiots.”

  You could see the bluish glow of the TV at the windows, and in the living room it was the only light at all, if you didn’t count the big purple lava lamp doing its slow motion churning along one wall on a table next to a bong. The log stretched out on the couch, facing the big console TV, must have been Erik.

  “There he is, if you can get much of a rise out of him,” she said.

  Maddox stepped up to say hello, then jumped straight back with the loudest “Holy Jesus!” I ever heard leave him.

  Sheena stood with her arms crossed. “There’s your sweet little crop of something or other. You still want to talk business?”

  I couldn’t see around Maddox yet, and wasn’t sure I wanted to, then he got brave again and crept a little closer.

  “He just lays around like that all day. And night. Twenty-four-seven, just about. It’s been weeks since he’s come to bed.”

  Maddox looked up. “Let me be the first to say that’s a crying shame.”

  Sheena snorted a c
ute little laugh. “You’re not the first, and not yet, it isn’t. If you want to know the truth . . . ” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I kinda like him better this way.”

  Maddox glanced over his shoulder at me, still hanging back near the door. “Get your bony butt up here, Wyatt. I bet you pay closer attention in science class than I ever did.”

  Sheena looked at me with camaraderie and my heart melted down into my shoes. “That’s a low bar.” She hitched her thumb at Maddox. “He never showed his face in science class at all.”

  Maddox put his hand on my shoulder and steered me the rest of the way toward the couch. “What do you think?”

  What did I think? What was I supposed to think? I think I would rather have been back in the Dodge topping 100 m.p.h. with the speakers thumping Duane Eddy so hard they were about to tear themselves off the rear deck. But no, instead he had me looking down at a long, skinny guy stretched out watching I Was a Teenage Werewolf on TV, with glazed eyes and mushrooms growing from his skin. They were a blue-gray color, speckled with purple spots . . . big fat ones popping from his neck and down his chest and belly, between the sides of his open shirt, and a bunch more little ones across his forehead like a fresh outbreak of zits. He had a few more on his cheeks, but not so many they got in the way of his eyes. I didn’t want to know what things looked like under the rest of his clothes.

  Maddox leaned in close to my ear. “That’s not normal, right?”

  “What are you asking me for? I’m not the one who works in a pharmacy!” I looked over at the movie on TV, at the werewolf in a varsity letter jacket. Yeah, people bug me too, Tony. “Maybe it’s normal for him.”

  “It started last week,” Sheena said. “I came out here one morning, ready to get coffee going, and he was like this.”