by John Brandon
“For it to be a date, you have to pay.”
“Anything you ask for while you got those scrubs on.”
“Need to feed that blue dog?”
“Oh, yeah,” Swin said. “I got a dog. His name is Bedford.”
“I like when people call dogs Steve or Dwayne.”
“He’s been Bedford for twelve hours. If you get along with him, you can have him. He hates me.”
Kyle and Swin did not get to meet Her. They navigated the trailer park with Bright’s lousy directions, watching the unit numbers jump about with no rhyme or reason, until finally, there was 56. They backed up a ways and parked, then stalked through a light rain, past all variety of small statue, flimsy fence, and colorful flag. An old man with sunglasses pushed up on his head stared at them, the stream from his hose sloshing into a birdbath. The sharp-cornered yellow packet rested on a tray table under Her’s carport. The packet contained a map, the meeting time, instructions to take the payment, how much, from whom. They would hand-deliver the drugs and receive cash, which led Kyle and Swin to believe they must be gaining the trust of Bright and Frog. They looked at the map, turned it right-side up: Louisiana.
1985
The delta dawn of Memphis beams through the front glass of your shop. It’s harsh in your eyes, warming the bag of money. You now have a modest nest egg —nearly twelve thousand dollars, plus another ten you’d already saved. You drop the bag under the floorboard and spend two customer-free hours in a haze. What you need is a breakfast that comes on several plates. Newspaper. A cigarette. You stand, but here is your first customer, a black guy with braided sideburns and long teeth. Buttons sent him and you have to give the money back. The PCP was bunk. You can’t give the money to him; he’s just a messenger. You have to take it back to the spot of the transaction, tonight, two in the morning.
“How do I know he isn’t lying?” you ask.
“Probably is. Between the two of y’all.”
“Tell him to stop by here.”
“I done all the telling I got to.”
“Just tell him I won’t be there tonight.”
“All I’m telling is the chicken man two thighs.”
He leaves and you know you’ve done something stupid. Your appetite is gone. Buttons wants you back in Frayser to kill you. You will start carrying a revolver. Your days as a shop owner, you know, are over as of this moment, your inventory lost. You say goodbye to Froggy’s. Buttons will have his people trash it.
You go to a hotel in Germantown to think. The clerk says it’s too early to check in, and you tell him to charge you for yesterday, too. Over a period of four or five hours, you flip through the nine channels repeatedly. You should be able to sleep by now. Nothing is happening in the world— no earthquakes or celebrity deaths or medical breakthroughs. People on game shows are doing silly things with food, urging one another. You’re starving. Though you’ve chosen to pay double for this hotel, you refuse to be fleeced for a room-service hamburger. You walk down the street to a barbecue restaurant full of pictures of celebrities in bibs—Merlin Olsen, Ed McMahon, Steppenwolf. You get a pound of pulled pork and a halforder of beans and stroll toward the hotel, over a retired railroad track and past a day spa and a political headquarters. In the hotel parking lot a vintage Buick cuts you off and the driver shows you a pistol. You get in the passenger seat and a big black dude with a sharpened gold tooth asks for your gun. He works for Buttons. Surprisingly, he’s alone. You hesitate and he tells you not to play. You hand over the .22 and then try to appear composed, opening the Styrofoam box on your lap and digging in. You offer the guy some and he says he’s on a strict diet of Hennessy and ass. He’s driving down the narrow lanes of Poplar Avenue, stopping at a light every ten feet, another police cruiser at each intersection. You suggest he cut up on Mendleson and he does so. You begin on your beans.
“How’d you find me?” you inquire.
“Followed you since you left the shop, you dumb shit.” He chuckles.
“I’ll give you five thousand dollars if you let me go.”
You see his breath catch, his head twitch, weighing the risk and reward. He starts to smile, something cute to say. You launch yourself on top of him, pinning his gun arm with all your weight, bust his nose with the top of your head, find his eye with the tines of your plastic fork and plunge it in. He jerks the wheel. The Buick bucks a curb and flattens a fence. You waggle the fork in his eye socket and keep butting his nose and mouth. You don’t know where the car is going. There is the neat pain of his filed tooth against your scalp, and you notice there is no noise. When the Buick slams into an oak tree, your revolver, which had been tucked under the driver’s seat, thunks onto the floor. There is noise now. You roll out of the car and shoot the man in the torso three times. You are on your side in an azalea thicket, baked beans smeared across your shirt. You open the driver door and allow the man to fall out. You back over the fence and down off the curb and drive the Buick to Darwin’s Recovery, where Darwin gives you two grand for it. He looks at the blood on your sleeve and collar and the bean stains on your chest and says, “That was some food fight.”
The walk back to the hotel is a blessing. You feel an insidious cramp of love for everything you see—the wily children with their schemes to get cigarettes, the river-colored haze hanging in the sky, the twenty-yearold pickup trucks that have been waxed until they gleam. You love the Mississippi women, dragged here by their husbands, the thick-accented women who will never understand why people want to live in the city. You love the old people who have watched this place go to shit. You love your .22. It’s accurate, doesn’t kick, doesn’t jam, has a marble grip, and you can get cheap ammo for it anywhere.
You will leave Memphis now.
Pine Bluff, Arkansas—craggy and pretty and shrinking. There is always fog in the troughs of Pine Bluff’s hills, and you enjoy walking down into the fog and emerging on the other side like a rising spirit. There is a tiny university and there are many rednecks. There are small buildings shaped like different foods, mom-and-pop lunch joints. You play the part of a user for a couple weeks, always getting what you want but always in a small quantity. The bars of Pine Bluff are big on amateur competitions. You sit in these bars, stoned or hopped-up, watching people try out jokes and pull things from their sleeves. At times it seems everyone in Pine Bluff is in an altered state; they are a little slow and too even-tempered.
Your dealer is an older man named Almond. He is also from Memphis. He has black hair and thin gaps between all of his teeth. Almond believes the world is becoming morally atrocious, that individuals of low quality are overrunning the planet. As long as you stay on the correct side of his moral-quality line, Almond will be a friend. You tell him you didn’t always have muscles, that you got picked on as a kid, that having to talk your way out of things made you into a salesman. This impresses him, and he gives you a shot selling for him. You pop from bar to bar, watching spindly girls croon and bald guys do impressions, becoming known, becoming the man to make eye contact with. In a matter of days, everyone knows where to find you, your prices, what you have. You gain confidence as a drug dealer. You’ve seen the business from the viewpoint of a bouncer and a buyer and a man on the run—a man who escaped with the money of one of the sizeable bosses of Memphis—and now you see it from Almond’s perspective. Almond is a fastidious, careful man, a man who steadily and quietly monopolizes a tiny city. Almond counsels you often. He wants to show you the right way to do things. He doesn’t want you to disappoint him. He doesn’t realize your time with him is merely an apprenticeship; he thinks you’ll be with him for the long haul. Sometimes while he’s making his coffee, which he drinks with one Sweet’n Low and one sugar, he stops and stares at you, regarding you with youdon’t-know-what. Almond strikes you as the kind of man who, in a fight, would expertly and quickly break someone’s nose, then take two steps back and just stand there.
Almond owns a sign-making company that he uses as his laundry. He spends about
twenty hours a week in the workshop, and much of his remaining time goes to his sister, who is fifteen years his senior and has severe health problems. Her brow is always furrowed and her fingers won’t bend. Almond has all kinds of adaptive equipment for her: mechanical beds, wheelchairs, customized toiletries, creams and balms and powders. Videos and toys. Almond will not take her to a nursing home. He processes her food and deposits tiny spoonful after tiny spoonful into her quivering lips. You offer to sit for her. Though Almond refuses the offer, this fully convinces him that you are a high-quality person.
Almond has a nemesis, his former brother-in-law, a man they call Hink. Hink, twenty-one years younger than Almond’s sister, divorced and abandoned her when she became ill. Hink still lives in Pine Bluff. He wears an anklet and flip-flops. He has a girlfriend in her thirties who wears high heels that are too big for her and sprinkles glitter on her arms and shoulders. Almond and Hink never go near one another. Almond is too smart, he says, to let himself go to jail for killing Hink. If Almond goes to jail, he says, his sister will be alone. Almond considers Hink a dog, not a man. Once, when a bunch of Almond’s signs were vandalized and everyone assumed Hink was responsible, Almond grew so irate at Hink that he had himself locked in a garage for twenty-four hours.
Almond lets all his other sellers fall off. You sell what he gives you in three or four days, before the weekend even hits, but he won’t buy more because it would be bad for the users and because it might bring trouble near. Almond has a ton of rules that are meant to keep him out of trouble. Apparently, they work. If you stretch one rule, he says, all the others are useless. Never cheat the customer and don’t allow yourself to be cheated. Find your volume equilibrium and stick to it. Have one middleman and one middleman only. Define your farm area and don’t stray.
Almond’s rules are appealing in the abstract, but after five months in which you earn the same meager commission, you grow antsy. Some guys aren’t careful enough, but Almond is too careful. You lead him to believe you’re fully on board with his program. One night, in a great show of esteem for you, he brings you along to his middleman’s house for a buy. The middleman is surprised to see you. He wears a T-shirt and a suit coat and has a fridge full of light beer. You and Almond and the middleman square away the evening’s business and then the three of you settle in and watch a movie featuring testy exchanges on balconies and women throwing their earrings. The middleman wants Almond’s car to sit in the driveway a few hours; he doesn’t like people pulling in and pulling right back out.
You understand that pleading with Almond would be useless and would make him suspicious. You understand that he is too meticulous to steal from. What you have to do is set him up to be caught by the police and make him think Hink is behind it. This is not a good plan but it’s the only thing you can do. You drop gossip around Pine Bluff about Hink wanting to end Almond’s self-righteous feud once and for all. You bust up a few signs. You type I KNOW THINGS on a postcard, put Hink’s name on it, and slip it in Almond’s mailbox. You look Almond in the eye and offer to take care of his Hink problem. A few weeks later, when things are settling down, you pull up next to a pay phone out by the mineral plant and call the police station and tell them that between nine-thirty and ten-thirty a gray Thunderbird with several bricks of cocaine in the trunk is going to cruise down Stringer Avenue and make a left on Tornbore Lane.
Almond is denied bail. When you are finally allowed to visit him, when you saunter across the room with a fake look of outrage on your face and pat his shoulder, he tells you not to fucking touch him. He knows it was you. He grips the edge of the table with white knuckles, his face locked in a twitch. You slide your chair back before you sit. It takes a great effort for Almond to speak quietly. He tells you that you will take over his responsibilities as a man. If you don’t, he will have you killed.
“Responsibilities as a man?” you repeat.
His face darkens, overrun with ire, wanting you to make light of what he’s said so he can spring across the table at you. You haven’t seen anything in your time with Almond to suggest he knows a hit man. He doesn’t deal with junkies, isn’t the type to farm out dirty work. Still, who knows what friends he’s making in prison? Still, you do owe him. You respect him. Although he was bound to be usurped, if not by you then by some guy like you, you respect him.
Your inherited manly duties, Almond tells you, are to kill Hink and to put Almond’s sister up in the Rissler House, the finest old folks’ home in the area.
“One condition,” you say. “I want your middleman. I want the dude with the light beer and the HBO.”
Almond turns his chair so he is not facing you and enjoys a deep breath. He seems relieved to be among such blatant immorality, to not have to worry about immorality sneakily encroaching.
“Have him,” he says. “Have him and be cursed.”
So you do what he wants. You put the sister in a tower of the Rissler House, a converted Victorian mansion where the residents eat shrimp cocktail and filet mignon. Hink’s girlfriend goes to visit her family in Mississippi. On Friday, you break into Hink’s house and wait for him to return home from bowling. You don’t bring your gun because it will be too loud. You didn’t want to go into a store with a small-talking clerk and a receipt reel and maybe even a camera and purchase a baseball bat to use on Hink. The best thing is to use something of his. You survey and rummage, under beds and in closets, unable to find anything to use as a weapon. You check the garage. No baseball bat, no golf club, no tire iron, no fireplace stoker. The most suitable thing Hink has is a hefty casserole dish, and this is the object that brings him death, possibly at the first blow, while he is passed out on his couch, still wearing his two-tone shoes.
In jail, Almond quickly grows into the old man he is and one morning fails to wake up, a weight off your shoulders. You are eager to move to Little Rock. You’re not like Almond, satisfied with being small-time. You want to go somewhere with less familiarity, somewhere you won’t have to hem business in. You’ve been in Pine Bluff six months and already everyone knows you. More than all that, Pine Bluff gives you a cloudy feeling. It sullies your meanness, this trusting, foggy burg.
Once in Little Rock, you make trips back to Pine Bluff every couple weeks to meet with the middleman and check on Almond’s sister. After eighteen months, she too passes away. Soon you establish your own middleman in Little Rock and squeeze the Pine Bluff guy on price until he tells you to fuck off. You’re glad. You don’t need him and you’re tired of driving down there and you want to, once and for all, sever all connection with Pine Bluff.
One day your Little Rock middleman offers to sell you his wholesaler. The middleman is desperate. He asks for one hundred thousand then quickly accepts your offer of sixty-one, which is all you have. You may get screwed, but you have no choice but to hold your breath and roll the dice. This is the part at which you excel, the point where you have to register fear only with your brain and not let it invade your guts. You do the same thing with frustration and discouragement; they can never really touch you. You can acknowledge injustice and the absurdity of life while never getting weighed down by these things.
You make the middleman watch you put the cash in a locker. You make an envelope out to him, put the key in it, and drop it in a mailbox. If the plan is to screw me, you tell him, you better change it to shooting me. You drop him off and turn your thoughts to meeting the wholesaler. You will wear a suit. You will arrive not a minute early and not a minute late. It will go smoothly and your next problem will be that you need people. You drive through a frail moonlight that settles like dust, knowing that your problems from here on out will be the kinds of problems you want to have.
You cannot get people. You wait outside a Labor Ready until you see a pair of prison-looking dudes, tough and lazy. You ask if they want to work for you and the question exhausts them. They say, “Naw, man.” You run a vague ad for delivery drivers and it is answered only by high-school kids and graduate students. You ask
around at a biker bar on the edge of town and the owner tells you his customers have a hard enough time keeping out of trouble, then he drops a glass ashtray on the bar, where it wobbles to a stop.
You are not going to be the only game in town. You will not be familiar. You will not be predictable. You will not get caught. You will spread yourself thin. Your deals will have no routine and will pepper the entire Southeast. It will be too much driving for you alone. You want two guys, two guys to start with, to bring in on the ground floor. They will drive only until other drivers are added, and then they’ll be management. These two will be your heirs, the keeper of your story. You never asked for your life to become a great story, but that’s what’s happening here. This is a lot to plan when you haven’t even met these two, when it seems you may never find them, when, before they do any of this, they’ll have to sit around in bars and work the streets and hone themselves like you had to.
The next trip was short. Kyle and Swin were to cross into Louisiana, barely into the swamps, and drop off a net bag of soccer balls filled with pills. They drove a Ford Taurus with digital dash meters and a CD player for which they’d brought no CDs. Kyle was sick of words, even his own.
“No more radio,” he said.
“There’s a lot of good stations around here,” said Swin. “This is a musical area.”
“Not today it isn’t.”
Swin picked at his door handle, a nuisanced look on his face. “What, are you going to contemplate the nature of the ever-expanding universe and man’s place in it?”
“Doubt it. But if I do have a thought, I’ll hear it.”
“Sure,” Swin said, “If you have one.”
“I feel one coming on.”
“Maybe you should pull off.”
“Nope. Nope, false alarm.”
“So now let’s turn the old radio back on.”