Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “You wish,” she said.

  “I just stopped by to say hi,” the kid piped in, adding, with a thumb cocked in the direction of the plow truck uphill, “while my dad’s working.”

  Huh. Dave processed this while chewing his cigar. So this Miguel was Pedro’s son. He did a little kneejerk calculus, putting one and one and then maybe one more together to solve the alcove equation: Miguel must be her dealer. Sure, okay—that made sense. Jumping out of the plow truck to drop off a—what’d they used to call it? A dime bag, yeah—while Papa Pedro scraped the Lane to Nowhere for whatever Frito-Lay products Russell probably paid him with. Then naturally sneaking in a little product test with Lexi. This was sweet. This was dirt. Dave grinned. “So, what,” he said to her, “you got a prescription for that?”

  Alexis snapped shut her phone and said, “It helps, okay?”

  “Bet it does.” He grinned at Miguel, who did not grin back but instead licked his lips and glanced sideways in a manner suggesting he was still mired in the disagreeable process of wetting his pants.

  “Seriously,” she said. “Look online. It’s, like, the best treatment ever for IBS.” As if to demonstrate her point, she pursed her lips around the joint, blazing the ember at its end. The long hiss of her inhale came to a sharp stop, however, as she coughed the smoke back up. The resulting cloud was thick and dense enough to obscure her face altogether. Waving away the cloud, she barked a few more coughs, her chagrined efforts to suppress them almost poignant. She tried passing it to Miguel but he waved his arms no: not the groovy-cool I’ve-had-enough wave no, Dave noticed, but a more adamant, appalled refusal, an I-don’t-even-know-what-that-illegal-shit-is wave no, all of which widened the smile behind Dave’s cigar. “Amateur,” he sniffed.

  “Like—you’d know,” she spluttered.

  “Hand it over.”

  Miguel peeked around the corner, presumably hoping for a rescue by his dad.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  “You need some instruction,” he said. “Give it here.”

  She did so, but reluctantly, as if fearing his instruction might involve throwing it down into the snow, coupled with a lecture about the evils of dope, etc. When he replaced his cigar with the joint, crabbing up his face as he took a long macho drag from it, her mouth flopped open. “This is so fucked up,” she said to Miguel. “I’m getting high with my stepdad.”

  “Yeah,” came Miguel’s reply.

  “Yeah . . .” Dave echoed him, but then it was his turn to cough. “Gaw,” he cried, his cheeks wiggling, shoulders shaking, as he hacked the smoke back up. The coughs, searing and unstoppable, bent his body and yanked tears from his eyes. Doubled over, he offered the joint back to Lexi, certain he was about to see pinkish lung flecks dappling the snow. Just how would he explain that at the emergency room? Snatching it back, she sniffed, “Amateur.”

  “Jesus,” he wheezed. “What the fuck is that? That’s harsh. Holy . . .”

  “It’s medical grade.”

  “Christ,” he said, still wheezing. He put a hand to his chest while leveling a cold glare at Miguel, who had somehow, he couldn’t help feeling, just shown him up. “I’m cured a’ something.”

  Alexis took another drag from it, more gently this time. No coughs followed—just a smooth, vampish exhale (were those smoke rings?) that felt, to Dave, like cocky one-upmanship. Now everyone was showing him up. Pouting, he wondered if he’d suddenly morphed into a Raymond—the impotent old coot, publicly tolerated but privately mocked. You wouldn’t want him having your back in a fight against some guys from Hopatcong High, but sharing a joint with him outside by the trash cans . . . eh, not so bad. This was an intolerable thought. “Not that I need any curing,” he said, brushing his chest as if the purpose of his hand there had been to dust snow off his coat, rather than to salve the fierce pain he’d been feeling. “Not in the shitting department, anyway. Here, gimme another toke of that.”

  He hadn’t smoked pot in—what, twenty years? And in that weedless meantime he’d turned against it—bitterly so, after then-candidate Bill Clinton made his oily crack about smoking but not inhaling it. He’d forgotten, until now, how much damn fun it had been, sneaking out back of the house as a teenager, giddy and terrified as he fired up a bowl, then floating back inside to giggle right beside the old man at whatever was on the tube. He’d had a girlfriend back then, Alcee Vercellino, who wouldn’t fool around unless she was high; though after that, man, it was no holds barred. She’d unstrap her bra before he’d even dug a hand in there. They’d drive to the Newton Reservoir in his mother’s big brown Delta 88, find the blackest, most secluded place to park, jam some Styx or Molly Hatchet into the cassette player, pass a poorly rolled joint back and forth in the backseat, and then just go at it, like rabbits, stoned rabbits. (Dave still saw Alcee, every now and then, at the ShopRite, and once at the Home Depot over in Newton. She’d gotten fat as a house, which gave him the liberty to pretend he didn’t recognize her.) Shifting from his reminiscence, which left a warm, briny residue in his mind, he looked down at Lexi and wondered what the setup was for kids like her: whether or not the Newton Reservoir was still fuck central, and how these poor kids managed to get it on comfortably without the plush generous expanse of an Oldsmobile’s backseat. Shit, at seventeen, she had to be getting it on—but where, and with who? He sized up Miguel again, tilting him sideways in his imagination so that he was on top of Lexi, then tilting him the other way (whee!) so that he was under Lexi . . . naw, he decided. Lexi was too snotty to be plowing the blowman’s kid. Wait a sec—too snotty to be blowing the plowman’s kid, he’d meant. What was this shit?

  “Thanks for the overshare,” she said coolly, immune to his insult. She was used to him making fun of her Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which he sometimes called Irritable Butt Syndrome. “Glad to hear something’s working for you.”

  “Seriously,” he said, his voice pinched and wheezy from trying to hold the pot smoke captive in his lungs. “I’m the world’s greatest shitter.”

  Miguel put a hand to his mouth, stifling a laugh.

  “I didn’t know there were, like, competitions,” Alexis said.

  “Here.” He fetched his cellphone from his belt holster. “Check the proof.”

  “What, you keep a record?” Apprehension paled her face.

  “I got proof, just hold on,” he said, squinting at the phone, thumbing its buttons.

  “You’re so fucking weird.”

  “Check this,” he said, holding out the phone.

  Jumping back from the sight of it, she bounced into a dwarf boxwood before Miguel caught her. “Fuck!” she bawled. “Did you just show me a picture of your shit?”

  He turned the phone inward, smiling, to re-admire the photo. “That’s what you’re aiming for on the can, baby. That right there.”

  Flatly, she said, “Ohmygod, I am so going to hurl.”

  “I’m just sayin, that’s a keeper.” He was still admiring it as she passed the joint—now just a half-inch nub—back to him. He offered a view to Miguel, who did that same crossed-arm wave with which he’d refused the joint, but when Dave said, “C’mon,” with a fat exhale of smoke, Miguel leaned in gingerly and took a wincing peep at the photo. “That’s an achievement, right there, huh?” Dave said, turning the screen back to give it another look of his own. He frowned at it, rotating the phone. “It’s kinda corkscrewed, isn’t it?”

  “I cannot fucking believe you took a photo of your own . . . shit. That is so, so wrong. You’re, like, the ultra-perv.” Like an unexpected gas bubble, however, a burst of laughter escaped her, which caused Dave to laugh, too: those raucous, infectious, irrepressible marijuana giggles. “Oh my fucking God,” she squealed, that sideways smile now open and wide. Miguel just shook his head, by all appearances hoping his father might lasso him at the soonest possible moment.

  “And I don’t even need no performance-enhancing drugs,” Dave said, taking a final, fingertip-scorching drag from the dying joint, then fl
icking it down to the snow.

  “You are so, so sick,” Alexis said, as a clear compliment. Another spasm of laughter convulsed her.

  “What, ’cause I poop?”

  “No, perv. Because you take pictures of it.”

  “Just this one. That’s a framer.”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Uh no, what? Like you can do better?”

  “Dude, I can’t even do, remember? IBS?”

  “Wah wah.” Dave made a sad-clown face. “Excuses.”

  “You’re really a dick, you know that?”

  They froze, suddenly stricken. “Dave?” a voice was calling from around back.

  “Oh shit, it’s Uncle Jeremy,” Lexi hissed.

  “Fuck me,” Dave snapped, panicking. Jeremy finding him getting high with Alexis: That was nothing short of the apocalypse. Liz would sound the sirens at full volume. The entire world would crack open, sending Dave to his death in a hot bath of lava. “Okay, call me,” he heard Alexis saying to Miguel, and from the corner of his eye he saw Miguel plant a quick smooch on Lexi’s cheek before he went scampering toward the front of the house. Dave wasn’t worrying about Miguel just then. He stomped his boot in the snow, roughly close to where he’d tossed the remains of the joint. Then he stomped again, beside there, and once more, beside there. He looked like he was trying to kill the rare New Jersey snow snake.

  “I’m gone,” Lexi said, scooting out between the dwarf boxwoods and fleeing toward the front of the house, the same scamper-route Miguel had taken. Dave started to follow, then reconsidered, then reconsidered his reconsidering, his feet going one way then the other.

  “Dayyy-eeeve?” Jeremy shouted again, either louder or moving closer. Jeremy’s shouts, Dave couldn’t help noticing, sounded like yodels.

  “Right here,” Dave called back, sucking on his cigar to build up the biggest, masking-est Costa Rican leaf cloud possible, then gulping cold air and re-sucking it like a hungry infant at the dry end of a bottle. Very very slowly, he walked back down the path, trailing a steam engine’s billow of smoke. At the corner of the house he collided with Jeremy.

  “The beer’s right by the door,” Jeremy said, all measly-faced and contrite.

  “Been looking everywhere,” Dave mumbled, still puffing wildly on the cigar. His mouth felt like he’d been chewing on a sweater. In addition, he couldn’t feel anything from the waist down, as if his thighs had broken loose and would at any moment abandon his torso to continue down the path. This, he knew, would be regrettable on several levels.

  “Sorry, man,” Jeremy said. “Thought I’d save you a few kilowatts, stashing it out here.”

  “I can spare the fucking kilowatts,” Dave grumbled.

  Back in the family room, Jeremy and Dave found everyone (save Lexi) still gathered in front of the big-screen, Sara now nestled between her mother and father, the Cowboys having maintained their lead into the fourth quarter, Aidan still watching from the floor with that far-out, far-off expression of his, which might possibly be evidence of another marijuana habit in the extended family. Maybe pot brownies were a remedy for gluten allergies. For the first time, Dave noticed how big the kid’s feet were—they were huuuuuge, like floppy clown feet, maybe larger than Dave’s own feet, which he felt the immediate need to check, to confirm they hadn’t scooted out ahead of him.

  Dave was lurking at the edge of the room, examining Aidan’s sneakers vis-à-vis his own Weejuns, when Raymond exclaimed, “Dave!’” Startled, Dave glanced up. Raymond was six inches off the seat, risen with glee as if they were reuniting after a multi-year separation. “Thought a bear might’ve got ya,” he said. Dave watched Bev’s eyes crinkle in amusement. So did Raymond, who crinkled his own eyes back at her. Crinkle crinkle crinkle. “Did a bear get ya, Dave?” he said.

  “Bear . . .” This was as much as Dave could say, and even this he didn’t say skillfully. More like “Burrrrrr . . .”

  All eyes, none of them crinkled any longer, turned toward Dave. “You all right, honey?” Sara asked. At this a jolt of panic went rattling through him, and he pulled his gaze away from Raymond to meet Sara’s stare directly. She looked baffled. And possibly angry. He noted an irked eyebrow, riding just a bit higher than its opposite-eye partner, the way the fur on an annoyed cat’s spine rises. Could she smell it on him? Holy fucking macaroni. Could everybody? And where were his goddamn legs? “Yeah,” he said, more chirpily than he’d intended—more chirpily, in fact, than he’d ever spoken the word yeah in his life. Like a chipmunk had hijacked his vocal cords. Then, by dint of explanation, he added, “It’s cold out there.”

  “That’s my fault,” Jeremy said, returning to his position behind Aidan. He seemed genuinely penitent, which Dave liked to see.

  “Well, take a load off then,” said Raymond. “You sure were right about those Cowboys. It’s just . . . a massacre, I tell ya.”

  Sitting—God, sitting down felt like the greatest thing that had ever happened to Dave. It was as if he’d spent the entirety of his forty-six years upright until some samaritan had confided to him, “You know, bending your legs, and putting your ass on something—it’s really quite pleasant, give it a whirl.” He emitted one of those meaty-sounding groans that tended to alarm Liz. Beyond the physical relief, however, sitting also brought some clarity to his mind. To wit: “Medical-grade” marijuana, whatever that was, was a vastly different species of grass than the shit he’d been smoking in 1980, back when Alcee Vercellino weighed 110 pounds and would put out, oh so spectacularly, for a doobie hit. He was in over his head, he realized, and needed to be very careful; he didn’t remember ever feeling this way, back when he’d sit giggling at Barney Miller punchlines beside his father—he’d never felt this woozy and trippy, this freakin legless. Also: Aidan’s feet weren’t really that enormous, upon closer inspection. Must’ve been the angle, he thought. Huh. Furthermore: The color quality on his eighty-two-inch LCD screen was miraculous, and incontrovertible proof that God not only existed, no matter what Liz and Jeremy might say, but that He loved us all. It was as if God, wearing a divine Best Buy jersey, had personally installed a rainbow in Dave’s family room. As well: There was a beer in his hand, but he couldn’t explain how it had gotten there. And woweee was it cold.

  The Raiders threw a TD with four minutes left on the clock. “Ope, ope, ope, ope,” Raymond chanted, though the Raiders’ chances—Dave swung his hundred-pound head at the big-screen to confirm this—were nil. Along the way he noticed a one-inch zipper gap at the top of Sara’s slacks, a little almond-shaped cleft opening just below a minor roll of bellyfat that he’d never detected before. This wasn’t much to behold—it was Thanksgiving, they were all puffed and bloated—until his gaze shifted two feet to her left, where Bev was displaying a similar gap in her own zipper, topped by a much fuller, much more major tube of bellyfat. His gaze went darting back and forth, from paunch to paunch, until he’d incised a mental line between them, at which point a whole series of lines appeared in his mind’s eye, a visual grid superimposed upon the two of them: one from Sara’s lush lips to her mother’s parched, lipstick-clotted lips, from Sara’s longish golden hair (the hair that had been lathered, so sexily, in that old Coast soap commercial, the one in which a younger Sara had cooed, “Oh, that scent!”) to the fluffed white poodle curled atop her mother’s scalp, from Sara’s long, slightly Olive Oyl–ish neck to Bev’s also long but wattled scrag, between their identical sockfeet . . . he’d never quite noticed, until now, with all that THC floating through his brain, what an exact replica of her mother Sara was. Could he stand that, twenty years hence—fucking Bev? He looked at Raymond, who was thrilling at the last pointless minute of the game, saying “Oh boyo” when the Raiders threw for a first down. Shuddering, he envisioned himself in Raymond’s cheap little blue house in Ohio, wearing Raymond’s clothes (navy cardigan with oversized buttons over a plaid flannel shirt with easy-on snaps in the back, twill putter pants with an elastic waistband and fake fly), begging Bev for some gray nookie. T
hat’s what he’d worked for? Surely Raymond must’ve spent a thousand and one nights walking outside, to plead with the moon: More. More. I want more. But here Raymond was. Here Dave was. The game ended. “They sure gave it their goshdarn best, didn’t they?” said Raymond to no one.

  Dave’s cellphone beeped. Grunting, he unsheathed it from its holster and flipped it open. What appeared on the screen brought forth from him an explosive, room-shaking laugh, as if he’d belched up a Roman candle. He stifled it as best he could, though not before everyone’s attention—quizzical, from some quarters; contemptuous, from others—had been drawn to him.

  “What is it?” Sara asked.

  On the screen was a photo message. In the photo was a single, small, demure-looking turd, like a fat little perfecto cigar, lying at the base of a toilet—Dave recognized it as the toilet in the downstairs half bath. In the photo’s foreground was a raised middle finger, its fingernail adorned with chipped purple polish.

  “Pete,” he lied, with a fingertip sponging a tear from his eye. “It’s Pete. You know how Pete is.” He snapped the cellphone closed. “Not for family consumption.” He frowned at Aidan. “Man stuff.”

  Vacantly, Sara nodded, while Liz shook her head and gave Jeremy a peeved black look signaling Time to go. Dave tried to suppress further giggling by drinking his beer, but the actions clashed, causing the beer to boil and go spurting down his chin and neck.

  “Something’s wrong with Uncle Dave,” said Aidan.

  “Be polite,” said Jeremy, kneading the boy’s shoulder in very very clear agreement.

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