The More They Disappear

by Jesse Donaldson

  She joined him in the kitchen and together they got high and soon enough Mark was close to comatose on the couch and said he should go to bed. Mary Jane wasn’t tired and what she really wanted was for Mark to fuck her but that wasn’t in the cards. Before he said good-night, Mark made a big show of taking a handful of pills from his bottle and leaving them on the cutting board. “These are for you,” he said, as if he were offering her diamonds.

  Mary Jane nodded and thanked him but she didn’t care about the pills. Not really. She wanted Mark inside her, wanted him to treat this night as if it were a wedding night. They were together now. She needed that to mean something.

  The lightness in her head—the wine’s feelgood—scampered away on a biting wind that snaked through a stuck open window. Mary Jane’s veins pulsed like hammer strings and her muscles clenched. She breathed deeply to calm herself but her breath remained ragged until she walked into the kitchenette and snorted another line.

  She peered into the bedroom and closed one eye to see better. Streetlight snuck through the busted blinds. After a minute, she could make out Mark’s body—wrapped in the sheets and lying diagonal across the bed. No room for her. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm and she mirrored it with her own to find some deeper connection. She told herself tomorrow would be better. And all the tomorrows after that.

  She scavenged in the kitchen for food but the fridge was mostly condiments and Coke. She settled for a plate of leftover fries, which she ate cold. Then she opened the front door and looked for Audra and Megan but they’d gone inside. She sat in the dark and listened to the wind bend the trees. The cars race the streets. Thoughts slipped from the back of her head on a river of wine and pill dust. The oil from the fries coated her fingers, and she licked them. Then she lay back on the couch and slipped her fingers under her dress. She worked in small circles and imagined Mark on top as her fingers warmed, but the drugs coursed through her and her limbs went heavy and no matter how close she seemed to coming, it escaped her.

  five

  Mark woke in a panic—his legs pumping as if biking uphill and his hands pulled tight to his chest in prayer. The remains of a nightmare lingered. Mary Jane pointing a finger that turned into a pistol. And then a gaping hole in his abdomen but instead of blood, a black sticky tar. He’d touched it, put it to his lips. It tasted like licorice. Booming from the heavens above was his father’s voice—amplified and reading the weather report. Monday: partly cloudy, highs in the sixties, lows in the forties overnight with a thirty percent chance of rain. Tuesday: partly cloudy, highs in the sixties, lows in the …

  He dressed in the shadowy half-light of a street lamp and poked his head into the common room. Mary Jane was asleep on the couch. He started to slink by her but reconsidered. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Mary Jane there; it was just that her arrival complicated things. He hadn’t followed through on collecting the money and she wouldn’t understand why. She’d expect him to go back to his father and demand what they were owed, as if it were that easy. He rubbed her shoulders and her eyelids fluttered. “MJ, I’ve got work to do. You should sleep in the bed.” She muttered nonsense as he helped her to the bedroom, pulled the covers over her, and sealed the blinds to turn the room an inky dark. Mary Jane trusted him to get her to Montreal and he’d pretended he could deliver. He was the steady half of their relationship—the planner, the pragmatist—but he wished he could harness Mary Jane’s faith. Sometimes he felt like he carried all the doubts and she carried all the dreams. To Mark, Montreal wasn’t a place, it was a state of mind, and he wasn’t sure how to get there. He kissed Mary Jane softly on the forehead and left a note and his spare key on the coffee table, along with twenty bucks in case she’d come empty-handed. You never knew with Mary Jane.

  The sun winched itself up over the suburbs. The sidewalks were empty save a couple of professors carrying leather satchels, and the first students Mark came across were still up from the night before, howling as they took turns posing atop a statue of the university’s first president. One girl put a cigarette in the statue’s mouth. Another sat in his lap as if telling her desires to Santa Claus. A boy did his best to make it look like the statue was sucking him off, and when the girls called for him to pull it out, he craned his head around to look for witnesses. Mark tried not to draw attention.

  Outside the library a maintenance crew blew leaves into piles and crisscrossed the grass with mowers, the din of motors buffeted by a strong wind. Mark ducked into the coffee shop next door, where a pair of basketball players sat drinking smoothies and signing autographs for a blond coed. The town treated its Wildcats like celebrities; it seemed ridiculous that in addition to dunking and posing for photos, they had to attend class and go through the motions of being actual students. Mark supposed the attention could become overwhelming at times.

  The black-haired barista treated him with her usual indifference, put his coffee on the counter without a hello and held out her hand to swipe his meal card. On the receipt he noticed his balance was under a hundred. Normally he would phone his dad and ask for money and deal with the lecture that accompanied the funds. Everything came down to money in the end. The money his father kept from him. The money Lew had extorted from his father. The money Mark and Mary Jane needed to start over in Montreal. Everyone carried a balance, was owed or past due. Everyone was greedy for more.

  It had started with money, too. And lies. Right around the time he’d learned to drive, Mark started making gas money by pinching drug samples from his father’s office and selling them at school. It didn’t matter what drugs he stole from his father’s supply, because Mark could sell a week’s trial of anything for twenty bucks. For nearly three months, the business kept his tank full of premium. Then one night at the diner he was careless and handed codeine cough syrup and hypertension pills under the table to a guy in his biology class named Luker. As he started to pocket Luker’s twenty, Lew Mattock’s beefy hand came down and pinched the back of Mark’s neck. “If it isn’t my good buddy, Mr. Gaines?” Lew said. And then, to Luker, “Whatever he gave you, leave it and get gone.”

  Luker had glanced at Mark and did as he was told. “What about my bill?” he muttered.

  “Get.”

  Lew slid into the booth and studied the drugs. “Now the cough syrup I understand. Drink enough and maybe you have visions. But the heart pills. That’s a surprise to me. A kid so young shouldn’t have coronary problems.” Mark didn’t respond. He took the twenty from his pocket and put it on the table, as if that might erase the crime. “Oh you keep that,” Lew said. “You earned it.”

  Mark expected to be charged with a crime, but instead Lew sat him on the passenger side and drove him home, talking all the way about how the good doctor wouldn’t be happy when he found out his drug samples were making their way around town. Lew never asked Mark to explain himself, didn’t seem to much care about the circumstances. When Mark’s dad came to the door, Lew suggested he send his son up to his room and let the grown-ups chat.

  A half-hour later, Mark learned Lew had agreed to keep him out of trouble (and keep his dad out of trouble, by proxy) in exchange for “fair” compensation—a deal he was willing to make because they were family of a sort. His father explained this to Mark in an even tone, but Mark could tell he was roiling inside and that it was only a matter of time before he blew. It happened when he finally got around to asking Mark what he was thinking? What the fuck was he thinking? Trip raised his hand as if to strike and Mark cowered into a corner, blubbering an apology. His father, disgusted or fed up or unsure what should happen next, lowered his hand and slammed the door.

  For a couple of silent but tense days Mark barely left his room. Then Lew showed back up with a different proposal for his father. Mark eavesdropped on the conversation. Lew explained it like this: Trip would supply Mark with pills and drive up demand by prescribing pain meds without refilling them, Mark would sell the pills to dealers at the dirt track whenever Lew told him to, and Lew
would provide protection from the law, along with a measure of comfort that it would all work out. To Mark’s surprise, his father said he’d heard worse ideas. And when Lew revealed how much they could make on just one bottle of painkillers, a measure of excitement entered his dad’s voice. When he explained the deal to Mark, his father claimed it was in everyone’s best interest. Back then Mark hadn’t questioned this. He’d already been dealing drugs and now he was promised protection from the law.

  In another way he felt like his father had opened up to him because of what happened with Lew, had trusted in him. Maybe Trip didn’t have any other choice but the end result was that dealing drugs brought them closer together than anything they’d ever done. Within a month, it became apparent the arrangement was successful beyond what they could have imagined. And a lot more complicated. Lew introduced Mark to a world he didn’t know existed. Instead of handshake deals for gas money, he was selling entire prescriptions for nearly a thousand dollars. His father had to start finding ways to make the profits look legitimate.

  A few times Mark expressed concern over what they were doing, but his dad had a way of making the drug trade seem normal. After all, weren’t prescription drugs safer than illegal drugs? And did Mark know that more people died taking Advil than OxyContin? And didn’t Mark want to help him rebuild the life they’d lost in Ohio? And Mark did, so he continued doing what was asked of him and his father kept treating him more and more like an equal. They started eating dinner together and Trip leased a Mercedes for himself and a yellow Mustang for Mark. He even talked about buying a piece of riverside property where he could build a dream house, the sort of place that could be passed on when the time came. A legacy.

  Mark thought the drug dealing would stop when he left for college, but neither Lew nor his father would let it end. Paying Mark’s tuition became contingent on his enrolling in the pharmacy program. Trip had big visions of opening a drugstore alongside the clinic and making a fortune. Mark came to realize he wasn’t a partner but a pawn.

  His father and Lew both possessed voracious appetites, and in the end, that drove them apart. Lew kept demanding a bigger share of the profit and his father started calling Lew a liability. Mark couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment a switch flipped and his father turned from a desperate man into an evil one but it was around the time he started talking about Lew as if he weren’t a flesh-and-blood person. Lew increased their “exposure”; he was an “encumbrance,” and there was little “residual benefit” to keeping him around. The relationship became, in his father’s words, “untenable.” That was the cloying word that led to murder. Untenable.

  Mark had gone along with it all. Out of fear, mainly. But also because it sounded logical in its way. He too stopped seeing Lew as a person, started viewing him as an obstacle. When he finally came clean and told Mary Jane the full extent of what was going on—because he couldn’t keep it inside any longer—she helped him see the situation as an opportunity. He could demand the sort of money from his father that would allow them to start new lives. Otherwise his option was to stick around Kentucky until his father or Lew screwed him and he ended up in jail.

  Mark’s sneakers squeaked along the library’s marble floor and echoed through the atrium. He passed a handful of students coming down off all-nighters, each of them curled up in a leather armchair, and took the elevator to the fifth floor, where a large skylight let through the watery morning sun. He spread his books on a long table. It was a Monday. Normally he would have popped an Adderall and made precise outlines of the week’s reading. Getting B’s in college had given Mark a greater sense of accomplishment than anything else in life; he’d never felt particularly smart or talented but he’d earned those grades.

  He wanted desperately to travel back in time, erase everything that had happened since he’d first stolen a drug sample and sold it. He wanted his textbooks to offer the same comfortable escape they had for the past year, but the time for magical thinking was over. The sun continued to rise and the atrium filled with a dusty light. Mark stacked his books on the table and left them. A symbolic gesture. His life as a student was over and he needed to come to terms with that.

  * * *

  Harlan ducked out of the office and picked up two boxes of campaign signs he’d printed on the cheap. He figured it was okay to start campaigning now that Lew was buried, okay to at least put the word out. When he dropped the signs off at his house, he found the neighbor girl, Mattie, crouched on his porch steps and picking at a scab.

  “You need some help?” she asked, jumping to her feet as Harlan grabbed a box from the truck bed. She scrambled up onto the Ford, her tattered sneakers knocking rust from the tailgate. “Man, this thing is older than my daddy’s car,” she said, turning her attention to the rust and scratching at it much as she had the scab. Blood ran a thin course down her leg and pooled in a loose, white sock.

  “It’s old,” Harlan admitted and pointed to the second box. Mattie lifted it over the side and onto his shoulder. “What’s your daddy drive?” he asked.

  “Drunk,” she said and Harlan tried not to smile. “Naw, he drives … I don’t know what you’d call it. The body is an El Camino but the engine is from a Ford. Other parts he grabbed out of whatever junked-out beater he could find. It’s a mutt car.” She rushed ahead to the porch and put out her hands to stack the boxes. “I’m taking the driver’s test next month, and I told my dad that if he lets me use his car, I’ll rip off one of those Mercedes hood things and solder it on the front all classy-like.”

  “You think it’s smart to talk about breaking the law in front of the sheriff?”

  “Don’t be rude now,” she said. “I didn’t have to help you carry these.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Mattie put a finger to her mouth and bit it, scrunched up her nose. She had large, open pores, some of which had turned into pimples, and her legs were rubbed red, like she’d shaved with a dull razor. Her clothes were secondhand things, pillowed over her lanky body, but she was sturdy—every inch of her muscle or bone. “You wanna come pick through the ashes of that fire with me?” she asked.

  “I’ve already been there. You won’t find much of value.”

  “It’s just something to do.”

  “Maybe another time.”

  She tapped her fingers on one of the boxes. “What’s in these anyway?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Sounds interesting.” She lifted a necklace with a pocketknife charm from under her shirt, cut open the box, and pulled out one of the signs, reading it aloud. “Harlan Dupee for sheriff,” she said, butchering his last name.

  “It’s ‘Du-pay.’”

  “Oh, Du-pay. Classy. I thought you was already sheriff after that last guy died.”

  “Not for long unless I win the election. You gonna vote for me?”

  “Not old enough. Sorry.”

  “Maybe you can put up signs at the Spanish Manor.”

  “Sure. But dogs’d just piss on them. Or people.” She returned to the scab, picked at the dried blood. She licked two fingers and swirled it in a mess. “You already knew that, though. My daddy told me you was once poor like us, that you wasn’t bigger than your britches ’til recently.”

  “Guess your dad knows everything, huh?”

  “Naw. He’s a puffy bastard. Like how he taught me to work on cars as if it was father-daughter bonding and now he just orders me around. Mattie, fix this, Mattie, fix that.” She pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her pocket. “He don’t pay, so I steal my wages in smokes.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled, and coughed like an amateur.

  “He sounds pretty rough,” Harlan said. “Maybe the sheriff should pay him a visit.”

  Mattie beamed. “Yeah right.” She threw a couple of phantom punches. “Henry would make mincemeat out of you.” A bee buzzed nearby and came to rest along the lip of an Ale-8 bottle to suck syrup. Mattie pointed and said, “He looks just like one of your advertisements.”

  Harlan studied th
e sign she’d pulled out. Some of the ink came off on his fingers. He’d used his full name in all caps across the top—black over a yellow background. HARLAN DUPEE. Most people just knew him as Harlan. Harlan that drives the old truck. Harlan whose daddy drowned in the river. Harlan who lives in that run-down shack. Below his name the words FOR SHERIFF were printed. He was proud of the sign—its simple honesty, the future it portended. “Maybe I should’ve gone with red, white, and blue.”

  “Naw,” Mattie said, “everyone does that. You’re different.” She crouched close to the bee and blew smoke on it.

  “You’re gonna make him angry,” Harlan said.

  “Nuh-uh. This stuns ’em.” She blew another cloud and the bee stumbled along the edge of the bottle, its legs twitching.

  “So that boy from the other night, is he your steady?”

  Mattie straightened up. Her reddish-brown hair was uncombed and she shook it before her face, peering through the tangles while she rubbed the hairs on her wrist. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just making conversation.”

  “I wouldn’t date a chubster like Lard. That’s his name you know. His real name is Lawrence, but people been calling him Lard ever since he was a fat baby. It’s good you showed up. He would have blabbed about it otherwise.”

  “Why’d you have relations with him if you don’t like him?”

  “First off, we were fucking. Second off, it was a transaction. Lard gave me something for my trouble.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something you don’t tell the sheriff about.”

  Harlan sat on the porch steps and patted the space next to him. “How about I promise immunity.”

  “You promise?”

  “Promise.”