by T. Braddy
“You wouldn’t need to quit.”
“That’s right. That’s right. It’s all about that defective gene, man. Got it from my daddy. He was always the one with the inkling to drink. Man came home every day with that unquenchable thirst. First thing he did when he got home from work was pluck a beer from the fridge. Didn’t matter if it was Monday or Sunday; he was going to have a drink. Same thing happened to me over time.”
“Where is your father now?”
“Oh, man, he passed. Some five years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Or maybe it was six. Talk to Robert, the old Johnny-Cash-looking dude over there, and he can tell you all about my daddy.”
“I might do that.”
“They used to work together at the paper plant up in Macon. Both moved down here about the same time. Robert lived right next door to my daddy, and he was the only white man on the block for, like, thirty years. Now that neighborhood’s all white people again, and we black folks’ve moved farther out.”
“Gentrification.”
“Whatever. All’s I know is, they got me – hey, Rolson?”
Bernie’s voice was strange.
“Yeah?”
“You know that dude over there? Don’t look – hold up. Keep pretending like we talking about something else. I’ma check this guy out for another second.”
I waited, the hair on my neck perking up and making me want to flee.
“He steady staring at you, man. You want me to go ask him what his problem is?”
“No,” I said.
“Don’t look yet. He’s still got the hinky eye fixed on you. Wait a second. Wait. Okay, look real quick.”
I shifted my weight and glanced, once.
“I know him,” I said. “He’s an acquaintance of mine.”
Bernie cleared his throat. “Dude’s got the wrong building. He needs a treatment facility, the way he’s sweating. I don’t think he’s in for the program just yet.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’ll understand his addiction ‘til it’s got him full of embalming fluid. Hold on, Bern. I’ll be right back.”
I went over and leaned against the wall, waiting for the new arrival to speak. Dead-eyeing him, hands clenched into fists.
“Rolson,” he said, “I figured this was as good a place as any to be able to speak to you privately.”
He was a mess to behold. He looked like a sweaty vampire. Dark circles under the eyes. Skin pale and waxy. Clothes soaked through. “How did you find me, Richie?”
“You’re not exactly in WITSEC, big guy,” he said, smiling. Already trying to run his game on me, use his personality to get in my good graces. “You go running around town, getting shot at, threatening known drug kingpins. Is that the kind of shit you pulled back in Pine City or whatever, or are you just looking to make some new and improved enemies?”
“Whatever I need to do,” I said. “You come here for something, or do I need to remind you that I’m going to drag you outside and kick the shit out of you for what you did to Jess?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “Jess? What did I do to Jess?”
I opened my mouth to respond but quickly shut it. “Let’s go outside. The locals are starting to stare.”
His smile practically crackled with oblivion. “They can sense I’m high as shit.”
We went around to the side of the church, and he sparked a J as we walked.
“I never been to a meeting wasn’t court mandated,” he said, inhaling. “They seem nice up in there.”
“They are,” I responded. “What do you want?”
“I got no beef with you. You got some beef with me, man? You think I did something to Jess? That what she tell you?”
I watched the smoke Richie exhaled spiral out and disappear into the air. “She got the back end of somebody’s palm, for sure. Said it was you.”
“Man, that crazy little– listen. Jess is good people. Otherwise, I wouldn’t let her at my parties. But she’s no angel. She’s got issues, dude. A slight distaste for the truth.”
“So you’re denying that you hit her?”
He took another hit, the resulting scent skunky and dank in the air. His eyes focused in on me, the hit off the weed giving him a sharpness he hadn’t possessed before. “I’m not saying I never hit her. Me and her, we used to go out.”
“I think she might have mentioned that.”
He exhaled, flicked the tip of the joint. “I know I look fucked up – you should have seen me years ago. I was redlining my engine, looking for a brick wall. Any brick wall.”
“You ever find it?”
“I’m still upright and breathing.”
“Point taken.”
He shook his head. His thoughts had drifted. “Man, that bums me out about Jess.”
“I’m telling you, man,” he continued, “I didn’t lay a hand on Jess. Last time I did that was better part of two years ago. Maybe three. Yeah, maybe three or so.”
“How come you couldn’t stay clean?”
For the first time tonight, he looked serious. “How come you can?”
I thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Precisely.”
In my mind, it seems I’d made the decision to go sober long before I did it. “I think I was sober for a while before I quit drinking,” I said. “I was just procrastinating.”
He laughed. “I like that. Maybe that’s what I’m doing: procrastinating. Waiting for the right time to get sober.”
“You’ve been sober in the past. Allison took me to your house because she thought you would be a good influence.”
“I was sober. Had been for a while. I thought I had gotten sober for good. For the longest time, it actually seemed like I had cured my addiction. Didn’t even think about being tempted by the people who were using in the bathrooms or the driveway. I thought I was invincible.”
He was hiding something there, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
“You can’t see sobriety from fifty thousand feet. It’s a day by day sort of existence.”
He smiled, wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. “They fucking got you all Jonestown up in here, don’t they? Real Kool-Aid fest, yeah.”
“Nothing but the truth,” I said. “I’m making a constant decision not to get fucked up.”
“Arguing about that shit ain’t what I come here for.”
“Then what?”
“I got you in.”
“What do you mean?”
He burped. “I think I had some bad – you ever done any bad speed?”
“Nope.”
“No speed? Not even the good shit? No coke, nothing like that?”
“Not really.”
He tilted his head back to look up at the AA sign. “Then what the fuck are you doing here? I thought this shit was for hardcore addicts?”
“Guess it’s just the booze, and the first A stands for alcoholics.”
“Oh. I just – man, my heart is doing dizzy-bat spins in my chest. I think – yeah, this is not some high quality shit here. Whoa.”
I crossed my arms. “Why don’t you tell me what you came here for?”
“Oh, right.” He snorted and hawked up a wet one. Spat it on the concrete at my feet. “You want an audience with somebody used to know Van. I got that.”
“What?”
“Signed. Sealed. Delivered. All’s you got to do is show up, and you can talk to the man, for whatever reason. He’s scary as fuck, and double crazy, but it seems like you’ve got your darkness to be chasing down, so far be it from me to stop you.”
“What do you get out of this?”
He put on that smile again. “Me? No. Nope. I’ve got to keep greasing the skids, and who knows – you might someday be able to give me something.”
“Quid pro quo.”
“I guess. Fuck, whatever that means.”
“You turn out to be a scumbag, and I’ll put you in a bad place.”
/>
“You still think I pulled a Mayweather on my old girl.” His smile became a leer. “That’ll make this whole enterprise worth seeing through.”
“For you.”
“That’s the thing about me – I do what I can to make life better for me. See you in a couple days. I’ll make the call. You just hang on until I get the word from the big guy.”
Satisfied with himself, he turned and stumbled in the opposite direction. Seemed sheer will had kept him in place long enough to talk with me.
He had the look of a kid putting on tough. Wearing it like a jacket, like he needed the comfort of a disguise to keep going. But he didn’t strike me as particularly evil, underhanded, or abusive. But I suppose that’s how they perpetuate themselves, by being nondescript in situations like this one. I needed to talk with Jess, get the truth somewhere toward the leveling line, and right now it was highly askew.
The meeting had persevered without me, and it was enlightening coming in late.
Del was leaning on the lectern, mid-story: “...And I found myself in a position where I was drinking before breakfast, on my lunch breaks. Hell, I was under so much pressure, I needed something to take the bite out of my day-to-day. Used to nip vodka from a flask and then gargle with Listerine. Sometimes, I drank that, too. Things got much darker after that, especially when Diane left me.”
Sometimes you just switch the names and events around, and it’s the exact same story. I could have been Del, and could have very well been me. It’s the little details. Love and death. Sex. Shit like that. Del and I had more in common than we didn’t.
But that didn’t erase what I felt coming, and that chasm could never be bridged. It was like my subconscious felt a storm coming and could do nothing but watch the clouds approach.
I leaned back in my chair, stretched my arms out on both sides, and waited for the sounds of thunder.
* * *
I called Jess that night, just after the meeting. She didn’t answer. I left no messages but made a few repeat calls to her, just to be sure. Nope. Nothing. I texted Richie, asking for her number, but he never texted me back. He had descended into his own world of Ralph Steadman drawings. It’d probably be days before he emerged from the tar pits of his own making.
Time became a weird, inverted mess of a way to measure existence – especially since I was waiting for contact from Richie – but somewhere in there, I got a phone call from Allison. The last time I had seen her was the night I’d met Jess out at Richie’s place. She’d fled like her ass had been on fire when she heard me talk about Vanessa.
When I picked up the phone, after viewing her name on my screen, I said, “I thought maybe I’d scared you off.”
“I’ve got to be honest: I did get pissed about you pining over your ex.”
“Kind of figured as much.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“You’ve got the megaphone. Shoot.”
“No, I mean, like, in person.”
“Anytime.”
We agreed to meet for a walk on the beach. Nothing romantic, I figured – just an interesting place to talk. The water was surprisingly calm, the waves reaching further onto the shore with each pass inland.
“It’s funny,” she said, “that when you live in a beach, you rarely go to the beach.”
“I came a lot the first few weeks,” I replied. “Kept my mind from wandering off into the weeds of all my bad decisions.”
“Wears off, though. You get used to it, or I guess you start caring about the elements of your life that had importance before you got near the ocean. Life, work, kids.” She paused. “Ex-wives and addictions.”
“Fair enough. I’ve got some baggage you might not have seen me carrying around.”
“It doesn’t matter. Okay. Sure. Everybody’s got baggage. Like I said, I didn’t expect it to be thrown out in front of me that way. It’s all right you were married. It’s all right you saw Jess after me.”
She savored my reaction, then continued. “Oh, come on. You don’t think I know things? I’ve got knowledge, and plus, it’s just kind of the way things go. We’re not an item. You’re thoughtful and good-looking, but we don’t have something to curate. My personal desires are not a museum of some kind.”
“That’s something I didn’t expect to hear in this conversation.”
“You want me to scream at you, be pissed off? I can do that. I’ve got reserves, dating all the way back to childhood.”
“No, I just– this is not my area of expertise.”
She picked up a shell. A half-broken little thing. “Christ, is it for anybody?”
“It’s been mostly a lone ship at sea for me. Lots of waves. Lots of rocks and things. My own personal Scylla and Charybdis.”
She inspected the shell. It was a false angel wing, a keeper if it weren’t chipped and split in two. She tossed it into the oncoming tide. “Everything here is fucking broken.”
“I’m still looking into my ex-wife,” I said.
She sighed. “Figured.”
“I’m not obsessed, or carrying a torch–”
“Not that most people who are carrying a torch ever notice the light above their shoulder.”
“But– I get that. But I need to know. There’s a whole side to Vanessa that, I mean, was completely hidden for me.”
“I understand. No, I do.”
“Her life is done. She’s dead and buried. The only aspects of her that I can ever recover come from these small pockets of the gray mist that is her time here.”
We walked in silence for some time. I listened to the waves: flowing in, flowing out. Dismantling the remnants of a child’s castle from the previous day.
“Do we try to make something of this?” I asked.
“Won’t Jess think something of that?”
“I’m not sure what I think of Jess, at the moment.”
She laughed. “Story of her life.”
“Huh. Have you heard of a man named–”
“Bellerose. Yeah. And I don’t plan on spending our time talking about a deadbeat, murderous-ass thug, either.”
“There was a pause in the discussion about my dead wife, so I figured...”
“Fair enough,” she replied, though not without a pause. “Yes, I know him. Know of him.”
“But you haven’t been in contact with him.”
“Just through Richie.”
“What has Richie said about him?”
“He’s scared of him. Would do anything to make the guy and his goons happy.”
That made me pause. I had been in traps like this before, and I wondered if I were stepping into another one. Was Richie going to use me to get in some kind of favor with Bellerose?
“Huh,” I said.
“I used to be an addict, but I don’t mess around with...all of that.”
“Probably smart. So you’ve never met Bellerose.”
“No. Hear his name a lot. There are stories.”
“Like what?”
“He’s sadistic. I mean, how many benevolent drug kingpins have you heard of? Well, ‘kingpin’ might be a strong word, but he’s not like Richie. He’s not just dealing skag and stomped-up coke. He’s bigger time than that.”
“How is he sadistic?”
“He takes souvenirs. Likes to hack people up. When they don’t pay, or they piss him off. You sure this is where you want to take this conversation?”
“It was a passing thought.”
“Okay. Oh, wait. One more thing.”
“All right. I’ll go silent with the questions after that.”
“He likes bum fights, things like that. I’ve heard he will take homeless people and pit them against one of his ’roided out douche bags. Have them fight to the death; only, one of them is bare-knuckled, and it ain’t the douche bag.”
“Christ.”
“Forces people to copulate with farm animals. Feeds pieces of them to alligators while they’re still alive. Heard he eats some of them himself. Dude’s as evi
l as they come, so whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t. That’s all the advice I have to give you.”
And still I felt the tug of my own curiosity.
“Fucked up,” I said. “Everything about that guy seems completely wrong.”
“Right.”
“We never got to why you wanted to come out here in the first place.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I think I’ve said some of it.”
“You wanted to talk to me about a partway mobster?”
“I wanted to warn you to be careful. I’d heard about you and the shooting–”
“Attempted.”
She smirked sardonically. “Right. Anyway, I knew about Jess and the other stuff, so I reconsidered shutting you out.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t think you could survive in this town on your own, not with the way you started things. Getting shot at is a bad introduction to Savannah. Do you know who did that, anyway?”
“I have an idea.” I just didn’t know with any certainty.
“Bellerose? You think Bellerose did it?”
I said, “No, but I’m going to figure it out.” The dude who had shown up at my house had not been this guy, Bellerose, but he could have been the friend, the accomplice. I hadn’t managed to get a good luck at the buddy, so maybe he was the sacrificial lamb and didn’t know it.
“Does it have to do with Vanessa?”
“Bingo.”
“No wonder you want to dig into her past here.”
I nodded. I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t only for that reason, and she probably wasn’t in a place to hear all of the other ones.
She said, “Well, it seems like you’ve got a lot going on at the moment, so.”
I took her hand, clasped it. At first, I felt a resistance, but she soon relaxed her grip.
“You sure you’re into this? I can be a fuck-ton more crazy than I am now.”
I nodded.
“Well, I suppose I should tell you my life story now. Subject you to the same gut-wrenching backlog of my ex-lovers that you forced me to endure.”
“It was just the one.”
“Two, now.”
Jess.
“She’s–”
“In a real bad place right now,” Allison said, taking my meaning. “She used to be sober – she and Richie both – but they’ve both fallen off the wagon in a real sad way. Richie’s place is going to become something of a hazard over the next few weeks and months.”