Burning Meredith

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘But see, that’s just what I know I can’t do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m the new kid. Mort knows, they all know, that I can write well and I learn fast. But if I try to correct anybody else’s copy, they’ll fight me for every misplaced modifier.’

  ‘Stuart, training staff is just part of management.’

  ‘Which doesn’t mean I’m ready to do it. Mort pulls some of the biggest howlers himself, and you know I can’t manage him.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Correct the errors. Make the language precise.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fix everybody’s bad grammar and spelling. Put the commas where they belong.’

  ‘You’re saying edit the paper.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Didn’t you just tell me you got hired to do that?’

  ‘Not exactly. Mort didn’t go to journalism school himself, did he?’

  ‘No. When he finished high school, he went straight to work on his father’s paper.’

  ‘See? He skipped the studying himself and he’s convinced he’s never needed it. The whole newsroom’s like that – they never miss a chance to make fun of my degree.’

  ‘So why do you think they’ll take criticism from me?’

  ‘You taught eighth-grade English to every single person working at that paper, except Mort. They’re not going to argue with the English teacher.’

  ‘The staff maybe. What about Mort?’

  Stuart looked smug. ‘I already negotiated that.’

  ‘You did? How?’

  ‘I told him we were both going to be too busy to do any fact-checking and if he didn’t want to get sued I thought I could find a great editor pretty cheap. He loves the word cheap and he just dodged a lawsuit, so that argument worked.’ He gave her the up-against-the-wall look again. ‘I’m sure you could do it in a couple of mornings a week. And I’m sorry I can’t pay you much to start. I tried, but you know how Mort is …’

  ‘I knew how Mort was before you were born. Stop babbling and let me think.’ She leaned on her pitchfork and stared at the hollyhocks.

  I don’t have to tell my bridge club how pitiful the pay is. It’ll help Stuart and it won’t take up much time – I can still play mah-jong.

  She tamped down the mulch around the last of the rosebushes and said, ‘If I take it, do I have to start calling you Mr Campbell?’

  ‘It’s a piece of cake,’ Alice told her sister, when she’d been editing the Guardian for a couple of weeks.

  ‘You mean it? Mort’s resigned to having you there, fixing his sentences?’

  ‘In his fashion. He calls me “Teach” and makes little jokes so everybody will know he’s just humoring the old fuss-budget.’

  ‘You’re good to do it, Alice.’

  ‘You want to know my dirty little secret? I’m having fun.’

  It was gratifying, seeing the little weekly begin to show some style. Mort got a little testy when she corrected his double negatives, but Alice knew how much he hated picky details, so she offered to collect the church notices. After a couple of weeks in which he never had to type ‘covered dish’ or ‘bingo,’ he was all but eating out of her hand.

  ‘It’s not a heavy load,’ she told Betsy. ‘As you well know, Clark’s Fort doesn’t generate much news.’

  ‘For sure. My street gets so quiet on August afternoons, I swear I can hear the bluebirds planning their trip south.’

  ‘Well, I enjoyed raising my children in a crime-free environment, but now that they’re grown and I’m in the news business, I kind of yearn for a crisis.’

  ‘Alice, be careful what you wish for.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you know I’m not serious. But after a few weeks of fixing the commas in those city council meeting reports, you can’t help dreaming about just one page of heart-stopping prose.’

  After the forest fire started, she never said that again.

  FOUR

  Soon after the first Oxy experiment, Crow-Bait brought some Percocet pills to the Games.

  ‘I found them in a drawer in the folks’ bathroom,’ he said. ‘They must be left from two years ago when my mother sprained her ankle.’

  ‘Won’t she miss them?’ Naughtie said.

  ‘Nah. I’m sure she’s forgotten all about them. If she hurt herself again she’d get a new prescription; she’d never think of using old pills. Whaddya say, shall we give ’em a test drive?’

  ‘Sure,’ Undie said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Let’s mash ’em up and go to heaven.’

  Everybody laughed. They all thought it was great how fast Undie had got with the program. They were content if they could rustle up the cash for a couple of beers and a joint, but Undie came to the loft now with that tricky smile on his face that said he was hoping for an extra treat.

  He brought cash for his treat. Thinking up the elaborate lies that got him out of the house on Saturday seemed to take all his energy. He arrived at the barn breathless and disheveled, and looked around nervously till he got inside and up the ladder. They could all see how much he dreaded getting caught.

  This week, it had helped a little that everybody in town was distracted by the news of a dead body that had been found on the mountain. Undie never asked questions about his father’s job as a sheriff’s deputy but he was an avid eavesdropper, and he told the group, ‘I heard my dad say it’s burned beyond recognition.’ He was pleased to see it send a shiver of dread through the group in the barn – it was the first chance he’d had to get a little recognition.

  He had not confided to anyone in the group that since he joined the Gamers he was bedeviled by the recurrence of a nightmare from his early childhood. In the dream, he found himself and all his family standing naked, in early morning light, in the middle of the street in front of their house. He had no idea why they were out there, but their neighbors, one by one, came out of their houses and stood on their porches or front sidewalks, pointing at them and laughing.

  Undie’s family were all quiet, undemonstrative people who did their best to blend in but never quite did. At least, Undie never felt blended. He couldn’t explain that, either – why did he always have the feeling they were not quite good enough? Their embarrassment during the dream was so intense that they couldn’t look at each other.

  In his sleep, he would feel the dream beginning and try to stop it, but never could. He blamed himself, and the guilty fun he was having at the Saturday games, for the return of the dream. His days had become an agony of conflicting desires. He wanted the stress from the nightmare to stop but could not consider giving up his Saturdays with the gang.

  The medication Crow-Bait had found was in capsule form, so they couldn’t crush it. They had to take each capsule apart carefully and spill the contents into a dish. The process was laborious – Naughtie couldn’t pry the two halves apart with the steak knife he’d brought up from the kitchen. The knife was serrated, though, and he found that with care he could saw right through the shell and spill the contents into the dish. It was slow, and they took turns trying to speed it up.

  They each had a couple of beers and a few pulls on a joint while they worked, so the process got less exact as it went along. There was some blood on the cutting board they were using by the time they were done, and only a small heap of product in the dish.

  ‘Be careful, now, don’t spill it,’ Crow-Bait cautioned. ‘There’s barely enough for one short snort each.’

  A short snort proved to be plenty, though – they all got dizzy and disoriented right away. Two of them got sick, Snootie the worst – he erupted explosively into the hay and was still too dizzy to drive when it came time to leave. They hid his car behind the barn where Tammy wouldn’t see it, and Crow-Bait gave him a ride home. To explain their peaky expressions and blurred speech, they agreed on a story about some leftover chili that Mrs Cronin said must have been out too long before she froze it. Nobody got grounded but two of the guys never came to back to the Games.<
br />
  ‘It made me almost too numb to smoke my pot,’ Undie said, when they got together under the stairs at school on Monday. They enjoyed a brief snort of derisive laughter over that, but then agreed they needed to get organized and find a product they could rely on.

  ‘Fun’s fun, but I don’t want to die,’ Snootie said, shrugging.

  ‘Right,’ Naughtie said, ‘and my horses might get pretty sick of finding your puke in the hay.’ They all broke up laughing then and got dirty looks from the hall monitor.

  The Gamers were not usually newspaper readers, but one of their number had pointed out a report on the front page of the Guardian this week, about the overdose death of a football player in a nearby town. They had all begun to hate those stories. Parents began to fix you in that level-eyed stare that meant they were trying to phrase The Question. Then you’d better be ready with the open-eyed, Credible Denial.

  They felt boxed from both sides. It was hard as hell to find a way to try any of the interesting drugs. And at the same time, you had to try to remember the mindset that allowed you to claim, with a straight face, that you’d never even considered wanting a sniff of the stuff.

  They nosed around, trying to be discreet. Hydrocodone was a dandy little trip, Naughtie heard, but hard to get prescribed because it could stop your breathing. Talking about prescriptions lofted Crow-Bait straight into search mode. He loved his laptop and spent hours tapping on it every day, mostly playing games that he called research so his mother wouldn’t worry that they kept him from his homework.

  Now, though, he worked seriously, following a trail of rumors about pliable physicians who’d write prescriptions for a little kick-back. But Snootie’s brother, the orderly, told him to forget about that.

  ‘In big cities maybe,’ he said, ‘but you’re not going to find one here. It’s too risky in small towns.’

  Anyway, the big hassle was the money. They talked about that a lot as their desire for drugs increased. You could take on a second job, something you didn’t tell your mate or parents about. But the pay for most part-time jobs was so low, and being prompt at a job you didn’t admit to having was going to be hard.

  Then Naughtie met a man at the smoke shop named Kurtz, who told him about heroin. It came in white or brown powder, Kurtz said, and you could control the dosage yourself by mixing the powder you bought with other powder.

  ‘That’s called stepping on it,’ Naughtie told the group, ‘and if you’ve got an honest dealer like this Kurtz, he’ll sell you the pure stuff. You can step on it enough so you can sell half and still have enough for the next two Game Days, or if you don’t sell any you could have four Game Days.’

  Being ahead of the Games for four Saturdays sounded like a major dream come true to Crow-Bait.

  ‘Yeah, but you shoot it through a needle,’ Undie said. ‘I don’t want any part of that. I want to stick to pills.’

  ‘Kurtz says if you don’t like needles you can smoke it or snort it,’ Naughtie said. ‘And the thing is he’s got a couple of friends who are users like him and they’ve been looking for a place to shoot up in peace and quiet. So if I let him use my loft, he says his price for heroin is already very fair, but for an introductory offer he’ll fix us up for five bucks apiece and show us how to use it. So we can try it out using our method of choice, that’s how he said it. Doesn’t that sound good?’

  The many layers of bureaucracy involved in opioid pills had begun to baffle and annoy them all. They liked the idea of getting started with the heroin market, where everyone you dealt with could be counted on to be breaking the law.

  That way, Undie said, there was less danger of somebody pulling a gotcha. And, like Naughtie said, if he didn’t like needles he could smoke it, just like they did with Mary Jane. Undie was not a good student in school, but out here in the real world he was learning fast.

  Kurtz told Naughtie he thought the nicknames they used for Game Day were ‘just a whole bunch of fun. You lads all travelling in-cog-nee-to, is that it?’

  Naughtie looked at him blankly but he rattled right along.

  ‘My friends are gonna like that too. Let’s see …’ He tapped his fingers for a few seconds, smiling brightly, before he said, ‘There are three of us, so why don’t we be Winkin, Blinkin and Nod?’ He laughed and clapped his hands. ‘How’s that for grins? One o’clock, did you say?’

  Kurtz was a very large black man with a jolly presence. He wore loose exercise clothing made of artificial fabric in vibrant colors, with labels that said they were made in China or Bangladesh and should not be left too close to the heat. Kurtz was a little different, Naughtie told the Gamers. ‘But not scary. Just … kind of unusual. He wants to be Winkin up here, so call him that, OK?’

  Winkin came right on time on Saturday, and was just as Naughtie had described him: huge but not scary, just … urgent, somehow, like it mattered a lot to him to get you settled into his clientele. In spite of his clothes, he reminded Undie of the maître d’ that you see in old movies at some grand hotel, always smiling, making welcoming gestures, like it’s his job to make everybody happy.

  ‘Blinkin couldn’t make it today,’ he said as he got out of the car. ‘Poor baby. He had to go fight a forest fire. Kind of a nice break for us, though – everybody up on some mountain fighting a fire, or in town talking about that toasted body. So nobody’s watching out here while we enjoy ourselves, hmmm? And Nod’s here.’ He turned as the other man got out of the car, and said, ‘Hey, Noddy-Boy, you haven’t forgotten how to climb a ladder, have you?’

  Nod was about as different from Winkin as it was possible to be. Definitely not excitable – he didn’t seem to give a shit about making anybody happy. He was contained, the way a pressure cooker is contained when it’s working. He had the compact build of a fighter or a soccer player – the balanced stance and clever, blunt-fingered hands. No question he’d be able to climb the ladder, they all thought, watching him stand and move. Someone you wouldn’t want to mess with wherever you met him. His clothes were the same nondescript jeans-and-jacket combo everybody wore in cool weather, but they looked better on him because they fit easily and hung well.

  Unlike Winkin, he was grave and almost entirely silent. And when he did talk, there was some disruption – not a stammer exactly, but a tiny silence after certain words, followed often by a shrug and then a small, scornful laugh, as if you were not meant to take what he had just said too seriously.

  Or you hoped that’s what it meant. There was something slightly ominous about Nod.

  But Winkin was there to see that everybody got all comfy, as he said. As soon as all the Gamers had handed over their five-dollar bills, he and Nod opened some boxes and went to work.

  Undie still didn’t want anything to do with needles, and the new kid named Rafferty, that they all called Drafty, said he felt the same way. So Winkin did the number with the water glass this time, crushed up some white stuff till it had the texture of talcum powder, and laid it out in two lines for them.

  Drafty made kind of a mess with his portion. He got a little up his nose and went into a sneezing fit, bouncing around the hay bales. For a minute, it looked like there might be some very happy horses at the next feeding but not much bliss left for the buyer. But Drafty was raised by frugal parents who constantly preached that he must always get full value for every dollar spent, so he pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger, managed to climb down the ladder one-handed and got outside, where he ran around jerking on his nose to keep from sneezing. Finally he got himself stopped, leaned against the outside of the barn for a few minutes and came back up.

  ‘And when I got back in the loft and saw how happy Naughtie looked,’ he said later, ‘right away I was, like, motivated. Gotta learn how to snort that stuff, I said to myself.’ He made a dismissive motion with his right hand. ‘It ain’t hard. It just takes concentration.’ Drafty was always very serious when he talked about getting started as a Gamer.

  Undie, true to his new form, followed i
nstructions precisely and had no trouble. Winkin actually sold him a small dose of heroin mixed with rice flour and baking soda, but Undie couldn’t tell the difference, so it all slid along his nasal passages like the Lord’s own well-known remedy for needy noses. And since he was a novice, the small dose was plenty to take him to the happy place and keep him there until Naughtie nudged him and said it was time to go.

  The rest of the Gamers got their trip from a needle, coached and aided by Nod. ‘And I gotta tell you,’ Naughtie said under the stairs at school on Monday, ‘that’s the quietest I’ve ever been while I was having fun.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Crow-Bait said, ‘what is it with that guy? He makes you feel like the stupidest thing you could possibly do is talk.’

  ‘And laughing would be even worse. He sure is a change of pace after Winkin, huh?’ Naughtie said. ‘I felt like if I made any sudden moves he might break my face.’

  ‘He really knows how to handle the H, though, doesn’t he?’ Undie said. H was heroin. Learning the cool expressions for things was part of the fun of this new life. When you didn’t call the drug by its proper name, you called it product. In a way that was even cooler – sort of put the substance in its place, showed it who was boss. You needed to do that right from the start, because you couldn’t help being a little concerned about this new yearning you were teaching your brain to feel. The other days of the week were just placeholders now, holding the week together till it could get back to being Saturday, when you could visit H’s enchanted land.

  The dealers were not troubled about anything as sappy as yearning, Undie thought – they were the very essence of cool. As soon as all the Gamers were set up and started on their trips the next Saturday, Winkin said softly, ‘Now we’re ready for a little of that joy juice ourselves, right?’ and Undie thought he actually did wink once – at Nod, not at any of the Gamers.

  The dealers each picked a spot next to a bale of hay, a little apart from the Gamers, and got, as Winkin would say, comfy. Winkin was a two-bale man; he need space to get comfy in and did some groaning and wriggling while he found the exact right posture in the hay. He used his gear as matter-of-factly as kitchen utensils, and doled out product like it was flour and salt. A good advertisement for the product, Winkin demonstrably got all the pleasure it was supposed to deliver.