by Nico Walker
“Realistically there’s nothing.”
“You’re going to let him get away with that shit?”
“Yeah pretty much.”
“Those guys don’t respect you.”
“No, I don’t imagine they do. Still you’d think just on principles of human decency he’d have had better manners than that.”
“You should fucking kill that motherfucker.”
“Eh.”
I had a theory. My theory was that I was a piece of shit and deserved it when bad things happened to me.
Was I bitter?
A little, of course.
But a loss was a loss. You didn’t ever get it back. Even if you recouped the money, the injury was still done. What was best was to write it off. So long as you didn’t give a fuck you had them beat. Only a thirsty no-account fucking loser would resort to such tricks as selling a half ounce of instant mashed potatoes. So why countenance it. Countenancing it wasn’t about to put dope in our veins. Morning would come soon. On its heels would ride the sickness. Moves had to be made. It was almost midnight.
I called Black. No answer.
I called Pistol. He picked up.
“Sorry to be calling so late,” I said, “but if you could come through I’d take four right now for your trouble.”
He said he couldn’t do it. “It’s been dead out here all day.”
“Shit. Well hit me up whenever you get things together tomorrow. I’ll take four for sure.”
“Alright.”
Rider’s phone went straight to voice mail.
Nobody got on again until Tuesday and we were sick sick sick.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Raul had said he was going to give me back some of the money he’d ripped me off for. He was going to pay me back in heroin. Which was fine because if he gave me cash I’d have just spent it on heroin anyway. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
It was night. He called and said his kid was in the hospital and he was going to be running a little late. And he was either on the way to or from the hospital when he was pulled over. He called me again. It was hard to hear him. “I’m about to get arrested,” he said. “They’re searching my car right now. Go to my mom’s house and tell her I got locked up.”
The line went dead. I put my coat on and left. I was at Raul’s mom’s house ten minutes later. I knocked on the side door. Nobody answered so I kept knocking. Eventually she opened the door.
I said, “Sorry to bother you, ma’am. But Raul called me a few minutes ago and said he was getting arrested. He asked me to come and tell you.”
“…Okay.”
“When I talked to him he said the police were searching his car and they were going to find some heroin.”
“Okay.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
She closed the door lightly and then locked it. Pistol pulled into the driveway. I walked up to his car. He opened the driver door.
“What are you doing here?”
I told him what happened to Raul.
Pistol didn’t say anything.
I said, “Do you have one you could spot me until tomorrow? I left in a hurry and I didn’t bring any money with me. I’ll definitely have you tomorrow though.”
He didn’t say anything.
He weighed out a gram.
I said thanks and I walked to the curb where I was parked and I got in my car and drove away. I thought about my theory again. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I was a real asshole. I’d been at those people’s house trying to act like I was worried about Raul when the truth was I couldn’t give so much of a fuck about a guy who wouldn’t have pissed on me if I were on fire. And they knew that. I thought, Was I just being polite? And the answer was no, I was just being full of shit. What a fucking ghoul I was. And then I didn’t know what their fucking problem was either, how they’d both acted like it was my fault. And that’s how it is. The very same who bleed you dry and fuck you are as bitter toward you as if you were getting over on them. And they’re half-right, and they’re half-wrong. This is what we do to each other.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Rider said he knew a bank in Bath, Ohio, that would be perfect to rob. This was more of Rider’s bullshit. Like I’d forget he wanted me to kill a guy in Bath for him. He really thought we were going to drive out to Bath and I’d say, Okay, Rider, where’s the bank? and he’d say, Change of plans, we’re gonna go murder this nigga instead.
Rider was a piece of shit like that.
I told Rider he could drive if he wanted but I was going to rob a bank downtown. I went to pick him up in the morning. He was with Pistol. Pistol had brought a pistol for me, and he spotted me two grams of heroin. I said I’d bring him some money in the afternoon.
It was a school day and Emily was over at the school and I wanted to make sure she got her share of the heroin in case I went to jail. So we stopped there first. She came out of the main classroom building and met us in the parking lot across the street. I asked Rider to let her have the front seat, and he did.
“Is it good?” she asked.
“I haven’t done any yet,” I said. “Pistol calls it Gunsmoke.”
“Gunsmoke?”
“That’s what he calls it.”
Emily and I shot up. The heroin was tremendous. It was black in the syringe. “Well,” I said. “That’s…really…fuckin nice. He must have made a mistake.”
“Mmm…” Emily sighed. “This is some good shit.”
I lit a cigarette and said I should be going. “I’ll pick you up tonight.”
“Okay,” she said. “Be careful.”
“I will, my love. Have a good afternoon.”
Rider said we were the coolest white people he had ever met. Emily went back to school, and Rider asked to borrow my phone real quick. I gave my phone to him. Somebody picked up and Rider said, “Hello…Yeah. Right now. Yeah, I’m about to do it right now.”
He was trying to sound like he was fine with it, even happy about it, but you could tell he was scared as shit. When he got done with the phone I asked him if he was sure he was good and he said he was. I dug around in the backseat looking for something to wear. Rider got in the driver seat. I lit another cigarette and told him I was ready. I had put on some Adidas track pants and a black fleece jacket and a balaclava.
He said, “You look mentally ill.”
I said, “I am. Let’s go.”
The bank was only a few blocks west. We parked across the street out front and down a ways, facing east. “Keep the doors unlocked,” I said. “I’ll be back in less than two minutes.”
I crossed the street. The pistol was in my waistband and neither of the two pairs of pants I was wearing was having an easy time staying up. So I only had one free hand. I went into the bank and moved to the counter. The bank was empty except for one teller—a woman—and two men—the manager and a client. I ignored the two men. They ignored me. They were talking business. I gave the note to the teller. She tossed some ones banded to a fifty onto the counter. I looked at her. She had a fat face and she glared at me with little red pig eyes. Her name tag said Sheina. I said, “Sheina, don’t be ridiculous. You’re better than that.”
She cleared out the cash drawers and I was feeling an ocean of sympathy for her. There were oceans inside of me. It wasn’t her fault she had little pig eyes. I knew that. You get the eyes you get. You don’t have any say in it.
We were on the freeway, and Rider wanted to see the money. I started going through it and counting the bands and fanning out the loose bills and handing him half as I went along. He kept saying, “Gimme more. Gimme more. Gimme more.”
There was a lot of traffic. We were as good as gone. Things were going well. Then Rider changed into the exit lane.
But he wasn’t hearing me.
“Stay on the freeway, Rider. What the fuck are you doing, man? Don’t get off here.”
He ignored me.
“Stay on the fucking freeway, man.”
He got off the freeway. Three exits down from where we had got on. And there was a police car rolling up at the bottom of the ramp. Rider started screaming: “OH, FUCK. OH, FUCK. NNNO. NNNO.”
I said, “Goddamn stay cool, man. Just go slow. We have nothing to hide. We’re just minding our own business. He won’t chase us if we don’t run on him. Look. We’re cool. He’s just sitting there. We’re cool. Just go slow. Don’t run on him.”
The police car stood still. Rider was hyperventilating. We drove through the intersection. Then he veered onto a residential street that ran off of Superior. Three quarters of the way down he threw the car into park.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Rider’s eyes were coming out of his head. He started screaming again: “NO. NNNO. NNNO. FUCK THIS. I’M GONE. I’M GONE.”
He got out of the car and walked away. I thought he had acted strangely. I didn’t see what his fucking problem was.
I thought the best thing to do would be to get back on the freeway. So I did. I rode 90 east to 271. I smoked Pall Malls and set fire to the little bands from the money and dropped them in the ashtray. It was an okay time. The Gunsmoke still had me good. I wasn’t worried about anything.
I got off the freeway at Chagrin and I got some burgers at the Wendy’s there and I went home and took Livinia out and fed her. I called Pistol and said I had his money together. He told me to go ahead and come around.
“Do you have three and a half I could get?”
He said no problem.
When I met up with him I didn’t say anything about Rider being a pussy. I didn’t want to embarrass Rider. Plus I thought he might shoot me if I told anybody about how he’d acted. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d want people to know. I paid Pistol the money I owed him for the three and a half grams and gave him the clothes I’d worn during the robbery and asked him to get rid of them for me. I gave him back the pistol. I gave him $500 for his trouble.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
I’d get sad as fuck when I thought about Emily and how I wasn’t going to be there for her because I was going to jail soon. I wondered what would happen to her and what she would do. And we were sad when she found the abscess in her arm. Her forearms were swollen. There was all this shit in her right arm. She was pushing it out and she said, Look. It was like dirt. We cleaned it out and treated it with alcohol many times and the abscess got better but she was frightened and ashamed and it was terrible.
I thought, My poor angel.
I don’t know. I could have still not gone to jail. It was mid-March and I had robbed something like seven or eight or nine banks and hadn’t yet been arrested.
I don’t think anybody cared. The police, I mean. This was just kid stuff, what I was doing. All it took was that you realized there was nothing stopping you and then you wet your beak.
Still you knew the police were fucking dangerous.
I think maybe I was about to give up.
* * *
—
RIDER SAID, “The nigga’s some shit. My dude’s baby’s mom and his son live with that nigga and he beats the shit out of them.”
Rider was trying to appeal to my sense of white-boy chivalry so I’d go kill the Bath guy for him. Going on five months he’d been trying to talk me into killing this guy.
I said, “Why doesn’t your dude call the police or child protective services or something?”
“Cuz the nigga’s got control of that bitch. She won’t say anything against him. She’s a fiend. He’s got her on that shit.”
“You mean heroin?”
Rider looked out the passenger window.
“Why doesn’t your dude just do it himself?” I asked. “It would save him some money.”
“Because they’ll know he did it. That’s why we need you. You don’t know the nigga from Adam, so they won’t be able to link you to him.”
The baby started yelling in the backseat. Rider turned around and told the baby to shut up.
“Shut up, lil nigga,” he said.
Rider had brought the baby with him. The baby wasn’t two years old. It couldn’t even talk. It wasn’t Rider’s baby. Rider said the baby belonged to a bitch he was fucking.
Rider hadn’t said anything about a baby. I’d called him looking for heroin and he’d said he had some, so I’d gone to meet him. I’d parked out front of some apartments and called him and he’d come out with this baby and got in the car and he didn’t have any heroin. I was crushed.
He said, “I have to go to Varsity Blue real fast.”
Varsity Blue was a clothing store where they sold jerseys and sneakers and tracksuits. They didn’t sell heroin at Varsity Blue. But it was wasn’t far, just down Superior. I parked and Rider went into the store. He left me with the baby and the baby was crawling all over the place. The baby grabbed my lighter out of the cup holder and tried to chew on it. I took the lighter back and said, “You probably don’t want to do that. You don’t know where it’s been.”
The baby made a real serious face and thought about this.
Rider was in the store almost an hour and he didn’t buy anything. He came out of the store looking pissed off. He was pissed off because he was a fucking loser. I was a fucking loser but Rider was worse.
He got in and I drove across the street to the McDonald’s and bought the baby some French fries. Rider tried to call some people but nobody picked up.
I said, “Now what?”
He said, “Drive over to Clair.”
I did. We went up a ways and he told me to park in front of a convenience store. He went inside for an hour and came out and told me it was dead.
Then I got a text from Pistol: “Where are you.”
“Clair.”
“What did u want 2 do?”
“3.”
“Belmar n 20.”
This was good. Rider’s mom lived on Belmar. I could leave him and the baby there. Meanwhile Rider was talking and I wasn’t listening and he was saying he wanted me to take him over to the West Side and he could get me some heroin over there.
“Can’t do it,” I said. “I’ve got to run up to Belmar.”
“But I just talked to my partner over there. He says he’s got that fire.”
“You just said it was dead.”
“I meant it’s dead on the East Side.”
“I’m meeting Pistol over on Belmar.”
“Drive me to the West Side first.”
“No. Can’t do it. Sorry.”
“It won’t take long.”
“It’ll take hours. Everything you do takes hours. You do nothing and it takes you hours.”
“What about the three hundred dollars you owe me?”
“I paid you that shit already.”
“You didn’t pay me.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“WHY WOULD I LIE ABOUT THREE HUNDRED PETTY-ASS DOLLARS?” he said. “I SPEND THAT SHIT ON LUNCH, NIGGA. I SPEND THAT SHIT ON LUNCH.”
I put the car in gear. Rider grabbed my arm.
“What? You want to have a fistfight with a fucking baby in the car? What are you, fucking nuts?”
Rider didn’t move.
I said, “I’ve got four hundred dollars on me. I have to give three hundred and sixty to Pistol. I don’t know what to tell you. You can fuck that up, or I can drop you and the baby off on your street. You’re making me late. I’m about to be in a bad way. Emily is about to be in a bad way. I’ve got to get this heroin fast and I’ve got to take
it over to her at school. That’s what I’ve got to do right now. I’ve looked out for you before and you know that. But I can’t right at this moment. So I’m asking you as nicely as I know how, please spare me this bullshit today. I’ve got a lot on my mind. But call me when you get this other thing together tonight. We’ll do that for sure. My dude’s got the money for you as soon as you get it together.”
He calmed down some: “He just wants one zone?”
“Yeah, I think so. But if it’s right he’ll get more.”
* * *
—
WHEN I saw Pistol he said Raul might be getting out soon. I said that was good and I got well and I went up to the school and Emily got well. That evening Rider called and said he had picked up. I went to see him and he had four ounces of coke on him. I tried some of it and it was right. I said if he gave me the one ounce I’d run it up to my dude and bring him back nine hundred dollars. But he said no.
“It’ll save me a trip,” I said. “It’s the same dude as last time. He’s good for it.”
Rider said he couldn’t front me that much. He needed the cash up front. I knew he was just saying that because he wanted to step on the coke before we met up again. But there was nothing I could do. I needed money. If I didn’t get money I got sick. Time was working against me. Motherfuckers knew that. That’s how they get over on you.
I said I’d get the money.
I called James Lightfoot. He told me to come through. I did and he gave me a thousand dollars. Then Rider wasn’t picking up his phone. Two hours later he called me back. I met up with him and he gave me the coke. I took the coke to James’s house. The coke was fucked now. Rider hadn’t just stepped on it, he’d murdered it. That was Rider.
I was thinking James thought I had ripped him off.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” he asked.
“He’s a piece of shit,” I said.
“Then why do you fuck with him?”
That was a good question. I didn’t have a ready answer for it. All I could say was I felt like shit about it. Anyway, James took it easy on me. He didn’t give me a hard time about the loss he took even though it was my fault. He already knew I was a fuckup. He knew that I’d fuck up but I wouldn’t rip him off. As it stood, James and I needed money and I knew one way of getting it.