Cherry

by Nico Walker

  “Where’s Raul?” I asked.

  James said, “Fuck. I don’t know.”

  “Shit.”

  James started to drive away. I took a breath.

  “We can’t leave him. We have to look for him.”

  James shook his head no and said, “Okay.”

  He turned the car around and we looked for Raul. We were going at parade speed and it was a fuckload of people around so this wasn’t good. But James kept his cool. We were out there forever but he didn’t panic. And Raul came running from behind us and got in the backseat and said, “GO GO GO.”

  We drove away.

  “How much did you get?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “Count it.”

  I gave the money to Raul. He counted it.

  “Thirteen hundred.”

  “You didn’t get anything?”

  He said, “No.”

  * * *

  —

  I DIDN’T care about what happened to the money. I think Raul kept all of it. I didn’t ask. I was tired of everything. This had nearly been curtains for me and I felt like a fucking purse snatcher. James called later and said Raul had tossed his sunglasses away when he was running from the bank. James said he had paid three hundred dollars for those sunglasses. I went over to his place and gave him three hundred dollars. I had lost three hundred dollars on the bank robbery. And with his sunglasses money, James had broke even, minus the gas and a balaclava, which he had written off as negligible.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  It was Sunday morning. Emily and Livinia were asleep in the bed and I listened to them breathing, their little clicks and drafts, and the light glowed through the drawn shade. It would be a fine day, and I knew it just as well as anyone did.

  When you have been afraid for a long time, you see how fear will come and go. How fear will overtake you. How fear will subside. How fear guts you for a moment. How hope puts you back together, till the fear comes back. Then the hope. Then the fear. I was only ever afraid of one thing in my life, and that was heroin.

  There’d been a dozen witnesses the other day. Somebody had to have got the plates off James’s car what with all the running around and the frock coats and the parkas and the bank being robbed.

  Raul had left his fucking mask outside the bank.

  We were fucked.

  Yet I was still free.

  I went downstairs and I called Black.

  I lit a cigarette.

  Black said to come on.

  I drove to the Walgreens over on Monticello. I was thinking about PFC Arnold, a kid I knew in Iraq, how the old boys used to say he was a shitbag. Then he got killed and they said he was a good guy, and his name was in with the good names, the names of our war dead, and if a shitbag talked bad about the name when the old boys were around he risked a punch in the mouth.

  Honestly I didn’t know much about him; I can’t say we were friends. They put us in the same room and he lived in the room eight months till he was killed. I helped pack out his things. We spoke now and then and I’d had nothing against him. He cut my hair a few times. I’d thought he was alright, but not all the time.

  He’d been a handsome enough motherfucker, 20 when he was killed, born and raised in Oklahoma, didn’t know his dad. His mom had raised him on her own. She was a hooker. He’d tell you that. But he didn’t say it like it was a bad thing. He liked his mom. And he was polite, always polite, so polite that when people talked shit to him they got away with it. Somebody might say, “Arnold, you’re a retarded shitbag.”

  And he’d blush and look all around himself as if to say, Yes, I know. And isn’t it wonderful?

  His wife was a few years older than he was. They knew each other from Oklahoma and had five kids together. Only it was maybe that two of them were his. His wife fucked around on him a lot. But then he fucked around on his wife a lot too and it didn’t seem to be a deal breaker for either one that the other was fucking around. They were Wiccans. So was his mom. They were all Wiccans.

  His mom had come down to Fort Hood before we left for Iraq. It was Halloween. She was dressed up as a cat, with the black tights and the little furry ears on. It was nighttime and her hair was black. I met her by the stairs in the barracks. She was smoking a cigarette. She asked if she could use my phone. She was a while on the phone and I smoked two cigarettes. She said she was sorry she’d taken so long. I said I hadn’t noticed she was a cat. She said cats were her familiars. I didn’t know what that meant. She said it was a Wiccan thing. I still didn’t know what it meant. Did they help her do magic? No. It wasn’t really like that. It was more like she had a special connection with cats, especially black cats. It was hard to explain. She asked me for a cigarette and I gave her one.

  She asked if I had a girlfriend.

  I said I was getting married in two weeks.

  She said, “I know a lot of guys still mess around though. I don’t judge. I get it. I understand why you guys want to have sex before you go over there.”

  I said I wasn’t trying to fuck around on my girl. “Sorry.”

  She asked if I knew Arnold. I said he was in my company. She said she was his mom.

  She couldn’t have been much older than thirty.

  “I was a child when I had him,” she said.

  “Doesn’t Arnold live off-post?”

  She said yeah. She had hooked up with some guys though and she was partying with them, but they were lame-os. She asked if she could use my phone again.

  When she was on the phone there was a guy I knew but didn’t know; he was wearing JNCOs and a wifebeater and a cowboy hat and was skinny. He came outside.

  She said, “I’m on the phone.”

  He lingered, but only a minute. She gave me the phone back.

  “That was one of the lame-os,” she said. “Ugh.”

  Her people took forever to come get her. We went to my room so she wouldn’t have to wait outside. She asked if she could smoke. We smoked cigarettes and talked about what kind of music she liked. She liked alternative rock.

  She borrowed my phone again. Eventually her people came and got her. I waited half an hour; then I jerked off.

  A few days later Arnold asked me if I’d had sex with his mom. “She said you’re really nice,” he said.

  I said I hadn’t had sex with his mom but I thought she was a really nice lady.

  Arnold liked that. He was good.

  It was three guys from Second Platoon who had fucked his mom, three guys from Second Platoon who had run a train on her. People talked shit to him about that. But Arnold was alright. “She made them wear condoms,” he said.

  Then we went over to Iraq. And then some other shit happened and whatever. Soon it was July. And Arnold got killed in July. It wasn’t long after he had come back from midtour leave. I remember because he had chlamydia and gonorrhea at the time. He had caught the chlamydia off a girl at Camp Liberty when he’d been on his way home, and he’d given it to his wife when he had got there, and his wife had given him the gonorrhea, or it was the other way around. Anyway. He was driving a Bradley out on Route Martha one night and he ran over an antitank mine, which killed him instantly. I wasn’t there. I had been across the way on Route Polk then. But Shoo had been there and he told me how it had been fucked up because Arnold was a mess. Shoo said he’d looked down into the driver hatch and it was so bad he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  Thus Arnold was a great guy and everybody said as much. Which was odd since there had been a lot of people wanting to beat the fuck out of him, and I’ll tell you why: Arnold wanted to be a computer genius. He used to say he was going to bring down Bill Gates. Those were his exact words: bring down Bill Gates. That’s what he used to say he was going to do. And he came up with a computer virus, for practice, I guess. This was when there was an insatiable demand for fuck videos,
and Arnold put together a massive file of that shit—gang bangs, barely legal, cum shots, anal, ass to mouth, lesbians, bukkake, MILFs, humiliation—and he got his virus on there one way or another and went around talking up this big porno file he had and he got some guys to download it off him and those guys shared it with other guys and soon all the computers began to crash and the computers were forever worthless after that. Nothing could be done for the computers. So a lot of people wanted to beat the fuck out of Arnold. But nobody did. Then he got killed and they said he was good. And maybe if I had got killed I’d have always been good.

  But I’m forgetting…

  * * *

  —

  I WAS waiting in the parking lot at the Walgreens. Black drove up and he parked and he got into my car. He fronted me 2 grams.

  He was wearing a new tracksuit.

  Adidas.

  Yellow on purple.

  I said to him, “Cool tracksuit.”

  He said, “It is, right?”

  He was happy about his tracksuit and it was an alright tracksuit and we pretended like we were friends. But we weren’t friends. I was just a dope fiend as far as he cared. And for my part, if I ever knew a better way to get heroin, I’d just as soon not see him again.

  I said, “You hear from Raul yet?”

  He said he had.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s good.”

  “Tell him what’s up for me, will you.”

  “I will.”

  “This makes it six, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about that other thing we were talking about? You still want to do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. What about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s good.”

  “Alright. I’ll call you.”

  I took Warrensville back. I went into the house quietly and went upstairs quietly and sat down on the edge of the bed, beside Emily. She stirred and murmured. I leaned over and kissed her ear.

  “Guess what.”

  “What.”

  “I just saw Black.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Guess what else.”

  “What else.”

  “He’s bought himself a new tracksuit.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s purple with yellow stripes and he really likes it a lot.”

  She rolled over and I pressed the bag of heroin into the palm of her hand.

  “Care to weigh it out?”

  “Mm-mm.”

  “You don’t have to do it now on my account,” I said. “We can wait till later if you want to go back to sleep.”

  “No,” she said. “You go ahead and weigh it out. I’ll be down in a second. I have to pee.”

  “I love you.”

  “Mmm. I love you too.”

  I went downstairs and split up the dope. It was three light. Never mind. I’d get it back. I put a shot together. There was hope for me yet. Life was good when you were cooking up a shot of dope; in those moments every dope boy in the world was your friend and you didn’t think about the things you’d done wrong and fucked up, the years you’d wasted. I put the needle in my arm. The needle was dull so it pushed the vein away when it was going in. But the vein couldn’t run forever. I felt a little pop and my blood flashed in the rig. I sent it home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It was fall of 2013. I was twenty-eight years old and I’d been locked up about two and a half years by then. I got a letter from Matthew Johnson. He had read an article about me being a criminal and he wanted to introduce himself and he sent me a five-dollar money order and asked me to write him back. So I wrote him back and said thanks for the five dollars and yeah it sucks being in prison but I’ll be alright. He sent me some books to read. One of the books was a collection of Barry Hannah stories. He asked me to call him and I did and he asked what I thought of the books and I said I liked the Barry Hannah book the best. Looking back now, I think this thing with the Barry Hannah book was a test, and I’d passed. And Matthew sent me some more books and one of them was Hill William by Scott McClanahan, and I said that I liked that one the best and Matthew said maybe I ought to try and write a book. He said he and his friend Gian were publishers. They were called Tyrant Books. And I said I really appreciated all the books but I didn’t think I’d be able to write a whole book. A little story, a poem maybe I could handle, but a long-ass book…

  Anyway he talked me into it. I started working on the fucker that February. I sent Matthew some pages. He said they were good and send some more. I did. He said keep going. Then I sent him some more pages and he said, Alright, everything you’ve sent up to now was horrible but these last pages aren’t so bad and maybe we can do this.

  Two and a half years went by. The book wasn’t done yet. We had about two-thirds of a manuscript. I didn’t know how the fuck I was gonna finish it. Things had got so bad I could tell that Matthew couldn’t think about the fucking manuscript without getting depressed real bad.

  Enter Josh Polikov.

  Josh was working for Matthew and Matthew said to him, Yer gonna help me with this.

  So he and Josh were going through it and Josh found some old pages I’d written that actually weren’t terrible and he showed them to Matthew and Matthew agreed that they weren’t actually terrible and Matthew sent them to me and said, Do something with these.

  And that’s how I finished the manuscript.

  We still weren’t done, not even close.

  The manuscript wasn’t so much a manuscript as it was a plastic bin full of paper. Every page had been rewritten one hundred times over. There was no Word file. It had all been done on a typewriter. Any given page, sometimes the first version was the best, sometimes the seventy-ninth; and Gian DiTrapano was supposed to edit this shit and turn it into an actual coherent thing. Which somehow he did. And he did such a good fucking job of it that Tim O’Connell from Knopf thought it’d be a good idea to buy the publishing rights to the manuscript from Tyrant. This was in February 2017, about exactly three years since we started.

  We still weren’t fucking done.

  Tim O’Connell said he liked the manuscript a lot but I needed to get a little better at writing before he’d print the thing and he said I’d need to rewrite it again. So I about died. But then I got to rewriting it again. And I was looking at Tim’s edits. And there were some big changes. And I was like, Tim, what about these changes? I dunno. He said, The changes are good. I said, Yeah, well…And it was kind of a thing. And then we all talked on the phone, Matthew and Tim and this lady (Adeline Manson) and I. And they said to the lady, Tell Nico what you told us. And she said, When I read your version I thought the main character was an asshole, and when I read Tim’s version I thought the main character was an asshole but I kind of liked him.

  So that settled it. And we finished writing the book after that. And if you’ve read this book and you thought the main character was an asshole but you kind of liked him, that was all because of Tim O’Connell.

  Tim and his brilliant assistant, Anna Kaufman, really did work absurdly hard getting this manuscript into shape, and if they hadn’t helped me out so much then you’d have never read this book, and I am very much indebted to them and also to Daniel Novack, who gave me good advice that I was all too glad to take, and to Susan M. S. Brown, who did copyedits for this book and saved me from more than a few errors that would have caused me no end of embarrassment. Any mistakes in the text are mine and I insisted on their being in there.

  I was very lucky. I’ve had a lot of help. I should not forget to mention Rosemary Carroll. Rosemary looked over all our contracts and watched out for us whenever we needed watching out for. And in our dark days she assured Matthew that he wasn’t wasting his time on me.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nico Walker is or
iginally from Cleveland. Cherry is his debut novel.

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