“True, but that doesn’t mean he’s lying. And it’s just sitting there while Tony sells his trash to us at a premium. Jesus, there’s more dust here than beneath my bed.”
“Quit the whining and spark it up, Sparky,” said Ben. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“I think we should go in and get it,” said Augie.
“Get what?”
“His good stuff.”
“Don’t be wacked,” said Ben.
“He owes us,” said Augie. “We’ll be in and out before anyone knows anything happened, and we’ll only take what we’re owed. With all he’s got, Tony will never miss it, and even if he does he won’t know who did it.”
“He’ll know,” said Ben.
“But he won’t be able to prove it.”
“He doesn’t need to prove it. If his brother even thinks we broke into his house, our asses are not our own anymore. We’re not talking a little beating here, Augie, we’re talking death. Not metaphorical death, real death. Fork-in-the-throat death. Devil-Rams-pounding-our-heads-into-the-cement-stoop death. No way in hell is J.J. or me going in there.”
“You two can stay outside and be lookouts.”
“You’re an idiot,” said Ben.
“How long have you been going through menopause?”
“Haven’t we learned by now not to mess with the Grubbinses? How’s your dog doing, J.J?”
“Still dead,” I said.
“Leave it alone, Augie,” said Ben. “A couple of stems is not worth getting killed over.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. Only a total loser idiot would think of breaking into the Grubbins house.”
“What do you say, J.J.?” said Augie.
“I’m in,” I said, as quick as that.
We waited like astrologists for the stars to align, when suddenly they did. Derek roared off from the house with three other Devil Rams, their saddlebags full and their sleeping bags cinched behind their seats. They were headed for a jamboree in Virginia, we heard, or maybe North Carolina, but someplace south and far away. And then a day later Tony went off with his girlfriend, Denise, and his factotum, Richie Diffendale, to a party in Hatboro that was supposed to last all night. A half hour after Tony’s car left the house, enough time to be sure he hadn’t forgotten his bong, and after a quick inhale of courage, Augie and I slithered through a loose window and landed in the pitch black of the Grubbins kitchen.
“We’re in,” I said into my walkie-talkie, one of three I had received from my mother for my fourteenth birthday and that, surprisingly, still worked. “Over.”
“Over what?” said Ben through a cloud of static. Ben had wanted nothing to do with the whole enterprise and agreed to be our lookout only after Augie convinced him that if we got caught he’d be blamed for it anyway.
“Just over, Mr. B.—it’s what you say.”
“No names, remember? Jesus Christ. Just get it done and get the hell out of there.”
“Over?”
“What?”
“You have to say it at the end. Over.”
“You’re making my head hurt.”
“Say it.”
“Go to hell.”
“Say it. You know you want to.”
“All right, if it will shut you up. Over.”
“Roger that,” I said. “Over.”
“While you two bicker,” said Augie, clicking on his flashlight, “I’m going upstairs and getting our stuff.”
I didn’t follow Augie to Tony’s hidden bedroom stash of prime Mexican weed. Instead I took the opportunity to pop on my own flashlight and look around. This was why I had so quickly agreed to Augie’s addled plan. It wasn’t about the drugs, though that was a nice side benefit, and it wasn’t about notions of fairness, though fair is fair, and it wasn’t just about the thrill of an illegal lark with walkie-talkies, though the lark was indeed thrilling. For the last seven years, Tony Grubbins had lived across Henrietta Road from me, his house daily in my vision, and yet in all that time I had never once stepped through the door into that strange and dark place. This was my chance to scope out the lair of my enemy, the kid who had killed my dog. Tony Grubbins was my Joker, my Red Skull, my Kingpin, my Dr. Doom. What self-respecting comic-book hero wouldn’t have taken that chance?
“What do you see?” said Ben over the walkie-talkie.
“Some expired milk, a pack of hot dogs, a couple beers, orange juice, something brown. Over.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just checking things out. Over.”
“Hurry the hell up, I’m having a heart attack out here.”
“Roger Wilko,” I said, closing the refrigerator door.
With my flashlight I wandered about, taking in the kitchen and living room. All the houses on Henrietta Road were structurally the same, so there was no mystery in the architecture, but each of these identical houses felt palpably different inside. Some felt happily messy, some felt bereft, some felt old, imbued with the smell of cooked cabbage, some felt sickly and wrong, one even felt rich for a time (and yes, there is a feel to rich that I still remembered from my youth) before the owners expectedly up and moved away to a place far better than Pitchford.
What the Grubbins house felt like, as I scanned the rooms with the beam of my flashlight, was charmless and dead, more like a storage locker than a house. There were no pictures on the scuffed and battered walls, no pictures on the beat old coffee table; the area in front of the curtained picture window was bare except for a television, set upon a cart and facing the couch. The place had the personality of a toad. It was all enough to almost make me feel sorry for Tony Grubbins—almost.
“There’s a car coming, wait,” said Ben.
I flicked off my flashlight and stooped down stupidly.
“Okay, it went past. Over.”
“Over where?” I said.
“Shut up.”
“It’s not where it’s supposed to be,” said Augie.
“Get out, then.”
“Just keep watching the street,” said Augie. “I’ll find the damn thing.”
I took the moment to slip down to the lower level, which in most of our houses contained a small laundry room with two doors, one leading to the backyard and the other leading to the garage. But the Grubbinses, like some of the other homeowners on Henrietta Road, had converted the garage into another room by bricking up the wide opening where the rolling garage door had been, knocking out the wall between the garage and the laundry room, and putting drywall up against the cinder-block walls. I had wondered for a long time what was behind that bricked-up garage door, and now I knew.
Crap.
It had once been a den, that converted garage, optimistically paneled with cheap, stained plywood, but now it was piled with overloaded boxes and stuffed plastic bags, with shattered picture frames and crappy furniture, with cracked knickknacks, bales of wire, pots and pans. It was as if over the years all the traces of homeliness placed into the Grubbins house by the doomed parents had bled down into the sea of rubbish in the converted garage. And yet, for some reason, neither Derek nor his brother, Tony, thought of just throwing it all away.
They were sentimentalists, I supposed, keeping the last traces of their parents alive in this pile of useless junk. Who would have thought? And then I wondered if maybe there was another reason for the mound of crap. Was it there to stop anyone from digging up the garage floor, from digging up what was buried there? I remembered all the old stories, and it felt like something huge and awful was crawling its way up my spine. And then I thought of the missing brother buried in the crawl space and I instinctively whipped my flashlight’s beam to where the crawl space beneath the kitchen was in each of the houses, a gap just to the left of the stairwell that led down to the laundry room, and what I saw was nothing but a wall.
A wall? What about the crawl space?
“Got it, the son of a bitch,” said Augie. “Why the hell was he hiding it so deep i
n his closet? What was he afraid of, the ghost of his mother finding his stash?”
“Maybe he was afraid of you,” said Ben.
“Anyone coming?” said Augie.
“Not yet, but we’re pushing our luck.”
“Calm down, Shirley,” said Augie. “Let me just scoop out a couple of bagsful.”
“Wait,” I said.
“What?” said Ben.
“Wait, wait,” I said, barely able to catch my breath. “Put the stuff back just where you found it. Do you read me? Over.”
“What the hell?” said Augie.
“Goddammit, put it back now.”
“Why? It smells sweet.”
“Do you trust me?” I said.
“Sure, yeah, I suppose.”
“Then do what I say. Over.”
“Okay, okay, calm down, I’ll put it all back.”
“Good.”
“What the fuck is going on in there?” said Ben.
“Shut up and keep your eyes peeled. And you upstairs, get down here to the lower level. You will not believe what I just found. Jesus Fucking Christ. Over.”
It was just a slight claw mark on the trim edging a stretch of drywall that sat above the rusted washer and dryer. A stranger to Henrietta Road would have passed it by without a second glance, but I was no stranger to Henrietta Road.
You could chalk it up to mere curiosity, I suppose, but as I wedged an old screwdriver into the slight gap between the clawed wood trim and the wall, I think there was something deeper driving me. From my very first day in Pitchford, the first day of my new and inferior existence, I had been terrorized by this house. Maybe I thought if I dug deep enough I could find out what was at the root of it all, and I’m not just talking about Tony Grubbins and his virulent hostility. I was digging for the root of everything that had conspired against me from the moment my father left home, the root of what had happened to my life.
With each pull of the screwdriver’s red plastic handle, as I grunted with the effort and the nails shrieked as they pulled from the wood, I felt like I was getting closer. And then the wood trim came free. And when it did, the piece of drywall shifted slightly. I grabbed the drywall’s edge with both hands and slid the large sheet out of the slot created by the remaining pieces of the trim. I could smell the crawl space before I could see it, and it smelled fetid and damp, acrid and raw.
When I shone the flashlight into the great dark gap, I fully expected to see something grisly, a family of rats gnawing on a pile of decomposing flesh and bone, maybe, or a grotesque monster, its limbs splayed, its joints swollen, plagued with boils, infested with vermin, gnashing its rotting teeth as it stared at me with a single cataractous eye.
What I saw instead was our future.
“Holy crap,” said Augie after he had come down the stairs to see what I had found behind the slip of drywall. “How much dope is that? It must be fifty kilos.”
We both were staring at stacks of brick-like packages wrapped in gray plastic tape, sitting on a tarp along with two large plastic paint buckets, five-gallon jobbers at least. It was the kind of stash frequently hauled out for the television cameras by drug enforcement cops when they wanted to blow their own horns for shutting down some huge and nefarious drug ring, but bigger than I had ever seen on the television.
“It’s not weed, that’s for sure,” I said, “packs as small and tight as that.”
Augie took hold of one of the packages that were stacked in piles on the tarp laid across the crawl space. He took a sniff, raised his eyebrows like a wine connoisseur.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
“Trying to figure out what it is.”
“What are you, Mannix? How the hell can you tell by smelling it?”
“It doesn’t smell vinegary, but it smells like something.” His eyes widened. “Coke. How sweet is that, bub? We finally hit the big time.”
“Wipe your prints off and put it back,” I said. “Whatever we do, we’re leaving that crap alone.”
“J.J., man, one packet of this will keep us high for months, years maybe. And if we start selling it—”
“You have to know what we’re dealing with, Augie. That’s why I needed you to put that weed back. This isn’t Tony’s shit, or even Derek’s. This is gang shit. The Devil Rams stashed this junk here instead of their clubhouse because they figured it was safer in the suburbs. But they’ll kill us if they find us selling stuff we stole from them. And if we’re getting high on high-grade crap that we wouldn’t be able to afford, they’ll know we took it and they’ll kill us for that.”
“But this stuff is probably so primo.”
“It gets us nothing.”
“Nothing but high.”
“Augie.”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. This whole thing is so far over our heads it’s in the clouds. Close it up and let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Wait. There’s more here than just the drugs.”
“Where?”
“The big plastic buckets with the lids,” I said.
“What about them?”
“Open one and look inside.”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” I said.
Augie gave me one of his looks, the sly kind he gave whenever I did something colossally stupid of which he approved.
“What’s going on in there?” said Ben.
“We’ve got an issue,” I said as Augie grabbed one of the buckets and hoisted it out of the crawl space. “Everything still clear?”
“For the time, but you’ve been in there way too long.”
“We’ll be out in a second. Keep looking. Over.”
Augie lifted the lid off the bucket.
“Oh. My. God.” He let out the words slowly, as if one of the hot black cheerleaders was stripping for him. “Oh. My. Jesus. God.”
He looked at me and I looked at him and for a moment we stood together in shocked silence. And then we started hopping wildly around the bucket, our arms and legs shooting spastically in all directions, our mouths wide in silent amazement. If anyone had been peering into the basement of the Grubbins house just then they would have seen two epileptic idiots performing a crazed dumb dance of glee.
“It looks to be mostly hundreds,” I whispered when we had calmed enough to breathe. “Stacks, some still wrapped from the mint, like a huge shipment was paid for with bills from the bank. It’s hundreds of thousands. They didn’t know what to do with it, where to put it, no bank would take so much raw cash, so they stuck it in here.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“What do you think we should do?” I said.
“Take it,” said Augie. “All of it.”
“We can’t. They’ll kill us if they find out.”
“Of course they’ll kill us,” said Augie. “But Jesus, I’ve never seen so much money.”
“If we take it and spend a dime of it they’ll know,” I said. “A new stereo, a new pair of sneakers, jeans, a stinking comic book, anything, and they’ll find out.”
“Then there’s no point.”
“But still, how can we leave so much money? And drug money, yet. Someone’s ill-gotten gains.”
“Do we take it just to screw with Tony? Do we put our lives on the line for that?”
“That sounds about right,” I said.
“You’re certifiable, man. We’d be better off burning it than spending it. I mean, let’s just say for talking that we don’t spend it. Let’s say we bury it, not just for weeks, but for years. Decades maybe. What if we don’t spend a dime until we’re all out of Pitchford, and then only a little at a time, nothing to make anyone suspicious. We might get away with it then, but that’s just crazy.”
“Crazy,” I said.
“I mean, who the hell can do that? First time we’re short, we’ll be tempted to take just a few bills, nothing much, maybe just a stack, and then, bam. They’ll be on us.”
“Like ticks on a dog,” I said.
“And ev
en if one of us can handle that kind of pressure, there’s three of us. Over time one of us will break, one of us will screw it up, and that’s the ball game.”
“End of the ninth,” I said.
“All it takes is one of us.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Can anyone trust anyone else that much?”
“Shit,” said Ben over the walkie-talkie. “Shit shit shit.”
“What is it?” said Augie.
“I think it’s—goddamn, it’s Tony.”
“He’s not supposed to be back for hours.”
“Yeah, well, the party must have sucked. He’s with Denise. Get the hell out of there.”
“How much time do we have?”
“He’s pulling up to the goddamn curb now. Over.”
“We can go out the back door,” I whispered to Augie. “Throw the bucket back into the crawl space and help me slide the drywall back into place. Hurry.”
Augie took hold of the bucket, but even as he began to lift it he looked up at me. And what I saw in his eyes in that moment still haunts me to this day. It wasn’t greed that I saw, or a hunger for risk, or even an acknowledgment that we were both thinking the same thing, that we understood the opportunity and the risk and we had both come to the same damned conclusion. No, it wasn’t any of those things, though all those things were present. What I saw most of all was a sadness, the sadness of a feral creature who can’t help but take one step forward into a trap. It was as if he knew exactly how it would play out for him in the end, how it would play out for all of us, and still he couldn’t help himself.
And that it had played out exactly as he knew it would makes the memory of that moment only cut deeper, like a scythe through the soul.
No wonder the son of a bitch was sitting by his pool in Vegas, crying into the night.
Augie and I really didn’t have many other places to go in the Pitchford social whirl—with his questionable wheeling-dealing and my brilliant sense of deprivation we had burned enough bridges over the years that we were stuck with each other—but Ben was a football hero who was welcome to hang out with the jocks, the black kids, the band geeks, the heads. Even the pops were always trying to include him, cheerleaders in their short skirts calling out, “Oh, Ben.” So it was a mystery why, each night as the moon rose, he ended up by the cherry tree with Augie and me and a hand-rolled reefer. I asked him once why he hung out with us when there were better opportunities for him, and he looked at me like I was talking fish.
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