* * *
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and let my robe fall. The bruises ran from the elbow almost to wrist, big blue-and-yellow blotches on the inside of each arm.
I ran the shower too hot, watching my skin turn pink as I stood under the scalding water. I scrubbed until it felt as though I were taking off, layer by layer, my own skin. I breathed in steam. I tried to understand.
It changes you. You can tell yourself you are doing it because you have to, so you can make the case. Because it’s better than sex or it makes sex better. Because you feel like it today. But no matter what you tell yourself, how you explain it, there’s only one reason.
You are after the rush.
And no matter how many times you go for it, no matter how many times, you’ll never hit it again. Some people look all their lives. They steal for it. Don’t know how to give up. Murder for it. Chase after it until it turns on them, roaring. Lumbers onto their backs like a bear, ripping flesh from bone, killing. They’ve been dead a long time by then.
10
Much later, years later, they would ask why didn’t I do anything. As if I hadn’t. I suppose that in their eyes, not doing enough is the equivalent of doing nothing. It’s easy, afterward, to make all the right decisions. Why didn’t you? What about? Couldn’t you have? Spectacular hindsight.
I got home from some club or another and found Jim’s front door kicked open. It should have stunned me, should have scared me, but I was still so wired up from the cases I’d made that evening that when the adrenaline mixed in my blood I was taken to a state of calm. I pulled my gun, peered in. He was passed out on the couch, his arm hanging off the edge, sticking out from under the navy blue blanket that covered his body up to the eyes.
I checked the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, the closets, moving silently, carefully, ready to shoot, hoping I would get the chance. The shrinks say there is a thin line between homicide and suicide, that it is only a matter of which direction you send your loathing.
I knelt next to the couch. Looked at Jim’s arm. He was good, I mean he could hit and leave only the faintest kind of track, a pinpoint puncture wound and the next day only a trace of bruise, but that was when he had it under control.
The marks were there, the indications of self-inflicted disease. Bruises, big ones, blue and green and yellow, and dozens of scabs dotting the skin. Around that, swollen redness.
I tried to shake him awake. He moaned and turned over in his sleep.
I jammed a chair under the doorknob, dragged the bedspread into the living room, and stretched out on the smaller section of the couch. I listened to the pulse that throbbed in my ears, I waited patiently while my body worked to purge the toxins I’d been forcing into it all day and all night. I watched Jim sleep. Even now, at rest, the muscles of his jaw were taught, his teeth clenched tightly. I had never seen his face slack with the innocence of sleep, but it must have gone that way sometimes. I wondered if the world he slept in was as vicious as the one we were fighting against and conceding to every day, and I wanted to be in there with him, to enter his dreams and take both of us to a place where we could have just a few hours of peace. I wanted to feel the way I had on the summer Sunday mornings of my childhood, when I would wake up early with my soul still perfectly clean from Saturday evening confession, and put on a sundress and grab my sandals and tiptoe out of the house while my family slept. The mornings I remember were always brilliantly sunny, but the air would be cool still from the night, and full of the smell of trees. I would walk past the green quiet of lawns mown yesterday and onto the hard-packed dirt path that led through the woods and was solid and cool against the bottoms of my bare feet.
The woods opened onto the elementary-school playground, where my sixth-grade friends and I played kickball during afternoon recess, and there it was, the basketball court, a rectangle of rough black asphalt, already soft from the sun, waiting. I would stand for a moment at the near end, with my head bowed, and recite, “O blessed Virgin Mary, accept this as my offering, it is right and just that man should suffer on this earth, for God gave His only Son so that all people might be saved, and pass from death into a new life. Accept now my own meager suffering in honor of your blessed name, and that of your son Christ Jesus, and ask God to look down upon me and bless me, and forgive me of my sins.” And then I would walk with slow steps down the length of the hot asphalt, the bottoms of my feet burning with each new step, until toward the top of the far goal line, they became almost numb. I took that as a sign that my offering had been accepted, and I would step off the hot asphalt and onto the cool of the lawn, where I would stand in a state of grace and slip into my sandals so that I could continue on my way to eight o’clock mass.
Jim sat up suddenly and seemed to be looking around the living room, but his eyes were still closed.
“I don’t understand the question,” he said, and then he lay back down and yanked the blanket up to his chin.
“Jim?” I whispered. “Jim?”
He was sound asleep. I got up and poured a shot of vodka and stared at the clock. 4:17 a.m. And there I was, stuck in the middle of the small hour, the hour of throbbing brains and quivering stomachs, the somnambulist’s daydream. I was tired, so very, very tired. All I wanted was for my eyes to shut. I went to Jim’s closet and began checking coat pockets, looking for a lost or forgotten stash. I found matchbooks and toothpicks, spare change, crushed cocktail napkins scribbled with doper hieroglyphics—phone numbers, price lists, initials—and finally, at last, in the pocket of his only wool suit, a couple of Quaaludes. I ate one, and then another half, and went back to the couch to wait for its effect: sleep so deep and dreamless that even the darkest nightmare could not crawl out of it.
I went under with my hand stuck down in the couch cushions, resting on the grip of my pistol.
* * *
The low curve of the sun rested on the rooftop of the apartments across the way and Walker was standing in the doorway, knocking loudly on the splintered wood frame. His body was a shadow against yellow glare. I moved in slow motion to pull the bedspread over my arms and saw the chair I’d wedged against the door lying on its side on the carpet. Walker fingered the doorknob.
“What happened here?”
I pulled at the bedspread. My arms were healing, but bruises were still visible. He was in his work clothes: blue jeans, steel-toed ankle boots, and a couple of sweatshirts. He had a black bandanna tied around his head. The chair on its side looked wounded.
“Well?”
I leaned over and slid the mirror from beneath the couch, keeping the bedspread over my arms, and pulled a glass vial from the pocket of my jeans. It was body temperature. I tossed it to Walker.
Have a bump,” I said.
He closed the front door as far as it would shut, darkening the room but for a thin wedge of sunset slicing across the carpet and the beige glow of daylight seeping through the curtains.
“I’ll be right with you,” I said. I stumbled to the bedroom and found a sweatshirt. UT, HOOK ’EM HORNS, GO TEAM FIGHT. The marks on my arms seemed to leer at me, yelling blue-and-green words about no self-respect, about what a weakling I was. “How low do you plan to get?” they said. “Gonna take the big dive? You’re strung. Smooth fucking strung. LOOK AT YOURSELF.”
“Flo?” Walker tapped on the door. “You all right?”
“Yes,” I called. “I’m fine. Just trying to wake up.” I pulled the sleeves down and wiped them over my eyes.
“Well come on out here,” he said. “This stuff you gave me will sure do the trick. Who’d you get this from?”
I checked my eyes in the mirror and opened the bedroom door. Walker was in the kitchen, snuffling and making coffee. He pointed to the mirror on the counter. Precious white lines. Blessed relief.
“We’re framing a six-bedroom over on the south side of town,” he said. “Got two more, almost as big, lined up after. I’ll have work clear into next July.”
“Good,” I sai
d, ‘that’s good. We’ll be finished long before then.”
I carried the coffee to the living room, needing the softness of the couch. My bones ached. I propped myself in the corner and wrapped the bedspread around my shoulders, leaving one hand free to hold my coffee.
“You look like Pocahontas,” Walker said. “A blond Pocahontas.” He pulled his boots off and put his feet on the coffee table. “So. Who wrecked the door?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was that way when I came in last night. Jim was here. He knows about it.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Out on a deal, I guess.”
“You seem down.”
“I’m tired is all.”
“Well, do I need to go home and shower, get cleaned up? We working tonight?”
“I’ve got some stuff coming through from that Mungo guy you introduced me to last week. He trusts me. I’ll ask him to bring it here. I’m not up to going out.”
“Want me to stay?”
“I’m fine. You don’t have to stay. Take a night off. Go on a date, do something.”
“Is he bringing snow?”
“Said he’d have some.”
“Maybe I’ll hang out here anyway.”
“If you want to. But I’m okay.”
He got up and browsed through the albums.
“Something quiet,” I said. “Okay? Pick something quiet.”
He put on Patsy Cline and came back to the couch.
“Flo,” he said. “Your parents do that to you, give you a name like that?”
“Part of my cover.”
“It’s weird,” he said. “Here I thought I knew these two cool people who’d moved in across the way. You know, good neighbors. I liked y’all. Come to find out I didn’t have a fucking clue, don’t even know your name.”
“Yeah. Well, you won’t have to put up with us after this is over. We’ll be out of your life and you can go back to the way it was.”
“Not exactly.” He sipped his coffee.
“You going to leave town?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t rule it out,” I said. “People get crazy when they’re busted. I had a few threaten to kill me in Pasadena.”
“But obviously they didn’t.”
“Didn’t even try, that I’m aware of. It’s usually just talk. But you have to think about it.”
“How’d you get into this? Why’d you become a cop?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I did, but I don’t. Not anymore.” I pulled the blanket close. “Why are you helping, other than staying out of jail?”
“To protect my friends.”
“That’s kind of running yourself out front.”
“Not really. I’d already sold to Jim and all. It was too late for me, I was just trying to find out for their sake. So they wouldn’t get caught. If he was the heat, I mean. I never even suspected that you might be.”
We didn’t say anything for awhile. Dusk had come and the room was in shadow. I knew I was breaking rules, letting an informant become a friend, but I needed one. I needed a dose of friendship. The only people I was meeting in Beaumont were dope dealers, and even if I was one of them, it was still a matter of playing roles. It was all surface, the illusion of communication. Rob would come by if he thought there might be dope around, but Denny had stayed away since the night he’d walked into that party. He said it scared him to be too close to undercover. He didn’t like it at all.
“You gonna take care of Grady?” Walker asked.
“The best I can,” I said. “Let me call Mungo.” I got up and dragged the phone to the couch. “Is that his real name, or is it license plate time?”
“That’s all I’ve ever known him by.” He started cutting out more rails.
“Listen,” I said, “you wouldn’t want to fix that front door for me, would you? Somebody could just creep in here.”
He stood up and stretched lazily, groaning with enjoyment. His hair was starting to streak golden from the spring sun. It tangled into his eyelashes in front and fell straight and clean down to his shoulders.
“You putting me to work on my night off?”
“Asking for volunteers,” I said. “I can call a locksmith if you’d rather pass.”
He let his hands slap against his thighs and sighed.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Let me go get my tools.”
* * *
Jim didn’t come home and he didn’t call and he didn’t come home. I cleaned. Washed the place down from ceiling to floor, scrubbing, scrubbing, wiping reddish dust from tables, raking the carpet with the vacuum cleaner, pushing and pulling, eight times even, back and forth, invisible rows, raking. Ammonia biting the air around my face, disinfectant on tile and glass. I polished windows and mirrors spotless, my yellow arms shining back at me. I bent needles and threw out rigs and put the coke up my nose. I was glad it wasn’t heroin I’d been shooting. I was not that strong, not that standup. I gathered clothes from chairs, from the closet floor, from beneath the bed, walked to the laundry, watched them tumble in circles, soap-soaked and wet, in clean-gleaming stainless-steel machines. He didn’t come home. I put coke up my nose. I wondered if he was dead. I wondered how I felt.
Day one. Day two. Night three. I sat in the apartment. Answered the phone and answered the door. Drank quarts of orange juice, ate bananas, swallowed vitamins. I needed cocaine. I made promises to my skin, to my arms.
When the dealers came over, I broke out the mirror. If they fixed, if they brought rigs, I sat watching, tasting the taste, counting the seconds until it went away. I ached for it. Some days my brain screamed for it. I put the stuff up my nose to quiet the yelling inside me. I wondered where Jim was.
At the end of the fifth day, Dodd called.
“My chair’s gone,” he said.
“What?”
“I said my chair’s gone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah-boy,” he said, laughing nervously. “It disappeared this morning.” He paused. “I sucked it up my ass when Chief called to ask what the fuck was going on with you two. He’s hot.”
“About what?”
”Wants to know why there’s no case on Gaines. You got a cold?”
“Were taking a breather,” I said.
“He wants something done. Soon.”
“We’re working on him. We’ll get next to him. Have you spoken to Jim?”
“No. Why? Where the hell is he?”
“Never mind. It’s okay,” I said. “We have some cases for you. I’ll drop the evidence by this evening.”
“Make it quarter to six or so. I’ve got places to go tonight.”
I could barely see the road. I wound down streets, past people’s Victorian homes, digging in the glove box for something I could use to dry my eyes, knowing that it wouldn’t do any good. I had envelopes full of vials, full of evidence, or just barely evidence. More than cutting the coke with mannitol, I’d been cutting the mannitol with coke.
I spotted Douglas the Younger, Lester’s little brother, holding his T-shirt in one hand and thumbing with the other. He saw my car and waved; I pulled over to give him a lift, taking a long time to brake so I could get my eyes dry. I didn’t know if I was crying for Jim or crying for something stronger.
He looked good, blond hair just touching his shoulders, and his acne had cleared since I saw him last at one of the clubs. He’d sold me speed that night.
When I told him he looked healthy he said he’d gone straight.
“It agrees with you,” I said. “Where you headed?”
“Lester the Mo’s.”
I turned up the radio. Poor bastard. Trying too hard, trying too late. Eighteen and a believer, soaking up all of Lester’s crap about being a communist and thinking that meant take what you want from wherever you can get it because your government owes it to you but they ain’t delivering. Started pulling jiggers for Lester the Mo when he was ten and Lester was seventeen
, before the Mo graduated from houses to banks and went to the joint for robbery.
He was sitting next to me smiling in the sunny afternoon and I had the keys to his jail cell hanging around my neck, I had the envelopes locked in the trunk, the reports were written, he was down for two counts of delivery and ten or twelve Sunday morning burglaries. He and Lester knew how to work fast, that was a given. And for once so did Sergeant Dodd. The serial numbers from the stuff Jim and I bought that morning had already been traced. We knew what houses they’d hit and what they had taken. Time automatic, his dumb-for-nothing brother had led him into the home of the D.A.’s cousin and they stole everything they could carry, including a diamond-studded butterfly pin, which I bought for fifty bucks. And which the D.A.’s cousin’s wife had recognized immediately when Dodd brought her in to claim her property. It was all done and nothing could change it, not even the best of intentions. It was all done for all of them, all of the defendants. The sucker was riding along happy to be alive and didn’t have a clue that it was my testimony that would send him to prison. My testimony and Jim’s, so help us God.
And now, too late, he’d decided to straighten up. Drug enforcement. Who were we kidding.
“442,” he said. “I really love this car.”
“It takes regular.”
I dropped him at the Mo’s, a yellow frame cracker box with dead pyracantha bushes under the two front windows. Some time later I stopped at a 7-Eleven for a Dr. Pepper and called Dodd to tell him I was tied up on a deal and wouldn’t be able to make it. I didn’t feel like trying to explain to him why there were no cases from Jim.
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