by ed. Pela Via
The voice sounded forced, like a Shakespearean actor forced to do Z-grade sci-fi. “So it’s been a while since you’ve had what you need, right, baby?”
Angela nodded and bit her lower lip.
“John hasn’t had any in . . . jeez, nearly a week, yeah?”
She scratched at her arm and looked away.
“So you need it?” The way he said it, it was like he was hoping she would say “no.”
She nodded again. Her eyes were glassy, and John Wily thought of the first time he’d seen them like that.
“How bad do you need it?” Tamer had gotten closer. Standing over her. Casting a shadow.
She only thought for a second before she began to undo Tamer’s belt buckle. He wiggled a baggie of crystals in her face and told her to be a good girl.
John kicked his TV over and ran out the door.
He was dead the next day.
Angela went back to her father, who held her close and took her out to play a game of miniature golf. They were mostly quiet and he kept score with a dull pencil and that night he tucked her in and told her he was happy that she was home. When she woke up and checked her newly reinstated cell phone, amidst the texts asking where she’d been and what she was up to she saw one from Tamer, and she felt the butterflies of young love in her stomach, and when she opened it and read it she vomited into the toilet and spent the morning on the cool tile, crying.
When she doubled over at John Wily’s wake it was Tamer that held her by the shoulders, Tamer who called the ambulance. It was the first sign of emotion he’d shown all day. He’d sat stoic through the slideshow, numb from the rush of emotion and Vicodin.
He’d decided against breaking into Wily’s place and destroying the tape on the off chance there were police watching the apartment. Instead he split his time praying that the cops wouldn’t find it and praying that God might bring Wily back. He sat in his apartment in the dark. He deleted Wily’s number from his phone. He deleted all the pictures of his friend from his hard drive. He couldn’t eat.
He worked his jaw and blinked in the dust kicked up by the ambulance. The funeral guests went back inside the house, dead set on finishing the moonshine in the bathtub. He sat on the porch and wrung his hands. The tall grass crept up to the edge of the yard. Bird chimes clanged in the hot yellow air. He got up and unlocked his car.
The silhouette of Tom Miles watched him from his Honda. He stepped out into the oppressive heat and hobbled toward the skinny boy walking to his car. Tom had at the very least done a little research, asked around those same neighborhoods you’re asking. At the most he’d coaxed the information out of John Wily at the end of a sawed-off shotgun, and it was with the butt of that same shotgun that he broke two of Tamer Reynolds ribs. He kicked the boy’s legs out from under him and dragged him to the Honda.
He laid the shotgun across his lap and listened to his CD player, only taking the buds out when he needed directions to Tamer’s apartment. As the town of Pocahontas disappeared in the distance, the two men stared at the road ahead of them. One of them had loved John Wily and the other couldn’t have cared less, but one of them was certainly responsible for his death. No one is sure who it was to this day, but they do know one thing: that was the day that Tom Miles became involved in the meth trade.
——————————
The Road Lester Took
by Stephen Graham Jones
Not only was it not Lester’s night, but it hadn’t even been his year, really. What he was doing was hiding from the private investigator his insurance company had tailing him. Where he was hiding was deep in a Friday night, in the farthest corner of his friend Wayne’s basement. Why he was hiding was because he was supposed to be wracked with pain, unable to place one foot in front of the other, the medication stripping his concentration so that all he was good for anymore was daytime television.
The reason it wasn’t his night tonight was Johnny, the new guy, who’d served enough weekends in county that he knew every way a hand of five card draw could fall.
Lester pushed his last two Vicodin into the pharmacy in the middle of the table, seeing Wayne’s nickel bag. Wayne had lifted it from his son Wayne Jr.’s sock drawer stash. Wayne had a pair of tens; Lester had seen them already, half on accident, half because Wayne didn’t care.
“So?” he said, to Johnny.
Johnny tongued his lower lip out slow, like a lizard would if he were a man, then shrugged, pulled something up out of his shirt. It was on a dirty string around his neck. A glass vial, rubber stopper. White inside.
“Shit,” Delbert said, and folded.
Johnny smiled, threaded it over the back of his head, guiding his thin ponytail underneath.
“Break in case of emergency,” he hissed, and nestled it onto the pillow Wayne’s nickel bag was.
Wayne dumped his cards as well, tried to push himself back from the table in his folding chair but it had rubber feet, and the drama was lost.
Johnny never looked away from Lester.
“That your pretty wife calling?” Johnny said, tilting his head to the world above.
“Crying for more . . .” Lester said, studying his full house for the four thousandth time.
“Set of lungs like that—” Johnny said, his smile thin.
Lester nodded, knew Johnny was trying to get him thinking about his wife Janice’s new, insurance-money breasts instead of the game.
“It’s good shit?” Lester said, about the glass vial in the pot.
“It’s baby aspirin,” Johnny said, shrugging. “Confectioner’s sugar.”
Lester smiled, looked to his cards again, then made a show of looking to his side of the table. His empty bank.
“Linda’s phone number,” he said finally, to match Johnny’s bid.
“Linda?” Johnny said, one side of his face drawn up in doubt.
“I’d take that,” Delbert said, in all seriousness. “I’d take that and bend it over—”
“Linda who?” Johnny said, and Wayne filled in, with “Lovelace, practically,” then explained: Linda was the main reason Lester had almost gotten divorced from Janice four years ago. Her and the snake tattoo curling around her right breast, so blue you could even see it through a bra, if she ever wore one.
Johnny nodded, packed his cards on the table.
“She’s a sure thing?” he said, to Lester.
Lester nodded. Johnny smiled, looked off at nothing then came back, said that was too much. He didn’t want to take advantage, being the new guy and all.
“What then?” Lester said.
Johnny shrugged, fanned his cards out again, closed them up into a stack.
“I just want to see them,” he said.
“Them?” Wayne said, nodding down to Lester’s cards.
Johnny shook his head no, was still staring at Lester.
“Them,” he said, again, and Lester heard, understood. Shook his head no.
Johnny was talking about Janice’s new breasts.
“ . . . like hide in the closet?” Wayne said, over his beer.
“Thinking more like a . . . video excursion,” Johnny said.
“Bull shit,” Lester told him, making it into two separate words.
“Hey,” Johnny said, opening his hands over the pile, to take it, “doesn’t matter to me, man.”
“You can’t just buy it like that,” Delbert whined. “This is supposed to be a friendly game, J.”
“Small wager between gentlemen . . .” Johnny finished, the pads of his fingers to the vial, now. And everything under it.
“No,” Lester said finally, his hand on Johnny’s now.
Johnny nodded, had never been expecting anything else.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lester said, to Delbert, flashing his cards over. “He’s not gonna win.”
“Yeah,” Johnny said, “I mean, shit. You three are probably running a game on me anyway.”
Wayne shook his head but didn’t say anything, just swirled his beer in
the bottle, drained it.
Lester swallowed, looked at his cards again, one more time, then said fuck it, laid them down, face-up.
Delbert whistled, smiled his crooked smile, and then Johnny did what all the Johnnies of the world had been doing to Lester since he was fourteen, and one of them had married his mother: laid down a full house of his own, king high to Lester’s two jacks.
“Shit, she’s gonna kill you,” Wayne said through his teeth, to Lester.
Lester was just staring at the cards.
“Can we watch it too?” Delbert stage-whispered to Johnny, and they touched fists softly over the table, and then the big joke of the night was later, after the Vicodin had been quartered up, Wayne Jr.’s pot still in the air, Janice calling on the phone at the end of every hour. The joke was Johnny, holding a cup of coffee under his face for the warmth—he was on shift at seven—then lifting the vial from his shirt again, emptying it into his mug.
It had been sugar all along.
Lester watched it all through a haze, then Wayne was talking through the narrow window at the top of the room, telling Lester that the coast was clear of private eye eyes, he could walk home now if he ran. Lester smiled a sleepy-feeling smile, nodded, and saluted Johnny with two fingers launched off his forehead.
“SP or extended?” he called back from the stairs.
Johnny smiled with his eyes closed, held his fist down like he was jacking off, and said SP. Because it paused better.
———
Two soaps into the afternoon, an hour away from the talk show Lester liked, Janice called from work.
“Still beautiful?” Lester said.
“He was up here,” Janice said back.
“Dick Man?”
Dick Man was their private eye. For a while he’d been LTD man, but then he got an Impala from some p.i. motorpool.
“He didn’t talk to you, did he?” Lester asked.
“Lester, please.”
“What was he doing, then?”
“Coffee. Pie. It wasn’t on accident, though.”
“Nothing he does is on accident.”
“He’s got a new toy, L. He kept it right there on the table by his water. One of those big lenses for his camera. He says he can see through a wall with it.”
“So he did talk to you.”
On her end, Janice exhaled, said Lester’s name one more time, then hung up.
Lester stood looking at the phone too long, then took it with him to the window. The Impala was three houses down, in front of Wayne’s old Ford van. Dick Man raised his coffee cup to Lester and Lester let the curtains fall back between them.
Except for the insurance checks and prescription meds, he might as well be in jail. He smiled, shook his head, and the phone rang in his hand. He dropped it like it was alive, his foot trying to kick it back up to him before he could tell it not to. The yellow battery pack crashed out the back, slid under the couch, leaving Lester to scramble for the bedroom phone. He made it on the sixth ring, fell back into the mattress.
“Lester,” he said into the receiver, winded.
“I know,” Johnny said back. Behind him somebody was wet-sanding a car, it sounded like. That high-pitched whine, grey water slinging all around the shop.
“What?” Lester said. “How’d you get my number?”
“We’re friends, remember? Anyway. Just wondering, y’know. What was on the old boob tube . . .”
“Fuck you,” Lester spat.
“Hey,” Johnny said, in a way that Lester could see the smile he was smiling around the receiver. “You’re not—not backing out here, are you?”
Lester stared at the dried-up moth bodies collected in the smoky white globe of their ceiling light. His and Janice’s.
“Tonight,” he said. “I asked her. She’s cool with it.”
“Perfection,” Johnny said, dragging the word out, and Lester dial-toned him.
Twelve hours, now.
Lester got one beer from the fridge and drank it, staring at the sink for an answer.
———
The school bus usually rumbled through just shy of four o’clock. Lester was through with the six pack he’d promised himself he wasn’t going to drink by then. It helped with his coordination, though. The way he needed it to help.
He levered himself out the door, shut it behind him with the rubber foot of an aluminum crutch.
He’d brushed his teeth for three minutes, the longest ever, maybe.
Instead of crossing the packed dirt of his front yard—the most direct route to the Impala, which had been inching forward with the shade of Wayne’s tree all afternoon—Lester poled down the cracked sidewalk, made a production of everything involved in a left turn. In four ugly minutes, he was to Dick Man, tapping on his passenger side glass.
“Lester,” Dick Man said.
“I need your help,” Lester said.
“Say the word, my man.”
“Our landlord, there”—the house, Janice’s name on the lease—“he won’t spray for roaches unless we establish roaches, if you know what I mean.”
Dick Man nodded, leaned forward over the wheel, to study the house.
“Bring him a jar,” he said.
“He says I could have got them anywhere.”
“What are you paying per month?”
Lester looked off, at the bus’s complicated door, opening to spill kids back into the neighborhood.
“Too much,” he said, finally. “But . . . I mean. Immobile like I am and all. Shit. This is embarrassing. They’re like, fucking—crawling on my leg sometimes, y’know? I mean, if I get like infected or something . . . I could be here for months, I guess.”
Dick Man angled his head over, in appreciation, compassion, something like that.
“And you need me to—what?”
“Nothing,” Lester said. “Just—I don’t want to get you in trouble. Conflict of interest, or assignment, whatever.”
“What?”
“If I can just borrow your camera for the night?”
Dick Man looked down to it, its white telephoto lens heavier than the camera itself.
He smiled, patted the lens, said, “Les, boy . . .” but Lester was already shaking his head no.
“Shit, not that,” he said. “Just like a . . . you’ve got a video unit in there, right? Just an old one, man. Like, with the big tape and everything.”
Dick Man was still looking to his telephoto lens.
“For roaches?” he said.
“I won’t get it dirty,” Lester said, “c’mon.”
The bus rumbled away, shaking every dish in every cabinet in the neighborhood, and, finally, Dick Man nodded, said, “What’s a videocamera between friends, right?”
Lester nodded, met him at the trunk.
The video camera was in a black plastic case, like the drills some of the contractors carried to and from work.
“Sure?” Lester said, and Dick Man nodded, hefted it up to Lester, and Lester took it, held it with the fingers of his right hand, down where his crutch handle was. It stuck out like a wing.
“Got it?” Dick Man said, his eyes the eyes of a used car salesman, suddenly.
Lester shook his head no.
“You do deliveries?” he said, smiling as if embarrassed.
Dick Man looked down to his car, the camera there. Said, “Sorry, this one—Chevrolets, y’know? She doesn’t lock. One of these miscreants”—the kids—“could walk away with everything I own.”
“I’m just there,” Lester said, pointing three houses down with his chin.
“Fast little boogers,” Dick Man said, and Lester nodded, agreed, and tried hard not to hear the shutter falling behind him as he made his way down the sidewalk: Dick Man, documenting how the subject could, it seemed, carry a thirty-pound camera case. At least.
———
In the house again, Lester started on six-pack number two, and called Delbert, asked if his brother still worked the door down at the Foxx.
> “That’s at night,” Delbert said, still half-asleep.
“That’s not my question,” Lester said back. “I just need his number.”
“Cell or home?”
“Both.”
The Foxx was The Foxx Lounge. It had had three x’s in it for about a month when it opened, but some zoning law had killed the last x.
Delbert’s brother answered his cell on the fourth ring.
“Dink,” Lester said. “It’s me, Les.”
“Caller ID says Janice Markson, Lester-san.”
“Yeah, well. It’s me, Dink.”
“Okay, it’s you.”
“Good. Now I was just wondering, kind of, if any of the girls up there make, like, house calls?”
“Like an escort, you mean?”
“Just for a few minutes. A lap dance.”
“What about Janet?”
“Janice.” Lester looked down to the talk show at his knees, a man’s mouth moving and moving, no sound coming out. “She’s at work, now, Dink. I that stupid?”
Beat, beat: Dink thinking.
“We open in forty minutes, Les. Shit.”
Lester explained Dick Man to him. How when you can’t go to the lap dance, your only choice is to bring the lap dance to you, get it?
“I don’t know,” Dink said, when Lester was done. “How much you talking?”
“That’s just it,” Lester said. “I don’t really—shit. It’s the end of the month, Dink. And it’s not like I’m exactly working, either.”
“Les—”
“I don’t even . . . all I want her to do is take her top off. Just for about twenty seconds.”
“For free?”
Lester breathed out through his nose, closed his eyes.
“I’ve got some medicine from workman’s comp,” Lester said. “It’s good shit.”
“Back medicine?”
“Vicodin.”
“I don’t care if it’s—”
“Dink, please. I’m in a jam.”
“Get a magazine, man.”