The Dope Thief

by Dennis Tafoya

  MANNY WALKED RAY to his car, looking at the dark sky. “More rain?”

  Ray went into the glove compartment and pulled out a short stack of twenties and put it in an envelope. He made a show of licking the gum and sealing it. Manny laughed and shook his head, let his long frame settle against Ray’s car, leather jacket flapping open. With his arms folded he looked even more like some great bird poised to erupt into the sky in a blast of lost feathers and rushing sound.

  “Fuck you.” Manny put the money in his jacket. “Ever since you gave up smoking you fucking delight in being a hump. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about holding the money.”

  Ray held up his hands. “Hey, anytime you want it . . .”

  Manny looked at his hands. “The thing is, I asked Sherry to move in.”

  “No shit. Huh.” Ray raised his eyebrows.

  Manny stuck his hands in his pockets, awkward. “You think I’m making a mistake.”

  “No. No I don’t. I like Sherry, she’s a good kid.”

  “But?”

  “Just, does she know, you know. Where the money’s coming from.”

  Manny smiled. “She knows I ain’t a house painter.” A dig at Ray, who in a moment of panic once told this dumb- ass lie to Theresa, who then spent hours on the phone digging up painting jobs around the neighborhood. “She knows I got money and don’t work. She’s been around the block. Shit, we met in rehab. Anyway, she knows not to ask too many questions.”

  “Great, then. She can dole out the money, get the rent paid and keep you from getting your legs broken by Dickie Lagrossa when the Sixers tank. What you owe him now, about twenty grand?”

  “Oh, stop. It’s a couple thousand. Anyway, I got a system.”

  “Yeah, how’s that working?”

  Manny pulled a medal from inside his shirt and kissed it. “And I got Saint Bernadine on my side.”

  Ray said, “You and Arnold Rothstein.” He squinted through the smoke from Manny’s cigarette. “You’re the one asked me to dole out the money. Hey, though, you got to love that there’s a patron saint for gambling degenerates.”

  Manny waved his arm expansively. “There’s a saint for every fucking thing. My ex- wife’s cousin, Deborah?”

  “The good- looking one.”

  “She says there’s a patron saint for meth cookers.”

  Ray held a palm up as if to stop the flow of bullshit. “Get the fuck out.”

  Manny held his hand across his chest, cigarette out. “I swear to Christ. Saint Cosmas, she says. He’s like the patron saint of people who work with chemicals. She was dating that guy, you know the one. Jacques or Jocko or some shit.”

  “I remember. He’s in Graterford now, right?”

  “When she moves in and finds out he’s dealing, she goes to the priest and asks what does she do. You can imagine that conversation.”

  Ray smiled. “He’s cooking in the house, the kid’s there . . .”

  “But deep down he’s a good guy.”

  “A sweet girl, not a smart one.”

  “No. But the priest comes up with Saint Cosmas. And of course that she should dime Jocko.”

  “Which she does.”

  Manny gave a half- shrug. “Of course, the asshole is also beating her and her kid, so . . .”

  “Well, wherever he is, I’m sure Saint Cosmas is looking after him.”

  They stood in the lot for a minute. Ray watched tiny waves cross a coffee- colored puddle. “So . . . the Rick question.”

  “You really think the cops would get onto us and try to put a guy inside?”

  “Don’t seem likely, huh?”

  “What are we, the Dillinger gang? I think we run into trouble, it ain’t going to be that kind. I don’t see nobody calling the cops.”

  They both thought about that. You could only do this shit so long. Someone was going to recognize them, or follow them, or just do something brainless when they came in the door. They wore the cop jackets and badges and they moved with purpose and told themselves they were smart, but there was only so much luck and then it was gone. At the end of the day they were as doomed as the goofy bastards they were ripping off. Manny and Ray would do lines in the truck before they went in, getting their edges sharp, making their minds fast. It couldn’t go on forever. Everyone was high. Everyone was stupid. Everyone had guns.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning Ray sat upright in bed, his heart racing. He wiped at his eyes and found them wet. He put a palm on his chest, tried by force of will to slow his breathing, fumbled for the TV remote. He clicked through the channels, found an old movie about a man and a woman, carnival sharpshooters who end up robbing banks in cowboy outfits. He didn’t recognize anyone in it, but it was good enough to keep him occupied. He liked how they were with each other, high in love the way you could sometime be, but he didn’t get the cowboy outfits. Of course they were doomed, that was the movies, but he couldn’t think of a lot of bank robber stories that ended up with they live happily ever after. Not a lot of any kind of stories. He wanted a drink but couldn’t see getting up to get it, and he knew it wouldn’t help him sleep or stop the nightmares. He wanted a cigarette, too, and thought how it was great you could tell yourself you were becoming a better person by staying in bed and doing nothing.

  He tried to remember the dream that woke him up. There was something about a house floating on a lake and somehow the house turned upside down. Someone he loved was in the house and he was screaming, or trying to scream. The place was familiar, like some place he knew or had seen, but not the same. That’s how it was in his dreams. The places were put together from bits and pieces of real life but reassembled in a crazy way that made him uneasy.

  He couldn’t think who would have been in the house. All he could bring back from the dream was that feeling of being helpless and desperate, but there was no one he’d feel that way about in his waking life. It made him jealous of his dream self, this other him with this other, richer life of strong connection and the kind of love that made you frantic.

  After the movie ended (they killed each other, but it was the only way out), another movie came on, something with Danny Kaye. He muted the sound and drifted off.

  He was standing up on the bleachers, after gym and Mr. Hughes blowing that fucking whistle to make them all deaf. Him and Pete Quirk and Pete’s little brother Davey, who everyone said was re tarded, but not to his face because he went six- two in ninth grade. They were high, drinking Mr. Pibb, which sucked but was the soda they had at the Indian’s store, the only place they could get to and then back before fourth period, and now they were standing up on the bleachers and watching the girls come out of the locker room in their black and white leotards. Pete said, what the fuck lame school has black and white colors, and Davey snorted his Mr. Pibb out of his nose, and they all laughed even more at that. Davey and Pete jumped off the bleachers and walked out, enjoying the loud, echoing bang of their feet hitting the boards and the girls all watching them go, butRay slouched back on the bleachers and watched one of the girls pull herself up onto the balance beam into a handstand. She was small, dark, her eyes clear and focused, and she held herself straight, her back like the blade of a knife under the green lights of the gym. Ray moved down crablike over the bleachers until he was just a few feet away from the beam as the girl rolled over to stand upright, the muscles in her legs standing out, taut as wires, her hands frosted with chalk. Her body turned in flat circles, described fluent arcs that in Ray’s eyes, half- closed by dope, seemed smeared against the bright blue of the mats.

  She launched herself off the beam, and he held his breath when she came down, pulled into himself in a sympathetic motion when her feet hit the mat. She held her hands up over her head then but looked down at her own feet while her friends clapped and one of them, the tall red- haired girl he knew was Claudia, whistled and smiled and called out to her. Go, Marletta. Ray smiled, full of expansive good humor fueled by Pete Quirks hash, and
he wished she’d look up and see him so he could say it, too. Go, Marletta. But when she did look up, finally, her smile wide and her feline eyes flicking over his and then away, he couldn’t get anything out. His dry lips worked, clicking, but she was gone that fast, head down, dark hair hiding her profile, and he sat a long time and looked at the small white handprints she’d left on the beam, and he repeated her name to himself, the way her friend had said it. Marletta.

  The next day Ray drove up 611, through Doylestown and up into the country, following a map Manny had drawn on the back of an unpaid electric bill. The rain had slowed. He passed an ice cream stand with a woman smoking a cigarette under the shelter of the awning, talking animatedly into a cell phone, and it made him unaccountably lonely. He glanced at his own cell phone as if he expected it to ring. Someone calling just to say hello. It brought back that feeling he had had in Theresa’s kitchen, that weight in his stomach, emptiness and a feeling of tears forming just behind his eyes. He put on the radio and found the college station from Princeton, drifting in and out with the effort of carrying all the way from Jersey. It was something he had never heard; a guitar drifting and echoing in a way that made him think of someone alone in an immense and empty space in the middle of the night.

  Above Ottsville he followed a forking exit onto smaller roads lined with farms being cut up into developments. Patches of trees, their branches moving in the rain. He slowed, found a rusted mailbox and a gravel drive leading off over a low hill, and kept moving around a slow curve. There was a turnoff into the field, and he pulled off and stopped.

  He grabbed his bag and got out, stretching as if he had come a long way, though he had only been in the car about forty- five minutes. The quiet, the unfamiliar greenness of things, made him feel he had made a long trip to a strange place. In the distance there were long fence lines and horse barns. A country of people whose lives he couldn’t imagine. Getting up early, to do what? Feed the fucking horses. Tinker with farm equipment, maybe. The engine ticked, and water dripped from the trees. He looked up and down the empty road and then walked off into the field, up the hill along a line of trees.

  He kept to the left of a screen of maples, moving quietly and staying aware of his position, ears straining. He began to sweat immediately, his legs getting wet from the high grass. There was nothing to see except the trees and the fields on either side of him. He looked at his watch and back down the way he had come to where his car was just barely visible now and began to hear a dog bark somewhere.

  Near the crest of the hill he stopped and swung the knapsack off his back and kneeled down to rummage in it. He lifted the pistol out and quietly racked the slide, putting a round in the chamber and then putting it back in the bag. He took out a pair of binoculars and picked up the bag, moving slowly up the hill. Finally on his right a farm house came into view, partially obscured by pines. A dog was tied up outside to a stake in the ground, barking itself hoarse at nothing. There was a Ford pickup collapsing in on itself by the side of the drive and a kids’ swing set with just the chains hanging, the swings long gone, the chains pinging off the rusted poles. There was a black barn with the doors rotting in.

  Ray squatted by a tree and put the glasses to his eyes. The lenses fogged up, and he wiped them with the tail of his T-shirt. The wind picked up, and rainwater ran out of the leaves over his head, soaking his back. A man with a black T-shirt, a leather vest, and a ponytail came out of the house with a beer can in his hand. He threw the can at the dog and lit a cigarette. The dog sat and watched the man expectantly, his ears back. There was a blue van in the driveway and a motorcycle next to the rotting porch. One of the windows upstairs was broken, and a curtain hung through where the glass was gone. After a minute a woman with wild hair and thick hips came out wearing a green T-shirt and shorts and carrying two bottles of water. The guy with the ponytail took one and dumped it over his head and into his eyes, and the woman smoothed back his hair with her hands.

  Ray ran the glasses over the house, the van, the yard. He could hear thunder far away, and the rain began to pick up again. He went into his bag and came out with a thin plastic parka and put it on and then settled onto a tree stump and picked up the glasses again. He smelled the faint, acrid odor of charcoal burning. The rain on the parka made popping noises close to his ears. He let his mind drift, thinking about de cades ago when the house was new and someone brought a young girl here to show her where she was going to live. Someone thinking this was the place they would get old and die and maybe being okay with that. Christ, but he was getting strange in his old age.

  After a while he walked back down the hill and along the road, back past the driveway and along a fence that bordered the other edge of the property. The ground was more exposed, open to view from the neighbors, and he walked just to the crest of the hill. He sat down in the wet grass and made sketches of the layout: the house, the barn, the dog, the tree line. This side of the hill had a view of a valley dotted with houses, stands of trees. Six or seven cows stood together on a hillside a hundred yards away. Horse -flies found him and began to bite him through his jeans. He retreated down the hill, swatting at his legs.

  LATER, RAY DROVE back down through the hills into Doyle stown and parked on a side street. It was a Sunday afternoon, the day quiet and the air thick with humidity. He put a baseball cap over his wet hair and walked the main drag, stopping at a book-store to get a paper. He stood near the door, feeling his wet clothes cool and holding his paper. There was a circular rack with ten- dollar DVDs near the register, and he stood and pushed it around. One of the faces looked familiar, and he picked up the case, finding it to be the movie he’d watched the night before. Gun Crazy.

  A woman stood at the register holding her glasses up to the light, and then she breathed on them and wiped them with the tail of her shirt. She put them on and took them off again while Ray watched her. She swore under her breath, then noticed him standing there.

  “Sorry about that.” Her smile was crooked, and she looked down. “We’re not supposed to, you know, swear in front of the customers.” He smiled back and shrugged to show he didn’t mind.

  She pointed at his hand. “Ring that up?” she said, and he handed her the box, his mind blank. He felt his face coloring.

  “This is a good one.”

  “I watched it last night. On TV. You know, not the DVD. Or why would I be getting it now?” Jesus Christ. “I never saw them before, the couple in it, but I liked it.”

  “John Dall, he never really did anything else that was, you know, famous. The girl, Peggy Cummins, she was in Night of the Demon.”

  “A horror thing?” He was conscious of the way he talked, the words forming in his mouth. Of not cursing, trying to seem okay. She had a small mole near her mouth, and her smell was sweet and faint, like an apple smelled when you held it to your face.

  “Oh, yeah, a great one, with Dana Andrews. Directed by Tourneur. Great stuff, very . . .” She waggled her fingers and widened her eyes in mock terror. “You don’t get nightmares, do you?”

  Ray thought she must be in her midtwenties, maybe thirty? Younger than him, he thought, but he was no good at ages. She came around from behind the register and went to another display and flipped through some more cases. She bit her lip and pulled her glasses off her face to use like a magnifying glass. Her hair was dark, and she wore it in a braid, something that always caught his eye. He thought of her in a room somewhere braiding her hair in front of a mirror. Putting on makeup, those little pencils and liners a whole branch of knowledge he knew nothing about. Not that she wore much makeup.

  “Shit. Sorry. These things aren’t worth a goddamn. Sorry. Doesn’t look like we have it.” She was tall, maybe taller than him, with a slim build under loose clothes. A gauzy skirt, one of those sweaters that looks like it has thread pulls all over it. Dark colors, like he wore. Browns and blacks and dark blues. Did that mean something?

  He wanted to keep talking, had nothing to say. He nodded.

&
nbsp; “Thanks for looking. I’ll keep an eye out.” He spent a long time looking through his pockets for the right change. “Night of the Demons.”

  “Demon, right.” She smiled at him. There were lines by her eyes that made her seem like someone who would be nice to people. Ray looked down. He held up his bag, smiled, and waved on his way to the door, and she watched him go.

  He sat in the car a while. The sun wanted to come out, he thought, but then fat drops started hitting the windshield and the roof, loud as pistol shots. It began to hail. Chunks of ice pounded the car, making a muffled roar that was somehow pleasant. He liked being inside and watching it come down. People ran by: two young girls, holding hands; a fat man with a bent umbrella. He opened his paper, closed it again. He was drawn to those women who wore long clothes and dark colors. He thought it meant something, dressing like that. It seemed to him they were protecting themselves against some possible danger, and he thought it wise to be onto the world, to know things could go wrong.

  He wondered if he asked her out, how long it would take for her to get on his nerves, or how long until she got bored with him. Isn’t that what happened? She seemed a lot smarter than he was. There were people he met who seemed to have a whole language he didn’t know. He wasn’t stupid, but what he knew was what he had taught himself. He haunted the bookswaps, buying paper bags full of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. Books about World War II, black holes. He had opened a book of short stories by a woman named Amy Hempel and couldn’t stop reading it. Bought it for ninety cents and went to the library in Warrington to get more. Something in it made him wish he’d finished school, could somehow get to know smart women who knew there was a terrible joke inside of everything that happened to you.