Opioid, Indiana

by Brian Allen Carr

  And then it occurred to me that people used to never have phones. Could never do that. Where they looked everything up. They’d have to decide stuff just on whims.

  So, I decided that being dirty made you more likely to be violent, but I knew good and goddamned well that there was a strong likelihood that when I finally got to google it, I’d be wrong.

  Which means, if you think about it, that people probably used to be more comfortable being wrong. You’d think a thing and then a month would pass and you’d find out you were full of shit.

  These days, you think a thing might be more likely, and then you look it up. You get to skip a step. The step where you choose and fail. Or choose and succeed. And that must have an effect on us. I don’t know if it makes us stronger or weaker, or better or worse. But it makes us different than we used to be.

  Also, since my data was gone, I got to just think up bullshit and be fine with it.

  As an example: I was rubbing shampoo in my hair, and I was like: Wonder what that name’s from. Shampoo?

  But I knew there was no way I’d find out anytime soon, so I just thought up some bizarre bull crap to satisfy my curiosity. I decided that it was a mispronunciation of Sham’s Poo, and there was a giant monster named Sham whose shit was somehow good for our hair, and he was captured and forced to poop into individual bottles, and that’s what I was rubbing on my head. As I sudsed up, I envisioned poor Sham’s life.

  Here’s how that looked:

  Sham’s Life

  Sham was born on the third planet from Croptic 4, a white dwarf sun on the outer edges of the Tri-angulum Galaxy near the realm of Kloptuse. The planet was called Klaz 19. And all of Sham’s kind were known as Shams.

  Now, planets, like towns, have identities—things they’re known for. Klaz 19 was known for scissors the way New Orleans is known for jazz. They made the best scissors in the universe. This is because their trees were made from a special steel that never dulled and also because they had lots of ugly diamonds that they used for their ax heads. Once upon a time Klaz 19 was made entirely of coal.

  They’d use their ugly diamonds to cut their trees, and they’d use their trees to make the scissors, but on all of Klaz 19 there wasn’t a single ribbon or sheet of paper or strand of hair. They had absolutely no idea what most beings used scissors for. They initially built scissors off a schematic they found on a wayward space broadcast that they’d intercepted with their satellite dishes, and prior to the scissors, no Sham had ever died.

  They are biologically immortal, the Shams. Nothing kills them except for being cut by steel scissors.

  It was quite fortunate they figured that out when they did, because Klaz 19 was getting overpopulated. They put to death all the riffraff with their scissors, and they started leading better lives, and so they considered the scissors holy, and they made them the way Christians make crucifixes and they wore them on chains.

  When their planet was discovered by a mammalian life form, the scissors gained new purpose. Shams made and traded scissors for goods from other worlds.

  Spices. Tobacco. Condoms. Fireworks.

  But one day this one trader named Vidal came around and was a real dick. He showed up to trade bananas for scissors, and he called Sham their equivalent of the N-word. He called Sham a “dirty scissor.”

  Sham decided to teach him a lesson.

  He shit in a water bottle and put it in Vidal’s luggage, and on the way home Vidal found it and took a sniff. He asked his wife, “What do you think this is?”

  And his wife took a whiff and was like, “Soap, you dummy.”

  She took a bath with it. Her hair had never shined brighter. They turned their spaceship around and went back to Klaz 19.

  When Vidal got there, Sham was like, “Why are you back?”

  And Vidal was like, “I need more of this.” And he held up the bottle of Sham shit.

  Sham laughed like a motherfucker, but his parents didn’t think it was too funny. It was a great and terrible thing on Klaz 19 to give people Sham shit, on account of on Klaz 19 Sham shit was the worst smelling shit in the world.

  They were super apologetic, the parents. They didn’t want to offend Vidal: he was their best banana supplier, and bananas were Shams’ favorite food.

  “I might be able to overlook it,” Vidal said, “so long as you give me your son.”

  Sham’s parents were appalled. “We can’t give you our son.”

  Vidal was adamant. “No son, no more bananas.”

  They didn’t have to think long. “Nice knowing you, son,” the father said.

  And Sham was tied up and put in a cage on Vidal’s spaceship, and that’s where he still lives to this day.

  Even right now, Vidal is feeding Sham bananas, and Vidal’s wife is catching Sham’s Poo inside plastic bottles to be sold at the store.

  When I got out of the shower, I had a text from Bennet from a number I didn’t recognize.

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Miss me yet?

  Me: Don’t you ever pay attention in class?

  (317) xxx-xxxx: I’m multitasking.

  Then I heard the front door, and I went out into the living room in my towel.

  “Why aren’t you out looking for your uncle?” Peggy asked me. She was jittery but beautiful, and I was in my towel and I thought about letting it drop from my body, but I thought that would be very bad. Like assault or something.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “He’s not usually gone this long with no word.”

  “Should we call someone?”

  “Who? The cops? And tell them what? That we’re missing our druggie?”

  “I mean . . .”

  “I’ve already tried everyone he knows. I’m getting a bunch of nothing.”

  “Then what’s me looking for him going to do?”

  “It has to beat nothing.”

  “Drive me around. We’ll look together.”

  “I have to go up to Indy.”

  “Why?”

  “To check up there. I mean, there are some places he goes I can’t take you.”

  I knew that. There were trap houses and all. Dive bars. Rotten places. Homes where children dawdled in filthy diapers as mothers played app games on cracked phone screens. Rank abodes with rotting carpet. Abandoned corners. Swollen neglect.

  I’d been in places like that. Where TVs babysat children. Where soup bowls sat crusty on sofa cushions. The taste of recent smoking lingered. A fight could break out whenever.

  Before my parents died, those were figments, man. And I guess I get a bit in shock at just the words “trap house,” because the first place I went to, when the courts were deciding where to place me, was some group home for kids like me, though calling them “like me” is like saying we were mammals.

  I started reading this book one time that said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Maybe that’s right. I think about it all the time. The book was too long and I didn’t finish it, so maybe the author changed his mind by the end.

  But as far as I can tell happy families operate like this: they love each other and do their things. Unhappy families can look all kinds of different. Kids can be orphans or mothers can be crack addicts. Children can be R-word. Fathers can be secret gay. Each little broken part of people looks different.

  I was in a home with eight other kids once and some of them had mothers in jail and some of them had never seen their fathers. Was their unhappiness like mine?

  If my mom was locked up, but I knew I’d see her again, would I feel the same kind of sad as the sadness of having one morning jumped up on her bed and pulled back her blankets to see her frozen still in death. Her mouth opened and tight. Her eyes wide at the sky.

  If my mom was in jail, would I have stood on the front lawn that morning in my underwear waiting for a
neighbor to wonder what I was doing and call the police?

  If I’d never seen my father, never met him, would I think about his truck? How he fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road and how they’d found his semi burning and how his charred body was identified by his teeth?

  If you’re happy because your mother and father are happy and alive it looks the same whether or not they are dentists or ballerinas, whether or not they are pimps or policemen. Only difference is you might eat dinner at different restaurants, but you’d still eat dinner together. You’d sit across the table and talk about your days.

  “What was the best thing about your day?” your father might ask.

  “I got an A on my math test.”

  “And the worst thing?”

  You’d stare off at bullshit. “My tummy ached during second period.”

  For me? No one’s asking, so I can’t say:

  Best thing: no one I know died.

  Worst thing: my junkie uncle is missing.

  And when I was at that house, the whole place grimy and the other orphans moaning and shitting themselves, some so disfigured their arms and legs were shaped like boomerangs and they wore bibs to catch drool, my unhappiness was different then.

  I was nine. I thought I’d gone to hell.

  I got dressed and was walking up and down the streets of Opioid, Indiana, with really no goddamned aim in mind and no goddamned clue.

  How do you even begin to look for a druggie?

  They operate under different gravities, are fueled by different suns. They wake with a time no one else moves to.

  I’ve seen my uncle so bent he can’t stand out of his chair, and he’ll think he should drive. The reason for that is, when he’s wasted, he likes to be in his car.

  “It’s the only place you can control everything,” he told me once. “You can diddle the radio and change the temperature, and you can even decide where to be. Don’t like the vibe of a place, you just drive somewhere else.” I saw his face through a three-day beard when he told me this, and the hairs on his chin were going white, and his eyes looked aimed at something far away. He seemed like he could hurt a baby. “Bump duh bum,” he said, and smiled at me. “You’re judging me with your eyes.”

  But his car had been in its space in the parking lot earlier, and I had watched Peggy climb into it to drive up to Indy to see if she could scratch him up, and it was 21 degrees outside but she had told me to stay out looking for at least a few hours, to ask anyone I saw walking around if they’d seen him.

  “Junkies know junkies, and junkies are always on foot.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “It’s getting to be like that,” she told me. “No one’s seen him, and there’s really no one to call. If we call the cops, what will they do with you?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I wouldn’t be a minor much longer, but until then I had to be somewhere, and I didn’t want to go back to a group home. The last one was full of ants that climbed on the walls. Everything about group homes is creepy-crawly.

  “I’ll look,” I promised Peggy. “I’ll look everywhere.”

  And there I was on foot moving in whatever direction I was aimed in as though the streets of Opioid, Indiana, would somehow cough up my uncle from the concrete and he’d lie there on the sidewalk gasping for breath and coming to, look up to me after a minute lost in a junkie jag and have me drag him home.

  It’s weird combing the streets for stray junkies.

  The day was a filthy gray cat rubbing its ribs on the asphalt. Purring its coldness. Whipping its tail.

  I couldn’t stream shit for music, and I only had two albums on my phone. One was a Wu-Tang album, but it was just instrumentals.

  For about three months back in Texas I had tried to be a rapper, but then Erika told me I couldn’t.

  “That’s not okay,” she told me.

  I’d used this Wu-Tang song called “Think Differently” for my beat, because you couldn’t use a beat everyone knew, and Wu-Tang was just old enough to be forgotten but just new enough to sound good, and I’d written these bars:

  I’m the world’s deadliest orphan

  And you cannot get rid of me

  Pack me up and ship me off

  And call my breaths felonies

  I am not a broken pencil

  My sharp end’s for sentences

  Mess it up and turn around

  and rub to get rid of it

  “Aye, no,” said Erika.

  “What?”

  “It’s no good. You’re too white.”

  And my rap career was over.

  But I was listening to Wu-Tang instrumentals and walking up and down the streets thinking, since the day was a gray cat: here, junkie, junkie, junkie.

  I was looking in parked cars and under parked cars. I dunno, I was looking everywhere.

  Now, remember when I told you that I am always finding the last thing I was looking for? Well sometimes I find things I forgot I was looking for at all.

  I was on some street, hell I can’t even remember now, and I was carving my eyes this way and that, and I heard a kind of “hoo hoo,” but it wasn’t an owl.

  It was Autistic Ross, propped up on a retaining wall in front of some yard, smiling and licking his teeth and batting his eyes. He had his hands together and he was rubbing them. He was wearing overalls tucked into rubber boots. An unzipped windbreaker, and a shirt that said jesus saves on the chest. He looked like a candy farmer. Like, if there existed a world where candy was farmed, where farmers went out into the dirt and yanked up lollipops, that’s what Autistic Ross would be.

  “Autistic Ross,” I said to him.

  And he said, “Ho, ho, hello.” And he smiled and his cheeks blushed joyfully. Some people just like what they are. When people are like that, they’re always happy to see other people. “Young man,” he said. “Young man.” His voice sounded like he had a bubble in his throat or like his saliva was sour.

  I had talked to him once or twice in some place I couldn’t remember, about a friend he used to have. A baseball player. And I asked, “Do you remember me?”

  “Not at all,” he said. He squinted. “Should I? Are you going to try to sell me a car?”

  “Oh, I don’t . . .”

  “We family?”

  “No.”

  “I got family all over and I never really learned to drive,” he said. “I got a cousin in Alaska. I’ve only talked to him once. On the phone. I asked how’s Alaska, and he said it was cold. But it’s cold here,” he said, “so maybe that’s not far. Is Alaska far?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s far.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “It sounds far. Like the moon.” He laughed. “Like the dadgum moon.”

  “Dadgum,” I said, because I was jealous of how he said it. I wanted to feel the word in my mouth. But I don’t think it felt for me the way it did for him. For him, it looked like he felt sweetly guilty for saying it. Like when you’re five and you say the word vagina to your mom.

  “I don’t got family on the moon though,” he said. He winked. “That I know of.” Ross started looking at his hands. Like he was hoping that in them there was some clue to what he should talk about next, and there was a weird quiet moment, so I figured I’d ask about my uncle.

  “I don’t guess you know Joe Riggle?”

  “Joe?” said Ross. His mouth wrestled around on his face, and his gaze drifted this way and that. “Not one iota.”

  “Iota,” I repeated.

  “Not a drop or a dime. But I’m working on something really great.”

  “What’s that?” I said, and I expected to hear some dirty secret. Like Autistic Ross knew a place to watch some pretty teen through a window get naked before showering, or where you could stand and listen to people fucking on an evening.
<
br />   “Look at this,” he said. And he held up his hand like this:

  I backed up. “Why you doing that?”

  “It’s a game,” Autistic Ross said.

  “A game?”

  “For a game.”

  The whole world seemed to shift. Go crooked. Things were becoming things they never were, and I didn’t know if I’d ever felt that way. Like all of Opioid, Indiana, was shrieking to a close, and I started thinking my mom was near me. Like I could smell her or feel her breath or something, and the next thing I knew, I was jogging away from Autistic Ross with this vague notion that I was being watched or manipulated or cared for. I couldn’t quite tell. There was a presence and it had intentions, but I couldn’t explain it. I buried my hands in my pockets, curious at the enormity of it all.

  I got a text from a number I didn’t know, and it said, “Still want a job?”

  “Maybe,” I texted. “Who’s asking?”

  “Chef,” the text said. “At Broth. In?”

  I needed something to take my mind off Autistic Ross’s hand. “Sure?”

  “Call,” Chef texted me.

  So, I did.

  “Here’s the deal,” Chef said over the phone. “It’s not cooking. Yet.” There was all kinds of commotion going on behind her. Voices and banging. The sound of water running or simmering food. “My dishwasher has to take a day for family stuff and I need someone to cover Friday night. I thought tonight you’d come in and learn. You’ll get paid, and I’ll feed you. Friday night you’ll come in for real. You in?”

  I didn’t want to wash dishes, but I wanted to do something. So, I told her I’d be there. I had nowhere else to go. I moved along the streets hoping to chance into junkies and trying not to think about Remote.

  Chef was behind Broth having a cigarette, leaned against a wall, the greasy alleyway glimmering around her. She had tattoos on her arms. On her right forearm there was a knife perched in flowers. On her left forearm there was a band of pans rimmed with fire. Her arms rested at her sides. Her right leg was bent so her clog rested against the brick wall of Broth. Her cigarette dangled from her lips. She plucked it free when she saw me. “There he is,” she said. “Lil Tex. Can I call you that? I call everyone something, and you kids are all something. Lil Peep. Lil Pump. Or you could be Omelette.” She took a drag and blew smoke. “Don’t get into these,” she said, kind of holding the cigarette at me. “They’re impossible to kick.”