by David Joy
“You pull that tab and it’ll tell you everything you need to do. You just push it down into somebody’s leg and, buddy, they’ll come back to life like Frankenstein!”
“Where’d you get it?”
“My old man’s a deputy,” Turtle said. “I took this shit out of the trunk of his take-home one night while he was sleeping. This here is your tax dollars, friend.”
“All right, Turkle, I about got you ready.”
Turtle had his eyes on the needle Breedlove held and Denny saw the boy swallow hard. There was a nervous smile and curiosity in his eyes and Denny recognized everything that expression carried, the want, the fear, all of it. He also knew the feeling that would come, how that first shot would be the greatest thing that kid had ever felt. It’d be like finding Jesus. It’d be like stumbling drunk into heaven. He knew that the rest of that boy’s life he’d chase that feeling and never find it again, because you couldn’t ever get back to that place. There was the before and there was the after.
Deep down Denny wanted to stop him, but he didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He stood there as the boy tied off his arm, pulling the knot tight with his teeth. Breedlove gave him instructions and the kid did what he was told.
Denny licked his lips and for a split second he caught this strange mood like he was about to cry. There was an immense guilt and sadness and he didn’t have any idea why the fuck he felt like that, but he couldn’t stand it so he looked away at the television screen. Judge Judy was on and some crazy-eyed broad with bright red lipstick was suing an ex-boyfriend for illegally repossessing a car he helped her buy, and the man was countersuing for a heap of unpaid parking tickets.
When Denny turned around, Breedlove was swinging the piece of surgical tubing they’d used to tie off Turtle’s arm round and round like a lasso. The boy’s eyes were closed and his head was leaned back against the wall. In a second or two, Turtle blinked lazily. His legs moved like he was climbing the rungs of a ladder and the turquoise comforter covering the bed bunched around his body. He was staring into the face of God.
“You’re up,” Breedlove said, and those words broke a trance Denny’d found. It took a second or two for any of it to register.
“You go ahead,” Denny answered. “I’ll hold off a minute.”
“No,” Breedlove said, “I go last.”
Denny knew it was a power move. He knew Breedlove didn’t want to shoot a bag and lose his wits. If a man made that mistake, chances are he’d come out of the dream and find everything gone. You could shoot up swimming in money and wake up drowning with nothing. Shit like that happened in the blink of an eye. Denny knew from experience.
“I’ll go,” Ricky said.
Denny’d almost forgotten Ricky was there until he spoke. Ricky rose from the toilet where he was sitting and came across the room.
The three of them were crammed in the corner by the door because that was the only countertop in the place and that’s where Breedlove had broken out the dope. Crossing the room, Denny leaned against the far wall to find space to breathe. Breedlove fell back on the bed and rubbed his hands up and down his face like he was trying to stay awake or starting to come down or who the hell knows what.
Denny watched as Ricky emptied three stamps onto the counter. Every junkie had his own way of doing things. Ricky chopped at the heroin with a driver’s license like he was cutting up a line of coke, scraped the dope into the spoon, and licked the powder from the edge of the card. Anyone who’d been at it awhile learned to tell what the heroin was cut with by the way it tasted, sometimes by specks of color—powdered milk, starch, quinine. He added water and mixed the solution with the tip of his finger before he hit the metal with flame. Smoke rose and when the bowl cooled he filled the needle.
Everything Denny needed to stay straight all day was loaded into that one shot. It was a good bit of dope, but Denny didn’t really think about it. His habit wasn’t all that crazy. He’d seen a fellow once who needed a gram and a half every twenty-four hours to stave off the sickness. Sometimes he thought if it ever got that bad he’d fire up one big shot and huck himself off the Fontana Dam just to get out from under the burden.
Ricky leaned in real close to a crackled mirror that hung above the sink. He canted his head to the side and studied himself from the corners of his eyes as if he was about to take a razor from his pocket and shave the underside of his jaw. With his chin pulled back, the veins in his neck pushed against his skin and Denny couldn’t believe what he was watching, couldn’t quit thinking, This crazy son of a bitch is about to shoot his throat.
It was like watching a little kid play with one of those collapsing push puppets, the kind where you press the bottom and the body crumples. Ricky jabbed that needle into his neck, and as soon as he pressed the plunger, his legs gave out from under him and it sounded like a heap of potatoes hitting the floor.
Breedlove rocked forward on the bed and stared at the place Ricky’d fallen. Turtle had his head cocked, mouth open with a strange look like he knew something horrible had happened but was too stupid or too far gone to know what. For a second or two, nobody moved. The only sounds were the air conditioner motor rattling in the window, water dripping inside the A/C, and Judge Judy giving that red-lipped woman hell on the television.
Turtle spoke three syllables that drew out like a paragraph. “What happened?” He smacked his lips and mumbled again, “What’s happening?” and no one answered. No one said a fucking thing.
For a few seconds everything was frozen. And then it wasn’t. Time sped into fast-forward and Denny’s mind couldn’t keep up. He realized what was happening, what he’d just witnessed, and he knew there wasn’t a second to spare. The naloxone shot Turtle was showing off had slipped off the bed and fallen onto the linoleum floor. Denny snatched the box up and was to the other side of the bed before Turtle could finish his next question. He ripped the case off and the electronic voice started to feed him instructions.
Ricky was lying facedown on the floor, his body just as straight as a board, and it was funny looking how there was no bend at all in his elbows or knees, how a man could wind up that flat in a space so tight. Denny leaned down and rolled Ricky over so that he was stretched out like a cadaver. His eyes were open and he was staring straight up through the ceiling, straight up toward the sky, off into the place where everything converged. Denny pulled the red tab on the bottom of the device and the electronic voice continued.
“To inject, place black end against outer thigh, then press firmly and hold in place for five seconds.” Denny wondered if the kit would work through baggy jeans, but he didn’t have time to think and no one to ask. He jammed the device down with both hands and heard a loud click. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One.” A set of tones beeped, then the voice said, “Injection complete,” and nothing happened. Nothing at all.
Ricky didn’t rise like Frankenstein. He didn’t come back to life like Jesus. He was flat on his back stone cold dead without enough breath in his lungs to lift a feather.
Denny’s mind went wild then. “That boy got another one of these?” he squawked. He looked up at Breedlove sitting there on the edge of the bed watching everything unfold.
“No,” Breedlove said. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think he does. I think he just had the one, man.” His voice was calm and collected as if Denny had asked to bum a smoke.
“What’s happening?” Turtle muttered, and Denny looked over at him and that boy’s face was just as white as paper and there was a sound buzzing in Denny’s ears, a ringing, and right then none of it seemed real. It all felt like make-believe.
This was one of those moments in a man’s life when looking back he would remember every detail with a surreal sort of clarity—the way the sunlight filtered gray through the blinds, the way the room smelled like mildew, how the floor was sticky against his palms, how the air was so cold that every hair on his body stood o
n end, how his tongue was dry and leathery against the backs of his teeth. There was something unexplainable about the way the brain gulped up all of that information. It was as if the mind had its own gauge for significance, as if the unconscious could take the reins at any moment and say, This is important. This is meaningful. Pay attention.
Denny made a fist and rubbed his knuckles under Ricky’s nose. Ricky’s head bobbed around under Denny’s hand, but his eyes were gone. Straddling Ricky’s stomach, Denny put his hands in the center of Ricky’s chest and started compressions. He had no idea what he was doing aside from what he’d seen in movies, but he knew he had to do something. He forced his hands down with all his weight and he felt Ricky’s sternum crack. The sound was like knuckles popping. The ribs snapped with each thrust until it was all just mushy beneath him and that sensation was so unexpected and jarring that he just stopped. There was this feeling that he was doing more harm than good.
“Give me your phone,” he said. He was out of breath, eyes wide, running his fingers through the sides of his hair.
Breedlove looked confused. He was still just sitting there watching all of it from where he sat at the edge of the bed. “What are you talking about?”
“We’ve got to call somebody. We have to help him. We don’t get him some help, this boy’s good as dead.”
Breedlove’s hand came to rest on his pocket.
“Give me your fucking phone!” Denny screamed and he stood up and started grabbing for Breedlove’s hand and Breedlove came off the bed and shoved Denny hard against the door. There had to be a phone in the campground office and there wasn’t time to stand around arguing. Denny grabbed the doorknob and cracked the door but Ricky’s body was in the way.
“You open that door and I’ll blow your fucking brains out there in the yard.”
Denny looked over his shoulder and Breedlove had a top-heavy pistol, one of those Hi-Point jobs with a slide like a brick, aimed at the bridge of his nose. He eased the door closed and turned slowly until they were squared off. There were only a few feet between them, the width of a body at their feet.
People always talked about how life flashed before your eyes during moments like that, when you’re staring down a barrel, but for Denny Rattler it wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t think a single thing as he dropped his head and bulldozed forward, taking that lanky son of a bitch the length of the room.
They crashed against the far wall and Denny kept his arms locked around Breedlove’s waist. He could smell the heat of him, a mix of sweat, stale deodorant, and old clothes. Breedlove’s feet were spread wide and Denny was trying to roll him when the first blast of white-hot light painted the backs of his eyes.
Denny dropped his hands behind Breedlove’s knees and drove forward to spear him to the floor. He felt Breedlove’s legs lock around his body, thighs digging into his ribs. Before a clear thought could find him, the pistol cracked him in the back of the head. His vision flashed like lightning and his mind shook in the wake. There was an acidic metal taste in the back of his throat like he’d stuck a battery to his tongue. His vision blurred and he blinked hard to try and hold his composure, but this was not a matter of fight or heart. Breedlove hammered the back of Denny’s skull again and again. It was inevitable that the light succumbed to darkness.
FOURTEEN
Denny Rattler woke to children screaming and laughing, the clap and clop of sneakers slapping pavement. The back of his head was on fire. He was on the floor and he could feel the filth of the linoleum gritty against his cheek. From where he lay, he had a clear view across the tile. He could see dust bunnies under the bed, Ricky’s body on the other side, a rectangle of light silhouetting the torso. The door was open and he saw a shadow shoot past outside. It took a second or two for things to come clear, a moment longer for anything to register.
Denny pushed himself to his knees and traced the back of his head tenderly with his fingertips. When he looked there was blood, and he wiped it across the front of his shirt, three thin stripes drawn across his stomach. There was blood on the floor, a small puddle the size of a dinner plate. Head wounds were always messy. Cut your finger, bleed a drop; cut your head and gush a gallon. Didn’t make sense, but he was no doctor.
When he stood, he came up too fast, rubber-legged and woozy, his head swimming. The room took a half turn real quick like he was on a merry-go-round and that vertigo feeling in the pit of his stomach almost made him sick. Denny wiped an open hand down the length of his face and swallowed a few mouthfuls of air. Slowly the cabin stilled.
Three blond-headed boys with hair like straw chased each other outside. The air was dusty and the light showed the day getting on toward evening. The door stood open and there was a dead man sprawled like a doormat across the entrance. Denny crossed the room and looked out onto the small yard and fire pit, the broken pavement cutting between ramshackle cabins.
His LeBaron was gone. Breedlove and Turtle had stolen his keys and split. Denny was anxious, but right then, as strange as it was, the feeling had little to do with his car or the body or the police. The hardest part was that they’d run off with the dope and he didn’t have anything but the spare change in his pocket. He didn’t even have the kit from the trunk of his car. In a few hours, his palms would start sweating and that feeling would spread over him until he was absolutely consumed, and this time there wasn’t going to be any way to avoid it.
He pushed Ricky’s right leg back with the heel of his boot so that he could squeeze the door closed. The television was off and there were no lights on in the cabin. Everything was too still. The air conditioner chugged loudly but the room felt eerily quiet and that lack of sound made him that much more nervous. He stepped across Ricky’s body and ran his hand inside his shirt so that he could press the power on the TV without leaving fingerprints.
The news was on and the anchors were talking about the wildfires. They’d never seen anything like it. Ten thousand acres burned in Tellico. Sixty-five hundred in Chestnut Knob. Seven hundred had burned in Dicks Creek. Another seven hundred back in Cherokee. The world was burning down around him and the way he figured, it had to be a sign.
He shuffled backward on his tiptoes with one foot on each side of the body. The soles of Ricky’s feet were black, cut and scratched from walking barefoot from God knows where. The jeans he wore were cinched tight around his waist with a long leather belt that had been notched with a pocketknife or ice pick to fit him. His shirt rode high on his stomach and the snake pictured on the front curved up his chest with fangs aimed at his throat. The needle was still in his neck. A dark bruise that stretched across the left side of his face was yellow at the rim, his left eyelid the color of muscadines. Both of his eyes were open. Denny had a hard time looking at him.
Denny Rattler didn’t know this fellow from Adam, but that didn’t change a thing. Way he figured, one man wasn’t all that different from another. Life was the way it was and dead was dead. That was no easy thing. Sooner or later it would be him sprawled out on a floor somewhere and he hoped when that happened whoever found him would treat him with decency, whether he deserved it or not. He took a step forward and knelt like he was going to sit on Ricky’s stomach. Hovering there, he reached out and brushed his hand across Ricky’s eyes to close them.
The auto-injector lay on the floor by Ricky’s hand and seeing that just to his right reminded Denny of everything he needed to wipe clean. He picked up the device and scrubbed the surface with his shirt. He needed to get his prints off everything he’d touched, mop the blood from the floor, and get the fuck out of Dodge. The longer he stayed put, the more likely it was someone would find him there.
There were two flat pillows on the bed and he slipped the cases off to use as rags. He had to walk back over the body to get to the sink and he was careful not to put his fingers on the faucet handles as he turned on the cold water. On the other side of the room, he knelt next to the puddle of blo
od and soaked up most of it with the dry pillowcase, then mopped the rest with the wet one. He made his way around the room wiping down everything he’d touched with his shirt, and when he was certain there was nothing left that could put him there, he got ready to hit the road.
Standing by the door, he felt like he had to say something, like at the very least he owed the man that. He looked down and swore, “First phone I get to, I’ll call somebody and tell them you’re here.” When he said those words, he made a cross over his body like he was ending a prayer. He wasn’t Catholic. He’d never done this in his whole life, wasn’t even sure what he believed, but he meant what he’d said down to his bones and something about making that symbol seemed like a testament to that.
When he opened the door, he didn’t know where he was headed. There was a gas station and a Dollar General two miles down the road. He imagined if he lit out over the mountain he could make the trek in less than an hour. Slipping out of the cabin, he glanced around to make sure no one was watching and he hit the woods fast. He didn’t stop or look back for a while.
When he was sure he was far enough away from the campground, he stuffed the bloody rags in a burned-out stump hole and kicked leaves over them. He had to stop there for a second to catch his breath. He’d only made it a half-mile but for some reason the journey felt much longer. A sick feeling was starting to take root in his gut. He had no way to stop what was coming.
FIFTEEN
Rudolph had chain-smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes over the course of a couple hours. He’d smoke three or four inside, then remember that his old lady had scolded him for smoking in the trailer on account of the landlord and the hundred-dollar deposit, and smoke the next couple pacing the porch. He couldn’t keep still, and that was one of the reasons Rodriguez had always preferred junkies to tweakers.
