by Alan Furst
YOUR DAY IN THE BARREL
Alan Furst
"I don’t hear a different drummer, YOU hear a different drummer.’’
John Accardo
Some guy with a mule probably worked this field a hundred years ago. It’s long gone to scrub, weeds, mountain laurel, and stuff that grabs your ankles and scratches along your pants. We’ve got a section flattened out for ourselves underneath what Genelle says is a Mountain Ash. She’s rolling a straight cigarette out of a Bull Durham can, sitting cross-legged with her black hair hanging down the front of her combat jacket. She says “This is good ole war movie stuff, man. I can see Bogey in his white trench coat down the end of the meadow.”
I’ve had a matchbook in my hand for a half-hour, but the July dusk is taking forever. We’ve got four auto-supply-store flares at the edges of the field, which is way up in the mountains north of Renovo, Pennsylvania, at the end of a ball-busting dirt road. Genelle tongues her cigarette closed and lights it with a wooden match. “Can I roll you one?” she says.
“I’ll get a store-bought,” I say and wade on over to the Highway Yacht, as we call it, actually a Winnebago motor home I bought last year, used, for twelve thousand cash. I open the shotgun-side door and grope around in the glove compartment for Marlboros. Robbie, Genelle’s four-year-old, is asleep in his bunk, and I can hear him chuffing and muttering. I take a long look up but the sky is still bluish-gray. Too early. Nothing can happen until black dark.
“If it’s Bogey waitin’ in the field, who do you expect is flyin’ the plane?” says Genelle.
“Let’s hope it’s Robert Ryan or somebody like that. Somebody who don’t make dumb moves.”
“Really. If it’s Peter Lorre or that other one, the fat one, we’re fucked.”
“Yeah. You remember how much time we get on these flares?”
“It said on the wrapping two hours. You don’t need those matches, y’know. You just peel the tape and the air lights ’em.”
“You’re a directions-reader, lady.”
“Fer sure. I was raised on box-cakes.”
“I wish to hell it would decide to get dark.” But it’s graying-out real good now, and I beat my way through the weeds and little swarms of bugs out to the first flare. There’s black friction tape across one end and I strip that off and pull back a section of the wrapping. Nothing. I’m halfway around to complain about it when there’s a sputter and a pop and the end lights up an intense red. It kind of sizzles, reminds me of trucks jack-knifed on the turnpike. I do the other three and sit down next to Genelle to wait. She says, “You think anyone saw us come up here?”
“Maybe,” I say, nodding towards the Yacht, “but people in those things turn up everywhere. In July, all America takes to the highways.”
“You got a set time with these folks?”
“Unh-uh. Just after dark. I gave ’em coordinates on a Geodetic Survey map. He’ll fly around ’till he sees the flares.”
“What happens if we get company all of a sudden?” “Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.” She hears the edge in my voice and backs off. Starts winding her hair around one ear.
She is, I guess, my employee in a crazy way. She doesn’t get a salary, but three months ago I bought her a pair of Bose 901 speakers and I keep her in dope and groceries and I’ll buy Robbie a toy or something now and then. We ball when we feel like it, maybe that’s part of the job, but mainly she and the kid are my cover. Instant family—instant respectability. She’s got a wig in the Yacht that makes her look like those Atlanta housewives on TV who want the soft diapers for their kid’s tush. A white blouse with a bow at the top and a plaid skirt. We give Robbie a big, mean-looking fucker of a plastic machine gun. Abracadabra, that nice family down the street, invisible.
I can’t say if Genelle likes the job. She doesn’t talk about what she feels, stays right on what we’re doing mostly. She could take a fall if I did, a good hard one. But she’s been worse places than jail. She left home, some asshole town in Louisiana, when she was fifteen, eight years ago, in ’62, before you could be a flower child and Life magazine told the folks to take care of you. Maybe she hustled her ass, she never said. Robbie’s father plays drums in a band in L.A., you’d know his name if I mentioned it. Whatever might happen, our thing has its advantages from where she sees it. She’s got an apartment on the Lower East Side, what hip accountants call the East Village. I pay the rent on that and stay there sometimes. I'm away a lot and she can ball whoever as long as she doesn’t give me the clap. She’s got welfare and an allotment from some sucker in the Navy who she convinced the kid was his. Genelle makes out.
It’s getting into night real fast all of a sudden; most of the birds have made it home, a few fireflies are out and a cricket starts up somewhere under the Yacht. Suddenly there’s a drone way above us and we both snap our heads up in the air, but it’s just some jet full of folks probably headed for Miami Beach to take advantage of the summer rates and work on their skin cancer. There’s a nice little wind springing up that blows the bugs back off the end of the meadow. Why it doesn’t blow a new shipment of bugs to where we’re sitting I’ve never been able to figure out. If the wind blew west long enough all the bugs would be in California, not that those folks would notice.
“You want a sandwich?” That’s me, the “boss,” making up to her.
“What kind we got left?”
“Egg salad. Fart food.”
“The Yacht’s big enough, I’ll take a half.”
I get there and halfway back, unwinding Saran wrap, when I hear a plane real close. The noise starts loud, gets louder, then rides way up there loud so that I squint my eyes. It’s winding up and down the scale and bouncing all around the field. I can’t stop myself from looking over my shoulder to see if some Appalachian hill-munchkin might be running down the road, shakin’ his iron spoon at all the racket. It’s just barely turned night and I hope to hell that’s the right Piper Apache up there and that someone up in these mountains isn’t holding some goddamn sky-diving jamboree. Egg salad in hand I tearass over to the Yacht and reach in from the passenger side and fumble the lights on. My feet are suddenly at the wrong end of my body so I dive under the dash and start pressing the dim-switch with my thumb, on-off, hi-lo, hi-lo. That egg salad is squished somewhere underneath me and it smells awful strong all of a sudden.
I slide out backwards in time to see the plane make a pass across the meadow. Nothing. The sound dies a little, changes pitch, and then comes right at us, from the end of the meadow this time. It seems like he’s gonna sit down on top of us from that angle and suddenly Genelle and I are both magically on our stomachs, but his nose flips up as a square shape tumbles out the side of the plane and I just barely hear Genelle holler “There it is!”
“It” is a good-sized crate bouncing around in the weeds out there. The Piper’s roar disappears over the hill behind us just in time for me to hear the crate settle with a splintery wooden crunch. I jump back into the Yacht and flick the lights off and take out after Genelle fast, but she still beats me there, black hair flying all over the place and hand-made stuck in the comer of her mouth.
Somebody took some trouble making this crate. The outside plywood is all smashed up but inside there’s metal tape holding eight cardboard boxes firmly in a cube. We poke at it for a minute and then head back to the Yacht for tools. We get a battery-powered lantern, a plastic version of the old track-walker’s lamp, wire cutters, and a Big Bob’s Burgers order blank that looks like it should feed an entire Boy-Scout troop for a year: 800 hamburgers, and like that. Genelle holds the light and I start snipping wire. The first box slides out and I tear the top open, popping copper staples out. Inside there’s brown butcher paper and then the bricks wrapp
ed in heavy plastic. “Hold this,” I say, and hand her the order form. The second, third, and fourth boxes are the same, but I tear open the fifth and it’s the assortment, the chocolate-covered cherry, the electric trains. I say, “You read, I’ll sort.”
We’re moving fast now ’cause this would be a very bad time for company, unless it was to be very understanding company, and up in these mountains they aren’t very understanding unless it happens to be a poached deer you’re standing over. Then they just take the hindquarters, say howdy-doo, and stroll off back into the night. Genelle reads, I unwrap. I suppose it’s a little like that nice young couple who just rrloved to Scarsdale from Akron so that hubby could be the new sales manager; there’s the gentlemen of the moving industry hovering politely in the background and wifey biting her lip as she reads the list they made real careful.
“Five thousand double-rich chocolate malteds.” “That’s 5,000 hits of acid, on 500-mg vitamin C tabs, and here it is.”
I’m not counting to five thousand but I’m a pretty good estimator, just like the lady in the local dairy market on Essex Street can carve an exact quarter pound cream cheese out of a huge white block.
“Good. Next you’re supposed to have 5,000 fish-wich specials. Yegh.”
“Just a second.” I scrabble around and find the mescaline, in purple gelatin caps. “Next,” I say.
“Five thousand golden-fried apple turnovers.” That’s the Ritalin, and it jumps right into my hand.
“One thousand french fries.” I search for a bit and can’t find it. Then I see a corner of a shirt cardboard sticking up between the kilo bricks in the bottom of the crate. I pull it out and there are neat rows of amyl nitrate snappers in their original pharmaceutical company cellophane, taped down tight. At the top of the cardboard it says in big red script letters “Good Morning. I have medium starch in my collar and cuffs.”
Genelle flashes the light back on the list. She says “One pound of, ah, Tartar Sauce?”
“Cocaine.”
“No shit. For us?”
“For special customers.”
I lay back the folded plastic a bit and put a touch of white powder over my canine tooth. The whole mouth doesn’t get numb so its not Procaine, PCP, the dentist’s high, but the tooth is like it isn’t there any more, so it’s the real thing, though I’ll give it a more thorough test later. “Tastes right.”
“This next says 800 Big Bob’s Burgers.”
“I ain’t gonna try to check that out here. Let’s move.”
We each take the end of a box and walk to the Yacht. After a half-hour we’re both sweating and it’s very dark. We’ve got the boxes piled into the middle of the Yacht—you don’t hide 800 keys of grass—and the drugstore fruit salad goes into a hideyhole I built into the door of the refrigerator. In summer weather, psychedelics have been known to take themselves if left to get warm. To find that stuff, you’d have to do Chinese puzzle tricks with the butter-keeper. If I get busted, better to be some college type hauling grass for the frat house, than a DEALER.
Genelle gets into the wig and the rest of her silent-majority uniform, I get a very fast flash of her bare tits, and I put on a lime-green short-sleeved shirt and a pair of tortoise shell eyeglasses with window glass in them. I back around on the dirt road and get us headed in the right direction. We’re back in civilization in a half-hour. Genelle is in the back, making Robbie a peanut butter sandwich and they’ve got Owen Marshall on the portable TV so it must be after ten. We do a good half-hour of highway before I see the Best Western I picked out last week from our motel guide. “Do your number,” I yell back. Genelle comes up front and gives her wig a little wifely pat—truth to tell, I always get a little homy when she wears that rig; I must have a secret desire to fuck housewives in Atlanta. We pull into the gravel courtyard, red and green signs flashing and the No Vacancy up with lots of little bugs flying around it. I crunch over to the manager’s office, looking harassed as any midsummer tourist driving around umpteen tons of next year’s salary. Outside the van, despite the shirt and the glasses, there’s still something about me that says ‘uh-oh,’ ’cause the manager is very busy working his face into a “sorry folks . . expression, just like they taught him at the School of Hotel-Motel Management, when I say “Hello there, the name’s Jim Adler, I believe we’ve got a reservation.”
He’s in his sixties, a white-haired Pennsylvania pixie, retired from his own little business probably, and at this time of night he’s real pleased to be dealing with someone who thinks about reservations. “Adler, y’say?”
“Yup.”
“Here it is. That’ll be number sixteen around the other side.” He glances up at the clock. “You just about got in under the wire, Mr. Adler.”
“Well, the little feller got sick on the way down.” If I lay it on any thicker, we’re gonna kiss each other. I turn to the door, “Honey, go on in and put Jimmy to sleep, I’ll be along in a minute.”
“Okay dear. Come on there, Jimsey, you’re gonna sleep in a real bed tonight.” Christ if she doesn’t have just a cunt-hair of Georgia accent in it too. Now I’m really homy.
Robbie staggers out, he digs that something is going on, ’cause no way in the world is that bitch in the dynel curls his real mama and he ain’t no way nobody named “Jimsey,” but kids love make believe, and Robbie’s got a little ham in him just like his dad, back there drumming up a sweaty storm in L.A.
I turn back to polish off my senior citizen. “We’d like to pay now ’cause we get us a real early start in the morning,” and I whip out my wallet and slide a little old American Express card at him. It says
Jas K Adler 1405 Pearson Dr Fullerton Cal 92631
and when he mails in that tear-away tissue paper, Jas K Adler will pay his American Express bill right on the nut from a checking account at the First National Bank of Fullerton Cal and all the computers will agree that old Jas is a right guy: Best Western, American Express, and the First National Bank. I park the Yacht, pat the dope goodnight, close up a special lock on the door that ain’t gonna be opened by the simply curious or slightly larcenous, and go into unit 16. Unit 16 is T-shaped and Robbie is snoring lightly on a cot down at the end of the T in the corner, Cavett is looking cute on the color TV with no sound on; the air-conditioning is whirring up on high, and on a big blond-wood motel bed, Genelle is lying on her stomach with her eyes closed and her hands folded under her cheek and she is gently grinding her lovely white ass. But she isn’t completely naked, she’s wearing that curly housewife wig.
Any small businessman will tell you that considerate employees can make meeting that payroll worthwhile.
James K. Adler of Fullerton, California, is not an actual person, but he makes up for that by being two legal people. The house on Pearson Drive is rented from a management company—perhaps it is owned by some extralegal folks of some variety—as the computers get hungrier, people get faster on their feet, what my high school bio teacher would have called evolution. It is lived in by a fellow my own age, twenty-six, who found it necessary to go to Canada a few years ago—some unpleasantness about keeping the world safe for democracy I suspect, but I don’t know and don’t want to know. He works in the area as James K. Adler, files income tax, votes, and owns a Malamute Husky registered to that name. As Adler he legally owns a 1969 Winnebago, and has a driver’s license. The Yacht he’s never seen, and he doesn’t drive a car because I’ve got the Adler license, registration and title, and the Yacht, of course. We sign just about the same signature and have social security numbers in common, but I don’t get to use that except for identification. We have copies of the same draft card (for ID) but we’re not registered with the Fullerton draft board. Last year, according to his 1040, he started a consulting business and made $10,000 and change. This he banked in 7%certificates. It’s my ten thou, of course, although he could steal it, but would run the risk of becoming nameless, stateless, and etc. less.
None of this is foolproof. It would all fold up under inv
estigation, but the California “Adler” is careful not to do anything that would bring the FBI hordes screaming down around his ears. We’re set up so that if I get busted my phone call goes to a special number, which calls him, and he’s fast on his way to being a Canadian. Again.
My name is Roger Levin. I come from a nice home in Great Neck, Long Island. My father owns a factory that makes small electronic parts that go into slightly bigger electronic parts without which your vacuum cleaner won’t work. My mother plays canasta, cooks on the maid’s night off, and worries mainly about my two younger sisters getting pregnant: the older one is married and my mother worries she won’t; the younger isn’t and my mother worries she will.
High School in Great Neck is Dope School.
That’s what folks do.
Some do speed and stay up all night rapping with each other about speed. Some do acid and stay up all night rapping with each other about the universe. Some do just humongous amounts of grass and stay up all night eating Chinese food. Some do smack and, in the daytime when all the night people are sleeping either at home or in high school, they come by and steal their stereos. The same stereo has been owned by seven or eight different people in Great Neck and when you go visiting other freaks you never know what particular possession of yours might show up.
So it’s just a hop, skip and jump to dealing, if that’s your personality. When I was in college I read books by Philip Roth and Herbert Gold and others about Jews. All these Jews had problems either because they were Jews or because they couldn’t fuck or because they couldn’t find anybody to fuck or all three. This didn’t have much to do with me. In Great Neck if you and a girl were in love, or if you just liked each other, or maybe just got high together, you fucked. The people I knew were first and foremost freaks; freaks with Jewish parents, freaks with Italian parents, freaks with Irish parents, black parents, WASP parents, what-have-you parents. These parents were the ones darting in and out of the synagogues and churches on Saturday and Sunday mornings and various ethnic delis on Sunday nights. We all ate Chinese food and we found God at four in the morning, usually while rolling around on the linoleum floor of somebody’s rec room, underneath the Ping-Pong table.
