Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  Air-pillow insoles? Shaving cream? Clay could find nothing he wanted, and getting things he needed — hair bands for instance — seemed sleazy. As he stood by the candy rack, weighing packages in his hand, cellophane crackling, Marshburn started up the aisle. Good, thought Clay when he discovered the expired box, I can return this later and get my dime back.

  When he felt Marshburn approaching he stepped into the aisle, blocking the way. Though the broom and the advancing flank of dirt stopped at Clay’s shoes, the cloud of dust preceding it continued, billowing up the aisle.

  “Can I get some help here?” asked Clay.

  Marshburn nodded to the pharmacy counter, where Ruth Crosby worked a register.

  “She’s open,” he said, curling the line of dust into a clump and herding it around Clay’s feet and up the aisle. Clay waited until Ruth was free, small-talked a minute about her job, husband, parties they’d heard about, Linda.

  “Can you call Mr. Marshburn over here?” he said finally.

  “Mister Marshburn? You mean Neal? What do you need him for?”

  “I need to ask his advice on something. Man to man.”

  Ruth laughed so loud that Clay was stunned. Rippling out over the aisles, her laugh caused nearby customers to swivel their heads and smile toward Clay and Ruth.

  She looked down at the box of candy Clay held below the counter. “You need some supplies, right? That’s the word guys use when I wait on them that kills me the deadest.”

  “I ride bareback, Ruth. You should know that.”

  Ruth kept her smile but froze it, stretched out the corners of her mouth until it was the generic eight-to-five smile of a salesclerk. In the space of ten seconds she seemed ten years older. “It’s hard to remember these things, Clay. Like, do you remember every meal you ever ate in your life?”

  “Just the ones that stood out,” said Clay. Ruth laughed again, as loud as before, but this time her laughter drew no smiles from passersby.

  “Obviously you’re not embarrassed to buy rubbers from a girl like me.”

  “It’s not about rubbers, Ruth. Really, girl, get your mind out of the gutter.”

  Ruth gave him another insincere smile. “That’s the gutter to you, I guess. So what do you want with him? Advice on an athletic support?”

  “You ask a lot more questions than I remember.”

  “I’m a lot more curious about things than I was when I was hanging around you.”

  “You act like his lawyer. Just call him over here.”

  Ruth looked over at Marshburn. “Well, he’s not doing anything but leaning on his broom.”

  Watching Ruth talk to Marshburn, the two of them sneaking glances at him from across the store, Clay wondered if there was something between them he could use.

  “I just couldn’t bring myself to let anyone else wait on me,” Clay said to Marshburn when he shuffled over to the counter.

  “Not even an old friend?”

  “Me and you are old friends. We went to the same high school. That makes us fellow alums.”

  “I didn’t even know your name until Ruth told me,” said Marshburn, staring at the candy.

  Clay put the candy down on the counter and said his name aloud, extending his hand to Marshburn. Marshburn loosened his grip when he felt the moist dime in Clay’s palm.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Clay.

  Marshburn pulled his hand away without the dime. “Prices have gone up since last week.”

  Clay nodded at the candy. “This is a present for Linda Grimes. From you.”

  “Not that again.” Marshburn sighed and looked away. “I’m telling you nothing happened.”

  “So I shouldn’t believe her?”

  “I’m just saying I don’t remember anything like what she said happening. She sat in front of me, yeah. I remember talking to her sometimes. But that’s been five or six years.”

  “Statute of limitations run out?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m inclined to believe her, since I live with her and all.”

  “Well,” said Marshburn. He looked around the store for help, but people — customers and employees both — moved obliviously through the tight aisles with their heads down. Watching them, Clay understood that this could go on forever. No one here cared.

  “Can you gift wrap this?” he asked Marshburn.

  “I can’t just keep giving you stuff. They’ll find out and fire my ass.”

  “Okay, fine. Just put it in a bag. You don’t even need a card. I’ll tell Linda it’s from you.”

  Marshburn pushed the dime back across the counter. “Don’t come in here again,” he said.

  Clay took the bag Marshburn handed him but left the dime on the counter. “Oh, no, I want to pay for it. I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t pay for it.”

  BACK AT THE APARTMENT Linda ate the candy quickly, as if she suspected it was stolen and was trying to destroy the evidence.

  “Tastes kinda old,” she said when she was halfway through the first layer.

  “I’ll take it back,” said Clay.

  Linda lifted the brown plastic tray from the box and peeked beneath, studying the next layer. “Where’d you get it anyway?”

  They were sitting at the small table in the kitchen. Life indoors was for them a series of moves from kitchen table to bed, rectangle to rectangle. They hated the low-ceilinged apartment they rented, a converted garage that sat in the back of a retired butcher’s yard. Every day they got up and got out of there, unless the weather was bad — they didn’t have a car — or Clay was working for Peterson and they had customers coming by. Most of the time they had someplace to go — the unemployment people for Linda’s check, Clay’s probation officer, the hospital — but when they had a free day, they’d ride the number 14 bus that took the ferry across the sound to Bell’s Island, where they’d eat oranges and lie on the beach fully clothed, or break into a boathouse and sit there for hours watching the water wave, as if the sound was a privately screened movie, the boathouse their own box seat.

  When Clay told her where he’d bought the candy, Linda reached for the half-empty top tray but did not try to fit it back into the box.

  “You didn’t see that guy Marshburn I told you about.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Clay.

  Linda pushed the candy away and said Clay’s name. There was a stack of bills on the table that Linda brushed with the box and toppled, and watching them fan out across the Formica Clay thought of how he always made Linda pay bills or, more often, made her write out the notes requesting clemency. They would sit at the table, Linda licking stamps and the crescent gluestrips of envelopes between her sentences, as if even the words they exchanged were broken up, interrupted by what they lacked. They were being made to grovel; their life was carved into little rectangles, rooms and past-due notes. No longer could it be cashews and assorted chocolates.

  “Marshburn sold me the candy,” said Clay, though he knew he didn’t need to.

  “You didn’t say anything to him about what I told you.” When she got anxious, Linda abandoned the interrogative, as if turning questions into statements could quell doubts.

  Clay looked down at the candy, thinking of how to turn this thing around so that she could see that he was looking out for her.

  “Goddamn it, Clay. That happened a hundred years before you.”

  “About the time this candy was made.”

  “Right. Make fun. Okay. Let somebody stick their hands down your pants every day for three months.”

  At times like this it was as if there was a script already written for him, words in reserve that he didn’t even think about as he spoke them. When things got heated, desperate sentences came not from him but from places he’d been before where such things were said — cars speeding down back roads, the back rows of classrooms, the parking lots of bars.

  “Sounds good,” he said. “Bring it on.”

  Linda left the table, slamming the thin do
or to the bedroom. Now the script again, rising as involuntarily as blushing skin. “Why didn’t you tell anybody? Tell the teacher? Your mom? They could’ve stopped it.” When no answer came he knew he should stop, but he felt off balance, down one. Her silence was a trump.

  “He claimed you wanted it,” yelled Clay, and at once he both regretted saying it and felt as if it delivered him power, even if summoned from someplace false but instinctive, someplace anyone could tap into, someplace shared.

  “NO CANDY TODAY,” said Clay. “No nuts.”

  Marshburn tipped a cup of soda and crunched his ice. “Nothing for you at all unless you got some cash.”

  “I need a box of syringes,” said Clay.

  Marshburn smiled. He shook his head like a teacher mock-tired of an unruly pupil’s antics. “See the pharmacist when he comes back from lunch. Of course you gotta have a prescription for those things. And I’m not authorized to sell them to you even if you had one.”

  “You know where they are, though.”

  “Sure,” said Marshburn. “But that doesn’t mean I can just walk back there and grab a box.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  Marshburn, filling his cup with soda, stared at him as if he were deranged. But then something passed over his face and he grinned, as if they were together on entirely different ground. “Be right back,” he said, and he disappeared.

  While Marshburn was gone, Ruth appeared to work his register. She looked at Clay with pity, and when he tried to small-talk her, she stood there with a frozen can-I-help-you cast to her face.

  “I’m being helped,” Clay said, and stood aside. He lurked by the back booths until Marshburn returned.

  “Here you are, sir,” Marshburn said, handing Clay a bag. “If they’re not the right size you can return them.” Halfway to the front door, Clay cringed when Ruth called out, “I thought there was only one size.”

  PETERSON WAS SO PLEASED with the syringes that a day later he fronted Clay three pounds of weed. “We’re in the money again,” Clay said to Linda after Peterson left. “No more sponging off mama, no more having to listen to her creepyass stories. No more flipping the coin.”

  They flipped a coin to decide whose family to hit up first, even though heads or tails it was always a trip to the hospital, since Clay’s parents had all but disowned him after his second bust and his brothers and sisters practiced something called tough love. As far as Clay could figure, this tough love meant that they could claim to be helping him help himself by clamping tight their wallets and pocketbooks, not answering their doorbells when he came around for a visit.

  “We don’t even have a coin to flip. We’d have to draw broom straws,” said Linda.

  Clay patted the cellophane bags of pot. “With some of this dough I’ll get us a roll of quarters.”

  “That’s what I call planning for the future,” said Linda.

  “Peterson trusts me now.”

  “Because you got him some needles he trusts you.” He didn’t try to hide it from her; it was hard to hide anything in their two tiny rectangles, visible or invisible, physical or emotional. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine when Clay had come in with the bag, the logo of the pharmacy clear to her. “Did you steal those or are you blackmailing him?” she had asked.

  “He wants to make it up to you,” said Clay. Saying this didn’t make it true, but it did make it easier to believe. “So he’s going to be helping us out right along through now. During these leanest of times.”

  Linda had put her magazine down. “Remember when I suggested spending the night with Larry in exchange for back rent over at the other place? And you freaked out?”

  “To start with you were eighteen then, not fourteen. And that was something you were willing to do, not something somebody was forcing you to do.”

  “Willing is not really the word I’d use. But anyway, Clay, if it’s so different in your eyes, how come you didn’t let me do it?”

  “Because I’m not a pimp and you’re not a whore. This isn’t about money, Linda. You were fourteen years old when he did those things to you. I think you must have blocked it out of your mind.”

  “I remember everything about it,” said Linda. “And I think about it a lot. Like how I passed him notes telling him over and over to stop. I even lent him my English notes, which he paid June Miller to copy out for him I found out later. And after a while I’d turn around in the middle of the class and tell him to quit it and everybody heard, everybody in the whole class knew, I told the teacher who didn’t do a goddamn thing and told Mom who talked to the teacher who talked to him again and he still didn’t stop it.”

  “It sucked back then,” said Clay. “Nobody listened to a thing you said.”

  “At least everything was paid for,” she said.

  Clay looked confused.

  “No flipping coins to find out where to go beg. No rent, no bills, no bitchy secretaries at the unemployment office treating me like I’m lying and lazy and ignorant.”

  “That’s fucking crazy, Linda.”

  Linda’s look was like a poke at some obscure animal of the sea that had washed up on shore. A prod to see if it was still alive. “Forget about him, Clay. This isn’t yours, okay?”

  “He said you wanted it, remember? I got to make him pay for that.” Another lie, but one made right by his promise to avenge it.

  “WHAT IF MARSHBURN had gotten a summer job lifeguarding instead of at that pharmacy?” Linda said when Clay came back from Peterson’s and pushed enough cash across the table to take care of that month’s bills.

  “We’d have some serious suntans,” said Clay. “It doesn’t matter where he works, Linda. There’s something bigger than this day-to-day. What he owes you and all. But you have to hit him in the day-to-day if you’re going to hurt him. Otherwise you can ask all you want for justice and respect and what you’ll get is I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I didn’t realize what I was doing. This way we make sure he really pays.”

  Clay watched Linda reach for the cash. He thought she was going to count it, start to divide it up and place it into envelopes, but she clutched the bills and looked down at the table.

  “You hear about those college guys who get drunk and go off on those sorority girls?” said Clay. “The newspapers give it a special name, what these college boys do: date rape, they call it. Personally that makes me a little mad. Like you have to be a certain kind of girl to get date-raped.”

  Linda looked up from the pile of money in her hand.

  “That didn’t come out right,” said Clay. “What I mean is have you ever heard of a date rape in this part of town? You ever heard of anybody getting date-raped west of Eagle Street?”

  Linda spoke very slowly. “First of all, no one west of Eagle goes out on dates. Anyway, you’re trying to get me to quit talking about Marshburn. What I want to know is, are you keeping up with how much he owes? Do you decide or does he? When does this stop, Clay? When he gets caught taking those needles?”

  “I’d say that’d be a natural end.”

  “And you get popped for receiving stolen goods.”

  “Those packages barely touch my hands. In my possession an hour at most. Let ‘em prove it.”

  This day marked the beginning of much strange behavior from Linda. One minute she’d rue the moment she told Clay about Marshburn, the next she’d get all defensive and say that she’d done nothing wrong by admitting it, that it was Clay who had taken her troubled past and turned it into trouble looming in the future for both of them. But he’d silence her always with shopworn words he felt uncomfortable with but that worked, not necessarily by comforting her but by sending her out of the room in disgust. And there was money coming in to distract them now.

  Like always, the money seemed as if it was going to last forever, and Clay did nothing to earn it but pick up an occasional package and hang around the house to receive customers. No more trips to the hospital, no more trips to the pharmacy either. H
e’d long since worked out an arrangement with Marshburn: Clay would call and let him know when he wanted more syringes, and they’d arrange a place for Marsh-burn to drop them.

  One afternoon Marshburn suggested bringing them over to the apartment. The fact that he almost agreed shocked Clay into remembering what this thing was all about. Marsh-burn’s complicity, which Clay had put off confronting for fear it would end, began to bother him again. Who decides how much he owes? Linda had wanted to know. Lately Peterson favored him over all the other guys he called his subcontractors, and Clay felt sure that he would continue to trust him even after the syringes stopped coming. Ditching Marshburn would certainly make Linda happy, though a part of Clay still resented her whining about a situation he’d managed to turn around. She owned three string bikinis now, just for laying out in the butcher’s yard on a beach towel; she couldn’t even swim. Still, now seemed as good a time as any to break it off with Marshburn. Clay arranged to meet him later that night at a bar out on South Boulevard.

  Clay was sitting at the end of the bar, sipping a draft, when suddenly, Marshburn was there beside him. “What’re you drinking?” he asked Clay.

  “Alcohol,” said Clay. But he had to fight an urge to be decent, which surprised him; one of the more consistent things in his life was his ability to hold a grudge. “Where’s the package?” he asked.

  “In the car,” said Marshburn. He tapped Clay’s almost empty mug. “Another one?”

  “Sure,” said Clay. Why not? Marshburn was paying. While Marshburn stood beside him trying to get the bartender’s attention, Clay allowed himself to wonder how Marshburn was getting away with this. Surely someone kept up with syringes sold, especially if it took a prescription to get them. Maybe Marshburn was tampering with the records somehow, or paying for them out of his own pocket. Maybe he really did feel guilty for what he’d done to Linda. Why else would he be doing this? If Marshburn was motivated by guilt, Clay could still consider himself the enforcer, making Marshburn pay for his sins. What was really wrong with making a little cash in the process? When bosses put the move on their secretaries and got dragged into court over it, the system awarded these women big bucks. For emotional and psychological distress. You can’t buy back innocence; might as well get a condo out of it or, in Clay’s case, a couple of months rent on an ex-garage and Peterson’s trust.