by Lee Pletzers
That fucker Dwayne.
Jim thought about it as he got himself a Corona and walked through the house from the kitchen, through the dining room and the parlor, to the front room they never used except as a kind of showplace for the furniture Patty’d picked out. His footsteps sounded loud in the house. Lot of creaking boards he’d never noticed before. He could hear water trickling in the sink of the front bathroom where his little girl had left it running, as usual. He couldn’t bring himself to turn it off. He crossed to the window, his hand tight on the beer bottle. Looked between the white curtains at the big, wind-blown oaks in the Barton’s front yard, across the street. On the ground beneath the trees, tangled shadows of branches and leaves moved like dark seaweed in a translucent ocean.
That fucker Dwayne had seen him coming. Seen a stoned stupid middle class white dumbshit.
He drank half the bottle of beer down all at once. The beer was like running cold water on a burn. For a moment it smoothed over some of the pain. The depression.
“You knew it was going to make you depressed afterwards,” Patty had said. “When you go on one of these stupid binges you always feel like total shit for a week afterwards. How come you don’t think about that before you—?”
“I don’t know, hell, I don’t know,” he’d said. “I just get too stressed out or something and it’s like somebody throws a switch, I just turn into a fucking drug robot and I go find it. I mean–I’ve got it down so it only happens once or twice a year now—”
“Once a decade is too damn much,” she’d said. Snapping it.
“I know. I know.”
“Christ, don’t you think about afterwards at all, Jim?”
“All I can think about is how I’m scared to crash. As long as I keep the drug coming I don’t think about it.” And he snorted derisively at himself, mumbling, “It’s like skydiving with a busted parachute. It’s a great ride till you hit the ground.”
No sympathy at all from her this time. He couldn’t blame her. That came sneering back at him again. Could. Not. Blame her.
For about the five hundredth time since he’d gotten out of the Crisis Ward of the hospital Sunday afternoon, he thought about killing himself. Get a gun . Blam. Brains on the wall. Or maybe use a noose, hang himself. I ought to suffer, he thought,
He thought about killing Dwayne, too.
My car. How dare he touch my car.
The phone rang. He walked in a dream to it. It took an effort of will just to pick it up and say, “Hello?”
“This is the Oakland police department calling for Mr. James Diggins—”
“That’s me.”
“You reported a stolen car…” He read out the license number, the other specs.
“That’s my car.”
“The car was found by a patrolman yesterday morning. It’s been towed to a lot at…”
Tuesday, 3:30 P.M.
Why had they taken only three wheels? He wondered numbly.
The Acura was tilted onto its right side wheel rims and the left rear tire. The car’s hood was standing open. Dwayne must have gotten spooked or burnt out, Jim decided, after taking three tires. Anything that could easily be detached from the engine was missing. The front seats were missing, too. The trunk had been cleaned out, tools, tire and jack were missing. The headlights were missing. The radio was gone, pried from the dashboard like a rotten tooth.
And the windshield was smashed out by vandals.
The insurance company would want to have the car repaired. It would be expensive, but still cheaper than a new car. It’d take months. Then he’d get to drive around in this reminder of the night he’d had a nasty fight with Patty, gone out and gotten blown away on coke and fucked up royal. Maybe even got AIDS for all he knew.
He stared at the hulk of his car. Stripped. Picked over like a mollusk after the gulls had been there. A lifeless shell.
Shit. He couldn’t believe it. He’d let this happen to the family car. It was a ton or so of pure, raw, undiluted symbol. Sitting on the hardened dirt of a towaway lot.
That fucker Dwayne. It wasn’t Dwayne’s fault, ultimately, he knew that. It was his fault. Dwayne was just a drug addict who’d seen an opportunity that Jim Diggins had stupidly dropped in his lap. But, nevertheless, Dwayne had preyed on him. It was like stealing from a blind man. A retarded blind man. Dwayne was raw, undiluted symbol, too.
And Jim wanted to kill him.
Thursday Night, 10:07 P.M., Oakland
A sultry night at Winston Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way. Lots of goods going around. Joleen and Binda turning toss-up tricks to get their blasts. Dwayne pacing in front of the rockhouse. Thinking: two hundred forty-five dollars. For all that stuff I got out of that Acura. Could have gone to the joint for stealing a car. Five to ten years in prison for two Cs and forty-five fucking dollars. Nobody wanted to buy a hot car. All that risk for an hour’s worth of rock…
Then here came Samson Ramirez in a new BMW that looked carved out of a single block of snow and ice. So new it didn’t have the plates on it, just a sticker in the windshield.
Samson was half white, half Mexican, but he’d been on the street so long Dwayne thought of him as just another homeboy. He was a hard motherfucker, and getting harder as his biz got bigger. He was supposed to be pulling down even more money than Doc now, which was what his white BMW was about, Dwayne figured, to advertise that.
Samson was pulling up in the white BMW, parking across the street and a ways down, not wanting to associate the car too obviously with the rockhouse. He had long, wavy brown hair in a fancy unisex perm, a brown leather jacket and brown leather pants with just a touch of a Latin flare about them. He was small but good looking, with his white Mama’s green eyes and his Mexican Daddy’s perfect white teeth. Perfect, but he’d had an incisor replaced with a gold tooth, to go with his thick gold chains and maybe just for the flash of wealth in his patronizing smile. They said he didn’t do his own product, but some combination of crystal meth and Demerol instead. You could see it in the way he moved. Real fast, but real smooth.
Raiders came out of the rockhouse to meet Samson on the sidewalk. Raiders was a tall black man in a red jogging sweatsuit that he never changed or washed, a gold Raiders’ medallion around his neck and a blue waistpack slung around his hips. The pack hung like a scrotum because of the snub-nosed pistol in it. They called him Raiders because when his talk wasn’t about grinding it was always about the Oakland Raiders; he held the team in reverence like they were gods.
Dwayne thought: Maybe I do it now. I could walk up to Samson when he’s talking to Raiders and ask for the delivery work, talk him up good.
But he didn’t have the nerve yet. The man didn’t know him.
Dwayne stepped back into a doorway, where he wouldn’t be noticed. He waited, listening in.
“‘nother one died,” Raiders was telling Samson, “and ‘nother one killed with his head busted in.”
“Same as old Hobey?” Samson asked.
“Same as Hobey. Head busted in like a melon.”
Dwayne felt a strange contraction in his stomach. Hobey was dead? He hadn’t heard. It was never a surprise to hear that someone he knew had died. He’d seen his father beat his mother with piece of pipe and he wasn’t surprised when she died in the hospital. And two of his homeboys had died within a year of each other, one fighting over base and the other from heroin. And he had an aunt was a whore, died of pneumonia that was probably from AIDS. But Hobey had seemed like a survivor, like he was too careful to get himself popped.
It was kind of scary, Hobey being dead. Made Dwayne remember what Uncle Garland had said about Essy.
“They think dogs are gettin’ into them,” Raiders was saying. “Somebody bust their heads in, then wild dogs come along . . .”
“You making me sick, I don’t need to hear this,” Samson said, grimacing. “What makes you think it was the silver cap that did the other ones?”
“I sold it to them both, half an hour befo
re. One of them went right here, died in the house, other one out in the alley.”
“You get rid of them?”
“What you think?”
“So what you want me to do about this shit?”
“Maybe it’s the bug spray.”
“Everybody uses bug spray for bonding.”
“Not this industrial shit we been getting. They use Black Flag or something. We oughta go back to it, maybe it’s this stuff that’s been—”
“Shut up. It’s not us, pendajo. Okay? This bug spray I got makes the stuff go farther, people like it, they come back for more, that’s bueno.”
“Reporters was hanging around the ‘hood, s’afternoon. Nobody told ‘em shit. And The Man be coming around. Asking shit.”
“They connect it to us?”
“Not yet.”
“Then fuck ‘em. It’s not us anyway.” Samson made a dismissive motion, a hummingbird blur of his hand, and started toward the front steps that led up to the old two bedroom stucco place that was the neighborhood rockhouse.
Dwayne started to go after Samson. Froze when he saw Raiders glare at him. They’d already had a run-in. Come back when you got the green, Raiders had said, we not hiring. You come around with money or we hammer your whole fucking body.
Samson was going into the house. Opportunity walking away. Dwayne rubbed his Bic-thumb callouses with a forefinger, could almost feel a dove there, between his fingers. Could picture putting the dove in a pipe, firing up. Could almost taste it.
Once Samson was in his “office” there’d be no getting to see him. Not from where Dwayne was at in the pecking order.
Dwayne smelled base, someone smoking somewhere. Turned and saw Joleen in the front seat of a beat-up van, her head bobbing over some guy’s lap. The guy firing a blast in a broken-off stem, the glow pulsing, lighting up a little blue skull tattoo on the guy’s cheek, and showing his face. He was a big, dirty yellow-haired white guy, a biker type, with an overgrown beard and matted hair; a biker who’d had to sell his bike for crack.
Dwayne smelled the burning base. Watched the flare of pipe. Heard the biker grunt as the blast rocked him.
Fuck it. Dwayne couldn’t stand it. He started up the stairs, after Samson. “Yo, Samson—!” he called after him. “Yo, my bro, wait up—”
But then Jim White Guy stepped out of the bushes with a gun. A .45 automatic. He was grinning. Motherfucker was real proud of himself.
10:15 P.M.
“You fucking with me, right?” Samson said.
Raiders shook his head. “While I was out. Ramon told me. Three more dead, just all in the last half hour, right here in this fucking house.”
Samson and Raiders were in the pipe room, which had once been someone’s living room. Now it was a big box, just a place to sit and smoke crack with a couple of burn-pocked mattresses on the floor and a smell like a shitty diaper from the plugged-up toilet in the bathroom off to one side. Naked bulb, windows double boarded over, linoleum curling up off the sagging wooden floor. Intricately calligraphed posse graffiti on the walls next to the mattresses. One broken stem in a corner.
Samson swore in Spanish. “What you do with them?”
“Some of the posse taking them to the dumpster behind the Pioneer Chicken place. I fucking don’t know. I ain’t smoking none of that silver cap.”
“You don’t be smoking at all around here. I go off on you, I catch you. Don’t smoke at work.” But he was thinking about something else.
“We use up this batch, then maybe we switch to Black Flag for the bonding agent in the stuff—who’s making it up?”
“The base? Ramon.”
“He get sick?”
“Hard to tell with Ramon.”
“Okay, we get rid of the Bug Deth now, but we use up this batch of the cooking. That’s forty, fifty thousand dollars, Raiders.”
Raiders looked like he was about to argue when Ramon and Buzzy came running in, yelling, and Ramon was missing half his face.
10:18 P.M.
Jim stared at Dwayne. Jim wasn’t sure how he was going to do this. Or what exactly he was going to do. Should he really do it, go ahead and kill him? Or maybe just kneecap him? Bust his knees open with a bullet. Fucking change his life for him. Ruin his transportation.
“How much you get for that shit you took off my car, Dwayne? More’n four hundred bucks? Probably less. Pretty pathetic, asshole.”
Dwayne just stared back at him. “You got me confused with somebody, man.” Maybe if he kept saying it, the guy’d buy it. Just keep saying it, make him doubt himself.
“No. Uh-uh. I was fucked up but I remember you vividly, Dwayne, and Joleen. I found her. See, I figured she wasn’t in on it, so I didn’t shoot her, and she told me you’d be here eventually.”
They were standing in the thick shadows by the dark green bushes, standing amidst dog crap in the balding front yard at an angle where nobody could see them but they could see most everybody. Jim White Guy had picked the spot carefully.
Inside the house. Ramon on his knees clutching his face, blood running down his arm, and twining through the links of the gold chain on his chest. Sobbing.
Samson trying to get a coherent story from him.
“The bodies in the dumpster what?”
And then the naked, filthy guys came stinking and stumbling into the piperoom and when Ramon saw them he screamed and scurried away on his hands and knees. Samson thought they were some kind of homeless lunatics until he saw that one of them was dragging his guts behind him on the floor.
Outside, Dwayne saying, “You mixed up, man, you piped up or something, got me mixed up wid somebody. It dark out here, too. Let’s go in the light, over there, you see if it really me. Come on, put your gun in your pocket.” All of this was halfhearted. Dwayne realized he was hoping Jim White Guy would shoot him. Put a hole in the hole.
“You lying sack of shit,” Jim Diggins said.
Dwayne took a step back, into the streetlight shine. Jim took a step toward him. Aimed the gun.
Then they heard the screaming from the house, and the gunshots. Three seconds of Dwayne and Jim gaping at the house. Another thirty seconds of uncertainty, staring at one another. Dwayne saying, “We better get the fuck—”
That’s when the naked, coughing man with brains on his fingers came staggering out of the darkness by the bushes, coming from the back door.
Coming at them.
Dwayne knew it was brains on the naked man’s fingers, because of the head the dude was carrying under his arm. It was a handsome head with a lot of hair that waved like a jacket fringe as the naked guy moved. A big gouge taken out of the skull. It was Samson’s head.
“Oh fuck,” Dwayne said. Recognizing Samson’s still-twitching face on the severed head. Seeing that the naked motherfucker lunatic had one nasty, filth-caked hand in the hole in Samson’s head, was scooping out the brains, eating them, using his fingers like a kid eating the frosting left over in a bowl…
Jim and Dwayne stared at the naked guy. A white guy with a bloated stomach and snaggly brown teeth. The naked guy was staring back without blinking, his milky eyes not moving. Standing there, swaying like he might fall over any second.
Jim was making a choking sound down in his throat.
The naked guy dropped Samson’s head. Thump. It rolled a little, in the grass.
The naked dude thrust his head out a little on his neck, like a cat, and sniffed at them. Sniff. Sniff again. Then he made a croaking sound, his mouth exuding a stink that made Dwayne want to puke. He took a step toward Dwayne. Sniffing. Made another sound. A word this time.
“Base.”
He reached his hands up toward Dwayne’s head.
Dwayne backed away and fell over. The guy dropped to his knees beside Dwayne and gnashed his teeth at him, reached for his head and…
Dwayne yelled hoarsely: “Jim, help me, man!” This wasn’t the way to die. Not this way. Uh-uh, no.
