by ed. Pela Via
“I can’t go to the store,” Lester said. “And—you think Janice is going to buy one for me?”
Dink laughed, said, “Twenty seconds?”
“Fuck you, Dinkman.”
Tamara was there in fifteen minutes, said it was on the way. Lester opened the door, watched her breasts enter, then the rest of her.
She was perfect.
“So my man says you have something,” she said, not turning her back to him.
Lester nodded, punched the pharmacy number into the cordless. He’d had to lick the contact points on the battery to make them work again.
The pharmacy’s system was automated. Lester entered the number from his old pill bottle, let Tamara listen: his prescription was ready.
“You just have to pick it up,” Lester said.
“Bullshit,” Tamara said, turning for the door. “I don’t know what Dink told you, but—”
Lester stepped in front of her, trying not to lose her eyes.
“This isn’t what you think,” he said. “The Vicodin’s really there. Anybody with my name can pick it up. And I’m not wanting anything special here.”
Tamara stared at him, then shook her head slowly, side to side.
“Where?” she said, finally. “I don’t have time for this.”
Lester smiled, looked to the clock: 5:52.
“You still have a few minutes, right?” he said.
Tamara nodded, shrugged, and, when she wouldn’t go into the bedroom with him, he went there himself, came back with Janice’s sleep shirt, the pink one with faded red cuffs. And the video camera.
“What is this?” Tamara asked. “D didn’t say you were a freak.”
“I’m not,” Lester said. “Just—like this,” and, like that, it only took four minutes.
———
Janice got home two hours later.
“Dick Man,” she said, closing the door behind her.
“I know,” Lester said, from the couch.
He was still thinking about Tamara. More than he’d meant to.
They ate tacos Lester cooked. The shells kept breaking, until it was funny. He put his in a bowl, finally, let it be the taco salad it wanted to be.
“I didn’t tell you,” Janice said, putting some more frozen cheese shreds onto her taco, “that new guy down the street, Jimmy—”
“Johnny.”
“Whatever. His whole body shop came in after lunch today.”
Lester pretended to just be looking at his taco.
“Popular place,” he said, the obvious thing.
Janice laughed through her nose, took a bite.
“I stopped for your pills,” she said.
Lester quit chewing, looked over his broken shell at her.
She shrugged, smiling, hiding something.
“What?” Lester said, then, impulsively, “They weren’t ready.”
Janice stopped chewing, looked at him across the table.
“You already got them,” she said, suddenly bored with the subject. “I had to go in, though, the drive-in was all fucked—”
“Drive-through.”
“Yeah—what’d I say?”
“Doesn’t matter. You were saying something else anyway.”
Again, the smile. Then, “They should put warning labels on these.”
Lester smiled, looked down to her hands, whatever she was holding. It was just the taco, though. But her hands were wrong, too, not close enough together. Framing her new breasts.
“What do you mean?” he said, tracking back up to her face.
“What do you think?” she said, taking a bite, smiling around it.
“I don’t know,” Lester said. “Janice, really, God. I don’t know.”
“Think, L.”
“I can’t—the meds.”
Janice set her taco down, took his left hand in both of hers.
“They have pregnancy tests there,” she said, her eyes wet now, and Lester swallowed everything in his mouth, saw a little him in the yard with him, on crutches like the old man; Janice, her breasts flotation devices practically; and Uncle Dick Man, snapping pictures of every precious fucking moment.
“Well?” Janice said, still holding his hand, and Lester nodded, made himself smile, and knew the only pills in the world that could soften this were the pills he had just given away.
———
Three weeks later, Johnny and Wayne and Delbert were still talking about what they thought were Janice’s perfectly tanned breasts. Wayne Jr. had even stolen the tape from the VCR in the basement, taken it to school once and forever, entered it into legend.
On his side of the card table, Lester was arranging his cards from biggest to smallest, then back again. When he’d peed fifteen minutes ago, he’d still been able to smell Tamara on him, and had apologized again to the Janice in his head.
It was just a one-time thing, though. Every time Janice was at work.
Dick Man had to know all about it.
And it wasn’t his fault anyway, Lester’s. Janice wasn’t supposed to ever get pregnant. Nobody was, by him.
Now he was having to think about names, though. Wayne of course thought Lester Jr. was the way to go, Delbert was all for Robert for some reason he wouldn’t go into, and Johnny’s contribution was less a name, more a visual meditation on Janice, leaking pale blue milk through a tight cotton shirt.
Lester liked Bent, or Bint; he’d heard it on a show once, and it had stuck.
Janice said none of their names mattered, because the baby was going to be a girl, like her momma.
Lester fingered a tablet from his bank, held it close enough to see.
“Not speed, is it?” he said to Wayne.
Wayne had lost fifty of the tablets three hands ago.
“I don’t know what they are,” Wayne said, cocking his head to the side. “I just know Junior Boy was selling them for five a pop.”
“‘Was,’” Delbert echoed, the key word.
Johnny smiled, took two cards, completing another royal flush probably, and Lester shrugged, let the pill dissolve on his tongue. It was bitter, chalky, meant to be swallowed, or ground up.
He’d promised himself he wasn’t going to bet Tamara’s number tonight, or anything free from her, was just going to hide in this one little pill, in this one little basement, and never have to be a dad.
But, too, he kept saying it in his head, just loud enough—Bent, Bint, Bint—and making promises to himself, to Bint: that he would never steal any of his stashes; that he wouldn’t even have to have stashes. That he was going to be faithful to his mother for him, Bint. Not make her cry. That he wasn’t going to play cards for dope anymore. That he was going to go back to work, set a good example.
And then the pill exploded wetly behind his eyes, washing the cards monochrome, and he smiled, looked around at Wayne—Wayne Sr.—Delbert, Johnny, Johnny Hood, as they were calling him now, since he’d got fired for folding one in half at the end of the day last week. It wasn’t his fault—it was a 1982 Chevy pick-up, for Chrissake, with a hood like a wet piece of paper—but still, he wasn’t employed anymore. And the terms of his probation were specific about that.
In ten minutes, Johnny Hood had all the pills and baggies in the room, was kicked back on the old couch Wayne’s wife made him keep downstairs.
Lester nodded off with whatever was in his blood, came to again with Johnny Hood still exactly the same. Meaning either he’d blinked, or slept through a whole nother cycle of drinking, peeing, and smoking.
It didn’t matter.
“Wayne Bo,” he said, his words slurring under each other.
Wayne was shuffling the cards over and over at the table. They were twelve years old again.
“Good shit, yeah?” Wayne called over.
“Fucking A,” Lester said, pushing himself into some kind of standing position. Lifting his head to the small window that opened onto the street.
Wayne nodded, rose, did his recon.
“Past his be
dtime, I guess,” he said, about Dick Man, and Lester nodded, pulled himself hand over hand up the stairs, said something hopefully good to Wayne’s wife, sitting on the couch, balancing a plastic cup of wine to her lips, then slipped out into the night, let it swallow him.
The first pole he pushed off of, heading home, it turned out to be a bush, and he fell through, laughed his way up again, and stumbled out to the sidewalk, suddenly both aware of his need to swallow and intensely paranoid about the whole concept of swallowing. What a design flaw it was.
He didn’t recognize Dick Man until he put his hand on the passenger side fender and their eyes locked over the long hood.
It wasn’t the Impala anymore, but the LTD. And Wayne had been looking for the Impala. Lester smiled, nodded, opened the door to explain this to Dick Man.
“Lester,” Dick Man said, loud and clear, as if he were recording this, and Lester nodded some more, finally swallowed, and passed out.
———
When he woke again it was a different day. Daytime, anyway. And not his neighborhood.
The LTD was pulled into an assigned slot, in a parking lot shadowed by a huge granite building.
Dick Man was looking up at the mirrored windows.
“Know where we are?” he said, without ever looking around at Lester.
“There,” Lester said, rubbing his right eye too hard.
Dick Man nodded, smiled. ‘There’ was Hell—the insurance company’s headquarters. The sign was tombstoned between the parking lot and the building. Suits going in and out like ants.
Lester closed his eyes against it all.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“I get paid to do this,” Dick Man said back.
“What?” Lester said.
“What what?”
“What do you get paid?”
“Half of what you still have coming to you.”
“Commission?”
“Percentage.”
Lester pulled his lips back from his teeth. Just to see if they still would, mainly. And to give him time to think: if Dick Man wasn’t open for business, here, he would have already carried Lester in, deposited him on some mahogany desk. Turned in his tapes, his logbooks, his report.
“This can’t be the only thing you do,” he said, finally.
“What do you mean, Lester?”
“I mean—shit. I’ve got two weeks left, full pay. Half of that’s four hundred, before taxes. You don’t pay liability on two cars on that.”
“Maybe I’m independently wealthy.”
“Yeah. And maybe I can’t walk without crutches.”
For this, Lester looked over. Dick Man was smiling a thin smile, nodding.
“This is the part where I beg, right?” Lester said.
Dick Man shrugged.
“It do any good?” Lester asked.
“Depends,” Dick Man said.
“Depends,” Lester said, tasting it, then just shook his head, asked it: “What do you want?”
Dick Man pushed his lower lip out, as if he hadn’t had all night to think about it, but then Lester cut him off: “—that’s better than four hundred dollars, I mean. But not too much better.”
Dick Man tapped his hands on the dash like a rimshot, shrugged.
“What do you got, Lester?”
He was Johnny Hood, practically. The world was Johnny Hood.
Lester stared at the keyhole in the glove compartment for just long enough, then said it to himself again, that this couldn’t be the only thing Dick Man did, right?
“What else?” he said, leading.
“Usual,” Dick Man said. “Cheating wives, little repo action now and then. Skip tracing . . . ‘other’ . . .”
Lester nodded, had expected the other, but knew better than to ask. But the skip tracing. He smiled. It was in the right family.
“Say I—” he started, “what do you get if you catch somebody, like, y’know, a criminal-type, breaking probation?”
“How?”
“You’ll find it on him, maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“For sure.”
“I’m listening.”
Lester smiled, told the invincible Dick Man about Johnny Hood’s rounds for the last week, strolling around with pocketfuls of poker winnings, selling here, there, to Wayne Jr.’s customer base when he could find them. Always making time to catch lunch down at Rita’s.
“Why there?” Dick Man said.
“Twelve o’clock,” Lester said back.
“Doesn’t your wife work there?”
“It’s just a place.”
Dick Man nodded, smiled, and said, “What else, Lester?”
“What else? That’s all, man. Shit. What you think I’m made of here?”
Dick Man kept smiling and popped the glove compartment. It opened onto Lester’s lap. Black and white glossies of Tamara, coming, Tamara, going. Tamara Tamara Tamara, leading with her breasts.
Lester just stared at the photos.
“Blackmail?” he said, quietly.
“Not quite,” Dick Man said. “I don’t want anything for her. I just want her, sabe?”
Lester looked up, to a security guard behind the glass doors of the building. Watching them.
“I’m not—I can’t—” he started, and Dick Man circled his thigh in his thick hand, and Lester nodded, told him how Tamara used to be a model, how all you had to do was point a camera at her, pretty much, and her clothes would just start jumping off her.
“ A camera,” Dick Man said, raising his, the ponderous lens scraping the dash, “like this?” and Lester nodded, looked away. Just wanted to go home.
———
Four days later, Johnny Hood was gone, and the game in Wayne’s basement took on sane dimensions again. Mostly just Wayne Jr.’s various stashes trading hands.
Lester was going back to work in one Monday. One Monday more.
It had been a good run, anyway. A good vacation.
To make it fun, they played with two decks at once—four jokers—and then just split up the dope at the end of the night. On the way up the stairs, Lester turned around, caught the dime bag Wayne was looping up to him.
“What?” he said.
“Piss tests,” Wayne said, shrugging.
Lester nodded, held the bag out to Delbert, who shook his head no too, for no reason Lester could make sense of. He felt like crying, for some reason. Walked all the way to the end of the block and counted cars driving by until he got to one hundred—though one of them was a repeat—then looped back to Janice.
“Early,” she said, when he opened the door.
Lester shrugged, twisted the deadbolt behind him.
On the floor in front of the television were all their old tapes. Janice had been crying.
Lester sat down by her, looked to the screen. It was rewinding.
“We’re—Lester,” she started. “Me, I mean. Marce at work says I’m going to have get them removed. So I can lactate properly. Because they can like, like leak into the milk. Poison the baby.”
Lester put his arm around her, tried not look down at the top slopes of her breasts, not to think about the underswell.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m going back to work. I’ll ask for some overtime, maybe.”
“It doesn’t—taking them out’s a lot easier than putting them in. It’s just, you liked them so much, right?”
“I like you,” Lester said, in a way that almost didn’t feel like a lie, and she stopped the rewind, snuggled close. “What’s this?” he said.
Janice laughed through her nose. “I want to see what I used to look like,” she said. “B-cup Janice, yeah?”
Lester smiled, felt a sudden stab of fear for some reason but fought it, told himself he was just addicted to her new breasts, how when she lay on her back they hardly even spread.
But then she hit play.
It was their old wedding tape, from six years ago. Lester nodded, remembered thinking not lo
ng ago of Delbert, his best man. The mustache he’d grown for six months for the ceremony, then shaved at the last minute.
And then he remembered why he’d thought of Delbert’s mustache not long ago.
“What?” Janice said, feeling him stiffen, but he couldn’t get it fast enough, could only hear his own voice through the speakers, reciting everything the preacher said, and then it was too late: the tracking on the tape shuddered, the recording shifting from Extended Play to Short Play. Because SP paused better.
The next scene was neck down, Janice’s night shirt. The television set itself just to the right.
This was the back-up copy, the personal copy.
Janice’s shirt, rising, pulling taut over the nipples then over, Tamara’s breasts bouncing into the frame, standing at attention.
Janice beside him, covering her chest, pulling her feet up onto the couch. Lester shaking his head no, but not looking away from the screen, either.
———
What he wound up trading Janice, in apology, so she wouldn’t divorce him, was every birthing class they could sign up for.
The Friday before his first day back to work, they were there with all the other expectant couples. The instructor put his hand to the light switch, said something about the glow in the room, how they didn’t even need lights, and most of the husbands knew that was their cue to clap.
Lester tried to keep up, to get his hands into that paternal kind of rhythm, but had enough of Wayne Jr.’s stash in him that it took some effort. But he was there, at least, for Janice. That was what mattered. And that Janice was finally saying she believed him, about Tamara. That the recording had just been him being a good husband, protecting his wife’s honor. That he had done it for her. Because he loved her.
Now he was just waiting for Dick Man to show back up, with a stack of prints for sale.
But fuck it.
Brent. It was what Janice had finally conceded, was part of their new deal; Bint wasn’t a real name to her anyway, not like it was for Lester. He still said it in his head, though. His lips moving with it sometimes.
For the birthing class, Janice had worn a halter top, no bra. She only had her breasts for two more weeks now. Lester told her it didn’t matter, that she could be his nature girl. They could start eating vegetables, even.
