The Dope Thief

by Dennis Tafoya

  “Christ, Ma, that’s like sixteen thousand nickels. What do they bring, a wheelbarrow?”

  “They pay in cash, smart- ass.”

  “Keep it somewhere safe, that’s all.”

  “Don’t worry about my money, dope fiend. I’m saving it to spend on my grandchildren.”

  “Okay, I can see where this is going. I’ll check in later.”

  “I talked to the lawyer about your father.”

  “That’s great. I’ll talk to you later.”

  She started to tell him something else, and he hung up.

  AT NIGHT HE cruised up and down 73 in Sherry’s Honda. He’d stop and get a drink at an empty bar, then get antsy and leave. He ordered from the drive- through at the Taco Bell. He felt like a shark circling in black water. Moving up and down from Marlton to Berlin, restless, jumpy, watching his rearview mirror and not knowing what to expect. The stations on Sherry’s radio were tuned to Jesus and teenage- girl pop, and he dialed around until he found a black gospel station promising hell but offering full-throated music against the Day of Judgment. He went around the circle at 70 and followed it west. He passed dark industrial parks and convenience stores, finally pulled in at a strip joint in Pennsauken that billed itself as an International Gentlemen’s Club. He sat in the car and pulled a one- hitter from under the seat and filled his nostrils with coke. He felt his pulse begin to race and his gums went numb. The car began to get hot, and when he opened the door he could smell the tar from the parking lot and the exhaust from passing trucks.

  He sat at the bar and ordered a vodka and tonic and then turned to watch a short, wiry girl in a half- T move languorously up and down along the pole, her back arched. Her hair was a sooty, unnat ural black, and all he could think about was how different she was from Michelle. Her eyes were half- closed, her movements as slow as if she were a sleepwalker, or moving against a current in a dark sea. Waitresses with hair tortured blond moved from table to table under dim red and blue spotlights that made it look as if they were being alternately frozen and then roasted alive. He finished the first drink fast and took another to a table in a corner. There was a black light overhead that made his shirt an unnatural white. He had more drinks and went to the men’s room to do more blow, navigating the tables of gray- haired businessmen and kids with baseball caps doing a frantic pantomime of desire for their friends.

  The girl from the stage came down and stood by him, her teeth brilliant in the ultraviolet light. He leaned into her, and she whis-pered to him. He took money out and gave it to her. She stood closer to him, and he felt heat in his face and along his arms. She smelled like perfume, something sharp and astringent, and beneath that sweat and cigarettes. She moved between his legs and breathed into his neck and somehow kept from touching him. Ray moved his hand along her leg, and she smiled and moved back a few inches. He held out a twenty, and she rolled a hip toward him so that he could put it beneath the band of the G-string.

  “I know the rules,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “I just don’t want to follow them.” He opened his fist and began counting off hundred- dollar bills. She closed her hand over his and told him she’d be done at eleven thirty.

  HE WALKED OUT, crouching to hide his insistent erection until he reached the car. He did another hit and rubbed his cramping jaw, blinking under the lights, which now looked ringed with purple motes from the dope in his blood. He drove back out to 73 and went into a package store. He walked up and down the aisles, conscious of being high. The aisles tilted away from him; the labels were too small to read. He walked up and down with a basket, eventually getting the layout. In the end he took a bottle of vodka and two bottles of tonic to the front and also bought pretzels and a handful of lottery tickets to give to Theresa, who saw tickets from another state as exotic: unfamiliar fruit from another continent.

  Back out on the road, he drifted again, killing time. At the last minute he caught the sign for a used- book store and cut the wheel fast to catch the driveway. He killed the engine and took a pull from the bottle and washed it down with a long swig from the tonic water, which fizzed hot in his mouth and dribbled down his shirt. He wiped his hand over his mouth and blotted at his beard.

  Inside it was quiet. A young woman with her lip and nose pierced stood at the counter talking on a red cell phone. He walked up and down the aisles, hunched over and trying to read the flaked and broken spines of westerns, mysteries with culinary themes, horror novels with titles that seemed to leak blood. He settled on Louis L’Amour, one of the Sackett books he knew but hadn’t read in a while.

  Next to the counter was a stand of cheap DVDs like the one in the store where Michelle worked. While the girl rang him up, the cell phone stuck between her ear and her raised shoulder, he flipped through the movies, looking for something he knew.

  “Do you have Night of the Demon?”

  She held out his change, shook her head, turned her back to finish her call. He felt the chemical thunderbolt of the cocaine in his blood and a flash of loneliness and shame that made his shoulders cave in on themselves, and he went to the car and pawed around for the vodka.

  He went back to the club and waited for the black- haired dancer, who came out with a bouncer and turned and said a few words to him before he went back inside. He waited, then got out and gave a nervous half- wave, and she pointed to her car. He pulled out, and she followed in a black Jetta.

  IN HIS ROOM, she said she didn’t have much time; her mother was watching her son and expected her home at midnight.

  “He’s nine.” She held up a cigarette and raised her black eyebrows, and he nodded. She fished in her purse and brought out a Zippo and a scuffed photo of a tiny kid with a mass of black curls in an oversized football jersey and shoulder pads. He smiled at the picture, and she looked at it, and when she put it away Ray could see her hands were shaking. He watched her light the cigarette, her full lips pursed and her eyes watching his.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, and she came over and sat in his lap fully clothed. He put one arm around her but thought of a small, black- haired kid in a messy living room watching TV, the grandmother asleep in the blue wash of light, mouth open, dentures loose. A smell of unwashed laundry and old cigarette smoke.

  He could feel a tremor in her arm across his chest. At the club he had wanted her with an ache that seemed to run through him, carried in his blood. Under the yellow light from the cheap bed-table lamp, it all fell out of him and he could see she was afraid that he might be a cop, that he might beat her. She wanted him to know about her son. She wanted the money for her rent, or maybe to get high. He had always known this about the massage parlor women, the strippers he had briefly dated or just fucked for money. Something about killing a man with his hands, or almost getting killed himself, or turning thirty, or talking to his father had changed the way he saw things. The way he saw himself, moving through the world. Maybe it had just been the house on Jefferson Avenue, the picture of the girl in her cap and gown looking so much like Marletta, and her voice in his head again. The way she had looked at him and the things he had let himself want when he held her.

  People were weak and stupid, and he had used that knowledge to get over on them. The things they needed, the people they loved, made them vulnerable. This special knowledge he had spent his lifetime accumulating he realized now was absolutely obvious to anyone alive in the world, and it made him ashamed to see it so plain. Anyone who wasn’t crazy or greedy or stupid knew it. He shifted to get his hand in his pocket and took out his money and handed it to the girl. He lifted his head and told her to go home, and she unfolded herself from his lap and got up and was gone in a few seconds. He had wished for a moment that she would stay and talk to him. The smell of cigarette smoke and perfume hung in the air for a minute. He had wanted to tell her something, but what ever he had to say she already knew it.

  When he closed his eyes he could get glimpses of Marletta, and of Michelle, the two of them sometimes getting
mixed up in his head. They were like two lights on a dark horizon, and if he could stay fixed on them, move toward them, he thought he could get away from all of this. Not just out from under this trouble but away from everything he knew, be something different, do some thing with his life, maybe. He stayed up through the night, drinking vodka and tonic to bring himself down off the coke and reading the book he’d bought. He thought, not for the first time, about the land in the westerns he read, the way the men in the stories found their way by the col-ors and shapes of rocks and canyons. Everywhere he had been in ten years had looked the same to him. The Philly suburbs were hills rolling out monotonously, every inch covered with weedy industrial lots, Wal- Marts and Kmarts and malls, and you couldn’t fix yourself in them. The stars were lost in a milky sky lit orange by sodium lamps. Sometimes he dreamed of himself on a horse in the desert, navigating dry wash canyons by the color of the sand and riding in the blue shadows of massive rock formations like pyramids grown from the earth.

  He lay with Marletta in his small bed, naked on the covers, heads close. He pulled a pillow from the floor and put it under her head, and she smiled at him. She was larger somehow out of her clothes, the fact of her working on his head, his need for her moving in the muscles of his arms and legs. Her eyes were shining and wide as if desire were a drug moving in her blood.

  She touched him, and he closed his eyes, moving his hips against her hand, and she kissed him and rolled onto her back. She caught his hand and guided his fingers to her, and he felt where she was wet and his breath came harder and he moved over her and balanced there.

  She put her hands on the small of his back and, lifting herself, drew him down onto her. He watched her eyes close, and fat tears rolled from the corners and she bared her teeth, and he stopped moving. Her eyes opened, and she saw there was something frantic and afraid in his face and put her hand on his cheek.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t hurt you.”

  “No, I love you.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” His voice was horse.

  She drew his head down and put her lips to his ear. “I need you to be with me. I love you. Everything beautifu l is on the other side of this. Everything is coming for us.”

  At dusk the next evening Ray went to a small strip mall in Trooper and waited for Cyrus. He got out of the Honda and paced, drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and wanting a cigarette. At eight thirty it was still hot, and he wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand. The phone buzzed in his pocket, and he looked at it. Manny again, wanting him to relent and let him be there to watch Ray’s back. He turned it off.

  He watched people go in and out of a convenience store, watched a man with tattoos and one wandering eye come out of a thrift store carrying an armload of scuffed toys. Moths and mosquitoes came out of the dark and thrashed against the green lights overhead. The man got into a worn El Camino and two small girls lunged at him, clutching at the toys with wide smiles.

  Cyrus showed in the huge red pickup, the kid with the shaved head riding shotgun. Ray made eye contact with Cyrus, and the older man took his hand off the wheel and pointed down the road. Ray got back in the Honda and headed out. They snaked over low hills, the pickup hanging back. Ray kept it slow, keeping them in his rearview. After a few turns he noticed there were more cars behind them and Cyrus was talking into a cell phone as they made the turns, his big head silhouetted against the slewing lights of trucks and SUVs.

  On Forty Foot Road Ray slowed and then pulled over. He got out and walked back to the pickup, kicking gravel and empty plastic soda bottles.

  The skinhead jumped out and moved out front. He had big, wired- looking eyes and thick rings on his knuckles. “What’s up?”

  “What is this? I thought I was taking him to look it over.”

  “Mister, you and me just do what we’re told.” He stepped back, pointing ahead.

  “You don’t need me. To look it over.”

  “You’re the one called this deal. You’re done when he says you’re done.” The big skinhead pointed back at the cab, where Cyrus cocked his head and pointed his red hand down the road.

  Ray shook his head but got back in the car and started away. Two vans and another pickup stayed close behind Cyrus. He turned down a long dirt road leading around a hill and watched the moon slide between clouds. At the bend he stopped. The road led into a copse of trees, and ahead he could see the lights on the pointed roof of a tall old farm house and the blank side of a white barn. He opened his window and heard music and a loud, rough laugh. Cyrus pulled up and got out, and Ray watched as the two vans and the truck pulled into the grass. A dark Taurus made the turn from the road and parked behind the other cars. Ray went under the passenger seat and retrieved the Colt and put it under his jacket at the small of his back. His breath was coming harder, and he put a hand on his chest. He got out of the car but left it running.

  To the north he could see heat lightning flash soundlessly. There was a din of crickets; a hot wind pulled at his shirt and hair, and sweat began to run on his neck and chest. Men came out of the vans wearing embroidered colors. They crowded around the trunk of the Taurus and talked to each other in low voices. Ray wanted to jump back in the car and get out.

  Cyrus moved over and put his ruined hand on Ray’s back, moved him forward away from the car. He closed the door and reached in through the open window and pulled the keys out of the ignition and pushed them into Ray’s hand. “Let’s go see what’s going on.” He nodded down the road toward the farm house.

  Ray looked behind him and got a glimpse of men carrying long guns and someone hefting a cardboard box. “This isn’t what I thought.” He made a gesture at the crowd of men filling the road now, kicking up dust that looked blue in the moonlight.

  “What did you think?” Cyrus leaned into him in the dark, and Ray backed up.

  “I thought you were just . . .” Ray licked his lips.

  “Bullshit.” In the dark, Ray could only see the liquid whites of the older man’s eyes. “You knew exactly what I was going to do.” Ray shook his head, and Cyrus pushed him hard against the car door with a rigid arm that compressed Ray’s chest and stopped his breathing. “Don’t lie to me, yardbird. You knew. You knew the minute you looked in my eyes.” The other men crowded around them, their eyes reflecting the blue glow of a distant light pole.

  Ray’s voice was thin and breathless. “I can pay them the money.”

  Cyrus reached into the skinhead’s jacket and came out with a pistol, a fast move like a magic trick in the half- light. He stuck the gun under Ray’s chin. He saw the skinhead wince a little, as if he were expecting to hear the flat, detonating pop and to see Ray’s head come apart. After a long moment, Cyrus pulled Ray off the car by his shirt and pushed him down the road.

  “Now fucking move.”

  Ray began to walk, pulling weakly at his clothing to recover himself, keeping the low hill on his left, between him and the house and barn. He left the gravel road and went into the grass, followed by Cyrus, the rest strung out in a line leading back to the cars. It was impossible to know how many there were in the dark. As they moved around the hill the music got fainter. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he could begin to make out junked farm equipment shrouded by tall grass, broken bottles catching the flashes of lightning. A pile of tires loomed and then retreated, and then they were walking through the trees.

  The music and party noise grew clearer as they made their way past the hill and into another stand of trees closer to the house. The men with Cyrus spread out as they came to the edge of the overgrown lawn, and everyone slowed. Ray dropped to his knees next to a scarred dogwood that bowed over to almost touch the ground. There was a clink of glass behind him, but when he turned all he could see was Cyrus carrying a double-barreled shotgun and some indistinct shapes of men among the trees. Ray’s own harsh breathing filled his head, and his heart
hammered.

  Ahead was the house, and beyond that the white barn. Men were sitting on the steps of the house and wandering in and out of the barn. There was a row of parked bikes, a white pickup. He could see more cars out on the other side of the barn and tried to pick out the Charger. The inside of the barn was bright with lights, and the music threw clattering echoes off the house and trees. A song about skinheads. Women danced in cut- off shirts that showed pouched bellies and waved plastic cups in thick hands studded with rings. A man threw a bottle out into the darkness, and it broke against the trees nearby. There was a fire in a barrel, and a shirtless man staggered out of the barn and fell hard in the gravel. Someone kicked him and he rolled. Ray could smell dope and wood smoke and gasoline.

  Ray turned his head and caught Cyrus striding out of the woods to stand in the sharp white glare from the floodlights on the side of the barn. The old man laid the shotgun down and stripped off his leather jacket and a dark T-shirt and bared his wiry torso, crossed with ropy veins and vivid tattoos: crossed swords, a helmeted Viking with a battle- ax, pit bulls on chains, and the words CRY HAVOC, inked liked a headline across his narrow chest. He picked up the shotgun, broke it open and checked the loads, and then stood unnoticed in the wash of sound and light from the party.

  No sign of anyone who might be Scott. A man came out of the barn, turned his back to Ray, and sat on a bike. He had long gray hair and wore colors. Ray looked right and saw Cyrus turn to call something to the men in the trees. One of the other men was pointing off into the dark near the house and cradling what looked like an AK- 47. A fat, sweating man hunched in the shadows and reached into the cardboard box Ray had seen earlier. He pulled out a bottle and handed it to someone behind him.

  Ray was breathing hard, his mouth dry. He thought about Ho and Tina and Manny and the man who wanted him dead. Who might right now be one of the indistinct figures moving in the barn, obscured by the haze from cigarettes and dope.