Garden of Fiends

by Matthews, Mark

  I pulled my legs into my chest, wrapped my arms around my legs, and blasted him with my eyes. Crack-heads are the least dangerous men on earth when they’re smoking, and he’d be sucking the glass dick in a second, his own limp and not dangerous.

  “Waiting on Brett,” I said. “So fuck off.”

  “I know,” he laughed. “I seen you with him. I know you two are buying smack. Shouldn’t be shooting that shit, you know. You ain’t seen any of us sticking a needle in our arms and dying like that. Hellz no. You know, someday someone like Brett is going to chop you up. You know that right? That’s what they do, Bretts, they poke holes in you until all that’s left are little pieces.”

  I got up to leave, gave him a look that stopped him from moving, just as the door down the hall opened and a crack of light spilled from the bedroom. Brett and Russell appeared. Brett motioned me over with his head. I refused with a shake of mine.

  “Come on,” he beckoned again. “Come here. Almost done.”

  I made a defiant march down the hallway, and Brett held the door while I walked inside. Not much had changed in the bedroom other than a bigger pile of clothes on the floor. The same yellow mattress rested on the ground near a card table littered with empty liquor bottles and overflowing ashtrays. The walls were stained from the rotting souls of those who’d been there before us. Brett shut the door.

  “So what the fuck is this about? You didn’t get high did you?”

  “No, Tara, why don’t you trust me? I just bought some to bring back with me to lock-up. I can get 100 bucks for two packs of dope. I’ve got a plan. Just gonna eat this in a tiny piece of plastic. After my morning crap, I got major coin.”

  The walls started to move in, coming together to squish me. My fingers shook as I checked my phone. Expect to hear from you Sweet-Pea. My dad had texted me ten minutes ago. Getting coffee with Stacey, I quickly thumbed back.

  “Your dad right? It’s always your dad. I know he loves you, but he don’t know you like I do. He loves you for who you were, I love you for what you are. He made you, but he doesn’t know you.”

  He made you, but he doesn’t know you. Last time I heard that was in a Motel 6, my dad looking for me with ads in the paper while I fixed up, Brett urging me not to respond.

  He made you, but he doesn’t know you

  Brett raised the packs of dope before my eyes. Tiny cells inside me started to wake, voices of my cravings started to whisper.

  “Tara you realize how strong you are? How powerful you are? You proved you can stop. And today might be the last time you’ll see me in a long time. Listen to my logic. You need to use one, just one. It’s perfect. You’ll have to stop, since I’m spending the night back in jail, and this will get you through. Then tomorrow you do some NA to get back on track, and I’ll know you were happy when I’m back in county lock up. Just one. For me.”

  Brett’s eyes pleaded. Mine looked to the floor. Another spider, same style as the one before, went crawling for cover.

  God, I needed a fix.

  The dam I’d built to hold back my cravings was starting to break. The leaks were springing. I needed a release from the pain of living. I needed to feel happy and loved. Brett was right: I’d use just this once and then get back on track. It will feel so good. Just one more time to remember how beautiful life can be, to remove the defects that I had been cursed with since birth. No more anger, hurt, rage, shame… all of it will float away and I’d feel fine. Dope was love, and Brett had brought it to me.

  “Just one.”

  Brett didn’t take long to get works from the nightstand and fix up with precision, boiling the spoon, then filling the syringe. The poke into my flesh was heaven, the sharp bite of the needle, the warm, gentle orgasm spreading up my back and through my blood. God, that was how I wanted to feel always. I had forgotten what it was like, not to hate to exist, the burden of having a body. Such comfort, such peace.

  Oh God, but something was wrong. It’s all too much. I looked up to Brett and his eyelids fluttered, his head starting to nod, his face with a smug smile, but not mine. The air was too thick to breathe. My heart was too tired to beat, my eyelids too heavy for my face. Love was lost, heaven on fire. Angels flew away, vultures took their place. Ventricles closed, lungs slowed, mouth foamed.

  Kaleidoscope eyes closed.

  Chapter Two: Gregory Snyder

  The sweat on my skin was black from dirt as soon as it squeezed out of my pores. My insides were boiling right out of my flesh. On the ground, pockets of snow had all disappeared under the blue skies and golden sun. It was April and time to plant. I stabbed the spade deep into the earth, stood on top to use my full weight, then twisted deep into the wound.

  Nearby, my wife’s shoulders gleamed in the sun, her muscles sinewy, her limbs strong as tree trunks. Garden tools were just part of her fingertips. She was used to this work, me just a weekend warrior, her living the dream of building this urban farm in Detroit. The small bit of land, one of a handful given out as grants by the city, was closer to a garden than a farm, but she had plans to make it expand.

  “Someday we’ll have a porch. A gathering place with a table, chairs, and a hose to rinse the produce and neighbors can eat fresh off the vine.”

  She spoke with her eyes to the ground, studying it for any trace of rubble that needed to be removed or that might contaminate her soil. The soil had been tested with alkaline levels and PH values, but it needed to pass the eye test.

  “I hope the house they tore down had no asbestos inside. Just the tiniest bits will be part of the vegetables the community eats. It will be soaked up into the bodies of these people who already suffer so much. So much. I’ve seen it.”

  She was fishing for comfort, and I took the bait.

  “We saw them tearing the place down. No facemasks on, nothing, no asbestos.”

  “But what kind of lives did the people lead here? All of it ends up in the soil. All of it. And it feeds the plants we eat and goes right into our souls.”

  She got on her knees, praying position, while my eyes scanned the horizon. The only person in sight was Lorenzo pushing his grocery cart with squeaky wheels down the sidewalk. “I’m Heather, and I’ll be working here” my wife had introduced herself weeks ago with hand outstretched.

  “I’m Lorenzo, and I’ll be living here,” he had answered. The man had a grey-splotchy beard, dark green jacket, and plenty of skills to live out here in the urban wild.

  And I was looking for my lost treasure.

  The city had eaten up our daughter. Tara had been gone for three days. Her disappearance wasn’t that unusual, but after her last run at the treatment center, she’d been staying clean. I could feel the sobriety in her veins same way I could feel the weather. Each day without dope she was getting younger, turning back time to when she dreamed of playing soccer in the Olympics, doodled cartoons, and wanted to be a veterinarian.

  I felt a buzz at my hip and checked my cell with dirty hands.

  Nothing. No calls, no text, just a phantom buzz.

  Where is she? Even with her doing so well lately, I’d learned not to let the hope seem real. Best to expect nothing. Hope was dangerous. “Expectations lead to resentments,” her therapist had said.

  “Your daughter has a disease, you have to understand that,” the therapist said to me again and again. I agreed, and that’s why I tried to cut the poison out. I pressed charges against her boyfriend who convinced her to steal my checkbook. He got six months in jail, Tara got probation, and I had her hate buzzing at me for life.

  “I love you enough that I’m okay if you hate me, as long as I keep you alive,” I had explained to her.

  “You put the only thing I love in jail,” she replied. “That’s twisted. That’s not love.”

  The therapist kept quiet. I looked around the room at posters on the walls about serenity and other heroics. A water fountain on a shelf was plugged in to keep it bubbling over fake plastic rocks.

  “There is a bond that happens
when you get high together,” her therapist finally chimed in. “Brett fed her sickness. Imagine, Mr. Snyder, if every day you woke up dying of thirst and hunger, but only one person brought you food and drink. Dope was love to Tara, love was dope, and Brett brought it to her.”

  Heroin had hijacked my girl, and here I was, wasting time planting a garden instead of out looking for her.

  Another buzz in my pocket. I checked my phone, but once again nothing. Phantom hopes, and phantom buzzes.

  I plopped the spade back into the earth with an angry grunt as if it was the kill shot, and the volunteer helping us flinched. He had long black hair and a black scruffy beard. Che Guevara, I called him. He was spreading compost but had no idea what type of treasure he had. Heather got up to help.

  “The organic matter is alive,” she explained, spreading it over the earth in graceful dashes. “You’re feeding the earth, the ground becomes a digestive tract. Think of it this way: The garden is just farming us, giving us air to breathe, fattening us up, making us juicy and oozing with nutrients, then the plants consume us after our dead bodies decompose at their roots.”

  My wife would make sure that our bounty would be an oasis in the middle of urban decay, a feeding place for those lost in the deserted city. My eyes circled the horizon, but all I saw were buildings that seemed bombed apart, black burn marks around windows, boarded up front doors full of graffiti, crumbling brick, sharp edges of broken windows waiting to rip apart any humans who entered through them. All of them the corpses of hopes once alive. Somewhere in this urban jungle, my daughter Tara had probably gotten a pack of heroin.

  Tara had been here working alongside us last week, digging in the earth on a day much cooler and the ground not so soft. Hadn’t we laughed and smiled together? Hadn’t she taken a break with Che Guevara and dug a deep hole in the ground, saying he’d be the first to die in the revolution, so why not have his grave ready?

  “Compost would eat you up,” Heather had said.

  I’d have happily walked Tara down the aisle to marry her off to this revolutionist.

  A Chevy Malibu drove by, a group of kids inside, the driver peering at the sign out front: “Garden of Friends. Where Good Things Help People Grow” was written in small italics and quote marks, as if the phrase itself was being stolen. We had debated about a fence for hours, unsure if it would seem too impersonal, but finally decided we needed one to keep out stray dogs, rabbits, and the random city deer. Tara and I had even made a scarecrow and propped it up with a broomstick. It had branches for arms, twigs for fingers, a hat sewn onto its head and a green shirt stuffed with hay. A permanent insane smile was drawn across its face with a black Sharpie.

  I needed a scarecrow for my home, something to stop the dope fiends like Brett who’d taken my daughter through the years. He wouldn’t stay in jail long enough, and restraining orders were just paper.

  Phantom buzz. I put the spade down and reached for my cell. Nothing.

  Heather noticed this time. “She’s going to come back soon. She always does. Just looking to find herself. She’ll come back when she knows she’s ready.”

  That spiritual optimism I fell in love with remained, but my hide had been roughened and bricks had loosened and toppled. The ghouls of the city had taken my daughter, hooked their claws into her flesh and ripped the precious gem from my heart. Heather looked to the earth for answers, grabbing handfuls of dirt and letting it sift through her hand, waiting for plants to spring forth. That would take weeks, but I needed action. Today.

  “I need to go, Heather. I’m going to go early to do a few things. I will get home soon enough and have dinner ready, okay?”

  “Wash the pasta please, and I’ll be just 30 minutes behind. Remember, leave the door open, we’re not locking it.”

  Times like these, we always leave the door open, in case Tara walks home. The therapist had said to kick her out. Tough Love. Let her suffer. But Heather shut that down with the silent power of Gandhi. Our door is always open.

  “She did not relapse,” Heather promised. “She’s just taking time. Be careful what you put out in the universe.”

  A relapse. God, each time hurt more than the last. Stains upon stains.

  Nobody was as good about giving space as Heather was: to me, to Tara, to the seeds in the earth. Still, I didn’t want her to know where I was driving to. I loaded up some tools in the trunk, then drove until out of eyesight.

  I was a one-man search party, driving down streets I knew Tara had been down: Brentwood to Linwood, Fenkell to Telegraph. I hovered down the road like a lost UPS worker, houses on the street looked on with windows like eyes, awnings like eye lids. I peered into all of them. None of them blinked.

  I knew I was wasting my time. The only real hope was to go straight to the source. I had followed Tara to her drug dealer’s house more than once and knew the way. I pulled up front, the house hidden under a dark tree, trash on the driveway, and customers walking up to the door as if the house was sucking them inside. I parked and waited for the rumble of my engine to fade. When I had come here before, I would stay out front hoping I could notice Tara’s gait, then rush out to bring her home.

  Not tonight.

  Tonight I was going inside.

  Chapter Three: Gregory Snyder

  My legs were wobbly and my body punch-drunk as I walked to the front door and rehearsed what I would say. My uncertain eyes and incorrect words could give me away. I had to fake this right.

  Maybe I should turn around.

  Remember why you’re here: to save your daughter

  I’d rip the heads off of everyone inside and feed them to a stray dog if needed. I wasn’t going to my own grave (or visiting Tara’s) knowing that I could have done more. Call it what you will, dear therapist, this right here is tough love, not that ‘let her suffer’ bullshit.

  At some point, Tara had made this very same walk for the first time. She had courage, that was clear, but of the dangerous sort. Even if Brett had been by her side.

  Doorknob or knock? I wondered, but didn’t have to do either, since someone was leaving as I approached. No invitation needed. I took tiny steps through the doorway, as if the ground was ice and might crack below me.

  A man stood just inside, ripped with muscles, each move smooth, and his eyes were on me in an instant. “Whatchu want?” he asked. “You say what it is you want.” He lifted his shirt to show a gun in his waist, hand teasing the handle, other hand on the doorknob.

  My clothes were full of dirt, soil from the garden, as if I had just crawled out of the earth. I was glad for it. A clean man would not have survived there.

  “Just looking to get high.”

  “You say whatchu want.”

  “Cocaine, just cocaine.” Asking for heroin seemed a bad idea to me.

  “Don’t sell powder, you look like a rock-man, you say.” His eyes shot into my chest, my testicles rose up into my gut. I had thoughts of turning around, but instead I answered.

  “Actually, looking for a girl named Tara, too. I used to get high with her all the time. Have you seen her?”

  Was this against protocol to ask? What was the code in these parts? I felt spirits moving about the house, bodies in motion, music pumping from the walls. I waited for my punishment.

  “Tara, man. I know her. Black hair, and tits, right? Yeah, cause without them, I’d think she was a dude. I ain’t saying shit about her. You want a piece of ass you say, then you move on. You want rocks, you buy them and go. You smoking here, I’m putting you in the basement. What you say?”

  Tara was there, or had been there. I dug a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket with no real idea what I was buying. The money in my palm was replaced with a tiny piece of tin foil with a chunk inside that reminded me of rock salt. I glanced around the room, the disdain for me was clear, so I walked down to the basement as I’d been instructed.

  Smoke rose in the stairwell as I descended. At the bottom of the stairs, I ducked under a beam and entered a cavern.
Cement walls, cement floor, and a handful of sad, pitiful creatures with backs against the wall, smoking, shooting up, and all I could think of was Tara being there. Over the years, places like this basement had coated her outsides and stained her soul, and I needed to find her.

  To save her.

  Somebody there had seen my girl.

  I held the rock in my hand, trying to prove I belonged, but not sure what was next. A man paced back and forth before me. Nervous tics made his face twitch. He wore a green shirt with 88 written in white across the front.

  “Hey man. You need a stem?” he asked.

  “A what?”

  “A stem? A pipe, to smoke. I got one for the rock if you let me hit it. Maybe hit it twice. Come on man.”

  “Thanks,” I said, too grateful perhaps for the tone inside the place, and held up the piece of rock salt.

  Trembling fingers of the skeletal figure fired up a flame over the crack rock and he sucked on the glass. His body started to quake. Three puffs, each time noises like orgasms from his chest, then he presented it to me to smoke from next.

  I hesitated, felt eyes upon me. My lips felt infected just looking at it. If I didn’t take a hit, then every addict there would point in my direction, scream that I was a fraud, that I need to be killed or taken hostage, anything but helped.

  I had no choice but to be one of them. I fired up the lighter and sucked on the glass stem, softly, no intention to get high, but hard enough to not be called out as a fake. I could hear the flame crackle inside the pipe. Cold smoke shot down my throat and froze my lungs. An electric current zapped my spine and a chill shot through my body. I blew the smoke out in an open mouth-kiss, and it rose to the ceiling, mixing in with the nightmares of souls gone by.

  Sounds of train whistles screeched in my ear so loud that my skull shattered like glass. Tiny pieces fell to floor. My eyes rolled straight back in my head, synapses zapping electric.