Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

  Eddie crawled naked to the edge of the ledge. It dropped twenty-five feet straight down a wall of granite blocks to two sets of railroad tracks. To his left, the tracks gently curved out of sight between chain fences, to his right were numerous tracks and switch-offs, where trains would be stored. Eddie realized he was near the train station, just outside of downtown Lowell, and that Chelmsford Street, one of the city’s busiest arteries, ran above his head.

  A much narrower ledge, like a catwalk, led away from the main ledge and followed along a tall granite retaining wall for about a hundred feet, ending at a steep, grassy knoll. The two-foot-wide catwalk looked like a dangerous exit from this place. It was a trek over patches of ice—a sheer stone wall on one side and a drop of more than two stories on the other.

  Did they really drag me down that walkway?

  The campfire had aged to coals. Somebody had spread Eddie’s suit near the fire. It was cold and wet and he shuddered at the thought of putting it back on. He crawled to a pile of clothes and picked through it. He found blue jeans with holes in the knees. They were short in the inseam and snug in the waist. He pulled on a rust-colored wool sweater with grease smears on the sleeves, and laced up red canvas sneakers, size eleven, one size too big. He tied them tight. He still needed a jacket. There was a large pile of clothes and blankets toward the back of the ledge, heaped against the abutment. He squatted in front of the pile and pulled out a black fleece pullover.

  There was a human head beneath it.

  Eddie’s head smacked a steel girder. The pain started at the back of his skull, roared up over his brain and shot out his eyes in a flash of light that washed the world white for three seconds. He massaged his lump and then crawled back to the pile. The head was attached to a man, buried in dirty laundry; it was the bald guy with the snakeskin tattoo who had tended the fire. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and noisy.

  “You okay, man?” Eddie said, tapping the man’s cheek. “I’m just looking for something to wear.”

  He turned his head and looked at Eddie. His pupils were specks. From his nostrils, drops of clear liquid streamed to his lips. He blinked a few times, and then turned away to sleep.

  “I’m assuming you don’t mind if I borrow a jacket.”

  The pullover smelled like sweat and campfire smoke. In the pocket Eddie found a wallet. It was an excellent tanned cowhide, or at least it used to be. There was an imprint of a polo player on it. Ralph Lauren? This was a pricey wallet.

  A voice said, “Those shoes do not match with that jacket.” Startled, Eddie dropped the wallet and spun around.

  The curly-haired man had come along the walkway to the ledge. He was kneeling, watching Eddie under the girders. He had an armful of dry sticks. Behind him, the woman who had warmed Eddie in the blanket edged along the walkway. She stepped sideways, her back to the retaining wall.

  “I needed clothes,” Eddie said. His eyes flickered to the railroad tracks below. A long way to jump.

  The man saw Eddie eye the tracks. His smile showed beige teeth. “We will trade clothes,” he said. The accent was Middle-Eastern. His language was formal, like he had learned English in a classroom. He looked about forty-five years old. “Then I will have a suit to wear to my board meetings.”

  They both smiled. The man lobbed the wood at Eddie’s feet and pointed to the fire. Eddie gathered the kindling and stirred the coals to revive them.

  The woman reached the ledge. She looked late forties. Forty-seven, Eddie guessed. “You look better,” she said to him. She had the voice of an elderly woman who had smoked all her life.

  “I’m doing better than that guy.” Eddie pointed to the man under the laundry.

  “Who? Snake? He’s as good as it gets. He’s on the nod.” She saw Eddie was puzzled. “He shot up this morning. Still on his wake-up hit.”

  “Heroin?” Eddie asked.

  “A rose by any other name….” She stopped in mid-thought and pointed down the catwalk. “Leo, here comes Fat Boy.”

  A calico cat trotted along the ledge. He was fat, all right, maybe eighteen pounds. The man grabbed a box of cat food and shook it. The cat hustled on stumpy legs. “Fat Boy’s a regular,” the woman explained. “He loves Leo. They all love him. We don’t eat sometimes but those cats always do.” She rolled her eyes at the man, but she smiled, too.

  The cat rubbed its bulk against the man’s shin and lifted its chin so he could scratch its neck.

  “Fat Boy trades his affection for food,” the man said. “That is how he stays fat. Not all of his kind has learned this.” He dumped a pyramid of dry food on the cement. The cat nosed into it.

  Eddie had the fire crackling again. They sat and talked. The man and woman who had saved him from the canal held hands. Her name was Gabrielle, he went by Leo, and this ledge was their home. They were part of a community of heroin addicts, a dozen or so, who often stayed under this bridge, though rarely more than a handful at a time. They had found Eddie in the water by chance, they told him. Ice had narrowed the swath of running river in the canal, and Eddie’s ice floe had become lodged.

  “How long have you lived here?” Eddie asked.

  Gabrielle answered, “Since we came from Montreal.” To Leo, she said, “What? About eighteen months?”

  “You don’t have to stay here, do you?”

  She shrugged. “Heroin is a full-time job. We can’t pay rent.”

  “What about the homeless shelter?”

  “They got big hearts down there, they do,” she said. “They check on us here sometimes, bring us coffee and they’ll give us clothes or a new blanket. But it’s a dry shelter. You can’t shoot up there, and they don’t let you in if you’re hooded.”

  “Hooded?”

  “You know—if you’ve been using.”

  “So you’d rather stay here, under this bridge, so you can shoot up?”

  They said nothing because the answer was obvious. Eddie pressed the point. “You don’t have a home, you don’t have heat or a phone. Christ—I don’t see a toilet under here.”

  Gabrielle looked sweetly on the naive stranger in her home. “That’s smack,” she said. “It knows everything you don’t have. And that’s what it gives you. Every time.”

  Eddie looked to Leo for confirmation. He nodded. “My wife tells it correct.”

  “You two are married?” Eddie asked, surprised.

  “In the eyes of everyone except the law,” Leo said. He grinned and kissed her cheek.

  By questioning them, Eddie got their biographies. Leo was born in Iran, moved to Paris at fifteen and studied philosophy as an undergraduate. His parents died young, and he moved to Montreal in his mid-twenties for graduate studies. There, blind drunk in the men’s room at a German-style pub on St. Catherine Street, he snorted heroin off the book jacket of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.

  Leo shook his head at the irony. “I had a backpack full of text with me. Plato, Kant, Hume, Bertrand Russell. But I chose Nietzsche.” He shrugged. “I did not even like Nietzsche.”

  Leo dropped out of school within a year of starting his habit, and took a job as a sausage cart vendor. His wages went to heroin.

  Gabrielle first used heroin with an old boyfriend in Montreal, in her first year of nursing school. He dumped her after she was expelled for stealing needles. She met Leo at the sausage cart, after a Canadians hockey game.

  “He was so shy,” she said. “He couldn’t look any of the girls in the eye, and such a gentleman. I knew right then, he was the one I was looking for.” They shacked up within a month. “We made a home together before we made love.”

  They stayed in Montreal six years together, shooting up as many as six times a day, until an overdose nearly killed Leo. Gabrielle wiped a tear as she remembered. “We made a pact to get cleaned up together and start over in Lowell, because I got a cousin here someplace.”

  They rehabbed in Canada for two months, and then rode a bus here.


  “We got this motel room,” she said. “The guy in the next room was selling heroin. There’s no excuse. It was there. We bought it.”

  Their money soon ran out. Other addicts had taken them here.

  “What about your cousin?” Eddie asked.

  She shrugged. “That’s the part that didn’t work out.”

  “What do you do for money?”

  “Leo works at a garage sometimes, under the table,” Gabrielle said. She looked to Leo and frowned. “I did some streetwalking, but when he found out it broke his heart so I stopped.”

  Leo pretended not to hear her. He let go of her hand and tossed a stick on the fire, which was burning just fine.

  They were so blunt, so open with their story. Would they tell it to the paper? Eddie couldn’t help himself—despite Danny’s death and his own near miss, he was born to tell stories such as this. He trembled at the possibility. “Does the city know you’re here?” he asked.

  “Cops do,” Gabrielle said. “They kick us out every few months when they’re looking for somebody on a warrant. We find someplace to bed for the night, just for one night. Mostly they don’t mind us. None of them want to come down here.”

  “What about rehab?”

  Leo and Gabrielle glanced to each other, sharing past hardships with their eyes. He took her hand again. “Leo’s been to rehab three times,” she said. “I been twice.” She patted Leo’s knee with her other hand. “The last time he did real good. He got a Section-Eight apartment in Centralville for a couple months. But when he couldn’t get me to stop, he started using again.”

  Eddie shook his head. “You guys are not what I would have expected in heroin addicts.”

  “What is that?” snapped Leo, suddenly annoyed. “You thought we would be gibbering like lunatics and lying in our own piss? Eh? That I could not talk to you like a person? Or love my wife like a man?”

  Eddie said nothing. Leo was right. Eddie had not expected they’d be human.

  Leo took a white candle and the lemon juice from the milk crate.

  “Let me tell you about heroin,” he said with no trace of annoyance. “It is the heart of this city’s underground economy. Think of the heroin trade like the shadow of regular commerce. It lies just behind it, and touches only at the bottom. This economy works in a circle. I will explain.”

  He twisted the butt end of the candle into a hole in the cement. “Addicts, as you say, people like me, get money for heroin from petty theft—car radios sometimes, smash-and-grab. The pawn brokers and the glass shops get some spin-off business—this is our economics.” He flashed that beige smile.

  He pulled from his coat a tin snuffbox and a fat pinch of tan powder twisted in plastic wrap. He held it up. “The hero of the underworld,” he said. He emptied the powder in the tin and shook his head. “It is crap. Mostly brown. Not the best. Not pure.”

  Eddie nodded.

  Leo stroked Fat Boy as the cat wandered away. Then he continued, “Look at the other economic forces working here. To stop my petty crime, the city hires more policemen. But you cannot fit all of us in the jail, right? So you treat us.” Leo lit the candle with a cigarette lighter. The wick was too long and the flame burned tall and smoky.

  “To treat all of these people, the government starts new programs. And they hire more counselors to rehabilitate us. That is a net job creation. Economics—see?” He sprinkled a few drops of lemon juice in the tin. “Some of us make it and become clean. Some go back to the spike and die.”

  He swirled the tin in the candle flame. “To make new customers, maybe my paper boy cuts his price, maybe a little—”

  Eddie interrupted. “Your paper boy? Is that what you call your heroin dealer?”

  “Yes. This is funny to you?”

  No, not funny, just ironic. Eddie didn’t want to say yet that he worked for the paper. He cocked an ear toward the distant clack of a coming train. “Are we safe under here?”

  “The train comes every hour at quarter past,” Leo said. He smiled. “It is a most noisy wristwatch.”

  Eddie said, “So you were saying, the dealer cuts his prices?”

  “Maybe a little, and he adjusts his strategy,” Leo explained. “You can snort heroin too, he tells everyone. And you—mister nine-to-five job—you might say you would never touch the needle. But you will sniff the powder. Maybe you cut it with ecstasy the first time, that yuppie drug. This is just recreation, right?”

  He blew out the candle and fanned the mixture in the tin with an open hand.

  Leo stared Eddie in the eye. “I promise you would like it, you would. Just takes a week and then you have a habit.” He grinned, and then whispered. “But the secret is this—snorting is never as good as the first time.”

  He took the needle from his coat and held it up. “Ah-ha!” he yelled in joy. “You hear that shooting in the vein is better than snorting—maybe it’s more like the first time, you hope.” He loaded the needle with the mixture in the tin. It was the color of root beer.

  His smile fell and he said, “And then you are here, with us, under this bridge. And you steal for money, smash and grab. It is a circle.”

  Gabrielle clapped lightly. “I love to hear you talk,” she told Leo. To Eddie, she said, “Couldn’t he have been a professor?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, she wrapped a tourniquet of torn nylons around her left biceps and slid up her sleeve. Swollen needle marks ravaged her forearm like little purple leeches. Leo gave her the needle.

  Eddie had seen enough. He crawled to his suit. His wallet was still in the jacket pocket. The crisp twenty-dollar bill he had was gone—probably on its way into Gabrielle’s arm. Small price to pay for a lift from the canal, he decided. His cell phone and shoes were gone, but his keys had survived the trip down the canal in his pants pocket. He left the suit for Leo. It was too small anyway.

  Gabrielle pulled out the needle and slipped the syringe behind her ear like a pencil. After just ten seconds, she tilted her head back and moaned, “Candy-coated.”

  Leo lit the candle again. Eddie’s mind raced for the right way to ask if they’d sit for an interview. Sweet-talking was out—they had no vanity to flatter. A direct approach, he decided. He said, “Aren’t you guys curious about what I was doing in the canal?”

  Leo shook his head. “You made somebody mad, probably. You are not the first. I do not want to know any more.”

  “That’s right,” Eddie said. “I’m a writer at the paper. I got in trouble sticking my nose where I shouldn’t. Look, I need a new story, and I think you two would be great.”

  Gabrielle said nothing. Did she even hear him?

  Leo thought for a moment and then dismissed the idea. The approaching train grew louder. Under the bridge, the noise echoed chaotically. Leo spoke up over the rumbling, “Us? Nobody wants to read about what they wish did not exist.”

  Not exactly a yes, but short of a no. There was hope.

  “People need to see their community, all of it,” Eddie shouted. “If they don’t like something, maybe that forces them to do something about it.”

  “Like run us out of here?”

  That was still not a no. “Like getting you some housing and more treatment. Maybe by spending more money on the methadone clinic.” Over Leo’s shoulder, a chewed-up black cat spied on the humans from behind a pile of empty soup cans. It was missing half an ear. Eddie pointed to the cat, “And by getting that guy a warm home.”

  Leo looked. “That is Ghost Cat. He will not eat if we are watching.” He poured more cat food onto the cement. “Pretend he is not here. Be busy for a minute.”

  A silver freight train barreled into view. Eddie crawled toward his suit to check the pockets again, but stopped at the stained Polo wallet he had found in the jacket. No money inside, no family photos. There was a Massachusetts driver’s license in a credit card slot. Eddie knew the face.

  The wallet belonged to Daniel P. Nowlin.

  Leo w
as paying Eddie no attention. He knelt beside the candle, melting more heroin. He tilted the tin to collect the brew in a corner. The edge of the metal box split the fire into a forked tongue.

  A guttural roar escaped Eddie’s throat. He scrambled on all fours to Leo, grabbed his overcoat and slammed him to the cement. The cat hissed and dashed away. Adrenaline hardened Eddie’s lazy muscles. He stuck the wallet in Leo’s face and screamed over the roar of the approaching train, “Where did you get this?”

  Leo whimpered. He struggled to wrench free. He was so weak. How did he ever carry me up here? Eddie gripped Leo’s coat with both hands and shook him.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Found it,” he stammered.

  “You found it where?”

  “Let me go.”

  Eddie pulled him close and spoke slowly. “Tell me where you found this wallet or you’re going over the ledge.”

  The train sped into the shadow of the bridge on a cyclone of wind. Paper hamburger wrappers around the ledge danced in glee.

  Leo looked Eddie in the eye, and then glanced past him, over Eddie’s shoulder.

  Eddie turned to see. Too late. The snakeskin-tattooed man was planted behind him. He cocked a four-foot length of firewood like a baseball bat. Eddie shut his eyes.

  “Snake!” Gabrielle’s voice was loud over the train, but calm.

  Eddie looked in time to see Snake check his swing. Nobody moved. The four of them waited as the train clattered under them. Their eyes blinked out swirling dust. Eddie coughed. The last car finally passed, sucking the energy from a furious cloud of paper trash under the bridge, which floated, exhausted, to the ground.

  Gabrielle shouted at Eddie, “We buy from a guy in the Acre who works the projects near the canal. We were walking to meet him when we took the wallet off a guy, okay? He was in the water, just like you were. But he was dead, froze like ice, that guy, and beat to shit. He didn’t need the money.”

  Eddie let Leo go. Both men panted. Eddie’s hands trembled with unused adrenaline. Could he believe them? If they killed Danny, why save me?

  “I’m sorry,” Eddie said. He held up Nowlin’s license. “I knew this man. I think somebody killed him. And I thought—you folks saved my life. I had no business—” His head ached behind his eyes.