Big Joe gave them a quick glance and kept adjusting the air intake screws on the ’52 carb as they swarmed into his garage bay, grabbed tools from his chest, and started working on their bikes, all of which had secret compartments for carrying illegal substances.
On the surface, the junkyard operated legally, specializing in building custom Harleys for bikers, but the real bank stacker was making and selling large quantities of crystal meth, which Big Joe had been expertly brewing for over three decades. Bikers traveling from state to state regularly stopped in to have their bikes worked on and their brains retorched. So while they were tightening bolts on their Shovelhead A-frames and checking air pressure, in the shadowy recesses of the warehouse, bubbling vats of chemicals were becoming monstrous jet fuel concoctions powerful enough to raise the dead.
I was aware that the bikers who frequented Big Joe’s garage were on runs, picking up or delivering something, and invariably one or two in the pack had his gruesome face thumb-tacked all over the country’s post offices by the FBI—wanted for murder or for the sale and manufacture of meth. They were a scary bunch, grubby and sun-chafed, mean-tempered and saddle sore, curse-spitting sleeveless pirates who sported tattoos and gang colors.
Shortly after their arrival, a dark-haired woman pulled into the yard driving a one-ton dually, half sanded and primered. She threw Big Joe a conspiratorial look and slid past the swing door into his private quarters adjacent to the bay.
Big Joe suggested we take a break and I followed him into his office. I was not about to be left alone with the bikers. Tania was sitting in one of the three grimy office chairs with wheels, puffing on a cigarette. She wore skimpy, cutoff jeans that barely covered her crotch, a soiled plaid woodchopper’s shirt that showed off ample cleavage and reeked of gasoline, and black steel-tipped boots. There was a drug-worn, unhealthy pallor to her skin and an anesthetized glassiness to her sleepless stare; her hands were blackened and chapped from working on engines, and she had an overall roughness that gave me the impression she’d be deliciously wild in bed.
We snorted up four-inch-long lines of meth laid out on a knife-sharpening whetstone, and leaned back in our salvage yard chairs. They talked about the latest news in the underworld of drugs, and as their voices droned in my ears, I imagined Tania’s long brown legs wrapping around my waist. As a lawyer who mostly represents clients accused of crimes, I have learned how to take advantage of people. Many of my female clients were poor, and they wound up trading an hour of sex with me for their freedom—not a bad deal, I would say.
I was sitting there trying to figure out a way of entering the conversation and taking control so I could maneuver myself into spending the evening with this woman, when the conversation turned to another woman, Carmen, who had previously been Tania’s roommate. Apparently biker informants on the street had discovered that Carmen was working with the narcs, doing buys with a wire on her; after a buy, the drug squad would raid the house and arrest the bikers. The bikers had put out a contract on her. As I listened quietly from my chair, I realized, though I hadn’t seen her in years, I knew Carmen quite well, and she was one woman who had slipped through the net.
I first met Carmen after her parents were killed in an auto accident. I had been appointed executor of their estate because their will was kept in trust at our firm. During our initial encounter in my office, Carmen’s erotic gestures and dancer’s nimbleness immediately put me in a sweltering fever, and later we began to meet for drinks. I pretended the meetings were for counseling her on how to invest her money. Carmen looked like a Vegas showgirl, a big glamorous woman, and I could tell from the erotic, acid smell of her perspiration that she was ready to have sex with me—but it never happened. Many times during sex with my wife I’ve imagined that it was Carmen I was with.
I told Big Joe that I was acquainted with her, and she seemed to be a nice woman—not at all a narc—and in fact I was a friend of hers. They both stared at me for a long second, as if determining my worth. In order to dispel any suspicions they might have about my loyalty to Big Joe and the bikers, I said that I would find out whether Carmen was working for the cops or not. Big Joe nodded and the woman gave me Carmen’s phone number.
Big Joe knew about my addiction to sex and knew how to feed it. A few lines of good crank is like swallowing a jar of hundred-milligram Viagras, and women on it absolutely go crazy in bed. Many times when I’ve been with a woman I’ve driven to Big Joe’s to get a small amount for the night. Big Joe supplied me because he was still paying me back for a favor I did him a little over nine years ago when we first met. At the time, I was with another legal firm practicing criminal law. Thanks to some people I met through NAFTA, I was able to arrange to break his old lady out of a Mexican prison in Chihuahua, and shortly after that, I helped him come up with the seventy-five grand and legal expertise he needed to beat a drug rap—for possession of thirty kilos of crystal meth. He didn’t have enough to cover my bill, so he gave me his prized ’52 hog and a lifetime supply of “aphrodisiacs.”
As soon as I left Big Joe’s junkyard, I called Carmen on my mobile phone from the road. We met in a café on Main Street the next day. She denied she was working for the narcs and then admitted she had only done it a few times. I knew she was lying; I also knew she was high on meth from the agitated way she licked her lips and her brown eyes darted back and forth from strangers on the street and back to me. I explained that I had enough influence with the bikers to lift the contract, and all I wanted in return was a few dates. She agreed, took my hands and clutched them, and smiled, promising me everything in that smile. Then she told me her side of the story.
“It was all his fault,” she began, lighting up another cigarette.
As she talked, I couldn’t help but be curious again about what kind of lover she was. She was built the way I like a woman—nice farm hips with a firm cowgirl’s ass, long dancer’s legs, narrow shoulders with firm breasts that leaped up when she walked. She had Mediterranean features, arched eyebrows, fleshy lips, and inquisitive flashing brown eyes that drew me in.
I knew I had clients waiting for me at court, but it wasn’t the first time I had been in dereliction of my duty. I love women, plain and simple, and I have gone to bizarre extremes to conquer them. In pursuit of sex I have lost homes, businesses, lots of money, and, during a couple of occasions when I was caught and shot at by enraged husbands, almost my life. My need for sex was so compelling that on the day I drove my wife from the hospital after our baby was born, I stopped by to see a client who lived on the same road as us. His wife was home alone, and with my wife in the idling car only ten feet away on the other side of the wall, I fucked her on the doorstep.
As distracted as I was by Carmen’s physical magnetism, I forced myself to listen to her story.
“Oh, you’ve got no idea what I’ve been through. You remember what was in my parents’ will—I ended up with almost a million dollars. My brother almost three million.”
Carmen was only sixteen and her brother Michael nineteen at the time we were divvying up the estate. The two received not only the lion’s share of the insurance policy money, but six houses, two four-plexes, a box of valuable old coins, and quite a portfolio of stocks and bonds.
“I hate that sonofabitch brother of mine,” she fumed. “I couldn’t deal with what happened to my parents but I pretended I could. I got married, had a baby, had more money than I knew what to do with, and so I got into drugs. Cocaine. Lots of it. And who do you think invested much of his money into drugs, women, and gambling? Fast cars, the high life, one day in Vegas, the next on the Riviera? Michael. It got so bad with me I gave him everything in exchange for a steady supply of cocaine. He said he was going to watch over my inheritance so that I wouldn’t lose it. But at some point he said if I wanted more cocaine from him, I’d have to sign him my share of the properties, which I did. When I went through my inheritance, I still wanted more cocaine, but he cut me off. I started prostituting on the streets. Bartending at rodeo bars. Suck
ing dick and fucking in the bathroom or an alley for a dime bag of cocaine. I was homeless. That’s when I started working for the narcs busting nickel-and-dime dealers. The narcs gave me enough to keep my habit going. And it was also legal with them to do all the drugs I wanted.”
I wanted to ask her about the fucking, to describe it in detail, but I was also repulsed by the thought of the men in that sewer sludge world, where even the best of drug users have the ethical standards of roadkill. Also, I was getting irritated, sitting there pretending to care about her problems instead of attending to my clients, enduring her miserable lament on life in the hopes of getting her to fuck me.
She swore she harbored no ill will toward her brother, but I sensed she still didn’t want to admit that she envied him. She stated with deep sincerity that she was now morally superior to that “human trash bin” and completely removed from “that world.” She even pretended, quite convincingly, that she was on the straight and narrow. Despite her insistence that she was clean, I was certain she was still using and I planned to prove it—she would have sex with me and she would do it for drugs.
From all my years as a trial lawyer, I knew all she needed was a nudge to go over the edge—and I would provide it. I was exploiting her weakness, but I was also only pushing her to her true self, to realize that it was better to admit the nature of one’s pleasures—drugs, whiskey, and fucking—than to delude oneself.
I remember a time sitting in New Orleans with a friend of mine, drinking and watching paddle wheel boats go by, when a young girl, perhaps no more than thirteen or fourteen years old, came in with her mother. My friend said it was a shame to bring a girl that young into such a seedy bar, and I retorted that he was kidding himself if he thought only men in “such a seedy bar” would fuck a girl that sweet and young. Every man would if it wasn’t socially prohibited. My friend accused me of wanting to destroy innocence and crush beauty. I grunted at him and told him about my experience in private school, when my math teacher took me into her classroom after school, straddled me on her desk, and fucked me. It was about power and control, and she had both. Before I left him he asked me, “To what extent will you go to fulfill your lust?”
I have never answered that question because the limits keep expanding, and I do things that surprise me. A few days after my café meeting with Carmen, with a little time to kill, I decided to drive down to her house. I smiled thinking how I had both power and control, but I grimaced with disgust when I pulled into the trailer court where she lived. I parked in front of trailer 23 and made my way around tires, broken appliances, and plastic bags of trash strewn all over the place to reach her door, which was open. She was inside lying on a torn couch in a bikini, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.
She got up and gave me a kiss on the cheek, said I looked like James Dean in my black suit and white shirt, and ran her hand through my hair as I eased down into an armchair. She got me a plate and spoon and I crushed and laid out a line of meth for her, hoping it would free her up enough to lead me into her bedroom, but she declined. I did the line myself, popped a beer, took a sip, and settled in. She stretched out on the couch on her belly with her butt sticking up, her hair cascading down, her legs crooked and crossed at the ankles. I stared into her cleavage, sure I was close to having her, when—I couldn’t believe it—she resumed her obsessive tirade about how her failure in life was all Michael’s fault.
“You’d think that two siblings suckled from the same tit would at least have one thing in common. Every time one of his business ventures failed, he came running to me, but there was a time when I never could see wrong in him, though I knew as early as high school that the traffic lights weren’t all working in that boy’s head.
“After our parents died, Michael became the man of the house. He was kind of feminine from the start, but of all the things he wanted to be—can you believe it?—a gangster, more precisely, a big drug dealer was tops. I thought he was kidding me, rabbit shy as he was. I literally had to pull him away from the school hall walls, he was so afraid of people—he’d even panic during class change in high school.
“I was the one voted most likely to succeed. I was a cheerleader. But Michael? Pimply-faced and lanky, droopy hound eyes, personality as creative as a country road telephone pole. I mean, flat. I’d take him with me to parties, he’d sit up in a corner, watch me make out with my newest boyfriend, hungering for a girl to talk to worse than a puppy whining for warm milk. I’m telling you, and you’ll agree with me when I tell you this, that boy is a pure miracle from hell. If I knew then what he was going to do and how he was going to turn out, I would have been the first to put a bullet in my head. Better yet, in him, much misery as he’s caused the world.”
I interrupted her to remind her of how I had saved her life and how she owed me. “Look, the reason I wanted to meet was to inform you that you had to stop snitching off dealers. They’ve let you slide this time, and they mean it too. I’ve represented Big Joe twice in court, and he has connections to take out anybody he wants. Both times I got him and his associates off, and that’s why they’re giving you this chance, through me, to walk away alive.”
“I will—I will—I will—” she said, jumpy with exasperation, glancing out through the open doorway at the beautiful view of fly- and maggot-infested trash heaps, “but I’ve got to tell you. This tweaker’s tango really begins now, meaning my brother Michael’s. Mother’s will—the little bastard forged a new one to replace the old and you, as the executor, never even questioned it.”
She caught me off guard with this accusation. I was about to make her prove her case when she blurted out, “That griddle-hearted sonofabitch—he’s much older and more experienced in cruelty than his years. Like, when we were little, if I really needed to use the bathroom, he wouldn’t let me in. He did that, cut you at the knees when you were most vulnerable. When poor Mother died, what do you think Michael did? He raced to the emergency room, stripped the jewelry off her hands and the gold and diamond chains off her neck. He swore up and down during the settlement in your office that she hadn’t been wearing anything, but shortly after that I saw Michael’s girlfriend and she was wearing one of Mother’s bracelets. That boy lies as pretty as a glazed donut on the rack. And of course I couldn’t say anything, because at that time I was getting my drugs from him. He would have cut me off. From where I’m sitting it looks like I’m the one dumber than a dog.
“Mother made me and Michael swear that when she died we’d take her ashes up to a mountain peak and scatter them, and that’s one promise I have to fulfill. She wanted to be free. Never thought I’d do the things I’ve done, but I’ve got to scatter her ashes up there. You know, things happen and you look back only so many times and get tired of looking back, and just let your head hang. Mine’s scraping the sidewalk.”
She got up, swayed her pretty behind into her bedroom, and came back holding a silver corked vase. “This is her, where she lives right now.” She knelt in front of me, one hand on my knee, the other holding the vase, looking at me. She squeezed my thigh, and I swear I thought she was going to go down on me when she drew closer and asked, “I’ll find out where Michael is, but can you go up there with us to scatter her ashes?”
“Can I do what—” I blurted out, taken aback by her request and annoyed that I was letting myself be drawn this far into such an absurd affair. I had no time to meddle in other people’s lives, not like this anyway. “Why does it matter to you? I don’t want to be blunt, but why don’t you just flush her down the toilet as you have your own life?”
“I think she might curse me if I don’t do this. Maybe my life is already cursed by her, and it won’t change until I do this. I’m thinking this would be a good way to get my life on track, keeping my word. I want to do this, but I’m not sure I can by myself.”
“You’re sincere? Did you get converted or something?”
“I want to change, I’m trying to change,” she said, and got up and sat on the couch again, c
lutching the vase in her hands between her legs. “I want Michael in on it too, kind of like a family or something. But with me and him, we’ll probably fight, it won’t happen. With you there, if we get in a fight, you can stop us.” She paused and then asked, “Did you go to bed with my mama?”
I nodded.
“Then that’s reason enough for you to help us see she gets what she wants.”
I promised to be available but gave Carmen’s request little regard. In truth, I expected never to see her again. I said goodbye, a little disappointed our meeting hadn’t ended as it had in my X-rated fantasy, but as I drove to my office a few blocks away, I was satisfied to forget the encounter. After all, my initial urge to meet her was based on nothing more than a compulsion to make love to every beautiful woman I met—and this failed attempt could just be chalked up to some temporary testosterone disorder.
I had a pretty peaceful life. I wanted things easy and didn’t need to mess it up by adding this woman’s problems. A one-night stand was not worth the hassle.
I’d all but forgotten about Carmen until six months later. It was Christmas Eve and I had a group of friends over to my house. Each had brought a dish of food to share after we returned from Mass. Once everyone had arrived we put on our scarves and coats and were headed out the door when the phone rang. I normally wouldn’t have answered it, but thinking it might be a friend who was running late, I picked up the receiver.
It was Carmen, and she wanted to know whether I was ready for the ritual. Her call caught me by surprise, and for a moment I found myself unable to respond. I said I was busy at the moment and told her to call later, after the holidays, but she insisted there was no time to waste. She was calling from a hospital bed, she said, and she claimed that she was going to die and that a member of her ex-husband’s family had put an evil hex on her. She sounded frantic and hysterical, and asked in disjointed phrases whether I knew a priest who could perform exorcisms.
The Importance of a Piece of Paper Page 11
