The Dope Thief Read online

  Ray noticed one of those little roadside shrines that families build where someone has been killed in a wreck. Saw the shattered plastic flowers and rotted wooden cross, a tiny, faded photograph flashing by too fast to register. He began to feel a tightness in his chest, a hitch in his breath that felt like panic.

  The girl in the picture reminded him of someone. The girl in the cap and gown. The name came back to him, and the accident, and a terrible pulse in his head that made him sick. Marletta. A girl he’d loved, who’d loved him. The brilliant girl with the open smile.

  He got her back for an instant sitting in the front seat of a car on the day she graduated high school. The day he would have graduated but for Juvie and the time lost. Marletta sitting beside him in her cap and gown, looking like the girl in the picture in the house on Jefferson Avenue.

  He stretched, turned on the radio. KYW came on, the an nouncer talking about Allen Iverson and his bad attitude. Ray snapped off the radio, opened the window, let the rain spatter his eyes, his cheeks, his open mouth. Manny watched the road, the traffic, occasionally looked his way. When they reached the exit, Ray cranked the window back up and ran his hands over his face. He caught sight of himself in the mirror on the visor, and it looked like he’d been crying.

  “Ray, man?”

  But Ray was staring, now. His hands empty in his lap, his brain twisting in his head. “All good things,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  THE NEXT DAY, the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Ray pulled his Camaro up outside his father’s house in Hatboro, hunched his shoulders against the rain, and ran to the open garage. He stood and watched the sky for a minute, the clouds low and dark as smoke. There was a faint sound of thunder, like cloth being torn, and a weak green light in the clouds. He could smell the wet asphalt and the cut grass caked on the old mower in the corner, the dust and oil and gas. The houses were shaded by leaning maples and oaks that muted the constant low roar from the turnpike but that darkened the streets and yards so that even outside Ray felt like he was behind walls. He walked through and opened the door to the house.

  Theresa, who had raised him after his mother left and stayed with him when his father went upstate, was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and watching the small TV he had gotten her for Christmas, squinting through a thin trail of blue smoke. In front of her were a cup of coffee and a game of solitaire. She waved her small yellow hand at him, leaving a smoke circle in the air.

  “The prodigal.” At her feet a white dog watched him, moving only his eyes as Ray moved into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Ma. How’s the reception?”

  She shrugged. “Good enough.”

  He looked in her refrigerator and walked into the living room. “You fixed for everything? Eating right?”

  “I got no appetite.”

  “Yeah? What’s the doctor say?”

  “He says I’m an old bag and I’m gonna die soon.” She moved cards on the table.

  Ray patted her on the head. “That sounds about right.”

  “Fuck you, too, chum.”

  He held up his hands as if to spar, and she flicked ashes at him, smiling a yellow nicotine smile. “You and what army, boyo?”

  “My ma, toughest kid on the block.” He walked through the narrow, paneled rooms into his childhood bedroom. He shook his head at the trophies topped with small gold batters with unreadable expressions that somehow frightened him when he was a kid and woke with night terrors. He got down on his hands and knees and pulled an olive drab duffel from underneath his bed.

  Theresa called from the kitchen. “Raymond, you want coffee?”

  He unzipped the bag and opened it, showing stacks of bills, some with the bank bands on and some ringed by grimy rubber bands. He took rubber- banded rolls of tens and twenties out of his jacket, his shirt, his pants and dropped them in the bag, then rummaged around under the cash.

  “Nah, Ma, thanks. You stay put.” He pulled out a Colt .45, a scuffed 1911A1 he had bought at a gun show in North Carolina, and laid it on the rug. He fished around in the bag and came out with two empty clips and laid them next to the Colt. He sat and did math for a minute, figuring the rent, the money he owed, food, gas, the money he’d have to front Manny until the next thing happened. He grabbed a stack of twenties, snapped off the rubber band and counted bills from one hand to the other, then zipped the bag and pushed it back under the bed, leaving a track in the dust.

  “You working today, Raymond?”

  He picked up the pistol and quietly worked the slide, then stuck it inside his jacket and pocketed the clips. “Yeah, Manny and this guy Rick Staley are picking me up.”

  “The degenerate Manny I know. Who’s the other degenerate?”

  He walked back out and laid money on the table, then went to the sink and washed his hands. The glasses in the cabinets rattled, and Ray ducked his head to see a pair of A-10s coasting into the naval airbase up the road above Maple Avenue. He had grown up to that sound, lain awake nights listening to the jets come and go and found it comforting.

  “You don’t need anything? Coffee, milk?”

  She shook her head. “Walk Shermie for me.” He watched her for a minute as if trying to fix her in his mind. “Shush, it’s my numbers.” She grabbed a pencil and two lottery tickets from the table.

  “What you got, Ma, the Powerball?”

  She screwed up her face in concentration. “Will you shut it?”

  He pulled the leash from a peg on the wall near the door and grabbed a plastic bag from a coffee can. The dog sighed like an old man and rose stiffly, stopping to scratch himself. Ray watched Theresa leaning toward the TV, her eyes flicking back and forth from the screen to the tickets, the lenses in her glasses blue with the reflection. For a minute she seemed otherworldly, alien. Her tongue curled around her upper lip, flicking. Finally she threw down the pencil. “Not one goddamned number.”

  “Anytime today, Sherm. This fucking dog. You should put it to sleep.”

  “Who’s going to keep me company, you?” He zipped up his jacket and led the dog outside. He heard her through the door. “Don’t forget to pick up the shit! I’ll put you to sleep.”

  He stood in the rain with an unlit cigarette while the dog sat in the shelter of a scrawny dogwood in the backyard. In the corner was a half- built brick barbecue; really just a hole in the ground covered with a piece of rotting plywood and a pile of bricks, a few stuck together with cement.

  He remembered his father standing in the yard, a cigarette working in the corner of his face, a beer bottle in his fist. Picking up a brick and fingering it, putting it back in the pile. The next day he went off to court to answer a robbery beef and never came back. Ray was eleven, already unmoored from childhood by the disappearance of his mother the year before. That night, when he woke up (a nightmare about a dog coming for him), Theresa was sitting in the dark, smoking a cigarette. She sat on the edge of the bed, her breath sweet with his father’s whiskey. She kissed him on the forehead and sat silently with him until he fell asleep.

  Now the dog looked at him, and Ray said, “What?” and led him out to the front yard through a teetering gate. The place was falling down, and Ray felt guilty again about the long list of things Theresa needed done. Shit that Ray promised he’d do but never got around to. He had lived in the house for a while after getting out of prison for his first fall as an adult. Driving a stolen car and getting into an accident.

  Manny rolled up the street in his vintage Mustang, the old 390 making a drumming sound he could feel in his chest. Ray hooked the leash onto a low branch of an apple tree that overlooked a statue of the Virgin Mary and walked over to lean into the car, smelling Armor All and cigarettes. He shook Rick’s hand and waved at Manny, who pointed at Rick, a muscular guy with long hair and a tattoo of a clock on his bicep.

  “This is Rick Staley. He did a bit with Harlan Maximuck at Graterford.” Rick was built up in his arms and shoulders the way some guys get in
side. He had lank brown hair and licked his lips ner vously. Manny was lean, tall, and stoop- shouldered, even behind the wheel of a car. His mouth was framed by a black goatee, and he wore sunglasses with blue lenses despite the sunless day.

  Ray leaned in the window. “Harlan the Hillbilly. I haven’t thought about him in, Christ.” He felt a pang, thinking of big Harlan keeping him pure inside. Keeping the skells away from Ray, when he was in for the first time and just a kid. And Ray getting out and away and never looking back. He could have done something, looked in on Harlan’s family, sent him some money.

  “What’s up with Harlan? Is he out?”

  Manny frowned, shook his head. “He tried to burn some guy in segregation.”

  “Jesus.”

  Rick Staley’s voice was low, and he looked up and down the street while he talked. “Yeah, he got shorted on some kind of deal, Christ only knows what. He got some cellie to smuggle gas in from where they keep it locked up for the lawn mower. Gets into Segregation, where they’re keeping the guy, sprays gas through the bean chute, and was trying to light him up when the CO came up. So Harlan, being Harlan, tries to light up the CO, too. He got Buck Rogers time for that shit.”

  Rick laughed. “I told him, bro, you got to look on the bright side. By the time you get out there’ll be flying cars and robot whores and shit.” Rick scratched a dope bruise on the inside of his elbow.

  Manny caught Ray’s eyes and shrugged. “Fucking Harlan.”

  Ray had known some guys inside who had been killed or maimed that way. The bean chute was what the cellies called the slot in the door where the dinner trays were slipped through in places like Segregation, where the guys were in protection or were too crazy to be let out to eat with everyone else. The correc tions officers, the COs, were a mixed bunch. Some were okay; some were humps who never missed a chance to smack you down. There were all kinds, holy rollers, drunks. He remembered one time when he was inside at Bucks County, awaiting trial on a car theft (dismissed). A skinny crackhead ran away from a work assignment and climbed up into the raf ters of the ware house and dangled his legs over into space, threatening to jump if he didn’t get a he li copter. The CO that time, a morose diabetic named Happ, stood there for a minute banging his clipboard against his leg, looked up at the kid, and said, “Jump, pussy. I got problems of my own.” Then he sent everyone back to work, and eventually the kid climbed down and they sent him to Segregation for a while.

  Manny pointed to the door, where Ray’s mother was standing at the door with a scowl on her face, lifted his hand, and smiled.

  “How you doing, Mrs. D?”

  “Just peachy, shitbird.” She pointed with her cigarette. “Bring Shermie in before he gets away.”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  “Did you pick up the shit, Raymond?” She walked away from the door.

  Ray shook his head. Manny laughed until he started coughing. “Yeah, Raymond, did you pick up the shit?”

  He took the dog back in and took one last look around. Theresa opened her purse, releasing a smell of cheap perfume and tobacco that took Ray back to summers waiting for her to pick through her change for quarters for him to take out to the ice cream man while he hopped from foot to foot, whining for her to hurry up and come across.

  She came out with an envelope and handed it to him. “Did you think I forgot?”

  He smiled and took it, shaking his head. “You didn’t have to do that, Ma.”

  “Who’s going to do it if I don’t?”

  It was a good question. “Well, thanks.”

  “You seeing anyone?”

  He shrugged. “Not really.” Not unless you counted the girls at the Osaka Spa, a Korean massage parlor behind a pool hall off Old Easton Road. The woman in the picture jumped into his head again, and he almost said something, made up a story about a woman with a hopeful smile and fierce brown eyes. Something dropped in his stomach, a lead ball moving down through him and pulling everything with it. He felt every minute of the life that had gone by. He felt like he could begin crying, and that if he did start he wouldn’t be able to stop. The old house creaked like a ship going down.

  Theresa tapped her cheek and he kissed her.

  “Happy birthday, Raymond.”

  He nodded, couldn’t get anything out. He could smell her, stale Arpège and Marlboros; and the house, something fried from last night, wet dog and dust and Lysol. The smell of home. He thought about staying there, sitting with Theresa while she watched her stories, playing poker for the pennies she kept in a glass piggy bank on the counter. Drinking the peppermint schnapps she liked, a beer from the fridge.

  He wanted to ask, did she remember Marletta? Ray had brought her to the house, but maybe only when Theresa was gone, so they could be alone. If he brought it up, he knew, it would be a bad memory for Theresa, bound up with him going to jail and all these lost years since. He felt something slipping away, couldn’t give it a name. He turned away, waved from the door, and was gone.

  THEY DROVE OVER to Horsham and dropped Rick off at his car at the Best Buy in Willow Grove. Rick, it turned out, had done some dealing, some B and E, passed some checks. He’d never done strong- arm but was willing to learn and didn’t come across as an asshole with something to prove. On the way over they talked about people they knew in common, some locked up, some dead, some still hanging around getting high, and some just gone. More signs for Ray that he was getting older and had nothing to show for it.

  Ray got lost in his head the way he did sometimes, thinking about prison and Harlan and feeling guilty he’d never visited him or really done anything for him since he’d been out and wondering what Harlan would think about that. Especially as Ray got older and knew better what it meant for a young kid to be inside with no one to look out for him the way Harlan had stepped up for him. Staring down the old lags who came for him, and half the time Ray too young and dumb to know what was going on until it was over.

  Later Manny and Ray sat at a booth at a diner in Willow Grove across from the air base. A-10s dropped out of the sky, touched the runway, and took off again, the roar making things clatter slightly on the table. Out at the curb Ray watched two kids walking up 611 with their thumbs out. One kid was short and one tall and black- haired, and Ray smiled, seeing him and Manny. The short kid wore a surplus army jacket, and the tall, skinny kid had a black leather jacket with duct tape over one elbow. A car went by at speed, and the big kid flipped it off, screaming something Ray couldn’t hear.

  Manny covered his mouth with his hand and leaned toward Ray. “What do you think?” He put sugar in his coffee and stirred.

  Ray kept his head down, talked to the table in a low voice. “About Rick? I think I don’t know anything about him except he’s got a jones.”

  Manny said, “Or a bruise on his arm, supposed to make us think he’s a hype. I could try to see Harlan, see what he says.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but if Harlan is jammed up he’ll just lie. What does he have to lose?” The waitress came over and poured more coffee. They watched her go. Ray shrugged. “We need the third guy on this one. The thing is I’d rather have a junkie than a cowboy, if that’s my only choice.”

  Manny nodded. “Some idiot who’s shooting just to hear the gun. Scaring the shit out of the citizens.”

  “For a junkie it’s a straight line. Money’” Ray drew a line in the air with his forefinger. “’Dope. The cops come, he runs away. What do you want, some guy’s going to make a stand, shoot it out with the bulls? Get his name in the paper?”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Yeah . . .” Ray said, but thinking: What am I, then? Not a junkie, not quite, or not yet. Not a cowboy. He used the gun, but didn’t love it. He thought of himself sometimes as a professional. Or as acting like a professional, if there was a difference.

  He and Manny had been robbing dealers for about a year. Had been in the life for a long time before that, of course. Stole cars, broke into houses. They had met in Juvie, a place called Lima, out in D
elaware County. Taking off dealers wasn’t something you could do if you didn’t know who was who, what to look for. You had to score dope to know dope dealers, or know people who did. Where to go, what to watch for. Manny had been in rehab and knew people who were out copping every day.

  They were careful, in their way. They would watch the houses they picked out for a few days or, if they were really hungry, a few hours. Watch the traffic, get a feel for how many people were in the place, who might be carrying. The trick was to go in strong but not crazy. Take control of the situation. Ray had found them the windbreakers with DEA in yellow letters on the back at a flea market in Jersey. They bought badges at an army surplus store in Connecticut and hung them on chains around their necks. It calmed the dealers down. No one wanted to get tagged, but only a stone retard was going to throw down on a Fed. Only when they were down on the floor, their wrists bound with plastic wire wraps, would they begin to get it. Who they really were, Manny and Ray. Why they were there.

  At least the older or more experienced ones would get it. Then they would curse, spit, roll around, put on a little theater for their girlfriends, but it was over already by then. Manny would have the pump gun pointed at their heads, and Ray would be looking under the toilet lids and in the freezer.

  The dealers made Ray feel like he had his life together. Dealers had their wives and mothers and girlfriends and kids in the houses with them holding dope and cash. He would tell them they were lucky he wasn’t some crazy Dominican there to cut throats. They’d be cooking meth and poisoning their own fucking brats in the next room, the air full of charcoal smoke and acetone mist. Speed cookers, small- time Mexican coke dealers with Scarface posters on the wall. Hillbilly tweakers with wide eyes and bad teeth, what they called now meth mouth. Big crosses around their necks, smoking dope to calm their racing hearts. When they were in the cuffs, they’d sing hymns and cry and call down Jesus Fire. It made Ray want to laugh’conjuring up a Tweaker Jesus in his head, a Jesus with gray teeth and unwashed hair, tattoos reading born to lose and born to die.