Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

Manny kept his voice low. “Deal with what? Are you fucking nuts? That was the most fucked- up situation I ever been in, and I don’t want to get in another one like it. We’re not shooters, Ray. What we mostly do is take candy from babies, like that kiddy crew last week.”

Ray adjusted the curtains to cut down on the light coming through and snapped off the light. He walked over and threw himself on one of the beds and put his hands over his eyes. “I gotta sleep for an hour. Get my head straight, so I can think. The guy wasn’t from around here. Did you hear his voice?”

“Where was he from?”

“New En gland somewhere. He had that ‘pahk the cah’ voice.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know, maybe it means something. If he’s in a club from up north and he’s going up against one of the local clubs or something?”

Ray heard Manny light a cigarette, blow the smoke out. He turned to see Manny pointing at him with it, the end glowing red.

Manny said, “Or working with them, so he’s that much more plugged in. Or he moved here twenty years ago and the accent don’t make a fucking difference.”

Ray shook his head. “Yeah, maybe. But if anyone knew him down here, Ho would have told us to back the fuck off.”

Manny jumped up and picked up a pistol from the low chest of drawers and stuck it under the pillow on the other bed, then stretched out again. He put the cigarette on the edge of the night-stand between the beds. “Man, what happened back there’”

“Yeah, I don’t want to think about that for a while.”

“Think about this, though, okay?” He held the cigarette in his hand without lighting it, then dropped it back on the table. “I know shit happens and you can only plan so much. It wasn’t anybody’s fault except maybe Rick, and he paid for it.” They could hear cars hissing by on the wet highway. “But here’s the thing, okay? Next time someone shoots at us? Fucking shoot back.”

HE LAY IN bed a long time before drifting into a thin sleep broken by sounds from the highway and the low, resonant rumble of thunder that seemed to come from the ground beneath him as much as the sky.

He’s sixteen and standing in a dark living room in Abington in De-cember. It’s late, maybe two in the morning, and Manny is climbing over the sill in the window behind him and trying not to laugh. The house is big, full of massive furniture looming in the dark rooms and throwing crazy shadows from the lights on the Christmas tree, the headlights of passing cars. Manny gets his boot caught in the curtains and goes over, jamming his hand in his teeth to keep from laughing out loud while Ray grabs his shoulders and drags him onto the carpet. He shakes his head at Manny, who finally pulls himself up and makes his way out to the kitchen, pulling sweat socks onto his long hands like gloves. The room is full of Christmas shit. Little houses with lights inside them. Holly wreaths set out on the tables.

Ray wanders down a hallway off the living room, passes a bathroom lit blue by a humming nightlight, pushes a door standing ajar with one elbow and finds himself in the master bedroom. A man and a woman are sleeping, two humped shapes under blankets. The room is darker than the rest of the house, and he stands a long time, his eyes adjusting. The woman is snoring slightly, her mouth open, blue-gray hair splayed out over the pillow, and the man is curled beside her, one slack white arm over hers. On a low dresser are pictures of kids he can barely make out. Grown kids and little ones that must be grandkids. On the table are the woman' s glasses and a picture of a man and woman that Ray picks up and turns in his hands till he can see it’s the woman and he guesses the man, too, only they’re young and skinny and the man wears a white jacket that’s too big for himand the woman is wearing dark lipstick and has a flower in a thing on her wrist like the girls wear to prom.

He wants to go get Marletta and bring her here. He has the crazy thought that she could explain it to him, act as a guide somehow to the kind of life where people get old together and have kids and grandkids. He reaches into his thin coat and brings out a pint of 151 and quietly unscrews the cap and takes a small sip and makes a face. Something about the way the man’s arm touches the woman’s arm makes him think he could wake them up and ask them if him and Marletta could live here until she graduates and he turns eighteen and can get a job somewhere.

Finally he walks back out, passing Manny standing on a chair trying to get the star off the tree, fishing drunkenly with a fireplace poker and making a tinny musical clinking noise every time he hits one of the ornaments. Ray doesn’t say anything, just goes back to the window and is climbing out when Manny sees him caught in the yellow glare of headlights, and as Ray lets himself down onto a dead azalea bush, he can hear his friend whisper, “Man, what’s wrong?”

Manny dropped him back at his house at about five. Ray jumped out of the van and kept his hand stuck in his pocket, the Colt rat tling in his shaking fist. He tried not to run to the house, but he had an itch between his shoulder blades and couldn’t keep him self from looking up and down the street over and over as he closed the distance to the door of his apartment. There was a bad moment when he realized his keys were in the gym bag over his arm and had to dig around in the bag while trying to look over his shoulder every other second. Finally he got the door open, jumped inside, and slammed it behind him, turning the lock and dropping the bag on the landing. He ran up the stairs and pulled the pistol out of his pocket, pointing it into every corner of the living room. He checked the bedroom, the closets, and behind the couch, finally closing the curtains and sitting in the darkened room for a minute, waiting for his heart to slow.

He picked up the remote and turned on the stereo, clicking through the CDs in the changer until he settled on old Stan Ridg-way. After a while he got a chair from the dining room and took it down the stairs to the front door. He wedged it under the doorknob and checked the dead bolt and chain, then carried the bag upstairs. He went into the closet, reached up, and knocked back a trapdoor in the ceiling. Balancing on a Rubbermaid storage box full of stuff from his father’s house, he reached through the hole in the ceiling and brought down a shotgun wrapped in rags and a box of double- aught shells. The gun was dusty and smelled of oil and old metal, and he sat down on the bed and wiped it clean, then loaded it and racked the slide. Stan Ridgway was singing about a lonely town, and Ray wished he could get high and let the rest of the day go by. Instead he stripped off his clothes and threw them in the trash can in the kitchen and pulled out the bag and left it on the kitchen floor.

The shower felt good, and he kept making it hotter and hotter, standing under the nozzle and letting the water pulse on his head while he tried to figure angles and means and whether it was possible to run or if he had to stay and slug it out with whoever was out there wanting him dead. He had to fucking calm down, is what he had to do. No matter how bad the guy in the Charger wanted them, it would take days for him to get to someone who could give him their names. They could make some kind of rational decision about what to do and where to go and how long they could stay there with the money they had.

He couldn’t help thinking, though, how did he think this was going to play out, anyway? Even before they fucked up at the farm house, where was it going? How did shit like this ever end? Either they stopped or they got killed or they got locked up. Upstate he had known guys who were stone thieves, and they had all of them spent more of their lives behind bars than on the street. Ray was thirty, and he felt like he had come to the end of the life he’d been leading. He just didn’t know if that meant he was going to change or if he was going to die.