Dennis Tafoya: The Dope Thief

“Jolly Rancher?”

RAY WATCHED THE cars around them as they drove west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “That was a nice house. Whose house do you think that was?”

“Someone’s grandma, I’d bet.” Manny clicked the radio on, low. “Maybe Ronald’s.”

“Didn’t stink, it was all kept up. It was like Crack House Lite.” Ray picked up the trash bag and set it on his lap, running his fingers through the loose cash and vials. He stuck a finger through the plastic bag of cash from the toilet tank and made a hole, thumb-ing the bills, looking at denominations.

Manny looked over. “How did we do?”

“We? Who did all the work?”

“Get the fuck out of here. Who got Jerome to spill?”

Ray waved his hand. “Oh, like I wouldn’t have lifted the lid on the toilet. Doper kids like that only know two places to hide shit, and I already looked in the fridge.”

“I have to admit I got a kick out of that ‘help the police’ stuff. How many times the cops tried to play me and my friends like that.”

Ray shrugged. “They call it the command voice. It’s a gift some people have. Your problem is you don’t watch enough TV. One or two episodes of Cops’ll tell you anything you want to know about managing the criminal element.”

“Please, the criminal element. They were all like fifteen. An episode of Sesame Street could have told you anything you needed to know about managing that bunch.” Manny rummaged in his pockets and brought out a cigarette. He pointed with his chin. “Seriously, what did we get?”

Ray didn’t answer. He kept thinking about the house, and the picture of the girl in the cap and gown. Someone’s mother, or grandmother. One of the doper kids her son or grandson. The kids now stumbling around the house, their wrists still cinched by the flex cuffs. It made him unaccountably tense, wondering how they’d get out. They had cell phones, he knew; he had seen them when Manny turned out their pockets. Ray thought about whoever was supplying them. Conjured a hulking gangbanger with big shoulders from the joint, a shaved head. Would there be trouble when they came up short? He saw a big man stalking around the house with a baseball bat, Jerome and Maybe Ronald talking fast, trying to make him see how they got took by two guys said they were cops. Had guns and badges, looked like cops, sounded like cops.

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.

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.