Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

HE WOKE UP again and it was night. He had a sense of days going by, but nothing changed except the light, so he wasn’t sure. He sat in the dark for a while getting used to himself, listening to the murmur of voices from the nurses’ station, and then a dark shape filled the doorway and Manny came in and stood over him.

“Hey, man.”

“Hey.”

“How you making it?’

“Not good. Not good.”

“Yeah, they giving you anything?”

“They wanted to. I told them no.”

Manny shook his head violently. “What the fuck, Ray? You’re missing your big chance here, man.”

“I’m trying to kick.”

“You’re what? Are you kidding?”

“No, I figure I can get straightened out.”

“Ah, bullshit.” Manny stepped close, his voice a tense whisper.

“What? I’ve been high for two weeks. I want to get clean.”

“You’re not an addict, Ray.”

“The fuck.”

Manny got closer, pulled a chair up, and folded himself into it, his shoulders hunched. In the dark Ray could see pinpoints of light in the lenses of his sunglasses. “I’m an addict. I been in and out of rehab like six times. I’m a fucking dope addict. My mom was a dope addict. You…” He looked over his shoulder at the bright hallway and figures going by. “You’re just, I don’t know. Fucking with yourself.”

Ray let out a long sigh and let his eyes close.

“You think you need to pay for something. Man, you paid. You went to jail for nothing, and your whole life was fucked.”

“A lot of people are dead.”

“Yeah, that’s fucked up.” He leaned in close, his voice dropping. “But you didn’t kill anyone wasn’t trying to kill you.”

“My head is full of it. All this shit I done. I can’t close my eyes.”

Manny watched him and then turned his head to look out into the bright hallway for a while. “Listen to me.” He turned back to look at Ray. “Listen to me. You ain’t like me. Or Harlan. Or Cyrus or any of ’em. You can get clear of this and get a life. That guy you killed’”

Ray shook his head no, but Manny kept going.

“That guy you killed, he cut an old woman’s throat and did worse for Danny. That doesn’t mean you give up being a human being. Shit, if a cop had been there he’d have done the same.”

“I threw it away.”

“No, see, the fact you even think this way? That means something. Man, I never had two minutes worrying about any of the things I did. I say fuck ’em all and I mean it. You got all messed up with your dad going up and then the accident and that girl dying and then you came out of jail all fucked up. This money we got? I’m just gonna burn through it. In a couple of months it’ll just be gone and I’ll be broke again with nothing to show for it.”

“What about Sherry?”

“I love Sherry, but she’s as fucked as I am. She talks about kicking, having a kid, about buying a house, but at the end of the day she’d rather get high and watch TV and eat takeout food. We don’t need that money. It’s just going to kill us faster.”

“What do I do?”

“Take the fucking money and go somewhere and do something. What do you do I have no fucking idea. I never been nothing but a convict or a thief. What ever you coulda been you better start being it now. Fuck, man, your heart stopped. Twice, Theresa said. And here you are, breathing and talking and shit. That means something.”

Ray shook his head. “It can’t be that simple.”

“It don’t have to be complicated. You’re thinking of the debt you owe? Then, I don’t know, own it. Do something good for somebody. That money had blood on it long before we walked into that house. You want to help somebody, that’s not wrong, but you got to help yourself. You got to want to. I remember enough of that crap from rehab to know you got to at least think you got a right to be alive, to get through the day. You did things wrong, do what you can to make things right.”

Ray sat and listened, his head cocked. It was the most Manny had said in years that wasn’t about wanting dope or girls or money, or getting dope or girls or money.

Manny grabbed Ray’s upper arm and squeezed it tight. “Somebody’s got to make it. We can’t all die off. Somebody’s got to get their shit together and get right.” He let go of Ray’s arm and grabbed his hand. “I got to go, I’m turning back into a pumpkin.” He squeezed Ray’s hand and got up, looming in the dark.

“Wait,” Ray whispered. “What happened to our friend? From up north?”

Manny looked over his shoulder to check for anyone nearby in the hall, then turned back showing his teeth. “Bart finished the barbecue.”

Ray flashed on the hole in the backyard, the pile of crumbling bricks.

“That thing’s got the deepest foundation of any barbecue in the county. He’s motivated, your old man works fast.”

MORNING, AND A feeling of being hollowed out, a husk around air and bones. There were two men in the room, behind the nurses as they worked checking the IVs and drains and patting his hand. Ray watched the men, one tall, long limbs folded into a chair, black hair and a knowing smile like an assistant principal who figures you were the one who took a dump in the faculty lounge and he’s just angling to prove it. He had a thick sheaf of papers and files in his lap.

The other one was short, gray- haired, moving around the back of the room with a dark energy, touching the pitiful bouquet from downstairs that Theresa had left, a card left thumb-tacked to a board for somebody’s grandma who had been in the room before Ray. The nurses left, and he sat and looked at them.

The younger one spoke. “Raymond!”

Cops.

“How are you, buddy? We thought we lost you there.”

“Ah, you know. Making it, Officer.”

“I’m Detective Nelson. This is Burt Grace, special investigator from the district attorney’s office.”

Ray nodded, and the gray- haired older man just looked at him.

“You know we’re police officers.”

Ray shrugged. Cheap sport coats and fraying collars, did anyone else dress like that?

“We wanted to talk to you about what happened.”

“I don’t really remember.”

The older one shook his head, snorted. “Right.”

“Well,” said Nelson, acting the reasonable public servant. “What do you remember?”

“I was coming back to my apartment in Willow Grove, this guy jumped out of the bushes and stabbed me.”

“You were home?”

“I guess. It’s all pretty hazy.”

“Did you know the man with the knife?”

“No, I didn’t really see him.”

“Lemme guess.” The older cop again, Burt Grace. “It was a big black guy you never saw before.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Grace turned to Nelson. “This is a waste of time.” He pointed at Ray without looking at him. “This piece of shit is in the dope business, and he got stuck by some other piece of shit in the dope business.”

Ray breathed through his nose, his body starting to hum with pain. “So is there something we have to talk about, or is this something you do for everybody gets stabbed in the county?”

Nelson leafed through the papers in front of him. “You’ve had quite a time, Raymond.”

“You got my life story there, do you?”

“Three juvenile arrests, sent to Lima. Two arrests as an adult, both involving stolen cars. Sent up twice.” He flipped pages. “You got a lot of interesting friends, Raymond. Emanuel Marchetti…”

Grace made a noise with his lips. “Manny Marchetti? That scumbag? Isn’t he the one his mother was a junkie retard got cut up in Bristol?”

Ray cocked his head. “Yeah, and you all did shit about that. It’s been ten years. Any leads on that, Kojak?”