Dennis Tafoya - The Dope Thief

“I know, man, you can have what ever you need, we just have to talk about what’s going to happen, and you need for Christ’s sake to put away the gun.”

The pistol went off then, always a different sound than Ray expected, not that resonant bang they dub into the movies but a concussive pop that slapped at his head and made his ears ring. The bullet cracked a display case behind him that showered glass onto the floor. Michelle jumped forward into the room, scuffling with Stevie, who was panting and trying to pull her back out to the parking lot.

Andy sighed again, and Lynch said, “I shot her old man. I told him and told him, but he was such a dumb- ass. You can’t keep beating on people. You can’t.”

Ray dropped his head. “Lynch.”

“Don’t fuck with us. Just give us some money and we’ll get out of here.”

“You don’t have to do this. Tell me what happened.”

“I just fucking told you.”

“No, I mean everything, everything, the whole story. He was hitting her, right?” Ray had only glimpses of their lives, Stevie and Lynch and Andrea. Drug abuse and alcoholism, suicide and abandonment and rage that chased the kids into the street to live in alleys and abandoned cars, camp in the woods, or cling to each other in wet sleeping bags in half- built houses and vanish into the forest like deer when the Mexican and Guatemalan construction crews came to work in the morning.

“I don’t have time to tell you no story. Me and Andy are going to Idaho. We’re going to do comics. Andy can draw. Man, she draws everything, and no one knows it but me.”

Ray’s head snapped up as Nelson appeared on the porch, and he turned behind him to see another cop, this one in a uniform, muscle past Michelle in the rear of the store and stand rigid. He saw Nel-son, Glock in hand, take up a position just outside the front door. He heard the cop behind him draw his gun, the creak of the leather holster. Through the window he could see people on the street. A couple stopped in front of the building, pulling apart a soft pretzel from the place across the street, the man feeding the woman the soft white flesh with the tips of his fingers while she laughed.

“Lynch, man, listen to me.”

“Drop your weapon, son.” The cop in uniform edged forward, his arms locked, the pistol a few feet from Ray’s head.

Ray circled, his arms wide. “Wait a minute, will you fucking please?” He watched the door swing slowly behind Lynch, Nelson holding his blocky automatic, his face transfixed, hard. Ray shook his head, held his hand out, palm up, at first the boy, then the cops each in turn.

“It’s all okay, right? This is just okay, all right?” He swallowed, his brain firing and his sinuses full of a strange ozone smell as his heart hammered and sweat began to form in a line on his back. “There’s a story here. You have to know the story. It’s not, you know. This is not,” he said, but Lynch raised the pistol and Michelle screamed and Ray didn’t know what to do and he was launching himself at the boy, his arms wide, crossing the floor without being conscious of moving his legs as if he were pulled on a wire.

There were shots, pop, pop, pop, loud, and glass breaking, and later Ray could never be sure of the order of things as he gathered Bradley Lynch in his arms and they went over together, everything happening at once, blood pouring onto the floor, following the cracks in the hardwood, eddying in hollow scuff marks. Michelle screaming, and Stevie yelling his friend’s name, and Andy giving one long banshee shriek that sounded like she had been saving it her whole life. Ray’s cheek was against the floor, and he saw the blood as a dark tide that came to carry him away to drown. When he lifted his head, his face was dripping, and he looked down at Lynch, his coat open and his T-shirt wound around his thin chest, and saw the boy’s white flank torn open, shattered like glass.

The room around him exploded into more screaming and shout ed orders, and he saw movement and lights out of the corners of his eyes. He looked over at Andy. She was hunched in the corner, her mouth working soundlessly, her arms around her belly and her jeans stained with dark water and flecked with foam.

He put his hands over the wound in Lynch’s side and pressed, put his blood- painted face inches from the boy’s and tried to hold his gaze, and he was screaming something but he never knew what it was, holding the boy’s eyes with his and willing him to stay in the room, stay connected, pushing hard on Lynch’s frail chest, as if he could hold his life in by force, hold him together, keep him alive.

August

It was a long drive into the hills, out past Valley Forge and through quiet towns where no one stirred on the street, and when they finally got out of the van everyone stretched and squinted, pulling at themselves in the heat like athletes before a long run. They started across a long stretch of grass, and small insects opened white wings and vaulted ahead of them.

It took a while to get them all in, Ray and Michelle taking turns holding the baby while Andy and Stevie signed the visitation forms and passing each other the mealy, lopsided bread that Andy had made herself the day before and an unwieldy bowl of peppery chicken salad. Theresa’s offering, though she herself was down with a cold and propped up in bed with a stack of romances, some DVDs of a cop show she liked, and a carton of cigarettes, which she claimed were necessary to keep her throat clear.

They put everything out on a long table in the visiting room, shyly watching the other families. They were black and white and other colors and nationalities that Ray couldn’t guess, clustered in knots, heads together, voices quiet except for the occasional murmuring cry from a baby or screech from two kids roughhous-ing in front of the vending machines.

Lynch was buzzed into the visiting room in his blue DOC jumpsuit, his arms out for his son, and they clustered around him and touched his shoulders, which were getting broad. Andy fingered his thin growth of beard while Lynch held his head up, his teeth showing and his bright eyes flicking back and forth between Andy and the baby, who observed everything with a wry and satisfied look. He reached for his father’s bright lapel and worked it in the minute and impossible fingers Ray could never stop looking at.

Michelle, hovering, organized plates of food and went into the diaper bag for a bottle. Ray caught Stevie checking out her ass and gave him yard eyes that had mellowed sufficiently to make the boy lift one shoulder and smile. The room was hot and close with bodies, but through the long windows they could see bright grass divided by rolling coils of wire and beyond that the Pennsylvania hills. They sat to eat, Lynch holding the baby across his lap and watching his son work his mouth and blink his eyes.

Ray knelt near him and kept his voice low. “How you making it?”

Lynch never took his eyes off the baby but nodded. “I read a lot, write letters. Stay in my house, out of the shit on the tiers. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not, it’s fucked every minute, but it’s twenty- four months. Not even. We can do twenty- four months.” He balled some of the loose material of the jumpsuit and put his lips inches from the boy’s pale ear. “Listen to me. Never think any of this shit is okay. Never think it’s what you got coming.”

Lynch shrugged, and Ray put a hand on his arm. “No, man. Twenty- four months and out, no fucking around in here, no ganging up, none of that slopbucket meth. Seven hundred and thirty days and you’re home with your boy and Andy and this is all behind you.”

“Yeah, it’s less time than middle school, huh?” Ray nodded, lifted one brown hand and touched Lynch at his temple, and was almost overcome. He cleared his throat and rubbed at his reddened eyes, trying to think of the light sentence as lucky for nearly killing Andy’s father, who had lived through the bullet in his back but who would never leave a wheelchair.