Paul Harding - Enon

Frankie’s father had worked for one of the major airlines for years, as a mechanic, until he’d had an accident — falling off a wing or something like that, I never quite knew the whole story, and Frankie had a knack for being vague about it. Part of the settlement Frankie’s dad had got from the airline, though, was that he and his immediate family could fly wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, for life, for the cost of the flight taxes. Without his ever getting into particulars, Frankie “went to New Mexico” every other weekend and came back with whatever drugs anyone had ordered. It got so that the first and third Mondays of every month were more or less shot, because Frankie came to work with the stuff everyone had ordered the previous Friday, and before ten in the morning the entire crew was zonked on dope, speed, hash, and the cold beers they all kept in their lunch coolers. The guys would straggle to wherever we were painting a house at about eight-thirty, groaning and exhausted, smoking cigarettes, as often as not with black eyes or split lips from having gotten into fights over the weekend after their races, when they took the cash the rich bankers and doctors who owned the boats paid them for crewing and spent it on booze and mostly lost it playing cards and sometimes dice.

“Frankie, man, gimme the shit; my eye is killing me. Murph sucker punched me and I’m fucking fucked . I had blood coming out of my fucking eye all night. It was sick .”

“Sucker punched you? You called him an Old Town pussy and he laid you out with a little love tap.”

“Fuck you, Rug. Murph was Airborne Golden Gloves. I could get Blazing Bill to bust him for assault with a lethal weapon.”

“Blaze’d kick your ass again and throw you in the tank, you pussy. Shut the fuck up and give the man the money.”

And so on. The guys razzed each other and talked like that all the time. They gave Frankie all sorts of grief, especially by making him get them their drugs without payment up front, but he always managed to supply whatever they wanted. He even got their buddy Billy Kopecky, who was a cop in town, a sack of amphetamines once a month.

“Jesus, Roger Dodger, when are you going to pay me for that last eightball? You owe me like five hundred bucks.”

“Come on, Frankie, don’t bust my balls; you know I’m good. Just front me a gram until I get the bread from Tammy. She gets paid Wednesdays.”

I could never figure out how it all worked, but somehow Frankie got the drugs and all the guys and he stuck together, like they all just happened to spend a couple summers working together with me as their titular boss by common consent so long as I got jobs for us and never did more than plead with them to work faster and more thoroughly and curse them out once in a while. But really it was me just passing through their world. When I thought of Frankie, I wondered if he would still be around Stonepoint. If he was, he’d be drinking at the Ironsides Tap Room.

A few weeks after Kate had died, a check for twenty thousand dollars had come in the mail from an insurance company. The amount was a pittance, what seemed like an insult. I hadn’t any mind to pursue the matter, though, and had mailed half of it to Susan in Minnesota and cashed the other half for myself, which I kept in a shoebox under the couch. Before I went looking for Frankie, I counted out two thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties and crammed the nut of bills into the inside pocket of my jacket.

Frankie was just where I thought he’d be, sitting on a stool next to the waitress’s serving station, smoking a cigarette and scratching at a lottery ticket with a nickel. There was a beer glass with a couple sips of beer left in it, an empty shot glass, and a red plastic ashtray in front of him. He wore a heavy green army coat over a frayed plaid flannel shirt, white carpenter’s pants, and tan work boots. He was covered in plaster dust. It was in his hair and on his arms and all over his boots and pants and shirt.

When I sat next to him and said, “Hey, Frank,” he recognized me but didn’t use my name when he said hello. I realized again that although he’d been on my painting crew, I was an outsider to him and the other guys I’d hired those summers. I suddenly felt humiliated asking him if he could still get drugs.

I said to him, “Hey, Frank, do you still ever, ah, make those trips anymore like you used to?” He looked at me and didn’t answer and went back to scratching the ticket. It struck me how suspicious it might be to him, me coming into this bar after not having seen him in probably ten years and asking him to score. He probably thinks I’m a cop now, I thought.

Before I said anything stupid, like No, man, I’m not undercover; it’s cool , I just told him, “Frank, my kid died and my wife left me and I busted my hand and I’m stretched out pretty thin and I thought that maybe you might still be around and know something.”

He stopped scratching the ticket and took a pull on his cigarette and asked me what I had in mind. I told him and he told me an amount of money and when to come back to the bar. The money seemed exorbitant and I got angry for a minute that he’d fleece me in the condition I was in. But I had the amount he asked for, and I looked at him, sitting there alone, covered in dust, covered in ashes, just like me and just as worn out and worn down and as baffled at this life as everyone else and, really, I thought, worse off than me, and I thought, God help us all, and agreed to what he said. He’d told me to come back in a couple hours, so I wandered around the tightly huddled old captains’ houses by the water and watched snow begin to fall over the harbor. I returned and Frankie had what I’d ordered and I gave him the money, right at the bar because no one but the bartender was there and he did not care. I bought Frank and myself a round of boilermakers and swallowed four pills with the whiskey.

“You got to get the aspirin stuff out of those before you take them,” Frankie said.

“The aspirin?”

“It’s not aspirin. It’s some other stuff, some headache stuff. It’ll fuck up your liver. They put it in there so you can’t take too much of it and get high.”

“How do you get it out?”

“You grind up the pills and put a little water in the powder and make like a paste. Then you put it in the freezer for like half an hour or a little more, just so it almost freezes. All the aspirin junk turns into crystal. Then you put it all into a coffee filter and squeeze out the liquid and chuck the crystal stuff. The liquid is the stuff you take. Best way to do it is get one of those syringes they use to give little kids medicine and stick it up your ass and shoot the liquid up there. You get way more fucked up.”

“Up your ass, huh?” I said. “That’s pretty weird.”

“Works every time.”

I talked with Frankie for twenty minutes about the town and who was still around and who had gone. I barely remembered any of the names he mentioned. As the pills started to work I shook Frank’s hand and said how much he’d helped me out and thanks so much and could I come back again if I needed to. He said I could come back but that he was out of town a lot these days.

I said to him, “Okay, Frank, thanks again and I’ll try here again if I need to.”

I left the bar and walked the six miles back to Enon in a heavy snowfall that kept traffic off the road and quieted the world.

LATE ONE WINTER NIGHT, AFTER THE NEW YEAR, WHICH CAME and went without my being aware of it for two weeks, after I had lost track of how much whiskey I had drunk and how many pills I had crushed and snorted, I lapsed into a blackout and awoke nearly frozen in the cemetery six hours later. I was laid out on my side, stopped up against the backs of three closely laid headstones, for three sisters, who had all died on December 12, 1839, at eight, seven, and five years old. I was sure that my toes and fingers had frostbite. By the wind and the barest light in the east, I could tell that it must be after five in the morning. The sky was still full of stars, but they were not the limpid, tame stars of an early summer evening. They were cold, wild, staring, and ferocious. They were stars that had arrived in Enon’s sky from the deepest trenches of space, from terrible, unimaginable beginnings, their light democratized by the present moment, but in fact a vast, tangled thicket of times, of ghosted universes haunting the hillside with their artifacted light. Their light unsettled me the way the open eyes of a dead person would — because it is impossible to believe that open eyes do not see. Their light blazed in the eyes of Enon’s dead for a moment in false resurrection.