Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“Well, sure, I guess so.”

“I’ll call you in the morning, okay?”

“Sure, Mom. Fine.”

“Goodbye, darling.”

“Goodbye, Mom.”

She hung up feeling rotten. However her mother looked at it, Lissie saw her father’s obstinacy about paying for her studies in India as only another example of his refusal to come to her assistance when she needed him most. The thing she desperately wanted (the one thing she could never tell to either of her parents) was to get Sparky away from Boston, show him a world he’d never been privileged to see because he was black and shit upon in this country, and therefore had turned to the only thing he could possibly do to support himself. She had tried on too many occasions to get him to quit dealing, but after all their arguing she was forced to conclude that he was right. What else could he do? He’d been born poor, had been forced by this country’s prejudice to learn the ways of the street, how to survive in the street, and then had been shipped to a Vietnam jungle where he’d learned that the only people fighting that dumb war were either poor or black or both. If she could only get him away from here , into a climate of acceptance, into an environment that was totally color-blind, why then she felt he could finally realize his full potential as a man and as a human being.

She recognized, of course, the danger the East represented. When Paul was planning his big narcotics coup (God, that seemed centuries ago!) he’d had all the statistics at his fingertips, reeled them off to her the minute she told him she was splitting for home, trying to convince her to stay. Afghanistan produced some 100 tons of heroin annually, most of which was exported to Iran, a country that was one of the largest consumers of narcotics in the world. (“Four hundred thousand addicts there!” Paul had told her. “Why would I have to sell to Americans, if that’s what you’re so fucking worried about?”) Pakistan produced something between 30 and 150 tons of opium a year, much of which also found its way into Iran. Opium was legal in India, and India produced more of it than any other nation on earth, but most of it was for home consumption. All told, the buying and selling of dope was a common practice in Asia and, yes, Lissie recognized the danger of introducing this free-and-easy trade to someone who was already a pusher.

But the danger here was greater.

The reason they had moved from their old apartment, which had really been a great one, despite the roaches and an occasional rat — actually, she’d seen only one rat in all the while they’d lived there — was that they couldn’t afford the rent on it anymore. And the reason they couldn’t afford the rent was that Sparky was taking the profits he made in his brisk college-student trade and using them to buy dope for himself. He had denied this vehemently at first, told her he’d have to be some kind of real sucker to get himself hooked like the jerks he was selling to. But she knew all the signs, had seen them often enough in Goa, knew he was a junkie even before she came upon him in their bedroom one night, cooking smack in a spoon, and threatened to leave if he stuck that fucking needle in his arm. That was the first time he’d hit her, slapped her backhanded across the face because she’d knocked the spoon out of his hand and spilled his precious shit all over the floor. He cooked up another batch. She watched despairingly as he shot up.

Which was why if only her father could see his way clear to sending her the three hundred she’d asked for, well, then, she could combine this with what she’d been able to hide from Sparky, put aside from her waitressing and baby-sitting, and get them both over to Europe. The way she figured it, he’d have to go over there clean because the customs officials would naturally tear apart any young person’s luggage, especially if he was black, and would find whatever he was holding, and Sparky certainly was smart enough to realize that spending his life in a foreign prison wasn’t worth the risk of trying to carry shit off an airplane. So he’d get to London clean, and since England had pretty strict laws about dope even though they gave it to you free if you were an addict and a subject of Her Majesty the Queen, he’d stay clean in England till they got on the road to Greece, and she’d make damn sure he stayed clean there, too. You couldn’t help but stay pure in body and mind and spirit on those beautiful beaches in Greece, she had Samos in mind again, she had been very happy there with Paul. She wouldn’t even mind if Sparky smoked a little grass every now and then, there was nothing wrong with grass. The thing was to get him away from the needle.

Once he’d kicked it cold turkey in London and later in Greece — she figured they’d spend, what, two, three months on the beach, that was surely enough time to kick a habit — then they’d move on to India where she’d get him involved in buying and selling the goods she’d be shipping back to Boston; Sparky was a good businessman who just happened to be in the wrong business. And once she started school there, she’d get him interested in that, too, get him to enroll in a few classes, and with the climate of acceptance there, the knowledge that there he wouldn’t be just another of America’s shit-upon blacks, why then there’d be no problem. Her father was the goddamn problem. She was thinking of her father on that night in August when Sparky tried to turn her on.

He had been in the bedroom for an inordinately long time. Her constant fear was that he would O.D. on bad shit, there was a lot of bad shit floating around Boston. She never watched him after that first time, the time he’d slapped her, because she couldn’t bear seeing him poisoning himself that way. But tonight, when he went in the bedroom to shoot up, and when he was gone so goddamn long in there, she thought she’d better see what he was up to.

The windows were open wide, this was the hottest summer she could ever remember. He was lying on the bed. The charred spoon, the syringe, the empty glassine packet were on the table beside the bed.

“Hey,” he said when she came into the room, and then grinned and waved open-handed at her, his fingers spread like a fan.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

“You’ve been in here a long time.”

“Cain’t move, is what it is. Fuckin’ potent stuff Jimmy laid on me.”

She kept looking at him. He was wearing only undershorts. His eyes were glazed. The grin perched on his mouth like the monkey on his back.

“Whut?” he said.

“Nothing.”

She was thinking that if her father sent her the three hundred dollars they could leave here in a week, pack all their stuff, get the hell out of here.

“Y’look too gloomy,” he said. He was still grinning vacantly.

“You make me gloomy,” she said.

“Not now,” he said, and waved the argument aside before it could begin. “Feelin’ too good, cool the bullshit, Liss.”

“If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t give a damn what you...”

“Then love me, an’ shut up.”

“You’re killing yourself,” she said.

“Here it comes.”

“Yes, here it comes. Sparky...”

“Whyn’t you jess go on over there to the dresser, Liss...”

“What?”

“... fine yourself that other bag of shit...”

“What?” she said again.

“Best fuckin’ shit Jimmy ever laid on me. Cook yourself some an’ shut up, Lissie. Do me a goddamn favor.”

She thought suddenly of that day back at Henderson, when Jenny was smoking pot in the locker-room toilet.