Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

“Depended on the score.”

Danny clamped the batteries together, as always expecting a sudden jolt to fuse his teeth. Instead, the Nissan roared to life. Flowers swayed in the halogens. The radio kicked in, a dissonant trombone blaring out of speakers more expensive than the rest of the car put together.

“Who’s this?”

She cranked the knob, drowning out frogs and grasshoppers nestled in the weeds.

“Sun Ra.”

They faced each other, covered with sweat. Haze hung like a wet sheet above the oily grass and between the oaks.

“What’s your name?”

“Steak.”

Danny knew it was a test. If he made a dumb joke, like medium rare or well done or free range , she’d immediately cross him off the list, the same method she’d erased four years’ worth of frat boys with.

“Hey, Steak?”

“What?”

“Wanna go out sometime?”

She smiled, hair impossibly long and Nile black, swung it out of her face like a flag of victory. “We’re already out.”

Danny watched as she folded herself back into the car, spun the wheel, fishtailed away.

2004 Volkswagen Vanagon

He found her in an old student directory. Stalled for an hour then dialed. No answer. Redialed. Voicemail. Danny left a message while Hippie Tim wrote him up for making calls on company time. In the kitchen, Mikey Atta snapped a towel at the ass of the busboy who wore a turban. A girl at the counter who’d been gazing at the menu like it was the New Testament finally asked if the Spinach Goddess came with extra spinach.

“Cold pies getting colder!” Hippie Tim yelled, rang the bell.

Danny gunned it across town. First a raft of sausage subs to the bio lab, along with two baggies of Vicodin. Then a departmental meeting, twelve wilted salads and a smaller baggie for the security guard, a dude named Heavy Kev, who let Danny in even on nights it was obvious he was fronting an empty box.

On the way back his phone buzzed.

Steak, Steak, Steak .

“Danny?” a secretary said. “Hold for your father.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“You there?”

“Sort of.”

“Any news about the team?”

“No.”

“What about coaching?”

“What about it?”

“My office has a few open slots. You buy a tie, I could place you.”

“I already have a job.”

“Bussing crusts?”

“There’s profit in humility.”

“Christ, even your voice is fat. You sound like I should send you a bra.”

“Actually, what you should send me is three thousand dollars.”

His father slipped out of permanent hard-on mode.

“Are you serious?”

Danny was.

The ambulance chick who wrapped his knee, name of Miss Kay, bought his entire script of Oxy after all. He’d decided to tough it out, ignore the pain. Needed the cash. When those were gone, they met for a beer, talked through shopping doctors, what to say, how to beg without begging. Danny came up with a few flourishes, thought with some practice he might even bust out tears on command. She nodded. “Big dude with a cringe? Puppy eyes like you got? Shit, I’d write you for three refills myself.”

When the clinic finally cut him off, a male nurse with a nose ring sent out front to say next time it was the cops on speed dial, Miss Kay offered Danny a job.

“On the ambulance?”

“No, in the saddle.”

“Wait, what?”

“Pill donkey. You apply somewhere does take-out. Thai, Chinese, whatever. Keep your tips, make special deliveries for me on the side.”

Hippie Tim hired Danny the next day.

Within a month he started to skim. Shorted baggies, palmed aspirin for Oxy, pocketed the difference. It was really dumb. Like Miss Kay was never gonna find out. Like numerous painfully unhigh adjuncts wouldn’t demand refunds. Like whole dorms full of underopiated sophomores would fail to vow revenge.

“Dad, I’m in real trouble here.”

“You spent three large on a girl?”

“No, a tattoo.”

“You gotta be shitting me.”

Danny wasn’t. It was pure old-school, Yakuza-style, from thigh to clavicle, carp and koi and an intricate blood-red moon slung over rows of Japanese waves. Twenty-six hours of table time already, on his stomach, an orgy of pain as an ancient woman with a bamboo stick jabbed ribbons of black and orange beneath his every surface and delicate layer.

“Give Mom a kiss,” Danny said, hanging up as a black Acura pulled from the 7-Eleven with a screech. Windshield smoked, chrome grill, shiny and mean. It cut off four cars and got right on his bumper.

Danny switched lanes.

The Acura switched lanes.

He switched again.

The Acura switched again.

Dad rang, went to voicemail.

Delivery texts poured in. Hippie Tim.

RUSH ORDER.

PEPPERONI.

DICK HEAD.

Danny played it cool, smoothed across campus like, hey, no problem , and then at the six-way stop by the bowling alley punched it way late through a red. There was a chorus of horns as he swept under the entrance to the state park. The little truck howled, blew by picnic tables and families and statues of founding Whigs, a purple blur through the high rolling switchbacks until he was absolutely sure there was nothing behind him except an old couple in a Vanagon taking pictures through their windshield.

1961 Ford Fairlane Taxi

“Where to?”

Danny repeated the address, chewing his tongue to ribbons. For some reason he’d dry-swallowed four Adderall from the case Miss Kay bought off a guy named Taco she met at Pilates. The pills jumped all over him right away, a thousand cups of coffee with a 120-volt chaser. His head felt light and untethered, like it might just float up out the window and through the atmosphere, begin taking cloud samples.

“You sure this is the place?” the driver asked, idling in front of vaguely Soviet concrete apartments. A pack of kids taunted each other crunching gravel circles on their ten-speeds. They gave Danny the finger, whirled off down the street.

“Yeah, this is it.”

Steak opened the door wearing a faded dress, straight from the Kansas Tornado collection, barefoot, beautiful.

Also, all her hair was gone.

Every inch, head gleaming, scalp shorn white. Her eyes dared Danny to be shocked, another test.

“Something’s different,” he said. “New perfume?”

She smiled and walked into the kitchen.

“You hungry?”

He wasn’t. Jangly-high, zero appetite.

“Starving.”

They chopped side by side, boiled water, made sauce from scratch, those goofy little cans of tomato paste that seem to contain nothing at all. When the penne was ready Danny rinsed it, a couple going over the edge. They lay in the sink, pale and soft, abandoned.

“We lost a few good men today.”

Steak laughed.

“Want to hear a story?”

“Sure.”

It was about this meathead campus hero, let’s call him Donny, and the feats of madness and stupidity she personally witnessed him perform back in the day. Like the time Donny rode a bike in the library naked, or the time he spray-painted JESUS SAVES SOULS AND RECLAIMS THEM FOR VALUABLE CASH PRIZES across the face of the student union, or the time he put an M-80 in a bucket of ranch dressing in the caf. How funny it all was. How tough and raw and compelling he had been. How, despite the fratishness and cult of moronicism it seemed to engender — just the sort of thing she normally despised — how inexplicably hot Donny had made her.

“Yeah, whatever happened to that guy?”

She got up and walked into the bedroom, kicked dirty towels into a closet. He lined up Adderall like a parade, crushed their dreams with the back of a spoon. They banged rails, compounds breaking down, binding together, a slurry of toxic waste seeping into all the appropriate organs.