“Christ,” I said. “Your kid was shooting smack?”
“Evidently it hadn’t got that far, thank God. The way I reconstruct it, he must’ve got in with some peckerheads from Des Moines who make his friends back home look like goddamn choir boys. I know for a fact he was using marijuana, right along, talked to some kids his age who went to school at West Lake with him, and they all knew what he was into, everybody knew but me. His peckerhead friends must’ve convinced him to turn onto the hard stuff about the time I stumbled in.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Same as before, only this time I shoved his ass in the car and drove him to Iowa City and checked him into the Psychopathic Hospital and said, here, here’s my kid, help him, he’s got this drug problem. And later they told me he did… but not heroin. I found the goddamn stuff before he had a chance to use it, even once, and that’s about the only break I got out of this fucking game. But he was psychologically addicted, they said, to marijuana.”
“Is that why he doesn’t say anything?”
“That’s part of it. I guess. Even the peckerhead doctors don’t know, really. You see, when I found that junk, I flushed it down the john, like the other time, and made him watch, too, like the other time, and while I was doing it, he said, ‘Don’t.’ And that’s the last thing I’ve heard him say. When he was first checked in, at the hospital, he talked to the doctors, other patients, but he was quiet, and gradually, over a period of a couple weeks, he pulled into a shell. Hasn’t said a word.”
“Frank,” I said. Kindly. “I know this is something you’re very concerned about, but how does it relate to you and me?”
“I think it does relate.” He looked convinced, like Oral Roberts telling his audience God is not dead. “I’ve stepped on people, Quarry. I’ve made some enemies. But that’s, most of it, past history. This is a recent history.”
And he took a clipping out of his pocket. The date was recent, about a month old; the headline: CITIZEN GROUP LAUNCHES ATTACK ON DRUGS, with a smaller headline above saying: Young People Major Victim. The article told of a civic group whose initials were D.O.P.E. (Des Moines Organization of Parental Enquiry) and who were demanding action on the “rampant drug problem demoralizing the youth of our city, state and country,” in the words of the ex-mayor who headed the “Executive Council” of the group.
I gave the clipping back to him. I looked at him close, in hopes he was kidding. He wasn’t.
“I’m staying on the sidelines, naturally… but it was my idea, my money, my connections got this thing going. I got some very influential friends, rich people, well-to-do assholes who don’t like the idea of their kids being stuck in the same school with a bunch of nigger junkies, and who’re willing to put their money where their mouth is and help cause a stink and put a stop to it. It’s a matter of educating the public, finger-fucking the press, all that Ralph Nader lobby group bullshit. Of course the group can only do so much, but I can put pressure on by myself, with the people I know in politics, local and state and even federal, and people in law enforcement, all kinds of people I got influence with.”
“You’re kind of an unlikely candidate for civic reformer, aren’t you, Frank?”
“Look, I know dope’s just a business, like anything else. Of course I never fucked with it myself, or any people I worked with, either, the DiPretas, say, they never had their hands in that kind of shit. A lot of mob people never did get into it, and hardly no mob people are into it, anymore. It’s the niggers and spicks who own it, now, but even so, I know I’m not gonna single-handed wipe out dope in the world, and couldn’t care less if I did. I just want to cause some trouble for the fucking leeches who turned a decent kid into a vegetable, all right? And I must be pulling it off, and it looks like, even though I kept in the background on this thing, word’s out I’m the one who put the heat on.” He shrugged. “So somebody bought a contract.”
“That’s what somebody did,” I said.
“Anyway, they’re two different things entirely.”
“What?”
“Running a gambling house and selling poison.”
“Right,” I said.
And finished my drink.
24
She was half asleep and completely naked, sheets and covers twisted and not covering much of her at all. She was on her stomach but turned to one side, hugging a pillow, against which rested one generous breast, cuddled there, not squashed, its large dark nipple soft and smooth and delicate, a flower with its petals unfolded. Her face, sans make-up, looked young, almost child-like, except for the worldly cast of those eyes and the faint smile of the freshly fucked. She lay there, dark blond hair tickling her shoulders, beads of sweat glistening along the sweep of her slender back, legs sprawled but gracefully so, slopes of her ass spread gently, exposing wisps of pubic hair and a glimpse or two of pink and one firm creamy thigh.
Often, in the clinical light of post-coital moments, a man may notice for the first time a pimple on a formerly perfect ass, or a dark coarse hair growing along the edge of a nipple, or how her one breast seems now oddly smaller than the other one, or the redness from the elastic around panty hose, or a scar or stretch marks or a birthmark, and pretty soon he can’t remember what was the big deal.
Lu was what every man is looking for: a woman who looked as good after as before.
I brought her a cup of Sanka. I brought myself one, too.
She looked up at me with hooded eyes, still hugging her pillow. “People are supposed to smoke afterwards, don’t you know that? Not drink instant coffee.”
“I say if you can’t smoke during, why bother?”
She laughed. Her laugh was throaty, baritone, like her voice. “You know,” she said, leaning on an elbow, “I used to smoke. I gave it up. Had an uncle who died from it.”
“Cigarettes killed my mother.”
“No kidding? That’s terrible.”
“Yeah. She got hit by a Chesterfields truck.”
“Go to hell,” she said, showing her gums as she smiled. “Gimme that goddamn coffee.”
She sat up in bed, took the coffee, draping a sheet over her lap, for decorum’s sake, I guess. I wondered how decorum would feel about those two big naked boobs.
“Seriously, though, folks,” I said, sitting by her on the bed, “I like it that you don’t smoke. It’s nice to taste a girl’s mouth that tastes like a girl’s mouth. Kissing some women is like sucking a tailpipe.”
“It’s the same with men. Fucks your teeth up, too.”
“It’s too bad everybody can’t be clean-cut like us.”
“Fuckin’ shame. Hey, you haven’t said how your job interview went, this afternoon.”
That was the story I told her. I even told her I was going to the Amanas, to see about a job selling the refrigerators and shit they make there. It was now about six, and I’d been back half an hour.
“I won’t know for a while,” I said.
“Don’t you even have a gut reaction to the interview or the job?”
“Sure I got a gut reaction. I think it sounds like a crazy job, and the guy I talked to was also crazy, but I’ll probably take it anyway.”
“Is that desperation talking, or just apathy?”
“Protestant work ethic, I think. How’d you spend your day off?”
“Like I thought I would: shopping. Didn’t you see the packages and sacks and stuff on the kitchen table?”
Like I was supposed to?
“Well, since you’re probably broke, why don’t I take you out to dinner? I understand Riccelli’s has terrific pasta.”
“They do,” she said, “only…”
“Only?”
“We already have plans.”
