“Christ, Ray.” Manny licked his lips. “When was the last time you fired up?” Ray untied the cord from his arm and smiled, but Manny shook his head. “Dude, I know you been chipping, but shit.”
“So bill me.”
“Fuck you, I don’t care about the money.” Ray put a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk. Go get more dope.” A wasp was buzzing, hitting the glass of the window with a rhythmic tick. Ray lay back and the buzzing filled his head. The hot light from the morning sun hammered his skin, and sweat rolled from his hair and into the hollows of his eyes. The bed was a raft on a sea of lava, and the air wrinkled with heat and fire. He heard Manny go through the door, but the sound was distant, tinny, as if it were on the radio in another room. Someone downstairs started up the sound system, and there was a resonant hum he could feel in his jaw and then long guitar notes. The room vibrated, and the beer bottles rolled, throwing green light onto the walls. The wasp hung in the air over his head. He focused on it, a perfect engine of rage beating the air with tiny wings in a relentless semaphore he could not follow.
ray jerked awake. Manny was sitting on the floor, flexing his arm to bang up the vein and holding the needle. The sun was lower in the sky, and there was noise from downstairs communicated by vibration through the floor. They couldn’t stay in this room much longer.
He’d had a dream about the accident that sent him away, when Marletta died. He was standing in the road with blood coming out of his hair and looking at a man asleep in the road, only of course he wasn’t really asleep, and there were tracks leading off into the weeds where the car Ray had been driving was on its side, and he couldn’t find Marletta anywhere. It was the most he had remem-bered about the accident that had sent him to prison. The most that he had let himself see, maybe. He knew there was more. It was like reading a terrible book and not wanting to turn more pages because you knew the story just got worse.
Ray got up and started policing up the mess into the plastic bag from the donut shop. He could smell himself, a rank tang of smoke and dope sweat and dust. He heard doors slamming and went to the window and watched guys come in from their trucks. Guys getting a beer after a day of work, three guys in jeans and T-shirts with a logo he couldn’t make out. Landscapers or delivery men or ware house guys. Something where they hauled shit or built shit or something that you got a righteous thirst from and at the end of the day you had a beer and bitched about, and then the married guys went home and the single guys stayed and chatted up the girls who would come in later. A life he didn’t know, that he felt a million miles away from. Like the Plimsouls said, he was on the wrong end of the looking glass.
Ray had sat in bars with guys and listened to them talk, and when the subject came up he just said he worked for a painting crew, but things broke down when somebody knew somebody in the business, and his lies would become tenuous and elaborate, which gave him a bad feeling, like he was pretending to be tall by balancing on stilts. He would get tense and defiant, and the people around him would slip away.
He went around the room and began picking up Manny’s clothes and stuffing them into his bag, impatient to be on the move. Manny himself lay back, his eyes rolling, and Ray knew it was going to be a little while before he could get him out of the room and into the car. He dug through his jacket and found the one- hitter and gave himself a jolt so he could focus, formulate a plan of action. He wanted his car back, wanted to go home and get a shower and listen to his own music.
Loaded up with bags and bits of clothing, he moved down to the car, edging past drinkers in the dim bar and pushing out into the sunlight slanting through the trees behind the crumbling asphalt lot. Outside he became aware of his clothes, stiff and foul-smelling, and he caught sight of himself in the long side mirror of a pickup. His hair was wild, his face streaked, and there were dark stains on his clothing and he remembered where they were from and he shuddered and had to resist the urge to crawl out of his clothes right there in the parking lot. He looked and felt like someone who had been living rough in the open and thought if he had seen a guy looking like this in a parking lot he’d have figured him for a guy on the bum. He dumped everything in the back of Sherry’s car and got in and drove up to County Line and cut left toward the Dunkin’ Donuts. When he got there he drove to where his Camaro had been and found an empty square of blackened asphalt surrounded by yellow tape.
Ray parked and got out and stood looking down at the place where someone had burned his car. There were greasy stripes of black where the tires had been and pools of melted plastic set with bits of broken glass fogged white. He tried to think about the sequence of events and tried to dope out if it had been before or after the barn, which was two nights ago. Maybe. His head hurt and his thinking was furred and had a lot of broken lines and gaps. He felt like he had been in the room getting high for a week, but that was junk for you.
He got back in the car and drove back down Easton Road. When he got to his street he slowed and began looking into each parked car for someone who didn’t look like he belonged there. Not that he would know. From half a block away he could make out the broad back and white- blond head of his landlord, Mrs. Gawelko, and a tall kid in his early twenties with big shoulders and a buzz cut. She was pacing and making broad motions with her arms, acting out some kind of opera for the kid, who Ray thought was her son.
He considered just driving on and coming back to deal with what ever it was later, but the urge to find out what was going on won out over what he felt was the more commonsense plan of action, to just keep going down to 611, get on the turnpike, and drive west until he saw red rocks and tumbleweeds. He parked the car and walked slowly across the lawn, flashes of muscle pain lighting up his arms and legs, bright spots and clouds in his eyes.
When she saw him crossing to her, she started shaking her head and pointing at him and then the door of the little apartment over her garage. “Men came for you. I told them no.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. G.”
“No, it’s not okay. These men are big, they have…” She brushed her hand down her arms. Tattoos. Yeah, he thought. I bet they had tattoos.
“I thought police, but they’re not police. I can’t have this.” She turned and gave a stream of Ukrainian to her son, who nodded and looked sage, not wanting a part of this now that he had gotten a closer look at Ray. She paced and ranted while Ray smiled and edged closer to the door, his hands up.
“I know, Mrs. G. They won’t be back.”
“No! It’s you. You won’t be back.” Then there was more Ukrainian and she poked her kid hard in the stomach and pointed at Ray.
“Okay, Ma. Okay. Jesus,” the kid said. She wandered off muttering, and Ray stood looking at the kid, who shrugged. “You see how it is? She wants you gone.”
“I see it.”
“Whoever those guys were, they scared the shit out of her.”
“Ah, just some… friends. It’s nothing.”
“Yeah, but she’s an old lady.”
Ray said, “Let me just get some shit and I’ll get out of here.” He moved up the short flight of stairs and turned around. “Tell Mrs. G,” he said, but then shook his head. There it was again, his face burning, his breath coming short, not enough air to inflate his lungs. He put his hand on his chest, and the bits of light through the trees danced in his head. He watched the big kid cock his head.
“Man, you okay?”
Ray grabbed the banister, held up a hand. “I’m fine. Just tell your mom I’m sorry, and thanks for putting up with… You know.”
He turned back up the stairs and saw boot prints on the door, but the lock had held, and he let himself in. Everything looked the same, all his stuff was untouched, but it all looked shabby and unfamiliar in the hard sunlight. He stood for a while, then went into the bedroom and got his duffel and threw it onto the bed. He packed his clothes and looked around. What did he want? His music, some DVDs. On the wall were movie posters he had gotten from the mall. Nothing he couldn’t replace in ten minutes. There was nothing of him here. He flashed on standing in a cell upstate on the day they were gating him out, a CO watching him while he looked at a couple of pictures stuck to the wall with the tacky bits of putty they made you use.
There was almost no one who would look for him here and no one who would realize he was gone. His money and his guns were all he had, and that was in the car or locked away. He threw a handful of CDs and movies in with the jeans and underwear and T-shirts and left quickly, without looking back.
He drove aimlessly around for a few hours. Over to the river, down to Oxford Valley. Across the bridge at Trenton and back up 29. Looking for a place to be.
AT DUSK HE collected Manny, and they went back to Monk’s and got more junk. They spent the night in
