The coffee helped clear my head and I thought about the pills. Dr. Winters would not give me another prescription. I did not want to get hooked but I was also not ready to wean myself from the schedule I’d adopted. As much as I conserved the pills and tried to use them to augment the alcohol, I began to panic at the thought of spending nights without the consolations of floating on that placid, narcotic-kissed ocean. I emptied the linen closet and the medicine cabinet and the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom, where I knew there was nothing besides the toilet brush and containers of bathroom cleaner, praying for some cough syrup with codeine in an impossible, crusted, brown plastic bottle from a long-ago bout of bronchitis, or muscle relaxants from a strained neck muscle, or painkillers from a root canal. I had the hope that my own simple will might be able to invoke the spontaneous appearance of a moldy pill or two, in some dark, dusty corner at the back of a closet or cabinet, as if it might be just a matter of concentration, as if, once I could take the idea and turn it in just the right way, to just the right degree, almost in the way a thief cracks the combination of a safe, can feel the tumblers drop with a minuscule twitch of the dial, I could transform the idea of a pill into an actual pill, could parlay my desire for a pill into the fact of a pill.
I spent the better part of the day crawling around closets and wriggling under beds and moving chairs and sofas, concentrating on the appearance of a miraculous dose. After scouring each room, I sat on the floor with my back against a wall, sweaty, more tired and more irritated. I’d eaten nothing all day except for the cup of ancestral coffee. But Kate was not your ancestor, I told myself. She was your heir. It must be blasphemy to assimilate the spirit of your own offspring. It should have been Kate, years from now, a grown woman, drinking the water steeped in your ashes.
By three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was already lowering into the trees. The last of my hopes for finding drugs in the house evaporated with the day’s light. The cold that had poured into the village from the north the previous night had settled in and the house snapped and popped as it contracted in the frigid air. You are just not going to not have your medicine tonight, I thought. Although I’d considered it three or four times, I lacked the nerve to rebreak my hand. I’d thought about laying it on the kitchen table and clobbering it with a saucepan or a rubber mallet, or even holding it under my butt and sitting down on a wooden chair as hard as I could, but whenever I decided to go get the toolbox or pulled out a kitchen chair and felt the hard wooden seat, I became queasy and my nerve failed. But where can you find some pills? Where? I asked myself. And I answered, You can get some from Frankie!
Frankie Shuey, a.k.a. Frankie the Dope, Hanky Frankie, Frankie Freak, or just Dumbass Frankie, was a kid I’d painted with one summer when I’d worked with Gus the ex-con and a few years later hired to work on a crew I put together myself. He was a tall, babyish, boneless-looking guy with long curly red hair that he let fall in front of his face so you couldn’t really ever see his eyes, like a big sheepdog. He must have had adenoid problems, too, because he always had a stuffy nose and could apparently breathe only through his mouth. He was a slow, sloppy painter and ended every shift covered in paint. It got all over his clothes and his arms and his hands and his legs, and caked in his hair, too. He took a lot of grief from the other guys on the crew, but everyone liked him and he was a good sport about the guff he got. He also could get just about any drug anyone wanted, just about any time anyone wanted it. Three of the other guys on the crew moved back and forth from the North Shore in the summer to Colorado in the winter. In the winter, they went to Vail and skied all day and took jobs as dishwashers in restaurants at night. In the summer, they painted houses during the days and worked as crew members on the sloops that raced out of the yacht clubs on the coast on week-nights and weekends. They were intense, wiry guys anyway, but they all kept going by sniffing tons of cocaine and popping any kind of speed they could get their hands on. Frankie got them most of their coke and bagfuls of amphetamines, too.
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.