“It was sweet, numbing, terrific really,” she said. “Later I found out it was heroin, but I didn’t know at first and when I found out it was too late.”
“You really didn’t know?”
“I was from Iowa. Within a week he was shooting up three times a day and I was joining him. Everything after that turned into a nightmare, unreal, smoky, disastrous.”
“Jesus.”
“Untie me, Victor.”
I untied her. Without rubbing her wrists she pulled her arms tight into her torso and turned away from me. I put my hand on her arm to reassure her but she shrugged me off. I didn’t want to hear any more, I wished I had never asked the question about her and Jimmy, wondered how the councilman entered into her story anyway.
“Through Pakistan and India he grew thinner and thinner, he was skinny to begin with, but he turned into a ghost. All night he shook, he sweated, his teeth started falling out. He was feverish. I begged him to come with me to America to get treatment. I told him they would fix his back, get him off the drug, we could live in Iowa, I told him, or New York, but he insisted on reaching the Ganges. His arm got infected, it swelled, it began to stink, he started limping from an abscess in his foot. His fever made him delusional in the nights. He was too weak to carry anything, so I emptied out half my stuff and put his clothes in my pack. He stopped eating anything but fruit, drank only water. He could barely talk when we arrived in Varanasi. We went right to the river and he wrapped himself in a white sheet and stepped down the ghat, slowly, mournfully. He turned and waved at me and then stepped down into the water of the Ganges until he was submerged.
“It was filthy, they were washing clothes, dumping sewage, it smelled like a latrine, shit and foam floated by, just upstream they were dumping ashes from the corpses ceremonially burned on the great pyres by the river. He was submerged for a long time, too long a time, and then I knew he would die in the river, his final wave was a wave good-bye, and I started running down after him. But he emerged, filthy, the white sheet covered with mud, his face serene, his eyes calm. His fever had broken. When he climbed out of the river he said, ‘Okay, Ronnie. Take me to America.’
“I put him in one of the whitewashed boarding houses they have just off the river and ran to a travel agent. There was just enough left in my account to buy two tickets to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of New York. We would leave the next day. Thrilled, I rushed back to the room and discovered him dead. I found out later that the boarding house was primarily for old men who were coming to Varanasi to die and have their ashes scattered in the river. Before I left I arranged for him to be burned like the others, in his muddy sheet, and to have his ashes shoveled like manure into that fucking Ganges.”
“My God, Veronica.”
“I didn’t wait for the funeral.”
“That is awful.”
She stayed on her side, facing away from me, silent, and I knew enough not to say anything. She lay there for five minutes, for ten. I lay on my back, my head atop my hands, thinking about the skinny dark poet with a name like Saffron entering the river bit by bit until he wasn’t there anymore. Suddenly she flipped over until she was facing me and ran a finger lightly down my side.
“So I cashed in his ticket,” she said. “It was money, you know. I had to change planes in New York and realized the last place I wanted to go was Cedar Rapids, so I stayed. I got a job as a paralegal, hated it, I waited tables, hated it, I worked in a gallery, hated it, I tried modeling, they hated me, so I decided to go back to school. I got into Penn, which is how I ended up in Philadelphia, and how I met Norvel.”
“How did a Penn student meet a drug dealing scum like Norvel Goodwin?”
“I looked for him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was still hooked, Victor. Just because Saffron died didn’t mean I was cured. I had a source in New York, but when I ended up at Penn, in West Philadelphia, I just walked into the neighborhood and started asking. He wasn’t hard to find. He liked me right off, this pretty white girl stepping into his place and asking for a fix. We became a thing.”
“What about Jimmy in all this?”
“Well, Norvel had a place in West Philly, about six blocks from campus. It was on Fifty-first Street, a shooting gallery of sorts, but not as bad as some of the places up north. Jimmy had lost his daughter only a few years before and was in full battle cry. A neighborhood group came to him about the house. He raised a mob of concerned citizens and raided the place with clubs and shovels and axes and baseball bats. I was there the night Jimmy smashed his way through the door. You should have seen him, his eyes fired, bashing anything in his way, knocking out windows, busting doors, slamming a television screen with a hatchet. He almost killed Norvel, dragged him out of a closet where Norvel had been hiding and started beating the hell out of him with his fists and then with a chair. Norvel’s a big man, stronger than he looks, but Jimmy beat the hell out of him. And then he torched the place. He later said the drug dealers had set it on fire, but his people had quietly cleared the surrounding houses before they burst in. Two boys died in the fire, lost in a stupor in a hidden attic. They found them later, after the ashes had cooled.”
“What about you?”
“He found me in a daze in a small room on the third floor and gave me to Chester to take to his car. Chester left me with the driver, who watched over me, made sure I didn’t leave until it was over.”
“Who was that, Henry?”
“No, Henry was inside. He was Norvel’s partner at the time.”
“No.”
“Sure. And after that, after Henry cleaned himself up, Jimmy gave him a job, turned him into one of his models. Everyone Jimmy hires had a problem. That’s so when he gives his speeches he can point with pride to his workers and lecture about how possible it is to change your life.”
“But what about you?”
“After the fire, after the police came and went, after Jimmy had given his speeches for the news reporters in time for the eleven o’clock news, after everything was over, Jimmy came back to his car and took me to a private drug treatment center. He knew by then that I had been Norvel’s girl. At the center they told him they didn’t have any openings but then he started yelling about city council funding and I was admitted that night. I told him I didn’t want it but I really did. I was ready. When I saw that house burn down I knew I was ready. I thought that would be it with Jimmy, but he kept on visiting me, my only visitor, hectoring me to kick my illness, taking me out for ice cream. It may sound strange, since it was more than a year later, but that raid and the fire, that whole night was part of that accident south of Isfahan. It was Jimmy who pulled me from the twisted wreckage of that van. With his help I got clean – he saved my life. By that time, though, school was finished for me, I had incompleted everything. Jimmy got me the apartment in Olde City, he got me a job.”
“And he got in your pants.”
“That was my choice.”
“And if you said no?”
“Believe it or not, if I wanted nothing to do with him I bet he would have done everything the same. When he pulled me out of that house he didn’t know me from Eve, all he knew was that I was in trouble and needed help.”
“And pretty as hell.”