Danny’s ears perked up at that.
“She wants to be found,” I said, “and I don’t care to find her.”
“Irregardless,” Benny Gil said.
“Where is she?” Danny said, and I shot him a look.
“Maybe,” Benny Gil said, “me and your dad ought to go out back and have a smoke.”
Danny watched us through the window, and I wonder what it is he was thinking and wonder to this day whether whatever it was he thought had anything to do with what he did later. Surely he saw something changing hands between me and Benny Gil, and he must have seen us shaking hands, too.
What he didn’t hear was Benny Gil saying, “God didn’t invent thirteen-digit zip codes for nothing,” or me saying, “How many?” or him saying, “Sixteen,” or me talking him down to six. Six, I could spare, by careful rationing, and by grinding the white pills into white powder with my pocketknife, and snorting them instead of swallowing, which meant I could stretch out the supply until it was time for a new scrip.
Danny didn’t hear any of it, but maybe he knew something of it, because after Benny Gil left, he said, “You get to hurting again, I know somebody who can get you what you need.”
“Who?”
“Ben Holbrook,” he said.
“That’s the case,” I said, “I don’t want to hear of you talking to Ben Holbrook ever again.”
I meant it when I said it, but the problem was the methadone got better after I started grinding it up, and once I knew how much better it could get, I had a harder time rationing it, and ran out a week early.
Believe me when I say I know a thing or two about pain. I was wounded twice in Liberia, and got radiation poisoning from the Arabs in Yemen. Once in Minnesota I split a fourteen-point buck in half on a old fossil fuel motorcycle and broke nearly every bone in my body and knocked one eye crooked, and it stayed that way until I could afford to get it fixed. But, son, you don’t know pain until you get what I got, which is a repetitive stress injury in my back from solar panel installations up there on roofs in the heat or the cold. So when the methadone ran out, I forgot about what I said before, and told Danny maybe if he knew somebody he ought to give him a call.
Ben Holbrook was a skinny son of a gun, no more than maybe eighteen years old, pimple-faced, head shaved bald so you could see its lumps. Money was not a problem for us. Benny Gil wasn’t the only one on the government teat, he just had to work for his. Still, I didn’t like the way this bald zitty kid came into our house thinking he was the only one who could set prices in America.
“Who do you think you are,” I said, “Federal Reserve Chairman Dean Karlan?”
He was cool as a cucumber. “Supply and demand,” he said, “is the law of the land in Kentucky, U.S.A.”
Much as I didn’t like it, I knew he was right, and I paid what he asked, which was considerable, and he handed over three brown-orange plastic bottles, which was supply enough for my demand and then some.
Soon as Ben Holbrook left, I went into the bathroom with my pocketknife and dropped two tablets on the sink counter and chopped them to powder and made a line. Then I put my nose low to the Formica and closed off my right nostril with a finger and snorted the line through my left.
I must have left the door open a crack, because I saw Danny there, just outside, watching. He knew it was a thing I was doing, but I don’t think he ever saw me do it before.
I knew good and well that wasn’t the type of thing I wanted him to see. Any other time I would have thrown a shoe at him if I caught him spying like that. But when you take your medicine through your nose, it hits your bloodstream fast and hard. That’s why you take it that way. So my first thought was to throw a shoe, but before that first thought was even gone the juice hit my bloodstream, and there was my boy, his eyes looking at mine through the crack in the bathroom door, and if I ever loved him I loved him more in that now than in any ever, and right alongside that first thought was the second, which came out my mouth the same time it came into my head, even though I knew it was wrong as I thought it and said it. “Boy,” I said. “Come on in here and try a line.”
Some things you see like from outside yourself and from above, and that’s how I see what happened next. Right there, below, there’s big old me, and there’s my boy Danny, and I’m coming around behind him, putting my arms around him like I did when I showed him how to line up a cue stick at Jack’s Tavern or sink a putt at the Gooney Golf, and he’s got the open pocketknife in his hand, and I’ve got his hand in my hand, pushing down on it, showing him how to crush without wasting anything, how to corral the powder, how a good line is made. That’s me, leaning down, pantomiming to show him how. That’s him, fast learner, nose to the counter, finger to nostril. There’s the line, gone up like the rapture. Danny, standing up too fast because he don’t know any better, and the trickle of blood down his lip and chin, and me, tilting his head back, cradling it in the crook of my arm, putting the old Boy Scout press on his nose with a wad of toilet paper, saying, “Hold still now, baby boy,” and his eyes bright, and his cheeks flushed, and his voice like from a hundred miles away saying, “Lord, have mercy,” then, “Weird,” and us lying back, then, on the cold tile, his shoulder blades resting on my chest, both of us waiting for the hit to pass so we could take another.
The days and nights started going by fast after that, and sometimes there was no cause to tell one from the other. One morning or afternoon or midnight, for all I know, I went into my room and found Danny half-naked underneath the bed I shared for all those years with Penny, and when I asked him what he was doing under there, he said, “She’s been after us all this time,” and I said, “Who?” and he said, “Her,” and hauled out a stash of scented candles his mother must have left under there, cinnamon and jasmine and persimmon-lemon.
At first I thought he was talking crazy, but then he pulled himself out from under the bed and walked real close and put the purple jasmine one under his eye and struck a blue tip match and lit the wick, and soon as it started to burn his eye went all bloodshot and swelled up. Even still, I wanted to take up her case.
“How was she to know?” I said, but he was looking at me hard. “Turn around,” he said, “and look in that mirror.” And sure enough, my eye was tearing up and swelling and all the blood vessels were turning red.
“Benny Gil,” he said, “told you where she is.”
“That’s not strictly true,” I said, except it was.
“The general area, then,” he said.
“The general neck of the woods,” I said.
He went into me and Penny’s bathroom, then, and for some reason, even though we had being doing it together, I couldn’t go in there just then and do it with him. I could hear him, though, and then I heard a few more sounds I knew but hadn’t expected to hear, which were the sounds of him loading my old Browning 9mm, which I kept under the sink in case of emergencies. When I heard that, I got scared, because for a while now I had been feeling, like I said before, like things were getting out of hand, but now, him stepping out of the bathroom, hand around the grip of that nine, I had the kind of proof that makes it so you can’t look the other way anymore.
“Killing,” I said, “isn’t a kind of thing you can take back.”
“I don’t mean to kill her,” he said. “I just mean to scare her a little.”
That was more sensible talk than the talk I had been expecting from him, but still not altogether sensible. He was angry, I knew, after finding those candles, and I can’t say I wasn’t angry, either, but when you’re young and full of piss and vinegar, caution is not a thing you take to naturally, and, besides, neither one of us was going through life in any kind of measured way at that particular point.