T
HE
W
ATCH AND THE
B
LOOD
B
ANK
2025
You find the note in the handle of the screen door of your trailer. It’s all caps and exclamation points, telling you you’re now two months overdue on rent and the next letter will be an eviction notice. A hangover soaks your brain from the night before at the bowling alley. You regret the blow Casey found; it was expensive and cut like shit. Matters worsen when you find the mail, fed through the slot and scattered over the carpet. There’s a letter from Claire Ann. You bite the inside of your cheek until you taste blood.
Bottom line is you need money. Three hundred fifty at least to get Claire Ann off your back, another $300 to hold off your landlord. How they got away with charging $300 a week for a heap of shit in the dubiously named Fairview Manor Trailer Courts is beyond you, but the whole town has been a landlords’ market for years. Add to that the fierce cramps in your legs, warning of the comedown on the way, and you’re settling in for a pretty bad week.
When you got fired from Tuscarawas, there was the typical spiral. It had taken all you had to land that job. Your old pal Casey Wheeler had an uncle who worked at the Tuscarawas Power Station, and you had been looking for any kind of steady work since moving out on your own. Casey hooked you up, and you put in your most earnest effort. Uncle Wheeler liked you well enough, and got you in for the test that Casey, his own nephew, had failed badly. You had to memorize the answers to questions like: If you’re a drop of water how will you flow from the feedwater pump, become steam, blow through the turbine, and end up back as water again? Five months it took you to get in as a utility operator, a hot, dirty job reaching into the furnace with the spud bar to tamp down the ash bed all day. Less than seven months later you were done. The first time you showed up drunk, Uncle Wheeler reamed you. The second time he warned you, cold as shit. The third, you were only a little hungover, but he fired your ass. Not that you don’t see your own culpability. No matter. Everyone in the plant was always talking about how it would be shut down any day now with the war on coal and all, so maybe you just fast-tracked the process for yourself. In some ways, it’s better when you don’t have money. Having money in your pocket has always gotten you into trouble.
Now the question becomes how to put together a few hundred dollars in a hurry. Your first thought is the blood bank, which of course deals in plasma but “banking” is a more apt description for what goes on there. Coshocton’s has an okay price. Thirty-five for an hour with a needle in your arm. It won’t solve your troubles, but it’ll let you score a couple pills to get the immediate physical demon off your back. You’re no addict—all you fuck with is the new Oxy—no heroin, no fent. But in a day, the withdrawal kicks are going to be psychotic, and you don’t want to deal with the valley of bones on top of the current predicament. You walk to save the gas.
Needle in your arm, you have a couple thoughts.
Staring around a clinical-white donation room filled with the steady hum of PCS machines, you lay on the black leather bed with the footrest and flex your hand to keep the flow light green and the blood hustling. The tech must be new because he started in on a long explanation of how the anticoagulant separates the blood from the plasma, and you had to tell him, “Bitch, just get on with it.” You said it in a jokey, friendly way, but he seized up and went quiet. Then the pressure, the needle tight in the vein.
You all lay there, middle-aged women, old-timers, a Black guy listening to his phone with earbuds and rapping away silently. Another dude has a pair of VR goggles on and cranes his neck back, as if peering up the sheer face of a cliff. All of your hands flapping open and closed like fish spluttering on the dock.
You watch superheroes throw each other into buildings on the one flat-screen framed in Christmas lights and think about what you can pawn. Your TV is worthless, your furniture hand-me-downs and garbage pieced together from Goodwill. You already pawned your PlayStation VR. You have a title loan for your truck, and it’s a month away from getting repossessed. You begin to wonder what your mom might have lying around that she doesn’t need. Probably nothing, but then you remember that watch, which has flitted through your mind when you’ve been in tight spots before. Back in your hometown on the other side of the state is a watch you got when you were a kid. You know exactly where it is in your mom’s place. Still in the shoebox with some other childhood bullshit. What had Joe Biggs told you at the time? That men size each other up by looking at the wrist when they shake. You needed a decent watch, he’d said. Then he’d handed it over and, if memory serves, said, “That’s five hundred bucks on your wrist.” If you could get back home and get that watch that might hold off either the landlord or Claire Ann.
As you entertain this notion, a young Black girl comes down the stairs and gets pointed to a nearby bed to get her needle. While she waits, she taps away at her phone with the slack expression of a donation veteran. You stare at her the way you stare at the Glocks in a gun store case—something you want that seems like a bad idea. She’s got tits, one of your prereqs, but also a delicate face. You imagine the bones beneath as translucent. She’s very pretty. Very dark skin. She’s still wearing her winter coat, but you can spot some of what’s working with her seat. Worth-the-rape-charges pretty, as you and Casey sometimes joke. Except you don’t like that joke about her. You more want to make her an omelet in the morning. You stare at her awhile, trying to catch her glazed gaze. She looks up once, and maybe her eyes catch yours, but they’re immediately back down. You saw the deep brown of the iris, though. The color of good soil.
You feel the icy tingle of the saline, meaning you’re almost done. It crawls up your bicep and down your forearm, a cool wonderful glow.
The tech comes by to finish you up.
“You got the veins for this,” he says by way of saying nothing. All the techs here are exhausted stoner types, but this guy’s pep makes your head ache. Reminds you of your hangover. If there was a way to donate at another place you’d head there now, but there’s the invisible ink they mark your finger with. You learned it takes two days and too much scrubbing to get it off.
You owe plenty of payday lenders in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. You’re in hock everywhere. Your truck’s looking like a lost cause, repossession imminent. You owe Casey like $1,200 and assume you’ll both forgive and forget all debts when you’re old men on the porch. So while you may owe more than the six-fifty, it’s an attainable goal, something to work for in the immediate here and now. After hitting up the food pantry in Millersburg, you drive down to Cassingham Hollow Drive, texting Tawrny to let him know you’re coming by.
Tawrny is the guy you go to for a fix. He fancies himself a regular kingpin, but mostly he deals from a connection in a pharma distribution center. No black tar for him. The Covid-era spike in ODs led to crackdowns on fentanyl, which sent the docs back to prescribing Oxy because at least it was less deadly, and as such, the region is once again happily flush with it. Police whack the head of one mole and an old tired one just comes shooting up. Local dealers like Tawrny know how to read these peaks and valleys like the stock market and sell their wares accordingly. You got to know him pretty quick after you landed in Coshocton almost ten years ago now. Right after Claire Ann cornered you.
He’s sitting out on the porch smoking a cigarette when you roll up to his house, a massive, falling-to-shit Queen Anne with pink trim that probably dates back to the Civil War. Half blue paint, half the faded wood beneath. You park, and he watches you approach, hunched forward on his elbows, smoking the cig in slow, laconic drags.