“What up, T?”
He nods. “Keeper.”
A big, powerful man, all shoulders and haunches. He has long salty hair and a snow-white goatee. Restless gray eyes that assess everything, miss nothing. He wears carpenter jeans and a light brown Carhartt, but you know beneath that he has a quilted coat he claims will block radio waves and tracking devices and whatever other tools cops used to put the pinch on folks. He looks perfectly comfortable sitting in the cold.
“Ain’t you freezing? Fuck.”
“Bets won’t let me smoke in the house.” Betsy is the wife you’ve seen only once. “Plus, we got this storm coming through. They’re telling us to batten down the hatches. Get me some fresh air while I still can.”
You ask if you can get a handful of Oxy floated on credit, already knowing the answer.
“This ain’t the country grocery, kid.”
“Well, what can I get?”
“How much you got?”
“Thirty bucks.”
“Got some of them thirty milligram ones. Hard to crush, though. Give you two for thirty.”
“C’mon, T.”
Tawrny never negotiates. He looks off into the bitter sky and blows a breath of smoke the same color.
“Look like you’re gonna need it soon.”
You’re sniffling. Your nose is a busted faucet, and you keep tasting the salty flavor on your lip. Your muscles buzz and it has you bouncing around on your feet like a fucking tweaker. You have your hands stuffed in your pockets because of the cold, but if they were out they’d be flying around your body like rabid bats.
“Aight, I’ll take ’em. Hey, T, you don’t got any work, do you? Maybe sales department’s hiring?”
“I don’t trust junkies with product.”
“I ain’t exactly a junkie.” You give him a goofy and—you hope—winning grin. “More a dabbler who’s fighting through a rough patch.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Keeper, I truly am. But maybe you shouldn’t’ve got yourself fired from Tuscarawas. Then there’s no rough patch.”
“Man, they’re about to evict me from Fairview. I’m trying here. You know a job where they hire ex-cons? By all means, I’ll put in an application. Wanna write me a recommendation? ‘He’s a self-starter, good eye contact,’ that sorta thing?”
Tawrny smirks. A tic in the corner of his mouth is about the most amused expression he ever lets rip.
“You got a good white-trash sense a humor, Keeper. That’ll see you through, boy.”
You grind one of the pills with a Dremel tool to get around the time-release agent. It’s a hassle, but you’ve just known too many dumbasses who’ve lost their lives to black tar and the rest. You heat the powder in the microwave to destroy the binders, until the powder’s a pale yellow, scrape it up with a defunct debit card, and snort away.
Immediately the world is a silkier place.
You sit on your couch and eat a few Oreos. Now that you’ve conquered this level, you can move on to the next, which is figuring a way to get that watch with only five bucks in your pocket. If you can get a few hundred dollars for that watch at a pawn shop, you’ll be able to split it between Claire Ann and the landlord. Buy yourself another day or two to figure something out. The problem is gas. If you have to spend forty or fifty bucks getting over to Dayton and back, it kind of eats into your profit margins. You sleep on it.
The next day, you hold off snorting the other pill, and instead go out to a gas station in Newcomerstown, just off 77. You park down the highway and wait in the shadows, black-and-white camo cap on your head. Someone finally leaves their vehicle with the pump going. A Tundra owner goes inside to buy Skittles or take a piss, and you walk over casually with your plastic gas tank. You slip the nozzle from the Tundra and fill up. Guy who owns a newish-looking Tundra probably just swipes the plastic and doesn’t even notice the final price. The clerk, a dark Muslim type, spots you and goes for the phone like it’s a bank robbery. You don’t panic. By the time any cop could possibly get worked up over this, you’re bound for Dayton.
The drive takes over three hours. Sitting in the stop-and-go traffic of Columbus, you think about this watch, which you hid under your bed at age twelve. It was way too big for your wrist, and even though Joe Biggs said he could take you to the jeweler, there were other reasons to keep it safe. You didn’t dare wear it to school. There were plenty of big tank hicks who’d beat the blood out of your nose and make it disappear.
Joe Biggs had been your mom’s boyfriend for a year bridging your little fourth- to fifth-grade life. He didn’t just give you the watch: He gave you the name Keeper.
Big and bald with fiery red hair still holding on around the crown, Joe was a good ole boy from Toledo who’d taught himself how to install heating and air-conditioning systems, which eventually earned him his fortune. When Mom started dating him, he took you to the Ohio State Fair, to Cedar Point, to Kings Island. He bought you gifts. You wanted to impress Joe Biggs, and you were all right at baseball. So when Little League started up that summer, you begged him to make it to the games. But the first game he did, you struck out all three times. The last one, you couldn’t help but go nuclear on the umpire, screaming, tears running down your cheeks, crying all the harder because everyone in the stands was looking at you, the other kids snickering into their gloves. Then you felt the hand on your back, and when you turned, Joe Biggs was there. “C’mon, kid.”
Joe led you off the field and down to the parking lot while you tried to vacuum back your tears. Finally, he stopped and pulled out the grossest, stiffest handkerchief and put it in your hand.
“Dry your eyes, my little friend.” You took it and wiped at the tears, added your snot to his. You could sense your mom hanging back, watching from afar. “Freddie getting ready,” Joe suddenly said. “Rock steady. When Johnny strikes up the band.”
Then Joe laughed, a big booming noise. You couldn’t help but smile at the sound.
“Huh?” you asked.
“Naw, nothing. You’re the keeper of the keys, kid.”
After that, Joe started calling you the Keeper of the Keys and soon just Keeper. When you switched schools that fall, you told the teacher that was your name.
Years later, you were listening to the radio and a song came on by an old, dead rock star, and you recognized your namesake. At that point you’d put Joe Biggs out of mind because after nearly a year with your mom, he was suddenly gone. Either he left or she told him off—she never said. At the time you were furious. Assumed she’d fucked it up somehow. You never heard from Joe Biggs again, but sometimes you’d take the watch out and admire it.
Dayton looks terrible. You haven’t been back in a while, but driving through, the whole city looks like a fucking bomb went off. Shuttered factories clutter the waterfront of the Great Miami River. They squat on the riverbanks like ass-ugly ghosts. You pass some half torn down, others mostly intact, and one is well illuminated by the lights of the city, and inside you can make out enormous piles of junk crowding up against the window: scrapped flat-screen TVs and detached mannequin arms trying to claw their way out. There’s a new Walmart Supercenter, lit like a space station, with armed guards patrolling the entrance. Cruising past the city proper, the first-ring suburbs don’t look much better. Maybe every other home is dark and empty, sidewalks and yards littered with trash, some with boarded windows, others with fresh foreclosure signs in the yards. When your mom told you she wasn’t going to let you borrow one more red cent, you stopped coming back here altogether.
You work your way over to your mom’s place in Trotwood. It’s a one-story split-unit with two bedrooms and shitty memories. Pulling up, you see the windows dark. When you first moved here in high school, there’d still been some white people left in the neighborhood, but from the looks of things there wasn’t much of anyone left. Dark house after dark house, and the lit ones all had some kind of porch-monkey vibe to them.