“So how come those dudes are up here now?”
“I told them I have five one-hundred pound bales of the stuff,” the kid said in a low voice.
Terry sat in silence, took a sip of his beer and said, “You’re stupid. Stupid. You oughta be selling insurance, not dope.”
“I thought it would let them know I was in business for myself and not dealing for some other supplier, if they knew I had five bales of my own. The Jamaican, Keppie, he just looked at me like I wasn’t there anymore and said I should go to California, and I knew the whole thing had come apart. So I left them at the motel and drove back up. My van’s parked on one of the lumber roads in the state park west of the lake. I walked in through the woods, and then I saw them. I was coming to get you,” the kid added.
“Me! What do you want me for? I wouldn’t touch this with a stick, man!”
“I need to get rid of the stuff.”
“No shit. What are you going to do with it, throw it in the lake?”
“We can lug it into the woods, man. Just leave it. Nobody’ll find it for months, and by then it’ll be rotted out and nobody’ll know what the hell it is anyhow.” After a pause, the kid said, “I need you to help me.”
“You’re strong enough to carry one of those bales five times. You don’t need me.” Terry’s voice was cold and angry. “You’re an asshole. You know that?”
“Please. You can take your sister’s car and we can do it in one trip. It’ll take me all night alone on foot, maybe longer, and someone may see me.” He was talking rapidly, like a beggar explaining his poverty. He whined, and his voice almost broke with the fear and the shame. He was a nice enough kid, and most people liked him right away, because he enjoyed talking and usually talked about things that at first were interesting, organic gardening, solar energy, transcendental meditation, but he tended to lecture people on these subjects, which made him and the subjects soon boring. Terry hung out with him anyhow, smoked grass and drank in town with him at the Hawthorne House, mainly because the kid, Bruce, admired Terry for being black. Terry knew what that meant, but he was lonely and everyone else in town either feared or disliked him for being black. The kid usually had plenty of money, and he spent it generously on Terry, who usually had none, since, except for the occasional chores and repair work tossed his way by Marcelle Chagnon, the manager of the trailerpark, it was impossible for him to find a job here. Outside of his sister, who was his entire family and who, through happenstance, had located herself here in this small mill town in New Hampshire working as a nurse for the only doctor in town, Terry had no one he could talk to, no one he could gossip or grumble with, no one he could think of as his friend. When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike. In that way Terry had attached himself to Bruce Severance, the kid who sold grass to the local high school students and the dozen or so adults in town who smoked marijuana, the kid who drove around in the posh, black and purple van with a painting of a Rocky Mountain sunset on the sides and the bumper stickers attacking nuclear energy and urging people to heat their homes with wood, the kid who had furnished his trailer with a huge waterbed and Day-Glo posters of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, the kid who, to the amusement of his neighbors, practiced the one hundred twenty-eight postures of T’ai Chi outside his trailer every morning of the year, the kid who was now sitting across the darkened kitchen of the trailer owned by Terry’s sister, his voice trembling as he begged Terry, four years older than he, a grown man despite his being penniless and dependent and alone, to please, please, please, help him.
Terry sighed. “All right,” he said. “But not now.”
“When?” The kid peered out the window again. “They probably went back to town, to drink or for something to eat. We should do it now. As soon as your sister gets home with the car.”
“No. That’s what I mean, I don’t want my sister to know anything about this. This ain’t her kind of scene. We can go over to your place and wait awhile, and then I’ll come home and ask her for the car for a few hours, and then we’ll load that shit into the car and get it the hell out of here, and you can tell those dudes you were only kidding or some damned thing. I don’t care what you tell them. Just don’t tell them I helped you. Don’t even tell them I know you.” Terry got off the stool and headed for the door. “C’mon. I don’t want to be here when my sister gets home.”
“Terry,” the kid said in a quick, light voice.
“What?”
“What should I tell them? I can’t say I was only kidding. They know what that means.”
“Tell them you were stoned. Tripping. Tell them you took some acid. Beg.”
“Yeah. Maybe that’ll cool it with them,” he said somberly, and he followed Terry out the door.
Keeping to the shadows behind the trailers, they walked to the far end of the park, crossed the short beach there and came up along the lake, behind the other row of trailers, until they were behind the trailer where Bruce lived. “Go on in,” Terry instructed him. “They couldn’t see you now even if they were parked right at the gate.”
The kid made a dash for the door, unlocked it and slipped in, with Terry right behind. When the kid had locked the door again, Terry suggested he prop a chair against the knob.
“Why? You think they’ll try to break in?”
“A precaution. Who knows?”
“Jesus, maybe we should’ve waited out in the woods till your sister got home!”
“No, man, forget it, will you?” Terry walked through the room, stumbling against a beanbag chair and giving it a kick. “You got any beer here? I shoulda grabbed a couple of beers from my sister.”
“No. Nothing. Don’t open the refrigerator. The light.”
“Yeah,” Terry said, his voice suddenly weary. He sat down heavily in the beanbag chair, and it hissed under his weight. “Jesus, it’s cold in here. Can’t you get some heat into this place?”
“I can’t make a fire. They’ll see the smoke.”
“Forget the fucking stove, you goddamn freak. Turn up the damn thermostat. You got an oil heater, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but no oil. I only use wood,” the kid said with a touch of his old pride.
“Jesus.” Terry wrapped his arms around himself and tried to settle deeper into the chair. He was wearing his orange parka and knit cap, but sitting still like this had chilled him. Bruce had gone down the hall to a window from which he could see the entrance to the trailerpark.
“Hey, man!” Terry called to him. “Your fucking pipes are gonna freeze! You can’t put a woodstove in a trailer and not have any oil heat and keep your pipes from freezing! It’s a known fact!”
There was a knock at the door, softly, almost politely.
Terry stood up and faced the door. He whispered Bruce’s name.
When the second knock came, louder, the kid was standing next to Terry.
“Oh, my God,” the kid said.
“Shut up!”
A clear voice spoke on the other side of the door. “Seberonce! Come, now.”
Then there was the sound of a metal object working against the latch, and the lock was sprung, and the door swung open. The Jamaican stepped quickly inside, and the white man followed, showing the way with a flashlight.
“Too dark in here, mon,” the Jamaican said.
The man with the flashlight closed the door, then found the wall switch and flicked it on, and the four men faced each other.
“Ah! Seberonce, we gots to hab some more chat, mon,” the Jamaican said. Then to Terry, “So, my brudder soul-bwoy. You gwan home now, me doan got no bidniss wid you, mon.” He flashed his gold teeth at Terry. Inside the small space of the trailer both the Jamaican and his companion seemed much larger than they had in the car. They were, indeed, both taller and thicker than Terry, and in their presence Bruce looked like an adolescent boy.