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“Pills?” asked Doug. “I hadn’t heard anything about this. What’s this about pills?”
Kevin ignored him. “Mitch, man, what the fuck is the matter with you? You won’t spend a few nights getting your precious little hands dirty for over six thousand dollars? Fine. Fuck it. Me and Doug’ll do it. That’ll be ten grand for each of us. We don’t really even need three people anyway.”
“Yo, you guys, what’s this about pills?” Doug said. “Do you know someone who can get pills?”
Surprised at how easily he was being cut out of the deal, Mitch began to backtrack. “Dude,” he said patiently, “I’m just a little surprised. I thought you knew exactly when and where we could find a Ferrari. I didn’t think it was going to involve a lot of detective work.”
Despite having run a booming pot-selling operation with Doug, Kevin wasn’t sure enough of his intelligence to go into the car-theft business with him alone and felt more comfortable about the three of them working together. He, too, began to backtrack. “Well, I can’t say for sure what night we’ll get a Ferrari,” he said, “but we’ll get one. The plan is good.”
“The plan is good,” Mitch agreed, skeptically.
“OK then,” said Kevin. “Do you guys have business suits?”
“What’s this about pills? Why won’t you guys answer my questions about pills? I know you’ve got pills,” said Doug.
“We don’t have any fucking pills,” said Mitch. “I was kidding.”
“You weren’t kidding. I distinctly heard you talking about stealing pills.”
“Well, if we’re talking about stealing them it means we don’t have them, right?”
“Do you guys own business suits?” asked Kevin again
“Yes, we have business suits,” Mitch half-shouted.
“What kind of pills?” said Doug. “OxyContin? Can you get some OxyContin? Seriously. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to get ahold of OxyContin?”
Kevin looked across at Mitch and rolled his eyes. Neither one of them gave Doug a straight answer as they drove back to Wilton.
ON THE DRIVE back, Kevin was thinking about a guy he had met in prison named Eddie Dars. They were in the common room one afternoon, which was really just a huge cell, and as they were the only two white men in the room at the time it was only natural that they gravitated toward one another. Eddie was playing chess by himself and had invited Kevin over and taught him some moves. Kevin had been intrigued by the game. Then the conversation had turned to sports, and they discussed the Steelers and the Dolphins in great depth. Eddie really knew his football, knew the colleges attended by the whole Steelers offensive line, the histories of the coaches. They had laughed sometimes as they talked and Kevin had gone back to his cell thinking, I’ve finally found a friend in this place.
Kevin found out later that same day that Eddie Dars had raped seventeen women. Not one, not two. Seventeen. The guy was a fucking maniac. After a week of jail, this was the first actual criminal Kevin had met and up until that moment it had not occurred to him that the prison’s ostensible reason for existence was occasionally valid. Among the black kids who had driven through white neighborhoods with bags of weed, the drunk drivers who didn’t have co
What did that say about him, Kevin wondered? He knew that he himself was a well-grounded fellow-normal upbringing, popular in high school. Yet in his personal choices he always seemed to gravitate toward the fringes. How else would he have wound up in a car with these two, Continually Complaining Mitch and Pillhead Doug, pla
He knew the fact that he got along with them a
So that was it; he was doomed to spend the next fifty years hanging out with married couples and going to di
He had sat down at the computer the next day and bought lights and seeds online, built a partition in the basement, and told Linda that he was setting up a “workshop” for himself. Rather than buy a padlock to keep her out, he had decided to make her think that whatever he was doing in there was just so boring that she wouldn’t care to enter. She wanted him to have hobbies, so he picked the most boring hobby he could think of-sculpting-and ran with it. The space behind the partition became his “sculpting room.” Linda never asked why a sculpting room required ten kilowatts of power a day, nearly doubling their energy bill, nor why it emitted an eerie glow visible under the panels of the partition at all hours of the night, nor why fans could be heard constantly ru
It had gone on that way for months. Linda never asked questions. She must have known all along what he was up to. Must have. He went to di
On the way home, Kevin had repeated some of the conversation to Linda, holding it up as an example of why these parties were a form of torture for him. Linda had missed the point. “Why don’t you bring them over and show them your sculpting room?” she had asked. But Kevin had detected a trace of irony in her voice, disguised as i