The Dope Thief

“Go ahead, man. I’ll keep an eye out.”

Ma

Ma

Ray thought about that. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“When will we know?” Ma

Ray shrugged, realized Ma

AT NINE THE next morning Ma

He was edgy and his mind skittered from one thing to the next. He took out his cell a few times and looked at it, finally shoved it in his pocket and went to the car. His arms and legs twitched from lack of sleep, and a kind of strange electricity pulsed in him. When he got back to the bar he took the stairs two at a time, shouldered in the door to grab Ma

Ray let the blood back up in the needle and shot it into his arm.

“Christ, Ray.” Ma

“So bill me.”

“Fuck you, I don’t care about the money.” Ray put a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk. Go get more dope.” A wasp was buzzing, hitting the glass of the window with a rhythmic tick. Ray lay back and the buzzing filled his head. The hot light from the morning sun hammered his skin, and sweat rolled from his hair and into the hollows of his eyes. The bed was a raft on a sea of lava, and the air wrinkled with heat and fire. He heard Ma

ray jerked awake. Ma

He’d had a dream about the accident that sent him away, when Marletta died. He was standing in the road with blood coming out of his hair and looking at a man asleep in the road, only of course he wasn’t really asleep, and there were tracks leading off into the weeds where the car Ray had been driving was on its side, and he couldn’t find Marletta anywhere. It was the most he had remem-bered about the accident that had sent him to prison. The most that he had let himself see, maybe. He knew there was more. It was like reading a terrible book and not wanting to turn more pages because you knew the story just got worse.

Ray got up and started policing up the mess into the plastic bag from the donut shop. He could smell himself, a rank tang of smoke and dope sweat and dust. He heard doors slamming and went to the window and watched guys come in from their trucks. Guys getting a beer after a day of work, three guys in jeans and T-shirts with a logo he couldn’t make out. Landscapers or delivery men or ware house guys. Something where they hauled shit or built shit or something that you got a righteous thirst from and at the end of the day you had a beer and bitched about, and then the married guys went home and the single guys stayed and chatted up the girls who would come in later. A life he didn’t know, that he felt a million miles away from. Like the Plimsouls said, he was on the wrong end of the looking glass.

Ray had sat in bars with guys and listened to them talk, and when the subject came up he just said he worked for a painting crew, but things broke down when somebody knew somebody in the business, and his lies would become tenuous and elaborate, which gave him a bad feeling, like he was pretending to be tall by balancing on stilts. He would get tense and defiant, and the people around him would slip away.

He went around the room and began picking up Ma

Loaded up with bags and bits of clothing, he moved down to the car, edging past drinkers in the dim bar and pushing out into the sunlight slanting through the trees behind the crumbling asphalt lot. Outside he became aware of his clothes, stiff and foul-smelling, and he caught sight of himself in the long side mirror of a pickup. His hair was wild, his face streaked, and there were dark stains on his clothing and he remembered where they were from and he shuddered and had to resist the urge to crawl out of his clothes right there in the parking lot. He looked and felt like someone who had been living rough in the open and thought if he had seen a guy looking like this in a parking lot he’d have figured him for a guy on the bum. He dumped everything in the back of Sherry’s car and got in and drove up to County Line and cut left toward the Dunkin’ Donuts. When he got there he drove to where his Camaro had been and found an empty square of blackened asphalt surrounded by yellow tape.

Ray parked and got out and stood looking down at the place where someone had burned his car. There were greasy stripes of black where the tires had been and pools of melted plastic set with bits of broken glass fogged white. He tried to think about the sequence of events and tried to dope out if it had been before or after the barn, which was two nights ago. Maybe. His head hurt and his thinking was furred and had a lot of broken lines and gaps. He felt like he had been in the room getting high for a week, but that was junk for you.

He got back in the car and drove back down Easton Road. When he got to his street he slowed and began looking into each parked car for someone who didn’t look like he belonged there. Not that he would know. From half a block away he could make out the broad back and white- blond head of his landlord, Mrs. Gawelko, and a tall kid in his early twenties with big shoulders and a buzz cut. She was pacing and making broad motions with her arms, acting out some kind of opera for the kid, who Ray thought was her son.