Bad Things (8 page)

with his drugs.”

“Shit,” he said urgently.

“Yeah.” I pushed Rick to the side, making sure he stayed tangled

with the chair and wound up falling heavily into the corner.

“Shit,”
Doug said, again, blinking fast. Dumb and high though

he was, he was smart enough to realize the evening had taken a very

poor turn.

I left a beat and then lashed hard right with the tire iron, smash-

40 Michael Marshall

ing the nearest light fi tting and sending a shower of glass fragments

around the room.

Kyle and Doug leaped back, arms over their heads. Rick mean-

while was trying to fi ght free of the chair so he could regain his feet.

I rested my own foot—pretty gently—on his chest. He went back

down almost gratefully.

“Tell me you’ve still got it,” I said. “Except, of course, for what

you’ve sucked up into your faces already.”

Doug nodded quickly, compulsively. He hadn’t been hit yet. He’d

be valuing that position a great deal, and ready to do pretty much

anything to protect it.

“I’m waiting,” I said.

He didn’t hesitate. Ran straight to the fridge and dug in the veg-

etable drawer. Out came a brown bag. He thrust it at me like it was

on fi re.

I looked inside, threw it to Kyle. Then took a step closer to Doug,

and looked him in the eyes.

“Do you understand how lucky you’ve been?”

He nodded feverishly.

“I hope so,” I said. “Ordinarily this would go some whole other

way. Kyle assures me you’re decent people, despite appearances, and

so I’m hoping you’re not going to wake up tomorrow feeling pissed

off and like you should have been more assertive about this, and de-

cide to take it out on Kyle instead.”

“No way,” Doug said quickly.

“Good. You do, then I’ll come burn your house down. Understand?

And I don’t mean this shit heap you’re living in.”

“Honestly, man,” he said. “W-we’re cool.”

I nodded to Kyle, and we walked out the door.

Halfway back to the car I stopped and put my hand on Kyle’s arm. He

turned warily. He looked about twelve years old.

B A D T H I N G S 41

“I don’t need to talk this through with you in the same way, do I?”

He shook his head quickly.

“Get rid of that shit, fast. Pay back the people you got it from,

then pay back the loan. And
do not do this ever again
. You are simply not up to this way of life. You piss off someone just
one
step higher up the food chain and you’re going to wind up fucked or dead. I mean

you no disrespect, Kyle—this is just career advice from someone who

knows.”

He was nodding almost continually now, his chin twitching.

“Okay.”

“Here’s how this business works. At the top are the guys who

make the stuff and run the top-level distribution: the shadows who

make the real money and never get caught. Then there’s the next tier,

the guys you bought your drugs from. They make a bunch of cash,

too, though once in a while they go down or get shot when the next

wave rolls over them. At the bottom there’s the guy
you’re
trying to

be, the street grunts. Who make a little cash in the beginning but

always
wind up junkies, or in jail, or dead, about which the guys above do not give a fuck.”

I grabbed his chin and made sure I had his full attention. “You

really want to be that guy? Bitch for some asshole who right now is

sitting on a yacht bigger than any house you’ll ever own?”

He shook his head, as best he could. “No.”

“Well, then.” I let go and clapped him on the shoulder. “We’re

done. Let’s go home.”

We walked the rest of the way back to Becki’s car. She slumped

with relief when she saw the bag.

“How?”
she said. “Is everything—”

“It’s all done,” I said. “And your boy did good.”

I rode in the back. I should have felt okay about what had just hap-

pened, but I did not. I watched the town as we passed through, then

down at the river as we went south over the bridge, then the dunes

and the dark sea beyond.

42 Michael Marshall

Becki stopped the car outside my house, a lot more gently than

the night before.

“Thank you,” she said, but she said it like someone who’d been

done a favor.

Then she shook her head, added, “See you tomorrow,” and the

feeling backed off a little.

When I got to the top of the path I looked back. The car was

still there. Becki and Kyle were holding each other, their foreheads

pressed together, her hand stroking the back of his head, the top of

his neck. There’s nothing to beat that. Nothing in the world.

I let myself into the house, feeling tired and wrong and like I

could walk a thousand miles in any direction and have no reason to

ever turn back.

I felt better after a shower, and took a Coke and cigarette out onto

the balcony. I wanted a beer, too, but I know better than that.

No big deal, I’d decided as the hot water coursed over my head.

Not doing anything would have led to a worse situation for people I

cared about. Isn’t that as good a justifi cation for action as any? And

hadn’t I been staring at the waves the previous night, feeling too much

to one side of the world?

I shook my head, dismissed the train of thought. I know how

much difference a night’s sleep can make, that what seems ungovern-

able and world-breaking at one a.m. can be made to feel like someone

else’s dream if you put seven hours of unconsciousness between it and

you. Tomorrow’s not just another day, another person lives it—and

every time you go to sleep, you say good-bye. Amen.

I went back indoors and got a glass of water to take to bed. As I

passed the laptop I hesitated, then decided I could put the day prop-

erly to rest by checking my e-mail one last time.

There wasn’t even much spam and I was already moving away

before I realized a fi nal message had just come in.

B A D T H I N G S 43

Subject line: !! INTERRUPTED!!

I swore, wishing I hadn’t checked. Now I had no choice but to

read it. Staying on my feet, I clicked on the e-mail and watched as it

came up on screen.

Please email me.

I know what happened to your son.

C H A P T E R 6

I saw the sun come up the next morning, though I hadn’t been awake

for all that time.

For an hour after reading the e-mail I’d alternated between the

laptop and the deck, trying to work out what to do. My fi rst impulse

was to throw the e-mail away, empty the trash, and pretend it had

never happened.

But I couldn’t just erase it. After a while I understood this, and

had to work out what to do instead. The fi rst question was how this

person had got my e-mail address. This address in particular, in

fact, as I have several. My main, and most current, which receives

nothing but infrequent missives from my ex-wife. Then a Gmail

address, set up for a specifi c purpose and not even checked in three

years, but which presumably/maybe still existed. Finally a corpo-

rate addresses, legacy of a place I once worked. It had become a dead

line long ago, but had evidently never been actually deactivated.

The e-mail had come into this last one. The person sending it

had either known or found out I had once been associated with the

company in question. It
was
a she, presumably, though I couldn’t

take that for granted—you can be anyone you want on the Net.

It didn’t look as though this person was calling upon previous ac-

B A D T H I N G S 45

quaintanceship, and I had no recollection of the name. I typed it into

a Web search engine and found the usual randomers on their own or

other people’s personal sites, a few others on the staff lists or minutes

of libraries and Girl Scout troops, and a handful referenced on ge-

nealogical sites.

In the end I did the only thing I could think of. I hit reply and

typed:

Who are you?

I looked at this for a while, unable for once to even hear the surf,

aware only of the low, churning feeling in my stomach. Should I send

it, or not? For the moment I still had the option of walking away, not

checking my mail, carrying on as I had.

But eventually I pressed send, and then stood up and went out-

side.

I drank glass after glass of bottled water, sitting out on the deck,

going back in to check the mail every fi fteen minutes. It was very

late. I knew there was little chance that a reply, were it ever to be

forthcoming, was going to arrive tonight. But however different they

may be in reality, we carry into e-mail conversations a vestige of the

expectations implicit in the more old-fashioned kind. We think that if

we say something, then the other guy will say something right back.

She (or he) did not.

At three o’clock I locked the doors and turned the computer off.

As I undressed I realized that, however it might feel during the day,

the year was turning. The room felt cold.

I got into a bed that seemed very wide and lay listening to the

blood in my ears, and trying to remember nothing, until I was no

longer myself.

46 Michael Marshall

No reply at dawn, nor by midmorning, nor four-thirty, when I changed

into my work clothes and set off for the restaurant. There had been

a lot of rain in the night, and on my early morning walk the sand

had been dull and pockmarked, the beach strewn with seaweed. As I

walked up the road toward the Pelican it seemed likely the same was

going to happen again tonight. A couple of hours from now it would

be raining with the sullen persistence for which Oregon is justly cel-

ebrated, which meant a quiet night in the restaurant. It was likely to

have been anyhow, and John wouldn’t be staying open on Sunday

evenings much longer. The season was done.

As I walked, I talked myself down. The e-mail was likely just the

work of an opportunistic lunatic who worked on a slow news cycle. If

there had been anything meaningful behind it, I believed the sender

would have been in touch again quickly. What do you do if you’ve

sent an e-mail like that, and it’s real? You expect a reply, and then you

get on the case quickly. Once the mark is hooked you don’t give them

the chance to wriggle off again.

So I was back to the idea that it never meant anything in the fi rst

place. I worked the sequence back and forth in my head for about ten

minutes, and kept coming to the same conclusion. I tried to make it

stick, and move on.

Two miles is enough to get a lot of thinking done. It’s also enough

to work out that you’re not in the best of moods. I was one of the

fi rst to get to the restaurant, however, so I got busy helping set up.

Eduardo walked by outside the window at one stage, saw me, and held

up his pack of Marlboro. I went out back to have a smoke with him

and two of the other cooks—which was pleasant enough but also kind

of weird to do after all this time, as if I’d slipped into a parallel but

not-very-different existence. Eduardo’s English was decent but the

others’ wasn’t, and my Spanish is lousy. The experience boiled down

to: so, here we all are, smoking, in an atmosphere of vague goodwill.

As I headed inside I was surprised, and yet also not surprised,

to see Becki’s car entering the lot. Kyle got out, putting his arrival

B A D T H I N G S 47

a good forty minutes ahead of ser vice. I watched him head into the

restaurant, and glanced across at Becki in the driver’s seat of the car.

She gave me a smile and I realized things were going to be okay

with her after all. Also that I’d probably seen the end of my nascent

pizza-making career, at least for now.

We got a reasonable sitting for the early-bird slot, but after that it

went real slow until there was just one family left at a table in the

middle of the room, eating in a silence so murderous it almost seemed

to drown out the music playing in the background. Ted sent Mazy

home after an hour. The rest of the staff fl oated like abandoned sail-

boats on calm seas, hands clasped behind their backs, coming to rest

in corners of the restaurant to stand and watch as the sky grew lower

and heavier and more purple outside.

“Gonna be a big one,” said a voice. “Like,
kaboom
.”

I turned to see Kyle standing behind me. He had strong opinions

on the weather, evidently. We looked out at the clouds together for a

while.

“You okay?” I asked eventually.

He nodded. Could be my imagination, but he actually looked a

little older than he had the day before, albeit somewhat wired. He

glanced around, and spoke more quietly.

“Working on closing out the . . . you know,” he said. “And then,

well, I heard what you said. And Becki has sure as hell told me the

same thing.” He looked down. “Thanks, by the way. I didn’t say that

last night, and I should of.”

“You’d had a bad day,” I said.

It was quiet for a while, but I knew he had something else to say.

Eventually he got to it.

“So how come you know how to do . . . that stuff?”