Spiked (7 page)

Chapter 8

Eddie woke to purring.

He listened a while and decided this was not a cat's purr, which goes in and out like a man sawing wood. This purr held steady. A motor, he thought. Powerful, and in perfect tune. He felt a swaying, like being below decks on the ferry to Nantucket, but not so predictable.

He thought to open his eyes. And then realized they were open and everything was black. He was on his right side. His knees were pulled up to his chin. Eddie's hip ached and his head felt magnetized to the floor. His cheek pressed into scratchy carpeting, and he tasted blood. His left hand was sticky and there was grit between the fingers. He reached up and felt the ceiling, very cold, just above his head.

His concussed brain correctly reasoned that this was the trunk of a car. But it could not decide if this was where he should be. And then the world phased back out.

A low grunt came next. It was a self-satisfied noise after a tough job done well.

Eddie was weightless, floating in space, arms stretched out like Superman.

It was so quiet out here.

The crash rattled back some of his senses. A low crack echoed once, and an icy shock bit into his flesh. Eddie lifted his head from water and silently gasped. He had landed face-down on milky ice. A section of ice had broken off under his weight and had dipped below the water. It bobbed back to the surface like a raft, with Eddie on board.

He recognized the walls of a mill canal on either side of him. A spiked wrought-iron fence ran along the top of the wall. Parts of the Worthen Canal had such a fence, he recalled. That canal flowed through low-income housing along the western edge of the Acre, into an industrial area, and then under the street where the police had found Danny.

On the ice, a few inches from Eddie's face, a rat was posed on the spot it had died. Its greasy gray hair looked brittle, like glass. Its pink tail snaked out under a coating of ice. The rat had stopped here long enough for its tail to become frozen in place. Why would it stop? Maybe for a last meal before a death struggle against its own tail. How long did it suffer?

Eddie was still.

A harsh whisper from above said, “If you tried all day, could you
be
any more stupid? It's floating away on the goddam ice.”

“Must you use the name of our Lord that way?” said another voice.

“Shut up. Get a rock.”

Eddie thought about General VonKatz. The cat could drink from the drip in the tub. And he could live hungry for a week, couldn't he? Longer, maybe. Somebody would check the house by then. Melissa would remember him. Eddie thought about the General's last ear infection. He wouldn't take his pills. Eddie had crushed them into some gravy and added catnip to hide the medicine smell. Would anybody think of that?

Something splashed beside his head.

Eddie hadn't the strength to swim. And even if he did, the water was too cold, the walls of the canal too sheer. To slip off the ice would be to drown. He tried to fuse himself to the ice with his will. Shivers shook blood from Eddie's head. The red droplets ran like bugs on the wet ice.

There was a bigger splash. The ice wobbled. An archway of rough stone appeared above him.

“You missed again, you idiot,” said a voice. “Now it's floating under the bridge.”

“Forget it,” the other voice answered. “It'll sink before it comes out the other side.”

Two car doors slammed and an engine purred off.

Eddie clung to the ice a while. It seemed a long time.

He thought about the Red Sox. If they could just add one decent starting pitcher this off-season, and one infielder who could run. He thought about Nowlin, floating face down in this canal with no ice under him. He thought about Bruno, his barber, dialing Eddie because the dive team was scrambling. Eddie's mind heard his phone ringing with the barber's tip. But nobody would answer it.

There was no more pain, not from his hip, nor the cold, not from the wounds that had bloodied his hands. Eddie was glad to be feeling better. His shivering went away. There was no sound beyond his own breath, so soft and calm, like a sleeping child without grown-up worries.

He studied the rat. Its eyelids were open and the eyes frozen white.

My eyes are brown
. He was glad to be feeling better.

Chapter 9

“Hey Gab! Help me—this one is alive. Get him up.”

“God, Leo, what a mess.”

Hands pulled at Eddie. He saw two blurry faces.

“Put the shawl over him.”

“Eew! Look at that rat.”

The hands passed Eddie around. They stretched him into a cross—arms out to the side. His face flopped forward; the ground passed under his feet. Eddie's shoes scuffed on the asphalt. The heads under his armpits wheezed and coughed as they carried him. Eddie smelled foul breath; these heads were rotting from the inside out. His shoes knocked against railroad tracks. The rails were polished like silver and they reflected the moonlight. The head under Eddie's right arm yelled out, “Kent? Snake? Get over here.”

“Kent's on the nod—he's long gone,” called another voice. “Did you get the stuff?”

“Yes, and something else.”

“Jesus—where'd he come from?”

The railroad tracks were gone. Now there was dry grass below his feet. Then Eddie's nose was in the grass and he smelled oil. The hands took him up a steep hill.

“Just lay him on his back and drag him along the ledge. Watch for the ice—do not lose him.”

They rolled him, and suddenly the night stars appeared. Eddie recognized Orion the hunter. He tried to tell them that the Egyptians built the Great Pyramids in a line with Orion's belt. But it came out in a gurgle.

“Easy, man,” a voice said.

Silhouettes passed over Eddie. They hid the starlight like black holes.

They moved him in small steps, grunting as they dragged him and panting when they rested. Soon Eddie was under rows of great steel beams, rusted orange and lit by flickering light. The place smelled like a campfire. A truck rumbled overhead. Above the beams, there was a concrete ceiling. They had taken him under a bridge.

“Take his clothes off.” The woman's voice was low and throaty.

Hands pulled at Eddie's belt. The man undressing him had curly black hair like steel wool, and a gray stubble beard. Shadows filled his deep eye sockets and the hollows in his cheeks.

Eddie struggled to ask them, who are you?

“Can't understand a word you're saying,” the woman said.

Eddie watched her in the campfire light. She spread out a blanket and sat on it. Her light hair hung limp to her shoulders. Dainty brown eyebrows seemed out of place on her ashen face, which was pockmarked by little scars. She pulled a faded pink sweatshirt over her head and exposed her breasts, which sagged into ovals. She undid her jeans and slid them off. Her legs were skinny, the color of buttermilk.

The man dragged Eddie to the blanket. Eddie's clothes were piled on the ground.

“Got to raise your core temperature or you'll die,” the woman said.

She pressed her body against his and the man wrapped the blanket around them. He spread another blanket over the first one. It smelled like piss.

The fire heated Eddie's face. Another man, bald with a reptile skin tattoo around his neck, stoked the flames with hunks of a broken rocking chair. The bridge rattled under the traffic.

Soon Eddie began to shiver again, and pain seeped back into his hip and his head. His shakes grew violent. The woman slid an arm over his chest and squeezed. “Don't fight it,” she whispered. “That's your life coming back.”

A fire engine howled across the bridge. She waited for the siren to pass, and then said to the man with curly hair, “Leo, honey, fix the spike for me, would you? I'm starving for it.”

He smiled, saying, “Already done the cooking.” From inside his soiled wool overcoat, he produced a syringe. He pulled off the safety cap and inspected the needle in the fire's light. He flicked it twice with a finger. “It is ready, Luv.”

Chapter 10

Eddie woke alone to the bustle of the morning commute clattering across the bridge overhead. His hip ached. A lump on the back of his skull throbbed when he rolled over on it. He was stiff from sleeping on cement. The cold air had tempered overnight to something more seasonable, maybe forty degrees. The sun blazed brightly outside the shadow of the bridge.

He lay wrapped in blankets on a cramped ledge, the size of an average living room, which jutted out from a concrete bridge abutment. Nine parallel steel I-beams, five feet overhead, carried the bridge to another abutment, maybe fifty feet away.

All sorts of trash was strewn around the ledge: empty soup cans, cat food boxes, fast food and cigarette wrappers. Old clothes, dirty sheets and blankets were in piles. A yellow plastic milk crate nearby held coffee mugs, cutlery, two long white candles, a bottle of lemon juice and a handful of new syringes wrapped in plastic.

Eddie crawled naked to the edge of the ledge. It dropped twenty-five feet straight down a wall of granite blocks to two sets of railroad tracks. To his left, the tracks gently curved out of sight between chain fences, to his right were numerous tracks and switch-offs, where trains would be stored. Eddie realized he was near the train station, just outside of downtown Lowell, and that Chelmsford Street, one of the city's busiest arteries, ran above his head.

A much narrower ledge, like a catwalk, led away from the main ledge and followed along a tall granite retaining wall for about a hundred feet, ending at a steep, grassy knoll. The two-foot-wide catwalk looked like a dangerous exit from this place. It was a trek over patches of ice—a sheer stone wall on one side and a drop of more than two stories on the other.

Did they really drag me down that walkway?

The campfire had aged to coals. Somebody had spread Eddie's suit near the fire. It was cold and wet and he shuddered at the thought of putting it back on. He crawled to a pile of clothes and picked through it. He found blue jeans with holes in the knees. They were short in the inseam and snug in the waist. He pulled on a rust-colored wool sweater with grease smears on the sleeves, and laced up red canvas sneakers, size eleven, one size too big. He tied them tight. He still needed a jacket. There was a large pile of clothes and blankets toward the back of the ledge, heaped against the abutment. He squatted in front of the pile and pulled out a black fleece pullover.

There was a human head beneath it.

Eddie's head smacked a steel girder. The pain started at the back of his skull, roared up over his brain and shot out his eyes in a flash of light that washed the world white for three seconds. He massaged his lump and then crawled back to the pile. The head was attached to a man, buried in dirty laundry; it was the bald guy with the snakeskin tattoo who had tended the fire. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and noisy.

“You okay, man?” Eddie said, tapping the man's cheek. “I'm just looking for something to wear.”

He turned his head and looked at Eddie. His pupils were specks. From his nostrils, drops of clear liquid streamed to his lips. He blinked a few times, and then turned away to sleep.

“I'm assuming you don't mind if I borrow a jacket.”

The pullover smelled like sweat and campfire smoke. In the pocket Eddie found a wallet. It was an excellent tanned cowhide, or at least it used to be. There was an imprint of a polo player on it. Ralph Lauren? This was a pricey wallet.

A voice said, “Those shoes do not match with that jacket.” Startled, Eddie dropped the wallet and spun around.

The curly-haired man had come along the walkway to the ledge. He was kneeling, watching Eddie under the girders. He had an armful of dry sticks. Behind him, the woman who had warmed Eddie in the blanket edged along the walkway. She stepped sideways, her back to the retaining wall.

“I needed clothes,” Eddie said. His eyes flickered to the railroad tracks below. A long way to jump.

The man saw Eddie eye the tracks. His smile showed beige teeth. “We will trade clothes,” he said. The accent was Middle-Eastern. His language was formal, like he had learned English in a classroom. He looked about forty-five years old. “Then I will have a suit to wear to my board meetings.”

They both smiled. The man lobbed the wood at Eddie's feet and pointed to the fire. Eddie gathered the kindling and stirred the coals to revive them.

The woman reached the ledge. She looked late forties. Forty-seven, Eddie guessed. “You look better,” she said to him. She had the voice of an elderly woman who had smoked all her life.

“I'm doing better than that guy.” Eddie pointed to the man under the laundry.

“Who? Snake? He's as good as it gets. He's on the nod.” She saw Eddie was puzzled. “He shot up this morning. Still on his wake-up hit.”

“Heroin?” Eddie asked.

“A rose by any other name….” She stopped in mid-thought and pointed down the catwalk. “Leo, here comes Fat Boy.”

A calico cat trotted along the ledge. He was fat, all right, maybe eighteen pounds. The man grabbed a box of cat food and shook it. The cat hustled on stumpy legs. “Fat Boy's a regular,” the woman explained. “He loves Leo. They all love him. We don't eat sometimes but those cats always do.” She rolled her eyes at the man, but she smiled, too.

The cat rubbed its bulk against the man's shin and lifted its chin so he could scratch its neck.

“Fat Boy trades his affection for food,” the man said. “That is how he stays fat. Not all of his kind has learned this.” He dumped a pyramid of dry food on the cement. The cat nosed into it.

Eddie had the fire crackling again. They sat and talked. The man and woman who had saved him from the canal held hands. Her name was Gabrielle, he went by Leo, and this ledge was their home. They were part of a community of heroin addicts, a dozen or so, who often stayed under this bridge, though rarely more than a handful at a time. They had found Eddie in the water by chance, they told him. Ice had narrowed the swath of running river in the canal, and Eddie's ice floe had become lodged.

“How long have you lived here?” Eddie asked.

Gabrielle answered, “Since we came from Montreal.” To Leo, she said, “What? About eighteen months?”

“You don't have to stay here, do you?”

She shrugged. “Heroin is a full-time job. We can't pay rent.”

“What about the homeless shelter?”

“They got big hearts down there, they do,” she said. “They check on us here sometimes, bring us coffee and they'll give us clothes or a new blanket. But it's a dry shelter. You can't shoot up there, and they don't let you in if you're hooded.”

“Hooded?”

“You know—if you've been using.”

“So you'd rather stay here, under this bridge, so you can shoot up?”

They said nothing because the answer was obvious. Eddie pressed the point. “You don't have a home, you don't have heat or a phone. Christ—I don't see a toilet under here.”

Gabrielle looked sweetly on the naive stranger in her home. “That's smack,” she said. “It knows everything you don't have. And that's what it gives you. Every time.”

Eddie looked to Leo for confirmation. He nodded. “My wife tells it correct.”

“You two are married?” Eddie asked, surprised.

“In the eyes of everyone except the law,” Leo said. He grinned and kissed her cheek.

By questioning them, Eddie got their biographies. Leo was born in Iran, moved to Paris at fifteen and studied philosophy as an undergraduate. His parents died young, and he moved to Montreal in his mid-twenties for graduate studies. There, blind drunk in the men's room at a German-style pub on St. Catherine Street, he snorted heroin off the book jacket of Friedrich Nietzsche's
The Birth of Tragedy.

Leo shook his head at the irony. “I had a backpack full of text with me. Plato, Kant, Hume, Bertrand Russell. But I chose Nietzsche.” He shrugged. “I did not even like Nietzsche.”

Leo dropped out of school within a year of starting his habit, and took a job as a sausage cart vendor. His wages went to heroin.

Gabrielle first used heroin with an old boyfriend in Montreal, in her first year of nursing school. He dumped her after she was expelled for stealing needles. She met Leo at the sausage cart, after a Canadians hockey game.

“He was so shy,” she said. “He couldn't look any of the girls in the eye, and such a gentleman. I knew right then, he was the one I was looking for.” They shacked up within a month. “We made a home together before we made love.”

They stayed in Montreal six years together, shooting up as many as six times a day, until an overdose nearly killed Leo. Gabrielle wiped a tear as she remembered. “We made a pact to get cleaned up together and start over in Lowell, because I got a cousin here someplace.”

They rehabbed in Canada for two months, and then rode a bus here.

“We got this motel room,” she said. “The guy in the next room was selling heroin. There's no excuse. It was there. We bought it.”

Their money soon ran out. Other addicts had taken them here.

“What about your cousin?” Eddie asked.

She shrugged. “That's the part that didn't work out.”

“What do you do for money?”

“Leo works at a garage sometimes, under the table,” Gabrielle said. She looked to Leo and frowned. “I did some streetwalking, but when he found out it broke his heart so I stopped.”

Leo pretended not to hear her. He let go of her hand and tossed a stick on the fire, which was burning just fine.

They were so blunt, so open with their story. Would they tell it to the paper? Eddie couldn't help himself—despite Danny's death and his own near miss, he was born to tell stories such as this. He trembled at the possibility. “Does the city know you're here?” he asked.

“Cops do,” Gabrielle said. “They kick us out every few months when they're looking for somebody on a warrant. We find someplace to bed for the night, just for one night. Mostly they don't mind us. None of them want to come down here.”

“What about rehab?”

Leo and Gabrielle glanced to each other, sharing past hardships with their eyes. He took her hand again. “Leo's been to rehab three times,” she said. “I been twice.” She patted Leo's knee with her other hand. “The last time he did real good. He got a Section-Eight apartment in Centralville for a couple months. But when he couldn't get me to stop, he started using again.”

Eddie shook his head. “You guys are not what I would have expected in heroin addicts.”

“What is that?” snapped Leo, suddenly annoyed. “You thought we would be gibbering like lunatics and lying in our own piss? Eh? That I could not talk to you like a person? Or love my wife like a man?”

Eddie said nothing. Leo was right. Eddie had not expected they'd be human.

Leo took a white candle and the lemon juice from the milk crate.

“Let me tell you about heroin,” he said with no trace of annoyance. “It is the heart of this city's underground economy. Think of the heroin trade like the
shadow
of regular commerce. It lies just behind it, and touches only at the bottom. This economy works in a circle. I will explain.”

He twisted the butt end of the candle into a hole in the cement. “Addicts, as you say, people like me, get money for heroin from petty theft—car radios sometimes, smash-and-grab. The pawn brokers and the glass shops get some spin-off business—this is our economics.” He flashed that beige smile.

He pulled from his coat a tin snuffbox and a fat pinch of tan powder twisted in plastic wrap. He held it up. “The hero of the underworld,” he said. He emptied the powder in the tin and shook his head. “It is crap. Mostly brown. Not the best. Not pure.”

Eddie nodded.

Leo stroked Fat Boy as the cat wandered away. Then he continued, “Look at the other economic forces working here. To stop my petty crime, the city hires more policemen. But you cannot fit all of us in the jail, right? So you treat us.” Leo lit the candle with a cigarette lighter. The wick was too long and the flame burned tall and smoky.

“To treat all of these people, the government starts new programs. And they hire more counselors to rehabilitate us. That is a net job creation. Economics—see?” He sprinkled a few drops of lemon juice in the tin. “Some of us make it and become clean. Some go back to the spike and die.”

He swirled the tin in the candle flame. “To make new customers, maybe my paper boy cuts his price, maybe a little—”

Eddie interrupted. “Your paper boy? Is that what you call your heroin dealer?”

“Yes. This is funny to you?”

No, not funny, just ironic. Eddie didn't want to say yet that he worked for the paper. He cocked an ear toward the distant clack of a coming train. “Are we safe under here?”

“The train comes every hour at quarter past,” Leo said. He smiled. “It is a most noisy wristwatch.”

Eddie said, “So you were saying, the dealer cuts his prices?”

“Maybe a little, and he adjusts his strategy,” Leo explained. “You can snort heroin too, he tells everyone. And you—mister nine-to-five job—you might say you would never touch the needle. But you will sniff the powder. Maybe you cut it with ecstasy the first time, that yuppie drug. This is just recreation, right?”

He blew out the candle and fanned the mixture in the tin with an open hand.

Leo stared Eddie in the eye. “I promise you would like it, you would. Just takes a week and then you have a habit.” He grinned, and then whispered. “But the secret is this—snorting is never as good as the first time.”

He took the needle from his coat and held it up. “Ah-ha!” he yelled in joy. “You hear that shooting in the vein is better than snorting—maybe it's more like the first time, you hope.” He loaded the needle with the mixture in the tin. It was the color of root beer.