The Art of Disposal (6 page)

I might not care about too many people, but I never met an animal I didn't like: right down to your common black and yellow garden spider. I walked out of Thin's apartment with a pound and a half of uncut blow in a messenger bag, and a pug on my shoulder.

“What's his name?” Eddie said when I was back at the office.

“I don't know, boss.”

“Did the girl kill Thin?” Ricky said.

“Nah, she wouldn't do that,” I said.

“A guy can choke on his own puke if he's bombed enough,” Dan the Man said.

“Like Jimi Hendrix,” Bullfrog said.

“Goddamn shame,” Eddie said. “I'm gonna miss those dabs of red wax.” Then he picked up the pug, held it on his lap, and scratched behind its ears.

“Hey Champ,” he said to me. “Run over to the pet-store and get Barney some food, dishes, toys… whatever you think he needs.”

“We got a problem with Tina,” Bullfrog said, wheezing from the steep flight of stairs that lead up to the office. Bullfrog looks like a glazed chocolate doughnut, and he wears a floppy hat.

I'm not sure how much you know about the business world—our business world—but you can't so much as sneeze without paying a fifty cent fee wherever a guy like Eddie Sesto controls the action. He gets his grubby fingers into every pie. But some guys get the idea that they can just open up shop without filing the proper paperwork, so to speak. That's a big no, no. Eddie likes his paperwork filed, with all the I's dotted and T's crossed.

Tina is slang for crystal meth. That stuff is bad news. If you're going to snort something, I'd recommend blow. It might not be organic, fair-trade, shade-grown, bird-friendly, and conflict-free, but it least it started off as an actual plant.

“Who's selling?” Eddie said to Bullfrog.

“Some hillbilly dudes. Brothers.”

“
Black
hillbillies?” Ricky said.

“No. White boys. Actual brothers,” Bullfrog said, shaking his head like Ricky was some kind of serious fool.

“Did you talk to 'em?” Eddie said.

“I sent Moe over there,” Bullfrog said. “They told him they don't deal with no niggers.”

“That's not cordial,” Eddie said. He took out an oily black cigar, clipped it with a guillotine cutter, and grabbed a book of matches. Then he flashed his wicked grin and his eyes got bright, as if he was thrilled to hear about a good throw-down. Moe's a big guy. He can do some damage.

“What'd Moe say to 'em?”

“He kept it cool. Now he's just waiting for your word,” Bullfrog said.

“I like Moe,” Eddie said, puffing away at the lit match and rotating the cigar to get an even burn. Ricky was sitting on the couch and Dan the Man was standing with his arms crossed, like he was a bouncer at a titty bar. Barney the pug was curled up on a blue blanket in the corner of the room.

“Moe is good people,” Eddie said. “Hey Rick, you wanna go over and talk some sense into these knuckleheads?”

“My pleasure,” Ricky said, standing up and flicking unseen things off the front of his leather coat.

“Hey Champ… you go too,” Eddie said to me.

It wasn't snowing, but there was dirty slush here and there and the trees looked like skeletons. The sky was so white it looked like God was smoothing out a freshly washed bed sheet. It actually stung your eyes to look at it, and it made the wind feel even colder.

We sat in Ricky's Buick Park Avenue and waited for it to warm up. Ricky rubbed his gloved hands together, and blew air between his palms like he was lost in Antarctica. I sat there wondering how a guy could take himself seriously while wearing black leather gloves.

“Do they help you drive?” I asked him.

“They keep my hands clean,” he said, and he mimed like he was gripping a guy by the throat with one hand and punching his face with the other. He laughed and put the car in reverse.

We drove past the parched lots and empty brick buildings; past dirty houses with lit-up reindeer and strings of white lights.

“I bought my kid a video game machine,” Ricky said.

“You get your wife anything?”

“She's already got me. What more could she want?”

“Me,” I said.

“Pffff. You? You wouldn't know what to do with her. She's big, for one thing.”

We drove through the south-side, until we found Santa in front of a Methodist Church. He was shaking a brass bell and standing next to a Salvation Army kettle. I saw a little white girl in a bright blue coat jumping up and down in a muddy slush puddle. There were black people walking up and down the church steps, the men dressed up in fine suits and trench coats, the women in dark dresses and shawls. Ricky drove a little way up the street and parallel parked into a tight spot that seemed impossible. Maybe those gloves really did help.

We walked up to Moe's filthy door, and Ricky rapped on it twice. Moe let us in and poured us a cup of coffee.

“Them hicks is crazy,” he said to Ricky. “I said they couldn't be dealin' round here. I tried to be cool. Told 'em I'd set something up, that maybe they could get in with us. They wasn't havin' it. Said they do what they want, when they want, where they want.”

“Where they gettin' their stuff?” Ricky said.

“Pop's a Hell's Angel. He sends it.”

“Their Dad?” Ricky said, a little confused.

“According to Mister Z.”

Mister Z is a meth head whose brain is so far gone that he literally thinks he's from another planet. Bullfrog watches out for him. He gives him free stuff and Mister Z brings us new clients. It works out pretty well for everyone.

Moe gave us directions to the hillbilly house, and we split. Ricky put a twenty dollar bill into Santa's Salvation Army kettle before we got into the car.

“God Bless,” Santa said.

Any time I go into a bad situation, I mentally prepare for the worst. I picture what it will feel like to have a bullet rip through my neck or get lodged in my chest. Then I tell myself it's not going to happen—because I'm too good. Like preparing for a test, or running five miles, you have to psych yourself up for it, tell yourself that you're the best: you're a winner. If you really want to live, the odds are good that you will. People die when they're ready to.

We turned off on a pothole-stricken road just outside of the city. Ricky kept the Buick at five miles an hour, and we bumped along. “Our tax dollars at work,” he said. He pulled over into a patch of dirty grass and mud near a squat blue house, and pointed through the windshield at a distant ugly house—the only other building on the street.

“Why'd you park so far away?” I asked.

“Never let 'em see you coming,” Ricky said. “Ready?”

I opened my sportcoat a little, so he could see the Beretta he'd sold me. We got out and shut the car doors, and they sounded loud and crisp, the way they always do when you're heading toward trouble. We walked. A skinny black cat ran across the road in front of us. It hid in some bushes, and as we passed I knelt down and made a clicking sound. It ran right over to me. You could see the shape of its backbone. I made a fist and let it stroke its face against my hand, and it hummed like an engine.

“Jesus,” Ricky said. “I ain't superstitious, but let's not push it.”

Ricky rang the doorbell. It took a few minutes. Then the white curtain of a nearby window lifted up and fell back into place.

“Who is it?” a voice said.

“The meter man,” Ricky said.

The deadbolt clicked and the door creaked open. A scrawny kid with long blond hair stood there looking us up and down. He had a lot of piercings. One through his eyebrow and one through his nose, right in the middle, like a cartoon bull. His ears were stretched out as big as silver dollars from those tribal style earrings that so many white kids are wearing these days.

Moe wears tiny gold hoops, and those look fine. What I don't understand is some guy with earlobes the size of a coffee mug. There's no going back from that. And it's disrespectful to the guys in Papua New Guinea with red face-paint and bows with poison arrows. Those stretched out lobes are an important part of their culture. They have spiritual significance. But over here in America, on some suburban college kid, giant holes in your ears are just a cheap way to say, “hey, look at me!”

So right off the bat I didn't like this kid. His baseball hat was turned sideways, he was wearing a tank-top, and his bony white arms were covered with ridiculous tattoos. His eyes were redder than a baboon's ass, and the sharp smell of weed was practically floating in a visible cloud behind him in the darkness.

“We're friends of Moe,” Ricky said.

“Who's Moe?” the kid said.

“The
black
gentleman you refused to do business with,” Ricky said.

“Who is it?” a girl said from the darkness.

“Shut up,” the kid said. Then he yelled out “Wade! Get down here!”

“Do we have to stand out here like bums?” Ricky said, flashing his white teeth.

The kid stepped aside and the door creaked open. Next thing I knew we were sitting on a couch in a living room with two empty pizza boxes, a three foot glass bong, some beer bottles here and there, and white sheets thumb-tacked over the windows. Classy.

A girl with pink hair and tight black pants sat in an ugly recliner. She looked even more stoned than the kid. She grabbed the wooden handle on the side of the chair and heaved herself back.

“Who are these guys?” she said.

“I thought I told you to shut up,” the kid said.

You could hear someone walking down the stairs, and I saw Ricky move his hand toward his gun. It was the kid's older brother. You could see they were related, but this one had short hair and a way more professional appearance. I couldn't find a single tattoo.

“I'm Wade,” he said when he reached the bottom of the stairs. “That's my brother Clayton”—he looked over at the scrawny kid—“can we help you?”

“You weren't very nice to Moe,” Ricky said.

“I thought he was bluffing.”

“No Sir,” Ricky said. “We have a certain way of doing things around here. If you guys want to operate, you're gonna have to pay a fee.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Wade said.

“But—” Clayton said.

“Don't worry about it. I'll talk to Dad,” Wade said to his brother.

“You talk to your Dad,” Ricky said. He stood up and looked around the room, like he was disgusted that anyone could live that way. “Then come see us… Tuesday at two o'clock. Eddie's Vacuum Sales and Repair. It's in the Yellow-pages.”

“I'll be there,” Wade said.

“I guess I should emphasize that none of your stuff hits the street again until we figure all of this out.”

“Not a problem.”

“But—” Clayton said.

“Shut up,” Wade said. “These guys are for real.”

“Who are these guys?” the stoned girl said.

Giant-holes-in-his-ears showed us out. He stared at us with bloodshot eyes and a half-open mouth. For some reason I pictured him and the pink-haired girl having a baby, and how the baby would come out covered with earrings and tatts: totally baked without ever taking a hit.

It was so bright out there in the street. My pupils must have dilated to the widest possible aperture back in the dark of that drug house. I had to make a visor with my hand. We walked back to the car, crunching over the few patches of snow.

“The older one was all right,” I said.

“A little
too
polite.”

“At least no one got hurt.”

“Not yet,” Ricky said.

There was a knock on the office door at exactly two in the afternoon the following Tuesday. There's something to be said for punctuality. When you show up on time, people take you seriously. It put Eddie in a good mood.

It turned out that Wade's old man was a pretty big name in the methamphetamine world. He came from West Virginia, but he was currently operating out of Sturgis, South Dakota, and running a huge game. His name was Griffin Shaw. One of Eddie's connections had even done business with a friend of Shaw's a few years back.

“Here's what I'm gonna do,” Eddie said. “The few weeks you've been operating are on the house. But we gotta work out some terms with your old man.”

“Why?” Wade said. “Why should we give you money?”

Eddie rolled back in his chair and looked around at the crew, a giant toothy grin covering half of his face.

“I like this kid,” he said. “He's smart. My old teacher, Miss DeWitt, always said there's no such thing as a stupid question.”

Eddie opened the top drawer of his desk. Wade Shaw reached inside of his jacket, down near his belt. Ricky and Dan the Man pulled out their pieces and aimed at the kid. I had my hand on the butt of my Beretta. The room was so quiet you could hear the rattling of the heater, and the pulsing song of a distant car alarm.

“Easy,” Eddie said. He slowly brought out a small wooden box, set it on the desk, and flipped it open. “Care for a cigar?” He held up a short perfecto with a red and gold band.

“Why not,” Wade said.

We all knew that Eddie was just going for his cigar box, but a scene like that is good for business. You have to do something big just to get all of that fear right out in the open. Guns had been drawn. The air was hot with dark possibilities.

By the time the sit-down was over, Eddie and the kid were downright chummy. Wade even placed a phone call to his old man in Sturgis and put Eddie on the line. From the laughter and quips, you'd've thought that Eddie Sesto and Griffin Shaw were old army buddies.

About a week later, Griffin Shaw flew into town, looking the way hillbillies do when they play dress up. They never quite get it right. He wore a bolo tie with a white dress shirt and black slacks. The shirt had a yellow tinge from sweat-stains that would never wash out, and the slacks were about two sizes too big. The guy was a bean pole. His face was rougher than 50 grade sandpaper and his beard was thin and gray. He was almost bald, but that didn't stop him from having a ponytail.

But Griffin Shaw was eloquent in a twangy sort of way. It was a case where the outside of a man doesn't match what's inside, and I've found that that happens quite a bit in life. Every time I thought I knew a person just from looking them up and down, I discovered how wrong I was once I'd sat through a cup of coffee with them.