“Did you just call it going steady?”
“Or whatever it’s called. Are we a thing?”
“That depends what kind of thing you have in mind.”
“You know,” I said, and she shook her head.
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
“A together thing.”
“You mean marriage?” she said, and I blushed so hard that even if I’d turned around, the hair on the back of my head probably would have been red. “I’m just messing with you,” she said. “I’m never going to get married.”
“Why?”
“Because my parents got married, and look at them. My dad’s gone, and I don’t talk to my mom.”
“Why?”
She reached into the cooler for another beer but took out a piece of ice instead and threw it at me. “What are you, Barbara Walters? Because when it was time for me to go to college, there wasn’t any money left. That’s why.”
“Times get tight,” I said, and she shook her head.
“It wasn’t like that.”
This was an unheard-of idea, this not talking to someone. In my world, you stuck with people. You sat in the same room, watching the same TV show, and never spoke a word—not talking still counted as talking. But this was something different. “Does she live in town? Does she try to talk to you?”
“She tries.”
“And what do you do?”
Now she threw a bottle cap at me. “You know what I like? Things. Do you like things?”
Sometimes you can feel something happening. You can even see it, I’ve learned, like a thread of spider silk hanging between you, and if you lean forward, and if she leans forward, the thread grows into a window that you can duck into. Other times, someone just barrels you over. I said, “That depends. What kind of things?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe we should find out.” She got up, went to the back door, and turned around. “You coming?”
She asked me, of course, what I did for a living, and I told her about delivering pizzas and newspapers, going door-to-door with vacuum cleaners. “I guess you could say I’m into sales.”
“A real go-getter,” she said, and I smiled.
“I’m actually picking up a fourth job. Seasonal work at an elevator.”
“You saving up for something?” she asked. “Like, maybe, a ring?”
“Or baseball cards,” I said. “You never know.”
She leaned over, nibbled on my ear, and whispered, “I bet a baseball card can’t do this.”
The elevator job started with unloading grain trucks, but grain wasn’t the point, not to me. The elevator was in one of the small towns out in the country, the kind with a closed grocery store, closed post office, and closed school. The only business left was the elevator, and for six months out of the year there was just one guy working, the foreman. During harvest, he hired another guy to help and kept him on through the first part of winter, when farmers applied anhydrous ammonia to their fields.
Anhydrous is a liquefied gas that, when released from the tank, immediately bonds to the first water it can find: in the ground, ideally, or, less ideally, in your eyes or lungs. It comes in big white tanks that slosh around when you’re pulling them and come to a stop. The foreman showed me how to connect the tanks to the blue applicators that we rented out, like plows with hoses that injected the ammonia into the ground as fertilizer. He said farmers sometimes sent their kids to pick up the tanks, and the kids could barely walk and chew gum, so you had to make sure they didn’t get themselves killed in case their dads told them to hook the tanks up to the applicator. “If you value your life, you won’t mess around with this stuff.” He went through the whole process again. “You think you got it?”
“Don’t get myself killed,” I said, and he clapped me on the back.
“Good boy.”
The tank yard wasn’t next to the elevator but instead miles away, in a square of dirt carved out of a field, with a temporary chain-link fence set up around it and a little tin shed with a stack of forms I was supposed to check off for every trade, empty for full. I’d sit in the shed until the farmers showed up, and when they did arrive, just before dawn, there’d soon be a line of them, pickups idling and me doing the work of an automated machine: bending over, pulling the pin, dropping the tongue, walking to a full tank, lifting the tongue, dropping the pin, stepping back, waving. At the end of the day, I’d lock up. The first day, the foreman came by to make sure I’d done it right. He shook the gate and then reached up and grabbed the points where the wire was tied off around the top bar. He had to stand on his toes to do it. When he was done, he looked sad and beat down.
“How much you want to bet we come out tomorrow morning, there’ll be part of somebody’s pants caught up here.” He looked at me. “Meth. They steal the gas and put it in those little propane tanks that are on your grill.”
I asked what I should do if I noticed something like this happening.
“Oh, you won’t,” he said. “See it, I mean. Maybe you’ll smell the ammonia if they don’t close the valve all the way, and if that’s the case, keep away. And if you see a body on the ground, definitely stay back. I don’t want to have to call the morgue for you too.”
“What a bunch of idiots.”
“Oh,” he said, “you’d be surprised. Some of them you probably know.”
The sun was setting as we drove away, and when he turned down his road, I went another mile before turning around and driving to the culvert where I’d stashed the half-dozen propane tanks that Rob and I used. I took them to the yard, filled them, and drove through the dark to Rob’s house, where he was waiting to cook.
In the evenings, when I got off work and before I went over to Rob’s, I’d meet up with Marissa, and we’d walk. She knew all the neighborhood kids and dogs from the loops she’d made on her own, in the time before she met me. Dogs would run up, wagging their tails, sniffing her hand, which she’d let them do once and just once. Then it was my job to scratch their ears so they’d leave her alone and not get her hands smelly. All of her clothes looked like somebody’s thoughtful mother had ironed them. She filed paperwork at the hospital, which meant she had to look professional. It also meant she knew private things about people I knew. I’d say, to make her laugh, “Tell me something I won’t believe.”
“Like what?”
“Like, who’s got an STD?”
“Everyone. You should never have sex.”
“You sound like my mom,” I said.
“She’s one of them that I’m talking about.”
One night I asked if the hospital ever saw meth addicts. Maybe cooks who’d gotten themselves hurt?
“Hurt how? You mean burned up? I’ve heard of that, but not here.”
“Or blinded.”
“Blinded! What do they do, shove it in their eyes?”
“It’s just something I heard once.”
“I think you’re keeping the wrong kind of company.”
“The life of sales,” I said. “There’s people out there you’ll never set eyes on unless you’re in line for the Tilt-a-Whirl at a carnival. Try selling them a vacuum cleaner, and they have to go get a dictionary to look up what you’re talking about.”
“They have dictionaries?”
“Self-preservation,” I said. “Otherwise they’d just grunt at each other.”
“Must be scintillating conversation.”
I said, “Oh, there are other ways to be—what’d you call it? Scintillating. Besides conversation.”
Rob and I had gotten into the meth business together when we were seventeen. For a long time he’d lived with his grandmother, a brittle old woman who threw saltines at you when you walked in front of her soaps. When she died, Rob stayed in the house and nobody thought much of it. In those days, a sixteen-year-old could be his own guardian, and so he dropped out of school and spent the day dreaming up bad ideas.
I was still in school, a B to C student but vice pres
ident of the business club, which was where I picked up the lingo. I’d go up to kids between classes, shake their hands, and say, “I’d like to discuss an opportunity with you.” Or, “Have you considered investment plans for your hard-earned cash?” The language caught on—there’s no thrill like euphemisms that teachers don’t understand: mission creep and hostile takeover. We’d do the deals after school, in somebody’s house, and eventually I expanded the market. I’d go out, find the worst houses, and knock on the door, unlock my briefcase, pull out a small amount of crystal, and say, “Try this.” Because we had a surplus, we didn’t need to cut it. “If this is detergent,” they’d say, “you know I’m going to kill you, right?” Then they’d snort it, and their eyes would roll back.
“Exactly,” I’d say. “Now, I’d like to discuss an opportunity with you.”
Afterward, Rob and I would throw our money in the air and hump the furniture and walls. That last part was his thing, his trademark. He came up with it before he dropped out, and he stuck with it for a couple of years, humping the lab and the propane tanks full of stolen anhydrous and the Maxwell House can where he kept his money. Sometimes he’d hump me, and I’d have to push him off. “Rob, you know they put dogs down for that.” He’d laugh and laugh. He was a funny guy. He didn’t take showers a lot, didn’t eat regular meals, didn’t wear shoes. He picked at the dead skin on his heel while the lab bubbled away. He didn’t go out in the world, and so seeing him was like seeing a fox. You stopped what you were doing and watched until he was gone. I’d be delivering meth and guys would ask, “Who cooks this stuff, you or that filthy partner of yours?” and I’d say, “Oh, look, it’s the world’s first fussy addict.” I knew they’d fork over the cash. Even if I’d said that the stuff they were snorting had little bits of dead skin mixed in, they’d have paid me and begged me to come back with more.
Between deliveries, I’d stop by Marissa’s house. We’d fool around, watch some TV, eat something, and then I’d have to go.
“Why? What could you possibly have to do right now?”
“Those newspapers won’t roll themselves.”
It was like going off to war, an act, sure, but too dramatic for my taste. She’d grab a wad of my shirt, and I’d have to pull her along with me to the door, smiling and being serious about it at the same time. It was hard not to think about Rob, alone on his couch in his underwear, thumbing sack. Once Marissa kept giving me crap even after I’d got out the door, and so I said, “You know what? After I leave, call your mom. It’s not okay to give up on people.” She slammed the door, but I was already down the sidewalk, figuring this was one of those moments that tell you something. We’d make up, or we wouldn’t, and that’d be the end of it. Either way, I told myself I was fine with what I’d done.
After six months with Marissa, I drove to Topeka, to the mall where the white people used to go, and bought a ring outright, with cash. I thought the clerk might give me some flak, but I guess he was used to such things. I carried the ring everywhere, all of the time. When I was making deals, I’d think about it, tucked away in my left pants pocket, and when the door closed and I was walking back to the car I used for deliveries, I’d reach in to make sure it was still there. Sometimes it felt like a ticking clock: I’d have to introduce Marissa to my parents, and both of us would have to answer their questions. What were we going to do with our lives? What are you going to be? I’d answered them plenty of times on my own, and it wasn’t a big deal: “I’m going to be an astronaut. Or a baseball player, not sure which.”
“You deliver pizzas,” my dad would say, and my mom would chime in. “You’re too smart for this. You need a career. You’ve got to pick one. What are your skills?”
“Talking,” I’d say.
“There you go. You should go into sales.”
But that was beyond what my dad could abide. He’d slap his head and say, “Jesus, anything but that.”
“Why?” she’d ask. “Someone has to do it.”
While they debated the merits of sales, I fingered the ring in my pocket and thought about drugs. They were like cars—you tried to find that fine line, the moment where the trouble they’d give you was mostly in the future and not in the past. You never wanted to hang on too long. You didn’t want to spend more on them than they were worth. I had about thirty thousand dollars saved up in cash that I’d stuffed in a sun-tea jar and rolled under the front porch of the house I was renting. This was a sizable amount. I could make more, but how much more? For all our business acumen, Rob and I hadn’t figured out a better system for what to do with the profits. He kept his money buried somewhere in his backyard. We’d talk about what to do with it: buy cars, buy houses, leave the country and never come back.
“I’d have to come back,” Rob said. “Can you imagine me in England, in some castle?”
“I don’t think all the Brits live in castles.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Or,” I said, waving generally at the travesty of an abode where we found ourselves. “You could do something about this.”
“Do what?” he asked, and for a moment I thought he was joking. The roof leaked in the bathroom. Half the windows had long cracks running diagonally across the panes. One in the bedroom was broken out entirely, and Rob had covered it in tinfoil, just like all the windows in the kitchen, where he cooked. He squinted at me and stuck his hands in his underwear. He kept squinting and rubbed his balls.
“Fix up the house. Upgrade from shithole to hovel.”
“Why would I do that?”
Some things you just can’t explain. I gave up. “No reason,” I said.
Unlike me, he used our product. I’d told him it was unprofessional, and he said, “You never eat Pizza Hut?” Of course I did. “Well, there.” He’d gotten thin and edgy, had picked up a gun somewhere. He wanted me to get one too, and he was right. A drug dealer needs a gun like a car owner needs a mechanic. But whenever I held the pistol, it felt heavy and potent, as if it had already made its mind up to go off. I worried about shooting myself in the foot. So when customers called on the phone, I made it clear that I was like the cashier at a convenience store. I didn’t carry much cash or product. And in case that didn’t work and they robbed me anyway, I made it clear that Rob was the heavy. “He’ll crack your eyeballs on your forehead like they’re eggs,” I said. Mostly I hoped that everyone would play nice.
“They won’t play nice,” Rob said over and over again. “And I won’t dig out their eyes. I’ll just shoot them.”
“What difference does it make?” I asked. “The point is that we don’t want to shoot anybody.”
This was when he got pissed. “It’s got nothing to do with wanting,” he said. “You do what you have to do.”
It was a pretty fundamental disagreement, and it wasn’t going to get solved in one argument or probably ever. But he put up with me—the latitude you give a friend. The truth was, he was just biding his time until the inevitable happened and I quit.
Sometimes I’d call in sick, and Rob would say, “Drug dealers don’t get sick.”
“Lovesick,” I’d say, and then I’d spend the evening with Marissa, talking and dreaming and naked.
One morning I woke up to find her showered, dressed, and curling her hair in the mirror. “Big plans?” It was Sunday. She was going to church.
“Why?” I asked, but this wasn’t an argument she wanted to have. For some reason, I did. “Is this something your mom got you into? Is she going to be there?”
She didn’t take the bait. “You can come if you want.” Then she left, and I realized that it really didn’t matter to her if I came or not. So I ran home and got dressed. The choir was singing when I walked in. The whole church got a good look at me stopping beside each row, looking for Marissa. Afterward people I knew by name only, bankers and doctors and other important Methodists, came up to us and said hello. The women smiled, and the men put their arms around Marissa. “Been awhile. We were worried about you,” t
hey said, staking their claim to her. They were her community. She was on her own in life, trying to make great things on a small inheritance, and they weren’t going to let anyone get in her way. “And who is this?”
“Oh,” she said, “just somebody I met.”
“Do you think we’ll be seeing him here again?”
She shrugged and bumped her shoulder into mine. “You never know.”
That was on Sunday. On Monday I went back to work. Rob was pissed. “You know how much money we lost last night? You know we just drove good customers into the arms of the competition?”
I said, “God didn’t mean for us to work every hour of every day. You’ve got to enjoy life.”
Rob said, “You don’t know shit about what God wants.”
I made a plan. When there was thirty-five thousand dollars in the jar, I’d quit. It’d be the start of summer, a good time for new beginnings. I wanted the change to be neat and tidy. So I started hanging out with Rob more. He’d go for a day without eating, and I’d say, “Don’t get up. Let me get the groceries. Let me get toilet paper. Really. It’s no big deal.” In a way it was the right move, because if anyone had seen him, they might have asked around: Is he okay? Is he sick? He looked like a corpse. He was meth-ly ill. His eyeballs were starting to stick out. When he looked at you, it was like he could see all the way around his body. He knew things, those eyes said. Can’t sneak anything past us.
“This lady friend of yours,” he said once, “when you going to bring her around here? If there’s going to be a wedding, shouldn’t I meet her first?”
I reached for the ring in my pocket but stopped myself. He was sprawled out on the couch, no shirt, no pants, in just his stained white underwear, the leg holes so stretched out that his balls fell through.
“I know you’re going to ask her,” he said. “It’s not a secret. You got that puppy-dog look all the time. You’re even going to church with her.” He winked at me. “What? People talk. It’s a wonder they don’t walk up and pat your little puppy head, scratch your ears. C’mon, bring her around.”