B009XDDVN8 EBOK (12 page)

“Who?”

“Harry.”

“Your boating friend? Why?”

“He’s having trouble with a loan.”

“Why tonight?”

“He’s desperate.”

“And he thinks you can help?”

“He’s grasping at straws.”

“He’s not the only one,” she said.

An instant before, the atmosphere in our kitchen had crackled with opportunity. Now it was suffused with our usual brew of bitterness and suspicion. Caitlin had opened herself to me and I had kicked the opening back into her face so that, as far as she knew, I could get drunk with Harry. And there it went, my last chance to win back my wife, gone, another sacrifice upon the altar of what I had done with my two best friends twenty-five years before.

I
T WAS
A
UGIE’S
idea to break into the Grubbins house, a matter of fairness, he said. Augie, our bent wheeler-dealer, talking about fairness was like…well, yeah, exactly. And the whole thing was a harebrained scheme from the start. I mean, of all the houses in Pitchford to break into, only a drug-addled fool would pick the Grubbins house, which explains how Augie came up with the idea.

We were seventeen, still hanging out together, bonded like brothers, a crew of our own, the immortal three. We had found a place for ourselves in the woods behind the small playground at the end of Henrietta Road, within the ruins of an ancient stone structure where stood a single twisted cherry tree, old and barely hanging on to life, the same tree, in fact, beneath which I had buried my dog Rex. When we wanted to get away from everything it was to those woods that we went, where we could lounge and dream, drink beer, write our names in paint on the stones of the ruin, plot, and, most of all, pursue our newest hobby. Almost every night now we got wasted, we got trashed, we got bombed or hammered or Kentucky fried, we got petrified, paralyzed, ripped up, shitfaced, torn down, wiped out, tweaked or toasted, starched or steamed, twisted or bagged, laid out, stretched out, killed, absolutely murdered.

Good times.

We smoked dope like it mattered, but we each of us reefed for our own special reasons. Augie had decided early on to live his life on the other side of whatever line he saw painted on the earth, and drugs were the quickest route there. Ben, who had become an all-county offensive tackle, smoked to take the edge off the pain in his knee and the pressure he was feeling to rise into a superman pro. As for me, hell, from the time my mom had first driven me into Pitchford, like one drives a stake into the dirt, I had been looking for an escape. But I always thought the language was just as seductive as the high. If we were getting “poodled,” it wouldn’t have felt half so fine. For what seventeen-year-old doesn’t want to get wasted, whether with drugs or alcohol, sex or a skateboard, or just by vegging in front of the television? All teenagers are nihilists in their hearts—it’s why you can never get them awake in the morning.

And here was the funny thing about our part in the national pastime of rampant drug abuse: our supplier was none other than my own sworn enemy, Tony Grubbins himself.

Things had changed at the Grubbins house over the years. It was still curtained up and locked down, but it was no longer dark and quiet. People were going in and out at all hours of the night; packs of motorcycles were parked along the curb, accompanied by corresponding packs of motorcyclists with their scruffy beards and denim vests, replete with a fierce skeleton ram’s head on the back. When they came, they came en masse, hoisting coolers of beer and bottles of liquor, keeping the neighbors up late into the night with their backyard revels. And Derek, with his hard eyes and huge biceps, was no longer working regular shifts at a construction site; instead he came and went with no discernible pattern. But he was doing okay, whatever he was up to, even more than okay, if the gleaming Corvette now parked in his driveway meant anything at all.

And then suddenly Tony Grubbins, a senior while we still were juniors, started making like a mini-mart, selling everything
a good little head could ever want: weed, ’ludes, uppers, downers, coke if you could afford it, acid if you had the guts for it. His pilot fish, Richie Diffendale, tall now, and surprisingly good looking even with the same round glasses, made his way through the halls of Pitchford High in a long black leather jacket that hung off his bony shoulders as if from a hanger, taking requests, keeping the ledger, filling the bags and filling orders, and slipping free samples to the prettiest girls, all while Tony supplied the drugs and collected the debts.

“We’ve been ripped off, boys,” said Augie one night by our cherry tree as he picked through a bag of weed he had just bought from Tony.

“Pipe down and roll,” said Ben. The years had stripped Ben of his stutter, but his slurry voice was still soft as a whisper.

“No, man. Look at this crap, all stems and seeds, the bottom of his stash. I’m telling you, he kicks us in the face on quality every time.”

“So find a new seller,” I said.

“Who? Tony’s chased out every other dealer at the school, including me. Before I bought this shit, I gently asked him if he could maybe make sure the quality was better than the last batch of crap he sold us.”

“He took your complaining well, I’m sure,” said Ben.

“Let’s just say it was nothing I could repeat in polite company.”

“When are you ever in polite company?”

“And, come to think of it, J.J., in the middle of his diatribe, your name came up.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. If we weren’t saddled with your sorry ass, bub, we’d be getting his prime stuff.”

“So you’re the one killing my buzz, J.J.,” said Ben, laughing. “Maybe I should be hanging out with the marching band. They always get killer weed.”

“I’m telling you guys,” said Augie, “Tony’s been dicking us for years. But I happen to know where he’s got some sweet Mexican buds stashed away. Richie was bragging about a shipment that came in, saying he saw a bag as big as a basketball in Tony’s closet.”

“Diffendale’s a dick,” I said.

“True, but that doesn’t mean he’s lying. And it’s just sitting there while Tony sells his trash to us at a premium. Jesus, there’s more dust here than beneath my bed.”

“Quit the whining and spark it up, Sparky,” said Ben. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“I think we should go in and get it,” said Augie.

“Get what?”

“His good stuff.”

“Don’t be wacked,” said Ben.

“He owes us,” said Augie. “We’ll be in and out before anyone knows anything happened, and we’ll only take what we’re owed. With all he’s got, Tony will never miss it, and even if he does he won’t know who did it.”

“He’ll know,” said Ben.

“But he won’t be able to prove it.”

“He doesn’t need to prove it. If his brother even thinks we broke into his house, our asses are not our own anymore. We’re not talking a little beating here, Augie, we’re talking death. Not metaphorical death, real death. Fork-in-the-throat death. Devil-Rams-pounding-our-heads-into-the-cement-stoop death. No way in hell is J.J. or me going in there.”

“You two can stay outside and be lookouts.”

“You’re an idiot,” said Ben.

“How long have you been going through menopause?”

“Haven’t we learned by now not to mess with the Grubbinses? How’s your dog doing, J.J?”

“Still dead,” I said.

“Leave it alone, Augie,” said Ben. “A couple of stems is not worth getting killed over.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. Only a total loser idiot would think of breaking into the Grubbins house.”

“What do you say, J.J.?” said Augie.

“I’m in,” I said, as quick as that.

We waited like astrologists for the stars to align, when suddenly they did. Derek roared off from the house with three other Devil Rams, their saddlebags full and their sleeping bags cinched behind their seats. They were headed for a jamboree in Virginia, we heard, or maybe North Carolina, but someplace south and far away. And then a day later Tony went off with his girlfriend, Denise, and his factotum, Richie Diffendale, to a party in Hatboro that was supposed to last all night. A half hour after Tony’s car left the house, enough time to be sure he hadn’t forgotten his bong, and after a quick inhale of courage, Augie and I slithered through a loose window and landed in the pitch black of the Grubbins kitchen.

“We’re in,” I said into my walkie-talkie, one of three I had received from my mother for my fourteenth birthday and that, surprisingly, still worked. “Over.”

“Over what?”
said Ben through a cloud of static. Ben had wanted nothing to do with the whole enterprise and agreed to be our lookout only after Augie convinced him that if we got caught he’d be blamed for it anyway.

“Just
over
, Mr. B.—it’s what you say.”

“No names, remember? Jesus Christ. Just get it done and get the hell out of there.”

“Over?”

“What?”

“You have to say it at the end. Over.”

“You’re making my head hurt.”

“Say it.”

“Go to hell.”

“Say it. You know you want to.”

“All right, if it will shut you up. Over.”

“Roger that,” I said. “Over.”

“While you two bicker,” said Augie, clicking on his flashlight, “I’m going upstairs and getting our stuff.”

I didn’t follow Augie to Tony’s hidden bedroom stash of prime Mexican weed. Instead I took the opportunity to pop on my own flashlight and look around. This was why I had so quickly agreed to Augie’s addled plan. It wasn’t about the drugs, though that was a nice side benefit, and it wasn’t about notions of fairness, though fair is fair, and it wasn’t just about the thrill of an illegal lark with walkie-talkies, though the lark was indeed thrilling. For the last seven years, Tony Grubbins had lived across Henrietta Road from me, his house daily in my vision, and yet in all that time I had never once stepped through the door into that strange and dark place. This was my chance to scope out the lair of my enemy, the kid who had killed my dog. Tony Grubbins was my Joker, my Red Skull, my Kingpin, my Dr. Doom. What self-respecting comic-book hero wouldn’t have taken that chance?

“What do you see?”
said Ben over the walkie-talkie.

“Some expired milk, a pack of hot dogs, a couple beers, orange juice, something brown. Over.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just checking things out. Over.”

“Hurry the hell up, I’m having a heart attack out here.”

“Roger Wilko,” I said, closing the refrigerator door.

With my flashlight I wandered about, taking in the kitchen and living room. All the houses on Henrietta Road were structurally the same, so there was no mystery in the architecture, but each of these identical houses felt palpably different inside. Some felt happily messy, some felt bereft, some felt old, imbued with the smell of cooked cabbage, some felt sickly and wrong,
one even felt rich for a time (and yes, there is a feel to rich that I still remembered from my youth) before the owners expectedly up and moved away to a place far better than Pitchford.

What the Grubbins house felt like, as I scanned the rooms with the beam of my flashlight, was charmless and dead, more like a storage locker than a house. There were no pictures on the scuffed and battered walls, no pictures on the beat old coffee table; the area in front of the curtained picture window was bare except for a television, set upon a cart and facing the couch. The place had the personality of a toad. It was all enough to almost make me feel sorry for Tony Grubbins—almost.

“There’s a car coming, wait,”
said Ben.

I flicked off my flashlight and stooped down stupidly.

“Okay, it went past. Over.”

“Over where?” I said.

“Shut up.”

“
It’s not where it’s supposed to be
,” said Augie.

“Get out, then.”

“
Just keep watching the street
,” said Augie.
“I’ll find the damn thing.”

I took the moment to slip down to the lower level, which in most of our houses contained a small laundry room with two doors, one leading to the backyard and the other leading to the garage. But the Grubbinses, like some of the other homeowners on Henrietta Road, had converted the garage into another room by bricking up the wide opening where the rolling garage door had been, knocking out the wall between the garage and the laundry room, and putting drywall up against the cinder-block walls. I had wondered for a long time what was behind that bricked-up garage door, and now I knew.