Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail (5 page)

I stare at the pictures until the light through the window turns gray, go outside and drive the streets in a beat-up Buick I purchased with part of my inheritance. Tonight, the air is hot, a simmer that dries from inside out, and the asphalt, slick from a spring shower, glistens like a black mirror. I breathe exhaust fumes and watch the shadows. Heroin, crack, meth, coke, weed, acid, it's all there.

Both sides of the street, buildings jut into the sky, and signs high on concrete walls jerk on and off. Under branched street lights, women in jacked-up skirts strut the sidewalk. If a john barters with a whore in bad shape, blow jobs start at ten dollars. Barter with a whore in worse than bad shape, and five will do. I drive past a Salvation Army, past a tavern with an open door, past a massage parlor with iron bars on the windows.

A girl in a silver miniskirt waves me over. She has long legs, and she's stoop-shouldered, tall, a young woman embarrassed of her height. I pull to the curb and roll the passenger window all the way down. She leans inside, dreadlocks framing a narrow face, and a boob slips from its fold. She smells of sweat and smoke, and I wonder when she last took a bath.

“Taz, honey, you know Roxie would kill me for messing with you,” Laketa says, and stuffs her boob behind her halter top. “She's down on Thirtieth Avenue. You know the house where TT Charlie hangs? He's got some good dope.”

I remember something I saw under the passenger seat when I was vacuuming the floorboards, dig out a plastic raincoat, and stick it through the window.

“Look, Laketa, you stay dry, you hear. You sleep someplace warm tonight.”

She shrugs into the raincoat, a grateful look on her face.
“Roxie ever turns you loose you come see me. I'll take care a you like you never seen.”

I merge the Buick with the flow of traffic, tuck behind a minivan. Rain pelts the windshield, and taillights reflect off the street in long liquid lines. The humidity makes me wish for air conditioning, but that's too much to ask with this crap car. It has one amenity, a radio that gets elevator music—only elevator music. I dribble my fingers on the dash and nod my head to a sleepy piano solo. Call it destiny, fate, whatever, but I knew I was headed for the gutter the summer I left my father at the dog pound, hitched east, and got a job at a zinc extraction facility in southern Georgia. Third shift was quiet, the nights lit with stars, and I spent my time hiding from this greasy operator who constantly chased me down. He was bucking for a promotion. Moving up in the world, he said.

On the Thursday before my first payday, an hour into the shift, I was easing across the concrete pad when I stepped into a drainage ditch. Hydrochloric acid soaked through my pant leg and filled my boot. I giggled at the absurdity, one foot in the gutter, one foot out. I had a choice and knew it. I could pull the foot out, or step in with the other one. I sensed this was important, that the choice I made forecast my future. The operator whined for me to stop acting like an idiot and get out of there pronto. I looked at him, big-ass grin on my face, and stepped in with the other foot. He yanked me to the pad and hosed me off. I wasn't in long enough to bubble skin, but he said the acid would have eaten me to the bone.

That's what the gutter does to a guy, eats him to the bone.

*   *   *

Roxie is the kind who gets inside a guy's head, the kind who hits hard. We met in a bar on the south side a year after I moved to Atlanta. We danced to Meatloaf, and she asked if I wanted to party. She was too skinny for my tastes, but when I slipped her sleeve up her arm and saw the track marks, I knew she wouldn't mind me huffing paint now and then. We drove to an overpass that petered out on the other side, like the state ran out of money or a rich politician changed his mind, and right there, in drizzling rain, we screwed on the hood of her mother's Honda Civic. After that, we were inseparable, and I quickly traded my high for hers. Seemed like the natural thing to do at the time.

She's white trash, I suppose, although I think there's more to her. Sometimes, when I least expect it, she works an obscure word into the conversation. Like
titular
. She used that one time when she was off on a rant about the president. She's told me so many stories about herself I don't know which to believe. One day her father's a Methodist preacher who stuck his finger where it didn't belong, and the next he's CEO of Minute Maid. Supposedly there's a sister in Miami, or Houston, or New York, maybe Memphis. Like I said, the story changes day to day. Roxie's a habitual liar, but I don't care. What we had, what's between us now, is real as it gets.

*   *   *

I park in a rutted drive, weeds knee-high in the yard, get out, and walk to the back of the house. A woman steps through the door and merges with the darkness. A stumble, a curse, and she's gone. Inside, I pick my way down the cluttered hall, while breathing in a urine stench so strong it waters my eyes. In one of the bedrooms, a black man on a mattress, muscular legs expanding and
contracting, humps a white girl, or maybe a white boy. I can't tell from this angle. I move on, down the hallway, to the kitchen. Crusted dishes clutter the sink, the counters, the refrigerator. A Mexican lies motionless on the floor.

A moan in the living room, and when I turn the corner, Roxie's naked on her knees in front of a guy on the couch. The guy's name is TT Charlie, and he's zipping his pants. I study her face, so familiar—the mole under her ear, the sliver of a scar on her cheek, the fine black hairs above her lip. Her eyes are my favorite part. They are a green paradox—innocently hard—eyes with staying power.

TT Charlie nods in my direction, then says, “I got me some bad-assed Peruvian Pink Lady if you're interested. Ain't cheap. Sixty a quarter.”

“I'm all right.” I watch a hooker I don't know stumble into the room and sit in the recliner in the corner. She hikes her dress to her waist and spreads her legs wide as a wishbone. Her panties are yellowed in the crotch, and curly black hair, tight as a wire brush, grows on the inside of her thighs.

“White boy,” she says to me. “Blow job'll cost you ten, poontang's twenty-five.”

TT Charlie pushes Roxie away and hands her a quarter-gram. She pulls on hip-huggers and a red blouse, comes over and gives me a hug.

“I need to talk to you,” I say. “About something important.”

The woman in the recliner says, “You watch out, girl, that white boy's vice through and through. You watch out or he be running you up town. I seen his kind coming and going. He put you in jail and now where you gonna be?”

“Shut up, Fayesha,” TT Charlie says. “Taz ain't no vice. That's his old lady.”

“All I'm saying,” Fayesha spits, “is she should watch her ass. I seen his kind. He don't want no poontang, he don't want no dope, there's something wrong. That's all I'm saying.”

“That Mexican out on the kitchen floor might be dead,” I say.

“We got us a real genius here,” TT Charlie says. “A real community-college whiz. That watermelon picker's been dead since morning. We ain't got around to it yet.”

“It'll cost you,” Roxie says. “Me and Taz'll dump him for an eight-ball.”

“Ditch his petrified ass away from here,” TT Charlie says, “and you got a deal.”

*   *   *

I drag the Mexican out of the backseat and roll him into an alley that backs up to a shopping mall. Roxie fires her lighter, and the Mexican's eyes shine like white buttons. I cover his face with a soggy newspaper and look away. The southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, less than a hundred miles to the north, feels like it is so far off it might as well be in another galaxy. I want to blame Roxie, the hold she has on me, but know I am at fault too. This life—filled with dead addicts, prostitute girlfriends, the intense desire for a fix—is a weakness I've never overcome.

“He might have some dope,” I say. “Feel down around his balls, unzip and feel down there, and see if he has some dope.”

“I'm not feeling up no dead man.”

“Feel down there and see if he has some dope. He must've died from something. Poor bastard probably overdosed.”

“TT Charlie checked him over pretty good. He didn't have no dope and he didn't have no money, no ID, nothing but one of those Spanish phone calling cards. Fayesha says his name was
Julio and he was a wetback that worked down at Pizzaria. She said he hadn't eaten in two weeks, probably starved himself to death or his heart stopped or something.”

To the south, lightning, like a radioactive vein, branches across black sky.

“I got something in the trunk, a surprise,” I say.

“If I'd known he hadn't eaten in two weeks I would have brought him a sandwich, or something. Maybe an egg roll. Huh, Julio? You think you might have liked an egg roll?”

“I have this plan, to get out of here, go somewhere we can't get any dope. It's impossible to get dope where I want to go.”

Roxie unzips Julio's pants, feels under his testicles, and comes up empty. “The things I do for you.”

I open the trunk.

“See, I went to an outfitter and bought a backpack and a sleeping bag and a stove and hiking clothes, and look here, a book about a crippled guy who hiked the Appalachian Trail. I must have read this fifty times when I was in prison. If a guy with a bad leg could do it, it'd be a piece of cake for you and me.”

She holds the book to the trunk light. “You nuts? I told you I ain't walking no Appalachian Trail.”

“I'm talking about walking out of here up to Maine and I'll get a job as a cook and maybe we'll wind up near the beach and I'll fish for lobsters. You can't get dope on the trail, that's what I'm saying. There's no dealer setting up in the mountains. You can't get dope out there. It's a dope-free zone.”

“You ain't no cook.”

“I can learn,” I say. “It can't be that hard.”

“You can't even cook eggs.”

I can cook eggs, but I don't want to argue the point.

Roxie gets in the passenger seat, and I wait outside while she shoots up. Then I head to 7-Eleven and buy donuts, broiled sausages, and a jumbo package of potato chips. Roxie's quiet when she's high—like she has too many thoughts to sort through—but I don't mind. It wouldn't kill her to offer me some of that eight-ball, she'd still have plenty left for the early-morning hours. My hands clench the steering wheel. Whenever a craving creeps through my body, I think about the trail. I don't know if I'll like walking through the mountains or if I'll like sleeping on the ground, but I can walk into any town in the lower forty-eight and buy coke within the hour. Can't do that in the mountains, and that's what I'm saying. There is no gutter on the Appalachian Trail.

*   *   *

The Buick's headlights sweep across earth brown as coffee stains, and the trailer, caught in the gleam, shines like an aluminum coffin. I park in the driveway, and Roxie and I get out and walk to the door. A barbecue smell lingers in the air, and I'm reminded of the food we purchased at 7-Eleven. That's another thing that's different since I quit shooting coke. Once I got clean in prison I started thinking about food all the time. Especially chocolate. There's nothing like an oversized chunk of chocolate melting in my mouth. I swear it makes me hard. I'm cut out for food. That's why cooking up in Maine's a good idea. I can make it as a cook. I bet I have recipes I never thought of.

“You coming in or what?” Roxie says.

The door thumps the siding, and windows vibrate. I lug the backpack inside, set it on the floor. The trailer is single-wide and has a kitchen and combination living-dining room. There are a few
pictures on the walls, an ashtray on a chipped end table, a red couch that faded to orange a long time ago. I glance at the refrigerator and can't help but smile at a picture of a Greek ruin. Roxie dreams about traveling abroad, and she clips
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
articles about exotic cities. She has plans to work for a travel agency that sends employees around the world, says she knows so much about these cities that she will make an excellent guide. I'm glad to see she's still dreaming and turn her way.

“Help me with this, will you?” Roxie melts coke on a spoon, cinches a shoestring around her bicep, and grips the string in her teeth. She's been pumping these veins for ten years, and purple splotches mottle the inside of her elbow like chicken pox. I press the needle through her skin and find a vein on the first try. Her teeth unclench, the string releases its grip, and her eyes roll back.

“This is some good dope,” she says. “Hits like a train.”

I open the backpack and hold up a miniature radio I bought especially for Roxie because she likes her music.

“See,” I say. “This thing runs on AA batteries and we can share it at night. You can listen to your country and I can listen to jazz.”

Roxie rolls up my sleeve. She's offering to get me high, and I might as well admit it, the coke in that Baggie is killing me. I want it so bad my heart's clenched hard as a baseball. The doorknob down the hall turns clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise. Click . . . Click . . . Click . . . Click . . . A circular metronome.

“Damn!” Roxie says. “When she went out, she must have locked Odell in the bedroom.”

“What the fuck?”

I have no idea who is down there, so I ease my way toward the
kitchen and rummage through a drawer for a knife. Roxie tells me to relax, that a girl she met over on Fifth Street is staying for a few days. The boy is only four, and he's probably hungry.

“His grandmother is picking him up in the morning,” Roxie says. “Brittany only has him every other weekend.”

“Where the hell is Brittany?”

Roxie shrugs, and I know my answer without prying. Roxie's roommate is a hooker out making money for her high. I jog down the hall, open the door to the rear bedroom. There's bottled water on a dresser, and in the corner a bucket for a toilet. The room smells like a gas station bathroom. Odell darts past my leg, and I follow him to the table. Wrappers fly. He stuffs a wrinkled sausage in his mouth. The kid's got shaggy brown hair, a rock star look, and squinty blue eyes. He wears shorts, no shirt, and ribs show through skin like rows of bent branches. He chews through three sausages, starts in on the potato chips. The boy eats like it's going out of style. If I had a restaurant, I'd want it full of eaters like him.