Buffalo Jump (3 page)

B
arry Aiken entered his garage from the laundry room off the kitchen, so it wasn’t until he opened the outside door that he felt the coldness of the rain and the bite of the wind. A raw, late winter day in Buffalo, still a few weeks shy of spring. Barry had to open the garage door by hand because the remote hadn’t worked in weeks: the only loser on Lincoln Parkway getting his face wet opening the door to the outside world.

He heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, felt the dampness in his bones. Shivered and zipped his leather bomber as high as it would go. Barry hated driving to the west side but that’s where Kevin was, and Kevin had the supply; Barry was all demand. He patted his jacket pocket, the inside one that buttoned shut, to make sure he had his wallet. He didn’t like carrying this much cash, but what else was he going to do? Offer to write Kevin a cheque? Ask him if he took plastic? Right, then hang around until he stopped laughing.

Barry aimed his fob at the side of his Honda CR-V and heard it chirp as the lock disengaged. He got in and eased the seat back and adjusted the mirrors. Amy had been the last one to drive and he was much taller than she was, six-one to her five-five. He started the engine and put the gearshift in reverse,
then put it back in park and turned off the engine. Got out of the car and retreated to a corner of the garage that was sheltered from the wind and the neighbour’s view. He opened his silver-plated cigarette case—both the case and the bomber jacket had once been his dad’s—and slipped out a thin joint.

Just half,
he told himself, to take the edge off, get him to Kevin’s and back. He needed to calm down. Needed
something
to calm him down. Until he saw Kevin, a joint would have to do. He lit up and inhaled deeply, holding it in his lungs, watching smoke spiral off the lit end. The neighbours would smell it if they were outside, but so what? It wouldn’t be the first time. He exhaled and inhaled again, holding the smoke in until his lungs told him to cut that shit out and take in some air. He blew out a good-sized cloud and took one more hit, then butted the joint carefully against the cinder-block wall of the garage and put the remnant back in the case.

No more, he told himself. Not until you get home. Don’t want to go past mellow into paranoid. Don’t want to be all red-eyed if you get pulled over for some reason. Especially on the way back.

Thus fortified, Barry backed out of his driveway and drove down Lincoln Parkway, a wide boulevard with fine houses on large treed lots. That he lived in one of Buffalo’s more affluent areas was due more to his father’s efforts than to his own. His dad had left Barry the house when he passed away two years ago, and he and Amy had been more than happy to leave their frame semi near D’Youville College and live close to the Albright-Knox Gallery and the park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Live as his dad had, in his dad’s colonial-style brick house with the white portico in front, on a street where the neighbours were all professionals, just as his dad had been.

Asked what he did, Barry would say graphic designer. True enough but not in the sense it had once been. He had started out in fine arts, like everyone else in his sixties circle, and eventually
had turned to Mac-based design to leverage his modest talent into a livable wage. He had been an in-house designer for more than twenty years, the last twelve at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority, churning out pamphlets, brochures, reports and newsletters until the latest round of cutbacks claimed him. Why keep a middle-aged man on staff with benefits when work could be farmed out to twenty-two-year-old techies straight out of college who knew all the latest design programs and would charge half the price, the bony-butted pimply little shits.

So now he was freelancing out of his home but work was hard to find. Maybe his lifestyle was catching up with him, or maybe he was just getting old, but he didn’t feel as sharp as he once did. Things didn’t click like they used to. He’d still be trying to master the latest page-making software when the company would release a new version. He couldn’t put in sixteen-hour days like cyberpunks fuelled by junk food, caffeine and the inexhaustible energy of their youth. His income had tailed off dramatically. For now he had modest savings and a decent stock portfolio his dad had left him, but there wasn’t enough to keep Barry and Amy going until their pensions kicked in. Thank God, thank God, thank God they had never had kids. Amy had wavered in her late thirties but Barry had held fast and hadn’t he been right? Look at them now. How would they manage if they had teenagers? Amy wasn’t faring any better than he was, financially or otherwise. Who needed a piano teacher with arthritis, barely able to play the notes her students stumbled through?

The worst thing about being laid off—worse than the drop in income or the blow to whatever self-esteem had accrued to him during a relatively unaccomplished life—had been the loss of his dental, health and prescription drug benefits. As a municipal employee, he’d had a good plan that covered Amy as well. Now they were shopping for a plan they could afford and having no luck at all.

Barry switched on his headlights and set the wipers to high as he drove toward Elmwood. Humps of snow were still visible on some lawns, so black with soot they looked like magma. Not even noon but almost dark, wind blowing the rain hard against the windshield. Remind me again why I live in Buffalo, Barry thought.

’Cause you got no fucking choice.

He had been born in Buffalo fifty-five years ago, the only child of a surgeon and a homemaker, his mom dying of breast cancer when he was fourteen. He had never lived anywhere else. Where could he and Amy go at their age? How would they find someone like Kevin in another town?

His dad had moved to Buffalo from Brooklyn after med school to take up residency at Roswell Park and had genuinely loved the town. Loved its history, its architecture, its smallness and slower pace. Well, you’d really love it now, Dad, Barry thought. It’s smaller than ever, fewer than 300,000 people, maybe half the population of its heyday. When his mom and dad had arrived in 1949, Buffalo had been a Great Lakes port thriving on shipping, steelmaking and manufacturing. With those industries now in decline, and little to replace them, it was just another Rust Belt relic closing in on itself, best known for lake-effect storms that dumped snow three feet at a time and a football team that went 0-for-4 in Super Bowls.

Some Buffalo Bills player, he forgot who, once said after leaving for warmer climes: “Buffalo isn’t the end of the world. But you can see it from there.”

Barry could feel the tightness in his hip spreading up his back and under his right shoulder blade, the one that’d been going into spasm lately. God, getting old sucked. It wasn’t just the hip, the leg, the back. Everything was starting to go. His eyesight: two new prescriptions in the last three years. His hearing, especially the right ear. Waking up mornings stiff all over, from his neck to his ankles.

Stiff everywhere but where it counted.

Barry had always pictured himself staying fit and virile into old age. He knew he still looked good enough. He had all his hair and wore it stylishly long. He thought he could pass for forty-five in the right light. He still had a couple of guitars around the house and could play passable rhythm if called upon. He wore hand-tooled cowboy boots and faded genuine Levis. No pre-washed designer crap; he had denim cred, goddammit. None of it changed the fact that he was closer to the end of his life than to the beginning. The vertical lines on his face were practically furrows. His jowls were beginning to sag. A wattle was forming under his chin. His feathered hair was greying. His body was betraying him at every opportunity, especially in the bedroom. Amy was still a gamer, up for pretty much anything, but lately even her most attentive ministrations had been for naught.

It could be worse, Barry told himself. You could be Larry Foti, who dropped dead of a heart attack before his fiftieth birthday. Or the guy who had worked next to him for six years at the housing authority, Marc Ormond. He had a cerebral hemmorhage in his sleep. His wife found him in the morning cold as ice, blood coming out of his ears and nose. People his age, his peers, his co-workers and old school chums, were dying of natural causes. Heart attacks, strokes and all kinds of cancer: the breast, the prostate, the blood, the brain, for God’s sake.

He stopped at a red light. Through rain-blurred windows he could see the people on the sidewalks were mostly black or Hispanic. One kid with a bandana under a tilted ball cap pushed off the wall and ambled toward Barry’s car.

Turn green,
he implored the light. He felt like an idiot, carrying so much cash in his wallet. If he got mugged, that’s the first thing they’d grab. A real pro would have thought of something better—like putting the money in a crumpled drive-thru bag under the seat. Sure, now I think of it, he
berated himself.
Why when it’s always too late?

Barry had nothing against black people. He was just scared shitless of them. He believed it was a class thing more than a race thing. A black doctor wouldn’t scare him. Or a black lawyer or actor or accountant. But the guys outside his car now were clearly not members of the professions, with their combative stares, baggy pants, untied runners, caps turned this way, that way, any way but straight. Barry was sure the one coming toward the car could see right through the car window, through the leather jacket and into his wallet stuffed with cash.
Turn fucking green,
he pleaded silently. Maybe he could outrun these guys if he had to. How fast could they run with their pants down around their thighs and their running shoes unlaced?

Who was he kidding? He could barely run anymore. An old lady in a walker could probably chase him down, and slap him silly too.

The light turned green and Barry lurched through the intersection fast enough to make his back end skid on the wet pavement.

Why did Kevin have to live on the west side? More to the point, why had he been made the new middleman? Everything had been fine the way it was before Kevin Masilek had been introduced as the new supplier. Prices had gone up, of course, to make up for this new layer of management, but not enough to warrant going elsewhere. The supply was safe and steady. Like it or not, this was the new regime, they’d been told. Barry figured, Why rock the boat when you can just keep sailing.

He started to weigh the pros and cons of smoking the other half of his joint.

Con: The car will stink, especially with the windows closed. Your eyes will turn redder. You could fuck up the transaction with Kevin. You could get so paranoid you’d turn around and go home to Amy empty-handed.

Pro: You know you want to.

The pro clearly outweighing the cons, he got the doob out of his silver case and lit up. He cracked the driver’s side window just enough to let the smoke out. Everyone else’s car windows were closed so who was going to smell it? Don’t worry so much, he chided himself. Just inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Aaaah.

Barry didn’t want any toke burns in the upholstery so he powered down the window and chucked the roach even though it had a little mileage left. Then he turned onto the street where Kevin lived in a tall semi-detached frame house. He pulled up at the curb and parked, kept the wipers going as he glanced up and down the street, looking for potential assailants. There were none he could see. Maybe the rain was keeping everyone indoors. Feeling a rare moment of affection for Buffalo weather, he got out of the car and locked it. Dashed up the three concrete steps to Kevin’s door and rang. Waited and rang again. Waited some more.

Shit. It was eleven-fifty and he had told Kevin he’d be by between eleven-thirty and noon. Hadn’t he? He briefly regretted smoking the second half of his joint, confused now—had he somehow got the time wrong? The day?

No. Even in his buzzed state he remembered the call: he had clearly said today between eleven-thirty and noon. Barry rang again. Knocked. Fished a quarter out of his jeans and rapped it on a square glass pane in the centre of the wooden door. Still no answer. The nerves behind his sternum started to slither over each other like snakes. What if Kevin had forgotten? Christ, what if he’d been arrested? Where would that leave Barry and Amy?

Okay, he said to himself. Breathe. Breathe and think. Which he did until he remembered the cellphone clipped to his belt. He dialled Kevin’s number and listened to it ring. Three times, four times, five, and then the voice mail kicked in. Barry disconnected without leaving a message. Maybe Kevin was having a shower, he told himself. Maybe he was on the can and
unable to get to the phone. Barry pressed his ear to the glass pane in the door. He could hear music playing at the back of the house where the kitchen was, a raw bluesy sound that took him one second to recognize: the Allman Brothers Band, the classic 1971 concert at Fillmore East, before Duane died, before Berry Oakley died, before Gregg started dating celebrities and falling face-first into his pasta.

Barry smiled. Kevin was home after all. Just couldn’t hear the bell over Duane’s moaning slide guitar and the band’s twin drum attack. He walked down the driveway to the rear of the house and went up the back stairs. He looked over at the adjoining yards and didn’t see anyone—thank you, rain— and knocked loudly. Waited. Knocked again. Waited some more. Pressed his ear to the back door, hearing Berry lead the band into “Whipping Post.” He thought he heard a door slam at the front of the house: could Kevin have gone to the front door just as he had come around back? Barry sighed and walked around the front again, hoping Kevin wasn’t at this very moment going back. They could do this all day, he thought, like some kind of bedroom farce, only without the laughs. He was relieved to see the front door was open. Thank fucking God.

He stepped into the dark-panelled foyer.

“Kevin?” he called. “It’s me, Barry. Hello?”

No answer.

Okay, so maybe he had gone out the back door to see who had been knocking. Barry walked down the hallway that led to the rear of the house, past the front parlour and dining room, the rooms all sparsely furnished. Whatever money Kevin was making was not being plowed into home decor.