Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (8 page)

“A beer please,” I said.

“You got ID?”

“What?”

“ID.”

“What for?”

“Are you from out of town?”

“Yes.”

“You have to be twenty-one to drink here.”

“I’m twenty-four. Must people think I look older,” I said.

“I don’t give a shit, you got ID?”

“Uh, wait, yeah, I got my passport.”

“That’ll do, let me see it.”

I showed him my passport, he looked it over, I don’t how he read it, so dark in there.

“You from England?”

“Yeah.”

“Tourist?”

“Yeah.”

“Been to Denver before?”

“No.”

“You’re too late to ski,” he said, his face contorting into a disconcerting chuckle.

“I don’t ski.”

“What type of beer you want?”

“I don’t care.”

“Coors ok?”

“Yeah.”

The barman pulled me a Coors and set it down.

“Three dollars,” he said.

I gave him a five and as I’d seen in the movie, I left a dollar of the change back on the bar.

“Tourist, huh. I was born here. Native, very rare. You know what the first permanent building in Denver was?”

“No.”

“A bar,” he said with satisfaction.

“Really?”

“Yup, you know what the second was?”

“No.”

“A brothel.”

“Fascinating.”

“You know that TV show
Dynasty
?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Denver.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

I finished the beer and bought another. I was getting increasingly anxious. It’s not that I needed a hit, I told myself. I just wanted one. The bar began to fill. A few more desperate types but also a party of college students. Four guys, two girls. Maybe they would know. The guys all had buzz cuts and were well muscled, they actually all looked like undercover cops, so maybe it wouldn’t be too clever asking them. It would have to be the barman. I cleared my throat.

“So,” I said, “I hear there’s a big drug problem around here.”

“You heard that?” His face frozen, revealing nothing.

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“You know, pot, smack, that sort of thing.”

“Is that a fact?” he said, giving me a quizzical look.

“It’s what I heard.”

He wiped the bar and served a customer at the far end. Obviously thinking something over. Clearly, I was from out of town, he had seen my passport, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t a sting operation. Suspicious, but not a sting.

“Bar tab’s twenty bucks,” he said, coming back to me.

I owed him nothing, I had paid and tipped for each drink. I took a twenty from my wallet and put it on the bar. He lifted it and put it in his pocket.

“I heard,” he began slowly, “I heard that the biggest problem with product was behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax and Grant. That’s what I heard. I heard, you should say Hacky sent you.”

“Hacky sent me?”

“Hacky.”

I left the beer, grabbed my baseball hat, practically ran out into the dusk. I went east. Night was falling fast and there were many more prostitutes out on Colfax, skinny black and Latino girls who looked as if they were about fifteen. Most of them on something. Crack, presumably. They were wired, nervous, looked for vehicle trade. Pimps on the corner, big guys, little guys, enforcers, all of them obvious, unconcerned about peelers or being seen. I found the Salvation Army hostel and walked around the back. Garbage, a small fire. A dozen men drinking from brown paper bags. Older guys, mostly white.

First character I saw, old for his years, pale, thin, drinking vodka. Rotted gums and teeth, horrible smell.

“Listen, I need to score, Hacky sent me,” I said.

The man looked at me.

“You want the kid. Are you a cop?” he asked.

“No.”

“Better not be a cop.”

I shook my head, what would he do about it anyway? Breathe on me?

“Hey, kid,” he yelled, “guy wants to book you.”

The kid came from out of the shadows. He really was a child. Maybe sixteen years old. Spanish, obviously, well dressed in jeans and a black cowboy shirt. Walking slow, smoking a cigarette. Was he the dealer? If so, why was he hanging out with a bunch of indigent white guys three times his age?

He came over.

“You’re no cop. I know all the cops.”

“I know. Hacky sent me.”

“Hacky sent you?”

“Yeah.”

“What you want?” he asked, suspicion flitting around his eyes.

“Ketch, I mean, horse, smack, heroin.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know, a few grams, seven good hits.”

“What you talking about? Where you from?”

“Ireland.”

“Where’s that at?”

“England.”

“See your money,” he said, the light gleaming on his smooth baby-face cheeks.

I opened up my wallet, he looked at me. His face had a scar under the chin. I stroked my beard nervously. He took out five twenty-dollar bills, put them in his pocket, said nothing, walked off to a door, went inside. I waited for about ten minutes. Had they stroked me? Was I ripped off? It would be the easiest scam in the world. Who would I complain to? I didn’t care about the money. I wanted the goddamn heroin. Let them rip me off, just give me the bloody ketch.

The sun disappeared behind the mountains and I stood there watching the oblique light illuminate the vapor trails of airplanes flying west.

Venus came out. The sky turned a deep blue.

From the Colfax side of the alley a homeless man shambled over to me with a brown paper bag.

“This is for you,” he said.

I opened the bag, inside was a plastic bag containing a white powder. Easy to get bait and switch in a situation like this, so I opened the bag, tasted the heroin. Milky, acidic, the real McCoy.

“Where’s this from?” I asked the homeless man.

“I don’t know,” he answered. I wanted to know where the heroin had originated—Burma, Afghanistan, South America. I wanted to know its purity, but the man was drunk, he knew nothing, just the fall guy on the outside chance that I was a peeler. I put it in my pocket and jogged back to the hotel. Night. Almost no pedestrians. I took a shortcut through the grounds of the state capitol, no one paying me any mind at all.

When I slid back into the motel room, John was asleep and the place stank of shampoo and hair conditioner. John washed that long mane of his twice a day.

“Who the hell is that?” he muttered from the bed.

“Me.”

“Did you get your ketch?” John asked from under the covers.

“I did. No pot, though.”

“Shit, ok. Was the guy trustworthy? I mean, you’re going to shoot that stuff into your veins. Did he look trustworthy?”

“He looked fine.”

“Ok, then it’s your life.”

“It is.”

I took out my syringes. I went into the bathroom and brought out my spoon and the distilled water. I took the heroin out of the plastic bag. I sieved it through my fingers. I boiled it in the spoon. Injected, drew it in, saw there was blood, I always find a vein first time, always. I injected myself.

A weird hit. A deep high.

I lay down on the bathroom floor. Goddamn, this stuff was purer than the gear that made it to Ireland. Wow. Everything that was hurt in my body disappeared. My thoughts became clear. The shower curtain, the tiles on the bathroom floor, the cream-colored ceiling. The traffic on Broadway. The fan from the AC in the bedroom, the bathroom pipes. One irritation. Helicopter, probably from the TV news. In Belfast there are no civilian choppers, all belong to the British Army. A copter is an ominous sound meaning trouble. I had to get rid of it. Blend it into the cars, pipes, air conditioner. Going, going, gone.

Noises, absence of pain.

Until you take heroin you don’t know how much pain there is in your body. Most humans just get used to it. With heroin every little ache disappears. Every ache of body and spirit. The wound of memory, the fear. That nagging fear that never quite goes away. For how can you live happily on Earth, knowing that your consciousness will be annihilated along with everything else you cherish? All the matter in the universe will someday decay into random photons and neutrinos. Diamonds are not forever. Nothing is forever. All the works of man will be lost in the Heat Death of the universe. Doesn’t that make everything pointless?

The girl is dead? We are all dead.

Heroin relieves you of these thoughts. And it was heroin, after all, that had saved my life. But for heroin I would be dead in a ditch somewhere in Ulster. Rain on my beaten body.

But I was smarter than them. Maybe not smart. But smarter than them.

The cars. The fading light. The airplanes. Men yelling. A fat June night. An urban symphony. A heavy overcoat of emptiness. I drift on an air bed over the ocean of eternity. On the infinite nothingness of a black sky.

The list of a diesel engine. The air horn of a freight train. Vehicles. Voices. A TV in another room. A breathing city. We are clawed by the past. I have read up on the history of this town. I think of the Spanish, the gold rush, of hard-faced Denver men throwing the bodies of the Indian women and children into Sand Creek. I think of Oscar Wilde at Denver’s Union Station. The golden spike. Walt Whitman’s beard. A father’s tears.

A beautiful girl in an orange sari, beaming from a photograph.

Everything eased….

Later.

Denver ketch.

The purest heroin I’ve ever had. Enough to make you become an addict. Lying there. Floating. Remembering the poet Novalis. “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” I don’t even have to take heroin now. Now I’m out of Ireland. I don’t even have to take it. I could be free of it. It has served its purpose. It’s been my shield. Like the beard, like the skinny stoop and the broken voice.

No reason now. Yeah, I’ll stop, quit. Solve the murder. Save myself. Yes. Thoughts. Coming down from a deep high. Heroin doesn’t end like anesthesia. The world slides you out.

Not today, though.

John shook me.

“Up, you bastard.”

“What time is it, you dick?”

“Ten o’clock,” he explained.

“In the morning?”

“Night.”

“Jesus Christ, what did I tell you about jet lag?”

“I’m hungry, I wanted to see if you wanted to go out and get something to eat. Besides, it’s America, we want to get out there, see stuff, do things, you know.”

“Yeah, but John, you’re supposed to sleep through the night, adapt to a new time zone.”

“Were you going to sleep on the bathroom floor in your underpants all night?”

“No.”

“Come on, then. I’m going to get something to eat. Are you coming or not?”

We dressed and went downstairs. The man behind the desk was watching baseball on a portable TV.

“Is there somewhere we could get something to eat around here?” John asked.

“White Spot Diner, three blocks south,” the man said, not looking up.

The diner. A waitress, ashen skin, dyed blond hair, a smoker, forties, exhausted, beaten down by the day and life. We looked at the menu. There were at least a dozen things we had never heard of: sloppy joes, meat loaf, submarine sandwiches, huevos rancheros; so we plumped for cheeseburgers and french fries, which was pretty bloody American in any case. When my burger came, I’d lost my appetite but John ate his and half of mine and I had a few fries. We drank Coke and John smoked and left. A nice night. I was feeling better now.

We walked down Broadway. The city of Denver ahead of us. The sky filled with stars and airplanes crossing the vast continent from coast to coast. Amazing to be here. Very different from living on an island as small as Ireland. You could get in your car in Ireland and the farthest you could drive from home was two hundred miles. Here, you could get in your car and drive to the top of Alaska or to the jungles of El Salvador.

Neon lights. The warm night. Police cruisers. Sirens. Big American cars. A club letting in a line of kids. John turned to look at me.

“No way, no way,” I said. “I’m going home and I’m going to get a good night’s sleep. No way, mate. No way.”

The nightclub…

Girls at the upstairs bar. A redhead in the PhD astronomy program at the University of Colorado. Brown eyes, feline, intelligent. John with an Asian girl in Daisy Dukes and sandals, John explaining that in
The Wild One,
Brando rode a Triumph, not a Harley. The girl feigning interest wonderfully.

John got us a round and his big smile infected all of us. He took the brunette to the dance floor and I talked to the redhead about astronomy. I told her my dad was a maths teacher and she said that astronomy was about 80 percent maths.

For possibly the only time in history our talk of mathematics proved mutually seductive and I found myself biting her pink, moist lower lip. She kissed me and moved from her stool to my seat so that the breasts under the R.E.M. T-shirt were touching my chest. We kissed and she tasted of beer and honey.

She stopped to get a breath.

“Hey, you know what day it is today?” the girl asked.

“Apart from my lucky day, no.”

“Ain’t lucky yet, mister.”

“Ok, what day is it?”

“It’s the start of the solstice. Began at sundown. You know what the solstice is?”

“Longest day of the year.”

“That’s right,” she said, surprised. “We’re going to a rave on the Flat Irons behind Boulder. Have you been to Boulder yet?”

“We only got in today,” I said.

“Denver sucks, man. Boulder’s where it’s at. Have you been to a rave before? You’ll need a sleeping bag. I can rustle one up. Do you take e? We’re going to dance all night until the sun comes up.”

“Why?”

“Haven’t you been listening? It’s the shortest night of the year. Midsummer night. Wait, I’ve got a flyer.”

She rummaged in her tight jeans back pocket. Raves were impromptu illegal affairs on public land. They were organized in secret and news of them spread through word of mouth. The ecstasy/rave scene was new to America. Rave culture here was in its infancy. Still enthusiastic, unironic. You could tell. The flyer had a big lowercase
e
and underneath it the words “Midsummer Madness Rave. Acid House. Party Till the Sun Comes Up.”