Road To Nowhere (15 page)

CHAPTER TEN

They drove north through the storm. Teresa didn’t know what time it was. She had left her watch at the old hag’s place, along with her virginity, wrapped in sheets wrinkled with fading pleasure. Her bodily aches had returned; they had been there the moment Free shook her awake and told her to get dressed because they had to hurry. Along with all her earlier complaints, her head now hurt. She longed for a couple of aspirins. She didn’t know what the hurry was, but Free said they had to get somewhere before the sun came up. She hoped Poppy wasn’t still planning on seeing her father, the priest.

Free sat silently beside her, staring straight ahead at the road. It was Poppy’s turn to speak and she was narrating the remainder of Candy’s tale.

“As I said, Candy had a newborn baby, no money, no skills, and no man,” Poppy said. “But she loved her little Johnny, and Candy blossomed when she was in love. She stayed in Oregon, but moved to Portland so that she could try to go back to school. At first that was impossible – Johnny needed too much attention – and she had to remain on welfare and stay at home, which was a postage stamp-size apartment. She drew a lot during these days, mainly sketches of her son. She couldn’t afford a camera or film to take pictures of him. She refused to ask anybody for help: Henry, her parents – she didn’t want charity from anybody. She despised being on welfare and got off it as soon as she could. It was a big deal for Candy to be self-sufficient. She felt it had been her dependence on John in high school that had led to so much misery in both their lives. Where John was, what he was doing – she had no idea. She had tried again, in vain, to find him. Yet she knew in her heart that he was not doing well. It was almost as if, when she held her son, she could feel John’s pain.

“Candy had discarded the idea of becoming a doctor, and with a kid to raise she didn’t want to risk trying to make it as an artist. When Johnny was a year and a half, old enough to be left with a sitter, she took a job as a waitress at a nearby restaurant and began to attend night classes at the University of Oregon. The classes she had taken at Berkeley were transferrable and she set to work trying to get into a nursing programme at the university. It was a long way from being a doctor but that didn’t bother Candy because as a nurse she would still get to help people. Also, from research she knew that nurses could have control over when they worked. They could do three twelve-hour shifts and take the rest of the week off. Candy thought that would be perfect. She could support herself and her son and still be around to watch him grow up.

“Candy was able to enter the nursing programme after only one more year of regular courses. The studying was hard for her, particularly when she was tired from working and taking care of her son. With her job, she made little more than she did on welfare, but Candy began to feel pride in herself and her abilities.

“The programme lasted two years and she made it through. She didn’t graduate at the top of her class. In fact, she almost failed a couple of courses. But when she went searching for a job, the hospitals scarcely glanced at her grades. She was an R.N. and they were in short supply. She got a job almost immediately, and for the first time in a long time she had money for herself and her son, who was now almost ready to enter kindergarten.

“The first thing Candy bought was a new car. She had spent the previous three years riding around town on a bike. She was in good shape, but she was tired of not being able to sit in comfort and listen to the stereo while she went from place to place. The car was nothing extravagant – a stripped-down import – but she loved it. So did Johnny. He liked to sit up front and point out and name everything in town. He had an extraordinary vocabulary for a kid. He was smart as a whip – Candy thought he would be the one to become a doctor. In fact, she began to call him Doc, which made him laugh.

“On a rare trip down to LA. to visit her parents, Candy met a guy. He wasn’t a doctor. He worked nights as a custodian at a local high school. That may not sound glamorous, but
he
was. His name was Clyde and he was almost as wild as John had been. Candy liked him right away and he fell head over heels for her. They met at a park near her parents’ house. She had brought Johnny there to fly a kite. Clyde was chasing the ducks down by the pond. He said his niece wanted one for her birthday, and by golly, she was going to have one. They never did catch a duck, and Johnny let go of his kite and the wind took it away. Clyde got her number, though, and called her the same night. They went to dinner and a movie, the same thing the next night. Candy wasn’t in L.A. long. She was back home in Oregon only a few days when Clyde showed up at her doorstep. He said he happened to be in the neighbourhood.

“Clyde pursued Candy inexhaustibly. Every weekend he drove up from L.A. to Portland to see her. He was serious. He asked her to marry him when they had been going together three months. Candy laughed the first time he asked – she thought he was joking. But then he brought her a diamond ring the next day. She was afraid to try it on. She liked Clyde, she may even have loved him, but it was all happening too fast for her. She told him she needed more time. One thing, though, that might surprise you. Clyde was able to talk Candy into moving back down to L.A. Recently, Candy and her parents had grown closer. They loved Johnny, and Candy decided it was unfair to deprive them of the company of their only grandchild. Also, Oregon was beautiful but it wasn’t home. Candy was an L.A. girl, even with the city’s smog and traffic and other problems.

“She moved back and got her own apartment, even though Clyde objected. He wanted her to live with him. She couldn’t, yet she was moving closer to accepting his marriage proposal. Clyde didn’t plan on remaining a janitor for ever. Now that he no longer had to drive up to see her, he switched to working days so he could go to school at night. He wanted to be a school teacher. He loved working with kids. He got along great with Johnny. Candy would watch the two of them playing together and wonder what was making her hesitate. She didn’t wonder too long to realize what it was. She didn’t love Clyde the same way she had loved John. It was the same old thing she had experienced with Henry.

“But Candy wasn’t thinking about John the night she ran out late at night to buy a carton of cigarettes. Clyde was staying overnight at her place. She got off work about nine and had spent the evening watching rented movies with Clyde. It was maybe one in the morning. Johnny was long asleep. Clyde didn’t go to the store with her because he had to stay to watch Johnny and because he didn't approve of her habit. He used to say to her, ‘You’re a nurse. You know what those things do to your lungs and heart.’ But Candy had been smoking since high school, and even John had been unable to get her to quit.

“Candy had been back in L.A. about three months at this time. She had an excellent job at a hospital about two miles from her apartment. It was a rainy night and she was tired but feeling content. In fact as she drove to the all-night mini-mart near her place she thought that her life had finally begun to turn round. She had financial stability and a man who loved her. Her son was healthy. On the drive to get her cigarettes Candy counted her blessings. But blessings are not like gold coins. You can’t count them and lock them in a safe and expect to find them there later. Candy had been tossed around by fate all her life, and fate’s kind of like a kid who has found a nice ball to play with, a ball that bounces back. The kid will keep playing with the ball until it goes flat or she loses it. Candy was about to lose something that night, though she didn’t know it.

“She parked in front of the mini-mart. She had been there a dozen times late at night, usually to get cigarettes and maybe fill up her gas tank. The place was always open. She got out of her car and walked towards the door. She walked fast – the rain was coming down hard and she didn’t want to get wet. It was only when she had her hand on the door, and was about to open it, that she raised her eyes and saw the man inside with the gun in his hand, pointed at the head of the store owner. Her breath stuck in her chest. She knew she should turn and run away, call the police. But she blinked and peered closer. The man looked familiar. It was John, her long-lost love. John was robbing this store. That was terrible, she thought there must be some mistake. She opened the door and stepped inside.”

“Stop right there,” Free interrupted.

“Why?” Poppy asked.

“Yeah, why?” Teresa asked. She wanted to hear the end of the story; she had waited so long to hear it. The tale helped distract her from her nausea and her burning wrist. The skin below her left hand could have had a torch on it, it hurt so much. She was going to have to take something for the pain soon.

“I want to tell this part,” Free said. “You’ll screw it up, Poppy. You’ll change things round and give Teresa the wrong idea.”

“Very well,” Poppy said. “Give us John’s version of the night of the hold-up.”

“In a few minutes,” Free said. “First I want to explain how John happened to be there that night. Listen closely, Poppy, you might learn a thing or two.”

“I doubt it,” Poppy muttered.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“John was now a heroin addict. Like I said before, he supported his habit by robbing soda and candy machines and phone booths. His addiction defined him. The drug was the centre of his life, and he spent most of his time trying to figure out how to continue to supply himself. To make more out of what he did get a hold of, he began to mainline. He injected the boiled drug directly into his veins. It made the high more powerful, yet, at the same time, he needed more of the drug to attain the same high. Like every other junkie, he took one step forward and two back.

“The pain in his hand only left him when he was high, and he could not stay high twenty-four hours a day so he went through a lot of bad times. The surgeons had done a poor job grafting the skin round his wound. He was prone to infections in his right hand, and was constantly having to buy antibiotics as well as heroin. His habit was now costing him five hundred bucks a day. Do you know how many quarters that is? Two thousand. That’s a lot of machines to rob just to stay even. It was hopeless, really, he had to go on to bigger game.

“John started to break into houses in middle-class neighbourhoods. He got to be something of an expert when it came to casing out houses. He never broke into homes when he thought people were there. Of course he miscalculated a few times and nearly got his brains blown out. But he wouldn’t carry a gun. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, and never really had except for the time he punched Sims in the mouth.

“His hand worked against him as a thief. Too many tasks that went with the territory, like picking locks and silently lifting stuck windows, required two good hands. When he did get inside, he was able only to steal small stuff: jewellery, watches, cash. Occasionally he’d swipe a portable stereo or a VCR. But he had to resell the stuff for pennies because he could only do business with the blackest part of the black market. His main drug supplier, an addict himself, suggested he do a little dealing on the side to help make ends meet. Being a pusher wasn’t John’s style – besides, it was dangerous. He only tried it for a couple weeks when he was robbed in the middle of the night by a guy with a switchblade. John lost his entire supply of drugs and two pints of blood. The assailant laid John’s belly wide open. He had to rush to the hospital holding his guts in. It took forty stitches to sew him back together. John was pretty hardened to the horrors of life by this time, but that incident scared him badly. He went back to straight stealing, a safe occupation. Man, life sucked, it really did.

“John was back in the hospital not long after that. He had caught another type of infection – hepatitis. A dirty needle was no doubt to blame. He didn’t want to go into the hospital, but the doctor he saw told him he’d die if he didn’t and the way John felt he figured the man was probably right. He had never been so sick in his life. He couldn’t walk across the room without having to stop and rest.

“He had a problem with the hospital, though, once he was inside. They wouldn’t give him any heroin, of course. But then, they wouldn’t even give him methadone to help him with withdrawal. His doctor explained that he had to be in a special programme to get methadone, and that it was an out-patient programme only. You couldn’t be in the hospital and join. John took the news hard. He was sick from hepatitis and from withdrawal. To top it off his old friend Mr. Three-Fingered Hand was complaining. He couldn’t take the pain, he just couldn’t. And it wasn’t his fault. Pain can make a proud man humble. Pain can make a good man turn bad.

“One evening when John had been in the hospital a couple of days, he got out of bed around nine o’clock, wearing only a bathrobe, and went searching for a nurses’ station that had been left unattended. He didn’t wait till later because he knew the nurses changed shifts at nine, and he hoped to take advantage of the change in shifts. The hospital was full of places to snitch drugs. John didn’t want much, just a little something to knock him out so he could sleep. That wasn’t much to ask, but the nurses in his ward wouldn’t give him anything stronger than Tylenol. What was Tylenol to a heroin addict? It was like giving cookies to a hungry tiger.

“John didn’t find any drugs. He had only searched a couple of floors when he spotted a nurse at the far end of the hall. She had her back to him and was waiting for the elevator. She appeared to be going off duty. Even from behind she looked familiar to John. He moved a few steps closer, hanging on to a laundry basket to keep from falling over. He really shouldn’t have been out of bed. The elevator door opened and a guy about twenty-five years old accompanied by a kid who was maybe five stepped into the hall. The nurse shouted with pleasure. The two had obviously surprised her by coming to pick her up at work. The little boy ran into the nurse’s arms shouting Mommy, and the guy hugged the woman and the two of them had a long kiss.