The Dope Thief (26 page)

“So, I’m twenty- two and stupid and he’s thirty- five and a lawyer. So . . .” Now she finally turned to Ray. “Sixteen months at Trumbull Correctional Camp. My mom died while I was in there.” Her voice broke, the sound catching somewhere in her chest. She cleared her throat, pushed up her sleeve, and showed him a tattoo, a cherry with a stem, crudely drawn and going blue now with age. “That was Cherry, a girl at the camp. I can’t . . . I can’t even describe that relationship now. She kept me from getting hurt. Hurting myself.” Her eyes flicked to his. “But you don’t need my prison stories, do you, Ray?”

“No.”

“ ’Cause you have your own.”

“Yes.” He tried to keep her eyes with him, but she turned her head. He kept going. “And not just prison. Juvie before that. Stu-pid things, stealing cars. Before it got more serious.” He sat back, and she kept her hands flat in her lap, sitting straight upright as if waiting to be called to another room. “I wanted money, I can’t even tell you why. It just sat there. My partner stole most of it, and I have to tell you I was . . .” He searched for the word. “Relieved. Like I was free of something. I wish to God I’d never seen it. Never wanted it.”

They sat for a minute, and she looked into a far corner of the room.

“So,” she finally said. “Are you another story that ends with ‘she should have known better’? Or are you the one who sees me and knows who I am? Where I’ve been and what it means?”

He wondered where the girl he met in the street had gone, the bright- smiling girl who had looked him in the eye, and it cut him inside to think he was the reason she sat slumped next to him, her eyes empty and her head full of the banging echoes of cell doors and the thousand daily humiliations of being locked up.

He thought for a while, listened to cars moving in the street and the sounds of kids somewhere. “I know some things. Not a lot, maybe not enough.”

“Tell me.”

“I know I don’t want any of it anymore. I know I want to sleep without the nightmares. Really rest, you know?”

She began to lean forward, her head lowering slowly. She put her hands on her face. He wanted to touch her but kept his hands in his lap though they twitched like wires. He kept going. “I wake up exhausted somehow. Like I never slept.”

She looked down but nodded and shut her eyes tight, listening.

“I have these nightmares,” he said. “Terrible things I can’t control, people in trouble I can’t help. And the terrible things are something I caused. Something I brought.”

Michelle put her hand over her eyes.

“I know that you’re ashamed. All the time.”

She turned her head away and began to sob, a terrible strangled noise, her shoulders heaving.

“I know it because I am, too.”

His eyes were dry, and he put his arms on her back and lowered his head to her hair. She gave a moan of pain that was dreadful to hear, a low, animal sound of loss, but clutched at his hand.

“You tell yourself all this . . . shit. Wrong place, wrong time. Not your fault. You were beat, or lied to, or hurt. But you know it doesn’t matter and the things you did that were wrong were in you to do. Part of you. And you let them out and they destroyed every fucking thing you might have been. Wanted to be. Everyone who cared about you. Like you set this fire to burn down your own life.”

She sat up and wrapped her arms around him, and he kissed her cheek and felt her tears soak into his shirt.

“I want to say it’s going to be okay, but that’s one of the things I don’t know.” Her breathing began to slow, to ease, and he kissed her cheek again, and she turned to him and covered his mouth with her own. Then they were quiet for a while.

They went back to her apartment, actually one big room over

a garage. The first time he’d seen it. Candles and a warm vanilla

smell of baking from the house next door. A miniature kitchen, a bank of small windows letting in the light and air. A photograph, torn from a magazine, of rolling green hills and a red stone house that made him think of Italy. More quotes from Rilke in her hand-writing. Fat loops and swirls, like the way she moved her hands when she spoke and was animated.

They kissed in the doorway, their mouths open, and pulled at each other’s clothing. She stood back and shucked off her sweater and then undid the buttons on his shirt as they moved to the bed. He put his hand on hers and stopped her from opening his shirt but hiked her skirt and pushed his hand inside the waistband of her pants. She moved under him, opening, and when he entered her, her eyes were still wet from crying. His breath hitched in his chest and she made a low noise in her throat and feeling the length of the space inside her for the first time he came, his teeth bared and her hands gripping his shoulders. He settled into her, breaking into pieces like a ship coming to rest in the sand at the bottom of the sea.

Later she opened his shirt. He stared at the ceiling when she put her cool fingers in the furrows left by the knife. He began to tell her, then. Everything that had happened, from when his mother left and Bart had gotten locked up. He told her about Marletta and the accident and how he couldn’t get it all back. Bits and pieces would come to him but he couldn’t hold it all his head at once. He told her how angry and stupid he’d been coming out of prison. About Harlan and Manny and Ho. About how it was all burned out or carved out by the things that had happened in August. Edward Gray dying, and the fire at the barn. He talked until it was dark and he was hoarse and his eyes burned, as if he’d been screaming instead of whispering.

When he woke in the night, his eyes wild, she was there with him and touched his head, and he fell asleep again, folded against her and smelling the warm bread scent of her skin and saying her name.

IT GOT COLDER
again, and rainy. Wind tunneled down State Street in front of the store and kept the foot traffic lower than they would have liked. Michelle brought people in with kids’ parties, and open mike night for bad poetry and white wine. A kid from the neighborhood noodling on a guitar while his black- haired girlfriend watched adoringly. People started to recognize them on the street. Ray began to stay most nights with Michelle in her room on Mary Street.

Bart died in April, and they buried him in a plot in Whitemarsh on a cool day when the shadows of clouds moving were sharp on the ground. They sat on folding chairs that sank into the spongy turf, and Michelle put her hand in his lap while he tried to fit everything that his father had been into his head. When the priest finished his generic prayers, Ray looked up and saw Manny, wearing his wraparound shades and a black jacket over jeans and standing back near his car. His face was whiter than Ray remembered. Something, a tremor, maybe, shifted his thin shoulders. Ray lifted his hand, and Manny nodded and turned away. When Ray held Theresa’s arm to steady her on the marshy ground, he felt how thin and brittle she had become. He hadn’t noticed against Bart’s rapid dwindling, but soon she would be gone, too.

When he got to the store the next day the kids were there. Lynch and Stevie and Andy. Michelle called the boys Burke and Hare and teased them, and Stevie had begun to fall in love with her. Ray let them in, and they brought shopping bags in full of paperbacks and dropped their satisfying weight onto the floor by the register. Michelle took Andy into the storeroom to make coffee and ask her about the baby and came back with Entenmanns’s cookies and a couple of paper plates. The boys were fighting over the last one, Stevie hanging back with feinted jabs and Lynch giving him dead eyes and saying, ‘Don’t even bother, dipshit,’ when Ray’s cell rang and it was Theresa.

“Someone’s been here.”

HE KNELT IN
the entryway and could smell the bag. Cigarette smoke and hash oil and dog piss and air freshener and Lysol fighting, almost enough to make him gag. He picked it up and took it back to the bedroom while Theresa made coffee. When he was alone he unzipped it and dumped it out. Bundles of bills in rubber bands. He did a quick count and a lot of it was gone. There was about eighty thousand left.

He took money out, enough to cover what Theresa had spent on the store and then some, and tucked it into his pants. He closed the bag and took it to the front door and dropped it and went into Theresa’s room and stuck the money from his pants in her top drawer. He saw the money now as a problem to be solved, but his life was getting crowded with people who needed help, and he’d think of some way to get rid of the rest of it.

Then he sat and had coffee and listened to Theresa talk about her latest trip to AC and her friend Evelyn who won six hundred dollars on a Wheel of Fortune machine. He made his eyes go wide. A lot of money.

RAY AND MICHELLE
drove up Holicong Road while he tried to get his bearings against the low hump of Buckingham Mountain starting to go green again. There were a few crocuses showing livid purple in the lawns they passed. The clouds moved fast in a wind that Ray could feel pulling at the car. The sky would show, blue- white between the clouds, then disappear again. He made two more turns, glancing down at a piece of paper Michelle had printed out for him.

She had been tense, watching the sheets print out, her shoulders drawn in, her eyes flicking over his. She shook her head. “If I said I didn’t want you to do this, would it matter?”

“Nothing will happen.” He smiled at her, or tried to, showed his teeth, but thought, how do I know that? “Anyway,” he said. “Anyway, I have to go.”

“Okay.” She looked down. “Okay, but I’m driving you.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Fuck that. You’re pretending you’re handling shit. I get that. But I’m not sitting here and you go off and I never see you again.”

He saw she was close to crying and thought about it for a minute and finally nodded. “Sure. Nothing is going to happen, but it’s cool you come with me.” He kissed the top of her head, and she held his arms.

NOW THEY WENT
slowly by neat houses, looking at numbers painted on mailboxes. They came to a brick house with a lot of windows, nicer than he thought it would be, the lawn trimmed. Flower beds, hard rectangles of turned soil expecting something that was coming.

He didn’t know exactly what he had expected. Dust and cracked windows, he guessed. Things rusting on a lawn. While they sat at the curb, the garage door lifted and there he was. Moving purposefully out across the driveway with a rake. Attacking a small pile of winter- dead leaves and pushing it into a black plastic bag.

He was still erect, and he matched the squared- away house. His hair was white etched with a few solid black lines, and his shoulders were broad. He looked like what he was, a state trooper. A cop. Retired, older, but still a cop.

Michelle opened her mouth, but Ray opened the door and pushed himself out, straightening slowly and then reaching back for the cane. She watched his face, showed him the cell phone. He winked.

He covered most of the distance to where Stan Hicks stood over the shrinking pile of leaves before the older man turned and faced him holding the rake loosely at his side. The eyes were pale gray and clear, focused. Ray wondered how old he was, comparing him mentally to the shriveled old man his father had been when they had finally let him out.

“I wondered if you’d ever come here.”

Ray nodded, thought about putting his hand out. He felt Stan Hicks look him over, taking in the cane, the thin frame. When Hicks looked back at the car, Ray followed his eyes to see Michelle sitting in the open door, watching tensely, working the cell phone in her hands like a rosary.

“That’s a pretty girl.”

“Yessir.”

“She looks a little like my girl.”

Ray nodded; there was no denying it. Ray allowed himself to see it, and he did have to look at Michelle again. He smiled at her.

“Why did you come here, son?”

“I don’t know.”

“You bring a gun? Going to make me pay for something?” He didn’t seem particularly worried about that possibility, and of the two of them seemed more able to defend himself.

“No, I thought maybe you already paid what ever you had to pay for.”

“And what would that be?” He looked Ray in the eye. “You think I ruined your life?”

“No.”

“You did that on your own.”

“No, my life wasn’t ruined.” Ray stuck his hands in his pockets. “Took me a long time to see that. I’d have said it was, you asked me not long ago. But it wasn’t.” They both looked down at the wet pile of jagged leaf fragments at their feet.

“Why didn’t you say what I did to you?”

“I wanted the same thing you wanted.”

“I kept expecting they’d come. I was ready for it. When you told somebody what I did.” He held the rake in his hands as if he were going to snap it. The way he’d snapped Ray’s arms.

Ray could almost feel it again. Stan Hicks pushing him down on the cold asphalt, the rage spilling out of the older man in a torrent of screamed curses and spit. The metal bar falling once, twice on each arm.

Ray cocked his head. “What was that? That bar you used on me?”

“The tire iron from my patrol car. I was ready to account for it. I think I wanted to. I broke your arms. I lied, I made that dope addict Perry March say you stole his car. I was ready to tell it. I was proud of what I did. But no one ever came.”

“No.”

“You killed my girl.”

“I loved her. A drunk driver killed her.”

“You don’t say that.” His eyes were full of tears and his mouth worked. “You don’t get to say that.”

“No, Stan. I think that’s why I went to prison. So I could say it. I think that’s why I let everything come. The beating and the lies you told.”

Stan Hicks sat on the ground and put his head in his hands. Ray got down slowly on one knee, the cold water from the grass soaking through his pants. He turned, to see Michelle standing now, watching intently, her eyes wet.

Stan Hicks spoke, his eyes hidden. “She’d have hated it. What I did.”

“Yes. But she’d have wanted me to help you.”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“No.” Ray reached over and put his hand on the older man’s arm. “That’s why I had to do it. Come here and say it was okay. That it worked out okay. It’s the same thing she did for me. Loved me. Wanted good things for me that I didn’t deserve. She would have hated what you did. But she would have kept on loving you.”