The Spider Inside (12 page)

Nik hung up the payphone, got on his bike and drove straight
to Martin’s house. He’d done his best to let Martin know there was serious
business that needed discussing without making it too obvious. Who knew what
They were listening too, right? And if he was going to be careful in one
aspect, it didn’t make sense to take risks in another. Other than the fact he
was a part-time user and trying to become a full-time dealer of
methamphetamine, Tattoo Nik was a model citizen. These days he drove at three
to five miles per hour under the posted speed limit, wherever he went. He
stopped for a full three count at every single stop sign, and never tried to
beat a yellow light. He didn’t jaywalk or litter or play the stereo in his
apartment too loud.

Thankfully there was no one at Martin’s house when he
arrived. Martin was high on weed. It made Nik itch just to be around him, but
this was the only way to get where he needed to go.

“I need you to introduce me to Xander,” Nik said.

“Cool, man,” Martin said, and picked up his bong. He put
fire to the bowl and then pulled it, ripping a huge hit. Nik watched as Martin
held the smoke in, his face turning as red as his eyes were. Martin released
the smoke in a long, fragrant cloud.

“So you don’t have a problem setting this up for me?” Nik
asked again. He was surprised that even Martin could have such a cavalier
attitude about it, unless of course he was bullshitting.

“Naw, man. Xander’s cool. He’s solid people. A real bro.”

Can you be any more of a fucking hippie cliché, Nik thought,
but said; “So when do you think we can do this?”

“What, man?”

Nik took a deep breath. “When do you think you can set me up
to meet him?”

“Oh, well dude, I’ve got to go over there in a couple days,
you can roll with me if you like.”

“Are you gonna call him and tell him?”

“You can’t really get hold of him,” Martin said, taking
another long rumbling hit from the two-foot high glass bong.

“So he’s cool with you bringing someone over unannounced?”
Nik asked.

Martin laughed. “Bro, I told you, he’s cool. I’m cool.
Xander and me are cool. Since you and me are cool, that makes you and Xander
cool by association, right?”

You’re a fucking idiot, Nik thought. There had to be another
way to go about this.

“Right,” Nik said. “So in a couple days, right?”

“Right man.”

“Thanks again, Martin,” Nik said.

“Oh and hey man,” Martin said, shifting a little on the
couch, sitting up a little straighter. “Do you like, have that thousand
dollars?”

“What thousand dollars?” Nik asked.

“Remember, man? I fronted you a little extra? That day Paz
and Lance were over here? And you came by?”

Nik sighed and shook his head. “Are you okay, Martin?”

“Yeah, man, why?”

“I’m worried about you, bro. This is the second time you’ve
asked me about this. I paid you already.”

Nik held back the smile that wanted to surface upon seeing
Martin’s expression change. He could almost see the cannabis-gummed gears in
his head trying to turn.

“You guys were tweeking that day, right?” Nik asked.

“Yeah man...”

“You told me you’d been up about a day when I came by...”

“Right, right,” Martin said. “Then I was up another day
after you left.”

“But I came back man,” Nik said. “Like five hours later.
Remember? Paz was still fucking with those dominos? Lining them up on the
table? He got all pissy when I bumped it and knocked some of them over?”

“Yeah, right. But wasn’t that the first time you were over?”

Nik laughed. “No, bro. I left, but then I ran into a couple
people that owed me, so I was able to collect a little there, and then my bro
Jim bought a ton of shit off me. You know Jim, right?”

“Yeah, man, I know Jim. He’s a good guy. Cool people.”

“Exactly. And I can vouch for him,” Nik said. “After I
bumped into him I came back here with your money. I showed up right when you
guys were getting ready to do another line, and Lance offered me one but I had
to leave, remember?”

“Oh!” Martin said, sitting up straight again. “Right right
right, Jesus brother I’m so spaced, I was kinda like...whoa…you know?”

“Totally,” Nik said. “So we’re copasetic?”

“Totally copasetic. My bad, dude. I need to lay off this
shit right here.” Martin picked the bong up off the coffee table and moved it a
little further away from him.

“So, I’ll see you, brother,” Nik said. “Thanks again.”

“Righteous, man. Righteous.” Martin held his fist out and
Nik gave it what he hoped would be a warm, sincere bump with his own fist, and
he left. He was able to hold the laughter in until he was on his bike and half
a block away.

Nik drove back toward his house to the payphone he always
used to page Gomez from. It was the phone Gomez had told him to use, and was
the only number he’d call back on.

Nik dropped fifty cents in the slot disgusted at how much it
cost to make a fucking phone call these days and punched in the code Gomez had
also given him, then the number.

He smoked a cigarette sitting on a bus stop bench watching
the phone, waiting for it to move. A bus approached and started to slow. Nik
was the only one there so he waved the driver on and the driver gave him a big
smile and a “thank you” wave and sped back up and another minute later the
phone rang.

“Hello?” Nik said, picking up the phone.

“I’m looking for Charlie?” the voice on the other end said.

“Sorry, I think you have the wrong number. I’m waiting for a
call.” This was also what Nik had been told to say. Charlie began with a C, the
third letter in the alphabet, and meant three o’ clock. Gomez only dealt in
twelve hour intervals, and would only set appointments for the top of an hour.
Adam, Bobby, Charlie, David, Ellie, Frank, Gary, Henry, Ivan, Jason, Kimberly,
and Lucas were the names Nik had been told he needed to remember if he wanted
to deal with Gomez.

Gomez. There was a man that could do business. First, Gomez
would never have given Nik anything on consignment the way Martin did, and
nothing about the man had ever given Nik the idea that he could ask. If he’d
tried pulling on Gomez what he’d just pulled on Martin, he would likely be now
lying in a shallow desert grave with his throat cut ear to ear.

Nik did not want to show up unannounced at Xander’s place.
There were steps that needed to be taken here, a certain kind of etiquette was
required. A little fucking style, and a little fucking finesse. Martin lacked
both. Fuck Martin. If he couldn’t get Gomez to make the right kind of
introduction for him, Nik decided to just leave it alone for a while.

He had a feeling he could get Gomez to help him out though.
With Gomez it was all about the bottom line. Right now there was no reason for
him to introduce Nik to Xander, because Nik was one of his top buyers, from
what Gomez had told him, anyway, and Gomez would lose a sizeable customer base
if Nik moved up a tier.

All he had to do was figure out how to make it worth his
while. Nik glanced at his watch. It was about half past noon, which meant he
had a little under two and a half hours to figure it out.

Jim looked closely at the child and wondered what was wrong
with it. That there was a problem was not the question, but only which of a
large spectrum of possibilities, or which combination of them there might be.
The first problem was obvious: she had Alice for a mother.

She looked far too thin for a baby, Jim thought. Weren’t
babies supposed to be fat? Or at least plump? He seemed to recall his baby
brother looking like Buddha.

The term I think, Jim thought, is Failure To Thrive. The
baby’s skin had kind of a waxy look to it. He wasn’t sure how old she was...six
months? Surely no more than that.

Looking at her made Jim feel sick to his stomach, and worse,
it put an ache in his heart because he knew the only chance this kid would have
would be if it were taken away by Social Services or Child Services or whatever
they called themselves now, and be placed with another family. This wasn’t even
that great of a shot...you all the time heard about these foster families that
get ten or twelve kids for the money and have them all sleeping in dog kennels
or locked in the closet and never getting enough to eat, or the people without
any kids and they go out and get one from the state and end up beating it, or
fucking it, or killing it.

Maybe this was the minority though. It probably was, right?
If the majority of kids placed in a foster home or adopted or whatever were
abused they’d have to fix the system. Right?

Being a white baby she would probably go pretty quick,
babies were like puppies in that regard, Jim had heard. People wanted them as
young as possible. Jim stared down into the crib, the baby breathing in ragged,
uneven gasps, the breaths would even out for a while, and then she would just
stop breathing. Just when he was about to get freaked out and think that he’d
stood here and watched the baby die--or worse, had killed it with his
thoughts--she would start up again. Her little body was shivering. Sure it was
warm enough, but what the fuck was Alice thinking...just putting her kid in a
crib with nothing on but a diaper? Jim stared at the long pink puckered scar on
the baby’s abdomen, the place where her stomach had been hanging out when she
was born, the place her insides had been stuffed back in and sewn over. Jim
reached into the crib and covered the baby up. He put his finger in her palm
and her skinny little hand closed around it. She still had a good grip, so
maybe this kid would be okay. What the fuck did he really know about babies
anyway? He was hardly a pediatrician. The kid might not look healthy, but maybe
she was fine. Maybe she just had something like...oh, what was it called, when
they looked yellow? Jaundice. Maybe the kid had jaundice.

“Jim?” Alice called from the living room. “Everything okay?”

He jumped at how loud Alice was. How this kid ever got a
minute’s peace, between her screaming mother, the blaring television or the
constant Pantera over the stereo, was beyond him.

Jim hurried back out into the living room. “Everything’s
fine, I was just looking at the baby. You’ve got a beautiful daughter.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Little shit machine, what she is,”
Alice mumbled, then put the tooter in her nose and slammed back a line. She
passed the mirror around and by the time it came to Jim, Cherry had drawn him
into a conversation about God and the nature of existence which was over Soup’s
head but he clearly enjoyed listening to, and he’d forgotten about the baby,
for the most part, anyway.

Part of a conversation between Soup and Two Step that Jim
would always remember, but would not necessarily remember who said what:

“Did you hear about Gary? He tested positive.”

“For what?”

“AIDS.”

“AIDS? Gary has AIDS?”

“Yup.”

“That’s fucking weak.”

“I know, man, I feel bad for the guy.”

“No, I mean it’s weak on his part. Not that he has it, but
that he got it.”

“What do you mean?

“Think about it man. This is the fucking twenty-first
century. We’re in America. Everyone’s known about this fucking AIDS for what?
Since the 80s? Thirty years now?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So there’s no excuse for a grown ass man in this day and
age, in America, to get AIDS. There’s no reason for it.”

“What about rape?”

“Was Gary raped?”

“I don’t know, man. I doubt it?”

“Okay, outside of rape, a blood transfusion, or being born
with it...all things no one has any control over, outside that, there is no
reason for someone to get AIDS. Fuck somebody? Wear a condom. Shoot dope? Don’t
share needles. How’d he get it, do you know?”

“Gary?”

“Yes, how did Gary get AIDS?”

“Well, he’s not sure. He said he’d have to talk to a couple
people he slept with--”

“He better talk to everyone he slept with.”

“--but he also said he’s shared needles before. Sometimes
with people he didn’t really know.”

“See? Fuck him. It’s his own fucking fault. Now he’s just
what? Gonna be a fucking burden on everyone. His family, his friends if he has
any, eventually society because you know he’ll end up in some state hospital or
something, sucking oxygen he has neither the means nor the intention of paying
for.”

“That’s kinda harsh, man. Besides, nowadays it’s not a death
sentence, they say. People are living longer and longer with it. Look at
Magic.”

“Okay, one, Magic only has HIV. Two, he was in top physical
health when he got it. Three, he can afford all the cutting edge treatment and
doctors, not to mention a team of people to make sure he’s eating right, taking
the right vitamins, getting his exercise...”

“Well sure, but there’s tons of regular people that have it
that lead long, fulfilling lives.”

“Sure there are, but do you think Gary is going to be that
guy? He’s not gonna carpe fuckin diem, man. Gary is
not
a day-seizer, or
he wouldn’t be shooting up with strangers in the first place. He’s gonna mope
around and keep fucking people and shooting dope and eating shit he shouldn’t
and not go to the doctor and he’ll just wither up and die. He’ll be dead in a
year, I guarantee it. And you know what? Fuck him. He deserves it. Anyone that
does the shit he’s done cannot expect to walk away with anything else. He’s
probably surprised as hell. That’s like a man who can’t swim jumping into the
middle of the ocean and being surprised when he fucking drowns.”

“You got a real fucked up world-perspective, you know that?”

“I’m just being honest. The only tragic part about this, is
that Gary will spread this fucking disease to other people. They should know
better, too, but a guy like Gary takes the randomness out of the equation.
He’ll go out looking for people that share needles and people that will fuck
him bareback and he won’t say anything about it to any of them. The best thing
to do, for everyone, for Gary and for everyone else, would be to take that fuck
out into the desert and blow his fucking brains out.”

The room was silent at that, for a moment, everyone letting
the words sink in. Cherry flinched a little at them, at the whole conversation
really, but overall she didn’t disagree. No one did.

“Do you think animals know they’re animals?” Alice asked.

Gears shifted, worlds spun.

“Yes,” Jim said. “But not in the sense that we know they
are.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have to possess a sense of self-awareness, because
they work to survive, they hunt, they gather, they fight, they run, they breed.
But I doubt a monkey stops what he’s doing and thinks, holy shit, I’m a monkey.
We view them as a different species or a lower life form, but monkeys don’t do
that. They don’t look at a frog and think, I wonder if that frog knows it’s a
frog, because the monkey doesn’t know it’s a frog, not in the way we do. The
monkey only knows if he can eat it or fuck it or not.”

“Don’t they say humans and chimps share like 97% of the same
DNA?” Cherry asked. “That a chimp is the next closest thing to a human?”

“On a biological level, yes.” Jim said.

“What other level is there?” Alice asked.

“Philosophical. A chimp is close to how man
used
to
be. The closest to how we
are
would be the sloth.”

“Wow,” Soup said. “Sucks for the sloth.”

“I know, right?” Alice said. “Next thing he’ll start
shitting where he eats and fucking his sister.”

Fragments, things were falling apart, becoming more
difficult to align. Nothing had any kind of logical progression. Everything
seemed to happen at the same time.

For Jim it was having a small nosebleed and how red the
blood looked on his knuckle, Cherry’s hand on his knee while he lit her
cigarette, the way her lips looked when she licked them, even that thin black
line of scab on the lower lip where she chewed it when she was really, really
spun. Two Step doing a card trick that no one could figure out and they finally
got him to explain and after he did everyone lost interest because of how
simple it was. Two Step playing with that St. Christopher medal he wore, always
doing something with it, rubbing it between his fingers or sometimes he’d put
it in his mouth and give it a little bite like people in movies about old times
did with coins to see if they were real or not. As if he were testing the reality
of it. Soup popping his teeth out to make them laugh by doing his old man
getting a blow job impression and then everyone laughing more when they slipped
out of his hands and fell into the ashtray. Alice saying she still wasn’t sure
who the father of her daughter was, the scar through the center of her left
eyebrow that had been there as long as Jim had known her, her perfect tits, the
monster zit she couldn’t possibly know she had just behind her earlobe. Jim was
thinking of how he needed to space his binges out longer, how he hadn’t gotten
enough rest in between now and the party at Sue’s. There was no sense of time
passing unless it was in the small bumps of meth going up his nose.

The baby, though. The baby brought everything back to him.
The baby was just screaming and screaming but Alice ignored her and continued
with her story, which seemed as though it had been going forever.

“--which is when I was fifteen. Now that was the first time
I ever actually shot up anything, it was H, you know, and I was so fucking
trashed I couldn’t move for like eight hours, just sat in this chair and stared
at the wall, right? Which is basically why I don’t even do opiates anymore, I
mean the high was great don’t get me wrong but who wants to just sit around
looking at the fucking wall all day? And the weird thing is I found out later
that the guy who cooked me up and shot me was the same dude I lost my virginity
to like three years before, and he had really changed! I guess you age faster
when you’re in your thirties, but he looked old enough to be my dad. I kind of
grossed me out, you know? He was hot when I fucked him but the thought of it
then, when I found out who he was, it just about made me gag. So then I started
getting into coke but that was too expensive and the high doesn’t last long
enough, but I liked the up, you know. Gave me a little ambition, so I started
experimenting, I would get Ritalin from this guy with ADD and crush it up and
snort it but first I started by swallowing it, you know? I tried smoking it
once but it made me sick. Then I moved on to speed, you know, not real meth,
not real good meth anyway, just shitty cow town crank. You would be surprised
how hard it was back then to get good crank in Bakersfield, and now you can’t
walk down the street without tripping over a fucking geeter head, but when I
was seventeen I finally moved out here and that’s when I met Ronnie, and he was
a good guy most of the time, but the best thing about him was he was a dealer
and got me into meth, and now it’s, I don’t know...like...my religion, you
know?”

All this seemed to be in answer to a question no one
remembered asking. What could it have been, Jim wondered. When was the first
time you did meth? How did you end up in L.A.? He knew he would never ask Alice
those questions, because all of it led up to her giving birth to that poor
little baby.

Jim shifted in his seat, trying not to think about the baby
screaming, the waxy look of her skin, and how he could see too much of her
skull, too many of her bones. What was wrong with her, and more importantly,
why didn’t Alice go do something about it?

Because, Jim thought, Alice is what’s wrong with her.

Cherry was thinking about the baby, too, and to take her
mind off it, thought of what Alice had said, about losing her virginity at
twelve to some guy in his thirties, and not even being able to recognize him
three years later. Twelve. What had she been doing at twelve? That would have
put her in what? Sixth grade? Seventh? Cherry played volleyball in seventh
grade, was friends with Kelly Cars, they had sleep-overs mostly at Kelly’s
because Cherry was embarrassed to bring any of her friends home. They’d stay up
late and watch movies and talk about boys and eat too much candy and Cherry had
really been in to horses back then, had a few posters on her walls, and a
collection of small plastic ones on her dresser. She hadn’t started playing
guitar yet, had never heard of methamphetamine, and this was just before her
growth spurt made her one of the tallest girls in her grade and made her shirts
too tight and skirts too short, before her mother started accusing her of
sleeping around, just like everyone else at school. Of course, Cherry hadn’t
even lost her virginity until she was eighteen because she’d been deathly
afraid of getting pregnant at a young age like her mother had. Not that she
didn’t ever want a baby but she sure didn’t want one when she was still not
much more than a child herself. More than anything she didn’t want to be like
her mother, and she was afraid that if she had a kid, no matter how old she
was, she would be a horrible parent. She was afraid of being like her mother.