The Drop (9 page)

He went down there to do a crime and the crime didn’t work out too well, left a pawnshop owner with cranial bleeding and a speech impediment, got one of Eric’s buddies shot dead and stupid-looking in the spring rain and Eric and the other buddy sent to Broad River Correctional to do three years.

Eric wasn’t built for hard time, and his third day inside he got caught in the middle of a cafeteria riot where he raised his hands in fear and managed to block a shank in midflight, the blade going straight through his hand but not into the head of a guy named Padgett Webster.

Padgett was a drug dealer with Broad River respect. Padgett became Eric’s protector. Even as he pushed Eric down on the mattress and entered his ass with a dick the length and width of a cucumber, Padgett assured Eric that he owed him. He wouldn’t forget. Eric had to look him up when he got released, call in the marker, take something to get him started in the postprison life.

Padgett was kicked loose six months before Eric, and Eric had time alone to think about things. To consider his life, the corkscrew path that led him here. His one remaining buddy in the joint—Vinny Campbell, who came down here from Boston and got busted with him—added another year to his sentence for taking a hammer to another con’s elbow in the carpentry shop. He did this on behalf of the Aryans, his new brothers, and they gave him a heroin habit as thanks, and Vinny barely talked to Eric anymore, just stumbled around with his skinhead crew, the droopy balloon bags under his eyes gone coffee-black.

At Broad River, they were the toys with the snapped limbs, the shorted battery wires, the exposed stuffing. Even if repaired, those toys were not welcomed back into the child’s room.

Eric’s only chance to make it in the world now was to create his own tablet of laws. Laws just for him. He did this one night in his cell, came up with a careful list of nine rules. He wrote them down on a sheet of paper and folded that sheet and walked out of Broad River Correctional Institution with the sheet in his back pocket, the creases fuzzy and fat from constant unfolding and refolding.

THE DAY AFTER HE
got out, Eric stole a car. He drove it to a Target off the interstate and swiped a Hawaiian shirt that was two sizes too big and a couple rolls of packing tape. He saved the little money he had to buy a gun off a guy whose name he’d been given in Broad River. Then he called Padgett from a pay phone outside of a motel in Bremeth and made arrangements, the heat wisping white off the black tar and dripping from the trees.

He sat the rest of the day in his room, remembering what the prison shrink had said—that he was not evil. His brain was not evil. He knew it wasn’t; he spent a lot of time wandering its pink folds. It was just confused and hurt and filled with misshapen parts like an auto junkyard. Underexposed photographs, a greasy glass tabletop, a sink tucked kitty-corner between two cinder-block walls, his mother’s vagina, two plastic chairs, a dimly lit bar, soiled maroon rags, a bowl of peanuts, a woman’s lips saying
I do like you, I do,
a white swing seat of hard plastic, a disintegrating baseball spewing across a gray-blue sky, a sewer grate, a rat, two Charleston Chew bars clenched in one small, sweaty hand, a tall fence, a beige cotton dress tossed over the back of a vinyl car seat, a get-well card signed by the entire sixth grade, a wooden dock with the lake lapping underneath, a pair of damp sneakers.

The List was in his back pocket as he went up the back walk to Padgett’s house at midnight. The trees dripped in the dark, dripped onto the cracked stone walkway with a soft, steady clatter. The whole state dripped. Everything was too moist in Eric’s opinion. Squishy. Midnight, and he could feel moisture beading against the back of his neck, leaving dark patches in his shirt below the armpits.

He couldn’t wait to get out of here. To put Broad River and banyan trees and the throat-clog scent of tobacco fields and textile mills and all these black people—black people everywhere, sullen and crafty and moving with a deceptive slowness—and the whole constant drip drip drip of the American South behind him.

Get back to cobblestone and an autumn bite in the night air and a decent fucking sub shop. Back to bars that didn’t play country music and streets where every third vehicle wasn’t a pickup and people didn’t drawl so thick and slow you couldn’t understand half of what they were saying.

Eric had come there to pick up a kilo of black tar heroin. Sell it up north, send the money back to Padgett on a sixty-forty split, the sixty being Padgett’s, the forty Eric’s, but still a good deal because Eric didn’t have to front the price of the product. Padgett was just going to give it to him on trust, pay back his debt for what Eric did with his hand.

Padgett opened the door to a screened-in porch, and the small shack creaked in a sliver of breeze that shimmied through the trees. The porch was lit by a green bulb and smelled of wet animal and Eric noticed a bag of charcoal propped up to the right of the door beside a rusted Hibachi and a cardboard box filled with empty wine coolers and fifths of Early Times.

Padgett said, “Ain’t you a sight, boy?” and clapped him on the shoulder. Padgett was slim and hard and his muscles rippled with gristle. His hair, gone mostly to white, looked like snow on a coalfield, and he smelled of the heat and the banana-musk breeze. “A white sight at that. Ain’t had one of your kind ’round here in a long time.”

To get here, Eric had followed the main strip through the flyspeck town, took a right past the train tracks, left behind a stretch of three gas stations, one bar, and a 7-Eleven. He drove three miles through rutted streets hash-cut by dirt alleys, jungles of rotting eucalyptus spilling over abandoned shotgun shacks, the last white face somewhere back before the train tracks and a thousand years away. Maybe one working streetlight for every four blocks of sloping houses and dark-scrabble fields. Brothers standing on collapsed porches drinking 40s and smoking blunts, car heaps rusting through riotous stalks of grass, while ebony, high-boned sisters scuffled past cracked, uncovered windows, babies held to their shoulders. Midnight, and the whole place lethargically awake, waiting for someone to come turn off the heat.

He said to Padgett as they entered the house, “You got some humidity around here, man.”

“Shit, yeah,” the old man said. “We do got enough of that to go around. How you been, nigger?”

“Awright.” They passed through a living room gone curled and rank in the heat, Eric remembering how Padgett used to lie on top of him after lights-out and whisper “My white little nigger” in his ear as his fingers clenched his hair.

“This here Monica,” Padgett said as they entered the kitchen.

She sat by a table pressed lengthwise against the window, all blown-out features and knobby joints, eyes as wide and dead as a pair of sinkholes, skin stretched too tight for the bone underneath. Eric knew from conversations in his cell that she was Padgett’s woman, mother of four kids long gone from here, and that just to the right of her hand was a sawed-off twelve-gauge hanging from hooks screwed to the underside of the table.

Monica took a sip from her wine cooler, grimaced in acknowledgment, went back to leafing through a magazine by her elbow.

Rule Number One, Eric thought. Remember Rule Number One.

“Don’t mind her,” Padgett said as he opened the fridge. “She all cranky ’tween about eleven pee-em and noon the next day.” He handed Eric a can of Milwaukee’s Best from a full battalion of them that filled the top shelf, took another out for himself, and shut the door.

“Monica,” he said, “this the man I been telling you about, little nigger who saved my life. Show her your hand, man.”

Eric raised his palm in front of her face, showed her the cabled knot of scars where the shank went straight through, came out the other side. Monica gave it a flick of a nod, and Eric dropped the hand. He still couldn’t feel shit in there, though everything worked okay.

Monica turned her eyes back to her magazine, flipped a page. “I know who he is, old fool. You ain’t shut up about that place since the day you walked out of it.”

Padgett gave Eric a beam of a smile. “So how long you been out?”

“The day.” Eric took a long sip of his beer.

They spent a few minutes talking about Broad River. Eric filled Padgett in on some of the power struggles he missed, most of them just noise, told him of the screw who shipped out on a medical when he pilfered the wrong con’s stash, started thinking his skin had turned purple and tore off several fingernails scratching against a wall in the yard. Padgett pumped him for as much gossip as he could, and Eric remembered what an old hen Padgett had always been, sitting out every morning by the weight benches with the older cons, all of them cackling and dishing like they were on a talk show.

Padgett dumped their empties in a wastebasket and got them two more, handed Eric his. “I told you eighty-twenty on the split, right?”

Eric felt a bad vibe enter the room. “Told me sixty-forty.”

Padgett leaned forward, eyes going wide. “And me fronting you the purchase? Nigger, you might have saved my life, but, shit . . .”

“Just telling you what you told me.”

“What you
think
you
heard,
” the old man said. “Nah, nah. It’s going to be eighty-twenty. Send you walking out my door with a full key? Don’t know if I’ll see you again? That’s a lot of trust, man. Damn truckload of trust.”

“You got that right,” Monica said, eyes on her magazine.

“Yeah. It’s eighty-twenty.” Padgett’s happy eyes went small and unhappy. “We clear?”

“Sure,” Eric said, feeling small, feeling white. “Sure, Padgett, that’s fine.”

Padgett beamed another of those hundred-watt smiles. “Yeah. I could say ninety-ten and really, what you gone do about it, nigger, am I right?”

Eric shrugged, drank some more beer, eyes on the sink.

“I said, ‘Am I right?’”

Eric looked over at the old man. “You’re right, Padgett.”

Padgett nodded and banged his beer can off Eric’s, took a swig.

Rule Number Two, Eric reminded himself. Don’t ever forget that one. Not for one second in your whole life.

A slim guy in a multicolored cotton bathrobe and tan socks walked into the kitchen, sniffling, a wad of tissue held to his upper lip. Jeffrey, Eric figured, Padgett’s baby brother. Padgett told him once that Jeffrey had killed five men that he
knew of,
said it didn’t bother Jeffrey no more than taking a swim. Said if Jeffrey had a soul, they’d have to send out a search party for it.

Jeffrey had the dull eyes of a mole, and they rolled across Eric’s face. “How you doing? You awright?”

Eric says, “I’m good. You?”

“I’m awright.” Jeffrey dabbed his nose with the tissue. He sucked hard and wet through his nostrils, opened a cabinet above the sink and pulled down a bottle of Robitussin. He snapped off the cap with a flick of his thumb, tilted his head back, and drained half the bottle.

“How you feeling really?” This from Monica, eyes still on the magazine, but it was the first interest she’d shown in anything or anyone since Eric had come in the house.

“Not good,” Jeffrey said. “Motherfucker got up in me, don’t want to come out.”

“Should have you some soup,” Monica said. “Keep a blanket around you.”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “Yeah, you right.” He screwed the cap back on the Robitussin, put it back on the shelf.

Padgett said, “You talk to that nigger?”

“Which nigger?”

“One always down front the Pic-N-Pay.”

Rules Number Three and Five, Eric repeated in his head like a mantra. Three and Five.

“I talked to him.” Jeffrey sucked hard through his nose again, dabbed underneath it with the tissue.

“And?”

“And what? Nigger’s the same place every day. He ain’t going nowhere.”

“Ain’t him I’m worried about. His friends.”

“Friends.” Jeffrey shook his head. “That boo’s friends ain’t a problem.”

“How you figure?”

Jeffrey coughed several times into the back of his hand, the hacks tearing up through his chest like cleavers pulled through a sea of hubcaps. He wiped his eyes and looked over at Eric, as if seeing him for the first time.

Saw something in Eric’s face suddenly that he did not like.

He said to Padgett, “You pat this boy down?”

Padgett waved it away. “Aw, just look at him. He ain’t up for no trouble.”

Jeffrey hawked a load of phlegm into the sink. “You fucking up, old man. You slipping.”

“Like I been saying,” Monica said in a tired singsong, flipped another page.

“White boy.” Jeffrey crossed the kitchen. “I got to pat you down, man.”

Eric placed his beer on the corner of the stove top, held out his arms.

“Try not to give you my cold.” Jeffrey stuffed the tissue paper in his bathrobe pocket. “You don’t want the motherfucker, neither.” His hands pressed against Eric’s chest, then waist, testicles, the inside of his thighs and his ankles. “Fills your head tight. My throat feel like a motherfucking cat fell down it, started clawing its way back up.” Jeffrey gave Eric’s lower back a quick, confident feel-around, sniffled.

“Awright, you clean.” He turned to Padgett. “That hard, old man?”

Padgett rolled his eyes at Jeffrey.

Eric scratched the back of his neck and wondered how many people had died in this house. As he had so often in prison, he marveled at how boring and basic the worst in people could be. The light above his head worked its way through his scalp, spread hot through his brain.

Jeffrey said, “Where that knottyhead at?”

Padgett pointed to a bottle of Seagram’s gin on the shelf above the oven.

Jeffrey took it down, grabbed a glass. “Thought I told you about keeping it in the freezer. Like my shit cold, man.”

Padgett said, “You need to get up on out of here, buy yourself a shawl. You become an old woman, Jeffrey.”

The room swayed a bit as Eric scratched the back of his neck, his fingers going down behind his collar and then down between his shoulder blades. He felt hot and his head drummed and his mouth was dry. So dry. As if he’d never taste another drink till the day he died. He noticed his can of beer sitting where he put it when Jeffrey frisked him. He considered reaching for it, then decided he couldn’t afford to.