The Duration (14 page)

“You got it?”

He nodded.

“Keep the money. But no more rides, no more nothing. I see you again, you're fucked. I know where you live. I know your parents.”

That last bit was a nod to Officer Grevantz, who'd employed it so successfully on me as a kid. I reached into my pocket and LaBeau flinched. So I left my hand there.

“You have thirty seconds to get out of here.”

I took the Slurpee from him.

“Put that underachieving son of a bitch in the car,” I said.

Robbie Golack was struggling to his knees back by the fender.

“Mother-” he said, reaching for his pockets.

In my experience, people who are drunk or on drugs, or who have just been decked, or who are wearing tracksuits, tend to have a real overestimation of their motor skills. Robbie Golack was probably all three of those, and he was still fumbling around for his pockets when I decked him again. LaBeau grabbed him and pulled him around to the passenger-side door. I opened it and LaBeau stuffed him in. Golack started to stick his head out to say something—something like “You're fucking . . . ” something, who the fuck cares?—and I slammed the door into him, the window smacking him in his nose. For a fat guy he had a skinny-ass nose. But it wouldn't be skinny tomorrow.

I took my phone out of my pocket and held it up so LaBeau could see it.

“Fifteen seconds,” I said, taking a big pull of Slurpee. I pointed to Robbie Golack. “You tell him what's up.”

LaBeau nodded.

“Fuck, man,” he said.

“That's right,” I said, tapping myself on the chest. “Fuckman.”

LaBeau hustled over to the driver side and slid in. The Slurpee was giving me a brain-freeze. I stood on Golack's side and kicked the door for good measure. Just a glancing kick. It was a nice car.

LaBeau backed up and I could see Robbie Golack yelling something, at him or at me, whatever. I put my phone to my ear and LaBeau peeled out of the parking lot. He hit the Knotsford-Gable Road heading north, running the light by the Grub-n-Grog and vanishing around a bend.

My knuckles were red and swelling a little. I pressed them against the Slurpee. I felt good. I felt like an MMA guy. Then I felt bad, almost instantly. Almost thirty years old, a member of the bar, beating up some sad-ass mule in a motel parking lot in order to help my druggie pal. Not mature. It was the sort of behavior that one might have hoped to leave behind by now.

I took the vial out of my pocket and looked at the label. It said “Oxycodone: 40 mg.”

The dude behind the Horse Head's front desk was reading an issue of
Bowhunter
.

“Yo,” I said, dropping my Slurpee onto the counter with a mild thud. “Benecik. Fifteen. We need to change rooms.”

When Chick opened his eyes, it was 8
A.M.
I'd been awake for an hour, my stuff already in a duffle bag in the truck.

“What's up?” I said.

He looked around. Different room. His stuff was in a pile by the bed.

“What's going on?” he said.

“You had some visitors last night.”

Chick slowly patted himself, as if checking for bruises.

“I took care of it.”

I held out my purple knuckles. What a badass.

With my other hand, I took the vial out of my pocket.

“They left this,” I said.

His eyes focused slowly. Then he dropped his head back on the pillow.

“Shit.”

I put the vial on the desk.

“You remember anything? You remember seeing Tim-Rick Golack last night?”

Chick stared at the ceiling and didn't answer. After a minute, he got up gingerly and went to the bathroom. I could hear him rubbing water onto his face. When he came back out, he ambled toward the vial. I picked it up, put it in my pocket.

“When did it start?” I asked.

He looked at me, sat down on the bed, put his head in his hands.

“This shit. When did it start with the Oxy?”

They called it “hillbilly heroin” in the
Franchise
. A blight on all these rural towns.

“I don't know.” He rubbed his temples. “End of high school, I guess. After my knee. Doc gave me some pills for the pain. They helped. A lot.”

“Ten years?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Off and on,” he said. “Probably more on. Varying in intensity. SmartSeeds was good, it helped. Thought I was solid. Wasn't. Slipped up out in the Pacific, they sent me home. Florida didn't help at all. Dudes hand shit out like M&M's down there. I get back here, scene of the crime, turns out I know half the orderlies and two of the orthopedic docs at KMC. They pegged me the minute I walked through the door.”

I shook my head, bewildered.

“Guy. How come you never told me?”

He wouldn't look up.

“I thought you knew. Everyone else, when you have a bum knee and a reputation for being a weirdo, they overlook stuff.”

That broke my heart a little.

“Can you stop?”

He didn't look up, sort of shrugged.

“Trying. There's always tomorrow.”

I looked across the room. This is where it was at, a motel room and drugs. But at least he said he was trying.

“Look,” I said. “I can't be a part of this if it doesn't change.”

Chick looked up, confused.

“What do you mean?”

“You gotta get your shit together.”

I handed him a slip of paper, the address of a local substance abuse clinic on it. I'd Googled it during the night.

“Here's a place. Have you heard of it?”

Chick looked at the slip, saw what it was, and crumpled it.

“Can I have my stuff, please?” he said.

I took the vial out of my pocket and tossed it to him. It was empty.

“I flushed it,” I said.

Chick's face darkened. I could see him trying to contain himself.

“That was pretty stupid. It was a lot of money.”

“No shit,” I said. “My money.”

He looked at me.

“I paid for it. And don't bother calling them back. They're not taking your calls.”

He sat still for a minute, then flicked the vial across the room and through the bathroom door, where it hit harmlessly against the shower curtain. He lay back down on the bed.

“You don't really think that this is how it works, do you?”

I sort of did. I think I was wrong.

He covered his eyes. Seemed like he was having a little internal debate. When he took his hands away, he was smiling.

“Okay. Fine. What do you want me to do?”

“I'm glad you asked,” I said.

I had it all figured out.

“Go to that place. They've got a bed for you. Call Unsie and ask for a job. Apologize to Ginny Archey. I can't babysit you. I have to go. But stay clean for a week, just this week, and I'll come back.”

He didn't move.

I played my trump.

“We can look for the horn. Just one week. I'll come back and we can look for the horn.”

Chick rubbed his face, still smiling, his eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance.

“You don't understand,” he said, shaking his head. “I appreciate it. But you don't understand.”

I stood up.

“You don't understand,” I said. “I'm out. I cannot stay. If you want my help, leave your phone on and answer it when I call. Put me on your list at that place and tell them to talk to me. Do that and I'm here for you. If not, you're on your own.”

I went to the door and paused. Like I was really going to walk away.

“You coming?” I asked.

Chick looked at his knees. He stretched one leg out and reached for it in a weird pantomime of loosening up. Took a deep breath, then another. Finally, he stood up.

“Where else do I have to be?” he said.

I drove Chick out to the clinic, a drab, one-story institution surrounded by the Becket woods. The sign at the entrance to a long drive read “The Birches—Your Wellness Source,” like “wellness” was something you could buy, aisle six at the CVS. There were no fences, but Chick didn't have a car, and the isolation seemed beneficial. Was it the right place for him? I had no idea. Was one week there going to do him more harm than good? Possibly. Here's what I knew—it was within my budget and the only drug rehab place around that wasn't in the Knots. I helped Chick fill out the paperwork and sent him off to intake. Right before he went in, we shared a little manly hug. It scared the shit out of me.

I spent my junior year of college in Spain, learning enough Spanish to try and convince Spanish girls to sleep with me. I did not have much success, but when I came home I figured I should just run the labs and make sure that I wasn't carrying any unwanted visitors from the more progressive stretches of the Costa Brava.

I'd never been to a walk-in health clinic before, so I tore out the “Cl” page from the Yellow Pages and headed off to Great Barr. There were a few clinics listed. At the first place, a Planned Parenthood outlet off Main Street, the receptionist recognized me. She'd been in the Garden Club with my mother. I acted like I'd walked through the wrong door and left immediately. Then I went around to another place, steeled myself for the humiliation, walked up to the receptionist—an attractive young woman whom I might have hit on, were I not seeking a test for sexually transmitted diseases—and explained my predicament. She wrinkled her nose and said, “This is a mental health clinic.”

This is a roundabout way to say that I didn't know much about clinics and that I felt capable of dropping my drug-addled friend off at the wrong sort. But the Birches was an actual drug treatment clinic, if not a terribly in-demand one. It had featured prominently in the Scared Straight presentations our high school had put on years ago, and I'd vetted it just that morning on Yelp, where it got mostly good reviews from the drug addicts who had been sequestered there.

I went back into town and filled Unsie in on what was going on. Told him about Robbie Golack and the oxycodone and where Chick was. Extracted from him a reluctant promise to visit Chick on Wednesday. Said I'd be calling. Heard the bells at St. Barney's herald the start of eleven o'clock Mass.

Then I hit the Pike and didn't breathe until Boston.

I wasn't a huge fan of my job, but that week I loved it. I loved my colleagues, I loved my city, I loved riding on the urine-scented subway with people I didn't recognize. With Kelly gone, my apartment was quiet and boring, and I could do pushups and try on suits and walk around in my boxers holding a beer and nobody was like “How's that ‘Most Likely to Succeed' stuff working out?” Not that Kelly ever said that. It was more something I said to myself.

Kelly and I had one of those photo wall-collages that happy couples make, vacations and hugs and beaches and such, and when she left she took about half of the photos, the ones with us and other people, the ones where we looked happy, and the pattern that remained was like an archipelago of melancholy. So I took the rest of the photos down, boxed them up carefully, shelved them in one of the now-empty closets, and covered the holes with a long horizontal poster of spread-armed Michael Jordan, circa 1991, saying “No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.” I spread my own wings, could have touched both sides of the kitchen if I wasn't holding a beer.