It took a few days for Hayes to return the mortar and pestle. When he came, I was in the bathroom scrubbing the ring of soap scum off the bathtub, so I didn’t hear the door. Mom never seemed to notice this brown ring of sticky muck, but I got tired of watching it grow each morning. I noticed a dark blob of shadow slide across the tile floor. But when I turned around, no one was there. I took off my rubber kitchen gloves and set them on the edge of the tub.
First, I noticed the mortar and pestle sitting on Mom’s vanity table. It took me a moment to hear the scraping sound on the other side of the bed. I stepped around to see what was making it, and there was Hayes picking through the carpet on his hands and knees.
“Hey, dorko,” I shouted, making him jerk up and hit his head on the corner of the dresser, “you drop your brain?”
“Ha, ha,” Hayes said, rubbing the back of his head. He looked pasty-faced and agitated. “Ha. Say, Little Flipper, I might of mislaid something important here the other day. A white plastic package wrapped in duct tape about yea big?” He stretched out his hands the length of a cat’s tail. “I was hoping maybe … actually, come to think on it, it might could be in a clear Ziploc bag. Anyway, I remember I put it in a safe place and now it’s, well, too safe. But it’s, umm, very—”
“Important?” I said, enjoying this way too much.
“Yeah.” He smiled and rocked from heel to toe on his beat-up old cowboy boots, looking very pleased to see I understood. “Very. Man, Flipper, man, I can’t thank you—”
“Nope.” I edged forward a little. “Haven’t seen anything like that. I would of noticed too.”
“No, really, no fooling now,” Hayes said, his eyes shiny with something that looked awful close to real tears. “You got to understand. I’m serious as shit here. I mean, this is important. To me. Shit. Fuck. I got to—damn it—”
“Finish making your pill flour?”
His eyes darted here and there, scanning the carpet. “If I hadn’t of lost that package, it wouldn’t of needed doing. And now I’m all out of—” He gave me a crafty look, the type he invented when he thought he was getting one over on me. This belief in his own sneakiness appeared to cheer him a good bit.
“What was that stuff you were making?” I asked.
Hayes explained the pills were some type of hormones for dogs. Dog relaxers, he called them. All the while, he kept picking up bits of lint, lost buttons, and even an unpopped popcorn kernel, holding them up to the light and then chucking them over his shoulder.
“So why were you sucking on them? Aren’t you worried you’ll start growing fur and some sort of weird dog muscles?”
“It’s the easiest way to get the coating off, so I can crush them. If you’re careful, they don’t even get all that wet. You just brush them off with your shirt and then you’re good to go.” Hayes gnawed on his thumb for a second before deciding to pull the dresser out a few inches. This was work that required grunting. Whatever he was looking for, it didn’t seem to be back there. He left the dresser pulled back from the wall and moved on to the vanity.
It still sounded hinky to me. But I knew Hayes really did breed dogs. Under normal circumstances, that’s about all he wanted to talk about. He trained rat terriers. Mom said he actually fought them against rats.
“Looky here,” I said, bending over and snatching one of his dog pills off the carpet under the vanity.
Hayes slid over the bed with both hands out. His eyes got big and hungry. I closed my hand around the pill and stepped back. He made a swipe at it, but I jumped away.
“Come on now, Flipper. Give it here!”
“That ain’t no way to behave. Calm down, Mr. Grabby Hands.”
I opened my hand and looked at his pill. A dull green thing about the size of an Advil with the number 80 pressed into one side. I cupped both hands around it and shook it like a pair of dice. Hayes’s eyes followed every movement of my hands. He smiled, but it looked like it took a lot of work to get those lip muscles curling. As I was about to sit down on the bed beside him, he grabbed my wrist and tried to pry open my hand.
“Ow!” I shrieked. “Stop, you asshole. You’re hurting me.” I kicked him on the shin as hard as I could and his grip loosened long enough for me to slip away. I was out the door and into the bathroom in a flash. The lock clicked into place barely a second before his hand shook the knob.
“Sorry about that, Flipper. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Hayes said through the door crack. “It’s only I need it back. It’s kind of important.”
The bathroom door had one of those easy-to-pick locks. The kind you can open with a bobby pin. I didn’t have much time before he’d get in.
“Please, Flipper. Just give me the pill.”
“You had a whole mess of them the other day. Why you need this one pill so bad?”
“I told you, I hid the main bunch real good and I seem to of forgot where. Either that or the trash man got it when he carted off the sofa on my lawn. I might could of tucked them there for safekeeping. I don’t know. Anyway, those you saw were set aside for something else. Then when I lost the big stash, I had to crush the set-aside ones for the buyer along with a bit of baking soda to fill out the bag some. You know, for it to look like a respectable count. But it weren’t hardly enough pill and too much soda besides. I need more pills. Way it stands now, that shit ain’t fit for nothing. Believe you me, I tried.”
“You tried? You ate some of the dog drugs yourself?”
“On a dog. He ate it. Didn’t much like it as far I could tell. Barked all night.” Hayes poked at the lock with something metallic.
“You bust in on me, Hayes, and I’ll flush it. I swear I will.”
The scratching stopped. Hayes thought so hard, I could hear his last five brain cells overheating on the other side of the door. They made the same sound my mom’s transmission did when it was on the fritz. I rubbed my thumbnail up and down the edge of the jamb.
“You hear that, Hayes? It’s your pill. It seems to want to take a swim. Tell me the truth now.”
Hayes took a breath, held it for two or three toe taps, then let it out with a defeated grumble. The pills, according to him, were really to dope the dogs, so they would lose their fights after he bet against them. If he crushed the pills, it made it easier to slip the stuff into a poor dog’s water bowl. Somebody had offered him big bucks for a bunch of these pills.
“God,” I said, “and you lost them. Maybe it’s for the best. Seems like a low-down business.”
“Yeah, well. If you ain’t noticed, I’m a little short on folding money these days.” He sighed. “The drugs don’t hurt them none. The dogs, I mean.”
This story, I figured, was just sleazy enough to be true. I pushed the pill out through the crack under the door. His plan seemed to me a mite too clever to of started its life in Hayes’s itty-bitty brain. The number of normal brains in his circle of pals numbered exactly zero. I hope you know what you’re doing, Mom, I thought. If it was you who put this idea in his head.
“There,” I said, “give this to your dogs with my compliments.”
“God bless you, Flipper.”