OCCASIONALLY, BEN SPECULATED ABOUT SLIM’S private life. He must be rich after 30 years as a dealer, but he still ran the Dirty Ditty, still drove a burgundy ’91 Mercury Grand Marquis. Somehow he got it past state inspection, even with Bondo around the wheel wells. The vehicle was so old it had a cassette player, and Slim still had cassettes: Motörhead, AC/DC, very early Nine Inch Nails. Guns N’ Roses was playing at lullaby volume. Was Slim married, did he have children? A cat, a dog, a fish? Ben imagined he owned a Caribbean island, and one day he’d just vanish from East Montrose. The Dirty Ditty’s gum-eyed regulars would show up, but the door would be locked, they’d wait mewling like abandoned kittens in the stairwell.
Ben and Slim were parked at a pullout on Diamond Hill opposite the old cemetery, one of Slim’s favorite meeting places because he could see cars coming in either direction and he could peruse the old gravestones. The compilation of loss refreshed his perspective on life’s ephemeral nature, he’d said. But also: time absolved all sins, even drug dealing. The children affected Slim most. “Infant boy, died 1823,” he’d tell Ben. Or, “Ester Rose, 1801–1805, Thou art in Heaven. Tragedy.”
Slim lit up a Cool, exhaled as he spoke. Nonchalance was important to Slim. “Tried vaping the other day. Thought, ya know, the modern thing, gotta keep up with the times and all. But it’s not the same thing, is it? I slept with a girl with fake tits once. Didn’t realize till I got her home, they looked great but it woulda been like tryin’ to tit-fuck a couple of basketballs and who wants that?”
Ben nodded, who indeed. But Slim wasn’t looking to parley, he did not care for anyone else’s ideas or opinions. He was not a friend, not even an acquaintance. He was a drug dealer. And, so, by association, was Ben. Ben wanted to excuse himself, he didn’t feel like a dealer, or how he imagined Slim to feel: sly, confident, wary, mercenary. In the beginning, he’d been resentful that he’d had to do this, but people had worse lives, people had cancer, people lived in terrible countries with terrible wars. Now he felt pretty much nothing, he didn’t even try to get his head around the irony of being a heroin dealer. Generally, he considered irony the universe’s most powerful force, stronger than gravity. The most ironic thing that could happen was usually what happened.
Slim was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, though—Ben noticed—not in time to the music. “We gotta problem, Benito.”
A car drove past, a ferrety old man in a battered Subaru Outback with a big mutt-dog riding shotgun and Bernie for President stickers all over the bumpers. The dog glanced at Ben and Slim as it drove by and let out a self-important bark. “NPR-listening mother-fucker,” Slim mumbled, then barked back, a sudden wild, manic lurching and Ben smelled the panic smell of Slim’s sweat.
When the car had gone and silence resumed, he turned to Ben, his voice calm again: “Feds.”
Slim had endured because his instinct for narcs was exquisite; he could smell them on the wind like a turkey vulture scenting carrion. Ben listened up.
“Some new task force.” Slim sucked his Cool. “Undercover bitches.”
Did Slim mean bitches as in women agents, or, in a more purely misogynistic sense, that all undercover agents were bitches?
“Your friend, Frank,” Slim said.
“Frank, yeah?”
“You trust him?”
“Frank is not going to talk to the cops. I guarantee it.”
“Guarantee?” Slim snorted. “He dead, then?”
“I’ve known Frank a long time.”
Slim merely smoked his Cool, tapping, tapping out of rhythm. “The other guys?”
“Ed and Moses?” Ben shook his head. “They’re solid.”
“All I know is this shit is deep undercover. Jacques Cousteau, like.”
“You want to hold off?”
“Nah. We’ve gotta shift it now. This week. Get rid of it. No phone calls, no connections. Eyes on, Benito, eyes on. We do not get careless. But we shift it fast.”
“Gotcha,” Ben said.
“Oh, yeah,” Slim reached into his glove compartment and handed Ben a brown paper bag. “Per your request. You would not believe the range of merchandise available. You can even get rabbit piss. The internet, eh? They’re catheterizing bunnies. There is some sick shit out there, man.”
Ben took the bag, made as if to pay. But Slim waved him aside, “It’s on me. It’s got a trace of THC.” He started the Marquis, the engine rumbled, throaty, well-oiled and tended. “Agnes Gillman, 1842–1869,” he went on. “Baby’s buried right next to her. A real heartbreaker.”
After Slim had gone, Ben waited in his truck—20, 30 minutes, watching the woods, listening. Deer couldn’t stand still for more than five minutes, and a person got shifty before that. Chickadees, squirrels scrabbling in the understory, a downy woodpecker looping over the cemetery. There was no one here, Ben was sure, but he waited another ten minutes, just the same.
The old man and the dog passed the other way in their Subaru. DEA agents, Ben mused. But that was the point, wasn’t it? You couldn’t tell. They weren’t going to show up here in suits and cheap ties, like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some felt-shoed liberal and his dog in a clapped out Subaru, pretending to listen to Fresh Air with Terry Gross: the perfect cover in rural Vermont.
Grabbing his backpack, Ben got out of the truck and entered the cemetery’s small gate. The stones were lopsided, some had fallen over. He walked among them. Dead babies, dead children, Vermont’s hillsides were their catacombs. They had once died of disease and cold winters; now they were punched in the head, thrown against walls. Or their deaths were slower: spite, meanness, left out with the dogs.
Ben looked around at the trees, the dappled light, waving leaves, the grass under his boots, tightly woven, newly mowed. Someone kept the graves, trimmed the weeds, remembered the dead. He found Agnes Gillman and her dead baby. He slid his fingers under the gravestone, listened hard for the sound of a car, the crack of twig under-foot. Nothing, silence. He pulled on latex gloves, lifted up the granite, took hold of the first plastic-bound brick, slid it into the backpack, then the next, the next, all six, all six kilos. Why kilos? This was a joke he had with himself: only drug dealers and Canadians used metric, and Canadians used Canadian metric. As he replaced the headstone, he felt the desolation of Agnes. She’d only been 19.
He drove to Ed’s, he kept checking his rear-view mirror. It was a bad feeling, nervy, like tweeking. He remembered his mother once, after a bad eight-ball, the carpet burns on her face from peeping under the door. The windows of the motel were all blacked out, but there was a quarter-inch gap under the door that let in daylight. She’d been convinced Satanists were coming to get her for their next human sacrifice, so she knelt on her elbows and knees for hours, moving her head back and forth, back and forth on the crusty shag rug, watching every shadow. You watch the shadows, Benben, the shadows coming in here, the shadows moving too fast.
It was easy to lose the ability to tell fact from fear, and it was easy to see patterns. Patterns felt safer than the random. It was also a matter of self-importance: to put oneself at the center of a scheme just because that felt better than redundancy. Still, Slim’s fear crawled all over him like ants. Cops. Undercover bitches.
Ed was tinkering with his chainsaw carvings. Seeing Ben, he turned off the saw. “Howya?”
Ben pulled to a stop, nodded to what might be a giant, angry squirrel. “Looking good,” he said.
The carvings were an idea Ed’d had to make extra cash. He set up a display at the local fairs carving the sculptures, Indian heads, turtles, and such, attracting mostly lost children and solitary men in camo. He was nimble and quick with the saw, but he had no flair, no “eye” as the arty people called it. He made the bear’s head so big it looked deformed; the turtle’s shell too small, a mutant. That didn’t matter with Ben, Ben didn’t need a frigging artist.
Ed smelled strongly of iodine from cleaning the teats of his dairy cows. It was a smell that never wore off; you couldn’t wash it from your hands. After backing the truck up to the cow barn, they unloaded the drugs into garbage bags as the radio played country and Western for the cows, and they stored the bags deep within a stack of hay bales. It wasn’t hard work, but the afternoon was hot, and they were sweating.
Ed clapped his hand on Ben’s shoulder, “You want some Newman’s Lemonade? I just opened a fresh tin.”
“Sure,” Ben replied.
They turned toward the house as a Ford Focus with out of state plates drove past, heading fast back toward the main road. A woman, Ben ascertained, coming from the dead end, coming from the direction of his house.
“Lookie loo,” said Ed.
Ben watched the car until it turned the bend, out of sight.