Aiden hated to spend every dime they made from the copper on dope, any kind of dope, but he especially hated to blow it all on crystal. Even though he wanted to get high, methamphetamine had never been his drug. Back before Bennie Hazel got gooney and smashed the old lady’s head to a pulp with a T-ball bat, Aiden used to buy pills from Gerty Brinkley. She may have just been the unluckiest woman ever to be born of this earth.
The way the story was told, Gerty and her husband, Frank, had a little girl named Pearl, and Pearl was the cutest thing God ever made. Pearl wasn’t more than five years old, chasing lightning bugs at the edge of a honeysuckle thicket, when a black coyote poured off a hillside and took her without so much as a gasp. Gerty caught sight from the kitchen window and Frank grabbed the gun, laid the lead to that dog, but, when it was settled, that darling girl was mauled something long past saving.
Folks said Frank never spoke another word. One morning he woke up, took his shave like he always did, and ran that long razor right straight across his neck like he was opening a sack of seed. They said he just stood there in front of the mirror and watched without a sound or expression until what washed over him left him too woozy to stand and he collapsed into the puddle he’d made. That’s how Gerty found him. That was before the cancer ate her.
When Aiden came to know Gerty Brinkley she lived off Shook Cove, and doctors kept her prescriptions coming just as fast as pharmacists could fill them. She always had OxyContin and when he was lucky she had Dilaudid. Once she’d had morphine suckers, but the OxyContin was what Aiden fancied.
The old woman barely had a single hair left on her head, just a few thin strands that waved about like feather fluff whenever she moved. The veins in her head shone through her scalp and she wore a thick pair of glasses that swelled her eyes two sizes too big. It was saddening to even look at her, but listening to her was unbearable. She loved to talk Jesus, never would shut up about that water walker. Every time Aiden was there it was all he could do to get away in an hour for the likes of all her preaching, but he had to stay for the whole sermon to score the dope. She said she sold the pills to raise money for the church, all that cash funding Jesus’s doings. “I can take the suffering now,” she’d say, “just knowing what awaits.”
What awaited Gerty Brinkley was Bennie Hazel, and he’d been up a week straight. They said he beat her until her head was just as flat as cube steak. There were times when Aiden had thought of robbing her, but the few beliefs he had kept him from acting. There was a part of him that had always believed in God and the devil. But when Bennie Hazel did that to Gerty Brinkley, that was the day Aiden McCall did away with God. If there was a God, He wasn’t worth a damn. The devil wins out every time.
Aiden always cared about everything in this world a little too much, like at any minute this old hunk of rock might go spinning off its axis and shoot off into the Milky Way somewhere. Those thoughts kept him up at night and perhaps that’s why he preferred pills. He liked downers and Thad liked uppers. Uppers made Aiden think too much, and him thinking too much had always been a dangerous thing. But ever since Gerty died, there hadn’t been much in the way of pills. There for a while the doctors had prescribed Thad some pretty good painkillers for his back, but when they called him in randomly to check his script and all the pills were gone, that free ride ended fast. Now Aiden did whatever was on the table.
With the house Aiden and Thad stripped, they took 243 pounds of copper. The rate was $2.83 per pound, their haul worth nearly seven hundred dollars at the scrap yard. But they couldn’t go to the scrap yard. The boys who ran the scales snitched to lawmen on those who tried to make an honest living stealing from millionaires and banks. The way Aiden saw it, he and Thad weren’t stripping the houses of hardworking families. They stripped foreclosures, and, in winter, the second homes of millionaires who had the gall to use copper for gutters and downspouts on a mountain where most folks survived on winter gardens and canned meat. Those assholes had it coming.
Since the scrap yard was out of the question, he and Thad sold their copper to a general contractor named Nicholson, who, despite the slow business of others, seemed to keep a full calendar of remodels and, because of that, had a reason to haul truckloads of copper to the yard. Nicholson was a businessman and he knew they had no other option, so he offered two fifty and Thad shook his hand. The whole thing made Aiden sick.
The dope house marked the dead end of a long, muddy cut that ran three miles from pavement. There were trailers scattered along the first mile, but after that a long stretch of woods and rutted trail swept into the holler. The tweakers in those trailers were customers just like Aiden and Thad, and as the two drove by, those wild eyes stared down on them from porches and windows like owls. Late at night, those addicts would stumble down to the road and stand peering into headlights to decipher friend from fiend. But there was still an hour or two of evening light and they knew Aiden’s ride, so there’d be no warning calls sounded.
At the house, the tweakers were always lit. Sometimes there were loads of them bouncing around the property like a circus of fleas, and it wouldn’t take long till Thad jumped onto his pogo stick and sprang right alongside them. The world was already spinning fast and so Aiden had always preferred dope that slowed that whirling to molasses. But life was too slow for Thad, and he loved how buzzard dust mashed the gas.
Two girls, one tall and skinny and a fat gal wearing a nightgown, slinked along the edge of the woods. A wiry man with his shirt off and lightbulbs for eyes came toward the Ranchero as Aiden and Thad pulled up. The man stared into the cab, his face pitted with acne scars and his sunken jaw working like his mind held all sorts of ideas. Aiden watched him closely, but the man walked past and his stringy mullet never turned. He headed further into obscurity and joined those two girls along the muddy drive.
“Where y’all going?” Thad hollered. He was already drunk again, almost too drunk to stand, having bought another bottle of whiskey just as soon as the money touched his hand. The booze was nearly finished before they left the trailer. Thad had drunk faster than usual, knowing that as soon as he got the dope up his nose his mind would even out. He was always loud when he and Aiden went to see friends, just wouldn’t shut the hell up to save his life, but he was especially bad around women. Thad had the door open and stood on the doorjamb with his upper half waving above the cab, as he banged on the roof and yelled, “Nose to nose my toes is in it, and toe to toe my nose is in it. There’s plenty to go around!”
The two girls glanced back and the fat one snickered like that just might suit her, but it was that wiry, wide-eyed boy that stopped and turned. He stood there and didn’t say a word, his eyes aglow from fifty yards like an animal’s. Aiden stepped out of the car and glared to where he stood. They watched each other for a moment, but the man turned, and he and the two girls disappeared like shadows.
The dope house was an old white one-story built like the homes in a mill village. The white paint had aged to the chipped and crackled color of bone. Tall windows were set one on each side with a small porch centered between. The front door was open and light shone through the windows and doorway, making that place look like a skull with a candle burning inside.
Wayne Bryson was on the front porch, shaking a two-liter bottle filled with a bright blue liquid that sloshed and fizzed like some childhood science experiment. He twisted the top and burped the bottle after every shake to ease the gas building inside. His eyes stayed fixed and he never blinked, as if a moment unfocused would crash the spell he cast, his hands whirling household chemicals into crank.
“Who was the legs?” Thad asked as he walked toward the house.
“Shit, that’s Julie Dietz, and that thing’d look like a wagon track through a cow pie.” Wayne’s words blew against a red bandanna he had tied around his face. He flicked his eyes to where the three had vanished, but snapped his stare back onto the bottle and stopped shaking as the plastic swelled tight. White chunks that looked like rock salt washed around in the bottom, and lithium strips melted into a copper film on the surface. Wayne unscrewed the cap, burped the bottle again, and an acrid gray steam seeped into summer air. “My cousin fucked her and he said she don’t even trim down there.”
“You don’t like hair pie?”
“I don’t like it looking like a stump full of spiders. That’s damn near thirty years of growth, boys. I’m talking granddaddy longlegs.”
Thad laughed, and he and Aiden stood there while Wayne worked the bottle until crystals formed.
“Who was that with her?” Aiden asked.
Wayne kept focused on his potion but answered with a nod. “The fat one?”
“No, that wiry boy.”
“That’s Doug, Dougie Dietz, Julie Dietz’s brother. Why?” Wayne spoke speed track sentences that took a second or two to untangle.
“You remember him, Aid. He was the one they caught fooling around with that little girl when we were in high school. It was all over the papers. Her daddy, I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, but he found them back behind the barn and Doug Dietz had that girl mashed up against an old Farmall.”
“What little girl?”
“I know you remember. It was all over the papers. I can’t think of that man’s name to save my life.” Thad looked straight overhead as if God alone could give him the answer.
“Murphy,” Wayne said.
“That’s right. Something Murphy. Lives down there by Ken’s Grocery in that trailer park. Lays rock. He lays rock for a living.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Well, he caught that son of a bitch with his little girl and he damn near beat that Dietz boy’s brains out. Wish he had. I’d do it myself.” Thad toppled forward and put one foot on the wooden step to catch his balance. “And I bet you that’s why his sister right there don’t shave her puss, Wayne. Reckon if she had that thing skinned that old nasty son of a bitch wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her. That’s how them pedophiles are, I’m telling you. Fuck their own sister if they get the chance.”
“I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.”
“Aw, Doug, Dougie don’t mean nothing, man, Dougie just looks like that. He looks like that all the time.” Wayne burped the bottle, shook it once more, and studied what floated and sank as if it might offer some glimpse into the future. “And he swears up and down he didn’t do that.”
“Well, fuck him’s all I know.” Thad slapped the rotted wood railing leading up the front steps and stomped the planks beneath him. “The real question is how much longer you got to dick around with that bottle before you can sell us a bag?”
“Almost there, Mr. Broom. This shit takes time.”
A year before, there was a man named Charlie McNeely who had Jackson County gourded on some of the finest dope to ever hit the mountains. He had crystals as big around as his thumb and just as clear as quartz. How the law told it, Charlie’s son stabbed his old man to death, then took out a deputy or two in a murder-suicide that played out in their front yard. After that, once the McNeely dope dried up, the whole scene turned wild. There was at least one person in every holler who cooked dope, and the folks who finally took the reins were the ones who controlled the medicine. The trick was to build an army to buy every box of pseudoephedrine from Arden to Murphy. The feds had an eye on what was being sold, but if a man had enough people, the ingredients could be walked right out of Walmart. Wayne Bryson had done just that.
When they made it inside, there weren’t enough holes in Wayne’s house to air out the ammoniac stench that settled on windows and walls. He left every yellowed windowpane lifted, the doors opened, and box fans blowing loud as warehouse exhaust, but none of it did a thing to soften the smell. It made Aiden’s eyes water and nose burn like a tomcat had marked every square inch of the house, but Wayne didn’t even seem to notice anymore.
Wayne untied the bandanna from his face and shoved the rag down the back pocket of his jeans. The crystal had started to deepen the shadows of his face, a fast-paced hollowing of features that uncovered a man’s skeleton. He’d always been wiry, but the dope burned off any lean muscle he’d ever had and now he was as scrawny as a gutted squirrel. Even his pile of greasy hair seemed too big for his head. The motor-oil-speckled jeans cinched tight to his waist had at least four inches to give, and the WrestleMania shirt he wore with cut-off sleeves damn near swallowed him.
Wayne hit the power on his stereo, a Drive-By Truckers album Aiden hadn’t heard in ages coming over the speakers. “Have a seat,” he said, slapping his palm against a coffee table by the couch before he disappeared into the back of the house.
Wayne came back into the living room with a half-filled ziplock bag, at least an ounce of yellow crystal coarse as pea gravel. He tossed the bag onto the coffee table the way a man might toss his car keys, and slid a stamp-sized baggie from underneath an ashtray. When others stopped by, the bags were already filled, and Wayne swapped them fast for crumpled wads of cash. But he’d known Thad for a long time and for whatever reason trusted him, almost seemed to look up to him, especially once Thad came back from the Army. So Wayne always weighed what Thad and Aiden bought in front of them.
He brought out the big bag of higher-grade dope he usually saved for himself. There was no reason in the world he should have believed Aiden and Thad any different from the others, but Aiden thought, in that line of work, a man might be searching for at least one friend, one person he believes won’t slit his throat, and, for Wayne, that was Thad Broom. Aiden would’ve dug Wayne’s grave in a heartbeat, never even thought twice, but Wayne’s dope was as clean as any shake-and-bake meth coming out of Jackson County, so Thad made Aiden promise to keep his hands to himself.
“How much y’all want?”
“A hundred a gram?” Thad asked.
“Got to be a buck twenty.”
“One twenty? You hear this shit, Aid? Skinning us.”
“Anybody else’d be one fifty.”
“That ain’t my problem.”
“And it ain’t mine whether or not you find that other twenty.”
“Just a gram, then.” Thad looked to Aiden as if he might give him the okay on buying two, but Aiden wasn’t ready to drop all the cash they had. It was hard enough to save anything, but there was no telling when the next payday would come.
Wayne swung his rag of hair out of his eyes and shoveled crystals into the baggie with a plastic spoon. He shook a little back out, flicked the corner of the bag till the shards settled, eyed it, sealed it, and tossed it onto digital scales.
“Why you weighing that shit in the bag?” Thad hollered.
“Why you always asking questions?”
“I ain’t trying to buy plastic bags.”
“Bag’s a gram. Dope’s a gram. Ought to weigh two.” Wayne pointed down to the scales where numbers bounced back and forth between 2.2 and 2.1 on an illuminated blue screen. “A cunt’s hair heavy, if you ask me.”
“Heavy my ass.” Thad reached down and snatched the bag before Wayne could even think of shaving it back.
Wayne laughed under his breath, reached over, and killed the power on the scales. “Do a rail right fast?”
“Out of your bag, we’ll do as much as you want.” Thad counted out six twenty-dollar bills and handed them over. “What you say, Aid?”
Aiden nodded and Thad tapped out half the bag onto the table. He drew his billfold from his back pocket, slid his expired license from a sleeve, and started to mash crystal into powder beneath the card. Aiden watched him closely as he ran the butt end of a cigarette lighter over the top of the card, crunched shards into dust, and when it was ground as fine as he could get it, he cut the dope into two lines.
“That ain’t enough to cook a toad,” Wayne said, then spooned more from his bag and piled it between the lines Thad cut. “Divvy it up.”
Thad went back to grinding, pushing, and turning the butt end of that lighter like he was milling medicine with a mortar and pestle. Aiden studied him as he raked the pile into three rails and scraped each across the table till they all had a thick trail of dope carved in front of them. Wayne snatched a straw from the table, slid his sodbuster from the side pocket of his jeans, and snipped the straw into thirds with the knife blade against his thumb. They each took a straw, Wayne counted down, and when liftoff came, they bowed like a family in prayer and walked their noses straight through dope as fine as broken glass.
The crystal burned them all the same, lit spot fires like a drip torch in each of their noses, and Aiden cleared his throat loudly with his eyes bulged to try and snuff it out. Thad howled over speakers rattling the Drive-By Truckers’ “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” and Wayne sparked off the couch with his head jerking from side to side.
“Got something you boys got to see to believe,” Wayne yelled before he shot off for his bedroom. “This shit’s going to blow your minds.”
Aiden’s mind was already blown, running sprint car laps around the dirt track of his skull, when Wayne Bryson popped out of the bedroom with guns strapped all over his body. There was an AR-15 assault rifle aimed downward from his chest in a military sling, the black grips of a pistol peeking from his waistline, some long-barreled stainless revolver shoved in his belt and dangling down his leg like a machete, a pistol-grip pump shotgun in his left hand by his side, and some skinny carbine rifle he balanced against his hip and aimed toward the ceiling.
“Ready for war!” Wayne screamed at the top of his lungs. “Goddamn Booker Branch Rambo!”
Thad was laughing hysterically as Wayne stood by a doorway right next to where a bar split the living room and kitchen, then waddled toward them with his legs bent wide so the pistols wouldn’t slide loose from his waistline.
“Where the hell’d you get those?” Aiden asked.
“Scabs’ll steal anything.” Wayne swung the shotgun up and tossed it Thad’s way. “I’ll take a gun over money any day of the week.”
Thad snatched the shotgun out of the air, shouldered it, and stared down iron sights like he just might blow off the bottom halves of Wayne’s legs. The gun seemed some natural extension of his body the way he handled it. He yanked back on the pump and a shell flipped into Aiden’s lap. “Might ought to tell somebody there’s one in the chamber.” He slid forward and yanked again, pumped till there were no more to give. There were six shells scattered across the couch, three red and three yellow.
Dope had a way of running Aiden’s mind full of some of the clearest thoughts that ever lit in his head, and right then his mind fired those thoughts from a Gatling. His mind thought things and saw things a second before they happened, and trying to make sense of it made his muscles twitch.
“Buckshot and slugs,” Wayne said. “I always go with the buckshot first. What you think, Mr. Broom?”
“I think I could do a lot of damage in close quarters with this thing, but in the long run I’d take that AR.” Thad reloaded the tube, racked it on the fifth to make room for the last shell, and set the shotgun on the grimy carpet. Wayne drew the long-barreled revolver from his belt and laid it on the coffee table, but Thad couldn’t leave it alone. He seemed to find something humorous about the size of the weapon and picked the revolver up, waving it over his head, hollering, “Nobody move!” before bursting into hysterics.
“Smith .500,” Wayne said. “Dirty Harry ain’t got nothing on that.”
Thad pulled the hammer back just a fuzz with his thumb and spun the cylinder like a little boy playing with the wheels of a toy car.
“You ever seen one of these?” Wayne asked, and shook the tactical rifle that he held down his side. “This Kel-Tec folds plumb in two. I’m talking you could shove that son of a bitch down your britches.” Wayne pushed down on the rear of the trigger guard and folded the barrel back over the stock, and the skinny rifle doubled in half. He placed it on the coffee table in that fashion, then pulled the pistol from his waistline and settled one hand on the grip of the AR. “But you’re right about this AR. These two, now, these two are my babies. This here’s the Colt my daddy carried in ’Nam.” Wayne raised the pistol and pointed it center mass on Aiden’s chest.
“Don’t point that thing at me!” Aiden rose off the couch and had split the distance between them before Wayne’s eyes even focused. Aiden’s thoughts were coming clear. He was seeing the future.
Wayne flipped the barrel toward the ceiling. “Calm down, Aiden. Ain’t nothing in the hole.” He hit the release on the side and the magazine fell to the floor. “It’s empty.”
“You point that thing at me and I’m going to shove it down your throat.” The dope had Aiden all funny and he was losing control quickly. The world was speeding up and speeding up and he was just about to kick it all into oblivion. Thad was still just laughing.
“Just calm down. Ain’t a thing in it.” Wayne cocked the hammer and raised the pistol to his temple. “See?” He pulled the trigger and the far side of his face blew off. A thrash of blood, chunks like grayed hamburger, let loose across the room. His arms dropped to his sides, his right hand still clenching the Colt, and he held there for a second or two before he toppled stiff as a tree face-first into the coffee table, rapping the bridge of his nose on the way to the floor.
Thad jumped up from the couch with his hands up around his face. “What the fuck just happened? What the fuck just happened?”
“Cocksucker blew his brains out! He blew his fucking brains out!” Aiden tilted his head so he could see around the coffee table, then kicked at Wayne’s shoes, Wayne’s bottom half trembling. “He’s deader than hell! I’m telling you, that motherfucker’s deader than hell!”
Wayne Bryson lay there with his gnarled face flat on the floor. His body blew a slow foam of bubbles where the hollow-point ripped apart his left brow. His mouth was slightly open. His eyes were closed. Blood pooled around pieces of him the same pale yellow hue as thrush.
“We need to get out of here, Aid.” Thad started panicking, yanking his head every which way, looking everywhere to try and make sense of something that had happened as fast as a balloon popping. Thad snatched the crumpled twenties he’d paid Wayne from the table and shoved the money in his pocket. He grabbed the bag of dope and that long, shiny revolver, settled his eyes on Aiden with his jaws sawing back and forth. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”
Faster and faster, the world was cooking now. Aiden followed Thad out the front door, knowing there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop it.