Two bare-chested boys with muddied elbows and scabbed knees wrestled each other on a lopsided trampoline missing a third of its springs in Leland Bumgarner’s front yard. The older boy had the little one by at least twenty pounds and was wringing a headlock deep into his kid brother’s neck. But what the little one lacked in size he made up for with sheer meanness. He trudged forward with bare feet kneading into the trampoline till his older brother back-stepped onto a drooping crescent of mesh, the two of them collapsing into the mud like a trapdoor had just opened beneath them.
“Cut that shit out now,” Leland hollered from the porch, “before one of you breaks something we can’t afford to fix.” Leland’s brow held his eyes in shadow. The two boys cut the horseplay long enough to offer a quick “Yes, sir,” before going back to pushing one another when their father refocused on sharpening a lawn mower blade with a bastard-cut mill file.
Leland Bumgarner could sell ice to an Eskimo, or fire in hell. He’d always been that way. Growing up, him, Aiden, and Thad all rode the same school bus, and Leland would talk kids out of the best things their miserable lives offered. If a kid got a new Case XX for his birthday—carbon blade, jigged bone handle, the whole nine—Leland would dicker that son of a bitch out of it with nothing more than a busted flashlight, always something dopey. He had a way of convincing folks that what they had wasn’t nearly as good as what he could give them, and someone who has that type of magic-bean salesmanship always has the upper hand. That’s why Leland came to mind when Aiden thought about selling the dope and medicine.
Leland crinkled an empty can of Milwaukee’s Best in his fist and tossed it onto the steps. He sat on the edge of the porch and kicked his heels against shabby lattice that fenced off dusty clay beneath the house. He pulled a few strokes down a goatee that hung to his chest, a habit he repeated over and over when he was in thought, then set back into filing the lawn mower blade without even acknowledging that Aiden and Thad were there.
“How you doing, Leland?” Aiden asked.
“Without,” he said, not looking up as he made another pass with the file.
The screen door swung open and slapped against the clapboard house as Karen Bumgarner tramped onto the porch past where her husband sat and down the steps into the yard where Aiden and Thad stood. She slid her arm into the leather handles of her pocketbook and flung the heavy bag over her shoulder. Karen had always been the prettiest girl they grew up with, all of the boys hell bent on taking her out. Somehow or another, Leland won, and they all believed he must’ve conned her.
Karen stopped in the yard halfway between Leland and Aiden. Two children and a life she never meant for had worn her down, but she was still gorgeous. She cocked her hip to the side, a fat bottom sitting ripe in tight pink shorts, thick legs as brown as tung-oiled walnut from hours spent in the tanning bed. Her hair was short and dyed black with blond streaks, a hairdo that all the girls were wearing but which made no sense to men who dodged skunks with their pickups nearly every time they drove.
“I’m going into town to get some groceries. You need anything?” she asked.
“A carton of smokes and some beer.”
“Anything else?”
“No,” Leland said. He still hadn’t looked up.
Karen spun away from him, sighed under her breath, and rolled her eyes.
“You going to take the boys with you?” Leland asked.
Karen looked over to where their sons were killing each other. The older one was holding his kid brother upside down, then dropped to his knees and pile-drove the little one’s head into the ground, his neck surely breaking on impact. Karen didn’t even blink. “You keep an eye on ’em.”
Leland just grunted.
Karen glanced over at Aiden and Thad, flipped her bangs to the side of her face, and her blue eyes shone like sapphires in the sunlight.
“Well, ain’t you just as pretty as always,” Thad said.
Karen scrunched her face and shook her head. “Fuck you.”
“You hear that? You going to let your old lady talk to me like that, Leland?”
Leland didn’t say a word.
Karen stared at Thad like she might kick him square in his balls.
“Still a firecracker, ain’t you?” Thad said. “A goddamn pistol, Karen.”
She walked over and stood right between Thad and Aiden. She met Thad eye to eye and spoke in a low, sharp tone. “Don’t you ever come back to my house all gooned out on that shit, you hear me?”
For once Thad seemed speechless.
“I’ve got enough trouble raising them boys already without folks like y’all poking around here.” Karen stood there for a few moments just staring at Thad, daring him to say something smart-assed back to her, but he didn’t. She walked off and climbed into a light blue Chrysler minivan with paint peeling to the primer on the hood. She drove out of sight and Aiden found himself wondering if she’d ever come back. If he were her, he wasn’t sure if he would.
“Still a pistol, ain’t she, Leland?” Thad walked over to the porch.
“You ain’t telling me nothing,” Leland said, and spit into the yard.
“Hell, maybe he had to haul her down to Harris and have her sewn back up, Aid.” Thad laughed. “Maybe that’s why she was so pissed off.”
“What did you say?” For the first time since they’d arrived at his home, Leland looked up. He glared at Thad and clenched his hands around the tools he held: the mill file in his right, the sharpened lawn mower blade in his left. Aiden knew that Leland heard what Thad said, but he was giving him a second chance.
Leland Bumgarner had the biggest pecker anyone had ever seen. One time he and Aiden were working for a cheapskate contractor who wouldn’t put diesel in the trackhoe to carve a ditch. Instead, he made them dig with pickaxes and shovels. Leland stood right up and said, “If he’s going to work us like mules, then by God I’ll look like one.” He dropped his overalls in the middle of the gravel road and there he stood with his dick halfway down his thigh like a horse. The other men joked from then on that if they had knee knockers like that they’d flop them out in wheelbarrows and haul them all over town for the world to see.
But Thad brought up a story Leland told one time in the locker room when they were still in high school, a story about how he’d accidentally hurt Karen. He said her parents had to take her down to Harris Hospital and have the doctors sew her back up. Aiden used to joke behind Leland’s back that he didn’t know how Leland slept at night knowing good and well he’d put a hole like that in his old lady. But those types of jokes don’t fly once a girl goes from being someone a buddy’s banging to the mother of his children.
“I said you must’ve had to take her down to Harris and have her sewn back up, the way she was acting.” Even when everything seemed to suggest that he should keep his mouth closed, Thad never shut up. It was worse when the dope had him. A day without sleep, and he spoke every word that crossed his mind. He’d been up nearly a week.
Leland stood from the porch and calmly set the mill file onto the planks. He traded the sharpened lawn mower blade to his right hand, the edge he’d filed shining white as mirror glare, and ran the blade against the hairs on his left arm. The blade scraped, hairs flicking into air then disappearing, leaving bare skin behind the pass. Leland looked down at what he held in his hand and shook it like he might try to guess its weight as he took a few steps closer. “I’m only going to say this once, Thad.” Leland held the lawn mower blade in front of him, aimed it square between Thad’s eyes. “If you ever say another word about my wife, I will open your head like a watermelon.”
“I ain’t mean nothing.” Thad shifted uneasily where he stood, flicked his eyes back and forth from Leland to the ground. “I was just giving you a hard time is all.”
“Do you understand me?” Leland still held the blade outstretched. His expression had not changed and he waited for Thad to look him square, to tell him he understood.
“I was just joking around. That’s all.”
“One more thing before we do business.” Leland put the lawn mower blade on the porch beside the file, then looked at Aiden. Leland talked more to Aiden than Thad now. “Just like Karen said, I don’t want neither one of you to ever come here again all gooned out on that shit. Not around my boys.”
“We ain’t all gooned out, Leland.” When Aiden said those words, he knew they weren’t true, but he was only twenty-four hours in and it could’ve been worse. He was more tired than anything, though Thad had obviously kept the pedal to the floor all night.
“Y’all’s eyes are about to pop out of your heads. Thad there has been scratching at his arms like he’s eat up with chiggers and you’re grinding hell out of your teeth, so don’t tell me that. I don’t care what either of you do, but don’t come acting like that around my boys.” Leland looked out into the yard to where his oldest son wrenched a figure-four leg lock into his wincing brother’s ankles. The little one slapped at the ground to cry uncle.
“We’re sorry, Leland,” Aiden said. “It won’t happen again.”
Leland Bumgarner stepped between Thad and Aiden and led them around the side of the house to where a shipping container was buried in the hillside out back. Years before, some businessman in Sylva had a lead on shipping containers for a few hundred dollars apiece. Folks all over the county nabbed those containers and buried them into hillsides to use as root cellars. The heavy steel was almost bulletproof and would probably survive the rapture.
Only the blue doors shone on a hillside blanketed with curly dock and lamb’s ear, sedge shoots and oat grass. The container ran straight back into the mountain. Leland worked a combination lock free and unlatched the steel bar holding the doors closed. He stretched a pull cord from overhead at the entrance and a lightbulb flicked on. Thad and Aiden followed him inside. There was one more light at the far end of the cellar. Leland yanked the cord and a yellow glow bounced around the corrugated walls, colors blending into a stale green all around them.
Makeshift shelves lined with mason jars canning everything from dilly beans to bear meat ran the length of the left side. Dusty boxes, the tape that once held them closed now stringy as corn silk with dry rot, were stacked on the right. At the far end, where Leland stood, a table piecemealed together from two-by-fours and warped plywood stretched the width of the container. Above the table, a board at least five feet long crossed the wall with a timber rattler skin lacquered to wood, the scales tattered and flaking. Aiden walked over and set the ammunition can on the table.
“How many boxes you say you had?” Leland asked.
“I don’t know how many boxes,” Aiden said. “Its just blister packs.”
“And what’re you wanting to get out of them?”
Aiden popped the latches on the can, placed the three bags of dope on the table, and counted out the sheets of pseudoephedrine.
“Wayne Bryson used to give scabs twenty dollars a box,” Thad answered.
“Cash or credit?”
“What are you talking about?” Thad asked.
“I mean was Wayne paying cash or trading dope?”
“Dope,” Thad said. “That’s all they was after.”
“And that’s a lot different than cash.”
“There’s a hundred and four packs so I’m betting that was half as many boxes,” Aiden said.
“I’ll give you ten a box.”
“You’re out of your goddamn mind!” Thad squinted his eyes and stuck his jaw out. “You hear this shit, Aid? Now I just told you Wayne Bryson was paying twenty dollars a box. Twenty dollars a goddamn box.”
“No, Wayne Bryson wasn’t paying twenty dollars a box,” Leland said. “Wayne Bryson was trading a bunch of tweakers dope he already had, dope that he’d set the price on. Ten dollars a box is all I’m paying. Besides, y’all called me.”
“So five twenty’s the best you can do?” Aiden asked.
“I might go five fifty, but if Thad there don’t shut the hell up, I’m more likely to tell you to pack your shit and head on down the road.”
“I bet you would, you cocksucker.” Thad was fighting mad.
Leland Bumgarner stood in the yellow light with a work shirt opened to the middle of his chest, and pulled long strokes down his goatee. His head was close-shaven, eyes green as dollar signs, and he shot them both a look like, Take it or leave it.
“And what about the dope?” Aiden asked.
“Ain’t got no use for it,” Leland said. “I won’t touch it no more. But I might know someone who’d take it off your hands.”
“You find somebody to buy the dope and we’ll do five even.”
“You kidding me, Aid?” Thad screamed. “Wayne Bryson got twenty dollars a box. Wayne Bryson got twenty goddamn dollars a box. Why don’t you just give it away?”
“Shut up, Thad,” Aiden said.
“You’re just giving it away.”
“I said shut up, Thad.” Aiden turned and looked him dead in his eyes. Thad didn’t say anything else. “Go call your boy, Leland. You find somebody to buy that dope and you can have it.”
Leland stood there for a second, but it didn’t take him long to figure what he’d make. He scooted between them and went to the end of the root cellar. Leland swung the doors open into daylight and walked out into the yard so he could get cell reception. He stood in white light that seemed too bright to be real and held the phone to his ear. The container door creaked closed, cut away more and more view from Aiden and Thad until it shut entirely and they could no longer see the day.
Thad wouldn’t speak. He turned away and checked mason jars on the shelf, turned the glass in his hand, and surveyed what sloshed inside. He picked up a jar of bear meat and eyed where the fat filmed over the cubes. Old-timers said they could predict the weather by how the fat rose and sank. Thad stared forever like he might decipher the next time it’d rain. When he made up his mind, he turned and kicked at mildewed boxes that teetered against the opposite wall. He flipped back one of the box flaps and rummaged through the contents, slapped the box closed when he found nothing that suited him.
After a few silent minutes, Leland came back inside the root cellar. He nodded as he came toward them. “I’ve got somebody who said he’ll take it all.”
“Who?”
“A guy named Eberto that used to paint houses with me.”
“A spic?” Aiden asked.
“Yeah. Good guy, though.”
“You sure?” And it wasn’t so much that Aiden didn’t trust Mexicans as that he’d never had any dealings with them. All he knew was that the minute they poured into Jackson County, all the good-paying jobs for folks who worked with their hands had dried up. Why pay a white man double for what a Mexican would do just as well for half? Since then, working-class white folks had been in a war of sorts with the Mexicans whether they said so or not.
“He’s the only person I know who can take that much dope off your hands in one go,” Leland said. “He’s connected to folks trying to get things back to how it used to be, get everything moving through one source again. When it all boils down to it, he’s a businessman just the same as me.”
“So he’s going to pay us a third of what it’s worth?” Thad shot another smart-ass one-liner. He’d been silent too long.
“He’ll pay you what he pays you, but ain’t nobody else in this county sitting on enough cash to take all of that off your hands at once.” Leland looked over at the table to where the three bags of crystal sat beside the ammunition can.
Aiden knew Leland was right, but mulled it over in silence, and finally asked, “He coming over here now?”
“No, he said he’d meet you tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“He lives down there in those apartments between Jimmy’s and Ken’s, right straight back across from the church.”
“You going with us?”
“No, I ain’t going with you,” Leland said. “Ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
“What apartment?”
“He didn’t say. He just said he’ll come out when y’all pull up.”
“And how the hell will he know it’s us?”
“’Cause there ain’t no other white folks driving back in there.”
Thad shook his head like he and Aiden were about to walk in front of a firing squad. The whole thing sounded sketchy, but Leland was right. There wasn’t another person in Jackson County with enough cash to buy a quarter pound of methamphetamine.
Aiden walked over to the table and pulled the blister packs of pseudo from the can, counted them out per five, and slid them stacked against the metal wall. Leland watched him work, tugged his goatee, and mouthed silent numbers as he counted. When all the packs were on the table, Leland took out a wad of folded bills from his back pocket, licked his fingers, and slapped twenty-dollar bills onto the table one after the other. He counted twenty-five, gathered them in his hands, and tapped them even against the plywood before counting twice more. When the cash was on the table, Aiden flipped through once for himself. They nodded at each other as Aiden threw the money into the can, dropped the three bags of dope on top, and latched the lid shut.
“A couple words of advice, and if I was you I’d listen awfully close,” Leland Bumgarner said, his eyes as serious as Aiden had ever seen. “First and foremost, don’t walk into any sort of business all gooned out. If it was anybody other than me, the two of you might not be breathing. Now, I’m going to give you a couple pills and I want you to take ’em tonight before you go to bed.” Leland grabbed a bottle of Advil from the table and shook two capsules into his palm. “Hand me the cellophane off your smokes.”
Aiden slid the plastic off his cigarette pack and handed it to him. Leland dropped the pills inside, rolled the packaging up, held a lighter to the edge, and dabbed it sealed between his index finger and thumb.
“What the hell is it?” Thad asked.
“I don’t remember what he used to call them,” Leland said. “The devil’s something or another.”
“I want you to listen to him, Aid. A nut job, I’m telling you.”
“It’s Ativan and Geodon,” Leland said. “It’ll knock the two of you off this binge you’re on and put some sense back in you.”
“I ain’t ever seen Ativan in a pill like that,” Aiden said. “Now, I’ve taken loads of it, but I ain’t ever seen it like that. And I ain’t ever even heard of Geodon.”
“A buddy of mine made ’em,” Leland said. “Six pills into each one of these. Six milligrams of Ativan and sixty milligrams of Geodon. That’s six pills, sixty-six milligrams. It’ll put your dick in the dirt. Back when I used to stay lit, that buddy gave me a batch of these to knock me down so I’d go to sleep, so as I wouldn’t lose my job and Karen wouldn’t leave my ass, and let me tell you, they work. The two of y’all take those tonight and you’re going to wake up tomorrow afternoon feeling like daisies.”
“If we wake up,” Thad said.
“You’ll wake up.”
Aiden slid the cellophane into his pack of cigarettes. He lit one and watched the first puff hold on the still root-cellar air like breath in winter.
“Last word of advice,” Leland said as he made his way to the door. “Don’t take all the dope with you. About the stupidest thing you could’ve done.”
“It’s just you—” Aiden started to explain.
“It don’t matter. You can’t trust a soul when it comes to dope and money.”
“But—”
“Your own family will put a knife to your throat.” Leland cut Aiden’s words short again, swung open the heavy steel door on the root cellar, sunlight blinding all three of them for a second or two, but only Aiden and Thad covered their eyes. Leland stretched wide in the summer air, stroked his goatee as he yawned. His sons were still playing outside. The older boy was chest deep in an aboveground swimming pool that stood beside the trampoline in the front yard. The aluminum sides of the pool bellied out like they just might blow apart any second. The younger son bounced around the trampoline, then cut a lazy flip in the air over the water. He splashed down on his ribs just shy of his brother. The older boy settled his hands around his little brother’s neck when he came up for air, held him under while his arms flailed. “Sometimes it don’t even take dope for them to do it.”