Chapter Eighteen

Thursday, October 19, 11:20 a.m.

Roy had been high on meth for fifty-two hours and counting. He hadn’t eaten much since Lydia left, but with meth, you didn’t need to eat. He had gone to work yesterday, and had actually done a pretty good job. There was a reason they called it go-fast. His hands had been a blur as he worked the line, pulling off defective diapers as they rolled past. Dri-N-Fresh Diapers was the only place within a fifty-mile radius where a person could make more than eight dollars an hour. They took just about anybody with a pulse and the fortitude to stay off drugs long enough to have a clean urine sample for the new-hire drug screen. Man, it had been hard to stay clean for a week. He had drunk so much water he had been pissing every fifteen minutes.

He liked crank because it gave him focus. Maybe too much focus. Things looked brighter and he had a lot of physical energy and jumpiness. Roy saw things so clear. When he wasn’t pulling defective diapers from the line, he picked at his skin, working on little scabs and blemishes until they bled again and scabbed over, only bigger. He barely noticed that everyone was staying clear of him – the blacks, the Mexicans, the few Indians, even the other whites. At work, people stayed in their own groups. The whites got the clean work – they were mostly mechanics or supervisors, or, like Roy, had easy jobs, where it wasn’t so clear whether you were working hard or not. The Indians got the in-between jobs. The niggers and the tacos and the inmates in their green uniforms on work release got the shit jobs. The jobs that demanded your hands move so fast that you got carpal tunnel, or where you had to reach into machines that had been known to chew off a finger or even an arm.

Yesterday, Roy had bounced up and down on his feet the whole nine hours. Inside the Dri-N-Fresh factory, which was basically a giant metal shed, there was no clock, no window, nothing to show the world outside. Sometimes Roy had even jumped up and down for no reason. Just because he had to. And at the end of the day, his feet didn’t even hurt. He could have worked another shift, easy, but they weren’t asking anyone to do overtime that night. Instead he went home and didn’t go to bed. He started one project and then another - cleaning his guns, picking up the house a little, heating up a can of chili he then forgot to eat.

Today his thoughts were all over the place. The work burned his muscles and dulled his mind. When the line had to be shut down for a few minutes, Roy went into the restroom. In the handicapped stall he did a huge line, which burned like hell. Five minutes later it hit. He was back on the line and all of a sudden he had a grin on his face. But the euphoria quickly faded. The endless series of white puffs rolling past just irritated him. He was supposed to look for places where the tape was defective, where the leg gathers had failed, but he found himself looking at everything too closely, seeing the smallest of flaws, yanking off diaper after diaper.

At break time, the spics stood around talking in groups. Roy never knew what they were saying. They took Americans’ jobs and did them for less. Some of them had houses in Mexico, while he was living in a prefab on a brick foundation way out in the woods. Here he was, born in this country, and he had to listen to Spanish. The world was going to hell. “This is America and I want to start hearing some English, now!” he screamed. One of the women told him where to stick his head and listen for the echo. “Then you’ll hear some English.” He wanted to pick up a box cutter and slice her open, but managed to walk away on stiff legs.

When Duane, the supervisor, came by in the afternoon, and went through the pile of rejects, he complained that most of them were actually okay. Then he started in on Roy. Duane didn’t like Roy’s work ethic. He went too slow. He cut out to the bathroom too much. Roy could hardly make out Duane’s voice over the hammer of compressors, the screech of pulleys, the grind of the belts. It got so loud that sometimes the only way to get somebody’s attention was to lob a diaper at them.

“Got a bladder infection?” Duane asked thirty minutes later, standing in Roy’s spot when he returned to the belt after snorting another line. “That’s it. You can’t go to the toilet unless it’s break time.”

Roy had a hard time focusing on what Duane was saying. His vision was totally locked up and he felt like he was going to explode. He knew he was going to start cussing out Duane if he said another word. When Duane reached down and tossed a diaper from Roy’s reject bin back onto the line, that was it.

Roy started cussing at Duane, hitting him around the head, calling him a motherfucker. Time slowed down and had gaps in it. It was like he was watching a series of snapshots, not a movie. Then Roy had Duane down on the ground, had Duane’s ears in his hands, and was pounding his head on the cement floor, over and over.

Two minutes later, two security guards hustled Roy out to his car, getting in a few belts along the way. Even though Roy was a white guy, that hadn’t stopped them from firing his ass. That’s why there were security guards, to stop the only kind of mixing there was in the plant – fighting.

Once in his car, Roy started banging his head against the steering wheel. It felt right, somehow, so he didn’t stop for a while. It was all Lydia’s fucking fault that he had gotten fired. If he hadn’t been so worried and frustrated, wondering how to find her, this wouldn’t have happened.

Later on, when he was at home, Roy felt a little better. His job hadn’t been fit for a donkey. It was okay, really, that he had quit. Down at the bar this afternoon, he had heard about a guy who might be hiring for a roofing crew. And with Lydia gone for now, maybe he could start making meth again, start making more money without her whining about how the house smelled, about how he was going to set the place on fire, about how she didn’t like him when he was using. Lydia didn’t understand that he had just wanted to get ahead a little bit.

And then Roy had another idea. An idea so good it made him smile. He knew this guy, Walter, this guy whose wife worked for the DMV. And he’d heard that for a little consideration, Shari could sometimes get numbers. Girls’ phone numbers. Addresses for them if all you had was their license plate number and you thought they looked pretty. For the right amount of money, she could even tap into the state’s data base and get you a Social Security number for someone who had died and didn’t need it anymore.

He had met Walter up at the old canyon. People liked to go shooting up there. Guys would shoot rock formations or into the walls. Animals, if they saw them. Didn’t matter what season it was or who had a fucking permit. This place had been there for thousands of years, long before there were permits. You could get drunk, build a bonfire, dress out a deer, buy whatever you wanted. Drugs, guns, home-brewed whiskey that would take off the back of your head, use of somebody’s girlfriend or maybe even daughter. And, Roy hoped, the information he needed. After all, even if Lydia was at a shelter, eventually she would have to interact with the system in some way.

That night, Roy called Walter. “Want to go shooting up at the canyon sometime?”