to brace him against the February cold. No socks in the basement, though, so the shoes get laced over bare feet, the leather edges digging into his ankles. He pauses for a moment, looking down, and almost manages a smile at the pointy-toed, two-tone dress shoes, burgundy and tan, bought on a lark for four bills in a secondhand shop because they reminded him of better days. He starts up the stairs, then stops, rubbing his head. Where’s the hat? Can’t go nowheres without the hat.
Dag.
He tears the bedding apart, finding it wedged between the mattress and the warped wall panel. A lucky California Angels cap that’s seen him through it before. He wears it with the brim behind him, smoothing the band against his forehead. The backward angel, up and moving, ready to wade into the mix.
He navigates the narrow passage through the basement, then makes his way up the steep staircase, climbing over and around an avalanche of bundled clothing tossed down the steps. He emerges in the center of the rowhome’s first floor, stepping into a dining room where the table has been pushed to the wall, then covered with clothing, papers, and a dozen other workaday things. In the McCullough home, the kitchen long ago gave the dining room a beating, forcing its furniture and formality against the far wall, giving the back of the first floor to Miss Roberta’s cooking and the chipped Formica table from which her family feeds.
Gary pauses for a moment at the basement door, caught by the sunlight from the back kitchen window. He wipes at his eyes, trying to adjust to the sight of his mother, working the stove, fixing W.M.’s lunch.
“Uh, Ma, I … ah, I need …”
His voice is soft, fading beneath the talk-show chatter of daytime television. She shakes her head. She doesn’t have it, she tells him, and Gary knows it’s true. If she had twenty dollars, she would reluctantly give ten to him, despite herself, so as not to watch her child suffer. He nods, accepting, and she offers instead to cook him some breakfast. An egg-and-bacon sandwich.
Gary shakes his head. The nausea drives him out of the kitchen and through the front door. He’s on Vine Street, the winter wind cutting through his sweater and savaging his bare ankles. Up on Monroe, there is a feeding frenzy as fiends flow from a tester line—freebies thrown to fiends as advertising for the day’s package. Spider Bags, too—this was a double blow, as the bags with the black widow on them are a definite bomb.
Gary knows he’s missed his chance, but he jogs up to the corner anyway, pushing into the wind, arriving in time to watch Tiny give out the last one and glide off. Gary stands there in the flow of just-served fiends, his hand out, his hunger on display. He tries a plea.
“Hey Janice.”
He gives Janice his stepped-on puppy look, but she ignores him. She has her own need; they all do. Gary, though, takes the refusal to heart. When I had it, he tells himself, I shared it. I shared it with crudballs who won’t give me the time of day now.
He’s alone at the top of the alley, standing amid the wind-whipped trash. He feels the snake move, then makes up his mind and heads off to find Ronnie. She’ll make him suffer, but she’ll also get him out of the gate.
There is a part of Gary that hates himself for leaning into Ronnie’s punches, for putting up with her games for the sake of a blast. She calls herself his girlfriend, tells him she loves him, but the truth is, there’s no sexual charge in the relationship, nothing that anyone could mistake for affection. They had messed around a few times, for appearances’ sake more than anything else, but Ronnie holds no real attraction for Gary, save for her ability to make it happen from nothing. Every day, Gary pisses and moans over her crudball moves, over the abuse he takes. Every day, he tells himself that it’s all one way, that he has tried to end the relationship only to have her follow him around and pull him back. Every day, he tells himself that this is the last time, that after Ronnie gets him the blast he’ll cut her loose for good.
But there is no getting around Veronica Boice. She is the neighborhood sorceress, a rare mixture of will and wisdom and evil. She’s different from Gary, who can’t wrestle with the snake without the fear rushing up and overwhelming him. Not Ronnie. She channels the pain into a demonic fury that seems likely to crush anyone standing between her and her shot. Gary saw it happen a few weeks back, when Ronnie took her ninety-pound frame up Fayette Street and stared down the New Yorkers.
“Gimme a blast,” she told Gee. “Last one wadn’t shit.”
There she was in the middle of Fayette and Monroe, not a nickel to her name, a whippet of steel wire standing up to big, bad, bat-waving Gee, threatening: “Gimme a blast or I’ll call the motherfucking poh-leece. You know I will.”
The crowd took it in, amazed. Gee laughed, made a joke, tried to play it off in front of all the touts and customers. But he could see it; he could see the dusty bitch dropping dime over a single vial and he could see that the choice for him was between minor charity and felony murder.
Gee gave in, slipping her one just to see her gone. And Gary, watching all of this from the sidelines, was once again staggered by the kamikaze logic that Ronnie always brought to the game. Ronnie punking Gee in the middle of Monroe Street. Dag.
He warms now at the memory, at the thought of finding the girl. He cuts from Vine Street across the vacant lot and through the back alley behind his parents’ house, then out onto Fayette Street through a second gap in the rowhouses, arriving at Ronnie’s sister’s house, where Ronnie’s been spending the colder nights. Pulling one hand from inside the sweater cuff, he bangs twice on the door, then twice again.
One of the twins, sleepy, stumbles out of the front room, cracks the door, and stares mournfully out of the vestibule.
“She not here,” he says, closing the door before Gary has a chance to react. His world is shrinking; the snake twists maliciously down in his bowels. He turns back toward Monroe, but Eggy Daddy and Fat Curt and the rest of the regulars are already on station, hustling the morning crowd. No work up there.
He heads down the hill. Fran might take care of him, for old time’s sake. Or DeAndre. Yeah, Andre, who’s got it going on down Fairmount. But at the Dew Drop Inn, only Bunchie is out on the stoop, looking none too good herself.
“Fran in bed,” she says. “Andre gone to school.”
School? DeAndre? Lord, please, what are the chances of that? Gary stumbles on, heading down Gilmor without any real plan, the snake now coiling and uncoiling in his throat. He goes around the block and turns toward Fayette, defeated, moving through the crowd at Mount Street, looking into the eyes of a half-dozen regulars who have already made their shot. By now, he’s unable to gather his wits, to endure the snake long enough to manufacture a hustle.
“Hey, hey,” a voice calls.
Gary looks up to see a face, vaguely familiar, smiling at him from the other side of Mount Street.
“What’s up with you?”
Gary squints, trying to focus. Now he’s got it. The guy from Stevie’s room. The fiend who’s been shuffling in and out of Dew Drop Inn for about a month now, firing with half a dozen others in Stevie Boyd’s rogues’ gallery. Doug, remembers Gary. Name is Douglas for sure.
Gary crosses the street.
“Nothin’ yet,” he tells Doug.
“Man,” says Doug, taking stock, “you looking flat-out rough.”
Gary nods agreement. “I feel bad. Can’t get started.”
“No, hey, I can hook you up with something,” says Doug. “I got somethin’ goin’ on.”
Gary takes this in. Doug is going to get him over. Doug, who hasn’t done anything but use the same shooting gallery. Gary nods agreement, hopeful, but waiting for the shoe to drop.
“Found this spot,” says Doug. “They practically asking you to take their shit. I’m serious. This one store out on Forty West been keeping me well all week.”
Gary nods. He can do it. He can do anything if the snake goes back down into its hole.