RAY CALLED MANNY and started telling him everything that happened, his hands vibrating like broken machines. Manny stopped him, told him to meet him at the place where he was staying, in a room over a bar where they sometimes hung out in War-rington, a place owned by a guy who’d sold them guns a couple of times.
Ray parked in the dark reaches of the parking lot and walked across the asphalt, feeling a bass beat from inside that resonated in his chest before he even opened the door. Inside, the noise was deafening, the place packed with kids. Young guys with ball caps on at angles and gold chains around their necks, shoulders hunched, going for some kind of effect that eluded Ray. Did they think, with their freckled skin and wide eyes, to be taken for dangerous? He elbowed his way to the bar and asked for a beer and a shot. He downed the shot and carried the beer back out to the entrance to get to the stairs, waved to the bouncer, a friend of Harlan Max-imuck named Edgy.
At the top of the stairs he knocked, and Manny let him in with his right hand held behind him, poking his head through the door and looking up and down the hall. When Ray went by him Manny threw a baseball bat onto a mattress on the floor and dropped down beside it. The floor vibrated with the pulse of the beat from downstairs. Ray could feel it through his boots.
The place was a mess, a big empty space with extra tables for the bar, chairs stacked, cardboard cutouts of girls in swimsuits and cartoon pirates selling rum and beer. There was a little plastic fan sitting on the floor pointed at Manny, the box it had come in put into service as an end table holding Manny’s works, a bottle of peppermint schnapps, a package of bright orange peanut butter crackers. There was scattered trash, empty bags from Yum Yum Donuts down the street, empty green beer bottles, an ashtray and a pack of Marlboros.
Ray told as much of what had happened as he could remember, though he knew things were already getting confused, his memory distorted by intensity and his own fear. “They went fucking crazy. They burned the fucking place down, shot people. I never saw anything like that.”
Manny’s head bobbed. “Good. I hope they killed that fucker and his dog. I hope they killed everyone who ever met him or knew his name.” He scratched at a sore in the crook of his arm.
Ray said, “You’re high.”
“Fucking A, I am high.” He went to the peanut butter crackers, took one out with exaggerated care, and made large, approximate movements of his arm to get it to his mouth. “Why are they orange? ’Cause of the cheese?”
“Fuck, man.”
“I mean, is cheese really orange? Isn’t it white, or blue or something? I mean, it’s basically moldy milk.”
“Manny.”
“I’m just saying, why orange? I can’t have an opinion about orange?”
Ray squatted by the box and picked up the bottle of schnapps and swigged it.
“That is some nasty shit.”
“It’s sweet. I got a sweet tooth.”
“You got like three teeth, and you’re going to be losing them soon.” Ray went to the window and looked out through a hole in the shades. The lights in the parking lot glinted from pickup trucks and SUVs. He watched a boy kissing a girl sitting on the hood of a parked car. She was wearing a white top that stopped a few inches from her jeans.
“Where did you score?”
“Monk on Bristol Road. You going to give me shit about that, too?” Manny got to his feet, swaying. He pulled the bat off the bed and swung it wildly, losing his balance and backing into a wall, leaving a dimple in the wallboard where his elbow connected.
Ray waved his hand in front of his face. “Oh, fuck off. I just want to keep a low profile.” He shook his head. “Like I give a shit if you get high.”
“I know, I just…” Manny bobbed his head. “I can’t handle this shit. Sitting around. I’d rather get out in it than sit and wait.”
“Well, what the hell? Aren’t I out there trying to handle it? Rolling around in the fucking tumbleweeds with these hillbillies?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t need shit from you.”
“Okay, okay.” Manny held up his long arms and dropped his head, making peace, then went back to pacing, swinging the bat at flies. “Life goes on,” he said, his voice low. “A man becomes preeminent; he’s expected to have… enthusiasms.” This was a favorite of Manny’s, The Untouchables. De Niro a hulking animal in a gray suit. “Enthusiasms. Enthusiasms. What is that which gives me joy?”
“Smack?”
Manny dropped the bat and it bounced and knocked over some empty green beer bottles. “Not just that.” He looked around as if seeing the place new and rubbed his eyes with both hands, like a child. “Stealing shit. Money. Sherry.” He stared into the middle distance. “I gotta sleep.”
“Go ahead, man. I’ll keep an eye out.”
Manny dropped to his knees and crawled to the mattress and dropped onto it, his black hair splayed around his head, his body long and white but for the tattoos aging green. Frankenstein on his right arm, Al Pacino as Scarface on his left. His junkie mother, from a photograph he used to keep with him all the time, across the small of his back. Blond hair in curls and a shy smile. She was long dead, cut to pieces and left in garbage bags by the side of the road in Bristol Township.
Manny didn’t lift his head. “So, did we win?”
Ray thought about that. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“When will we know?” Manny’s voice was muffled by the mattress.
Ray shrugged, realized Manny couldn’t see it but figured he took the meaning from his silence.
AT NINE THE next morning Manny was still asleep, so Ray left a note and went down to pick up a paper and took it to the Yum Yum Donuts at County Line and sat on a stool bolted to the floor. He hadn’t slept, and his eyes were cinders in his head. He skimmed through the accounts of what had happened at the barn. Two dead, names unreleased, with three more in critical condition, a dozen more treated and released. The cops knew it was bikers fighting over turf, and there were sidebars on the motorcycle clubs, the Pagans and the Outlaws, and the meth trade. He would have to look at later editions to see the names of the dead.
He was edgy and his mind skittered from one thing to the next. He took out his cell a few times and looked at it, finally shoved it in his pocket and went to the car. His arms and legs twitched from lack of sleep, and a kind of strange electricity pulsed in him. When he got back to the bar he took the stairs two at a time, shouldered in the door to grab Manny’s works, and then tied himself off using the cord from the fan. Manny was a freak about not sharing needles and kept spares still in their cellophane and paper covers. The noise of unwrapping them woke Manny, who sat up and watched him cook the heroin in his blackened spoon and bang his arm to bring up the vein.
Ray let the blood back up in the needle and shot it into his arm.
“Christ, Ray.” Manny licked his lips. “When was the last time you fired up?” Ray untied the cord from his arm and smiled, but Manny shook his head. “Dude, I know you been chipping, but shit.”
“So bill me.”
“Fuck you, I don’t care about the money.” Ray put a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk. Go get more dope.” A wasp was buzzing, hitting the glass of the window with a rhythmic tick. Ray lay back and the buzzing filled his head. The hot light from the morning sun hammered his skin, and sweat rolled from his hair and into the hollows of his eyes. The bed was a raft on a sea of lava, and the air wrinkled with heat and fire. He heard Manny go through the door, but the sound was distant, tinny, as if it were on the radio in another room. Someone downstairs started up the sound system, and there was a resonant hum he could feel in his jaw and then long guitar notes. The room vibrated, and the beer bottles rolled, throwing green light onto the walls. The wasp hung in the air over his head. He focused on it, a perfect engine of rage beating the air with tiny wings in a relentless semaphore he could not follow.
ray jerked awake. Manny was sitting on the floor, flexing his arm to bang up the vein and holding the needle. The sun was lower in the sky, and there was noise from downstairs communicated by vibration through the floor. They couldn’t stay in this room much longer.
He’d had a dream about the accident that sent him away, when Marletta died. He was standing in the road with blood coming out of his hair and looking at a man asleep in the road, only of course he wasn’t really asleep, and there were tracks leading off into the weeds where the car Ray had been driving was on its side, and he couldn’t find Marletta anywhere. It was the most he had remem-bered about the accident that had sent him to prison. The most that he had let himself see, maybe. He knew there was more. It was like reading a terrible book and not wanting to turn more pages because you knew the story just got worse.
Ray got up and started policing up the mess into the plastic bag from the donut shop. He could smell himself, a rank tang of smoke and dope sweat and dust. He heard doors slamming and went to the window and watched guys come in from their trucks. Guys getting a beer after a day of work, three guys in jeans and T-shirts with a logo he couldn’t make out. Landscapers or delivery men or ware house guys. Something where they hauled shit or built shit or something that you got a righteous thirst from and at the end of the day you had a beer and bitched about, and then the married guys went home and the single guys stayed and chatted up the girls who would come in later. A life he didn’t know, that he felt a million miles away from. Like the Plimsouls said, he was on the wrong end of the looking glass.
Ray had sat in bars with guys and listened to them talk, and when the subject came up he just said he worked for a painting crew, but things broke down when somebody knew somebody in the business, and his lies would become tenuous and elaborate, which gave him a bad feeling, like he was pretending to be tall by balancing on stilts. He would get tense and defiant, and the people around him would slip away.
He went around the room and began picking up Manny’s clothes and stuffing them into his bag, impatient to be on the move. Manny himself lay back, his eyes rolling, and Ray knew it was going to be a little while before he could get him out of the room and into the car. He dug through his jacket and found the one- hitter and gave himself a jolt so he could focus, formulate a plan of action. He wanted his car back, wanted to go home and get a shower and listen to his own music.
Loaded up with bags and bits of clothing, he moved down to the car, edging past drinkers in the dim bar and pushing out into the sunlight slanting through the trees behind the crumbling asphalt lot. Outside he became aware of his clothes, stiff and foul-smelling, and he caught sight of himself in the long side mirror of a pickup. His hair was wild, his face streaked, and there were dark stains on his clothing and he remembered where they were from and he shuddered and had to resist the urge to crawl out of his clothes right there in the parking lot. He looked and felt like someone who had been living rough in the open and thought if he had seen a guy looking like this in a parking lot he’d have figured him for a guy on the bum. He dumped everything in the back of Sherry’s car and got in and drove up to County Line and cut left toward the Dunkin’ Donuts. When he got there he drove to where his Camaro had been and found an empty square of blackened asphalt surrounded by yellow tape.
Ray parked and got out and stood looking down at the place where someone had burned his car. There were greasy stripes of black where the tires had been and pools of melted plastic set with bits of broken glass fogged white. He tried to think about the sequence of events and tried to dope out if it had been before or after the barn, which was two nights ago. Maybe. His head hurt and his thinking was furred and had a lot of broken lines and gaps. He felt like he had been in the room getting high for a week, but that was junk for you.
He got back in the car and drove back down Easton Road. When he got to his street he slowed and began looking into each parked car for someone who didn’t look like he belonged there. Not that he would know. From half a block away he could make out the broad back and white- blond head of his landlord, Mrs. Gawelko, and a tall kid in his early twenties with big shoulders and a buzz cut. She was pacing and making broad motions with her arms, acting out some kind of opera for the kid, who Ray thought was her son.
He considered just driving on and coming back to deal with what ever it was later, but the urge to find out what was going on won out over what he felt was the more commonsense plan of action, to just keep going down to 611, get on the turnpike, and drive west until he saw red rocks and tumbleweeds. He parked the car and walked slowly across the lawn, flashes of muscle pain lighting up his arms and legs, bright spots and clouds in his eyes.
When she saw him crossing to her, she started shaking her head and pointing at him and then the door of the little apartment over her garage. “Men came for you. I told them no.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. G.”
“No, it’s not okay. These men are big, they have…” She brushed her hand down her arms. Tattoos. Yeah, he thought. I bet they had tattoos.
“I thought police, but they’re not police. I can’t have this.” She turned and gave a stream of Ukrainian to her son, who nodded and looked sage, not wanting a part of this now that he had gotten a closer look at Ray. She paced and ranted while Ray smiled and edged closer to the door, his hands up.
“I know, Mrs. G. They won’t be back.”
“No! It’s you. You won’t be back.” Then there was more Ukrainian and she poked her kid hard in the stomach and pointed at Ray.
“Okay, Ma. Okay. Jesus,” the kid said. She wandered off muttering, and Ray stood looking at the kid, who shrugged. “You see how it is? She wants you gone.”
“I see it.”
“Whoever those guys were, they scared the shit out of her.”
“Ah, just some… friends. It’s nothing.”
“Yeah, but she’s an old lady.”
Ray said, “Let me just get some shit and I’ll get out of here.” He moved up the short flight of stairs and turned around. “Tell Mrs. G,” he said, but then shook his head. There it was again, his face burning, his breath coming short, not enough air to inflate his lungs. He put his hand on his chest, and the bits of light through the trees danced in his head. He watched the big kid cock his head.
“Man, you okay?”
Ray grabbed the banister, held up a hand. “I’m fine. Just tell your mom I’m sorry, and thanks for putting up with… You know.”
He turned back up the stairs and saw boot prints on the door, but the lock had held, and he let himself in. Everything looked the same, all his stuff was untouched, but it all looked shabby and unfamiliar in the hard sunlight. He stood for a while, then went into the bedroom and got his duffel and threw it onto the bed. He packed his clothes and looked around. What did he want? His music, some DVDs. On the wall were movie posters he had gotten from the mall. Nothing he couldn’t replace in ten minutes. There was nothing of him here. He flashed on standing in a cell upstate on the day they were gating him out, a CO watching him while he looked at a couple of pictures stuck to the wall with the tacky bits of putty they made you use.
There was almost no one who would look for him here and no one who would realize he was gone. His money and his guns were all he had, and that was in the car or locked away. He threw a handful of CDs and movies in with the jeans and underwear and T-shirts and left quickly, without looking back.
He drove aimlessly around for a few hours. Over to the river, down to Oxford Valley. Across the bridge at Trenton and back up 29. Looking for a place to be.
AT DUSK HE collected Manny, and they went back to Monk’s and got more junk. They spent the night in another motel, this one in Lahaska. In another room somewhere a man and woman made lovemaking sounds that were like a terrible anguish. They paid for three days in advance and stayed high as much of the time as they could, breaking the fall off the heroin with coconut rum and hash. Ray would do coke out of the one- hitter to get straight enough for runs to a Wawa to get Tastykakes and soda and hoagies they’d pick at and then throw away.
It reminded Ray of when they were young and boosting cars and they’d get four or five hundred bucks for a car and blow it all in a few days on CDs and movies and dope and clothes and buying girls drinks. Seeing the same movie over and over. Terminator 2 and Predator 2 and a long list of crap they watched back to back for the explosions and the guns, the sounds echoing around inside their dope-hollowed brains.
But events kept going, even if the two of them were stuck in a groove. Sherry and Theresa came home from the shore. Sherry needed her car, so Ray told Manny to buy her something and take it out of the money at the U-Store It place in Warrington and he kept the Honda. One of the bikers burned at the barn died, and the story faded off the news. No one seemed to be looking for them. What ever it was that had happened didn’t seem to be ongoing.
On the fourth day Manny went home to Sherry’s, and Ray called Ho Dinh.
“Man, how the hell are you doing?” How da hell. Ho’s accent was more pronounced when he was agitated, and his words were clipped short now.
“I’m good, you know. I’m cool.”
“Yeah? We were worried. Tina showed me the paper, all that shit that happened up there.”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“You sound high.”
“Well, good and high.”
“Well.”
“No, man, I wanted to say thanks.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“For hooking me up with, you know.”
“I thought maybe you had a problem, Ray.”
“No, no. I guess it all worked out.”
“Man, are you all right?”
“Really, I’m good. Really, Ho.”
There was a long pause on Ho’s end. “If you say so.”
Ray wanted to tell him the truth, but what point was there? He wanted to say his head was full of death and fire and he couldn’t close his eyes without being drunk or high and he wanted to start screaming and never stop. He wanted to tell him that one night while Manny was fixing in the bathroom he’d taken out the old army Colt and dry- fired it into his mouth. But there would be something in there that Ho might see as aimed at him for setting him up with Cyrus. He didn’t want that. What ever Ho had done had been to help him out and protect Tina and the kids.
“No, I’m just taking a little vacation, really. I’ll call you in a few days.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’ll come over, bring some wine. Tell Tina.”
“Okay.” Ho didn’t hang up. “Just so, you know.”
“Thanks, man. I owe you big on all of this.”
“Ray.”
“Really, man. I’ll talk to you soon.”
AFTER MANNY WENT home Ray moved to a cheaper motel, one of those places that used to be a real motor hotel back in the forties, with little cabins set apart down a short drive. He was stuck somewhere. He sat and watched the tiny TV in the room, flipping through dozens of programs about life on another planet. He would go to the car, stand there juggling his keys, not knowing where to go.
Ray called Manny’s guy Monk again for dope, but he said he was short and gave him a name in Fairless Hills. Ray drove down around dusk into a neighborhood of close- set houses, pickups and cars showing Bondo and rust. Sprawling neighborhoods of postwar homes elbowing each other for a little sun, a little air. He sat outside, watching the house while it grew dark. There were kids’ toys in the yard and a blue plastic turtle filled with sand and empty beer bottles. After a while he walked up and knocked. An older guy with prison- yard eyes answered and stood holding the door between them. Ray had the feeling he had something in his hands behind the door.
“What?”
“Monk gave me your name.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Was he wrong?”
“Monk is always wrong. He’s a punk.”
“I don’t want to get into anything, man. I just want to get what I’m looking for.”
The guy shook his head and slammed the door. Ray had started walking back up the cracked walk when the door popped open again. A small woman in shorts was standing there showing tattoos snaking up under a tube top. Her hair was a colorless brown, and there were lines etched around her mouth, but she seemed hopeful.
“Come on, get off the street.”
He stood for a minute, thinking it wasn’t a great idea, then fi-nally walked back in. The yardbird was in a seat watching a Phillies game, a green bottle clenched in his fist as if he expected somebody to make a grab for it. There were more toys around, which Ray tried to see as a good sign. Though he knew better. The house stank of mold and stale beer and cigarette smoke.
The woman smiled at him and nodded, like a helpful clerk in a pharmacy. “What you need, doll?”
“I’ll take what you got. Black tar, china, what ever.”
“Okay, hon. How much?”
“A gram, two.”
“You make small talk with Heston. I’ll be right back.”
The man, Heston, looked over his shoulder at him, then back at the TV. “You get your shit and keep moving, got it?” On the walls Ray saw swords, throwing stars, and pictures that looked like they had been cut out of magazines of women tied with ropes. Somewhere a baby started crying. Heston moved in his chair and turned up the sound on the game with a remote. Ray saw that what looked like a heap of wool blankets on a couch was a young obese woman with a black eye and a fixed stare. The noise from the baby was a resonant whine that pried at Ray’s head like somebody was trying to get it open with a screwdriver. Heston banged on the arm of his chair.
“Goddammit, Rina.”
The woman came back in carrying the baby, a wet rag of a kid with brown stains on its jumper, its face contorted in a now silent howl. Ray dug at his jeans and pulled money out, his body jerking with the need to get out and on the road. He saw Heston turn and throw the remote hard at the woman on the couch. She made no move to block the throw, and the remote hit her in the temple with a hard clatter.
The woman with the baby scooted Ray outside with her body, his hand with the money still extended. Her eyes were wild and full of something Ray couldn’t imagine, fear or hate or something, so amped that it became something else, a wounded animal vulnerability leaking out of her eyes.
She held the baby out to him. “Take her.”
“What? Do what?”
“Take this baby. You got to.”
“Lady, what? I’m, uh, I use dope. I can’t’”
“Take this baby and get her away from here. Give her away, do something. He don’t let me out of his sight, and she’s going to end up dead or in the hospital. Mister, these people are crazy.”
Ray held his hands up and shook his head. “I don’t understand.” The woman shrieked and shook, and he retreated another step, waving the money like a flag of surrender.
The woman hit herself on the forehead with an open palm. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, won’t nobody help me?” She turned the baby to stare into its startled eyes and it was silent, and for a long and terrible moment Ray thought she was going to throw it away from her onto the walk. Finally she lowered the child back to her chest, where it folded itself against her. She turned away, her eyes unfocused, and slowly moved back inside and shut the door.