A Visible Darkness by Jonathon King Read Free Book Online Page B

the bus stop, older dropouts in the alley behind Murcheson’s Gas Station. He watched, his face down and eyes probing. When they left he’d inspect their trash, figure out their methods and find out a way to get his own, because Eddie was not stupid. Eddie could always find a way.
    When he got older he moved up to smoking weed, drinking whatever booze he could steal from his mother’s house or find discarded in the backstreet bins. The day he watched a young white couple being taught by one of the neighborhood dealers to smoke cocaine from a tiny metal pipe, was a turning point Eddie never saw coming.
    Crack.
    The first time was a wonder to him. The high soaked into his head and body like a huff of glue gone wild. It burned his insides with a tingle and a rush that rolled him back on the milk crate he was sitting on and turned the whole alley into a soft place racing with a warm fire. And when it passed, Eddie wanted more, and more.
    He would get ripped off in the early days. He’d scrape together the money, steal when he could, run his routes through the northwest neighborhoods picking up aluminum and metal to recycle for a few bucks, and then head for the dope man. The early ones would overcharge him, or give him bad shit. They’d give him chunks of soap and even ground bones to pass for crack. But Eddie learned from his mistakes. His mother had taught him early not to let anyone take advantage of him, and unlike so many junkies, the drugs did not diminish Eddie. By the time he was seventeen he was thick and strong and the deep tunnel of his stare caused most of the dealers to simply give him his due and get his unsettling presence off their corners.
    But the crack finally scared him. Eddie did not like the way it blinded him. He would find himself in places he didn’t know, trying to recognize people he should have known. The randomness of it unsettled and scared him. Eddie liked routine, it was how he survived. His discovery of heroin was his savior. A drug he could use and still move through the night streets, feeling painless, carrying out his work, keeping his eyes tuned. His routine was his cloak and his slow dark visage did not carry a reputation off the streets. He remained quiet, silently invisible to most of the world.
    Today the Brown Man had been equally silent when Eddie came for his heroin. The dealer had seen him two blocks away, pushing his shopping cart along the edge of the street, one defective wheel clattering and spinning wildly each time it lost purchase with the concrete. The Brown Man swept the area with a knowing eye for any hiccup in the routine and then, satisfied, elbowed his new runner.
    “Bundle,” he said, and the boy looked expectantly down the street and then wrinkled his face at the lack of traffic.
    “Go on, nigger,” snapped the dealer, cuffing the boy with the back of his hand and scowling after him until he’d disappeared around the fence. As Eddie rattled closer, the dealer reached into his pocket and took out a gold dollar coin and started flipping and rolling it in his hand. He had worked the street for two years, dealt with the meanest motherfuckers in the biz. Been tightened up by the cops a dozen times and just swallowed the blood in his mouth and stayed cool. But the trash man always made him nervous. Those got-damn eyes lookin’ up at you like dark holes that you couldn’t escape.
    The boy came back just as Eddie slowed to a stop, his cart inches from the Brown Man’s hip. The runner started to offer up a warning to the old junk man but the dealer hushed him. The Brown Man took the thirteen dime bags of heroin from the boy and dropped them casually into the cart. In exchange Eddie passed him a crisp, folded hundred-dollar bill. Neither man spoke a word. Eddie shuffled on and the boy’s eyes rode his rounded back until he was out of earshot.
    “They’s a man you don’t fuck with,” the Brown Man said when the runner turned. “His moneys always good, and you