Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail by T.J. Forrester Read Free Book Online Page A

have plenty left for the early-morning hours. My hands clench the steering wheel. Whenever a craving creeps through my body, I think about the trail. I don’t know if I’ll like walking through the mountains or if I’ll like sleeping on the ground, but I can walk into any town in the lower forty-eight and buy coke within the hour. Can’t do that in the mountains, and that’s what I’m saying. There is no gutter on the Appalachian Trail.
    *   *   *
    The Buick’s headlights sweep across earth brown as coffee stains, and the trailer, caught in the gleam, shines like an aluminum coffin. I park in the driveway, and Roxie and I get out and walk to the door. A barbecue smell lingers in the air, and I’m reminded of the food we purchased at 7-Eleven. That’s another thing that’s different since I quit shooting coke. Once I got clean in prison I started thinking about food all the time. Especially chocolate. There’s nothing like an oversized chunk of chocolate melting in my mouth. I swear it makes me hard. I’m cut out for food. That’s why cooking up in Maine’s a good idea. I can make it as a cook. I bet I have recipes I never thought of.
    â€œYou coming in or what?” Roxie says.
    The door thumps the siding, and windows vibrate. I lug the backpack inside, set it on the floor. The trailer is single-wide and has a kitchen and combination living-dining room. There are a fewpictures on the walls, an ashtray on a chipped end table, a red couch that faded to orange a long time ago. I glance at the refrigerator and can’t help but smile at a picture of a Greek ruin. Roxie dreams about traveling abroad, and she clips Atlanta Journal-Constitution articles about exotic cities. She has plans to work for a travel agency that sends employees around the world, says she knows so much about these cities that she will make an excellent guide. I’m glad to see she’s still dreaming and turn her way.
    â€œHelp me with this, will you?” Roxie melts coke on a spoon, cinches a shoestring around her bicep, and grips the string in her teeth. She’s been pumping these veins for ten years, and purple splotches mottle the inside of her elbow like chicken pox. I press the needle through her skin and find a vein on the first try. Her teeth unclench, the string releases its grip, and her eyes roll back.
    â€œThis is some good dope,” she says. “Hits like a train.”
    I open the backpack and hold up a miniature radio I bought especially for Roxie because she likes her music.
    â€œSee,” I say. “This thing runs on AA batteries and we can share it at night. You can listen to your country and I can listen to jazz.”
    Roxie rolls up my sleeve. She’s offering to get me high, and I might as well admit it, the coke in that Baggie is killing me. I want it so bad my heart’s clenched hard as a baseball. The doorknob down the hall turns clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise. Click . . . Click . . . Click . . . Click . . . A circular metronome.
    â€œDamn!” Roxie says. “When she went out, she must have locked Odell in the bedroom.”
    â€œWhat the fuck?”
    I have no idea who is down there, so I ease my way toward thekitchen and rummage through a drawer for a knife. Roxie tells me to relax, that a girl she met over on Fifth Street is staying for a few days. The boy is only four, and he’s probably hungry.
    â€œHis grandmother is picking him up in the morning,” Roxie says. “Brittany only has him every other weekend.”
    â€œWhere the hell is Brittany?”
    Roxie shrugs, and I know my answer without prying. Roxie’s roommate is a hooker out making money for her high. I jog down the hall, open the door to the rear bedroom. There’s bottled water on a dresser, and in the corner a bucket for a toilet. The room smells like a gas station bathroom.