Carry the One by Carol Anshaw Read Free Book Online Page B

the parking lot included apprentice drivers practicing three-point turns or parallel parking, or old men waxing their cars, but for the most part the lot at night was a bustling marketplace of sex and drugs. Every now and then some guy mistook the point of Nick’s presence and pulled up next to him and looked over with an insolent expression that Nick now understood was supposed to be provocative. At first, he tried to look uninterested, but sometimes this was only interpreted as coyness, so now he would say straight out, “Hey. I’m just here for drugs. You know.”
    Specifically, he was here to meet up with one of two dealers. Angelo or Don. If one didn’t have something for him, the other would. They both offered a good line of product and always showed up; if you had the money, they had the drugs. In the world of addicts, who were pretty much totally unreliable, good dealers were almost parental figures. Pillars of the transient community that cruised this lot. They were reassuring to him; their presence implied a population still interested in the clarifying experience of drugs. Used to be everyone was into getting high, or could be persuaded. More and more, though, people seemed to have left partying behind for a creeping, phony “adult” culture that was all about jobs you had to wear suits to, and success. Whatever that was.
    Waiting in the lot was part of the whole experience; it built a little tension around scoring. While he waited, he closed his eyes and lit up an equation behind his lids.
Mb=Co3 / 2(pi)GPo2
    The sound of a large engine idling interrupted this thought. It was Don in his black Mercedes. Nick turned off the dome light in his car.
    “Really nice night,” Don said once he had pulled next to Nick and rolled down his window. He was looking up at the sky where a full moon hung low and fat. But he wasn’t talking about the clear sky or the mild fall temperatures. “I’ve got some excellent morphine drops,” he said, clicking a small, brown bottle against the window opening. “Undiluted. Straight from hospice.”
    The price tag on these was too steep, though, so Nick just picked up a dozen Percodan.
    “Hey. You can probably help me with this. My living room is the coldest room in my house. There’s an old fireplace, but I’ve never tried it.” Dealers always liked to talk to you as though you were a real person, or as though they were. Little conversations like this lubricated a transaction.
    Nick told him, “Get someone over. Make sure the flue is working. Get it cleaned, get the chimney lined. You can build a fire in it then. Nice and cozy.” He had told Don that he worked in construction, which was true on the mornings he could get it together to show up at this or that job. Telling people you are an astronomer, he found, was not usually a conversation starter. Or, worse, it started a conversation with the other person telling you his sign.
    As he pulled onto the Drive, Nick popped three percs to get the party rolling, then headed over to Alice’s. Something was wrong with her toilet; it ran on unless you did some complicated jiggling with the handle. He had promised to take care of this a week ago then lost track of time. He had a wrench and a new ball stopper on the passenger seatnext to him. He took pride in Alice’s loft; he’d done a lot of work on it, helped turn it from a gray space with a strong bleachy odor into an apartment she could live in.
    According to her lease, Alice was only supposed to use the loft as a place to paint, but she lived there too, sort of openly on the sly. She had made a kitchen in one corner with counters that were planks across sawhorses, a two-burner hot plate, a giant sixties refrigerator in harvest gold—an artifact from an earlier American epoch. Nick rigged up a metal stall shower off the pipes on the big wash sink. Next to this there was a toilet—the one now running on—that he enclosed with drywall.
    By the time he parked down the block