Authors: Jack Ketchum
But you couldn’t just up and tell them.
He got the plunger out from under the sink because who the hell wanted to bother with the storage space just for that and walked out into a blast of warm humid air and crossed the macadam lot around the side of the pool to number nineteen. He glanced over his shoulder and through the plateglass window saw his mother at the front desk registering a middle-aged couple. Their van was parked out front.
Sundays were the only days his mother would consent to sit desk duty. The rest of the time he split with his father and Willie, their old part-timer, supposedly about fifty-fifty but it didn’t work out that way because his father had no life. Shit, you could buy Harold Pye with a clap on the back and a smile and a fifth of J&B and he’d gladly handle the overtime.
Inside the unit he found Carla in the bathroom trying to stem the tide, dipping a pan into the filthy water and emptying it into the sink. There were rolled-up towels on the floor by the entranceway. She’d managed to protect the green wall-to-wall carpeting anyway.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said. “I’ll have her call you when I’m through.”
“Thanks, Ray.”
She was grateful. This kind of job? She damn well should be.
Twenty minutes later he had the water running clear again and a soggy brown Kotex in the sink, Fucking women. Some of these women were fucking
animals
. You posted a sign in every unit telling them not to flush the goddamn things, provided disposable bags but they went and did it anyway. He cleaned and rinsed the plunger in the tub, dried it with a towel and headed out to the manager’s office to get Carla for the final cleanup.
His mother was sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk with a pretty young blonde standing in front of her who turned and smiled at him briefly as he walked in. His mother did not smile. She rarely did. On the television behind her they were showing clips from the moon landing. No sound. His mother thought sound intrusive in public places and in bad taste. At home she’d blast the sucker.
“Ray, meet Sally Richmond. Sally, this is my son Ray. He manages the place along with my husband Harold. Sally’s coming on in housekeeping tomorrow.”
Housekeeping
. His mother called them housekeepers. They were maids for chrissake. In some other town they’d all have been black. Sparta had no blacks. Not so far at least. So far the niggers were at bay.
“Hello, Sally. Good to meet you.” He extended his hand and she took it. Her grip was surprisingly firm, her hand not nearly as soft as he expected. He exerted just the right amount of pressure and then let it fall away.
“Hello, Mr. Pye.”
“If you’re going to be on staff here it’s Ray, okay?”
“Okay. Ray.”
“Nine o’clock, then,” his mother said.
“Sure. Nine will be fine.”
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We’ll give you three days to start with and then see about extending you.”
“Fine. Tomorrow, then. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Pye. Nice to meet you, Ray. Thanks.”
“See you tomorrow.” He smiled at her and she returned it brightly. It was no more a shy smile than his was. The girl was pretty and knew it and didn’t mind somebody appreciating the fact.
She walked past him out into the parking lot and he told his mother about the Kotex in the toilet and that the room was ready for Carla and his mother said she’d page her. And that was the extent of their conversation. When he stepped out of the office again Sally Richmond was just pulling out into traffic in a blue Volkswagon Beetle.
The girl was interesting. Very interesting, he thought. Slim but not fine-boned. Tall too. And pretty. Not as pretty as Katherine Wallace was but that was going some. Long blond hair and big green eyes.
And not shy.
She’d be coming in tomorrow. Tomorrow was Monday and that gave him four days and four nights before his date with Katherine on Friday. He could get rid of Jennifer easily enough whenever he wanted to. He had Jennifer pretty well trained by now. She came and went pretty much on his say-so.
A lot could happen in four days. You never knew.
He crossed the hot macadam to his apartment. He hoped Jennifer would be dressed by now and ready to split. It would be nice to take a long, hot shower, find Tim and maybe Lee and some of the other guys and hang out for a while and smoke a little dope and tell them about Katherine and this new girl Sally and he couldn’t do that with Jennifer tagging along.
Fact was, Jennifer was getting to be something of a drag on his action lately. Katherine obviously didn’t like her
or
Tim. He wondered what he should do about that, if anything. He didn’t know. Keep them separate anyway for now.
Divide and conquer
.
It always worked for him.
“You know one thing I love about you? Your hair.”
“Hair? I don’t have hardly any.”
“Sure you do. It’s fine as baby’s hair.”
“And there’s just about as much of it.”
Ed lay on the pillow under her arm. She stroked his head. When he turned toward her she could feel his beard against her breast. The beard was thick and soft, not at all prickly as she’d first expected and she liked the feel of that too.
She stroked his powerful shoulders, his strong arms, the soft smooth lightly freckled skin.
“What time you have to be at work in the morning?”
“Nine.”
“I wish you’d told me what you were planning to do and where you were planning to do it. I couldn’t forbid you god knows but I sure as hell would have tried to talk you out of it. Harold and Jane, they’re all right I guess, though I don’t really know the mother too well. But that goddamn Ray. I dunno, Sally. Were you listening to what I just said? We had the guy prime on a
murder
charge. Charlie and I still think he’s guilty as sin. Or at the very least knows who is. You sure I can’t get you to rethink this thing?”
“Cut it out, Eddie. You’re trying to spook me.”
“Damn right I am.”
“It’s just a job, Ed. I’m not going to marry the guy.”
He was making her uncomfortable, though. It was the first she’d known Ed Anderson to make her uncomfortable about
anything
, and certainly not on purpose. She needed the goddamn job. There weren’t that many of them open for kids this late in the season. She’d left the last one, the Dairy Queen, because her boss had accused her of stealing from the till. And even though they went through the receipts again and they’d tallied and even though he’d apologized
sort of
she’d never stolen a dime from anybody and wasn’t about to work for someone who thought she might be capable of it. The Dairy Queen was a lousy job anyway. On your feet all night long, five to midnight. Though she didn’t expect that changing sheets and doing people’s dirty laundry would be a whole lot better.
But it was something. And her father had made it clear to her that if she wanted college next year she’d damn well better pull her weight. And she wanted college very much. So she was going to pull her weight. She’d have done it anyway even if she hadn’t been accepted at B.U., if for no other reason than to make enough money to get out of town like her older sister Ruthie’d done. There was nothing about Sparta with the exception of Ed to keep her here and she expected to be free of her father and his precious Sparta Realty and all her parents’ self-important phony
connections
as soon as humanly possible.
“I committed myself, Ed. I told her I’d be there. Listen, I can handle Ray.”
“The best way to handle Ray Pye is to keep the hell away from him.”
“I can do that too. It’s a motel for godsakes. This time of year there are people all over the place. What’s he going to do, attack me in the laundry room in broad daylight? You’re a sweet silly man and you’re crazy about me, aren’t you.”
She kissed him and gave him a hug.
“I love you,” she said. “I could eat you up.”
She reached down under the covers and he
was
up, or well on his way up. Ed was no fifteen-minute man but he was a
half-an-hour
man and she supposed that at his age that was really not half bad at all.
She stroked him. His lips traced the side of her breast.
“You remember the day we met, Eddie?”
“Mmmm-hmmmm. Strawberry shake.”
“And you asked for crushed pineapple in it, three spoonsful in the shaker and I thought you were crazy. Then you made me try it and it was delicious. And you got this great big smile on your face and said,
I wouldn’t lie to you. Why would I lie?
And you’ve never ever lied to me since, have you.”
“No.”
“Then tell me the truth. Are you going to be sad when I leave?”
“Tonight?”
“I mean when I leave. Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to handle that okay?”
“Hell, Sally. I’d never have expected you in the first place. I surely never expected you to stay. You’re young and you’re too good and too smart for this little town. You’ve got all sorts of places to go. I’m happy taking you day to day.”
“Then you know what?”
She shifted slightly away from him.
“What.”
She climbed over and straddled him, sunk him into her slowly and then deep and began to gently rock.
“That’s what,” she said.
Tim crossed the Andover Post Office parking lot, opened the door and stepped into the blast of air conditioning and used his key on the box. The package from Sammy was there just as he’d said it would be along with a handful of junk mail. He took it all out and locked it again and walked out the door into the sun. Simple as that. Sammy worked the mailroom for the First National Bank of Irvington so the hash was packaged like a box of checks, which for a pound of the stuff was the perfect size.
He dumped the junk mail in the basket at the curb and got into the car he’d borrowed from his boss at Center Hardware where his father had his shop. Gene was a pretty nice guy. Gave him an entire hour for lunch which was just what he needed to drive to Andover and back and still stop by his house for a few minutes in order to drop the hash. He put the box in the cluttered glove compartment and drove back to Sparta, careful to obey all the lights and traffic signs and stay within the speed limit.
His father’s battered truck was parked in front of the hardware store exactly as he’d thought it would be. His father almost always brown-bagged his lunch and he’d done so today. His mother’s old Plymouth was parked in front of the A&P where she worked as cashier. He stopped at the light and went on.
On his lawn the grass needed cutting. The shrubs were looking scraggly and needed watering. The pavement was cracked where the cement met the brick-and-mortar steps and there was a half-piece of brick missing out of the bottom one. You’d have thought his father, who was supposed to be so all-around handy, would have gotten around to both these things long ago.
He used his key in the door and smelled last night’s ham and cabbage wafting toward him from the kitchen. He went upstairs to his room, sat down on the bed under the poster of John Lennon in his granny glasses—a photo Ray despised—and opened the package. He had plenty of time. He needed to check the weight. He got the scale out of his dresser and took the two layers of foil off the tarry brown brick of hash and placed the brick on the scale and saw that the weight was fine.
He went to the bathroom and got one of his father’s double-edged Gillettes out of the medicine cabinet. This was the part that always got to him, always made him excited, the part that always scared him. Not the pickup and the drive but this. Getting the razor blade. Unwrapping it. Going back to his room.
It was almost sexy.
If Ray knew he’d absolutely shit. It was one thing to cut a dime bag or two out of a pound of grass for his own use. But hash was harder to come by these days and Ray’s personal favorite. So hash was another thing entirely.
He sat down on the bed again, set an old dog-eared copy of
National Geographic
on his lap and began to shave the sides of the brick, just the thinnest of cuts on all four sides. Ray would never miss it. He never checked the weight. Either he trusted Tim as much as he said he did or figured that Tim would never dare to cross him.
But he’d been shaving the stuff for months now. What was the point of muling for Ray, doing pickups of both grass and hash, handling the risky stuff, if you couldn’t take a bit off the top? His cut of the profits was good but it wasn’t near what Ray was getting, it was half that, because Ray had all the connections and he didn’t.
He knew that one day Ray might check the weight and he didn’t like to think what would happen then. He might get away with saying that his scale was fucked, say that it was Sammy who’d short-weighted them and that the scale hadn’t caught it. He
might
get away with that. But then he’d probably have to deal with Sammy. He didn’t even know Sammy. Sammy was just a voice on the phone. But it was a mean voice and Ray said that Sammy came from Newark originally and everybody knew that Newark was one tough city.