Contemporary fiction
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Having pre-heated the oven, Ox slid his mom’s meal prep
inside its jaws. After wearing himself out from pacing back and forth in the
family room, he picked up the receiver from a beige Princess phone on an end
table by the sofa. Dialing the number to the beachfront flophouse, his heart
thumped over the ten-to-one odds of Jenkins chewing his ass for hunting him
down. One of the other two blockheads in-residence answered in an alcoholic
haze. Unseen, digging a pinky inside his ear. “N-a-a-h! He ain’t here.”
Great! Not a helluva lot to go on.
If his brother didn’t
follow through by tomorrow afternoon, the day before Christmas Eve, Ox’s window
of opportunity for picking up Aileen’s bracelet would nail itself shut. For
that sole purpose, he’d already jumped on the bandwagon to accompany his dad to
Someplace in Time for a Thursday evening of merrymaking with three wise men.
***
On Tuesday evening, Jenkins ripped open the envelope to
extract his paycheck. Reaching for his wallet inside one of the frayed back
pockets of his dungarees, he slid the check inside the bill compartment while
slipping the ten-spot he’d coerced from Ox out of its mooring. That, he folded
and shoved into the coin pocket, the one half-tucked into the left, front
pocket of his jeans. Jenkins stuck it out until Neville Saunders left the
filling station. On his own until closing, he made a phone call.
At nine on the nose, Jenkins locked up. Driving over the
hose, the bell chimed as he peeled rubber onto Old Post Road, hell-for-leather
on his way to Charlestown Beach Road, the offshoot his great-grandfather and
Lillian Wright had taken to access the Breachway for their romantic interlude.
Forlorn at this hour in the freezing cold of the upcoming winter solstice, the
boonies provided a haven for whatever rocked your boat.
Jenkins dimmed his headlights when he spotted the familiar
’70 Mach 1 off the main drag. The Candy Man! Mustn’t keep him waiting. He
maneuvered his crate into a clearing behind the sleek racehorse. Dousing the
lamps and killing the engine, he stepped out. Sashaying up to the Mustang
muscle car, its V8 engine idling, the driver rolled down the window partway.
Jenkins pulled the rabbit out of his pocket. Money and product exchanged hands
without a word spoken between them.
At five bucks a bump for cocaine, Ox’s tenner enabled him to
snap up two. Poverty-stricken, he couldn’t afford to go the whole hog and pop
for a gram of blow, the equivalent of twenty-five bumps. From force of habit,
he’d nickel-and-dime it until his well went dry. Before Jenkins hiked his bony
ass back to his car, the Candy Man muscled his coupe onto the chewed asphalt
and disappeared from view.
***
Colder than a witch’s tit, in the twenty to twenty-five
degree range and dipping, Jenkins started the engine and goosed the lever on
the heater to full blast. He switched on the overhead light. Irritable from
depraved deprivation, he couldn’t wait to sample the stuff. Prepared for times
like these, he opened the glove compartment to pull out his resources: an
unviable URI student identification card; small, flat mirror; a used straw he’d
whittled down to three inches or thereabouts.
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
Tempted to organize both bindles of white powder into lines
for snorting, dire financial straits predicated dosing out one of them into two
short lines onto the mirror he’d placed on the passenger side of the bench
seat. Inserting the straw into his left nostril while holding the other shut,
Jenkins snorted a line of coke. He repeated the procedure for his right
nostril. Barely rolling down the window on the driver’s side, he tossed out the
wrapper for a wind gust to carry off somewhere.
Three minutes later, the euphoric rush hit him with an
accompanying jolt of energy and mental acuity. With his high tolerance for
turbocharging, he knew his altered state wouldn’t last for more than fifteen
minutes. He’d ride it out for a while, then head home to smoke some weed to
tone down withdrawal symptoms and reduce his craving to squander the second
helping so soon. His work here being done, Jenkins shoved his implements back
inside the compartment and put the spare one-inch by one-inch wad of wax paper
inside the fold of an outer pocket on his jacket.
In short order, he experienced a hard landing. Inside the toasty rattletrap of his ’64 Chevy Bel Air sedan, fatigue outpaced his intention to drive off just yet. Leaning his head back against the tatty upholstered seat, his eyes closed of their own volition for sack time in the dead of Tuesday night.
