“I don’t believe that.”
“Then you ballsier than me, man. I put a guy in the hospital once with a rupture.
Some rich guy. Cops chased me three days. But you ballsier than me. ” He took a cigarette and lit it. “Maybe you’ll go the whole month. A billion dollars. You’d have to buy a fuckin freight train to haul it off.”
“Don’t swear, praise Gawd,” the old woman said from across the room where she was slicing carrots.
Bradley paid no attention. “You an your wife an little girl would be on easy street then. You got two days already.”
“No,” Richards said. “The game’s rigged. You know those two things I gave Stacey to mail when he and your ma went out for groceries? I have to mail two of those every day before midnight. ” He explained to Bradley about the forfeit clause, and his suspicion that they had traced him to Boston by postmark.
“Easy to beat that.”
“How?”
“Never mind. Later. How you gonna get out of Boston? You awful hot. Made ’em mad, blowin up their oinkers at the YMCA. They had Free-Vee on that tonight. An those ones you took with the bag over your head. That was pretty sharp. Ma!” he finished irritably, “when’s that stuff gonna be ready? We’re fallin away to shadows right before ya!”
“She comin on,” Ma said. She plopped a cover over the rich, slowly bubbling mass and walked slowly into the bedroom to sit by the girl.
“I don’t know,” Richards said. “I’ll try to get a car, I guess. I’ve got fake papers, but I don’t dare use them. I’ll do something-wear dark glasses-and get out of the city. I’ve been thinking about going to Vermont and then crossing over into Canada. ”
Bradley grunted and got up to put plates on the table. “By now they got every highway going out of Beantown blocked. A man wearin dark glasses calls tension to himself. They’ll turn you into monkeymeat before you get six miles.”
369
“Then I don’t know,” Richards said. “If I stay here, they’ll get you for an accessory. ”
Bradley began spreading dishes. “Suppose we get a car. You got the squeezin green. I got a name that isn’t hot. There’s a spic on Milk Street that’ll sell me a Wint for three hundred. I’ll get one of my buddies to drive it up to Manchester. It’ll be cool as a fool in Manchester because you’re bottled up in Boston. You eatin, Ma?”
“Yes an praise Gawd. ” She waddled out of the bedroom. “Your sister is sleepin a little. ”
“Good.” He ladled up three dishes of hamburger gumbo and then paused. “Where’s Stacey?”
“Said he was goin to the drug,” Ma said complacently, shoveling gumbo into her toothless maw at a blinding speed. “Said he goan to get medicine.”
“If he gets busted, I’ll break his ass,” Bradley said, sitting heavily.
“He won’t,” Richards said. “He’s got money.”
“Yeah, maybe we don’t need no charity money, graymeat.”
Richards laughed and salted his meal. “I’d probably be nabbed now if it wasn’t for him,” he said. “I guess it was earned money.”
Bradley leaned forward, concentrating on his plate. None of them said anything more until the meal was done. Richards and Bradley had two helpings; the old woman had three. As they were lighting cigarettes, a key scratched in the lock and all of them stiffened until Stacey came in, looking guilty, frightened, and excited. He was carrying a brown bag in one hand and he gave Ma a bottle of medicine.
“Thass prime dope,” he said. “That of man Curry ast me where I got two dollars and semney-fi cents to buy prime dope an I tole him to go shit in his boot and eat it. ”
“Doan swear or the devil will poke you, ” Ma said. “Here’s dinner. ”
The boy’s eyes widened. “Jesus, there’s meat in it!”
“Naw, we jus shat in it to make it thicker,” Bradley said. The boy looked up sharply, saw his brother was joking, giggled, and fell to.
“Will that druggist go to the cops?” Richards asked quietly.
“Curry? Naw. Not if there might be some more squeezin green in this fambly. He knows Lassie’s got to have heavy dope.”
“What about this Manchester thing?”
“Yeah. Well, Vermont’s no good. Not enough of our kind of people. Tough cops. I get some good fella like Rich Goleon to drive that Wint to Manchester and park it in an automatic garage. Then I drive you up in another car.” He crushed out his cigarette. “In the trunk. They’re only using Jiffy Sniffers on the back road. We’ll go right up 495.”
“Pretty dangerous for you,” Richards said.
“Oh, I wasn’t gonna do it free. When Cassie goes, she’s gonna go out wrecked. ”
“Praise Gawd,” Ma said.
370
“Still pretty dangerous for you.”
“Any pig grunts at Bradley, he make ’em shit in their boot an eat it,” Stacey said, wiping his mouth. When he looked at Bradley, his eyes glittered with the flat shine of hero worship.
“You’re dribblin on your shirt, Skinner,” Bradley said. He knuckled Stacey’s head.
“You beatin your meat yet, Skinner? Ain’t big enough, are ya?”
“If they catch us, you’ll go in for the long bomb,” Richards said. “Who’s going to take care of the boy?”
“He’ll take care of himself if something happens,” Bradley said. “Himself and Ma here. He’s not hooked on nothin. Are you Stace?”
Stacey shook his head emphatically.
“An he knows if I find any pricks in his arms I’ll beat his brains out. Ain’t that right, Stacey?”
Stacey nodded.
“Besides, we can use the money. This is a hurtin family. So don’t say no more about it. I guess I know what I’m doin.”
Richards finished his cigarette in silence while Bradley went in to give Cassie some medicine.
Minus 063 and COUNTING
When he awoke, it was still dark and the inner tide of his body put the time at about four-thirty. The girl, Cassie, had been screaming, and Bradley got up. The three of them were sleeping in the small, drafty back bedroom, Stacey and Richards on the floor. Ma slept with the girl.
Over the steady wheeze of Stacey’s deep-sleep respiration, Richards heard Bradley come out of the room. There was a clink of a spoon in the sink. The girl’s screams became isolated moans which trailed into silence. Richards could sense Bradley standing somewhere in the kitchen, immobile, waiting for the silence to come. He returned, sat down, farted, and then the bedsprings shifted creakily as he lay down.
“Bradley?”
“What?”
“Stacey said she was only five. Is that so?”
“Yes. ” The urban dialectic was gone from his voice, making him sound unreal and dreamlike.
“What’s a five-year-old kid doing with lung cancer? I didn’t know they got it.
Leukemia, maybe. Not lung cancer.”
There was a bitter, whispered chuckle from the bed. “You’re from Harding, right?
What’s the air-pollution count in Harding?”
371
“I don’t know,” Richards said. “They don’t give them with the weather anymore. They haven’t for . . . gee, I don’t know. A long time.”
“Not since 2020 in Boston,” Bradley whispered back. “They’re scared to. You ain’t got a nose filter, do you?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Richards said irritably. “The goddam things cost two hundred bucks, even in the cut-rate stores. I didn’t see two hundred bucks all last year. Did you?”
“No,” Bradley said softly. He paused. “Stacey’s got one. I made it. Ma and Rich Goleon an some other people got em, too. ”
“You’re shitting me,” Richards said.
“No, man.” He stopped. Richards was suddenly sure that Bradley was weighing what he had said already against a great many more things which he might say. Wondering how much was too much. When the words came again, they came with difficulty. “We’ve been reading. That Free-Vee shit is for empty-heads.”
Richards grunted agreement.
“The gang, you know. Some of the guys are just cruisers, you know? All they’re interested in is honky-stomping on Saturday night. But some of us have been going down to the library since we were twelve or so.”
“They let you in without a card in Boston?”
“No. You can’t get a card unless there’s someone with a guaranteed income of five thousand dollars a year in your family. We got some plump-ass kid an kifed his card. We take turns going. We got a gang suit we wear when we go. ” Bradley paused. “You laugh at me and I’ll cut you, man.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“At first we only read sexbooks. Then when Cassie first started getting sick, I got into this pollution stuff. They’ve got all the books on impurity counts and smog levels and nose filters in the reserve section. We got a key made from a wax blank. Man, did you know that everybody in Tokyo had to wear a nose filter by 2012?”