Chapter Seven
Calliope closed her nose to the smells of urine and rotting garbage greeting her when she entered the narrow alley. Her arms swung freely at her sides as she marched toward the man huddled in a corner sleeping between a dumpster and water-stained cardboard boxes.
As she neared him, she found he didn’t look like someone who sold drugs, but what did she know about such things? Nothing. Probably another wild goose chase, she surmised. Her spirits had been raised for nothing. This seemed always the way. She got her hopes up, then reality pounced.
Gosh dang.
At this rate, she would never fulfill her promise to herself to make Grace’s life easy to live.
She kicked empty tins of beans and soup aside until she stood a foot from the supposed drug pusher. When he didn’t acknowledge her presence, she bent at the waist, lowering herself until she came inches from his face. “Hey, sonny. You alive?” The stench emanating from him turned her stomach. She pinched her nostrils. This was for a good cause, she reminded herself.
The drug pusher still hadn’t moved.
“Yoohoo, bud,” she said and fanned her hand in front of his face. “Gone to sleep with the devil, have ya?” Wouldn’t you know it!
She straightened, cursing her frackin’ rotten luck.
Didn’t it beat all?
One possible lead for drugs, and he turned out dead.
Bugger.
To know for sure, she gave him a solid kick in the shin. The hoodlum didn’t move. If he were here and not in the hereafter, the blow should have awakened him, shouldn’t it?
While she pondered the question, she realized how good lashing out had made her feel, so good in fact she decided to vent some more. She pulled her leg back and ―
“Let that leg go, lady, and I swear you’ll be in traction before the end of the day.”
Calliope promptly stopped the swing. She lost her balance and grabbed the corner of the dumpster for support. “Give an old lady a heart attack, why don’t you!” she said after regaining her composure. “You looked dead. I was just making sure you hadn’t gone to parlay with the devil.”
“Well, as you can see, I haven’t. What do you want?”
She backed away from the foul smell of him, and took a good, long gander at his emaciated frame. He looked more like a homeless person than a drug dealer. This was not how she envisioned the score going down. The man could have at least stood to serve her. A well-mannered drug dealer would have.
Then, as though he read her thoughts, he put a bony liver-spotted hand on the wet asphalt, paying no mind to the bird droppings under his fingers, and pushed to his feet with more creaks than century old flooring.
Kids today didn’t get enough exercise.
She took a few more steps back, then a couple more when she could still smell him.
“Well?” he asked, hitching his jeans onto his waist.
“Well what?” With the dramatic jerk of her head, her new tortoiseshell sunglasses fell down her nose. She looked at him over the rims.
“What do you want?”
Good question. His horrible odor had given her memory loss. She pruned her lips, thinking. A second later, the reason came to her. She wasted no time telling him. “I was told someone would sell me drugs in this alley.” She gave him another once over and cocked a brow. “Obviously, I was misled.” Feeling disillusioned and heartbroken her plan had gone south, she turned and trotted toward the entrance, the flounce of her silk dress swinging against her legs.
“Not so fast, little lady. Maybe I can help you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said over her shoulder without a break in step.
“You said you wanted drugs?”
That earned her full attention. She stopped, turned and looked him in his blood-shot eyes. “That I did, laddie.” Oh, land of the free. She watched him pull plastic bag after plastic bag, like the ones holding a spare button on items of clothing, from the pockets of his jeans.
“What are you looking for?” he asked. “Uppers, downers?”
The question brought dentures to her mind. She was fortunate to need neither. “They’re not for me. They’re for a bastard of a man….” She waved her hand in the air in a dismissive gesture, thinking she probably told him more than he wanted to hear.
He held several bags in the air. “Heavenly Blue? Black Beauties? Bennies? 357 Magnums?”
She shook her head so rapidly her straw hat dipped to one side. Straightening the bonnet, she said, “I don’t know.” When he huffed a breath, apparently upset with little old ladies not knowing their minds, she lost her cool. “Don’t give me attitude, young man. That’s not very nice.” Calliope was happy she spoke her piece when the drug pusher had the good sense to hang his head.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.
He appeared contrite and because of that she accepted his apology.
“What did you intend the drugs for? Ice cream habit?”
She formed her lips in an ‘o’.
“You know about morphine and Valium, don’t you, ma’am?”
“Of course I do, boy-o. I didn’t just get off the turnip truck.” She jutted her chin as Calliope always did when someone mistook old age for senility. “I’ve been around the block a couple of times.”
“I’m sure you have.”
She took offense with the way he said it, like he humored her, or on second thought, like he thought she sold her body like those hussies on Water Street. Well! Of all the nerve. She could tell him a thing or two, but couldn’t take the time. Maybe they would meet again, and when they did, she would be sure to advise him of her Irish lineage.
“Morphine,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll take morphine.” She had so many choices and so little knowledge. Gosh dang. She should have done some research.
“Good choice.”
Calliope beamed.
He handed her a small plastic bag holding several pills in a pretty cream color.
She dug her pocket book from her straw purse, plucked a five-dollar bill from the zippered pouch and handed it to him. The next thing she knew a metal bracelet encircled her bony wrist.
Oh good Lord.
Wilson would be pissed.
And the word that Calliope had yet to say in all of her eighty years spilled from her lips, “Oh fuck.”