The ‘almost’ part was a bitch. It was a heartbreak.
He needed to get high enough to fly away, like Cooter promised they could do.
But he wasn’t high enough for that.
For Billy the high used to start before he even clicked his lighter to smoke the ice. Meth was always like that, you even think about it you get a tingle in the balls and a flutter behind the eyes. High before you’re high, that’s what Cooter used to say.
Cooter used say a lot of stuff.
Cooter was pretty funny. He had Billy laughing the first time they smoked meth. Called it methandfriendofmine. That was funny.
He and Cooter would smoke so much they’d get pipe-drunk and then everything was funny. Peeling wallpaper was funny. A cockroach swimming in his cereal bowl was funny. Even watching Carla, that scratchity-ann crank hoe, pick at her blisters was funny.
That was a long time ago.
The anticipation wasn’t the same.
The high wasn’t the high anymore.
Now, when Billy popped a lighter under the quartz all he felt was bad stuff. His stomach was full of bees and there were thorns in his head. Even when he sucked in that first lungful and the world fell off its hinges. That used to be epic. That used to be the fucking it.
Now it was like opening a door into a haunted house.
Cooter was in that haunted house, too.
Sitting there, grinning at him with crooked teeth surrounded by charred skin, staring with eyeballs that had been boiled white in the fire.
If Billy smoked too long he could see Cooter die all over again. It was like a big DVR playing the scene over and over again in his head. Surround-sound and everything. No amount of smoke could bury that, and the deeper into the high Billy went to hide from it, the clearer the picture got.
-2-
They’d come in a couple of Escalades. Farelli and his posse of six wiseguy wannabes from Newark, rolling up to Cooter’s little place on DeFrane Street. White boys dressed like they thought the Sopranos was on the Fashion Channel. Pointy shoes and tight pants and shirts open to show Neanderthal hair on their chests. Acting tough, hoping to be noticed by guys who are tough. Talking trash.
Carrying baseball bats and gas in red plastic cans.
Billy was in the attic, huddled over the last fumes in a pipe. He heard the shouts, but at first that didn’t mean shit to him. You get high, you hear stuff. Some highs are good, some highs blow. People steal shit from each other. There are fights. It’s no big.
But then the shouts turned to screams.
Screams weren’t part it. Meth doesn’t take you down that avenue. Billy staggered to his feet and looked down the attic stairs. There was no doors anywhere. Billy remembered he and Cooter taking them off, but he couldn’t remember what that had been about.
The screams were loud enough to poke holes in the envelope of his high.
He crept down to the second floor and leaned over the bannister.
There they were.
The dickheads from Seventh Avenue. Farelli’s thugs were like a pack of dogs. Billy lost count of the number of times they beat him up. Rubbed his face in dogshit. Kicked him in the balls. Always laughing about it. Always grabbing their own nuts and yelling ‘Eat me!’ every time they saw Cooter. Always calling Cooter faggot or nigger or other shit.
Worse than a pack of dogs, Billy thought. Dogs won’t fuck with you for no reason.Billy Sparrow didn’t hate very many things, but he hated Farelli and his crew.
Farelli lived in the house with all those statues of the Virgin Mary on their lawn. The virgin and a bunch of dumb-ass plastic pink flamingoes.
Billy had a vague memory of him and Cooter stealing some of them the other night. Or was it last night? What the fuck did they do with them?
They stole all sorts of shit. Flamingoes, those goofy little lawn gnomes, a statue of a black guy dressed like a jockey. That one really pissed Cooter off. Billy didn’t know why. Sure, Cooter was black but he wasn’t a jockey. But it pissed Cooter off, and when Cooter gets pissed he gets funny.
Billy remembered what they’d done with the stuff they stole. The gnomes and flamingoes were all on the front lawn here, with the Virgin Mary and the lawn jockey snuggled down in the crab grass together. Cooter couldn’t take their clothes off –they were statues, after all—but the way he laid them down said it all. With the gnomes and pink birds watching. It was fucking hilarious.
Afterward, when they were about to get high, Cooter said that he’d have to move that shit before his uncle saw it. Uncle Conch Boukman was a hard-headed, short-tempered old man who moved to New Jersey after his village in Haiti was destroyed in that earthquake. Cooter was his only relative, but to Billy they were so different that it was hard to tell that there was any connection.
But Uncle Conch brought a little money with him, and he paid the mortgage off on Cooter’s pad.
The screams from downstairs punched Billy in the head and it shook him out of the memories of last night.
Farelli and his goon squad were all there. So were a whole mess of Cooter’s friends. Couple of kids Billy knew, too. Maybe ten people, hanging out, getting high. One guy –the uptown kid who brought some quality ice with him--with the shorts down around his knees so Carla could give him a courtesy BJ. But Carla wasn’t blowing him. Or anybody. Billy looked at her and saw her face burst apart as a baseball bat hit her.
She screamed and then bat hit her and she couldn’t scream anymore. Carla fell back and she fell weird, like she had no bones in her neck.
That’s when it all went crazy.
That’s when Farelli’s thugs went apeshit. Bats and chains.
Farelli stood in the center of the living room and even from upstairs Billy could see that there was a bulge in Farelli’s pants. He was rock-hard watching this shit. Billy knew about that. His old man had been like that sometimes. Getting serious wood because using a belt on Billy and his sisters felt that good. Made him feel that jazzed.
That’s when Billy heard Cooter came crashing into the room, swinging a mop handle and catching Farelli’s cousin, Tony, right across the forehead.
There was a moment when Billy thought it would all be over right there and then. Everyone and everything froze solid. Even the screaming stopped for just a second.
Billy wanted to scream a warning. He wanted to shout at Cooter and everyone else. Tell them to run, tell them to get the fuck out.
While there was still a chance.
-3-
But there was no chance.
Cooter knew it when he came charging out of the kitchen with the mop.
Farelli and his goons knew it before they loaded into their Escalades. They knew it when the stopped at the Lukoil to fill up their red gas can.
Even the zoned-out stoners knew it. Carla probably knew it, too, right up until the bat knocked her head loose on her neck.
Billy knew it. Billy knew that all of them –greaser or meth-head—were born into this. Into this moment, like they were all bowling-balls thrown down polished wood alleys but all the alleys were designed to converge into one spot. No pins. Just a bunch of bats and a gas can and a mop handle.
The moment became unstuck when Farelli laughed.
The right kind of laugh will do that.
Cooter looked at him and Farelli looked back.
Billy screamed then.
Nobody heard him, because everyone was screaming. The bats went up and down and around and around, and somebody kept painting all of the drowsy, doped-up, screaming faces with red.
Cooter tried to run.
They splashed him with gas.
Farelli flicked a cigarette at him.
Cooter made it all the way to the second floor. Billy tried to help him. Swatting at the flames that were wreathed around Cooter’s face. Billy shoved him into the bathroom, knoc
ked him down with burned hands into the tub. Turned on the water.
But by then there were flames coming up through the floor.
The water filled the tub, but fire reached up with long yellow fingers between the floor boards and drove Billy back. From the bathroom doorway he watched the inferno heat boil the water in the tub. Where Cooter was.
When Billy dove through the second floor window, he saw three things.
The Escalades driving away, laughter tumbling out of the open windows.
The faces of pink flamingoes and lawn gnomes and the mother of Jesus staring up at him with plastic eyes.
And then the hedged reaching up tear at him with a thousand green fingers.