Tooling Up
Sheldon Lee Compton
“Don’t worry about it. Go make your living.”
Maxine and Bill go easy on me. They should. Before Maxine gave up pills, Box, and Done, before she got all the way clear from everything, I was her one supplier. I had birdies in three suboxone clinics, two methadone clinics, and four doctors set up between Lexington and Hazard who still had enough balls to give out solid scripts for Lortab, Percs, and Oxys. And, bear in mind, this was after Purdue got nailed with the suit and squeezed out millions to Kentucky after offering doctors bonuses for whoever gave out the most scripts. This was during the overreaction to the opioid crisis. Not before it. Anybody and their mom could have sold before the shitstorm. So it’s don’t worry about it and it’s go make your living because they can’t really say nothing else.
“Will do,” I say. I head to the parking lot where Dougie Fletcher waits in his purple S10. When I get there he’s dozed off, leaning against his driver’s door and snoring a beat ninety. He’d had some benzos already this morning.
“Dougie!”
Dougie jerks awake, grips the steering wheel.
“Holy-shit-what-the-hell!”
“You working double shifts or something?” I ask.
It’s a mean joke. I’m full of them. Dougie ain’t worked a whole hour since Gerald Blackmon arrested him straight from behind the counter at Osborne’s Grocery after somebody told Clay Osborne he was selling pot out of there. Since then Dougie, or as the high school kids call him, Druggie, mostly bought pain pills or Done, took half and sat at the old site where the Baptist church burned down a decade ago. He might have been the fucker who burned it down for all anybody knows. It ain’t never got him in jail if he did. After awhile drugs ain’t never got him in either. Law just gives up and focuses on containment when it gets too bad. I was ready to cut ties with him a few months back. Got convinced he was on a deal informing for somebody, probably the sheriff. But he’s part of my set up so I take my chances.
“Been doing okay, Druggie?”
“Piss now Patrica don’t call me that.”
He’s sorting through what he’s got in the car. Looks like a lot of it’s loose in clear baggies. Some of it he gets from his shirt pocket.
“Ain’t got nothing to carry this shit in?” I ask.
“You can put it in a paper poke for all I care.”
“I’d rather not, dumbass.”
Druggie bends over into the floorboard and I see him sifting through old McDonald’s bags and pop cans. He comes up with this red plastic thermos.
“Put it in this and stick it in your trunk. You’ll be fine long as you don’t drive like a bat out of hell.”
About now I’m tempted to jab my thumb into Druggie’s throat. But I don’t. I shouldn’t. Sometimes my anger gets ahead of me and gets me in serious trouble. I’m trying to keep all that down these days. It might sound crazy, but there’s such a thing as a straight arrow drug dealer nowadays. I don’t mess with homemade nothing. The really rare commodity anymore is pain pills. And Druggie is part of my link for that. He gets me Opana. So no matter how bad I want to crack his windpipe, instead I take the plastic thermos and nod my head, take a long draw on my cigarette. Calm myself. Get ready to start the rest of my day.
Maxine and Bill’s is pretty dead right after breakfast and it stays that way until about a quarter to lunchtime. The thermos half full of Opana is back home in my bedroom. I stowed twenty with me for this buy, some high school kid tooling up for a graduation party next month. Back home makes me wonder if home is the right word. Taking a rundown—Mom is dead, Dad is moved out, I live alone—it’s probably better to call it something closer to a truck stop.
The high school kid, who I call a kid even though I’m only like two years older, is late. This gives me too much time to think. I think about how you’d think drugs, drug dealing, dope heads, and all that, were this really scary or strange thing that sticks out. But it don’t. They’s people around here who are third-generation dope heads and drunks. People whose mamaws and papaws stayed blowed in the creek. People who don’t think a thing about smoking meth on the front porch right beside kids, theirs or anybody else’s.
The kid reaches out to shake hands like a vacuum salesman.
“Trish?”
“Sit down, dumbass.”
I take a quick look around to see if anybody noticed the way this dumbass strolled up like me and him was doing big business. He sits down and starts studying Maxine. Bill’s in the back working on the dough mixer.
“Don’t worry about them. They know what’s going on. It’s good.”
“Yeah, well I’d still like to take this outside. I ain’t never bought off somebody I don’t know.”
I usually use one menu to send the pills their way and get them to send the cash back to me in the other menu. But that’s enough. I slam a three-month bottle down in the middle of the table. He about heads over in the booth, like he’s taking sniper fire or something. But not before grabbing the bottle.
“You’re crazier’n hell.”
When he settles down I give him the price. He pulls out the cash and I take it from him extra slow, grinning.
He must have took a pretty good offense to the whole thing because the next thing he says he knows’ll upset me.
“I saw your dad heading up Paint Lick on my way here. Don’t you all live on Paint Lick?”
“What’n the hell you talking about?”
“Didn’t your dad take off and leave you to make your own way in the world?” He puts that dickhead emphasis on the last part and waves his hand across the table top where we just finished the buy.
I’m starting to get pretty tired of this kid. Instead of answering I stare at him long and hard.
“Just saying,” he says, raises his hands up in a truce pose. “You might want to see what he’s up to. Word is he’s been going around talking a little crazy lately.”
“Leave.”
“Do what?”
“Leave now.”
He pauses about two more seconds and then stands, shakes his head, and walks heavy to the door. He had to get that last little head shake in. That’s what’s going to get him derailed one day with a busted head. Attitude like that.
It’s come a heavy rain and there’s standing water on Paint Lick. The high school kid wasn’t wrong, but I had no urge to let him know that. If he saw my dad coming this way, it couldn’t be good. But the puddles are winning and I can’t get ahead as fast as I want. I imagine Dad burning down the house; I imagine him driving his truck through the house; in my wildest nightmare I imagine Dad sitting on the front porch ready to forgive me for disappointing him.
When he left, he left because he found out I was selling drugs. This was only a few months after Mom died. Not a drug-related death, a point I spent a lot of time trying to get people to understand. At least at first. Then it didn’t matter to me that much. People in general stopped mattering to me mostly. But the key point now is that my dad is likely on his way to the truck-stop-house.
When I pull in his Dodge is still there. I swing in pretty hot but get out moving slow, in no hurry to get to the end of whatever this is going to be. The front door’s open and I get a low feeling in my stomach so I move through it like I’m running from a fire and there he is on the couch. The red thermos is on the floor between his feet. His neck looks broke, like a stem on a wilted flower. He took some Opana. Why in the hell did he do that? When I get to him and touch his shoulders he spasms and this awful gurgling starts coming out of his mouth. But he’s not breathing. Even if I didn’t check anybody could tell he’s not breathing. The skin on his face is literally blue. What was he thinking doing this?
Calling 911 is a stupid move for something like this. By the time they made it from First Responder Ambulance thirty minutes away in Lower Belcher whoever it was you called the 911 for is gone, if gone was on the table. So I drag Dad off the couch and drag him across the living room floor and onto the porch and into the car. By the time I make it to the hospital, he’s been without oxygen to his brain for almost ten minutes.
To teach me a lesson. To show me what he’d look like high on drugs. As best as he can, this is what he says he was trying to do. We’re in his room at the nursing home, and it went pretty much like this: Dad swallowed a lot of Opana, more than he should have been able to and still survive, truth be told. Down went his heart rate, his respiratory rate. Down went his central nervous system. To make it simple, his body forgot to breathe. Three minutes would have been enough to give him permanent brain damage. He had time to spare and still came out talking. Talking about mostly nonsense, but talking. He can even tell it himself.
“The brain is an organ. It’ll get hypoxic when it’s not getting enough oxygen,” Dad says while changing the channels on the wall-mounted television. “Mine didn’t get no oxygen at all and that’s when anoxic brain injury happens. That’s when it happened to me.”
The whole time he’s saying this, his eyes are draining. It’s what I call it: draining. I don’t know if it’s crying or not, or if it’s just his eyes watering. There’s no fucking way to know.
“I know it, Dad. I know. You didn’t have a thing to do with it. It happened to you. You just keep saying that and it might make it true.”
I’m whispering to myself mostly. But I’ve heard this plenty enough. Doesn’t matter if he did it to teach me a lesson. He did it. It didn’t happen to him. But none of it matters now. All that matters is that he’ll go to sleep soon and I’ll get out of here, hit the fresh air, shake this place off for awhile. His eyes are closed but I’m listening for him to start snoring. Instead of snoring, he sits up all of a sudden and comes all the way awake.
“Lord I tell you what,” he says. “You’d think me being an electrician that I would’ve been able to wire up a light in this coffin. It’s dark as pitch in here.”
I watch him blinking in the shine coming from the television. The rest of the room is dark, so I get up and go turn on the light, and it’s like I performed a miracle. He claps twice in a kind of celebration, stands up and turns to me.
Then he says, “Ohmygod.” He holds his hand over his mouth for a couple seconds and then whispers, “We didn’t put a light in your mom’s coffin neither.”
My mouth’s hanging open on its hinge. I’m trying to think of what in the world to say to him when he sits back down and takes me by the arm and pulls me beside him.
“Let’s dig her up and put one in there,” he says, eyes set tight on that television. He’s still whispering and the sound of it makes me want to cry. Just the sound of it pushing out of him that way so weak and sad and beat. Then he turns his head as slow as I’ve ever seen anything move. “But she’d smell I reckon. She’d smell bad for sure.”
Sheldon Lee Compton
“Don’t worry about it. Go make your living.”
Maxine and Bill go easy on me. They should. Before Maxine gave up pills, Box, and Done, before she got all the way clear from everything, I was her one supplier. I had birdies in three suboxone clinics, two methadone clinics, and four doctors set up between Lexington and Hazard who still had enough balls to give out solid scripts for Lortab, Percs, and Oxys. And, bear in mind, this was after Purdue got nailed with the suit and squeezed out millions to Kentucky after offering doctors bonuses for whoever gave out the most scripts. This was during the overreaction to the opioid crisis. Not before it. Anybody and their mom could have sold before the shitstorm. So it’s don’t worry about it and it’s go make your living because they can’t really say nothing else.
“Will do,” I say. I head to the parking lot where Dougie Fletcher waits in his purple S10. When I get there he’s dozed off, leaning against his driver’s door and snoring a beat ninety. He’d had some benzos already this morning.
“Dougie!”
Dougie jerks awake, grips the steering wheel.
“Holy-shit-what-the-hell!”
“You working double shifts or something?” I ask.
It’s a mean joke. I’m full of them. Dougie ain’t worked a whole hour since Gerald Blackmon arrested him straight from behind the counter at Osborne’s Grocery after somebody told Clay Osborne he was selling pot out of there. Since then Dougie, or as the high school kids call him, Druggie, mostly bought pain pills or Done, took half and sat at the old site where the Baptist church burned down a decade ago. He might have been the fucker who burned it down for all anybody knows. It ain’t never got him in jail if he did. After awhile drugs ain’t never got him in either. Law just gives up and focuses on containment when it gets too bad. I was ready to cut ties with him a few months back. Got convinced he was on a deal informing for somebody, probably the sheriff. But he’s part of my set up so I take my chances.
“Been doing okay, Druggie?”
“Piss now Patrica don’t call me that.”
He’s sorting through what he’s got in the car. Looks like a lot of it’s loose in clear baggies. Some of it he gets from his shirt pocket.
“Ain’t got nothing to carry this shit in?” I ask.
“You can put it in a paper poke for all I care.”
“I’d rather not, dumbass.”
Druggie bends over into the floorboard and I see him sifting through old McDonald’s bags and pop cans. He comes up with this red plastic thermos.
“Put it in this and stick it in your trunk. You’ll be fine long as you don’t drive like a bat out of hell.”
About now I’m tempted to jab my thumb into Druggie’s throat. But I don’t. I shouldn’t. Sometimes my anger gets ahead of me and gets me in serious trouble. I’m trying to keep all that down these days. It might sound crazy, but there’s such a thing as a straight arrow drug dealer nowadays. I don’t mess with homemade nothing. The really rare commodity anymore is pain pills. And Druggie is part of my link for that. He gets me Opana. So no matter how bad I want to crack his windpipe, instead I take the plastic thermos and nod my head, take a long draw on my cigarette. Calm myself. Get ready to start the rest of my day.
Maxine and Bill’s is pretty dead right after breakfast and it stays that way until about a quarter to lunchtime. The thermos half full of Opana is back home in my bedroom. I stowed twenty with me for this buy, some high school kid tooling up for a graduation party next month. Back home makes me wonder if home is the right word. Taking a rundown—Mom is dead, Dad is moved out, I live alone—it’s probably better to call it something closer to a truck stop.
The high school kid, who I call a kid even though I’m only like two years older, is late. This gives me too much time to think. I think about how you’d think drugs, drug dealing, dope heads, and all that, were this really scary or strange thing that sticks out. But it don’t. They’s people around here who are third-generation dope heads and drunks. People whose mamaws and papaws stayed blowed in the creek. People who don’t think a thing about smoking meth on the front porch right beside kids, theirs or anybody else’s.
The kid reaches out to shake hands like a vacuum salesman.
“Trish?”
“Sit down, dumbass.”
I take a quick look around to see if anybody noticed the way this dumbass strolled up like me and him was doing big business. He sits down and starts studying Maxine. Bill’s in the back working on the dough mixer.
“Don’t worry about them. They know what’s going on. It’s good.”
“Yeah, well I’d still like to take this outside. I ain’t never bought off somebody I don’t know.”
I usually use one menu to send the pills their way and get them to send the cash back to me in the other menu. But that’s enough. I slam a three-month bottle down in the middle of the table. He about heads over in the booth, like he’s taking sniper fire or something. But not before grabbing the bottle.
“You’re crazier’n hell.”
When he settles down I give him the price. He pulls out the cash and I take it from him extra slow, grinning.
He must have took a pretty good offense to the whole thing because the next thing he says he knows’ll upset me.
“I saw your dad heading up Paint Lick on my way here. Don’t you all live on Paint Lick?”
“What’n the hell you talking about?”
“Didn’t your dad take off and leave you to make your own way in the world?” He puts that dickhead emphasis on the last part and waves his hand across the table top where we just finished the buy.
I’m starting to get pretty tired of this kid. Instead of answering I stare at him long and hard.
“Just saying,” he says, raises his hands up in a truce pose. “You might want to see what he’s up to. Word is he’s been going around talking a little crazy lately.”
“Leave.”
“Do what?”
“Leave now.”
He pauses about two more seconds and then stands, shakes his head, and walks heavy to the door. He had to get that last little head shake in. That’s what’s going to get him derailed one day with a busted head. Attitude like that.
It’s come a heavy rain and there’s standing water on Paint Lick. The high school kid wasn’t wrong, but I had no urge to let him know that. If he saw my dad coming this way, it couldn’t be good. But the puddles are winning and I can’t get ahead as fast as I want. I imagine Dad burning down the house; I imagine him driving his truck through the house; in my wildest nightmare I imagine Dad sitting on the front porch ready to forgive me for disappointing him.
When he left, he left because he found out I was selling drugs. This was only a few months after Mom died. Not a drug-related death, a point I spent a lot of time trying to get people to understand. At least at first. Then it didn’t matter to me that much. People in general stopped mattering to me mostly. But the key point now is that my dad is likely on his way to the truck-stop-house.
When I pull in his Dodge is still there. I swing in pretty hot but get out moving slow, in no hurry to get to the end of whatever this is going to be. The front door’s open and I get a low feeling in my stomach so I move through it like I’m running from a fire and there he is on the couch. The red thermos is on the floor between his feet. His neck looks broke, like a stem on a wilted flower. He took some Opana. Why in the hell did he do that? When I get to him and touch his shoulders he spasms and this awful gurgling starts coming out of his mouth. But he’s not breathing. Even if I didn’t check anybody could tell he’s not breathing. The skin on his face is literally blue. What was he thinking doing this?
Calling 911 is a stupid move for something like this. By the time they made it from First Responder Ambulance thirty minutes away in Lower Belcher whoever it was you called the 911 for is gone, if gone was on the table. So I drag Dad off the couch and drag him across the living room floor and onto the porch and into the car. By the time I make it to the hospital, he’s been without oxygen to his brain for almost ten minutes.
To teach me a lesson. To show me what he’d look like high on drugs. As best as he can, this is what he says he was trying to do. We’re in his room at the nursing home, and it went pretty much like this: Dad swallowed a lot of Opana, more than he should have been able to and still survive, truth be told. Down went his heart rate, his respiratory rate. Down went his central nervous system. To make it simple, his body forgot to breathe. Three minutes would have been enough to give him permanent brain damage. He had time to spare and still came out talking. Talking about mostly nonsense, but talking. He can even tell it himself.
“The brain is an organ. It’ll get hypoxic when it’s not getting enough oxygen,” Dad says while changing the channels on the wall-mounted television. “Mine didn’t get no oxygen at all and that’s when anoxic brain injury happens. That’s when it happened to me.”
The whole time he’s saying this, his eyes are draining. It’s what I call it: draining. I don’t know if it’s crying or not, or if it’s just his eyes watering. There’s no fucking way to know.
“I know it, Dad. I know. You didn’t have a thing to do with it. It happened to you. You just keep saying that and it might make it true.”
I’m whispering to myself mostly. But I’ve heard this plenty enough. Doesn’t matter if he did it to teach me a lesson. He did it. It didn’t happen to him. But none of it matters now. All that matters is that he’ll go to sleep soon and I’ll get out of here, hit the fresh air, shake this place off for awhile. His eyes are closed but I’m listening for him to start snoring. Instead of snoring, he sits up all of a sudden and comes all the way awake.
“Lord I tell you what,” he says. “You’d think me being an electrician that I would’ve been able to wire up a light in this coffin. It’s dark as pitch in here.”
I watch him blinking in the shine coming from the television. The rest of the room is dark, so I get up and go turn on the light, and it’s like I performed a miracle. He claps twice in a kind of celebration, stands up and turns to me.
Then he says, “Ohmygod.” He holds his hand over his mouth for a couple seconds and then whispers, “We didn’t put a light in your mom’s coffin neither.”
My mouth’s hanging open on its hinge. I’m trying to think of what in the world to say to him when he sits back down and takes me by the arm and pulls me beside him.
“Let’s dig her up and put one in there,” he says, eyes set tight on that television. He’s still whispering and the sound of it makes me want to cry. Just the sound of it pushing out of him that way so weak and sad and beat. Then he turns his head as slow as I’ve ever seen anything move. “But she’d smell I reckon. She’d smell bad for sure.”