1- KEVIN

Prologue: Kevin and Laird

      The hulking frame of Kevin’s Chrysler moved slowly down Ocean Avenue, passing Prospect Park.  It was rust brown, with windows that didn’t work, but it had six-hundred dollar rims, and a five-hundred dollar sound system.  They rode in silence, however, past green grass, chain-link fences, and parked cars through falling rain.  It was almost two in the morning, and there was something quiet about the night.  Only the tires with their spinning rims rolling along on wet asphalt, and the rain itself seemed to make any noise at all.  Doors were locked, and windows were shut.  Not so much as a night light seemed to penetrate the cool, wet darkness.  Sitting in the passenger seat, huddled into the corner with his face pressed against the window, the rain was the only thing that Laird could hear.  It had come down hard in the evening, and had left the concrete of the streets and buildings slick and shimmering in the car’s headlights.

Rolling his head from side to side, Laird watched as Brooklyn passed by in a daze of trees, brick, and concrete, bathed in that sickly yellow light.  Watching through the fogged-up window as tiny rivulets of rain that slowly inched their way down the glass, he saw people slumped in the alleys and the ditches, and congregated on stoops.  Their faces, mostly black, Hispanic, or even a kind of ash gray white, turned down their eyes as the car passed, or they met Laird’s gaze with anger and intent.

Laird was on Percocet and Paxil, and he was calm and pliant.  His face pressed up against the glass as the car sped on, the window seemed to make up everything in the world.  But the glass looked eight inches thick, and every light and every shadow looked a thousand miles away.  The eyes and the hunched bodies to which they were attached looked animal.  Hungry, starving.  From where he sat, he saw them gnawing on their own arms and howling like coyotes.

Kevin sat, back stiff behind the wheel, his arms locked-off, tight.  They’d been to a Mets game, but they’d left after the fifth inning, with some Asian kid named Ishii catching a beating to the Pirates of all teams.  For five innings, Laird watched as Pirates players struck the ball into the gaps and into the bleachers, and he ate a hot dog, drank three beers, and washed it down with the Perco, and the Paxil. He might have swallowed his last Secenol, too.

“Turn the radio on,” Laird said, as they passed a woman who sat, legs folded under her, Indian style, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk on Snyder Avenue, with her hands raised up to the heavens, rain coming down and soaking through her clothes.  She wore ratty jeans and a dirty blue sweater, and her face- pale except for the bruises and the swollen purple of a black eye- was turned up to the sky.

“No,” Kevin said, staring straight ahead.

The right windshield wiper was broken, and while the left paced back and forth across the wet windshield, it only swung a quarter of the way, slow and laconic, missing the beat, and then stopping, retreating, and starting over again.  Kevin’s eyes lay wide open, and they looked straight past the lagging wiper and the wet glass, like a trance.  He said, “I don’t want to hear anything.”

He turned the car at a corner with a small Puerto Rican bodega, the kind of place that sells five dollar phone cards and single servings of jerked beef, and followed it up a dark street with old brick buildings and empty cars jamming the parking lanes.  Laird’s eyes met those of an old woman pushing a grocery cart.  She wore an old brown sweater with holes in it, and her face looked brittle and dirty.  She smiled black, moldy teeth as they passed, and Laird shivered.

Kevin pulled the car up to the curb at an empty spot, and he killed the engine.  They sat for a minute in silence as he lit up a cigarette and took three long pulls.  Laird ran rough-skinned hands over his face.  His buzz was fading.  His skin felt dry, and he had three or four days of beard on his face, and he was sure that he looked awful.  He felt awful.  It was just past two in the morning, and considering the time and the neighborhood and Kevin, they were probably here to see one of his sluts.  Maybe one with a friend. 

Maybe if he had a comb and a toothbrush…

With the headlights off, Laird noticed that there were no street lights on this block.  Everything had been turned off.  Colors and people, and objects blended together into a thick, dark paste.  All that he could see, in all that dark, was a few feet in front of him in any direction, through those thick, cloudy panes of glass.  There were no cars.  They had all disappeared.  The only thing in the world that he could really see, looking up, was a single window in a single building, with the light on.

He recognized it, actually.  He’d been there before. 

That was where Pink lived.

The cherry of Kevin’s cigarette glowed orange and red in the nothing, and his mouth was the only thing that seemed to have shape.  “Ricky,” he said, “have you ever gotten to a point where you feel like you’re just running for the sake of running?”

            Laird was thinking about Xanax, and the way it could make his body fall limp.  He would fall asleep and wake up covered in drool and puke.  The way that he felt when he drank Vodka, like his intestines were on fire.  The gram of shitty coke that was in his breast pocket in a small, folded piece of white paper, the thought of which suddenly made him smile.  He definitely wasn’t thinking about Kevin, and he wasn’t listening.

            “…Rick,” Kevin said, but all Laird saw was his lips moving, and all he heard was the tobacco crackling and popping and slowly oxidizing and burning.  Kevin said something, but it was drowned out in the sizzling of tobacco and the pounding of rain.

            “I can’t hear you,” Laird said, thinking about the Secenol.   The night air was cool, but the windows were beginning to fog, and he felt tiny pockets of sweat forming in his shirt.

            “I’m so fucking scared,” Kevin said.  Laird turned the knob on the radio, but he couldn’t get it to work, and the silence was driving him mad, and then Kevin said, very slow, and clear, “I’ve got to make a move, man.”

            Laird’s hand found its way into his pocket, and out came the little make-shift envelope, folded like a Chinese throwing star.  Barely able to see, he fingered a pinky-full of coke, and he bumped it quick, hoping that Kevin didn’t see.  The back of his throat filled up with a taste like aspirin, and his nose began to run, and his heart began to race.

            Kevin said that he had a move he was making, and that he wanted Laird in on it.  A quick strike at some quick cash.

            “That’s…” Laird searched for a word, any word.  He searched for a word, and he bumped another finger tip of the coke, which was making the back of his throat burn and wasn’t very good.  He was sniffling, and he wiped snot away from his nose with his sleeve, and he said, “That’s decent.”

            He felt Kevin’s hand on his shoulder, and Kevin told him that he had a move coming that they were never going to see coming, and Kevin told Laird that he was going to need to meet with Vermin, and that he was going to have to get a message to Getch about a shipment that was coming through, and…

            “Stop for a second,” Laird said, wiping snot and a bit of blood from his nose, “Do you think I should write this down?”

            Kevin was sweating, and his hands were shaking.  The cherry of his cigarette danced around, spilling ash on the imitation leather, and the carpet.

            “The guy’s supposed to meet with me at eight o’clock in the morning, and he and I are supposed to go to meet Getch...”

            Laird’s eyes were so watery that he couldn’t really see, and the air tasted like aspirin and cheap, burning non-leather.  All he could do was stare up at that one window, that one light, and at the silhouette of a woman, which stood there like a frame from some old French film in black and white, and feel sick to his stomach.  He felt like he was folding in half inside, but he kept nodding.

            Laird took a deep breath, and Kevin was crying, and he said, “But I’m not meeting him, this guy.  I’m not meeting him because he’s…”

            Laird bumped another line, and he stopped being able to hear.

            His eyes were out of focus, but Kevin told him that everything is going to be all right, but they had to stick to the story.  You have to stick to the story.  Kevin said that there was a plan, and that Laird had to trust him, and his hands were shaking, and he took a long pause, and he asked, “Are you high?  Are you high right now?”

He screamed “Jesus Christ,” and he shoved, he pushed, and he screamed at Laird, “I need you to fucking listen to me, Richard!”

He screamed, “I need you to understand that I am not going to be there when you show up at Getch’s place tomorrow, and that I’m sorry for what I’ve done, and I’m sorry for what I’m going to do.  I wouldn’t…if I didn’t have to, I…”

            Laird shook his head, and then he nodded.  “I understand.”

He neatly folded the make-shift envelope tightly closed, and stuffed it back into his breast pocket, and he ran his fingers through his sweat-damp hair.  His pulse was racing, and he sniffed hard and swallowed Tylenol-flavored snot, and he told Kevin, “It’s cool.”  He told him, “Everything is…”

            Up in the window, the woman shadow, Pink, the French film, smoked a cigarette, and Laird watched tendrils of smoke, dark against the sick yellow light, rising up into the sky, and she stood, leaning against the window with her head hanging low.  She looked so…beaten, and sad that he had to look away.

            Kevin was crying.

“I’m fucking sorry, and I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.”  He slumped over the wheel, and he continued to cry.  “I am so fucking sorry.”