A Beast Without a Name, page 17
Bear goggled at her. “What? Why?”
Addie continued calmly undressing. “It’s the new thing in the tech business. Creative edge. Drop a micro dose and the ideas just flow like water. So they say. I wouldn’t know—I’m in procurement, not design. I just need to keep the clever little boys happy.”
“Jesus!” Bear grabbed a knitted throw off the nearest couch and tossed it at her. “Stop that. Cover up.”
Addie ignored the blanket, letting it fall as she kicked off her shoes and dropped her clothes on the floor. “What? Afraid the wife will see me standing in your living room bare-assed?”
“She’s out of town.”
“I know. So what’s the problem?”
“You! I said I don’t do that anymore. Because of you! I’d just gotten back, just gotten my work on track again and you showed up and burned all that to the ground! If Moore had caught me right then, right there, they would have locked me up for the rest of my life!”
Addie folded her arms under her breasts. “I was locked up. For sixteen years. You ran and I served in your place. No one fought for me—I had to fight for myself. And I have fought every day to get where I am. So imagine my surprise when I found out that what I’d gone to jail for could finally be useful to me. So I came to get it.”
“I. Don’t. Do. That. Any. More! I don’t even remember how!”
Addie scoffed. “You’re a liar, Bear. You wouldn’t be afraid if you had nothing to hide. You still know how to cross the diamond with the pearl and come up with the cleanest trip ever to tickle a brain. You couldn’t give that up—feeling like God creating the heavens and the earth. Who could? You are still Kid Charlemagne.”
Bear chewed on the inside of his lip as Addie gave him her coolest Mona Lisa expression.
“And you owe me,” she said.
He stared at her face, silent for a couple of minutes while Addie just stood there, still bare as a newborn. Finally he let out a disgusted sigh. “Fine. Get dressed and put on those boots by the door.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re taking a long walk.”
Addie grinned.
It wasn’t a walk, so much as an expedition through the fields of knee-high wheat—or whatever it was—that rustled against Addie’s bare legs for a couple of miles. Addie’s calves were striped with thin cuts from the long leaves that drooped from the sturdy stalks, and she was sweating by the time they reached the old cinderblock shed.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Work shed, and pump house for the irrigation wells,” Bear said, unlocking the padlocks and easing open the warped old wooden door. “Technically, it’s not on my property, but the owner’s retired and he doesn’t mind my using it in exchange for doing a little labor and upkeep at this end of the field. Get inside, out of the sun, and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on lately.”
She went in as he closed the door behind them. Yellow light crept through the cracks in the door, barely illuminating the shed’s interior. The air inside was already hot and thick with must from stacks of moldy straw bales and bins of old grain rife with mouse poop. Bear pointed across the cracked cement floor to a second door—newer and more robust than the first. Addie hurried toward it.
At the next door she stopped and had to wait for him to catch up. Somewhere between the first door and the second, he’d put on a plastic overcoat and carried one of those filter masks that look like some kind of big white bug. “This’ll take a minute. Sit down,” he added, waving at the nearest stack of bales. Huffing with annoyance, Addie sat and waited, the dirty straw stinging the backs of her abraded legs, while he fiddled with the locks for what felt like five full minutes before he opened the door. He slipped the filter mask over his face as he started to step through, then turned back. “Hang on,” he said, muffled by the fiber filter over his nose and mouth. “You’ll need one of these. Just in case,” he added, fumbling inside the unlit room for another mask, which he handed to her.
It was dark inside until Bear flipped on the lights—first dim red ones, then the full flood of old fluorescent tubes that hummed and flickered as if they hadn’t been used in a while. The windowless cement room reminded Addie of the lab in the ranch house’s basement without the white tile. But in this case, one end of the room held a row of flat trays she hadn’t seen in the old place.
“I recognize the set-up. But what’s that?” she asked.
“Rye mold. I’m culturing the ergot myself. Importing lysergic acid monohydrate is tightly controlled now, so I’m synthesizing from scratch. Ergot is the base and, luckily, it grows on ears of wet rye.”
“As in rye bread?”
“The grain. About fifty acres of rye out there,” he answered, tinkering around with one of the flasks, and a carboy, and an unlit Bunsen burner. “Usually it just gets plowed under to reinvigorate the fields and no one cares if it gets moldy. If you eat it, breathe it, or take it in through the blood, you hallucinate. If you get too much for too long, you get a little crazy, have convulsions, and lose circulation to your fingers and toes until they rot and fall off. There’s a theory knocking around that Salem witches and the girls who accused them were suffering from ergotism—out of their minds on the rye mold that had gotten into the grain supply they all ate. Funky shit, huh?”
Addie felt a little dizzy—the lights were really bright and it irritated her. “Was that what I was sitting on out there in the shed? Moldy bales of rye?”
“Walked through it too.” Bear set the flask of clear, oily-looking fluid over the burner. “Those bales are feed stock for the synthesis of lysergic acid hydrazine. Isomerize with heat and, when cooled, convert that to LSD by mixing with an appropriate acid and a base. That’s where the magic happens—in the choice of acid and base. Then dilute to an appropriate dosage with pure alcohol—not kerosene, like they used up on the hill back in the day—and apply the liquid to a medium like fiber paper or gel—you should be writing this down.”
“Shit…” Addie muttered staring down at her scratched and dirty legs.
“Don’t get freaky on me yet. Ergot is photo-sensitive.” He pointed upward. “It breaks down really fast in strong light.”
“So, you just ruined the batch?”
He nodded. “Just like last time. But there are finished blotters in the lock box under the counter—like the ones you stole from your parents.”
Addie got up in his ratty face. “Don’t get pious with me, Bear. You’re the one who made the shit.”
Bear remained calm as a windless sea. “And you’re the one whose foolishness brought Agent Moore to my lab.”
“I also warned you off and took the heat myself.”
“That was your choice,” he said. “You could have run the same way I did. But now you’re here, looking for the door to Wonderland again. Only this time, you’re not trying to save anyone’s ass, you’re just trying to get rich off the ride.”
She grabbed onto his plastic overcoat as if to shake him, but he put one elongated hand up between them. “Now, now. Don’t get pissy. It’s not a problem. You said you wanted the recipe, but it’s not that simple. I could show you the process, but you can’t sell the trip if you’ve never taken it.”
“You want me to drop acid?”
“You already have. Your mask was soaked in it. With the way you’re sweating, we’re just waiting for the show to start.”
“You rat-fucking bastard.”
“You’re not going to have any fun with an attitude like that.” He shrugged out of her grip and turned to light the Bunsen burner, turning it down low. “Oh, don’t tip over this flask by accident—this shit combusts like a motherfucker. Leave it alone and it’ll spark off on its own in a couple of hours.”
Horror gripped Addie’s lungs. She snatched off her mask and stumbled backward. Bear caught her.
He dragged her to a corner near the door and helped her sit down on the floor against the wall. “Don’t move fast, and you’ll be all right,” he said, removing his own mask. “It’s a big dose, but it’ll wear off in about half an hour. Maybe forty minutes—you are kind of skinny, Addie. You should take better care of yourself.”
Bear really did look like a bear, with his big head. His nose was going a bit snouty as she watched. “Oh, God…” she muttered. “How could you do this to me?”
“You didn’t give me a lot of choice, little Addie. Remember I said The Man doesn’t forget and he doesn’t forgive? That applies to both of us. Moore’s dogged my heels every day since we met. I tried to live straight, but he wouldn’t let me. I’m still an outlaw to him. To all of his kind. And so are you. That’s why I’m doing this. Because I have to get out of here and I can’t take you along. So listen up. Be careful what you carry. Be careful what you say and who you know. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, he’s wise to you, wise to what you are. If you find my notes in the cabinet, they’re all yours, but you’ll be taking a hell of a risk. Best bet: just crawl away and let this place burn to the ground. Crawl off and be someone new. Someone clean.”
Addie was sure she was clean. She was underwater. Wasn’t she? She watched his words crystalize and float away from his mouth, like dirty ice. “What,” she started, distracted by the way her own voice turned purple and spiky. “What about your wife?” Funny she could breathe underwater…
“Did I say I was married?”
Addie nodded stiffly, watching a razor-sharp fish pop out of an electric outlet and swim across the undulating floor behind Bear.
“I lied. She’s just a woman I was shacking up with. She’ll be fine. Even if the house burns down. We’ll all be fine once I’m out of here. By the way: is there gas in the car?”
“Gas…? In the car?” The fish didn’t care about gas or cars. She should care, but she was worried about the fire and the fish. Would the fire get her or would the fish eat her…?
“The rental. The convertible.”
“Yes. Yes, there’s gas in the car.”
“Thanks Addie.” He bent his big head and kissed her hair. “The world falls apart, but you can get away if you’re willing to give it up. I’ve got to get along now. You take care.”
The water closed over her head as the door closed behind him. Then the fish turned, its mouth gaping and full of needle teeth as it swam toward her. It looked very hungry.
Back to TOC
The Girl Could Be So Cruel
Jim Thomsen
“Donny? Would you come up here? Please? Tonight?”
It took me a few seconds to remember that only one person had ever called me Donny. And that person had disappeared from my life seven years ago.
“Donny?”
“Abby? Holy shit—I mean, hi. I mean, what? Where?” The sample wedding invitations that Thuy asked me to weigh in on, as if I really had any say, slipped from my fingers and all over the kitchen floor of our newly purchased condo.
“Bellingham. Can you come now?”
I dropped into a chair, bumping the last of my Jameson-and-ginger from the arm and dumping it onto the floor and all over the samples. Thuy was going to kill me. But already I’d forgotten about that. Because, Abby.
Abby. The last time I saw Abby was just before I graduated from college.
She didn’t. Or wasn’t going to, or so I gathered because she hadn’t shown up at any classes—or anywhere that I could find—those last two months.
And I looked. Believe me, I looked.
That’s what you do for your best friend, right? Best friend didn’t seem exactly right, even as I formed the thought, because I wished it had been so much more, and it sort of had, for a hot moment. But those were the only words that came.
“Donny?” Her voice softened, deepened, became almost whispery, the way she did sometimes on late nights when it was just the two of us and she was tired, and tired of who she thought she had to be around anyone else. “Are you in?”
Abby had never been much of one for spelling things out. She gave you a little, and if you guessed the rest well enough, or just bought in based on what you could get, you were in. Was I ever in?
For the last seven years, I would not have said yes.
“Wait, what? Tonight? Jesus. I live all the way in—”
“I know. But I need you. I can’t say more, not on the phone. In case he comes back.”
“He? What?”
A long shuddering breath was her only response. And something in me came unsprung, just a little.
“Abby? Are you OK?”
“You said—” Another tortured breath. “You’ve always been there for me. Remember? You said you’d always be there for me. Can you be there for me now? Please?”
Hadn't I told her that the last time I saw her? That she could always count on me? The question was, could I count on her? And the answer was, of course not.
But it had never been a reciprocal kind of deal, not completely. Never could be between a schlubby tubby and a sexy Sadie. But, if there’s something I know now that I didn’t then, it’s that love, true love, isn’t transactional, and if it is, well, your books never really balance out. It’d be nice if they did, but if they don’t, do you ever really close out the account? Not until the overdraft notices pile up a while. And maybe not even then. Not until the sheriff’s deputies change the locks on your life and haul away everything inside.
I’ve spent every day trying to remember that. And to forget Abby. Even after I met Thuy, who sort of marched into my life and took over its management, running all departments of me as efficiently as she did the nursing staff at the hospital where we worked. Which, after Abby, was something I needed. Otherwise, I’d probably still be one of those sad sacks sitting at the end of the day at the end of the bar in some chain restaurant, BJs or Red Robin or TG-fucking-I Fridays, drinking overpriced drinks, trying to catch the an eye at a table full of schoolteachers or secretaries, and hoping my cologne could overcome the “stench of death” that overcomes every single man with a sandblasted heart who hasn’t dealt with his shit.
But would there ever really be an “after Abby”?
If I didn’t know the answer then, I did now.
“Of course I’ll come. I’m in,” I told her, and even as I did, I tried to think how I would square it with my fiancée, who was not used to me making decisions without consulting her. Or me making decisions, period. Let alone square it with the head of my pathology lab. Or my bank balance. All of which would be very unhappy with me.
But no matter. Abby needed me.
Would you come. Not could. Would.
Ten minutes later, I threw a bag in the trunk and sped off, north, into the rain, into night.
The last time I saw Abby also began with a late-night phone call. And a plea for my help. And of course I went. She’d given me the street address, and even though I’d plugged in the GPS on my phone, it wasn’t until I’d circled the Whatcom County Jail three times looking for it that I realized the address was the Whatcom County Jail.
It took a while before I was allowed to see her. She looked badly washed out, drained of the primary colors that made her her, and not just because of the bleach-stained orange of her jail uniform.
She wept. Told me she couldn’t ask anyone else. Not her wealthy daddy, not any of her daddy’s wealthy friends, not “Aleksei,” whoever the fuck that was. They’d hold it against her, use it to use her, to bend her over, to break her.
But, she said, she could trust me. “You’re my best friend,” she said, and that made my heart sing. And sting.
She danced around the details of the arrest. Something about solicitation, or promoting solicitation. Something about an undercover operation, a combined task force, a confidential informant, cocaine located in a Coach purse. She didn’t know about any of it, didn’t do drugs, she swore. When I looked at her eyes I wondered fleetingly if the redness was merely the product of prodigious tears.
I’d never known Abby to do drugs. But what I didn’t really know about Abby would fill a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and I suspected that’s the way she preferred it.
But I took Abby on faith, because Abby was my religion.
I struggled to get the gist of it as she spilled bits of information like broken glass all over the filthy green tile all around us. A lease in her name. A condo just south of the British Columbia border, south of White Rock. White Rock, which even a late-night lab geek like me knew was home to what seemed like half of the strip clubs in the world that weren’t in Las Vegas.
And Aleksei, again. Fuck that fucker. I'd stand over his dead body someday if he did this to her. A favorite saying of ours came to mind, something one of us would say anytime we heard about someone dissing one of us: I’ll work the shovel if you hold the flashlight.
It was something we said a lot because nobody at school understood her and me, and she defended me almost as much as I defended her, and neither of us felt any need to explain what we were and what we were not to anybody else, and that just made more out of the mystery of us to most people.
Which, I had to admit, was more than fine with me, the idea that people had half a crazy idea that the local Jughead was somehow getting to bend his crown between Veronica’s legs every time they saw us laughing it up in the Viking Union coffee shop or on the rim of the fountain in Red Square. I didn’t fuel the speculation. But maybe I did by not pissing on that particular fire. And maybe I knew that.
Finally, over the jail’s visiting-room phone, Abby did say something I understood too clearly. Would I get her out?
It came out after much more dancing that what she needed was money, because any she had, had probably been seized in the raid. A raid which swept up more than two dozen other people, including a port commissioner and a state senator and the XO of the naval air base on Whidbey Island.
It was a scandal, maybe a scandal with serious cable-TV legs. And she couldn’t begin to run from it until she could begin to run from the sterile, scuffed gray-green room in which we both sat.
