“What’s up?” I asked.
Rider’s eyes were coming out of his head. He started screaming again: “NO. NNNO. NNNO. FUCK THIS. I’M GONE. I’M GONE.”
He got out of the car and walked away. I thought he had acted strangely. I didn’t see what his fucking problem was.
I thought the best thing to do would be to get back on the freeway. So I did. I rode 90 east to 271. I smoked Pall Malls and set fire to the little bands from the money and dropped them in the ashtray. It was an okay time. The Gunsmoke still had me good. I wasn’t worried about anything.
I got off the freeway at Chagrin and I got some burgers at the Wendy’s there and I went home and took Livinia out and fed her. I called Pistol and said I had his money together. He told me to go ahead and come around.
“Do you have three and a half I could get?”
He said no problem.
When I met up with him I didn’t say anything about Rider being a pussy. I didn’t want to embarrass Rider. Plus I thought he might shoot me if I told anybody about how he’d acted. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d want people to know. I paid Pistol the money I owed him for the three and a half grams and gave him the clothes I’d worn during the robbery and asked him to get rid of them for me. I gave him back the pistol. I gave him $500 for his trouble.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
I’d get sad as fuck when I thought about Emily and how I wasn’t going to be there for her because I was going to jail soon. I wondered what would happen to her and what she would do. And we were sad when she found the abscess in her arm. Her forearms were swollen. There was all this shit in her right arm. She was pushing it out and she said, Look. It was like dirt. We cleaned it out and treated it with alcohol many times and the abscess got better but she was frightened and ashamed and it was terrible.
I thought, My poor angel.
I don’t know. I could have still not gone to jail. It was mid-March and I had robbed something like seven or eight or nine banks and hadn’t yet been arrested.
I don’t think anybody cared. The police, I mean. This was just kid stuff, what I was doing. All it took was that you realized there was nothing stopping you and then you wet your beak.
Still you knew the police were fucking dangerous.
I think maybe I was about to give up.
* * *
—
RIDER SAID, “The nigga’s some shit. My dude’s baby’s mom and his son live with that nigga and he beats the shit out of them.”
Rider was trying to appeal to my sense of white-boy chivalry so I’d go kill the Bath guy for him. Going on five months he’d been trying to talk me into killing this guy.
I said, “Why doesn’t your dude call the police or child protective services or something?”
“Cuz the nigga’s got control of that bitch. She won’t say anything against him. She’s a fiend. He’s got her on that shit.”
“You mean heroin?”
Rider looked out the passenger window.
“Why doesn’t your dude just do it himself?” I asked. “It would save him some money.”
“Because they’ll know he did it. That’s why we need you. You don’t know the nigga from Adam, so they won’t be able to link you to him.”
The baby started yelling in the backseat. Rider turned around and told the baby to shut up.
“Shut up, lil nigga,” he said.
Rider had brought the baby with him. The baby wasn’t two years old. It couldn’t even talk. It wasn’t Rider’s baby. Rider said the baby belonged to a bitch he was fucking.
Rider hadn’t said anything about a baby. I’d called him looking for heroin and he’d said he had some, so I’d gone to meet him. I’d parked out front of some apartments and called him and he’d come out with this baby and got in the car and he didn’t have any heroin. I was crushed.
He said, “I have to go to Varsity Blue real fast.”
Varsity Blue was a clothing store where they sold jerseys and sneakers and tracksuits. They didn’t sell heroin at Varsity Blue. But it was wasn’t far, just down Superior. I parked and Rider went into the store. He left me with the baby and the baby was crawling all over the place. The baby grabbed my lighter out of the cup holder and tried to chew on it. I took the lighter back and said, “You probably don’t want to do that. You don’t know where it’s been.”
The baby made a real serious face and thought about this.
Rider was in the store almost an hour and he didn’t buy anything. He came out of the store looking pissed off. He was pissed off because he was a fucking loser. I was a fucking loser but Rider was worse.
He got in and I drove across the street to the McDonald’s and bought the baby some French fries. Rider tried to call some people but nobody picked up.
I said, “Now what?”
He said, “Drive over to Clair.”
I did. We went up a ways and he told me to park in front of a convenience store. He went inside for an hour and came out and told me it was dead.
Then I got a text from Pistol: “Where are you.”
“Clair.”
“What did u want 2 do?”
“3.”
“Belmar n 20.”
This was good. Rider’s mom lived on Belmar. I could leave him and the baby there. Meanwhile Rider was talking and I wasn’t listening and he was saying he wanted me to take him over to the West Side and he could get me some heroin over there.
“Can’t do it,” I said. “I’ve got to run up to Belmar.”
“But I just talked to my partner over there. He says he’s got that fire.”
“You just said it was dead.”
“I meant it’s dead on the East Side.”
“I’m meeting Pistol over on Belmar.”
“Drive me to the West Side first.”
“No. Can’t do it. Sorry.”
“It won’t take long.”
“It’ll take hours. Everything you do takes hours. You do nothing and it takes you hours.”
“What about the three hundred dollars you owe me?”
“I paid you that shit already.”
“You didn’t pay me.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“WHY WOULD I LIE ABOUT THREE HUNDRED PETTY-ASS DOLLARS?” he said. “I SPEND THAT SHIT ON LUNCH, NIGGA. I SPEND THAT SHIT ON LUNCH.”
I put the car in gear. Rider grabbed my arm.
“What? You want to have a fistfight with a fucking baby in the car? What are you, fucking nuts?”
Rider didn’t move.
I said, “I’ve got four hundred dollars on me. I have to give three hundred and sixty to Pistol. I don’t know what to tell you. You can fuck that up, or I can drop you and the baby off on your street. You’re making me late. I’m about to be in a bad way. Emily is about to be in a bad way. I’ve got to get this heroin fast and I’ve got to take it over to her at school. That’s what I’ve got to do right now. I’ve looked out for you before and you know that. But I can’t right at this moment. So I’m asking you as nicely as I know how, please spare me this bullshit today. I’ve got a lot on my mind. But call me when you get this other thing together tonight. We’ll do that for sure. My dude’s got the money for you as soon as you get it together.”
He calmed down some: “He just wants one zone?”
“Yeah, I think so. But if it’s right he’ll get more.”
* * *
—
WHEN I saw Pistol he said Raul might be getting out soon. I said that was good and I got well and I went up to the school and Emily got well. That evening Rider called and said he had picked up. I went to see him and he had four ounces of coke on him. I tried some of it and it was right. I said if he gave me the one ounce I’d run it up to my dude and bring him back nine hundred dollars. But he said no.
“It’ll save me a trip,” I said. “It’s the same dude as last time. He’s good for it.”
Rider said he couldn’t front me that much. He needed the cash up front. I knew he was just saying that because he wanted to step on the coke before we met up again. But there was nothing I could do. I needed money. If I didn’t get money I got sick. Time was working against me. Motherfuckers knew that. That’s how they get over on you.