“I think maybe I need some. I don’t feel well.”
“We’ll take care of you, Da. Just sit back and watch the scenery.”
He does, and the scenery does basically the same granite-trees-granite-trees-flying-by trick for the whole forty-minute ride.
“Are we there yet?” asks a convincingly bored-out-of-his-skull voice. It belongs to Jarrod.
“You are the driver,” I point out. “You tell us.”
“Just about there,” he says as we finally turn off the highway and onto the lead-in road to the town. Five minutes later we are pulling into one of those classic northern New England towns that never wind up on postcards. There is a small steel-colored river running past a couple of hulking and empty factories that must have made shoes or shoelaces or shoehorns or something that somebody else makes even better now. The river has a couple of bridges over it, but neither is covered like in the calendars. They should cover them. They should cover everything else while they are at it.
“Oh yeah,” I say, admiring the ambience.
“You want meds or don’t ya? Don’t be so snooty.”
“Oh yeah,” Da says, recognizing something else. “Bet this town arms more militias in a year than I ever did. And I spent a lot of time in Angola.”
Like in slow motion, Jarrod and I turn to Da, who is poker-faced.
A horn wails at us. I spin and yank the wheel, pulling us out of oncoming traffic. The other driver is wailing even louder.
“Lucky you didn’t kill us,” I shout at Jarrod, shoving his head sideways.
“Even luckier that guy didn’t,” Da says, staring out the back at the other driver, still menacing us with a finger.
We pass several vehicles as we negotiate the main drag, and they all look like they were monster trucks in their playing days. Then we turn off the road, off that road, and then off that one. We park at a modest-looking little shop that appears like it doesn’t want to bother anyone. VENUS EXOTICS, it says in red lettering on a cream-painted window.
“Is this what I think it is?” I ask as Jarrod leads us in.
“Not if you think it’s a bakery,” he says.
“Whoa,” I say as we head straight down the middle of three aisles. The woman behind the counter, dressed in a schoolgirl uniform, waves us through to the back. If that is her uniform, she’s kept it nice for about forty years.
Da keeps muttering behind me as we walk toward the door that says MANAGER. I pull him in front of me and guide him. “Whoa,” he says. “Wow.”
“Jarrod,” the man says when we walk into the office.
They shake hands. Da and I get introduced.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Da says.
“Thank you,” the man, Matt, says.
“I have never seen so many giant rubber penises in one place in my life,” Da marvels.
“Please,” Matt says, “you’re making me blush.”
We have only just met, but I am guessing that is purely impossible to do.
“Anyway…,” I say, catching Jarrod’s eye.
“Yeah, Matt,” Jarrod says. “About business.”
“Right, right, I’ve got your order. I take it your friends are here for something as well. What can we do?”
This is where it gets complicated.
I can just about recall the main couple of medications Da takes daily to almost hold it together. Matt is something of an expert, but he is not 100 percent certain.
“Do you sell cigarettes?” Da asks politely. His hands are starting to tremble from a number of different deprivations.
“Sorry, sir, I do not.”
Something my grandfather always pounded into me, and I always believed it anyway, but now that I am seeing his hard side I am believing it fantastically: Manners beget manners. Don’t start a ruck when you can just say please and get the same result. I suppose it works with a sex-shop black marketeer as well as it does with anybody else.
“Here,” Matt says, sliding a nearly full pack of Camels across his desk.
“You’re a good man,” Da says, smiling pleasantly.
“Keep that to yourself,” Matt says, smiling likewise.
“Entebeyar,” Dad says.
“Huh?” Matt says.
I must break in. “Listen, we have a time thing here. You might not be one hundred percent sure about the medication, but it sounds like the stuff to me. And we are one hundred percent desperate, so we are going to go with your sense on this.”
“How old are you?” Matt says.
“Eighteen,” I say.
“Hmmm.” He nods approvingly. “You’re quite the young commando here, aren’t you? Taking charge and running the show.”
“No, really I’m not. It’s just, circumstances require.”
“Circumstances require!” Da says, jumping up in the air a bit and clapping his hands loud as gunshots. It’s like I have won some kind of talent show or something. “That’s the thing, my boy, the thing, and the thing itself. When circumstances require, what are you capable of?”
He has the whole room staring.
“The man is proud of his grandson,” Jarrod says to Matt.
“So he is, so he is. Wanna buy a Glock, kid?”
“Jeez, no,” I say, physically recoiling.
“Right, another day,” Matt says.
“Hey, if you can’t locate the right stuff,” Jarrod says, “maybe we can just find something off the shelves here to help him out.”
“Jarrod,” I snap. “That is my grandfather.”
“I don’t mind,” Da says.
“Listen, gents, come back in a couple hours, I’ll have you all sorted out,” Matt says.
“Um,” I say, taking charge a little less authoritatively than my new rep might suggest. I lean a bit closer. “About payment… we’re a bit light right now, trying to avoid cash machines…”
He looks right past me. He looks hard and soft at Da as Da tries to coolly not look at the wares on offer everywhere we turn.
Matt shakes his head slightly. “I know that look. I know all about it. Call it a gift, from my uncle.”
I am about to open my mouth to thank him, find it already hanging wide open, start to speak, but stop. Matt pulls out a small lunch bag tightly wrapped in tape, whips it punishingly hard into Jarrod’s midsection. “Besides, this guy right here is three of my best customers.”
We walk down the tired, gray main drag, killing time and being anonymous.
“Wanna bone up?” Jarrod says, because that’s what Jarrod says, and he is walking around with a rock band’s monthly supply.
“The answer is yes,” Da says. Hunching over a bit, smoking on his cigarette as if he is trying to get things out that are just not in there.
“The answer is no,” I say. I put my arm around Da, and he feels a lot less substantial than the guy who loosened my tooth. “Why don’t we just get something to eat?”
“One small smoke, I swear,” Jarrod says, “then eat. I’m buying, even.”
This is an attractive offer. I took a few hundred dollars out of the ATM before we fled, but that wouldn’t last long without a lot of help. I am about to say okay when Da pushes me over the edge.
“Please?” he says.
No matter what his stories. No matter what his tall tales, and I have no idea which ones are redwoods and which have some reality. No matter, no matter, I know the old guy did not go through his life as a chimney like Jarrod.
He just wants to feel better. Any kind of better. Before his mind started the tricks, he was frequently in this kind of stoop-over or that kind of organ discomfort. The blinking lights in his attic sometimes made the physical pains skitter into the shadows. But now, when the meds are not balanced just so, they all seem to come slithering out of the corners.
“Fine. A little. Jarrod, a little by standards other than yours.”
“Promise,” he says.
We wander around the gritty town that we don’t know and that doesn’t appear to want to know us. But this being this kind of town, there has to be an overgrown baseball field around someplace for just this sort of thing.