“I heard you.” He reached into the cookie jar and pulled out a baggie.
“I didn’t come out here because she’s got the flu, Niko. Dad thinks it’d be good for her if you—” Van stared as Niko removed his rig from the baggie. Teaspoon and syringe and cottonballs and a tiny cellophane packet of china white. Cut with baby laxative but hey. Beggars can’t be choosers. Also a length of surgical tubing but Niko no longer bothered with it.
“What are you doing?”
“Making breakfast.” Niko measured a fingernail sized pinch of whitish powder into the spoon and added water from the dripping tap. He grabbed a matchbox from the foodcaked O’Keefe & Merritt stove. “Most important meal of the day you know.” He scraped a match alight and held the flame beneath the spoon and watched the powder liquefy and quickly bubble. “All your recommended daily vitamins and minerals.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Van’s tone was curiously empty. “Well I’ll tell you, brother mine.” Niko stirred the spoon with the hypodermic needle and pressed a cottonball into the liquid. He pushed the needle into the cottonball and slowly drew the plunger. “I’m cooking my heroin because snorting it just don’t float the boat no more.” He held the filled syringe up to the light and turned it to look for cotton filaments. Instead of pulling up the sleeve of his robe he unbelted it and dropped it just to piss Van off even more. Sickly thin and bareass naked in the filthy kitchen he held the syringe away from himself and glanced at the crook of his elbow. Three square meals a day for the last six months had not collapsed his veins and Niko took a certain pride that he still shot in the ditch. Not between his fingers or his toes and not under his tongue or behind his balls or in his neck or stomach like some fuckedup junky. Sure these regular meals had gotten steadily larger but hey, that’s what appetites are for. An eighth a day, big woop. A real junky’d call that a fucking tease. And hell, look at this arm. Pinpricks sure, but nothing like some of the road atlases he’s seen. His last abscess was a fading purplish memory. Good healthy veins. The better to—
That was when Van hit him. Van was taller than Niko but much lighter and he’d never been much of a fighter. The blow was more haymaker slap than punch but Niko wasn’t expecting it and the hypo sailed out of his hand and onto the baggie which promptly turned over and emptied every last expensive necessary grain of china white into the filmy gray dishwater.
Niko gaped. For a second he seriously wondered if he could shoot up the dishwater.
Van looked as surprised as Niko, as if he had just been operated by remote control.
“You asshole.” Niko made to go around Van but Van was ahead of him and rounded the counter and saw the syringe on the carpet and stomped it. Then he whirled around with his fists up but Niko only stared in total disbelief at the ruined syringe and the wet stain on the shag carpet like some backwoods king whose tiny kingdom has just vanished out from under him.
“You dick. What the fuck do I do now?”
“I guess you’ll have to do without like the rest of us.”
Niko lunged. He got Van by the collar and pushed him back into the kitchen and bent him back over the counter and put his face inches from his brother’s. “I got a special bulletin for you, Father Vangelis.” Flecking his brother’s face with spittle. “That wasn’t yours. Who told you you could show up here uninvited and fuck with my shit?”
Van tried to push back but Niko pushed him first and then turned away. “Fuck. I got no dough for more smack and my connection might as well be in Antfuckingarctica till tomorrow. Jesus in a fucking sandbox, man.” Suddenly he turned toward Van with narrowed eyes. “You came here with money didn’t you? Sure you did. Our father who art in Florida wouldn’t send his baby boy out west without a little pin money.”
“I’m not going to give you money to buy drugs.”
Niko clasped his hands and looked piously skyward. “And somewhere an angel gets its wings.”
Van watched perplexed as Niko stomped out of the kitchen and came back with a wrinkled Cheech Wizard shirt and a wrinkled pair of pants drawn from a laundry pile.
“Look Niko, whatever we need to do I’m sure we can both—”
Niko tossed a set of keys and Van caught them. “You broke it,” said Niko, pulling on the pants he’d grown too thin for. “You can help fix it.”
“Where are we going?”
“Trolling.” Niko slid his feet into a pair of rubber thongs.
THE INTERIOR OF Niko’s white Ford wagon looked a lot like the inside of Niko’s apartment. A for sale sign taped to one window, useless because the phone number on it was disconnected now. On the rear windshield some wag had written Test Dirt—Do Not Remove! The engine’s idle sounded like an offbalance washing machine on spincycle. Niko slumped in the passenger seat and yawned at the roof. He sniffled and wiped his nose with the back of his hand as Van backed out of the driveway and onto Las Palmas.
Niko gave Van directions to a payphone on Highland and scrounged up change from the seat cushions. He was out of the car before it stopped moving. Van watched him run into the booth and slam the door and drop the change and dial and light up a Kool and try to pace the eighteen inch length of the booth. Niko’s face brightened when someone answered. He got out maybe five words and then frowned. He said hello a few times and then batted the receiver into the phone and left it hanging. He got back in the car and slammed the door and sat there scowling at a torn flyer for some band at Gazzarri’s.
“Niko—”
“Shut up man, I’m trying to think.” His face was covered in sweat. “I’m not going to help you get any more of that shit.”
Niko looked at Van as if he’d told a bad joke. A thin clear trickle of snot ran onto his upper lip.
“I mean it. I won’t have anything to do with it.”
Niko pursed his lips. Finally he nodded. He sniffed loudly and held out his hand. “Okay. Give me the keys.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You’re gonna take a cab back to the airport and tell Mom and Dad whatever the hell you want. If I can’t get hold of my guy I’m gonna drive to Watts.”
Van pulled the keys out of the ignition and held onto them. “Are you crazy?”
“The brothers don’t care who they sell to.”
“You’re not going to Watts and I’m sure as hell not driving you there.”
Niko waved at his brother as if batting away flies. He yawned hugely and spat out the window. “Spare me the party line, little buddy. I don’t really give half a shit if you approve. I’m facing the day without my usual rosy smile and it’s all your fault. So this is your chance to make it right.”
“I’m not going to help you buy drugs.”
Niko wiped sweat from his forehead. “If I was a kid and you broke my toy you couldn’t just say So what, kid, I don’t like your toy. Right?”
Van stared at him as traffic went by on Highland. “That’s some seriously messed up logic.”
Niko shook his head. “No it’s not. You break my toy, you owe me a new—”
“It’s not a goddamned toy.” Van slammed the steering wheel. His eyes were tearing. Frustration, anger, pity, some combination. “Jesus look at you. What the hell have you done to yourself out here? Mom’s got cancer, do you understand me? She’s going in for radiation treatments and Dad thought it’d be good if you were home. I’ve been running interference for you for a month. I told him you’re a musician, you keep weird hours, maybe you fell on bad times and your phone got cut off, maybe you had to move, it’s a tough life, flying by the seat of your pants, blah blah blah. And then I show up and—” He waved at his brother as if he could dispel him like smoke. “What a fool,” he said and Niko knew Van meant himself. Somehow that was worse than him calling Niko a fool. Because something in Van’s tone said, I should have known better. You’re a screwup and I should have known better.