Mercy Street(11)

The crawl continued. IF THE REFERENDUM PASSES, MASSACHUSETTS WILL BECOME THE THIRD STATE TO LEGALIZE. COLORADO AND WASHINGTON APPROVED RECREATIONAL USE IN 2012.

“Colorado,” Timmy said.

Those four syllables seemed to trip a switch in his head. As often happened, he told her something he’d told her before. Last summer, he’d gone to Denver for a buddy’s wedding and was amazed to find a weed store on every corner, marked with a green neon cross. He chose one at random and went inside.

Long ago, when Claudia was briefly married, her in-laws took a trip to China. When they returned, they threw a party for themselves, featuring an hour-long slide presentation narrated by her mother-in-law, who had some sort of rapturous experience seeing the Great Wall and couldn’t shut up about it.

The weed store in Denver was Timmy’s Great Wall.

In a trance of stoned wonderment, he described its interior, the track lighting and exposed brick and blond wood floors. The product was displayed in glass jars, spotlit like sculptures in a gallery. He’d counted forty kinds of flower, from commercial-grade to fancy heirloom varieties, vials of cannabis oil, shelves of hookahs and ornate pipes, expensive LED inhalers kept under glass. The store stocked a full range of edibles, not just candy but tortilla chips, granola, frozen pizzas in slick packaging, all clearly labeled with grams of THC per serving. An entire convenience store worth of processed food, guaranteed to get you high.

“Capitalism run amok,” he said, his final words on the subject. “The little guy can’t compete.”

He reached for the remote and began clicking through the channels. Finally he settled on a car show, which was what they usually watched. This one featured American cars of the 1960s: Falcons, Thunderbirds, the era of heroic winged creatures. It might have been ten minutes or an hour before the doorbell rang.

At Timmy’s this happened all the time. There was a steady stream of random dudes in and out of the apartment. He stepped into the hallway and came back with a customer, a pale skinny guy with a receding hairline and—you couldn’t miss it—a smudge of holy ash on his forehead.

“Claudia, Winky,” said Timmy. “Winky, Claudia.”

Winky sat at the other end of the couch. “Anthony,” he said.

Timmy ignored the correction. “Winky, man. There’s something on your face.”

“It’s Ash Wednesday,” said Winky.

“Aren’t you going to wash it off?”

Claudia was glad he’d asked. She’d been wondering about this for years, ever since she moved to Boston. How long was a Catholic expected to walk around with a dirty forehead? An hour, an entire day?

“You’re not supposed to.” Winky blinked rapidly, one eye at a time—left first, then right. Claudia felt that she’d seen him before, which made a certain kind of sense. If he smoked a joint a day, as she did, an eighth would last him four weeks. They had gotten on the same weed cycle, like roommates who menstruate in unison.

“I should get going,” she said, clawing her way out of the couch.

Timmy followed her into the hallway. “Hold up, I want to show you something. It’s just down the block.”

Outside, the temperature had dropped. Claudia hugged her coat around her. Timmy, in his layered Tshirts, seemed impervious to the cold. Walking beside him, she was aware of his hugeness—a foot taller than she was, easily twice her weight. Usually she forgot this. Sitting in front of his television, they were roughly the same size.

When they turned the corner, she saw the car parked across the street: a Plymouth Barracuda from the early 1970s, dark green, lovingly restored.

“Whoa.” She crossed the street to study it. “It’s, what, a seventy-one?”

“Seventy-two,” Timmy said.

“Oh, right, the headlamps. They went back to the singles, for whatever reason.” She peered through the passenger window. The leather seats looked smooth and glossy. The dashboard was a marvel of midcentury futurism, the dials and gauges ringed in chrome.

“I just got it back from the body shop,” said Timmy. “That’s fresh paint. I need to drive it over to my buddy’s garage, but I wanted you to see it first.”

“It’s yours?”

“For now,” said Timmy. “I picked it up last summer for cheap. I figured I’d put a few grand into it and double my money.”

She wanted to ask why anyone would sell such a car; how, if such a miraculous object came into your possession, you could ever part with it. The question seemed too personal. He was just her weed dealer.

Such a car could take a person anywhere, to an entirely different life.





3


When Claudia was growing up, her uncle Ricky worked at a body shop in town, and for a while she spent a lot of time there. In later years she’d be busy after school, minding two or three fosters, but at the time they had only one. Erica was easy, a quiet, shell-shocked girl who was always hungry. As long as she was eating, she was happy, even if it was only grape jelly and soda crackers. Claudia’s mother complained that the child was eating them out of house and home, but crackers, even Zesta or Krispy, weren’t expensive. The ones Deb bought, in plain white cartons labeled SALTINES, were practically free.

Each day after school, Claudia put Erica in front of the TV with a box of crackers. Then she rode her bike across town to Street Rodz, where the guys would be jacking up a rear end or ripping out an original bench seat to replace it with buckets, atrocities that should be covered under the Geneva Convention. Besides these “customizations,” Street Rodz also offered detailing. Claudia was a skinny kid, small enough to wedge herself into tight spaces, and for two dollars an hour she attacked seats and floor mats with a shop vac. It was criminal what people did to their cars. She vacuumed out pounds and pounds of dog hair, cigarette butts, shredded Kleenex. Under the seats she found candy wrappers, costume jewelry, roach clips, used condoms—and often, a few dollars in coins. She was allowed to keep whatever she found.