Mercy Street(9)

They weren’t in love and never would be, but in one respect Stuart was the ideal man: late in his marriage, at his wife’s insistence, he’d had a vasectomy. Nora had already decided to leave him, he told Claudia, and was looking out for the kids’ interests: if he fathered more children with some other woman, their inheritance would be further divided at his death. His ex-wife had exhibited an adaptive behavior that favored the survival of her offspring, what mothers of every species were hardwired to do. Stuart explained this calmly, without rancor. His reaction struck Claudia as peculiar but generous, which made her like him. Combined with his inability to make her pregnant, it dramatically increased his appeal. After the STD test, they stopped using condoms. The careless sex was luxurious, like driving a car with heated seats or onboard navigation, some extravagant amenity she’d once considered unnecessary and now couldn’t live without.

Garden tomatoes were always worth having, even if they were small.

“Traffic is moving up ahead. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Stuart said.

Claudia crossed the street to the T station and hurried down the stairs. Rumble and clatter, a squealing of brakes. A southbound train was near.

WHEN SHE RESURFACED, A LIGHT SNOW WAS FALLING. THE SIDEWALKS were crusted and slippery, rock salt crunching beneath her feet. Her destination was a side street off a busy avenue, a maze of crooked one-ways lined with parked cars.

The house on the corner looked like all the others, an unnumbered three-decker wrapped in grubby aluminum siding. If you’ve ever passed within five miles of the Charles, you’ve seen a thousand like it—cheap workers’ housing, a hundred years old and built to last fifty. The inevitable synecdoche for the city of Boston; the part that stands in for the whole.

On the front porch, Timmy—she didn’t know his last name—was smoking a cigarette, a big beefy guy with pale blue eyes and the terminally startled look of a person with blond eyebrows. He wore no coat, just the standard Boston street uniform: nylon track pants, wool watch cap, a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved one. His most distinctive feature was a burly old-fashioned beard, the style favored by Ulysses S. Grant and the Smith Brothers, makers of cough drops. It hung halfway down his chest like a coarse woolen bib.

He waved her into a narrow entranceway—drafty, unheated, its tile floor encrusted with grime. The apartment door was ajar, three rooms connected shotgun-style, bedroom, sitting room, kitchen in the back. The floors were bare, stacked here and there with random clutter—sneakers, CDs, a sweatshirt—piled into plastic milk crates. The place was very warm and smelled intensely of marijuana. The windows were covered with a paisley tapestry the size of a bedsheet.

They sat in their usual spots—Claudia on the couch, Timmy in his magisterially large La-Z-Boy recliner. His massive television was tuned to TrafficCam. For someone who never seemed to leave his apartment, he was intensely interested in road conditions. A tray table held his daily necessities, arranged like surgical instruments: a cigar box, a remote control, a water pipe, and a small digital scale. Behind his chair, invisible from Claudia’s vantage point, were several large glass jars with rubber seals, the kind used for storing sugar or flour.

He reached behind his chair and handed her a jar.

“This is Green Crack.” He had a smoker’s voice, deep and phlegmy. “It’s high sativa. Trippy, a little heady.”

Claudia opened the jar and sniffed, like a customer in a pretentious wine bar. The smell was fresh and verdant, like cut grass. From her spot on the couch she could see into Timmy’s bedroom. The bed was unmade, the floor littered with dirty clothes, like the lair of some furtive, hibernating male creature. Under the bed, in a giant metal footlocker, was the rest of his inventory. She’d seen him dip into it to replenish the jars when they ran low. It says something about that time in her life that none of this seemed strange.

He passed her a second jar.

“This is Blue Widow. It’s a hybrid, Blueberry crossed with White Widow. Your basic body stone.” He always had a lot to say about the product, the relative merits of different strains. He preferred indica over sativa, pure strains over hybrids. Growing conditions mattered—the acidity of the soil, natural or artificial light. Men and their opinions: Stuart and his speakers, Timmy and his weed.

Blue Widow smelled darker, like freshly brewed coffee.

“Which one do you like?” Claudia asked.

“That depends.” Timmy sat back in his chair, index fingers touching. With his insistent beard he might have been a wizard, an ancient seer, a warlord of the imperial era. “The question is, why are you smoking? What are you looking for?”

These questions were not easily answered.

SHE’D BEEN COMING TO TIMMY’S FOR SIXTEEN MONTHS EXACTLY. One of the hotline volunteers had put them in touch. Claudia made her first buy in funeral clothes, having driven straight from Maine. In what would become their usual pattern, Timmy met her on the porch. Once inside, they smoked together and watched television. When money changed hands, both pretended not to notice. As though they were old friends just hanging out; as though there were any other imaginable circumstance in which they’d find themselves in the same room.

Was this normal weed-selling protocol? Claudia had no idea. She hadn’t smoked in twenty years, and had never bought her own. In college she had no money for drugs, no money for anything. She smoked her first joint with a guy in her dorm, a rich boy from Concord, Mass, who was stoned for every minute of their freshman year. They had a rambling conversation about writers she hated (Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson) and music that bored her senseless (Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead). While they talked, he lay on the floor and did sit-ups, his Tshirt riding up to show his ridged midsection. This interested her more than the conversation or the weed, which made her hungry and sleepy. His name was Scott McKotch, and he was never her boyfriend. He was just a guy in her dorm.