The Saddest Break of Day

P. H. Madore

May 2006

Massachusetts was dry, as were Providence and Newport, and the first thing we did the morning the call came was attack a homeless dude with a shopping cart full of food. We'd smoked from Corey's reserve stash and were feeding our respective munchies in our usual fashion: wandering around the Hi-Lo grocery store across the park from our, two-bedroom filling a cart with whatever seemed right. I’d been relying on a now-imprisoned redneck named Cob in Newport during dry season for about two years–an eternity in our culture. But I knew a guy who knew an Asian in New Jersey named Yao, and I paid him to put me in touch with this shady unheard-of fuck. Excited by the ringing of my cell phone, nothing else seemed important.

"The one you been told about," I said on demand.

"Have I what you need."

"Ten-pack, twenty-pack, what?"

"Fifty, no less."

I was stunned. I’d never picked up fifty pounds before, never even close to that from a strange connect. "How much?"

"Thirty-five per Z," he said, thinking I could do the math in my head.

"I’ll call you back."

"C'mon!" I told Corey, who was grabbing a leg of cooked chicken from the cart. "Wha'do-I-do-with-this?" he spat and I said, looking around and pointing at a harmless drifter we'd once drank with, "Him!" Then I was running across the parking lot. Corey followed and all I heard as my feet hit grass was the metal wheels bouncing across the asphault and the incoherent, chasing thanks of the bum.

Back at the apartment Corey executed a mad search for my calculator and once it was found we did the math: thirty large. We talked it over and he brought up the obvious: we'd be crazy to go to New Jersey with that kind of loot. According to him neither of us had ever been there–he didn’t know about the time I went to Newark to drop off three white kilos and had a bullet graze my neck in the process. My explanation for the scar was always some bullshit tale of a childhood accident.

He was right, though. New Jersey definitely wasn’t safe for guys like us, life-long New Englanders. This is basically what I said to Yao while adding that the price was truly unbeatable. Before I’d even finished my sentence, he said, "We will bring. Two days. You wait for call." Then he hung up, and I felt like a sucker for tossing all that food.

I couldn’t even calculate the profit. During dry season we could sell skimpy bags for higher prices and not lose a single customer. I figured the first eight pounds would be gone in a couple days. I contemplated cocaine to stay awake; contemplated hiring help–but where was I to go for that, the classifieds? Rats were everywhere, and there were days when I even wondered about Corey. If given the chance and the right conditions, would he roll on me? I wasn’t stupid enough to ask–all I could do was watch–but I wouldn't have blamed him or been surprised if he had. I'd never told him all the evil I was responsible for; he knew. The eyes of a man like me give nothing away, but my hardened presence and stories on the street inevitably lead to unconfirmed assumptions. "This is fuckin’ nuts," I said to him later on. We were waiting on some girls, finishing off some gifted top-shelf vodka.

He was looking out the window and not paying me any attention.

"Yeah this shit hits pretty hard."

"Not that," I said. "This deal. We’re gonna make around seven-hundred percent at-fuckin'-least. We could retire no problem when it's gone."

"But we won’t," he said and dawned an Irish grin. Into the night we blinded ourselves with inherent alcoholic darkness.

Waking up at about four the next morning excited and jittery, I pulled a book out of my hiding place and picked up where I’d left off two weeks before. It was A Walk On The Wildside by Nelson Algren.

"Stranger on a strange-lit stair, you have come to a strange frontier," I read, and my heart moved, though that's rare for me.

I wondered if they’d be the last words I would think if we got hit in Newark or Hackensack or wherever, and heard Corey stir in the next room; as he flushed the toilet I hid the book again. Spent the next hour carefully oiling an unused, clean AR-15.

At about seven I woke his ass up and directed him to get me high, knowing he still had some Canadian hash from a queer dealer I refused to associate with.

When my phone finally rang that late-afternoon, it was the number I'd been waiting for again. Nearly every other number had gone ignored.

"Yeah."

"You have left yet?"

"F'wheah?"

"You decide. Call when you reach turnpike," Yao told me.

"Bu–" I started as the line went dead.

Corey was looking at me with happy wide hazel eyes. I nodded.

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