Page 6 of Safe Enough

I was the guy that couldn’t be stopped.

But then I met Ryland.

And all that’s over now.

TEN KEYS

Mostly shit happens, but sometimes things fall in your lap, not often, but enough times to drop a rock on despair. But you can’t start in with thoughts of redemption. That would be inappropriate. Such events are not about you. Things fall in your lap not because you’re good, but because other people are bad. And stupid.

This guy walked into a bar, which sounds like the start of a joke, which was what it was, really, in every way. The bar was a no-name dive with a peeled-paint door and no sign outside. As such it was familiar to me and the guy and people like us. I was already inside, at a table I had used before. I saw the guy come in. I knew him in the sense that I had seen him around a few times and therefore he knew me too, because as long as we assume a certain amount of reciprocity in the universe he had seen me around the exact same number of times. I see him, he sees me. We weren’t friends. I didn’t know his name. Which I wouldn’t expect to. A guy like that, any name he gives you is sure to be bullshit. And certainly any name I would have given him would have been bullshit. So what were we to each other? Vague acquaintances, I guess. Both close enough and distant enough that given the trouble he was in, I was the sort of guy he was ready to talk to. Like two Americans trapped in a foreign airport. You assume an intimacy that isn’t really there, and it makes it easier to spill your guts. You say things you wouldn’t say in normal circumstances. This guy certainly did. He sat down at my table and started in on a whole long story. Not immediately, of course. I had to prompt him.

I asked, “You OK?”

He didn’t reply. I didn’t press. It was like starting a car that had been parked for a month. You don’t just hammer the key. You give it time to settle, so you don’t flood the carburetor or whatever cars have now. You’re patient. In my line of work, patience is a big virtue.

I asked, “You want a drink?”

“Heineken,” the guy said.

Right away I knew he was distracted. A guy like that, you offer him a drink, he should ask for something expensive and amber in a squat glass. Not a beer. He wasn’t thinking. He wasn’t calculating. But I was.

An old girl in a short skirt brought two bottles of beer, one for him and one for me. He picked his up and took a long pull and set it back down and I saw him feel the first complex shift of our new social dynamic. I had bought him a drink, so he owed me conversation. He had accepted charity, so he owed himself a chance to re-up his status. I saw him rehearse his opening statement, which was going to tell me what a hell of a big player he was.

“It never gets any easier,” he said.

He was a white guy, thin, maybe thirty-five years old, a little squinty, the product of too many generations of inbred hardscrabble hill people, his DNA baked down to nothing more than the essential components, arms, legs, eyes, mouth. He was an atom, adequate, but entirely interchangeable with ten thousand just like him.

“Tell me about it,” I said, ruefully, like I understood his struggle.

“A man takes a chance,” he said. “Tries to get ahead. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”

I said nothing.

“I started out muling,” he said. “Way back. You know that?”

I nodded. No surprise. We were four miles from I-95, and everyone started out muling, hauling keys of coke up from Miami or Jax, all the way north to New York and Boston. Anyone with a plausible face and an inconspicuous automobile started out muling, a single key in the trunk the first time, then two, then five, then ten. Trust was earned and success was rewarded, especially if you could make the length of the New Jersey Turnpike unmolested. The Jersey State Troopers were the big bottleneck back then.

“Clean and clear every time,” the guy said. “No trouble, ever.”

“So you moved up,” I said.

“Selling,” he said.

I nodded again. It was the logical next step. He would have been told to take his plausible face and his inconspicuous automobile deep into certain destination neighborhoods and meet with certain local distributors directly. The chain would have become one link shorter. Fewer hands on the product, fewer hands on the cash, more speed, more velocity, a better vector, less uncertainty.

“Who for?” I asked.

“The Martinez brothers.”

“I’m impressed,” I said, and he brightened a little.

“I got to where I was dealing ten keys pure at a time,” he said.

My beer was getting warm, but I drank a little of it anyway. I knew what was coming next.

“I was hauling the coke north and the money south,” he said.

I said nothing.

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