far and it’s too risky, because the cops are clamping down, chasing the slingers inside. Or worse, you buy from some narc and get busted and what Jacqui really, really doesn’t want is to get arrested and detox at Rikers.
She’s about to go back to the van and drive down to Waldbaum’s parking lot where you can usually score and then her phone buzzes and it’s Marco and he isn’t happy. “It’s Sunday morning.”
“I know, I need a wake-up.”
“You should have saved some from last night.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“What do you need?” Marco asks.
“Two bags.”
“You want me to come out for twenty bucks?”
Jesus, why is he hassling her? Her nose is starting to run and she thinks she’s going to puke. “I’m getting sick, Marco.”
“Okay, where are you?”
“The Walgreens on Amboy.”
“I’m at Micky D’s,” Marco says. “I’ll meet you behind the Laundromat. You know where that is?”
Yeah, she does her laundry there all the time. Well, not all the time, when she thinks about it. When it gets too disgusting. “Duh, yes.”
“Half an hour,” Marco says.
“To walk across the parking lot?”
“I just got my food.”
“Okay, I’ll come there.”
“Ten minutes,” Marco says. “Behind the Laundromat.”
“Bring me a coffee,” Jacqui says. “Milk, four sugars.”
“Yes, Lady Mary,” Marco says. “You want, like, a McMuffin or something?”
“Just the coffee.” She’s just going to be able to keep that down, never mind greasy food.
Jacqui crosses the parking lot and walks out to Page Avenue, then up to the next strip mall, which has a CVS, a McDonald’s, a grocery store, a liquor store, an Italian restaurant and the Laundromat.
She walks behind the CVS and waits out the back of the Laundromat.
Five minutes later, Marco pulls up in his Ford Taurus. He rolls down the window and hands her the coffee.
“You drove across the parking lot?” Jacqui asks. “Global warming, Marco? Ever heard of that?”
“You have the money?” Marco asks. “And don’t tell me you’ll get it, you’re totally out of credit right now.”
“I have it.” She looks around and then hands him a twenty.
He reaches into the console and then slips her two glassine envelopes. “And a buck for the coffee.”
“Really?” Marco’s gotten kind of salty since he started dealing. Sometimes he forgets he’s just another addict, slinging shit so he has the money to get himself well. A lot of people are doing that these days—every dealer Jacqui knows is a user. She digs into her jeans pocket, finds a dollar bill and gives it to him. “I thought you were being a gentleman.”
“No, I’m a feminist.”
“Where are you going to be later?”
Marco holds his little finger to his mouth and his thumb to his ear—“Call me”—and pulls away.
Jacqui puts the envelopes in her pocket and walks back to the van.
Travis is awake.
“I scored,” Jacqui says, pulling the envelopes out.
“Where?”
“From Marco.”
“He’s an asshole,” Travis says.
“Okay, you go the next time,” Jacqui says.
Fuck the lazy bastard, she thinks. She loves him, but, Jesus, he can be a pain in the ass sometimes. And speaking of Our Lord and Savior, Travis looks a little like Jesus—shoulder-length hair and a beard, all slightly tinged with red. And thin like Jesus, at least like he looks in all the pictures.
Jacqui finds the cut-out bottom of a soda can she uses instead of a spoon for a cooker and pours the heroin into it. She fills her syringe out of a water bottle, squirts it into the heroin, then flicks on her lighter and holds it under the cooker until the solution bubbles. Taking the filter out of a cigarette, she dips it in water and gently lays it into the solution. Then she puts the tip of the needle into the filter and sucks the liquid into the syringe.
She takes a skinny belt she keeps for the purpose, wraps it around her left arm, and pulls on it until a vein pops up. Then she places the needle into the vein and pulls the plunger back so there’s a little air bubble in it and moves the needle around until a little blood shows up in the needle.
Jacqui hits the plunger.
Unties before she pulls the needle out and then—
Bam.
It hits her.
So beautiful, so peaceful.
Jacqui leans back against the van wall and looks at Travis, who just finished shooting up himself. They smile at each other and then she drifts off into heroin world, so vastly superior to the real world.
Which isn’t that high a bar to clear.
When Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl, she saw her daddy in every man on the sidewalk, on the bus, every man who came into the restaurant where her mommy worked.
Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? Is that my daddy? she’d asked her mom until her mom got tired of hearing it and told her that her daddy was in heaven with Jesus and Jacqui wondered why Jesus got him and she didn’t so she didn’t like Jesus very much.
When Jacqui was little she stayed in her room and looked at picture books and made up stories and told herself stories, especially when Mommy thought she was asleep and brought home some of the men who came into the restaurant where Mommy worked. She’d lie in her bed and make up stories and sings songs about when Jacqui was little, when she was little, when Jacqui was a little girl.
She wasn’t so little, she was nine, when Mommy married one of the men who came into the restaurant where she worked and he told Jacqui he wasn’t her daddy, he was her stepdaddy, and she told him she knew that because her daddy was with Jesus and he laughed and said yeah maybe, if Jesus is holding down a barstool in Bay Ridge.
Jacqui was eleven the first time Barry asked her if she was going to grow up to be a whore like her mother and she remembers that he pronounced it “who-are,” like “Horton Hears a Who-Are,” and Jacqui would
