Crossroads

The guy answered on the sixth ring. Perry got no further than pronouncing his first and last names when the guy interrupted him. “Sorry, man. Closed for the holidays.”

“It’s something of an emergency.”

The guy hung up on him.

At this point, Perry might wisely have conceded defeat and gone back to First Reformed to content himself with whatever bottle Larry Cottrell had managed to poach, but Larry’s success was by no means assured, perhaps more like the opposite, and Perry had money, the guy had drugs—what could be simpler?

He’d been to the guy’s house only once, not to cop but simply to be introduced to him by a disagreeable upperclassman, Randy Toft, who’d been Keith Stratton’s dealer. Subsequent guy–Perry meetings had occurred among potholes in the parking lot behind the old A&P, which was boarded up but not yet demolished or repurposed, and had invariably involved lengthy waiting for the guy’s anonymous white Dodge to nose into view, Perry stewing about his lack of punctuality but never brave enough, when the guy finally arrived, to raise the issue. Both of them knew who had the power and who didn’t.

The house was easy to find again, because it was on a dead-end street by the cheerful name of Felix and its street-side mailbox bore a weathered NIXON AGNEW bumper sticker, possibly humor, possibly a red herring for the township police, or possibly, who could say, a heartfelt statement. As Perry came up the street named Felix toward the rail embankment, he saw the white Dodge in the driveway, buried in whiter snow. Light showed around the edges of sagging shades in the house’s living-room windows. The front walk was unshoveled, altogether untrodden.

Resolved: that embracing badness accords power.

Because what else, the first affirmative speaker asked rhetorically, distinguishes the person who needs to score from the person who needs to sell? The buyer, after all, is as free to withhold money as the seller is free to withhold his goods. Doesn’t it follow that the difference in power must relate to the gravity of the offense? A high-school dealer is nothing worse than a dispersing nozzle on a hose, dispensing good times to his peers and to himself, whereas the man who makes a career of being the hose has chosen to flout stern federal statutes. He’s morally far worse than the young dealer, and this is why the latter silently endures the former’s lack of punctuality. The deeper you go into badness, the more formidable you become.

Empowered by the shittiness of what he’d done to Larry Cottrell, Perry opened the guy’s chain-link gate and waded through the snow to the door, behind which he heard music. Before he could knock, there came a kind of strangled howl from a dog he’d forgotten about until this moment, followed by a cascade of savage basso barks, as the dog found the breath it had lacked for its initial howl. On Perry’s only other visit to the house, the dog had stood in the open doorway, large and short-haired, slit-eyed with suspicion, its jaw muscles grotesquely bulging, while the guy met him and Randy Toft outside the gate and put his arms on their shoulders, demonstrating amity, which the dog had grudgingly conceded. Now the barking caused the porch light to come on. Through the door, he heard the guy shouting.

“What are you doing, man, it’s out of control! The dog is out of control! You better just get the fuck away from here! It’s nobody’s business!”

The door had a fish-eye peephole through which Perry felt sure he was being observed. Even discounting for a distributor’s understandable paranoia, the situation didn’t seem promising, but he thought it was worth trying to signal his harmlessness before he gave up. He fished out his wallet, removed his twenty-dollar bill, and dangled it at the peephole.

“What are you doing to me?” the guy shouted, over the barking. “Wrong house, man! Go away!”

To make his intention clear, Perry mimed taking a toke.

“Yeah, I get it! Go away!”

Perry made a beseeching gesture, and the porch light went out. This seemed to be the end of it, but the door suddenly opened. The guy was wearing only blue jeans, neither buttoned nor zipped, and had his fingers under the collar of the outraged dog, which was scratching at the air with raised forelegs. “What are you doing?” he said. “What are you standing there for? You can’t be standing there. What do you think I am?”

He dragged the lunging dog back from the door. Extremely warm air was flowing out.

“Shut the fucking door already!”

Taking this as an invitation, Perry entered and closed the door. The guy was straddling the dog as if it were a canine pony, hauling it farther back into the house while Perry waited on the entry rug, the snow on his rubbers immediately liquefying. The house temperature was a good ninety degrees. The music, which came from a wooden stereo console, was Vanilla Fudge. Perry remembered neither the console nor anything else about the living room, partly because the walls were bare and the furniture nondescript, but mainly because he’d been too agitated, too full of anxiety and shame, to pay attention. The guy, that afternoon, the previous April, had introduced himself as “Bill,” but his smirking intonation had led Perry to assume that Bill wasn’t his real name. He had a reddish mustache too large for his face, and one of his legs was an inch or two shorter than the other. According to Randy Toft, the leg had kept him out of Vietnam, but the guy didn’t seem to have much going for him otherwise. Namelessness suited his station in life.