19 Knives by Mark Jarman

Author:Mark Jarman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2012-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

19 Knives

he’s pleased to meet you underneath the horse

—Elliott Smith, Speed Trials

Carol my caseworker vouched that I was reliable enough for carry privileges, so they let me have a week’s worth of methadone to take home, instead of driving every day to the pharmacy across the island, especially since I had my boy to take care of. Carol knew I wouldn’t sell the meth, knew those days were over.

Back in the days — way back — my buddies were salmon fishermen, buckets of money, growing on trees back then working mildew fishboats way up the rainy green coast. Lost cedar inlets with hot springs and bleached totem poles. Too much cash flying like loose leaves through marina bars and government wharves, and the fish piled in dead heaps in the mist, in icy holds and bilgewater that smelled of money and diesel.

No needles at first. We only snorted heroin, a sport and a pastime, the conventional wisdom being that it’s not addictive when just snorting I planned to stop after a few lost weekends and get back to normal, but something failed me, old school words gave up the ghost, crackers in soup, and new vague words clouded through me like trained white mice.

Those Vietnamese boys in Nanaimo had that good pure stuff, stepped on with a little lidocaine to keep you lining up for more.

Just a taste, I insisted, that’s all.

Those skinny Viet boys almost giving it away, points of China white going for ten or twenty bucks, deliver it by discreet courier, so the train kept arolling, and then a year or two later you’re boiling up ammonia on the stovetop and the car has an expired temporary permit in the back window and your Swiss cheese brain is pawning your father’s sax and you’ve spent enough to buy a space station.

Here’s the funny thing: I always despised junkies, shunned their inhabited hectic arms, sleepy syllables, and sybarite synapses. Look at those bozos, I said, can’t see a hole in a ladder. I thought I was smarter than the rest with my hornet-hive head. My earthly powers I believed to be manifold, special, hard as teeth on a chainsaw. I knew I could handle it, knew.

I mix my meth with the sweetest orange juice I can find, because the meth is so bitter. It’s really gross. A strip of masking tape on my juice, where I wrote in big felt pen: DO NOT DRINK!! I knew my boy loved OJ. I put it in the door away from the regular milk and juice and Kool-Aid containers.

I said, “The stuff in the door is my special medicine.” I said, “Don’t — touch — anything — in — the — door.” I made it very clear. I could not have made it clearer.

My boy is a light sleeper. My boy wakes up in the middle of the night, our little house quiet. My boy loves orange juice, would say, “I need a dur-rink, Dad.” He wakes up thirsty, a thirst

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