Opioid, Indiana by Brian Allen Carr

Author:Brian Allen Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-08-02T01:17:18+00:00

(317) xxx-xxxx: Miss me yet?

Me: Don’t you ever pay attention in class?

(317) xxx-xxxx: I’m multitasking.

Then I heard the front door, and I went out into the living room in my towel.

“Why aren’t you out looking for your uncle?” Peggy asked me. She was jittery but beautiful, and I was in my towel and I thought about letting it drop from my body, but I thought that would be very bad. Like assault or something.

“I’ll go,” I said.

“He’s not usually gone this long with no word.”

“Should we call someone?”

“Who? The cops? And tell them what? That we’re missing our druggie?”

“I mean . . .”

“I’ve already tried everyone he knows. I’m getting a bunch of nothing.”

“Then what’s me looking for him going to do?”

“It has to beat nothing.”

“Drive me around. We’ll look together.”

“I have to go up to Indy.”

“Why?”

“To check up there. I mean, there are some places he goes I can’t take you.”

I knew that. There were trap houses and all. Dive bars. Rotten places. Homes where children dawdled in filthy diapers as mothers played app games on cracked phone screens. Rank abodes with rotting carpet. Abandoned corners. Swollen neglect.

I’d been in places like that. Where TVs babysat children. Where soup bowls sat crusty on sofa cushions. The taste of recent smoking lingered. A fight could break out whenever.

Before my parents died, those were figments, man. And I guess I get a bit in shock at just the words “trap house,” because the first place I went to, when the courts were deciding where to place me, was some group home for kids like me, though calling them “like me” is like saying we were mammals.

I started reading this book one time that said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Maybe that’s right. I think about it all the time. The book was too long and I didn’t finish it, so maybe the author changed his mind by the end.

But as far as I can tell happy families operate like this: they love each other and do their things. Unhappy families can look all kinds of different. Kids can be orphans or mothers can be crack addicts. Children can be R-word. Fathers can be secret gay. Each little broken part of people looks different.

I was in a home with eight other kids once and some of them had mothers in jail and some of them had never seen their fathers. Was their unhappiness like mine?

If my mom was locked up, but I knew I’d see her again, would I feel the same kind of sad as the sadness of having one morning jumped up on her bed and pulled back her blankets to see her frozen still in death. Her mouth opened and tight. Her eyes wide at the sky.

If my mom was in jail, would I have stood on the front lawn that morning in my underwear waiting for a neighbor to wonder what I was doing and call the police?

If I’d

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