Poppy Z. Brite - Liquor 01 by Liquor

Author:Liquor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-30T12:14:17+00:00

G-man awoke with the feeling that he had left something unfinished. When he went to put the coffee on, he remembered what it was: the pizza he’d made was sitting on the counter covered with plastic but otherwise untouched. He wondered why Rickey hadn’t eaten any. Then he saw the twelve empty beer bottles by the sink.

Sighing, G-man fixed two cups of coffee and took them into the bedroom. Rickey was just waking up, wincing at the weak afternoon sunlight that filtered through the shutters. “No coffee,” he whispered, lacing his fingers over his eyes. “No coffee.”

“Why—” G-man was speaking at normal volume, but Rickey looked as if he might cry, so he lowered his voice to match Rickey’s. “Why’d you drink so much? You drank all the beer in the fridge.”

“Ah! Don’t say that word!”

G-man laughed. He’d been through this hundreds of times, but Rickey was still pretty funny when he was hungover.

“You’re never gonna drink again, right?”

“Right.”

“Gonna be pretty hard making all those recipes with liquor, then.”

Rickey pushed himself out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. G-man sat on the edge of the bed and wondered why people ran the water in the sink when they were throwing up. It didn’t mask the sounds of throwing up; it just made them wetter.

After a few minutes Rickey returned, red-eyed and damp-haired, and burrowed back under the covers.

“You’ll feel a little better now,” said G-man.

“Thanks.” Rickey ran his tongue over his lips. “I’m so thirsty…”

“You want a snowball?”

Snowballs were a hangover remedy they had discovered by accident when they were seventeen. After a night of drinking vodka and Kahlua, they were rounded up and taken to a Metairie home-improvement store by Rickey’s mother, who wanted them to load her car with several huge bags of sand she intended to dump into a pothole in front of her house. She knew they were suffering, but she had no sympathy. “You got your daddy’s tolerance,” she told Rickey. “That man never could hold his liquor. On our very first date, I drank two cocktails for every one of his.”

“That must have charmed the pants off him, Momma.”

Somehow they got the wretched sand into the car. On the way home, they groaned about their exhaustion and thirst so much that Brenda stopped and bought them strawberry snowballs from one of the brightly painted wooden stands that went up all over New Orleans in the summer.

G-man didn’t know if it was the coldness of the shaved ice, the quick sugar fix of the syrup, the fluid replacement, or some magic X factor, but they both felt better afterward: so much better that they not only filled in the pothole, but loaded the extra sand into a wheelbarrow, took it over to G-man’s sister’s house, and poured it into his little nephew’s sandbox.

Leaving Rickey with a glass of water on the nightstand and a pillow over his head, G-man got in the car and drove the short distance to their favorite snowball stand, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz on Tchoupitoulas.

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