White Sugar, Brown Sugar by Michael A. Pyle

Author:Michael A. Pyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * * * * * *

A new manager had rehired Jude at Old South. One morning, he was reviewing orders and stacking fish, meat, and vegetables in the window.

Roosevelt’s mother leaned in the window and smiled, showing erratic and damaged teeth. “Hey Jude,” she said. Wrinkles stood in the dark skin around her tiny eyes. “Listen, what time you get off?”

“Three.”

“Me too.” She looked down, and then at him. Then she spun her eyes around the room and then back at him again. “Jude. Can ya give me a ride somewheres?”

“Well, uh, yeah,” wondering why she was acting so nervous.

“Gotta pick up a package in Tampa.”

Feeling his gut begin to churn, he asked, “What kinda package?”

“Scag.”

He thought his heart stopped. He visualized himself jabbing a needle into his arm, booting the plunger. He could almost feel the deadening intrusion of the drug in his system. “Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Anne?”

“I got a buddy, Jerome. He need a package pick up. Girl’s gettin’ married tamorrow, so he cain’t go. He gonna give me some product if I get it.”

“Sure Anne,” he responded. “We gonna do some?”

“Hell, yeah,” she said, laughing.

Leaving town, they stopped at Joe’s Food Store and stocked up on cigarettes, Slim Jims, Coke and other goodies, and then headed west. He thought of old Hank as he ran through the gears of Jude's car and cruised up and around the ramp from 92 onto I-4.

They smoked cigarettes and chatted. They passed downtown Orlando within an hour and continued past the highway signs for Disney World, which had opened two years before. Jude wanted to go there someday.

Jude recollected traveling with Hank to doctors’ offices at various exits they passed — shooting up in vacant lots, orange groves, woods and lake fronts — and he recalled the hapless cops following them around in various small towns and larger cities. That had been the life. He’d enjoyed making the cops look like fools, getting the doctors to give them drugs, obtaining cheap, legal drugs directly from drug stores, and the notoriety. Everybody in town knew they’d come to Main Street at night with a full supply.

He enjoyed the ride today because he loved being on the road. He searched for radio stations, finding few. He anticipated with fear and excitement the dull explosion of heroin in his veins.

After a long silence, Anne said, “Need ta stop an’ see Roos’velt.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s over by Tampa, ain’t he? How’s he doin’?”

“Great. Straight. He be in Saint Petuhsburg.” She smiled proudly.

Jude hadn’t seen Red for a long time, but had trouble imagining him straight.

At some point his mind turned to sex, like it always did. Jude ran through his memory bank, reviewing the sexual escapades in which he’d succeeded, had messed around so much he felt he’d succeeded, or had succeeded in his mind only. He thought of doing it with Anne, but she was too old.

They arrived in Tampa and followed the hand-scribbled directions to a small apartment house. They stood and stretched for a minute, lit cigarettes and started for the stairs.

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