A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,72

the blades of grass. “And your boy can’t get that kind of information without a subpoena, and you don’t get that without an official investigation. And from what I seen, you’re far from official, bud.”

“It would probably be a hell of a lot easier on you, McCane, if it didn’t get that official.”

I’d turned to him and was walking backward now, holding his eyes as we came around the corner of the house to the front lawn. Then I saw his face change.

When I looked around, the three street guardians were leaning up against the rental car. The leader in the middle, his head turned down, watched our approach from under the edge of a Marlins’ ball cap. He was poking at his teeth with a toothpick. His friends had their hands in their pockets. While I hesitated, McCane stepped past me.

“Get y’all dusty asses off my car, niggers,” he said, striding toward the group.

Without a word all three of them nonchalantly flexed their leg muscles and bent forward, bouncing their rumps off the fenders and taking one step forward. Their eyes followed McCane as he passed them and walked around to the driver’s side.

McCane got in, started the car and pulled around my truck, driving slowly and with as much dignity as one could in a tiny rental. We all watched him turn the first corner and disappear.

“Tell me that cracker cop ain’t workin’ wit you, G,” said the leader without turning to me, his words directed in the direction of McCane’s car.

“He’s not working with me,” I said.

“Then what’s he doin’ round Ms. Thompson’s?”

It was my turn to hold a response.

“I think he’s looking for the junk man,” I finally said.

The leader was quiet while he poked at an upper tooth.

“Ahh,” he said, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “A unified goal.”

“You call me if you find him,” I said, climbing into my truck.

Eddie was out in the street. He couldn’t wait under the bridge forever. He had two more days to wait out Mr. Harold, and the ache in his veins was too much. He needed his heroin.

He had waited in his concrete corner through the daylight hours, listening to the cars overhead, trying to ignore the twisting in his stomach and the ache in his muscles. Just after nightfall, he heard the voices of the homeless men nearby, and their tone sounded oddly satisfied. He uncurled himself and approached them. He could smell gravy.

Three men were crouched in a huddle with white Styrofoam boxes in front of them. They looked up when Eddie came close. The light from the overpass lamps kept his face in darkness and cast a shadow large enough to cover them all.

“You can go down to the Salvation Army yonder and get you some,” one offered, pointing to the east with a plastic fork.

Eddie stood silent. He had never gone to the feeding programs anywhere in the city. He’d seen the men, sometimes women and kids, lining up when the traveling kitchens stopped in the park on the west side. But he stayed away, his momma’s voice in his head: “We ain’t no welfare case, an’ we don’t take nothin’ that ain’t our deservin’.” Eddie didn’t try to figure why then she mostly took her dinner at the church in the last few years. “That’s from God,” she would say, bringing home leftovers. “And we are all deservin’ from God.”

Eddie determined that he was hungry now, and took a step closer to the men. When the headlights of a tractor-trailer swept through the bushes and momentarily lit his face, the three men got up and backed away, leaving their meals behind.

After he had eaten Eddie sidestepped his way down the steep embankment to his cart. He still had a hundred-dollar bill deep in his pocket, and he needed his bundle. One bundle would get him through, he convinced himself. Just one until Mr. Harold came again.

The thought of the heroin had warmed his veins and set him to pushing up the empty street toward the train station that was always empty at night. From there he could slip into the neighborhood, where he would again be invisible. And now he was out in the street.

31

Someone had put Springsteen on the jukebox. Billy was drinking a bad Merlot. Richards was sipping on a glass of white wine and I was studying a green bottle of beer that had long ago lost its soggy label. On Richards’s suggestion, we were sitting