see them, without all that hair in your eyes. Do you see the positive influence I’m having on you already? I thought your mother was going to kiss my feet when she saw you.”
“It wasn’t you. My hair was all”—he coughed again—“knotty.”
“Take it easy, champ.” Les gave Jude’s back a few slaps. “You haven’t tried reefer till you’ve tried Uncle Lester’s reefer. Do you know what today is?”
Jude took another hit. “Saturday?”
“Monday. The fifteenth. Distribution day.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “In exactly five minutes, my first guy will be here for a pickup. They come one by one. Six guys in six hours, twice a month, in and out, clean as can be. Don’t even have to leave the apartment.” He lit a cigarette. “This business is a science, like anything else. You have to have a schedule. You have to have rules. So, like us.”
“What?”
“This new arrangement. There’s some other matters to discuss.”
“Like what?”
“Like I snore. I move my bowels from six-fifteen to six-thirty-five every morning. And I own a handgun.”
“Does it shoot?”
“That’s what they do, champ. It’s in a case under the kitchen sink. A thirty-eight special. I call it McQueen. Don’t touch it unless I tell you to, in which case it’s loaded, so watch out.”
“Why would you tell me to?”
Les gave an I-know-nothing shrug. “Also, there’s the matter of a curfew.”
“Great,” said Jude, but when he thought about it, his brain stretching the word, softening it—was his dad’s shit that good?—it seemed a shiny fragment of adult vocabulary, somehow alluring. He’d never had a curfew before. Delph and Kram did. “When is it?”
Outside the window, a bird flickered on a tree branch. A bird in New York. All his life Jude had seen the same birds, and this one—he’d never seen it before. It was an amazement. When he thought about walking downstairs and outside into the daylight it was difficult to control his nerves. “Well,” Les said, “if you can demonstrate that you’re in possession of your faculties, if you return eventually from wherever it is you’re going, which proves you can remember where you live, if you’re wearing the same clothes you went out in, if you can continue to convince me, Hey, Dad, I’m just a kid having fun, I drank a beer at the Centre Pub, or what have you, but I don’t have a knife sticking out of my stomach—then I’m willing to forgo a curfew.”
“Did Mom say that was okay?”
Les stood, put out his cigarette, picked up the blanket, and began sloppily to fold it. “It doesn’t matter what your mother thinks. Look, I know she has serious concerns about you staying here. I can’t blame her. Would you help me with this thing?” Jude stood up and took two corners of the blanket. “Put it this way. If you don’t get into trouble, your mother doesn’t have to know about it. Now, we happen to have different definitions of trouble. Your mom wants me to be a rehab clinic for you, man, but come on, you’ve got a liking for this stuff I can dig.” Jude matched one of his corners to the other. “But I happen to have a classy operation here that could get screwed up overnight if, you know, Officer Friendly started sniffing around. Which means if I catch you stealing a candy bar, you’re going straight back to the Green Mountain State. Understand?” Like dancers, they stepped toward each other, the blanket dipping between them. Les took it, folded it in half, and stuffed it and the pillow inside the coffee table/chest.
Then he led Jude through the closet under the loft—through coats and dry-cleaning bags, his old dashiki—to a padlocked door. Jude never would have known it was there. “Voilà,” Les said, spinning the combination, and opened it onto another closet, walk-in size. The smell hit Jude like whiplash. He hadn’t smelled marijuana like this since his father’s greenhouse, and the memory of that place, mixed with the heavenly bouquet of free-flowing drugs, produced in him a strange quickening. The walls of the closet were lined with shelves, which were lined with plants, which were green and farmy and rich, their leaves crawling with flowers like lavender caterpillars, the sodium bulbs beaming lovingly upon them.
From behind them, muffled through the closet, the buzzer rang. “What’d I tell you?” Les said. He picked up one of the five-gallon buckets, then closed the door and locked it, and they shoved through the hanging