Masters of Horror (2 page)

For better or for worse, crack seems to have fallen off the national radar or it’s been eclipsed by that other breakfast of champions, crystal meth. Or a prediction has come true…one authority on drugs called the crack epidemic, ‘A self-cleaning oven’, meaning: ‘In a few years there won’t be a crack epidemic, because everyone who keeps using crack will be dead.’

Or, as imagined by the amazing John Shirley, WORSE than dead…

AFTERTASTE

By John Shirley

8:45 P.M., Saturday Night, West Oakland, California

Dwayne was sick of hearing Uncle Garland talk. The old man would talk about Essy and he would talk about the dope and he would talk about grindin’, about everything but his own goddamn drinking. Sitting in that busted wheelchair at the kitchen table, talking and sipping that Early Times. Talking shit about his angel dreams, too.
One more word about the dope. . .

But Dwayne tolerated more than just one more word, because he needed Uncle Garland. He needed a place to stay and some place to run to. So he just sat and listened while he waited for Essy to get up, waited for Essy to get them started again. Essy in the next room, had to crash for awhile, been two hours already. Fuck it. Dwayne could taste rock at the back of his tongue; smell it high in his nostrils. All in the imagination.

The TV was on, with the sound turned off. A rerun of a show with that guy used to be in
Taxi
. Tony something.

“
You listening to me, Dwayne?” Uncle Garland demanded, scratching his bald pate with yellowed fingers. His rheumy eyes looking at Dwayne and not seeing him. Moving with less life than the TV screen. Blind. The old man was blind, but that was easy to forget, somehow.

“
Can’t hardly
not
listen, you talking all the time,” Dwayne said.

“
The dope killing this town, it be killing our people,” Garland was saying. “Killing the black man. I’m fixin’ to go the Next World, and I’m glad to be goin’, Praise Jesus, with the devil eating this world like a pie. . .” Didn’t pause to take a breath.

Uncle Garland’s place was an apartment in the Projects, in the shadow of the freeway that collapsed in the ‘89 earthquake. Used to be you heard the freeway booming and rushing all night. Now it was eerie quiet. Or quiet as it ever got in the Projects.

“
Tell you some true now,” Uncle Garland said, using the expression that always prefaced a long, long lecture. “These are the end times, that the Lord’s truth. In my angel dreams, they come to me and tell me it’s so. And it’s on the news, about the dead people rising. It’s in the Bible, son, when the dead rise it’s a sign that the Lord is coming for Judgment—”

“
You see that shit in the
Weekly World News
or the
Star
?”

“
Radio news, I heard it. A disease in the air, they said, a radiation. The dead rising and hungry for the flesh of the living, Lord, and they—”

“
That’s complete shit,” Dwayne snorted. Why didn’t fucking Essy get up? Maybe he wouldn’t help him, get him started on the rock today.
Cousin Essy think he’s a big Grinder now, selling dope, stylin’ like a B Boy, but he got nothing to show for it. Not like he paying the rent here. Some grinders, they put their family in a nice house, buy them cars. Essy don’t give the old man shit, so don’t tell me you’re the big Fly
. Of course, the old man wouldn’t accept the money, he’d know it was dope money…

“
Tisn’t radiation,” the old man said, sucking on the pint bottle, “It’s the dark wave, the night wave that sweeps over things, son. It changing the world, readying for the end times. People, they do evil to each other and it opens the door for more evil. Evil deeds call up evil spirits and their hunger enters the dead, it’s a sickness on the land…

Dwayne couldn’t stand it anymore. Fuck Essy. He’d get his materials, one way or another.

He stood up abruptly and headed for the door. Put his hand on the knob. Said, over his shoulder, “Uncle, you tell Essy I got tired of waiting. I going to—”

“
No p’int in telling Essy shit. He dead.”

Dwayne felt a cold wave, like that wave of darkness the old man gabbled about, ripping through his gut. “Bullshit.”

“
I feel it. He died, maybe an hour ago. Got some p’ison in him.”

“
Shit,” Dwayne said again, and opened the door. He wasn’t going to go in and check on Essy. Wake him up when he’s crashing, he’d go off on you. Anyway the old man was full of shit.

But as he walked down the hallway he felt like Essy was dead, too.

In the kitchen, Garland sat up straighter on his wheelchair: he heard Essy stirring. Heard the creak of the bedsprings. Garland had been blind so long he scarcely noticed the darkness anymore. But now, it seemed to take on density and weight; his blindness seemed to thicken about him and chill him like a cloud covering the sun.

Heard the shuffling steps coming. Knew for certain what it was. The dream angels had left him in no doubt.

He reached out, found his cane, forced himself to his feet. He rarely stood anymore, but this time the danger of it, of fracturing one of his porous old bones, didn’t matter. He crossed to the broom closet by the old, whirring refrigerator. Moving only a little more slowly than the footsteps coming up behind him from the next room. He felt for the knob, found it, pulled the closet open. Found the old pistol where he kept it under the oily rags on the top shelf and drew it out, his hands shaking.

Then thought:
What if the dark wave brings me back too?

It wouldn’t be Garland, not really him, but . . .

He heard a dream angel whisper:
Not you, nor your old body.

He heard the shuffling nearer. Heard no breathing with it. No breathing, not any.

He raised the gun. Raised it to his mouth, pressed the barrel up against the palate, pulled the trigger.

His last thought was:
Leaving a kind of gift for it.

Light.

9:57 P.M., Downtown Oakland

Dwayne knew. He knew even before the white guy got out of his car. You could see it by the way he drove up, the car moving almost spastically, and the way he parked, the sedan slung across two parking spaces outside the liquor store, and the way his head moved around like one of those little dashboard dolls that’s got a head wobbling on a spring. The white guy was fucked up, really fucked up, and probably on base. Crack cocaine.

He was opportunity on the hoof.

The white guy had longish red-brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a little reddish mustache. He was driving a tan Acura, maybe a ‘95, and he had a gold watch on his right wrist. This was looking better and better.

Hobey saw him too. But Hobey was across the parking lot, trotting up real slow. Hobey was too old, too fat. Didn’t smoke, drank Night Train instead. Sold the rock sometimes, but never used, and acted like he was ruff because of it.

Dwayne was leaning into the white guy’s passenger side window by the time Hobey got there. “Whus’up,” Dwayne said, “What you need, tell me, I help,”

The white guy’s mouth was hanging open a little. His eyes dilating, shrinking, dilating, shrinking. A tongue so dry you could almost hear the rasp of it as be licked his lips. Word: it was base.

“
Rock,” the guy said. ‘Crack’. Things white guys called base cocaine.

“
How much?’

“
Uh—sixty bucks worth.”

Man, he was fucked up. Not supposed to make a deal that way, people rip you off. They sure do.

Dwayne almost laughed. But he said, “Okay, I take you there.”

“
Get in.”

Hobey was coming around to the guy’s driver side, “What you need, chief? I get it for you, I find the best—”

“
I got it,” Dwayne snapped. “I taking care of it.” He gestured briskly to the white guy. “Hobey’s a rip-off artist. He gaffin’ people all the time. Let’s go.”

The guy changed gears like a robot and they backed out, nearly plowing into the brick wall on the other side of the lot. Then they were careening down the street, Dwayne hissing, “Yo, chill this thing down, man, you get the cops on us.”

The white guy slowed down to a crawl.

1O:15 P.M.

This part of San Pablo Avenue was mostly liquor stores; flyblown bars with the light bulbs burnt out in their signs; adult video stores where fag hustlers cruised the video galleries. Dwayne had worked the video stores doing the tease thing, as Essy called it. Pretending you were a fag, going into the booth with a real fag. He puts some tokens in the machine, some fag video comes on, he’s watching it and you’re kind of messing around with his dick with one hand, distracting him, making a lot of noise about it, then lifting his wallet, going through his pockets while his pants are down. Then you say, “Oh shit—I think somebody’s coming, they checkin’ the booths,” and you split. It takes them a minute to discover they are ripped off and—

“
There it is,” Dwayne said, now. “That hotel.”

It was an old white wedge of a building, tall and narrow, on a sort of island where three streets almost intersected. The rest of the block was abandoned office space, rickety buildings from the early part of the twentieth century. Doc was standing in the doorway of the hotel, all in white as usual. A white suit, with a pink carnation. His black Jag was parked just a few feet from him where he could keep an eye on it.

“
Tha’s the dude,” Dwayne said. “Got him a Jaguar XKE, doing this shit.” Dwayne couldn’t keep the admiration out of his voice. That Doc had it together.

“
Pull up over there,” Dwayne said. “No, fuck, don’t — shit!”

The guy cut across two lanes with a screeching right angle turn.

“
Shit!” Dwayne looked around as the guy parked. No cops. Lucked out again.

“
What’s your name?” the white guy asked.

“
Dwayne.”

“
I’m Jim. Okay…uh…” He looked through the window at Doc. Knew he couldn’t go over and buy the shit himself. Or thought he couldn’t, anyway. Probably could have. Probably didn’t need Dwayne.

But Dwayne was banking on Jim White Guy not knowing that. And in fact, Dwayne could feel he was going to connect good here. Fuck Essy. Dwayne could grind his own business. Essy could come asking
Dwayne
for a start. (No way Essy was dead, that old man was getting brain damaged from drinking…Drinking kill you. . .)

Jim went on, “What you want for this?”

Dwayne said, “A dove.”

“
Half a dove.”

So he knew what a dove was anyway. A forty dollar rock of crack.

“
Whatever you wanta do, hey homes, it’s okay. I’m not one of these gaffers like Hobey —”

“
Yeah, yeah.” The guy was getting a weary look as he took a chip of rock out from a jar, broke it in half in his teeth, put one of the halves in a pipe…Shit. The pipe was a
pipe.
It was a motherfucking
briar
pipe. Lighting it with a Bic. Sucking at it.

Dwayne felt his scalp contract, his mouth go dry as he watched. Smelled the oily perfume and insecticide tang of the smoke. “You oughta get yourself a stem, man. What kind of fucking pipe is that?”

“
Only one they had left in the store. I’ll get a stem later. Here’s sixty. Don’t cruise on me, you’ll be fucking up a good thing.” The guy was involuntarily grinning as he said it.

“
Gimme a blast,” Dwayne said. The guy handed over the pipe and the Bic. Dwayne took a hit. The pipe worked shitty, but good enough for now, except it burnt his fingers having to hold the Bic upside down over the bowl. The blast feeling blossomed in him. It rushed through him and instantly he began to work on ways to get more. This guy, no telling how much money he had. Probably had a bank card. Maybe—