Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 24

Buffalo: the previous March

A my Farber sat at the round oak table in her kitchen, removing vials of pills from their cartons. Her left hand was giving her more trouble than the right, the twisted knuckles looking like bird claws gripping a roost. It was a good thing she didn’t have to open any vials. These days, childproof caps were pretty much Amy-proof too.

She always listened to classical music when she worked in the kitchen. Tonight it was Vladimir Horowitz playing a remarkable sonata Scarlatti wrote after moving from Rome to Madrid in mid-career. Amy herself couldn’t play Scarlatti anymore: the rapid notes, hand crossings and leaps were beyond anything her stiff hands could manage. But Horowitz could- could he ever-evoking the vibrant sights and sounds of eighteenth-century Spain just as Scarlatti had experienced them when he arrived.

Above the music she could hear Barry and Rich Leckie laughing in the den at the front of the house. Barry had probably taken Rich outside for a toke while Amy was filling orders for him and Marty Oliver, this after Barry had promised no one would come until tomorrow.

Dear God, what had he gotten them into?

He had stumbled in the side door that afternoon after going to see Kevin, his hands shaking, bursting into tears as soon as the door closed behind him. She couldn’t get a word out of him no matter what she asked. He flopped on the couch in the living room without even taking off his boots, still in his dad’s old bomber jacket, crying until the sleeve was wet with tears and snot. She soothed, she patted, she murmured. When the crying finally stopped she handed him a box of tissues. He blew noisily into several sheets, then got up and washed his face in the sink. He went back out the door to the garage without saying a word. When he came back in ten minutes later, she could smell pot on his jacket and in his hair. He was carrying a cardboard carton. He handed it to her-surprisingly light for its size-and asked her to take it to the kitchen, the first words he had spoken since getting home.

There were seven cartons in all. Once they were piled in the kitchen, he took Amy’s hand and walked her to the table, where they each took a chair. He was still wearing his jacket. He told her that he had gone to Kevin’s and that Kevin had not been there. It looked like he had cleared out but these cartons had been left in his kitchen.

“I just took what I could fit in the car,” he said. “Things we need and maybe some of our friends would want.”

They opened the cartons. Each held hundreds of vials containing hundreds of pills. There were a few drugs she’d never heard of, for fighting various forms of cancer or the rejection of transplanted organs. But most were familiar medications to lower cholesterol, grow hair, raise erections, fight depression, soothe anxiety, induce sleep, induce wakefulness, regulate insulin, treat infections and- yes!! -reduce pain and inflammation due to arthritis.

“Why would Kevin leave all this sitting there?”

“Honey, he wasn’t there for me to ask.”

“Then why did you come in crying like a baby?”

“Ames, I didn’t-”

“Look at your sleeve, Barry. You were blowing snot bubbles.”

“I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m overtired.”

“Bullshit, Barry. You toked yourself into a stupor last night, like you always do, and fell asleep during the movie.”

“It had subtitles in five fucking languages, honey. The lead character was a violin, for Christ’s sake.”

“What happened at Kevin’s? Tell me or get rid of it. I mean it, Barry. I’ll trash every last pill, I swear.”

“Trust me, Amy. It’s better if I don’t.”

“Oh, my God. What did you do?”

“Don’t get paranoid.”

“Then tell me what happened instead of making me imagine the worst.”

He looked at her like a little boy lost in an airport. Tears welled in his eyes and his chin trembled. “It was the worst, Amy. The worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He pitched himself forward, folding his long body across the table, his face buried in his arms, and began to cry again. She came around the table and tried to soothe him. She could feel his tears running down her bare arm and her own heart beating against his back. After a while he pushed himself up into a sitting position and blew his nose again. She watched this man of hers, her husband, take in deep breaths and blow them out, his cheeks puffed up like a trumpeter. He shrugged out of the leather bomber and let it slide to the floor beside him. The overhead light brought out the cross-hatched lines in the pouches forming under his eyes. She could see the old man he would one day be, taking after his father in looks if not character.

Barry took another deep breath and told her everything that had happened from the time he arrived at Kevin’s to the time he entered their house in tears.

When he was done, Amy said, “Jesus, Barry, what if we get caught?”

“By who?”

“What do you mean who, the police! Who else would there be?”

“Whoever killed Kevin.”

“You didn’t think about that when you took the stuff?”

“I don’t know. At the time, I guess I figured it’s not exactly heroin. It’s not even pot. And you never had a problem doing that. Remember third year? We’d buy a lid of Acapulco Gold off Jackie Rispoli and parcel it into grams. Get what we needed free.”

“What I needed, maybe. There was never enough for you.”

“We can get rid of this stuff quickly and quietly, just among friends. And it’s not like I’m going to smoke the profits like I used to. I’m not going to run out to the garage for a hit of Lipitor.”

“You would if you had nothing else. And third year was different, Barr. We were kids, we had nothing to lose.”

“Do we have that much now?”

She couldn’t say they did.

“No one saw me,” Barry said. “I was in and out in a few minutes. It was pouring rain the whole time. Everyone was inside.”

“I want it out of here in two days tops.”

“Agreed.”

“And we don’t leave one trace of evidence it was ever here.”

“Except for massive piles of cash,” he grinned, throwing his arms around her.

“This is a one-time thing, Barry Aiken. Understand?”

“Of course it is, babe. Even if I wanted to do it again, I wouldn’t know where to get more.”Amy booted up the computer and looked up every drug in their possession on MedlinePlus. gov, noting what it was for and who among their circle might need it. Then she spent half an hour surfing websites of major pharmacy chains to find the average current retail price of each product, which ranged from five dollars a pill for the more familiar ones to more than thirty for cancer and anti-rejection drugs. They had more than a hundred thousand pills. Even if they sold them for a fraction of what they were worth, she could buy all the painkillers and anti-inflammatories she’d ever need. They could enroll in a VIP health plan with every benefit imaginable. They could travel somewhere warm, escape the Buffalo winters that made her joints ache and swell. She could free her mind from the worries that had shrouded her since Barry was laid off.

“Five bucks a pill minimum, fifteen for the expensive stuff,” Barry argued.

“Three dollars,” she said. “And the cancer and transplant drugs are free to anyone who needs them. I won’t make a penny off them.”

“But Ames-”

“The higher the prices, the longer it’ll take to unload, and the more people we’ll have coming through here. I want this kept to the New Fifty group and friends we can trust to keep their mouths shut.”

Barry agreed and went off to start making phone calls, starting with Marty Oliver.

“Why him?” Amy asked.

“He’s the closest thing I have to a lawyer.”

Listening to Rich and Barry giggling in the front room now, Amy wondered, not for the first time, whether Barry’s lifestyle was finally catching up with him. All the dope he had smoked, the acid and mushrooms he had tripped on. Was he finally coming unhinged? Taking a chance like this: was it a sign that his moorings were slipping, easing him out from shore into water whose colour warned of hidden depths?

Amy had fallen hard for Barry the first time she saw him on campus. He was studying fine arts; she was majoring in piano, unaware that her own immune system would one day turn on her so badly she’d barely be able to play Chopsticks, let alone Chopin. Barry had black hair straight down his back like a Native American in those days. He was lean; he could wear those skinny black stovepipe jeans without looking ridiculous, unlike Rich, whose pear-shaped body demanded something more forgiving even in his youth. Barry had enjoyed considerable acclaim as a student, winning a faculty award for works inspired by Frank Stella’s minimalism, discrete blocks of bold colours separated by thin lines Barry scraped across the canvas with his thumbnail. Then he’d gone post-modernist, influenced by Andy Warhol and his celebrity portraits, only Barry didn’t know any real celebrities, so his work lacked the connection between subject and style that Warhol exploited. Then it was on to Robert Rauschenberg’s emerging pop-art sensibility, Barry screening archival images onto canvas in jarring contexts, trying to confront society, as he then explained it, with society’s own face. And that was Barry, Amy eventually realized. Talented enough to soak up influences and talk the talk, but always riffing on someone else’s style rather than developing one of his own. He went only as far as his modest talent and even more modest work ethic could take him, and that had not been very far at all.

Amy, on the other hand, had made the most of her musical gifts, always working as hard as, if not harder than, other musicians she met in schools or competitions. It wasn’t until her last year that she could see other students pulling away from the pack and realized a concert career was not to be.

Neither Barry nor Amy wound up at the forefront of an artistic revolution, as they’d once hoped, Buffalo being several hundred miles northwest of said forefront in New York. But both found work that made good use of their skills, Barry in graphic design, Amy as a piano teacher and rehearsal accompanist for musical theatre, ballet and dance companies. They liked their jobs and lived well. They had great friends, most of whom they’d known since college. But what had it all amounted to, Amy sometimes wondered. What impression had they made on the world? They had never had children: supposedly a mutual decision but it was Barry who had never been ready, Barry who always ended the discussion, Barry who wouldn’t have unprotected sex with her unless the time was safe.

So unlike his father. Amy had adored Norman Aiken; she found in him a warmth and unconditional love she had never felt with her own parents. He loved classical music and was as knowledgeable about it as she was. He had a baby grand in the living room and often asked her to play-something Barry would never do unless it was old Beatles songs or faux-classical crap by pretentious old buggers like Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman. When Norman died and left them the house, Barry had wanted to sell it and bank the profits. Amy insisted otherwise. She was ready for a real life, a real house. Her arthritis was already evident and she wanted out of their semi on Franklin Street, with its thin walls and warped doors that let in the frigid air of winter. If they were going to live the rest of their lives together without children, she wanted a home that felt warm and safe and solid.

She heard more laughter from the den and then a swell of music, the opening chords of “Let It Be” ringing like a church bell.

“Barry?” she called. “All done.”

Footsteps clumped down the hall and Barry and Rich joined her in the kitchen. She handed Rich two plastic shopping bags. “This one is yours,” she said. “And this is for Marty. Twenty-four hundred all together.”

“A steal at twice the price!” Rich’s eyes looked bloodshot and his tongue was sticking to his mouth. Barry had obviously rolled the good stuff, the indoor weed he bought from a thin black guy named Crawford, who lived on Hampshire down by Grant.

Rich pulled a thick wad of bills out of his pocket and began thumbing hundreds and twenties into a pile. When he was done, Amy recounted it, despite the rolling of Barry’s eyes, and put it into a box of Tide she had emptied out.

They were going to need more boxes.

“Before you go, Richard, there’s something I must show you in the den,” Barry said.

Amy sighed. She knew what that meant: Let’s roll another joint. It was always time to roll another one. Goddamn Barry sometimes. Goddamn him and his appetites and impulsiveness. Goddamn the rut he’d gotten himself stuck in sometime between the Summer of Love and Woodstock. Guys his age still running out to smoke behind the garage, acting like eternal adolescents even as their bodies began to crumple and fail. The heroes of 9/11, the ones who brought down the plane in Pennsylvania: “ Let’s roll” had been their rallying cry. It was Barry’s too, the cry of a big gangly kid who once told her he smoked too much dope because he had never been breast-fed.

The doorbell rang. Amy didn’t hear Barry move to open it, even though he was at the front of the house.

“Barr?” she called. He didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t want to put off rolling his joint.

“Jesus,” Amy sighed, and left the kitchen. At the front door, she looked out the glass panel. A delivery man stood there holding an insulated vinyl pizza-warmer.

“Barry?” she called. “Did you order a pizza?”

No answer. The music in the den was louder now. Some shrill rock classic: Nazareth or AC/DC.

“Barry?”

Of course he had ordered a pizza. That’s what arrested adolescents do when they get the munchies after a toke behind Mother’s back.

She opened the door to a pleasant-looking young man with Cupid’s-bow lips and a face as round as the moon.