Chapter Text
Crossroads Devil
Sister Fiona dragged Marco by the ear from the Narcissus Fountain Room at Marshall Fields, from which she’d caught him stealing pennies. Jimmy, too slick for her, cringed behind a potted fern to the sounds of Marco’s well-earned reaming. That fountain money went charity, she told him between smarting whacks. And just where did he, with two loving parents and a roof over his head, get off stealing Christmas dinner from the mouths of orphans? Mr. and Mrs. Pasternak would hear about this.
At the candy counter, Jimmy shared his loot: Nine bright pennies, two silver dimes, and a new-clad quarter. They browsed the comic book stands, pockets bulging with Razzles, and Chuckles, and Zotz, until it was time to run home for dinner: Jimmy to his hero’s welcome for helping Sister Agnes with the first graders like a regular angel, Marco no doubt to an earful from his Ma.
Man, how do ya do it? Marco would marvel, shaking his head less in envy than in awe. He begrudged Jimmy nothing, never seemed too put out when he was the one left holding the bag for one of Jimmy’s flights of fancy. Naturally, with a single wish-penny to spare, Jimmy let him keep it.
Troubled by the plight of the orphans, however, he resolved to make it up to them, with interest. Fifty-four cents became an even seventy-five. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, he took three quarters from the till and come after school Monday next, they hurried back to Marshall Fields to deposit them into the fountain. Quarter wishes, they reasoned, were twenty-five times more potent than penny wishes.
As they sat on the white marble lip, Jimmy felt a wash of vertigo, as though overlooking the gunwale of a ship into the ocean, momentarily afraid that he might fall— or jump? —into the shallow chlorinated water and pass clear through to the other side. The old folks warned that you had better take care at such thresholds, lest something from the other side steal into you, or you into it. Like crossroads and graveyards and wishing fountains, places where the veil between this world and the faerie world was thin.
Pobody’s Nerfect
But surely, Kim could conjure up some happy childhood memories. Her dad would take her to a miniature golf course in Dodge City that featured a fiberglass statue of Wyatt Earp and served swirls of vanilla and orange frozen custard. For years, she thought the statue was of ‘General Custard,’ because of his similar handlebar moustache, and it tickled her to picture him attacking a cone with that broom overhanging his lips.
On their way out of Dodge, they would usually drop by Uncle Casey’s to find him squatted on the porch steps drinking MD 20/20. He would drive to the liquor store on a tractor because the police had impounded his pick-up. On long car rides, Kim loved listening to her dad talk shit about Casey and Kansas. He lived in Missouri on what, to hear him tell it, might as well have been the other side of the Berlin Wall. No matter how trashy your folks were, there was always someone even trashier to make you feel better about it.
This Mess is a Place
The magic is gone. Jimmy’s vague, mute reach dodders after it, as though it might turn up in the couch cushions, but the fact of the matter is that his last wish-penny is spent. SWAT ex machina was it. They have pulled their last fast one, cracked their last caper, beat their final buzzer as the many-turned favorites of fate.
Kim throws herself down on the mattress and covers her face like Goya’s sueño de la razón, menaced by phantasms, groped by Jean Cocteau arms, guarding the back of her neck against the flying monkeys that catch at her hair. Jimmy tries spooning her, to ambivalent effect. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t relax. She’s always been hard for him to get a bead on, which drives his fascination with her; Most people are easy for Jimmy to read.
When it’s time to change her bandages, she sits on the toilet lid while Jimmy frets over the sink, hissing at each increasingly saturated layer of gauze as though the pull of stuck fibers is causing him pain. Nerving himself, he washes the nub of her little finger as tenderly as he can. The cut was clean, but still they shaved the bone down a few millimeters so they could stretch the skin over it. For now, a row of blue nylon sutures puckers everything in place. She flinches only during the cleaning. So tended, she picks at her foil tray of chicken and fusilli from the lobby restaurant and gradually ebbs back into bed.
They’ll want for naught that can be got. Cristal and Cadillacs, a place in the islands. When they check out of here, they’ll run down to Costco and grab a ten pack of kitchen sinks. Those who say money can’t buy happiness are kidding themselves. They’re going to order it by the caseload; They’ll have it flown in from Fiji; They’ll sip it poolside in Mallorca. But it won’t bring the magic back.
The Definition of Insanity
Roger Shepard published his findings in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in December of 1964, and by ‘70 he was getting written up in High Fidelity, to which Chuck was an avid subscriber. A cognitive scientist who studied optical illusions, he had identified a novel auditory anomaly: By layering multiple sine waves an octave apart, it was possible to create a rising tone that seemed to rise indefinitely, while in reality repeating on a loop, like a sonic mobius strip. Chuck explained the Shepard tone, as it was called, over family dinner; It was fascinating, if unsettling, to consider how the human brain could be fooled. For years, Jimmy thought it was called the ‘shepherd’ tone, and was vexed by the image of sheep being led in sisyphean circles, wearing rings in the technicolor Sound of Music hills. The cruel illusion of progress.
Minced Oaths
The drug game’s occupational lexicon was replete with tasty tidbits to tickle one’s etymological fancy. Those glossaries published by the DEA were often laughably out of touch— was anyone actually calling heroin ‘Beyoncé?’ —but the real lingo could be just as kooky.
Gak /gæk/ n. was evidently onomatopoetic in nature, evocative as it was of the sound of a cat coughing up a hairball.
Gakking /ˈgæk ɪŋ/ v. was what happened when a meth user snorted too much in one rail and was forced to explosively clear their burning sinuses.
Tina /ˈti nə/ n. was reminiscent of cockney rhyming slang. Through a sort of guilt by alliteration, crystal meth became ‘Christina,’ which in turn was truncated to ‘Tina.’ This term was especially popular in the gay community.
Scante /ˈskɒn teɪ/ n. was supposedly derived from the Spanish verb ‘esconder,’ meaning ‘to hide.’ As in “La policía esta viniendo, esconde, esconde!” (“The cops are coming, hide it, hide it!”) The drug trade itself might also be dubbed ‘el escondite’ or ‘las escondidas,’ for the children’s game of hide-and-seek.
Crank /kræŋk/ n. was an old school biker term from the ‘60s. Back then, at least according to legend, the gangs would smuggle product across the country hidden in the casing that housed the crankshaft of their motorcycles.
Smurfs /ˈsmɜrf ɪŋ/ n., not to be confused with the blue Belgian comic book characters of the same name, were individuals who bought over-the-counter cold medicine on behalf of meth manufacturers in order to circumvent the legal cap on purchases of products containing pseudoephedrine. ‘Papa Smurf,’ the buyer, sent his invisible smurf army off into the wild to gather the ingredients he needed, like snickering imps copping a cup of sugar and a stick of butter from your larder in the middle of the night.
Ice /aɪs/ n. appeared self explanatory at first glance, but actually worked on two levels, referring both to the translucent, crystalline appearance of the product and its vasoconstricting stimulant effects, which, by obstructing blood flow to the extremities, could sometimes result in a freezing sensation.
Breakfast /ˈbrɛk fəst/ n. was a bit of gallows humor, the jaded junkie’s confession that a rail of crystal was the first thing they did when they got up in the morning.
Ya-ba (ยาบ้า) /ˈjæ bæ/ n. literally Thai for ‘crazy pills,’ was a combination of meth and caffeine sold in pill form. Popular across southeast asia, Ya-ba made its California debut around 2003 where it was marketed as a party drug. The little round tablets, which were often stamped with hearts, stars, or smiley faces, and came in a rainbow of pastel colors, could easily have been mistaken for Smarties.
Hot railing /hɒtˈreɪ lɪŋ/ v. was exactly what it sounded like. Vaporized meth was inhaled through a heated glass tube, producing a quicker and more potent high. Experienced tweakers swore by this method, though if practiced incorrectly, it could result in some nasty intranasal burns. (Of course, if the risk of ending up like the syphilitic cautionary tale in a Victorian dime novel were enough of a deterrent, then they wouldn’t have been snorting crystal meth in the first place.)
Philopon™ (ヒロポン) /ˈhɪər oʊ pɒn/ n. from the Greek ‘philóponos’ (φιλόπονος) meaning ‘lover of work,’ was the original Japanese trademark for crystal meth, still widely used in Japan as a catch-all term for hard drugs. First synthesized in 1919 by Japanese chemist Akira Ogata (1887-1978), the productivity-enhancing wonder drug was handed out like candy by both the Allied and Axis militaries during World War II. Nazi scientists believed that crystal meth could be used to create super-soldiers with little need for food or sleep; Instead, it created insomnia, malnutrition, tooth decay, open sores, heart attacks, strokes, paranoia, hallucinations, and psychosis. At then end of the war, the defeated Imperial Japanese Army dumped its supply of Philopon™ on the civilian market, which caused an epidemic of addiction in Japan in the 1950s. By the 1960s, the illicit meth trade had spread from Japan to the U.S. Pacific Island territory of Guam, and from Guam to the west coast of the United States.
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Jimmy once caught a Wall Street analyst on CNBC who made repeated appeals to the authority of some pop historian who claimed that widespread coffee consumption in the eighteenth century had caused the Age of Enlightenment. There was a similar facile airport book to be written about how crystal meth had caused the twentieth century’s Age of Derangement.
The One Who Knocks
Stationed at the window, stale pod coffee on the sill and feet up on the mini split air conditioner, Jimmy pages through his manuscript, waiting for Kim to rouse before ordering them breakfast. Make that brunch, he corrects himself, glancing at the clock.
He is circling the lacuna. Its presence— which is to say, its absence —is now undeniable. He can no longer kid himself that he’s getting around to it. He has been putting this chapter off until the end. And without it, he doesn’t have a book: Just two halves of a book that don’t meet in the middle.
“Did you talk to Elena?” Kim croaks from within her pillow fort.
The pages float from Jimmy’s hands as he perks up, riding the slope of his blanketed lap onto the carpet. “I got off the phone with her an hour ago.”
“And?” Her voice is clogged with dry leaves. She rolls his way, a single silver eye peeking owlishly out from her hollow.
“Hi.” Jimmy smiles.
Kim heaves up from the pile of bedding. The bruises on her arms have faded from contusive plum to a mottled pale green.
“She’s handling it,” he gentles. “I have the utmost faith in her.”
Still woozy from the Percocet, Kim jerks on her sweatpants and fixes herself a pod coffee, laboring to shake it off. Dragging a chair to the window, she declines his offer of breakfast in favor of granola from the minibar, which she consumes dry directly out of the single serving box.
“If they subpoena Madrigal Houston’s security cameras, we’re screwed,” says War Room Kim, suddenly in attendance despite her puffy eyes and bloodless lips.
Jimmy brushes her arm, careful of the bruises. “It’s okay. They record over the footage every ninety days, remember? And it’s…” he calculates, “December 30th?” Unless they lost a day or two in a fugue state. “We’re in the clear.”
Her brow crimps, surveying downtown Austin from the thirty-second floor as her tongue moves inscrutably behind her closed lips.
It goes without saying that they’re never sleeping in that apartment again. Last night, Jimmy lay awake beside her mentally packing them up and moving them into a penthouse in downtown Chicago. Now that he’s been caffeinated, he downgrades this to an apartment in Chicago they can actually afford, the fantasy beginning to take the shape of a plan.
A city mouse, he never should have gone to the desert but for her, his stark High Plains flower, pale lavender pillar of Prairie Blazing Star. Now, his bleary head dances with sugar plum dreams of whisking Kim away to the amber-windowed winter world of his childhood. As a Kansas City Royals fan, she’d be right at home in Cubs country, where any enemy of the St. Louis Cardinals was a friend. He can see them ice skating on Wrigley Field, or hand in hand, strolling the Magnificent Mile. Somehow, it’s 1977 there, and the Oriental Theater is still a hasheesh-dream movie palace, and a ham sandwich at the Marshall Fields lunch counter still costs seventy-five cents. And there’s still a Marshall Fields lunch counter.
But Kim’s mind is elsewhere. “We need to deal with Garett Wills.”
“What?” Jimmy snaps out of his reverie.
“Quayle’s assistant,” she is saying. “Cameras or no cameras, he can put us in Quayle’s office. It undermines the case against her. She’ll play the victim, again. She’ll say, I don’t know, that we planted it all on her hard drive.”
“Come on,” he minimizes. “How would the feds even know to question him? He’s not on their radar.”
“If and when his boss is arrested by the FBI in connection with us, don’t you think he might come forward?” she asks. “God, I can’t believe we just waltzed right into her office like that— What were we thinking? What was I thinking? It was my idea!”
“Was there a better way to do it?” He toes some rogue pages back into the pile between his feet. “I certainly couldn’t think of one.”
Kim slings low in her chair and knocks back the crumbs of her granola, a corner of the cardboard box serving as a spout. The moment stretches as this dry drink occupies her mouth.
“Jimmy, what if I fucked us?” she asks him.
He lowers his hands as though to physically depress her worry. “I gave De Soto the whole rundown, okay? She knows all about Gary. And like I said, she’s handling it.”
“I knew it.” Kim hucks her balled cereal box, missing the wastebasket. “We should have been gradually withdrawing the money. Transactions over ten grand are automatically flagged,” she says breathlessly, “but if we had taken out ten grand a month— we’d still need a cover story for it —but we’d have a hundred grand by now.”
“For what?” Jimmy stands with a grunt of effort, a stitch in his hamstring and a crack in his good humor. “So we can flee to Cambodia?” The Venn diagram of countries that lack extradition treaties with the United States and countries in which he’d like to try his hand as a fugitive probably doesn’t have a great deal of overlap.
“You are not going back inside,” she pronounces. “I forbid it.”
“You ‘forbid’ it?” he laughs.
Kim’s windowlit stillness brooks no argument. “She’s a great lawyer, Jimmy. But she’s not us.”
“Yeah? What does that mean?” Jimmy crosses his arms.
She looks at him sidelong. “You know what it means.”
His throat becomes host to a boulder. For four days, she’s barely spoken. Watching the REM twitches of her glazed eyelids, he had no inkling that what was going on behind them could be this.
“We need to prevent him from testifying against us,” she’s saying.
“Yeah, how? Break his legs? Kim, that’s not funny.” Jimmy turns to prepare a supernumerary third coffee just to give himself some distance. She can’t be saying what he thinks she’s saying. The tip of panic pierces his chest. “Hey, how many of those Percs have you had?” he jibes.
“I’m not joking,” she says flatly.
“Jesus, Kim!” He whirls on her. “You want me to ‘deal with’ a witness? You sound like fucking Walter White!”
The betrayal in his own voice prompts Jimmy to look down and realize he’s shaking.
Kim surges towards him as the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bed, her good arm enfolding him on his wobbly way down. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” She kisses his temple. The crook of her elbow girds the back of his head as she holds him tight, waiting for his rabbit’s pulse to steady.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she hushes. “I didn’t.”
“Well, how did you mean it?” he accuses.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m just scared.” Her bandaged hand hovers intangibly over his back. “I’m scared for you.”
They order a utilitarian breakfast of eggs and toast. Kim needs the calories to heal, and Jimmy needs something on his stomach for the shakes. They talk about the things they don’t talk about: They talk about the night Howard was killed, and Kim recalls the weight of the pistol Lalo placed in her hand.
“I was really gonna do it,” she confesses. “I walked up to the house, I knocked. I was holding the gun. And before Mike stopped me, I was gonna shoot whoever opened that door. I didn’t know who the guy was or why Lalo wanted him dead. But I was gonna do it. That night, I learned I would kill for you,” she says.