The Dope Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

making their minds fast. It couldn’t go on forever. Everyone was high. Everyone was stupid. Everyone had guns.

CHAPTER

THREE

    AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning Ray sat upright in bed, his heart racing. He wiped at his eyes and found them wet. He put a palm on his chest, tried by force of will to slow his breathing, fumbled for the TV remote. He clicked through the channels, found an old movie about a man and a woman, carnival sharpshooters who end up robbing banks in cowboy outfits. He didn’t recognize anyone in it, but it was good enough to keep him occupied. He liked how they were with each other, high in love the way you could sometime be, but he didn’t get the cowboy outfits. Of course they were doomed, that was the movies, but he couldn’t think of a lot of bank robber stories that ended up with they live happily ever after. Not a lot of any kind of stories. He wanted a drink but couldn’t see getting up to get it, and he knew it wouldn’t help him sleep or stop the nightmares. He wanted a cigarette, too, and thought how it was great you could tell yourself you were becoming a better person by staying in bed and doing nothing.
    He tried to remember the dream that woke him up. There was something about a house floating on a lake and somehow the house turned upside down. Someone he loved was in the house and he was screaming, or trying to scream. The place was familiar, like some place he knew or had seen, but not the same. That’s how it was in his dreams. The places were put together from bits and pieces of real life but reassembled in a crazy way that made him uneasy.
    He couldn’t think who would have been in the house. All he could bring back from the dream was that feeling of being helpless and desperate, but there was no one he’d feel that way about in his waking life. It made him jealous of his dream self, this other him with this other, richer life of strong connection and the kind of love that made you frantic.
    After the movie ended (they killed each other, but it was the only way out), another movie came on, something with Danny Kaye. He muted the sound and drifted off.
    He was standing up on the bleachers, after gym and Mr. Hughes blowing that fucking whistle to make them all deaf. Him and Pete Quirk and Pete’s little brother Davey, who everyone said was re tarded, but not to his face because he went six- two in ninth grade. They were high, drinking Mr. Pibb, which sucked but was the soda they had at the Indian’s store, the only place they could get to and then back before fourth period, and now they were standing up on the bleachers and watching the girls come out of the locker room in their black and white leotards. Pete said, what the fuck lame school has black and white colors, and Davey snorted his Mr. Pibb out of his nose, and they all laughed even more at that. Davey and Pete jumped off the bleachers and walked out, enjoying the loud, echoing bang of
their feet hitting the boards and the girls all watching them go, but
Ray slouched back on the bleachers and watched one of the girls pull herself up onto the balance beam into a handstand. She was small, dark, her eyes clear and focused, and she held herself straight, her back like the blade of a knife under the green lights of the gym. Ray moved down crablike over the bleachers until he was just a few feet away from the beam as the girl rolled over to stand upright, the muscles in her legs standing out, taut as wires, her hands frosted with chalk. Her body turned in flat circles, described fluent arcs that in Ray’s eyes, half- closed by dope, seemed smeared against the bright blue of the mats.
    She launched herself off the beam, and he held his breath when she came down, pulled into himself in a sympathetic motion when her feet hit the mat. She held her hands up over her head then but looked down at her own feet while her friends clapped and one of them, the tall red- haired girl he knew was Claudia, whistled and smiled and called out