Love & Theft - Excerpts
He was on Old Simmons Pass, it was morning, and the steep embankment was on Raymond’s left, the Hurley Flats on his right. The season was fall—baseball playoffs happening, and the corn high and dry. In fact, a crew was out on a combine harvester near Davenport Farm, a moving platform holding the workers under which the stalks passed and the blades turned. There were at least six men up there and probably a farmer in the tractor's cab, at his relative leisure. Raymond rolled on, past the silver silos, bunk houses, and tiny swingset for the children of the immigrant laborers. As the road curved, the morning sun winked at Raymond low and gold.
He put on WDST. Classic rock, folk, new age and everything in between, out of Woodstock. He was almost at Route 28 when a trooper’s lights came up behind him. He slowed, and thank God the copper whizzed past him in the left lane. Raymond lowered the radio volume, shook it off and kept going, east towards Midtown Kingston, where he pulled into Impressions Auto Detailing and parked around back. He went in using the open garage bay and entered through the dim, dingy attached office.
Edgar was in the shop, at the bench.
“I told you, man, give me some notice,” Raymond said.
“Can’t help it. I get short notice, you get short notice.”
Raymond worked a lathing machine at Excelsior Wood Products but took sick time, or emergency time, when delivery jobs come up. Edgar paid well because what was labeled as auto parts wasn’t auto parts, and there were county task forces now established to target the substances they were moving. The sawmill work wasn’t full-time, and anyway, and the delivery money was too good to pass up. Edgar was a mean old hard-ass; he put his drivers’ names on the shipping registers. Those were the terms—and a promise that he’d deny everything if it came to that.
“Where’s this going?”
“The speedway.” Edgar nodded at the package atop the desk.
Ray picked up. It was printed with a logo from an aftermarket autoparts company. It was hefty and drum tight. “Air filters are made of paper. This must be nine pounds.”He leered expectantly at Edgar.
Edgar peered over his glasses saying, “Must be a bunch of ‘em in there.”
Ray let out a big sigh, then a groan like he was riding on a thrombosed hemorrhoid.
“I got other guys, Ray. We been over this. But you said you wanted the work.”
Ray took the package, and crossed the shop floor to the window. He couldn’t even see what was outside, the plexiglas was so scratched and dusty.
“Packing slip’s on there.”
Ray put his hands on his car keys in his jacket pocket, clenched them to keep them from jingling. A jingle was too jolly at the moment.
“What’s it gonna be? I got a airbag to tamper with.” Edgar laughing sounded like a broken bellows.
Ray turned around. “Yeah, I’m going.”
“Okay, then.”
Grabbing a clipboard and pen and dropping out off his stool, Edger lumbered around the desk like one of those punching bag inflatables with the disc of sand in the bottom. A kid’s toy. Wobble, wobble.
“You fucking Weebalo.”
“Mileage check. This ain’t new.”
They went out through the bay, passing under the empty lift. In Ray’s car, Edgar wrote down the odometer reading.
“The level of trust is just impressive,” Ray groaned, standing back, turning away from the view of the man’s exposed hairy ass crack.
“It’s just in the name of fairness, that’s all, Ray.” He wrote the number on the sheet. “Should be 38 there and back.” Edgar grunted noisily when getting back on his feet.
Ray scribbled his name.
With the package secured discreetly in the spare tire well, Raymond shut the trunk only to find Edgar was out of sight. He started his 15-year-old Nissan Altima, and eased onto Broadway.
He was not even out of town when suddenly there was another trooper in his rearview. A new sedan, dark blue against the night, silver spotlights mounted on each side. Used to be troopers drove Chrysler LeBarons or something boxy and utilitarian. Now it was Dodge Chargers, muscular beasts hulking, ready to pounce like a cougar. The law had transformed from servility to animal aggression. Raymond drove cautiously, seeing the officer’s hat brim in his rear mirror, steady and shadowing.
At the traffic circle he figured the trooper was getting on the Thruway. Ray quickly decided to fuck Edgar’s mileage count, and loop it. He entered the traffic circle, yielding cautiously, keeping relaxed, hugging the inside lane, watching the trooper behind him.
He got lucky, and a contractor’s truck, blew into the roundabout from Washington Avenue so loaded down with lumber the rear axle was sparking. The trooper was on it in a flash, tailing him to the interstate ramp, lighting up the red, white and blue lights just before the tool booths.
Raymond exhaled like a blow torch. Cracked his neck. Deep breaths and shoulder shakes settled his nerves, and he swung onto 209 South toward the Speedway.
¤
He was in Marbletown when he started whistling. That’s what he did when he drove—these jobs and in general. Whistling or singing kept Raymond’s mind where he could tolerate it—not thinking about Charlotte, or Houston or Milwaukee or Chicago or Baltimore…
He always drove alone, and there’d been a lot of runs lately. Sometimes it felt like driving was just about all he did. Countless hours over Catskills country highways, dodging deer and storm-downed tree limbs. Clouds hung over the road, bucks leapt out of the fog, and so on. He knew the roads and he felt the roads knew him. A big swath of his country regarded him as a gorilla, but he still had the rolling mountain roads of his adopted home (Raymond was from Philly). And he would always have song.
He made steady time to the Speedway, and when the stadium cannisters illuminated the low-hanging cloud cover, making it glow silver, Ray was whistling Prince’s “Kiss.” He tried singing but it was too damn high.
He’d been to the Speedway before, and carried the box to the gray concrete garage at the edge of the woods. He was glad to be rid of it. Any time a package was out of his hands, out of his trunk, Raymond’s shoulders loosened. Especially when he saw the royal blue and mustard colors of an Ulster trooper, or the white and brown of a Duchess County cop.
Now he would go back home to Kingston, to his apartment on the curve by the high school and the newspaper office.
All the way home he just sighed with relief. Is wasn’t that there were always scares, but there had been some. Was it an intake valve or a brick of meth—you didn’t always know. Or sheets of acid? Molly? Did it have fentanyl in it that would kill someone? Raymond had a cousin who had looked boney and bug-eyed as hell last time Ray ran into him. Strange stuff was everywhere, and he wanted nothing to do with it but the hundred and fifty bucks.
Troopers have dogs, and they will use them on brothers.
The general mood of paranoia didn’t help, caused by times being lean for everyone. Every day being a brother in this decadde was hell, much like other decades. On Facebook people were saying the whole year could do use a redo. Amen to that. It seemed that at any time a piece could slip out of the puzzle, and Raymond’s life would be on the floor in a disconnected heap, just like was happening with the whole fucking country.
Raymond stepped on it a bit to get home. Lucas Turnpike, heavily wooden on either side, a succession of roller coaster hills, long climbing bends, and nothing but woods. The throttle hissed, he checked his hair in the mirror, even though it was too short to go awry in any way—millimeters long, like his heroes Sugar Ray Leonard, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier. It was a pretense, this hair-check. Pat, pat. The hair never moved. The real check was of his general countenance, the light in his eyes. Was it out yet? No, and his real face was there, the one he knew as a boy, when his mother told him he was handsome and good. He let out a deep sigh and turned up the radio.
“Raymond Ramirez Townes, ladies and gentlemen,” he seemed to hear a voice say and the crowd’s cheer came alive. In reality, it was Ike and Tina live, doing “Proud Mary.”