5.

We had a plan. Drive to Austin, Texas and pay a visit to Motherland Mark. We’d hit Barton Springs, cool off, slam a few Lone Stars, burn a few doobies and pretend that I was still young enough to be screwing around like this and not the 27 year old undergraduate I was. Then we’d head for the border, cross the Rio Bravo and buy our personal quotas of Mexican Valium. Maybe we’d get some tequila or a piñata but that would be about the summation of our visit to our southern neighbor. Then back to Austin for more good times. And a reunion with Crazy A. Sure, I had to admit it to myself. I was looking forward to seeing her again. It didn’t matter if she had a new man or a string of new men. I knew she’d give me a hug and a kiss and let me make it right with her one more time. Let me ease the sting of our three breakups in less than a year. Ease the sting of the dead puppy, the dead cats, the runaway tortoise, the abortion. We’d put away all those sad photo albums of the mind and instead we’d break out the Black Love incense and the Boone’s Farm and we’d go at it the way we used to when our love set the world on fire and everybody looked at us and said it couldn’t last. They were right. Nobody can stay on fire forever. Eventually you simply run out of fuel.

Little Chris was along for two reasons. He was my driver, and I intended to split the pills with him and he’d pay me back later. But he had his own agenda as well. He’d killed a crack dealer a few nights ago and found it convenient to leave town for awhile. He related this to me as Baton Rouge disappeared in the rearview and mother night enveloped the car. In the backseat my dog slept peacefully in a curl of tail and ears. Little Chris was behind the wheel, hunched up. The cigarette smoke contorted about him, his face lit up by the courtesy lights. He said that the crack dealer pulled a gun on him and got off the first shots but all were misses. Then Chris pulled out his own weapon.

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened?” said Little Chris with a mean laugh. “I shot him in the chest. He fell down and didn’t get back up.”

“Are you sure you killed him?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Little Chris. “I’m pretty sure I killed him. I put three bullets in him.”

“How come he missed and you didn’t”

“Because I don’t shoot like a nigger,” said Chris, and he demonstrated the crack dealer holding the gun, sideways and slack as if he killed ten men a day before breakfast. Maybe, but he missed that day.

Still, he had friends or a crew or someone who would be interested in putting a few bullet holes in Little Chris. The best plan then was to flee Baton Rouge altogether. There was nothing there for him anymore. His wife had fled the state and taken their child. At this rate his daughter would grow up never knowing Little Chris, never seeing his artistic side, the part of him that selected a dozen books from my shelf, plays, novels, military histories, he wanted to know everything, he’d wasted so much time, taken so many drugs, tasted his mind too many times. He’d had close call after close call and so far he’d survived them all. But it couldn’t go on and he knew it. This was the chance then to redeem himself, to sell a few downers and turn it into an upper. A chance to live someplace where nobody knew your mud fence past, where forgiveness was as easy as standing everybody to a round of Irish whiskey. Whatever he had, Little Chris was willing to share. Special coffee, his last cigarette, hell, even a bullet to the heart, Little Chris was willing to provide. All he asked in return was that you understand him, understand the special pains he felt in that stunted junky body. He was a man, but he was incomplete, inchoate, misunderstood. He was superfluous and he knew it. He wanted more and I had the power to make it so.