17.

I saw Big Chris one more time before I left Baton Rouge forever. He was perched atop a bar stool at the Bayou, sipping from an endless glass of scotch. From time to time the bartender added a cube of ice or a splash of Macallan but the rocks glass never left his hand. On the bar in front of him was a silver cross pen and a checkbook. There was something vaguely medical about Big Chris as if he were the world’s top surgeon who’d become engulfed by drink and so was often called upon for consultation but kept far away from the scalpels. He toasted me.

“I just paid my tab,” he said. “1,367 dollars. Can you believe that? Can you believe that shit?” He laughed and wiped a tear from his eye. He and Andy were shutting down the business. Andy had knocked up his girlfriend and they were moving to New Orleans to have the child.

“Stupid fuck,” said Big Chris. He had woman problems of his own. He’d fallen for a foreign woman who spoke in a foreign tongue. They’d stay up all night talking philosophy and smoking cigarettes. He was getting no sleep and no work done and had become somewhat addicted to Mexican valium. He’d been Little Chris’s best customer but wasn’t at all sorry to hear that he’d been killed.

“Fuck him,” he said. “The last time I bought from him he threatened me. He came over to my house and said he could ‘get me’ now if he wanted because he knew where I lived. That shit head. I wish I had killed him. I told you he was bad news.” Big Chris stubbed out his cigarette and took another sip of scotch. “I got the last laugh anyway,” he said. “I still owed him twenty bucks for the last bottle of pills. Ha. Can’t pay that debt, fo’ sho.”

In fact Big Chris had been all over Baton Rouge that day paying off everyone he owed money to. He wrote them all checks and they all bounced. When I heard that later I wasn’t surprised. I had done stunts like that myself, though thankfully with cash. It was the need to redeem ourselves. We wanted it like everyone else. We walked through the desert and sought communion through acid with the Acid Christ. It wasn’t enough to achieve salvation. It had to be a good time.

The semester was almost over when I got the news about Little Chris. The last time I saw him was Easter Monday. He had spent the night on the couch after our all-day drive from Texas. In the morning I boiled up some cowboy coffee while Chris looked over my books. He selected a short stack of everything but he wanted more than that; he wanted to move in with me, as had once been the plan. He had stuck me with this pad, a little too big and too far from work and school but I’d grown accustomed to the African rhythms of the neighborhood and the easy access to the levees. I had room for him and he promised he wouldn’t take up much space, I’d never know he was here and he could help me walk Pineapple.

I stood in the doorway, sipping hot coffee, thinking it over. An eerie wind began to blow through the shotgun double, whipping and swirling, shaking the boards. It felt like the ghost of a dead crack dealer and it promised to destroy Little Chris and me and my good dog. I stood there so long, paralyzed with fear that Little Chris said, “Say something man. You’re creeping me out.”

I looked at him and said, “I’m sorry brother. You can’t stay here.”

He gave me a look. ‘You too?’ That’s what that look was. Then he spat his coffee out in the sink and walked out the door, leaving the books behind.

I called his father one afternoon in early May. It was the only number I had for Chris that worked anymore. A woman answered and when I asked if Little Chris was there she said, “He’s dead.”

“What.”

“He’s dead,” she said. “Or almost.”

“Wait a minute, Chris Morgan is dead?”

“Or almost,” she said, sounding both bored and annoyed.

“Where is he?”

She told me the name of the hospital and when I asked her what he’d been admitted for she said, “Gunshot wounds,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I went to see him but he was so messed up they would only let me look at him through a pane of glass. He’d been found in his car shot to pieces and that consumptive body would only be able to hold on so long. As he slowly expired I thought of the chance I had to save him. I knew that as he lay there hooked up to the Great Twitch itself he forgave me. The only things going through his battered brain were thoughts of making it all up to his daughter. He’d get back the apartment, the cool car, the good coffee, dig up Disco, call upon all the old friends, reestablish his west coast acid connection. It would all come together, she’d see. Once he had owned that town.