Born Slippy Read online

  He had with him a woman he had met in a truck stop in Oklahoma. Matty was from Brooklyn, a dark-haired homegirl, knowing and tough. She had been traveling by bus — on the Green Tortoise — when all the luggage had spewed onto the roadside as they took a corner in the middle of some godforsaken scrub around Odessa, Texas, and nobody realized it for hours, not until they stopped for the night at the truck stop, an hour out of Tulsa. The driver, probably as stoned as all the passengers, had forgotten to latch the luggage doors, maybe even forgotten to close them, and Matty described the scene as they all stood around, looking at the near empty, dust-encrusted luggage area, dumbfounded. There was some talk about calling the state police to see if any of it had been recovered, but since three-quarters of the people had stashes of drugs in their bags — it was a hippie bus line, after all — they were afraid to claim them. They took a vote and decided nobody was going to call. The bus drove to a Wal-Mart and everyone bought a new toothbrush and some underwear.

  Dmitry met them as the bus was gassing up the next morning. Given that the Green Tortoise vibe had terminally soured, Matty was happy to abandon it for Dmitry’s yacht, and Dmitry was happy to take her aboard, along with her new friends Mary and Sally. Matty was noticeably Italian, with that New York borough accent only Italians have, a photographer, and a good ten years older than Dmitry. Despite being with him, she was a surprisingly mature person. She had dark, cynical eyes, a tiny Betty Boop mouth, wore her jeans low and her shirts cropped, a jewel in her bellybutton, and had an East Coast, lower-middle-class woman’s way of looking at you, a way that said I know what you want better than you do yourself. Hard to say why exactly she was hanging out with this big lug of callow youth, but she was.

  And truth be told, Frank did have a very good idea. Maybe the same reason Margie gave him a roll — although he still couldn’t, for the life of him, pretend to understand Margie.

  How to say it? In Connecticut back then you still saw, fairly often, those guys with the slicked-back, slightly balding hair and disco-era gold chains, Mafioso-style matching sweats, driving a Corvette or other flashy sports car. Whenever one went by, Dmitry would say, in mock astonishment, “Wow, Franky, that man must have an ENORMOUS penis.” This was funny, it always seemed to Frank, because the Italian horn phallic symbols, the fuzzy dice big-ball symbols, the gold-necklaced, open-shirted hairy chests, and the car itself: all advertising the drivers as superstuds, as if the response they wanted to elicit was precisely Dmitry’s faux-impressed line. At the same time, as everyone guessed, they were probably overcompensating. Ergo, funny. And whenever Dmitry found something that made Frank laugh he would repeat it over and over again, each time the proper prompt presented itself, until it no longer got him going. This one he heard a couple times a week.

  It was also funny, in part, because Dmitry himself had an enormous, a really enormous penis. They did, after all, bathe in the same clammy pond every evening, like soldiers in the Punic Wars, and they tended to talk as they bathed, Dmitry’s thing hanging in front of Frank every evening like one of those big tubes of baloney in the deli case, yes, baloney — huge enough that you really couldn’t help looking — and Frank wasn’t very homo-inclined, really, any more than an average person as far as he could tell, it was just that nobody could help but notice. There are other reasons his excessive endowment made an impression on Frank, not least of which was that Tracy had made, in the course of their nastiness, some disparaging remarks about his own equipment, and so — anyway, Dmitry had a big dick, and thus could make big dick jokes without sounding like he was overcompensating.

  All of this, in other words, might explain why, Frank thought, the photographer girlfriend was interested. Dmitry’s interest had a more obvious cause: she was interesting. She was quite a good photographer, it turned out: he saw some pictures she took of his step-kids, or ex-step-kids, or whatever they were, when she and Dmitry went up to Massachusetts, and they were the best he’d ever seen: black-and-white, maybe a little arty, but she got the kids to look into the camera like they really expected to find something remarkable in there. Dmitry was fond of her, and she of him, and it displayed a side of him Frank had never seen — as if he was actually willing and able to think, however briefly, however fleetingly, about someone else’s comfort and well-being.

  They spent an evening together, the three of them, before Dmitry and Matty went up north, lolling about in the shell of the house as it was starting to get some interior trim — the French Canadian sheetrock crew having blown through in three days, Frank amazed at how fast they were. And so it was an odd little party, as if they were in the ruins of a mansion with all the furniture gone, like the scene in Rebel Without a Cause, a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling of the gargantuan living room. Matty had some pot and they smoked that, and she and Frank drank too many beers, listening to Dmitry tell stories of the multitude of hitchhikers he picked up. He had made them all — except Matty — pay something for the ride, enough, he claimed, to cover all his gas and make a tidy profit. The stories were funny, since predictably the cast was a freak show — one long-haired, bearded guy who ate nothing but raw onions and kept saying, over and over, powder-blue suit, sirocco; a young shaved-headed guy who had enlisted in the army while he was outrageously high, thinking it would sober him up, and when he sobered up ran in horror and was still AWOL; a guy who claimed he was a shamus, and when Dmitry asked what a shamus was, said it was a grifter with a license.

  After telling stories about a few of these characters, Dmitry abruptly stopped. Frank realized he hadn’t been drinking any beer.

  “Alrighty, boys and girls,” he said. “Time for bed.”

  He stood up, gave Matty what looked like a remarkably domestic kiss goodnight until Frank realized his hand was cupped between her legs. Dmitry winked at him over her shoulder, and then lumbered off to the motorhome.

  Matty pulled out a little tinfoil spoon of coke.

  “Dmitry doesn’t like this,” she said. “But maybe you do?”

  “Yes I do!” Frank said, already woozy enough to agree to anything, wondering, the fuck am I doing?

  “I always say,” she said, pulling out a compact mirror and pouring out enough for a fleet of buffalo. “Variety: spice o’ life.”

  There is always something buzzingly intimate about snorting coke with someone — since you’ve stepped together into illicit territory, you know that you’ll both immediately start blabbering without your normal filters in place, and you also know full well that the speedy spits and crackles of coked energy morph with the slightest provocation into sex.

  The provocation in this case started with the otherwise inexplicable variety — spice of life comment and continued with a quick series of glances and smiles. It wasn’t long before they were fucking on the dining room floor.

  She was fun and crazily orgasmic and they kept going at it until some noise outside the window, a crunch in the gravel, made them remember Dmitry. They stopped still, glanced at each other, and she just smiled, shuddering yet again, and in that sex- and coke-addled way, Frank said to himself, OK, I guess it’s OK, I mean, if she’s cool with it, I mean she’s more than cool with it, I mean it’s OK, right? talking to himself at cokehead speed as if his relationship with Dmitry meant nothing. She actually seemed to get turned on by the danger, by the idea that Dmitry would see them, and had a series of rolling orgasms that only the anesthetizing effect of the cocaine allowed him to get through without coming himself. Finally it was too much, he exploded, twitching like a freak, and she hopped up, walked off without looking back, and joined Dmitry in the rusty yacht.

  Frank didn’t sleep. He sat around looking out the windows of the place as the sun rose, cycling through what this little adulterous moment meant — did it even matter? Was she really even Dmitry’s girlfriend? Didn’t he kind of encourage it? If not, was Frank the biggest shit in the world? He smoked a sickening number of cigarettes and drank three or four more teeth-grinding beers.

  “Well, w
ell,” Dmitry said, waking him as he came into the house. It was late morning, judging from the sun glaring outside: Frank had apparently dozed off on the kitchen floor. “It is time, Franky, to get even.”

  “Say what?” Frank said, coming to. He had a small coughing fit, choked by the nasty, acrid, coke-laced mucous half congealed down the back of his throat. He stood up, splashed his face, and started the coffee, all of which helped him not look at Dmitry, who, when he did, was smiling, happy the way he always was when things were on the verge of chaos. He handed Frank a wad of bills.

  “Here’s your half of the profit, as promised.” It was at least a thousand dollars.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I sometimes had five or six hitchhikers at a time, Franky. It adds up. And I said we would split everything I got fifty-fifty. Hello, gorgeous,” he added, grinning broadly as Matty walked in.

  “Franky, you’re a bad, bad man,” she said, rubbing her head.

  Christ.

  “Yes, Franky, what did you do to my girlfriend last night? The first thing she said this morning was: It feels like someone took a crap in my mouth. Excellent, superb for my catalogue of Americanisms, but otherwise not really nice, and it can’t possibly reflect that well on you.” One effect of his constant smirking smile was that it always seemed like he knew all your secrets. Maybe he did.

  “I’m never doing coke again,” Matty said, faux-melodramatically. “Thank god! Coffee!”

  She walked past us to the pot.

  “She’s a complete whore, Franky,” Dmitry said, grinning at him.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Gallant, Franky. But if I tell her to suck your cock right now, she will. Would you like me to tell her to?”

  Did he know about last night? Is that why he was taunting Frank with such bullshit and that infuriating smile?

  “Stop it, Dmitry,” she said. “Don’t be an asshole, it’s too early.”

  “But Matty,” Dmitry said. “I can tell Franky doesn’t believe me. Isn’t it true you once had five cocks in one day?”

  She walked right past him with her coffee. “Dimwit,” she said quietly as she headed back to the motorhome. “Dimwitted fucking Dim-mitry.”

  “I see she’s not in the mood to play. This is why drugs are bad for you, Franky. They may enable sex at first, but then they disable you. Even alcohol. One goes to the bar, drinks enough to fuck anything, and then the next morning one is too hungover to fuck. Best to go ahead and fuck without the booze, and remain ready to greet the new day and all it has to offer. That’s why all I do is a little marijuana now and then.” It sounded like mariwanner. “But to each his own, etcetera, etcetera. Speaking of drugs, do you think that your Marlboro Lights are significantly ‘lighter’ than my Marlboro Reds, Franky? I’m not sure how smoke can have less smoke in it, but perhaps I should switch if there is a serious health benefit. Have you looked into it or is it just a Pavlovian response to marketing? What do you think?”

  The two of them left for Massachusetts an hour or so later. Frank told him not to sell the motorhome, that he’d rather keep it and live in it.

  “Of course you would, Franky, although it might complicate our negotiations, since it is my belief and the belief of the venerable Kelly Blue Book that the beast is worth more than I paid. I’d prefer to get what I can for it on the open market and send you a check.”

  “Yes, but you won’t have to go through the hassle of selling it, and who knows how long it would take?”

  “All right, then, Franky,” he said, and he seemed all of a sudden tired, like he couldn’t be bothered to negotiate, couldn’t even be bothered to explain. “We’ll see.”

  Matty didn’t come out again. And then they were gone.

  A day or two later Frank was adding a little exterior trim to the first-floor windows, and setting up his ladder under the dining room bay he saw a small pile of cigarette butts in the mud. It had rained the night before, so it was hard to tell when they were from, but he picked up one to check and it was, indeed, a Marlboro Red. He played back the tape of the cocaine night in his head. It had a few blank stretches in it, and it was surprisingly difficult to make the translation from being inside the experience, the sense memory of it, to watching it from outside. It was also difficult to move from his intellectual agreement with Freud about universal perversity to an understanding of his own bit part in this debauched drama. But eventually he had to admit: Dmitry had been watching them. He had a nagging sense he should have an opinion about it.

  A week or so later, Tracy called him.

  “There’s been an accident,” she said.

  “An accident.”

  “Nobody’s hurt,” she said.

  He drove up there immediately and saw the wreckage. Dmitry’s motorhome had flown off their hill — Tracy and the kids lived on top of the steepest road Frank had ever driven, named Frizzell Hill Road after some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century guy named Frizzell — and crashed through the roof of the Bartons’ house at the bottom. If you saw a picture you’d swear it was photoshopped, the back wheels up in the air like the thing had been dropped from a plane, windshield first, straight into their living room. A surreal horror.

  The town’s one and only cop and thus Police Chief, Horace Snowes, was sitting on the hood of his beater F-150 having the time of his life, the detachable cherry flashing its red light from his roof. Snowes was, in Frank’s estimation and just about everyone else’s, an annoying nincompoop who wore a pearl-handled revolver in a holster while on duty. Being on duty meant nothing more than wearing the pistol and hassling his neighbor’s teenagers whenever he felt like it. The town paid him $100 a month so he could pretend it was a real job. This flying RV fiasco made him happy as a kid at his own birthday party. Something had actually happened. It was his first chance ever to unroll a bunch of crime scene tape. An insurance adjustor was inside the tape taking measurements and notes.

  Snowes saw Frank and came over, one hand on his gun like the dork that he was.

  “I’m going to want to ask you a few questions about all this here,” he said.

  “I don’t know anything about it, Horace,” Frank said. “I just got here.”

  Snowes started to say something else but Frank pretended he didn’t hear him and headed up the hill, which he knew from past experience was the only way to deal with the guy. He was glad Tracy had told him nobody got hurt, because it sure looked like people were dead. Dead in the motorhome for sure, and anyone in the living room dead, too. The thing had rolled down the hill in the middle of the night, Tracy told him on the phone, with no one in it, and no one in the living room either.

  He went up the hill to her house, their old house, although self-protectively he rarely thought of it that way. The kids were at school, he assumed, and as he got to the door, he could see Trog, Dmitry, and Tracy sitting around the table he had built, in the kitchen he had built, having coffee. People always seemed to have plenty of time up in the hills to sit around and drink coffee.

  He knocked on the door and Trog looked up and shrugged, as if to ask why he wasn’t coming in. Well it wasn’t his house anymore, was it?

  Trog got up finally and opened the door.

  “How the hell-?” Frank said, unable to even finish the sentence.

  “Oh, don’t say hello!” Tracy said. “You want a coffee?” She tried to sound unperturbed, but he could tell she was as shaken by the murderous destruction below as he was. She was already pouring the coffee and was putting in the milk and sugar that she knew he took when it dawned on him. She was fucking Dmitry. Why else was the thing parked there, and him not in it, in the middle of the night?

  Oh, well, not his business.

  Plus, he couldn’t blame Dmitry. Tracy still looked good. Better than Margie, that’s for sure. Black hair. Really black. Oddly white skin. Her grandparents were from Estonia.

  “Lulu? Kennedy?” he asked, not trusting himself with full sentences.

  “They’re at Tom and Tr
ish’s with Mayela,” she said. Mayela was their best friend. More than anything, he wanted Tracy to say she’d call them, or say not to worry, he’d see them later, or — well, anything. She didn’t look at him.

  “What happened?” he asked Dmitry, quietly.

  “It was parked on the street,” Trog said. “We don’t know if some kids pushed it down or somehow it wasn’t in park and it just rolled.”

  “Yeah,” Dmitry said. To his credit the smirk was missing and the monologue turned off.

  “It wasn’t locked?” Frank asked.

  “Franky!” Tracy said. He remembered she sometimes replaced argument with inflection.

  “You know nobody locks anything here,” Trog translated.

  “It must have literally flown off the side of the road,” Frank said, more to himself than anyone else.

  “Yeah,” said Dmitry, quietly.

  “It’s a hell of a grade,” Trog said, and it was. This baroque little corner of Massachusetts — the high hills west of the Connecticut River — with its fishnet of cobbled stone walls, its lush hardwoods and hemlock, the houses extended, addition by unmatching addition over hundreds of years, and every fifteen miles the requisite white church, still had a number of gravel paths like Frizzell Hill Road, unimproved for a century or more, steep as a roller coaster. Many a brutal winter day trying to get home, taking a run up that hill spraying snow from his back tires, sliding back down sideways, and trying it another half-dozen times, Frank had had to give up, leave his truck in front of the Bartons’ house, and slip-trudge up the exhausting hill home. It was, indeed, a hell of a grade. A stretch of the Bartons’ roof could be seen from the bottom of his driveway during the winter, and although once the spring came it was hidden by green, it was almost straight below you as you hit the top of the hill.