In the video that flashed in her head, a rogue wave hit a beach on some island she couldn’t pronounce and injured some people just trying to relax.
It was supposed to be funny. It looked terrifying.
Boolie’s thumb has a red indent.
His eyes were clear.
Still a little yellow from a lifetime of sucking on a glass stem and swimming in neon high octane wine, but improving.
Boolie’s thumb has a red indent.
He’s not talking crazy, not sweating, but…
Boolie had done more to improve his entire character in 78 days clean and sober than her own father had done in 12 years gin and a splash of tonic free.
“You hungry, Boo?”
Ginny asked the question with no real idea where she was going from it. If he was using again he wouldn’t be hungry.
Boolie laughed.
He scratched at his face when he laughed and all Ginny could see was that red indent.
“Nawww,” he said. “Maaan…”
Ginny locked on his eyes. His voice sounded like he was about to make an excuse. He was the Nobel Prize worthy excuse maker when he was using. But those eyes were clear. If he relapsed, he might have done one shot of booze, maybe, but that wouldn’t explain the red indent on his thumb. And that’s what terrified Ginny like a rogue wave on a beach.
“Bourson,” Ginny said, using his despised given name so he knew she was serious, “There’s an indent on your thumb.”
Boolie flipped his hand so he could see it.
He chuckled, more of a “wow” at a memory than a laugh.
Then he looked over his shoulder, in a way that made Ginny think he was guilty of…something.
She saw a beach umbrella collapse in her mind. She knew this was part of it, the worry…
Boolie turned back to Ginny.
He laughed again. This one had more joy behind it.
“You thought the mark was from a lighter, right?”
Ginny felt herself flush as she nodded.
Then she found some guts, some honesty guts, and said “It reminded me of the time you threw cat shit at me at that place on Stahelin.”
Boolie seemed to lose two inches of height.
“I threw…” it began as a question and stopped like a bug hitting a windshield. “I’m sorry I threw cat shit at you. Wanna talk about it? I don’t remember, but know you wouldn’t lie about that.”
“You used to smoke at that place on Stahelin.”
“I remember, but not the cat shit part.”
“Landrum told me he heard that narco was gonna raid it, so I went to get you. You wouldn’t come, of course. All the good torches…”
Ginny bit her lip and took a step back, sick at the idea of a torch heating a stem as being ‘good.’
“…you and whoever cashed all the good ones and were sifting through a bowl of disposables.Those indents on your thumb seemed to last for days. Anyway…you weren’t coming, weren’t listening, of course, and you picked up cat poop out of a litter box in a corner and threw it at me.”
“I’m sorry. Weird…I remember liking the cat there…”
“Well, the thumb indent spooked me.”
Boolie looked over his shoulder again, though the trailer court was abnormally quiet.
When he turned back his face was calm, present. Another smile rose, reminded Ginny a bit of a sunrise.”
“Bout two weeks ago me and Kotch patched a hole in Miss WaWa’s trailer where rats were getting in.” He pointed over his shoulder to the faded forest green single wide with the ancient satellite dish on top.
“Juanita Dedrick? You still call her Miss WaWa?”
Boolie shrugged.
“Yeah. It ain’t gonna last forever, but she hasn’t seen any rats and…”
“That poor old woman can’t see nothin’.”
Boolie smiled.
“She can’t cook, neither.” He bit his lip. “No, shit…I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. So she cooked steaks for me and Kotch. But Kotch is hardcore vegan. You ain’t gonna believe this…”
Ginny let her nostrils flair, raised her eyebrows.
Boolie knew what she was thinking; all the crazy shit he had told her over the years, crazy truths, crazy lies, outright hallucinations from not sleeping for 6 days straight.
“How’d she afford steaks?”
“Maybe not steak. Slabs of some kinda meat. And some motherfucker broke like two years ago she said, and stole…”
“Some crackhead?”
Boolie flinched, then nodded.
“Probably, though it wasn’t me, and the meth heads that come up from Fort Raker might be just as bad. Anyway, they stole her steak knives, her jewelry and her clock radio. I sat there and ate two of the toughest steaks I ever ate, smiling, cutting those bitches with a butter knife.”
Ginny reached slowly, gently, for Boolie’s right hand. The indentation was fading, but still visible. Thin, different from the indentation of a lighter.
“You really did that, Boo.”
It wasn’t a question.
He kissed Ginny on the ear lobe and resisted the urge to say “one steak at a time.”
Instead he said “Sorry about the cat shit.”
Ginny kissed Boolie on the vertical scar that ran from his nostril to his lip. Neither of them knew how that happened.
“There was way, way worse than cat shit.”
Boolie held Ginny’s pinkie finger and tried to get his clearing eyes to say “I’m sorry.”
***
He quit.
He's moving on and sorry for what he did.
And he's not going back.
Patching holes.
Good for Boolie!
I think you should start reading these out loud. Use the Substack App and just go for it. Nobody here writes junkies and losers as well as you. The deeper you look into your stories, the more humanity you see. You capture the characters and express their hurt and loss so eloquently. A pleasure reading you.