Carved in Bone

bring on the mother of all vertigo attacks. Staggering back against the metal wall, I grabbed for the closest support I could find: the rim of the trash barrel, half-filled with dead roosters. Bracing myself on my forearms, I leaned down, my face inches above the barrel’s rim. Just as I felt myself spinning down into darkness, I began to vomit. Half-conscious, I kept on vomiting long after my stomach was empty, long past the point where the violent heaves produced only trickles of tears from my eyes and commingled strings of bile and snot and tobacco juice from my nose and mouth. “Just blend in,” I reminded myself absurdly, and with that parting thought, I felt my brain fade to black as my body tipped forward, headfirst, toward the mound of lifeless roosters.

CHAPTER 19
    I FOUND MYSELF RIDING IN Waylon’s truck. I had been vaguely aware of the big man carrying me through the cockfight shed, parting the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea. Cap-topped faces, gap-toothed and disgusted, had loomed into my field of view, then swiftly disappeared into a fog of nausea and semiconsciousness. Some indeterminate time later, I felt the rumble of pavement beneath wheels. Occasionally I would rouse myself enough to retch; at those moments, a plastic dog bowl materialized beneath my chin, attached to a mammoth paw that I realized must be Waylon’s hand. “Sorry,” I would murmur. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” Then I would slump back into oblivion in my posh captain’s chair.
    Eventually the fog began to lift. I sat up, looked out the window, and saw that we were now parked at the Pilot station at the interstate exit, right beside my truck. For the first time in what must have been hours, I felt hopeful about the prospects for a return to civilization and good health. Moving slowly and carefully, I opened the door to clamber out of the cab, then turned to ask a question that had been gnawing at me ever since my head started spinning back at the cockfight. “What’s in that stuff, Waylon? I thought Copenhagen was just tobacco, but something in there hit me like a freight train.”
    Waylon held up a finger to pause the conversation, then got out of the truck and came around to my side. Reaching up with his tree-trunk arms, he lifted me down like a child, and began walking me around the parking lot. “Dip is just tobacco, Doc, but they pump up the nicotine somehow; I don’t know how. You don’t hear much about it, but nicotine packs a pretty good wallop, you get enough of it. A lipful of dip is worth ten unfiltered Camels. It’ll knock you on your ass if you ain’t used to it. Hell, I knowed that; I shoulda thought about it before waving that tin under your nose.”
    I shook my head. “I’m a big boy, Waylon. Didn’t have to take it.” The walking was helping, but I still felt woozy. “When I was a kid, my granddaddy used to smoke a pipe. Prince Albert. Never liked cigarette smoke, but I loved the smell of Granddaddy’s pipe. Whenever he came to visit, I would beg for a puff on his pipe. He’d always say, ‘No, it’ll make you sick,’ but I’d plead and whine and wear him down. Sure enough, I’d get sick every time. But nothing like this, man. I’m amazed this stuff is legal.”
    “Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. People get hooked on it, they’ll get ahold of it anyhow. Just like moonshine or weed or chicken fights. Scary thing is, I see kids ten or twelve year old already doing a can a day. Gonna be losing their lips and tongues time they’s forty.” He scratched his chin. “I got me a late start, and I’m what you might call moderate. Figure my mouth won’t fall off till about sixty-five.”
    The image almost pushed me over the edge again. I concentrated hard on another question that had been nagging at me. “Waylon, that first day you took me up to meet Jim—how come Leon Williams, the sheriff’s deputy, helped you shanghai me?”
    Waylon rubbed his chin, and I heard a sound like coarse sandpaper rubbing on rocks. “You want the short answer or the long ’un?”
    “Give me the long ’un, if you don’t care to.”
    “First I’ll give you the short ’un: bullshit walks, money talks. Deputy sheriffs in Cooke County don’t make too much. Leon’s probably pulling down about twenty thou a year, which ain’t what it used to be. So he’s open to a little extry income, if the deal ain’t gonna get him thowed in jail hisself.”
    “So how much extra income did he get for handing me over