Wicked Prey

smoke; I can make a better pipe in eleven minutes, yo.”
    Whitcomb said, “Make a pipe?”
    * * *
     
    RANCH HAD skills: there were a few ancient tools under the sink, left behind by a previous tenant. Included in the greasy, cobwebbed old green canvas bag was a pair of side-cutters and a rusty file. Ranch unscrewed a forty-watt GE Crystal Clear bulb from a sconce at the bottom of the stairs, and said, “A perfect bulb. Don’t even have to wash the motherfucking white shit out.”
    “What white shit?” Whitcomb asked.
    “Some bulbs got this white shit in them,” Whitcomb said. “Tastes terrible.”
    They gathered at the kitchen table, and Ranch used the side-cutters to cut off the contact at the bottom of the bulb, and then carefully crack out the ceramic insulator that had held the contact in place. With the insulator gone, he broke the glass rod that held the light filament in place, and pulled the broken pieces of glass out of the bottom of the bulb by the wires that led to the filament. All that, he brushed onto the floor.
    “This is the hard part,” he said. “This is where you can fuck up if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
    Using the edge of the file, he scratched a line across the glass of the bulb, then went back into the scratch and drew the file across it again, and again, slowly, carefully. In two minutes, he’d opened a narrow hole to the inside.
    “Really careful now, so’s we don’t break the glass . . .” He was breathing his words, holding the bulb, working the file with some delicacy. In another two minutes, he had a hole an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. “That’s where you load the shit,” he said. And, “I need some tape.”
    They didn’t have any tape, but Briar remembered that one of the seats in the van had a piece of duct tape on it, patching a rip, and she went out and peeled it off and brought it back inside, and Ranch pronounced it perfect. Using pliers, he made five small cuts in the aluminum screw-in base on the bulb, pushed the ragged tabs across the width of the bulb until they formed a small hole, and pushed a McDonald’s straw into the hole and taped it in place.
    “There you go,” he said, holding up the bulb. “Best pipe in the world. You’ll see.”
    Whitcomb took it, his hand shaking, looked at it, and said, “That’s the greatest fuckin’ thing I ever saw.”
    Even Briar was proud of Ranch.
    Then George came.
    George had the crank in little Ziploc baggies, and they bought three. Whitcomb, eyes narrowed, cracked one of the baggies, said, “Pretty fuckin’ yellow.”
    “It’s right out of the coffeepot,” George said. He was a short fat man with short black curly hair, most of it sticking out of the neckline of a Vikings T-shirt; and he wore cargo shorts and Nike shoes. “Just come out that way, but I got no dissatisfied customers. It’s good shit.”
    Whitcomb dampened a finger with his tongue, stuck the finger in the bag, picked up a schmear of the crank, tasted it and winced: the taste was bitter, cutting, perfect. No sugar, no salt, no baking soda.
    “Okay.” He passed over the money; George looked at each bill, then tucked it in his side pocket. “Call me.”
    “How’s business?” Ranch asked, his eyes on the baggies in Whitcomb’s hands.
    “Shit. Republicans don’t want nothing from me,” George said. “They go for the high-end stuff, no fuckin’ redneck drippin’s.”
    “This shit’s better than coke,” Whitcomb said. “It’s like somebody sticks a fuckin’ knife in your brain.”
    George bobbed his head and said, “Party on, men,” and he was gone. George was a teetotaler.
    * * *
    CRANK—ENOUGH OF IT—affected Whitcomb the way a paddle affects a Ping-Pong ball. They loaded the GE crank pipe with a spoon of the stuff, melted it down with a Bic lighter, watched it bubble and then begin to smoke. Whitcomb took the first hit, closing his eyes, letting it scream into him . . . He and Ranch blew smoke at each other for a while, long snakes of black lung-leavings that held together in the air like dirigibles, and then, after a while, like the Hin denburg, fell apart. Then Ranch ripped off his shirt, backed against a wall and sat down, his eyes going goofy and red, into zombie mode, shaking with the intensity of it; but Whitcomb began crashing around in the chair, pumping with one arm, then the other, and then both, crashing into walls, chairs, the table, singing, “Oh, Black Betty, Bam-a-Lam,” the