The Octopus on My Head Read Free Page A

themselves.”
    My phone rang.
    Ivy studied it, chose a button, then tilted the phone so we could both listen.
    â€œAuntie,” said a woman’s voice.
    â€œIvy.”
    â€œWhat’s up, train wreck?”
    â€œA ten.”
    â€œWow,” she whistled, “ten bucks. You get a job or something?”
    â€œI’ll never sink that low again.”
    â€œSo just how low are you sinking? Skip that. I don’t want to know. Just tell me where you’re doing it.”
    â€œMy crib. Where else?”
    â€œWe don’t keep records, you fucking idiot.”
    â€œ2733-1/2 Cardoza. Stairs up the back.”
    â€œFifteen minutes.”
    â€œI’ll wait here.”
    Ivy handed over the phone. “When they get here, hang back in plain sight. I’ll do the talking.”
    We watched the cemetery for a while. Not far from the stone wall at the back of Ivy’s yard a squirrel humped along the chamfered top of a catafalque of black granite flecked with pink. When it reached a corner, it stood up to gnaw an acorn between its front paws, watching us the while.
    I tried again. “You never think about playing music?”
    Ivy didn’t look at me. His hair had gone gray since I’d last seen him, but he still wore it in a pony tail, pulled neatly back. “Shit,” was all he said.
    In ten minutes they appeared at the foot of the stairs—two Mexicans, one of them a kid. The older one sized us up, then let the younger one precede him up the stairs and follow us into the kitchen. Once inside he pushed the door to behind him, not closing it, and held out his hand. Ivy laid the two fives across it. The younger kid spat a green penny balloon with a knot in its neck onto the palm of his own hand and passed it to Ivy, saliva and all. Ivy closed his fist around it, and the Mexicans left without a word.
    â€œHome delivery,” I marveled. “Are we strung out yet?”
    â€œSpeak for yourself.”
    â€œI am speaking for myself. That’s just too damned easy.”
    â€œIt is that,” Ivy agreed. “The hard part’s the money.”
    â€œOh,” I said. “You want I should iron the bills first?”
    Ivy almost smiled. “It just makes up for the shit you wasted.”
    â€œSo whose dope is it?”
    â€œOurs, of course.”
    â€œHow simpatico .” I followed him to the stove. “What’s with the kid?”
    Ivy rinsed the balloon and his hands at the sink. “The kid carries the dope; the older guy handles the money.”
    â€œHe’s not sixteen,” I surmised.
    â€œTrue story.” He patted dry the balloon and his hands on the folded newspaper. “They get busted, which they will, the kid is under age with no papers: no matter what they charge him with, he just gets deported. The older guy’s clean, so he walks. Six weeks later the kid’s back in the country and back in business.”
    â€œNobody gets hurt,” I concluded, “except the greater society.”
    â€œJesus Christ, Curly, you are about as square as the corner in a 3-4-5 triangle.”
    â€œOh, man. You really know how to hurt a guy.”
    Ivy bit the knot off the balloon and turned it inside out over his thumb. A lump of paste that looked like a quarter-inch of brown crayon dropped onto his palm. “Voilà.” He rested his eyes on it. “One ten-dollar tarball.” And, just then, I glimpsed Ivy Pruitt’s solitude. With whom he was sharing these arcana was, perhaps, immaterial. Whether they were reprehensible didn’t matter. He was showing me what he was doing, what it felt like, and how it worked. It seemed to me that he hadn’t shared anything with anybody in a long time; equally obvious, he had only the one deal left to share. This brief glimpse was a reduction and a condensate, diminished and perversely so, of the kind of conjoint moment that people can discover when they play music