Arizona Man Part One

Rob exhaled and it felt like the burning smoke was somehow jerking off his lungs. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t need to. Perhaps the whole point of smoking crystal meth was that it didn’t need to make sense. Certainly, it didn’t make any sense to Rob. Why did he allow the pull of this strange rock to dominate over every single human impulse in his body? Why did he choose it over a career, a family, a hobby — literally anything else that he could have done with his thirties? Stop thinking about it, that’s not the point, he thought to himself. Exactly. No answer was needed. He closed his eyes and smiled.

Carolyn grabbed the pipe out of his hand kind of aggressively and without saying anything, but he didn’t mind — another hit probably would have made him puke anyway. He began to drift into a pleasant daydream before realizing that he had lost track of the sack. Rob’s eyes narrowed to slits and he scanned the dingy room. Where the fuck did it go?

It wasn’t on the sheet-less mattress in the middle of the room, although some pee was. It wasn’t on the shag carpet that no one had ever vacuumed. It wasn’t on the table next to the needles and the vodka. It wasn’t on Carolyn, which he could tell because she was naked. It was nighttime and the room had no lighting save for a desktop lamp, so looking was difficult. Then he saw it — the kid was playing with it.

“Hey, give that back to me you little fucker” he said, snatching it from the boy’s hands. The child’s eyes reddened a little like he had just dropped an ice cream cone. Rob looked at Carolyn, who had cleared the last of the speed out of the pipe, of course. He nudged her with his elbow and gestured towards the kid. She looked at him, and then back at Rob with narrowed eyes and an expression that seemed to say, ‘that’s a little weird, huh?’

She turned back to the kid and asked him softly: “what’s your name?”

“Cameron,” he said in a monotone and prepubescent voice.

She followed up with, “and how old are you, Cameron?”

“Eleven.” Cameron had no shirt, giant holes in his baggy pants, no shoes, dirt on his face and hands, and messy black hair that covered much of his face.

Rob cut in curtly- “where are your parents?”

“I don’t have any.”

Rob and Carolyn exchanged a look of mutual concern. Despite being junkies, the couple shared a strong sense of protective responsibility. They had told each other shockingly similar stories of being molested as small children, and each of them knew what it was like to be a broken and lost child of a decaying and indifferent world. But an orphan in a drug den? What do you even do with that? Lucifer knows they couldn’t take care of it. They didn’t even take care of themselves. Neither of them had eaten in days. Neither had showered in days. Neither had slept in days. The fight was lost before it could even begin.

The pipe was empty. Carolyn put on her clothes and she and Rob wandered off into the night. Both of them felt guilty in a way that they would never be able to describe or say to each other out loud. But both knew it in their hearts. They did the wrong thing.