Fiction

Know going in that I hardly knew the girl, that I remember the look of her more than anything else. If you’re trying to understand this thing, you’re brushing the bottom of the barrel with me. I’d like to understand it, too. But I just have the one day with Helen. Lucky for you, it was memorable, unlike the days around it. I can’t think that it will be of interest to the investigation, but then I’ll leave those decisions to professionals. 

She was, as far as I know, friends with this guy Bedugnis, Dan Bedugnis, who used to deal a little grass up and down the Pioneer Valley. Have you run any of this by Dan yet? I might give a call, if I were you. I myself am not hurrying to catch up with him, at the moment, if there’s any hope of avoiding that. I wouldn’t know what to do. I spent a lot of time with Bedugnis, but he was never an easy guy, at least not then. You knew it to look at him, I hate to say. He had these yellowy jowls — at twenty-six, or seven — and scuffed blonde hair stringing down the back of his head. He kept tobacco in his lip, almost always, sometimes when he was smoking, which kept him dazed around the clock and quieter, even, than he might’ve been. Imagine being nauseous all the time. The statute of limitations having lapsed, I can tell you that I mainly dealt with him to score that grass, which was fine by me, being on a budget. 

Maybe it’s me, though. I never could get anything good going with a dealer. I don’t know why. You’re about the same age, usually, spend a lot of time together around a common interest. But then there’s something about the nature of the relationship, or maybe the nature of drug dealers, that wrecks it. 

Take for instance Bedugnis, who once bowled me over, deck-chair and all, for just beginning to compliment his grass, out on his stoop. We were smoking his grass, in a pretty dense stretch of homes, too, near the corner of Fearing and North Pleasant in Amherst, near the frat row on campus. It was a calmer time, in a lot of ways, you know, for better or worse. He insisted that he was trying to screen me out of photographs, potential photographs, or something. The kid had zero understanding of law enforcement. Anyway, I never felt welcome at his house from then forward, but we’d managed to patch it up before I met Helen. He ended up calling me to pick him up from the mechanic — the first time I’d picked up and heard that old-engine voice of his, so low and bored you could hardly make out words. He said nothing on the ride home, if I remember right, just kept up spitting in the old glass Coke bottle he kept with him, which he’d been known to spill. It had this awful, crisp smell of mud, or mint, but looked just like Coke from across the car. After that we generally met around town in his big-block ‘71 Dodge Dart Swinger, which might be important. It was painted off-green, a stemmy sort of green, with a darker green racing stripe down the side — kind of forest-color. My mother, who visited one week, hated Bedugnis just on account of how much noise that car made, not knowing what he was. Just inferred it, from the car. I agreed with almost everything she said. 

But I saw him almost every day that summer. He’d roll up in the late morning or the early evening, and I’d score some grass, and we’d drive around smoking it for a half hour, an hour, not saying much—just watch the fields turn green, then yellow, and listen to the Moody Blues. I was taking a break at the time, from my job breaking bottles at the recycling plant. Putting the English major to work, you know. We’d work with a hammer and then with a press, and sort all the time by color. I’ve moved up in the world since then, by the way. Could you make a note? And my girlfriend at the time would go through at night, and pick the little chips out of my hair. It was actually hard to get it all, but it felt nice, her trying. My hair was long back then. 

On the day I met Helen I was trying to move quickly: a friend and I were considering driving to the Quabbin reservoir in the afternoon, and I was trying to smoke before he picked me up. It didn’t play out. I mean, I got caught up, ran late across the board. It was probably four-thirty or five when I saw that Dart roll up in front of where I was living at the time, out in Sunderland. Sunderland was great because it was closed in out there by all these tobacco farms. It stayed real quiet and you could run around at night without running into anyone. The rents have probably stayed low, I imagine.