|
Carl’s Rights
After a five month winter in the Rockies, I lived for spring days. A fleece, a pair of shades and you were good to go. The thirteen-thousand-foot, snowcapped peaks against the bright blue sky are a picture postcard.
It was Carl’s idea to kidnap Adam. Carl spotted him walking out of the 7-Eleven in Frisco. He pulled around
the back of the building then snuck up beside him. Shelia and I popped out of the sliding van door, grabbed both Adam’s arms and pulled him inside. You should’ve seen his face. I laughed so hard I started to choke.
Adam and I met Carl about a year before working on the construction site of a $750,000 sprawl in Breckenridge,
Colorado. Carl was a carpenter when he felt like working. Adam and I had moved out from Duluth to start a painting company. During a lunch break, Carl asked if we wanted to grab a slice. On the way, he rolled a joint while using his knees to steer.
We were “friends” since.
After the abduction, Adam had calmed down and was all smiles. He sat shotgun pulling on a
can of PBR. Shelia and I sat across from each other in the back on a raised, plywood and
two-by-four bed where Carl and Shelia would fuck. Fresh out of rehab, Shelia sipped Jack from a red water bottle that we passed between us. When I told Shelia that I’d been to rehab a few years back, Carl chimed in, “You’re such a fuck up.” I used to kiss Carl’s ass, but it was no secret that I despised him.
He was just another junkie like the rest of us, but he thought he was the shit because he had the best coke and weed in town.
We made it four miles before two Summit County Sheriff and two more Frisco squad cars with flashing red and blue lights
pursued like they’d been chasing at high speed. Carl tugged on his beard. “Goddammit!” He pounded the steering wheel. “Motherfucker!”
There was enough cocaine and marijuana in a shoe box under the bed to keep the four of us high for a week. Shelia parted one of the back
window curtains just enough to peak out. “Holy shit! They’ve got their guns out!”
Speaking through a megaphone an officer ordered us out of our mobile drug den. While we laid belly down in gravel and side-of-the-
road garbage legs spread, arms on the small of our backs, a cop searched us. He found a small dime bag with residual powder in one of my
jacket pockets and a glass bowl in another. Carl leered at me. “You fuck up.”
With probable cause, the cop walked to the van, flung Carl’s belongings to the side of the road and
discovered the stash. He held the box like buried treasure. “Look what we have here!” he said with a smug smile.
The officer who had used the megaphone walked toward us. “Who’s the owner of this vehicle?”
“I am,” Carl admitted.
“We pulled you over on a possible kidnapping. Which one of you was picked up outside the 7-Eleven in Frisco?”
“I was sir,” Adam said, his head raised off the gravel. “But they’re my friends. It was just a joke.”
Shelia cried when they read Carl his rights. I watched the squad car grow small.
“Who’s the shit now, asshole?” I said to the back of Carl’s head. Then I realized, as Carl went, so did our drugs.
We walked a half mile to the Goat and ordered soup and whiskey for lunch. With two of my needs met,
I made calls on my cell to fill the third. After forty-five fruitless minutes, I leaned back against the bar stool, fondling a tumbler with melting ice. A light went off. The mother lode was in Carl’s apartment. I waited until dark and prayed that the first floor sliding window was unlocked like it usually was.
With blood-shot dilated eyes I saw the sun rise over Utah in my rear view mirror. Overcome with regret and paranoia worsened by
the drugs, I wondered how far I needed to drive. I wondered if I’d ever be safe. I dreamed of a new life, as if someone as fucked up as me
could ever outrun his demons.
Previously published in Ex Cathedra, 2009.
Brad Bisio
Email: Brad Bisio
Return to Table of Contents
|
