Chapter 1

It was a Tuesday, and so I smelled smoke.

Not a nice smoke, either. Not the smoke of s’mores and pine trees and dirt goddamn everywhere, but an unnatural, violent beast that scorched the back of your throat and watered your eyes.

It hung lazily across my room, catching and clouding the sunlight like morning fog – or maybe tear gas. My window, a cute little afterthought of a thing, was open but ignored.

I rolled onto my back, blinking through the irritation of both fresh consciousness and chemical attack. It was neither early or late, and I had nowhere to be. I grabbed my glasses from the top of the inverted wastebasket next to my bed. The room was warmer than one would think it should be this early, in the same way that it’d been colder last night. It was small enough that my twin-sized mattress placed directly on the carpet and my tilted dresser covered seventy percent of available real estate. Scattered clothes covered most of the rest. The pale, pink walls were bare except for a poster next to the door of Michael Jordan dunking from the free throw line and then a $50,000 oil painting hung beside the window. Or at least that’s what Keller had said.

“My War.”

I wasn’t much of an art guy, but the story is that a French American newspaper columnist turned attempted draft dodger turned unwilling soldier named Luton Lefevre had started painting it in the early 1940s after an underthrown Allied grenade blew off both his legs. It was the first and last thing he ever painted. Lefevre worked on “My War” every day for a year until he died of complications from not having legs, leaving the state of its completeness up for debate. The painting itself was nonsense, not drawn well enough to show anything real but not abstract enough to be abstract. Best I could tell, Lefevre had painted himself atop a mountain of mangled soldiers and weapons that served to either replace or obscure his legs, lifting him, arms outstretched, toward… enlightenment? New legs? Tough to say. Yet somehow the end effect of this aimless mess of smudges and shapes, all black and white but for the green of grass and the red of blood, was mesmerizing and I found myself staring at it often without fully knowing why. I’d like to think that something about the idea of a single oil painting capturing the entire artistic existence of a man truly resonated with me, but it might just be because Keller said it was worth $50,000. 

I swung my legs over the side of the mattress and stood up. Elbows popped, neck popped, knees creaked. I walked out of my room, the smoke thickening now, and into the bathroom across the hall. I splashed water on my face and brushed my teeth, staring at myself through the spit-stained mirror, wondering how many more days I could get by without shaving the unsightly neck hairs that seemed to want to join forces with my chest hair and reach around to meet my few, resilient back hairs – I assume in an attempt to strangle me. Couple more days, probably.

The smoke got thicker as I moved closer to the kitchen. The itch at the back of my throat demanded action and I coughed a couple times, which made me cough a couple more times. A spicy dryness that saliva couldn’t wet. My eyes were burning again now, too.

“Aye! Peach!” An exclamation and a greeting, unbridled enthusiasm attached to both as though he hadn’t been the one to gas me awake.

He was Roosevelt, and he was a specimen. Slightly under six feet tall with a skinny face but big shoulders and a belly that jutted out conspicuously. Not quite fat but you’d be surprised if you saw him choose to take the stairs. The way he stood, with his waist forward and his chin up, made it seem like he was always about to burp. This morning he was wearing scuba goggles and holding a wet washcloth to his mouth with one hand while the other stoked a smoldering mess of diced potatoes on the stove.

“Aye! Ouch!” I said, an exclamation and an admonishment.

“You’re fine,” he said and tossed me the washcloth. “The smoke alarms didn’t even go off this time.”

I wiped my eyes and looked up at the vacant mount on the ceiling where the smoke alarm should’ve been.

“It’s not my fault, anyway,” he continued. “This pan is useless. Everything just sticks and burns”

I threw him the washcloth and walked to the back door, which wasn’t all that much of a door. Instead of a heavy slab of wood like you’d expect to be securing one of the building’s two primary access points, it was a flimsy formality that would throw itself open for a mild breeze. We told our landlord as much and he’d made a big show of coming over himself and installing an equally flimsy door latch like the kind movie stars obliterate with the bump of a shoulder. But it could keep out a breeze at least.

I propped the door open with our spare brick and took my first clean breath of the morning. The yard was so overrun with weeds that it looked almost enviably green from the right distance. There was a beige couch nestled against the wall of the house that came as close as fabric could to being rusted. The yard sloped down slightly, terminating in a short, wooden fence and giving full view of the tiny channel just beyond the edge of the property where water ran through for a few months each year and mud reigned for the rest. Leafy trees bordered each side, somewhat obscuring the apartment complex and 24-hour liquor store a quarter mile away. Our neighbor to the left was a nice enough man who lived alone in a better-maintained copy of our house. Our neighbor to the right was our landlord who lived in the fourth-largest place in Lynnwood.

“Peach! I forgot to make you try the coffee,” Roosevelt shouted from inside.

I took a last clean breath and went back inside.

“What’d you do?” I asked, pulling the pot out from under the drip. There was a filter rubber-banded in place over the spout.

“It’s my new creation,” he said, too excited. “Fuckstrong coffee.”

“What does…” I started as I went to take a sip. “Oh fuck!”

It was bitter in a way I’d never experienced before – a total absence of anything else. Pure, uncut darkness that made my jaws tingle and my teeth hurt. I took an involuntary breath, brought in a lungful of the acrid smoke, and coughed several times.

Roosevelt cackled. “Good stuff, huh? It’s drip coffee but I put grounds in the pot, too. It’s like drip and French press had a baby.”

Just then the basement smoke alarm went off. I could smell only smoke, I could taste only death, and now I could hear only pain. It was too much. I quickly stepped outside.

The klaxon continued to blare through the basement window, joined shortly by Roosevelt’s muffled obscenities, but the air was warm with only the slight residue of an earlier morning chill. I took another sip from the void in my mug and whispered a private fuck.

A figure was moving gracelessly beyond the trees, heading toward the house. He was carrying something and struggling to do so. He reached the edge of the channel and strained to peer over the top of his burden, right foot extended and tapping the ground, searching for the base of the bridge that spanned the muddy trough.

Bridge is a generous word. There were two individual planks of wood pressed close together and stamped as far into the dirt as Roosevelt could stomp them on either bank. It was mostly sturdy, but was starting to flex in the middle, the left plank a few centimeters deeper than the right plank. Precarious in the best of circumstances. I saw he was carrying a case of beer with a bottle of something balancing unbound atop it.

I took another sip.

Searching toes found the left plank and swept themselves quickly from side to side to make sure that in fact, yes, it was the left plank and not the right. He shuffled forward cautiously, eyes now locked on the bottle that was teasing from side to side, looking for the chance to jump. The planks swelled downward at their different levels and he adjusted wonderfully with a familiar drop of the hip.

And then he was across and moving cautiously closer to the low fence. A knee was lifted and a leg was extended. A shaky foot stretched forward to a point like an arthritic ballerina. It cleared the fence and he straddled it briefly, only just tall enough to do so, before the outer leg lifted itself across much less elegantly. The bottle kissed the lip of the cardboard case but rolled back into the safety of his chest. His shoulders lifted then sagged as he took a deep, victorious breath.

I took a sip of coffee.

“What’s all this about?” I asked as he neared the house.

“We needed limes,” he rasped. And now I could indeed see that clutched in his left hand, swinging wildly below the beer, was a plastic bag with a dozen liquor store limes in it. “And then we needed beer because look at all these limes.”

The ground was mostly flat and he seemed mostly stable, but just then the bottle leapt from its perch and tumbled, almost slowly, toward the ground. He threw out a foot that nicked the neck and sent it spinning even faster across the patchy grass. It came to rest by my feet and I reached to grab it.

“And what’s this?”

“Champagne,” he shrugged. “It was next to the register.”

He was Lucky, and he didn’t make a lot of sense. Skinny and limby with big ol’ glasses that enlarged and rounded his eyes, making him look in awe of just about everything. He was only describable in ranges, somewhere between 5’7” and 5’10” and anywhere from eighteen to thirty years old – depending on the light or his mood or what day of the week it was.

I held the door open then followed him inside. The alarm had stopped blaring and Roosevelt had stopped cursing, but the smoke seemed even thicker now.

“Aye! Lucky!” Roosevelt greeted.

“Aye! Good batch today,” Lucky said, eyes watering. “Extra cayenne?”

“Extra everything,” Roosevelt said as he prodded the burning mess on the stove. What had been cubes of potato were now balls, the corners and edges torn away by the ungreased stainless steel and used to form a layer of blackened starch. The balls bumbled along across it and looked quite raw. Roosevelt shook some more seasoning into the pan and gave it a gaudy toss. The thing was billowing like a smokestack.

“How far out are we?” Lucky asked, gingerly placing the beers on the floor then tossing the bag of limes across the kitchen where they landed neatly in the empty fruit bowl.

Roosevelt flicked a potato ball into his mouth and chewed experimentally. “Minutes.”

“Roger that,” Lucky said. He loped over to the limes, fondled the full dozen, then plopped the winner on the cutting board by the fridge. The counter was nearly full of bowls and plates holding tortillas, cheeses, pico de gallo, Roosevelt’s culturally ignorant take on green chile. Lucky chopped the lime into quarters and squeezed a single wedge theatrically over the pico de gallo and gave it a stir with his finger. “Salsa’s ready.”

“Which war is this?” Shouted a voice from the hallway. The body belonging to the shout emerged shortly through the haze – elbow crooked across mouth, eyes closed, hair on point.

The body and the voice was Abe, and he was an asshole. Taller than the rest of us with the perfect amount of stubble working itself across a jawline that didn’t need any help. He moved smoothly and spoke clearly. He was sincere and selfless and probably my best friend. Asshole.

“This is Tuesday breakfast, baby,” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Potatoes are done, let’s go!”

Lucky and Roosevelt flew around the kitchen, Abe and I stayed out of the way.

“You try the coffee yet?” I asked and offered my mug.

Abe took a sip. “Oh fuck!” He yelled and started coughing on the smoke.

Lucky popped the cork on the bottle of champagne, which promptly geysered up to the ceiling where it mingled with champagne stains from previous breakfasts. He poured it into four matching pint glasses and topped each with a splash of orange juice. Roosevelt had somehow already assembled and rolled four large burritos. Sweat darkened his shirt near his neck and chest. He shoved two of the burritos toward me and Abe.

“Go, go, go!” He ordered.

And so Abe and I went outside and sat on the same side of the leaning picnic table, where we always sat, near the center of the backyard. Lucky and Roosevelt emerged shortly through the cloud of smoke, hands full of beverages and burritos.

We all sat and took a moment.

The night hadn’t been that cold, but the sky was such a pure blue and the sun already so irresistible that it felt as though the world was thawing. It was the kind of idyllic mid-spring morning that made you hate weather for not doing this every day. The burritos were even more impressive, in a way that I won’t be able to explain. There was a smoky flavor that could almost seem intentional if not for the undercooked toothiness of the potato balls, which were marvelous aberrations of culinary technique. An impossible texture that was almost unpleasant, but maybe, you thought, only because you’d never had anything like it. Somehow the totality of all these near failures imprinted itself on the tongue, so that the echo of the bite lasted long after it’d been swallowed, demanding that you take another. I think this is a compliment.

“Good batch,” Abe said through a mouthful of mush.

Roosevelt grunted acknowledgment, not breaking focus on his burrito.

Lucky swirled his mimosa like fine wine and downed half in one hearty swig. “So today’s the day, huh?” He asked.

Abe looked at me before answering. “We’ll see. Keller hasn’t told us a thing, just to show up and dress nice.”

“What’s the take?” And then, after a beat. “Or who?” Almost hopeful.

“We don’t do kidnappings,” Abe said.

“What’s the difference, really?” Roosevelt pondered.

Abe ignored that. “What do you two got today?”

Roosevelt looked at Lucky before answering. “No clue. Surely nothing that can’t wait ’til tomorrow.”

“Same as yesterday, then,” Lucky said, and the two of them clinked glasses and drained the rest of their mimosas.

“Actually,” Roosevelt started, then held up a finger as he let out a series of soft burps, “we have a couple deliveries today. Ms. Friedland needs a new pair of glasses, and John wanted some of those Korean drinks in the green bottles you can’t really find around here.”

He burped again and continued. “Shouldn’t be too bad, I got a guy.”

“One guy?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“You have a glasses and Korean drinks guy?”

“He does cars, too.”

I wasn’t sure quite what that meant, but left it alone and turned to Abe instead. “Time to head out?”

He nodded and we both stood.

“You boys be careful out there,” Roosevelt said, and he and Lucky raised their empty glasses as a farewell. “Don’t get caught.”