[1] See Lisa Carson, "One of Ten Things," for all annotations that follow.

[2] "Soon we are joined by a group of travelers who don't seem to be going anywhere at all. It's the boy with the camo vest again. It says "Finn" on the strap of his backward baseball cap and he goes by Huck, but the girl he's with calls him Junior and he sometimes introduces himself as Eric..."

[3] "He also keeps telling me I'm beautiful..."

[4] "She was the sweetest thing to ever walk on three legs..."

[5]  In 2014, before her arrest, "she overdosed. The heroin was laced with fentanyl and she was in her bathroom..."

[6] "Fentanyl complicates Narcan treatment. They had to do it twice [on Anna]..."

[7] "She still really wanted to do pills and he didn't know how else to take care of her..."

[8] "Side note: Travis will not willingly listen to music that is not Nirvana..."

[9] ""Why couldn't Ken get Barbie pregnant?""

[10] "...the Good Neighbor Clinic in White River Junction. She’s middle-aged, wearing a pastel sweater when I meet her..." 

[11] "It takes us about two minutes to find Eric and The Kid loitering on Main Street..."

[12] "I sit with Eric on the curb in what I'm pretty sure is a small puddle of vomit and he tells me his life story..."

[13] ""Don't leave without me," he says, walking off down the street..."

Montage of Heck
It's a world of uncertainty you're trying to get into, by the way.

by SARAH KHATRY

Springtime in Vermont and everyone is tripping face.

The foliage has shot phosphorescent green—actually glows in the sunlight—and spiders are parachuting through the air.

City Hall Park, Burlington . The brick-and-concrete-stepped fountain at my back is dry, copper pipes exposed. A skateboard rumbles behind me. I’m cross-legged on the ground. Huck Finn's on the bench between Rose and Lisa[1]. Gord, with his permanently skewed eye, is almost out of the circle, he’s so far down the bench. He’s shy. Huck Finn’s homeless, a ‘traveler’ or train-hopper he claims, though it seems he’s been in Burlington most of the last three years. Rose says she’s in high school. Gord won’t talk.[2]

Huck Finn has an open beer in a paper bag wedged between his legs, where he can almost hide it. Gord brought him the beer, in exchange for something passed into his jacket pocket. Huck Finn’s got infinite pockets on his camo vest. Out come cigarettes, rolling papers, sometimes the plastic envelope of a green tea bag, whose contents he cuts with tobacco. His fingers and midway up his palms are so black with dirt, they’re stained.

A young woman, long pale limbs and the harsh blonde ponytail of a ballerina, walks spinning through the park. Her shirt is too big for her, and the neck has been hand-cut even wider, so it falls off her shoulder. She drapes over the back of the bench and whispers in Huck Finn’s ears. She lifts her head, passes her eyes over the circle of us, the same smile. She’s gone.

Huck Finn’s all muddled by the other women. Within moments of meeting Lisa, he told her he loved her.[3]  He’ll be reminiscing with Rose, hugging her, and the next moment explaining how he wants to break her face. She ignores that. He’s been saying it to everyone. The police took his dog today. Kira was four months old.[4] 

When the ballerina was leaning over him, he didn’t look up at her—she remained just touch, sound, scent. Now, Huck Finn blinks, twists around and says, “Wait. She’s already gone?”

The Kid focuses on me and says, “That girl was tripping.”

“No, really? Now?” Five in the afternoon on a Saturday. Wind in the leaves. The skateboard circles round.

The Kid nods, his lips sealed tight, chin out. He smiles. The top of his mouth is ridged gums. His bottom teeth are rot. He says, “You saw her.”

Nice day in the park for it. It’s not a nice park. When The Kid moved down from the bench to join me on the brick, he demonstrated the black canvas ass-flap sewn into the hem of his jacket. I ask him if it’s for a cushion. He says, “It’s because you don’t want to know what you’re sitting in. Trust me.”

The Kid told Lisa he’s forty-two. I would guess older, seeing as he later claims to have been a traveler since 1986. Huck Finn—twenty and cute under the dirt—calling him The Kid is weird. His goatee, which covers his chin, is gray and his skin is orange leather. Scattered studs on a torn jean vest, straps hooking it to black cargo pants. A hunting knife the length of half my forearm holstered on his thigh.

When he first sat on the brick, he said he was still tripping from accidental contact with LSD the night before. Didn’t even realize he’d been dosed till a half hour later when—boom! He popped his eyes wide.

Huck Finn in his rambles now makes a comment about blue baggies somewhere up The Kid's ass. The Kid snaps his head and glares, chin out, in a moment so fast and so silently observed it almost didn’t happen. Huck Finn doesn’t seem to notice, but he says no more about The Kid.

Huck Finn isn’t as glazed as he seems. And The Kid is not tripping.

He was on something in that park. I can say that because later in the night he sobered up, and began to look at me the same way he did Huck Finn just then. But LSD? The eyes, blue and cold with black specks in the center.

Pinprick pupils, hyper constricted. That’s a sign of opiates. Pills. Percocet. Oxycontin. Vicodin. And heroin.

*  *  *

When Lisa and I asked Anna if she had wanted to be clean, she said, "Honestly, no. My attitude was, I'm young, I should be able to party." She loved the lifestyle: "the cars, the money, the people." In Hartford, Connecticut, she said, she'd cut the raw heroin and seal 2,500 bags in a go. Sometimes to fuck with people, she'd swap out the stamps she was using. They'd get the latest batch of the same dope and tell her last week's was better, or this week's was the shit. She said she was rolling with the Latin Kings.

She didn’t try heroin until she was seventeen. A friend told her it would be just like Oxycontin. She snorted it. After her first time, she said, “heroin trumped everything.” She became an IV user.

Anna is twenty and lives in Vermont. When we first met her, she was in furlough housing, six weeks out of jail, just off the bracelet.

Her roommate, Colleen, had been there a year. She said she had been involved with the Bloods in Vermont. The police said so, too, when they raided her apartment, finding tens of thousands in drugs and cash. Her drug of choice was crack. When we first came by, Lisa and I spoke to Colleen and Anna in the living room, honeycomb blue carpet, huge box of a SHARP television, an old gray Nintendo on the floor wired in. Three levels of a bookshelf were filled with DVDs: comedies, horror, action, and all seven seasons of Sons of Anarchy. The films were Colleen’s. She said that her collection used to be much larger, but most had been taken in the raid.

Within a few weeks, the movies are gone but for a dozen. Colleen’s officially moved out, but when we arrived for that third visit, she just had slept over.

Anna had been vacuuming. She hadn’t heard our knock. When we stepped in, Colleen was there in the armchair in the corner, and a young man with a fish-hook lip ring matching Anna’s slumped into the chair beside her, a red Chicago Bull styled on his black snapback, chinstrap beard, clicking away at the keyboard on his phone. Dave. Anna went and perched on the arm over Colleen.

This furlough apartment is only blocks from Anna’s mother’s house. When it was raided, Anna had claimed all the heroin was hers to protect her mother. But she tells us the heroin hadn’t been hers or her mother’s. She says it was a dealer’s from New Jersey who’d been visiting. Anna makes clear: He was not a friend. I asked her today why she hadn’t explained to the police that the heroin was his.

She told me, simply, you don’t do that. You accept your charges.

The cars, the money, the people.

Anna, Colleen and Dave had hung out, sober, all night, playing Nintendo, eating Chicken Alfredo cooked by the father of Anna’s younger brother. Earlier in the week, Dave had made Anna some batch: jailhouse beef stew. “Like a bunch of shit put together. Leftovers, crunched up ramen noodles. Cook them up, put some cheese in there, throw some sauce in there, some Adobo, pickles, hot and spicy, some type of meat. We made it with sausages. I wanted beef, but she wanted sausage.” Sober fun, Colleen told us. Games of pong with water, campfires and s’mores, classic Mario on the old Nintendo.

When Dave first moved to Springfield, when he was fifteen, he said the hardest stuff you could find on the street was Percocet. “Nobody was even doing it that much. Everyone was just drinking and smoking weed. And then a few years later I did my robbery, got locked up. When I got out, the town had went to shit. Everyone was breaking into stores, breaking into cars, stealing cars, selling dope, shooting people, stabbing people.” According to Colleen, Springfield now is The Walking Dead.

Dave said he had been involved with the Bloods, like Colleen. Says he never got into drugs. The hardest thing he tried was cocaine, which made his head feel like the liberty bell—WHOM WHOM WHOM. He never became addicted.

Anna, with old rhythm, blames Dave for having all the good karma, and herself for being karma’s bitch. She still calls him a cityboy.

The cityboys: the gang-affiliates they encountered up here, coming to distribute. They also refer to them as the fuckboys.

When Lisa and I asked for a funny story about them, Colleen shared, “My last birthday with them, they called me down. Colleen, come down with your pipe and your straw! Come downstairs! They had a plate and they made a smiley face out of drugs: crack rocks, heroin and cocaine. And then we did it all at once. I could not fucking move for three hours and they recorded this shit.”

They put her on their shoulders and danced with her and sang. As she spoke, she mimed her limp and lolling head, her cast arms, marionetted about on their backs. “They sang to me. I was like you guys are dumb! And they recorded it!” A few months later, they got raided. “And I was like shit, that shit’s on the phone. Like they got our phones, too, and they’re gonna see this shit.”

I said, “They’re probably gonna laugh at that shit.”

“They probably would. We were pretty fucked.”

“These were the fuckboys?”

“Yeah, the fuckboys.” She smiled. There was an endearing gap between her front teeth.

One on one with Lisa and I before, in front of a café, where Anna was waiting for a date, she’d said, “When I lived in Connecticut, we always put stuff together in the basement. They got a pool table, and you would never know they’re so strapped. Under the pool table is AK and behind the picture frame are a couple Glocks.”

“Were you ever scared?”

She smiled. “I knew I was protected.”

I asked her how she came to meet the fuckboys. Through her mother. “All drug dealers know each other, even if they’re not in the same circles.

“One time I was down there and my connect fell through so I went right to Park Street in Hartford, Connecticut. It was barber shops. People stand on the corner. I was trying to get something and this guy pulls up in a white Lexus and says, ‘Trying to have a good time?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ I still talk to him. I got arrested in Connecticut and he was going to bail me out of jail, like $10,000 cash.”

“So these are your friends?”

“People are like, ‘Drug dealers aren’t your friends.’ Well, some of them actually are. The people I lived with, they’re like my family. I learned the little bit of Spanish I know from them. They don’t do drugs. Noooo. Funny thing is this culture. You’re raised up here around something like I was raised, around my mom, who hustled but also did drugs, you think that’s OK. But they’re raised to sell drugs and never touch them. The last time I went to Connecticut I stayed sober. And I was around it. Putting it together. They wouldn’t let me touch it. No, you’re too good for that. Stick to smoking weed.” She laughed. “And I was like, ‘You don’t gotta tell me twice.’ ”[5]

*  *  *

Scott Farnsworth, a guidance counselor at Hartford High School, remembered, “In 2011, maybe 2012, one of my kids had just graduated high school in June. November, we get a call in the morning that he was found in his room. Small town local. He had overdosed, accidental overdose, at six-thirty in the morning. Myself and somebody else were up at the house talking to the mom by noon that day. Heroin overdose.” The boy’s brother still attended Hartford High.

In October 2014, Christopher Scott-Smith died in Hartford. He was twenty-one, and a graduate of Hartford. Eleven days later, Chardonnay Lynn Colonese, eighteen, died in Canaan. She had graduated from Lebanon High School in 2013. Farnsworth told us that Chardonnay, whose name he did not recall, had been in the room for the overdose of another young man from the area not long before her death; she’d helped in saving his life.

Farnsworth recalled the events, “So one was a Hartford grad, the other just barely graduated from another local town, the female was from a local town—these kids are all so interconnected.  It’s not necessarily one school, one town. It’s pretty clear to us in the region that between the overdoses and suicides we’ve had in the last four years, Lebanon, Hanover, Mascoma, Woodstock, Hartford, all of these towns and these kids are so tightly together.”

Police suspected the heroin involved in the deaths of Christopher and Chardonnay was laced with fentanyl, an analgesic, that’s the strongest narcotic opiate. Fentanyl-laced heroin frequently results in overdoses, as even regular users can fail to reduce their dose enough for the increased potency. Anna overdosed in 2014 because just she didn’t know there was fentanyl in her heroin. When we were in Burlington at City Hall Park, we heard gossip that fentanyl-laced heroin was moving in. And wherever it goes, someone ODs. It’s good advertising.

In November 2014, after one month with those two deaths and seven other overdoses in the Upper Valley, the Hartford School Board rejected the suggestion of its board member Paul Keane that the nurses stock Narcan. Narcan, the brand name of naloxone, can be used in the event of overdose to help prevent death and minimize brain damage[6]. They said heroin addiction is uncommon among their students, and patients when revived by naloxone can become violent, putting the nurses’ health at risk.

When we asked Scott Farnsworth about this decision, he said simply it was the school board’s ruling. Early in the interview, he interrupted himself to make a call to the high school’s drug and alcohol counselor. He left her a message. “Hey,” he said, “so here’s a quirky one for you. I’m chatting to a couple Dartmouth students. One of the things I’m going be talking to them in the next few minutes about is prevalence and use of substances in our middle schools and high schools—just in very generic terms. So if you’re in the building today, I’m honestly not sure if you are, and you’re free, you’re welcome to come down. If there’s a chance you’re free and you’d like to join us, you may, just to talk in generalities about what you see and patterns and trends and how our youth are doing here.”

*  *  *

Travis was the one to first warn us about Burlington. He'd lived there about five years ago, when he had moved to Vermont. He and his girlfriend had become clean. She didn’t want to stay that way.[7] Burlington didn’t let them. He thought he was going to marry her. Travis told us on the Statehouse lawn, the second time we met, “Burlington’s a fucked up place.”

We were introduced to Travis at the corner of the counter at the Three Penny Tap Room in Montpelier, which his brother owns. We met up with him next in a coffee shop. We interviewed him on the Statehouse lawn one sunny day and a spider crawled on the bare skin of my knee, exposed through a tear. Dogs and kids cartwheeled and yapped. We later called him and asked him to come with us to Burlington, to be our guide, our translator, our protector. I drove.

His drug of choice was opiates. He had gotten himself clean.

On Church Street: Travis, in a faded Nirvana[8] t-shirt with micro holes along the hem, black shorts that sag, masking the knife in his side pocket. Work boots. Trailing cigarette smoke. He had to smoke on the drive over, too. In the street, he moved fast.

Huck Finn approached us with a joke[9] and Travis pulled him aside, asking him where on the street to buy. As we headed for the top of the street, he explained how to read these guys. Some aren’t just high; they’re crazy. How do you tell? I asked. Just instinct and experience? No. Huck Finn, as soon as Travis pulled him aside, dropped his act: became coherent, logical, direct. It’s a disguise. Act this way even when you’re not fucked up, no one will know the difference when you are.

The first pass of the street after Huck Finn got his us nowhere. We cycled around and through City Hall Park, where Travis sat down with us on the steps by the fountain. Travis was going to go back alone to Church Street, try again, press harder. He explained that if this had been him five years ago, really looking to buy, he’d never have walked away. He’d have pushed and pushed.

But there’s danger in that too. The source of the violence, he told us, is paranoia. Plain mistrust.

He recalled one dealer. As soon as they had said hello, the man shoved Travis in the chest. To us, Travis mimed it: two hands, spread fingers, one push.

And then—the dealer laughed. Travis realized then that with that shove, the man had been feeling for a wire under his shirt.

While Travis was gone, The Kid wandered into the park and joined a young woman along a row of benches facing the fountain. While we were speaking to him, Huck Finn and Rose rolled into the park with a box of sliced turkey and a hunk of bread they’d been given free.

From the bench, Huck Finn ran his routine.

“Hey, want a joke? 

“Why can’t Ken get Barbie pregnant?

“How do you tell there’s a dirty hippie in your house?

“My face is melting and my girlfriend beats me. She’s imaginary.

“My boyfriend beats me. I’m not gay but he’s gayer than I am.

“Hey! Your girlfriend likes you better than she likes me.

“Douchebag! I’ll tell you a good joke: my nuts in your mouth, asshole.”

Around dusk, we had to drive Travis home to check on his brother’s dog. As we were leaving the park, Huck Finn stood up from the bench, his eyes red around the rims, spread his blackened hands. He said to both of us, “I’ve been scaring you haven’t I? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I hope I haven’t scared you. I scared you, didn’t I?”

As I drove and Lisa sat in the back, Travis confirmed for us some things we already suspected. The Kid seemed to be muling something—all heroin comes out of somebody’s ass. His pupils were pinprick; blue-eyed, sure, so it could’ve been nothing, but that’s a sign. "And Lisa," he said, "use your assets on Huck Finn."

“So we have to go back?”

He told us yes. If we wanted to get something out of tonight, we’d have to go back. They’d start using again as it got dark. We couldn’t ask direct questions, not yet. But spend enough time and hope they’re high enough—something will be said. He said, “It’s a world of uncertainty you’re trying to get into, by the way.”

I won’t lie. We were both frightened. Huck Finn wasn’t scary. The Kid was.

But we had at least an hour until then. I offered Travis the radio, but he said he didn’t know the stations. He never took his discs of Nirvana out the speaker. He referred to himself, perfectly serious, as a Nirvana addict.

He said, “Have you seen Montage of Heck yet?”

“No, not yet. You?”

“Yeah, yeah—” He cocked his head.

“What’d you think?”

“I mean, if I had the footage, I could’ve made that movie. I could’ve narrated it. I know every Nirvana song that has ever been published. Have you heard the actual ‘Montage of Heck’?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

He described the B-side, a half-hour track that’s randomly sampled of other songs and layered sounds. At one point, someone rants about the landlord. I said it sounds like one of those jokes that’s gone on too long to be funny but keeps going on just long enough to become funny again. He laughed and said it is like that. He warned me it’s not casual listening.

He asked if I knew the intended meaning of the song “Rape Me.” I told him I’d never looked it up. He said, “So tell me what do you think it is?”

“I think it’s like—rape me, hate me. It’s saying, Think what you will about me. Do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah, no that’s a great interpretation. That’s really close to my personal interpretation but—”

“So what is it really?”

“It really is about rape.” He explained how it was Kurt Cobain’s imagining of himself as the victim of a rape, a woman, and it’s his message song. Saying it’s OK to come forward. Don’t keep it secret. You know, come out and say it. Do the worst—Rape me again. Hate me, blame me for it. I’ll survive.

I asked him about Cobain’s suicide.

“You see, this is what I know. I’ve probably had eight times the lethal limit at once in my body. It doesn’t matter if you’re used to it. If you have a tolerance. So when people say, ‘No way with three times the lethal limit in him could he have shot himself,’ I know he could. I mean, I don’t think he did it alone. But that’s getting into a whole other thing.”

We were at a stoplight by then, about to cross the bridge into Montpelier downtown. Travis said,

“You know, it’s because of Kurt Cobain that I always knew I was going to try heroin. When I was twelve years old, I just knew.”

He’s got expressive eyes, curly hair that shapes like a helmet when it’s gone too long. He smokes. He doesn’t chew gum, but he bought Lisa and I a pack. He’s thirty-one.

As we were driving off, he texted us, “Be safe, don’t hesitate to call.”

We played Nirvana’s album MTV Unplugged in New York on my phone stuffed in the cupholder.

I would shiver the whole—night—through—

*  *  *

A stranger messaged Anna on Facebook just as she got out of prison saying that she should kill herself.

“I didn’t leave my house for a month,” she said.

I asked, “This house?”

She nodded and explained, “This house! I know everybody. I know everybody from here, to Lebanon, to Grafton, to Windsor. I grew up here. I will never escape my reputation.”

Anna says her mother became an addict when Anna was eleven. It started with cocaine. Anna lived with her Gram at the time. She would come to her mother’s house on weekends, and wonder “What are you doing, dude?” when her mother kept disappearing into the garage. By the time Anna was thirteen, she says, she was raising her little brother. She hated drugs. But as her mother’s addiction evolved into pills, the only way to afford using was to sell. And so, with her mother using and just “always gone,” Anna started selling crack. Later, heroin.

She remembers how the parents of her friends wouldn’t let her come over, because of her mother. Anna, at eleven, with “lots of growing up to do” to support herself, her mother and her brother.

Systems of exchange. Someone comes to you in a bad way, giving them dope is a kindness. They’re sick. This will make you feel better.

She remembers a diabetic woman who came to her house for heroin. Anna pitied her, gave it to her. She says the woman overdosed in the driveway, seizing on the pavement. Anna was fourteen.

She found it hard to sympathize with her peers. How could she? They worried about their little problems. “Mom won’t buy me a flatscreen.” The man she called her best friend overdosed on Xanax and methadone. It was her freshman year. On the way to the funeral, “a teacher grabbed me and I pushed her and I walked out.”

At the end of our first meeting with Anna, I spotted on the blue honeycomb rug a spider, the size of a thumbnail: thick brown body on powerfully bent legs. I told her and she scrambled her feet up under her, “Where? Where?!” She found it just as it crossed off the rug onto the wall-to-wall carpeting, where it became even more of a shadow. Lisa offered to take care of it, but Anna took a composition notebook, cornered it between the lampstand and the armchair, and slapped. Again and again, thumping the ground for it, laughing at herself. She tossed the book aside and said, “Ain’t no such thing as half-dead in this house!”

*  *  *

Rehab failed Travis and his girlfriend. Detoxing in jail worked for Anna, but she's the rare case: she had to actively turn down illegal drugs offered to her within her own cell while she went through withdrawal. For many, a one-month detox program, no matter how expensive, will end in relapse. It's just not enough.

The stats are hard to find online. One site tells you a 10-15% relapse rate post-rehab. Another will give you the same figures for success.

Dr. Peter Mason runs a family practice. For the last eight years, he’s been prescribing medically-assisted treatment involving the drug, suboxone, in several-week long increments. Suboxone is an opiate, but it has a ceiling effect—the high plateaus at a feeling slight enough former users will not even register it and be fully functional, while preventing withdrawal. Suboxone has an additional chemical within it that will cause symptoms of withdrawal if someone attempts to take other opiates while on it.

Peter Mason had realized many in his practice, including kids he’d watched grow up, had become addicted. He drew up contracts with them: Don’t be abusive to the staff, be on time, be in counseling, expect urine drug testing on a regular basis and come in for random screenings and pill counts. Bring in your pills, bring in your films of suboxone. No marijuana or alcohol.

According to Peter Mason, Twelve Step programs work for alcoholism but do not work for opiates. He cites a 90% failure rate, and says the best way—maybe the only way—forward is medically assisted treatment.

Laura Byrne, an administrator at a needle exchange in Vermont[10], said of her program, “A lot of people have been in and out of treatment. The detoxes are so short. One month of treatment is the bare beginning for someone to start changing their behavior.” After they just get out, both Mason and Byrne agree, they’re at their most vulnerable. Byrne said, “It will take a long time for their brain to recover. Years.

“You can’t just give them three weeks of detox and send them back to their families, who are all using, and expect they’re not going to.”

When we first started talking to Anna, her mother was in methadone maintenance. Methadone, unlike suboxone, has to be administered daily from a clinic. For that reason, Dr. Peter Mason calls it “chemical handcuffs.” But Bethany, her mother, was doing well. She passed a weekly urine test.

Anna loves her mother. After she got out of jail, she couldn’t go up to her mother’s house, legally, but as soon as it was allowed, they ate together once a week, Mondays, here at the furlough housing. After a couple visits with Anna, Lisa and I asked if we could meet her mother too. Anna said yes, of course.  We picked a date, less than a week in advance.

That Tuesday, we arrived to find Colleen and Dave instead. Anna, sitting on the arm of the chair above Colleen, told us that Bethany had relapsed. And Anna, for her own sobriety, has had to take a break from her.

A couple weeks later, Anna asked us to change their names in this story.

*  *  *

Huck Finn and The Kid were panhandling to the right of Nectar’s on Main Street in Burlington at ten one night.[11] The sign, lettered in red neon, rotated above them: LOUNGE Nectar’s RESTAURANT. The sidewalks, glowing orange by streetlight, were traversed by the night crowd: dressed to entice, sometimes already a little drunk. No kids out tonight. Huck Finn was wading out into them, putting his body in the path, spreading his arms, “Anyone want a joke for a buck? Hey you! Can I tell you a joke?”

He blinked and had to be reminded of who we were. When he recognized Lisa, he lit up.

His friend Rose gone, Gord gone, just Huck Finn and The Kid. Huck had managed to get himself banned from the park.

Still, there on main street, he smoked a joint—offered to share—and had a tall open can of Four Loko. The Kid told me if Huck Finn got banned from Main Street too, he wouldn’t be able to make any money Friday through Sunday.

After we greeted them, asked if we could hang with them for the night, Lisa sat down with Huck on a single low step and I was left with The Kid. He told me, for a second time, “With me, you’re the safest you can be in Burlington.”

That sentence should always make you run the other way.

With me sitting between The Kid and Huck Finn on the steps, Lisa and I engaging them separately, the men cooled down. Though I didn’t hear Huck’s conversation, he did seem to relax.[12]

But The Kid, he got cold.

He framed it to me as Huck Finn putting him on edge. He’s gotta get away from that guy. Huck’s young. He doesn’t control himself. He heckles too much. It’s true—he did almost get in a fight out in the park, when he tried the gay-boyfriend line on a pair of stringy rednecks. Huck Finn, though, seems to get away with it; besides the rednecks, most people laugh with him. If it was The Kid saying these things--

The look in his eyes, squatting on a pipe next to me, was hostile. His pupils, small but gaze clear, appraising. He said, “I should have brought a backpack.”

“Why?”

“Because if I had a backpack, people’d know I was really homeless, not some drug addict.”

“So you’re worried they won’t come?”

“With you sitting there with that pen and notebook, I know I won’t be getting anything.”

“I can put it away—“ I folded the notebook, laid it to my other side, but he looked up, shook his head.

“No, no, it’s fine.” The eyes said otherwise. I left it in reach but in shadow. I looked out with him from our place against the wall. At the men and women who walked by. There was a parking meter, lighting its own monitor in stark fluorescent white. Across the street, the trees, newly green, that almost metallic tone I’ve only ever seen in New England, swayed and sent horizontal, vertical tracing shadows up a stone edifice. Half the leaves were of shadow themselves.

The Kid lit a cigarette and the wind sent the ashes in an orange trail toward me. One stung my leg and I jumped. He blamed the wind and didn’t adjust his hand.

We sat most of the next hour in silences. I asked periodic questions and got a sentence or two back before we settled into it again. Sometimes, he played the harmonica. Aggressively, wobbling his head and his hands. Hard to hear the melody.

When I asked him about the Vermont heroin epidemic again, he said, “I think it’s a class war. I think the upperclass is trying to get rid of the lower in Burlington. It’s called gentrification. You should look it up.”

I told him I know what gentrification is. He looked at me and said, “So what are you asking me for?”

The Kid explained he was going to write his own story about it. Self-publishing, that’s what he believed in. Someday, he said, I’ll be watching one of his PBS documentaries and I’ll know, I sat with that guy when he was a bum in Burlington.

A tall, trim young woman in a black dress was clicking up the sidewalk when Huck hooked her with the promise of a joke.

“How do you know you’ve got a dirty hippie in your house?”

“How?”

“He’s still there and my face is melting.”

The last bit puzzled her. It should have. She told him, “That’s not worth a cigarette.”

“Oh please, can I try again?”

“I really have to go. I’m on a schedule. I’m sorry.” It was all right. Huck Finn had been getting more and more cigarettes as the night went on. 

As she stamped off, she paused to stub hers out on the metal frame of a trashcan. The orange sparks umbrellaed in a perfect bloom that died out as it flowed towards us.

One man, for whom Huck Finn had forgotten all his jokes, was instead promised a song on the harmonica by The Kid. The Kid started off, wriggling and possessed on it. The guy nodded, smiled a little, tapped his foot along. He waved as he walked away, but The Kid was still going. He played another thirty seconds, heavily increasing the volume until it could be heard, I imagined, down the street. He filled the air. The Kid was crouched and curled over the instrument. The way his head was moving I was reminded of how an animal shakes the body of its prey to snap the neck.

He finished, looked to me and said, “Why can’t they fucking stay?”

“What?”

“Here I am, playing for him, and he can’t stay for one fucking song.”

“This is how’re you’re paying him,”

“Yes. And they can’t even just stay.”

“He smiled.”

“Oh he smiled. What’s that worth? Anyone can smile.”

Alone now, he started to play again. Softer. I looked away from him, out to the road. The wind became violent—blew open a door up the street, and rattled and flapped the umbrellas outside Muddy Waters, the bar adjacent.

In the following calm, The Kid said, “There’s no way to learn harmonica without living on the street and here I am.”

He said, “Sorry, this isn’t my first sidewalk. It’s disappointing to be back on one. It’s been a month. I had an apartment. I moved out so I didn’t have to not pay my landlord.”

“What happened?”

“Laid off, classic American story. At least I have a past of this. At least I know what to do. But I had a corner office. The whole nine yards. And now I’m here.”

He was gesturing towards the building across the street.

“Was that the office?”

“No—no. I can’t tell you. Secret CIA stuff.”

He explained how he’s going to get out of this. He knew he would. It was just a matter of time. I didn’t write any of it down, instead holding his eyes. I told him I believed him. He knew how it was done. He knew what he had to do.

He told a joke on Finn’s behalf to a young man from Virginia who had stopped by us before, asking Lisa and I to party with him; asking our ages when we declined. The Kid said, “How do you get a nun pregnant?”

Virginia, smoking a joint, thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know. How?”

The Kid grinned. “You fuck her.”

When Virginia was gone, The Kid told me again how he had to get away from Huck Finn. Then he asked me the time. Near midnight.

“Shit.” He had to be somewhere.

“So you’re headed off?”

“I need to go to that bridge in Winooski. Just a ten minute drive from here. You know, I could really use a ride.”

 “It’s not my car,”

“It’s only ten minutes. That bridge in Winooski. Just over there. It’d save me a long walk if you could.”

“It’s Lisa’s car.”

“I know, I know. But it’s just ten minutes.”

“You have to ask her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

He stood up, went and squatted on her other side. I slipped my notebook away. I knew we couldn’t drive him anywhere. Not with the knife bound to his thigh. Not with the aggression in his gaze. Not with Travis’s evaluation: opiates, and definitely baggies of something hidden up near his prostate. An appointment at a bridge in Winooski. No. We couldn’t.

The Kid stood and walked off towards the right, the opposite direction of our car.[13] I went and stood before Lisa. She said, “I think I just agreed to drive him somewhere.”

“OK,” I said. “We can’t.”

“Definitely. Yeah. We can’t.”

“Where’d he go?”

“To get something—I don’t know.”

“All right.”

“Let’s go before he gets back.”

When we said goodbye to Huck Finn, he accepted it with something like inevitability. We headed off down the street, our fast walk verging on a run. In the car, Lisa was wide-eyed.

*  *  *

One time, we asked Anna what heroin felt like. After rolling her eyes and saying, “I was wondering when you were going to ask me that,” she said, “So, you know when your leg falls asleep and it’s tingly and it hurts but it’s not a bad hurt? That’s your whole body. All at once from head to toe—then that goes away, and you’re itchy, but it’s good. Then it’s like a warm blanket goes over you. And then: there’s just nothing. No pain. No sadness. No emotions. No loneliness.

“That’s actually the last feeling I felt before I overdosed. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, If I was going to kill myself, this would be the way to do it. This would be the way to go, man, having that be the last thing you feel and then nothing.’ I was like, ‘dude, that would be great, you know?’”

We didn't. We couldn't. When we were frightened, we could just walk away.

Part B/A, "Of Heroin and Other Demons."
Part A/B:
"One of Ten Things"