Free Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess Page B

provided only so much interference. Her stomach grumbled without hunger. At the rumpus she had pounded down two cups of coffee, but now in her hands she was holding an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup, her prop for today’s role. Tevis and Gonz kept their own empty cups in the plastic holder beneath the radio, which had been turned off so the uncles could more effectively argue. Not about—are you kidding?—the efficacy of the methadone clinic system, or rehabilitation versus incarceration, or Clinton versus Obama, but whether Puffy should be allowed to piss into a plastic bag.
    “I’m telling you,” said Gonz in the interest of mayhem, “it’s not good to hold it. Really. That’s how people end up on dialysis.”
    “Dialysis!” Puffy pleaded.
    “Forget it,” Richie said with a cell phone against his ear, on hold with an office-supplies wholesaler so he could replace the buy board with a better buy board, a magnetic one in a more tasteful wooden frame. “It’s unacceptable,” he told Puffy. “Seriously, I’m dead ass here. Just … just think of something else.”
    Puffy, who misunderstood the suggestion, said, “I could go in the Dunkin’ Donuts cup, but I’m not sure it’d be big enough.”
    Claustrophobic, per usual, she powered down her window, but Tevis powered it back up from the front. No cool air allowed. They needed to look as sweaty as smack addicts when they reached LIC’s Narco Freedom.
    “Cup or bag,” she said, “either way, I’m a definite no.”
    Tevis also claimed to be a definite no, but then why’d he keep driving past all the gas stations? There wasn’t any time to stop, he said. The clinics shuttered around noon, but by nine o’clock most of the for-profit heroin dealers would have moved on to their second shift outside NA meetings. Tevis pushed the odometer’s needle past forty, as far as traffic would allow. After Narco Freedom, they would have to drive to the methclinic at Elmhurst Hospital in the 115 Precinct, to appease Sergeant Hart and his investigators, who were all still annoyed she’d left the Martys’ apartment empty-handed. Usually urgency didn’t start building until closer to the end of the month, but with that nonmagnetic, aluminum-framed board hanging on the rumpus’s wall, everyone felt added pressure to clock out the day with a buy. After Elmhurst, they’d go to the Psychiatric and Addiction Recovery Services center in Rego Park. Then a storefront meth clinic on Archer Avenue. But hold up, one thing at a time: they needed to argue about the fastest way to get to Narco Freedom. Jump on the Grand Central Parkway, the most direct route? Or stay on Northern Boulevard, so as to bypass JFK traffic?
    It sounded like water spraying the shower curtain, Puffy pissing into that plastic bag.
    “Unacceptable!” Richie said.
    “Shh,” Puffy said. “You’re gonna make me spill.”
    It seemed silly not to at least take a peek. And there it was: circumcised, thin and long, without any stage fright. She was unimpressed by all this, but a part of her, a pinkie-size part of her, appreciated his willingness to treat her as an equal. Was that insane? Probably, but she grew up with a sister, no brother, spent half her life in a house with three women. She imagined that if she weren’t here in the car, there’d be four dicks in one bag, with Gonz potentially shitting into a Pringles can.
    “A satin finish?” Richie cooed into the phone. “Now is that on the whiteboard itself or just the frame?”
    Gonz also had his phone out, not to talk to anyone, but to take a picture with the camera. She turned away from them all to stare out the window. Go ahead and crop her out of this photo. Unseen, but close by behind Northern Boulevard’s billboards and gas stations, her father was probably standing on the artificial putting green in his auto-repair shop, practicing his stroke, a busy Big Boss himself. Up ahead, under a broken traffic light, an Indian patrolman blew softly on a