Billy Smith was in a bad, bad way.
“Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man,” he kept saying, a steady mumble, all the time shaking his head, gritting his teeth, running one hand through his greasy heavy-metal hair. “Oh, man, oh, man.”
“Why don’t we have a seat, Mr. Smith?” I said—I kept saying—but he couldn’t do it or wouldn’t. He told me to call him Billy, everybody fucking called him Billy, but that was all the sense I got out of him, at least at first. I sat watching him from one of his two folding chairs while he smoked and paced the tiny apartment in caged-tiger loops, trailing ash, stepping over and around Styrofoam food cartons and empty beer bottles. Billy didn’t look like any truck driver I had ever seen: lean and lank, with nervous, edgy eyes that flickered constantly into all corners of the room.
“You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry, man,” he said over and over in our first few minutes together, no matter what I asked, no matter where I tried to start. “You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “You bet. But listen. Billy.”
“You’ll tell them? Please?”
I couldn’t make him slow down. I couldn’t make him hear me. Billy was operating on some level beyond my reach. The air in the apartment was a low, thick funk, the smell of a scared little man, an addict who had run out of whatever it was that kept him bumping along life’s bottoms.
“I did what I could, okay? I’m sorry; things don’t always—I did my best, okay?”
He lit a new cigarette with the end of the one he was smoking and shook his head bitterly. “I don’t know why I ever got involved with all this mess. I really, surely do not.” Inhaling, twitching, pulsing. “It all just depends who’s on the gate, you know, and it was supposed to be Murph, but it wasn’t Murph, and there’s nothing I could do, so I’m sorry. Will you tell them? Will you?”
“Mr. Smith?” I said, real loud, then I slapped my hand down hard on the table and for whatever reason that caught him. He stopped moving. Rubbed his forefingers into his eyes, shook his head, then took a good look at me at last: no shirt, black pants, green wristband.
“What center you sneak out of?”
“I’m not part of the population here, Billy. I’m from the outside.”
“No shit?” His eyes went wide. “How’d you get in?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.” He rushed over to the window, slowly lifted one slat of the blinds, and peeked outside, clutching his chest. “Jesus.”
And he was off, a new tense orbit around the apartment. This man had all sorts of cosmic things going on in his mind, some stew of fear and regret and, unless I missed my guess, early-stage narcotics withdrawal.
“They’re coming,” he said now. “They’re fucking coming.”
“Who, Billy?”
“Bosses, man.” He gaped at me. “Bosses always coming, man. It’s not my house, you know what I’m saying? They can come in any time they want to. They got that right, okay? It’s my house, you know, but they own it. Rent comes right outta my check. Everything. Food. Water. Stove gas. Everything.” He had ramped up, he was talking fast, a million nervous miles an hour. “They can come in whenever. My man Jackie Boy in building C, he got jacked for porn. Black-girl porn, too, which they fucking hate. Tossed him right the fuck out. I knew a guy—Bolo, Bowler, Bowser, something—in FW 6, he had a bunch of coke in a Baggie in the toilet tank, you know? They canned his ass in a hurry. They woulda sold him offshore if he had a drop of nigger in him, shit you not.” Billy had made his way back to the window, and he risked another glance outside. “No, man, no: they can come in any time they want to. That’s why I’ve been so freaked out, you know?” He crossed the room in two long paces, sat down across from me, sudden and hard. “So let’s go, okay? What do you want to know?” Banged his fist on the table. “What do you want to fucking know?”
“You said something about Murph. Who’s Murph?”
“Fucking no one, man. Murph wasn’t there. He wasn’t fucking there.”