The Pill Thieves

Bob Pajich

Saturday afternoon in the cave
of my old man’s smoky apartment.
Everything he needs is packed
into this front room. He sleeps on a bed
in there, a bag of candy on the floor,
the TV so loud we can hardly listen, but we’re
not trying. We are both stoned.

The aluminum bang startles us
and he limps over to answer the door.
There is a lady a generation younger than my father
looking as ragged and worn as twine.

She already has two bills folded in her hand
for a few Vicodins the old man has stashed
in a bedside table. When I was a kid
I hid porno magazines in the bottom drawer
and they were still there the last time I looked.

He said he sells a few here and there,
is a little embarrassed. Some lady
cleans his kitchen for them. The rest pay.
He has too many, he says, and it’s true.

Every time he’s handed me a few pills
after twisting his arm with tales of back pain or
travel, I’d get the warning:

These are nothing to fuck with.
Then I’d watch him fade off in some TV dream,
a worm of ash replacing his cigarette in the tray.

He was more generous with friends
than he ever was with me. The pills for his hip and his brain
and the day dreams and the regrets and everything else
under his blazing sun. Vicodin makes
people go deaf and destroys the livers of alcoholics
faster than they could do it themselves.
They suck the water right out of the body
and turns shit into rocks.

The old man would often repeat stories
but told me this only once: Nanny cracked
a bone in her back the first summer
he was home from Vietnam.
They had her in a cast that stunk the moment
the ambulance drivers carried her ass in sideways
through the front door and into the living room
of that house in East McKeesport.

He immediately noticed the bennies tucked in
the pink fabric of Nanny’s hard make-up case.

“Those are diet pills,” Nanny said, when he held them up.
“They think I’m going to get fat in this cast.
I never took a diet pill in my life and I’m not going to start now!”

The old man’s heart must have leapt
and his hands turned to cold mush when he saw them
because he knew exactly how
they make him stay up all night,
grind his teeth, drink forever.

Everyone he knew was on pills and booze
and grass and powders, so later
he snuck the bottle into the kitchen and
shook a few into his hand. That went on
for about a week before Nanny got fat.

He rubbed his eyes and fought tears
as he told me this, caught like he was
by the woman who raised him,
the love child of her beautiful daughter.

“Bobby, Bobby, why’d you steal my pills?”

Humiliated, he called it, the flash of light through the
polished glass of the memory on his face. I didn’t
try to relieve his pain, couldn’t do it. I had three pills
tucked in the little pocket of my blue jeans.

I swiped them the minute he stepped into the bathroom.
I couldn’t wait to get home and take them with a beer chaser.
I should’ve confessed. I missed my slim chance
to show him we have this in common
to say: “See, you’re not so bad.”

Bob Pajich has a book of poems soon coming out with Low Ghost Press and writes for theterriblefan.com.