Outside the airplane hanger, Jimmy watched Eric suck on a joint. He exhaled a plume of smoke, and handed it to him. They stood in the lee of the wind coming down from the mountains, but grit still blew around, stinging their eyes like microscopic pin pricks.
If anyone deserved to be told what had gone down between him and Jeannie, Jimmy thought, it was her brother, who he'd known for longer anyway. Some things, women just couldn't understand the way another man would. He toked until the end flared bright orange. While holding the smoke deep in his lungs, he mentally hedged around the subject, trying to find the right angle to approach like he was casing various entrances of a building he planned to rob. Not that he'd ever done any such thing himself. It was just another thing his daddy had taught him in lieu of actual life skills like dealing with girls. Especially grown up girls.
Neither Jimmy nor Eric had said much of anything since they'd been out here and now it was a standoff as to who would talk first.
"Surprised to see you here tonight." Eric was the one to break. "Thought you'd told Frank to fuck off the other day."
"I'm always telling Frank to fuck off." Jimmy kept his breath held in as he passed the smoking nub back. He blew out a long plume, savoring the head rush. Why didn't he do this stuff more often. Oh yeah, because he couldn't afford it, that's why. He could barely afford to eat or cover his cell phone bill. Not that he ever had it on him when he needed it. "Once upon a time I liked the idea of living better than being dead. Now I realise I'm fated to follow my dad's footsteps and I'd spent so much time trying to avoid them, I failed to see I was walking straight down that same path."
"Yeah?" Eric's voice hitched as he tried not to release any of the smoke he'd inhaled just yet. The weed was some weak shit he'd grown himself. Jimmy wasn't the only one who'd spent the past year flat broke. "I've heard stories about your dad. Wasn't sure if they were true or not."
"My daddy was a good man, just on the wrong side of the law––not violent or nothing. My momma though, she was the devil. She claimed she had no idea what she was getting into when she married him, but that was a lie. She knew. She encouraged it. She only gave him the boot once the money started drying up, when he wanted to go straight. And guess what? To get her back, he decided to go for one more job knowing full well how dangerous it would be. She didn't care one way or the other so long as someone else paid her mountain of credit card bills. He taught me how to crack safes and run bets and all kinds of other shit but never how to drive a car or shave my face."
"My dad was one of them prepper types." Eric chuckled. "Thought the end of the world was coming, which is why Jeannie and I spent some of our childhood in the woods and the rest in towns so small they were barely a cluster of houses around a crossroads. I thought we came pretty close with that subprime crisis last year. I read something, you know. According to some guy in this think tank, do you know what saved the entire global economy from collapse? I'm talking the whole world's financial system."
"What?" Jimmy shrugged, annoyed they'd gone off topic.
Eric took a long toke, the heater crackling and burning bright. Somehow a fresh joint had appeared without Jimmy noticing. "Drug money. There was just enough cash stashed in offshore accounts to keep the world turning and hold off Armageddon. This, according to a guy at either the IMF or the OECD."
Okay, that was funny. Jimmy choked on a laugh and shook his head. "Goddamn, the old bastard was onto something. He always said three things make the world go around: drugs, sex, and bullshit."
Eric crouched and rolled the fraying ashes off the joint onto a rock embedded in the dirt. The guy still couldn't roll for shit, even with daily practice. "You know, Jeannie's a lot more forgiving than you think."
Now that Eric had raised the topic, Jimmy realized Jeannie was the last thing he wanted to think about. He wanted to keep this nice buzz going as long as he could. He helped Eric stand back up. "I was stupid to think I had a chance to begin with."
"Are you kidding me? I keep saying, she's crazy about you!"
"If she's crazy about me, she's crazy period. She deserves better, someone who can walk that straight and narrow ... Someone better than me, someone with their shit together, who can keep it together." He took one final drag of the spliff and held it deep in his lungs while he gesticulated, the scene of his last moments on Earth playing in his mind. "So long as at the end, she holds my hand, kisses my forehead and tells me she loves me ... that's how I'm gonna go. Blood leaching out of holes in my chest, sweat dribbling from my brow as I breathe my last, not even able to say a word to her."
"That's fucked, man."
"See? Proves my point." Jimmy threw down the end of the joint and mashed the ember into the sandy dirt with his foot. "Aw, shit, I'm dead inside anyway."
Eric brought a flask out of the breast pocket of his oversized suit jacket, took a swig, and as Jimmy reached his hand towards it, he put it away again. "You're cut off. Getting too emo on me."
"Now you see why I wrecked things with Jeannie," he said. "I'm too fucked up for her. For anyone decent."
They headed back inside and Eric slapped his back. "Dude, you gotta cut all this victim talk. Seriously, that's what's killing you. And annoying the living fuck out of everybody else. Your life is what you choose to focus on and there is nothing else to it."
Jimmy bristled, not at the words so much, as to how true they were. Yeah, life had dealt him a shitty hand but he hadn't been born in some war zone or third world slum run by drug lords where people didn't even stand a chance of getting the hell out. And yet, now that he was set on this path, he couldn't see straying from it until he reached the end.