Charles Bowden - A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

an old preacher holds on to a bible a small child sings the water is wide I stand like a stone all alone outside their circle a faithless man, a fast left hand and a hole inside Ray Wylie Hubbard, "the sun also rises"

IT all happened. Everything takes place in an unnamed city that exists. The man who calls himself Joey O'Shay continues his life. But that is not his real name. Nor are the other names real. Nothing has been fabricated, no person is a composite. The deals occurred. As did the killings, beatings, shootings, tortures, betrayals, suicide, and love.

Joey O'Shay says, "She gripes at me. I ponder the situation having had a few. I tell her undercover work...working heroin with old Latinos... is like playing poker in a dingy old yellowish lighted 1920s hotel room... with a oscillating antique fan... with ghosts. She starts laughing. I tell her we all have ghosts... but they bring them hard to the table. No wild cards... straight poker. Old men including me ...dragging our past to play. No one pissed off...just playing what we're dealt. Nobody goes home... both me and the ghosts... we know it."

Deep Night

1E puts the gun down. It is close, his finger beside the trigger, the round chambered and ready. Then the man moving toward him hesitates, and the moment passes. Joey O'Shay's face remains passive, a blank as he reaches for the gun and sweeps it up, a blank as he lowers it and puts it down.

He says, "Never hesitate, never say a fucking thing, none of this hands-up shit. Just keep pumping them into him. If you want to live."

O'Shay looks at the departing man without expression.

The bluing has worn off the weapon.

The city does not sleep at this hour but becomes a zone of zombies, that time when the drunks have made it home, the sober have not yet risen, and the streets belong to the feral, to predators coursing its arteries for prey.

Deep night.

He cannot rest. The nights have always been hard but now with this major heroin deal bubbling along, he cannot sleep at all. When he was younger, he prided himself on not needing sleep. Now he is resigned to not getting sleep. He thinks of $5 million a week street value and then he does not sleep at all. Not out of greed but because of other hungers.

"One of my sons wrote this about me," he says. Then he slides the music into the dash of his truck. A voice knifes through the stale air:

Come take a walk inside my mind, Meet the ghost that lives inside Fallen friends and broken dreams That haunt me in my sleep.

come, smell, look, listen. There, the city spreads like an oil slick across the flat plain at the point where the rain begins to die. The past falls dead here before it is bornbladed, buried, and un-missed. Yesterday has no more meaning than last night's bar bill.

Everyone comes here for the money and no one knows why the city itself exists. The sky refuses to forgive, the sun seldom smiles. The air sags with fumes and towers rise and try to center the glistening slick with no tool but money. The talk is boasts, the lips thin, the streets a refutation of the talk. As in all such places, most people believe in the promise and most lose. In the dirt and grass and wind and tired rivers that lie beyond the city, the eyes tighten at its name and one and all say they hate the city. And yet they come regardless of their hatred. And so the city thrives and devours despite the words of anyone. Streams barely move across the flat earth and the waters laze and eddy with trash and time.

Smell the exhaust of millions laid out like a pure line for all to suck up through rolled hundred-dollar bills. The grass rank by the ditch, the green water licking the air, diesel fumes foaming out of the trucks, a woman walking briskly in heels and trailing musk, piss in the alleys, raw onion chopped and biting from the small food stalls, pecan smoke reaching out from under the brisket, ribs, and sausage, the fresh tang magically lifting from the beaten streets after a sudden spring shower, the smell of a

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child's hair, that scentless scent shared with fawns hiding in the tall grass, the faint scent of a child's hair slamming the face in the dark of the night. The gunpowder shredding the stale air and hanging therea noose and a gallows after the explosion has passed.

Look at the spires scratching the sky, squares, rectangles, spikes, all insulting the sun and the moon and the stars, houses hiding on the prairie, faces blank and safe, white, black, brown, vacant, nothing in the eyes but the city staring back, eyes careful, eyes eager, eyes always alert, eyes never trusting, the towers a gleam on the corneas, towers beyond reach, towers saying into the day and the night a yahoo and yodel to the prairie that fails around them. A woman's body rigid at a table as the waiter serves, his jowls sagging as he takes her in, a man leaning into the window and whispering fast words in code and his hand reaching for the hundred-dollar bill for the message, the idle of engines always at red lights never at green, the hope of Saturday night melding into the pollution of Sunday morning, always, always coming down, streets not mean but cold like the mortician who screws the coffin lid shut. Screams, laughs, alarms, wails, bottleneck strumming, quick picking, blue haze of a bar when everything briefly feels right and beckoning, soft music at two a.m. in the dark with the drink warming in the hand, whisk of tires down midnight streets, light creak of black leather as she walks her tight pants past, the thrumming of the fingers on the cleared desktop, the maps and plots where the money lies hidden in the ground, the lockstep as people move from their cages to their prisons, the towers rising and rising and saying join us or die.

Listen as the air brakes jack the ear on the big roads lacing the city and moving its blood like sludge, hear the horns, the chopperswhomp whomp whompoverhead on their secret errands, the shout of children racing through the back lanes, the

chirp and crackle of birds stalking the crumbs and garbage, the click of keys in the towers, the hum of overhead lights in the caves of work, the soft rich vowels of Spanish in the back rooms of businesses, the chords of a blues guitar asking for someone to consider the question, long sigh of a zipper down the back before the dress melts to the floor, the bark of angry dogs, the slippery song of knife sliding into flesh, blade warming itself with blood, the lights at night fighting the prairie, beams, shreds, slabs, towers, beacons of light that only seem to underscore the loneliness as people pull the shades in their houses and lock doors and scurry down darkened walkways and pray for dawn. The light golden in the fat wet air or glaring through the breath off the parched plains to the west, the choirs faltering toward heaven from the temples of Sunday, thunk of a shot glass after that necessary swallow, voices loud, braying, vowels licked and slurred, consonants like ice picks, voices clamoring for attention as the machines smother them with decibels, thrash of the tree limbs the night of the big wind, sirens, chimes, radios, televisions, bar bands, lap-dancing palaces, a singer saying the city "is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes," a preacher saying the city "is lost but must be saved," slap of shoes on dark streets, the audible click of eyes as the young men with guns lock onto a target, the silent prayer of her breasts falling from her bra, the faint promise, barely a whisper, of lipstick spreading on the lips, the shout of a hammer locking on a gun.