How it Starts
When Creeley started, she didn’t know a damn thing.
It was a way to make money.
Small risk. High reward. Just drive—that’s what Animal said. Drive, Creeley. Not too fast. Not too slow. No drinking. Maybe a little herb if you want to stay cool. So that’s what Creeley did. She smoked a bowl and drove to Grants Pass from Portland. Summer then, and the highways were filled with Subarus, yuppies headed to the mountains for a taste of what it was to sleep outside under the black, rainless sky. An easy trip—no snow or ice. Her first time picking up Animal’s product. A few hundred thou worth of cocaine, the bag so small it surprised Creeley. The whole payload in a gray Under Armour backpack that a redneck named Murphy jammed beside her Volvo’s spare tire.
She remembered Murphy’s weasel voice and cigarette breath. “I like these old Volvos. You could jump this fucker off a cliff and live to see Christmas.” He slammed the trunk and leaned against her car with his arms crossed. “I ain’t never seen you before. You Animal’s girl?”
Creeley scratched her sunburned neck and shifted from one foot to the other. Her flip-flops were wearing through, and she felt the heat of the parking lot asphalt through the cheap rubber. They were standing outside an auto body shop, the chemical smell of paint making Creeley want to sneeze or cough. What Creeley was: Thirty-nine years old, unwed, poor as shit, and somewhat proud to be a second-shift waitress at Walburn’s in downtown Portland.
But no, she was not Animal’s girl.
Creeley shook her head.
Murphy lit a cigarette, squinted at her. “Hey, look,” he said while blowing smoke through chapped lips, “I’m just asking. I don’t want to step on Animal’s toes.”
“Like, how?”
Murphy ran his tongue across his upper lip. He took another drag. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he had a neck tattoo—a small black raven—and a black spot of rot between his upper front teeth. Body slim and hard beneath a greasy white shirt—sculpted by labor and bad luck. He stared at her for a beat too long and said, “By asking you out. I don’t want to step on Animal’s toes when I ask you out.”
“I have a long drive tonight. Back to Portland.” Creeley looked away from him and stared at the slow-moving traffic on the roadway. Lifted pickup trucks and tractor trailers carrying uncut lumber. The sun was in the late stages of its arc and dense manzanita and pine glowed purple across the distant mountains. “And besides, I’m not dating anybody. I just got out of a relationship.”
Murphy stood there and finished his cigarette, flicked it at her. He raised his left eyebrow when the glowing butt missed Creeley’s unguarded feet. He shook his head and curled one side of his mouth. “Well, a bitch says she has to go—I ain’t got a mind to stop her. Have a good one,” he said, “and don’t get caught on the way back.” He shoved off from the Volvo and walked toward the auto body shop. Over his shoulder, he said, “See you next month, bitch.”
The treatment didn’t surprise Creeley. She expected it because being a woman meant being seen as a possession—men thought they deserved her. Or wished they deserved her. At her age, Creeley found this dynamic amusing. She’d stopped being afraid of men a few boyfriends ago, and now she steered clear of them. She’d given up on love.
Didn’t exist. Not for her.
Her relationship with men was controllable, under her power and her power alone. Like everything in her life, by-the-fucking-way. That was how she could take a job driving cocaine from one city to another without a second thought. It was how she climbed back into her Volvo—a casual smirk on her lips—and idled out of the parking lot and onto the highway.
But not everything was in her control.
She had a panic attack during the return trip. Forty miles outside town when she looked in the rearview mirror and spotted a Ford Explorer bearing down on her. It was dusk and she recognized the headlights and familiar silhouette of the make and model. Creeley looked at her speedometer, noticed she was eight miles per hour over the limit. They say ten over is safe, but not when you have a load of cocaine. She tapped the brakes and started breathing in uncontrollable bursts. The headlights got closer, and Creeley’s hands tinted white as she squeezed the steering wheel. She’d been through panic attacks before—a spat of mental fatigue during her late twenties. She had an abusive boyfriend and got sick of getting her ass kicked. One call and the cops decided Creeley’s face was proof enough to put him in the joint. She ran off and never looked back, but a year or so later she got a call from him at her restaurant job. There was no mistaking the voice and the rage. She hung up without speaking, but for months she fought off panic attacks every time a phone rang. So when, at seventy-three miles per hour on an Oregon highway, her breath quickened and her chest tightened like a crushed sheet of tinfoil, Creeley had enough experience to keep her head, to realize she was having a biological response to uncontrollable stimuli. She flipped on her blinker and turned into a gas station, pulled her car beside an open pump. The Explorer—not a trooper, in fact—sped by without slowing. She unlatched her seat belt and put a hand to her chest, tried to bring her breathing under control. By the time the pump attendant reached her window, Creeley could squeeze out instructions for him. A few minutes later she was headed north again, her eyes darting back and forth to the rearview mirror. And with the cruise control set at a hard sixty-eight.
Three more hours and she was parked outside Animal’s house in northwest Portland, her Volvo’s engine ticking as it cooled from the long drive.
Her first run—a success.
When Creeley started, she didn’t know a damn thing.
But she knew a whole bunch after finishing that first run. She knew all the risk was hers, that Animal didn’t give two fucks about what happened to her.
Nobody did.
She knew that staying cool was everything, and that her panic attack was a one-time event—Creeley was done being afraid and on the run in her life. Or so she thought.
When Animal put three grand in her hand that night, she made an instant, irrevocable decision.
Creeley Nash decided to be a drug runner.
