Spiked by Mark Arsenault Page A

the nod.” She saw Eddie was puzzled. “He shot up this morning. Still on his wake-up hit.”
    â€œHeroin?” Eddie asked.
    â€œA rose by any other name….” She stopped in mid-thought and pointed down the catwalk. “Leo, here comes Fat Boy.”
    A calico cat trotted along the ledge. He was fat, all right, maybe eighteen pounds. The man grabbed a box of cat food and shook it. The cat hustled on stumpy legs. “Fat Boy’s a regular,” the woman explained. “He loves Leo. They all love him. We don’t eat sometimes but those cats always do.” She rolled her eyes at the man, but she smiled, too.
    The cat rubbed its bulk against the man’s shin and lifted its chin so he could scratch its neck.
    â€œFat Boy trades his affection for food,” the man said. “That is how he stays fat. Not all of his kind has learned this.” He dumped a pyramid of dry food on the cement. The cat nosed into it.
    Eddie had the fire crackling again. They sat and talked. The man and woman who had saved him from the canal held hands. Her name was Gabrielle, he went by Leo, and this ledge was their home. They were part of a community of heroin addicts, a dozen or so, who often stayed under this bridge, though rarely more than a handful at a time. They had found Eddie in the water by chance, they told him. Ice had narrowed the swath of running river in the canal, and Eddie’s ice floe had become lodged.
    â€œHow long have you lived here?” Eddie asked.
    Gabrielle answered, “Since we came from Montreal.” To Leo, she said, “What? About eighteen months?”
    â€œYou don’t have to stay here, do you?”
    She shrugged. “Heroin is a full-time job. We can’t pay rent.”
    â€œWhat about the homeless shelter?”
    â€œThey got big hearts down there, they do,” she said. “They check on us here sometimes, bring us coffee and they’ll give us clothes or a new blanket. But it’s a dry shelter. You can’t shoot up there, and they don’t let you in if you’re hooded.”
    â€œHooded?”
    â€œYou know—if you’ve been using.”
    â€œSo you’d rather stay here, under this bridge, so you can shoot up?”
    They said nothing because the answer was obvious. Eddie pressed the point. “You don’t have a home, you don’t have heat or a phone. Christ—I don’t see a toilet under here.”
    Gabrielle looked sweetly on the naive stranger in her home. “That’s smack,” she said. “It knows everything you don’t have. And that’s what it gives you. Every time.”
    Eddie looked to Leo for confirmation. He nodded. “My wife tells it correct.”
    â€œYou two are married?” Eddie asked, surprised.
    â€œIn the eyes of everyone except the law,” Leo said. He grinned and kissed her cheek.
    By questioning them, Eddie got their biographies. Leo was born in Iran, moved to Paris at fifteen and studied philosophy as an undergraduate. His parents died young, and he moved to Montreal in his mid-twenties for graduate studies. There, blind drunk in the men’s room at a German-style pub on St. Catherine Street, he snorted heroin off the book jacket of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy.
    Leo shook his head at the irony. “I had a backpack full of text with me. Plato, Kant, Hume, Bertrand Russell. But I chose Nietzsche.” He shrugged. “I did not even like Nietzsche.”
    Leo dropped out of school within a year of starting his habit, and took a job as a sausage cart vendor. His wages went to heroin.
    Gabrielle first used heroin with an old boyfriend in Montreal, in her first year of nursing school. He dumped her after she was expelled for stealing needles. She met Leo at the sausage cart, after a Canadians hockey game.
    â€œHe was so shy,” she said. “He couldn’t look any of the girls in the eye, and such a