Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  “We went out for wood from the pile behind the warming hut,” Turk said. “All unsplit, so Delia got to work with the ax while I held the lantern.”

  “Delia did the splitting?” Roy said.

  “I was going to at first, of course,” said Turk, “but she took the ax.”

  “Delia never handled an ax in her life.”

  “Then she was awful good for a beginner,” Turk said. He got a look in his eye. “In fact, I distinctly remember mentioning it to you.”

  “When?”

  “At the rink one night. Between periods.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “No?”

  But surely he would have remembered that. “I must have thought you were joking,” Roy said.

  “Maybe,” said Turk. “The point is, the wind’s howling up there, snow flying all over the place, but we’re sheltered there behind the hut, in this quiet pocket, and she turns to me and says, ‘I could live this way forever.’ Meaning living rough, cabin in the woods, water from the stream, all that.”

  “That’s not her at all,” Roy said.

  “Her exact words—they made an impression,” Turk said. “And I told her she’d get bored pretty quick, start missing her job. That’s when she said she hated it. I asked why, but her answer didn’t make much sense.”

  “What was it?” Roy said.

  Turk screwed up his face. “Something along the lines of ‘when you see how things really happen, the fun goes out pretty quick.’”

  “What things?” Roy said.

  “That’s what I didn’t get,” said Turk. “Economics is at the other end of how the world works, right? The theoretical.”

  “Not always,” Roy said, thinking of the pineapple caper, as Paul Habib had called it—practical, hands-on. “But this kind of fits into the problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Delia’s job,” Roy said. “The Hobbes Institute seems to have disappeared.”

  “Disappeared like…?”

  Roy told his story—mistake in the obituary; Richard Gold and his cell phone; Consulate of Greece; Tom Parish; Wine, Inc.; Lenore; Sergeant Bettis.

  When he finished, Turk was silent for twenty seconds or so. Outside the window, the crow perched on Neanderthal Number Nineteen spread its wings wide. It didn’t take off, just stood there like that.

  “You’re saying the reporter’s death is somehow connected?” Turk said.

  “Not out loud till now,” said Roy. He was suddenly aware of his own voice, the strain in it, the tension; was it possible he sounded afraid?

  “That would be pretty extreme,” Turk said. His eyes went to Skippy’s drawing. “The kid drew this?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s the wine-store woman, for sure?”

  “Lenore.” Roy forced his voice back to normal. “Got to be.”

  Turk gazed at it for a moment or two. “One thing off the bat,” he said. “We can clear up this Hobbes business.” He swiveled around to his computer. “Spelling?”

  Roy spelled Hobbes. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Heard of Google, Roy?”

  “I’m an idiot,” Roy said.

  The crow folded its wings.

  Turk tapped at the keyboard; thick fingers, misshapen from being broken so many times, but the typing was quick and agile. “Sure about that spelling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Funny,” said Turk.

  “What?” Roy said.

  “No hits.”

  “Meaning?”

  Turk didn’t answer, tapped a few more keys. “Rephrasing,” he said. “Sometimes that…” He gazed at the screen, shook his head, typed some more.

  “What now?” Roy said.

  “Other…Nope.” He turned to Roy. “This Hobbes Institute of yours doesn’t seem to be on the Web.”

  “So?”

  Turk smiled. “Surf the Web much, Roy?”

  “No.”

  “Ever?”

  “You mean just sort of exploring around?”

  “Yeah. Surfing the Web.”

  Roy shook his head.

  “You’re missing something,” Turk said. “For example, let’s try R-O-Y V-A-L-O-I-S.” Tap-tap. “See?”

  Roy glanced over.

  “Twelve thousand four hundred twenty hits,” Turk said. “Probably some other Roy Valois mixed up in there, but still, not bad. The point I’m making is that anyone who’s anyone or anything that’s anything gets hits on the Web.”

  “Try Delia,” Roy said.

  Turk leaned over the keyboard. “Delia Stern,” he said. “Middle initial?”

  “She never used it.” Tap-tap.

  Roy got up, stood behind Turk, read over his shoulder.

  “One hit,” Turk said. He clicked on the link.

  “Would have thought there’d be more,” Roy said.

  A long list of names in alphabetical order appeared on the screen, Delia Stern, toward the bottom, underlined in red.

  “What is it?” Roy said.

  Turk scrolled to the top, revealing the heading: Former Employees, Economics Section, UNESCO.

  “UNESCO?” Roy said. “Is that the United Nations?”

  Turk nodded. “United Nations Education and something-or-other.”

  “The United Nations?” Roy said, his voice rising on its own. He read the heading again, three, four, five times. “But it’s wrong.” Almost unaware of what he was doing, he crowded Turk out of the way, took control of the mouse, scrolled back down.

  Delia Stern.

  “Why is her name underlined?”

  “The search engine does that,” Turk said.

  “Why in red?” he said.

  “Some programming thing,” Turk said, on his feet now. He touched Roy’s back. “Roy?”

  “What?” Roy said, scrolling back to the top to see that heading again.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “She didn’t even like the UN—she wrote a paper about it.” Roy hit the back arrow, returned to the original link. He clicked on that, landed again at the UNESCO list, unchanged in any way. He scrolled up, scrolled down, scrolled up, scrolled down, scrolled—

  “Roy?”

  They went for a walk, around the green. The snow from the storm lay in puffy white drifts, but slightly settled now, like day-old meringue. “Do you have a favorite?” Turk said.

  “Favorite?”

  “Of the Neanderthals.”

  Roy glanced up at Number Nineteen, saw the crow was gone. “No,” he said.

  “This one’s like an old friend to me,” Turk said. “Those huge shoulders and at the same time…”

  Turk paused, gazing up at Number Nineteen. Roy looked at him in surprise: Had Turk ever talked about his work before, outside the context of showings and money?

  “…at the same time,” Turk went on, “the way he’s turning, as though he’s heard something, maybe there’s trouble on the way, even for a giant like him.” Turk saw the expression on Roy’s face, misinterpreted it. “Maybe it’s just supposed to be I-beam shapes and stuff—I’m no art critic, that’s for sure,” he said, looking a little sheepish. “But lots of people feel the same about him, kind of attached. Like he’s watching over the town.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Roy said.

  Their eyes met. The sunshine, bright already and brightened more by all the reflecting snow, lit up networks of tiny lines on Turk’s face, lines Roy had never noticed before. He could picture how Turk would look as an old man, one of those sweet, round-faced old men with no regrets; then he thought: something I won’t see in real life.

  “I feel kind of bad,” Turk said, “like all this is my fault.”

  “All what?” Roy said.

  “The whole obituary thing was my stupid idea,” Turk said. “If I’d just kept my mouth shut, you wouldn’t be going through all this agitation.”

  “That’s crazy,” Roy said. “I’m not an ostrich—and I don’t need protecting.”

  �
��I know that,” Turk said. “But this is a time for looking out for yourself, not getting agi—not wasting your energy on some wild—some little mix-up that doesn’t really matter in the end.”

  “Little mix-up?” Roy said. All at once, he had no air, could hardly get the next sentence out. “Mind telling me what you think’s going on?” His voice, starved for air, turned thin and harsh, like a preview of how it would be, or would have been, in forty years or so.

  “I don’t know, Roy,” Turk said. “Somebody made a mistake, wrote down the wrong thing, it all got magnified, memory plays tricks on people—does it really matter?”

  “Memory plays tricks on people?” Roy said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Turk said.

  “Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute, not the UN,” Roy said. “It was real. I was inside. There was a goddamn fountain.”

  “Maybe it was part of the UN,” said Turk.

  “It was a think tank.”

  “Possibly funded by the UN?”

  “No.”

  “Then who funded it?”

  Had Roy ever known? “Private money,” he said. But he wasn’t sure.

  “Like who?” said Turk.

  “You mean the actual people?”

  “Yeah. Private money means actual people.”

  “I don’t know,” Roy said. He’d never thought much about the funding; and the realization that specific people might have put up the money was hitting him now, for the first time.

  Turk smiled, and, as though his mind had been following a parallel track, said, “You’re an artist, Roy.”

  Roy didn’t smile back. “So don’t get involved with this? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying there’s probably nothing to get involved in,” Turk said. “And if Dr. Chu pulls this—if it works out, then there’ll be lots of time for your investigation. But right now it’s about Roy. That’s my advice as lawyer and friend.” He glanced at Roy’s arm. “And speaking as the goalie for the Thongs, we need you back on the ice. How’s the arm?”

  “Fine.” In fact, it was aching in a dull way pretty much all the time. Angles changed in Roy’s mind, unbending a little: if the cocktail worked, he’d have time, years and years. Where was the flaw in that? “What about Skippy?”

  “He gets the best defense money can buy,” Turk said. “On the house.”

  “What’s the defense going to be?”

  “No reason we can’t use this robbery idea, insurance scam, getting the kid out of the house, all that,” Turk said. “We’ll just keep the wraps on this…this murky part.”

  So: no flaws left.

  Roy went home. Skippy was in the big room, sweeping the floor. The sun shone through the windows, lighting the dust motes he was raising. They swirled around Delia, made it seem like she was slowly rotating, in orbit. When you see how things really happen, the fun goes out pretty quick: Had she ever said anything like that to him? Roy had the strange feeling that he was in motion, too. He thought of the dark side of the moon.

  Sixteen

  They lay in the warming hut. Delia and Roy had one of the top bunks; the air was musty, close, a little strange, maybe from so many adults—eight or nine men and women—sleeping so near each other. Roy slid his hand up under Delia’s fleece, cupped her breast.

  She whispered in his ear: “No craziness, buddy boy.” But she encouraged his hand to stay where it was. Not by any movements or things like that: Then how? No telling. Roy just knew.

  The storm sang in the trees, all high notes. The woodstove crackled. Sounds of breathing, some light, some heavy, rose all around, as though the warming hut itself had lungs. Roy slept the deepest sleep he could remember, slept in fact like a baby, a dreamless, milky sleep.

  It was still snowing in the morning, but not hard. Everyone woke up looking rosy and a little confused; got their skis or snowshoes on and left without saying much. Roy and Delia were the last to leave. Delia took it all in, all three hundred and sixty degrees of a world gone white. Snow rounded everything—the cedars, the spruces, the hut. She took Roy’s hand, squeezed hard.

  “Meet me here, Roy,” she said. “If anything ever happens, meet me here.”

  “Like what?” Roy said.

  “Anything bad.”

  “Nothing bad’s going to—”

  “If we get separated, if you can’t find me.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Roy, I mean it,” she said; a world gone white, except for Delia’s dark eyes, intense and focused on him. “Meet me here.”

  Roy awoke. Daylight in the room, light that had lost its freshness. Quarter of ten? Right now it’s about Roy. But he didn’t like sleeping in, needed time every day with that early-morning light, light somehow untouched, if that made sense. He got up, went into the kitchen. Coffee was brewing and a note lay beside the pot.

  Hi Mr. Roy. Mr. McKenny called for me to come see him. Back later. Also—man who said his name was Krishna.

  Roy opened the fridge, saw not much. Was he hungry? No. But he went outside, got in the truck, drove down to Russo’s Meat and Groceries.

  “Got some nice New York strip today, Roy,” said Dickie Russo, alone in the store.

  “I’ll take a couple.”

  “How’s the arm?” Dickie played for the D-Cups, was probably the biggest guy in the league, also had a mean streak that only showed up on the ice, would have been pretty scary if there’d been bodychecking.

  “Coming along,” Roy said.

  “I almost scored last night,” Dickie said.

  “Barhopping?” Roy said.

  “Very funny.”

  Dickie never scored: a big guy with a weak shot. He wrapped the steaks in butcher paper. Roy wandered around the store, loading his cart with fattening foods.

  “Those tomatoes over there actually got some taste,” Dickie said.

  Roy took some. He went on to the apples, bagged half a dozen Macs, came to some pineapples. They had circular stickers on their sides, showing a smiling sun and a palm tree; the writing on the circumference read: Product of Venezuela. Roy stopped right there. This was something he’d never considered: that Delia’s project had ended up being successful.

  “You get your pineapples from Venezuela?” he said.

  “This time of year,” said Dickie. “They’re just as sweet as the ones from Hawaii and a lot cheaper.”

  “When did you start?”

  “Start what?”

  “Buying Venezuelan pineapples.”

  Dickie shrugged. “Long as I can remember.”

  “Ten years or so?” Roy said, trying to make calculations about how long it would take to get the plantations up and running.

  “Oh, longer than that,” Dickie said. “We had ’em when Dad ran the store and I just worked weekends.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” said Dickie. “Twenty, twenty-five years, maybe more. Venezuela’s a big-time pineapple producer, always has been. Try one—on the house.”

  Back in the kitchen—Skippy still gone—Roy ate double-chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream out of the carton. It had the feel of ice cream but tasted strange, like copper. He made himself take ten spoonfuls, as though it were medicine. There was nothing to hear except eating sounds, very quiet. Time slowed down, which had to be a good thing. Right now it’s about Roy. Hard to argue with that on a rational basis. So why didn’t it feel right? Because it’s about Roy meant being self-absorbed and passive, like…like what? Like an invalid. He had this disease, yes, but he was not an invalid.

  That was part one. Part two: this problem of Delia didn’t go away. In fact, it kept spreading, had now reached the pineapple story, the whole reason she went to Venezuela in the first place. Roy put the ice-cream carton in the freezer, moved into the big room. He gazed at those twisted helicopter blades high up on Delia. Thoughts he hadn’t had for years came back to him, thoughts of that long spinning fall,
green jungle coming up fast from below, Delia’s face at the window.

  Fact: Tom Parish had called with the news. Nothing could change that.

  Fact: Tom Parish had also been in the hearse that brought the coffin from D.C. to the old cemetery behind the Congregational church.

  Fact: Roy knew Delia, like no one else.

  Fact: The guitarist by the grave played “For All We Know.”

  Roy went down to the storage room in the cellar, where he’d kept Delia’s things—clothes, papers, all those shoes—for three or four years, finally forcing himself to get rid of everything. What seemed usable, he’d given to the Salvation Army. The papers—essays from college, backgrounders from work, financial documents—he’d burned in the fireplace in a private ceremony he’d also forced on himself. And among those financial documents: green pay stubs; he had a memory of them, browning at the edges and curling up in the flames. What he didn’t remember, probably hadn’t even noticed, was the printing in the payor line. But it must have read The Hobbes Institute; proof, if he had kept even one, that he could put before Sergeant Bettis. And did those stubs have bank routing numbers or some similar identification? Follow the money, as they said in so many cops-and-robbers stories. And what had Turk just told him? Private money means actual people.

  The storage room had rough, freestanding shelves on two sides. The shelves on one side held old things of his; those on the other side were bare. What if a pay stub, even one, had slipped out of a box, fallen free?

  Light flowed in from a ground-level window, high above. Roy got down on the dusty cement floor, hands and knees. He peered under the bottom shelf, saw nothing but dust balls, patted around anyway, hoping for the feel of crumpled paper. Nothing.