by John Niven
Lunchtime found Frank out by the pool, on a lounger, in shirtsleeves and shorts. Next to him on a little metal table he’d arranged mineral water, glass and novel. (The World According to Garp, a paperback copy he’d picked up in the drugstore. He’d remembered loving the book as a young man, but he was having difficulty getting into it second time around, he was having difficulty concentrating on anything.) He topped up his glass and lay back in the sun with thoughts of where he was headed, how many miles to drive tomorrow, how far up into him the cancer was now. Thoughts of where he’d been too, thoughts of Hauser, jerking and juddering as bullet after bullet hit him. Two girls, in their twenties walked along the side of the pool and established themselves opposite him with a pitcher of cocktails, cigarettes, magazines and ashtray.
No, it hadn’t been any kind of fun, back there in Oklahoma. But, like the man said, hopefully that had been the bitch of the bunch. He thought of The List inside, in his bag in the room. Five names on it.
Now (Hauser) four.
Just getting tougher from here. Better strap it on. Suck it up. Buckle down.
Frank was soon ignoring Garp again as he found himself thinking about the reason he was here in Phoenix, en route to Vegas: his first wife Grace.
After he’d left her for Cheryl, Grace had tumbled into a depression. During this depression she moved back in with her parents and gained weight, sitting on the sofa, alone, ploughing through potato chips, candy bars, ice cream. One night, chewing on a toffee, she pulled a filling out of her back molar. This was how she met Dr Leslie Roberts, DDS. Roberts refilled her tooth. Then he asked her out to dinner. Following a whirlwind three-month romance, he asked her to marry him. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea, Grace?’ Frank had asked her. ‘I mean, let’s be honest, you barely know the guy.’ Frank was told, in no uncertain terms, to go fuck himself. He was told that he’d lost the right to comment on such matters the moment he’d started fucking Cheryl. Fair enough, Frank thought. And Frank could see the logic: she wasn’t getting any younger, he had a good job, money in the bank, and he said he loved her. In the end, Frank figured, go with God.
It all started going wrong on the honeymoon, a trip to Palm Springs. He was rigid about his routines. He liked to drink. He liked to choose what she wore to dinner. What they ate. (Frank got all of this later.) What he didn’t like to do, it turned out, was work.
He had very few patients. He played tennis. He went on long drives. When he was at home he rarely came out of his den. Thinking she’d married a rich dentist, Grace soon found she was paying most of the household bills out of the small allowance her father, old Tony, still gave her, Frank’s alimony having stopped on her wedding day. Tony also staked the new couple three hundred thousand dollars so they could buy their dream home. (Leslie’s dream home. He had, as Frank’s mom used to say, champagne tastes and beer money.) Tony then invested a further two hundred thou into Leslie’s dentistry practice. He was looking to expand, open up a second surgery. It also became increasingly clear that, despite his speeches during their three-month romance, he had no interest in having children. Grace stood it for three years before she asked him to leave. He flatly refused. He was perfectly happy here and if she had a problem she could leave. Grace pointed out that her father had paid most of the cost of their home. He countered that the money was gifted to them as a couple. (Indeed, as he knew, it had been classified as exactly this for tax purposes and if she and her father wanted to now say that this was not the case, well, Leslie wouldn’t like to be the one explaining all that to the IRS.) After a couple of months of screaming and shouting about all this, Grace, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, moved back in with her parents for the second time.
Leslie established residence in the former matrimonial home and Grace and her father began expensive legal proceedings to get him out of the property, as well as trying to reclaim the 200K he’d sunk into Leslie’s ‘expansion of the practice’, an expansion that, mysteriously, had never happened. Something else soon became apparent. While Leslie Roberts DDS had shown next to no appetite whatsoever for dentistry, what he did seem to have an almost inexhaustible appetite for were complex, protracted legal battles. It turned out that one of his best friends was an attorney who specialised in divorce law. He countered all of Tony and Grace’s suits with suits of his own. He alleged that Grace had abandoned him. Tony and Grace retained one of the best firms in town, at eye-watering cost. After two years they ended up settling: Tony wrote off the 200K business investment and Leslie got half of the house. (The fucker even managed to keep all the contents. All of the furniture that Frank had left behind when he went off with Cheryl wound up going to this fucking dentist.) Leslie Roberts walked away with close to half a million bucks. After legal costs, what was left of Grace’s half was just about enough for a deposit on a one-bed apartment.
She settled into it and started drinking heavily. Died of cirrhosis a few years ago Frank heard. He’d loved her so much when they were kids. Leslie Roberts took his cash and moved to Vegas, where he allegedly prospered in real estate.
There was a postscript to all of this. Intrigued by hints Grace had made about her and Leslie’s sex life – or lack of it – Frank brought in a private investigator called Tab Leyland, a guy he used to know well during his days editing the paper. Leyland went to work. It turned out that Leslie Roberts had done all of this at least once before: used his dentistry front to meet a young divorcee – an Annabel Reed of Minneapolis – and then suckered her out of a chunk of money. Almost impossible to prove in court, however, Leyland cautioned. There was another kicker. During the course of compiling his report, Leyland spent a fair amount of time following the good dentist around. Tailing his car one night led him to a parking lot on a quiet stretch of lake road outside town. There, from a safe distance through a set of night-vision goggles, the investigator observed the subject, Dr Leslie Roberts DDS, enter another car belonging to an unknown male. An unknown male whom he began to lustily fellate. ‘He’s queer, Brill,’ Leyland told Frank. ‘Blows strangers in parking lots.’ Frank never told Grace. That fucking toffee, Frank used to think. If you hadn’t eaten that toffee then you wouldn’t have pulled that filling then you wouldn’t have …
The Computations.
But it hadn’t been the toffee that had caused Grace to wind up childless, broke and dead, Frank knew. It was him. He had broken her heart. For the sake of experiencing a slightly different variety of orgasm with a different woman, he had driven her into the arms of Roberts as surely as if he’d introduced them at a party. He thought about the lyric from an old song, something about how the love you take was about equal to the love you make. Well, he might be able to pay something back. For Grace. For old Tony Deefenbach.
One of the girls across the pool walked past him and took a lounger closer to Frank. She smiled a hello, but there was nothing in it, she was just moving into the sun. It was the kind of polite, neutral smile you’d give to children or old people. Frank had been an attractive man once. Was it just that he was older now that girls never looked? Or was it something more? Was it rats who could detect imperfections and sickness in potential mates? Could she – oiling herself now, having slipped in earbuds – detect the cancer twining through him? Age, cancer, whatever. The effect was much the same – nullifying. You were a sexual non-entity. Come to think of it – when had he last had a hard-on? He didn’t mind. It was kind of a relief actually. One less thing to worry about. Frank reached for the bottle of mineral water, poured himself another glass, and lay back, eyes closed as he gave free play to his thoughts.
What were the free thoughts of the dying Frank Brill, ex-husband to three women, father of two dead children and murderer of (so far) one man? He saw Hauser reaching towards him with a trembling, bloody hand and saying ‘Please …’ He saw himself with all the guys from editorial, clustered around the booth in the front at Macy’s Bar & Grill, laughing as they overloaded the waitress with orders of Martinis and pitchers of beer. He saw himself
hitting that great three-wood that time, absolutely pure, right out of the screws, flying nearly 230 yards, landing softly onto the green in two at the par five, then, naturally, missing the eagle putt. (‘You didn’t think you deserved that eagle, did you, Frank?’ his playing partner – Doc Wallace? Tom Hunter?’ – had said to him.) He saw Cheryl crying when he told her he was leaving her for Pippa. And he saw, as always, the primary images, the ones that rarely left him for long: the bodies of his children. Olivia in the morgue up in Fort Wayne, dead for three days, but looking so beautiful. The mortician had done a great job. Adam on his gurney in the emergency medical centre they’d set up in the aftermath of the shooting. (They hadn’t let him look at what was left of Pippa’s face – that last shot, to the base of the skull. He’d identified her from the birthmark on her hip.) His son, however, he … he just looked like he was sleeping. Like Frank could have done what he used to on the rare mornings when Adam slept longer than them, just slip into the bed next to him and nuzzle him until he woke up, saying groggily ‘Mmmm, Daddy …’ and putting his tiny arms around Frank’s neck.
He opened his eyes, squinting up into the glare of the afternoon sun. He could smell tobacco drifting. The girl was smoking and reading a newspaper, a supermarket tabloid. ‘IT’S WAR!’ the headline screamed, next to a picture of President Trump. Not an actual war this time, of course. Ivanka had declared war on drug dealers, backing mandatory death sentences for offenders caught dealing at certain levels, stressing her support for the Accelerated Justice Program her father had introduced, a way of getting more criminals onto death row faster. It was said that she didn’t really believe in it but that now, halfway through her first term, it was time to start riling up the base again, tossing them some red meat. They’d started dragging Dad out again at rallies, the old boy increasingly becoming a law unto himself, but loving it, all of it taking him back to the glory days of ten years before. Just the other week, in some arena in Houston, he’d slipped up and referred to a black man who’d been pardoned on death row as a ‘fucking nigger’. The crowd had gone wild, gasping and cheering and applauding. It had made headlines for a couple of days.
Frank thought about starting a conversation, seeing what the girl thought about the headline, if she thought about it at all. Then he remembered he was in Arizona – Donald had won the state by a few points ten years ago. Then by a 15 per cent margin in 2020. Two years ago Ivanka got 75 per cent of the vote. He sat forward and said, ‘Excuse me?’ She looked over. He waved. She took out one of her earbuds. ‘Hi. I was just wondering, about your newspaper there?’ She looked at it. ‘The headline on the front. How are you folks feeling about that here in Arizona?’
The girl turned back to the front cover and looked at it, surprised, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘About executing drug dealers?’ Her voice was high, almost shrill.
‘Yeah.’
‘I guess we’re for it.’
‘Right.’ Frank nodded.
‘I mean, we’ve got to do something.’
‘Yeah.’
‘If the president thinks it’s the way to go …’
‘You like Ivanka?’
‘Sure. She’s so beautiful.’
Frank nodded some more. ‘What if you get the wrong guy?’
‘Well, I guess that happens.’
‘You can’t make an omelette and all that?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’
‘What do yo—’
‘It’s just an expression.’
‘I never heard that before. That’s a good one.’ She smiled politely as she put her earbuds back in and lifted the paper back up, signalling that the conversation was over.
‘I had a daughter,’ Frank said quietly, to no one. ‘She’d be about your age. She died. They cut her inside and she bled to death in her sleep. In a motel room. I never got to say goodbye to her. We had our ups and downs but, you know, I loved her. I really did. She was my little girl.’
He could hear the tinny sound of the girl’s music, the water lapping in the pool, glugging as it slapped against the filter intake. Traffic on the highway. A propeller plane droning somewhere off in the distance. Frank talking, no one listening to him.
TEN
‘Las Vegas doesn’t care for out-of-towners.’
The drive from Phoenix to Vegas took five and a half hours, taking the 60 out of town, then picking up the 93 around Wickenburg. Then north all the way up through Mohave County until you cross the Colorado River into Nevada. You saw scrubland and desert and mountains and rivers and gas stations and water towers. Frank saw a coyote eating something dead by the highway near Boulder City.
He checked into the Desert Pines motel (‘Hot tub! Water beds!’) just after lunchtime and had a shower, washing off the sweat from velour seats. Nursing a coffee, with a towel around him, he took stock of his supplies situation, spreading it all out on the bed and doing an inventory. He’d been on the road for four days now and was down to two pairs of socks, one pair of boxers and a couple of clean T-shirts. He’d need a sweater too, was heading back north after Vegas and it would be colder. He checked the perishables.
Two cans of Diet Coke.
Half a carton of cigarettes.
Sixty .22 cartridges.
Ten 9mm cartridges.
He’d need more 9mm, for Hauser’s stolen Glock. He was also out of shaving cream and deodorant.
In America, when your shopping list was as diverse as toiletries, soft drinks, cigarettes, clothing and 9mm ammunition, there was only one place to go …
* * *
Frank parked, got out of the car and looked up at it, glittering in the hot afternoon sun, towering above him, casting shadows all around, huge, biblical. It might have been the biggest SupraMart Frank had ever seen. He left the desert heat of the parking lot, walked into the artificial cool of the temple (‘Welcome to SupraMart, welcome to SupraMart,’ the greeter intoned over and over, like a Krishna chant) and began to consume.
In the clothing section he chose a couple of check short-sleeve shirts, two three-packs of white crew-neck T-shirts, a jumbo pack of black socks, two three-packs of boxer shorts, a pair of chinos and a navy lambswool sweater. Frank marvelled, not for the first, but possibly for the last time, at all the things America needed.
The endless number of microwaves, blenders, toasters and TVs. All that milk. All those meats. Cheeses. How many different types of Cheddar could humanity need?
Trying to find the toiletries, he took an accidental detour down the baby aisle and spent a moment in front of the towering jars of food, diapers, teething rings, formula, toys and pacifiers. Man, how did anyone even manage to raise a baby fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, before all this shit was invented? Tears streamed down Frank’s face as he stood there, remembering his children when they were tiny. No one paid him much attention. Just another nutty old man in Las Vegas. Probably had a bad night at the tables. This was the good thing about going crazy in America – there was always someone way ahead of you. Driving over here he’d passed a beggar who’d been eating an onion like you would an apple.
Pulling himself together, he got his shaving cream, his deodorant and his Cokes and headed over to sporting goods, where, behind all the camping and fishing stuff, he could see the wall of matt-black and nickel-plated rifles and the glass cases full of handguns, looking like specimens of an exotic, deadly species pinned out in some museum.
Like several of America’s major supermarkets, SupraMart had got a bit jittery about firearms a few years back. In 2020, after the public outcry following the Coolidge High shooting, they had issued a statement:
In light of recent, tragic events SupraMart are raising the age for purchase of firearms and ammunition from 18 to 21 years of age. We will also no longer be retailing so-called ‘assault rifles’, including the AR-15. From the end of this year we will cease to sell handguns, bump stocks, high-capacity magazines and similar accesso
ries. We will be requiring customers to pass a background check before purchasing any firearm. We must keep our children safe.
Now, six years on, things had returned to normal. Had indeed tipped the other way. In 2022 a series of Tweets by the president (‘Failing SupraMart thinks it knows whats best for you and you’re family. Un-American and BAD!’) led to a sustained boycott by patriots that seriously dented SupraMart’s profits and ignited a shareholder panic. The chain issued another high-minded statement …
We at SupraMart pride ourselves on listening to our customers. We are pleased to announce that effective immediately we will return to selling modern sporting rifles, including the AR-15. We will be lowering the age for purchase of firearms and ammunition from 21 to 18 years of age. We will also once again be selling handguns, bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. In compliance with new federal laws we will no longer require customers to pass a background check before purchasing firearms. God bless America!
Frank looked up at the wall of holsters, magazines, speed-loaders and other accessories. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ A sales kid, materialising behind him.
‘Yeah, uh, I need some bullets for a Glock.’
‘Which model, sir?’
‘Uh … shit, I don’t … this one.’ Frank pulled the pistol out of the waistband of his pants and sat it on the counter. Even a decade ago this would have been bad news. But these days Nevada was full ‘constitutional carry’ (‘the legal carrying of a handgun, either openly or concealed, without a licence or permit’) and the kid didn’t bat an eyelid.