We Live in Water: Stories

by Jess Walter

  I HAVE this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole.

  We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

  That afternoon, I walk. The sun presides over crowded sidewalks; streets course with stretch hummers; shadows reach from the big facades fronting all those giant, bland block-and-steel boxes. Beneath the streets, gladiators sharpen their spears; lions await.

  I MEET Bobby in front of the New Frontier and give him five hundred dollars. I offer to give him more, but he says it’s all he needs. In fact, he tells me, he could’ve easily made it home without the loan. I don’t doubt it. I imagine him walking across the desert, sucking water from cactus roots, and cooking cockroaches in his boiling saliva.

  I tell him that I found Lisa. That she’s fine, that she isn’t a prostitute, that the picture on the snapper card was a mistake. I also repeat what she asked me to tell him: that under no circumstances should he try to contact her.

  Good, good. Very good. He acts as if he didn’t hear this last part. How’d you find her, anyway?

  I tell him I looked in the telephone book.

  He shakes his head admiringly, as if I’ve just described some kind of global search involving advanced GPS and DNA databases. See, he says, that’s exactly why I brought you in on this one. This one: as if it’s one of our many cases together. Then he asks, How’d she look?

  I promised not to tell him about the baby. Fat, I say.

  He nods and looks off into the distance. Flexes. Inhales. Wrinkles his brow. He has five more days before he has to report. There are certain people you feel like are supposed to be in your life forever, you know? Like, there’s been some mistake . . . then he sighs. What do you say we go get that wife of yours back?

  She’s getting remarried, I tell him for at least the third time.

  Oh. He nods. What are you gonna do now?

  Stick and move, I say.

  THEN BOBBY RAUSCH smiles and stares down the strip. We are standing outside the New Frontier, beneath that eighty-foot sign. The street shimmers. Sweat beads Rausch’s head like a newly waxed car. He looks up at the sign. They always tear down the good shit, he says. It’s always the end of the legacy, ain’t it?

  I tell him I can’t argue with that.

  Then Rausch holds out his hand. I’m not thrilled to touch it after all the pleasure he’s given himself, but I take it and he pulls me in tight for a hug. We did it, man. They said the Dream Team couldn’t do it, but hell if we didn’t come down here and find her.

  We say good-bye then, and I start back down the strip. The snappers flick their cards at me: A girl in your room in forty minutes!

  GOD, I ache for those girls.

  A LONG BLOCK AWAY, I glance back. Bobby Rausch is still standing there, beneath the New Frontier sign. He is a head taller than the crowd around him, and for just a moment he is framed against the brash, spread-out skyline, staring off, maybe at something beyond the strip, beyond bikini bull riding and dirty-girl mud-wrestling, beyond stripper cards and the last cowboy and archaeologists and his generation’s war, beyond even the myth of an $8.95 steak-and-shrimp dinner. And suddenly Bobby Rausch is moving again, not with our old meandering strip-stroll, but with real purpose, perhaps with the stride of a changed man, a man headed for a new realm of honest insight and humility, a man finally making his way out of this frontier of stale and unfulfilled dreams.

  Or maybe he’s just headed for the Flamingo.

  The Brakes

  TOMMY DROVE away from Ken’s funeral, kid next to him on the bench seat, kicking at the air in front of the glove box.

  —Do you gotta do a funeral when you die?

  —No.

  —If nobody’s gonna be there but four people they shouldn’t do one.

  —Army paid for it, Tommy said.

  —Did you like him?

  No, Tommy thought. —Yeah, he said.

  —Were you sad when your mom married him?

  Yeah, Tommy thought. —No, he said.

  —Then your mom died. It wasn’t a question so Tommy didn’t answer it. The kid’s sneakers kept kicking air. —If Jeff marries Mom he’d be my stepdad.

  —Yeah.

  Tommy could only get the morning off, so he brought the kid back to work with him. —I’ll get you some popcorn, and you can watch the TV.

  —Okay, the kid said. Tommy pulled in back of the garage. The old racist lady’s Lincoln was jacked up in bay three.

  Inside, Miguel was popping lug-nuts with the pneumatic. Tommy looked over, through the window into the bullpen. The old racist lady sat staring out the window with a cup of coffee. Hunched back. Hair like old wire. She watched Miguel suspiciously. She saw Tommy through the window, sat up, and waved.

  Miguel nodded at the raised car. —Tires and brakes, dude. It’s slow as shit so Andy said to give her the works.

  Tommy wiggled into his coveralls.

  —Where’s he at?

  —Andy? He went to get Taco Bell. I don’t think he knew you was gonna be back.

  Tommy went into the bullpen, the kid a step behind. —I’m glad you’re here, said the old racist lady. —That wetback makes me nervous.

  —Mrs. Gerraghty . . .

  —Before my husband died, he said, Always take care of the tires and brakes. Don’t ever let them put you on junk.

  Tommy glanced out the window toward bay three, where Miguel was watching him.

  The old racist lady leaned forward as if sharing a secret. —I used to go to the garage by our house. But they have a colored fella working there.

  —I know. You told me.

  —Bad enough having a beaner work on it, but Carl would die all over again if I let a nigger anywhere near the Lincoln.

  Tommy felt the kid flinch next to him. He grabbed the boy’s hand. —Mrs. Gerraghty, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.

  She laughed. —Oh, I don’t mean anything by it. They call each other that, you know.

  Tommy walked his kid over to the popcorn in the back of the waiting room. —She’s a stupid old lady.

  Kid nodded. —We did a thing about Martin Lufer King at school.

  Tommy got him settled in front of the TV. He put it on the public station. Puppets. Then he went to the counter. Her work order was sitting there. Andy’s handwriting. Eight hundred sixty bucks. Goddamn. Tommy walked over and sat next to her. —Mrs. Gerraghty, remember you came in last week, and I said you didn’t need tires?

  She looked past him, into the bay. —I wish you would do the work, or the other nice white man.

  —You said you have a niece, right? Over in Post Falls?

  She made a face. —My sister’s girl. She’s fat. Her daughter looks like a mongoloid.

  —You were going to bring me her phone number.

  —She eats enough for five. I have no respect for that.

  —What about her last name? You know that?

  —She married this man Geller. I think he’s queer. No wonder they had a mongoloid.

  Tommy went to the counter. He tried information, and on the second Geller in Post Falls, Tommy got the woman’s niece. —Your aunt’s here buying tires.

  —Senile old bitch, the niece said. Then she hung up.

  Andy pulled up in back then. Tommy walked out to meet him. Andy got out of his truck with two bags of Taco Bell.

  —Andy.

  —Sorry, man. I didn’t know if you’d ate or not.

  —Let’s just rotate her tires, Tommy said.

&n
bsp; —Who, old racist lady? He smiled.

  —Come on. It’s only been three weeks. Six since we did her brakes.

  And three weeks before that, Tommy thought. And six weeks before that. Of course, they didn’t really do the brakes. Just jacked the car and popped the wheels. Swung hammers and pretended to use screw drivers. Sometimes all three of them pretended to work on it together, grabbing random tools, making faces to each other, turning their backs to laugh, old racist lady watching from the bullpen.

  The three-week-old tires Andy sold online.

  —It’s enough, Tommy said.

  Andy waved him off, walked past him with the Taco Bell bags.

  Tommy was surprised to hear himself. —I’ll call the cops.

  Andy stopped. He turned. Gave a little smile. Took a half step toward him.

  —Dad, can I turn it to Nickelodeon?

  They both turned and saw Tommy’s kid standing in the doorway. In his good jeans and shirt for the funeral.

  They stood there. Andy. Tommy. Tommy’s kid. Tommy aware of his own breathing. His kid’s eyes on him. He must look so big from down there, Tommy thought. The way Ken did, fucking Ken, holding a beer or a belt, always pissed at Tommy’s mom, at him sometimes, at the whole goddamn world mostly. Tommy stood his ground.

  Finally Andy scratched his head, sighed, and walked to the door of bay three. He yelled to Miguel. —Rotate her tires. Fluids and belts.

  He held up one of the bags. —And your fuckin’ food’s here, Miguel.

  Andy gave Tommy a sideways glance as he walked back into the bullpen. —Good news, Mrs. Gerraghty. Your brakes look okay after all.

  Tommy took his kid back to the TV in the waiting room. Turned it to Nickelodeon. There was a cartoon about this little genius kid. There was a cartoon like that when he was a kid, but Tommy couldn’t remember the name of it. He felt tired. Slumped next to his kid on the couch. Looked down on the cow-licked swoop of the kid’s hair.

  —You know it don’t matter who your mom marries, right? I ain’t goin’ nowhere.

  The kid looked up. He offered his dad some popcorn.

  The Wolf and the Wild

  1

  THEY FANNED out in the brown grass along Highway 2 like geese in a loose V, eight men in white coveralls and orange vests picking up trash. In the center, in the hump between lanes, Wade McAdam found himself explaining futures trading to a drug dealer named Ricky.

  “Wait,” Ricky said. “So you’re just betting on whether the price goes up? You need a fuckin’ finance degree for that?” He grabbed something with his trash-picker and showed it to Wade: a shit-filled diaper. Then he flicked it back into the weeds. “Sick.”

  Wade snagged the diaper and put it in his bag. “Yeah, but the wheat, the stock, the energy, whatever—it never changes hands. The thing is beside the point. You’re selling a contract. You’re selling the instrument itself—”

  “Wait, what?”

  Wade shielded the sun from his eyes. “See, the underlying asset can be anything: a hedge fund, an interest rate. Hell, you can sell futures on futures. The thing doesn’t matter. All you’re doing is spreading risk. You make money no matter what.” Wade smiled at the irony of saying this while wearing a prison jumpsuit. “You know, within a certain algorithmic range.”

  “Goddamn it, Beans, you totally lost me.”

  Wade didn’t know why the men called him Beans.

  Ricky grabbed a Taco Bell bag with his picker, flicked it into his garbage sack. “You’re like them scientists on TV explaining black holes. More you talk, less I get.”

  2

  AT GROUP, Wade just listened.

  Ricky always got emotional in the big circle. He twitched and wept and said he could see the “patterns I been chained to my whole life.” The social worker in the wheelchair asked if that meant Ricky was “ready to go straight now.”

  “Oh fuck, definitely,” Ricky said.

  After group Wade asked Ricky if he was really going to quit dealing drugs.

  “Oh, that ain’t what I’m here for, Beans,” Ricky said. “I diddled my neighbor’s kid.”

  3

  WADE DIDN’T even know they still made Fanta, but there were two empty cans in the weeds along the highway.

  “How’d you get caught, Beans?” Ricky asked.

  Wade paused over a cigarette pack. Pall Malls. Did they still make Pall Malls? This stretch of highway was a time machine. “One of the partners had a girlfriend,” Wade said. “Anna. After his wife found out, I started seeing Anna. Next audit, my partner pointed out some internal controls that I’d let slip. Trust-account funds that had mingled into my . . .” Wade stopped and stared up at the sky. “Black holes,” he said.

  “How much you take?” Ricky asked.

  Wade looked back down at the sandy tufts of grass along the highway, at the line of orange-vested men with their garbage-picking spears and trash-bag shields. “Not enough,” he said.

  4

  ANOTHER TIME Ricky said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Beans. Everybody up in this shit for some kind of greed or fucking.”

  5

  WADE’S LAWYERS said they could get him transferred back to Seattle for community service, but he didn’t want some old client seeing him cleaning pigeon shit in Pioneer Square. His kids wanted nothing to do with him. And until the divorce was finalized, he didn’t even know which house to go to.

  No, he said, he’d just do his community service in Spokane.

  At the hearing, Densmore got the judge to agree to shorter probation in exchange for a steeper fine and Wade’s involvement in a community-service pilot program. Wade had never worked with the criminal side of the firm before; Densmore was crudely efficient, brusque even, as if this business was beneath him. The hearing took all of four minutes. It was between the lawyers. While they talked at the bench, Wade looked down at the white socks he had on beneath the suit Densmore’s secretary had brought for him.

  “We’ll see you back in Seattle in six weeks,” Densmore said when it was over. He closed his briefcase. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to try to catch the four PM flight.”

  Back at Geiger, Wade looked for twitchy Ricky to say good-bye, but apparently he’d been caught flashing one of the female prisoners on the federal side of the fence and shipped back to the sex farm at Shelton.

  6

  REAL ESTATE was practically free in Spokane. Wade had known that, of course, but it seemed somehow profane to be standing in a fully furnished, two-bedroom downtown loft that went for half the monthly price of his sailboat moorage. He walked from room to room, the property manager a step behind. She explained that Wade would need to provide “bank statements, pay stubs, references, that sort of thing.” In the kitchen, Wade used her laptop to call up his personal checking account. The property manager said not to worry about the references and the pay stubs.

  She suggested a nice restaurant a few blocks away, and Wade went alone, took a seat at the bar. He had a scotch and water, his first drink in sixteen months. He closed his eyes as he drank it. His counselor at Geiger had once asked him if booze wasn’t perhaps “the first knot in your life.” How to answer something like that? It was knots all the way down.

  “Want me to pour the next one straight down your gullet?” the bartender asked.

  Wade looked down at his empty glass, then up at the bartender. She was in her thirties, slight and attractive, with short black hair. She smiled at him, a little warily. Then she filled him up again.

  “No sense dirtying a glass if you’re going to inhale it,” she said.

  He tipped it, barely let the whiskey touch his lips, then put it down.

  “Attaboy,” she said.

  7

  THE VOLUNTEER coordinator was a thin woman with a flesh-colored eye patch and an atrophied left arm that curled into her breast like a hawk’s claw. Wade wondered if she’d had a stroke.

  “This is a very controversial pilot program,” she explained. “We don’t typically let e
x-cons work with children. But our test results call for drastic measures, and since you white-collar assholes are the least likely to volunteer, we’re targeting a few hand-picked, non-violent offenders to supply supervised, one-on-one tutoring.” She closed his file. “Now, this program is my baby, and I’d really hate to lose my job, so I’d consider it a personal favor if you could refrain from having kids bring you their mom’s checkbooks.”

  “I’ll try,” Wade said.

  She slid a contract across the table. “You check in at the school office every time. If you go walking alone down a hallway or contact a student outside school, anything like that? Start some Ponzi lunch-money scheme? It’s back to Geiger for you, my friend, and my little program dies. Understand?”

  Wade nodded.

  “Four hours a day, four days a week,” she went on. “Two days you’ll work at a high school, two days at an elementary school. Sophomores and second-graders. We’re assigning you to two very good, veteran teachers. Any questions?”

  “I didn’t get your name.”

  She seemed uncomfortable with this and looked away from him with her good eye. “Sheila,” she said.

  “Well, Sheila,” he said, “thanks for this opportunity. I’ll do my best.”

  8

  MEGAN’S MOUTH hung as if on a loose hinge, her eyes half-lidded. She blinked, sighed, stared at the page, at the equation, at oblivion. Wade had to fight to keep from reaching over and gently closing her jaw.

  “Come on, Megan. We just went over this. The coefficients are . . .”

  “Ni-i-ine,” she said, “and . . . fi-i-ive?”

  “That’s right. And the variables.”

  “Are the letters?”

  “Right, although technically a letter could be a coefficient too, if there’re no assumed variables.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Sorry. So how would you go about solving this?”