by Homes, A. M.
“Considering the damage not only to her academic life, but to her emotional development, the violation of trust—”
“I can go to one fifty,” she says, cutting me off.
“Two fifty is where the conversation starts,” I say.
“I’ll need to go to the board.”
“Ashley is not leaving until there’s a certified check in hand,” I say.
“Can I call you back?”
“Please,” I say, and hang up, pleased with myself for pushing hard on Ashley’s behalf.
An hour later Sara Singer calls and says, “We’ll have the check by noon tomorrow—I’m keeping Ashley with me tonight.”
“Hostage taking?”
“Safekeeping,” she says. “And we’ll want you and Ashley to sign a non-disclose.”
“I’ll sign,” I say. “She can’t, she’s a minor.”
Before I can close such a substantial financial arrangement I feel an obligation to check in with Hiram P. Moody. I explain the situation as best I can, going on to say that I feel comfortable with the settlement—that I think I did a good job.
“They’re just giving you a quarter of a million bucks?” he asks with a kind of joyous incredulity.
“Apparently,” I say.
“On what condition?”
“I agreed to sign a non-disclose about the incident.”
“I assume that means you won’t press charges.”
“I don’t want to put the child through anything more.”
“Do you know what really happened? I mean, if they were willing to go to two fifty, you can’t help but wonder if there’s something they’re not telling you—like, the woman had a venereal disease?”
“If there’s information they’re intentionally not disclosing, it would be a bigger problem, but my sense is, they’re embarrassed and concerned about their reputation. When I get the check, I’ll forward it to you. Let me know what makes sense in terms of taxes, whether it should go into a trust, or what the best handling is.”
“Of course,” he says. “And forgive me. I didn’t mean to be offensive regarding venereal disease.”
“No offense taken,” I say, even though the comment seemed weird. I hang up and breathe.
When I pick Ashley up, both her arms are wrapped in gauze. “Dramatic effect?”
She shakes her head. “Pus,” she says.
“Your idea to wrap it?”
“Hardly,” she says.
Sara Singer hugs Ashley goodbye as though everything is as it should be. As they are hugging, Ms. Singer hands me a thin white envelope.
“What’s that?” Ashley asks.
“Information about your internship,” Sara Singer says without missing a beat.
It occurs to me Ashley doesn’t know she’s been kicked out of school but simply thinks she’s won an award of some sort—the privilege of leaving early and getting to work at a puppet theater. A few friends run across the quad and tearfully hug her goodbye.
“E-mail me.” “Text.” “Keep a journal.” “Collect ephemera for eBay.”
“Ashley, it has to stop,” I say, when the car is all loaded up, when we’re on our way home. “We have to get you back on track—lesbian love affairs, tribal warrior marks—it’s all a little out of control.”
“It’s boarding school, what do you expect?”
“We should go see a doctor. Maybe you need to be taking some kind of medication?”
“I’m on an antibiotic.”
“I mean something else: maybe the events of the last few months have just been too much to process without a little pharmaceutical support.”
“I feel fine. I’ve been kind of freaked out since ‘the accident,’ which is what everyone calls it, since no one knows what to say. But apart from that, apart from how my life was going along perfectly normally and then my father killed my mother and Miss Renee got me all overexcited—and now I’ve got this oozing thing on my arm, and one on my hip that only you and the girls know about—apart from all that, I don’t feel sick or anything.”
I swerve to avoid hitting an enormous groundhog lumbering across the road. “Of course,” I say, “that’s my point. It’s a heck of a lot to deal with on your own, and there are medicines that can sometimes help us feel better. You have lots of potential, and medication might make life a little easier.”
“Is this about being smart? Everyone has always said I was dumb.”
“You’re not dumb. Who ever said you were dumb?”
“Dad,” she says. And there’s a long silence. “I don’t want to be a drug attic,” she says.
“I don’t want you to be a drug addict either,” I say.
“Isn’t this how it starts? I’m only eleven,” she says. “That’s still pretty young.”
We’re quiet for a while.
“I do want to get my ears pierced,” she says. “Mom said I could. Can I?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“Maybe.”
“This weekend?”
“We’ll see. I’m not sure I should be rewarding behavior like this.”
She twists my arm for the next three days: Can I, can I, can I? And on the weekend, I take her to the gift shop at the mall; it’s a cross between what we used to call a head shop, selling rolling papers, bongs, and Jimi Hendrix T-shirts, and a Hallmark store, but with a section of erotic novelties. The girl who waits on us is pierced up and down, through the nose, eyebrow, lip, and tongue. It is hard to understand her when she talks: her speech sounds lumpy and a little slurred.
While we’re waiting for her to find the ear-piercing gun, I whisper to Ashley: “See what you have to look forward to if you do all that self-decorating? When you grow up you can get a job working in a mall.”
Ashley looks at me as if to say, I don’t get it.
“I think it makes it hard to do other things, like get into college or have a real job, unless your application essay is about embracing your native culture and having a clitoridectomy.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
Walter Penny calls. “What the hell,” he demands, unpleasantly.
“Who the what?” I ask.
“Penny,” he says. “Walter Penny. Buddy, you have got yourself one big problem. I am about to crawl so far up your ass, you’re going to feel like you had sinus surgery.”
“I think you dialed the wrong number.”
“Why the hell would I dial the wrong number?” he shouts. “I’m goddamned calling to scream at you—you academically impaired idiot.”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“International arms dealing.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you have no idea, I wouldn’t expect you to have an idea. Let me be blunt, did you or did you not send your brother an iPad?”
“I did, as a birthday gift. I thought it would be nice to send pictures of the kids, or so he could map his way if he got lost in the woods, or stream movies on a cold winter night. It’s hard to think of what to get for a guy like George.”
“You provided the hardware for illegal commerce on an international scale. We could throw you in jail and lose the key.”
“That certainly wasn’t my intention,” I say.
“Open your e-mail—I sent you something.”
I go to the desk and, as instructed, open the mail; it’s a series of infrared aerial photos of George with the iPad in hand. There’s another guy peering over George’s shoulder.
“Is that your brother?”
“Sure looks like him. Who’s the other guy?”
“The Israeli arms dealer,” Walter Penny says.
“How did he get in the picture?”
“He’s one of our inmates from New Jersey.”
“But you said this program was only for hard-core types, not your average white-collar—”
“Quit whining. This guy is a former used-car dealer, Jersey Jewish mafioso, left his
family for the Israeli army. When he came back, his wife had taken up with another man; he killed the guy point-blank at the dinner table, in front of everyone. Funny enough, we didn’t want to put some Israeli commando in one of our standard facilities. What the fuck made you think you could send your brother ‘presents’?”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal to send a birthday gift.”
“You opened a portal to the free world, asshole. These guys are on Amazon Prime and have stuff coming every day—food, clothing, pornography.” He stops screaming and then takes a long, thin sucking breath. “Where to begin?” Walter says. “This is now a federal incident, the purview of the Secret Service, ATF, FBI, and the CIA—that’s how big it gets. Can you imagine the number of eyes on my little pilot program that I worked so hard on, the one with the wood-grain logo, the one with the yellow, green, red, black—four-color printing! Can you imagine how fast they’d like to close me down? I’m disappointed in you, Silver. When we met, I thought you had some good ideas, a sense of justice. You presented yourself as a thinker, and it turns out you are just another idiot.”
“What can I do to fix it?” I ask.
“We’re gonna come up with a plan,” Walter says.
“It’s set up on auto-pay; I can cut it off. I’d be happy to do it right now, while we’re on the phone.”
“Don’t do anything—we don’t want to arouse suspicions. Let me liaise with the others and get back to you. But for now, one move without my approval and you will go to jail. Oh, and think of something George would like to have, something he can’t get on Amazon.”
Walter calls me again a few days later. “I have been in conversation with the related agencies: ATF, FBI, Secret Service, National Guard. We are going to use you as bait and bring the Israeli in.”
“I am at your disposal,” I say.
“You bet you are. E-mail George as per the address you got from Jason.”
“You know about Jason?”
“He’s a good boy,” Walter says.
“Is he in on this?”
“We’re using a range of assets.”
“Have you been in my e-mail?”
“First stop on the tour,” Walter says. “Tell George you’re driving up Friday night to get his signature on some paperwork.”
“But I’ve got company on Friday—Ricardo will be here for the weekend,” I say.
Walter Penny doesn’t even acknowledge what I’m saying. “Tell George you’re able to meet anytime after six on Friday through six on Saturday.”
I do as I’m told; George replies he can do it anytime before sundown on Friday or after sundown on Saturday. I call Walter.
“Crap,” Walter says, “this confirms my suspicion. Your brother is practicing Judaism. He and Lenny are observing the Sabbath; that’s what we’ve been seeing them doing on Friday nights. The feds couldn’t figure it out—said they were lighting some kind of ‘flares’ and then sitting dormant—as if waiting for something. The feds couldn’t crack it.”
“A Jersey used-car dealer got George hooked on religion?”
“Strange things happen when men are left to themselves.” In the background a phone rings. “That’s the big boys—do nothing further until you hear from me.”
Meanwhile, another message from George appears in my inbox: “When you come, bring my silk boxers—upstairs dresser on the left. And some cookware—pots, pans, a spatula, and a ladle—and maybe Mom’s old candlesticks, not the silver ones—glass?”
A little while later, the phone rings. “So what’s your special gift, something you can bring that he can’t get from Amazon?”
“Aunt Lillian’s chocolate-chip cookies,” I say, not telling him that (a) I’m not in possession of her actual cookies and (b) I don’t have the recipe to attempt re-creation.
“It’s like the frontier; your brother and this Lenny character are running a general store up there. The bad boys bring them a dead duck and get Hershey bars in return. They’ve used the Amazon boxes to build themselves some sort of fort in a fort, which at the moment our camera can’t penetrate—we’re thinking it’s made out of some kind of river mud.”
“Dung,” I say. “Grass and dung.”
“Shit?” Penny asks.
“Yes.”
Aunt Lillian’s cookies. I make it my secret mission to replicate the cookies and the tin. I go to CVS, buy a tin of Danish Butter Cookies, come home, play kick-the-can with it while I walk Tessie, send it through the dishwasher, tumble it in the clothes dryer on hot with a bunch of towels, basically abuse the hell out of it, in a program to rapidly achieve the patina that would otherwise come with age. I buy the semi-sweet morsels, walnut halves, brown sugar, white sugar, vanilla, butter, flour, salt, baking soda, and remember the all-important tablespoon of warm water that Ashley told me about. Soon I am turning out Toll House hockey pucks that are equal in size, color, and lumpitude to Lillian’s famous. I leave them out to air-dry. Each day, fewer cookies remain—I say nothing to the suspected culprits at home, except that I am counting and know exactly what I’ve got, and I offer them a two-for-one special on the “defective” batch, which is actually far better.
And then, when I’ve got all the details, I call Ricardo’s aunt and tell her that I’ve got to work late in the city and ask if she can come and keep an eye on the kids.
“Of course,” she says.
And then—the real craziness starts. Later, I will wonder if this part really happened or if I dreamed it.
I am directed to a location several hours from home, and then, once I’m there, I’m led by an unmarked car to a deserted airstrip lit like a film set. Parked on the dirt runway are a small private plane and two military helicopters. By the time I arrive, the sky is sinking from twilight to the flat black of a starless night. On the grass nearby are several unmarked black cars, four guys in ATF nylon jackets, a dozen or more National Guard in full gear, Secret Service men trying to look low-key in polo shirts and khakis, a couple of unidentified men, assumedly FBI or CIA, and Walter Penny with a clipboard and a whistle on a lanyard around his neck, looking like a coach, preparing for the big game. The field is lit with giant floodlights—there’s even a quilted silver snack truck serving hot coffee and doughnuts.
I take out a nine-by-twelve envelope filled with papers for George to sign, permission slips from school, bank forms, health forms for summer camp for the kids, release of documents re the mortgage, etc.
“Are these for real?” Walter asks.
“Mostly,” I say. “So what’s the plan?” I ask.
“We need the iPad and the Israeli. Beyond that, the less you know the better.”
I notice some guys are working on my car—the hood and trunk are open.
“I’m sending you in with two hundred pounds of halvah,” Walter Penny says, with some difficulty pronouncing “halvah.” He says it as though he’s been practicing in a mirror.
It triggers an instant flashback—cultural insensitivity. “Here we go again. Don’t you people ever learn?”
“What are you talking about?” Penny demands.
“Iran Contra,” I say, “Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, and arms-for-hostages. They sent a Bible signed by Ronald Reagan and a chocolate cake shaped like a key—baked by an Israeli, no less.”
“I still don’t know what you are talking about,” Penny says.
“You may not, but I do,” I say. “What’s the point of the halvah?”
“I figure it might appeal to this character; also high in fat, so good for these guys, and it’s not something the government food bank can distribute easily, with all the rules about nuts and seeds. They can’t use it in school lunches, hospitals, the VA, or old-age homes. And I was thinking the indigenous birds also like it. And if the men like it, we can get them more: apparently we’ve got tons—literally.”
“At what point during this ‘mission’ am I supposed to say, ‘Oh, and I have two hundred pounds of Middle Eastern sweets, aka Jew food, in the trunk if you’
re interested’?”
“Play it by ear,” one of the unidentified men says.
“And why are so many agencies involved?”
“The transactions were international, with multiple money sources, and involved what would have been considered top-secret information that seemed too easily accessible to your brother and the Israeli,” Walter says.
“Do you think he’s a spy? A double agent?”
“I think it’s time to shut up and do your job,” the unidentified man says. “One pointer, when you’re with your brother and this other guy, make sure to leave a space between you and any other man—you don’t want to be collateral damage. Our soldiers are armed, the bullets are experimental pellets. We’re testing a glycerin-based product, with kind of an entry dart, something that we’ll be able to add an additional agent to if desired.”
“Agent?”
“Like a nerve agent, or a bio agent, or a little sleeping medication. Nothing for you to worry about…”
Walter Penny resumes the lead: “Earlier this week, we dropped a marker that’s sending a signal; that’s the point you need to drive to. We put a GPS in your car that will lead you there. And we’re using the same marker for the operational assistants.”
I must have looked confused.
“The soldiers,” he says. “Your car has now been wired, it’s now miked inside and out. Do not talk with us or engage in any way en route in or out. It’s two-point-five miles in, down a rutted old road, really less of a road than a path.”
Suddenly things are moving quickly. I’m ushered back into my car—sent packing.
The road is beyond dark, it is like driving into a tunnel from which all hope has been removed. The car’s headlights seem to frame things only a half-second before I am upon them. I keep driving blind towards the blinking light; a few times I am thrown off track by fallen trees and have to navigate around.
As I pull up to the spot, the GPS goes dark without my even turning it off. I flash the brights on and off a couple of times before getting out of the car.
I hear rustling in the bushes. George steps out into the headlights, looking pretty good in a kind of rough-hewn, Sunday-morning way.