Ellen shook her head. Then the phone rang again. She ran to get it.
No reason to think it should be anything like the last call, as that one had been the first of its kind ever to be made to this office. But Reeve had a bad feeling. “Would you like to speak to him now?” Ellen asked the caller, and Reeve’s bowels shifted perceptibly. He clenched his buttocks together and stared in horror at his own phone.
Ellen’s head appeared in the doorway. “This one’s a woman. She is calling to inform us that she has read the letter and watched the DVD and that she is very sorry but her daughter will not be returning to Equinox College after the holiday. And that she would be seeking to recover the semester’s tuition. And that if she fails to recover it, she will be retaining a lawyer.”
“Ah.”
She sipped her coffee. “Reeve.”
“Mmmm.”
“What letter? What DVD?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
She shook her head. He was still shaking his—they shook their heads in unison. Finally she said, “Are you going to pick up?”
“What’s her name?”
“Rebecca Layton.”
They stared at one another. “Her daughter—” Reeve began.
“—is a total lesbo, yes,” Ellen finished. Then she left the room.
The voice that met Reeve’s ears was coherent, modulated, and polite. It also occurred to him that he had heard it before, and that it was attached to a great deal of money. It dispensed quickly with the pleasantries and launched into a devastating monologue, only some of which Reeve caught, for he was busy trying to listen between the lines: What DVD? What letter?
“I chose to send my daughter to your institution, Mr. Tennyson, after a fifteen-minute conversation I had with you in 2002 during which you assured me that its calming influence would divest my daughter of her unsavory proclivities. And now I receive in the mail this repulsive artifact illustrating that the precise opposite has occurred. My daughter is visible, Mr. Tennyson, in the center aisle of the auditorium, removing her shirt and massaging her breasts before a massive crowd of similarly aroused young women.”
“Mrs. Layton…”
“You shall call me Miz Layton, Mr. Tennyson, and you shall also make out to me a check, in the amount of fourteen thousand five hundred thirty dollars, and send it home with my daughter tomorrow.”
“Miz Layton…”
“And I will remind you, Mr. Tennyson, that you were referring to me as Rebecca at the end of our last conversation, so intimate had we become in the course of your delivering to me your pile of big fat lies.”
“Rebecca, I’m sorry, but—”
“Which is not to say,” she went on, “that you may call me that now.”
“I’m sorry. I just have to ask you—Miz Layton—pardon me but, what DVD are you referring to, exactly? And what letter?”
“Ah,” the woman said, after a pause. “I received them several days ago. A plain black case containing a plain DVD. And a letter. Would you like me to read the letter?” Her tone, he thought, indicated that she herself would be delighted to read the letter.
“Please.”
She read the letter, and as he listened he tried to remember what he did for money back in the days before he entered the higher education business—had he been a waiter? A bookstore clerk? He had definitely worked one summer mopping the floor of the post office. At any rate, the sound of this woman’s voice was the sound of his career drawing to a premature close. Somehow he had managed, yet again, to blow it.
“And so,” she said, with a satisfied little rustle of paper, “Jessica will be taking the rest of the semester off to sort out, as they say, a few issues, and then she will be attending a more suitable institution. And you will refund me for this semester.”
“Yesss…” was all Reeve could say.
“Or shall I compel you to refund me for the entire year and a half?”
“Ahh…”
“No, that won’t be necessary, just the semester will be fine.”
When it was over, Reeve and Ellen stood facing each other across the office, not speaking. On the wall, the clock’s minute hand heaved from half-past two to two thirty-one. The phone rang again. After five rings, it stopped. Then it started again. Reeve said, “Maybe…”
“We should kick off early?”
“Yes.”
They hurried into their overcoats, gloves and scarves, to the incessant bleeping of the telephone. In his head, Reeve counted the calls. Three…four …five. Seven. Nine. Even after Ellen had locked the door, even as they bustled down the hall, they could hear it, muffled by distance and an inch and a half of solid oak.
The impulse to run did not arrive until they’d reached the stairs, but it did seem to strike them both at once. Anyone watching from the tall office windows of Crim Hall might have noted, upon seeing them emerge from the building, that each of them hit the ground at a dead sprint and didn’t stop until they reached their respective cars.
* * *
Meanwhile, people had sort of forgotten about Dave Dryer. A lot of people in Equinox knew him, of course, but they knew him in the way you know somebody who runs a bar. You see him all the time, and you talk to him then. Nobody had ever been in the habit of calling Dave on the phone, or knocking on the door of his apartment, and so nobody did those things now. They knew the bar was closed, and if they thought about it at all, they probably figured that he was with family, which was what you did when the chips were down. One or two curious villagers might have noticed that Dave’s truck was still out behind the bar, covered over with snow; but even if they had, they were unlikely to put two and two together and pop in for a chat.
And the fact was, Dave would not have welcomed any visitors. He was drunk most of the time, which is only natural when you’re cooped up in a recently closed-down bar. And he was usually hungry, owing not so much to poverty as forgetfulness, for, in addition to being drunk, he was also very, very busy.
For he had developed a kind of routine, a regimen, to fill his days. He would wake up, usually quite early in the morning, and he would drink something, and then he would eat something, if he thought of it, and he would take a bunch of prescription painkillers. Then he would lift some weights. He did this without a great deal of enthusiasm, but he had begun to notice a certain wiry, sinewy quality to his muscles (which, truth be told, could be attributed as much to malnutrition as exercise) that he found extremely appealing. His face had thinned, too, except where it was swollen and inflamed. A lean Marine, he thought. A mean Marine.
After his exercise he would bundle up and go out into the woods to shoot his rifle at trees. Even drunk, he was good at it. He would stare intently at his target, and picture the storm that was etched into the gun, and the barrel would drift to the right spot and hang there, as if drawn into the hurricane’s eye. When he started to get cold or his mouth hurt too much, he would go inside, drink more, apply his poultice, and go to sleep. And he would sleep quite deeply, quite dreamlessly, and he would wake refreshed and still somewhat drunk. And then he would remove the poultice and shower and get back to work.
But today he was nearly out of food. He’d been subsisting on frozen potstickers—once served at the bar as hors d’ourves—and salty snacks from plastic bags. Weaving out to the woods for target practice, he clutched, with work-gloved hands, his acid-drenched stomach; and when he arrived at his customary spot, he wobbled a bit on unsteady legs, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he found, sitting not twenty feet from him, an acorn in its paws, a gray squirrel. He didn’t need to think: he raised the gun to his shoulder and fired.
The squirrel seemed to explode in a fountain of fur and blood. What remained of it twitched and lay still. He walked over to where it lay and bent over, his head throbbing. He’d gotten it right between the eyes, it seemed. Its head was split in two and its brain, the size of a marble and resembling the nutmeats it so craved, lay
exposed to the air. For a moment, Dave couldn’t take his eyes off it. Then he picked up the body and brought it back to the building, leaving it lying in the parking lot while he went inside for a knife.
He chopped off the head, slit the hide down the belly, and pulled the animal out of its skin, bracing it with his boot. Then he brought it into the bar, heated up a pan, and fried the carcass, scraping the meat off with a fork as it cooked. Bits of acorn the squirrel had eaten fell into the pan from its stomach and turned black. A tuft of fur he’d missed caught fire and sent up an acrid plume.
He turned off the heat, stepped back.
Fuck it. What he wanted was a bowl of soggy cereal.
He went outside and dumped the squirrel, pan and all, into the dumpster. Then he brushed off the truck and pulled out into the street. Bottle between his legs, he headed north toward Unionville, fishtailing on the three inches that had fallen since the plow’s last pass. It was the Alp grocery he was heading for, a defunct A&P that had been reopened by locals, the ampersand transformed into an awkwardly scripted L. In Equinox, the college types were divided from the townies by which grocery store they patronized: townies went to the Alp, students and professors drove the extra fifteen minutes to the Megashop in Nestor, with its sushi bar, deli, pharmacy and video store.
But only Dave was out driving today. Alone on the white and slippery road, he felt as if the rest of the world had perished, leaving him to endure the nuclear winter in solitude. A more reasonable explanation presented itself, however, when he arrived at the Alp: its parking lot was empty and dark, its cheerful busted plastic sign was extinguished, and a hand-drawn banner in the dirty front window read HAPPY THANKSGIVING SEE YOU TOMORRO!, the W left off in a miscalculation of space. Thanksgiving: he hadn’t known.
So it would have to be Nestor. He donutted out of the lot and back onto the road, gunning his engine to make up for lost time. He was annoyed, sure, but his annoyance seemed to exert itself far below the surface of some vast buffering sea, like a tiny blind bottom-dwelling fish. He took a swig from his bottle, turned on the radio, turned it off again. He tapped the brakes and let the tail of his truck, heavy with snow, drift slowly to one side or another. Physics, Dave thought, are subject to the power of the human mind. The snow parted before him, swirling like his hurricane, and he drove right down the center of it as if into a black hole. His course was set; no recklessness could draw him away from it. And so he made it safely to the Megashop, and pulled into its freshly plowed parking lot, and staggered through the automatic doors cupping his swollen cheek in a trembling hand.
He bought everything he even remotely desired. Five cartons of milk. Orange juice. Cereal. Meat. He filled the cart and paid with a credit card, which worked despite his having ignored the last bill, and he shoved it all into the passenger side of the truck, since the bed was full of snow. And then, with a whoop, a chug, and a lurch onto the highway, he pointed himself toward Equinox.
It was right before the Nestor city limit that he got caught, speeding and swerving up the hill that separated Grange County from Onteo. The cop was parked behind a defunct school bus in an otherwise empty gravel lot, and Dave watched in the rearview as the lights switched on.
Well, fuck. He pulled over and gazed down at the bottle clamped between his thighs, and he thought, They’ll probably take this away from me in jail. He had just polished off the last drop when the knock came at the window.
* * *
“Well,” Jennifer said to her family, “here’s to change, right?” Her hair tied back, her face cluttered with bruises, she stood over the turkey like an army surgeon, carving knife in hand, forehead shiny with perspiration. “Happy Thanksgiving and good riddance.”
Bud, Buddy, and Vince stared up at her with a mixture of terror and awe from their places at the wooden card table, tablecloth-draped, that they had dragged up from the basement for the occasion. Their wife and mother was different. Her hair had grayed, and her mouth had developed wrinkles, and she appeared for the first time to be succumbing to middle age. Hardly a defeat, in this house, since Bud had been middle-aged since he was a child—but the years, which Jennifer had long been able to deflect by nerves alone, had caught up to her this fall. She appeared before them strong, but old, like a deposed third-world president. She said, “Who wants a drumstick?”
Lost in reverie, none of them answered.
“Yo! Drumstick!”
“Me,” Vince said suddenly, snapping out of it. He accepted the limb from Jennifer with a wary eagerness, never once taking his eyes from her.
“Buddy can have the other,” Bud said.
“You eat it, Daddy.” Buddy replied, his eyes misting over.
“Naw, pal, it’s yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I don’t want it either,” Bud insisted.
“For Chrissake,” Jennifer said, and hacked off the second drumstick and put it on her own plate. Bud and Buddy gazed at it morosely.
For a long time there was no other sound except that of eating. They had stuffing, and cranberry stuff from a can, and mashed yams. They had bread and butter. In time, all of it was gone, save for a few orange smears in the yam bowl and the scraps on the carcass. They sat back, each emitting, from time to time, a gentle grunt or moan, and avoided looking one another in the eye. Finally Vince said, “How come she’s knocking it all down? Why doesn’t she just fix it up?”
Buddy hazarded a quick look at his father, who was staring determinedly at his crossed arms. Jennifer set down her fork and wiped off her mouth with a paper napkin. “That’s how she wants it done.”
“Yeah, but how come? I thought you were just gonna keep working in the—”
“Don’t ask me, Vince. Ask her.”
“Even the ice cream?” Buddy ventured.
Jennifer sighed. “There’s still gonna be ice cream, just in a different thing. Building, whatever.”
Vince said, “When are we getting the money?”
“The contract’s with her lawyers,” Jennifer said, and her voice, which up to now had sounded pretty relaxed, pretty impressively calm, was beginning to get a bit testy. “We’ll get it when the lawyers are done.”
“So how come it’s getting knocked down next w—”
“Hey, Vince?” Jennifer said, leveling a demonic glare. Her son shrank in his chair. “Howsabout no more questions, okay? This is how the lady wants it done. We made an agreement. It’s gonna make us rich, so quit complaining.”
“I wasn’t complaining,” Vince muttered. But nobody responded to that.
When they were finished, the kids went down to the cellar to watch TV and Bud went to the kitchen to wash the dishes. Jennifer was left at the table. She slumped in her chair, touched her face. The flesh was still sore around the cheekbones and her lips were cracked and swollen. But, she told herself, the pain was good. Change was good. The past would be demolished along with Ice Cream & Gas—her memories, her bitterness, her resentment of Happy. She still didn’t like the bitch, but you didn’t have to like everybody you did business with. They’d have starved long ago, for instance, if they refused to fix assholes’ cars. And the new Ice Cream & Gas—the new kiosk, the new garage, with new equipment—would represent a clean slate, a bright new future, with new customers, in practically a new town.
The fact was, there was nothing so great about being a low-class, chain-smoking nutcase in a dead-end town, and there was nothing wrong with combing your hair and tucking in your shirt and swallowing your pride. There was no shame in making yourself comfortable. There was no shame in not being angry all the time.
So why did she still want to kick Happy Masters’s ass? Over and over, for eternity?
Suck it up, Jennifer, she told herself. She stood, walked to the window, looked out. The garage was covered with snow: if they were going to be using it past the end of this week, they’d have to get up there and shovel it all off, to protect the roof. Instead, they would just let it collapse, if that’s what it wanted
to do. She sighed, picked up her coat from the floor. She told Bud she was leaving and walked out into the yard. Down to the lake, and then along the path. Behind the new Inn, which had been roofed and walled and wrapped in moisture-resistant sheeting in anticipation of the storm. Almost as if Happy had a weather schedule at her disposal.
She went around to the front of the Inn and strolled down the sidewalk before it. It was like a castle—a white plastic castle, lousy with towers and dormers. New and huge and out of place, like a mountain an earthquake had made in a weekend. That’s what it was like all over town. Things were instantly different—the electric streetlights gone, replaced by gaslamps, even in front of the places Happy didn’t own. The houses re-sided, repainted, re-sold; the people inside them strangers. Not that she liked the old occupants, those snotty bastards—but those had been her bastards. Behind their windows, the newbies sat around dining tables, drinking wine, laughing with their families and friends—who the hell were these people? What were they doing here?
What, for that matter, was she doing here? Out on the sidewalk, in the snow, on Thanksgiving Day? Well, it was her right to be here, wasn’t it. It was her fucking town to walk through. Her fists clenched inside her coat pockets, and one of them closed around something. A pack of cigs, near-empty. She pulled one out and gave it a long look. Bent, stale, it looked great—she hadn’t smoked for a week. But there was no lighter. So she stuck the pathetic thing in her mouth and breathed through it, like Bud, remembering what it looked and smelled like when it was lit, remembering what smoke used to taste like.
28. Every child should be so lucky
Paranoia, Happy had long believed, was an affliction of the weak—you only worried about people having it out for you if you thought you were capable of being had out. So when Happy perceived the machinations of deception in motion behind her back, she tended to go at them with all her might, exposing them and kicking them to pieces. She’d fired a lot of people in her day—would-be corporate spies, sticky-fingered servants, corner-cutting subcontractors—and when she did, she treated them to the full complement of wrath that she might, years ago, have exacted upon her fat cousins, had she been grown enough to take them on.
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