by Unknown
“So if—”
“Yeah, right. Everybody was in the wrong fucking place, wasting everybody’s fucking time. It happens. The dad never even said he had a brother, and nobody thought to ask about that. No, we had to get fixated on weirdo-looking smokers with amnesia. I’m not trying to be a comedian, Thomas. The kid was alive for five days, minimum, after she went missing, and that makes me sick to the bottom of my fucking guts.”
Tom wanted to say that he understood, that he knew he wasn’t blameless in the matter of Hayley’s death. But in this dialogue he was cast as the Fool, and Nagel would allow him to say only foolish things. “I think I know how you must feel.”
“You don’t know squat, Thomas.” Nagel’s voice crackled like dry leaves in a late-summer breeze. “You don’t have the least goddamn clue about how I fucking feel.” He hung up with what sounded to Tom like a racking sob.
There was no lift of spirits, no sense of release, as Tom replaced the phone in its cradle. He, too, felt sick to the bottom of his fucking guts. He sat staring numbly through the study window, into the black tangle of the holly tree with its clustered berries. He seemed to have divided into two people. He observed his second self reaching for pen and paper and writing out a list of supplies for Finn’s ugly little puppy, which was asleep in the box at his feet. This other person wrote Cage. Then collar + lead. Then clicker? And rubber bones.
Tom watched him doing it, glumly envying his heartless, mechanical composure.
“. . . in this world except death and taxes,” Mr. Don said. He was sitting at his roll-top desk, from which a white drift of papers was spilling to the floor. “Know who said that? Before I did? Benjamin Franklin. He was quite the humorist. You ought to read him sometime.”
“Maybe I do that, Mr. Don.”
“You probably seen his picture on the hundred-dollar bill.”
He’d come here to negotiate for the Mexicans. He had no great hopes of success, but he was prepared to pay $1,000 for the whole crew, and it seemed a good-luck sign that he’d arrived to find Mr. Don groaning over his tax forms.
He was still groaning over them, showing his back to Chick—scribble, scribble, scribble—and keeping him waiting. Finally, he swivelled around in his chair. “Okay, what can I do you for, pardner?”
Chick laid out his terms. Mr. Don’s meaty, sunburned, turtle-like face showed no expression as he stared at a spot on the ceiling above Chick’s head.
“Be all I can pay, Mr. Don.”
At last Mr. Don looked directly at him. “I wouldn’t want to take your money. I got a better idea.” He tossed a cheroot in his general direction, and Chick had to go down on his knees to pick it off the floor. “Know my steam barge?”
“Sure I do.” It was the gray ship at the end of the dock that looked like a floating factory, its superstructure as big as the American’s house and encrusted with a labyrinth of pipes and catwalks. Chick had long admired it for its air of serious business, though he could never figure out what anybody could do with such a thing. He’d asked Lázaro, whose answer—“make steam”—only added to the ship’s attractive mystery.
“It’s a sad story. I paid thirty-four grand for that sucker at auction. Got it off the Navy. I had big plans for it. Thought I could sell it foreign. Steam barge that size new, you’d be looking at a million-five, a million-six. I called all over the marine business, spent a thousand bucks in advertising. Guess what? No takers. Now I got buyer’s remorse.” Mr. Don tapped his cigar on the old brass spittoon he used as an ashtray.
“See, what I’m thinking here is, if you and me go into partnership, I can cut my losses. The scrap market’s tanked on me, but I can still unload the non-ferrous metals. There’s ten grand in brass, and more than that in copper, plus the lead ballast. Say thirty-five thousand total. We strip all that good stuff out and then we sell the son-of-a-bitch. That’s another twelve, maybe. You following the math on this?”
Chick was following, but wasn’t impressed.
“You got one problem. To even get at the good stuff, and make it legal, you got to get all the wiring out, for the PCBs. And the asbestos. There’s more asbestos in there than you can shake a stick at. You should see the lagging on the boiler alone. There’s three truckloads of that shit, maybe more—and I’m not talking pick-ups, I mean the biggest goddamn moving vans you can rent from U-Haul. You’ll have to find a wilderness-area somewhere, like up in the North Cascades, in the national park, or out by Ross Lake. And if you’re not careful, you’ll end up doing jail-time. Which I’d hate to see.”
Chick felt insulted. This wasn’t partnership; it was $12 an hour, or less, by another name, however Mr. Don tried to talk his numbers. Rolling his unlit cheroot between his fingers, he studied a spot on the ceiling above Mr. Don’s head and said, “I don’t think so.”
“Wait. You haven’t heard the kicker yet.”
“The kicker?”
“Yeah. You get to be the owner. That’s your guarantee. No way I can sell what isn’t mine—that’s breaking the law.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s like this. The way things stand, we go partners and each one of us lands up with around twenty-three grand at the end of the day, right? Which is okay for you, but bad for me. That sort of business makes me feel sorry for myself every time I see my ugly chops in the mirror. I already paid the thirty-four for that sinker, remember. Plus it’s been rotting out there for a year, costing me a hundred fifty feet of dock space. I need the loss. If I sell it to you today, I get to write off the difference between what you pay and what I paid, and the charges for all that dock space I been renting out to myself.”
“I don’t want no steam barge, Mr. Don.”
“You haven’t heard my price yet.”
“What price?”
“A hundred bucks. One Ben Franklin bill.”
“Why you want this?”
“Simple self-interest, pardner. If you got title to that ship, I make sixty-eight thousand, or twice what I paid. If I retain title, I only make twenty-three. So if you buy it, you’re doing me a forty-five-thousand-dollar favor.”
“Like win-win.”
“Right. You win, I win. The brass, the copper, the lead, the barge, I buy all that back from you at half of market. You don’t even have to find a buyer, I’m sitting right here. You get to hire the Mexicans for as long as it takes—three weeks, a month—starting next Monday. I need ’em to finish up a job for me first. Then you can look after their health insurance and Social Security taxes.”
Chick sniggered.
“Course the real price you’ll be paying is in sweat-equity, which is a kind of equity the IRS won’t ever know about.”
A little while ago, Chick thought, he would’ve been baffled by the logic of this proposal, but now he saw it clearly. It was like the money market, as Mr. Qiu had explained it to him at the bank: Japanese yen go down, people in Japan crying, but you’re laughing because you gobble up their money cheap with high-rising German marks. Loss makes for profit. Lose money, you make money. All the big American companies knew this: their value was reckoned by the size of their losses, so the bigger the loss, the richer they got. Even the fifteen-dollar dog fit this pattern. Mr. Don wanted to give him the ship so he could make more money, which was the exact-same reason why Chick had bought the mutt for the boy. It was like Mr. Don said: win-win!
“How I buy from you?”
“Well, first you give me a hundred-dollar bill. Even better, I’ll give it to you on credit. Then we make out a bill of sale. We go to the bank at Fishermen’s Terminal and get it notarized. Then—bingo!—you got title.”
Mid-afternoon, Tom drove Finn and Sugar to PETCO, where Finn basked in the celebrity conferred on him by the squirming puppy in his arms, whose vicious and eccentric appearance seemed to unreasonably enhance its popularity. A woman Beth’s age stopped Finn to ask him if it was “a little boy dog or a little girl dog,” and two girls at the checkout, cooing extravagantly, fed it miniature co
lored bones, which it seized from their fingers much as the Tasmanian devil Tom had seen on “Animal Planet” went for the tethered carcass of a dead sheep.
They came away with $160 worth of dog-essentials piled into the trunk, along with a book titled The Dog in Your Life, which Finn made a heroic attempt to read aloud on the way home.
“Getting—a—puppy—is—parrot—of—the . . . I don’t get it.”
“Spell it.”
“A-m-e-r-i-c-a-n . . .”
“American.”
“Is parrot of the American drum.”
“Dream?”
“Yeah, getting a puppy is part of the American dream!”
“Brilliant, Finbow.”
Leaving boy and dog to frolic in the kitchen, Tom went upstairs to his computer. Just in from Beth:
I read the Times story. Horrible about the child, but so glad to see the bit about you. They even apologised, and everybody says that’s unusual.
It’s crazy here. Instead of me picking up Finn from you this evening, can he stay with you tonite? I may be able to have him tomorrow, but I’m not sure yet. Depends on the craziness at work. (Chicago!)
—B.
Tom, who’d been dreading an evening of remorseful solitude, replied that he was happy to take Finn for the next few days, and that Beth was not to worry. He was heading for the Times site when he heard Finn shouting downstairs.
“Oh, no! Oh, Sugar! Bad doggie! Bad doggie! Dad?”
In the living room, the puppy was crouched, snarling, in a nest of shredded paper.
“What happened?”
“I only went to the bathroom.” Finn scooped up the puppy and held her to his chest, eyeing his father fearfully. “Is it very, very bad?”
“No, Finbow, it’s not.” Tom saw from Finn’s face that he’d half-expected his pet to get euthanized for its work on Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans. He picked up a chewed fragment:
a noble boat,
as they are called were
ple balcony, sheltered by an awning; chairs and
son, nearly all the female passengers passed the whole
d vessel was the Lady Franklin. By the way, I
That book-idea, Tom thought, was no bloody good anyway. Stuff Fanny Trollope. He laughed. “It’s a literary-critical dog. It’s a patriot dog, Finbow. So where did you put its real food?”
“Oh, man!” Lázaro’s shoulders, usually hunched and sullen, were shivering with laughter. “Know what he call you? Harry Onassis.” His dark, cratered face had never looked so full of life.
“Funny guy.” Chick hoicked a gob of phlegmy spittle onto the asphalt.
“He make you buy the shit-bucket.”
Both men looked across the shipyard to the steam barge, whose immense evening silhouette blocked the view beyond.
“He not ‘make.’ Me and him do deal. Win-win.”
“He win, man. He always win.”
“You don’t know fuck. I got title.”
“He win taxes, you win trouble.” Lázaro was on the brink of another laughing fit.
“What you mean?”
“He in deep shit with EPA, with Coast Guard, with city, even. Lady write letter, say it fuck her view. He say last week he going to tow that thing out to sea, way deep, and pull plug—only he scared the Coast Guard see.”
“Then he say bye-bye to all that good non-ferrous,” Chick said contemptuously. “Is brass. Is copper. Is lead. Plus barge. Follow the math!”
“Is all trouble, man.”
“Is business.”
“EPA come looking, man. Coast Guard, and city too. Guy set you up.”
Chick scowled, disbelieving; then believing, and again disbelieving. Maddened by the sight of Lázaro’s idiot grin, he lowered the shutters on his eyes and forced his mouth into a smile. “That what he think. Maybe.”
“I tell you, man, end of month, he charge moorage— thousand dollar, minimum. You not pay, he say get that fucker off my property. You the owner! Gotta move it! How you do that? You screwed!”
“He say that?”
Tom made a cabbage-patch run to the university—a low-flying raid under enemy radar. Mount Rainier was “out,” the campus unseasonably pretty in February sunshine. He kept his head down and walked fast, a moving target.
He encountered flak at Padelford Hall, when he stepped into the elevator. Russ Van Strand was standing there, and, like him, going up. The assistant professor found an extremely interesting knot in the grain of the wood paneling, and gave it the full semiotics treatment. His miniature purple nylon backpack, stuffed to its limits with books or provisions, looked brand-new. As the door slid shut, he mumbled, “Good to see you back.”
Seeing no adequate reply to this, Tom said, “Going hiking?”
“No, why?”
“You look—equipped.”
At the third floor, Van Strand shot out like a greyhound bounding after an electric hare. He turned right, Tom left. The unwelcoming bare office, swept clean in his absence, reminded him unpleasantly of Paul Nagel’s grim quarters in the King County Sheriff’s Department. He wrote out a schedule of visiting hours and posted it on the pin-board beside his door, along with a notice saying CLASSES RESUME AS NORMAL FROM 3/9/00, then sent a round-robin e-mail to the eleven M.F.A. students in the Fiction class. He pulled down Sister Carrie from the shelf and pretended to read Dreiser before he braved the hallway and called on Bernard Goldblatt.
If Tom’s troubles had awakened ghouls from Bernard’s past, it was obvious the department chair had wasted no time in laying them to rest. Alarm spread over his face the second he saw Tom standing in the doorway, and his eyes were pleading. Before they had finished exchanging mild pleasantries, Bernard was off and away on the “prickly” subject of the Ray Fellowship. Tom had suggested in an e-mail that the university might, in charity, still honor its commitment to Scott-Rice, who clearly had a following among the students.
“Totally impossible. Totally.” Bernard treated Tom to his ironic Oxford smile, the silver hairpiece twinkling in the sunlight that fell aslant into Bernard’s south-facing office. “That’s a year’s salary for a perfectly competent Renaissance man. I mean, just look who’s teaching Shakespeare now!”
Tom didn’t know who was teaching Shakespeare, and wasn’t about to ask. “Given the circumstances, I’m sure David would settle for less—or perhaps we could get him to teach a whole semester for the same price.”
“We’re practically drowning in novelists as it is.”
Tom could see his point all around him. Bernard’s office was furnished ceiling-to-floor with uniform editions: Austen, Benn, Burney, Defoe, Edgeworth, Fielding, Radcliffe, Richardson, Smollett, Sterne . . . He was practically drowning in poets, too, though they took up less space. This collection made it rather hard to argue the importance of David Scott-Rice. Tristram Shandy and Crystal Palace: Compare and contrast.
“I mean, you can teach the Victorians—well, at least to undergraduates. No, I’ve had it out with Development, and the absolute best we can do is offer him our sincere apologies with a check for a thousand dollars.”
“I dread his response.”
“Well, they’re very concerned about the form of the apology, and would much prefer no apology at all. At any rate, we’ll have to clear it with the lawyers before we send off anything in writing. There’s also the question of exactly how we describe the check—if, indeed, we have to produce one.”
Trying to reach Bernard the human being, his moral champion during the emergency, Tom reckoned his best hope was to address himself to Bernard the dog-lover. In the deferential tone of a beginner seeking advice from an acknowledged master, he told the story of Finn’s puppy. It didn’t go down as well as he expected.
“Clarissa passed away. A year ago next week. Cancer of the bladder.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Most people did. I had quite a number of condolence cards.”
So that was that. On his way out,
Tom said, “I just wanted to thank you for—”
“Absurd business,” Bernard said, dismissing it, and Tom, from further consideration.
Returning to the house, Tom was shocked. Chick had spent the morning painting the new deck and pillars with gray primer, and the house now bared to the world a mouthful of immense tombstone teeth, set in an expression of irrational—no, maniacal—exuberance. No amount of forest-green paint could disguise that ghastly grin. It was as if the contractor had given the house his own face.
Inside, the puppy was howling in her crate—a sopranino tirade accusing Tom of unpardonable selfishness and neglect. When he let her out, she cowered and promptly puddled on the carpet. He mopped up after her, while she gazed at him with a look of wrinkled doubt and sorrow on her squashed features. He knew that look. He’d never been much good at appeasing it, and had little idea of how to begin to appease it in a dog. When he showed her the bowl of Canine Maintenance, she sniffed at it disdainfully and backed away. He got out her leash. From some remote cranny in his memory, a strange word surfaced.