American Dreams

by Price, Bruce;

  “No,” Felix said softly.

  “The only question I can see is how shall we do it?”

  “How?”

  “Well, I know that pills are simple and neat. But that’s not us, Felix, let’s face it. I’ll tell you one I’ve been thinking about. We go up in a plane. And we jump out holding hands and we kiss all the way down.”

  “Can’t we screw all the way down?”

  “I said tender,” Morris insisted.

  “Screwing isn’t tender?”

  “How would it look when they came to get our bodies?”

  “We’ll care?”

  “You would actually do that?” Morris asked.

  “Who knows?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Morris said. “Anything you’ll do, I’ll do. Because I love you. And I don’t want to live without you.”

  “Hmmmmmmmm.”

  “Your bluff is called, Big Momma.”

  “Hey, Lover, you are livening up. And here I thought you were going to be a big drag in my final misery.”

  “Well, I really don’t have anything to worry about now.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “You know what the Mayans say?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “‘Death is your best friend.’ It’s a loose translation but that’s the idea. I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “When we jump out of the plane,” Felix said, “you should carry a copy of your translation. It’ll give the thing some press.”

  “We’ll care?”

  Felix often smiled, but rarely laughed. Morris never laughed. Now they both did, staring into each other’s eyes.

  52

  Joe Floyd’s life became richer and richer, or emptier and emptier, depending on how you looked at it.

  In the week after the fight with the man who had slept with his wife, Floyd drank a lot and then he moved on to the emerald isles of amphetamines and cocaine. The wife, the job, the life he had had, it was as though he had lost an overcoat or a briefcase and couldn’t remember where and didn’t care.

  He had in his face a darkish charm and he grinned with one side of his mouth. Clothes didn’t seem too important to him now and he tended to be slovenly. In his mind, however, he was wearing a coat of many colors. He was taking what he called a vacation until he settled on his true calling. He thought he might be a photographer or a private detective, maybe, or a professional wrestler.

  “I’m wide open,” Floyd told the man who sold a few pills in his off-hours. “Life is, you know, just fantastic. I just feel there’s nothing but opportunity and possibility out there. My whole life is waiting for me. You know, I’m not even thirty. God!”

  The man with the pills was Harold Morgan, an unhealthy specimen who smirked inside at this line of thought. As far as he could see, there was no opportunity, no possibility and nothing to be done but maybe survive. Still, there were professional ethics and a salesman does not laugh at his customers. They sat together in a better sort of bar, Harold nodding while Floyd talked.

  “I’m going to California,” Floyd announced. “Everything’s out there. Los Angeles, Hollywood. You know, if I could have anything, I’d be a stuntman. In the movies, you know.” Floyd held up his fists, remembering his fight with Georges, and feinted left, right, left, left. “I’d be the guy in the bar who takes a punch and crashes through the window. I couldn’t play much sports in high school because I never even weighed a hundred and sixty, but I could wrestle. Did some gymnastics. Easy for me. I’ve got the basic equipment. Hell, man, I’ll do anything.”

  “Anybody’ll do anything, I got work for him myself.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Driving. Helping out. Law and order work.”

  “What the hell do you do, Harold?”

  “I’m an independent operator.”

  “Yeah?” Floyd seemed to focus on Harold for the first time. No, no, he didn’t fit. What Floyd wanted was everything that was young and ripe and potential. Harold didn’t belong in his California dreams, what belonged was technicolor, wide-screen, Dolby sound all across the sky.”

  “Yeah,” mumbled Harold, “I can always use anybody who’ll do anything.”

  “I won’t be around that long. I got a house to get rid of. A few loose ends. And then,” Floyd shot one arm up past Harold’s head like a jet taking off, “I am GONE!”

  Harold looked at his wedding ring. “You got a wife?”

  “Did.”

  “Where’s she.”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “You went to the movies,” Harold said, “and you forgot where she was sitting.”

  “Yeah,” Floyd grinned hugely. “Look out, L.A., Joe Floyd has got it up for you!”

  Harold didn’t respect people who lost touch with reality. He believed that he himself was at the center of reality, dead center. Los Angeles, Harold thought, would use this kid up faster than a gross of Trojans.

  53

  Time running forward like a river in one direction seemed like a safe way to look at things. Now they aren’t so sure. There’s talk about time running backward. Do the words even make sense? Now they’re saying there’s a hundred kinds of particles making up matter and for each of them there’s an anti-particle. And the two kinds coming together explode and cancel each other out of time running forward or backward, whichever is the case. But maybe it’s only a love of symmetry that makes us want to see these things or think we do. For every force there’s an equal and opposite force, how could any words be prettier to the inner ear than those? But people will take any kind of chaos—stars and history and tea leaves and what’s left of lives—and say, Now you see the order! Sometimes they say the order proves God.

  It may even be the opposite, supposing God has taken as a credo Nothing That Makes Sense. Then if people didn’t try to see the order, they couldn’t be His handiwork. Making sense out of things that don’t make sense, you see, doesn’t make sense. This is the anti-teleological proof for the existence of God.

  Thelma Compton and Dr. James Smithers went up to Chicago for the weekend by way of celebrating. They took a suite in the International House with a view of Lake Michigan. It was unseasonably hot, and the sun flashed off the water while they committed adultery left and right.

  Thelma had an eye for the big picture and didn’t bother much with details. She saw they were getting married, some day, and that was enough for her. Her husband Roy could take a large flying fuck into the eye of a hurricane.

  Dr. Smithers, however, being the opposite, was unhappy about all the debris they were leaving about, ex-spouses, children, and it was going to take a lot of the fun out of their plans if his wife Rachel kept trying to kill him. She had as much as said he had better look behind every bush, because she intended to be behind one with a large lethal weapon one of these days. Every day at the office Smithers and his nurse had to be alert for Rachel coming through the door with a hachet.

  “What am I going to do about Rachel?”

  Thelma was grateful but unsympathetic toward this woman. “Have her committed,” Thelma suggested.

  “Jesus, Thel! There’s our kids.” The doctor slumped down in his lounger and eyed the sky with suspicion. “I can’t start over in another city. She’ll always know where to find me.”

  Smithers was wearing the sort of gaudy shirt that Americans wear in Hawaii. Thelma had on a silk kimona. The idea was to be festive, this trip being considered a pre-honeymoon. They couldn’t be sure how long they would have to wait for the real one. Rachel wasn’t going to grant a divorce to be nice and it was going to be messy. Smithers could not grasp how he had come to be married to a woman like Rachel. He was an orderly man, he liked to think, responsible, predictable, one of the community’s small pillars. Rachel on the other hand was not. Smithers remembered the pain he had experienced when he had learned of his wife’s affair with Mac Samson, pain without end he had thought at the time. He had been ready to kill. The shame had almost killed him. Now all of tha
t was only a whiff of a memory. His wife was out of her time: she should have been a pioneer or missionary, undaunted on the frontier. People would have said she was courageous instead of crazy.

  Thelma was reading a trashy novel. A line in it gave her the idea. One woman to another: All right, so you don’t want your husband, I’ll take him. Thelma turned to look at Smithers. “I’ve got it. We’ll give Rachel to Roy!”

  The doctor didn’t respond. Logically, the remark made no sense.

  “Well,” Thelma said, “this way the children don’t have so many new parents to think about.”

  “Thelma! It’s the same to them, one old parent, one new one.”

  “But look, I mean it’s the same basic four people, we’ve just rearranged them a little. We can all vouch for each other. That’s the point, don’t you see. It’s so much more symmetrical this way.”

  With a tired sigh Dr. Smithers said, “There’s just one thing. How do we give Rachel to Roy?”

  “That’s what we have to figure out.”

  “I would say so.”

  “One thing I can tell you. If Rachel went home and got in bed with Roy tonight, he wouldn’t notice the switch. Or if he did, he’s not going to complain. For the first year he’ll probably call her Thelma, but then everything should be all right. You know, Jim, they’re really quite alike.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “They’re obsessive.”

  “True.”

  “Deep down they’re completely nuts.”

  “True enough.”

  “Well! So they are made for each other. They are now unattached. Right? So we’ll introduce them. Let nature take its course.”

  Dr. Smithers had to laugh, finally. He liked that about Thelma, she never made little jokes, which he would have considered frivolous, but she had a wonderfully deep vein of humor, which he considered precious and lovable. If his wife Rachel had even a cubic centimeter of humor in her body, she wouldn’t be such a persistent pain in the rectal region. And now that he thought about it, Roy Compton did not have a drop of humor in him either. Abruptly he offered, “I think we’ll need more leverage than letting nature take its course.”

  Thelma did not appreciate being laughed at. She began waving her arms around. This was to be the most artistic time of her life, not counting her experiments in fornication. “Well,” she groped desperately, “you’ll tell Rachel that you’re having her indicted for attempted murder. Twice. And you have witnesses. She has to do what you say. I got it. Take over a lawyer, a family friend, and really pile up the legal BS.” Thelma supplicated her gods with raised hands—if only fish would rise from the waters of the cosmos. “Well, of course: at the same time I’ll tell Roy that there’s this nice woman who knows something about the statue.”

  “Thelma!”

  “Listen, just listen! Who’s the kind of guy who would steal a statue? Mac Samson—am I right? And Rachel knew him.” She shrugged both shoulders up to her ears. “So there’s a distinct possibility that in talking to this Rachel, my dear husband may get a lead on, well, things, uuhhh people, in the underworld, you know. That statue, Jim—it’s his whole life.”

  “Thelma.…” Dr. Smithers was worn out. He had never seen such creative effort close-up, not since he had watched a surgeon from Louisiana lay open a heart and replace a valve in twenty minutes on the clock.

  “The clincher,” Thelma said. “What the hell is the clincher?”

  Now she stared across Lake Michigan, absorbed in the wrinkles of her husband’s brain. The trouble, she considered, is that Roy’s a complete fool. People like that are never vulnerable. Aloud she said, “If there’s one thing, it’s his reputation in his field. I’ll tell him I’m bringing suit against him, or somebody is, for mismanagement of a portfolio. I’ll look him in the eye—now this is after he talks to her—Roy, you’re going to marry that woman or all hell is going to break loose, you’ll never get out of court.”

  “But Rachel,” said Dr. Smithers.

  “Yeah, the bitch!” muttered Thelma. “Rachel … Rachel … I got it! We’ll tell her—somebody will tell her—that Roy is a man you hate. And the worst thing you can imagine is that she would mess around with a man you hate.” Thelma stood up, her face glowing. Dr. Smithers jumped up beside her. His face lit up.

  “If she thinks it’ll hurt me,” Smithers said, “she’ll do it. She’ll love him to death.”

  “It’s just a matter of getting the information to her. We can’t do it. Third parties!”

  “Fourth and fifth parties,” Smithers shouted as they both waved their arms in the air.

  “I feel so much better,” he said.

  Thelma’s face looked smug and beatific. “You just have to care enough to want to help,” she said.

  54

  In all of Georges’ plans there was space alloted for bad luck and extemporization. He had perimeters to fall back on. He had a second or third chance—except at one point.

  Georges sat in his car in the dark and the only comfort he found was that he was doing what he had to do. He had thought backward and forward and around this point. There was no other way.

  He had parked in the woods, ten yards off the road, three hundred yards short of the river. It was almost two in the morning. There was no moon, no stars, no lights. The nearest town was fifteen miles away. He had sat in this spot on other nights and he had learned that a car crossed the bridge every four or five minutes at two in the morning.

  Now he was like a pilot going through his pre-flight checklist.

  Georges looked to see that his notebook was in the breast pocket of his jacket before placing the jacket on the floor, somewhat under the seat. He felt to be sure that the half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey was also there. He opened the door on the right side and let it fall back against the frame but unlatched. He turned the mirror vertical. On the seat he had a short, thick piece of lumber, a six by six, which he had rounded on one end with a saw and sandpaper. He rested this on the steering wheel, rounded end against the windshield. Turned sideways in the seat, he hit the lumber with a large hammer until the glass shattered. He hammered until the lumber had created a cavity almost an inch deep in the windshield. The noise of the hammer in the stillness of the road unnerved him. He got out of the car with the lumber and hammer and threw them in different directions, as far as he could into the thickest woods. He sat back in the car, careful not to let the door lock, and wiped his face, Then with his toes he pushed off his shoes and moved them up under the seat. From his pants pocket he took a knife and cut his left forearm. With his fingers he transferred blood from the cut to the broken windshield. With a violent yank he pulled a bunch of hairs from his head and pressed them on the sticky blood. After he had put a bandaid on his arm, he locked the seat belt tight.

  He remembered waiting outside the house. Two hours or more he had waited. He had hated it but done it. This was like that.

  Georges saw headlights coming along the road, from the other side. If this was a cop and the cop noticed him, that would be a problem. The odds, he thought, were more than fifty to one in his favor, which was more than he could say for the rest of it. The car passed at high speed. As the taillights vanished, Georges started the engine and rolled out onto the shoulder of the road. From the backseat he took a large inner tube fully inflated, the kind of tube that goes inside a truck tire. He wedged the bottom curve of the tube between the steering wheel and his thighs. He had to reach around the tube to grip the steering wheel.

  In the back seat was a small stack of magazines addressed to his house. And in the truck there was a suitcase packed for an overnight trip.

  Georges searched the road in both directions. Darkness. He switched on the lights. He started the motor and pressed hard on the accelerator. He could not see the speedometer because of the tube. This didn’t matter. He pushed the car to its top speed. By the time he reached the bridge the motor was roaring complaint. He hit the brakes hard. A skid. He hit the brakes again. Another skid
. Then came the hard part.

  Georges wrenched the steering wheel hard right and the car rammed through the curb and guard rail.

  Far out in front of him he could see the headlights shining faintly on the opaque water. Then the car tilted and the light on the water became much brighter. He pressed his face down into the cold curve of the tube, gripping the steering wheel with all the muscles in his arms and shoulders. His feet pushed into the floor. His life did not pass before him. He hoped that this meant he was not going to die.

  It was a deep river, fast moving. After the car hit the water and started to settle, Lawrence planned to push out from the car. He would climb onto the tube. And float a quarter-mile down the river, where he had supplies on the south bank. Further on there was a dirt road and a pick-up truck.

  More than anything else, these plans were all for his wife Mary. He had realized that he could not leave her, could not do that to her. But if he was dead, that would be something she could accept. And there was all that insurance.

  Georges was not entirely convinced that he could fool the police and the insurance company.

  But he knew that he could fool Mary.

  55

  It took weeks before she could do it, but when she finally made the decision, it was easy.

  Susanne asked the doctor about the woman who was dying of cancer and then she called Bradford Morris. She was sure that she might be able to help him. Maybe, she was self-consciously hazy about this, she might be able to love him. It did not occur to her that he would not need help. She had not thought she would ever see the dying woman. It did not occur to her that Morris would insist on just that. She had thought that meeting Morris would be a bleak counterpoint to the bleakness of her own life and thus somehow appropriate, even morally. It did not occur to her that she would find two people who spent their days plotting how they would kill themselves and laughing about it.

  Immediately the Morrises adopted Susanne and they made her tell them every detail about her husband, the producer, and their life together, both agreeing a hundred times that Charlie was a perfect ogre, laughing at that, too. They took Susanne around with them. She never did have the opportunity to help them, they were always helping her. They insisted that she obtain a leave of absence from the hospital, so she could be with them a lot, right until the end. “But don’t tell Charlie,” they said, laughing, “he’s no fun!”