Doubled or Nothing

by Warren Esby

  I now had an additional problem. After paying old Ms. Halloran her $200 and paying for the animals that turned out to be made of gold I presumed, rather than China(?), according to how much they cost, I had used up a good bit of the money I had saved to travel cross country to my postdoctoral position at the Salk Institute in San Diego. And I had to move out of my apartment because my lease was up and I didn’t want to go home. I guess the whole incident did benefit my parents because I would now have to go through the whole graduation ceremony for my Ph.D. and they could attend. I had told them not to come to my undergraduate graduation since I would be getting a postgraduate degree and they had reluctantly said okay. I had intended to skip out on the postgraduate ceremony as well, but now I thought I may as well go to it since I was still in town. God apparently was looking out for my parents even though He didn’t seem to be looking out for me. But I had some additional good fortune. My parents agreed to give me enough money to pay for gas and food so that I could get to California as a graduation present. They wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t stayed for the graduation ceremony.

  The Salk Institute had told me it was okay to come one month later than planned, but they couldn’t begin to pay me until I got there. My graduate school stipend had ended, of course, when I graduated. So now I had still one more problem. I needed somewhere to stay. Now this had happened to me in the past. I had an old Toyota Corolla that had at least 120,000 miles on it. The reason I say at least was because the odometer is broken and has been since I bought it. The other student I bought it from said it had just broken the week before. I wanted to believe him since I needed a car and could afford his. I know it sounds dumb that I bought it and, since I later found out he had a higher GPA than I did, I guess compared to him at least, I was dumb. But it had continued to operate fine with its little four cylinder engine. I had continued to change the oil on a regular basis, which meant when I could afford it, but I always declined to have the mechanic check the brakes and other items on their list when I changed the oil because that would only depress me since I wouldn’t have been able to fix whatever they found. And I wouldn’t have trusted them anyway. I was sure they didn’t have a higher GPA than I did, even though mine, as you may have guessed by now, was not that high. I did worry about having the brakes checked for a while. The other things weren’t important, because if they broke, the car wouldn’t go and you couldn’t crash. But if the car was going, then brakes were important and if they failed, you could crash. But then I realized that the little Corolla had an air bag. It had this little symbol in the middle of the steering wheel that said there was one right there. I rationalized that if my brakes failed and I got into an accident, the air bag would deploy and I wouldn’t die. And if they failed and I wanted to stop, I could just head for the nearest tree. I had heard stories of people walking away from a head on collision when their airbags deployed, so why should I be different? After that I made sure I kissed the little airbag symbol in the middle of my steering wheel before I went on the highway.

  The way I had solved my living problem in the past, when I didn’t have a place to stay, was to load all of my possessions in the Corolla and mooch off of my friends. Now you may ask how I could get all of my possessions in a small Toyota Corolla. The answer is a simple one word answer. Easily. I had enough clothes to fill one suitcase and one duffle bag. All the information I needed was online or in my laptop. Everything else, like my thesis and a few books (you remember what they are – hint: they’re filled with paper) had been shipped to my parents except my sleeping bag which is the one essential you need if you are going to mooch off of people. I had sold my skiing equipment, which was the only sport I still liked, except for basketball, since the prospects for skiing in San Diego were slim.

  Now I did lose a lot of friends by mooching off of them over the years. But they had for the large part graduated, and I didn’t see them anymore, anyway, and I doubt they would still be my friends since I never did find out where they all went. And besides, if they ever found out I live in this cool house on the beach in the Cayman Islands, they’d probably just try and come and mooch off of me, so I guess not having them for friends anymore worked out okay. Getting a place to stay turned out to be less of a problem than I thought. There was a group of girls who used to live near me in Boston. One was really cute and I originally met her at the local convenience store. You know, the kind that carries only the essentials at twice the price of the real grocery store because you can walk to it. They did sell a small selection of meat and cheese that you could have weighed out and wrapped in separate little packages if you only wanted enough for one sandwich, but you had to keep an eye on the robber (not his real name – no one ever knew his real name) because if he thought you weren’t watching, he would put his thumb on the scale and you would end up paying for 3/8 of a pound of meat that would include an extra 1/8 of a pound of ‘thumb’ weight, hence his name.

  Loren and Jessica and Julie had all moved, but had made the mistake of giving me their new address in Brookline. The one who I thought was cute was Loren, but she had a boyfriend. She invited me over to meet her room mates who were also acceptably cute. The acceptable part was dependent completely on how horny I was. Anyway, I had dated Jessica a few times and then had to stop dating entirely to concentrate on preparing for the final defense of my thesis, and they had all moved away. After I paid old Ms. Halloran and kissed her on the cheek – yes we had become friends after not having spoken to each other for a year – see you can buy friendship – I went over to Brookline and asked if I could sleep on their couch for a few days. When they said yes, after Jessica told me she had a new boyfriend, and I agreed she was now off limits, I called the police and gave them my new address since they wanted me to keep in touch. By this time, the Beretta was in my duffle bag and it was a good thing for me that it was.

  Two things happened over the next thirty days and then I left for the west coast. The first was that I took up with Julie. It was that or sleep on the couch for a few days and be kicked out. Julie was acceptably cute, as I said before, and became very acceptable on the weekends because she worked during the week and was very tired when she came home and only wanted to sleep. We had started off as just friends before the benefits started and it stayed pretty much that way. She was cute in a gamine looking kind of way with straight blonde hair and big blue eyes. She was almost, but not quite flat chested but had a cute little round butt and she was a real blonde. She was the first girl I had ever slept with who had real blonde pubic hair. And you know what they say. You never forget your first.

  The police brought me in for a second round of questioning. There seemed to be a problem about the suicide verdict that was so obvious. It wasn’t. It appears that the bullet that had blown away a lot of Ivor’s brain had been fired from a .25 ACP caliber automatic. What a surprise. Unfortunately, the ballistic tests showed that the bullet was not fired from the little Beretta that was lying near Ivor’s outstretched hand. And the little Beretta had been wiped completely clean of all fingerprints. I don’t see how Ivor could have done that, no matter how clever they say those students in electrical engineering are supposed to be. I came to the realization that there must have been a third one of those little Berettas. That was utterly the most absurd thing I could think of. Why would anyone want even one, let alone two, and now three, of the most worthless little piece of shit of a gun the world had ever known? Of course, I would live to regret that thought and end up thinking at least one of those guns represented the most wonderful piece of engineering the firearms industry had ever made. But that is for later. Now I had a dilemma. Should I tell them about my gun? The one I took out of the locker as soon as they had removed the signs designating the area as a crime scene and allowed people to resume using the gun range. The one that had my fingerprints all over it, and no one else’s. I was sure it had been locked up safely in that locker the whole time and there had to be a third one, but was there? The possibility that someone had
taken the Beretta out of my locker, used it and replaced it was every bit as absurd as there being a third one. And what if they did a ballistic test on my gun and proved that this version of the absurd had taken place. That thought led to my life flashing before my eyes once again. I decided not to volunteer the information about my gun and fortunately they didn’t ask me if I had, by the way, one of those little Berettas in my duffle bag in my little Toyota Corolla. I did check how many bullets were in the magazine. There were five left. The magazine held eight, and Ivor said he had left it with seven. I had shot it twice just to make sure it functioned okay, which it did. So the number was correct. But what if Ivor had left me a full magazine of eight, not seven and one had been used for the unthinkable. I know. I was stupid not to check when he sold me the gun in the first place. I kept my mouth shut and said nothing to the police. When they decided to open all the lockers and do a thorough search of the gun range, I thanked God that I had taken the gun out when I did and thought that He must have liked my parents enough to cut their only son some slack.

  It turned out that the time of death they were able to establish was sometime that morning up until the time I was pacing around outside the conference room waiting for the decision on the oral defense of my thesis. It was certainly before the time I had dialed 9-1-1. I told the police where I was at the time and the Department Chairman and my Thesis Advisor both confirmed that I was taking the exam that morning. Although during that forty five minutes that they were meeting inside, I theoretically could have had time to run across campus, shoot Ivor and run back. Of course I probably would have been sweating and probably would have looked nervous and upset and a little pale, and the professors would have noticed. They didn’t tell the police that I looked like that because the police didn’t ask them, at least not at that time.

  I was finally released from having to remain in town. With a sigh of relief I gassed up the little Toyota Corolla and spent one last night with Julie. It was a Sunday. I had decided to get up very early in the morning since my first stop was Tommy’s. Tommy lived in Cleveland which was over six hundred miles away, and I thought I might be able to get there before dark, or at least before midnight, if I started out early enough. I’m a morning person anyway, so starting early appealed to me. It didn’t to Julie who immediately rolled away from me when I got up to leave and tried to kiss her goodbye. I had the distinct impression that she wasn’t unhappy to see me go. So I got into the Corolla, kissed the steering wheel, released the clutch and headed out of town against the flow of the rush hour traffic and onto I-90 West. I only wished the Corolla had a working radio. My iPod had long since broken so I wouldn’t have any music, but I had a lot of thinking to do and I sure was glad to be on my way finally.

  Chapter 3

  The first thing I thought about after I got onto the interstate was ‘fucking’ Ivor. I still wasn’t particularly upset that he was dead. He wasn’t one of my favorite people and I wouldn’t miss him. I mean, no more so than if he were alive since I was going to California anyway. I had learned a lot about guns from him. I had first come down to the gun range out of curiosity and a desire to learn how to shoot a pistol because my father would never let me touch a firearm and wouldn’t let me shoot one at the rifle booth at the state fair when I was ten. He had to drag me away screaming, and I kicked up such a fuss that I ruined the fair for my parents and older sister and they had to leave early because I wouldn’t stop screaming at every opportunity, like whenever they asked me a question such as,

  “Would you like an ice cream?”

  “No. I want to shoot the gun,” I would scream as loud as I could.

  “Do you want to see the horses?”

  “No. I want to shoot the gun.”

  My parents knew those were two of the things I really liked to do at the fair, see the horses and eat ice cream. They then asked several other questions having to do with activities I said I was looking forward to doing when I got to the fair. I screamed “No” on every occasion and just screamed repeatedly every few minutes for no apparent reason. Now my father was a very patient and mild mannered man and had a hard time punishing his children. He would try to reason with us instead. I hadn’t been spanked since I was six since I usually did respond to reason. But now, when I wouldn’t stop screaming, he began to get this look on his face that I had only seen when he got really, really angry. So I naturally stopped shouting “No, I want to shoot the gun” and instead started shouting “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me.” Everyone stopped to stare and to give him dirty looks. No one had been paying particular attention to me when I was screaming. There were a lot of children screaming at the fair. The fair was filled with screams so one more scream by a child was ignored. Except if the child is screaming “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me” and it sounds like this is something that the person he is screaming at has been doing to him on a regular basis. It was at that point that we left the fair and I never did get to shoot a gun until I came down into the MIT gun range and met Ivor Federov, the range officer for the pistol club.

  Ivor seemed to know everything there was to know about guns and never got tired of talking about them. He taught me everything I know about guns. He was, as you might expect, an excellent shot, but was very condescending to everyone else about shooting, especially me. That was one of the reasons I wouldn’t miss him. Another was that he always seemed to have tons of ammunition in his locker room to practice with, thousands of rounds of ammunition. He never seemed to lack for the money to buy ammunition. I would be lucky to buy a box or two now and then and he knew it, but he never offered me any of his.

  Now one of the reasons Ivor was such a good shot was that he was built like a truck. He wasn’t especially tall, only a little taller than my 5’10”, but he was solid muscle with huge biceps and forearms. He could hold a pistol in one outstretched hand for what seemed ages to me and continue to get every shot in the ten ring, the highest score given if you hit dead center on the bulls eye, until the magazine was empty, and he looked like an absolute statue doing it with no movement whatsoever, not even a little twitch. He was such a good shot that no one like me, no matter how much they practiced, could ever come close to him. And he wouldn’t even condescend to compete in any pistol matches. He wasn’t interested.

  In the beginning I was lucky to even hit the target. It seemed that every time I pulled the trigger, the target moved. That was because my hand was shaking so much that, as I looked down the barrel to line up the sites, it looked like the target was moving back and forth and up and down in the distance just to frustrate me. I started to believe that I had better learn to think I was shooting at a moving target and try to hit it as it came by. That strategy actually helped, but only a little, and my scores did improve, but only a little. And then Ivor condescended to tell me what I needed to do to build up my arms, and he taught me to relax and how to breath in and hold my breath while I let off a round, and I got better. I went from shooting sevens and eights, to eights and nines with an occasional ten as I got even better. Under his instructions I eventually got good enough to place in pistol matches, and I became the second best shot in the club. But that was not good enough to have Ivor acknowledge that I was even a little competent. He didn’t seem to care.

  One day when I was shooting I had one of those sessions when I couldn’t seem to do anything wrong, and I ended up getting all ten of my shots in the ten ring. I told Ivor to look at what I had done. Ivor was two lanes over. He picked up the gun he had just loaded, and without appearing to even look at the target, he obliterated the ten ring on the target that I was going to save forever. That’s another reason I didn’t care if he was dead and I won’t miss him, and no, I didn’t kill him. The final reason that I didn’t care if he was dead was that I was moving to California and never expected to see him again anyway. Or did I say that already.

  But I did try to think of how and why he had died if he didn’t commit suicide. I couldn’t believe he would let anyone point a loaded gu
n at him or get close enough to do so. Ivor was as quick as a cat. He insisted that any gun, loaded or not, only be pointed down range, as any good range officer would do. And we were not allowed to load the gun until just before we were going to shoot it. There was one occasion I remembered when one of the less experienced shooters started to turn around with an unloaded gun in his hand. Like a blur from across the room, Ivor was on him taking the gun from him and almost breaking his wrist in the process. So how did someone get close enough to him with a gun, let alone a loaded gun, and have time to point it at him and shoot it before he grabbed it from them? And how did that little bullet get through such a thick skull? That’s why I thought it had to be suicide, but what do I know. I know I won’t miss him, that’s for sure. I didn’t like him, but not enough to kill him.

  I then turned my thoughts to old Ms. Halloran. No, I couldn’t think of her as Siobahn. I learned from the girls in the apartment, when I told them the story, that China does make a lot of cheap china after all and that was what probably was on her window sill. They told me the china figurines I had bought her were far more expensive than the ones she had or that she could have afforded on her own and what she had demanded was like extortion to keep her from pressing charges. And I know she lied about having two hundred dollars missing and had insisted I pay that amount too, which was also extortion. Was I angry at her for being dishonest? I decided I wasn’t. She obviously had very little and was probably living in a neighborhood filled with students because she was so poor. And she was so happy with the extra cash and her little figurines. So even though she had taken my money, I was happy for her and not angry. What the hell, spread the wealth around I thought to myself, even if it was my money that was spread around to her and I wasn’t even as wealthy as she was. Now where had I heard that business of spreading the wealth around before? I know I had heard it somewhere recently which is why that thought had come into my mind. I seem to remember some well-known person had used that expression, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember who. I still can’t. I think it may have been some comedian spoofing one of those old movies where the bank robbers are sitting around counting the loot and one of them says, “C’mon, let’s spread that wealth around.” And just like old Ms. Halloran, that wealth they were spreading around wasn’t theirs.