Now the expensive sound system her sons sold her has been defaced by Dresden’s graffiti. They’ll have to be scrapped, unless they can find an audiophile who doesn’t mind dropping a few grand on a pair of high-end speakers adorned with crude sketches of beer bottles and boobs.
Val looks around. She has the impression of an almost visible film propping up the objects in the house, giving shape to the material things that collectively stand for their lives together—a gossamer membrane, airy and tenuous, whose removal would allow everything they have to tumble into ruin. That substance—the thing that’s holding everything together—is the lie she told her husband eighteen years ago, the lie she’s been restating daily, if not in words then through the very living of their lives.
To her surprise—and to her credit, she’d like to think—the lie has remained singular, never branching out into an untenable web. The initial deception had worked; everyone who needed to had believed her, so she’s never had to prop it up with other untruths. Truth be told, she’s never even been ashamed of it, not really. The things one actually does are far easier to deal with than the things one only dreams of doing (a corollary to the notion that “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission”). Fantasies are slippery, intractable—the shame that comes with imagining doing something is spectral and hard to shake. But when you’ve gone ahead and done a thing… there it is. It has shape, dimension. And as long as you’ve got the salt, you can deal with it. You can absorb the consequences and put your feelings about what you’ve done in their proper place—locked away, out of sight. That’s exactly what Val has done with this, the great misdeed of her life.
She would have been content to live quietly with it, to take it to her grave, as long as it was hers alone to live with. But now it’s out there, the light of day drifting dangerously close to it, threatening to dismantle the life she’s built if that light should fall upon it.
And that is a very big problem. That’s a far bigger problem than the graffiti, the beer spilled on the carpet—how the trappings of the life she means to protect are being toppled in front of her, torn down by the yahoos who have invaded their home. They can burn the house down for all she cares. The indignity would be great, but she could live with it, as long as her secret is safe.
Dresden guffaws as he adorns the Santangelo painting with the image of a stiff penis, its bulbous tip pointing toward a furrow that looks vaguely anal. He raps Stanley on the shoulder with his knuckles. “You see that, Stan? Now that’s some art that I can get behind. You get it? Get behind?”
If Stanley gets the joke (it would be hard not to), he doesn’t show it. It’s not clear whether he’s even listening to Dresden. He stands by the wall, stock-still, looking pale and distant. Is he weak from the cut she gave him? He couldn’t have lost that much blood. It could be that he’s losing heart. He already tipped his hand to her in the library, revealing that he doesn’t share his partner’s zeal for the violent dimension of their mission. Perhaps this operation is getting heavier than he’d anticipated. He’s realizing that he’s in over his head. Perhaps the reality of what they’re doing is finally dawning on him—that regardless of how this continues to play out, they’ve already committed some serious crimes. Or perhaps he finds Dresden’s Wild-West disdain for person and property, along with the debasing tenor of their leader’s correspondence, as repugnant and unsettling as Val does. Either way, his reticence betrays weakness, a big old chink in his oversized armor.
Dresden moves down the line to the next painting, a pleasant but undistinguished piece of lyrical abstraction by a minor Belgian painter whose name Val can’t recall at the moment. He regards the painting, turning his head this way and that, as if searching for a vantage point that will illuminate its meaning.
“How much you pay for this one?”
“I’m not sure,” says John. “We acquired it through a consultant.” His hands, taped again to the arms of a chair, fiddle anxiously with the wood.
“You hired someone to buy a painting for you?”
“It’s not an uncommon practice,” John explains.
“Why not do it yourself?”
“He has a better understanding of their value,” Val cuts in, “both present and potential. He also knows how to integrate them into our design aesthetic.” John is glaring at her, as he had earlier. Her husband—ever the defenseman—doesn’t understand what she’s doing. He doesn’t understand that sometimes you’ve got to force the action.
“So, like, ballpark,” says Dresden, “how much you figure something like this might go for?”
“I really don’t know,” says John.
“Fifty thousand,” says Val. “Maybe sixty.”
“Jesus Christ. It looks like a squashed bug or something.”
“Then again, you never know,” Val continues, “the value of these things can explode out of nowhere. If the artist suddenly comes into vogue, it could be worth a million or more overnight.”
Dresden shakes his head. “That is truly fucking loony. Anyway, it won’t be worth no million after this…” He shakes the can of spray paint.
“You know, you don’t have to destroy these things,” says John. “You could sell them.”
“Right, and while I’m at it, might as well a put a big red target on my back, scribble underneath it ‘fire when ready.’”
“There’s a huge black market for artwork. If you took what’s left of these and found a way to flip them, you wouldn’t have to work again for a very long time.”
Dresden stops shaking the can and turns to John. “I don’t think you yet conceive the scope of what we’re doing here,” he says, striking the same lofty, stilted tone he had when reading the Declaration. “This isn’t about making a quick buck. This is a coordinated nationwide effort to realign our country’s dysfunctional economic, political, and judicial systems. The funds that are being drained from your accounts as we speak are not going directly to us. They’re being re-sourced to programs that will benefit the public good and allow regular folks—people totally unlike yourselves—the chance to reclaim their own lives, no longer tyrannized by the burdens of debt, unfair wages, and regressive taxation.”
“And what are these programs,” says Val, “that will make such good use of our money?”
“Afraid that’s a bit above my pay grade.”
“Will there even be pay grades in this new order of yours?”
“Listen, lady, I don’t claim to know everything. I’m just a foot soldier. There’s cells down in New York and DC tonight executing much larger operations than this one. They’ve infiltrated Wall Street and the Fed—they’re in this at every level. I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m a major player in all this, but I will nonetheless discharge my duties to the best of my abilities.”
“By tormenting a couple in their home?” says Val. “By kidnapping and abusing us? You people are terrorists, plain and simple.”
A grin steals over Dresden’s lips. He pulls out a cigarette and a lighter. “Let me ask you something, Doc.” He keeps his eyes on Val as he addresses John. “When you got out of med school and you were on your way to being a doctor, you took an oath, right?”
“The Hippocratic Oath, yes.”
“And the gist of it is ‘do no harm,’ ain’t that right?” He lights the cigarette and takes a drag.
“Well,” says John, “there’s a little more nuance to it than that…”
“‘With regard to healing the sick, I will devise and order for them the best diet, according to my judgment and means; and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage.’” Dresden takes another drag. “That ring a bell?”
“That’s a line from the original, I believe,” says John. “The Ancient Greek version. The oath I took was a bit different.”
Dresden continues quoting, “‘Nor shall any man’s entreaty prevail upon me to administer poison to anyone; neither will I counsel any man to do so.’” He takes a step towards Stanley. “‘Moreover, I will
give no sort of medicine to any pregnant woman, with a view to destroy the child.’” He looks at Stanley, who stares straight ahead, statue-like, so still he might not be breathing. “With a view to destroy the child…”
Dresden stands beside Stanley for another moment, the smoke from his cigarette rising in waves between their faces, before turning back to John. “A bit ironic, don’t you think? ‘Cause you people do harm every day. By hoarding all this expensive shit that you don’t need. By hoarding all that money of yours that somebody else could put to a whole lot better use than buying a bunch of overpriced ‘art’ that my five-year-old nephew could have painted. You do harm by just existing. You poison us by living. You counsel others to poison us by your corrupt political system. You’re a blight, a plague, a cancer, you rich folks—eating up more and more, not giving a damn if you’re choking everybody else in the process. Everything about you is toxic.” He takes a long drag from the cigarette. The smoke drifts up from his lips, framing his face. “But tonight, all that ends. Tonight, we begin an aggressive course of treatment. We the people of this once great country are coming to the aid of our society’s weakened immune system and eradicating the disease that has been progressively destroying our vitality and long-term health. No longer will injustice reign. No longer will the rich be able to inflict pain on the rest of us with impunity. No longer will there be any rich! No longer will millions of red-blooded Americans be consigned to lives of penury, passing from the cages of childhood want to the cages of our failing public schools to the cages of indentured servitude in low-wage jobs and all-too-often to the cages of our commercial prisons! No longer will we be forced to suffer and then told it is our own fault! No longer will the chains—”
The sound of the doorbell cuts through Dresden’s tirade. For a moment, all is still and quiet apart from the rock music blasting out of the big speakers. Then Dresden draws his revolver, ratcheting his arm out to aim it at Val. He nods to Stanley to cover John. Stanley raises the rifle.
“Any idea who that might be?” says Dresden. Val shakes her head. John does the same. “‘Cause if you did know someone was coming and you didn’t tell us, that could turn out badly for you.” The doorbell rings again. Dresden looks around. “All right, Stanley, gag ‘em. I’ll take care of this.”
“We should get them back upstairs,” says Stanley.
“No time. Just cork ‘em good and tight.”
Stanley grabs the hand towels and duct tape and sets to work.
Dresden looks back and forth between John and Val. “One sound out of either of you—I swear to God, one fucking sound—and you’re both dead, along with whoever’s at the door. We didn’t come here to kill nobody, but if it comes to that, it comes to that.”
The doorbell rings a third time as Stanley tapes the towel into Val’s mouth. Dresden tucks the revolver into the back of his jeans, sniffs, and heads for the door.
The real estate in the Bluffs is even more impressive now than when Damien was a teenager, McMansions deposited on just about every four- or five-acre plot of land, the entire surface of the earth landscaped to perfection. A decade ago, when he was in high school, the neighborhood was so sparsely populated that he could head up here any Saturday night with a couple of friends, a case of Keystone Light in the trunk of the car; they could get lit up, making all the ruckus and general dickheadery that a weekend in Great Falls might call for, and not have to worry about fetching any ‘noise’ complaints.
His favorite part of these excursions had always been the point, an hour or two into the evening, when they would head up to a treeless outcropping to “pop the seal”—the first piss in a beer-soaked evening. He loved to watch the rivers of urine roll down the steep hillside in the dark. It was boatloads of fun and always a bit of a mystery to young Mr. Edwards why the occasional female accompanying this bunch of assholes would fail to appreciate the hilarity of a good group pissing. Maybe they were jealous that they had to squat if they wanted to join in. God, those were good times.
It only took him eight minutes to make it out to Moon Drive—faster than he had expected—giving him a little rush of endorphins, a quick shot of satisfaction, like winning a hand of blackjack or getting a quick grab of his junk from one of the girls out on Leeds Street. He’s feeling good: bold and up to the task. And even though he’s wide awake already, he goes ahead and chugs another can of Red Bull, his third tonight, to give himself an extra burst of encouragement. Some guys use amphetamines on night shifts like this—diet pills or Ritalin, whatever they can get their hands on—especially other adrenaline-hungry former infantrymen like himself, but Damien is already under such close scrutiny from Sergeant Shithead that he doesn’t want to put himself out there. So for the last few weeks he’s been running on caffeine, sugar, B vitamins, and taurine, delivered in massive quantities in cans that are taller and thinner (and lonelier) than the beers he used to tip up here with his high-school buddies. Back then, as in the military, he’d felt a part of something, despite whatever good-natured shit his friends and fellow soldiers might give him.
Now, walking up the driveway to 79 Moon Drive, he feels a mean kind of lonesome. Like he’s the only creature in the universe.
He parked in a cul-de-sac at the upper end of the street, the plan being to make his way on foot to where Moon Drive meets at a T with Rockford Lane. He had drained the last drops from his Red Bull as he got out of his cruiser, then tossed the empty can into the woods beyond the embankment.
He had counted eight houses along the mile-long stretch of road, and he figured that going door-to-door, giving each his due diligence—a phrase he applies persistently and, he has begun to fear, wrongly to his policing duties but which no one has ever bothered to explain to him—he should be able to stretch the call out to an hour or more, enjoying the fresh air in a part of town a whole lot more picturesque than route-fucking-126.
Some other guys on the force would be fool enough to blast through an assignment like this as quickly as possible, but Damien appreciates any opportunity he can find to break up the pecker-wilting monotony of a slow Sunday night. Plus, he was still so amped up and antsy from that business with those snot-nosed high-school kids that he hadn’t felt like sitting in the cruiser for another minute.
The first two houses brought nothing of interest or incident. The homeowners were open and communicative, if a bit surprised to have their doorbells rung so late on a Sunday. He found no probable cause (another term he’s grown concerned he may be misusing) to detain them for any longer than it take to answer a handful of questions.
The third house was dark, the owners apparently away on vacation. The fourth house had a ‘for sale’ sign in the yard and seems to be unoccupied.
Damien had grown bored and more antsy. He craved another Red Bull and had begun to wish he’d brought the cruiser with him. He thought about going back to get it, but he figured he was already halfway down the road—he may as well go the rest of the way on foot.
It was 10:57pm when Damien walked up the long driveway to 79 Moon Drive, easily the most impressive estate he’d encountered so far. The house itself was huge, with a lawn big enough to play a respectable game of football on (you could use as one end zone the massive rock garden that extends to the side of the old barn at the edge of the property).
It’s always a question with these places which entrance to approach, as there are several reasonable options. He considered heading for the side door by the garage but opted instead for the front, drawn perhaps by the stately awning hanging over the porch.
As he approached the porch, he noticed that the lights were on throughout much of the house but all of the blinds were drawn. Like there was activity going on, but someone didn’t want it to be seen. A bit odd, but not necessarily probable cause (?) for suspicion. There was music playing as well, the kind of whiny ‘90s rock his older brother used to make him listen to before Damien was old enough to start downloading his own music—Nickelback, Linkin Park, 3 Doors Down… good bands like
that. By the sound of it, they had one hell of a sound system. (He’s been eyeing a Bose unit that would run him $499.95, but even with his military pension, he can’t justify a purchase like that.)
Might be a party. That would explain the drawn blinds. It might also mean that his appearance won’t be welcome. Which means that things could get hairy real quick. About which Officer Damien Edwards figures Bring. It. On. Hairy is his middle name.
The figure who shows up at the door, after he’s rung three times, isn’t at all what Damien expects. Wiry and unshaven, hair a tousled mess, dressed in no-nonsense dungarees and denim jacket—the full-on Canadian tuxedo—he isn’t the picture of well-heeled wealth that greeted him at the first couple of houses. He looks, frankly, like the kind of guy Damien would get all blotto with, polishing off a few dozen wings at The End Zone when he’s not on duty. He might even have seen this guy over there on wing night once or twice.
The guy sure acts like he belongs in the house, though, leaning against the frame of the half-opened door, left hand tucked casually behind his back as the music continues to blast from the next room.
“Evening officer,” the guy says.
“Sir,” says Damien.
“What can I do you for?” His accent doesn’t quite fit the bill either. The folks around here tend to sound like they popped out of a boarding school in Anywheresville, U.S.A. They don’t usually have chewy Downeast lilts like this guy’s.
“Is this your residence, Mr.…”
“Harrison. Benjamin Harrison. No, sir, it’s not. I’m doing a bit of house sitting for the lord and lady of the manor.” He winks. “The Lavandos, that is.”
“I see.” Damien is starting to feel a bit anxious, less and less sure what to make of this guy and his presence here. “They friends of yours?”
Reclamation Page 15