by Trevor Cole
The teller had pushed a stack of bills toward the window. “Eighteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-six dollars.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
The chestnut-haired woman, whose name badge said Jo-Anne, put a firm hand on my arm and looked straight into my eyes. “It’s the shock,” she said. “It’s a wild thing, winning at the slots. Almost crazy. You think you haven’t earned this money. You don’t deserve it. Maybe there’s some mistake.” She looked at me like she was trying to go deeper with her eyes. “It’s a natural reaction, hon. But I saw you – you were at that machine a long time. Since before I came on shift. So you darn well earned it.”
“Sir?” The teller was trying to get my attention.
Jo-Anne looked down. “Oh, you have to sign the receipt.”
“I don’t want the money.”
“No, but you have to sign the receipt.” She patted the piece of paper being pushed under the glass. “That shows we fulfilled our obligations. Everything has to be clean and legal. You don’t want us to get in trouble.” She pointed a silver fingernail at the line. “Right here, dear.”
I took the pen being slid under the glass and signed the paper.
“Now,” said Jo-Anne, “since you’ve signed that paper, you have to take the money.”
Why couldn’t they hear me? “I don’t want it.”
“Understood, hon. However, the law states that once you sign that paper, that’s your money. And we have a responsibility as a respected gaming establishment to protect you and your money as long as you’re on the casino premises. So we can’t leave this lying around.” She took the stack of bills off the counter and slapped them into my right hand. “There you go, young sir. Your hard-earned winnings.” She patted me on the shoulder and winked. “Go and buy your mother something nice.”
I walked in the direction I was pointed, across the casino floor, between the rows of slots, past the crowded restaurants and T-shirt shops, carrying the money like a rock I meant to hurl through plate glass. It was dark when I made it outside but that didn’t surprise me; my legs felt heavy with blood from sitting, and my head was fuzzy from not having eaten since lunch. I stood at the entrance under a blanket of bulbs, as people came and went around me, and I tried to think of what to do.
“Car, sir?”
A black limousine had pulled up to the curb in front of me, and a uniformed driver held open the door. I shook my head and began walking to the parking lot, and as I did the driver called after me, “You might want to put that away.”
I considered going to the edge of the Falls and dumping the money over the railing; there was a pleasant symmetry in the idea of water sucking away whatever prosperity I had. For a while I thought about releasing the money, bill by bill, into the evening breeze. But halfway to where I’d parked my dad’s car, I knew what I was going to do.
At the quiet edge of the lot, Hockey Sweater Guy was leaning against a fence with his friends. They were nudging each other like boats tied to a pier. As I tacked a diagonal course through the parallels of cars, I sensed them becoming aware of me, and by the time I left the last pool of light, they were moving.
Their jabbering sounded like carny noise as they rolled closer, along the fence; ahead I could see the outline of Dad’s GS 450. There was a chance I could have made it inside and locked the door before they reached me, and if that’s what I’d intended I would have felt for my keys. Instead, when there was just the space of an open lane between me and the car, I stopped and turned toward them.
“Hey, fuckhead,” Hockey Sweater Guy called. “That’s right, motherfucker. You and me, we got unfinished business.” He laughed in a jagged way that made the others join in. “I told my boys about you, man. All about you, motherfucker. How you were fuckin’ with me? ’member that? ’member that? Yeah, you do, asshole. Now we’re gonna teach you respect.”
I felt no urge to run as they bullied toward me. When they were two car lengths away and one of them pointed to my hand, what I did was tighten my grip.
“Ooo-hoo, what’s that?” Hockey Sweater Guy crouched as he came, the fingers of his hands reaching out like he was approaching a toddler with a shell on the beach. “What’s that you got, motherfucker? You been holding out on me?” I waited as he came in low with a grin, waited still as he rose with a fist. I heard him say one more word – “Jackpot” – and then he came down on me like a wave.
As I lay on the pavement, while they pummelled and stomped, I put everything I had into my hand. I made them use their heavy boots to crush the knuckles and fingers, made them use the sharp edges of their heels. Because this time, I told myself, I wasn’t going to flinch. I wasn’t going to let myself care.
THREE
1
“That’s a stop sign coming up, Bish. Right there, straight ahead.”
Bishop, behind the wheel, was lost somewhere deep. Already this morning, since picking up Gerald at the house, he’d missed a crucial left turn, overestimated to a fair degree the duration of two yellow lights, and failed to make his Lincoln Town Car straddle or evade any number of potholes. Even the Lincoln’s bathwater ride could no longer keep Gerald from tensing up at the sight of the slightest depression in the road ahead. But right now he’d have traded for a good-sized pothole and been thankful for it.
“See the sign? Coming up in two secs.”
Gerald had been put in the position of getting a lift from Bishop because Kyle had called late the night before saying he was tired and didn’t think he should drive home. And Gerald, resisting the powerful urge to quiz his son on where the hell he was and what the hell he was doing, told him that sounded wise. Then this morning Vicki had driven off without a word before he woke up. Now, having missed the first exit off the highway, he and Bishop were being forced to double back through regions of industrial parkland Gerald had never seen before. It was all godforsaken, treeless, and drained of any breath of life, a lot like the affordably leased acreage Spent Materials called home. There was only one benefit to industrial parkland that Gerald could see as he pressed back, rigid, into his glove-leather seat, and that was the complete absence of foliage that might obscure the presence of cars travelling along perpendicular roadways one was about to cross without stopping –
“Son of a bitch.” He tried to relax his fists and let his breath out slowly, but it got held up somehow and came out in a gust.
“Sorry, Gerald, what?”
“Missed the stop sign back there, Bish.”
“Did I?” Bishop examined his rear-view to see if he could spot the sign to which Gerald referred. “Oh yes.”
“You’re having a bit of trouble concentrating.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” said Gerald. They were half a minute away from another crossroads and he was already working on the problem, scanning the horizon as he imagined water buffalo watched for moving cheetah spots amid the tall grasses. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Bish, you don’t seem really with us these days.” Between the car and the intersection ahead, the road dipped and he could see a coffee shop elevated on the right. There was no visible driveway for the coffee shop, which de facto meant the driveway was hidden in the dip and any kind of vehicle of any shape or size – a tanker truck seemed the likeliest possibility – could be pulling out of the driveway at any moment. “Hey,” said Gerald. “Do you feel like a coffee?”
“Feel what?”
“Feel like having a coffee, and maybe a doughnut. Boy, I could sure use one.” White hair or no, it was all Gerald could do not to knock Bishop out with some kind of karate chop and take hold of the wheel.
Bishop appeared confused. “You want to stop?”
“Yes,” said Gerald. “Slow down and pull in there. Slow down and, slow down and pull in – see where the truck is coming out?” He flicked a glance at Bishop hoping to see recognition in his eyes. Bishop was looking in his side mirror. “Up there, Bishop. Up ahead!”
“I see it, I see it.” The car began to slow
down, though not as much as Gerald would have liked, and Bishop turned the heavy Lincoln into the coffee shop drive with a NASCAR-like drift of all four wheels, clearing the tail light and bumper of the exiting pickup only by dint of its scooting out into the road. He pulled the car into a space dead ahead, turned off the ignition, and sat for a moment, still. Then he turned to Gerald with a look of perplexity. “Why are we here?”
Inside, the two men smoothed their ties as they slid into a booth. They gave their orders to a tall, aproned waitress and, after a quiet moment, as they were stirring their cups, Gerald took delivery of a cream-filled chocolate-glazed.
“Didn’t know you liked doughnuts,” said Bishop.
“Vicki doesn’t like me eating them.” The way the doughnut sat like a dark satin cushion almost perfectly centred on its clean white plate gave Gerald a good feeling about the coffee shop. “But I’ve decided it’s all right once in a while.”
“Good for you.” Bishop lifted his cup and took a delicate sip. His thin, aging lips pulled back tight from the heat. “Have to enjoy what we can on this earth while we’re here.”
“Yes indeed.”
“How is Victoria?”
“Oh, fine.” He picked the doughnut up off the plate and liked its weight. “More to the point, how’s Susan?”
“Well, I’m afraid” – he sighed heavily – “she may be dying.”
In the briefest moment after asking about Susan, about the time it takes to step on an antique Christmas ornament your wife has treasured for years, Gerald had given himself to the doughnut – he’d bitten deep, with gusto – and already begun to see what a mistake that probably was. Now he had a mouth full of glorious cakey chocolate and sweet custardy filling at the precise moment when he should have been expressing his heartfelt horror. He saw that Bishop, having shared his terrible news, was now watching Gerald eat his doughnut in the face of it. And he felt unsurpassably guilty, because the doughnut was superb.
“Bishop,” he managed through his mouthful, “that awful.”
“I don’t actually know she’s dying,” his boss clarified. “But given what the doctors in Denver are saying I’m starting to think the worst.”
Gerald, swallowing, thought it best to set the doughnut down. “What are they saying?”
“The worst kind of nonsense.” Bishop watched two men in construction vests settle on stools at the counter. “They’re talking about ‘amplifying the fields of opportunity.’ ‘Exploring discretionary scenarios.’ Which all sounds like ‘Expanding our pay-cheques’ to me. But it’s clear enough they’re mystified. They’re talking, if you can believe it, about sending her to Phoenix.”
“Phoenix,” said Gerald.
“What the devil Phoenix has to do with anything I have no idea.” He grabbed his cup by the handle and then slammed it down again. “I told them on the phone, if you people in Denver can’t fix the problem what makes you think it’s going to be any better in Phoenix?”
“What did they say?”
“They said Phoenix has a new clinic with new equipment.”
“That sounds good,” said Gerald.
“So I called the damned doctors in Cincinnati.” Bishop had sloshed coffee onto his saucer and the laminate table around it, and Gerald slid his napkin across the table and cosied it around his boss’s dish as he talked. “I said to them, ‘Why the hell did you send my wife to Denver when they’ve got a new clinic in bloody Phoenix?’ ”
“I’ll bet that felt good.”
“Hell, no,” Bishop grumbled. “I felt like the most impotent fool. And the Cincinnati doctors said the Phoenix clinic specializes in something entirely different from the problem my wife has, and they can’t understand the Denver doctors’ thinking.” He shook his head as if all doctors and the medical system itself had gone mad.
“What problem is it exactly? If I’m not intruding.”
“Hmm?”
“Susan’s problem,” said Gerald. “We’ve never actually talked about it.”
Bishop sighed even more heavily than before, as if a great sacrifice were being demanded of him. He glanced up at Gerald and then focused on his two furrowed hands, the fingers of which he began to entwine. “It’s a kind of …” His face grew strained and pink as he knotted his hands tighter and made faint, throaty sounds of struggle, until Gerald reached out and laid a hand on his wrist, and Bishop’s shoulders slumped. He looked up, helpless. “It’s hard to explain.”
For a while, the two men drank their coffee, and accepted refills when the waitress brought a carafe to the table. Then Bishop set his cup down with finality.
“So I’ve decided to go,” he said. “I’m heading to Denver first thing tomorrow and then flying with Susan to Phoenix.” He looked at Gerald with a face so vulnerable it was as if he expected some rebuke. “You’ll wonder why I didn’t go before, to be with my wife.”
“No.” Gerald shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Somehow I had it worked out that leaving the office and flying down there made it official, that things were serious.” He turned his face to the window, and his voice seemed to choke and submerge. “And so she’s been traipsing thousands of miles, from one set of doctors to the next, facing it all alone, while I’ve been here keeping myself comfy and safe like a goddamned mouse in the wall.”
He glanced back at Gerald and gave him a rueful smile.
“And I’ve been letting the company go to hell while I’m at it.”
“No, Bish. That’s –”
“Goddamned market share’s pissed down to nothing.”
“That’s my fault,” insisted Gerald. “I should have been on top of that sooner.”
Bishop seemed to absorb that notion and twitched his mouth as though he thought it might be true. “You’re operations though. Wasn’t really on your plate.”
“Still, I should have seen what was happening and come to you. If as you say …” Gerald stopped himself from completing the thought, If as you say I’m CEO material, because now wasn’t the time to throw his own ambitions into the mix, and he didn’t want Bishop, in his disappointment, to contradict him. Sorry to lead you on there, my friend, but…
“Well, whatever the case,” said Bishop, “the board’s not happy about it.”
“What are they saying?”
Bishop looked down at Gerald’s doughnut and pointed. “You going to finish that?”
Gerald glanced down at the bitten doughnut. He associated it with shame now, guilt over putting his own trivial needs first, and it was ruined for him. He pushed the plate across the table. “Be my guest.”
The older man broke off a peaty hunk and lifted it to his mouth trailing a primordial ooze of cream filling. “It’s good,” he said, after a minute. “Sure you don’t want the rest?” When Gerald shook his head Bishop pulled away a second bite and held it ready as he washed down the first.
“What did the board tell you?”
“Well, it’s Gwyn, really.”
Gerald had never more than shaken hands with the board’s short, stocky chairman, but Gwyn Doremond’s reputation as a humourless Welsh prick was firmly established. Bishop had brought him in as a director three years ago, hoping his experience in fasteners manufacturing (high tensile nuts and bolts, pop rivets, and socket screws) in Cardiff during the downsizing phase of the early nineties would improve Spent’s image among materials industry analysts. Within fifteen months, Doremond’s coal-browed ferocity had overawed enough of his fellow board members to get him nominated as chairman. After that he’d become an ever-tightening band around Bishop’s neck.
“I’m told Gwyn’s been on the phone to a number of the board, saying if we don’t get the market share up to double digits by the next quarter, he’s going to call for a vote on me.”
Gerald worked very hard to keep the involuntary thoughts of purging at bay. It was like walking along the curb of a busy roadway and trying not to think about tripping and falling into the path of an onrushing truck. I
n other words, nearly impossible. “I’m sure you’d win that,” he said.
For a moment there was a stillness to Bishop as he studied the dregs of his coffee. He seemed more saddened than angered. “I don’t know that I care,” he said finally. “I think this company needs somebody to take it by the scruff of the neck and shake it hard. But this thing with Susan …” He rubbed the rim of his cup with a puckered finger. “Not sure I’m that somebody any more.”
Gerald distracted himself with motions – he pulled a napkin out of the tin dispenser and pressed it to the corners of his mouth, then laid it on the table and began to fold it into progressively smaller halves. There were coffee spots on the laminate that needed his attention, and he worked against them with the dry corner of the tight napkin bundle he’d made.
“What do you think?” Bishop asked.
“Well …” He attempted a chuckle, to suggest how much less than seriously he might be taking the notion of Bishop leaving the company he’d founded and built. But to his chagrin the chuckle came out somewhat squeakily, somewhat tiny chipmunkily, which seemed to signal to a precise degree how very seriously he took it, in fact. “That’s hard for me to answer, Bish,” he said. “Only you know how you feel, but, I think the company needs you.”
“Company needs somebody,” said Bishop. “Doesn’t have to be me.”
The purging fears that had been creeping up the walls Gerald had erected began to trickle over the top. He caught his first glimpse of a headline: CHANGES COMING AT SPENT. Ghostly images started to form of board-appointed auditors trooping in to examine books in search of excuses to “achieve economies” in the costs of personnel.
“What would you say,” Bishop continued, “if I were to recommend to the board that we begin a succession process with a view to naming you chief executive within the year?”
Suddenly the purging waters receded. The spectres vanished. The newsprint under the headline began to fill up with type in which the name “Gerald Woodlore” appeared in the vicinity of adjectives such as “capable” and “promising.” He searched the older man’s eyes to make sure this idea of succession – which as a word sounded remarkably close to succeed – was not some ephemeral fancy akin to “What if the sky were orange?” but actually something thought through and solid. He tried to think of the most ideal response to a hypothetical question that used as its central assumption the idea that he, Gerald Woodlore, was so well-regarded as an executive that he could be considered a viable, indeed, the preferred leader of a nationally traded company.