———
Richard pushed heavily into the Monaco Club. Despite its name, the place was not affiliated with any casinos and at a glance featured no gambling, other than the one you took with your life upon entering. Richard had been in plenty of dive bars in his day, had even worked in one until recently, but he grudgingly admired how the Monaco took the concept of diviness to another level. In one corner of the trapezoidal room, the ceiling had partially collapsed where a pipe had burst. The rusted pipework jutted down like a hernia through a ruptured abdominal lining. The rest of the tiles were sodden and brown and looked ready to go at any second. An incongruous candy machine near the entrance contained what looked like tiny plastic bananas. A grim pair of blondes sipped drinks from plastic cups and smoked by a pay phone next to the bathroom, waiting for a call that would almost certainly not come for them. They were immediately identifiable as prostitutes from their shared bearing, a singular brand of avid hostility. A trio of dodgy-looking men at the bar craned their necks around at him as though he was intruding on a private function. One of them featured a neck tattoo that read STRANGE DAYS in gothic script, with a curlicue extending up over the jawline like the leg of a hidden spider. Richard approached him.
“Is Mikhail here?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Richard.”
“Who’s Richard?”
“I am.”
“What do you want.”
“Jesus. To talk to Mikhail.”
The men looked at one another dubiously. One of them pulled out his phone and sent a text message. Richard waved off the bartender and sat alone at the end of the bar, aware of the trio watching him. He thought how if there was ever a time it seemed reasonable to get a drink, waiting at a bar to confront your daughter’s loan shark or blackmailer or whatever the hell he was seemed like the time. But he didn’t, he just sat there. That was the trick: you just sat there and didn’t do it.
While he sat there not doing anything, he thought about Cindy, sleeping, or unconscious anyway, in the car outside with Vance. She’d been about to speak but nodded off, and they hadn’t been able to fully rouse her—some combination, it seemed, of the pills she’d taken plus a more or less complete nervous breakdown. Eventually, they pried her off the couch, to some murmured fussing but no real resistance. On the way down the stairwell, they passed by a man who did the best he could to pretend he wasn’t seeing two other men carrying an unconscious woman down the stairs. Not entirely unconscious—she took little shambling steps, helping them move her to Vance’s car. Eyes still closed, she scooted into the backseat, where Richard fastened her in place with the seatbelt while Vance went back to retrieve the suitcase he’d hastily thrown clothes into. She lolled as he felt behind her for the strap—her condition oddly reminded him of when they’d gone to Knott’s Berry Farm when she was four. As a long day of standing in lines, eating bad concession food, and standing in more lines, all under a vengeful July Central Valley sun, had progressed, so had Cindy progressed through some toddlery version of Maslow’s stages of grief: from excitement to an overstimulated stupor to hot frustration and subsequent sobbing meltdown to an exhaustion so pure as to render her infinitely pliable, holding his hand and trundling toward the car with her eyes closed. The closed lids had fluttered then as they fluttered twenty-four years later, like a butterfly in delicate, momentary equipoise.
Eventually, Mikhail pushed in from outside, in the process letting in a bit of weak sunlight, which seemed to take one look at the inside of the Monaco Club, turn around, and leave immediately. Mikhail sat down next to Richard, exuding fatigue as well as sweat. The bartender, without being asked, set up a tequila sunrise in front of Mikhail and a moment later impaled it with a straw.
“Where’s your valet?”
“Outside, in the car. He’s also my chauffeur.”
Mikhail stared at him blankly. Richard said, “Tell me what’s going on.”
“She owes me money.”
“How much?”
“Ninety-five hundred, give or take.”
“For what.” Mikhail gave Richard a very abbreviated version explaining for what. Richard said, “I don’t believe you. Leave her alone.”
Mikhail sucked the straw, further hollowing his already hollow cheeks. “Or what?”
“Or I don’t know. Something.”
“Something? You’re not very good at this.” It almost sounded as though he was disappointed.
“I’m a beginner, but I’m willing to learn.”
“Okay.” Mikhail drummed his fingers on the counter.
Richard had anticipated a tense showdown, but the man’s laconic, depressive aura was like a sponge absorbing and nullifying all of Richard’s hostility. He tried again. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll burn this place down.”
“Please, you’d be doing me a favor.”
“Fine, use your imagination.”
Mikhail lit a cigarette. “I have to say, you have a lot of nerve coming in here trying to tell me to forget about ninety-five hundred bucks and acting protective on your daughter’s behalf.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let’s just say World’s Greatest Father you weren’t.” Mikhail sipped from the long straw of his drink, then settled his head in the crook of his bent arm, and said, “She told me about one time you were gone a whole week? Just disappeared. Then came back like nothing had happened.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I bet. She said it happened a lot.”
“I’m not going to discuss this with you.”
“She said you were like a dog that kept running away, getting lost, and brought back home.”
“I made some mistakes, sure.”
“I mean, what do you think that does to a little girl’s psyche?”
“Probably screws it up.”
“Yeah, probably. Might make her fear abandonment by men and yet be attracted to men who are likely to abandon her.” As he spoke, Mikhail’s face was finally animated by something other than fatigued displeasure—it was not an improvement. “She told me about another time—you’d already fucked up somehow and were trying to make it up to her—you bought her this big plastic playhouse for the backyard. Only you couldn’t figure out how to do it, and you got frustrated and forgot about it. She said the plastic pieces sat in a big pile in the backyard for three days before your wife at the time noticed and put it together. She said she didn’t tell her mother about it, because she didn’t want to cause another fight.”
“Did she tell you about how I used to take her to ballet class when she was five? What about how I used to stay home and paint pictures with her?” The truth was he’d been between construction jobs at the time and had little more to do than sprawl around hungover and daub greens and browns on construction paper, but still. He strained his memory for more exculpating evidence. I always. I used to. There was this one time when I. “Anyway, fuck me. Why am I sitting here explaining myself to you?”
Mikhail said, “She told me about one birthday when she was older that you had obviously forgotten about. You showed up at the house to get something you’d left there when you moved out. And you noticed the HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner and half a cake sitting on the counter, and you pretended like you had come for her. And you gave her something from your pocket—was it breath mints?” He guffawed. “Could that be right?”
“It was a Magic Eightball key chain.”
Mikhail made a stabbing motion with his cigarette as he bent again toward his drink. “Right. And she told me she held on to it for years anyway. Kept it in her desk. That it reminded her of you and how she hated you and loved you, too, even though she didn’t want to. Her words. She might still have it, you should ask her. But anyway, the point is, don’t ride into my bar on your high horse about how I’m mistreating your daughter. I’m a piece of shit and so are you.”
Richard watched the bartender wipe grime onto highball glasses with a soiled rag and wondered why this assessment
of his character made his stomach twist. It wasn’t as though he’d ever deluded himself into thinking he’d been a good father. And he regularly thought of and referred to himself as a piece of shit. But there was something about hearing it from this cheesy hustler, sweating in his pleather, that codified it as indisputable, objective truth. This guy—this fucking guy—clearly knew from pieces of shit; an abridged family history from Cindy and five minutes around Richard had been all he needed to get it right. Mikhail sucked with a long crackle at the ice in his empty drink, like an enervated spider draining the last bit of life from the husk of his victim.
“All right.” Richard sighed. “So explain what happens if you don’t get the money.”
“I don’t know, maybe nothing. Or maybe I email her boss, tell him my side of things.”
“Why would they believe you? Why would they even listen?”
“They might not. In this life, there are no guarantees.”
“Basically, you’re full of shit is the feeling I get here. You’re just some grubby dirtbag leaning on my kid. No reason not to, right? It doesn’t cost you anything, and if she’s dumb enough to pay, you’re up ten grand.”
Mikhail shook his empty glass in the air. He waited until the new drink had been put in front of him and the bartender had resumed dirtying the glassware before he answered. “That’s basically it, yeah. I’m pretty harmless. But the thing you’re forgetting, and she’s not, is that I know a lot of people who aren’t harmless. I’m not saying I want anything to happen to her, because I honestly don’t. I like your daughter, she’s a tough girl. Really sharp and funny, too. I would genuinely feel terrible if anything did happen to her….” He made a circular motion with his hand as he droned on, like a chess expert going through a tedious explanation of an endgame’s foregone conclusion, and finally wrapped up with “Desperate times, desperate measures. Et cetera, et cetera.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yeah, man, of course it is.” Mikhail laughed. “See, that’s how you threaten someone.”
Richard pulled out his overstuffed wallet and found one of the checks he’d brought just in case a situation arose, though he hadn’t imagined this particular situation, could never have imagined this particular situation in a thousand years.
“You got a pen?” he said.
Mikhail laughed again. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Banks closed an hour ago, and I’m leaving town now.”
“Okay. You know what? Fine. If it bounces, it bounces, and she still owes me the money. What’s the difference? And I think you do want to help her, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Hey, you know what else?” He reached over the bar, felt around, and procured a plastic Bic, which he bounced a couple of times on its end. “I like you. I trust you. You’re a lot like me.”
“Now you’re just being hurtful,” said Richard. He took the pen, made out a check for ninety-five hundred dollars, and handed it to Mikhail. He pushed himself up from the bar and stood over the man, imagining, for a moment, plunging the pen down into the bent neck, the exposed ridge of spine. “Listen, if you ever talk to my daughter again, I will kill you. I really do mean that.”
Mikhail folded the check into his front shirt pocket. “That’s good,” he said, looking up and nodding. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”
———
Richard doddered through the parking lot, the warm Vegas dusk, and got in the car. Vance sat behind the wheel, jotting something in his notebook. He shut the door quietly and bent backward to look at his sleeping daughter. She moaned in her sleep and turned halfway on her side, her arm unfurling off the edge of the backseat with a languid grace that suggested a hostess at some plantation gala introducing an especially dear and important guest. He nudged her shoulder but to no effect. The limb was unresponsive in its socket, as though unconnected to its owner.
“Okay,” he said to Vance. “Let’s go.”
Very soon, the desert reemerged from under its asphalt and neon camouflage. Squat segments of a rusted industrial chemical storage unit jumbled out into the sand like spilled intestines. A mottled dog limped in their shadows, watching the car long after it had sped past. Various signage on the side of the road desperately advertised LOBSTER! NEW GIRLS, SHOWS NIGHTLY!! WORLD’S LARGEST TRUCK!!! as though the landscape itself was racking its brain, trying to find something to make you turn around and spend more money, in the unlikely event you had any left. As though she sensed a loosening of Sin City’s gravitational field, Cindy roused herself. “Where are we? Where are we going?”
Richard said, “Leaving Las Vegas.”
“No. No no no.”
“Yes. I have to get on to the next stop, and you can’t stay there.”
“I have a job. And I have to pay off that money.”
“I paid him off.”
“What?” She pushed herself halfway up in the seat, against the door. “You what?”
“I paid him off.”
“How?”
“I wrote him a check.”
She laughed incredulously. “A check?”
“They’re these little paper rectangles? People used to carry them around to pay for things?”
He waited to hear more objections, then glanced back and saw she was sleeping again. After a few more minutes, they crossed some impalpable line and slipped the very last, flailing grasp of the city: no more billboards, no more industrial chaos or jackpot truck stops or signs of human existence at all, really. He felt himself relax, secure in the certainty that—as with the state of Oregon—this was a place to which he would never return. What was the opposite of Viva, he wondered, glancing back once more at his sleeping daughter, and then quickly slipping into his own Bonanza Dreams.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Later, after the bodies had been searched and robbed, and a kill count radioed in (twenty-six!), and a trench had been dug for them, and quicklime sprinkled, and a recon team sent into the jungle to look for other survivors or other encampments, and dinner had been eaten, and shit had been shot, and someone had said “fucking A” under their breath for the hundredth time, I went and looked for Berlinger. He was sitting with his back up against a little rice palm that waved in the warm breeze. Endicott was evidently not worried about him deserting, which made sense—going out into the jungle without a weapon or map or provisions would have been suicide.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s up,” he said, without looking at me. He was whittling away on a little piece of wood.
“I thought they took your weapons.”
“It’s a penknife, Lazar. I’m not going to stage a mutiny with it.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I already said why.”
“Years in jail. I thought you were smarter than this.”
“You thought wrong, I guess.” He shrugged and attended to his whittling. It was a little man, rough still, but with clearly discernible legs and big feet splayed out. I was trying to figure out what to say when Davis Martin came up behind us.
“Lazar,” he said. “We’re moving out soon and Lieutenant wants you to look after Berlinger.”
Berlinger said, “What’s ‘look after’ mean? I’m fine, thanks.”
Davis Martin didn’t even look at him, and I realized that as far as Martin was concerned, when Berlinger refused orders and laid down his gun, he’d ceased to exist. To me, Martin said, “What this means is that you will accompany Berlinger for the rest of this march. You will make sure he doesn’t get killed, or get anyone else killed, or run off, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Good, we’re moving soon.”
Berlinger arched his back against the tree like a cat stretching, and looked up at me. He grinned. “Got you on MP duty, Lazar. You up for this assignment?”
“Shut up, Mitch.”
“You could make your stripes here.”
“I said shut up.”
He shrugged and went back
to whittling his little man. I walked back to where my pack was, through the village. Bloodstains in the dirt around the fire pit were already dry, getting trampled by our soldiers and blown by the wind. It was startling how fast the evidence of what we’d just done was disappearing—soon it would all be gone. I sat on a rock and wrote a letter to my parents that I knew I probably wouldn’t send. I never thought I’d personally experience the feeling, but I was suddenly very, very homesick. I told them about the march, about the shitty MREs, about how pretty the mountains were. I even told them how one of the guys surrendered arms, how I was in charge of getting him to base. My dad would like that, I knew. But I didn’t tell them about what we’d just done. There wasn’t any putting it into words. I’m just now getting to where I can.
———
Cindy looked over at her father, who lay on the other bed watching TV with the volume down. Nick at Nite: Sanford and Son, it looked like. His great gray head was cushioned between the stacked pillows behind him and his bulbous neck in front. Richard had protested at first when earlier, on the long drive to Salt Lake City, Cindy had asked for a copy of the book, but relented when he saw her desire was genuine. She’d wanted to read the rest of the chapter he’d read at the Convention Center. She put the book down beside her and said, “It’s good.”
“Thanks.”
“You never told me about any of that. You never told me you’d killed someone.”
“I’ve never told you a lot of things.”
“Maybe you should give it a try sometime.”
Richard didn’t look up. He clicked the channel to a golf tournament. Tiger Woods, flanked by hundreds of people, drove a disappearing ball into the white dome of the upper sky. Two seconds later, the camera swooped up to catch the ball’s disorienting reentry as it appeared to arc toward the screen until perspective showed it landing farther away, bounding like a frightened rabbit, and finally coming to rest in a swath of unreal green. Watching it, Cindy felt the nausea she’d been ignoring creep back up her gullet. She’d slept the remaining few hours of the ride, and when she awoke, the pills were starting to wear off. She felt nervous and raw, like her entire body was a scraped knee.
The Grand Tour Page 20