In Mike We Trust

by P. E. Ryan

  “I just don’t feel like being touched right now, is all.”

  “Listen to me. I hate seeing you like this. So we’ll deal with it. Okay? We’ll talk about it. The gay thing, I mean. As for the other…” She hesitated, and looked away.

  He thought maybe she was crying; but when her head swung back around, her jaw was set forward and her eyes had hardened and she looked angrier than ever. “I’m surprised the two of you didn’t end up in jail. I’ll tell you one trait your dad and your uncle Mike shared: pride. Mike is too proud to ever stoop to working at a regular job, with a boss, so he drifts around gambling and meddling with who knows how many people’s lives. As for your dad…” She held him in her gaze, but her words trailed off.

  “What about Dad?”

  “Your dad was too proud to admit he could do any wrong.”

  “Meaning…”

  “That second hardware store was a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, that’s normal. But he was already in over his head, and when he realized it, he only made things worse thinking another store would help. He didn’t even tell me how bad things were, because he was too proud to admit he’d taken a wrong turn. We wouldn’t have been in nearly as bad a shape if he’d just stayed with the place on Hamilton. But he refused. He spent and he borrowed and he spent some more. And then…he died.”

  It was shocking to hear her state it so bluntly.

  “I’m angry at your dad,” she said.

  “But he’s—”

  “I know. He’s not here to be angry at. That’s one of the things that makes me angry. I miss him, of course, and I want him back every day of my life. But he left us in a big mess.”

  She took a deep breath and folded her arms across her stomach. “So where is all this stolen money that was supposedly for your college fund, anyway?”

  Garth cringed. He stared at Hutch, who had the luxury of simply falling asleep. “Mike has it.”

  “Mike has the money,” his mom said.

  He nodded. “He kept saying he was keeping it all together, and that we were going to tell you we bought a lucky lottery ticket and surprise you with one lump sum.”

  “Brilliant. Did it occur to you, like it would have to me, that unless you win a dollar or two from a scratch-off card, the state doesn’t pay you in cash? They issue a check. A government check. How much money are we talking about, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I never actually saw it all put together.”

  She shook her head and stood up from her chair. “I can only hope he uses it to travel as far away from Richmond as he can.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making a cup of tea,” she said. “It’s all I want in the world, right now. A quiet cup of tea.”

  “Well, what about me?”

  “I’m mad at you. You can get your own tea.”

  “No, I mean…am I grounded, or what?”

  “Let’s see.” She counted off his offenses on the fingers of one hand. “You lied about where you were the other night. You broke your promise about not coming out yet. Oh, yes—you participated in an ongoing fraud and cheated who knows how many innocent people out of their money. I’d say you’re grounded until you turn…forty. Not that we’re done talking about it.” Her eyes fell to the end table. “Why am I looking at a Christmas present?”

  “It’s a ship model Mike gave me. He said it was the only wrapping paper he could find.”

  “A model,” she said. “Which is supposed to be what, a consolation prize?”

  “It’s the Flying Dutchman.”

  “Perfect,” she said. “At least he has a sense of humor.” She walked into the kitchen.

  He wandered into the backyard, his hands jammed into his pockets, feeling miserable about their conversation (which, as she’d pointed out, was unfinished), miserable about himself, about Adam, and perhaps most of all miserable about Mike.

  Mike, who had skipped out while Garth was confronting Jackie’s angry boyfriend, which meant he hadn’t really cared whether or not the guy took a swing at his fifteen-year-old nephew.

  Mike, who had either had a last-minute, greedy change of heart or who had been planning all along to steal the money.

  Mike, who had orchestrated an entire network of lies and had somehow convinced Garth to go along.

  Hutch had followed him outside. The spaniel visited a few choice spots along the hedges, then found his filthy tennis ball and carried it back to Garth, where he dropped it and looked up expectantly.

  Where was it Mike had said he was headed the night he’d first arrived?

  Atlantic City.

  They could follow him there. Get into the station wagon and drive, their eyes peeled for that sleek blue Camaro with the grinning con man behind the wheel and the overnight bag filled with cash in the trunk.

  And what if they caught up with him? Hold him against a chain-link fence, maybe. Slip the end of a knife blade inside one of his nostrils. Do you like your nose, Mike? Do you like breathing through it?

  But no. There wasn’t much of a violent streak in Garth. He couldn’t even enjoy fantasizing about it.

  Hutch barked in frustration, nudged the ball, stepped back from it.

  Garth brought his foot back and kicked it across the yard.

  Back inside, he carried Mike’s gift to his room, sat on his bed, and tore the snowman paper away from the box. He didn’t understand his mom’s remark about how Mike still had his sense of humor intact until he removed the lid, opened the booklet that came with the model, and compared what it said there to what Mike had told him weeks ago about the legend of the Flying Dutchman.

  In Mike’s version, the crew of the Dutchman was cursed to sail the seas giving aid to ships in peril—forever and ever, till the end of time. According to the booklet that came with the model, the Dutchman had been caught in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, and when a divine angel had appeared on the bow to offer help, the captain had taken a shot at it. From that point on, the Dutchman was doomed to wander without rest, and to bring down disaster on any ship within its path.

  17

  For the first time since Mike’s arrival, Garth dreamed of his dad on the Chesapeake Bay, and for the first time since the accident, the dreamed changed. Mr. Holt wasn’t even in it. Garth was the one manning the tiller. His dad was working the line for the sail. They were enjoying themselves, tacking across the surface, watching gulls circle and dive, circle and dive, some of them bobbing up out of the water with fish twisting in their beaks.

  Right on cue, the storm came out of nowhere. It darkened the sky and brought with it a harsh, battering wind. The rain soaked them to the skin within minutes. Then things—as Garth knew they would—turned serious, fast. Dad, he shouted over the noise, this is bad. I know what happens. We’re going to drown.

  No, we’re not, his dad hollered back. Head east!

  Garth pulled on the tiller, and the boat turned.

  The wind caught the sail. They were practically flying across the water. It sluiced away on either side, and even the storm seemed to have a hard time keeping up with them. Garth steered with one hand, held on to the Sunfish’s side with the other, and yelled, Why am I not seasick? Is it because this isn’t really happening?

  It’s happening, his dad yelled back. It’s real. Look up ahead!

  Garth leaned sideways, peering around the mast and the sail, through the rain, to a blinking yellow eye fixed over a dark spot on the horizon. The spot grew, and gradually it took the shape of a dock.

  The mainland. They were going to make it, he realized.

  They were going to live.

  He’d spent several hours steeped in thought the night before, unable to fall asleep. As a result, when he opened his eyes from the dream, it was midmorning, nearly ten o’clock.

  His mom had left for work over an hour ago. The note taped to the milk jug read

  Don’t forget you’re grounded and in very big trouble. No television. No fun of any kind. No stepping outside the apartmen
t—unless the place is on fire or you want to take Hutch for a walk.

  Love, Mom.

  There was at least a hint of humor there. He scrambled an egg and ate it between two slices of toast with ketchup. Because he’d been forbidden to turn on the television, he sat with the newspaper at the kitchen table and read the comics. Then he washed his dishes and returned to his room, still haunted by the dream. What did it mean? Had it been his tiller work or his dad’s handling of the sail that had saved them? Did it matter? He hadn’t been drenched in sweat when he’d awakened; his heart hadn’t been pounding. One of those corny interpretation books might have told him the dream meant survival. Another one might say, Water represents change, but rain represents sadness. Garth had never believed that stuff and didn’t believe it now. How about this: Dreaming that you and your dad were in a boat and didn’t drown means: Lucky you for having the dream.

  Still, it seemed like there had to be some connection between recent events and what his sleeping mind had conjured up.

  Eager to make whatever amends were possible with his mom, he got out the cleaning supplies and scrubbed down the hall bathroom. He vacuumed and dusted the living room. He made his bed and straightened up his closet, said, “To hell with eBay,” to Hutch, and carried all the Halloween costumes out to one of the garbage bins alongside the building (save for the capeless Superman outfit, which, as far as he knew, was still on the floor of the rental car). Finally, he stuck his head into the room opposite his—what had so suddenly become “Mike’s room” and then, just as suddenly, gone back to being “the spare room.”

  On the ladder-back chair sat the dog-eared copies of Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep. He picked them both up and read the back covers, but decided he’d had enough of crime for a while and so set them back down.

  The sheets Mike had used were in a wad on the floor at the foot of the daybed. Garth gathered them up and dropped them into the washer, then wandered back to his room. The HMS Victory sat on his desk, officially completed, its sails glued into place. He’d taken his time with the model, and he had to admit it looked pretty great. Carefully, he edged the Batavia to one side on top of his dresser, turned it at a diagonal to make room, then lifted the Victory from his desk and carried it over. With the two ships arranged so that their bowsprits pointed at each other, they looked to be on a collision course, so he lined them up parallel, bowsprits aimed toward the window. That way, they appeared to be racing—or just sailing side by side.

  He turned around, and was caught somewhat off guard by the sight of his barren desk: no project in the works, just the X-ACTO knife, the sandpaper, and the few other tools and model supplies that remained there all summer when there was no schoolwork to do. Should he start on the Flying Dutchman? Should he work on it at all? The model itself looked highly detailed and fairly complex. But was it better just to toss out a “consolation prize” from Mike after all that had happened rather than have the finished product—impressive as it would undoubtedly be—staring him in the face, reminding him of how he’d stood around in public dressed as Superman and Scooby-Doo while he lied and helped steal from both strangers and friends?

  He told himself he was indifferent to the decision.

  And, besides, maybe it was time to give up the ship models entirely. When he’d glimpsed them in the mirror the night he and Adam had watched Beautiful Thing, they’d looked like nothing more than a bunch of childish toys.

  He carried the box, which rattled with the unassembled parts of the Flying Dutchman, down the hall and through the living room, bound for the back door. The dryer buzzed as he was passing.

  He set the box on the kitchen counter and pulled the dryer door open. He was removing the sheets when a T-shirt crackled with static electricity and dropped to the floor. Bright yellow. A green, grinning dragon on the front, eating ice cream.

  Mike. For all of Mike’s many, many faults, Garth wanted the T-shirt. Even if he could never wear it around his mom.

  He also wanted the model of the Flying Dutchman.

  He let Hutch out into the backyard, then carried the box and the T-shirt back to his room. He folded the shirt and tucked it into the bottom drawer of his dresser. He set the box down in front of him on his bed. The booklet still lay on top of the pieces, opened to where he’d been reading the legend.

  So I’ll build it, he thought. If nothing else, it’ll be a monument to a low point in my life.

  He began removing the plastic racks of pieces from the box and laying them out on his desk.

  Hutch barked at the back door, ready to be let back in.

  “I’m coming!” he hollered.

  The dog barked again.

  “I said I’m coming! Don’t lose your fur—”

  He stopped, midsentence. When the dog barked a third time, he hardly heard him.

  Lisa slapped the side of his computer monitor. “Does this thing even work?”

  “Yes. You just have to give it about a year to boot up. Why? What’s so important to show me? Pictures of your latest boyfriend?”

  “Very funny,” she said. “I want to show you something I made for you.”

  “Wow—what is it?”

  “You’ll see. Meanwhile, why did you ask me over? You sounded all frantic when you called.”

  “Two reasons,” Garth told her. “One, I’m not allowed to leave the house because I’m grounded due to my recent criminal high jinks.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll slip you a file inside a Twinkie. Why else?”

  “Because of this.”

  The money—which Mike had changed out into mostly twenty-dollar bills—was rubber-banded together and resting beneath one-half of the Flying Dutchman’s hull. There was a post-it note attached that read simply:

  You deserve to be the one who presents this to her.

  –Mike

  Garth lifted the inch-high stack and waved it at Lisa.

  “Oh my god!” she said, her eyes widening. “This is what you made?”

  “Yeah. It’s crazy, right?”

  “It’s beyond crazy. How much is it?”

  “Two thousand eight hundred and seventeen bucks.”

  “Amazing,” she said. “See, that’s the ultracrazy part—that there are that many people who would believe a pair of dorks standing next to a card table.”

  “I’m not a dork! And, besides, it’s not like twenty-eight hundred people each gave us a dollar; some of them gave us five or ten. One old guy shelled out fifty!”

  She shook her head. “So the Flying Jerkman didn’t make off with the loot after all?”

  “Not much of it, anyway. He may have skimmed some for travel expenses.”

  “He was probably planning to vanish with every penny, then chickened out when you confronted him.”

  Not so, Garth knew. He’d replayed the sequence of events in his mind over and over again: He’d made it clear to Mike that he was done scamming; Mike had conceded; then he’d presented Garth with the Flying Dutchman, already wrapped, the cash hidden inside. All of that before Garth had challenged him about the money’s whereabouts. Even if he’d secretly packed his things and had been planning on making a stealthy exit, taking the money with him hadn’t been part of his plan.

  She glanced at his computer again. “Finally!” she said, and then opened a connection to the internet. “Check your email.”

  “I never get email.”

  “Because you never write email. But check. I sent you something.”

  He logged on to his account and saw over thirty new messages, nearly every one of them junk. But the most recent one was from Lisa. “Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut,” read the subject line. He opened it, clicked on the attachment, and then listened to the cricket sounds of his computer struggling with the file. As slowly as if a tapestry were being woven down the screen from top to bottom, the picture opened.

  There was his dad, hunched down next to the base of the tree, holding a peanut for the blurry squirrel. Only, the squirrel wasn’t quite as blurr
y as it had been in the snapshot. And the evidence of the creases was gone, the flecks of color that had fallen away over the years filled in with some expert Photoshopping. Jerry Rudd, at about the same age Garth was now, looked vibrant and glowing. The picture might have been taken yesterday.

  “How did you get this?”

  “You handed me the snapshot the other day, remember? I didn’t give it back. I wanted to hold on to it and make a reproduction for you. If you had a printer—or if I had one that didn’t keep breaking down—we could print it out on glossy paper, eight by ten, and get it framed.”

  “This looks great!”

  “I know,” she said proudly.

  “Hey, thanks, Lisa. A lot.”

  “You’re welcome a lot. Here’s the original, by the way.” She took a small envelope out of her purse and handed it to him.

  “I can’t wait to show my mom. She’s going to love it. I might make it my screen saver, too.”

  “So…” Lisa’s eyes had moved from the computer screen back to the bed, and the stack of money. “What happens to all of that?”

  “We could go to Kings Dominion for a month.”

  “No.”

  “You’re right, it would probably get boring after day seven. How about we buy two new printers—one for me and one for you?”

  “Garth, you can’t spend this money! You can’t keep it! It’s stolen.”

  “I know, I know. But what am I going to do? It’s not like I can give it back to all those people. I don’t even know who they were.”

  “You have to give it to your mom,” Lisa told him.

  “She won’t take it! She’ll be horrified.”

  “No, I mean, give it to your mom and let her decide. What other choice do you have?”

  He stared at the money. He nodded. “You’re right. Still”—he reached down and ran his thumb along the edge of the stack—“just a hundred? Who would know? We could go to a movie, buy the newest Sufjan, maybe order a pizza with about twenty toppings?”