Slippery Slope

by Robin Shaw

  Chapter 8

  SEATTLE, like all modern cities, is a plant whose heart has died but whose leaves continue to flourish.

  Families, fleeing with their wealth from the dirt and i linger of the center, had flowed over the surrounding countryside, each attempting to mark out a little kingdom that might prove secure in the final crisis, which all subconsciously knew to be inevitable. Seen from the air, their efforts appear to be no more than a minor blot in an otherwise majestic countryside. From leu thousand feet, the great expanse of Puget Sound stretches as far as the eye can see, its sparkling water masking their inner sickness. Back from the city in a long sweep, the great snowcapped mountains seem to have everything under control.

  On the ground the view is different, and more frightening. The houses, all very neat and spruce in the suburbs, loom larger than the mountains, and their cancerous growth strains toward Vancouver in the north and Portland in the south. One day soon the great megacity will be born.

  Seattle, unlike Chicago or New York, is an easy city to get out of. In half an hour one can be sailing among myriad islands of Puget Sound or climbing on the slopes of one of the icy giants that lie nearby.

  However, Craig was as happy in Seattle as a hobbit in a trailer park. Baxter College was situated about three miles from the center of the city, on one of the hills overlooking it, and Craig lived a short walk from the campus.

  The campus was pleasant but not remarkable, a product of the post-Sputnik years of educational hysteria, when any nation seemed doomed whose garbage men did not have a liberal arts degree. Now that Boeing's great network of installations had stopped expanding, many of the city's garbage men did have degrees, and the financial pinch was being felt up the hill at Baxter. Applications outnumbered available positions by hundreds, and as the dean was fond of pointing out with scarcely veiled blackmail, it was a buyer's market. An air of nervousness had hovered over the younger teaching faculty for almost a year now, and praise bestowed on teachers by their colleagues, who were in competition with them, had noticeably declined in quantity.

  Craig found the whole struggle for power, prestige, and scarcity distasteful. But he had to admit to himself that he had gone along with it to a small degree. From now on, no more, he thought to himself, as he sat by his desk in his small office drinking coffee from the communal urn and working through a sheaf of freshman English papers.

  Within a year, he mused, twirling his pencil idly, I'll be rich enough to walk out of here and do what I want. He found it difficult to concentrate on the poorly thought-out critique of Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience that lay before him. The writer, a somewhat pompous individual, could not follow Thoreau's distinction between justice and law, and Craig found himself ceasing to care.

  He lifted the mug of coffee to his lips and set it back again on the ring of stain it had left on the table. Warm Sawtooth sunlight flooded his mind and, with it, the scent of pine forests and the rough feel of granite. The mind rarely focuses on the unpleasant experiences of the past. Memory prefers the joy to the pain; the delightful days spent on warm rock loom larger than the terror of the desperate move for a small hold.

  It was two months since Craig had left Martin on the dusty space in Stanley. His three letters to him had gone unanswered, and now with the fall vacation approaching, he wondered if he ought to make the journey to Denver.

  Certainly something had to be done. They were irrevocably joined in the enterprise. It would be supremely difficult for any one of them alone to recover the money, and despite their rift, Craig did not think that Martin would ask anyone else to accompany him. Though he did not know Jean well, he could not believe she was enough of a mountaineer to be of any use to Martin. There was no urgency to meeting up with Martin again. Martin would not be foolish enough to try to collect the money so soon after the event. The police were still vigilant. Only a couple of weeks ago they had inquired about him at the college. A shiver of fear had run down Craig's back when Margaret, the president's secretary, had told him.

  What have you been doing wrong?" she had asked, laughing.

  "Oh, nothing much," he had replied. "A few rapes, a burglary or two, and selling a few bags of smack. Why do you ask?"

  "Well, the police phoned up yesterday and asked if you worked here and where you lived."

  Craig had tried not to show his fear and had mumbled something about probably having an unpaid parking ticket. He knew that the inquiry was probably routine, but it had worried him. The police were obviously keeping an eye on anyone who had been in the Sawtooths during the hijacking. There could not have been more than a hundred or two people in the area at the most, climbing, fishing, and walking. So the police would probably continue to check on them for a few months more.

  Martin would not be foolish enough to try for the money so soon, he hoped. If he did, it would be disastrous for him, and for Craig also. If Martin were caught, then Craig could not escape. But he was foolish even to think of the possibility. He tried to dismiss it from his mind and return to the neatly typed paper on his desk, but the thought was persistent. He would have to get in touch with Martin again and warn him of the police interest. He hoped that the two months had mellowed Martin and that he would be able to laugh over the fight in the Stanley bar. Martin's temperament was a mercurial one, and Craig had seen him flare up in a vile temper and be the best of friends later in the same day.

  Yes, he would have to go to Denver and make peace. A quarter of a million dollars would make their differences seem petty.

  There was a knock at the door, and as Craig looked up, Sam Meek thrust his head in.

  "Why don't you knock that off and come for a drink?" he suggested.

  "Well," hesitated Craig, "I've got to get these papers back by tomorrow, and I've only done seven."

  "Oh, screw it," replied Sam. "Do you think they care? How many times did you get a paper back on the dot when you were at school? What are you trying to do? Reform the profession?"

  Craig pushed the papers back on his desk, gulped the last of his tepid coffee, and took his coat from the back of the chair. He was glad of the excuse to get out of this box and to enjoy Sam's company.

  "Come on then. Do you want to go to the Faculty Club?"

  "Are you kidding?" Sam pulled a face, his features contorting to give the impression of an aged pedant admonishing a student. "And sit around with old Jones and Weingarten discussing the latest American Professors Conference? I have my car by the library. Let's go down to Willy's or the Starlight."

  They left the office and made their way down the carpeted corridor to the stairs, past the central office, with a wink and a blown kiss for the secretary. Then more silently past Dean Ritter's office, where the head of the English faculty seemed to live his entire life.

  The traffic was light at this time of the afternoon, and the city was bathed in a gentle autumnal light. Craig could just see the great bulk of Mount Rainier to the south through a web of power lines and tall buildings. It would be good to break out of this existence, to escape from the noise and the bustle to the peace of the high country. Craig looked at Sam as he concentrated on getting through the next traffic light on the green or orange. Sam didn't feel this tension between country pleasures and city life. He liked towns, and to settle him down in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Bend, Oregon, would be to inflict on him a cruel and unusual punishment. It's incredible how quickly some men adapt to this concrete-and-steel environment, Craig thought, as an impatient driver behind them leaned on his horn. Sam had been born at Bakersville, a small town in the center of Washington, surrounded by rivers and mountains, yet the closest he got to nature now was an occasional trip to the Skagit River to fish for steelhead. His pleasures were those of the bar, the concert and the theater. And yet Craig found him good company. They did not lack subjects of mutual interest. Just as well that many people love cities, he thought selfishly. Otherwise there would be no wild country left for me.

  Willy's Bar was busy. Sam had man
aged to slide into a parking place two blocks away, and Craig had enjoyed the walk to the bar. They found a booth away from the noise and ordered beers. When it came, the ice-cold Olympia seemed tasteless to Craig, and he wished he had a whiskey.

  Sam leaned back and lit his pipe. The fragrant aroma of Balkan Sobranie filled the booth, and layers of opaque smoke hung like morning clouds over the table.

  "How's your study on Romantic joy coming?" he asked, without removing the pipe from his lips.

  Craig grunted and grimaced.

  "I see, little romanticism, and no joy." Sam laughed.

  "Aren't you worried about tenure? You know we have to produce at least a hundred pages of bullshit a year to survive."

  "I don't know that I want to survive here," confessed Craig. "In fact, I can't think of anything worse. Can you see yourself climbing these stairs up to the cells for the rest of your life?" He knew that Sam could, and probably would, but he was in a particularly bitter mood and did not feel like sparing his friend's feelings.

  "Well, what else are you going to do?" Sam, pleasant as always, ignored the thrust. "Why else did you go through that hell in grad school?"

  "Oh, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I guess I'm not cut out for the academic life. I love the poetry, but it gets destroyed in teaching it. Perhaps I'm just a bad teacher. Anyway, let's not talk about my problems. How's Sally?"

  "Oh, she's no problem," laughed Sam. "It's just that her fat cat of a father thinks I'm after the money. He can't imagine what she sees in a poor English instructor, when there are so many young executives from his electronics factory floating around their house. Still, it doesn't seem to worry Sally. How's your love life? Are you still seeing Claire?"

  "Yes, occasionally, but not seriously. She was too keen on marriage, and I'm not about to commit that folly yet."

  "You'd rather make love to your rock faces, I suppose. A clear case of Oedipal love for Mother Nature. One conquest after the other, each one bigger than the last." Sam was in full stride now, chortling and poking his pipe at Craig. "Virgin summits, eh? Where man has never been before, eh?" His eyes lifted above Craig and he waved his pipe. "Hi, Tony. Come on over here. This young man's in trouble; he's searching for his lost mother on the mountaintops of the world."

  "Oh, knock it off," laughed Craig. "Nice to see you, Tony. What'll you have?"

  "Beer, thanks. Jesus, it's busy tonight. It's time to buy stocks in booze." Tony eased his large bulk in beside Craig. Craig waved for the waitress and ordered two beers and a whiskey for himself.

  Tony was short and fat, and an enormous mustache clung to his upper lip. His face was pallid and unhealthy, and his black-rimmed glasses gave him the air of an overworked librarian. He was, in fact, a mathematician, some said a brilliant one.

  "Boy, there's nothing like Willy's Bar for driving home the fact that we have a population explosion," Tony said, licking the beer-moist hairs of his mustache. "Soon they'll remove all the tables and we'll have to stand up to drink. It'll become illegal to spend more than five minutes for each beer."

  “No," countered Craig, "they'll just build more abominations like those wood and plastic drinking shacks that are lining the roads out of Seattle. Soon it will be impossible to drive to Portland without being able to spit on plastic, if you have a good supply of spit."

  "Oh, come on," laughed Sam. "It's not that bad. You're just a people hater. You've spent too much time in the forests. You're an anachronism. Where was it you spent your last vacation—the San—eh?"

  "The Sawtooths," corrected Craig.

  "God, its not even English," hooted Sam. "You mean the Sawteeth."

  "No, I don't. The Sawtooths are a mountain range in Idaho."

  "See what I mean, Tony?" wailed Sam, rocking back and forth on his seat. "Idaho, for Christ's sake. Idaho. Christ! Famous potatoes. If Idaho had been any good no one would've reached Seattle."

  "And then Seattle would have been worth coming to," Craig laughed. "Right, Tony?"

  Tony peered through his glasses.

  "Give me Seattle any day," he responded. "I would get lonely in Idaho. Say, wasn't it the Sawtooths that airline dropped all that money in? When were you there?"

  "Actually I was there when it happened," said Craig, "though I didn't see anything except police."

  "Well, they really got away with it, whoever they were," said Sam. "The police were pretty confident they had them, but I guess that's typical cop talk."

  Tony looked over at Craig, his dark eyes glinting behind his glasses. "How do you think they managed it?" he asked.

  "Me? I don't know. Maybe they had a helicopter and took off the minute they had the loot."

  "Yes, but they had a tight ring around the area the minute the money was dropped. A helicopter can’t just vanish into thin air." Tony sucked thoughtfully at his pipe. "No, the money must still be there, don't you think, Craig?"

  "I don't know any more than you guys. Just because I was in the area doesn't make me an expert." Craig's response sounded forced to his ears.

  "Well, how would you work a job like that?" asked Sam.

  "I wouldn't," replied Craig. "I wouldn't risk my freedom for money." He was beginning to feel very uncomfortable and hoped that he wasn't showing it. He lit a cigarette and lifted his whiskey, trying to think of some way to change the subject.

  "Oh, come on, George Washington," laughed Tony. "You would just love to get a quarter of a million for nothing. Where did you hide the money—up one of your beloved cliffs?"

  Craig felt himself flush and covered his embarrassment with a laugh. "Do you think I'd tell you and then have to pay you off? An experienced crook like myself?"

  "Well, now we know your game, we expect a cut," said Sam, leering at him. "Or we'll get you fired from the English faculty," he added with a laugh.

  "Big deal," responded Craig. "Go right ahead."

  The conversation turned to the rising crime rate in the city fueled by the desperation of heroin addicts, to the psychology behind addiction, and to the so-called British system where addicts are treated as sick, not criminal.

  Despite the change to less dangerous topics, Craig did not feel at ease. If two untrained and not very criminally conscious individuals, such as Sam and Tony could jump to the right conclusion, what was preventing the police? Probably nothing, he had to admit. Undoubtedly, his name, along with another fifty or sixty others, had been scrutinized and filed away for close watching. Perhaps fifty or sixty was an exaggeration. When all the clues were assembled the figure might be nearer five or six, and any approach of these individuals to the Sawtooths would trigger off renewed police interest. If they did nothing, they would be perfectly safe. Craig was sure of that. If they had left any trail or any suspicion behind them, it would not have taken the police two months to close in. They must be waiting for the next move. Perhaps their earlier plan of waiting a year was too risky. Two or three years would be safer. He must have a conference with Martin— that was top priority. He must demand that Martin make no move for at least a year. If only there was some way to dissociate himself from Martin. Why the hell had he got himself into this mess?

  "You're very silent." Tony broke into his thoughts.

  Craig responded quickly. "I was wondering how intelligent people knowing what they do about heroin can get themselves hooked."

  "Well, I guess there are some people who just force themselves into situations where they will punish themselves. It's not unusual. Most drunkards know they're killing themselves; so do most smokers. Why lay it all on the heroin addict? How about guys who climb or drive cars like maniacs? They're hooked in a certain way. Or take me," added Tony. "I eat too much, and I know what it does to me, but I can't resist."

  Sam looked at the table. "Like another whiskey?" he asked Craig.

  Craig had had enough, both of the company and of the drink.

  "I'd better be getting back to my papers," he said, rising from the table. "No, I'll get back myself. Why don't yo
u guys have another? See you."

  He gave a wave and made for the door. Outside dusk was falling and the street lights had just come on. The air felt cool and sweet. In two weeks the fall vacation would set him free from this city and he could head east to see Martin and get out into the mountains around Denver. A panhandler asked him for a cigarette, and Craig, against his better judgment, gave him a couple. The man then began some tale about a job on the other side of town and how he needed a dollar to get over there. Craig cut him off rudely and walked off. You have to be hard in cities. Any sign of weakness or humanity, and you become an immediate prey, Craig thought. The poor bastard obviously needed a buck, but if I'd given him one, he'd have wanted ten.

  He walked a block to the bus stop and waited about five minutes before the right bus came along. When he reached his apartment and let himself in, the room was dark and cheerless. The morning's dishes still lay on the table, and the odor of fried egg was in the air.

  He sat down on the chair by the telephone. Martin couldn't refuse to answer a telephone call, as he had done with the letters. He searched the pad, found the number, and dialed. The number rang once, twice, then a female voice, uninterested and flat, broke in.

  "This is a recording. The number you have dialed has been temporarily disconnected. For further details you may call the correct exchange."

  A call to the exchange produced the information that Martin had not paid his telephone bill. No, they didn't know if he still lived there.

  Craig returned the phone to its hook, lit a cigarette, and leaned back. Martin hadn't answered his letters, his phone was disconnected, and he lived a thousand miles away. The only other hope was Jean, but he couldn't remember her name. He had visited her once, with Martin, at her neat apartment near the center of Denver. But what her name was, or her address, he could not think. It was in his brain somewhere, but he could not find the right trigger. If he were in Denver he could find his way to her door, but he wasn't in Denver and couldn't possibly be for two weeks. Craig could just imagine Dean Ritter's face if he were to ask him for two weeks' leave of absence. There was no hope. He would just have to relax until vacation came and then see if he could meet up with Martin, either at his apartment, if he was still there, or at Jean's.

  Craig stubbed the cigarette out on the shell that served for an ashtray. He began to clear the table of its dirty plates, on one of which the bent remains of his breakfast cigarette mingled with the dried egg.

  I don't really want money, he thought. What I need is company. Even if I got one hundred thousand dollars, I would still be alone. I would still be returning to a smelly room to watch television or read.

  He dropped the dishes into the basin and picked his coat off the chair. Even his college office was better than this. A shudder shook him as he closed the door and headed for the stairs.