by Jonathan Dee
“Need somebody to drive you home?” Barrett said. “You seem like you might be impaired.”
He had a hard cast to his mouth and eyes. You could never tell what was going to set him off. Mark was just glad they were outside Hadi’s earshot. “It’s like five hundred yards,” he said. “I think I can manage it, thanks.”
“Righty-o, boss.” There was that edgy, fight-picking overexuberance in his voice. Maybe Mark should have just let Hadi give him a beer. Why not? Why should Mark sit and drink with the client but not Barrett? Because Mark was the boss, that’s why not. He suddenly understood a truth that cast Hadi’s attitude during their conversation in a different light: you expected those above you to welcome your ascension into their company, to root for it, but you wanted those below you to be happy in their place.
“Where’s the wife today?” Barrett asked.
“My wife?”
“No, man, his wife. Rachel. Rachel Rachel I’ve been thinking. We don’t even get to say goodbye.”
“She’s out. She doesn’t want to be in the house when we’re painting.”
“When who’s painting?”
“You know what I mean. She doesn’t like to see people tearing up the place.”
“Doesn’t trust herself with me in the bedroom, eh?”
Mark stopped talking.
“I know what she needs. I doubt that geek does. Anyway, he’s got you to suck his balls all day, so what does he care?”
“Okay,” Mark said, putting out a hand toward the small of Barrett’s back, but not touching him. “Let’s just get on the road, we shouldn’t be hanging out in their driveway like—”
“I would hit that,” Barrett said. “I would hit it with great vigor. Maybe I still will.”
“Okay, champ,” Mark said, climbing into the cab of his truck.
“On the surveillance cameras,” Barrett said cryptically, grinning like an idiot.
“Okay. Time to go.”
“So when’s our next job?” Barrett said.
Mark paused. “We talked about this,” he said. “I don’t have anything for you right now. Working on a couple of things. But this job’s done and now we have a break before the next one. Thank God there was this one, the way the economy’s been.”
“Yeah,” Barrett said. “Thank God.”
They rolled single file down the long driveway, slowly because Mark’s truck was in front, and turned right on Route 4, in the direction of Mark’s house. He’d forgotten about Barrett already. He was trying to remember that last thing Hadi had said, about standing outside. He turned into his driveway; Barrett honked twice at him, jauntily, then floored it past Mark’s house and down the empty road.
He slowed down in town but once he was across 7 he opened it up again. As if he really had been drinking, instead of being treated like a little boy. See? he thought. See, you smug asshole? I don’t need a few beers to act wild. I can act wild at any time. He fucking hated that guy—Mark Firth—and particularly hated feeling dependent on him, like he felt right now, dependent on the money from this six-month gig that should have lasted Barrett and his wife through the winter but wasn’t likely to. Tomorrow he’d go to Pittsfield and get back on unemployment. Tomorrow or the next day. He hit the radio but there was no good driving music on so he switched it off again and rolled down the windows and let the green roar fill the cab. The air was sweet and cold. It was still fall.
Fuck Mark. He thought the world of himself. And could he have glued his lips any more firmly to the ass of that Hadi guy? Why, just because he was rich? That was exactly why. Mark worshiped those people. He thought they were like royalty. When the fact was that those people got rich precisely by looking at two guys like Mark and Barrett and seeing no difference between them at all. Yet Mark, that clueless douche, was afraid lest Hadi’s hand be sullied by passing Barrett a beer. Barrett didn’t really even want to do the guy’s wife, she was nothing special, but he couldn’t resist saying it just for the look he knew it would put on Mark’s face, and boy, was he rewarded. Like he was some kind of commoner who’d suggested putting it to the queen.
He’d done Mark’s sister, back in high school. Actually he hadn’t, but he almost had, and he preferred to embellish the memory, just for imaginary revenge’s sake.
Why not have a beer? Why not have one right fucking now? He pulled into the packie just south of Great Barrington and bought a six from the hostile owner who sat behind the register in a ratty old office chair on casters. He always looked like you were trying to cheat him somehow, even though he was the one counting out your change, so go figure that out. Barrett popped one, stuck it between his thighs, and put the bag down on the passenger seat.
Not going straight home was actually a gesture of consideration toward his wife, considering the mood he was in. If she could see him right now, she’d know: she’d give him her blessing to stay out until he could cool off and come home in a less volatile state. She’d give it as much for her own sake as for his. But of course she couldn’t see him right now, she could only sit at home and get mad wondering where he was. And that meant she would be in an extra bitchy frame of mind whenever he did walk in. Which made him stay out longer. Life was like a loop, a Catch-22, a cycle you couldn’t break in which the same things happened over and over, and yet somehow you got older anyway. How fucked up was that?
He had the idea that he was headed somewhere, like maybe up to Adams or even the state line, but all he was really doing was driving in a wide, half-assed circle as he looked for safe places to throw the empties out the window. By the time he was ready to pop number five he decided that he might as well get off the road and see what was doing at the Ship.
The money: you might as well blow it, right? You might as well forget about making it last as long as possible, because there was no way to make it last long enough, and so all scrimping and saving did was put you in a shitty mood every day until the inevitable happened anyway, turn every day into a petty humiliation until the day finally came when you zeroed out like you knew you were going to all along. So why not zero out on your own schedule? Then at least you were living, you weren’t some fucking Mark Firth out begging for rich assholes to hire you, making budgets and then asking permission to go over budget or whatever the fuck. And trying to restore some of your lost manhood by acting like the big condescending boss man with guys who’d agreed to do the actual work for you, guys who knew you when you were fifteen and could have kicked your ass as easily then as they could have now.
He was in enough of a state that there was another guy standing at the bar who he thought for a moment was Mark. He did look a lot like Mark, but fatter, less prissy-looking. The guy caught him staring.
“Tough day?” the guy said, and all of a sudden it hit Barrett who he was: fucking Mark’s brother. How do you like that. Firths everywhere. He couldn’t remember the brother’s name.
“Laid off today,” Barrett said. “Out celebrating the way of the world.”
The brother smiled ruefully. “The rich get richer,” he said.
“Like I said, the way of the world.”
“Maybe not, though,” Gerry said. “Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but we just accept it. If you forget the past, then it’s like hey, I guess things have just always been the way they are right now.”
“Um, whatever.”
Gerry smiled. “Things are fucked, is my point,” he said, “so we un-fucked have to stick together.” He summoned Slade the bartender with one finger, and put a twenty down on the bar. “That’s for my tab,” he said, “and a round for my brother here.”
“I sure ain’t your brother,” the guy said, “but thanks.”
Gerry walked out to the lot. It made him feel pretty good every time he got into his car at the end of the night still relatively sober. A small measure of control, but control nevertheless. By the time he got home he felt how much he needed to sleep—he hadn’t been getting enough sleep, he hadn’t even really been trying—but as
usual he got online first and then before you knew it, it was the pit of the night.
It had started with just idly tooling through some of the websites whose links his sister Renee was always bcc’ing him—typical Renee-drama, like the list had to be secret, in case they were all rounded up and tortured for the names of the friends of Renee Firth Tomlinson, famous housewife-revolutionary. Some of the sites were flat-out insane. Tonight she’d sent him a link to something on InfoWars about how the Defense Department was suppressing evidence of bin Laden’s whereabouts: leaked memos proved that they had a budgetary interest in keeping bin Laden alive, because as long as he was alive, they would get whatever money they asked for. Gerry didn’t believe a word of it. But he was also aware of not wanting to believe it, and his not wanting to believe it made his disbelief seem suspect, knee-jerk. It was scary to open your eyes too wide to the world. He bookmarked it to read again later, when he was less tired, and logged in to Little Green Footballs for a while.
Renee emailed him again; it wasn’t as late out there, but it was still pretty late. Did u read it? “U” instead of “you,” like the nanosecond that saved her was so important to her day, like she was so busy that it was a big sacrifice just to stop what she was doing and write to you. Not yet, he wrote back. Just got home. Hold your horses.
“Warblogs” was a term he’d learned through her; the first time he saw it, he’d thought it referred somehow to blogs that warbled. They were interesting up to a point. I mean, America had real enemies, you could hardly deny that now, even if the notion that these enemies were swarming at the gates of Colorado Springs was a little bit laughable. Colorado Springs probably had even fewer Muslims in it than the Berkshires. Something was happening, though. You followed the links where they led and the sense you got—slowly sobering up in your living room, in the lamplight and black silence of the middle of the night—was of something weakening, giving way. The paranoia, the sense of helplessness, of being overwhelmed, was self-fulfilling. And when that happened, your weakness became apparent, and you really were ripe for attack.
And there was no better representation of the connectedness of things than the internet. It was a world inside the world, a counterforce to one’s sense of events as random or uncontrolled. There were a lot of lunatics. You didn’t have to engage with them, but in the aggregate all that lunacy meant something, was a symptom of something that couldn’t be harnessed. You dismissed it at your peril. The best part was feeling that you were anonymous out there but had an identity at the same time. He’d started out as Baystater76, though lately he’d grown to worry that even that revealed too much; he was thinking about a new name.
You forgot the house was empty when you were in that other world; you forgot it wasn’t fully paid for and not particularly clean. If he felt like he had a romantic or sexual prospect anywhere, he might have taken care of the place a bit better. But he didn’t. Once, a couple of years ago, not long after the whole Lindsey thing, Candace had come over unannounced and, after an awkward ten minutes or so during which she didn’t sit down, she started cleaning—his shower, his baseboards, his nasty fridge, everything. He was sort of offended at the time, and in fact they’d had a little fight about it, but now he hoped it would happen again at some point. In fact that could fairly be described as his plan.
Every once in a while the intimations of decadence and rot, though generated by solitude, would jump the borders of his virtual world and make an appearance in the real one, particularly the world of his work. There was a guy who drove a school bus in Ancram: in December he came with his wife to an open house for a four-bedroom modern on six acres in Egremont—which was fine, it happened all the time, people came to high-end open houses to gawk or to research property values or even just to act out a pathetic little fantasy that they were successful enough to be able to live in an upscale place like this, which was listed at $295K. No harm done, he didn’t mind humoring them for a few minutes, supporting their play-acting questions about taxes and solar heat. Then two days later the bus driver shows up at Gerry’s office and he’s holding a check. Paid list for the place. Gerry thought for a moment that maybe the guy was literally, unamusingly crazy. He was reluctant even to ask Alina to print him out a contract.
But you couldn’t discourage buyers just because you didn’t know everything about them. Maybe the bus driver’s wife had a rich aunt or something. Sure enough, the sale—and Gerry’s commission—turned out to be real after all. When he told Alina, who was the only other person in the office that early (Gerry had found it in himself lately to start showing up on time), there was a little polite flicker of a smile but she didn’t seem to share his enthusiasm. She was very weird around him now, even when, as on that morning, there was nobody else around to put on an act for.
A lot of that mid-priced housing stock that was such a bitch to unload—rich people didn’t want it, locals couldn’t afford it—was all of a sudden in play. Even 225 Valley Road, that legendary dud where Gerry and Alina had hooked up, found a taker. Gerry had his best quarter in…well, he hadn’t previously kept track of such things too carefully, but it had to be one of his best quarters ever. One night in March he was sitting at the bar in the Ship, absorbed in his laptop—they’d just gotten wi-fi in there, which made it a little harder to leave some evenings—when a guy tapped him on the shoulder from behind.
“Are you Gerry Firth?” the guy said. He was young, maybe still in his twenties, a little soft-looking around the jaw, and he had an earring. Trying to be something he wasn’t.
“I am,” Gerry said, closing the laptop. He’d been flaming some guy on Daily Kos who wanted to talk about Al Gore and global warming.
“You work at the Century 21 in Stockbridge?”
“I do,” said Gerry. He should have been more patient—a good salesman could turn it on and off in any situation—but he didn’t feel like it now, and this was a pretty inappropriate time and venue for a business inquiry, let’s face it. He was smiling as gamely as he could and reaching for his wallet to pull out a business card for the morning when the guy wound up and threw a punch at him. It was apparently the first punch he’d thrown in a long while, maybe ever—the windup went way behind his head—but even though Gerry had that instant to move out of the way, it still glanced off the bone right by his eye, and it stung like a bitch. Gerry put his hand to his face to check for blood but it was too dark to see, while the guy took an ambiguous step backward and Slade the bartender flipped up the counter and ran toward the action.
“Come on, big man!” the guy yelled at Gerry, after Slade was between them. “Fucking piece of shit! Putting your hands on another man’s wife!”
Gerry put his hands up in front of him, trying to calm the guy down. He wasn’t going to hit him. He couldn’t get banned from the Ship, for one thing. “Who’s your wife?” he asked, which he realized a second too late was not the best thing he could have said.
“Jesus!” the guy squeaked. Slade was facing him, holding him by the upper arms, but loosely, because it was clear now that the one punch was all he had come here to throw. “You’re a fucking predator!”
“I’m a man,” Gerry said. He was trying to gin up some testosterone, mostly because some of the people watching were people he knew. But the guy was such a weasel. Even if you pounded him in self-defense you’d be in the wrong. He looked on the verge of cathartic tears now. He was trying to be inconspicuous about shaking off the pain in his hand. What a fallen world this was, Gerry thought, in which this passed for a bar fight. A fight over a woman, no less. It had probably taken this poor wuss hours, or days, to work up the nerve to track down the man who may or may not have fucked his wife and throw a mostly symbolic punch at him; surely it had not gone at all like he’d imagined it. “Throw him out, would you please?” Gerry said.
“I’m leaving,” the guy said, and Slade casually let him go. “But this isn’t over, motherfucker.”
“Better luck next time,” Gerry said, and turned back to hi
s laptop and his beer. He was positive the guy was just mouthing off, trying to save face on his way out the door, but about that he was mistaken. The man with the earring was, as Gerry had started to figure out toward the end of their encounter, Alina’s husband; the next day, Alina wasn’t at work, and the day after that she came in sporting a bruise on her face that, even covered in makeup, was way worse than Gerry’s. Adrenaline hit him like a thunderbolt. She wouldn’t meet his gaze, but when Kimbrough came over to her desk and whispered to her, she got up with him and the two of them went down the block to get coffee. There was no privacy for them in the one-room office, and whatever she had to say, she didn’t want anyone else there to hear it.
She returned alone, red-faced, and walked to her desk, not holding a cup of coffee. Kimbrough, following her, did not allow the door to close behind him; he beckoned Gerry out into the parking lot, using just one finger. It was raining.
“Did you have a relationship, a personal relationship, with an employee of Kimbrough Century 21?” Kimbrough said.
Gerry made the mistake of smiling at the self-regard in the boss’s super-serious demeanor, as if he were a lawyer, as if they were in front of an audience. Kimbrough didn’t even seem that mad—just self-consciously solemn, like a bad actor.
“She’s an adult,” Gerry said.
“And did the two of you carry out this relationship in a home belonging to a client, a home listed by us for sale?”
Jesus. She’d held nothing back, clearly. So stupid.
“No,” he said instinctively. “That’s not true. She’s lying.”
Kimbrough nodded. “You’re fired,” he said.
Gerry’s mouth fell open.
“You’re seriously surprised?” Kimbrough said. “You can’t go around banging the secretary. You have any idea what that opens us up to, in terms of liability? She could shut us down. I could lose my franchise.”
“Did she say I forced her or something?”