A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  I tilted the bottle of Old Overholt and poured a gush into my mouth.

  How much easier would his life have been if he had wanted only money? He might not have been so reckless with other men’s wives. He might not have been so cavalier about shooting off that gun of his and going on the lam. He might have found a way to stuff his wallet without being killed in the process. I could imagine Jesse Duchamp in some New Orleans manse, sucking down French champagne and screwing lithe beauties. I could imagine him buying politicians so that he could soak the government and get ever richer. Why, I could imagine him in Congress himself. That was the ticket: Jesse Duchamp, man of the people. And it’s not like they hadn’t been hawking the splendor of money as ruthlessly as they hawked the magnificence of love.

  His mistake was so damn simple it was a joke. So why wasn’t I laughing?

  I tried to imagine what it was like to be so desperate to feel some sort of love that I’d rather die than continue numb. I tried and failed; of course I failed. Yet I could admire the nobility in Jesse Duchamp’s effort, a foolish nobility, yes, but maybe the only nobility available to our kind. Was there anything I wanted as much in this world?

  I poured another bolt of my father’s rye into my mouth. I swallowed some and coughed out the rest. It ran down my cheeks like tears.

  I fell asleep on the floor, dead naked, arms and legs akimbo. I was exhausted from the drive, from the visit with my mother, my bizarre calisthenics, the drugging effects of the whiskey. I fell asleep but my mind whirred and my dreams were brutally vivid. I don’t remember them all, one bled into the next before fading into the mists, leaving only the vaguest impressions, but when I woke with a start and a screaming bladder, the dream I was in the middle of at that moment somehow stayed with me. It has stayed with me still. And in its adhesion, I discovered something.

  We were talking of evolution.

  After my diagnosis I knew with an utter certainty that my inner core would always remain as it was, stunted, deformed, a heartless, soulless abomination. How could such an abomination ever evolve? Lying on the sodden carpet, still overcome by the dream, I realized I had received an answer from the most unlikely of sources: Jesse Duchamp.

  And someone was going to pay the price.

  I rolled onto my side, pushed myself somehow to standing, staggered into the bathroom, and loosed a hydrant into the brown, reeking toilet bowl. As I scratched at the bites on my neck I remembered the moment in Caroline Brooks’s office after I’d smashed her bonsai tree against the wall.

  Caroline had leaped to her feet, with dirt now sprinkled on hair and shoulder, but her voice remained calm and her face betrayed her pity. “You’re doing it again, Phil, don’t you see? Using violence to force an ending. Like with your law firm, and your wife. But our work here doesn’t have to end. And you don’t have to fall into the same tired patterns. You’re better than this.”

  My fists were balled in anger, tensed so tightly I was shaking. “But you’ve just told me I’m not. And I never will be. The question now is how the hell do I live with myself?” The query had been rhetorical, I didn’t want an answer, especially not from her, but she gave me one anyway.

  “You just do,” she said.

  Slowly she turned away from me, stooped down, and gently took hold of the bonsai now sprawled on the floor. There was something brave in the motion, turning her back to me as I stood there with fury surging through my veins, brave enough to bleed my anger. “There’s a shallow ceramic pot in the closet,” she said, “along with some Akadama, gravel, and potting compost.”

  “Akadama?”

  “A sort of Japanese clay. You have to repot the plants every couple of years or so to keep the roots strong, and this one was overdue.” She twisted her neck to look at me, her smile surprisingly warm. “Come on.”

  I had never before tried to repair something damaged in one of my fits of anger. Normally I just stormed out and bore the consequences—a broken jaw, a destroyed marriage, a lost career. But Caroline’s calm smile was like a challenge. There was no bullshit discussion of my feelings or thoughts, we just worked. She cradled the damaged plant as she shook the roots free of any clinging soil. I mixed the clay and gravel and compost. She trimmed the roots with a small pair of shears until they lost the appearance of a ghastly dead spider and looked instead sturdy enough to support a life. While she held the little tree in a jade-colored piece of pottery, I spooned the soil mixture into place, tapping it here and there so that it made its way between the roots. In the end the tiny tree rested securely in a new pot, green and shiny. The tree was not all it had been—a main branch had snapped, many of the little green needles had fallen off—but it was still standing, a thing saved.

  The morning after my dream I checked out of the GrandView Motel, scratching like a mangy dog at my side and shoulders, took all my available money out of the Chase bank branch on Metairie Road, and headed west on Interstate 10 to visit my mother in prison for the very last time.

  32. Making Sausage

  I drowned my cell phone in the slow, black waters of the Saline Bayou, just outside Saint Maurice, Louisiana, in Winn Parish. Saint Maurice was west and north of New Orleans, and I thought killing the phone there might lead them in a different direction when they tracked the signal and started coming after me. But before I tossed it, standing on the banks of the river, I made one final call.

  “Phil?”

  “Can you talk?” I said.

  “Hold on a sec and I’ll go to the other room. Where are you? You were supposed to be back yesterday.”

  “I had a change in plans. Who is she?”

  “Just someone.”

  “Do you care about her?”

  “Yes, no, I don’t know. What the hell, Phil?”

  “Remember that beach in Bali you were talking about. What was it, Cootie or something?”

  “Kuta. Kuta Beach.”

  “Well, now might be a good time to see it.”

  “I thought we had ourselves a job in Philadelphia.”

  “Maybe you could take your friend in the other room. And before you go, close out your bank account. I’ve already closed out mine.”

  “Phil?”

  “Do me a favor and tell Gordon and Kief the same thing. Quietly, if you get me. The longer Mr. Maambong doesn’t know anything’s going on the easier it will be for the rest of you to get out of harm’s way. Things are about to get messy, and you won’t want to be in the middle.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got a new pot.”

  “Hell, it must be killer stuff. Bring it back to Miami and Kief will bong it up.”

  “No, not that kind of pot, sorry. You know all those qualms you’ve been having about what we do? I don’t have them, I never did, not like you. But I don’t like being pushed to play someone else’s game. If I’m going to become what they want me to become, it’s going to be because of what I want, not what they want.”

  “And what you do you want, Phil?”

  “I want to see all the assholes burn.”

  She laughed, but when I didn’t laugh with her, she stopped. “You’re serious.”

  “I’m heading west. I’m going to set up operations in the middle of the desert, well away from Maambong and the Principal.”

  “You want me to join you?”

  “No. I want you just to get the hell out of there. I’ve got to go.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “Don’t thank me, Riley. The sad truth is, I don’t care about you and I never did.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “We all love our fairy tales.”

  “Maybe, but you told me when I decided to run that I shouldn’t tell a soul, that I should just disappear. And yet here you are, Phil, warning me. What does that say about you?”

  “Enjoy the beach,” I said before killing the call and tossing the phone.

  My car was parked behind me on a rutted dirt drive just north of a bridge. I left the car where
it was and walked away from the main road, toward a mobile home about fifty yards away. The scrub had been cleared between the front door and the river. A blue wooden boat sat on an unhitched trailer. A faded red barn listed farther down the road.

  I went up to the front door and knocked. When I heard nothing I knocked again. I was looking at the dark waters of the river when the door opened.

  “Kay couyon tu?”

  I turned around. The man was squat and bald and fat and ugly. His overalls were filthy, his face was a desiccated orange, his mouth collapsed around a sorry collection of ten or so scattered teeth. He kept on speaking some weird French mixture as he climbed down the wooden steps leading from the door, and it took me a moment to realize I had no idea what he was saying. I tried to slow his speech, I tried to get a grasp of the words flying out of his mouth, tried and failed and figured, the hell with it.

  “Are you Mr. Boudin,” I said. “Mr. Louis Boudin, like the sausage?”

  He nodded as he spoke, which clued me that I had knocked on the right trailer door and that he could understand me fine enough.

  “I believe you have a daughter in the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women.”

  He kept nodding, kept talking, undoubtedly telling me the whole sad story of how his lovely girl had ended up in such a place, but I wouldn’t have cared even if I could have understood him.

  “My mother is in jail with your daughter,” I said. “My mother’s name is Madeline Kubiak, and she has told me that she owes your daughter two thousand dollars, and she has asked that I pay that amount to you.”

  A smile, wide and butt ugly. He yammered on and made some motions with his hand that at first looked like he was having a seizure but that I eventually deciphered as him offering me a drink.

  “No sir,” I said. “I don’t have time for a drink. But I do have the two thousand dollars. If you’ll permit me I’d like to pay that debt.”

  He kept yammering, even as I took a wad of hundreds out of my pocket and counted out twenty before handing them over. His smile broadened as he took hold of the bills, stuffing them into a pocket on the chest of his overalls. Then he laughed and snapped the shoulder straps and climbed back inside the mobile home, returning with an old bottle, something clear sloshing within. He pulled the cork out with what was left of his teeth and pushed the bottle at me, and it was all I could do to decline the honor. Instead I stripped off another ten bills from the wad.

  “I also understand there was an unfortunate altercation in the prison between my mother and your daughter and there will be some necessary dental work and I hope this will cover that expense.”

  Louis Boudin spit the cork into his hand and talked some more and nodded with great seriousness and paused to take a swig and then kept talking. I held out the bills and he snatched at the stack like a crab snatching at a finger.

  “Finally, Mr. Boudin, I worry about my mother, as you understand, and I was hoping we could come to some sort of arrangement.” I slipped another stack bills off the wad. “If I give you two thousand dollars more, do you think your daughter could ensure that my mother remains safe during her time in prison?”

  Boudin’s whole face lit up, he stretched out his arms as in preparation for a great hug, and babbled on with some French-sounding words that I’m sure were designed to let me know I had become like a nephew to him, which meant my mother had become like a sister to him, and what kind of man would he be if he didn’t do everything in his power to protect his sister in such difficult circumstances.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said after he took this final offering and put it into the front pocket of his overalls with the rest. “It warms my heart knowing that my mother will be so well taken care of.”

  He smiled and yabbered and took another swig of the bottle and nodded like he had just won some sort of lottery.

  “Now as a favor I’d like you to look into my eyes.”

  He pulled back and tilted his head at me.

  “Go ahead.”

  He smiled and shrugged and took another swill from the bottle and then stepped forward and raised himself on his tiptoes and peered deep into my eyes. The smell was rank, worse than my New Orleans motel room, and I had to fight not to stagger or blink. He looked for a long moment, into a darkness as black as the waters roiling past his trailer, and then stepped back, his face suddenly creased with concern.

  “I just wanted you to know how serious I am, Mr. Boudin. And I want you to know I am now holding you responsible for my mother’s welfare in that prison. I’m headed to the West Coast, to my home in Sacramento. But if anything happens to her, anything at all, have no doubt that I am going to come back to Winn Parish, and I am going to murder you in your sleep, and then I’m going to spread enough gasoline over your dead body so that when I light the match, the only thing your daughter will find to bury in that churchyard down the road will be the charred remnants of your thick skull. Tu comprends that, you fat tub of lard?”

  My mother, I suppose, loved me in her way when I was a boy. Too bad her way was all about neglect and desertion. That I paid her back by threatening a fat old Cajun with murder and immolation seemed about right.

  My last visit to the prison I had filled her account with as much cash as they would take and then told her I would never see her again. She cried—she is good at crying when she thinks she’s supposed to—but despite her tears I have been true to my word. I expect they have someone keeping tabs on her visitors. I expect if I ever pulled into Saint Gabriel again, I’d never pull out of that town alive. My mother would appreciate the gesture, though, giving my life to see her one last time.

  Two of a kind.

  33. Shark

  All my life I thought I had known what I had wanted. Cash, baby, on the barrelhead, along with sharp clothes, fast cars, stuff, so much stuff, more stuff. I wanted sex and power, too—Tom Preston had used the right lures to get me on his board—along with the admiration of the multitudes, but in the end, when you got to the root, it all came down to cash. The world charged me rent, billed me for food, showed me that everything had a price and the prices of the best of things were sky high, including the reverence gained from speaking softly and carrying a big stack, and so what I always wanted most was money. Simple enough. I became a lawyer because I thought it was the road to riches. Talk about your punch lines. Then I sold gold because who couldn’t make a killing selling gold? Then I joined the Hyena Squad because there was money to be made in selling my especial talents to those who had more than I did. Why do geeks bite the heads off chickens? Exactly. Money was the thing for me, for always and forever.

  And then I had the dream.

  After delivering my message to Louis Boudin, I drove along the bridge stretching across the black bayou and then wended my way to Natchitoches, half an hour distant. At the Walmart Supercenter I bought a couple of prepaid iPhones and six months’ worth of unlimited service. At the Orange Leaf I bought a mango frozen yogurt that promised to be a luau in my tummy. Aloha. While spooning the yogurt, I used one of the phones to find myself a pawnshop.

  I parked in front of the squat white building. Two cars on the wide asphalt lot, splotched paint on the wall, iron bars on the door. We Buy Gold & Diamonds. Cash Loans. My kind of place.

  Inside, I looked around a bit before heading for the guitars, a range of acoustics and well-shined electrics. I lifted a Gibson off the wall, black body, tan accents. I found a chair and strummed the thing badly as I watched the clerk behind the glass counter conclude a jewelry sale for a young man in low pants. A row of amplifiers was up against the wall and there were a couple of coiled chords looped over two of the boxes, but I left the guitar unplugged as I strummed.

  “That’s a Les Paul standard,” said the clerk, who had ambled over when the young man left. In his sixties, he was tall and chesty, with an unshaven jaw. One cheek was distended, in his hand he held a tin can, on his hip was a gun. “It’s a lovely thing.”

  “I don’t really play.”

/>   “I can see that, but if you’re going to learn, that’s a nice thing to have sitting on your lap.”

  “I’d rather have a girl.”

  “One gets the other, if’n you know what I mean.”

  “In high school maybe. But truth is I didn’t really come for a guitar,” I said. “You got guns?”

  “Do we got guns.” He worked the wad in his cheek and then spit a brown line of sludge into the can. Slurp, smack. “Where’d you say you from? Not from here, I can tell.”

  “New Jersey, originally. But now I live in California.”

  “I don’t know what you got up there in New Jersey, but down here we got guns. What you looking for exactly?”

  “Just a pistol, with ammunition.”

  “Any type you got in mind?”

  “The type where I don’t have to fill out any federal paperwork.”

  He looked me up and down, squinted one eye. Slurp, smack. “We don’t do that here, mister.”

  “I’d pay more.”

  “Sorry. Law’s the law, whether I take to it or not. No paperwork required on the guitar, though.”

  “I’ll pass on that. Thanks for your help.”

  I stood, and took a moment to put the guitar back on its prongs. “They’re going to be coming for them sooner or later.”

  “They’re going to try,” said the clerk.

  “It’s going to be more than just a try. You see what they did out there in Oregon? I make it a practice not to put my name on their lists. If they’re coming for mine, I’d rather it be later.”

  “I get you, I do, and I’m not saying I disagree.”

  “Usually I buy through the shows, or private. But I was just passing through and saw the sign and got an itch. Thanks for your time.”