“It’s expensive. The guy from down state rolled over.”
“So I heard. The guy from Sanford, right? Fuckin’ scumbag. You can’t trust them city folk. I heard he was in a head-on collision and killed two people.”
“Yes,” I say and let the wave of guilt and dread wash over me like nausea.
“Not good,” Michael says
“Not good at all,” I agree. “He’s hurting a lot of people.”
“Miserable fuck. So what’re you going to do?” Michael asks as we pull into the motel parking lot. “I’m fucking loaded,” he announces. And then, “Why the fuck are you staying in this fleabag joint?”
“I’m not. It’s a decoy. I have these bags. You know, there’s stuff in them. Not drugs. But… stuff I don’t want to lose. I’ll give you five grand if you let me lock them up in your office until I track down JD and he can take care of them for me.”
“Stuff?” His eyes light up with a conspiratorial twinkle. “Five grand?”
“Stuff. I’ll give you another five grand to shut down the inn for the night and we’ll have a party.”
“I have a few guests.”
“Are they cool?”
“They ain’t cops,” he says. He’s smiling, happy now. The thought of money and a party cheers him up. We get out and fetch the bags.
“So invite them.”
“Throw in a quarter pound of this weed and you’re on,” he says and helps me load the suitcases into the trunk and rear seat of his Volvo.
“Stuff,” he mutters and grins. “This is some good weed. I’m fucking hallucinating.”
It’s like energy, I’m thinking, remembering my illumination of the previous evening. Paper. Dope. It’s as if there is some mysterious force emanating from these bags as we ride back through town that has me uptight and Michael excited. I’m sure he knows what’s in the bags. We load them into his office. He puts the CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE PARTY sign on the door to the inn and gets on the phone, calls Godfried’s farm, leaves a message with the housekeeper. He calls around and invites a few other mutual friends—a poet and a sculptor, some musicians—to come by for a dinner party later but doesn’t mention there might be a mystery guest. I give him a few fat buds of the Thai weed, take ten grand in Canadian hundreds from one of the bags and give that to him as well.
“Canadian,” he says. “Better yet.”
“You can tell your banker you had a family of Canadians come through and pay cash.”
“Always a pleasure doing business with our neighbors to the north,” Michael says and puts the ten grand in his desk. “Now I can pay my mortgage for the next six months and take the little lady on vacation this winter.” He locks his desk drawer and taps me on the chest. “Just don’t forget my quarter elbow.”
Seriously high, I lope down the hill to the bar at the Herbert Grand in the middle of the village. Even as I assure myself that I know what I am doing, I feel like one of the characters in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics. Each step seems impossibly long, my legs are like wet noodles, I imagine a posse of baton-wielding cops in hot pursuit while I whistle toot toot.
No one knows me at the Herbert Grand. I use the pay phone in the lobby, check the answering service. Wart Hog called and left a number, as did Carlos. I call Carlos in Farmington and tell him to head over. At the bar, sipping Patrón on the rocks, I question this move: Why bring the hash into proximity of the cash? That’s a fundamental no-no in this line of work. Never put the dope and the loot in the same locale. But I won’t; I’ll keep them well separated. I just need a hand here, and JD and Father Flaherty are still MIA. I try my neighbor’s farm again and finally reach the stable hand who confirms they are all up at the mountain at the music festival and not expected back until late.
This town is like something out of the Old West: one dusty main street through the middle of a cluster of wood-frame buildings; a railroad line long out of use; and some stately mansions set on the outlying streets. Sitting at the bar in the late afternoon with a mellow tequila and reefer buzz on, I look up as my nephew, Carlos, steps through the door and stops, framed in the sunlight, backlit like some young-buck gunslinger who just rode into town and strode into the local saloon looking for trouble. He blinks, sees me, and takes a seat at the bar beside me.
“What’re you drinking?” I ask.
“I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
He’s a good kid, Carlos, as I call him, half Dominican, fathered by my older sister’s second husband. Just out of high school. We’ve been close for years, since he was a child. Some would argue I destroyed any chance this young man may have had for a normal adolescence or even a normal childhood by introducing him to the outlaw lifestyle at an early age. Maybe so. He lived with me one summer after my freshman year at Arizona State when I was working as a lifeguard—one of the few straight jobs I have ever held, and I got fired from that position midway through the season. Carlos was four or five years old. My sister, Gi Gi was off working as a model at the World’s Fair in New York. I rode a Harley Davidson Sportster bought with money I made smuggling weed from Mexico. I used to tie young Carlos around my waist, climb on the Harley and take him to work with me at the Wayland Swimming and Tennis Club, where nubile, bikini-clad girls would look after him while I dozed in the lifeguard’s chair.
I lived in a rented house that summer with a few friends. On any given night, you never knew who might be crashing there. It was a nonstop party with a revolving cast of characters and a keg or two of beer on tap in the garage at all times. My friend Ronnie, the guy who first turned me on to pot, showed up one evening with a giant snapping turtle. He discovered the beast trying to cross the street and tossed it in the bed of his pickup truck. Prehistoric-looking creature. Take your finger off with one snap of his wedge-shaped jaw. We filled one of those basting tubes with gin, stuck it in the turtle’s mouth, and squirted gin into his gullet. The turtle got completely fucked up. He staggered around the party that night on all fours so drunk he was snapping at the dancing barefoot girls in slow motion. Then we chopped his head off, stuck a set of those wind-up chattering teeth in his mouth, and mounted him in the refrigerator. Childish, and cruel, I know, but we were kids.
A few of those summer nights after we closed the swimming and tennis club down for the day, I opened the pool back up for skinny-dipping parties for my friends. Nude teenagers, boys and girls, cavorting in the pool, drinking beer and Southern Comfort, smoking a little weed, making out when one night the place was raided. A couple of local cops and one of the owners, the guy who had hired me, surrounded the pool area and then lit the place up with spotlights. My friends hurriedly pulled on their clothes. We were busted. Trespassing. Underage drinking. I stashed the weed. The owner was flabbergasted to find that it was his head lifeguard who was responsible for the intrusion. He called me the next morning and said I should not report for work until they had a board meeting and decided what to do. I told him I would save him the trouble by quitting. At the end of the summer I sold my motorcycle and everything else I owned and took off for Europe and parts unknown instead of going back to college.
Years later Carlos came to live with me again on the farm in Maine, and I put him to work. My sister had been married two or three more times since then. She was a serial bride. Her first husband she met while in her senior year at Wellesley High School. A beautiful girl, she had no trouble attracting boys. The one male she couldn’t get to pay attention to her was our father. Her first husband, Oswaldo, was from a wealthy Venezuelan family. He was going to college at Babson when they met and eloped before my sister finished high school. They had one child, a daughter, who was born on my sixteenth birthday. The marriage didn’t even survive the pregnancy. Next she married Carlos’s father, a handsome playboy whose grandfather had been president of the Dominican Republic.
“I was wondering if I’d ever see you again,” Carlos says as we sip our drinks. “Mimi and Grandpa have been going out of their minds worrying.”
&nbs
p; My parents. Another pang of guilt. “Let them know I’m okay.”
“They were relieved to know you’re alive.”
“With all this Heat, I have to be super careful.”
“I know. I keep telling them, if something bad happened to you, we’d hear about it,” he says.
He’s a smart kid, Mensa-level IQ, with an amazing memory for trivia and useless information and a soulful, complicated nature. It’s as if the workings of his brain inhibit his ability to take initiative. He thinks too much and gets lost in a jumble of ideas undermined by sentiment and fantasy. He watches too many movies and too much TV. Too much pornography. Once he’s given a task and instructions, he’s fine. Left alone, he gets tangled up in convoluted cerebration and daydreams. I’m sure that’s why he took to his uncle with my restless jones for decisive, dangerous action.
“Where’s the truck?”
He nods toward the street. “Right out front.”
“There’s a parking lot in back. Put it there and then get yourself a room.”
While Carlos is off moving the truck, the bartender gets a phone call.
“You Richard?” he asks me.
It’s JD, calling from a pay phone at the base lodge at Sugarloaf. “Yo, what’s up, kemosabe?”
“You know, taking care of business.”
“Everything all right?”
“So far… I could use a hand.”
We make plans to meet at Michael’s inn for dinner. He asks if it’s okay to bring his lady, Father Flaherty, and his date.
“Sure,” I say. “Why not? It’s a party.”
The boxes containing the hash look legitimate enough with their packing slip enclosed envelope stuck to the outside. And there is no odor. Carlos and I carry them into the hotel through the rear doors and up the stairs, pile them in the closet of his room. We drive the truck up to Michael’s place, where already people have started to gather. Michael is one of those hosts who, once he gets a buzz on, will go to extravagant lengths to show his guests a good time. He has a large banquet table set up with pitchers of margarita, bottles of wine, a feast of hors d’oeuvres. The main course is venison, duck, lobster, oysters, and shrimp with local vegetables, and corn on the cob. A guitar, drums, and violin trio plays country rock. Michael joins in on piano. The bartender’s old lady sings.
Midway into the evening Channing Godfried shows up with his wife, a respected political writer and biographer, and a former classmate at Harvard Law School with his date. Channing is at first freaked to see me. “Rick!” he bellows when he walks in. He practically gasps and looks around to make sure it’s not a setup. When he gets over the initial shock, he says, “I was beginning to think you’d been taken hostage by Hezbollah.”
“Not quite. Almost.”
As my attorney, Godfried understands the gravity of the situation. During a private moment he tells me Wolfshein and an agent with the Internal Revenue Service stopped by his home in Cambridge what must have been six months ago. When Godfried invoked the attorney/client privilege, Wolfshein made reference to the exclusion of knowledge of ongoing criminal activity as not protected and in fact possibly indictable. The IRS agent asked Godfried if he had accepted any large sums of cash money from me as a retainer. Godfried refused to answer their questions and told the agents he would have to speak to his attorney before he would agree to be interviewed.
“But what do I know?” he says to me. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in… what? Over two years.”
Godfried is a cigar smoker, loves his Cubans. He has wild, bushy Groucho Marx eyebrows, skin pockmarked from adolescent acne, and an unkempt bird’s nest of curly black hair. When we get up from the table to withdraw to Michael’s office, Godfried doesn’t so much walk as he lurches like a stiff-legged man on the deck of a ship in high seas. He’s brilliant, graduated summa cum laude in his class at Harvard Law School and was recruited early on by the Kennedy camp when Jack was still a senator. The war in Vietnam eroded his political conscience. He’s been holed up here in Maine, in Cambridge, and at times on the Cape writing his memoirs ever since retiring from the Lyndon Johnson camp. He once told me that for days on end the farthest he would go from his writing desk was to walk to his mailbox. He would open it, see it stuffed with bills, and close it back up. Return to the refuge of memory, the solace of the written word.
Godfried’s wife, whose writing career has produced bestsellers, asks the inevitable question: “Where’s Anaïs?”
Ah, yes… My estranged wife, dear Anaïs, known and mostly well liked, even loved by the people who meander in and out of this gathering. The question alone is enough to alter my mood. The simple answer is: Toronto, though that’s not true. She is in Spanish Wells, a small island in the Bahamas, at our home there, waiting for me. I believe this to be so but choose to tell no one. “She’s traveling,” I say and leave it at that.
Anaïs has been on my mind ever since we touched down at the airport in Rangeley. She occupies a place just next to that section reserved for Wolfshein. There is some connection between them I haven’t figured out yet. Anaïs used to drive me to the airfield in Rangeley; she would sit on the hood of her Land Rover and watch while I took flying lessons. Memories of our best years together take form and dissolve around random thoughts like reflections of a familiar face seen fleetingly in a hall of mirrors. I see her here or there and then she is gone. I can’t quite hold on to her image or the feeling evoked by our remembered good times together. The sense that I let her down, that I failed to live up to the promises we made to each other is so strong it overwhelms any other feelings I have for her. I hurt and drove away the woman who loved me and wanted only to have my children and be my wife. Because I was too selfish, too consumed with my own desperate need to prove myself and impress others.
Was that it? Maybe I am following a path that I absolutely must pursue, overcoming some karmic debt to reach that place where I will meet my higher self. A life of crime, if that’s what this is, will deliver me—where? I know the answer to that: to a small space from which I can no longer run, or a hole in the ground. And no one will be there except me. I will be alone with my guilt. But not yet, not now, not so long as I still have fight and flight left in me. And Val, waiting for me in Hawaii…
LATER IN THE evening when the band takes a break, Michael puts on the Steely Dan album The Royal Scam and plays the title song. Almost on cue, Jimmy D and Father Flaherty walk in with their babes on their arms and the outlaw bravado of John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson in their swagger. They act like it was only a week or so since they last saw me. Good to see they are flush, wads of money give a man élan. This is what it is all about—the rush, the feeling of living outside the law. Music. Dope. Money. Food and drink. Song. All energized by the awareness that the Heat would love to crash our party. If only they knew where we are. It’s like we are back in high school; the bullies and the hard-ons are out there riding around trying to find out where the cool kids are getting down.
JD gets with the program immediately. This is business disguised as gaiety. No questions asked, just get the orders and carry them out. That’s what I love about these ex-military types. The good father eats. As a former gunnery sergeant, he has assumed command. JD and Carlos remove the suitcases into the rear of Flaherty’s truck. They take the kid, and the three of them are gone for nearly two hours as the rest of us party on.
I should say the party continues mostly without me, for I have withdrawn, first into thoughts that follow the men on the road into the night to my neighbor’s farm, owned by JD’s old lady. I watch them like a voyeur. They stash the money in a sealed concrete compartment we built beneath the floorboards of a horse stall. They work by the light from a single bulb smeared with bat shit. The boards of the stall floor are heavy with horse piss. The horse, tethered outside the stall, watches them work and flicks his tail from side to side impatiently. Flaherty gives the animal a handful of oats in a black rubber bucket. JD works with an unfiltered cigarette hangin
g from his lips. His long hair falls from under his Boston Red Sox baseball cap. My nephew is thrilled. This is the real deal. Crime. Better than sex in that it lasts longer. Certainly more real than pornography.
When the loot is safely put away, they return smelling of horseshit. I can relax at last, for a minute. But I don’t. Instead I recede further, I take leave to my room at the inn—the bridal suite. Now I have rented five rooms, counting Wart Hog’s in Augusta, Carlos’s two rooms, and the empty motel room on the outskirts of town. Finally, this room, with a large four-poster canopied bed where I curl up alone on my honeymoon without even my cash-filled suitcases to keep me company.
My marriage is over, I feel it now, feel it in the marrow of my lonely bones. Married to myself, I am married to this life. Curious how I had to come back here, where we were so close, to let her go. I rest my head and know the comfort that at the end of the day when lovers, husband and wife, mother and child, loosen their embrace and roll over into the land of sleep, they are as alone in their dreams as I am.
* * *
IN THE MORNING Carlos and I load the boxes of hash back into the camper on the rear of the truck and head out to the Sugarloaf Regional Airport to rendezvous with Wart Hog. Giles will meet the Cessna 210 in Trois-Rivières, and the Canadians will have their appetite for hashish replenished. But not so fast, for as we pass by the motel on the outskirts of Kingfield where I first checked in last night, a state cop car peals out in front of us and speeds off in the direction of the airport. There are two more Maine state trooper cars and a black unmarked federal cop sedan parked in the motel lot. The door to the room I occupied for all of fifteen minutes is open and cops and plainclothes agents mill in and out.
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