Empty rooms winged out to either side of me. I trod more carefully here than on the steps, seeing as a fall through rotting floorboards would be even more catastrophic. But this was different wood, seasoned and solid, and after a minute of exploring I felt reasonably safe.
I'd never been in a house empty not only of people but also all the stuff people accumulate once they settle in. The hollowness of my footsteps unsettled me, as though I was hearing echoes of my own ghost. Dog could hear my aimless wandering and by now must know I had no idea where the money was. I imagined him running around front and snarling a few stark truths to his master. Would the lead start flying? Or would Carl realize we were just as much dupes as he was and call it a day? I suspected something in between, a few warning taps on our kneecaps or some cosmetic rearrangement that would turn our reflections into strangers.
The idea of having my nose handed to me like a juicy Tasty Bit spurred me onwards through the rooms. Blank walls and bare floors greeted every turn. In my desperation I looked for secret hiding places, but all I found were tiny red bugs happily burrowing through the crevices. For a moment, the life of an insect looked pretty good. I'm sure they couldn't conceive of an alternative.
And then, in the last room, I found what I was looking for: junk. It was a paltry collection, as though the Confederates who had vacated the place had grouped their sentimental trinkets for later retrieval. They had never come back.
It was obvious the room had been visited, if not exactly ransacked. Over the years, the occasional carpetbagger had lifted the more valuable items for display on Antique Roadshow, leaving behind a few dismal odds and ends: cracked vases, assorted broken crockery, a battered chest, a flaky suitcase, a few broken tools. I hefted something like a large iron 'S' with a blade inside the upper curve. I couldn't imagine what it was for, and it was too heavy (or I was too weak) to use it as a sword. It wouldn't have been much good against a handgun, anyway, as has been proved on any number of history's imperial lapses. I dropped it on the floor and slapped the coating of rust off my hands.
I picked up the suitcase, half-expecting a snowfall of Confederate bonds or dixies. Leather peeled off at a mere touch, and inside the only fragments were from the suitcase itself. Still, it seemed a feasible substitute for a sack of cash, but when I closed it the handle sloughed off and the two halves fell apart.
That left the chest, which on quick inspection also proved empty. I found a piece of wire and wound it through the latch, twisting it into a knot I hoped would delay its opening for at least a few minutes. If help didn't arrive soon, I could gape at the empty chest and gasp something like, "He said the money was here!" or some such nonsense. A pretty feeble script, on a par with the fake Maltese Falcon, but it would have to do. If ever there was a pinch, this was it.
The chest was homemade, something hammered together in the face of brute necessity. Maybe Ma Barker had yelled at Pa that she needed something to hide her unmentionables in, and he had used wood from the barn and horseshow nails to jerryrig this 4X3X2 piece of ugliness. It couldn't have satisfied Ma's dainty sense of esthetics, but it was certainly not bulky enough to justify its weight. I hefted it up, then promptly put it back down. I was tempted to open it again to make double-sure it was empty, but the wire I had cinched on the latch was brittle and would probably break if twisted too much. With this in my arms the stairs would certainly belch their last and send me into a dank and unforgiving plunge. I went to the front window and studied the possibility of tossing it from the second story.
Carl was still holding a gun. Monique looked bored. Jeremy looked frightened and bored. Barbara looked bored and frightened. Nothing had changed, except that Dog's straw hat hove into view as he jogged around to the front yard. He looked unusual, being off the leash like that. I imagined a movie review of Dog's performance. It would be entitled: "No Redeeming Humor.
Carl spotted me and waved his gun in my direction. "Y'all stuck up there?"
"No," I shouted down.
"I suggest you get your ass in gear before bodily harm comes to your brother and sister."
"Sounds good to me," I said.
"Or before I send Dog up to fetch you," Carl added.
"Right," I said, backing away.
With Dog out front I was free to run out back. I went into the junk room and leaned over some detached window shutters to survey the yard. I looked longingly at the woods beyond. Unfortunately, the woods looked longingly back at me, as if the trees and thick underbrush wanted to eat me alive.
Carl and his one-dog wolf pack were being surprisingly patient out front, probably in the belief that the camera was a hoax and they had all day. I heard sour-sounding noises I didn't recognize and was startled to realize it was Dog...speaking. I couldn't catch exact words, but the drift carried an ominous, skeptical twang.
If I threw the chest out the window and it broke open, trouble would break out when they saw only busted lumber. It was carry the damn thing down or nothing at all. So I took up the chest again, reacquainted myself with its weight, and forged onto the steps. I took them slowly, like a blind man on a cliff, feeling the sag beneath my shoes and knowing if I tested the wood too much it would break from over-cautiousness. I winded quickly. I was dying for a smoke. I thought of my deceased mother. Boy, that didn't help.
"May I ask what you're doing?"
I was becoming accustomed to the voice, and was in fact expecting him to check out what I was up to. I didn't think he could see up the stairs, but he could no doubt hear all my panting and moaning. I did not look up, but kept my eyes glued to the next step. With the chest in my hands, I found it hard to gauge depth and distance.
"Buying time," I gasped, going down one more step then stopping to inspect the one I had broken on the way up.
"By bringing them an empty footlocker?" the voice scoffed.
He could see me, even though I was only halfway down the steps. This was a real Hollywood production. I was feeling like a featured victim in the Blair Witch Project.
"You have a better idea?" I said.
"Yes, sit and wait until help arrives."
"That's a little obvious." I crooked the chest under one arm, judging I could manage five seconds. Gripping the rail, I stretched my right leg over the jagged hole and found the next unbroken step with my toe.
"Careful!" the voice shouted.
His solicitude was cancelled out by his fear, adding up to nil in the moral support department. Trembling from cramped foot to cramped hand, I eased slowly over the gap, got both feet on the step, and let go of the rail.
There was a loud snap and I went down.
"Oh!" the voice cried out. "I shouldn't have...are you all right?"
I guess he was amazed that I was still standing. I, for one, was impressed—not to mention thankful. It was only the second step and I had not dropped far, but keeping my balance represented something of a miracle.
But even miracles have limits. The chest had slipped my grasp and fallen on the rubble of the first step, the sound muffled by what amounted to a small heap of mulch.
"Is it broken?" the voice inquired.
I reached down to my knees, mired neatly in the breach while my feet were planted on the floor under the stairs. "Not even a scratch," I said admiringly, as though the handiwork was my doing.
"That's wonderful," said the voice. "And the footlocker?"
"It's a chest," I corrected. I don't know why I was being finicky about it. Maybe I hated the way the unseen voice (aka Invisible Asshole) was still behaving like a know-it-all, when it was obvious from Carl's sudden appearance that he was almost as clueless as the rest of us.
"A chest, then, though to my knowledge very few chests that age had padlocks like that."
"There's just a latch," I said, drawing one leg out of the hole and planting it forward below the first step, on the floor. "It's homemade. They made whatever they wanted out of it."
Abruptly, the weirdest noise rose from the camera speaker, like the sound ef
fect of a flying saucer approaching and landing on a lonely country road.
"What the hell's that?" I said, alarmed.
The noise stopped. "Sorry," said the voice. "I was...doodling."
"Take your doodling somewhere else," I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about. "And maybe you should shut down. Those folks out there aren't deaf, you know."
"I want to see what's going on," said the voice.
"You can't see much...unless you've got more cameras planted around here."
The red light again went out.
I finished extricating myself from the hole and gave the chest or footlocker or steamer truck or whatever the hell it was a once-over. It seemed undamaged, but when I lifted it I thought I detected some new wobbles in the frame. This was bothersome. If the wire in the latch annoyed Carl, he had only to snap his fingers for Dog to kick it into fragments and expose the deception. But I wasn't about to go back upstairs to find a suitable replacement. For non-saints, miracles are probably restricted to one per lifetime.
I walked out the front door and negotiated my way around the gaps in the porch. Not really wanting to see Carl's reaction—as though he had X-ray eyes and could see right through to the emptiness inside the chest—I did not look up until I felt grass under my feet.
Everyone was pretty much where I had left them, but they were turned away from the house. And Carl had let go of Monique, who had mixed success staying upright on her impractical spiked heels.
I appreciated their oblivion, and held off asking why they were all gaping towards the sorry excuse of a driveway, which disappeared into the trees. Anyone coming up couldn't be seen until they entered the clearing. And from the sound of it, someone was coming up.
Not very quickly, though. The engine noise was nearly drowned out by the swish and gush of dirt and gravel. There was only one gear appropriate for ascending this hill, but the driver was spinning roulette to find it. Whoever it was must be a novice on all-terrain, or they were driving an oversized go-cart, because the noise stopped suddenly with no vehicle in sight.
Carl glanced at Dog, as though trying to decide who to sic him on. Then he saw me. Well, he saw the chest. Jeremy and Barbara turned and gave me a good gawp.
"That's it?" Barbara asked breathlessly.
Carl answered for me, using words not exactly appropriate for the occasion.
"Oh man baby." He staggered towards me like a man knocked on the head. "Oh man baby."
This sounded a bit too much as though he was having gender identity issues, with pederasty thrown in for good measure, and I took a step away. Dog whirled, his eyes narrowing, ready to tackle me if I tried to escape.
I could feel the pressure building up. The pressure of anticipation—of greed, so long shortchanged, about to be gratified. Oh man baby, indeed. They had completely forgotten about the intruder stuck on the hillside.
"Put the chest down," said Carl, with the bemused wrath of someone confronting a nematode too dense to heed the obvious. "Put the chest down before Dog removes your legs."
"And eats them," Jeremy added like the cretin he was...as if Carl intended to hand out shares.
For some reason I found myself looking fondly at Monique. Speak about inappropriate responses. But I couldn't get over this vision of the trash goddess, so perfect in her pulchritude, as though the atmosphere around her was awash in pheromones. Gonads fox fear every time. When Dog caught the direction of my glance he came down a notch—from canine to human.
"What'reyoulookingat?"
It was the work of a second to put spaces between the words, and I realized jealousy (or the territorial imperative) foxes fear and sex...and greed. Dog might not comprehend the intricacies of the exchange rate, but could easily go rabid over a prize like Monique. He might tolerate Carl plastering fingerprints all over her, but I didn't have a meal ticket as compensation. I found myself switching back to my primary emotion, a longing to save my neck. It was then that it dawned on me that Carl was quite close, that Jeremy and Barbara too were magnetically drawn in my direction. Money sucks the life right out of a family. So does poverty, which makes you wonder what the point is in the first place.
I mentally played out the timing of the situation. Whoever was stuck on the hill would be coming up soon, by foot. But would they reach me before Carl poked his gun barrel between my eyes and carved out my mental faculties? How long would he delayed by the wire in the latch once I put the chest down? A minute? Two?
Carl made a sudden reach for me and I jerked back. He managed to get a hand on the chest and it toppled forward out of my arms. I heard a chunky crash, but stayed focused on Carl's nickel-plated gun. Stupidly, I turned to run back into the house, thinking the rotten floor would slow down any pursuer, when a joint gasp of delight filtered through the roaring in my ears. I wondered if the chest itself was more valuable than I realized, a Louis Pick-a-Number antique. I lowered my eyes.
Oh man baby.
The latch wire had held, witness to the durability of old ironmongery. It was the bottom of the chest that I had heard crunching on the ground. The wood slats had splintered open as the chest banged down and rolled over—exposing the false bottom and its contents: rectangular chunks of $100 bills in light blue shrink-wrap. Carl was reaching down for one of the bundles when a voice caught our attention.
"Hey! Assholes! Hold it right there! Police!"
CHAPTER 14
"Where's the rest?"
It was a perfectly reasonable question for Detective Yvonne Kendle to ask after we determined each bundle held $5,000, and there were only ten bundles tucked in the false bottom of the chest. Fifty grand was nothing to sneeze at (unless you converted it into something sneezable), but it was just a fraction of what we had expected. Our eyes had bulged enough to justify a winning scratch-off ticket, but not enough to claim the lotto jackpot. And now that the law had walked off with even that, we'd lost our ticket to leave the ranks of the wretched of the earth.
I'm getting ahead of myself, which is unusual for me. It's not that I'm a methodical person who accomplishes his chores by beginning at the beginning and working his way to the end. I could have just as well started in the middle. Or I could have presented a tease, like in some movies, by giving you the improbable ending first and then showing how I landed in the Oval Office. (A plague kills off everyone else and I become President.) But these two possibilities only now occurred to me, and I would have to delete everything I've written and start over. And truly, you just can't scrap the truth—not without a really good reason. Let's face it, though, I began at the beginning because I'm not smart enough to begin anywhere else. You can't screw up a timeline without a straight one to start with.
Our fiasco in the clearing continued with Kendle gasping her way up the hill and puckering her fat lips in righteous machismo theatrics. So much for synopsis.
"Bam," said Dog, bunching his fist as he awaited his next command from Carl.
"An adult bambino, right?" I said, ever willing to defuse a bomb with infantile humor.
Like the rest of us, Kendle stopped short when she saw the money on the ground. You never feel a suspected treasure actually exists until it falls on your head.
I was ready with an excuse:
"Thank God you're here," I told Kendle. "We've been looking all over for this money so we can return it to its rightful owner."
A half dozen pairs peeped at me in spectacular disbelief. Maybe it would have been better to say, "Oops, look what we've found."
"Antique hunting?" Kendle said with a quizzical snarl.
That was good, too.
Other reactions varied. Jeremy and Dog gave me the thousand-yard dog meat stare. Barbara and Monique pulled their comely faces into attractive pouts, as if I had just cancelled Christmas. While Carl remained imperturbably poker-faced. He was used to dealing with the law. The best way to handle cops was to smooth his plumpness into a perfect blank, as though this was his usual reaction to either pleasure and despair (two side
s of the same wooden nickel). In fact, this was probably how he looked when he was asleep.
Since my ability to deal with people was malformed the instant I laid eyes on Skunk in the maternity ward, I could only gawk dismally at my skeptical audience. I was even more nonplussed when Kendle brushed up against Jeremy. It seemed furtively amorous, until they sprang apart.
In the end, I was consoled by the fact that none of them could come up with a better lie.
We counted out the money and Kendle jokingly made out a receipt. Carl held Dog back with a verbal command when the detective walked away with it all. Then Carl departed with his little entourage and Jeremy plugged me with his fists.
"You told that cop we'd be here, didn't you?"
Seeing as I was the only one who hadn't said anything to anyone about the money, I took great exception to his complaint. After mingling some protests and denials with my shouts of pain, I pointed out the obvious:
"That cop saved our necks. Why don't you punch Sweet Tooth? She's the one who told Carl."
This had obviously crossed Jeremy's mind, but it seemed she was more or less Carl's property. Carl might sic a whole pack of Dogs on him if he bruised his recurring revenue.
The whole thing stank of deflation, anti-climax, and set-up. I returned to the house and stood under the mute camera. The voice had nothing to say, the red eye stayed dark, and my desire to rip the device out of the ceiling gave way to indolence, once I saw the difficulty involved.
Three hours later I was back selling popcorn, listening to the phony Tyrannosaurus ream me out for being a dummy. Rex was full of himself: big, strong, and sure as hell no mute. His roar drummed my inadequacies into my ears and I had to fight the urge to shove popcorn down the throats of senior citizens, just to prove I wasn't extinct.
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