The fantasy ended abruptly. My whacko brother had trashed the interior. Cups and wrappers littered the semi-aniline leather seats and the mat carpet, rude brown blotches were splattered across the dashboard. There were even crumbs on the console display. When he switched on the engine the analog clock glowed a phosphor blue, like a radioactive bird feeder.
"Some things you're supposed to take care of," I complained.
"Listen to that V8," Todd gloated. "Does that sound deprived?"
My car had a V8, too, but the Impala's loose belts and misfires made everyone else's car sound destined for Daytona, so I couldn't say if the Jag's engine was properly maintained or was a complete shambles.
"This calls for some explaining," I said as Todd shifted into reverse.
"You can't drive standard?"
"I mean this car," I said. "I'm surprised Carl didn't bring it up. For someone who's supposed to be broke, it's a helluva asset."
"Worth more than the house, so far as I'm concerned," Todd nodded, patting the wheel.
"You treat your car like your house, and they're both losing book value."
"I inherited it from Dad," Todd said, nonchalantly sliding past my comment.
Both of us had-hand-me-down modes of transportation, like Amish buggies handed on from bearded to beardless. Todd's carriage had a lot more cachet than my heap, but we had identical emptied Big Gulp cups rolling under our feet. I wondered if some of the trash was left over from Winny, who had been no neatnik. I began scanning the interior, looking for clues.
"What are you looking for?" Todd demanded in an annoyed tone, as though I should be busy admiring his driving skills.
"When's the last time you cleaned out your car?"
"I think you already made your point," Todd snarled without twisting his lip, causing his mouth to flatten painfully.
"Is some of this junk Winny's?" I asked, reaching for the glove compartment.
"You want to stop—hey!"
I pulled out a glop of papers and planted them on my lap. A couple of maps slipped off, along with a small plastic folder. I leaned over and picked it up. Inside was the registration.
"What the fuck?" I said, staring.
"Cut it out!" Todd griped, struggling to look in two directions and not doing either very well. "You can't look at that. It's illegal!"
"The registration?"
"No, dipwit, looking at someone's private documents."
"I don't see a stamp on it," I reasoned. "If it's not in the U.S. Mail—"
With more frustration than timeliness, he slapped at the pile on my lap and sent the folder flying, even though he knew it was too late.
"This is a business car," I said.
He grunted.
"'The Ice Boutique dba New River Environmental Group." I eyed him narrowly. "That's pretty...what's the word I'm looking for? Fishy? Fucked up?"
"Let it go."
"No can do. Firstly, what do jewelers know about asbestos removal? Secondly, Skunk and Winny were killed at the Ice Boutique on Staples Mill Road—which begs a thousand and one questions. What the fuck is going on here?"
"You say 'fuck' an awful lot," Todd complained.
"That's the most dimwitted thing you've said so far. If you and I are anything alike—"
"And we aren't," Todd interrupted.
"Right. Anyway, rich people say 'fuck' a lot more than poor slobs like me. They can afford to."
"Whatever that means," said Todd, now focusing on the road. "And I told you, I'm not rich."
"So you don't own this car?" I demanded.
"It was my father's car," Todd said grimly, shifting the gears needlessly. The ensuing rattle and roar could only be cured by braking suddenly and shifting again, which nearly resulted in a spontaneous daisy chain in the thick traffic.
"Hmmm," I observed.
"What?"
"No one honked at you."
"They're very polite and understanding out here." Todd allowed himself a moment's smugness, until a BMW pulled out a shade too close and he leaned on the horn. "Fuck him," he growled as the startled driver ahead of him swerved fearfully.
"It makes more sense, Winny driving a company car," I continued. "I mean, he never had two dimes to rub together. I never knew he even had a driver's license..." I looked down at the J-shaped notch of the selection lever. "...forget handling a shift."
I couldn't get over the idea of Winny Marteen behind the wheel of this prince of cars. It was like something out of a fairy tale, a regular frog kiss—and come to think of it, he had looked a lot like a toad. Someone had bussed his lips, and he had come up with this.
"Did Winny ever talk to you about his work?" I asked.
"You asked that before, I think," said Todd.
"Maybe I did. Did you answer?"
"He complained about all the hours on the job," Todd said after reflecting a moment. "I never learned anything about abatement from him, that's for sure. Which way?"
We were approaching Cary Street, and any Richmond numbskull would know Oregon Hill was right.
"You've been downtown plenty of times."
"Shockhoe Bottom, sure," Todd said with a shrug, as though to say his low life had a touch of class—meaning, as well, that he was only slumming, while I was a real chip off the old white trash block.
"You're lying," I said.
"You're talking about that dead end where they keep all the dead rebels?"
"Hollywood Cemetery, yeah."
He turned right.
We were soon passing the grand estates of Windsor Farms, mansions and grounds ripped straight out of the pages of the Versailles edition of Better Homes and Gardens. Both Todd and I turned a little green from envy and nausea, aware that places like this belonged in the 'careful-what-you-wish-for' category.
"That's a lot of grass to cut," Todd said.
"They've got groundskeepers," I commented.
"The kid down the block wants $80 to cut my lawn." Todd bloated his cheeks, as though demonstrating the rate of inflation.
"Just think, you could've done it yourself for free."
"Don't miss my point. Eighty bucks for a quarter acre lot. Multiply that by—"
"They've got money, too," I sighed.
That was what we wanted. Not the mansions, but the wherewithal to fork out maintenance fees. There didn't seem much point in having property if you had to sweat over it. That's not what I had told Todd back at his house, I know, but neither of us had energy to spare for contradictions, reserving it instead for disclaimers and ripostes. We lacquered the air with 'kiss my ass's' and 'rotate and screw yourself's' all the way through Carytown. By the time we reached the VCU district we had settled down to a raw simmer that smelled like burning clams, or maybe our combined wrath was frying the bucket seats' softgrain leather.
"Why don't you just run them down?" Todd griped after we had swerved around our fifth or sixth student strolling insouciantly down the middle of the street.
This was not proof of shared mental processes. It was a thought that would have crossed the mind of any sane citizen.
"This whole area used to be part of Oregon Hill," I said, falling into tour guide mode. "Then the poor ignorant folk were turned out and the area dedicated to higher education."
"I just saw two guys holding hands," Todd said in disgusted amazement.
"Don't worry, it wasn't us." Adding, with a sniff, "You're not very tolerant, are you? Are you homophobic?"
"I've got a phobia against anything that deserves a phobia," he answered. I found this remarkably astute, but of course didn't say so.
"Tell me when to turn."
"Here."
I had forgotten to alert him to make a right on Laurel. He was so much like me I had instinctively assumed his inner radar would direct him straight to my front door. Swerving sharply, he almost collided with a bicyclist coming the other way. After a traditional exchange of horn blowing and curses, without a whisper as to how lucky we all were, we continued towards the river.
"I shouldn't have braked," Todd fumed.
"You would have killed him," I said. "His head would have cracked your windshield."
"He was wearing blue underwear."
"That was Lycra. Don't you see any of this in your area? Gays? Cyclists? I thought the Westies were pretty liberal."
"All the real couples on River Road produce real kids," he logicized.
"And those kids end up on Oregon Hill." Only after I said it did I realized I had made my neighborhood sound like a leaking nuclear power plant where kids came to get mutated.
I directed Todd to circle around to Pine Street. To my astonishment, we pulled up behind my Impala.
"My car!"
"Yeah?"
"It's here! I thought it was towed from your back alley. Who...?" I reached into my pocket. My keys were still there.
Todd snickered at the fat-assed car trunk that filled his front view, rusty streaks running down the back, looking like Flint Dementis' chin when he went on a drooling jag. He backed away some, as though fearful of contamination, but was reassured when he bumped into the Mercedes behind him.
"Wait," I said as he began to get out. I nodded across the street. "Doesn't that look like your buddy's van? Not the fancy one, but the plain wrapper."
"Carl?" He squinted, as though I was asking him to pick out a fir tree on a mountain range wrapped in fog.
"Oh, yeah...they hotwired my car so they could take it to a quiet place and search it for clues."
"And they brought it back here because...?"
"Five'll get you ten they planted another bug on it."
Todd shifted uneasily. "You think Dog's around?"
"I don't see why they'd go back inside..." I mused, then looked at the front of my house, thinking of Dog in my closet. If I told my brother that Carl and his pet had already searched my house, I might trip over the circumstances of our encounter. He had bedded the luscious Monique, while I had bounced an adiposal prison security guard. You can have pride without standards.
"What do you think?" Todd snapped. "They think the Brinks money is here." He cocked an eye at me, an ape in a mirror. "Is it?"
"Would I still be living here if I had that kind of dough?" I snapped back.
This reminded him of the reason for driving me home. He scanned the block, none of which had an edge on the Taj Mahal's outhouse. "Which one is yours?" he asked doubtfully.
"The one you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy or your brother," I said.
His expression drooped. "You mean where those beer cans are rolling onto the side walk?"
I didn't know what he was talking about. Beer cans spilled out of every yard and recycling bin. "You have to be more specific."
"The one where you can't see the porch for the junk."
There was junk on every porch, mainly in the form of old chairs and ratty sofas where kids hung out to smoke, the landlords around here making a peculiar stipulation against smoking indoors. "Try again."
"Don't be a hard case, I mean that one there, where the door's wide open." Todd pointed.
From where I sat the porch post blocked the door. I leaned towards the driver's side and saw what Todd meant.
"Don't tell me you always leave your door open," Todd leered, as though he had caught me with my pants down.
"Not all the time," I said slowly.
Carl and Todd might be half-assed business partners, but neither one of us wanted to encounter Dog, no matter what his incarnation of the moment happened to be. We waited. I wasn't sure what we would do if Carl and Dog emerged with a boatload of cash. I was sure most of the students milling up and down the street toted cell phones, and for once was comforted by their presence. In the old days, the law was lucky to scrounge up a stray cat as a witness to criminal activity. But now, even Joe Dog as Rabid Mutt would be forced to tone down his act in front of so many witnesses who could summon the cops at the press of a button—sort of like a nuclear exchange for beginners. These kids might be self-absorbed, but a major mood-killer (an oil or bloodspill, for instance) was bound to rouse them out of their navels.
To my annoyance—actually, to our mutual annoyance—it turned out Todd and I shared fidgets. I rubbed my elbows, then stopped abruptly when I saw he was doing the same. I began reaching for my nose, but hesitated when he began inserting his index finger in his left nostril. He caught me staring and switched directions to pinch his earlobe, but froze when I beat him to it. There was a thump-thump-thump as he tapped his heel and I nearly snapped a tendon to keep from following suit.
"Don't you want to go in?" he said without a whole lot of enthusiasm. "They could be turning the place upside down."
Should I bother telling him there would be no difference in degree or kind? After the police had finished I only needed to clear a path through the rubbish to put things right. In fact, I had begun to wonder what might be under all those piles of McPherson paraphernalia. Someone could have sneaked into my house (it had become the national pastime) and buried something, anything, out of sight and mind. It had been a long time since I had rummaged through my past. Maybe at that moment Carl and Dog were doing me a favor, sifting through all the extraneous junk for the Brinks nugget. Of course, when I mentally composed a list of voluntary contributors to my personal wealth, I had to scratch out the zero and start over.
"They'll see us when they come out," said Todd.
"Maybe they've already seen us."
"And they're afraid to come out?" Todd snorted. "The only thing that scares Carl is the Department of Health."
"Maybe we should call the cops," I posed.
"For a simple B&E?" Todd scoffed. "Do you care?"
"Kind of."
"For a dump like this?" Todd scraped his chin along the collar of his wrinkled shirt. "You weren't kidding, bro. This is a dump par excellent."
"'Excellence," I corrected. "You've been hanging around Carl too much."
"And you've been living in a shithouse, so don't lecture me on associates."
It was obvious from Todd's frank appallment that he had not believed a word I had said about my house, which was sort of a slap in the face. He had not seen the inside of the house and understood already there was nothing here worth inheriting.
"OK, you've seen my old homestead," I fumed. "Why don't you leave? Thanks for the ride."
"You know why I'm not leaving," he said.
"Enlighten me."
"Maybe Carl and Dog know something we don't," Todd said. "They knew we were back at my house. The field was open."
"So it's about time we closed it." I got out of the car.
Todd was as chickenshit as I was about the whole business, but he was also just as curious. Giving a moan of disgust, he switched off the engine (he had been prepared to roar off) and got out.
"I can smell your house from here," he winced.
"Get out of here."
"Seriously, I can smell—"
"No, I meant 'get out of here', as in 'go'."
"All right, all right," Todd threw up his hands. "I only meant offense."
I would have continued the argument, but we had already taken a few steps towards the house and my attention re-magnetized. There was a possibility that Carl and Dog were in the back of their van, either peeking out or playing a duet for Monique. I imagine threesomes and quadruplesomes are common in that crowd. But my luck is the juicy wart on Chance, and it was more likely the two of them were waiting for us in the living room, which would promptly become the dying room.
"Think they found something?" Todd actually licked his lips. I must look like a lizard, too, whenever I did that.
"Did they give you any hints?"
"They just hinted they would rip out my guts if I crossed them," he said.
"What were you supposed to get out of this?" I asked.
"Didn't Carl say? Barbara told him about the letters from Skunk. Carl figured I would get all antsy that you would show up and claim—"
"He offered to rub me out?" I excla
imed.
"No, just to brush you off. Somehow." He only slightly wilted under my gaze. "And he said he could brush off Barbara and Jeremy, too. You know, convince them it wouldn't be worth their while to go to all the trouble..."
"And what was Carl's service fee for all of this?"
"A lot more than I realized." Todd gave a small cough. "He's a blackmailer, you know. He said he would use me to plea bargain at his next arrest. He practically bunks out in the courthouse."
"But if the money has been laundered—"
"Carl said I could end up in jail, anyway. And I had to protect..."
"Who?"
"No one you know," he blushed. I blushed back and turned away from him.
"Maybe we shouldn't go in," I said, hesitating. Todd seemed to agree. Why not? We thought alike, shared the same dread of beshatting ourselves with fear. Then, because neither of us was very talented at making up our mind, we started forward again.
"Wait," he said.
We stopped. On cue?
"I have an idea." He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket.
An optimistic flash shot across my mind. There, the difference! Todd was tech savvy. Don't kid yourself, cell phones are hi-tech. They might have been superseded by all sorts of Androids and what-nots, but for someone who held cash registers and shoe laces as mortal enemies, they were the height of advanced Martian civilization. I might have mentioned that I'm able to peck a few strokes on the library computer, but that's an anomaly. If I whistled Dixie, I didn't want a return call in Mandarin. Local suits me fine.
Todd dialed a number on the tiny pad with his thumb. His thumb! It was like an act out of Barnum and Bailey, or opening a bottle of Schlitz with your teeth. It was physical proof that, at some critical juncture in the womb, our genes had diverged. Sure, it's a common talent, but I'm uncommonly stupid. He got the smarts, and I got the shaft. I wondered which one of us had gotten out first.
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