The Fugitives

by Christopher Sorrentino

  Yes, and so Bobby—who hadn’t the slightest interest in table games, who felt that to stake money on the outcome of a game of chance was to be a fool—had no difficulty finding people—Indians—willing to accept his bets on collegiate sporting events, particularly Division I football and basketball games. Bobby did not consider himself a gambler, and had contempt for those who were. He described his betting as recreational. And yet more and more frequently I found myself accompanying him on his visits to an Indian man named Wendell Banjo. Wendell Banjo lived in Petobego, in a mobile home set amid the weeds on a patch of ground before an old frame house which had fallen into an advanced state of decrepitude. On the way there and back, Bobby would invariably deride the interior of Wendell Banjo’s mobile home, which apparently was filled with whatever furniture from the collapsed old house had been able to fit inside it, comparing it to what he declared was the beautiful environment of Manitou Sands. Bobby’s belief in the beauty of Manitou Sands was tantamount to certain knowledge; to him it was inconceivable that anyone at all might find it to be gauche or overdone or unrefined. Bobby had managed to develop good taste, but his taste had its limits, as any useless and vain affectation should. More to the point, he had tremendous confidence in the beauty of Manitou Sands, and believed that it inspired confidence in the guests. His dismay at Wendell Banjo’s evident lack of pride appears to me to have been his way of expressing his confusion over the very reality of a Wendell Banjo in his life, a life that he had elevated so as to be in daily proximity to such beauty, to such a beautiful environment; confusion over the fact that he needed to take Wendell Banjo, his dealings with him, as seriously as he did. The larger the amount he owed to Wendell Banjo (which I was able to gauge only by the fullness of the plastic bag from the casino gift shop that he carried with him), the more bitterly Bobby complained about Wendell Banjo’s lack of ostentation, his disinterest in style or fashion or what Bobby sometimes referred to as the finer things. He would always conclude by insisting that he had laid his last bet with the man. But within the week we would again be driving to Wendell Banjo’s mobile home with the ruined house behind it.

  One day, before we were to drive to Petobego, Bobby called me into his office and asked me to close the door behind me. He sat with his arms folded across his chest for a minute and then reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a semiautomatic pistol. He passed it to me and I checked the magazine and the chamber and then put it into my pocket. He did not carry a plastic bag from the gift shop with him on that day. When we arrived at Wendell Banjo’s place, Bobby asked me to get out and stand beside the car while I waited for him. He went inside and I waited. After a short time Ryan Labeots, one of Wendell Banjo’s employees, came out of the mobile home. I’d spoken to Ryan on several occasions, but that day he just sat on one of the steps and watched me. I leaned on the fender of the car and returned his look. I would not have hesitated to use the gun had I thought that Bobby was in any danger. As I settled into staring at Ryan, he seemed to grow nervous and uncomfortable. He was not a formidable person; he was a big, fat boy who wore oversize clothes and affected a sparse mustache on his upper lip. I was aware that I knew very little about the protocol that obtained there under such circumstances. I could shoot Ryan and then shoot Wendell Banjo, and Bobby and I could leave without troubling ourselves further, but I didn’t know what would happen after that. I trusted in Bobby to guide me; he seemed to be at ease, to have done well, surrounded by the finer things in the beautiful environment that made him so proud. I didn’t think to implicate Bobby, nor did I question his dubious decision to bring, in place of the customary plastic shopping bag filled with cash, a loaded firearm. Finally, Bobby emerged from the mobile home. Ryan moved a little to make room for him as he started down the steps, an unconsciously considerate gesture that utterly dissipated the implicit threat his presence was supposed to convey. As Bobby walked toward the car, and me, Wendell Banjo came through the door and stood silently on the top step to watch us go.

  On the way back to Manitou Sands, Bobby described, in unprecedented detail, the furnishings and decor in Wendell Banjo’s mobile home. He talked about it exhaustively and with the special contempt one reserves for those who don’t fully avail themselves of their privilege. Then he was silent. He didn’t say a word until after we’d gotten back and then said only that I was to make sure that nobody bothered him for the rest of the day, a job I was only too happy to take on.

  FROM HERE, THE rest of the story is merely a matter of mechanics. I promise that, in due time, I will deliver the rest. I want to pause, though, to comment on how the doomed often are badly served by narrative. Whatever remains for the doomed to do before they meet their end, it is tainted to the exact degree that the audience has foreknowledge of their fate. The doomed character, though—he imagines, plans, anticipates, expects, looks forward to. His life is not the dull continuum of a beast, plodding unknowing from day to day, from season to season, year to year, until it meets knife or needle: even the simplest of us are, have to be, able to imagine how we will accommodate ourselves to a future that hasn’t happened yet, while knowing as well that it may never happen, not to us. The thing we don’t know is just how much of it may never happen.

  And so while I went about my business in all innocence, as the saying goes, Bobby began to devise his scheme that very afternoon, in cunning silence. If he treated me more kindly than usual over the days that followed, I am willing to ascribe his motivations partly to residual sentiment rather than pure calculation (we did share a history), although I know better, I may know better, I certainly should know better. In the end, is there a difference? It was unnecessary to be especially kind; as ever, I was not inclined to suspicion as far as Bobby was concerned. But if I had been at all mindful, I might have become wary of the anxious way that Bobby asked me each day for the running tally of the money I would soon be transporting to South Richmond. I assumed it was concern about the considerably larger-than-usual amount—perhaps even concern for me, for my safety and security. If I had been mindful I might have discerned that Bobby’s anxiety had been supplanted on Friday by relief, and that his relief had been supplanted on Sunday by greed. I didn’t know then that Bobby owed Wendell Banjo $220,000, including the vigorish Bobby had agreed to for paying late. By Sunday I could report that roughly twice that amount would be transferred to South Richmond. Bobby harbored a few lingering doubts about his plan; that amount served to dispel them. I don’t know that I can blame him; to fantasize about money is the perfect idiot’s delight.

  I made it easy for Bobby in many ways. On Sunday evening, when I was preparing to leave to drive east, he asked me to meet him on the road heading up into Manitou County, at an old gas station that had been closed for at least as long as I’d lived there. I pulled in under the canopy that had once sheltered the pumps from the elements. Bobby jogged out of the shadows under the eaves of the garage and told me to pull my car around to the back. He said that he needed to drive me somewhere to show me something. I parked and then we drove together to the state hospital grounds. I recall being mildly annoyed because while I was getting mud on my shoes and slacks, Bobby was dressed in old khakis and sneakers. He had a flashlight to light the way as he hurried us through the groves. Finally we came to the clearing and Bobby stopped. I was out of breath; we both were panting in the dead quiet. He gestured at the running board of a small backhoe that was parked there and suggested that I sit. As I was lowering myself onto it, I noticed a dead crow lying on the ground. I pointed it out to Bobby.

  “What the hell happened to it?” he said. “Take a look at it, would you?”

  As I bent over to examine it more closely, not even the faintest presentiment came to me. He shot me in the back of the head.

  Here Bobby was stricken by grief and guilt. He sat on the running board and wept over my body. As well he should have: I will stress once again that Bobby could have relied absolutely upon my aid and discretion; Bobby knew that, had always known it. Under o
ther circumstances he would have valued it, and while he even wished that he could have valued it under these circumstances, my life stood between him and his own safety, between him and the fulfillment of his wishes, finally and most decisively between him and his gratification, and not long after he started digging the hole for my body, he began to blame me. It took over an hour for him to dig a hole deep enough to bury me in, strip me of my identification and belongings, fill the hole in, and disguise it. It took another hour to get back to my car, drive it down the fire road to the beach, and then walk back to the gas station. Finally he had to change his clothes and find a place to dump them and then a different place to dump my things. By the time he returned to Manitou Sands he was filled with self-righteousness. He felt good about himself. Gradually he came to feel, faintly at first and then fully and unselfconsciously, that I was to blame for my own death. And as his plan began to work as if of its own accord, so that the crime I was supposed to have committed became a story other people pressed upon him, a story that he pretended to accept only reluctantly, he began to believe that the story was true.

  BOBBY ANTICIPATED THE heat he’d receive from our old cronies on Hylan Boulevard about this significant loss, and he felt that, steady hand that he was, he could ride it out. Throw himself into the job and earn his redemption. At his core, Bobby was an optimist, which marks him, perhaps, as the gambler he always denied he was at heart. Even at the end, he had trouble understanding what Hanshaw told him about what he’d brought upon himself. But so much crowded that simple, devious mind in its last moments. For example, he was still wondering what Kat Danhoff’s game could be.

  While Kat is hardly innocent, she is not responsible for my reappearance as the storyteller Salteau. It’s more accurate to say that Salteau is responsible for her appearance on the scene. Her game is exactly as you might have surmised: to find a means to attain escape velocity yet again, having determined yet again that her situation is not to her liking. This woman, not so young anymore, who exists in a state of constant anticipation, who has never been capable of being, but only of looking forward to being, who views everyone and everything as a mirror in which she is reflected, was conjured by Salteau, by me, whom she instinctively recognizes, perhaps without putting it to herself quite this way, as the perfect distorting mirror. As for Alexander Mulligan (to whom Bobby devoted considerably less thought), he is always willing to join in a union of desperate people. He has a cultivated eye for the bored and the impatient—potential partners in crimes of passion, so to speak. This is properly characterized as a personality flaw, this unavailing search for perfect fulfillment with people who, and in circumstances that, distort and exaggerate the ordinary transactional aspects of human relationships, even (or especially) sexual relationships. Sandy Mulligan has never had an ordinary relationship with a woman in his entire life, as he himself has helpfully suggested in one of his moments of unwitting candor. And what about Rae, you ask, the wonderful and steadfast Rae? Married for two years when Sandy barged into her life, stirring in her the desire that things should become “interesting” once again. In omitting any mention of Rae’s marriage, Sandy was quite dishonest, but we must forgive him. A habitual liar, he overlooks the truth in this instance in order to cast Rae in the heroic role to which he believes she is entitled as a sort of consolation prize for his having deserted her (she is, I can assure you, far less interested in that than in the not-quite-as-generous-as-he-would-have-you-believe financial provisions that he has made for her and their children), and also to try to convince himself that in ending his marriage and fragmenting his household he has done something both extraordinary and necessary, when he knows perfectly well that it was neither of those two things.

  Such people, I have learned, are no more or less flawed than anyone else—a Bobby, for example, is more flawed, vastly more flawed. But it’s the tiny destroyers like Sandy and Kat who have the greatest effect, wreak the most damage. And Salteau has, I have, summoned the two of them to grind harmlessly against each other, and to draw Bobby into my net.

  PART 6

  WITHOUT SHADOWS

  44

  I SPENT the next week recuperating. Locally, at least, the news dominated—a casino bigwig had been murdered, after all, and Argenziano’s criminal record came to light, prompting a state investigation. I kept checking the Mirror’s website to see if anything had been written about it by Kat, but Chicago apparently saw no need to import news of violence and corruption all the way from northern Michigan. Kat ignored two e-mail messages I sent her.

  No one associated “Alex Mulligan,” a bit player and Cherry City resident several of the stories mentioned in passing, with the faintly scandalous author from New York, so I was left alone. Or so I thought, until I was contacted by the general counsel of the Boyd Foundation, who informed me that, at the instigation of an unnamed member of the board, he was initiating an inquiry into my personal conduct. As it turned out, the old Baptist sensibilities had not been completely purged from the institution, and the awarding of the fellowship was subject to a morals clause that, I was advised, I was suspected possibly of having violated. Remittance of my fellowship stipend would be suspended while the investigation was ongoing. With this story, I wasn’t so lucky: it got picked up by the usual schadenfreude sites, and then by the Times, and that was when I heard from Rae, or rather from her attorney, who wrote to assert that since my potential change in income arose from my “negligent and/or reckless behavior” the provision in our settlement that allowed for adjustments in support in the event of hardship would not, in her opinion, apply. Moreover, she added, my “unwarranted” remittance to Rae of $10,000 had made it clear to her that I was in perfectly adequate financial condition to continue supporting Rae “in the manner to which she has become accustomed.” Next, I got a call from Dylan.

  “I am leaving the profession,” he announced.

  “To do what?” I asked. “Personal shopper?”

  “I’m going to be cultural liaison to the lieutenant governor of the State of New York.”

  What can you possibly say to that? I offered my congratulations.

  Soon afterward, the other shoe dropped, and a summons and complaint arrived via certified mail: Monte had canceled my contract and was suing to recover the advance he’d paid me, with interest. It was disappointing, although the disappointment, being purely financial, was relatively easy to handle. I could have taken ten times as much money from Monte, could have taken it in completely bad faith, and the world would roll on just as it does when cities are destroyed, races exterminated—the sort of epic wounds of history memorialized (and profited from) by Monte’s celebrated publishing house. He would still find the limo calling for him at eight thirty each morning; at the office people would still flirt and cringe and watch the clock. On the other hand, I’d be a lot richer.

  In happier times Monte would have been delighted with me for expressing an attitude like that; he had no problem copping to the oceans of cash that flowed from one side of his balance sheet to the other in the wake of this or that crappy decision. We were both cynics, in our different ways. Once, he’d given me a lift home from a symposium at Brooklyn College and, as we passed through Ditmas Park and its streets full of elegant houses, he pointed out three of them that had been bought with advance money on books that hadn’t panned out.

  “That one’s Jenna Henson’s. Remember her? If That’s the Ladies’ Room, I’m Out of Here? Of course you don’t. It sold eight hundred and sixty-three copies in hardcover. She was Artemis’s roommate at Wellesley. Artemis was before Shepard. The book was about a Wellesley grad who comes to New York to study graduate anthropology at Columbia. The scene that sold me was when her heroine tries to perform fellatio on the skeleton of an australopithecine hanging passively from its armature in an empty classroom. Nobody bought it. The anthropology metaphor unfolded a little narrow at the edges.”

  “What about the blow job metaphor?”

  “It wasn’t a metaphoric b
low job at all.”

  “Nice house.”

  “Isn’t it? She’s writing YA novels now. Girls at risk, that’s her theme. Always bitching about the jackets. Too YA-ey, she says. I tell her that she’s chasing after a level of puerility specific to adult trade fiction. Now, that’s Gregory Mockworth’s place. He wrote I’m with the Developmentally Disabled Person. Originally called I’m with Stupid. Based on the notorious T-shirt.”

  “What interested you about that one?”

  “Long, long story. Vertical integration. Parker Brothers and Paramount were breathing heavily, but they backed off and left us holding the bag after the Association for Retarded Citizens pressured us into the title change. When the word stupid went, so did the magic.”

  “Art really can’t be asked to accommodate those kinds of delicate sensibilities, I guess.”

  “So true. There’s Oliver Parsley-Currier’s house.” He’d pointed at the biggest and grandest yet. “He’s the one who wrote Wood: The Material That Built Civilization. That one surprised me. I thought it would be a monster. I paid for a monster. People have been making things out of wood for a long time, it turns out. The chapter on dildoes alone . . .” He’d trailed off, sighed, and looked out the window. After a moment, he turned back to me. “It’s all a big guess, Sandy. We could easily publish the modest successes that would sustain us over the long haul if that were our model—but it’s not. Who can get excited, sexed up, about that? Not publicists. Not the sales force. Not booksellers. Not reviewers. And it’s not just publishing. Insurance, banking, religion: all the quiet industries seek out hysteria now. Fortune 500 CEOs are trashing hotel rooms and gargling with Cristal like heavy metal drummers. Everybody wants to be a rock star. That’s the dominant paradigm. Poets and politicians are rock stars. Psychologists and defense attorneys. Even movie stars are rock stars. If nobody’s ever called you a rock star, you’re not really whatever it is that you think you are. Rock star indicates a certain magnitude of profit, however that profit is measured. Votes, share price, sales, converts. Who cares about the old ideas about prestige? They were dumb ideas anyway. You hit the ceiling too fast.”