by Scott Smith
"I'll do whatever you ask me to," I said.
AS SARAH and I were putting dinner on the table -- lasagna, garlic bread, and salad -- Jacob excused himself to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was down the front hallway, beneath the stairs, and I followed him with my eyes as he lumbered out of the kitchen. I watched him until he disappeared inside.
"He's going to do it?" Sarah whispered, gesturing with her knife toward the bathroom. We were standing over the table together, Sarah cutting the bread while I poured out two glasses of wine. Sarah was drinking apple juice with her meal; until she finished nursing, she wasn't allowed to have any alcohol.
"We just called," I said. "We're picking up Lou tomorrow at seven."
"Did you listen to their conversation?"
I nodded. "I sat right next to him."
"He didn't give him any hints?"
"No. He said exactly what I told him to."
"And he doesn't mind doing it?"
I hesitated before I answered, and Sarah glanced up at me. "He made me promise to help him buy back the farm."
"Your father's farm?"
I nodded.
"I thought we already agreed--"
"He didn't give me a choice, Sarah. It was either that or he wouldn't help us."
The toilet flushed, and we both looked toward the hallway. "But you're not really planning on letting him stay, are you?" she asked.
The bathroom door opened, and I turned from her, taking the jug back toward the refrigerator.
"No," I said, walking away. "Of course not."
Amanda was sleeping in the family room, in her Portacrib. Sarah brought her out for Jacob to see before we ate. He didn't seem to know how to act around the baby. He blushed when Sarah made him take her in his arms and held her out, away from his body, as if someone had spilled something on her and he was afraid to get himself dirty. She started to cry a little as soon as he took her into his hands, and Sarah had to soothe her, whisking her quickly back to the family room.
"She's so tiny," Jacob mumbled, as if he hadn't expected this. That was all he could think to say.
It was a peculiar dinner. At first it appeared that only Sarah would manage to enjoy herself. She looked pretty, alluring, and seemed to know it. Her body was already reclaiming the tightness it had lost in her pregnancy, and though I knew that she must have been exhausted -- the baby had not let her sleep for more than four hours straight since they'd returned from the hospital -- she still looked vibrant, healthy. She rubbed my calf with her foot while we ate.
Jacob, in his shyness around her, focused on his food. He ate rapidly, gorging himself, his forehead breaking out into a sweat. Everything about him hinted at his social discomfort -- he exuded it like a miasma -- and after a while it began to feel contagious. I, too, started having difficulty finding things to say, started overthinking before I responded to his or Sarah's questions, so that my answers came out sounding unnaturally terse and formal, as if I were angry with them and afraid to show it.
It was the wine that saved the evening. Sarah seemed to sense it first: each time Jacob or I emptied a glass, she stood up and refilled it for us. I'm not a drinker -- I've never enjoyed the disinhibiting effect of alcohol, that gradual slipping of self-control -- but tonight it worked exactly as I'd always been told it was meant to, as an anodyne, a lubricant, a builder of bridges. The more I drank, the easier it became for me to talk with Jacob, and the more he drank, the easier it became for him to talk with Sarah.
My inebriation, as it grew, filled me with an unexpected feeling of hope. It was a physical sensation, something warm and liquid that spread outward from my chest -- from my heart, I remember thinking -- to the tips of my fingers and toes. I began to wonder if my brother was not so unreachable as I'd always imagined. Perhaps it was still possible to reclaim him, to invite him into my family and bind him to my heart. He was across the table from me now, saying something to Sarah, almost flirting with her, in fact, but shyly, like a child with a teacher, and at the sight of it I felt a surge of love for the two of them, an overwhelming desire to make things come out right. I would help Jacob buy some land out west, I decided, in Kansas or Missouri; I'd help him set it up just like our father's farm, help him build a replica of the house we'd been raised in, and it would be a place to which Sarah and Amanda and I could return over the years, a respite from our travels across the globe, a surrogate home for us to leave and then come back to, bearing gifts for Jacob and his family.
I watched them talk and laugh with each other, and though I knew I was drunk, sensed it in everything I said and did and thought, I still couldn't help but believe that everything was going to be okay now, that it was all going to work out exactly as we planned.
AS WE were finishing dinner, the baby started to cry. Sarah took her upstairs to nurse while I did the dishes. By the time she returned -- having put Amanda to sleep in her crib -- I'd finished, and Jacob was in the bathroom again.
We'd decided to pass the evening playing Monopoly. Sarah began laying out the board on the kitchen table while I sponged down the counter. I'd stopped drinking toward the end of the meal, and now the wine was settling on me like a heavy cloak, so that everything I did seemed to require more effort than it ought to. I was beginning to think that what I wanted to do was go upstairs and fall asleep.
When I finished with the counter, I went over to the table and sat down. Sarah was dealing out the money. She went in ascending order -- ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties. When she got to the hundreds, she glanced up at me, smiling mischievously.
"You know what we should do?" she asked.
"What?"
She flicked her finger at the tray full of money. "We should use real hundreds."
"Real hundreds?" I was so tired, I didn't understand what she meant.
She grinned. "We could bring down one of the packets."
I stared at her, thinking this through. The idea of removing the money from its hiding place gave me a distinctly unsafe feeling, an irrational mixture of panic and fear. I shook my head.
"Come on. It'll be fun."
"No," I said. "I don't want to."
"But why not?"
"I don't think we should take the risk."
"What risk? We're just going to use it to play the game."
"I don't want to disturb it," I said. "It seems like it'd be bad luck."
"Oh, Hank. Don't be silly. When'll you have another chance to play Monopoly with real hundred-dollar bills?"
I started to answer her, but Jacob's voice interrupted me. He'd returned from the bathroom; neither of us had heard him approach. "It's hidden in the house?" he said. He was standing at the edge of the kitchen, looking tired and overfed. I frowned at Sarah.
"Some of it," she said. "Just a couple packets."
Jacob shuffled toward his chair. "So why don't we use it?" he asked.
Sarah didn't say anything. She poured my brother another glass of wine. They were both waiting for me to speak. And what could I say? There was no reason not to do it, just my own amorphous suspicion that it was wrong, that in dealing with the money we should be painstakingly rigorous, treating it as something potent and malevolent, like a gun or a bomb. I couldn't think of a way to express this, though, and even if I had, it would've come out sounding silly. It's just a game, they would've said; we'll return it when we're through.
"All right." I sighed, slouching back in my chair, and Sarah ran upstairs to get a packet.
JACOB was the little dog, Sarah the top hat. I was the racing car. The thrill of the hundred-dollar bills wore off with surprising celerity, so that soon they seemed just like the other denominations we were playing with -- rectangles of colored paper, a little larger, a little thicker than the others, but nothing more. We were using them for imaginary transactions, and this cheapened them somehow, robbed them of their value. They ceased to feel real.
The game took several hours, so it was almost midnight before we finished. We quit when I went bankrupt. Sar
ah and my brother agreed to call it a draw, but Jacob would've won. He had more properties, more houses and hotels, and a great big, messy pile of money. It wouldn't have been long before he ran her out of business.
I put the game away while Sarah gathered all the hundred-dollar bills together and carried them back upstairs.
I didn't realize how drunk my brother was until he stood up. He heaved himself out of his chair and took two weak-kneed steps toward the counter, his face looking panicked, his arms held out rigidly before him. It was as though he'd suddenly been transformed into some sort of thick-bodied marionette and someone else was now controlling his movements, dragging him across the room by invisible strings. He rested one of his huge hands on the counter and stared down at it, as if he were afraid it might jump away when he turned his head. He gave a short giggle.
"Why don't you stay here tonight?" I said.
He looked around at the table and chairs, the dishwasher, the sink, the stove. "Stay here?"
"In the guest room. Upstairs."
Jacob frowned at me. He'd never spent the night at our house before, not in all the years we'd lived there, and it seemed like the idea of doing so now made him nervous. He started to say something, but I interrupted him before his words emerged.
"You can't drive home like this. You're too drunk."
"What about Sarah?" he whispered loudly, glancing toward the hallway.
"It's all right," I said. "She won't mind."
I helped him upstairs, feeling like a child beside his oversized body, pushing against its soft mass, straining to guide it forward. Every now and then he let out another little laugh.
I put him in the guest room, across the hall from our bedroom. He sat down on the bed and fumbled with his shirt. I crouched on the floor in front of him and started to untie his boots. The dog had followed us upstairs. He sniffed at each piece of furniture in the room, then climbed up onto the bed and curled himself into a tight, compact ball.
When I got the boots off, I looked up to find Jacob staring in bewilderment at the bed's headboard.
"It's all right," I said. "I'm putting you to sleep."
"It's my bed."
I nodded. "You're sleeping here tonight."
"It's my bed," he said again, with more insistence. He reached out to touch the headboard, and I realized what he meant. He meant that it was the bed he'd slept in as a child.
"That's right," I said. "Dad brought it over here just before he died."
Jacob glanced hazily around the room. Nothing else in it belonged to him.
"It's a new mattress, though," I said. "The old one was all worn out."
He didn't seem to understand me. "It's in the guest room now," he said.
He stared at the headboard for another moment or so, then lifted his feet from the floor and eased himself down onto his back. The bed rocked like a boat. The dog lifted his head, seemed to frown at us. I watched Jacob close his eyes. He appeared to fall asleep instantly, his breathing deepening within seconds to a snore. His face went slack, and his jaw fell open, so that I could see his teeth. They seemed too large, too wide and thick, for his mouth.
"Jacob?" I whispered.
He didn't answer. His glasses were still on, and I stood up to take them off. I pulled them from his ears, folded them shut, and set them on the table beside the bed. His face looked much older without the glasses, years older than it really was. I bent and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
Across the hall, the baby started to cry.
Jacob's eyes flickered open. "Judas kiss," he whispered hoarsely.
Still leaning over him, I shook my head. "No. I'm just saying good night."
He struggled to bring me into focus but didn't seem to manage it. "I'm spinning," he said.
"It'll stop. Just wait it out."
He smiled at that, seemed to fight down a giggle, then suddenly turned serious. "You kissed me good night?" he asked. His voice slurred a bit.
"Yes."
He stared up at me, blinking. Then he nodded. "Good night," he said thickly.
When he closed his eyes, I backed quietly out of the room.
ACROSS the hall, I found Sarah just climbing into bed. She'd soothed Amanda, and the baby was making a soft gurgling sound as she fell asleep in her crib.
The money was stacked in a pile on my dresser. After I got into my pajamas, I went over and picked it up.
"That was stupid, Sarah," I said. "I can't believe you did it."
She stared at me from the bed. She looked surprised, hurt. "I thought it would be fun," she said. Her hair was pinned up in a bun, like a schoolteacher's. She was naked except for a pair of panties.
"We don't touch the money," I said. "We agreed about that."
"But it was fun. Admit it. You had fun."
I shook my head. "It's how we'll get caught, taking out the money."
"It's not like I took it out of the house."
"We aren't going to touch it again, not until we leave."
She frowned across the room at me. I could tell that she thought I was being too hard, but I didn't care.
"Promise?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Fine."
I brought the stack of money over to the bed and began to count it. I was still a little drunk, though, and I kept losing track of the numbers.
"He didn't take any," Sarah said finally. "I already checked it."
I froze, startled. I hadn't realized why I was counting it.
LYING in bed, waiting to fall asleep, we whispered back and forth at each other.
"What do you think will happen to him?" Sarah asked.
"To Jacob?"
I sensed her nod in the darkness. We were both on our backs. All the lights were out, and the baby was asleep in her crib. Sarah had forgiven me for lecturing her.
"Maybe he'll buy a farm," I said.
I felt her body go tense beside me. "He can't buy the farm, Hank. If he stays--"
"Not my father's farm. Just any farm. Someplace out west maybe, in Kansas, or Missouri. We could help him set it up."
Even as I spoke, I realized it would never happen. It had been the wine that had allowed me to hope for it earlier that evening, but now I was sobering up, seeing things as they actually were rather than as I wished them to be. Jacob knew nothing about agriculture: he'd have just as much of a chance succeeding as a farmer as he would becoming a rock star or an astronaut. It was simply childishness on his part to keep on dreaming of it, a willful sort of naivete, a denial of who he was.
"Maybe he'll travel," I tried, but I couldn't picture that either -- my brother climbing on and off planes, dragging suitcases through airports, checking into expensive hotels. None of it seemed possible.
"Whatever he does," I said, "things'll be better for him than they are now, don't you think?"
I rolled over onto my side, draping one of my legs across Sarah's body. "Of course," she said. "He'll have one point three million dollars. How could things help but be better?"
"What's he going to do with it, though?"
"Just spend it. Like us. That's what it's for."
"Spend it on what?"
"On anything he wants. A nice car, a beach house, fancy clothes, expensive meals, exotic vacations."
"But he's so alone, Sarah. He can't just buy all that for himself."
She touched my face, a soft caress. "He'll find somebody, Hank," she said. "He'll be okay."
I was tired, so I tried to let myself believe her, but I knew she was probably wrong. The money couldn't change things like that. It could make us richer, but nothing more. Jacob was going to remain fat and shy and unhappy for the rest of his life.
Sarah's fingers moved up my face, a shadow in the darkness above me, and I shut my eyes against them.
"Everybody's going to get what they deserve," she said.
SOMETIME before morning I awoke to the sound of someone moving through the house. I rose onto my elbow, my eyes focusing instantly. Sarah was sitting beside me, her b
ack against the headboard, nursing Amanda. An icy wind was rattling the windows in their frames.
"Someone's in the house," I said.
"Shhh," she whispered, not looking up from the baby. She reached out with her free hand and touched me on my shoulder. "It's just Jacob. He's using the bathroom."
I listened for a bit, listened to the walls creak against the wind, listened to Amanda softly cooing as she drew the milk from Sarah's body. Then I lay back down. After another minute or so, I heard my brother pad heavily back down the hallway to his room. He groaned as he lowered himself onto his bed.
"See?" Sarah whispered. "Everything's okay."
She kept her hand on my shoulder until right before I fell asleep.
6
WE PICKED up Lou just after seven and drove into Ashenville, to the Wrangler. The Wrangler was one of two taverns in town, each an exact replica of the other. Years before, it had sported a western theme, but all that remained of that now was its name and the huge, graffiti-ridden skull of a longhorn steer slung up above the doorway. The building was long and narrow and dark, with a bar running down one wall and a line of booths down the other. In the rear, through a pair of swinging doors, was a big, open room. There was a pool table here, some pinball machines, and a broken-down jukebox.
Things were relatively quiet when we arrived. There was a handful of older men at the bar, sitting alone with bottles of beer. A few of them seemed to know Lou, and they grinned hello. A young couple was seated in one of the booths, leaning toward each other across the table and whispering fiercely, as if they were fighting but afraid to make a scene.
We went into the rear, and Jacob and Lou set themselves up for a game of pool while I bought the drinks. I got a boilermaker for Lou, a beer for Jacob, and a ginger ale for myself.
Jacob lost to Lou, and I bought another round. This happened three more times before some people came back and we had to give up the pool table. We went up front then and sat down in one of the booths. By now it was after eight, and the place was getting busier.