American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “Yes, sir. Or, no, sir. I’m not sure.”

  “Saranac Lake is . . . Gregg Allman?”

  “Frank Allman, sir.”

  “Get him on the phone. And Irv, too. I want a word with your Supreme Leader.”

  Alfonzo’s magical boat-repair gunk needs thirty minutes to harden. It’s as good a time as any to eat, so they do.

  When Frank’s phone rings Irv is finishing off a Kiwassa Burger from Blue Moon Cafe.

  “Hello?” says Frank.

  It is Howard Howard. Howard is going to send them a team and they’ll be there soon. How are things going? Howard asks.

  Frank muffles the phone with the heel of his palm and speaks to Irv: “Howard is sending your SERT to help. He wants to know how it’s going.”

  “Same old, same old, you can tell him,” says Irv, reaching for a napkin.

  Frank finishes absorbing instructions from Howard and eventually stops his nodding and starts his frowning. Irv doesn’t like the look on Frank’s face and shows this by mimicking it.

  “Howard wants to talk to you,” Frank says.

  “Tell him I’m not here.”

  “He knows you’re here.”

  “How?”

  “He can hear me talking to you.”

  Irv takes the phone and watches Alfonzo tap the repaired hull with the pommel of a fixed-blade knife. From this distance it sounds like glass. Alfonzo gives a thumbs-up to the rest of his team. They halfheartedly return the gesture as they eat.

  “What do you want, Howard?” he shouts into the cell phone.

  “I’m sending Pinkerton,” Howard says.

  “Pinkerton is a fascist with little testosterone-deprived testicles looking to put lead into something because he’s unable to produce semen. There might be a need for people like him someplace, Howard, but not on Lake Flower. I have seven guys here who constitute a crackerjack assault team. I’m watching them prepare right now and it’s like the Harlem Globetrotters with guns. You send a guy like that over here and you’ll throw a wrench into the works.”

  “I’m not only sending him. I’m sending your whole team. Give me the coordinates,” Howard says.

  “You don’t have the authority to do that.”

  “The commissioner agrees.”

  “I’d like to talk you out of this,” Irv adds more quietly.

  “I will not let this fugitive of yours get away and complicate matters in New York State even further.”

  Irv calls Howard something other than Howard and says that he is going to need a moment to find the exact coordinates that are “here someplace.”

  There is a small notebook in Irv’s side pocket with addresses—an old-fashioned little book with tabs for each letter of the alphabet. He skips to the W section to see if a friend’s number is there and, finding it, decides that now is the time to take a hint from Sigrid and boldly grasp this shitty situation by the short ones and turn it right around.

  Irv had been taught in a business course once that all strategic action has four components: a goal, resources you’ll use, methods you’ll perform, and—at the center of it all—a theory or argument about why using those resources a certain way will bring about the desired goal. In this case, Irv’s strategy to deal with Howard and the commissioner and Pinkerton is held together by a simple theory that Irv thinks is rock solid: People in government are assholes and will always sell out others to save themselves. So the question becomes What resources do I have, and how might I use them to get all these people fired in one go?

  It is quite an ask, but he’s an innovative guy and he has an idea.

  Irv finds what he needs in his address book, pulls up a bit more information from his phone, and reads the GPS coordinates to Howard with resignation. He hangs up without wishing Howard a nice day.

  Frank stands and brushes about half of his lunch from his shirt, which has collected on his belly.

  Irv stands too, adjusts his Magnum, and strides out onto the boat with the rest of Alfonzo’s well fed and slightly bored team.

  Frank unties the rope for them and tosses it ahead of himself and into the boat. He’s not coming. On the dock he hooks his thumbs into his gun belt and watches the men ready themselves for an extremely slow and relaxing cruise across the flat lake.

  “You know, Frank,” says Irv as they pull away, “if you lose the belly you might find your pockets.”

  “Doesn’t seem worth the effort,” Frank says.

  “All right, Lieutenant,” says Irv, “let’s go get our man before this thing gets out of hand.”

  With a confident yank on the repaired pull cord, Alfonzo starts the outboard that produces a gentle put-put sound not unlike a lawnmower.

  “Things aren’t out of hand yet?” asks Alfonzo.

  “What, this?” Irv says, scanning the wreckage behind them. “This is nothing.”

  With a twist of the throttle on the tiller, the team sets off to find Sigrid, their stolen boat, and Marcus Ødegård as Irving Wylie places a call to a certain Ms. Weaver.

  The Lost Boys

  There is no path beneath Sigrid’s ruined shoes. Her feet occasionally disappear entirely beneath heavy ferns, and the massive leaves batter her legs. She holds her mobile phone with its compass and GPS coordinates before her like a divining stick. She follows its direction through the scruff and scree of virgin woods and clouds of gnats that swarm silently in beams of yellow sunlight breaking, periodically, through the upper canopy. Below, here on earth, Sigrid walks among the splays of sunlight that punctuate and light the forest floor.

  Sigrid is no tracker and no scout-sniper like Sheldon Horowitz. She can’t tell whether someone has been here a moment ago or never. She looks for telltale signs within her urban skill set: maybe a discarded Kvikklunsj bar wrapper, for example, or a whiff of Gillette aftershave. That would be the kind of evidence she could use.

  She decides that all those natives squatting down to taste the earth must have been full of shit, and she raises the phone higher, putting her full faith in the technological power of the satellite constellation system.

  Periodically her messenger bag snags and she yanks it free. She yanks it hard. She yanks it because she is angry at Irv.

  And she is angry at Marcus.

  And she is angry at her father.

  She is angry at men. All men. For their stupidity, their lies, their egotism, their irrelevant words, their aggressive personalities and hairy backs. She is angry at them for what they did and didn’t do. For what they say and leave unsaid. For the timbre of their voices and the length of their strides, the ease by which they open jars and their inexplicable incapacity to return even the smallest objects to their rightful locations. She is sick of investing in them without dividend, trusting in them without reward, and pouring her guts out in motels—with words, emotion, trust, nostalgia, laments, confessions—to wake up the next day—feeling good, feeling closer, feeling unburdened and more earthy and connected and natural and complete—and be abandoned at her own moment of need, and set free, once again, to solve everything herself.

  “No,” he’d said, when asked if he had anything to add. “No.” Nothing more. Nothing to explain himself or apologize or come to her defense.

  And maybe a small part of her is angry at her mother, too.

  Sigrid kicks through the understory and follows her compass toward some arbitrary spot on this earth. And on finding Marcus—if she does, and so help him God—he had better be there with open arms, a smile, and an apology.

  As on the university campus, she can hear the conversation they are clearly not going to have. For some reason she imagines him—like a toad—sitting on a log:

  “Oh, Sigrid, it’s so nice to see you. Thank you for coming for me,” he won’t say.

  “It was a major pain in my ass, Marcus. I should be at home in Hedmark reading a bad romance about a bellboy and a duchess. And instead I’m . . . Where the hell are we, anyway?”

  “Over there”—he’d point to a spot betwee
n three trees—“is the actual middle of nowhere. Not only in New York or America. But the entire galaxy. We’re about eight meters away from it. The actual thing.”

  “You couldn’t be bothered to sit there for the simple poetry of it?”

  “There’s nothing to sit on in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think the universe wants us to loiter for too long.”

  “I’m being followed,” she’d explain, “by Friar Tuck and the rest of the merry men, and when they get here, I’m going to stand in front of you so they don’t kill you on sight for a crime you didn’t commit, OK? Because they tend to shoot citizens on sight, I’m learning.”

  “Dad thinks this is about Mom. He’s right. Don’t you remember? Didn’t you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Remember!”

  “There’s nothing to remember. She had cancer, she died in her sleep. It was terrible, but I’ve come to realize as an adult that it was the best we could have hoped for given the circumstances. There was no cure. There still isn’t. There’s no regret here, Marcus, only sadness.”

  “You are lucky,” he’d say to her, as he would always say to her.

  It rather annoyed her.

  Luck?

  She kicks through the woods. She kicks at the woods. She hates this. And she hates hating it, because she used to love it. Absolutely adored everything about it. They used to do this; they’d play hide-and-seek in the woods behind the farm. As far as they knew, the woods there extended eastward all the way through Norway and Sweden to the Gulf of Bothnia, which was—in their juvenile imaginations—populated by Caribbean pirates and Arabs in dhows bringing spices and lanterns and magic from the southern realms into the uncharted lands of the world’s northern domains. There, in the hills, they’d walk together; they would search for evidence of ancient civilizations and cultures colliding to make new languages and poetry that could unlock doors in the trunks of trees that would lead them down spiral staircases to where they would spy on teams of Vikings carving new navies with glittering swords illuminated by magical orbs that would circle around, overhead, each one representing a planet or moon from an alien sky, proving to her, and her brother, that the universe was deep and vast and unknown and full of possibility.

  In the south, Sigrid learned in school—in Kenya, in Congo, in Brazil—the equatorial sun would plummet like a burning rock into the surface of the earth, spreading its fire wide over the horizon to burn the day and relent before the night. Every season the same. Every day the same length. A ritual that devoured time. But up north, in Norway, the summer sun would pilot through the clouds to make the softest and slowest of gentle landings, and if the summer was at its peak, that pale and weak orb would only skim the surface before rising—slowly, almost imperceptibly—back into the sky, rising on its own reflected warmth off the distant snow, to take its place—where it belonged—above them.

  She and her brother traveled with an old army compass from the war found in a box in the attic. Marcus carried rations in a Spiderman knapsack. They each had green Fulton flashlights that looked like tiny periscopes and they would flash each other messages using the little black button over the switch, messages through the trees in a Norwegian Morse code they invented themselves.

  Where had that boy gone? How does such an open and free child become reclusive and withdrawn and solitary and later holed up in a decrepit house by an off-ramp that absorbs all natural light?

  Their mother’s death. Yes. But now? Some thirty-six years later? What is it that has caught up to him?

  Sigrid emerges from the woods at the end of a large pond that is empty of boats and dotted with lily pads. The sun glistens with an intensity that blinds her as she pulls herself out of the darkness of the forest with the realization that she is hot and sweating and thirsty. But she does not bend to the pond to wash and drink and replenish herself, though it invites her. Because there, sitting on a rock with his feet in the water, surrounded by the dense copse, is her brother, Marcus, dangling a revolver between his knees.

  F-U-N, Fun

  This is Pinkerton’s first visit to the swanky towns of the Adirondacks, out here where all the rich assholes take their trim to summer homes. He is cruising down Route 3 at breakneck speed with the rest of his team. The sun is shining, a heat is pounding down the way it always has in war zones he’s been in, and he has a green light—no, an order!—to form an iron fist around a foreign killer on American soil.

  OK, no, fine, this isn’t Afghanistan. It’s Lake Placid or whatever, but the mission is the mission and the stage is just a stage.

  He bounces along on the back of the pickup and feels giddy. Today he has a role in the world and a chance to play his part. His only regret is that he doesn’t have a cigar to hold between his teeth so he could spit out the soggy bits before giving his big speech to the team. But . . . well . . . heck. Life is still good and Irv the limp-dicked sheriff isn’t here to get in the way. What he concludes, as they pass a Mercedes C-Class going the opposite direction, is that this town they’re headed toward is going to provide a nice place to launch an amphibious pincer assault.

  The team is divided up into two Ford F-150 flatbeds that are breezing along Main Street past the Lumberjack Inn. Fifteen guys still pumped from the standoff last night and feeling like warriors on their way to an alien invasion, boxes full of tactical nukes and a weapons-free directive to light things up. That might not be exactly how it is, but it feels close enough for this chickenshit job that has never given him a chance to pull the trigger. He smiles at the five other guys swaying along beside him and they smile back. They are going to have this fucking foreigner surrounded and on his face in the dirt with his hands behind his back within the hour. And if not? If he resists? He’ll die of lead poisoning the way they did when the West was won.

  Pinkerton doesn’t care one way or another. This is a milk run in a nice town and he is going to come out looking good, good, good, especially after having broken up the black mob last night. That’s two stripes in two days in a place where, frankly, very little happens and his team has grown flabby and complacent.

  Back in Afghanistan he learned that a good kill can help morale and fill a team with purpose. It helps focus their minds on what’s real, and mints them as a deadly force. Eventually word gets around and those words sound like fame. No, something better: glory.

  If they capture or kill this wiener-dick, Pinkerton might even be able to get out of here and into some real action in a big city or else join one of the FBI teams. Pinkerton has always fancied himself a hostage-rescue guy. Especially in this whole post-9/11, terrorist-soaked biscuit of a world they’re living in now. Back in earlier years hostage rescue was a talky-talky profession; lots of gabbing and negotiation and takeout pizzas. But today? When the Muslims are there to kill people? Oh, no. Now you put together an assault plan and you kick in the fuckin’ walls and go full Call of Duty on those jihadist motherfuckers right at the start.

  Pinkerton wants a piece of that.

  And—he thinks, as the wind blows through his hair—maybe a chance to go mano a mano, too. Yeah. He’s fit these days. And this guy they’re up against is . . . what? A Norwegian bachelor farmer or something? Whatever. He wants the reputation of taking one down with a knife. Guns are guns, but a good knife kill? That’s the kind of solid street rep that doesn’t follow you around: It leads.

  And what a douchebag! Who throws a woman out a window? A coward, that’s who. Not someone likely to put up any resistance to a team like his.

  Pinkerton knows it’s a good thing he was called in. The local guy—Alfonzo something. Who is he, anyway? OK, SWAT, so maybe he’s got some game, but no way he’s seen any action up here.

  The Ford arrives at a large intersection and turns left onto Route 30 south along Tupper Lake.

  And a name like that. Alfonzo. He should be fixing Fiats in a dusty garage at the edge of town.

  “Hey, Ricky,” Pinkerton says to the guy farthest away on the bench opposite near
the back. Ricky is the misfit of the group who ended up in the SERT accidentally. He was a U.S. Army Ranger and allegedly knew his stuff, but he wanted to be a police officer after his service, and only ended up on the team because there was a space and he only took it because of the pay. His wife had a baby four months ago and her loss of income had prompted his transfer from a city desk where he wrote up policy documents or some damn thing. Pinkerton wants to either draw this guy out of his shell or transfer his ass back.

  “Ricky—who’s this Alfonzo guy? And what the fuck are they doing with a Puerto Rican upstate anyway? What is he, lost?”

  “His mother’s Italian,” Ricky says. “Father’s from Vermont. Runs an apple farm and antique shop I think. He’s a really nice guy,” says Ricky. After he says this, and seeing the horror on Pinkerton’s face, he looks down at his own boots again.

  Ricky doesn’t like Pinkerton any more than Irv does.

  “Whatever,” Pinkerton says to no one in particular.

  Bored with Ricky, and typically unimpressed, Pinkerton whacks the side of the pickup and shouts for the driver to put on the sirens. “I want to be back at the bar telling war stories before happy hour is over, you got that? I don’t see any reason we all need to be paying more than three bucks a beer tonight. How much farther? We don’t want little Alfonzo getting all the glory, now, do we? No, we don’t. No, we absolutely do not. What’s our ETA?”

  The driver screams out his window. “Twenty-two more miles, sir.”

  Pinkerton calculates. At sixty miles an hour, which is about what they are doing, that makes it twenty-two minutes to the destination. Fifteen minutes maximum on site. And then they flash the lights again on the way home. It will have to do.

  “What kind of place is it?” Pinkerton asks.

  “Some kind of compound in the woods, sir. The satellite photos show a house on a little peninsula.”