$200 and a Cadillac

by Fingers Murphy

  “Funny to be out here again.”

  Eddie stuck his hands in his pockets and kicked at a rock. “It is, isn’t it?”

  There wasn’t much to say beyond that. After a few more minutes they agreed that the truck was probably ready and they went back in. Eddie jumped up in the cab, put his thermos beside him on the bench seat and leaned out the window. “Two runs still seems like a lot, but maybe I’ll see you down there.” He gave Eli a mock salute, grinned, threw it in gear and drove off.

  After a few minutes, when the truck was completely gone and silence returned, Eli stood alone outside, looking over the remnants of his family business. The sky was streaking with light and the oil derricks stood like random grave markers, denoting the death of another time, another life. Suddenly the nostalgia turned to sadness and then a spark of anger. He wanted to steal everything he could from Monarch. It had run his father’s business into the ground. It had sucked five years of labor from him and then cut him loose. It was eventually going to destroy the entire town by simply closing up shop and hanging everyone out to dry, once the pipeline had sucked every last dime from the ground.

  He fired up the other tanker truck and backed it into the warehouse. He started pumping another load and stood around, trying not to think about what was really bothering him. But being alone with his own thoughts was too much. There were no distractions. Ron might as well have been standing there, poking him in the shoulder. They would have to get rid of him. Despite Eddie’s reticence, it had to be done.

  He wandered up the hillside while the tank was filling and looked out over the desert. There was nothing out there. A sea of rolling sagebrush stretched out in all directions. An orange and pink glow spread outward from the distant eastern peaks—bleeding upward through the sky like an infection. Standing on the ridgeline, less than two hundred yards away from the warehouse, he could barely hear the pump, which was deafening when you stood beside it. The desert seemed to swallow sound with all its space. He wondered how far away a gunshot would be heard. A single, solitary, sharp noise, lasting half a second or less, was all it would take. The odds anyone would hear it, recognize it, and respond to it were as remote as the coyote running out in front of that guy they heard about. There was almost no way it could happen.

  He could see it in his head, playing like a movie—Hey Ron, you need to come out here and look at some things—they’d tell him. Then he’d pull up in his truck, and they’d walk around, and as soon as Eli was close enough he’d just do it, without thinking. No speeches, no threats, no bullshit. Just pull the gun out and pull the fucking trigger. BANG! Ron’s dead. Problem solved. Dig a hole and stick the bastard in it. Or better yet, use the hole they’d already dug.

  By the time he thought it through he was grinning. It had to work. It was just like their oil scam. It was so damned simple there wasn’t room for any problems. When he walked back down the hill, the tank was nearly full. He waited a few more minutes and then shut it down. As he was driving away he started liking the idea of making two runs a day. Why not? It was all going to be their money anyway, once it was over.

  As he pulled out onto the main road, he thought through the plan again, such as it was. Once Ron was out of the way, maybe they’d finish getting the hundred grand together and call it quits. Fifty apiece wasn’t bad. A guy could change his life with cash like that. All they needed was a gun, and there were guns everywhere.

  XVI

  Janie lay awake in the dark.

  It was something she did and it bothered her. Despite Eli’s comments, despite the way her youth had taught her to act around men to get along with them, deflect, and sometimes to control them, she rarely went home with a stranger. In fact, she’d only been in a room at the Super 8 a few times before. But on those occasions, much as this one, her eyes roamed the walls at four a.m. trying to make out the shapes in the dark, feeling guilty about feeling good, and then getting angry with herself for feeling either way at all.

  She thought through the catalogue of men, or boys, or distractions, or whatever they were at the different times of her life. The first one only a few days before her sixteenth birthday. There were eight altogether during high school. That first one, two as a sophomore, four as a junior—maybe that was excessive, but she was only seventeen—and then the guy she dated her senior year. The love of her life, or so she thought. They’d tried to make it work when she went to San Diego, but all that did was ruin her first year of college.

  Then there was Tom, the math nerd. They dated for two inexplicable years. That made nine. Then it was her last year of college and she was determined to enjoy it. Fires on the beach. Guys with wet hair and surfboards and not a care in the world. But even then, getting drunk and stoned and running around on the beach and splashing in the water, she’d only been with five of them. That made fourteen by the time she finished college.

  She worked for one celibate year, and then life got serious. She dated one guy briefly during her master’s program and then returned to Nickelback. And in those five years there were five others, including Hank. That made an even twenty. She was thirty-two years old. She’d been having sex more than half her life— nearly seventeen years—and that was barely more than one a year. Was that so bad? If she’d ever found the right one then the number would be smaller—but she hadn’t. It was that simple. Was there a certain number she was supposed to stop at? Twenty just seemed like a lot. It sounded like a big number, but it wasn’t. Was it?

  She knew this calculus of promiscuity, filled with strange Puritanical variables, was silly and yet she ran through it anyway, as though the final number could have some meaning, could be some indicator of her own self-worth. She wondered how many other women were haunted by the same thing. Not daily. Not all the time. But in quiet moments, late at night, when they were studying the walls. And then the anger would start again. If a man ever made the same calculation, it was merely to brag to his friends.

  She listened to Hank’s breathing beside her. He was forty-nine. Forty-nine. She remembered her father being that age. When had she started sleeping with men her father’s age? How did that happen? Not that it mattered to her, not really. It was merely one more indicator that her life was adrift—creeping toward old age, slowly, but surely and steadily. How many women had he been with? Janie did the math in her head. Even at her average, which she rounded in her head to 1.2 per year, and starting at sixteen years old, that was thirty-two years and roughly thirty-eight and a half women. Call it forty. What did it mean? Nothing, certainly, because he was a man.

  She turned to watch him sleeping. Even in the dim room, she could see his chiseled features, make out his dark hair, his olive skin, the stubble on his cheeks. Nothing fit together. He drank and played pool and moved around a bar with macho confidence. Yet in bed he’d been hesitant, almost timid, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her, caressing the curve of her hip in the darkness like delicate porcelain. And then his conversation: reflective, introverted, analytical, befitting the reluctant Ivy League philosophy student he admitted to once being only after she pestered him about it.

  The bar had been nearly empty. The chemist had gone. Her brother and Eli were long gone too. Only a couple of tables still had people at them. She sat across from Hank trying to figure him out. He said he started at Columbia the fall after his brother was killed and he never really felt comfortable there. He nearly quit several times, but to do what, he didn’t know. He told her about how his father was never the same after the funeral, and in fact had seemed surprised that there was actually a casket, a hole in the ground, a flag folded by a color guard and given to his wife. As though the visit from the captain and the letter from the general, informing them of their son’s death had all been a mistake. None of it was real until they put him in the ground.

  Then Hank ordered a scotch, neat, and leaned toward her as he spoke. His eyes lit up, as though something metallic lay just behind them, trying to push its way out through the holes in his
head. “By the time I finished school,” he said, “the war that killed my brother was over, we were pulling out. The communists had won. I could still remember my old man, back in, I dunno, ’66, ’67, talking about how the communists were evil and that they had to be stopped and how we didn’t understand fascism. He used to say, ‘You don’t remember Mussolini.’ He would go on about secret police and torture and how people who tried to live outside the natural law were doomed and that right always triumphed. He still believed that there was a set of correct rules to live by, and that good always prevailed.”

  Hank took a slow sip of the scotch and shook his head. “He never talked like that again after Vincent died. I only half-believed it as a kid. And then there was Kent State, Watergate, the Weathermen, and an insane obsession with throwing kids in jail for taking drugs. And all of the sudden, I’m looking around wondering where was this set of fucking rules my old man seemed to think were governing society.

  “You’re too young to remember what that was like. But it just seemed like everyone was going around doing whatever they wanted—or whatever they thought they could get away with. No one had any guiding principles. No values. Nothing. It was like everyone in America—from the president, to the Army, to student protestors, to Charles Manson and the fucking Zodiac killer—woke up one day and said, ‘Fuck you. I’m doing what I want.’”

  Hank took another drink and his eyes flickered. “And then I was walking down the street one day. Broadway, right through Times Square. This is, oh, probably 1976, and I see these two guys on this corner doing a drug deal. That was pretty common in Times Square in those days, so I just kind of watched out of the corner of my eye. Then, right after the one guy hands over this baggie, the other guy sticks a knife in him and runs off. He’s just stabbed somebody right in broad daylight. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know what came over me, but I’d just had it. I was just like, goddamnit—” Hank slammed his palm on the table and his glass of scotch jumped.

  “Is this what it’s come to? Is there no morality in the world at all? I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ. So this guy’s running, but he doesn’t see me, and I cut over in front of him and lay this fucker out. I mean, I grab him as he runs by and slam him into a wall and kick him in the face and all of the sudden, I’m down on my hands and knees just wailing on this guy. I can’t stop. I’m pounding his face into the pavement. I’m about to kill him. Then, I feel these two guys grab me and drag me off him. And they keep dragging me right over to the curb and they throw me in the back of this limo.”

  Hank laughed and finished the scotch. “I swear to God. One second I’m pounding on this guy in the middle of Times Square, and the next I’m sitting in the back of this limo with this old guy smoking a cigar and telling me that the world has gone to hell and you can’t trust anyone anymore and that it was good to see a citizen sticking up for the rights of others and he asks me if he can buy me a drink.

  “I’ve still got adrenaline pumping through me, but I say sure. So twenty minutes later I’m sitting in this little bar with this old guy. He’s asking me what I do, and I wasn’t really doing anything at the time. I tell him I’m a student, although I’d graduated a year before, and I was just drifting from job to job trying to figure things out. You know the routine.

  “And then the old guy starts asking me why I was beating the guy up. And I really didn’t have a good answer. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The old guy says he agrees with me, that it was the right thing to do. He tells me he happened to be watching from the car, saw the whole thing. He said he was impressed by my immediate reaction, almost like a reflex, and he told me that when he saw me he knew there really was justice in the world. He said he could see that I possessed an innate and immediate sense of the true moral code, as he called it.

  “I remember I said something to him like, well, it was a drug transaction, so it’s not like these were great people to start off with. And I’ll never forget it, he leaned into me and pointed a finger at me and said, ‘Son, that’s where you’re wrong. These two guys, they’d made a business arrangement, and then the one guy tried to pull a fast one. That’s wrong. It doesn’t matter what the business arrangement was about. You make a deal, you stick to the deal. That’s what’s wrong with our society. The law, what’s the law? Where does it come from? I’ll tell you where.’ This is what the old guy says to me. He says, ‘I’ll tell you where. It’s not out there, it’s not from outside. It’s not the government. It’s not the courts. It’s right here.’ And he points to his chest like this and says, ‘We are the law. Each of us. That’s the essence of democracy. That’s what makes this country great. Each of us is responsible for our own actions because this is a free country. And the price we pay for freedom is responsibility.’”

  Janie shook her head, processing it all, and then said, “That’s bizarre. Who was this old guy anyway? Did you ever find that out?”

  “Yeah, his name was Luciano Fazioli. Hard as nails old Italian guy.” Hank caught himself about to say more. He looked down at his empty glass, as if blaming it for something. Then he added, “He made millions running pawn shops all over the city.”

  Janie said, “Sounds like an old man with some interesting ideas about the way things work.” She thought about it for a second, and then added, “Most people wouldn’t say two drug dealers owed a moral obligation to each other because they live in a democratic society. Especially when that society makes the very thing they’re doing illegal.”

  Hank shook his head slightly and said, “He meant democracy in the sense of a social contract. We can all be a party to many social contracts. The obligations two drug dealers owe each other are no different from the obligations two Masons owe each other, or two members of the same homeowner’s association. Once you’ve joined the group, you’re bound by the code of the group and the penalties they’ve agreed to for violations of the code. Joining the group is an act of consent to the rules of the group. Just like forming a democracy requires an act of consent.”

  Janie shrugged, “But you can always choose to quit, can’t you? Then you don’t have to follow the rules.”

  “Right,” Hank smiled back. “But you can’t quit in the middle of something, and quitting doesn’t wipe out the moral obligations you already incurred before you quit. I mean, if you sign a lease on an apartment and decide later that you don’t want to live there, you still have to pay the rent.”

  “But that means there are no real moral obligations. Everything is based solely on what people agree to. And that’s not right.” Janie shrugged, “You can’t opt out of a democracy. I mean, I’ve never consented to being an American, I was just born one.”

  “Which is why the country has so many problems.” Hank leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “The very notion of civic responsibility has eroded to the point of nothing. We don’t value the social contract anymore because none of us ever really chose to join it. It was forced on us by virtue of being born here. Democracy doesn’t work unless everyone consents to it. It’s like Rousseau said, ‘You have to have a unanimous vote, at least the first time.’”

  Janie smiled at him. What kind of surveyor was this? “So you think there’s more legitimacy to the laws of a homeowner’s association than the laws of the United States?”

  Hank shrugged. “I’m just telling you what Fazioli meant.”

  “You sound like you mean it too.”

  Hank just sat there, spinning his empty glass on the table.

  After a minute, Janie asked, “Doesn’t someone who stays in the United States rather than leave the country consent to its laws? Implicitly?”

  Hank grimaced for a second. “That might have been true in the beginning. A guy who didn’t like what was going on could always head west, into the wilderness. But now, as a practical matter, you can’t just move to another country. So no. It’s impractical to opt out.”

  “But is that really the key to our moral obligations to each other? Consenting or opting out of
some agreement?”

  “Of course.”

  “But there are some laws you never consent to and can never opt out of.”

  Hank leaned back in his chair, tipping it onto its rear legs, grinning. “Don’t tell me you believe in natural law.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Janie said. “But I believe in the laws of nature. No one consents to gravity. You can’t opt out of the laws of motion.”

  Hank laughed. “You can take the girl out of the physics department, but you can’t take the physics department out of the girl, eh?” He gave her a wink and set the legs of his chair back on the barroom floor.

  Hank turned the conversation to the music, the pool table, his fondness for highland single malt. Janie listened without saying much. She just watched him. He seemed to have had enough serious talk for one evening. They ordered another round, drank it, and then the moment came: the long silent stare, eyes meeting eyes, gauging some primal frequency of attraction, an atavistic moment of assessment. No words were said, but there was communication beyond words, harkening back to a time before language, when only actions mattered. Two animals meeting in a native habitat, looking each other over, each determining that the other is an adequate breeding partner. And then come the understanding expressions, the slight and tender touches as they make their way back to the place where the act will be done.

  Janie stretched in the bed, feeling restless but trying not to disturb him. She reached one arm off the bed and the tips of her fingers ran over the piled up equipment. Another contrast. She hadn’t believed he really was a surveyor until she saw it. She knew nothing about survey equipment, of course, but when she saw it she sensed immediately what it was and a twinge of disappointment went through her. The sudden death of a girlish fantasy she knew she was too old to feel. He was no different than the others. Why should she think he was? Just a guy who came to town to do a boring job and then leave. That’s all he ever said he was, why should she want him to be something more, or different?