Come on, you motherfucker, Martin thought—yelled out loud.
By the time the horses hit the eighth pole and started down the final stretch, the lead was one length. Carmine had his whip out and he was working Big Bad Wolf’s flank, but it didn’t matter. The other horses were reeling him in.
“Oh my God,” Martin said as one horse (it looked like it might be High and Mighty) shot past Big Bad Wolf with about forty yards to go. The announcer yelled over the loudspeaker, confirming Martin’s guess. The people around them were yelling and screaming and cheering. Jeez, he thought. Did everyone bet on this horse except me?
And then the other three horses from the chase pack caught Big Bad Wolf, and the whole group crossed the finish line in a clump. From Martin’s vantage point it looked like at least one of them had passed Big Bad Wolf, maybe more. Martin watched as the jockeys stood in their saddles and slowed the horses. Carmine reached over and patted Big Bad Wolf on the neck—maybe a gesture that said sorry for whacking the shit out of you with my whip.
“What the fuck was that?” Ludwig yelled. He lowered his binoculars and looked at Martin. Then he sat down. He looked stunned. Incredulous. It was obvious that he’d been convinced that Big Bad Wolf was going to win—that he hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might lose.
“I don’t know,” Martin said, shaking his head.
He closed his eyes. Three hundred dollars, down the drain. Just like that. Poof. What a fucking idiot.
“Jesus Christ!” Ludwig yelled—screamed. “I thought you said this guy Carmine knew what he was doing!”
Here it comes, Martin thought. Not that he felt like defending himself. I should’ve known, he thought. Big Bad Wolf isn’t a finisher. The problem isn’t the length of the race—it’s what he does when he sees the finish line. He doesn’t have the stuff.
The announcer was reading off the names of the horses that had placed, but Martin wasn’t paying attention. Why did I bet two hundred dollars to win? he asked himself. Wasn’t one hundred stupid enough?
He looked out at the board. He saw that the seven horse had won. That was High and Mighty. The payout wasn’t posted yet, but he’d won all right.
Then he looked at the Place slot, at the number of the horse that had finished second. And there it was. It was the two horse—Big Bad Wolf. Hey, he thought. Look at that. He hung on after all—he must have just made it.
He sat there for a second, thinking. He was tempted to check his ticket, but he resisted the urge—he didn’t need to. Because he knew what it said. He’d double-checked it after Charlene gave it to him. He’d bet the 2–7 exacta—Big Bad Wolf and High and Mighty. But he’d boxed it, and so it didn’t matter what order the horses finished in. He had the first- and second-place horses, and so he’d won. Yes.
He was about to tell Ludwig about his win, but when he looked over at him, he decided against it. Ludwig was slumped back in his seat and staring outward, maybe at the geese flapping around out in the ponds, or maybe at the coastal hills just on the other side of Highway 101. Martin watched him pull his ticket out of his pocket, look at it, and then crumple it up and throw it away.
The payoff for the exacta still wasn’t posted, so he wasn’t able to calculate how much he was going to clear. But he knew it would be a lot—over five hundred dollars, for sure. Definitely more than he’d lost on his other bet.
This, he thought, was a good sign. First the handshake with Val Desmond, then the winner on the exacta box. It was all about having a backup plan. That was how you beat the system. Because these days you couldn’t count on anything to work out, could you? You either gave your money to the cranky lady in the betting booth or you handed it over to the guy at the bank, and then you just crossed your fingers. Sure, you tried to be smart about it, but things could happen—your horse could stumble out of the gate or even break down, or the fucking Arabs could choke off the oil supply. So why not have a plan B? At the track today it was the exacta box. In Martin’s life—his real life—it was the deal with Val. Now his business could tank, but it wouldn’t matter (or it wouldn’t matter as much, anyway). Because he was going to start bringing some money in through the back door. He’d covered himself, and if things went well, he might win big (or he might avoid losing—which to his mind, at least lately, was another version of the same thing).
Martin looked over at Ludwig. He was still sitting there, but he wasn’t scowling anymore. He was looking down at a Racing Form and mumbling to himself—he was getting ready for the next race. Good, Martin thought. Martin was tempted to tell him to try boxing some bets, but he knew better. Instead he stood up. He wanted to cash in his ticket and then give Linda a call. He knew he was going to be late and that this would piss her off. But he also knew she’d be pleased to hear the good news—the news about the race, that is. He didn’t even consider saying anything about Val Desmond and their new agreement.
CHAPTER THREE
Martin slept like a baby Monday and Tuesday nights. He felt relieved—at least he’d made a decision. Better, Val was off his back. No more scary messages, no more wondering how to deal with the money he owed him. He had a plan, and that was more than most people could say. He’d even been in a good mood at home, patient with the kids, frisky with Linda. She’d been wary but eventually receptive.
“What’s with you?” she’d asked, but even in the darkness of their bedroom he could tell she was smiling. It was like old times—or like things had been until a few years ago, when suddenly they were only having sex once a month (if that), and he could sense a latent resentment in her.
But by Wednesday he’d realized what he’d actually signed on for with Val, and by the time Thursday morning rolled around he was a wreck. Flying to Mexico? For drugs—for heroin? Are you fucking kidding me?
He stood in his underwear, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, trying to picture himself making the deal. He’d land the plane in some field, leave it running, and just hop down, a suitcase of money in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other.
“Not so fast,” he said into the mirror, imagining some Mexican guy reaching out for the cash. “Let me see the drugs first. Then you’ll get your dinero.”
He looked at his fleshy belly, pale white skin, and bald head. He used to have bigger arms and strong shoulders, but now he looked older and weaker. Even his face had lost its sharpness. When had that happened? Down the hall he could hear Sarah screaming at Peter about something. He took a big gulp of air.
Not a chance, he thought. I can’t do it.
Linda was getting ready for work (she’d started back at her job as a secretary in the insurance office in November, after the first shock waves from the oil embargo). So he made breakfast for the kids, scrambled eggs and toast. Sarah ate like a bird, but Peter shoved the food into his face. It was as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks.
“Jesus, Peter, slow down,” Martin said. “What’re you, part of the Donner Party?” He and Sarah exchanged a glance.
Peter shrugged. “Everybody thinks it’s so horrible that the Donner Party ate each other, but it wasn’t,” he said. “I’d have done it, too. For sure. I mean, the people they ate were already dead. It’s not like they were saying, ‘No, no, please don’t eat me.’ And their bodies were frozen in the snow. It’s the same thing as the hamburger we have in the freezer. It’s not that big a deal, when you really think about it.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “But I don’t really want to think about it right now. I’m eating. It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting.”
Peter shrugged. “Hey,” he said. “I’m just trying to survive.”
Martin rolled his eyes. It was as though they were plotting to annoy him—had practiced their parts, even. He looked out the window and watched their dog Arrow sniff around and muse about the ideal spot for his morning dump. He reminded himself to send Peter out to pick up the dog poop from the yard before the end of the week. He also reminded himself that he didn’t have to go in to the office if h
e didn’t want to. He was still the boss, right? It wasn’t like he was punching a time card, for Christ’s sake.
So still without his toupee, he took the kids to school, then went back home and called Ludwig.
“I’m sick,” he said. “You’re on your own today. Sorry.”
“You mean you’re playing golf?” Ludwig asked. “Is that it?”
“Fuck you, Ludwig,” he said. “I’m really sick.” He slammed down the phone. Why did everyone always assume he was lying?
He sat by the pool for a while, drinking coffee and thinking. It was early May and nice out, warm.
If he backed out of the drug deal with Val (not that this was really an option anymore), he’d sink like a stone, financially. Sure, the Wells Fargo guys might loan him some money, especially if Radkovitch pulled some strings. But how long would that actually last, anyway? Would the Arabs ever open up the spigots again? Maybe oil was going to a hundred dollars a barrel—not just for a while, but for good. Maybe the party was over, America.
On the other hand, if he flew to Mexico—did it for a year like Val said—he might actually turn the corner. It just might work. He might just be able to keep on being the Martin Anderson he’d managed to create in the past ten years or so. Not the drifting loser who’d stumbled through his twenties and was headed for a bleak life as a middle-manager sales guy. No, this was the guy who’d started a business, had been successful, and had then moved with his family out to the suburbs. Sure, the suburbs had been a disappointment, but still, did any of his friends from high school live near Sal Bando? No, they didn’t. And yeah, Martin’s brothers liked to mock him, calling him “the banker,” but that didn’t stop them from asking him for loans all the time. It wasn’t easy to get by as a photographer or a musician, was it?
Martin watched the Pool Sweeper make its circuit around the pool. It was like a space ship patrolling the mini solar system of Martin’s pool. Its hoses swept around the pool’s bottom, blasting away at the algae. In some ways, Martin realized, the little machine was a real task master: it circled the pool all day and night, bringing order and cleanliness to this important part of Martin’s backyard. If you were an errant leaf or piece of walnut skin, you were in trouble.
He sipped his coffee. It was cold. If he didn’t take the job (could you call drug smuggling a job?), he’d have to tell Linda that he was broke—that they were broke. And that would be very nearly as bad as giving up the Viking and the horse. Not because she’d be angry. She’d probably understand that it was the oil crisis that had done him in, rather than his own bungling (she didn’t know about the gambling debts, of course, but she didn’t know about the back taxes and the interest on them, either). No, telling her was out of the question because she’d see him differently—look at him differently. She wouldn’t say anything, but he’d know. He’d be right back to being the guy who’d lied to her fifteen or sixteen years ago at a fraternity party in Berkeley. He’d been at Armstrong, and she was visiting from Boston for the summer, staying with her cousin. He crashed the party with a couple of friends, and when they met he told her he was a business student at Berkeley. He kept up the charade all summer, but then suddenly Linda was pregnant with Sarah. And that was that. She was Irish Catholic, and they had to get married. But he also had to tell her the truth—that he wasn’t a student at Berkeley, that the fancy house they were staying in didn’t really belong to his family (he was house-sitting for some friend of his boss’s at the car dealership where he was working), and that, yes, he’d swapped out the photos on the wall and the mantel for pictures of himself and his family.
He’d never forget the way she’d looked at him . . . not at him, but into him. And what she saw was the person he’d tried to hide—not just from her, but from pretty much everyone. Including himself. And, he knew, if Anderson Aircrafts went bust, then the wall he’d built up brick by brick between himself and the outside world (Linda included) would come crashing down all over again. It wasn’t that he had something horrible to conceal. In fact, it was almost the opposite. His real fear was that, when exposed, the real Martin Anderson didn’t add up to much of anything at all.
“Fuck,” Martin said out loud, and with enough irritation that the dog’s ears went back.
He stood up, threw the dregs of his coffee into the bushes, and within five minutes he was pulling out of his driveway and driving slowly down Miwok Drive. The realtor said that Miwok was the name of an Indian tribe that had lived in the area a hundred or so years ago. He’d pointed out that a lot of the neighborhood streets in Walnut Station had Indian names. Martin thought it was a little odd to name your streets after the people you’d exterminated to make room for you, but he certainly wasn’t on a crusade. He wasn’t some anthropologist out from UC Berkeley looking to start protests, or put some ads on TV like the one with the Indian crying about roadside trash. Peter loved to make fun of that one. He’d recite it whenever Sarah left her socks or dirty dishes or whatever lying around the house.
“Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” he’d say, affecting his most serious look. “And some people don’t.”
When he drove past the Weavers’ house, he saw that the driveway was empty. Hal’s Mercedes was gone, and so was Miriam’s station wagon. Martin knew where Miriam was. Tuesdays and Thursdays she taught art at the high school. He wondered what the kids thought of her. Especially the boys. She probably put up with a lot of shit in there. When he was that age he died for good-looking teachers. Couldn’t stand it. He’d act out, make an ass of himself—anything to get their attention.
He also wondered what the other teachers thought of her. The men probably hovered around her classroom door, acted surprised to see her when she came out in her smock or whatever she wore, her hair up, her expression a little mysterious.
“Oh, hi,” they’d say. “I didn’t know you were teaching today. How’d it go? I hope those kids aren’t giving you too much trouble. Some of them think art is just free time.”
She’d see right through it, he knew, but it bothered him just the same. Not that he’d be any different. He’d tried the same crap with Peter’s fourth-grade teacher—some horseshit he’d stolen from Linda about how the kids weren’t quite adolescents but weren’t really little boys anymore, either. On the other hand, she’d engaged him, told him about how crazy a couple of the boys could be. So there was that.
At the intersection not far past the Weavers’, about eight or nine houses down, he didn’t keep going straight ahead, like he usually did. Instead, he took a right, and then another right a few hundred yards after that, onto the frontage road that ran along the outside of their neighborhood. On his right was the walnut orchard that bordered the neighborhood and acted as a kind of buffer between it and the frontage road. The neighborhood kids played back there all the time. Some of the older boys had put up tree forts, probably smoked cigarettes and looked at Playboy. They had battles with the green walnuts that were all over the ground. Peter said they used garbage-can lids as shields and pelted the shit out of each other with the walnuts. Sometimes, on a quiet evening when they were really going at it, Martin could hear the shouts and screams from his yard. He liked hearing it, but he got annoyed that Peter wasn’t out there with them.
“That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?” he’d asked once or twice, but Peter said that the older kids threw the walnuts too hard.
Martin slowed for the opening he wanted. He pulled onto the dirt and then forward until he was shielded from view by the rows of trees. You’d have to really be looking to notice him back there. He turned off the ignition and sat there, not really thinking, just sitting. His window was rolled down, and he listened for any unusual sounds, maybe someone tending the trees. But he didn’t hear anything. He sat for another minute or so, feeling the tingling in his body.
He got out of the car and cut into the orchard, toward his neighborhood. Whoever owned the orchard came through once in a while and plowed the
soil into big loosened chunks of dirt, and so he wasn’t able to walk steadily in his alligator shoes. He slipped and stumbled a little, holding his right hand out for balance now and then. But he didn’t fall. He had to stop once or twice to get his bearings, figure out which house was in front of him. Then he saw where he wanted to be, and headed toward the gap in the Weavers’ fence. It was one their kids had made for easy access to the orchard—just a couple of slats that had been kicked out. Martin had noticed it during one of the cocktail parties. He’d been out on the patio, yakking with some neighbors and tossing back drinks and stealing glances at Miriam. Standing now on the orchard side, he peeked through the gap. He would have been surprised to see anyone, but he wanted to give it one last glance. There weren’t any signs of life, and so he squeezed himself through.
Martin walked quickly across the yard toward the house—didn’t look right or left, just walked through the tall grass (sure, the landscaping was plush and expensive, but Hal needed to get his shit together and mow the lawn—either that or have one of the kids do it, for Christ’s sake). In a couple of seconds he was up on the patio, his hard-soled shoes crunching and scraping a little bit on the brick. And then he was inside, right on in through the sliding glass door that led into the living room. No one locked their doors in the suburbs. Yes, there was the occasional robbery here and there, and for a while people would be more careful. A few people might put stickers on the windows or signs on the lawn that said something like home protection system. And then next to it there might be a sign about not letting your dog shit on the grass. But people let their dogs take a crap wherever they wanted, and they didn’t pick it up. Martin certainly let his dog pick his spot, and there was no fucking way he was going to stoop over with a plastic bag and pick up dog shit. It was the same with alarm signs—they were bullshit, too.
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