by Norman Green
“How did we get to this, Stoney?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t, either. Why is it, how could we have went for such a long time, we made it through all those years of craziness and nothing ever seemed to change, then you quit drinking and we fall apart? Can you tell me why that is?”
“I heard a story,” he said. “Probably not true. Probably just one of those things that gets repeated over and over. But the story goes, you put a frog in a pan of water on your stove, you heat the water up very slowly, he won’t notice it getting warmer. He’ll sit there until he boils.”
“Is that how it was? Things just kept getting worse, and I didn’t see it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t want to see it. Maybe you wanted to believe that everything was all right.”
“Maybe I did,” she said. “Are you working?”
He shook his head. She really had no idea, she couldn’t, not if she was asking a question like that. He and Fat Tommy had been partners for years, using a succession of scams to prey on people who should have known better. In the shadowier, seedier neighborhoods of capitalism, far from the eyes of the law, a smart and ruthless person could make himself wealthy. “Vultures,” that’s what Fat Tommy called the two of them. Stoney didn’t like the word, but maybe that’s how it really was. He hated to think of himself that way, though.
He had considered talking to Benny about it a couple of times, but he hadn’t been ready. And what the fuck would Benny know about it, anyway? Benny had been a plumbing inspector before he retired, a guy who went around making sure you got the hot water on the left and the cold water on the right, for chrissake. But that’s not the way it worked. AA was a collective, a distillation of the hard-won experiences of a couple million desperate motherfuckers who had, beyond everything else, taken the hardest punches that life could throw at you, and had gotten back up again. You find the right guy in AA, he can save you oceans of grief. Find the wrong one, he’ll cosign your bullshit, you both wind up dead. But Stoney was pretty sure Benny was the right guy. “If you’re a thief,” Benny had told him once, early on, “we’ll make you a better one.” Stoney always wondered how much the guy really knew.
Donna cleared her throat. “I had to get a job, you know.” Stoney could hear the kernel of resentment in her voice. Donna had never been much interested in the particulars of Stoney’s complex financial gerrymandering. She didn’t know what the two of them had, how could she? Not if she had gotten a job. And what the hell did she know how to do, anyhow? He recognized that for an ungenerous thought, and he rephrased it carefully in his mind before giving it voice.
“Yeah? Doing what?”
“I’m a personal assistant.” He could hear the mixture of defensiveness and pride in her voice. “For a judge. She needed someone to run her house for her.”
“A judge? Are you shitting me?”
“What?” She was angry, insulted. “Do you think I’m so stupid that I can’t—”
“No, no, no,” he said, interrupting her. “Easy does it, okay? I didn’t mean that. It’s just that, I mean, a judge? You sure go from one extreme to the other.”
She didn’t see the humor in it. “I had to do something, Stoney. The bills are piling up around here.”
“I understand. We need to get together to talk about this, Donna. There are things we can’t go into over the phone.”
“Okay.”
Jesus, was it going to be that easy? “I could meet you somewhere….” You screwed up already, he told himself. You were supposed to have a place picked out ahead of time, with flowers and shit.
“Yeah…” She sounded doubtful.
“We’ll meet at some restaurant in Closter. Say Monday night.”
She thought it over for a few seconds. “All right. But not in Closter.”
He tried to calm himself and keep his nervousness out of his voice. “All right. How about that steakhouse up on the river, just over the New York state line? What’s the name of that town?”
“Piermont,” she said. “All right, that’s fine. Marisa’s graduating soon, you know.”
“Yeah, she told me.”
“Marisa talked to you?”
He could hear it in her voice, Donna felt betrayed by her own daughter. That’s twice you messed up, hasn’t even been two minutes, he told himself. What’s wrong with you? “Look,” he said quickly, “maybe I shouldn’t have said. Did I screw up by telling you? I don’t want to get her in trouble with you.” She didn’t say anything, and he sat listening to the sound of her breathing. “Donna, gimme a break. Don’t make this worse than it already is. Cover for me. Can you do that?”
“Stoney, this is so fucked up.”
We can save it, babe, oh man, he ached to tell her that, but he was afraid to, he hesitated too long, and the opportunity was lost. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“All right.” She didn’t sound like she believed him, she sounded like she had settled for what she could get instead of holding out for what she needed. “Anyhow, some of the other parents and I got together, we’re going to throw a big graduation party for the kids. Maybe you should come.” She told him the day and the time.
He didn’t tell her that Marisa had invited him already. He felt a great weight lifting from his shoulders, though, and his spirit rose up, leaving him breathless, wordless, afraid to move. “I’ll be there.” He could sense her, silent, on the other end of the line, and he knew he should say something more but he had no idea what that something was.
“I’ll see you later, then,” she said. Waiting for him to say it, that elusive right thing.
“Okay. Talk to you Monday night. Call my cell number.” He became afraid, then. Do I tell her that I love her, he wondered, or would that scare her away? Would it be presuming too much to say how much I miss her? Maybe she doesn’t want to hear about that. Or that he saw her face a dozen times a day, superimposed on the women walking down the streets of the city, standing on a subway platform, dancing, once, at Kelleher’s, naked as the day she was born. God, what a sight that had been, until the smells of beer and scotch had driven him out.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, all right, then. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” he said, making no move to hang up. He listened to her, doing the same, for a few seconds, then he heard the click as she put the phone down.
SIX
Stoney had seen her a few times, going in and out of the apartment across the hall from his. The thing he noticed about her most of all was her condescending smile. Every time they passed in the hallway she would give him this look, like she knew something funny about him but had promised not to tell what it was. It was the kind of look that made you check the zipper on your pants, just in case. She could have passed for her late twenties, early thirties, but he really couldn’t tell how old she was. The two of them had fallen into a sort of nodding acquaintance, hi, how are you. He didn’t think she actually lived in the place, she usually left late at night, returned around noon the next day. He’d noticed a succession of male callers, mostly middle-aged white guys who wore suits and carried a little extra weight. She was quiet, though, and he supposed that it was none of his business how she made her living.
“Who was that girl I saw you with?” She had been coming down the hall, heading for her door just as he was leaving. It was the first time she’d ever asked him anything. There might have been an edge to her voice, but he hadn’t spoken with her enough to be sure. “She looked awfully young.”
“That was no girl,” Stoney told her. “That was my daughter.”
“Ah,” she said, with what could have been relief. “I see. For a while, there, I thought you were one of those raincoat perverts.”
“Not me,” Stoney said. He noticed that she was wearing some kind of black eye makeup that went all the way around her eyes, the way young girls and Ozzy Osbourne were wearing it. “I may be a pervert, but I don’t think I own a raincoat.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said, and she flashed that patronizing smile of hers. She was wearing a tight white sweater that spoke volumes about the wonders hidden inside. Normally he would not have been affected, but it had been a long time. He turned and locked his door behind him.
“So you’re divorced,” she said, making it a question.
“No. Separated, I guess. You?”
“Oh, I’m single,” she said. “Divorced two years ago, for the second time. I love men, but I just can’t find one I can live with.”
“Hah,” Stoney said. “I saw this show on albatrosses the other night. They mate for life, right, but they’re not up each other’s ass all year long. They meet once for mating season, and to raise baby albatrosses. The rest of the year they leave each other the fuck alone.”
She laughed. “Sounds like an intelligent system. That’s probably why human beings can’t do it that way. We have to make everything so goddamn complex. Wouldn’t it be great if we could take the sentimental bull out of relationships? Just get together once in a while, give each other what we need. Let the rest of it slide.” She had her door open, and she stood in the doorway. “I like the albatross thing, except for the once-a-year part.” She smiled at him again, what the hell was it about that smile? “You gonna be around today?”
“No,” he said. “I got something I gotta do out in Jersey.”
“Too bad.” She stepped inside. “Well, knock on my door sometime,” she said, and she closed it, left him standing there in the hall, wondering.
When the realtor showed up, she looked pretty much how Stoney had imagined her. She was emphatically buxom, suspiciously blond, way past twenty-one. She had an Al Gore bumper sticker on the back of her Volvo 4X4. Stoney waited until she’d parked it in front of the McMansion’s garage and got out before sauntering over and sticking out his hand. “You must be Ms. Garrett,” he said. “I’m the guy who called you yesterday. Thanks for coming out.”
“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” she said, and she shook his hand. “Shall we go inside and have a look around?”
“Absolutely,” he said, and he looked past her, out across the short expanse of lawn to the edge of the woods. It was a half a mile, more or less, through those trees to the edge of Prior’s property. It would take ten minutes of hard going to get from one to the other. Maybe twenty. A lot of things could happen in twenty minutes.
“Mr. Ross?” She was looking at him quizzically.
Was that the name he’d given her? “Ma’am?”
“Would you like to look inside?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I was just admiring the, ahh, forest, there. Still an amazing thing to a city kid like myself.”
“Oh, it is beautiful,” she gushed. “This property really is a rare opportunity. Not many houses up here on top of the hill come on the market, and there is no new development on the horizon. Not up here.” She stepped up to the front door, stopped to wrestle with the lockbox hanging from the doorknob. It held the key to the front entrance.
“Anybody wants to build up here, spends ten years in court, I bet,” he said.
“At least,” she said. She got the key out and opened the door. “Believe me, it would take an act of God, at this point, to get approval to build anything new around here.”
The front door opened into a soaring entryway. The room had a larger footprint than Stoney’s entire apartment. It was open to the second floor, and semicircular stairways on either side of the room led to the upper level. A chandelier the size of a small automobile hung down in the center of the room. “Wow,” Stoney said.
Ms. Garrett glanced at him, then up at the chandelier, cleared her throat. “Well, yes,” she said. “Wow.” Stoney got the impression that she did not want to render an opinion about the house, or even imply that she had one. Stands to reason, he thought. How many houses you gonna sell if you go around telling your customers they got no taste?
“There are closets all along this back wall,” she said, her steps echoing as she walked across the empty room and pushed on a panel that sprang open to reveal one of the promised closets. It was as empty as the rest of the place. “Down this corridor,” she said, pointing to her left, “is the gourmet kitchen….”
There was, indeed, a gourmet kitchen, along with a butler’s pantry, a breakfast nook, a formal dining room, a great room, a living room with a fireplace large enough to roast a pig in it, a study, an entertainment room, a laundry, maid’s quarters, five bedrooms, and four bathrooms, not counting the one in the master suite. It also had a panic room in the basement, a steel-doored vault the size of a walk-in closet. The maker’s name was posted on a metal tag affixed to the inside of the door. Stoney followed her from room to room, listened to her spiel without comment. Eventually they found their way back down to the kitchen.
“Well,” she said. “What do you think?”
“Big house,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, somewhat uncertainly. “Yes, ahh, it is.”
“Ms. Garrett, let me ask you something. You live in town?”
“Yes, I do.” She stared at him. “I bet I have the smallest…I, ah, live in a small house, down near the Closter town line. Why do you ask?”
“You like Alpine?”
“Alpine is a treasure,” she said. “I love it here.”
“So you don’t want to see it change,” he said.
“I would hate to see it developed,” she said. “You don’t care for the house, do you?”
“Hate it,” he told her. “The place is hideous. Can’t imagine what kind of moron would want to live in it.”
She fought off a smile. “So?”
He pointed out across the empty dining room, where the woods were visible through the glass sliding doors. “Can you imagine,” he said, “about four hundred town houses just down over the hill, there? Imagine what that would do to this town. Not to mention the strain on the environment.”
“That will never happen.” She sounded, all of a sudden, a bit less sure of herself.
“That’s gonna happen quicker than you think,” he said. “You know the old saying ‘A good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge.’”
She stared at him, openmouthed. “Do you know something I don’t? There’s no way…”
“This is New Jersey,” he said. “We’ve gotten word that the fix is in.”
“You have to be kidding. My God. How could this have happened?”
“You ever hear of a place called Skunk Hollow?”
“Well, I’ve seen the sign, but it’s just a mile or so north of here. I have never stopped to read it. What does that have to do with—”
“We believe the sign is misplaced,” he told her. “We believe that Skunk Hollow was right down there in those woods. I work for a very wealthy individual who holds the same opinions about development in this town that you do, Ms. Garrett. Now, briefly, not to bore you too much, Skunk Hollow was a pre–Civil War settlement of freed African-Americans. I think that archaeological evidence of that settlement must still exist on that property, but I have been unable to gain access, due to the developer’s concerns about his project. In point of fact, I was threatened with arrest for trespass twice in the past month.”
“Lord,” she said. “Well, if they’re smart, they’ll bulldoze whatever’s left before anybody sees it. And if you do find something, you’ll have gained that knowledge unlawfully, won’t you? You won’t be able to use it in court.”
He nodded. “They will destroy the evidence if they know what to look for. I don’t know how much time I have left. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s been found legally or not, once it gets out that there’s something historically significant on that property, we’ve won. The developer will be forced to sell to the state. Anyhow, now you understand my interest in this house.”
“But…Surely you can’t be serious. Would you actually buy this place, just to…” She gestured at the woods.
“My employer’s generosity does have it
s limits,” he said. “You still have this property under exclusive contract, am I right? If we were to compensate you for your forbearance, could you be persuaded not to show this house for, say, another week to ten days? Or is the market too hot for such a thing?”
“The top end of the market has plateaued,” she said. “Yours is the first call I’ve gotten on the place. But what you’re proposing is unethical and against the law. I would be acting contrary to the interests of the current owner.”
“I understand,” he said. “Can I ask you who the current owner is?” She looked at him, unsure. “I’m sure it’s a matter of public record. You’d hardly be giving away state secrets.”
“Sony,” she said. “One of their executives owned it, and they took it off his hands when they transferred him back to Japan.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Well, that’s a relief. All is not lost, corporate property managers are notoriously corrupt.”
“Well, in that case,” she said, and she cleared her throat. “How much are we talking about?”
“I can go ten thousand,” he said. “In cash, of course. For a week.” He nodded his head in the direction of the front door. “I came prepared,” he said. “The money is out in my car.”
“Lord have mercy,” she said. “Here’s the key. I’ll give you two weeks. How’s that? Is there anything else you need?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll need the garage door opener.”
He stepped through the woods carefully, taking his time, doing his best to walk south in a straight line, which would keep him parallel to the road and the parkway beyond. The sound of the traffic was muffled, but steady and unceasing. Once out of sight of the McMansions, there was nothing to look at but the trees, the carpet of leaves under his feet, the occasional stone ledge shouldering its way up through the earth, a dead tree here and there, prone on the forest floor. Three times he crossed narrow trails that meandered across his path. Kids, he thought, coming into the woods to drink beer, but there were no empty beer cans anywhere, no footprints, and the trails were too narrow to have been made by a bunch of undisciplined humans. That’s not the way we walk, he thought. We wander off the trail, we throw shit on the ground to let everyone know we’ve been here, empty bottles and candy wrappers and cigarette butts. He saw none of that. Deer, he thought, or coyotes. This part of New Jersey had plenty of both.