by Iain Levison
Eyes focused and expert, Doug turned a pill in his hand and then held it up to the light coming through the window into their dingy living room. “Hydrocodone,” he said, as if pronouncing a discovery. “These are the good ones. Seven-point-five milligrams.” He looked at Mitch beseechingly. “Can I . . . eat it?”
“Yeah, man. It’s yours.”
Before Mitch had finished uttering the short sentence, the pill was in Doug’s stomach. “Thanks, dude. Where’d you get it?”
“Never mind.”
“Do you have more?”
Oh, for god’s sake. He had created a monster. He was about to empty his pockets, dump the twenty or so pills he had all over the coffee table, but then had an evil impulse. Doug was suddenly like a trainable dog, begging for treats. Mitch was aware of an almost total power.
“That’s it,” Mitch said. “I took one myself and saved two for you. All I’m feeling is itchy, like I’ve got fucking ants in my shorts.”
Doug laughed. “They make you itchy,” he said. “But you get a little high and a little speedy.”
Which was true. Within minutes of popping the pill, Mitch had suddenly found he had energy and a real interest in dog-walking. He could see how these things could be addictive, until the ants in the shorts effect had started, and by the time he was walking Duffy, his last dog of the day, he was scratching himself raw. Still, the extra energy might be nice if he was going to spend the evening sitting behind a bush in the freezing woods dressed in a business suit.
“Are you ready to go steal a Ferrari?” Doug asked. “Kevin just called. He said he’d be over in a little bit.”
“I guess we have to go put on suits.”
“I guess.”
“I think the suits are a stupid idea.”
“Kevin says we should wear suits,” Doug said, as if reminding him of the teachings of their cult leader. Mitch picked up on something in the tone of his voice. Over the last two days, he had noticed that Doug had been particularly reverential toward Kevin, careful to not interrupt him or disagree with him. Nothing specific, just a vague change in attitude. It was definitely a change from his regular behavior. Two weeks ago, Mitch remembered Doug cursing Kevin for failing to return a CD he had lent him, and before that, mentioning that Kevin might be a little too enthusiastic about the idea of stealing the television and that perhaps they should spend less time with him because he seemed to be turning into a criminal. But this week every word that fell from Kevin’s lips had to be stringently adhered to.
“Dude, what’s going on with you guys?”
Doug stared at the television, not saying anything, and Mitch leaned over him, slowly putting his head between Doug and the TV set, which was showing a commercial for toilet-cleaning products.
“Duuuuuuude, I’ve got pills,” Mitch taunted. “Talk to me,” he sang. “I’ll give you another piiiiiiiiiiiiill.”
Doug said nothing, but continued looking toward the TV, clearly stressed and focusing harder than ever on a foaming liquid which was making a toilet bowl so clean that it sparkled.
“Have you joined Kevin’s cult or something? Is there something going on between you two I don’t know about?”
“Nothing,” said Doug. Then he added, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Ah-hah! So there is something. What don’t you want to talk about?”
“DUDE, IT’S NOTHING!” Doug yelled, and his voice was filled with such anxiety that Mitch was taken aback. Doug was so easygoing and relaxed and this outburst so uncharacteristic that Mitch instantly sensed joking about pills was not the right way to go about having this conversation. But he was also baffled. He knew both these guys pretty well and hadn’t really noticed anything unusual between them, other than Doug’s reverence. Kevin had been acting normal. For Kevin.
His head still hanging jauntily in Doug’s view of the TV screen, Mitch began to piece the situation together. Kevin had been acting normal and Doug hadn’t. Which meant that whatever it was, Kevin didn’t know about it. Doug had, therefore, done something to Kevin. What? Stolen something from him? Nah, Doug would never steal stuff. At least not by himself or from someone he knew and liked.
“Dude, did you do something to Kevin?”
Doug got up from the couch, not making eye contact. His voice was shaking slightly as he said, “We should put on suits.” Then he ran up the stairs, which was also uncharacteristic. For a tall, thin man, he was surprisingly slow moving and bursts of energy were usually signs that something was very wrong. The last time Mitch had seen Doug move very quickly was when his grandmother had suffered a heart attack.
“Hey man,” Mitch called after him. Doug was at the top of the stairs and when he turned, Mitch noticed his eyes were red rimmed as if he was going to cry. Shit, Mitch thought, something serious is going on. He decided he didn’t want to know. He reached into his pocket, pulled out all the pills, and showed the handful to Doug. “I’ll leave these here for you on the coffee table.”
Doug nodded and almost smiled in gratitude.
“Don’t overdose yourself, you pillhead.”
“I won’t.” This time he did smile. “Thanks.”
MITCH LOOKED GOOD in a suit. His suit fit well and had been expensive, over two hundred dollars, and he wore his hair in a short, military cut, as did many men who wore suits regularly. When he had looked at himself in the mirror before they left, he’d had the thought that, had he made different decisions with his life, this would be the way he looked every day. What decisions could he have made differently? Not smoking pot in the army would have been a start. He could have finished his six-year stint and gotten GI Bill funding to get into a real, four-year school. He could have graduated with a degree in finance and gotten a job on Wall Street or gone on to law school. He was certainly smart enough. The image of himself, crisp and professional, as he posed in front of the mirror on his way to steal a car, filled him with a sense of regret over his lost opportunities.
Doug, on the other hand, was never meant to wear a suit. His hair was long, his expression more artistic and dreamy than alert, and his “suit” was an ill-fitting sport jacket with nonmatching dress pants that he had bought at a thrift store for his grandmother’s funeral. His appearance was that of a small boy who had been dressed for church and would run off and play in mud if you didn’t keep your eyes on him. Mitch had to stop himself from wincing when he saw him.
“Dude, you need a new suit.”
“Fuck it. What’re you, like James Bond or something?”
“I’m more James Bond than you.”
“You look like . . .” Doug searched for a derisive comparison and found nothing.
“Good comeback,” Mitch said.
“Yeah, uh, eat me.”
“Good comeback again. You’re like Oscar Wilde with this shit.”
Before the conversation could deteriorate into abuse and cursing there was a knock on the door. It was Kevin. It was Ferrari time.
THE PLAN REQUIRED that Kevin park the pickup out of sight of the restaurant and, as soon as Doug and Mitch were in the Ferrari, pull out onto the gravel road and lead them to the drop-off point. Kevin couldn’t park his pickup in the parking lot because one of the valets might think it looked suspicious and take down his license number. So the pickup was parked about a hundred yards away, on a small gravel access road that led to a now defunct quarry. The minute a Ferrari pulled into the lot, Doug and Mitch were to call Kevin and he would drive back out to the road. Doug and Mitch were to stride over to the Ferrari and, bold and unobtrusive in their business suits, drive it out of the parking lot to the road, where Kevin would be waiting.
What the plan hadn’t taken into account was the fact that to get to their stakeout point from the pickup, Doug and Mitch had already had to walk through a forest in their business suits, meaning their dress shoes were caked with freezing mud. They had also neglected to consider that business suits were not very warm. So while Kevin, fully dressed for the weather in a heavy d
own jacket and blue jeans, was waiting in the truck for a cell phone call alerting him that a Ferrari was present, Doug and Mitch were standing behind a tree, freezing, with ice forming on their feet.
“Dude, this sucks,” said Doug.
Mitch had taken to the work. There was a lot to be said for working outdoors. He had been enjoying the adventure of it, the concealment, which gave the mission an air of great importance. Who concealed themselves if their work was unimportant? Then Doug had ruined the moment by complaining.
“It’s cold,” Mitch agreed. He had brought with him a cheap pair of opera glasses, which had been in the apartment when they had moved in. He put them up to his eyes and examined the parking lot, which was perfectly visible with the naked eye.
“Dude, do you really need those?”
“It’ll give us more time. To call Kevin. With these, I can see a Ferrari the minute it comes up the drive.”
“Whatever. I can’t feel my feet.”
“Why don’t you go wait in the truck with Kevin?”
Doug was quiet for a second. “No. Then you’ll talk shit about me, about how I didn’t help.”
“These things are cool,” said Mitch, ignoring him and holding up the opera glasses. “You can see the hostess through the window. She’s hot.”
“I don’t care,” said Doug.
“Dude, if you’re gonna be a bitch, seriously, why don’t you go wait in the truck?”
They froze and ducked as they heard the noise of an approaching car. Mitch put the opera glasses up to his face, but they had fogged over. He polished them with his wrist as a car came into the parking lot and pulled up beside the little valet hut. It was a BMW. Mitch looked at it through the glasses and said, “BMW.”
“Dude,” Doug said, shivering. “I can see that from here.”
They watched as the valet parked it about three spaces from the door. Somebody was apparently paying a valet to walk eight feet. Even if it had been a Ferrari, it was parked so close to the valet booth that the valet would notice anyone who approached it, and he would be sure to notice two half-frozen, wet creatures with their feet caked in mud emerge from the woods and get into it.
“Dude, this ain’t gonna work,” said Doug.
Mitch was surveying the situation like an embattled paratroop commander, his breath frosting in the air as he swung the opera glasses back and forth across the parking lot. Doug asked idly what the fuck he was looking at. He had to admit, Doug had a point. “It’s not gonna work unless the parking lot is full,” he said.
“These business suits were a bad idea,” Doug said.
Yes, Mitch had to admit, they were. The deception of wearing business suits was all well and good but after you had been crouching in a wintry, outdoor environment for several hours, a business suit just made you look more conspicuous. All soiled and muddy and coming out of the woods in suits, they would look more like survivors of a plane crash than jaunty guests heading into the Eden Inn. And besides, they were freezing.
They knocked on the window of the pickup. The truck was idling and Kevin was sitting in the warm cab reading the paper, a steaming thermos of cocoa in his hand.
“You comfortable enough?” asked Mitch as Kevin rolled the window down. “Need, like, a foot rub or something?”
“What’s up, jerkoff?”
“We’re scrapping the plan,” said Mitch. “This business suit bullshit is ridiculous. If I’m waiting in a bush all night, I need to be dressed for the weather.”
“Y-Y-Yeah,” shivered Doug.
“We’re going for speed not deception,” said Mitch, his paratroop commander persona returning. “There’re two ways we can do this. One, deception, where we get in the door by looking like we belong there, or two, speed. Just spring out of the forest and take the goddamned Ferrari while the valets are busy. What’re they gonna do? Leap in front of it to save the car? Then we speed off.”
“We decided this,” said Doug.
“Besides, look at him,” said Mitch, pointing at Doug, who was shivering and wet, his soaked long hair clinging to his cheeks. “He looks even creepier than usual.”
Kevin looked at Doug. “All right,” he said with a nod. Doug’s appearance was enough to win the argument. These two were never going to pass for business people, or even people who had any business in the parking lot of the Eden Inn. He leaned over and opened the passenger door and they got in.
“We’re going commando,” said Mitch. “Comfortable, warm clothes we can move fast in.”
“Doesn’t that mean you’re not wearing underwear?” asked Doug.
“What?”
“Going commando.”
“No, it means quick and well prepared. And dressed for the damned weather.”
“I think it means no underwear,” said Kevin.
“Bullshit. I never heard that.”
“I’m going to wear underwear,” said Doug.
Kevin pulled out onto the road for the long drive back to Wilton, the snow starting to fall silently on the tree-lined roads, his two friends bickering in the seat beside him, and thought: This is so much better than a PTA meeting.
7
CHAPTER
DOUG WAS FLIPPING through the classifieds and found himself drawn to a particular ad promising wealth for the writing of children’s books. According to the ad, there was a virtually bottomless market for children’s books and no real skills were required to write one. Doug allowed himself a moment of reverie as he imagined being an admired children’s book author and realized it was a fantasy he had had before.
Two years earlier, while working at the restaurant, Doug had found himself staring at the lobsters in the tank and imagining writing the story of one that escaped. He had wanted the story to be happy and have the lobster make it home to Maine, where he would be reunited with his family. Standing over the hot grill, sweat dripping into his eyes, he had been suddenly thrilled at the idea of being a writer of children’s books and the next day he had sat down to write one.
At first, everything went well. The stage was set, the lobster escaped, and he went off on his happy way to Maine. Annalisa had said she loved it and waited eagerly for the next installment. But as the story developed, the lobster began to change perceptibly, from a happy escapee to a morose and violent drifter. At his best the lobster was aimless; at his worst he was hell-bent on revenge. Despite Annalisa’s admonishments to keep the story light, Doug continually had the lobster running into trouble. By the time the lobster had been arrested for selling nitrous hits at a Phish show and had stabbed a lizard at a truck stop following an argument about leftover fast food, Annalisa had finally persuaded him to give up the story for good.
“You’re weird,” she had said, but her voice had lacked the saucy delight that had been present when she had made the same observation at the beginning of their relationship. It had been the final weeks and now Doug wondered, as he sat and read the classifieds, if he hadn’t thought of the lobster story as a device to keep her attracted to him, an attraction he knew was waning. He stared blankly at the ads, not reading them, wondering what Annalisa was doing now. Right now at that very moment. Waiting tables at some other corporate restaurant, telling all her tables about moving to France, and getting an advanced degree in poetry writing probably. And maybe banging one of the cooks. She liked cooks. Banging other waiters was just so jejune. Or passé. Or coup d’etat. Or something. He was shredding the edges of the newspaper with his fingers.
On the kitchen table was his final paycheck, which had arrived in the mail that day. One hundred ninety-eight dollars. That was it. That was all he had going for him. He had just lost his job and his car and most likely his license, and he had slept with his friend’s wife, and all he had to show for his life was a check for $198. And a handful of little white pills that Mitch had given him. He took another one.
The phone rang. It was Linda, the call he had been dreading. He had so many things he wanted to say to her, serious things about right and wrong
and betrayal and friendship, things that had been circling madly in his mind for the past few days. He wasn’t used to keeping secrets and he hated the feeling that he might make an errant comment to Mitch or Kevin. Skills of deceit were not in his DNA.
“How are you?” she asked. Her tone was cheerful, which he wasn’t expecting. He had imagined their next conversation would be a somber rehashing of events, full of admissions of shame and phrases like “never again.” Instead she sounded happy, energetic, and friendly, which made Doug nervous.
“I’m good,” he said, wondering how to play this. Maybe she just didn’t want to share her angst on the phone.
“I was just wondered how your day was going,” she said pleasantly, not sounding at all angst-ridden. “I miss you. We haven’t talked in a couple of days.”
Doug wanted to point out that prior to two weeks ago they had never talked at all. Accidentally having an affair with his friend’s wife was one thing, but having her call up and pretend it had never happened was not only insulting, it was confusing. What was this about? Should he join her in the pretense that they were just friends? Yeah. He should. Maybe that was the answer and Linda had figured it out. If they both pretended they had never had sex, maybe the whole thing would just go away.
“Yeah,” Doug said. He could hardly say he missed her too, because that was some weird schmaltzy shit you said to your girlfriend, not to your friend’s wife while your roommate was watching TV ten feet away, wondering who you were talking to on the phone. He tried to think of something mundane to say, some insignificant detail of his day which he might offhandedly mention to a friend but nothing occurred to him except, “I’ve been thinking of writing a children’s book.”
“Really?” Linda sounded genuinely enthusiastic and Doug realized how nice it was to make new friends, because they weren’t sick of you yet. To new friends, an announcement of your new life plans was a novelty. It wasn’t put into the context of a dozen previous announcements which might not have come to fruition. New friends accepted your announcements with the excitement that you had when you made them, and they understood that when you announced your life plans, you were deadly serious and totally committed, at least for the duration of the announcement. “What’s it gonna be about?”