by John Brandon
“Redistribute, huh?” said Lucas.
“An intelligent foray into gaming.”
Garner told Lucas about his first bet, when the fullback had been out. He explained that with the fullback returning the Coastal offense was expected to recover its swagger, but if they didn’t have Forde, the only deep threat, the opposing defense would put nine men in the box and stuff all of Coastal’s pet running plays. He informed Lucas that they were going to accuse Nigel Forde of academic dishonesty. That was the easiest plan. They were going to make an accusation and that accusation would have to be looked into.
Lucas still hadn’t cast his line back out. He rinsed his hands in the water and shook them dry. He was a patient guy, even now. “I was wondering why you wanted to go fishing with me,” he said.
“Now you know.”
Lucas looked vaguely in the direction where the boundless ocean was. He let out a laugh, not because anything was funny. “This is what we’ve come to,” he said. “Ten years ago we were sitting out on this dock, ecstatic to have a couple beers in our possession. Remember?”
Garner nodded at him.
“I guess you always find a solution, don’t you? You’re the solution guy.”
“It would appear that way,” said Garner.
Lucas rested his forehead in his palm. He picked at one of the soft wooden planks of the pier with his fingernail. “I didn’t like tutoring from the first day I did it,” he said. “Helping those imbeciles write papers so they can keep bashing each other’s heads in.”
“If anyone catches onto this, there might be consequences more dire than losing your tutoring career.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“And this is still gambling, you know?” Garner said. “There’s still a chance we could lose the bet. It’s slim, but it’s there.”
“I’m losing now,” said Lucas. “I’m getting whipped.”
“Well, you and me both.”
Lucas hung his hook on an eyelet of his rod and reeled the line taut. He rested the whole rig on the pier. He looked down at nothing for a time, his head bowed like an exhausted traveler, then he spat deliberately into the water. “So,” he said. “I’m not agreeing to this, but how would we do it?”
Garner talked it over with him, encouraged that Lucas didn’t seem drunk, and they decided the simplest method would be for Lucas to drop an anonymous tip into the Dean of Students’ box. Just wait until the hallway was empty and stroll by and slip it in. There was a geology class all the athletes took, a class that was exactly the same every semester. Lucas could drop a typed note asserting that Forde had copies of all the tests. They only needed him to be held out of this one game while the dean’s office investigated the claim. Forde would be cleared eventually, no harm done. Just a mistaken tip, an empty rumor, and no one to attach it to.
“I guess no one’s going to look after my future but me,” Lucas said.
“Can you do this?” Garner asked him.
“I can do more than you probably think I can.”
Neither of them wanted another drink. Garner offered Lucas one of the sandwiches still sitting there in the cooler, but he didn’t want it. The day was getting hot finally, the silvery sun getting a bead on the marshland, that sweet rotten smell rising up from the reeds.
***
On Friday, Garner parked down the block from Cuss Seafood, under a stunted myrtle that offered little shade. Lucas had not backed out, as Garner had thought he might. Lucas had, just minutes before, called Garner’s cell phone and hung up when Garner answered, meaning the tip was planted. Early that morning Lucas had dropped off his $6,100 at Garner’s mom’s house, all the money he had.
Garner emerged from his mother’s Honda and took a sharp breath. His date with Ainsley the night before had not gone well. They hadn’t made it past the hors d’oeuvres course, the samosas Ainsley had spent half the day making. He’d arrived three or four gimlets in, and had immediately started working on an oversize Indian beer. He’d been too drunk and could now feel the proof of that in his temples. This was why Garner didn’t usually drink. He couldn’t handle it. He’d gone to the bar yesterday afternoon because he was anxious about dragging Lucas into this. Garner had felt impatient since the minute he’d arrived back on the coast, and it had all caught up with him last night. He’d kept trying to rush things to the bedroom, and Ainsley had kept slowing him down as politely as she could. He’d asked her why the hell she’d invited him over, and then watched injury bloom in her face. She’d stood up from the couch stiff and composed. He was different from his old self, Ainsley had told him. There wasn’t any sweetness in him anymore. Not a trace. Whatever he’d been pretending to be in Atlanta, he really was now. She’d handed him the wristwatch and given him a long look that expressed mostly disappointment.
Maybe he could patch that up in a few days, but he couldn’t let it distract him right now. It was a bad date with an old flame; that’s all it was. It was time for business, time to look Cuss in his good eye. The reason schemes didn’t occur to most people, he knew, was they couldn’t pull them off. Garner could. This is what he did. He found the soft spots, and there were plenty of them. He swung the door of the Honda shut and stepped over a row of lilies and up onto the sidewalk, the day open and bright in every visible direction, feeling the fist of rolled cash in his pants pocket with each stride.
THE PICNICKERS
At the close of the spring semester, Kim drove from Galesburg to Chicago to visit her old friend Rita. She normally stayed a week, but after three days in the suburbs it began to feel like she’d been there long enough. Rita’s neighborhood friends were always dropping by—Tuesday for health shakes, Wednesday for scrapbooking. This morning, roused by their noise, Kim had made her way down to the kitchen to find a group of them trying to convince Rita to go to the outlets. These women had plenty of money but nonetheless got a thrill out of finding a bargain. Rita was hesitant about the plan. She knew that Kim wasn’t a shopper.
“Maybe it’s time I learned,” Kim said. “Maybe it’s time I broadened my horizons. This is stuff other people didn’t want, right—at the outlets? That might suit me. I usually like stuff other people don’t want.” She got a bottle of diet soda from the fridge and sat down at the table with it. She felt bad for Rita, having to juggle Kim and her other friends all at once. Kim so plainly didn’t fit in that she’d begun to feel emboldened.
“It’ll be all day,” Rita said. “We grab lunch up there and everything.”
“I have two hundred and twenty dollars and some change. Is that good enough for all day?”
Rita’s friends had grown used to Kim and didn’t often respond to her. They were regarding one another with tight faces and blowing into their coffee cups.
“I just don’t want you to be bored,” said Rita. “You have to promise you won’t be bored.”
“You don’t need to worry about me being entertained,” Kim said. “How long have we known each other?” She was smiling—a little crazily, it felt like.
It was very bright outside, but Kim could see a lot of clouds through the window too. The leaves on the trees were tender-looking and motionless. The kitchen smelled of whole things, grains and healthy shampoo.
One of the women, the youngest of them, wasn’t drinking coffee. She made this conspicuous by fondling her cup, turning it upside-down. When the others finally questioned her, she played coy for a moment before announcing she was pregnant. Might be pregnant. She was almost sure. Squealing and flouncing ensued, the women all hugging each other and even deigning to hug Kim, though she remained seated. The other women jokily consoled the pregnant one about not being able to drink wine. Apparently she really liked wine. They all hoped she’d have a girl this time. Preliminary plans for a shower were put in place, duties assigned. Rita didn’t want catering again. She wanted anything but catering.
“The Carter’s outlet,” one woman said. “I saw the sweetest animal blankets in there. Neutral colors too. They have a p
ale green and a mustard. And some adorable bibs. You can’t have enough of those.”
“I have a stack of ten-percent coupons,” Rita put in. “They work anywhere in the whole mall.”
“I have some for the kitchen place,” said someone else. “Not Williams-Sonoma but the other one.”
Now Kim stood with her soda. She didn’t really want it anymore, but she opened it and took it over near the sink. There were more clouds in the sky than a minute ago but also more sunlight. Going to the outlets, she knew, was not a good idea. These women didn’t want Kim around. Things would not turn out well. There was a time when Kim could go with the flow, could see the good in people, but that time had passed. She was grumpy now; she worried all the time, and about the wrong things. She worried that she was tired of all the music she owned, instead of that her bathroom was filthy. Her car’s engine was about to give out, but she complained that the windows stuck. She had some money in the bank but no confidence she knew how to spend it. Right now she should’ve been worrying about the fact that she’d fallen out of friendship with Rita, but there didn’t seem to be anything either of them could do about it. Their lives had diverged radically; the alliance of soul they’d shared when they were younger was dead on the vine.
Franklin, Rita’s son, came down the stairs, his footfalls weighted and clumsy. Without acknowledging the kitchen full of women, he stuck his head in the fridge. He wore a wrinkled dress shirt and pants with numerous pockets. He was lanky, with sharp, slight shoulders. Franklin had a driver’s license these days and didn’t seem to eat meals. He didn’t need anything from Rita anymore.
After banging around for a minute, Franklin emerged from the fridge with a bag of lemons. He dumped them on a cutting board and began halving them with a cleaver.
“Franklin,” Rita said. “Dare I ask?”
“They’re going rotten. The United States and Australia waste more food than the rest of the world combined. That’s something I learned just this morning, doing random Internet research. It may or may not be true. I don’t know what you bought these for, but they’re on their last legs.”
“I’m aware they’re on their last legs,” Rita said. “That’s why I put them in the fridge. I was going to make pear butter, but I didn’t get around to it. For the walk-run.”
“Well, what I’m going to do is take the lemons life gave us and make lemonade.”
Rita picked up a heavy peppermill and cleaned a spot on it with her thumb. “I don’t think lemonade is a breakfast. Why don’t I make you some eggs? I’ll make over-easy eggs and rye toast like you like.”
“Breakfast isn’t really my strong suit anymore,” said Franklin. He set the knife aside and squeezed a few of the lemon halves over a bowl. He paused and plopped in ice cubes, then found a spoon and fished out some seeds. “This day is starting off fun,” he said.
Kim could remember Franklin as a small child. Rita and her husband had been worried about him, thinking he had Asperger’s or something. It had visibly pained him to look anyone in the eye, and for some reason he’d refused to ever say hello or goodbye. He still didn’t say hello, now that Kim thought about it. His verbal skills were always off the chart and he’d been a happy kid, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He’d shown no interest in the cartoons the other kids adored, no interest in playing hide-and-seek or tag, but then he’d take a puzzle over to a corner of the room and keep putting it together and taking it apart for hours, until someone stopped him.
Somewhere along the line, he’d outgrown it. He’d learned to read people well enough. In grade school, they’d put him in a gifted class, and now he was in an expensive untraditional high school. The last time Kim visited, almost two years ago, he had been neck-deep in the collected letters of Vincent van Gogh. He’d found an enormous three-volume set at an estate sale, and was staying up nights with it. He’d sought Kim out one afternoon in the den, knowing she’d majored in Art History in college, and conducted a one-sided conversation with her in front of the cold, clean-scraped fireplace. He’d asked her unanswerable questions about the bond between siblings, made familiar accusations about the tastes of the public. Kim had asked him how he’d gotten interested in van Gogh’s letters and he’d said he didn’t think he was interested in them as much as hypnotized by their redundancy.
“We’re going to the outlets,” Rita was telling him. “Are you going to wear that shirt to school? It looks like you slept in it.”
“I didn’t sleep in it,” he said. “Not last night.”
“You know where the iron is,” she said.
Kim hoped Franklin didn’t lump her in with these other women. She didn’t know why she would care, but she did. She was running her eyes over the sprawled sections of newspaper on the kitchen counter. They were full of the same stories that were always in newspapers. Unemployment was down, but not enough. A species of warbler had gone extinct. The smell of the women and the coffee and the lemons on an empty stomach was making her a little sick.
“I wonder, Mom, if you could spare one of your gang.” Franklin’s hair was messy by design and there was a scuff of acne along the curve of his jaw. “There’s an extra-credit thing I need to do. It’s on the Gauguin exhibit at the Art Institute. It’s a two-man deal, though.”
“At the Art Institute?” Rita said.
“I’m supposed to go with someone and then interview them about the exhibits. Anybody except a classmate. There’s a whole list of questions, then I’m supposed to think of my own follow-up questions based on the answers to the first questions. It can’t be a classmate, though. It has to be, like, a member of the public.”
Rita’s face was resigned, faintly amused. “Let me guess. Today is the last day you can do it.” She looked around at the other women as if for sympathy. “I can always tell the last day something can be done, because that’s the day he’ll mention he needs to do it. I thought we talked about you having a schedule,” she told Franklin. “Writing it all down.”
He nodded, but he was in the middle of slurping more of his lemonade. When he came up for air, he shuddered, as if he’d done a shot of whiskey.
“And what about school?” Rita asked Franklin.
“This is the morning the class meets. You can miss a class meeting if you’re doing the extra credit.”
“What class is it for?”
“The Politics of the Image. I’ve got an atrocious grade in there, so I could use the points. I mean it’s really alarming, how low my average is. The teacher says it’s sad, because my insights are of uncommon quality.”
“The Politics of the Image?” said Rita. “When I was your age, they called it Art Class.”
“You’re the one who put me in this school. None of the names make sense. We talk about Freud in Civics.”
It seemed it was Rita’s turn to talk again, but she only shook her head. The air conditioner kicked on. The woman named Teresa or maybe Tessa slipped a thin sweater off the back of her chair and hung it on her shoulders.
“Education first,” said Franklin. “That’s what I’ve always heard.”
Rita was looking at Franklin with a face Kim guessed was tough love. “You should have planned this out ahead of time,” she said. “You always do this. You always want people to change plans around you. You always want to get bailed out.”
“I planned to plan ahead, but that plan fell through. Kind of like with your pear butter.” Franklin shifted around inside his shirt. “I just need someone to respond to art. It’s not a terrible thing to ask. It’s not breaking rocks in the sun.”
Everyone was quiet. Kim could tell Rita’s friends wouldn’t get involved. The etiquette was to mind your own business when someone else’s kid was being difficult, to not say a word. An airplane could be heard passing over the house. The coffeemaker made a gentle gurgling noise.
“We should all get going,” Rita said. “Us to the mall and you to school. Manage your schedule better next time.”
Franklin exhaled dramatically. He
was standing still, his eyes wide, and Kim thought he was trying to look toward her. He was looking at the area of her knees, his face stiff and apprehensive. He let his eyes flash up to her face for only a second. “If no one wants to go, no one wants to go,” he said. “I can’t force anyone.” He waited a beat. When no one spoke up his shoulders went slack and his head slumped forward onto his chest. He started fishing around in his pants pocket for something. Rita had opened a drawer and pulled out a little accordion folder where she kept her coupons organized, and was flipping through it with a fingernail.
“I’ll do it,” Kim said. She pushed the newspaper into a pile and pushed it away from her. “I’ll be the subject.”
The kitchen went silent again. Kim could feel the skewering looks of the women in the room. At this point she was enjoying them. She’d broken the noninterference code, compromised the unified front.
The look Rita rested on Kim was one of tart curiosity. Kim didn’t look away from it. Rita still had her fingers in her coupon book. She cleared her throat, and quickly enough she was smiling again. There was something brave in her smile nowadays.
“All right then,” she said. “I guess that’s settled.” She pulled what she needed out of the coupon book and placed it back in the drawer, which she closed very softly. Then she reached for her purse and gave the contents a shake. “Franklin, it looks like you’re going to slide by again.” She removed her wallet from her purse and found some cash. “Take this,” she said to him. “If Kim’s giving up her day for you, you can at least buy her lunch.”
“That’s not necessary,” Kim said, but Franklin was already accepting the bills and stuffing them into one of his pockets.
The rest of the women were gathering up their phones and sunglasses. “We could try Barbette for lunch,” one of them offered uncertainly. “They’re supposed to have really good soups.” Franklin smirked at Kim and returned to his lemonade, sniffing it and adding more sugar.
“Isn’t Gauguin the one that molested all those island girls?” Rita asked.