“I think ten thousand dollars should be just about right,” said Billy.
“Ten thousand dollars.”
Billy was silently expectant. Wildstrand shivered a little, then pulled his coat tight around him and felt like crying. He had cried a lot with Maggie. She had brought all of his tears up just beneath his skin. Sometimes they rushed out and sometimes they trickled in slow tracks down his cheeks, along his throat. She said there was no shame in it and cried along with him until their weeping slowed erotically and sent them careening through each other’s bodies. Crying with her was a comfortable, dark act, like being painlessly absolved in church. There was an element of forgiveness in her weeping with him, he felt, and sometimes he became sentimental and sad about what his grandfather had done to a member of her family, long ago.
John Wildstrand heard himself make a sound, an ah of doubt. There was something about the actual monetary figure that struck him as wretched and sorrowful.
“It’s just not enough,” he said.
Billy looked perplexed.
“Look, if she keeps the baby, and you know I want her to keep the baby, she’s going to need a house, a car. Maybe in Fargo, you know? And then there are clothes, and, what, swing sets, that sort of thing. I’ve never had a child, but they need certain equipment. Also, she needs a good doctor, hospital. That’s not enough for everything. It’s not a future.”
“Okay,” Billy said, after a while. “What do you suggest?”
“Besides,” Wildstrand went on, still thinking out loud, “the thing is, in for a penny in for a pound. This amount will be missed just as much as a larger amount will be missed. My wife sees our accounts. There needs to be an amount like, say, let me think. If it’s just under a hundred thousand, the papers will say nearly a hundred thousand anyway. If it’s a hundred thousand, they’ll say that. So it might as well be over fifty thousand. But not seventy because they’ll call that nearly a hundred.”
Billy Peace was quiet. “That’s just over fifty thousand,” he said finally.
Wildstrand nodded. “See? But that’s a doable thing. Only there must be a reason. A very good reason.”
“Well maybe,” said Billy, “you were going to start some kind of business?”
John Wildstrand looked at Billy in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s good, a business. Only then we’ll need to actually have the business, keep it going, make a paper trail and that will lead to more deception and the taxes…it all leads back to me. It gets too complicated. We need one catastrophic reason.”
“A tornado,” said Billy. “I mean in winter maybe not. A blizzard.”
“And where does the money come in?”
“The money gets lost in the blizzard?”
Wildstrand looked disappointed and Billy shrugged weakly.
“A cash payment?”
They both cast about for a time, mulling this over. Then Billy said, “Question.”
“Yes?”
“How come you don’t get divorced from your wife and marry Maggie? A while ago, she said you loved her and now it sounds to me like you still love her. So maybe I didn’t have to come here and threaten you with this.” He wagged the gun. “I’m not getting why you don’t leave your wife and go with Maggie, like run off together or something. You love her.”
“I do love her.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Look at me, Billy.” John Wildstrand put his hands out. “Do you think she’d stay with me just for me? Now be honest. Without the money. Without the job. Just me.”
Billy Peace shrugged. “You’re not so bad, man.”
“Yes, I am,” said Wildstrand. “I’m…a lot of years older than Maggie and I’m half-bald. If I had my hair, then maybe, or if I was either good-looking or athletic. But I’m a realist. I see what I am. The money helps. I’m not saying that’s the only reason Maggie cares for me, not at all. Maggie is a pure soul, but the money helps. I’m not losing one of my biggest assets—if I divorced Neve now I wouldn’t have a job. All gone. I took over from her father, who is, yes, old and in a nursing home. But perfectly lucid. Neve is a fifty-one percent shareholder. Besides, here’s the thing. Neve has done nothing wrong. She has never, to my knowledge, betrayed me with another man, nor has she neglected me within her own powers. It is not her fault. Until I really saw Maggie, you understand, one year ago, I was reasonably happy. Neve and I had sex for twenty minutes once a week and went to Florida on winter vacations; we gave dinner parties and stayed two weeks out of every summer at the lake. In the summer we had sex twice a week and I cooked our meals.”
Billy looked uncomfortable.
“Besides, we’re a small bank and we could get bought out. That would change my situation. I’d like to be with Maggie. I plan to be with Maggie. If she’ll have me.”
Now Wildstrand leaned questioningly toward Billy.
“What does your presence here mean, actually? Did she send you?”
“No.”
“What happened? She won’t talk to me, you know.”
“Well, she told me about her being pregnant. She was kind of upset and I thought you were ditching her. That’s what I thought. You know there’s always been just the two of us. Our mother froze in the woods when I was eleven. Maggie raised me in our grandparents’ house. I would die for her.”
“Of course,” said John Wildstrand. “Of course you would. Let that be our bond, Billy. Both of us would die for her. But here’s the thing. Only one of us…right now anyway, only one of us can provide for her.”
“What should we do?”
“Something has come to me,” said Wildstrand. “Now I’m going to propose an act that may startle you. It may seem bizarre, but give it a chance, Billy, because I think it will work. Hear me out? Say nothing until I’ve laid out a possible plan. Are you ready?”
Billy nodded.
“Say you kidnap my wife.”
Billy gave a strangled yelp.
“No, just listen. Tomorrow night you do the very same thing. As if tonight was just practice. You come to the door. Neve answers. You show her the gun and you come into the house! You have some strong rope. A pair of scissors. At gunpoint you order me to tie up Neve. Once she’s taken care of, you tie me up and say to me, in her hearing, that if I don’t deliver fifty thousand dollars in cash to you tomorrow you will not let her go. Otherwise you’ll kill her…you have to say that, I’m afraid. Then you bring her out to the car. Don’t let her see the license plates.”
“I don’t think so,” Billy said. “I think you’re describing a federal crime.”
“Well, yes,” said Wildstrand. “But is it really a crime if nothing happens? I mean you’ll be really, really nice to Neve. That’s a given. You’ll take her to a secure out-of-town location, like your house. Keep her blindfolded. Put her in the back bedroom where you keep the junk. Lay down a mattress there so she’s comfortable. It’ll just be for a day. I’ll drop off the money. We’ll time it. Then you’ll let her out somewhere on the other side of town. She may have a long walk. Be sure she brings shoes and a coat. You’ll drive back to wherever and turn in the car. I don’t think we should tell Maggie.”
“Maggie’s gone, anyway.”
Wildstrand’s heart lurched, he’d somehow known it. “Where?” he managed to ask.
“Her friend Bonnie took her to Bismarck, just to clear out her head. They’ll be back on Friday.”
“Oh, then, this is perfect,” said Wildstrand.
Billy looked at him with great, silent, dark eyes. His and Maggie’s eyes were very similar, thought Wildstrand—that impenetrable Indian darkness. They had some white blood and both were cream-skinned with heavy brown hair. Wildstrand felt extremely sorry for Billy. He was so frail, so young, and what would he do with Neve? She worked outside shoveling snow all winter and in summer she gardened, dug big holes, planted trees even. Billy kept shifting the gun from hand to hand, probably because his wrist was getting tired.
“By the way, where did that gun
come from?” Wildstrand said.
“It belonged to my mother’s father.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Of course it is.”
“You don’t have ammunition for it, do you,” said Wildstrand. “But that’s good. We don’t want any accidents.”
The Gingerbread Boy
WHEN BILLY PEACE knocked on the door the next evening, John Wildstrand pretended to have fallen asleep. His heart beat wildly and his throat closed as the quiet transaction occurred in the entryway. Then Neve walked into the room with her arms out and her square little honest face blanched in shock. She made a gesture to her husband, asking for help, but Wildstrand was looking at Billy and trying not to give everything away by laughing. Billy wore a child’s knitted winter face mask of cinnamon brown with white piping around the mouth, nose, and eyes. His coat and his pants were a baked-looking brown. He looked like a scrawny gingerbread boy, except that he wore flowered gardening gloves, the sort that women used for heavy chores.
“Oh no, I’m going to throw up,” Neve moaned when Billy ordered John Wildstrand to tie up his wife.
“No, you’ll be okay,” said Wildstrand, “you’ll be okay.” Tears dripped down his face and onto her hands as he tried firmly but gently to do his job. His wife’s hands were so beautifully cared for, the nails lacquered with soft peach. Let nothing go wrong, he prayed.
“Look, he’s crying,” Neve said accusingly to Billy, before her husband tied a scarf between her teeth, knotting it hard behind her head. “Nnnnnn!”
“I’m sorry,” said Wildstrand.
“Now it’s your turn,” said Billy.
The two of them suddenly realized that Billy would have to put down the gun and subdue Wildstrand, and their eyes got very wide. They stared at each other.
“Sit down in that chair,” Billy said at last. “Take that rope and loop it around your legs, not around the chair legs,” and then he gave instructions for Wildstrand to do most of the work himself, even had him test the knots, all of which Wildstrand thought quite ingenious of Billy.
Once Wildstrand had secured himself to the chair and Billy had gagged him, Billy told Neve to get on her feet. But she refused. Even as anxiety coursed through him, Wildstrand felt obscurely proud of his wife. She rolled around on the floor, kicking like a dolphin until Billy Peace finally pounced on her and pressed the barrel of the gun to her temple. Straddling her, Billy untied the cloth gag in her mouth and rummaged in his pocket. He drew out a couple of pills.
“You leave me no choice,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you to dry-swallow these.”
“What are they?” asked Neve.
“Sleeping pills,” said Billy. Then he spoke to Wildstrand. “Leave the money in a garbage bag next to the Flickertail Club highway sign. No marked bills. No police. Or I’ll kill your wife. You’re being watched.”
Wildstrand was surprised that Neve took the pills, but then for some reason she always had been like that about taking pills, even asking the doctor to paint her throat when it was hardly pink—she’d always been a willing patient. Now she turned out to be a willing hostage, and Billy had no more trouble with her. He undid the rope on her legs and put a hobble on her ankle. She walked out dreamily, her coat draped over her shoulders, and John Wildstrand was left alone. It took him about half an hour of patient wiggling to release himself from the rope, which he left looped around the chair. Now what? He wanted desperately to call Maggie, to talk to her, hear the slow music of her voice. But for some hours, he sat on the couch with his head in his hands, replaying the whole scenario. Then he started thinking ahead. Tomorrow he would go in early. He would withdraw cash out of their joint accounts. Then he would take the cash and get in the car. He would drive out to the highway sign and make the drop. It would all be done before eleven A.M. and Billy Peace would free Neve west of town, where she could walk home or find a ride. There would be police. Investigation. Newspapers. But no insurance was involved. He’d have used all of their retirement money, but Neve still had the bank. It would all blow over.
Helpless
A BLIZZARD CAME up and Neve got lost and might have frozen to death had not a farmer pulled her from a ditch. Because Billy had actually scooped up her snowboots as they left, and her coat was a big long woolen one that ended past her knees, she suffered no frostbite. She ran a fever for six days, but she did not develop pneumonia. Wildstrand nursed her with care, waited on her hand and foot, took a leave from the bank. He was shocked by how the kidnapping had affected her. Over the next weeks she lost a great deal of weight and spoke irrationally. To the police she described her abductor as quite large, muscular, with hard hands, a big nose, and a deep voice. Her kidnapper was stunningly handsome, she said, a god! It was all so bizarre that Wildstrand almost felt like correcting her. Though he was delighted, on the one hand, that she had the description so wrong, her embroidery disturbed him. And when he brought her home she was so restless. In the evenings, she wanted to talk instead of watch television or read the magazines she subscribed to. She had questions.
“Do you love me?”
“Of course I love you.”
“Do you really, really love me, I mean, would you have died for me if the attacker had made you make a choice—it’s her or you—say he said that. Would you have stepped forward?”
“I was tied to the chair,” said John Wildstrand.
“Metaphorically.”
“Of course, metaphorically. I would have.”
“I wonder.”
She began to look at him skeptically. Her eyes measured him. At night, now, she wanted lots of reassurance. She seduced him and scared him, saying things like, “Make me helpless.”
“He made me helpless,” she said one morning. “But he was kind. Very kind to me.”
Wildstrand took her to the doctor, who said it was hysteria and prescribed cold baths and enemas, which seemed only to make her worse. “Hold me, tighter, squeeze the breath out of me.” “Look at me. Don’t close your eyes.” “Don’t say something meaningless. I want the truth.” It was terrifying, how she’d opened up. What had Billy done?
Nothing, Billy insisted on the phone. Wildstrand was ashamed to be repelled by his wife’s awkward need—it was no different from his own need. If she’d been this way earlier on, he recognized that maybe he would have responded. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned to Maggie. Maybe he would have been amazed, grateful. But when Neve threw herself over him at night he felt despair, and she could sense his distance. She grew bony and let her hair go gray, long, out of control, beautiful. She was strange, she was sinking. She continually looked at him with the eyes of a drowning person.
Murdo Harp
JOHN WILDSTRAND WENT to visit his father-in-law in the retirement home which his money had endowed. The Pluto Nursing Home. This place did not depress him, though he could see the reasons why it might. Murdo Harp was resting on his single bed, on top of a yellow chenille coverlet. He’d pulled an afghan over himself, one that Neve had knitted, intricate rainbow stripes. He was listening to the radio.
“It’s me. It’s John.”
“Ah.”
Wildstrand took his father-in-law’s hand in his. The skin was dry and very soft, almost translucent. His face was thin, bloodless, almost saintly looking, even though Murdo Harp had been ruthless, a cutthroat banker, a survivor.
“I’m glad you’re here. It’s very peaceful and quiet, but I woke up at four A.M. before the rest of them this morning. I thought to myself, I hope someone will come. I want to go somewhere. And you came. It’s good to see you, John. Where are we going?”
John ignored the question, and the old man nodded.
“How’s my little girl?”
“She’s just fine.” No one had told Neve’s father, of course, what had happened. “She has a cold,” Wildstrand lied. “She’s staying in bed today. She’s probably curled up around her hot water bottle, sleeping.”
“The poor kid.”
Wildstrand resisted
telling Neve’s father, as he always did, “I’ll take good care of her.” How wrong, and how ironic, would that be? The hand relaxed and Wildstrand realized that his father-in-law had fallen asleep. Still, he continued to sit beside the bed holding the old man’s slender and quite elegant hand. With someone this old a little wisdom might leak out into the room. There was, at least, a pleasant sensation of rest. To have given up. Nothing else was expected. The old man had done what he could do. Life was now the afghan and the radio. John Wildstrand sat there for a long time; it was a good place to consider things. The baby would be born in four months and Billy and Maggie were living in a sturdy little bungalow not far from Island Park. Billy was just about to start technical college classes. The last time Wildstrand had visited, Billy was just walking out the door. He shook hands but said nothing. He was wearing his old enfolding topcoat, a long, striped beatnik scarf, and soft, rumpled-looking boots.
As for Maggie, she was often alone. Wildstrand couldn’t get away much because of Neve. Maggie understood. She was radiant. Her hair was long, a lustrous brown. They went into her bedroom in the middle of the day and made love in the stark light. It was very solemn. He’d gone dizzy with the depth of it. When he lay against her, his perceptions had shifted and he saw the secret souls of the objects and plants in the room. Everything had consciousness and meaning. Maggie was measureless, but she was ordinary, too. He stepped out of time and into the nothingness of touch. Afterward, Wildstrand had driven back to Pluto and arrived just in time for dinner.
Leaving the old man, Wildstrand usually patted his arm or made some other vague gesture of apology. This time Wildstrand was still thinking of his time with Maggie, and he bent dreamily over Neve’s father. He kissed the dry forehead, stroked back the old man’s hair and thoughtlessly smiled. The old man jerked away suddenly and eyed Wildstrand like a mad hawk.
“You bastard!” he cried.
The Gesture
ONE DAY NEVE was sitting in her bathrobe at lunch, tapping a knife against the side of a boiled egg. Suddenly she said, “I know who he was. I saw him in a play. Shakespeare. The play had two sets of twins who don’t meet until the end.”
The Plague of Doves Page 13