“You want me to help you send my husband to jail.”
“I want you to do the right thing.”
“Which is what, exactly, in this day and age? You check the price of gas lately, Agent Roorda? You want to call your friendly neighborhood mortgage broker, ask them to do the right thing? Right and wrong, it’s all gone corporate. Now I have to get home and start dinner.” I hit the button on my car’s opener and it flashed its lights. “Excuse me.”
“I’ll be seeing you around,” said Agent Roorda, once I was settled in the driver’s seat with the engine running.
“Not if I see you first.” I pulled out of the parking space smartly, shifted into drive, and accelerated so fast that he had to take a step back.
Was it a right or a wrong that I didn’t say anything to Bobby? I chased the ideas round and round through my tired head. Right to stand by my husband? Wrong that he was defrauding somebody or other, when so many laws had been arranged to allow for legal fraud? Right or wrong to want to save myself? It all collapsed into a big heap of doing nothing. And of course by then I’d gotten pretty good at ignoring things as a way of life.
Still, I hoped there was some easy exit we could take. “Bobby,” I said one night in bed, “I think we should make a clean start. Be done with your project—” That’s what we called it, like something he was putting together for the school science fair. “And have you get some sort of regular old job. It doesn’t have to be anything much. Enough to tide us over until times turn around again.”
Bobby yawned. We’d just made love and he was drifting off to sleep, maybe not the ideal time for such a conversation. But sometimes heavy things roll out of you on their own. Bobby said, “Only a little while longer. One or two more golden eggs.”
“No, Bobby. Now.”
“Soon. Few loose ends to tie up.”
“Soon soon. Promise.”
He had been fondling me, in a drowsy, afterward way, and now his hand stopped. “What’s up with you?”
“It’s too risky.”
“Babe, there’s risk in everything. Including the stock market. Okay, bad example. Hey, we’ll be back to Mr. and Mrs. Clean Upstanding in no time. You think I want to end up like my old man?”
I said of course not, and he gave me another friendly groping, and then he was asleep.
I didn’t see him first. Agent Roorda. It was a Saturday and I was at the Sav-A-Lot, checking detergent and Kleenex and whatnot off my list, when he rounded a corner, blocking his cart with mine. “Oh, hey there, Mrs. Crabtree. Wait a sec, I’ll back up.”
He was no doubt the only man in the place wearing a tie, though he’d at least shed his sports coat. The only item in his cart was a packaged angel food cake. “Picking up a few things,” he said. “My mom used to make angel cakes. I don’t expect this’ll measure up to homemade.”
“Where’s Agent what’s-his-name?” We were right in the middle of the store and it was crowded with families and shrieking children. I couldn’t believe he was here.
“Tate. That’s him over in the coffee shop.” Agent Roorda pointed him out, and I could see right away why Agent Roorda was the one doing the legwork. Agent Tate looked to be about sixty going on eighty. He was hunched over a paper coffee cup, and he might as well have had one of those electric signs over his head, running down the months, days, and hours until he reached retirement. “He’s got some cardiac issues,” said Agent Roorda, as if reading the thoughts on my face.
“You guys work weekends. I’m impressed.”
“Whatever the case requires. Sure.”
It put a chill on my heart, thinking of Bobby as a “case.” I wondered if our phones were tapped, or if people were going through our garbage, or worse. I scanned the grocery list in my hand to steady myself, and pushed my cart down the aisle. Agent Roorda made a U-turn to follow me. “Mrs. Crabtree, I’m thinking you’re just a victim of circumstances here. I’m thinking none of this was your idea. Unfortunately, the law doesn’t see it that way. If you benefit from the proceeds of illegal activity, then you have a liability.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Do you see pancake syrup?”
“We need the hard drive from his computer.”
“Get a warrant.”
“Help us so we can help you. This is a limited-time offer.”
I’d led us to the big wall coolers with the milk and eggs and I stopped, not remembering what I’d come for. Agent Roorda and I were dimly reflected in the glass surface. We stared into it as if we were having our picture taken. I was startled to see how likely a couple we looked. Same light hair (mine more artful with its streaks and highlights), same pale, stolid faces. We could have been the couple in American Gothic, dressed up for a day off the farm.
I turned away from the glass. “Where did you grow up, Agent Roorda?”
“Paris, Illinois,” he said, not missing a beat. “My parents still live there.”
“No kidding. I’m from Olney. We’re practically neighbors.”
“You could say that.” He was cautious about where I was taking this.
“So we’re both a couple of hicks who made it to the big city. Worked hard. Bettered ourselves. A toehold on the American Dream. Why do you think me or anybody else would want to give that up?”
“Nothing in any American Dream says it’s all right to bend the laws until they break.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” I said, and I left him there to contemplate the price of milk, which had gone up twice in the last month.
At the checkout, the girl asked me how I was today. “The FBI followed me in here,” I told her, and she asked me if plastic was okay.
On Wall Street, giant investment banks rocked on their foundations. Not literally, but something close to it, and when that very week a twenty-two-story construction crane came loose from its moorings and pancaked a New York condo building, filling a city block with rubble and the innocent dead, well, it seemed like a sign. People whose job it was to make pronouncements about the economy argued over the different gradations of Bad. If we’d been told that a giant asteroid was hurtling our way through black and frozen space, it would have seemed par for the course.
“Look around and you can always find somebody else worse off,” my dad used to say, whenever we were faced with some reversal or privation. “Yes, and somebody better off too,” my mother would chime in from her place at the kitchen table, sorting through our bills as if they were a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. And I have to say, that was pretty much the way I saw the world, going back and forth between the two views. There but for the grace of God go I, and Why shouldn’t we have a new SUV? I’m not claiming it was admirable, just another part of contrary human nature, our better and worse angels. I think that all those months, I kept trying to hold on to something that wouldn’t change, some bedrock certainty I could count on, be it a job, a future, love, or who I’d chosen to be in life.
The day after I’d encountered Agent Roorda in the Sav-A-Lot, a Sunday, Bobby and I took one of our walks. The last cold spell was behind us and the grass had greened up, the trees were budding, and a few damp spring flowers had begun to uncurl, crocus and daffodils and those little blue stars I don’t know the name of but they always break my heart, each one so small and so perfect. We were surprised to see a Realtor’s sign in front of one of the grandest houses in the development, an oversized nouveau-Victorian with turrets and balconies, scrollwork, fanciful windows. Or maybe we were not surprised, once we thought about it.
As it happened, the Realtor was having an open house, so we went inside. What a staircase! Such acreage of shining wood floors, so many luxurious appointments in the kitchen, in the near-decadent master bath! We gawked and envied, as we were meant to do, but the sadness that was never too far out of reach rose up in me as I considered that people used to live here, no one we knew, but human lives no different from our own, and now all traces of them had been erased. It was too easy to imagine our house, mine
and Bobby’s, emptied out and wiped clean, as if we’d never been, and strangers’ feet echoing on the bare floors.
When we came outside, a black Town Car was idling at the curb, and Agent Roorda was extracting a flier from the plastic sleeve attached to the For Sale sign.
I turned the other way and set off for home. Bobby hurried to catch up with me. “What’s the deal, huh?”
I told him I was catching a chill.
What to do? What to leave undone? I didn’t seem to be able to bring myself to be an FBI rat fink, but I’m not going to throw any flowers at myself. I just thought that process would be every bit as terrifying as waiting to get busted. And I was still hoping that Bobby would pull it off. Not just because of money, wanting the money. That had been a deal with the devil, and the devil could have it all back, as far as I was concerned. But I wanted to believe in Bobby. I wanted him to triumph, be the hero in the movie that was my life. You always want a man to come through, live up to all the things you saw in him back when you were first in love.
A few days? A week, two? I was eating bad and sleeping worse by then, and time had a bleary, jerky quality. Easter was in there somewhere, with its chocolate rabbits and potted lilies. But it was still tax season. I know that, because one morning on my way to work, I was waiting at the traffic light and watching Miss Liberty and Uncle Sam doing their thing on the sidewalk in front of the tax shop, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. The light changed and I pulled into the strip mall’s parking lot and got out of the car.
“Uncle Sam wants you!” Agent Roorda greeted me, strolling across the lot.
“I don’t believe this.”
“It’s only for a day or two.” Agent Roorda removed his starred and striped hat, which made him freakishly tall. He patted at his forehead with a handkerchief. The day was already warm. “It’s actually kind of nice, getting out in the fresh air. Usually on a stakeout we’re cooped up in cars or some kind of trailer.”
I pointed to Agent Tate, who made the world’s saddest Miss Liberty. He’d stalled out and was sitting on a bench as if waiting for a bus. The green plastic sheeting sagged between his knees. “How did you get him to do it?”
“There was some comp time he’d been negotiating. Now he’s going to get paid for it.”
I guess I said something like that working out well for him. I was still in a state of stupid disbelief, as if I’d gotten up that morning and found the world turned into some scary cartoon. Then I said, “A day or two.”
Agent Roorda gave a perfunctory wave at the passing traffic. He was too big for the costume and his ankles protruded from the striped pants. He wore what I guessed were regulation FBI black socks and shiny black wingtips. “I shouldn’t have said that, Mrs. Crabtree. But make no mistake, major bad-type things are in the pipeline. I’ve tried to tell you that all along.”
“I have to get back to work.” But I didn’t move. I said, “It must be nice to have a job that’s all about truth and justice. No, I mean it. Good guys, bad guys. You always know where you stand.”
“I don’t decide those things, Mrs. Crabtree. I follow orders just like anybody else. But I serve my country, and I’m proud of that.”
“Well, it used to be a better country.”
He was distracted by Agent Tate, who had fished a pair of binoculars out from under the green plastic and was training them in the direction of our driveway. “That’s not for me to say.”
“Good-bye, Agent Roorda. Keep in touch.”
“Count on it,” he said, turning back to the busy traffic. But in fact I never saw him again.
That night in our bed I put my mouth up to Bobby’s ear and whispered. I felt his body next to mine shiver and then grow rigid. That was almost the hardest part, right then and there, feeling all the sick-making fear pass through his skin, both of us knowing how sundered we were now from the life we’d led. A few days later, the FBI raided the house. It was another first for the neighborhood. Agent Roorda wasn’t with them. I like to think that he had some choice in the matter and decided not to join in out of his personal feelings for me. It would have been too embarrassing for us both, having him poke around through our dresser drawers and the refrigerator’s freezer compartment. They really do look through the freezer. I guess people stash drugs or money there more often than you’d imagine.
Bobby was long gone, of course. There was some more unpleasantness to get through, but by then I had a good criminal lawyer, the kind who slices and dices the law so that you’re left with some odd-shaped piece of it. There were ways in which I was innocent and ways in which I was guilty, so I guess staying out of jail was enough of a good deal.
The bank foreclosed on the house and I moved to another city. They still keep tabs on me, waiting for me to show up with some of Bobby’s ill-gotten loot, but we’ve been clever about that in ways I won’t go into. Uncle Sam still wants me. Bobby too, though I expect he can keep one step ahead of them for quite some time. I’d like to think I’ll see him again someday, now that I know for sure I’m pregnant. My last dishonesty was not telling Bobby I’d gone off my pills, but I can’t say I’m sorry.
Meanwhile, times in general have improved, a modest up cycle after all the down. But it’s as if the whole world’s slipped a notch. No more happy dollars filling the air like flocks of birds. We’re all sadder but wiser, as my mother used to say darkly, when one or another bad thing had come to pass, just as she’d predicted. But I’d rather hold to my dad’s favorite saying, which was about never missing the water until the well runs dry.
Smash
It happened the usual dumb way these things happen: driving along, driving along, then, smash. The voices of metal shrieking, the angels of automotive death.
I was on my way to work. I wasn’t paying any more or any less attention than usual. Commuting as I do—much as everyone does—you zip along inside your enclosed space with your coffee and your radio and the rest of your personal comforts, and the world outside is like wallpaper, almost, in a room where you have to sit for a time. Just get it over with, go on to the next thing. Zone out. Twenty or thirty or forty minutes you’ll never get back. Maybe if you’re a champ at meditation, a guru or something, you can devote your life to sifting through consciousness a grain at a time so that nothing is lost. Whole days spent watching lotus flowers drop into a pond. Nice, but it’s not the way most of us live. Nope. We have to get to work.
Instead of lotus flowers it was a twenty-five-foot aluminum extension ladder come loose from its rigging and lying like an orange slash mark along both lanes of the interstate. It must have just landed. It had my number and nobody else’s. I saw traffic in the passing lane veering wide, then I was right on top of the thing. I braked, tried to swerve onto the shoulder, clipped the ladder with my front wheels and threw it underneath me. There was a grinding racket as the car shook and thumped and the steering wheel was a broken toy.
Someone else hit me from behind, hard, sending the car shooting off the road, briefly airborne. It turned around 360 degrees in the ditch, with a noise as if it had been dumped whole into a blender.
When everything was over, I waited for the great Announcement that would tell me I was dead. It didn’t come, but that was when my heart started flopping around in a panic, wondering if I was gravely injured but didn’t yet know it. Neck or spine broken, or the soft parts inside of me burst open, and then a whole new fear, that my face might have been split or gouged, ruined. There was by now a great deal of broken glass around me.
I touched my fingertips to my face, registering also that I had the use of my hands, and was relieved to find no new seams or leaks. Just the same tidy arrangement of eyes, nose, et cetera, as
before. And there were people crowding around the car door,
peering in and tapping at the window, and a thick, burnt smell, and in the distance, like a wasp sound you’d bat away, a siren.
“Sir? Sir?” the people outside kept saying, but that was not my name so I didn’t answer
. With difficulty, they pried open the door. I was extracted, led to a spot on a green embankment, wrapped in a blanket, and made to sit. How was I, was I all right? Everyone wanted to know. It was thrilling to think that so many people, all of them hitherto specks on the traveling wallpaper, had stepped out of the wall, so to speak, to make these solicitous inquiries on my behalf. But I couldn’t say anything. I felt abashed, unworthy.
Someone said, “Whoever dumped that ladder sure as hell didn’t come back for it.”
“Would you? Tickets, court appearances, fines, all that?”
“I’d like to think I would.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d keep on going. If I have to be honest about it, which I guess I don’t.”
My car had died and gone to car heaven. The funeral was being held right then and there. A wrecker made its untroubled way down the side of the ditch, like a tank on a battlefield. A man got out and attached a hook to the car’s undercarriage—the bumper had been bitten off—and began the noisy, officious process of winching it up. I can’t say I felt sad, watching it, or felt much of anything else. It was only one more remarkable thing, a car aimed skyward and ready to launch.
All this time people had been doing things to me with rubber gloves and flashlights and probes of different sorts. These were the necessary examinations before you were declared officially Alive, and so far I had not satisfied them. Either I had lost the power of speech, or perhaps I’d never possessed it in the first place.
A small pile of my personal belongings had been assembled on the grass. Wallet, phone, briefcase, insulated and insulted coffee mug. Someone picked up my wallet and flipped through it. “Mr.———. Is that your name? Can you tell us your name?”
It seems like such an easy thing, but it was beyond me. My name no longer fit me. It had been bent out of shape and flung aside, like the car’s bumper.
“He looks familiar,” someone else said. “Like he was on TV, maybe.”
“I don’t think so. He’s too ordinary-looking.”
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