Rudy had financed the cruise by liberating three laptops from the Walmart warehouse where he worked. Sold them to friends at 30% off retail. It had been the biggest heist of his life, of 20 years of shoplifting and penny ante thievery. The first at the age of five, a bubble gum cigar from the drugstore. Up until now they had all been impulsive acts, whims, spur of the moment. This one had been different.
“I can’t go,” Amy had argued. “How can I go? I’m not even eligible for vacation yet.”
“You have to go,” he told her.
“Well I can’t.”
“In that case I’ll just have to take somebody else.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Would you really do that?”
“Only if you force me to.”
“But it’s so expensive. I mean, a cruise. They’re expensive, aren’t they?”
“I’ll pay for everything.”
“How can you manage that?”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
In any case he had to get away from the loading dock for a while. He had to or something was going to explode in him. He felt on the verge of something, he told her, though he could not say what, or whether it might be good or bad. But he had felt something looming inside him, building to crescendo. It had started the morning Alex hadn’t shown up for work. Alex the college kid, barely 19 , summer worker between his freshman and sophomore years at Duke. Alex didn’t show up one Friday, so Rudy telephoned the boy’s home to chew him out for not calling in sick, for leaving them short-handed. The boy’s mother said, “Oh didn’t he tell you? Alex left for Seattle, he’s accepted a job there. Computer graphics, web design, 120k a year to start, plus a 25k signing bonus. They’ll even send him to school at night to finish his degree! Isn’t that wonderful?”
Immediately a knot bloomed in Rudy’s stomach, a lump the size of a grapefruit, twice as sour. It sent tentacles into his chest, scratched at his throat, pinched his testicles. Nerdy little snot-nose, he thought, and even muttered it out loud from time to time, like the phrase from a jingle he could not get out of his head.
And so, the cruise, the get-away, the laptops. Two days of figuring out how to fudge the paperwork. How to conceal the laptops in the warehouse. How to slip them into his truck.
The cruise was supposed to dissolve that knot in his stomach. And for the first few hours on the water, he had imagined it might work. He had still felt on the verge of something, but something promising, explosively good. Barely underway, he and Amy had stuffed themselves at the buffet table, dropped a few dollars in the casino, made noisy love on their bed.
That night they both drank too much, though for different reasons. Then, back in their little room, she had been unusually receptive to experimentation, allowed him a pleasure previously denied, and afterward she would not take her hands off him until he was ready to make love again. Then she straddled him and rode him furiously, oblivious to or maybe even excited by the noise she was making, and startling him when she began to talk out loud, something she had never done before, always the most silent of lovers, but this time adamant, unrestrained, vociferous.
Later, lying side by side, he had said, “You never talk like that. You never act like that. I should get you drunk on champagne more often.”
“It’s something about being here, surrounded by all this, I don’t know, this luxury. It makes me feel dangerous.”
It was only on the second day, after lunch, that the sense of promise soured in him. Amy had insisted that they go to the sun deck. In their Walmart swimsuits and rubber sandals. Her beach towel sporting a picture of Winnie the Pooh, his a bottle of Budweiser. He spent two hours neck-deep in the whirlpool, simmering with embarrassment while she paraded her soft pale body around the deck.
That same evening, after dinner, he liberated a bottle of champagne from the buffet counter, took it back to their cabin, tried to reverse the entropy. But that night she wanted only conventional lovemaking, no auditory accompaniments. Afterward she kept her hands to herself, rolled over to watch a movie on their TV. He stared at the ceiling. After a long while he eased up close against her back and maneuvered himself against her buttocks. She neither moved nor acknowledged him there. He pushed a little harder. She rolled over suddenly and looked at him with frightened eyes and shook her head no.
That was when he climbed out of bed, told her he needed a cigarette.
“But you quit,” she said.
“I’ll quit again tomorrow.”
Up to the lido deck he went, smoking, staring at black water. The feeling was strong in him now. Something was imminent, something was coming. Maybe he was going to kill somebody. Maybe he was going to kill himself. Maybe he would return to his cabin and do whatever he wanted to Amy whether she liked it or not. He felt capable of anything that night. Every possibility existed. All he needed was a sign, something to point him in the right direction. Consequences were of no importance.
He started walking. Quietly, stealthily, because he understood somehow that he was sneaking up on something. Sneaking up on himself perhaps. The end of Rudy Fenton, Walmart employee, the boy from Hickory, North Carolina, the poor swimmer with the pimpled back. He seemed to be the only individual out there in the moonlight, everybody else holed up in the casino or the disco or locked away in their staterooms doing who knows what to each other.
He walked for 20 minutes, circumnavigating the lido deck twice, then finally, cigarette gone, smoked to the butt and tossed overboard, he went up the stairs to the sun deck, to the stars at the top of the stairs.
Two steps from the sun deck he heard them. A man and a woman, over by the whirlpool somewhere. He crept forward slowly, scrutinized the dark. There, that shadow on the darkness. Two people wrapped in a blanket on a chaise lounge, the chaise lounge rhythmically scraping, bucking atop the deck.
Had it not been for the woman’s voice he might not have watched, might not have inched closer. But her voice was resonant and rich, the purr of a big cat, it growled at the man. “Not yet, damn you,” she told him. “Don’t you dare. Not yet.”
Rudy pressed himself to a bulkhead, crept closer, just a little bit closer. He could smell her perfume now, the spiciness of it, a tropical breeze, something like cloves and lavender. She was atop the man and kept talking all the time and she did not limit herself to just one phrase as Amy had done. This woman’s vocabulary was extensive. The more she talked, the more Rudy felt that he was getting some of what the man beneath her was getting.
By the time the man moaned and arched his back, she had thrown the blanket off her shoulders. She was standing up, straddling the chaise lounge, doing deep knee-bends as vigorously as she could.
But the man was finished and she was not happy about it. “Damn you anyway,” she said. She swung one leg over him and stood for just a moment beside the chaise, looking in Rudy’s direction just for an instant, so that his breath caught in his chest, snagged on something sharp. But apparently she had not noticed him. She turned back to the man and straddled his head and lowered herself atop him and started talking again.
Rudy had to meet this woman, that was all he knew. He wanted desperately to see her face so that he could recognize her in the daylight. She was what he had been waiting for and what had been building inside him.
He scrutinized the deck for an opportune place to conceal himself, a place from which to watch when, inevitably, she would rise and return to her room, with or without the man, walking through sufficient light that Rudy could see her face illuminated. He required only a glimpse in order to memorize her face forever. He had already memorized her body, the silhouette of heavy but not ponderous breasts, the strong and tireless hips. He guessed that she was nearly as tall as him, feet 5’9 ½”. Not a small woman certainly, not a girl timid and uncertain, not a girl too soft inside and out.
He identified what he thought would be the perfect hiding spot, and was on the verge of moving toward it when the woman cried out, one long sustained Yesss! so loud and uninhibited that Rudy almost
giggled, but held his own noise in check, made his chest ache by trying not to laugh.
She shivered for a moment and shook herself, her head hanging limp. Then she stood and reached down for a glass on the deck and raised it up and drank deeply from it. She drew back her arm then and hurled the glass far out into the sea. Then she dragged a second chaise lounge up beside the man’s and pulled the blanket off the deck and draped it over her body.
“You mind if I have some of that?” the man said.
“Yes I do.”
He got up and walked over to a deck chair where there was a stack of folded towels, took two and returned to his own chair and covered himself. “You might try to hold it down a decibel or two,” he told her. “Just a suggestion.”
“You might try keeping your suggestions to yourself,” she said.
Rudy was so focused on the woman now, leaning toward her, drawn to her like a needle compass to magnetic north, that he no longer heard the throb of the ship’s engines, no longer heard the music from the disco three decks below. He was breathing her in with every breath and he could swear that her heat was washing over him in dizzying waves.
He saw every movement she made, every gesture, so keen was his attention. He saw when she raised her right leg, stuck her toes out beneath the end of the blanket, bent and cracked her big toe. He saw when she reached across to the man and took his hand in hers, laid his hand atop her breast.
And when she began to talk again, it was in softer tones than before, sweetly, seductively. With every suggestion by her and every agreement or counter-suggestion from the man, Rudy felt more certain of his own destiny, more certain that the vague something on whose verge he had been standing since leaving Hickory was now within his reach.
Finally he understood it all, understood every last flutter of anticipation he had been feeling. This man and woman were formulating a plan and Rudy was a part of it. It did not matter that they did not know he was a part of it. This was his call from Seattle. This was why he had been compelled to steal those laptops. It was not about sex at all. Sex, next to the things he overheard that night, was icing on the cake.
He waited until their conversation waned and the man and woman began to stir, to reach for their clothing. Then he backtracked, creeping backward on his heels. He went to the place he had picked out earlier, behind the corner of an equipment locker, and knelt like a shadow, and tried to calm his racing heart.
When the man and woman walked past five minutes later, she was so close that he could have reached out and brushed her cheek with his fingertips. She trailed the scent of cloves and lavender and the dizzying musk of her flesh. In the glow of the lights along the rail, he saw that she was older than he had thought, maybe 10, even 15 years older than him. But her face was lovely and angular and she had the calmest, most confident eyes he had ever seen.
He waited another five minutes before returning to his own cabin. Amy was asleep. He undressed at the foot of the bed, not even attempting to be quiet. But still she would not awaken. Finally he drew the covers off her and slid in beside her and with his arm behind her back he pulled her against him.
“Mmm,” she said, but she did not open her eyes.
“Get up on top,” he told her.
Her eyes came open, but only for a moment. “I’m too sleepy.”
Gently he rolled her onto her back and moved atop her. He was very noisy and maybe too rough but soon she was wide awake again and she did not seem to mind.
* * *
After that it all moved quickly. In the morning Rudy and Amy crowded into their snug, narrow shower and he recounted the conversation he had overheard on the sun deck.
“Did she actually say it?” Amy asked. Even under the hot spray, she had goosebumps. “Did she come right out and tell him to kill her husband?”
“She said shoot, not kill. ‘That’s when you shoot him,’ she said. But I don’t think she was talking about a flesh wound, do you?”
“They must have been joking.”
“Like hell they were. This woman is serious business, believe me.”
The man had asked her, “Why don’t I break into the house some night? I’ll be a burglar. I’ll shoot him in bed. Maybe I’ll rape you, tie you up, wrap some duct tape around your mouth.”
“You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?” the woman had said.
“There’s no chance of being seen if I do it at the house.”
“Who’s going to see you at the factory? It’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Somebody could drive by and see my car there.”
“Nobody ever uses that road anymore, you know that. Teenagers maybe, after dark. But you’ll be long gone by then.”
“I could take a rental, I suppose. Could I get a rental by paying cash? That’s the only way they couldn’t trace it back to me. If I can even convince them to let me pay in cash.”
“Stop worrying so much,” she said.
“That’s easy for you to say, isn’t it?”
“Listen, it has to be done at the factory and that’s the end of it. The money is in his office.”
“That’s another thing I don’t understand. What’s so important about the money? It’s insignificant.”
“Fifty thousand in cash is insignificant to you?”
“It’s nothing compared to what you’ll get afterward. The business is worth what—two, three million a year?”
“It has to be at the office,” she said.
“So that you can be at the club with your friends. Playing tennis. Beyond suspicion.”
“Listen, Caspar Milquetoast,” she told him. “It will be months before I can start drawing anything from the business accounts. Plus he’s got partners. They’re going to wrangle for every penny. And in the meantime, what are we supposed to live on—your income? What do you make a year? Minus my tips, I mean.”
“You’re sure he’ll be alone in his office?”
“What did I say already?”
“And the money will definitely be in the safe?”
“One last time,” she had said. “Now pay attention. The last Friday of every July, and the last Friday of every January. Two packets of cash, $25,000 each. One for each driver. The factory closes at 5:00, everybody goes home except for Russ. The trucks show up right after dark. They load up all the barrels of old chemicals, Russ gives each driver his money, and off they go to dump the stuff who knows where. The entire operation takes less than two hours.”
“And between the time the factory closes and the trucks get there. What’s Russ doing all this time?”
“What would he be doing? He has his dinner, he watches TV—”
“How?”
“How what?”
“How does he get his dinner? Does he order in? Does he drive into town? Where’s the food come from?”
“He picks it up at lunchtime. A Blimpie’s and two glazed doughnuts.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“I can even tell you what’s on the damn sandwich. I’ve been married to him for 19 years, haven’t I? Don’t you think I know the man’s habits?”
“He just waits there alone in his office. Watching TV.”
“He’s not alone. He’s got his Blimpie’s and his doughnuts. He’s in heaven.”
“Okay then. From the time the factory closes, how long do you think before he starts to eat?”
She blew out a breath.
“I’m the one who’s taking the risk,” he’d told her.
“The suspicion always falls on the spouse.”
“Except when she’s playing doubles at the country club.”
“There’s no risk. I’ve taken all the risk out of it for you. I’m the one who’s taking the risk.”
“You?” he had said.
“Who stole his office key and had a duplicate made for you? Who drove to that idiotic gun show in West Virginia and bought you a handgun?”
“Try to keep your voice down,” he said.
“You either wan
t to do this or you don’t. You either want to be with me or you don’t.”
“I do want to be with you, you know that. But this other, it’s....”
“Then forget it. Don’t do it. Forget we even discussed it.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing. Nothing changes. I keep living with a slug and playing tennis five nights a week. And for an hour every Wednesday, you keep trying to improve my backhand.”
“You have a lovely backhand,” he told her.
She said nothing to this.
“Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “that I have a master’s degree in psychology?”
“And?” she said.
“I wanted to be a therapist once. Wanted to help people.”
Again she remained silent.
“Have you ever wondered—” he began.
She held up a hand. “Don’t. Don’t start wondering on me, please.”
Half a minute passed. She said, “Just so you know. I despise weak people.”
This was followed by a two full minutes of silence. Finally she spoke again, but very softly this time, so softly that Rudy could barely hear. “Do you want to change your life or don’t you?”
The man in the chaise lounge did not answer. But Rudy, his spine hard against the bulkhead, had nodded in the darkness. His lips had mouthed the answer for all of them. I do. I do. I do.
* * *
For a while Rudy did not press Amy for any kind of decision, did not let her know that his own decision had been made. Instead he suggested that they simply observe the couple as closely as possible, eavesdrop, ingratiate, glean whatever useful information they could.
On the fourth evening of the cruise, when Amy returned to the ship after a shopping trip ashore, while Rudy had followed the man to a dive shop on the beach and then passed the rest of the afternoon alone on the sand, Amy came into the cabin and tossed her bag onto the bed and told him, too happily, “We can’t do it.”
He, lying on his belly in his undershorts, his back flame red, said, though he already knew, “Do what?”
“They live in Pennsylvania! Halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie, she said.”
Incident on Ten-Right Road Page 15
