Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “Eli!” she said, in High Schoolmarm. She was the only one Frank had ever heard use his real name.

  “Don’t yell at me, Margie! Tell him to stop being such a little bitch,” he said, but he let Frank go with one last slap to the head. “I’m getting another beer. Who wants?” Catskills always quickly returned to his own version of normal after running amok, as if nothing had happened. Frank straightened out his hair and shirt.

  “Oh, help yourself,” Margie said, as if depressed by the fact that men were so reliably disappointing. She turned and left.

  “Don’t worry, Franky, really,” Paul said when they were alone.

  “Frank.”

  “Oh, right, sorry! As long as I am the main worker on it, then we’re fine? I can hire other people, it’s all legal. We wouldn’t want any records of you working more hours than me, though, OK? A salary agreement rather than an hourly rate, no record of your hours or mine?”

  He spread out a printout of his cost estimates and Frank looked at it for a few quiet minutes. Paul had used the standard National Construction Estimator, which was good, a little high if anything, and he had a total number of labor hours, with a single dollar figure.

  “How do you figure the labor costs?” Frank asked. He had a horse in that race.

  “Well, this is what I’m hoping? You see the total materials cost here? And figure two laborers at six bucks an hour, forty hours, twenty weeks, that’s $7,680. I’ll be working forty hours, too, four each day after work, and twenty each weekend, and I thought, maybe, if you worked sixty a week, that would do it — Catskills said you wanted overtime. As you can see, I have labor, materials, and subcontracting coming to eighty-two thousand, and the loan is for ninety? We have to figure some overruns, right?”

  “I always add twenty percent.” Paul looked crestfallen again. Jeezus, this guy was easily derailed. “But let’s say ten. I don’t mind sixty hours a week if I’m getting paid for it,” he said, “but how much?”

  Paul paused. Like he was afraid to say.

  “The thing is, if it all goes well,” he said, finally, looking up with wide-eyed innocence, “we could sell this for twice what it costs to build? Even more.”

  They looked at each other, and Catskills, returning with three more beers, was suddenly interested, too.

  “I thought this house was for you,” Frank said, with a reflexive motion of his chin toward the door Margie had walked through. Paul apprehensively glanced that way.

  “Once I explain the profit, and show her drawings for a bigger place, she’ll be on board.”

  “The state won’t mind?”

  “My lawyer says there’s nothing in the loan docs about not selling it. You have to move in, which I can do for a week, but that’s it. It will sell better if it’s furnished, anyway? This one will be in my name, and by then we’ll establish your residency and do the next one with state money under your name. When we sell that one, we’d have enough to each finance our own, or maybe do two at the same time?”

  Frank saw it immediately. Over a hundred grand profit per house. Four houses, a half million. Eight houses, a million bucks. This was his shot. He would finally have a stake. He had washed up on the shore alive, godammit, pockets full of doubloons. He wasn’t stupid: he doubted it all. But emotionally he had already signed the papers.

  “Fifty-fifty?” he asked.

  “Fifty-fifty. You do the extra labor? I’m the contractor, take care of the legal, etc.”

  “OK. And how do I live between now and the big payday?”

  “Obviously winter will slow us down, but we can get this first one done in four months, get the next one framed before winter, finish the interior even if it’s cold? Then launch the next two next spring. Sixteen or eighteen months from now we each have a $250,000 house and that much cash? That’s a lot of money.”

  No, duh, five times anything he had ever made.

  “Still,” Frank said. “You have a job, right?” Paul put on a coat and tie every day and worked — fairly high up — in an insurance company, one that insured nuclear power plants. Must have made this risk here seem miniscule. “I have to get paid something. I have to live on something. I’ve got child support.” Not court-ordered, but still.

  “I was thinking that maybe, if you took, say, $6 an hour like the other laborers, it would look kosher for the state? It’s not a very good hourly rate, I know? But you could maybe get by on $300 a week?”

  Frank looked at Catskills and cursed him silently, since no doubt that’s where Paul got the information about his income. But it didn’t matter. He could, in fact, get by on that, if it was steady, and the payoff was worth it. Defrauding the state of Connecticut seemed a little dicey, but that was mostly Paul’s lookout; besides, a lawyer was on the job and on paper maybe it did look OK. Ethically, he decided, he was in the clear. If the state was trying to extend the ownership society, well, he was, in fact, a poor person, and he would end up owning his own house. Maybe not in Connecticut, and maybe not this house, but still, he would be fulfilling the spirit, if not the letter of the law.

  “Make it $350, and charge it as a project expense. The fifty-fifty happens after that?”

  “OK?” Paul said.

  “Where do I sign?”

  “Nothing to sign. We can start right away?”

  In less than two years Frank would have hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was in. He had no protection if this Paul wasn’t as innocent as he seemed, but he looked at that soft, ineffectual-looking body, clearly on tenterhooks, and tried to imagine it screwing him over. Didn’t seem possible. And what the hell, at worst Frank would be right where he was. With the down time between jobs he wasn’t averaging $350 a week lately, and he knew the world well enough to know that contract or no contract, the guy with the lawyer had all the power. Paul was sweating, so Frank stayed silent.

  “There’s a motel in the town? I can rent a double room there by the month for $300. We can make that a business expense, too? I’ll need a place sometimes, I assume, but you can have it alone the rest of the time.”

  Frank was sick of being a loser. And he had been making all the right moves to get ready for this. He had stopped smoking pot all the time. He drank way less. He was keeping better records. He had gotten more serious about his reading to make up for never going to college — he didn’t count the semester he signed up for two night courses and, being high all the time, kind of forgot about them — literally forgot he was going to college. But now he was a new man. He was prepared for this chance.

  And Tracy. One unintended consequence of getting sober was that his relationship with Tracy changed. He had known all along that he came up short with her, could see it, see her exasperation with him. But he’d always assumed it was because he was high, or drunk, so much of the time — she loved him, he was almost her shining-armored knight, he was just still young and stupid, a.k.a. stoned, and she, older and wiser, was waiting for him to straighten up and be his true, brilliant, reliable, gallant self.

  But once he was straight, it was harder for either of them to pretend that he was the guy she was looking for. At nineteen, we all look like we can become anything, but by the time we’re twenty-five, our limitless prospects have already massively shut down, and we start to look like what we will become. She saw it and didn’t like it. They all but stopped having sex, and without that, there was no escaping her disinterest. She had had a project — fix him, make him less of a loser — but now, the drugs and booze put aside, the man replaced the boy, and she wasn’t impressed. She may have even preferred the boy.

  Less of a loser, but feeling like more of one, he begged for her love. In the final throes he wept in shame and anger, and this mooncow act made her even more fed up. When he moved out of the house it surprised no one, all his friends having seen it coming and wondering why it was taking so long.

  The kids were devastated, Lulu six and Kennedy eight, girls already left behind by their real dad. Although Kennedy had been stoic when he
told her, he knew she would fall apart as soon as she was alone in her room, and she did. Lulu was talking to herself in the full-length mirror on the bedroom door, as if reminding herself she existed, or maybe the opposite, lost in whatever fantasy she could grab. The only thing that would make it OK, he decided, the only thing that would allow him to feel like less of a shit, was to make something of himself. This boondoggle with Paul was exactly what he’d been waiting for, the thing that would set him up, make him solid. They could do six or eight more houses, then split the resulting millions and go their own merry ways. He imagined Tracy’s eyes full of surprised pride, and, once again, desire.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  From then on he and Paul had two sets of conversations, one when Margie was around that was all show, a big charade about the house they were building for her — did she want it this way? did she want it that way? — and one when she wasn’t there, working out the actual business plan, stopping to look at other building lots on their way to the lumber yard. Margie was curt with Frank, and he wasn’t sure why, but didn’t think it was because she sensed their plan. It didn’t even seem personal. Her contempt had been sitting there waiting for him, because of the kind of guy he was, a lost soul. He was used to that, he could deal. And besides, he wasn’t going to be that guy anymore. He was going places.

  Frank had been thrilled to get rid of his sad little divorced-dad Western Mass basement apartment and eliminate that part of his nut. A week after his first chat with Paul, he put his few pieces of furniture in Tracy’s garage, stuck his tools and clothes and some books in his truck, and drove the two hours south to meet Paul at the site. The surveyors had marked where the drive and building pad would go. Frank started clearing trees and Paul went off to work. He came back at six, when they were supposed to check into the motel.

  “Look what I found?” he said, unfurling an enormous crusty mass of canvas in a cloud of foul dust, holding his arm out like Vanna White showing off a prize. “A tent!” Faded army green with brownish blotches, it looked like it was left over from Ulysses Grant’s meetings during the Civil War. It stank of dusty mildew like only thick, ancient canvas can.

  “Think about it,” he said. “The motel for ten weeks? Three thousand dollars. We put in three thousand dollars of high-end fixtures instead? That’s a minimum $50,000 bump in the asking price. It’ll be like picking up thousand-dollar bills off the street. Think about it — every night we don’t spend $40 on a motel? It turns instantly into $1000. You want to spend $1000 a night on a motel?”

  Paul knew, by then, that Frank was a sucker for that kind of reasoning. They cleared a spot for the moldy monstrosity and built a platform with three 4x8s of plywood. The makeshift deck was almost big enough for the rank, asymmetrical, beat-up architectural marvel of a tent. It had a vestibule in front and flapped windows that, with some twigs holding them up, stuck out like awnings. Paul had bought a couple air mattresses, and Frank hung lines for clothes and a utility light.

  “We live in here?” Paul kept saying. “Fifty grand. A piece? Sweet.”

  His estimates could double like that. And Paul never spent a night in it. Not once. His use of “we” was sneaky like that.

  Two weeks later, Frank and Dmitry were hanging the second-floor joists, one of those repetitive two-man jobs where you can have a decent conversation, sitting on top of opposite framed walls.

  “Trog thinks your father was in the drug business, too,” Frank said. Trog had met Dmitry’s father Edwin in the 1970s, smuggling hash up from Morocco for the English market — Trog was smuggling hash, at any rate, and he suspected Edwin was as well, although Edwin never copped to it, and had a front as an importer of rugs and kilims and antiques, never letting on otherwise. On the ferry between Algeciras and Tangier, Trog could be mistaken for little except what he was, an American hippie drug dealer, but Edwin might have been a schoolteacher, an archeologist, a mining engineer. One day, the bartender in Trog’s local pub in Hackney whispered to him that some very square guy, reeking of Interpol, had been around asking questions. Trog decided it was time to close shop and head back to the hill country of Massachusetts. He packed up his British wife Catherine and a box of books and flew home. He grew a little weed behind his house but was otherwise retired.

  “Franky, the simple fact is this: I know nothing about my father,” he said.

  Having had a tough father himself, the kind of guy who would beat the crap out of you one minute and give you big hugs (and a sermon) the next, and who died young — his anger, Frank always assumed, causing an aneurysm to burst in his brain before he hit sixty — Frank was completely prepared for the I hate my father talk. And, frankly, where else do you go after I know nothing about him?

  “What do you mean you know nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was he a drinker?” Frank asked.

  “No.”

  “Angry?”

  “No, mild-mannered to a fault,” Dmitry said. “He is like, I don’t know — he’s like the clerk at the shop where you buy your bread, or your auto parts salesman, excuse me salesperson, someone you don’t really take any notice of, a nonentity.”

  They pulled the twenty-foot-long slabs of fir into place, their legs dangling into what would be the living room, slipping each board into galvanized hangers, and toed a few 10d nails into the plate and end joist, a task which always took Frank half the time it took Dmitry on his end.

  “You’re killing me. You’re getting paid by the hour,” Frank said for the umpteenth time. “I’m getting paid by the house.”

  Dmitry would then stop altogether, and say, “But, Franky! You own the means of production — for instance you own this hammer — and my surplus labor is going into your pocket.” Frank had been telling him about Marx, his latest reading, and proud as he was of his autodidactic accomplishments, he also wondered how much of it he had wrong.

  When Dmitry finally finished nailing, they grabbed the next joist and slid it in.

  “I mean, he was a smuggler of some sort, right?” Frank said. “That makes him at least mildly interesting. Morocco in the Seventies? That’s interesting.”

  “Perhaps,” Dmitry said. But he didn’t seem to be really thinking about it. He had lost interest.

  They talked some other nonsense for a while, and then, out of the blue, Dmitry said: “I realize now that you are right, Franky, that my father would have been an excellent smuggler, because like any proficient spy he is so ordinary he would never in a million years be suspected or even noticed. You look at him and your eye is immediately drawn elsewhere, not because he’s hideous or repulsive or anything, but because he’s unable to inspire interest. Look at him a split second and you find yourself contemplating the picnic table next to him, or the yew hedge behind him, or the grass to the left of his shoe, all of which seem more engaging.” He thought for a moment, sank a nail. “And if he was a spy, it would explain everything…” He trailed off, but then, slipping the next joist in, said, “Yes, that’s it, Franky. My daddy is MI6. Hence the fancy electronic gear in the attic.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Deadly serious.” He wasn’t. “And perhaps this is true of all successful spies; there is no way of knowing whether he is one unless he were to be arrested. Then we’d all go on the telly, like the neighbors of serial murderers, and say, he was always so quiet.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Ask him if he’s a spy?” he said, with a half laugh, followed by a moment of hesitation. Why he couldn’t hit a nail while he was thinking Frank would never understand, and asking would just mean they’d waste more minutes while he explained. “You don’t understand, Franky. He’s not a man you ask questions. It’s not a psychological thing — well, it is psychological I suppose, but not about my psychology, and not his exactly — even if you intend to ask him a question, one look at him and you realize you can’t, any more than you could ask a tree, or a cow” — and here he let out one of his distressingly regular,
long-burst farts, the result of eating a pound of Oreo cookies every day — “I mean you can, after all, ask him what time it is or whether he would mind passing the butter. You just can’t ask him a real question. It’s as if some force field surrounds him that transmogrifies every serious query into, Look like rain to you? — or no, not even that, that’s too ominous: Right, then? That’s all you can ask: Right, then? His answer, ineluctably, is, Yes, right, then. I’m not kidding, Franky. Somehow, alchemically, or like an invisible centrifuge taking your words and separating out all their meaning, conversation is drained of content. Right, then?” he paused in fake anticipation. “Right-o!” They slipped another twenty-foot joist into its hangars. “Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “He’s a perfectly pleasant chap. Perfectly pleasant.”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. “Maybe that’s not such a bad way for a father to be, kind of neutral.”

  Dmitry sighed.

  “Honestly, Franky, you have to get over your father, you really do. Yes, he was a little brutal, OK,” he said, and added, in his American guy accent, “Hey, really, it’s hanging you up, man,” and then, back in his own voice, “That stuff with your dad. Let it go. I’m so much younger than you and already I don’t really care about my father’s non-entityness. I don’t, Franky, it’s just that you asked.”

  Frank was shocked, since most of the time whatever he said seemed to act simply as prompts for further tangential monologue on Dmitry’s part, and the last thing he expected was any insight. But Dmitry was right that he spent too much time pitying himself for his tragic youth. His father was complicated. He should get over it. He was careening toward thirty. It was time to let his dead father stay dead. They were lowering the last joist into place, a natural endpoint for the conversation.