“Fee?” I echoed. “For what?”
Another pause. “She’s a—what would you call her, Will?—a rain-bringer. A shaman.”
The woman lifted her eyes for the first time and said something then, her voice a dry rasp that rattled in her throat.
“What was that?” I asked.
“She says she can help us.” Alta shrugged. “She has powers.”
At this point I just let out a laugh. “Good luck with that,” I said, rising from the chair and making my way back across the room to the foyer, where I stood waiting with my hand on the doorknob while they exchanged glances and finally, reluctantly, got up and followed me. I held the door for them. The sun blazed on the doorstep. The wind blew. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “how much is she asking?”
They were already out the door. Will hunched his shoulders, swung his head back round. “She doesn’t want money.”
“What does she want, then?”
Alta turned now too, as did the dwarf woman. “She wants a Mercedes,” Alta said.
“450 SEL,” the woman put in, her voice as dry as the wind itself. “Verde Brook Metallic. Amaretto interior. And twenty-inch wheels—only the twenty, not the nineteen.”
Absurd, right? Effrontery to the nth power? When I told Micki about it she gave me a look of disgust. “How did people like that even get into the neighborhood?” she demanded, as if it had been up to me in the first place.
I shrugged and pointed out to her, as gently as I could, that it was a matter of income. “The people on the west side, in the condos? I’m sure they’re even worse.”
We were in the kitchen. It was hot. Her scalp glistened with sweat. “Tell me about it,” she said, crossing to the sink for a glass of water, then thinking better of it when she saw the yellow tape I’d wrapped around the faucet as a reminder. “And I’ll bet they flush their toilets too, don’t they?”
Yes, yes they did. And they showered and let the water run while they were brushing their teeth and god knew what else. This was what it had come to, a universal resentment of anyone who used water for any purpose, when it was meant for us—for us and us alone. Here was the lesson of the village green, writ large, but then the village green wouldn’t have been there to abuse in the first place if it hadn’t rained, would it?
A few days later, when I was out in the yard assessing the condition of the orange trees (there’d been no fruit for two years now and no blossoms either), I heard the thin keening of a voice struggling against the wind and realized, after a moment, that it was coming from the far side of the fence, in the Veniers’ yard. Puzzled, I crossed to the fence, went up on tiptoe and peered over. There was the dwarf woman, the shaman, dressed in Indian regalia—feathers, deerskin, a bone breastplate—and doing a slow-motion dance around the faded remnant of lawn the Veniers had been able to keep alive through their illicit means. She was chanting, her voice rising and falling on the wind, and she held a rusted Chock full o’Nuts can in one hand, from time to time dipping her fingers into the mouth of it to extract droplets of the liquid it contained and fling them over her shoulder. The liquid—it was a bright arterial red—stained her fingertips and shone greasily under the assault of the sun. I understood then that it wasn’t paint she was releasing into the air and in the same instant felt something open up inside me, a kind of awe I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Absurd, yes, but there it was. “Hi, hi, hi-hi,” she chanted. “Heya-heya-heya.” The sky stood motionless. Nothing moved, not even a bird. I stood there and watched her till the muscles in my calves felt as if they’d been soldered in place.
I’d like to report that it rained the next day, but that didn’t happen. Things just got worse. A man whose water had been cut off after he’d exceeded his ration three months in a row attacked the director of the water board as he bent over a bowl of pasta e fagiole at a three-star restaurant downtown. Water vigilantes began to patrol the streets. Car washes closed. There was legislation on the table to criminalize golf. On a more personal level, Everett called to say he was getting married and Micki sobbed over the phone for half an hour because there wasn’t even the faintest hope we could attend, our credit cards maxed out and our frequent-flier miles long since depleted. Through it all the dwarf woman never stopped chanting. A week went by, then two, then a month, and still she kept at it, her voice a thin plaint that conspired with the trills and whistles of the birds till it passed beyond recognition. The Veniers’ lawn grew browner, greasier, the blades of grass gone heavy with coagulated blood. “Hi, hi, hi-hi,” the woman chanted. Nights fell. Days broke. Nothing changed.
And then one morning I woke to a presence I couldn’t have named, a lightness, a release, as if a band had been stretched beyond capacity till it snapped. Micki was there in bed beside me, snoring softly. The air was fecund, crouching over us like a living thing, daylight just beginning to show at the windows. That was when the sound started in, a sound so alien I didn’t recognize it at first. It began as a patter on the roof, and then it quickened, and then the drains were rattling, macho, macho as all hell. I snatched my wife’s hand and pulled her from the bed and in the next moment we were out in the yard, our faces lifted to the sky as the rain beat down around us and beat and beat again till we were soaked through and fell to our knees laughing in the mud, the glorious mud that clung to us and saturated us and promised everything.
Science, meteorological science specifically, tells us of weather patterns, of hemispheric changes, of cycles of drought and plenitude, but science is cold and disinterested. It models, describes, predicts. All that is small comfort to a community under constraint and a grove of citrus trees stressed to the tipping point. I’m not saying that the Indian woman in the Veniers’ backyard knew something the scientists didn’t or that superstition is anything but just that, and yet she did get her Mercedes (we even kicked in what we could, though it wasn’t as much as we would have liked) and when the rains had gone on for a month and people began to worry about flooding and mudslides and the like there was a movement afoot to bring her back and make it all stop. The water board even did a cost-benefit analysis—what would she have wanted, we wondered, a Jaguar? Two Mercedeses? Her own dealership?—but eventually, in the way of these things, the rains did finally come to an end.
The reservoirs are full now and Micki’s growing her hair back. We shower separately, though old habits die hard and we both keep to a two-minute limit, and when I see her wrapped in her terrycloth robe, toweling her hair dry, I just want to reach out and pull her to me, thinking how very, very lucky we are to be alive in this moment on this planet that provides us with such abundance and such everlasting grace.
THE DESIGNEE
THE BOREDOM
What he couldn’t have imagined, even in his bleakest assessments of the future, was the boredom. He’d sat there in the hospital while Jan lay dying, holding her hand after each of the increasingly desperate procedures that had left her bald and emaciated and looking like no one he’d ever known, thinking only of the bagel with cream cheese he’d have for dinner and the identical one he’d have for breakfast in the morning. If he allowed himself to think beyond that, it was only of the empty space in the bed beside him and of the practical concerns that kept everything else at bay: the estate, the funeral, the cemetery, the first shovel of dirt ringing on the lid of the coffin, closure. There was his daughter, but she had no more experience of this kind of free fall than he, and she had her own life and her own problems all the way across the country in New York, which was where she retreated after the funeral. A grief counsellor came to the house and murmured in his direction for an hour or two, people sent him cards, books and newspaper clippings in a great rolling wave that broke over him and as quickly receded, but nobody addressed the boredom.
He got up at first light, as he always had. The house was silent. He dressed, ate, washed up. Then he sat down with a book or the newspaper, but his powers of concentration weren’t what they once were, and he wound up staring at
the walls. The walls just stood there. No dog barked, there was no sound of cars from the street—even the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom seemed to have fixed itself. He could have taken up golf, he supposed, but he hated golf. He could have played cards or gone down to the senior center, but he hated cards and he hated seniors, especially the old ladies, who came at you in a gabbling flock and couldn’t begin to replace Jan anyway, not if there were ten thousand of them. The only time he was truly happy was when he was asleep, and even that was denied him half the time.
The walls just stood there. No dog barked. The water didn’t even drip.
THE LETTER
The letter came out of nowhere, a thin sheet of paper in a standard envelope that bore a foreign stamp (England: Queen Elizabeth in brownish silhouette). It was buried in the usual avalanche of flyers, free offers and coupons, and he very nearly tossed it in the recycling bin along with all the rest, but it was his luck that at the last minute it slipped free and drifted in a graceful fluttering arc to the pavement at his feet. He bent for it, noticing that it was addressed to him, using his full name—Mason Kenneth Alimonti—and that the return address was of a bank in London. Curious, he wedged the sheaf of ads under one arm and pried open the envelope right there in the driveway while the sun beat at the back of his neck and people drifted by like ghosts out on the street.
Dear Mr. Alimonti, the letter began, kindly accept my sincere apologies for contacting you out of the blue like this but something very urgent and important has come to our notice and we seek your consent for the mutual interest of all.
His first thought was that this had something to do with the estate, with Jan’s death, more paperwork, more hassle, as if they couldn’t leave well enough alone, and he glanced up a moment, distracted. Suddenly—and this was odd, maybe even a portent of some sort—the morning seemed to buzz to life, each sound coming to him separately and yet blending in a whole, from the chittering of a squirrel in the branches overhead to a snatch of a child’s laughter and the squall of a radio dopplering through the open window of a passing car. And more: every blade of grass, every leaf shone as if the color green had been created anew.
The letter was in his hand still, the junk mail still tucked under one arm. When Jan was alive, he’d bring the mail in to her where she’d be sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee and a book of crosswords, and now he was standing there motionless in his own driveway, hearing things, seeing things—and smelling things too, the grass, jasmine, a whiff of gasoline from the mower that suddenly started up next door. I am Graham Shovelin, the letter went on, Operations & IT Director, Yorkshire Bank PLC, and personal funds manager to the late Mr. Jing J. Kim, an American citizen. He died recently, along with his wife and only son while holidaying in Kuala Lumpur, and was flown back to England for burial. In our last auditing, we discovered a dormant account of his with £38,886,000 in his name.
This is a story, he was thinking, a made-up story, and what did it have to do with him? Still, and though he didn’t have his glasses with him so that the letters seemed to bloat and fade on the page before him, he read on as if he couldn’t help himself: During our investigations, we discovered that he nominated his son as his next of kin. All efforts to trace his other relations have proved impossible. The account has been dormant for some time since his death. Therefore, we decided to contact you as an American citizen, to seek your consent to enable us to nominate you as the next of kin to the deceased and transfer the funds to you as the designated heir to the deceased.
There was more—a proposed split of the proceeds, sixty percent for him, thirty-eight percent for the bank, two percent to be set aside for expenses both parties might incur (if any) during the transaction. At the bottom of the page was a phone number and a request to contact the bank if the above-mentioned transaction should be of interest, with a final admonition: Please also contact me if you object to this proposal. Object? Who could object? He did a quick calculation in his head, still good with numbers though he’d been retired from the college for fifteen years now: sixty percent of 38,886,000 was 23 million and something. Pounds, that is. And what was the conversion rate, one-point-two or -three to the dollar?
It was a lot of money. Which he didn’t need, or not desperately anyway, not the way most people needed it. While it was a sad fact that the bulk of what he’d set aside for retirement had been swallowed up in treatments for Jan the insurers had labeled “experimental” and thus non-reimbursable, he still had enough left, what with social security and his 401(k), to live at least modestly for as long as he lasted. This offer, this letter that had him standing stock still in his own driveway as if he’d lost his bearings like half the other old men in the world, was too good to be true, he knew that. Or he felt it anyway.
But still. Thirty million dollars, give or take. Certainly there were places he’d like to visit—Iceland, for one, the Galápagos, for another—and it would be nice to leave his daughter and his grandson something more than a mortgaged house, funeral expenses and a stack of bills. There were stranger things in this world—people won the lottery, got grants, prizes, estates went unclaimed all over the place, and it wasn’t as if he was desperate. A voice warned him against it, but what did he have to lose? The cost of a phone call?
THE PHONE CALL
The phone picked up on the third ring and the first thing he heard was music, a soft trickle of music that was neither classical nor pop, but something in between, and for a moment he thought he was being put on hold before the music cut off abruptly and a deep crisp voice—so deep it surprised him—swelled inside the receiver. “Yorkshire Bank PLC, Graham Shovelin speaking. How may I help you?”
He’d rehearsed a little speech in his head, along the lines of establishing his authority as the person solicited rather than soliciting, but it deserted him now. “Um, I,” he stuttered, “I, uh, received your letter?”
There was the faintest tick of hesitation, and then the voice came back at him, so deep he couldn’t help thinking of Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River” on one of the old 78s his grandmother used to play for him when he was a boy. “Oh, yes, of course—delighted to hear from you. We have your number here on the computer screen, and it matches our records . . . still, one can never be too careful. Would you be so kind as to identify yourself, please?”
“Mason Alimonti?”
“Mason Kenneth Alimonti?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, well, wonderful. We’ll need verification of your identity before we can proceed, of course, but for the moment, since we’re just beginning to get acquainted, I am satisfied. Now, what do you think of our proposal?”
He was in the living room, sitting in the armchair under the reading lamp, using the old landline phone his daughter told him he ought to give up since the cell was all anybody needed these days and she really didn’t know anyone, not a single soul, who still paid for a landline. But for something like this—an overseas call—he somehow felt better relying on the instrument he’d been using for thirty years and more. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds too good to be true—”
The man on the other end of the line let out a booming laugh, a laugh that scraped bottom and then sailed all the way up into the high register, a good-natured laugh, delighted, a laugh of assurance and joy that proclaimed all was right with the world. “Well, of course, it is,” the man boomed, and here came the laugh again. “But sometimes we just have to accept the fact that luck has come our way—and be grateful, Mr. Alimonti, kick up our heels and embrace what life brings us, don’t you think?”
For a moment, he was confused. He felt as if he’d gone out of his body, everything before him—the love seat, the houseplants, the blank TV screen—shifting on him so that it all seemed to be floating in air. The phone was in his hand. He was having a conversation. Somebody—the man on the other end of the line—wanted something from him.
“Mr. Alimonti—you there?”
“Yes,” he heard himself sa
y. There was something odd about the man’s accent—it was British, proper British, Masterpiece Theatre British, but the syntax was off somehow. Or the rhythm, maybe it was the rhythm. “Why me?” he asked suddenly.
Another laugh, not quite so deep or pleased with itself as the last. “Because you’ve lived an unimpeachable life, because you pay your debts and you’re as solid an American citizen as anyone could ever hope to find. Oh, rest assured we’ve vetted you thoroughly—as we have each of the nine other final candidates.”
Nine other candidates? The receiver went heavy in his hand—molded plastic, but it might as well have been cast of iron.
“Am I hearing surprise on your end of the line, Mr. Alimonti? Of course, you understand, we must protect ourselves, in the event that our first choice doesn’t wish to accept our offer for any reason—and I can’t really imagine that happening, can you?—but as you are the first on our list, the single most qualified individual we’ve examined to date, we have to say—I have to say—that we are delighted you’ve contacted us ahead of any of the others.”
He felt a wave of relief sweep over him. The phone was just a phone again. He said, “What next?”
“Next?” the voice echoed. “Well, obviously we have to make certain that you’re the man for us—and that we’re the men for you too. Do you have any question about the figures I presented in my letter to you? You agree that a sixty/thirty-eight percent split is equable? You’re content with that?”
He said nothing. He was back in himself, back in the moment, but he didn’t know what to say—did the man want him to negotiate, to quibble over the way the money would be split?
“Again, let me anticipate you, Mr. Alimonti. You are wondering, no doubt, what’s in it for us?” The laugh again, but truncated now, all business. “Self-interest, pure and simple. If this account has not been claimed within a five-year period, the whole of it goes to the government and we receive nothing, though we’ve been the guardians of the late Mr. Kim’s fortune for a quarter century now. We need you, Mr. Alimonti, and that is the bottom line. We need an American citizen in good standing, with an unblemished record and absolute probity, to be the designee for your fellow American, Mr. Kim.” A pause. “Otherwise, none of us receives a shilling.”
The Relive Box and Other Stories Page 18
