The F*ck-it List

by John Niven

  ‘It’s an investment, man, for the next generation.’

  ‘Bullshit. The place is uninhabitable, like forever, man.’

  The guys across, louder as the fresh pitcher went down.

  ‘Fuck you. There’s people living in Hiroshima, right? In fucken Hiroshima. Am I right? How long did that take? Thirty or forty years?’

  ‘Yeah,’ another one of them entered the argument. ‘Or that place in Russia. Cher-whatever. Years back. There’s Russkis living there too now.’

  ‘Yeah, but this, I mean, come on, guys. We fucken destroyed the place.’

  ‘Fucken A.’

  ‘I’m telling you. Thirty years. That place is going to be the fifty-first state. I’m telling you, man.’

  They were talking about North Korea, about what was eventually going to happen to the 30,000-odd square miles that remained of it. In his last days in office Trump had been talking enthusiastically about the ‘tremendous’ construction opportunities the place offered. Frank kept his head down over his food.

  ‘Golf courses, hotels, casinos …’

  ‘Hey, can we get the check please?’

  ‘Like Vegas meets Hawaii, man.’

  ‘Fucken A.’

  ‘No, man, that’s like over 15 per cent. Just leave a five. The bitch was slow. Food took like forever.’ Frank listened to the guys stiffing Carmen on her tip.

  The redevelopment of North Korea seemed to have become a lesser priority for President Ivanka. Indeed, in line with what many commentators on Fox were lamenting as the ‘Trump-Lite’ policies of new administration, the tone seemed to have softened, with less talk of ‘to the victors the spoils’ and more talk of the kind of stuff the international community was demanding: reparations for the surviving North Koreans, and all the South Koreans, and the northern Japanese, the people in Sapporo who’d been poisoned by the north-easterly winds that had prevailed in the aftermath of the surprise 200-megaton attack. Ivanka, it seemed, was more concerned with the optics of offending the world than her father had been, or indeed her brother was. Apparently it had been a close-run thing, whether Ivanka or Don Jr would be the one to succeed their father, to continue the dynasty. Don Jr played better with the base, the hardcore, but Ivanka had the potential to carry more teetering voters, more women, more, or at least some, of the college-educated. In the end they calculated – correctly – that the brand name would be enough to keep the base and Ivanka might even expand it slightly. (It was rumoured that even Trump himself had wondered if his son was not just too stupid, just too crazy.) But there were still difficult patches these days, when Ivanka talked too much of women’s rights, or cosied up too much to the LGBT community. The base didn’t like that shit. And Don Jr would get sent out on a hunting photo op in the Midwest. Or to scream abuse in an arena somewhere. There was talk now that they might pull a similar stunt again in the run-up to the 2028 election – dropping Hannity from the VP slot and installing Don Jr. See how it played out.

  The gun guys were getting up to leave now. Frank looked at one of them, a beefy guy in check shirt and cargo pants, with a little goatee beard. He was slipping his weapon ostentatiously into a leather holster. Frank sighed and shook his head. The guy caught it. ‘Excuse me?’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’ Frank said.

  ‘You got a problem, pal?

  ‘The gun?’ Frank nodded at the shoulder bulge.

  The guy looked down at the check rubber grip of the automatic, almost like he was surprised to see it there, then back at Frank. ‘Cocked and locked and on my hip 24/7, buddy …’

  ‘Real big man, huh?’ Frank said quietly.

  The guy’s friends gathered around. Four of them standing over his booth, staring down. ‘How’s that, mister?’ one of the others said.

  ‘Big men. Throwing your guns around, scaring people.’

  The goatee guy stepped towards Frank. One of the others put a hand on his arm. ‘Just leave this fuck, Al,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t carry like a good American?’ Goatee said.

  ‘TRUMP!’ the other guy yelled in his face. ‘TRUMP! You don’t like it – get the fuck out.’

  TRUMP! TRUMP! You still heard it all the time now, in the street, in bars, arguments. It didn’t matter that he’d been out of office for more than two years. It served as a simple declaration of all they believed in. A one-word credo. The brand.

  ‘Hey! Please! That’s enough!’ Carmen said, appearing, Carlo behind her. ‘There’s families trying to eat here.’

  ‘Fuck you, bitch! You got papers? Huh? Papers?’

  ‘Maybe we’ll call ICE on your beaner ass.’

  ‘Out. Get out.’ This was Carlo.

  ‘There goes your tip, bitch.’

  ‘Just leave.’

  They shouldered past them, heading for the door as the other diners kept their heads down over their food, not making eye contact. ‘TRUMP, BITCHES!’ Goatee yelled as he left, getting a supportive ‘TRUMP!’ back from one stray customer. The bell clanged and it was quiet again.

  ‘Frank,’ Carlo said. ‘You shouldn’t make so much trouble.’

  FIVE

  ‘The quickest route is the one you know …’

  The next morning, a Saturday, and Frank was up early as usual, before the sun. He packed briskly and efficiently. One large wheelie suitcase with enough clothes and toiletries for about a week. (He’d be needing clothes for longer than that, but he figured he could just buy new ones on the way and discard the old stuff.) He filled a suit bag with his good dark blue suit – the one Olivia had helped him pick out for Pippa and Adam’s funeral, the only time he’d worn it – a sport coat and a couple of ties, because who knows? He might go somewhere nice. A last meal, something like that. Into his shoulder bag went the laptop, chargers, the five files, spare legal pads, his .22 Woodsman and a box of ammunition. He knew the Woodsman would never be enough for all of this, but he figured it’d work for #1 and then he’d review from there. He packed his luggage into the trunk and went back inside.

  At the kitchen table, over coffee, light just beginning to soften the darkness outside, Frank reviewed his route: out of town and then south until he picked up the I-64 which he’d take west to St Louis. Bit of luck and he’d be there by lunchtime. A quick bite and then take the I-44 south for about eight hours, all the way to Oklahoma City.

  It wasn’t much more than twelve hours straight driving but it felt like all this time the guy had been living in another country, on another planet.

  Frank filled his flask with the rest of the coffee from the pot and turned all the appliances off. He turned the heating off. He made sure the back door was locked. He propped the letter up on the mantelpiece, where it was sure to be found, stood in the hallway and took a last look around. He felt like he should be feeling something more, knowing he would never be returning. That this should feel like something worth commenting on. But all he could think to say was what Adam used to say whenever they went away on vacation, down to the house in Florida. ‘Bye-bye, House,’ Adam used to say.

  ‘Bye-bye, house,’ Frank said.

  Frank picked up breakfast at McDonald’s, a sausage-egg McMuffin and a hash brown – why worry about the cholesterol and the weight gain now? It was about the only thing he liked from McDonald’s, but he found he could only take a couple of bites. He was at the bank just after it opened, where there was already a line. He nodded hellos to a few folks while he waited. (Poor Frank. That poor man.) Having been the editor, coupled with his tragic personal history, meant a lot of people in Schilling knew Frank better than he knew them. Which was one of the reasons he rarely went out any more, least of all downtown on a Saturday morning, but he couldn’t get more than a few hundred bucks from the ATM so he hadn’t much choice. Ah shit, here was some guy now, some old fella Frank recognised from the golf club, on his way over, tucking a deposit slip into the back pocket of his Farah slacks. ‘Hey, Frank,’ the guy said. ‘How ya doing?’

  ‘Good, good …’

  ‘Alw
ays a line, right?’

  ‘Always.’ There was only one bank now. Used to be lots.

  ‘Not seen you up at the club much lately?’

  ‘My knee. Shot to hell. Might have to get a new one.’

  ‘Aw darn.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What can you do, Frank? You get old.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I was just saying to Freddie Lewis the other day, you remember Freddie? He –’

  The light went up saying the next teller was free. ‘Damn, sorry, I got to –’

  ‘No problem. Don’t let me keep you. Take it easy.’

  ‘Sure. Bye.’

  Frank handed over his withdrawal slip. The teller frowned. She was young, pretty, about the same age as his daughter was. Would have been. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Brill, but this is for three thousand dollars.’

  ‘So? There’s got to be fifteen thousand in that account.’

  ‘Yes, but we really need prior notification for cash withdrawals over two thousand dollars.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Oh, a few years now. We just don’t carry as much cash as we used to. People these days tend to –’

  Frank sighed and leaned on the counter. ‘Can you help me out here?’

  ‘Ah, just a minute …’

  She hurried off. People these days tend to … Yeah, Frank thought, they tend to pay for a goddamn can of soda or a candy bar with a credit card. Contactless this, Apple Pay that. Saw a kid the other week trying to buy a banana from a market stall with his phone. Swear to God. Fella was pissed when it wouldn’t fly too. Probably soon enough it would. Cash would be gone. There would be upsides – they’d get rid of that new hundred-dollar bill, the one with Trump on it, his face sketched lean, his shoulders muscular as he stared proudly into the mid-distance. One of the first things Ivanka did. Apparently folk in California were refusing to use them. Yeah, a kid trying to buy a banana with a phone. That was where we were now. Jesus, listen to yourself, he thought. You sound like an old man. Still, maybe best not make too much of a fuss, draw attention to himself. He could always go the ATM and top up whatever she gave him. Here she was now, bustling back, smiling. Frank looked over to the office door she had come from and saw the manager, Ben what’s-his-name, looking over this way. He’d been a few years below Frank in school. ‘That’s all fine, Mr Brill, sorry for the hold-up. Now, how would you like the cash?’

  With twenty hundred-dollar bills, Trump’s face staring up at him, ten fifties, twenty twenties and ten tens in an envelope tucked in his inside pocket, Frank was gassed up, back behind the wheel and heading west out of town by 9.25 a.m., an FM station he liked on the radio and the heat set just right.

  He joined the 64 at Carefree (ha!), about fifteen miles north of where the Ohio River formed the border with Kentucky, made a right onto the freeway and was soon rolling through Hoosier National Forest, bare sycamore trees stretching away on either side of the highway as he headed west with the rising sun at his back. He’d never been through here in winter before. For Frank, Hoosier Forest would always mean summer holidays in the early, happy days of his first marriage, back in the late eighties and early nineties, back when they didn’t have so much money. As often happened when you were driving long distances alone, Frank’s mind slipped into the past as the tarmac sizzled beneath his wheels …

  Grace’s parents – old Tony Deefenbach and his wife Marge – had owned a cabin near Lake Monroe. Two bedrooms and five acres of woods. There had been a little pond, a fire pit with a grill. Frank still in his early twenties. He could drink back then, like you could when you were younger. Him and Tony sitting out on the porch after dinner while the girls did the dishes (man, you try that shit now, Frank thought), knocking back, what was that stuff old man Deefenbach used to drink? Amaretto. Sweet tooth. Like a lot of those old-timers who grew up in the Depression. Tough old guy though. Big. Shaved head. Huge Reagan fan. Was at Normandy. It was Tony who gave him the Woodsman and taught him how to use it, out in the trees behind the cabin, popping and plinking away at bottles and cans (‘Darn it, Frankie, squeeze it now! Like a tit!’), the .22 cartridges small and slippery as Tic-Tacs in Frank’s clumsy hands as he tried to reload the magazine, dropping them onto the leaves and pine needles, pissing the old boy off. He hadn’t been a bad man, Tony.

  And he’d liked Frank, Frank who had broken his heart, going and cheating on his daughter like that, going off with Cheryl, right after Grace had that miscarriage too. They’d never spoken again after that night, him and Tony, after … now when exactly would it have been? He’d taken Cheryl to see Titanic, one of their first proper dates after all the sneaking around, and got home to a ringing phone. 1997. The old guy in his late seventies by then, drunk and ugly and mean as he said, ‘You son-of-a-bitch, you no-good cheating son-of-a-bitch,’ and all Frank could say was ‘I’m sorry, Tony. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I’m sorry.’ Cheryl coming out of the bathroom and Frank hanging up and saying, ‘Wrong number.’ And then it all got worse when Grace went off and married that asshole dentist who took all her money. And a lot of Tony’s money too, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t Frank’s fault she’d married him, of course. She’d been angry and hurt and on the rebound and in her mid-thirties with no kids or anything and maybe thinking she’d be left on the shelf and all that. But then, if Frank hadn’t left her for Cheryl maybe it would all have been different and Grace wouldn’t have wound up becoming a drunk. (The Computations: If X hadn’t happened then Y wouldn’t have happened and then …) Old man Deefenbach had died a few years later. Frank not welcome at the funeral. Yeah, he’d done some terrible things. Caused more than his fair share of pain and upset. But there was a chance, rolling towards him now on the bright morning macadam, that he could still put a few of them right.

  His phone chirruped, Waze telling him that there was a faster route available, but Frank ignored it, deciding he’d stick with the 64. It reminded him of a conversation he’d had with Tony, funnily enough, who’d once said to him, way back, long before Wayz and Google Maps and GPS and all this stuff, when Frank was dropping Grace off after one of their first dates and wondering what was the best route to take to get back to his parents’ place. ‘You know, son,’ Tony said, putting his hand on Frank’s shoulder there in the hall, Grace and her mom just visible in the kitchen behind him, the clatter of pots and pans being put away, the aroma of some dinner still clinging to the air (chicken, paprika), ‘the quickest route is always the one you know.’

  Frank had surely had many more important conversations in his life than that one. The one where he broke up with Grace for a start. Why should that one still be stuck in his mind now, an entire generation later? Why could he recall a specific phrase from it and exactly where he was standing when it was uttered when he couldn’t recall a single line from any one of a hundred undoubtedly more major conversations?

  Ach, the things you remembered.

  Frank was brought back into the world by the sound of his tyres sizzling over metal and he realised he was on a bridge, crossing the Wabash River, the western dividing line between Indiana and Illinois.

  Out in the wildlands now, the long, barren stretches beside the Wabash, the tri-state area that encompassed north-west Kentucky, south-west Indiana and south-east Illinois. He realised over an hour must have passed from the forest. He yawned, the muscles in his jaw cricking. Bad sign that, only snapping out of it with the sound of the surface changing beneath his wheels. He saw a sign for a Road King a few miles over the bridge. Coffee. Snack. Top up the tank. Rest the old eyeballs for a minute or two. ‘Can we stop, Dad? Please can we?’ his kids used to say. Then the ‘YAYYY!’ when he said yes. His dead kids.

  * * *

  Frank pulled into the lot, finding a space right in front, parking under the red-white-and-blue signage. He hadn’t been at a Road King in a while, a lot more of them in Illinois than over in Indiana. They’d substantially changed their logo over the last decade. It had always had red-white-and-b
lue elements but now it was more so: pretty much a giant Stars and Stripes. A ‘Support Our Troops’ below it that looked pretty much permanent too.

  He cranked his seat back and rested his eyes for a moment, lowering the window down a couple of inches to let some cold air in, the sounds of the lot drifting in too – the big trucks hissing and squealing as they stopped and started, the dingdingding of people trying to get their pumps going, the hum and clank of the electronic doors as customers came and went, the blasts of horns from the highway, snatches of music – rock, hip hop, pop – coming from the opening and closing car doors, fragments of conversations, in English, in Spanish (something you didn’t hear too much these days, people tended to keep that to themselves), the cries of children, all the sounds of American travel carrying on the breeze.

  Inside the store, bright and loud, Frank paid a long, complex visit to the can (he would spare us the details here) and picked up some mints and a styrofoam beaker of coffee. Joining the line to pay, he tuned in and out of the muzak – an instrumental version of ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ – and the conversations floating around him – ‘I told you “no”, young lady … when we get there … Did you get me sugar in this? … I’m just gonna use the restroom … I’ll meet you back at the car … Oh, grab me some peanut brittle …’ He gazed at the windows and shelves with tired eyes, automatically sub-editing the handwritten signage dotted around the store: a mortuary of redundant or missing apostrophes and grammatical howlers, things like ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’ with their inverted commas of wild promise and the spelling of the madman loosed everywhere – ‘Lifes to short too drink cheap beer’ one sign said. The editor inside Frank still raged at all of this and wondered if the downfall of America wasn’t somehow connected to it. But he was too old and too tired to put it together into a coherent theory. Besides, someone had probably already done so. In the Atlantic. In the New Yorker. Someone younger and cleverer than him.