Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  The red Jaguar was in the circular driveway, parked slightly askew as if it were in a magazine shoot, or halfway through a bank robbery. The paving stones felt larger than they were under the low ride of the Lamborghini, and Brett moved slowly in beside the Jag.

  I have a checkered past when it comes to cars. I’ve had them smashed by hockey stick-wielding maniacs and driven into lakes by golf club-wielding morons. I have my insurance company on speed dial. I don’t think they’d let me get a car like a Lamborghini, even if I could afford one. But they need not worry. I don’t own a bean bag for the same reason that I don’t own a hot European sports car. Once you’re in, you’re in. They are close to impossible to get out of, and I certainly can’t do it with any semblance of style.

  It was like getting up off a yoga mat, only the yoga mat was actively trying to pull you back down. The seat in the Lambo was fitted to the human body like a rocket ship and kept me leaning back, which meant getting one of my long legs out was only the half of it. I used to be a professional sportsman, and I’m still in pretty decent shape, but my abdominal muscles were having none of it. I knew there was a secret to it. I’d seen women in tight dresses get out of these things in the movies, but I couldn’t fathom what the secret was. I could hear Brett walking across the pavers toward the front door of the house, so I changed tack and pulled my one leg back in, and then I went out head first. I put my hands down onto the pavers and then crawled forward so my legs were the last thing out.

  I ended up on my hands and knees in the driveway, huffing like a steam train. I took a quick glance around to see if anyone was watching my humiliating display but saw neither a gardener nor a security camera.

  I closed the door as casual as could be and then waited. It was clear to me that Brett had not told his wife half the story, let alone the whole tale, so I wasn’t sure how he was going to sell the idea of her losing her car. It felt like the smart move to let him sort that out by himself. I glanced across the driveway and noticed another building. It was about the size of my house, and for a moment I thought it might be some kind of in-law apartment, but then I noticed that the driveway looped around to the side of it. I wandered over for a look.

  It was a garage. The front faced away from the driveway and the street so the ugly garage doors weren’t the architectural highlight of the home. Except that these doors could have been a highlight. There were three rolling doors, but they were made of wood, not vinyl made to look like wood. They made the garage look like a New England boat shed. I couldn’t see inside so I found a side window and took a look.

  The interior was big enough to host a wedding reception. There were all sorts of toys inside, all neat and ordered. I saw a trailer holding twin jet skis, and beside that a larger trailer with a sleek speedboat on it. Beyond the boat sat a black BMW. It was a recent year but a base model, so an expensive car but not of the same order of magnitude as the vehicles in the driveway.

  I heard the front door of the house open so I wandered back to meet Brett. I didn’t find him. A woman stood at the base of the steps, hands on hips. She saw me and frowned. It wasn’t much of a frown. Her skin didn’t wrinkle at all, but her eyes pinched around her nose to give her a general look of unhappiness. She looked like a million dollars, or at least as if she had spent a million dollars looking the way she did. She had been a naturally good looking younger woman, I suspected, and to many an eye probably still was. To me she was the difference between French Cordon Bleu cooking and a good beef bourguignon. The Cordon Bleu might be fancier and the preference of five-star hotels, but I prefer the rustic stew every time. This woman’s brown hair was expertly messed in an expensive fashion, and her casual woolen sweater and thin trousers looked straight off a high-end mannequin. Her pinched expression pulled her skin tight across her face and made me think she didn’t work out as much as she didn’t eat. She looked one lettuce leaf short of fainting, and I wondered whether it was all worth it.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

  I smiled but it wasn’t returned. “Brett didn’t tell you?”

  “He did tell me. He said you were taking my car. I don’t know who you think you are, but you certainly aren’t taking my car.”

  “Actually ma’am, I’m afraid I am.”

  “You bottom feeders are all the same. You think you can take whatever you want. Well, not around me, mister.”

  I didn’t appreciate the bottom feeder comment, but I didn’t hold it against her. I held it against Brett.

  “You’re Mrs. Pickering, I assume?”

  “I am. And I’d like you to leave.”

  I walked up to her. She had big brown eyes like Danielle.

  “I am leaving. Unfortunately, I will be back. You see, there are some things you don’t know. Things your husband clearly hasn’t told you. Now, I don’t see it as my job to explain these things to you. That’s a chat you need to have with him.”

  “I know what I need to know, and I know you need to leave before I call the police.”

  “Ma’am, you’re not going to call the police.”

  “You think?”

  “I do. Because if you do, the person going to jail will be your husband.”

  She seemed to frown more, which oddly manifested itself as her dropping the pinched expression. I waited for her to work through her thoughts. She looked like a practical person, as pragmatic as a rich person needed to be. It was a digital choice. There were two possibilities. She would get it, or she wouldn’t. She would handle it, or she wouldn’t.

  Mrs. Pickering took a long, deep breath, but she was so thin she didn’t seem to take in much air, and then she looked at me. The faux-frown, the pinched look, both were gone.

  “How bad is it?”

  “It’s bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “I don’t know. Not exactly, not yet.”

  “So all this is somewhat premature.”

  “I’m afraid I know that much, and no, it’s not. You’re husband owes some people money. He owes some good people, people who don’t deserve to lose it, and he owes some bad people, who won’t allow him to.”

  “Which are you?”

  “I’m a little bit of both. I’m here for the good people, but I can be one of the bad ones if he doesn’t do the right thing.”

  “And what is the right thing?”

  “I’m hoping that’s a rhetorical question.”

  She took another breath. Her chest didn’t seem to move when she did it, as if it were all for show.

  “Was the jail thing just a line?” she asked.

  “No. It’s a possibility, if we don’t fix things asap.”

  “He wouldn’t do so well in jail.”

  “Few people do.”

  “And you can prevent that?”

  “I don’t know. My associate is trying to figure out how far down the hole we are, but from where I’m standing, no one is better off with Brett in prison.”

  At that she turned to walk back into the house, and then she stopped.

  “You say you’re coming back?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll need to talk to my husband when you get back.”

  “I would think so.”

  “But it’s bigger than the cars?”

  “Much bigger.”

  She nodded and then spun like a ballerina and strode back inside. I stood in the gloom looking at the house for a few minutes, and then Brett came out alone.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What you should have,” I said. “The charade’s over, Brett. I don’t know what kind of relationship you have, but if there’s anything to it at all, you need to come clean with her, as well as with yourself.”

  He threw me a set of keys. “You leave my wife to me.”

  “She asks me questions, I’ll answer them, if I think it will help my cause. Don’t forget, Brett, I’m not here for you. You are a very distant secondary consideration for me.”

  He frowned at that. He d
idn’t like being a secondary consideration. He liked being top of mind. I guessed he always had. The athletic boy, popular at school, quarterback on the football team. I bet he was a big man on campus at college, and then the banking set where he fought every day to become top of mind for the uber-wealthy. He liked to think he was the center of everything. I supposed everyone felt that way, to some degree. Just most of us were more used to being shown that it wasn’t so.

  I didn’t wait for more chit-chat. I strode over to the Jaguar, and it beeped and opened and I got in. I waited for Brett to curl up and get inside the Lambo, and then I hit the button and fired up the Jaguar. The engine rumbled deeply and then settled. It was a cliché, but it really did purr like a kitten.

  I pulled out around the circular driveway and checked my mirror to confirm that Brett was following. Then I slid out onto the street and headed back along the tree-lined Merritt Parkway toward the state line.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The city of Rye was just across the state line from Connecticut, in Westchester County. The whole area had originally been part of Connecticut, and it all looked the same to me. For reasons that I could never fathom, the city of Rye—which had originally been the village of Rye—was a separate entity from the town of Rye, which itself lay in two sections either side of Rye city. I often wondered how with this kind of logic a great nation was born, but despite the odds, the founding fathers had managed to come up with plenty of stuff that worked.

  When I pulled into the lot off the Boston Post Road that Sally had directed me to, I was pretty sure one of us had made an error. It looked like the wrong lot. To say it was low rent was an understatement. There was no signage, and the shingled hut near the driveway looked like a dilapidated boat shed. It leaned with the prevailing breeze, the way palm trees did in Florida. The tarmac was old and cracked and the chain that hung between rotten posts around the perimeter appeared to have been rescued from a Spanish Galleon.

  I pulled in far enough that Brett could drive in behind me, which he did very slowly, as the Lamborghini bottomed out on the rise in the driveway. I got out and looked at Brett and he looked at me. Then we both looked over the lot. The cars didn’t match the lot. They weren’t quite at the Lamborghini end of the market, but they weren’t domestic junkers, either. There were a lot of European brands. BMW, Audi, Mercedes. There were some Lexus SUVs gathered in one corner.

  The guy who came out of the hut reminded me of Chachi from Happy Days. He looked too young to drive, and he wore a leather jacket and slicked back hair, as if he’d just fallen through a time tunnel from the 1950s. I waited for him to pull out a comb and brush down his hairdo, but he didn’t. He just nodded at me.

  “Nice rides,” he said.

  I nodded. “Sally sent me.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So what, we just leave them here?”

  “Sure, why not. We got some paperwork to do.” He nudged his head toward the little hut. It wouldn’t have looked out of place on one of those Minnesotan lakes where those crazy old guys went ice fishing.

  “We’re leaving them here?” asked Brett, with a good dose of doubt in his voice.

  “Yeah,” said the kid. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Brett looked at the kid and then back at me. “My name is on the lease.”

  “Yeah, we’re gonna end that,” said the kid.

  “End it? You can’t just end a lease. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Sure it does. Don’t worry yourself about it. We have a relationship with the leasing company. We buy the lease from you.”

  Brett didn’t look sure, but he said nothing more.

  “Sally mentioned something about getting him a replacement ride,” I said.

  The kid nodded. “Yeah, he said to give the guy his pick of cars.”

  Brett stepped over to a recent model Range Rover. It looked like it got gallons to the mile. Brett nodded his approval.

  “Of the selection back here,” continued the kid. He waved that we should follow him. We walked around the hut and down toward the rear of the lot. We were close to Long Island Sound and I could smell the brine in the air. The kid stopped and waved his hand across a row of cars like he was a model on the Price Is Right.

  These cars suited the state of the lot. They weren’t so much in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range as the hundreds of dollars range. I didn’t see a single one without rust. There were cracked windshields and drooping headlights and one white car bore a mismatched black hood. Several had passed the hundred thousand mile mark when Reagan was president.

  “Do these run?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said the kid, as if looks weren’t everything.

  I turned my eye to Brett. If this wasn’t a lesson on the course correction that his life had taken, then I didn’t know what was. I wasn’t sure how far he had gotten in his own mind. I knew he had fallen apart some in the tunnel at Yale Bowl, and I knew he hadn’t told the whole truth to his wife later, so he was still floating somewhere on the River Denial. I just wasn’t sure how far he had gotten.

  I figured it out pretty quick. The look from the tunnel returned as he cast his eye over the ramshackle collection of junkers. Then his body started the convulsing, like he was dancing in place but had no natural sense of rhythm. Then he started sucking air with great gulping motions, and a noise came out of him that sounded like the buzzer when a truck gets put in reverse.

  “Is he okay?” asked the kid, astutely.

  I didn’t answer but I didn’t think so. I grabbed Brett by the shoulders and walked him away from the cars before his brain split in two and he became catatonic. We stepped over the knee-high chain around the lot and out onto the street. I marched Brett away toward the salty air, and his unintelligible moaning turned into cries of no, no, no, which, as bad as that was, sounded like a step in the right direction.

  We strode down onto the wide beach beside the amusement park. Like many attractions in the Northeast, Playland Park was only open during the summer. It was symbolic of the seasons. When the hot sun beat down, the park resonated with the screams from the old roller coaster and the laughter from kids on the rides and the cries of kids losing at the midway games. It was an old-fashioned kind of place, the wooden coaster overlooking the facilities that really hadn’t changed in decades. It was a candy-floss-and-hot-dog type of place, a poor-man’s Disneyland with just enough summer fun to keep the crowds amused. But in the fall it closed up and fell silent, the wind blowing across the empty concourse the only sound. As I helped Brett onto the beach to suck in some deep breaths of sea air, I was hit by the familiar sense of darkness, that for every summer day in this part of the world there was an equally long winter’s day to be had, where everything good was closed, and the snow turned to black slush by the road, and the cold felt so long and so penetrating that it seemed to be part of a person’s DNA. The contrast with Florida was total and extreme. There, it seemed the sun never stopped shining. Even when the clouds were out, or a hurricane beat down, you always sensed that the sun was up there, somewhere. I had left Connecticut for college in the fall as it closed down and closed in, and arrived in a Florida that felt like it was open for business every single day of the year.

  Brett bent over and took in some air and the convulsing slowed to just regular shaking. He wiped his hands across his face and I saw the moisture from tears wring through his fingers. Then he stood and lifted his face to the sky, to the dark clouds overhead, and he screamed. I knew the feeling.

  “How did this happen?” he said to the heavens. I figured it was a discussion between him and whomever he looked to for guidance on such things, so I stayed mute. Then he looked at me and repeated the question. “How did this happen?”

  I shrugged. “You really want to know?”

  He shook his head. “No. Yes.” He looked to the sky again. “Yes, I want to know.”

  “Well, okay then. You didn’t earn it.”

  He frowned. It was a more authentic f
rown than his wife’s. “Didn’t earn what?”

  “Any of it. You didn’t earn any of it. You think you did, and you did just enough work to convince yourself you did. But the truth is, you didn’t earn it.”

  He didn’t drop the frown, so I continued.

  “You were good at sports, it came naturally, so you made the football team. You trained, but unlike the less-talented kids, you didn’t have to train hard. It just came to you. And then when it would have gotten hard, you quit.”

  “Quit?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t play in college, did you? You went to the state finals in high school, and then to take the next step you were going to have to work at it. At the college level, everyone’s good enough to have made the high school state finals, especially at QB. But you told yourself that you were done with football, that your goals lay elsewhere. So it didn’t feel like quitting. It was just moving on in another direction. But the truth is, you quit before it got hard.”

  “You think, do you?”

  “I do. And then you went to college, I don’t even know where.”

  “NYU.”

  “Right. And you did what you had to do to get your degree, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts you didn’t make the Dean’s List or anything. Just the bare minimum. And then you got a job on Wall Street because that’s what guys like you do, and you made your way up a bit, not outstanding, not in the upper echelon, but good enough. And then someone gives you a chance to move to investment banking or hedge funds or whatever it is you did in Connecticut, and the money pours in and you and the wife move to New Canaan, and the whole time it’s all taking just enough effort to make you think it’s you, but not enough effort to make you appreciate it.”

  Brett said nothing. He just stared at the sea the way people do when they contemplate themselves. The ocean brings that out in folks, sometimes for better, sometimes not.