A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  FOURTEEN

  Early the next morning, a timid silt of wispy fog had settled in the valley, waiting for a suggestion of sun to chase it away. Grant came out of the Hiwan house in board shorts and crew socks, triggering the remote in his hand, and the garage door swung open.

  The familiar smell of oil, gasoline, and wood braced him; one half of the garage was filled with things Lee couldn’t bring himself to throw or give away, which meant pretty much everything. Shovels; stepladders; snow tires; a box of old unpaired basketball shoes (mostly right foot); a box of old baseball gloves (mostly lefties); ten boxes of Christmas ornaments carefully labeled and clearly unmoved for untold seasons since they supported a collection of other boxes labeled, simply, “1984 ed. World Book Encyclopedia”; power tools; hand tools; pipe wrenches; axes; a posthole digger; three ancient CRT computer monitors; an eight-track car stereo; a cassette car stereo; four Altec-Lansing floor speakers; a plaid deluxe Barcalounger; a plastic trash can filled with wire clothes hangers; some old car parts (including worn disc brake pads, a Honda clutch, one quarter of a catalytic converter, and a discharged air bag); odd scraps of metal; more surplus mining helmets; half a dozen cans of paint; a push lawn mower; a child’s E-Z Bake Oven; Eddie Belasco’s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers walkie-talkies (which Lee had promised to fix when he and Eddie were twelve); a Jedi helmet; moth-eaten furniture pads; a console stereo-television circa 1953 (the Sylvania “Riviera” model); bricks; two-by-fours; sheetrock; solvents; stirrups for a saddle; deflated footballs and basketballs, including the old red-white-and-blue ABA version; a floor fan; and a giant cardboard cutout, movie theater floor promotion for Silence of the Lambs.

  The other half of the garage was spotlessly clean. Occupied solely by a car tucked under a faded chamois cover, which Grant yanked off like a magician performing a trick to reveal a badass 1984 Chevrolet Camaro, black with silver pinstripe detailing, a T-top, and fat whitewall tires, slightly lowered. Grant ran his hand along the top of a fender where the early day’s sun bent around the arc of steel and spilled its reflection across the swept, smooth concrete floor.

  Already fourth period, and ten minutes into wood shop, a band saw screamed as it ripped through a four-by-four. The cut was true because Lee was guiding it, clad in oversized safety goggles that made him look only slightly more demented than his class of mostly boys, watching, wearing safety glasses of their own.

  Lee had to yell to be heard over the hollering saw. “Who can give me three applications in which the band saw is superior to the table saw?”

  Not surprisingly, only the two girls’ hands went up.

  The air-conditioning was down, so the climate in Floyd Hill Properties erred on swampy, due to the absence of functional windows and the northeastern exposure of the double-glass front doors, a Feng Shui no-no that Grant made idle note of as he got sucked inside. A big, low-ceilinged room of identical desks, with a row of enclosed offices along one side, the bullpen felt kind of sleepy and tropical, right down to the palm trees in the planter. Fittingly, one man in chinos, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pastel tie was dozing, legs propped up on a bookshelf filled with long-outdated Multiple Listing books. Grant rapped on his desk and the chino man jumped, nearly tipping out of the chair.

  “Lorraine around?”

  The man blinked, eyes puffy and, disoriented, told Grant (as the man emerged from his daydream) that six and a point was the best he could do.

  “What?”

  “Oh. Um . . . ” And then with a slow-dawning and fretful recognition: “’Lo, Grant.” Grant couldn’t remember his name.

  “What the hell-o? Is that Grant Garrison?”

  Grant looked to his right for the source of a second voice and locked eyes with Stan Beachum, who stood in the doorway of one of the little private offices, power tie, blue jeans, Italian tassel loafers, and a 9mm Beretta handgun aimed directly at Grant’s nose.

  “Hoh boy.” A shallow intake of breath, but a forced, cheerful “Stan. Hey. Whassup?”

  “I still can’t taste anything, thanks.”

  “I meant the penny stocks.”

  “I can’t taste them, either.”

  Grant’s lips curled up over his teeth, dry, in what he hoped to God was a smile. “You change jobs, Stan?”

  “I’m trading my own account since the subprime melt, so I sublet the old place and situated my brokerage here, and now Lorraine and I can better facilitate our child-care responsibilities.”

  Grant pretended to be surprised.

  “Whoawhoawhoawhoa—you—you and Lorraine?”

  “Hey, screw you,” Beachum barked. “Okay? Screw you. You’re supposed to stay clear of me.”

  “I came to see her, not you. Had no idea you’d even be on the premises.”

  Beachum’s fingers squeezed the grip of the gun. Grant flinched. The sleepy chino man took his coffee cup and retreated into a back room.

  There was a huge board on the wall next to Beachum. Lots of house listings. Sales information. Salespersons’ names. An open house flag was stuck to one of the listings, and Grant’s eyes, following the chart across, found the name of the salesperson associated with the showing: Lorraine Simons.

  Beachum, meanwhile, was on his slow boil. “You know, stupidly, I thought I might be notified before they let you out of prison. Thought I might be given an opportunity to maybe express why they should incarcerate your sorry ass for the full term of your sentence. Through a close personal friend,” Beachum spat, “I could have gotten to the Governor himself and asked him to keep you locked up in there.”

  “Gee,” Grant said. “I’m glad that didn’t occur.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You should write to somebody and complain.”

  “Believe you me, I did. Heck yes, I did.”

  Grant was working up his courage to walk out. What, he wondered again, the fuck was Lorraine doing with this git? Beachum let the gun drop to his side, looking smug. Evidently he only wanted to scare the crap out of Grant, not actually pull the trigger, which—Grant having spent some considerable time with individuals who would have pulled the trigger already without giving it a second thought—had been Grant’s assumption about Beachum’s gunplay all along.

  “Well. Good to see you,” Grant said, staying friendly. “I don’t suppose she’s . . . ?”

  “Stay away from her.”

  “Good advice. Yeah. Thank you.” Grant’s feet moved him back toward the door.

  “Hey,” Beachum called after him, following, “is employment a condition of your parole?”

  “Not to worry, thanks. In fact, me and Lee, we’re working together.”

  “The gold mine?”

  “Which would make me self-employed.”

  “In what universe?”

  Grant explained the parole rules in an abbreviated way, emphasizing that, because of the difficulty many ex-cons had finding meaningful work, said rules encouraged a certain amount of entrepreneurship.

  “That mine is a goddamn joke. He went up to his eyeballs in debt to buy it, off the Internet, for Pete’s sake, like some kind of moron-Ponzi-rube—and there’s no upside because you can’t develop the land. Your brother’s the laughingstock of this whole town.”

  Grant stopped in the door. His shoulder twitched. He looked back at Beachum, smoldering. “What does that mean, ’laughingstock’?”

  Not so bold of a sudden, Beachum took a step backward and regripped the gun.

  “Listen, I don’t want you around me.”

  “Who’s laughing? You and the fucking quiche-farters in that fucking Troutdale tract home abomination upstream from where the hotel used to be? You got nothing better to do than suck down Shiraz and make fun of my brother, who, I’m just sayin’, contributes more in one day at that high school, teaching your fat, Ritalin-scrubbed, YouTube-worshipping progeny to be semi-humans than you have, Stanster, in your entire greedy, pointless, subprime life.”

  Beachum’s ears went crimson. “The terms of your release
specifically prohibit you—”

  “I know.”

  “If I call your probation officer—”

  “You won’t have to.”

  Grant pushed through the glass door, and the sultry air surged out.

  “And stay clear of Lorraine!”

  Lorraine. Her lively, remarkable face filling the fifty-two-inch span of a Sony flat-screen television mounted on the lichen-rock face of a massive fireplace.

  “Now,” she was saying, eyes smoky, lipstick Vogue-perfect, “if you press function key four, and then press enter, you keep the home-watch feature going while you enjoy your personal entertainment selection. TiVo, satellite, World Wide Web, and XM radio.”

  Lorraine. The woman Grant watched from across the street in front of her house in Troutdale Estates, here, in digital HD, suddenly squared in the upper right-hand corner of the LCD, while the rest of the screen filled with Bogart from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

  “Pressing function key five, you can view all the home-watch security cameras at once.”

  And then Lorraine, gone. Gone from the screen, the screen subdivided into a grid of nine small boxes showing fixed surveillance camera views of various rooms, entries, and outside locations of a new house, including one, from above, angled down, of Grant at the front door. He walked in, disappeared from that view, reappeared in the foyer on another, disappeared again.

  Lorraine, who stood behind her prospective buyers slumped in two of six full-feature electric recliners facing the tiny decorative gas fireplace and huge display of an in-home surround-sound screening room, lost all color in her face and needed to put a manicured hand on the sideboard to steady herself.

  “Okay. Great. Let’s turn off the system, using the red button, and continue our tour in the gourmet kitchen, shall we?”

  She walked out, but her buyers, slow to follow her instructions since the in-home surround-sound screening room was all that really mattered to them, stayed, and continued to watch the mosaic of security monitor views because Grant had appeared in the vaulted great room, and Lorraine was with him.

  Flip of a function key and this picture filled the screen. As in a movie, Lorraine leapt on Grant, happy, wrapped her legs around him, mashed her mouth against his, and appeared determined to suck his tonsils out.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said the male buyer.

  “Turn it off, Jim,” said his wife, her mouth agape.

  Instead, the husband, Jim, nervously fiddled with the remote, trying to get some sound going. But when finally he did, Grant had spun out of the picture, presumably with Lorraine still affixed to him.

  The buyers were spellbound.

  “Like that thing from Alien,” Jim said.

  “Oh hush,” his wife giggled.

  “I didn’t think you’d come back,” the disappeared Lorraine was saying in Dolby TMX surround.

  “Shit.” Jim waved the remote at the screen, sequencing through the surveillance stations, unable to find them. Somewhere in the house they heard a door slam shut.

  “That is so unprofessional,” the wife clucked.

  Jim found Bogart again, though, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on the TiVo queue in Blu-ray, and it started right up where it had been interrupted, so they settled into the soft, distressed leather of the stadium seats.

  A splendorous overbuild, the master bathroom was the Spartacus wet dream, all gold and glass and marble and mirrors. There was even a walk-in tub with a waterfall feature. Grant disentangled himself from Lorraine and backed up.

  “We can’t. Lorraine, I don’t . . . ”

  “Dear God, I’ve missed you.”

  Her smile was viral and highly contagious. The heat came off her. She reached under her skirt and pulled off her panties. Grant pretended they were just talking.

  “You got married to Stan Beachum?”

  “God no. We’re just living together. Or, well, all right, yes, technically married, I guess—but I didn’t think you’d come back. He’s stable; he’s a good father.”

  “He’s arrogant and narcissistic.”

  “And it’s kind of sad what happened to him,” Lorraine continued, ignoring Grant’s slur, “and pretty much my fault when you get right down to it.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “Ooo. Honey, I really don’t think you should be the one making that call.”

  She took his hands and backed up to the counter with the ‘his’ and ‘hers’ sinks.

  “Let’s do it right here. On the Vesuvian marble.”

  “There is no such thing. Vesuvian. That’s retarded.”

  “It sells.”

  “What has happened to you?”

  There was cold desperation in her bright eyes. It broke his heart. “Life happened to me,” Lorraine said.

  “My brother lives in a house without furniture,” Grant said. “He’s making a big wooden cross.”

  “Hello. He bought a gold mine on eBay, Grant. He plants toilets in the front yard. He went skydiving on what would have been our third anniversary and sent me a Polaroid.”

  “They’re not toilets.”

  “Same difference.” She moved his hands to her hips and scooted up against him.

  “We created him,” Grant said. “Our own personal Frankenstein. You and me, together, separate, we cut his heart in half so we could see how it worked, we gave him the diseased brain and sent him out where the villagers could chase him with pitchforks. He deserved better. Deserves better.”

  “Oh shut up.”

  “Do you ever talk to him?” Grant asked her.

  “It’s a joke. The gold mine? It’s pathetic. He gets all these unrealistic ideas in his head: backhoe, gold mine, Lorraine would make a swell wife for me, my little brother wants to be good but needs my help. You know I’m right. And then he’s crushed when it doesn’t work out. Doh. I don’t feel sorry for him. I don’t. He’s not gonna find gold, or silver, or coal, or strike oil, or anything else of use in that mine. No, wait. He’ll find unhappiness. Which is what he craves, Grant. You know I’m right. He’s hardwired for failure, and I won’t apologize for maybe taking advantage of it because, hey, it’s what he wanted. Not Frankenstein. Humpty-Dumpty. Good luck fixing that.”

  “He loved you.”

  “He loved the idea of me. And the idea of losing me, because . . . you know.”

  “Jesus, that’s cold.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Okay, but maybe he still needs you to help him get through this—”

  Lorraine just shook her head.

  “It’s . . . I don’t know. It’s a wound, he keeps picking at it,” Grant said, “picking at the scab and it won’t heal.”

  “I don’t love him, Grant,” Lorraine said flatly.

  “You loved him once.”

  “No, baby. I liked him. I loved you.”

  Grant felt short of breath. Lorraine. She put her hands on his chest and pulled her heels up to dig them into the backs of his legs.

  “I love him,” Grant said.

  “I’m sure that’s incredibly comforting for him, too. Considering.”

  “What about Beachum?”

  “I stayed with Lee to be with you,” she said, “and I moved in with Stan because he likes the idea of me with him, plus I had a baby and didn’t want to wind up living under some freeway on-ramp, and maybe all this makes me a horrible person, or a selfish bitch, and maybe I’ll rot in hell for it, but oh well.”

  She pressed hard against him again, her lips searched for his, walking up his neck, teeth sharp and scraping, while her fingers went to his belt and the zipper of his jeans.

  “You’re the only woman who’s ever scared me.”

  “Heights don’t make me dizzy.”

  They kissed for a while. He couldn’t help it. He felt his pants falling.

  “At least I know what I want,” she added. They kissed until, as if chaste, she pushed him gently back. “I should warn you that I’m pretty sure Stan bought a gun the day he heard you got out
of jail.”

  Grant admitted that he’d seen the Beretta and recounted his visit to the office.

  “I thought he was being paranoid. But here you are.”

  They kissed greedily.

  “How’s the baby?” Grant asked her.

  “Awesome. It’s yours.”

  Grant’s legs went rubbery. “What?” He tried to disentangle from her, but Lorraine kept her legs clamped around him. What? His mind reeled.

  “Think,” she said. “Count. Oh, right, you were never good at math.”

  Grant just gave up then. He held her, quiet.

  “This is where you’re supposed to engage,” she said. “Ask me if it’s a boy or a girl,” she said. “Ask me its name.”

  “Mine” was all Grant could muster.

  She sighed. “What do you want from me, Grant? Or are you just here on another mission of mercy for your brother before you move on?”

  “What do I want?”

  The bathroom door opened and the two prospective buyers poked their heads in:

  “Heyoh. There you are.”

  Lorraine uncoupled, pulled her skirt down as if nothing had been going on, but as Grant stepped back he nearly fell over the pants snagged at his ankles, and everybody pretended not to see his boxers or the erection tenting them.

  “Question,” the wife spoke, all business. “There’s the big screen in the living room, and the built-ins in the bedrooms, and the little one in the study, but I can’t find a TV in the kitchen.”

  Lorraine unclipped a Sharpie from her blouse and scrawled something on her panties. The kitchen flat screen was behind a secret panel in the trompe l’oeil above the trash compactor, she told the wife, then handed the panties to Grant, as if it was all in a day’s work: “There’s my cell number, for future reference. If you have any other questions, Mr. Garrison, I’ll be showing these people the gourmet kitchen.”

  She smiled, her lipstick mostly rubbed off, her eyes alive, her face flushed and beautiful, and she led the vaguely discomfited buyers away. Grant shared a blank look with the husband before he disappeared, then pulled up his jeans and saw himself in the mirror and was more than a little bit terrified.