Right Livelihoods

by Rick Moody

  “It’s a Cessna 414A,” I called to Skip, having long ago left behind my Lucky Charms. Who knew how many hours passed before this felicitous conclusion? I found, by querying the FAA Web site, that there was in fact a Cessna twin-engine plane with the registration number DB-81404, and that the owner was located in Massachusetts. But that was not all I learned. It was here that the uncanny part of my story caused me to spill a cup of coffee, up in the study, which would annoy Helen no end. I suspect you will have divined the owner of the plane by now, or the registered owner thereof. But I will make manifest my evidence. The registered owner of the aircraft was none other than one S. Hawkes-Mitchell.

  How many S. Hawkes-Mitchells could there be? And could this Hawkes-Mitchell be the government agent who wrote the original Omega Force report, which had been leaked to me by the woman on whose loggia I had spent a night one month before? Was Hawkes-Mitchell working for us or them? Was he a man who merely dreamed up techno-thrillers? Or did his work involve consulting on national security issues, such that the thrillers were almost certain to have encoded military information contained within them? Did Omega Force: Code White precede the actual Omega Force, which I now believed was bent upon attacking the coast of the Northeast, such that the Omega Force was an effect of the novel? Or vice versa? Was Hawkes-Mitchell employed by one of the conservative think tanks? Was he associated, in an earlier era, with plots to furnish arms to the Nicaraguan Contras?

  I did my best to enunciate when I called the FAA hotline to ask if there was a telephone number listed for the licensee of the Cessna in question. I made clear that there were legal issues involved. The operator asked if I had a head cold.

  “I’m in excellent fettle, and while I’m touched by the thought, I don’t have time to discuss my health.”

  She declined to give me the necessary telephone number, but directory information served ably in that regard. There was a feeling of momentousness when at last I was in possession of the telephone number of Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell. I was not sure of protocol with respect to an actual, living author. Should I tell Hawkes-Mitchell that I’d found myself eager to learn how his novel would end, though in truth the ending was hackneyed and predictable? Was it appropriate to tell him that I hadn’t found the character terribly sympathetic? And what if he was not the same Hawkes-Mitchell who composed Omega Force but was, rather, an assassin who could instantly cause to be distributed to the island a lethal dose of some rain forest venom that would be admixed with my antidepressants and my antiseizure medication, causing my instantaneous death before the eyes of my horrified loved ones?

  I could sense that I was being delivered to the center of the mystery. I waited as the bell tolled on the other end of the line. Apparently there was no answering machine, because the ringer kept tolling and tolling long past what is acceptable in this day and age. At last a tired woman grumbled a curt greeting. Her voice sounded as though she’d had cigarettes for breakfast since years before the surgeon general’s first report on the hazards of that product, a health campaign I personally helped implement.

  I asked for Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell.

  “Excuse me?”

  I asked again for S. Hawkes-Mitchell. Or Mr. Hawkes-Mitchell.

  “I’m inquiring into the whereabouts of Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell.”

  “Well,” she said, sighing mournfully, “I’m sorry to tell you then that Stuart is dead.”

  “Dead?” As the author might have said himself, I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “But I just read his book, and it was . . . a pretty good book.”

  “Stuart died last year, I’m afraid.”

  “Would it be possible to ask how he died?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  I blanked for a moment, trying to come up with an appropriate pseudonym. “Well, this is Ned Roberts Jr. I’m an amateur pilot, looking for a, uh, I’m looking to buy a Cessna Skyhawk or similar model, and I was doing some inquiries into persons in western Massachusetts who might be interested in—”

  “We don’t have the plane anymore.”

  “I see, well, I—”

  “Stuart had an accident in the plane.”

  “He—”

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean the plane with serial number DB-81404 met with a . . . with a fiery conclusion?”

  “I hated the plane right from the beginning, and I told him to get rid of it.”

  I continued to stress the consonants in my words, such that I probably sounded like a speech professional to her. “And you say this tragedy took place last year?”

  “About fourteen months ago.”

  “So there was no chance that he was . . . because you see I could have sworn I saw the plane . . . ”

  It was then that I began to hear in her voice a growing suspicion. I couldn’t help, however, but push my inquiry to its logical conclusion. It was all clear to me now. I could see it as plain as the headlines on tomorrow’s daily papers. Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell, by virtue of his imagination, had breathed into life the Omega Force series long before recent global political events. Hawkes-Mitchell was trying to make an honest dollar, though he had in fact dreamed up a rather dreary thriller with unappealing characters. He was naturally unaware that the story had somehow spawned a genuine Omega Force, this cadre staffed entirely by dark-complected persons. Naturally, in the course of beginning to use their assault capability just as Hawkes-Mitchell had planned it, it had become necessary for the Omega Force to kill off the author himself, the artificer, lest he reveal the linkage between his pulp novels and the planned assault on the PIADC or the Osprey Nuclear Power Plant.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Hawkes-Mitchell said. “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Wait,” I cried. “Just one more question!”

  Many points remained to be resolved. Why was our island now central to the Omega Force? Why had I happened to find Hawkes-Mitchell’s all-important piece of fiction on the porch of that house, when the Omega Force would have perhaps preferred that I never find the book? And why did the plot, here in the real world, feature woebegone individuals: a modernist architect, a German barmaid, my learning-disabled son, and an out-of-work surf-casting lobsterman?

  I had my face in my hands. And I would have stayed that way for a while were it not that I suddenly felt Skip’s large, meaty palm on my clavicle.

  I looked up into his soulful eyes.

  “Shall we go for pizza?”

  10. On Beach Parties and International Disarmament

  There was only one venue on the island for that popular culinary item known as pizza pie, and that was the bar named Dumpling’s. A dangerous location, Dumpling’s, and not simply because of the presence there of sodium and trans fats. Sinister characters lurked in the margins of Dumpling’s. They nursed lethal intoxicants meant to prove, through ingestion, their ability to survive anything, any degradation or humiliation at the hands of the affluent. I should not have gone into Dumpling’s. I was not dressed properly, for one. In any kind of scuffle that would result from our presence, Skip and I were sure to fare poorly. Neither of us was terribly strong, nor were we schooled in the proper sorts of self-defense techniques.

  Additionally, my wife had taken the car. And I had given the domestic help the afternoon and evening off. There was no recourse but to walk to Dumpling’s, and as we went, I held tight onto the arm of my son to steady myself. I am sure that in Skip’s view this amounted to a noble responsibility, being able to guide his old father along in the world. As we walked, we played the rhyming game. That is, I allowed Skip free rein with respect to this peculiarity of his character. I would select a word, like storm, and then I would challenge Skip to come up with the greatest number of possible rhymes. Swarm, warm, dorm, and the dazzling fungiform. I even allowed Skip to use the ersatz rhyme of orn, so naturally he scored heavily with warn, torn, scorn, mourn, and, to my horror, porn.

  I’d left my goodly wife a note explaining where we had gone, so that when she returned o
n the late boat she might find us, but it was my belief that by the time she reached Dumpling’s we would be well on our way to meet Ernest Piccolo.

  I was glad to behold the expanse of bottles in Dumpling’s. I loved the way these mixables were arrayed, like the tiered dancers on a Busby Berkeley riser. Always in front of a mirror too, so that their tableau would be twice as seductive. I kept as far away from the bar as I could get. I installed my son by the foosball table (I believe this is the name of the game) because he was inordinately fond of foosball, as I had found on a previous visit, ruseball, brewsball, Jewsball, and I hustled to the bar quickly to lodge our order. I carried back a lamentable seltzer water with lime while we waited for our french fries and other salty preliminaries. I could taste the moment of hypostasis, I could taste the ousia of drink, even at this distance from the bar, the way in which all mystery would be made comprehensible. Who knows but that I would have weakened right then and there—as we picked lazily at our french fries and Skip eyed the foosball table lustily—if a staff person in Dumpling’s, someone unknown to me, had not begun shouting for no fathomable reason. This crusty publican was outraged about some patron sitting near to us, but I could not identify the offending individual. “You got a lot of nerve coming into this place! Some people got a helluva lot of nerve!” Initially, I feigned ignorance about the disturbance, as did many others. I searched discreetly for the target of the aggression, but in vain. The ripostes only amplified. “All a man like you does is lie around like you couldn’t be bothered to—”

  Soon there was another fellow with him, an apron-wearer, and they were walking toward the section of the establishment reserved for those of us dining. I believe the apron-wearer was cleaning a knife on a rancid dishcloth. Without further delay, I took hold of my son’s hand, and I told him that we needed to change venues immediately. I told him, in a tumble of words, that we needed to hurry now, that there were treasonous elements everywhere around us, enemies of the state, and it was no longer safe to be in Dumpling’s, especially in light of the altercation that was almost certain to take place. I told Skip that we would have the pizza delivered, and we could microwave it, and it would taste just as delicious as if we got it right here, fresh from the brick oven.

  There was some bushwhacking to do. There were some back roads and some clambering through the boxthorn and blackthorn, until we were again at the water’s edge, beholding the drama of the swells. It wasn’t so far. The moon was on the rise, despite the storm that was predicted in the marine band forecast. The thick humidity of early autumn was an oracle of summer’s undeniable last gasp. Through hurricanes does summer relinquish its grip. With a little more hardship, we would step from the overgrowth behind the house of a certain mergers and acquisitions specialist and into the moon-light. That is, we soon found ourselves on Carson’s Bluff, a spot of gentle dunes a mile or so beyond the end of the golf course, and as we overlooked the lip of the land, we could see that the waves had grown unruly and restive. We threaded our way down an eroding path, catching on to dune grasses to avoid plummeting to our deaths below.

  In the distance, a robust beach fire flickering. A bona fide beach fire of the sort that the neighbors’ kids used to have once or twice a summer, getting into whatever trouble they got into. Of course, I worried that this beach fire not only was unsafe but constituted a security breach in the matter of our objectives. For if one of the beachcombers from the gathering was hiding out in the nearby brush, it would be virtually impossible for me to keep this individual from recognizing that a high-level exchange of information was about to take place. Unless I neutralized him or her. As I was thinking this thought, I was disturbed by another interloper on the scene, perhaps an attack dog! A pit bull or a German shepherd sent to menace us! I distracted the hound by pulling on the stick in its mouth, which prompted it to yank back, growling ominously. I could tell that my technique, disarming it with play, had won over the attacker, because its growls had now given way to a relentlessly wagging rump end.

  The stick, of course, was a perfectly shapely and sea-worn example of Atlantic driftwood, the kind of stick that may have been thrown into the sea and fetched out by dogs like this for decades now without ever having been chewed to saliva-moistened bits. Skip and I were trying to persuade the dog to return to its masters, but it was having none of it. Instead, it expected us to cooperate in this ceaseless throwing of the stick. Skip was about to oblige, though he didn’t throw very well, but something in me steadied his arm. I took the stick from him. I could feel it overcoming me, that humiliating need. Now was not the time for the Dance of the Stick, with all that was upon us: an amphibious landing by the Omega Force, intent on commandeering the island for a multipronged assault, a shock-and-awe-style assault on multiple military targets in the environs. The Omega Force was aware, no doubt, of the presence on our island, at least during the months of summer, of a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a deputy director of Homeland Security, likewise numerous members of the party in power. Each forking path of possibility had been duly accounted for by them. There was no time for the stick dance, and yet I felt an inability to sit still or to think clearly. Still, I didn’t want Skip to witness me in the middle of what was certainly, at best, an eccentricity and at worst a sign of some nervous disorder that I had never quite eradicated despite years of treatment.

  Skip was beginning to shiver.

  “Want to wear my jacket?”

  Skip shook his head dramatically. I forced the jacket on him. A man who knew what I knew could not afford to be wrapped up in outerwear. And then I took off my loafers. It was easier to walk in the sand without them. The seconds passed interminably. No fisherman appeared on the shore. Was it true that there was no choice but to make our way over to the beach party? To do reconnaissance in that area? It seemed there was no choice. The attack dog chaperoned us.

  Did I recognize those urchins of the neighborhood? Urchins no longer. They were the mostly grown children of privilege. Grown children who had never known a day of being short for change in their lives. They carried no cash. Grown children whose hair was perfect, whether combed or disarranged, from the moment they were expelled from the womb, and who seemed to know, even then, exactly how to ski, exactly how to do that nonsense on the surfboard with the sail on it, whose gift for repartee, even in their twenties, would exceed mine over the whole of my tired life, who would succeed effortlessly in lives that would be noteworthy for an absence of self-reflection despite reversals, illnesses, or death. Their mysteries were so buried that they were inaccessible even to themselves. As the fashions of the years turned, these young people remained unaffected, unperturbed, and by virtue of their lack of interest in the goings-on of the world, as perfectly lovely, as luminously beautiful and purposeless, as the hosts of heaven.

  What was unclear, as I gazed around at the group of them, all delinquent from classes at the colleges in the area in preparation for a long weekend, was whether or not they were collaborators. Would collaborators be making the campfire dessert known, Skip helpfully pointed out, as the s’more? Because amid their other nefarious activities, about which I had as yet not enough information to surmise, there was the preparation of this dessert. It could just as easily have been some explosive preparation, gelignite or TNT, who knows, and maybe these supplies had been secreted away when the scouts had given word of our approach. For the moment it was the s’more, prepared in the traditional way with stick, marshmallow, graham cracker, chocolate bar.

  I was immediately hailed by name. “Dr. Van Deusen,” one of the young men called to me. Did I know him? Whose son was he, and why did he look so much like so many other people? Like sons who had perhaps by now grown up and had sons themselves, in some eternal return of Anglo-Saxon reinheritance. He could have been anyone on the island, and that alone made it impossible to establish his intentions. “Care for a beer, Dr. Van Deusen?”

  As any espionage agent will tell you, it’s important to be able to blend in wit
h the indigenous cultures, and if this means garroting a one-legged prostitute in Bangkok in an effort to establish that you are not sentimental and are willing to take risks, then you will have to garrote that hussy and pray to God that you will be forgiven. Accordingly, while attempting to fathom the purpose of this so-called beach party, I had no choice but to partake of the local grog and to attempt, at least in brief, to make nice with our hosts.

  I introduced Skip, and I was asked if Skip would like a beer too. Though Skip was beginning to go gray early just the way his father had, with a full head of hair that would need to be carefully treated with some masculine dye, we did not permit him to drink alcoholic beverages. It only confused him. I demurred on Skip’s behalf, to his disappointment.

  From the first sip of the beverage, I realized that these were not such bad kids after all! In fact, maybe they weren’t such carbon copies of their stuffy parents as I believed them to be! Maybe there was a little something going on in there. A little understanding of the complexities of the world. Perhaps they were able to understand that everything that was so felicitous to them, their way of life, was about exclusion, and that this precious exclusion, in which they got to romp on the beach with the same kids with whom they went to their preparatory schools, was something that they needed to defend somehow, whether through public service or through the participation in the foreign bureaus of the Central Intelligence Agency or similar organizations.

  The youngsters, they now informed me, had been about to undertake a certain drinking pastime. According to this game, one either had to answer a question with a revealing truth about himself or else he had to drink. The youngsters now revealed that there was a rather powerful punch lying in a cooler not far distant, just beyond the merry light of the bonfire, a punch that had some preposterous name such as From Here to Eternity. The drinking game was already under way, and there were already some bodies lying around. Whether in the midst of premarital fornication or unconsciousness was hard to know. Perhaps there had been a ritual poisoning or perhaps powerful sedatives had been stirred into the beverages by malingerers in an effort to sideline various parties in the military battle to come.