by Jess Walter
When he was done, Eli put the box of shells and the handgun back in the drawer. He took a deep breath and came back in. I pretended to be reading the magazine.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “This is going to work. I’m going to take care of everything.” He walked me to the door.
I went down the stairs, but he stayed on the landing above me.
“Thanks,” Eli said.
“For what?”
“For coming back, even after…I shouldn’t have spent that money against you, Clark. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“We always come back, huh?” He scrunched his nose and raised his glasses and looked like the boy at the bus stop, the boy who’d come across me bleeding alongside the river. “We’re like—” He shivered and then he smiled. Eli had trouble expressing emotions. He began to fidget and to shift his weight. “We’re like best friends.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure we are.”
He grinned like a kid at a birthday party. Then he paused.
“And we’ll never go against each other again.”
“No,” I said.
He smiled again and went back inside.
When I got home I called Michael and told him Eli was ready to sell but that Michael had to come to Spokane. He didn’t want to do it, but finally he agreed. “The game had better be ready,” he said. “Otherwise, the deal’s off.”
“The game is ready,” I said.
“One more thing, Mason,” Michael said. “When this is all over, I don’t want you calling here. It makes Dana nervous when you call. I don’t like to see her upset.”
Outside the snow was swirling, and I imagined being lost in it, lying down and letting it blow and drift around me until I was buried, gone. “Okay,” I told Michael. “I won’t call after this.”
The next day, Eli sent me an e-mail.
Senator—
Have a nice trip. Get an early start. I’d go too but I have a meeting that day, February 6, at 10:00 a.m. Everything will be great after that.
Your best friend,
Eli
I bought an airline ticket for February 5, the day before Eli was going to…do it. I caught the last flight out. I got to San Jose about 10:00 P.M. and slept at a hotel near the airport. All night I tossed and turned, until the sheets and covers were like ropes binding me. In the morning I grabbed a taxi (a receipt, I was thinking, and a witness) and gave the driver Dana’s address in Sunnyvale.
“That’s gonna cost,” he said. “You could rent a car for what it’s gonna cost.”
“I know.” I stared out the cab window at the surging, pointless suburban northern California traffic—millions of cars and no sign of a downtown anywhere. The clouds were light and formless, a white-gray haze above us. I felt a detachment from myself—a defense mechanism, I suppose—self-denial over what we…what Eli was doing.
But it’s his plan, I protested my own guilt. I didn’t buy the gun. I didn’t buy the shells. I didn’t load it. I didn’t tell Michael to come to Spokane.
“Gun?” the cabbie asked.
“What?”
He gestured to the eye patch. “Your eye. BB gun?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”
“It’s always a stick or a BB gun, ain’t it?” He turned and smiled, his own right eye milky, the pupil spilled out like the punctured yolk of an egg.
I looked back out the window. Cars swirled around us on the freeway, and every eye seemed to stare at me. A little boy perched on a safety car seat looked at me and shook his head slowly, and we stayed even with the little boy’s car until I wanted to yell at the cabbie to go faster or go slower, anything but driving alongside that boy.
Calm. Cold. There is a synapse in the brain that connects brilliance to brutality. It is the oldest part of the brain. And so I felt better when I thought about the details, when I reveled in my criminal genius:
I had found a way to murder my enemy without incriminating myself, without even lifting a finger. The brilliance of it overshadowed any misgivings I might have. Even if Eli were caught, he would say I had nothing to do with it. The motive would always be his disagreement with Michael over Empire. My motive—Dana and our daughter—would stay secret forever. And since I would be with Dana when it happened, my motive would also be my alibi.
Perfect. Cold. I could hear my own breathing.
The cab left the freeway for the flat prosperity of Sunnyvale: small stucco war-era houses remodeled and expanded until they threatened to burst their small lots; new apartment complexes and condos and low-slung business parks where fortunes had been made and lost and were slowly being made again; an anachronistic villagelike downtown shaded by the condos and apartments rising around it. I was suffocating.
There was some kind of street fair going on and the cabbie had to detour around it—blocks of Berkeley vendors unloading knit hats and bracelets from Volvos and microbuses, and I thought I might choke in the back of that cab. The heat.
I had found a way to murder my enemy. What are you doing? Nothing! Settle down. You’re just seeing an old friend.
“Seeing an old friend?” the cabbie asked. “That’s great.”
Was I talking out loud? Jesus. “Yeah,” I answered. Was I really doing this? I checked my watch. Almost ten. The meeting would be any minute.
The cab stopped in front of a small, one-story stucco house, leaning out over two painted posts onto a lawn pocked with oranges from a small, leaning tree. No garage, just a cloth carport over a blue minivan. A tricycle sat on the front porch. My daughter’s tricycle. My wife was in that house. The air was shallow and sharp in my chest; I couldn’t get it to go any deeper, my lungs pressed beneath some weight.
I paid the cabbie and walked up to Dana’s door. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t do it. My God. We were going to kill Michael. I’d told myself that Eli had lost his mind, but it was me. “My God!” I said aloud. “We can’t do this.” I rang the bell over and over. We had to hurry. We could still warn him. Michael’s cell phone number! Maybe we still had time.
My first thought when Michael answered the door was relief: Oh, thank God. I didn’t do this. Then a little girl came up and peeked around his hip. She was beautiful, round faced and pigtailed, wearing pajamas with Belle from Beauty and the Beast on the front. Amanda.
“Who is it, Daddy?” Behind them was the house not of a Silicon Valley mogul, but a struggling, working couple: a box of Cheerios on the dining room table, papers and bills spread out, toys and pillows on the carpeted floor.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Michael asked me.
I couldn’t look away from the girl. “Is Dana here?” I asked.
“Mama’s gone,” said the girl.
“She’s in Spokane,” Michael said. “That freak friend of yours said he didn’t trust me. It had to be Dana. I don’t know why I ever got involved with you crooks.”
I just stared at that little girl, at Michael and Dana’s little girl. She held out a picture she had drawn. I took the picture and looked down at it. It was a stick-figure girl with stick-figure pigtails. “That’s me,” Amanda said. “What’s on your eye?”
“It’s…it’s a patch,” I said. My legs felt weak beneath me. I thought of what Eli had said. He’s going to hurt like he’s never imagined someone could hurt. Oh my God.
“Are you a pirate?”
“He sure is, sweetie,” said Michael. “What do you want, Mason?” Behind him, his telephone rang.
7 | WHAT ELI WANTED
What Eli wanted was the money he believed Michael owed him, the venture capital he was convinced Michael was holding back: $500,000, according to the ransom note Dana read over the phone. Michael listened with his hand on his head, making little moaning sounds every few seconds. I set Amanda’s drawing down on the dining room table and stood next to Michael, my head next to his so that I could hear what Dana said.
“‘Get the money and fly to Spokane,’” Dana read. “�
�There is a flight out of San Jose in ninety minutes. That gives you just enough time to go to the bank and get to the airport. The flight lands in Spokane at three-thirty. Exit the airport and walk to the garage. On the top floor, near the elevator, you will find a gray Mercedes-Benz with the top down. Put the money in the car and then go back into the airport and sit at the pay phone directly adjacent to the escalator. When Eli has the money, he will call and tell you where to find me. I’m in a cabin in the woods. If you do everything right, he won’t hurt me. But if you call the police or don’t bring the money, he will kill me. If you bring the police, he will never tell them where I am and I’ll—’” She stopped. “What’s that word?”
“Starve,” said Eli in the background.
“It looks like swerve.”
“No,” he said. “It’s ‘starve.’ How could you swerve to death?”
“Yeah, I didn’t think that made sense,” she said, and I couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact she sounded, as if they were just chatting. “‘Starve to death,’” Dana said. “‘You have until four o’clock. If Eli doesn’t have the money by four o’clock, he will kill me.’” The phone went dead.
“Dana!” The phone dropped out of Michael’s hand. “Jesus. This isn’t happening!” He tried Dana’s phone again, but there was no answer. While he listened to it ring, he suddenly pushed me in the chest. “Did you have anything to do with this?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I love Dana.”
He just stared at me. Then he threw his phone across the room and put his face in his hands. Amanda started crying. “Daddy?”
Michael picked her up and comforted her. His hand was on her head. It fit perfectly between her pigtails. He was crying, too. He pressed her hard to his chest, and her little legs swayed side to side. She had frills on her socks.
So perfect. So cold.
“Listen,” I said. “Nothing is going to happen. I’ll take care of this, Michael. I’ll make sure nothing happens. Eli isn’t violent. He’s just confused. He’ll listen to me. I’m going to get Dana back and get Eli some help. I knew he was losing it. I knew—” I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t tell him that I had pushed Eli to this point.
“I don’t have that kind of money,” Michael said. “We gotta call the cops.”
“No,” I said. “Not yet. Don’t force his hand. I’ll fly back up there. I’ll talk Eli down. Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen. He’s just confused.”
“What if he hurts her?”
“He won’t,” I said. “Look, you can call the police if you want. But please. Let me fly up there and see if I can stop this. Get me on the plane and then it’s up to you. Call the police. I don’t care. But give me a chance to make this right.”
Michael considered me. I’d always thought we looked alike, but as I looked into his teary eyes I felt so much smaller than him, so much less.
“Okay,” he said.
He let me on his computer and I signed onto my e-mail and wrote Eli a quick note, just in case he checked.
Eli—
Don’t do anything. I’m coming back there. Don’t move. I need to talk to you.
I lied about everything. There is no more money. I’m sorry. For everything.
It’s going to be okay.
Clark
We ran out to Michael’s minivan, parked under the cloth carport. His hands shook as he worked the keys—hung on a long gecko key ring—and he beat on the dashboard as we sat snarled in traffic, trying to get around the street fair and the construction. The drive took forever, Michael yelling at drivers and squirreling the minivan from lane to lane. Throughout, Amanda sat in a child’s seat strapped in back, staring at me.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Does what hurt?”
“The thing on your eye.”
“Sometimes.” I turned to face her full on. “So you just turned four?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“When’s your birthday?”
“December nine.”
I turned to Michael, my mouth dry. “You had her party late.”
He looked perturbed. “What?”
“Her birthday party. When I called in January you were having her party.”
“My parents were out of town for her birthday so we had a second party when they got back,” he said, incredulous that I would ask about such a thing at a time like this. I did the math again. Less than eight months.
“My sister just had a baby,” I said carefully. “She was almost a month early. Was Dana early like that?”
“No. She was three weeks late. What the hell is this, Mason?” Seven months.
We pulled into the airport turnout. As I got out of the car, Michael put his hand on my arm. “Please.”
I said good-bye to Michael’s daughter and ran into the airport.
I bought a ticket and was the last person to board. I settled in, panting and sweating, between two businessmen, who leaned away from the frantic, one-eyed passenger who sat between them. The plane had to land in Seattle before continuing to Spokane. The Seattle leg seemed to take forever. I’d check my watch, and only two minutes would’ve passed. I’d sit for an hour, snap my arm up, and check my watch again. Two minutes. I stretched and leaned and craned my neck. Out the window the clouds were stretched and striated, not enough to cover the snow-scarred ground beneath us.
In Seattle the passengers deplaned slowly, as if they were marching to their deaths. “For God’s sake,” I muttered. Both the businessmen got off and the Spokane passengers got on, families, students, and short-sleeved businessmen, ladies in tan slacks, a couple of drunk golfers. The new passengers sat and we waited, quiet except for the low rumble of conversation from the back of the plane and an occasional cough. I checked my watch: 2:45. And still the plane didn’t move. I buzzed a flight attendant and asked what the problem was. “It’s just a minor delay, sir. We’ll be taking off shortly.”
We didn’t take off until just before three. It was a fifty-five-minute flight to Spokane. There wasn’t enough time. Eli had said to put the money in the car by four or she would die. I was having trouble breathing again. Like he never imagined someone could hurt. Eli didn’t have a phone, so I tried to call Michael from the phone on the plane, but it wouldn’t work. I slid my credit card over and over, but it fucking wouldn’t work. I tried the phone in the row in front of me. None of them worked. Maybe Michael had called the police. Maybe it would be okay. At 3:55 we made a pass over Spokane, but there was low fog and the pilot said we had to circle. Always circling. We banked and straightened and I saw in a flash my own death, like a carousel ride, faster and faster, around and around, the same faces spinning at the bus stop and high school and the prom and Empire—Dana and Eli and me, and even Ben, until he couldn’t hold on anymore and he let go of the railing and fell away. I knew then that I couldn’t hold on much longer either (the plane banking, my head sliding against the seat, the tears falling from my eyes) and it occurred to me that I was dead already, that I had been dead since that day by the river, that Eli had put his hand on the chest of a corpse, had comforted a dying boy, and I thought, We are all just loose piles of carbon and regret.
When the fog cleared and the plane stopped circling and I stopped spinning, there was nothing holding me together; when we finally landed, at 4:10 P.M., I felt as if I would dissolve in the air.
As I got off the plane, I half expected to see police meeting me. There were none. I ran through the airport, waded through the other passengers, and sprinted across the terminal, over the sky bridge and into the parking garage, up the elevator to the top floor—low-roofed concrete and round pillars. No cars. The Mercedes was gone. My voice echoed in the garage. “No! Eli!” I ran down three floors to my own car, which I’d left in the garage the night before. My tires squealed coming down the ramp, and I sped away from the airport and across town.
It took me fifteen minutes to get to Eli’s house. The Mercedes was parked out front, the For Sale sign still on it
. I ran up the stairs to the carriage house apartment. “Eli!” The door was unlocked. He would never leave the door unlocked.
My old friend Eli Boyle was lying on his side. Blood was barely moving, in a slackened flow outward from the wound, across the carpet, onto the kitchen floor. Lying there on the ground he seemed so small, just like when we were kids and I saw him walking to the bus stop, the braces rattling around his knees, drawn into himself, as if he could keep the world away. And I remembered feeling his hand on my chest that day, comforting me, the pellet from Pete’s gun burning in my eye.
I suppose there are worse things than rest. “I’m so sorry, Eli,” I said. I crouched down next to him. Blood wept from his head.
The gun was next to his body. I picked it up. The shades were pulled in the apartment and it was dark, so I carried the gun out onto the porch. I pulled the pin the way I’d see Eli do it and rolled the chamber out. There were two bullets missing. I slammed it closed, threw the gun across the lawn, and screamed out: “Dana!” And then I looked up at the main house and—
Caroline? Another police officer is here. A Sergeant Spivey? He says you have gone home. Is that right? He says I have to stop writing. We almost made it, didn’t we? Just close enough to know what we’ve missed…if that’s not the shape of life—
I’ve been trying for two days to imagine the words I would use to close this, to finish—I have dreamed for you the profoundest words, Caroline—poetry to temper the sorrow and the longing, to somehow make this life beautiful.
But there are no words. No poetry. And only one thing left for me to do.
Rest now.
Clark
