It was a little after two. A stroke of luck, seeing as the bars had closed and students were flooding the streets in search of new waterholes. Actually, it looked like the entire hill was the hole, with kids staggering in all directions, smashing bottles, pissing in the alleys, throwing up on the sidewalks. Devolution 101, the one and only college course they took seriously, and which they seemed to be passing with flying colors. I adopted the pose, lurching ahead for the entire three minutes it took to get to my house.
I surveyed the block carefully, hoping that, in the poor light, Dog or whoever else might be watching would mistake me for a future ambassador to St. James Court. No one appeared to be scoping my front door, but I thought it best to strike out across an empty lot to the alley and enter through the back. It was a tricky proposition. Once I had hefted the sagging gate off its broken hinge, I had to maneuver through all the junk Skunk had deposited in the yard: decrepit sawhorses, Budweiser empties, waterlogged (and very slippery) magazines, a broken birdbath that he had found in the alley. Our yard was a monument to stillborn notions. Skunk might have intended to mend that birdbath, but once he had it he discovered he hated birds. You don't leave things behind without rationalizing the mess. The path of logic was inescapable. He didn't care for those old Playboys anymore, but in case of emergency it was good to keep them around, but once they were tossed under the open sky they became worthless sludge, leaving indifference as the best option. You might say my life followed the same pattern. My body and soul were discards that I was too lazy to drag out to the garbage.
Yeah, I know--I belabor the point.
Shifting past a couple of rusting outdoor barbecue grills, I inserted my key in the back door and gave it a shove. The door bottom sucked and cracked across the decaying threshold as I maneuvered my way past a trash can mewling with life. I opened my mouth to call out to Barbara, then zipped. Dog could be in the house again and it would be dumb to announce myself.
There were no lights on. Had Barbara come and gone? Working my way to the dining room, I took my courage in nose and sniffed. Mold and mildew—nothing more. Had my sister taken Flint's suggestion and used the empty lot? With her condition, she probably kept a roll of toilet paper in her bag at all times. God, I could have stepped in the mess while walking to the alley. It wouldn't have been the first time shit had been tracked in this house.
I checked every room and closet. There was no sign, odiferous or otherwise, that Barbara had come back to use the facilities.
Peeking out the upstairs window, I looked for her car. I saw a Sentra that could have been hers across the street, but I preferred to think it belonged to someone else. She would not have left it behind unless someone had snatched her. Either way, the money from the island was gone.
The money should not have been my primary concern. But we had staked our lives, meaning our identities, on the Brinks haul. Let's face it, we would never have heard of Croesus or Rothschild if they hadn't been loaded. Ms. Barbara McPherson had become $$$ Barbara McPherson, aka Enchanté "Euro" Chanel, aka Big Bucks Sweet Tooth--we shall discard Possum Butt. Same woman, different titles of courtesy. I could bemoan the money and my sister in the same breath.
CHAPTER 18
Mortified into a ludicrous lump. A little tinny, true, but that was one of the lines that streamed through the cold alpha soup of my brain as I slept away what was left of the night. It was the only line that remained coherent when I opened my eyes around nine.
Mortified into a ludicrous lump.
Maybe it wasn't the same head. Maybe it wasn't a case of being unable to control my dreams. Maybe I was someone else when I nodded off. It gives a whole new meaning to sleeping with a stranger. While catching a few z's, you're liable to intercept all sorts of crazy signals from the wacky station that broadcasts the Top Ten Archetypes. I once woke up convinced I was William Shakespeare, a notion that stuck with me a good ten seconds. In all the cerebral noise, our personalities slip into new personas. And right now I was Joe Schmuck, a ludicrous lump. It was a notion that stuck with me for the rest of the day.
What might or might not have been Barbara's Sentra was gone when I walked outside. How fitting. I had missed the opportunity to confirm its ownership last night, when I was too afraid to step over my own front doorsill. That meant I was a schmuck before I went to bed. My dreams were just being consistent.
I don't know why my courage picked up that morning. Anyone could have stopped me as I walked to my car. But all sorts of craziness can result from a good night's sleep. Besides, I didn't have much choice. If I wanted to go anywhere, I needed my wheels.
I thought this early in the morning I would have James River Park to myself. It wasn't exactly the crack of dawn, but in my universe if you weren't headed for work by now, your time was best spent staring at the ceiling. The kayak and bicycle lunatics gathered at the 22nd Street entrance came as an unpleasant surprise. In their tight-fitting outfits and safety helmets, they looked like a quorum of hard-headed aliens preparing to vote on the best way to conquer Planet Earth. I nudged my Impala as gently as I could past boats and bikes, across ruts and exposed tree roots, until I was at the far end of the parking lot. A couple of squirrels—real squirrels, without helmets—chattered indignantly at me for poking a car so close to the woods. Getting out, I leaned my back against the door and watched the entrance for any unwanted nature lovers. After a very long five minutes, I went down on my knees and began goosing the bumper.
"You'll need an RF detector to find it."
I fell back on my ass in surprise. A girl was standing next to my car, jogging in place. Her ponytail flopped up and down in the air, giving her head a vibrant lashing.
"You're looking for a GPS, right?" she said gaspingly.
"I thought I ran over a squirrel," I said quickly, sharp as a Milk Dud.
"Yeah, well I searched my car and didn't find a thing, but my husband still tracked me down. That asshole had stuck it under the brake pedal. The brake pedal! What if it had come loose and I couldn't stop? I could have run down someone!"
She had not stopped jogging in place as she spoke, giving her words a huffing urgency. I nodded agreeably, with nothing else to add. I had been completely flat-footed by her assertion that I was looking for a GPS, as though it was a commonplace problem, like an oil leak. It removed some of the menace from the cameras that had been scanning my life. See? Everyone's spying on everyone. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not that it's a pleasant experience, as evidenced by the girl's screwed-up expression. She wasn't suffering from cramps, but from memories.
"I never thought that creep..." she continued briefly.
"The man you married," I said objectively.
"That asshole. What if I had bugged his car, huh? I wouldn't have heard the end of it!"
I found this a bit duplicitous, seeing as her husband, or former husband, had probably never heard the end of it. I made the universal gesture of showing I was a busy man, much as it dismayed me to be rude. This consisted of a rueful smile and continuance of what I was doing before I was so rudely interrupted.
"Check the pedals!" the girl emphasized before darting past a gaggle of kayakers on her way to the river trail.
Crooking my fingers under the bumper, I ran my hand the width of the car. There was a lot of road crud, tar and dried mud, but no knobby anomalies. My knees sore from the gravel, I lay on my side and stared up. And there it was, a surprisingly bulky rectangle slapped on the gas tank. Stretching out, I tugged at the box until the magnet gave way. Sitting up, I gave the GPS a cursory inspection. StreetEagle. It looked expensive. Someone had invested a fair amount in the hope I would lead them to a big score. I was comforted by the prospect of putting a loss on their ledger.
I'm sure I looked suspicious as hell as I sauntered to the other side of the lot, but no one was looking as I planted the device on a small pickup.
I was a boy the last time I had been to River Road. For some reason, our father had taken it into his head to give us (Barbara
and me—Jeremy wasn't on the scene, yet) a quick tour of the area.
"This is how the other half lives," Skunk had orated, putting on the airs of a tour bus guide. He inserted a few oaths that verged on jailbird socialism, then amended: "This is how two percent of the population lives. One day..."
"One day what?" Barbara asked as she sucked on a Sugar Daddy.
"We might just move here."
This was received with the bland skepticism we reserved for all of our father's grand pronouncements. He was going to make millions, he was going to register us at the YMCA, he was going to excavate a swimming pool in the back yard, he was going to take us to church, he was going to take us to the circus, he was going to join the circus.... These and a million other promises remained unfulfilled. We learned not to complain, seeing as most of the promises he broke were those he made to himself. But when he swore he would beat the living daylights out of us...that we took to heart, and scampered out of arm's reach.
River Road's snobnabobs did not appeal to me. I can handle the mansions, which have their own kind of indiscreet charm. The lesser houses, in the $600,000 to cool-million range, belonged to the local peasantry who had to work for a living, and were undoubtedly sneered down upon by their upscale neighbors. I suspect that, like me, Skunk had been put off by the gated communities. Those sequoia-high iron wrought fences could just as easily hold someone in as keep yokels from going beyond the curb. The numerous churches were in stiff competition to see which would be the next Notre Dame. They didn't bother me much. I could pass them without stopping.
There were far more buildings in the area than when Skunk had bought us out here twenty-three years ago. The long row of fat-cat communities was a money sump, draining Richmond's tax base and leaving isolated old dry scabs with laughable infrastructures. The downtown university, which hogged millions, was rimmed by sorry-ass shantytowns. Last year one of the main streets, Belvedere, was practically blocked off for a year while construction crews plied their earth-movers down the middle of the road. It was a big production and we anticipated a grand result, maybe even the hub of a new subway. What we got was a new median strip with a handful of bushes that stretched all of four blocks. In the meantime, River Road gained new mansions, new churches, and a lot more resentment from the have-nots. The Belvedere project was a sham to show our few remaining tax dollars at work. The flowers died within three months.
Well, it's an old story, here and everywhere else, and bitching won't change a thing. Let's face it, my own contributions to the tax base are minimal, maybe even negative. I don't deserve more than what I've got, and until the Brinks money reared its green head, I had been thriving in poverty. Even old reruns of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous couldn't rouse me out of my contentment.
"What would it be like to inherit millions?" Skunk had mused as we were turned away from another gated community by a guard who took one look at our car and its occupants and bellowed, "Out!"
It was such an inconceivable notion that neither Barbara nor I applied any mental power to the idea. Nor were we put out by the self-important ire of the security guards. Thumbing our noses at authority was in our blood. To us it was the best part of the tour. It was only now, so many years later, with the odor of money drifting across my shallow consciousness, that I felt the contempt of wealth and the humility of my condition. In Europe, I would have been a peasant (even today, I think) and none the worse for wear. Peasants may be looked down upon, but at least they have a valid niche in the hierarchy. Here, without money, you're a worm. And I was beginning to squirm, as worms tend to do. Especially when they're on the end of a hook.
I began to wonder if my driver's license had expired. It was the kind of spontaneous apprehension that evaporates quickly from my mind.
Everyone around here obeyed the speed limit, so there was no honking behind me as I slowed to study the street signs. This could be either a good or a bad sign of things to come. In some moneyed neighborhoods speed limits are a waste of signage. Cops being poor working slobs, there was no need to cater to their whimsical notions of civic obedience. You floored the pedal, paid the fines, and thumbed your nose at the underpaid and overworked. But the Riverside crowd seemed intent on toeing the line. And here was where the bad part came in. I might not get sideswiped, but these were just the kind of folks who would call the cops (or their private security service) if a suspicious character glanced at their lawn. I don't look out of the ordinary—not particularly—but around here I probably looked out of place. I wasn't a local and I wasn't a maid.
I spotted the Victorian-esque street sign that announced Ferncrest, turned off River Road, and gave a mental sigh of relief. Judging from the houses and the occasional crown of weeds, Ferncrest wasn't as unapproachably saturated with respect as some of the other subdivisions. These were reasonable homes, in the half-mil range. Armed guards had been mowed down by fiscal common sense.
A collie raced across a broad front lawn to chase my car, but was brought up short by invisible fencing. I saw the receiver on his collar spiking his mutt-brain with electronic diktats. These people kept their pets under control. It might be an ominous sign. There would be no one-sided gunfights on the immaculate fescue, but there were other ways to control unwanted strangers. I scratched my neck, sensing imperious fleas.
20011Ferncrest Avenue was one of those stucco-stacks real estate salesmen love to describe as "well appointed". It was tucked between two homes whose architectural styles were equally vague, with chef-tossed bits of Mediterranean, Northwestern, Contemporary, French Chateau, Golf Course and Burger King. They were distinguishable by Nouveau variations in roof tilts and shrubbery and the degree of racism in their lawn ornaments. Not exactly the ticky-tacky houses ol' Pete Seeger had railed against, but similar enough to impart a creepy frisson of conformity. The same kind of architectural dictatorship prevailed on Oregon Hill, but over the years front porches had become encrusted with personality. No one in our neighborhood would stop you from making a fence out of surveyor stakes or random mosaics of broken beer bottle glass. No one created a stink for strewing appliances on your property and leaving them to rust for so long that they became works of art. That brand of bohemianism was absent from Ferncrest. Even the cars looked stamp-punched.
That included the Jag sitting in the driveway at 20011, which was worth as much as my house plus the houses to either side, with a bit of riverfront thrown in. As I proceeded slowly down the road, my Impala whimpered in envy. But I took note, in that quick pass, that monotonous perfection had no home here. Put politely, there appeared to be a lack of lawn and garden hygiene.
There was no place to park without drawing the attention of alert homeowners. I know, because I tried. After pulling off a few blocks down the street to think things over, a woman came running towards me, arm raised. It took me a moment to realize she was not pointing at me or my heap, but at the cigarette dangling out of my mouth. "Jesus," I said to myself, racing away before Ms. Anality took it into her head to write down my plate number.
Lucky for me, Ferncrest was low-class enough to have its blocks divided by alleyways to allow access to garbage trucks and other unsightly vehicles that might disturb the antiseptic vistas. In fact, there were cars parked back there that resembled my own automotive universe, cars with carburetors, the only real difference being they were dent-free and clean. But so long as they were parked next to trash cans, I felt at home. There was even a whiff of decaying vegetables as I got out of the Impala. It was probably leftover ragout, but it might as well have been Campbell's Beans à la Sewer.
I was still a couple of blocks from the Neerson house. Being on foot was no less noticeable than being in a car tenderized by multiple fender benders. I offered neighborly nods to the homeowners and mortgage slaves who ventured beyond their privacy fences into the alley, trying to give the impression that my tux was at the cleaners. They nodded back in a friendly enough manner, but that could have been a ploy to distract me while they furtively pressed t
heir panic buttons. But as I drew closer to the house, I was nonplussed when a couple raking cut grass looked up, smiled...and waved. I wondered if they recognized me from the Science Museum, the only place I could imagine where our paths might have crossed. I had always thought of myself as the proverbial invisible man, and was disconcerted by the idea of complete strangers logging me in their mental databases.
I found it difficult identifying the Neerson house, not having foreseen that I would be approaching from the back. I had scooted past the front too fast to count the lawns.
I wondered about the kids mentioned in the Neerson will. Were they related to me? Could they be my half brothers and sisters? It was inconceivable, seeing as Skunk was too busy counting his cell bars to start a second family. But why else give the Neerson will as a clue? Could Skunk have had a brother I didn't know about? Someone who could have laundered the Brinks money, perhaps keeping some—or all of it—as his reward? Could this theoretical brother be Jeremy's father, and could Jeremy really have a twin? If Jeremy did have a twin living the good life, I would imagine certain similarities between the man and his shadow. In other words, I began to look for any sign of eyesores that would distinguish a man born with a rusty spoon in his mouth. No one with the Skunk gene could avoid a certain accumulation of junk.
I had spotted a broken trampoline cushioned by overgrown fescue when the roar of an engine distracted me. I stepped off the gravel lane with the casual gravitas of a well-heeled resident, as though dodging a ton of flying metal was a simple act of courtesy. I reasoned any other reaction, like diving behind some bushes, would attract attention. The van came on in a maniacal swirl of dust, as though it was packed with a demented posse from the Neighborhood Watch.
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