The Big Get-Even

by Paul Di Filippo

  A lightbulb overhead flashed to life before dying with a sharp pop. Dunkel reappeared, grinning. “You’re live now, Mr. McClinton. The feed goes from here to all the outbuildings. Now you can start up your water pump. Want me to give you a hand with that?”

  “This isn’t part of the power company’s regular service, is it?” I said. “Will there be any extra charge?”

  Dunkel snorted as if I had accused him of being a werewolf. “Shucks, Mr. McClinton, course not. Just want to make you folks feel welcome by lending a hand where I can. People in these parts are mighty glad someone’s trying to revive the lodge. I won’t pretend you’re not gonna get a lot of job-seekers dropping by before long. The employment situation is still pretty grim in these parts.”

  Oh, great. Along with orchestrating our scam on Nancarrow, we were going to have to deal with hordes of unemployed yokels dropping by. I wondered whether Stan had anticipated this and had some plan in place for dealing with visitors.

  “We’ll do what we can, Mort, but we’ve got to take things slow till we get it all sorted out.”

  “Totally understood, Mr. McClinton.”

  We found the outbuilding that housed the water pump. The intake came from Nutbush Lake itself, not a well. Under Dunkel’s expert ministrations, including liberal applications from an old-fashioned thumb-trigger oilcan, the long-dormant motor began to whir.

  “I think you’re gonna have to install some new filters, but things look pretty sweet otherwise. Here’s a card for Elbert Tighe. Good man. Runs a well-drilling business and can do you right. He’ll give everything a better once-over than I can.”

  Dunkel and I walked back to his truck.

  “Don’t hesitate to call if you need any more electrical work, Mr. McClinton. I moonlight most evenings.”

  When the rattle of Dunkel’s truck died away, I was truly alone. Suddenly, space seemed to expand around me—too much of it. The nonhuman sounds of the woodlands and the lake felt unnatural to this city boy, making me apprehensive without any good reason.

  This would be the third evening since our arrival.

  That first morning after our contorted night in the car, we had emerged to size up the place by daylight. Stan claimed one of the stand-alone cabins for himself and Sandralene, while I took the last room in the eastern wing of the lodge. Sandralene had found a broom and some cleanish rags and began a concerted tidying-up campaign on our bedrooms, with water hauled two buckets at a time from the lake. Stan and I perambulated the property, sizing it up and talking about how best to con Nancarrow, fleshing out our still-nebulous attack. By the end of the day, we had better lodgings than the car, although they were still primitive, without electricity, running water, or any sort of bed linens. Luckily, the warmth of the day carried through the night, and although I couldn’t speak for Stan or Sandralene, I stayed dressed.

  Vee Aptekar and Ray Zerkin had not arrived as planned on that first full day at the camp. Vee called Stan to explain why. Having attained his majority a couple of years ago, Ray Zerkin lived in a group home, under the auspices of some state agency. Getting him signed out for an extended “vacation” under Vee’s care involved a bit more paperwork than anticipated. But they hoped to be up at the lodge the next day.

  That next day, today, had dawned on a trio of grumpy campers, unwashed and sick of subsisting on snack foods. Having arranged the appointment with the power company representative, I had been tapped to stay at the lodge while Stan and Sandralene took the car to Centerdale for various supplies.

  Centerdale, almost an hour north and thus still unseen by any of us, was the nearest town of any size, with stores, restaurants, a movie theater, and other hallmarks of civilization. It was also where our new parole officer, Wilson Schreiber, was headquartered. Stan and I would have to report in to him before much longer.

  Around 9:00 a.m., after a breakfast of cookies and warm soda, Stan had gotten behind the wheel of the Impala, with Sandralene sitting close beside him.

  “We’ll be back by afternoon, Glen. Maybe you can catch a few fish for supper.”

  “Yeah, right. Just bring back some real groceries, okay?”

  “Steaks and champagne, to get us used to living off Nancarrow’s millions. Hang tight.”

  The thought of a real steak had me salivating. I went over to the burger-stand building, where I recalled seeing an old refrigerator inside. Sure enough, it was already chilling down, ready to hold whatever food Stan brought back. I found a can of Ajax, grabbed a rag, and ran some blessedly hot water. (The electric heating element was built in right under the sink.) Soon I had the stove top ready for cooking.

  Just as I was finishing, I heard tires on gravel outside.

  15

  The car was a new royal-blue Volkswagen Beetle, smudged with road dust. As it wheeled to a stop by the office, its retro styling seemed to fit well with the old lodge and this timeless forest. And for a brief moment, standing in the doorway of the little kitchen shack, I had a vivid hallucination, a kind of spontaneous New Frontier fantasy. I was back in the 1960s, long before I was actually born, and the world was a lighter, happier place, with my part in it all solid and safe and certain. It seemed I was running this place for real, just waiting to welcome guests. I half-heard the Beach Boys playing on a tinny transistor radio, and the splashing and joyful cries of children in the lake. I felt happy and at peace.

  The driver’s door opened, and the daydream blew away in a puff of reality. Still, it had been nice while it lasted—odd and possibly symptomatic of a coming reality breakdown, but nice.

  Varvara “Vee” Aptekar was an inch or two shorter than I, trim, and graceful. She wore a demure beige linen shirt, loose black cotton slacks, and flat shoes. Her only jewelry was a small gold cross on a short chain around her slim neck.

  I had had some vague notion that all women from Belarus were blonde. But her shoulder-length hair was chestnut with tawny highlights, artificial or not. Her taut face was all sharp planes, as if various hardships and trials had leached away any sort of padding. The effect was one of stern beauty. Her unpainted lips struck me as severe at first, but then just seemed to fit the general theme of self-discipline and tight constraint.

  I crossed the gravel lot. She waited by the open car door, as if ready to dart inside and take off should I prove in any way suspicious.

  “You are Glen McClinton,” she said in a voice that discouraged any silliness. No accent—right, though her parents were immigrants, she had been born here.

  “Yes, that’s me. And you must be Varvara.”

  “You can call me Vee.”

  “Vee, then.” I extended my hand, and she took it with businesslike efficiency. Her nails were unpolished, her grip respectable, her skin cool and soft.

  “Welcome to Bigelow Junction,” I said, trying for at least a grin. “No cable TV, no heated pool, no nightlife except owls and raccoons. Just what my parole officer ordered as punishment.”

  Although she didn’t actually smile, she didn’t seem deliberately frosty. She seemed to accept my lame jest in a kind of tolerant but chastising manner, like an adult waiting for a child to calm down.

  “We can’t very well expect luxuries when embarked on a mission of revenge, can we? The main reason we’re all here is take that goatfucker Barnaby Nancarrow to the cleaners and leave him feeling stupid and broken. Let’s not forget that. If we keep our goal always uppermost in our minds, we can’t fail. Or so life has taught me.”

  Man, this was one steely and unswerving gal. I could foresee some strained silences around the breakfast table. How she was going to turn on the sexy charm and seduce Nancarrow, I couldn’t quite picture.

  “Makes sense, I guess,” I said. “Though I have to say, I once had some serious uppermost-in-mind goals that nonetheless landed me behind bars.”

  “You did something wrong, then. That is obvious.”

  Well,
there was no countering the certainty in that blunt assessment, so I didn’t even try.

  Vee leaned down to peer inside the car. “It’s all right, Ray, you can come out now.”

  The passenger door swung open, and out stepped our ace hacker.

  I doubted that Ray Zerkin weighed much more than 125 pounds, even though he was close to six feet tall. A disordered mop of black hair, a pair of thick prescription lenses in taped-together frames resting on a snub nose. His face was weirdly devoid of affect, but odder still was his attire. He wore the complete uniform of a New York Yankees player.

  The kid clutched a top-of-the-line iPad whose screen commanded all his attention.

  “Yes, Vee. The signal is still strong. I can do everything from up here.”

  Vee explained. “He’s got a 5G connection on that device. He can do anything online you can do back in the city with your fiber-optics provider.”

  “Uh, well, great,” I said. “That’s why he’s here, right? So, I guess we need to get you guys set up in a room. Or two rooms.”

  “No, just one. Ray would freak out if he had to be alone. I’ve known him since he was twelve, and he trusts and needs me very much. Both his parents died in a car crash back then. It took him forever to recover.”

  I recalled how Stan had told me of the murder-suicide involving Vee’s own parents. Surely that similarity had helped foster the unlikely bond between her and the kid.

  “All right, then, one room. We haven’t really cleaned up anything yet for you. You have a preference?”

  “Where is everyone else staying?”

  I pointed out Stan and Sandralene’s cabin, and my room at the east end of the lodge.

  “We’ll take that one,” Vee said, indicating the farthest room of the west wing. Her lack of interest in my company could not have been plainer.

  “Let’s take a look inside. You got any luggage?”

  The VW held a couple of small suitcases, which I took.

  Ray followed Vee and me, but his whole attention was fixed on his tablet, which was emitting a familiar sports announcer’s voice. “Vee, the game is about to start! The Yankees are playing the San Francisco Giants. I expect the Yankees to do very well today. Perhaps they will equal or improve their historic eighteen-to-four victory over the Giants from October second, 1936!”

  “I certainly hope so, Ray.” Her voice softened noticeably when she spoke to the kid.

  We got the room open and lifted some windows, and it wasn’t too bad. The lodge’s previous owners had closed things down in a tidy, weather-tight manner, and the intervening seven years had accumulated only dust, leaves, and spider webs.

  “Stan’s coming back soon with sheets and food and stuff,” I said. “I’d offer you a meal, but there’s only cookies and soda.”

  “I love cookies and soda,” said Ray.

  “Okay! The lodge’s first soon-to-be-satisfied customer. I’ll be right back.”

  I left Vee and Ray in their room, with Ray glued to the game and Vee using a paisley scarf from her luggage as a dust mop.

  As I was assembling the cookies and soda, the Impala pulled up, and Stan jumped out. He was eating a juicy peach that I would have killed for.

  “Hey, they made it! The whole crew’s here! Whaddaya think of our prospects now, Glen boy?”

  “You have signed on an ice princess as Mata Hari and some kind of sabermetrics idiot savant as our dark-web mastermind. So I need to know, did you bring back any fucking miracles from Centerdale? Because that’s what we really need.”

  Stan slapped me on the back. “Lighten up, dude! We are golden now. C’mon, help Sandralene unload the car. I’m hot, and I’m gonna take a swim.”

  16

  I had to compliment Ray on his ability to work hard and unrelentingly. I had never seen anyone with that kind of focus. Whereas other kids his age would have been bellyaching and bugging off every five minutes, he just powered ahead with the task given him, as if nothing else in the world mattered. If I had been able to marshal that kind of sustained concentration in my own life, I might have gotten rich without resorting to crime. Maybe his weird Asperger’s condition had some compensating benefits after all. I suspected that if we provided him with adequate instructions for spoofing Nancarrow, he would not stop until the guy was gaffed and landed. I began to feel a tad more sanguine about our prospects.

  Vee was still cleaning her room, with Sandralene’s help, and the two of them also planned to install bedding for the rest of us. They had already put away all the groceries, including the promised steaks and champagne. Having donned an exceedingly immodest Speedo swimsuit featuring a green and black abstract motif, Stan was splashing in the weedy waters of Nutbush Lake like a stranded grampus, bellowing snatches of various blues tunes. That left Ray and me to fix up our outdoor dining room.

  So he and I went over to the collection of picnic tables that the last owner had stacked under some big shady pines when they closed down the place. It might have seemed like a good storage idea at the time, but seven years later, the tables were rich with moss and pine tar and squirrel scat.

  “Think you can lift your end and help me carry this to the cook shack?”

  “Mr. McClinton, I expect to try and succeed, if it is at all possible.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The kid held up his end fine, though it took some effort, and we waddled back with the table. We positioned it near the shack’s side door, which gave easy access to the kitchen area. Then I took Ray to the garage–cum–equipment shed, where we found some industrial cleaner, a wire brush, and a garden hose with a brass spray nozzle. I also noticed a small canopy affair—basically just a colorful tarp with four tall metal poles. We carried all this stuff back to the picnic table, and I located the nearest exterior spigot for the hose. Thank the Lord that Dunkel had gotten the water pump running. I made a mental note to tell Stan about the filters needing changing, and the local guy who could do it.

  “Okay, Ray, let’s see if you can find any actual wood under all this bird shit.”

  He eyed the table as if he were a surgeon, and the table his patient. “I believe the structural integrity of the table is uncompromised, Mr. McClinton.”

  “Have at it, then, kid.”

  Ray rolled up the sleeves of his jersey, splashed down the table, and began wire-bristling off the years of gunk as if attacking an alien plague intent on the destruction of life on Earth.

  “Hey, Ray, slow down!” I said. “You’re getting your uniform all wet and dirty.”

  “I have several more in my suitcase, Mr. McClinton, and I assume there are laundry facilities here. Am I correct in that assumption?”

  I had seen an industrial washer and dryer back at the office. “Yes, Ray, we can do laundry.”

  “This is awesome news, Mr. McClinton.”

  “Ray, you gotta start calling me Glen.”

  “I shall attempt to remember to call you Glen, Mr. McClinton.”

  I left Ray to his demonic scrubbing and went to see if I could help the women.

  Vee was in my room, which, of course, I had left unlocked. I had nothing inside that anyone would want to steal, and there was no one in sight to steal it. She was just tucking in a lightweight blue cotton spread at its upper corners. The bed looked as if it had been made under the eye of a particularly fastidious marine drill instructor.

  I had an odd feeling then, watching her fuss with my bed, as if she and I were lovers or married or something. And if she had not already presented herself as unassailably aloof, I might have used the occasion to make some harmless flirtatious innuendo. But her shell of inviolable remoteness around a core of hurt warded me off as effectively as an electrified fence. And yet, I felt somehow that I wanted to say more to her than merely thanks.

  “Can I help?”

  “No, it’s done.”

 
“Where’s Sandralene?”

  “She decided to go swimming with Stan.”

  Vee moved to leave. I almost restrained her, as if I needed to communicate a vital message before she walked away. But I simply said, “I appreciate all your help. Not just little stuff like this”—I gestured at the bed—“but with the big plan. It can’t be easy, the thought of getting close to Nancarrow after what he did—”

  She stopped and looked at me with a stolid expression that felt like the innocuous shell of a roadside bomb.

  “Nancarrow ruined the lives of my mother and father. I was five years old. When I was a teenager and learned about my history, I thought he had ruined mine, too. But since then, I’ve worked hard to make sure he was powerless over me. And that gives me power over him. I’m here because you and Stan can help me exercise that power the way I wish to. No thanks are necessary.”

  The strength of will that I saw in those dark eyes made me thankful we were on the same side. “You know,” I said, “this seems an excellent foundation for a business partnership. As an ex-lawyer, I approve. Good to have all the contractual provisions spelled out.”

  If she detected any irony, she ignored it.

  “I’m glad you see things the same way I do.”

  “Yes, we have that going for us,” I said. “Well, I’m gonna go check out the aquatic ballet.”

  * * *

  Down at the beach, the sight of Sandralene presented such a contrast to Vee that my head spun around like that of a Tex Avery wolf. Stan’s girl had poured her bounteous flesh into a crimson two-piece suit that left little to my libidinous imagination. Frolicking in the water with Stan, she uttered a variety of pagan, ecstatic grunts and squeals. Stan picked her up and heaved her into deep water with an outsize splash. Then, incredibly, she did the same to him, although even her exceptional strength could not hoist him very high.

  “Glen, you lame-ass motherfucker, get in here and help me! This broad is nuts! It’s fucking war! The reputation of all men is at stake!”