The Big Get-Even

by Paul Di Filippo

  Looking up from his iPad, the first thing Ray said was, “I miss Vee. When can I go back with her, Mr. Glen?”

  “Well, Ray, you probably won’t be sharing a room with Vee again up here at the lodge. You know that our scheme is in its end stages, right? In large part, thanks to you. And so, with any luck, we’re all going to get rich and go our separate ways. Now, you should be safe in your old stomping grounds, just so long as you don’t go spending your money too fast and too loud. Nancarrow doesn’t even know you exist. And you have to keep it that way by staying hidden while he’s here, even though it’s boring and a pain.”

  “I have covered my online trail so no one can find it, Mr. Glen.”

  I leaned back against the closed door of our quarters, suddenly feeling a little sapped. “Good, good, I expected nothing less. So you’re going home soon, and I suspect you’ll see Vee there as much as you ever did.” A thought crossed my mind. “Has she told you what she intends to do after we pull this off?”

  “Vee has said to me that she would like to change her name and start a new life somewhere. But I always hoped it would not be too far away from me, so I could still see her. I assume she would tell me her new name.” Ray grew contemplative. “But you know, there is always Skype.”

  Change her name and start a new life. She’d be hard to locate after that. For a moment, I fantasized that she would come to the Cape Verde Islands with the rest of us. Although I had a hard time imagining what kind of ménage would suit her, Nellie, and me.

  “Well, Ray, there’s no point worrying about the future. We can’t always know how things will work themselves out.”

  “That is pretty much how I feel, too, Mr. Glen.”

  * * *

  I changed into my trunks, grabbed a towel, and headed to the beach.

  This late in the day, no other swimmers were around to see me enter the water and start stroking east, close to shore. I hadn’t had a chance to take a swim for too many days, and the water, still holding the unseasonable warmth, felt wonderful.

  I reached the little cove where Sandralene and I had met Stan a few nights ago. His camp had to be some distance in from the water, and I watched for his beached kayak as marker.

  My arms and legs were tiring—I must have swum half a mile—and I almost didn’t spot the unnaturally straight line amid the surrounding organic shapes and contours. I swam to the mossy bank and rested a minute. The earth smelled rich and loamy. Then, with my bare feet feeling every pebble and my bare calves feeling every twig and briar, I went deeper into the underbrush until I came upon Stan’s tent.

  I poked my head inside the tent flap. “Stan?”

  I was immediately grabbed from behind in a viselike hold and lifted off the ground, then swung around and plopped down.

  Stan Hasso grinned. “I heard you coming for about the last ten minutes, even while you were still in the water. Just wanted to show you it’s hard to catch me unaware-like.”

  “My aching ribs are a testament to your Natty Bumppo tradecraft.”

  “All right, then! What brings you out here, anyhow?”

  Still rubbing my side, I said, “I wanted to fill you in on today.” I gave Stan the rundown on Nancarrow’s arrival and Vee’s setting of the hook. Then I said, “I was also wondering if you had any great ideas on how to break the news to Nellie when the shit goes down.”

  “Yeah, it came to me, and it’s simple. Once Nancarrow signs the bill of sale, we have to move fast. We don’t tell your girl how much we sold the place for, and we damn sure don’t tell her that Nancarrow bought what he figures is casino land and that he’s bound to shut the lodge down. We let her think the place will keep running under new ownership as a gravy train for all her cousins. And we get her sympathy by saying we just couldn’t run at a loss anymore and had to make a deal. Poor Uncle Ralph, his life savings gone, boo-hoo-hoo. But everything’s hunky-dory now, because we even turned a little profit. Then you say, ‘Nellie, you sweet piece of ass, I am totes in love with you and your ancestral rock pile, and now I want to go live the simple life in Cape Verde. Will you come with me?’ Once she says yes and you’re safely overseas, then you can give her the full story. But not till then.”

  “And you think she’ll buy it?”

  “Glen, that is up to your smooth tongue—in more ways than one!”

  40

  Nellie was ecstatic.

  “Oh, minha nossa! This is just like I remember from the old days, when I was little! Happy crowds under the stars! People are gonna be talking the lodge up so big after this, we are bound to have so much success!”

  Nellie’s business instincts had proved spot-on. The hoped-for crowds from Centerdale and the surrounding area had indeed shown up for this Friday night performance by the Lucky Graves Group. There had to be close to seventy jazz fans present, in addition to the lodge residents. We should have posted a cover charge.

  Arriving back at the lodge after my clandestine visit with Stan, my arms and legs felt rubbery from the long swim. I changed into the nice linen slacks and sports shirt befitting the host of such a popular venue and dived right into my duties, earning a grateful smile from Nellie as she bossed her crew.

  The tables and chairs nearest the stage were pulled back and squeezed together to make space for dancing. Seating quickly filled up, and since the night was warm and cloudless, we could leave the tall hinged windows open for a pavilion effect. Moreno and Jaaziel had raided the garage and come back with thirty cheap folding chairs gifted to us by the happy-to-be-gone former owners. They were cobwebbed and grimy, and I had to enlist some of the off-duty staff to hose them down and dry them off. We went through all our week’s utility towels, and I made a mental note to call the laundry service first thing tomorrow.

  In surprisingly short time, we had ranks of chairs set up on the grass around the dining hall, most with a view of the stage.

  The regular dining hall staff of six included only two waitresses and four workers in the kitchen. That was enough during the days, but not tonight. So I enlisted our housekeepers, Rosa and Simonica, to circulate and serve drinks and food. The prospect of overtime pay plus tips put fresh spring in their tired step.

  By the time the band launched into their first number, drinks were flowing, dancers were swaying, and bowls of spicy goat stew were sliding onto tabletops just as smoothly as if we did this sort of thing every night.

  Finally free of duties, I could zero in on Vee and Nancarrow.

  Somehow, Nancarrow had secured the best table, centered perfectly across the dance area from the stage. Only he and Vee sat there; Rushlow and Digweed stood at opposite points across the room. Allowed to nurse a cold beer apiece, they also seemed to appreciate the music—as well as the lovely figures of our waitresses and any other women in sight.

  I sauntered over to Nancarrow’s table. One of his bottles of Dom Pérignon nestled in a makeshift cooler: a plastic bucket that had held shucked clams, now decoratively swaddled in a cloth napkin and filled with ice. In the absence of real champagne flutes, two narrow wineglasses sparkled with bubbly.

  “Barnaby, Miss Pomestu, I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.”

  Vee wore a black cocktail dress, black stockings, and heels, and Nancarrow had broken out a different two-thousand-dollar getup.

  “You bet we are,” said Vee. “This is the most fun this old joint has shown me since I got here.”

  Nancarrow seemed genuinely relaxed. No one would ever have surmised by his genial, laid-back attitude that he was here on a mission: to use his insider knowledge to bilk the lodge’s unsuspecting owners of Steve Prynne’s yet-unannounced opportunity. He just seemed like a nice, albeit pompous and self-satisfied, guy on vacation.

  His easygoing demeanor suddenly hit me as postcoital bliss. But surely he and Vee could not have gotten down to it so quickly, just a couple of hours after meeting. The kind of woman Vee wa
s representing herself to be would surely hold out—and be expected to hold out by the man eager to get in her pants—for at least a little extravagant courtship, some champagne and dancing, before she came across. I looked more intently at Nancarrow and decided that no, he hadn’t closed the deal with Vee yet. He was just this good at what he did. Somehow, he was able to segregate his hedonism from his avarice, his personal life from his business dealings, in a way that I could not. It seemed to speak of a Zen-like in-the-moment ease with whatever life brought. Or maybe just a high-functioning sociopathy. Paradoxically, this ability to compartmentalize made him seem all the more formidable an opponent, and I reminded myself not to underestimate him. When he was focused on business, he would be just as intent on winning as he now was on enjoying himself.

  “Indeed, Glen,” said Nancarrow, “this is truly remarkable. Such a simple, almost primitive setup. No glitter, no glitz, but just look at how people are enjoying themselves. You know, I can see now why my boys insisted I come up here for the weekend. This place of yours has a lot of potential.”

  “Why, thanks, Barnaby. I take it you have some experience with operations like this one.”

  “Oh, I dabble in a lot of things to earn a living.”

  “Well, I have to circulate now. You folks enjoy yourselves!”

  “Perhaps you’ll join us a little later, Glen, when your duties permit. I have altogether too much champagne for just two people to consume. And by the way, thanks for letting me ice it down in your facilities.”

  “No trouble at all, really.”

  Nellie was in the kitchen, transferring warm beers from a case into the fridge. I mentally tried out the dialogue with her that Stan had outlined—suitably rephrased, of course—and in my dreamscape it all went smoothly. I began to relax a little more.

  “Hey, girl,” I said, “you’ve got to take it easy. Let the others do that.”

  Straightening up, Nellie suddenly looked weary, and she wiped sweat from her brow. “Maybe you got something there. I been running flat-out all day.”

  “Go sit in the corner over there, and I’ll get you a drink and a bite.”

  I was happy to wait on her at the chopping block, where she had pulled up a stool. Watching her eat and drink like the young, healthy animal she was, I got the feeling that we could overcome any barriers arising from the sale of the lodge.

  The food and drink had a tonic effect on Nellie. “Okay, velho, now I think you owe me a dance. I gotta loosen up for that batuque later that I promised you.”

  Out on the dance floor, Nellie felt good in my arms. Lucky Graves’ sax was spinning out such a dense, elaborate sequence of notes that it took me a while to recognize that he was playing “All or Nothing at All.”

  Pivoting, I saw Nancarrow dancing with Vee, his hands low down on the upper slope of her ass. The sight made me feel something, but I couldn’t say exactly what.

  The band’s generous first set went till ten thirty. They came back on at a little past eleven, looking fresh and ready to rock.

  The crowd thinned out around one a.m., most of them to make the long, twisty drive back to Centerdale. By two thirty, only a handful of outsiders and residents were hanging in. The place was a shambles of empty bottles, dirty dishes, and overturned folding chairs.

  Nellie and I had been sitting with Vee and Nancarrow for an hour or so, not saying much. That Dom Pérignon had gone down like nectar, leaving us pleasantly stupefied.

  Then, at the end of a number, Nellie jumped up. “It’s batuque time! Lothar, you know what to do!”

  Lothar nodded to the drummer, and she began laying down pure loping, looping Afro-Caribbean percussion, subtly underpinned by the sax and keyboard.

  Nellie dashed out onto the emptying dance floor, and all the other Caboverdean girls followed her. They began chanting along with the drumming, repetitive phrases that seemed to invoke sultry tropical deities as black as interstellar space. It suddenly dawned on me just how close the Cape Verde Islands are to Africa, geographically and culturally.

  Apparently, Caboverdean women were capable of completely untethering the lower half of their lithe bodies from the upper half, and moving their hips in mind-bogglingly intricate patterns that contained all the carnality in the universe, while gently waving their hands in a vaguely hula pattern. The effect was hypnotic.

  Suddenly, an anomalous figure joined the dancers.

  Sandralene.

  She had been absent, I realized, from the earlier festivities. Maybe she had been moping over Stan’s absence, or just wanted to steer clear of Nancarrow for fear of giving him some inadvertent entrée into stuff he shouldn’t learn. Whatever the reason, she had been nowhere around till now, drawn out of seclusion, perhaps, by the change in music.

  Sandralene tried her best to fit in. The other girls made space for her and tolerated her, trying to bring her into their rapturous dervish trance. But she just couldn’t bring it off. Under any other circumstances, her dancing would have been appreciated, I was sure. She was adequately graceful and beyond sexy. But her Anglo-Amazon presence, her contrasting moves and attitude, came off as jarring and stiff. A bison among gazelles.

  To give Sandralene credit, she didn’t take long to realize her incongruousness, and she bowed herself off the dance floor and out of the hall with as much good spirits and panache as she could muster. But underneath the smiles, I thought I detected a wounded soul.

  I excused myself to Nancarrow and Vee, who barely seemed to notice my departure. She had one leg draped over his lap and was leaning in to breathe in his ear.

  I noticed that Rushlow and Digweed had made themselves scarce as well. Had they hooked up with some of our staff? There was nothing I could do about it if they had. I wasn’t acting in loco parentis for our female employees. And despite the dormitory trailers being segregated by gender, I had good reason to suspect that there had already been plenty of liaisons among the workers—perhaps even between workers and guests. You could not confine a bunch of young people to a remote locale like this and not expect them to make out with each other.

  I caught up with Sandralene as she approached her stand-alone cabin. The attenuated strains of the batuque still mocked her at this distance.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Sandy? Sandralene? You okay?”

  In the shadows, I couldn’t see whether she was crying. “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “I liked your dancing.”

  She snorted. “I looked like a bumbling spaz next to those hot little things. I guess I’m getting old.”

  “Aw, c’mon, don’t make me laugh. You are the sexiest woman at the lodge.”

  “It’s awfully nice of you to say that, Glen. I could kiss you.”

  And so she did.

  My head spun with booze and that incredible kiss. It was every bit as ripe and lush as I had ever imagined. For weeks now, since she first climbed into my car, this untouchable woman had inspired nothing but lust in my brain. And suddenly, it seemed as if the whole universe had inverted and my fantasies and reality had exchanged places.

  Although it killed me to do so, I pushed her away.

  “No, Sandy, Stan—”

  She pulled me into her, grabbed me by one wrist, and put my hand on her ass.

  “I know all about Stan, Glen. And he knows all about me. That’s why he told me I could have you if he wasn’t around. And now I’m gonna.”

  I really had assumed that my life was as complicated as it could ever get.

  Ha.

  PART FIVE

  41

  As the shadows paled into dawn, I was still wide awake. I hadn’t slept one second of the past three and a half hours. The intimate and thrilling revelations of Sandralene’s exotic bodily landscape, augmented by my own desire to match her ardor, had kept me going despite all the possible hindrances of too much liquor, free-floating anxiety,
residual guilt over having sex with Stan’s woman, and my long swim in the waters of Nutbush Lake. Sandy and I had rutted like the last two members of a dying species intent on repopulating the entire planet, and now I was satisfied, sore, and generally insentient. But not asleep.

  Sandralene, by contrast, was snoring with the same less-than-ladylike gusto I had encountered that first night of our arrival at the lodge, when the three of us sacked out in the Impala.

  Before she dropped off—as reliably sated, I hoped, as I was—I had whispered one question to her. “Why?”

  “That’s an easy one, Glen: I like you. And you saved Stan’s life.”

  As she dropped off into deep sleep, her words ignited something like the explosion of an atomic bomb—all radiance and heat that lit up the inside of my skull. The whole past ten months, from that December night when I blasted a shot of Narcan up Stan Hasso’s hairy nostrils, right down to the present moment, assailed me like a lifetime of memories compressed into a giant writhing, spiky organic mass and hurtled straight into my gut. I apprehended the whole insane yet seemingly predestined sequence of events not so much intellectually as with my entire nervous system. My bones and blood vessels resonated with the cosmic vibrations of the whole universe—or at least my minuscule portion of it.

  It was as if someone had invented the most perfect virtual-reality device ever and I had been allowed to immerse myself, as an observer, into some stranger’s existence before being ejected back into my own limited mental shell.

  Of course I couldn’t fall asleep after such an epiphany! It left me feeling somehow that no matter what came of it, every step of my path so far, even back to my misdeeds at the law firm, had been integral to my existence, the only possible expression of who I was and where I was going.