"What we should do is put the twins in boarding school and head for Europe."
He ignored this. "What irks me is that he really doesn't give a shit one way or the other about Pennant and the congressman. What he really wants is for me to admit that it's okay to screw around with cases for political advantage."
"So admit it," said Marlene sensibly. "It's true, isn't it?"
"Let's go to bed."
After a pause, she said, "Yes, let's. I assume you'll want to bother me with your disgusting lusts, as usual."
"Not at all. I got a very satisfying blow job from Big Albertine the transvestite on my way to Penn Station. I'm quite depleted."
"We'll see about that."
Karp was awakened just after dawn the next morning by gunfire. Bang. He jumped wildly out of bed. Bang bang.
And thumped his head against the narrow, sloping ceiling. Cursing and crouching, he went to the window, raised the roller shade, and peered down at the farmyard below, which was rose-gray and longshadowed in the early light. He saw in extreme foreshortening a wiry, yellow-haired man in a white T-shirt and jeans: Ireland, the trainer. One of the mastiffs stood by his left side. The dog was wearing a training harness and a long lead. Ireland led the dog slowly toward the chicken house. As they reached about ten feet from it, its door flung open violently and a man Karp had never seen before leaped out. He was big, unshaven, wore a dirty raincoat and a black cowboy hat, and had a small black pistol in his hand. He yelled something incomprehensible and fired two shots into the air. The mastiff barked and heaved against the lead as the man vanished back into the building. Ireland said something to the dog and walked away with it. A minute later the man came out of the chicken house carrying his hat and coat. Karp saw Marlene come into view and walk off with him. Some kind of dog test, Karp imagined. He knew nothing about dog training and had no interest in learning anything about it. He thought the dog farm a dubious enterprise, rich in possibilities for torts and tax trouble.
He showered and dressed in cutoffs and an old, faded Hawaiian shirt, a member of a large collection he owned, as it was the family joke to give him one every birthday. This one showed big, tan pineapples and green palm fronds against black. He went down to the kitchen, where he found coffee in the Braun and a box of doughnuts open on the table, together with the Times. Karp poured, selected a cinnamon, and sat down to peruse. The house was quiet except for the thudding of the elderly refrigerator. From outside he could hear faint sounds of barking, a boy's call, the distant rumble of a large engine.
The back screen door popped open and the unshaven man came in. He stopped short when he saw Karp.
"Oh, sorry. I didn't know anyone was here. Marlene said I could get some coffee and… "
"Help yourself," said Karp. The man did, and Karp was not pleased to see that he intended to take his coffee break at the table. He was a younger man than Karp had first thought, midtwenties at most, big and athletic, with a round face that the stubble made look older. After a short silence, Karp said, "And you are…?"
"Oh, sorry!" The man wiped powdered sugar off his hand and stuck it out. "Alex Russell. I'm the agitator."
"Excuse me?"
"The agitator. One of them."
"I caught your act from the window, with the pistol."
"Oh, yeah. That's the first test. If they won't stand up to an attack like that, you can forget training. Some of them pee and whine-I mean rotties, big Dobes. It's pathetic, really. But all of your dogs so far came through great."
"They're her dogs," said Karp in an undertone, and picked up his paper again in a way that suggested an end to the conversation. But Russell, sensing the void in the dog-training part of Karp's brain, and wishing to fill it, resumed. "Yeah, I never worked with mastiffs before. Great dogs. Billy's a great trainer, too, but I'll tell you, and you can ask anybody in the business, the agitator makes the dog. You mess up, you don't drop the sleeve just right, you're a little too aggressive with a beginner, you're a little too slack with a varminty dog, hell, you can totally throw him off. It's all in the timing. And the acting. I mean, you got to act like a slimeball, you know? I mean really feel like you're up to bad shit. The dogs can tell if you're not sincere. Hi, Marjorie."
Karp looked up as the screen door banged open again. A pretty woman of about thirty with a big mop of dark curls walked directly to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. She sat down in an empty chair and poured in cream and sugar. "That Jeb is a handful," she said.
Russell said, "I know it. I got bruises up and down my arm."
The woman seemed to notice Karp for the first time. "You're the husband."
"I am. Who are you?"
"Marjorie Rolfe."
"Don't tell me. You're an agitator, too."
"You can tell, huh?"
"Uh-huh. My first clue was that you're wearing quilted bib overalls made out of leather. Unless that's a fashion statement."
"Oh, no," she said straight-faced, "that's part of the gear. The dogs are trained to go for the arm. We got sleeves, you know, to protect the arm. But some of them get excited, especially if you're down and they could bite you someplace else. See, that's why we have to wear these scratch pants."
"I think I'm following you," said Karp, putting down his paper. "So this is how you guys make a living, as dog agitators?"
They both laughed. Karp saw that the woman had a canine tooth missing. "Heck, no," said Russell. "I mean we get paid good money by the hour, but it ain't no living. No, I work down at the Safeway. Marjorie's a groomer."
"And, what? You answered an ad?"
"Oh, no," said Marjorie cheerfully. "We know Billy from the NA at St. Malachy's. We're all three junkies together. Recovering junkies."
The other two started talking about dogs and cars and the various afflictions that arose in the marginal life, and Karp finished his Times browse and his coffee and went outside. The sun was up over the barn now and already warming the air. Karp had been out to the dog farm a number of times since Marlene had purchased it, but never before when dog training was going full blast. He had always wanted a summer place on the Island; they had spoken of it often when they had both been struggling ADAs, but Karp had imagined a little cottage in Quogue, not this sprawling, crumbling spread at the end of the North Fork. Nor the felon, nor the huge dogs, nor the junkies in the kitchen, either. On the other hand, if you were married to Marlene Ciampi, you had to expect a little louche in your life. Marlene was not a Quogue-cottage person.
On the other other hand, this feeling was real, the one he had nearly all the time, of things out of control, of impending disaster, of entering the scratchy borderlands of the crazy country, and it was not good, he did not want to live the rest of his life feeling this way. If work had been going well-that was another thing, that remark about how he should quit and do something else. Guys worked and supported their families, they did an honest day's work and took what shit they had to and put something away to send the kids to college and to retire on, that was what guys were for. It had never occurred to Karp that he would be in a situation where no sacrifice would be necessary. He had made a bundle once himself, working as a private litigator, but he had not liked it much, suing faceless enterprises or defending them. What was the point? Whereas when you stood up for the People, there was something real behind it. Or not, as it seemed recently. And now he could no longer see himself as a… martyr was too strong, he would never have said that, although he was in fact the kind of man who would take a bullet for a short list of causes, his family one, his friends, and a certain vision of what the law was meant to be, a vision that apparently was not broadly shared in his profession, and hardly at all within his own office. It was not like it was on the TV. So why get out of bed and go to work? To feed the kids to keep the wolf from the door. But the kids had trusts now, the college taken care of, the little nest egg afterward, and the wolf was…
Circular thoughts, sliding into obsession. He told himself to stop it. It was the wee
kend, take a break, Butch. Take the kids to the beach. Lie down and hang out. He had one of those fat fact-filled history books he read for pleasure, no beach thrillers for Karp, no, usually something like Norwich on Byzantium, or the rise of the Dutch Republic, or McPherson or Page Smith. Okay: book, beach, relax. Round up the gang, then.
He went into the barn, which was large, sagging, plank-built, painted crumbling white, and still smelled faintly of hay and its former tenants, with an added topnote of kibble and dog. It had a loft at one end, and at the other a flight of stairs leading to the trainer's apartment. Karp inspected the nursing Magog and her puppies. The bitch lifted her great head and gave him, the stranger, an unfriendly look and a coughing growl. Backing away, he heard a rustle from above and then a loud pop, followed by a cry from a boyish throat: "Got you!"
"Hello, who's up there?"
"Dad, I got another one!" In a moment Zak appeared at the edge of the loft high above, grinning and dangling a huge, dead rat by the tail. Karp took a step back to avoid a falling drop of rat gore.
"Do you want to go to the beach?"
"Maybe later. I want to hunt some more. This place is crawling with them." Zak dropped the dead animal, which fell with an unpleasant sound at Karp's feet.
"Do you have the safety on that thing?"
"It's automatic, Dad," said Zak, with a touch of patronage. "It goes on when you cock it." Zak placed the butt of the rifle against his knee and heaved the barrel down, then up with a smart click. He struck a Hemingway pose and pointed to the red tab sticking up from the foot of the breech. "See?"
Yet another thing to place in the worry file. The weapon was not, as Karp had once thought, a BB gun, but a Diana 34, a precision German weapon that could propel a.17-caliber pellet at a thousand feet per second and blow the brains out of a rat. Or child. The crazy wife had bought it for Zak's last birthday, and he loved it more than life.
"Well, just be careful," said Karp, and left the barn. He proceeded around the barn, where he found Marlene in consultation with a couple of contractors. Marlene gave him a friendly squeeze, but continued with her conversation, which was technical, boring, and presaged enormous expense.
After a few minutes of staring at the large rock that blocked the trench, he asked, "Where's Giancarlo?"
"In his garden."
Karp himself had never gardened, and as far as he knew, Marlene's vegetable expertise was limited to windowsill herbs and houseplants, but Giancarlo had decided to grow veggies on what seemed to his father an absurdly large scale. He had studied books on the subject and arranged for the rental of a rototiller and talked his brother into helping him break the soil for it. Then he had laid the garden out with mathematical precision, using stakes and strings, and had planted and watered and fertilized and weeded. Now the taut strings were nearly obscured by young growth. Karp had no idea what any of it was, although he thought he recognized young corn. They showed it a lot in the movies.
Giancarlo was in the field with a hoe. He was wearing bib overalls over bare skin, and on his head was a ragged straw hat, once Marlene's. When he saw Karp standing by the wire fence, he stopped, pulled off his hat, wiped his brow theatrically, looked up at the heavens, and said, "Paw, if it don't rain soon, we gonna lose the farm."
"Yes," said Karp, "we'll have to move to the city and live in miserable tenements, but someday your grandchildren will go to college. What're you doing?"
"Hoein'."
"I see you are. Why exactly does one hoe?"
"To rip out the weeds. You can use herbicides, too, but I don't like them. I like hoeing. It's hard work but it's also really like restful. You want to try it?"
"Sure, if you think I can."
"Well, I don't know, Dad, it's totally tricky." The boy grabbed up another hoe from a collection of tools lying by the fence. "You see, the metal part here, that goes down in the dirt, and the wood part, you hold in your hands."
"Met-al? Down?"
Giancarlo giggled. "Sorry, I guess I was going too fast for you there. See, you kind of chop down and then up and pull the weed out roots and all. You have to make sure you rotate your hips and always keep your eye on the weed. Follow through the weed." He demonstrated.
"Got it. Point me at some weeds."
It was restful, Karp found. After half an hour he had taken off his shirt and tied a bandanna around his head and was going down the row of feathery plants with a will, making the dirt fly. At first, his mind was full of the office, and he took out his several frustrations on the dandelions and plantains. Later on, however, these thoughts faded, and he became interested in the hoeing itself, how to lift the weed with a minimum of effort, how to keep a gentle rhythm going. At this stage it was very much like shooting baskets, he was thinking, and he briefly speculated that athletic prowess largely depended on the constant repetition of acts that were essentially as boring as pigshit. Both of the boys were reasonable athletes, but neither was as yet outstanding. They didn't seem impelled to practice in the way he had. Still, it was early for them. He had not pushed them at all yet. Should he? He hated the men he had observed who lived their athletic dreams out through their kids, and though his own athletic dreams had been more or less blasted, he had firmly resolved not to do this to them. He had himself been a high school all-American and a standout in college until he had screwed up his knee. The knee was an artificial one now, an emptiness there that worked well enough when it worked, as now. Gradually even these thoughts faded, replaced by mere sensation: the beat of the sun on his back, the shock of impact in his hands, and the dull burning of friction where he gripped the handle. Mindless work; what he needed.
After an unknowable interval, he stopped to stretch and saw that his wife was standing by the fence, staring at him in wonder.
"I never thought I'd see the day."
"Bring me little water, Sylvie," sang Karp.
"How did he talk you into it?"
"He promised me a quarter of the crop and a peck o' salt. I thought it was a pretty good deal."
"But now you're ready to go to the beach and have a picnic, which your wife has lovingly prepared, despite the urgencies of running a vast and complex enterprise. You look remarkably sexy as a peasant, by the way."
"Mistress like Ivan?" said Karp, throwing down his hoe and advancing on her all sweaty and filthy, and she shrieked and they had a little chase around the garden, while Giancarlo looked on with benign interest, like a faun.
At the beach, they found Rose Heeney and her daughter, and Marlene set up her blanket and establishment adjoining and made the introductions. The boys and Karp ran off to splash around. Marlene looked sympathetically at Lizzie, who was making a good show of pretending that she did not care and rolled her eyes at Rose. "Men!"
Rose's smile in return was weak, and her face showed more strain than it had the previous day. She said, "Lizzie, go off and play with the boys. They have a raft."
"I'd rather stay here."
"No, go. Build a castle, swim. Go ahead."
Lizzie took the hint and wandered off.
"Something wrong?" Marlene inquired.
"Oh… yes, as a matter of fact. Red called late last night. He came back from a meeting and found someone had shot Lady, our dog. She was dead in the yard. A big stupid mutt, loved everybody. Completely useless as a guard, of course. Dan used to say she was a reverse watchdog. She barked continuously until a burglar arrived and then she'd shut up and go lick his hand." Rose pulled her sunglasses off and stared out to the water. Marlene saw that her eyes were wet. "Stupid dog. I don't know how I'm going to tell Lizzie. She practically grew up with her."
"Do they think it was a burglar?"
"No. It was some evil son of a bitch working for Weames. Escalating the threat."
"Weames is…?"
"Lester Weames. Red's running against him for the union presidency. The Union of Mining Equipment Operators. Known as UMEO. It's a small outfit, basically covers strip mine operators in three or four states, very A
ppalachian and totally corrupt. Weames has been in there for eighteen years, screwing the workers and staying cozy with the mine operators."
"I thought they didn't allow that anymore. I thought the feds came in…"
"Well, you thought wrong," said Rose bitterly. "Southern West Virginia is not really that much a part of the US of A when you come down to it. Weames keeps the coal flowing, and the coal keeps the lights turned on and the Internet humming. Yeah, there've been investigations, but he's smart. He lives modestly and he's got a gang of loyalists around him who keep him clean. On the few occasions the feds picked up something, they threw them a couple of small fry and they went back inside the Beltway feeling they did a good day's work. The bottom line is nobody much cares, except Red."
"Will he win?"
"Oh, he might get the most votes. Red's real popular among the rank and file. But whether Weames will let him actually take office is a whole other story. His guys count the ballots. It would be better for Weames, though, if Red just forgot about it. That's been suggested in very strong terms."
"Threats?"
"Expressions of displeasure, yeah. Phone calls in the middle of the night. A dead skunk in the mailbox. Tires slashed. Now, Lady…" Rose sighed. "That's why I'm spending the summer here with Lizzie, instead of supporting him in McCullensburg, like a good wife. When they started to get rough, I discovered I was easily distinguishable from Mother Jones." A self-deprecating laugh here, but Marlene saw it was eating at her. "He's coming up here next weekend to try to talk me into coming back with him."
"Will he succeed?"
"Oh, I guess. I don't know. It's really confusing. A life of struggle and relative deprivation, that I can deal with. Dead dogs and death threats? I don't know if I can take it. It's a whole different thing, especially with kids."
"Uh-huh, I know what you mean."
Rose looked at her sharply. "Do you?"
"Oh, my, yes indeed," said Marlene fervently.
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