Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  "Fuck no!" Cordelia said.

  "Fuck no? Because your lips are purple. And your friend!" She addressed Donny with a humorless smile. "You're whacked also. And you smell of beer. You're drunk. You've both been up all night slamming crystal. God bless us and save us!"

  "No, man," said Donny. "We're cool. We're down."

  "Cool? How cool you're cool, you moron!"

  "Hey, Slim, man," Donny said, repentant, "it's all good."

  "Do you know what this means?" Margaret asked. "It means we'll have to call Desirée." Desirée was a Haitian girl who often minded the baby. "I'll have to cancel the Lascar. I'll have to expose my posterior on the open road. You can't drive." She turned on Cordelia. "Cordy can't drive. She has warrants. Oh, God," she moaned, "the two of you."

  "Don't let her come!" Cordelia implored Donny. "It's such a drag when she comes."

  "Yeah, sure," Slash said.

  "Well, it is," said Cordelia savagely. "Mother." She pronounced the word with the irony of the street.

  "Shame on you," Margaret said. "And take off that stupid hat."

  It was close to noon when they arrived in Calverton and parked on the road a few yards up from the Bowers' house. Margaret looked as chic as a middle-aged woman in white coveralls ever could, but she was annoyed at the delays.

  "Check it out."

  Slash started out of the truck.

  "Not you," Margaret told him. "Cordy."

  Cordy returned to say that the coast was clear.

  "No system?" Slash asked.

  Margaret laughed bitterly, snorted. "He didn't set it. People like him often don't."

  They drove up to the house.

  "Even if they'd set the system," said Donny, "I coulda disarmed it."

  "Yes, you're wonderful, Slash," Margaret said. She addressed him as Slash only to torment him. "Now check the weathervane." She indicated the metal instrument on the roof. It had the form of a killer whale and was handsomely wrought.

  "Nice," said Donny.

  "Nice. So can you?"

  "Sort of a hassle. But yeah." He turned and looked down the wooded driveway behind them. "Think it's cool?" From somewhere in the middle distance they heard the whine of a chain saw. Someone cutting firewood. Cordelia, without her bomber jacket or tweed cap, was jumping up and down out of high spirits and to keep warm.

  "Let it go," Margaret told him. "Maybe we can take it when we're weathervane shopping. Open the door, please."

  "Deadbolt?"

  "He didn't use two keys."

  Slash tried and failed to open the door with a credit card. Then he applied the Halligan bar his cousins had stolen from a West Virginia state police car. The door, lopsidedly, fell open.

  "Open fuckin' sesame! Perfecto Garcia!"

  Margaret brushed past him and the couple followed her. Inside, they put on their rubber gloves and took up items as Margaret directed. As she watched through a window, they carried furniture and bric-a-brac outside and stashed it in the rental truck on padded mover's quilts.

  "Doucement," Margaret advised them. "Gently."

  After their exertions her two assistants both began to tremble with cold and the drug.

  "Let's go," Cordelia whined. She had begun jumping again, in the Bowers' living room, and was working herself into a state. "Let's go before some asshole comes. Like joggers or..."

  Donny, annoyed, grabbed her arm to hush her and discourage her bouncing. Cold as it was, they watched Margaret unbutton her leather coat and take a pearl-handled straight razor from one of the pockets and hasten into the bathroom. Very shortly she emerged. Her face was contorted with what appeared to be rage.

  "Let's go, Slash," Cordelia said, pulling him toward the door.

  They stood just outside the crippled, half-open door. They could hear Margaret screaming inside, the smash of glass and crockery, the rending of cloth.

  "What?" he demanded. "What the fuck?"

  "You've never seen her do this before? This is like her signature mode." She moved from the door with an expression of pity and distaste. "Oh, Jesus, I hate it."

  "Does what? What's she doing?"

  "You'll find out."

  Slash stepped inside and came out again.

  "Jeez," he said, "she's cuttin' it up pretty good. She's wired. Bad."

  Cordelia shook her head and sighed impatiently.

  "Yeah, she's like loot and pillage."

  He and Cordelia stood shivering, watching the driveway, until Margaret appeared. She looked quite composed, if a little unsteady and breathing audibly. Donny and Cordelia said nothing.

  "Okay," Margaret said. "Tout finis. Let's roll."

  They had driven the truck only a few miles along the highway when Donny saw a flashing bluey in his rearview mirror. A startling burst of siren rose and fell. Cordelia, crouching behind the seats, cursed and moaned.

  "What?" Donny asked Margaret.

  "Were you speeding?"

  "No way."

  "Well, pull over." She turned back to Cordelia. "Relax, dear. We'll survive."

  The cruiser that had pulled them over belonged to the town cops. There was only one of them, quite a young man. He wore cheap sunglasses, so Margaret could not be sure how stupid he was.

  "I only wear handcuffs when I'm being fucked," Margaret whispered. She was joking to encourage them. The cop got out and stood just to the rear of the driver's side door, looking in at Cordelia.

  "License and registration," he told Donny. Donny had a forged but well-made Virginia driver's license. The cop gave them all the once-over and stepped back and away to read the documents. He did not return them. From her side, Margaret leaned across Slash to address the young policeman.

  "A problem, officer?"

  He looked at her without apparent expression.

  "Where you all coming from?"

  "From Princeton, New Jersey," Margaret declared. "Actually, we're on our way home."

  "Where to?"

  "Across the bay. I have a house in Fredericksburg."

  "What about you, sir?" the cop asked Slash.

  "Little Creek, Virginia. See, we're driving her. Moving some furniture." He was blinking stupidly in all directions. Margaret gave him an elbow.

  "Didn't take Ninety-five?"

  "Thirteen is so much more pleasant," said Margaret. "Sometimes faster, too."

  The cop turned on Cordelia in her lair behind the seats.

  "That true?"

  "Yes, it is," Cordelia answered, sounding like her mother.

  "This lady your mom?"

  "Yes, she is."

  "You family too?" the officer asked Donny.

  "No," Donny said. He showed the officer his top-of-the-line smile. "Hired help."

  "That right?" he asked the ladies.

  "Well, yes," Margaret answered a bit impatiently. After a moment the officer handed Donny the registration and license.

  "Have a nice day, ma'am." He took a last glance at Donny Slash. "Drive carefully, sir."

  When the cop had vanished from sight, Donny and Cordelia whooped with joy.

  "Oh, Moms! You're like so great!" She was, in the end, her mother's greatest admirer.

  "Hey, Slim," Donny yelled. "You're awesome, man."

  He took one hand off the wheel to offer Margaret a high-five. She condescended to return it.

  "Everybody loves you when you're somebody else," she explained.

  The Wine-Dark Sea

  ON A VERY FOGGY late-autumn morning, a man named Eric Floss was wandering the quaint streets of a preserved Connecticut whaling town. He found himself walking scrubbed brick sidewalks that fronted the marble steps of exquisite Federal-style houses. Old ironwork bordered gardens grown with lilac bushes and hedged in boxwood. There were warmly lighted shops soon to open for the sale of antique ornamental pieces and vintage furniture. One place had antique willow-patterned china from the ginseng trade. Most of the windows, though, offered midlevel, tourist-standard marine studies. There was scrimshaw from the lathes of the P
hilippines and here and there some genuine old pieces, crude but authentic. A few shops had rows of jade and amber jewelry for sale and the odd lissome ivory apsara.

  Floss had come to the town because it was where a ferry crossed many times a day to Steadman's Island, the only habitable point on a reef of rocky islands, a low-key resort where large holdings and a paucity of space and fresh water had made summering expensive and restricted. One section of Steadman's Island was called Heron's Neck, the site of the island's largest and most ornate summer cottage. The big houses were all called cottages.

  It had become generally known that the owner of Heron's Neck, a friend of the Secretary of Defense, had made the place available to his friend for a few days. The Secretary liked to summon his political retainers to remote and inconvenient meeting sites to inform them of his wishes, and the island had become a favorite. That fall week he had called a conference to sic the dogs of his department on some of their opposite numbers in other government agencies.

  Eric was a freelancer whose demonstrated unreliability had limited his prospects of journalistic advancement. It was not his reporting or the soundness of his prose that had failed to satisfy, but his tendency to overlook deadlines and even entire assignments once undertaken. This time he had signed for an article on the reaction of the year-round island population to the presence of the policy conference on its shores. The journal was a post-pornographic monthly that had passed into the hands of an old colleague of his. That fall, both Eric and the magazine were attempting to find their way back to seriousness. The magazine was cutting back on its ration of sexual fantasy and hard-core pix, running an occasional piece of political revelation. Eric had nearly stopped drinking and using recreational drugs.

  The theory behind the story was that the locals might have some comments worth recording on the combination of mystery and ostentation that surrounded such a high-level, high-security event. Moreover, Eric had what he thought might be a useful local connection. One of the year-round inhabitants, Annie Shumway, was the sister of a woman with whom Eric had traveled in the Middle East. It would be an interesting beginning, he thought, to visit them.

  The fact was that his enthusiasm for the story had been waning since he had pitched it successfully to his acquaintance. Still, he thought that if he went to the island something original might present itself. And he would get to see the place and meet Lou's sister. There were no hotels, and both of the bed-and-breakfasts were serving as barracks for the security detail. So he had rallied some effrontery and telephoned Annie, who had, with obvious reluctance, invited him to dinner with her husband and herself.

  He was a few weeks out of rehab in southern California, but contrary to its principles he had started smoking the odd joint and getting drunk by six. He had occasional blackouts once more and woke up with strange troublesome women. Still, he had allowed himself to believe that things were working out. Hanging around the classy mainland town, waiting for the next ferry, Eric found the fog, particularly, beginning to bother him.

  On the Atlantic side of the island stood a cluster of small saltbox houses where the original farming village of Steadman's Island had been. Some of the houses were as old as the first settlement, and some were new, conforming to the original style. A few barns there had been converted to condos, over ineffectual opposition. Among the most vigorous opponents of the condos—of all exploitive change—were the Shumways, Annie and Taylor, who lived in one of the saltboxes. Taylor Shumway's family went back on the island for centuries. Annie, his wife, came from Oregon, where they had met at a seminar for eco-activists. Annie was not in her first youth, but no one would quite call her middle-aged. She was youthful, peppy and attractive. She wrote a gardening column in the island paper every week and taught two primary grades at the school.

  That evening, she and Taylor were expecting Eric Floss, an old boyfriend of her sister Lou's, who had called out of nowhere. He was at the ferry on the mainland, waiting for a crossing. The piggy conference of fat cats on the Neck and the impossible visibility had stalled all transport. Eric claimed to be an alternative journalist who wanted to keep one eye on the conference. "One eye," he had said.

  In the late afternoon, fog had settled so thickly over the island that it was difficult to see across the main street of the village or even the neighboring houses. The fog warning at Salvage Reef, off the northeast light, sounded at sixty-second intervals. Annie had never found anything dismal about the groaning of the horn. But in the faded gray light of that afternoon she had an unfamiliar sense of enclosure and isolation. She had never experienced so many days at the heart of such enveloping fog before. At the same time the air was wet and sweet with honeysuckle, bay and wild rose, maybe more fragrant for being confined.

  She had been taken by surprise by the sudden necessity of entertaining a guest, a situation she shamefacedly knew she had brought on herself. The Shumways were not dinner-party people. Taylor Shumway, who worked on the ferry, kept a boat and lobster traps; his days began well before autumn light. Annie Sorenson-Shumway did not drink, and Taylor couldn't. He particularly did not enjoy company at home. On her side, Annie was indifferent. She had plenty of social life around her Sunday Meeting, the island school and her botany column in the weekly paper. For Taylor, a pleasurable group activity after work might be driving across the island with his power jacks to help a crew raise the corner of a house. He would leave before the beer was opened.

  But that morning, after Eric had made clear who he was, she had impulsively invited him for dinner. He seemed to have sort of expected it, and she was a bit of a people pleaser. Then too, she was plain curious about any guy Lou had taken up with—Looie was a world traveler and collector of what she called "types," but the individuals Annie had met seemed pretty unique. She was also curious about what Eric was on to, as a freelance journalist, in terms of the big-shot gathering on the Neck. She and Taylor had both been activists. Taylor had gone to prison, though it was only drinking that had moved him to hurt anyone.

  Annie realized that if Taylor had answered the telephone, he would have told Eric Floss to piss off, or to do something along those lines. She herself had been amazed when Eric had patently angled for shelter. But she had offered him the couch. What else could a civilized person do?

  "What the shit?" Taylor had demanded when she reached him between ferry trips.

  His manner got her back up, and of course she felt foolish.

  "Well, gee," she said, "people dropping in. That used to be all right."

  "When was that?" he asked.

  On the mainland, Eric paced Harbor Street, trying not to look at his watch too often. Dead time was hard for him. His recent rehabilitation had been partly paid for by a prosperous former girlfriend, a television producer, who had sent him for treatment at her favorite facility. They had treated him at Possibilities for what she called virtual addiction. She used the word "virtual" in the old journalistic way, as a nifty reinforcing adjective. However, Eric's addictions were substantial, to marijuana, alcohol and so on. The docs at Possibilities had pronounced him bipolar, a condition formerly known as manic depression. He had then been virtually imprisoned with loons, and a very expensive confinement it was.

  Possibilities was well named, since anything could happen to you there, from being whacked with a chair leg in a locked corridor by a brother or sister bipolaroid to a lightning-fast heave-ho if your money ran out. The idea was to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and you became Mr. or Ms. In Between. There were pills to zonk or stun. There were even pills to encourage, but Eric was not allowed them. Dope was around, but of course getting thrown out was a waste of time and money. Eric managed not to use it. Hitting the street, he had felt ready for sobriety. Some unremembered misstep had betrayed him into his own lower nature.

  Annie, the Steadman's Island lady he had spoken to—importuned somewhat—sounded nicer than her sister. Anyway, Eric was used to soliciting contacts and hospitality in a variety of places. For quit
e a few years he had been traveling the world, scratching a living from his trade. He had written about the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East and had seen disturbing things along the way. At times he had experienced the elation of being in new cities and new landscapes that were dangerous and fascinating. As a younger man he had been able to truly rejoice in those things.

  In the early afternoon, Eric found his way to the comfortably unpreserved back streets of town. In the shadow of a fog-wrapped railroad underpass he came on a tavern called the Fisher's Inn. It had an anchor over the door, always a good sign. The place was empty except for a couple of old-timers in ragged team jackets and baseball hats. At the Fisher's Inn, where no one bought drinks for Eric, the fog seen through dim windows was seamless. Eric sauntered out and took up headquarters in a yo-ho netting-and-knotboard joint that overlooked the water, or would have if there had been anything to see through the gray shroud. He was waiting for the hour when the public might be carried across the bay. Beefeater was prohibitively expensive in the harbor spot, but Eric allowed himself several. He had drunk more modestly at the Inn. On the walk to the dock he had been shocked to discover two joints of the finest pakalolo in his raincoat pocket. A left hand had faked out the right again.

  In a day or two, the conferees at Heron's Neck would hold a press conference on their deliberations at a media center on the mainland. From Eric's point of view, the only interesting thing about the event were the rumors of the Secretary's spectacular mood swings. Insider material, not funny if you were a ragged peasant in the shadow of his gleaming wings. Not funny for his undermanned, under-equipped and underinformed legions either. A few insiders had suggested in print that the main event of the conference might be some maneuvering by the Secretary's enemies to test his grip on things. There would be leaks—controlled burns, as they said in the Forest Service. That kind of thing, even considering Eric's perspective, was hard to resist.