Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  "Yeah. Make us rich."

  A deeper silence seemed to fall, so that it was possible to hear the river below.

  "I'm trying," Leroy said merrily.

  No one laughed, though the hard-faced man to whom he had spoken made his features humorlessly reflect Leroy's attempt at a friendly smile, with a curled lip, a show of teeth and raised eyebrows. Everyone stood in place at his workstation, still and staring. As he turned to walk back to the car, he heard what he had always dreaded in places like Salikan, a rumble of spitty laughter, low growls and arrested fricatives trailing his departure. The successful man is resented by the hewers of wood and carriers of water. The wealthy man of taste and means draws the impotent hatred of the mob. In some countries, Leroy had heard, such people had a clearer sense of their station in life and conducted themselves accordingly. Whereas here, he thought, it was supposed to be all jolly rough-and-tumble, and you couldn't spit in some peon's face when he tried to be smarter than you. Leroy had some enraging and frightening memories. Losers could come right to your house.

  The turns were sharper and the incline steeper where the paving gave way to sealed gravel, but Leroy's car rose smoothly through it all. When he had put the car snugly in his garage he let himself inside, into the large kitchen, and poured himself a glass of pinot grigio. It had been a very tiring drive, and Leroy was working on a headache for which the wine was not a remedy. His eyes were sore; he thought he might be due to replace his contacts. He had worked hard at keeping fit, seeming and feeling younger than his age, but still he had put in the time. He had not been out for an easy life, and he had not had one. It occurred to him that no matter how a man postponed it, he ended by progressively settling for less. The thought made him angry.

  Leroy's canyon home was the newest and biggest house on the river. Somebody's had to be. He had definitely come to feel that a house ought not to be outsized or conspicuous, and his own place caused him a jot of self-consciousness. The thing was, it had been like a new toy, and hard for him in the first flush of ownership not to improve on it and add features. The pool had been something of an engineering feat, but it was a joy, looking cut into the rock, though it really wasn't, and ingeniously supplied with water at great cost. There was glass on one wall of the den, cantilevered so as not to catch the full force of the wind coming down the canyon but commanding a view of the national forest and wilderness to the north and east. It would have been hard for him to say why, but the dimensions of the place made him feel somehow younger. It proved he belonged to an age group below his calendar years, a Bullshit Walks generation. The right people understood.

  Maybe he had figured there would be more people around. In the past they always came to pick his brains, to find out what he could do for them, to listen to his strategies and plans. Girls came for the fun and games, an adventure by the pool, the brightness and glossiness. You always had to be careful with girls, he realized. Girls could go a long way toward making or unmaking your reputation, especially in California. Guys came for access, to prove themselves to him, eager for his blessing on some project. He had taken the Orvis trout-fishing course twice in the hope of excelling on the river. He had become a proficient skier, having learned, one on one, from a top Kraut.

  Everybody had to be kept in line. The fact was, Leroy knew, to be too accessible was dangerous. Accessibility aroused the predator. When they call you a nice guy, beware. The nice guy will find his brains on the floor—a proverb from somewhere, some newly competitive nation. Leroy could envision his brains on the floor, gray, bloody, posthumously active, refusing to cease their clamor. He often contemplated with satisfaction the brilliance concentrated within his intellect and will. Sometimes, he knew, it burned with too bright a flame.

  He was running a supervisory eye over the road and the garage side of the house when it fell upon an undesirable oddity. Tied to one of the aspens over his driveway—certainly visible from the road—was a twisted length of plastic, the kind of transparent tube in which a newspaper might be delivered on a rainy day. The tube was wet, soiled and blackened like something that had washed up in some filthy city gutter. It was knotted on a high branch of the tree so that part of it floated like a pennant over his turnoff, perhaps a signal pennant. Signaling what? His presence? It was unsettling. It made him imagine piracy, a Jolly Roger.

  He moved out of the well-appointed kitchen and sat before his floor-to-ceiling window, watching the stormy night darken the borders of the canyon. The black clouds brought down the night sky, the moon that had been rising; the first stars all disappeared. He took his glass of wine outside to the patio, walked down the stone steps to his pool and switched on the poolside lights and underwater illuminations. The sleekness of the lighting was comforting at first. Then in the blue-tinted light he saw that lapping against the tile of his pool was another soiled piece of plastic like the one in the tree. He felt a wave of disappointment—in things, in the sorry aspect of his rewards, blemishes on good fortune. It seemed like the work of a spoiler, and it frightened him. He looked around him. Somewhere in the sunken canyon behind his house thunder broke and echoed massively; the sound of it felt as though it might shake the house on its stone fortress. A fork of lightning struck rimrock overhead, and whether by reflection or a second strike, it lit the canyon below in stunning detail, displaying precisely the coloring of each cliff, its cuts, layers and scars, its geological history. Leroy stepped back against the rock wall of his house. There was a smell of scorched sage and burning pine. The air was bone-dry, and not so much as a drop of rain fell.

  He went back inside, finished his wine and poured another. The drink made him hungry—on the trip up he had not given any thought to food. All that was in the house unfrozen were the eggs and milk he had bought at Craw's, a half stick of butter and an unopened jar of caperberries the beautiful Ilena had brought him months before. The caperberries were imported from Romania, from a place called Cluj, which happened to be in Transylvania, where Ilena herself came from. She had always described herself as Transylvanian, which meant she might have been Romanian or Hungarian or descended from Saxon or Slavic settlers. Leroy had never asked her. He required only that she be as beautiful as she was, and as accommodating. To be seen with her was to command envy and respect and to display the superior quality of his life. Any fool could see her out in Valentino and Cole Haan, and that, Leroy thought, was all they needed to see.

  He opened the berries with difficulty and took out the butter, milk and eggs. He broke an egg onto the Teflon surface of the frying pan. Looking at the yolk under the kitchen light, he saw that there was a bright blood spot in the center of it. This was mildly disturbing to such a perfectionist as Leroy and he tried to remember what it might signify. Perhaps, he thought, the egg was not fresh. Or the opposite. He stood reflected in his kitchen window against the black night outside, seeing his own blank face. A flash of lightning lit the rock landscape outside, revealing the aspens, the plastic flag at the top of one tree. He sipped his wine, put the pan aside and dialed Ilena's number in San Anselmo.

  "Allo, Leroy," Ilena said in her husky voice when she heard who it was. "How may I serve you, my kink?"

  "I miss you," Leroy told her. "Why didn't you come with me?"

  "Aha. Your punishment, cheri."

  "Punishment for what?" He smiled wanly at his reflection. "I've been good."

  "Good? Ho ho. A good one."

  "No, really. Come up, get a morning plane to Rock City. Get one tonight. I'll get you picked up."

  "Naah," she said in a vulgar comic voice. He hated her speaking that way. "Naah," she said. "No fuckink way."

  Leroy suspected Ilena might be drunk. She had a drinking problem.

  "But why, sweetheart? Don't you love your king?"

  "Naah," she said.

  "Come on."

  "Come on," she mimicked. "Come on. Leroy, you're a noodle, eh?"

  "Please come."

  "Naah."

  "I'm opening your caperberries. Thin
king of you."

  She laughed charmingly. "Don't be so stupid. You make me pissed off."

  "If you don't come," Leroy said, "I'll make you sorry."

  "Ya? I don't think so. How about: Fuck yourself, dollink."

  "Listen," Leroy said, trying to change the subject. "I broke an egg into the pan to cook your berries. There's a red spot in the yolk. What about that?"

  She gave a soft canine yip. "Break other egg."

  Leroy reached for a second egg and broke it. It also had a red spot in the yolk.

  "A red spot," he told her. "Honestly."

  "Yes? No shit? Whoa."

  "What?"

  "Break next egg. Egg next to it."

  Leroy did. There was a red spot. He told her so.

  "Somebody playing a joke on you, boss. Like the jokes you like. Put-on, pain-in-the-ass jokes you like."

  "I thought you liked my jokes, Ilena."

  "Naah."

  "You always laugh at them."

  "Tell your name for me," she said.

  "Oh," he said, trying a laugh. "It's harmless." His nickname for her was Strangepussy. Harmless. But who could have told her?

  "I laugh when you put-on somebody else," Ilena said. "You too, when someone hurts. You're cruel motherfucker."

  "When did you decide this?"

  "Lewis tells me."

  Lewis was a business associate of whom Leroy had had enough.

  "Lewis! He told you? That nitwit?"

  "You think? Screw you! Hey, kink, what looks like? The red spot?"

  "It's just red."

  "Look like skull, no? Tiny skull."

  "I don't see a skull."

  "Yes!" she insisted bad-humoredly. "You will see. Ask your other girlfriends. Ask Ludmilla, the gypsy."

  "Ludmilla's not a gypsy," Leroy said.

  "Fuck she ain't. You cheating cul. You get what you deserve. Your money is cursed. Your house. Your dick. Skull in the eggs. You will see."

  Leroy cleared his throat. "Please, Ilena."

  She cursed in her language and hung up.

  Holding his silent phone, he looked out of his dark kitchen window again and saw the face of the fugitive Alan Ladd, the ape's face, the tiny eyes. Smiling. And what to call his mouth? Disapproving. A homicidally disapproving mouth. But it was only a vision, imagination. Alan Ladd, his crushed face, his tiny eyes. Alan Ladd was at the wheel of some murder victim's car, perhaps driving on a transcontinental superhighway, otherwise driving a back road in the woods, prowling. Prowling for victims. Beside Alan Ladd a dog was seated, an exquisitely trained pooch, a mechanical dog actually, its teeth honed and gleaming. Maybe Alan and his dog were seeking out a lonely house in the woods marked by a filthy plastic banner.

  But there was nothing in the window. The thought was a worm of the brain. Leroy's phantom, the torment of a too busy man dedicated to his work.

  "I can and will make life sweet," Leroy said aloud. As frightening as losers are, he thought, I am more. I have the high ground.

  He went into the part of his den that served as a library. Lightning flashed beyond the glass wall, thunder boomed in the rock. There was still no rain. On Leroy's reading table was the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. It stood beside Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, whose citations he used to crush underlings. The dictionary came equipped with a magnifying sheet that could be applied to the page to make the small print more readily legible. Leroy picked up the sheet and took it into the kitchen. He had not turned the stove on, so the eggs sat coldly in their pan, complacently three-eyed in the light, innocent as unborn Cyclopean babes. Leroy set his magnifying sheet on the pan's rim.

  Yes, he saw. The spots might be skulls. They were elongated, cephalic, with inward curves that might mark cheekbones. The tops were rounded, maybe cranial. There were two tiny rounded darker marks against the blood red that might represent eyes, little rectangles that could stand for teeth. A hollowed snout.

  Blood spots, though, not portents, nothing intentional. Whether random biology or a poisoner's mark, Ilena had made them appear as they did. Out of secret hatred or jealousy, out of the sheer evil of the weak, which he had seen often enough. As so often with the helpless and self-deluding, she had turned the strength of the strong against her betters. The tactic of sly inferiors: to set his mind against itself in a lonely place. All day, he realized, he had been thinking negative thoughts. Was it something fated, a test of confidence to be proved, as though there were some superforce that ruled strength, constantly sorting out the chosen, making them risk their gifts and qualities against the little strategies of the lame? Was there some kind of supernaturalism in the law of survival?

  Leroy decided that it did not matter to him. Even if all the forces of the eternal loser were able to combine against his superior mind, people like himself had to prevail. Because morality was functional. To be strong was to be hard, to laugh at punks who never dreamed of taking the first step toward getting what they wanted, who never knew. Never knew except to resent and set petty traps.

  Oh, and they hated being called by the names they chose for themselves by virtue of their own absurdity. And their humor was frail; they hated the jokes that required them to act out their foolishness and impotence. They had to live the reality that the elected provided for them. In their sheepy droves they hated Leroy and his like.

  Angry, he burst out onto the patio. In his rage he brought his hand down hard on his metal outdoor breakfast table, again and again. While his legato echoed on the wall, he heard a faint but curious sound. Looking up, he saw a dark brown shape. It stayed in place without motion. In a moment, the overhead lights above his pool cast two glowing lights on the lower extension of the thing. What glowed was a pair of bright yellow eyes. It was a cat, coiled, about to spring.

  Somehow Leroy managed to leap into the pool. His plunge took him below the surface for a second, and as he fought to clear his vision he made himself hope that he had imagined the thing. But then he saw the panther in the very place he had been standing. It was trembling, regarding him from the far edge of time. Its face was skull-like.

  Immediately the big cat moved around to the other side of the pool so that it waited behind him. He turned, treading water, fighting for breath. Floating in the middle of the pool was a large red and green beach ball. He put his arms around it to stay afloat, but it seemed to be drifting toward the side of the pool where the cat waited. Leroy came so close that the cat reached out over the water and, as Leroy watched, a pair of claws the size of kitchen knives shot out from its paw's black pads. The cat growled what sounded to him like a command to despair. Leroy, hanging on to his buoyant toy, saw something dreadful that he recognized in the animal grin and extended fangs. Unrelenting confidence. Dead certainty.

  Leroy clung to the merry beach ball. The harder he clung to it, the more it seemed to drift toward the panther's reach. Batted by an almost casual thrust of the cat's claw, the ball began to spin in his slippery embrace. The cat was circling the pool, tense but assured as any mere animal could be, feinting, reversing ground. At play. Leroy began to scream for help. His breath was failing, but on each inhalation he clung harder to the whirling ball.

  Overhead the stars had come out, the Milky Way. Leroy thought it might be a trail, a way out. All at once from somewhere in the canyon he heard a voice, one he thought he remembered. He called to it for help with all the breath he could summon until he realized that the voice was singing.

  "I'm drowning in the lowland, low land low."

  The song was one he knew. It was the voice of Dongo. Dongo singing a song in the canyon.

  "Drowning in the lowland sea."

  Leroy, spinning with the beach ball, began to sing along.

  High Wire

  I FIRST MET LUCY AT a movie premiere at Grauman's about midway between the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton. Attending was a gesture of support for the director, who happened to be a friend of mine. The film's distributors had made a halfhearted lurch towa
rd an old-style Grauman's opening, breaking out a hastily dyed red carpet. A couple of searchlights swept the murky night sky over downtown Hollywood. By then these occasions were exhausted flickers of the past, so there were none of the much-parodied rituals some of us watched in black-and-white newsreels at the corner Bijou. No more flashbulbs or narrators with society lockjaw telling us what the talent was wearing. Neither simpering interviewers nor doomed starlets walking the walk. The camera flashes and the demented fans crowding the velvet rope were all memories. Hollywood Boulevard was even rattier then than it is now. The only people around the marquee that night were frightenedlooking Japanese tourists and bright-eyed street freaks with slack smiles.

  The picture was no good. It was the forced sequel to a 1960s hit with a plot cribbed from a John Ford movie of the fifties. It featured two very old actors, revered figures from the time of legend, and the point of it was the old dears' opportunity to recycle their best beloved shtick. The withered couple and their more agile doubles shuffled through outdoor adventures and a heartwarming geriatric romance stapled to some bits of fossil western. Attempts had been made to make it all contemporary with winks and nods and brain-dead ironizing.

  The audience consisted mainly of people who were there on assignment, out of politeness, or from fear. There were also members of the moviegoing public, admitted by coupons available through the homes-of-celebrities tours and at the cashier counters of cheap restaurants. Raven-haired Lucy, with her throaty voice and dark-eyed Armenian fire, was in the picture briefly, as an Apache maid. I later learned she was not in the theater to take pleasure in the picture or even in her own performance. She had come in the service of romance, her own, involving an alcoholic, Heathcliffish British actor, the movie's villain.