by Howard Owen
“Hey,” Jack calls. “Where’ve you been? Who are you?”
The old man keeps smiling. He puts his index finger to his lips and shakes his head, slowly and deliberately, the gray ponytail swaying slightly.
Jack is almost afraid to breathe, the way he is when he watches the deer drink, knowing they soon will scatter so fast he’ll wonder if he saw them at all.
He doesn’t know how much time passes—probably no more than two minutes, and then the old man turns and walks back into the thicket.
“Wait,” Jack calls. “I have to ask you something.”
But he is gone.
It is no mean feat to cross the creek here. There are some rocks 100 yards downstream, just far enough apart to require a couple of leaps. Jack makes it without soaking anything except his lower left leg.
When he reaches the spot where he saw the old man, he can’t find any evidence that he was there, not even a shoe-print in the hard red clay.
In the dying light, Jack walks on into town, right down Main Street, past the diner and Speakeasy Lightfoot’s marker. Susan Edmonds blows her horn as she goes past but doesn’t stop to ask him if he needs a ride. Like most of the people in the town itself, she knows he likes his walks.
He drops in at the fire department long enough to again thank the ones who are there for their wasted efforts of six weeks ago.
The insurance money will be coming soon, maybe by the end of the year. It’s obviously arson, but Jack has little hope that anyone will be caught. The last thing he wants to do is draw unwanted attention to Brady Stone’s nearest living relatives, and he hopes the drug dealer who burned his mother’s house down would just as soon sever his ties with Speakeasy.
The money is less than they would have received from the Korean couple, and Mike and Sandy don’t speak to him unless absolutely necessary, even though he’s certain their need is less than his.
By the time he gets back home, it is fully dark. Gina is home from work; Shannon has already gone somewhere with friends.
He takes three deep breaths to calm himself, and goes inside.
“Well,” she says. “Where have you been? I thought maybe you had a hot date tonight and forgot to tell me.”
She is sitting in the living area, drinking a glass of white wine, her feet up on their leather couch.
He walks over to her, kisses her on her forehead and goes to get himself a Coke. He settles into one of the Barcelona chairs Gina talked him into getting three years ago before he broaches the decision he reached this afternoon.
“I heard from Gerald Prince today,” he tells her with studied casualness.
“Oh, really,” she says, and then waits.
“He says the book is promising. He thinks it’s really good, but he thinks maybe I ought to change it from third person to first.”
“Really?” She frowns and hesitates before speaking again. “Won’t that be kind of, um, difficult?”
Yes, Jack tells her. He’s been thinking about it, and it won’t be easy.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he says, and she frowns in spite of herself.
“I’m thinking,” he says, turning to face her, “I’m thinking that I really need to give this my full attention for a while. And, with the money from the insurance coming in soon, I figure I can pay the mortgage at least through the end of the year …”
“Whoa,” Gina says, holding up her right palm like a traffic cop. “Are you telling me that you can’t pay the mortgage without the insurance money?”
He has tried to keep it from her. He hasn’t wanted her to worry needlessly, and if he required any further proof that he is on the right path, the old man’s appearance today clinched it. Still, how do you tell your wife that you’ve hitched your—your family’s—star to a wrinkled old man who she’s never seen and who disappears into thin air?
He tells her that, yes, it has gotten a little tight, with the stock market going south and all. Thank God, he thinks, she doesn’t know about the $7,000 Brady took to California, more than three months’ mortgage payments.
“My God,” Gina says, getting up to get herself another glass of wine. “Why didn’t you tell me we were getting so strapped for money?”
“We won’t be tight much longer,” he tells her. “Just hang on until the … until they buy my book.”
She sits down again, and he walks over and kneels beside her.
“Trust me,” he tells her. “This is going to work. I know it’s going to work. I haven’t ever believed in anything this much.”
He knows, from her small frown, that he should have added, “since I first met you,” but the moment is gone, and he’s never been good at fooling her.
There is a pause, and then he plunges on.
“I’m thinking that, if I had six weeks, from now to New Year’s, I could do it. I could rewrite the whole book the way Jerry … Gerald suggested, in the first person, and have it ready to send back to him by New Year’s Day.”
“You mean …” she knows what he means but doesn’t want to give it legitimacy by saying it. “You mean, quit your job?”
“I’m not making that much anyhow,” he says.
“Almost enough to make the mortgage payment,” she says, a thin, humorless smile playing on her red lips. She’s had her dark hair done in a way that makes it look wild, with no two strands seeming to go in the same direction but with the result somehow coherent. She is flushed, the way she gets when she’s had too much wine or she’s angry.
“It’ll all work out,” Jack tells her.
“How?”
“It just will.”
“‘Just will’? Good Lord, Jack, that sounds like Brady talking.”
He knows that he isn’t doing a very good job of selling his idea, but he’s known, since he left the creek, that this is what he has to do.
“Just give me till New Year’s,” he says. “I can make it work. Believe in me.”
“I want to.” She shakes her head, and her hair floats back and forth before regaining its shape. “I really want to. But what if it doesn’t work?”
He has to give her credit. She has never, before now, even mentioned that possibility. He feels like a tightrope walker who has just felt the faintest breeze testing his equilibrium.
“It will,” he tells her. “I won’t let it not work.”
They go around and around.
“What about Christmas presents?”
“We can charge them.”
“On what? We’re barely paying the interest on the two cards we have now.”
“We’ll get another one. Hell, they offer us about 10 a week.”
He can tell he’s scaring her. He’s always, until the last two-and-a-half years, been the stable one, the one who tried to talk her out of extravagance and spontaneity. It’s as if they’ve changed roles, with Gina now the unhappy voice of reason.
“You know, Jack,” she says at last, when they realize it’s almost 8 o’clock and they haven’t even thought about dinner, “I believe in you, but you’ve got to promise me one thing. We don’t lose this house. Promise me that, Jack.”
He tells her they won’t lose the house.
“Because, if we lose the house, I—I don’t know what I’d do, Jack.”
But he knows exactly what she’d do.
They haven’t ironed things out completely when Shannon comes in, tires peeling rubber as her ride tears down the 200 yards of cul-de-sac. She has her books with her, and Gina asks her what she was studying, and with whom. Shannon’s answers seem to satisfy her.
“Anything to eat?” she asks them.
“Let’s call Domino’s,” Jack says.
“Think we can afford it?” Gina replies, cold enough that Shannon picks up on it, Jack’s afraid.
That night, in bed, he’d hoped that they could talk some more, but she says she’s tired.
“Just one thing,” she tells him, before turning away. “You’re awfully sure about all this, and you’d better
be.”
When he knows she’s asleep, he gets up and tiptoes into the empty living area, careful not to wake the dog, then walks up the spiral staircase and gets out his copy of the manuscript.
He calls up the first chapter and starts over, just like that, his fingers clicking in the silence that is broken only when he reads a passage to himself:
“I’d been traveling for three days solid. Hadn’t slept the last two, since I slit the girl’s throat back in Dothan, in that place that made you pay extra for ice …”
Yes, Jack says to himself, and realizes he’s talking out loud.
Yes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Come back to bed,” Gina says. “You’ve still got to be at work in five hours. You’ll be bleary-eyed all day.”
He tells her he’ll be down in a minute. He sees the hurt in her eyes, but he can’t stop now. Just a little more, he begs her, and she turns without another word and edges her way down the narrow spiral staircase.
“I’ll make you proud,” he calls weakly after her. “It’ll be worth it, I swear.”
Just then, the heat pump kicks in, and he doesn’t hear what, if anything, she says.
He goes back to the desk, where the computer waits patiently, humming low.
He looks up on the bookshelf. They had floor-to-ceiling shelves built when the house was being constructed, and on the one nearest him, at eye level when he’s sitting, is a photo montage put there by Gina. In the middle is one of the two of them, on their trip to Cancun, taken by another cruise-ship passenger, not long before they were married. She is wearing a small fuchsia bikini, and he has on flourescent green trunks. They look young and happy, without a doubt or a care.
“It’s going to work,” he says to the picture. “I know it will.”
Even the picture, though, looks doubtful.
They met at his 30th birthday party.
By then, Jack Stone was fairly sure his life was not destined to follow any plan he might have helped design.
The truck farm did not turn out so well. After Carly left, he threw himself into it fully for more than a year, because he had to throw himself into something. But then he woke up one late-summer morning, and he knew he could not bear another year of it. He was no farmer, had never planned to be one, had never prepared to be one. He knew, as he lay in bed and watched the first light slip into his room, that he was not going to be either successful or happy growing fruit and vegetables for other people’s tables. He wondered how his father had stood it so long.
His mother left the decisions up to him, and she told him later she was relieved. She’d had no more intention of working on a farm than he had, until she fell in love with a farmer.
They managed to lease most of the acreage to a man who finished Gladden High two years after Jack, and from then on, Jack Stone’s experience with farming consisted of a few rows of tomatoes, beans and squash, mostly tended by his mother. The house was paid for, and Ellen could afford to take it a little easier.
“But what are you going to do with yourself?” his mother asked him. He felt he was too old to go back to school, too old to do anything that didn’t involve making money on a regular basis. Any dreams he might once have had were out of the question.
He knew a couple of long-distance truckers whom he’d met through the farm. One of them had told him one day, when Jack confessed to him just how much he truly disliked farming, that he should go to school, get his commercial license, and hit the road.
“Nothing like it,” the man had told him. “You can go everywhere, be your own boss, make damn good money.”
Jack Stone, who had seen his hopes of a college education twice thwarted, finally got his diploma from a truck-driving school in Oklahoma City. It wasn’t that hard. He was bigger and stronger than almost all of the mostly young men there, and he was capable of driving large trucks hundreds of miles at a time without experiencing much physical or mental discomfort. He had, in the words of one of his trucker friends, an iron butt.
And he’d learned in the Navy that he didn’t mind travel or solitude. He’d always been able to put himself into a zone, to drift into daydreams while still focusing another part of his brain on the task at hand—in this case, keeping an 18-wheeler from killing someone.
And, he has to admit now, some of it was that he just wanted to get away. The loss of Carly hadn’t made him and Brady any closer. The boy seemed to actually blame Jack for his mother’s absence. He was prone to throwing tantrums that would force Jack to spank him. Ellen was the only one who seemed capable of keeping her grandson in line without at least the threat of corporal punishment. Even when he was three years old, Brady was, all agreed, a handful. And when Jack looked at his young son, he saw, beneath the Stones’ reddish-blond hair, Carly Hamner’s eyes looking back at him.
And so, Ellen kept Brady while Jack crisscrossed the country, seeing very little of it.
The money was good, though, and in January of 1982, with his 30th birthday approaching, he was close to buying his own rig.
Ellen wanted to throw him a party. It wasn’t a surprise, because she knew her son was very tired of surprises, had never liked them that much in the first place.
She invited Milo and Cully, and Ray and Martha Sue Bain, Susan Edmonds, and a couple of other friends who had not left Speakeasy. His sister and her husband came, but Mike had to work.
Milo was between marriages, and he brought a date.
She was going by Gina Royal again. She told friends that at least she wouldn’t have to be Gina Freemason for the rest of her life, although that was all she’d planned to be when she was in high school.
They threw the party in the back room at the Speakeasy Inn. Almost everyone bought the kind of gifts Jack would have expected from his old buddies—almost all of them dealing in one way or another with bodily functions. Nothing cost much more than $10, and most of it would be in the trash can out by the road the next morning.
Gina Royal was the exception, though. She’d wrapped her present in shiny silver foil, and when Jack opened it, expecting the worst, there was an emerald-green crewneck sweater.
She said later that nobody said anything about bringing a gag gift, and Jack supposed it was Milo’s own little joke, not telling her.
She was the youngest one at the party, 22 and a couple of years out of junior college. Milo had hired her to run the office in the insurance agency he was still sharing with his father, and he had told Jack how sexy she was, and how horny he was for her. This was the first time he’d taken her out, although he’d asked twice before.
Jack had seen her around town, between cross-country hauls, at the grocery store or the McDonald’s. She always nodded and smiled, so he did, too, without ever really introducing himself. He knew, because Speakeasy wasn’t that large, that she and her family had moved there in the late ’60s. Her father ran the pharmacy on the north edge of town, the one that eventually would be done in by the Revco on the south side. She had been Miss Gladden High of 1977, and she was already divorced.
She told Jack later about Skip Freemason. He’d been the star of the basketball team, they’d gone steady for three years, and they got married the week after they graduated.
They both went to a junior college in the foothills, where, with their parents’ money, they rented an apartment. The plan was that they would transfer to a four-year school later, but by Christmas of their freshman year, he’d fallen for a blonde sophomore from Lynchburg and moved out. He and the blonde transferred to James Madison after spring semester, leaving Regina Gay Royal Freemason abandoned and soon to be divorced.
“You know,” she said once, after she and Jack were engaged, “I probably would have dropped out after the first semester and just gotten a job if it hadn’t been for Skip leaving me. I never liked school, but I was damned if he was going to make me skulk back here like some loser.”
Two years were enough, though. She moved to Richmond and worked for a year and a half as a secretary, an
d then she came home. She didn’t really mean for it to be permanent. She was visiting one weekend, and her father told her about the job that Phil Wainwright was advertising for at the insurance agency he and his son ran. She went by that afternoon, and the job was hers.
If I hadn’t met you, she told Jack a year later, I’d have taken a job in Washington or Norfolk, somewhere. She knew almost as soon as she returned and rented a small apartment a couple of miles toward Richmond that Speakeasy would always be better for her as memory than as reality.
Four days after the birthday party, Jack was pulling into the Giant parking lot when he saw her again, carrying two grocery bags across the pavement.
He waited until he saw where she was headed, a burgundy Honda with dealer’s tags still on it, and he eased into a space one down from her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, birthday boy,” she replied, smiling when she recognized him. “I’m glad to see you survived the party.”
As he and his mother were the only teetotalers at the event, he said he supposed his chances of survival had been pretty good.
“My biggest challenge,” he told her, “was staying clear of Milo.”
“I hear that.”
Milo had decreed that, since the birthday boy wasn’t drinking, he would take it upon himself to down a shot of Jack Daniel’s for every one of Jack’s 30 years. He made it to 23, just into the second fifth, before he fell backwards off the stool, tumbling Ray Bain to the floor with him.
“Oh,” Jack said, when he realized he was wearing the green sweater. “Nice gift. You shouldn’t have, though.”
“It goes good with your hair. That’s why I picked it out.”
They talked for 20 minutes, until Gina realized she had ice cream in one of the bags.
“Listen,” he said, “are you and Milo dating or anything?”
She smirked.
“Why would you want to know that?”
