by Jon Cohen
He would miss her when this was over. He would miss the tree house, and Oriana, and he would miss Amanda. The way she loved and understood the natural world. Her resilience, her guidance of Oriana, her tough kindness, her amused tolerance of him. Increasingly, he counted on seeing her light at the end of each day. The sound of the wind through the trees, the owls hooting in the dark, the spring peepers chirping like crickets, the distant beckoning light of Amanda’s bedroom.
Beckoning? Bedroom? Harry steadied himself. A comforting light, not a light that beckons. Like the moon is a comforting light. Keep your mind on the mission. Are you nuts, Susquehanna Santa? Focus.
He fixed on the white oak. Perfect tree. He fixed on the house. Dark and quiet, plenty of bushes to shield his movements. Excellent conditions for a surreptitious delivery. He felt a kind of lightness, in himself and in the bag of gold as he hoisted it off the passenger’s seat of his car. A moonlightness.
He gripped the rough burlap and hoisted the bag over his shoulder—yes, yes, like Santa. A child peeping out a window (hope not!) into the moonlight might think that. Santa! But a slender Santa, dressed all in black, intent on absolute silence, devoid of ho-ho-ho. Harry moved like a cat, the three hundred coins in the bag as noiseless as a sack of marshmallows.
He shouldn’t have moved like a cat.
For the dog that patrolled the half acre of yard that surrounded this little house on Lindmore, a 120-pound Rottweiler named Brutus, hated cats. He patrolled the yard all night long, staying well within the boundaries of the invisible dog fence (because what he hated almost as much as cats was an electric jolt from the receiver box attached to the studded collar that circled his muscular neck). Brutus’s favorite spot was the base of the white oak tree, the trunk so wide that Harry failed to sense the massive presence tensing on the other side of it.
Brutus watched Harry. Friend or foe? He huffed very quietly, which was the Rottweiler way of chuckling. Oh, that’s right—he had no friends. Everyone on the planet was foe. Especially strangers moving cat-like after midnight. Brutus stood. Flexed his paws like a thug cracking his knuckles.
Halfway up the front walk, Harry stopped. Was it a shift in the wind? The whisper of a curtain parting at a window? The sound of an approaching car? Something indiscernible stopped him. He looked over his shoulder.
Brutus lunged, barklessly. To make him even more lethal, his owner had had a veterinarian remove Brutus’s vocal cords, his bite now infinitely worse than his bark. Brutus missiled toward Harry at fifty miles per hour, which was also the speed of the pickup truck, veering into view around the corner, headlights blazing. The headlights made Brutus’s fur gleam like a black leather jacket. Maybe it was a leather jacket. Brutus, a leather-clad, stud-collared, killing machine.
That was Harry’s first thought when he saw Brutus hurtling toward him. I’m going to die! His second thought: My, what big teeth you have!
Harry attempted to run. Brutus hit him from behind, knocking him to the ground. The dog’s mighty jaws clamped down on the burlap bag slung over Harry’s left shoulder. Brutus thought he had torn off a chunk of Harry’s back. In a frenzy of bloodlust, he circled Harry, shaking the bag maniacally. Harry jumped to his feet.
Brutus shook the bag of gold with the awesome power of a great white shark. Coins rocketed into the air like fireworks, lit up by the moon and the headlights of an approaching truck.
Harry was no stranger to dogs rending bags asunder. Sometimes dogs spread ashes. Sometimes they spread gold. Perhaps it was the reason dogs had been invented—to add spectacular craziness to the world.
Harry was not stricken with despair, as he had been a year ago. This time, it seemed perfect. Dog running around insanely with a bag of gold. Why the hell not? Harry lived in the forest now. He had climbed a very tall tree. He had millions of dollars hidden in a quarry. Life was an adventure!
The truck powering toward him, however, was another matter. He ran for his car. He had left the door open and the engine running. He jumped in and gunned it down Lindmore Street. The pickup truck tore after him.
Harry bounced up the dirt road into the night-black hills. The halogens reflecting in his rearview mirror were blindingly bright. It was as if he were being pursued by a monster with twin suns for eyeballs. He twisted and turned his car, spraying dust and gravel. Was it the police? But there were no flashing lights, and it was a truck—a vehicle much better suited to this twisty road, and much more powerful than Harry’s Camry.
Harry couldn’t go any faster. The trees were tight on either side, and he was swerving in the slippery gravel, the truck so close now it felt like it was about to climb over the back of the car. The bumpy road bounced him around in his car, grew narrower, twistier. The guy in the truck honked and flashed his lights.
Suddenly, it cut to Harry’s right, pushing parallel to Harry’s car. The truck squeezed past. A sharp grating of metal, and then it was in front of him, slowing inexorably, weaving back and forth. It turned sharply and skidded to a stop, cutting Harry off in a spray of gravel.
Harry hit the brakes.
A woman jumped out of the truck. Amanda! In his headlights, she was a brightly lit avenging angel approaching in a swirl of dust. Her fist pounded down on the hood of his car like Thor’s hammer.
“Get out of that car!”
Harry obeyed. He instinctively raised both hands in the air.
“Yeah, look at you, hands up like a criminal.”
Harry cleared his throat. “Hi, Amanda.”
“Because I should call the cops. Lurking around our woods. Getting Oriana involved in your. Your—”
“Adventure?” Harry offered. He carefully lowered his hands.
“Adventure.” Amanda spat the word. “You think this is funny? You’re an adult. Oriana’s a kid. What were you thinking?”
He’d been thinking, for the last month, Hope Amanda never finds out. And now she had. “How—?”
Amanda threw something at him. It bounced off his forehead. “Ow!” A gold coin lay in the dirt at his feet. He picked it up. Stared at it.
“Yeah. That’s right. She stole gold from the crazy-ass son of a bitch living in the tree house.”
Harry shook his head sadly as he continued to stare at the coin. “Oriana, Oriana. You stole a coin.”
“Borrowed, she said. Just to play with, she said. You know how kids are. When they can’t get hold of diamonds, they like to play with gold.” Amanda was hugging herself so tightly, her nails dug into her arms.
Oh Oriana, Harry thought, brushing the dust from the coin. He felt the feathers of the golden eagle. And he understood. It was too tempting. And it meant so much to her. He held the coin out to Amanda. “She should have it.”
Amanda slapped it out of his hand. She paced angrily back and forth, in and out of the headlights. “Hawks and candy bars. Grums and gold. How could you do this, Harry? How could you pull her in so deep?”
Deep. Did Amanda know the deepest thing of all? “Did she tell you I wasn’t climbing the sugar maple that day? The day we all met? That I’d tried to hang myself? Did she tell you Dean saved my life?”
Amanda rushed forward and slapped him.
Harry bounced back against the hood of his car. Straightened. Looked her in the eye. “It’s true. He saved my life, Amanda.”
She slapped him again.
Again he straightened and stood before her. “He saved. My life.”
“Stop it!” She raised her hand to slap him again. Harry braced for the blow. But her hand came to his cheek, slowly, and rested there. She looked into his eyes, searching. “Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“Her father, dying in a field. Someone so wonderful, Amanda, so powerful, suddenly vanishing from her life. There had to be a reason. A magnificent reason.”
“And you’re it.”
“I’m it. And the gold is it. And the
grum is it, and the forest, and Susquehanna Santa. It answers everything for her. A great big, magnificent, Dean-sized adventure.”
Amanda hugged herself again and turned away. “You can’t involve her in this. It’s so over-the-top. It’s so wild.”
“She’s safe at home. I’m the one running from Rottweilers.”
“Harry, listen to yourself.”
“I am, and isn’t it amazing? Oriana brought The Grum’s Ledger to life. I’m giving away gold, Amanda.”
He turned her around. “You want to know how Dean really saved my life? He sent Oriana to me. And guided by her vast, incredible kid-wisdom, I’m doing this crazy, amazing thing. Me. Harry Crane. Bureaucrat. A guy who’s never risked anything, never taken chances, is running around the countryside handing out gobs of gold.”
Amanda shook her head. She removed his hand from her arm. “You know what’s really crazy? That you tried to kill yourself. Why didn’t you hold on, Harry? People hold on.”
“Not if they do what I did.” Harry looked into the night. “It was my fault Beth died.”
Oriana, in her rushed account of the gold, had not told Amanda this. “How was it your fault?”
He took the tattered lottery ticket out of his wallet and placed it in Amanda’s hand.
“I couldn’t just quit my shitty job. What I needed was a little courage. A little trust that Beth and I would figure it out. Instead, I bought lottery tickets. She asked me not to buy this one. Just this once, don’t do it, Harry.”
Amanda stood very still.
Harry, in the headlights. “I told her to wait outside. I left her there, Amanda. In front of a construction fence. And I crossed the street, went inside the convenience store and bought that ticket. And a crane collapsed.”
A long silence. “And there was an accident,” Amanda said. Her voice, very quiet.
“A year later, I was awarded millions. That’s the lottery I won.”
And you bought a length of rope and climbed a tree, Amanda thought. And then Dean saved you. She was trembling.
“Harry,” she said. “I trusted you. And you created a secret world with my daughter. You led me to believe you were someone you weren’t.”
“Yes.”
“Lied.”
“How could we have asked your permission?”
“I would never have given it.”
“But Dean did.”
Amanda looked at Harry. For a long moment, just looked at him. “If you knew how that sounded.”
What it sounded like was a miracle. Amanda allowed herself to connect the dots of a miraculous story. As a child might. Her child. She’d heard Oriana’s words, but only half-understood them because she had refused to truly listen or believe. Amanda closed her eyes, and listened to the voice inside her recite a fairy tale:
Once upon a time, a grief-stricken man wandered into a deep forest and threw a rope over the limb of a sugar maple. At the moment of his death, he was saved by the glitter of gold in a knothole—a piece of candy placed there by a red-tailed hawk. The hawk had found it in the forest, where it had been left by a little girl who, in her wisdom, had filled the trees with candy. When the man reached for the golden candy, the limb broke, and he fell to the ground, where he found a magic book the girl had lost in the forest.
He returned the book to the girl. They read it together, and she helped him understand that life is an adventure you can’t avoid. Do the very thing you cannot do, she told him.
He found the strength to climb the tallest tree in the forest. And like the grum, he began to throw his gold to the winds. When at last, against all odds, he cast away the very last coin, he was saved. And in saving himself, he saved the little girl.
Hand in hand, the man and the little girl walked out of their forest.
Amanda opened her eyes. And saw Harry. Astonishing Harry. He was doing the impossible for Oriana. And it was working. The crazy plan was working when nothing else in the last year had. He had unlocked Oriana’s grief. And good Lord, Amanda, she told herself. The man is giving away millions of dollars in gold to complete strangers. There’s no one in the world like him.
Watching the cascade of emotions flooding Amanda’s face, Harry didn’t know what to expect. He was prepared for anything. Except for the moment she suddenly reached out, pulled him close and kissed him.
The fairy tale she had told herself about Harry. So many of them end with a kiss. It was a worrisome thought, as she had stood there struggling over whether or not to risk it. Because what if Harry, though astonishing, couldn’t kiss? Kissing well—very few men could do it.
She kissed him. And Harry kissed her back. Just the right amount of pressure. Just the right amount of heat. Parting his lips, just right, to meet the parting of her own. Harry smelled good. He tasted good. Harry could kiss.
He pushed away from her. Pale and shaken. Touched his lips.
The Year One Club, Amanda thought. She’d broken the rules. She looked at the ground, then at Harry. “I get it. Beth danced on water.”
Harry started to touch her, but didn’t. “All I’m allowed is the chance to help Oriana. That one, little, tiny sliver of redemption. But having you...”
Was impossible. The look on his face, sorrowful but resolute.
She reached out to him, but he drew back. “You’re very, very hard on yourself, Harry Crane.”
“Will you let us finish the gold?”
“I’m going to ground her, Harry. She has to be punished.”
When Harry started to protest, she held up her hand to quiet him.
“Not for Operation Grum. For that, you have my blessing.”
“Then punish her for what?”
“That gold coin,” Amanda said. “She stole from you, Harry.”
He nodded. “You are one tough mother.”
Amanda smiled. “You are one amazing grum.”
She got into her truck and Harry followed behind. In the tree house, later, he waited until she turned out her light before he turned out his own.
30
Wolf had driven around Wilderness Tract A803 twice, just to get a feel for the thing, and a sense of the little towns that clung to its perimeter. The forest was thirty-eight-thousand acres. It took him two hours to drive around it, the roads generally crummy, the stoplights in the towns interminable. Why were there stoplights? Who would stop in these miserable towns, lost in the shadows of the rolling Endless Mountains?
And what really irritated him about these towns? All the greedy SUSQUEHANNA SANTA PLEASE STOP HERE! signs. You people think you’re taking my gold? That you have some kind of right to it?
Well, they didn’t have a right to it, but they were getting it. Harry was speeding up the process, as if he could tell I’d entered his domain. And this latest Santa drop, unfuckinbelievable. Wolf was chewing angrily on a bad hamburger in a bad diner on the side of the road outside Elkdale.
“Now Rottweilers are getting my gold? Rottweilers?” Brutus the Rottweiler was instantly famous. Photos of him posing proudly with the torn burlap bag between his teeth had gone viral. Wolf stared into the dog’s eyes and Brutus stared back. Wolf swiped the “Lucky Bastards” app away.
The question is, where is Harry’s domicile within the domain? Wolf had spoken to an agent at Laurel View Realty, used a lot of teeth in his smile, big mesmerizing alpha teeth.
“Yes, we also rent properties,” the agent said, quickly going through his listings. Wolf leaned over the agent’s shoulder, staring into the screen. The agent felt Wolf’s chin stubble brush against his cheek. He gave a little jump.
“No rentals in the last month?” Wolf said.
“Uh, no. You, uh, mentioned on the phone, though, that you were interested in buying a property. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Is that what I said?”
The agent cleared his thro
at. “Yeah, well, maybe I just—”
“Misunderstood?” What am I doing? Wolf thought. Why am I intimidating this guy? Because it is my nature. Because time is running out. Because I am an endangered species. I have three arrows in my back, shot from the bows of three wives. I am the hunter of a dwindling sum. Wolf felt a sudden wild hunger.
“Need to eat some meat,” he said. “Where might I do that?”
The agent stared up at Wolf. Meat? “You mean...like a hamburger?”
Wolf nodded. The agent gave him directions to a diner. There was a place closer, but the agent didn’t want Wolf closer. He wanted Wolf farther.
Later, Wolf walked past Phil Bartek’s house. He saw Phil standing next to his pal the state trooper, who was big like Wolf. I could take you, if I wanted, Wolf thought reflexively. Both of you at once. Except the state trooper has a gun on his hip. And Phil. What does he have? Phil has a brand-new Dodge Ram pickup. Bought with my gold. A little cocker spaniel came yapping across the lawn.
“Toodie,” Phil yelled. “Come back here, girl.”
“Not a problem,” Wolf called back. Resisting the urge to punt the barking runt over the top of Phil’s new truck. Wolf kept walking, feeling the state trooper’s eyes on him.
He went to Halfordsville next. Talked to a woman realtor there. No need for teeth, just charm. She told him there was no recent rental activity.
“Bet things pick up with all the Santa fun,” Wolf said.
“Actually, I’ve started to get a few calls.”
“Well, it’s a lucky place,” Wolf said. Full of lucky bastards.
When he left the realtor, he swung down Ginger Thompson’s street to have a look-see.
What he saw made him smile. The little bread crumbs, Harry, that only your big brother could see. There’d been one in front of Phil Bartek’s house, too, it just hadn’t quite clicked. Big, beautiful trees in both Phil’s and Ginger’s yards.
Really, Harry? You ever gonna let go of childhood? Naw, I guess we never do, huh? In the forest, have you hidden the rest of the gold at the base of a tree? Which was why there was no point in searching the forest. Harry’s gotta guide me to it. I find you, Harry, and I follow you into the forest.
