by Norman Green
When in doubt, ask a lawyer. There was a guy who practiced in Lubec, had a sign out in front of his house. His name was Weaver, and Louis and I decided to stop and see him on our way past. It just happened that Weaver was tied up with old man Calder and some other guy, so we sat in his kitchen and waited. At least he had coffee going, or his wife did. She seemed very nice, much more cheerful than anyone ought to be. She was short, round, and happy, there were pictures of her and her husband everywhere, and the two of them could have been bookends. I got a chance to talk to her for a while because Louis was still a little stunned. It struck me then that he wasn’t out of the woods yet, that regardless of his financial situation, Eleanor was still in the hospital. Mrs. Weaver tried to engage him, asking him how Eleanor was holding up, but Louis had retreated to some monosyllabic alternate universe. She gave up on him after a while, and she and I sat in the kitchen and listened to her husband doing what lawyers do. I could hear him, not the words he said but the sound of his voice, measured and reasonable. The guy with Sam had a voice that was a little higher and a little more strident, and Sam himself was off the chart. He either started or finished every one of his sentences with “Goddammit, Weaver.” Mrs. Weaver and I sat drinking coffee in her kitchen and listened to him. I found my mood rapidly improving, watching Mrs. Weaver giggling every time Sam said something in the other room.
“You know,” she said to me, “Mr. Calder has always been such an unhappy man. You would think, with all his money, he could have anything he wants, but I can honestly say that in all the years I’ve known him I can’t remember seeing him smile.” She glanced over at Louis, but he was still in a world of his own.
“Takes more than money, I guess.”
“Well, you know, that’s true,” she said. She pitched her voice low and leaned across the table to be heard. “Mr. Weaver and I don’t have a lot, but we enjoy life, do you know what I mean? We both like to play golf. I may never be that good, but my husband is actually not bad, you know, he’s got a nice tight swing and he stays in the fayahway mowah than just about anyone I know. But what I mean to say is, we enjoy life. We have a time-shayah in Noth Carolina, and we go golfing down theyah for two weeks every yeah, and we take other vacations when we can affodd it, we’ve played everywayah from Florida to Banff, you know, and of course we play around heah. There’s a nice little course right over to Campobello. But Sam, he hardly evah even takes a day off.” She leaned closer. “Tell me,” she said. “Can going to business be that interesting? Can it be so much fun that it’s all you want to do? And if it is, how come everyone that does it looks so unhappy?”
“I don’t know the answer to that one.” I stopped, and she and I listened to Sam launching into a tirade, but after a strong start he lost steam. “I can tell you that I used to enjoy my profession a lot more than I do now.” I watched Louis out of the corner of my eye, but I might as well have been speaking Swahili. “I used to think being good at something was worth whatever price you had to pay for it. It’s like playing a game, I guess. You want to win, even if there’s no prize. There was something in me that needed that. But you know, after my son’s mother died . . .”
She clucked her tongue. “Sorry to heah that.”
“Thanks. But I’ve had to spend a lot more time with my son recently, and it almost makes me wonder why I was so interested in what I was doing before. You know, I’ve never played golf. I don’t think I’ve ever even held a golf club in my hands. I used to wonder about people who played. Like, What could they be thinking?”
She laughed softly. “Oh, I know what you mean,” she said. “When my husband first wanted me to go, I thought he was crazy. I agreed to try it, though, and I went and took some lessons with him. It was so funny, at first, half the time I would miss the ball altogethah. But you know what? All it took was one good shot. The first time I swung that drivah and heard that smack that you hear when you’ve struck it well, Lord, I stood theyah and watched it fly. . . . That was all it took. I’ve been hooked evah since. You know, you should try it sometime. I bet you’d like it.”
We listened to Sam Calder through the walls of her house. “Now, goddammit, Weaver . . .”
“You suppose he’d be happier if he played golf?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, “it wouldn’t have to be golf. But you ought to have something that you can do, just because. You’ve got to have something in your life that makes you smile.”
A while later, I looked out of Weaver’s kitchen window and saw Sam Calder Sr. and the guy who was with him go stomping across Weaver’s front yard towards Sam’s Mercedes. They stopped for a few seconds to stare at the minivan before continuing on. Weaver came back into the kitchen a few minutes later, and his wife made introductions. He offered to take Louis and me into his office, but that hardly seemed necessary—his wife was going to hear it all anyhow, though I didn’t say that. I explained what Louis and I wanted to do, and it turned out he had contract templates loaded in his word processor, all he needed to do was fill in the details and change some shit around. We wound up signing papers about an hour later, and Weaver had some advice for Louis on handling the money once he got it. Weaver’s fee was a hundred and fifty bucks, and I had to fight with Louis to pay it out of my end. I won, finally, but it was a struggle.
When we got back to Louis’s house, he stared at his Jeep with a funny look on his face. I thought I knew what it was. I’ve done it myself, and it’s worse when you do it in the city, you get fried and park your car on the street someplace, and then in the morning you can’t remember where you put it. You spend a couple of hours, or days, sometimes, wandering around the neighborhood looking for it, and when you finally find it, you stand there staring at it, thinking, Shit, I don’t remember this at all. But there it is, you know, and your key fits and all that, so it had to be you who put it there, and it’s a strange thing to realize that you were behind the wheel but someone else was driving.
“C’mon, Louis,” I told him. “It’s all right.” He shook his head and followed me into the kitchen. “I gotta make a run down to Manhattan,” I told him once we were inside. “I should be back in a couple of days. You gonna be all right?”
I watched him stand there, breathing, looking at the wall. “You know,” he finally said, “when I was in that cell, I felt like I was back where I belonged. I felt like I had just been playacting all these yeahs since the last time I was locked up. I’ve been pretending that I was grown up, but it was all for show.”
“That’s fucked up, Louis. Eleanor needs you now, you gotta be there for her. You think you can do that?”
He nodded. “I’ll be all right.”
I went upstairs and grabbed one of my duffel bags. The other one, the one that held my laptop, my birding stuff, and the money, I left where it was. I did grab five bundles out of it, though, fifty grand. It seemed such a meaningless thing, like I was giving someone some of my extra socks. I took them downstairs, laid them on the kitchen table, where Louis was sitting down. His friend Jim Beam was nowhere in evidence. Louis let out a big sigh when he saw the money, like he’d been holding it in ever since I’d picked him up.
“Manny,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to say anything.”
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, Louis. Made a lot of poor choices.” I had always taken care of myself first. I had the feeling that if I got started telling him about that, we would be sitting there for hours. “Maybe this’ll make up for a couple of them.”
“Maybe it will.” Louis’s voice got husky, and he got that Sunday-morning look in his eye. He stood up, walked over, and took my hand in both of his. “I’ll pray for you, son, you and Nicky both. I’ll pray that the Lord forgives you, and that he sets you on the right road.”
“Thanks, Louis.” His gratitude was making me itchy because I still had no real appreciation for money. I wasn’t giving him s
omething I had worked for, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything more significant than passing on a pair of shoes that didn’t fit me anymore. “I appreciate that. You want my advice, I would take the money up and give it to Weaver, let him handle it for you. You can’t just go and lay it on the hospital, you know what I’m saying? You gotta make them think you had to sell your firstborn to get it, every step of the way. You need a ride back down there? You need a ride down to the hospital in Machias?”
“I can make it,” he said. “You go on and do what you need to do. Thank you, Manny. Thank you for everything.”
I almost forgot about Gevier’s money, but I noticed his invoice lying on the floor of the passenger side of the van when I threw my duffel bag inside. It wasn’t a lot, not to me, but I don’t think money ever means much of anything to a thief. It had never mattered that much to me if I was broke, because I knew how to get what I needed. You take a guy like Gevier, though, even though he was obviously a bright guy and knew his profession, if no one came into his garage for a few weeks, or a few months, he could wind up in a hard way pretty quickly. It struck me then that I’d had the unearned luxury of not needing to worry about finances most of my life, on account of being a crook, while more or less normal guys like Gevier and Louis probably had to expend a lot of mental energy sweating how they were going to make it. Of course, neither one of them was likely to get locked up for pursuing his chosen profession.
Now that I had Nicky, I couldn’t afford that risk any more, either.
Jesus.
I drove over to Gevier’s house to pay my bill.
I didn’t expect him to be there, and he wasn’t. Eddie answered the door. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even look at me, she just stared out past me at the minivan. Sometimes I have this effect on people, and I’ve never understood it. I don’t growl, I don’t flex my muscles at you, I even try to smile sometimes. Maybe it’s just a size thing, you know, maybe some people are afraid of me for the same reason I’m afraid of Louis’s horse.
I’m not really afraid of the horse, okay, I just don’t like it. Anyway, Eddie hadn’t been afraid before, either of the times I had met her. Her father and Louis had both been around the first time, but I couldn’t see that making too much of a difference, and I thought we’d done great when Nicky and I met up with her out in Louis’s pasture. When a person is scared of you, though, you can sense it, you can see it in the way he looks at you, the way he moves, the way he sits, everything he does. I’ll tell you something I would never be able to admit if you and I were standing someplace having a conversation: it hurts every time it happens. It’s like being slapped in the face. You think you can get used to it, right, you think you have a thick skin and they can’t really touch you, but then you see that look again, and you think, Come on, man. I ain’t a bad guy. And even if I am, you don’t know it yet. But you’re on the outside again, and there’s nothing you can do to make him let you in.
She did, though, she stood back from the door, held it open, waited for me to come inside. “He’s not here,” she said.
“He’s still at work, right? I just came by to pay up.” I held out the bill, and she took it from me with a shaking hand. This kid is afraid, I thought, really afraid. Something must have happened, something that shook her up. I wondered what she thought I was.
“I couldn’t stand it if he had to go back to jail,” she said. “They’d send me away somewhere, we’d be locked away from each other, and I can’t stand the thought of it.” She started undoing the buttons on her shirt. Her cheeks were flaming red, and she still wouldn’t look at me.
“Eddie, stop.” She had all the buttons open and she shrugged her shirt back off her shoulders. She had no bra on underneath it, and, I suppose, no need for one. I turned away, put my hand on the doorknob. “I gotta go.”
“Why can’t you just leave him alone?” I heard panic then, and her voice rose in pitch, loud, uncomfortably close to hysteria. “I’ll do whatever you want me to, if you’ll just go away afterward, and leave my father alone.”
I didn’t turn around. “Eddie, put your shirt back on.”
“He didn’t do anything! He’s just a mechanic now, don’t you understand that? He fixes cars for a living!”
I kept my back to her. “Eddie, I ain’t made out of stone. If you put your shirt back on, I’ll stay and talk to you.” I listened to the sound of her breath, angry little huffs in and out.
“All right,” she finally said. I turned around to see her standing, rigid, her face still red. Her shirt was on, though. She had buttoned it all the way up to her chin. At least she was making eye contact.
I walked past her. “Sit down,” I told her. “Over there.” She took a chair, and I sat down across the room from her. “Eddie, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Your father fixed my van, and I came by to pay the bill. That’s all I know.”
She glared at me. “You can stop pretending. Thomas Hopkins told me who you really are.”
“Did he now?” My stomach did a kind of a roll, but it stopped, because I didn’t think Hopkins knew who I was, for one thing, and it didn’t fit with Eddie’s worries about her father, for another. “What did he tell you?”
She looked at me, anger and defiance plain on her face. “He said the DEA sent you up here to break up the Oxy trade. He told me you didn’t even care if you got the right guy, that you knew my father used to be a chemist, and you were going to hang it on him.”
It was almost funny. “Fucking Hopkins.” The guy was poisoning the waters, I guess. “And you believed him?”
“You wouldn’t tell me the truth, anyway.”
Maybe not. “Look, Eddie, I am the furthest thing in the world from any kind of cop, okay? But I just came by to pay my bill. When I’m done here, I have to go out of town for a couple days to take care of some business, and when I’m done with that, I’m going to come back up here, pick up Nicky, and be on my way. I got nothing to do with the DEA, and I couldn’t care less about the Oxy trade.”
Her face seemed to crumple. “Hopkins said you thought my father was the chemist who figured out how to counterfeit OxyContin. He said there’s a lab in India someplace where they’re making it now, and that they’re bringing it in through Canada.”
I shrugged. “Well, that may be true, but I always figured, you want to put a needle in your arm, it’s your business. Nothing to do with me.”
She leaned forward in her chair, covered her face with both hands, and began to cry silently. It was relief, I guess. After a couple of minutes she stopped, but she didn’t uncover her face. “You must think I’m a fool,” she said, her voice muffled.
“No.”
“I’ll be right back.” She stood hastily and stomped out of the room. I could hear water running, and then she lost it again, I could hear her going on, “hoo-hoo-hoo,” crying like a little kid. She came back about ten minutes later. She had washed her face, tied her hair back, tucked her shirt in. Probably had on a pair of cast-iron underpants.
“I’m sorry,” she said, standing next to her chair, flustered. “I thought . . .” She gestured with a fluttering hand over toward the door, where she’d been standing when she’d taken off her shirt. “I was afraid of you, you know. . . .”
“Sit down,” I told her. “Let’s move on from there, okay? Let’s just, like, go forward. Can we do that?”
She glanced at me, and she blushed again and looked away. “Okay,” she said, sitting down. “Yeah, sure.”
“You must love him a lot.”
“All I have is my father.” Her eyes clouded over. “Why would Hopkins say that stuff about you?”
I told her the whole story of Hopkins and me, the traffic stop, the convenience store where he’d been smacking his girlfriend around, the complaint Bookman made me sign, the fight at the VFW, Bookman suspending Hopkins for the fight at the VFW, all of it. “Next he’ll be sneaking over at night to let the air out of my tires,” I said. “I caused him some trouble
, or he thinks I did, and he wants to return the favor. Nothing he would say or do at this point would surprise me.”
“What a dick,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been under so much stress lately. I’m trying to figure out what I should do, and I worry about what would happen to my father if I left, you know, and then this. . . . I couldn’t stand it if he had to go back to jail.”
“I understand, believe me.”
She looked at me. “If Nicky were in my position, would you make him go away to school? Will you do it when he gets old enough?”
I hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t know. I guess I would want him to go. Not to get him away from me, not to get rid of him. But you know, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I don’t want Nicky to make the same ones. I want better things for him. I’m sure your father wants better things for you than what he can give you.”
She thought that over. “Do you remember what you said, back when I told you I didn’t fit in up here?”
“What’d I say?”
“I told you I wouldn’t fit in down in New York City, either. You made a joke. You howled like a wolf, and then you told me you could get me around that in ten minutes.”
“Oh, yeah.” She sat there staring at me. “All right,” I told her. “Easy enough. First of all, you don’t have much of an accent, so you don’t need to worry about that. Second, don’t go by the name Edna. Nicky was right. Call yourself Eddie. All right? Eddie Gevier. Lose those flannel shirts, but just keep that one on for now, okay?” She grimaced at me. “Wear black jeans everywhere, and sneakers, those old-fashioned Chuck Taylors are good. Sunglasses, no jewelry. T-shirts, black leather jacket for winter. Okay? That’ll get you through the first year. Next, stay out of places you don’t belong. Don’t smoke dope, don’t drink more than two beers. Never tell anybody anything about yourself. Nobody’s got your back, so you got to look out for your own self. If you go out, go with a bunch of other females. Keep your mouth shut and sit near the door. Never carry money in your wallet, keep it in your pants pocket. Never date a guy more broke than you. Never believe a guy when he talks shit to you.”
