A Simple Plan (19 page)

In the afternoon, while the two of them were napping, I slipped out and bought a tape recorder. I went to Radio Shack, in Toledo. I told the salesman that I needed something tiny and uncomplicated. It was for dictation, I said, for recording business letters while I drove to and from work. He sold me one that was a little smaller than a deck of cards. It fit snugly, almost invisibly, into my front shirt pocket, and its record button was extra large, so that you could feel it through the fabric and know which one to press without taking it out to look.

Sarah and the baby were still asleep when I got home. I checked on them quickly, then went into the bathroom and practiced turning the tape recorder on and off in front of the mirror. I did it over and over again—a slow, casual gesture—my right hand scratching briefly at my chest, my palm holding the machine in place while my index finger pushed down the button. It looked good, I thought; it was something Lou would never notice.

Later, after Sarah woke up, I tried it out on her. She was in bed, with Amanda in her arms.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to buy with the money?” I asked, and when she glanced up at me, I scratched at my chest, turning on the tape recorder.

She bit her lip, debating. In the silence, I could just barely make out a soft humming sound coming from my pocket.

“A bottle of champagne,” she said. “Good champagne. We’ll drink it, get a little tipsy, and then we’ll make love on the money.”

“On the money?”

“That’s right.” She smiled. “We’ll spread it out across the floor, make ourselves a bed of hundred-dollar bills.”

I took the tape recorder from my pocket and rewound it to the beginning. “Look what I bought,” I said. I handed it to Sarah.

“Does it work?”

I grinned. “Press the play button.”

She found the button, pushed it in.

“A bottle of champagne,” her voice began, the words emerging one after the other with incredible clarity. “Good champagne. We’ll drink it, get a little tipsy…”

T
HURSDAY
evening, around five-thirty, I telephoned Jacob from the feedstore and suggested we visit the cemetery together, finally fulfilling our obligation to the ghost of our father. He declined at first, saying he was busy, but eventually I managed to badger him into it. We agreed to meet at quarter till six, on the street in front of Raikley’s.

By the time I emerged from the feedstore, he was already waiting for me on the sidewalk with Mary Beth. He looked even more overweight than normal, his face puffy, swollen. His jacket was so tight that he couldn’t drop his arms to his sides. He kept them extended, away from his body, like an overstuffed doll. The sun had set, and it was dark out. The streetlights cast weak circles of pale yellow light across the pavement at regular intervals along the road. A few cars moved by, and down in front of the pharmacy a cluster of teenagers loitered, talking and laughing loudly. Other than that the town was quiet.

Jacob and I crossed the street toward St. Jude’s, stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk, and moved into the parking lot. Our boots crunched in the gravel. Mary Beth jogged on ahead of us toward the cemetery.

“I’ve been thinking about the money,” Jacob said, “and I think maybe we were fated to get it.”

“Fated?” I asked.

He nodded. He was eating a hunk of chocolate cake wrapped in a piece of aluminum foil, taking great bites out of it as we walked, and he had to wait, chewing and swallowing, before he could speak.

“There are so many things that might’ve gone some other way,” he said. “If it’d just been chance, then it never would’ve happened. It’s like it was meant to, like we were chosen.”

I smiled at him. It seemed like a romantic idea. “What things?”

“Everything.” He listed them off on his fingers. “If the plane had flown another mile, it would’ve crashed out in the open and been discovered right from the start. If the fox hadn’t crossed exactly in front of us, and we hadn’t crashed, and Mary Beth hadn’t been there or hadn’t jumped from the truck and chased it, and the fox hadn’t run right next to the plane, we never would’ve found it. If you’d left the bag inside after checking on the pilot, we would’ve come into town and told the sheriff without even knowing about the money. It just goes on and on.”

We’d reached the cemetery’s chain-link gate now, and we stopped there, as if hesitant to go inside. The gate was merely ornamental; it blocked the path but nothing more. There was no fence attached to it. Mary Beth sniffed at it for a moment, lifted his leg briefly against its supporting post, then stepped off the path and entered the cemetery by himself.

“But why is that fate?” I asked Jacob. It seemed more like luck to me, and it was a little frightening to hear him list off all the things that had gone our way. I couldn’t escape the thought that everything balances out in the end: if it was luck that was bringing us through our present difficulties, it was bound to turn on us before we were through.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “It’s too arbitrary to be just chance. It seems like there has to be something determining it, a plan helping us along.”

“God’s?” I asked, smiling. I waved at the church.

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“And what about Pederson? Was that part of this grand plan?”

He nodded emphatically. “If he’d come at any other time that day, he would’ve found the plane. There would’ve been our tracks. We would’ve been caught.”

“But why have him come at all? If you were the one making the plan, wouldn’t you have just omitted him?”

He thought about that, finishing off his cake. He licked at the aluminum foil a few times, then balled it up and tossed it into the snow. “Maybe it’s important for something which hasn’t happened yet,” he said, “something we don’t know about.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d never heard him attempt to philosophize before. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

“It’s going on right now, too, I bet,” he said. “Things are happening in just the right sequence, one after the other, falling into place so that it all works out for us.”

He grinned at me. He seemed to be in an exceptionally good mood, and for some reason this irritated me. It reeked of complacency. He had no concept of the trouble we were in.

“You’re happy we found the money, then?” I asked.

He hesitated, as if confused by the question. He seemed to think that there was a trick embedded in it. “Aren’t you?”

“I’m asking you.”

He waited a second, then nodded. “Definitely,” he said, his voice serious. “Without a doubt.”

“Why?”

He answered quickly, as if this were something he’d already considered many times. “I can get back the farm now.”

He looked at me when he said it, to see my response, but I kept silent, my face expressionless. In a few minutes I was going to ask him to betray his only friend: it didn’t seem like the right moment to inform him that he couldn’t remain in Ashenville.

“And I can have a family,” he went on. “I wouldn’t have before. I need to find someone like Sarah, and—”

“Like Sarah?” I asked, startled.

“Someone aggressive. You needed that, too. You were too shy to find someone on your own; she had to come and get you.”

I was a little bewildered to hear him say this, but at the same time I recognized it as true. I nodded at him, prodding him on.

“Without the money,” he said, “no one was ever going to come and get me. I’m fat”—he patted at his stomach—”and poor. I was going to grow old and be alone. But now that I’m rich, all that’ll change, someone’ll come get me for the money.”

“You want someone to love you just for your money?”

“I’ve never had anyone, Hank. All my life. If I can get someone now, I’m not going to care why she’s with me. I’m not proud.”

I leaned against the cemetery gate, watching him tell me this. His face and voice were very serious. This wasn’t modesty or self-deprecatory humor; there was no sense of irony whatsoever. It was the truth, cold and shiny as a bone freshly stripped of its flesh: this was how Jacob saw his life.

I didn’t know how to react. I stared down at his massive boots for a moment, embarrassed, then said, “Whatever happened to Mary Beth?”

He adjusted his glasses on his nose, squinted past me into the cemetery. “She’s in there.”

“She’s dead?”

“Dead?” he said. “What do you mean? She was just here, you saw her.”

“Not the dog. Mary Beth Shackleton, from high school.”

Jacob frowned. “She’s married, I think. Last I heard she’d moved to Indiana.”

“She liked you without the money, didn’t she?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “I never told you the truth about that, Hank. I was always too ashamed.” He didn’t look my way while he spoke; he stared off beyond me into the cemetery. “She dated me as a joke. It was a bet she made with some of her friends. They all chipped in and bet her a hundred dollars that she wouldn’t go steady with me for a month. So she did.”

“You knew this?”

“Everybody did.”

“And you went along with it?”

“It wasn’t as bad as it seems. It was mean of her to do, but she did it in a nice way. We never kissed or touched or anything like that, but we walked around a lot together, and talked, and when the month was up she still stopped to say hello to me when we passed, which she didn’t have to do.”

I was shocked. “And you named your dog after her?”

He shrugged, smiling strangely. “I liked the name.”

It was absurd, of course, the whole thing. I felt sorry for him, and ashamed.

A car honked somewhere farther down in town, and we both paused, listening. The night was very quiet. The dog had reappeared out of the cemetery and was sitting now beside the gate.

“I’m thirty-three,” Jacob said, “and I’ve never even kissed a woman. That’s not right, Hank.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“If my being rich’ll change that,” he said, “then fine. I don’t care if it’s just for the money.”

We fell silent after that. Jacob had spoken too much; we both seemed to sense this. An awkwardness hung about us like a mist, so thick that we could hardly see each other through it.

I unlatched the gate, and we passed into the cemetery. Mary Beth bounded off ahead of us.

“Sort of spooky, isn’t it?” Jacob asked, his voice loud, brave, a bulldozer straining to push his embarrassment aside. He made a moaning sound, like a ghost, then laughed, short and sharp, trying to twist it into a joke.

But he was right; it was spooky. The church was dark, empty; the sky clouded over, its stars hidden, its moon just a vague shimmer above the horizon. What little illumination there was to guide our way drifted in from the surrounding town, entering the cemetery weakly, more glow than light, not strong enough even to pull shadows from our bodies. The darkness among the graves was so complete it was like something liquid; walking through the gate, I felt as if I were descending into a lake. I watched Mary Beth disappear ahead of us, leaving only the sound of the tags on his collar, clinking lightly together whenever he moved, to prove that he was there at all.

We found our parents’ graves by memory rather than sight. They’d been buried in the very center of the cemetery, just to the right of the path. When Jacob and I got there, we stepped off into the snow and stood before the tombstone. It was just a simple square of granite, serving as marker for both of them. Etched into it were the words

Twofold is our mourning

Below this were two blank spots, sanded smooth. These were for Jacob and me: our father had bought four plots before he died, to ensure that we might all be buried together one day.

I stood perfectly still before the grave, staring intently at the stone, but I wasn’t thinking about our parents, wasn’t remembering their presence, or grieving for their loss. I was thinking instead about Jacob. I was searching for a way to enlist his aid in our plot against Lou. That was why we were at the cemetery tonight: I was reminding him of the bond we shared as brothers.

I waited several minutes, letting the silence build around us. I was wearing my overcoat, a suit and tie, and the cold bit at me, the wind pressing through my pant legs like an icy hand, firm, insistent, as if it wanted me to step forward. My eyes moved furtively from the stone to the dark shape of the church, then sideways toward Jacob, who stood beside me, swaddled in the tightness of his jacket—silent, massive, immovable—a giant red Buddha. I wondered briefly what he was thinking about, standing there so still: perhaps some private memory of our parents, or of Mary Beth Shackleton, or of the mysteries of fate, and the gift it’d brought him, the doors it promised to open now, finally, when his life already seemed so far along. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of anything at all.

“Do you miss them?” I asked.

Jacob answered slowly, as if rousing himself from sleep. “Who?”

“Mom and Dad.”

There was a brief silence while he thought this over. I could hear the packed snow beneath his boots creaking as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Yes,” he said, his voice sounding flat in the cold air, honest. “Sometimes.”

When I didn’t say anything, he went on, as if to explain himself. “I miss the house,” he said. “I miss going over there on the weekends to eat dinner, and then sitting around afterwards to play cards and drink. And I miss talking with Dad. He was someone who listened when I spoke. I don’t know anyone like that anymore.”

He fell silent. I could tell that he wasn’t quite through, though, so I just stood there, staring up at the sky, waiting for him to go on. Off to the west, above the church’s spire, I could see the blinking lights of two planes moving slowly toward each other. For a second it looked like they were about to collide, but then they passed. It was only a trick of perspective; up in the air they were miles apart.