Stress (16 page)

By the time the house was finished, four months later than the projected completion date, Joe and Dolly Piper were barely speaking to each other. He had sold most of his school and hospital bonds, a portfolio he’d fondly expected to see him through a comfortable old age, to cover the closing costs at the bank, and having been overcharged, duplicate-billed, double-talked, piggy-backed, raked off, skimmed, scalped, skewered, shilled, and taken to the cleaners on every item from the staircase in the front hall to the porcelain knobs on the closet in the laundry, the lord of the manor decided he had too much conscience ever to go into legitimate enterprise.

The first jolt was small but irritating. Ceremoniously putting away their first two sacks of groceries in the new house, the Pipers found that none of the cupboard shelves in the kitchen was tall enough to contain a cereal box standing up. By the end of that day, faced with windows that either wouldn’t open or refused to stay up, a door that swung the wrong way so that the person entering the room had to walk around it to operate the wall switch, and an almost studied lack of straight lines and level surfaces anywhere on the premises, the prospect of having to lay their Post Toasties horizontal for the rest of their lives hardly seemed worth mentioning. It was as if a construction firm that had been in business since 1936, and whose reception room walls were papered over with awards and citations, had suddenly and with breathtaking thoroughness come down with advanced senility.

Flushed, however, with the fever of ownership and a little high on turpentine fumes and the odor of fresh sawdust, the couple had shrugged off each unpleasant discovery. They agreed that in time none of the things would matter.

They mattered.

Six years later, as he sat drinking Cutty-and-water in front of some dumbass cop show in the room he called the living room and Dolly insisted on referring to after the brochures as the lounging area, he had only to turn his head a quarter to the left to see the fireplace whose sunken hearth he had specifically requested be raised to create an extra seat, while a full turn to the right would confirm that the blue Mexican tiles Dolly had ordered for the foyer had during the process of installation magically transformed themselves into wall-to-wall carpeting over plywood; and he saw again the curl on the kid contractor’s fuzzy upper lip and heard his bullshit Boston accent as he pointed out that since neither of these details was on the work order, Mr. Piper must have mistaken his
intention
to discuss them with the act of doing so. The changes would of course be made, but Mr. Piper must understand that he will be charged for the extra labor and material. Mr. Piper was too gentle-mannered, with his new wife at his side, to tell the little prick to invest some of his own labor and shove the material up his pimply Harvard ass. He often thought his sanity, during those next two years of working evenings and weekends to increase business and cover the mortgage payments, depended upon the belief that some of the people who wound up standing in front of the guns he sold were bound to be in construction.

For all that, the house was a showplace. Joe Piper had to employ all his Irish charm to keep the woman who organized the local home tour from adding the house to the itinerary, and once
House &Garden
had called. Dolly was disappointed, but she understood the necessity of avoiding attention. Photos and floor plans of houses where the IRS and burglars of the community imagined valuable guns were kept made their jobs a little too easy for the homeowner’s comfort. It was a handsome place to begin with, and Dolly Piper had worked miracles with the interior details. Her husband had never lived in a house to compare with it; but more and more his thoughts went back to that little brick saltbox on Trumbull, with its faded wallpaper and pervading scents of corned beef and cabbage, and the gone past struck him in the chest like a blow from a baseball bat. That house had been one of a group built and owned by Big Jim Dolan, an old-time political boss who believed in keeping his family around him for their protection and his. From its cramped attic to the dugout basement Joe Piper had felt the old fixer’s presence: big-bellied, red-whiskered, stinking of whiskey and cigars, secure in an environment that had remained fundamentally unchanged between County Cork and Detroit, and safer in the three steps that separated him from the street than Joe Piper felt inside his ring of burglar alarms and closed-circuit cameras. It was a world that had vanished with the onset of Prohibition, buried as deeply beneath the rubble of three wars as Troy. Now the house itself was a memory, even its basement filled in and covered with asphalt.

Change. It seemed to him the world kept on turning, and every time it turned it leaned on him.

Immersed in this sour reflection, he jumped when the telephone rang. On TV, the cop in the fedora with a nose that looked like a baboon’s ass was boondocking a big black Bonneville over one of those ball-busting hills in Frisco while Kirk Douglas’s kid chased a dope dealer down an alley filled with dumpsters and the cleanest garbage this side of Beverly Hills. Joe Piper got up and turned off the set, then went over and lifted the receiver.

“Piper, this is Scott.”

“I don’t know any Scotts. You got the wrong Piper.” He started to hang up.

“
Scott
, you bricklaying son of a mick bitch.
Winfield
Scott.”

Joe Piper’s eyes went to the big glossy picture book of the Civil War lying on his glass coffee table, a gift from Homer Angell. Angell, it had turned out, modeled himself after General Winfield Scott, distinguished veteran of every American war from 1812 through Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Like many of Joe Piper’s business contacts, the former militiaman was wary of wiretaps and used the name as a code when identifying himself over the telephone. The gun dealer, who employed a Jap to sweep his house monthly for electronic devices, and who didn’t know General Sherman from General Foods, thought it was a dipshit affectation on the part of a man who he was convinced played with toy soldiers in his bedroom.

“Okay, Scott. What’s the rumpus?”

“That salsa I picked up for you is giving me heartburn. When can you come get it?”

Puzzled, he turned that one over. He was getting old, having to drag himself out of his reverie to remember the shipment of Ingrams he was arranging for Wilson McCoy. Instinctively he stroked his neck. The bandage had come off finally, but a long thin crusty line remained, tracing the path of the former Black Panther’s razor. He wondered what Big Jim would have made of that.

“You’ll have to hang on to it for a while,” he said. “I don’t have the price yet.”

“Ordinarily I might, but I’ve got a bleeding ulcer.” Which Joe Piper took to mean Angell was under some kind of surveillance. He hated this cloak-and-dagger shit, everyone talking around corners. If James Bond were genuine he’d be jabbering to himself in the Old Spies’ Home by now. “I’ve got a customer in Argentina willing to meet the market and take delivery next week.”

Perón. He’d heard the Fascist asshole was planning a comeback. “We got a deal, Homer.”

“Scott. I don’t know any Homers. Did I say this ulcer’s about to rupture? Surgery’s expensive.”

“Who pays for most of your operations, you little shitpot Napoleon?”

Angell made a noise in his nose. “Napoleon. That squirt thought strategy meant outnumbering the enemy twenty-five to one. If Murat hadn’t saved his Corsican ass with a suicide charge at Marengo, Waterloo would have come fifteen years early.”

“Scotty boy, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Your market’s in Detroit. There’s a revolution going on here every night. If you can beat that in South America, my advice is to go ahead and brush up on your fucking
español
.” He slammed the receiver into its cradle.

The bell rang again. He walked over to his chair and drained his glass, then came back and answered.

“Josephine speaking.”

Angell said, “I might be able to hold things off ten days. That’s the absolute limit. After that it’s
buenas dias
, Buenos Aires.”

Joe Piper glanced at the incredibly tasteful calendar Dolly had hung on the wall next to the kitchen, Tahquamenon Falls rendered in watercolors by an Ann Arbor artist. Suddenly he missed Maureen’s pot roast-and-potatoes taste, big clunky crucifixes and fake jade lamps with fringed shades, her high color when she brought home a Day-Glo St. Sebastian on black velvet from a garage sale in Taylor. Grief swept over him in a wave. She had shot herself with a .38 Colt he had held out of a sale lot for their personal protection. From that day to this no firearm had come through his house.

“Give me to the first and I’ll see what I can do,” he told Angell.

“Two
weeks
?”

“Well, fifteen days. ‘All the rest have thirty-one,’ remember?”

“That’s a long time to live with a bellyache.”

“Take Pepto.”

After the conversation he went out on the glassed-in porch looking out on the rest of the subdivision and the peaks of the buildings in Pontiac’s crumbling downtown beyond. February, Michigan’s bleakest and least predictable month, was on its way, casting its steel point shadow over the snow-heaped rooftops. Two more months of shoveling and snow tires, not counting the annual St. Patrick’s Day blizzard. Big Jim would have embraced St. Patrick’s Day with the fervor of a transplanted Dubliner. Joe Piper had never met Dolan, dead some forty years, but he’d seen the old man’s photograph in the Shamrock Bar, his big mutton-chopped face above a cruel collar and stickpin, and he could picture him leading the parade on foot in a pressed-paper hat with a shillelagh in his bricklayer’s fist. Behind him, perched atop the back seat of an open touring car, would ride the mayor and the chief of police, possibly the governor. Why not? All three owed him their jobs.

In those times, according to Joe Piper’s father, the fixers danced jigs in their shirtsleeves and garters with red-headed women to the old music performed by live bands, then met in back rooms. They played cards, larded the air with blue smoke, and propped their feet in big square brogans and pearl-gray spats on the tables, doling out money and favors to their constituents and arguing over who would run their city. Their speech, laced heavily with the Gaelic, throbbed with the bass tremble of a tuba band. Whiskey ran like water. St. Paddy’s was Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July rolled into one sodden orgy. Now it was just an excuse to swill beer tinted with green vegetable dye and listen to the Rovers. Half the people who dressed up as leprechauns weren’t even Irish. Some of them were black. The atmosphere in the Shamrock on that most glorious of days belonged to a Presbyterian wake.

Again Joe Piper’s fingers traced the scar at his throat. More and more now he saw himself as Sebastian in Maureen’s bargain painting, his hide pierced at every angle with barbed shafts that glowed in the dark. At those times the wounds felt as tangible as the one he bore in reality. They let in the chill even through the windows of the porch.

He bet that on February second nobody in California gave a shit whether the groundhog saw its shadow or not.

W
EEDS MADE
C
HARLIE
B
ATTLE CLAUSTROPHOBIC
.

The officer, who had spent hours last autumn drilling holes and installing cedar panels in his four-by-four apartment closet, had once crawled headfirst down a broken sewer pipe in ninety-degree weather to rescue a four-year-old boy who had fallen in and broken his leg, all without breaking a sweat. Yet he found himself laboring for breath less than a minute after climbing down a bank covered with thistles and timothy off Schoolcraft Road. The growth, flattened somewhat by an earlier snowfall and winterkilled yellow, was thick, and he had to stand on tiptoe and fill his lungs with cold air before he could steel himself to go on.

He blamed the condition on fishing vacations with his Uncle Anthony, a lifelong urbanite who equated the wilderness with emancipation. Come the doldrums between wrestling’s busy spring season and the fall start-up, he would bundle nephew and tackle into the car at 4:00
A.M.
and takeoff for some northern lake or river that could only be reached by a long trek down a tangled bank. By the time they got to the water, young Charlie would be bleeding from a dozen thorn-scratches, bumpy with insect bites, and itching from poison ivy. In the heat of day the atmosphere became tropical. When the pair started home at sunset, battling their way back through the undergrowth, the air would be as thick as meringue. Invariably fears of suffocation forced the boy to claw through the last few yards of weeds in a panic, gasping for the oxygen and monoxide of the highway.

But he was unwilling to disappoint his uncle, and in twenty years he never missed a fishing vacation. In time he grew to dread the approach of summer. And so he had not been as regretful as he felt he should have when Anthony’s deteriorating health caused them to give up the annual trip.

Now here he was again, and the absence of heat, mosquitoes, and noxious plants did little to lift that old sense of oppression. If anything, the knowledge of what awaited him at the base of the shallow slope contributed to it.

The January morning was all hard edges and pewter gray. The culvert, installed thirty years previously to prevent swamp runoff from covering the road, was chalky to the touch, the trickle that came through it frozen solid in a glinty braid. The usual detritus of cigarette filters, spent condoms, and Styrofoam Big Mac coffins was stuck fast to the ground. Even the vapor issuing from the throats of the five men standing near the mouth of the culvert seemed sluggish in the frost, curling spastically in a kind of stop-motion effect. Four of them were in uniform, but only two of the uniforms belonged to the city.

“Charlie, I almost didn’t recognize you out of the bluebag.” The officer who came partway up the bank to shake his gloved hand was black, and even bulkier-looking than usual in winter issue with a pile-trimmed collar and earflaps on his cap. Matt Kellog of the Public Vehicle Bureau was always fighting to keep his weight below the department maximum.