Thanksgiving (3 page)

‘Nice place you’ve made here,’ I remarked conversationally.

‘It’s all right. I’ve got my tapes, my videos, my photographs.’

He smiled in a way I couldn’t interpret.

‘My memories.’

‘No books, though.’

‘I have
the
book. Only one I need.’

Oh, so he was one of those, I thought. Lucy hadn’t told me about this aspect of his personality. Or maybe he’d found Christ after she dumped him.

He pointed out a shelf of about twenty identical, tall, narrow volumes bound in black.

‘The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
,’ he declaimed in a parody of an English accent. ‘The 1911 edition, complete in twenty-eight volumes, not counting the index and maps. I’m about three-quarters of the way through, so far. Reading about the poet Ovid in a volume entitled “Ode to Pay”. Ovid never wrote a poem called that, as far as they know, and those guys knew everything, but I think it could have been a big hit. Sort of Robert W. Service bar-room ballad stuff. Strong subject. Like I always say, the two oldest lies are “Your cheque’s in the mail” and “I promise I won’t come in your mouth.” You a reader?’

‘Must have cost a fair amount, that set.’

‘I got it for fifty dollars. The library had a sale. Wanted all new stuff, didn’t know what it was worth. I had to make a trip through Carson anyway, get wood for the stove. I go once a year, up into the National Forest other side of Lake Tahoe. Find a couple of fallers, cut them to length with a chainsaw and winch them on to the half-ton. Back here I split and stack ’em. Lasts me all through the winter.’

‘Isn’t that illegal?’

‘Never got caught yet. There’s not a lot of law out here, and what there is is spread awful thin. So go ahead and have as much booze as you want. You’ll never get popped for DWI round here.’

He sat back down again, crossed his legs and stared at me directly for what I realized then was the first time. Every eye-contact earlier had been brief, oblique and teasing. This was confrontational. The warm-up was over and the game was about to begin.

‘So, you said you wanted to talk about the kids. How are the little charmers, anyway? It’s kind of hard to keep in touch, having to go out to some bar to phone and all. Last I heard Claire’s husband ran off with another woman leaving her holding the kid, what’s his name?’

‘Daniel.’

‘But Frank seems to be doing pretty good. Guy takes after me, always did. He’ll be okay.’

He slurped some whiskey and looked at me.

‘So your point is, Tone? Or should I call you Tony? We all know how toney you Brits are. Like to think you are, anyway. No, Tone sounds right to me. Tone it is.’

‘Talking about what sounds right, do you want to drop the cornball idiom? “Doing pretty good”, and all the rest of it. You’ve got a degree from UC Berkeley, Lucy told me. Don’t try playing the hick with me.’

‘Why, I’m sorry. I guess living out here with the kind of people who live out here, you sort of adapt to the way they talk.’

He stood up and stepped towards me. At that moment, the light dimmed for a moment.

‘The wind,’ Allen explained, looming above me. ‘When it drops, the power goes out. Here, let me take your coat. It’s awful hot in here. Awfully hot, I mean. Frightfully hot. Dreadfully hot. Appallingly hot. And all that rot.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Believe me, you’d be better off without it. You’re starting to sweat.’

‘I’m fine.’

He paused there a moment, then returned to his chair.

‘Actually, just for the record, I never did go to college. Fact is I was what you might call a high-school drop-out.’

‘That’s not what Lucy told me,’ I said as the light surged back.

‘Well, that makes sense, because it’s not what I told her. But I was trying to get into her pants, you see, and the first rule of successful salesmanship is “Don’t knock the merchandise.” If the customer likes what she sees, and I have to tell you she did, then your job as a salesman is to validate her decision. Reassure her that she’s made the right choice. Which I did, with maybe a little hyperbole built in. You ever been to the Hyperbowl, Tone? It’s kind of like the Superbowl, only more so.’

‘Can we get back to the point?’

‘Which is?’

‘The will.’

‘What will?’

‘I’ve been talking to the children about how we should manage the estate.’

‘Luce made a will? Well, I’ll be. Never thought she’d have gotten around to it. She left everything to the kids, I guess.’

‘“Everything” is basically the house. They each get a third, I get the rest.’

‘Oh, really? You did all right, then. That place must be worth close to quarter of a million these days. It was a total fixer-upper when we bought it, but the neighbourhood demographic’s changed some since then.’

Lucy and I had had the house valued a few months earlier. The realtor said we should list it at two-seventy and expect to sell for at least two-fifty.

‘You seem very well informed,’ I replied.

‘Real estate’s another little hobby of mine. Anyway, I notice I don’t get a cent, so what’s all this to do with me?’

‘What it’s got to do with you is that Claire, Frank and I have to decide whether or not to sell up and cash in now – which would of course mean me moving – or wait a while. A factor in that equation is knowing what expectations if any they have from you.’

‘How do you mean, expectations?’

‘What provisions have you made for your children in
your
will?’

Darryl Bob Allen stretched lazily.

‘Well, tell you the truth I haven’t actually got around to making out a will just yet. I’m planning on hanging in here a while yet.’

‘Of course. That’s what we all plan on. But the fact is you could die any time. Even tonight. You never know.’

‘You mean a person?’

‘What person?’

‘A person never knows? Or I, me, myself, specifically don’t know?’

‘I’m just trying to work out what’s the deal for the kids. I’m sure we both want the best for them, Darryl.’

‘Oh, sure.’

He sighed and waved his hand around.

‘Well, this is basically all I’ve got. If they want it, they’re welcome to it. I mean, there’s no one else in the picture. They’ll get it anyway, will or no will.’

‘You have no other dependants?’

He shook his head, a single decisive swipe which reminded me uncannily of Lucy. She must have copied it from him, I realized, or he from her.

‘So that’s it?’ he asked.

‘What’s what?’

‘You came all the way down here for that? Hell, we could have done that when I called you from town.’

He refilled his glass.

‘But that’s not really why you came, is it?’

‘Why else?’

He beamed at me through his lumberjack beard.

‘You came to see me!’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Well, I’m just guessing here, admittedly. But you’ve just lost your wife, right? I lost her too, but that was a while ago. I’ve had time to get used to it. Plus I had her for longer in the first place, and in better shape. But for you the grief is still fresh, like they say, and you’d only known her for a few years. So the bit of her you knew was like the tip of the iceberg, and now the iceberg’s sunk. You know that old joke? “
Titanic
Collides With Iceberg. Iceberg Undamaged.” Where was I?’

‘You were asking why I came down here in person. Well, one reason was just to get away. The past few weeks have been quite intense.’

‘I imagine. Listen, I’m real sorry I couldn’t make the funeral.’

‘There was no funeral. You need a body for that.’

‘Well, the service or whatever. But I sort of felt maybe it wouldn’t be right.’

‘Very tactful of you.’

‘And then of course there was the money angle. I sell a little gas here. Only station for eighty miles in one direction, sixty-two in the other. Problem is, there’s hardly any traffic on this road. Then once in a while I do some construction work down in Vegas. Man, you should see that place! You can stand there and watch it grow. Take a lunch break and there’s a whole new sub-development.’

Once again the lights died quietly, then came back. Allen leant forward and poured some whiskey into the other glass.

‘Come on, Tone,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me drink alone here. Listen, you’re welcome to sleep on the sofa. I really mean that. On one condition, and that’s that you’re not a happy breakfaster. I myself always need a couple of hours to remember who the hell I am, so don’t count on any scintillating table-talk. But I’ll brew a pot of coffee and pack you on your way in broad daylight, instead of you squinting at some unmarked road for hours on end. Anyway, you want to talk. I know you do.’

‘Talk about what?’

‘About Luce, of course. Admit it, you’re curious. That’s okay. You’d have to be crazy not to be curious. Oh, it was fine while she was still alive, although I bet even then you must have had the occasional nagging question about this or that. But it didn’t matter then. She was here, you were a couple, you hit the sack together every night. Who cared what happened before you met? That was all history.’

He reached a box of cigars down from a shelf, stuck one between his lips and lit it with a splinter of wood from the stove.

‘But now
she’s
history,’ he went on, exhaling a cloud of blueish smoke. ‘Your marriage is history, just like mine. The only difference is that if we’re talking history, Luce and I had more and better. And you’re bound to be curious about that. Who wouldn’t be?’

He beamed at me again.

‘So go ahead. Slake that curiosity. Ask away. I promise to answer freely and frankly to the best of my ability.’

I shifted slightly to move the angular bulk of the revolver off my hip, where it was beginning to ache.

‘Still shy?’ said Allen. ‘Or “in denial”, like they say these days. Okay, I understand. Look, how about if I kick this one off? For example, I imagine you’re probably wondering how we met.’

Indeed. I had occasionally tried to get Lucy to talk about her time with Darryl Bob, but she almost always shied away from the topic. ‘I hate the past,’ she’d say.

‘Well, it was at a party. Nothing very original, I’m afraid. I was working as a freelance photographer at the time, but I was also drummer in a rock band in the evenings. We used to get some good people stopping by. I can remember jamming with a bunch of guys who were big names even then, and legends now. Garcia, Crosby, Cipollina . . . I always think John was underestimated as a guitarist.

‘Anyway, what with that and the photography, I got invited to a lot of parties, and one night at some house in the Panhandle, there she was. This was, what? Early seventies? I had a nice little three-way deal going at the time. This one little skinny blonde number, and then a real mamma, gallons of oomph, tits bigger than your head, roll-’em-in-flourand-see-where-the-wet-spot-is type, know what I mean? So anyway, what with Liz and Deb I was getting laid pretty good, but I could tell right away that Luce was something special. Great body, but acted like she didn’t know it. We got dancing. Luce always loved to dance. You ever dance with her? Oh, I already asked that. Anyway, one thing led to another and we ended up back at her place. She had a nice little room in a funky old Victorian on Haight, just around the corner from the Free Clinic. Must be worth over a million now.’

He smiled.

‘What I remember best about it is the way she took her clothes off. A lot of chicks were self-conscious about that part, even back then. They either wanted to be undressed during a scuffle on the sofa, or do a kind of amateur striptease routine, or else go into the bathroom and reappear magically naked. Luce just stood there and took off her clothes, completely casual and matter-of-fact, just like she was alone. Which just made it worse. I just about died there and then. No, actually I just about burst into tears. Dumb, huh? I mean, I’d been around the block a few times. I must have had forty or fifty women by then. Like they say, who’s counting? But when I saw Luce standing there nude, I felt humbled. I really did. Like when you hear some great piece of music or something. I thought, I don’t deserve this.’

He laughed.

‘Then I thought, but hey, since it’s come my way I guess I’ll grab myself a piece of it anyway.’

He looked at me.

‘You know the real problem with fucking? It’s not the Darwinian angle. You know, the peak experience that turns out to be a flashy sales pitch by your genes, like the casinos sending a private plane down to wherever to lure some high roller back to the tables and take him for everything he’s worth. That’s kind of depressing, once you get it, but it’s just a mind thing. You can work around that one. No, what always bugged me about the whole thing is you can’t look at them and fuck them at the same time. And believe me, Luce was worth looking at, back then. But of course next thing you’re squished up together playing hide the salami and frankly it could be anyone down there. I mean you get the occasional glimpse, of course, depending on the position and so forth, but it’s tough to really get the whole action in perspective, know what I mean? That’s one reason I got interested in the picture angle. Still sure you don’t want to take your coat off, Tone? No? Suit yourself, but I have to say you’re sweating like a pig. Kind of a strange expression, when you think about it. I’ve never seen a pig sweat. I’m not even sure they do sweat. Except maybe at the slaughterhouse.’

During the drive, I had turned off the highway on to a dirt track which led up into a range of low, rounded bluffs, ending at a disused mine of some sort. There I took a rest break and got in some target practice, firing at an array of cereal boxes I’d picked up at a convenience store on the outskirts of the city. Lefty had told me that if that hypothetical intruder entered my home, the upper chest area was the place to go for. I measured a twenty-ounce Cheerios box against my own chest. It seemed about right.

After about an hour, and a pack and a half of cartridges, I’d managed to demolish all but one of the boxes, each producing a satisfying shower of honey-coated wheat cereal all over the surrounding rock. By then the revolver, which had initially shocked me with its alien power, had settled down to become an extension of my arm, a hardened and potentially lethal prosthesis. I had no intention of killing Darryl Bob Allen, but I knew that this artificial limb wouldn’t have the slightest compunction about doing so.