WHITEY HAD THIS guy named Daryl, his buddy from high school, whose job was to follow Whitey everywhere and fetch him things and get people on the phone and refill his soda. Daryl had a comb-over and a big belly that hung over his khaki pants. Judging from Daryl, Whitey must have been about fifty years old, which surprised me. Whitey had a wrinkly monkey face, but his hair wasn’t gray and the way he moved made me think of an elf. Not a handsome bow-and-arrow-type elf like in movies but an Old World elf, the kind who steal babies and switch them with dirty elf babies, or maybe Whitey was the dirty elf baby all grown up. Anyway, people called Daryl Whitey’s “body man,” and pretty soon they were calling me Marie’s body man, Whitey especially, like it was some kind of joke. I didn’t like it. It made me think of myself as a sort of extra body Marie used to do her bidding, like a zombie almost. It was kind of true, though: I drove her around, I answered her phone sometimes, and I went with her to meetings, where I sat down next to her and took notes nobody read. Marie wanted to get me a suit, but Whitey said no. He said my western jacket rubbed a little “hotshot Texas mojo” on the whole operation. He started calling me Tex.
I didn’t see too much of Whitey except when Marie went with him to speaking engagements, but Whitey had a way of making you feel connected to him, like he was your buddy from way back. One time we were at a community meeting where an old codger was holding court about how deer season should be longer, and I glanced over at Whitey and he glanced back and rolled his eyes, then he slacked his jaw like he was dimwitted, then he turned back to the old guy and kept watching but nodding his head so earnestly that he looked kind of crazy. When the old guy finished, Whitey raised his hand and waved it around until the guy called on him and Whitey said, “Sir, what you’re saying is of great interest to me, and to everyone else here, I imagine, but tell me this: what’s your favorite thing about killing an animal?” The old guy hesitated, like he thought maybe Whitey was a secret tree-hugger. But then Whitey smiled and said, “My favorite thing is the smell of blood. Nothing gets me out of bed like the red promise of a bloody hunt.” Then Whitey laughed good-naturedly and everybody else laughed nervously, and the old guy said yes, that the smell of blood was pretty nice in the morning.
Since I spent all my time going around with Marie, I started to worry about the campaign office. Who was taking care of it? Who was greeting people? Who was offering info on Whitey Connors’s questionable platform? Then in January a half a dozen real interns started. They were college students who were supposed to work at Bi-Cities HQ for college credit, but Marie said each could spend one-sixth of his or her time staffing the campaign office. I showed them the ropes. Most were from the suburbs outside the city and went to good colleges, but one was none other than Kyle James.
I almost didn’t recognize him, with short hair and khakis and a coat-and-tie combo like a high school debater. He was handsome as ever but had gotten a little thick around the collar. He said he had rushed a fraternity and drank beer all the time, and he was trying to get into a workout routine but couldn’t fit it between his studies and fraternity engagements. He was in his second semester at Tech.
“How about you?” he asked. “I didn’t peg you for a college man—no offense.”
“I’m not,” I said, then explained how I had dropped out of high-school to work full-time for Whitey and Marie. I was expecting Kyle to be shocked. I was kind of hoping for it, honestly, so I could play it hard like he was just a college boy and I was a man of the world, but Kyle nodded. He looked thoughtful.
“Yeah,” he said, “if it wasn’t for how we got in trouble about that stupid book, I might have dropped out too. But my parents sent me to military school. It was good for me. Taught me a little responsibility, you know?”
“Sure,” I said, even though the only thing I knew about military school was from a movie where a truck driver kidnaps his own kid from one to teach him arm wrestling.
Kyle and I had that conversation alone in the campaign office, while I was showing him the campaign materials and telling him what to say on the phone. I was glad to see him. I thought we might be friends again. But when I saw Kyle back at Bi-Cities, he seemed afraid to let on he knew me. The other interns seemed to regard me with amusement. I heard one of them call me “little Whitey” to another, which just about made me spit. The only thing me and Whitey had in common was our size and accent, though I like to think I spoke better than he did. When I passed Kyle in the halls or had to speak to the interns as a group, I played it cool. I treated him brusquely. But the next time I saw him alone, at a makeshift desk in a Bi-Cities conference room where he was cold-calling potential donors, I came over to chat.
“Did you hear about Ronnie?” I asked.
“No,” Kyle said.
“He’s in jail.”
“Big surprise.”
That pissed me off. Ronnie and Kyle used to be friends. I said, “I guess your college buddies stay out of jail, huh?”
“Most people stay out of jail, Ben. The rest of the world isn’t like Komer.”
“The rest of the world? You mean that city two hours away?”
“I know it isn’t much, but it’s better than this.”
“Then why are you here?”
“If Whitey wins, I can work for him in the capital next summer. If not, I’ll work for Hoffer in DC.”
“Who’s Hoffer?”
“Our congressman.”
“So you wanna be a politician?”
Kyle said he wasn’t sure about the whole politics game, but it probably looked good on his résumé. “The safest bet would be to get good grades and go to law school,” he said. “The money isn’t as good as banking or if you own your own business, like Whitey, but it’s lower risk. I’d have to start off at a firm in the city, but I could end up inhouse. It’s better hours. Hell, I could end up working for Whitey. I wouldn’t mind that one bit. A guy from Haislip could do a lot worse than Bi-Cities Sanitation.”
I didn’t know what to say. Kyle had thought it all out. But I didn’t like the way he talked about Whitey, like he knew him and could use him, like the world was a videogame and Kyle was playing it.
“What’s the rap on Ronnie?” Kyle asked.
“No idea,” I said.
“Well, it was only a matter of time.”
“It could have been you. You said so yourself.”
“I could have dropped out, not gone to fucking jail. Ronnie’s a born loser. God knows why we hung out with that guy.”
“Yeah, well, he never liked you either.”
“Good.”
I knew I should let it drop, but I couldn’t. I thought about the night I saw Ronnie behind my old apartment, how he had asked after Ruthanne, shown me his flaming skull Jesus tattoo. “Ronnie isn’t a loser,” I said. “He has vision. A secret inner life.”
“Deranged vision is what he has.”
“You didn’t think so back then.”
“You were his friend. So was I.”
“If you like him so much, you should visit him.”
“I do,” I lied. The truth was I didn’t know I could visit Ronnie. I didn’t know how jail worked. “Maybe I’ll drop by tomorrow.”
“Go for it.”
“Maybe I will, and maybe this time I’ll pull a few strings.”
“With the warden?” Kyle smirked. “Or maybe you know the governor?”
“I know Whitey.”
I was bullshitting, of course, but it had the desired effect. Kyle seemed cowed: I was the one who knew Whitey, not him. When Kyle was in-house lawyer or whatever, he’d be answering to me too. Hell, I might have taken over Bi-Cities by then. That’s what was going through my head at that moment. Later, I would remind myself not to indulge in fantasies like that. Bi-Cities was temporary. I was on a mission. A more important mission than the likes of Kyle would ever know.
Visiting Ronnie turned out to be pretty easy. The county sheriff’s office website listed which unit people were in and what they were in for. The different units had different visiting hours. MLEZCKO, RONALD NMI was in Unit Five for POSS OF MARIJ-1OZ, POSS COCAINE W/INTEN, PROBATION VIOL, UNDERAGE POSS/FURN ALCH, and POSS/MAKING FALSE ID. His name was listed once for each crime so it was like there were five Ronnie’s in there, which seemed pretty dire until I saw that one guy, PATTERSON, DUANE TYRELL, had his name posted twenty-six times. I clicked on Ronnie’s name, thinking it would give me more information on his case, but it took me to his mugshot. He looked terrible. There were wrinkles around his nineteen-year-old eyes, and the whites were bloodshot. His mouth was partway open so the yellow tips of his buckteeth stuck out. He hadn’t shaved and his black hair was greasy. His skin was so white it was green. After I got over the shock of Ronnie’s appearance, I started to get mad. What was the point of humiliating him by posting that photo? Even worse, his address was on there: “Park Place Homes #13-B.” Why did anybody need his address? It wasn’t like Ronnie was a sex offender or a spree killer. He wasn’t even a burglar! I could just picture a bored old lady pouring over this list for somebody who lived near her, just to warn her old lady friends about that no-good Ronnie Mlezcko down the block. It made me sick.
Anyway, all I had to do was call the jail and say I wanted to visit Ronnie Mlezcko. The jailor looked at some kind of schedule on his computer (I could hear him typing) and said, “Wednesday at three p.m.” He didn’t even ask Ronnie.
After lunch on Wednesday I told Marie I had some personal business and she said no problem. We had that kind of a relationship.
On my way across town to the jail, I got nervous. It was the same old building I had passed a thousand times, the same little courtyard with inmates playing lazy games of basketball, the same tall wire fence, the same sad looking gray bus parked outside. Whenever one of the school buses broke down, the old gray jail bus used to be brought in to replace it. The inside of the jail bus was exactly the same as a school bus except for a cage around the driver and these metal rings on the backs of the seats where they could shackle you, if need be. Usually I sat alone, but if I was sitting with anybody else I liked to tie my wrists to the ring by my shoelaces, as a joke. I used to be excited to ride that bus, to pretend to be a jailbird, but now that I was going to the jail to see somebody I knew, it felt different. What if other jailbirds stared me down? What if Ronnie had got all hard and wouldn’t talk to me? What if he had a face tattoo? I almost turned back, but then I thought about how they probably had told Ronnie by then so he might have been expecting me. I didn’t want to disappoint him.
I parked in visitor parking and walked inside, where a corrections officer looked at my driver’s license (Marie made me get one) and had me sign something on a clipboard, probably agreeing not to pass Ronnie a saw, or that if Ronnie shanked me in the neck I wouldn’t press charges. I don’t know. I didn’t read it.
I expected a long glass divider with old phones you had to talk through and people pressing their hands to the glass in solidarity or passionate love, but the visiting room looked more like the inside of a barbecue restaurant. Instead of tables and chairs there were picnic benches.
The room was empty except for a somber mustachioed man in coveralls talking softly to his wife or girlfriend, or maybe it was his sister; they weren’t too affectionate. In addition to the corrections officer who had escorted me into the room, there was another standing in the far corner with his thumbs hooked over his belt. He had a big black gun and was wearing sunglasses.
I sat down as far away from the talking couple as possible, to give them privacy. I expected to wait a while, but Ronnie came right out. He didn’t look nearly as rough as I expected from his mugshot; he looked like the same old Ronnie, except he was growing a beard and his coveralls fit. The little coveralls, unlike his droopy jeans and hooded sweatshirts, made him look wiry and spry. His face was real cold while he came towards me, so I thought he might be pissed I was visiting, but when he sat down he held up his fist and I bumped it. He said “What up, kid?” and I said what up. Then he glanced from side to side and leaned forward. “We gotta talk quiet,” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Thanks for visiting. It’s good to see a friendly face.”
“Doesn’t your mom visit?”
“Not much. She’s got lots of people to visit.”
“Sure.” I felt awkward. I wasn’t sure what was appropriate to talk about with somebody in jail. I really wanted to ask how he got arrested, if the cops had busted through the door and stuff, but maybe that was rude? “So,” I said, “how you holding up?”
“The black guys beat the shit out of me and the white guys ignore me. If it weren’t for my uncles they’d beat the shit out of me too. One guy, my uncle’s buddy, is some kind of Nazi, swastikas and everything. I gotta choose sides, man.”
“In what?”
“The race war.” Ronnie explained how his theory of the coming race war apocalypse had been confirmed by his jailhouse experience. “I try to tell people, but it isn’t a popular subject. There’s this one guy, Beauregard, who knows what’s up. He writes letters to news outlets and lets me read ’em as long as I promise not to tell anybody inside. His idea is that the black people are gonna overthrow the white government and CEOs and put them on a secret shuttle to the moon. He’s says there’s another NASA—Black NASA, he calls it—that’s got a shuttle and stuff in a cave in Tennessee, where there’s thousands of unexplored caves so nobody could find the shuttle even if they knew it was there. I know what you’re thinking: ‘How they gonna fit all the CEO types, let alone the government, onto one shuttle?’ Beauregard says shuttle technology has made major strides, but we don’t know about it because the government, via NASA, white NASA, has been holding out on us. It’s like with cars. We could all be getting fifty mpg right now, but they won’t let us. They got an agreement. Why do you think Hyundai gets forty while the Jap cars get thirty? It’s because the Japs and the Americans are colluding but the Koreans, they hate the Japs. They’re like, ‘No deal, motherfuckers,’ and that’s why they build the cars down in Alabama. The workers there are disenfranchised. They don’t give a fuck. The Koreans will be on the black side in the coming race war apocalypse, along with the Polacks and Jews, and also the Lithuanians and former Yugoslavians—the basketball countries. You ever wonder why poor people play basketball? Because it’s cheap. The communists back in Poland or wherever, they just nailed a few hoops to brick walls and said ‘Here you go, kids. Don’t assassinate anybody.’ It’s an opiate, like religion. Beauregard never plays and neither do I. Some say music’s an opiate too, but I don’t know. Pop music? Sure. Soul music? Country? Anything you can fall asleep or fuck to is an opiate, for sure, I hear you, but what about the hard stuff? Gangsta rap, thrash metal—that stuff isn’t opiating anybody. It’s waking people up. I got these Corpse Christ bootlegs, I listen the hell out of ’em. The songs are the same as the album versions but each one’s kinda different, like a separate work of art. Beauregard says art’s another opiate. He thinks we’re all doomed, but I don’t know. I guess I don’t see why we can’t break free when the shit hits the fan and make our way to the shuttle. He says he can get me in with Black NASA, even though I’m white, but when we get to the moon all bets are off. Every man for himself. We gotta start thinking about the terraforming of other planets. The population is growing, that much is obvious, so what happens when we run out of oil? Water? Rare earth metals? Anyway, what you been up to?”
“Pardon?”
“You working or something?” He was eyeing my jacket.
“Oh yeah. Um—” Before I came, I had been debating whether or not to tell Ronnie I worked for Whitey, but now I was so dazed by his monologue that I didn’t care anymore. “I work for Christian Connors for State Treasurer.”
“Who’s Christian Connors?”
“Whitey Connors.”
“Holy shit. How deep are you?”
“You mean at Bi-Cities?”
“Yeah. I assume you’re infiltrating?”
“Definitely,” I said, though I hadn’t taken stock of my progress in a while, infiltration-wise. I tried to tell Ronnie about my day-today, Marie, etc., but he didn’t seem interested. He kept asking about Whitey: how many cars he had, how the dump made its money, if they brought in truckloads of guys from Mexico then hid the bodies when they died on the job. He kept going and going until finally he said, “You have to kill him.”
“What? Come on.”
“You used to talk about how you tried to blow shit up, how you’re a terrorist at heart, but nothing changes until Whitey Connors is out. What happens if he becomes treasurer?”
“Nothing. He’s just treasurer. Better to have him up there in the capital than down here bulldozing houses.”
“The houses get bulldozed either way, motherfucker. He’ll probably make a law so he can bulldoze the whole city. Can you imagine? Komer and Haislip, just one big dump. It might take a while to notice the difference.”
Ronnie may have been exaggerating for effect, but the spirit of what he was saying rang true to me. It cohered with my own dim vision of the future. I started feeling kind of emotional, and Ronnie seemed to notice. He said, “Shit, man, you okay?”
“They bulldozed my house,” I said.
“Fuck. Really?”
I nodded. I hadn’t talked to anybody about it, not even Ruthanne, so it felt weird to be telling Ronnie. But I knew I could count on Ronnie to react with appropriate outrage, and he did, muttering about “fucking Whitey” and “fucking Bi-Cities” until the corrections officer in the sunglasses looked up at us. Ronnie didn’t seem to care. “When Komer and Haislip are one big dump,” he said, “they could use prisoners like me as workers, like a penal colony, and if anybody acts up it’ll be trial by combat, gladiator style, prisoner against prisoner. That’s good money right there.” Ronnie laughed so I laughed too, even though it wasn’t funny to me; it was disturbing.
“Let’s be honest,” Ronnie said, “Komer, Haislip, they’re small potatoes. Nobody cares. But what if Whitey Connors is on his way to bigger things, know what I’m saying? It’s like that movie where the guy can see the future and knows that this candidate guy is going to turn into a crazy fascist Hitler guy, so the one guy, the psychic, who’s otherwise a pretty peaceful dude, takes it upon himself to stop the proto-Hitler guy by sniping him.”
“Sure,” I said, even though I never saw that movie. I just wanted to get out of there at that point. Ronnie looked good, and I was glad to see him, but listening to him put me on edge. It stirred up something inside me, something uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said, “I should go, but I’ll visit again soon.”
“You do that. I enjoyed this talk.” Ronnie leaned back and his face got hard. I wondered if he could tell I wasn’t really listening anymore. I felt bad.
We stood up and bumped fists again, and I left.
Most of what Ronnie said was kind of crazy, sure, but the thing about Whitey stuck with me. Whitey wasn’t a maniacal fascist Hitler guy, but he was definitely on the rise. I didn’t have to kill him, necessarily, but I had to do something. I had gotten too comfortable, with the meetings and joking around and now the training of interns. I had to remind myself that I was there to do my job, not their job.
I thought about that on the way back to Bi-Cities, and I got pretty fired up about injustice and whatnot. But it was hard to stay fired up when I got there and saw Marie. She was so pragmatic. Right away she was telling me how the Haislip Kiwanis wanted money for a bingo ball machine, and could I find one on eBay? I told her sure I could, and there I was, just minutes after firing myself up, sitting in front of a computer weighing the pros and cons of manual versus hydraulic bingo cages.
The problem was I liked Marie. I liked running errands for her, arranging travel. I liked calling people on the phone and saying, “Hi there, I’m calling on behalf of Marie Angiulo, and she’d like to talk to so and so,” then handing off the phone when the person she wanted was on the line. Sometimes it was Marie’s sister in Rhode Island and the sister would joke that Marie was such a bigshot she couldn’t even punch a few numbers anymore. Marie and her sister talked all the time. When I asked Marie about it, she said family was a choice.
I told Marie how Mom and Ruthanne were always bugging me to visit them but never visited me themselves. I told her they were lazy. Marie nodded. I expected her to say how lazy people were the worst, but what she said was that part of being an adult was taking responsibility for your relationships. She said, “It’s decision time, Ben. If you want to keep having a relationship with your mother and sister, you gotta make an effort. Families drift apart all the time.” I thought about that, how Grandpa was alone and Dad was with Geraldine, and Mom and Ruthanne were far away. I guess our family had already drifted apart, except for me. I was in the middle. I tried to think of myself as connected to all of them, like the hub of a wheel, but I hadn’t talked to Mom in almost a month, Dad in three or four months. Even Grandpa I hadn’t seen in two weeks, and I lived with him, or was supposed to. If I was the hub, then the wheel was broke; the hub had popped out miles back and been left in a ditch.
As if it weren’t hard enough to stay fired up working with Marie, one day in February she told me she and Whitey had decided in the budget meeting to start paying me ten dollars an hour.
I was shocked. Minimum wage was one thing, but ten dollars an hour? That was good money. I thanked Marie again and again, but Marie said to thank Whitey.
“Free work is easy to come by in this game,” she said, “but Whitey went to bat for you. Your new title is Assistant to the Campaign Manager.”
I was dazzled. “Assistant to the Campaign Manager,” I repeated. “What do I do? Do I do something different?”
“Keep doing what you’re doing.”
I felt emotional. It was like I had been working all my life for the promotion when really it was just a few months. I felt so thankful it was corny. I tried to remind myself that the one who was paying me was Whitey Connors, my secret nemesis, but it didn’t make a difference. Whitey was the one who went to bat for me, like Marie said. I just didn’t hate Whitey Connors. I wanted to, but I didn’t.
“The question,” Marie said, “is what you’re going to do with that money. I’d warn you not to blow it on liquor but you’re, what, sixteen?”
“You still sleeping in the back of the office?”
“No,” I lied.
“Well, if you were, I’d say stop. It’s like getting paid twice. Find a roommate and get an apartment, like a couple city girls. It’ll be like a TV show except horrible. Sex in the Shithole. You could probably afford a mansion in this dirt-bag town.”
“How do you find a roommate?”
She laughed. “I don’t know anymore. Tell you what, I’ll give you the number of the lady who found my place for me.”
The lady who found Marie’s place for her, meaning the furnished apartment she had rented sight-unseen when she moved down to run Connors for State Treasurer, was a realtor named Debbie McIntosh. I arranged to meet Debbie at an apartment in downtown Komer, and she showed up wearing high heels and a skirt-suit. She drove a hybrid car and had a businesslike air. The only thing about her that said Komer, not the city, was a colorful mask of makeup.
The apartment was in a new building where a parking lot used to be. It was four stories and each story had some terraces so overall it looked like a stucco ziggurat. Inside, the apartment had lots of windows and a shiny floor that looked like wood, but Debbie said was bamboo. The shower had two nozzles. The whole place was kind of creepy but I kept poking around to be polite and Debbie kept smiling and showing me the granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, linen closet, etc. Finally, when there wasn’t anything left to show me, she said the apartment cost twelve hundred a month.
I couldn’t believe it. “Twelve hundred dollars?”
“Quite a deal, I know.”
“The last place we lived was three-fifty and it had two whole bedrooms.”
Debbie looked at me quizzically. “You’re from Komer?”
“Of course I am. Who lives in Komer who isn’t from Komer?”
“Marie Angiulo, for one.”
Debbie sighed. “Young professionals, is the idea, but they haven’t gotten here yet. This building was supposed to be, like, an if-you-build-it-they-will-come thing.”
“I’m sure it’ll get filled eventually.” I had my doubts, but I wanted to be nice. Debbie seemed to be taking this personally.
“What kind of place did you have in mind?” she asked.
I told her about the apartment where I used to live and said I wouldn’t mind living there again, but she told me it was dangerous, which was true, and for about the same price she could get me a place much nicer and more centrally located.
“Central to what?” I asked.
Debbie sighed again.
I followed Debbie all the way to Haislip. I was excited. I thought she might show me an apartment in one of the old haunted houses along Grande Esplanade. But what she showed me was an apartment downtown, which wasn’t much of a downtown, just a strip of shops in two-story brick buildings painted various colors. Most were closed. The apartment Debbie showed me was over a boarded up hardware store. She called it a loft apartment, but what made it a loft I had no idea. It was one long room with a toilet and a sink. The wood floor was pretty scuffed and had an unusual number of electric sockets along the baseboards. “It used to be a dressmaker’s,” Debbie explained. “The rent is five hundred a month.”
I had done the math and knew I would make over four hundred a week, so I could afford the place, but five hundred for a creepy old dressmaker’s shop where the toilet faced the kitchen sink didn’t seem justified. I liked the idea of living in Haislip, though, and I didn’t want to come off as a hayseed, so I said, “This place is nice, but can I think about it?”
“Sure,” Debbie said. “Take all the time you need.” Then she just stood there so I guess I was supposed to start thinking about it. I walked to the big front windows and looked down on Main Street, which was empty, but there were some kids throwing a football in the square. Beyond them were the mansions of Grande Esplanade. One had a long front porch with a lady in a rocking chair. Next to that one was the one with the round part like the tower of a castle. The windows on that one were broken, so I wondered if anybody lived there. I was looking for signs of life when a long-haired white man with a backpack let himself through a wire gate into the side yard. I watched for lights to come on, but none did. I wondered if he was living there in secret, what Grandpa would have called squatting. Grandpa would have called this man a hobo, but I didn’t think of people that way anymore.
I told Debbie I just couldn’t decide. I asked if I could talk to my Grandpa first, and she said yes, of course. “When you’re ready to sign the lease,” she said, “you’ll need the first month’s rent plus a five-hundred-dollar security deposit.”
“A thousand dollars?”
“Cash or certified check.”
I drove to Grandpa’s, meaning to sound him out, but I ended up helping him pull the buckwheat he had planted to overwinter in the raised beds. “Buckwheat fixes nitrogen,” he explained, “and it tastes good too.” For dinner we had buckwheat pancakes. The batter was made from buckwheat flour he got at the store, though, not his garden. Maybe he was trying to convince himself of the usefulness of buckwheat. After dinner we watched Traces of Red, in which a Palm Beach detective runs afoul of a sensual heiress.
After the movie I went up to Dinwiddie’s room and slid out my shoeboxes from under the bed. There was $2,013 inside, twice as much as I needed to cover the security deposit and first month’s rent. A thousand was a lot of money, of course, but I had two thousand sitting right there, and what else was I going to use it for? I wasn’t buying flamethrowers. I wasn’t enriching uranium. I wasn’t saving up for college, that was for sure. The money wasn’t doing me any good sitting in a shoebox wrapped in duct tape. But to spend it felt like a violation. A violation of my ideals. Except what were my ideals anymore? What had they ever been? Destruction? Infiltration? And wasn’t it also a violation not to spend the money? It was a waste, was what it was. The question I had to answer was if spending the money on a dumb apartment was the best way to spend it, or if there was another way that would do more good. I wracked my brain. A new bike? But I needed a car to get back and forth from Grandpa’s. A new truck for Grandpa? But he never even used the old truck, preferring the smooth ride of his Crown Vic. New screens for the porch? A window unit for Dinwiddie’s room? None of it seemed worthwhile. Grandpa and I were doing fine. But there were people in the world besides me and Grandpa. If Boss had been in that room with me I would have given him a hundred in cash right then and there, to ease his way. I would have given money to Leo and Candy, too. Maybe I could go around handing money to people, like some kind of Christmas movie. But I didn’t like the idea of giving money to strangers. I wouldn’t know what they might use it for. Even Leo, what if he just bought a sharper knife? What if Candy bought a moped? What if Boss, who wasn’t too bright, let’s be honest, bought a massage chair or box seats to the rodeo? No, I had to give the money to someone I knew well.
So the next morning I took the heaviest shoebox and wrapped it in one more layer of duct tape then dunked it in the toilet to make sure it was watertight (it was) and drove it to the post office in downtown Komer. I told the post office lady I wanted to send it the safest way possible, so for $23.30 I sent it priority mail with two-thousand-dollars insurance. She thought I was crazy to get so much insurance on a shoebox, but I insisted.
Ruthanne called two days later to ask if I was dealing drugs.
“Nope,” I said.
“Then where did all this cash come from?”
I explained to Ruthanne that I had saved every dollar I ever made except for what I spent on the candy we shared.
“I don’t want it.”
“I don’t either. I don’t need it. Use it for rent so you can quit the Burger Brothers and concentrate on school.”
“What about you? What about college?”
“Well,” I said, then explained my entire situation: how I started showing up late to school when I was scavenging at the dump, then missed a few days living with Pete, then stopped going altogether when I got my job at Connors for State Treasurer. The words came in a flood. It felt good to tell the truth, and what could Ruthanne do? She was a hundred miles away.
She didn’t comment for a while. I expected her to rake me over the coals like she always did, then to tattle on me to Mom at the earliest opportunity, but instead she said, “Ben, you always did go your own way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like. You go your own way.”
“Is that something Mom says or what?”
“It’s something I say. I know you, Ben.”
“So you’re telling me to keep skipping school? What about college?”
“Seems like you’re doing okay without college. Whitey Connors has been good to you. I don’t hate him as much as I used to, now that I don’t live there anymore. I mean, he’s employing people like you, Komer people, which is good.”
Ruthanne was so levelheaded!
“Look, Ben,” she said, “it’s you and me now, is the way I see it, and that’s how it’s always gonna be. It doesn’t matter if you live down there and I live here or vice versa. There’s this thing that happens, that’s been happening to me, as I get older. It’s like, when I’m apart from people—you—you continue to exist for me. Before, it was out of sight, out of mind. Now I think about you, I wonder what you’re doing. I’ll be on the bus to class and wonder if you’re drinking a glass of water or combing your hair or what. It’s kind of dumb, I guess.”
“It’s important not to forget people.”
“That’s right. You wanna talk to Mom?”
“No, I guess not. Don’t tell her about the money, okay?”
“She’s gonna ask when I pay the rent.”
“Huh. Well, come up with something so she doesn’t think I dropped out.”
“I will,” she said, and I knew she would. She was a genius at deceiving Mom.
The conversation was kind of sad in a way, but it gave me a good feeling, deep down. Ruthanne said it was her and me, and she was right. She would be my sister my whole life, or at least until she died. Ruthanne would probably die first, I figured, on account of her inactive lifestyle and possible side-effects from her weird spine.
“Ben,” she said, “what the hell were you going to do with all that money?”
“I was gonna buy a Red Dragon 400,000 BTU Backpack Torch Kit with Squeeze Valve,” I said, and that was that. I wasn’t going to incinerate the dump. I wasn’t going to throw my life away to murder Whitey Connors and end up in jail like Ronnie, gibbering about the race war apocalypse. I didn’t even dislike Whitey Connors. It was a relief, honestly, except for the vague feeling that with the money went my chance at adventure. But maybe the life of an adventurer just wasn’t for me. Or maybe it was but it would have to be somebody else’s adventure, like Whitey’s or Marie’s, and I would get in on the action as a sort of Sherpa, possibly the superior climber but by virtue of temperament and circumstance more of a facilitator, a technician. That, or I could go my own way. Only time would tell.