After lunch one day in elementary school he glimpsed a fold of green-beige money move from a classmate’s hand into a jacket pocket on a hook, and a moment later paused and slapped his thighs as if forgetting something and turned back to where he could slip his fingers in upon the fold of bills and fold them into his hand. He had seen no one but then heard something, though only as he turned on his way to the classroom did there come from behind the squawky voice of Vera Burton: “I said I saw you, Virgil! I saw what you did!”
He ignored her, moved on, avoided eye contact, though later, under threat, saw that he would have done better to return the money in her presence, to have made a face at her or even offered to share it with her. (She had premature breasts; who knew how things might have gone?) He angled to his seat, heard her squawk again, and hissed over his shoulder: “Shut up!”
He denied all. The teacher made him empty the money and everything else from his pockets, and heard from Leon Plourde, recovering his jacket, that his money was missing, and, from Vera Burton, her eyewitness account, still he denied all. The money was his, they could ask his mother, and not only that, he said, but during recess he had heard them planning to trick him, and no, it wasn’t a lie! They were the ones lying! You could ask his mother, you could!
In the vice principal’s office, he held to his story all over again. They were instructed, one at a time, to tell their stories, and he held to his, said they were the ones lying, and how could he not interrupt when they were telling lies? They could ask his mother, because it was money he was saving for a present for his dad and carried with him always, was money he was saving and shouldn’t have let them see in the first place, he knew he was guilty of that, of showing off, but he could prove it was his because you could see pencil marks he had put on the border of each bill—only they were hard to see now because he had done it two weeks ago when he first started saving the money—but how could he have done that if what they said was true?!
That he had a way with words may have been lost on him at the time, but awareness leaped ahead when the vice principal said at last that if Virgil wasn’t willing to confess, there was nothing to be done about it, and the first rule, in any case, as every pupil knew, was not, under any circumstances, to leave valuables in the hallway where they could come up missing! Or to show off with money, he added on a glance at Virgil. It should be a lesson to them all, he said, and they were to return to their room because the incident was over, and he did not wish to hear another word about it, then or ever again!
Only years later did Virgil see that his best opportunity in crisis management may have eluded him in failing to compromise Vera at the outset when she caught him red-handed, and that an added missed opportunity, when they came from the vice principal’s office and in response to Leon crying and slugging him in the back, was not to call the small boy chicken (which he knew himself to be) but to have said okay, take the money, it’s yours, what do I care? Nor to say he didn’t fear Leon’s brother at all, not for a second, though everyone knew—something he had also failed to factor into his reply—that Ronnie Plourde, an eighth-grader with facial hair, was a hockey player known for penalties, a muscle-bound boy who put the fear of God into eighth-graders, ninth-graders, teachers and coaches, too.
Still another opportunity eluded him when Ronnie Plourde called him at home and told him to bring his brother’s seven and three more to school the next day or he was going to smash his face like a pumpkin. Given the chance to buy his way out of a corner—not an unreasonable amount for someone caught red-handed—he chose yet again to deny, swore he did not take the money! Leon was a liar! Went on trying to persuade himself that the hours of possession had made the money his, and only an idiot would surrender such an enormous amount.
Off the phone, however, and as terror began taking him over, he started to pay a different price, and while he did not forgo his resolve (the money was his!) he progressed enough in cunning that he at least considered cutting his losses with a return call and counteroffer of eight dollars or nine dollars, even the ten dolloars Ronnie Plourde had demanded, anything to be free of the terror he was suffering. Only later did he see that the countermove would have saved him the plum-sized eyes, the bruises and taunts, the added terror with which he lived, plus a net payment of thirteen dollars, before the ordeal turned toward concluding (he lived with it yet today). Rather, he spent a night so frightened he hardly slept, and a day at school so terrified he trembled at every turn, only to wet his pants on the spot when he thought the day was over, when, returned to his own neighborhood, believing he was home free, pivoting to look behind him, he turned forward again to see Ronnie Plourde step from behind a tree before him, felt shocked urine soil his pants and pride, was pounded onto the sidewalk, pounded in the face, cried to no avail, and had his manhood disrupted for the rest of his life.
Such was Virgil’s confused state as he crouched beside a sliding cabinet door in the dead end corner of the store, several aisles from Beatrice’s office, that he was hoping Ronnie Plourde and Warren Hudon would both die once and for all and leave him alone. His arm was bleeding, but the wound—ripped near his armpit as if by a nail—was not life-threatening, and what kept racing through his mind was how feeble he had sounded when the chips had been down (“Can’t we be reasonable here!”), that he had left Beatrice to her fate with her insane husband, that after thirty years of offering to care for her, to support her in all ways and run interference for her, he had been the one to run (what else was he to do?!) and might be seen to have acted unmanly.
It happened so fast—he imagined explaining. There was no opening; he had to run for help, was a miracle the shot he received wasn’t worse … just inches … and it was then that he heard Warren’s cough and his voice calling his name, then that he collapsed within in recognition of his own mortality.
Still, generating some grit, he duck-walked past an aisle, crouched ever more compactly, face and wet cheek nearly to the floor, gasping, to see if he might yet escape through the main door, or (as he imagined telling reporters) to see if it were possible to disarm Warren by jumping him from behind. He pressed to a cabinet, bleeding down his right side, damp with blood in his armpit, praying his chance was real, when footsteps, shoes, khaki pant legs, and the disgusting cough entered the aisle, approaching, brown shoes belonging, he knew, to Warren Hudon, he with whose wife he had carried on a lifelong affair, whose person he had vilified a thousand times or more, he whose hand carried that unanswerable weapon.
The shoes Virgil dared not look at scratched toward him. Hardly able to breathe, he tried to raise a hand and beg Warren, jesusgod, tried to turn his face up and get words out, while voice and throat refused to work, and as the shoes stopped before him, he all at once found strength enough to scramble to one side, to his feet, to push off, and dragged himself one step, two steps before heat and metal stabbed his back and ribs, sent him lurching though continuing to think the front door was freedom, life, salvation, if only he could make it there and push through to the other side.
He knew Warren was coming behind him, but struggled on. And it was as he reached a hand to the door that everlasting life exploded within him, that he and plate glass shattered together and he went sprawling onto the sidewalk, contriving yet to beg for mercy, thinking to offer, confess, own up in exchange for his life to every dirty little secret he had ever known. But the former chairman of a hundred committees and subcommittees, the former broker of countless deals, could manage to gurgle but a syllable before his hair was jerked back in a handful and his skull detonated, before he glimpsed, in a last shattered thought, the consequences of failing, in a crisis, to get an offer on the table.