A Simple Plan (7 page)

I glanced up at her, surprised at the forcefulness of her tone.

“Greed is what’ll get us caught,” she said.

I considered that for a moment; then I acquiesced. “All right,” I said, “it’s five hundred thousand.”

I counted out fifty packets right then and there, as if afraid she might change her mind. I stacked them up at her feet, like an offering at an altar, and put the rest into the duffel bag. Sarah sat in her chair, watching me work. When the bag was full, I pulled its drawstring tight, closing it, and smiled up at her.

“Are you happy?” I asked.

She made a noncommittal gesture with her hand, as if she were flicking away a fly. “We can’t get caught,” she said. “That’s the important thing.”

I shook my head, leaning forward across the bag to take her hand. “No,” I said. “We won’t.”

She frowned down at me. “You promise you’ll burn it if things get out of hand?”

“That’s right,” I said. I pointed toward the fireplace. “I’ll burn it right here.”

I
HID
the bag of money beneath our bed, pushed all the way back against the wall, with two empty suitcases jammed in after it, masking it from view.

We stayed up late, watching a New Year’s show on TV. When the orchestra played “Auld Lang Syne,” Sarah sang along, her voice high and tremulous, but hauntingly pretty. We drank sparkling cider, nonalcoholic, because of the baby, and clinked glasses at the stroke of midnight, wishing each other the best for the coming year.

Before we went to sleep, we made love—gently, slowly—Sarah crouched over me, the weight of her belly resting flat upon my stomach, her breasts hanging full and heavy in the darkness above my face. I cupped them carefully in my hands, squeezing her nipples between my fingertips until she moaned softly, a low, animallike sound coming up from deep inside her chest. Hearing her, I thought of the baby, pictured it rocking within her, enclosed in a watery bubble, waiting to be born, and the image gave me a strange, erotic thrill, sent a shiver running across the surface of my skin.

Afterward Sarah rested beside me on her back, holding my hand to the tautness of her belly. We were underneath the blankets; I was pressed up tight against her. The room was cold. Ice was forming along the edges of the windowpanes.

I listened to the sound of her breathing, trying to guess whether she was asleep yet. It was slow and steady, which made it seem like she might be, but there was a tenseness about her body, as if she were listening very hard for something to happen. I caressed her stomach, a light, feathery touch. She didn’t react.

I was starting slowly to slip into sleep myself, thinking of the bag of money sitting right beneath us on the floor, and of the dead pilot out in his plane in the darkness, with the ice and the orchard full of crows, when Sarah turned her head and whispered something at me.

“What?” I asked, struggling back awake.

“We should just burn it, shouldn’t we?” she said.

I raised myself on my elbow, looked down at her in the darkness. She blinked up at me.

“People don’t get away with things like this,” she said.

I lifted my hand off her belly and brushed the hair from her face. Her skin was so pale, it seemed to glow. “We’ll get away with it,” I said. “We know exactly what we’re doing.”

She shook her head. “No. We’re just normal people, Hank. We aren’t sneaky, we aren’t smart.”

“We’re smart,” I said. I brushed my hand across her face, making her shut her eyes. Then I laid my head down beside her on her pillow, snuggling up against her warmth. “We won’t get caught.”

I’m not sure if I actually believed this: that we were unassailable. Certainly I must’ve been aware even then of the dangers of our course, must’ve felt some fear when I stopped to consider all the difficulties yet to be overcome. There were Jacob and Lou and Carl and the plane and a hundred other ways that I could only guess at through which trouble might come and find us. On the most basic level I must’ve been scared simply because I was committing a crime. It was something I’d never even considered doing before, something far enough beyond my realm of experience to give me a lost feeling in and of itself, even without the fear of punishment that hung all about it like an aura. But I don’t think these thoughts weighed on me then as much as they do now, in hindsight. I think I was happy then; I think I felt safe. It was New Year’s Eve. I was thirty years old, contentedly married, with my first child soon to be born. My wife and I were lying curled up in bed together, having just finished making love, and beneath us, hidden away like the treasure it was, sat $4.4 million. Nothing had gone wrong yet; everything was still fresh and full of promise. I can look back now and say that in many ways this was the absolute apogee of my life, the point to which everything before led upward, and from which everything after fell away. I don’t think it was possible at that moment for me to believe we could ever be punished for what we’d done: our crime seemed too trivial, our luck too great.

Sarah was silent for a long time. “Promise me,” she said finally, taking my hand and placing it back on top of her stomach.

I tilted my head and whispered in her ear, “I promise we won’t get caught.”

Then we went to sleep.

3

I
AWOKE
around eight the next morning. Sarah was already out of bed; I could hear her showering in the bathroom. I huddled there beneath the covers, warm, still a little sleepy, and listened to the pipes creaking under the pressure of the water.

The pipes in my parents’ house had made a similar sound whenever someone opened a faucet. As a child, Jacob had told me that there were ghosts within the walls, moaning, trying to escape, and I’d believed him. One night my mother and father had come home, drunk, and started dancing in the kitchen. I was six, maybe seven years old. Roused by the noise, I arrived just in time to see them, wrapped in each other’s arms, trip over a chair, my father’s head knocking a fist-size hole in the wall as he went down. Terrified, I rushed into the room with a wad of newspaper, to patch the hole before the ghosts could escape, and at the sight of me—a scrawny, nervous kid in pajamas, my hair tousled with sleep, frantically jamming paper into the wall—my parents broke into hysterical laughter. It was my first memory of embarrassment, of being ashamed, but thinking back on it that morning I felt no bitterness toward them, only a curious sort of nostalgia and longing. I missed them, I realized, still half asleep, my mind wandering, half-dreaming, so that, as I thought of them, they somehow usurped Sarah’s and my places—my mother, young, pregnant, was washing herself in the bathroom while my father waited beneath the covers, the shades pulled down, the room dim, listening to the pipes softly creak behind the wall above his head.

That was how I always tried to think of my parents, as young—like Sarah and me—with their life together just beginning. It was more invention than recollection: I hadn’t been born very long before things started to fall apart, so the memories I retained of my parents, the real ones, the ones that came floating up unbidden, were from when they were already aging, both of them drinking too much, the farm slipping away behind their backs.

The last time I saw my father alive, he was drunk. He’d called me at the feedstore one morning, his voice sounding shy and embarrassed, to see if I could stop by sometime and take a look at his accounts. I consented gladly, feeling a little shy myself, but flattered, too, because he’d never really asked me for help before.

I drove out to the farm that evening, straight from work. My father had a little study that opened directly off the kitchen, and there, on the folding card table he used as a desk, I spent the next fifty minutes disentangling his finances. He kept track of his bills in a huge leather-bound ledger. The book contained a mess of hastily scrawled numbers, columns merging one into the other, computations scribbled illegibly in the margins. He’d written most of the notations in ink, so when he made a mistake—which appeared to have been quite often—he had to cross it out rather than erase it. Even through this morass of disorder, though, it was instantly clear to me that my parents were about to lose their farm.

I’d known they were in trouble, had known it for as long as I could remember, but I’d never imagined that things could get this far out of hand. They owed money to just about everyone—the electric, phone, and water companies, the insurance company, the doctor, and the government. It was lucky they didn’t have any livestock, because then they would’ve owed Raikley’s, too. They owed money for repairs on their combine, for fuel and seed and fertilizer. Those were just bills, though: they were bad to get behind on, and my parents would’ve had to pay them eventually, but they weren’t how you lost your farm. It was the bank that would take your property, and it was to the bank that my father owed the bulk of his money. He’d overborrowed and mismanaged. He’d mortgaged his home, mortgaged his land, and now, in a matter of weeks, he was going to lose them both.

I worked for a while before I said anything, organizing numbers into coherent columns, separating his debits from his assets, adding everything up. My father sat behind me on a stool, watching over my shoulder. They’d already eaten dinner, and he was drinking now, whiskey out of a juice glass. The study door was open, and through it we could hear my mother washing dishes in the kitchen. When I finally put down my pencil and turned around to face my father, he smiled at me. He was a large, heavyset man, with a good-sized paunch, and blond, balding hair. His eyes were pale blue, small in his face. They leaked little strings of tears when he drank too much.

“Well?” he asked.

“They’re going to foreclose you,” I said. “I don’t imagine they’ll give you much past the end of the year.”

I could tell that he’d been expecting me to say this—he had to have known, the bank must’ve been threatening him for months, but I think he’d been hoping I’d find some loophole, something he was too uneducated, too unfamiliar with the intricacies of accounting, to see for himself. He got up from his stool, went over to the door, and shut it. Then he sat back down.

“What can we do?” he asked.

I lifted my hands into the air. “I don’t think we can do anything. It’s too late.”

My father considered that, frowning. “You’re telling me you did all that adding and subtracting, and you still can’t figure out a way to help us?”

“You owe a lot of people money, Dad. There’s no way you can pay them all back, and when you don’t, they’ll take the farm.”

“They aren’t going to take the farm.”

“Have you talked with the bank? Haven’t they—”

“Banks.” My father snorted. “You think I’m going to give up this place to a bank?”

It was then that I realized he was drunk—not seriously drunk, just enough so that he could feel the alcohol running warmly through his veins, like a soporific, deadening his perceptions, enervating his reactions.

“You don’t have a choice,” I said, but he waved me aside.

“I got plenty of choices,” he said. He stood up, set his glass down on the stool. “All you’re looking at is those numbers, but that’s not half the story.”

“Dad,” I started, “you’re going to have to—”

He shook his head, cutting me off. “I don’t have to do anything.”

I fell silent.

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I was just staying up because I thought you’d be able to figure out how to get them off my back.”

I followed him from the room, trying to think of something to say. There were things they’d have to be considering now, not the least of which was finding someplace new to live, but I couldn’t imagine a way to bring this up. He was my father; it seemed like I could only insult him by offering advice.

My mother was still out in the kitchen. The dishes were all done now, and she was cleaning one of the counters. I think she must’ve been waiting for us to finish, because she dropped her sponge and came right over when we emerged. My father went straight past her, heading toward the stairs, and I started to follow him.

“No, Hank,” my mother whispered, stopping me. “He’ll be all right. He just needs some sleep.”

She took me by the elbow, pulled me off toward the front door. She was small, but strong, too, and when she wanted you to do something, she let you know. Right now, she wanted me to go home.

We talked for a moment in the entranceway before I left. It was drizzling out, cold. My mother turned on the porch light, and it made everything look shiny.

“You know?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Have you talked about what you’re going to do?”

“We’ll manage,” she said quietly.

Her composure, coupled with my father’s denial, was giving me a panicky feeling in my chest. It didn’t seem like they had any understanding for the magnitude of their trouble. “But this is bad, Mom,” I said. “We’re going to have to—”

“It’ll be all right, Hank. We’ll weather it through.”

“Sarah and I can give you a few thousand. We could maybe take out a loan, too. I can talk to somebody down at the bank.”

My mother shook her head. “Your father and I are going to have to make a few sacrifices is all. But we can do that. You don’t have to worry.” She smiled, turned her cheek toward me for a kiss.

I kissed her, and she opened up the screen door. I could see that she didn’t want to talk about it, that she wasn’t going to let me help. She was sending me away.

“Careful of the rain,” she said. “It’ll make the pavement slick.”

I ran through the drizzle to my car. As I climbed inside, the porch light flicked off behind me.

I called my father the next morning, from my office. I wanted him to come into town and go to the bank with me, so that we could have a talk with the manager, but he refused. He thanked me for my concern, then told me that if he wanted my help, he’d ask for it. Otherwise I should assume he had everything under control. Having said that, he hung up the phone.

That was the last I ever spoke to him. Two days later, he was dead.

S
ARAH
turned off the shower, and—as if to fill the sudden silence—a voice whispered in my head:
you forgot to go to the cemetery.

It was New Year’s Day, which meant that Jacob and I had let a year pass without visiting the graves. I considered this, debating its importance. It seemed to me that the thought behind the ritual, the simple act of remembrance, was more important than the visit itself. I could see nothing that was gained by our actual presence at the cemetery. Besides, it was only a matter of a single day. We could go this afternoon, twenty-four hours later than we’d promised. I was sure that, considering the circumstances, our father would forgive us our tardiness.

But then, at the same time, I realized that much of the visit’s importance came through its strict observance, the fact that we were forced to put aside a specific afternoon each year, block it off from any outside interference, and devote it to the memory of our parents. The minor inconvenience of it was exactly what gave it its weight. The new year was a boundary, a deadline we’d let pass.

I began to consider several possible forms of penance for this transgression, all of them revolving around an increased number of trips to the grave site in the coming year, and was up to twelve, one each month, when Sarah reappeared from the bathroom.

She was naked except for a yellow bath towel wrapped around her head. Her breasts had become so full that they looked comical on her tiny frame, like something a pubescent boy might draw. Her nipples were a brilliant crimson, two scabs against the bloodless white of her skin. Her belly hung low and heavy, and she cradled her hands beneath it while she walked, as if it were a package she was carrying, rather than a natural distension of her body. She looked awkward, clumsy. It was only at rest that she had any grace, holding her eight months’ weight with a peculiar stateliness, an animallike elegance. I watched her waddle to the windows and, one at a time, pull open their shades.

The room filled with gray light. The sky was cloudy, cold looking, the trees beyond the glass dark and bare.

My eyes were partly closed; Sarah glanced toward the bed but didn’t seem to realize I was awake. She unwrapped the towel from her head, bent over, and rubbed at her hair. I watched her, her body framed against the window and the winter sky beyond.

“We forgot to visit the cemetery,” I said.

She looked up, startled, her body still bent partly over. Then she went back to rubbing her hair. She worked vigorously at it; I could hear the sound of the cloth against her scalp. When she finished, she straightened up and wrapped the towel around her chest.

“You can do it this afternoon,” she said. “After you go back to the plane.”

She came over and sat on the edge of the bed, her legs spread wide, her weight resting behind her on her hands. I sat up, so I could see her better. She looked at me and put her hand over her mouth.

“Oh, God,” she said. “You’re all bloody.”

I reached up and touched my bump. It was virtually gone, but I could feel a wide swath of caked blood arcing out from it across my forehead.

“It bled during the night,” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

I shook my head, probing the wound with my fingertips. “It feels like it’s almost gone.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

“Think if it’d hit me in the eye,” I said.

Sarah examined my forehead, but with a distracted expression on her face. I could tell she was thinking of something else.

“You ought to tell Jacob you’re going back to the plane,” she said. “Maybe have him come with you.”

“Why?”

“It just seems smart. Last thing we need is for him or Lou to drive by and see your car sitting next to the park. They’ll start thinking something’s going on, that you’re trying to trick them.”

“They wouldn’t see the car. I’ll be there and back before either of them is even out of bed.”

“It’s just being careful, Hank. That’s what we have to be from now on. We have to be thinking ahead all the time.”

I considered that for a moment, then nodded halfheartedly. Sarah watched me closely, as if waiting for me to argue. When I didn’t, she gave my leg a squeeze beneath the covers.

“We aren’t going to tell him about putting the money back, though,” she said. “You’ll have to hide it under your jacket and go into the plane by yourself.”

“You’re saying he’d go back and steal it?”

“Maybe. Jacob’s human. It’d be a perfectly natural thing to do. Or tell Lou about it. I know Lou would do it.” She brushed at her hair with her hand. Wet, it looked darker than it actually was, almost brown. “This way we don’t have to worry about it. We can just know it’s there, and that if it’s there, we’re safe.”

She rubbed my foot. “Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Smiling, she slid up the bed toward me, leaned forward, and kissed me on my nose. I could smell her shampoo, something lemony. I kissed her back on the mouth.

I
GOT UP
to shower, and Sarah, wearing a dark green maternity dress, disappeared downstairs to fix us breakfast.

I turned on the water to let it heat up, then went to the mirror and inspected my forehead. In its exact center was a small hole, no bigger than an acne scar. Dried blood spiraled out from it, highlighting it like the target on a bull’s-eye.