B009XDDVN8 EBOK (5 page)

Think of the militiaman in his bomb cellar, praying for the apocalypse because he knows how pathetic all his feverish preparations would be if the apocalypse never came. When you prepare for the worst, the worst that can happen is nothing. All my paranoia over the years, all my obsessive planning, turned out to be exactly necessary. Augie and Ben hadn’t taken the same precautions; they had assumed they were safe. Augie was now dead and Ben was in the deep latrine. But I had options. It was if my life had been given a government-approved jolt of meaning.

But there was something else, too, giving me a lift. It was the way I had handled myself through the afternoon’s violence. I hadn’t been able to pull off the gunfight thing—I’m not a torpedo after all—but I had leaped Augie’s back wall pretty damn nimbly. And after the bastard had rammed me into the wall by the park, I had taken care of him all right. Did I intend to put the car in reverse to squash the bastard bloody? I wasn’t sure, it surprised the hell out of me, but reverse it was, even if it was my subconscious pulling the gear. And I certainly didn’t brake after the first
thump. The last time I had faced such danger, twenty-five years ago, I had fallen into a pathetic jag of wails and tears, but this time I had risen to the challenge. Over the years I had purposely constricted my life, doing everything I could not to be noticed, not to be too successful, not to achieve all of which I was capable. But suddenly I had an inkling that maybe I was capable enough. Which was good, because I sure as hell would need to be.

It was time to take the next necessary steps. I had turned the cell phone off right after I had called Ben. It was a phone I had bought in an office-supply store with the minutes purchased in bulk. Now I turned it on and booked a Northwest flight from Las Vegas to LA for J.J. Moretti, and paid for it with a credit card in that name, the same card I had used to book my flight to Vegas. Then I lifted the toilet tank and dropped the phone inside to kill it dead. The credit card, I cut into fourths. The card was paid out of a bank account I had maintained with a post office drop box in North Dakota. They could keep what was left in the account. I took my Nevada driver’s license and cut it up as well. In the bathroom, with the fan going, I crumbled up some paper and put it in the sink with the cut-up cards on top, set the whole thing on fire, and watched the last of J.J. Moretti melt and turn black.

Frenchy was dead.

I looked at the bus schedule, found something leaving for Phoenix dead early in the morning. I checked the address of the bus station and got a break: it was just down the road, so I wouldn’t need a cab. Everything was setting up nicely. A bus to Phoenix, a plane to Chicago, another plane ride, purchased separately and leaving the next morning, to Philadelphia. With the five-hour drive south from Philly, I could be home by early afternoon the day after next.

I knew my precautions hadn’t been perfect, there were a thousand details that could have gone wrong, but if the bastards had been waiting for me at Augie’s that meant the secret life I had created for myself must have held through Augie’s torture.

If they were as sharp as I feared, they would glom onto the truth soon enough, but by then, if everything went as planned, I’d be gone again.

I set my alarm to give me plenty of time and then lay down in the bed and closed my eyes. Tomorrow was a big day, tomorrow everything had to go just right. I needed to be rested, I needed to sleep, I needed to prepare.

Tomorrow I would need to start deconstructing my life.

“I only just realized it, J.J., but you are the most boring suburban asshole in the world.”

—Augie Iannucci

I
F YOU WANT
to blame it on anybody, the mess I found myself in, you might as well blame it on my father; I always did.

My father left when I was nine. To say he fled would be more honest, but who the hell wants honesty when dealing with family? Certainly not my mother. First my father was on a brief business trip. Then the brief trip turned to a lengthy assignment in another town. Eventually his absence was barely noted as my mother and I ate dinner together in the large, empty dining room, with a pot of flowers placed directly between us so I wouldn’t see all that she was drinking and she wouldn’t see me gagging on her tuna casserole.

My father’s leaving left a hole in my life, but it wasn’t his actual presence that I missed. My father was one of those men whose power was expressed in his absences, an absence of care and concern, an absence of humor, an absence of a personality more dynamic than a cardboard box. My father’s leaving would hardly have been noticed if it wasn’t followed by concomitant losses, losses so dire that I spent the greatest portion of my life thereafter trying to make up for all that vanished when he vanished, too. Think of the kiwi bird haunted by a hawk floating free across the sky—that was me, haunted by what I once had been.

We lived in a big stone house in a leafy suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line. We had a pool within the gardens in the backyard,
a purebred bichon frise named Rex on the leash, and a family membership at the Philadelphia Country Club. My father was a Willing. One of those Willings. It doesn’t mean much in Omaha, admittedly, but being a Willing meant a great deal in the dining room of the Philadelphia Country Club. Old society ladies who had known my great-grandmother used to pat my head as they walked by our table; waiters brought me Cokes and addressed me as
Master Willing, sir
; mothers pushed their young girls my way.
Say hello to Jonathon, sweetie, don’t be shy.
I wore a blazer and tan pants in the dining room and I ordered the filet from the adult menu, well done, with french fries, hold the spinach, please.

That was the before.

Much later, my mother told me the details of what happened to all that grandeur. The telling came when I was in college in Wisconsin and had flown down to Florida to watch her die. There was a period between the final operation and her death when she was filled with an unnatural energy, like a sun becoming a supernova before collapsing into a black hole. In those few days she told me more about my history than she had in the entire twenty years that had come before. By then the cancer from her lungs had wrapped like a cobra around her heart and bowels, but her disposition was surprisingly cheerful because she had lost so much weight her figure approximated that of the slim beautiful secretary who had unexpectedly won my father’s heart. Her dreams had been simple before she met my father, typical of the South Philly girl she had been: a modest house in the neighborhood, summers down the shore, maintaining her size four. But when she married a Willing her life exceeded her dreams, and therein lay the seed of my downfall.

Her troubles with my father, my mother told me from her hospital bed, began shortly after I was born. The delivery had been difficult and my mother hadn’t healed well, making conjugal relations unpleasant. And the medications and alcohol she consumed for the pain made it difficult for the weight to come
off. And so, as was inevitable, my father found himself a whore. (This is vintage my mother. Notice how the root cause of the problem is her weight, notice how her weight is out of her control, notice how the other actor in the drama is a low-down slut. If you asked my mother about the origins of the American debacle in Vietnam it would all begin with a few extra pounds she gained in 1964 and a Ho.) My father’s affair lasted for years; in fact it was less an affair than a secret life. The other woman had a child with my father, she set up house, he played the doting husband with her Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other weekend.

When my mother belatedly caught wind of what was happening, through an offhand remark slipped into the meaningless babble of club conversation as neatly as a knife in the ribs, she had a choice. She could choose to ignore my father’s secret and keep our lives intact, along with my stature as a Willing at the club, or she could put her well-heeled foot down and imperil it all. And my mother reacted exactly as one would expect of someone who hadn’t ever angled for all she was risking: blindly, foolishly, with no regard for my present or future prospects. A midafternoon visit to the offices of my grandfather, who then stood at the pinnacle of all the far-flung Willing enterprises, started the process of ending my father’s secret life. A short time later, after weeks of haggling and anguish, the lawyers paid off the mistress. And my father, after a thorough upbraiding by my grandfather, returned full time to our happy home in the leafy suburb.

I was in the third grade when all this occurred. Generally ignored by my ever-present but often inebriated mother and my absent father, I was used to spending my days at the posh private school where they stashed me, or eating dinner at my schoolmates’ houses or at the club, living a life of delicious freedom. But suddenly my now-dour father was home every night, as I was expected to be, and every evening the three of us ate dinner together, chewing our food silently in the dining room, staring at
the walls so as to avoid staring at each other. And then one night my father went on his brief business trip.

It wasn’t too much later that the lawyers came for us.

My mother’s lawyer was supposed to be pretty good, but the lawyers at the Willing family firm were better, and by the time it was over, whatever my mother ended up with was not enough to maintain the lifestyle to which we had become accustomed. Still, she kept us in the house as long as she could. She cried, she yelled into the phone, she fired the servants and cooked economical dinners with execrable results. Things changed, of course. We were no longer included in the family membership at the club. Or invited to my grandparents’ house for Sunday supper. And I wouldn’t be back at my posh private school for the fourth grade. And my schoolmates suddenly stopped calling. And the lawn went unmowed and algae turned the pool green. But my mother and I shared the strange delusion that as long as we had the house and the dog everything would remain as it was.

Until all we had was the dog.

It was late in the summer, just before the start of the school year, when we moved into our new neighborhood. I was no longer a Willing, my mother had made me take up her maiden name, Moretti, for our new life. She wanted a clean break, her old name, and, yes, a new neighborhood, on the other side of the city as well as the tracks. She said she didn’t want to bump into anyone from our other life in the supermarket, and if that was her goal, then Pitchford was the exact right place.

I remember driving onto Henrietta Road for the first time, the moving truck behind us and Rex on my lap. A gang of kids stared sullenly as they shifted their hockey nets to let us pass. A mangy collie barked at Rex. The split-level houses placed cheek to jowl all along the street were shockingly small, the postage-stamp lawns were unkempt, outdated cars were parked at the curb. When my mother pointed out the tiny house that she was
renting for us, I burst into tears. I was ten years old and I already knew the best part of my life had passed.