Bad People (33 page)

“Tell me what it is worth.”

“It’s worth nothing. None of it is worth anything.”

“You’ve got to think,” said Luke. “I will hurt you. You know I can do it. You’ve got to think. You have money, or something of value. Somewhere.”

Barry shook his head. “Nothing.”

“You can get it for me; I know you can.”

“There’s nothing.” Barry shrugged. He felt himself grin again and grin stupidly. He didn’t care what happened. As long as something did.

Luke straightened up and looked at him evenly. Though not even with curiosity. He looked at Barry as if he were an object. Then he turned, went back through the kitchen and back the way he came.
He’s going to set fire to the house
, thought Barry,
and leave me in here, like a tomb
.

He was born in this house, grew up in this house, attempted his adulthood in this house, and now he was going to burn in this house.

Unexisted.

He waited. The backyard gate creaked outside. That meant Luke had left the backyard and gone to the front. Barry waited. Five minutes. Five minutes more.

There was no fire.

Barry crawled up on his knees and put his hands on the nearest window ledge. He peered out through the white curtains. The driveway was empty. The street was empty. He was alone.

He started crying. He hit himself in the head, calling out “stupid, stupid!” but that didn’t make him stop crying. He stood up and ran upstairs, wiping his face on his sleeves. His bedroom was destroyed; so was his parents’ room. His Dad’s old trunk of trinkets had been overturned. The long hunting knife was there, shiny. Luke hadn’t even bothered with that. That knife could have killed Barry, so why hadn’t Luke used it? Why didn’t he bother?

The knife was not in its sheath; the sheath had been cast aside, so maybe Luke
had
considered using the blade to kill him. Or maybe he’d examined the knife for value or just general usefulness and found it lacking for either. Barry sat on his parents’ upturned box spring and contemplated the blade.

Not steel, he could not see his reflection in it. Teflon or something, easy to clean, impossible to rust, and always sharp. It could split a person open with no damage to itself, ever. So much for that.

He pushed the tip of the knife into the fat pad of his palm. It did not break the skin. He pushed the blade of the knife into the blue veins of his wrist, and it began to sting and hurt a nerve before he had barely applied any pressure. He wondered what kind of strength he would need to, not only break the skin, but cut deep enough to open the vein.

Would wine help? Would it help enough?

Was it like cutting into meat? Like cutting through the fat wrapping a raw pork loin? That wasn’t hard. No, living skin must be harder. Or maybe it was just the fear of pain, and the inability to face it, that kept him from cutting his own skin. He made a few tepid cuts. They raised blood but they were shallow. He could not imagine doing more. He wrapped the wrist in the belt of his robe, rather that get up and clean up somewhere else.

When he had finished wrapping it, the beige terrycloth absorbing the red blood from his shallow cuts (can’t even call them cuts, he thought; more like tracings really) he reversed the wrap, slowing unwrapping the belt from his wrist like winding a clock in reverse.

He wrapped the belt around the knife: the lower part of the blade, then the hilt. When he came to the grip, he continued to wrap; he wrapped his good hand and the knife together, knife at a right angle, pulling the fabric very tight, tighter and tighter with each turning until the tips of fingers swelled purple. There was the blood, the real blood, fluid hot and purple, not the thin sap that had leaked out of the surface of the skin of his wrist, not that weak gruel. He raised his hand/knife high, feeling the blood pounding and icy there. He turned his wrist over to the point the blade downward. He closed his other hand over it.

What was Robb’s last thought when he died? Did he know it was coming? Barry summoned all his strength. The knife plunged downward.

Chapter 36: Connie, Erika

Connie had postponed the meeting with Erika and Barry twice. The second time had been this morning, just before she would have had to leave to make it. She was at the desk in her “office”, which was now just in a corner of her own bedroom, unlike in the old house where it had been practically the only furniture in her own office, in the room that probably would have been described in a different era as a “sewing room.” Or maybe home sewing was making a comeback in the new economy. She had gone down to the storage unit and picked up the box of materials she needed. For some reason one of her old day planners had gotten into that box and not the other box where she had stored them. She flipped through it and left it out of the box, laying on her desk. At the last minute she called Erika to cancel.

Erika took a satisfied-sounding tone with her that irked Connie. A half hour later, Connie called and rebooked through Erika’s assistant, even though she could have just as easily called Erika again directly on her cell. Erika had an opening in an hour, so Connie resolved to take that. She wanted to get out of the house now. She took her materials down to the car and drove to Erika’s office, stopping at a bubble-tea place on the way to kill the rest of the time.

She got to Erika’s and saw immediately that she had redecorated reception, but then, it had been almost a year since she’d visited the office. Once upon a time Erika had come to her.

After the assistant let Connie through, she went in, and noticed immediately that Erika’s office was now rosy and pink—very un-Erika, Connie thought. Erika was at the desk, typing on her laptop right-handed, probably IMing someone from the other-focused expression on her face, and jotting down something on a notepad with her left, and dominant hand. “Just catching up,” she said, probably to Connie. “Barry with you?”

“No,” said Connie. She took one of the seats in front of the desk. Like a bank manager’s office set-up now. “Are you expecting Barry?”

Erika look at her, then back at her other work. “No,” she said. “I thought you might have scheduled this with him. It’s hard enough to get either one of you in here frankly.”

“I’m here now,” said Connie.

Erika hit the return key on her laptop hard and then slammed shut the case. “So you are,” she said.

They discussed options, various options, none of them great, about the future of Connie and Barry’s business. Or rather they discussed various options, varying only in minor particulars about the dissolutions of the business. Connie realized she wasn’t ready for the meeting; wasn’t ready for Erika. Nothing had changed in the past month. Well, that wasn’t true. Everything was much worse.

But there was nothing surprising about that.

“When was the last time you spoke to Barry?” Erika asked her.

“What? It must have been the night of the play.”

“No, that’s not possible,” said Erika. “That was weeks and weeks ago.”

“Was it? That long. Well I must have talked to him since then, I guess.”

“I can’t get a hold of him. Look, if you want to do this thing, I have to have both of you involved. I think you will be fine personally, but the business has a lot of liabilities. You need to start facing up to your obligations. You still with that booker you used to use? For speaking engagements? Can you get her to give you something? And you should double your rates. You haven’t done a seminar in almost a year, so you can play up the fact that you’re less available now. You’ll have to revise everything though. Focus on the downturn. It’s a completely different atmosphere out there. Focus on frugality, caution. Core values.”

“I haven’t even started thinking about any of that.”

“I know you haven’t. But your speaking and teaching skills are the only assets you have that are unencumbered. You do realize you will have to work at some point, right?”

“I don’t want to tell people what to do. I don’t want to take women’s money for telling them to follow their bliss. It’s all bullshit. I’m broke.”

“Then you talk about that. That resonates with people.”

“At double the rates?”

“Or work at Rite-Aid. If one is hiring. Do you think this is funny? People pay to listen to you. And you have the whole tragedy thing going for you now.”

“What?”

Erika had always been arrogant. Had always been jealous on some level. But the dynamic had changed. Now Erika had actually contempt for her. No. That wasn’t it. Erika had
always
had contempt for her. She had just stopped hiding it anymore. Connie figured she should probably actually thank Erika for that.

“Connie, I’m done coddling you. Be a grown up. Actually I am glad you are here alone. I don’t know what to do about Barry. He doesn’t have soft skills. Maybe he can become a construction foreman again. Only there’s no construction. He’ll have to sell his parent’s house, if he can. That was smart of you, selling yours, I’ll give you that. Just before the bubble burst. But then again your timing has always been great.”

“That’s funny.”

“I’m sorry if I sound callous,” said Erika.

“No you’re not.”

“Excuse me? This is for your own good. You know something Connie, you have always been right there, just ahead of the storm or the next wave, or whatever else came along. Every trend that’s happened to this generation. You were into punk rock before any of other kids. Yeah, it goes back that far.”

“Really? What else, because it looks like you’ve been keeping track.”

“That’s because I have. I have been keeping track. And now you’re on board with this whole cougar/milf thing. You should embrace all that. You don’t really care what people think about you anyway. You’ve always been a free spirit, just embrace it. Follow your bliss; it’s gotten you this far.”

“I’m getting another accountant,” said Connie.

“Oh darn,” said Erika. She reached into a drawer, pulled out a few business cards and tossed them across the desk. “Here’s a couple of referrals.”

Connie ignored them. She stood up. “Erika, I realize that my putting this meeting off twice has left you with nothing to do but build up bile, but you really will have to find somebody else to hate. I’m finished with people like you.”

“Get out of my office,” Erika said.

When Connie was back in her car, she had to sit there parked, her hands twisting on the wheels, to stop shaking and calm down enough to drive anywhere.

In a strange way—no, strike that,—in a quite sensible way, she felt good. The jealous Erika was finally out of her life. She’d get a new accountant. And Erika was never a friend. That was clear. Connie
felt
clear. Clean and empty, like everything was going to be good now. She decided she should see Barry too. She started to call and then just decided to go over. She could clear all this up today. Tell him she was hiring a new accountant, her own accountant, not Robb’s; the businesses were done. Everything was done.

It was like plunging into a swimming pool on an August day. She felt as if she could keep forever plunging: into the clean deep silence, endlessly down.

She drove to Barry’s. His car was there, so she knew he was home. He didn’t answer when she knocked. His front window drape was open enough to see inside. The living room looked pretty messed up. She tried the door, but it was locked. She went through the side gate, which was standing open, and around back and through the sliding glass door, which was also open. She hesitated. Should she go in? Was there someone else inside still? A burglar? She took out her phone to call 911 but she didn’t want to call the cops, especially not at Barry’s. She didn’t want anything more to do with cops.

“Barry!” she called out.

Silence.

“Barry?” She waited this time. Heard nothing for a moment, then a thump from upstairs.

She called out a third time, and this time came his muffled response: a slur of her name coming down through the ceiling from the second floor, sounded like from his parents old room. She entered the kitchen and rushed up the stairs.

Barry sat on the floor, sprawled, leaning again his parents’ old bed frame, chin buried into his chest. He was holding something in his lap, something too bloody to see at first. A blade, a knife. More blood stained his open robe and his boxer shorts. She screamed at the shock of it all. The sound made him jerk his head up, as if he was coming out of a trance. He eyes were unfocused, clearly he only recognized her from the sound she made. “Connie? Connie, I’m messed up,” he said.

Chapter 37: S/D, Ardiss

The girl was named Ardiss and she started giving him free coffee drinks. S/D didn’t stop to think about how she knew Luke or that Luke might turn up there (this coffee shop might be his hang-out, though it seemed too cool for that). He might even bring Connie there and that would be horrible. Or none of those things might happen. He didn’t think of any of those things until later, until much too late in fact. For now he only thought of Ardiss.

She was beautiful, one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen: she had tattoos: sleeves covering her shoulders and down her arms. Sleeves of thorned rose vines, forest of red, violet and green. She wore brown leather cuffs on her wrists: worn leather, creased and distressed. Her hair was dyed deep red. S/D wanted to hold her and kiss her, before he even thought of what to order.