Fun With Problems (12 page)

At the counter Leroy paid a simmering Craw Beck for his
purchases. Seven dollars, no less. The family group was at the counter behind him. Before Leroy reached the door, Craw exploded.

"You plan on paying for the boy's candy?"

He was speaking not to Leroy but to the father of the little boy.

"What candy?" the man asked.

"The candy in his pocket!" Craw said with a vicious smile. Beside him, Slob frowned. The wrapper was in plain view.

"He's not even allowed to eat candy!" the father said. More surprised, Leroy thought, than angry. A mild type. Leroy had paused with one hand on the door, a disinterested onlooker.

Turning to look at Leroy, the woman recalled what she had told herself she could not possibly have seen in the space of a moment. She gasped and pointed at him.

"That man!" she said. "He gave it to Todd. I'm sure he did."

Leroy shrugged. Slob looked at him suspiciously.

"Well, damn well put it back or somebody pay for it," said Craw.

Leroy went out at once and put the scene behind him.

Halfway between Beck's store and the post office he encountered a tall woman whom he had nicknamed Grannykins. It was not that she was particularly grandmotherly, only that the plain metal-rimmed glasses she wore lent her long lean face a certain severity. She came under Leroy's scornful definition of older lady; in fact, she was about his age. She was graying but distinctly handsome and had friendly brown eyes. He had first seen her on a horse. She had said hello to him that day, and he had the distinct impression that she was putting moves on him. It was just sad, he thought. She was so much older than any babe he would ever be seen with. Was she serious?

"And how are you today?" she asked, smiling. "I'm Sal," she reminded him. This woman, Leroy knew well enough, was really named Salikan, after the river. The idiotic name dated her pretty well, he thought, and he wondered how she lived with this embarrassment. Salikan, a dog's name. The thought made him grin, which she took as indicating pleasure in her company. He had the strongest impulse to explain to her what was funny, give her a tip about herself. Leroy had been told that Sal's parents had been rich hippies, descended from a Helena molybdenite tycoon. Leroy had never introduced himself, although she had told him her name many times before.

"Hi!" he said. He had to stop when she did.

"How are things with your house?"

"They're good."

"I ride up by your canyon sometimes," she said.

How pathetic, thought Leroy.

"Yeah, I've seen you."

"I don't go up there so much now. I've got wary."

"Right," Leroy said. "You can't be too careful."

Over her shoulder, he saw the flustered-looking tourist family approaching, snuffling little junior, angry mom, subdued loser dad. Sal saw that she had lost Leroy's interest and went away.

"Well, so long," she said. "
You
take care."

As the tourists passed, Leroy went into the post office to
check his mail. Inside, a clerk stood behind the open parcel counter holding a fly swatter. Leroy went past him to the bank of post boxes, opened his and scooped out the useless paper, real estate ads and supermarket flyers. Just then his eye fell on a row of federal
WANTED
posters on a glass-cased bulletin board beside the street door and he sauntered over to inspect them. One of the fugitives, Leroy observed, was born Alan Ladd. He sometimes used "Bum" as an alias. Hilarious, thought Leroy. In fact, the man's face was a little daunting. The FBI wanted Bum for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for the crime of murder, committed a few times over on little provocation. At a distance his picture resembled the old cartoon image of a burglar, plug-ugly in the striped shirt and wool cap. But even Leroy could see that there was a man behind the small dead eyes that looked at you over his flute of a nose. The peculiar nose, the lines around his mouth and his round chin made him look like a bad puppet. Pinocchio. The poster said Alan Ladd had worked as a dog trainer; his face was both swinish and prim. Leroy went out, climbed into his BMW and began the drive upriver toward his house.

The huge sky over the valley showed a late-August afternoon light, and even from the car Leroy could savor the deliciousness of the waning day. In the distance a front was gathering, an enormous darkening tower that rose from the mountaintops to an azimuth where innocent blue began. The clouds, bank heaped on bank, spread like an angel army across a quarter of the sky and closed on the near hills. In his own way Leroy was stirred by the drama of it, but he was not in the mood for rain, not on the road up. The fleecy cumuli that had graced the afternoon were giving way before the front; sudden cloud shadows raced over the landscape. The idea of rain, the shadows, caused him a quick confusion of ideas. They were positive: things changed and he thrived. A man who believed in himself was free. The secret was that you could almost make your own weather if you stayed smart and strong. You could sort of make yourself the mysterious force. Leroy thought good things. He shivered.

The road before him climbed in tightening switchbacks, and it was pure pleasure to follow its turns up the slope. Sometimes his heading was the range of shadowed white peaks across the valley, sometimes the field of black volcanic rock that stretched away from the river. To drive such a car and know what you were doing was to own the road.

Climbing, he passed the last few frame ranch gates and then there were no more cattle grids or mailboxes. Driving the last paved half mile, he came to a cleared lot on the canyon side of the road. A house was being built there, a house as big as Leroy's own, as far as he could tell. About a dozen men worked on the construction—carpenters laying and nailing boards on an upper story, roofers, painters applying an undercoat to a completed separate building across the lot. A mobile roller for laying tar and an articulated loader were parked just off the road. Leroy pulled onto the shoulder. The building lot was surrounded by birches bending to a wind he could not feel at first. One moment, walking toward the construction, he was dazzled by sunlight, dazed by the afternoon heat that rose from the bone-dry earth. In the next, he was in the shadow of the imminent storm overhead, grazed by the wind out of the trees. The crewmen were all
looking up the valley into the storm that seemed about to break.

Leroy was curious about the house that would be neighboring his. Its rising presence agitated him. On the one hand, he was annoyed that construction upriver was advancing. On the other hand—and he had not thought of it much before—there were times when the loneliness of his location impinged on his satisfaction. He wanted to start a conversation with the men working on the site.

"Hi," he called out. Right then he knew it was going to turn out wrong somehow. "Anything I can do for you guys?"

All of them turned toward him at once. For a long time none of them gave him any answer. He looked at each of them in turn. One of them looked like the man on the poster. It caused him a slight intake of breath. Of course it wasn't the same man, but the brutality of the workman's face shocked him a little. Then it seemed that all of them, the lot, had some weird vocabulary of features in common. It looked as though all they were going to do was stare at him, tight-lipped, hard-eyed. Then the man whose face he had thought most resembled the poster said:

"Yeah. Make us rich."

A deeper silence seemed to fall, so that it was possible to hear the river below.

"I'm trying," Leroy said merrily.

No one laughed, though the hard-faced man to whom he had spoken made his features humorlessly reflect Leroy's attempt at a friendly smile, with a curled lip, a show of teeth and raised eyebrows. Everyone stood in place at his workstation, still and staring. As he turned to walk back to the car, he heard what he had always dreaded in places like Salikan, a rumble of spitty laughter, low growls and arrested fricatives trailing his departure. The successful man is resented by the hewers of wood and carriers of water. The wealthy man of taste and means draws the impotent hatred of the mob. In some countries, Leroy had heard, such people had a clearer sense of their station in life and conducted themselves accordingly. Whereas here, he thought, it was supposed to be all jolly rough-and-tumble, and you couldn't spit in some peon's face when he tried to be smarter than you. Leroy had some enraging and frightening memories. Losers could come right to your house.

The turns were sharper and the incline steeper where the paving gave way to sealed gravel, but Leroy's car rose smoothly through it all. When he had put the car snugly in his garage he let himself inside, into the large kitchen, and poured himself a glass of pinot grigio. It had been a very tiring drive, and Leroy was working on a headache for which the wine was not a remedy. His eyes were sore; he thought he might be due to replace his contacts. He had worked hard at keeping fit, seeming and feeling younger than his age, but still he had put in the time. He had not been out for an easy life, and he had not had one. It occurred to him that no matter how a man postponed it, he ended by progressively settling for less. The thought made him angry.

Leroy's canyon home was the newest and biggest house on the river. Somebody's had to be. He had definitely come to feel that a house ought not to be outsized or conspicuous, and his own place caused him a jot of self-consciousness. The thing was, it had been like a new toy, and hard for him in the first flush of ownership not to improve on it and add
features. The pool had been something of an engineering feat, but it was a joy, looking cut into the rock, though it really wasn't, and ingeniously supplied with water at great cost. There was glass on one wall of the den, cantilevered so as not to catch the full force of the wind coming down the canyon but commanding a view of the national forest and wilderness to the north and east. It would have been hard for him to say why, but the dimensions of the place made him feel somehow younger. It proved he belonged to an age group below his calendar years, a Bullshit Walks generation. The right people understood.

Maybe he had figured there would be more people around. In the past they always came to pick his brains, to find out what he could do for them, to listen to his strategies and plans. Girls came for the fun and games, an adventure by the pool, the brightness and glossiness. You always had to be careful with girls, he realized. Girls could go a long way toward making or unmaking your reputation, especially in California. Guys came for access, to prove themselves to him, eager for his blessing on some project. He had taken the Orvis trout-fishing course twice in the hope of excelling on the river. He had become a proficient skier, having learned, one on one, from a top Kraut.

Everybody had to be kept in line. The fact was, Leroy knew, to be too accessible was dangerous. Accessibility aroused the predator. When they call you a nice guy, beware. The nice guy will find his brains on the floor—a proverb from somewhere, some newly competitive nation. Leroy could envision his brains on the floor, gray, bloody, posthumously active, refusing to cease their clamor. He often contemplated with satisfaction the brilliance concentrated within his intellect and will. Sometimes, he knew, it burned with too bright a flame.

He was running a supervisory eye over the road and the garage side of the house when it fell upon an undesirable oddity. Tied to one of the aspens over his driveway—certainly visible from the road—was a twisted length of plastic, the kind of transparent tube in which a newspaper might be delivered on a rainy day. The tube was wet, soiled and blackened like something that had washed up in some filthy city gutter. It was knotted on a high branch of the tree so that part of it floated like a pennant over his turnoff, perhaps a signal pennant. Signaling what? His presence? It was unsettling. It made him imagine piracy, a Jolly Roger.

He moved out of the well-appointed kitchen and sat before his floor-to-ceiling window, watching the stormy night darken the borders of the canyon. The black clouds brought down the night sky, the moon that had been rising; the first stars all disappeared. He took his glass of wine outside to the patio, walked down the stone steps to his pool and switched on the poolside lights and underwater illuminations. The sleekness of the lighting was comforting at first. Then in the blue-tinted light he saw that lapping against the tile of his pool was another soiled piece of plastic like the one in the tree. He felt a wave of disappointment—in things, in the sorry aspect of his rewards, blemishes on good fortune. It seemed like the work of a spoiler, and it frightened him. He looked around him. Somewhere in the sunken canyon behind his house thunder broke and echoed massively; the sound of it felt as though it might shake the house on its stone fortress. A fork of lightning struck rimrock overhead, and whether by reflection or a second strike, it lit the canyon below in stunning detail, displaying precisely the coloring of each cliff, its cuts, layers and scars, its geological history. Leroy stepped back against the rock wall of his house. There was a smell of scorched sage and burning pine. The air was bone-dry, and not so much as a drop of rain fell.

He went back inside, finished his wine and poured another. The drink made him hungry—on the trip up he had not given any thought to food. All that was in the house unfrozen were the eggs and milk he had bought at Craw's, a half stick of butter and an unopened jar of caperberries the beautiful Ilena had brought him months before. The caperberries were imported from Romania, from a place called Cluj, which happened to be in Transylvania, where Ilena herself came from. She had always described herself as Transylvanian, which meant she might have been Romanian or Hungarian or descended from Saxon or Slavic settlers. Leroy had never asked her. He required only that she be as beautiful as she was, and as accommodating. To be seen with her was to command envy and respect and to display the superior quality of his life. Any fool could see her out in Valentino and Cole Haan, and that, Leroy thought, was all they needed to see.