Homemade Sin (46 page)

If John had to use one word to describe himself it would be ‘organized.' He was the type of person who would plan a trip from the den to the kitchen to get a beer, which included tasks to be accomplished on the way there and on the way back like emptying the trash can or unloading the dishwasher. He even timed these trips so he would be back in front of the T.V. as the commercials were ending.  When people met John they would never guess that he was a systems expert, he didn't look the part at all. He didn't have the nerdy look of the average systems expert; no plastic pocket protector or black, framed glasses and there was no Star Trek uniform hanging in his closet. His large green eyes were speckled with gold flecks; he had a sprinkling of freckles over his nose; tousled, deep auburn hair and a semi-toned body on his six-foot frame. To look at him you would guess he was a bookish divinity student rather than a computer guru or a banker. He wouldn't call himself handsome, maybe above average good looks.  And throughout his life he'd been nervous talking to women. He never knew what to say; he'd be tongue-tied and blush. No, he wasn't prince charming, more like prince introverted. And he was no Mike Compari.

Mike was another story. In the thirteen years that John had known him, Mike had never planned anything beyond the upcoming weekend, and when he did attempt to think ahead, the most planning he did was minutes in advance. Mike had relied on his looks and charm to avoid responsibility or anything associated with a normal day's labor. Over the years he had managed to charm his way out of quite a few dangerous situations and to con other people into doing his work for him.

What infuriated John was that it worked.

Back in college, whenever Mike had a term paper due, some moon-eyed girl would show up, a stack of books in tow, looking for Mike's room. The evenings when something either unsavory, or flat out recognizable, was being served in the dining hall, Mike would have an invitation to dine at a lady friend's house off-campus, often an older woman who owned her own house, or whose husband was away on business. His laundry was picked up and delivered on Fridays by a member of the cheerleading squad and he always had a key to some rich girl's daddy's car in his pocket.

The reason was simple; he looked like Titian's ‘Adonis' come to life, and even though he was from Queens, New York, he had an almost European demeanor. He was what Benjamin Franklin called the civilized barbarian. Mike would put on a show whenever he introduced himself to a lady. Taking her hand and bowing from the waist, he would turn her hand over and kiss it, just a brush of his lips in the middle of her palm.  He would raise his eyes slowly up her body, while a cockeyed grin danced on his face, until they locked eyes. To John, this act seemed as sincere as one of Eddie Haskell's compliments to June Clever in an old episode of
Leave It to Beaver
. Women, however, never failed to be moved; with a vacant look in their eyes they blushed right down to their toes.

The next day Mike would be driving around in her car.

Well, John thought, Mike must have found himself in a situation this time where that damn Compari charm didn't work. For the first time in his life he was looking forward to a trip to New Jersey, if for no other reason than to see Mike sweat for a change. And, once John had helped Mike out of whatever jam he was in, laugh like hell at his miserable ass.

All else aside, John figured he owed Mike whatever help he needed.  Mike had helped him out of a jam or two back in college. John knew he tended to be a smart ass. He had been in a few bars where Mike had stepped between him and some guy who wanted to tear John apart for some comment or other. John had never suffered fools well and wasn't shy about telling the fools they were insufferable. Mike on the other hand was cool in tense situations. He stepped back and surveyed the situation, worked the angles before rushing in. John supposed it was his background.

John sipped his coffee and informed his boss, Jim Harkness, the Information Systems Division Manager, that he was taking vacation for the rest of the week. Jim raised holy hell about taking unplanned vacation. He went on and on about system reconfigurations, network installations and software testing, but John could tell most of his wrath was contrived. Jim had to raise a little hell, if only for show, but he knew John hadn't taken off more than a couple of hours in the last six months and had worked quite a few nights and weekends on various system crashes and other sundry emergencies. When Jim finished his tirade he took a deep breath, paused for a few seconds and said “OK, John, go on and do what you have to do, but be quick about it and get your ass back here on Monday.”

It was after eight by the time John pulled into the satellite parking lot at Ronald Reagan International airport. The snow had been falling since four in the morning and had slowed the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic to an inch-by-inch crawl through stagnant clouds of engine exhaust and freezing, smoke-stained, gray slush. John had a stroke of good luck in that a few folks had failed to check in for the 9:45 a.m. Gambler's Special shuttle to Atlantic City. John guessed this was because of the snow and he was able to get a seat on standby. While he sat in the boarding gate waiting to be called to his flight, he took out his cell phone and punched in Rachael's office number. “Rachael, honey” he muttered to himself as he punched in the number, “try to be understanding for once.”

Although any traveler in the passenger lounge who cared to eavesdrop would have heard just one side of John's conversation, the other side left little to the imagination.

“Yes, Rachael, I know I was out of town all last week.”

“No, I haven't forgotten that I have to be in Atlanta for that systems administrator's conference next week.”

“I don't know when I expect to have time to discuss our relationship. I know you have something you need to discuss … I don't have the time now and I am running out of tolerance for this situation. All I know is that the neighbor's dog has been more affectionate than you have been in the last few months, and that little shit tries to bite me every time I walk by.”

“Yeah, OK, I'm sorry, that was mean, but you have to admit we just don't have the passion we used to.”

“Yeah, I know, that is part of what you want to discuss. I'll be back soon and we will sit down and talk about it.”

“No, I'm not sure why I have to go to New Jersey except that I'm needed there. Well, no, it's not exactly business … it's more like helping out an old friend.”

“What do you mean what's her name? It's …” John started to say Mike Compari, then remembered how much Rachael disliked Mike and stopped, not wanting to start another heated exchange.

He remembered how inebriated Mike had been as best man at their wedding. Mike had handed John the ring and then thrown up all over the minister with gusto. Rachael had never forgiven him for that. Shit, he thought, I'd be better off telling her it's some girl than telling her it's Mike. 

“Listen,” John spoke fast into the phone, not giving Rachael time to react “that's all I know and they are calling my flight, so I have to go, I'll call you when I know more. Goodbye.”

John stared out of the airplane window watching Washington D.C. become smaller and smaller. With each minute he ascended he was feeling a little better until he lost sight of the city with satisfaction. He admitted to himself that if he never saw D.C. again he would be a much happier man.  It wasn't just D.C. It was his whole lifestyle.

His marriage had started out with such hope and promise but had turned into two passionless people just passing each other in the hallways and getting through another meal in silence. The job at the bank had become routine and the commute back and forth from the suburbs was taking years off his life. He wasn't sure just where things had started going off track.

In fact, there wasn't any one time when it went south: he and Rachael had just drifted in different directions over the last year or two. She was finishing grad school and devoted a lot of time to schoolwork, in addition to her full time job at a beltway consulting firm.  Her career was starting to take off and all she seemed to talk about these days was the office, this project, that presentation, while John pretended to listen and just stared off into space wishing he was somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else.

John felt a wave of deep sadness, almost emptiness, wash over him as the pilot announced they would be landing in Atlantic City in a few moments. At that moment John didn't care if the plane landed intact or plummeted to the ground in a ball of flame. When the plane touched down and taxied to the gate John's thoughts turned back to the reason why he had come. Mike.

John's flight arrived in Atlantic City at 11:05 a.m. after circling the airport for what seemed like an hour. While the plane circled, John thought back to the first time he and Mike had met, some fourteen years earlier. They had both been freshmen at Georgetown, but that was where the similarities ended. 

Mike was from the North, New York City and part of a large Italian family. He sometimes hinted about a connection to the Mafia but was always vague. He grew up in Queens and learned how to survive on the street pretty early ‒ a little too street smart and a little too early, according to him. He'd been in quite a bit of trouble when he was a kid, involved with the wrong crowd, and wound up doing a stint in juvy hall.

That was why he had gone into social work; a counselor had taken an interest in him in juvy hall and turned him around. He came out of juvy hall on a mission to help other kids who were taking the wrong path in life: he wanted to pass on the favor the counselor had done for him. He turned his life around, studied hard and went on to college, the first in his family to escape the old neighborhood.

After graduation, he did a tour with the Peace Corps and then took a job as a counselor at a juvenile detention center. Three years later he was running the juvy center himself.

Mike was also a liberal, a democrat and a Luddite. He hated anything electronic, he wouldn't own a computer or a cell phone, and would probably never trade in his VHS and tape player for DVDs and CDs.

John on the other hand was the southerner, born and raised in rural Virginia. In the South ‘I'm going to kick your ass' meant just that, not ‘I'm coming after your whole family'. And in the South guys were quick to throw a punch but just as quick to have a couple of beers together when the fight was over and end up slapping each other on the back and calling each other Bubba.

He grew up on a corn, tomato and tobacco farm and when he left the farm, he never looked back. Because he grew up without all the modern conveniences (the TV had a total of three channels, and one of them was PBS) he now embraced technology. He was from an old Virginia family, one of the first families of Virginia, FFV his mother called it.

His ancestor, William Wye, had received a royal land grant for close to a thousand acres of prime Virginia farmland and brought his own boat over from England in 1668. Most of the original thousand acres had been lost or sold over the years and John's father had inherited just over two hundred from the original thousand. John was proud of his lineage and could list each of his ancestors back to the 1500s in England.

At college, John had double majored in systems technology and finance and gone into the banking business after graduation. John was a capitalist and a libertarian; he believed that the worst thing you could do for poor people was give them money, especially his. Mike and John had stayed up on many nights in college, until the sun rose, debating political issues, doing point-counterpoint, Mike taking the left and John taking the right. But no matter how heated the discussions had been they ended by agreeing to disagree. 

John expected Mike to be waiting for him at the arrival gate; he'd better have a damned good explanation for dragging me out of bed at dawn, and bringing me to New Jersey in the middle of a snowstorm, he thought. And the explanation had better include an apology and an invitation to kick back a few bottles of Black & Tan.

He panned the crowd of other people's friends and relatives.  He had the sense that he could feel the eyes of the people waiting at the gate, scanning the passengers coming off the plane, searching for someone. The scrutinizing gazes were tactile as, for a second, each looked for recognition and finding none, moved onto the next passenger. He'd had the same feeling many times, on many out-of-town trips, when no one was waiting for him at the arrival gate of a strange airport in a strange town.

John wasn't prepared for the spark of recognition in the piercing blue eyes of someone who looked to be the twin brother of Grizzly Adams. Well, he didn't look exactly like Grizzly Adams but he looked enough like him to make John look around for the bear. He stood next to the ticket counter with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders, grinning through a shaggy, blond beard that ended midway down his huge barrel chest.

The mountain man look-alike swaggered over to John, extended a huge paw and drawled a two-word question “You John?” John nodded. “This here is for you.” The bearded man grinned while he pumped John's right hand up and down. He produced a scrap of paper in his left hand and pressed it into John's shirt pocket.

In the two or three seconds it took John to retrieve the scrap of paper from his pocket and read the address scrawled across it, the bearded figure was gone. John scanned the concourse in all directions but the Grizzly Adams look-alike who had been standing arm's length from him moments before had vanished. 

“Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick,” John muttered under his breath, “what the hell
IS
this all about?”  

It took fifteen minutes and two twenty-dollar bills for John to convince the cab driver to take him to the address on the scrap of paper.

The cabby kept refusing over and over, saying things like, “You don't want to go there!” “You got no business in that part of town.” “I ain't taking my cab down there!”