The Duration (11 page)

“A secret locked away forever,” Chick said, bending a finger over the picture and tapping on the topmost shelf. It was hard to see what was there. I brushed his finger aside and squinted, but all I saw was something that looked like a bat in a sack.

“She knew the whole time,” said Chick. “That's the horn.”

We left the library an hour later with a plan. Or plans.

Chickie's plan was insane. It involved infiltrating Head-Connect via a sort of hillbilly parkour, sneaking into the basement of the main building—where Chickie was sure the old Van Nest safe remained—
cracking
the safe, removing the now 100-year-old rhino horn from its shroud, spiriting it back out of Head-Connect, and committing it to the woods in some druidic fashion. If we couldn't locate the rest of the rhino, at least we could make it whole. A rhino's soul is in its horn. It's what it's got. Something like that.

My plan was, to my way of thinking, more realistic. It involved figuring out who we knew at Head-Connect—we had to know someone—and asking them if there was a rhino horn sitting around, or if they'd ever heard of one. Was there an abandoned safe on the property? It seemed unlikely. Even in his despondency, Guy Van Nest wouldn't have just left his valuables behind, right? No safe meant no horn—if indeed there ever was one—and no horn, then, you know, no need for any insanity.

My plan might have lacked the drama and excitement of Chick's, but it was just about the limit of what I was willing to do. I'd borrowed upward of $75,000 to finance a law degree and, as tangled a history as we had, I wasn't prepared to surrender it in the pursuit of Chick's lunatic errand. There were legal and ethical issues to consider. As it stood I was due back in Boston for work by 8:30 Monday morning.

“So, let's talk to Unsie about this,” I said as we walked away from the library.

Chick, so focused and impassioned a few minutes earlier, was now fidgety.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, checking his watch. It wasn't yet noon. “Can we do it later?”

I shrugged. We were two blocks from Asgard.

“Let's do it later,” Chick said. “I actually have a thing in a few minutes.”

“What thing?” I asked.

Chick shrugged. “Just stuff. Errands.”

I looked at him.

“What's going on, man?”

Chick gave me his big smile.

“Don't worry about it, dude. Listen, we are going to find that thing, and it's going to be great.” He looked me in the eye. “Thank you for helping me. It means a lot.”

“You're full of shit,” I said.

A purple Trans Am idled at the corner of Church and Main, because in Gable it could always be 1983. Chick spotted it.

“That's my ride.”

I scanned the Trans Am. A driver and the waitress from breakfast in the front. A guy in the back.

We were outside the Heirloom. If Chick was going to pull this shit, I was going to extract a price, the past for the future.

“Fine,” I said, hooking a thumb toward the door. “Meet me here at six sharp,”

Chick looked up at the establishment, and his eyes narrowed.

“Meet me here or come find me in Boston,” I said.

The big smile came back.

“Heirloom it is. Six o'clock.”

I nodded skeptically.

“See you then,” I said.

Chick gave me an enthusiastic double thumbs-up and jogged off toward the waiting Trans Am. I watched him go.

“What the fuck, dude?” I said to Unsie, when I found him in the back of Asgard, folding performance T-shirts into shiny squares. “Drugs, right?”

Unsie kept folding.

“I think so. I mean, it's not my area of expertise, but sure seems like it.”

“Ginny Archey says he's been going back and forth to Sink City.”

“I guess. Seems to me that there's probably plenty of local options, no need to make the drive. Things are bad out here. But, again, it's not my thing.”

I picked up a shirt and folded it. His square looked better than mine. He took the shirt and shook it out, then folded it again.

We'd smoked a little in high school, except Unsie, who was too focused on lung capacity and had already begun researching ways to up the red blood cell count in his plasma. Jimmer and Chick smoked the most, the former using his high to deconstruct the moral arc of certain video games, the latter sinking into a poetic stupor. Never anything harder than weed, though, almost never. There were plenty of kids we knew pushing pharmaceuticals, and once in law school I tried to convince Kelly that we should enhance a Hootie & the Blowfish concert with Ecstasy, but it didn't work. I knew nothing about real drugs.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

Unsie looked at me.

“Hah,” he said.

“Come on, man.”

Unsie stopped folding the performance shirts.

“You come on,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

I looked around the store. Eight or nine people were milling around, trying on fleece vests and alpaca socks.

“Can you give him a job?” I asked.

Unsie looked up and spoke firmly, as if he'd thought it all out already.

“The kid is on drugs. I'm not going to give him a job. If he was not on drugs, I would consider it.”

He gestured to the quiet store.

“But look around. How long you think a job like this would hold Chick's attention? How many shirts you think he could fold before he tied one around his forehead? Some days even I want to take a blowtorch to the place.”

He sighed.

“Look, Pete, I know you feel like you owe him.”

He stopped. I sensed an opening, thin as it may be.

“Kid saved your life,” I said. “You owe him too.”

Unsie rolled his eyes.

“Please.”

“If I can get him to give up the drugs, you give him a job. If he screws up, fire him.”

Unsie shook his head, but more in exasperation than in resolve.

“You're just going to get him to give up the drugs, huh?” he said. “What drugs is he on?”

I didn't know.

“You should probably start there, don't you think?”

I nodded.

“So that's where we'll start. Let's find out what we're dealing with.”

The “we” was on purpose, again.

“Hah,” Unsie said again.

I decided to shift gears, circle back later and act like we'd agreed.

“Hey, do we know anyone who works over at Head-Connect?”

Unsie finished the shirts and walked over to an inventory console.

“Yeah, sure. Why?”

I shook my head.

“You don't want to know.”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“So,” I asked. “Who?”

He tilted his head. I like people who have little unconscious tics that manifest when they're thinking. It's like you can see into their minds. I really like people who make little clicky noises with their tongues when they think. Like they're micro-processing or something. I trust them, trust that they're thinking. I've been working on emulating those gestures. They seem like useful gestures, deployable in a number of situations.

“Well, some friends of friends work there. Sales, outdoor rec. I think Ava Winston is in there somewhere. They contract out their snowshoeing and Nordic to us in the winter.”

“What does it mean to contract out a Nordic?”

Unsie looked up and made a sad face.

“It means we lead the cross-country ski tours through the property. Out to the Magic Meadow, through the woods. Bunch of bankers and entertainment types, can't ski worth a shit. But they pay well.”

He clucked his tongue.

“Longest ninety minutes of your life, though.”

“That's probably not true,” I said. “So, so far we know you and Ava Winston.”

I thought for a second.

“You ever get in there?”

Unsie looked at me.

“Ava?”

“Head-Connect. You ever hang out inside?”

He shook his head.

“Not if I can help it.”

Unsie didn't like the idea of fitness retreats, preferring the idea of fitness lifestyles. He was disdainful of anything that smacked of a shortcut.

“What's Ava Winston do?”

Unsie returned to the console.

“Don't know. I never see her. But she was in the paper a few years ago when they promoted her. Local interest story, something like that.”

“Her dad still around?”

“Yeah, in the existential sense. He retired a few years ago. Moved west.”

“Shoot,” I said.

I looked around the showroom. A rack of skis. A fleet of kayaks.

“You ever see a rhino horn down there?”

Unsie looked up at me.

“Are you on drugs too?”

When we were sixteen, Unsie broke his leg playing spring soccer after sneaking out with us on a day that he was supposed to be grounded. His punishment was six weeks in a foot-to-hip cast and a cat that bit his exposed toes. One hot June day we sprung him from his house and drove him out to the quarry in West Normanton, where Shaunda Schoenstein and the other rising seniors on St. Eustace's girls' field hockey team had installed themselves as sirens. Shaunda had a plastic baggie full of pot and a two-piece bikini whose top she would untie when she was sunning on her stomach, and as we swung Unsie and his leg across the narrow creek that separated the access road from the winding path to the quarry, we discussed various ruses that we might use to get her to sit up suddenly. Jimmer said that if she, or frankly if any of the other girls there, put themselves in a compromising position, we should feign a drowning. They would probably feel compelled to dive in, breasts unfettered, to save us.

The quarry was a mile back in the woods off of Route 183, a rectangle of limestone, shades of green and bottomless. One long edge was crowded with trees, but the other sloped gently down into the water. On the eastern short side was a sort of altar of rock, 12 feet up at its highest point, with sloping sides and a perfect flat top for lounging. On the western edge was the sacrificial cliff, a promontory 65 feet high, with leap spots at 30, 40, and 60 feet. I'd done the 60-foot jump once, in my sneakers, after a half-hour of mind games. Chickie did it every time we went, even though he couldn't swim very well.

We pushed through the undergrowth, a determined expedition, Unsie on his crutches and the rest of us in swimsuits. Eventually we emerged at the base of the quarry. Shaunda and a bunch of the other St. Eustace girls were crowding the altar. A couple of disgruntled junior males scuffed along the edges. Girls like that always had body men. Someone had to buy the Slush Puppies.

Shaunda waved at me. Alas, she was wearing a T-shirt.

The four of us waved back.

“Hello, ladies,” Jimmer said, but it came out sounding skeevy and he frowned.

We crossed the vestibule and emerged at the water's edge. Nods were exchanged and we began unfurling our towels, marking off our plot of quarry. We weren't there just for the girls. Of course, Unsie couldn't go in on account of the cast, and Chick didn't swim on his own. But the girls didn't know that.