A Simple Plan (5 page)

“Stop the truck,” I said. “We can count it here.”

J
ACOB
pulled off onto the edge of the road, and we climbed outside into the cold. We were about three miles west of town. Snow-covered fields lined either side of the road, and there were no houses in sight, no lights of any sort. If a car had approached us from either direction, we would’ve been able to see it for nearly a mile before it reached us.

Jacob and Lou counted the money; I stood behind them with a flashlight. Mary Beth remained inside the empty cab, sleeping on the seat. They organized the packets into stacks; each stack was ten packets high. It seemed to take forever to count them. I divided my attention equally between the piles of money and the surrounding horizon, alert for approaching lights.

The night was very quiet. The wind hissed across the empty fields; the snow made an occasional creaking sound as it settled alongside the road; and over it all, soft but insistent, came the steady shuffling hush, like cards being dealt at a casino, of Jacob and Lou counting the packets into piles.

When they finished, there were forty-four stacks lined up one after the other along the truck’s tailgate. It was $4.4 million.

It took a little while for this to sink in. We stood there, gazing at the money. Lou counted the stacks again, touching the top packet of each one with his forefinger.

“How much is that apiece?” Jacob whispered.

I had to think for a second. “Almost a million and a half.”

We continued to stare at the money, stunned.

“Put it away,” I said finally, shivering in the cold. I handed Jacob the duffel bag and watched it grow solid as he slowly refilled it.

When all the money was inside, I took it back to the cab.

L
OU LIVED
southwest of Ashenville, in the opposite direction from me, and we drove there first. It was getting colder and colder; a fretwork of ice was forming along the edge of the windshield. The torn rear window flapped in the wind, sending a steady stream of frigid air pulsing through the cab. Mary Beth rode in the back, huddled halfway into the truck, right up against our necks, so that I could hear him breathing in my ear. The bag of money was resting on the floor, wedged tightly between my legs. I held the top shut with my hand.

It was quarter till seven by the time we reached Lou’s.

Nancy’s car was in the yard, and there were lights on in the house. It was a large, run-down farmhouse, ancient, one of the oldest surviving homes in the area. Lou and Nancy rented it from Sonny Major, whose grandfather had once owned all the surrounding fields, growing corn and cabbage in them; he’d been one of the region’s gentry in the high days before the Depression. Things had gone downhill since then. Sonny’s father had sold nearly all the land over the years, except for two thin strips along the road. One of these supported the farmhouse; the other, a smaller plot about three quarters of a mile to the south, had a tiny, rusted-out house trailer on it. Sonny lived in the trailer, alone, within sight of the house he’d grown up in. He called himself a carpenter but survived chiefly off the money he made from Lou and Nancy’s rent.

Jacob parked in the driveway, leaving the engine on. Lou opened the door and climbed outside, hesitating for a second before shutting it.

“I was thinking we might each take a packet now,” he said. “Just to celebrate with.” He smiled at me.

I slid over toward the door, keeping the duffel bag between my legs. Mary Beth climbed in through the window, his fur smelling fresh and cold. He shook himself and then sat down on the seat, leaning up against Jacob. Jacob put his arm around the dog.

“Forget about the money, Lou,” I said.

He wiped at his nose with his hand. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing’s going to change in your life for the next six months,” I said.

Jacob patted Mary Beth’s side, a hollow sound. There were trees clustered around Lou’s house, huge ones with thick, gray trunks rising up tall against the blackness of the night sky. They were swaying a little in the wind, their branches clicking together. Down the road Sonny’s trailer was completely dark. He wasn’t home.

“All I’m asking for—” Lou started, but I shook my head, cutting him off.

“You aren’t hearing me, Lou. What I’m saying is, don’t ask.”

I leaned over and pulled shut the door. He stared at me for a moment, through the window, then exchanged a quick glance with Jacob before turning and walking slowly up his driveway.

I
T TOOK
forty minutes to drive from Lou’s house to mine. Jacob and I covered much of this distance in silence, sunk in our own private thoughts. I replayed my encounter with Carl. I’d lied to him; it’d come easily, naturally, and I was surprised by this. I’d never been successful at deceit before. Even as a child I couldn’t lie; I hadn’t had the self-confidence for it—the essential calmness—and had always ended up either giving myself away or breaking down and confessing. As I reviewed my talk with Carl, though, I could find no weak points, no holes in my story. Jacob had overstepped, it was true, asking about the plane, but I realized now that what he’d said wasn’t as compromising as it had originally seemed. Perhaps, as he claimed, it might even help us.

I hardly thought of the money. I hadn’t yet allowed myself to begin considering it as my own. It was too vast a sum for me to personalize; it seemed abstract, a mere number, nothing more. I felt an edge of lawlessness, it’s true—a cool, cocky feeling rippling with a terrible fear of getting caught—but it stemmed more from my mendacity with Carl than from any understanding of the magnitude of our theft.

Jacob had pulled a candy bar from the glove compartment and was chewing at it while he drove. The dog sat on the seat beside him, his ears erect, watching him eat. We were on Highway 17 now, making our way into the outskirts of Delphia. Trees were springing up alongside the road, houses beginning to cluster into subdivisions. The traffic slowly thickened. I was almost home.

The thought came to me suddenly, in a little jolt of panic, that if we were to be caught, it would be because of Lou.

“Lou’ll tell Nancy, won’t he?” I said to Jacob.

“Will you tell Sarah?” he asked.

“I agreed not to.”

Jacob shrugged, took a bite from his candy bar. “Lou agreed not to tell Nancy.”

I frowned, dismayed. I knew that I was going to tell Sarah about the money as soon as I got home—I couldn’t imagine not telling her—and this knowledge seemed to confirm my reservations about Lou. He’d tell Nancy, and one of them would screw it up.

I reached over and adjusted the rearview mirror so that I could look at my forehead. Jacob turned on the dome light for me. When I touched it, the bump felt smooth and hard, like a pebble. The skin directly above it was shiny and taut, while the area around it was taking on a purplish tint, a painful-looking darkness, as blood coagulated within the damaged tissue. I licked the thumb of my glove and briefly tried to clean the wound.

“How do you think that thing knew he was in there?” Jacob asked.

“The bird?”

He nodded.

“It’s like a vulture. They just know.”

“Vultures see you, though. They see you crawling in the desert. That’s how they know you’re dying, if you’re crawling or just lying there. That thing couldn’t see inside the plane.”

“Maybe it smelled him.”

“Frozen things don’t smell.”

“It just knew, Jacob,” I said.

He nodded, three short, quick movements of his head. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly my point.” He took another bite of his candy bar, then fed the last little bit to Mary Beth. The dog seemed to swallow it without chewing.

When we pulled into my driveway, I sat there for a few seconds before climbing out, staring off through the windshield. The house’s front light was on, illuminating the trees in the yard, their branches glistening with ice. The living-room curtains were drawn, and there was smoke coming from the chimney.

“You and Lou going out tonight?” I asked. “Celebrating the new year?”

It was cold in the truck; I could see our breath in the air, even the dog’s. The sky outside was cloudy, starless.

“I suppose.”

“With Nancy?”

“If she wants.”

“Drinking?”

“Look, Hank. You don’t have to be so hard on Lou. You can trust him. He wants this just as bad as you—more so, probably. He’s not going to mess it up.”

“I’m not saying I don’t trust him. I’m saying he’s ignorant and a drunk.”

“Oh, Hank—”

“No, hear me out.” I waited until he turned to face me. “I’m asking you to take responsibility for him.”

He put his arm around the dog. “What do you mean, responsibility?”

“What I mean is, if he fucks up, it’s your fault. I’ll hold you to blame.”

Jacob turned away from me and looked outside. All up and down the street my neighbors’ windows were full of light. People were finishing their dinners, showering, dressing, busily preparing for their New Year’s celebrations.

“Who takes responsibility for me?” he asked.

“I do. I’ll look after the both of us.” I smiled at him. “I’ll be my brother’s keeper.”

It came out like a joke, but I only half meant it that way. All through our childhood our father had told us how we ought to take care of each other, how we couldn’t depend on anyone else. “Family,” he used to say, “that’s what it always comes down to in the end: the bonds of blood.” Jacob and I had never managed to pull it off, though; even as children we were always letting each other down. Because of his weight, he’d been mercilessly teased at school and was constantly getting into fights. I knew that I was supposed to help him, that I ought to be jumping to his defense, but I could never figure out a way to do it. I was weak, small for my age, a thin, bony kid, and I’d just stand with everyone else, in a tight circle around my brother and his tormentors, watching, in absolute silence, while he was beaten up. It became the template for an interaction that we’d ceaselessly repeat as we aged: Jacob would fail somehow, and I—feeling impotent and embarrassed and unworthy—would do nothing but observe.

I reached over the dog’s head and punched Jacob lightly on the shoulder, feeling silly doing it, an awkwardly forced attempt at fraternal camaraderie. “I’ll take care of you,” I said, “and you’ll take care of me.”

Jacob didn’t respond. He just watched me open the door, pull the duffel bag out of the truck, and, straining, hoist it over my shoulder. Then, as I was picking my way carefully up through the snow to the house, he reversed down the driveway and drove off.

I
ENTERED
quietly, setting the bag inside the hall closet, on the floor toward the back. I draped my jacket across its top.

There were sliding doors on either side of the entranceway; the one on the right led to the dining room, the one on the left to the living room. Both were closed now. The dining room’s was rarely open; except for the extremely sporadic occasions when we had company over, we always ate in the kitchen. The living room’s, on the other hand, was closed only when we had a fire going.

Straight ahead, the entranceway divided into a flight of stairs on the left and a long, narrow hallway on the right. The stairs led to the second floor, the hallway to the kitchen at the rear of the house. Both of these were sunk in darkness.

I slid open the door to the living room. Sarah was in there, reading in a chair beside the fire. As I entered, she looked up: a tall, thin-boned woman with dark blond, shoulder-length hair, and large, brown eyes. She had some lipstick on, a bright shade of red, and her hair was pulled away from her face with a barrette. Both things—the lipstick and the barrette—made her seem younger, more vulnerable, than she really was. She was wearing her bathrobe, a huge tent of white terry cloth with her initials sewn in blue thread above her heart, and its folds masked the distension of her abdomen somewhat, making it look like she merely had a pillow resting on her lap. Beside her, on the table, was a half-finished bowl of cereal.

She saw me looking at the bowl. “I got hungry,” she said. “I wasn’t sure when you’d be back.”

I went over to kiss her on the forehead, but just as I was bending down, she cried, “Oh!” grabbed my hand, and placed it on her stomach beneath the robe. She gave me a dreamy smile. “Feel it?” she asked.

I nodded. The baby was kicking. It felt like an erratic heartbeat, two firm thrusts and then a softer one. I hated when she made me do this. It gave me an uneasy feeling, knowing that something was alive inside her, feeding off her, like a parasite. I pulled my hand away, forced a smile.

“Do you want dinner?” she asked. “I could cook us an omelet.” She waved toward the back corner of the room, where an open doorway led into the kitchen.

I shook my head. “I’m all right.”

I sat down in the chair on the other side of the fireplace. I was trying to decide on the best way to tell her about the money, and as I attempted to work my way around this, it suddenly came to me that she might not approve; she might try to make me give the money back. This idea led me to a disturbing revelation. I saw for the first time how much I actually wanted the money. Up till then—with Jacob and Lou—I’d always been the one threatening to relinquish it, and this had allowed me to nurture the illusion that I was relatively disinterested in its fate: I would keep it, but only if certain rigorous conditions were met first. Now, confronted with the possibility of being forced myself to give it back, I understood how artificial those conditions really were. I wanted the money, I realized, and I’d do almost anything to keep it.