Authors: Thomas Mcguane
Faucher scanned his menu vigorously. “My God, this all looks good and will look even better after a nice cocktail.” He was a vampire coming to life at sundown; with each drink pale flames arose beneath his skin.
They ordered from a ruddy-faced girl who seemed excited by every choice they made, especially the Spanish fish soup with which they both commenced. She had a Fritz the Kat tattoo on her upper arm, which Faucher peered at over the top of his menu. John asked for a bottle of Bandol, and when the candles had been lit he thought the way lay clear for Erik to make himself plain. Erik looked down at the table for a long moment, absentmindedly rearranging his silverware. He heaved a great sigh and raised his eyes in self-abnegation. “I feel right at home here,” said Erik. “Talk about your fresh start!” Briggs remained quiet and didn’t take the bait.
The mayor came to the table with the vibrant merry hustle with which he drew all attention to himself. Briggs introduced him to Faucher, smiled patiently, and did not rise but stared at the mayor’s fringed vest. Following a local convention, the mayor asked John when he had gotten back.
“I’ve been
back
about five times this summer,” said John, “from Tanzania, Berlin, Denver, and Surinam.” He was always exasperated at being asked this question.
The mayor held his head in his hands. “Surinam! Never heard of it! Denver, I’ve heard of! What’s in Surinam?”
“Bauxite.”
“
Baux
—”
“Pal,” said Faucher, “give it a rest. We’re trying to eat.” He made a shooing motion and the mayor left; Faucher raised his eyebrows as he asked Briggs, “How can we miss him if he won’t go away?”
The last time Briggs had seen him, Faucher had been insuring marine cargo out of a nice office on Old Colony Avenue in Boston and doing rather well, especially in the early going, when Everett Hoyt had tipped him off to opportunities with far-ranging classmates. Now, Faucher said, he was an investment adviser at a tiny merchant bank in Boston, a real boutique bank. He liked meeting his people in St. Louis Square on warm spring days (he had a key), to lay out the year’s strategy, clients who were charmed by his arrival on a Raleigh ten-speed. For a long time he had made cavalier decisions about his clients’ investments, but now, in harder-to-understand times, they trusted him less and obliged him to chase obscure indices across the moonscape of U.S. and foreign equities. He vowed to deepen his mystery. He kept a hunter-jumper at Beverly and dropped into equestrian talk to baffle the credulous, using terms like
volade
and
piaffe
and
volte
to describe the commonplace trades he made (and commissioned), or comparing a sustained investment strategy to such esoterica as Raimondo D’Inzeao’s taking the Irish bank at Aachen on the great Merano. His own equestrian activities, he admitted, consisted in jumping obstacles that would scarcely weary a poodle, in company with eight- and nine-year-old girls and under the tutelage of roaring Madame Schacter, a tyrant in jodhpurs married to a Harvard statistician. To his clientele, yachts and horses were reassuring entities, things to which one’s attention could turn when times were good.
Faucher said, “John, I’ve got to tell you, nothing makes me happy anymore. I need new work. I want to be more like you, John.
I need a gimmick.
You get the time-zone watch from Sharper Image, and the rest is a walk in the park. Whereas my job is to reassure people who are afraid to lose what they have because they don’t know how they got it in the first place. John, it’s not that I mind lying but I like variety, and I’m not getting it.” His face was mottled with emotion Briggs found hard to fathom. “I desperately wish to be a cowboy.”
“Of course you do, Erik.”
“That family”—Faucher pointed conspicuously toward a nearby table with a rancher, his wife, and their three nearly grown children—“has been here an hour, and they have
never
spoken to each other once.
Don’t people here know how to have fun?” The family was listening to this, the father staring into the space just over his plate, his wife grinning at a mustard jar in fear. “We do that when we
hate
each other,” Faucher said.
“I don’t think they hate each other, Erik.”
“Well, it sure looks like it! I’ve never seen such depressing people.”
Marjorie proceeded from the bar with a colorful tall drink. She was wearing a red tunic with military buttons over a short skirt and buttoned boots, hair pulled tight and tied straight atop her head with a silver ribbon. Briggs was glad to see her; she looked full of life. She said, “May I?”
Briggs got quickly to his feet and drew a chair for Marjorie, steadying her arm as she sat. Faucher looked very glum indeed. He said in an unconvincing monotone, “Sorry I missed you this morning. I understand you cooked a marvelous breakfast.”
“It filled us up, didn’t it?” she said to Briggs.
“All we could eat and no leftovers,” Briggs agreed.
“What’d you do with the rental car?” Faucher barked.
“In front of the bank, keys under the seat.”
Faucher lost interest in the car. “Not like I’ll need it,” he said with a moan.
The ranch family stood without looking at one another, obliging at least two of them to survey the crown molding. The father glared at Erik and dribbled some coins to the table from a huge paw while his waitress scowled from across the room. Karaoke had started at the bar, and a beaming wheat farmer was singing “That’s Amore.” “Can I get a menu?” Marjorie asked, craning around the room.
“Has it possibly occurred to you that we’re having a private conversation?” Faucher said.
Marjorie stopped all animation for a moment. “Oh, I’m so
sorry.
” She looked crushed as she arose. Briggs tried to smile and opened his hands helplessly. She gave him a little wave, paused uncertainly, picked up her drink, and then turned toward the bar and was gone.
Briggs’s face was red. “I’m surprised you have any friends at all!” He was practically shouting.
“I only have one: you.”
“Well, don’t count on it if you continue in this vein.”
“I suppose it made sense for me to make two changes of planes plus a car rental to have you address me with such loftiness,” Faucher wailed. “I came to you in need, but your ascent to the frowning classes must make that unclear.”
After dinner, they had a glass of brandy. And then Marjorie appeared at the karaoke and managed to raise the volume as she belted out “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” followed immediately by a Cher imitation, pursed lips and slumberous eyes. “I Got You, Babe”—she directed various frug moves and Vegas gestures in Faucher’s direction.
Feeling under attack, Faucher urged Briggs to call for the bill and pay it promptly. “I can’t believe how quickly things have gone downhill,” he said, as if under mortar fire.
Marjorie followed them out of the bar. She was so angry she moved in jerks. She walked straight over to Briggs and said, “You think you’re above all this, don’t you?” Then she slapped him across the face, so astonishing him that he neither raised a protective hand nor averted the now-stinging cheek. “You want another one?” she inquired, lips flattened against her teeth.
“I think I’ll hold off,” Briggs said.
“Ask yourself what Jesus would do,” Faucher suggested.
Marjorie whirled on him and John hurried away toward a boarded-up drygoods store where he’d parked; Faucher joined him. When they got to the car, they looked back to see Marjorie’s friends restraining her by the arms theatrically. A cowboy with a goatee and jet black Stetson stared ominously as their car passed close to him on the way out of town.
“Don’t drive next to them, for Christ’s sake!” Faucher said. “The big one is about to come out of the bag!”
Faucher mused as they drove south into the piney hills and grassland.
“People have become addicted to hidden causes. That’s why you were the one to get slapped. They’ve been trained to mistrust anything that’s right in front of their eyes. That woman was a turnoff. Everything reminded her of
family,
like it was a substance. Not
the
family or
my
family but just
family,
like it was liverwurst or toothpaste. You can’t imagine the difficulty I had preserving the pathetic taco I was trying to sell as an erection in the face of all that enthusiasm for family. I told her she was amazing, and that seemed to take all the wind out of her sails. Oh, John, my path has been uneven. I’ve made so many enemies. Some of them intend to track me with dogs.”
“Outlast them.” Briggs listlessly watched the road for deer.
“I hope I can. Really, I’ve come here because you never quite give up on me, do you?”
“We’re old friends,” Briggs droned.
“Perhaps once I’m a cowboy, you’ll invest your remarks with greater meaning. Anyway, to continue my saga: I knew the noose was tightening; charges were being prepared. But I had been so nimble over the years at helping my clients improperly state assets for death taxes that they saw the wisdom in dropping all complaints against me.”
Erik had moved in with his daughter and harassed her with dietary advice until she drove him to the bus station. Settling for a year in Waltham, he lived on the thinnest stream of remaining Boston comforts that shielded him from freefalling disclosure of his curiosity-filled investment days. He might have stayed, but the only job he could find was teaching speed-reading with a primitive machine that exposed only a single line of text at a time, gradually accelerating down the page; that didn’t appeal to him. He went back to Boston to “clean some clocks,” but important inhibitions were gone and he crossed the line, running afoul of the law at several points but especially attempted blackmail. Nevertheless, he survived until a client—with whom he had reached a mutually satisfactory settlement exchanging forgiveness for secrecy—died; and that brought snoopy children into Faucher’s world, followed by investigators, and “Net-net, I’m on the run.”
Just before sunrise, Briggs heard Faucher calling to him. He climbed the stairs, pulling on a sweatshirt and his shorts, and entered the guest room. He found Erik kneeling next to the window, curtains pulled back slightly. He gestured for Briggs to join him.
In the yard below, two men stood smoking next to a vehicle with government plates. The smoke could be smelled in Erik’s room as he stared hard at them. “They’re here for me, John,” he said. “I can’t believe you’ve done this. Now I’m going to jail.”
“You know perfectly well that I didn’t do this,” Briggs said. But nothing could prevent him from feeling unreasonably guilty.
“Judas Iscariot. That’s how I shall always know you.”
They carried Faucher away. Briggs ran alongside in an L.L. Bean bathrobe pouring out offers of help, but Erik waved him off like a man shooing flies.
The weather began to change, and the high white clouds that had remained at their stations for so long moved across the horizon, leaving ghostly streaks in their place. One quiet afternoon, while John looked at the casework that was to follow the demise of the town in Delaware and the new prosperity of the town in North Carolina—mine mitigation in Manitoba, bike paths, a public swimming pool, a library wing in exchange for ground permanently poisoned by cyanide—the phone rang. It was Carol, bringing news that Erik was going to prison. He had been ruinously disagreeable in court, which inflated the sentences to which his crimes had given rise. She aired this as another grievance, as though little good could be extracted from Faucher now. “You were with him, John, why didn’t you help him?”
“I didn’t know how to help him. We were just spending time together.”
“You were just spending time together?”
“I’m afraid that’s it. I feel I wasn’t very perceptive.”
“You have my agreement on that,” said Carol. “He left you literally eager for imprisonment. You had a chance to put him back on his feet, and you let him fall.”
“Well, I don’t know the facts. I—”
“You don’t
need
to know the facts. You need to listen to what I’m telling you.”
“Carol, I don’t think you understand how tiresome you’ve become.”
“Is that your way of commiserating with me?”
“Yes,” Briggs said simply. “Yes, Carol, it is.”
At times, John worried there
was
something he should have done. The whole experience had been like missing a catch on the high trapeze: the acrobat is pulling away from you, falling into the distance. Or perhaps the acrobat is pulling you off your own trapeze. Neither thought was pleasant.
It was inevitable that he would get worked once more for the newsletter. Hoyt wanted to know how Briggs had found Faucher.
“Breathing,” Briggs said.
“You’ve got good air out there,” said Hoyt. “I’ll give you that.”
In November, on his way to the town in North Carolina he had saved from oblivion, he stopped in Boston, rented a car, and drove to the prison at Walpole but Faucher refused to see him. Sitting in his topcoat in the pale-green meeting room, Briggs rose slowly to acknowledge the uniformed custodian who bore his rejection. He was furious.
But once he was seated on the plane, drink in hand, looking out on the runway at men pushing carts, a forklift wheeling along a train of red lights, a neighboring jet pushing back, he felt a little better. His second drink was delivered reluctantly by a harried stewardess—only because Briggs told her he was on his way to his mother’s funeral. At this point, a glow seemed to form around Briggs’s seatmate, and Briggs struck up a conversation, ordering drinks for both of them as soon as the plane was airborne. The seatmate, an unfriendly black man who worked for Prudential Insurance, actually was going to a funeral, the funeral of a friend, and this revelation triggered a slightly euphoric summary of Briggs’s friendship with Faucher, delivered in remarkable detail, considering that Briggs’s companion was trying to read. Briggs concluded his description of his visit to the prison by raising his arms in the air and crying, “Hallelujah!” a gesture that made him realize, instantly, that he had had enough to drink. The seatmate narrowed his eyes, and when Briggs explained that, at long last, a chapter of his life was over, the man, turning back to his open book, said wearily, “Do you actually believe that?”