Something for Nothing (7 page)

He sipped his coffee. It was cold. If he didn't take the job (could you call drug smuggling a job?), he'd have to tell Linda that he was broke—that
they
were broke. And that would be very nearly as bad as giving up the Viking and the horse. Not because she'd be angry. She'd probably understand that it was the oil crisis that had done him in, rather than his own bungling (she didn't know about the gambling debts, of course, but she didn't know about the back taxes and the interest on
them, either). No, telling her was out of the question because she'd see him differently—look at him differently. She wouldn't say anything, but he'd know. He'd be right back to being the guy who'd lied to her fifteen or sixteen years ago at a fraternity party in Berkeley. He'd been at Armstrong, and she was visiting from Boston for the summer, staying with her cousin. He crashed the party with a couple of friends, and when they met he told her he was a business student at Berkeley. He kept up the charade all summer, but then suddenly Linda was pregnant with Sarah. And that was that. She was Irish Catholic, and they had to get married. But he also had to tell her the truth—that he wasn't a student at Berkeley, that the fancy house they were staying in didn't really belong to his family (he was house-sitting for some friend of his boss's at the car dealership where he was working), and that, yes, he'd swapped out the photos on the wall and the mantel for pictures of himself and his family.

He'd never forget the way she'd looked at him . . . not at him, but into him. And what she saw was the person he'd tried to hide—not just from her, but from pretty much everyone. Including himself. And, he knew, if Anderson Aircrafts went bust, then the wall he'd built up brick by brick between himself and the outside world (Linda included) would come crashing down all over again. It wasn't that he had something horrible to conceal. In fact, it was almost the opposite. His real fear was that, when exposed, the real Martin Anderson didn't add up to much of anything at all.

“Fuck,” Martin said out loud, and with enough irritation that the dog's ears went back.

He stood up, threw the dregs of his coffee into the bushes, and within five minutes he was pulling out of his driveway and driving slowly down Miwok Drive. The realtor said that Miwok was the name of an Indian tribe that had lived in the area a hundred or so years ago. He'd pointed out that a lot of the neighborhood streets in Walnut Station had Indian names. Martin thought it was a little odd to name your streets after the people you'd exterminated to make room for you, but
he certainly wasn't on a crusade. He wasn't some anthropologist out from UC Berkeley looking to start protests, or put some ads on TV like the one with the Indian crying about roadside trash. Peter loved to make fun of that one. He'd recite it whenever Sarah left her socks or dirty dishes or whatever lying around the house.

“Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” he'd say, affecting his most serious look. “And some people don't.”

When he drove past the Weavers' house, he saw that the driveway was empty. Hal's Mercedes was gone, and so was Miriam's station wagon. Martin knew where Miriam was. Tuesdays and Thursdays she taught art at the high school. He wondered what the kids thought of her. Especially the boys. She probably put up with a lot of shit in there. When he was that age he died for good-looking teachers. Couldn't stand it. He'd act out, make an ass of himself—anything to get their attention.

He also wondered what the other teachers thought of her. The men probably hovered around her classroom door, acted surprised to see her when she came out in her smock or whatever she wore, her hair up, her expression a little mysterious.

“Oh, hi,” they'd say. “I didn't know you were teaching today. How'd it go? I hope those kids aren't giving you too much trouble. Some of them think art is just free time.”

She'd see right through it, he knew, but it bothered him just the same. Not that he'd be any different. He'd tried the same crap with Peter's fourth-grade teacher—some horseshit he'd stolen from Linda about how the kids weren't quite adolescents but weren't really little boys anymore, either. On the other hand, she'd engaged him, told him about how crazy a couple of the boys could be. So there was that.

At the intersection not far past the Weavers', about eight or nine houses down, he didn't keep going straight ahead, like he usually did. Instead, he took a right, and then another right a few hundred yards after that, onto the frontage road that ran along the outside of their neighborhood. On his right was the walnut orchard that bordered the
neighborhood and acted as a kind of buffer between it and the frontage road. The neighborhood kids played back there all the time. Some of the older boys had put up tree forts, probably smoked cigarettes and looked at
Playboy
. They had battles with the green walnuts that were all over the ground. Peter said they used garbage-can lids as shields and pelted the shit out of each other with the walnuts. Sometimes, on a quiet evening when they were really going at it, Martin could hear the shouts and screams from his yard. He liked hearing it, but he got annoyed that Peter wasn't out there with them.

“That sounds like fun, doesn't it?” he'd asked once or twice, but Peter said that the older kids threw the walnuts too hard.

Martin slowed for the opening he wanted. He pulled onto the dirt and then forward until he was shielded from view by the rows of trees. You'd have to really be looking to notice him back there. He turned off the ignition and sat there, not really thinking, just sitting. His window was rolled down, and he listened for any unusual sounds, maybe someone tending the trees. But he didn't hear anything. He sat for another minute or so, feeling the tingling in his body.

He got out of the car and cut into the orchard, toward his neighborhood. Whoever owned the orchard came through once in a while and plowed the soil into big loosened chunks of dirt, and so he wasn't able to walk steadily in his alligator shoes. He slipped and stumbled a little, holding his right hand out for balance now and then. But he didn't fall. He had to stop once or twice to get his bearings, figure out which house was in front of him. Then he saw where he wanted to be, and headed toward the gap in the Weavers' fence. It was one their kids had made for easy access to the orchard—just a couple of slats that had been kicked out. Martin had noticed it during one of the cocktail parties. He'd been out on the patio, yakking with some neighbors and tossing back drinks and stealing glances at Miriam. Standing now on the orchard side, he peeked through the gap. He would have been surprised to see anyone, but he wanted to give it one last glance. There weren't any signs of life, and so he squeezed himself through.

Martin walked quickly across the yard toward the house—didn't look right or left, just walked through the tall grass (sure, the landscaping was plush and expensive, but Hal needed to get his shit together and mow the lawn—either that or have one of the kids do it, for Christ's sake). In a couple of seconds he was up on the patio, his hard-soled shoes crunching and scraping a little bit on the brick. And then he was inside, right on in through the sliding glass door that led into the living room. No one locked their doors in the suburbs. Yes, there was the occasional robbery here and there, and for a while people would be more careful. A few people might put stickers on the windows or signs on the lawn that said something like home protection system. And then next to it there might be a sign about not letting your dog shit on the grass. But people let their dogs take a crap wherever they wanted, and they didn't pick it up. Martin certainly let his dog pick his spot, and there was no fucking way he was going to stoop over with a plastic bag and pick up dog shit. It was the same with alarm signs—they were bullshit, too.

He didn't have a specific plan. He hadn't even planned to sneak into their house this morning. But his worrying out by the pool had given him too much free-floating energy. And then when it had occurred to him that Miriam was out working, he couldn't not do it. It seemed as if one minute he was sitting in his backyard, and the next he was squeezing himself through the Weavers' back fence.

Martin went through the living room to Hal and Miriam's bedroom and stood in the doorway, looking around, taking it in. He walked over to the bed and ran his hand along the sheets—nice and soft, a high thread count. They were white, which Martin was relieved to see—no cheesy red or gold or anything like that. And no absurd mirrors on the ceiling, or Hawaiian sunset wallpaper. Though he did notice that the bureau located across from the foot of the bed had a nice big mirror.

He climbed onto the bed and sat down, swinging his feet up, crossing his legs at the ankles and resting his back against the headboard, which had a bamboo weave. He looked at himself in the bureau mirror.
He didn't smile at himself. He just sat there staring—staring at himself staring. Then he raised his right hand in a feeble, uncertain wave. It was proof: he really was sitting on Miriam's bed like this, and the person he saw in the mirror was actually him, rather than some ghost self who'd followed him here and who was seeking to make the leap from the two-dimensional space of the mirror into the three-dimensional reality of his world.

Martin swung his feet back down to the floor, and began to look around, pulling open drawers, stepping into the walk-in closet, looking on the shelves in there. He didn't know what he was looking for. Once he located her underwear drawer he made the obligatory search through its contents, but really only so that later he wouldn't regret not having done it. The next time he talked to her, he'd know he'd run his hands over the bra and panties she was wearing—and that was worth something, he thought. But he was actually more interested in finding out if she'd hidden something beneath her underwear. Sex toys, certainly—that would be very interesting. But he'd settle for an old photo that was important to her, or a note of some sort. Or a diary. That would be a gold mine.

The idea of the diary set him on a new round of searching. He reopened drawers and looked under sweaters and T-shirts; he stood on a stool and peeked on the top shelves in the walk-in closet. And he got down on his hands and knees and ran his arms between the mattress and the box spring. Nothing.

Under the bed, though, it was a different story: there were at least half a dozen guns. He plopped belly down onto the carpet (it was an ugly olive green, but recently vacuumed) for a closer look. There were a range of shotguns, from a little .28 gauge up to a couple of .12-gauge guns. The rifle was a .30-06, he was pretty sure. There was a mediumsize pistol that said Colt on the side and that he thought was a .38—he was almost positive. There was another gun that was in a little yellow-and-black box labeled
TP
-70. It also said “.22 cal.” Martin took it out of the box. It was flat and light and small. The handle was black, and
the barrel was a gray metal. He liked it. He saw that there was a little clip that you inserted into the handle, and that there were bullets in it. They were small, like baby bullets.

Jeez, he thought. He knew that Hal Weaver was a big hunter—did the whole duck-hunting thing out in the delta, got in some deer hunting on his property on Mount Diablo. Martin had even traded with Hal, salmon for duck. But it was pretty weird to put your guns under your bed. Not to mention stupid and unsafe—especially loaded guns. What were the odds that the kids didn't know they were here, within easy reach? Martin thought he wouldn't be surprised to hear someday that one of the Weaver kids had been killed in a home shooting, or at least in a hunting accident. It happened all the time. He was about to put the pistol back into the box, but then he thought better of it. Instead, after checking to make sure the safety was on (it was), he put the pistol into the front pocket of his pants. Then he put the lid back onto the box and set it back in the spot where he'd found it, up against the wall and in between two of the shotguns. Yes, it was stealing, but that's what you got for having a loaded gun in your house, Hal.

He was just climbing to his feet when he heard the front door open. Open, then close. Then he heard the rapid click-click of shoes on the entry hallway tile (women's shoes) and then coming down the hall, toward the bedroom, toward him. No hesitation, no trip to the kitchen for a glass of water or a Coke (he was suddenly thirsty). Did Miriam somehow know he was here? Was she marching back to confront him? He looked at himself in the mirror of the bureau as he stood there, still stooped over. He looked like a cartoon version of himself, eyes bulging and white with terror.

He had just enough time to crouch behind the bed and then lie down on his right side. If she came to her side of the bed, which was on the far side of the room, the farthest from the doorway, she'd see him. He wasn't sure, but she might even be able to see him in the mirror. That, he thought, would be doubly terrifying. But of course it didn't matter if she saw him in the mirror or straight on. Either way, she'd
be completely horrified. He could imagine her scream, and her terrorstricken look when he sat up and faced her, sheepish, hands up and telling her it was all right, he could explain (“I lost something,” he'd say). He could also imagine himself from her perspective, lying there next to her bed, panicked-looking—not a robber or a rapist (the obvious first choices), but a freak. What the fuck are you doing in my house? she'd be justified in asking. He wouldn't have an answer for her, though, because he didn't have one for himself.

But she didn't come around to his side of the bed (or her side, depending on how you thought about it—it was more hers than his, after all). Instead, he heard her walk right into the bathroom, adjust her clothing somehow, sit down, and then pee. He could hear the urine stream down and hit the water, and then he heard her sigh. She kept peeing for a long stretch of seconds, and he realized that she'd been rushing to get inside and use the toilet. Had barely made it from the car, from the sound of it. Linda complained about this; there were times when she almost didn't make it to a bathroom. In fact, he'd been out places with her when she'd simply had to run behind some bushes and pee right there on the ground while he kept watch for her.