Looking back on it all afterward, Doug recalled that traumatic day only in quick bytes, short periods of lucidity floating in a dark menacing swirl of queasiness and panic. And beginning with a living room full of people, men and women, all of them strangers to him except John and Andy, and all of them for some reason very angry with him.
Particularly one mean-looking old guy in a chair in a corner. While everybody else was still shouting, this guy kept saying, quietly and dispassionately, “Kill him.”
Kill him? Kill me? Doug stared around at all these cold faces, swallowing compulsively, afraid that if he threw up it would only give them more reason to kill him.
It was Andy who responded to the mean old guy first, saying, “I almost agree with you this time, Tom.”
Oh, Andy! Doug cried in his mind, but he was too frightened and sick to say anything out loud, not even to save his life. Andy, Andy, Andy, he cried inside himself, I taught you to dive!
But John was saying, “We need him, Tom,” and thank God for that. Even though John didn’t sound at all happy to have to say it; no, nor did he sound entirely convinced that what he was saying was true.
And the mean old guy—Tom—said, “What’s he doing up in this neck of the woods? Long Island boy. He followed you, John, you and Andy. He’s on to the caper. He wants the dough for himself.”
Teeth chattering, Doug found voice at last, saying, “I, I, I, I got a girlfriend, she’s M-M-Myrtle St-St-Street.”
“That’s the next block over,” said a short blunt angry woman in a flannel shirt.
“No-no-no,” Doug stammered, “that’s her, that’s her—”
“His girlfriend can put flowers on his grave,” Tom said. Then he smiled very unpleasantly at Doug and said to the others, “He’s a diver, right? Let’s take him to the reservoir, see how he dives with weights around his neck.”
“We need him to get the money,” John said.
“I don’t,” Tom said.
The other woman in the room, taller, calmer, said, “Tom, you’re letting John do it his way, remember?”
Tom shrugged. “You like this diver?” he asked John. “You want this diver in our lives?”
The other fellow present, a red-haired jaunty guy who looked as though he’d be an excellent street fighter, said, “Let’s see if he likes the deal. Make him the offer, John.”
Offer? “I accept!” Doug cried.
They all stared at him, too surprised to be mad; even Tom looked nearly human for a second. Andy, nodding, said, “That’s what I call low sales resistance.”
John, sounding almost sympathetic, said, “Listen to the offer first, Doug.”
“Okay,” Doug said. He still had to keep swallowing, and pinwheels had started to dance in his peripheral vision. But he would listen to the offer first, if that’s what he was supposed to do. Listen to the offer first.
“You know what we’re going for in the reservoir,” John said.
Panic again! “Oh! Well, uh—”
“We know you know,” John told him, sounding more irritable. “Don’t waste our time.”
“Okay,” Doug said. “Okay.”
“Okay. So here’s the story.”
Then John made the offer, something about this and that, and percentages, and diving, and Doug nodded all the way through the whole thing, and when John finally stopped talking and looked at him for a reaction, he smiled big at everybody in the room, smiling through his nausea, and he said, “Okay. Fine. I agree. It’s a deal. Where do I sign? Sounds fair to me. Hey, no problem. I’m with you. By all means. Sure! With pleasure. What’s to argue? Shake on it! You got a—”
“Oh, shut up,” said the short woman in the flannel shirt.
Then there was the drive to the city. The red-haired guy, whose name turned out to be Stan, drove Doug’s pickup, with Doug as his passenger, following Andy and John down the Thruway in a Cadillac Sedan da Fe with MD plates. (“Listen, I can drive,” Doug had said, but, “No, you can’t,” John had told him, so that was that.) Before leaving the house on Oak Street, a phone call had been made to somebody called Wally, and now they were all going to the city for this Wally to show Doug something. Sure; whatever you guys say.
Along the way, Doug tried to befriend this guy Stan, but it didn’t work out too well. His opening gambit was, “You know John and Andy a long time?”
“Uh-huh,” said Stan. He drove with both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road.
“I just met them,” Doug said. “Recently. I taught them how to dive.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I could, uh, teach you to dive, too, Stan, if you want. You know, a pal of John and Andy, I wouldn’t charge you any—”
“Did you ever,” Stan interrupted, “see a three-sixty?”
Doug looked at Stan’s expressionless profile. “A what?”
“A three-sixty.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Doug admitted, little flutters of panic starting up again in his stomach.
“No?” Stan nodded. “I’ll show you,” he said, and suddenly floored the accelerator, and the pickup flashed past the MD Cadillac into an empty bit of highway, traffic ahead and behind but none right here, and then Stan flicked the steering wheel left, yanked it right, simultaneously did something fast and tricky with brake and clutch and accelerator, and the pickup spun all the way around in a circle in the middle of the road—still going sixty miles an hour toward New York—wound up facing south again, shivered once, and drove on.
Doug wasn’t breathing. His mouth was open, but he just wasn’t breathing. He’d seen an entire sweep of the outside world flash past the windshield—the grassy center strip, the road behind them with the Cadillac in it, the forest beside the road, and then the proper road again—in just about a second; too fast to panic during it, so Doug was going all to pieces after it.
Stan the driver, without speaking, slowed the pickup and let the Cadillac pass. Andy, driving that other car, grinned and waved at Stan, who nodded with dignity back. And Doug hadn’t breathed yet.
Finally he did, a long raspy vocal intake of breath that hurt all the way down. And then at last Stan spoke. “That was a three-sixty,” he said. “You talk to me some more, I’ll show you some other stuff I know.”
Doug kept very quiet the rest of the way to the city.
Wally turned out to be some sort of freak of nature, short and fat and moist. The only good thing you could say for him was that he didn’t seem to be mad at Doug for any reason. He even welcomed Doug to his weird apartment—it looked like an appliance repair shop—with an eager smile and a damp handshake, as he said, “You want some cheese and crackers?”
“Uh,” Doug answered, not sure the others would permit.
No, they wouldn’t. “No time, Wally,” John said. “Show him the model, okay?”
“Sure,” Wally said.
The “model” turned out not to be an actual toy train set kind of model at all, but a series of pictures on a television screen connected to a computer. Part of it was an animated movie, and much of that was pretty.
Doug stood there behind Wally, unaware of anything except the necessity to do what he was told: look at the model. After this, he’d be told something else to do, and he’d do it. He gazed at the screen, totally unaware of John, beside him, frowning at his profile. He was unaware of John finally shaking his head in irritation, raising one hand, and making a fist, with the knuckle of the middle finger extended. But he was very aware when John suddenly rapped him on the side of the skull with that knuckle.