Irv had had enough. “We’ll let the police decide that,” he snapped, turning to stalk back up the lawn.
“Hey, Irv,” the stranger said suddenly, “don’t get huffy — old man Belcher won’t be needing this plot anymore. You can hide all the golf balls you want down here.”
The gloom thickened. Somewhere a dog began to howl. Irv felt the tight hairs at the base of his neck begin to stiffen. “How do you know my name?” he said, whirling around. “And how do you know what Belcher needs or doesn’t need?” All of a sudden, Irv had the odd feeling that he’d seen this stranger somewhere before — real estate, wasn’t it?
“Because he’ll be dead five minutes from now, that’s how.” The big man let out a disgusted sigh. “Let’s quit pissing around here — you know damn well who I am, Irv.” He paused. “October twenty-two, 1955, Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart Church in Mount Kisco. Monsignor O’Kane. The topic is the transubstantiation of the flesh and you’re screwing around with Alfred LaFarga in the back pew, talking ‘Saturday Night Creature Features.’ ‘Did you see it when the mummy pulled that guy’s eyes out?’ you whispered. Alfred was this ratty little clown, looked like his shoulders were going to fall through his chest — now making a killing in grain futures in Des Moines, by the way — and he says, ‘That wasn’t his eye, shit-for-brains, it was his tongue.’”
Irv was stunned. Shocked silent for maybe the first time in his life. He’d seen it all, yes — but not this. It was incredible, it really was.. He’d given up on all that God and Devil business the minute he left parochial school — no percentage in it — and now here it was, staring him in the face. It took him about thirty seconds to reinvent the world, and then he was thinking there might just be something in it for him. “All right,” he said, “all right, yeah, I know who you are. Question is, what do you want with me?”
The stranger’s face was consumed in shadow now, but Irv could sense that he was grinning. “Smart, Irv,” the big man said, all the persuasion of a born closer creeping into his voice. “What’s in it for me, right? Let’s make a deal, right? The wife isn’t working, the kids need designer jeans, PCs, and dirt bikes, and the mortgage has you on the run, am I right?”
He was right — of course he was right. How many times, bullying some loser over the phone or wheedling a few extra bucks out of some grasping old hag’s retirement account, had Irv wondered if it was all worth it? How many times had he shoved his way through a knot of pink-haired punks on the subway only to get home all the sooner to his wife’s nagging and his sons’ pale, frightened faces? How many times had he told himself he deserved more, much more — ease and elegance, regular visits to the track and the Caribbean, his own firm, the two or maybe three million he needed to bail himself out for good? He folded his arms. The stranger, suddenly, was no more disturbing than sweet-faced Ben Franklin gazing up benevolently from a mountain of C-notes. “Talk to me,” Irv said.
The big man took him by the arm and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. He wanted the usual deal, nothing less, and he held out to Irv the twin temptations of preternatural business success and filthy lucre. The lucre was buried right there in that shabby patch of woods, a hoard of Krugerrands, bullion, and silver candlesticks socked away by old man Belcher as a hedge against runaway inflation. The business success would result from the collusion of his silent partner — who was leaning into him now and giving off an odor oddly like that of a Szechuan kitchen — and it would take that initial stake and double and redouble it till it grew beyond counting. “What do you say, Irv?” the stranger crooned.
Irv said nothing. He was no fool. Poker face, he told himself. Never look eager. “I got to think about it,” he said. He was wondering vaguely if he could rent a metal detector or something and kiss the creep off. “Give me twenty-four hours.”
The big man drew away from him. “Hmph,” he grunted contemptuously. “You think I come around every day? This is the deal of a lifetime I’m talking here, Irv.” He paused a moment to let this sink in. “You don’t want it, I can always go to Joe Luck across the street over there.”
Irv was horrified. “You mean the Chinks?”
At that moment the porch light winked on in the house behind them. The yellowish light caught the big man’s face, bronzing it like a statue. He nodded. “Import/export. Joe’s got connections with the big boys in Taiwan — and believe me, it isn’t just backscratchers he’s bringing in in those crates. But I happen to know he’s hard up for capital right now, and I think he’d jump at the chance—”
Irv cut him off. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But how do I know you’re the real thing? I mean, what proof do I have? Anybody could’ve talked to Alfred LaFarga.”
The big man snorted. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he fired up the chainsaw. Rrrrrrrrrrow, it sang as he turned to the nearest tree and sent it home. Chips and sawdust flew off into the darkness as he guided the saw up and down, back and across, carving something in the bark, some message. Irv edged forward. Though the light was bad, he could just make out the jagged uppercase B, and then the E that followed it. When the big man reached the L, Irv anticipated him, but waited, arms folded, for the sequel. The stranger spelled out BELCHER, then sliced into the base of the tree; in the next moment the tree was toppling into the gloom with a shriek of clawing branches.
Irv waited till the growl of the saw died to a sputter. “Yeah?” he said. “So what does that prove?”
The big man merely grinned, his face hideous in the yellow light. Then he reached out and pressed his thumb to Irv’s forehead and Irv could hear the sizzle and feel the sting of his own flesh burning. “There’s my mark,” the stranger said. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock. Don’t be late.” And then he strode off into the shadows, the great hulk of him halved in an instant, and then halved again, as if he were sinking down into the earth itself.
The first thing Tish said to him as he stepped in the door was “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been shouting myself hoarse. There’s an ambulance out front of the neighbor’s place.”
Irv shoved past her and parted the living-room curtains. Sure enough, there it was, red lights revolving and casting an infernal glow over the scene. There were voices, shouts, a flurry of people clustered round a stretcher and a pair of quick-legged men in hospital whites. “It’s nothing,” he said, a savage joy rising in his chest — it was true, true after all, and he was going to be rich—“just the old fart next door kicking off.”
Tish gave him a hard look. She was a year younger than he — his college sweetheart, in fact — but she’d let herself go. She wasn’t so much obese as muscular, big, broad-beamed — every inch her husband’s match. “What’s that on your forehead?” she asked, her voice pinched with suspicion.
He lifted his hand absently to the spot. The flesh seemed rough and abraded, raised in an annealed disc the size of a quarter. “Oh, this?” he said, feigning nonchalance. “Hit my head on the barbecue.”
She was having none of it. With a move so sudden it would have surprised a cat, she shot forward and seized his arm. “And what’s that I smell — Chinese food?” Her eyes leapt at him; her jaw clenched. “I suppose the enchiladas weren’t good enough for you, huh?”
He jerked his arm away. “Oh, yeah, I know — you really slaved over those enchiladas, didn’t you? Christ, you might have chipped a nail or something tearing the package open and shoving them in the microwave.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” she snarled, snatching his arm back and digging her nails in for emphasis. “The mark on your head, the Chinese food, that stupid grin on your face when you saw the ambulance — I know you. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She clung to his arm like some inescapable force of nature, like the tar in the La Brea pits or the undertow at Rockaway Beach. “Isn’t it?”