Charles O had to laugh: this kid’s dad, going to a hospital in LA? He’d be ruined by the expense. “How much it cost?” he said, interested now.
“T’irty t’ousand, five hundert, forty. T’ree days intensive care.”
“How much you gotta pay?”
“Five t’ousand. I got brothers.”
Charles O saw the kid’s feet down in the footwell — nearly black with ingrained dirt, in flappy plastic sandals. They were five-dollar feet. “The shit you in, Miguel, no way you ever going to get out.”
The kid was weeping a fucking river now.
“What do you think I’m gonna do to you? You better think, Miguel.” He wasn’t looking at the kid, who was cowering back in the seat against the window.
“You a piece of garbage, you know that?”
“Yes, Mr. Lee.”
“The others. How much they take?”
“Maybe little bit. Sometimes.”
“Like Lazaro. Last week, how much?”
“Saturday. Take twenty-five.”
“Enrique?”
“Saturday also. He take forty.”
“Party time, huh?”
“No — for family. In Mexico. By wire.”
“You and me, Miguel, we’re gonna do a deal.”
“Deal?”
“You be my eyes, my ears. Lazaro takes five bucks, you tell me. I want to know when Enrique took his last crap? You tell me. You tell me every fucking thing I want to know, right? You say one word to them, I tell you this: I make you hate to be alive. You bullshit me, I fuck you up so good you think I am the king of hell.” He spoke softly, slowly, making sure the kid got every word. “Everything. You tell me everything.”
“I do that.” He was making the cross sign again.
“You be good boy, I pay for your daddy in the hospital. Twenty-six hundred plus what you stole, asshole.”
The broken kid was sobbing out his guts in heaving gasps and grunts.
“Shut the fuck up,” Charles O said, starting the engine.
Back at the lot, the kid stumbled, still sniveling, back to the booth.
“Remember: everything!”
He was in high good humor as he drove away, having handled it just right. Surprise was the key: surprise yourself, surprise others. That was a mark of the elite player. He switched on Good to Great.
“Sam Walton began in 1945 with a single dime store. He didn’t open his second store until seven years later. Walton built incrementally, step by step, turn by turn of the flywheel….”
MAYBE IT WAS just that Germans were in the habit of tossing infirm, elderly Jews out of windows in their armchairs.
Nothing else in The Pianist chimed directly with Boy 381. Lucy had gutted it that evening, cover to cover, carefully reading every page. Both books were set in the same landscape of hunger, wreckage, and brute violence, but aside from that they were as different as could be. Vanags was the better writer: Szpilman, pianist and composer, writing back in 1945, was perhaps a little too close to his terrible material to achieve the sharp focus that was Augie’s hallmark. In Boy 381, suffering and laughter were constant bedfellows: there were no laughs in The Pianist.
Over the weekend, she’d raise the coincidence with Augie — lightly, casually, with tact. He had no reason to embellish his unique experience of the war by lifting a paragraph from someone else’s book. Somehow the explanation must lie in the character of the war itself. Yet that one incident — the irregular soft thud of the body, the splintering crash of the chair on cobbles — had thrown the book out of whack for her and become the dominant image in the foreground. Happening on The Pianist had made her a bad reader of Boy 381, unable to see the forest because of her perverse preoccupation with a single tree. But she was sure that talking with Augie would restore the book to its rightful shape in her mind — well, almost sure.
It had been a tough sell, trying to get Alida to buy into the weekend. She’d played the homework card, the date-with-Gail card, the stay-with-Tad card.
“The house is right on the beach. You used to love that beach when you were little. Don’t you remember Tom and Maggie Owen?”
“No.”
“We’ll pack your swimsuit.”
“How old are they?”
“Oh, sort of…sixtyish.”
“Great.”
“They have kayaks. Augie wants to take you kayaking.”
“Cool,” Alida said, making kayaks sound like a second helping of spinach.
The school had recently sent out a booklet, “Understanding Your Child.” Alida, at eleven, now exactly fit the profile of “Early Adolescence: Ages 12–14,” which advised parents to “resist seeing only the worst in your changing children. Focus on the positive, including their creativity, curiosity, and fresh ideas”—easier said, as Lucy was finding nowadays, than done.
“Anyway, Rabbit, we’re going.”
“Okay. I really like being a parcel.”
Then, when Lucy laughed, Alida abruptly relented. “You know, it’s been so long since we were at the beach? Not since we went to Hawaii.”
And when they were snuggling in Alida’s bed at around ten, she’d said, “Mom, I’m really looking forward to going to Useless Bay,” but Lucy caught in her voice the unmistakable tone of an adult indulging a child. Perhaps the school had issued a similar booklet to the students: “Understanding Your Parent.” What profile, Lucy wondered, did she fit?
From under the covers, she clicked on the remote to watch the late-night news. The torrential rain had triggered a massive rockslide near Snoqualmie Pass, closing Interstate 90 in both directions. A murder-suicide in Bellevue: “They seemed like such a normal, happy couple,” said a neighbor. More on the Safeco “terrorist,” who’d been released and sent back to Canada; but his brother had been found in a Eureka, California, motel, his giveaway Jetta parked outside his cabin, and was now in police custody, charged with immigration violations and tax fraud. Under the new laws, they never arrested anybody who wasn’t guilty of something.
As Augie had said, the weather for tomorrow looked good: isolated early morning showers, followed by sunshine in the afternoon. Temperature in the high seventies, rising to the mid to upper eighties on Saturday and Sunday. “For the first week in April that’s phenomenal,” said the weatherman. “You’re talking me into my bikini,” replied the fortyish newscaster in the coy voice that always made Lucy reach for the retch button and switch her off.
Readying herself for sleep, she evicted thoughts of Augie and his book from her mind and returned to the place she so often visited at this time of night — a long, straight, gumbo road riding the oceanic swells of prairie; her dad in the driver’s seat, on his rounds; scanty-legged pronghorn antelope leaping barbed-wire fences; the openness, the smell of dust and sage; prairie dog towns by the roadside; seasonal creeks overhung with cottonwoods; cattle on the rangeland; far-apart ranches hiding behind shelter belts of trees. The more remote this world grew from her, the greater the solace Lucy took from it in her most placid and satisfying dreams. So tonight she willed herself back to Custer and Prairie counties, her own patch of Eden before the world went bad. The penalty she paid for these sweet dreams was that occasionally she’d wake up screaming, but only when the dream went into uncontrollable fast forward — a risk that Lucy was prepared to take, for most nights the route in her dreams took her nowhere near where Lewis Olson stood, barring the entrance to his slovenly ranch.
ALL VERY WELL for Lucy — the model bourgeois liberal — to tease him about his “paranoia,” but Tad wasn’t paranoid, he was entirely reasonable.