Today was the housekeeper’s day off and he’d driven downtown in the station wagon, yes, taking matters into his own hands, as Lydia had said with a sneer. He enjoyed doing the marketing. The Safeway was laid out to be enjoyed, bright and wide and colorful. He enjoyed the checkout counter, had a favorite among the clerks, Roy, whom he’d gotten to know slightly over the years, probably better than he knew certain of his colleagues. Was this embarrassing? Interesting? Signs of some sort of “common man” “hangup,” as Lydia frequently suggested? Roy had been a bookbinder, high-quality precision craftwork that had given him a bleeding ulcer and a bald head at the age of thirty-one. So he’d quit and was now being paid something like four-fifty an hour to ring up groceries, to snap open brown paper bags and pack them up. Hard to imagine, on a busy Sunday afternoon, that this was less nerve-wracking than binding books.
Roy seemed to be off today, though, so Hank had steered the cart into the line forming before Delia’s register. Delia’s father had bought her a new car when hers “hydroplaned” on a slippery road. He’d provided the down payment for a little Milpitas cottage after her apartment had been broken into. He’d sent her to Santa Clara University for two and a half years before she decided that what she really really wanted to do was not go to Santa Clara University. Delia freely confessed her dependence on her old man. She looked maybe Italian or Greek; Hank pictured her father as a stern but indulgent type with hairy arms, but who could know? They’d never gotten on a last-name basis. The clerks were stripped of their surnames as part of the wave of epidemic casualness. Delia was lean and tan and had a big booming voice she used, raising a bunch of carrots or a canister of breadcrumbs high over her head to call for a price, bringing an assistant manager running over, keys jangling on the Key-Bak clipped to his waistband. So how is it, Hank thought, that you’re here? How did your dad manage to keep you? How come you’re ringing up groceries instead of carrying a rifle through your days?
“How you doing, Mr. Galton?”
Of course she knew him, famous fellow that he was. In the news more during the past four months than he’d been over the course of his entire life. Though he had not yet acquired the foul appetite for press conferences that possessed, say, his future son-in-law, if Stump was in fact still that. The contempt Stump had for what he thought of as the family’s stale decorum! Whatever it was the family had decided upon, had been bred, to say, Stump could be counted on to say the opposite. Fine, OK. But this wasn’t around the dining table. This wasn’t someplace where Stump looked stupidly out of place, like the Burlingame Country Club, where dozens of eligible young girls entertained boyfriends who — who were not Eric Stump. Someplace where Eric Stump opened his yap and a knowledgeable person of experience, a Mickey Tobin, simply settled back with his drink and enjoyed the show. Someplace where Stump, ever dedicated to the prospect of his intellect as a burnished display (Hank didn’t claim much of one, but he assumed that intellect should be like money: concealed yet present at all times), simply tired himself out from talking. This was in front of the reporters to whom none of it mattered. To them, Stump was one of the magical people dwelling in the tragedy-touched world of the rich and famous. Standing each day before the clustered microphones outside the house, Stump faced an inexhaustible audience expecting an illimitable story. And brother, when the big time came calling, he was ready. All his crap about philosophy, all his barely sheathed contempt for “the media,” and he got weak in the knees at the idea of telling his story for publication, just like every housewife and longshoreman and shopkeeper Hank had interviewed when he started out as a cub with the old San Francisco Call back in 1940. Starstruck, his skin ready to receive the glow that constant, passionate scrutiny imparted to it. He’d helped with her homework touched her eaten the last meal she prepared seen the panties in which she was carried away “half naked” watched TV with her listened to her desires and goals. They smoked pot they made love and yes they’d had a very interesting discussion, with friends, about politics just a day or so before it happened. But basically she just wanted a dog and a station wagon. Yes, Stump warmed to his role as the interpreter of every mysterious and occluded young mind occupying every messy rear bedroom in every house.
“Thirty-seven forty, please, Mr. Galton.”
Fishing in his pocketful of anonymous cash. Which is of course exactly what it had never been.
The grocery bags were stowed now in the back of the wagon, which he’d parked in the shade of a tree growing at the edge of the municipal lot. Hank walked slowly, in a light breeze, slightly unsteady on his feet. These old suburban downtowns, bleached in sunshine. A tavern, a delicatessen, a store selling uniforms. A Chinese restaurant, nothing sadder by daylight, the characters forming its name, its true Chinese name, carved in red-painted wood and crawling down the bright stucco wall. Might say “Fuck You, White Devil” for all Hank knew. The only Chinese person Hank knew was Sam Yee, to whom he brought his shirts.
Feeling slightly unsteady, trying to take a true look at these things. It was like touring a place you were about to leave permanently.
But all he was doing was running errands. Nothing suspicious about that, correct? If someone was to leap out of a doorway and confront him, confront him with the subject of his culpability, holding a microphone or a protest sign or a hand grenade (they seemed equally likely possibilities), his list was as innocent as Christ. Now see here: he wanted to buy some stamps, and a package of Aquafilters, and a pound of spiced ham, and a magazine for Helene. Lydia laughed sharply. She thought it was ridiculous. She wondered what would bring this playacting to an end. Going downtown in a brown station wagon like a fool. And then, if he really wanted to, he could come home and stack cans in the pantry.
But that was what he wanted. Affix a clean piece of scrap paper to the fridge with a magnet and begin the list all over again. If you just kept buying groceries the household would continue forever.
Groceries. There hadn’t been enough money to satisfy the SLA’s ransom demand that he personally feed the state’s poor. Not that they’d believed him. He had a hard enough time explaining to the immediate family, let alone to the fanatics holding his daughter, the elaborately interwoven relationships among the old man’s heirs, the Galton Corporation, the Galton Foundation, and the Galton Family Trust. In effect, Hank was the paid employee of his father’s money, not its possessor. The bottom line was that he was worth about two million bucks, about a half million of it available in cash, which he’d duly forked over to the food relief effort, a program dubbed People in Need. For the remainder of what would be required, he’d had to appeal to the corporation, which, acting through the trustees, had given him a total of four million dollars to work with. He and the other five family members on the board had recused themselves from the vote. Though he was glad not to have been there, tired of hearing the value of his daughter’s life weighed. They came out with the four million figure and he said fine. Sounds good. What the hell did he know? Not only did he have no idea how much it would cost, he had no idea what “it” was; in one tape Alice said that the SLA would accept a “good-faith gesture,” that “whatever you come up with is basically OK.” What he’d god damned come up with was one-quarter of his net worth. But later in the tape Cinque, to whose voice Hank had begun to react with nauseous loathing, had endeavored to clarify the matter by defining a “good-faith gesture” as a “sincere effort.” Thank you so very much. Sincere effort further stipulated to mean seventy dollars’ worth of “top-quality fresh meats, dairy products and produce,” handed over to anyone who turned up to ask for it, regardless of need.