Ronnie finally brings the glasses down. “This is where you grew up,” she says in a flat, quiet voice.
“This is the place,” Flynn says.
Ronnie thinks for a minute, then says, “Do you want to go in?”
He turns his head sideways toward her and squints his eyes like he’s in pain. “Are you kidding?”
“Do you drive out here a lot?”
“Not a lot. I mean, what does a lot mean?”
“And you never go in?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Do you stay in touch with anyone? Like any of the boys you knew here?”
He gives a slight shake of the head.
“So, why are we here?” she asks.
He opens his mouth, closes it, shrugs.
“You’re a fountain of self-knowledge,” she says.
He likes this. The easy tease, the playfulness. The throw-away intimacy. He wants to give it back and wishes he were as good at it.
He lets his head fall back onto the rest, keeping his eyes on the farmhouse. “It’s a ploy,” he says, “I bring all my dates out here. Women are nuts for orphans. Brings out all kinds of sympathies.”
“I knew it,” Ronnie says. “You reek of ulterior motive.”
“Comes in a little bottle. Imported from Europe. Costs me a fortune. It’s made from the spleens of just-dead lawyers.”
“What about just-dead financial planners?”
“Nothing ulterior about our motives. We’re right up front. Sign the check and try not to worry.”
She smiles and nods, holds in the laugh. Then she changes the tone of her voice and says, “So, why are we here, Flynn?”
“Jesus, you’re good at that,” he says. “You could make some coin off that voice.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“I don’t know. I just keep coming back.”
“You know. Do you send money to this place?”
“Almost never.”
“Almost never?”
“I’m like that with money. I’ve got to beat myself up just to keep from dialing in to the TV preachers with my credit cards.”
“Did they abuse you here?”
He makes a face. “It wasn’t like that. I got hit in the head with a Bible once. Can’t remember what for. Nun came up-stairs before bed to apologize.”
“Did you let her off the hook?”
“After I sold her a whole life policy.”
“And got put on retainer to manage the sisters’ savings account. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“There you go,” Flynn says. “You’re on to me.”
“No, but I’m working on it.”
“I’m clear water, Ronnie. You can see right through me. There’s not much here, I swear to God.”
“Maybe you’re not the best judge.”
“Maybe there’s no big mystery.”
“Maybe there’s a bunch of little ones. Like why you drive out here. Like why the yuppie biz-master hangs out with radio criminals.”
“They’re not criminals, Ronnie.” An edge comes up in his voice.
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry, Flynn, but technically they are. It’s a crime to jam licensed radio broadcasts—”
“And where I sit, it’s a goddamn crime that some scumbag racist hatemonger like Ray Todd can fill the airwaves with fascist bullshit—”
“Go buy some licensing, Flynn. Go buy the station. Then pull Todd and pump your own grudges out at the public. That’s the way it works. That’s the system we’ve got.”
“And if I don’t like this particular system?”
“Seems to work well enough when you’re hustling life policies and mutual funds.”
“I provide a service, Ronnie. I don’t put a gun to anyone’s head—”
“And there’s an off switch on every radio, Flynn. No one makes people listen to Ray Todd.”
“There are reasons I do what I do—”
“Right,” she says, indicating the farmhouse with a tilt of her head. “But you don’t seem to know what they are.”
He stops himself from blurting a comeback, waits a beat, then says, “Okay, maybe I’m just one more confused guy.”
“And maybe you just don’t trust me completely,” Ronnie says. “Not yet. And maybe that’s a smart move at this point. I can tell already, I’m more instinctual than you—”
“That right?”
“—and I think, maybe, you’re sitting in the middle of this awful paradox. And I think you tie yourself up in knots trying to make things logical.”
“Paradox?”
“Yeah,” Ronnie says. “I think maybe you’ve found that, through no fault of your own, by some quirk of nature, okay, the orphan boy moved pretty easily into the heart of the system. He ended up looking the part. The language came easy. He wore clothes well. He had a weird knack for sales and for saying the right words at the right time. He discovered this genius for subliminal manipulation.”
“This is me, now, right? This is beautiful—”
“But the lousy thing was — the more Flynn moved into the heart of the system, the more he hated it. So here’s the paradox. He stayed there and made good money off this system to finance the people who couldn’t fit in. And who wanted to tear it down.”
“You think I’m a man of huge responsibilities.”
“You know why you hate Ray Todd so much—”
“Who says I hate Ray Todd?”
“It’s because people with brains like Ray Todd are absolutely convinced they know what’s best. Not only for themselves but for you. And they want to enact the knowledge. They want to make it as unconditional as nature. That’s the heart of fascism, G.T. And what you can’t stand, whether you know it or not, what you can’t bear, is the fact that it’s sleeping, to some degree, inside every one of us. It’s like as a kid, you never figured that out. Or if you did, you just blocked it out completely.”
“That’s your take on human nature?” Flynn says. “Were your parents this cynical? Does this run in the genes?”
“I think maybe you come out here ’cause the nuns told you life was different. That if you cut into the human heart you’ll find a sleeping Jesus. Not a sleeping fascist. And you want to figure out why they lied to you. And you sit in the car and never go up to the door ’cause you can’t stand to finally give up their version.”
He doesn’t know what to say and this bothers him because he knows that not speaking, not returning a quick rebuttal, validates what she’s said. The car goes silent for a long awkward minute and when he does finally find his voice, it comes out different. There’s no edge and no rhythm, no shading of an angry humor. And no sarcasm whatsoever.
He says, “I wish I could take you through that house.”
More silence, and then, “There’s this old dirt-floor cellar. Classic New England cellar. Mortared rough-stone foundation. Hottest day of summer, that place used to be cool as October.”
There’s a pause. He rubs his hand at his neck, touches his Adam’s apple.
“Most of the others hated the cellar. It was dark. Musty. Shadows everywhere. But I loved it. I loved exactly those things. And way in the back, in the deepest corner of the cellar, was this little shaft area. I don’t know, it might have originally been a potato bin or something. But when I was there it was filled with scrap wood. Just random pieces of plank and beams and I remember there was some hacked-up barn board. It was just this big pile of wood. Sat about four feet high. When it rained, when it really poured, the cellar would take in water. You ever smell wet wood? You know that smell? I’ll never forget that smell.”
He puts his hands on the steering wheel, the classic driving-school grip.
“I used to be missing a lot. The nuns would have something going on and they could never find me. By suppertime I’d show up. To this day no one ever knew where I was hiding. Drove them nuts. Maybe that’s why I got hit with the Bible that time.”