Fun With Problems (11 page)

"Yeah," Ussolini said. "But Eric's—pardon me, Eric—he's a little strange."

"No, no," Eric said. "I only appear strange. You can check my clips. My background."

The two of them watched him. "I could call you," Eric suggested, "'officials familiar with the circumstances.' I wouldn't have to say 'local officials' if you didn't want me to. If the Coast Guard investigated, I could say 'Homeland Security officials.'"

"They couldn't kill it after that, could they, Charlie?"

"Trust me," Eric said. He gave the captain his card. "I'll be in touch."

Being led tenderly up the gangway, the Secretary was sure he spotted wise guys in the crowd. Some were taking photographs with their cell phones. Agents advanced on them threateningly. A reporter on the dock was wrestling an agent for his laptop.

"How do you like it now, gentlemen?" the Secretary called merrily to the people on the dock. That, he happened to know, was what Hemingway used to say to wise guys.

In a day or so, Eric sneaked back onto the island to interview his eyewitnesses. Taylor refused to speak to him. Annie also refused. But in the end it was Annie, working day and night at the island paper, who got her version of the events in print before anyone else. Annie's version was extremely partisan but convincing enough for the paper's owner to triple the print run and sell copies on the mainland. Blogs picked it up before the mainstream press did, together with YouTube videos of the Secretary's tantrum. The package was a great success.

A magistrate dismissed the charges against Taylor on the grounds that he had only passed a remark. The Sorenson-Shumways were not litigious and sought no settlement, although they were irritated to discover that in common law the king could do no wrong.

The public relations people at Defense were unable to keep the story under control. The plenitude of YouTube scenes provided evidence more vivid than any description of Annie's or Eric's ever could. In them, the Secretary railed against the CIA and its collaborators, who were mainly Filipino Mormons from Panay, paid handsomely to spy on him.

His mission completed, Eric left the island forever and never saw Annie or Taylor again. Six months later in India he was reunited with Lou, who explained ectomorphism and its relationship to alcoholism and mayhem. Eric and Lou went to Bali together, and then Eric went back to Possibilities.

The Secretary resigned his cabinet post and returned to private life, working on his poetry and translations. Presently he was reported ill, resting at a naval facility near Baltimore. The facility was a twenty-story wedge of brick, almost winged in shape, red brick wings folded each over the other. It seemed capable of some kind of ungainly sudden flight that would appall and unsettle witnesses. Its wings hovered over a courtyard a hundred feet below. The Secretary's accommodations had an exhilarating view of the sky too.

The Secretary's special labor in the months following his embarrassing exposure to the press had been translation. He had been working on little reading costumes calculated to charm an audience, making crowns, transliterating the Greek alphabet. He had fashioned a pillowcase with an eye torn in it for his poem about Cyclops, Poseidon's son:

Blinkered child of sea and sky
Made weak by the sly man'S trickery,
Conniving Odysseus laughs and chooses,
Leaves to you the cursed, the defense of island realm, resounding cavern.
Defending your island, your realms your caverns resounding.

Then one day he took it to their faces, a banner short and sweet, and on it read:
APOTETELEMENON
! A strange device to the cowards—Mission Accomplished! Yes, strange to this
one and that one, cowards and defeatists! Mission Accomplished, or something close, Victory!

"Nobody's killing me now," the Secretary screamed. And raced them to the window again. It was a close-run thing, but he was overtaken and put to bed.

L
EROY TRAVELED EAST
into the high country pursued by little sense of sin. He had made a lot of money being no worse than anyone else in the San Francisco Peninsula data business and in his way contributing a lot. He had gone early to Silicon Valley; he had lived with his first wife in a bungalow, a tiny place in the bamboo near the Stanford golf course. She had worked as a keypunch operator for Bank of America, and he was hired by Lockheed as an analyst.

The place he was headed for was high in the Mountain West, a second home so far upstream on a river called Irish Creek that past it the canyon went to ground. The gorge was still two hundred feet from rim to riverbank, but beyond Leroy's it sank from sight and became a descent into the heart of the high desert. Here the mountain sheep had nowhere to go but down to escape danger, and they had learned over generations to leap from the exposed crags when startled, and disappear into the shadows and scattered sunlight of the sunken canyon.

In some ways the house Leroy had built—or caused to be built—reminded him distantly of the bungalow in Menlo Park. It was much larger, to say the least, and it had a swimming pool. But it accorded with an old need that he was not at all ashamed of: being close to the land. It stood at the far end of the only access road, a mile and a half beyond where the paving ended. Approaching his house the track was only surfaced and sealed. Paving, the realtor had sworn to him, would come soon. When he had spent a few weeks in the house he was not sure he required paving, which would mean his road's extension and more development along the canyon.

Decades before, Leroy had happened by a university research center on one of the rare Saturdays when he was free from Lockheed, and had seen some acquaintances from the company playing with computers. They were the old computers of that time, which, people joked, looked like the Dnepropetrovsk hydroelectric dam. His friends were playing a primordial war game, dogfighting with virtual spaceships, blasting each other's entities on the screen. They were whooping and dancing and having enormous fun. Leroy thought it looked like fun too. He was as fun-loving as anyone, though he liked practical jokes most. He loved what had once been called the put-on, in his own definition of it. For example, on his BMW there was a bumper sticker that read:
LOST YOUR CAT? CHECK MY TREADS
.

His mountain property had two levels, both of them set well back from the river so he could assure himself that he was not like the reckless householders downstream. Some of them had balanced themselves on picturesque but heart-stopping outcrops, where they could crawl to the edge of their decks and look down over the rim into swirling white water. Leroy never failed to see, in his imagination, their terrifying fall into the canyon, houses and Franklin stoves and heritage tomatoes and trophy wives in a fatal descending whirl.

Leroy and one of his friends from the company were among the young men who employed the principles of the early computer game to establish their electronics company. They called it "electronics" at first, but it became ever so much more. He and the friend, whom he called Dongo, prospered. Life on the San Francisco Peninsula was good; he and Dongo could smoke dope and pick up chicks at Kepler's and party. Everyone had a beard and grew their hair long; it was a statement. You could laugh at the nine-to-five dorks from IBM with their white shirts and scabby close shaves. They laughed back, but not for long when their scene looked like it was going under. Then he and Dongo would sing a song about the IBM types that went:

They're drowning in the lowland, low land low,
They're drowning in the lowland sea.

It had been a long time since those days, but every once in a while the song came back to Leroy. As the drive to his house took him over the high prairie, the sweet land smelling of sage and pine, the plain disappeared into a dizzying impossible perspective that ended where the white-clouded, snowy, sawtooth-shaped peaks rose. Approaching the head
of the valley, he hummed and sang "drowning in the lowland sea," not really thinking of IBM or Dongo or the First Girl or anything much. Just sort of singing along with the tumbling tumbleweed.

Dongo had really liked to party. Too much party, old Dongo. Dongo had turned Leroy on to acid once—there had been a lot around then—but Leroy, with his enthusiasm for work and his strong business sense, had not gone near it ever again. In fact, watching Dongo had led him to stop using dope altogether. Moreover, he had found a chick, not that he would call her a chick anymore. A woman, a woman who taught him all of love that he would ever know, which on the emotional level was not really too much. Barbara, the most beautiful of all things California.

Then Dongo starting losing it. Really. Dongo got so into acid that he thought he could teleport himself to remote galaxies. Much as Leroy loved the land, Dongo went utterly insane over the idea of it and moved to the toolies of Humboldt County. Leroy had been forced to take what was called in Communist dictatorships of the time "strong measures," as his Romanian girlfriend Ilena liked to say. Ilena's mother had been a commissar. Leroy had been forced to cut poor Dongo loose. He was able, legally it turned out, to take over the business, a fair-means-or-foul sort of thing, a dire necessity. One way or another.

Times were not then tough, but there was no knowing. Dongo was beyond help. Leroy never knew quite why he called Paul Dongo. There was just something Dongo-like about the guy. Poor Dongo hadn't liked it much from the first day, although he had never said "Don't call me Dongo." Probably, Leroy thought, he sensed where the power was. The petty resentment actually helped when the time came to move on, and Leroy, as anyone would, did what he had to do. What happened then was Barbara the beautiful, on some kind of fucking cosmic ray, beamed herself to Dongo up in Dongoville, California, but she came crawling back after a year and Leroy unwisely married her. Dongo died—had to happen. Leroy's marriage was brief.

Halfway across the prairie below Leroy's house was the Salikan River, of which his Irish Creek was a fork, and along the Salikan was an old mining town with the same name. Half the town's houses were post-sixties, alpine style or Old Westy, but there were fifties ranch houses, a steepled Mormon church and a black-and-white-movie motel at the top of the bluff over the river. An old general store stood beside it that had an
Oakland Tribune
newspaper rack on the wood sidewalk outside, though Oakland was nearly a thousand miles away, and insofar as Leroy could remember there was no such paper. Leroy parked his BMW out front.

The newspaper rack was always empty because Beck, the proprietor, was afraid that people would take newspapers without paying. Leroy himself had made a practice of doing that. Still, he wondered about Beck's savage irascibility. People around Salikan called Beck Caw or Crow or Craw or something of the sort, some sound they made. Craw was an older gentleman, as the wry youth of California said, God knew how old. There was a woman who worked with Craw sometimes, and Leroy had taken to thinking of her as Slob, which was his name for poorly groomed, overweight individuals. Slob, he presumed, was Craw's daughter, but who knew the relationships between these people?

Leroy straightened up as he stepped onto the wood sidewalk. Maybe it was the influence of westerns: something about shed-like buildings with wooden sidewalks made a man feel like walking tall. And Leroy was in good shape. He worked out regularly. He thought it made him stand out from the obese jerkarounds you saw in town and at the downscale mall in the valley. The little bell tinkled when he opened the door of Beck's store. Craw and Slob were both behind the counter.

"Afternoon, folks," Leroy said going in.

Old Craw looked at his watch. Slob gave him a soft hello.

"Hey, Beck," Leroy asked, "you got the
Oakland Tribune?
" Leroy thought he might have made that joke before. Old Beck never looked at him. The daughter answered.

"Hasn't been an
Oakland Tribune
for a great many years," she said. "I'm surprised you ever heard of it, your age."

Leroy was pleased. Indeed, he appeared considerably younger than his years.

"I haven't," he told her, and walked away. He heard the old man start to say something but get shushed by his daughter.

Strolling down to the dairy case to get some skim milk, he was reminded of the first heavyset person he referred to as Slob. He was good at nicknames, at least he thought so, and pretty original. Some people, he thought, practically named themselves by not caring how they looked. The other Slob was a young man who had worked for Leroy, a bit of a genius type, too much so. Leroy had started out calling him George. Slob the First became political and made objectionable noises about contracts with the Defense Department. Some systems went into the making of cool modes of weaponry that featured nasty surprises for enemy personnel and their dependents. Of course they did terrible things to people—they were weapons, for Christ's sake. As much as anything else they reminded Leroy of the computer war games at the research institute. But it was the age of the agitator; people needed to piss and moan. If Slob First had not been so obnoxious about it, Leroy would not have conceived the plan to make him disappear, corporately speaking.

While Leroy was fetching his quart of milk and dozen eggs, a bunch of drive-through tourists came in. The man was slight and overpolite to Craw and Slob behind the counter, tentative and ingratiating as your drive-through tourists tended to be. His wife acted the same way, smiley, hi there. The wife was a babe in nice-fitting jeans and a tight University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, T-shirt with a blue hoodie over her hair. They had a child of about five, who unfortunately for the kid resembled his dad. While the couple fiddled around the counter, the lad wandered down the rows toward the dairy section where Leroy was getting his milk and eggs.

The little boy looked about him blankly. Leroy had a sudden impulse. Craw kept the candy under his birdy eye at the counter but his supply boxes were in the back, near where Leroy was standing. One carton of expensive chocolate bars stood beyond the child's reach but available to Leroy's. He reached up and took a bar of imported chocolate out. Catching the child's eye, he made a small clicking sound of conspiracy and handed it to him. After a moment the child took it and put it in his pocket.