Nerve Damage (15 page)

 

Roy went home.
Skippy was in the big room, sweeping the floor. The sun shone through the windows, lighting the dust motes he was raising. They swirled around
Delia,
made it seem like she was slowly rotating, in orbit.
When you see how things really happen, the fun goes out pretty quick:
Had she ever said anything like that to him? Roy had the strange feeling that he was in motion, too. He thought of the dark side of the moon.

They lay in the warming hut. Delia and Roy had
one of the top bunks; the air was musty, close, a little strange, maybe from so many adults—eight or nine men and women—sleeping so near each other. Roy slid his hand up under Delia's fleece, cupped her breast.

She whispered in his ear: “No craziness, buddy boy.” But she encouraged his hand to stay where it was. Not by any movements or things like that: Then how? No telling. Roy just knew.

The storm sang in the trees, all high notes. The woodstove crackled. Sounds of breathing, some light, some heavy, rose all around, as though the warming hut itself had lungs. Roy slept the deepest sleep he could remember, slept in fact like a baby, a dreamless, milky sleep.

It was still snowing in the morning, but not hard. Everyone woke up looking rosy and a little confused; got their skis or snowshoes on and left without saying much. Roy and Delia were the last to leave. Delia took it all in, all three hundred and sixty degrees of a world gone white. Snow rounded everything—the cedars, the spruces, the hut. She took Roy's hand, squeezed hard.

“Meet me here, Roy,” she said. “If anything ever happens, meet me here.”

“Like what?” Roy said.

“Anything bad.”

“Nothing bad's going to—”

“If we get separated, if you can't find me.”

“That won't happen.”

“Roy, I mean it,” she said; a world gone white, except for Delia's dark eyes, intense and focused on him. “Meet me here.”

 

Roy awoke.
Daylight in the room, light that had lost its freshness. Quarter of ten?
Right now it's about Roy.
But he didn't like sleeping in, needed time every day with that early-morning light, light somehow untouched, if that made sense. He got up, went into the kitchen. Coffee was brewing and a note lay beside the pot.

Roy opened the fridge, saw not much. Was he hungry? No. But he went outside, got in the truck, drove down to Russo's Meat and Groceries.

“Got some nice New York strip today, Roy,” said Dickie Russo, alone in the store.

“I'll take a couple.”

“How's the arm?” Dickie played for the D-Cups, was probably the biggest guy in the league, also had a mean streak that only showed up on the ice, would have been pretty scary if there'd been bodychecking.

“Coming along,” Roy said.

“I almost scored last night,” Dickie said.

“Barhopping?” Roy said.

“Very funny.”

Dickie never scored: a big guy with a weak shot. He wrapped the steaks in butcher paper. Roy wandered around the store, loading his cart with fattening foods.

“Those tomatoes over there actually got some taste,” Dickie said.

Roy took some. He went on to the apples, bagged half a dozen Macs,
came to some pineapples. They had circular stickers on their sides, showing a smiling sun and a palm tree; the writing on the circumference read:
Product of Venezuela.
Roy stopped right there. This was something he'd never considered: that Delia's project had ended up being successful.

“You get your pineapples from Venezuela?” he said.

“This time of year,” said Dickie. “They're just as sweet as the ones from Hawaii and a lot cheaper.”

“When did you start?”

“Start what?”

“Buying Venezuelan pineapples.”

Dickie shrugged. “Long as I can remember.”

“Ten years or so?” Roy said, trying to make calculations about how long it would take to get the plantations up and running.

“Oh, longer than that,” Dickie said. “We had 'em when Dad ran the store and I just worked weekends.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Hell, I don't know,” said Dickie. “Twenty, twenty-five years, maybe more. Venezuela's a big-time pineapple producer, always has been. Try one—on the house.”

 

Back in the kitchen
—Skippy still gone—Roy ate double-chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream out of the carton. It had the feel of ice cream but tasted strange, like copper. He made himself take ten spoonfuls, as though it were medicine. There was nothing to hear except eating sounds, very quiet. Time slowed down, which had to be a good thing.
Right now it's about Roy.
Hard to argue with that on a rational basis. So why didn't it feel right? Because
it's about Roy
meant being self-absorbed and passive, like…like what? Like an invalid. He had this disease, yes, but he was not an invalid.

That was part one. Part two: this problem of Delia didn't go away. In fact, it kept spreading, had now reached the pineapple story, the whole reason she went to Venezuela in the first place. Roy put the ice-cream
carton in the freezer, moved into the big room. He gazed at those twisted helicopter blades high up on
Delia.
Thoughts he hadn't had for years came back to him, thoughts of that long spinning fall, green jungle coming up fast from below, Delia's face at the window.

Fact: Tom Parish had called with the news. Nothing could change that.

Fact: Tom Parish had also been in the hearse that brought the coffin from D.C. to the old cemetery behind the Congregational church.

Fact: Roy knew Delia, like no one else.

Fact: The guitarist by the grave played “For All We Know.”

Roy went down to the storage room in the cellar, where he'd kept Delia's things—clothes, papers, all those shoes—for three or four years, finally forcing himself to get rid of everything. What seemed usable, he'd given to the Salvation Army. The papers—essays from college, backgrounders from work, financial documents—he'd burned in the fireplace in a private ceremony he'd also forced on himself. And among those financial documents: green pay stubs; he had a memory of them, browning at the edges and curling up in the flames. What he didn't remember, probably hadn't even noticed, was the printing in the payor line. But it must have read
The Hobbes Institute;
proof, if he had kept even one, that he could put before Sergeant Bettis. And did those stubs have bank routing numbers or some similar identification?
Follow the money,
as they said in so many cops-and-robbers stories. And what had Turk just told him?
Private money means actual people.

 

The storage room
had rough, freestanding shelves on two sides. The shelves on one side held old things of his; those on the other side were bare. What if a pay stub, even one, had slipped out of a box, fallen free?

Light flowed in from a ground-level window, high above. Roy got down on the dusty cement floor, hands and knees. He peered under the bottom shelf, saw nothing but dust balls, patted around anyway, hoping for the feel of crumpled paper. Nothing.

Roy gathered his legs under him, started to rise. For a moment, he
couldn't; as though all his strength had gone at once. And in that moment, he noticed a footprint in the dust. Not his—his feet were bare right now, and besides, this print came from a woman's shoe: two separate prints, really, small square heel and larger oval toe. Lenore had been rooting around down here.

“Goddamn it,” Roy said. The thought of this invasion and his own failure to stop it infuriated him. The next thing he knew he was on his feet, angrier than he had ever been in his life—angry at Lenore, who had framed Skippy and searched his house, possibly found and taken the evidence that would force Sergeant Bettis and the official world to believe him; all this while he lay in a hospital bed.

What are you going to do about it?
Delia's voice again, but the effect was not as comforting as it had been in the feng shui room. “I could use some help from you,” he said.

Roy heard a crunching sound in the snow outside. He looked up, through the high window, saw someone going by; just the lower half, from that angle, but the someone wore a black mink coat.

 

“Good news,”
said Krishna as Roy opened the front door. The limo sat idling in the driveway, exhaust rising in the cold air. “Oh dear—what happened to your arm?”

“Hockey,” Roy said.

“Don't tell me you're still playing at it?”

“You don't
play at
hockey,” Roy said. “You
play
it.”

“A tad grumpy today?” Krishna gave him a close look. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Fine,” Roy said.

“Have you lost a little weight?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Roy said. “Ramping up my workouts till I get back on the ice.”

Krishna nodded. “It's all of a piece,” he said.

“What is?”

“This physicality of yours,” Krishna said. “It informs the work.”
Roy thought about that.

“Are you going to invite me in from the cold?” Krishna said.

“Oh, sure, sorry.”

They went into the kitchen. “Didn't you get my message?” Krishna said. “About dropping in on the way to Stowe?”

Roy glanced at Skippy's note on the counter.

“What are you smiling about?” Krishna said.

“Nothing,” Roy said. “Coffee?”

“With pleasure,” said Krishna. “But don't you want to hear my news?”

“All ears,” said Roy.

Krishna took Roy's arm, led him into the big room. He stopped in front of
Delia.
“My God,” he said. “Even better than I remembered. Just breathtaking.”

“Thank you.”

He turned to Roy. “The news, Roy, the excellent news, is that we have a buyer. And what a buyer. And what a price. From the sight of the photos alone, he has offered—are you ready for this?”

“Probably not,” Roy said.

Krishna laughed, clapped Roy on the back. Not hard—Krishna was small and soft—but for some reason it hurt. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Roy! A quarter of a million.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” said Krishna. “Just oh? It's more than twice what we've gotten for anything before.”

“I'm…stunned, that's all,” said Roy; a lie—but why spoil Krishna's fun? “It's fantastic.”

“Fantastic, splendid, wonderful,” said Krishna. He shook Roy's hand. “Congratulations. You deserve every penny. This is marvelous work—I suspect you've arrived at a whole new level.”

Roy gazed up at
Delia:
he saw another flaw almost every time he looked, but that didn't make Krishna wrong about the whole new level; the very fact that he was seeing them might make him right. “Who's this buyer?” he said.

“That's the beauty part,” Krishna said, “as if the money wasn't beauty enough. The buyer is Calvin Truesdale.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Roy! Calvin Truesdale. The Truesdale Ranch.”

Roy shook his head.

“Like the King Ranch,” Krishna said. “Only bigger.”

“He raises cattle?” Roy said.

“Yes, I suppose,” said Krishna. “Besides owning twenty percent of the oil wells in the Gulf, a couple hundred radio stations, a controlling interest in Texas Semiconductors and God knows what else. But the important thing for our purposes is that in the past ten years or so he's gotten interested in art. He's already accumulated the largest private Giacometti collection in the country, and just last April he bought Rodin's
Seated Zola
for fourteen-point-five mil. I've tried getting in touch with his people more than once about some pieces—that Degas ballerina I had two years ago, for example—never getting anywhere. And then what happens?”

“What?” said Roy.

“Yesterday morning he just walks into the shop.”

“Who?”

“Calvin Truesdale, Roy,” Krishna said. “Are you following this?”

Roy nodded; those names—Giacometti, Rodin, Degas—spoken even in distant relationship, made him very uncomfortable.

“I showed him a few things—he bought that little Matisse that's been in the window on the spot, actually ended up strolling out with it under his arm, for God's sake. But I went through the catalog with him, too, and that's where he saw this.” Krishna gestured toward
Delia.
“He flipped over it, Roy, just flipped.”

“Like how?”

“Like how did he flip?”

“Yeah.” Roy was trying to imagine some cowboy jumping for joy in Krishna's hip and sophisticated Tribeca shop, and having trouble.

Krishna shrugged. “He said amazing, incredible, had all kinds of questions—size, materials—and wanted to know about you, of course. He'd also like to come see it. ‘At the artist's convenience'—he's very polite, but the offer stands in any case, personal viewing or no, bound with a check for ten percent of the total.” Krishna had a huge grin on his face, one of those faces shaped for conveying happiness to begin with.

“I'll have to think about it,” Roy said.

The grin faltered, went misshapen. “But why?” Krishna said. “What sort of thinking?”

“I just don't know if I want to…”

“To what?”

“Part with it right now.”

Krishna's gaze went to Roy's cast, then back to his face. “You're not just saying that?”

“Why would I?”

“Maybe as a strategy to drive up the price?” Krishna said. “Playing hard to get?”

“Why would I strategize on you?” Roy said. “And it's already more than the thing is worth, way more.”

“Hush,” said Krishna.

Roy laughed. Krishna laughed a little, too.

“All right,” he said. “Think about it. I understand—it's like a mother giving up her baby. But, Roy—you can make more babies. And remember Picasso's warning.”