The Odds (24 page)

Mac read the bags. “Power Times Three.”

“You in this, too?” K asked Zero, who had been silent.

“Yes.”

“Way to go. Split ’em up, five in each pocket. This works, we’ll have more lessons. You each bring me back one twenty-five in exactly three hours, the other twenty-five is yours to keep. We go from there. I’ll be one street over from where I drop you. You want to try it?”

They said they did.

Then K said, “You ever tell anybody you saw me, talked to me, ever, it’s real bad for you. Not my fault. Other people above me get violent. Talk is the one thing they won’t tolerate. But it’s a great business, wellrun.” He pulled the bundle back. “You sure you’re up to this? You can shut up through anything?”

“Yeah,” Mac said.

“What are your names?”

“Pete MacKensie. Mac. He’s Sean Zero.”

“I need to know where you live.” They told him and he wrote it down. “Who you live with?”

“Mother,” said Zero. “He lives with his father,” he said about Mac, trying to bring himself into the conversation.

“Memorize these words: ‘I don’t know nothing.’ Say those a hundred or two hundred times if you have to. You can do that, nothing bad will happen.”

“We can do that.”

“Give it a go.”

They got out of the car. They could tell he watched them getting to work. Mac knew they looked natural. He started right away, walked up the street with some guy, talking. Real natural. He cut into an alley with another and came back. He gave a look to Zero—meaning, look smart, do something, but when he turned around, the van had gone. Well, they had the shit anyway.

In three hours, they went a block over to meet K and he was there. He gave them each two more bundles and said, “We’re still on trial, but keep going. And one more thing. I really need to talk to Carl. You find him for me—and don’t say anything to him, just tell me where he is—there’s money in it for you. Can you do that?”

“No problem.”

The third time they met with K was Tuesday. The selling had gone well, but they didn’t have any word on Carl yet. They had hoped Joel might know something, but he didn’t. When they reported they didn’t have any information, K nodded sadly and looked upset, angry.

Mac said, “I’ll find him.”

K winked and said, “Good boy. I knew you were a good kid.”

   CARL OPENED THE DOOR TUESDAY night, but he felt a terrible panic and closed the door quickly, shaking.

He breathed deeply for a few seconds, then opened the door again, slowly, a crack at a time, telling himself he had to go out sooner or later. Finally, he made himself go outside where he stood in the overgrown yard for a minute, two minutes. Anyone might see him even with the cover of night. He went back inside.

He was out of batteries. Not to mention that he was getting down to a few cans and he was out of good drinking water. He would have to go out in the middle of the night for supplies.

The last he heard when the radio was fighting to go out on him was the name of the man killed up at the house was Earl Higgins. “Anybody having information is asked to come forward,” some woman said cheerfully through the static. And then the radio conked. He still didn’t know what had happened to Nick.

The memory of the bright fluorescent lights at the Giant Eagle parking lot made him tremble. He had almost no money. Still, he wanted fresh bread and cheese and lunch meat. Milk. Juice. Power bars and beef jerky, tuna, soup, anything with a pull lid. He wanted new clothes, warm meals. It was good that he wanted these things.

Tomorrow, then. He could make it for another day.

He studied his journal entries.
Think of a future time when you are okay. Think of woods, house, garden. School when it was going okay. Think about Tracy. Don’t panic. Keep to routines
.

He’d been religious about his routines; now he simply had to add going outside three times a day.

Before he went to bed, he opened the door again and stood just outside the back door long enough to get used to the fact that an outdoors existed.

   WEDNESDAY — AND SO the kids. Christie heard the car pulling up outside.

Marina came into the house, urging Eric and Julie along. “Show him the movies you rented.”

His children presented the DVD sleeves awkwardly, as if for his approval. Marina was saying, “We’re having a nice simple pasta with just butter on it and a salad.”

“Do smells still bother you?” Julie asked.

“Yes.”

“Bummer.”

“Well, the good news is I get a break for the rest of this week and all of next week, then the week after I’m supposed to be back on the treatment, but then I get a break again. Don’t worry. It’ll work out.”

“It’s nice outside,” Eric said.

“Let’s go out back then,” he agreed. He made himself walk normally to the back door. The humid air assaulted him. It was going to rain soon for sure.

“What do you want to do?” Eric rocked a football in his hands, prompting the answer.

“Toss it to me, but easy, easy. Work on the spin, not force.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” Already he felt better using his body. He was going to try going in to work tomorrow. A couple of hours. He needed it.

He wanted to be back at work, laughing over the insane things that came at them every day.

He wanted to be there to watch out for Potocki and Greer, who had their hands full with Farber.

The football hit him hard in the stomach.

“You hit him,” Julie cried. “Why don’t you be careful?”

“It’s okay,” he grunted, even though it wasn’t, quite. How bizarre that you could walk around in your body for months, years, and not know the bad things going on inside it until the chaos reached certain proportions and the alarms went off. Then the body talked back, all right.

Later he stood in the kitchen, watching as his children set the table. They were always interesting to him. Eric remembering, with a little pantomime of knife and fork, to put the knife on the right. Julie catching Eric’s almost mistake and silently congratulating herself for never having to think twice about how to set a table. Julie looking at Marina’s long hair and freeing a strand that was caught under the strap of the apron.

It was going to rain again. It seemed it rained every Wednesday.

Marina said, “Dinner’s on,” and Christie straightened himself for the task.

   WEDNESDAY NIGHT AND THE smell of food was overwhelming, fantastic, and he was downstairs now with a lot of help from the crutches and the two older children, Meg and Joel. He’d practiced back and forth in the small upstairs hallway. How good it felt to be downstairs, seeing a different sight. While he practiced moving swiftly to the approving gaze of the two younger girls, Joel and Meg went back upstairs and carried the TV down. They plugged it in.

“He’s got the hang of it,” Laurie said.

They thought of everything. They’d put a chair at the top of the stairs for him to use to support himself while lowering himself to the stairs.

Susannah took small pillows from the couch to make a space for him. “Do you want to sit?

“I want to move. Man, I needed this.”

They watched him go back and forth in their small house. The front window blinds were pulled, so the place was darker than it would normally have been, but there, they’d thought of that, too.

The smell was of chicken roasting, unmistakable. “How did you come up with the food?” he asked Meg.

“They cashed my check at Doug’s Market. They said if I shopped there, they could. Things are more expensive there, but still, they had what we needed. I got milk and cereal and ham for sandwiches and bread and a chicken and some vegetables. And peanut butter. I even bought ice cream. You can get pretty far with forty dollars if you think about it. The guy was so nice, I’m going back to check because … if it bounces, I’d have to find some way to pay him back.”

Nick got upset again, thinking about money, owing. Sometimes it seemed all you could do was cut and run.

“Anyway, we’re okay for food for a couple of days,” Meg said evenly, trying to read his expression. She wore a denim skirt with a knit top. Her hair looked glossy, and he thought he saw a trace of lipstick. She was acting very grown up.

Nick walked some more, into the kitchen and eating area, the only other room downstairs. If you stood at the bottom of the stairs, you could see into each room. There was a table and chairs, all set. Five places. He clomped back to the living room.

He wondered where important papers were kept in this small place. Possibly in the basement.

The two younger girls stood in the front room, watching him.

“You don’t want to sit?”

“I want to sit,” he said.

They hovered as he settled himself on the couch, his right leg extended.

“We had a house once. In Greenfield,” Laurie said.

“Did you?”

“It wasn’t huge or anything, but it was a
house
. With three bedrooms and a dining room and a kind of sunroom we turned into a book room. The good old days.”

“I could use some help,” Meg called.

Laurie left the living room reluctantly.

Susannah put on the television. “We don’t get a lot of channels,” she said.

He knew that perfectly well. Once he’d got to standing and moving upstairs, he’d tried them all. Two more days of practicing moving and he’d be ready to leave this place if he had some clothes. The sweatshirt was okay. He needed some kind of pants. And there was the problem of changing his dressings. Could he support his leg and do it himself?

Susannah watched him to see if he was watching TV. She was very cute, very … soft. He said, “Sorry. I was working things out.”

“Okay,” Meg called. “It’s ready.”

By the time he got himself up and into the other room, Meg was bringing a roasted chicken to the table. On each plate there had appeared a baked potato and what really surprised him—a heap of green beans. Not the shabbiest meal he had ever had, not the usual kid fare. She said, “I hope the chicken’s good. It was on special.”

The others looked eagerly at the bird.

“Where do you want me?”

“The end,” Meg said. “You might want to sit sidesaddle a bit so you can extend your leg.”

He got himself into his seat, doing as she suggested. “You kids sure keep a clean operation,” he said, looking about. “Somebody must have taught you.”

They all pointed to Laurie. “She’s a clean-nik,” Joel said.

“Are you good at carving?” Meg asked.

“Very good at carving. I’d love to carve.”

They put paper napkins on their laps and waited. “You’ve been good to me,” he said, making a neat slice at a leg and disengaging it. “I don’t want you to think I won’t make it up to you, somehow, sometime. Who likes the leg meat?”

Laurie’s hand went up.

He sliced it in half and gave her the thigh. Meg would want to make the chicken last. “I’m not good at making speeches. You know what I mean about wanting to thank you.” He held the drumstick between knife and fork. “Who gets it?” Both girls pointed to their brother.

“White meat or dark?” he asked Meg and Susannah.

Both said, “White please.” He understood they were trying to give him the option of the other leg. He carefully cut white meat for all three of them. “Hey, let’s get started.”

Then they were eating, maybe too rapidly, all of them, and nobody knew what to say. “What grades are you in?” he asked.

Meg said, “Eighth.”

Joel said, “Seventh.”

Laurie said, “Fifth.”

Susannah said, “Second.”

“So that means you are—what ages?”

Meg answered, “Almost fourteen, almost twelve—Joel skipped a grade—and ten.”

“Almost eleven,” Laurie amended.

“Seven,” Susannah said in that quiet sandy voice.

“And school? Nearly over for the year? You’re glad?”

He half expected the usual cheer of release. But, no, they were not glad.

“More like bummed,” Joel said.

Nick carefully cut into the piece of chicken on his plate. He saw with surprise that it was moist, not overdone as he feared.

While he brought a forkful to his mouth, he watched them eat. “Is it okay?” Meg asked, startling him.

“It’s fine. More than fine. How’d you learn to cook?”

“Practice. My dad showed me. I used to cook for all of us even when he was here.”

“How long do you think you can keep pulling this off? I mean if somebody from school calls or comes by. Or a neighbor?”

“We say something they can’t check,” Joel said. “We say our parents are at work. That’s all they care about if they call—just not having to report something.”

“Meg is going to say I’m your father—if she ever has to say something. It’s okay with you if I give your father’s name?”

They said it was. Other questions hung in the air.

Nick ate for a while, feeling the sting of the new silence that settled. “But when I leave … if you don’t have food—”

“That is a problem,” Laurie said. “We like food.”

“So how will you get it?”

“Ask us something else,” Laurie said. “Chaaaaange the subject.”

Meg said, “We’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t tell about you and you don’t tell about me. Right?”

“That’s the deal,” Joel said.

Nick cast about for something happy to say. It was wrong to ruin a good meal with worries. “You sure have a lot of books in the other room. I was noticing the bookcases, and that’s quite a pile of books on the table near the door.”

“We read a lot,” Meg said.

“I imagine so.”

“You don’t like to read?” Joel asked, and this time his tone was friendly.

“No, I never got around to it.”

“Did you always do the same work?” This time it was Laurie who spoke. “Pizza shop?”

“Not at all. I used to work construction way back. Then bartending. Then for a while I was a fisherman. I mean I am a fisherman.”

“Aha,” Meg said.

Laurie said, “She’s our Sherlock. She told us, your skin, your hands, it was something out in the weather.”

“What kind of fish?” Joel asked.