The Realm of Last Chances (4 page)

As far back as Matt could recall, he’d been unable to think of Paul without also picturing the team of Clydesdales that pulled the Budweiser beer wagon in TV commercials. He was big, he was reliable; he did nothing purely for show. All right, hell: he was
noble
. The only problem was that a little over four years ago, he’d married Matt’s ex-wife and become stepfather to both of his daughters.

Whether or not all activity ceased the moment Paul walked in, Matt would never know. He just knew that it seemed to. Later on, he couldn’t remember which customers were still present or if they appeared to be taking note, though he hoped not. “Hey, Paul,” he said, relieved that the words actually came out. “What can I do for you?”

To his amazement Nowicki blushed, even the tip of his nose turning red. “I was wondering,” he said, “if I could speak to you in private? Would that be all right?”

Matt turned to Frankie, who was taking a record amount of time to rewrap a chunk of hot ham, giving the task his full
attention. He acted as if he hadn’t heard the request, though he must have. Rather than ask him if it would be all right to step away, Matt pulled off his gloves, lifted the counter leaf and led Paul into the back room.

The space was small and, with a man Nowicki’s size in there, crowded. Matt stood with his back to the counter where the char broiler rested. It felt like a defensive position.

Paul pointed at the grill. “I didn’t know you guys cooked in here.”

“Every now and then somebody’ll come in wanting a breakfast sandwich. That’s about the only thing we sell that needs to be cooked.”

“Is it on the menu?”

“No. But if you want one, Frankie’ll make it.”

“That’s good to know. But of course that’s not what I came to talk about.”

“I never thought it was.”

Paul stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Look, Matt,” he said, “I try to stay out of here. You know that, don’t you? Before you went to work for Frankie, I probably came by three or four times a week. There’s not a better Italian sub anywhere.”

Matt shrugged. “You can come in whenever you choose. It’s a free country, and Frankie could always use the business.”

“I know that. But I think you and I have both been operating under the assumption that you’ve got your sphere and I’ve got mine. You used to come in the hardware from time to time, but not anymore.”

“I haven’t been undertaking any home-improvement projects lately.”

“You’re being ironic, I guess,” Nowicki said, “but that’s actually what I came to talk to you about.” He said that the previous weekend, when the girls returned home after their regular sleepover, they made a few remarks that got Carla upset. “Understand, they weren’t complaining, they were just laughing
about stuff and having a good time, but their mom sees things differently.”

The “stuff” in question was the decay they’d observed in the house that had formerly belonged to their grandmother. The hot-water faucet was gone from the second-floor bathtub, and the only way you could turn it on was to twist the stem with the pliers that lay on the windowsill. The toilet handle in the half bath was broken, though you could flush it manually by pulling the top off the tank, sticking your hand in and lifting the stopper. Two boards on the back porch had rotted clean through, the drain in the kitchen sink kept backing up and disgorging some kind of soupy substance that stank to high heaven, all the light fixtures were so full of dead insects you could sometimes hear their bodies frying. Angie and Lexa had evidently painted quite a picture, making the house sound like the one Herman Munster’s family occupied.

In the far corner of the deli’s back room, there was an enormous reach-in freezer that had three doors and could have held a huge amount of frozen food, except for one thing: it didn’t work. It hadn’t for at least twenty years, according to Frankie, but he’d never gotten rid of it because it wouldn’t fit through the opening into the front room; it had been there in 1984 when his father renovated, and nobody considered the possibility that it might ever quit and need to be removed. Matt focused on that freezer now as a means of keeping himself anchored. Lately, he felt insubstantial, weightless, as if he were merely the idea of a person rather than the real thing. People weren’t just a past or a present or a set of extinguished expectations. They had to have a future, too, and for himself he failed to see one. He felt as if he could readily be brushed off, as if right now, should he choose to, Nowicki could swat him aside as if he were no more momentous than a fly or a gnat.

“Matt?” Paul said. “You know I don’t mean to offend you, right? I’m just trying to call attention to the problem because … 
well, it really bothers Carla. So, look, if you’d like to come over after closing time and get some stuff for the place—some faucets, maybe, and a handle for that toilet, a few cans of outdoor latex, some drain opener, insecticide, whatever—I’ve got ’em, and they’re yours. Hell, I even have lumber. I could help you do whatever needs doing to that back porch.”

There had been a time when Matt Drinnan could talk his way out of almost any jam, when explanations and justifications and complex and simple evasions came to him so easily it got boring. Then one morning, in the basement of the Harvard Book Emporium, surrounded by millions upon millions of words, he tapped his own verbal reservoir and found it empty. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say that day, and he couldn’t think of a single thing to say now.

The silence took as much of a toll on the other man as it did on him. Finally, Nowicki reached out and wrapped a massive arm around him, whispering, “Jesus, Matt, I’m sorry.”

their first few years together
, Kristin knew nothing about Cal’s father. Then she learned enough not to want to find out more.

While his father had never served in the military, he used the word “ground” like a real soldier. Cal had reached this conclusion in a Sacramento metroplex in the fall of 1993. He was there to watch the movie
Gettysburg
, and his moment of revelation came when Major General George G. Meade, played by Richard Anderson, arrived at a gathering of Union officers on the evening of the battle’s first day. Addressing Brian Mallon, who played Winfield S. Hancock, Meade asked, “Is this good ground, General?” To which Hancock raised an eyebrow and replied, “
Very
good ground.” They saw it as a place where their side could slaughter the opponents rather than suffering it themselves, and that was how his father must have viewed any number of properties as he drove around the northeastern edges of Bakersfield in the midseventies, gazing out the truck window at one tract or another barren but for the occasional manzanita. “That’s good ground,” he’d say. “
Damn
good ground.”

What he saw that others missed was anybody’s guess. All Cal himself saw was the kind of vacant space where you and your friends, if you had them, could pull off the road, drive a hundred yards or so into what should have been the desert and drink a little beer or get high. On an exceptionally good night, he guessed, you might even get laid, but back then he’d never had any nights like that.

His father had known quite a few of them when he was Cal’s age, a fact he didn’t ever bother to hide. He’d grown up on
a farm in Oklahoma, but to hear him tell it he’d spent most of his time harvesting something besides corn. “In high school,” he said on one of the evenings when he forced his son to sit with him in the wood-paneled room he called the bar, underneath the head of an elk he’d shot in Montana, “my best friend was a guy named Walter. He played tailback, I played fullback. He was number twenty-one, I was twenty-two. About halfway through our sophomore season, we made a bet on who could get to his number fastest. You know what I mean?” He didn’t wait to find out if his son knew this. “I’m not talking about touchdowns,” he said, poking him in the ribs so hard he gasped. “I made my number after the third game my junior year. Poor old Walter didn’t hit twenty-one till just before Christmas.”

At the time they were living in a mission-style house with smooth stucco siding, a red-tile roof, clover-shaped windows, a covered archway and dark interiors. His mother referred to it as “the dungeon.” She hadn’t liked the design and didn’t want his father to build it, but what she wanted never mattered much. It was big, it was showy, it had all the right coordinates. It was a good place to entertain the people his father had decided to buy.

Every member of the Bakersfield City Council eventually showed up there—sometimes singly, sometimes in the company of two or three other councilmen as well as several young women who worked at his dad’s company. The head coach of the Bakersfield State football team was a frequent visitor as well. On one memorable occasion he brought four of his players along—huge, beefy guys—and the high point of the raucous evening came when he ordered each of them onto the enormous dining table to perform push-ups for the pleasure of the other guests. His father accompanied these “friends” on trips to places like San Juan, Cabo and Puerto Vallarta, all of which he paid for, and while he never took Cal’s mother on those junkets, he did sometimes invite one or more of his
female employees. He also financed hunting trips to Alaska and once took the mayor to Belize.

The whole time he was doing those things, he was also buying cheap land north and east of the city, and all of it was quickly rezoned. “Time’ll come,” he’d predict, “when Bakersfield’ll run clean into Sequoia. You’ll be seeing strip malls in Bearpaw Meadow.”

That never happened, but over the next twenty years his father’s firm built a third of all the new homes in town. Most of them, unlike his own, were poorly constructed, but they looked good on the day the new owners moved in and offered a lot of space for the dollar. “Coat a turd in chocolate,” he liked to say, “and folks’ll smack their lips.” If occasionally some irate homeowner filed a lawsuit because seams had developed in the stucco, or the foundation was cracked, or the sewers failed to drain, or the ventilation system was circulating mold through the house and making the kids sick, his father could always hire the best lawyers. And if by chance they failed to prevail—well, judges liked to go to Cabo, too.

The indictment didn’t come until 1998, by which time Cal was living hundreds of miles away and had already been married for almost three years. In 1985 he’d legally changed his last name, so when the story broke nobody who knew him could have associated him with the man at the center of the FBI sting dubbed Operation End-Zone. Yet he told Kristin the truth, laying the Sacramento paper on the table as she was eating her breakfast. He tapped the headline with his finger. “I haven’t been straight with you,” he said. “I told you my father was dead. He’s not. That’s him, right there.”

She swallowed her oatmeal and looked at the photo, in which three men stood before a bank of microphones. The one in the middle, flanked by two attorneys, bore an unmistakable resemblance to her husband. He had angular cheekbones, and
his eyes were deeply set. He was grinning, which didn’t make a lot of sense, given the headline:

Charges Include Bribery, Mail Fraud, Witness Tampering

Then she noticed the name of the accused: Stegall, not Stevens. Immediately she experienced the same light-headed sensation she’d felt the previous summer when they rode the cog railway to the top of Pikes Peak, except that this had nothing to do with altitude. “If that’s your father,” she said, “why does he have a different name?”

“I changed mine,” he said. “Before we met.”

“You changed yours.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“That isn’t easy to answer.”

“Try.”

To his credit, he did. Still standing over her, he said he wanted to become everything his father wasn’t. He sought only small jobs, never big ones, and wanted to perform all the work himself. He used the best materials. If something went wrong, he endeavored to make it right. He never pursued money just to have it. The only possessions he loved were his musical instruments, and though some of them would have been valuable to others, much like a Sheraton satinwood table might be, he valued them solely because of the sounds they could make. He never coveted anything for ownership’s sake.

She heard him out. And then she said, “A lot of people want to be everything their fathers weren’t. But they don’t go out and change their names. And they don’t lie to their wives about their past.”

“A lot of them lie to their wives about their present,” he said. “Which is something I’ve never done and won’t ever do.”

She hadn’t always been straight with him, either. She’d claimed to be relieved when her first husband left, that she was ready for the marriage to end. He had no idea that she’d lost thirty pounds in six months, that her doctor thought she might have cancer of the adrenal gland or that the university granted her a paid leave in an effort to help her recover from a disease for which there was no treatment. You had to cure yourself, and she did.

“My first husband lied to me about an affair,” she said now. “He didn’t lie about who he was.”

He walked over to the coffeemaker and poured himself a cup. “Who he was,” he said, “was the kind of guy that goes out and has an affair. My dad was that kind of guy, too. Only my mom always knew. And couldn’t do shit about it.”

“Couldn’t? Or didn’t want to?”

“Didn’t know how to,” he said. He set the mug on the counter, and a little coffee sloshed out that he didn’t bother to wipe up. “She was just a small-town girl from Chouteau, Oklahoma, who moved to California with an asshole. Then the asshole got rich. And that was the end of her.”

“Where is she now?”

“I’d like to think she’s in heaven, since she spent her earthly life in hell. But she’s actually in a hole in the ground.”

“A real hole?” she asked. “Or one you’ve made up?”

“This hole’s as real as any hole’s ever been. I’ll take you there to see it if you’d like.”

She rose, carried her bowl to the sink and ran it full of warm water. Then she pulled a paper towel off the rack and wiped up the coffee. “Is there anything else I don’t know?” she asked. While she waited for an answer, they heard a tremendous crash, and she looked up to see the glass vibrating in the sliding door that led to the patio.