Trust (7 page)

“You’re hard to please,” he said, opening his door.

“I’ve had a hard life,” she said.

“Have we got a deal?” he said.

“We’ve got a start,” she said.

Earl took Route 189 off Interstate 95 and headed east toward Lafayette. “This’s pretty down around here,” Penny said as the car passed between tall maples that overhung the road. “Sort of like a long green tunnel. Only without walls. Nice big house, riding horses, smell the ocean, too. Very nice down here.”

“I guess so,” Earl said. “I didn’t come down for the scenery.”

“I don’t see a bar, though,” Penny said. “Nice friendly inn with a bar, sit on the porch with a drink.”

“You don’t need another drink,” he said. “You had your drinks back at lunch. You got to get this thing home in one piece, and the cops in this state’re vicious.”

“I could still use another drink,” Penny said. “Those ones I had, that dog-assed motel, all those crappy things were was water. Since I’m not gonna see you tonight after all. Could at least buy me, real drink. What the hell made you pick that place, anyway? You said you knew a place, and that’s where we end up?”

“Old times’ sake,” he said. “Used to meet Joey in
there. That’s where we had our meetings, in the coffee shop.”

“All that way out of the city?” she said. “There’s no coffee shops in Manhattan? You came all the way out of the city, meet with a guy, and then it turns out, he’s working the FBI? That was smart. No wonder you got caught.”

He sighed. “Penny,” he said, “there’s another thing you worry about, you’re doing something like that. Besides the FBI. Sure, you don’t want
them
to see you. Liable make them wonder: ‘What’s a nice college guy, plays for Saint Stephen’s, what’s he doing having coffee with this large layoff man?’ But you also, you also don’t want the high rollers, don’t want them seeing you, either. They might start thinking, ’long same lines: ‘Hey, how come Joey’s having coffee with the guy that runs the plays?’ Might cut down on the action, cut down the action a lot. So you stay out of their hangouts, too. And anyway, Joey wasn’t working the Bureau, the first year. Or most of the second one, either. It was only the last four or five times, they had him. After his brother came coco. That’s when they got him wired up. Joey never wanted, you know, set me up. Just they had him in the bucket when his brother spilled his guts, and he didn’t have a choice. It was either he did what they told him, or else he did twenty-five years. I could see what a box he was in.”

“Earl,” she said, “Joey was the guy that set you up. Joey was the guy that picked you to do the dirty work with the team. Which means that Joey was the guy that arranged for you to go to jail.”

“Well,” Earl said, “but he didn’t have no choice about that, either. I would’ve done the same thing myself.”

“ ‘No choice,’ ” she said. “Whaddaya mean: ‘No choice’? He had a choice. He could’ve left you alone. He could’ve picked some other guy. He could’ve bribed the whole team. Why did he pick just you? Why were you the fall guy?”

“Penny, for Christ sake,” Earl said, “when you’re fixing games, all right? You don’t pay off the whole team. For one thing, it’d be too dangerous. The more people know, the more people can tell. For another thing, it’d cost too much, and some of the guys, it’d stand to reason, they wouldn’t be cute enough to make it look good. No, Joey did what I would’ve done, if I’d’ve been Joey, you know? I was the guy that they needed. I was the guy with the ball. I was the playmaker. Joey just got my name out the papers. Coach said I was the best point guard he ever saw in college ball. He said maybe I was the best college point guard ever. I was the natural choice.”

“Do I believe that?” she said. “Or is that like the ex-wife you call when you’re drunk, and the daughter that dropped out of U Mass? Something you just tell people you meet, something that just never happened.”

“You could go and look it up,” he said. “I lost the clips myself, but it was all in the papers.”

She shook her head. “Well, I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Well, that doesn’t matter, you do,” he said. “That’s still the way it happened.”

“I don’t mean,” she said, “I don’t mean I don’t believe what you just said. I just don’t believe a guy like you can walk around like you do, on his way to steal a car—some guy’s
expensive
car, which means he is at least rich, and probably he’s mean, and will come after
you himself, if he doesn’t like the cops—and tell me to take a chance on either Allen dumps me, or
Allen
calls the cops. So we
both
go to jail. And
then
, in the practically very next breath, you sit there and tell me, a perfectly straight face, this Joey that sank you was just a nice guy that just hadda get out of a jam. What’s the
matter
with you? You get dropped on your head, you’re a kid? You must’ve had some time yourself, when you were in the can. Didn’t you ever start to think: ‘How did I get here?’ I mean, I
assume
you didn’t like it. I don’t know too many guys that actually did time, but my brother and the couple or so ones I did meet, said they didn’t like it at all. So why’re you so damned determined, do things like this, probably get yourself more? We’re doing okay, just the way that we’re going. Everything’s not hunky-dory, but I had some worse times, my life, and I never even got busted. I figure that’d be worse, worse’n the worst day I had.” She shook her head again. “There’s no part of this that I see that I like. No part I see that I like.”

“Look,” he said, “inna first place, all right? You like these houses? You like the fields and the ponies? The stone walls and big trees and all of that shit? Wait’ll we get little closer to town, you see all the boats onna bay. They’ll make you cry, they’re so pretty. But, this’s the shit that you like? This is shit that you want? Well, you want to get it, it won’t be from blowing Allen, and it won’t come the job I got now. It’s like when they teach you to swim, you know? When they teach the young kids to swim. First they get in the water, and then they teach ’em to tread it. So they can stay afloat. But they don’t tell them: ‘You keep doing that, you’ll make it the end of the pool.’ Get to the deep end, you got to do more. Got to use both your hands and your
feet. And that’s exactly where we are, where we are right now: treading the fucking damned water. We ever expect, get this kind of stuff, we got to start kicking and grabbing. And that’s why we’re doing these things.”

She slumped down in the seat. “Maybe if I close my eyes,” she said, “maybe if I go to sleep. Maybe then when I wake up, this all will be over, and I won’t be meeting a matron.”

Earl drove the Dodge through the village and up a long hill where big houses overlooked wide lawns and the ocean on the left, and old farmhouses guarded walled pastures on the right. He took the third road on the right after leaving the village. It was dirt, rutted with shallow washouts; the tops of boulders protruded. “Are you sure,” he had said to Battles after following him to the faded red barn behind the white colonial house, “are you sure I’m gonna be able to get this fucking thing out of this place? ’Thout leaving the oil pan behind?” Battles had smirked at him, pulling the dustcover off the blue roadster. “Well,” he’d said, “I got it in here. And the guy that owned it’s been getting it into places like this for years. Taking it out again, too. I didn’t have any trouble, bringing it in here when I did. So, he did it, I did it, figure you can.”

“Yeah,” Earl had said, “but he knows the car. And you both know the roads. All the holes are, which rocks’re too big to go over. I don’t know any those things.” Battles had bent over the cockpit and extracted the ignition key from the lock. It was fobbed on black leather that carried a Mercedes badge. Battles had held it up by the tip of the key, dangling the fob. “Come to Papa,” he had said.

“And,” Earl had said, “while he’s been doing those
things all these years, his neighbors and the other people that know him, they’ve been watching him do it. Judge must know a lot of people, he got to be a judge. They see me in it, they’re not gonna think: ‘Geez, the judge sure got tall. And younger.’ They’re gonna think: ‘Hey, that’s not the judge. How come he’s got the judge’s car? Somebody call up the sheriff, get a posse started here.’ Maybe that cop I met on the way down, maybe tomorrow he’s this side the road. I already told you, he recognized me, and he knows what my license says. It doesn’t say ‘judge’ on it, not that I saw, and what if he knows the judge? Maybe testified in his court. Cops do that, you know. They do it a lot. They know what judges look like. They know what they don’t look like, too.”

“Look,” Battles had said, “I know it’s a sports car. I know there’s not many. But this here’s still not the only one the Germans made, you know? You put a different set of plates on this, something out of state, and you just drive her up the road there and no one’ll bother you. Sunday traffic from the beaches, cops’ll have their hands full. Assholes running into each other, assholes overheating their radiator, assholes running out of gas? Assholes driving drunk? Assholes’ll be everywhere, whole fucking
world
of assholes. All driving the fucking cops nuts. Cops won’t have the time to wonder if some particular buggy’s hot. Long’s it keeps running, don’t clog up the road, that’ll be all that they care.”

“Yeah,” Earl had said, “but that’s you saying that. You in a barn in a field. I’m gonna be the guy out on the road. What if this fucking thing breaks? I don’t know these little sleds. ’Cept they can be delicate. Maybe it doesn’t like heat—that could be. Judge only drove it cool nights. What if it decides throw a hose
on me? What if I’m one the guys that the cops stop to help? What the hell do I tell the cops then? ‘Well, Mister Battles there, he said it’d be all right I just drove this puddle jumper up to Boston for the night. Said you guys wouldn’t mind.’ Think that’ll satisfy them, do you? Think they’ll say: ‘Oh, that’s fine.’? I got as close a look at that jail yesterday as I really want to get. I don’t know if it’s better, or worse, ’n the ones that I’ve stayed in so far—and I don’t want to find out, all right? The food’s better in Cranston, it was out in Kansas, well then, good, the inmates are lucky. But I don’t want any more of that luck, no more of that kind of luck.” He had turned to go out of the barn. “I’m not messing with this thing,” he had said. “Get yourself another boy.”

Battles had grabbed him by the right forearm and spun him around. His face had hardened. “Now you listen me, fucking punk. You got that? You just listen to me. You’re here because you really owe somebody something, and that somebody owes me. You know what I did for a guy one time? I got him out of a fucking big jam he was in, because a fucking girl just fucking
died.
Because of me, it was a fucking
accident
, and that’s
all
it fucking was, and it
stayed
that fucking way. Not a fucking
murder
charge. Not some big fucking thing that the papers would’ve gone and had a fucking field day with. Just a fucking
accident.

“Now,” Battles had said, clenching his grip on Earl’s arm, “I know how to
do
things, all right? I got a kid that doesn’t know his ass from third base, and he wants to go to Vietnam. Which means he gets it blown
off
, and
I
end up supporting his kid and his fuckin’ frogfaced wife. You think I want to do that? I do not. So I called a guy I know and I said: ‘Keep my fucking kid
in Georgia.’ And he called somebody in Washington,
and the kid is staying in Georgia.
So I know how to do things.

“Now,” Battles had said, “the reason you are here is because the guy that owns this car’s got a big fucking problem, and I got a connected problem. And I consequently called the same guy I called about my fuckin’ kid, all right? It’s not a problem like somebody fucking
dying
is a problem, but it’s still a fucking problem. You can stand there and tell me: ‘The judge must be stupid.’ And I won’t argue with you. The judge was fucking stupid, get himself into this, and I told him when he started that was what he fucking was, and he wasn’t thinking straight. A lot of guys don’t think straight, they get pussy on the brain. And you can tell me:
‘You
were stupid.’ I won’t argue with that either. Maybe what I did was worse. Because
I
knew it was stupid, and I
was
thinking straight, and I still went along with it.

“But none of that fucking matters,” Battles had said. “The judge asks me to help him? I hadda help the judge. He wants to come to my place on the Wednesday afternoons, use a room a couple hours? Well, I run a public place, and I rent rooms to people, and some of them get laid in them, or do some other things, and some of them aren’t married, and some are but not to them, and some if you know what I mean can’t get married anyway, ’cause guys can’t marry guys, and gash can’t marry gash.

“Well,” Battles had said, “I told him, and I told him: ‘This fucking town is small. People see what’s going on, and they talk about it. They don’t know who’s doing it, they don’t talk very much, but if they fucking
notice
you, they just won’t shut fucking up. So
for Christ’s sakes, all right? Do me a fucking favor. I know you done me a few favors, and I will do this for you. But: just be fucking careful.’ And he said that he would.” Battles had paused and laughed shortly. “I fuckin’ near fuckin’ died the first time I see this fuckin’ car outside the room on a Wednesday afternoon. I mean: I fuckin’
died.
I call up the room extension, and I hear him breathing hard, and I said: ‘Hey judge, all right? Sorry for the interruption. But parking that fucking car out there, with that fucking license plate, I mean, you call this “fucking careful”? You call this “being careful”? Like I thought we both agreed we’d fucking better be?’ And you know what he says to me? ‘My other car broke down.’ He’s a fucking wonder, he is, a fucking goddamned wonder.”

Earl had looked down at the registration plate. Between the “Ocean State” and “Rhode Island” lettering were five capital letters reading “
HONOR
.”