The Grand Tour (21 page)

“She owes me money.”

“How much?”

“Ninety-five hundred, give or take.”

“For what.” Mikhail gave Richard a very abbreviated version explaining for what. Richard said, “I don't believe you. Leave her alone.”

Mikhail sucked the straw, further hollowing his already hollow cheeks. “Or what?”

“Or I don't know. Something.”

“Something? You're not very good at this.” It almost sounded as though he was disappointed.

“I'm a beginner, but I'm willing to learn.”

“Okay.” Mikhail drummed his fingers on the counter.

Richard had anticipated a tense showdown, but the man's laconic, depressive aura was like a sponge absorbing and nullifying all of Richard's hostility. He tried again. “I don't know, maybe I'll burn this place down.”

“Please, you'd be doing me a favor.”

“Fine, use your imagination.”

Mikhail lit a cigarette. “I have to say, you have a lot of nerve coming in here trying to tell me to forget about ninety-five hundred bucks and acting protective on your daughter's behalf.”

“What does that mean?”

“Let's just say World's Greatest Father you weren't.” Mikhail sipped from the long straw of his drink, then settled his head in the crook of his bent arm, and said, “She told me about one time you were gone a whole week? Just disappeared. Then came back like nothing had happened.”

“I don't remember that.”

“I bet. She said it happened a lot.”

“I'm not going to discuss this with you.”

“She said you were like a dog that kept running away, getting lost, and brought back home.”

“I made some mistakes, sure.”

“I mean, what do you think that does to a little girl's psyche?”

“Probably screws it up.”

“Yeah, probably. Might make her fear abandonment by men and yet be attracted to men who are likely to abandon her.” As he spoke, Mikhail's face was finally animated by something other than fatigued displeasure—it was not an improvement. “She told me about another time—you'd already fucked up somehow and were trying to make it up to her—you bought her this big plastic playhouse for the backyard. Only you couldn't figure out how to do it, and you got frustrated and forgot about it. She said the plastic pieces sat in a big pile in the backyard for three days before your wife at the time noticed and put it together. She said she didn't tell her mother about it, because she didn't want to cause another fight.”

“Did she tell you about how I used to take her to ballet class when she was five? What about how I used to stay home and paint pictures with her?” The truth was he'd been between construction jobs at the time and had little more to do than sprawl around hungover and daub greens and browns on construction paper, but still. He strained his memory for more exculpating evidence.
I always. I used to. There was this one time when I.
“Anyway, fuck me. Why am I sitting here explaining myself to you?”

Mikhail said, “She told me about one birthday when she was older that you had obviously forgotten about. You showed up at the house to get something you'd left there when you moved out. And you noticed the
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
banner and half a cake sitting on the counter, and you pretended like you had come for her. And you gave her something from your pocket—was it breath mints?” He guffawed. “Could that be right?”

“It was a Magic Eightball key chain.”

Mikhail made a stabbing motion with his cigarette as he bent again toward his drink. “Right. And she told me she held on to it for years anyway. Kept it in her desk. That it reminded her of you and how she hated you and loved you, too, even though she didn't want to. Her words. She might still have it, you should ask her. But anyway, the point is, don't ride into my bar on your high horse about how I'm mistreating your daughter. I'm a piece of shit and so are you.”

Richard watched the bartender wipe grime onto highball glasses with a soiled rag and wondered why this assessment of his character made his stomach twist. It wasn't as though he'd ever deluded himself into thinking he'd been a good father. And he regularly thought of and referred to himself as a piece of shit. But there was something about hearing it from this cheesy hustler, sweating in his pleather, that codified it as indisputable, objective truth. This guy—
this fucking guy
—clearly knew from pieces of shit; an abridged family history from Cindy and five minutes around Richard had been all he needed to get it right. Mikhail sucked with a long crackle at the ice in his empty drink, like an enervated spider draining the last bit of life from the husk of his victim.

“All right.” Richard sighed. “So explain what happens if you don't get the money.”

“I don't know, maybe nothing. Or maybe I email her boss, tell him my side of things.”

“Why would they believe you? Why would they even listen?”

“They might not. In this life, there are no guarantees.”

“Basically, you're full of shit is the feeling I get here. You're just some grubby dirtbag leaning on my kid. No reason not to, right? It doesn't cost you anything, and if she's dumb enough to pay, you're up ten grand.”

Mikhail shook his empty glass in the air. He waited until the new drink had been put in front of him and the bartender had resumed dirtying the glassware before he answered. “That's basically it, yeah. I'm pretty harmless. But the thing you're forgetting, and she's not, is that I know a lot of people who aren't harmless. I'm not saying I want anything to happen to her, because I honestly don't. I like your daughter, she's a tough girl. Really sharp and funny, too. I would genuinely feel terrible if anything did happen to her….” He made a circular motion with his hand as he droned on, like a chess expert going through a tedious explanation of an endgame's foregone conclusion, and finally wrapped up with “Desperate times, desperate measures. Et cetera, et cetera.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Yeah, man, of course it is.” Mikhail laughed. “See, that's how you threaten someone.”

Richard pulled out his overstuffed wallet and found one of the checks he'd brought just in case a situation arose, though he hadn't imagined this particular situation, could never have imagined this particular situation in a thousand years.

“You got a pen?” he said.

Mikhail laughed again. “You've got to be kidding.”

“Banks closed an hour ago, and I'm leaving town now.”

“Okay. You know what? Fine. If it bounces, it bounces, and she still owes me the money. What's the difference? And I think you do want to help her, even if you don't know what you're doing. Hey, you know what else?” He reached over the bar, felt around, and procured a plastic Bic, which he bounced a couple of times on its end. “I like you. I trust you. You're a lot like me.”

“Now you're just being hurtful,” said Richard. He took the pen, made out a check for ninety-five hundred dollars, and handed it to Mikhail. He pushed himself up from the bar and stood over the man, imagining, for a moment, plunging the pen down into the bent neck, the exposed ridge of spine. “Listen, if you ever talk to my daughter again, I will kill you. I really do mean that.”

Mikhail folded the check into his front shirt pocket. “That's good,” he said, looking up and nodding. “Now you're getting the hang of it.”

Richard doddered through the parking lot, the warm Vegas dusk, and got in the car. Vance sat behind the wheel, jotting something in his notebook. He shut the door quietly and bent backward to look at his sleeping daughter. She moaned in her sleep and turned halfway on her side, her arm unfurling off the edge of the backseat with a languid grace that suggested a hostess at some plantation gala introducing an especially dear and important guest. He nudged her shoulder but to no effect. The limb was unresponsive in its socket, as though unconnected to its owner.

“Okay,” he said to Vance. “Let's go.”

Very soon, the desert reemerged from under its asphalt and neon camouflage. Squat segments of a rusted industrial chemical storage unit jumbled out into the sand like spilled intestines. A mottled dog limped in their shadows, watching the car long after it had sped past. Various signage on the side of the road desperately advertised
LOBSTER! NEW GIRLS, SHOWS NIGHTLY!! WORLD'S LARGEST TRUCK!!!
as though the landscape itself was racking its brain, trying to find something to make you turn around and spend more money, in the unlikely event you had any left. As though she sensed a loosening of Sin City's gravitational field, Cindy roused herself. “Where are we? Where are we going?”

Richard said, “Leaving Las Vegas.”

“No. No no no.”

“Yes. I have to get on to the next stop, and you can't stay there.”

“I have a job. And I have to pay off that money.”

“I paid him off.”

“What?” She pushed herself halfway up in the seat, against the door. “You what?”

“I paid him off.”

“How?”

“I wrote him a check.”

She laughed incredulously. “A check?”

“They're these little paper rectangles? People used to carry them around to pay for things?”

He waited to hear more objections, then glanced back and saw she was sleeping again. After a few more minutes, they crossed some impalpable line and slipped the very last, flailing grasp of the city: no more billboards, no more industrial chaos or jackpot truck stops or signs of human existence at all, really. He felt himself relax, secure in the certainty that—as with the state of Oregon—this was a place to which he would never return. What was the opposite of
Viva,
he wondered, glancing back once more at his sleeping daughter, and then quickly slipping into his own Bonanza Dreams.

Later, after the bodies had been searched and robbed, and a kill count radioed in (twenty-six!), and a trench had been dug for them, and quicklime sprinkled, and a recon team sent into the jungle to look for other survivors or other encampments, and dinner had been eaten, and shit had been shot, and someone had said “fucking A” under their breath for the hundredth time, I went and looked for Berlinger. He was sitting with his back up against a little rice palm that waved in the warm breeze. Endicott was evidently not worried about him deserting, which made sense—going out into the jungle without a weapon or map or provisions would have been suicide.

“Hey,” I said.

“What's up,” he said, without looking at me. He was whittling away on a little piece of wood.

“I thought they took your weapons.”

“It's a penknife, Lazar. I'm not going to stage a mutiny with it.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I already said why.”

“Years in jail. I thought you were smarter than this.”

“You thought wrong, I guess.” He shrugged and attended to his whittling. It was a little man, rough still, but with clearly discernible legs and big feet splayed out. I was trying to figure out what to say when Davis Martin came up behind us.

“Lazar,” he said. “We're moving out soon and Lieutenant wants you to look after Berlinger.”

Berlinger said, “What's ‘look after' mean? I'm fine, thanks.”

Davis Martin didn't even look at him, and I realized that as far as Martin was concerned, when Berlinger refused orders and laid down his gun, he'd ceased to exist. To me, Martin said, “What this means is that you will accompany Berlinger for the rest of this march. You will make sure he doesn't get killed, or get anyone else killed, or run off, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Good, we're moving soon.”

Berlinger arched his back against the tree like a cat stretching, and looked up at me. He grinned. “Got you on MP duty, Lazar. You up for this assignment?”

“Shut up, Mitch.”

“You could make your stripes here.”

“I said shut up.”

He shrugged and went back to whittling his little man. I walked back to where my pack was, through the village. Bloodstains in the dirt around the fire pit were already dry, getting trampled by our soldiers and blown by the wind. It was startling how fast the evidence of what we'd just done was disappearing—soon it would all be gone. I sat on a rock and wrote a letter to my parents that I knew I probably wouldn't send. I never thought I'd personally experience the feeling, but I was suddenly very, very homesick. I told them about the march, about the shitty MREs, about how pretty the mountains were. I even told them how one of the guys surrendered arms, how I was in charge of getting him to base. My dad would like that, I knew. But I didn't tell them about what we'd just done. There wasn't any putting it into words. I'm just now getting to where I can.

Cindy looked over at her father, who lay on the other bed watching TV with the volume down. Nick at Nite:
Sanford and Son,
it looked like. His great gray head was cushioned between the stacked pillows behind him and his bulbous neck in front. Richard had protested at first when earlier, on the long drive to Salt Lake City, Cindy had asked for a copy of the book, but relented when he saw her desire was genuine. She'd wanted to read the rest of the chapter he'd read at the Convention Center. She put the book down beside her and said, “It's good.”

“Thanks.”

“You never told me about any of that. You never told me you'd killed someone.”

“I've never told you a lot of things.”

“Maybe you should give it a try sometime.”

Richard didn't look up. He clicked the channel to a golf tournament. Tiger Woods, flanked by hundreds of people, drove a disappearing ball into the white dome of the upper sky. Two seconds later, the camera swooped up to catch the ball's disorienting reentry as it appeared to arc toward the screen until perspective showed it landing farther away, bounding like a frightened rabbit, and finally coming to rest in a swath of unreal green. Watching it, Cindy felt the nausea she'd been ignoring creep back up her gullet. She'd slept the remaining few hours of the ride, and when she awoke, the pills were starting to wear off. She felt nervous and raw, like her entire body was a scraped knee.

“Listen.” He muted the TV and turned toward her. “Why don't you come with us to New York.”

“Dad, I really do have to go back.”

“No, you don't.”

“I have a job. I have a life there.”

He snorted. “Yeah, some life.”

“How's being a hermit in the desert treating you?”

“I want you to come along to New York, maybe stay with your mother for a little while.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“No, but I'm sure when she hears how things are, she'll be happy to put you up.”

“How things are. How are things?”

He turned his head and looked at her for a moment. “You really want me to answer that? I'll be honest with you, Cin, they don't seem great.”

“I'm going for a swim.” She got out of bed on shaky legs, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and left the room. She was resigned to many things where her father was concerned, but not a lecture on good life choices. Outside the room, the synthetic piling of the blue carpet bristled between her toes; the large hallway stretched out bland and identical in both directions, implying that it didn't matter which way you went.

The night outside was an eerie bliss of desolation broken only by the hum of cars on the distant highway. Despite the parking lot's fullness (a gymnastics tourney, they'd been informed by the somber, garishly necktied desk clerk), the place felt deserted, vacant. It was located ten miles south of Salt Lake, on a rectangle of dust, as though a nomadic team of Sheraton executives had wandered to that spot and seen that it was good. She walked around the pebbled edge of the hotel's patio area. The swimming pool sparkled a beckoning green-white under halogen lights, like a jewel left unguarded to lure a thief, baiting an obscure trap in the surrounding darkness.

The water was tepid, still warmed by the hot exhale of the October desert. She piled up her clothes on the rough concrete that surrounded the pool, though she kept on her underwear. She didn't really care if some car salesman from Provo caught what he might consider a naughty glimpse from his window. That would be his problem, not hers—she was currently at the absolute limit of problems she could have. The needful water clung to her. It was a relief physically, but also mentally, to escape her father's proximity—the radius of his personality that extended around him like a force field—and her own uncontrollable, compulsive desire for his attention and approval.

When she dove beneath the surface, the overchlorinated water assaulted her eyes with a purifying, righteous burn. She let out a few air bubbles and swam to the shallow bottom, which was littered with pennies and a fine dusty residue, the provenance of which was best left unimagined. She was a good swimmer, always had been—a waterbaby, in Eileen's words—though she rarely used her own apartment complex's pool, a dismal square of green water under constant siege by a squadron of intimidating teenagers. She kicked across the bottom to the deeper end, letting the weight of water overhead squeeze the uneasy dope-sick feeling out from under her rib cage. She surfaced with her hands on the cool slick of the tiled lip, then dove again.

From the balcony, Richard watched his daughter swim. Or, rather, he watched a blurry form with blonde hair he assumed was his daughter move around in a greenish rectangle he assumed was a pool. Whoever it was was staying underwater for full minutes at a time. He wondered if she'd seen him up there and was, childishly, trying to worry him. The blurriness of her form in his vision allowed him to imagine her as a child again, not the hard, difficult woman she had become. The yellow hair crowned the surface of the water and then disappeared again, and he idly wished he could banish her back to the womb.

He called Eileen. “Hello?”

“Ei, it's Richard.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, fine. I'm with Cindy.”

“Really.” The musical extension of the long first syllable followed by an octave's drop into the second conveyed an entire marriage's worth of skepticism. “She came to your thing?”

“Yeah. We're in Salt Lake City now.”

“She came with you?”

He had planned on telling Eileen everything—the money, the apartment, the pills—but instinctively pulled away from that tack, not wanting to give Cindy one more thing to blame him for. “I guess she felt like catching up. Is that really so shocking?”

“Yes, to be honest.”

“Anyway, I was just looking at her, and it made me want to give you a call, for some reason.”

“Do I detect a note of nostalgia?”

“No.”

“A pining for younger, better days? A sense of loss?”

“Stop it.”

“Congratulations on the book again, by the way. It seems as though it's doing incredibly well.”

“Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, right?”

“No, well, obviously it could have, but still.”

“Are we on for next week?”

“I think so, call me. I have to go, there's a thing I'm late for. Hi to Cin.”

He hung up the phone and returned to the balcony. The blurred green water flickering below, his daughter somewhere beneath it, lost to him. He'd tried, over the years, to re-insinuate himself into her life. Phone calls here and there, a standing invitation for her to visit Phoenix, even an unannounced visit to Vegas, under the pretext of writing some nonexistent travel piece for a nonexistent magazine. But each time, he was rebuffed. Not cruelly or in anger, but with a curt courtesy that was worse for its modulated lack of feeling. The message was clear: thanks but no thanks.

After that Vegas visit—the unsmiling embrace outside the casino, the terse breakfast that followed, and the little wave that dismissed him back to his hotel—he'd written her a letter. He'd never sent it and had forgotten most of its contents, but the upshot was why couldn't she forgive him? Why? He looked at the pale face in the mirror and asked again. What had he done that was so terrible? Divorce her mother? They couldn't stand the sight of each other at the time. Drink too much? It seemed like she should have developed some sympathy for compulsion and addiction. Cheating? He'd never really cheated on Eileen, not when it mattered—toward the end it had all felt like part of the same disaster; who cared if the waiter spilled his drinks, if the piano hurtled into the first mate, when the ship was going down?

He'd left, that was all. She couldn't forgive his not being there, not fighting to be there as much as he could. And the truth was he hadn't wanted to at the time. He'd wanted to be left alone to work on his lousy novels and tile houses and drink and occasionally get laid and always be hungover. She couldn't forgive him those years, and she couldn't accept his interest, or the possibility that, in some admittedly incremental and insignificant way, he might have changed.

But she couldn't refuse him now. So this was, then, maybe, the second chance he'd been looking for. He didn't deserve it, but he would take it. He was glad she needed him. He was glad she was fucked up.

On the other side of the pool, near the salt barrens at the edge of the parking lot, Vance stood frozen. He, too, watched Cindy, though he knew for certain it was her, even at a respectful distance. He'd gone for a little walk around the hotel, stretching his legs after the eight-hour drive, when he noticed a blonde woman taking her clothes off. Seeing her through the metal bars of the pool's fence was like watching a prisoner disrobe. She lowered herself in, went underwater for a long time, surfaced, dove, surfaced, dove. Her skin was smooth, younger looking than he'd have imagined.

He hadn't been attracted to her before at all. The intensity of her demeanor frightened him. And she was both puffy and depleted with drugs and exhaustion and age. Being close to thirty, she was, of course, to Vance, a member of that impossibly aged demographic swath that included everyone older than him. What was it, then, that held his stare from forty feet away? The consanguinity with a man he admired, or whose work he admired, was one thing, he supposed. Her breasts, full and pale under the greenish glow of the sodium lights overhead, were another thing. Her skin was an innocent white, not what you would have expected from a longtime desert dweller. Now, the thought of her in that musty apartment, stalking around like an animal at the zoo, filling every crevice with her presence, excited him in a way he couldn't understand. There was no light where Vance stood, and he knew she couldn't see him, yet he remained stock-still and realized he was holding his breath.

She dove again. He waited for her to resurface, but this time she didn't. A breeze came across the desert and rippled the dull-green skin of the water. His legs tensed in the moment before he would run to jump the fence, dive in, and pull her out, when she surfaced, gasping, and leaned against the pool's wet lip. Then she pulled herself out, wrapped the towel around her, and exited the pool area. As she did, he saw the bald spot gleaming on the crown of her head. He stared at it, into it, and it was as though a portal to her inner self had momentarily opened. A moment later she was twisting her hair up over it, walking toward the dark stairs, but he had seen it. It was there. He felt privy to an enormous secret, entrusted with something precious by her, even though she didn't know it yet.