Finders Keepers

  He slid the trunk into the hole and shoveled the dirt back around it and over it quickly. He finished by tamping it down with the flat of the shovel. He thought it would be okay. The bank wasn't particularly grassy, so the bald spot wouldn't stand out. The important thing was that it was out of the house, right?

  Right?

  He felt no relief as he dragged the dolly back along the path. Nothing was working out the way it was supposed to, nothing. It was as if malignant fate had come between him and the notebooks, just as fate had come between Romeo and Juliet. That comparison seemed both ludicrous and perfectly apt. He was a lover. Goddam Rothstein had jilted him with The Runner Slows Down, but that didn't change the fact.

  His love was true.

  ***

  When he got back to the house, he went immediately to the shower, as a boy named Pete Saubers would do many years later in this very same bathroom, after visiting that very same embankment and overhanging tree. Morris stayed in until his fingers were pruney and the hot water was gone, then dried off and dressed in fresh clothes from his bedroom closet. They looked childish and out of fashion to him, but they still fit (more or less). He put his dirt-smeared jeans and sweatshirt in the washer, an act that would also be replicated by Pete Saubers years later.

  Morris turned on the TV, sat in his father's old easy chair--his mother said she kept it as a reminder, should she ever be tempted into stupidity again--and saw the usual helping of ad-driven inanity. He thought that any of those ads (jumping laxative bottles, primping moms, singing hamburgers) could have been written by Jimmy Gold, and that made his headache worse than ever. He decided to go down to Zoney's and get some Anacin. Maybe even a beer or two. Beer wouldn't hurt. It was the hard stuff that caused trouble, and he'd learned his lesson on that score.

  He did get the Anacin, but the idea of drinking beer in a house full of books he didn't want to read and TV he didn't want to watch made him feel worse than ever. Especially when the stuff he did want to read was so maddeningly close. Morris rarely drank in bars, but all at once he felt that if he didn't get out and find some company and hear some fast music, he would go completely insane. Somewhere out in this rainy night, he was sure there was a young lady who wanted to dance.

  He paid for his aspirin and asked the young guy at the register, almost idly, if there was a bar with live music that he could get to on the bus.

  The young guy said there was.

  2010

  When Linda Saubers got home that Friday afternoon at three thirty, Pete was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of cocoa. His hair was still damp from the shower. She hung her coat on one of the hooks by the back door, and placed the inside of her wrist against his forehead again. "Cool as a cucumber," she pronounced. "Do you feel better?"

  "Yeah," he said. "When Tina came home, I made her peanut butter crackers."

  "You're a good brother. Where is she now?"

  "Ellen's, where else?"

  Linda rolled her eyes and Pete laughed.

  "Mother of Mercy, is that the dryer I hear?"

  "Yeah. There were a bunch of clothes in the basket, so I washed em. Don't worry, I followed the directions on the door, and they came out okay."

  She bent down and kissed his temple. "Aren't you the little do-bee?"

  "I try," Pete said. He closed his right hand to hide the blister on his palm.

  ***

  The first envelope came on a snow-showery Thursday not quite a week later. The address--Mr. Thomas Saubers, 23 Sycamore Street--was typed. Stuck on the upper-right-hand corner was a forty-four-cent stamp featuring the Year of The Tiger. There was no return address on the upper left. Tom--the only member of Clan Saubers home at midday--tore it open in the hall, expecting either some sort of come-on or another past due notice. God knew there had been plenty of those lately. But it wasn't a come-on, and it wasn't a past due.

  It was money.

  The rest of the mail--catalogues for expensive stuff they couldn't afford and advertising circulars addressed to OCCUPANT--fell from his hand and fluttered around his feet, unnoticed. In a low voice, almost a growl, Tom Saubers said, "What the fuck is this?"

  ***

  When Linda came home, the money was sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. Tom was seated before the neat little pile with his chin resting on his folded hands. He looked like a general considering a battle plan.

  "What's that?" Linda asked.

  "Five hundred dollars." He continued to look at the bills--eight fifties and five twenties. "It came in the mail."

  "From who?"

  "I don't know."

  She dropped her briefcase, came to the table, and picked up the stack of currency. She counted it, then looked at him with wide eyes. "My God, Tommy! What did the letter say?"

  "There was no letter. Just the money."

  "But who would--"

  "I don't know, Lin. But I know one thing."

  "What?"

  "We can sure use it."

  ***

  "Holy shit," Pete said when they told him. He had stayed late at school for intramural volleyball, and didn't come in until almost dinnertime.

  "Don't be vulgar," Linda said, sounding distracted. The money was still on the kitchen table.

  "How much?" And when his father told him: "Who sent it?"

  "That's a good question," Tom said. "Now for Double Jeopardy, where the scores can really change." It was the first joke Pete had heard him make in a very long time.

  Tina came in. "Daddy's got a fairy godmother, that's what I think. Hey, Dad, Mom! Look at my fingernails! Ellen got sparkle polish, and she shared."

  "Excellent look for you, my little punkin," Tom said.

  First a joke, then a compliment. Those things were all it took to convince Pete that he had done the right thing. Totally the right thing. They couldn't exactly send it back, could they? Not without a return address, they couldn't. And by the way, when was the last time Dad had called Teens his little punkin?

  Linda gave her son a piercing look. "You don't know anything about this, do you?"

  "Uh-uh, but can I have some?"

  "Dream on," she said, and turned to her husband, hands on hips. "Tom, someone's obviously made a mistake."

  Tom considered this, and when he spoke, there was no arking and barking. His voice was calm. "That doesn't seem likely." He pushed the envelope toward her, tapping his name and address.

  "Yes, but--"

  "But me no buts, Lin. We owe the oil company, and before we pay them, we have to pay down your MasterCard. Or you're going to lose it."

  "Yes, but--"

  "Lose the credit card, lose your credit rating." Still not arking and barking. Calm and reasonable. Persuasive. To Pete it was as if his father had been suffering from a high fever that had just broken. He even smiled. Smiled and touched her hand. "It so happens that for now, your credit rating is the only one we've got, so we have to protect it. Besides, Tina could be right. Maybe I've got a fairy godmother."

  No, Pete thought. A fairy godson is what you've got.

  Tina said, "Oh, wait! I know where it really came from."

  They turned to her. Pete felt suddenly warm all over. She couldn't know, could she? How could she? Only he'd said that stupid thing about buried treasure, and--

  "Where, hon?" Linda asked.

  "The Emergency Fund thingy. It must have got some more money, and now they're spreading it out."

  Pete let out a soundless breath of air, only realizing as it passed his lips that he had been holding it.

  Tom ruffled her hair. "They wouldn't send cash, punkin. They'd send a check. Also a bunch of forms to sign."

  Pete went to the stove. "I'm making more cocoa. Does anyone want some?"

  Turned out they all did.

  ***

  The envelopes kept coming.

  The price of postage went up, but the amount never changed. An extra six thousand dollars per annum, give or take. Not a huge sum, but tax-free and just enough to keep th
e Saubers family from drowning in debt.

  The children were forbidden to tell anyone.

  "Tina will never be able to keep it to herself," Linda told Tom one night. "You know that, don't you? She'll tell her idiot friend, and Ellen Briggs will broadcast it to everyone she knows."

  But Tina kept the secret, partly because her brother, whom she idolized, told her she would never be allowed in his room again if she spilled the beans, and mostly because she remembered the arkie-barkies.

  Pete stowed the cash envelopes in the cobweb-festooned hollow behind a loose baseboard in his closet. Once every four weeks or so, he took out five hundred dollars and put it in his backpack along with an addressed envelope, one of several dozen he had prepared at school on a computer in the school's Business Ed room. He did the envelopes after intramurals one late afternoon when the room was empty.

  He used a variety of city mailboxes to send them on their way to Mr. Thomas Saubers of 23 Sycamore Street, going about this family-sustaining charity with the craft of a master criminal. He was always afraid that his mom would discover what he was up to, object (probably strenuously), and things would go back to the way they had been. Things weren't perfect now, there was still the occasional arkie-barkie, but he supposed things weren't perfect in any family outside those old TV sitcoms on Nick at Nite.

  They could watch Nick at Nite, and Cartoon Network, and MTV, and everything else, because, ladies and gentlemen, the cable was back.

  In May, another good thing happened: Dad got a part-time job with a new real estate company, as something called a "pre-sell investigator." Pete didn't know what that was, and didn't give Shit One. Dad could do it on his phone and the home computer, it brought in a little money, and those were the things that mattered.

  Two other things mattered in the months after the money started coming in. Dad's legs were getting better, that was one thing. In June of 2010 (when the perpetrator of the so-called City Center Massacre was finally caught), Tom began walking without his crutches some of the time, and he also began stepping down on the pink pills. The other thing was more difficult to explain, but Pete knew it was there. So did Tina. Dad and Mom felt . . . well . . . blessed, and now when they argued they looked guilty as well as mad, as if they were shitting on the mysterious good fortune that had befallen them. Often they would stop and talk about other things before the shit got deep. Often it was the money they talked about, and who could be sending it. These discussions came to nothing, and that was good.

  I will not be caught, Pete told himself. I must not, and I will not.

  ***

  One day in August of that year, Dad and Mom took Tina and Ellen to a petting zoo called Happydale Farm. This was the opportunity Pete had been patiently waiting for, and as soon as they were gone, he went back to the stream with two suitcases.

  After making sure the coast was clear, he dug the trunk out of the embankment again and loaded the notebooks into the suitcases. He reburied the trunk and then went back to the house with his booty. In the upstairs hall, he pulled down the ladder and carried the suitcases up to the attic. This was a small, low space, chilly in winter and stifling in summer. The family rarely used it; their extra stuff was still stored in the garage. The few relics up here were probably left over from one of the previous families that had owned 23 Sycamore. There was a dirty baby carriage listing on one wheel, a standing lamp with tropical birds on the shade, old issues of Redbook and Good Housekeeping tied up with twine, a pile of moldy blankets that smelled like yuck.

  Pete piled the notebooks in the farthest corner and covered them with the blankets, but first he grabbed one at random, sat under one of the attic's two hanging lightbulbs, and opened it. The writing was cursive and quite small, but carefully made and easy to read. There were no cross-outs, which Pete thought remarkable. Although he was looking at the first page of the notebook, the small circled number at the top was 482, making him think that this was continued not just from one of the other notebooks, but from half a dozen. Half a dozen, at least.

  Chapter 27

  The back room of the Drover was the same as it had been five years before; the same smell of ancient beer mingled with the stink of the stockyards and the tang of diesel from the trucking depots that fronted this half of Nebraska's great emptiness. Stew Logan looked the same, too. Here was the same white apron, the same suspiciously black hair, even the same parrots-and-macaws necktie strangling his rosy neck.

  "Why, it's Jimmy Gold, as I live and breathe," he said, and smiled in his old dislikeable way that said we don't care for each other, but let's pretend. "Have you come to pay me what you owe, then?"

  "I have," Jimmy said, and touched his back pocket where the pistol rested. It felt small and final, a thing capable--if used correctly, and with courage--of paying all debts.

  "Then step in," Logan said. "Have a drink. You look dusty."

  "I am," Jimmy said, "and along with a drink I could use

  A horn honked on the street. Pete jumped and looked around guiltily, as if he had been whacking off instead of reading. What if they'd come home early because that doofus Ellen had gotten carsick, or something? What if they found him up here with the notebooks? Everything could fall apart.

  He shoved the one he had been reading under the old blankets (phew, they stank) and crawled back to the trapdoor, sparing a glance for the suitcases. No time for them. Going down the ladder, the change in temperature from boiling hot to August-normal made him shiver. Pete folded the ladder and shoved it up, wincing at the screek and bang the trapdoor made when it snapped shut on its rusty spring.

  He went into his bedroom and peered out at the driveway.

  Nobody there. False alarm.

  Thank God.

  He returned to the attic and retrieved the suitcases. He put them back in the downstairs closet, took a shower (once more remembering to clean up the tub afterwards), then dressed in clean clothes and lay down on his bed.

  He thought, It's a novel. With that many pages, it's pretty much got to be. And there might be more than one, because no single novel's long enough to fill all those books. Not even the Bible would fill all those books.

  Also . . . it was interesting. He wouldn't mind hunting through the notebooks and finding the one where it started. Seeing if it really was good. Because you couldn't tell if a novel was good from just a single page, could you?

  Pete closed his eyes and began to drift napward. Ordinarily he wasn't much of a day-sleeper, but it had been a busy morning, the house was empty and quiet, and he decided to let himself go. Why not? Everything was right, at least right now, and that was his doing. He deserved a nap.

  That name, though--Jimmy Gold.

  Pete could swear he'd heard it before. In class, maybe? Mrs. Swidrowski giving them background on one of the authors they were reading? Maybe. She liked to do that.

  Maybe I'll google it later on, Pete thought. I could do that. I could . . .

  He slept.

  1978

  Morris sat on a steel bunk with his throbbing head lowered and his hands dangling between his orange-clad thighs, breathing in a poison atmosphere of piss, puke, and disinfectant. His stomach was a lead ball that seemed to have expanded until it filled him from crotch to Adam's apple. His eyes pulsed in their sockets. His mouth tasted like a dumpster. His gut ached and his face hurt. His sinuses were stuffed. Somewhere a hoarse and despairing voice was chanting, "I need a lover that won't drive me cray-zee, I need a lover that won't drive me cray-zee, I need a lover that won't drive me cray-zee . . ."

  "Shut up!" someone shouted. "You're drivin me crazy, asshole!"

  A pause. Then:

  "I need a lover that won't drive me cray-zee!"

  The lead in Morris's belly liquefied and gurgled. He slid off the bunk, landed on his knees (provoking a fresh bolt of agony in his head), and hung his gaping mouth over the functional steel toilet. For a moment there was nothing. Then everything clenched and he ejected what looked like two gallons of yellow toot
hpaste. For a moment the pain in his head was so huge that he thought it would simply explode, and in that moment Morris hoped it would. Anything to end the pain.

  Instead of dying, he threw up again. A pint instead of a gallon this time, but it burned. The next one was a dry heave. Wait, not completely dry; thick strings of mucus hung from his lips like cobwebs, swinging back and forth. He had to brush them away.

  "Somebody's feelin it!" a voice shouted.

  Shouts and cackles of laughter greeted this sally. To Morris it sounded as if he were locked up in a zoo, and he supposed he was, only this was the kind where the cages held humans. The orange jumpsuit he was wearing proved it.

  How had he gotten here?

  He couldn't remember, any more than he could remember how he'd gotten into the house he'd trashed in Sugar Heights. What he could remember was his own house, on Sycamore Street. And the trunk, of course. Burying the trunk. There had been money in his pocket, two hundred dollars of John Rothstein's money, and he had gone down to Zoney's to get a couple of beers because his head ached and he was feeling lonely. He had talked to the clerk, he was pretty sure of that, but he couldn't remember what they had discussed. Baseball? Probably not. He had a Groundhogs cap, but that was as far as his interest went. After that, almost nothing. All he could be sure of was that something had gone horribly wrong. When you woke up wearing an orange jumpsuit, that was an easy deduction to make.

  He crawled back to the bunk, pulled himself up, drew his knees to his chest, and clasped his hands around them. It was cold in the cell. He began to shiver.

  I might have asked that clerk what his favorite bar was. One I could get to on the bus. And I went there, didn't I? Went there and got drunk. In spite of all I know about what it does to me. Not just a little loaded, either--standing-up, falling-down shitfaced drunk.