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 toothpaste. 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.