“Then why doesn’t He know when somebody is going to give in to a temptation? Why doesn’t He stop it before it happens?”
That was the one thing she never could abide from me, questioning God’s almighty wisdom. And it was the one thing I never could keep myself from doing.
Anyway, I sat in front of the TV that night, sweating in the lightest jacket I could find in the closet, until I was reasonably certain Cindy wasn’t going to come downstairs to ask how I was doing. Then I shed the jacket and tried to fall asleep on the couch. But then I started thinking about that naked girl, and damn if I didn’t get hard thinking about how she looked all muddy and wet in her yard.
I was so horny all of a sudden I almost got up and went back to Cindy. But then I thought what an asshole I’d be, using my wife like that. So instead I went to the little side room that was supposed to be a dining room but where the computer is set up and where most of the girls’ toys always end up on the floor.
I had a good idea about what I’d seen at the house that afternoon but I wanted to be even more certain. I mean the black poster paper over all the windows, the cat piss stink of the place, the buckets full of rags in the tub. I’d never been in a meth house but I’d seen enough TV shows to have a pretty good idea. So in the Internet search box I typed What does a meth lab look like? Sixty seconds later I was as certain as I needed to be.
At first I felt a surge of satisfaction, as if I’d proven something important to myself. I guess you could say I was looking for a kind of justification, as if stealing from dopers is different than stealing from your neighbor the schoolteacher or the guy across town who sells antiques. For the life of me I couldn’t even make up my mind about what Gee would say in a situation like this. Would she say, Sin is sin, baby boy, no matter who you do it to or with? Or maybe, If you can turn evil to good, that’s when you know you’re doing God’s will. Or would she say, It’s what’s in your heart that matters. God only cares about what’s in your heart?
If I ever had such a thing as a moral compass in my life, it had been Gee. Still is, I guess, considering how much time I spent sitting there trying to figure out what she might say to me about this.
After a while, though, it was sort of like you stepped into my head, Spence, and very politely pushed Gee aside. Soldiers, I could hear you saying. That was always the way you’d get things started when you had a little speech to make. And I liked hearing that word, no denial here. When you grow up not only an only child but half an orphan, and somebody you admire throws his arms around you in brotherhood, it’s a powerful feeling. That word always warmed me up in an instant and made me want to do whatever you were about to suggest.
Soldiers, I could hear you saying, ’tis done what ’tis done. You can’t wish it away, you can’t undo it, you can’t paint it over or pretend it isn’t there. It’s the elephant in the room—you understand what I’m saying? For the time being it might be a sleeping elephant, but elephants don’t sleep forever. It’s going to wake up someday and see you trying to tiptoe around it, and it’s going to be pissed. It’s going to reach out with its trunk and haul you in and rape the living shit out of you. And the only thing for you to do, assuming the thought of being raped by an elephant does not appeal to you, is to get busy while it’s still sleeping and figure out how to get it out of your house without waking it up. Are you gonna bail and move out, let the elephant have your house? Are you gonna cut out a big circle in your floor, then hire a crane to pick up your house and move it? What’s your best option here? That’s what you have to figure out and figure out quick. You don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you don’t even visit the fucking latrine until you have a plan of action. And then you execute. Maybe it’s only an 80 percent solution, but a well-executed 80 percent solution is better than a 100 percent solution that comes too late. So you pull on your pants, you lace up your boots, you get the job fucking done. Period.
The last time I looked at the blue numbers on the cable box that night, they said 4:17. Two and a half hours later I woke up to Cindy’s hand on my forehead. When I looked up at her she said, “You don’t seem to have a temperature anymore. You feeling okay?”
“Better,” I said, and sat up. “Yeah, I’m good now.”
“I’ll call Jake if you want me to.”
“I’m good,” I said. “You mind if I take the truck today?”
That day, the day after the incident with the girl, Jake seemed to be avoiding me most of the day, which was fine with me, seeing as how it was all I could do to keep from falling into a piece of equipment, not only from lack of sleep but because my mind was working elsewhere. And I found every excuse I could to stay out of the office. We couldn’t even look each other in the eye. He was ashamed of having made the best decision he could, and I was ashamed for making the worst.
My most immediate problem was what to do with the money. For the time being it was locked in the toolbox in the bed of my truck, but I wasn’t comfortable keeping it there. What if Cindy or I had an accident and the truck had to be towed? What if the truck got stolen?
I mean, maybe those dopers had so much money that they never even counted it. Maybe they never pulled back that shower curtain except to dump more bundles of cash into a box. Yeah, and maybe the earth really is flat and we don’t know it yet.
I was betting those dopers knew to a dollar how much they had. I mean why else does a person go into that line of work except for the money? They probably even knew to a dollar how much was missing, which was more than I could say for myself. I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to count it yet.
Anyway, by midafternoon I’d run through every possible scenario I could come up with. The way I figured, I had two things to accomplish. One was to get that money where it wasn’t going to be found until I could decide what to do with it. The other was to distract the dopers, maybe for a good long time, from launching an investigation into the whereabouts of their money.