Windfall
by
James Magnuson


ISBN: 0812992261

BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

"Psychologically acute ... Magnuson's first novel in a decade is well
worth the wait."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Jim Magnuson has written his most thrilling and suspenseful book
yet--another terrific read from one of our very best authors."-Denis
Johnson, author of Already Dead and Jesus' Son

"Windfall does to the reader what found money does to its hero: It
grabs hold and doesn't let go.  Magnuson leads us expertly through the
minefields of betrayal, the nature of success, the lure of materialism.
It's what would happen if Alfred Hitchcock teamed up with Henry David
Thoreau.  But at its core Windfall is a fierce and taut thriller about
the biggest crimes of all--the crimes of the heart."  --William
Broyles, author of

Brothers in Arms, former editor in chief of Newsweek, and founding
editor of

Texas Monthly

"A hugely entertaining novel.  No writer working today is better than
James Magnuson at charting the humiliations of middle-class life, the
dilemma of the good man who's maybe not quite good enough.  He belongs
in a line extending from Graham Greene to Robert Stone--writers who
know how to pose urgent moral questions within the demands of the
thriller."  --Anthony Giardina, author of The

Country of Marriage

"Windfall is the thinking man's thriller-if you think you're too smart
to get trapped in terror, read it and sweat."  --Mary Willis Walker,
author of

All the Dead Lie Down and The

Red Scream

JAMES MAGNUS ON is the author of a dozen plays and six novels,
including Ghost Dancing, Open Season, and Money Mountain.  He has
written extensively for television, and is the director of the Michener
Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents
are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.

To Wendy Weil, once again

It would be difficult to describe the avidity with which the American
rushes forward to secure this immense booty that fortune offers.

--ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

I would like to thank my friends whose encouragement, suggestions, and
diplomatic criticisms have vastly improved this book: Bill Adler, Marla
Akin, Sarah Bird, Andy Cooper, Charles Crupi, Tony Giardina, Steve
Harrigan, Bill Hauptman, Brian Johnson, Joe Moldenhauer, Kathleen
Orillion, and Tom Zigal.

WINDFALL

CHAPTER 1

On a long hill just outside of Corsicana, Ben first noticed that he was
losing power.  Stepping on the accelerator felt like stepping on air.
His speed dropped from sixty-five to fifty-five and then to fifty.  Two
pickups and a small Accord with an AandMore sticker in the rear window
zoomed past him.  Once he got to the top of the rise, everything kicked
in again; there wasn't a trace of a problem.

The moon shone over empty winter pastures and the drained swampland
along the Trinity River.  Katy and both children were asleep.  He'd
hoped to get back to Austin early enough to at least look over his
lecture notes for the next day, but saying good-bye to Katy's family
after a long vacation was not a simple thing.

For years they'd been spending Christmases on Katy's family's farm in
Mississippi.  There was no place in the world where Katy felt freer.
The kids took care of themselves, roaming with their cousins, riding
horses, going on long Jeep rides over the fields.  The family all
gathered for the holiday--brothers, sisters, relatives from Boston and
Chicago.  Contrary to the nearly universally held opinion of
Mississippi as a bastion of the unenlightened, these gatherings were as
cosmopolitan as any Ben had ever experienced; there were folklorists
and screenwriters, Harvard cardiologists and painters from Venice
Beach.  Sometimes it seemed as if meals for twenty were being prepared
nonstop, but Katy loved it, working in the kitchen with her mother,
organizing a pi nata party in the garage for all the kids, black and
white, who lived along the road, taking long walks through the pastures
with her sister.

Their life in Austin seemed so small in comparison.  On the long ride
through Louisiana and East Texas, a quietness would settle over Katy,
and Ben always felt an unacknowledged reproach in that quietness.

He heard someone stir.  Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw Matt
shift under his quilt and throw his arm across his eyes, trying to go
back to sleep.  The headlights flashed across a shack with a
hand-painted sign for barbecue tacked above the door; the place looked
as if it had been closed for years.  The van's tires hummed on the
asphalt.  He reached down into the sack next to his seat and fished out
a couple of stale gingersnaps.  He turned on the radio and flipped
through the evangelists and the oldies stations, trying to keep himself
alert.

Then, on a long incline ten miles east of Mount Calm, it happened
again: the accelerator suddenly going soft as a beanbag chair, the van
slowing down--sixty, fifty, forty--and this time the motor began to
backfire.  Katy woke up and turned sleepily to him.

"Is everything okay?"

"Everything's fine," he said.  Ben was a man who kept his worries to
himself.

As soon as they hit the top of the hill all difficulties vanished; once
again the van was running like a top.  Katy was asleep in another
minute, but Ben was utterly awake.

This was all they needed.  Maybe it was something small, a dirty
carburetor filter, but when was it ever small?  The van had 105,000
miles on it and they couldn't afford a new one, but the truth was, they
couldn't afford a three-hundred-dollar repair bill either.

Every time something like this happened, it seemed to push them to the
brink.  In his twenties and thirties, Ben had never thought about
money--more or less what you'd expect from a scholar whose specialty
was the transcendentalists--but now, in his forties, trying to raise
two children on a thirty-thousand-dollar-ayear salary, it was all he
thought about.

There wasn't an ounce of trouble the rest of the way.  In the blackest
of moods, Ben sped up the ramp onto I-35 at Waco, merging fearlessly
with the thundering trucks and the shiny-bright sedans of returning
college students.

They pulled up in front of their yellow two-story house in South Austin
a little after ten and roused the sleeping children.  As he shoved open
the front door, Ben heard the slither of two weeks' mail piled inside.
He carried the two heaviest suitcases into the bedroom and checked the
phone messages.  There were a couple of invitations to New Year's
parties they'd missed and a half dozen calls from the kids' friends,
but it was always less than you'd hoped for.

The kids handled coming back better than he and Katy did.  After a
couple of trips to the car to help carry things in, Abby was soon
ensconced on her bed reading Sassy magazine and Matt was settled at his
computer, installing the newest version of Wing Commander, which his
uncle had given him for Christmas.

When Ben came into the kitchen with the soggy sackful of snacks and
half-eaten apples, Katy was already on the phone with her mother,
letting her know they'd arrived safely.  Ben put the boxed fruit juices
in the refrigerator, unlocked the back door, and stepped outside.

It was cold, and a wind had come up; the weatherman had said they could
expect a freeze.  The moon, shining through the gnarled branches of the
live oaks, cast ghostly shadows on the brick patio.

He retrieved the sack of cat food from the toolshed and poured some of
it into Dusty's metal dish.  He gave a low whistle, rattling the bowl.
When there was no response he called out three or four times.  Still
there was nothing.  He unlocked the patio gate and went around the side
of the house, calling as he went.  Dusty had a habit of disappearing
over Christmas vacation.  It was her way of punishing them for
abandoning her.

He left the dish of cat food on the back steps and went inside.  Katy
was still on the phone with her mother, so he went into the bedroom to
use the other line.  He called Alice, the ten-year-old down the block
they paid a dollar a day to feed Dusty while they were away.

Alice hadn't seen the cat in three days, and she sounded as if she was
near tears about it.  "I put food out every day, just like you told me,
and petted her," she said.  "I don't know what could have happened
..."

"But, Alice, when you came over in the morning, was the food gone?"

"No.  Not for the last couple of days."  Ben's silence only set her off
again.  "I'm really sorry, Mr.  Lindberg.  My dad and I went out
looking for her yesterday ..."

"It's not your fault, Alice," he said.  "Please.  It's just something
Dusty does."

When Ben went back into the kitchen, Matt was hunched over a bowl of
cereal and Katy stood at the stove making a grilled cheese sandwich for
Abby.  They wanted to know whom he'd been talking to, and when he told
them the story, Abby was vociferous.  He had to go out and look for
Dusty.  What if the Doberman that lived across the street had gotten
hold of her?  Their poor cat could be dying under some woodpile.  Ben
tried to argue that Dusty would probably show up in a day or two like
she always did, but it was hopeless arguing.  He was outvoted three to
one.

Flashlight in hand, he jogged down the front steps and out across the
yard.  At ten-thirty, most of the houses were already dark.

They lived in a strange non neighborhood cut up by too many church
parking lots.  Their house was the nicest one on the block, a two-story
Victorian, but they, like their neighbors, were renters.  The man next
door was a carpenter who seemed to split his time between working on
his boat in his driveway and smoking dope with the musician who lived
on the other side of him.  Across the street was the woman with the
Doberman.  As he passed under her windows, Ben could hear her arguing
with her boyfriend; at least once or twice a month the police would
come by.

He and Katy had found the house on a whirlwind three-day trip to Austin
four years ago, right after he heard that he'd been hired.  They took
the house because it had lovely porches, the rent was cheap, and it let
them take their time looking for a place to buy.  Four years later they
were still here, caught in the financial no-man's-land between an
academic salary and a booming Austin real estate market.

As he moved along the street, he fanned the flashlight under the cars,
along the gravel driveways, calling the cat's name.  In the parking lot
of the Baptist church a couple sat in a dark car talking.

When he got to Congress Avenue, he stopped for a moment and stared down
the long hill at the state capitol, all lit up a mile away.  The wind
blew a loose sheet of newspaper against the wall of the abandoned feed
store across the street.  There was no one else out.  It was too cold
even for the streetwalkers who used the motels a few blocks down.

It was the third of January, the week for ponderous editorials and
special "The Year in Pictures" editions of all the slick periodicals;
it was the time for taking stock.  Ben was by nature an optimist,
someone with both the knack and the inclination to cheer people up, but
if someone had forced him to speak the truth, the truth was that things
were not good.

Katy was finishing her teaching certification, but even with a second
teacher's salary they still weren't going to be able to touch the kinds
of houses Katy had her heart set on.  It went beyond money; somewhere
along the line some essential hope had been dimmed, if not
extinguished.  They were losing ground in more ways than one, and they
both knew it.

Turning to head home, he caught a bit of motion from the corner of his
eye.  On the far side of Congress Avenue a low-slung gray cat slipped
silently over the curb.

"Dusty?"  he called out.

The cat stopped for a moment, head raised, and then ran, squeezing
under the abandoned feed store Ben hesitated.  It probably wasn't Dusty
--all gray cats looked alike anyway--but he had promised the children,
and it was a cold night.  He didn't want to be responsible for the
animal freezing to death.

He crossed the street, trotting ahead of a city bus wheezing up the
hill.  The two or three passengers looked, in the fluorescent light,
like children of the damned.  The feed store had been closed for more
than nine months.  A FOR SALE sign still hung in the window.  It was
amazing that the store had stayed open for as long as it had.  Thirty
years ago this had been the edge of town.  People had pastured their
horses where St.  Edward's University now stood, but Austin had
exploded since then and the store had been reduced to an anachronism, a
curious relic.

He had taken the kids inside once or twice before it closed; it was a
wonderful place, with chicks and rabbits for sale, screwworm medicine
and liniment on the shelves, a big brass cash register, and barrels
full of everything under the sun.

He moved around the outside of the long stone building, whistling,
calling the cat's name.  He knelt at a place in the wall where the
stonework had broken away and shone the light into a shallow washed-out
burrow, but there was nothing there.  He stood up and shone the
flashlight in through one of the dirty windowpanes.  He was about to
give up when he heard a long, distressed moan.

"Dusty?"

The sound had come from under the building and it sounded as if the cat
was trapped.  He called Dusty's name again and there was an answering
cry but this time it sounded fainter, farther away.  A dog barked
somewhere down the block.

He went around to the back of the building.  A chain was wrapped
through the handles of a set of battered double doors, but the lock
intended to secure it was broken.  It took Ben only a few seconds to
unravel the chain.

He slid one door partway open and stepped inside the old store.  The
place still smelled of sweet feed, and there were still incubators and
animal cages piled up against the wall.  As he moved across the worn
floorboards, he heard scurrying in the rafters--probably rats.  Car
lights flared for a second at the front windows and then faded away.

The cat meowed loudly, clearly in distress; it sounded like it was
right under his feet.  "Dusty?  Hey, girl ... hey, girl ..."

The trick was how to get under there.  He shone the light across the
floor, into the dark corners.  Then he saw the answer.  Along the south
wall, where they used to keep the bins of feed, was a knotted tuft of
rope jutting from a slightly raised section of the floor.  There was a
trapdoor.

He got down on one knee.  It took three hard yanks to get the trapdoor
to budge; on the fourth he had it open.  He laid the heavy sled like
rectangle of wood against the wall and retrieved his flashlight.

He shone the light down into what looked like a root cellar, waving the
beam over packed walls of dirt.  The space was maybe eight feet deep at
the center, but it tapered quickly at either end.  A smoky, burned-out
lightbulb hung from a frayed cord and there was a ladder with a couple
of missing rungs.

"Hey, girl, come on!  Come on!"

It would be like Dusty to play hard to get.  He thought he heard a
quick rustling, but he couldn't see her.  What he did see was a
fifty-dollar bill half buried in the dust and rat droppings at the base
of the ladder.

His first thought was that the bill couldn't be real, that it must be
toy money.  He sat there on his haunches, staring down at it.  Two or
three times in his life he'd found cash in the street, but never
anything bigger than a ten.  It had always made him feel lucky and
guilty, in equal measure.  Despite an easygoing demeanor, Ben was one
of those people who always waited until the light said Walk; he was as
law-abiding as they come, someone whose entry in the Soap Box Derby of
Life had been packed with an extra load of superego.

He tested the top rung of the ladder with a foot.  When he was sure it
would hold, he moved down carefully, one hand still gripping the floor
above him.  His heart pounded.

He picked up the fifty-dollar bill and brushed off the dust.  It was an
old bill and as smooth as velvet.  It looked real enough.

He thought, Katy isn't going to believe this.  He jammed the bill into
his pocket, but as he turned to grab hold of the ladder, he saw
something else.  Tucked back in the farthest recesses of the cellar was
a milky-white sheet of plastic draped around a casket-size mass.  He
held the flashlight steady for several seconds, the light reflecting
off the rippled plastic, winking back at him.

He stepped forward, put a knee against the sharp dirt incline, and
tugged at the sheet.  It crumpled to one side.  Eight red Igloo coolers
were lined up in two rows.

He caught hold of the handle of one of the coolers and pulled it toward
him.  It was heavier than he expected.  He dragged it to the foot of
the ladder.

The lid was taped shut, but the tape was old and dry.  He sliced
through it quickly with a fingernail.  Pickles, he thought, it's
probably nothing but old jam jars.  But his hands were trembling as if
he were an eleven-year-old boy.

He opened the lid.  The cooler was filled to the top with stacks of
fifty-dollar bills.  He took a quick involuntary breath.  The bills
were in two rows, eight stacks per row, and the cooler itself was maybe
a foot high.  Each stack was wrapped in its own individual wrapper and
taped shut.

He grabbed the corner of a second cooler, spun it toward himself, then
slid it down the rough dirt slope.  His eyes stung from the mold and
the dust.  He opened the second cooler.  It too was filled with
fifties.

He knew it had to be dirty money.  Either that or it was counterfeit;
he wasn't an idiot.  He knew he should leave, but he couldn't.  It was
the most extraordinary moment of his life and he wanted to savor it.

He bent down finally and undid the tape on one of the stacks.  Each
stack was divided into smaller, more manageable packets and secured by
paper straps.  Ben broke one of the paper straps and lifted out three
bills, crisp and new.  He fingered them as if they were some sort of
Japanese delicacy.  The flashlight lay at his feet.  It was starting to
dim, the beam flickering along the dirt walls of the root cellar.  He
took out his wallet and put in all four of the fifties.

There was a loud thump above him, somewhere in the store.  He didn't
move for almost a minute.  There was nothing more.  He decided it must
have been the door or a shutter banging in the wind, but it was enough
to spook him.

He slipped his wallet back in his pocket.  Screw the cat, he was
getting out of here.  He retaped the stack of bills and shoved the
coolers back into their original positions.  He crawled up into the
narrowest part of the cellar to retrieve the milky-white plastic.  He
tried to drape the sheet over the coolers so that everything would look
just the way he had found it, but it was tricky working in such a
tight, airless space.  He did the best he could.

He batted the dirt from his trousers and picked up his flashlight.  He
climbed the rickety ladder and lowered the trapdoor softly back into
place.  Somewhere a siren rose and fell.

Stepping outside the building, he quickly wrapped the chain around the
handles of the double doors.  Across the street a light shone from a
bathroom window, but there was no sign of anybody moving around inside.
Directly behind the feed store was a small auto repair place--a dozen
cars, some up on blocks, others with their hoods up, behind a high
chain-link fence.

When he got home the cat was there, crouched over a pan of warm milk in
the kitchen.  She had come up to the porch maybe five minutes after Ben
had gone out looking for her.

"I'm sorry," Katy said.

"That's okay," he said.  He set the flashlight on the table and
unzipped his jacket.  Abby was kneeling beside the cat, stroking it as
it lapped hungrily at the milk.  It looked as if it hadn't eaten in
months.

"Are you all right?"  Katy said.

"I'm fine.  Why?"

"I don't know.  You look upset."

"No, I'm fine.  I wanted to say, when we were driving in, the van was
acting up some.  We should probably take it in tomorrow."

He saw the worry come over her face.  "What do you think it is?"

"It's probably something small.  But I think we need to be sure."

"I guess I can take it in after I take the kids to school."

"That would be great," Ben said.

He went in to take a bath.  The smell of sweet feed was still on him.
He leaned over the tub, testing the temperature of the water with his
hand.  He hadn't checked the other coolers, but if they were like the
first two ... There had to be several hundred thousand dollars in every
one.

He took off his clothes.  The bathroom filled with steam.  He dug his
wallet out of his trousers and opened it, riffling through the bills
just to be sure he hadn't hallucinated the whole thing.  He had two
hundred extra dollars in his pocket; all he had to do now was call the
police and tell them what he had found and he would be fine, it would
be over.  He heard his son singing in his bedroom.  He set his wallet
back on the sink.  So Merry Christmas, he thought, Merry Christmas.

CHAPTER 2

The next morning, waiting at the corner for the bus, Ben thumbed
through his notes for his first lecture.  The course on the
transcendentalists was a new one, entitled--he hoped not too
pretentiously--"How Are We to Live?"  Sunlight gleamed off the dirty
windows of the feed store across the street, the old building looking
as harmless as a clapboard front at Knott's Berry Farm.

A young Pakistani woman who worked at a gift store downtown sat on the
bench, absorbed in her paper.  Ben took the bus into campus most days.
After four years, he was one of the regulars and knew nearly all the
faces.  He'd turned it into a joke, one he'd repeated more than once:
the only people who rode the buses in Austin were maids, patients from
the mental hospital, and assistant professors.

The bus was ten minutes late, which meant Ben missed his transfer at
the capitol and had to walk the rest of the way to the university, but
nothing could dampen his buoyant mood.  The weather was crisp, he had
two hundred extra dollars in his pocket, and the world was not quite
the same.

When he walked into class at nine-thirty, he was amazed to find all
forty seats filled and people lined up against the wall.  He knew
better than to think it had to do with his wonderful reputation as a
teacher.  Two of the Americanists were away and a third had just gone
on emergency medical leave, which created a real crunch.

After going over the syllabus and answering questions, Ben read to them
from Walden.  Reading aloud to undergraduates was always a risky
business, but if they couldn't respond to Walden, what were they going
to respond to?  His mother had given it to him for Christmas when he
was fourteen and he had devoured it in two days.  It had become the key
book in his life.

His voice resonated like a preacher's: ""I went to the woods because I
wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came
to die, discover that I had not lived...."" He raised his head and
scanned the students' faces.  These words still had the power to move
him, but what about them?  They looked as frightened and bewildered as
puppies at the pound.

After class, Ben walked back to Parlin and stopped off at the mail room
(ernestine Bryce had left him a second notice that he owed $1.21 for
postage).  By the time he got to his office, a dozen kids were camped
out in the hallway waiting for him.  He ushered them in one by one, and
listened to their stories about why they needed to get into his course.
It was always like this at the beginning of the semester, and Ben
sometimes got himself into trouble by being kinder than he needed to
be, but it all went fine until he got to the last in line, Dan Sweeney,
a swaggering wise guy in cowboy boots.

Though shiny-faced and still carrying a layer of baby fat, Sweeney was
not exactly a kid; he was twenty-eight and had been knocking around the
university for years.  He needed one more course in American Lit to
graduate--this course.  When Ben told him what he'd told the others,
that he had no control over registration, that it was a matter for the
undergraduate advisor, Sweeney acted like he knew better, leaning back
in his chair, his fingers locked behind his head.

"But I'll bet if you wrote a note, that would help," Sweeney said.

"That's not what they tell me," Ben said.

Sweeney grinned and hitched up his belt buckle, big as any bull
rider's.  "I know, but no harm in trying, right?"

Sweeney persisted.  He'd heard what a great teacher Ben was and had
been trying to get into his classes for the last two years.  Emerson
and Thoreau were his favorite authors and he'd gotten an A from Knapp
in the Twain course last semester.  If Ben wanted to sign him up as a
conference student and just let him sit in, that would be all right
with him.  Exasperated, Ben finally wrote him a note just to get him
out of the office.

As soon as the door was closed, Ben tried to call Katy to see what the
word was on the car, but got only the answering machine.  He walked
over to the Middle Eastern restaurant on Rio Grande.  He ordered the
chicken special, which he always did, and a glass of chardonnay, which
he never did, to celebrate his good fortune.

The dueling bouzoukis from "Never on Sunday" drifted from the speakers
above the kitchen door, and next to the window an intense young
linguistics professor enthralled a table of women graduate students.
When the wine came, Ben raised his glass to the owner, a middle-aged
Lebanese man with a wonderful smile who was sitting at his usual table
in the corner.

Waiting for his food, Ben checked his wallet, just to be sure the four
fifties were still there.  It still didn't feel quite real.  Why would
anyone seal up that amount of money under a feed store and then leave
it unprotected?  Whoever they were, Ben was sure they would be back for
it.

Part of him felt a little dirty for having taken any of it and yet
another part of him regretted not having taken more, but taking more
would only have been asking for it.  From time to time there were
stories in the Austin papers about the local drug busts, but Ben never
read much more than the headlines.  All he really knew was what he saw
on television: cops kicking down tenement doors, young black men on the
ground with their wrists handcuffed behind their backs.

At the next table they were talking of Richard Rorty, Derrida, and the
history of American pragmatism.  Ben drained his wineglass.  It would
be insane for him to go back to the feed store  He had a wonderful wife
and two children he loved, he wasn't going to risk that.  But it was a
hard thing to get out of his head, imagining what a difference money
like that could make.  They could buy a nice house, he could take a
year's leave and get his book done, he wouldn't have to waste his time
listening to dunderheads like Sweeney.

When his food arrived, he ordered a second glass of wine.  The chicken
had never been better, garlicky and tender, served on a bed of yellow
rice with a generous scoop of tabouli.  He wolfed it down; he hadn't
realized how hungry he was.

The bill came to a little under fifteen dollars.  Ben pulled out one of
the fifties and set it on the chocolate-colored plastic tray.  When the
soft-eyed young Lebanese waiter (ben guessed he was the owner's nephew)
came to collect it, he did a double take.

"Is this okay?"  Ben asked.

The slender waiter, usually so cheerful, was in a quandary.  "Sure, of
course," he said.

The waiter disappeared into the kitchen.  Five minutes passed.  The
linguistics professor and his admirers left, sucking on peppermints.
Ben sat with his fingertips on the edge of the table, trying to stay
calm.  He scrutinized the map of the Middle East on the wall, then
glanced at his watch.  The owner, sensing Ben's distress, got up and
went back to the kitchen.

The wine had made Ben dizzy.  What a fool he'd been to think he could
get away with this.  What if the money was stolen?  Somewhere he'd
heard that restaurants have lists of serial numbers taped up next to
their cash registers, numbers the police were looking for.  He was on
the verge of bolting when the owner came out with Ben's change.

"I'm so sorry," the owner said.  He set the money on the table.  "We
have all these new people in the kitchen, we're a little confused
today.  I hope everything was all right?"

Ben picked up his change from the tray and left a three-dollar tip. His
mouth was dry, his heart pounding.  He gave the owner a reassuring pat
on the forearm.  "Better than ever," he said.

The news about the car was not good.  When Ben got home that night,
Katy gave him the full report.  Jeff, the manager at the Texaco
station, said the gears were totally stripped.  It might be possible to
find a rebuilt transmission for seven hundred dollars, but the van
already had so many miles on it they would probably be better off
buying a new car.

"What does he mean, buy a new car?"  Ben said.  "How are we going to
buy a new car?"

"People buy cars all the time," Katy said.  "People who have a lot less
than we do."  She stood at the stove, pouring brittle sticks of pasta
into gently boiling water.  "We could go to the credit union.  I'm sure
we could get a loan."

"And how would we pay that off?"

She didn't answer, her face flushed above the steaming pot of water.

Ben knew he had a way sometimes, when he was frustrated, of being
cutting, of making her feel stupid.  "Let me call Jeff in the morning,"
he said.

That night he tried to work on his lectures for Wednesday, but it was
impossible to concentrate.  Katy was scarcely speaking to him and it
was his fault for taking the tone he had, but she was nuts if she
thought they could think for one minute about spending twenty thousand
dollars on a new van.

He had never felt that Katy understood money.  Her family wasn't rich,
but they were comfortable.  She had always had the feeling that you
bought what you needed and somehow everything would work out.

It was not a faith that he shared.  Ben's father had slaved away at a
number of jobs--selling insurance, managing a small plastic draperies
firm--and while they'd always had a respectable middle-class life, it
had been an existence without any give to it.  Ben had worked all
through high school and college--delivering papers, cleaning hotel
rooms, shoveling peas in a canning factory--and it had left him with
the sense that if you took one false step, the ground might open up and
swallow you.

He shoved the stack of books away from him.  A dog-eared copy of The
Imperial Self tumbled to the floor.  How in the hell could they afford
a twenty-thousand-dollar van?  They didn't even have the seven hundred
dollars for a rebuilt transmission.  What a joke: two blocks away there
were thousands upon thousands of dollars sitting untouched in a root
cellar, while here they were killing themselves over a few hundred.

He had no classes on Tuesday, but he went in anyway and called Jeff
from his office.  Jeff was singing a slightly happier tune to Ben than
he had to Katy.  The gears were shot but he'd already found a rebuilt
transmission, and if Ben gave him the go-ahead, he could have the car
back to them in a day and a half.  He had looked the van over again and
it wasn't in as bad shape as he'd originally thought.  With any luck
they could get two, maybe even three more years out of it.

Ben walked over to University Federal Credit Union, deposited the three
remaining fifties, and then went in to speak to one of the bank
officers, an attractive young black woman with stylish silver earrings,
about a loan.  She had him fill out a series of forms, listing his
previous employers and three personal references.

On the way back to his office, he stopped at an umbrellaed stand for a
couple of spring rolls.  On the far side of the Littlefield Fountain,
Nathaniel Harrison, frail as a reed and wearing rubber boots, rummaged
through a concrete garbage receptacle.  Nathaniel had been retired from
the English department for nearly ten years but he was still a familiar
figure around campus, making his rounds with his sack of crushed Coke
cans over his shoulder.  It wasn't as bad as it looked--Nathaniel was a
fervent environmentalist--but the sight of him always made Ben cringe.
Nathaniel was like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, an emblem of the
way academics at all but the most elite universities secretly feared
they were going to end up.

That afternoon Ben found himself, in the middle of writing
recommendations, taking out his wallet and counting his money.  The
fifties were gone now, but he still had sixteen bills--two twenties,
two fives, and twelve ones.  Sixteen bills pressed together were almost
immeasurably thin, maybe as thick as the rind of an orange.  How many
could you get in an inch?  Fifty?  He guessed more.  He leaned forward
on his desk, doing the arithmetic on the back of a departmental
newsletter.

If you could get a hundred fifty-dollar bills in an inch--that would be
pushing it, but say you could--that would be five thousand dollars.
Stack those fifties a foot high and you'd have sixty thousand dollars.
Ben had counted sixteen stacks in the first cooler he'd opened.
Multiply that times eight coolers and you would be looking at something
over seven and a half million dollars.

For a week, Ben tried to pretend that nothing had changed.  He taught
his classes and they got their van back and it ran like a dream.  He
put the repairs on his Visa, culled the dead bamboo in his backyard,
took the cat to the vet, and drove Matt and his friends to a UT
basketball game against the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Yet every day, going to work and coming back, he was forced to pass the
feed store  The dirty windows stared at him like the clouded eyes of a
genie awaiting instructions.  He went for long runs in the late
afternoons, trying to wear himself out, trying to get it all out of his
mind, but to no avail.  He found it impossible to read or concentrate.
He forgot lunch with Tom Strickland, his oldest friend at the
university, and when Katy sent him to the grocery store, he came back
with two of the four items she'd asked for.

There was more money in one of those coolers than he'd make in his
entire academic career.  But what was he going to do about it?  Even if
he managed to somehow get the coolers out from under the feed store
what then?  What was he going to do, hide them all in his toolshed?
Keep all the money in boxes in his office?  And what about Katy?  It
would be a secret he would have to keep from her forever.

The presence of the money worked its way into him like a slow-moving
poison.  His colleagues--people he would have judged, had he been in a
normal mood, as ranging from the exasperating to the admirable to the
truly brilliant, people with whom he'd been quite happy to serve on
committees, joke in the hallways, gossip over lunch--now struck him as
universally doomed, trapped, consumed by the pettiest of jealousies. As
if to prove his case, one afternoon he ran into Richard Bates, the
oldest of the Renaissance scholars, fresh from his annual trek over to
the library to check out the university budget.  Richard, his eyes
puffy with cedar fever, was full of information about everyone's
raises, who had gotten five hundred more and who had gotten five
hundred less.

If only he didn't have to pass the feed store every day!  The money was
like an underground fire, fueling resentment, new and old.  He saw now
just how desperate his life was.  He was forty-four years old, he
didn't own a house, his car was falling apart, he had two kids and not
a penny for their college educations, a pittance in his pension.  His
problem was that he had never paid much attention to how the real world
worked, as if being a good guy, doing your job, keeping everyone around
you happy, meant that things would work out in the end.

Everything came to a head on Wednesday night.  A friend of Abby's, a
tall girl named Crissie with braces, had been knocked down at school
and had to be taken to the hospital.  Another girl, an eighth-grader,
had tried to grab Crissie's Coke out of the Coke machine, and when
Crissie had refused to give it up, the girl had hit her.  Crissie had
fallen and banged her head against the machine.  Crissie's parents were
talking of transferring schools.

"So is Crissie still in the hospital?"  Ben swung his briefcase onto
the living room couch.  He picked up the mail and flipped quickly
through it.

"No, she's at home," Katy said.  "Ben, this is serious.  We need to
talk about this."

"Come on, these things happen."

"Last week someone set a fire in one of the bathrooms.  And just before
Christmas there was that big fight in the hallway."

"So what are we supposed to do?  Pull Abby out of school?"

"I didn't say that."  She flared quickly; she had put up with a week of
his crankiness.  "Don't put it all on me.  You have just as many
complaints as I do."

It was true.  Carter was a magnet junior high, which meant it had an
accelerated academic program that was used to attract bright students
to a school in one of Austin's toughest neighborhoods.  The goal was
integration; the result was a two-tiered system that often seemed to
reinforce resentment and distrust.  All year long there had been
incidents, and to make matters worse, the vaunted academic classes
weren't as good as they'd been cracked up to be.  In Abby's honors
English class, they had yet to write a paper or read a book.

"I didn't mean it like that," he said.  "But what are our choices here?
Are we going to pull her out and put her in a private school?  And
where are we going to get the money for that?"

"I can teach next year."

"I know."

"What do you mean, I know?"

"Katy, I've been a public school guy all my life ..."

"Well, so have I."

"I know.  I just can't see moving her.  I'll go in, I'll talk to the
principal.  Abby's going to be fine.  I promise."

That night as they lay in bed, he reached across and put a hand on her
hip.

"Are you okay?"  he whispered.

"I'm okay.  Just tired."  She was turned away from him, the covers
pulled up around her chin.

He took his hand away.  The branches of the live oak raked across the
tin roof.  If I don't do something, he thought, it will always be like
this.  Life will just go on getting smaller and more bitter.

It was time to make a move.

The next day at work he called several self-storage firms in North
Austin.  The best deal was a place on Burnet that charged thirty-six
dollars a month for a five-by-seven-foot locker.  The office was open
until nine each night, when they closed the gates and let out the
dogs.

At noon, he walked over to Breed Hardware and bought a heavy-duty lock,
one that opened with a key.  As he was leaving, he saw the chairman of
his department looking over the wheelbarrows, but Ben did not go over,
just gave a wave from a distance.

That evening he brought Katy a bouquet of white daisies, a peace
offering.  After supper, while they were loading the dishwasher, he
told her he needed to go in to the office for a couple of hours.  She
made no objection.  She looked lovely to him just then--her high
cheekbones, her honest blue-gray eyes--suspicion was not part of her
nature.  All she asked was that he pick up a carton of milk on his way
back; they would need it for the morning.

He walked out of the house a little before eight.  He drove around the
neighborhood a couple of times to calm his nerves.  There was almost no
traffic on Congress Avenue, just a couple of cars parked in front of
Fran's Drive-in.  He finally pulled into the alleyway behind the feed
store and turned off the ignition.  He sat for five minutes, the
flashlight in his lap.  I still do not have to do this, he thought.  I
can still just start the car and drive home and everything will be just
the way it's always been.

A dog trotted up the alley, sniffed briefly at the tires of the van,
and then trotted off, tail high.

Ben got out of the car.  The chain on the heavy wooden doors was cold
to the touch.  He undid it and slid the door back just far enough for
him to slip inside.

He snapped on the flashlight and shone the beam across the worn
floorboards, the incubators, and the stacked animal cages; nothing had
been disturbed.  He thought of his family: Abby lying on the bed, doing
her homework; Katy working at her desk in the kitchen; Matt thumping
around in his stocking feet in his bedroom, slam-dunking the Nerf
basketball through the miniature rim they'd rigged up on his closet
door.  They were only two blocks away, but they might as well have been
halfway around the world.

The smell of sweet feed was oddly comforting.  He opened the trapdoor
and shone the flashlight into the root cellar.  He hadn't dreamed it;
it was all still there.

He made his way down the ladder.  He pulled the plastic sheet to one
side and dragged one of the coolers down the rough dirt slope.  When he
lifted it, the weight surprised him.  It must have been at least fifty
pounds.  He worked the cooler up the ladder, pushing it ahead of him,
balancing it for a second or two on each rung, and finally slid it onto
the worn wooden floor.  He rested on the ladder, his elbows splayed out
on the floor like an exhausted swimmer at the edge of a pool.  When
he'd thought about it that afternoon, he hadn't planned on taking more
than one of the coolers, but now it seemed crazy not to take them all,
he had already come so far.

It took him twenty minutes to wrestle the rest of them up from the root
cellar.  Two of the coolers, the ones at the back, were slick with mud
where water had seeped through the cracks in the cellar wall, and the
mud got on Ben's jacket.

Moonlight poured in through the windows.  He lowered the trapdoor and
kicked it back into place.  He straightened up, his hands on the small
of his back, stretching.  Now came the tricky part.

He carried the coolers out to the van, one by one.  He was able to
stack four of them in the far back; the rest he heaved onto the seats.
Trying to stay calm, he kept repeating a homemade mantra: don't rush,
don't panic, one step at a time, you are just a man going about his
business.  On every trip he was careful to close both the van door and
the door to the feed store minimizing the chances of attracting the
curiosity of any late-night dog walker.  Even though it was a cool
night, he was drenched in sweat.  With the physical labor his fear
began to ebb and it was replaced by a kind of giddiness, a kind of
glee; he was getting away with it.

Seven down and one to go.  He went inside for the last cooler.
Moonlight made the warped wooden floorboards shimmer like an uneasy
sea.  He bent his knees, wrapped his fingers around the plastic handles
of the cooler, and lifted.  He had to pause for a second, the muscles
in his lower back starting to seize up.

He heard the chain rattle outside the door.  He froze.  For several
seconds there was nothing more.  Maybe he'd just made it up, maybe it
had just been the wind, but then he heard it again, the crawl of metal
on metal, the sound like a low growl.  Someone was dragging the chain
from the door.

"Hey, fuckin' fuckhead, come on, get the lead out!"  The voice was
loud, drunken, and slurred.  Ben still hadn't taken a breath; his back
muscles fluttered like moths.

The door banged as if someone had just slammed his shoulder into it and
then it began to slide open, allowing an arrow of streetlight to race
across the floor.  Ben silently set the cooler down, frantically
scanning the store; there was no place to hide.  His heart banged in
his chest.

"So where'd everybody else go?  Come on, get in here!"

"I'm not going in there."  It was impossible to tell if the second
voice was a man's or a woman's, it was so ruined and bullfrog deep.
"Look, man, the door's already open.  Somebody's in there."

"Nobody's in here.  What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Then whose car is it, shithead?  I'm not getting busted again."

Ben felt the wet hair on the back of his neck.  He was standing in
plain view; one glance through a window and they would see him.  He
moved swiftly and silently to the nearest wall and crouched low.  The
bare wood smelled of caramel and oats.  He panted in low, shallow
breaths, like a deer being run by hounds.

"What you so chicken for?  You afraid you're going to piss in your
pants again?"

"Hell with you."

There was a loud slap, and then a scuffle followed by the breaking of
glass and the sharp yip of a dog.

"Look what you fucking did, man!  What are we gonna do now?  What are
we gonna do?"

"I told you not to touch my fuckin' puppy dog!"

A shadow moved across the narrow opening in the door and the dog
whimpered again.  Something scraped along the outer wall, and then
someone cleared his throat and spit lushly.  Ben's worry now was that
they would break into the van.  He cursed himself for his greed.  If
he'd only been satisfied with one or two of the coolers, he would have
been long gone by now.

"Where are you going, man?"  The voice was alarmingly close.  Whoever
it was had planted himself against the same wall as Ben; they were
separated by two feet of wood and crumbling rock.

"I'm going back down to the store!"  The second voice, the hoarse one,
had moved off into the distance.

"What the hell are you going to the store for?  You ain't got no
money!"

The answer was garbled, incomprehensible.  The man sitting at the
opposite end of the wall from Ben gave a low, shuddering belch. "Shit."
He and Ben were so close Ben could hear his labored breathing, hear
him scratching the back of his neck.

Then there was more shuffling, the sound of footsteps moving across
gravel, and utter silence.  Ben waited another two or three minutes
before he had the nerve to move at all.  He slipped to one of the side
windows and peered out.  The two men were nearly out of sight, still
pushing and staggering against each other like buffoons, heading down
the sidewalk toward the river.  They must have been sixty yards away;
it was too far to see much, except that one was big as a buffalo and
the other small, the smaller one carrying a squirming puppy on his
shoulder.  Ben stood at the window until they disappeared from view.

He went back to the door and, after a long few seconds, slid it slowly
open another six inches.  He stared into the dim alleyway, scanning the
parking lot and the dark lawns.  A huge live oak threw long shadows
that twined like the arms of a Hindu god.  Car lights appeared, moved
slowly down the street, and swished past.  Waiting any longer was
probably more dangerous than going.

He looked over his shoulder.  The last cooler still sat in the middle
of the floor, forlorn as a lost lamb.  He couldn't just leave it. Going
back to retrieve it, it felt nearly twice as heavy as it had before. 
He waddled to the door, the pebbled plastic banging against his knees. 
He scanned the street and alleyway one last time, just to be sure, and
then stepped sideways into the cool night air.

He swung the last container into the van and eased the hatchback shut.
He returned to the feed store fingering the chain, not sure how it
would be best to leave it.  In the end, he closed the doors tight again
and wrapped the chain around the handles, just the way he'd found it.

As he drove down Congress Avenue, his hands still shook.  He was in an
altered state, near delirium.  Nothing had happened, he kept repeating
over and over to himself, it was just a close call, even though it felt
like so much more--a warning, an omen.

He cut over on Riverside and took the highway north.  The capitol
glowed, majestic against the night sky.  He checked his watch; it was
nearly eight-thirty.  He felt a sudden surge of panic.  The woman had
said the office closed at nine.  That was all he needed: seven million
dollars in the back of his van and nowhere to put it.

He stepped on the gas and moved into the left lane, passing a
shuddering cattle truck.  He could see, through the metal slats, the
helpless bovine eyes, the bodies pressed together, headed for
slaughter.  The van's engine hummed.  Jeff had been right; the car felt
as if it were brand-new.

I-35 divided East Austin from West Austin, rich from poor, black from
white.  He passed the football stadium, huge as a canyon, lit up like a
shrine, and passed the turnoff to Houston.  He spotted a police car in
the far right lane just in time and eased up on the accelerator,
checking his speedometer.  He had to focus; he couldn't afford to let
what had happened throw him or he was going to end up in a lot worse
trouble.  All he needed was to be pulled over, have a cop walk around
the van, peering in the windows.  He edged down under the speed limit.
The police car slid off on the next exit and zoomed up the access road,
turning on its siren.

Ben got off at Fifty-third Street.  Once he got to Burnet he picked his
way through the stop-and-go traffic, passing the hodgepodge of
taxidermists and palm readers, cheap burger joints, and RV dealers.

At a quarter to nine, he drove through the gates of North Austin
Self-Storage and parked in front of the office.  When he came in, a
motherly-looking woman with big hair and a pink sweater got up from
behind her desk.  Her name was Rose and she had a variety of forms for
him to fill out.

Randy Travis sang softly on the radio.  Rose explained about insurance,
but Ben said he thought he could do without it.  He gave her thirty-six
dollars cash for the first month's rent, and signed the environmental
statement.  They did not send out bills, Rose said.  If you didn't pay
for sixty days, they would start sending out the auction notices.  It
wasn't an idle threat.  Through the picture window behind her, Ben
could see the jumble of repossessed rolltop desks, battered canoes,
fraying wicker chairs.

She gave him a map.  His locker would be in Building 7, near the back
of the lot.  As he drove away from the office, he saw her at the window
lowering the blinds.

There were at least twenty of the low concrete buildings, set out in
rows like a military base.  At the far end of the lot were parking
spaces for RV'S and boats.

Ben's building was one row in from the fence, well out of sight of the
front office.  He was able to drive his van right up to the metal door.
He worked quickly, heaving the coolers into the locker like a man
tossing bales of hay.  It took him no more than five minutes.  There
was a steady hum of traffic on Burnet.

When he was done, he walked to the corner of the concrete building and
looked back toward the office just to be sure no one was coming.

He went back to the locker and examined the coolers one at a time. They
were all filled with money, mostly fifties, some twenties, a few stacks
of hundreds.  He undid one of the cellophaned packs; it was like
undoing Girl Scout cookies.  The bills were banded so tightly together
they looked as if they'd been pressed, and they had a smell to them
that was almost like chlorine.  Each of the paper straps was stamped
with a tiny scorpion inside an inky circle.  He took a thousand
dollars, twenty fifty-dollar bills.  He could scarcely fold his wallet,
but he didn't want to have to come back here every three days.

He shut the metal door and fastened it with the shiny new lock he'd
bought that afternoon.  He tried the key a couple of times and, when he
was sure it worked, slipped it onto his key ring.

As he drove out of the lot, he saw Rose standing in the open door of
her car.  The office was dark now and she was talking to a slender boy
in a hunting cap crouched by the high wire fence.  Behind the fence,
three German shepherds tussled and barked, excited as puppies, anxious
to be let out.

He could not keep the money here forever, he knew that; he was going to
have to find another place, but he couldn't think of that now.  He was
wired; he felt as if he'd just downed six cups of coffee.  He
remembered that Katy had asked him to pick up some milk.

When he got home, the children were already in bed.  Katy sat at her
desk in the kitchen, some monstrous book on educational methods open in
front of her.  She wanted to know where he'd been.  She'd called his
office a couple of times.

He wiped the cold beads of condensation off the plastic container of
milk and opened the refrigerator door.  "I guess I must have been out
in the hallway talking to Ernie," he said.  "You know how he is, once
he gets going."  It occurred to him that he had never really lied to
her before; he was going to have to get used to it.

CHAPTER 3

He woke at five-thirty in the morning, knowing he'd made the biggest
mistake in his life.  He stared up at the sloping ceiling.  Katy slept
soundly next to him.  He had to undo this.  But how?  He tried to
imagine himself moving all the coolers back, wrestling them down that
rickety ladder, or driving out into the hill country and dumping them
into the deepest river he could find.

He was in an utter panic.  He'd come so close to being caught, and in
the first ten minutes.  What in hell had made him think he could get
away with this?  What if one of those drunks had looked in the window?
Ben didn't know that they hadn't.  And if someone came asking, they
would certainly be able to describe the van.  They might even remember
the license plate, the university parking sticker.  What if the woman
at the storage unit got curious?  She had a key.  What was to stop her
from going to take a look?

For the next week Ben was in a state, making a hash of his lectures,
accidentally locking himself out of his office, and when he came into
the department on Thursday and saw two campus policemen joking with one
of the secretaries, he was sure they had come for him.

But no one did come for him.  Life went on as it always did.  The
weather was lovely, with highs in the seventies, and at noon he would
take his bag lunch and eat on the patio behind the Union, sitting at
the wrought-iron tables, tossing bits of his sandwich to the pigeons
and squirrels.

He deposited another two hundred dollars cash in the bank, making a
point of using a new teller.  Three hundred he kept in his wallet, and
the other five hundred he stashed in an envelope in the bottom drawer
of his desk at school.

Katy's birthday was the last week in January.  She kept saying they
should just celebrate at home--it was on a school night, after all, and
it would be so much cheaper--but Ben insisted that they were going
out.

They went to Castle Hill, a cheerful, upscale restaurant Ben had been
to only once, back when he was being recruited.  After the waitress, a
diminutive young woman with a butterfly tattoo on her wrist, took their
orders, she asked if anyone would be interested in an appetizer.  Katy
and the children all murmured no.

"Let's see what you have here," Ben said.  He took his menu back from
the waitress and opened it.  "Why don't you bring us an order of the
crab cakes and, let's see ... the curried lamb empanadas with the
coconut-cilantro sauce."  He exaggerated every syllable, making a joke
out of it.  After the waitress left, Katy shot him a look.  Ben put up
his hand.  "Katy, it's going to be fine.  It's your birthday."

So many times Ben had found himself on the verge of telling her
everything and yet he always pulled up short.  He was still trying to
understand why.  It always came back to the fact that telling her would
risk her saying no, and he didn't want anyone telling him no.  He knew
her.  She was one of those law-abiding people, she would insist on his
turning it all back.  And what rational person wouldn't have had
trouble with what he was doing?  The odds of making it work were small,
the dangers enormous.  Katy was a fretter, a worrier, the pessimist of
the two of them.  She was not always the easiest person to have a frank
discussion with.  He had his own private business here; he was not
about to let anyone take it away from him.

Abby was thrilled to be out on the town.  A boothful of
theatrical-looking people carried on at a table near the door and Abby
was sure the dazzling blonde in the silver dress was Nicollette
Sheridan; Abby had read that she was in town to shoot a TV movie. Matt,
who never had liked restaurants, was sweetly forbearing, looking very
handsome and as solemn as a Mennonite in his jacket and tie.

The food arrived, and it was just as delicious as Ben remembered it. He
had the pork loin, Katy the Thai salad, Matt some very fancy
enchiladas, and Abby the blackened catfish; but they all swapped back
and forth, everyone getting a bite of everything.  It was very noisy
and hard to have a conversation, but when Jerry Jeff Walker came over
to speak to the people at the next table, Abby's evening was made.

When the meal was over, Ben got up and caught the waitress coming out
of the kitchen.  It took her just a second to find the bill.  Ben
glanced at it and handed her two fifties.

"Let me get you change," she said.

"No, no, you just keep it."

She was astonished.  It was nearly a twenty-dollar tip.  Katy and the
kids waited by the front door, unwrapping their mints.  "Are you
sure?"

"Absolutely.  You have a good night."

When they got home, Katy was banished to the living room while they put
candles on the mousse cake that Ben had bought that afternoon at the
Amandine Baker.  Matt ran to turn off the lights and then they all
marched in and sang "Happy Birthday."

They cut the cake and Katy opened her present, the new biography of
Lewis and Clark.  Reading the inscription (ben had compared her to
Sacajawea, leading them all through the wilds of life), Katy reached
across and pulled Ben's hand to her cheek.  He was not ordinarily a big
one for occasions; it was not one of his strong points, he was too
midwestern-casual, and she appreciated the effort.  That night they
made love for the first time in a while.

To his surprise, Ben found he actually got a kick out of having Sweeney
in the classroom.  Though he was the kind of student Ben needed to keep
in check, he was also the one to call on to liven up a discussion.

He was something of a hero to the younger male students in the class.
About once a week he came in looking seriously rumpled and wearing
sunglasses at nine-thirty in the morning, as if his days of living hard
were not totally behind him.  He entertained the back of the room with
his wisecracks, flirted with the girls, and yet, more than anyone else
on the roster, had a genuine intellectual curiosity.  After class he
would wait around so he could walk Ben back to Parlin, wanting to know
what Ben thought about Kerouac or Kesey, Martin Amis or Raymond Carver.
One afternoon he showed up at Ben's office with an old copy of Raritan
that he'd found at Half Price Books, containing the first article Ben
had ever published.

He may have been a reader, but no one would have called Dan Sweeney
refined.  When Ellen Pyle, a bright, delicate-complexioned transfer
student from Bryn Mawr, objected that there was no place for women in
Walden, Sweeney couldn't resist.

"Hey, come on, we're not talking about country-club memberships on the
Main Line here."

Ellen colored but she didn't back down.  "I wasn't talking about
country clubs.  It just seems to me that any time anything having
remotely to do with women or the encumbrances of domesticity comes
up--the notion that you might have to work to pass something on to your
children, say--Thoreau goes on the attack."

"So what?  You want him to date?"  Sweeney said.

"Mr.  Sweeney!"  Ben said.  "That's enough."

"You want me to say it?"  Ellen shot back.  "Okay, I'll say it.  I
think he's a misogynist!"

"Oh, man."  Sweeney shook his head wearily.  "Where am I supposed to
start?  The guy was into cha/y.  Better him than me, but I say more
power to him.  I'm serious.  He was trying, if you'll excuse the term,
trying to clear all the claptrap out of his life."  The remark was
greeted by a chorus of groans and jeers.  "Seriously.  He was trying to
get things down to what really mattered.  I wish I could do that.  I'm
not joking."

Two class periods later Sweeney, as if to clear up any possible
misunderstanding, brought his girlfriend to class, a stunningly sexy
and world-weary blonde in her mid-forties who looked like Marianne
Faithfull.  It created a sensation among his claque in the back of the
room.

What was Ben going to do with all that money?  At first he was too
paralyzed to do anything.  It seemed insoluble.  Someone, sometime, was
going to notice the money was gone, and he knew he could not leave it
at the storage unit forever.

The first thing he did was what all academics do when faced with an
impossible problem: research.  He made several forays to the library,
but the books he was able to find about money laundering offered little
help.  They were all focused on drug cartels, international banking,
high-finance razzle-dazzle.  He felt as if he were drowning in an
alphabet soup of CTR'S, CMIR'S, cyber payments and NBFI'S.  There were
things he found out that he was happy to know; banks, for example, were
required to report any cash transactions over ten thousand dollars, but
he wasn't about to deposit ten thousand dollars, or five, or two.  He
knew instinctively that the key was not acting too quickly, not
attracting anyone's attention.

On the first of February, Ben drove up to the storage unit to pay the
next month's rent.  Rose was by herself in the office, smoking
cigarettes and watching Murder, She Wrote.  As she wrote out his
receipt, Ben made the mistake of asking how she was.  Her husband had
had a stroke during the fall and now it seemed as if he'd almost given
up; he wasn't taking his medicine as he should and was refusing to go
to therapy.  At least she had her grandchildren.  They were her
salvation, cute as they could be and just full of the dickens.  One of
them was going to be in the school play and Rose was making his lion
costume.

She snubbed out her cigarette, narrowing her eyes against the rising
smoke, and handed Ben his receipt.  Her beehive hairdo was a marvel of
construction: delicate as cotton candy and yet solid as a helmet.  "So
do you have kids?"

He hesitated; he was not looking to make friends.  "Two," he said.

"How old?"  Outside, a pickup rumbled through the gate, pulling a boat
along behind.

"Thirteen and eleven," Ben said.

"Oh, I envy you.  Those are the best years.  I hope you realize what
you've got."

"I do," he said.  He folded his receipt neatly in two and pushed away
from the counter.  "Rose, it was great talking to you."

Outside, the night air was cool and there was no one else on the lot
except for a man in a maroon AandMore hat and his son unhitching their
boat.  It was nearly eight-thirty.  Ben had told Katy he was just
returning some books to the library.

He drove the van back to Building 7 and turned into the narrow lane. He
grabbed his briefcase, got out of the van, and took his key from his
wallet.  Instinctively he looked over his shoulder, even though he knew
he was well out of sight of the office.  It took him a moment to undo
the lock, his fingers clumsy from the cold (either that, or it was
nerves).  He yanked open the metal door.  All eight coolers were still
there, looming like polar bears in their dark cell.

He stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.  For several
seconds he was plunged into utter darkness.  He fished for the overhead
cord, caught it, and snapped on the single naked bulb.

He opened the coolers, one, two, three ... The money was just as he had
left it, packed as snugly as saltines in their cellophane wrappers.  He
stopped and took a deep breath, collecting himself.  The overhead light
still swayed on its cord, shadows rocking up and down the walls like a
silent cradle.  A roach scuttled out from under one of the coolers and
tumbled down through the planked floor.

Ben began to cry.  He didn't know why.  Maybe it was out of relief that
the money was still there, maybe it was out of sadness for what he was
doing to himself.  He slammed the lid down on the last cooler and
leaned back against the wall, squeezing his face with a hand.  So fuck
me, he thought, so fuck me.  High up in the corner was a spiderweb full
of roly-polies.

He picked up his briefcase and unzipped it, taking out the oversize
manila envelope.  The first time, he'd taken a thousand dollars.  This
time he took two thousand.

It had been only five months since they'd bought Matt his last pair of
basketball shoes, but he was growing by leaps and bounds.  On the
court, he and his teammates looked like puppy dogs, a tangle of huge
floppy feet and skinny limbs.

The shoes that Matt yearned for were the new Michael Jordan Nikes, but
they cost more than a hundred dollars and Matt was a conscientious kid;
it worried him, asking his parents to spend all that money.

Ben took him to Rooster Andrews on Saturday.  The sporting goods store
smelled of leather, and Ben led Matt past the bins of soccer balls and
the rows of burnt-orange jackets.  The clerk was busy with someone
else, so they had a few minutes to scrutinize the wall of footwear. 
There seemed to be more kinds of basketball shoes than there were
flavors of ice cream.  They came in every color, some had straps,
others had blinking lights in the heel or air pumps sewn into the
tongue, but when the apologetic clerk finally came over, Ben said, "I
think he'd like to try on a pair of those Michael Jordans."

Matt's mouth became a perfect O of astonishment.

"Let's just see how they feel," Ben said.

The clerk, a husky college kid who looked as if he'd be long off the
tee, disappeared into the back room and was back a moment later with a
red-and-white box of 9-astb's.  Matt sat in a low chair and the clerk
laced the shoes up for him, squeezing the toes to make sure there was
still room to grow.  The great UT all-Americans from the forties and
fifties stared down from their grainy black-and-white posters on the
walls.

"Get up and walk around and see what you think," the clerk said.  A
six-year-old boy danced down the aisle with a football under his arm
while his mother looked through the team jerseys.  Matt rose and walked
slowly in front of the long mirrors as if he were walking on eggshells.
His face shone.

"How do they feel?"  Ben said.

"They feel great."

Ben stared at his son.  With his skinny shoulders and huge, clear, blue
eyes, he suddenly looked as fragile as a four-day-old calf.  The shoes
glistened as if they'd been basted in frosting.  Damn it, Ben thought,
what's the point of having seven and a half million dollars sitting in
a locker if you can't buy your kid a hundred-dollar pair of sneakers?

"We'll take them," Ben said.

With tax, it came to $115 and change.  Ben paid at the front with three
fifties.  Because of the amount of the purchase, the clerk never
blinked twice.  Matt wore the shoes out of the store.

When they got home, Katy was in the front yard, raking up the dead
branches that had fallen during a big windstorm the night before.  Matt
was out of the sliding door before Ben could even put the van in
park.

"Hey, Mom, look what Dad got me!"  He stood in the driveway, his smile
a mile wide.  "Michael Jordans."

Katy, in sweatpants and green turtleneck, leaned her rake against the
tree.  "I see."

"Aren't they great?"

"They are great."  Ben knew the tone.  He grabbed the plastic bag
containing Matt's old pair of shoes and got out of the van.

"I'm going to call Cameron," Matt said.  He bounded up the steps and
let the door slam behind him.

Ben moved slowly across the lawn.  He bent down and picked up a sodden
branch, snapping it in two before jamming it in the plastic trash
can.

"So how much were they?"  Katy asked.  She pulled the blue bandanna out
of her hair and worked at the knot.

It would not do to lie.  "A little over a hundred."

"Ben ..."

"The kid never asks for anything."

"I know that, but I thought we'd already discussed this."

Ben dropped his head for a second.  The winter lawn might as well have
been straw, patchy and brown, and the neighbor's Doberman had made his
daily donation at the curb.

"Sometimes you just need to do things," Ben said.

"Ben, I know, but there are some things we just can't afford."

"But maybe we can."

"What do you mean?"

He stared at her.  Even on a cool day, the top of her turtleneck was
soaked in sweat.  Why not tell her now?  What was he so goddamned
afraid of?  He trusted her with his life, with his children--why not
this?

The door slammed.  They both looked up.  Matt leaped down the stairs,
the basketball under his arm.  He waved to them both.

"Cameron's coming over!"

"Great!"  Ben shouted back.

They watched Matt dribble across the street, losing the ball for a
second as he tried to put it between his legs.  He recovered, racing
across the church parking lot.  The white shoes flashed over gray
asphalt.  Look at him, Ben thought.  He knew he had done the right
thing.  Matt stutter-stepped, then took two long strides and leaped as
high as he could, laying the ball off the backboard of the basket at
the far end of the lot.  This was a boy who felt, right now, as if he
could jump over the moon.

Ben reached out and took his wife's hand.  "Katy, it's going to be
okay, I promise.  I promise."

Ben had been a child of admirable candor.  When he knocked a baseball
through the window of the parochial school, he had walked up to the
front door (it was an overcast March day and there were still dirty
banks of snow on the Wisconsin playground) and told the nuns that he'd
been the one who'd done it.  When he hit a concrete median in a
rainstorm one night and threw the wheels of the family car out of
alignment, he had owned up to his father the first thing in the
morning.

He'd always been a little on the sensitive side, and his family had
moved so many times it seemed as if he was always the new kid in
town-Wisconsin, North Dakota, then back to Wisconsin again.  He read
books, tromped in the woods with his homemade bow and arrow, and
organized pickup baseball games for the other boys whose fathers had
neglected to sign them up for Little League.  Once, a bully came by his
house looking for a fight, and Ben, galvanized by terror, wrestled the
whale-size newspaper boy to the ground, but once he got on top, he
promptly surrendered.

He was a late bloomer.  His friends came from his church youth group,
not from high school.  He never drank a beer until he was eighteen and
never kissed a girl until his graduation party, when everybody was
pretty much kissing everybody.

He met Annette Molinaro his sophomore year at the University of
Michigan.  She was from San Francisco and a brilliant student of
Chinese, small, with long brown hair that came nearly to her waist, and
a little bossy.  It was the first relationship for both of them.  On
their second date she took him to an Impeach Nixon rally.  They studied
together three hours every evening (ben's grades improved markedly
during their courtship) and smoked a moderate amount of dope.

After graduation she went to China for a year to teach English, a
choice that left Ben mystified and hurt.  Why would she ever want to be
apart?  He spent twelve lonely months in New York working for the
welfare department, going down to the Village on the weekend to see
musicals about transvestite gorillas, and writing Annette two anxious
letters a week.  When she got back, they were married on a mountaintop
above Sausalito.

She got a job with the Ford Foundation and it was there that she met
Chang Wei, a young Chinese refugee.  Chang was a former Red Guard and a
gymnast who had made his break for freedom during the final round of
the high-bar competition at an international meet in Hong Kong.  He had
applied for political asylum and was writing a book about his
experiences.  Annette helped him obtain a grant for the book and then
began to work as his translator.

Chang became a friend.  He started to come over for supper with them
several times a week.  He was gentle, polite, and still struggling with
his English.  Ben took him down to Riverside Park to play touch
football.  Chang was muscled and quick, but huddles took forever, Ben
trying to explain to him what a down-and-out was, or a buttonhook.  In
the end, Ben would just outline the plays in the dirt with a stick.

Ben was so naive then.  He didn't see what was coming.  Chang was
something of a celebrity in New York (except, of course, among that
handful of Upper West Side radicals who still could describe themselves
as Maoists) and there were dinners with James Michener and Martin
Scorsese, the heads of foundations and human-rights organizations. 
More often than not, Annette would go along with him to act as his
interpreter.

Ben was busy himself.  His first play was being produced in a church
basement in Soho, and some days he would leave the house at eight in
the morning, go directly from work to rehearsal, and return home after
midnight.  Chang stopped coming to the house for dinner.

Then one Saturday morning Annette burst into tears and fled the
apartment.  When she came back two hours later, they sat down together
in the kitchen.  The air smelled of Comet cleanser.

"So what is it?"  he said.

"Nothing," she said.  She shook her head.  She'd had her hair cut and
it was Jean Seberg short.  "Nothing, really."

He reached across the rickety oak table to touch her hand.  "Come
on."

"I don't know.  Some things maybe it's better not to talk about."

"That's not true.  Not if you're married.  I can handle it."

"You think?"  She looked up at him with glistening brown eyes.
Somewhere down on Broadway a street musician was playing very bad
saxophone.

"I know I can."

She was silent for a long time.  "We've been sleeping together.  Chang
and I."

It turned out that Ben was the one who'd been lying.  He'd said he
could handle it and he couldn't --not at all.  It had never occurred to
him that something like this was even possible.  They talked and
talked, for days, for weeks.  She was an honest person.  When he asked
her a direct question she gave him a direct answer, but that did not
make things any better.  She didn't want to end the marriage, but she
wasn't ready to dump Chang either.

They met once, the three of them.  Chang's difficulties with English
made him seem somewhat simpler than he was, but he didn't flinch from
what he'd done.  He'd stood up to Mao; after that everything was a
piece of cake.  He was sorry to hurt his friend Ben, but he felt what
he felt.  They were all quite civil.  Only later did Ben lose it
entirely. "He's using you, you know that!  He's just trying to get an
American passport, it's the oldest scam in the book!"

Ben moved out finally.  He was too ashamed to tell his parents,
managing to conceal from them what had happened until the following
Christmas.  The only person Ben told the whole story to was Jonathan,
his closest friend and a young actor.  It turned out to be a mistake.
Jonathan, though he was the most supportive guy in the world, had never
been able to resist a good tale and this was an irresistible one:
cuckolded by an ex-Red Guard.  Someone at a party made a crack, and Ben
realized to his horror that Jonathan had spilled the beans.  Ben and
Jonathan had a massive falling-out and didn't speak for six months.

Ben learned his lesson: he learned to keep things to himself.  For
nearly three years he went emotionally underground.  For a long time he
didn't date, and when he did, there was always something to make it
impossible.  Maybe what had happened between him and Annette had been
an irreparable wound, or less melodramatically, maybe it had just made
him--a naturally cautious man--more cautious.  It wasn't until he met
Katy, whose integrity shone like a beacon, that he felt he'd met a
person he could utterly trust.

Over the years he'd come to hate frankness: the blabberers, the
afternoon talk shows, the share-your-pain kind of guys.  Emily
Dickinson had it right: the truth needed to be told slant.  No one
could take it straight on: not the colleague whose life was sustained
by the illusion that it was merely a cruel trick of fate that he was
here in Texas surrounded by, as he put it, ham-and-eggers, instead of
being tenured at Yale; not the woman down the street married to the
blowhard, who consoled herself with the belief that he was so wonderful
with the children.

Of course Ben should have told Katy about the money.  He should have
owned up, but he couldn't.  The nineties was not an era that held the
truth in high regard (witness any congressional hearing or the French
lit crit spin doctors, the advocates of deliberate slipperiness), but
that wasn't it.  The problem with Ben really wasn't a problem of the
times.  It was just the North Dakota in him.  He was becoming more and
more like his uncles, his mother's brothers, growing increasingly
silent as the years passed, living alone in brick farmhouses after
everyone else had left, keeping their sorrows to themselves, knowing
that talk seldom made anything better.

CHAPTER 4

He developed a simple set of rules.  He never tried to cash a fifty for
any purchase under twenty dollars; he'd learned his lesson at the
Middle Eastern restaurant.  Once he'd broken a fifty at a place, he
never tried it at that place again.  He avoided breaking large bills in
the neighborhood or in places that he and Katy frequented.

Despite the rules, he gradually found ways to work the money into their
life: buying sixty-five dollars' worth of groceries with a
one-hundred-dollar bill and pocketing the change, paying the dentist in
cash and filing the receipt with insurance, taking Abby and three of
her friends to the movies and, while they were buying popcorn, paying
for the tickets with one of his secreted fifties.  Buying books was
good.  Any hardcover book cost twenty-five to thirty-five dollars,
which meant no cashier ever thought twice about cashing a fifty.

In a ledger in his office, he kept a record of all his transactions, as
scrupulous as Thoreau.

Amt.  Cashed Purchase:::::::::: .::::::: 150.00 ... 115.22 basketball
shoes 100.00 ... 65.17 groceries 100.00 ... 62.50 Bookstop 100.00 ...
60.00 Dr.  Norman 50.00 ... 25.00 movies 100.00 ... 100.00 Castle Hill
50.00 ... 36.00 Half Price

Books 50.00 ... 22.50 but.  cake 50.00 ... 31.00
Apollinaire's:::::::::: .::::::: 750.00 ... 517.39

Add to that the $400 he'd deposited in the bank and there was more than
$1,100 he'd brought into his life in a single month.  Yet its effect
was unnoticeable.  When Ben sat down to do the bills, his bank balance,
because of the hit they'd taken on the rebuilt transmission, was
actually $245 less than it had been at the end of December.

Ben stood in front of the open door of the cooler, trying to find a
chilled twelve-dollar bottle of wine, when the bell sounded at the
front of the liquor store.  He glanced over his shoulder; two
nice-looking men in rayon shirts had just come in, Mexicans or
Colombians he would have guessed, and the clerk pushed up from his
stool to greet them.

Ben was not a man who knew wines.  His method was to get into a
respectable price range and then pick a classy label.  Not that he
needed to impress anyone tonight; he and Katy were going over to their
friends the Stricklands for fajitas and a game of hearts.  He pulled a
Fetzer zinfandel from the top rack and headed for the front of the
store.

He wasn't sure what made him pull up short; maybe it was the slightly
queer look on the clerk's face or maybe it was the way one of the men
stared intently out into the parking lot as if he was standing guard.
For a second Ben thought he'd stumbled onto the start of a robbery; but
it wasn't a robbery--just the opposite.  The second of the two men, the
taller one, was being perfectly cordial, almost courtly.

"It's just a question," he said.  "All we want to know is whether
anybody's been throwing around a lot of money in the neighborhood.
Throwing big parties.  Buying fancy cars."

"Not that I know of," the clerk said.  The clerk's eyes were wide open,
like an about-to-be-gigged frog.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

It was as if Ben were invisible.  He stood maybe ten feet away,
clutching his wet bottle of zinfandel, partially shielded by a
cardboard cutout of the Bacardi girl.  Both interrogators wore pants
with no belts and their shoes were freshly shined.  This was the moment
Ben knew would come; for weeks he'd known it would come.

"So who would know?"  the talker of the two asked.

"I don't really know."

The man who'd been watching the parking lot looked back quickly,
irritated, and spied Ben for the first time.  His friend was
unperturbed.  "I'll tell you what," he said.  He pulled out his wallet
and removed a hundred-dollar bill.  "Here's a little something," he
said.  "Just to keep your eyes open."  As the man reached across the
counter with the bill, Ben saw, between the man's thumb and forefinger,
the inky black tattoo of a scorpion.

For the next two days Ben was in the blackest of moods,
roller-coastering between raw terror and the wallow of self-disgust.
What could he possibly have been thinking?  That no one would notice
seven and a half million dollars was missing?  He'd been living in a
dream world

He couldn't sleep at night, tossing and turning, finally going out on
the living room couch so he didn't disturb Katy.  At four in the
morning he found himself sitting with a glass of water in his hand,
watching the headlights of a car crawl down the block, swing around the
corner, and slowly dissolve into darkness.

Days were equally grim.  In the mail room, one of his colleagues gave
him a quick double take.  "Whoa.  What's wrong, man?  You look like
your dog died."

What was he going to do?  It wasn't as if he could just give the money
back; these people would kill him.  Could he just let it sit in the
storage unit and rot?  Or drive into the country and leave all eight
coolers in the middle of a cornfield?  What a sensation that would be.
There would be police, reporters ... And what if someone happened to
spot him?

The other option was to call the police.  He'd always rejected the
thought before, but it wasn't too late.  What crime had he actually
committed?  Maybe none.  He'd been a little slow in reporting what he'd
found, but anyone could understand that.  He'd spent a little more than
a thousand dollars and he could find a way to give it back; if it meant
saving the lives of his family, he sure as hell would find a way.  He'd
been lucky to see those two guys in the liquor store; it had been a
wake-up call.  This was a chance to get out before things got ugly. Was
he going to spend the next thirty years running and hiding?  He wasn't
a criminal; he didn't have the nerves for it and he didn't have the
training.

After the qualifying exam meeting on Tuesday he went to his office.  He
flopped the phone book open to the City Government section and ran his
finger down the page until he found the number of the police
department.

Three times he picked up the receiver and sat with it in his hand,
unable to dial.  He'd never really been in the wrong before, his entire
life.  What if they arrested him?  What if it came out in the papers?
He would be the laughingstock of the university; it could end up
costing him his job.  He had no business doing this until he talked to
Katy.

The fourth time he picked up the receiver, he finally punched in the
number.  It rang three times and a woman with a strong West Texas
accent answered.

"Austin police department."

"Yes.  Hello.  I ... uh ... I wondered if I could speak to one of the
officers."

"In regard to what?"  She sounded as if it had been a long day.

"I found something that I think might have been stolen."

"A car?"

"No, not a car."

"Excuse me, I'm going to have to put you on hold."

With that, she left him hanging in the air.  He could feel something
bubbling, high in his throat.  He leaned forward in his chair and
rubbed his temples with his fingers.  Nobody gave a damn.  He was on
his own.

A knock on the door made him start.  "Professor Lindberg?"  The knock
sounded him again.  "Professor Lindberg, are you in there?"  It was
Marcie from the graduate office; he had promised her his course
description for the fall.

"I'll be right with you," he said.  He set the receiver back on the
phone, gently, the way you might set a fallen baby bird back in its
nest.

The next day, when he thought about what he'd nearly done, he wondered
what had come over him.  He felt vaguely ashamed.  How could he have
let himself get worked up into such a state?  What a break it had been,
the woman on the switchboard putting him on hold.  She could have put
him through to some grandstanding cop out to make a name for himself
and Ben could have ended up with his face plastered all over the
morning American-Statesman, his life in ruins.  He needed to calm down,
to truly think this through, not just go crazy.

It was a good thing he hadn't given the switchboard operator his name.
On the other hand, if anyone in the world had Caller ID you'd figure it
would be the police.  He wasn't going to think about it.  You'd have to
be totally paranoid to believe that the cops would go through every
phone call they got in a day to check out who it was from.

The February weather continued to be sunny and gorgeous.  After one
day, and then two, the urgency he'd felt began to ebb like the fading
of an old toothache.  No Colombian bad guys with machine guns showed up
at his door.  Every day he took the bus into work and every day he came
back.  In the evenings he helped his kids with their homework and
watched the Seinfeld reruns at nine-thirty with Matt.  Ordinary life
closed in around him, as comforting as balm over a wound.

He got a call from Sammy Bishop, the manager of the softball team,
saying that their first practice was on Sunday.  It always caught Ben
off guard, starting the spring softball season in February, but then
this was Texas.

He had played on the team for four years.  It was a squad loosely
sponsored by the Texas Progressive, a muckraking and constantly
impoverished left-wing publication that had been around since the
fifties.  A little over half the players had some affiliation with the
magazine.  The slick-fielding shortstop was a former editor, the
midwife who'd once brought a tape recorder to the dugout so they could
play the Sandinista national anthem before the game was a board member,
and there were a couple of laid-back lawyers and actors who were always
willing to pitch in during fund-raisers.  Ben had found his own
political instincts growing increasingly cranky and complicated as he'd
gotten older, but these were people he felt comfortable with, and he
loved softball.

On Sunday, Ben was one of the first ones out.  They threw some behind
the bleachers, warming up stiff arms, joking around, trading stories,
and when it was time to hit, Ben was the first one to the plate.

His first swings felt slow and leaden.  He kept hitting the ball into
the dirt and in off the hands, despite the fact that Sammy's soft
tosses looked big as melons, but finally he got into a groove.  He hit
three or four shots in a row, the last one hard enough that Alex Aiuto
misjudged it in right field, coming in only to have it soar ten feet
over his head and rattle off the fence on one bounce.  Ben flipped his
bat away and went to retrieve his glove.

He trotted out to the outfield, where Don Marcus and Alex were gabbing
about some dope-dealing client of Alex's who'd just been arrested.

"It's stupid," Alex said.  "You'd think these FBI guys would have
something better to do with their time.  Charlie's just this old Travis
Heights hippie who maybe sells ten ounces of marijuana a week and runs
his money through these knife-and-gun shows.  If they're going to bust
him, they might as well bust half of South Austin."

Tracy, one of the new women Sammy had recruited, laced a hard liner
over second.  Don scampered over to see if he could make a shoestring
catch, but the ball skipped under his glove.  Everyone hooted, and
Sammy waved for Don to come in and take his cuts.

Ben jogged out to retrieve the ball.  In the distance, white steam
curled out of the power station towers.  He underhanded the ball in to
Alex, who whirled and lobbed it in the direction of the mound, the ball
bumping and rolling across the rough dirt infield.

"I don't understand," Ben said.  "When you say he was running this
money through these knife-and-gun shows, what do you mean?"

"It's simple.  It's the oldest scam in the world," Alex said.  Tracy
hit a scorcher down the right-field line.  She'd played softball for
the UT varsity, and even though her politics were suspect (she worked
in marketing), she looked as if she was just what the team needed. "Say
you're a small-time dope dealer.  You've got all this cash, right? And
you've got no way to account for it with Uncle Sam.  So you go to a gun
show, you buy a gun for eight hundred dollars cash, you walk down the
aisle and sell it to another guy for six hundred, and you get yourself
a receipt."

"I'm sorry, Alex, I'm a little slow here."  Don whirled three bats
behind his head as he walked to the plate, and all the fielders moved
around to the left.

"If the IRS ever asks you, you tell them the gun was part of your
grandfather's private collection."  Alex ran his hand over his
salt-and-pepper beard and then pounded his glove.  "It's so simple a
three-year-old could get away with it.  Except, of course, unless
you're Charlie and make the mistake of blabbing to somebody and then,
when they call you in, lose all your boxes of receipts."

Ben stopped leaving his wallet on the dresser at night.  He didn't want
Katy coming on a wad of fifties in those early-morning scrambles for
lunch money.  With each week that passed, Ben had become more cautious,
more able to imagine the million nightmarish scenarios through which he
might be discovered: Rose, say, calling the house after a monster
rainstorm had damaged some of the roofs of the storage units and
getting Katy on the phone; a suspicious bookstore clerk; a slip of the
tongue; some cleaning guy at the university opening a drawer that he
shouldn't.

Yet there was no sign Katy was suspicious.  There had been the incident
in the front yard after he bought Matt's basketball shoes, but nothing
else, really.  It was almost too easy.  He was the one who paid the
bills and Katy was not what anyone would call a fastidious balancer of
the checkbook.  What he was banking on was an unspoken reservoir of
trust--and hadn't he earned it?  Through seventeen years of marriage he
had been an utterly faithful husband.  As far as he could tell, she
hadn't noticed any difference in their lives.

The difference came when Katy started her practice teaching the second
week of February, fourth grade at an elementary school in East Austin.
It was not easy for any of them.  Katy was, as a friend once labeled
her, a genius of domestic life.  She was the most competent human being
Ben had ever met and, at home, a person of strong opinions, no
pushover, yet she'd always had a weird lack of self-confidence about
work.

When Ben was in graduate school in New York, Katy had supported the
family with a job in a publishing house and, later, one at the Museum
of Natural History.  Her bosses had universally professed their love
for her, but she never believed in their praise; she always dismissed
it as their being nice.  She was conscientious to a fault, and it had
always driven Ben a little crazy.

She didn't really want to go back to work--she wasn't sure how it would
affect Matt and Abby, she wasn't sure she would be any good as a
teacher, she was older now, she'd been away for too long--but she felt
as if there wasn't any choice.  For them to be able to buy a house, to
have the kind of life they wanted to have, they needed two incomes. And
besides, now, when they were at faculty parties and people asked her
what she did, she would have an answer.  She would finish her
certification in the spring and apply for paying jobs in the fall.

The consequences of her being gone all day were immediate.  She had to
be at Ortiz Elementary by seven-fifteen, which meant getting up before
six.  Ben had to take both children to school, and at night Katy was up
until eleven-thirty making lesson plans.  He was now the one doing the
dishes and sorting the laundry.  On Wednesday nights, when she had her
educational methods class at the university, Ben would take Matt and
Abby to Mr.  Gatti's for pizza.

What a sham it was!  It was eating Ben alive.  They had all the money
they'd ever need, Ben just had to find a way for them to use it;
someone smarter or bolder would have figured it out by now.  He
continued to spend hours in the library, his head aswirl with tales of
bank examiners and the Russian mafia.  He was looking for a simple
scheme.  What it boiled down to was, he had to either find a way to get
into a cash-intensive business--like a casino, a massage parlor, or an
amusement arcade--or he had to get up enough nerve to get on a plane to
the Bahamas with bagfuls of money.  He still could not imagine how he
would do either.

On Tuesday night Katy was working late, preparing a unit on the Indians
of Texas, and Ben watched the news alone--there was another report on
the Mopac rapist and a report on cedar fever--but when it was over, he
shambled into the kitchen, looking for company.

"You about ready to go to bed?"  he said.

"Not quite yet.  You go ahead."  She smiled at him, curled up in the
big chair by the desk.  It had never been a problem, Ben being
attracted to her.  People always said she looked a little like Audrey
Hepburn.  She would always deflect that--no, she was just a simple
country girl, she would counter--and though she was stronger-looking
than Audrey Hepburn, there was something to what people said.

"You sure?"  Ben said.  "You look tired."

"I just have to get this done.  I won't be long."

He went upstairs and brushed his teeth and got into bed.  He tossed and
turned, but only found himself getting angrier and angrier.  When did
they ever go to bed together anymore?  She was just too stubborn, too
obsessive.  Maybe he was being a big baby, but every night was like
this.  He rolled over, scrunching up his pillow.  A siren wailed in the
distance.

He must have fallen asleep, because when he woke it felt like the
middle of the night.  He reached across, patting the cold bedspread,
and then realized Katy wasn't there.  He turned and saw the line of
light under the door; she was still down in the kitchen.  He got out of
bed and peered at the digital clock.  It was twelve-fifteen.

He padded down the stairs in his oversize Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt.
Katy sat hunched over the desk now, making a huge chart out of
construction paper.

"Katy, come on, this is nuts.  It's nearly twelve-thirty."

As she swung around, Magic Marker in hand, he could see the map of
Texas she'd made with the names of all the Indian tribes in bright
colors --Comanche and Apache, Karankawa and Ca.o.

"It's almost done," Katy said.

"Goddamn it!"  Ben said.  "This is for a bunch of fourth-graders!"

She turned away from him and snapped the top back on the Magic Marker.
Ben waited, not sure what she was going to do, and then he realized she
was crying.

"I'm sorry," Ben said.  Somewhere the cat scratched at an outside
screen, waiting to be let in.  Ben stood motionless for several
seconds, feeling like a hairy beast in his underwear.  The floor was
cold on his bare feet.  He put his hand on her shoulder, and she slid
out from under his touch.

"What is wrong, Ben?"

"We're both just tired."

"It's more than that.  Ever since we got back from Christmas, you've
seemed so angry."

"I'm not angry."

"Is it my teaching?  Is that it?"

"No."

"Then what is it?  I feel as if you're somewhere else.  I feel as if,
sometimes, you're just looking at me as if I'm crazy."

He ran his tongue across his teeth, like a man who has just swallowed a
bitter pill.  "No, you're not the one who's crazy, I promise."

On Wednesday night, when Katy was at the university and the kids were
in bed, Ben sat in front of the television eating a piece of cake and
watching an old John Wayne western.  When the commercials came on, he
leaned over to switch channels but his finger froze on the dial.  The
ad was for the Travis County Knife and Gun Show, all day Saturday and
Sunday at the Coliseum.

On Sunday afternoon, Ben announced to Katy that he was going to the
Hike and Bike Trail to take a run.  Instead he drove to his office, got
eight one-hundred-dollar bills out of the envelope in the bottom drawer
of his desk, and drove back to the Coliseum.

The parking lot was jammed.  Ben had to drive around for three or four
minutes before he found a place, and when he got out of the van an old
country couple was packing a brand-new rifle into the trunk of the car
next to him.

Tickets were three dollars, and the signs plastered around the
box-office windows were ominous:

NO LIVE AMMO, NO CONCEALED

WEAPONS.  Inside, the space was as cavernous and echoey as a roller
rink.  Ben wandered up and down the aisles, getting the lay of the
land, telling himself that this was just an experiment, a foray.

There was every kind of gun and everything associated with guns--grips,
scopes, holsters, ammo clips--but there were also crossbows, pepper-gas
canisters, blowguns, and paint ball equipment.  It had the
down-at-the-heels feel of a carnival on an Indian reservation.  The
chubby eleven-year-old son of one of the exhibitors sat in a metal
chair stuffing his face with nachos while the loudspeakers blared out
the words of an old country song: "I fought the law, and the law won"
At a book stand of survivalist literature a scar-faced man wearing two
floppy stocking hats, one set atop the other like stacked ice cream
cones, perused a pamphlet entitled "Big Sister Is Watching Y."

It struck Ben how many of the people there were maimed or crippled in
some way: a man in camouflage gear sitting in a wheelchair, spitting
snuff into a metal cup; a huge Chicano skinhead in a Dallas Cowboys
jacket hobbling past on crutches.

His heart dropped when he saw, at several tables, men filling out
forms.  It wasn't as simple as Alex had described it.  Guns had to be
registered, there were waiting periods and checks run by local police
departments, the last thing Ben needed.

Set against the west wall, away from the other booths, was a sagging
white banner that announced WESTERN SPECIALTIES.  Antique guns were
laid out on coyote skins.  Ben wandered from table to table, fingering
the tags.  He ran his hand over the polished stock of a long rifle that
looked as if it could have belonged to Daniel Boone.

"Beautiful gun, isn't it?  Go ahead, pick it up."  The old man behind
the table had the manner of a British colonial officer and wore a hat
decorated with rattlesnake rattles.  He picked the gun up and laid it
in Ben's hands.  Ben turned it over.  He hadn't held a gun since he'd
gone squirrel hunting when he was fifteen.

"It's an old cavalry gun.  Reproduction of an 1873 Winchester.  It's a
great shooting gun.  You can still hit a steel silhouette at three
hundred yards with it.  Let me show you this...."  The old man reached
across and slid back a thin metal panel on the top of the barrel.
"That's the dust shield.  When they were out riding, they needed it to
keep the grit out of the works."

"So how much is it?"

"Eight hundred dollars."

"Now, let me ask you.  I'm new to all this.  Say I wanted to buy this
gun, there would be a certain amount of paperwork...."

Ben thought he was being subtle, but the man in the rattlesnake hat was
a mile ahead of him.  "Well, with that one there would be.  But let me
show you something else."  He took the rifle from Ben and laid it
carefully back on the coyote skin.  He gestured to the revolvers at the
far end of the table.

"Now, these over here are part of my private collection, which means
nobody has to fill out any Brady Bill forms, there's no background
check.  You pay me, you can walk right out of here with your gun.
There's a lot of good honest people in this country, they just don't
like the government messing in their business."

He took a small shiny revolver that had been propped up by an owl's
pelvis and offered it for inspection, handle first.  The weight of the
gun surprised Ben.

"Colt Thunderer with a bird's-head grip.  Three-and-a-half-inch barrel;
it's a fine piece for conceal and carry.  In the Old West they used to
call them belly guns."

"So how much is it?"

"I can give it to you for five hundred and fifty dollars.  I'll pay the
tax."

Ben stared at the gun in his hand--so small it looked like a toy.  If
he bought it, he was then faced with the task of selling it.  Alex had
said all he had to do was walk down the aisle and find a buyer, but
what if he wasn't able to, where could he keep it?  He couldn't imagine
taking it home.  What if one of the kids found it?

"Okay.  For you, I'll knock it down to five-twenty-five."

Ben glanced up at the old man.  He thought Ben's hesitation was just
part of his bargaining technique.  He gave a wry little smile as if to
say, you're too slick for me, and the smile caught Ben off guard,
dispelling his fear for just long enough.

"Okay," Ben found himself saying.  "Five-twenty-five.  You take
cash?"

"Absolutely."

Ben handed the gun back to the man in the rattlesnake hat and reached
for his wallet.  He took a sidelong glance just to be sure no one was
watching, and then counted out five hundreds and a fifty.  The man in
the rattlesnake hat went to his cashbox and gave Ben two twenties and a
five.  He wrote a receipt, wrapped the gun in a soft gray cloth, and
set it quietly in a small cardboard box.  He slipped the box into a
plastic bag and handed the bag to Ben.

"It's been a pleasure doing business with you," he said.

"It's been a pleasure doing business with you," Ben said, and they
shook hands.  Ben could feel the blood racing through his temples.  He
had taken four or five steps before he heard someone call out behind
him.

"Hey, Professor!"

Ben turned.  Sweeney, looking quite delighted, stumbled out from
between two racks of T-shirts.

"Hey, Professor, how you doin'?"  Sweeney set a T-shirt emblazoned with
the picture of a golden retriever back on its hanger and sauntered
over, his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans.  "Geez, you never know
who you're going to run into at these places, do you?"

"I guess not," Ben said.  Sweeney could not hide how pleased he was.

"So, what you doin' here?"

"Nothing much.  It's just interesting to look."

"Looks like you've been doing more than looking."  Sweeney tapped Ben's
bag lightly with his finger.  Ben felt his face color.  He shouldn't
have tried to lie; he wasn't any good at it.  Sweeney's big smile
faded, and he turned curious and speculative.

"Listen, Dan, it's good to see you, but I'm afraid I've got to run."

"You serious?  I was just on my way out myself," Sweeney said.  "I'll
walk you out."

They made their way silently past the security guards, out into the
sunlight.  A woman was selling wooden popguns out of the back of her
truck.  Across the street Ben could see a team of rowers out on Town
Lake, perfectly synchronized, knifing through the water.  Ben felt sick
to his stomach, but he couldn't afford to panic.

"So I guess we're doing old Margaret Fuller next week, huh?"  Sweeney
said.

"That's right."

"I'll tell you, I've been having a great time in there.  It's probably
one of the best courses I've ever had at the university.  No bull."

"That's always nice to hear."  The plastic sack with the gun inside
swung at Ben's side.  Ben gestured with his thumb.  "I guess I'm parked
over here."

"Listen, I've been meaning to ask you about something, if you have a
minute."

"Sure."

Sweeney rubbed his nose with his knuckle.  "I was wondering if you'd
like to go over to the Green Mesquite, let me buy you a beer, we could
talk about it.  I haven't had anything to eat all day."

"I should be getting home."

Sweeney ruminated for a moment, toeing a spot of tar on the cement,
then looked up sharply.  "It won't take long.  I just need your advice
about something."

Ordinarily, Ben wouldn't have let himself be bullied, but he was in a
weak position; this was not a moment when he wanted to piss Sweeney
off.  "Sure.  Why not?  For a few minutes."

Sweeney grinned.  "Great.  I'll meet you over there."

Ben went to his van, fuming, and slipped the gun under his front seat.
It didn't look as if he was going to be selling it today.  He drove
over to the Green Mesquite, berating himself for letting Sweeney badger
him into this.  Sweeney was just a student and Ben knew how to handle
students-he needed to remind himself of that.

As Ben drove in, Sweeney was waiting in the small parking lot, leaning
against the portable sign that announced TWO-MEAT PLATE $5.79.  He
looked happy as a lark.  Inside, they found a booth near the front and
Ben ordered a Coke while Sweeney ordered a Shiner Bach and a brisket
platter--barbecue, beans, coleslaw, creamy potato salad, the works.
Sweeney ate with relish; Ben noticed for the first time how small his
hands were.

What Sweeney wanted advice about was graduate school.  He loved books
and it seemed to him that being a professor would be a great life, but
he wanted to know what the chances would be for someone like himself,
realistically.  His overall GPA wasn't great--he'd flunked out as a
freshman and come close a couple of other times back when he was young
and foolish--but he did have a straight 4.0 in his upper-division
English classes.

Sweeney ordered a second Shiner and shook the squeeze bottle of
barbecue sauce over his brisket.  The brown sauce sputtered out in
short flatulent bursts.  Ben nursed his Coke.

Ben gave him the advice he gave to everyone: don't do it unless you can
get into a first-rate program.  The profession was too tight.  There
were some areas where they were still hiring--rhetoric and comp, third
world--but the old dream of getting out of graduate school and going to
a big research university where you would teach a two-two load and
write your books was slipping away for all but the most elite.

Sweeney seemed to take it like a man.  The waitress came by with his
beer.  A band had begun to warm up in the sunny beer garden.  He wiped
off the mouth of his bottle.

"That bad, huh?"  Sweeney said.

"That bad."

"Hope it's not so bad you're thinking about shooting yourself."

"What do you mean?"

"I was joking."  Sweeney took a swig of his beer.  "So, what kind of
gun did you get?"  In the next booth, two old men in cheap Sunday suits
leaned over their cobblers.

"A Colt Thunderer."

"Are you kidding me?  The little one with the short barrel?  Man, that
is a pretty little gun.  I don't believe this.  I was thinking about
buying that myself.  So what does it shoot?"

"What do you mean?"  The fan moved slowly, overhead.  At the counter, a
huge man in suspenders pointed out a spot of barbecue sauce on his
shirt to the cashier.

"What caliber?  Forty-fives, forty-four forties ..."

"I don't remember."

Sweeney picked at the label on his bottle, sensing Ben's discomfort. If
he thought Ben was a fool, he kept it to himself.  "If you don't mind
my asking, what did you pay for it?"

Ben hesitated.  Sweeney beamed.  It occurred to Ben that maybe the beer
had loosened him up, made him a little more aggressive.

"A little over five hundred."

"Not bad," Sweeney said.  A waitress cruised by carrying two huge
platters of ribs.  "What would you say if I offered you six for it?"

"I just bought it."

"I know you just bought it.  What about six-fifty?"

The music coming out of the beer garden wasn't bad.  They were playing
some old Bill Monroe song with furious mandolins.  Through the screen
door Ben could see an old couple dancing, the flash of a red skirt.
Sweeney leaned to one side so he could wrestle his wallet free.  He
counted out seven one-hundred-dollar bills and set them on the
green-checkered tablecloth.

CHAPTER 5

He did not sell Sweeney the gun.  Sitting with Sweeney's seven hundred
dollars on the green-checkered tablecloth in front of him, he balked,
though he knew that balking alone was not enough to save him.

In class on Monday, Ben could scarcely bring himself to look at
Sweeney.  Ben considered calling him up after the bell, telling him
that he would appreciate Sweeney's not mentioning their encounter at
the Coliseum, but decided against it.  He didn't want to add any more
spice to an already spicy situation.

The cat was probably already out of the bag anyway.  What student could
resist telling a story about his pistol-packing professor?  Ben fully
expected the story to be all over the department in a matter of hours.
That afternoon he drove to Lake Buchanan and threw the Colt Thunderer
over the dam.

All day Tuesday he kept waiting for someone to come up to him and say
something, yet no one did.  On Wednesday, when Ben walked into class,
Sweeney was reading an article from The Daily Texan to his claque in
the back.  Ben walked to the podium, waiting for the first smirk, the
first knowing snicker, some sign that Sweeney had spilled the beans,
but there was none.

On Thursday, Sweeney came in to discuss his term paper.  The topic was
a good one: "Going Native: Thoreau and the Indians."  Ben suggested
that he read the captivity tales in Richard Slotkin's Regeneration
Through Violence and Robert Sayre's book.

As Sweeney dutifully scribbled down all the references, there was a
timid knock on the door.  Ben leaned across and opened the door,
staring up into the kindly face of Sam Steinbach, the department's
senior Americanist.

"I'm sorry," Sam said.  "I see you're busy."

"No, that's fine," Ben said.  "We're just about done anyway."

"All I need is thirty seconds," Sam said.

"Sure."  Ben rose from his chair, gesturing to Sweeney to stay put.
"Don't go anywhere.  I'll be right back."  Ben followed Steinbach into
the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him.  "Everything all
right?"

"Everything's fine."  Sam was a sweet man, with the sad eyes of a
beagle and the furtive manners of a police informer.  He was the
world's leading authority on William Dean Howells and he'd been through
the academic wars.  "You know we have this candidate coming in
tomorrow."

"Yes.  I was planning on going to his talk."

"Margaret and I were intending to have a small dinner party for him,
but a couple of people have bailed on us.  Steve read his work and says
that hell will have to freeze over before he even speaks to the man,
and Jane has the flu.  I know this is awfully last-minute, but I was
hoping you and your wife might come."

"We'd be delighted to," Ben said.  "Let me just check at home to be
sure it's all right and I'll call you."

"I appreciate this.  Margaret and I both like Kathy so much and she's
so gracious at these things."

"Katy," Ben said.

"Katy!  That's right!  I'm sorry."  Sam looked both ways just to be
sure no graduate students were within earshot.  "It's not as if I'm so
crazy about the man's work myself.  I mean, class, race, gender ...
well, whoop-de-do.  But we all need to be civilized about these
things."  He clapped Ben heartily on the shoulder.  "Thank God there
are still a few people who write in English around here.  How's the
work coming?"

"Great guns," Ben said.  If he let him, Sam would go on all afternoon
and Ben was starting to get nervous about leaving Sweeney unattended in
his office.  He took a step away.  "I'll call you tonight."

When Ben pushed open the door, Sweeney was sitting just as Ben had left
him, with his backpack between his ankles, but there was something
different about him, something a little Sunday-school-boy-smarmy about
his smile.

"So where were we?"  Ben asked.

"I think we're done," Sweeney said.  "At least I hope we are, because
I've got enough reading here to last me till next Christmas."  Ben
stared at him.  There was definitely something off; he could hear it in
Sweeney's voice.

"I've got something for you," Sweeney said.  He dug an orange flyer out
of his backpack and handed it to Ben.  It was the announcement of a
club opening downtown in two weeks.  "It would be great if you could
come.  It's going to be cool.  It's a little place me and my friends
have been putting together."

"I'd love to," Ben said.  "But I'm afraid we're going to be out of
town."

Sweeney grinned.  "I guess those are the breaks."

As soon as Sweeney left, Ben closed the door and went to his desk.  He
yanked open the bottom drawer and with trembling hands rifled through
the stacks of student papers and battered manuscript boxes.  He lifted
out the manila envelope concealed in the back and undid the metal
clasp.

He poured the contents onto his desk, seventeen hundred dollars, all in
fifties.  He counted it again, just to be sure, then put it all back in
the tawny envelope.  He lay the envelope in the drawer and carefully
reburied it under a mountain of paper.

He sat for a moment, covering his eyes with his hands.  He could hear
students laughing in the hallway, passing between classes.  It was
crazy to think that Sweeney would have had the nerve to go through his
desk.  Then what had he seen on Sweeney's face?  Maybe Ben was just
losing it, making things up out of thin air.

He opened his eyes and scanned the room.  His gaze drifted and then
snagged.  There it was: the ledger, sitting in clear view atop some old
course schedules on the bookshelf.  He leaned forward and snatched
it.

It shouldn't have been there.  Ben had always kept it in the corner
file cabinet, behind the teaching evaluation folders.  Every time he
made an entry he was scrupulous about putting the ledger back.  How
could he be slipping up like this?

He flipped quickly through it.  There were three full pages of entries
now.  He turned to the last set of columns, letting his eyes run down
the neat rows of figures.

Amt.  Cashed Purchase:::::::::: .::::::: 100.00 ... 75.40 Run-Tex 50.00
... 18.12 Chevron 50.00 ... 37.57 Randall's 100.00 ... 83.85 Fitting
Stool 100.00 ... 70.34 Circuit City 50.00 ... 29.25 Wal-Mart 50.00 ...
34.66 Kinko's

100.00 ... 82.00 HEB

550.00 ... 525.00 Gun Show

They drove to Mississippi for spring break and spent a week on the farm
with Katy's mother, her brother, and his family.  Everyone took care of
themselves.  Abby and Matt had their cousins, Katy had her mother, and
Ben worked and read until the late afternoon, when he rounded up the
children and the cane poles and drove them to the twin ponds, where
they fished for bream until the sun went down.

It was a wonderful week, but when they got back to Austin, obligation
descended like a hammer.  Katy still had four weeks of practice
teaching and Ben was inundated with classes, the reading of term
papers, and the ferrying of children.

The dread he felt was constant, like a low-grade fever.  He was faced
with an impossible task: he wanted the money to make a difference in
their lives, yet he had to do it in such a way that Katy didn't notice
that difference.  The storage unit was not safe enough.  Not only was
there the risk of being spotted, but each time he went he was forced to
tell Katy another lie.  Someone was going to discover the money was
gone sooner or later, and when they did, they would come looking for
him, come looking with a vengeance.

One night Katy shook him out of a deep sleep.  He rolled onto his side,
thinking the problem was that he had been snoring, but she shook him
again.  "Ben, there's someone outside," she said.

"What?"

"There's someone outside on the lawn."

He pushed up on his elbows, still groggy.  "What time is it?"

"Almost midnight."

His heart was pounding.  He didn't move, and after a second he could
hear voices too, and a soft thudding sound close to the house.

"Would you go see?"

"Yeah," Ben said.

He rolled out of bed and felt along the top of his dresser until he
found his glasses.  He went to the window and peered out.  He didn't
see anyone, just the long shadows of the trees stretching across the
dry lawn, but because the bedroom was up under the pitched roof, his
field of vision was restricted.  He went to the closet.  As he pulled
out his metal softball bat, it made a soft ping against the wooden door
frame.

"What are you doing?"  Katy said.

"Nothing," he said.  "I'm just going to go see."

He crept down the stairs in his bare feet, dressed only in his
underwear, and moved past Abby's bedroom, through the dining room, into
the front hall.  He heard the patter of running feet; it almost sounded
as if someone was on the porch.  If they killed him it was one
thing--just as long as they left his family alone.  It occurred to him
to call the police, but there wasn't that much time.

He went to the front door.  He held the bat at his side and turned the
knob slowly, careful not to make a sound, and eased the door open. Long
white streamers floated in the live oak tree, and there were also
streamers wrapped around the bushes on the side lawn.

"Look out!  He's coming!"

The warning cry was young and feminine.  Suddenly Ben saw them--three
or four thirteen-year-old girls standing on the dark lawn with their
rolls of toilet paper, a couple more leaning against parked cars at the
curb.  Another girl burst out of the bushes to Ben's left, and then
they all ran, not stopping until they were halfway down the block.

Ben stood in the half-open doorway watching them; they were skittish as
deer under the streetlight, unsure whether he was coming after them or
not.  He thought he recognized one of them from Matt's class.  After a
few seconds they began to drift on down the street.

Ben leaned the metal bat against the desk.  He stood there for a couple
of minutes, just breathing in and out, trying to get back to normal,
and then bent down and picked up a roll of toilet paper from the porch
and began to reel it in.

Night after night he lay in bed trying to come up with a solution.  The
things he found himself considering bordered on absurdity: purchasing
herds of cattle in Mexico, buying lottery tickets by the thousands,
opening a chain of copy shops ... He cursed himself for his ignorance.
What did he know about the way the world worked?  Nothing.  He felt
like a wasp trapped between two panes of glass, battering endlessly and
in vain.  Then one evening, taking a shower, a solution came to him, so
obvious he couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before.  He called
Jonathan the next afternoon from school.

He had met Jonathan in New York nearly twenty years ago, and their
friendship had survived through good times and bad.  Jonathan had been
an actor then and quite a good one, small, dark, and flamboyant, with
huge eyes and mobile features--the Also Pacino of Off-Off-Broadway, he
used to call himself--but after banging around for ten years he went to
work in a producer's office and eventually became a producer himself.

His first legitimate success came when he brought in some of the money
to revive Show Boat.  Katy and Ben had taken the kids to New York, and
Jonathan got them orchestra seats and took them backstage afterward to
meet the stars.  It was the most glamorous night in the kids' lives,
and perhaps in Katy and Ben's too.

Jonathan had since gone on to produce a number of shows on his
own--some had been successes, others not--but he was always looking for
money.  Also in his favor, given what Ben intended to propose, was that
Jonathan, as charming and generous as he was, was not above bending the
rules when it suited him.

"Hey, my man!"  Jonathan's voice blasted through the phone; Ben had to
hold the receiver a little away from his ear.

"Hey yourself, Jonathan, how you doin'?"

"Great, man!  So how's Texas?  Those big gushers still coming in down
there?"  As far as Jonathan was concerned, Texas might as well have
been in the Gobi Desert.  "Your family okay?"

"Yeah, we're doing fine.  So how are things up in the Apple?"

"Oh, you don't want to know.  My love life's as big a mess as ever, but
I'll get through it.  The good news is, I'm trying to raise money for
our pal David's play and I think we've just lined up John Tillinger to
direct."

"Listen, Jonathan, there's a reason I called.  There's a guy I know
down here.  He's got a lot of money"

"Sounds like a guy I'd like to meet."  There was a series of bangs and
rustlings on the other end of the line.  "Hey, sweetheart, you're going
out, could you get me a Danish and some coffee?  ... You're a doll....
So what about this friend of yours?"

"I think he might be interested in investing."

"So give me his name."

"There's just one catch.  I don't know if it would be a problem or not.
I think it's in cash."

Jonathan brayed with laughter.  "That's too wonderful!  So, what--he
wants me to launder his drug money for him?"

"Jonathan, it's not what you think."

"So where did you meet this guy?"

"Some party.  He seems like a perfectly respectable guy.  He's got a
couple of kids, a nice wife, a big house in the hills."

"So what is he, one of those Sand Like guys?"

"I don't know, Jonathan, I don't know."

"Of course you don't know, you big lug, but I know.  If I were you, I
would not be hanging around this guy."

"I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have called."

"Hey, what are you talking about?  I've been missing you guys.  When
are you coming up to the city?  I want to see those kids of yours!"

Sweeney had become a model of decorum-a bit more serious than before, a
bit quieter, but quick to take on the role of Ben's defender in any
classroom debate.  On their walks back to Parlin after class, Sweeney
gradually began to open up about himself.  He'd grown up just outside
Houston and his father had been a charmer, a drinker, a fast talker
who'd made a lot of money and then lost it all a half dozen times. He'd
been in the lawn-maintenance business, run a topless bar and an
air-conditioning company.  "If you can go broke in the air-conditioning
business in Houston," Sweeney said, "what hope can there be?"  One week
he would beat Sweeney with a razor strap after catching him trying to
make plum wine in his closet, and the next week he would pull Sweeney
out of school so they could go fly-fishing in New Mexico.  His father
left the family for good when Sweeney was seventeen, and two years
later was shot to death outside a casino in Atlantic City.

The more they talked, the clearer it got to Ben that even though
Sweeney was twenty-eight, he was still very much a student.  Behind all
the strut and flash was an essential naivete; Sweeney still believed
there were answers to the big questions.

One morning they stood in front of the statue of a Civil War general,
talking about life in the 1840's as students poured out of the double
doors of Parlin.  "So, do you think things were better then?"  Sweeney
asked.

"It's a complicated question," Ben said.

"I know it's complicated, but what do you think?"

"I think it was better.  I think there was more hope then.  I think
there was a real enthusiasm about democracy.  You understand, when I
say this, I'm aware that slavery still existed, that the Indians were
being decimated."

"Yeah, yeah, I know ..."  The sea of students parted around them.  In
the Calhoun walkway the department's senior medievalist was sneaking a
quick smoke between classes.

"But on the other hand there was this magnificent and unexplored
country out there.  If things weren't working out in one place, you
could always pick up and go."  A Frisbee hovered above the green lawn.
"Maybe it was just that the country was younger then."

"What do you mean?"

"You know how it is when you're young.  You feel like you can take on
anything, you're so full of juice.  But later on, things get more
complicated.  You realize you don't have as many choices as you thought
you had."

Their eyes met for a second and then Sweeney looked away.  A Buildings
and Grounds truck eased its way down the sidewalk with a crew of men
with rakes in the back.

"But you do," Sweeney said.  "Still have choices.  Only I guess
sometimes you don't realize it."

Sometimes, when Katy finally came to bed, she would tell Ben stories
about what her day was like: reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in a
noisy gym, the kids fussing in the hallway over who was going to be
line leader (katy had learned early that teachers were judged on how
orderly their lines were).  Half the battle was crowd management; most
of the day seemed to be spent telling kids to keep their hands to
themselves.  The kids Katy was seeing had so much other than school to
deal with: a drug-addicted mother, a father in prison, eviction
notices, welfare checks that didn't arrive.  The joke was that all the
children were on Ritalin and all the teachers on Prozac.

Ben had not foreseen the effects of prolonged deceit.  Keeping the
money secret was a little like keeping a mistress: the deceptions
compounded in unexpected ways.  Every day that passed only made the
possibility of honesty more remote.

The way things were now, he couldn't help but become increasingly angry
at Katy, as unfair as that was.  She'd become an obstacle, an
adversary.  He'd become even more convinced that if he did tell her,
she would make him turn the money in.  Even if she did go along, she
would waffle, there would be qualms, her insecurities would make it
impossible.  Or she'd say something to her sister.  Didn't she tell
everything to her sister?  No, this was a one-person operation.

One afternoon, Ben came upon a gathering of men in suits in a state of
high hilarity in front of the departmental office.  Several of them he
knew--the chairman and a couple of the deans whose faces Ben recognized
from their pictures in The Daily Texan--and one he didn't--a handsome,
smallish man in his mid-sixties whose stories were keeping the others
in stitches.  The older man had a spark and an ease, with an open
collar and the ruddy, wind burned complexion of someone who spent a lot
of time out of doors.

The chairman waved Ben over and introduced him, but Ben didn't quite
catch the older man's name.  Late in the afternoon, Ben asked one of
the secretaries what was going on.  She said there had been a big lunch
with a potential donor, someone who was actually considering giving the
department a new building.

Why was Ben the last man on earth to understand?  Money talked, and it
was talking to him night and day.  The possibilities were dazzling,
almost infinite.  All he needed was to keep his head on his shoulders.
All his life, he saw now, he'd been living in a fog of bookish
idealism.  He'd never come to terms with the real world.  He'd never
done the most basic thing a man was supposed to do (a phrase he could
have never dared use around his own department): he hadn't provided for
his family--not well enough.  This was not, when he really thought
about it, the first time he'd ever lied to Katy.  The first lie had
been telling her all those years that everything was going to be okay,
when he didn't have a clue.

Yet he needed her more than ever.  For the past week he hadn't been
able to go to sleep unless he was touching her hand or shoulder.  He
kept telling her that he loved her, too many times, like some anxious
nineteen-year-old.  He had always been the easygoing one with the kids,
the one they would turn to after Katy laid down the law, but now he was
increasingly short-tempered.

How could he keep such a thing secret?  There were too many ways to be
tripped up.  One Saturday morning he walked into the kitchen to find
Katy in front of the washing machine, emptying out the pockets of a
pair of his trousers.

"Here," she said.  "You may want these."

Without examining what she had, she poured it all in his hands: a pen,
a half dozen quarters, and the crumpled-up receipt for North Austin
Self-Storage.

The last weekend in March, Patrick O'Bannon, a robust Australian poet,
came to give a reading.  Ben was one of several faculty members who
went to dinner with him after his Dylan Thomas-like performance and, to
Ben's dismay, the one who was somehow roped into showing O'Bannon
Austin's nightlife.  O'Bannon was a blues fanatic and when someone
mentioned at dinner that the fabled Mississippi blues man Son Jones was
playing at Cinders, O'Bannon's big blue eyes went wide with yearning.

Cinders had been around for a decade, succeeding in spite of its
dubious location, sandwiched between abandoned warehouses and the Union
Pacific tracks.  In the past two or three years a couple of smaller
clubs and a dismal all-night coffee shop had taken root around it, but
it had lost little of its back-alley appeal.

It was a Friday night, and Ben and O'Bannon had to park more than a
block away, along a potholed street that ran along the tracks.  The
club was raucous and smoky, but Ben spotted three guys from the history
department he knew.  All three were going through divorces and huddled
around a tiny table with a visiting English economist, a lovely,
long-necked woman with Pre-Raphaelite looks and a capacity for beer. It
took O'Bannon no more than ten minutes to become fast friends with all
of them.

Ben stayed for one set.  Son Jones had an implacable manner, a raspy
voice, and lyrics as down and dirty as any middle-aged suburban white
man could want.  The audience went wild.  O'Bannon stood and whistled
and cheered as if he were at a rugby match, and put his hand on the
shoulder of the English economist, whispering something in her ear that
made her laugh.

Ben saw that he was no longer needed.  When he told O'Bannon at
midnight that he was taking off, it was not a problem; the Australian
poet was happy to find his own way home.

Stepping out into the cool night air, Ben realized how weary he was.
He'd been up since six.  People were still arriving; a black couple
hurried between cars, the man fussing at his wife for making them late.
She was fifty, a little heavy, in a black dress that shimmered like
fish scales, and she wobbled a bit trying to cross the gravel in high
heels.

Ben made his way along the pitted street.  The moon above the Austin
power plant was full, gleaming along the railroad tracks.  His jacket
smelled of smoke; he knew that Katy would make him take it to the
cleaners when he got home.

The gutting sound of a motorcycle made him look up.  A broad-shouldered
kid with no helmet wheeled his Harley over the curb at one of the other
clubs.  Outside the low concrete building, arguing with a group of
musicians, stood Sweeney.  Above the door the neon sign read THE

RAIL YARD

Ben stared.  If this was the club that Sweeney had been talking about
opening with his friends, they were in serious trouble.  There were
only a half dozen cars parked out front and one of them belonged to the
disgruntled drummer loading his traps into the backseat.  The
cinder-block building was painted purple and the biggest yucca plant
Ben had ever seen obscured one of the barred windows.  The pale,
spiky-haired musicians seemed melancholy, but Sweeney was filled with
Rotarian vigor; it was impossible to tell if Sweeney was trying to talk
them into or out of something.

It took Sweeney nearly a minute before he realized he was being
watched.  He turned and squinted at Ben, taking a few seconds more.  He
cupped his hands to his eyes, just to be sure.

"Professor?"

"Hey.  How you doin'?"

Ben could hear the steely sound of Son Jones's guitar coming from
Cinders, starting up the second set.  Sweeney slipped something into
the shirt pocket of one of the musicians, excused himself, and
sauntered over.

"I was wondering if you were ever going to show up!"  Sweeney clapped
him on the shoulder, his breath sweet with alcohol.

"Actually, I was just around the corner."

"You mean over at Cinders?  That Son Jones is fucking great, isn't he?"
Sweeney was in too good a mood to be offended.  Ben reached into his
pocket for his car keys.  "Listen, why don't you come in, let me show
you around?"

"Maybe some other time."

"It would only take a minute.  Come on.  What are you going to do, go
home and correct papers?  It's Friday night!"  He took Ben by the
elbow.

The inside of the club was a revelation.  The walls were covered with
the work of local artists, most of it bright and whimsical,
southwestern funk.  Lamps had been made of Mexican whorehouse dolls,
and each glass-covered table had its own rock-and-roll collage.  A lot
of care had gone into the place, though only two or three couples sat
at tables and the bar was deserted.

Ben stared at a hubcap-and-chicken-wire construction that loomed over
the jukebox.  "It's great," he said.

"Isn't it?  My girlfriend, Rebecca, the one who came to class?  She
talked all her artist friends into donating stuff."  Sweeney leaned
across the counter and shouted to the bartender drying glasses at the
far end of the bar.  "Toby, I want you to meet somebody!"

The bartender, tall, mild, and movie-star handsome, set a glass on the
overhead rack and came over to say hello.

"This is my English professor," Sweeney said.  "The guy who changed my
life.  This is Toby."  The bartender reached across and shook Ben's
hand.  "Why don't you give us a couple of those Shiner Bachs?"  Elbows
up on the bar, Sweeney turned to Ben.  "You hungry?  We got some great
Mexican food ..."

"No, I'm fine," Ben said.

Toby got them their beers and they went to a table in the corner.  The
floor was slippery with sawdust and Maria Muldaur crooned softly on the
jukebox.  Sweeney crossed his boots in front of him and leaned back.

"Man, you keep surprising me!"  he said.

"How do you mean?"

"I don't know.  It's just that you've turned out to be a wilder guy
than I thought."

Ben took an unhappy swig of his beer.  He tried to tell himself that he
was under no obligation to stay, but it wasn't true.  There was an
obligation even if the terms hadn't been spelled out, an obligation
contracted the afternoon Sweeney had spotted him at the Coliseum.

"So it's going okay?"

"You mean this?  Oh, yeah, it's going fine.  We've got some great bands
lined up.  It's going to take a little time for word to get around, but
we knew that, going in.  It's a hell of a lot of fun.  And that's the
point, right?"

Sweeney dug a chip deep into a bowl of salsa and managed to spill half
of it before it got to his mouth.  Sweeney was probably drunk.

"I've been meaning to come in," Sweeney said.  "I've had this idea
kicking around in my head."

"You mean about graduate school?"

"No, not about graduate school."  Sweeney squashed some of the spilled
salsa as if it were a bug and then licked it off his thumb.  He hunched
forward.  "It's just a thought.  You know how things come to you
sometimes.  We've got a really good deal going here.  Really good."

"Yeah."

"Well, if you were looking for someplace to put some extra cash to work
for you, it might be good for both of us."

"I don't know what you're saying," Ben said.  A single microphone stood
gleaming on the bare black stage.

"I'm just saying it's a nice opportunity," Sweeney said.

"You're asking me to invest in your club?"  Ben said.  Sweeney picked
mournfully at the label of his beer bottle.  "But I'm your teacher."

"I know that."

"I think it would be better if it just stayed that way."

CHAPTER 6

Sweeney had made an offer.  The question was, what was it?  Unless Ben
had misread him, it had almost sounded as if Sweeney had offered to
launder money through his club, but how could Sweeney have known?
Either he was a mind reader or he'd gotten a peek at the ledger in
Ben's office after all.  It was all a little too perfect.  Maybe it had
only been a casual remark, a shot in the dark, maybe Sweeney had just
been a little drunk and was talking big, but it was unnerving.

The club was just the kind of cash-intensive business Ben was looking
for.  But could he trust Sweeney?  He had not forgotten the seven
hundred dollars Sweeney had laid on the table at the Green Mesquite
that afternoon.  No, he did not trust Sweeney.  Not enough.

On the tenth of April they got a letter from their landlords.  The
Bells, an academic couple who'd moved to Santa Barbara, had decided to
put their house on the market.  It was a gracious and apologetic
letter, thanking Ben and Katy for taking such good care of their home
for the past four years.  They wanted to give Ben and Katy enough time
to look for a new place--unless, of course, they wanted to buy the
house themselves.  They were listing the house at $260,000.

"Goddamn California liberals," Ben said.  He sat at the kitchen table,
staring at the handwritten letter.  It was ten in the evening and the
children were in bed.  "They're dreaming if they think they can get
two-sixty."

Katy opened the dishwasher, letting the steam escape before she pulled
out the rack.  "So, what are we going to do?"  she said.

The cat scratched at the back door.  Ben got up and dug a cupful of cat
food out of the blue bag.

"What are we going to tell them, Ben?"

He looked at her as if she were crazy; she was really hoping they might
buy the place.  "What is there to tell them?  It looks like we're
looking for a new house."

Two days later the real estate agent, a tall and high-strung West
Austin divorcee named Darcy Kennedy, came by to get a key.  She needed
to know when the best time would be for her to show the house.  She
would always call before she came, she said, and the Bells had agreed
to lower the rent by a hundred a month to make up for any
inconvenience, as long as they agreed to keep the house presentable for
prospective buyers.  When she left, she drove a metal FOR SALE sign
into the front lawn.

Abby was up in arms.  She didn't see how anyone had the right to look
in her room when she wasn't there.  She was ready to leave Austin, go
back and live in Mississippi with her cousins.  Matt, the quieter of
the two, just listened, but that evening, when Ben went into his room
to say good night, he asked Ben what school he would be going to in the
fall.

On Saturday, Darcy Kennedy called again.  She had a couple with her
from Palo Alto who were just in Austin for the weekend and she wondered
if it would be all right to bring them by.  Katy sprang into action;
she couldn't help herself.  She rousted Matt from the couch in the
living room where he'd been watching cartoons in his pajamas, put away
the breakfast dishes, and asked Ben if he would clear off his desk.

"Hey, it's not as if the queen of England was coming to visit," Ben
said.

"Maybe not," Katy said, "but we don't want the place to look like a
pigsty."

At a bit past ten in the morning Darcy Kennedy's Town Car pulled up in
front of the house.  The couple's name was Reeves and they were in
their early thirties.  He was a computer executive with a firm
handshake and a no-nonsense manner, and his wife, in her red blazer,
looked like a runner.

Katy offered them coffee.  They all said no, they were fine.  Scanning
the kitchen, Mrs.  Reeves did not look happy.  She kept glancing at the
pencil markings on the door frame where Ben and Katy had recorded the
children's heights throughout the years.  Mrs.  Reeves looked like the
kind of woman who would have everything stripped down to the original
wood within a week.

"So, is there much crime in the neighborhood?"  Mrs.  Reeves asked.

"No, not really," Ben said.  "Just a few drifters."

When Darcy Kennedy took the couple upstairs, Ben went to the study and
tried to pay some bills, but he was too angry to concentrate.  He could
hear toilets flushing overhead, closets opening and closing.  When he
looked out the window and saw the neighbor's Doberman crapping in the
front yard, he was overcome with fondness for the animal; he just hoped
Mrs.  Reeves saw him too.

The door opened softly behind him.  Ben turned to face Katy.  "So what
do you think?"  she said.

"They're not going to buy this house," Ben said.  "Not in a million
years."

Two days later Darcy Kennedy called to say that the house had been
sold.

When Ellen Pyle, in a spirited classroom discussion about the nature of
friendship in the early nineteenth century, said that she thought
Emerson and Thoreau were gay, Sweeney hit the roof.

"Just hold your horses for a minute here, sister," Sweeney said. "Where
do you get that?"

"I'm not saying it's a bad thing," Ellen said.  She sat a couple of
rows in front of him and had to twist around to face him.  "But come
on.  Emerson has Thoreau come live in his house for two years, they go
for long walks every day, Emerson gives him the land to build his cabin
on, Thoreau gets this big crush on Emerson's wife ..."

"Oh my God," Sweeney groaned.

Ben stood at the front of the room, arms folded, keeping mum.  Ellen
and Sweeney had been going at it for most of the semester and it had
not been a bad thing for class discussion.

The offer Sweeney had made that night at the club had not come up
again.  If anything, Sweeney had seemed a bit abashed ever since, as if
he knew he'd overstepped.  Perhaps to make up for it, his midterm had
been the best in class.

"So are you saying they were actually doing it?"  Sweeney said.  That
drew a couple of snickers from Sweeney's sophomore admirers.

Irritated now, Ellen pushed up the sleeves of her London School of
Economics T-shirt.  "I don't know what they were doing.  It was a very
repressed time."

"Oh, I see.  They weren't psychologically aware enough.  I mean, Jesus
God.  Maybe we're the ones who are too uptight.  Aren't we the ones who
need to turn everything into some sniggery sitcom joke?  Did it ever
occur to you that for some people friendship might actually be more
important than sex?  Having someone you can tell your deepest secrets
to, knowing they'll cover your back?"

"Mr.  Sweeney, I believe you've made your point," Ben said.  In the
back row a girl was surreptitiously trying to apply her lip gloss.
"Anyone else?"

Their lease ran until July 1, and Katy started looking immediately. She
had a friend who handled rentals all over the city and who began taking
Katy to see places in the evenings.  The prices people were asking were
a revelation.  For years Ben and Katy had groused about paying the
Bells twelve hundred a month for a three-bedroom house in a non
neighborhood but now it looked as if that was a steal.  Renting
anything comparable was going to cost them eighteen hundred to two
thousand a month unless they were willing to rent a place within
spitting distance of the highway.

Some nights Katy cried.  She saw their lives spiraling downward; even
if she did teach in the fall, how could they afford that kind of money?
She didn't see a solution.  Ben kept telling her everything was going
to work out, they shouldn't rush into things, but his reassurances only
made her angry.  How do you know that?  she would say.  How do you know
it's going to work out?

How could he tell her?  He had enough money to buy the governor's
mansion three times over.

Getting off the bus, Ben hustled across the street, but even at a
distance he could see the CLOSED sign in the window of the cleaners. He
cursed softly under his breath, the pink receipt in his hand.  It was
the second time in a week he'd promised Katy he'd pick up the laundry
and the second time he'd failed.

He thought he saw a light burning in the back.  Maybe he was in luck.
He went to the door and knocked loudly, then cupped his hand to his
eyes and peered in, straining to see past the racks of clothes wrapped
in ghostly plastic.

"Hey, mister, you have a dollar you could spare?"

Ben turned.  A homeless old woman, dressed as fantastically as a
creature out of Dr.  Seuss, huddled against the low wall at the corner
of the building, her wire shopping cart at her side, jammed with all
her worldly possessions.  She could have been anywhere from forty to
sixty, with tiny, hard eyes and dirt-streaked cheeks.  She wore
scuffed, mismatched men's shoes with sagging candy-cane-striped socks
and various layers of tattered shirts and blouses.

Ben knew the reigning progressive opinion was that it did no good to
give money to panhandlers, that nine chances out of ten it was going to
go for alcohol or drugs, but Ben wasn't a big one for just turning his
back on people.

"Sure," he said finally.  Scratching her face, she scrutinized him as
he took out his wallet.  Her teeth were as variously colored as kernels
of Indian corn.  A UPS truck rumbled past on Congress Avenue; it was
just a little past six.  He handed her a dollar bill.  "Here you go."

She took the bill, folding it once and then twice.  "Thief!"  she
hissed at him.

He stared at her, dumbfounded.  "What?"

"You're the one, aren't you?  The one who took it."

For a second he thought he was going to faint, everything tipping as if
he were in a steeply banking plane.  She had to be talking about
something else.  How could she possibly know?  She was just a mad old
woman.  As she pulled up her knees to tuck the dollar bill in one of
her many pockets, Ben could see the skin on her shins, slick as a
frog's and pocked by open sores.

"So where are you hiding it?"  Her voice rose to a raspy screech.  A
half dozen grackles winged their way toward the river.  Across the
street the windows of the abandoned feed store flashed like semaphores
in the setting sun.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, yes you do."  Her face was red and inflamed as a boil, a soiled
scarf knotted around her neck.  She put a hand on the low wall behind
her and struggled to her feet.  "What are you looking at me for?  Don't
you look at me!"  She bumped the cart over the low curb, nearly
upending it, then rattled it across the parking lot.  "You people think
you can get away with murder, don't you?  Well, you're wrong!  You're
wrong!" She fled down the sidewalk, the cart, with its one squeaking
wheel, careening before her like a runaway carriage.

Katy was dismayed to discover that he hadn't made it to the dry
cleaners in time.  She turned off the faucet and dried her hands on a
kitchen towel, the freshly washed lettuce sitting in a colander on the
counter.

"Oh my God, Ben," she said.

"I know, I'm sorry.  I'll walk over first thing in the morning, okay?
I'm sorry!"

The unexpected emotion of his response caught her off guard.  She gave
him a quick look.  Cokie Roberts was interviewing David Sedaris on the
radio, and a pot of water for pasta boiled softly on the stove.

"Are you all right?"  she said.  "You look ill."

"I'm fine."

"Did something happen?"

"No."  He fingered a piece of sliced onion on the counter, avoiding her
gaze.

"Why don't you go lie down?"  she said.  "Supper will be ready in a few
minutes."

He went upstairs and lay down on the bed.  His head was swarming.  Was
it possible?  That someone had seen him take it?  It all came welling
back, that night in January, the rattling of the chain at the door, the
drunken voices outside.  He remembered the terror he'd felt, the
constriction in his throat, and he remembered the elation he'd felt
later, when he thought he'd lucked out, squeezed through
undetected--but maybe he hadn't squeezed through, maybe there had been
someone peering through one of the grimy windows as he stood over the
trapdoor holding the last of the coolers, or maybe they'd been bedded
down under the trees outside, watching as he drove away.

But it didn't make any sense.  If she or anyone else knew the money was
there, why wouldn't they have taken it themselves?  No, the woman was
crazy.  Crazy people are always accusing people of things, their lives
riddled by infinite, addled grievances.  This was just the thanks he
got for giving her a dollar.

But she had called him a thief.  What else could she have meant?  His
mistake was letting her walk away.  He should have pressed her for
more, but he'd been too stunned to do anything.

After dinner he got into the car and drove slowly through the
neighborhood.  Several people were out with their dogs, a father pushed
his child in a blue stroller, and an older man worked on his rock wall.
On Congress Avenue he saw a couple of bearded drifters with dirty
bedrolls headed toward the bridge, but there was not a trace of the old
woman.

Katy had found a place in Tarrytown she wanted Ben to look at.  For the
first time in months she was excited.  It was a nice neighborhood, she
said, and a good school district.  Abby could go to Austin High, where
she already had several friends.  The landlord was asking fourteen
hundred, but he'd said over the phone that the price was negotiable.

They drove over on a Saturday afternoon.  Ben was not really himself.
Every night for a solid week he'd been going out at night, looking for
the old woman with the shopping cart, cruising the Have-Every-But
parking lots and the neighborhood Dumpsters, checking out Stacey Park
and the woods below the School for the Deaf, and he'd come up with
nothing.  He hadn't been able to sleep, unable to get her out of his
mind.  He'd gone over it a million times, from a million angles.  If
she'd seen something (and he was not at all sure that she had), how
would that change things?  Four months had already passed.  She hadn't
gone to the police and he doubted that she would.  If she did, who
would believe her?

Maybe she was a pal of the two drunks.  He remembered one of them
saying, "Where'd everybody else go?"  Maybe she was the everybody else.
Maybe she'd come dragging along later, stood in the shadow of the
gnarled live oak and watched him load the last cooler into the van. But
even if she had, what was he supposed to do, bring the money back? No,
not because of some senile old loon.  Yet for all of his attempts to
banish her from his consciousness, she stayed with him night and day.

The West Austin neighborhood was lovely, with big oaks and
green-shuttered brick houses that could have been lifted straight out
of New England.  Everything seemed greener and more shaded than in
South Austin; it felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped ten
degrees. There has to be a catch, Ben thought, and then he saw what the
catch was.

The house looked like a rotting barge: low, ranch-style, and in need of
a paint job.  As they drove up, the landlord was hauling a huge limb
out of a patchy front yard that hadn't been cut for months.  The
landlord's name was Stanley Heller, a man with thinning hair and the
nerves of a rabbit.

He led them on a hurried tour of the house.  There was no furniture
except for a set of bedsprings sagging against the wall in the back
bedroom.  Several of the light switches were broken and the small,
fenced-in backyard was littered with dog turds.  The previous tenant
had apparently left in a hurry.  Heller's wife wanted fourteen hundred,
but he was willing to give it to them for twelve as long as he didn't
have to paint.  He smiled at Katy; it was clear that she had charmed
him.

Ben could feel Katy waiting for him to say yes.  "We'll let you know,"
Ben said.  "Would it be all right if we call you tomorrow sometime?"

"That would be fine," Heller said.

After the landlord drove off, Katy and Ben sat in the car, talking.  "I
could fix this place up," she said.  "I could make it nice."

"It just seems so dark to me," he said.  "There's no light."

A woman pushed a double stroller down the street with two Prince Edward
terriers on leashes at her side.  "We're not going to find any place
better," she said.

"You don't know that."

"But I do know.  You haven't been looking at the places I've been
looking at."

He stared at the patchy lawn littered with sticks.  This was what their
life would be without that money.  He looked back at her quickly.  She
began to cry.

A ponytailed workman, his nose and mouth covered by a rippled white
mask, was leaning over a set of sawhorses, spray-painting a screen door
purple.  He was so absorbed in his task that he didn't hear Ben drive
into the gravel parking lot; he looked up only after Ben got out and
slammed the van door.

"Is Sweeney here?"  Ben said.

The ponytailed worker lifted his mask and moved it up onto his
forehead, where it sat like a white horn.  "I think he's inside."

When Ben entered the club, Sweeney was sitting alone at a corner table,
his back turned.  The only other person in the place was a waitress
filling salt shakers at the bar and watching the Jenny Jones show (two
black teenagers screamed and jabbed their fingers at each other while
the audience roared).  The waitress got up, reaching for a menu.

"That's all right," Ben said.  "I'm just here to see my friend."

Sweeney lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder.  "Hey."

"Hey.  You got a minute?"

"I've got all the time in the world."

It was a sight to warm a teacher's heart: a dog-eared copy of Walden, a
library edition of Young Man Thoreau, and an array of three-by-five
cards fanned out across the table.  Sweeney had been studying, an empty
beer bottle at his left elbow.

Ben pulled up a chair.  Sweeney cleared away the three-by-five cards.
He looked concerned.  "Everything okay?"

"Oh, yeah," Ben said.  The waitress had disappeared into the kitchen.
"When I was here a few weeks ago you made me a proposal."

Sweeney stared blankly.  "Yeah."

"I wonder if you could just go over with me what that proposal was."

Sweeney, thoughtful now, rubbed at a spot behind his right ear.  "I
think all I said was that if you had some money to invest I could help
you out."

"The way I remember it, you said cash."

Sweeney frowned.  "Maybe so.  I don't remember."

"What I need to know is whether or not the offer is still open."

Sweeney let out a small puff of surprise.  "I don't know.  I'd have to
talk to my partners."  A rumbling, indistinct at first, drew closer and
then was pierced by the familiar whistle of a train.  It sounded as if
it were coming right at them.

"I'd rather you didn't," Ben said.  He had to raise his voice to make
himself heard.  "I'd rather you didn't talk to anyone."

"You're not trying to set me up, are you?"

"No."

Sweeney rested his thumbnail against his teeth, considering.  The roar
obliterated everything.  Ben glanced at the window; he could see the
freight cars flashing by, the alternating slats of dark and light.  We
do not ride on the railroad, Thoreau had said; it rides upon us.

Sweeney said something but Ben couldn't make out what it was.  "I'm
sorry?"  Ben said.

Sweeney repeated what he'd said, and this time Ben was able to read his
lips: "I'll have to think about it."

The semester was almost over.  On Wednesday, Ben had everyone do their
teaching evaluations and spent the remainder of the hour answering
questions about the upcoming exam.  Sweeney caught up with him in the
hallway after class.

"I wondered if you'd have time to have lunch tomorrow," Sweeney said.
Ben glanced quickly at Ellen Pyle, who was waiting in the doorway to
have a word with him.

"I suppose we could do that."

"Why don't I pick you up?"  Sweeney hefted his backpack onto his
shoulder.  "Say, in front of Littlefield Fountain about twelve?"

On Thursday, Ben was at the fountain at the stroke of noon.  Several
scantily clad coeds sunned on the wall above the splashing water, and
long lines had already formed at the Korean egg-roll stand.

Ben waited for nearly fifteen minutes, scanning every car that came by,
half hoping that Sweeney wouldn't show up.  He felt a little as if he
were jumping off a pier in the dark, but what else could he do?  He'd
exhausted every other possibility and he couldn't put it off any
longer.

Ben had been over what he was about to do a million times.  At least
with Sweeney there was a certain rapport, a reservoir of respect, and
he'd already proven that he was capable of loyalty --he hadn't blabbed
to the other students about the gun business.  Ben felt more than a
little guilty about taking advantage of that.  Strictly speaking, he
was contributing to the corruption of a student, though it seemed
highly likely that Sweeney had already been corrupted.

As the bells tolled for a quarter after, a dusty red Bronco took a
squealing U-turn in front of the church, scattering pedestrians, and
pulled up to the curb.  Sweeney leaned across to roll down the
window.

"Sorry I'm late."

They drove to a fish place on Airport that Sweeney claimed had great
po'boys.  A giant plastic shark loomed above the glass counter and a
sallow Cajun took their order.  Drinks, the old man explained, they'd
have to get for themselves from the machine in the corner.  Sweeney,
loaded with quarters, got a Big Red for himself and a Coke for Ben.

The only other customers were two truck drivers waiting for takeout,
and Ben and Sweeney had their pick of a dozen empty tables.  At first
Sweeney seemed nervous and distracted.  His major preoccupation seemed
to be the plight of the Rockets in the play-offs.  He was a big
Olajawon fan, but Sweeney was concerned that they seemed to have
surrounded him once again with a team of CBA castoffs.  As Sweeney
talked on and on, Ben realized that the man was just trying to size him
up, trying to get comfortable.

"So what changed your mind?"  Sweeney said finally.

"About what?"

"About investing your money."

"Does it matter?"

"It might."  Sweeney took a swig of his Big Red.  He nodded toward the
counter.  "I think our order is ready."

The po'boys were all that Sweeney had promised and they were nearly
buried under mountains of fries.  Sweeney methodically doused
everything in ketchup.  Ben could only watch, too tense to eat. Sweeney
took a big crunching bite, then wiped a little mayonnaise from the
corner of his mouth with a napkin.

"It feels sort of weird, doesn't it?"  Sweeney said.

"What do you mean?"  Ben said.

"Our doing this.  I know, I was the one who brought it up.  I just want
to be sure you know what you're getting into."

"I think I do."

Sweeney stopped chewing for a moment.  "Listen, I don't want to get you
into trouble and I don't want to get myself into trouble, either.  And
where this money is coming from I don't care, as long as you're not
selling kiddie porn.  But if we do this, it's just between us.  I don't
want anybody hearing about it."

"I understand."

"So, how much do you want to invest?"

Ben didn't know; he pulled a number out of the air.  "What if we
started with six hundred a week."

"Cash."

"Cash," Ben said.  Sweeney gave a low, soft whistle; Ben didn't know if
that meant the figure was low or if it was high.  "So what would you
say my return on that might be?"

"Five hundred sound about right?"

"That would be fine.  And you would give me a check."

"Yeah, I'd give you a check.  We could list you as one of the partners,
or as a vendor, whatever you say."  The white-aproned Cajun knelt
behind the display case and began to arrange slabs of redfish on banks
of crushed ice.

"And no one will get into trouble," Ben said.

"That's the way it's supposed to work."  Sweeney put a fist to his
chest as if he had gas.  He looked sorrowful and young, all of a
sudden.

"What's wrong?"  Ben said.

"I don't know.  I just loved your class so much."

"And does this have to change that?"

"Not really.  I guess there's just more to life than what you read in
books."

CHAPTER 7

He was only partway there.  The task now was to come up with a story
for Katy.  He was going to be getting a check for five hundred dollars
once a week and he needed a way to explain that.

He had an aunt who'd died a couple of years before, leaving behind an
eight-hundred-acre farm in North Dakota, and the estate had yet to be
settled.  That seemed like a credible enough explanation for a
windfall, but Ben could just see Katy getting on the phone with his
sisters or one of his eight cousins in North Dakota and blowing that
one out of the water in about ten seconds.  The same was true of any
story he concocted about a grant or a book contract dropping out of the
blue; it would be too easy to check out; his colleagues would get wind
of it; there were too many ways to be tripped up.

He kept coming back to one possibility.  In the mid-eighties Ben had
worked on a series for public television on American writers and the
West.  He had written several of the scripts, one on the
paleontologists Cope and Marsh and their adventures in Wyoming, another
on Walter Van Tilberg Clark.  Two years later he received a check for
$6,200 for the sale of foreign rights, and three years after that, a
second check arrived for $2,700.  Those two checks were the closest
thing to a bonanza Ben had ever experienced.  It wasn't altogether out
of the realm of possibility that he might receive a third check.  All
he had to do was get Katy to believe it.

On Friday, he and Katy went to see Doctor Zhivago at the Paramount.  It
had been thirty years since Ben had seen it and he had forgotten how
astonishingly beautiful it was.  It was a movie that could make you
fall in love with the cold again--Omar Sharif and Julie Christie's
tryst in an icicled ruin, a candle glowing inside a frosted pane,
horses pounding through the blowing snow.  Ben found himself moved more
than he expected by the story of the respectable doctor torn between
two women, destroyed by his secret life.

Walking out of the theater into the moist Texas night was like walking
into a sauna; summer was so close.  They went up the street to a small
coffee shop for a cappuccino.  It was an Austin version of Little
Italy, a jazz-and-cheesecake type of place; the light fixtures were so
arty they could have been mistaken for aboriginal artifacts, baskets
from the upper Sepik.

Ben blew across his cup and wiped off some of the excess foam with his
finger.  "I have some wonderful news," he said.

"What's that?"  Katy said.  A couple in bicycle helmets and black
spandex pants leaned across the marble-topped counter, laughing,
forehead to forehead.

"You remember the old PBS series I worked for?"

She brightened instantly.  "You got another check?"

"Yeah."  He stared down at the stone table.  He had still not gotten
used to lying to her.

"That's funny," Katy said.  "I didn't see it in the mail."

Ben glanced quickly at her.  "It came to the department.  They must not
have had the right address.  It's been bouncing around for a while."

"That's great.  How much was it?"

"It's a nice amount of money."  A Spanish guitar thrummed mournfully
through the sound system.  "But I've been thinking about this.  It
seems like every time we get a little boost we buy a couple of things
and then we're right back where we started."  She snapped off a bit of
biscotti and set it on her tongue; he could see that she thought he was
somehow blaming her.  "I'd like to do something else this time."

"Like what?"

"I'd like to invest this," he said.  She brushed a strand of auburn
hair from her eyes.  "There's some people from school, they've started
a new club."

"A club?  What do you mean, a club?"

"A music club."

She was incredulous.  "You're joking."

"I'm not joking.  This place is going to be very successful."

"We don't have enough money to rent a decent house, and we're putting
money into a nightclub?"

"Katy, it's not what it sounds like--"

"Isn't it?"

"Just once in my life I'd like to see if we could get ahead...."  He
wasn't aware of raising his voice, but one of the bicyclists looked
back at them.

"You've been to this place?"

"A couple of times, yes."

"And where is it?"

"It's just behind Cinders, the old blues club."  His stomach churned
with self-contempt and late-night caffeine.

"Do I have a vote in this?"

"It's going to be fine, I promise you.  I've already set it up so we'll
be getting weekly checks; we'll be the first ones to be paid off. Trust
me, Katy, there is no way we can lose."  He knew he sounded like a
fool, but there was no other choice.  He had to just bull his way
through.

"You mean you've already agreed?"

"Yes," he said.

She was stunned.  "So how much was it?"

"I told you--"

"I want to know exactly."

"A little over five thousand dollars."

"Jesus, Ben."  He reached out for her hand, but she pulled away.  She
picked up a packet of NutraSweet as if she was about to open it and
then just tossed it at the napkin holder.  "I think it's time for us to
go home."

The young woman sitting in his office was an appallingly bad liar.
She'd missed nineteen out of thirty classes; she knew she was in
trouble and was willing to try anything.  She'd had to go to LA because
her company had received a music award, she said, and while she was out
there, her rental car had exploded on the Santa Monica Freeway and
then, when she got back to Austin, her ex-boyfriend had been hit by a
baseball bat in a brawl and had been in a coma for two weeks.

"So I just wanted to know if I could do an extra paper or something to
make up for the classes I've missed," she said.  She was attractive in
a B-movie kind of way--huge eyes, full lips, skintight jeans, lots of
red hair, and vivid makeup--and she was used to getting by on that.

"It's too late," Ben said softly.  He had a hard time being firm and
the word had gotten around, only making things harder still.  "The
semester's over."

"You mean even if I do really well on the exam ...?"

"I'm sorry.  The syllabus says six absences is grounds for failing the
course."  Ben swiveled in his chair.  In the drawer of his desk was an
envelope with twelve fifties in it.  Sweeney was supposed to have been
at his office at two; it was now nearly three and there was no sign of
him.  "I've cut people breaks before, but this isn't even close."

She began to cry.  Ben looked away.  He hated this office, the
pea-green walls, the stacks of yellowing papers.  He was supposed to go
through another twenty years of this?  She got out a tissue and wiped
at her eyes; her mascara had started to run.  There was a sharp knock
at the door.

Ben got up and opened it.  Sweeney stood there looking like Jimmy
Buffett, in a Hawaiian shirt and a new tan.

"Sorry I'm late," Sweeney said.  It took him a beat before he realized
Ben had someone with him.  "Oh, I'm sorry ..."

"I was just leaving," the girl said.  She rose, unsteady on her high
heels, and gathered up her books.  "I'm going to go speak to the
undergraduate advisor," she said.

"That's your privilege," Ben said.  Sweeney gave her the once-over as
she swept by.  "Mr.  Sweeney."  Ben gestured him to a chair.  Sweeney
stepped inside as the door closed behind him.

"She didn't seem too happy."

"She wasn't.  You look like you got a little sun."

"I went out to the lake with my girlfriend this weekend.  You ever been
on one of those Jet Skis?  Man, you could kill yourself on one of those
things, I'm telling you.  So, when are they going to get you a window
in this place?"

"I'm not sure."

Sweeney sat with his boot across his knee, confident and relaxed.  Ben
could smell the coconut oil five feet away.  There was the slightest
hitch of hesitation, each waiting for the other to make the first move;
they both knew it was a moment.

"You got something for me?"  Sweeney said.

"I do," Ben said.

Ben opened his desk drawer and handed the envelope to Sweeney.  Sweeney
opened it, flicking quickly through the money without bothering to
count it.

"Great," Sweeney said.  He leaned to one side so he could pry his
wallet out of his back pocket.  He slid the stack of bills into the
wallet, tapping it all in place, and took out a check.  "This is for
you."

He handed the check to Ben.  It was made out for five hundred dollars,
signed by Sweeney, with the Railyard's address printed in the upper
left-hand corner.

"I've got something else for you too," Sweeney said.  He leaned over
and unzipped his backpack.  He pulled out a thick, cream-colored,
slightly bent envelope and offered it at arm's length.

"What's this?"

"Open it and see."

Ben took the envelope and worked his forefinger under the flap, tearing
it open.  It was an invitation to graduation.  The air conditioner
kicked in, shuddering in the wall.

"I was hoping my uncle could come up, but he's not feeling so well, so
I thought, why not invite my teacher?  I was hoping maybe I could take
you and your wife out to dinner.  You'd get to meet my girlfriend,
Rebecca.  It's taken me nearly a decade to get out of this place, I'd
kind of like to celebrate it."  Ben stared down at the Gothic type.
Sweeney was too smart not to notice his hesitation.  "Unless it would
make you uncomfortable."

"No, it wouldn't make me uncomfortable at all.  I'll just have to
ask."

The last thing Ben wanted was Sweeney anywhere near Katy.  Things were
tough enough at home the way it was.

The storm had not blown over.  The night they came home from Doctor
Zhivago they were up until two, arguing.  It was incomprehensible to
her that he would put five thousand dollars into a music club without
talking to her about it.  She did not understand.  What was this, some
kind of mid life crisis?

It wasn't as if he'd gone out and bought a Jaguar, he'd said.  This was
going to create a steady income for them.  There was going to be five
hundred a week coming in; they were finally going to be able to afford
the kind of house Katy had always wanted.

Ben had miscalculated how big a deal it was going to be.  Perhaps
because of what he wasn't telling her, five thousand seemed like
chicken feed to him; it didn't to her.  For a solid week, anger hung
over the house like the deep blue of an impending norther.  Whether
they talked about it or didn't talk about it, it was still there.  All
sorts of other things got dragged in, old wounds reopened.  Katy felt
betrayed and shaken; this was so unlike him, she felt as if she needed
to rethink everything.

The children did not miss what was going on.  One afternoon, driving
Abby to her softball practice, she asked Ben, "Are you and Mom going to
get a divorce?"

"Of course not, honey," he said.  "What makes you think that?"

"I don't know.  It just seems like you're mad at each other all the
time."

"That's not really true, Abby.  We disagree sometimes, but everybody
does that.... Hey, we love each other.  And we love you."  Abby,
unpersuaded, did not look at him, and pounded the pocket of her
baseball glove.

His one consolation was going by the bank to be sure Sweeney's check
had cleared.  The bank teller slid the feathery bank statement across
the counter to him.  The available balance was $1,183.  One week
before, it had been $683.  In a few days there would be five hundred
more, and five hundred more after that.  The cavalry was coming to
rescue them all.  Katy would see.  It was a matter of time, but she
would see.

The university was emptying out.  They were just halfway through the
exam period and the library was already tomblike.  It was possible to
find parking spaces again, and the lines at restaurants had vanished.
Everything was relaxed.  Coming out of the copy room one morning, Ben
ran into Dick Dennison wheeling his bike into his office.

"Hey, just the man I was looking for."  Dick grinned, unbuckling his
plastic helmet.  He had reason to be in a good mood.  Dick would be on
leave for the coming year, with a semester in France and a semester in
Boston.  "Listen, you got a minute?"

"Sure."

Ben followed him into his office.  The narrow room was jammed with
packing boxes; there must have been at least twenty of them, piled high
enough to block the lower half of the window.

"Jesus," Ben said.

"I know," Dick said.  "I've got everything I own in here.  I'm supposed
to fly to Paris on Wednesday and I've been working like a dog to get
ready."

He rested the bicycle carefully against the mountain of books.  Dick
was one of the creative-writing faculty and a lover of experimental
French fiction (his most recent enthusiasm was a novel written without
the use of the letter e).  Fit, in his mid-forties, and still single,
Dick was always off for somewhere in search of the telling
detail--Haiti, Africa, India-and there were times it was hard not to be
envious.

"I need to ask you a favor, man," Dick said.

"You name it."

"They're giving me all this grief upstairs about my office.  They've
got all these visiting faculty members coming in next fall and no place
to put them, but I'll be damned if I'm going to have some crazy
Irishman in here burning holes in my carpet, so I told Carol you were
going to be using my office."

"You told her what?"

"I told her we'd talked about it and it was all worked out--that you
needed a quiet place to get your book done.... I had to say
something."

Ben stared at him and then gave a low laugh.  "Dick, it's fine.  Don't
worry about it."

"I really appreciate this.  Here, I can give you the key right now." He
worked his key off his key ring and handed it to Ben.  "And feel free
to use it.  It's not exactly a bad idea.  You know how hard it is to
get anything done in your office, people knocking on the door every
five minutes.  Here, nobody'll even know you're around."

Ben scanned the bookshelves, the copies of The Paris Review and Gordon
Lish's Quarterly neatly lined up in rows and the Samuel Beckett poster
on the wall, considering the possibilities.

"If you want, you can even have the phone turned off," Dick said.
"You'll have your own little hideaway."

"Who knows?"  Ben said.

Dick gave him a soul handshake.  "My man.  I'll send you a postcard
from the Eiffel Tower."

When Sweeney came to Ben's office the following Wednesday something was
off.  He seemed distracted, even vaguely hostile.  Ben had never known
him not to want to talk, but he didn't want to talk today.  They made
the exchange, cash for check, and Sweeney was ready to go.

"You all right?"  Ben asked.

"I'm fine."

Ben gestured to the pile of blue books on his desk.  "I haven't read
your exam yet, but I'm looking forward to it."

"Whatever," Sweeney said.  His tan was peeling and he kept rubbing his
forehead.  Ben folded his check in two and put it in his shirt
pocket.

"Listen, I've been meaning to call you about your invitation, but these
friends of ours were supposed to be coming in for the weekend and we
just haven't heard from them, yes or no."  It was not the deftest of
lies.

"I understand," Sweeney said.  So that was it; Sweeney's voice gave it
all away.

"I'll tell you what.  They're really more friends of Katy's, maybe I
could let her entertain them for the afternoon and you and I and your
girlfriend could go out to celebrate."

"I'd really like it if your wife would come."

Ben said nothing for several seconds.  "Let me talk to her," he said.
"We'll see if we can work something out.  And I'll call you.  I
promise."

It kept gnawing at him, Abby's thinking they might be getting a
divorce.  After seventeen years of marriage, Ben and Katy had weathered
so much more than their children could ever know.

They had met in New York at a loft party given by an Italian sculptor
whose artistic reputation rested on giant kinetic chickens.  Ben was
twenty-six, Katy twenty-five.  He was still recovering from the
shattering of his first marriage and had just quit his job as a
caseworker at the welfare department to pursue playwriting full-time.
She had just come to New York after breaking off a relationship with a
Seattle lawyer and was working for a publisher.

At the beginning she just wanted to be friends.  She loved the fact
that he was such a great listener--most of the men she'd been out with
in her first six months in New York had done nothing but talk about
themselves, for hours on end--but Ben's grooming was not the best.  It
was summer, it was hot, and she was finicky.  Years later she would
entertain company with the story (it had grown wildly exaggerated, he
thought) of the first time she saw his apartment--the chicken bones
under the hi-fi, the roach that crawled across the salad bowl at a most
inopportune moment.

Her therapist, an ex-priest and ex-novelist, was a problem.  Ben was
convinced she was secretly in love with him.  She baby-sat for his
children.  She felt he had saved her life.  For the first time she
viewed the world psychologically, she said, even though every time she
quoted him he sounded like an idiot.

Ben persevered.  He began to shower twice a day, trimmed his beard,
lost ten pounds, and called in an exterminator.  All his friends found
her charming; what they couldn't see was how hardheaded she was in
private.  He was very much in love with her.  She was physically
radiant, a country girl in the big city, riding her bike fearlessly to
work every morning through the midtown traffic, hauling Ben off to
incomprehensible loft performances and to the screening of her
brother's documentaries on Mississippi blues at the Museum of Natural
History.

There was the inevitable trading of romantic histories.  Despite her
impeccable southern manners, Katy didn't pull any punches-her stories
of college boyfriends, slimy photography instructors, and most of all,
the egomaniacal lawyer she'd wasted four years on were enough to make
anybody wince.  Ben, Mr.  Bohemian Playwright, turned out to be the
reticent one.  It caught Katy by surprise.  On the surface he was so
easy, so nonjudgmental, but she soon learned there were buttons he
didn't like to have pushed--and one was the button of his first
marriage.

What won her in the end, he was convinced, was the theater.  His short
plays were being produced all over town, in tiny sub-basements in the
Village, in churches on the East Side, in settlement houses in Harlem.
More often than not the productions went unreviewed and the audiences
seldom topped fifty, but they were good plays, as anyone sitting out in
those ratty folding chairs knew, and afterward, after the hat had been
passed, Katy and Ben would go out for a beer and a hamburger with the
actors.

They would push a few tables together and order a pitcher or two and
eat French fries off one another's plates and laugh and tell jokes.  It
felt like family, and Ben was everyone's hero.  The excitement was
infectious.  They were actors, after all, and it was their job to be
convincing; what they seemed most convinced about was that Ben was a
genius and that great things lay just around the corner for all of
them.

The year after they were married, Abby was born.  Looking back, those
seemed like such innocent times.  They had absolutely no money, but
such hope.  Their friends were mostly other young parents they met at
the sandbox at 103rd and Riverside, and their idea of a big day out was
pushing the kids in strollers through the Bronx Zoo.

But it also seemed as if there were always signs that something
wonderful was about to happen: a knockout reading at New Dramatists, an
encouraging note from Joe Papp, his buddy Jonathan taking the scripts
around to his producer friends.

The problem was, they couldn't live on signs.  What looked like Ben's
big break turned into a debacle when a production of one of his plays
at the Manhattan Theatre Club was savaged by John Simon.  He went to
work for a PBS series to make a little money and auditioned as a writer
for a daytime soap.  Katy got pregnant again.  She was a trouper, but
she talked more and more about moving out of the city; all their
friends with kids seemed to be leaving.

One March night they had a huge, confidence-rattling fight, the first
real fight in their marriage.  It wasn't about money, but it was-he saw
that now, looking back--it was about all those implicit promises that
come with marriage.  He had been a full-time playwright for five years.
No one could say he hadn't given it a shot.  It was great to be
uncompromising if you were a genius, but what if you were merely B
plus?  It was his hanging on to his dreams that was making them all
miserable.

He applied to graduate school at Columbia.  It took him six years to
get his Ph.d."  six years of unrelenting poverty, even with Katy
working and both their parents pitching in.  The kids got too big to
both fit in the maid's room, so Abby slept on a couch behind a screen
in the living room.  At times it felt as if it would never end, as if
they were forever doomed to live in the same two-bedroom apartment with
the paint cracking off the ceiling and the broken tile in the shower.

When he flew to Austin for an interview, he was not optimistic.  They
were looking at three people, and all indications were that he was
third on the list.  Two days later, after he returned to New York, the
call came offering him the job.

It felt like a miracle.  He had a tenure-track job at a major
university, and anyone they'd ever met who'd ever lived in Austin loved
the place.  Matt, just seven years old, wanted to know if he'd get to
see real cowboys.  When they had their big party to celebrate, Jonathan
came over with a cassette of the old Dean Martin movie Four for
Texas.

On Friday, after a long editing session with one of his graduate
students, Ben took the bus home.  An elderly black man in blue overalls
sat on a mower, cutting the grass in front of the abandoned feed store
The mower spat gravel as it bumped over the uneven ground.  It was the
first sign of activity at the store in months.  Ben stood and stared
for nearly a minute.

He crossed Congress Avenue, hustling the last few feet to avoid a
careening bread truck.  The weather was strange.  For days Austin had
been under a health alert, the skies obscured by smoke from hundreds of
fires burning in Mexico.  Most of the fires had been set by small
farmers to clear their fields for spring planting, and they'd been
unable to control them in a countryside parched by an El Ni@no-fed
drought.  After a week, it had become increasingly oppressive, ominous
as a biblical warning, and early in the morning the smoke hung close to
the ground, clinging to the houses, thick as a London fog.

He waved to the klatch of hippie mothers gathered on the porch of one
of the corner bungalows.  One of the women, nose-ringed and in a
diaphanous dress, waved back.  Barefoot children chased one another
with wooden swords, emitting bloodcurdling yells.

Ben was halfway down the next block before he saw Sweeney's dusty red
Bronco at the curb in front of his house.  His first thought was that
there had been a disaster, that they had been found out.  He walked
faster, beginning to run, but then he saw them standing in the front
yard, Katy and Sweeney.  She was in sweatpants and T-shirt, trimming
the dead limbs off the flowering peach tree.  Sweeney picked up the
clipped branches and jammed them into a plastic trash container, making
himself useful.

Katy was laughing.  Matt and his friend Cameron played catch in the
street, throwing a rubber football with a long plastic tail that
whistled as it arced above the telephone lines.  Katy saw Ben first,
Sweeney turning a second later.

"Hey," Sweeney said.

"Hey."

Ben was furious, yet he couldn't let on.  Katy wiped the sweat from her
forehead.  How much had Sweeney told her?

"I hope you don't mind," Sweeney said.  "I hadn't heard from you-all
and I was just driving by, so I thought I'd stop in and see if you were
coming to my graduation party."

"I think it would be fine," Katy said.  "I don't think we're doing
anything tomorrow."  Ben could tell from her tone that Sweeney had
charmed her.  The football whined somewhere in the soot-ridden air
above them, and Ben's throat felt suddenly raw.

"That would be great," Sweeney said.  He looked away for a second,
taking everything in: the house, the nine-year-old van, the
neighborhood.  He didn't seem to mind that he'd been lied to; it just
made things that much more interesting.  "I guess you haven't had a
chance to talk about it."

"We've been pretty busy," Ben said.

Sweeney grinned.  "So I guess what they say about these absentminded
professors is right, huh?"

Cameron took a running start and flung the football as far as he could.
The ball careened off the telephone pole and bounded across the lawn.

"Lemme show these kids how it's done," Sweeney said.

He trotted over to retrieve the football.  Ben had tried to call
Sweeney twice that afternoon and missed him, but that would do him no
good now. Sweeney waved to Matt to start running.

"Go deep, go deep...."  Matt sprinted and then hesitated.  "Come on,"
Sweeney yelled.  "We're going for seven here!"

Sweeney threw a long, picture-perfect spiral that screamed like an
incoming missile.  Matt made a stumbling one-handed catch and came up
grinning, the ball held aloft.  Sweeney applauded.

"There you go!"  Sweeney raised both hands in the air, signaling
touchdown.  He looked back at Katy and Ben.  "That's quite a little
athlete you've got there."  He rubbed his palms on his jeans.  "Your
wife was telling me she's from Mississippi.  It's funny how these
things work.  My grandfather used to raise cotton right across the
river from Vicksburg.  It just shows you, it's a smaller world than you
think."

Sweeney gazed steadily at Ben.  The look was even, not hostile but not
conciliatory either.  Ben remembered the first time they had met in his
office, how Sweeney wouldn't leave until he got permission to take
Ben's class; he was the kind of guy who didn't like to take no for an
answer.

"Listen, I don't want to keep you from supper," Sweeney said.  The sun
glowed dully in the smoke-filled skies.  "But I'll see you-all
tomorrow."

Ben and Katy met Sweeney and his girlfriend just past one o'clock at
Littlefield Fountain.  They made quite a sight together: Sweeney
stalwart as a doughboy in his cap and gown, Rebecca tall and imperious
and at least fifteen years older than he was, with her Marianne
Faithfull bangs and an oat-colored dress slit provocatively up the
side.

The hill was covered with black-gowned seniors posing for pictures with
their families, and Sweeney insisted on pictures too, first of Rebecca
and himself, then of Ben and himself, and finally a shot of all of them
together with the tower in the background, taken by a helpful Asian
graduate student.  If Ben still carried any residual anger over
Sweeney's unannounced visit to his house, Sweeney wasn't noticing; he
acted as if they were the oldest of pals.

Afterward they all piled into Sweeney's Bronco and drove fifteen miles
out to the most expensive restaurant in the county, a place frequented
largely by personal-injury lawyers and lobbyists.  The wind had turned,
and the skies were blue for the first time in ten days.  Sweeney made
it clear that he was picking up the tab; nobody was pulling nickel on
his big day.

They sat outside under the live oaks; all the tables were decorated
with bouquets of baby's breath and yellow roses.  The Texas sun gleamed
off the windshields of the Jaguars and Mercedeses lining the gravel
road.

Sweeney ordered champagne and told funny stories about Ben as a
teacher--how his hair popped up when he got excited, how he would go
"Hmm, hmm, interesting" when a student said something idiotic.

The restaurant's specialty was wild game; Katy ordered a hot and crispy
pheasant with mango aioli and Rebecca asked for the ostrich.  The
breeze blew a napkin off the next table and a white-shirted young
waiter had to run to retrieve it.

By the second glass of champagne, Rebecca was well on her way to
telling Ben her life story in her low whiskey voice.  She was British
and had been married and divorced four times, most recently from the
son of one of Dallas's wealthiest families.  She had a teenage
daughter, away at boarding school in Massachusetts.  She was a woman
who knew books and movies; she'd first come to the States to work on a
John Schlesinger film.  She was charming but hard, with the habit of
relaying the most astonishingly intimate details in the most offhand
way.

Ben listened, but his real attention was on the conversation between
Katy and Sweeney across the table.  He was in torment.  Katy had yet to
make the connection between Sweeney and the music club Ben had invested
his purported residuals check in, and Ben hadn't told her, hoping to
somehow slide by.  It may have been a mistake, but what choice did he
have?  It was a no-win situation.  If he told Katy and she started
asking questions, Sweeney would go through the roof; if he didn't tell
her and it came out anyway, she would feel betrayed.

So far, so good.  Katy was delighted by the restaurant and she found
Sweeney hilarious.  He teased her about her accent and she teased him
right back.  Ben couldn't quite hear about what, but she soon had him
roaring.  Sweeney seemed to be able to bring something out in her, a
sense of play that Ben hadn't seen in her in a long time.

By the time the food arrived, Ben was a little stunned by the sun and
the champagne.  The other three were still going strong, trying to
remember the words to "Proud Mary."  Ben sat back and sawed away at his
exotic meat.

Sweeney did a five-minute takeoff on the commencement speaker that was
worthy of Billy Crystal, they talked about their favorite high school
teachers and then opened graduation presents.  Sweeney was the only one
who had room for dessert.  The others ordered coffee, and while they
were waiting, Rebecca leaned forward on her elbows.

"So, what will you be doing this summer?"  she said.

Katy looked over at Ben for help.  "We're not sure yet.  One thing we
know, we're looking for a place."

"Really?"  Rebecca said.  Ben looked down, frowning, brushing some
crumbs off the white tablecloth.

"Our landlord has decided to sell."

A pall fell momentarily over the conversation.  A boat-tailed grackle
strutted across the lawn, then flew up suddenly as a waiter came down
the stairs with Sweeney's hot fudge sundae.

"I'm sure you'll find something.  I was looking at the paper the other
day and some wonderful places have just come on the market," Rebecca
said.

"I don't think we can afford to buy right now," Katy said.

Ben gave her a quick dirty look.  She didn't have to tell them that.
Sweeney seemed dumbfounded; something didn't make sense here.

"So we're looking," Katy said.

"Well, then," Rebecca said, "I think you should come stay at my
place."

Katy shook her head, embarrassed.  "No, we couldn't."

"I'm not just being polite," Rebecca said.  "I've been looking for
someone.  I'm moving to Santa Fe in July for at least a year."

The waiter set the brimming sundae in front of Sweeney.  Sweeney
flicked his napkin and then tucked it under his collar like a
six-year-old tucking in his bib.  A single strand of hot fudge rolled
down the fluted glass like a glistening tear.

"I'm telling you, it would be perfect," Sweeney said.  He was looking
only at Katy now, not at Ben.  He plucked the cherry off the top of the
sundae and popped it into his mouth, sucking it clean.  "It's got a
pool, the whole works.  You're not going to believe it."

That night, Ben went into the bathroom while Katy was in the shower.
June bugs batted against the narrow window, and the mirror was clouded
with steam.

"Is that you, Ben?"

"Yeah."  He could just barely see her through the plastic shower
curtain, her image blurred and out of focus as she rinsed her hair. "So
did you have a good time this afternoon?"  He spoke up to make himself
heard over the rush of the water.

"Yes, I thought it was great," she said.  "It was very generous of
them."

"I thought you should know," he said.  "Sweeney is one of the guys
who's put money into the club."

The water went off, the pipes shuddering for a second.  Katy pulled
back the shower curtain and faced him, her wet hair slicked back, her
bare shoulders glistening.

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

He took the towel from the back of the chair and handed it to her.  "I
meant to.  I suppose I didn't want to put a damper on the afternoon."

She wiped her face dry with the towel.  "What's done is done," she
said. He knew from her tone that she was still a long way from
forgiving him.  "I thought they were both very charming."

The following Wednesday when Sweeney came to Ben's office for their
weekly exchange, Sweeney was in an ebullient mood.  He still couldn't
get over the fact that he'd graduated, and when he said he wanted to go
to lunch, Ben didn't have the heart to say no.

The first summer session didn't start for another week and the campus
had the languorous quality of a north woods Bible retreat.  A librarian
sat under the trees in front of the Union feeding bits of his sandwich
to a squirrel.  Skateboarders clattered in and out of the empty stone
fountain.

"I'm telling you, man, I'm going to miss this place," Sweeney said.
"Lots of memories, lots of memories ..."

They crossed over to The Drag, Sweeney waving to a sorority girl at the
cash machine, exchanging cheery hellos with the woman running the
Korean egg-roll stand.  It felt a little like walking down the street
with the mayor.

Sweeney had just launched into a complicated story about his freshman
year, something about the Aggies stealing Bevo off the roof of the
Coop, when Ben saw the wire shopping cart with the one warped wheel. It
sat on the sidewalk in front of a recently vacated store and it was
just as he remembered it--stuffed with milk cartons and pillows, soiled
overcoats and plastic dishes.  As they moved closer he could see the
old woman too, huddled in a recessed entryway.  She still wore her
scuffed, mismatched men's shoes and her sagging candy-cane socks, but
as a final madcap touch she'd added several strands of Mardi Gras beads
over her layers of tattered blouses.

She saw him a second after he saw her.  The wise thing would have been
to just walk on by, but Ben was confused--after all, hadn't he been the
one looking for her for nearly two months?  He hesitated and the
hesitation was enough to set her off.

"What are you looking at me for?"  Her voice sounded as if someone had
just run a cheese grater down her vocal cords.  "You've got no right,
looking at me!"  Sweeney, who'd walked on, turned back at the
commotion, but the old woman's fury was aimed totally at Ben.  "I know
what you did!  I know!"

"What's the problem here?"  Sweeney said.  "You picking on my buddy?"

She recoiled as if she'd been slapped, grabbing at her beads.  Above
her head and behind dirty glass a sign proclaimed in huge letters:

EVERYTHING MUST GO!  50% OFF!

"Don't you touch me!"  the old woman screamed.  Sweeney stepped away,
both palms in the air.  Three or four people, one of them the assistant
dean of Liberal Arts, had stopped on the sidewalk to stare.

"Nobody's touching you," Sweeney said.

She gaped at him for a second to be sure, and then lurched to her feet.
She grabbed her shopping cart and fled down the street, the bad wheel
squealing as she went.  Laughing, Sweeney turned back to Ben.

"So what did you do to her?"

"I didn't do anything," Ben said.

Sweeney's smile faded.  "You don't know her, do you?"  he asked.

"No," Ben said.

Sweeney stared down the sidewalk as the old woman disappeared under the
umbrellas of the Renaissance Fair.  He turned and stared at Ben again,
assessing.  He put a hand on Ben's elbow.  "Hey, let's go get ourselves
a cheese steak."

CHAPTER 8

As soon as he entered the locker, he knew something was different; he
just couldn't put his finger on what it was.  He swung his maroon
briefcase down on the planked floor as the heavy door latched shut
behind him.  He yanked on the overhead cord, snapping on the single
bare bulb.

All eight coolers were still there, in two rows; one of the coolers was
set sideways on top of another.  Was that the way he'd left them?  He
couldn't remember.  He flipped the coolers open one by one; as far as
he could tell nothing had been removed.  There was only the one stack
he had broken into--the stack he'd been taking fifties from all
along--and even that was down by no more than an inch.

He took a moment, scanning the narrow, tomblike room.  On a hot May
afternoon--it had been all the way up to ninety by noon--the locker was
still cool, smelling of mildew and other people's rotting furniture.

He hated coming here.  He did not like being reminded of just how
precarious his position was, how all his hopes, all his promises to
Katy, all the money now flowing into his bank account, rested on his
ability to keep this airless room secret from the world.

A wasp bumped lazily against the naked bulb.  He heard voices murmuring
outside.  He froze for several seconds, waiting until the voices had
passed on.  He shut the tops of the coolers, all but the one.  He was
jumpy and cross; he hadn't been sleeping well for more than a month.

He took two or three deep breaths, trying to calm himself, then
unzipped his briefcase and removed a large manila envelope.  He got to
one knee, counted out sixty fifties, and slipped them into the
envelope.  He had it all worked out: six hundred a week would go to
Sweeney, with an extra six hundred for his own walking-around money. It
meant that Ben would not have to come back for another month.  The key
was to not be seen here too often, not give anyone a reason to start
asking questions.

He closed the metal clasp on the envelope and slipped it back into his
briefcase.  He flipped the top of the cooler down and leaned hard on it
to be sure it was closed tight.  As he rose to his feet, something
caught his eye in the far corner of the storage locker.  He moved a
couple of steps closer to be sure; three or four cigarette butts lay
scattered on the floor and there were three or four more that had
fallen through the planks to the concrete below.

He just stared for a moment, dizzy suddenly, blood pounding through his
temples.  He bent down and shredded one of the butts between his
fingers.  It was impossible to tell how fresh it was.  Maybe the butts
had been there all along, since he had first rented the place, and he
just hadn't noticed.  But how could he not have noticed?  He'd been
back here five or six times, surely he would have noticed.

He looked up at the rafters, back at the latched door, trying to figure
it out.  There was no sign of a break-in.  Who could have been in here?
The woman in the office?  One of the night watchmen?  He rubbed the
back of his thumb slowly across his mouth, unintentionally getting a
little tobacco on his tongue.  He grimaced, trying to wipe the acrid
taste away.

He tried to imagine someone sitting in the dark, smoking, surrounded by
seven and a half million dollars.  How could they not take any?  Maybe
they had.  If they had a way in, they would surely return.  Ben could
come back in a week and find the locker totally empty.

He went to the first cooler and opened it.  At the top of the open
stack of fifties there were still a few loose bills, but beneath those
bills the money was all divided into neat packets by green paper
straps.  On the straps were the stamps of the inky black scorpions,
their tails curled and ready to strike.  He gathered the packets by the
handful, stashing them into his briefcase.  The loose bills he just
jammed in his pockets with trembling fingers.  He wasn't calculating
now; instinct drove him, instinct and fear.  He shook the briefcase by
its handles to make more room, then tore the cellophane off a second
stack of fifties, filling the briefcase with as much as it could
hold.

He rested his forehead against the door for a second before opening it,
trying to compose himself.  He leaned against the latch and stepped out
into the heat.  Rows of low concrete buildings baked in the
midafternoon sun; there was no one else around.  The grass along the
chain-link fence was parched and yellow, desperately needing rain.

He opened the rear of the van and swung the briefcase inside.  He spied
a roll of duct tape under the seat; he retrieved it and slammed the
trunk shut.

He stepped back up into the locker and pulled the door closed behind
him.  He wrapped each of the coolers in duct tape, three times around,
lengthwise and widthwise.  He was in some kind of state.  He got six of
the eight coolers wrapped before he ran out of tape.  Maybe it was a
futile gesture, but if they were going to get his money, he was at
least going to make it hard for them.

He drove down to school and locked his briefcase in the bottom drawer
of his file cabinet.  The campus was empty; it was the quietest time of
the year, between graduation and summer school.  The only people he saw
as he was leaving were two maintenance men sitting in a truck in front
of the old music building, listening to the radio.

The next morning Ben came in early and counted the money; he had
$87,850 in cash.  He entered the money neatly in his ledger.  He felt
ashamed and shaken by his behavior the previous afternoon.  He knew
that he'd overreacted, that it probably had all been in his
imagination.  Still, it was all he could do to resist the temptation to
go back to the storage unit to be sure the rest of the money was still
there.

He stacked the money neatly in several Kinko's boxes, put the boxes in
his briefcase, and took a cab out to a bank in Westlake (katy had the
van for the day).  He amazed himself how relaxed he was, talking with
the bank officer and filling out the forms for the safety deposit
box.

They took him to a small room where they left him alone.  Everyone was
so respectful, so discreet, it reminded him of the moment the doctor
and nurse leave you to make a urine sample.  He packed the $87,850
neatly into the box--it turned out to be just the right size--and
locked it.

Outside, waiting for the cab, he worked the key to the safety deposit
box onto his key ring.  He felt as if he'd done well.  All the same, he
knew he had a task in front of him.  He was going to have to move all
the money out of the storage unit, and move it all soon.

Using the map that Rebecca had drawn them, they drove up into the
hills, following gravel roads that divided and divided again, cutting
under limestone cliffs that shone in the afternoon sun.  They drove
along a high ridge, passing radio towers, rolling over ancient cattle
gaps.  There were only two or three houses they could actually see from
the road and even though they were only minutes away from the suburban
palaces of the computer royalty, it still felt wild and remote.

They parked along the road and when they got out, four deer scampered
into the brush sixty feet ahead of them.  They walked up the steep
hill, Ben taking Katy's hand so she wouldn't fall.  Cedar and
honeysuckle crowded the caliche driveway, so they couldn't see the
house until they were nearly on it.  When it finally came into view,
Katy let out a small involuntary gasp.

It was a fortress; the mammoth white stucco walls and terra-cotta tile
roof reminded Ben of a Mexican hacienda or a French villa.  Around the
corner of the house, Ben could see the shimmering blue water of a pool
and, beyond the pool, the distant brown hills.

They knocked at the heavy carved door and waited.  After a moment there
was a scurry and the hoarse barking of a dog.  A moment after that, a
Mexican maid with heavy Mayan features opened the door.

"We're here to see Rebecca?"  Ben said.

The maid nodded and smiled; Ben suspected she didn't speak English.
Even as the maid gestured them to come in, Rebecca was sweeping down
the stairs in a peach-colored silk blouse and a remarkably short tan
skirt.  She gave Ben and Katy each a quick kiss on the cheek.

"I'm sorry, my darlings, I was just on the phone," Rebecca said.  "So
you've met Zoila?"

When the maid smiled again, nodding hello, Ben could see a gold tooth.
Rebecca spoke quickly to her in Spanish and Zoila slipped away to the
kitchen.

Rebecca took Katy by the arm.  "It's so wonderful of you to come all
this way.  Please, let me give you the tour."

As huge as the house had seemed from the outside, on the inside it had
the slightly stuffed quality of an English cottage.  Pillows and
cushions were everywhere in the living room, but the most remarkable
thing about the room was the photographs; there seemed to be hundreds
of them, many in expensive silver frames, lined up on every table and
ledge.  There was a photograph of Rebecca arm in arm with Clint
Eastwood and Ronald Reagan; photos of her in Hawaii, skiing in
Switzerland, on safari in Africa, posing under the arch of two giant
elephant tusks with an ex-husband (it was clear that she had been
breathtakingly beautiful when she was young).

She ushered them out of the living room into a small, walled garden
with a fountain.  A couple of large, delicately colored fish drifted in
the small pool, and a turtle surfaced for a second and then disappeared
in a wink.

As Rebecca led them up the stairs to the second floor, Ben glanced over
her shoulder and saw a little boy staring at them through the banister.
He had huge brown eyes, brown skin, and a tiny red car clutched in his
right hand.  As soon as Ben spotted him, he darted away.

That was Roberto, Rebecca said.  He was Zoila's son and had just turned
three.  Rebecca wouldn't be able to take the two of them with her to
Santa Fe, and she hoped that wouldn't be a problem.  They would stay
with the house if it was all right with Katy and Ben.  Zoila was not an
accomplished cook yet, but she was learning, and she cleaned, did
laundry, made beds, and had a wonderful disposition.

Ben listened, quietly appalled.  How could they possibly have a maid?
The people in Ethnic and Third World would kill him if they found out.
As they marched down the hallway he tried to catch Katy's eye, but she
wasn't looking at him.

All the bedrooms were on the second floor, and there were six of them.
The bedroom on the left Rebecca wanted to use to store all the stuff
she wasn't going to be able to take with her, and the one next to it
was Zoila and Roberto's room (glancing inside, Ben could see an ironing
board, still set up, some stacked shoe boxes, and an old radio).  The
other four, of course, would all be theirs to use as they wished. Maybe
it was just Rebecca's manner, but she sounded as if everything had
already been decided, as if she'd already made them a gift of the
house.

"Ben, come look."  Katy stood in the doorway of Rebecca's daughter's
room.  Ben stared over her shoulder at the canopied bed and the softly
blowing white curtains, the rows of miniature horses lined up on the
French Provincial furniture.

"Abby would love this," Katy said.

"I know," Ben said.

They went back downstairs and Rebecca excused herself for a moment,
stepping into the kitchen to speak to Zoila.  Three Jack Russell
terriers jumped up on the chairs, barked furiously, and then ran out
again.  Ben leaned over, scrutinizing an autographed color photo of
Mick Jagger hanging next to a cabinet of English crockery.  A huge
parrot swung upside down, eyeing them warily, biting at the wires of
his cage.

Rebecca took them outside.  The view was spectacular; the pool seemed
to hang at the very edge of the cliff.  As Rebecca led Katy through the
rose garden, Ben stood at the fence, staring down at the blue ribbon of
the Colorado miles below.  This all felt a little too good to be
true.

After a couple of minutes, Zoila came out with a full tray of goodies.
Ben smiled warmly at her, as if to say that he was not really party to
this.  They sat by the pool and Rebecca poured Katy and Ben tea.  She
talked about her trials at the Texas Film Commission, how politically
difficult it had been for her since the election of the Republican
governor.  It was going to be good for her to get away from it all for
a while, she said.

"Hey, you guys, how you doin'?"

Ben looked back over his shoulder.  Sweeney swung through the kitchen
door and strode down the walk.  Rebecca rose to greet him.  He took her
hand for a second, kissed her on the cheek, then turned and gave Ben a
soft sock on the shoulder.  Katy sat with her teacup, smiling up at
him.

"It's nice to see you," Katy said.

"Not as nice as it is to see you."  Sweeney leaned across and gave Katy
a peck on the cheek.  "Didn't I tell you?  Isn't it great?"  It struck
Ben that Sweeney was awfully cheerful for someone whose girlfriend was
leaving town.

"It's wonderful," Katy said.

The automatic pool cleaner writhed across the bright blue water.
Sweeney dragged a plastic chair over to join them.

"Zoila!"  Rebecca's voice was suddenly imperious, almost harsh; it took
Ben by surprise.  "to Una taza por Se@nor Sweeney, por favor!"

"Can you believe we're sitting out here having tea?"  Sweeney said.
"Pretty damn civilized if you ask me!"

Zoila came down the walk with another cup.  Behind her, Roberto stood
in the kitchen door, watching them as he tried to sit on one of the
Jack Russell terriers.

"So, what do you think?"  Sweeney said.  He leaned forward and took one
of the Oreos off the plate, twisting the two halves of the cookie
apart.  Half-moons of sweat curved under his armpits.

"I don't know.  It's utterly amazing," Ben said.  "I just don't know if
it's for us.  I wonder if it would be a little too isolated for the
kids."

"Not really," Rebecca said.  "The people across the road have three
teenage daughters.  And the schools are excellent."

Katy said nothing, stirring her tea.  An antique rocking horse stared
at them through the glass windows of the pool house, ears back,
nostrils flaring.

"I'll bet your kids would love it," Sweeney said.  "Having all their
friends out to swim.  And at night, you should see the deer."

"I just don't know if we can afford something this grand," Ben said.

"All I'm looking for is someone who'll take good care of the place,"
Rebecca said.  "If you could pay Zoila, which is four hundred a month,
and pick up the utilities, that would be it."  Sweeney grinned, bits of
black Oreo between his teeth.

Ben was still for a moment.  He could feel everyone watching him; none
of them understood how he could possibly consider saying no.  Water
guzzled down one of the pool drains.

"I'm telling you, you can't beat a deal like this," Sweeney said.

Ben glanced warily at Katy.  "So what do you think?"

Her face shone.  "I think it would be great."

CHAPTER 9

Ben and Katy stood on the hill beyond the outfield fence, watching
Abby's softball game.  It was dusk--nearly eight--and it was still hot,
traffic whooshing by on First Street.  Suburbans were parked everywhere
on the grass, like great beasts at rest, and even now, in the fourth
inning, a mother and her daughter in a green jersey hurried toward the
field.  On the far side of the access road, the slope leading up to the
railroad tracks looked strangely denuded.  It had been cleared of
underbrush to discourage homeless squatters, but the remains of their
camps were still there, bulldozed into great heaps for the city to take
away, piles of broken crating and cardboard, the tail ends of soiled
blankets.

Katy was quiet.  They had already had one fight the night before, and
it seemed as if they were about to have another.  Katy had fallen in
love with Rebecca's house immediately and had been astonished and then
furious at how strongly Ben had been against their taking it.

A great shout went up as a girl with a red ponytail hit a fly ball that
the spindly left fielder misjudged.  As the redheaded girl sped around
to third, her teammates rose to cheer.

Ben watched as Abby strode to the plate, glancing over her shoulder to
laugh at something her coach said.  Girls' sports seemed to Ben to be
infinitely better than boys'; the girls actually managed to have fun.
Ben had once heard a parent at one of Matt's Little League games
talking, without irony, about how their son was going to make it to the
majors and support them in their old age.

"I'm sorry about last night," Ben said.

"I'm sorry too," Katy said.  "I guess I just didn't understand."

Ben stared across the field.  Abby took the first pitch for a ball. She
stepped away to let the catcher throw the ball back, then took her
stance again, just the way Ben had taught her: bat held high, elbow up,
back leg slightly bent.

"I don't see how we could find a better deal," Katy said.  "How much
could the utilities be?  Three hundred a month?  If you're worried
about it, I'm sure Rebecca would show us last summer's bills.  Plus
Zoila, that's seven hundred at the most.  That's four hundred less than
we're paying now."

"I know.  But it's such an ostentatious house."

"It's so beautiful, Ben.  I just think it would be a great
adventure."

Abby fouled the second pitch back off the screen.  How many hours of
batting practice had he and Abby put in together?  First in New York,
in Riverside Park, with a red plastic bat that was nearly as big as she
was, and later in their backyard in Austin with Wiffle balls.  She'd
gotten good enough that she would hit one out of three onto the roof,
and in the spring, when Ben cleaned the gutters, he would find three or
four of the white plastic balls up there, nestled in among the twigs
and rotting leaves like the eggs of some giant condor.

"I just think it would be better for us to get into a real
neighborhood, someplace permanent," Ben said.  "What if Rebecca decides
she doesn't like Santa Fe and wants to come back in six months?"

Abby hit a line drive over the second baseman and, by the time the
right fielder arced a lollipop throw back in, Abby was safely on
second.  Katy, exasperated now, wasn't even watching.

"She told us a year, Ben."

"I know what she told us.  I just don't think it's the most practical
thing.  We'd be so far from town, and we're going to be spending half
our time driving the kids back and forth."

"That's ridiculous.  You know that's not it."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know.  Something else.  Something you're not saying."

He stared out at his daughter, so beautiful, standing at second base,
waving to her teammates.  He wanted his old life back.  "I don't know,"
he said.  "Maybe I just don't like the idea of being up there with all
those rich people."

On Sunday evening, Ben had a softball game of his own, but he didn't
go.  Instead he tossed his mitt into the front seat of the van and
drove to the self-storage unit on Burnet.

The lights on the lot shone bright and pitiless, as if they were
glaring down on a prison yard.  As Ben pulled through the front gate, a
father and his burly son wrestled a yellow pullout couch off the back
of a mud-spattered truck, too absorbed in their task to even look up.
Ben drove down to Building 7, backing around so that the van was nearly
flush with the wall.

He worked quickly.  He was able to get four of the coolers in the far
back, two in the backseat, one on the floor, one in the front.  Somehow
it seemed as if they took more room than before, as if they had somehow
swollen after the long months of darkness.  He covered them as best he
was able with a couple of threadbare bedspreads he'd snuck out of the
linen closet.  The whole operation took him less than fifteen
minutes.

He drove back to the front office.  He was pleased to discover that
Rose wasn't there.  In her place was a pimply teenager in a Baylor
Bears hat, who could scarcely be roused from the Sunday sports section.
When Ben announced that he was checking out, the boy swung his feet
down from the desk.

The kid turned out to be slow as molasses.  It took him three or four
minutes to find the right ledger, and then he couldn't find a pen.  Ben
drummed his fingers on the counter.  Through the window he could see
his van parked outside, packed to the gills, the flimsy bedspreads
draped over everything.  The boy finally found a ballpoint that would
work and wrote out a final receipt that Ben crumpled and tossed away as
soon as he was out the door.

Traffic was light.  It was a little after nine.  Katy, thinking he was
at his game, wouldn't be expecting him for at least another hour.  Even
though he knew it was foolish, he kept checking his rearview mirror,
just to be sure he wasn't being followed.  Every sense seemed to be
magnified, quickened.  The coolers squeaked, rubbing together when the
van swayed around a curve, and once or twice Ben could have sworn he
heard a rustling as if there were someone huddling under the bedspreads
in the back.

It turned out not to be just his imagination.  Pulling up to a red
light on Guadalupe, he felt something on his collar, then something
tickling his neck.  He swatted quickly at it, batting a sleek roach
against the windshield.  Trying to right itself, the wriggling insect
slid off the dashboard.

"Damn!"  Ben said.  He tried to jam the van into park so he could step
across and stomp it, but he wasn't quick enough.  The roach scuttled to
safety under the seats.

A car honked behind him.  The light had changed to green.  Ben wrenched
the van back into drive and eased into the intersection.  He rubbed the
back of his neck, disgusted; the roach must have been lurking on the
bottom of one of the coolers.  There were no doubt others, living
undisturbed for months; he was going to have to check.

He turned left on Twenty-first Street.  On a Sunday night there was no
guard at the traffic booth and the campus seemed deserted.  He came
around on Inner Campus Drive and parked across from the north doors of
Parlin Hall.

Getting out of the air-conditioned van, the heat slapped him in the
face like a great moist towel.  This was the hard part, the next few
minutes, but there was no helping that.  He just had to get through it
as quickly and efficiently as he could.

He slid open the side door of the van and pulled out the first of the
coolers, setting it on the sidewalk as he locked the car.  His heart
pounded.  Far off he could hear a band playing, the slurred sound
carrying on the heavy night air.

He carried the cooler across the road, setting it down again while he
fumbled through his tangle of keys.  If someone saw him right now, what
could they possibly think he was doing?  A professor getting back late
from a picnic?  He opened the outer door, held it open with one foot,
and reached back to catch the handle of the cooler.  He slid it closer,
then lifted it and pivoted into the dark building.

He edged his way up the stairs.  There were light switches, but he
didn't want to use them.  He didn't want any campus policemen coming to
investigate why one of the buildings was suddenly lit up at night.

He moved on down the dark hallway, the only source of illumination the
dull flickering EXIT light at the far end.  He passed the ghostly
displays for the Oxford Summer Program, a bust of Shakespeare, a
painted jester's mask.  He passed the window outside the departmental
office filled with snapshots of his colleagues, one clowning, jamming
his umbrella in the jaws of a stone lion in Beijing, another posing
with a sheep in the Scottish highlands, another leaning against a wall
in southern France.  He really didn't need any light; he knew this
place by heart.

He backed into the handle of the exit door at the end of the hallway
and shoved it open.  There was a second door at the bottom of the
stairs, and as he maneuvered his way through it, he knocked the cooler
accidentally, nearly dropping it.  He felt a sharp twinge in his back.
He duck walked down the hallway to Dick's office, unlocked it, and
shoved the cooler inside.

It took nearly forty minutes to move all eight coolers, much longer
than he had anticipated.  It was slow work, not just the trek down the
long hallways, but the constant locking and unlocking of the van, the
building, Dick's office.

His only bad moment came when a lone cyclist came out of nowhere,
whizzing silently past as Ben stood frozen by the open door of the van,
but the cyclist was gone in a moment, swooshing around the architecture
building like a darting bat.  The only other people Ben saw were a
couple holding hands under the trees in front of the Humanities
Research Center, and they drifted off after a minute or two for a more
private spot.

Standing finally in Dick's office with all eight coolers stacked in
front of him, Ben was amazed at how much space they took.  Between the
eight coolers and all of Dick's packing boxes, there was barely room to
get to the desk.

Maybe it was craziness bringing it all here, but from the moment he'd
seen the cigarette butts on the floor of the storage unit, he'd known
he had to do something and do it fast.

Dick's office would serve, at least until he found someplace better. It
had its advantages.  Dick was going to be away for fifteen months.
Aside from the evening cleaning crews, Ben was the only one with a key.
The monthly trips up to Burnet had become too risky anyway, bound to
attract attention if they hadn't already.  Here, Ben would have daily
access to the money.

In a way it was perfect.  Surely the last place anyone would come
looking for seven and a half million dollars was in an assistant
professor's office.  Ben knew from experience he had nothing to worry
about from the cleaning crews; they were in and out in fifteen seconds.
The chances of theft were minimal.  In the four years he'd been in
Austin there had been only two break-ins in the department, both over
the holidays, and in both cases the thieves had been interested only in
computers.

It took Ben another half hour to rearrange everything, barricading the
eight coolers against the far wall, burying them under an avalanche of
rugs and boxes of avant-garde fiction.  It looked pretty convincing
when he was done, not much different than the office of any other
pack-rat academic away in Europe.  Who would have guessed that there
was enough under there to pay the entire department's salaries for
years?

He checked his watch.  It was nearly ten-thirty.  Katy was going to be
wondering where he was.  As he left the office, he jiggled the doorknob
a couple of times to be sure it was locked.  He tucked in his shirt,
moving quickly toward the EXIT sign.

There was a soft cough from the far end of the hallway.  Ben stopped
dead in his tracks.  He strained to hear; for several seconds there was
only the steady blowing of the air-conditioning, but then it was broken
by a jangling of keys.

"Hello?"  Ben said.

There was a sharp click and the overhead fluorescent lights flickered
on.  Nancy Rankin, a junior medievalist, stood in the doorway of her
office, looking frightened as a deer.

"Hey, Nancy."

"Hey."

"What are you doing?"

"I just came in to use my printer," she said.

He and Nancy had come to the university the same year.  She was single,
smart, from a working-class family in Ohio, and was finishing a mammoth
book on linguistics and critical theory.  She often worked late in the
night and was the author, Ben suspected, of many of the subversive
one-liners scrawled anonymously across the posters advertising
scholarly talks.

The question was, how long had she been standing there?  She couldn't
have been there while he was lugging the coolers down the hallway.  She
couldn't have been sitting in her office in the dark, unless she had
been sleeping.  No.  She must have just come in; that was why he'd
heard the keys.  But what if she'd passed Dick's office?  What if she'd
heard him sliding the boxes around?

"How about you?"

"Oh, I just came in to get something," he said.

Suddenly he was aware of how he must have looked to her in his sneakers
and tattered Milwaukee Brewers T-shirt.  She was still half hidden in
the doorway.

"We'll have to have lunch this week," he said.  "It's been too long."

Locusts sang in the honeysuckle as Ben trudged up the caliche driveway.
A sprinkler sent soft arcs of water over the flower beds next to the
massive house, and Ben had to step through a snarl of hoses to knock at
the carved wooden door.

After several seconds Zoila opened the door.  She seemed delighted to
see him.  "How are you?"  Ben said.

"Fine," Zoila said softly.  She gestured him to follow her.

As they moved through the house, the Jack Russell terriers swirled
around his feet, barking, and then disappeared.  Roberto stood in the
kitchen eating a peach, wearing only a heavy diaper.

"Hey, Roberto!"  Ben said.  The little boy was not about to be won over
so easily.  When Ben tried to give him a high five, Roberto turned and
ran into the laundry room.

Rebecca was in the pool.  As Ben came down the walk she waved to him.
"Ben!  Do you want to swim?  I'm sure Zoila can find you a suit."

"No, no, I'm fine."

He took a chair and sat by the edge of the pool.  Rebecca was totally
at ease in the water.  She swam facing him, doing the sidestroke with
no more apparent effort than a woman stretching out on the silkiest of
couches.  It was hard not to notice her tanned, lithe body; Ben had the
definite sense that he was being invited to notice.  She chatted away,
asking about Katy and the children.  Ben leaned forward in his chair,
stolid as a farmer.

She finished her laps, pulling herself out of the water, and grabbed a
towel off one of the plastic lounge chairs.  "Would you like anything
to drink?  Iced tea?  Coke?"

"A Coke would be great," Ben said.

"Zoila?  Zoila!"  The maid materialized at the kitchen door.  "A Coke
for Mr.  Lindberg, por favor!"

Rebecca sat down carefully in the chair next to him, draping her towel
over her shoulders.  "So you've come around."

"Yes, I seem to have come around," Ben said.

It was a done deal.  They were taking the house, despite all Ben's
misgivings.  He had been outvoted.  Katy had dug in her heels and Abby
had taken her side.  What thirteen-year-old was going to say no to a
place with a pool?  Ben was not in a good position to offer much
resistance.  After all the ruckus about the mythical residual check, he
owed Katy one.

Zoila brought him a Coke, and Rebecca watched him drink it, drying her
arms.  "So, will you be teaching this summer?"  she said.

"No.  Just writing my book."

"It sounds like a wonderful life.  You must be very content."  He
glanced quickly at her.  Was she teasing him?  She didn't seem to be.
"Your wife is so lovely and Sweeney says your kids are terrific."

"Things are pretty good," he said.

She stood up, tossing her towel aside, and leaned across for a
terry-cloth robe that lay at the edge of the pool.  The blue of the
water was so intense it almost seemed unreal, something only a painter
could come up with.  "And where did you go to graduate school?  Not
here."

"No.  Columbia."

"Oh, really?"  She brightened, as if this was the most delightful thing
she'd ever heard.  "I used to know people there, years ago."

"Such as?"

"Lionel Trilling."

Ben laughed.  "Yes, I've heard of him."

Rebecca slipped into the robe, knotting the belt loosely at her waist.
"I'm not saying that I knew him well.  I met him three or four times at
parties.  I was very young, but he was very nice to me.  I love his
books.  They must seem very old-fashioned now."

"I love his books too," Ben said.

"Sincerity and Authenticity.  It's wonderful, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is."  He sipped the last of his Coke.

"And so, which are you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Sincere or authentic?"

"I may be a little too old to be either," Ben said.

The answer seemed to please her.  "That's a relief."

Ben rattled the ice in his empty glass.  Wind rustled through the stand
of bamboo.  Sitting next to the water, he almost felt cool.  She gazed
steadily at him; he could see the curiosity in her eyes.

"Maybe I should show you around," she said.

"Of course."

He put his glass down on the glass table and she took him on a tour of
the backyard, showing him the switch on the side of the pool house for
the hot tub, the cutoff valve for the gas.  He had forgotten how
spectacular the view was from up here; even on a hazy day he could make
out the dome of the capitol, miles away.

The dogs she would take with her, she said.  The parrot she might
leave, if that was all right.  If he squawked too much they should put
his cage in the sink in the laundry room, it always quieted him down.

"This is very generous of you," Ben said.  "Everyone is very
excited."

"I'm delighted you're taking the house," she said.  "I'm just in love
with your wife.  You know, I've never done this before.  I spoke to my
friend Didi--I'm sure you'll meet her, she lives down at the far end of
the canyon.  Anyway, they rent their house every summer when they go to
Maine.  Her only suggestion was that I should get a deposit, just in
case."

"Of course," Ben said.  Awkwardness hung in the air.  "How much would
you like?"

A tawny cat clawed up on the fence and bounded across the lawn. Rebecca
went down on one knee.  "Come here, puss, come here."  The cat stared
for a moment and then approached warily.  Rebecca scooped the cat up in
her arms and began to scratch her behind the ears.  "That's a good cat.
What Didi suggested was the equivalent of one month's rent. Of course
I'm not charging rent, but what Didi usually asks for is four thousand
dollars."

"Four thousand," Ben said.

The cat rolled over in her arms.  Rebecca ran a long finger slowly
through the soft fur.  "Look at her, she's nothing but an old tart." 
She knelt down and let the cat flow out of her arms.  "If it's too
much, please tell me," she said.  "I've never been very good at these
money things."

"I'll talk to Katy.  It's just that in the summer the university
doesn't pay us, but I'm sure we can work something out."

"I'm sure.  The important thing is that you'll be in the house.  Oh,
there's one other thing I want to show you."

She took him around to the side of the house, where a canoe hung in a
rough shed.  She showed him the scarred metal locker where she kept the
paddles and four yellow life preservers.  There were some wonderful
places to take the children canoeing, she said, all within a couple of
hours' drive.  She had a book she could show him.

"Please," she said.  "I don't want you to worry about the money.
Whatever you decide is reasonable."

"I understand.  We'll talk it over."

"Oh, and I should mention--" The locusts had started up again,
screaming like defective smoke detectors.  "My ex-husband and I are in
a bit of a financial dispute, shall we say, so I'd like to keep this
off the books."

If he wasn't irritated enough, Ben also managed to hit rush-hour
traffic on the way home.  He was not happy about Rebecca hitting him up
for a four-thousand-dollar deposit, and the worst thing about it was
the fears it triggered that Sweeney might have said something to her,
spilled the beans about the two men's secret arrangement.  He was going
to have to speak to Sweeney about it.

By the time Ben got to Oltorf, things had slowed to a crawl.  After a
couple of blocks, Ben saw why.

Several police cars and an EMS truck surrounded the feed store  A crowd
of fifty people had gathered outside a barricade of sawhorses and
twisted yellow tape.  A lone policeman stood in the middle of the
street, diverting traffic.

Ben slowed, rolling down his window, but the patrolman was in no mood
to answer questions and waved him on.  Ben followed the flow of traffic
onto a side street and pulled into the first alley he saw.  He hurried
back, walking and running.

He jostled his way through the crowd.  There, leaning against the front
door of the feed store was a wire shopping cart with one warped wheel.
Ben could only stare.

"Long time no see."

Ben turned.  It was Marvin Booth, the hulking musician who'd lived two
doors down from them for the past four years.  He wore his trademark
red suspenders and sucked on a Popsicle.

"How you doin'?"  Marvin said.

"Fine.  What's going on?"

Through the windows of the feed store Ben could see the police
shuffling around inside.  One of the local TV reporters stood on the
far curb, pert as a robin, while her cameraman prowled, looking for the
perfect angle.

"It's pretty bad," Marvin said.  His lips were purple from his
Popsicle.  "Some old woman was sleeping in there, and they shot her."

"Who shot her?"

"Nobody knows.  Fuckin' world we live in, huh?"

"So is she still in there?"

"No, they took her out.  They had a blanket over her.  But apparently
whoever did this, not only did they blow her face off, they also busted
both her hands with a hammer."  Ben turned away.  Sirens wailed in the
distance.  Marvin took a long noisy slurp on his grape Popsicle to keep
it from dripping.  "So, I hear you're movin'.  Sounds like a good time
to do it."

When Ben came into the house, everyone was already sitting down for
supper.  The three of them all looked up at him, waiting for him to say
something.  His mouth was dry and chalky, incapable of language.  The
overhead fan spun slowly overhead; a bouquet of fresh flowers adorned
the table.  What a frail vessel a family was, he thought.  He swung his
briefcase onto the chair next to the bookcase.

"So I guess you heard," Katy said.

"I just did," Ben said.  "You guys okay?"

Matt nodded and Abby rolled her eyes.  "We're fine," Katy said.  "You
sit down and I'll get you a plate."

She got up and went into the kitchen.  Ben took his place at the head
of the table and shook out his napkin, scrutinizing his children: his
son cutting his meat, his daughter fiddling with her ring.  For a
second it struck him that it was a scene out of Father Knows Best.

"Sort of scary, isn't it?"  he said.  "Listen, I know it's a terrible
thing, but the police are going to find out who did this."

"She was just a poor old woman, Dad," Abby said.  "Why would anyone do
something like that?"

"I don't know," he said, not looking at her, because of course he did
know.  He felt his son's clear-eyed gaze on him, his son who believed
everything he said.  It was his daughter who needed to question
everything.  "These things do happen."

"But this was so close," Abby said.

"I know," he said.  "But it's not as if somebody's going to be coming
down the street murdering people."

"How do you know that?"

"Oh, come on, Abby!"

Katy came back with his plate and set it in front of him: steak,
twice-baked potatoes, and asparagus--the children's favorite meal. They
didn't have red meat often, but Katy felt it was important to have it
once in a while, to keep everyone's strength up.

His hands were shaking.  He kept them in his lap, out of sight, trying
to regain control.  He tried to tell himself that everything was the
same, that nothing had changed, it was still just the four of them
sitting down at a beautifully set table, the slanting late-afternoon
light coming in through the windows.  But it wasn't the same, because
he could still hear the old woman screaming at him, "Thief, thief!" and
when he shut his eyes for a second, he could see her red, blistered
face contorted by fear.

Ben took a bite of his potato and then he took two.  Abby, still
sulking over his reprimand, wasn't looking at him.  He sliced into his
steak and trimmed off the gristle.  Lying to the children had turned
his stomach to bile.  What if he blurted out the truth?  That none of
them was safe now, that their entire lives could be torn apart with a
single knock on the door five minutes from now, or ten.  He stared down
at his meat.  A thin pool of blood had gathered in the bottom of his
plate.  He rose from the table.

"Excuse me," he said.

He left the room and trotted quickly up the stairs.  He pulled the
bathroom door shut behind him and knelt over the toilet just in time.
He vomited in three long, choking heaves, and a yellow cloud mushroomed
in the clear water of the basin.  His nose stung and tears blurred his
eyes.  He sat on the floor, depleted, resting his head against the cool
white porcelain bowl.  A woman had died, a woman Ben had once given a
dollar to; she'd died because of what he had done and what he had not
done.  His passivity had just taken him over the line: he was now an
accomplice to murder.

After a moment he took a piece of tissue to blow his nose, cleaned it
of the tiny chunks of food, and then flushed the toilet.  He washed his
face and hands, then opened the bathroom door and stood for a moment on
the landing, gathering himself before facing his family.  He could
still taste the sourness in his mouth.

A little after nine that evening, he went out on the front porch.  Long
arms of colored light still flashed from squad cars three blocks away,
pulsing blue and red off the trees.  Small groups of neighbors huddled
together on their lawns, talking quietly together.  A seven-year-old
boy, plastic helmet strapped dutifully under his chin, rode his bike in
circles in the street as if it were a national holiday, as if there
would be no school in the morning.

The police had been down there for at least four hours.  What were they
looking for?  Ben had no idea what the police did in a real
investigation; all he knew was what he'd seen on television.  He
imagined them going over the feed store with a fine-tooth comb.  What
if they found his fingerprints?  But that was laughable.  He hadn't
been in the feed store for five months, surely any prints would have
been erased by dust and grime by now.  But maybe they'd find some fiber
from his coat.  He might have torn a sleeve on a nail, or something
might have fallen from his wallet when he'd taken it out to put the
four fifties in.

He didn't hear Katy come out on the porch and he started when he felt
her hand on his shoulder.

"You okay?"  she asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

"It's upsetting."

"I know."  The evening was pleasantly cool for early June and there was
a light breeze.  They stood silently together, husband and wife,
concealed in the deep shadows of the porch.  Packing boxes leaned
against the wall.  The scene surrounding the feed store was far enough
away that it looked as tiny and unreal as a boy's train set, but it was
brilliantly lit, as if they were shooting a commercial or a movie.

"I keep thinking about what it must have been like," Katy said.

"What what must have been like?"  Ben asked.

"For that poor woman."  She slipped her hand in his.  "We are so
lucky."

The murder was plastered all over the front page the next morning.  The
homeless woman's name was Audrey Davis and she'd been living on the
streets of Austin for seven years.  She'd grown up in a series of
foster homes in Oklahoma, had worked for a time for the phone company,
and had been institutionalized on and off for years.  The photo showed
her sitting cross-legged on the steps of a church, flanked by a couple
of her street cronies.  It was a strange picture.  Her face was all
screwed up as if she was either drunk or squinting into the sun, but
her left arm was raised over her head, the hand curved, the fingers
pressed together like a ballerina's, like a dim remembrance of grace.

Terry Rossi, the director of the Homeless Center, remembered her as a
troubled, fragile woman who loved animals and kept to herself.  "She'd
had a hard life, but if you were her friend she would give you the
shirt off her back."  A memorial service would be held on Friday and
contributions could be sent care of Ms.  Rossi at the Center.

Ben sat at the breakfast table staring at the article.  Whoever had
done this had gotten the wrong person and by now they must know that.
The house was silent; Katy had already gone for her walk.  Ben had the
use of the car for the morning so he could move several boxes of books
into his office.  Now he had another, more private task as well.  He
pushed his chair away from the table and patted his pockets to be sure
he had the keys.

The red brake lights of the white pickup ahead of Ben flickered as they
came down First Street.  The reaction of the thirty young men, mostly
Mexican, lined up along the curb was instantaneous.  Hands flew in the
air.  Some of the men whistled; others began to run toward the truck as
it pulled over.  Ben waited, watching as a dozen men crowded around the
window of the pickup, negotiating.  After a few seconds, two of the
younger ones leaped into the back, grinning and pulling their bandannas
over their mouths, and then hunkered down as the truck sped away.

Ben took the next left and came all the way around the block.  An old
man pushed a shopping cart filled with bags of crushed cans.  It was a
dicey neighborhood for parking.  The Homeless Center was lodged in one
of a dozen old warehouses and on the front steps a group of drunks dug
into a bin of old clothes, quarreling over a pair of boots.

Inside, a half dozen men sat waiting on benches.  One was asleep and
another sang softly in Spanish.  A large woman in a wheelchair pinned a
chalk drawing of a pink cat to the wall.  Pictures were everywhere, as
if they were getting ready for an art show.

"Can I help you?"  the woman in the wheelchair asked.

"I'm looking for Terry Rossi," Ben said.

"Her office is back there.  Last door on the right."

Ben walked down a narrow hallway, past a water cooler, past a series of
cramped offices.  His first job in New York had been with the welfare
department; this building had the same underfunded smell.

He peered into the last office on his right.  A small woman with curly
black hair crouched over her computer.  When Ben knocked, she
straightened up quickly.

"Yes?"

"Hi.  My name's Ben Lindberg."  She waited for more.  "My family and I
live in the neighborhood where the woman was shot yesterday.  I'd like
to make a contribution if I could."

"Please, sit down."

Ben took a seat carefully; an ominous-looking metal stud protruded from
the chair's frayed vinyl covering.  Every inch of wall space was in
use.  There were bumper stickers, newspaper articles, government
notices.  On Ms.  Rossi's desk was a tiny framed photo of a group of
women in front of a raft with their paddles, a raging river in the
background.

"You didn't know her?"

"I used to see her in the neighborhood.  And I spoke to her once."

"She wasn't an easy person.  But she had a sweetness too, once she
learned to trust you.  Sometimes she would write poems and give them to
me."  She closed her eyes for a second, pinching the bridge of her
nose.  "I'm sorry.  I'm just so tired of this.  I've worked in this job
for seven years.  And last night I counted it up, how many people I've
known here who've died.  Nearly a hundred.  A woman drowned while she
was sleeping in a culvert, three men burned to death in an abandoned
house because one of them owed somebody three dollars ..."

"The police must have spoken to you."

"Yes."

"Do they have any idea what happened?"

"No."  The intercom blatted, but she ignored it.  "Do you know what
they did before they killed her?  They broke both of her hands.  With a
hammer.  And then they shot her eight times."

Both of them were silent.  "The one time I spoke to her she accused me
of stealing something," Ben said.  She looked up at him with steady
brown eyes.  "Did she ever say anything to you about that?"

"You mean about you?  No.  She was always accusing people of taking
things from her ... her sleeping bag, her money, her shoes.  She would
come in here, she would be just furious.  It was usually when she
hadn't been taking her medicine.  Not that she was always wrong.  One
way to look at it, people took things from her, her whole life.
Apparently she had a child once.  She was working for the phone company
then, but she started drinking and lost her job, and then the county
came and took the baby away.  She never saw her kid again.  So don't
think it was just you."  She frowned, her eyes misting up again.

Ben took out his wallet, counting out four fifties and a hundred, and
set them on the desk.  "I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention this to
anyone," he said.

As he left, he walked down the steps and stared out across the lot for
the day laborers.  There were still a handful of men lined up along the
curb, but it was nine-thirty now and most of the jobs were gone.  A
majority of the men had retreated, some to sit on the benches under the
tin-roofed shelters, while others shared a bottle in the back of an
ancient van.

"Hey, mister!  You got any spare change?"

Ben turned.  A broad-shouldered drunk shambled toward him, his dirty
blond hair as matted as a Rastafarian's.

"Sorry," Ben said.  "I'm broke."

"Broke?  How can you be broke?  America is the richest country in the
world!"

The men gathered around the van were staring at them now.  A young
Mexican boy sitting under a tree rose to his feet.

"My name's Bobby.  What's yours?"  the drunk said.  Ben shook his head.
Traffic still droned down First Street.  From the far side of the lot a
half dozen men began walking toward them.  In another minute Ben would
be surrounded.  "I said, what's your name?"

Ben backed away.  "You take care."

"Take care?  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

A second group of men was coming from across the street.  One of them
had a towel over his head, and he tripped and nearly fell in his haste.
Ben waved his hands like a referee waving off a basket.

"No jobs," he said.  "No jobs."

CHAPTER 10

It took Ben five minutes to drive home.  He jogged up the porch steps,
opened the front door, and called Katy's name.  His voice echoed in the
empty house and then there was only the thunking of the dryer; she
wasn't back from her walk yet.

He got in the van and drove slowly through Stacey Park.  A young mother
pushed her toddler on the swings and a couple of fiftyish-looking men
in voluminous shorts swatted a tennis ball back and forth across a
sagging net.  Ben headed up the steep hill and turned right on Travis
Heights Boulevard, following Katy's usual route.

As much as he dreaded what he was about to do, it was better to get it
over with now, while the children were in school.  It would give them a
few hours to talk it all through, alone.  He tried to imagine what she
would think.  She wouldn't believe him at first, but when she did
believe him, what then?  He had always feared her anger.  Forgiveness
was not necessarily her first reflex, and this was not going to be an
easy thing to forgive.  He had always felt that their marriage could
survive anything; he was not convinced it could survive this.

Gregorian monks chanted softly on public radio.  Ben drove up and down
the streets of the neighborhood, but somehow Katy had eluded him.  He
turned toward home.  As he pulled up alongside the curb, the cat,
sitting on the front porch cleaning itself, lifted its head and, after
a second, flowed down the steps and loped over to the car.  Ben opened
his door and ran his hand over Dusty's arching back.

It was nearly ten; Katy should have been back by now.  She must have
stopped off at someone's house.  He could feel his resolve slipping
away.  He had screwed his courage to the sticking place in order to
confess, not just to sit out here wasting the morning.  The cat purred,
fidgeting under his touch.  Maybe what he should do was go in to
school, unpack the boxes of books, and come back.  He shoved the cat
gently away from the van, shut the door, and turned on the ignition.

He got a temporary pass at the guard station and was lucky enough to
find a parking place directly across from Parlin Hall.  He lifted one
of the boxes from the back of the van, then turned without looking to
cross the street, and nearly got himself run over.  There was a long
screech of brakes and the blast of a horn.  Ben stared stupidly,
clutching his carton of books.  Sweeney sat behind the wheel of his red
Bronco, shaking his head.  After a couple of seconds he lowered his
window.

"Nice move," Sweeney said.

"Hey."

Sweeney scrutinized him.  The clanking of metal, the banging of
hammers, filled the air.  In front of the main building a dozen workmen
disassembled the graduation bleachers.

"You all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You sure?  I hate to say it, Ben, but you look like shit."  Out of
nowhere, Ben's eyes filled with tears and he had to look away.  Not in
front of Sweeney.

"Get in for a second," Sweeney said softly.  "You can put the box in my
car."

"No, that's all right."

"Come on."

Sweeney leaned across the front seat and shoved open the door on the
passenger side.  Ben stood without moving for another second, utterly
lost.  Sweeney waited.  A truck from Buildings and Grounds pulled up
behind them, the driver tapping lightly on his horn.

"Maybe for a minute," Ben said.  Sweeney said nothing.  Ben walked
around to the passenger side, slid the carton of books in the back, and
then got up front.

They drove slowly past the architecture building, past a UT cop on his
scooter, making out a ticket, then took a right on Guadalupe.

"So is Katy okay?"  Sweeney said.

"She's fine."

"And the kids?"

"They're great."

It was a hazy June day, moist and warm as a bath, and Sweeney had the
air-conditioning going full-blast.  An old man in a battered cowboy hat
leaned against the wall of the Coop, strumming and singing, his empty
guitar case on the sidewalk in front of him.

Sweeney turned right on Twenty-sixth Street.  Ben rubbed at his eyes
with his thumb and forefinger.  Neither man spoke.  The story hung in
the chilled air, waiting to be told.  Ben knew Sweeney wasn't going to
let him out of the truck without some kind of explanation, and Ben was
too drained to invent one.

"So, did you see the papers this morning?"  Ben said.

"You mean about the woman they found in the feed store

"Yeah."  He leaned forward and turned the air conditioner down a notch.
"That's where I found it."

"What are you talking about?  Where you found what?"

"Where I found the money."

"In the feed store

Ben was quiet for a long time, knowing that he had done something
irrevocable, that there could be no going back.  "Yes."

Sweeney glanced over quickly, incredulous, to see if Ben could be
kidding, then saw that he wasn't.  "Well, mother fuck

Sweeney was the last person Ben should have told.  A day later, or even
an hour later, Ben might have said nothing, but now, still reeling from
the death of the old woman, it all came out, haltingly at first and
then in a fierce rush of self-loathing.

It was the first time Ben had ever seen Sweeney speechless.  His face
colored and he rubbed his arms, and occasionally he would utter a soft
curse --"Goddamn ..."  and "Good Christ ..."

The telling took twenty minutes and they were nearly to San Marcos by
the time Ben finished.  Sweeney drove one-handed, listening, his eyes
grave and intent.  He offered Ben a stick of cinnamon gum.  Ben shook
his head no.  Sweeney took a stick for himself, folding it before
putting it into his mouth.  He chewed slowly and looked over at Ben.

"So how much money are you talking about?"

"A lot."

"More than, say, a hundred thousand?"

"Yeah."

"And where is it now?"

Ben shook his head again.  He'd told Sweeney enough; he wasn't playing
Twenty Questions.  Sweeney balled up the foil from his gum, opened his
window a crack, and tossed it out, the faintest hint of irritation on
his pursed lips.  Billboards flashed by, advertising snake farms and
outlet malls.  Ben covered his face with his hands.

Sweeney slid off on the next exit, drove down under the bridge and then
back onto the highway on the other side, heading north toward Austin.
Neither man spoke, both lost in their own thoughts.  Clouds had started
to roll in from the west, and across the vast pastures Ben could see
cattle and a lone white horse grazing in shadow as well as in light; it
was like a scene painted by one of the Dutch masters.

"So what do you think of your old teacher now?"  Ben said.

Sweeney rolled his eyes.  "What are you going to do?"

"I was thinking of telling my wife."

"Jesus, Ben.  No offense, but you really can't do that."

"Why not?"

"What good is it going to do?  Why would you drag her into this?  It's
not her problem, Ben.  You'll just end up losing everything."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Absolutely nothing.  Just go about your business.  Go finish your
book.  You didn't kill that woman.  And nobody knows you've got the
money."

"Don't they?  What if she told them?  After they broke her hands."

"She was nuts.  No one would have believed her!"  There was a lot of
construction south of town and the road narrowed to a single lane.  Men
in orange vests and hard hats moved slowly among the barricades.  "Lie
low.  I'm going to help you."

"How?"

Sweeney leaned forward, both elbows on the steering wheel, stretching
out his back muscles like a big cat.  "I don't know yet."

That night on the ten o'clock news the police chief bridled at a
reporter's suggestion that the fact that the murder victim was a
homeless person might make some difference in the way they handled the
investigation.  There was also a brief, appalling clip of someone who
described herself as Audrey's best friend, a stout middle-aged woman
with bad teeth and heavily tattooed arms.  Halfway through the
interview she burst into tears.  "If they could do something like this
to Audrey, none of us are safe.  I'm scared, okay?  You don't know how
rough it is out here."

He dreamed that night that he heard something bumping up the stairs, a
dull squeaking.  In his dream, it woke him and he sat upright in bed,
listening until the sound stopped.  He rose and went into the dark
hallway and saw the wire shopping cart with the one bad wheel stationed
in front of Abby's bedroom.  He went to the door and looked in.  The
homeless woman sat on the bed, stroking the hair of his sleeping
daughter; her hand was bloody and broken.

Ben woke, whimpering, his heart racing.  Katy lay asleep next to him,
the air-conditioning sending a hush through the dark house.

Sweeney insisted that the four of them go out dancing at the Broken
Spoke for Rebecca's farewell party.  It was not clear that this was her
first choice, but Sweeney was determined to send her off with a real
Texas evening.

The Broken Spoke was old-time Austin, a throwback, a dump; the long
barnlike building with the wagon wheel out front looked as if it hadn't
been painted in forty years.  The music was in full swing when they
came in--a true country-western band with fiddles and accordion and a
square-jawed lead singer with his black cowboy hat pulled down almost
to his eyebrows.

A dozen dancers swirled across the sawdust floor.  There was one old
couple that was fantastic; the man must have been at least seventy,
stooped, and he was missing a hand; his wife looked like Dale Evans in
her yoked denim skirt with red bandanna appliques of coyotes and
cactus.  They never looked at each other, they never smiled, and he
backed her around the floor as if they were both on ball bearings.  The
other dancers were pretty much from the blue-jeans, cowboy-boots, and
white-shirts-with-the-sleeves-rolled-up crowd.

Ben found them a table and they all sat down and had a beer, watching
for a few minutes to get their courage up.  As the old couple swept by,
Ben caught a whiff of Old Spice.  Sweeney finally rose from his seat
and reached across for Katy's hand.

"Shall we?"

Rebecca and Ben followed Katy and Sweeney onto the floor.  Ben was
generally an acceptable dancer, but this was two-step and he didn't do
steps.  He and Rebecca did their best, but this was serious dancing,
and after a couple of songs they made their way by unspoken agreement
back to the table.

"I hope you don't mind," Ben said.

"No," Rebecca said.  "These really aren't the right shoes anyway."

The band launched into "Your Cheating Heart."  Ben stared out onto the
floor.  What Sweeney lacked in technique he made up for in energy, and
Katy was a great dancer; it didn't take her long to pick up what people
were doing.  She never looked more beautiful than when she was
dancing.

"So, how early in the morning are you leaving?"  Ben asked.

"I hope to get away by seven."

"And you're driving by yourself?"

"I'll be fine.  I love to drive.  And I'll have my dogs to keep me
company."

They fell silent for a moment, gazing out at the dancers like two old
chaperones.  Sweeney jigged across the floor, moon face beaming.  Maybe
it was just Ben's imagination, but from the first moment of the evening
he'd noticed a change in Sweeney, a new gallantry and confidence, a
sly, bright-eyed solicitude.  Ben could almost see him savoring the
secret that he and Ben now shared, rolling it across his palate like an
after-dinner mint.  Ben pressed his knuckles to his lips and then
turned, aware that Rebecca was watching him.

"You lucked out, didn't you?"  she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Your wife.  She's a wonderful person."

"She is."

Rebecca brushed a strand of hair from her face and took a swig of beer.
She wore a flowered sundress, her bare shoulders glistening in
reflected light.  "You know, you mean a great deal to Sweeney.  He
talks about you all the time."

"Really?"

"The right teacher at the right moment, it can change everything."  Out
on the dance floor Katy and Sweeney linked arms with a group of line
dancers.  Rebecca seemed sad.  There was a fineness to her features.
Ben could imagine there must have been a time, not long past, when
everyone fell in love with her.

"So it's okay between you two?"  he said.  "Your leaving and all?"

"It's fine."  She hesitated for a moment.  "He's a sweetheart, really,
but he's one of those people you don't ever want to say no to."

They both had their elbows up on the narrow table.  As she adjusted the
gold bracelets on her tanned arm, the back of her hand brushed against
his.  For a flickering paranoid second it crossed his mind that Sweeney
might have told her, but her smile was so rueful, her gaze so
unflinchingly candid, it didn't seem possible that anybody could have
been that good an actress.  The song ended.  A black-hatted fiddle
player dipped toward the microphone, taking his bow.  Katy and Sweeney
made their way back to the table.

Ben was leaning forward on a ladder, trying to work a screwdriver into
one of the intractable knots of rope that held up the porch swing, when
he saw the man making his way down the block.  The man stopped at every
house, rang the bell, talked a moment or two with whoever answered,
then moved on.  It was curious; at ten-thirty in the morning it was the
wrong time of day for encyclopedia salesmen or clean-air canvassers.
The man was middle-aged, slightly dumpy in his tan suit, and, judging
from the hitch in his walk, not that many months from his first hip
replacement.

The man raised a hand in greeting as he came across the lawn.
"Morning."

"Morning," Ben said.

The man squinted, surveying the packing boxes lined up on the porch and
the rolled-up rugs draped across them like exhausted serpents.  "Looks
like you're moving."

"That's right."

The man leaned over and retrieved a chewed-up rubber football from the
shrubbery below the porch.  He came slowly up the stairs and set the
ball gently in the blue crate filled with Matt's tennis rackets,
plastic swords, and old Frisbees.

"My name's Malcolm Hyde," the man said.  "I'm with the police
department."

Ben looked over his shoulder and wiped the sweat from his eye with his
forearm.  "Uh-huh."

"I'm going around the neighborhood to talk to people.  See if anybody
remembers anything about the night that old woman was killed.  Anything
out of the ordinary you might have heard or seen."

"No, I can't say that I do."

"No strange cars driving around the neighborhood ..."

"No."

Ben turned back to his work, twisting the screwdriver into the
rock-hard knot, then taking it out and trying to pry the swollen rope
loose with his fingers.  His heart was pounding.  The key was to stay
calm, not to give himself away.  There was no reason to believe the
policeman knew anything.  It was just routine, he was talking to
everyone.  Maybe Ben should offer him something cool to drink?  But no,
he didn't want to appear too anxious to please.

"You at the university?"  Hyde said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, you at the university?"

Ben glanced over his shoulder.  Hyde stood at an open boxful of
scholarly journals, running his finger across some back issues of The
New England Quarterly.

"Yes," Ben said.

Hyde smoothed a hand over his halo of wispy hair.  "You ever recall
seeing this old woman?"

"You mean the woman who was killed?"

"Yeah."

"I think maybe so.  Once in a while.  You'd see her up and down
Congress."

"And did you ever talk to her?"

Ben hesitated for a fraction of a second.  "No, not that I can
remember."

Hyde looked mournfully out at the street.  "So where are you moving?"

"Westlake."

"That'll be nice.  I hear the prices are pretty steep out there."

"I think they're pretty steep everywhere."

Hyde fished a blue spiral notebook out of his jacket pocket.  "And what
did you say your name was?"

"Lindberg.  Ben Lindberg."

"That with a g or a gh?"

"Just a g."  Ben clutched at the ladder with his left hand, suddenly
dizzy.

Hyde scrawled something on his pad and then stared at it, frowning.
"Uh-huh.  You the one that went by the Homeless Center and made the
contribution?"

"Yes," Ben said.

"That was nice," Hyde said.  He put the notebook back in his pocket.
"Well, good luck with your move."

CHAPTER 11

The plan had been to move early, before it got hot, but as always,
there was more to be dealt with than they realized: a refrigerator to
be cleaned out, counters to be washed, an ancient chest of drawers to
be carried over to the neighbors, last-minute boxes to be packed and
taped.  It was nearly twelve by the time they finished loading the
U-Haul, a quarter to one by the time they pulled into Rebecca's
driveway.

The kids were amazed.  Abby hopped out of the truck and ran around the
side of the house to stare at the bright blue pool.  "Matt, come
here!"

Ben got out, unlatched the back of the truck, and pulled down the ramp,
giving Matt time to look, too.  Abby turned back to them.

"Mom, there's a Jacuzzi!"

"Okay, you guys," Ben said.  "We need some strong backs here."

They had brought more than they needed.  Rebecca's house came fully
equipped; all they really would have had to bring was their clothes.
With everyone pitching in, it took them a little over an hour to
unload.  The children's excitement was contagious, irresistible.  They
were both delighted with their rooms and with the secret garden with
the fountain and the colored fish.

By the time Ben returned the U-Haul, picked up the van, and came back
again, the kids were already splashing in the pool.  Roberto stood on
the lawn, watching enviously.  It was one of the house rules--Rebecca's
or Zoila's, Ben wasn't sure--that Roberto, at three, wasn't allowed
near the water.

Ben climbed the stairs and found Katy hanging clothes in the bedroom
closet.  "So what do you think?"  he asked.

"I think it's wonderful," Katy said.  "Abby said she feels like she's
living in a fairy tale."

Ben walked out on the balcony.  The kids played Marco Polo at the far
end of the pool, the way they had when they were eight or nine.

For nearly twenty-four hours Ben had been berating himself.  He should
never have lied to the policeman about having spoken to the old woman.
There had been no reason to lie; he'd just panicked.  What if someone
had just happened to have been driving by when she'd been ranting at
him in front of the cleaners?  It was possible.  Or even more possible,
what if someone remembered her verbally assaulting him that afternoon
on The Drag, that time with Sweeney?  What was wrong with him?  It was
as if he was losing his grip, making one mistake after the other: going
to the Homeless Center, confessing to Sweeney, and now fumbling the
interview with the policeman.  He leaned forward on the balcony rail
and stared down at his children, healthy as young seals, plunging in
and out of the water, Abby accusing her brother of peeking.

Ben had tried to convince himself that he was blowing things out of all
proportion.  What were the odds, after all, of somebody seeing Audrey
Davis's face on TV and making the connection to a fleeting glance of a
woman panhandling on Congress Avenue three months before, and then
being concerned enough by it to call the police?  It was preposterous.
All the same, Hyde had been too alert.  The one thing Ben couldn't
erase from his mind was that Hyde had recognized his name, that he knew
Ben had gone to Terry Rossi to make a donation for Audrey Davis's
memorial.

That night Zoila made them lasagna for supper.  They ate in the dining
room under a huge dark painting of one of Rebecca's ancestors.  Matt
was convinced it was a king; he looked like a king in his white wig,
carrying a golden mace.  It felt quite thrilling and a little awkward
having someone serve them, and afterward Ben carried a stack of dirty
plates into the kitchen to find Roberto sitting on a stool in front of
the refrigerator eating alone.

The kids went in for another swim while Ben went upstairs to finish
unpacking his suitcase.  He paused at the bookshelves.  Rebecca had an
amazing array of titles: contemporary fiction, art books, photography.
There was even an entire shelf devoted to theology, and it wasn't New
Age stuff either, but some of the classics of Tillich, Niebuhr, Buber.
How in the world had a woman like Rebecca ended up with Sweeney?

Later, passing Matt's room, Ben looked in to see him lying on the bed,
absorbed in Nintendo, with Roberto, full diaper and all, lying on the
bed next to him.

It was nearly eleven-thirty by the time they got everyone in bed.  Ben
took a shower while Katy went downstairs to be sure the doors were
locked.  He ran the water until it was very hot, then let it pelt over
him.  When he was done, he found a thick soft towel of Rebecca's under
the sink to dry himself.  He pulled on a pair of shorts and gathered up
his dirty clothes.

As he opened the bathroom door he heard Katy call to him from the
balcony "Ben?"

"Yeah."

"Come here.  I want you to see something."

He tossed his clothes into the laundry basket and went to join her.  A
doe and her fawn grazed out by the pool.  In the silence, Ben could
actually hear the tearing of grass.  A single light shone up from deep
within the blue-green water.  The doe looked up for just a second, ears
alert, twitching, and then went back to grazing.

Katy took Ben's hand.  "So, are you still mad about being outvoted?"

"No," he said.  "I'm fine."

The following Monday, Ben showed up at Sweeney's condo a little before
noon.  Sweeney had just gotten up and was only half dressed, padding
around barefoot, wearing only a faded pair of jeans.  The place was a
mess--clothes tossed over the back of the furniture, a half-eaten
carton of Chinese food sitting on one of the mammoth speakers, an
eternal-wave machine rocking back and forth on the bookcase, the softly
roiling liquid a snow-cone blue.

Ben stood in the middle of the living room, his briefcase at his side,
while Sweeney rummaged through his closet.

"So how's the house?"  Sweeney asked.

"Everybody loves it."

"Great.  I've got this housewarming gift I want to give you."  Sweeney
scratched at his bare chest, flicking away some loose hairs.  "You all
right?"

"I'm fine."

Sweeney pulled a garish Hawaiian shirt from the closet and slipped into
it.  "You got something for me?"

"So, we're going to go on like this?  Business as usual?"

"Usual is always the best way."  Sweeney stared at him blankly.  "Why
wouldn't we?"

"I don't know."

Sweeney extended an open palm.  Ben sat down on the couch and unzipped
his briefcase.  He took out the tan mailing envelope, heavy with
fifty-dollar bills, and handed it to Sweeney.  Sweeney set the envelope
on the mantel, patted the pockets of his jeans, then went to his desk.
It took him a minute or two to locate his checkbook.

Sweeney pulled up a chair to write the check, his back turned to Ben.
The place smelled of day-old lo mein.  If they had been dealing in
dirty money before, it was really dirty now.  Ben got to his feet.  He
stared at the little roll of baby fat above Sweeney's collar; it was
like a bear's hump.  The idea came out of the blue; he found himself
wondering what it would take to go over and snap Sweeney's neck,
whether he would have the strength, whether he would have the will.

"So, have you been having any second thoughts?"  Sweeney said without
looking up.  The question caught Ben off guard.

"About what?"

"About talking to me.  Telling me what you did."

"No."

"You don't have to lie to me.  It would make sense if you did.
Something like this got out, it would be pretty terrible."

"Yes."

"I'm a jerk, but I'm not that big a jerk.  If there's one thing I've
learned in my life, it's how to keep my mouth shut."  Sweeney pivoted
in his chair and smiled, waving the blue check in his right hand. "Here
you go, man."

Ben took the check and stared at it for a minute.  "You said you were
going to help me," he said.  "What did you mean?"

"Oh, the other day?"  Sweeney shut the drawer to his desk.  "Right now,
the way I'm going to help you is to take you to this great fish taco
place for lunch."

He was, of course, supposed to be working on his book.  With the
decision about his tenure just a year away, it was crucial that he have
a submittable manuscript by the fall, but he'd found it nearly
impossible to focus.  After dealing with Sweeney day in and day out,
the world of high-minded transcendentalists rambling through the
Concord woods seemed as distant as Mars.

He'd struggled with the book for five years.  Its genesis was the most
remarkable stroke of beginner's luck: working in the Berg Collection at
the New York Public Library, he'd found a letter from Thoreau to an
unnamed woman, written on the back of one of his botanical studies.

Dear Sister,

I want to beg your forgiveness.  I have betrayed your faith in me.  For
all these months your gentle spirit has been my morning star.  My
misanthropic soul has opened and grown tender under the soft rains of
your friendship.  At times I could no longer tell where you ended and I
began.  I know I have destroyed that with one rash act.  Be assured
that I will never speak of this to anyone.  I was your brother and now
I am nothing.  God have mercy on me.

Though the woman wasn't named, it scarcely seemed necessary.  There was
only one real possibility: Lidian Emerson, the wife of Thoreau's great
mentor.  The affection between the two was scarcely news, but the
standard interpretation was that it was entirely Platonic.  The only
dissenter, a critic from the thirties, was roundly scoffed at when he
declared that "Thoreau was what the common man would call in love with
Emerson's wife."  But he'd had no ammunition.

Ben had the ammunition.  The afternoon he found the letter, sitting at
a grime-slicked table with great Bierstadt-like shafts of light pouring
in through the high library windows, he stared at it for a half hour
without moving.  He'd stumbled onto the Comstock lode.  The letter cast
the Emerson-Thoreau friendship and eventual estrangement in an utterly
new light.  The book that was going to come out of this looked like a
slam dunk.

The argument, which he was able to virtually outline in his head that
first afternoon, was a simple one.  In the early years of Thoreau's
writing life, everything good that had come to him had come through the
older man's generosity.  It was Emerson who took him under his roof
when he was penniless, who pressed editors to publish his work, who
bought the tract of land adjoining Walden Pond and allowed Thoreau to
build his famous cabin there.  Thoreau, in return, was a fervent and
dutiful disciple ("Emerson's shadow," James Russell Lowell called him),
adopting his mentor's ideas, his manner of speaking, even his walk.

Over time, inevitable tensions began to surface --Emerson's
disappointment in Thoreau's early writing, his exasperation over the
young man's prickliness ("As for taking T."s arm, I should as soon take
the arm of an elm tree ...")-but the real breach didn't occur until
1847, when Emerson went abroad, leaving Thoreau in charge, acting as
surrogate husband and father to his wife and three small children.

Thoreau thrived in the role, roughhousing with the children in the
evening (like Sweeney, he seemed to have a full repertoire of party
tricks, making a book disappear only to pull it out of young Eddy's
nose seconds later), tending Lidian when she was ill, helping plant the
spring garden.

When Emerson returned after eight months to take up his old place as
head of the household, things were not the same between the two men. 
It would have been natural for Thoreau to feel some twinges of
jealousy. The Big Dog had come back to claim his kennel, with stories
of the high life in London and Paris (emerson had picked up his share
of English manners, including the ritual of the after-dinner cigar),
and what was Thoreau supposed to do?  Slink off into the woods again? 
He had come to love Emerson's children; he had great fondness for
Lidian; America's most famous solitary had found more pleasures in
domestic life than he'd ever imagined possible.

The two men were never able to recapture their old intimacy.  Each
complained about the other in their journals.  Emerson on Thoreau: "He
wants a little ambition in his mixture.  Fault of this, instead of
being the head of American Engineers, he's the captain of a huckleberry
party."  Thoreau on Emerson: "While my friend was my friend he
flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became
my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow."

Who could have guessed that what lay at the bottom of it all was as
simple as sexual betrayal?  It was classic, straight out of Sophocles
or Freud or Harold Bloom: the need to destroy the father.  The article
Ben published in The New England Quarterly a year after his discovery
created a furor.  The traditionalists were incensed, the Young Turks
filled with glee.  A half dozen editors called, putting their bids in
to see the finished manuscript.

Ben's problem, five years later, was that he had lost faith in his
evidence.  Did he actually believe that Thoreau and Lidian Emerson had
slept together?  There were, after all, other rash acts besides the
sexual one; there were other ways to betray people's trust besides
seducing them.  Lidian Emerson was forty-five, fifteen years older than
Thoreau; had borne four children and buried one of them; was a sad,
strange woman in black who fed the rats in her house for fear they
might go hungry, and who burst into tears over her husband's supposedly
spiritual friendship with Margaret Fuller.

Ben had played the scene backward and forward so many times, trying to
convince himself that it could really have happened: Thoreau swinging
the children on his arms and then putting them to bed, coming
downstairs to find Lidian in the drawing room, reading her husband's
latest letter (he hadn't written nearly as often as she'd hoped) about
his dinner with Thomas De Quincey and Sir Walter Scott.  The house
would have been still, the only sounds the ticking of the clock, the
pop and rustle of the fire in the fireplace.

He tried to imagine the author of Walden coming up behind her chair,
putting a hand on her shoulder.  (now, if it had been Sweeney, Ben
could imagine it all too easily!) He tried to conjure up the surprise
on her face as Thoreau touched her gray hair coiled up in a twist, held
by a single ornate comb.

Ben found it preposterous.  One could make the case, just the way you
could make the case that Jefferson had children by his slave mistress,
that Melville beat his wife, or that Hemingway was impotent, but what
was the point?  To make a stir?  To publish a book he didn't believe
in? He'd struggled to make the manuscript less reductive, but that only
led him into the murk; the reality was that the more reduced the
argument, the more pithy and striking it was.  The enterprise had come
to disgust him.  He'd lost his appetite for scandal, for exposing
another man's shame.

For the first time in his life, Ben was a true hero to his wife and
kids.  It wasn't just the pool or the incredible views or the fact that
life was so much easier with no beds to make, no laundry or dishes to
be done; it was something more, some sense that they were all being
taken care of, some sense that life contained possibilities they had
never before imagined.

Their first weekend in the house they invited the Stricklands out for a
barbecue.  Ben had to run to the store for some last-minute items and
when he returned, everyone was already gathered around the pool with
their drinks.  Tom Strickland rose to greet him, spreading his arms
wide: "Il padrone!"

It felt as if they'd just won the lottery.  The kids had their friends
over to swim in the afternoon, and it seemed as if they were having
people over for dinner almost every other night.  With Zoila to help,
it was a lot easier to entertain.

The only one who had any trouble adjusting was Dusty, their cat, who
was intimidated by Rebecca's parrot.  It was a formidable bird; not
only could it squawk and hiss, it could also bark like a dog, imitate a
doorbell, and call for tea.  Dusty ran away twice.  The first time they
found her trotting along the road nearly a mile from the house, as if
she was determined to walk all the way back to South Austin, and the
second time they found her cowering in a storm drain.

Katy was happier than Ben had seen her in years.  Something had been
liberated in her.  He could hear it in her voice when she talked to her
mother and her sister on the phone, insisting that they had to come and
visit their new home.  Suddenly it was as if there was breathing space
in their lives.  Several times she and Ben went walking along the road
at night.  There was no traffic, and the only lights were the lights on
the radio towers a couple of miles off.  The only sounds were the
crunch of gravel under their feet, the occasional rustling of birds in
the cedar, the distant barking of a dog.

Yet at the same time Katy knew something was not right with Ben.  She
was so attuned to his moods that it was nearly impossible to hide.  He
had more and more trouble sleeping and was uncharacteristically short
with the children.  At first she thought the problem was the house,
that he was uncomfortable living in such luxury.  "Maybe I'm just more
materialistic than you," she said.  "I'm a more superficial person."

No, he said, it wasn't that.  It was just that there had been so much
disruption in their lives; he needed to get back to his work.

Every day he scrutinized the papers, but the story of Audrey Davis's
murder had been replaced by more recent atrocities: a policeman who'd
stopped to help a stranded motorist and been run down by a drunk
driver, a gunman taking a child hostage at a day-care center.

Ben bought a car.  For Katy to drive him in every morning and then pick
him up again every afternoon was madness, so for five hundred dollars
he purchased a ten-year-old Cutlass that he found in the ads in the
paper.  When he brought it home Abby was mortified.  She swore that she
was never riding in it, ever; she would die first.  Ben didn't argue.
The car was not a beauty.  The upholstery on the ceiling sagged, the
windshield was cracked, and the roof and hood looked as if they'd spent
too many nights under flocks of roosting grackles, but all Ben needed
was something to get around in.  It solved any number of problems.

Having the eight coolers hidden in Dick's office worked out better than
he could have imagined.  It was reassuring to be able to walk past
three or four times a day, just to calm his fears.  He had mentioned to
several of his colleagues that he would be using the office as a
hideaway, a place to get his writing done.

Every other day at eight in the morning, when the building was
virtually deserted, he would come in and pack one hundred thousand
dollars in a Kinko's box and slip the box into his ragged, ink-stained
briefcase.

It took only four or five minutes.  The key was not to rush, not to get
clumsy and make a lot of noise.  The walls were thin.  When the phone
rang in the Africanist's office next door, Ben could hear the message
on the answering machine as clear as a bell.  Sometimes, while he
counted out the stacks of fifties and hundreds, he would hear students
laughing as they passed beneath his window.  Leaving the office, he
would walk quickly across campus to his car, the strap of his overladen
briefcase cutting into his shoulder, stopping for no one, waving to the
departmental secretaries as they plodded up the hill, nursing their
morning coffee.

He never went to the same bank twice.  He used Bank One, Texas
Commerce, Cattleman's, Franklin and Frost, driving his sputtering
Cutlass as far out as Dripping Springs, Georgetown, and Taylor.  The
first couple of times it was terrifying to walk up to a strange bank
(they all seemed to have planters full of red geraniums out front and a
Texas flag snapping on a flagpole), but he soon came to realize that he
had nothing to fear.  What reason did they have to suspect him?  He was
a middle-aged white man with pleasant manners.  All they wanted for
identification was a driver's license.  Often there were duck-hunting
prints on the wall.  He would fill out the forms, chatting with the
bank officer about the weather, and then she would take him back to the
vault.

In the larger banks, the safety deposit boxes were located in their own
sealed-off rooms, but in others all that separated the vault from the
lobby was a simple metal gate.  The safety deposit boxes all had two
keys, one for him, one for the bank.  The bank officer would unlock her
lock and then leave him to conduct his business in private.

During the first three weeks of June, Ben secreted one million dollars
in safety deposit boxes in ten banks scattered across three counties.
He was as busy as a squirrel getting ready for winter, the Johnny
Appleseed of cash.  Yet he had emptied, in its entirety, only one of
the eight coolers and part of a second.  He kept the ten keys for the
ten safety deposit boxes in a small brown envelope in his desk at his
office.

They kept getting calls for Rebecca.  There was the woman with the
heavy German accent who phoned to say that Peter DeVries had died and
there would be a memorial service in Connecticut; she was sure that
Rebecca would want to know.  There was the famous playboy English
publisher who happened to be in town for the night and was hoping
Rebecca was free for the evening, and there was a very pissed-off
housepainter whom Rebecca still owed eight hundred dollars.

There were also the hang-up calls.  Not a lot, maybe one every two or
three days, but enough to make Ben wonder.

Katy kept asking when they were going to have Sweeney over for dinner,
for Ben please to remember to ask him, and when Sweeney finally came
over on a Saturday night three weeks after they'd moved in, Katy really
put on the dog.  She baked her grandmother's cream cake and drove to
Central Market to pick up a whole Alaskan salmon that had been flown in
fresh that day.

They ate out by the pool, and Sweeney was at his most charming.  He had
seconds of everything and entertained them all with tales of his
escapades in the music business.  When he casually mentioned that he'd
once met Elton John, Abby was dumbstruck.

"You did?"  Her eyes were wide as saucers.

"Yeah, but it was no big deal.  This friend of mine was one of their
sound men and he had me come backstage and we talked for maybe two
minutes.  And you know what he wanted to talk about?  Fishin'!  Can you
believe it?  He wanted to know about fishin' in Texas."

"And what was he like?"  Reflections from the candles shimmered on the
pool.  Ben sipped slowly on his wine, the taste faintly bitter as he
watched his wife and daughter lean forward in their chairs, utterly
transfixed.  He saw something tonight he hadn't really seen before:
behind all Sweeney's joking around, the country-boy shtick, a true
malevolence.... "Sort of a weird little guy, to tell you the truth.  I
hate to bother you, Katy, but could I have a sliver more of that
cake?"

"Of course."

"It's got to be about the best thing I ever put in my mouth."  Ben
watched as Katy cut the cake; the piece she laid on Sweeney's plate was
big enough to strangle a horse.  "And what do you think of him?"

"I think he's a genius," Abby said.

"A genius!"  Sweeney said.  Sweeney gave Ben a wink, reaching across to
give him a playful punch on the arm.  "Your father's the one who's the
genius!"

Car lights bouncing up the driveway made them all turn.  A horn sounded
and Abby got up from her chair.  "I guess that's Kim."

"You've got your keys?"  Katy said.

"Mom, I'm fine."  Abby turned to Sweeney, her face shining.  "It was
nice talking to you."

Sweeney bounded to his feet, a real gentleman.  "It was nice talking to
you.  So don't have too wild a time out there tonight."  Abby could
only continue beaming, not knowing what to say.  Sweeney remained
standing, watching her as she skipped down the walk to the house.  "So
how old is she?"

"Thirteen," Katy said.

"Thirteen."  He shook his head.  "My God, is she going to break some
hearts!"

They waited while Sweeney polished off his cake, then gathered up the
dishes, snuffed out the candles, and went inside.  Katy put on the
water for coffee while Sweeney went to use the bathroom.  Ben scraped
the plates, stacking them in the sink.  His fingers smelled of
salmon.

"Is something wrong?"  Katy asked.

"No.  Why?"

"You seem out of sorts."

"I'm just a little tired."  The parrot eyed them warily from his
cage.

"You're not mad at me?"

"I'm not mad."

"Ben, it's something ..."

They heard the toilet flush in the hall bathroom.  Ben opened the door
to the dishwasher and pulled out the top rack.

"Just leave all that," she said.  "We can get it later."

When Sweeney returned they went into the living room.  Sweeney rummaged
through the liquor cabinet, found a bottle of Drambuie, and then got
down three of Rebecca's brandy glasses.  He poured a glass for himself
and one for Katy.  Ben passed.  Sweeney sprawled on the big yellow
couch, making himself at home.

Katy asked about the photographs scattered around the room, who the
people were, and before they knew it Sweeney was launched on Rebecca's
entire life story: her brilliant roue father and her futile attempts to
win his approval, her various marriages and liaisons.  At one time or
another, Sweeney claimed, her romantic entanglements had included a
high-ranking member of Parliament, the star of the national cricket
team, and an American television commentator.

"But what about your family?"  Katy asked.

"My family?"  Sweeney waved the question away as if it were beneath
consideration.

"No, I want to know."

"I've already told Ben."

"But you haven't told me.  Tell me about your father."

Sweeney leaned forward and refilled his brandy glass with Drambuie.
"You want to know about my father?  I'll tell you the story about my
father.  I've never even told Ben this one.  Houston.  Summertime.  I
was thirteen years old, just Abby's age.  My mother had been sick, so
she and my little sister were in Arkansas where my aunt could take care
of them.  For the first time in my life it was just me and my dad and I
was lapping it up.  He'd been in and out of the family for years, on
the road a lot, and I just followed him around like a little dog, going
out on the job, carrying his toolbox.

"One day we went by this rich lady's place, this mansion across the
street from Rice.  She was married to some doctor and they'd just moved
down from the north.  It was their first summer in Houston and she was
hysterical.  Big barn of a house and all they had in it was window
units.  I mean, they were dying.

"As soon as we walk into the place I could see the dollar signs going
off in my father's head.  This place had everything--Tiffany
chandeliers, marble statues, stained-glass windows with the family
seal--everything except central air.  We took the tour, checking out
the vents.  My father started joking around with her.  She was not that
old.  Sort of pretty in this shiny wax-doll way.  Every time he made a
suggestion about what needed to be done she would go, "Uh-huh, uh-huh,"
as if it was no problem at all.  He got her laughing--he was a totally
charming guy when he wanted to be--and whenever she looked the other
way he would give me a wink like, do we have ourselves a pigeon here or
not?  Pigeons were what he used to call them when he found somebody who
would pay our rent for a couple of months.

"Then he told me, "Danny, we're going to have to do something to keep
this poor lady from asphyxiating.  I'm going to have to go check up in
the attic.  Why don't you take the car and go get some lunch?"

"I was like, God!  I was thirteen.  He'd never let me drive before,
unless it was in somebody's pasture.  "Give me a couple of hours," he
said.  "Get yourself a magazine, get a nice booth, and sit up in the
cool for a while until I figure this one out.  You can bring me back a
malt and a burger."

"He gave me the keys and twenty dollars.  I walked out of there so
proud.  We had a red '57 Cadillac.... Whether we were in the chips or
not, my father believed in driving a good-looking car.  When I got
behind the wheel I could barely see over the dash; I hadn't gotten my
growth yet.  I must have driven down that road about seven miles an
hour.  When I saw somebody coming up behind me I'd just pull over to
the curb and let them pass.  People must have thought I was crazy."

Sweeney stopped for a second to take a sip of his Drambuie.  He was
telling the story almost as if he thought it was funny, but nobody
thought it was funny, not at all.  Ben looked over at Katy, who was
hunched forward in her chair, listening intently.

"I drove up the avenue to this place where my father and I used to go.
They had the thickest malts in town.  The problem was, there was this
huge line, twelve million Chinese guys with slide rules in their
pockets; there must have been a physics convention or something.  The
lady said there would be a forty-five-minute wait.  I didn't know what
to do.  My father had said for me to take my time, but I didn't think
he meant that much time, so I went to the takeout window and ordered
two malts, two burgers, and some fries.  It was the best day of my
life.  I had wheels, I had two big creamy malts in my hands, my father
was going to score this major job and pay off all our bills.  God bless
air-conditioning, I was thinking.  Houston--air-conditioning capital of
the world!

"I drove back to the house.  When I went inside, there didn't seem to
be anybody around.  I called out, but there wasn't any answer.  I
looked in the kitchen.  Nobody there.  Living room.  Nothing.  I
started up the stairs with the carton of food in my hands, trying not
to spill anything.  It was sweltering hot in that house and a little
scary; big smooth banisters and pictures of men in black suits on the
walls.  I thought maybe my dad might still be up in the attic, but I
couldn't figure out where the woman might have gone.

"Then, on the second floor, I saw the door partially open to this
little maid's room and I saw my father's work boots sitting on the rug.
When I took a step closer, I could see the cot and I could see my
father's feet.  He still had his socks on and there was a hole in one
of them.  Funny what you remember, isn't it?  I'll always remember that
little hole.  Pink little dime of flesh.  I could see his toes digging
into the mattress and I could see her white knees waving back and
forth.  There I was, thirteen years old, holding the best malts in
Houston.  I could hear the rattling of one of those old window units
and once in a while I could hear her moaning.  Sweat was stinging my
eye, but my hands were full, I couldn't touch it.  I tried to wipe my
face on my shoulder, but I must have banged against something.  All of
a sudden he was on his feet, scrambling to pull up his pants and coming
at me.  Screaming.  "What are you doing, sneaking up on me, boy?  What
the hell do you think you're doing?"  With one hand he was holding his
trousers and with the other he whacked me across the face and then it
all went--malts, hamburgers, fries--all over the lady's rug...."

"And what did you do?"  Katy said.

"I should have killed him."

"But what did you do?"

"Nothing.  He paid me to keep quiet.  Five dollars a week."  He waggled
his hand as if trying to wave it all away.  "You asked me, right?"

"Yes," she said.  "I asked you."

Sweeney locked his fingers behind his head.  "So, are you loving it
here?"

"We are," Katy said.  She was flushed now and upset.  "I don't know if
Ben's enjoyed it as much as I have ..."

"Oh?  And why is that?"

"I guess I'm just a more superficial person.  It's so beautiful here.
He's not so interested in physical things."

Sweeney took a sip of his Drambuie and set down his glass.  "Don't
worry, we're going to loosen him up."

CHAPTER 12

Sweeney started to show up a lot--not every day, not even every other
day, but a lot.  He had a knack for appearing just at dinnertime, and
two or three times he came out to swim.  Once, he came by with a litter
of basset hound puppies he wanted to show the kids, and once, he
arrived with a huge tray of Mexican food from the restaurant, all
wrapped in silver foil.

As far as the kids were concerned, Sweeney was just part of the family.
He played Prince of Persia on the computer with Matt and argued with
Abby over who was the most beautiful of all the supermodels.  He would
stand in the kitchen with Zoila and Katy, grating cheese and making
them laugh with his endless stories.  Katy was like a mother to him.
One afternoon Ben came home to find him stretched out on the bed,
chatting while Katy folded the laundry.

He had fastened onto the family like a bloodsucker.  Sweeney seemed, at
times, almost pathetically eager for something resembling normal life.
He was full of plans for them all; he had a friend named Also Jackett
who had a beautiful ranch an hour west of town, and Sweeney was
determined to get them out to see it.  He was constantly trying to sit
down with Ben for earnest discussions, and every time Ben suggested a
book--Trilling's The Liberal Imagination or D. H. Lawrence's Studies in
Classic American Literature--Sweeney would be back in three days, ready
to talk about it.

What were his motives?  Ben had spent hours thinking about this.  Ben's
taking him into his confidence was without doubt the most flattering
thing that had ever happened to Sweeney.  He had become the family's
protector, all that stood between them and ruin.  He clearly loved the
idea of himself as the stalwart friend, but he was human too, he had
his own appetites.

Ben knew the time would come when Sweeney would start asking what was
in it for him.  Ben hadn't told him how much money was involved and it
was no doubt good that he hadn't, but that just made it that much more
tantalizing; he knew how Sweeney's imagination could run.  It was an
inherently untenable situation.  What Ben needed was for Sweeney to
remain silent forever, and how likely was that?  One word to anyone--to
Katy, to one of the bartenders at the club, a drunken brag to a girl
after a couple of margaritas--and everything would become a disaster.

Sweeney had said he would help and yet he had never told Ben how he
would help.  In his darkest moments it occurred to Ben that Sweeney
might be deliberately delaying the moment to make Ben suffer, to make
him beg.

They were the rankest of amateurs when it came to dealing with
servants.  Ben had to admit there was a certain awkward pleasure in
coming down every morning and having Zoila serve him tea and toast
while he read The New York Times, but it also offended every democratic
bone in his body.

Zoila did a good job.  It was a matter of some pride to her.
Unfailingly polite and good-natured, she got along with everyone in the
family and, in spite of the lack of a common language, they all found
their own ways to communicate.  Abby would carry Roberto around on her
hip and Matt would play a version of Ping-Pong with him in the yard,
tossing the ball softly to him and letting him swing wildly at it.
Roberto missed most of the time, but every so often he'd swat it into
the flowers.

Yet there was always a gulf.  When guests came over, Roberto would be
confined to the kitchen while the rest of them swam and splashed in the
pool.  At night Zoila and Roberto would go to their bedroom and close
the door while the rest of them had the run of the house, watching
television, reading, playing hearts around the kitchen table. Sometimes
Ben, passing down the hall, would hear the radio in Zoila's room,
turned down low, playing Mexican music.  Once a week Ben would put five
twenties in an envelope for her, always finding a way to give it to her
when no other members of the family were around, as if there were
something implicitly shameful about the transaction.

She had Sundays off and her uncle would come pick her up.  He lived in
a housing project in East Austin and the ancient Ford Fairlane he drove
was in worse shape than Ben's Cutlass.  He never came to the house. His
routine was to park out on the road, and sometimes in the evening when
he brought her back they would stand out by his car and talk for an
hour.

This arrangement bothered Ben.  Several times he nearly said something.
There was no reason the uncle couldn't come up to the house, unless
this was something they'd worked out with Rebecca.  Ben, after all, was
new to this; he didn't want to upset the apple cart.  But he didn't
like it, this being comp licit in a drama he didn't remember
auditioning for, this waking up on Sunday mornings, looking out the
window of the second-story bedroom to see the uncle waiting patiently
on the road as the early-morning light crept down through the cedars.

One night he dreamed of Walden.  In his dream, he stood in the snow
outside Thoreau's cabin just before dawn, and there were foxes barking
deep in the woods.  He knocked several times and when there was no
answer, he finally cracked open the door and peered in.  Several books
lay open on the simple writing desk, embers still smoldered in the
fireplace, the bed was still unmade, but there was no one.

He turned finally and spied tracks in the snow leading down to the
pond.  He followed the tracks down through the white pines.  An owl
hooted softly from the boughs overhead.  It was bitterly cold.

A lantern glowed far out on the frozen pond.  As Ben drew closer, he
saw a figure squatting over a hole in the ice.  Ben began to walk
faster, his rubber boots squeaking on the snow.  When Ben got within
ten feet, the man finally glanced up.  It was Thoreau--he looked just
the way he looked in all the old daguerreotypes, with strong features,
a piercing gaze, and a slightly misshapen beard.  A heavy woolen cap
covered his ears and came down so low it nearly reached his eyebrows. 
He smiled, almost as if he'd been expecting Ben.

Thoreau held one end of a slender cord that disappeared into the black
water of the raggedly cut hole.  Ben knew perfectly well what it was: a
sounding line.  Thoreau was mapping his pond.

Ben crouched on his haunches, balling his hands tight inside his
mittens.  His toes ached from the cold, but he was so excited.  There
were so many things he wanted to ask, but he didn't want to disturb
him.  Scholarship didn't matter now--books, articles,
citations--nothing mattered as long as he was allowed to sit here.  It
was the happiest moment in Ben's life.

Thoreau kept pulling the sounding line up, hand over hand, letting it
coil at his feet.  It seemed as if it had been going on forever.  Maybe
Thoreau had been wrong; maybe Walden was one of those bottomless ponds
after all.

Thoreau turned and gestured to him.  When Ben hesitated, Thoreau
gestured again, somewhat crossly, motioning him to come look.  Ben rose
and went to his side.  Thoreau pointed down into the hole.

Ben couldn't see anything at first; the water was too dark.  He got
down on his knees, both hands on the ice.  From up close, the water was
remarkably clear, tinted a faint green.  Thoreau kept pulling, the cord
sawing across the sharp edges of ice.

Finally Ben saw what Thoreau intended him to see.  Clinging to the
stone at the end of the sounding line was the old woman.  She was not
alive.  If anything, she looked frozen, her eyes open but lusterless
and vacant as a pike's, but somehow that hadn't loosened her grip as
she trolled upward in the sacred water, her Mardi Gras beads drifting
around her neck like eels.

The next morning, Ben left the house before eight and drove in to the
university.  Crossing campus, the only people he saw were a couple of
maintenance men fooling with some sprinklers and the owners of the
Korean egg-roll stand setting up in front of the fountain.

The empty halls of Parlin smelled of fresh wax.  He let himself into
Dick's office and switched on the light.  He'd done this so many times
by now he was nearly as quick and efficient as a meter reader; it took
him less than ten minutes to move the cartons of books, count out the
forty packs of fifty (fifty to a pack, one hundred thousand total) and
tape them securely inside two Kinko's boxes.  He put the Kinko's boxes
in his briefcase and zipped it shut.

A new Cattlemen's Bank had just opened in Lockhart.  If the traffic
wasn't backed up, he could get down there, have the money in a safety
deposit box, and be back at work by ten-thirty.  He shoved the cartons
of books into their original positions and draped the rolled-up rug
artfully across them.

Leaving the office, he instinctively looked both ways.  The only thing
moving in the hallway was a Study Abroad notice on a distant bulletin
board, blowing softly in the air-conditioning.  Ben pushed out the
double doors into the muggy summer morning, hustled down the stairs,
and, as he turned the corner, nearly knocked Sweeney down.

Sweeney staggered back a step, putting a hand out to catch himself.
"Jesus Christ!"  he said.  In his sunglasses, cutoffs, and flip-flops,
his hair wild, Sweeney looked as if he'd just emerged from an all-night
luau.  "What are you doing here?"

Ben hefted his briefcase back onto his shoulder.  "I was just heading
over to the library, see if I could get some work done.  What about
you?"

"Me?"  Sweeney rubbed at his nose.  A dead grackle lay under one of the
bike racks, swarming with ants.  "I was supposed to meet somebody for
breakfast, but it looks as if they stood me up."

Ben stared at Sweeney.  What a glib bastard, he thought.  "So who was
that?"

"Who was what?"

"Who was it you were supposed to meet for breakfast?"

Sweeney put his fist to his mouth and belched softly.  "Just some lady.
It's not a big deal.  She said she needed somebody to talk to ... you
know.  Listen, you got time for a cup of coffee?"

"I should probably get to work."

Sweeney reached out and gave Ben's briefcase a thump with his fist. "So
this is it, huh?"

Ben felt all the blood drain instantly from his face.  "What?"

"The opus.  The magnum fucking opus."

"Yeah," Ben said, trying to recover.

Sweeney sucked at his teeth, regarding him quizzically.  "Tell you
what," he said.  "I've got nowhere to go.  Let me walk you down to the
library."

There was no real way to say no.  They headed down the hill together,
Sweeney's flip-flops slapping on the sidewalk as he rattled on about
how baseball had gone to hell.  It was all those expansion teams, he
said, every two-bit second baseman was on track to break Ruth's
record.

Ben was still having trouble breathing.  He didn't for a second believe
the story about Sweeney meeting someone for breakfast.  What was the
truth, then?  Had he been following Ben?  Or worse yet, maybe he hadn't
been following him, maybe he'd been on his way to Dick's office to
empty the place out.  As they crossed the street, a bicyclist whooshed
down on them and Sweeney grabbed Ben by the elbow to keep him from
being run over.

They stopped in front of the library.  Sweeney seemed in no hurry to
leave.  For a moment Ben thought Sweeney intended to follow him into
the library.  A student in a knee brace sat on a low wall watching
them, smoking a cigarette.  Pigeons strutted in wide circles before the
newspaper racks.

"So, you working all day?"  Sweeney said.

"We'll see."

Sweeney bent down and scooped an Arby's two-for-one coupon off the
concrete.  "Whatever.  Good writing, all right?"

Ben went in through the revolving doors and then stood for a few
seconds, watching through the tinted glass as Sweeney slouched off. The
guard at the turnstile dozed, a paperback mystery propped on his lap. 
When Sweeney reached the curb he stopped and looked back over his
shoulder as if to see if he was being observed.  That was the moment
Ben knew with utter certainty that Sweeney knew.

Ben waited until Sweeney had disappeared from view and then pushed on
through the doors, cutting ahead of a young Chinese couple holding
hands.  He walked fast at first, head down, and then began to run, the
briefcase banging at his side.  What he had under his shoulder was
nothing compared with what he was about to lose.  He looked up and down
Twenty-first Street; Sweeney had vanished.

He began to run again.  Someone waved to him from a car.  It was
Marcie, the graduate coordinator from the department, being dropped off
by her son.  Ben didn't even acknowledge her.  He ran up the steps,
past the rearing metal horses, across the lawn.

By the time he reached Parlin Hall his shirt was drenched in sweat.  If
he found Sweeney, what was he going to do?  There was no light under
the door to Dick's office.  Ben flipped through his keys, found the
right one, inserted it into the lock.  He shoved the door open, faced
the same mountain of boxes, the same rolled-up rug, the same neatly
organized shelves of books that he'd faced just a half hour before.
Nothing had been touched.  He stepped inside and the door closed after
him.  He let his briefcase drop.

Something slithered behind him.  He whirled, thinking it was Sweeney
crouching in the corner, waiting for him, but it was only a yellowing
notice for an old creative-writing contest that had slipped to the
floor.  He picked it up and crumpled it in his hand.  He rested his
forehead against the wall and pounded the rough stucco just once with
both fists, and then pulled back, trying to gather himself.  From the
framed portrait above the desk, James Joyce eyed him through lenses as
thick and round as onion slices, eyed him with utter suspicion.

Ben never did get to the bank in Lockhart.  He went in to the library
the next day, but was too distraught to work and took the afternoon
off, driving west into the Hill Country, through Dripping Springs and
Johnson City.  He had no plan, no sackful of money; he was just driving
to calm himself down.

Maybe Sweeney hadn't discovered Dick's office yet, but he suspected,
Ben was sure of it.  The man had the nose of a bloodhound.  Ben was
going to have to move the coolers and move them quickly.  But where?

Ordinarily, being in the country soothed him.  When they'd first come
to Austin he hadn't understood why everyone made such a big deal about
the Hill Country; it seemed like yet another case of Texas boosterism. 
But he'd come to love the vistas, the way you could hit the top of an
incline and suddenly be able to see for miles; he'd come to love the
trickling creek bottoms, the sight of wild turkeys waddling across the
road, the stone farmhouses set back in the trees.

Heading home, he took the back roads out of Johnson City and managed to
get himself thoroughly lost.  There was no place to ask directions--the
one gas station he passed looked as if it had been closed since the
Eisenhower administration--and he seemed to have gone miles without
seeing a marker.  He roller-coastered over the hills, great parachutes
of dust swirling in his wake.

Finally, coming across a pickup parked in the middle of the road, he
slowed, pulling over to the shoulder.  A heavyset man in overalls
looked up from hammering a FOR RENT For SALE sign in the rocky soil
along the fence line.

Ben leaned across and rolled down the window.  "How you doin'?"

"All right."  The old man held his five-pound hammer loosely at his
side.  He was not just old, he was big.  He must have gone at least
two-fifty, but his eyes were watery and there was a frailty in his
voice, as if a locust had lodged in his throat.

"Listen, I seem to have gotten myself turned around here.  I'm trying
to get back to Austin."

The old man walked slowly to Ben's car.  He pointed back up the road.
"You'll need to go back here to the fork and take a left.  That'll take
you back out to the highway."  Insects sang in the grass.

"So, you're getting rid of your place?"

"It's my sister's place.  She's gone in the hospital."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"She'll be all right," the old man said.  Behind him the sign had blown
down softly in the weeds without his noticing.  "She's just gotten too
old to live out here by herself anyway."

"So how big a place are you selling?"

The old man nudged a rotting armadillo shell with the toe of his boot.
"About a hundred acres.  You interested?"

"I don't know if I am or not."

"It's pretty back there.  If you've got the time, I could show you
around."

"All right."

They got in the old man's truck.  His name was Harold Smeltzer.  It was
a long way back in, and they had to stop twice to unlock gates.  The
property was mostly woods with a couple of prickly pear-ridden meadows.
They passed a collapsed shed, rolled down to a stream, and bumped
across a treacherous-looking cattle gap.

The house sat at the top of the next rise.  It was the simplest of
buildings, four small rooms with a long porch, some beautiful live oaks
in the front yard, and a badly neglected garden in the back.  Mr.
Smeltzer's sister hadn't raised vegetables for a couple of years, but
it was a good plot, the old man said, you just had to be sure to put up
a stout fence to keep out the deer and the feral pigs.

The old man moved at a snail's pace as they surveyed the front yard.  A
massive longhorn skull sat on a weathered porch.  The best thing about
the place was the view; the stream, a hundred yards away, widened into
a swimming hole under high limestone cliffs.  People still did catch
fish in there, Mr.  Smeltzer said, you just had to watch for snakes.

"Pretty remote out here," Ben said.

"It's quiet, all right," Mr.  Smeltzer said.  "If you like quiet."

"So how much are you asking?"

"Two hundred and fifty thousand.  That would include everything."

Ben whistled softly.  "Pretty steep."

"Not for around here.  Not anymore."

Ben put his hand on a worn cedar post.  "I don't know if I could do
that," he said.  "All at once.  But maybe we could work something
out."

"I should let you know I don't like dealing with those fancy real
estate people."

"Me either," Ben said.  "What if I rented it from you for a while?  Say
for a couple thousand a month?"

The old man bent over and picked up a fallen branch, then tossed it
over the barbed wire.  "That's something to think about."

He moved the seven coolers late on Tuesday night.  This time he was
very careful to be sure no one was in his office before he lugged the
forty-pound containers down the Parlin hallways.  The risks of moving
the money out were just as great as they had been moving it in, but he
wasn't nearly as nervous; maybe he'd finally accepted that it was all
in the hands of the Fates, or maybe he was just developing the
instincts of a second-story man.  Because Katy had the van in
Mississippi he had to use the Cutlass, and it took him two trips out to
the ranch and back, almost three hours of driving.  He stacked the
seven coolers in the old machine shed behind the house and then covered
them with some half-rotted bales of hay.

It was nearly two in the morning by the time he got back to Rebecca's
house.  He crept up the stairs as quietly as he could.  Zoila had left
the hall light on for him; God knew what she thought he was up to with
his wife out of town.

In the morning, Zoila was noticeably cool toward Ben as she served him
his breakfast of tea and toast.  Roberto, at least, was talking to him,
tugging at his leg and calling him el Se@nor.  Ben found Rebecca's
yardstick hanging in the cupboard, then drove in to the hardware store
to buy a rototiller, a shovel, and a pickax.  He stopped by Church's on
the way out of town and got a basket of chicken and a jug of Coke.

It was nearly eleven by the time he got out to the ranch.  The
thermometer read 96.  It took him two hours to rototill the garden plot
behind the house.  When he finally stopped to eat, his T-shirt was
soaked and his arms ached, but he knew he'd gotten through only the
easy part.

He measured out each hole with the yardstick.  The coolers were
twenty-six by fifteen by thirteen, and he figured he needed to make the
holes at least a foot deeper than that to protect them against
burrowing animals and sudden rainstorms.

He set to work with the pickax.  It went well at first, each ripping
stroke releasing the rich aromas of topsoil and of popping roots, but
after he got down ten or eleven inches there was a new clicking
sound--he began to hit limestone.  Some of it he could shatter or work
around, but at other spots he found himself slamming away at an
impenetrable ledge.  The first hole he tried he had to abandon, the
second was fine, the third no good again.

After two hours he had one cooler buried.  Despair was taking him over.
He had underestimated the size of the task, underestimated badly.  His
shoulders throbbed with the effort and the sun was killing.  He took a
break again about four, went to the stream, and just lay motionless in
the water for a half hour.

When he came back his luck improved.  He dug two good holes in a row,
lowered the coolers into their resting places, stomped them down with
his foot until they were snug, then shoveled the dirt back on top.

He was too tired to think; the world had narrowed to this plot of
plowed ground, the field of prickly pear and thistles that surrounded
it.  He had forgotten to bring gloves and his hands were blistering. 
He was losing all judgment.  At one point in the late afternoon, as he
sat panting on one of the coolers, taking a break, he thought he heard
a car coming up the road.  He panicked, convinced that it was Smeltzer,
convinced that he was about to be discovered.  He grabbed the cooler
and stumbled toward the machine shed, the forty-pound container banging
against his thighs, but by the time he reached the shed the sound had
disappeared.

By seven-thirty he had four of the coolers buried.  He went into the
house, ate the rest of the cold chicken, and drank some water.  He went
into the empty bedroom and lay on a dusty mattress; when he awoke it
was nearly nine.

As he stepped out of the house, a huge croaking bird flapped up from
the live oaks next to the stream.  The sun glowed a dull red, sinking
behind the limestone cliffs.  The plot was a mess; it didn't look so
much like a garden as it did a battlefield or a mass grave.

He bent down stiffly to retrieve his pickax.  Birds twittered in the
brush and the crickets had started their twilight chants.  It was going
to be a matter of will, now.

He set to work again, and his T-shirt was utterly drenched within
fifteen minutes.  Whippoorwills were calling from somewhere across the
front lawn.  It was easier now that darkness had come.  He lost track
of time, but he buried the fifth cooler and then the sixth.  His
muscles trembled in protest.

The moon came up over the trees just as he finished digging his last
hole.  He carried the last cooler from the machine shed, nearly
tripping over some snarled barbed wire.

He knelt to lower the cooler into the hole, gentle as a father lowering
a baby into a cradle, but it wouldn't go.  He tried to force it with a
foot, but all he got for his effort was the grinding sound of rock and
plastic.  He tugged the cooler free and stared down into the dark mouth
of the hole, trying to see what the problem was, but he couldn't see
anything.

He grabbed the pickax and went to work widening the hole.  He shoveled
out the loose rubble, but when he tried the cooler again he still
couldn't get it to go down more than halfway.  He sat on the edge of
the hole, pushing with both feet, but it got him nowhere.  It was as if
the jaws of the earth had swallowed enough for one day.

He was near tears with frustration.  He yanked the cooler free a second
time, then got on his belly and reached down into the hole as far as he
could, like a kid trying to retrieve a lost baseball from a sewer.  He
patted his way along the rough walls, pulling at roots, digging out
limestone shards, tossing them over his shoulder.  Was there no one in
the whole world on his side?  He was a sweating, rooting, exhausted
animal.  He felt something wet on his hands and then he realized that
his knuckles had begun to bleed.  He stopped for a second to suck them.
He heard a rustling in the woods.

He lay still.  The sound stopped and then started again, moving closer.
It was too noisy for deer.  He reached out for the pickax at his side.
There was a snuffling and a grunting, and then something jangled the
barbed wire.

Two armadillos waddled along the freshly turned-up soil.  They came
directly at Ben, dim-witted and blind.  When Ben finally rose to one
knee they stopped five feet away, sniffing the air with their
prehistoric snouts.  When Ben stood up, one of them gave a hop and
began to scurry away; the other wasn't quick enough.  Ben drove the
pickax squarely through the shell.  The animal shuddered, its tongue
flickering in the throes of death.

CHAPTER 13

Katy and the children got back from Mississippi about six-thirty. She'd
done all the driving herself, but she seemed in great spirits and
delighted to see Ben.  They'd stopped in Shreveport for lunch and
brought him a strawberry cream pie from Strawn's.  Everyone at home had
asked about him, she said, and hoped his writing was going well. 
They'd had no rain and the soybeans were drying up, but otherwise
things were good.

That night Katy and Ben lay side by side in bed, holding hands.  "So,
are you happy to be back?"

She gave his hand a squeeze.  "Very happy," she said.  "This is a
wonderful house."

"Do you think you'd like to own a house like this?  If we could afford
it?"

She hesitated as if it were some sort of trick question.  "Yes."

He turned onto his side, putting his hand on her hip.  "Say we didn't
have to worry about money.  Ever.  What would you want most of all?"

"I don't know.  It's hard to imagine."  She had brought magnolias back
with her from Mississippi and one of the huge white blossoms sat in a
bowl next to the bed, filling the dark room with the scent of
yearning.

"But try."

"I suppose I'd like to take my mother and my sisters on a trip to
England."

"And what else?"

"I can't think of anything else.  What about you?"

"I don't know."

"Would you quit your job?  Would you want to go back to New York and
write plays?"

He thought for a long time; the question had caught him off guard.  A
siren sounded far, far away.  "No."

"Why not?"

"I just don't think you can ever go back."

Ben and Sweeney leaned forward on the iron bench, staring at the ice
skaters, waiting for Matt and his friends to get out of the movie.
Sweeney dug about in a carton of buttered popcorn.  Behind them the
Saturday night crowd drifted past, sucking on smoothies, checking out
the T-shirt stands.  Outside, it was 97 degrees at nine in the evening.
It was August in Texas, and all over the state the malls were full.

"So what are we going to do, Ben?"  Sweeney said.

"What do you mean?"

"We've got to do something."

Ben glanced at him swiftly, taken by surprise.  Sweeney tossed back a
handful of popcorn like a man tossing back tequila.  Out in the middle
of the ice a man with a shaved head, dressed all in black and lean as a
wolfhound, skated backward, weaving his way among the stumbling
novices.

"Your wife keeps asking me what's wrong with you.  What am I supposed
to say?"  Sweeney asked.

"I hope you don't say anything."  Ben watched an awkward teenager flail
his arms and then slide slowly into the far wall of the rink to stop
himself.  Almost mournfully, Ben remembered the pond behind their
house, growing up in Wisconsin, the makeshift games of hockey they
would play on gray February afternoons, two or three on a side,
scrambling back and forth on the rough ice for hours.

"These guys," Sweeney said, "whoever they are, they haven't forgotten
about the money, don't kid yourself.  I've been thinking a lot about
this, Ben.  There are people I can put you in touch with, people who
could help you."

"What kind of people?  Crooked bookkeepers?"

As soon as it was out of his mouth, Ben knew he shouldn't have said it.
Sweeney's face underwent an instantaneous change.  Suddenly he was glum
and offended.

"No.  Some pretty classy people, as a matter of fact."

Neither of them spoke for a minute.  A man walked out of Furr's
Cafeteria, picking his teeth with a toothpick, one arm around his wife.
His T-shirt read REEL MEN PLAY WITH THEIR FLIES.  Ben looked down at
his hands, still nicked and cut from the night he'd buried the
coolers.

"I think I'll pass on that right now," Ben said.

"What do you mean, you'll pass on it?"

"I'm not ready to do this yet, Sweeney."  They were close enough to the
ice that they could feel the coolness coming up at them in waves.
Sweeney flipped a bum kernel of popcorn away with his thumb.

"And when do you think you'll be ready?"

"I don't know."

Sweeney pulled a cowboy boot over his knee.  "Whoa," he said.  The
corners of his mouth glistened with butter.  For the first time Ben
could see the flaring of undisguised anger.  "Whoa.  So what's the deal
here?  You think I'm after your money?"

"No."

"The only reason I'm offering you this is because I love your family
and I don't want anything bad to happen to them.  It's nice to be nice,
but let's deal with reality here.  This is really big-time crap you've
fallen into.  It's going to take more than a damn Ph.d. to get you out
of it."  Ben nearly came back at him, but decided against it.  "I've
been protecting you in ways you can't even know."

"What do you mean by that?"

Sweeney shook his head, stony-faced.  "I don't know.  Sometimes I feel
a little like I'm being used."

"Being used?  How have I used you?"

"I've done a lot for you."

"I know that," Ben said.

Ben had had enough.  He stood up.  The crowds were just letting out of
the seven-thirty movie; he thought he saw Matt and his friends goofing
around at the video games.  Sweeney stood up too, right at Ben's
elbow.

"That gun you bought, you still got it?"  Sweeney said.

"Why?"

"Because one day you're probably going to have to use it."

It was the first time they'd had a dinner party for people from the
department, and it was a roaring success.  They had the Steinbachs, the
Stricklands, Mike Howard, back from a month at Bellagio, and his
girlfriend, a striking third-year graduate student who could more than
hold her own.  If Ben had been concerned about the grandiosity of his
new house, his fears were quickly laid to rest; everyone thought it was
splendid.  Sam Steinbach told a story about a student of his who, for
several years, had house-sat for a wealthy art collector in Westlake
and used to throw the wildest all-night bacchanals, but this house was
so much more tasteful than that one had been.

Zoila was an immense help, rushing back and forth and keeping track of
everything in the kitchen.  The wine flowed freely.  They had grilled
chicken and salad by the pool (mrs.  Steinbach said she felt as if she
were on the Amalfi coast), and came in afterward for coffee and
dessert.

Everyone got along famously.  It was as if the house itself had put
them all in an expansive mood; didn't this stroke of good fortune for
the Lindbergs really mean good fortune for them all?  Mrs.  Steinbach,
who had a reputation for being the person no one wanted to get stuck in
the corner with, had everyone in stitches with her stories of growing
up in small-town Vermont.  Mike Howard, whom Ben had secretly
considered rather grim and full of himself (his Ring Gardner article in
The New York Review of Books, the paper he'd given at a cultural
studies conference in Dublin), ended up trading reminiscences with Tom
Strickland about the old Mr.  Magoo cartoons.

As the evening wore on, the group inevitably segregated itself, the
academics settling in the living room to discuss the department's
prospects under the new dean, Katy taking the two other wives on a tour
of the house.

The doorbell rang a little after eleven.  Ben rose to his feet,
baffled.  He had no idea who it could be; both children were spending
the night with friends.  Katy, already on the stairs, came down to open
the door.

It was Sweeney.  He stood there grinning, holding a small wooden crate.
In his Caesar's Palace T-shirt, cowboy boots, and dark glasses he could
have passed for one of Wayne Newton's bodyguards.

"Hey!"

"Hey," Katy said.

Eyeballing the roomful of people, Sweeney leaned over and kissed her on
the cheek.  "Listen, I'm sorry if I'm interrupting."

"You're never interrupting.  Please, come in," Katy said.  Ben stood
with one hand on the back of his chair, feeling the acid rising in his
stomach.

"I just came from the club," Sweeney said.  "They had this extra crate
of Fredericksburg peaches they didn't know what to do with, and there
was no point in letting them spoil."

"That's really nice," Katy said.  "Please, come in and have some
dessert."

"No, you've got real company here."

"You're real company.  I insist."  She took him by the arm and led him
into the living room.  "Everyone, this is Daniel Sweeney.  He's a good
friend of ours.  As a matter of fact, he's the one who found us the
house."

Sam Steinbach raised his coffee cup.  "Hear!  Hear!  The hero of the
evening!"  Everyone else applauded lightly, their faces raised and
genial.  Sweeney almost seemed abashed.

"Hey, everybody," he said.  He had yet to look in Ben's direction; he
knew what he was doing.  Katy took the crate of peaches from him,
making a ballet spin toward the kitchen.  "Do you want your pie with or
without ice cream?"

Sweeney snapped off his sunglasses and put them in his back pocket.
"With would be great," he said.

There was an awkward moment when no one said anything.  "Let me
introduce you," Ben said.  "Sam Steinbach, Mike Howard, Tom Strickland,
Emily Chassen ..."

"Like your necklace," Sweeney said.

Mike Howard's new girlfriend, caught off guard, seemed flustered for a
second.  "Thank you."

"Please, everybody, sit down," Sweeney said.  As Sweeney wove across
the room to get a chair from the hallway, Ben realized he was drunk.
Everyone there had had a lot to drink, but Sweeney'd had more.

Sweeney bumped the chair across the rug, pivoting it around so he could
sit on it facing them, his elbows resting on the back.

"So, what were you-all talking about?"  he said.

"Oh, not much," Mike Howard said.  "The future of the English
department."

"Is that right?  From what I hear, there isn't one."  Everyone looked a
little stunned.

"What do you mean?"  Mike Howard said.

"Didn't somebody write a book about it?  I don't mean your department,
I mean all English departments.  With all this lesbo stuff, Chicano
lit, my-body-is-a-text kind of thing ..."  He reached out and touched
Emily Chassen's arm.  "I hope I'm not offending anybody."  She didn't
answer yes or no, her face a mask, but that wasn't going to stop
Sweeney.  In the dining room, Zoila moved silently around the table,
removing dessert dishes.

"From what I read, it's like nobody knows what an English department is
supposed to be anymore.  I'm not blaming you guys.  It's not like you
can go back to the days of raising well-rounded young gentlemen ..."

"I think it's a little more complicated than that," Mike Howard said,
gearing up for a fight.  The sadness had returned to Sam Steinbach's
great beagle eyes; he'd been having such a nice evening; did they
really need to get into this discussion again?  Did they really need to
have some stranger dressed like a croupier telling them that their
lives had no meaning?

Tom Strickland shot Ben a quick glance, waiting for him to do
something.  Ben should have thrown Sweeney out on his ear, but he
couldn't do it and Sweeney knew that.  This was payback for the other
night, payback for telling Sweeney no.

"Hey, but what am I doing, shooting my big mouth off when I could be
learning something?"  Sweeney rose from his chair as Katy entered the
room with a plate of apple pie adorned with two glistening scoops of
vanilla ice cream, a dessert fit for a king.

Ben had a total of twenty-one thousand dollars in his retirement
account.  He sat at his desk with Stan Gancher, the dapper consultant
from his pension fund, going over the numbers.  It was mind-boggling.
Ben was forty-four years old, more than halfway through his life, and
he had twenty-one thousand dollars set aside for what Gancher insisted
on referring to as his and Katy's golden years.

"So what would this turn into?"  Ben said.  "By the time I'm
seventy."

Gancher loved to use his pocket calculator.  He punched the buttons,
nimble-fingered as any ragtime virtuoso, then held the calculator up
for Ben to see.  Ben squinted at the figures pulsing behind the smoky
plastic.  It wasn't much.  It was a lot less than half a cooler.

"Of course that doesn't factor in your raises," Gancher said.

"I got seven hundred dollars this year."

"Yes."  Gancher was a tall, gentle man from East Texas, a golfer and a
churchgoer, a fancier of expensive silk ties and tas sled loafers.  How
he could make a penny coming to see Ben once a year, Ben had no idea.
"So let's see.  That will make it thirty thousand, seven hundred."

Ben leaned back in his chair.  It was just two days after the dinner
party debacle, it was late in the afternoon, and he wasn't in the mood
for pity.  "Tell you what," Ben said.  "I want you to max me out."

Gancher looked stunned.  "Are you sure?"

"Yeah.  I want you to take the maximum out of my salary next year and
put it all in retirement."

"But what will you live on?"

Ben rocked forward and slapped Gancher on the knee.  "We'll figure
something out."

It was nearly six by the time Ben got back to Rebecca's.  As he pulled
into the driveway he saw Sweeney's Bronco parked under the magnolia
tree next to the garage.  The van was gone.  He opened the front door
and called out, but the only one in the house was Zoila in the kitchen,
snapping kernels off a cob of corn one by one with her thumb; she had
nearly an entire bowlful.  Ben gave her a smile and then looked up; he
could hear shouts and splashing coming from the pool.

He stepped into the yard.  Matt, Abby, and Cameron, all in their
dripping swimming suits, teetered on the concrete edge of the pool
while Sweeney bobbed up and down in the water, eyes closed, his back to
them, counting.  They were playing Sharks and Minnows and Sweeney was
the shark.

Roberto stood in the middle of the lawn with his plastic gun, watching
enviously.  Matt was the first one with the nerve to ease into the
water.  He made it maybe a third of the way across before Sweeney heard
him.  With a roar, Sweeney turned and threw himself at Matt like a
blitzing linebacker.  Abby and Cameron, seeing their chance, dived in
at the other end, but Sweeney was wise to them and reversed his field.
Cameron was out of range, but not Abby.

Sweeney lurched through the water, hairy-backed, arms held wide, love
handles showing above his trunks.  He wasn't interested in the others,
just in her; Matt and Cameron coasted to safety.  Abby backed off,
laughing at Sweeney, trying to splash him, and he splashed back,
carving out great bucket-size scoops.  Ben stood invisible on the
grass. Abby tried to dive to escape, but Sweeney made one last ursine
belly flop and caught her by the ankle.  He rose up, swinging her
through the water.  She tried to keep her balance on one foot, but he
wouldn't let her and she fell back.

"Hey, Dad!"  Matt said.

"Hey," Ben said.

They all turned.  Sweeney let go of Abby's leg.  "Hey, Ben, how you
doin'?"  he said.  Water was everywhere; the deck was soaked; the New
York Times sitting on the glass-topped table was sopping.

"I'm fine," Ben said.  He was so angry he could barely see.  Roberto
ran back to the house.  "So where's Mom?"

"She had to go to the store," Matt said.  He clung to the side of the
pool, regarding his father with wonder, knowing something was wrong but
not knowing what it was.  Abby wrung out her wet hair while Sweeney
bounced from foot to foot, standing chest high in the water, grinning,
man in his larval state.

"You guys need to get out and get dried off," Ben said.  "We're going
out to supper."

"But, Dad," Matt said.  "Mom said she was making hamburgers."

"Plans have changed.  We're going to meet the Stricklands downtown."

The kids groaned.  It was a clumsy lie, but Ben didn't care.  It was
more than he could take, the idea of Sweeney touching his daughter.

"Aw, come on, Dad ..."  Abby said.

Ben clapped his hands.  "I said it once, that's enough.  Cameron can go
with us.  Let's go, guys."

He bent down to retrieve a pair of wet goggles.  The two boys struggled
out of the pool while Sweeney glided over to the ladder.  Ben could not
bring himself to look at him.  Sweeney padded across the deck and
grabbed a towel.

"Feel free to stay and swim," Ben said.

"No, that's all right."  Sweeney scrubbed his head hard, drying his
hair, looking as sullen and injured as a child.  He knew perfectly well
what was going on.  "I should be pushing along anyway."

Ben didn't hear from Sweeney for a week.  On Monday, the day they were
supposed to meet to exchange cash and check, there was a message from
Sweeney on the answering machine saying that something had come up and
he'd call later.  Ben didn't like the feel of it.  If there was one
thing worse than having Sweeney around all the time, it was not having
him around at all and not knowing what he was up to.

All evening Ben brooded about it, and finally, just as he and Katy were
getting ready for bed, he said, "Katy, I think I'm going to see if I
can find Sweeney.  I think I may have really hurt his feelings."

Katy stood at the bathroom sink.  Her face was covered with white
cream, all but two circles for her eyes.  "You could just call him."

"No," he said.  "I want to do this face to face."

He got to the club a little after eleven, but Sweeney wasn't there.
Toby, the bartender, was busy throwing out a group of Austin High girls
with fake ID'S, but through the melee managed to say that Sweeney'd
left a half hour before.  Toby thought he'd been headed home, but he
wasn't sure.

Ben drove Mopac to Bee Caves, the jagged crack in the windshield of the
Cutlass gleaming in the headlights of the passing cars.  His stomach
was raw; this was not a scene he was looking forward to, but he needed
to somehow clear the air.  He waited for a break in the Monday night
traffic and finally took a left up through thick cedars into the condo
complex.  The parking lot was jammed, and he had to park near the front
and walk all the way back, passing a raucous pool party.

Sweeney's apartment was on the first floor, with a big picture window
overlooking the woods.  Ben was glad to see that the lights were on,
but as he came up the sloping walkway it struck him that there was
something odd about the far wall of Sweeney's living room.  It took him
a second to figure out what it was: the bookcase wasn't there.  Then he
saw the shattered mirror above the mantel.

He stopped dead in his tracks.  Splashing and shrieking from the pool
party echoed through the humid night air.  Ben reached out for the
railing and took two steps up onto the landing.  He stared in through
the picture window.  A three-hundred-pound man sat on the couch in
Sweeney's living room, resting his chin on the knob of a baseball
bat.

The apartment looked as if a bomb had gone off.  There was almost too
much to take in at once: the slashed furniture, the contents of
Sweeney's desk spewed across the floor, the shattered remains of the
beloved wave machine, the electric-blue stain on the rug.

Off to the left side of the room and partly concealed by an overturned
bookcase, a teenage boy, Mexican-looking, in T-shirt and crinkly black
running pants was down on the floor, pitching forward and back as if he
were riding a mechanical bull.  But it wasn't a bull he was riding.  As
the boy reared back, nearly standing for a second, Ben saw that the boy
had Sweeney by the hair, even though it scarcely resembled Sweeney
anymore, one eye shut already, his face swollen and bloody and looking
vaguely Chinese.

Ben couldn't stay where he was.  A bug-spattered bulb above the
entryway cast a flickering half-light, and though they hadn't seen Ben
yet, they would have if they looked.  He moved back off the steps and
slipped under a low chain into a landscaped area of wood chips and
lariope.  He was in darkness again, under the twining shadows of an
ancient live oak.

As he moved closer to the picture window he stumbled on a pile of
broken flagstones.  When he stood on top of it he was within a foot or
two of the glass and could see the upper half of the enormous man, the
gold chain and the neatly trimmed goatee.  One of the louvered side
panels of the window was open four or five inches, but it was enough to
funnel the sounds of their voices.

"So where's our money, Mr.  Sweeney?"  There was a muffled answer, but
Ben couldn't make out what it was.  "What did you say?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."  Sweeney sounded half
strangled, like a man in a dentist's chair.

"No?"

"No."

Off to Ben's right, around the corner of the building, he could see the
crowd gathered around the pool.  It was a young Westlake crowd and they
had started to do the limbo, men in golf caps and Bermuda shorts
bending low, staggering like crabs, then collapsing on the grass.
Everyone was laughing and having a beery good time.

The giant man rose from the couch.  He moved awkwardly, as if he'd been
through his share of knee operations.  He crossed to the picture
window.  Ben stared at the back of the man's stout calves, only inches
away.

"Come on, shit face where are you hiding it?"

"I don't have it!"

"Why have you been talking, then?"  The big man swayed like a genie,
filling the window.  "You've been talking like you got it.  You told
our friend Calvin--"

"I was just asking--"

Ben felt something sting his left ankle.  He bent down to swat at his
sock and nearly lost his balance, teetering on the flagstones.

"You were talking like you wanted some finder's fee."

"I was talking hypothetically--"

"You know what your finder's fee is going to be?  Just staying
alive!"

The hulking man moved away from the window and disappeared from view.
There was a thud, followed by a shuddering groan.  Around the pool they
were singing, "Here we go looby loo ..."

"So, are you saying we made a mistake?"

Sweeney's answer was inaudible.  There was another thud and this time
Sweeney cried out.  "Here we go looby light ..."  It was utterly clear
to Ben what had happened.  Whether out of stupidity or greed or hurt
feelings, Sweeney had betrayed him.  He had tried to sell Ben out and
ended up outsmarting himself.

An air-conditioning unit cut on, somewhere above Ben.  He was soaked
with sweat.  If he did nothing, Sweeney was going to die, and what was
terrible was that Ben had to acknowledge that there was some part of
him that would have been almost willing to let him die.  Yet another
part of him, no less low and calculating than the first, knew that
Sweeney would offer up names before he died, and Ben couldn't let that
happen.

He bent down, groping among the broken flagstones until he found a
dagger-shaped shard, with slightly more heft than a softball.  He moved
back from the window, back through a shoulder-high yaupon hedge.  He
was a good thirty feet away.  He hurled the stone with all his might,
felt the rough edges spin off his fingertips.  The picture window came
down in an avalanche of glass.

For an instant, everything was still--inside and out--and then three
guys came running around the corner from the pool party to see what had
happened.  The teenage boy stared out from where the window had been,
looking rather slight and forlorn.  Ben crouched low behind the
hedge.

"What the fuck are you doing?"  one of the men standing on the grassy
slope bellowed.  He sounded belligerent enough, but neither he nor any
of his pals was willing to come any closer.

The boy disappeared from the window, and a moment later he and the
three-hundred-pound man, his bat under his arm, came out of the
building, moved briskly across the parking lot, and roared off in a big
Land Cruiser.

Ben rose to his feet.  About a dozen other partygoers had come for a
look.  One of the men, tall and redheaded, finally came up the walk and
disappeared into the entryway.

Ben stepped backward off the curb.  No one seemed to have noticed him;
everyone was pointing at the shattered window, talking among
themselves.

"Oh, shit!"  The voice came from inside the apartment; it wasn't
Sweeney's.  "Oh, shit!  Somebody call an ambulance!"

Ben felt for his keys, walking quickly across the parking lot to his
car.

It was Toby who called the next morning with the news that Sweeney was
in the hospital.  He'd been banged around pretty good, Toby said, but
he was going to be fine.  If there was one thing Sweeney had going for
him, it was a hard head.

"So, what hospital?"  Ben asked.

"Seton."

"And do they have any idea who did this?"

"I'm not really sure," Toby said.  Katy stared up from the breakfast
table, her eyes dark with alarm.  She didn't know who or what was being
discussed, but she knew from Ben's questions it was bad.

"So will they let him have visitors?"

"I don't see why not.  But you might call," Toby said.  In the walled
garden outside the kitchen window Zoila sprinkled fish food into the
fountain, sunlight gleaming off the lily pads like something out of a
Monet painting.  Ever since the night that Ben was out until two A.m.
burying the coolers, Zoila had been sullen around him.  It was as if
she was somehow onto him.  It used to be she would have his tea ready
for him as soon as he came down in the morning, greeting him with her
radiant smile; now, he had to fend for himself.

When he hung up, Katy was waiting for the story.  Ben repeated
everything that Toby'd told him and she sat stunned for a second.  "But
how could this happen?"  she said.

Ben turned away from her, scanning the room for his car keys.  Deceit
lay at the back of his throat like some imperfectly dissolved capsule.
"Things like this happen all the time," he said.

Driving in to the hospital, Ben was in a fury.  He kept going over it
again and again in his head.  How many ways, really, were there to
interpret what he'd seen the night before?  Sweeney had betrayed him.
Whether Sweeney intended to do it all along or whether it was because
he'd gotten his feelings hurt, gotten impatient and greedy, or couldn't
resist talking big, it didn't matter.  There was absolutely no one Ben
could trust now.  The thugs would be at his door if he didn't act, and
act immediately.  Sweeney had gotten Ben into this, and now Ben was
going to have to use Sweeney to get himself out.

He rode up on the hospital elevator with a one-legged woman in a
wheelchair and her husband, a crew-cut ex-Marine whose face was a map
of defeat.  Ben held the door for them and then followed them out.

He wandered down the hallway, a box of chocolate brownies under his
arm, looking for Sweeney's room number.  He passed the nurse's station,
where a scrub-suited doctor was making a golf date over the phone.
Hospitals always gave Ben the heebie-jeebies.

Sweeney's room was at the far end of the corridor and the door was
open.  Looking in, he saw a willowy woman with Joni Mitchell hair
sitting next to the bed, ladling soup out of a plastic bowl.  When he
gave a soft knock, she turned.

"Hey," she said.  "Come in."

Ben entered almost sheepishly, poking his head around the corner.
Sweeney lay under a white sheet, one hairy foot protruding.  His neck
was in a brace, his nose looked like a bratwurst about to pop, and his
right eye had narrowed to a slit.  He tried to smile, but it didn't
quite work.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," Ben said.

"Marina, this is Ben," Sweeney said.

"How are you?"  Ben said.  The TV set blared overhead and Sweeney's
attention was divided.

"I've had better days," Marina said.  She was an attractive woman,
though not exactly what Ben would have called Sweeney's type.  She was
thirty at most, in cutoffs and hiking boots, and sported a butterfly
tattoo on her inner thigh.

Ben raised the box of brownies.  "Got something for you."

"What's that?"  Sweeney asked.

"Brownies."

"Great.  Why don't you just set them over there?"

Ben put the carton down on the windowsill, amid some artfully ribboned
bouquets.  When he looked over his shoulder, Marina was leaning across
the bed with a spoonful of soup and Sweeney was puckering up to receive
it, eager as a baby bird.

"So how'd you hear?"  Sweeney said.

"Toby called me."

Marina wiped Sweeney's lower lip with a napkin.  "Pretty pathetic,
huh?"  he said.

"I never think of you as pathetic," Ben said.

They all stared at the television for a second.  All the guests on the
talk show were people who'd made love to their pets, and the studio
audience was in an uproar of glee and disgust.

"I think I'd better be going," Marina said.  Sweeney hit a button on
his tray and the screen winked off.  She got up and kissed Sweeney
tenderly on the forehead.  "I'll be back later."  She turned to Ben. 
"It was nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," Ben said.

After she was gone, Ben took her chair.  Sweeney's eyes followed him
even though he couldn't move his head.  "So what's the prognosis?"  Ben
asked.

"Got myself a nasty little concussion.  And my ribs don't feel so
great, though the doctors are telling me they're not cracked.  They
want to keep me around for another twenty-four hours to observe me."

"So what happened exactly?"

"What does it look like?  I got the shit kicked out of me."

"Over what?"

"The usual stuff."

"And what's the usual stuff?"

"Over a girl.  You'd think I'd know better by now."  Sweeney rested his
head against his pillows.  Ben marveled at the offhanded ease with
which Sweeney lied.

"And you told the police?"

"I told 'em what I could."  Sweeney stared mournfully at the
brilliantly yellow cubes of Jell-O shimmering on his lunch tray.  "I'm
not holding my breath about it."

Ben leaned forward in the chair, pressing his fingers together.
"Listen, I want to apologize," he said.

"About what?"

"About the way I've been lately.  And I wanted to say ... I've been
thinking about your proposal."

"What proposal was that?"

"The other night.  At the skating rink."  Ben raised his head, meeting
Sweeney's gaze directly.  "I was thinking maybe we should go ahead with
that."

Sweeney didn't say anything for a long time.  "You're sure?"

"I'm absolutely sure."

Sweeney fingered the edge of his tray.  Ben rose, thinking he needed
help, but Sweeney waved him off.  Sweeney's eyes glistened with tears.
"You won't regret this," he said.  "I promise you.  Scout's honor."

Ben and Katy lay on a quilt on a patch of grass under the Congress
Avenue Bridge, waiting for the bats.  They were supposed to have met
their friends the Stricklands, but for some reason the Stricklands
hadn't arrived.  (anna's sisters were visiting from Ohio, and taking
them to see the Mexican free-tailed bats was one of the obligatory
tourist things to do.)

Dusk was falling fast but it was still nearly one hundred degrees.
Eighty or ninety people were hunkered down on the scraggly lawn around
them: parents feeding Popsicles to fussing infants in strollers; some
German college students, adorned with tattoos and a variety of
piercings, their heads propped against their backpacks; a romantic
young couple in white ducks who'd had the foresight to bring their own
cooler and wineglasses.

Lined up along the railing of the bridge were several hundred others.
It was Austin's nightly show.  A paddle wheeler, lit up like a Vegas
casino, drifted back and forth under the bridge while out in the middle
of the darkening water a canoeist sat with his paddle across his lap,
just an Indian scout in some nineteenth-century painting.

Katy was out of sorts.  She'd been quiet in the car.  When he asked her
if anything was wrong, she said it was just that it was so ungodly hot,
but on their walk from the parking lot he could see that she had a
definite look.  When he tried to put his arm around her, she pulled
away.

"Maybe I should call them and see what happened," Ben said.  He could
hear the bats twittering and chirping under the girders.  There were a
million and a half of them, incredible as it seemed, living in the
one-inch expansion joints of the bridge.

"No, I'm sure they're on their way," she said.  "I went down to
Sweeney's club today."

"Oh.  And why did you do that?"

"Because you've never taken me.  I wanted to see it."  One of the
German students had gotten to his feet and was pointing; several of the
bats were starting to swirl, flying in tight circles beneath the great
concrete pillars.

"And?"

"I met one of the owners."

"Which one was that?"

"I forget his name.  A big muscly ex-football star.  I introduced
myself.  He didn't know who I was."

"Well ..."

"And he didn't know who you were, either.  I told him we'd invested in
his club.  He said he hadn't heard anything about it."

More and more of the bats were venturing out now, the whirlpools of
tiny bodies beginning to thicken but still spinning under the bridge.
The smell of marijuana sweetened the air.

"Come on, it was five thousand dollars.  Why should he even remember?
That's peanuts to these guys."

"I mentioned Sweeney's name and he got this look on his face."

"So what are you trying to say?"

"I'm saying that I don't know what's going on here!  I'm not stupid,
Ben!  I never saw any residual check.  All I see is that our bank
balance goes up five hundred dollars a week--"

"Katy, listen.  About the money.  I did it all through Sweeney.  It was
more like a loan.  He needed the money to even be a partner."

"But you didn't tell me that."

"Maybe I didn't."

"No, you didn't."  A great shout went up.  Farther on down the bridge a
great stream of free-tailed bats was heading out over the lake.  "You
know, I went back and checked our bank statements.  You lent him five
thousand dollars, right?  And we started getting five hundred dollars a
week in the middle of May.  This week will make it fourteen weeks.
That's a two-thousand-dollar profit in four months.  Forty percent
interest.  Hard to beat that."

"What are you accusing me of?  That was the deal, that I was going to
be paid off first!  Jesus Christ, I don't believe this!"

She pushed up from the quilt and walked toward the lake, her arms
folded tightly around her chest.  He watched her go, hesitating for a
moment.  She was so close to the truth; one more step and they were
lost.  He got to his feet and went after her.  This time when he put
his hand on her shoulder she didn't pull away.

"I took a job," she said.

"What are you talking about?"  An old man with perfect posture stared
through his binoculars, standing just a few feet away from them.

"They called me from Ortiz today.  They need someone to teach reading
half-time.  I told them I'd do it."

"But, Katy, you don't have to do that."

"Don't I?  Maybe not.  But I think it would be better for all of us."

She stared out over the lake.  Clouds of bats stained the sky, drifting
south and east like smoke from a great conflagration, like a genie let
out of his bottle.

CHAPTER 14

A week later they all drove out to visit the ranch of Sweeney's friend
Also Jackett.  They took the van, Sweeney playing Botticelli with the
kids in the back.  Other than a scab over his right eye and a swollen
nose, he seemed to have returned to robust good health.

It was a cloudless morning and it was hard to believe that summer was
almost over; Abby and Matt would be back in school in a matter of days.
They drove for nearly an hour, deep into the Hill Country.  Sweeney had
promised to show them the real Texas and he was doing it.

Turning off the highway, they followed a dirt road for a couple of
miles, passing a creaking windmill and herds of longhorn cattle.  As
they rumbled over a bridge, a red fox dashed suddenly in front of them,
disappearing into the dense brush on the far side.

Jackett's place was perched on a high ridge and the rutted road up to
it nearly tore the bottom out of the van, but the view on top was
magnificent.  The house sat behind stone walls and the Texas state flag
snapped from a twenty-foot flagpole; it looked like the kind of place
John Wayne and four good men could have defended for weeks.

They parked in the shade of some mesquite trees, and no sooner had they
gotten out of the van than two cowboys came thundering over the rise on
their lathered-up horses.  Matt's eyes went wide with wonder; this was
better than the movies.

The older of the two cowboys swung off his horse and tossed the reins
up to the younger.  He took off his hat, wiped the sweat out of his
eyes with his elbow, grinned a winning grin, and extended a hand to
Ben.

"Al Jackett," he said.  Ben stared for a second.  He had seen this man
before and he couldn't remember when.  Sweeney was nearly squirming
with pleasure.

"It's nice to meet you," Ben said.  "Ben Lindberg."

"Sweeney here has told me a lot about you," Jackett said.  He was in
his late sixties, Ben would have guessed, but looked as tough as nails.
The horses stomped their hooves, still blowing hard, anxious to get to
the barn.  Matt reached out to touch the wet flank of one of them.

"Johnny, why don't you take the horses down and get them some water?"
Jackett said.  "I'm sorry to be looking like this, but some cattle
busted down a fence and our neighbor was mad as blue blazes.  Hey, you
kids must be starving after driving all that way.  Let's see if we can
find you something to eat."

Unpretentious from the outside, from the inside the house was sneakily
grand.  Picture windows overlooked miles of rolling Hill Country, and
glassy-eyed heads of deer and bighorn sheep, lion and water buffalo,
stared down from the walls.  A huge stone fireplace that wouldn't have
been out of place in one of the old railroad hotels loomed in the
living room.

"Shelby?  We've got visitors here!"  Jackett shouted.  Ben kept looking
at him, racking his brain, trying to figure out where he could have
possibly met him.

Mrs.  Jackett came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.  A
trim and attractive woman in a black-and-white-print dress, she was
horrified by the grimy state of her husband and sent him off to wash.
She was as gracious and welcoming as Mr.  Jackett, kissing Sweeney
lightly on the cheek and taking everyone back to meet the cook, an
elderly man with a gold tooth whom they'd just brought up from
Monterrey.

When Jackett returned, fresh-faced and in a seersucker shirt and clean
blue jeans, they all sat down for dinner.  The food was remarkable: the
best enchiladas Ben had ever tasted, an avocado salad, and peach
cobbler with homemade ice cream for dessert.  There was still a part of
Ben that was wary, trying to puzzle out what part the Jacketts could
possibly play in Sweeney's schemes.  He squeezed Katy's hand under the
table.

Mrs.  Jackett entertained Matt and Abby with stories of her
grandmother, a hardy woman who'd homesteaded in West Texas and had once
killed a Comanche who'd come to her door while she was alone with her
three young children, then given him a dipperful of cold water as he
lay dying.  Mrs.  Jackett had been an English major at the university
and Frank Dobie had been her favorite professor.

"And we like that chairman you've got over there now," Mr.  Jackett
said.

"My chairman?"  Ben said.

"A few of us have been talking about maybe coming up with a new
building for you-all."

It suddenly all came back to Ben: outside the chairman's office, late
January, the gathering of men in nice suits.  Christ, leave it to
Sweeney to introduce him to a donor.

"That's terrific," Ben said.

"See if you can get this guy an office with a window while you're at
it," Sweeney said.

"We'll do our best."  Jackett pushed away from the table.  "What do you
say we go for a little ride around the place?"

In Texas, Jackett said, people always take you to see their water, and
that was what Jackett did, though in late August there wasn't much of
it.  The creeks were down to a trickle and the tanks nothing more than
circles of trampled mud.

The three men bounced from ridgeline to bottom, trailing clouds of
dust, Jackett pointing things out.  Jackett was the kind of man any man
would like to have for his father, charming to the point of seeming a
little simpleminded, but sharp-eyed as well--quick to spot either
turkey buzzards soaring on the thermals a mile away or a strange pickup
parked next to a distant deer stand.  He was originally from the
Panhandle, he told them, and had started in the oil business, but for
the past ten years had been in trucking in Mexico.  The ranching was
just a diversion, but it was good to get some dirt between your toes
from time to time.

Jackett wanted to check on his beehives.  A man from North Dakota came
every year, and in exchange for a place to raise and winter his bees,
he gave the Jacketts free honey.

"He's from your part of the country," Jackett said.  Sweeney and Ben
both braced themselves as Jackett gunned the pickup over an embankment.
"Nice fella.  Hardworking.  Those people can be a little quiet, though,
I'll tell you.  Here we go."  A half dozen square white boxes sat under
a grove of pecan trees.  "Want to take a look?"

"Sure," Ben said.

The three men got out of the truck.  A huge longhorn swung its head
around to stare at them from a fence line fifty yards away.  Sweeney
let Ben and Jackett walk on ahead.

"This fellow from North Dakota is amazing.  He'll walk in among them,
never get stung.  I guess the key is staying calm."

As they moved closer, Ben could see some of the bees looping in and out
of the boxes.  The longhorn ambled toward the truck as if he thought he
was about to be fed.

"So I hear you've got some money to move," Jackett said.

Ben stepped over a dried cow pie, taking in a quick, involuntary
breath.  So this is it, he thought, the moment he knew was coming.  The
moment he wanted.  "So where did you hear that?"

"Sweeney told me a little about your situation."

"This is the guy, Ben," Sweeney said.  "You're not going to do better
than this."

Jackett bent down and picked a couple of pecans out of the tall grass.
He rolled them together in his fist, pressing hard until they cracked.
He offered Ben the handful of shattered shells.  "Want some?"

"No, thanks."  Ben could hear the bees droning, the low, throbbing
warning.

"So you just found this money, is that right?"

"That's right."

"When Sweeney told me the story I had a hard time believing it.  I
thought, the guy's got to be either a cop or a crook.  But you're not
either, are you?"

"No.  Just a lucky guy."

Jackett put one of the fractured bits between his teeth and crunched
down on it, then wiped the bitter fragments off his tongue with his
thumb.

"Let me put my cards on the table.  I work closely with a number of
Mexican banks.  If you wanted to deposit your money in one of those
banks, it could be arranged.  We could set up the accounts for you and
we have people there who know how to stay discreet.  It may sound
complicated, but it's a lot less complicated than driving a herd of
cattle to Montana.  You just want to be damn sure you don't make any
amateurish mistakes."

Ben glanced over at Sweeney.  For a second it crossed his mind that
this was all part of one vast conspiracy--the Colombians in the liquor
store, Jackett, the pair who'd beaten Sweeney up--but he didn't really
believe that.  No, Sweeney was looking for a way out of the jam he'd
gotten himself into, just the way Ben was.

"And how much would it cost me, your assistance?"  Ben said.

"Forty percent."

"Forty percent."

"I believe that's the going rate."

Ben whistled softly, kicking at a clump of weeds.  Grasshoppers sprayed
up in front of him.  "And so what would I do?  Just turn all the money
over to you?"

"These things are based on trust.  That's what it always comes down to.
You just have to decide."  Jackett reached out and flicked a bee from
Ben's collar.  "Remind me when we get back to the house.  I want to
give you some of that honey."

The children had had a great afternoon.  They'd both gotten to ride on
a one-eyed stallion named Spook, and the horse had nearly run Abby into
the low-hanging branch of a tree, a cause of much excited conversation
on their trip back to Austin.  Katy'd had a good day too; she and Mrs.
Jackett had made arrangements to have lunch in town with some of the
Jacketts' museum friends.  It was only the men who were quiet: Sweeney,
staring out the window, lost in his own thoughts, and Ben, at the
wheel, silently battling the late-afternoon traffic.

As they came up the driveway, a raccoon scurried away from an
overturned garbage can.  Everyone got out of the van, Katy leaning back
to retrieve the red plastic bucket of honey and the rusted horseshoe
Mrs.  Jackett had given Matt for good luck.  She called the children
back from the front door to thank Sweeney for the lovely day.  Sweeney
put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a feathery kiss.

"I'll walk you to your car," Ben said.

The two men trudged silently down the driveway.  Neither spoke until
they heard the door to the house slam.

"So, what did you think of Jackett?"  Sweeney said.

"I liked him."

"You ready to do this?"

"Probably so.  If you could just give me a couple of days.  It's a lot
to think over."  Sweeney shot him a quick glance.  The setting sun
stabbed through the tops of the cedars like a glowing cinder.

"Sure," Sweeney said.  "Just don't think about it too long."

The plan had been for the whole family to go to Wimberley for their
last weekend before school started, and they'd rented a pair of simple
cabins on the Blanco River with the Stricklands.  Katy was dismayed
when Ben announced that he had too much work to do and they should go
without him.  It wouldn't be nearly as much fun without him, she said.
Couldn't he bring his work with him?  Or they could come back early on
Sunday.  Ben held fast; there was no room for negotiation on this
one.

Katy and the children left a little after ten on Saturday morning.  Ben
went into his office and fut zed with his syllabus for an hour and then
drove up to Julio's for lunch.  As much as he loved his family, this
was a time when he wanted them out of the way.  He was about to take
the biggest chance of his life and what he needed was time to think and
move.

In the afternoon he returned books to the library, stopped by Kinko's
to pick up his course instruction packet, and went to the gym.  He got
back to the house about six-thirty and was surprised to find a
brand-new Honda Accord parked in the driveway.  He sat with his hands
in his lap, just staring at it for a minute.  Zoila and Roberto were
spending the weekend with her uncle in East Austin; he had no idea who
this could be.

The front door was unlocked.  Ben pushed it open and stepped into the
cool blast of the air-conditioning.

"Hello?"  he called.  The house was utterly still.  Through the living
room windows he could see the tiny head of a turtle moving across the
surface of the fountain, a green nub.  Something thumped softly on the
second floor.

Ben set down his gym bag and moved silently up the stairs.  The door to
the spare bedroom stood open and suitcases were strewn across the
landing.  Rebecca had her back to him as she sorted through a stack of
summer dresses on the bed.  When she finally turned and saw him, she
gave a start.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."  She wore white pants, a tightly rolled blue bandanna to hold
back her tawny hair, and the kind of Gucci sandals that show lots of
tanned foot.

"What are you doing?"

"Just looking for some of my clothes," she said.  All the closets in
the bedroom hung open and a David Hockney print, bowed slightly in an
inadequate frame, leaned against the wall.

"And when did you get in?"

"This morning," she said.  "I tried to call three or four times, but I
didn't get anyone, so I just came by.  I hope it's all right.  I was
going to leave you a note."

"Of course it's all right."  There was something about her that seemed
off, something desperate and harried.  Ben didn't believe her story for
a second.

"So where is everybody?"  Rebecca asked.

"Katy and the kids went down to Wimberley for the weekend.  Zoila's at
her uncle's."

"So it's just the two of us."

"Apparently so," Ben said.  He scratched his nose.  His heart still
raced wildly.  "You have plans for dinner?"

"No."

"Well, let's see what I can whip up."

Still more than a little pissed--who likes people breaking into their
home, even if it is their landlord?  --Ben went downstairs and found a
couple of chicken breasts coiled inside a container of lemon marinade.
He got the grill going and then rustled around for salad makings.
Rebecca--acting as if she'd done nothing wrong--opened a bottle of wine
and sat at the kitchen table while Ben sliced tomatoes.

Her summer in Santa Fe had been a mixed bag.  The air was wonderful and
she'd gotten a lot of work done, but the crowds in August had turned
the place into a zoo, and sometimes she yearned to have a conversation
with someone other than a massage therapist.

"So, have you seen Sweeney?"  Ben asked.

"No," she said.  "And I don't imagine I will."

"And why is that?"

She rolled her wine around in her mouth for a second before swallowing.
"Sweeney, I believe, is occupied."

"How do you mean?"  In the corner, the beady-eyed parrot chewed on
sunflower seeds, dropping hulls to the floor of his cage.

"Oh, come on, Ben.  You must know."

"Know what?"

"Sweeney's got a girlfriend."

Ben slid the tomatoes into the salad bowl, feeling his face beginning
to color.  "Well, yes."

"Well, yes, indeed.  You must see him."

"We saw him yesterday, as a matter of fact.  We went to see a friend of
his.  A man named Also Jackett."

Rebecca got up from her chair and stared out the window.  In profile
she seemed noble and ruined.  "You've done a wonderful job with the
flowers," she said.  "Everything looks so nice.  You and Katy are doing
well?"

"Oh, yeah.  She loves it here."

It was nearly dark by the time the chicken was ready and they ate by
the pool.  A breeze had come up from the north, for the first time in
months it seemed, and the temperature dropped ten degrees.  Ben was
still wary; it was too strange, her appearing tonight of all nights; it
felt too much like a setup.

Most of her women friends were becoming Episcopalian priests, she said;
maybe she would give it a try herself.  Not that she believed in God
exactly, or at least not in the God with the long white beard peering
down from heaven, but there were things about religion that had always
drawn her, the part where you ask God to forgive you your trespasses as
you forgive those who trespass against you.  Perhaps it was
simpleminded, but just saying those words always made her feel cleaner.
If she could only make it a practice--forgiving her enemies, clearing
the slate and allowing God to forgive her, getting rid of all those
terrible poisons.

Ben said nothing, staring out at the breeze rippling the surface of the
pool.  It was cool enough now, but tomorrow it would be a hundred
again, without doubt.  Between the two of them, Ben and Rebecca had
finished the bottle of wine.

They did the dishes and went for a walk on the road.  The cat followed
them, meandering into the bamboo from time to time to search for baby
birds.  Rebecca made Ben tell her the story about his and Katy's
courtship, their years in New York.  For all of his wariness, he found
himself talking to her almost eagerly, talking more openly than he'd
talked to anyone in months.  Sometime during their stroll he decided
he'd been wrong to be so suspicious of her.  She was just lonely and
wounded.  Sweeney had really hurt her--not a difficult thing to
imagine.

When they got back to the house it was nearly eleven.  They went
upstairs and she finished her packing, filling two travel bags and a
leather suitcase the color of caramel.

"So, do you have a place to stay?"  he asked.

"No, but it won't be hard to find one."

"You're welcome to stay here.  It is your house."

Her smile was wry.  "It wouldn't be awkward?"

"Not at all.  You can sleep in Abby's room."

He got her fresh towels from the hall closet, kissed her on the cheek,
and they went to their separate bedrooms.

He got into bed and tried to read for a while, thumbing through an old
Best American Poetry anthology.  He heard Rebecca go out to her car and
then come in again; a few seconds later he heard the shower.

He snapped off the bedside lamp and lay in the dark for a long time,
just thinking.  In the morning he would have to call Sweeney; he'd let
him sweat enough.  He rolled over on his side, scrunching up his
pillow.  He didn't remember falling asleep but he must have, because
the soft knock on the bedroom door took him out of it with a rush.

"Yes?"  he said.  He was aware of his voice sounding oddly strangled.
He propped himself on an elbow as the door swung open.  Rebecca stood
in the half-light from the hallway, wearing a simple cotton
nightgown.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello."  She stood there for a long time without saying anything.  "Is
anything wrong?"  he asked.

"No," she said.  She came in.  The bed creaked as she sat down.  "It's
just that it's so strange, being here again."

"Why is that?"

"I don't know.  It's as if I don't quite know where I belong in the
world."  He reached out for her hand; her grip was surprisingly
fierce.

"Why did you come back?"  he asked.  She shook her head and then turned
away from him, surveying the dark room.

"You moved the bureau," she said.

"I hope it's okay."

"Of course it's okay.  Everything's okay."

She leaned forward and kissed him gravely.  He didn't move away from
her at first but then he did, touching her lips with two fingers.

"I don't think we should do this," he said.

"But you want to, don't you?"

"Part of me does.  But I can't ... I can't lie to my wife."

"But you already are."

"What do you mean?"

"You already are lying to her."  There was just enough moonlight coming
through the window for him to see the long line of her bowed neck.

"About what?"

"You know what."

"Sweeney told you."

She let go of his hand and got up from the bed.  "Of course he told me.
You think Sweeney can keep his mouth shut about anything?"  She moved
across the room to the window.  "Why do you think he talked me into
giving you this house?  He's going to rob you blind.  He and his friend
Jackett."

"You know Jackett?"

"Of course I know Jackett.  He and I were once quite ... close."  He
heard her stumble against something in the dark.  "I better go."

"Yes," he said.  "You better go."

"Give my best to your wife."

She closed the door when she left.  He heard her bump down the stairs,
heard her start the car.  Lights slid across the ceiling of his bedroom
as she backed down the driveway.  He got up and opened the window.  The
cool breeze was gone; even at midnight he could feel it heating up
again.  He stood for a long time, staring at the blinking lights of the
radio towers and listening to the chant of the cicadas.

He called Sweeney as soon as he got up the next morning.  It was a
little before nine and it was clear that Ben had woken him.

"Any chance we could get together today?"  Ben asked.

"Sure.  Whatever you say."

"How about two this afternoon?"  Ben leaned over on one foot to
retrieve the two wineglasses from the dishwasher and then set them back
in the cupboard.

"Great," Sweeney said.  "You want me to come over there?"

"No, I want you to meet me.  You know where Camp Chautauqua is?"

"You mean that place out by Spicewood?"

"Yeah."

"It takes forty-five minutes to get out there!"

"It's Sunday, Sweeney, what else do you have to do?  I'll see you
there."

Ben took the towels from Abby's bedroom and put them in the washing
machine.  He toasted a bagel and ate it standing at the kitchen
counter.  When he was done, he went out to the garage and found the
shovel.  As he was putting it in the trunk of the Cutlass he heard the
phone ringing.  He raced back inside, thinking it was Sweeney, that
there was some problem, but it was just Katy, calling to see how he
was.

"The kids have had a great time," she said.  "Really, it's so
beautiful. We're right down by the water and there are all these big
cypress trees.  Everybody misses you.  We were thinking if you could
come down and have a swim with everybody"

"I probably shouldn't," Ben said.

"Is anything wrong?  You sound rushed."

"No," he said.  "I'm just trying to get a couple things out of the
way."

He filled up at Chevron and headed out.  The evening with Rebecca was
still with him, but what remained wasn't so much alarm as a deep
sadness.  He was weary of imagining conspiracies.  She had come to warn
him, nothing more, but he was already warned.  What had she told him
that he didn't already know?  Sweeney had been setting him up from the
start: big surprise.  Nothing she'd said was going to change anything.
What he needed to do now was act.

There were readings for the blind on public radio, articles from the
week's newspapers; a woman had been married at the Central Park Zoo.
Ben listened for a while and then snapped it off.  Driving through Oak
Hill he caught a glimpse of a red Bronco eight or nine cars back in
traffic and his heart leaped.  His first instinct was that it was
Sweeney following him, but after a mile or so the Bronco vanished.  It
was nothing but his jumpiness; it had gotten to the point where he was
seeing Sweeney behind every tree.

Once he got into the high, rolling country he started to relax.  The
turns were almost second nature to him now.  He passed the crossroads
store and the rusted windmill, and labored up the big hill.  Getting
out to unlock the gate, he picked a half dozen flattened beer cans from
the weeds and tossed them in the backseat of the car.  Dust billowed
behind him as he drove in; it had been almost a month since they'd had
any rain.

A relief welled up in him, just seeing that the house was still
standing.  He parked under the live oak, got the shovel from the trunk
of the car, and walked to the plot; it was untouched.  He stood for
several minutes, staring at it.

He knew exactly where every cooler was.  He'd buried them in a simple
crossing pattern, five in a north-south row and two on either side,
with two long paces between each, using the line between a rotting
fence post and the corner of the house to get his bearings.

He scooped out two shallow shovelfuls and then turned the shovel upside
down, plunging the handle down into the earth, jabbing it again and
again until he heard a reassuring thunk--the hard bottom that Thoreau
had always been looking for, below freshet and frost and fire, a place
where you might found a wall or a state.

It took twenty minutes to dig up the cooler and wrest it from its rocky
hole.  The heat was withering, and by the time he finished he felt as
if he might pass out.  He lugged the cooler into the shade of the porch
before he opened it.

It was all there, fifty-dollar bills, packed tightly and orderly.  Ben
tore open one of the cellophane wrappers and counted out twelve
thousand dollars (six hundred a week times twenty weeks, the equivalent
of everything he'd already given Sweeney).  He put the twelve thousand
in a rusted coffee can and stuck it under the front porch, his only
witness the longhorn skull that stared blankly with its cavernous eyes.
Ben closed the cooler, went back out in the heat, and shoveled the dirt
back into the hole.  He stamped it down with his feet.

He glanced at his watch.  It was just eleven-thirty and he wasn't
meeting Sweeney until two.  He walked down to the creek and took off
all his clothes.  He waded up the shallow stream, watching the minnows
dart ahead of him.  The high grasses rustled on the shore and a
red-tailed hawk circled high above the limestone cliffs.

The water was warm at first, but as he moved downstream, it got deeper
and cooler, and when he came to one of the gouged-out pools he bent
low, launched himself, and breast-stroked his way to the middle.  At
its deepest, the water was neck-high.  He rolled over and spread his
arms, letting the pool hold him, only his face exposed to the intensity
of the 100-degree heat.  He remembered being baptized at a small
Wisconsin church, the minister's hand covering his face with a cloth;
he remembered how he had struggled, afraid of going over backward,
afraid of surrender.  Insects sang on the bank and tiny fish nibbled at
his ankles.

He must have floated on his back for a couple of minutes, letting the
combination of sun and cool water lull him nearly to sleep.  It was
only when he shook his head, waving a hovering dragonfly away from his
nose, that he saw the flash of light in the trees above the limestone
cliffs.  He scrambled quickly to regain his feet and stood chest-deep
in the creek, staring upward.  It had been just a sudden splash of
light, like the reflection off a mirror or a windshield, but he hadn't
made it up.  He stood for a long time, shielding his eyes, but he
didn't see it again.  A jay called from the nearby cedars.  Ben looked
back toward the house where the cooler still sat on the porch,
undisturbed.  He sloshed back to the shore; it was time to get going.

On his way out he stopped at the crossroads store and picked up a
six-pack of beer and a chopped beef sandwich.  He ate the sandwich in
the car, wiping his greasy fingers on a Dairy Queen napkin and then
pitching the crumpled paper out the window, watching in the rearview
mirror as it tumbled down the pavement and into the tawny weeds.

It took him a little over thirty minutes to get to Camp Chautauqua.
There was no attendant at the gate, so Ben put two dollars in one of
the camp envelopes, carefully writing down his license number and time
of arrival on the flap, and slipped it into the drop box.

He found a picnic table a hundred yards from the water, sheltered from
the sun by a rough wooden roof.  A clown reunion seemed to be going on
across the road, four or five of the men in full costume, the others
wearing their Shriners jackets, and they were having a great time. They
had a fire going; mothers slathered their children with sunblock, and a
group of swim suited teenagers picked their way carefully through a
field of cockle burs heading for the water.

Ben sipped at a Corona, staring at the lake, the six-pack sitting on
the table in front of him.  The afternoon had turned hazy.  He had
never quite accepted the fact that central Texas lakes were lakes; to
him they were just dammed-up rivers.  There were stories he had heard,
he didn't know if they were apocryphal or not, of entire western towns
still down there, buried beneath a hundred feet of water.

Sweeney pulled in a little after two.  He looked rather confused when
he got out of his Bronco.

"This your idea?"  he asked.  He gestured to the clowns across the
road.  A man in a Shriners jacket twisted balloons into giraffes for a
group of eight-year-olds.

"No," Ben said.  "You want a beer?"

"Why not?"

Sweeney lifted a Corona from the six-pack and sat down on the opposite
side of the table.  He twisted off the cap and tossed it in the general
direction of the trash basket.  It came up a couple of feet short.  Far
out on the lake two cigarette boats bounced across the choppy water.
Ben took a swig of his beer and Sweeney did the same.

"I hate circuses," Sweeney said.

"Is that right?"

"I never thought they were that funny.  A bunch of clowns beating the
crap out of each other with clubs.  I remember buying a ticket once to
see the world's fattest man.  It was just this guy in a trailer, he
couldn't even get up.  It was like he was just swimming in this pool of
flesh.  Eight hundred and fifty pounds.  I didn't really enjoy it."
Sweeney took another swig of his beer.  "So what's the deal here?"

"I've got something for you," Ben said.

"What's that?"

"It's in my trunk."  He fished his car keys out of his pocket and laid
them on the table.  Sweeney gaped at him.  "Go on," Ben said.

Sweeney took the keys, got up, and went to the Cutlass.  The closest
possible witness was a father in wing-tip shoes and no socks changing
his daughter's diaper in the backseat of a van thirty yards away.  Ben
pulled at his nose; in the heat, one beer was enough to make him dizzy.
Sweeney popped open the trunk and stared at the cooler.

Ben rose from the table.  "Open it," he said.

Sweeney hesitated, as if it had to be some sort of trick, then undid
the plastic latch and lifted the lid.  Ben stood five feet away, just
watching Sweeney's face.  For a second there was no reaction at all--as
if Sweeney didn't know what he was looking at--and then he let out a
big sputter of amazement.

"So how much is this?"  Sweeney asked.

"A little under a million," Ben said.  Sweeney ran his hand lightly
over the stacks of money.  He seemed oddly baffled, a shadow of
disbelief lurking behind his clear blue eyes.  "You can take it to your
friend Jackett."

"You don't want to take it yourself?"

"I thought it would be better if you did."  Across the road one of the
clowns danced around the table with a can of beer that cascaded with
foam and everyone was laughing uproariously.

"Either way," Sweeney said.

"You want to count it?"

"No, I'll take your word for it," Sweeney said.  He was still staring
down at the money, fingering the torn cellophane, mulling over the one
shortened stack.  Somewhere in the distance speedboats droned like
angry hornets.

"I guess this means no more of our weekly meetings," Ben said.

"No, I think we just graduated," Sweeney said.  He handed Ben his keys
back.  "So how do you want to do this?"

"I'll help you load it in your car."

Sweeney gave a short laugh.  "So I'm the guy who gets to drive back
into Austin with this in my backseat, right?"

"Just make sure you don't get stopped," Ben said.

Together they lugged the cooler to Sweeney's Bronco and set it on the
floor in the back.

"So this is all of it?"  Sweeney asked.

"Yeah, this is all of it," Ben said.  Sweeney rubbed gravely at his ear
for a second and then patted Ben on the shoulder.  "I'll get it to
Jackett tomorrow.  I'll call you."

"Whenever."

A white Camry was coming slowly down the road toward them.  As it
passed, Ben saw that all three passengers were in full clown
costumes--curly orange wigs, cherry-red noses, the corners of their
painted mouths curving downward in horseshoes of irrevocable sadness.
One of them raised a hand in greeting; Sweeney refused to acknowledge
him, glowering back.

Driving back to Austin, Ben was filled with elation.  Let them rob him,
let Sweeney disappear with the money if that was what he was going to
do.  It was a small price to pay.

The solution was so simple--the only astonishing thing about it was
that he hadn't thought of it before.  The one advantage Ben had was
that Sweeney didn't know how much money there was.  As long as Sweeney
thought he'd gotten his, he wasn't going to be turning Ben over to a
bunch of drug dealers for some lousy ten percent.  Ben still had
millions, more than anyone would ever need.  Next time around, he
wasn't going to be so stupid.  He would talk to no one, trust no one,
let the money bake in its sun-hardened plot for ten years or twenty if
he had to, until everyone had long forgotten.  The million he'd lost he
could just chalk up to the rising cost of education.

Katy and the children pulled into the driveway ten minutes after he
did.  The tops of Matt's feet glowed with sunburn and everyone was
tired.  Ben hugged them and kissed them all as if he hadn't seen them
for a month.

Abby wriggled out of his grasp with a sardonic smile.  "Dad, is
something wrong with you?"

"No, honey, I'm just in a good mood."

It was school the next day and everyone needed to go to bed early. They
ordered pizza and spent a quiet night watching television and searching
for three-ring notebooks and protractors.  It was a nice evening; the
only jarring note was when Abby stomped down from her room just as the
weather came on.

"Mom, somebody's been in my closet."

"Oh, yeah," Ben said.  "Rebecca was here last night."

"Rebecca?"  Katy said.  Her face furrowed with confusion.  "Did she
stay here?"

"No," Ben said.  "No.  She was only in town for the day.  She came to
pick up some of her stuff."

CHAPTER 15

At nine-thirty the next morning he stood in front of 150 strange faces,
talking about the origins of American writing, of the desire to create
a literature to match the energies released by the Revolution, the
desire to burn away the past.

"If you want to understand this country and its literature," he said,
"a good place to start would be with the accounts of the early hunters,
the descriptions of skies blackened by flocks of passenger pigeons and
wild turkeys, of buffalo herds stretching to the horizon.  America has
always been, in the world's imagination, the land of plenty, the
country of limitless possibility, a place where the streets are paved
with gold.  But everything comes at a price.

"If you listened to the political speeches during the last election,
you might have come away with the impression that the essential
American is just a good-hearted Joe temporarily misled, perhaps, by a
few unscrupulous leaders of the opposing party.  But as you will see as
we move through the semester, our greatest writers have a more complex
story to tell.  Putting it most charitably, Emerson said that heroes do
not fix but flow, bend forward, and invent a resource for every moment.
Less charitably, Simon Suggs tells us that it's good to be shifty in a
new country."

Two burly football players at the back of the room exchanged swift
glances: this was a course to drop.  A young blond woman in bobby socks
scribbled furiously.  After class a dozen students crowded around the
podium--the scruffier ones, by and large; the ones with the nose rings
and the burning eyes and the Berkeley T-shirts.  They thought they had
found their man, their closet radical.

His second class wasn't until three-thirty.  On his way over to the
Coop to check on textbooks, the sweet and melancholy sound of pan pipes
pierced the air.  Ben jostled his way through the crowd that had
gathered on the West Mall to listen to the music of two tiny Peruvians
and an old hippie.  A gentle pear of a man in a cheap suit was passing
out pocket-size copies of the New Testament, and newspaper salesmen
were offering free copies of the Statesman.

He'd started the morning free and easy, almost gleeful, but as the day
wore on he felt himself growing increasingly edgy.  Sweeney had said
he'd call; Ben guessed there was less than a fifty-fifty chance of that
happening, but he couldn't help wondering about it.  The big question
was, if Sweeney did go to Jackett, was Jackett going to buy the story
that the million dollars was all of it?  Maybe they knew more than Ben
thought they knew.

After he straightened things out with the textbook people, he stopped
at Texas French Bread for lunch and then walked all the way across
campus to the parking office to see about a new sticker for his car.

The bell had already rung when he walked into his three-thirty class.
He strode quickly to the podium, unzipped his briefcase, and arranged
his notes.  He glanced up.  Every eye in the room was on him.  It was
usual, on the first day, for a class to be wary, but this was more than
that.  He nodded at an Indian student in a said who quickly averted her
gaze.

"Hot enough for everybody?"  he said.  "I've always thought that if
they're going to ask us to start our lit classes in August in Texas, it
would make a lot more sense to begin with Dante's Inferno than with
Ralph Waldo Emerson."

He surveyed the room.  Not a glimmer of a smile anywhere.  What had he
done?  For a second he thought he must have walked into the wrong room.
A couple of latecomers peered in through the door.

"Come on in," Ben said.  "We've got plenty of room down front."

Ben waited until they made their way to their seats and got settled.
The rest of the class was still staring like a herd of transfixed
cattle.  Then he realized that the students weren't looking at him,
they were looking past him.  He turned.  Scrawled on the blackboard, in
huge juvenile print, was the message WE WANT OUR MONEY

BACK.

Ben turned back to face the class.  He ran his fingers through his
hair, taking a second to gather himself.  "I'm sorry, everyone, but
there's been an unexpected emergency.  I'll leave copies of the
syllabus here in front, you should all pick one up before you leave,
and I'll see you on Friday."

The students seemed dumbfounded.  Ben jammed his lecture notes back in
his briefcase, stumbled down from the podium, and set the stack of
syllabi on an empty seat in the front row.

"Professor Lindberg?"

Ben glanced up and saw the hand waving in the back, but there was no
time.  He shook his head no and fled the room.  As soon as he was
outside the door he began to run.  He raced down the hallway, through
the clutch of students gathered in front of the course listings board,
and nearly knocked over Ernestine Bryce as she came out of the
undergraduate office.  He took the two flights of stairs to the
basement three steps at a time.  He fumbled with his keys, picked them
up, and opened the door to his office.  His fingers danced, punching
the numbers in on the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hey," Ben said.  Out of breath, he leaned against his desk.  "Are the
children home yet?"

"No, but they should be any minute."

"I want you to go to school and get them."

"What are you talking about?"

"Please, Katy.  Just do it.  I'll explain when I get there."

She heard the fear in his voice and it frightened her.  "I'm sure
Tracy's already picked them up.  What is this?  What's wrong?"

"Go anyway," Ben said.  "Please.  I'll be home in twenty minutes."

He hung up and stood staring at nothing for a moment, then swept his
hand across his desk, sending books and papers flying.

His car was parked all the way down by the stadium.  Walking and
running, it still took him five minutes to get there.  It was four
o'clock and the traffic on Mopac wasn't bad.  He was on autopilot,
terror coiled in his stomach like a spiny sea creature.  It was all he
could do to remember the way home.  His tires squealed as he took the
long curves on Bee Caves.  Maybe he'd overreacted.  Maybe he'd scared
the wits out of Katy for no reason, made a fool of himself, but that
didn't matter.  All that mattered was that his children were safe.

He'd said he'd be home in twenty minutes; he made it in fifteen.
Pulling into the driveway he saw their neighbor Tracy Carter's Suburban
parked next to the house.  The back door of the van was open and Matt
was getting out, crouched low to keep from hitting his head.  Katy
stood on the far side of the satiny black-and-gray vehicle, talking to
Tracy.

Ben snapped off the car's air conditioner, listening to its long hushed
sigh, and then turned off the ignition.  He sat with his hands in his
lap, like the last man to leave the stadium after a hair-raising game.
Matt looked back, crooked his neck, and gave him a shy wave.  Ben
opened the door and pulled himself out of the Cutlass.

Katy came around the front of the van.  Her face was so hard that Ben
didn't know what to think --could Sweeney have somehow called her and
spilled the beans?  The image flashed in his mind of the two of them
sitting in Rebecca's living room, under the photograph of Clint
Eastwood and Ronald Reagan, Sweeney gesturing as he talked as if he
were juggling unseen balls in the air, presenting it all as if he was
doing her a favor, as if it was something she really needed to know,
reaching across to touch her hand, offering consolation, a glass of
untouched iced tea on the table between them.  Ben really wouldn't put
it past the guy--but then he suddenly realized he didn't see Abby.

All eyes were on him as he moved across the driveway of crushed
limestone.  Tracy leaned forward on the steering wheel, her three kids
solemn as owls in the back, still strapped in seat belts.

"Where's Abby?"  Ben asked.

"We're not sure," Katy said.  She could not bring herself to look at
him, her voice low and throttled.

"We waited fifteen minutes," Tracy said, "and then I sent Vivian to
look.  One of her friends said she thought Abby had said something
about going home with Claire."

"Did you call Claire?"  Ben asked.  He squinted from one woman to the
other, the sun glaring mercilessly off the huge white house.

"I just tried," Katy said.  "There was no answer."  Matt stood at the
front door, his green backpack sagging at his side.  Tracy took her
sunglasses out of her hair.

"I should get the rest of these kids back," Tracy said.  She was wise
enough not to want any part of this.  "If there's anything I can do,
please call me."

"Of course," Katy said.  As they watched Tracy back down the drive, Ben
put his hand on Katy's elbow.  She slid away from him.  "What is this?
Ben, what is happening?"

He looked at their son, shadowed in the door.  "We'll be in in a
minute, okay?"  Matt hesitated and then went inside.  A jet had left
its stuttery Morse code trailing across the cobalt sky.

"So where is she?"  Katy said.  She'd been working in the yard and a
pair of heavy cloth gloves protruded from her back pocket.

"I don't know."

"Then why did you call me like that?"  The phone rang inside the
house.

"I need to get this," Ben said.

"Answer me, Ben!"

As he turned away she tried to catch his arm.  The phone rang a second
time and he tore free, running for the house.  She stood stunned for a
second, and then she began to run too.

He slammed open the front door.  Matt, on his way to get his father,
froze in the hallway, startled by the violent entrance.  He pointed to
the receiver lying on the table in the breakfast room.

"It's for you," he said.

"Thank you, Matt, thank you."  He patted his son quickly on the
shoulder as he passed.  When he picked up the phone, all he could hear
at first was a grainy hum, as if the call were coming over the
transatlantic cable.

"Hello?"  Ben said.  Zoila stood at the kitchen counter chopping red
peppers.  "Hello!"

"Mr.  Lindberg?"  The voice was gravelly, male, with the hint of an
accent.

"Yes?"  Ben turned, the phone cord spiraling around him.  Katy stood
behind Matt, her face flushed, her hands on his shoulders.

"You got our money, right?"

"Who is this?"

"What does it matter who it is?  You got a whole lot of money that
doesn't fucking belong to you, right?"  The hum grew stronger, and for
a second Ben thought they'd been disconnected.  "What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything," Ben said.  The parrot clattered in his cage,
ruffling his green-and-yellow feathers.

"So you've got something that's mine and I've got something that's
yours."

"What do you mean?"

"Your daughter."

"Where are you?"

"Don't you worry about where I am.  What you need to worry about is
getting all that fucking money back to me."

"That's fine."

"By five-thirty."  Zoila kept at her task, slicing vegetables,
rock-solid reliable at one hundred dollars a week.

"I can't do it that fast."

"Don't you fucking tell me how fast you can do it!  You're not the one
making the rules around here!"

"But the money isn't here!"

"Then where is it?"

"It's out in the country.  I buried it.  On this piece of land.  I can
take you there.  Or I can tell you where it is, either way.  Just let
her go."

There was only silence on the other end of the line for several
seconds, and then, in the background, a heated conversation in Spanish.
Ben glanced at Katy and Matt, saw the wonder in their faces.  Katy had
taken Matt's hand.  The blender sat on the counter, full of strawberry
smoothie that she had made for the children's after-school snack.

"So how far out in the country is it?"

"Seventeen, eighteen miles," Ben said.

"We're going to have to call you back."

"What do you mean, you'll call me back?  I can take you there right
now--whatever you want."

"I just told you, man.  We'll call you back.  So stay off the phone,
all right?  And don't even think about calling the cops."

"No, wait--" There was a series of short castanet like clicks and then
the steady hum of the dial tone.  Ben set the phone down.

"Bye-bye," the parrot called.  "Bye-bye."

Ben turned.  The only sound was the steady snap of Zoila's knife
against the chopping board.  Matt pulled free of his mother's hand.
Katy, a million miles away, stared out the window at the rosebushes,
dappled in the late-afternoon sun, and the water splashing in the
fountain.

There was a sudden patter of feet.  Roberto raced in, beaming, holding
aloft two Ping-Pong paddles.  "to El Se@nor!"

"No, Roberto, not now," Ben said.

The boy stopped short, his diaper sagging.  His smile turned tragic.
Zoila put her knife down and gathered him in, prying the paddles out of
his hands.

"If you could take him upstairs for a few minutes," Ben said.

Katy said something in Spanish and Zoila nodded, moving Roberto toward
the hallway.  Matt stepped out of the way to let them pass.

"Matt?  You too, pal," Ben said.  "Mom and I need to talk."

Without a word Matt was gone.  Ben could hear Roberto complaining
loudly to his mother on the stairway.

"Someone has her," Katy said.  Her voice had fallen to a whisper.

"Yes."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

Katy rose from her chair.  "You said something about burying money.
What money?"

"There is this money.  That I found."

"How much money?"

"A great deal of money."

"Zoila!"  the parrot screeched.

Katy fingered the basket of apples and browning bananas on the side
table.  "You mean the residual check--"

"There was no residual check."

"And the money from Sweeney's club--"

"That was all part of it."

She slapped him, catching him flush on the cheek, the sound loud as a
shot in the still room.  The parrot cocked his head, first left and
then right, regarding them with a curious, unblinking eye.  Ben reached
up to touch his face.

"How long have you been lying to me?"

"Katy, listen, let me explain."

"How long, Ben?"

"Since--I don't know--January."

"I'm calling the police."

"No, you can't."

"What do you mean, I can't?  It's my daughter's life we're talking
about here."

"I know that.  But the police aren't going to be able to get her back.
I'm the only one who can get her back."

"My God, Ben--"

"They're going to call me."

"When?"

"I don't know."

"And if they don't?"

She waited and then saw that he had no answer.  She pivoted away from
him, trying not to cry.  It was not in her nature to be pitiable.  When
he tried to touch her shoulder she spun around, knocking his hand
away.

He walked to the far end of the room and leaned against the back of a
chair.  The parrot began to bark, going through its whole repertoire.
Katy picked the Ping-Pong paddles off the floor and put them in the
drawer of the china cabinet.

Without looking at him she said, "So tell me.  Tell me what you did."

He told her the story from the beginning, about the night he found the
coolers under the feed store about moving them to the storage unit,
about the arrangement he made with Sweeney.  He did not tell it well.
He kept having to go back over things and she didn't make it any easier
for him, staring at him without expression as if he were explaining how
he'd just spent the last nine months walking on the moon.

"So when we all went out for dinner on my birthday, it was with this
money?"

"Yes," he said.

She pulled a napkin from one of the blue ceramic napkin rings and
folded and refolded it on the table in front of her.  "And you never
asked yourself whose money it was?"

"Of course I did.  All the time."

"But you thought you could get away with it?"  She spoke as if she were
talking to a simpleton.  Ben could see it sinking in, just how deeply
tainted everything was.  "So you were both in on it, you and
Sweeney?"

"Katy ..."

"And Rebecca?  I suppose she knew too?  This is where the house came
from?"  He made a futile wave of his hand.  He didn't even begin to
know how to answer that one.  "How could you do this, Ben?  How could
you go on lying to me like this?"

Suddenly he was hollering.  "I lied to you because I thought you would
have made me turn it all in!  I lied to you because I wanted you to
have a home you could be proud of!  I lied to you because I was tired
of our being at each other's throats every time we had to send the car
to the shop!  I lied to you because I wanted there to be some
possibility of hope in our lives, because, let's face it, it was
getting pretty goddamned clear what our life was going to be like on
thirty grand a year, or even forty, and it wasn't the life you were
counting on."

Her face filled with disbelief.  "So it's all my fault, is that what
you're saying?"

The dull ring of the phone made them both jump.  Ben picked it up,
heard the fuzz of the cellular phone.

"Hello?"

"Mr.  Lindberg?"

"Yes."

"Do you know where the 7-Eleven is on Cedar Breaks Trail?"

"Yes."  Ben stared out at the empty pool, the brilliantly blue water
riffled by a slight breeze; he remembered how excited Katy had been the
first time she'd seen it, how she'd cried out for them to come look.

"There's a pay phone outside the store.  I want you to be at that phone
in fifteen minutes."

"And what about my daughter?"

"Your daughter is the least of your worries.  You just be there, all
right?  And I don't want you bringing anybody with you."

"I understand."

There was a sudden click and then nothing.  He looked back at Katy.

"So what did they say?"

"I'm supposed to go down to the 7-Eleven on Cedar Breaks."

"And are they bringing Abby?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going with you," she said.

"You can't.  He said not to bring anyone."

"He said!  And this is what we're doing?  What he says--whoever he
is?"

He stared at her with a look that could have been mistaken for
contempt.  "You need to stay here.  If there are two of us, they'll
never show their faces."

"And what am I supposed to do, then?"

"Wait.  If you don't hear from me in an hour, call the cops."

When he walked past her she never moved.  He made it all the way out to
the car before he heard the door to the house open behind him.  He
turned and saw Katy running toward him.  In the distance, an electric
lawn mower droned and sputtered.  Ben stepped in front of the Cutlass
to intercept her.  As she lunged for the door handle he caught her by
both wrists.

"I'm going.  I have to see her.  I have to know--" She tried to pull
free and they pirouetted in the white gravel.

"You can't, Katy!  You can't!  Listen to me!  I'm the only one who can
give them what they want!  I got us into this and I'm going to get us
out!"

He still had both of her wrists.  They were locked tight against one
another, like the bride and groom atop a wedding cake.  Her face
dissolved.  She lunged and hit him on the chest with her forehead,
once, twice, three times, and then she was sobbing deep inconsolable
sobs.  Ben let go of one of her wrists so he could put his arm around
her.

"I'm sorry," he murmured.  "I'm so sorry."

He put his other arm around her then, trying to comfort her.  She let
him.  Leaning against the car, he felt the hot metal sear his back like
a brand.  He looked up.  Matt stared down at them from his bedroom
window, one hand holding back the white lace curtain.

He sped down the twisting mountain roads, narrowly avoiding a
slow-moving gravel truck on one of the blind curves.  The 7-Eleven was
at a four-way stop a half mile up from the lake.  The road had been
built before the housing boom, and what had been a quiet country road
was now a major thoroughfare for rush-hour traffic.

When Ben pulled up, there were cars at all six gas pumps and a couple
of kids lounged in front of the store with their Big Gulps.  A sign for
the Texas lottery was taped to the cashier's window.

Ben pulled himself out of his car.  The pay phone stood unoccupied next
to the Dumpster.  Checking his watch, he saw that he had five minutes
to spare.

He leaned against the side of the store, staring at the traffic.  The
four-way stop was a miracle of cooperation, the bulky gray-and-black
Suburbans taking turns like trained elephants.  Every so often a Jaguar
zoomed down from the hills.  A blonde in a lime-green aerobics outfit
went into the store and came out a couple of minutes later with a Diet
Coke and a bag of chips.  She smiled uncertainly at Ben; anybody who
was going to just stand out in the 98-degree heat had to be crazy.

Five minutes passed.  A large man in a sweat-stained white shirt and
loosened tie came out of the bathroom.  He dug into his pants pocket
for change and headed for the pay phone.  Ben pushed away from the
wall.

"Excuse me, sir," Ben said.  "I'm sorry.  I'm waiting for someone to
call me back.  I think they've got another phone inside.... I
appreciate it."

The man looked at Ben for a couple of seconds and then decided it was
too hot to make anything of it.  The man shook his head as he lowered
himself into his car.

The air smelled of gasoline and burning brakes.  The heat was making
Ben dizzy.  What if they'd changed their minds?  What if something had
gone wrong--if they'd been scared off?  Part of him still refused to
believe any of this was real.  Maybe it was just another one of
Sweeney's pranks.  Maybe Abby was perfectly safe at a friend's house,
drinking lemonade.

He looked at his watch again.  Nearly fifteen minutes had passed.  He
scrutinized the passing traffic.  It could have been just his
imagination, but he was almost certain that a beige Land Cruiser with
tinted windows had gone by more than once.  Two girls about Abby's age
came out of the store, giggly and gangly-legged, aware of the boys'
stares.

The ring of the phone was anemic.  Ben grabbed the receiver, the
plastic hot to the touch.  "Hello?"

"Mr.  Lindberg?"

"Yes."

"Here's what we want you to do.  There are some batting cages out on
Riverside, all the way out, past Montopolis.  They'll be on your right.
You think you can find them?"

"Yeah, I'll find them."

"We'll meet you there."  Ben put his fingers to his left ear, trying to
drown out the passing cars.

"And what about my daughter?"

"She'll be there too."

"And how are we going to handle this?"

"You're going to take us to the money."

"But she doesn't have to be part of this."

"Not once we have you."

Riverside was all the way across town and it was rush hour; there was
no good way to get there.  Ben drove in on Bee Caves and cut across the
park.  Traffic slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether.  He
snapped the radio on and then off again, trying to get hold of himself.
For a second he considered being a real asshole, pulling onto the
shoulder and zooming past everyone, but it looked as if it was bumper
to bumper all the way to the Barton Creek Bridge, and the last thing he
needed now was a cop pulling him over.  It was unthinkable, what had
happened.  His mind leaped like a grasshopper in a jar.  Even if he got
Abby back, how were they ever going to recover from this?  A terrier
scrambled about in the car next to him.

"Fuck it!  Fuck it!"  he shouted, hammering on the steering wheel.  The
traffic began to move again, almost as if someone had heard him.  On
the soccer fields the players ran relentlessly up and back, through a
haze of dust.

Once he got to Riverside, traffic improved.  The cars suddenly got
cheaper and older.  These guys, he thought, do they have any idea how
many years they could get for this?  He drove past the shopping center,
past the half-built apartment complexes and the empty wooded lots. Just
when he was about to turn around, thinking he'd gone too far, he
spotted the netting high above the trees.

He turned off onto a narrow dirt path.  A low clubhouse was set fifty
yards back from the road, and behind it were the cages and three or
four sand pits for horseshoes.  Beyond the cages was a junkyard.  The
place looked as if it had been closed for a while.  The front door of
the clubhouse had been kicked in, and huge untrimmed mulberry bushes
made it invisible to the passing traffic.

Ben got out of his car.  There was a pay phone on the patio of the
clubhouse.  As he walked toward it, a sparrow burst out of the rotting
eaves and winged its way into the trees.  Ben picked up the phone; he
was surprised to find that it had a dial tone.  On the wall of the low
building someone had scrawled a crude picture of a man with a huge
erect penis.

He walked to the cages and pushed open one of the creaking metal doors.
A half dozen yellow softballs nestled under the pitching machine.  He
walked down the sloping concrete and picked up a couple of them.

He remembered the first time he had taken Abby to a batting cage.  She
had gone reluctantly, and when they got there, she'd fussed over not
being able to find a helmet that was the right size, but she'd ended up
being delighted, hitting ball after ball while he sat outside on a
wooden bench, watching.  They must have spent three dollars' worth of
quarters.

He whirled and threw one of the balls high into the sagging nets.  The
ball snagged for a moment, rolling along a seam, and then dropped to
the concrete.  It rolled back toward him.  As he bent to pick it up he
heard the low thumping of a boom box.  He turned to look.

The beige Land Cruiser with the tinted windows swayed along the dirt
path and pulled to a stop behind the Cutlass.  The music was loud
enough to shake the windows.  The doors opened on both sides and two
kids got out.  They both looked Mexican and sported expensive sneakers
and baseball hats worn backward.  One, wearing a 76ers T-shirt, carried
a baseball bat.  The other had what looked like a water pistol crooked
under his arm, but Ben figured it wasn't.  Neither of them could have
been older than seventeen.

Ben dropped one of the softballs and stepped out of the cage.  He
thought he heard someone else bumping around inside the van, but he
couldn't see through the tinted windows.  The kid with the gun looked a
little Vietnamese and his shoelaces weren't tied.  He shouted
something, but the music was so loud Ben couldn't make out what he
said.  The one with the baseball bat moved off to Ben's left, making
his own independent appraisal.

A second Land Cruiser, identical to the first, rolled down the dirt
path.  The door opened and a giant of a man got out, the same man Ben
had seen that night in Sweeney's apartment.  Ben took a quick, deep
breath.  The man wore the largest pink shirt Ben had ever seen and he
walked with difficulty.  Irritated, he waved his arm at the first Land
Cruiser and shouted something.  The music went off.

"Mr.  Lindberg?"  the big man said.

"Yes."

"You ready to go for a ride?"

"Where's my daughter?"

"Hey, Dr.  No, put that shit away, would you?"  the big man said to the
kid with the gun.

"But, Whale--"

"Just do what I tell you, all right?"

The boy shrugged and stuck the gun in the back of his belt.  The big
man turned back and made a sweeping circular motion with his arm.

"Hey, Tavo, let her go!"

A door opened and Abby stepped out.  Someone inside handed her her
backpack.  She stood there in her khaki shorts from the Gap and her new
sandals, looking like every other West Lake schoolgirl.  She didn't
seem angry or scared, but profoundly embarrassed.

"Hey, pie," Ben said.

"Dad?"

Ben walked toward her.  The nets of the batting cage seemed to have
been slung up against the sky.  When he ran his hand along her arm she
flinched, her eyes darting from the huge man to Dr.  No to the van and
back again.

"Dad, what did you do?"  Abby asked.

A stoop-shouldered boy got out of the second Land Cruiser and then
reached back to pull a bat from under the front seat.  Ben had seen
this boy before too, riding Sweeney's face into the floor, that
terrible night.

"I'll tell you all about it," Ben said.  He could feel the tears
welling up in his eyes.  "Just not here."

"Does Mom know?"

"Yeah, Mom knows.  Listen, I'm going to have to go with these guys for
a little while, okay?  It's nothing to worry about, I promise.  Here."
He dug down into his pocket and found a quarter.  "You call Mom, she'll
come pick you up."

"Hey, hey," Whale said.  "Not so fast."  He scratched at his neatly
trimmed goatee.  "I think she should go with us."

Ben stared at Whale for several seconds and then down at his feet.
Birds flitted in the mulberry bushes.  "But that wasn't the deal."

"I didn't know we had a deal."

Ben drew himself up, frowning.  "I'm not going through with this unless
you let her go," he said.

"You're not what?"  The big man hitched up his jeans and walked off a
few paces.  Dr.  No, squatting by the vans, took the gun out of the
back of his belt.  "You think we're going to leave her out here in the
middle of nowhere?  That doesn't seem smart, does it?  Who knows what
kind of crazy person might come along?"  Abby looked at her father and
then at Whale, unable to hide her alarm.  "I mean, hell, we're just
going for a little ride in the country, right?  If it goes the way it's
supposed to, we'll have you both back by suppertime."

Ben considered the quarter in his hand.  Rush-hour traffic droned
thirty yards away, behind the high hedges.  It had been stupid to think
they would just let her walk away, but Ben had a major problem.  What
were these guys going to do when they discovered that Ben had only six
coolers, not eight?  Whatever they might do to him, he didn't want Abby
around when that happened.  On the other hand, these guys were just
foot soldiers, maybe they didn't know how many coolers there were.  At
least there was a chance, a lot better chance than their trying to bolt
for it now.  The boy in the 76ers T-shirt picked at his teeth, the bat
hanging loosely at his side.

"Okay," Ben said.

"Good," Whale said.  "I want to ride with Mr.  Lindberg here, so Dr. No
and Ricky, you come with us.  And Tavo, why don't you take the young
lady in the other van?"

Abby took a step back.  "I don't want to do this," she said.  Dr.  No
rose to his feet and Ricky wiped his hand across his 76ers T-shirt,
amused.

"Abby, please," Ben said.

"I don't know what this is about.  No one has explained anything to
me."  Her face shone in the heat; she had never been a child you could
boss.  "Are you selling drugs or something?"

"No, honey, no," Ben said.

"You want to tell her what you did?"  Whale said.  "Go ahead.  Tell
her."  He turned to the girl.  "Your dad ripped us off."

Abby stared at her father, waiting for him to deny it, to say it wasn't
so.  He couldn't.  Her chin began to quiver.

"Honey, we don't have a choice, please.  It will all work out ..."

Tavo came and took her by the elbow, gentle as a prom escort.  She did
not resist him.

CHAPTER 16

Ben sat in the back next to Dr.  No, with Whale driving and Ricky in
the seat next to him.  As they bumped onto the paved road, an empty
Colt 45 bottle rolled out from under the seat.

"So where are we going?"  Whale said.

"Out 290 West," Ben said.

"You got it."  Glancing back, Ben saw the other van easing into
traffic.  The tinted windows made it impossible to see Abby.

They skirted the city.  It was a quarter to seven and the worst of the
traffic was over.  The car smelled brand-new and was loaded with
accessories; when Whale hit a button on the dash a little compartment
opened overhead and revealed his sunglasses.

No one spoke for a long time.  Dr.  No held the semiautomatic between
his knees, and Ricky resumed his task of trying to dislodge whatever
was stuck between his first and second molars.  Whale caught Ben
checking the rearview mirror.

"Don't worry, we're not going to lose 'em," Whale said.  He drove like
a man sitting on a throne.  "So, you teach college?"

"That's right."

"So what do you teach?"

"English."

"Is that right?  Maybe you could teach these guys something.  I keep
telling 'em, they're not going anywhere in this world if they can't
speak correct English.  Hey, Dr.  No, you even know what a pronoun is?"
Dr.  No was silent.  "You see what I'm saying?"

A car in the right lane had its blinker on, trying to cut in, but the
two Land Cruisers were bunched up as tight as a church-camp caravan.
Whale leaned over and turned on an oldies station.  Neither of the boys
looked happy with the choice.

"So how'd you end up with all that money?"

"I was out looking for my cat," Ben said.

"You were out looking for your cat!  That's a good one!  were you
scared?"

"I guess I was."

"I guess so."  Bobby Darin sang "Dream Lover" on the radio.  "There are
people out there on the street, they'll shoot you over twenty
dollars."

Without warning Whale hit Ricky across the mouth with the back of his
hand.  It was a blow of astonishing force, the teenager's head
ricocheting off the headrest.  And Whale hadn't even taken his eye off
the road.  Ricky reached for his mouth, checking for blood.

"It's such a goddamned dirty habit, picking your teeth!  You ever heard
of floss?"

Everyone was quiet for a while.  They passed two girls riding their
horses by the side of the road.  Ben was furiously considering his
options.  It wasn't as if he were just a couple hundred dollars short;
he'd already seen what they'd done to Sweeney.  It occurred to him that
he hadn't told Katy the location of Smeltzer's sister's ranch.

"So how much farther?"  Whale said.

"We'll be turning off in three or four miles," Ben said.

"Hey, Dr.  No, pay attention, you might see a real cowboy."

The vistas were magnificent once they turned off 290.  Long shadows
crept across the pastures.  Ricky leaned his head against the window,
staring at a half dozen white goats scampering under a distant
windmill.  The roads were gravel now and Tavo dropped back a hundred
yards to avoid eating the first van's dust.  Ben tried to imagine what
Abby could possibly be thinking, what the conversation was between her
and Tavo.

"Up there on the right there's a gate," Ben said.  "I'm going to have
to unlock it."

Whale eased the Land Cruiser over to the side of the road.  "Dr.  No, I
want you to go with him."

Dr.  No got out and Ben got out after him, his legs stiff after the
long ride.  He fished his keys from his pocket as the other van pulled
up in a halo of dust.  Ben unlocked the gate and it made a low groan as
he swung it open.  Whale rolled down the window and stuck his head
out.

"Hey, Tavo!"

The window of the other Land Cruiser slid down.  Tavo and Whale
exchanged a dozen words in Spanish.  Standing at the open gate, Ben
caught just a glimpse of his daughter, sitting on the far side of the
vehicle, rigid and forlorn as a statue in some distant gallery.

"Yo, let's get the fucking show on the road!"  Whale said.

Both windows hummed shut and the two Land Cruisers rolled through the
gate.  Dr.  No, his face scrunched up against the billowing dust,
waited while Ben rewrapped the chain and hung the open lock on it.

The two vehicles waited.  As Ben and Dr.  No passed the second car, Ben
could just make out Abby's outline through the shadowy glass.  He
tapped lightly at the window.  It was a stupid thing to have done.  The
gesture startled her.  She turned, the look on her face as blurred and
terrified as a drowning child sinking into amber murk.

Dr.  No shoved Ben in the shoulder.  The back door of the lead car hung
open.  Ben climbed in first and Dr.  No followed him.

The Land Cruisers rumbled down the washboard road.  A couple of deer
grazing at the edge of the woods raised their heads but didn't run.
Ricky leaned forward, hands pressed together in front of his mouth.  As
they rolled over the cattle gap, a great blue heron flapped up from the
creek.

"Nice out here, huh?"  Whale said.  "We should get out to the country
more often.  Hey, Dr.  No, you ever been to any of those fresh-air
camps?"

"Can I ask you something?"  Ben said.

"What's that?"  Whale said.

"The old woman who died.  Did she tell you about me?"

The van was utterly still.  "No," Whale said.  "She couldn't tell
anybody anything.  She was nuts."

Sure, she was nuts, Ben thought.  He remembered that they had taken her
child away from her; that would be enough to send anyone over the edge.
"It's up here, just ahead," he said.

The tin roof slid into view, shining in the sun.  The longhorn skull
still sat on the front porch and the plastic water glass was still
under the chair where Ben had left it.  The first thing he saw that
struck him as out of place was the pickax leaning against the live
oak--Ben didn't remember ever putting it there--and then he saw the
plot.  It looked as if it had been blasted by mortar shells.  Great
holes were everywhere, the plastic top of one of the coolers tangled in
the barbed-wire fence.

Whale pulled under the live oak, frowning.  "This is it?"  He saw what
Ben saw, but only Ben knew what it meant.

"Yeah," Ben said.

They all got out, Dr.  No taking his gun with him.  The second Land
Cruiser eased in behind the first and parked on the steep incline. When
the doors opened, Whale turned.

"Leave her in the damn car!"  he shouted.

Tavo, one foot already on the ground, hesitated, then leaned back to
say something.  The door on Abby's side closed.  Tavo yanked the bat
from under the seat, slammed his door, and came to join the rest of
them.

Dr.  No had wandered on ahead, scouting out the back of the house.
Ricky, sensing something was wrong, looked as if he was about to
giggle.

"You sure this is it?"  Whale said.

Ben moved slowly toward the plot.  "Yes," he said.

He tried to count the holes to see if any of the coolers could have
been overlooked, but it was hopeless; the plot looked as if it had been
torn apart by amphetamine-crazed bears, dirt and shattered rock thrown
everywhere.  Sweeney, Ben thought.  It has to have been Sweeney.

Whale lurched up behind him on his bad knees.  A mockingbird scolded
them from a fence post, tail jerking like a metronome.

"So what the shit is this?"  Whale said.

"It's gone," Ben said.

"What are you talking about?"

"It's gone."  Ben turned to face him.  "It was all here yesterday, but
now it's gone."

Ben didn't see the swing coming.  The punch caught him in the face and
knocked him down.  It was the first time in his life Ben had truly been
hit.  It felt as if the chemistry in his head had been permanently
altered.

"Aw, man, how fucking stupid do you think I am?"  Whale said.

Ben put a hand out to steady himself and staggered to his feet.  There
was the warm taste of blood in his mouth.  He prayed for Abby to stay
in the car.  "It's the truth, I swear to God."

"Fu-us-ck!"  Whale's head snapped in frustration.  "Fu-us-ck!  If it's
not here, then who's got it?"

"I don't know."

Whale gaped at him for a moment as if he hadn't understood.  Huge
half-moons of sweat shone through his nice shirt.  The others watched
him, tense and excited, waiting to see what he would do.

"Give me that thing," Whale said.  Dr.  No handed over the gun.  Tavo
and Ricky grabbed Ben's arms and Whale laid the gun barrel gently along
Ben's temple.

"So tell me again, where is it?"

"I don't know."  Sunlight glinted off the windshields of the Land
Cruisers.  What was it like for Abby, he thought, being forced to watch
this?  It was as if she were trapped at a second-rate drive-in movie,
only it was her father up on the screen, about to be done in, and there
was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

"It must have felt pretty good, having all that money, huh?"  Whale
said.  Ben kept his mouth shut.  If only Tavo had somehow forgotten and
left the keys in the van, maybe Abby could just get the hell out before
it all started, but no, Tavo would never be that stupid.  The barrel of
the gun moved back into his hair.

"It must have made you feel like a real big man.  So what did you do?
Spend it all?"

"I didn't spend any of it."

"Aw, come on, man!  Somebody has all that money and they don't spend
it, they're not human.  These guys here, whatever you give them,
they'll piss it away in twenty-four hours."

"But I'm not them," Ben said.

"Now, that sure is right.  Still driving that shitty car.  So where the
fuck is it?"

"I don't know."  Ben could see waves of heat rippling in front of the
limestone cliffs, a hundred yards away.  He remembered the splash of
light he'd seen in the trees when he'd been lying on his back in the
creek.  He understood now.  It had been Sweeney who'd followed him.

"You better come up with some ideas real quick, teach, or I'm going to
blow your brains all over this fucking garden!"

"I don't know.  You think I would have brought you all the way out here
if I didn't think it was here?"

It was a point.  Whale lowered the gun and stepped back as if he was
thinking it over.  He looked down at the gun, took the barrel in both
hands, and then swung it underhanded like a man shoveling snow and hit
Ben in the groin.

Ben fell to the ground.  The pain was excruciating.  He clawed at the
dirt, the ring of young faces staring down at him.

"Hold him down!"

Fighting back waves of nausea, Ben could scarcely see.  He felt his
arms and legs being yanked and he was suddenly spread-eagled, facedown
in the dust.

"Give me the bat!  Where's the goddamned bat?"

Ben tried to raise his head.  With one eye he could see Whale walking
around him, strutting like a professional wrestler before the big pin.
He had gotten rid of the gun; he carried Tavo's baseball bat over his
right shoulder.  The mockingbird flew from the fence post to the top of
the machine shed.

Whale squatted next to Ben.  "Nobody's playing here, teach.  Somebody's
going to tell us, one way or the other.  Because if we finish with you
and we still don't have what we want, we're going to go back and burn
your house down, do you understand?  I don't care how fucking fancy
your zip code is.  You ripped us off.  Do you know what would happen if
word got around that I let you get away with this?"

"There's a guy named Sweeney," Ben said.  "Daniel Sweeney.  He owns a
club in town, the Railyard.  You know him."  Ricky had a knee on Ben's
right arm; Tavo straddled his left.

"Yeah, I know him.  We've been following that guy around for a month.
How the hell do you think we found you?"

"Go ask him where the money is."

"Well, fuck."

Whale straightened up and walked off a few paces.  His shirttail hung
out at the back and there were big dirt stains on the knees of his
jeans.  He held the bat out in front of him and spun it around until
the trademark was on top.  So this is how he got his name, Ben thought.
It wasn't Will-have-a-like-every, it was Will-a-i-like.

Whale turned and raised the baseball bat over his head, his cheeks
puffed out like a man gathering every ounce of strength to ring the
bell at the county fair.  Ben tried to jerk his hands away, but the
kids on his arms held fast.  The sound of his right hand breaking was
like the crunching of a mallet on fish bones.  Blood flew.  Ben bucked
twice, but his captors rode it out.  Someone screamed; for a second Ben
didn't even realize the screams were his own.

He was blacking out.  Whale let the bat drop, disgusted.  "Somebody go
get the bitch in the car," he said.

Tavo rose to his feet and let go of Ben's left arm.  Ricky let go too,
rolling back onto his knees, his face flushed.  Ben groveled in the
dirt, cradling his mangled hand to his chest; bones protruded from the
skin and the blood had welled up dark and red.  Everything was
spinning, but only one thing mattered.  No one was going to call his
daughter that, no one was going to do what he was sure they intended to
do.

Whale and Dr.  No both had their backs turned, watching Tavo stroll
toward the van.  Ben pushed up on his left elbow.  Only when he got to
one knee did Ricky realize what was happening and try to collar him,
but Ben pulled free.

"Hey!"  Ricky shouted.

Dr.  No and Whale turned, but not in time.  Ben plowed into them with
his shoulder and grabbed for the gun, but he succeeded only in knocking
it loose, sending it cartwheeling across the loose dirt and into one of
the freshly dug holes.  All three men went sprawling.  Pain flashed up
Ben's right arm as if he'd just stuck his finger in an electrical
socket, but he couldn't stop.  He rolled over once and staggered to his
feet.

The gun was out of reach; Dr.  No was already scrambling after it.  The
bat lay in the grass.  Ben and Ricky both went for it, Ricky getting
there first, but Ben shoved him past it and scooped up the Louisville
Slugger with his one good hand.

Ricky spun back to face him.  Ben swung, the bat missing the boy's head
by inches.  Ricky's eyes went wide with disbelief.  Ben flailed again,
and missed again, but this time Ricky stumbled backward, sprawling onto
the porch.

Somewhere Whale was bellowing like an Old Testament prophet.  Ben
turned, waiting for the shot, but Dr.  No was banging the gun in the
palm of his hand, trying to get the dirt out.  Whale lay on his side
holding his left leg, beached.

Ben ran for the vans.  The only one in his way was Tavo, who stood his
ground, arms spread.  Ben swung the bat one-handed.  Tavo ducked,
making a futile swipe at the bat as it blurred past his face.

Ben panted, trying to get his wind back.  His right hand felt as if it
were about to come off, the bones were stabbing into places where they
never should have been.  He rocked back for a moment.  Red spots
swirled like gnats in front of his eyes and it almost seemed as if the
second Land Cruiser was silently sliding away from him.  Ricky and Dr. 
No were both sprinting toward him, Dr.  No tossing the jammed gun into
the weeds.

Tavo gave a little juke, as if he was going for Ben's legs.  It was a
mistake.  Ben chopped down with the bat, hitting Tavo on the shoulder,
the sound sharp as a solidly hit golf shot.  Tavo crumpled at his
feet.

Ben bolted for the vehicles.  To his astonishment he saw that the
second Land Cruiser really was moving away from him, rolling down the
steep incline, gathering speed as it went--somehow Abby had managed to
get it out of gear.  Ben stumbled on the gravel road and then righted
himself and flew down the hill with the teenagers in pursuit like
something out of the Keystone Kops.

With only one usable hand he had to toss the bat away in order to jerk
open the car door.  Abby crouched over the steering wheel, tears
streaming down her face.  Ben kept pace for three or four more steps
and then, grabbing hold of the passenger seat, lunged, banging his
knee, wriggling his way in.  Abby glanced across at him and sobbed.

"Honey, honey ..."  he said.

The van hit a rock and pitched to the right, nearly throwing Ben out
again.  He slammed the swinging door shut and then reached across to
help Abby, but with no key and the ignition off the van's power
steering made any kind of control nearly impossible.  They careened
backward like a runaway caboose, slamming through thickets, banging
over culverts, heading for the creek.

Ben glanced up the hill.  Tavo was still curled motionless on the
ground and Dr.  No seemed to have given up, going back to the other
Land Cruiser for something, but Ricky, who'd retrieved the fallen bat,
was right on their trail, broken-field running through the yucca and
the prickly pear.

There was a high-pitched rasping sound like a badly tuned violin, and
then a series of sharp pops as the van broke through a fence.  Suddenly
they were over the bank.  The van reared like a frightened horse and
then slid backward into the shallow water.

For several miraculous seconds they seemed to float, the whole car
eddying around like a boat, and then water began to bubble through the
floor.  Ricky stood on the bank, gaping, while Dr.  No bounded down the
hill carrying the other bat.

Abby shook uncontrollably, covering her face with her hands.  When he
reached across to comfort her, she gave a small cry, but there was no
one else for her to turn to, and she buried her head in his chest as if
she were six.  He kissed her hair--it smelled of vanilla--his left arm
around her, his bloody right hand erect in the air as a flag.

He looked down suddenly; his shoes were wet.  The water pouring into
the car was warm, heated by the August sun.  The van rocked softly and
finally touched bottom, upright in three feet of water.

The two teenage boys stood side by side on the bank.  Ricky looked
uncertain, almost as if he'd had enough, but then something made them
turn.  Whale limped across the lawn, screaming orders.  He grabbed the
pickax that had been leaning against the tree.  Ben reached across and
locked all the doors.

The two boys sat down in the dry grass and took off their shoes and
socks; they weren't about to ruin their hundred-dollar sneakers.  Ricky
eased into the water and Dr.  No waded in after him.  Ben pushed Abby's
head down, knowing what was coming.  Ricky took the first swing.  The
bat bounced off the windshield, and the boy lost his balance, splashing
backward into the creek.  Dr.  No swung second, to no greater effect.

Abby clung to Ben's hand.  When she was small, he remembered, she would
squeeze his thumb as she was falling asleep to keep him from slipping
away.  Whale limped heavily down the hill.  He swung the pickax at his
side like an old prospector.

"Get in the back, Abby," Ben said.  "Just get in the back and get
down!"

Ben helped her squeeze past him.  The water was ankle-deep now in the
car.  He reached down under his seat and groped around in the silty
water, looking for a tire iron, something he could use.

The two boys had figured out that they would have better luck with the
side windows.  One solid hit transformed the pane on Ben's side into a
glistening spiderweb.  Blow followed blow, Ricky and Dr.  No swinging
in tandem, spirited as apprentice carpenters.  Abby was curled up in
the back, her eyes bright with fear, not making a sound.  We are
rabbits in a burrow, Ben thought, being dug out by dogs.  Ben opened
the glove compartment, raking out maps, gas receipts, a jumble of
cassettes--there was nothing there either.

Whale, on the bank now, let himself down into the stream like the
shyest of bathers.  A direct hit by Dr.  No made the window sag inward
like wire mesh, but it didn't give.  Ben felt along the ceiling,
yanking open the overhead compartments.

Whale swayed through the waist-high water.  He was pissed; it was one
thing to steal seven and a half million dollars, but you don't fuck
with somebody's car.  He took a roundhouse swing, but lost his grip on
the wet handle.  The pickax glanced off the roof of the van and
splashed a dozen feet downstream.  Whale flailed like a circus bear and
nearly went down, but when Ricky tried to help him he pushed the boy
away and wrestled the bat from him.

Ben turned and glanced at Abby.  She knew there was no way out; he
could see it in her eyes.  It was then that he saw the shoe box under
her seat.  He reached back and yanked it free.  The cardboard was
sopping wet.  He yanked off the top.  Inside was a damp cloth case of
some sort.  It was heavy; he fumbled with it and finally managed to
unbutton it.  The gun was huge.  Sweeney would have known what caliber;
Ben didn't.  He wiped the moist barrel dry under his arm.

Whale sloshed through the water, getting himself into position.  One
blow sent glass flying all through the Land Cruiser.  Suddenly there
was no window, nothing between them.  Whale extended his bat like a
triumphant fencer daring his opponent to make another move.

Ben raised the gun with his left hand.  His crippled right hand was
clutched over his heart as if he were making the Pledge of
Allegiance.

Whale gave a short, mirthless laugh, running his tongue along his lower
lip.  It was only the second time Ben had ever held a revolver in his
hands; the first had been at the knife-and-gun show, but that had only
been playing.  He had no idea if the gun was loaded or if it was too
wet to fire, and Whale didn't seem to know either.

Ben flinched, startled by the touch of his daughter's hand on his
cheek, a reminder of some other world.  "Shoot him, Dad, shoot him--"

He gave an impatient shake of the head, signaling her to get back.  For
several seconds there was utter silence, just the sunlight glowing off
the limestone cliffs, a dragonfly flitting above a clump of thistles,
the only sound the soft rippling of the stream.

Whale lowered the bat and let it slip into the water.  He rubbed at his
nose with his thumb and then looked back at Ben, trying to decide what
he was capable of.  Ben strained to keep the gun steady, but the barrel
had started to waver.  His right hand pulsed at his chest like a fierce
wounded animal.  There were no more than two feet between the two men.
Whale sucked at his teeth and took another slow step forward, holding
his empty hands out to the side, as if it had all been in good fun,
counting on Ben not to do certain things in front of his daughter.

The shot was deafening, echoing in the enclosed van.  Ben felt a quick
spatter on his face like rain and Whale pitched into the stream.  Dr.
No broke for the bank.  Ben lowered the gun and rested it against the
broken glass of the window.  He could feel Abby's head against the back
of his seat; he could hear her sobbing.

Ricky didn't move, standing knee-deep in the water, stricken.  When
Whale floated down to him Ricky bent his knees and tried to grab him
under the arms, tried to get Whale's face out of the water, but as the
boy wrestled the huge body around, Ben saw there was no face there
anymore, only a red pulp.

Ben turned away.  He slammed the glove compartment shut with the barrel
of the gun.  His ears rang, but there was some other sound too, rising
and falling, coming from far off.  It was a siren.  Ben looked up and
saw Dr.  No crashing into the woods.

Two green sedans and a police car bumped over the cattle gap.  Ricky
let Whale's body slip back into the water.  The front of his 76ers
T-shirt was rose-colored with blood.  A policeman stepped out of the
lead car, barking orders.  Ricky raised one hand, but still clung to
Whale's shirt with the other, refusing to abandon him.  Abby touched
Ben's arm.  He set the revolver down on the driver's seat and reached
back to pull his daughter's head to him.  The baseball bat floated
downstream, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun like a golden otter.

CHAPTER 17

The soft rustling of a newspaper woke him out of a drugged sleep.  Ben
opened his eyes, blinking at the beige ceiling of his hospital room. It
was several seconds before he realized there was a man who looked
vaguely familiar sitting in the corner, reading the sports section. The
man put the paper down and stared at him intently.

"Mr.  Lindberg?"

"Yes?"

The man was avuncular, on the far slope of middle age, with thinning
hair and a Save the Children tie.  He got up and moved toward the bed.
"So how are you feeling?"

"Not so good."

Ben's right arm was immobilized and elevated, propped up on a pillow,
encased in a stocking, and tied to an IV pole.  It made him feel a
little absurd, as if he were permanently frozen in the position of a
New Yorker hailing a cab.  The metal pins prickled in his hand.  The
man sat down in a chair next to the bed.  Ben watched him out of the
corner of his eye, not wanting to move his head.

"Sounds like you had yourself one hell of a day yesterday."

"Yeah."

Not that he could remember all of it.  He had passed out in the police
car, and once he got to the hospital they had pumped him full of
sedatives and painkillers.  The operation on his hand had taken hours,
nearly all of the bones having to be rotated back into place.  All
through the night and early morning he'd drifted in and out of a
drugged fog, waking several times in utter panic, not knowing where he
was, having to be restrained by nurses when he swore he heard Abby
calling for him in the hallway.

"My name's Hyde.  Malcolm Hyde.  You may remember me.  We spoke out in
front of your house, two, three months ago.  I'm with the police
department."

Ben's mouth went dry; he grimaced and wiped his mouth with his left
hand.  "So where is my daughter?"

"She's home.  I was over there this morning.  She's doing fine."  Ben
waited, hoping for more, but Hyde seemed satisfied that he'd said
enough.

"I just want to tell you," Hyde said at last, "you're quite a hero down
at the station."

"Why is that?"

"This guy Whale ... a really bad guy.  There are a lot of people who
would have liked to have done what you did."  Hyde took a small tin of
Altoids out of his shiny jacket and popped one of the breath mints into
his mouth.

"So have you talked to the kids who were with him?"  Ben asked.

"Yeah."

"So how did they find me?"

"You went to see Sweeney, right?  Apparently they were watching the
hospital.  They started following you.  And when they saw you living in
the big house, it wasn't hard to figure out."  Hyde sucked hard on his
breath mint.  "I'm just here to make sure nothing bad happens to you. I
thought we could go over things...."

"It's a long story."

"I've got time.  You want a little water?"

"Yes.  Please."

Hyde leaned forward and poured some water into a tiny plastic cup.  Ben
drank greedily through the flexible straw.

Hyde didn't take any notes and didn't seem to have a tape recorder;
they just talked.  It all went easily.  Even though Hyde was a cop,
telling the story felt strangely inconsequential--maybe it was just the
effect of the painkillers.  He told Hyde about the feed store the
weekly exchanges of cash and check, the safety deposit boxes, the visit
to Also Jackett.

Hyde didn't seem particularly surprised by any of it, but as Ben went
on, there was a slow and noticeable change.  Hyde got up and went to
the window, staring out at the parking garage.  He took another breath
mint and hitched up his ample trousers.

At first Ben thought he was just restless.  Maybe Ben was boring him,
or being too cavalier and not showing enough remorse.  As Hyde lowered
himself back in his chair, Ben thought he detected the shadow of a
frown on the older man's face.

A nurse came in with lunch.  She had bobbed hair and a Sandy Duncan
bounce to her step; she did a lot to improve the mood in the room.  She
set up Ben's tray, adjusted the bed, and fluffed up his pillows.  The
doctor was making his rounds now, she said, he should be by soon.

Hyde stayed to watch him eat.  It was classic hospital food: a slice of
cardboard chicken, some watery vegetables, and butterscotch pudding.
Ben tried a couple of awkward, left-handed bites of the pudding, and
then put the spoon down.

"So when you shot him ..."

The voice of the detective startled him.  Ben's hair was damp with
sweat.  He turned his head.  Hyde stood in the doorway, looking as
solemn as a basset hound.

"Was he actually coming at you?"

"He'd taken a step forward, yeah."

"And he still had the bat in his hand?"

"Well, no, actually.  He'd put it down."

"Uh-huh," Hyde said.  He pushed away from the door.  The taste of
cut-rate butterscotch still clung to Ben's palate.  "But what did you
think he was about to do?"

"He wanted the gun.  He didn't think I had the nerve to do it."  A bell
sounded in the hallway, soft as the ring in a department-store
elevator.  "What else could I have done?"

"Yeah, well, these things are not exactly like Gunsmoke.  You're not
obliged to shoot the guy in the arm."

"So what's going to happen now?"  Ben asked.

"We'll probably need to take a statement from you, but we don't need to
do that today.  It'll go before a grand jury, but I can't imagine
they're going to find anything but justifiable homicide, given the
circumstances."  He gave the rail at the bottom of the bed a light tap.
"Now, there may be some other people who are going to want to talk to
you."

"Like who?"

"We'll have to see.  I'm just a lowly homicide detective, all right?  I
should let you get some rest."  Hyde retrieved his paper from the
chair.  All of a sudden Ben didn't want him to leave.

"So how did the police find us yesterday?"

"Somebody called."

"Do you know who?"

"No.  They didn't leave a name."  Hyde folded his paper neatly and
stuck it under his arm.  "It was nice talking to you."

"Something bothers you about this, doesn't it?"

"Bothers me?  No, nothing bothers me."

"It does.  I can tell."  Ben, still tethered to the pole, had to wrench
his neck around.  "What is it?"

Hyde straightened his belt.  "It's none of my business, but I don't
know how you could not tell your wife all that time.  My wife would've
killed me."

Ben had the cab drop him off at the foot of the drive so he could walk
up on his own.  He carried the paper bag of painkillers in his left
hand, his right protected by a blue sling and wrapped in a roll of
gauze the size of a boxer's mitt.

He was surprised to find the van gone, and more surprised still to find
the house empty.  Even the parrot was missing, the wire door to the
cage open and birdseed scattered on the floor.  Ben walked into the
backyard, calling out for Katy and then Zoila, but there was absolutely
nobody there.  A slice of watermelon sat in a puddle of red juice on a
plate in the middle of the lawn.  It had evidently been there for some
time because an army of ants had found it.

It was as if everybody had been swept away by extraterrestrials in one
of Matt's X-Files episodes.  Ben threw the watermelon in the garbage,
brought the plate inside, and checked the answering machine.  There was
a worried call from Anna Strickland, offering to bring over food,
whatever she could do to help, and a wary message from his chairman,
asking him to call when he got in.  The number of Ben's hospital room
was scrawled on a pad next to the phone and breakfast dishes were still
piled in the sink.

He trudged up the stairs, looking for some clue to what had happened.
The door to Zoila's room was shut, Abby's clothes were, as usual,
scattered across her floor, and Matt's mud-encrusted Michael Jordan
basketball shoes were propped against the laundry hamper.

He entered his and Katy's room.  The white bedspread looked as if it
had just come in off the line, stiff and clean and fresh, and frilly
throw pillows were tossed against the oak headboard.  He went to the
window.  Everything was so still he could hear the splashing of the
fountain in the walled garden below.  Orange carp drifted in the dark
water.

He wiped at the back of his neck; he had started to sweat again.  He
lay down on the bed, his heavily swathed hand extended out in front of
him like a wounded paw.  He was asleep within seconds.

The slam of a car door woke him.  He lay without moving, still groggy,
uncertain how long he'd been asleep, and after a moment he heard the
key in the downstairs lock, a rustling, and then his children's voices.
He pushed himself out of bed and went to the top of the stairs.  They
were all below him-Matt holding the door for his mother, Abby a couple
of steps behind, wrestling with two sacks of groceries.  They did not
see him at first.  His heart ached the way a ghost's heart must ache.

"Hey, guys," he said.

Startled, Katy dropped her keys.  Abby leaned her bags against the
sideboard, staring at the blue sling on her father's arm.  She looked
well, he thought; this was going to be all right.

"How did you get here?"  Katy said.

"I took a cab," Ben said.  He could feel them all braced against him.
He came down the stairs.  "Is there more stuff in the car?"

"No," Katy said.  "I think we've got it all."

He reached out for his daughter's face.  "Hey, pie," he said.  She
turned her head away, avoiding his touch.  She lifted her bag of
groceries and walked into the kitchen without a word.  Ben tousled
Matt's hair with his good hand.  "It's nice to see you, pal."

Ben helped unpack the groceries and set the table while Katy got supper
ready.  She was making every effort to remain civil, but Ben could feel
her anger, even on its short leash.  It was not the time or place for a
real talk.

Zoila and Roberto had left; Zoila's uncle had come that morning to pick
them up and there was no indication when they were coming back, if
ever.  And just to top everything off, the parrot had escaped.  No one
knew quite how, but someone must have left the door to the cage ajar.
The bird had flapped wildly around the kitchen before flying out a
window and taking refuge in the top of the magnolia tree in the
backyard.  Matt had spent an hour trying to tempt him down with Oreos
and slices of watermelon, without success.

Katy lifted the platter of chicken out of the oven.  "I guess you can
probably call the children."

"And Abby?"  Ben said.  "She didn't go to school today?"

"No.  I called a woman at the university counseling service.  I'm going
to bring Abby in tomorrow."

Katy was determined to create a normal evening, even if it was a little
like trying to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope.  Dinner was marked
by long silences that she did her best to fill.  Her mother had sent
pictures from their summer visit and there were some wonderful ones.
Matt needed to write her to say thank you for the check she'd sent for
his birthday, and Abby needed to pick up her room.

Ben found himself growing increasingly cranky, even though he knew he
had no right, not after what he'd put them through.  All the same, who
did Katy think she was protecting?  Him?  The children?  Matt and Abby
watched him eating left-handed.  The chicken and the squash were
manageable, but when he stabbed at his broccoli the green stalks
skittered away from him.  Without Zoila and Roberto the house felt too
big, oddly spooky.  Matt got up and went to the kitchen to pour himself
more milk.  When he got back, Ben put his knife down.

"I want to say something," he said.  He saw the instant alarm on Katy's
face.  "I want to ask your forgiveness."  Abby had pulled the skin off
her chicken, spun it on her fork, and banished it to the edge of her
plate.  "You see, I found some money.  I don't know how much Mom has
told you.  I found it in some coolers under the feed store in our old
neighborhood.  It sounds a little like a fairy tale and I guess it was.
But I couldn't give it up."  Matt took a long drink of his milk, his
eyes as wide as an owl's above his glass.  "I kept it secret.  I
thought it was a chance to make things better for all of us.  It was
incredibly stupid, but I couldn't see what it would mean ... how I
would have to lie to your mother, how I would put Abby's life in
danger."

"So will we get to keep it?"  Abby said.

Startled, Ben looked across at his daughter.  "The money?  No.  The
money's disappeared."

"And will you go to jail?"

"Abby ..."  Katy said.

"No," Ben said.  "I don't think so."

It had been a mistake, mentioning forgiveness.  Abby brushed a strand
of hair from in front of her eyes.

"When they had you down on the ground, I thought they were going to
kill you," she said.  "And you know what?  I didn't even care."

"Abby!"  Katy said.

Abby plunged on blindly, gesturing with her hands over her plate.  "I
knew you must have deserved it.  I mean, they wouldn't have done
something like that for nothing.  You know all I was thinking?  That
we'd have to move to a smaller house--"

"Abby, you are not allowed to speak to your father like that!"  Katy
said.

Abby's chair scraped against the floor as she pushed away from the
table.  She stormed out of the room.  Katy put her napkin to her lips,
close to saying something, but she didn't.  She folded the napkin
carefully, set it next to her plate, and then got up herself.

"Excuse me," she said.  Ben watched her trip up the stairs.  The room
was suddenly just guys.  They could hear the grandfather clock ticking
in the hallway.  Matt had not moved.  Ben tried to smile at him.

"So, does your hand hurt?"  Matt said.

"It's okay," Ben said.  "They gave me pills for it."

After dinner, Ben and Matt went into the backyard to see if they could
coax the parrot out of the magnolia tree.  He was still there; they
could catch glimpses of him through the canopy of great waxy leaves,
strutting from branch to branch, looking back at them with his cockeyed
stare.  They tried to talk him down at first, whistling and offering
saltines, but their only reward was the bird's own repertoire of
bizarre sounds: cacklings and mutterings, his imitation of a ringing
phone and imperious cries for Zoila.  The parrot would be lucky to
survive the night out here--what did he know of hawks and owls and
raccoons?--but he was not about to surrender his freedom.

They got the stepladder from the toolshed, Ben holding it in place so
Matt could climb up with a long bamboo pole.  Ben glanced back at the
house.  Katy was still talking with Abby; his mind swarmed with the
blackest thoughts.  Matt rattled the pole slowly through the branches.
With a shriek the parrot dived, a blur of green and yellow sailing over
to a neighboring elm.  By the time they carried the ladder over to the
elm and got it set, the parrot had flown back again.

Ben folded the paint-spattered ladder, staring into the magnolia.  They
were just going to have to wait him out.  Ben couldn't even see the
bird now.  There was only the faintest shaking of the leaves and a
mocking chortle that sounded like nothing so much as Sweeney's
high-pitched laugh.

With only one good hand, Ben worked clumsily, moving wet laundry from
the washer to the dryer.  It was nearly ten-thirty and Katy was
upstairs, saying good night to the children.  Damp socks and underwear
kept tumbling to the floor and he kept having to retrieve them, but the
important thing was to stay busy, not to have to think.

He didn't hear Katy come into the kitchen.  It wasn't until he punched
the start button and turned that he saw her, standing at the
refrigerator, putting away the milk.  It gave him a start.  She closed
the refrigerator door.  For a moment neither of them knew what to
say.

"Is she okay?"  Ben said.

"She'll be fine."

"Should I go up and see her?"

"No, I think it would be better if you didn't right now."  She wet a
rag at the sink and began to wipe the counter.  Without Zoila, all
these tasks would be theirs again.  "The things that Abby said ... that
isn't what she really thinks."

"I know that.  Katy, I'm sorry...."

"Please don't say that.  Please."  He could see the reflection of her
face wavering in the dark window; he could see her struggling.  She
rinsed out the rag and hung it over the spigot.  "You know, I thought a
lot about what you said."

"What I said when?"

"Yesterday.  About how you wanted me to have a home I could be proud
of.  I didn't need this house."

"Katy, I know that."

"I loved our life.  I know we've had our struggles, just like everybody
else.  But I could have gone back to work full-time, we could have
figured it out.  But you didn't tell me, Ben.  Why couldn't you tell
me?"

He didn't know the answer; he was too battered and confused.  The dryer
whirred and knocked.  "So you were the one who called the police
yesterday?"

"No," she said.

"Then who did you call?"

"Sweeney."

He stared at her, dumbfounded.  It was impossible.  Sweeney had to be
long gone.  "Sweeney!"

"There was no one else I could turn to."

"And you got hold of him?"

Her glance was resentful.  "I called and left a message on his machine.
He called me back maybe a half hour later."

"From where?"

"I have no idea."  Branches raked the kitchen window.  For just a
second he was back there, in the van, the bat shattering the glass,
Whale's face only inches from his own ... "And what did he say?"

"I explained what had happened.  He said not to worry, I should just
leave it to him, he would call the police.  He said he thought he knew
where they might have taken you.  I tried to call him again this
morning, but the phone's been cut off."

"I'll bet," Ben said.  It was more than he could bear.  To the bitter
end, Sweeney had to have his cake and eat it too: rip him off and then
ride to the rescue.

Katy pulled open the drawer and set the unused silverware back in its
tray.  "You have always been such a wonderful father to these
children," she said.  "And such a wonderful husband to me.  But how are
we going to get through this?"

"I don't know.  But we're going to.  I promise," Ben said.  She stared
at him, leaning back against the counter, the word promise floating
between them like devalued currency.

CHAPTER 18

Matt and his friends Stevie and Josh sat in the backseat, having an
excited discussion about Broken Arrow while Ben drove.  The boys all
thought it was cool--exploding helicopters, fireballs mushrooming up
tunnels, lots of broken glass and acrobatic karate, a twelve-year-old's
idea of a good movie.  Under the bright overhead lights of the highway
Ben could see the first patches of bluebonnets on the embankments,
blooming in the March night.

Ben dropped Stevie off first and then Josh.  Alone with his father in
the car, Matt suddenly got quiet.

"So you liked the movie okay?"  Ben said, glancing in the rearview
mirror.  Matt's eyes went wide and shy.

"Yeah."

"Your friend Josh is pretty funny."

"Yeah."

When they turned into the apartment complex there was a group of
college students horsing around in the tiny pool, laughing and drinking
beer.  Matt opened the back door.

"Hey, pal," Ben said.  He turned and grabbed Matt by the back of the
neck with his right hand, the bad hand, the hand he would never again
be able to fully open or close.  Matt didn't move, his head bowed.  It
was as much of an embrace as a thirteen-year-old boy could accept.  "It
was great seeing you."

"It was great seeing you, Dad."

"You have a good week at school, okay?"

"Okay."

Ben waited, watching Matt trip up the wooden steps to the second-floor
landing.  It was several seconds before Katy came to open the door. She
was visible only in silhouette, but Ben could see her hesitate for a
second as Matt slipped past her.  She knew Ben was out there.  She
raised a hand in greeting--after all this, she still had manners--and
then the door closed.

By the time Ben got back on Mopac he was in a rage.  This was
impossible.  This was not fair to anyone.  They were a family: to go on
like this would only continue to tear them apart.

The fall had been a siege, a series of hammer blows.  The story had
been plastered across the front page of the newspaper, supplanting the
tales of murderous baby-sitters and secessionist militias in West
Texas.  Photographers trampled through Rebecca's shrubbery to snap
pictures, and photographers waylaid the children outside of school.

It was more of a scandal than the university could handle.  The
department chair arranged for Ben to go on emergency sick leave for the
semester, and Katy's sister flew out to help.  He went in once a week
at night to pick up his mail, avoiding his colleagues.  When he did run
into them at the mall or one of the bookstores, they either pretended
not to see him or went all bright and cheery with interest.

He met with a prosecutor from the financial crimes division of the
attorney general's office, a tenacious man who scoffed at the idea that
Ben had just found the money.  (wasn't that the story he always heard?)
He would have dearly loved to nail Ben, but after a month-long
investigation, including a couple of weeks when Ben was sure he was
under surveillance, the prosecutor was reluctantly forced to conclude
that Ben had done nothing illegal--he hadn't filed any false IRS
returns and the records of his transactions with Sweeney were nowhere
to be found.  The keys to the safety deposit boxes were turned over to
the police, and the money forfeited as criminal proceeds.

Despite Ben's allegation, no charges were ever brought against Also
Jackett.  He had never received any money from anybody, and as for the
story that he had offered to launder Ben's money for him, it seemed, at
least to the battery of lawyers involved, patently preposterous.

The only trial to take place was that of Ricardo Sanchez, Gustavo
Santander, and Donald Rodriguez (dr.  No's Christian name) for
kidnapping and assault.  Ben and Abby had both had to take the stand,
though the judge had not allowed him to hear his daughter's testimony.
Ben had been forced to watch from the hallway, staring in through the
narrow pane of glass in the courtroom door.  He could not hear the
questions or Abby's answers, but she seemed as composed as a Swiss
choir girl in her sleeveless white linen blouse and blond braid.  The
lawyers for both sides treated her with kid gloves and she faltered
only a couple of times, biting her lip in confusion, looking over at
her mother in the third row.

Ben's time on the stand did not go nearly so easily.  The facts of the
case were impossible to dispute; the only strategy the defense had was
to convince the jury that Ben was the one who should have been on
trial, not the three teenage boys.

"So tell me, Professor Lindberg, the afternoon that you learned that
your daughter was missing, it was the first day of classes at the
university?"  The defense lawyer was a small man with a salt-and-pepper
beard, sleepy eyes, and a tone of acid contempt.

"Yes."

"And what had you been doing before that?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Until then.  During the summer."

The three teenage defendants, all in suits and ties, their hair cut
short as military recruits', never took their eyes off Ben.  Gustavo's
left arm, still in a full cast, rested on the railing like a club.  In
the back row the relatives sat together.  It was not hard to pick them
out.  They were all poor, all Mexican American, their faces all taut
with distress and distrust.  A girl who couldn't have been older than
Abby nursed an infant.

"I was working on my book," Ben said.

"So you didn't teach summer school?"

"No."

"How long do you have off, three months?  Four?"

The prosecutor shot to his feet.  "Objection, Your Honor!"

"Objection sustained."  The judge, in this room of flags and seriously
varnished wood, had the muscled rectitude of a former Eagle Scout.

"So could you tell us what your book is about?"

"It's about the friendship between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau."  At the defendants' table, Ricky, restless and bored, tipped
back in his chair.

"Henry David Thoreau.  One of America's most distinguished authors."
The defense lawyer roamed the rail.  He was a little too angry.  Ben
guessed that he had lost more than his share of cases; he lacked the
ingratiating manner of a winner.  "Walden.  "Civil Disobedience."  The
great inspiration for Gandhi and Martin Luther King."

"Yes."

"But you wouldn't consider yourself a real follower of the doctrine of
nonviolent resistance, would you, Professor Lindberg?  Considering that
you smashed this boy's shoulder with a bat and shot a man in the face
at point-blank range?"

The prosecutor was up again in an instant.  "Objection, Your Honor!"

"Objection sustained."

"I was protecting my daughter!"  Ben said.

"Oh, and this is the way you protect your daughter, by ripping off drug
dealers?"

The court erupted with the sounds of the gavel and shouts from the back
of the room.  Ben and the defense lawyer stared at each other.  It was
a pure moment.  Whether the question was stricken or not, Ben had no
answer.

Whatever card the defense lawyer thought he was playing, it backfired.
The three boys, being tried as adults in part because of their previous
criminal records, were found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years
to life.  Three days after the verdict was announced, Katy and the
children moved into the apartment on Enfield.

Headlights came up fast on Ben's right: a sleek red sports car.  Mopac,
since the speed limit had been raised, had suddenly turned into the
autobahn.  Ben gradually increased his speed.  There was no way he was
going to let this guy cut him off.  In his nine-year-old Cutlass he
didn't have a lot to lose.  The sports car came up even with him.  Out
of the corner of his eye, Ben could see the driver checking him out
and, after a second, dropping back.

They had not put the separation to the kids as if it was going to be a
permanent thing.  It was just something for now, until things sorted
out.  It was as if they just had to let the fever run its course.  It
had become sheer hell, the four of them under one roof-the glacial
silences, the bursts of tears, the strangled courteous dinner
conversations as if they were the newly introduced guests at an English
boardinghouse.  They were all a little afraid of him after what had
happened, spooked, like earthquake survivors recoiling at the tinkling
of ice in a glass.  Abby would wake up at night crying and, since she
had started seeing her counselor twice a week, had ceased speaking to
Ben altogether.  Matt remained loyal to his father, though Ben had
started to notice he'd picked up an array of nervous tics and his
grades were sliding.

He and Katy had been over the story so many times.  Sometimes he
thought if he could only have pleaded temporary insanity or chalked it
up to a mid life crisis, she might have been able to accept it, but the
truth was that Ben still believed that no one faced with those eight
coolers in that spoor-ridden cellar could have resisted.  That enraged
her.  "What do you mean, no one could have resisted?  What an easy way
out!  Your daughter could have been killed."  "But I couldn't see
that," Ben would say.  "How could you not see it?  Can't you think?"
"Only to a point," he would say.  "Only to a point."

She said she felt as if her heart had been sucked out of her.  She
needed for there to be some lesson to be drawn.  For the life of him,
he could find no lesson.  It was like one of those nineteenth-century
Viennese folk plays where the beggar wakes up in the king's bed.  The
beggar was always brought low, and what lesson was that?

Financially, it was a disaster trying to maintain two households.  Katy
had found a job in an elementary school, but even with that and the
money her mother was sending her, they were just digging themselves
into a deeper hole.  He was teaching again for the spring semester, but
there was no one in the department foolish enough to suggest he had the
remotest chance of being recommended for tenure.  He had one more year
and then he was out.  He'd sent letters to every college within two
hundred miles, but he was not hopeful.  On Tuesday he was going to
interview for a state job, something Tom Strickland had set up for
him.

His life had become wonderfully simplified.  He had a single purpose:
to dig out from under the rubble he'd created.  It didn't matter how
long it took, he wasn't going to give up.  He struggled not to
surrender to despair.  He still saw Katy a couple of times a
week--there were still, after all, errands to be run, bills to go over,
decisions about the children to be made--but there was a look in her
eye now--it wasn't hatred or even sorrow, just something broken--and
when he saw that look, all hope drained out of him despite his
resolves.  He found himself thinking what he didn't want to allow
himself to think: I had the gun in my hand; my mistake was using it on
Whale; I should have used it on myself.

He took the Steck exit.  His apartment was just off the highway, and
its only outstanding feature was its price.  He rolled into his marked
parking place, locking the car when he got out.  There was nothing to
steal, but he had come down one morning to find an empty Popeye's box
in the backseat and it had unnerved him.

Almost every balcony had its own barbecue grill and cheap plastic
furniture.  Someone had hung a rug over a railing to dry.  It was the
sort of complex where the tenants kept to themselves.  In seven months
he had met only two people.  One was the creepy fertilizer salesman
who, whenever Ben made the mistake of asking him how he was, would
always reply, "Delicious."  The other was his next-door neighbor, a
quiet, constantly worried older woman who was a secretary for Motor
Vehicles.

He opened his door and turned on the light.  The day's mail lay strewn
across the floor.  He bent down to gather it up.  He flipped through it
quickly, hoping for a letter from one of the colleges, but no such
luck.  The only thing of interest was a bulky manila envelope with a
Canadian postmark and no return address.

He walked into the kitchen.  The concrete arches of the cloverleaf, the
interchange of 183 and Mopac, loomed through his back window like the
bowed legs of giant cowboys.  When he flipped on the lights, a roach
scurried frantically under the refrigerator.  He dumped all the junk
mail in the wastebasket and sat down at the table.

The envelope made a scratchy sound when he squeezed it.  He tore it
open and then turned it upside down.  Pine needles sprayed across the
table and a half dozen color photos slithered out.  Ben peered inside
the envelope and pulled free a small pine bough.

He spread the pictures in front of him with his stiff right hand. There
was one of a moose in a driving rainstorm, another of a red fox playing
on a stump, a third he needed to look at for a few seconds before he
realized it was of a grizzly wading in a distant stream.

He did not understand.  He could hear his neighbor's television playing
through the thin walls.  He checked the envelope again and spied the
letter inside.  He tugged it out.  It was typed on what must have been
the world's oldest typewriter.

Dear Ben,

So here I am, up where the roads end.  There's no point trying to find
me.  They don't put places like this on any of the maps.  About the
only people I see are bush pilots and a few crazy fishermen.

I killed a moose, can you believe that?  Talk about ribs!  You can eat
on those things for months.  Winter up here is unbelievable.  Fifty
degrees below zero and the sun never gets more than a few inches above
the horizon.  Sort of a shock for an old Houston boy.  At least Thoreau
had his mother to bring him pies.  All I got is some Eskimo dropping by
with lynx meat stew.  But it's good to get away from the rat race once
in a while and get back to basics.  Not that I don't miss those UT
coeds.

I've thought about it a lot, the way things ended between you and me,
and it never makes me happy.  I know I wasn't exactly a saint, but I
swear to God it could have worked if you hadn't gone all squirrely on
me.  Jackett's the real thing, he could have saved your ass, and the
money.  But you just couldn't trust me, could you?  Did you really
think I was so stupid I wasn't going to figure out that you were lying
to me? I've had people try to run games on me before, but never my
Thoreau professor.  I'll confess, it sort of pissed me off.  But I
guess that's all so much water under the bridge now, huh?

I hope everything has worked out with Katy.  I was kind of worried
about you guys.

I probably won't be coming back to Texas soon, so drink a Shiner for
me.

The big P, Paranoia, it'll get you every time.

All the best,

Daniel Sweeney

P.s. I'm sending along a little something to help with the bills.  More
to follow.

Ben stared at the P.s. What was Sweeney talking about?  He picked up
the envelope.  There was some balled-up newspaper in the bottom, and
when he pulled it free still more pine needles sprinkled the table and
then two packets of one-hundred-dollar bills tumbled out.  One of the
packets fell to the floor.  Ben retrieved it and set it on the table
next to its twin.  He could hear the theme music from Saturday Night
Live coming through the walls.  The evergreen made the tiny kitchen
smell like Christmas.  The two stacks of bills sat in front of him like
a freshly cut pack of cards.  He did not move.