Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (5 page)

 
          
 
"From a pack of hyenas."

 
          
 
Burnham could see that Sarah's irritation was
ripening into true anger. The hand that held her coffee cup was trembling, and
the sinews in her long neck pulsed against her pale skin as, subconsciously,
she worked the muscles in her jaw. She wanted to maintain control, but the effort
was as futile as trying to stop a shaken soda bottle once the cap has been
started. The pressure had momentum, and it would be released.

 
          
 
"You'd quit," she said tightly,
"if you had the guts." She set her cup down so hard that the handle
snapped off.

 
          
 
"Noble. And what would we eat?"

 
          
 
"There're other jobs. You're not a
complete incompetent, you know, no matter what you think of yourself."

 
          
 
"Look ..." Burnham said, stalling,
praying for the doorbell to ring, or the telephone, or for the living-room
couch to combust spontaneously—anything to move the conversation away from this
sore and tired subject. "The job is a matter of simple economics, not
principle. Fifty-nine grand is not bad pay for—"

 
          
 
"Crap!" Sarah said. "That's
crap, and you know it!"

 
          
 
Derry's head popped up from the funnies.
"Hey, gimme a break!" she said, employing one of the multipurpose
adolescent tools that could be interpreted as intended to convey amazement,
annoyance or admiration.

 
          
 
Sarah interpreted it as reproach, and she
lowered her voice to the octave of reasoned discourse. "It's power. You
just love the power."

 
          
 
"Me?" Burnham tried to laugh, but
what emerged from his mouth and nose was more of a hollow bark. "How can I
love power? I don't have any." He reached again for the paper and opened
it and pretended to read.

 
          
 
Sarah was right, of course. Even at his level,
employment in the White House was strong drink. Power seeped down from the
summit and intoxicated everyone from the janitorial staff to the telephone operators.
It was power-by-association, the implicit (and usually untrue) suggestion of
access to the throne, of the possession of secrets. In the amorphous,
indecipherable middle-level ranks where Burnham resided, where everyone was a
staff assistant, a special assistant, a deputy special assistant or (most
mysterious of all) a plain assistant to the President, it meant restaurant
reservations when all tables were full, the instantaneous return of phone calls
from the

 
          
 
most power-crazed snobs in the capital, and
entree (at least once) to redoubtable Georgian manors where the glassware
tinkled with clarion clarity and no wine was served before its time.

 
          
 
"You know what?" Christopher said,
closing the Lampoon and sliding it into his L.L. Bean canvas tote bag.

 
          
 
"What?" Burnham looked at
Christopher eagerly, gratefully.

 
          
 
"I think you guys are heading for a
divorce." Christopher's tone was flat, unjudgmental, but he did not look
at either parent. He made a show of arranging his books in his tote bag.

 
          
 
His sister looked at him as if he had just
shouted "Fuck!" In church.

 
          
 
"Wha . . . gck ..." was all Burnham
could manage. He had prayed for detente, not escalation. He glanced at Sarah,
whose face was purpling as if prior to a major stroke.

 
          
 
"You fight all the time these days,"
Christopher said, standing up and slinging the bag over his shoulder.
"About everything."

 
          
 
Derry stood up, too, still eyeing her brother
as something from The Twilight Zone.

 
          
 
"We do not," Burnham said, adding
with a weak smile, "WASPs don't fight. We discuss."

 
          
 
"Yeah, well ..." Christopher brushed
past him and headed for the living room. He stopped at the front door, turned
and waited for Derry.

 
          
 
"I mean, it may seem like fighting,"
Burnham admitted amiably, "but really it's just. . . ah . . . intense
conversation."

 
          
 
Derry shouldered her bag and stepped around
her father, avoiding him by an unnecessary four feet, as if he had suddenly
been exposed by Christopher's words as contaminated and contagious.

 
          
 
"Did you feed MacNeil?" Sarah asked
Derry.

 
          
 
MacNeil was Derry's fish. Burnham had to
admire Sarah: Christopher had unleashed a monster, and Sarah was concerned
about a fish.

 
          
 
" 'Course," Derry said, as she left
the kitchen. "We're out of fish food, so I gave him Grape Nuts."

 
          
 
"Wait!" Burnham shouted, panicked,
realizing that he was about to be left alone with Sarah to deal with the
monster. The monster could not be confronted, not now. It must be avoided. Burnham
didn't know how real it was, from his perspective or Sarah's, but he sensed
that if confronted, the monster would become undeniably real, and he wasn't
ready for that. Maybe later. Maybe never. Certainly not now. "I'll walk
you out."

 
          
 
He sprang to his feet, tightened his tie,
feigned searching for something so that he wouldn't have to look at Sarah, who,
cherry pink, stood as still as Lot's wife. Burnham scurried into the living
room.

 
          
 
His children had gone, leaving the front door
open, but he spoke to them anyway, to keep Sarah from calling him back and
forcing him to face down the monster.

 
          
 
"Right. Here we go. I'll walk you up to
the bus stop. Bye, hon!" He stepped outside, pulled the door closed behind
him and leaned against it, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

 
          
 
After ten seconds or so, his pulse slowed so
that he could no longer hear it. He opened his eyes and looked to the right,
saw that his children were out of sight and stepped off his doorstep onto
Prospect Street.

 
          
 
Back in the Kennedy days, and even into the
first Johnson years, Georgetown had been clean, elegant, quiet, safe, tolerably
uncrowded and discreetly expensive. It was even spared the carnage of the
Martin Luther King riots in 1968 that burned down a large part of the District
of Columbia. The government simply stationed troops on all the bridges going in
and out of Georgetown, and if you couldn't prove you lived there you stayed
outside.

 
          
 
Georgetown's decline had begun in the Nixon
years, but not only because the President knew it to be a fortress for his
enemies, a redoubt of bleeding-heart assholes, knee-jerk liberals and media
preppies who could not abide the thought that Nixon had been savvy enough and
tough enough to hang in there until finally he found a way to tweak the
public's reflex into giving him the White House.

 
          
 
No, Georgetown had been beset by discovery,
celebrity and prosperity.

 
          
 
Tourists had always liked Georgetown, but the
Kennedy myth—especially as it flowered in comparison to the hard, mean,
grayness of the Nixon crowd—made Georgetown a shrine. There's the house he lived
in. There's where the press waited (see the plaque?) all through election night
and were served hot coffee and cocoa. There's where Jackie lived after the
assassination. Harriman. Kay Graham. Joe Kraft. They all lived here. This was
it. Camelot of a thousand days.

 
          
 
The tiny house Burnham lived in had sold for
$30,000 in 1967. Ten years later, it went (to the current landlord) for
$220,000. Included in Burnham's lease was an option to buy the house. For
$350,000.

 
          
 
Neighborhood stores couldn't afford to keep up
with the rents, so the groceries and shoe-repair places and cheap restaurants
and drugstores and haberdasheries on Wisconsin Avenue gave way to boutiques and
Haagen-Dazs parlors and leathercraft shops and saloons with brick walls and
sawdust on the floor and movie posters and a cucumber rind in your Bloody Mary
for only $4.95, plus tax. Wisconsin Avenue became the place to hang out, and
that, of course, attracted peddlers—of belts, Indian necklaces, hot wrist
watches and scarves and umbrellas and several controlled substances.

 
          
 
Since the controlled substances cannot exist
without people to buy them and people to prey on those who have the money to
buy them and on those who get money from selling them, soon society's predators
came to call Georgetown home.

 
          
 
Not all of them lived here, just enough to
make it exciting.

 
          
 
Early one morning, Burnham had gone around the
comer to 33rd Street to get the car and had found a couple asleep in it, male
in front, female in back, though he would have had hell to ascertain the gender
of the creature in the back seat if one of her jugs hadn't flopped out of her
shirt when she stirred. He had waited and watched for a few long moments before
determining that it was probably safe for him to wake and chase them rather
than trudging all the way back to the police station and getting a cop and
coming back, by which time something else would have spooked them anyway.

 
          
 
They hadn't broken into the car. They had used
a "popper" (he saw it on the floor), a thin strip of metal that
fitted between the closed window and the door, and was slipped down and
maneuvered to pop up the lock. A good sign. They were professionals—in that
they did it every night in order to have a place to sleep—not car thieves, and
they weren't looking for a fight. Burnham had no doubt that if he had come by
at
8:30
, his
normal time, instead of
6:15
, he would have seen no trace of their
occupancy and wouldn't have noticed anything at all until he got in the car and
was led by his nose to wonder if something had died under the front seat.

 
          
 
He hadn’t yanked open the door and bellowed.
He knew enough about junkies to know that if you surprise one in its sleep,
depending on what it's been taking and what dreams it's in the grip of, you run
the risk of setting off a hysterical, explosive awakening. So he tapped softly
with his knuckles on the closed window. Nothing. The young man on the front
seat slept with his hands between his knees, curled up in a fetal ball, which
was as close as he had been to primal innocence in a couple of decades. Burnham
rapped again, harder, and, with the speed of a striking viper, the man
uncoiled, thrashed around in a grimy blur and ended up crouched, facing Burnham,
weaving from side to side and tossing from one hand to the other a kukri —one
of those nasty curved knives that the Gurkhas carry to decapitate the enemy.

 
          
 
Burnham took an involuntary step backward on
the sidewalk, raised his hands to show he was unarmed, smiled vulnerably,
opened his palms as if to say, "Golly, I'm sorry to disturb you, but can I
have my car?," tapped his watch for some absurd emphasis, then spread his
palms again, begging.

 
          
 
The man in the car scowled at him and pulled
an antique gold pocket watch from his vest. He opened it, snapped it closed and
rolled down the window.

 
          
 
'*Hey, man," he said, "it's only
six-fuckin'-twenty."

 
          
 
"I know. I'm sorry . . . I . . ."