Just After Sunset (45 page)

Then Grunwald had put in an electric fence between his property and Curtis’s.

That Motherfucker.

It wasn’t especially high voltage, Grunwald said he could prove that and Curtis believed him, but it had been of a voltage high enough to do for a slightly overweight old dog with a bad heart. And why an electric fence in the first place? The Motherfucker had spouted a lot of bullshit having to do with discouraging potential home-breakers—presumably creeping from Curtis’s property to that upon which
La Maison Motherfuckair
reared its purple stucco head—but Curtis didn’t believe it. Dedicated home-breakers would come in a boat, from the Gulf side. What he believed was that Grunwald, disgruntled about the Vinton Lot, had put in the electric fence for the express purpose of annoying Curtis Johnson. And perhaps hurting his beloved dog. As for actually
killing
his beloved dog? Curtis believed that had been a bonus.

He was not a weeping man, but he had wept when, prior to her cremation, he had removed Betsy’s dog tag from her collar.

Curtis sued The Motherfucker for the price of the dog—twelve hundred dollars. If he could have sued for ten million—that was roughly how much pain he felt when he looked at the idiot stick lying, innocent of dogspit now and forever, on the coffee table—he would have done so in a heartbeat, but his lawyer told him that pain and suffering wouldn’t fly in a civil suit. Those things were for divorces, not dogs. He would have to settle for the twelve hundred, and he meant to have it.

The Motherfucker’s lawyers responded that the electric fence had been strung a full ten yards on Grunwald’s side of the property line, and the battle—the
second
battle—was on. It had been raging for eight months now. Curtis believed the delaying tactics being employed by The Motherfucker’s lawyers suggested that they knew Curtis had a case. He also believed that their failure to propose a settlement, and Grunwald’s failure to just cough up the twelve hundred, suggested that it had become as personal to Grunwald as it was to him. These lawyers were also costing them plenty. But of course, the matter was no longer about money.

Riding out along Route 17, through what had once been ranchland and was now just overgrown scrub ground (
Grunwald had been raving mad to build out here,
Curtis thought), Curtis only wished he felt happier about this turn of events. Victory was supposed to make your heart leap, and his wasn’t. All he seemed to want was to see Grunwald, hear what he was actually proposing, and put all this shit behind them if the proposal wasn’t too ridiculous. Of course that would probably mean the roach-relatives would get the Vinton Lot, and they might well decide to put up their own condo development, but did it even matter? It didn’t seem to.

Curtis had his own problems to deal with, although his were mental rather than marital (God forbid), financial, or physical. They had begun not long after finding Betsy stiff and cold in the side yard. Others might have called these problems neuroses, but Curtis preferred to think of them as angst.

His current disenchantment with the stock market, which had fascinated him ceaselessly since he had discovered it at sixteen, was the most identifiable component of this angst, but by no means the only one. He had begun taking his pulse and counting his toothbrush strokes. He could no longer wear dark shirts, because he was plagued with dandruff for the first time since junior high school. Dead white crap plated up on his scalp and drifted down to his shoulders. If he scraped with the teeth of a comb, it came down in ghastly snow flurries. He hated this, but still sometimes found himself doing it while sitting at the computer, or while talking on the phone. Once or twice he’d scraped until he drew blood.

Scraping and scraping. Excavating that white deadness. Sometimes looking at the idiot stick on the coffee table and thinking (of course) of how happy Betsy was when she brought it to him. Human eyes hardly ever looked that happy, especially not when the humans in question were doing chores.

A midlife crisis, Sammy said (Sammy was his once-a-week masseur). You need to get laid, Sammy said, but he didn’t offer his own services, Curtis noticed.

Still, the phrase rang true—as true as any twenty-first-century newspeak, he supposed. Whether the Vinton Lot fuck-a-monkey show had provoked the crisis or the crisis had provoked the Vinton mess, he didn’t know. What he
did
know was that he had come to think
heart attack
instead of
indigestion
each time he felt a transient, stabbing pain in his chest, that he had become obsessed with the notion that his teeth were going to fall out (even though they had never given him any particular trouble), and that when he’d gotten a cold in April, he had diagnosed himself as being on the verge of a complete immunological breakdown.

Plus this other little problem. This compulsion, which he hadn’t told his doctor about. Or even Sammy, and he told Sammy
everything
.

It was on him now, fifteen miles inland on seldom-traveled Route 17, which had never been particularly busy and had now been rendered all but obsolescent by the 375 Extension. Right here with the green scrub pressing in on both sides (the man had been
bonkers
to build out here), with the bugs singing in high grass no cows had grazed for ten years or more and the power lines buzzing and the sun beating down like a padded hammer on his helmetless head.

He knew just thinking of the compulsion summoned it, but that was of no particular help. None at all, in fact.

He pulled over where a track marked DURKIN GROVE VILLAGE ROAD shot off to the left (grass was now growing up the center hump, an arrow pointing the way to failure) and put the Vespa in neutral. Then, while it purred contentedly between his legs, he forked the first two fingers of his right hand into a V and stuck them down his throat. His gag reflex had grown numb over the last two or three months, and his hand was in almost all the way to the bracelets of fortune on his wrist before it finally happened.

Curtis leaned to one side and ejected his breakfast. It wasn’t getting rid of the food that interested him; he was many things, but bulimic wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t even the vomiting part that he liked. What he liked was the
gagging
: that hard rejecting clench of the midsection, plus the accompanying yaw of the mouth and throat. The body was totally in gear, determined to oust the intruder.

The smells—green bushes, wild honeysuckle—were suddenly stronger. The light was brighter. The sun beat down more heavily than ever; the pad was off the hammer and he could feel the skin on the nape of his neck sizzling, the cells there maybe at this very moment turning outlaw and heading for the chaotic land of melanoma.

He didn’t care. He was alive. He rammed his spread fingers down his throat again, scraping the sides. The rest of breakfast yurped up. The third time he produced only long strings of spittle, stained faintly pink with his throat’s blood. Then he felt satisfied. Then he could go on toward Durkin Grove Village, The Motherfucker’s half-built Xanadu out here in the silent bee-buzzing wilds of Charlotte County.

It occurred to him, as he putted modestly along the overgrown lane in the right-hand wheelrut, that Grunwald might not be the only one who was in a tight place these days.

Durkin Grove Village was a mess.

There were puddles in the ruts of the not-yet-paved streets and in the cellar holes of unfinished (in some cases not yet even framed) buildings. What Curtis saw below—half-built shops, a few pieces of shabby-looking construction equipment here and there, sagging yellow caution tape—was surely a blueprint for deep financial trouble, perhaps even ruin. Curtis didn’t know if The Motherfucker’s preoccupation with the Vinton Lot—not to mention the decampment of his wife, his illness, and his legal problems concerning Curtis’s dog—had been the cause of the man’s current overextension or not, but he knew overextension was what it was. Even before continuing down to the open gate and seeing the sign posted there, he knew.

THIS SITE HAS BEEN CLOSED BY
THE CHARLOTTE COUNTY DEPT
OF BUILDING AND PLANNING
THE CHARLOTTE COUNTY BUREAU OF TAXATION
THE FLORIDA BUREAU OF TAXATION
UNITED STATES INTERNAL REVENUE
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CALL 941-555-1800

Below this, some exuberant wit had spray-painted:
DIAL EXTENSION 69 AND ASK FOR THE CUNT-LICKER GENERAL!

The tar ended and the potholes began after the only three buildings that looked completed: two shops on one side of the street and a model home on the other. The model home was a faux Cape Cod that made Curtis’s blood run cold. He didn’t trust the Vespa on the unpaved surface, so he turned in beside a payloader that looked as if it had been parked there for a century or more—grass was growing in the dirt at the bottom of its partially raised scoop—put down the stand, and turned off the engine.

Silence poured in to fill the socket which had been occupied by the Vespa’s fat purr. Then a crow cawed. It was answered by another. Curtis looked up and saw a trio of them poised on a scaffolding that enshrouded a partially finished brick building. Maybe it had been intended as a bank.
Now it’s Grunwald’s tombstone,
he thought, but the idea didn’t even bring a smile to his lips. He felt like gagging himself again, and might even have done it, but farther down the deserted dirt street—at the far end, in fact—he saw a man standing beside a white sedan with a green palm tree on it. Above the palm tree: GRUNWALD. Below it: CONTRACTORS & BUILDERS. The man was waving to him. Grunwald was for some reason driving a company car today instead of his Porsche. Curtis supposed it wasn’t impossible that Grunwald had sold the Porsche. It wasn’t impossible to think the IRS had seized it, and might even seize Grunwald’s Turtle Island property. Then the Vinton Lot would be the least of his worries.

I just hope they leave him enough to pay for my dog,
Curtis thought. He waved back to Grunwald, flicked the red alarm switch below the ignition after removing the key (these things were only reflex; he did not think the Vespa was in any danger of being stolen, not out here, but he had been taught to take care of his things), and put the key in his pocket with his cell phone. Then he started down the dirt street—a Main Street that never was, and, it now seemed certain, never would be—to meet his neighbor and settle the trouble between them once and for all, if that were possible. He was careful to avoid the puddles left from the previous night’s shower.

“Yo, neighbor!” Grunwald said as Curtis approached. He was wearing khakis and a T-shirt with his company’s palm-tree logo on it. The shirt bagged on him. Except for hectic blotches of red high on his cheekbones and dark—almost black—circles under his eyes, his face was pale. And although he sounded cheerful, he looked sicker than ever.
Whatever they tried to cut out of him,
Curtis thought,
they failed.
Grunwald had one hand behind him. Curtis assumed it was in his back pocket. This turned out not to be true.

A little farther down the rutted and puddled dirt road was a trailer up on blocks. The on-site office, Curtis supposed. There was a notice encased in a protective plastic sleeve, hanging from a little plastic suction cup. There was a lot printed on it, but all Curtis could read (all he needed to read) were the words at the top: NO ENTRY.

Yes, The Motherfucker had fallen on hard times. Hard cheese on Tony, as Evelyn Waugh might have said.

“Grunwald?” It was enough to start with; considering what had happened to Betsy, it was all The Motherfucker deserved. Curtis stopped about ten feet from him, his legs slightly spread to avoid a puddle. Grunwald’s legs were spread, too. It occurred to Curtis that this was a classic pose: gunfighters about to do their deal on the only street of a ghost town.

“Yo, neighbor!” Grunwald repeated, and this time he actually laughed. There was something familiar about his laugh. And why not? Surely he had heard The Motherfucker laugh before. He couldn’t remember just when, but surely he must have.

Behind Grunwald, across from the trailer and not far from the company car Grunwald had driven out here, stood a line of four blue Port-O-Sans. Weeds and nodding wedelia sprouted around their bases. The runoff from frequent June thunderstorms (such afternoon tantrums were a Gulf Coast specialty) had undercut the ground in front of them and turned it into a ditch. Almost a creek. It was filled with standing water now, the surface dusty and bleared with pollen, so that it cast back only a vague blue intimation of sky. The quartet of shithouses leaned forward like frost-heaved old gravestones. There must have been quite a crew out here at one time, because there was also a fifth. That one had actually fallen over and lay door-down in the ditch. It was the final touch, underlining the fact that this project—crazy to begin with—was now a dead letter.

One of the crows took off from the scaffolding around the unfinished bank and flapped across the hazy blue sky, cawing at the two men facing each other below. The bugs buzzed unconcernedly in the high grass. Curtis realized he could smell the Port-O-Sans; they must not have been pumped out in some time.

“Grunwald?” he said again. And then (because now something more seemed to be required): “How can I help you? Do we have something to discuss?”

“Well, neighbor, it’s how I can help
you.
It’s strictly down to that.” He started to laugh again, then choked it off. And Curtis knew why the sound was familiar. He’d heard it on his cell phone, at the end of The Motherfucker’s message. It hadn’t been a choked-off sob, after all. And the man didn’t look sick—or not
just
sick. He looked mad.

Of course he’s mad. He’s lost everything. And you let him get you out here alone. Not wise, buddy. You didn’t think it through.

No. Since Betsy’s death, he had neglected to think a great many things through. Hadn’t seemed worth the trouble. But this time he should have taken the time.

Grunwald was smiling. Or at least showing his teeth. “I notice you didn’t wear your helmet, neighbor.” He shook his head, still smiling that cheery sick man’s smile. His hair flapped against his ears. It looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a while. “A wife wouldn’t let you get away with careless shit like that, I bet, but of course guys like you don’t have wives, do they? They have
dogs.
” He stretched it out, turning it into something from
The Dukes of Hazzard: dawwwgs.