Son of Destruction (6 page)

‘I’ll find a new angle.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘I have to. It’s my job.’ He slaps his wallet on the counter: business as usual. ‘Now if you’ll just.’

‘We’ll put you down as business,’ she says smoothly, scrawling in the showy red leather register planted like a stage prop on the marble counter next to the brass telephone with its standing mouthpiece and a receiver that you have to point at your ear. ‘But I need to know how long you’re going to be in town.’

‘Good question,’ he says.

‘There’s a rate break if you rent by the week.’

With grin that doesn’t quite come off, he repeats the line written for him by the boss he probably no longer has. ‘For as long as it takes.’

‘OK then.’ She makes a tick next to his name. ‘Now, print your name in the book while I run your plastic. Folders with maps and tourist attractions over there in the rack. Nice handwriting.’ She hands back his card. ‘I have you on Five. Anything else I can do for you?’

‘Not right now, not that I can think of. Well, one other thing.’ He takes it and turns to go. Then need overwhelms reason and he pulls out his picture of Lucy, snapped in front of her house. ‘So. Can you tell me where this is?’

‘Sure,’ she says, now that his card has cleared. Leaning over the counter, she shifts position, letting out a wave of sunscreen and perfumed deodorant compounded by body heat. ‘Always happy to help.’

‘I mean, this house?’ She’s squinting so he slides the snapshot closer adding, ‘For. Uh, an architectural piece?’

That blind, vague smile tells him that she’s one of those women who can’t see without glasses but is too vain to put them on. Handing it back, she rests her knuckles on the counter. ‘Sorry.’

He says, ‘About . . . Old Florida?’

‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ She shrugs, rearranging her cleavage.

What is she, coming on to me?
Damn, all his statements come out with question marks. Damn, he should have slept on the plane. ‘So. You don’t know the house?’

She isn’t looking at the snapshot, she’s watching him. ‘Not really. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘So,’ he says, ‘I have this other picture?’ Knowing she’ll need glasses he says tactfully, ‘The faces are pretty small.’ He slides it across the counter.

She may not recognize faces, but she knows shapes. Jessie slaps on her glasses and looks again. Dan is too distracted to pick up the change in her as she says, carefully, ‘No, I don’t know these people. From the looks of the car, that’s from the dark ages. I’m a lot more recent than that.’ She takes off the glasses with her foxy, jagged grin.

‘OK then.’ He puts it away. ‘If I can just have my key?’

Odd. It’s like a study in stop motion photography. Woman, arriving at a conclusion. Click. Click. Click. Let’s get this done. She pulls a big brass key off the hook. ‘Room 51. I’m alone at the desk today. You can find it, right?’

‘Yes Ma’am.’

She does not say,
It’s Jessie, please!
She dismisses him. ‘OK then.’

‘OK.’ Dan lingers just long enough to be sure she’s done with him.
What did I do wrong?
At the elevator, he turns and looks back. Jessie is doubled over the register, squinting at his entry. Then he sees her reach for the glasses again. As the elevator doors open he sees her snap open her phone. The woman who could have cared less about the snapshot stabs a number with her fingernail. She looks up with a sweet, distracted smile just as the steel doors snap shut on them.

She didn’t need glasses to know that was Chape Bellinger’s old Jeep or name the others: Bobby Chaplin, Buck Coleman, Stitch Von Harten. Fucking Brad Kalen, God damn his eyes.

The minute the elevator doors close on the kid, Jessie hits 8 on her speed dial. She entered the number in a blinding rage when she re-entered Fort Jude. Given that she wants to smash her fist into that big, wet smacky mouth of his, she’s avoided Kalen ever since. In spite of the fact that Jessie Vukovich from Pierce Point is now a member of the Fort Jude Club in good standing and last year he was the fucking Commodore, she’s managed, but now . . .

She always suspected that life’s a bitch. Turns out, it is.

His machine picks up, which is probably just as well. Jessie has been sitting on this for so long that acid fills her mouth. Things the bastard bastard needs to hear pile up in her head – packed in like enough nitro to blow up the world. If they spoke, it would all come out too fast, and Brad is stupid. Let the walking slime mold dangle by the short hairs for a little bit. She wants to see him hang by his guts, twisting in the wind while she takes her sweet time, laying it out for him.

As it is, the slick, radio-announcer track he laid on the machine goes on forever, smoothly supplying his cell-phone number and the number at the club. She has a full minute to compose before she spits:

‘Now, don’t call me back and don’t ask questions. Just be aware that nothing you did is ever over. In fact, it’s come to town. After what you did, it damn well serves you right.’

Shaking with fury, she ducks into the office. She has to compose herself before she can do makeup and put on her chic silk jacket and her diamond studs and high heels for lunch at the prestigious Fort Jude Club. She hates that she can’t stop thinking of it as the prestigious Fort Jude Club. People who couldn’t see her for dirt in high school have changed toward her since she came back to town in her Lexus and bought this hotel outright, thanks to the late Billy James, her fourth and final ex. The shittiest snots from Fort Jude High are her new best friends now, and even the boys look at her differently. Last year she sat down on the club patio with the Friday Lunch Bunch – on a trial basis, she thought, but she’s been sitting down with them regular ever since.

It’s silly, but given that everybody used to think of Jessie James, née Jessie Vukovich, as that cheap girl from Pierce Point, it’s a very big deal. She has to get her shit together and get her smile working right so she can go down there and face them.

Even though it’s the desk clerk’s day off, she shuts the office. When he comes back down to the lobby, cute Dan Carteret will think she’s gone for good, which is just as well. She likes the kid, but she doesn’t want to talk to him, not as raw and hopeful and helpless as he is. There are things he doesn’t know and things he should never have to know.

Poor kid, she thinks. Thinks he can walk in cold, ask around, and everybody will open up and tell him everything. Fat chance. There are some things only Jessie knows, and she’s not about to tell anybody anything. She sighs. Poor kid, his knuckles were white when he signed the book, this is a very big deal for him.

Then she focuses on the real problem. The Lunch Bunch. What to say when they ask why she’s late. They’re nice enough to her now, but underneath Jessie knows who she is and they know who they are and there’s still a huge difference between them. She’s learned to hide it. In Fort Jude, the littlest things can give you away, so she has to be careful. Appearances are that important.

It isn’t pathetic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you end up doing when you’re not yourself. He’s been out of work for so long that he isn’t sure who that person is.

For the seventh consecutive day since Nenna McCall limped by, Bobby is out in the sunshine, weeding around the cement lions on the front steps. In the dawn of his doomed real estate venture, Grandfather planted cast cement sphinxes and lions at every intersection in Pine Vista, which is what the late Herman Chaplin named his dream tract at the height of the Florida real estate boom. He poured thousands into private roads out here in the Twenties, when the sky was the limit and a thousand dollars bought something. The old man bought up every plot between here and Far Acres, in the happy expectation that the rich would come clamoring to moor their yachts on private docks behind their new houses. He envisioned a Spanish stucco wonderland out here: golf course, tennis courts, Moorish castles on the waterfront, as many as the traffic would bear. The last of his money went into building his dream house, the model home he could show buyers. One look and they’d come swarming to invest. He laid down octagonal tile sidewalks and convinced the city to pave the streets with red brick an unfortunate six weeks before the Florida real estate crash. It came a full five years before the national stock market tanked: an event that was anticlimactic down here, where land is everything.

Herman’s brick streets are overgrown now, and jungle has reclaimed all his vacant lots. Most of his stony sentinels were stolen or vandalized and the ones that survive are decaying, all but the two flanking the Fourth Street approach to Pine Vista and the ones in front of his dream house. Grandfather kept them in mint condition until he died, at which point Bobby’s father took over, which Bobby is expected to do. Like Bobby, the lions look tired; they’ve been doing what they’re doing for too long.

Like Bobby, they need a change.

He isn’t out here looking for Nenna, exactly, but it would be nice to talk to her. He’d like to know what brought her by here the other day, and why she was walking. The woman looked like she could use a little there-there – which he is happy to give, if she’ll only tell him what’s wrong. He isn’t out front waiting for her, but there’s always a chance that she’ll come by and they can talk.

Not that there isn’t plenty to do. He’s yanking sandspurs out of whatever Bermuda grass remains in the doomed front lawn. Unlike his grandfather, who took to weeding the walks all the way up to Fourth Street, Bobby is not crazy, nor is he going there. He has responsibilities.

Until he lost his grip, Herman Chaplin saw to it that the pink-and-gray octagons in the front walk were lifted and leveled every year. Then Bobby’s father did. His parents died gratefully, like relieved commanders turning over the helm of a doomed ship. Bobby sees to it now. As the only functional Chaplin, he sees to a lot of things. His siblings aren’t fit to go out.

He wishes Nenna had let him help last week, she was so harassed. Lovely woman, looking maybe a tad old for her age – which is his age, more or less, they were in the same year all through school. Little Nenna was at the graduation house parties out at Huntington Beach, at the ruinous end of senior year at FJHS.

It was awful; he’s never had more fun. Until the end.

That June he and Chape Bellinger and Brad Kalen, Stitch Von Harten and Buck Coleman stayed free in a condo Chape’s aunt was stupid enough to loan. He remembers they promised to keep their feet off the furniture, which was covered in flowered chintz; there were all these little china
things
around and he remembers waking up on the pink shag rug with broken china mashed into his cheek but that’s all he remembers because they were loaded for a solid calendar week.

They ran around until the sun came up and then you slept until three and got up and ran around all night, ingesting whatever until everybody was bombed into insensibility. Then they fell into Chape’s Jeep and roared up and down the beach until the sun came up; at low tide the sand was packed that hard. They tore along screaming, scattering early morning walkers like gulls. Every condo and cottage on Huntington Beach was full that week; kids from five Suncoast high schools converged, so the people you fell down with just outside the circle of the bonfire weren’t always people you knew.

Cathy Rhue had her folks’ beach house for the week, she was famous for her body. She brought all the usual girls. Betsy Cashwell and the cheerleaders rented a cabana at the DelMar, everybody who was anybody came to Huntington Beach. Sexy Jessie Vukovich was there, but nobody knew where she was staying. Even Lucy came, but not until the last night, her grandmother was that repressive. His heart turns over whenever he thinks of Lucy, which he tries not to do. He slipped his tiny gold football into her hand after the May crowning but she never mentioned it. Everybody but Lucy was there for the week, and there were parties every night. Nenna Henderson was there, he thinks, but in the background, because she wasn’t famous for anything. Not that they weren’t all pretty. In high school certain elements gave you distinction and everyone else was a blur.

For instance, Jessie Vukovich was famous because she would do it with anybody, and in spite of the cold distance she kept, Lucy was famous for her looks. The cheerleaders you remembered because you all rode the bus to away games and you did what you could with them in the back. When you were team captain you had the best and the sexiest and the most famous, but that was before.

Nobody at school knew it but Bobby was also smart. He managed to hide it until he got into Harvard, the first in ten years from Fort Jude High. At the time he actually believed getting into Harvard made him better than he was, which turned their senior blast into a curious exercise in detachment.

All week, at least until that awful Saturday night, Bobby was like a passenger poised at the top of the gangplank, waving goodbye to all those little people on the dock, watching them recede as he left them behind.

Nothing turns out the way you thought. Most of us handle it, but people like Bobby are inclined to dwell. Something grave happened to Bobby Chaplin between then and now, and long before Grace left him, it broke him in two. He can’t leave it alone and he can’t figure it out.

People like Bobby actually believe there is a fulcrum, an exact, identifiable point when life tips and everything goes downhill. With people like Bobby, it’s never who they are, or what they did. It’s,
I was going along fine until X happened.
They need something to blame. The problem is, they can’t put their finger on the X.

He has wasted his life on it. One of his shrinks said,
It’s never what happens that makes the difference, Mr Chaplin. It’s how you handle it.

Well, he thinks, that’s easy for you to say. He feels bad about what came down at senior houseparties. No. That he was involved. No. That he was out of his mind on vodka and whatever they were smoking and lying nose down in the mangroves when he should have . . . Don’t go there.