Want Not (18 page)

Bundling himself like a polar explorer, he cursed the forced switch from Weejuns to snowboots and all the political deviance it represented. Outside, he was distracted from the search for his organically chilling beer by the spectacle of his kingdom, all 2.11 acres of it covered in a moon-colored blanket of snow so plump and waveless that it resembled marshmallow cream. After dumping thirty inches on northern New Jersey, the snowstorm had finally ebbed, and the landscape—quiet to begin with—seemed gripped by a weird, muffled stillness: a snow coma. Dave dragged the trash bags down the path that Raymond had shoveled for him (“good for the old ticker,” he’d said, pink-faced and jolly). He heaved them into the roller bin beside the garage, then paused to take stock of the bestilled landscape from this slightly different angle.

Pedro, the only Mexican plowman Dave had ever encountered, was out on Russell Lane, scritch-scratching the pavement as he cleared the driveways to three houses, almost identical to Dave and Sara’s, and twelve empty lots. For a moment Dave felt sorry for Pedro, pulling a holiday shift, then wondered if Mexicans even celebrated Thanksgiving. He didn’t recall any beaner pilgrims. He also didn’t know why the developer forced Pedro to clear the driveways to the empty lots—who was going to scope out homesites during a blizzard?—but then Dave’s low opinion of the developer precluded any reasonable theories. The sufficient answer was: Because he’s a prick, that’s why. Dave would have gleefully organized a lynching party among the neighbors if there had been any neighbors to organize.

Greg Russell—that was the developer, the greasy grand poobah of Russell Estates, LLC—had promised an “ultra-exclusive” neighborhood of fifteen luxury homes. Two years later, however, Russell Estates consisted of the house Dave and Sara had built, a smaller one built by a Pakistani orthodontist, and the model home; the rest of the development was bare graded dirt poked with weak little
FOR SALE
signs. From what Dave had gathered, Russell had never had the proper funding to begin with; just the land, a bulldozer, and a boneheaded mixture of hope and greed. The rumor was that he’d scammed the 112 acres—gorgeous rolling hills, about 60 acres of them covered in second-growth hardwoods, plus a wide ribbon of wetlands bisecting its middle—from an old spinster he’d befriended. This was way back when, when she and her brother had operated a chicken farm on the property, but the brother died, the old lady morphed into a chickenless shut-in, and then came Russell to the screen door, offering to mow her lawn if she’d let him deer-hunt on the back sixty. No one knew how, but Russell had somehow weaseled her into deeding him the land, which he’d promptly started logging three days after her death. Cleared the whole damn parcel, laid a horseshoe-shaped road on it, then constructed a rococo, foam-concrete entranceway—
RUSSELL ESTATES: A LUXURY COMMUNITY
—with columns, caps, pediments, three thousand dollars’ worth of pansies, and a foam-concrete sculpture of a bucking stallion onto which a local yahoo had painted red tears (probably, Dave and Russell agreed, one of the eco-ninnies who’d opposed the subdivision permit). Dave should’ve figured Russell for a fraud—he prided himself on his radar that way—but Sara had gotten all misty-headed about the views (they
were
pretty magnificent, if you were into that sort of thing) and about the “community stables” and equestrian trails Russell had promised for the long term. She’d swooned. Whispered hot breathy things in Dave’s ear, things that’d gelatinized his good sense.

There were no stables, of course. Hardly any houses, for that matter. Just Pedro, the Snow Spic, clearing this oxbow to nowhere, while King Dave of Masoli stood watching from on high. He’d sell the goddamn house if the real estate market hadn’t tanked; right now they’d be gobsmack lucky to break even. And, Christ, all the issues; Russell’s houses were built to last a season, tops. An offset crack in the foundation. Drippy white stains between the pool’s deck and bond beam. Popped nails and buckling in all the windows. The veneer already peeling from the kitchen cabinets, which weren’t supposed to be veneered to begin with. Insufficient flashing around the chimney, resulting in a water-logged attic. “What’d you expect?” his golfing buddy Pete had said to him. “The houses they build these days, they ain’t designed to outlast the warranty period. Back in the old days, they built ’em to pass down to their kids, y’know? Who the hell you know now who’s living in the old family homeplace?” Into Dave’s mind had entered a vision of himself occupying his parents’ shabby little bungalow in Rahway, causing him to shudder so violently that he shanked the ball with his seven iron.

Surveying the not-neighborhood now, he decided it didn’t look quite so abortive and barren beneath all the snow—though maybe only in the way a corpse doesn’t look so bad after someone drapes a sheet over it. Regardless, it was better than the view inside—Jeremy no doubt explaining why the Cowboys cheerleaders’ uniforms were sexist and exploitative, rather than magically delicious—so Dave fetched a cigar from his shirt pocket. He lit the cigar, a high-end Nicaraguan torpedo. As always, life improved. Unlike the proverbial cat to which he’d been recently likened, Dave had never eaten a canary, but he guessed they might taste something like this.

Except soon the cigar began to stink. He pulled it from his mouth and stared at it. Number eight on
Cigar Aficionado’
s top twenty-five cigars of the year, with a Sumatra seed wrapper around Costa Rican leaf, ten bucks a pop, supposedly heavy on pepper and leather flavors with an espresso-bean finish. And it smelled like a friggin skunk fart. But then, no, scratch that: Bringing the cigar to his nose, Dave sniffed its smoke plume, twice, then a third time, finally acquitting it from blame. So what the hell
was
that smell? He flipped the lid on the trash bin beside him and took an investigative whiff. All he got there was a mixture of gravy odor and whatever the chemical was that they impregnated the trash bags with to make them smell like a mountain meadow or feminine deodorizing products. Just about then, however, with his nose probing the trash bin like a wine expert’s assessing an old Bordeaux, Dave recognized the smell—unmistakable, once he’d pegged it. He grinned, and not only because he was instantly transported back to 1984 when Bon Jovi opened for the Scorpions at Madison Square Garden and Matt Rocca showed up with some tripweed his hippie brother had brought back from Kathmandu. Sauntering farther down the path, his cigar jutting from his smile, he turned the corner to the dark little alcove where the central air conditioning unit sat hidden inside a semicircle of dwarf boxwoods.

“Busted,” he announced.

Alexis shrieked in terror, her arms gyrating so wildly that she ejected the contents of both hands—her cellphone shooting one way, the joint she’d been smoking the other. But she wasn’t alone. Some kid was standing beside her, a slim shadow raising his hands slowly to show they were empty.

Pricked by the indignity of her surprise, once she’d identified her stepfather behind the orange nub of his cigar, she pouted at him and snarled, “What are you
doing,
perv?”

“I know what
I’m
doing,” he replied, his mad hatter’s grin fading as he sized up the terrified-looking kid frozen beside her. “What’re
you
doing?”

“It’s medical, okay?” she said, bending to retrieve the joint and cellphone from atop the snow. With her coat sleeve she wiped the snow from the phone’s screen. “It helps with my condition.”

“It helps you shit?”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Who’s this?”

“Who’s what?”

“Who’s
what?
Him.”

“That’s Miguel.” To Miguel she said, sighing, “My stepdad.”

The kid nodded, dropping his hands, while Dave leaned in for a closer look. The kid was Latino, he noted, and—no way around it—a handsome little devil, with a narrow smoldery face and soccer-star frame. Skittish-looking, but Dave guessed that was to be expected in the present weed-perfumed circumstances. Dave snorted. “Who’s Miguel?” he said to them both.

“He goes to Sussex,” answered Alexis, Miguel affirming this with another nod. “Let’s not make an issue out of this, okay? With you-know-who?”

Dave pursed his lips.
Goes to Sussex:
This was a cryptic answer, even for the reliably cryptic Alexis. And what precisely was the issue she didn’t want Sara digesting, he wondered. The pot—or the presence of Enrique Iglesias here, hiding in the shrubs?

She and Dave had what might be called an “understanding,” despite his geopolitical alliance with Sara. Or if not an understanding, then a kind of caustic accommodation—a mutual tolerance manifesting itself in the kind of thorny banter that cocktail waitresses engage in with their dumpy regulars: lewd jokes, hard-edged teasing, recurrent bouts of eye-rolling. He called her Lexi, which Sara abhorred (“that’s a stripper name,” she protested), and, privately, she called him “perv,” owing to her exploration one night—accidental, but exceedingly thorough—of his unsavory internet browser history. That discovery—in which she’d reveled, acidly, for the power it gave her—had shifted the relationship, infusing it with something oozy and potentially toxic but also, to Dave’s thinking, kind of . . . stirring. It was as if they’d lowered their human masks—the do-right businessman, the Honor Roll teen—to reveal something meaner and more reptilian behind them: the lecher, the blackmailer. The benign teasing she’d formerly directed Dave’s way—dubbing him her “step-guido,” taunting him for the undone top buttons of his shirts, his Rocawear sweaters, the tinted windows on his Escalade, the way his dancefloor moves were limited to punching the air in slipshod time with a song—had turned darker, aimed deeper. She’d redrawn her cartoon of him, depicting him as a goatish old sadsack, as discontented with his life with Sara—albeit far differently—as she herself was. “Having a little
me
time?” she’d say, as she passed by his home office. “I’ll just close the door for you,” punctuating it with a cold wink. Or in the aftermath of a spat between him and Sara: “Guess you’ll be working late tonight, huh?” This had chafed Dave, at first, until he’d formulated a defense, which was more like a plea of
nolo contendere:
Copping to the perv charge, he’d taken to constantly quizzing her about her own sexual hijinks, real or imagined, with just enough quasi-parental disapproval in his tone to maintain a staged sense of decorum. As in, “I hope you kept it to just a blowjob tonight,” when she’d roll in late on a Friday night. Or, in the present instance, as he watched her peck away at her cellphone while poor Enrique/Miguel stood there wetting himself: “What’re you—getting a little action out here in the bushes?”

“You wish,” she said.

“I just stopped by to say hi,” the kid piped in, adding, with a thumb cocked in the direction of the plow truck uphill, “while my dad’s working.”

Huh. Dave processed this while chewing his cigar. So this Miguel was Pedro’s son. He did a little kneejerk calculus, putting one and one and then maybe one more together to solve the alcove equation: Miguel must be her dealer. Sure, okay—that made sense. Jumping out of the plow truck to drop off a—what’d they used to call it? A dime bag, yeah—while Papa Pedro scraped the Lane to Nowhere for whatever Frito-Lay products Russell probably paid him with. Then naturally sneaking in a little product test with Lexi. This was sweet. This was dirt. Dave grinned. “So, what,” he said to her, “you got a prescription for that?”

Alexis snapped shut her phone and said, “It helps, okay?”

“Bet it does.” He grinned at Miguel, who did not grin back but instead licked his lips and glanced sideways in a manner suggesting he was still mired in the disagreeable process of wetting his pants.

“Seriously,” she said. “Look online. It’s, like, the best treatment ever for IBS.” As if to demonstrate her point, she pursed her lips around the joint, blazing the ember at its end. The long hiss of her inhale came to a sharp stop, however, as she coughed the smoke back up. The resulting cloud was thick and dense enough to obscure her face altogether. Waving away the cloud, she barked a few more coughs, her chagrined efforts to suppress them almost poignant. She tried passing it to Miguel but he waved his arms no: not the groovy-cool
I’ve-had-enough
wave no, Dave noticed, but a more adamant, appalled refusal, an
I-don’t-even-know-what-that-illegal-shit-is
wave no, all of which widened the smile behind Dave’s cigar. “Amateur,” he sniffed.

“Like—you’d know,” she spluttered.

“Hand it over.”

Miguel peeked around the corner, presumably hoping for a rescue by his dad.

“Fuck off,” she said.

“You need some instruction,” he said. “Give it here.”

She did so, but reluctantly, as if fearing his instruction might involve throwing it down into the snow, coupled with a lecture about the evils of dope, etc. When he replaced his cigar with the joint, crabbing up his face as he took a long macho drag from it, her mouth flopped open. “This is so fucked up,” she said to Miguel. “I’m getting high with my stepdad.”

“Yeah,” came Miguel’s reply.

“Yeah . . .” Dave echoed him, but then it was his turn to cough. “Gaw,” he cried, his cheeks wiggling, shoulders shaking, as he hacked the smoke back up. The coughs, searing and unstoppable, bent his body and yanked tears from his eyes. Doubled over, he offered the joint back to Lexi, certain he was about to see pinkish lung flecks dappling the snow. Just how would he explain
that
at the emergency room? Snatching it back, she sniffed, “Amateur.”

“Jesus,” he wheezed. “What the fuck
is
that? That’s
harsh.
Holy . . .”

“It’s medical grade.”

“Christ,” he said, still wheezing. He put a hand to his chest while leveling a cold glare at Miguel, who had somehow, he couldn’t help feeling, just shown him up. “I’m cured a’
something.
”

Alexis took another drag from it, more gently this time. No coughs followed—just a smooth, vampish exhale (were those
smoke rings?
) that felt, to Dave, like cocky one-upmanship. Now everyone was showing him up. Pouting, he wondered if he’d suddenly morphed into a Raymond—the impotent old coot, publicly tolerated but privately mocked. You wouldn’t want him having your back in a fight against some guys from Hopatcong High, but sharing a joint with him outside by the trash cans . . . eh, not so bad. This was an intolerable thought. “Not that
I
need any curing,” he said, brushing his chest as if the purpose of his hand there had been to dust snow off his coat, rather than to salve the fierce pain he’d been feeling. “Not in the shitting department, anyway. Here, gimme another toke of that.”