Chapter Nineteen―Follow the Money

Consider this washing machine, wealthy as washing machines go—an automatic bought new by Harriet Hopwood in the starry-eyed days when she first started accumulating a trousseau—a good machine with a hearty spin cycle and a pump made for a big city water supply. It had come off the Sears truck and was the wonder of the neighborhood. Hooked to a well, that this contraption would suck you dry right down to the water table was the wisdom of the county: pump and circumstance, wash and be damned. And its rate of discharge was more than enough to back up most septic systems in Willipaq. It was, in short, one hell of a washer and to be used only on occasion. With the affinity that some machines have for people, and having been trashed by the same teen vandals who, thwarted at dumping snow into the Valiant Trust Memorial Library’s after-hours book drop, turned their energies to burglary in the off season, it had attached itself to Harry Profitt Pease.

Harry fired it up and it worked just fine. His laying-on of hands worked the customary wonders. Harry did not question Providence; the washer had come free and, despite its doubtful antecedents, he was paid cash for hauling it off and was happy. The hundred thousand dollars, duct-taped in plastic bags about the drum's circumference corrected the washer's overload problems in the spin cycle, and over the years to follow Harriet came to revise her opinion of Harry's skills with things mechanical. "He's a drunk but he's a natural genius," she would say of Harry Pease.

Harry Pease had caught himself daydreaming lately—dreams of passion and romance. Was this not the very machine he had promised to Alma Nightingale six years earlier? The fugal paradox did not trouble Harry at that moment, nor did it bother the machine. Neither Harry nor the Maytag washer had been reading ahead to know how their fates were to be entwined. They ascended the slopes of destiny together just far enough to get the job done.

With the slap-dash and whiz-bang of a reconstructed bachelor about to set up housekeeping with a woman for the first time in... well, ever, Harry was making over his old house on the ledge with a flourish. But something was not right; he had a feeling Harriet and her boyfriend—that South American fellow—wanted her washing machine back.

Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O'Rourke y Nuñez lurked at Harry Pease's place. Not an open lurk, he thought, for surely a malingerer to no apparent purpose would arouse suspicions with the neighbors. He would be recognized. He satisfied himself that the washer had survived the trip unblemished, the money undiscovered.

He did not doubt his knots—the coil of doorbell wire twisted tight with a telegraph splice such as the Illuminati insurgents used on the hands of their prisoners. The money was calling him to come, see if it had been discovered. Only that. He would not touch it, unwrap it, play with it. They had been closing in and what better place. Under the possible scrutiny of the defenders of the statute, there, waiting to his need, was the washing machine, its studied innocence a revelation of an annuity from San Expedito.

Small bills in lumpy bundles. Much handled, crumpled, flattened on thighs of faded blue denim, steam-ironed by Coca mamas for Mama Coca’s sake—then fresh and acceptable, sent to rise to the oxygen-rich plateaus of tinted windows where the touch of a bank teller would work the magic of conversion. Credited, converted, flown offshore, photographed and deposited against a string of numbers in a database; authenticated as the real thing. Then respectable, flown back to the Federal Reserve for a final humiliation, the shredder. Then a consignment to the fire. The confetti thus generated fed into federal furnaces for a final laundering, expunging any vestigial scent of poverty. The government of the Estados Unidos was pleased to substitute new, large bills for the authenticated worn money which smelled excessively of clove and lavender-scented brilliantine. Only the asperity of his singleness of purpose had kept him from daily visits. The anxieties had been growing. This was as he had been told as a child, money is power. The power of hidden, unearned dollars had become an evil talisman eating at his soul.

Money.

There was the thin threadbare money of the street dealers' women, suitcases of it—carry-on flight bags with puffy packets of bills that bulged, unable to lie flat. After many handlings the bills were laundered, starched and ironed as befitted the coupons of delight. The money had once been American, balled and grubby from foldings and stuffings into many pockets. It had cleaned fingernails, picked ears; rolled into tight tubes it sucked the snows of Mama Coca. Nieves, nieves. The Church and the shadow-church had complementary magics, on this the gullible and the wise agreed.

The dream of Mama Coca had been a sign. Harriet had an infectious though unsupported faith in the high-mindedness of tax-supported institutions. "You are innocent. Let them poke about, they won’t find anything." But suppose they did?They were watching. If not the living then, the dead. A little warning, some money even, and the policía would give you a running start, Los Muertos, none.

There was a balance achieved between being and not being, the living and the spirit world. Money was the bridge. Los Muertos were the walkers on that bridge. Los Muertos—either seen and not acknowledged or invisible but for little signs—the bristling of a cat’s tail, the secret messages in recurrent lottery numbers.

"Hiya, kid."

Oswaldo jumped as though he had been hit by a bullet. "Oh. Señor Pease. I thought..."

Harry came around from the back of the house hitching his suspenders up after a trip to the privy. A wooden necessarium leaned unsteadily against what remained of a disintegrating outbuilding. He is drunk, thought Oswaldo. "Thinking will stunt your growth," said Harry. "C’mon in and have a beer."

Inside, Harry fished two bottles of Seadog Export Lager from the refrigerator. "Second thoughts?"

Oswaldo felt the panic rising in his throat. "About?"

"That’s one damn fine washer. I fixed it. Works fine now."

"What did you find?"

"Didn’t have to look. It’s the electricity. See, I got two-phase here. It was running weak at your place."

Relief flooded Oswaldo’s body. He leaned back in his chair and took a long pull at his beer. "You have the power, then." Oswaldo smiled. "To the strong goes the victory." Harry grinned back—he was a winner at the game of life. They toasted one another, the washer, Harriet, Alma Nightingale, life and love in general. Oswaldo left woozily ten beers and three hours later.

That evening was the regular illustrated lecture—a slide show—at the Valiant Trust Memorial Institute Free Library. Alma Nightingale was a known regular. "What the hell. Why not. I’ve got her washer for her, haven’t I?"

Even after forty years, he was proprietary about Alma when he was drinking, and moved right in. Harry's approach to a huddle of small talk generated a ripple effect. This was a problem of ventilation. The Valiant Trust committee had argued quire reasonably that taking down the storm windows in the spring was only inviting trouble—a building after all, was sort of like a bottle of wine. Unbuttoning one's edifice to let it breathe with the advent of the warm months, taking down the storm windows for other than routine maintenance, say every five years or so, was borrowing trouble. The summer gales caused weather damage to exposed interior casements, in the knockabout trip down the bulkhead hatch to the Valiant Memorial Trust's basement snuggery some panes were inevitably broken, requiring replacement. The exterior double glazing thus stored acquired a layer of dust and needed washed before being put back in place for the winter when it would be discovered they had shrunken in the dry of the cellar and had to consequently be re-puttied, painted and re-caulked about the seams when re-hung.

Despairing of fresh air, early each spring Mrs. Gladstone herself popped the storms from the clerestory windows at the opposing sides of her office space that welcomed borrowers and book returners as they climbed the three steps from the entry foyer.

A bright young couple from away was tied up in an intense conversation with Alma at the refreshments table—coffee and cookies, the Valiant Friday buffet. More circumspect and less outspoken when sober, Harry caught a snippet of conversation while cruising the refreshments table. "...full of charming, picturesque, bearded people whom I want never to work on my washer again..." Jaws snapped shut as they caught sight of him. Aware of Alma's earlier acquaintance with Harry, they were inquiring as to any other jack-of-all-trades available locally. They were looking for a fixer learned in the ways of automatic household washers and dryers. Harry vaguely remembered doing some work for them the previous summer.

Enough fresh air for one librarian and the occasional browser, this was not enough for the Friday enlightenments plus Harry. Harry's body heat was cooking the emollient of his afternoon as he trod manfully toward the cookies and fruit punch in a vapor haze of Seadog beer, grass and sweat. The pallid figures clustered about the paper-covered library table stopped their talk, held gestures uncompleted.

"Lo!...Conan the Barbarian has come to wassail at the gates," thought Joyce Gladstone, librarian, suppressing a titter.

The slide presentation on the Holy Land was a grand old standby for filling out the schedule of the Valiant's bi-weekly offerings, usually wildlife and nature oriented. Often someone from the Audubon Society would give a talk on bird watching, a park ranger from the wildlife preserve an illustrated nature walk. The spectacle of green foliage up there on the beaded screen in the reference room on an icy winter's evening with the Nor'easters howling past the Bay of Fundy made Alma Nightingale dream of donning her silk with the tropical flower print.

Reverend Murtry from the Methodist parsonage had actually been to the Holy Land but had run out of film and been fatally attracted by the stock shots available at the tourist kiosks. Grainy cliffs of Masada in rotogravure orange alternated with Kodacolor transparencies of the Via Dolorosa, Bethlehem and tract housing in the Golan Heights. Rev. Murtry had typed out his commentary. The lights were dimmed and by the light of a lamp on the lectern he started a cassette player. He had prepared a tape with music and automatic pulses to advance the slide carousels while he gave his full attention to the narrative. Percy Faith's rendition of music from the film Exodus good-naturedly did the best it knew how, a command performance from The Land of Useless Tunes where it had slumbered fitfully through the decades awaiting Rev. Murtry's call.

Harry noticed the quiet of the usually chatty Friday night crowd and guessed it might be him. Were these, his friends and neighbors, sending him a not-so-subtle declaration that he did not belong here? They looked like the little figures architects put into their models. Tiny elongated people interspersed with shrubberies and trees made from sponge dyed green with painted shadows to suggest a sunny afternoon. Their plastic joints stiffly articulated in fashion poses by a builder more used to laying out soffits and gables—mezzogiorno at the mall where the sun always shines and the shadows are short.

Was he out of place?

Harry was not a regular communicant at the Valiant Trust's Sabbath-eve menu of uplift; he was getting the transparent treatment. Admittedly bad timing for a raid on the goodies but he was nursing a hangover and wanted to go home. He didn't feel like staying for the show, besides after the lectures the buffet was so picked over it was hard to do it any heavy damage.

Joyce Gladstone caught a whiff of Harry bearing down on her and charged right on with a cheerful determinedness, hoping to cut him out of possible intrusion by keeping the conversation bright, up, happy and busy. She turned her back and the circle tightened defensively, as if wolves prowled outside their campfire.

"Doesn't Alma look pretty," said Joyce Gladstone (Mrs.). "You always had good chemistry, you and Alma, Harry. Don't put her off. She's going to ask you to fix her washing machine. Do it Harry... for me? It's such a little thing to ask. I'm not comfortable with this stuff yet." She nodded at the tableau of the Valiant's Friday-nighters. The familiar faces had a snapshot quality. Reverend Murtry tinkering with his slide projector, Bobby Farrell waving his finger—they had been having a sports conversation Harry recalled—pressing home some fine point about basketball statistics with Oswaldo while sneaking a peek down the front of Harriet's dress.

There was a splash as a ladle fell into the punch bowl.

"Land's sakes, can't take me anywhere." Alma's voice. Harry turned, she was dabbing at a stain on her silk print dress. There small movements and the sounds of lungs being filled as respiration resumed. The party was unfreezing.

A tentative guffaw, most likely Bobby Farrell, and then random chatter broke out as the party restarted itself. A continuo of manly resonances, hesitant hushed chirpings, percussive shufflings and rustlings and the staccato cough of a smoker coming in from a quick toke in the foyer joined the counterpoint of Alma Nightingale's crystal glockenspiel as with a susurrus of silk she stirred the ice cubes in her tureen of pink citrus soup. Their unconcerned random chatter broke through Harry's haze. The group was realigning itself with the perplexing indeterminacy of the social animal about the business of small talk. Harry tried concentrating but the ebb and flow of people in their huddles and clusters made him dizzy. Pick out one individual and follow it. Like hunting.

Harry noticed the long arm of the law depredating the hors d'oeuvres. "Hiya, Everlast."

Everlast was Etienne Cyr—a mountie, over the river from Canada to scarf down the free lunch. Everlast shot a vaguely annoyed look Harry's way. "Uh, Constable Cyr," Harry corrected himself. "Where're the other two musketeers? Solo stakeout on the cookies tonight?"

The mountie gave a grunt and tried to look inconspicuous. The musketeers at issue were Champion, Everlast and Quigley. Everlast and Champion were Etienne Cyr and Ed Hurley, Canadian constables. Tim Quigley, a Maine state trooper, had no nickname. Pen Harrington had christened the trio as a gag on his radio show; he knew them from the gym where he put in a dutiful twenty minutes on the treadmill three times a week. Champion, Everlast and Quigley lifted weights almost every day.

Everlast shuffled embarrassedly as if looking for somewhere to hide. "Now even my girl friend has started-in with calling me Everlast. I'm a joke at the beauty parlor she gets her hair done at. So much for under-cover work." Pen had started calling them Champion, Everlast and Quigley when announcing the daily rotation of speed traps, a much listened-to feature of his show on WEST. They were named for the brands of workout sweats they favored. "Thank Pen for the handle. Thanks a bunch."

"Pen's most likely protecting the anonymity of our Boys in Blue, Steve. And WEST cherishes all the listeners it can get. Treat her good; tell her thanks from Pen. On duty? Looking for some dirty slides from the Rev, maybe..."

"Uhn... no. Not on duty. Socializing." The mountie, all six-foot-four of him, made a beeline for the door.

"Hmm..." thought Harry Profitt Pease.

He cut Alma Nightingale out from the herd and focused on her. Just how much had he had to drink today? Figure it tomorrow, count the empties. He made an effort to bring his eyes into focus. He tried walking and found he needed to maneuver by shifting his center of gravity, letting his feet follow, stiff-legged. The room was swimming and to keep from falling over he had to balance on a very fluid pivot dead center in the middle of his hips. Damn! He wasn't that drunk. Funny how the beer catches up with you all at once. Harry had reached that plateau where the accumulation of alcohol gets the body drunk but leaves the brain alone to try to sink buckets from the free throw line of social ruin. He'd feel his balance start to go and his lower body would shuffle forward, trying to keep centered under the wobbly load.

"Still dreaming about a girl from high school, Harry?" Harry turned to see a pig hopping up on the window seat next to Alma, claiming a warm depression vacated by Mrs. Gladstone. Harry stared. The pig was a spotted china with a tight brushy tip to her tail that hinted at purebred bloodlines. "You wouldn't have a cabbage left in your truck, would you?" the pig added.

"Huh?" said Harry. "Oh, yeah. Sure." He shook his head to clear it and the pig was no longer there.

Up until the day when she met Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O'Rourke y Nuñez Harriet Hopwood considered herself an intelligent woman, a good planner. It was just that small things went wrong more often for her than for anyone else she knew. Of all the encounters of day-to-day living the Red and White carried the greatest potential for humiliation. The weekly gathering-in of groceries had become a dreaded ordeal.

Harriet planned ahead, brought cash and a checkbook, and performed scrupulous mental arithmetic as she wheeled her cart along the aisles and, being sure she had the identity card the store issued before she left the house, compulsively fingered it again before queuing up at the register. People were always so polite. That was the worst, when the shopping carts backed up behind her and stalled shoppers reached for a National Enquirer or Today's Woman from the racks and chewed gum with a resigned sigh. Born under an unfavorable opposition of celestial signs—that was it.

"Shit," said Harriet. Having successfully negotiated the checkout line, she now faced a door that would not open. As she stood on the rubber mat that held the trigger device for the door mechanism she could hear the straining of a servo and smell a vague electrical odor. Her hands latched together, arms encircling the week's grocery purchases, Harriet gave a rippling spasm that started at her knees and managed to work the bags to a firmer purchase. Something was on the fritz. Again. And something was leaking and her bags were going to tear. Plus there was a man, a young man, leaning against her car, watching her. His hair was cut square and thick at the base of his neck—styled—with just a hint of a moustache to suggest he hadn't started shaving yet, though at his age he had to be shaving regularly. He looked well, foreign. She swung her pelvic girdle and slammed the door a roundhouse right with her hip. The servomotor breathed a pneumatic wheeze and the door opened. Her car was less than twenty yards away on a straightaway. The perpetrator-in-waiting watched as she ran at him. Harriet did the distance in a crouch, her knees bent to favor her changing center of gravity. She made it to the hood of her car with a grateful thump.

"You are leaning on my car. I am trying to unlock the car. When I drive away you will most likely fall down." All of this made perfect sense as she said it: simple courtesy combined with basic physics. "And if you make me drop these bags I will scream bloody murder and a cop will come and pound you into a platter of yesterday's shit." The Hands-On Guide To Life Situations that hovered in Harriet's cerebral cortex was riddled with useful and instructive illustrations. None of them covered this. But she did not feel threatened. The man looked agile enough to run rings around the local cops and, well... nice.

The perpetrator-in-waiting brightened and smiled a million-dollar toothpaste smile, as seen on TV. He stooped to undo the drawstring securing the top of his backpack and pulled out what had to be a machine gun. He shrugged his shoulders. Harriet had seen guns like that in the movies. You didn't have to be a good shot; you just pushed the button and washed the car. He let the gun swing from two fingers, a pendulum effect. "It is a Mach-10. I beg your indulgence." He flashed a pearly-white smile with row upon row of perfect teeth.

"Huh, show-and-tell," said Harriet. Very good-looking, she thought. Continental, that's what. He's wet—most likely fallen off a yacht. Too handsome to be a bum. A refugee, that's it—I am the first American he has met. Aggravation was the dish of tea meted out for Harriet Hopwood, and having lived thirty-seven years in a state of gracelessness, she had learned to cope. With the arrival of her very own asylum seeker things had begun to look up.

"Which way to the aerodrome?" he asked—obviously his best shot. He appeared younger than his years, maybe 18-20, olive-skinned with a bridgeless aquiline nose.

"You are very beautiful..." said Oswaldo. The aerodrome had certainly gotten this woman's attention and, if he lived through this, he vowed to study further. They were eye-to-eye and their chemistries embraced one another.

"So are you." If he asks me for the time of the next dirigible landing, we'll be doing it right here in the street. "Uh, I mean you have freckles, too." Harriet acknowledged a fellow sufferer. "Are there any bullets in that thing?"

"I have never shot it. It may be empty."

"Good. My name is Harriet." Harriet dropped a remaining bag of groceries and held out her hand. The young man kissed it. From the pavement at their feet rose the bouquet of vinegar and spices. Pickles. "Shit," said Harriet.

The Recognitions was what Oswaldo and Harriet called their lovemaking, the Recognitions of St. Rose. In the lore of the Church, the recognitions were rightly the Recognitions of Christ and preceded by the Imitation of Christ in all one's thoughts and deeds. St. Rose of Lima recognized the voice of God when a black and white butterfly settled on her shoulder. She was picking medicinal herbs at the time. St. Rose took the black and white habit of the Third Order of St. Dominic and lived austerely. Oswaldo told Harriet that the butterfly was a symbol for the soul.

"Does this have something to do with that little saint you keep on the night table?" Harriet asked.

"San Expedito." St. Rose of Lima slept alone on a bed of nails and mortified her flesh; St. Rose, who existed as a portrait on a prayer card. San Expedito sat between a pack of Marlboro Lights and the alarm clock on Harriet's bedside table, a reminder that the delights of tobacco and its potential tumors were to be weighed against the inevitability of the daily grind.

"He's cute. I don't think I ever heard of him."

"He wouldn't mind. San Expedito is a bogus saint, a voodoo saint. Voudun?"

"Sounds French. The way you say that."

"It is Creole, a patois."

"A magical language, then. A troubadour language for summoning spirits."

"Claro, Cara—voodoo, Santería. Expedito the saint is not recognized by the Holy Church as is St. Rose of Lima. The people love him and his image. They make him real."

"The language of the people." Harriet was progressive, politically.

"Sí, but not all the people and not all the time. The botánicas are full of tropical juju and Santería, the African magic of the blacks, their home shrines with plaster statues of fake saints."

"And you believe in a fake saint."

"Sí, querida. Santa Barbara, Mama Coca, voodoo lady, intercede for us."

"That is a voodoo prayer, a fake prayer."

"No, querida. The prayer is real."

The Orange Virgin was scheming. The Fata Morgana, Orange Virgin, etc, etc., had discovered a minor petulance. She fought it off but it persisted. "We live on the bow wave of perceived time. Time is a comforting figment, a subjective place humans have dreamed up to give superficial meaning to their paltry lives. Everything is all there and a glorious moment it was. We can never live it at once. We are merely writing its catalog as it unfolds. Merrily we roll along." She spoke to a cat that lolled in the sun at her feet. The two were high atop a turreted tower to observe the progress of an excavation far below. One of the gardener’s boys had gotten a bad bite transporting the swans to a corral on the river as they readied to drain the moat. The Orange Virgin entertained hopes that the swans might also attack the diggers, Lamprey and Tawse, at their pick and shovel work.

"The shovel, a useful instrument," remarked the Orange Virgin. "It asks little in the way of affection, has no moving parts and runs on dried-out crusts, cheese rinds and yesterday's ale." Some time had passed since her interview with El the sky-demon in the cellars of the Hotel Taft and, after the manner of time passed away beyond recall, there was an air of melancholy tempered with a vague unease. "And speaking of useful instruments, I shall require some pocket money, eh sweet puss?"

The Orange Virgin wore a checked flannel shirt and a culotte with hiking boots. "Aha! Money―that is the answer." Morgana's big gray tomcat gave a burraow, bleep, bleep, rubbed affectionately against her ankles then, seeing a gloriously fat horsefly buzzing, forgot the moment and was after it in a pell-mell dash up Morgana's tresses and off the top of her head. Suspended over nothingness high above a hard ending on the sun-caked mud floor of the moat 30 meters down, he gave with a miaow as if in farewell to a foolish, pampered life. "Not yet an end for you, my pretty, a panoply of voles, moths and milk-filled saucers lies yet ahead, sweet puss," said the Fata Morgana. She snatched the cat from the air. "Follow the money. Remember this."

 

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