Ways and means, p.33
Ways and Means, page 33
Mark pursed his lips.
“Thirty-six percent? Thirty-six percent! I’m definitely walking around on my own.”
For a moment Mark said nothing. In fits and starts the half-glimpsed facts and dim conjectures settled. He knew, of course, that his father would never want him to let Cliff go off on his own—he now suspected Arty’s cryptic guidance the day before had been tailored precisely to this eventuality—but in light of this new information he also no longer knew where his loyalties lay. Everything Cliff had told him had redoubled his disdain for his father’s line of business. That the incoming firm would make the residents’ lives even worse than they already were sickened him; that Arty surely knew this but was too keen to cash out to care sickened him further; and that he himself had agreed to be Arty’s ear, to help protect his exploitative and (if he was understanding Cliff correctly) possibly spurious gains in the hope of sharing in them: this sickened him most of all. He saw, as he stared up the sunbaked road, no obvious course of action, no obvious choice of whom to help and whom to harm. His mind was a wash of obscure, ambiguous instincts—some valorous, some cynical, some an uneasy mix of the two—that in the end manifested only as a paralyzing inertia. He put up no resistance to Cliff’s declaration. All he did was ask one more question, though he had a guess already as to the answer.
“Who gave you the other rent roll?” he said.
Cliff shrugged. “It’s ours now. That’s all that matters.”
Mark fell silent and began the drive-through. He fished a notebook and pen from the backseat and, using his steering wheel as a desk, jotted down every violation in sight. He was supposed to drive past all three hundred homes, but out of laziness he subscribed to a pollster’s logic: a quarter of them probably offered an accurate enough picture of the rest. Trash bags left outside at lot 3, porch steps broken at lot 17, grass too long at lot 26. Artificial flowers at lot 33, for some reason a violation. Men tinkering with a car in the driveway at lot 40, for some reason also a violation. As they turned onto the next lane they saw a Trump sign in the yard of lot 51.
“Christ,” Cliff said.
CommonWay had a long-standing rule against political paraphernalia. But in recent months park managers across the country had reported vociferous pushback from residents with Trump signs. After a park manager in Indiana had sustained a punch to the face the company had announced a moratorium on the rule until after the election. The moratorium was technically politically agnostic, but there were never any Hillary signs to ignore.
He came to a stop in front of the park office. Cliff got out, holding his laptop open on his arm, and began walking up the main road.
Mark let him go. Compounding his paralysis was his fear that if Cliff joined him in the park office and heard Tricia Lindquist address him by his real name his cover would be blown.
“Wish me luck!” Cliff called back.
Mark did wish him luck. He noticed a few nearby residents staring at Cliff, this business-attired brat walking with princely pomp through their park. He wouldn’t have been surprised if some of them gave him trouble, and he wouldn’t exactly have blamed them.
He entered the park office. Tricia Lindquist, blond and bespectacled and clad in a robin’s-egg blouse, stood behind the counter. The first thing Mark noticed was the conspicuous flatness of her chest, and then he remembered something Joey Spera had mentioned: a long sick leave, a double mastectomy.
“You’re Mark?” she said.
Better, obviously, not to have let Cliff come in with him. “That’s me.”
“The scion?”
“Today I’m just an employee.”
Tricia eyed him half maternally, half flirtatiously. “And tomorrow you’ll inherit the earth.”
Mark took the flirtational bait. “I thought that was the meek.”
“Maybe you’re a meek scion,” Tricia said.
He approached the counter, passing tables festooned with pamphlets and a window darkened by a chugging AC. He laid his notebook on the counter and rattled off the violations he’d noticed. “Little things, mostly.”
Tricia peered at the notebook with a frown. “I’ve never understood the rule about fake flowers.”
“Neither have I,” Mark said. “But it’s a rule.”
“You sound like Joey.”
“Please don’t say that.”
Tricia smiled briefly and then frowned again. “And I enforce the rule. Everything you’ve written here I’ve told residents about time and again.”
“You can always impose fines.”
Tricia looked up at him searchingly. “These people have so little money,” she said. “You saw my report. I’m as annoyed as you are.”
“I’m not annoyed. If it were up to me—”
“If I started handing out fines for every little thing I saw, I’m telling you, there’d be an uprising. People would leave. The park would be empty. It’s a third empty already.”
Mark thought of Cliff’s one hundred and seven PO homes.
“I already stopped taping the mailbox shut at five p.m. on rent day,” Tricia said. “Even though Joey would go berserk if he found out. Just to collect a hundred-dollar fine from someone who tries to drop off their check at five-oh-five? Some of these people don’t get off work until midnight. It’s cruel.”
“Your secret is safe with me.”
Tricia reached under the counter and brought out a ream of crinkled papers. “Lot of maintenance requests.”
Mark uncapped his pen. Technically he was supposed to read each request and study each cost estimate carefully. One of CommonWay’s “goals of the year” for 2016 was to reduce maintenance expenses by twenty percent. But Mark had no interest in contributing to this goal, and as ever he was lazy. He signed the whole pile in minutes.
“I guess you’re not like Joey,” Tricia said. “Now for the big problem.”
“The woman who isn’t paying her rent.”
“You need to talk to her. I can’t anymore. At this point I fear for my safety.”
“Just forget the last three months,” Mark said.
“That’ll only embolden her.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to residents. You know that. That’s your job.”
“She frightens the daylights out of me,” Tricia said. “But I don’t want her evicted. Joey is always on my case about being soft. You seem a little soft yourself, so. This woman lost her husband. I think she quit her job. She’s got a baby. I lose sleep thinking about what goes on in that house. She’s driving herself crazy with all these conspiracies about her husband’s death. She can’t punish whoever she wants to punish, so she’s punishing anyone in sight. Frankly, I get it. But I think a visit from top brass might put some fear into her.”
Something about Tricia, her kindness, her recent brush with death, gave her an air of irrefutable moral authority. “Is she home now?” Mark asked.
“She never leaves.”
“You have one of those payment forms?”
“You think she’ll pay now?”
“Easier for her to sign a paper than drop off a check.”
Tricia rooted around under the counter and handed him a form. “Don’t be too hard on her,” she said. “Don’t force her hand.”
“I’m taking it just in case.”
“In case of a miracle.”
Outside Mark listened for Cliff’s voice, but all he heard were distant TVs, syncopated sprinklers, singing insects. As he walked up the main road he passed lot 51, of the Trump sign, and this time saw the owner outside, hunched over a lawnmower. The man was young, shirtless, and exquisitely built. When he noticed Mark he stood and revealed unexpectedly patrician features. They nodded at each other and Mark walked on. He fought off a tingling in his groin. He’d seen such men on previous visits, rakishly handsome, fatless and firm, sheathed in veiny muscles. They were gods to their fellow residents, idols to the men, blessed botherations to the women. They enjoyed an esteem within the park’s limits that they enjoyed nowhere else: went to their jobs and suffered the humiliations of a corporatized economy and then returned here, where they ruled according to an older system, a politics of virility, an erotics of martial law. He wasn’t surprised that such a man would display such a sign, swear his loyalty to such a person. Trump alone promised, however emptily and self-servingly, to extend his dominion back into the wide world.
He arrived at lot 188, stepped onto the porch, and knocked.
The woman who opened the door had dyed red hair and a preemptively hostile expression. She wore a ribbed yellow tank top that seemed designed to do the opposite of flatter her figure and complexion. Behind her, in the living room, a baby boy sat on the floor, playing with a ring of rainbow-colored keys. “Yes?”
“Are you Amber Osgood?”
“Who’s asking?” Amber said.
“My name is Mark Landmesser. I’m with CommonWay.”
“Landmesser? Like, the CEO of this place?”
“I’m a relative.”
Amber’s expression grew more hostile. “What do you want?”
“I’m wondering if we can have a little chat,” Mark said. Only when he heard the wobble in his voice did he realize how much this woman intimidated him.
“About what?”
“About how you’re doing.”
“I’m doing fine.”
“May I come in?”
“I don’t have to let you in.”
“I know,” Mark said. “That’s why I’m asking. I’m here to help.”
The baby boy on the floor made a paralinguistic sound, something like hunter or hundred.
Amber stepped two inches to the side and turned. “Be my guest.”
The home was a single-wide, fifteen by seventy-two, and its interior was a model of light absorption: burgundy carpet, chocolate brown furniture, dark oak cabinets and tables. The curtain was a microfiber Buffalo Bills blanket cinched with a hairband.
Amber heaved herself onto the couch and nodded for Mark to take the armchair. She shut off the TV and put her hands in her lap. “So.”
Mark laid his notebook and the payment form on the floor. The baby boy stared at him dumbfoundedly. Mark wondered if he was the first non-Amber person he’d laid eyes on in months. “I understand you’ve been having trouble paying your rent,” he said.
“I’ve been having all sorts of trouble,” Amber said. She pulled from the coffee table a clunky plastic object, put its end in her mouth, and emitted a plume of vapor. She spoke to the wall. “It doesn’t hurt the baby.”
“Are you working?” Mark asked.
“Nope.”
“You were let go?”
“I quit.”
She had no interest, it appeared, in presenting a sympathetic case. “Any reason?”
“I was night shift at a hospice,” Amber said. “You think I wanted to be around all that death?”
“Right,” Mark said. “After your husband.”
“We weren’t married,” Amber said.
Mark waited a moment, wondering whether to push on this subject or skirt it. “Are you on unemployment?”
Amber emitted another plume. “Here’s a lesson for you, rich boy. You don’t get unemployment if you quit.”
“There are programs for single mothers,” Mark said. “Assistance programs.”
“You try filling out all that paperwork.”
“Can I ask when your husband passed away?”
Amber glared at him. “We weren’t married,” she said, “as I told you. And he didn’t ‘pass away.’ He was murdered.”
“When did this happen?”
“End of April.”
“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I’m sure he was a wonderful father. A wonderful husband.”
Amber brought her palm down on her thigh. “We were not! Fucking! Married!”
Mark shrank back in his chair. He glanced at the baby, who continued to stare at him. “I don’t mean to upset you.”
“You’re doing a wonderful job of it.”
“I was under the impression that your—partner—”
Amber rolled her eyes.
“—that he took his own life.”
“Yeah, well, everyone’s under that impression,” Amber said. “The police, his family, everyone in this hellhole park, everyone in fucking town. But they’re wrong. He was murdered.”
“Why do you think that?” Mark said. He didn’t like asking these questions, and he didn’t like hearing Amber’s answers, but he hoped that if given the chance to vent she might become more reasonable.
“Weird fucking shit happening in that warehouse,” Amber said.
“Warehouse?”
“He was taking care of this warehouse,” Amber explained grudgingly, “over in Richford. Mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, that kind of shit. New company moves in, pays him triple what he’d been making, and nothing goes in the warehouse. So that’s all fucking weird to start. Then, end of April, he comes home saying there’s weird people there now, going in and out, doing weird shit. Won’t tell me a thing, doesn’t want me to worry. I keep asking him, he keeps his mouth shut. But I could tell from his face, he was scared. Then, boom, week after he tells me about all these weird people, doing their weird shit, cops find him in his car, off the road in the woods, with a hose going from his exhaust to his window, everything all duct-taped. You tell me. You tell me.” She reached for a framed photograph on a side table and chucked it at Mark. The corner of the frame jabbed his stomach. “That was taken in November. You tell me that’s the face of someone who’d fucking gas himself to death.”
The photograph showed Amber, her boyfriend, and the baby outside the home Mark was now sitting in. He was struck at once by the resemblance. The dead man had Alistair’s hair color, his eye color, his bright smile. His face shone with the same skyward yearning. Amber was right: he didn’t look like someone who would take his own life. But then Alistair didn’t look like someone who would disappear.
For a minute the only sound in the room was the aimless murmuring of the baby. Mark stared at the stained burgundy carpet. The picture of Amber’s boyfriend had left a ghostly image in his mind, and it was this image, maybe, that finally sunk him, finally brought home to him what he couldn’t deny any longer: he would never see Alistair again. If he wasn’t dead he was in hiding, and he had no desire to be found. All at once the delusion he’d been subsisting on for two months collapsed. He shut his eyes and breathed out quietly. He felt his shoulders fall, his stomach drop, his blood slow.
“And now you’re here,” Amber said, “and you’re probably trying to evict us, aren’t you.”
Mark heard himself reply as if from afar. “You’re three months behind.”
“Like you need my four-twenty-five a month,” Amber said. “Like you and your family will starve without it.”
Mark opened his eyes but kept his gaze on the floor. “I understand your pain.”
“You don’t understand,” Amber said. “You could never. You don’t!”
Mark looked up at her. “I understand,” he said.
Amber may have seen his dawning realization in his face. She fell silent. When the baby began crawling into the kitchen she reached down and hoisted him onto her lap. She looked at Mark defensively, as if afraid that in showing tenderness she’d forfeited an advantage. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked softly.
Mark took his things from the floor. He laid the payment form against his notebook and reached for his wallet. He couldn’t keep asking Tricia to ignore Amber’s delinquency on his questionably authoritative orders. He went for the company American Express but he couldn’t do this either. His father’s accounting team was scrupulous and he wouldn’t be able to explain the charge. He slid out his personal debit card and copied the numbers onto the form. He tried to multiply $425 by some generous number of months, but his mind was a fog of grief and he gave up and wrote $5,000.
He stood and held out the form. “Give this to Tricia.”
Amber rocked the baby. “I don’t want your charity.”
“Take it,” Mark said. “Please.”
Amber reached out and snatched the form quickly. She seemed to fear that the moment she made for it he’d take it back.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Mark said.
Amber made no reply and he left.
When he emerged onto the main road he saw Cliff sitting on the hood of the Mercedes, speaking into his phone in a hot whisper. When he saw Mark he leaped off the hood, raised an index finger, and scurried down one of the lanes. Mark decided a conversation Cliff didn’t want him to hear was one he might like to hear, and a minute later he followed.
Cliff, standing at the end of the lane with his back to the main road, spoke quickly, jubilantly, with astounded shakes of his head. Mark crept halfway down the lane, for now devoid of residents, until he could hear his every word.
“Not a one,” Cliff said into the phone. “They’re fucking empty, dude.” He listened to the person on the other end of the line. “No shit. If this is happening at all the parks? Eighty? They’re fucking delusional.” He listened and nodded. “That’s what I’m saying. This is an ideal situation. Tainted asset, solid fundamentals. We can get this thing cheap.” He nodded again. “Let’s talk to all of them. Anyone in the running. Race to the fucking bottom now.” He hooted. “I still can’t believe it. In your dad’s fucking study! I could kiss you, man. Seriously, I could kiss you!”
Mark, having heard all he needed to, walked back to the car and waited. When Cliff returned his face was glowing. It seemed beyond him to imagine that Mark had eavesdropped on him, or that it would even matter if he had. As far as Cliff knew Mark was Joey, and Joey was a nobody, a negligible suburbanite with a crap job. When he got into the car his eyes passed over Mark’s face as if he were a server obstructing his way at a party. All at once Mark understood how Amber must have felt standing at the door of her trailer. This person doesn’t see me. I’m no more real to him than a gnat. An hour from now he’ll go back to his life and forget he ever met me.
Mark drove out of the park and turned onto the highway. Cliff, typing madly on his phone, deigned to make small talk.
