“Yes.”
“Okay.” I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, “I ran Will Darnell’s accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know.”
I turned back to him, really surprised.
“No. I didn’t know that.”
My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all—it was cynical and hard and totally aware.
“Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“Don’t just think so.”
“Yes. I can.”
“Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville.”
My father looked at me closely.
“I won’t say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead.”
He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000—it was now worth maybe $150,000—and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.
“No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?” he said.
“It’s fine,” I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.
“Darnell and I parted amicably enough,” my father went on, “not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch.”
I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.
“But there’s all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went… but it didn’t go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Cash kept showing up,” he said. “Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell’s direction I invested in two corporations—Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing—that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I’ve ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him.”
“What did he say?”
“He began to dance,” my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. “In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you’re thirty-eight or so… if you’re good at your business, that is. And I’m not all that bad, The dance starts off with the guy asking you if you’re happy with your work, if it’s paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you’re carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids’ college education—maybe you’ve got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford… see?”
“Sounding you out?”
“It’s more like feeling you up,” he said, and then laughed. “But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you’d like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you’d like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat.
I gave a little start at that, because I knew my dad wanted a boat about as badly as he wanted anything these days; a couple of times I had gone with him on sunny summer afternoons to marinas along King George Lake and Lake Passeeonkee. He’d price out the smaller yachts and I’d see the wistful look in his eyes. Now I understood it. They were out of his reach. Maybe if his life had taken a different turn—if he didn’t have kids to think about putting through college, for instance—they wouldn’t have been.
“And you said no?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I made it clear pretty early on that I didn’t want to dance. For one thing, it would have meant getting more involved with him on a personal level, and, as I said, I thought he was a skunk. For another thing, these guys are all fundamentally stupid about numbers—which is why so many of them have gone up on tax convictions. They think you can hide illegal income. They’re sure of it. He laughed. “They’ve all got this mystic idea that you can wash money like you wash clothes, when all you can really do is juggle it until something falls down and smashes all over your head.”
“Those were the reasons?”
“Two out of three.” He looked in my eyes. “I’m no fucking crook, Dennis.”
There was a moment of electric communication between us—even now, four years later, I get goosebumps thinking of it, although I’m by no means sure that I can get it across to you. It wasn’t that he treated me like an equal for the first time that night; it wasn’t even that he was showing me the wistful knight-errant still hiding inside the button-down man scrambling for a living in a dirty, hustling world. I think it was sensing him as a reality, a person who had existed long before I ever came onstage, a person who had eaten his share of mud. In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.
Then he dropped his eyes, grinned a defensive grin, and did his husky Nixon-voice, which he was very good at: “You people deserve to know if your father is a crook. Well, I am not a crook, I could have taken the money, but that… harrum!… that would have been wrong.”
I laughed too loud, a release of tension—I felt the moment passing, and although part of me didn’t want it to pass, part of me did; it was too intense. I think maybe he felt that, too.
“Shhh, you’ll wake your mother and she’ll give us both the devil for being up this late.”
“Yeah, sorry. Dad, do you know what he’s into? Darnell?”
“I didn’t know then; I didn’t want to know, because then I’d be a part of it. I had my ideas, and I’ve heard a few things. Stolen cars, I imagine—not that he’d run them through that garage on Hampton Street; he’s not a completely stupid man, and only an idiot shits where he eats. Maybe hijacking as well.”
“Guns and stuff?” I asked, sounding a little hoarse.
“Nothing so romantic. If I had to guess, I’d guess cigarettes, mostly—cigarettes and booze, the two old standbys. Contraband like fireworks. Maybe a shipment of microwave ovens or colour TVs every once in a while, if the risk looked low. Enough to keep him busy these many years.”
He looked at me soberly.
“He’s played the odds good, but he’s also been lucky for a long time, Dennis. Oh, maybe he hasn’t really needed luck here in town—if it was just Libertyville, I guess he could go on for ever, or at least until he dropped dead of a heart attack—but the state tax boys are sand sharks and the feds are Great Whites. He’s been lucky, but one of these days they’re going to fall on him like the Great Wall of China.”
“Have you… have you heard things?”
“Not a whisper. Nor am I apt to. But I like Arnie Cunningham a great deal, and I know you’ve been worried about this car thing.”