As my brain tried to reason how Spitz and Braverman had brought back food from a restaurant that was no longer in business, Compton discarded his genial manner and taught me how frightened one man can be of another.
“Now let me ask you, sonny: Why would you make up a pack of lies unless you had something to hide? I’ve already asked each of your three associates where they were last night. Their stories were impressively consistent. It seems Spitz bet like a wild man and won over a hundred dollars. They ordered in a pizza with anchovies, since the Abbey Victoria graciously allows deliveries. They arrived at six P.M. and played until two A.M. They talked about their upcoming projects at the network, compared notes on current movies, discussed rumors about Wilt Chamberlain leaving the Globetrotters to sign with the Warriors, and indulged in some fairly graphic speculation regarding the mores of a girl in the secretarial pool named Rita Truscott. Each man’s story was completely consistent with the others. Whereas you, Winslow, are totally at odds with all of them. So the question is, why would you so ignorantly and desperately lie to me if there weren’t something you need to hide?”
A window alongside the door to the office looked out upon the hallway. Over Compton’s shoulder, I could see Donna standing at the water cooler, having herself a quick laugh with Spitz and Braverman, while Spitz was having himself a quick feel of Donna’s derrière. It was a silent movie, and I was not a member of the cast. Donna was opening the manila envelope that Dancer had left with her, and withdrawing what looked to me like currency. She wore an expression of pleasure, likely the first genuine one I’d ever seen on her face, including last night at the planetarium.
I understood now. There had never been a Monks of the Abbey Victoria. Not until I came on the scene. The one meeting I’d attended of “the Order” had been the only meeting ever convened. My fellow Brothers must surely have struck a deal with someone at CBS. Perhaps theo’c made a similar deal the year before, one for which my predecessor, Ted Thissel, had taken the fall.
Whatever cash from CBS they were splitting, I was certain a modest percentage of their take could be found in the envelope now in Donna’s hands.
I knew. But I couldn’t speak, couldn’t offer my real alibi, tell anyone with whom I’d been the night before, because Donna would simply deny it. Besides, any such claim on my part would give my wife, Joanie, abundant grounds for divorce. I was caught in a fool’s mate, where my king could only toggle between two squares, either of which placed me lethally in check.
“All right, maybe I got some of my facts wrong,” I rasped from my suddenly dry mouth. I was about to be given the red-carpet treatment, my head bouncing down the hall, bound for the express elevator that eagerly awaited my plunge to the street. “But Compton, how would I know about the poker club, and the name we gave it, even the room number, if I hadn’t been there?”
He frowned. “Your associates independently explained that, sympathetic to your being the new man here, they offered you the fellowship of their club, which you attended for the first time last week. They were stunned and insulted that, after reaching out to you in a brotherly way, you were so rude as to simply not show up last night.”
I had no idea how I’d explain to Joanie that I wouldn’t be working at NBC. What reason could I give her for my dismissal? How might I earn a living after this? I looked back at Compton as if I were staring into the very sun that was setting on me.
He wasn’t quite done. “A very foolish bluff to try to put over, Winslow. Frankly, your friends are lucky to be rid of you.” He stood without offering his hand. “You must play one lousy game of poker.”
Holly Goddard Jones
Proof of God
From Epoch
When Simon turned sixteen, his father gave him his old car: a red ’88 Corvette, just four years off the showroom floor. Corvettes, his father insisted, were the only American vehicle worth a goddamn anymore — and made in Bowling Green, Kentucky, at that. Good for the local economy. Also, as a businessman and a local leader — pillar, he’d say sometimes, if he were shitfaced — looking like a success was important. “I’m a walking advertisement,” he’d tell Simon’s mother, who’d pretend she hadn’t heard the same bellowed proclamations two dozen times already. “Folks see me living high and know I must sell the good stuff.”
Good stuff it wasn’t. Jefferson Wells owned a small chain of furniture stores with locations in Kentucky and several surrounding states, and what he dealt in could only be called furniture by the most generous and perhaps naive of observers: chipboard entertainment centers with plastic veneers meant to mimic the look of wood grain; kitchen chairs with metal legs that would start to bow upon too many sittings. The name of the chain — Wells Brothers Furniture Company — was also crap. Simon’s father didn’t have a brother. He thought the name sounded old-fashioned, though — established — and so he put it on all of his stores in heavy Old West lettering. He told Simon that he might change the name to Wells and Son if Simon minded his p’s and q’s and got through a business degree at Western, and back then Simon had considered that more of a threat than an offer. He wanted to help the old man sell junk like he wanted a hole in the head.
A few weeks after Simon’s sixteenth birthday, some guys from his high school trashed the Corvette. He’d been driving it to school every day, feeling good: folks at Bowling Green High School paid attention when he walked down the hall now; heads turned. One day, a couple of seniors, football players, asked him if he wanted to go down the road to G. D. Ritzy’s with them after final bell, and Simon agreed, too dazed to do much more than nod and croak out a “yes.” This is how things change for a person, he’d thought, walking out BGHS’s big double doors with two of the most popular guys at school on either side of him, like bodyguards. He wished his father could see him. They rode in the Corvette with the windows down and the radio blaring Aerosmith; he wouldn’t remember the song later, not for sure, but it was one of the ones with Alicia Silverstone in the video, who was, Kevin Britt proclaimed in the car that day, “hotter than sin.”
They ate burgers and string fries, drank giant chocolate milk shakes in a dining room decorated with photos of fifties and sixties rock stars. Simon paid. The two older boys talked about Friday’s game and about Sheila Foster’s enormous tits. “Just wanna get my face between them,” Ray Hunter said, putting his hands out in front of him in a honking motion, shaking his face vigorously side to side, so that his considerable jowls trembled. They all laughed. When the food was eaten, Simon dropped Kevin and Ray off back at the high school, next to Kevin’s Pontiac Grand Am — a real clunker — and they raised hands to one another, made promises to do Ritzy’s again next week. Simon’s heart didn’t slow down until he pulled off Scottsville Road and down his family’s long, paved drive. He’d never been good at making friends. Being with those boys had been a joy and a torture all at once.
The next morning, his father woke him at 6:00 A.M. by flipping on the light switch. “Get up,” he said, and Simon did. He knew not to make his father say something twice.
He found him outside. The sun was just an ember several hills over, and fog clung to the cow pasture like sweat. His car was where he parked it, but it looked like a murder victim, destroyed and decomposing. Unrecognizable.
“Explain this,” his father said.
Simon look a few steps forward, then circled the car. None of the glass was broken, or even the headlights, but there were deep gashes in the paint on the doors, the hood, and the trunk. He’d discover later that the culprits had also pulled the old sugar-in-the-gas-tank trick, but what hurt the most — what embarrassed him to the point of nausea — was the graffiti slashed across the hood and trailing down both sides of the car: FAG, over and over again, like a curse. On the trunk door, just for variety: RICH FAG. He returned to his father’s side.