"Yeah."
Nicky recaptured her attention effortlessly. "Are they good to you here? They treat you nice?"
She smiled again, wider this time, looked over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. "Well, you know," she said, "sometimes they do, and then sometimes they don't. You want something to drink, honey?"
The two of them turned and looked over at me like I knew something. It took me a couple of seconds. "You want a glass of milk?"
"Milk?"
"It's that white stuff goes on your Cheerios."
He gave me a look, like, Okay, buddy, and turned back to her. "You got chocolate milk?"
"I don't know, honey," she said. "I'll go check." She walked off chuckling, shaking her head. I've got to learn how he does it, I thought. I knew that part of it was his looks, but still, he had a way of connecting, of opening people up and making them want to talk to him. He'd been able to do it ever since he'd learned how to talk, and I had no idea how it worked. Put me in a room full of strangers and I will be guarded and defensive until I figure out who's who and how much compensating I have to do to make up for what I am, you know, no education, jail, and the rest of it. Put Nicky in the same room and he'll walk out a half hour later friends with everybody in there, he'll remember their names and everything they talked about. Jesus. He should be helping me eat my breakfast, not the other way around.
They didn't have chocolate milk, so he settled for the white stuff. I don't think he'd ever had pancakes before but he didn't let on, he watched me carefully and did what I did. He had some trouble cutting them into manageable portions, so after a while I woke up and helped him with that, and then he did okay, aside from getting maple syrup all over his face, hands, and shirt. I think he was pretty worried about how I was going to react to that. When we were done we went to the men's room and hosed him down. After I got him more or less clean he stood there with his face upturned and his eyes squeezed shut, getting blasted by the hot-air machine. Jesus, God, I thought, I know this is my job, but I got no idea what the fuck I'm doing, You got to help me out, here. It struck me then that he had no other clothes, he had nothing in the world except what was on his back.
The stores in the mall were open by the time we left the pancake house. Nicky and I went inside and wandered around for a couple of hours. I bought him a knapsack almost as big as he was, then we went into Baby Gap and filled it up. I watched him work on the ladies who staffed the place, and then I took one of them aside and told her I was taking him to camp for the first time but I had forgotten to bring his stuff, I didn't want to ruin things for him, could she fix him up with all the normal kid stuff?
She put a hand on my shoulder. "It would be my pleasure," she said, hardly looking at me at all. She and the other women fussed over him for what seemed an eternity. He sucked up all the attention like a camel drinking water after a long dry trip, and I watched, feeling inadequate. What had made me think I was qualified to be anyone's father? I knew the answer to that one, though. When you get a hard-on, the blood rushes out of your brain and into your dick so you can't think at all. Otherwise, the human race would have died out long ago, because who would be so egotistical that they would do this on purpose? "Oh, yeah, I can handle this." Sure you can, pal.
We walked out of that mall with Little Nicky looking like all the other suburban yuppie kids, Little Lord Fauntleroy, ready to inherit the world. You're gonna have to change your style, too, I told myself. Urban street rat chic is not going to cut it. As soon as we hit the highway, Nicky fell asleep clutching his knapsack. See, I thought, you're learning already. Wear his ass out first, then drive.
* * *
I got off the highway when we hit the Maine state line. I was sick of it by then, it seemed pointless, speeding through the countryside in a big hurry, particularly in light of the fact that I didn't know where the hell we were going to begin with. There was a big sign, "Scenic Route, U.S. 1," so that's the way we went. For quite a while, "scenic" seemed to mean tourist traps, giant liquor stores, souvenir places, and outlet shops, but gradually they tapered off and we began to see more of the Maine shoreline, rocks and pine trees and wide wet mudflats that smelled strongly of salt and clam shit when the tide was out. We passed through a few small towns on the way and I looked carefully at the inhabitants, wondering how I was going to blend in up here. I didn't know anything about my heritage, but it was a pretty safe bet that my forebears did not come from Maine. These people looked rugged, but they were white, baby, white, with lots of red faces, yellow hair, and blue eyes.
* * *
I called Buchanan from a pay phone outside a diner in Gardiner around ten the next morning. "What do you have?"
"I got something sweet, baby, I got a guy the SEC is after," he said. "Nice deal, clean and neat."
"How does the guy help me if the SEC is after him?"
"That's what makes this work," Buchanan said. "He's holding stock in a small pharmaceutical company. They're going to get FDA approval on a new boner drug."
"Say what?"
"A new boner drug. You suffer from limpus dickus, it makes you seventeen again."
"I thought these guys were trying to cure cancer."
"More money in hard-ons. Anyway, he can't hold the stock. He's got to sell before word of the approval gets out. The SEC thinks he uses inside information, which he does, but if he sells early, before the stock goes up, he can say, 'Hey, look at the bath I took,' and they'll back off."
"So how does this work?"
"He sells, you buy, sometime between now and three weeks from now, current market price. You got any trades in the past twelve months?"
"Yeah."
"How'd you do?"
"Don't ask."
"Better and better. They look at you, they got to figure you work on the monkey and the dartboard theory, you finally got one right. So you buy the stock from him, right, you put your cash in escrow with me. After the FDA approval becomes public, you ride it up and then dump it, you're nice and clean. He takes his end out of the cash you put up with me."
"How are you getting yours?"
"You're getting a free ride on this one, Mo. Once I know the name of the security, I'm jumping in on the open market."
"Serious?"
"I like this one, Mo. This guy is golden. Listen, you got a broker or do you make your trades on-line?"
"I do everything on-line."
"What's the total value of your account?" I told him. "Wow," he said. "You're not doing so bad."
"Job security," I said.
"Yeah, sure," he said. "Look, here's what I want you to do. Sell everything you're holding, and start messing around with some pharma stocks. Buy a bunch of Merck, hold it for a week, then sell it all and buy Abbott, or something like that. We want to establish a pattern of trades in the time we've got left until it's time to jump into this new stock. Can you do that?"
"Yeah, sure."
"How can I reach you? It will take me a few days to get set up with this guy, but I've got to get to you before the FDA goes public."
"You can leave a message on my voice mail." I gave him my cell number.
"Okay, great," he said. He was actually beginning to sound excitedusually, talking to him was like talking to an undertaker. I guess the guy loved making deals. "How do you want to handle the cash end of this? I'll need to have it when he gives me the word."
I pictured it, inside those two big green bags, sitting on a table inside that storeroom in Hackensack. "It's out in Jersey," I told him. "You tell me the day and the time, and I'll meet you there. You can do a count, and after that it's yours." And your problem, I thought.
"Oh, man," Buchanan said, "I hate New Jersey. Can't we do this in Manhattan?"
"I don't want to move it again. It's too dangerous. There's too many things that can go wrong. You want my opinion, leave it where it is. I'll give you the key and walk away, and then when it's time to pay your boy, you give him the key and do the same thing." Working with Buchanan depended on trusting him. Now I would find out if he would trust me not to go back and rip him off.
"All right," he said, after a moment. "We can do it that way. I'll call you when it's time. Meanwhile, don't forget to make those trades."
I hung up the phone and went back to where the van was parked. I'd left it in a spot on a concrete bridge spanning a good-sized, fast-moving stream. Nicky was glued to his window, watching the water cascading down the hillside and passing underneath on its way to the Kennebec River. It was a weird feeling, letting go of that business with Buchanan, getting my head back to me and Nicky, and Gardiner, Maine.
"Pretty, huh?"
He turned to me and nodded, but he didn't have words for it, and I guess I didn't, either.
* * *
Back out on the road, Nicky and I made up a game to pass the time. It was called "bird." If Nicky spotted a bird and I either missed it or didn't know what it was, he got a point. If I knew the name of the bird, I got a point. The game got more complex as we went along. He didn't believe me when I identified a seagull as a great white bug-eating stinkbird, so he got ten points for that one, and I got penalized a hundred points for making up stories, not that it mattered, because Nicky was keeping score and his math system was idiosyncratic, to say the least. He got bored with that game after a while, so we made up another one, the "what color is the ugliest car" game. He could pick out ugly cars with no problem, but he really didn't know the colors too well. That game went on a lot longer than the bird game. His attention would flag from time to time, and he would start telling me about cartoon characters or the people in his building, but he always seemed to go back to the color game. Kid's five years old, right, already he's playing catch-up. See, that's the way it goes. You grow up the way I did, the way Nicky had been, you're on your own in a lot of ways, and of course no kid can make up for the lack of an interested adult. You wind up deficient, and that's not a value judgment, it's just how it is. You reach school age, one of the first things you learn is that you're not like the other kids. As a matter of fact, you're way behind, and you begin trying to compensate, you have to try to be cooler than anyone else, or tougher, or wilder, you start doing everything you can think of to catch yourself up to where you think you are supposed to be. I had been playing that game for as long as I could remember, and of course you can't win. In fact, it gets worse as you go along, because you lose track, the gap between what you were supposed to be and what you are becomes wider instead of narrower until you can no longer see any way across. You wind up with the conviction that you might somehow cross the finish line if you keep dogging along, but no way you're winning any prizes, bro. I was really hoping Nicky was young enough, that I had gotten to him in time for him to be spared that, but there's no way to know that, and besides, there were still plenty of things that could go wrong. I mean, I was just making this up as I went along, and on top of that, Tommy Lee Jones might be right around the next corner.
Two
THE MAINE COAST GETS WILDER and more beautiful the farther north you go. I had been a street rat my whole life, had grown up thinking there was only two kinds of trees, Christmas trees and the other kind. Nicky and I found plenty of places to stop and lots of stuff to look at, and we had no problem finding motels with vacancies. We bought matching plaid flannel shirts at L.L. Bean, we climbed the hill above Camden and looked down at the boats in the harbor, we rode a ferryboat over to Vinalhaven Island and back, we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain. I don't know what I was looking for, and I began to doubt myself, you know, maybe I should have had more of a plan before I jumped into this, but I knew in my heart that if I had stopped to think about things too long I would have wimped out. By the time we hit Washington County, up at the northern tip of the Maine coastline, we were way past the tourist zone, the radio stations all played hillbilly music and gospel, there were deserted houses with peeling tar paper in the middle of fields of tall grass, and I halfway expected to see Jed Clampett somewhere, except it was too damn cold up there for the way he dressed. We were a couple of hours north of a town called Machias when a CV joint in the front end of the minivan let go. I coasted to a stop over at the side of the road, feeling lucky to get there, because I'd suddenly lost all influence over the van's direction. I got out, cursing, kicking the front fender. There was not a house in sight. As a matter of fact, I could not remember exactly how long it had been since I'd seen human habitation. I looked up and down the road, but there weren't any cars around, either. Nicky climbed into the driver's seat and rolled down the window.
"Poppy," he said, sounding worried. "What happened?"
"Sit down, Nicky. Everything's gonna be all right."
He looked around doubtfully. "Are we gonna have to sleep in the woods?"
"Wow, wouldn't that be fun, huh?" He blinked at me a few times, so I went over and rubbed his head. "Don't worry. We won't have to sleep in the woods, I promise. Just sit down and be cool, okay?"