Absolute Zero Page 22

  Earl had converted the finished part of the basement into a computer crash pad. He had a futon, bench press, and weights in one corner. The rest of the space was a spaghetti junction of cables and lines connecting up two computers, two video monitors, a scanner, a TV and VCR, and a CD player set up on three tables. Piles of disks and software manuals littered the carpet.

  Earl sat at his central computer nodding to the beat of ’NSYNC. Broker did not know the name of the group and vaguely understood that it was teeny-bopper music, and he wondered why a grown man was into those sounds.

  Earl was selecting blocs of numbers off his screen and saving them to a file. Broker took a discreet step closer and studied the spreadsheet. Names. Addresses. Social security numbers. Sixteen-digit numbers grouped in fours. Then the heading: mother’s maiden name. And names, hundred of them.

  Hmmm.

  Because of the music, Earl did not hear him approach, so Broker watched for a few moments as Earl scrolled up more columns of names and numbers. And it looked to Broker’s cyber-challenged, but suspicious, eyes that Earl was in possession of a whole lot of other people’s credit cards.

  Broker reached down and took an envelope with Earl’s name and a St. Paul address from a pile of bills on the desk and tucked it in his pocket. Then he leaned over and tapped off the CD.

  Earl spun around, momentarily startled. Broker smiled and said, “Working hard, huh?”

  Earl quickly moused an X in a box and closed the screen. “Code,” he said.

  “Code, huh?”

  “Yeah, I’m consulting on an encryption project for this firm in Bloomington.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  “Some people find programming elegant. Actually I think it’s pretty fucking tiring,” Earl said slowly, carefully watching Broker casually swing the maul in his right hand back and forth like a Stone Age intruder in Earl’s little high-tech pod.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Broker said.

  “Tiring and stressful,” Earl said. “Gets old pretty fast when you go through two million lines of code to find one comma out of place. I used to work for Holiday, you know, the chain of gas stations. Trouble-shooting their network.”

  “Sure, Holiday,” Broker said.

  “They own you twenty-four hours a day. Beep you in the middle of the night. You’re not your own person.” He positioned his feet to get up, and leaned forward and found the wedge blade of the maul jammed against his chest. “What the fuck?”

  “Hey, that’s one of those new, thin-screen jobs,” Broker said, nodding at the trim-line monitor. “That must have cost a few bucks.”

  Earl started to get up again and this time Broker thumped him on the chest with the maul, causing him to drop back in his chair.

  “I’m done with the wood, thought you’d like to know.” Broker jabbed the maul harder.

  Earl was not intimidated. He grinned and shook his head. “Take a minute to think, old man. When you came down those stairs you were looking at a bloody nose. Now you’re headed for intensive care.”

  “Nah,” Broker said, “I think you’re just another of those point-and-click pussies.” Broker heaved the maul, and the cool, liquid glaze of the screen exploded in a puff of glass and sparks in Earl’s face. The maul handle clattered, overturning his keyboard.

  “You, you,” sputtered Earl as he knelt and yanked the monitor cords from an outlet box.

  “Sorry, must be my Luddite tendencies coming out,” Broker said.

  Earl was puffed with fury but his shirt and eyebrows and hair and lap were dusted with sticky pieces of broken glass. His hands, which had balled into fists, now opened to wipe the debris away from his face and eyes.

  “Don’t touch her again,” Broker said, then he whipped out his wallet, fingered out the hundreds that Earl had given him up north, and flung them in Earl’s face.

  Then he turned, walked up the stairs, out of the house, and got into the Jeep. He waited for a minute, watching the door to see if Earl would come out. It occurred to him that he probably needed a weapon if he was going to play these kinds of games again. But Earl didn’t show. So he scribbled Earl’s license plate on a scrap of paper, shifted into reverse, backed up, put it in first, and drove away.

  Broker was smiling, enjoying the memory of the shocked look on Earl’s face when his computer monitor turned to glitter dust. For the second day in a row he had come to Hank Sommer’s house for the last time. He had a feeling he’d be back.

  On his way to J.T.’s, Broker detoured through Timberry’s main commercial drag and spent half an hour purchasing some items in a CompUSA.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Earl looked funny with shards of computer glass dusted in his hair and his eyebrows, so Jolene left him sputtering in the kitchen and went downstairs. She saw the chopping maul lying in the havoc of the computer screen like a collision between Earl’s and Broker’s worlds, and she laughed harder. Coming back up the stairs she continued to laugh. So he yelled at her to clean up the mess and she told him to go fuck himself and he started to come at her.

  So she stabbed the straight finger in his chest again and said, “See, dummy, I told you not to mess with this guy.”

  Then that mean glower came over Earl’s face that made him look like a blond Klingon on Star Trek. And he stomped off, and to make some kind of point he took the keys to Hank’s Ford Expedition and drove off and left her alone.

  Which suited her just fine and she had to smile. Broker, swinging his axe.

  Feeling a little light-headed, she wandered into the living room and allowed herself one twirl. Whee. Sort of. When Hank had been . . . normal, the house was more like school and he was the teacher she got it on with between classes. Not really hers.

  Now she liked being alone in the house; well, alone with the wreckage of Hank. She liked to walk through the rooms, trying them on.

  The idea slowly forming.

  Her house.

  She turned the volume up on the baby monitor in the kitchen so she could hear Hank. Then she paced the living room and touched the old-fashioned couch with its fat arms outlined with fat brass tacks. For months they’d trolled the St. Croix Valley and western Wisconsin, hitting all the antiques shops, finding Mission Oak furniture and Tiffany lamps. Funny man. He’d worked hard to make the whole place look like an old Humphrey Bogart detective movie. She understood what Hank was trying to do, how he had made up this house like a movie set and arranged her among the furniture. He had reached a certain age and made some money, and he had tried to live his life like entertainment. Which was similar to trying to stay high all the time. Trying to make your life into a story that was smoother or more exciting than it really was.

  What, in treatment, they called delusion.

  The thing about stories, she thought, was that they have beginnings, middles, and tidy conclusions where they wrap up all the loose ends. But what if you’re thinking you’re in the long, happy middle and real life suddenly comes along.

  She’d cut hair with a perky born-again named Sally during her hair-stylist phase, and Sally had two neat kids and a dutiful husband, and one day she opened her kitchen cabinet to reach for the cornflakes and found Death sneering her in the face.

  Breast Cancer. Snap. Just like that it zipped through the lymph glands and into the lungs, the liver, the pancreas. And Jesus turned out to be on a different page of her story. Maybe he could raise the dead and turn water into wine in the Bible. But through a frigid Minnesota February he sat back and watched Sally wither and die in slow, irradiated nausea.

  At the end of Sally’s story they had to pour gas on the frozen dirt to warm it enough for the backhoe to dig her a hole to be buried in.

  “Poor Hank,” she said. She wasn’t sure what Hank believed in, but she didn’t think it was anywhere near Jesus.

  To get sober you were supposed to admit you were powerless over alcohol and turn it all over to a Higher Power who could restore you to sanity. So far she’d faked her way through the Hi
gher Power part, saying it was just other people. Mainly it had been Hank. Now he was gone and she wasn’t sure about God, big G. God sounded like another man she’d have to deal with at some point down the line.

  So, with Hank gone, it was just natural that her Higher Power was going to be the Almighty Dollar. Until something better came along.

  But right now her Higher Power was playing hard to get.

  She walked through the living room into the alcove den and confronted the stack of bills on the desk. She’d sorted the envelopes into two piles. The first contained all the maintenance expenses that kept the house running, that Earl had paid for the month of October: mortgage, NSP, phone bill, cable TV, garbage and water, and three VISA cards.

  The biggies went in the second pile; the hospital bills from Ely and Regions; the helicopter, the neurologist workup; and the consult, the MRI, nerve testing, the stomach feeding tube. They all had three zeros after the commas.

  It all came down to the money. Hank knew that. Realistically, would she have married him if he were going to AA twice a week, working on a loading dock, and holding on by his fingernails?

  Her dad had been like that—a good guy who drank a little too much and worked with his hands. Mom changed the locks and got a lawyer and then, when Dad was gone, she went to work as a secretary for the lawyer. Jolene was seven.

  When she was ten, Mom married the lawyer and they moved from North Minneapolis to Robbinsdale. Mom had a bigger house with plastic covers on the upstairs living room furniture; she had new friends, she had parties and vacations.

  When Jolene was fifteen the lawyer’s eyes would follow her up and down the hall as she got dressed in the morning to go to school. But the lawyer never touched her. Neither did her mom. Jolene always had clean clothes and food and shelter and about a foot of Plexiglas between her and Mom. Jolene broke the suburban plastic pattern and ran away with Earl when she was sixteen.

  She stirred the bills with her hand, willfully messing them up. She’d seen this show on the Discovery Channel; these experiments with orphaned chimpanzees where they’d put the apes in cages with mother surrogates which were these constructions and one of them, the wire mother, had food and water but was made of cold steel mesh. The other, the cloth mother, had no food but was heated wood and fabric. The baby chimps would go to the warm mother and hug her and stay there even when they started starving.

  And that was the bottom line on drinking right there, it was hugs in a bottle.

  Yeah, well, the last Jolene heard, her wire mother was living in Sarasota, Florida, and the lawyer had oxygen tubes in his nose, and fuck her for giving up on Dad.

  Jolene fluffed her short-cropped hair, straightened up the bills, found a note she’d written to herself, and said “details.” Then she picked up the phone and called the information desk at the Timberry Public Library.

  An hour later, she was in the studio sickroom, turning Hank when the phone rang.

  “Jo, it’s Allen.”

  “How are you doing, Allen?”

  “Well, Earl called me and he said he was a little worried about you. Apparently Broker came back today and they had a run-in.”

  “Yesss,” Jolene said slowly.

  “Earl did some checking. Have you heard of NCIC?”

  “The national crime computer.” She chided herself for knowing the answer a little too quickly.

  “Well, before he was a friendly canoe guide he was something else. He’s in the computer. Or someone with the exact same name is who did time in Stillwater Prison in 1989 for assault. There’s some other charges about drug possession and stolen property.”

  “And?” Jolene was cautiously curious. A reformed con was a nice concept but was pretty much a liberal myth.

  “I just want to make sure you’re all right. Do you want me to drop by?”

  Jolene evaluated the courting urgency just below the surface of Allen’s voice and clicked her teeth. Dutiful Allen. Useful Allen. Everybody assumed Hank would die.

  What if he didn’t, what if he stayed there for years and years. What were her options, medically?

  Allen could tell her when the time came, maybe help her through IT. Briefly she imagined Allen, naked, in bed and she wondered if sex was more natural for him because he was used to putting his hands inside people’s bodies.

  “So you think it’s serious?” she asked frankly.

  “A police record is nothing to joke about.”

  “I could make a pot of coffee if you can get free.”

  “I’m in the clinic today, so I could come over for a while in about an hour,” Allen said quickly.

  After Allen hung up Jolene turned to Hank and said in a practical voice, “I have to think about the future now. And I don’t want you to suffer any longer than necessary.”

  Jolene brewed up another pot of coffee in Hank’s Chemex, following the procedure Hank had taught her. She ground the beans—Cameron’s Scandinavian Blend, distributed in Hayward, Wisconsin—for exactly seventeen seconds. Then she put one of the round white paper filters in the glass beaker pot that looked like something from her high school chemistry lab, added the coffee, and poured in the boiling water.

  She stepped back for a minute to let the grounds bloom.

  It was the second pot of coffee for the second male visitor of the day.

  Moving right along. Her timing was perfect; the last of the coffee was dripping into the pot as Allen’s Saab roared down the drive.

  Okay.

  She met him at the door wearing her brave smile but, when they came into the kitchen, he saw the twinkle of glass on the floor. Must have dropped from Earl’s clothes and she’d missed sweeping it up. She told Allen what had happened and, at the end of her story, she leaned forward and rested her forehead briefly on his chest.

  Like the hot water and the coffee grounds, Allen bloomed.

  Then they sat down at the kitchen table and had their coffee, and she confided in him. She told him how she’d got off to a bad start letting Earl back in her life, and now, Broker was just trying to help out and send Earl packing.

  She hoped it didn’t get rough.

  She said she was really getting tired of having these kinds of guys in her life. Then she and Allen took their coffee to the study and Allen quickly did an examination of Hank, whose lungs were still clear and whose blood pressure was still normal, and clearly he was going to live forever that way.

  And so Jolene just blurted it out, not caring how horrible it sounded, how she was afraid when all this was over, the court case and everything, how Hank could go on and on and she’d be—a few real tears creeping out now—a nun married to breathing cadaver for the rest of her life.

  And she let Allen take her briefly in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he murmured, “I can help, if it comes to that.”

  “Shhh,” she placed her cool finger to his lips and felt them flutter in a faint kiss. “Not now,” she said. “Someday, but not now.”

  She could see Allen conjure intimacy in the tone of her voice and in her moist eyes.

  Jolene withdrew her finger from his lips and took a step back. “Details,” she said, brightening, blinking away tears. “And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

  “What?” Allen asked.

  “The poem you mentioned, remember? It’s anonymous. A doggerel, not really a poem, it’s part of the Real Mother Goose Rhymes. I looked it up.”

  Allen was impressed.

  As he drove away, he placed his right hand across his heart, like a civilian saluting the flag; except he was touching the place where Jolene had rested her head against his chest.

  She had definitely reached out to him on a very delicate matter. And it wasn’t as simple as a Do-Not-Resuscitate or a Do-Not-Intubate order. Hank’s heart and lungs showed no signs of failing.

  And he wasn’t hooked to a ventilator, so it wasn’t a case where the care provider could elect to end medical support and flip a switch.

  Jolene could try to get a court ord
er to withhold nutrition but that looked mercenary, and there would be a gruesome time element.

  But if she did get a DNR-DNI order as a precaution against a future incident, and if he discreetly induced a respiratory arrest—that would work.

  Yes, it would.

  Earl came in around supper time smiling sweetly and carrying a deluxe Domino’s pizza and an armful of flowers, which he proceeded to place in makeshift vases around the kitchen. She gauged the depth of his insecurity by his needy cow eyes; he was actually watching her for signs that she might be willing to fool around with him.

  “What do you have now, friends in the cops? How’d you get on the national computer?” she asked, ignoring his eyes tracking her movements around the kitchen.

  “Allen must have called,” Earl said in a distracted voice, arranging flowers, sniffing them like Ferdinand the fucking bull.

  “How’d you come up with a police record on Broker?” Jolene asked as she turned on the oven.

  “Easy. Those ads on TV for the online background checks: ‘See if anyone you know has a criminal record,’ ” Earl mimicked a hyped broadcast voice. “Well, they’re jacked into NCIC, so, since Broker came on a little stronger than your run-of-the-mill canoe guy, I typed in his name.” Earl folded his arms and looked very concerned. “I think you have to be real cautious around this dude.”

  “He likes me.” She held up her bruised wrist. “It’s assholes who molest women that he’s down on.” She put the pizza in the oven.

  “Ah, I’m thinking, if he gets rough again, I may need to bring in a war elephant.”

  “Who?”

  “I was thinking Rodney.”

  Aw, God, a name that brought back the dumb old days. While she drove, Earl and Rodney would act out their comic-book fantasies with the guns, and they picked off three desolate 7-Eleven’s in the outer-ring burbs before she and Earl went off on their own and had the bad experience in North Dakota that ended their stickup-artist phase. Jolene shook her head. “Earl, Rodney’s in jail. Remember his bright idea about stealing machine guns from the National Guard?”