He was not a weeping man, but he had wept when, prior to her cremation, he had removed Betsys dog tag from her collar.
Curtis sued The Motherfucker for the price of the dogtwelve hundred dollars. If he could have sued for ten millionthat was roughly how much pain he felt when he looked at the idiot stick lying, innocent of dogspit now and forever, on the coffee tablehe would have done so in a heartbeat, but his lawyer told him that pain and suffering wouldnt fly in a civil suit. Those things were for divorces, not dogs. He would have to settle for the twelve hundred, and he meant to have it.
The Motherfuckers lawyers responded that the electric fence had been strung a full ten yards on Grunwalds side of the property line, and the battlethe second battlewas on. It had been raging for eight months now. Curtis believed the delaying tactics being employed by The Motherfuckers lawyers suggested that they knew Curtis had a case. He also believed that their failure to propose a settlement, and Grunwalds failure to just cough up the twelve hundred, suggested that it had become as personal to Grunwald as it was to him. These lawyers were also costing them plenty. But of course, the matter was no longer about money.
Riding out along Route 17, through what had once been ranchland and was now just overgrown scrub ground (Grunwald had been raving mad to build out here, Curtis thought), Curtis only wished he felt happier about this turn of events. Victory was supposed to make your heart leap, and his wasnt. All he seemed to want was to see Grunwald, hear what he was actually proposing, and put all this shit behind them if the proposal wasnt too ridiculous. Of course that would probably mean the roach-relatives would get the Vinton Lot, and they might well decide to put up their own condo development, but did it even matter? It didnt seem to.
Curtis had his own problems to deal with, although his were mental rather than marital (God forbid), financial, or physical. They had begun not long after finding Betsy stiff and cold in the side yard. Others might have called these problems neuroses, but Curtis preferred to think of them as angst.
His current disenchantment with the stock market, which had fascinated him ceaselessly since he had discovered it at sixteen, was the most identifiable component of this angst, but by no means the only one. He had begun taking his pulse and counting his toothbrush strokes. He could no longer wear dark shirts, because he was plagued with dandruff for the first time since junior high school. Dead white crap plated up on his scalp and drifted down to his shoulders. If he scraped with the teeth of a comb, it came down in ghastly snow flurries. He hated this, but still sometimes found himself doing it while sitting at the computer, or while talking on the phone. Once or twice hed scraped until he drew blood.
Scraping and scraping. Excavating that white deadness. Sometimes looking at the idiot stick on the coffee table and thinking (of course) of how happy Betsy was when she brought it to him. Human eyes hardly ever looked that happy, especially not when the humans in question were doing chores.
A midlife crisis, Sammy said (Sammy was his once-a-week masseur). You need to get laid, Sammy said, but he didnt offer his own services, Curtis noticed.
Still, the phrase rang trueas true as any twenty-first-century newspeak, he supposed. Whether the Vinton Lot fuck-a-monkey show had provoked the crisis or the crisis had provoked the Vinton mess, he didnt know. What he did know was that he had come to think heart attack instead of indigestion each time he felt a transient, stabbing pain in his chest, that he had become obsessed with the notion that his teeth were going to fall out (even though they had never given him any particular trouble), and that when hed gotten a cold in April, he had diagnosed himself as being on the verge of a complete immunological breakdown.
Plus this other little problem. This compulsion, which he hadnt told his doctor about. Or even Sammy, and he told Sammy everything.
It was on him now, fifteen miles inland on seldom-traveled Route 17, which had never been particularly busy and had now been rendered all but obsolescent by the 375 Extension. Right here with the green scrub pressing in on both sides (the man had been bonkers to build out here), with the bugs singing in high grass no cows had grazed for ten years or more and the power lines buzzing and the sun beating down like a padded hammer on his helmetless head.
He knew just thinking of the compulsion summoned it, but that was of no particular help. None at all, in fact.
He pulled over where a track marked DURKIN GROVE VILLAGE ROAD shot off to the left (grass was now growing up the center hump, an arrow pointing the way to failure) and put the Vespa in neutral. Then, while it purred contentedly between his legs, he forked the first two fingers of his right hand into a V and stuck them down his throat. His gag reflex had grown numb over the last two or three months, and his hand was in almost all the way to the bracelets of fortune on his wrist before it finally happened.
Curtis leaned to one side and ejected his breakfast. It wasnt getting rid of the food that interested him; he was many things, but bulimic wasnt one of them. It wasnt even the vomiting part that he liked. What he liked was the gagging: that hard rejecting clench of the midsection, plus the accompanying yaw of the mouth and throat. The body was totally in gear, determined to oust the intruder.
The smellsgreen bushes, wild honeysucklewere suddenly stronger. The light was brighter. The sun beat down more heavily than ever; the pad was off the hammer and he could feel the skin on the nape of his neck sizzling, the cells there maybe at this very moment turning outlaw and heading for the chaotic land of melanoma.
He didnt care. He was alive. He rammed his spread fingers down his throat again, scraping the sides. The rest of breakfast yurped up. The third time he produced only long strings of spittle, stained faintly pink with his throats blood. Then he felt satisfied. Then he could go on toward Durkin Grove Village, The Motherfuckers half-built Xanadu out here in the silent bee-buzzing wilds of Charlotte County.
It occurred to him, as he putted modestly along the overgrown lane in the right-hand wheelrut, that Grunwald might not be the only one who was in a tight place these days.
Durkin Grove Village was a mess.
There were puddles in the ruts of the not-yet-paved streets and in the cellar holes of unfinished (in some cases not yet even framed) buildings. What Curtis saw belowhalf-built shops, a few pieces of shabby-looking construction equipment here and there, sagging yellow caution tapewas surely a blueprint for deep financial trouble, perhaps even ruin. Curtis didnt know if The Motherfuckers preoccupation with the Vinton Lotnot to mention the decampment of his wife, his illness, and his legal problems concerning Curtiss doghad been the cause of the mans current overextension or not, but he knew overextension was what it was. Even before continuing down to the open gate and seeing the sign posted there, he knew.
THIS SITE HAS BEEN CLOSED BY
THE CHARLOTTE COUNTY DEPT
OF BUILDING AND PLANNING
THE CHARLOTTE COUNTY BUREAU OF TAXATION
THE FLORIDA BUREAU OF TAXATION
UNITED STATES INTERNAL REVENUE
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CALL 941-555-1800
Below this, some exuberant wit had spray-painted: DIAL EXTENSION 69 AND ASK FOR THE CUNT-LICKER GENERAL!
The tar ended and the potholes began after the only three buildings that looked completed: two shops on one side of the street and a model home on the other. The model home was a faux Cape Cod that made Curtiss blood run cold. He didnt trust the Vespa on the unpaved sur face, so he turned in beside a payloader that looked as if it had been parked there for a century or moregrass was growing in the dirt at the bottom of its partially raised scoopput down the stand, and turned off the engine.
Silence poured in to fill the socket which had been occupied by the Vespas fat purr. Then a crow cawed. It was answered by another. Curtis looked up and saw a trio of them poised on a scaffolding that enshrouded a partially finished brick building. Maybe it had been intended as a bank. Now its Grunwalds tombstone, he thought, but the idea didnt even bring a smile to his lips. He felt like gagging himself again, and might even have done it, but farther down the deserted dirt streetat the far end, in facthe saw a man standing beside a white sedan with a green palm tree on it. Above the palm tree: GRUNWALD. Below it: CONTRACTORS & BUILDERS. The man was waving to him. Grunwald was for some reason driving a company car today instead of his Porsche. Curtis supposed it wasnt impossible that Grunwald had sold the Porsche. It wasnt impossible to think the IRS had seized it, and might even seize Grunwalds Turtle Island property. Then the Vinton Lot would be the least of his worries.