Men in Black by Scott Spencer

Author:Scott Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

9

MONEY WAS IN THE WIND. THE CHECK WAS REALLY and truly in the mail, and one hoped the mailman was bonded, because it was going to be a biggie. Somewhere, everywhere, sales of Visitors were being totaled up, cash registers were making like sleigh bells, fresh copies of my stale book were being forklifted onto trucks.

I bought a baby-blue solar-powered calculator and diddled around with fantasy numbers. Forty thousand bucks, sixty thousand; six percent interest, eight percent. I was whistling in the dark, I was a bearded babe in toyland. With Michael gone and the TV unoccupied, I looked in on the Financial News Network, to get a sense of where interest rates were on those long-range T-bills I had once heard someone mention.

This money, unarrived but already mine, was a set of keys to allow me entrance into the rooms I had long wanted to stroll through—the rooms in which you order from a chic little typewritten menu without making a little mental running total of the tab, the room in which you bought your wife a pair of ruby earrings because they were wrenched from the earth to live next to her raven hair, and the room in which you sat at your typewriter with a fresh stack of high-rag-content paper and a goose-necked lamp and wrote something so true and so necessary that for a while you could imagine you were doing God’s work.

In the beginning, it was written, there was the Word, and the Word was God, and from now on I would honor the Word and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me.

Except.

Except I would, by necessity, continue to maintain the lies I had already told and which were so firmly and intractably in place.

By necessity. Necessity must be taken into account, necessity must be given its due. I was not an angel. All I could do was leap winglessly into the air; but there was gravity, too, stronger than my ability to leap.

By day, while Amanda was in school, Olivia and I continued our disorganized, desultory search for Michael. We went back to the high school. We loitered there, drove around the nearby neighborhoods—newer, pastel, humble one-story houses with a hint of domestic violence beneath their aluminum siding. I drove into neighboring towns, villages of roughly the same population as Leyden, with similar stores, but shuffled and dealt out in different order, so that they seemed strange, eerily distinctive. I went back to the state cops, but now that they knew that Michael had called the house they had lost interest in us. It seemed no longer in their jurisdiction. It was a family matter—that was becoming a chilling phrase. One of the older cops suggested I contact the truant officer.

“A truant officer?” Olivia said to me. She was sitting at the kitchen table, with her back to the window. Behind her was a curtain of rain.

“What can I tell you?”

“I don’t know, Sam. What can you

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