Thanksgiving Read online

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  He frowned at me.

  ‘Are you paying attention? I told you. I taped them at it. Well, some of it, anyway. But I’ve got pretty lengthy extracts from eight sessions. They used a motel, you see. Luce had the kids at home and Scott had a wife. And since they had no reason to suppose that anyone suspected them, they always used the same motel. So I checked out the facility in question, and figured out that whatever the room number, the bed was always on the left-hand side of the unit. After that, it was just a question of following Luce down there, seeing which room she went into, and then trying for the one next to it. “107 free? I’ll take that.” Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. Then a microphone embedded in a suction cup sticker attached to the party wall, and I got to record the whole party. The sound quality isn’t that great, compared with what I got up to later, but it’s okay. They were mostly quite loud, anyway. You can surely make out what was going on.’

  He stood up unsteadily.

  ‘Want to hear one? March eighteenth is my favourite. That’s right before Scott’s wife found out what was going on and the shit hit the fan. The interesting thing is that you can kind of sense, unless this is just me, that Luce already knew that something was up. She was always good at that, sort of premonition stuff. Anyway, there’s an edge of desperation there that’s lacking in the earlier tapes, when she was just thinking of the moment. The down side is there’s also a lot of talk about how she feels guilty and doesn’t want to wreck his marriage and all that, but that just makes the action scenes more piquant, if that’s the word I’m looking for. Frankly, of all the tapes, it’s the one I find myself taking down off the shelf most often. It’s definitely the one I’d start with, if I were you. You want to hear it?’

  He surveyed his stacked cassettes blearily.

  ‘Unless you’d prefer to be the star yourself, of course.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Allen slumped back into his chair.

  ‘Well, see, once Scott was out of the picture I kind of lost interest for a while. There were others, I knew that. I can’t remember the names. They came, they went. No pun intended. By that time, I didn’t really care that much.’

  He grinned at me.

  ‘But you were different. You stuck in there. You did the decent thing. Just what we expect of you guys. Poor old Luce must have thought she’d died and gone to heaven. Every young maiden’s dream come true. The other guys were just interested in one thing, but you fell in love with her. You even married her.’

  He feigned a British salute, palm turned out.

  ‘Good show, chaps. Although as a show it didn’t seem that impressive to me, I have to say. Not compared to the Scott archive, at least. His tapes definitely get more air-time around here than yours, I’m afraid. But comparisons are invidious, and I’m sure it seemed great to you at the time. Plus technically it was a piece of cake compared with that motel gig. Cheaper, too, since I didn’t have to rent a room myself. It was just a question of wiring Luce’s bedroom for sound, which was easy enough to do, visiting the kids every week like I did. I bought a sound-activated recorder from Radio Shack and slipped it in the back of one of the closets. I knew she’d never look in there. Hell, I found some of my own stuff while I was doing it, a pair of shoes I’d forgotten about.’

  He shot me a glance.

  ‘So how about it, Tone? Do you want to hear you and your late wife “doing the deed”? Like I say, it all sounds distinctly underwhelming to me. Lots of talk, but where’s the meat? Still, I have high standards in these things. Maybe it’ll be different for you. Might bring it all back, eh?’

  He frowned.

  ‘Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, Tone. Hell, we’re practically related. We’ve both had the same woman. They’ve got some word for that in Spanish. We’re brothers under the skin. Under Luce’s skin, that is. All I’m saying is that you’re perfectly welcome to access my private Library of Congress here, should you feel so inclined. For legitimate research purposes only, of course.’

  My limbs felt like lead, but I forced myself to stand up. I took out the revolver clumsily, snagging the barrel on my coat pocket.

  ‘Ah, I knew Mr Chekhov wouldn’t let me down,’ Allen said quietly.

  He finished his whiskey and got up.

  ‘Now before you shoot me, Tone, let me give you two fashion tips for future reference. Never wear brown shoes with a blue suit, and don’t choose a lightweight Burberry if you’re planning to carry a concealed weapon. Okay, go ahead, I’m ready.’

  ‘I’m not going to shoot you.’

  For the first time, a trace of anger appeared in his eyes.

  ‘You’re not? Then what the hell is the gun for? And what was all that “You-could-die-tonight” bullshit? What are you, some kind of tease? I’ve been counting on your shooting me. Why do you think I’ve been goading you like this? Jesus, I’ve spent all this time working on you, and now you tell me you’re not going to come across?’

  He brightened up suddenly.

  ‘How about if I throw in the Polaroids?’

  ‘The what?’

  The lights waxed and then waned almost to nothing.

  ‘I took a whole set one night she was really hot. Got her to pose in various positions. Made her think it was all a game. It wasn’t that hard. Man, she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Next day she asked about it, sounding kind of scared, but I showed her the empty camera and said I’d just been kidding. I got about eighteen in all. They’re around somewhere. You interested?’

  In the dim light cast by the stove, I saw him give me a look.

  ‘Or maybe you’d prefer the video.’

  ‘Video?’

  ‘Well, it was originally Super-8. They didn’t have video back then. I got it transferred later.’

  He searched around among the video cassettes stacked on his shelving.

  ‘This was back when we lived in San Francisco. You know those mornings that dawn bright and clear and kind of cold, with an edge to them, and everything feels possible? You don’t get any more of them once you turn thirty, even if the weather’s the same. We’d been on a stoner all night long. Luce wasn’t really into drugs, not like me, but I slipped some speed into the juice I brought her that morning. It was a kind of crazy night. We’d been to a party, well a couple in fact, and then a bunch of us ended up driving over to Marin.

  ‘I don’t recall too much after that except when Luce and I finally got home we were both bopping and the light was just incredible and I remembered this camera I’d borrowed from someone. I was just pissing around at first, seeing how it worked, totally into the trip, you know, focused, and suddenly she came in and started dancing to this music I’d put on. Only she had plans of her own, see, so she did a sort of slow strip to get my attention. Like I was into this boring guy thing with gadgets and she needed to win me back. Which I have to say she did, but not before I got some pretty good footage. I was a little worried about the light shining in through the window behind her, the one that always used to stick when it was damp, which it was a lot of the time with the fog rolling in, but not that morning. And the exposure turned out to be just perfect.’

  He smiled.

  ‘You going to kill me now? Or you want to see your late wife back when she was still cute? What’s it to be, Tone? Don’t keep me hanging on like this.’

  There was a deafening bang, as if someone had struck the roof of the trailer with a huge hammer.

  ‘What in hell’s that?’ gasped Allen.

  Before I could react, he was at the front door. I followed him out, gun in hand. The wind had died away, leaving an unblemished stillness.

  ‘There she is,’ I cried, pointing to a triangle of white lights in the sky.

  Allen followed the pattern of lights for some time.

  ‘Must be military,’ he said at last. ‘Area Fifty-one’s just over those hills. Groom Lake Base. Lots of secret, high-tech stuff going on t
here. Some kind of sonic boom, I guess. We’re miles away from any regular flight path here.’

  The lights receded in a wide arc, disappearing over a ridge of high land to the west. Allen shivered.

  ‘Fuck, it’s cold.’

  He went back inside and I followed, still holding the gun. Allen turned on a small lamp on the shelves above the stereo.

  ‘Runs on a battery,’ he explained. ‘For when the wind fails.’

  We sat down again.

  ‘So what’s going to happen now?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Okay, here’s my proposition. That gun cost you how much?’

  ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘And you’re planning on flying back? Well, they won’t let you take the gun on the plane without some fancy locked fibreglass case that’ll cost more than that. Plus I can’t imagine you needing a firearm at home. So how about this? I buy it off you right now for one hundred fifty in cash.’

  He finished adjusting the stove and gave me a quick glance.

  ‘I’ll go and dig out my savings account. Make yourself at home. Have a drink. Watch a video. Listen to a tape.’

  He disappeared into the darkness at the back of the trailer. There were various noises, then a blinding flash.

  ‘Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!’

  I raised the gun, and was answered by another flash.

  ‘I like to take a few snapshots when folks visit,’ Allen remarked. ‘Kind of a souvenir. Doesn’t happen that often.’

  He put down the camera and a battered candy tin on the table. Then he opened the tin, counted out eight twenties from the bundle inside and spread them on the table like a hand of cards.

  ‘You see, the fact of the matter is I never got over Luce kicking me out. I mean, okay, maybe I wasn’t the perfect husband and father, but who the hell is? She’d married me for better or worse, and I assumed we’d stick at it one way or another and hang in there, the way most people do. But she had other ideas. You got a ten?’

  I looked at him through the dim yellow light and raised the gun.

  ‘I’m going to shoot you now.’

  ‘No, you’re not, Tone. I know it and you know it. It’s like sex. Eye contact. The smell in the air. There are certain rules in life, like you can’t stop pissing once you’ve started. And you’re not going to shoot me. We both know that.’

  He sighed wearily.

  ‘Strange, that plane coming over. I’m not one of those UN black helicopter wackos you read about, although there’s more than a few of them around here. But I don’t recall anything quite like that happening before.’

  While still speaking, he reached up in one smooth movement and took the gun from my hand. He pushed the spread of twenties across the table, then lifted one and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Okay, if you can’t make change, I have a new deal for you. Let’s say one-forty, and I’ll throw in one of my compilation tapes as a sweetener. Give you something to listen to on the drive back.’

  He pushed the cassette across the table to join the seven banknotes.

  ‘There’s some good stuff on this one. I seriously recommend side two. It’s a real killer. Don’t worry, this is just a copy. I’ve got the original around somewhere.’

  He picked up the revolver.

  ‘Taurus, eh? I’ve heard of them. Supposed to be good. I’ve been meaning to get a gun for some time. In this state it’s practically mandatory to have one. Plus you never know when you might want to end it all, right? I’ve been tempted more than once. It’s the how that always stops me. Knives and razors are out for me. I have this thing about blood. I know it makes me sound like a wuss, but there it is.’

  He smiled reminiscently.

  ‘Fact is, about the only problem Luce and I used to have in bed was that she liked to fuck right through her periods. Pills? I don’t even have a doctor, let alone the feelgood variety. Carbon monoxide sounds good in theory, but in practice it always feels like too much like work. Getting a tube the right size to fit the exhaust pipe and long enough to reach in the side window, all the rest of it. It’s like you want to kill yourself, that’s fine, but first you have to remodel the basement. You end up thinking, the hell with it, I’ll do it tomorrow.’

  He gave me one of his trademark beaming smiles.

  ‘But now I’ve got a gun, I can do it tonight.’

  ‘Do what?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You came here to kill me, but you didn’t,’ Allen said at last. ‘So now I’m going to have to kill you. I don’t want to, you understand. I have nothing against you, Tone. On the contrary, you took Luce off my hands and gave her another interest in life. Without you, she might have spent more time wondering how I managed to make ends meet, maybe even hired a lawyer to check my assets. But thanks to you she was all wrapped up in love’s young dream. Well, love’s middle-aged dream, anyway.’

  He waved the gun in the air.

  ‘Anton Chekhov – one of my favourite authors incidentally – said that if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, then it must go off in Act Three. We wouldn’t want to disappoint Mr Chekhov, so this baby’s going to have to be fired, no?’

  ‘You’ll never get away with it. The police will find out that I flew down here and rented a car. They know we were both married to Lucy. You’ll be the obvious suspect.’

  Darryl Bob Allen smiled.

  ‘“Suspect”, maybe. But that’s all I’ll be. It’s your gun, after all. And I’m not going to make any stupid mistakes like trying to sell off the car to make some extra cash. No, this is going to be the perfect crime. When the gun is discovered next to your body and the rental car, out in the desert a long, long way from here, they’re going to say it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Suicide while of unsound mind. Wife just died tragically. Guy was shocked, depressed.’

  He extended his arm, the gun pointed straight at my forehead.

  ‘It’s time to move on, Tone. Change is always painful, but that’s how we grow. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’

  He laughed and lowered his arm.

  ‘Mock execution, like they did with Dostoyevsky. Another of my favourite authors. The piece about him in the encyclopaedia is kind of snotty, but I guess there were some things even those guys didn’t get. Anyway, the shock effect sure worked for Fyodor Mikhailovitch. Who knows, maybe you’ll write a masterpiece too, make yourself a fortune. You could call it I Loved Lucy. “Honey, I’m home!” But listen, I want a piece of the movie action, okay?’

  I started to weep uncontrollably, shaking all over.

  ‘Speaking of movies,’ Allen went on, ‘there’s another reel you might be even more interested in. This one was a video right from the start, not like that one I got switched from a different format. Because this one I made later, right at the end of that memorable period I was talking about before. The one when I was still sleeping with Luce for months after she’d given me the big speech she’d conned out of some book on how to dump your partner, all about how it would be better for everyone if we separated.’

  He plucked a black plastic box down off the shelf, laying the gun in its place.

  ‘I’m kind of proud of this, tell you the truth. Setting it up was bitch central. You know those surveillance cameras they have in stores and offices, real small, about the size of a pack of smokes? Well, they had them at the building where I had that janitorial job I mentioned. Now I knew that the building would be shut down over the Thanksgiving weekend, so I stayed late the night before, disconnected one and took it home. I was still hanging on there by the skin of my teeth, see, because although I’d got the job I hadn’t had a cheque yet, so I couldn’t pay the deposit on an apartment. Luce offered to lend me the money, but I told her a man has his pride. And she couldn’t very well insist, it being the great American family holiday and all.

  ‘On Thursday, she and the kids were out buying the turkey. Luce didn’t usually bother that much abo
ut Thanksgiving, but she wanted to make this one special, because right afterwards she was going to have to break it to Claire and Frank that their daddy wasn’t going to be living with them no more. While they were out, I clamped the camera to a lamp stand and set it way back in the closet, on my side. We had a his-and-hers arrangement, know what I mean? Maybe it was the same with you. I guess it would have been. Luce was pretty conservative when it came to those kind of things. So I guess your pants were hanging where mine used to.’

  He drank more whiskey, waving the tape around as though unaware he was holding it.

  ‘Then I snagged the video player from the living room, plugged everything in on an extension cord from my workshop down in the basement, stuck a blank tape in the player and pulled my clothes along the rack to cover it up, all except one little crack I left open for the camera. So far, so good. The really tricky bit was getting Luce drunk. I knew that after a few belts I could get her to do anything. The problem was, she knew it too, and the way we were fixed she wasn’t going to take the risk with me around. So I had to kind of sneak it up on her.

  ‘In the end I went down to the video store and rented an old movie. White Cargo. 1942. Hedy Lamarr as Tondaleyo. One of her favourites. On the way home I stopped off at 7-Eleven and bought a big bottle of Coke and some popcorn. Then I hit the liquor store and picked up a twenty-sixer of Smirnoff Blue Label. Back home, I poured about a third of the Coke down the sink and topped up with the vodka. Both the kids were spending the night with friends, so they weren’t a problem.’