Bomber's Law Page 7
“And did you?” Dell’Appa had said.
“Of course not,” Dennison had said. “It was a mighty tempting offer, sure, but one we couldn’t even think about. We couldn’t do that, couldn’t’ve done it even if we’d wanted to. Tory’s an only child, no one else to take care of her mother. As Virginia’d been herself, an only child, so she had no sisters or brothers of her own who might’ve helped to look after her. Tory’s father’d had a couple of sisters and a brother, but none of them lived around here and they’d never had much contact with their brother or his wife, even when Stan was alive. Stan’s brother didn’t even come to the funeral. His sister, Katherine, said he was laid up in Tucson, which was where he’d retired to, with phlebitis in his right leg, and that may’ve been true, I suppose. Although Virginia made it pretty clear she didn’t think so. But the long and the short of it was that Tory was it: if she didn’t look after her mother and her interests, who else was there around who could be trusted to do it, and’d also actually go through then, and do it? No one, that’s who.
“Not that I blame anyone,” he had said. “Not for one minute do I blame them. One of the reasons, one of the principal reasons, that it costs so much to hire and then keep people to take care of the elderly is because it’s no damned picnic taking care of the elderly all day. It’s a lousy, rotten job, that’s what it is. The patients’re sick and they’re frail, and some of them’re just plain downright mean. They’re querulous, and demanding, and unhappy. A good many of them deliberately spend a good part of every day rolling around in their own shit. They haven’t lost control of their bowels or their bladder. They’re not incontinent at all. They soil themselves and mess their beds out of sheer cussedness, because they’ve got a mad on at the person taking care of them and know how much that person hates cleaning up shit, and cleaning the shit off of them, or they do it because what they’d really like to do is shit on the relatives who put them into care, but the relatives know what they’re thinking and’re too smart to come within range.”
“Pure spite,” Dell’Appa had said.
“Spite, pure and simple,” Dennison said, “and Virginia had it in spades. The only way we could ever figure out to get ourselves a fifty-fifty chance of her doing what we actually wanted her to do was by convincing her that we passionately wanted her to do the opposite. And then, if she decided to do anything at all—which was never guaranteed; she was very clever, and she’d long since figured out, or good old Lucy’d told her, that her scheming daughter and her wicked son-in-law might not be above pulling some reverse psychology on her. So unless she was completely sure that we sincerely wanted her to celebrate her eighty-second birthday by taking up sky-diving or bungee-jumping, she might not only refuse to rent a parachute or a long rubber-band; she might not do anything at all. But if we did convince her that we truly thought something was an absolutely rotten idea, then there was at least an even chance that what she did decide to do might turn out to be what we’d actually had in mind. What we’d thought she ought to do in the first place. But we never could be sure. There was always that lingering uncertainty. It was like batting against a young Nolan Ryan-type pitcher in a night baseball game with no lights on: you’re up there in the dark with just a thin stick to use to defend yourself against a fastball coming at you at a hundred and six miles an hour, and the crazy-wild kid who’s throwing it’s got no more idea in this world where it’s going’n you’ve got, when he rares back and lets ’er rip.
“So for, say, Virginia’s last eight or ten years in this vale of tears, well, not every day turned out to be exciting, but still, when you woke up in the morning, there was always the distinct chance that things might all of a sudden get pretty exciting. There was always that exhilarating possibility. Along with the knowledge that if there was an uproar in the making, you’d be hip-deep in the middle of something else that was really important to you when you first caught wind of it. ‘Up to yo’ ass in alli-ga-tors,’ as I heard old Lucy say once.
“Which was another thing about dear Virginia: Not only was what she’d just now decided she absolutely had to have done always extremely important; it was also, invariably, extremely urgent. It had to be done right now, because the man with the backhoe and the front-end loader was waiting at the door for her decision on whether she wanted the entire county dug up, and unless she told him within two minutes that she did and he should get to work, he’d start up his flatbed and take a long-standing offer that he’d been putting off for years to dig up Rhode Island, from Pawtucket all the way down to Westerly, and her big chance’d be gone forever—she’d never see him again.
“See, she always started with the element of surprise in her favor, like an enemy fighter pilot diving down out of the sun to attack your fuel-tanker. You could never be sure whether she’d call you, on any particular day, and she knew this. So whenever things got too dull to please her, she’d capitalize on it and confront you with a full-blown, rampaging crisis already well underway before she’d made up her mind to call you about it. To do something about it right off.” Dennison had snorted. “I said she lived in Taunton? That was wrong; I should’ve said she lived in Ambush.
“Anyway,” he had said, “after Stan’d died, and she’d had the operation, and Lucy’d dug herself in, there was one area in particular where we could always be completely confident that we had no idea at all what she would do next, and that was betting on the Massachusetts State Lottery. We knew she would most likely do it, but only if she felt like it. We didn’t know what made her feel like it. We couldn’t keep track of it. There wasn’t any pattern. She didn’t really have any system, although naturally she claimed she did. She’d bet the three-digit and the four-digit Daily Numbers, exact order, any order, all those variations, but she didn’t bet them every day, and on the days she did bet, almost never the same number two days in a row. The way I guess most gamblers do: choose a number and that then becomes their number, their birthday or the registration on their car, and then they stick to it for years, day in, day out, until they die. But not Virginia. If it was the same number she’d bet the day before, she very seldom bet it in the same way. It was never clear to Tory what’d prompted her to do yesterday what she had no intention of doing, wouldn’t’ve heard of doing, today. Unless it was something one of her consultants, one of her spirit-visitors, ’d suggested overnight. And of course, as you might’ve guessed, there was absolutely, positively, no way in the world of ever knowing how much she’d bet, or whether she’d won or lost.
“It was Instrument Flight Rules all the time when you flew with her, and your instruments were always on the fritz. She might or she might not bet Mass Millions, or Mass Cash. Then again, she might decide to pass up all those big-jackpot scams and instead have Lucy get her a whole wad of those evil scratch-’n-sniffs, the instant-game cards, insidious little sucker-bets they peddle to the clinically-, pathologically-, terminally-ignorant pigeons, at a buck or so a whack—they’ve got one that goes for five, dude, five whole fuckin’ dollars, for a sucker bet—our good old, righteous, ‘One and Only,’ Con-man-wealth of Massachusetts, at the top of the ethical game. Good old Reverend Cotton Mather must be spinnin’ now, boys, screamin’ in his crypt there like a double-overhead full-race cam on a Top-Eliminator Fuel-A dragster when the Christmas tree goes down and it’s runnin’ low on oil. ‘When the Mafia does it, it’s criminal, boys, and it’s your damned job to go out there and catch ’em. But when Holy State does it, it’s all right. It’s grand. It’s the purtiest thang inna world. ’Cause our intentions are good, and our hearts, they are pure, and you can believe this, law says so, and we are the ones write the laws. So we just can’t ever be wrong.’ But regardless of what Virginia’s choice turned out to be, you wouldn’t’ve known in advance, and you couldn’t’ve known, either. Because she didn’t. And that meant you’d never know from day to day or week to week, month to month or year to year, how much she was spending. Read: losing. How much she’d won if she won. So consequently you had
absolutely no way to estimate how much she’d be likely to throw away next week, next month, or next year, on this gambling obsession of hers. And that was just what she wanted.
“The old bat was crafty, you see. She may’ve been daffy, or heading in that direction, but she was still very sneaky, just as devious as she could be. Her Stanley’d been an accountant, an accountant to the rich. Well, some of those rich people were also dotty, and many times he’d served as a court-appointed conservator for some old bastard millionaire who’d gone silly over his twenty-year-old housekeeper and was about to deed to her—or him; not all of the dotty old moguls were men, and some of those who otherwise resembled men liked the sweet boys just as much as the softheaded old ladies did—his mineral rights to the whole of Venezuela if this new sexual toy’d promise to French-kiss and hand-job him to sleep at his naptime every day, until he went to meet Jesus. Virginia knew all about the dodge that the heirs-expectant used then, thank you very much; her late Stan’d received many a retainer after some mogul’s nervous relatives’d been to court and convinced a judge that their poor old Uncle Bosely’d lost his marbles, and really needed a keeper or he’d give the ranch away. Virginia’d have none of that foolishness. Tory might know to the penny how much Stan’d left the old lady, and she might know, too, how much it cost Virginia to live—docs, medicines, home maintenance, heat, lights, and so forth—but until she could prove to a judge that what Mom was pissing away on Lucy’s pay, and Lucy’s keep, and the Lottery, all together’d reached critical mass, the point where it was endangering her ability to remain self-sufficient, no self-respecting person in a black dress on any bench in a court of law was going to rule that the old lady’d forfeited her God-given right to make as big a reasonably-limited damned fool of herself as her time on earth permitted.
“And so, to our low-grade despair,” Dennison had said, “the old lady did persist in her bad habits, shrugging off our more-than-occasional heavy hints that the Lottery’s a mug’s game, appealing only to the innocents who think that three-card monte’s a square shake, and they know they’ll beat it some day, maybe Tuesday will be, their Goodnews-day, and then one Wednesday night, just as we sat down to a late dinner in our old new, or former modern, house, that we actually liked,—the one we’d picked out for ourselves, in convenient Canton—the old bat called up and told us she’d just won the fucking thing.”
“No shit,” Dell’Appa had said. “She won the Lottery?”
“No shit,” Dennison had said. “And no kidding, either. Virginia, bless her heart, hit a Quik-Pik Megabucks for three million American dollars. Apparently the consultants’ vision of the future wasn’t sharp enough to let them see ahead of time exactly what numbers would come up, but it was zoomed in good enough to tell them when Virginia’s stars and planets were so perfectly aligned that the Lottery machine itself would pick the winning number for her, if she made nice and asked it. And so that was what she’d done, or she’d had Lucy do: Ask the simpering machine to pick a winner for her, and that’s precisely what the dear, dear thing’d gone right to work and done. To the lilting tune of three million smackeroos. Guess it pays to have Poe in for tea. Or maybe it was U. S. Grant who told her. We never did narrow it down there.”
“If it was Grant, by God,” Dell’Appa said, “it wasn’t tea she had him in for.”
Dennison laughed. “No,” he said, “but it didn’t really matter. She enjoyed them all, all the people who climbed up into her spiritual tree-house. And she did win three million bucks. Hard to argue with results.”
“Paid out over twenty years, right?” Dell’Appa had said.
“Right,” Dennison had said, “but it gets a little more complicated than that. What they do, the people at the Lottery, they buy annuities for the winners that over the course of those twenty years will deliver equal annual payments that add up to the amount of the jackpot. For three million, it’s a hundred-fifty large each year. But that’s before taxes, State and federal, which get deducted first, before the winners get their checks. In Virginia’s case, what they figured’d be about right to de-duct and with-hold was fifty-two-five K, leaving a net check of ninety-seven-five. Which, with the interest rate where it was when Virginia scored the booty, would’ve been the annual yield on a little over one-point-two mill, not three million, if you’d invested the money in a solid twenty-year mortgage. Not only does the State con you into making the sucker-bet in the first place; if by some prank of fate it turns out you actually won, you get conned again on how much.”
“But still, wholesome walking-around money,” Dell’Appa had said. “Nine-seven-five ain’t no whale shit.”
“Oh, most certainly not,” Dennison had said, “but the plot, as dey say, continued to ticken, dere, and it developed that the check that Virginia would get each year after taxes would be forty-eight, seven-fifty.”
“As in forty-eight-thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars?” Dell’Appa had said. “If I am not mistaken that would be precisely half of the ninety-seven-five left in the pot after the taxes came out.”
“Exactly,” Dennison had said.
“You’re not gonna tell me,” Dell’Appa had said.
“Do I need to?” Dennison had said. “For the record, okay, maybe I should. But it’s really not necessary. She said she and Lucy’d agreed to split their tickets, any winnings that they got. ‘One of us wins, we both win,’ Virginia said. ‘Neither one of us loses alone.’ ”
“Very cosy,” Dell’Appa had said.
“Oh, absolutely heart-warming,” Dennison had said. “Although actually, if it’d just been that, the two old ladies turning into high-rollers, advised by Alexander Hamilton and FDR, in their sunset years, it would’ve been just fine. And it was unquestionably very nice for Virginia and for Lucy, too, as long as Virginia was alive, because it meant that what she’d thought all along she could do, but couldn’t really’ve managed, on what Stan’d left her for money—support Lucy living with her—she now really could do. And that made her happy, which from our selfish point of view was also a very fine thing—happy old people’re just like happy middle-aged people, and happy young people, and happy-dear, little children: much less trouble to their kinfolk than unhappy old people. No, the real trouble didn’t begin until later, after Virginia’d cooked up the house idea and decided there was no reason why she couldn’t finally have, at seventy-nine, the house she’d always wanted since she was a blushing bride and she saw it one day with her husband, because his client owned it and Stan’d had to drive down to it to see the man. And goddamned if it wasn’t for sale, didn’t just happen to be on the market, asking-price: four-hundred, twenty-five-thousand, breathtaking, American, dollars.”
“My,” Dell’Appa had said.
“I should say so,” Dennison had said. “Now, praise God, by the time Virginia began to hatch this harebrained plot of hers, we’d managed after much exertion to get it through her head that the Lottery folks hadn’t really screwed up, and she more or less understood that she hadn’t really been supposed to’ve gotten her whole mill and a half in one swell foop, and the way that they were proposing to pay her off was not only the way they paid off all the big winners, every time; it was also perfectly legal. She still thought it was also a perfectly rotten trick to pull on the people who bought tickets on million-dollar raffles thinking they would get a million dollars all at once if they should win, and I’ve got to say that even Tory and I found it pretty hard to argue with her on that point, but she did still have it straight that that was the way they were going to do it, and it was not against the law. So, when she found out that the castle of Chillon was for sale, the very same house that she’d visited with her Stanley back when his rich-oddball rug-merchant client was not only living in his dream-house but running his business from it, she went into the whole adventure knowing that she’d have to get a mortgage. Which for a woman in her very late seventies, even one who’s just hit the Lottery for a one-half, after-tax share of almost forty-nine K a year, is
no mean trick to pull off. For some reason or another, bankers and other lenders—even those extremely-shifty fellows doing business out of low-rent, store-front offices in cinderblock shopping plazas that aren’t quite making it and depend on late-night, home-shopping channel, cable-TV advertising to drum up business for them—for some reason or another all of these people are very reluctant to write twenty- and thirty-year paper for people much past, say, forty birthdays or so.
“ ‘They say they won’t consider anything over ten years, even though we’ve got all that jackpot money,’ she told Tory. See, the cock-and-bull story she’d dreamed up for our benefit then was that she and Lucy were both going to be on the mortgage, so whatever the monthly payment turned out to be, each of them would be paying half that. And the plan was that she would make a will leaving Lucy enough from her share of the winnings to cover her half of the mortgage if she turned out to be the one who died first—which it sort of figured she would be, since Lucy at the time was a spry young seventy-two-year-old, as lively as a squirrel. But for some reason or another, which Virginia never did manage to explain to Tory’s complete understanding, Lucy didn’t want to be listed as co-owner on the deed, which we both thought was kind of a strange attitude for a mortgage borrower to have, even when the borrower was an ignorant, unsophisticated, simple elderly lady from the bayou country. I mean, commit yourself to paying two, maybe three, thousand dollars a month, debt and taxes on a great big fancy house, and then turn around and say you want no part nor share of ownership? That you could pass on to your dear kinfolk? Well, hard as we found it to believe, according to Virginia that was Lucy’s wish. She wanted it instead all to go to Tory and me, when she went to Jesus, if Virginia’d died first. Partly because Virginia’d be putting what she got from the sale of the Taunton house, that Tory’d expected to inherit someday, into the Westport Disaster, and partly to show how much she admired us, for taking care of ’Ginia.