Small Town

Should he have made a move? She was out the door before the possibility had even occurred to him, so it had never been an option, and it didn’t take much thought to realize it would have been a bad idea. He was with Roz, for one thing, and although there would never be anything romantic or sexual in their relationship, that didn’t mean he could abandon her and trot off after some tail-wagging cupcake. But even if the timing had been different, even if Susan had turned up as he was putting Roz in a cab, it still would have set the evening off in the wrong direction.

This wasn’t the night for a romp with a starfucker, however classy this one might be. This was a night to be spent exactly as he had spent it, first at the bar at Stelli’s, sharing laughs and insights with men who had suddenly become his peers, and then at home, by himself, to taper off with good whiskey and think through and relive the best day and night of his life.

He’d keep her card, though.

But where? It was all too easy to misplace things in his roomful of organized clutter, and he didn’t want to let it slide until calling her would be awkward. His memory might be spotty in the morning, and he might be like a squirrel who buried nuts and forgot where he’d buried them. You got a lot of trees planted that way, but in this instance, if you’d pardon the expression, he was more interested in getting his nut.

So the idea was not to make a point of remembering where he put the card, but to put it where he’d find it anyway. He could leave it on top of the computer keyboard, that would work, but then it would be in the way and he’d have to stick it somewhere, and he’d be back where he started from. But if he left it where it would not be in the way, but where he’d see it every day...

He opened his sock drawer, propped it on top of a pair of navy socks, and closed the drawer.

That did it, and now he could go to bed and dream whatever sort of dreams successful men dreamed. He wouldn’t set a clock, he’d wake up whenever the sun or his bladder woke him, and—

Wait a minute.

He’d seen something, got the merest glimpse of something, in his sock drawer. Or imagined it, some chimera hovering on the edge of thought and the periphery of his vision.

Forget it, he told himself, and go to sleep.

But it was still there in his mind’s eye when he got into bed, just a patch of color, really, but of a color that didn’t belong in a drawer full of socks that were almost all black or navy, with the rest brown or maroon. His white socks were in another drawer, with gym gear, because that was pretty much the only time he wore them. He was, you’d have to say, a dark socks kind of a guy, although — who knew? — he supposed that might change with success. He might turn out to be the sort of man who wore argyles, but up until now he’d been Mr. Dark Socks, so what would a hint of bright color be doing in his sock drawer?

He got up, switched on the light. Opened the drawer, and yes, Jesus, there it was, sitting between two pairs of socks as black as a murderer’s heart.

He drew it out and looked at it, a little turquoise rabbit, expertly carved by some fucking Indian with too goddamn much time on his hands.

eighteen

There was no dearth of information. You could sit in an Internet café and surf the Web for a modest hourly fee, and leave there knowing how to make nerve gas and botulin, how to construct all manner of bombs and incendiary devices. Even a nuclear bomb. Secrets that earned the death sentence for the Rosenbergs were readily available to anyone who knew how to use a computer and consult a search engine.

But what good did it do to know that a truck packed with a particular fertilizer and a particular detergent could bring down a building? If you were an older gentleman, living alone in a fourth-rate hotel room, how could you possibly assemble those components? Where would you get a truck, let alone its explosive contents?

A constitutional amendment guaranteed him the right to bear arms, and there were groups of men throughout the country who exercised that right to the fullest extent, equipping themselves with machine guns and automatic rifles, with bazookas and grenade launchers, with enough sophisticated weaponry and ammunition to unseat the government of Brazil. But could he walk into a store and buy a gun? Well, perhaps, if he rode a train to Virginia or North Carolina and back.

Practically speaking, though, he couldn’t buy a gun, he couldn’t purchase dynamite. He didn’t have access to a lab where he might produce some sort of biological or chemical weapon, or the opportunity to purchase the raw materials for them.

He had hands that could encircle a throat. There were stores that would sell him hammers and chisels and screwdrivers and charcoal lighter fluid. But now it was time for sacrifice on a larger scale, and the tools for such a sacrifice were impossible to obtain.

Fortunately, he was resourceful.