Big If Page 2

  Carol Cooper was standing on her diving board in short shorts and a big straw hat, vacuuming her pool.

  “See?” said Walter. “Everything is fine.”

  Vi was nine when her father finally let her go on his adjusting trips. They got up in darkness, preparing for the trips. Vi was in the kitchen, packing sandwiches with Evelyn, luncheon loaf and mayo, an apple for each bag. Walter was upstairs, ironing a crease into his pants. Jens was in his room, hunting for a missing sneaker, half asleep. Walter found him in the closet, curled up among the shoes, and led him like a blind man down the stairs. Vi watched her brother fake his way through breakfast, a fork clutched in his lap, one eye slowly closing, the other eye a slit, his black hair sticking up, a head of exclamation points, his face sleep-dopey and unpunctuated. Evelyn told Jens to eat something. Jens went through the motions, lifting a glass of juice to his nose, biting his waffle, but not chewing. The waffle bite would still be in his mouth as they backed down the driveway, following the inland shore of the heart-shaped marsh, a curve of misty streetlights to I-95. Fifty miles later, heading to Berlin as the sun was coming up, Vi would hear Jens chewing waffle in the front seat and know that he was finally awake.

  They went everywhere one summer. They covered the whole state, stopping off in county seats and depot towns. Vi at nine saw things she didn’t understand—a farmhand with one foot, a school without a roof, a golf pro dead from lightning, still grasping the flag.

  They saw a paper train derailed outside Berlin. It was timber country up there on the border with Quebec. Berlin was a pulping town, her father said. The wood came in as trees or logs and left as paper by the ton, rolling south along a spur to the Gorham switches. The system went in two directions after that, east along a stony river into Maine or through the mountain notches to St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

  It was hot that day. Jens sat in the front seat of Walter’s car, counting seven jackknifed flatcars with his finger, until he couldn’t see past them to the rest. Vi leaned out the window. She saw giant reams of paper unrolled to where they stopped, paper in the gully, on the dirt road, in the woods.

  Walter stood on the embankment with the men and mangled train. The men wore suits and ties, or sheriff’s uniforms, or dressed like they worked on the trains. They smoked and spat and pushed their hats back. One of them looked up the tracks and said it was a doozie.

  The others said, “Uh-huh,” and “That’s a fact.”

  A man in a white suit said, “What do you think, Walter?” This man was the superintendent of the line. He had flown up from the Maine Central yard in Portland in a bubble helicopter—Vi was totally impressed—yet even this man waited on her father. Walter Asplund had adjusted most of the noteworthy damage around here going back twenty years and was known to be a reasonable man. He didn’t say too much, but when he spoke he spoke for The Connecticut.

  The super said, “What are we looking at, you think?”

  Walter was looking at the paper in the woods. He said, “You got the fees and spoilage, the rolling stock—”

  “Total write-off,” someone said.

  “Mm-hm,” the others said.

  “Two men hurt,” the super said. “One fatally. Don’t forget.”

  Walter saw it all. He would not be rushed, he would not forget. He sidestepped down the bank, laid his suit coat on the front seat of the car.

  “You kids okay?”

  Vi said, “We’re okay.”

  Jens said, “What happened, Dad?”

  Walter stood by the door, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs with a dainty plucking motion. “Not too hot in there?”

  Vi said, “We’re okay.”

  He rolled his sleeves up, took his time. The men were watching him.

  He said, “Let me know if you get too hot. Dogs die in overheated cars, you know.”

  The trunk was loaded with the tools of his profession: a bulky camera with a flash, a hundred feet of tape, a wheel on a stick that also measured distance, an adding machine with a roll of paper, spare rolls of paper, a manual typewriter, a bag of flares and stakes, ledger paper, carbon paper, many pads of legal forms, a reel-to-reel recorder, coiled rope, a notary stamp, and a wide flat book, maroon leather, embossed in gold THE CONNECTICUT. Inside the book were blank checks the color of the ocean on a map. The book in the trunk was power. A check from the book was called a settlement. This was what adjusters did, settle or not settle or settle partially, after taking pictures and measuring distances and interviewing witnesses in county seats and depot towns, at train wrecks in the north. Vi felt the bounce as he shut the trunk.

  Coming back from Walter’s trips, they always stopped at the Boyles’ house. Phil Boyle was a man about her father’s age, a prosperous mortician-politician, a pillar in his parish and a power in the town. The Boyles lived above their mortuary, a mansard rampart fortress on the shady, stonewalled corner of Main and Derry Turnpike. In the summer, Walter and Phil Boyle would sit out back at the picnic table, drinking coffee in their shirtsleeves. They would talk about the things they had in common, family, taxes, politics. Boyle the mortician was her father’s closest friend, but he always frightened Vi. His hair was black, his suits were black, his winter hats were Homburgs, black, and his hands were long and liver-spotted gray. He always smelled like flowers and he took his coffee black, stirring for no reason Vi could see, the memory of milk, and even the insects were afraid of him. He had served a term for the machine in the state legislature, the lower house, and even in high hatching season, with the salt pond through the pines, Vi never saw him swat at even one blackfly. She believed that he was death itself, living in her town. She stayed by her father on their visits, protecting him from Boyle’s undertow.

  Jens stayed in the car, reading Mathemagic, or he ventured out and stood on the edge of the long driveway, watching Boyle’s sons play H-O-R-S-E against the three-hearse garage. Boyle had four sons, scrappy, loud, athletic boys, groomed and destined to be preppy undertakers. The Boyle boys played H-O-R-S-E and many variations, S-M-E-G-M-A, M-U-C-U-S, S-P-U-T-U-M—being sons of a mortician, they had an interest in effluvia and knew all the latest gross-out words. Jens, standing on the grass, watched the active Boyle boys. Jens looked like a Martian, like an aphid, like another life form altogether.

  Peta Boyle was the mortician’s daughter, a year ahead of Vi in school. Peta’s full name was Petulia Marguerite, but if you called her anything but Pet (her family nickname) or Peta (as in, pet a pet), she was apt to call you something nasty back. Vi and Peta ran through sprinklers or played hide-and-seek.

  The oak tree by the table was their counting place. Vi would shut her eyes and kiss the bark as Peta hid. Vi counted, One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, nonsense numbers used by children not to measure time, but to pass it. It took a second to say one-thousand, roughly equal to a Mississippi. Peta in her yellow dress slipped between the trees. She was never any good at hiding. Vi knew even as she counted (six one-thousand, seven—) that Peta would hide behind the metal garden shed. Vi finds her without trying, and now Peta’s kissing bark, one one-thousand, two one-thousand. Peta searches down the yard, but Vi’s already gone and now Peta’s crying in the doorway of the shed. Boyle’s boys are fighting, who’s a S-M-E-G and who’s a S-M-E-G-M. Jens hikes, slope-shouldered, up the drive, as the fathers talk about their common things, business, children, politics, undertaking, underwriting.

  Vi traveled with her father in the summer and when school was out. She remembered paper trains and tractor-trailers overturned, but of all the things she saw, the fires in the houses made the permanent impression. It was always a slum bungalow by the harbor in the town. Lobstermen lived back there. Coming up the street in her father’s car, Vi saw the wooden parlor traps stacked in the backyards for the winter, the trap-towers bigger than the houses.

  It was always Christmas, always cold, and the fires always started in the plug behind the tree. What the fire didn’t total, the firefighters did, with their boots and pikes and
high-pressure hoses. Vi and her father usually arrived after the fire marshals had declared the fire out. By then, the water-slurry-foam, dripping from the eaves and the bare trees in the street, had frozen into huge smooth cookie-batter oozes, rounded, sparkling, fanciful, a wonderland in what was once the family room. They toured the ground floor with a flashlight and a magic guide named Mullen from the county arson squad. Not that this was arson or suspicious-origin. Mullen pointed to the dangling remains of the wall outlet, noting the char-path to the stairs, black and straight, like a road. Fires are intelligent. They process information. Where is air? Where is fuel? They burn and decide. They act and choose a path.

  Mullen had a scratchy cough and offered them Sucrets. He took one for himself and said the kids’ rooms were closest to the landing on the stairs, one of them’s at Shriners, the other one’s okay. Mullen said the tree, the creche, all the window candles, and a motorized reindeer on the lawn were pulling power through extensions from the plug behind the tree, that one there—see it, Walt? Clearly fiddled with, goddamn do-it-yourselfers. Note the tool marks on the wall, wires probably heated. The drapes were made of rayon and the tree was dry.

  “Poof,” said Mullen quietly.

  Walter asked for light. Mullen put the beam on the tool marks. Walter took a picture with a flash.

  This was Christmas, growing up—a restless week away from school, the whole town snowbound, the beaches battered, empty.

  Walter in the den wore his cardigan. He hunted through the dial for a single station not playing Perry Como Christmas hits.

  Evelyn was in the kitchen, slow-basting a pork loin. She said, “Oh for Pete’s sake, Walt, get off your high horse. Let’s have a carol, just this once. It’s Christmas and the melodies are pretty.”

  Vi stood on a chair at the kitchen table, pushing cookie cutters into dough, first circles and then stars. Jens was on the shoveled driveway, trying to enlist one of the Dingos in a game of fetch. Jens threw a tennis ball. Dingo watched it bounce away. Jens chased the ball and threw again. Dingo loved this game.

  Evelyn sang along with Perry Como. Hark! The herald angels sing glory to the newborn king…

  Her voice was light and high and surprisingly pretty. She said, “It brings me back to dear old Braintree. Push a little harder, Vi.”

  Vi’s mother was a Randle from Braintree, Massachusetts, and Dear Old Braintree was a phrase she used to indicate a world, Boston’s lost South Shore of 1951. Every family had a maid, dinner was at six, potatoes were ubiquitous and mashed. Every mother wore a fur and every father took the Boston-Maine, which they never called the B&M, sounded smelly somehow, and Vi’s Grampa Randle manned the fearless masthead of the town newspaper, battling corruption and cupidity not just in Braintree but in Hingham too.

  Walter said, “It’s a song about singing about nonsense. Why would it bring you anywhere?”

  Evelyn was talking to her daughter now. “We used to sing those songs, Vi. I remember standing on the green with my Walker cousins. I remember Dolly Davis at the dancing school. I remember going shopping with my mother at Filene’s. Their Santa was an Irish drunk, poor wretch, probably had a shameful secret on his conscience. Mother took me on the train and did it snow. They had to send a special train to get us, Vi. Us, of course, being every Tom, Dick, and Harry stranded on the platform at South Station, but secretly I thought the train had come for me. We filed on, Mother and I, with boxes for my brothers and a special box for me. Didn’t know what was in it. Suspected tap shoes. Dreaded that. The train they sent was wonderful, great curved plates in front, like an ocean liner’s prow, and this other thing, a huge caged fan, bigger than our car, like an ocean liner’s screw. What was this special train? A ship on land with its propeller on the front, and we blew through the snow, and Father picked us up, and I remember how warm it was, the kitchen.”

  Vi said, “What was in the box?”

  “A muffler,” said Evelyn. “The kind you wear around your neck.”

  They heard Jens out back shouting, “You stupid goddamn dog.”

  Walter suffered Perry Como in the den. He said, “The melodies are pretty, but the words—they ruin it for me.”

  Evelyn said, “Don’t listen to the words.”

  There was silence for a time as Walter tried. He called around the corner, “How the hell do you do that?”

  They ate the loin for supper, bowing their heads as Walter read a short reflection by Mr. H. G. Wells. Later they opened gifts, which Walter said was their way of honoring the dignity of humankind.

  “Whoop-de-doo,” said Evelyn, raising her wineglass in a sarcastic toast.

  Vi knew the truth—it was Jesus getting born. She had heard this from Peta Boyle, who wore a kilt to school.

  Walter said that Jesus was a cherished symbol of the dignity of humankind.

  Peta said that Jesus was the biggest baby ever.

  The day they saw the paper train derailed outside Berlin was the last insurance trip Jens ever went on. He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves. Jens abandoned his old loves together in a week, ham radio and hurricanes, playing ball with dogs, riding to disasters with his sister and his dad. His new love was a beaker storage closet in the science lab at Center Effing High where the teachers kept a slow acoustic modem which connected Jens to a Hexatron 1000 timeshare mainframe donated to the high school by a company in town. The rig was obsolete even then, but Jens was changed forever. He ran models of the Big Bang (which was, he told Vi, like a train wreck in the sky, vast and long ago, zillions of times bigger than all hurricanes combined). He played Zorc and Space War down the phone lines with his friends and came across a book on how to program in Beginning Glyph, which was, he said, a computer language, like logic or like math, except it’s language, it’s you telling the computer what to do. He spent a summer getting paler in the beaker storage closet. He came out in September with his masterpiece, a program he called JENSISNUMBER1.exe, which caused a distant printer to spit out the sentence JENS IS NUMBER 1!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  He went on to bigger things from there. He learned COBOL, FORTRAN, C, the upper dialects of Glyph. He built his own computer from a kit, sold his Hallicrafter and his weather instruments to buy a faster modem, and would probably have taken his computer to the prom if he had even noticed that the high school had a prom. He went to high school two years early. At seventeen, he went to Dartmouth, Walter’s alma mater, Walter’s father’s before that, the official college of male Asplunds in New Hampshire. Jens went to Dartmouth dreaming of inventions, of writing software that would change the world. Someday they would speak of the giants of computer science, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs, and Jens Asplund, father of the Jensatronic hyper-object language. Vi, who knew nothing about software except you couldn’t wear it, was glad enough to move her stuff to Jens’ empty bedroom, which was bigger and closer to the john.

  When her brother went away, Vi was into other, less momentous things, basketball and soccer, tan lines at the town beach, and a lifeguard in the tower who was sixteen and too gorgeous to approach. That was the last year Vi went on insurance trips with Walter.

  A cool October night, a town near Lebanon, New Hampshire, a small cement plant by the railroad tracks. Eight employees sat on vinyl chairs waiting to be interviewed by Walter and a man from the Byrnes Detective Agency in Boston. Whispers in the office. Money’s missing, two grand and change. The employees readjust the blinds, smoke and push their butts into stand-up ashtrays. The town is the cement plant, the cement plant is the town, and these people have lived here all their lives, but by the close of business one of them will be exposed as an embezzler and his life in town will end. Vi watched her father find a plug for his tape recorder.

  She remembered driving home that night. They saw the outline of the mountains and the stars. Her father kept it right at fifty-five.

  He said, “From time to time, those cement plants explode. Especially the older ones. It’s due
to inadequate ventilation. There was a horrible accident in Nashua once. Six men killed, a slew injured—first million-dollar loss I ever handled for the firm. Horrible. They thought some men were buried in the rubble. They listened to the ground with stethoscopes and tubes. They asked for total silence on the scene. Your mother was expecting, two weeks overdue. I called her from a pay phone and she said, ‘Come home. I feel a little woozy, Walt.’ That wooziness was you, Vi, saying you were on the way, but I couldn’t leave the accident. Stethoscopes and tubes—they listened through the night. They asked us to give blood. We lined up in total silence.”

  He looked worn out, driving home from Lebanon. Vi remembered thinking, he is old.

  “Small office frauds are the worst,” he said. “The pettiness, the fear, the cheap dishonesty. Doesn’t make you hopeful for the species, no. Give me an explosion any day.”

  One day about eighteen months ago, Vi was driving up I-95, thinking of these things, the saltbox on Santasket Road, the child’s little world, the Coopers and the Buckerts, Vi’s mother in the garden pruning roses, her father in the den with his insurance journals. Exit signs were floating by, Hampton, Exeter, Eatontown, and Rye. It was a summer weekend in July. Summer meant the beaches and the beaches would mean crowds, heavy traffic on the coast road up from Gloucester into Maine. Knowing this, Vi stayed on 95.

  She was twenty-five years old, a single woman living in New Jersey, working for the Secret Service in New York, Criminal Division, Treasury Enforcement. Her squad did counter-counterfeiting, though, as a trainee agent, she did everything, the scutwork of the station, long rolling tails, prisoner transport, petty counterfeiting stings, credit cards, cloned cell phones, fake ID, routine death-threat follow-up, interview a madman, finalize the time sheets, memo to the file, hot dogs in the street. She was a private in the infantry of fed-dom, a GS-5, one civil service notch above a common letter carrier, which was probably closer to the glamour level of her job.