Fly Paper

10

Carol said, “I wish I was going with you.”

Ken made a face at her in the bedroom mirror, as if to say, Don’t be ridiculous, and went on strapping the emergency parachute to his stomach, over his black cotton pullover. On the bed, closed, locked, was the suitcase with the fake bomb in it. The suitcase was a cheap, tan overnight bag they’d picked up at a discount department store. “Picked up” was literally right: Ken had shoplifted the suitcase, much to Carol’s discomfort, and the thought of that afternoon, several weeks ago, still gave her something of a chill.

Ken had said he didn’t want to leave anything behind that could be traced to him, and he felt purchasing any such items locally would be dangerous. Carol didn’t agree: the items he had in mind (the suitcase, some clothes, a wig) could be purchased at any large chain store and should be virtually untraceable. How could you tell, for example, which of the hundreds of thousands of stores an overnight bag had been purchased from?

But Ken had poured out a stream of double-talk, saying many items were code-marked for certain distribution areas, and skyjacking was a federal offense of the most serious nature, and those FBI men can trace a piece of string to the shirt on your back and blah blah blah. Carol didn’t believe any of it, but realized that Ken probably didn’t either. There was some secret reason he hadn’t divulged to her yet for his going one hundred miles to a discount department store to purchase the items at all: he was going to shoplift them — a bit of news he saved for Carol until they were parked in the discount store’s huge parking lot.

“You will cover for me,” he said. “Make sure none of the floor-walkers or sales people see me.”

“But Ken... this is crazy.”

She looked across the sea of cars — it was Saturday, and the only parking space they’d found was at the rear of the endless lot — and even from this distance the store looked gigantic, some grotesque national monument to commercialism. Though the massive building was a pinkish brick, its face was primarily steel-trimmed glass, topped with enormous neon letters that said BARGAIN CITY. She knew, without ever having been in there, that those rows and rows of doors would open onto an entryway big enough to put their house in, an entryway lined with bubble gum machines and armed guards.

Wasn’t Saturday the worst possible day to go shoplifting? All those people? All those people were precisely why Saturday was ideal, Ken said; there’d be too many people for store personnel to keep track of. Carol didn’t quite buy that line of reasoning, either, but she went along with Ken. When push came to shove, she always went along with Ken.

She realized it wasn’t stylish these days to let your husband — or any man — control your life. But she wasn’t a liberated woman, and had no desire to be one. That point of view came from being the last of six children, she supposed, all the rest of whom were boys. She’d been the little sis, and she and her mother had lived in the shadow of her father and his five sons. And it hadn’t been so bad. Being the only sister of five brothers had plenty of advantages, and she was the baby of the family besides and accordingly was awarded extra attention: on a holiday, she’d get more gifts, more kisses, than anyone.

Still, a big part of her childhood had been learning to keep her place. As the youngest child, you learned that anyway, and as the youngest and a girl, you got used to having your life controlled for you; your decisions made for you; your thinking done for you. You got used to having men dominate your world.

Ken had been just the kind of man she was used to. They’d met at a junior college in their hometown, in downstate Missouri, and he had been the firm but gentle sort of guy she’d been looking for, always. It hadn’t been hard to grab him; she was aware of her good looks, and Ken was a loner whose nonconformist ways had turned off most of the girls he’d dated — he’d rather spend Friday night working on some electronics project than at a movie, say, or a dance. He had a quiet strength she liked, and he was cute, and while he wasn’t thoughtful, he certainly wasn’t cruel. Besides, she was used to having self-centered men around her. Wasn’t that the way of all men? The ones worth having, anyway.

There was a side to Ken that bothered her, when she got to know him better; but she’d cherished the flaw in him, rather than rejected him because of it. By the time she noticed his weak spot, she was already hopelessly in love with him, so her reaction was positive: the flaw in Ken was something she could, in her quiet way, help him with; she could give him the encouragement to overcome his one weakness.

His weakness was that he had a tendency not to finish things. He had a fine mind, brilliant, really; he could do most anything. But his mind moved so quickly, his enthusiasm shifted so rapidly, that he often did not complete what he’d started. He’d flunked out of the junior college, primarily because he had no interest in the subjects he was taking, and one just doesn’t flunk out of J.C. — J.C. is where a person goes ’cause he might flunk out (or already had) someplace else.

After they were married, Ken had gone to Greystoke Teacher’s College, while Carol worked as a secretary and helped put him through, and he finally graduated after an extra semester. Greystoke was an expensive school that ate up much of what Ken’s parents had left him, not to mention most of Carol’s weekly paycheck; but Greystoke was a special sort of college, a school for students who hadn’t hacked it elsewhere, an educational court of last resort, guaranteed to graduate its enrollees. Mostly rich kids from back east made use of Greystoke, just so they could pick up a token degree. Some years it was accredited, others it was not. Fortunately for Ken, his was one of the accredited years, though with the school’s poor reputation, it hardly mattered. Not that the odds of landing a good job with a Greystoke degree were bad; why, they were excellent — provided you were the son of some tycoon.

So she’d watched, reluctantly, while Ken took the salesman job, selling Florida real estate with a pitch that included a free meal and the showing of a film. Ken would go into towns of medium size, mostly, with the dinner invitations already sent out, and proceed with his routine. He didn’t know where the company got its mailing lists, but the prospects who attended the dinners were excellent, couples nearing retirement who were ripe for a good land offer. It was a lucrative field, though Carol was bothered by the fact that the company sales pitch sounded uncomfortably like a con game. Ken assured her it was on the up and up. And she’d finally been convinced, because after all, hadn’t the sales executive invited them to Florida to give Ken a first-hand look at the land he was selling? And they’d gone, they’d seen it; it was gorgeous land; they’d bought a chunk of it themselves.

Of course, that had been part of the deal: Ken had to invest in a lot of his own and become a stockholder, purchasing a specified minimum number of shares. That had taken the last of the money his parents had left him — just over ten thousand dollars. But what better investment was there than land?

This time Ken hadn’t been a quitter, and Carol had been so proud of him. For three years he sold the lots, and he and Carol racked up quite a savings — as one of the company’s top salesmen, Ken was regularly offered stock options, and they fed over half of Ken’s earnings into Dream-Land. And they’d bought the house in Canker with a bank loan, choosing the quiet little town so they could be close enough to Carol’s family to make visiting easy, but far enough away to enjoy privacy. Ken’s plan was to keep selling for another three years, and then they’d have amassed enough stock for him to borrow against and open up a small TV and radio repair shop, which would be ideal for him and for Carol, too, who didn’t like sharing her husband with the road.

Ken’s investment of his time and money had assured Carol that her husband’s flaw — that tendency not to finish what he started, which came from a certain immaturity — was now a thing of the past, a wound healed over, with not even a sign of scar tissue.

But wounds can open up after the longest time, if enough pressure is applied to them. And pressure in this instance emerged in the form of Ken’s aptly named parent company, Florida Dream-Land Realtors.

Part of Ken’s pitch had included pointing out that, while the cash outlay for a piece of Dream-Land land was amazingly low, that low price was made possible by holding off actual development of the land, actual building of homes, until 70 percent of the lots had been sold. Of course, a buyer couldn’t be expected to wait forever for his home and his land, so a projected date (five years hence, from Dream-Land’s first sale) was set for development to begin. This was guaranteed; either said development began, or the buyer’s money would be returned, with the buyer retaining full ownership of his lot.

All of which sounded swell, both to salesmen like Ken and to prospective buyers, most of whom were far enough away from retirement that waiting a few years for their dream land was no problem. Five years wasn’t so long.

But long enough for a swindle.

Plenty long enough for that. Oh, the land was down there, all right; everybody who bought a lot owned a slice of Florida land. But not the land in the film Ken had shown to the people at the invitation-only dinners; not the land the sales exec had pointed out to Ken and Carol on their trip down there. The land in the film, the land the exec pointed out, belonged to somebody else.

Dream-Land was Florida land, too.

Swampland.

Uninhabitable damn swampland that could gag an alligator; dream land that was a nightmare. And Ken and all the other salesmen and the folks they’d sold the land to, all of them, were stuck in that swamp up to their rears.

The only happy aspect was that Ken himself, and most of the other salesmen, were in no way liable for the fraud perpetrated; they, like everybody in it (except the Dream-Land wheels) were the butt of the joke.

So there they sat, in Canker, Missouri, with over three years of their lives wasted, no savings, not a damn thing — except a mortgaged house and plans that had fizzled into nothing.

But you can always make new plans, and Ken came up with one. Carol hadn’t liked it from the outset, but what could she say? Ken was, after all, the man of the house.

But sometimes bowing to every wish of the “man of the house” could go too far. She shouldn’t be expected to do something she would hate herself for doing. Like helping him on this crazy skyjacking thing. Even aiding and abetting his silly, stupid shoplifting. There just wasn’t any sane reason for it; no logic to it. And besides, she didn’t for the life of her see how he was going to get the shoplifting done. He had picked the suitcase up first, actually just tucked it under his arm, then strolled around the store, and while she kept an eye peeled, he’d slipped the various items in: curly brown wig, some sunglasses, green corduroy shirt, and some jeans.

“How are you going to get past the registers?” she asked him.

“Just watch,” he said, and headed to the front of the store. There was a coffee shop up on the right, off to one side of the rows of check-out counters. They sat in a booth in the shop, and Ken carefully drew a folded-up sack from his pocket, a large sack with the discount store’s name on it. He put the suitcase inside. When that was done, she followed as he slid past the check-out counters, mixing in with the shoppers pouring out of them, and with the suitcase-in-sack snugly under his arm, went out the door.

Past several armed guards who were standing by that door for the express purpose of nabbing shop-lifters. No one questioned him. Nothing.

In the car, she found she was panting. Sweat was rolling down her cheeks, though the day was a cool, overcast one. “What would you have done,” she managed to ask, “if someone stopped you?”

“I was prepared for that,” he said, the tone of his voice implying he’d almost been hoping for that, as well. “I had a story ready.”

“What kind of story?”

‘That I’d seen a lady drop this package in the coffee shop and was going out into the lot after her, to give her her package.”

“But there would be no sales slip in the sack.”

“So what? It was her package, not mine.”

“Do you think they would have believed you, Ken? Do you honestly think they would’ve believed you?”

“Been interesting to find out, wouldn’t it?”

They drove fifty miles and then Ken stopped for lunch, but Carol didn’t order anything. Her stomach was still jumping. All the while, sitting in the car, she’d been expecting a highway patrol car to come screaming up behind them. The heavyset Broderick Crawford cop would say, “Okay kids, let’s have a look at that suitcase there in the back seat.” He had never shown up, of course, but he was there in her mind, the cop and his car and siren and gun.

Finally, she consented to a grilled cheese sandwich, which she nibbled at. She said, “I never stole anything before, Ken.”

And Ken looked at her, and there was something in his eyes, a damn twinkling in his eyes. He grinned and said, “Me neither.”

There it was: the reason. The secret purpose of the trip. The skyjacking he’d been planning, this new, obscenely dangerous project, this terrifyingly large-scale crime he was going to commit, was the first time he’d ever even contemplated breaking the rules.

Ken. Conservative Ken. Arrow-straight Ken. It was quite a leap from shoplifter to skyjacker, but an even bigger one from Eagle Scout to skyjacker. She understood that now.

She understood that in a crazy way the shoplifting had been a trial run, as well as an absurd ritual of self-initiation; that had Ken been caught and been unable to bluff his way out of the situation, he would have taken it as, well a sign, an indication from somewhere that he was in way over his head. That this should be another project left unfinished.

But he hadn’t been caught, and here they were, weeks later, the skyjack plan finally going into effect.

Ken seemed very calm, the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the filmy pink curtains of the bedroom window and bathing him in a golden, contented glow; he seemed almost peaceful, as he neatly assembled himself, climbing into the green shirt, which fit over the chute as though he had a paunch. It was as if he was assembling the components of one of his electronics gadgets. Could he really be so cool? Carol wondered. Did that silly afternoon of shoplifting free him so from worry?

She wouldn’t be free from worry, not until she had him back again, in their house, in this bed. Her only consolation was that the bomb in the stolen suitcase was a dummy. Carol wondered for a moment why Ken would have spent so much time building a mock bomb into the suitcase. This, like his shoplifting escapade, was almost eccentric aspect to the “project” that Carol would never completely understand. She just took comfort in knowing that her Ken could never really hurt anybody, let alone blow up a planeload of people.

She touched his shoulder, caught his eyes in the mirror, and held them. “Maybe something will happen. Something you haven’t thought of. Maybe... maybe we won’t ever see each other again.”

This time he really made a face. This time he said it out loud: “Don’t be ridiculous.”

And he looked away.

Fifteen minutes later, they were in the car, and she was driving him the eight miles to a town where no one knew them, where he could catch the bus to Detroit. She felt uncomfortable in the driver’s seat.