The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

The Good Samaritan by Thomas Mcguane

FROM The New Yorker

SZABO DIDN’T LIKE to call the land he owned and lived on a ranch-a word that was now widely abused by developers. He preferred to call it his property, or “the property,” but it did require a good bit of physical effort from him in the small window of time after he finished at the office, raced home, and got on the tractor, or, if he was hauling a load of irrigation dams, on the ATV. Sometimes he was so eager to get started that he left his car running. His activity on the property, which had led, over the years, to arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, one vertebral fusion, and mild hearing loss, thanks to his diesel tractor, yielded very little income at all and some years not even that-a fact that he did not care to dwell on.

He produced racehorse-quality alfalfa hay for a handful of grateful buyers, who privately thought he was nuts but were careful to treat his operation with respect, because almost no one else was still producing the small bales that they needed to feed their own follies. They were, most of them, habitués of small rural tracks in places such as Lewistown or Miles City, owners of one horse, whose exercise rider was either a daughter or a neighbor girl who put herself in the way of serious injury as the price of the owner’s dream. Hadn’t Seattle Slew made kings of a couple of hapless bozos?

Szabo was not nuts. He had long understood that he needed to do something with his hands to compensate for the work that he did indoors, and it was not going to be golf or woodworking. He wanted to grow something and sell it, and he wanted to use the property to do this. In fact, the work that he now did indoors had begun as manual labor. He had machined precision parts for wind generators for a company that subcontracted all the components, a company that sold an idea and actually made nothing. Szabo had long known that this approach was the wave of the future, without understanding that it was the wave of his future. He had worked very hard and his hard work had led him into the cerebral ether of his new workplace: now, at forty-five, he took orders in an office in a pleasant town in Montana, while his esteemed products were all manufactured in other countries. It was still a small, if prosperous, business, and it would likely stay small, because of Szabo’s enthusiasm for what he declined to call his ranch.

It wasn’t that he was proud of the John Deere tractor that he was still paying for and which he circled with a grease gun and washed down like a teenager’s car. He wasn’t proud of it: he loved it. There were times when he stood by his kitchen window with his first cup of coffee and gazed at the gleaming machine in the morning light. Even the unblemished hills of his property looked better through its windshield. The fact that he couldn’t wait to climb into it was the cause of the accident.

The hay, swathed, lay in windrows, slowly drying in the Saturday morning sun. Szabo had gone out to the meadows in his bathrobe to probe the hay for moisture and knew that it was close to ready for baling. The beloved tractor was parked at the foot of the driveway, as though a Le Mans start would be required once the hour came around and the moisture in the tender shoots of alfalfa had subsided, so that the hay would not spoil in the stacks. Szabo, now in jeans, tennis shoes, hooded sweatshirt, and baseball cap, felt the significance of each step as he walked toward the tractor, marveling at the sunlight on its green paint, its tires nearly his own height, its baler pert and ready. He reached for the handhold next to the door of the cab, stepped onto the ridged footstep, and pulled himself up, raising his left hand to open the door. Here his foot slid off the step, leaving him briefly dangling from the handhold. A searing pain informed him that he had done something awful to his shoulder. Releasing his grip, he fell to the driveway in a heap. The usually ambrosial smell of tractor fuel repelled him, and the towering green shape above him now seemed reproachful. Gravel pressed into his cheek.

As he lay in recovery, the morphine drip only prolonged his obsession with the unbaled hay, since it allowed him to forget about his shoulder, which he had come to think of not as his but as a kind of alien planet fastened to his torso, which glowed red like Mars, whirling with agony, as soon as the morphine ran low. It was a fine line: when he wheedled extra narcotic, his singing caused complaints and he got dialed back down to the red planet. Within a day, he grew practical and managed to call his secretary.

“Melinda, I’m going to have to find somebody for the property. I’ve got hay down and-”

“A ranch hand?”

“But just for a month or so.”

“Why don’t I call around?”

“That’s the idea. But not too long commitment-wise, okay? I may have to overpay for such a limited time.”

“It is what it is,” Melinda remarked, producing a mystification in Szabo that he ascribed to the morphine.

“Yes, sure,” Szabo said. “But time is of the essence.”

“You can say that again. Things are piling up. The guy in Germany calls every day.”

“I mean with the hay.”

Melinda was remarkably efficient, and she knew everyone in town. Her steadiness was indispensable to Szabo, who kept her salary well above temptation from other employers. By the next day she had found a few prospects for him. The most promising one, an experienced ranch hand from Wyoming, wore a monitoring ankle bracelet that he declined to explain, so he was eliminated. The next most promising, a disgruntled nursery worker, wanted permanent employment, so Szabo crossed him off the list, ignoring Melinda’s suggestion that he just fire him when he was through. That left a man called Barney, overqualified and looking for other work, but happy to take something temporary. He told Melinda that he was extremely well educated but “identified with the workingman” and thought a month or so in Szabo’s bunkhouse would do him a world of good. Szabo called Barney’s references from his hospital bed. He managed to reach only one, the wife of a dentist who ran a llama operation in Bozeman. Barney was completely reliable, she said, and meticulous: he had reshingled the tool shed and restacked their large woodpile in an intricate pattern-almost like a church window-and swept the sidewalk. “You could eat off it!” she said. Szabo got the feeling that Mrs. Dentist had been day-drinking. Her final remark confused him. “Nobody ever did a better job than Barney!” she said, laughing wildly. “He drove us right up the wall!”

Szabo took a leap of faith and hired him over the phone. The news seemed not to excite Barney. “When do you want me to start?” he droned. After the call, Szabo gazed at his phone for a moment, then flipped it shut. His arm in a sling, his shoulder radiating signals with every beat of his heart, he returned to his office and stirred the things on his desk with his left hand. Eventually he had pushed the papers into two piles: “urgent” and “not urgent.” Then there was a painful reshuffle into “urgent,” “not that urgent,” and “not urgent.” Melinda stood next to him. “Does that make sense?” he asked.

Melinda said, “I think so.”

“I’m going home.”

Barney, who looked to be about forty, with a pronounced widow’s peak in his blondish hair and a deep dimple in his chin, was a quick study, though it took Szabo a while to figure out how much of his instruction the man was absorbing. Barney was remarkably without affect, gazing at Szabo as he spoke as if marveling at the physical apparatus that permitted Szabo’s chin to move so smoothly. At first Szabo was annoyed by this, and when Barney’s arm rose slowly to his mouth to place a toothpick there, he had a momentary urge to ask him to refrain from chewing it while he was listening. It was the sense of a concealed smirk behind the toothpick that bothered Szabo the most. But once he’d observed Barney’s efficiency Szabo quickly trained himself not to indulge such thoughts. Some of the hay had been rained on, but Barney raked it dry, and soon the shiny green tractor was flying around the meadows making beautiful bales for the racehorses of Montana. This gave Szabo something of a heartache, but he praised Barney for the job he had done so well. Barney replied, “That’s not enough hay to pay for the fuel.”

Szabo tried to ride his old gelding, Moon, a tall chestnut half-Thoroughbred he had been riding for thirteen of the horse’s sixteen years. One-armed, he had to be helped into the saddle. He could get the bridle over Moon’s head and pull himself up from the saddle horn, barely, but the jogging aroused the pain in his shoulder so sharply that he quickly gave up. Barney looked on without expression. Szabo said, “I really need to ride him regularly. He’s getting old.”

“I’ll ride him.”

“That would be nice, but it’s not necessary.”

“I’ll ride him. There’s not much else to do.”

Barney rode confidently but without grace of any kind. Moon’s long trot produced a lurching sway in Barney’s torso, exaggerated by the suspenders he always wore, that was hard for Szabo to watch. And it was clear from Moon’s sidelong glances that he, too, was wondering what kind of burden he was carrying. But the sight of Barney’s lurching exercise rides seemed a small price to pay for the skilled work he provided: repairing fences, servicing stock waterers, pruning the orchard, and even doing some painting on the outbuildings. One day, as he rode Moon down the driveway, Barney said to Szabo, who had just pulled up, “By the time you get the sling off, I’ll have your horse safe for you to ride.” From the window of his car, Szabo said, resisting the impulse to raise his voice, “As I recall, he’s been safe for me to ride since he was a three-year-old colt.” Barney just looked down and smiled.

When Barney restacked the woodpile, Szabo decided to treat it as an absolute surprise. He stood before the remarkable lattice of firewood and, while his mind wandered, praised it lavishly. He was reluctant to admit to himself that he was trying to get on Barney’s good side. “It’s one of a kind,” he said.

Szabo’s mother lived in a ground-floor apartment across the street from a pleasant assisted-living facility. She had stayed in her own apartment because she smoked cigarettes, which was also what seemed to have preserved her vitality over her many years. Further, she didn’t want to risk the family silver in an institution, or her real treasure: a painting that had come down through her family for nearly a century, a night stampede by the cowboy artist Charlie Russell, one of very few Russell night pictures in existence, which would likely fetch a couple of million dollars at auction. The old people across the street would just take it down and spill food on it, she said. When Szabo was growing up as an only child, his mother’s strong opinions, her decisive nature, had made him feel oppressed; now those qualities were what he most liked, even loved, about her. He recognized that when he was irresolute it was in response to his upbringing, but caution, in general, paid off for him.

Barney enjoyed tobacco, too, smoke and smokeless. One afternoon Szabo sent a shoebox of pictures and two much-annotated family cookbooks to his mother by way of Barney, who was heading into town to pick up a fuel filter for the tractor. Later Szabo cried out more than once, “I have only myself to blame!”

In a matter of weeks, Szabo was able to discard the sling and to exercise his shoulder with light weights and elastic strips that he held with one foot while feebly pulling and releasing, sweat pouring down his face. The next morning, three bird watchers entered the property without stopping at the house for permission and were all but assaulted by Barney, who chased them to their car, hurling vulgar epithets until they disappeared down the road with their life lists and binoculars.

“But Barney, I don’t mind them coming around,” Szabo said.

“Did they have permission, yes or no?”

There was no time for Szabo to explain that this didn’t matter to him, as Barney had gone back to work. At what, Szabo was unsure, but he seemed busy.

Szabo had to be in Denver by the afternoon. He took an overnight bag and drove to town, past Barney, lurching from side to side on Moon, who bore, Szabo thought, a fresh look of resignation. He stopped on the way to the airport to see his mother, who sat in her living room doing Sudoku in front of a muted television, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. On a stand next to her chair, her cockatiel, Toni, hunched in the drifting smoke.

“I’m off to Denver till tomorrow, Ma. I’ll have my cell if you need anything.” She looked up, put down her stub of pencil, and moved the cigarette from her mouth to the ashtray.

“Nothing to worry about here. I’ve got a million things to do.”

“Well, in case you think of something while I’m-”

“Lunch with Barney, maybe drive around.”

“Okay!” Luckily his mother couldn’t see his face.

Melinda had things well in hand, had even reduced some of the piles on his desk by thoughtful intervention where his specific attention was less than necessary. She was a vigorous mother of four, barely forty years old, happily married to a highway patrolman she’d grown up with. They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda’s family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures. And yet she was not just an employee but a cherished friend.

It was a tested friendship with a peculiar intimacy: Szabo’s former wife, Karen, an accomplished ironist, had made several stays at the Rimrock Foundation for what ended up as a successful treatment for alcoholism-successful in that she had given up alcohol altogether. Unfortunately, she had replaced it with other compulsions, including an online-trading habit that had bankrupted Szabo for a time. Once it was clear that Szabo was broke, she had divorced him, sold the house, remarried, and moved to San Diego, where she was, by the reports of their grown son, David, happy and not at all compulsive. What does this say about me? Szabo wondered obsessively. Maybe she was now on a short leash. Szabo had met her husband, Cliff: stocky, bald, and authoritarian-a forensic accountant, busy and prosperous in the SoCal free-for-all. His dour affect seemed to subdue Karen. In any case, Szabo had loved her, hadn’t wanted a divorce, and had felt disgraced at undergoing bankruptcy in a town of this size. He’d sunk into depression and discovered that there was no other illness so brutal, so profound, so inescapable, that made an enemy of consciousness itself. Nevertheless, he had plodded to the office, day after day, an alarming, ashen figure, and there he had fallen into the hands of Melinda, who dragged him to family picnics and to the dentist, forged his signature whenever necessary, placed him between her and her husband at high school basketball games, as though he might otherwise tip over, taught him to cheer for her children, and occasionally fed him at her house in the uproar of family life. When, once, as she stood by his desk in the office, he raised a hand to her breast, she amiably removed it and redirected his attention to his work. By inches, she had restored his old self, and solvency seemed to follow. He began to see himself as someone who had returned from the brink. He liked making money. He liked visiting his little group of suppliers in faraway places. He liked having Melinda as a friend, and her husband, Mike, the highway patrolman, too. Mike was the same straight-ahead type as his wife: he once gave Szabo a well-deserved speeding ticket. Now Szabo’s only argument with his ex-wife’s contentment in San Diego was that it seemed to prove to David that it had been Szabo who drove her crazy.

As Szabo headed away from the Denver airport, he could see its marvelous shape at the edge of the prairie, like a great nomads’ camp-a gathering of the tents of chieftains, more expressive of a world on the move than anything Szabo had ever seen. You flew into one of these tents, got food, a car, something to read, then headed out on your own smaller journey to the rapture of traffic, a rented room with a TV and a “continental” breakfast. It was an ectoplasmic world of circulating souls.

On a sunny day, with satellite radio and an efficient midsized Korean sedan, the two-hour drive to the prison that had held his son for the past couple of years flew by. Szabo was able to think about his projects for the ranch-a new snow fence for the driveway, a mouse-proof tin liner for Moon’s grain bin, a rain gauge that wouldn’t freeze and crack, a bird feeder that excluded grackles and jays-nearly the whole trip. But toward the end of the drive his head filled with the disquieting static of remorse, self-blame, and sadness, and a short-lived defiant absolution. In the years that had turned out to be critical for David, all he had given him was a failing marriage and a bankrupt home. I should have just shot Karen and done the time, Szabo thought with a shameful laugh. The comic relief was brief. Mom in California, Dad in Montana, David in prison in Colorado: could they have foreseen this dispersion?

Razor wire guaranteed the sobriety of any visitor. The vehicles in the visitors’ parking lot said plenty about the socioeconomics of the families of the imprisoned: Szabo’s shiny Korean rental stuck out like a sore thumb. The prison was a tidy fortress of unambiguous shapes that argued less with the prairie surrounding them than with the chipper homes of the nearby subdivision. It had none of the lighthearted mundane details of the latter-laundry hanging out in the sun, adolescents gazing under the hood of an old car, a girl sitting on the sidewalk with a handful of colored chalk. The place for your car, the place for your feet, the door that complied at the sight of you, were all profoundly devoid of grace-at least, to anyone whose child was confined there.

David came into the visiting room with a promising, small smile and gave Szabo a hug. He had been a slight, quick-moving boy, but prison had given him muscle, thick, useless muscle that seemed to impair his agility and felt strange to the father who embraced him. They sat in plastic chairs. Szabo noticed that the room, which was painted an incongruous robin’s-egg blue, had a drain in the middle of its floor, a disquieting fact.

“Are you getting along all right, David?”

“Given that I don’t belong here, sure.”

“I was hoping to hear from you-” Szabo caught himself, determined not to suggest any sort of grievance. David smiled.

“I got your letters.”

“Good.” Szabo nodded agreeably. There was nothing to look at in the room except the person you were speaking to.

“How’s Grandma?” David asked.

“I think she’s doing as well as can be expected. You might drop her a note.”

“Oh, right. ‘Dear Grandma, you’re sure lucky to be growing old at home instead of in a federal prison.’”

Szabo had had enough.

“Good, David, tell her that. Old as she is, she never got locked up.”

David looked at his father, surprised, and softened his own voice. “You said in your letter you’d had some health problem.”

“My shoulder. I had surgery.”

Szabo knew that the David before him was not David on drugs, but now that the drugs were gone, he still hadn’t gone back to being the boy he’d been before. Maybe it would happen gradually. Or perhaps Szabo was harboring yet another fruitless hope.

“Melinda still working for you?”

“I couldn’t do without her. She stayed with me even when I couldn’t pay her.”

“Melinda’s hot.”

“She’s attractive.”

“No, Dad, Melinda’s hot.”

Szabo didn’t know what David meant by this, if anything, and he didn’t want to know. Maybe David just wanted him to realize that he noticed such things.

“David, you’ve got less than a year to go. Concentrate on avoiding even the appearance of anything that could set you back. You’ll be home soon.”

“Home?”

“Absolutely. Where your friends are, where you grew up. Home is where your mistakes can be seen in context. You go anywhere else-David, you go anywhere else and you’re an ex-con. You’ll have to spend all your time overcoming that, when everyone at home already knows you’re a great kid.”

“When I get out of here,” David said in measured tones, “I’m going to live with Mom and Cliff.”

“In California?”

“Last time I checked.”

Szabo was determined not to react to this. He let the moment subside, and David now seemed to want to warm up. He smiled faintly at the blue ceiling.

“And yes, I’ll write Grandma back.”

“So you heard from her?”

David laughed. “About her boyfriend, Barney. I think that’s so sweet. A relationship! Is Barney her age?”

“Actually, he’s quite a bit younger.”

As Szabo drove back to the airport, he tried to concentrate on the outlandish news of Barney’s role in his mother’s life, but he didn’t get anywhere. He couldn’t stop thinking about David, and thought of him in terms of a proverb he had once heard from a Mexican man who had worked for him: “You have only one mother. Your father could be any son of a bitch in the world.” That’s me! I’m any son of a bitch in the world.

He did have a mother, however, there in God’s waiting room with a new companion. His late father, a hard-working tradesman, would have given Barney a wood shampoo with a rake handle. But my standing, thanks to my modest prosperity and education, means that I shall have to humor Barney, and no doubt my most earnest cautions about the forty-year age gap between Barney and my mother will be flung back in my face, Szabo thought. Suddenly tears burned in his eyes: he was back to David.

Drugs had swept through their small town one year. They’d always been around, but that year they were everywhere, and they had destroyed David’s generation. The most ordinary children had become violent, larcenous, pregnant, sick, lost, or dead. And then the plague had subsided. David, an excellent student, had injected the drugs between his toes, and his parents had suspected only that he suddenly disliked them. Instead of going to college, he had apprenticed with a chef for nearly a year, before heading to prison. David didn’t think that he would go back to drugs when he was released, and neither did his father. But his bitterness seemed to be here to stay, fed, likely, by his memory of the things that he had done in his days of using. Perhaps he blamed himself for the failure of his parents’ marriage. The body he had acquired in the weight room seemed to suit his current burdened personality. The way he looked, he could hardly go back to what he had been.

The tractor was wet and gleaming in the bright sunlight. Barney was gathering stray bits of baler twine and rolling them up into a neat ball. He hardly seemed to notice Szabo’s arrival, so Szabo carried his suitcase into the house without a word. Once inside, he glanced furtively through the hall window at Barney, then went back out.

“Good morning, Barney.”

“Hi.”

“This shoulder thing is behind me now. I think I’m ready to go back to work here.” Barney looked more quizzical than the situation called for. “So let’s square up and call it a day.”

“Meaning what?” Barney asked with an extravagantly inquisitive look.

“Meaning the job is over. Thank you very much. You’ve been a great help when I needed it most.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m quite sure of it.”

“It’s your call, Szabo. But there’s something about me you don’t know.”

“I’m sure that’s the case. That’s nearly always the case, isn’t it, Barney?” Some ghastly revelation was at hand, and Szabo knew that there would be no stopping it. “But I’d be happy to know what it is, in your instance.”

Barney gazed at him a long time before he spoke. He said, “I am a respectable person.”

Szabo found this unsettling. Clearly it was time to have a word with his mother. He asked her out to lunch, but she begged off, citing the new smoking rules that, she said disdainfully, were “sweeping the nation.” So he took her to the park near the river. Her size had been reduced by tobacco and her deplorable eating habits. She scurried along briskly, and any pause on Szabo’s part found her well ahead, poking into garden beds and uprooting the occasional weed to set an example. They found a bench and sat. Mrs. Szabo shook out a cigarette by tapping the pack against the back of her opposing hand, then raising the whole pack, with its skillfully protruded single butt, to her lips. There the cigarette hung, unlit, while she made several comments about the weather and dropped the pack back into her purse. Finally she lit it, and the first puff seemed to satisfy her profoundly.

“How did you find David?”

“Fine, I think. The way I get to see him down there… it’s uncomfortable. Just a big empty room.”

“Is he still angry?”

“Not that I could see.”

“He was such an angry little boy.”

“Well, he’s not little anymore, Mom. He’s got big muscles.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t misuse them. He got that attitude from your wife. The nicest thing I can say about her is that she kept on going.”

“She married a decent, successful guy.”

“What else could she do? She didn’t have the guts to rob a bank.”

“You forget what David was like before his problems. He didn’t have an attitude. He was a nice boy.”

He could see she wasn’t listening.

“Barney said you told him he was no longer needed.”

“He knew it was temporary from the start.”

“Well, he’s certainly got my place pulled together. My God, what a neatnik! And he made me insure the Russell, which I should have done a long time ago. He thinks that David’s in this pickle because he got away with murder while he was growing up.”

“What? He’s never met David!”

“Barney’s a very bright individual. He doesn’t have to know every last thing firsthand.”

“I think his views on how Karen and I raised David would be enhanced by actually meeting David.”

“Why?”

“Jesus Christ, Mom.”

“Of course you’re grumpy. Barney does so much for me and you want me all to yourself. Can’t you just relax?”

Telling people to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it’s up there. The first time Barney had driven the tractor, he’d nearly put it in the irrigation ditch. Szabo had cautioned him, and Barney had responded, “Is the tractor in the ditch?” Szabo had allowed that it was not. “Then relax,” Barney had said.

There was nothing like it: leaning on his shovel next to the racing water, the last sun falling on gentle hills crowned with bluestem and golden buffalo grass, cool air rising from the river bottom. Moon grazed and followed Szabo as he placed his dams and sent a thin sheet of alpine water across the hay crop. The first cutting had been baled and put neatly in the stack yard by Barney. The second cutting grew slowly, was denser in protein and more sought after by owners trying to make their horses run faster. All the way down through this minor economic chain, people lost money, their marvelous dreams disconnected from hopes of success.

Once winter was in the air, Szabo spent less time on his property and made an effort to do the things for his business that he was most reluctant to do. In November he flew to Düsseldorf and stayed at the Excelsior, eating Düsseldorfer Senfrostbraten with Herr Schlegel while pricing robotic plasma welding on the small titanium objects that he was buying from him. The apparent murkiness of Germany was doubtless no more than a symptom of Szabo’s ignorance of the language. He wondered if all the elders he saw window-shopping on the boulevards were ex-Nazis. And the skinheads at the Düsseldorf railroad station gave him a sense of historical alarm. After a long evening in the Altstadt, Szabo found himself quite drunk at the bar of the Lindenhof Hotel, where he took a room with a beautiful Afro-Czech girl called Amai, who used him as a comic, inebriated English instructor, her usual services being unnecessary, given his incapacity. Since Szabo appeared unable to navigate his way back to the Excelsior, Amai drove him there in return for the promise of a late breakfast in the Excelsior’s beautiful dining room. Afterward, she asked for his address so that they could stay in touch once he was home.

From Germany, Szabo flew directly to Denver. He slept most of the way and awoke to anxiety at the idea that this was probably the last visit he would have before David was released. In the chaotic year that preceded his son’s confinement, he had never known what David was doing or to what extent he was in danger; in the last weeks of his marriage, he and Karen had admitted to feeling some relief, now that David was in jail, simply at knowing where he was. Perhaps it was that relief that had allowed them to separate. Yet Cliff’s prompt appearance had aroused Szabo’s suspicion: he sensed that California had beckoned while his marriage was still seemingly intact.

David was warmer toward his father this time, but more fretful than he had been on the previous visit. Szabo understood that David was probably as afraid of his impending freedom as Szabo was on his behalf. He seemed, despite the muscles, small and frightened, his previous sarcasm no more than a wishful perimeter of defense. And the glow of anger was missing. Szabo wondered if jet lag was contributing to his heartache. He hardly knew what to say to his son.

“In two weeks, you’ll be in California,” Szabo said.

“That was the plan.”

“Is it not anymore?”

“Mom and Cliff said they didn’t want me. I’ve got to go to Plan B.”

“I’m sorry, David. What’s Plan B?”

“Plan B is I don’t know what Plan B is.”

“What made your mom and Cliff change their minds?”

David smiled slightly. He said, “I’m trying to remember how Mom put it. She said that a new relationship requires so many adjustments that introducing a new element could be destabilizing. It was sort of abstract. She left it to me to figure out that I was the destabilizing new element. Then Cliff got on the phone and said that unfortunately closure called for the patience of all parties.”

“Did you say anything?”

“Yes, Dad, I did. I told Cliff to blow it out his ass.”

Szabo could have taken this as evidence of David’s unresolved anger. Instead, he enjoyed the feeling that they were in cahoots. “How did Cliff take that?”

“He said he was sorry I felt that way. I told him not to be. I told him I didn’t feel anything at all.”

They were quiet for long enough to suggest the inkling of comfort. Finally David said, “Tell me about Barney.”

“Barney! What about him?”

“Why did you send him here to see me?”

Startling as this was, Szabo did not react at first. He was quiet for a long and awkward moment. Then he asked quite levelly, “When did Barney show up?”

“While you were still in wherever. He said you sent him.”

“Not exactly. Perhaps, based on our conversations, Barney thought it might be something I wanted him to do.” Szabo had no idea why he was dissembling like this, unless it was to buy time. He suddenly recalled, from David’s childhood, the purple dinosaur toy called Barney that was guaranteed to empower the child, a multimillion-dollar brainstorm for cashing in on stupid parents. “Did he explain what he was doing here? How did he get here?”

“He came in your car.”

“Of course. Well, that was cheaper than flying. What was the purpose of his trip?”

“Are you asking me?”

“David, cut me some slack. I’ve been halfway around the world.”

“Did you sleep in those clothes, Dad?”

Now Szabo was on the defensive, still in the clothes of his Düsseldorf night with Amai, whom, in this moment of bewilderment, he was certain he should have married. Escape was not so easy. If he hadn’t fallen off a tractor and injured himself, this squirrel Barney wouldn’t be in the middle of his life. What would he be doing? Living in Germany with Amai, siring octoroons and trying to keep her out of the bars? “I’m afraid I underpacked, David. I wore this suit at meetings and slept in it on the plane. So, Barney was here… for what?”

“I guess for counseling of some kind, to prepare me for the outside world.” David winced at these last two words.

“Why would Barney think he was in a position to counsel you?”

“If you don’t know, Dad, I’m sure I don’t, either. At least he has a PhD.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Dad, I’m not following this! I didn’t send him here-you did!”

“I know, I know, and I’m sure it’s all to the good. Was Barney helpful?”

“You tell me. He said I should go home and take over the ranch.”

“It’s hardly a ranch, David. It’s just some property. What made him think you should do that?”

“Nothing you need to hear.”

“What do you mean by that? I want to hear what some jackass with a PhD had to say.”

“You won’t like it.”

“David, I’m a big boy. Tell me.”

“He said that you were incompetent and that it was only a matter of time before you broke your neck doing something you had no business doing.”

Furious, Szabo took this in with a false thoughtful air. Karen had said almost exactly the same thing. But her words had been motivated by a wish to replace the property with a winter home in San Luis Obispo, a town that had ranked number one in a Times survey of residential contentment.

“I trust you told Dr. Barney Q. Shitheel that you were not interested.”

“I didn’t tell him that, Dad.”

“What did you tell him?”

David smiled at his father. “I told him I wasn’t welcome there.”

“You could have come there anytime you wanted.”

“Right.”

“What’s this? Dave, why are you crying?”

David wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and spoke with odd detachment.

“I knew I would never understand business, but I worked on a lot of ranches in high school. I was good at that.”

Not all the fight was gone out of Szabo. Nor had he given up on the story he’d been telling himself. But even as he asked his derisive question he was reminding himself how he might have been absent for his own child. “Did you think selling drugs was a way of learning business?”

David looked weary. He didn’t want to play anymore. “You’re right, Dad. What was I thinking?”

“I’m not saying I’m right.”

“No, Dad, you’re one hundred percent right.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m right some of the time.”

This exchange, more than anything, troubled Szabo. Here was David, broken down, imprisoned, soon to be released with his stigma. And Szabo was only adding to his insecurity, instead of trying to make the situation better.

There was plenty to do when he got home. And there was something to learn when he visited his mother: Barney had absconded with the Charlie Russell painting. The next morning Szabo met the detective who was interviewing his mother while fanning away the smoke with his clipboard. She only glanced at Szabo, crestfallen, defeated. From the detective, a handsome fellow in a short-sleeved shirt, too young for his mustache, Szabo learned that his ranch hand’s name wasn’t Barney; it was Ronny-Ronny Something. Ronny’s gift was for slipping into a community with one of his many small talents: the sculptural woodpile had taken him far. The painting would go to a private collector, not likely to be seen again. “This isn’t Ronny’s first rodeo,” the detective said. “The only thread we’ve got is the PhD. There is no actual PhD, but it’s the one thing Ronny drops every time. There’s been a string of thefts and they all lead into the same black hole. I don’t know why everyone is so sure that Ronny wants to help them.”

When Szabo repeated this to Melinda and saw her wide eyes, he just shrugged and shook his head. Maybe to change the subject, she asked after David, and Szabo told her that he would soon be coming home.