The Road To Ruin

45

MAC DIDN’T KNOW WHICH part of the enterprise frightened him the most—all of it, probably. All he knew is, it was the most scared he’d ever been in his life. More scared than the first time he’d had sex with the girl who would soon become his wife; hell, more scared than the first time he’d had sex with anybody. More scared than when they put him in charge of the K-type showerhead assembly line. More scared than the first time he’d gotten off a ski lift at the top of a mountain and looked down.

Well, that time, he’d ridden the ski lift back down the mountain again, and had been firmly apres-ski ever since. But he didn’t have that choice this time. There was only one way off this particular mountain.

And it was worse than the mountain, because the mountain was just one thing. With the mountain, you’ve got this steep bank of white with trees and boulders on it, and the job is to get from the top to the bottom without ricocheting too much. Simple, straightforward. But this horse thing was all details, and every detail was scarier than every other detail.

Take the mustache. It was a thick mustache, like a push broom, and it felt very insecure glued to his upper lip. Also, it tickled his nose. But the worst, the most scary part, was how horribly Os had smirked in amusement while gluing the thing onto him.

You took one look at Os, you knew he was a mean practical joker. But this was too important to him, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t arrange for Mac’s mustache to fall off his face at just the wrong instant for a gag, would he? Would he?

All right, say he wouldn’t. The thing could nevertheless fall off anyway, without underhanded scheming from Os.

So that was one thing to be scared of. Then there was the horse. No, that was scary enough, but before the horse was the horse trailer. It was attached at the rear of a very big pickup truck with four wheels across the back axle, and it wasn’t until Mac really closed with the idea that he was the one who would have to drive it that he saw just how big the damn combination was.

The truck was bad enough, but the trailer was big as a house, built for four horses, two across and then another two across, with a side door on the forward left to feed and look after the front pair. In it at the moment was one horse, at the back, with a big blanket suspended from the roof in front of it to block off the front half, which was where everybody else would hide while Mac drove to Monroe Hall’s compound.

Which was another thing to be scared about. Were they really gonna buy it, those suspicious professional sentries at the entrance to Hall’s compound? Were they really not going to search the trailer from one end to the other and find the four hidden men and all that rope, but just be contented to look at the rear end of one horse? Would they really believe this stupid mustache, and this stupid four-color jockey’s hat, and this stupid green cable-knit sweater with stupid gray leather elbow patches, and these stupid jodhpurs? (Mac had never heard of jodhpurs before, and now that he had, he wished he hadn’t.)

And then the horse. No, forget it, let’s not even think about the horse. Because everybody else is ready, whether Mac is ready or not. They’re all going through the side door into the concealed part of the trailer. Os, entering last, pauses to give one last word of advice: “Try not to have to back up.” But even that he says with a kind of snotty chuckle and a twinkle in his eye.

Sheesh. Where did he go wrong?

•

And yet it worked like a charm. The thirty-mile drive was long enough for Mac to get used to that blunt gray metal box tailgating him, forever up close and personal in the mirror. He never had to back up, thank God, but he did have to learn to brake gently, or the trailer would buck and weave and threaten to take matters into its own hands. And best of all, the mustache didn’t fall off.

He actually got to the compound ten minutes early, and when he said to the brown-uniformed tough guy at the gate, “Jay Gilly, I’m expected,” all the fellow did was make a checkmark on his clipboard and say, “I got to call the house.”

“Sure.”

While the guard was calling the house, a second guard walked around the pickup and horse trailer, more out of curiosity than suspicion. Then the first guard nodded at him through his guardshack window and the bar lifted in front of him, and by golly, after months of trying he just drove onto Monroe Hall’s property and up the long blacktop road to the big white house.

And here he wouldn’t have to back up either, because the road made a little loop past the front door of the house before angling off to a parking area on the right. Mac did the loop so that the left side of the pickup was toward the house, so no one down by the gate would be able to see what was going on up here. Leaving the engine on and the gearshift in park, he got out of the pickup, touched fingertips to the mustache for luck, and walked up to the front door.

Which opened just before he got there, and a sad sack in a black suit looked out at him as though waiting to hear his parole had been denied. “Sur?”

“Jay Gilly,” Mac said, though he wished Flip had given him some other name. He didn’t feel like a Jay Gilly, and was glad he wouldn’t have to pretend to be Jay Gilly for very long.

“One moment, sur,” the gloomy fellow said, and shut the door again. Butler, he must have been, and gloomy because he worked for Monroe Hall.

Mac had acted in high school, mostly because his sister Beth had acted in high school, expecting to be a movie star any minute. (She was now a wife and mother, married to a bus driver.) The drama department at Mac’s high school had all the girl actors they could need, and then some, but it was tough to get boys to come fill in the boy parts in the plays. Beth had dragged Mac along, saying it was because she sensed his massive talent, but he knew her real reason was that she was sucking up to Ms. Mandelstam the drama teacher in hopes of better roles. Mac had parts in Romeo and Juliet and Teahouse of the August Moon and Major Barbara, and felt pretty good about it, though he knew darn well he did not have massive talent, and once high school was over he never thought about acting again.

But here it was, wasn’t it? A new play and a new role: Jay Gilly, horse-riding instructor. He didn’t have any written lines—sides, they were called, he remembered that—but he did have a character to play, and would have to play that character from this front door all the way down to the side door of the trailer. And then briefly again at the gate, on the way out. But his main period on stage was to begin here, right now.

And here it was. The door opened again, and the sad-sack butler stepped back to hold it open and stare into space as out came Monroe Hall himself, recognizable from all those newspaper photos and the few perp walks he’d done when the feds still thought they could pin something on him. He was dressed in what he must think appropriate for climbing on a horse, being tailored blue jeans and expensive leather cowboy boots with pictures of cactus plants on the sides and a red-check flannel shirt. He also had a big smile on his face as he said, “Jay Gilly?”

“Yes, I am,” Mac said, and thought, yes, I am! I can do this. “How do you do, Mr. Hall?” he said, and stuck out his hand.

“Just fine,” Hall said, though he had a rather limp handshake. Waving at the sky with the same hand, he said, “What a beautiful day to go riding, eh?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“Let’s see what this horseflesh looks like, shall we?”

“Certainly, sir. Just walk this way.”

“Come along, Rumsey.”

Come along? They didn’t want the butler; they didn’t need the butler in this scene; this was supposed to be just themselves and Monroe Hall.

But what could Mac do about it? Here came the butler, slope-shouldered and heavy-browed, and here came Hall, and there was nothing for it but to walk ahead of them down the path from house to pickup and along the side of the pickup and the trailer, where in fact he did have a previously prepared line to deliver, as a signal to the group inside the trailer: “This way, Mr. Hall.”

Well, he did have to say it, butler or no butler, and so he said it, and then, all according to plan (except for the butler), that door in the side of the trailer popped open and out jumped four people in a variety of masks with Buddy (paper bag with eyeholes cut in it) carrying the burlap sack meant to go over Hall’s head.

And Hall couldn’t have played his part better. His reaction was stunned astonishment. He didn’t try to run; he didn’t bob and weave; he didn’t even holler; he just froze.

Buddy leaped forward, raising the sack, as Mark (green ski mask, with elks) and Ace (Lone Ranger mask) jumped to grab Hall’s arms, while Os (rubber Frankenstein head), who was supposed to grab Hall’s ankles, pointed instead at the butler and cried, “Who’s that?”

“The butler,” Mac said, apologetic even though it wasn’t his fault.

“Grab him!” Mark yelled, he already having his hands full with the belatedly struggling Hall, Mark and Buddy and Ace now tugging the sacked Hall toward the trailer.

Up to this point, the butler had just been watching events unfold, interested but not involved; as though he thought of himself as merely a bystander. But now, when Os lunged at him, shouting, “Come on, Mac!” the butler backed away, putting his hands up as he cried, “Hey, don’t call me Mac, I’m the butler, I’m not in this.”

“He’ll raise the alarm!” Mark shouted from halfway into the trailer.

Mac, having already figured that out, leaped forward to join Os in grabbing the butler by both arms and dragging him in his employer’s wake.

The butler struggled like mad: “What are you doing? I got work here! I got things to do!”

What, was he crazy? Mark on one side, Os on the other, they lifted the butler by his elbows, ran him forward, tossed him through the trailer door onto the fallen cluster inside, Os jumped on top of the scrum, Mac slammed the door, and three minutes later the guards were waving bye-bye as he drove out the gate.