Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

5

Morning had stolen in like a secret, and the big house was still and empty and quiet around Lowell Gantcher. Nancy and the kids were away in lake country for the month and he wasn’t doing well alone. He’d spent the night checking the paper’s Web page every minute for updates and had quickly begun to feel like he was playing the starring role in an unfolding nightmare. At first there’d been no information. Then there’d been a brief bulletin at around 4:30 A.M. He had kept checking incessantly, waiting for further details, but they didn’t come. The starkly worded initial report was all there was for hours.

He’d taken to pacing around the house. Ten thousand square feet of living space, plus three thousand more in the finished basement that included screening, workout, and poker rooms, probably was a bit much. It hadn’t seemed so when he and Nancy had been buying it and tricking it out, but it was a real bull market house. That was only two and a half, three years ago, but it seemed a lot longer. Hell, they hadn’t even gotten the place fully furnished yet.

He sat in the study, which was dark and silent, and wrapped in oak paneling. The only light in the room was the early sunlight bleeding through the closed slats of the horizontal blinds, which were also made of oak. This room was furnished. It was done up to the nines. His hands rested on a massive mahogany partners desk. There were matching leather couches and armchairs in a lustrous tobacco color, silver frames and leather-bound books on the shelves around a wet bar. Over the marble fireplace hung a plasma television that was so large it could serve as the scoreboard in a minor-league baseball park. It was the first room that had been done once the master and the kids’ bedrooms had been made livable. When they’d been walking around the newly built house, it was the study that had practically sold the place. The Realtor drifted away, leaving them alone, and Nancy had turned to him and said, “Let’s buy it. You’ll be like Don Corleone in here.”

“Yeah?” he said, hesitating for a moment.

“Yes, Lo. Every man needs a Godfather room.” And she gave him that smile that inspired him to greatness, that made him feel he was able to do anything, and they’d bought the place. But Don Corleone was a grave and powerful man, restrained and effective. Lowell was an aspirational real estate developer who had fed on times of easy credit until he’d practically turned into white dough. He even felt pale and washed out sitting there. The phrase “nouveau riche” was one he’d just recently learned.

It seemed simple once, to sit at the brand-new partners desk, going over statements that outlined the take of each machine and table and the casino’s total. How could there be trouble in the world? he’d wondered back then.

But now he was staring at a B rating on his venture. B. When he was in college a B would’ve been a welcome sight on his transcript. But now, because ratings started at AAA, a single, measly B was six classes down the quality scale; and once an investment had ticked south out of the A’s, it started to stink worse than a road-killed skunk. With a tumble from even BBB, there was no chance of rescue investors coming in now. No chance at all.

A report had recently landed on his desktop full of projections that intimated the state’s casino business had hit a high-water mark. That was more bad news. Adding to the gloomy forecast was out-of-state competition, the specter of those sausage eaters in Chicago passing gaming downtown, and the god-blessed Indians opening up all over the place with their tax-sheltered free rolls. A housing slump, a credit crunch, and record unemployment sucking disposable income out the customers’ pockets were the final grim strokes to the ugly picture. There was only one hope, and that was abatement by the state on the 75-million-dollar-per-year gaming license tax.

He heard tires on gravel. It was the sound he’d been waiting for. He hurried to the door to see a battered Honda Civic driving away, and the morning paper resting in its pink plastic sleeve at the end of the driveway. He hurried barefoot to get it, the sharp gravel digging into the soles of his feet. He bent and picked up the paper, tearing the plastic away, and scanned with his eyes while he hop-ran back to the house. What he read confirmed what he’d seen online. He didn’t make it back to the house. He collapsed to his knees on the pebbled ground, as if he’d been hit in the gut with an ax handle. Powerful, ungodly, tearless sobs shook his chest. It was all going to end.