Mark Costello: Big If

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.

She stopped for gas at a landscaped Mobil on the pike in Rye. She pumped it at self-serve, standing by her car, a primer-painted Bug with the ugly mustard plates of the Garden State, a gym bag and a basketball in the backseat. She wore rope sandals and a sundress and her cool Israeli shades. Her duty weapon, a Glock nine, was in her purse. The purse hung from her shoulder (a new habit — keep the gun nearby; if you lost it you were in for lengthy bureaucratic water torture, a zillion lost vacation days, and a letter from the ASAC to your file). She tapped her foot, pumped her gas, blew a bubble with her gum, pushed her shades back up her nose. The sun was hot. Traffic passed, generating breeze.

She saw two guys in a jeep with a jet ski on a trailer. The guys were putting air in the tires of the jeep. They were college boys, tank-topped, ball-capped, zinc sunblock on their noses. She saw them check her out, the sidelong glance, the nudge, babe in shades at two o’clock, or whatever was the lingo at their frat. She wasn’t that much older than the guys, but she felt ancient, pumping gas.

She paid in cash and drove away. Vi didn’t see herself as pretty or not pretty, though she knew that most people would have said that she was reasonably pretty. She was small and strong, an honest tomboy blond, many kinds of blond, in fact, depending on the time of year — dingy in the winter months, like a head of roadside snow, shocking corn silk in July. She had unusual gray eyes, bright and deeply gray, which made her look in winter, with the paleness in her face, a bit like Death’s kid sister, the one who’s always tagging along and whining for a turn, getting on Death’s nerves. In the summer, with a tan on and the corn silk in her hair, the gray eyes made her kind of beautiful. It was a funny thing, her father always said, that the sun, so busy with its cosmic projects, would stop to touch his daughter in this way.

She was crying now, snot flowing out her nose. She took the exit down the hill into C.E. She had come to see her mother and her brother, to deal with the arrangements, half family and half finance, which always crop up when a father dies.

She couldn’t go home crying. She drove around the rotary, past the brief commercial strip, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, the Easy Reader Bookstore (Deepak Chopra in the window), thank God they haven’t closed down Monsey’s Luncheonette. She parked along the chain-link fence at the cracked and sunbaked courts behind the purple sticker beach. Purple sticker meant town residents only. She didn’t have a sticker but she had a fairly impressive Secret Service placard for her dash and a couple of the younger village cops were former high school boyfriends, guys she knew from sports. She figured she could park here long enough to get herself together.

Late morning on a Saturday. The beach beyond the fence was white. The families on the sand were townies, even whiter, dads with hairy backs, moms with cellulite, shrieking kids with blow-up water wings. The harbor was a cup between two rocky points. The ocean was a blue slap to the eyes. How she loved this coastline in July.

She wiped her eyes to see it clearly. She grabbed the basketball from the backseat of the Bug and walked around the fence to the foul line. Even in a messy state, she had the rolling, open-challenge walk of a woman who had once been very good at something physical. She was pretty good at racquet sports — squash in college, tennis with her father growing up (he played a stiff, stay-at-home, rally-from-the-baseline game; she beat him once at fourteen and after fifteen never lost), paddleball in New York (the agents in Manhattan played a lot of paddleball). She was a strong swimmer, a double-diamond skier, a high school soccer striker, an effortless ten-handicap in golf, but her top sport — growing up, in college, all along — was basketball. She had played in the summer as a kid, pickup games right here, three on three all afternoon, shifting groups of shirts and skins. She was always shirts and the only girl. She didn’t have the size to post up or go down the lane, but she had quick hands, stamina, and an intercontinental jumper. She played CYO and rec league, summer nights and fall. She played for Effing High and later UNH. Her lack of height and leap caught up to her in college, where she rode the bench, coming in for garbage time, New Hampshire down by thirty-five to mighty UConn. Vi went for 0–1, picked up two assists, and hard-fouled this obnoxious power forward, and none of it meant anything.