The Man in Florida

I went to Florida looking for the hand that drew the hammer back. Let me tell you what I found there instead, because it is worse than a hand.

I had it built in my head like a wiring diagram by the time I got there. Somewhere down in the flat green heat was a man doing the arithmetic. The one who ran the figures on my death and then, three years on, ran them again on Paige. The designer. The hand behind it all. I had him half drawn already: a big cold trucker with a calculator for a heart, sitting off to the side of that house for years, reaching in through my wife to work the machine. Some stucco place with the AC units rusting off the wall, a boat he never took out, a phone going off in his pocket with my wife's want on the other end of it.

His name was Dale, and he did drive a truck, or said he did, and my wife had been his the whole long time she was mine. That much was true. I'd felt the cold of him on my neck for years and declined, proud fool that I was, to go hunting for the crack it came through. So I went hunting now. Followed him back the way I've followed everything back, down through the heat that lays on that state like a wet towel. And I followed the money, because money is the truest wire in any box. It never once lies about which way it wants to go. It doesn't get proud and it doesn't tell itself a story to get to sleep. It just flows downhill to whoever's really pulling.

And here is where the diagram in my head fell off the wall and broke.

The money went the wrong way.

The escape man, kept forever just out of reach, so the money never has to stop. That's not a lover. That's a leash she paid to wear.

I had it that Dale was paying into something: a scheme, a partnership, the two of them squirreling away their getaway nest egg against the day they'd run. That is not what the wire showed. The money ran out of that house and down to Florida in a steady bleeding stream, for years, hers to his, a little here, a lot there, then a lot more, wired at the counter of the grocery store, mailed in envelopes, loaded onto the kind of gift cards you read the numbers off over the phone so a man a thousand miles off can drain them before you've hung up. Thousands upon thousands of dollars vanishing south into the heat as fast as she could lay hands on it. I watched her do it, from up here, watched her stand at that Western Union window on her lunch hour in her work clothes and slide the cash across and take the little yellow slip and fold it into her purse like a woman mailing a love letter. She wasn't running off with Dale. She was paying Dale. She'd been paying Dale the whole time.

Because Dale, it turns out, was a fantasy she was buying on time. The trucker with the horizon in his eyes, the man who was coming for her, the life the two of them would run off and live the day the money was finally right. None of it was ever going to happen, and it was never meant to. Dale wasn't a lover. Dale was a business. He had a script and she was a subscriber. He fed her the future she was starving for: a warm voice on the phone in a cold house, soon, real soon, honey, just as soon as you can send a little more to tide me over, and she ate it, and paid for every bite, and there was always, always one more reason the day itself had to wait. A truck broke down. A surgery he couldn't cover. A lawyer, a fine, a load impounded, a run of bad luck a good woman could fix with just a little more. Always the same shape, that ask: the promise fat, the price small, the finish line painted one more field down the road. I've watched the whole sorry loop of it now, from up here, run and reset and run again. She was being played the exact way I played a felt table my whole life, reading the future I wanted right off a hand that had nothing in it, and she never once read Dale, same as I never read her. There's a bitter symmetry in that I could do without.

So Dale did not design my death. Dale never wanted me dead at all. Sit with that the way a fixer sits with a reading that doesn't fit, the way I'd sit with a meter that swears there's no current in a wire I can feel is hot: a con man does not kill the thing that pays him. A live John, blind, generous, easy, keeping his wife flush enough to keep the payments flowing. That's the goose. Me dead was a well gone dry. Me in the ground did Dale no good, except in the one way everything did Dale good, which was to keep the money coming a while longer. He didn't point her at a single policy. He never once ran the arithmetic on anybody's life. He ran no arithmetic but his own, and his own was simple as a stone: how do I keep this woman sending. That's the whole of Dale, top to bottom. Not a mastermind. A mouth on the far end of a hose.

The arithmetic on me was a different animal, and it was surgical. Savings first, spend the man down to nothing so there's a reason showing when the neighbors ask. Then the insurance. Mind the probate, mind the timing, don't let the two deaths sit too close on the calendar. Embalm the body before anybody thinks to look twice at it, because embalming washes out the very thing a second look would go hunting for. Have the story cut and ready before the question's even asked: he was a drinker, officer, you know how they get, the DTs, the shakes, he must have run himself a bath. That was not Dale's.

That was hers.

And oh, sit down for the shame of this one. It's mine to carry, and I mean to carry it right out into the open even if the only soul here to witness it is me: of course it was hers. It was hers the whole time, and I looked straight past it, dead, reading my own murder off the wall, because I could not make myself believe that the woman across my kitchen table, the woman who salted my eggs and asked about my day, was the coldest, cleverest thing in that house. So I built myself a man in Florida to pin it on. I needed a hand behind the hammer, because a hammer is a thing that gets swung, and I could just about stand to have married a thing that got swung. A weapon in somebody else's fist. What I could not stand, what I dodged from the first page of this notebook clear to Florida and back, was that I'd married the whole machine. The hand and the hammer both. The appetite and the arithmetic, walking around in a housecoat, kissing me goodnight.

And her arithmetic had a trade behind it, and I knew that trade. I told it to you myself, pages back, and walked right past the size of it. She moved property out of one name and into another for her living. Title and escrow. She sat in a quiet office all day and made ownership change hands and leave no wake, made paperwork sit still and look innocent while it carried a whole house from one life into another. Quiet transfers. That was the job, and that was the woman, and I never once laid the two side by side. That is not a woman who needs a man to do her sums. That is a professional. I married a professional at the quiet moving of things, and when the thing that wanted moving quietly was my own life, off my body and onto a check, she moved it the way she'd move a deed: clean, papered, notarized, and gone before the county woke up.

She killed me to keep Dale. That's the whole of it, laid flat, and it's so small at the bottom it makes me sick. The savings ran dry, and the fantasy in Florida still had its hand out, still needed feeding, and I was worth more to that fantasy dead than alive. One fat insurance payout to feed the thing a good while longer. So she fed me to it. And when that ran dry, three years on, and Dale was still on the phone, still coming, still just as soon as, there was one paid-up policy left in that house, and it was breathing down the hall from her, and its name was Paige. Her own. So she fed her too. She looked at her daughter and saw a balance.

She murdered her husband and then she murdered her daughter to keep sending money to a man who was laughing at her. Who was never coming. Who took a lonely, grasping, cold-hearted woman and used her, and I'll say the thing and let it stand, because it's the last hard truth this chapter's got in it: Dale used her less cruelly than she used everyone else. He only took her money. She took people. He's a leech and a liar and a thief and there's a warm room waiting on him wherever such men are finally kept, but the man never once in his life carried a body up a flight of stairs. At least he never killed anybody. Chew on that. In that whole rotten arrangement, the con man was the one who stopped short of murder. That is the caliber of what I married. She'd have made Dale blush.

And here's where I get my own face rubbed in it one last time, and I'll hold still for it. I knew about Dale. Not the whole of it, not the money, but I knew there was a man, I knew his name, I knew my wife's attention went south when she thought I wasn't looking. And I am the exact breed of proud, lonesome, aging fool who'd sooner perform he isn't threatened than say plain that he's scared. So one year I mailed the man a fishing rod. A good one, too. Wrapped it myself. A present, from me, to my wife's fella down in Florida, ha ha, look how big I can be about it. I did it grinning. I pictured him opening it and knowing he'd been outclassed by a bigger man. I thought it made me the bigger man.

I sent a gift to the con artist my wife was murdering people to pay. And the joke's even blacker than it looked when I first set his name down, because Dale never wanted me dead either. I was his golden goose too, same as I was hers, right up until she decided the goose was worth more cooked. Every soul in this thing was somebody's fool. I was a fool for Sarah. Sarah was a fool for Dale. Paige was a fool for her own mother, poor girl. And Dale was nobody's fool at all, which is the nearest thing to a winner this notebook is ever going to name, and it turns my stomach to write it. The one clean pair of hands in the whole business belonged to the crook.

So there's no hand behind the hammer. I went to Florida for a mastermind and came home carrying one, because she'd been sitting across my own kitchen table the whole time, passing me the salt. The machine had one maker. She was the whole of it, the want and the plan both, and there was never any missing wire to find, only a man too proud and too tender to look at his own wife and see her plain. I couldn't do it alive. I couldn't do it dead. Not until the money drew me the map and made me follow it all the way down to the flat green end of the line.

Which leaves the last question. The one that's sat under this whole thing since the tub. Because however she did the killing, the drink, the stopped pill, the long patient wait, that got done where a dying man is: in a bed, on the main floor.

So how in the wide world did I end up two flights up, dressed, dead, in a tub I never once used?

Somebody carried me.

And I know now who. And it's the page I've dreaded worse than my own murder.