Just After Sunset

It was funny. Anyone could see that. It was sitcom shit if there had ever been sitcom shit. But his eyes--although tearless--were stinging as if they were full of poison ivy. He glanced to his right, but the hitchhiker was still mostly turned away, and now his forehead was leaning against the glass of the passenger window. Sleeping for sure.

Almost for sure.

Monette hadn't spoken of her betrayal aloud. Kelsie still didn't know, although the bubble of her ignorance would pop soon. The straws were flying in the wind--he'd hung up on three different reporters before leaving on this trip--but there was nothing they could print or broadcast yet. That would change soon, but Monette would go on getting by with No comment for as long as possible, mostly to spare himself embarrassment. In the meantime, though, he was commenting plenty, and doing so brought a great, angry relief. In a way it was like singing in the shower. Or vomiting there.

"She's fifty-four," he said. "That's what I can't get over. It means she started up with this guy, whose real name is Robert Yandowsky--how's that for a cowboy name--when she was fifty-two. Fifty-two! Would you say that's old enough to know better, my friend? Old enough to have sowed your wild oats, then ripped them up again and planted a more useful crop? My God, she wears bifocals! She's had her gallbladder out! And she's boffing this guy! In the Grove Motel, where the two of them have set up housekeeping! I gave her a nice house in Buxton, a two-car garage, she's got an Audi on long lease, and she threw it all away to get drunk on Thursday nights in Range Riders, then shag this guy until the dawn's early light--or however long they can manage--and she's fifty-four! Not to mention Cowboy Bob, who is fucking sixty!"

He heard himself ranting, told himself to stop, saw the hitchhiker hadn't moved (unless he'd sunk a little deeper into the collar of his duffle coat--that might have happened), and realized he didn't have to stop. He was in a car. He was on I-95, somewhere east of the sun and west of Augusta. His passenger was a deaf-mute. He could rant if he wanted to rant.

He ranted.

"Barb spilled everything. She wasn't defiant about it, and she wasn't ashamed. She seemed...serene. Shell-shocked, maybe. Or still living in a fantasy world."

And she'd said it was partly his fault.

"I'm on the road a lot, that much is true. Over three hundred days last year. She was on her own--we only had the one chick, you know, and that one finished with high school and flown the coop. So it was my fault. Cowboy Bob and all the rest of it."

His temples were throbbing, and his nose was almost shut. He sniffed back hard enough to make black dots fly before his eyes and got no relief. Not in his nose, anyway. In his head he finally felt better. He was very glad he'd picked the hitchhiker up. He could have spoken these things aloud in the empty car, but--

-5-

"But it wouldn't have been the same," he told the shape on the other side of the confessional wall. He looked straight ahead as he said it, right at FOR ALL HAVE SINNED AND FALLEN SHORT OF GOD'S GLORY. "Do you understand that, Father?"

"Of course I do," the priest replied--and rather cheerfully. "Even though you've clearly fallen away from Mother Church--except for a few superstitious remnants like your St. Christopher's medal--you shouldn't even have to ask. Confession is good for the soul. We've known that for two thousand years."

Monette had taken to wearing the St. Christopher's medal that had once upon a time swung from his rearview mirror. Perhaps it was just superstition, but he had driven millions of miles in all kinds of shit weather with that medal for company and had never so much as dented a fender.

"Son, what else did she do, your wife? Besides sinning with Cowboy Bob?"

Monette surprised himself by laughing. And on the other side of the screen, the priest laughed, too. The difference was the quality of the laughter. The priest saw the funny side. Monette supposed he was still trying to ward off insanity.

"Well, there was the underwear," he said.

-6-

"She bought underwear," he told the hitchhiker, who still sat slumped and mostly turned away, with his forehead against the window and his breath fogging the glass. Pack between his feet, sign resting on top with the side reading I AM MUTE! facing up. "She showed me. It was in the guest room closet. It damn near filled the guest room closet. Bustiers and camisoles and bras and silk stockings still in their packages, dozens of pairs. What looked like about a thousand garter belts. But mostly there were panties, panties, panties. She said Cowboy Bob was 'a real panty man.' I think she would have gone on, told me just how that worked, but I got the picture. I got it a lot better than I wanted to. I said, 'Of course he's a panty man, he grew up jerking off to PLAYBOY, he's fucking sixty.'"

They were passing the Fairfield sign now. Green and smeary through the windshield, with a wet crow hunched on top.

"It was the good stuff, too," Monette said. "A lot was Victoria's Secret from the mall, but there was also stuff from a high-priced underwear boutique called Sweets. In Boston. I didn't even know there were underwear boutiques, but I have since been educated. Had to've been thousands of dollars' worth piled up in that closet. Also shoes. High heels, for the most part. You know, stilettos. She had that hot-babe thing down pat. Although I imagine she took off her bifocals when she put on her latest Wonderbra and tap pants. But--"

A semi droned by. Monette had his headlights on and automatically flicked his high beams for a moment when the rig was past. The driver flicked a thank-you with his taillights. Sign language of the road.

"But a lot of it hadn't even been worn. That was the thing. It was just...just pack-ratted away. I asked her why she'd bought so goddam much, and she either didn't know or couldn't explain. 'We just got into the habit,' she said. 'It was like foreplay, I guess.' Not ashamed. Not defiant. Like she was thinking, This is all a dream I'll wake up from soon. The two of us standing there are looking at that rummage sale of slips and skivvies and shoes and God knows what else piled in the back. Then I asked her where she got the money--I mean, I see the credit-card slips at the end of each month, and there weren't any from Sweets of Boston--and we got to the real problem. Which was embezzlement."

-7-

"Embezzlement," the priest said. Monette wondered if the word had ever been spoken in this confessional before and decided it probably had been. Theft for sure.

"She worked for MSAD 19," Monette said. "MSAD stands for Maine School Administrative District. It's one of the big ones, just south of Portland. Based in Dowrie, as a matter of fact, home of both Range Riders--the line-dancing joint--and the historic Grove Motel, just down the road from there. Convenient. Get your dancing and your fuh...your lovemaking all in the same area. Why, you wouldn't even have to drive your car if you happened to have a snootful. Which on most evenings they did have. Tequila shooters for her, whiskey for him. Jack, naturally. She told me. She told me everything."

"Was she a teacher?"

"Oh no--teachers don't have access to that kind of money; she never could have embezzled over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars if she'd been a teacher. We've had the district superintendent and his wife over to the house for dinner, and of course I saw him at all the end-of-school-year picnics, usually at the Dowrie Country Club. Victor McCrea. University of Maine graduate. Played football. Majored in phys ed. Crew cut. Probably floated through on gift Cs, but a nice man, the kind who knows fifty different guy-walks-into-a-bar jokes. In charge of a dozen schools, from the five elementaries to Muskie High. Very large annual budget, might be able to add four and four on his own in a pinch. Barb was his executive secretary for twelve years."

Monette paused.

"Barb had the checkbook."

-8-

The rain was getting heavier. Now it was just short of a downpour. Monette slowed to fifty without even thinking about it, while other cars buzzed blithely past him in the left lane, each dragging up its own cloud of water. Let them buzz. He himself had had a long and accident-free career selling the best fall list ever (not to mention the best spring list ever

and a few Summer Surprise lists, which mostly consisted of cookbooks, diet books, and Harry Potter knockoffs), and he wanted to keep it that way.

On his right, the hitchhiker stirred a little.

"You awake, buddy?" Monette asked. A useless question, but natural.

The hitchhiker uttered a comment from the end of him that apparently wasn't mute: Phweeet. Small, polite, and--best of all--odorless.

"I take that as a yes," Monette said, returning his attention to his driving. "Where was I?"

The underwear, that's where he was. He could still see it. Piled up in the closet like a teenager's wet dream. Then the confession of the embezzlement: that staggering figure. After he'd taken time to consider the possibility that she might be lying for some crazy reason (but of course it was all crazy), he had asked her how much was left, and she said--in that same calm and dazed manner--that there was nothing left, really, although she supposed she could get more. For a while, at least.

"'But they're going to find out soon now,' she said. 'If it was just poor old clueless Vic, I suppose I could go on forever, but the state auditors were in last week. They asked too many questions, and they took copies of the records. It won't be long now.'

"So I asked her how she could spend well over a hundred thousand dollars on knickers and garter belts," Monette told his silent companion. "I didn't feel angry--at least not then, I guess I was too shocked--but I was honestly curious. And she said--in that same way, not ashamed, not defiant, like she was sleep-walking: 'Well, we got interested in the lottery. I suppose we thought we could make it back that way.'"

Monette paused. He watched the windshield wipers go back and forth. He briefly considered the idea of twisting the wheel to the right and sending the car into one of the concrete overpass supports just ahead. He rejected the idea. He would later tell the priest part of the reason was that ancient childhood prohibition against suicide, but mostly he was thinking he'd like to hear the Josh Ritter album at least one more time before he died.

Plus, he was no longer alone.

Instead of committing suicide (and taking his passenger with him), he drove beneath the overpass at that steady, moderate fifty (for maybe two seconds the windshield was clear, then the wipers once more found work to do) and resumed his story.

"They must have bought more lottery tickets than anyone in history." He thought it over, then shook his head. "Well...probably not. But they bought ten thousand for sure. She said that last November--I was in New Hampshire and Massachusetts almost that whole month, plus the sales conference in Delaware--they bought over two thousand. Powerball, Megabucks, Paycheck, Pick 3, Pick 4, Triple Play, they hit them all. At first they chose the numbers, but Barb said after a while that took too long and they went to the EZ Pick option."

Monette pointed to the white plastic box glued to his windshield, just below the stem of the rearview mirror.

"All these gadgets speed up the world. Maybe that's a good thing, but I sort of doubt it. She said, 'We went the EZ Pick route because the people standing in line behind you get impatient if you take too long to pick your own numbers, especially when the jackpot's over a hundred million.' She said sometimes she and Yandowsky split up and hit different stores, as many as two dozen in an evening. And of course they sold them right there at the place where they went to line dance.

"She said, 'The first time Bob played, we won five hundred dollars on a Pick 3. It was so romantic.'" Monette shook his head. "After that, the romance stayed, but the winning pretty much stopped. That was what she said. She said once they won a thousand, but by then they were already thirty thousand in the bucket. In the bucket is what she called it.

"One time--this was in January, while I was out on the road trying to earn back the price of the cashmere coat I got her for Christmas--she said they went up to Derry and spent a couple of days. I don't know if they've got line dancing up there or not, I never checked, but they've got a place called Hollywood Slots. They stayed in a suite, ate high off the hog--she said high off the hog--and dropped seventy-five hundred playing video poker. But, she said, they didn't like that so much. Mostly they just stuck to the lottery, plugging in more and more of the SAD's dough, trying to get even before the state auditors came and the roof fell in. And every now and then, of course, she'd buy some new underwear. A girl wants to be fresh when she's buying Powerball tix at the local 7-Eleven.

"You all right, buddy?"

There was no response from his passenger--of course not--so Monette reached out and shook the man's shoulder. The hitcher lifted his head from the window (his forehead had left a greasy mark on the glass) and looked around, blinking his red-rimmed eyes as if he had been asleep. Monette didn't think he'd been asleep. No reason why, just a feeling.

He made a thumb-and-forefinger circle at the hitchhiker, then raised his eyebrows.

For a moment the hitcher only looked blank, giving Monette time to think the guy was bull-stupid as well as deaf-mute. Then he smiled and nodded and returned the circle.

"Okay," Monette said. "Just checking."

The man leaned his head back against the window again. In the meantime, the guy's presumed destination, Waterville, had slid behind them and into the rain. Monette didn't notice. He was still living in the past.

"If it had been just lingerie and the kind of lottery games where you pick a bunch of numbers, the damage might have been limited," he said. "Because playing the lottery that way takes time. It gives you a chance to come to your senses, always presuming you have any to come to. You have to stand in line and collect the slips and save them in your wallet. Then you have to watch TV or check the paper for the results. It might still have been okay. If, that is, you can call anything okay about your wife catting around with a stoneboat-dumb history teacher and flushing thirty or forty thousand dollars' worth of the school district's money down the shitter. But thirty grand I might have been able to cover. I could have taken out a second mortgage on the house. Not for Barb, no way, but for Kelsie Ann. A kid just starting out in life doesn't need a stinking fish like that around her neck. Restitution is what they call it. I would have made restitution even if it meant living in a two-bedroom apartment. You know?"

The hitchhiker obviously didn't know--not about beautiful young daughters just starting out in life, or second mortgages, or restitution. He was warm and dry in his dead-silent world, and that was probably better.

Monette plowed forward nonetheless.

"Thing is, there are quicker ways to chuck your money, and it's as legal as...as buying underwear."

-9-

"They moved on to scratch tickets, didn't they?" the priest asked. "What the Lottery Commission calls instant winners."

"You speak like a man who's had a flutter himself," Monette said.

"From time to time," the priest agreed, and with an admirable lack of hesitation. "I always tell myself that if I should ever get a real golden ticket, I'd put all the money into the church. But I never risk more than five dollars a week." This time there was hesitation. "Sometimes ten." Another pause. "And once I bought a twenty-dollar scratch, back when they were new. But that was a momentary madness. I never did it again."

"At least not so far," Monette said.

The priest chuckled. "The words of a man who has truly had his fingers burned, son." He sighed. "I'm fascinated by your story, but I wonder if we could move it along a bit faster? My company will wait while I do the Lord's work, but not forever. And I believe we're having chicken salad, heavy on the mayo. A favorite of mine."

"There's not much more," Monette said. "If you've played, you've got the gist of it. You can buy the scratch tickets at all the same places you can buy the Powerball and Megabucks tickets, but you can also buy them at a lot of other places, including turnpike rest stops. You don't even need to do business with a clerk; you can get them from a machine. The machines are always green, the color of money. By the time Barb came clean--"

"By the time she confessed," the priest said, with wha

t might have been a touch of actual slyness.

"Yes, by the time she confessed, they'd pretty much settled on the twenty-dollar scratch-offs. Barb said she never bought any when she was on her own, but when she was with Cowboy Bob, they'd buy a lot. Hoping for that big score, you know. Once she said they bought a hundred of those puppies in a single night. That's two thousand dollars' worth. They got back eighty. They each had their own little plastic ticket scratcher. They look like snow scrapers for elves and have MAINE STATE LOTTERY written on the handle. They're green, like the vending machines that sell the tickets. She showed me hers--it was under the guest room bed. You couldn't make out anything except TERY on it. Could have been MYSTERY instead of LOTTERY. The sweat from her palm had wiped out all the rest."

"Son, did you strike her? Is that why you're here?"

"No," Monette said. "I wanted to kill her for it--the money, not the cheating, the cheating part just seemed unreal, even with all that fuh...all that underwear right in front of my eyes. But I didn't lay so much as a finger on her. I think it was because I was too tired. All that information had just tired me out. What I wanted to do was take a nap. A long one. Maybe a couple of days long. Is that strange?"

"No," the priest said.

"I asked her how she could do something like that to me. Did she care so little? And she asked--"

-10-

"She asked me how come I didn't know," Monette told the hitchhiker. "And before I could say anything, she answered herself, so I guess it was a whatchacallit, a rhetorical question. She said, 'You didn't know because you didn't care. You were almost always on the road, and when you weren't on the road, you wanted to be on the road. It's been ten years since you cared what underwear I have on--why would you, when you don't care about the woman inside it? But you care now, don't you? You do now.'

"Man, I just looked at her. I was too tired to kill her--or even slap her--but I was mad, all right. Even through the shock, I was mad. She was trying to make it my fault. You see that, don't you? Trying to lay it all off on my fucking job, as if I could get another one that paid even half as much. I mean, at my age what else am I qualified for? I guess I could get a job as school crossing guard--I don't have any morals busts in my past--but that would be about it."