Envious Moon(4)

But this story was different. At the wake, Victor’s only job was to stand in this library room in the mansion and look official in his suit. O’Brien always gave him exact orders. How to stand with your arms at your side, look straight ahead and don’t smile. If someone asks you a question, then bend forward to listen. It was all about appearances and Victor was pretty good at it, I guess. At any rate, at the wake all the people were in another room on the second floor of the house. This was where the food was and in the library where Victor was stationed nothing was going on. Occasionally someone or other would drift into the room and look at the leather-bound books on the wall, or sit in the big chairs and talk in hushed whispers, hiding their words from Victor who would pretend not to listen. And then, for a while, Victor was all alone. He could hear voices from the other room and once O’Brien poked his head in but that was it. So he did one of those impulsive things that people will do when left alone in someone else’s house. He lifted the corner of the Persian rug that covered most of the parquet floor. He told me he didn’t know exactly why he did it; he thought that perhaps he wanted to see if the wood was a different color as a result of being protected by the rug. Regardless, what he saw when he lifted the rug was dust mostly, but then some five or six feet in, was an envelope that appeared to be overflowing with green bills.

Victor dropped the rug. He looked around and waited for someone to come back into the room. A full ten minutes passed and then the door opened and an elderly couple came in and sat down in the big chairs in front of the fireplace. They made themselves comfortable and Victor gave up hope of being able to lift the rug again.

When Victor told me this, I stopped him. “Tell me about it again,” I said.

“Tell you what,” Victor said.

“The whole thing,” I said, and Victor sighed for I was always making him say things twice. But he was a good sport and started from the beginning and when he reached the part about the money, I said, “You sure it was money.”

“Of course, I’m sure. It was money. Tons of it.”

“Why didn’t you grab it?”

“Because I thought someone was going to come in.”

“And did someone?”

“Well, that couple. Then O’Brien. He was just talking about how f*cking rich these people were. Over and over.”

I said, “I think I would’ve grabbed it.” Though the truth was I didn’t know if this was true or not. Chances are I would have done exactly what Victor did.

“I should’ve,” Victor said, and then he told me that the house was empty now, but that all the things were still inside, which meant that the money was there, under the rug. I asked him how he knew this and he said he heard some of the caterers talking and they said it would be six months before the place was cleaned out. We talked about how the woman had lived alone and had no family. How there was no one for that money to go to. And once we reached this point in the conversation, I think we both knew what we were going to do. We had always been good kids and had opportunities to not be and had not taken them. But it was the summer and we were best friends and sometimes when you’re young like that you’ll do things together that you won’t do by yourself. Victor said the house would be open.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s on the island. It’s only rich people. Why would they lock it?”

“That makes sense,” I said, and we were walking down the road now, down the road toward doing this thing, in our minds anyway. We began to joke about what we would do with all that money, and talking about how much there actually was. The more we talked about it, the more money there was. Enough money to pay for four years of college. Plus, anything else we wanted to do. We joked about how I would go to college and Victor could come live with me. Then after I would be a lawyer or something and we could share a big house together. Have lots of girls. It seemed so easy. We would ride my skiff out to the island at night and sneak into the house. Find the money. And I wasn’t only thinking of myself. I thought too of my mother, of Berta, who cooked in a hot kitchen all day and who, at night, moaned in bed because her back hurt so bad. And I think it probably hurt even more than she let on, for the last thing she wanted was for me to worry about her. Which meant that her moaning was involuntary and that she could not do a damn thing about it. I didn’t know how I would tell her I got all this money. But I figured I’d worry about that later. The important thing was what it could do for us. If it could change our lives. If it could take us away from the narrow pathways we had always walked on to something different. We were young and when you are young you think there are shortcuts out there that you only need to find. Shortcuts that older people have kept from us. Both Victor and I believed that this might be one of those. And that it could alter our lives. As it turned out, it could. Just not in the way we had imagined.





Victor and I left the following night under clear skies. The moon had appeared as only a sliver above the harbor and the breeze was light. We were in my fourteen-foot skiff, the one that had been my father’s, and the most important thing was the breeze. We were going through open water and anything more than a light chop could be trouble.

I steered the skiff through the rows of fishing boats docked in the inner harbor. Under the lamplights on the wharf we saw men on the decks of boats readying themselves to go out the next morning. Some of them looked up at us as we went by and when they did they waved or nodded at us in the dark.