Only the Rain(24)

“Visualize your desired outcome,” you always said. “Know your desired resolution for Plan A, Plan B. Know where the friendlies are. Know your exit strategy. Then pull up your panties, take a deep breath, and execute, motherfucker. Execute.”

My situation is this: No police tape wrapped around the house on Route 218. No windows blacked out. No sign of a police raid. So, how to account for that? Two possibilities: Either the dispatcher who took my call is a friend of the druggies and gave them a heads-up, or, and this is the option that makes the most sense to me, the local police acted on my tip and visited the house, but found nothing to justify a search warrant. Which meant that the druggies cleaned everything up before the police arrived. And what would prompt them to do that? They came home, found muddy footprints all through their house, saw that a lot of their money was missing, and did a quick cleanup in anticipation of a possible visit from the po-po. Maybe the girl remembered me and maybe she didn’t. Maybe somebody saw my bike and maybe not. In either case, the end result is the same: they know they’ve been ripped off.

Thing is, Spence, we knew some guys like that, didn’t we? They were small-time, sure, what with the military eyeballing everything a soldier does. But, correct me if I’m wrong here, seems to me that every single one of them was a sneaky, hateful bastard pissed off at most of the world. So imagine if somebody made off with ninety thousand of their trust fund. What would they do to get it back? What wouldn’t they do?

My Plan A, but only because it was the first plan to come to mind, was to return the money. Creep into the yard in the middle of the night, and as soon as that pit bull started barking, throw the shoebox onto the porch and run like hell. But have a vehicle parked not far down the road in case they turned the dog loose on me.

It sounded simple enough—undo the one thing I’d done wrong. But simple is never as simple as it looks. Would the druggies say, “Hey, isn’t that nice? We got all our money back. Let’s all go back to bed now.”

Not likely. I pictured them being a good bit less forgiving than that. This is only a problem if they know who stole their money. And the only way they could know is if somebody recognized my bike.

Plan B is to do nothing. Don’t spend any money, don’t call attention to myself. Get busy looking for another job. Be the kind of man I want to be. Be the kind of husband and father Pops has always been.

That last part comes with obligations of its own. Should I tell Cindy about losing my job? Or should I save her the worry and wait until I have another job lined up?

I suspect I wouldn’t have even been asking myself these questions if I didn’t have all that money squirreled away. I’d probably have come home that day and told her all about my conversation with Jake, and both of us would have ranted awhile about the damn Chinese and how rotten a deal I was getting, and we’d both have been worried but not the way I am now. Because the truth of it is, a part of me wants to keep that money. A big part. Now that I have it, I want to keep it. Because now I really need it.

Man, all I ever wanted or expected out of life was to have a decent job for thirty years or so, stay reasonably healthy, raise good kids and put them on their own paths to success, and then enjoy my last twenty years or so playing with my grandkids. Don’t want to be famous for anything, don’t expect to be a millionaire. The only reality show people I envy are the ones on The Amazing Race, but only because I think it would be so much fun for Cindy and me to go racing around the world together, seeing all the places and doing all the crazy things we’re otherwise never going to experience.

More than once Cindy has said how she envies me getting to travel to the other side of the world. A lot more than once. Our little three-day honeymoon was the first time she’d ever even been out of the state. And the only time so far.

So lately I’ve been thinking something dangerous. This is Plan C; sort of my fantasy plan. What if I do have the money to take her someplace really special? What if I have the money to take the whole family there? Where would I take them?

There’s this one guy I see on TV now and then when I’m channel surfing, and for some reason I always lay the remote down when I see him and listen for a while. He’s not a preacher but he sounds like one, though without all the fake healing and hallelujahs. And the gist of his sermon is always the same thing: God wants us to be prosperous. He keeps putting opportunities for prosperity in front of us, but it’s up to us to seize those opportunities. And I don’t know, but I sit there and listen to him sometimes and I wonder, when am I going to get that opportunity?

And then there was this kid who worked washing dishes in the DFAC in Mahmudiya, an Egyptian boy named Musa something or other, you remember him? We all called him Moose. He was what, maybe fourteen or so, and he was always making deals everywhere he could, trading bootleg movies for porn DVDs, then trading the porn for a case of cheap Swadeshi whiskey that cost five bucks a bottle in Dahuk, then selling the whiskey to soldiers in Bagdad for five or six times as much. One of our own Bible thumpers would ask him, “What would Allah say about you cheating our new guys like that, Moose?” And Moose had two verses from the Koran he’d come back with: “Wealth and children are the ornament of this life.” Or else this one: “Whatever the Apostle gives you, accept it; and whatever he forbids you, abstain from it.”

So that night in bed with Cindy, while she’s sleeping and I’m lying there awake trying to choose between Plans A, B and C, I have three advisors chattering in my head. I have that TV prosperity guy, I have Moose quoting the Koran, and I have Gee reminding me it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.