The Road To Ruin

It was very awkward, holding on to the window frame, the window, the chairback, the sill, while he maneuvered himself around, but finally there he was, seated on the sill, legs outside the house, nose against the window glass. He had no idea what was outside or how far away the ground might be, but did that matter? No, it did not.

Where were those jutting screws? He felt under his thighs, and there they were, too close together to avoid completely. He’d just have to slide out above them somehow.

Grasping the bottom of the open window with both hands, he leaned far backward into the darkness of the room, then began to hunch himself forward, first on left buttock, then on right, while pulling with the strength of his forearms, upturned hands gripping the window bottom. Outside, his feet kicked in the night air, until he pressed his heels against the side of the house and used that leverage, too.

He was moving. The curl of plywood pressed against his right hip, but he was moving, inexorably moving, and all at once the plywood let him through.

Gravity took over. It took over too soon, before he was ready, before he was clear of the building. Two screws laid tracks of sharp awful pain upward along his torso, and he couldn’t twist away. His flailing left hand hit the wedged bar and grabbed it, pulling it loose, and the plywood snapped back down onto him like a mousetrap, scraping the entire upper half of his body as it squeezed him like toothpaste out of the building.

Eleven feet below this window was the ground, dark thin mountainous soil full of boulders and rocks. Most of Hall’s parts hit rocks when he landed, most significantly the head-sized rock he hit with the back of his own head.

He was unconscious then, but didn’t know it. On automatic pilot, he struggled to his feet, straightened, and marched into the wall of the house. Correcting, he spun himself about, lost his balance, found his balance, and headed off downhill, reeling forward, still clutching the metal bar in his left hand, only staying upright because his feet still knew their job was to stay, if possible, directly beneath his head.

Plunging in this way, his head hurtling down the mountain while his feet scrambled to keep up, he legged it some distance from the house, and might even have gone on like that all the way to the valley if his head had only been alert enough to tell his feet to avoid that tree.

Concussed for the second time, Hall dropped onto his back like a delivery of curtain rods. His extremities twitched, then lay still. A frown gradually faded from his brow as, off to his left, the sun at last put in an appearance.

56

MARK GOT BACK TO the lodge a little after nine in the morning, and the brown Taurus was already there, tucked in next to Os’s white Porsche. Putting his mother’s hand-me-down Buick Regal in next to the others, he was happy to see that Taurus, because it meant the union guys had not funked.

He himself had almost funked, damn near funked. After yesterday’s traumatic experience of having Monroe Hall recognize his voice, on top of the tension and disbelief co

Of course, he’d tried not to phrase it in such negative terms during those wakeful hours. He’d tried for a more positive spin in his internal debate, telling himself he could “start over,” he could “reinvent himself,” he could “wipe the slate clean,” he could, in the Mark Twain way, “light out for the Territories.”

Isn’t that, after all, what it really means to be an American? All of the current resistance to a national identification card (and many years ago, for the same reason, to the Social Security number), all of the alarm about the threats to “privacy,” are based on the simple American conviction, from the very begi

And yet he hadn’t done it. Along toward dawn, he had sunk into a heavy troubled slumber, and when the alarm jolted him awake no time later he knew, grimly, that he wouldn’t be doing his patriotic duty as a turn-tail-and-run after all. There are no Territories to light out for, not in this century. It was no longer easy to become the new you. New or old, you were already you.

So that’s what it came down to. He was Mark Sterling, of a certain background and a certain position in the community, and he always would be. He had started on this path, and the only thing to do was keep on it. And keep his mouth shut, particularly around Monroe Hall.

So it was a relief to see the Taurus, because it meant they were all in agreement: There was no way out of this. If the union men had successfully bagged it, Mark would have felt even worse than before, but they had not, so he felt marginally better.

Entering the house, he found an empty but astonishingly messy living room with faint sounds of activity far ahead. Following those sounds, he came eventually to a kitchen containing all four of his co-conspirators, plus more mess than a kindergartner’s birthday party. Breakfast was being made, with more enthusiasm than precision, all over the kitchen, using most of the pots, plates, cutting boards, cutlery, silverware, and electric gadgets formerly in the cupboards and on the shelves. Os was the most covered with flour, Ace the most covered with egg in varying degrees of congealment. It was as though they’d been hired by biased researchers to prove male incompetence in the kitchen.

Os noticed Mark first: “Ah, there you are. We’re almost ready here.”

Mac waved toward him a maple-syrup-smeared hand, and said, “I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“I haven’t,” Mark agreed, looking around, “but I’m not sure I’m hungry.”

“It’s go

“First, of course,” Os said, “we have to not feed Monroe Hall, and then feed the butler. Then we can bring most of this back down here—well, not down here, I think the dining room would be more welcoming—and tuck in to a hearty meal.”

Mark couldn’t help it: “Like the condemned man?”

Os frowned at him in surprise, “What’s wrong with you?”

Mark shook his head. “Not enough sleep,” he said, knowing it would be impossible to explain that what was wrong with him was that there weren’t any Territories any more.

Buddy said, “You know about the reward?”

“Reward?” All he could think of was receiving a gold star. But who would present it, and for what?

Mac explained, “Somebody, the wife, I guess, put up fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the return of Monroe Hall.”

“Fifty thousand?” Mark grimaced. “For Monroe Hall? That’s not much.”

Buddy said, “Ace wants to collect it.”

“And why not?” Ace demanded. “Fifty grand for information? We got the information.”

Mark said, “Os?”

Os shrugged. “It’s up to his friends in the labor movement,” he said, “to draw for Ace the direct line between that information and the jail cell.”