52 pickup

"Shots of the pool now… and all the schmucks lying around in their resort outfits. Hot shit, huh? Seventy-five bucks a day, couple hundred bucks for the jazzy outfits… Here comes sport now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That's your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift. Right?"

Eleven and a half years, Mitchell was thinking, seeing himself in the green bathing trunks that were too big for him because he had lost fifteen pounds in one month after meeting Cini. Eleven years and seven months exactly. Two-eighty an hour when he quit.

He saw the beach again, deserted now in the early evening. Their last day. He had stayed in the room to take a nap and she had gone for a walk.

"And as the sun sinks slowly in the west… we leave the beautiful Bahamas, isles of intrigue and plenty of extracurricular screwing, and get back to real life."

He saw his car on a street, moving, the bronze Grand Prix.

"We spliced this in with the other," the voice-over said, "so we wouldn't waste your valuable time changing film. You recognize it, sport? That's you. Now watch where you go."

Mitchell knew where the car was going. He remembered the day and the time and the street and the Caravan Motel.

There it was.

A zoom lens on the camera got him coming out of the motel office and driving over to unit number 17. There was a good shot of him looking out toward the street before he opened the door and they went inside.

Fifteen bucks. Not a bad place. It had been their third time. They had taken a shower together and drunk a bottle of champagne in bed, before, during and after, with a lot of kissing and squirming around, kissing the way he hadn't kissed in twenty years. She had said to him, "I think I'm falling in love with you. If I'm not already." But he did not say anything about love to her that time.

Over footage of them coming out to the car the narrator said, "I like this one, the expression. Mr. Casual. We cut to… suburbia."

Now Mitchell was looking at his home in Bloomfield Hills and saw himself in a te

"Keeping fit," the voice-over said. "You start chasing twenty-one-year-old tail you got to stay in shape. Mile-and-a-half jog every morning before going to… the plant.

"Here we are. Ranco Manufacturing near Mt. Clemens. Gross sales last year almost three mil. Forty-something employees working two shifts. You bank at Manufacturers, you pay your bills on time and you have a very clean D and B. I like that. I also like the hundred and fifty grand you make a year on the patent you hold. What is it, some kind of a hood latch? Doesn't cost two bits to stamp out, but all the cars got to have one and, man, you own it."

Mitchell had never seen his plant before on a movie screen. It didn't look bad: the front ledge-rock and Roman brick, and the aluminum sign that read, ranco.

"One of your trucks going out on a delivery," the voice-over said. "Or is it making a haul to the bank? We like your style, sport, so we're go

The film stopped, holding on the plant that was now slightly out of focus.

"The deal is, you get to buy this complete home movie for only a hundred and five grand. Not a hundred and fifty, no, we're not greedy and we know you got to pay capital gains on your patent royalties. So we'll let you pay it and give us approximately what's left. That's all, one year's royalty check. You won't even miss it and you'll have this fun movie for your very own. Nice color footage of what must be the most expensive piece of ass you ever had in your life."

There was a silence before Mitchell spoke.

"Is she part of this?"

The narrator paused. "Well, I wouldn't say she's a hundred-percent pure. We had a talk and the chick is not dumb. She decided to move out, figuring fun and games were over."

Mitchell sat in the chair, not moving, realizing he was calm and in control and this surprised him.

"What happens if I don't pay?"

"We get stills made of you and the broad-on the beach, the motel-and pass them around. A set to your wife. Set to your customers at G.M. Maybe a newspaper. I don't know, we'd think of ways to mess you up. Maybe it's no big deal, but you don't seem like the kind of guy who'd want to get smeared around. On the Keep Michigan Beautiful Committee, you go to church every Sunday, all that shit."

Mitchell thought about it. "You think I just go to a bank and draw a hundred and five thousand dollars?"

"No, it could take you a little time. But we want ten grand tomorrow. Like a down payment. Show us you're acting in good faith. You dig?"

"Give it to you where, here?"

"I'll call you at work, let you know." The voice paused. "Any more questions?"

"I'll have to think about it."

"You got all night, sport. We'll pack up and leave you alone."

"When do I get the film?"

"After the last payment. When'd you think?"

He sat in the dark room for perhaps a half hour after they had left. Finally he went into the kitchen and poured Jack Daniels over ice, took a drink of it and thought of something. He opened the door to the garage and saw that Cini's car was no longer there. Then he called his lawyer.

2

From the bedroom window Barbara Mitchell watched her husband for several minutes. Sometimes in the summer, while she was still in bed, she would hear him in the pool doing his twenty-five lengths. This morning it was cold and there was no sound.

He was directly below her on the patio, sport coat open, hands in his pants pockets. He never wore gloves, and only occasionally a raincoat during the cold months. She wasn't sure what he was looking at or how long he had been there. When he moved finally it was to walk along the edge of the swimming pool, looking down, as if inspecting the pale plastic cover that was stained and streaked with dead leaves and the dirt of winter and spring.

When she came outside, wearing a housecoat over her nightgown, he was still at the pool.

"Thinking about going for a swim?"

A trace of a smile appeared as he turned. "Pretty soon. Get her cleaned out, be ready for Memorial Day."

Barbara's hands were deep in the pockets of the housecoat, her shoulders hunched against the chill.

"Did you sleep at all?"

"Little bit, on my couch. Couple of the turning machines were giving us the trouble. They got them adjusted and set, then I had to wait while they started the run again and checked the pieces, cylinder rod couplers. Some reason the outside diameters were coming out trimmed a hair undersize and we had to scrap thirty percent of the run. That costs money."

She knew he was not explaining but was talking to be talking, filling a void. She knew his sounds. Something was on his mind and it could be cylinder rod couplers or it could be something else.

"I'm going to change and get back. Sit on the job till it's out. Supposed to be in Pontiac this afternoon."

"You make the deliveries now, too?"

"Sometimes it looks like it's coming to that."

"Well, how about breakfast first?"

"Couple of soft-boiled eggs would be good. Four minutes."

"I know," Barbara said.

She was in the bedroom waiting for him. She heard the shower turn off. He would be drying himself now. In a few minutes he would open the bathroom door to clear the steam from the mirror and would shave with the towel wrapped around his waist that was flat through the stomach, hard-muscled, but bulged slightly above his hips and around into his back. You could never get that area, he said. You could do two hundred situps and twists a day and never quite get to those little bulging handles of fat. Love handles, Barbara said. Or she would say it was because he wore his pants so low, down on his hips. Something left over from younger days. And he would say he would never wear his pants way up high, the way fat old men did. Where did they get those pants? The goddamn zipper must be two feet long.