The return of inflation had been very good to Albert Finney. A newly-retired hedge-fund principal, he had latched on to resource stocks. He had also taken positions in the now-huge commodity carry trade. The central bankers had indeed scotched the demon deflation, but at the cost of reviving the Beelzebub of inflation. The year that Albert decided to retire early, 2020, saw official inflation hit 14%. Unofficial inflation was much higher.
Contrary to what his still-active colleages thought, he had not retired because he had burned out. He did so because he was worried about the economy burning out. The inflation juggernaut was unstoppable, even with legislative sterilization remedies; Albert knew well that in the long run, the currency would all be dead. Resolving to do something about it, he found himself joining a conspiracy of goldbugs determined to save as much of the economy as they could.
In doing so, he would place a heavy adult responsibility of his teenage son Neil and his distant relative Dylan. How heavy, both would find out...
Showing posts with label hawaladar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hawaladar. Show all posts
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Ancestral Ties
News always traveled fast in Wakia. Like many towns, it adapted its name from a term used by the originary inhabitants - who were later told to take a hike. At first, it was one of many areas that weren’t settled quickly because of too much bedrock and too little topsoil. The peaceful Wakia Lake was a bonus, but not much of an enticement in a hardscrabble age when what counted was arable land.
So, the land was initially filled by settlers with a penchant for hunting, trapping and fishing - plus a few fools. The fools soon learned that the cheap land with the spectacular views wasn’t much good for farming. Their compensatory talk about the views and the swimmable lake were greeted with mirth, even by the other locals who shared those advantages. Those fools were less than a century ahead of their time, but a sound long-term view doesn’t fill an empty stomach. To the surprise of some, they learned to fish and even hunt and trap; they stayed.
Even when it became a town, Wakia was at heart a township. The fellows who got their hands on lake land, and thus could avail themselves of fish in their diet, had on average a thousand to two thousand feet of frontage each. Those who preferred dry land found that the hunting was better, so it all evened out. In order to keep things smooth, the lakesiders stuck to fishing and the drylanders specialized in hunting. Both types kept themselves fed, which was all that mattered at a time when the land was dirt-cheap and there were no property taxes to speak of. The latter came later.
Wakia the town, really the township centre, started off at the place where the lake drained off into another through a narrow and somewhat long river. As a result, it was easy to find – if you knew the area, that is. Because the river land was not picked up at first, it had evolved into a kind of commons where people could meet, trade and sometimes settle disputes. Long before the area was filled up, the most level-headed man in that neck of the woods was chivvied into buying and settling that border land. Since there was no legal category for the commons, only owned or unowned land, the folks back then had to find someone who’d be amenable to holding a plot that was already earmarked for gatherings and such.
The level-headed man they selected already owned more than two hundred acres and about three thousand and five hundred feet of frontage: well above the average homestead. Half of the frontage formed a natural harbour, making his land a natural destination point for those who didn’t know the area. The other half stretched to the right if you were leaving. The owner’s name was Brian Mullen.
When he heard of his neighbour’s plans, he first told them to hoof it. Why would a man, well settled in, up and move to a completely different place on the lake? After a few blandishments, he grumblingly conceded that his older brother – a lawyer in the big town of Freham – had enough to buy up a lot of acreage if he picked up sticks and moved to the riverside. And move he did – but his younger brother demanded that the blandishers pick up the cost of the stamp. And the paper, envelope and pen.
Willard Mullen, having been somewhat of a success on Freham, was expecting that the 2,000 acres with 4,000 feet of frontage on Lake Wakia would entitle him to the courtesies entitled to a man who gave up a successful law career and a possible judgeship. It didn’t. Instead he was ribbed a little, particularly by his younger brother. Sighing and bending to the inevitable, he learned how to hunt and fish. He was one of the few who did both; it was tolerated because he did keep the gathering-place arrangement on what was legally his land. To his surprise, he found himself becoming a real de facto judge when ribbing turned into respect. Even his younger brother Brian toned it down. Willard’s word became known as golden all over the Wakia township.
He had had a little money left over after the move, and had spread it around by having a place built out of real milled timber. More money came in later with the railroad, as people from Freham discovered that Wakia was indeed a relaxing place with beautiful views. Soon, the joke among the original settlers was “Don’t shoot the tourists; they’re too tough to eat.”
With tourism came more trade. Money began flowing freely in the township. But, the trade also brought something else.
The first man to sell his land to a distinguished Freham resident had been one of the fools. Lawrence Finney hadn’t been that much good at fishing, so he made up for it by trying his hand at distilling. He had enough of a potato patch to grow enough potato for he, and later he and his family, to supplement the fish diet. There was also enough left over to feed a still. The money for the still equipment came from him hoofing off to Freham and getting steady work for a period of two years. He found it easy to live with the Chinese immigrants, and they taught him how to save a few pennies while keeping body and soul together. Larry the Fool found that he had a talent for whipping up nice strong vodka, which the residents were happy to barter for. When money came in, he gently declined payment and insisted on meat and other goods. Misunderstanding the excise-tax laws, likely deliberately, he decided that it was okay for him to run his still as long as no cash changed hands. None did, except for a few pennies to buy new bottles and more yeast. He creditably offered to barter fish he caught for the empties, so as to minimize the cash component of his revenue, but most settled for a negotiated discount on a re-up. Being somewhat averse to work, and prone to wandering off on his lonesome at times, Finney “the Fish” didn’t participate in the cash economy at all when the tourist trade got rolling. He didn’t see much in it for him.
His own spread was about sixty acres; it had fifteen hundred feet of lake frontage. Although the border was somewhat irregular, his land extended an average of six hundred yards into the woods. By coincidence, part of it was flat enough to make for a good section of road. That part was two-thirds in.
A town legend that said Wakia was incorporated as a town, and began levying property taxes, in order to get Finney into a steady job. Grumbling to a now-august Willard Mullen about it, he found out the truth: there was enough trade for the township to consider putting down roads. The main road was going to be parallel to the railroad and eventually hitch up with the main cart line all the way to a now-bustling Freham. There was also a plan to put in side roads so the township folks could reach the new town centre more easily. Finney’s spread, like his neighbours’, would be cut in two by one of them.
Seeing the opportunity, he decided that he would be a good civil fellow and deed over the land for the road…in exchange for a ten-year tax abatement.
Willard objected. Since the town centre was going to be bisected by the river, a bridge suitable for vehicles was in order. The new tax monies would be used to demonstrate proof of payment for a first bond issue, whose proceeds would be used to build a proper bridge over the river and thus connect the future town. Several gentlemen of means in Freham had already been contacted, with details about how the tourist trade was turning the township from backwater to viable. Two had expressed interest in the bond issue.
When he found out that most were deeding the land for the road out of the goodness of their hearts, or for the advantage it would give them, Willard believed he had right on his side when he insisted. After all, he himself was going to deed the meeting-ground part of his land – about two hundred acres – free of charge to the town for a town-hall and court-house complex, and public park alongside the river. He was unsure about the rest, but was sure it would eventually be sold piecemeal to new residents and hopeful shopkeepers. By comparison to Willard and the others, Lawrence Finney looked just plain mean.
As for Larry, he insisted too. The specialty he had boxed himself into meant avoiding cash, by his own rules, and two years of regular work was enough for his lifetime. Out of the goodness of his own heart, he offered to give a few barrels’ worth of vodka for the incorporation party instead of the taxes.
From the perspective of the law, it was the cleanest transaction Finney had ever proposed to undertake. It was completely legal to give away moonshined liquor to friends out of the goodness of one’s heart with no expectation of return. Willard Mullen thanked him for his generosity, but didn’t bend on the abatement. Being a legal man, he feared the consequences for the bond issue if Finney set a precedent.
The issue remained stuck for some time, until Mullen threw in his hand and offered to pay Finney’s taxes in cash money for the first two years. Most others could pay the tax with funds they got from the marketplace. Those who couldn’t, could pay in barter of marketable goods or labour if they wanted to. Mullen insisted that the last part be voluntary: he didn’t want to inaugurate his town with a corvée. Forced labour was out.
Finney, of course, didn’t much like the idea of labouring on the bridge. Barter goods were out, as he bartered for his needs; the only good he could supply out of his own efforts were perishable fish and not-quite legal vodka. His wife, a former schoolteacher who shared his penchant for solitary ambling, offered to tutor the local kids for money. Finney, of course, would have none of it. Like many men of his time, he was firm in his belief that a woman’s most important job was that of wife and mother.
Although granted his two year’s respite, the new tax still left him with a problem. What to do when the de facto tax abatement ran out? The problem was solved more quickly than he expected when one of Freham’s more worthy financiers came to Wakia to visit.
Being one of the fools, Finney had selected a plot to homestead with one of the best views on the lake. Since it faced south, sunrise cheered the left and sunset graced the right. His frontage included some beach land as well as the rocky sort. Luckily, the ground underneath the water at the beach part was silty instead of rocky. It was squishy on the toes, but it was easy to walk on. The rocks were underground bedrock: large and easy to stand on. They were also easy to build on, as was the silt.
There were enough rocks in the underwater vicinity, near a less choice island whose bedrock has broken into many pieces, to make the weighing for cribs made with raw stripped tree logs. Finney, contrary to his reputation as a slacker, had assembled enough crib to make for an honest-to-Gosh dock; it played host to his oar-powered fishing boat. His home was a cozy 1,200 square foot one-story number that was nestled into the hillock overlooking the lake. Not far from the dock, it was made of milled lumber. Yes, it had been procured by barter, but informal trade had been good to him. He had the goods.
Finney’s tax problem got solved when H. Walthorp Denniger, distinguished Freham financier, came to visit Wakia to see to the bond issue. Being a conservative sort, Willard Mullen had prepared an estimate of the tax base by using only the cash that could be raised: the barter was valued at zero, so as to leave a reserve. Even with that conservatism, the tax rolls were enough to float a bridge. The deal was sound, and was cut shortly after the town was incorporated.
Denniger was a well-known teetotaller, and was invited to the incorporation party which Finney had generously lubricated. He was also invited by Willard’s younger brother Brian to meet a man on a very fine homestead. Of course, the man was none other than Mr. Lawrence Finney, who the younger Mullin said was so solid that his taxes were cash-paid two years in advance. Brian and his friends chuckled, waiting for Denniger to gasp at the sight of one of Wakia’s purportedly solid citizens running a still. Denniger did gasp, but for a different reason.
He fell in love with the place, at first sight. Being an established man, with suit, Van Dyke beard, near-gone salt-and-pepper hair and established girth to show it, he could take time off from his work and vacation up at Wakia Lake. It was a day’s trip by cart, but a new-fangled device called the horseless carriage promised to cut the travel time down considerably. The road land now excised from the property, Finney now had two parcels on each side. The lake parcel had about forty-five acres. The remainder had about thirteen.
Denniger offered Finney one thousand dollars cash on the spot for the lakefront parcel. Honestly demurring, Larry didn’t bite because he had nowhere else to go. He was a fisher, not a hunter, and for that calling he needed lake access. He was now getting on, having two sons that were teenagers, and he honestly didn’t know what to do with the less valuable parcel. He had even less idea of where to go in lieu of settling on the rocky and tree-filled remains.
Denniger, trying to coax him, said truthfully that a thousand dollars sufficed for a fine upstanding house in Freham. Finney, honestly stuck in his rut, just shook his head and mumbled a polite refusal. So, Denniger upped the offer to $1,500.
That was more than enough for a substantial Freham home, plus enough cash money to make a job search leisurely, but Finney still didn’t bite. He didn’t accept until the offer was upped to $2,000. Seeing as how he got the better of the bargain, Larry was good enough to destroy the still before Denniger fully realized what the still-shack contained.
By selling most of his property to H. Walthorp Denniger, Freham financier, Mr. Lawrence Finney had not only set a precedent but also made himself somewhat infamous. Although much of the complaining was displaced greed, there was also genuine resentment of the man. He had let an outsider into a tight-knit town. Almost overnight, he was known as Finney the bootlegger.
Willard Mullen secretly didn’t mind, as he was a professional man. Denniger was a much better risk in terms of taxes. He vacationing on the lake made him an easier touch when it came to raising more bond money to put down the side roads and improve the main road. Brian Mullen did mind, and not just because his prank fell flat. He saw an out-of-towner moving into a settled property, determining to use it as a mere vacation home, as something akin to an invasion. How long before other Freham blowhards came in and turned his beloved Wakia into New Freham? Mullen being popular, his opinion carried – but not enough to prevent a few other sales when the dust settled. Other Frehamites used a homesteading dodge to get vacation plots: the land they got was subpar from the homesteading standpoint, but coveted from the summer-home standpoint. For the first time, the islands on the lake were spoken for – making for a disgruntled crop of youngsters who used to treat them as parks, camping and sometimes dating sites. Their parents were miffed at the Freham slickers who put on airs as if they were settlers too.
The first crop of cottagers was somewhat pompous, and judgemental when crossed, but they had a knack of treating the old-timers respectfully despite the worldly gulf between them. As the decades flew by, a second crop moved in. They weren’t stilted, were far less judgemental, and were more gregarious than the first crop - but they had the habit of measuring people by the size of their wallets. Despite using manners to conceal, they still gave their measuring stick away. In retaliation, the locals got the town government to institute a rudimentary market-value assessment scheme. The Freham cottagers ended up paying the bulk of the town’s property taxes.
By the time the second crop came in, most of the settlers’ descendents on the lakefront had sold their properties for increasingly handsome sums and moved into town. They found they preferred town life and their own kind of gregariousness. Again, a stable equilibrium developed and quiet resumed. The town of Wakia became devoted to servicing the affluent clientele of Lake Wakia.
One of the few families who didn’t move was the Mullens. The descendent of Willard stayed in town, as befitting the heirs of the first mayor. Some of them were active in civic government; the rest had straight jobs. A few left for the big city or parts unknown, but not many. Willard had enough land left over, even after sales to shopkeepers, to make for more than enough homes for five generations of descendants. Brian parceled his land out in a similar way, but twenty acres surrounding the natural harbour was turned into a marina. That being the family business, it stayed intact. As was normal, the family outstripped the family business and some moved into town. The others set off for new pastures. None moved to Freham.
As for old Larry, he had left for Freham with the money he got from the sale – most of it. With the aid of a little age inaccuracy, he deeded the off-lake land to his younger son Patrick and left the boy with enough money to build a cabin and get by for the next five years. Larry had been tempted to make it ten, but he had halved it instead. Word was, he bought himself a house and took up drinking for a living – for about a year or so. Then, he opened up a tavern.
As the twentieth century turned into two decades less a year after the start of the twenty-first, the boy of the Patrick Feeney house was his great-great grandson Dylan. In the time being, Freham had gone from a bustling town to a huge metropolis and major financial centre. Dylan’s dad Darren, the man of the house, was an electrician who branched out into computer and network installation to keep up with the times. Dylan, being the great-great grandchild that was the scion of the eldest sons of Patrick, was in line to inherit the house and land when his dad moved on. Complaints about inflation, which had reached double digits by 2018, were part of the town’s conversation. Despite that additional burden, life was still simple. The Finneys had stayed away from the cottagers on the other side of the road except for business reasons.
Until 2020, when the property changed hands for more than twenty-three million well-depreciated dollars. The buyer was one Albert Finney, great-great-grandson of the original owner. The Finney scion, thrice removed, has come back to the old homestead.
So, the land was initially filled by settlers with a penchant for hunting, trapping and fishing - plus a few fools. The fools soon learned that the cheap land with the spectacular views wasn’t much good for farming. Their compensatory talk about the views and the swimmable lake were greeted with mirth, even by the other locals who shared those advantages. Those fools were less than a century ahead of their time, but a sound long-term view doesn’t fill an empty stomach. To the surprise of some, they learned to fish and even hunt and trap; they stayed.
Even when it became a town, Wakia was at heart a township. The fellows who got their hands on lake land, and thus could avail themselves of fish in their diet, had on average a thousand to two thousand feet of frontage each. Those who preferred dry land found that the hunting was better, so it all evened out. In order to keep things smooth, the lakesiders stuck to fishing and the drylanders specialized in hunting. Both types kept themselves fed, which was all that mattered at a time when the land was dirt-cheap and there were no property taxes to speak of. The latter came later.
Wakia the town, really the township centre, started off at the place where the lake drained off into another through a narrow and somewhat long river. As a result, it was easy to find – if you knew the area, that is. Because the river land was not picked up at first, it had evolved into a kind of commons where people could meet, trade and sometimes settle disputes. Long before the area was filled up, the most level-headed man in that neck of the woods was chivvied into buying and settling that border land. Since there was no legal category for the commons, only owned or unowned land, the folks back then had to find someone who’d be amenable to holding a plot that was already earmarked for gatherings and such.
The level-headed man they selected already owned more than two hundred acres and about three thousand and five hundred feet of frontage: well above the average homestead. Half of the frontage formed a natural harbour, making his land a natural destination point for those who didn’t know the area. The other half stretched to the right if you were leaving. The owner’s name was Brian Mullen.
When he heard of his neighbour’s plans, he first told them to hoof it. Why would a man, well settled in, up and move to a completely different place on the lake? After a few blandishments, he grumblingly conceded that his older brother – a lawyer in the big town of Freham – had enough to buy up a lot of acreage if he picked up sticks and moved to the riverside. And move he did – but his younger brother demanded that the blandishers pick up the cost of the stamp. And the paper, envelope and pen.
Willard Mullen, having been somewhat of a success on Freham, was expecting that the 2,000 acres with 4,000 feet of frontage on Lake Wakia would entitle him to the courtesies entitled to a man who gave up a successful law career and a possible judgeship. It didn’t. Instead he was ribbed a little, particularly by his younger brother. Sighing and bending to the inevitable, he learned how to hunt and fish. He was one of the few who did both; it was tolerated because he did keep the gathering-place arrangement on what was legally his land. To his surprise, he found himself becoming a real de facto judge when ribbing turned into respect. Even his younger brother Brian toned it down. Willard’s word became known as golden all over the Wakia township.
He had had a little money left over after the move, and had spread it around by having a place built out of real milled timber. More money came in later with the railroad, as people from Freham discovered that Wakia was indeed a relaxing place with beautiful views. Soon, the joke among the original settlers was “Don’t shoot the tourists; they’re too tough to eat.”
With tourism came more trade. Money began flowing freely in the township. But, the trade also brought something else.
The first man to sell his land to a distinguished Freham resident had been one of the fools. Lawrence Finney hadn’t been that much good at fishing, so he made up for it by trying his hand at distilling. He had enough of a potato patch to grow enough potato for he, and later he and his family, to supplement the fish diet. There was also enough left over to feed a still. The money for the still equipment came from him hoofing off to Freham and getting steady work for a period of two years. He found it easy to live with the Chinese immigrants, and they taught him how to save a few pennies while keeping body and soul together. Larry the Fool found that he had a talent for whipping up nice strong vodka, which the residents were happy to barter for. When money came in, he gently declined payment and insisted on meat and other goods. Misunderstanding the excise-tax laws, likely deliberately, he decided that it was okay for him to run his still as long as no cash changed hands. None did, except for a few pennies to buy new bottles and more yeast. He creditably offered to barter fish he caught for the empties, so as to minimize the cash component of his revenue, but most settled for a negotiated discount on a re-up. Being somewhat averse to work, and prone to wandering off on his lonesome at times, Finney “the Fish” didn’t participate in the cash economy at all when the tourist trade got rolling. He didn’t see much in it for him.
His own spread was about sixty acres; it had fifteen hundred feet of lake frontage. Although the border was somewhat irregular, his land extended an average of six hundred yards into the woods. By coincidence, part of it was flat enough to make for a good section of road. That part was two-thirds in.
A town legend that said Wakia was incorporated as a town, and began levying property taxes, in order to get Finney into a steady job. Grumbling to a now-august Willard Mullen about it, he found out the truth: there was enough trade for the township to consider putting down roads. The main road was going to be parallel to the railroad and eventually hitch up with the main cart line all the way to a now-bustling Freham. There was also a plan to put in side roads so the township folks could reach the new town centre more easily. Finney’s spread, like his neighbours’, would be cut in two by one of them.
Seeing the opportunity, he decided that he would be a good civil fellow and deed over the land for the road…in exchange for a ten-year tax abatement.
Willard objected. Since the town centre was going to be bisected by the river, a bridge suitable for vehicles was in order. The new tax monies would be used to demonstrate proof of payment for a first bond issue, whose proceeds would be used to build a proper bridge over the river and thus connect the future town. Several gentlemen of means in Freham had already been contacted, with details about how the tourist trade was turning the township from backwater to viable. Two had expressed interest in the bond issue.
When he found out that most were deeding the land for the road out of the goodness of their hearts, or for the advantage it would give them, Willard believed he had right on his side when he insisted. After all, he himself was going to deed the meeting-ground part of his land – about two hundred acres – free of charge to the town for a town-hall and court-house complex, and public park alongside the river. He was unsure about the rest, but was sure it would eventually be sold piecemeal to new residents and hopeful shopkeepers. By comparison to Willard and the others, Lawrence Finney looked just plain mean.
As for Larry, he insisted too. The specialty he had boxed himself into meant avoiding cash, by his own rules, and two years of regular work was enough for his lifetime. Out of the goodness of his own heart, he offered to give a few barrels’ worth of vodka for the incorporation party instead of the taxes.
From the perspective of the law, it was the cleanest transaction Finney had ever proposed to undertake. It was completely legal to give away moonshined liquor to friends out of the goodness of one’s heart with no expectation of return. Willard Mullen thanked him for his generosity, but didn’t bend on the abatement. Being a legal man, he feared the consequences for the bond issue if Finney set a precedent.
The issue remained stuck for some time, until Mullen threw in his hand and offered to pay Finney’s taxes in cash money for the first two years. Most others could pay the tax with funds they got from the marketplace. Those who couldn’t, could pay in barter of marketable goods or labour if they wanted to. Mullen insisted that the last part be voluntary: he didn’t want to inaugurate his town with a corvée. Forced labour was out.
Finney, of course, didn’t much like the idea of labouring on the bridge. Barter goods were out, as he bartered for his needs; the only good he could supply out of his own efforts were perishable fish and not-quite legal vodka. His wife, a former schoolteacher who shared his penchant for solitary ambling, offered to tutor the local kids for money. Finney, of course, would have none of it. Like many men of his time, he was firm in his belief that a woman’s most important job was that of wife and mother.
Although granted his two year’s respite, the new tax still left him with a problem. What to do when the de facto tax abatement ran out? The problem was solved more quickly than he expected when one of Freham’s more worthy financiers came to Wakia to visit.
Being one of the fools, Finney had selected a plot to homestead with one of the best views on the lake. Since it faced south, sunrise cheered the left and sunset graced the right. His frontage included some beach land as well as the rocky sort. Luckily, the ground underneath the water at the beach part was silty instead of rocky. It was squishy on the toes, but it was easy to walk on. The rocks were underground bedrock: large and easy to stand on. They were also easy to build on, as was the silt.
There were enough rocks in the underwater vicinity, near a less choice island whose bedrock has broken into many pieces, to make the weighing for cribs made with raw stripped tree logs. Finney, contrary to his reputation as a slacker, had assembled enough crib to make for an honest-to-Gosh dock; it played host to his oar-powered fishing boat. His home was a cozy 1,200 square foot one-story number that was nestled into the hillock overlooking the lake. Not far from the dock, it was made of milled lumber. Yes, it had been procured by barter, but informal trade had been good to him. He had the goods.
Finney’s tax problem got solved when H. Walthorp Denniger, distinguished Freham financier, came to visit Wakia to see to the bond issue. Being a conservative sort, Willard Mullen had prepared an estimate of the tax base by using only the cash that could be raised: the barter was valued at zero, so as to leave a reserve. Even with that conservatism, the tax rolls were enough to float a bridge. The deal was sound, and was cut shortly after the town was incorporated.
Denniger was a well-known teetotaller, and was invited to the incorporation party which Finney had generously lubricated. He was also invited by Willard’s younger brother Brian to meet a man on a very fine homestead. Of course, the man was none other than Mr. Lawrence Finney, who the younger Mullin said was so solid that his taxes were cash-paid two years in advance. Brian and his friends chuckled, waiting for Denniger to gasp at the sight of one of Wakia’s purportedly solid citizens running a still. Denniger did gasp, but for a different reason.
He fell in love with the place, at first sight. Being an established man, with suit, Van Dyke beard, near-gone salt-and-pepper hair and established girth to show it, he could take time off from his work and vacation up at Wakia Lake. It was a day’s trip by cart, but a new-fangled device called the horseless carriage promised to cut the travel time down considerably. The road land now excised from the property, Finney now had two parcels on each side. The lake parcel had about forty-five acres. The remainder had about thirteen.
Denniger offered Finney one thousand dollars cash on the spot for the lakefront parcel. Honestly demurring, Larry didn’t bite because he had nowhere else to go. He was a fisher, not a hunter, and for that calling he needed lake access. He was now getting on, having two sons that were teenagers, and he honestly didn’t know what to do with the less valuable parcel. He had even less idea of where to go in lieu of settling on the rocky and tree-filled remains.
Denniger, trying to coax him, said truthfully that a thousand dollars sufficed for a fine upstanding house in Freham. Finney, honestly stuck in his rut, just shook his head and mumbled a polite refusal. So, Denniger upped the offer to $1,500.
That was more than enough for a substantial Freham home, plus enough cash money to make a job search leisurely, but Finney still didn’t bite. He didn’t accept until the offer was upped to $2,000. Seeing as how he got the better of the bargain, Larry was good enough to destroy the still before Denniger fully realized what the still-shack contained.
By selling most of his property to H. Walthorp Denniger, Freham financier, Mr. Lawrence Finney had not only set a precedent but also made himself somewhat infamous. Although much of the complaining was displaced greed, there was also genuine resentment of the man. He had let an outsider into a tight-knit town. Almost overnight, he was known as Finney the bootlegger.
Willard Mullen secretly didn’t mind, as he was a professional man. Denniger was a much better risk in terms of taxes. He vacationing on the lake made him an easier touch when it came to raising more bond money to put down the side roads and improve the main road. Brian Mullen did mind, and not just because his prank fell flat. He saw an out-of-towner moving into a settled property, determining to use it as a mere vacation home, as something akin to an invasion. How long before other Freham blowhards came in and turned his beloved Wakia into New Freham? Mullen being popular, his opinion carried – but not enough to prevent a few other sales when the dust settled. Other Frehamites used a homesteading dodge to get vacation plots: the land they got was subpar from the homesteading standpoint, but coveted from the summer-home standpoint. For the first time, the islands on the lake were spoken for – making for a disgruntled crop of youngsters who used to treat them as parks, camping and sometimes dating sites. Their parents were miffed at the Freham slickers who put on airs as if they were settlers too.
The first crop of cottagers was somewhat pompous, and judgemental when crossed, but they had a knack of treating the old-timers respectfully despite the worldly gulf between them. As the decades flew by, a second crop moved in. They weren’t stilted, were far less judgemental, and were more gregarious than the first crop - but they had the habit of measuring people by the size of their wallets. Despite using manners to conceal, they still gave their measuring stick away. In retaliation, the locals got the town government to institute a rudimentary market-value assessment scheme. The Freham cottagers ended up paying the bulk of the town’s property taxes.
By the time the second crop came in, most of the settlers’ descendents on the lakefront had sold their properties for increasingly handsome sums and moved into town. They found they preferred town life and their own kind of gregariousness. Again, a stable equilibrium developed and quiet resumed. The town of Wakia became devoted to servicing the affluent clientele of Lake Wakia.
One of the few families who didn’t move was the Mullens. The descendent of Willard stayed in town, as befitting the heirs of the first mayor. Some of them were active in civic government; the rest had straight jobs. A few left for the big city or parts unknown, but not many. Willard had enough land left over, even after sales to shopkeepers, to make for more than enough homes for five generations of descendants. Brian parceled his land out in a similar way, but twenty acres surrounding the natural harbour was turned into a marina. That being the family business, it stayed intact. As was normal, the family outstripped the family business and some moved into town. The others set off for new pastures. None moved to Freham.
As for old Larry, he had left for Freham with the money he got from the sale – most of it. With the aid of a little age inaccuracy, he deeded the off-lake land to his younger son Patrick and left the boy with enough money to build a cabin and get by for the next five years. Larry had been tempted to make it ten, but he had halved it instead. Word was, he bought himself a house and took up drinking for a living – for about a year or so. Then, he opened up a tavern.
As the twentieth century turned into two decades less a year after the start of the twenty-first, the boy of the Patrick Feeney house was his great-great grandson Dylan. In the time being, Freham had gone from a bustling town to a huge metropolis and major financial centre. Dylan’s dad Darren, the man of the house, was an electrician who branched out into computer and network installation to keep up with the times. Dylan, being the great-great grandchild that was the scion of the eldest sons of Patrick, was in line to inherit the house and land when his dad moved on. Complaints about inflation, which had reached double digits by 2018, were part of the town’s conversation. Despite that additional burden, life was still simple. The Finneys had stayed away from the cottagers on the other side of the road except for business reasons.
Until 2020, when the property changed hands for more than twenty-three million well-depreciated dollars. The buyer was one Albert Finney, great-great-grandson of the original owner. The Finney scion, thrice removed, has come back to the old homestead.
To Hawala
The Lawrence Finney property was more than a vacation home to Albert Finney. With double-digit inflation came turmoil; with turmoil came nervousness. Albert Finney’s Freham homestead, a mini-mansion on an eighty by one hundred and fifty foot lot, wasn’t as safe as it had been. There had been three burglaries in three months in their exclusive neighbourhood. One of them, two blocks down, had been a full-scale home invasion. The police didn’t get to the scenes in time for any of them. Rumours flew that professional thieves were beginning to bribe the dispatchers in at least one major security company.
That invasion had been too close for comfort. Albert, his wife Susan and their only son Neil, although personally unaffected, had felt threatened enough for Albert to look for new digs. Their first choice was a luxury condo with security force on the payroll, but the sight of the old Finney property going on the market for $23,499,000 got Albert looking into it as a home. Not a vacation home, a new home. Like small towns everywhere, the town of Wakia was less prone to civil breakdown than Freham the unwieldy city. Albert had been enough of a genealogy buff to know that his great-great grandfather had lived up there. From what he could find, Lawrence Finney had been a fisher and small-scale farmer with the stereotypical-Irishman potato patch. That part of the land, though only a few acres of the mostly tree- and rock-filled property, had been enough to scrape a living from should the fish go scarce.
When he found out that his twice-great grandpa Lawrence had homesteaded that exact same $24 million plot, he had hit the offer without thinking twice. The family progression from tavern owner to major hedge-fund principal had resulted in Albert having enough liquid assets to buy the place on the spot. He could take his own time selling his Freham home.
Most of his neighbours, in a kindly way, thought he was nuts. He was shrewd enough to be reassured by that straw poll: it meant he could still sell the old address at a nice premium. The central bankers who wanted to cure the economy from a real-estate-induced depression had done their jobs too well: real estate had indeed recovered. More than recovered: hard assets, even real estate, became sought again as inflation loomed and ran rampant. Only this time, real estate wasn’t in a bubble unto itself. The entire economy had become ridden by the inflation bubble; if anything, real estate had been mighty slow out of the gate. As the reality of high inflation set in, though, homes and condos had started to catch up. Gold was closing in on $20,000 an ounce.
Albert has been late to becoming a father, even by citified standards. He was now fifty-three, thirty-seven years older than his boy, and had more than enough to retire on. He knew, as did the gold market, that the stated rate of inflation woefully underestimated the real thing. Although formally 14%, it was more like 30%: perhaps more.
Both Albert and Susan could see the way things were going. Crushing liabilities, the consequent deficits and the increasing need for the central bank to monetize them had set off an inflation spiral. The central bank’s sterilization dams blocking the inflationary effects of the monetization had developed serious cracks. A legislative remedy, hard credit-growth controls, was making its way through the legislature. Albert knew enough about the financial system, not to mention about his equally shrewd colleagues, to know that any such attempt would have enough loopholes to make the repair job crumble. What politician would dare say “no more credit” to the masses, without escape hatch?
Adding to the trouble was the fact that the dollar was plunging on the forex market, even though its more successful competitors were being inflated too. Yes indeed, the dollars were being repatriated. Even the proposed credit-rationing law could do nothing about the dollar carry trade, whose proceeds were going into gold and commodities. Given the inflation spiral, it was a better bet than high-interest short-term debt in less soft fiat currencies. Commodities kept going up: you just peeled off enough of a position to pay off the interest on the carry loan and let the rest ride. If a mistiming mishap took place, the central bank was there. More and more, the central bank was creating new reserves; more and more, those new reserves leaked into the carry trade.
Albert was old and experienced enough to see where the long run was going. In order to scope out how it would end, he used a trick that his father taught him at thirteen: the Nash Empathy Principle. In order to see how the game would play out, imagine that you’re your opponent and find the best move he or she could make. Then make your own move with that best play in mind.
He tried to imagine what he could do had he been the head of the central bank, but his imagination came up dry. That was the trouble. He could easily find ways to profit from inflation, knowing the ins and outs of the monetary, banking and shadow-banking system, but the prospect of stopping it baffled him. The only way out was to unleash a monster depression, which was politically impossible.
The financial pom-pom wavers were pushing the message that the robust economy could survive an extended spell of double-digit inflation. Albert knew better. He also could see the bleeding edge of civil chaos coming to Freham. So could his wife: she had gently pushed him to move after the home invasion.
So, he and his family were well prepared to move up to Lake Wakia permanently. Although distant, he had an ancestral claim to the property he had bought. He was prepared to go prepper, but he was shrewd enough to not pack anything in advance except for furniture, gadgets and clothes. He knew quite well that buying local was the way to go. Not only food, but also firewood. He’d be spending a fair bit of fiat up there – with one important exception, decided on because the product didn’t exist in any quantity up in Wakia.
His savings were in gold mining stocks: with a wistful tear, he had cashed in his share of the hedge fund after stepping aside for his successor. All of the proceeds were put into mining stocks – all of them. Albert was sure that the stocks would go up by the time it came time to pay his tax bill. In miniature, his manoeuvre was the same as the commodity carry trade: sell some of what went up most and pay the tax bill with the proceeds. Wash, rinse and repeat for the next tax year.
There was a risk of the stocks going down in the interim, but well-timed buys and the overall trend made it slight. Albert had comped out the risk and decided it was well worth shouldering, although not without a few qualms. Since his firm had been a hedge fund, he was not entitled to the bailouts the trading department of the banks now expected as a matter of course. That made him more prudent in his calculations than his professional colleagues trading for the banks. They justified the bailouts by the monumental amount of income taxes both they and the banks paid when times were good. He once noted that he and his own firm paid enough of a fair share to qualify, but wasn’t let in. They didn’t like where he was going with it, so he kept his further thoughts to himself for the sake of professional peace.
Now retired, with a private portfolio spilling out more than enough dividends to meet his needs, Albert saw to that exception on the day before he and the family moved. He had budgeted the entire day for the chore.
Going into a large bank, one with a very ample supply of gold coins, he wryly noted to himself that he could wait in the lengthy line for the first time in what seemed his life. The bank occupied the entire first floor of a high-rise that spanned half the block.
A now-balding, gray-haired thinnish man with not much girth, slightly more than the average height, Albert’s casual clothes could not hide his wealth. Perhaps that was because he wore them like his distant cousin Darren Finney would wear a three-piece suit. A bespoke suit, silk shirt, gold cuff links, genuine soft-leather shoes and Hermès tie were just Albert’s work clothes.
He went in with a huge cash balance. Two and a half hours later, he exited with a very heavy briefcase. It contained two hundred and fifty one-ounce bullion coins, one hundred half-ouncers, one hundred quarter-ouncers, five hundred tenth ouncers and five hundred twentieth-ouncers. The last had been a bit of a stretch for the bank’s inventory. In addition to the coins, he also had a single hundred-ounce gold bar. Having to haul five hundred ounces, he moved slowly towards the taxicab he had hailed by cell phone. Thankfully, the civil breakdown had no influence in the business district: instead of rustled, he was treated with great respect and given a wide berth. Aware of how conspicuous he was, he trundled to the door while blushing.
Tongues could wag: it didn’t matter. Had any authorities decide to inquire, his obvious lackadaisicalness with security would make his story about having lost the gold plausible. By ‘losing’ the gold, he would do his part to save the economy from the decaying currency. Albert planned, in his retirement, to help pave the way for an alternate money. He and a few others, at first, would save what part of the economy that they could.
As he struggled to get the gold-filled briefcase into the taxi, he wryly noted to himself that he was part of a conspiracy. A conspiracy of goldbugs.
All next day was moving day. The transport-truck moving van arrived promptly at 9 AM. It was more than a two-hour drive to the old Finney homestead. Because of the time it would take to load and unload the furniture and effects, the van and the men were spoken for over the entire day. Albert hoped that he wouldn’t have to put them up overnight.
As Susan and Dylan settled into the soft and conformable leather front seats of the 2019 Mercedes S550, Albert regretted having bought such an expensive vehicle. He himself was taking up their second car, a 2018 Mercedes G55, with the gold-laden briefcase tucked in with his personal effects. It was an excellent off-road vehicle, but both Mercedes yelled out “luxury.” He wasn’t sure how they would fit in, now that he and his family were moving for good. He did have an ancestral claim, but it was rooted in the distant past. So much had changed since his great-great grandpa had given up farming and fishing for taverning.
Albert had gotten into the hedge-fund world the honest way. His father had been a business professor and Modern Portfolio devotee; as a result, he grew up with quant theory for breakfast and dinner. Albert getting his MBA at an elite school followed as a matter of course.
Crucially, the dad had also passed along his observations about life and business to his eldest boy. Those discoveries came too late to help the father, in the practical sense, but they were early enough to help young Albert. His old man had passed away nine years ago, at seventy-four, and Albert had made sure that the funeral was lavish as well as tasteful. He remembered it turning into a business funeral. At the time, he felt that his dad deserved no less: he had deeply wanted his son to succeed, and the power funeral showed his son had. His father’s colleagues and friends had been duly, genuinely, impressed.
After years’ worth of retrospect, though, it had planted a seed of doubt. Is that was Albert the man really wanted – to turn his dad’s final rest into a quant-driven investment conference?
As he saw his wife and son off, with the moving van still parked and being loaded in the oversize driveway, he realized he now had the chance to think things through. Remembering the home invasion in the neighbourhood he was now vacating, he crazily hoped that his dad’s grave wouldn’t be desecrated once he was gone.
Susan had noticed that he had begun to act shy, like he had done when they had first met. She had enjoyed the money and the status; she was mature enough to realize that both cost in terms of Albert’s time and attention. But, he shucking off the yoke was something for which she had been profoundly glad. They had a lot of catching up to do.
The house, a full 6,500 square footer, now had a large but tasteful “For Sale” sign on the lawn. The real-estate agent had been charged with managing the transaction, up and including having access with spare keys. Albert hesitated before getting into the G55. One of the moving men accosted him as he was looking around the front yard for the last time: “You worried about something?”
The man was cheerful, and Albert realized that people like him were going to be the Finney’s neighbours. “No,” he responded with Freham urbanity. “I just wanted to say good-bye to the place.”
“Okay; happy waving,” the guy finished with a smile before getting back to his work.
Because Albert was in the habit of driving fast, he beat Susan up to their new place. Not stopping to look at his new neighbour across the road, he drove along the quarter-mile driveway and was rewarded to see his homestead. More than a century ago, there had been a modest pre-ranch house made out of milled wood. Now, in the same location, there was a 3,500 square foot spread – still in ranch, as there was more than enough land for it – done in modern rustic cedar. Three chimneys poked up from the spread of roof. Thankfully, a detached two-car garage was to the right of the house.
Instead of a lonely fisherman’s dock, there were now two extensive spreads of lumber that jutted into the lake. The one on the right, replacing that old dock made of slapped-together crib and saw-milled lumber, was made of solid-professionally made cribs that supported pressure-treated boards. Built on the network of docks was a three-slip two-story boathouse, whose roof angled up like an elongated barn’s. Several hundred feet to the left was a thick dock that split into two, making for a slip for two guest boats that fitted in single file. The rest of the dock was elongated enough to make room for six other docked boats. The fat part of the dock was big enough for dock chairs, and there was a forty-foot spread of dock running parallel to water’s edge joined to the rest. The place where Lawrence Finney’s old still had been was now covered by a dockhouse garage that was big enough to hold two ATVs along with the dock furniture and fixings.
For more than a century, this land has served as a haven for rest, recreation and relaxation. For Albert and his family, it was now a permanent home.
After looking around the large, circular, gravel-dusted dirt driveway, he stopped to wonder where the rest of his family was. His wife drove more slowly than he, but she should have gotten here by now. Did she stop to shop?
Five minutes later, Albert saw what she had stopped to do. The S550 was at the head of a three-vehicle procession ambling in towards the driveway. The other two were a Ford F250 and a Dodge Ram extended-cab; both trucks looked used.
There was a strange boy in the front passenger seat beside Susan, looking a little bemused. Neil was on the bench seat of the F250, looking dutiful. In the driver’s seat beside his son was a stranger whose features looked vaguely familiar. The man in the Ram was simply a stranger.
When she got out, Albert noticed his wife was genuinely happy. She was a good height, a little lanky, with streaks of grey in her black hair. The boy beside her now looked flummoxed, but he was smiling too. They had evidently chatted on the way in. The fortyish-looking man and Neil got out at the same time, both silent. The fellow in the Ram was silent too as he got out, but his eyes were twinkling. Neil and the strange lad walked towards one another as his wife walked to him.
“You’re not going to believe who I met!” she enthused. “The people who live on the other side of the road, they’re your distant cousins!”
Really! Albert’s eyes widened as they lighted on a man who – unbeknownst to him at that point – almost literally lived on the other side of the tracks. No wonder Susan had mixed kids with him.
Taking her words as an introduction, the man strode forward. He was a little bulkier than Albert, but about the same height. There was a vague resemblance in the eyes, the way that both men’s were set into their respective skulls. Darren Finney had only a widow’s peak, and his hair was closer to sandy than Albert’s dark, but their faced were both angular and their noses both snubbed. He wore his jeans and lumberjack shirt comfortably.
“Hi, cuz. I heard you’ve moved here permanently.”
“Makes for quite the homecoming,” the stranger observed while seeing a chance to move into the conversation. Extending his hand to Albert after Darren, he introduced himself as Paul Mullen. “I own the marina upstream. Been the family business since my great-great-great grandfather persuaded his elder bother to come up and keep us from killing each other,” he added easily. Moustachioed, his hair was balding like Albert’s but not greying. His face was wider than the Finneys’, as were his eyes and mouth, and he looked like he was used to being in charge in these parts. “Myself, I head up the bad Mullens,” he continued with his eyes becoming merry again. “We’re the ones that sponge off the government. The good Mullens pretty much are the government. They’re the ones in town, most of them.” With those last two sentences, the merriness disappeared; he meant it.
But it came back. With Darren patiently watching, Paul explained the set-up as he saw it. Susan listened; she was learning. The two boys had edged towards each other, both shy. Despite Darren being eleven years younger than Albert, the boys were about the same age. Dylan, though, had something on Neil: he knew how to drive, while the more sheltered boy hadn’t taken his lessons yet.
That biographical fact came up between the men. When he learned that Albert’s strapping young boy hadn’t learned how to drive, Paul goggled. “Seriously?
“I drove a truck for the first time when I was thirteen!”
Dylan smiled as his thinner counterpart Neil, a bit lewdly. “Don’t take him too seriously. The Mullens, they whup their kids when the kids don’t do something.”
His dad overheard. “Don’t sneer at it, son,” he said edgewise. “It does get them doing something.” Turning to Albert, who he assumed was listening in too, “The trouble with you city folks is, you get whupped for doing something.” Seeing Albert’s uncomprehending look, he specified: “Through the laws, cousin, through the laws.
“You can’t even cut down a tree on your own property down in Freham. Not even if it’s on a farm-sized spread,” he added as a coup de grâce.
“That’s the plain truth,” Paul added sidewise to Darren. “That’s why we have to take care of ‘em.”
Albert, still uncomprehending, looked back at the man who had gotten in the most words. Paul’s paunch now showed more than usual.
“The trouble is, Albert, it’s your great-great-granddad who started all the trouble by selling his place. It brought in the city folks.” Darren emphasized the point with a troubled nod. Paul continued. “I’m telling you because you’re the Feeney now; you’re the fit for the legend.” Darren circled his right hand as if to say “in a manner of speaking.” Oddly, he kept his left hand in his pocket when it had nothing to do. His right hand remained free.
“Oh yeah, he’s fitting the legend all right,” Darren added with merriness mixed with pride. “Albert here’s wife told me that he’s going into the family business. They call it ‘a wall-a’.”
“Hawala,” Albert corrected quietly. “A hawaladar’s a private banker, a node in a system of informal private banking.”
“Wrong, cuz,” Darren cut in cheerfully. “I looked it up before we drove in. The go-to guy’s a thak-uh-dahr.
“Yes, technically I’m a thakedar,” Albert responded with his still-citified polite, “but I’m the principal as well as the agent. If something goes wrong, I make good.” As he was clarifying, Paul pulled out his smart phone and looked up the term.
“I thought they cracked down on you hedgie guys when you covered up your mistakes,” Darren added a little too quietly. In his own way, he was telling his distant blood relative to not be a city sleaze.
Having found a summary and read it, Paul looked up from his phone and beamed. “Hey Albert, you really are the Finney! Gone right into the family business!”
Now confused, Albert looked at his cousin. There was something he wasn’t getting in all the cross-talk.
“Darren, how could our ancestor have been a private money-transfer node? From what I understand, there was hardly any money around before the town incorporated.”
Darren, the moment of warning now passed, started chuckling as if Albert had told him a good in-joke; his head turned to his old neighbour. “Might as well do the honours, Paul.” His eyes turned back to his distant cousin, expectancy mixing in with the merriment.
Paul did so, with a fair bit of glee. “Albert, old sod, your great-great grandpaw was none other than the local bootlegger. Your ATV garage, that’s the exact place he had his still.”
That invasion had been too close for comfort. Albert, his wife Susan and their only son Neil, although personally unaffected, had felt threatened enough for Albert to look for new digs. Their first choice was a luxury condo with security force on the payroll, but the sight of the old Finney property going on the market for $23,499,000 got Albert looking into it as a home. Not a vacation home, a new home. Like small towns everywhere, the town of Wakia was less prone to civil breakdown than Freham the unwieldy city. Albert had been enough of a genealogy buff to know that his great-great grandfather had lived up there. From what he could find, Lawrence Finney had been a fisher and small-scale farmer with the stereotypical-Irishman potato patch. That part of the land, though only a few acres of the mostly tree- and rock-filled property, had been enough to scrape a living from should the fish go scarce.
When he found out that his twice-great grandpa Lawrence had homesteaded that exact same $24 million plot, he had hit the offer without thinking twice. The family progression from tavern owner to major hedge-fund principal had resulted in Albert having enough liquid assets to buy the place on the spot. He could take his own time selling his Freham home.
Most of his neighbours, in a kindly way, thought he was nuts. He was shrewd enough to be reassured by that straw poll: it meant he could still sell the old address at a nice premium. The central bankers who wanted to cure the economy from a real-estate-induced depression had done their jobs too well: real estate had indeed recovered. More than recovered: hard assets, even real estate, became sought again as inflation loomed and ran rampant. Only this time, real estate wasn’t in a bubble unto itself. The entire economy had become ridden by the inflation bubble; if anything, real estate had been mighty slow out of the gate. As the reality of high inflation set in, though, homes and condos had started to catch up. Gold was closing in on $20,000 an ounce.
Albert has been late to becoming a father, even by citified standards. He was now fifty-three, thirty-seven years older than his boy, and had more than enough to retire on. He knew, as did the gold market, that the stated rate of inflation woefully underestimated the real thing. Although formally 14%, it was more like 30%: perhaps more.
Both Albert and Susan could see the way things were going. Crushing liabilities, the consequent deficits and the increasing need for the central bank to monetize them had set off an inflation spiral. The central bank’s sterilization dams blocking the inflationary effects of the monetization had developed serious cracks. A legislative remedy, hard credit-growth controls, was making its way through the legislature. Albert knew enough about the financial system, not to mention about his equally shrewd colleagues, to know that any such attempt would have enough loopholes to make the repair job crumble. What politician would dare say “no more credit” to the masses, without escape hatch?
Adding to the trouble was the fact that the dollar was plunging on the forex market, even though its more successful competitors were being inflated too. Yes indeed, the dollars were being repatriated. Even the proposed credit-rationing law could do nothing about the dollar carry trade, whose proceeds were going into gold and commodities. Given the inflation spiral, it was a better bet than high-interest short-term debt in less soft fiat currencies. Commodities kept going up: you just peeled off enough of a position to pay off the interest on the carry loan and let the rest ride. If a mistiming mishap took place, the central bank was there. More and more, the central bank was creating new reserves; more and more, those new reserves leaked into the carry trade.
Albert was old and experienced enough to see where the long run was going. In order to scope out how it would end, he used a trick that his father taught him at thirteen: the Nash Empathy Principle. In order to see how the game would play out, imagine that you’re your opponent and find the best move he or she could make. Then make your own move with that best play in mind.
He tried to imagine what he could do had he been the head of the central bank, but his imagination came up dry. That was the trouble. He could easily find ways to profit from inflation, knowing the ins and outs of the monetary, banking and shadow-banking system, but the prospect of stopping it baffled him. The only way out was to unleash a monster depression, which was politically impossible.
The financial pom-pom wavers were pushing the message that the robust economy could survive an extended spell of double-digit inflation. Albert knew better. He also could see the bleeding edge of civil chaos coming to Freham. So could his wife: she had gently pushed him to move after the home invasion.
So, he and his family were well prepared to move up to Lake Wakia permanently. Although distant, he had an ancestral claim to the property he had bought. He was prepared to go prepper, but he was shrewd enough to not pack anything in advance except for furniture, gadgets and clothes. He knew quite well that buying local was the way to go. Not only food, but also firewood. He’d be spending a fair bit of fiat up there – with one important exception, decided on because the product didn’t exist in any quantity up in Wakia.
His savings were in gold mining stocks: with a wistful tear, he had cashed in his share of the hedge fund after stepping aside for his successor. All of the proceeds were put into mining stocks – all of them. Albert was sure that the stocks would go up by the time it came time to pay his tax bill. In miniature, his manoeuvre was the same as the commodity carry trade: sell some of what went up most and pay the tax bill with the proceeds. Wash, rinse and repeat for the next tax year.
There was a risk of the stocks going down in the interim, but well-timed buys and the overall trend made it slight. Albert had comped out the risk and decided it was well worth shouldering, although not without a few qualms. Since his firm had been a hedge fund, he was not entitled to the bailouts the trading department of the banks now expected as a matter of course. That made him more prudent in his calculations than his professional colleagues trading for the banks. They justified the bailouts by the monumental amount of income taxes both they and the banks paid when times were good. He once noted that he and his own firm paid enough of a fair share to qualify, but wasn’t let in. They didn’t like where he was going with it, so he kept his further thoughts to himself for the sake of professional peace.
Now retired, with a private portfolio spilling out more than enough dividends to meet his needs, Albert saw to that exception on the day before he and the family moved. He had budgeted the entire day for the chore.
Going into a large bank, one with a very ample supply of gold coins, he wryly noted to himself that he could wait in the lengthy line for the first time in what seemed his life. The bank occupied the entire first floor of a high-rise that spanned half the block.
A now-balding, gray-haired thinnish man with not much girth, slightly more than the average height, Albert’s casual clothes could not hide his wealth. Perhaps that was because he wore them like his distant cousin Darren Finney would wear a three-piece suit. A bespoke suit, silk shirt, gold cuff links, genuine soft-leather shoes and Hermès tie were just Albert’s work clothes.
He went in with a huge cash balance. Two and a half hours later, he exited with a very heavy briefcase. It contained two hundred and fifty one-ounce bullion coins, one hundred half-ouncers, one hundred quarter-ouncers, five hundred tenth ouncers and five hundred twentieth-ouncers. The last had been a bit of a stretch for the bank’s inventory. In addition to the coins, he also had a single hundred-ounce gold bar. Having to haul five hundred ounces, he moved slowly towards the taxicab he had hailed by cell phone. Thankfully, the civil breakdown had no influence in the business district: instead of rustled, he was treated with great respect and given a wide berth. Aware of how conspicuous he was, he trundled to the door while blushing.
Tongues could wag: it didn’t matter. Had any authorities decide to inquire, his obvious lackadaisicalness with security would make his story about having lost the gold plausible. By ‘losing’ the gold, he would do his part to save the economy from the decaying currency. Albert planned, in his retirement, to help pave the way for an alternate money. He and a few others, at first, would save what part of the economy that they could.
As he struggled to get the gold-filled briefcase into the taxi, he wryly noted to himself that he was part of a conspiracy. A conspiracy of goldbugs.
All next day was moving day. The transport-truck moving van arrived promptly at 9 AM. It was more than a two-hour drive to the old Finney homestead. Because of the time it would take to load and unload the furniture and effects, the van and the men were spoken for over the entire day. Albert hoped that he wouldn’t have to put them up overnight.
As Susan and Dylan settled into the soft and conformable leather front seats of the 2019 Mercedes S550, Albert regretted having bought such an expensive vehicle. He himself was taking up their second car, a 2018 Mercedes G55, with the gold-laden briefcase tucked in with his personal effects. It was an excellent off-road vehicle, but both Mercedes yelled out “luxury.” He wasn’t sure how they would fit in, now that he and his family were moving for good. He did have an ancestral claim, but it was rooted in the distant past. So much had changed since his great-great grandpa had given up farming and fishing for taverning.
Albert had gotten into the hedge-fund world the honest way. His father had been a business professor and Modern Portfolio devotee; as a result, he grew up with quant theory for breakfast and dinner. Albert getting his MBA at an elite school followed as a matter of course.
Crucially, the dad had also passed along his observations about life and business to his eldest boy. Those discoveries came too late to help the father, in the practical sense, but they were early enough to help young Albert. His old man had passed away nine years ago, at seventy-four, and Albert had made sure that the funeral was lavish as well as tasteful. He remembered it turning into a business funeral. At the time, he felt that his dad deserved no less: he had deeply wanted his son to succeed, and the power funeral showed his son had. His father’s colleagues and friends had been duly, genuinely, impressed.
After years’ worth of retrospect, though, it had planted a seed of doubt. Is that was Albert the man really wanted – to turn his dad’s final rest into a quant-driven investment conference?
As he saw his wife and son off, with the moving van still parked and being loaded in the oversize driveway, he realized he now had the chance to think things through. Remembering the home invasion in the neighbourhood he was now vacating, he crazily hoped that his dad’s grave wouldn’t be desecrated once he was gone.
Susan had noticed that he had begun to act shy, like he had done when they had first met. She had enjoyed the money and the status; she was mature enough to realize that both cost in terms of Albert’s time and attention. But, he shucking off the yoke was something for which she had been profoundly glad. They had a lot of catching up to do.
The house, a full 6,500 square footer, now had a large but tasteful “For Sale” sign on the lawn. The real-estate agent had been charged with managing the transaction, up and including having access with spare keys. Albert hesitated before getting into the G55. One of the moving men accosted him as he was looking around the front yard for the last time: “You worried about something?”
The man was cheerful, and Albert realized that people like him were going to be the Finney’s neighbours. “No,” he responded with Freham urbanity. “I just wanted to say good-bye to the place.”
“Okay; happy waving,” the guy finished with a smile before getting back to his work.
Because Albert was in the habit of driving fast, he beat Susan up to their new place. Not stopping to look at his new neighbour across the road, he drove along the quarter-mile driveway and was rewarded to see his homestead. More than a century ago, there had been a modest pre-ranch house made out of milled wood. Now, in the same location, there was a 3,500 square foot spread – still in ranch, as there was more than enough land for it – done in modern rustic cedar. Three chimneys poked up from the spread of roof. Thankfully, a detached two-car garage was to the right of the house.
Instead of a lonely fisherman’s dock, there were now two extensive spreads of lumber that jutted into the lake. The one on the right, replacing that old dock made of slapped-together crib and saw-milled lumber, was made of solid-professionally made cribs that supported pressure-treated boards. Built on the network of docks was a three-slip two-story boathouse, whose roof angled up like an elongated barn’s. Several hundred feet to the left was a thick dock that split into two, making for a slip for two guest boats that fitted in single file. The rest of the dock was elongated enough to make room for six other docked boats. The fat part of the dock was big enough for dock chairs, and there was a forty-foot spread of dock running parallel to water’s edge joined to the rest. The place where Lawrence Finney’s old still had been was now covered by a dockhouse garage that was big enough to hold two ATVs along with the dock furniture and fixings.
For more than a century, this land has served as a haven for rest, recreation and relaxation. For Albert and his family, it was now a permanent home.
After looking around the large, circular, gravel-dusted dirt driveway, he stopped to wonder where the rest of his family was. His wife drove more slowly than he, but she should have gotten here by now. Did she stop to shop?
Five minutes later, Albert saw what she had stopped to do. The S550 was at the head of a three-vehicle procession ambling in towards the driveway. The other two were a Ford F250 and a Dodge Ram extended-cab; both trucks looked used.
There was a strange boy in the front passenger seat beside Susan, looking a little bemused. Neil was on the bench seat of the F250, looking dutiful. In the driver’s seat beside his son was a stranger whose features looked vaguely familiar. The man in the Ram was simply a stranger.
When she got out, Albert noticed his wife was genuinely happy. She was a good height, a little lanky, with streaks of grey in her black hair. The boy beside her now looked flummoxed, but he was smiling too. They had evidently chatted on the way in. The fortyish-looking man and Neil got out at the same time, both silent. The fellow in the Ram was silent too as he got out, but his eyes were twinkling. Neil and the strange lad walked towards one another as his wife walked to him.
“You’re not going to believe who I met!” she enthused. “The people who live on the other side of the road, they’re your distant cousins!”
Really! Albert’s eyes widened as they lighted on a man who – unbeknownst to him at that point – almost literally lived on the other side of the tracks. No wonder Susan had mixed kids with him.
Taking her words as an introduction, the man strode forward. He was a little bulkier than Albert, but about the same height. There was a vague resemblance in the eyes, the way that both men’s were set into their respective skulls. Darren Finney had only a widow’s peak, and his hair was closer to sandy than Albert’s dark, but their faced were both angular and their noses both snubbed. He wore his jeans and lumberjack shirt comfortably.
“Hi, cuz. I heard you’ve moved here permanently.”
“Makes for quite the homecoming,” the stranger observed while seeing a chance to move into the conversation. Extending his hand to Albert after Darren, he introduced himself as Paul Mullen. “I own the marina upstream. Been the family business since my great-great-great grandfather persuaded his elder bother to come up and keep us from killing each other,” he added easily. Moustachioed, his hair was balding like Albert’s but not greying. His face was wider than the Finneys’, as were his eyes and mouth, and he looked like he was used to being in charge in these parts. “Myself, I head up the bad Mullens,” he continued with his eyes becoming merry again. “We’re the ones that sponge off the government. The good Mullens pretty much are the government. They’re the ones in town, most of them.” With those last two sentences, the merriness disappeared; he meant it.
But it came back. With Darren patiently watching, Paul explained the set-up as he saw it. Susan listened; she was learning. The two boys had edged towards each other, both shy. Despite Darren being eleven years younger than Albert, the boys were about the same age. Dylan, though, had something on Neil: he knew how to drive, while the more sheltered boy hadn’t taken his lessons yet.
That biographical fact came up between the men. When he learned that Albert’s strapping young boy hadn’t learned how to drive, Paul goggled. “Seriously?
“I drove a truck for the first time when I was thirteen!”
Dylan smiled as his thinner counterpart Neil, a bit lewdly. “Don’t take him too seriously. The Mullens, they whup their kids when the kids don’t do something.”
His dad overheard. “Don’t sneer at it, son,” he said edgewise. “It does get them doing something.” Turning to Albert, who he assumed was listening in too, “The trouble with you city folks is, you get whupped for doing something.” Seeing Albert’s uncomprehending look, he specified: “Through the laws, cousin, through the laws.
“You can’t even cut down a tree on your own property down in Freham. Not even if it’s on a farm-sized spread,” he added as a coup de grâce.
“That’s the plain truth,” Paul added sidewise to Darren. “That’s why we have to take care of ‘em.”
Albert, still uncomprehending, looked back at the man who had gotten in the most words. Paul’s paunch now showed more than usual.
“The trouble is, Albert, it’s your great-great-granddad who started all the trouble by selling his place. It brought in the city folks.” Darren emphasized the point with a troubled nod. Paul continued. “I’m telling you because you’re the Feeney now; you’re the fit for the legend.” Darren circled his right hand as if to say “in a manner of speaking.” Oddly, he kept his left hand in his pocket when it had nothing to do. His right hand remained free.
“Oh yeah, he’s fitting the legend all right,” Darren added with merriness mixed with pride. “Albert here’s wife told me that he’s going into the family business. They call it ‘a wall-a’.”
“Hawala,” Albert corrected quietly. “A hawaladar’s a private banker, a node in a system of informal private banking.”
“Wrong, cuz,” Darren cut in cheerfully. “I looked it up before we drove in. The go-to guy’s a thak-uh-dahr.
“Yes, technically I’m a thakedar,” Albert responded with his still-citified polite, “but I’m the principal as well as the agent. If something goes wrong, I make good.” As he was clarifying, Paul pulled out his smart phone and looked up the term.
“I thought they cracked down on you hedgie guys when you covered up your mistakes,” Darren added a little too quietly. In his own way, he was telling his distant blood relative to not be a city sleaze.
Having found a summary and read it, Paul looked up from his phone and beamed. “Hey Albert, you really are the Finney! Gone right into the family business!”
Now confused, Albert looked at his cousin. There was something he wasn’t getting in all the cross-talk.
“Darren, how could our ancestor have been a private money-transfer node? From what I understand, there was hardly any money around before the town incorporated.”
Darren, the moment of warning now passed, started chuckling as if Albert had told him a good in-joke; his head turned to his old neighbour. “Might as well do the honours, Paul.” His eyes turned back to his distant cousin, expectancy mixing in with the merriment.
Paul did so, with a fair bit of glee. “Albert, old sod, your great-great grandpaw was none other than the local bootlegger. Your ATV garage, that’s the exact place he had his still.”
Conspiring
The two old Wakians were rewarded by seeing an all-out blush on the new boy’s face. Darren Feeney, Albert’s distant cousin, was used to being thought of as the distant seed of the local bootlegger; it didn’t bother him. He even played into it with a little under-the-table electrical and computer-installation work for cash, which added to him fitting in. It reassured the locals who liked to think of family behaviour as part of family tradition.
Paul Mullin, the scion of the “bad” Mullens, did his own part to fit in too. Since he ran a marina, a business that was easily targeted by the tax authorities, he didn’t go much for under-the-table transactions. But, his status as a business owner didn’t prevent him from collecting unemployment on the off-season along with his staff. The way he saw it, unemployment was like forced savings. The only way he could cash in on what he himself contributed was if he were unemployed. The marina being a seasonal business, it was the perfect vehicle for extracting prior contributions once the vacationers called it a year. Paul felt no guilt in doing so. If he came a little ahead as a result, it was just because he was smart.
Because both old-timers lived according to the old country code of seeking advantage from a too-citified government, they were pleased to see the new boy cultivating his own angle. Albert had joined up with several other well-off goldbugs to put together the bare bones of a gold hawala network. He and his friends would privately keep tallies on gold exchanged for goods; the aim was to build up an alternate monetary system to cushion the economy from the worst effects of hyperinflation. It was set up by believers in gold, so the alternative of using hard fiat currency wasn’t seriously entertained. Other could see to using Euros, yen and renminbi; Albert and his cohorts were sure that several payment networks had. The advantage of gold was that it was easier to hide. Had the national government decided to crack down on foreign-currency transactions, it could do so fairly easily. Like dollars, those other currencies were mostly in the form of computer blips. Thanks to the new world of international co-operation, the governments overseeing those currencies would be eager to aid and abet any such crackdown. Yes, even the communist Chinese; they needed good trade relations, and it was no skin off their backs. They had no duty to help out foreigners who were trying to protect themselves against the ravages of inflation caused by a non-Chinese government. Such non-citizens were of no account.
The same iron logic applied to physical bills. Had the feds been authorized to confiscate those bills and burn them as if they were confiscated marijuana, the respective governments would not intervene at all. The advantage of using Euros, yen or renminbi, which were also inflating but at a lesser rate, was outweighed by the disadvantage of they being tied to an overly policed financial system.
Physical gold, on the other hand, was independent of the very well-monitored banking system. There was no national gold registry. Unlike with digital and vault-stored gold, there were no records to impound. Gold in the shadows was very hard to confiscate. Given the amount of robberies lately, it could easily be ‘lost’ and thus enter the shadowy black market.
Not everyone can be a hawaladar, a node in the hawala money-transfer network. Imported from India, the system worked as follows: a hawaladar had a large stash of money. If a client wanted to transfer money to someone else, the hawaladar took a small cut and then checked his or her private records. If the client had a credit balance, then the agent adjusted it accordingly. If physical money was brought in, the hawaladar stored it along with the rest of the funds in his or her keeping.
If the recipient lived in the area, the hawaladar would ask if a credit balance would suffice for payment. If so, then the records were adjusted. If not, then the money was delivered and the account settled. Transaction closed, and fee earned.
Things got interesting when the money needed to be transferred out of the agent’s own turf. Then, a hawaladar would contact a colleague that looked after the territory where the funds were going. The same clearing-house process was employed: if it sufficed, records were adjusted and that other agent would release the funds from his or her own pile. Out of convenience, the nodes of the hawala system kept credit balances with each other; they didn’t draw upon the funds until their own stash got short. Not until then was a risky physical courier delivery resorted to.
By description, it sounds a lot like Western Union – but there were these crucial differences: Western Union was centralized; the hawala network was radically decentralized. Western Union went out of their way to solicit your business; hawaladars didn’t. Western Union could be shut down with a single edict and raid; a raid of even the biggest hawaladar would only shut down that one node. Once the network was large and thriving, the transactions could simply be rerouted like data packets over the Internet. The final difference, of course, is Western Union was cheaper. With respect to Albert and his crew, there was an additional difference: Western Union did not handle gold, although several digital-gold companies did.
How a single hawaladar handled his or her books was completely up to him or her, as long as probity was iron-clad. Records could be kept in a manner as primitive as pen and paper, perhaps in code to deter snoops. Or, it could be as sophisticated as a triple-encrypted spreadsheet - specially encrypted file on a hard drive also encrypted, with a cloud backup file also hidden and encrypted – with no password needed because the hawaladar’s eyeball served as the password. The latter system matched Albert’s set-up. He had no passwords to remember, so he had no need to write down strings of digits and letters or exert his memory. The iris-recognition system did use passwords, as it was layered over the standard system, but those were generated using a true-random number generator that was certified by the casinos as matching the real thing. Once the password was generated, the recognition software calibrated it to the data received by the eye-camera. A different iris would be translated into a different and therefore wrong password. Since human memory was no longer a factor, the passwords in question could be huge. One glance into the eye scanner on Albert’s system translated into a 128-character password. As a backup, the wrong iris immediately changed the password into a new random 128 characters. The eye-scanner went into lockdown until Albert's right iris relinked the scanner data to the password. The communication between the device and the desktop was encrypted at the Pentagon level.
It took a special person to be a hawaladar. Money was necessary but far from sufficient. A true and hard-won reputation for iron probity, underlying a word that’s golden, was also necessary. Not much spoken of, but also crucial, was being loved. Hawaladars always lived with the spectre of theft; the best defence was being nestled in a community who would all but lynch a robber who dared prey upon the well-nested agent. Being loved wasn’t a substitute for safes and safeguards, but it was more effective than physical means alone. Burglars know who not to touch; they know who’s looked out for. That’s why so few small-town widows with comfortable competences, and husbands who had been pillars of the local church, got burgled or even defrauded.
Albert Finney, being new to the world of hawala, was luckier than he knew. The ribbing he had just endured was a disguised invite into the well-knit fabric of Lake Wakia. Had he been a mere city boy, without an ancestral connection and a Wakian relative living just across the road, his node would have never gotten off the ground. Fame and widespread repute through the business media was not enough. Had he not had dormant but deep roots in Wakia, his hawaladaring would have been dead on arrival.
Moreover, he would have been seen by the salt of Wakia’s earth as just another “tourist” who put on airs when it suited him. No-one who knew the land would look out for him, and burglars would notice. Albert being known as the Finney, the great-great grandson of the local moonshiner back when the area was new and well-hid, gave the locals a dig at him but it also granted him a place. He had an opportunity to roll with the hazing and thus draw on it; by accepting the local customs himself, he had an opportunity to be one of the looked-out-for. He would need it.
He didn’t think of it in the above terms, but he had enough sense to cotton on to the process. Through his blush, he realized that he had to “Finney it up” to be accepted.
So, after recovering his tongue, he replied: “Well, the goldlegging still is going to be well buried.”
Both Darren Finney and Paul Mullen looked at each other, nodding. Albert, citified though he was, would do.
Neil and Dylan Feeney, now mutually-recognized distant cousins, began to spend some time together. Neil, having been yanked out of the exclusive Yancey Grove prep school, didn’t sign up for the local schooling; instead, he homeschooled. Dylan spread the word that Neil had found a way to goof off. That wasn’t true, but the new boy went along with the joke although stiffly.
He also went along with something else. Dylan, having grown up with electricity and computers, had showed a precociousness that was expressed in the time-honoured manner in which boys express their creativity in the useful arts. When twelve, he had built himself a clubhouse about a hundred yards away from the two-story family home. Bigger than a treehouse, it was the size of an overly large shed and thus had to be put down on the surface. The boy had to have help from his dad Darren when building the thing, directly modelled on a large shed, but he wired it himself. Pleased, his dad added a special circuit to the circuit-breaker board and marked it with the label “Boys’ Club.” The 15-amp line from the breaker went out the basement wall a foot below ground. It had been Dylan’s task to dig a trench for the wire from the house to the clubhouse, which he had undertaken with visible reluctance.
The 14-gauge wire had been shielded with a half-inch PVC pipe to prevent damage from any later digging. When it reached the clubhouse, it went to three sets of double-plugs in the small building before it reached the lights and the light switch. One set was, of course, for the computer. Being old-fashioned, Dylan’s main unit was a desktop. Computer, printer, monitor and other gadgets required a power bar that plugged into the first outlet. The second and third were for whatever additional junk he wanted to plug in. Dylan had thoughts of plugging in a permanent electric heater for those cold spring and fall nights, but his dad smilingly explained that it would overload the circuit unless it were a small one. And then, he told his son to add insulation to the roof and walls. “You asked for it,” he explained. His boy had been miffed but had gotten over it. In so doing, the youngster had learned in a rudimentary way how to wire a building properly. Something as simple as running the wires parallel to the floor, which was not that simple to a growing boy, made sense to him when he had to cut the fibreglass to fit around the wires.
Initially, it had been something like a secret fort. As boyhood turned into teenagerhood, it became something else. The computer desk was vertical; the desk chair, small, simple and easily moved. Both were tucked in the near corner of the clubhouse on the right side of the door when entering. The large monitor thus served the entire room as a TV and movie centre; speakers were beside the monitor, except for a woofer that was tucked on the floor. Said room was made up of a couch, on the left wall, and three stuffed chairs. One was behind the couch, one was backed up against the far wall, and the third was on the right wall. All of them came from the town dump; all were serviceable.
Near the computer desk was a foot locker secured with an old-fashioned combination lock, of the kind that that generations of schoolboys had secured their lockers with. Wanting to introduce his fellow teenager to one of the manly arts, Dylan headed straight for it after he had gotten back from Friday schooling, had accosted Neil, and had a polite and pleasant conversation with his distant aunt Susan. Amused to find the other boy still studying, Dylan verbally dragged him to the truck and booted out the driveway. While driving, he remarked to Neil that the only part of the drive that wasn’t on private property was the road between their places. Although the two driveways weren’t facing each other, there was only a hundred yards between them. Only one hundred yards of public-property road in the entire journey, which clocked in at almost a third of a mile.
Party time was after dinner, by convention, but Neil needed the orientation course.
Albert’s mission proved to be a frustrating one. His name and press got him quick invites from the cottagers, but they sized up his alternate-money idea as something worthy of an overwrought strung-out retiree. Word spread on social networks that poor old Albert Finney had gone native. Instead of playing the gold and commodities game like a professional, he had snapped and become a disreputable goldbug. One fantasizing about hyperinflation and the wreckage of the economy.
The closest thing to luck he had, ironically enough, was with one of the "good" Mullens. Caleb Mullen was Wakia’s tax collector, a neat nearly-bald man of medium height with a clipped moustache; he wore his ancestry lightly. Sizing up Albert as a mere gold buff, he said that the township would be pleased to accept Albert’s property taxes in gold. “Two years in advance would be nice,” he added with a genial smile, but Albert didn’t get the in-joke.
But the newcomer did get what the tax collector was driving at. Gold being more sensitive to real inflation than ostensible inflation, it held its value. The national legislature was well on its way to passing a bill that would ration credit, so as to stop the money supply from rocketing up as it had. Seeing the writing on the legislative wall, Caleb had privately lobbied the Mayor and town council to rush through a new bond issue that, when added to the current ones, would all-but break the back of the tax base. Before inflation caught up, that is.
Thanks to the official inflation rate being only 14%, the bonds could be floated with a 15% coupon. Wakia was a good credit, if a little stretched, and the bonds could be easily sold to those people who still trusted municipal bonds and the national government. Caleb already had the idea of putting the proceeds into gold, selling off only what was necessary to meet city expenses, but his meeting with Albert crystallized the decision. Albert was a Finney, and knew the angles. He clearly approved of Caleb’s idea.
A sticking point was reached when Albert suggested that Wakia take physical possession of the gold and store it locally. At first, Caleb thought the man was nuts. Why would the town take that risk, especially when storing it with an allocated dealer with an ultra-secure double vault was the obvious choice?
“Because there’s a risk that the federal government will confiscate it,” Albert answered. Soberly.
Caleb looked at Albert to see any trade of wild-eyedness but found none. Pausing to clean his glasses, he remembered hearing about his guest cementing a secure safe right in the bedrock underneath his home. This man clearly meant what he said.
Wakia’s theft rate was low, even in these inflationary times, and the thefts tended to be of the ‘borrowing’ sort. Still, the town having gold in a basement safe would upset the applecart. The bond issue, once it went though, would be enough to secure 5,000 oz. of gold at present prices. Fifty one-hundred ounce bars provided the right balance between compactness and vendiblility. Should the national government be pushed to confiscate, things would have gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Having a secret reserve might not be a bad idea. Since citified government officials still looked down on the small towners, Caleb and his colleagues could easily plead “bumpkin” after they took their time to hand the gold in.
A move that momentous, though, had to be discussed with the Mayor and the council. So Albert got sent off with a polite “we’ll let you know.” As he went off, disappointed yet again, he didn’t know that his fellow hawaladar had arranged a gold deal that would involve him directly.
Having got to the clubhouse and its foot locker, Dylan opened it up with a mischievous look in his eye. Neil waited beside him, uncomprehendingly.
Inside the locker were two four-litre bottles of liquid. One was near full, the other was half-empty. Both had semi-inflated balloons where the caps would be.
“This is mead,” Dylan explained. “You make it with honey and other stuff that’s store-bought.”
Not cluing in, Neil waited. The slightly older boy now assumed what he considered to be a pedagogical air; his voice became a little gruff.
“To make it, you need to buy a jug of spring water, although distilled works okay. Get an orange, and say you want to eat it. Peel the orange and put it in the bottle after draining about half. Put the water in juice jugs so you can pour back some if you need to. Make sure to tear the membrane of the orange slices before you put them in.” Neil, not quite understanding, nodded.
“You need raisins – about thirty of them. Snack raisins: you get?” Seeing a nod, Dylan also noted the owlish eyes. Not a worry: he had an Internet link if the kid needed it.
“Next, is yeast. Just one packet. You can buy three and use the other two for homemade bread. If your mom presses, you can say you lost the third.”
Now brandishing the half-filled bottle as if it were a teaching aid, Dylan faced Neil. “The sticky part’s the honey. You have to use raw, which means you have to order it online. There’s no apiary around here. You can order five pounds and put a quart of it in the bottle, and save the rest for your sweet tooth. If there are questions about why you want the water, buy two tins of juice concentrate. You’re developing a taste for the finer things in life.”
Having mixed his how-to-make lesson with how to avoid attracting suspicion, Dylan continued. “Once the ingredients are in, you shake it for five minutes to get the oxygen in the water. That’s for the yeast.
“The raisins and orange are for the yeast too. You have to put a balloon on the top, pricked twice with a needle, to let the carbon dioxide escape. You don’t want the bottle to explode.” He paused and looked Neil in the eye to make sure the point sunk in before continuing.
“After a month or so, you rack it. Use a strainer and your juice jugs to filter out the raisins, oranges and dregs from the mead. Pour the mixture once through the strainer and that’ll get your raisins and orange out. Pour it through the strainer again, this time with a dish cloth to get the dregs. You’ll have to rinse the cloth when the stuff backs up.”
Satisfied that Neil was following along, Dylan added: “You have to use the sink, so you wait until everyone’s gone before you rack. It takes about an hour and a half if you sanitize the juice jugs and mead jug with bleach. You have to use the bleach,” he emphasized, “otherwise you risk contamination. Put in about a tablespoon with warm water, and don’t forget to rinse three times after swishing the bleach around. You’ll want to wash them with dish soap beforehand to get the crap off. Don’t skip this step.
“Once the racking’s done, the mead is back in the bottle. Let it age six months, or less if you don’t mind a little roughness, and you’ve got your drinks.”
Now comprehending, Neil’s eyes lit up. His eyes shot to the half-filled bottle which his distant cousin was brandishing.
Albert got the news on his smart phone from his fellow hawaladar in Freham, Harold Renfrew. Renfrew was a man of inherited wealth who got into the gold network on a lark. He transmitted, as agent over the smart phone’s well-encrypted network, the message that an unknown client wanted to buy Albert's old home in Freham for one thousand ounces of gold. Physical gold.
Paul Mullin, the scion of the “bad” Mullens, did his own part to fit in too. Since he ran a marina, a business that was easily targeted by the tax authorities, he didn’t go much for under-the-table transactions. But, his status as a business owner didn’t prevent him from collecting unemployment on the off-season along with his staff. The way he saw it, unemployment was like forced savings. The only way he could cash in on what he himself contributed was if he were unemployed. The marina being a seasonal business, it was the perfect vehicle for extracting prior contributions once the vacationers called it a year. Paul felt no guilt in doing so. If he came a little ahead as a result, it was just because he was smart.
Because both old-timers lived according to the old country code of seeking advantage from a too-citified government, they were pleased to see the new boy cultivating his own angle. Albert had joined up with several other well-off goldbugs to put together the bare bones of a gold hawala network. He and his friends would privately keep tallies on gold exchanged for goods; the aim was to build up an alternate monetary system to cushion the economy from the worst effects of hyperinflation. It was set up by believers in gold, so the alternative of using hard fiat currency wasn’t seriously entertained. Other could see to using Euros, yen and renminbi; Albert and his cohorts were sure that several payment networks had. The advantage of gold was that it was easier to hide. Had the national government decided to crack down on foreign-currency transactions, it could do so fairly easily. Like dollars, those other currencies were mostly in the form of computer blips. Thanks to the new world of international co-operation, the governments overseeing those currencies would be eager to aid and abet any such crackdown. Yes, even the communist Chinese; they needed good trade relations, and it was no skin off their backs. They had no duty to help out foreigners who were trying to protect themselves against the ravages of inflation caused by a non-Chinese government. Such non-citizens were of no account.
The same iron logic applied to physical bills. Had the feds been authorized to confiscate those bills and burn them as if they were confiscated marijuana, the respective governments would not intervene at all. The advantage of using Euros, yen or renminbi, which were also inflating but at a lesser rate, was outweighed by the disadvantage of they being tied to an overly policed financial system.
Physical gold, on the other hand, was independent of the very well-monitored banking system. There was no national gold registry. Unlike with digital and vault-stored gold, there were no records to impound. Gold in the shadows was very hard to confiscate. Given the amount of robberies lately, it could easily be ‘lost’ and thus enter the shadowy black market.
Not everyone can be a hawaladar, a node in the hawala money-transfer network. Imported from India, the system worked as follows: a hawaladar had a large stash of money. If a client wanted to transfer money to someone else, the hawaladar took a small cut and then checked his or her private records. If the client had a credit balance, then the agent adjusted it accordingly. If physical money was brought in, the hawaladar stored it along with the rest of the funds in his or her keeping.
If the recipient lived in the area, the hawaladar would ask if a credit balance would suffice for payment. If so, then the records were adjusted. If not, then the money was delivered and the account settled. Transaction closed, and fee earned.
Things got interesting when the money needed to be transferred out of the agent’s own turf. Then, a hawaladar would contact a colleague that looked after the territory where the funds were going. The same clearing-house process was employed: if it sufficed, records were adjusted and that other agent would release the funds from his or her own pile. Out of convenience, the nodes of the hawala system kept credit balances with each other; they didn’t draw upon the funds until their own stash got short. Not until then was a risky physical courier delivery resorted to.
By description, it sounds a lot like Western Union – but there were these crucial differences: Western Union was centralized; the hawala network was radically decentralized. Western Union went out of their way to solicit your business; hawaladars didn’t. Western Union could be shut down with a single edict and raid; a raid of even the biggest hawaladar would only shut down that one node. Once the network was large and thriving, the transactions could simply be rerouted like data packets over the Internet. The final difference, of course, is Western Union was cheaper. With respect to Albert and his crew, there was an additional difference: Western Union did not handle gold, although several digital-gold companies did.
How a single hawaladar handled his or her books was completely up to him or her, as long as probity was iron-clad. Records could be kept in a manner as primitive as pen and paper, perhaps in code to deter snoops. Or, it could be as sophisticated as a triple-encrypted spreadsheet - specially encrypted file on a hard drive also encrypted, with a cloud backup file also hidden and encrypted – with no password needed because the hawaladar’s eyeball served as the password. The latter system matched Albert’s set-up. He had no passwords to remember, so he had no need to write down strings of digits and letters or exert his memory. The iris-recognition system did use passwords, as it was layered over the standard system, but those were generated using a true-random number generator that was certified by the casinos as matching the real thing. Once the password was generated, the recognition software calibrated it to the data received by the eye-camera. A different iris would be translated into a different and therefore wrong password. Since human memory was no longer a factor, the passwords in question could be huge. One glance into the eye scanner on Albert’s system translated into a 128-character password. As a backup, the wrong iris immediately changed the password into a new random 128 characters. The eye-scanner went into lockdown until Albert's right iris relinked the scanner data to the password. The communication between the device and the desktop was encrypted at the Pentagon level.
It took a special person to be a hawaladar. Money was necessary but far from sufficient. A true and hard-won reputation for iron probity, underlying a word that’s golden, was also necessary. Not much spoken of, but also crucial, was being loved. Hawaladars always lived with the spectre of theft; the best defence was being nestled in a community who would all but lynch a robber who dared prey upon the well-nested agent. Being loved wasn’t a substitute for safes and safeguards, but it was more effective than physical means alone. Burglars know who not to touch; they know who’s looked out for. That’s why so few small-town widows with comfortable competences, and husbands who had been pillars of the local church, got burgled or even defrauded.
Albert Finney, being new to the world of hawala, was luckier than he knew. The ribbing he had just endured was a disguised invite into the well-knit fabric of Lake Wakia. Had he been a mere city boy, without an ancestral connection and a Wakian relative living just across the road, his node would have never gotten off the ground. Fame and widespread repute through the business media was not enough. Had he not had dormant but deep roots in Wakia, his hawaladaring would have been dead on arrival.
Moreover, he would have been seen by the salt of Wakia’s earth as just another “tourist” who put on airs when it suited him. No-one who knew the land would look out for him, and burglars would notice. Albert being known as the Finney, the great-great grandson of the local moonshiner back when the area was new and well-hid, gave the locals a dig at him but it also granted him a place. He had an opportunity to roll with the hazing and thus draw on it; by accepting the local customs himself, he had an opportunity to be one of the looked-out-for. He would need it.
He didn’t think of it in the above terms, but he had enough sense to cotton on to the process. Through his blush, he realized that he had to “Finney it up” to be accepted.
So, after recovering his tongue, he replied: “Well, the goldlegging still is going to be well buried.”
Both Darren Finney and Paul Mullen looked at each other, nodding. Albert, citified though he was, would do.
Neil and Dylan Feeney, now mutually-recognized distant cousins, began to spend some time together. Neil, having been yanked out of the exclusive Yancey Grove prep school, didn’t sign up for the local schooling; instead, he homeschooled. Dylan spread the word that Neil had found a way to goof off. That wasn’t true, but the new boy went along with the joke although stiffly.
He also went along with something else. Dylan, having grown up with electricity and computers, had showed a precociousness that was expressed in the time-honoured manner in which boys express their creativity in the useful arts. When twelve, he had built himself a clubhouse about a hundred yards away from the two-story family home. Bigger than a treehouse, it was the size of an overly large shed and thus had to be put down on the surface. The boy had to have help from his dad Darren when building the thing, directly modelled on a large shed, but he wired it himself. Pleased, his dad added a special circuit to the circuit-breaker board and marked it with the label “Boys’ Club.” The 15-amp line from the breaker went out the basement wall a foot below ground. It had been Dylan’s task to dig a trench for the wire from the house to the clubhouse, which he had undertaken with visible reluctance.
The 14-gauge wire had been shielded with a half-inch PVC pipe to prevent damage from any later digging. When it reached the clubhouse, it went to three sets of double-plugs in the small building before it reached the lights and the light switch. One set was, of course, for the computer. Being old-fashioned, Dylan’s main unit was a desktop. Computer, printer, monitor and other gadgets required a power bar that plugged into the first outlet. The second and third were for whatever additional junk he wanted to plug in. Dylan had thoughts of plugging in a permanent electric heater for those cold spring and fall nights, but his dad smilingly explained that it would overload the circuit unless it were a small one. And then, he told his son to add insulation to the roof and walls. “You asked for it,” he explained. His boy had been miffed but had gotten over it. In so doing, the youngster had learned in a rudimentary way how to wire a building properly. Something as simple as running the wires parallel to the floor, which was not that simple to a growing boy, made sense to him when he had to cut the fibreglass to fit around the wires.
Initially, it had been something like a secret fort. As boyhood turned into teenagerhood, it became something else. The computer desk was vertical; the desk chair, small, simple and easily moved. Both were tucked in the near corner of the clubhouse on the right side of the door when entering. The large monitor thus served the entire room as a TV and movie centre; speakers were beside the monitor, except for a woofer that was tucked on the floor. Said room was made up of a couch, on the left wall, and three stuffed chairs. One was behind the couch, one was backed up against the far wall, and the third was on the right wall. All of them came from the town dump; all were serviceable.
Near the computer desk was a foot locker secured with an old-fashioned combination lock, of the kind that that generations of schoolboys had secured their lockers with. Wanting to introduce his fellow teenager to one of the manly arts, Dylan headed straight for it after he had gotten back from Friday schooling, had accosted Neil, and had a polite and pleasant conversation with his distant aunt Susan. Amused to find the other boy still studying, Dylan verbally dragged him to the truck and booted out the driveway. While driving, he remarked to Neil that the only part of the drive that wasn’t on private property was the road between their places. Although the two driveways weren’t facing each other, there was only a hundred yards between them. Only one hundred yards of public-property road in the entire journey, which clocked in at almost a third of a mile.
Party time was after dinner, by convention, but Neil needed the orientation course.
Albert’s mission proved to be a frustrating one. His name and press got him quick invites from the cottagers, but they sized up his alternate-money idea as something worthy of an overwrought strung-out retiree. Word spread on social networks that poor old Albert Finney had gone native. Instead of playing the gold and commodities game like a professional, he had snapped and become a disreputable goldbug. One fantasizing about hyperinflation and the wreckage of the economy.
The closest thing to luck he had, ironically enough, was with one of the "good" Mullens. Caleb Mullen was Wakia’s tax collector, a neat nearly-bald man of medium height with a clipped moustache; he wore his ancestry lightly. Sizing up Albert as a mere gold buff, he said that the township would be pleased to accept Albert’s property taxes in gold. “Two years in advance would be nice,” he added with a genial smile, but Albert didn’t get the in-joke.
But the newcomer did get what the tax collector was driving at. Gold being more sensitive to real inflation than ostensible inflation, it held its value. The national legislature was well on its way to passing a bill that would ration credit, so as to stop the money supply from rocketing up as it had. Seeing the writing on the legislative wall, Caleb had privately lobbied the Mayor and town council to rush through a new bond issue that, when added to the current ones, would all-but break the back of the tax base. Before inflation caught up, that is.
Thanks to the official inflation rate being only 14%, the bonds could be floated with a 15% coupon. Wakia was a good credit, if a little stretched, and the bonds could be easily sold to those people who still trusted municipal bonds and the national government. Caleb already had the idea of putting the proceeds into gold, selling off only what was necessary to meet city expenses, but his meeting with Albert crystallized the decision. Albert was a Finney, and knew the angles. He clearly approved of Caleb’s idea.
A sticking point was reached when Albert suggested that Wakia take physical possession of the gold and store it locally. At first, Caleb thought the man was nuts. Why would the town take that risk, especially when storing it with an allocated dealer with an ultra-secure double vault was the obvious choice?
“Because there’s a risk that the federal government will confiscate it,” Albert answered. Soberly.
Caleb looked at Albert to see any trade of wild-eyedness but found none. Pausing to clean his glasses, he remembered hearing about his guest cementing a secure safe right in the bedrock underneath his home. This man clearly meant what he said.
Wakia’s theft rate was low, even in these inflationary times, and the thefts tended to be of the ‘borrowing’ sort. Still, the town having gold in a basement safe would upset the applecart. The bond issue, once it went though, would be enough to secure 5,000 oz. of gold at present prices. Fifty one-hundred ounce bars provided the right balance between compactness and vendiblility. Should the national government be pushed to confiscate, things would have gone to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Having a secret reserve might not be a bad idea. Since citified government officials still looked down on the small towners, Caleb and his colleagues could easily plead “bumpkin” after they took their time to hand the gold in.
A move that momentous, though, had to be discussed with the Mayor and the council. So Albert got sent off with a polite “we’ll let you know.” As he went off, disappointed yet again, he didn’t know that his fellow hawaladar had arranged a gold deal that would involve him directly.
Having got to the clubhouse and its foot locker, Dylan opened it up with a mischievous look in his eye. Neil waited beside him, uncomprehendingly.
Inside the locker were two four-litre bottles of liquid. One was near full, the other was half-empty. Both had semi-inflated balloons where the caps would be.
“This is mead,” Dylan explained. “You make it with honey and other stuff that’s store-bought.”
Not cluing in, Neil waited. The slightly older boy now assumed what he considered to be a pedagogical air; his voice became a little gruff.
“To make it, you need to buy a jug of spring water, although distilled works okay. Get an orange, and say you want to eat it. Peel the orange and put it in the bottle after draining about half. Put the water in juice jugs so you can pour back some if you need to. Make sure to tear the membrane of the orange slices before you put them in.” Neil, not quite understanding, nodded.
“You need raisins – about thirty of them. Snack raisins: you get?” Seeing a nod, Dylan also noted the owlish eyes. Not a worry: he had an Internet link if the kid needed it.
“Next, is yeast. Just one packet. You can buy three and use the other two for homemade bread. If your mom presses, you can say you lost the third.”
Now brandishing the half-filled bottle as if it were a teaching aid, Dylan faced Neil. “The sticky part’s the honey. You have to use raw, which means you have to order it online. There’s no apiary around here. You can order five pounds and put a quart of it in the bottle, and save the rest for your sweet tooth. If there are questions about why you want the water, buy two tins of juice concentrate. You’re developing a taste for the finer things in life.”
Having mixed his how-to-make lesson with how to avoid attracting suspicion, Dylan continued. “Once the ingredients are in, you shake it for five minutes to get the oxygen in the water. That’s for the yeast.
“The raisins and orange are for the yeast too. You have to put a balloon on the top, pricked twice with a needle, to let the carbon dioxide escape. You don’t want the bottle to explode.” He paused and looked Neil in the eye to make sure the point sunk in before continuing.
“After a month or so, you rack it. Use a strainer and your juice jugs to filter out the raisins, oranges and dregs from the mead. Pour the mixture once through the strainer and that’ll get your raisins and orange out. Pour it through the strainer again, this time with a dish cloth to get the dregs. You’ll have to rinse the cloth when the stuff backs up.”
Satisfied that Neil was following along, Dylan added: “You have to use the sink, so you wait until everyone’s gone before you rack. It takes about an hour and a half if you sanitize the juice jugs and mead jug with bleach. You have to use the bleach,” he emphasized, “otherwise you risk contamination. Put in about a tablespoon with warm water, and don’t forget to rinse three times after swishing the bleach around. You’ll want to wash them with dish soap beforehand to get the crap off. Don’t skip this step.
“Once the racking’s done, the mead is back in the bottle. Let it age six months, or less if you don’t mind a little roughness, and you’ve got your drinks.”
Now comprehending, Neil’s eyes lit up. His eyes shot to the half-filled bottle which his distant cousin was brandishing.
Albert got the news on his smart phone from his fellow hawaladar in Freham, Harold Renfrew. Renfrew was a man of inherited wealth who got into the gold network on a lark. He transmitted, as agent over the smart phone’s well-encrypted network, the message that an unknown client wanted to buy Albert's old home in Freham for one thousand ounces of gold. Physical gold.
On A Mission
After dickering when he got back home, Albert got the price up to 1200 ounces: three 400 oz. bars. “Plus transfer tax and your fee,” he added to Renfrew. “He can pay it; he’s still getting a bargain.”
Legally, the sale was a deemed disposition for the cash equivalent of the gold. “Just treat it as a cash sale and don’t go into any details. They won’t check up on you,” Renfrew assured him in a slightly nasal and somewhat charmless full-throated voice. “The gold can go into your stash up at Wakia.”
Having secured an oral agreement, Albert saw to the paperwork – enough to satisfy the real-estate agent that it was listed with. The total outlay for the anonymous buyer was only a little more than what Albert’s new place on Lake Wakia had cost him. Given that his old Freham home was on an eighty by one hundred and fifty foot lot, and sported 6,500 square feet worth of house excluding basement in an exclusive part of the city, the buyer was indeed getting a bargain. Albert could have insisted on the cash equivalent of fourteen hundred ounces of gold, which was close to what the agent urged him to hold out for.
Technically, he could have dismissed the agent and handled the details himself – but the agent was a near-friend and Albert had a reputation to uphold. Relying on legalities while acting brusquely didn’t gibe well with a man that could be trusted. So, he explained the sale and said he’d pay the commission on the ‘cash’ sale price out of pocket. “The trouble is, Mark, the buyer has a secrecy fetish. You’re going to be transferring the property to a private corporation” – one of several, intertwined in a serpentine fashion so as to deter snoops. All except the front corporation were offshore.
Switching back to Renfrew, he got asked if he wanted the twelve hundred ounces of gold as a credit. “I want to settle this as soon as possible. ‘Speed is our Service,’ and all.”
“So this is a precedent,” Albert replied, pensive.
“Yes, it is. The first deal I put through since I got into this time-waster.” Renfrew hit the right note; Albert chuckled in empathy.
But, the word ‘precedent’ anchored a plan in his mind. “Since we’re giving the system a trial run, how about disbursing the physical? I can have it shipped up tonight.”
Renfrew hesitated for a moment. “It’d be a pinch, but I can do it. It’s not as if I was doing much business right now.
“You’re right, I have to say. We might as well give the system a full shakedown now. When will you be arriving?”
“It won’t be me,” Albert answered. “I’m sending my son and another boy I’ve vetted.”
As a reward for listening to the lecture, Dylan pulled out a glass from the foot locker and filled it up after deftly removing the balloon from the half-full jug. Passing it to Neil, who was now looking excited, he got another glass and filled it up for himself.
The mead was well-made. Being of the plain variety, a slight inconsistency with respect to Dylan's juice-concentrate cover story, it tasted slightly sour but went down easily. Neil could hardly believe he had drunk down real alcohol. He soon felt his vision narrow a bit. The room felt lighter, and he found his eyes moving more slowly. He blinked as he started to blush.
Dylan, being more experienced, drank it down more matter-of-factly. “Lots left over for the party tonight. We might as well sit down and watch some Youtube before dinner. Party starts at 7:30.” Said party was a gathering of he three other school chums, all local. One of them was the son of Paul Mullen.
Booting up the system and setting up the video, Dylan got to the point of his tutorial. “For your homework, young man” – that got a chuckle out of Neil’s gut – “I’ll send you a link to a page that has the recipe in full. Everything’s there except the part about using your head so your folks don’t catch on.
“You can order sixty pounds of honey online, which’ll make for twenty four-litre jugs…”
The clips Dylan called up were local news from Freham, of a certain sort. “Things are pretty bad in the old town, aren’t they.” Neil, rolling with the satisfaction is his distant cousin’s voice, nodded.
“Yeah. What got us out was a home invasion in our old neighbourhood.” He didn’t notice that his voice had flattened.
“That’s what shotguns are for,” Dylan replied authoritatively. “Best defence against creeps.”
“Not down there; it’s the big city.” Surprised, Neil heard himself talk dismissively about the place where his old school chums were still at. Even the boarders had to live there.
“Right,” Dylan nodded sagely. “They really have it hard there.”
“I heard the robbers are bribing the security companies,” Neil added as alcoholic friendship settled into his belly. “Three people got toasted in my old neighbourhood. All of ‘em had security.”
Dylan smiled, pleased at what he heard. “Just goes to show you: you can’t bribe a shotgun.”
At that point, to the boys' surprise, Darren Finney burst in. “Better sober up, boys. Neil, your father wants to see both of you.”
Shocked at his distant uncle’s casualness, Neil jerked his head over to Dylan. “Right, Dad,” the elder boy replied, “we’ll stop in at detox on the way.”
Cracking a smile, Darren left the door open for the pair as he walked back to his home. He had gotten the message shortly after his day was done and the weekend started. That Neil had been startled, but he needed to get used to the way things worked in Wakia.
“One more thing,” Dylan added as they both got up. “When you hear a feeler like that, stonewall!”
The blooming tutorial relationship hit its first snag when Dylan motioned Neil to the truck after opening the door and getting out the keys. A little older than his dad’s F-150, it was the spare vehicle that Dylan could pretty much use as he pleased. His mom didn’t do much driving, and she preferred the F-150.
Instead of going over to the passenger door, Neil went over to Dylan and whispered: “Don’t you think it’s a little unsafe?”
Dylan’s eyes went neutral when he heard those words. Yep, his cousin was still citified. “We’re on private property, and we’ll be there for most of the drive. Cop shows up maybe once a year.”
Aided by the alcohol, Neil adapted to what his elder cousin said even though he had meant something different. Compliantly, in part because of the alcohol in him, he went over to the passenger side and got in as Dylan was starting up the truck.
In a tone reminiscent of his father’s, Dylan sang out, “Don’t forget your seat belt!” Getting the hint, Neil left his off; so did Dylan. A slight informal rewiring meant that the truck could get rolling unimpeded.
When they reached the end of the driveway, Dylan stopped. To make the point clear, he said to Neil:
“Look at the left side of the road.” The other boy did.
“Now look at the right side of the road.” Again, Neil complied.
“Look left.” Now wondering what was up, Neil did so.
“And right again.” That got the younger boy asking what was up.
“I don’t see any cars either, kid. We must have missed the rush-hour traffic from Freham.”
“Okay,” Neil replied a little deflated. Evidently, the older boy thought he was a big-city worry wart. Maybe he was: they had only had one drink.
The hundred yards to Neil’s private driveway were driven without waver or incident. No-one saw them.
“Back on private property again,” Dylan concluded as he made the right turn into his neighbour’s driveway. “Clear sailing.” Getting his humour back, he informed Neil that he had driven into town with more in his belly than that single drink. “It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t.” With those words, the older boy ended the day’s lesson.
After pulling up into the wide circular driveway, made of dirt and bedrock laced with some gravel, Dylan stopped and the boys got out. Neil’s mom was preparing dinner, but his dad was waiting for them in the living room beyond the entrance foyer.
“How would you guys like to earn some gold.” Both boys heard the absence of a question mark at the end of Albert’s sentence.
He was sitting on a chair behind the head of the coffee table. Three 1/10 oz. gold coins were in front of him. Alongside the length of the table was a couch, which both boys sat on. Trying to sober up, Neil just got nervous. He committed to memory what Dylan had told him about stonewalling.
Sounding like he was back at his office, Albert continued. “I want you to drive down to Freham and meet a gentleman by the name of Harold Renfrew. Neil knows where he lives.”
Dylan’s eyes widened. He had seen lots of news from Freham, mostly bad news, but he had never been there.
“Once there, I want you to pick up three four hundred ounce gold bars and bring them here. Those bars are very valuable, and I expect you both to use your judgment when placing them in the truck. Thankfully, no-one’s going to believe that a couple of young men from Wakia could be carrying a cargo that valuable. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions, but you two in your” – this said to Dylan “father’s truck don’t look like you have anything to steal.
“The order for the gold was made through encrypted secure smart phone, so there’s no way anyone will know you have it.” His voice turning to reassuring, he continued: “There’s really nothing to worry about except getting back here safely. It’ll be just like hauling three packages.
“One of these gold coins is” – this to Neil - “going to Dylan’s father for use of his truck.” Now to both: “He gets it in advance. The other two coins, you two get – one each – once the delivery is done.”
One tenth of an ounce of gold, each. Two thousand dollars. Neil interpreted the figure as twice his weekly allowance. Dylan, more practical-minded, interpreted it as fifty gallons of gas.
“Now, you should be able to get there in about two and a half hours. The traffic’s going the other way at this time.
“If you want, you can try to make it home tonight but don’t try if you’re tired. If you need to stay at a hotel overnight and pick up the gold tomorrow morning, I’ll reimburse you. Just make sure that the journey is continuous once you’ve gotten the gold. Ask yourself” – this to Dylan – “if you can make it before you go to Mr. Renfrew’s place to pick it up. You have to stick to whatever decision you make, so I suggest you be prudent.”
Albert noticed his son looked and acted more serious than usual: Neil seemed a bit owlish. Not being privy to Dylan’s clubhouse yet, he didn’t even have any grounds for suspecting. What he saw convinced him that his boy wasn’t taking the task lightly, almost as if he were a young man.
Dylan responded first, scratching his jawbone. “Well, Uncle Albert, I think I can do it but we’ll have to get started a little after dinner. I’ve got friends coming over – it’s Friday, you see – and I have to tell them why the usual entertainment night isn’t going to have me for it.” Looking up at the older man, he concluded: “They’re old friends. I owe them that.”
Left unsaid was the fact that he needed the extra time to completely sober up. Driving on the main highway, and a city he hadn’t been to, was very far from a jaunt into the town he had grown up in and roads whose traffic patterns he knew.
Turning to Neil, he said “We’d better get coffee’d up, because we need to be alert.”
Back at his home for dinner, Dylan told his dad what Albert wanted him to do. He had also brought the gold coin.
Darren stared at it. “So this really is business for him.” The value of the coin wasn’t that far off from the price of a rental car and gas for the trip.
“Okay,” he decided. “Go fill up the truck from the tank” – a 250-gallon upright tank that Darren had installed thirteen years ago, two years after Hurricane Katrina when gas prices had started to go nuts – “and get going when you think the time is right.”
His earlier gibe hadn't entirely been fun and bluster. Darren suspected that his kid had gotten ahold of some alcohol for weekend blasts…because that’s what he himself had done when he had been a boy. Strangely, his adventures in teenage alcoholicism had turned into near-sobriety once he had hit the legal drinking age. It had set him a little away from Paul Mullen, but neither man minded. They were still born and raised in Wakia; they were still neighbours.
The boys had arrived on time; there was about a hour’s worth of sunlight left. Safely in the clubhouse, Evan Mullen – Paul’s eldest son – greeted Dylan jovially. He was unsuccessfully trying to grow a moustache like his dad’s, who he resembled except for being chunkier.
“Mead man! Glad you’re here! Cripes, I got a load of school to wash away.”
“Wine man!” As per usual, Evan had brought a one-litre outdoor-style juice jug filled with home-made. Two other local boys were on the couch, pulling out their own supplies. They shared a small bottle of “jungle juice,” an informal mixture composed of what they could sneak out of their parents’ liquor cabinet. An ounce each from twelve different bottles added up to a pretty good blast.
“I wanted to ask you,” Dylan continued. He knew well how Evan got his hands on the wine kit, carboy and other supplies he needed to go into wine manufacturing. Mullen’s Marine ordered stuff by courier all the time. Ordering the equipment online had raised no eyebrows in the neighbourhood, particularly since Evan had specified that it be delivered to the business. Since he was responsible for opening the packages and storing the contents anyway, he could easily divert the wine equipment by noting the return address. Being careful, he had bought from private parties so no business identifiers could give his game away. The wine was made in a dry-land boathouse where boats were stored in the winter as a service, so the building went unused from May to October. When season changed to off-season, he moved the equipment into the repair shop. By that time, everyone including his dad was going on unemployment; no repairs were made in those months. He could easily justify his recurring interest in parts of the marina not used by saying he wanted to get the hang of running the business. Since he also frequented the parts that were used, including the tuck shop, he covered his tracks fairly well.
“Can you see your way to receiving a five-gallon bucket of honey? Addressed to the marina?”
Evan considered it. “Thing is, it’d have to be worth my while. Mead?”
Dylan nodded. “Neil and I, we’re going into production.” Once he got the details worked out, and deigned to secure Neil's consent.
Still considering, Evan allowed that he could do it for a bottle of mead.
“Half bottle,” Dylan countered. “But it’ll be good.”
Evan bobbed his head side by side as if to say he’d consider it. Subject put to rest, Dylan now gave his regrets.
“I have to go into the big town tonight, with Neil. His dad wants me to pick up a shipment for him.”
“Of what?” one of the jungle-juice boys asked. None of Dylan's guests seemed to realize that the "big town" meant Freham.
Seeing nothing wrong with telling the truth, Dylan replied “gold. Three bars.”
That got Evan’s eyebrows up, briefly. “Right. My dad told me he’s a gold smuggler. Didn’t know you’d be his courier.”
“I blend in. A Brinks truck’d be too conspicuous.”
Evan nodded, a little boozily. “Makes sense.”
“Anyways, I just wanted to let you guys know the place is yours ‘til you go or pass out.” Dylan wasn’t all kidding. “Just make sure to shut everything down when you’re gone.”
“One way or the other, my friend.” Those words from Evan were as good as a signed contract.
Leaving the door closed, Dylan went to say goodbye to his dad. It had been more than an hour and a half since he had that cup of mead; the effects were sure to have worn off. He stuffed some coffee in himself to make sure.
Darren told his son to hold it for a minute, and discussed what he had pulled up from drivers’ social media about the highway. “I’d watch it if I were you.”
Now especially sober, Dylan nodded – several times. What his dad had told him wasn’t good.
Now back at Albert’s, Dylan knocked at the door instead of going in. Since this was business, it seemed fitting to do so.
Albert answered the door; he seemed to understand why the boy knocked. “So you’re ready to go.” Seeing the boy nod, alertly, he called for Neil.
Like his cousin, Neil had been drinking coffee too. Not having drank before, he still felt the effects a little. His dad, he was sure, didn’t suspect.
“You ready?” Dylan asked. Neil just nodded, still acting a little alcohol-owlish.
“Okay,” he said assuredly. The two walked over to the truck and got in; this time, both boys put their seat belts on. It wasn’t just because of the cops, either.
“Should be a nice, safe drive, Neil old boy,” Dylan boomed as he put the truck in gear. He didn’t tell his partner anything about what his dad had told him. Nor did he breathe a word about what was in the bed of the truck, covered by some coils of electrical wire and two toolboxes he had put in there for show and concealment.
Legally, the sale was a deemed disposition for the cash equivalent of the gold. “Just treat it as a cash sale and don’t go into any details. They won’t check up on you,” Renfrew assured him in a slightly nasal and somewhat charmless full-throated voice. “The gold can go into your stash up at Wakia.”
Having secured an oral agreement, Albert saw to the paperwork – enough to satisfy the real-estate agent that it was listed with. The total outlay for the anonymous buyer was only a little more than what Albert’s new place on Lake Wakia had cost him. Given that his old Freham home was on an eighty by one hundred and fifty foot lot, and sported 6,500 square feet worth of house excluding basement in an exclusive part of the city, the buyer was indeed getting a bargain. Albert could have insisted on the cash equivalent of fourteen hundred ounces of gold, which was close to what the agent urged him to hold out for.
Technically, he could have dismissed the agent and handled the details himself – but the agent was a near-friend and Albert had a reputation to uphold. Relying on legalities while acting brusquely didn’t gibe well with a man that could be trusted. So, he explained the sale and said he’d pay the commission on the ‘cash’ sale price out of pocket. “The trouble is, Mark, the buyer has a secrecy fetish. You’re going to be transferring the property to a private corporation” – one of several, intertwined in a serpentine fashion so as to deter snoops. All except the front corporation were offshore.
Switching back to Renfrew, he got asked if he wanted the twelve hundred ounces of gold as a credit. “I want to settle this as soon as possible. ‘Speed is our Service,’ and all.”
“So this is a precedent,” Albert replied, pensive.
“Yes, it is. The first deal I put through since I got into this time-waster.” Renfrew hit the right note; Albert chuckled in empathy.
But, the word ‘precedent’ anchored a plan in his mind. “Since we’re giving the system a trial run, how about disbursing the physical? I can have it shipped up tonight.”
Renfrew hesitated for a moment. “It’d be a pinch, but I can do it. It’s not as if I was doing much business right now.
“You’re right, I have to say. We might as well give the system a full shakedown now. When will you be arriving?”
“It won’t be me,” Albert answered. “I’m sending my son and another boy I’ve vetted.”
As a reward for listening to the lecture, Dylan pulled out a glass from the foot locker and filled it up after deftly removing the balloon from the half-full jug. Passing it to Neil, who was now looking excited, he got another glass and filled it up for himself.
The mead was well-made. Being of the plain variety, a slight inconsistency with respect to Dylan's juice-concentrate cover story, it tasted slightly sour but went down easily. Neil could hardly believe he had drunk down real alcohol. He soon felt his vision narrow a bit. The room felt lighter, and he found his eyes moving more slowly. He blinked as he started to blush.
Dylan, being more experienced, drank it down more matter-of-factly. “Lots left over for the party tonight. We might as well sit down and watch some Youtube before dinner. Party starts at 7:30.” Said party was a gathering of he three other school chums, all local. One of them was the son of Paul Mullen.
Booting up the system and setting up the video, Dylan got to the point of his tutorial. “For your homework, young man” – that got a chuckle out of Neil’s gut – “I’ll send you a link to a page that has the recipe in full. Everything’s there except the part about using your head so your folks don’t catch on.
“You can order sixty pounds of honey online, which’ll make for twenty four-litre jugs…”
The clips Dylan called up were local news from Freham, of a certain sort. “Things are pretty bad in the old town, aren’t they.” Neil, rolling with the satisfaction is his distant cousin’s voice, nodded.
“Yeah. What got us out was a home invasion in our old neighbourhood.” He didn’t notice that his voice had flattened.
“That’s what shotguns are for,” Dylan replied authoritatively. “Best defence against creeps.”
“Not down there; it’s the big city.” Surprised, Neil heard himself talk dismissively about the place where his old school chums were still at. Even the boarders had to live there.
“Right,” Dylan nodded sagely. “They really have it hard there.”
“I heard the robbers are bribing the security companies,” Neil added as alcoholic friendship settled into his belly. “Three people got toasted in my old neighbourhood. All of ‘em had security.”
Dylan smiled, pleased at what he heard. “Just goes to show you: you can’t bribe a shotgun.”
At that point, to the boys' surprise, Darren Finney burst in. “Better sober up, boys. Neil, your father wants to see both of you.”
Shocked at his distant uncle’s casualness, Neil jerked his head over to Dylan. “Right, Dad,” the elder boy replied, “we’ll stop in at detox on the way.”
Cracking a smile, Darren left the door open for the pair as he walked back to his home. He had gotten the message shortly after his day was done and the weekend started. That Neil had been startled, but he needed to get used to the way things worked in Wakia.
“One more thing,” Dylan added as they both got up. “When you hear a feeler like that, stonewall!”
The blooming tutorial relationship hit its first snag when Dylan motioned Neil to the truck after opening the door and getting out the keys. A little older than his dad’s F-150, it was the spare vehicle that Dylan could pretty much use as he pleased. His mom didn’t do much driving, and she preferred the F-150.
Instead of going over to the passenger door, Neil went over to Dylan and whispered: “Don’t you think it’s a little unsafe?”
Dylan’s eyes went neutral when he heard those words. Yep, his cousin was still citified. “We’re on private property, and we’ll be there for most of the drive. Cop shows up maybe once a year.”
Aided by the alcohol, Neil adapted to what his elder cousin said even though he had meant something different. Compliantly, in part because of the alcohol in him, he went over to the passenger side and got in as Dylan was starting up the truck.
In a tone reminiscent of his father’s, Dylan sang out, “Don’t forget your seat belt!” Getting the hint, Neil left his off; so did Dylan. A slight informal rewiring meant that the truck could get rolling unimpeded.
When they reached the end of the driveway, Dylan stopped. To make the point clear, he said to Neil:
“Look at the left side of the road.” The other boy did.
“Now look at the right side of the road.” Again, Neil complied.
“Look left.” Now wondering what was up, Neil did so.
“And right again.” That got the younger boy asking what was up.
“I don’t see any cars either, kid. We must have missed the rush-hour traffic from Freham.”
“Okay,” Neil replied a little deflated. Evidently, the older boy thought he was a big-city worry wart. Maybe he was: they had only had one drink.
The hundred yards to Neil’s private driveway were driven without waver or incident. No-one saw them.
“Back on private property again,” Dylan concluded as he made the right turn into his neighbour’s driveway. “Clear sailing.” Getting his humour back, he informed Neil that he had driven into town with more in his belly than that single drink. “It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t.” With those words, the older boy ended the day’s lesson.
After pulling up into the wide circular driveway, made of dirt and bedrock laced with some gravel, Dylan stopped and the boys got out. Neil’s mom was preparing dinner, but his dad was waiting for them in the living room beyond the entrance foyer.
“How would you guys like to earn some gold.” Both boys heard the absence of a question mark at the end of Albert’s sentence.
He was sitting on a chair behind the head of the coffee table. Three 1/10 oz. gold coins were in front of him. Alongside the length of the table was a couch, which both boys sat on. Trying to sober up, Neil just got nervous. He committed to memory what Dylan had told him about stonewalling.
Sounding like he was back at his office, Albert continued. “I want you to drive down to Freham and meet a gentleman by the name of Harold Renfrew. Neil knows where he lives.”
Dylan’s eyes widened. He had seen lots of news from Freham, mostly bad news, but he had never been there.
“Once there, I want you to pick up three four hundred ounce gold bars and bring them here. Those bars are very valuable, and I expect you both to use your judgment when placing them in the truck. Thankfully, no-one’s going to believe that a couple of young men from Wakia could be carrying a cargo that valuable. I don’t mean to cast any aspersions, but you two in your” – this said to Dylan “father’s truck don’t look like you have anything to steal.
“The order for the gold was made through encrypted secure smart phone, so there’s no way anyone will know you have it.” His voice turning to reassuring, he continued: “There’s really nothing to worry about except getting back here safely. It’ll be just like hauling three packages.
“One of these gold coins is” – this to Neil - “going to Dylan’s father for use of his truck.” Now to both: “He gets it in advance. The other two coins, you two get – one each – once the delivery is done.”
One tenth of an ounce of gold, each. Two thousand dollars. Neil interpreted the figure as twice his weekly allowance. Dylan, more practical-minded, interpreted it as fifty gallons of gas.
“Now, you should be able to get there in about two and a half hours. The traffic’s going the other way at this time.
“If you want, you can try to make it home tonight but don’t try if you’re tired. If you need to stay at a hotel overnight and pick up the gold tomorrow morning, I’ll reimburse you. Just make sure that the journey is continuous once you’ve gotten the gold. Ask yourself” – this to Dylan – “if you can make it before you go to Mr. Renfrew’s place to pick it up. You have to stick to whatever decision you make, so I suggest you be prudent.”
Albert noticed his son looked and acted more serious than usual: Neil seemed a bit owlish. Not being privy to Dylan’s clubhouse yet, he didn’t even have any grounds for suspecting. What he saw convinced him that his boy wasn’t taking the task lightly, almost as if he were a young man.
Dylan responded first, scratching his jawbone. “Well, Uncle Albert, I think I can do it but we’ll have to get started a little after dinner. I’ve got friends coming over – it’s Friday, you see – and I have to tell them why the usual entertainment night isn’t going to have me for it.” Looking up at the older man, he concluded: “They’re old friends. I owe them that.”
Left unsaid was the fact that he needed the extra time to completely sober up. Driving on the main highway, and a city he hadn’t been to, was very far from a jaunt into the town he had grown up in and roads whose traffic patterns he knew.
Turning to Neil, he said “We’d better get coffee’d up, because we need to be alert.”
Back at his home for dinner, Dylan told his dad what Albert wanted him to do. He had also brought the gold coin.
Darren stared at it. “So this really is business for him.” The value of the coin wasn’t that far off from the price of a rental car and gas for the trip.
“Okay,” he decided. “Go fill up the truck from the tank” – a 250-gallon upright tank that Darren had installed thirteen years ago, two years after Hurricane Katrina when gas prices had started to go nuts – “and get going when you think the time is right.”
His earlier gibe hadn't entirely been fun and bluster. Darren suspected that his kid had gotten ahold of some alcohol for weekend blasts…because that’s what he himself had done when he had been a boy. Strangely, his adventures in teenage alcoholicism had turned into near-sobriety once he had hit the legal drinking age. It had set him a little away from Paul Mullen, but neither man minded. They were still born and raised in Wakia; they were still neighbours.
The boys had arrived on time; there was about a hour’s worth of sunlight left. Safely in the clubhouse, Evan Mullen – Paul’s eldest son – greeted Dylan jovially. He was unsuccessfully trying to grow a moustache like his dad’s, who he resembled except for being chunkier.
“Mead man! Glad you’re here! Cripes, I got a load of school to wash away.”
“Wine man!” As per usual, Evan had brought a one-litre outdoor-style juice jug filled with home-made. Two other local boys were on the couch, pulling out their own supplies. They shared a small bottle of “jungle juice,” an informal mixture composed of what they could sneak out of their parents’ liquor cabinet. An ounce each from twelve different bottles added up to a pretty good blast.
“I wanted to ask you,” Dylan continued. He knew well how Evan got his hands on the wine kit, carboy and other supplies he needed to go into wine manufacturing. Mullen’s Marine ordered stuff by courier all the time. Ordering the equipment online had raised no eyebrows in the neighbourhood, particularly since Evan had specified that it be delivered to the business. Since he was responsible for opening the packages and storing the contents anyway, he could easily divert the wine equipment by noting the return address. Being careful, he had bought from private parties so no business identifiers could give his game away. The wine was made in a dry-land boathouse where boats were stored in the winter as a service, so the building went unused from May to October. When season changed to off-season, he moved the equipment into the repair shop. By that time, everyone including his dad was going on unemployment; no repairs were made in those months. He could easily justify his recurring interest in parts of the marina not used by saying he wanted to get the hang of running the business. Since he also frequented the parts that were used, including the tuck shop, he covered his tracks fairly well.
“Can you see your way to receiving a five-gallon bucket of honey? Addressed to the marina?”
Evan considered it. “Thing is, it’d have to be worth my while. Mead?”
Dylan nodded. “Neil and I, we’re going into production.” Once he got the details worked out, and deigned to secure Neil's consent.
Still considering, Evan allowed that he could do it for a bottle of mead.
“Half bottle,” Dylan countered. “But it’ll be good.”
Evan bobbed his head side by side as if to say he’d consider it. Subject put to rest, Dylan now gave his regrets.
“I have to go into the big town tonight, with Neil. His dad wants me to pick up a shipment for him.”
“Of what?” one of the jungle-juice boys asked. None of Dylan's guests seemed to realize that the "big town" meant Freham.
Seeing nothing wrong with telling the truth, Dylan replied “gold. Three bars.”
That got Evan’s eyebrows up, briefly. “Right. My dad told me he’s a gold smuggler. Didn’t know you’d be his courier.”
“I blend in. A Brinks truck’d be too conspicuous.”
Evan nodded, a little boozily. “Makes sense.”
“Anyways, I just wanted to let you guys know the place is yours ‘til you go or pass out.” Dylan wasn’t all kidding. “Just make sure to shut everything down when you’re gone.”
“One way or the other, my friend.” Those words from Evan were as good as a signed contract.
Leaving the door closed, Dylan went to say goodbye to his dad. It had been more than an hour and a half since he had that cup of mead; the effects were sure to have worn off. He stuffed some coffee in himself to make sure.
Darren told his son to hold it for a minute, and discussed what he had pulled up from drivers’ social media about the highway. “I’d watch it if I were you.”
Now especially sober, Dylan nodded – several times. What his dad had told him wasn’t good.
Now back at Albert’s, Dylan knocked at the door instead of going in. Since this was business, it seemed fitting to do so.
Albert answered the door; he seemed to understand why the boy knocked. “So you’re ready to go.” Seeing the boy nod, alertly, he called for Neil.
Like his cousin, Neil had been drinking coffee too. Not having drank before, he still felt the effects a little. His dad, he was sure, didn’t suspect.
“You ready?” Dylan asked. Neil just nodded, still acting a little alcohol-owlish.
“Okay,” he said assuredly. The two walked over to the truck and got in; this time, both boys put their seat belts on. It wasn’t just because of the cops, either.
“Should be a nice, safe drive, Neil old boy,” Dylan boomed as he put the truck in gear. He didn’t tell his partner anything about what his dad had told him. Nor did he breathe a word about what was in the bed of the truck, covered by some coils of electrical wire and two toolboxes he had put in there for show and concealment.
To Trouble
The Finneys’ places were on the far side of the main highway, so Dylan had to drive through the town centre. Several people smiled at the truck, but their smiles disappeared when they saw it drive right through. The boy had changed his habits, all right: normally, he stopped a while and palavered. He had gotten into the habit honestly; it came from his dad Darren. Habit broken, people wondered what was up. They would soon find out from the gossip network.
Not stopping had made Dylan a little uncomfortable. Not only was he breaking convention, but also Neil needed orienting. So the old boy spoke up.
“Normally, when we go into town, we stop a while and talk things over. It’s what we do. I’d be doing it now, but we don’t have the time.” Sundown was approaching, and Dylan’s steady diet of bad news from Freham made him want to get there before the night turned ugly.
Covered by wires and tools, Dylan’s varmint gun was well-concealed. If there were trouble, he could say he forgot it was there. By “trouble,” he meant trouble with the law, as based on his Wakia experience. The other kind of trouble, he had anticipated but didn’t feel.
A couple of years earlier, when relatively new to carrying the 12-gauge, he had asked himself if he could kill a man. The thought had left him enervated. Varmints were one thing, but killing a human was murder - plain and simple. Guns were only to be used on animals, either dangerous ones like attacking bears or ones destined for the food table. Once, the former has served as the latter. Dylan had decided that the greasy, sweetish, grainy, fibery, gamey taste of black bear wasn’t for him. Not having a taste for fat, he didn’t see bear fat as any great treat.
Seeing his distant cousin getting abstracted, Neil asked what was up.
“Just stay away from the bears,” Dylan replied.
Back in Dylan’s clubhouse, the party was getting rolling. Although Dylan’s age, Evan had enough experience with the world of wine to concentrate on his smartphone while the videos were playing. They’d switch to a movie later, but the videos gave Evan a chance to see what his old friend was about to face. Switching through several social networks, he gathered up what his friend’s dad had seen. Some of it looked like city complaints, but some of it looked real.
As a trial run, he switched over to Twitter and entered the search string “truck Freham.” Evan knew he’d see nothing about Dylan, as it was too early, he wanted to get a feel for the background chatter. Most of it was of the variety, “Went over to club in new truck. Everyone amazed!!!” There weren’t any alarm bells.
Evan hoped there wouldn’t be. Satisfied, he disengaged his smart phone and went back to the entertainment. The jungle-juice boys, absorbed in the video and alcohol, didn’t see his scouring as anything worth asking about. Although the liquor-cabinet concoction didn’t taste good, they liked the effects. Since they were a little ahead, Evan took a big swig of his wine and smiled over at them. The alcohol was working its magic.
A half an hour out of Wakia, it was sundown. Seeing a gas station and convenience store, Dylan pulled over to the right lane and gripped the wheel. There was enough traffic to make him reluctant to do most of the slowing down on the main drag. Turning the wheel right, he got onto the gravel that preceded the asphalt turning lane for the station. Slowing down was a little rough at first, but the truck was well capable of handling it. By the time it got to the drive-off lane, it was going half the speed of traffic. That gave him more than enough slow time to make a smooth turn into the station itself. Neil looked nervous on the gravel, but didn’t complain.
Noting the price of the gas, Dylan quick-calculated that a fill-up from empty would cost close to a thousand dollars. By his reckoning, it was a bargain. He didn’t know, but the station’s gas price marginally cheaper than that of those in Freham.
He pulled into the parking lot, the tank being near-full, and stopped. Both he and Neil took off their seat belts and got out.
Inside was a well-kept, neat if small store with the usual offerings, including several portable vats of coffee in different flavours. Neil saw the security cameras and took them in stride, but Dylan blinked. Wanting to see what was up, he walked over to the cash register and buttonholed the clerk. Neil, not having anything particular to do, followed him.
“What’s with the security?”
The clerk, an older man, looked watchfully at him for a few seconds before answering. “I don’t recall seeing you before. You from around here?”
Dylan started blinking again; Neil joined him by feeling apprehensive. The Freham-raised boy was used to seeing security cams, but he wasn’t used to the clerks being anything but welcoming. Security cams were just part of the ambience – weren’t they?
“Wakia,” Dylan answered with little faze. “The way you got this place decked out, I thought I had already gotten to Freham.”
The way the older man’s posture straightened up said to the boys that this was no mere clerk. Both of them wondered why the owner of the place would be manning the cash register on a Friday night.
“That used to work, kid,” he said in a manner connoting that he took no offence, “but not now. You could say that Freham’s spread out.”
Evidently wanting to talk, he continued. “It’s the inflation, you see. Everyone’s getting the idea that a fellow who waits his turn and does things by the book is a sucker. It’s as if we were all Frehamites now.” He didn’t ask if they were going to buy anything, preferring to get what he had stored up off his chest. Neil looked perplexed; he hadn’t known that the rural denizens used his old home city as a professional bad example.
“In fact, just five miles away – “ The owner’s eyes jerked to a display underneath the cash register, and then looked uncertainly out the window to the gas pump. A newer-model subcompact had pulled up by the front pump, and disgorged a young man with rumpled mid-length hair in jeans and checked shirt. Frowning after reading the pump, he turned and bounded in. By the time he was in the door, he had replaced his frown with a jaunty grin.
“Hey Jack,” he belted out, “what’s with the lockdown?”
“Jack’s not my name, sir, and the pump’s been secured because some’s disappeared when I wasn’t looking.”
Neil had been the first to move away from the cash register; he covered it up by going to the coffee and making himself up a large regular. Dylan didn’t join him, preferring to watch, but he did step back too.
“Well, maybe it was your wife!” The guy’s goatee was accentuated by his now-full smile.
“Maybe it was,” ‘Jack’ answered easily. “If she complains to me in a certain way, I’ll know it was her.”
The stranger’s teeth were now gone, but the smile remained. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I’ll turn the pump on for you.”
Dylan hadn’t bothered to get a coffee, having been more interested in the back-and-forth between the two. At first wary, he had then waited to be noticed by the stranger; he wasn’t. Neil had handed over a twenty for his coffee and got eight back.
Now back on the highway, Neil opined that there should be a thousand-dollar bill. “I don’t know why they don’t. They say the thousand’s only good for drug runners, but it’s not much more than a hundred’s worth back when we were born.”
Eyes not turning from the road, Dylan answered: “They want to track everyone. You hand over a twenty: no-one knows unless it’s entered into the system. Use a debit card, and everyone knows.” With the assurance that came from a largely clean if not sober town, he added: “the drug war’s largely an excuse anyhow. They” – meaning, the citified federal government – “just want to keep an eye on everyone.”
Neil hadn’t seen it that way. Hearing the more rural take on the matter didn’t gibe with his own, so he didn’t respond while Dylan opined that the inflation was a trick to make cash money obsolete.
A half an hour later, just after passing through the larger town of Arkdale, they saw a transport truck stuck on the shoulder with hazard lights on and warning flares burning. It was now twilight; there was still enough light to see. Without a word, Dylan pulled the truck onto the shoulder; Neil didn’t comment. They stopped about fifty yards after the flare, which offered enough room to manoeuvre around using the far side of the shoulder, near the transport truck. Dylan, although minding the highway traffic, got out first. Neil again followed.
Striding up to it, they could see the back doors of the trailer were hanging open. Neither boy had any knowledge of trucking, so they didn’t see anything unusual about it. They both assumed that the driver had done it for some professional reason.
The trailer was painted with a large image of Pollard’s, a popular beer. Pollard had a brewery in Arkdale that supplied a fair number of jobs, so the truck made sense. It must have suffered a breakdown of some sort, which wasn’t terribly unusual in this time. Dylan was just curious, as was Neil.
They found the truck driver looking at them apprehensively. He had Cintas work pants below a jean short with a badge stencilled onto the left breast with his name, Gil. His baseball cap, now off, had left an etching in his sandy hair. Gil was in his thirties, larger than medium height and fairly husky, and was a couple of days away from his last shave. A lit cigarette was between his middle and index finger, which did not have any nicotine stains on them.
“You look worried,” Dylan introduced himself. “What gives?”
“More like ‘who swipes,’ kid,” Gil answered. “I’ve been broken down here since a little before sundown. Ever since then, my truck’s been a popular destination for those fine people who like to have themselves a little free beer.” He looked at the half-finished lit cigarette, and then chucked it on the gravel. Neil noticed that he looked relieved when cars drove by on the highway without stopping.
“I don’t even know why I got out of my seat,” he continued with a put-upon look. “Back in the old days, people would have looked and saw a man and they would have at least hesitated. Now, they don’t care. Some of them wave, of all things.”
Dylan mulled it over and asked if Gil was financially responsible for the beer.
“Nope,” the driver replied, “I’m waged. Owner-operators are being squeezed out because the insurance costs are skyrocketing. Mine would be, had I been,” he said dolefully.
“It’s the inflation, you see. Inflation means there’s no shame anymore.” He looked down the highway. “The folks who did it are local, of all things. They come from the area. They know I’m only wage, but they also know that Pollard’s provides jobs for the area. I’m no corporate apologist, but I do know that you don’t steal from the jobs. It’s almost as if my colleagues were siphoning gas from the other guys’ trucks at the truck stop.” With the last sentence, he looked vacant. “Yep, it’s close to us stealing from each other.”
As if Gil had introduced them, a late-model SUV filled with four youths stopped right behind them. They had found out about the accident, like their predecessors in swiping, through the local social network. Laughing and grinning, they got out and headed to the back of the trailer with impunity. One of them climbed up and began handing 24-cases out to his friends. Transferring them to the back of the SUV, they didn’t stop until eight cases had gone.
The guy who had handed them out saucily waved at Gil as his friends got back in the SUV. “Thank Pollard for making up for our gas, friend.” Friend? Both boys’ eyebrows wrinkled. Dylan was already folding the incident into his healthy prejudice against the big city. This time, it was Neil who stepped forward.
“Why are you guys swiping?”
The young man, muscles showing through his T-shirt, cracked up. “Kid, why aren’t you?” He snorted genially. “Too young to drink? Driver’s love-boy?”
Seeing the kid’s look of disgust at the last, he continued with the same self-confident air. “Boyo, it’s easy. Ever calculate the rate of inflation? Try it sometime. I figured it, and my figures show we’re being charged twice the price for Pollard’s that we should be charged. Same with gas, man.”
Assuming that a reasonable approach would work, Neil responded that gold was $20,000 an ounce while official inflation would indicate a price of somewhere around $5,000. He hoped the word ‘official’ would get the hint across.
It didn’t. Feeling his own not-quite healthy prejudice confirmed, the young man continued. “I know who sells it. The banks, right? They fixed it, just like all the big corporations fix everything. The banksters, they’re manipulating the gold upwards - just like they manipulate oil.”
Evidently used to having people listen to him, he continued. “I’m not stupid, and you aren’t either. The CPI says 14% inflation. My bills say, somewhere between 30 and 40%. Put ‘em together; it’s easy.”
By now, Neil was little more than a shadow – as was the ringleader of the swipe gang; it had darkened. “I’ve pumped more than enough money into Pollard’s corporate pocket as it is. ‘Buy for the jobs,’ ‘buy for the local economy,’ ‘buy to help your friends’ – what a crock of crap.” Hoping to get a better view, he approached the boy. His own shadow showed a narrow waist and wide shoulders to complement his well-muscled arms. “The way I figure it, they owe me loads. I’ve paid up more than enough to entitle me to a huge discount, and that’s what we’re getting here.”
Neil saw the swiper-in-chief’s head, now ten feet away, turn to the driver. “And what about you? If you were smart, you’d be selling the load until you’ve topped up your wages. What do you get, cost of living? The way these guys lied, you should be getting double to keep up. If they’re underpaying you, why wouldn’t you be getting back at them?” His tones suggested there was something wrong with Gil. “What’s the matter – got Pollard’s stock?”
“I do fine, kiddo,” Gil answered with a completely different tone. “But since you’re so concerned for my welfare, I can sob-story you back. The Pollard stock I got has gone down half using your cost of living figures.” The last fact, he intoned it as if he were trying to flash a deputy’s badge.
Evidently deciding that Neil was a neutral party, or at least corruptible, the young freebooter turned back to him. Dylan stood watching, ignored by all.
“The banksters, right? They manipulate the stock market, downwards. Everyone’s stealing, and the big boys steal the most.”
Not noticing that Neal’s eyes were darkening, as he was insulting his audience's father by implication, he continued. “Why don’t I get up and toss you a few cases? If you’re, uh, ‘too young to drink,’ you can still barter ‘em.”
Neil tried to be diplomatic, but his voice sounded principled – or, to a certain type of person, truculent. “No thanks, I’ve been looked after.”
Pausing, the young thief looked him over and then smirked. “You’re quite the Richie Rich type, aren’t you." He paused for a moment. His expression was invisible to Neil, as it was to Dylan and Gil. Being brushed off, he now ignored the latter; the former, he didn't recognize at all. Neil occupied his attention.
“Kid, let me give you a tip: there’s lots of Freham gals ‘bout ten years older than me – call it twice your age plus seven – who’s love to get their manicured hands on the likes of you. They pay for it: lots. They have mucho money but no class, you get? They’d love to rub their thingies on a classy young son. Top dollar goes to virgins, too, but you only get that once.
“Don’t laugh,” he continued without checking Neil’s reaction. Having decided to be friendly, he now saw no need. “I’ve heard of boys like you that are clearing twenty thousand a night. ‘Presents,’ you get? You might even get gold for it.
“Hell, I’d get into it myself, only I’m ten years too old and they don’t go for working stiffs.” Pausing, looking reflectively at the backsides of the cars speeding by, he added: “The funny thing is, those babes are a lot like the ones you see the business channel. They’re good-looking. I know guys who’d pay them for the privilege.” Surprisingly to Neil, the rapscallion’s tone had indicated a compliment. “Just goes to show you how confused everything is." The charm he put on didn't get though to the boy whose ears he was bending.
Misinterpreting Neil’s silence as the boy considering what he suggested, he continued easily: ”By all means, think it over, kid. Youth is wasted on the do-gooder. I can assure you of it.”
By now it was dark. Neil saw the headlights of a car that was pulling over to the disabled transport truck. The beer trailer was turning into the head of a parking lot, it seemed. From what he could tell, it was a regular sedan. Two guys, also in their twenties, jumped out.
His would-be mentor was about two feet away from him; the young man not only had ten years and three inches of bicep on him, but also about three inches. Neil wasn’t intimidated at all. The schooling he got at Yancey Grove gave him enough poise not to flinch.
One of the guys from the sedan belted out, “Hey! Is that you, Ralph?”
Ralph turned, smiling. “Yep, it’s me. Here for the free-beer rebate.” Squinting through the dark, he recognized a regular at the hardware store he worked at. Incongruously, Ralph had been recently chosen to be the supervisor in the camping department. He was already being discussed, albeit tentatively, as a store manager or franchisee by the time he was forty.
He saw no contradiction between he being on the corporate fast track at Bild-It Hardware and he lifting beer from a ‘thieving’ corporation. He had gotten to where he was by being in the swim of things. Popular in school, he remained popular when he signed up with Bild-It. At first, he being in the swim of things, he had made jokes at management’s expense when in the free-spending bar. Older employees sought his company out. Later, though, he had become used to the job and showed a knack for bucking people up and even motivating them. Because he was well anchored in the culture mainstream, people tended to like it when he motivated them; his charm carried. The promotion therefore had come quickly.
He, and management, found that his subordinates didn’t mind being bossed by him; his irreverent humour turned into a self-confident light touch. That gave him a crucial edge over someone who knew the job much better than him but didn’t have his people skills. It was that type who disliked being bossed by him, he being a fitting match for the symbolic sleazebag who always euchred out the hard and conscientious worker. Ralph wasn’t a thief by nature, but ‘getting back at the Man’ was in the swim of things.
His managers knew that he had made fun of them but they promoted him nonetheless, once he grew out of it. They did so because he would tolerate jokes made at his own expense once he had attained management rank. Having done so himself, he’d identify with them and thus let it slide. Even the store manager had followed the same track himself; it was part of growing up.
Since going with the flow worked for him, Ralph saw nothing wrong with going with the swiping trend. Unfortunately for him, the same process that would lead to him abiding jokes made by subordinates at his expense had fatally compromised his probity. He far from knew it, but the only way he could keep his own employees from stealing when he was a real boss was to get self-righteous. The unaware Ralph, seeing impunity in popularity, didn’t even discern that the swim of things was to carry him to the shoals once he was in charge. Given his outgoingness and popularity, it would be all-but impossible to conceal his ‘past.’
Oblivious, he walked away from Neil and to the new arrivals. Greeting them self-confidently, he paraphrased his earlier self-justification – this time, to an approving and agreeing audience. Now left alone, Neil looked back for Dylan’s shadow. He could hardly see his companion and Gil the trod-upon truck driver. The stealings weren’t coming at Gil’s financial expense, but they would require forgiveness. And, that forgiveness wouldn’t take away him seeing his own upright values being violated, with popular impunity. In a very real way, he was the unwilling host of a swipe party - one that the cops wouldn't raid.
Carefully walking back, staying as close to the truck and as far away from traffic as he could, Neil saw the two now standing at the front of the tractor part. Dylan greeted him with, “You’re not going to believe what got this guy stuck!”
Gil nodded, with a sour smile. “Yep, I ran out of gas.”
Neil’s eyebrows jolted up. “This close to the town? Why?”
Now, the truck driver snorted. “Management, that’s why. Some ‘get-eveners’ like those dolts keep stealing diesel from my truck. Management’s gotten the idea that we’re somehow responsible, so they’re rationing the purchase orders. I go in, damn lucky to reach the depot on fumes, and find out that I’m not yet entitled to a purchase order for a fill-up. Half my tank got siphoned. ‘Okay’, I said to the dispatcher, ‘then I’ll keep running on the fumes and you guys can come fill me up when I’m stranded.’ He laughed, ‘cause he didn’t make the rule.
“Just like I told you, kid,” he added to Dylan, “you can’t fix stupid unless it breaks something. Then you can. For being stupid, the boss not only cost a special fuel run but also a lot of inventory being swiped. If they try to lay it on me, I’ll up and tell them: ‘What do you expect me to do, bring a shotgun? You going to fix it for me so I can carry one on the truck legally?’”
Now facing Neil, he continued: “I’ll be backed up, that’s for sure. Management needs to see and feel they’ve been stupid. Then they can spend the added money for better truck security, just like we’ve been telling them. But, as I said, you can’t fix stupid unless it breaks something.” Dylan nodded, sagely.
“It’s as if they were living in a dreamworld,” Gil continued, “one where inflation’s nothing other than numbers on a screen that just require adjustment. They’re too out of it.”
With that, he let the boys go. Both of them knew he had gotten his game face on, for when his rescue came. He now had assertiveness in his voice that was absent when he tried to get across his standard of right and wrong.
Thankful for their company, he decided to offer the boys something. Although illegal, it was only breaking a blue law. Nothing like stealing.
“Tell you what: I’ve got twelve smokes left in my pack. I bought it two weeks ago.” He sometimes smoked one cigarette at the end of the day, but mostly not. It depended on his mood. “Why don’t you guys take it.”
Neil looked over at Dylan, ready to refuse. His distant cousin, with eyes resembling his, replied: “Sure, thanks.
“Maybe we’ll see you again,” he said encouragingly as he discerned loneliness shaping the trucker’s face.
“Yes, thank you,” Neil added out of politeness. It seemed the right thing to do, and the guy hadn’t asked them to light up.
“Git outa here,” Gil relied easily. “It’s past your bedtime.” He seemed bittersweet.
After Dylan had explained that you never turn down a gift from someone who’s hurting, the two fell silent at the journey continued through the night. Neil had long finished his coffee, and glanced occasionally at the pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. Neither of them being smokers, neither had a match or lighter.
They had been on the road a full three hours before they reached the outskirts of Freham. Both boys had cell phones, but they both appreciated their newfound independence so they didn’t make any calls along the way. Nor were they called, which Neil appreciated. Dylan was close to taking it for granted.
Thanks to an informal improvised jailbreak, though, Neil’s smart phone transmitted his exact location to his father’s home network – but to no-one else. Albert, although not seeing any restaurant or gas station next to where the two boys had stopped, had assumed that they had found an out-of-the-way place that wasn’t on the computer map. If it were new, there’d be some time before it appeared on the maps. It was close to Arkdale, the phone worked, and his son didn’t call him, so he assumed that they were just having a good time and stretching the trip out.
Darren, after phoning ahead to Albert, had joined him. He trusted his son to do the right thing, but it was a serious job. Since he didn’t wind up the week at the bar or the beer fridge, he was fit to watch along with his distant cousin and new neighbour. It was he who suggested that the boys were goofing off in a restaurant or some place, but it jibed with Albert’s own intuition.
The two men sat at one end of the elongated banquet table in the open-space dining room, watching and sipping colas.
Dylan was amazed at the sight, which was merely homey to Neil. Starting with a white-yellowish corona on the horizon, the lights of Freham turned into a polka-dot display of streetlights punctuated by lit buildings that seemed to go on to infinity as they drove in. Being used to a town with only a minor highway as the main drag, the born-and-raised Wakian thought the city went on forever.
But, he knew they had to exit – so he concentrated on one of the many main drags of Freham, Unity Avenue. Four miles down that way would take them to a lesser turn-off into the ritzy area of town. A few more turns down well-treed and fat-lotted side streets, which Neil knew from memory, would take them to Harold Renfrew’s place. A divorcé, he had not gone with the swim of things and acquired himself a trophy wife; he felt that doing so would shame his two sons and daughter, all of which had flown his nest. So, he lived alone on his Tudor-style mansion and did without. Although his home was only the same size as the one he had sold for Albert, it was on a bigger lot in one of the richest areas of Freham. He had inherited it, and was in part acting as custodian for his eldest to inherit it from him. Unlike Albert, Harold had no intention of moving from Freham. For him, money for a personal security detail was money well spent.
Having gotten off at Unity, they went halfway there when Dylan decided to pull off to a drive-through restaurant for a midnight snack. It was pushing eleven o’clock.
Seven people his age were in the parking lot. In keeping with the times, they were dressed in well-priced casual clothes: no faux-prison garb. That marked them off, Neil knew, as upper middle class: professionals’ kids, in a feeder school for universities. They looked rowdy, but seemed safe.
Now that they were in Freham, Dylan turned the pleasantries over to Neil. After all, Wakia’s newcomer had been born and raised in the big city. He would know what to do.
Having gotten the standard burgers and fries, which cost them a little less than fifty bucks each, they parked in the lot near the gathering they had seen when coming in. “You might as well do the honours,” Dylan said jauntily. He parked the truck so as to get Neil’s door closer to the crowd. On a hunch, he also parked so that there was no vehicle beside theirs on either side.
There were five boys and two girls, all teenagers. Before Neil got out, Dylan said, “Take the pack of smokes with you.” Knowing that a lot of veterans smoked, he assumed it would make them look tough. You never knew.
Getting the hint, Neil did so as he got out. Dylan followed him out, but stayed behind the truck and watched. Something didn’t seem right.
Whatever that something was, Neil was oblivious. Politely, he walked over to the seven and kept a respectful distance.
One of the boys approached him, with a mean look in his eyes. Not expecting it from this crowd, Neil assumed that he was ticked off at something. Maybe this fellow got a rejection letter for the college of his choice, or gat a B on a test, or something of that sort. The collegiate kids, they cared deeply about their grades and their prospects.
The strange boy was Neil’s height, and built a little thicker. Neil’s civil assumption was flayed when the boy opened his mouth.
“A smoker, eh? Come to kill us with your second-hand smoke?”
Thrown out of gear, Neil reacted placatingly. His back to the truck he came from, he didn’t see what Dylan was doing. The young tough did, but concluded that the other boy was using the truck cab to hide. He was quite sure that both newcomers were weak; what this new kid said and did confirmed his impression.
Putting the pack in his pocket, Neil replied peaceably: “There, it’s gone. Nothing to worry about.”
Encouraged by what he thought as weakness, the boy withdrew a knife to the approving glances of his girl and the rest of the pack. “You sound Yancey,” he spat out. “Bankster boy. The way I figure, you owe me. You owe us.
Contemptuously looking at the somewhat beaten truck, he continued spitting out his hostility. “Chicken, trying to hide what you got. Figures.
“Well, Yancey boy, you can call me ‘Taxman’ ‘cause you’re getting an audit.”
“Yeah!” one of the boys behind him exclaimed. ”Audit him!” The next sentence mixed “tax” in with a couple of invectives.
“Oh yes, sir,” the boy replied sarcastically. “And we’ll be needing an inventory of what’s in your fine truck. Or perhaps I should say, our truck.” All seven were now moving in, looking excited, scenting victory over the hapless pair.
The boy that the young gang leader thought was too scared to show his face, seemed to have disappeared. “Now hold on,” Neil said, trying to reach their better nature. “I’m not at Yancey and I don’t know what the rules are here.”
Enjoying the sight of what they took as squirming, they closed in and circled him. Dylan, thinking his cousin was a stand-up guy, took the placating as a delaying tactic. Since Neil’s supposed deference was working, Dylan decided to add to it. Deliberately putting synthetic fear in his voice, he said from behind the truck: “Neil, just lie down on the ground.”
“Good one!” the young thug chimed in. “Better do as your cowardly friend says, Yancey boy. It’ll make the audit go much - more - smoothly.” Neil, trusting Dylan, did so. His nose touched the pavement. Unknowingly to both him and Dylan, several people gathered on the sidewalk side of the parking lot to see the robbery go down. Not wanting to get involved, they just watched. Most of them were full adults.
Now, the gang leader boomed: “Hey coward! Stop cowering behind the truck and bring me the keys!” One of his confederates looked lewdly at the other, swung his foot as if to kick something and looked at Neil’s torso. The other nodded, grinning in the same way. The girls’ lips and eyes glowed as they looked at the rest of the gang.
Dylan had found his earlier enervation, elicited at the thought of shooting a human being, gone. These thugs weren’t acting human; they were varmints. Dangerous ones. So, he acted exactly like he was facing down an attacking bear when he hauled himself half-up, using the truck bed as a shield, and clicked the shotgun into readiness. Part of his ‘cowering’ was spent making sure the safety was off, the parts were assembled smoothly, and the magazine had enough ammo. He knew very well that the shotgun had better work.
The sound of it being readied almost echoed through the parking lot as everyone hushed.
Most of the gang changed from lewd to open-mouthed. There was enough light to show the eyes of a ‘coward’ who in fact was a trained killer. Granted that Dylan had only killed animals, but his adrenaline-soaked subconscious had pegged the targets as nothing more than varmints.
Sensing something, Neil rolled around and saw his towering tormenters frozen. “It’s in the car; we can’t get to it,” one of the boys said unsteadily to the gang leader.
His eyes still glinting, Dylan trained the sights on the leader. He figured, correctly, that the others were under his thumb except perhaps for the girl he was banging.
Jerkily relying on his bravado, the head thug took a step forward. The lot echoed with a crack as the shotgun pellets deliberately went over the boy: Dylan had fired a warning shot. At that sound, everyone ran to the two cars they drove up in except for one of the girls. He face showed the exact same look a fading beauty showed when she discovered her first crow’s feet. Two of the spectators let out a yelp, but no-one started screaming
Neil stood up. Getting the scent of the turn-the-tables victory, he stood tall. Seeing it, the girl’s eyes turned obsequious as she lowered herself to her knees and opened her mouth in a clearly suggestive manner.
Disgust overcoming the tingle in his midriff, Neil backed up. “Get in the vehicle!” Dylan belted out. He has seen them ruffling around for something in one of theirs.
Neil bolted to the truck, almost tore the door open, and jumped in without fastening his belt; Dylan didn’t either. Seat-belt tickets were the least of their worries right now.
His hand shooting to the key, he started up the truck after handing the shotgun to Neil. “Just pretend,” he barked as his right hand jerked the vehicle into reverse. Both boys were jerked by his quick back-up and turn, shove into drive, and slam-down of the pedal. The people watching by the parking-lot exit hastily cleared a wide, respectful path for him; they looked scared. Jerking the accelerator back, Neil coasted to the exit and turned a hard right onto Unity Street.
Luckily for them, the gang had forgotten their own gun. There was less than two miles to go before Dylan and Neil reached the turn-off to the Renfrew place.
Their luck continued. This part of town, although middle class, was becoming used to teenage gangs. Those who weren’t scared of calling the police, didn’t bother because they figured those young hooligans got what they deserved. As for the others, they’d get theirs once the word spread; it would all even out in the end.
Yes, Dylan and Neil were very lucky: they had been accosted at the time when the collegiate-school bangers inflicted violence only on each other and strangers. Had they begun shooting the innocent, it would be a very different story.
The more aggressive gangs were moving into the drug trade. Those less aggressive took up burgling, after carefully confirming that their target houses were insured. They justified their thefts by saying that they weren’t ‘really’ stealing, as the insurers picked up the loss. Insurance companies being easy political targets, they were no longer allowed to jack up their premiums above the CPI rate unless they could show “clear cause” for doing so. It would take a long time for the insurance companies to convince a now-cynical regulatory staff that this part of Freham was turning into a jungle. There was now a fixed formula, which the thieves knew about. Using their university-track education, they calculated the number of robberies they could commit before the threshold was reached. If the area went over the threshold because of outside or professional thieves, the gang boys and girls could blame the outsiders for the premium hikes. The drug dealers, quite righteously, looked down on the thieves.
Without knowing it, the two had confronted a farm-league offshoot of a drug gang. Most of the spectators did know it. Almost instantly, the word spread across cyberspace. There were now new boys in the ‘hood!
Not stopping had made Dylan a little uncomfortable. Not only was he breaking convention, but also Neil needed orienting. So the old boy spoke up.
“Normally, when we go into town, we stop a while and talk things over. It’s what we do. I’d be doing it now, but we don’t have the time.” Sundown was approaching, and Dylan’s steady diet of bad news from Freham made him want to get there before the night turned ugly.
Covered by wires and tools, Dylan’s varmint gun was well-concealed. If there were trouble, he could say he forgot it was there. By “trouble,” he meant trouble with the law, as based on his Wakia experience. The other kind of trouble, he had anticipated but didn’t feel.
A couple of years earlier, when relatively new to carrying the 12-gauge, he had asked himself if he could kill a man. The thought had left him enervated. Varmints were one thing, but killing a human was murder - plain and simple. Guns were only to be used on animals, either dangerous ones like attacking bears or ones destined for the food table. Once, the former has served as the latter. Dylan had decided that the greasy, sweetish, grainy, fibery, gamey taste of black bear wasn’t for him. Not having a taste for fat, he didn’t see bear fat as any great treat.
Seeing his distant cousin getting abstracted, Neil asked what was up.
“Just stay away from the bears,” Dylan replied.
Back in Dylan’s clubhouse, the party was getting rolling. Although Dylan’s age, Evan had enough experience with the world of wine to concentrate on his smartphone while the videos were playing. They’d switch to a movie later, but the videos gave Evan a chance to see what his old friend was about to face. Switching through several social networks, he gathered up what his friend’s dad had seen. Some of it looked like city complaints, but some of it looked real.
As a trial run, he switched over to Twitter and entered the search string “truck Freham.” Evan knew he’d see nothing about Dylan, as it was too early, he wanted to get a feel for the background chatter. Most of it was of the variety, “Went over to club in new truck. Everyone amazed!!!” There weren’t any alarm bells.
Evan hoped there wouldn’t be. Satisfied, he disengaged his smart phone and went back to the entertainment. The jungle-juice boys, absorbed in the video and alcohol, didn’t see his scouring as anything worth asking about. Although the liquor-cabinet concoction didn’t taste good, they liked the effects. Since they were a little ahead, Evan took a big swig of his wine and smiled over at them. The alcohol was working its magic.
A half an hour out of Wakia, it was sundown. Seeing a gas station and convenience store, Dylan pulled over to the right lane and gripped the wheel. There was enough traffic to make him reluctant to do most of the slowing down on the main drag. Turning the wheel right, he got onto the gravel that preceded the asphalt turning lane for the station. Slowing down was a little rough at first, but the truck was well capable of handling it. By the time it got to the drive-off lane, it was going half the speed of traffic. That gave him more than enough slow time to make a smooth turn into the station itself. Neil looked nervous on the gravel, but didn’t complain.
Noting the price of the gas, Dylan quick-calculated that a fill-up from empty would cost close to a thousand dollars. By his reckoning, it was a bargain. He didn’t know, but the station’s gas price marginally cheaper than that of those in Freham.
He pulled into the parking lot, the tank being near-full, and stopped. Both he and Neil took off their seat belts and got out.
Inside was a well-kept, neat if small store with the usual offerings, including several portable vats of coffee in different flavours. Neil saw the security cameras and took them in stride, but Dylan blinked. Wanting to see what was up, he walked over to the cash register and buttonholed the clerk. Neil, not having anything particular to do, followed him.
“What’s with the security?”
The clerk, an older man, looked watchfully at him for a few seconds before answering. “I don’t recall seeing you before. You from around here?”
Dylan started blinking again; Neil joined him by feeling apprehensive. The Freham-raised boy was used to seeing security cams, but he wasn’t used to the clerks being anything but welcoming. Security cams were just part of the ambience – weren’t they?
“Wakia,” Dylan answered with little faze. “The way you got this place decked out, I thought I had already gotten to Freham.”
The way the older man’s posture straightened up said to the boys that this was no mere clerk. Both of them wondered why the owner of the place would be manning the cash register on a Friday night.
“That used to work, kid,” he said in a manner connoting that he took no offence, “but not now. You could say that Freham’s spread out.”
Evidently wanting to talk, he continued. “It’s the inflation, you see. Everyone’s getting the idea that a fellow who waits his turn and does things by the book is a sucker. It’s as if we were all Frehamites now.” He didn’t ask if they were going to buy anything, preferring to get what he had stored up off his chest. Neil looked perplexed; he hadn’t known that the rural denizens used his old home city as a professional bad example.
“In fact, just five miles away – “ The owner’s eyes jerked to a display underneath the cash register, and then looked uncertainly out the window to the gas pump. A newer-model subcompact had pulled up by the front pump, and disgorged a young man with rumpled mid-length hair in jeans and checked shirt. Frowning after reading the pump, he turned and bounded in. By the time he was in the door, he had replaced his frown with a jaunty grin.
“Hey Jack,” he belted out, “what’s with the lockdown?”
“Jack’s not my name, sir, and the pump’s been secured because some’s disappeared when I wasn’t looking.”
Neil had been the first to move away from the cash register; he covered it up by going to the coffee and making himself up a large regular. Dylan didn’t join him, preferring to watch, but he did step back too.
“Well, maybe it was your wife!” The guy’s goatee was accentuated by his now-full smile.
“Maybe it was,” ‘Jack’ answered easily. “If she complains to me in a certain way, I’ll know it was her.”
The stranger’s teeth were now gone, but the smile remained. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I’ll turn the pump on for you.”
Dylan hadn’t bothered to get a coffee, having been more interested in the back-and-forth between the two. At first wary, he had then waited to be noticed by the stranger; he wasn’t. Neil had handed over a twenty for his coffee and got eight back.
Now back on the highway, Neil opined that there should be a thousand-dollar bill. “I don’t know why they don’t. They say the thousand’s only good for drug runners, but it’s not much more than a hundred’s worth back when we were born.”
Eyes not turning from the road, Dylan answered: “They want to track everyone. You hand over a twenty: no-one knows unless it’s entered into the system. Use a debit card, and everyone knows.” With the assurance that came from a largely clean if not sober town, he added: “the drug war’s largely an excuse anyhow. They” – meaning, the citified federal government – “just want to keep an eye on everyone.”
Neil hadn’t seen it that way. Hearing the more rural take on the matter didn’t gibe with his own, so he didn’t respond while Dylan opined that the inflation was a trick to make cash money obsolete.
A half an hour later, just after passing through the larger town of Arkdale, they saw a transport truck stuck on the shoulder with hazard lights on and warning flares burning. It was now twilight; there was still enough light to see. Without a word, Dylan pulled the truck onto the shoulder; Neil didn’t comment. They stopped about fifty yards after the flare, which offered enough room to manoeuvre around using the far side of the shoulder, near the transport truck. Dylan, although minding the highway traffic, got out first. Neil again followed.
Striding up to it, they could see the back doors of the trailer were hanging open. Neither boy had any knowledge of trucking, so they didn’t see anything unusual about it. They both assumed that the driver had done it for some professional reason.
The trailer was painted with a large image of Pollard’s, a popular beer. Pollard had a brewery in Arkdale that supplied a fair number of jobs, so the truck made sense. It must have suffered a breakdown of some sort, which wasn’t terribly unusual in this time. Dylan was just curious, as was Neil.
They found the truck driver looking at them apprehensively. He had Cintas work pants below a jean short with a badge stencilled onto the left breast with his name, Gil. His baseball cap, now off, had left an etching in his sandy hair. Gil was in his thirties, larger than medium height and fairly husky, and was a couple of days away from his last shave. A lit cigarette was between his middle and index finger, which did not have any nicotine stains on them.
“You look worried,” Dylan introduced himself. “What gives?”
“More like ‘who swipes,’ kid,” Gil answered. “I’ve been broken down here since a little before sundown. Ever since then, my truck’s been a popular destination for those fine people who like to have themselves a little free beer.” He looked at the half-finished lit cigarette, and then chucked it on the gravel. Neil noticed that he looked relieved when cars drove by on the highway without stopping.
“I don’t even know why I got out of my seat,” he continued with a put-upon look. “Back in the old days, people would have looked and saw a man and they would have at least hesitated. Now, they don’t care. Some of them wave, of all things.”
Dylan mulled it over and asked if Gil was financially responsible for the beer.
“Nope,” the driver replied, “I’m waged. Owner-operators are being squeezed out because the insurance costs are skyrocketing. Mine would be, had I been,” he said dolefully.
“It’s the inflation, you see. Inflation means there’s no shame anymore.” He looked down the highway. “The folks who did it are local, of all things. They come from the area. They know I’m only wage, but they also know that Pollard’s provides jobs for the area. I’m no corporate apologist, but I do know that you don’t steal from the jobs. It’s almost as if my colleagues were siphoning gas from the other guys’ trucks at the truck stop.” With the last sentence, he looked vacant. “Yep, it’s close to us stealing from each other.”
As if Gil had introduced them, a late-model SUV filled with four youths stopped right behind them. They had found out about the accident, like their predecessors in swiping, through the local social network. Laughing and grinning, they got out and headed to the back of the trailer with impunity. One of them climbed up and began handing 24-cases out to his friends. Transferring them to the back of the SUV, they didn’t stop until eight cases had gone.
The guy who had handed them out saucily waved at Gil as his friends got back in the SUV. “Thank Pollard for making up for our gas, friend.” Friend? Both boys’ eyebrows wrinkled. Dylan was already folding the incident into his healthy prejudice against the big city. This time, it was Neil who stepped forward.
“Why are you guys swiping?”
The young man, muscles showing through his T-shirt, cracked up. “Kid, why aren’t you?” He snorted genially. “Too young to drink? Driver’s love-boy?”
Seeing the kid’s look of disgust at the last, he continued with the same self-confident air. “Boyo, it’s easy. Ever calculate the rate of inflation? Try it sometime. I figured it, and my figures show we’re being charged twice the price for Pollard’s that we should be charged. Same with gas, man.”
Assuming that a reasonable approach would work, Neil responded that gold was $20,000 an ounce while official inflation would indicate a price of somewhere around $5,000. He hoped the word ‘official’ would get the hint across.
It didn’t. Feeling his own not-quite healthy prejudice confirmed, the young man continued. “I know who sells it. The banks, right? They fixed it, just like all the big corporations fix everything. The banksters, they’re manipulating the gold upwards - just like they manipulate oil.”
Evidently used to having people listen to him, he continued. “I’m not stupid, and you aren’t either. The CPI says 14% inflation. My bills say, somewhere between 30 and 40%. Put ‘em together; it’s easy.”
By now, Neil was little more than a shadow – as was the ringleader of the swipe gang; it had darkened. “I’ve pumped more than enough money into Pollard’s corporate pocket as it is. ‘Buy for the jobs,’ ‘buy for the local economy,’ ‘buy to help your friends’ – what a crock of crap.” Hoping to get a better view, he approached the boy. His own shadow showed a narrow waist and wide shoulders to complement his well-muscled arms. “The way I figure it, they owe me loads. I’ve paid up more than enough to entitle me to a huge discount, and that’s what we’re getting here.”
Neil saw the swiper-in-chief’s head, now ten feet away, turn to the driver. “And what about you? If you were smart, you’d be selling the load until you’ve topped up your wages. What do you get, cost of living? The way these guys lied, you should be getting double to keep up. If they’re underpaying you, why wouldn’t you be getting back at them?” His tones suggested there was something wrong with Gil. “What’s the matter – got Pollard’s stock?”
“I do fine, kiddo,” Gil answered with a completely different tone. “But since you’re so concerned for my welfare, I can sob-story you back. The Pollard stock I got has gone down half using your cost of living figures.” The last fact, he intoned it as if he were trying to flash a deputy’s badge.
Evidently deciding that Neil was a neutral party, or at least corruptible, the young freebooter turned back to him. Dylan stood watching, ignored by all.
“The banksters, right? They manipulate the stock market, downwards. Everyone’s stealing, and the big boys steal the most.”
Not noticing that Neal’s eyes were darkening, as he was insulting his audience's father by implication, he continued. “Why don’t I get up and toss you a few cases? If you’re, uh, ‘too young to drink,’ you can still barter ‘em.”
Neil tried to be diplomatic, but his voice sounded principled – or, to a certain type of person, truculent. “No thanks, I’ve been looked after.”
Pausing, the young thief looked him over and then smirked. “You’re quite the Richie Rich type, aren’t you." He paused for a moment. His expression was invisible to Neil, as it was to Dylan and Gil. Being brushed off, he now ignored the latter; the former, he didn't recognize at all. Neil occupied his attention.
“Kid, let me give you a tip: there’s lots of Freham gals ‘bout ten years older than me – call it twice your age plus seven – who’s love to get their manicured hands on the likes of you. They pay for it: lots. They have mucho money but no class, you get? They’d love to rub their thingies on a classy young son. Top dollar goes to virgins, too, but you only get that once.
“Don’t laugh,” he continued without checking Neil’s reaction. Having decided to be friendly, he now saw no need. “I’ve heard of boys like you that are clearing twenty thousand a night. ‘Presents,’ you get? You might even get gold for it.
“Hell, I’d get into it myself, only I’m ten years too old and they don’t go for working stiffs.” Pausing, looking reflectively at the backsides of the cars speeding by, he added: “The funny thing is, those babes are a lot like the ones you see the business channel. They’re good-looking. I know guys who’d pay them for the privilege.” Surprisingly to Neil, the rapscallion’s tone had indicated a compliment. “Just goes to show you how confused everything is." The charm he put on didn't get though to the boy whose ears he was bending.
Misinterpreting Neil’s silence as the boy considering what he suggested, he continued easily: ”By all means, think it over, kid. Youth is wasted on the do-gooder. I can assure you of it.”
By now it was dark. Neil saw the headlights of a car that was pulling over to the disabled transport truck. The beer trailer was turning into the head of a parking lot, it seemed. From what he could tell, it was a regular sedan. Two guys, also in their twenties, jumped out.
His would-be mentor was about two feet away from him; the young man not only had ten years and three inches of bicep on him, but also about three inches. Neil wasn’t intimidated at all. The schooling he got at Yancey Grove gave him enough poise not to flinch.
One of the guys from the sedan belted out, “Hey! Is that you, Ralph?”
Ralph turned, smiling. “Yep, it’s me. Here for the free-beer rebate.” Squinting through the dark, he recognized a regular at the hardware store he worked at. Incongruously, Ralph had been recently chosen to be the supervisor in the camping department. He was already being discussed, albeit tentatively, as a store manager or franchisee by the time he was forty.
He saw no contradiction between he being on the corporate fast track at Bild-It Hardware and he lifting beer from a ‘thieving’ corporation. He had gotten to where he was by being in the swim of things. Popular in school, he remained popular when he signed up with Bild-It. At first, he being in the swim of things, he had made jokes at management’s expense when in the free-spending bar. Older employees sought his company out. Later, though, he had become used to the job and showed a knack for bucking people up and even motivating them. Because he was well anchored in the culture mainstream, people tended to like it when he motivated them; his charm carried. The promotion therefore had come quickly.
He, and management, found that his subordinates didn’t mind being bossed by him; his irreverent humour turned into a self-confident light touch. That gave him a crucial edge over someone who knew the job much better than him but didn’t have his people skills. It was that type who disliked being bossed by him, he being a fitting match for the symbolic sleazebag who always euchred out the hard and conscientious worker. Ralph wasn’t a thief by nature, but ‘getting back at the Man’ was in the swim of things.
His managers knew that he had made fun of them but they promoted him nonetheless, once he grew out of it. They did so because he would tolerate jokes made at his own expense once he had attained management rank. Having done so himself, he’d identify with them and thus let it slide. Even the store manager had followed the same track himself; it was part of growing up.
Since going with the flow worked for him, Ralph saw nothing wrong with going with the swiping trend. Unfortunately for him, the same process that would lead to him abiding jokes made by subordinates at his expense had fatally compromised his probity. He far from knew it, but the only way he could keep his own employees from stealing when he was a real boss was to get self-righteous. The unaware Ralph, seeing impunity in popularity, didn’t even discern that the swim of things was to carry him to the shoals once he was in charge. Given his outgoingness and popularity, it would be all-but impossible to conceal his ‘past.’
Oblivious, he walked away from Neil and to the new arrivals. Greeting them self-confidently, he paraphrased his earlier self-justification – this time, to an approving and agreeing audience. Now left alone, Neil looked back for Dylan’s shadow. He could hardly see his companion and Gil the trod-upon truck driver. The stealings weren’t coming at Gil’s financial expense, but they would require forgiveness. And, that forgiveness wouldn’t take away him seeing his own upright values being violated, with popular impunity. In a very real way, he was the unwilling host of a swipe party - one that the cops wouldn't raid.
Carefully walking back, staying as close to the truck and as far away from traffic as he could, Neil saw the two now standing at the front of the tractor part. Dylan greeted him with, “You’re not going to believe what got this guy stuck!”
Gil nodded, with a sour smile. “Yep, I ran out of gas.”
Neil’s eyebrows jolted up. “This close to the town? Why?”
Now, the truck driver snorted. “Management, that’s why. Some ‘get-eveners’ like those dolts keep stealing diesel from my truck. Management’s gotten the idea that we’re somehow responsible, so they’re rationing the purchase orders. I go in, damn lucky to reach the depot on fumes, and find out that I’m not yet entitled to a purchase order for a fill-up. Half my tank got siphoned. ‘Okay’, I said to the dispatcher, ‘then I’ll keep running on the fumes and you guys can come fill me up when I’m stranded.’ He laughed, ‘cause he didn’t make the rule.
“Just like I told you, kid,” he added to Dylan, “you can’t fix stupid unless it breaks something. Then you can. For being stupid, the boss not only cost a special fuel run but also a lot of inventory being swiped. If they try to lay it on me, I’ll up and tell them: ‘What do you expect me to do, bring a shotgun? You going to fix it for me so I can carry one on the truck legally?’”
Now facing Neil, he continued: “I’ll be backed up, that’s for sure. Management needs to see and feel they’ve been stupid. Then they can spend the added money for better truck security, just like we’ve been telling them. But, as I said, you can’t fix stupid unless it breaks something.” Dylan nodded, sagely.
“It’s as if they were living in a dreamworld,” Gil continued, “one where inflation’s nothing other than numbers on a screen that just require adjustment. They’re too out of it.”
With that, he let the boys go. Both of them knew he had gotten his game face on, for when his rescue came. He now had assertiveness in his voice that was absent when he tried to get across his standard of right and wrong.
Thankful for their company, he decided to offer the boys something. Although illegal, it was only breaking a blue law. Nothing like stealing.
“Tell you what: I’ve got twelve smokes left in my pack. I bought it two weeks ago.” He sometimes smoked one cigarette at the end of the day, but mostly not. It depended on his mood. “Why don’t you guys take it.”
Neil looked over at Dylan, ready to refuse. His distant cousin, with eyes resembling his, replied: “Sure, thanks.
“Maybe we’ll see you again,” he said encouragingly as he discerned loneliness shaping the trucker’s face.
“Yes, thank you,” Neil added out of politeness. It seemed the right thing to do, and the guy hadn’t asked them to light up.
“Git outa here,” Gil relied easily. “It’s past your bedtime.” He seemed bittersweet.
After Dylan had explained that you never turn down a gift from someone who’s hurting, the two fell silent at the journey continued through the night. Neil had long finished his coffee, and glanced occasionally at the pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. Neither of them being smokers, neither had a match or lighter.
They had been on the road a full three hours before they reached the outskirts of Freham. Both boys had cell phones, but they both appreciated their newfound independence so they didn’t make any calls along the way. Nor were they called, which Neil appreciated. Dylan was close to taking it for granted.
Thanks to an informal improvised jailbreak, though, Neil’s smart phone transmitted his exact location to his father’s home network – but to no-one else. Albert, although not seeing any restaurant or gas station next to where the two boys had stopped, had assumed that they had found an out-of-the-way place that wasn’t on the computer map. If it were new, there’d be some time before it appeared on the maps. It was close to Arkdale, the phone worked, and his son didn’t call him, so he assumed that they were just having a good time and stretching the trip out.
Darren, after phoning ahead to Albert, had joined him. He trusted his son to do the right thing, but it was a serious job. Since he didn’t wind up the week at the bar or the beer fridge, he was fit to watch along with his distant cousin and new neighbour. It was he who suggested that the boys were goofing off in a restaurant or some place, but it jibed with Albert’s own intuition.
The two men sat at one end of the elongated banquet table in the open-space dining room, watching and sipping colas.
Dylan was amazed at the sight, which was merely homey to Neil. Starting with a white-yellowish corona on the horizon, the lights of Freham turned into a polka-dot display of streetlights punctuated by lit buildings that seemed to go on to infinity as they drove in. Being used to a town with only a minor highway as the main drag, the born-and-raised Wakian thought the city went on forever.
But, he knew they had to exit – so he concentrated on one of the many main drags of Freham, Unity Avenue. Four miles down that way would take them to a lesser turn-off into the ritzy area of town. A few more turns down well-treed and fat-lotted side streets, which Neil knew from memory, would take them to Harold Renfrew’s place. A divorcé, he had not gone with the swim of things and acquired himself a trophy wife; he felt that doing so would shame his two sons and daughter, all of which had flown his nest. So, he lived alone on his Tudor-style mansion and did without. Although his home was only the same size as the one he had sold for Albert, it was on a bigger lot in one of the richest areas of Freham. He had inherited it, and was in part acting as custodian for his eldest to inherit it from him. Unlike Albert, Harold had no intention of moving from Freham. For him, money for a personal security detail was money well spent.
Having gotten off at Unity, they went halfway there when Dylan decided to pull off to a drive-through restaurant for a midnight snack. It was pushing eleven o’clock.
Seven people his age were in the parking lot. In keeping with the times, they were dressed in well-priced casual clothes: no faux-prison garb. That marked them off, Neil knew, as upper middle class: professionals’ kids, in a feeder school for universities. They looked rowdy, but seemed safe.
Now that they were in Freham, Dylan turned the pleasantries over to Neil. After all, Wakia’s newcomer had been born and raised in the big city. He would know what to do.
Having gotten the standard burgers and fries, which cost them a little less than fifty bucks each, they parked in the lot near the gathering they had seen when coming in. “You might as well do the honours,” Dylan said jauntily. He parked the truck so as to get Neil’s door closer to the crowd. On a hunch, he also parked so that there was no vehicle beside theirs on either side.
There were five boys and two girls, all teenagers. Before Neil got out, Dylan said, “Take the pack of smokes with you.” Knowing that a lot of veterans smoked, he assumed it would make them look tough. You never knew.
Getting the hint, Neil did so as he got out. Dylan followed him out, but stayed behind the truck and watched. Something didn’t seem right.
Whatever that something was, Neil was oblivious. Politely, he walked over to the seven and kept a respectful distance.
One of the boys approached him, with a mean look in his eyes. Not expecting it from this crowd, Neil assumed that he was ticked off at something. Maybe this fellow got a rejection letter for the college of his choice, or gat a B on a test, or something of that sort. The collegiate kids, they cared deeply about their grades and their prospects.
The strange boy was Neil’s height, and built a little thicker. Neil’s civil assumption was flayed when the boy opened his mouth.
“A smoker, eh? Come to kill us with your second-hand smoke?”
Thrown out of gear, Neil reacted placatingly. His back to the truck he came from, he didn’t see what Dylan was doing. The young tough did, but concluded that the other boy was using the truck cab to hide. He was quite sure that both newcomers were weak; what this new kid said and did confirmed his impression.
Putting the pack in his pocket, Neil replied peaceably: “There, it’s gone. Nothing to worry about.”
Encouraged by what he thought as weakness, the boy withdrew a knife to the approving glances of his girl and the rest of the pack. “You sound Yancey,” he spat out. “Bankster boy. The way I figure, you owe me. You owe us.
Contemptuously looking at the somewhat beaten truck, he continued spitting out his hostility. “Chicken, trying to hide what you got. Figures.
“Well, Yancey boy, you can call me ‘Taxman’ ‘cause you’re getting an audit.”
“Yeah!” one of the boys behind him exclaimed. ”Audit him!” The next sentence mixed “tax” in with a couple of invectives.
“Oh yes, sir,” the boy replied sarcastically. “And we’ll be needing an inventory of what’s in your fine truck. Or perhaps I should say, our truck.” All seven were now moving in, looking excited, scenting victory over the hapless pair.
The boy that the young gang leader thought was too scared to show his face, seemed to have disappeared. “Now hold on,” Neil said, trying to reach their better nature. “I’m not at Yancey and I don’t know what the rules are here.”
Enjoying the sight of what they took as squirming, they closed in and circled him. Dylan, thinking his cousin was a stand-up guy, took the placating as a delaying tactic. Since Neil’s supposed deference was working, Dylan decided to add to it. Deliberately putting synthetic fear in his voice, he said from behind the truck: “Neil, just lie down on the ground.”
“Good one!” the young thug chimed in. “Better do as your cowardly friend says, Yancey boy. It’ll make the audit go much - more - smoothly.” Neil, trusting Dylan, did so. His nose touched the pavement. Unknowingly to both him and Dylan, several people gathered on the sidewalk side of the parking lot to see the robbery go down. Not wanting to get involved, they just watched. Most of them were full adults.
Now, the gang leader boomed: “Hey coward! Stop cowering behind the truck and bring me the keys!” One of his confederates looked lewdly at the other, swung his foot as if to kick something and looked at Neil’s torso. The other nodded, grinning in the same way. The girls’ lips and eyes glowed as they looked at the rest of the gang.
Dylan had found his earlier enervation, elicited at the thought of shooting a human being, gone. These thugs weren’t acting human; they were varmints. Dangerous ones. So, he acted exactly like he was facing down an attacking bear when he hauled himself half-up, using the truck bed as a shield, and clicked the shotgun into readiness. Part of his ‘cowering’ was spent making sure the safety was off, the parts were assembled smoothly, and the magazine had enough ammo. He knew very well that the shotgun had better work.
The sound of it being readied almost echoed through the parking lot as everyone hushed.
Most of the gang changed from lewd to open-mouthed. There was enough light to show the eyes of a ‘coward’ who in fact was a trained killer. Granted that Dylan had only killed animals, but his adrenaline-soaked subconscious had pegged the targets as nothing more than varmints.
Sensing something, Neil rolled around and saw his towering tormenters frozen. “It’s in the car; we can’t get to it,” one of the boys said unsteadily to the gang leader.
His eyes still glinting, Dylan trained the sights on the leader. He figured, correctly, that the others were under his thumb except perhaps for the girl he was banging.
Jerkily relying on his bravado, the head thug took a step forward. The lot echoed with a crack as the shotgun pellets deliberately went over the boy: Dylan had fired a warning shot. At that sound, everyone ran to the two cars they drove up in except for one of the girls. He face showed the exact same look a fading beauty showed when she discovered her first crow’s feet. Two of the spectators let out a yelp, but no-one started screaming
Neil stood up. Getting the scent of the turn-the-tables victory, he stood tall. Seeing it, the girl’s eyes turned obsequious as she lowered herself to her knees and opened her mouth in a clearly suggestive manner.
Disgust overcoming the tingle in his midriff, Neil backed up. “Get in the vehicle!” Dylan belted out. He has seen them ruffling around for something in one of theirs.
Neil bolted to the truck, almost tore the door open, and jumped in without fastening his belt; Dylan didn’t either. Seat-belt tickets were the least of their worries right now.
His hand shooting to the key, he started up the truck after handing the shotgun to Neil. “Just pretend,” he barked as his right hand jerked the vehicle into reverse. Both boys were jerked by his quick back-up and turn, shove into drive, and slam-down of the pedal. The people watching by the parking-lot exit hastily cleared a wide, respectful path for him; they looked scared. Jerking the accelerator back, Neil coasted to the exit and turned a hard right onto Unity Street.
Luckily for them, the gang had forgotten their own gun. There was less than two miles to go before Dylan and Neil reached the turn-off to the Renfrew place.
Their luck continued. This part of town, although middle class, was becoming used to teenage gangs. Those who weren’t scared of calling the police, didn’t bother because they figured those young hooligans got what they deserved. As for the others, they’d get theirs once the word spread; it would all even out in the end.
Yes, Dylan and Neil were very lucky: they had been accosted at the time when the collegiate-school bangers inflicted violence only on each other and strangers. Had they begun shooting the innocent, it would be a very different story.
The more aggressive gangs were moving into the drug trade. Those less aggressive took up burgling, after carefully confirming that their target houses were insured. They justified their thefts by saying that they weren’t ‘really’ stealing, as the insurers picked up the loss. Insurance companies being easy political targets, they were no longer allowed to jack up their premiums above the CPI rate unless they could show “clear cause” for doing so. It would take a long time for the insurance companies to convince a now-cynical regulatory staff that this part of Freham was turning into a jungle. There was now a fixed formula, which the thieves knew about. Using their university-track education, they calculated the number of robberies they could commit before the threshold was reached. If the area went over the threshold because of outside or professional thieves, the gang boys and girls could blame the outsiders for the premium hikes. The drug dealers, quite righteously, looked down on the thieves.
Without knowing it, the two had confronted a farm-league offshoot of a drug gang. Most of the spectators did know it. Almost instantly, the word spread across cyberspace. There were now new boys in the ‘hood!
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