A Simple Plan Read online

  "It was his bear," I said.

  "Jacob's?"

  "When he was little."

  The music continued, sounding flat and far away beneath the teddy bear's fur:

  Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques,

  Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

  Sonnez les matines. Sonnez les matines.

  Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang, dong.

  Sarah held the bear up in front of her, reappraising it. The music gradually slowed -- each note drawing itself out as if it would be the very last -- but it didn't stop.

  "I guess it's sweet of him, isn't it?" she said. She sniffed at the bear.

  I took the tissue paper and shoved it into the wastebasket beside the bed. "I wonder where he's kept it all these years."

  "Is he coming up?"

  "No," I said, moving toward the door. "He's in a rush."

  Sarah started to wind up the bear again. "What's the check for?"

  "Jacob," I said, over my shoulder. I was stepping out into the hallway.

  "He's borrowing money?"

  I didn't answer her.

  THE BABY started to cry as I made my way back up the stairs. She began softly -- something between a suppressed cough and a squawking sound like a bird might make -- but just as I entered the bedroom, she suddenly, as if at the twist of a knob, increased her volume to a full-blown wail.

  I lifted her from the crib and carried her to the bed. She started to cry even harder when I picked her up, her whole body tensing beneath my hands, her face going a brilliant crimson, as if she were about to pop. I was still surprised by her weight; I hadn't thought a baby could be so heavy, and there was a peculiar denseness about her, too, as if she were full of water. Her head was huge and round; it seemed to take up half her body.

  Sarah extended her arms toward me, lifting the baby from my hands, a pained expression on her face.

  "Shhh," she said. "Amanda. Shhh."

  The teddy bear was sitting beside her, its back to the headboard, its little black paws reaching out, as if it also had wanted to comfort the crying infant. Sarah held Amanda in the crook of her arm and with her free hand unbuttoned her pajama top, exposing her left breast.

  I turned away, walked back toward the crib, and looked out the window. I was still embarrassed by the sight of Sarah nursing Amanda. It gave me a creepy feeling, the thought of the baby sucking fluid out of her. It seemed unnatural, horrid; it made me think of leeches.

  I gazed down at the front yard. It was empty: Jacob and his truck had disappeared. The day was still, beautiful, a postcard of winter. Sunlight shimmered off frozen surfaces; the trees laid thick, precise shadows across the snow. The gutters on the garage were swaybacked with icicles, and I made a mental note to knock them off the next time I went outside.

  When my eyes strayed upward from the icicles, they discovered, on the very peak of the garage, the dark outline of a large black bird. My hand moved involuntarily toward my forehead.

  "There's a crow on the garage roof," I said.

  Sarah didn't respond. I massaged the skin above my eyebrows. It was perfectly smooth; the bump had left no scar. The baby was making a cooing sound behind me while she nursed, steady and insistent.

  After a minute or so Sarah called my name. "Hank?" she said softly.

  I watched the crow hop back and forth along the garage roof's snowy peak. "Yes?"

  "I thought up a plan while I was in the hospital."

  "A plan?"

  "For making sure Lou doesn't tell."

  I turned to face her. My shadow, framed in the window's square of sunlight, fell gigantically across the bedroom floor, my head looking monstrous on my shoulders, like a pumpkin. Sarah was bent over Amanda, smiling in an exaggerated manner -- her eyebrows raised high on her forehead; her nostrils flared; her lips parted, showing her teeth. The baby ignored her, frantically sucking at her breast. When Sarah turned toward me, the smile dropped from her face.

  "It's kind of silly," she said, "but if we do it right, it might work."

  I came over and sat at the foot of the bed. Sarah turned back to Amanda, stroked the baby's cheek with her fingertips.

  "Yes," she whispered. "You're a hungry little girl, aren't you?" Amanda's lips worked eagerly at her nipple.

  "Go on," I said.

  "I want you to tape him confessing to Pederson's murder."

  I stared at her. "What're you talking about?"

  "That's my plan," she said. "That's how we're going to keep him from turning you in." She grinned at me, as if she were very pleased with this idea.

  "Is this supposed to be funny?"

  "Of course not," she said, surprised.

  "Why would he confess to something he didn't do?"

  "You and Jacob invite him out for drinks; you get him drunk; you take him back to his house, and you start joking about confessing to the police. You take turns pretending to do it -- you first, Jacob second, Lou last -- and when Lou does it, you tape him."

  I assumed that there had to be something logical embedded within what she'd just proposed, and I tried for the next moment or so to find it.

  "That's insane," I said finally. "There's no way it would work."

  "Jacob helps you. That's the key. If Jacob eggs him on, then he'll do it."

  "But even if we could get him to say it -- and I doubt we could -- it wouldn't mean anything. No one would ever believe it."

  "That doesn't matter," she said. "We just need something to scare him with. If we tape him saying it, and we let him hear it, there's no way he'll turn you in."

  Amanda finished nursing. Sarah took a dish towel from the night table and draped it across her shoulder. Then she picked up the baby and began to burp her. She pulled her pajama top back across her breast but didn't button it. They were the pajamas I'd given her for Christmas. She hadn't fit into them then -- her stomach had been too large -- so this was the first time I'd seen them on her. They were flannel, white with little green flowers. I could remember buying them at the mall in Toledo, could remember wrapping them in a box on Christmas Eve and then her opening them the next morning, holding them up against her swollen belly, but it all seemed as though it had happened ages ago. We'd come so far since then, so much had happened -- I'd lied, stolen, murdered -- and now that past, so close in a purely temporal sense, was utterly irrecoverable. It was a terrifying thing to recognize, the gulf that separated the two of us then -- opening our presents together on the floor beneath the tree, a fire burning on the hearth -- from the two of us now, sitting here in our bedroom, plotting how to blackmail Lou and frighten him into silence. And we'd crossed it not in any great leap but in little, nearly imperceptible steps, so that we never really noticed the distance we were traveling. We'd edged our way into it; we'd done it without changing.

  "All you have to do is get him to understand that you and Jacob could claim he killed Pederson just as easily as he could claim you did it. If you make him think that Jacob would side with you, he'll never risk bringing in the police."

  "This is dumb, Sarah."

  She glanced up from the baby. "What harm could come from trying it?"

  "Jacob won't want to help."

  "Then you'll have to make him. It won't work without him."

  "He'd be betraying his best friend."

  "You're his brother, Hank. He'll do it if you show him how important it is. You just have to get him so he's as scared of Lou as we are." She glanced up at me, pushed her hair away from her face. There were hollows beneath her eyes, dark, bruised-looking circles. She needed to sleep. "It won't end when Lou has his money. He'll be hanging over us for the rest of our lives. The only way it'll stop is if we can make him fear us as much as we fear him."

  "You're saying the tape'll make him fear us?"

  "I know it will."

  I didn't say anything. I still couldn't imagine Lou confessing to killing Pederson, not even in jest.

  "We should at least try, Hank, shouldn't we? We can't lose anything by trying."

 
She was right, of course, or at least it seemed as if she was. But how could I have known then all the loss to which her simple plan would ultimately lead? I could see no risk: if it worked, it would save us, and if it didn't, we'd just be right back where we started.

  "All right," I said. "I'll talk to Jacob. I'll see if I can get him to do it."

  I TOOK the next day off so I could help Sarah with the baby.

  In the afternoon, while the two of them were napping, I slipped out and bought a tape recorder. I went to Radio Shack, in Toledo. I told the salesman that I needed something tiny and uncomplicated. It was for dictation, I said, for recording business letters while I drove to and from work. He sold me one that was a little smaller than a deck of cards. It fit snugly, almost invisibly, into my front shirt pocket, and its record button was extra large, so that you could feel it through the fabric and know which one to press without taking it out to look.

  Sarah and the baby were still asleep when I got home. I checked on them quickly, then went into the bathroom and practiced turning the tape recorder on and off in front of the mirror. I did it over and over again -- a slow, casual gesture -- my right hand scratching briefly at my chest, my palm holding the machine in place while my index finger pushed down the button. It looked good, I thought; it was something Lou would never notice.

  Later, after Sarah woke up, I tried it out on her. She was in bed, with Amanda in her arms.

  "What's the first thing you're going to buy with the money?" I asked, and when she glanced up at me, I scratched at my chest, turning on the tape recorder.

  She bit her lip, debating. In the silence, I could just barely make out a soft humming sound coming from my pocket.

  "A bottle of champagne," she said. "Good champagne. We'll drink it, get a little tipsy, and then we'll make love on the money."

  "On the money?"

  "That's right." She smiled. "We'll spread it out across the floor, make ourselves a bed of hundred-dollar bills."

  I took the tape recorder from my pocket and rewound it to the beginning. "Look what I bought," I said. I handed it to Sarah.

  "Does it work?"

  I grinned. "Press the play button."

  She found the button, pushed it in.

  "A bottle of champagne," her voice began, the words emerging one after the other with incredible clarity. "Good champagne. We'll drink it, get a little tipsy..."

  THURSDAY evening, around five-thirty, I telephoned Jacob from the feedstore and suggested we visit the cemetery together, finally fulfilling our obligation to the ghost of our father. He declined at first, saying he was busy, but eventually I managed to badger him into it. We agreed to meet at quarter till six, on the street in front of Raikley's.

  By the time I emerged from the feedstore, he was already waiting for me on the sidewalk with Mary Beth. He looked even more overweight than normal, his face puffy, swollen. His jacket was so tight that he couldn't drop his arms to his sides. He kept them extended, away from his body, like an overstuffed doll. The sun had set, and it was dark out. The streetlights cast weak circles of pale yellow light across the pavement at regular intervals along the road. A few cars moved by, and down in front of the pharmacy a cluster of teenagers loitered, talking and laughing loudly. Other than that the town was quiet.

  Jacob and I crossed the street toward St. Jude's, stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk, and moved into the parking lot. Our boots crunched in the gravel. Mary Beth jogged on ahead of us toward the cemetery.

  "I've been thinking about the money," Jacob said, "and I think maybe we were fated to get it."

  "Fated?" I asked.

  He nodded. He was eating a hunk of chocolate cake wrapped in a piece of aluminum foil, taking great bites out of it as we walked, and he had to wait, chewing and swallowing, before he could speak.

  "There are so many things that might've gone some other way," he said. "If it'd just been chance, then it never would've happened. It's like it was meant to, like we were chosen."

  I smiled at him. It seemed like a romantic idea. "What things?"

  "Everything." He listed them off on his fingers. "If the plane had flown another mile, it would've crashed out in the open and been discovered right from the start. If the fox hadn't crossed exactly in front of us, and we hadn't crashed, and Mary Beth hadn't been there or hadn't jumped from the truck and chased it, and the fox hadn't run right next to the plane, we never would've found it. If you'd left the bag inside after checking on the pilot, we would've come into town and told the sheriff without even knowing about the money. It just goes on and on."

  We'd reached the cemetery's chain-link gate now, and we stopped there, as if hesitant to go inside. The gate was merely ornamental; it blocked the path but nothing more. There was no fence attached to it. Mary Beth sniffed at it for a moment, lifted his leg briefly against its supporting post, then stepped off the path and entered the cemetery by himself.

  "But why is that fate?" I asked Jacob. It seemed more like luck to me, and it was a little frightening to hear him list off all the things that had gone our way. I couldn't escape the thought that everything balances out in the end: if it was luck that was bringing us through our present difficulties, it was bound to turn on us before we were through.

  "Don't you see?" he said. "It's too arbitrary to be just chance. It seems like there has to be something determining it, a plan helping us along."

  "God's?" I asked, smiling. I waved at the church.

  He shrugged. "Why not?"

  "And what about Pederson? Was that part of this grand plan?"

  He nodded emphatically. "If he'd come at any other time that day, he would've found the plane. There would've been our tracks. We would've been caught."

  "But why have him come at all? If you were the one making the plan, wouldn't you have just omitted him?"

  He thought about that, finishing off his cake. He licked at the aluminum foil a few times, then balled it up and tossed it into the snow. "Maybe it's important for something which hasn't happened yet," he said, "something we don't know about."

  I didn't say anything. I'd never heard him attempt to philosophize before. I wasn't sure what he was getting at.

  "It's going on right now, too, I bet," he said. "Things are happening in just the right sequence, one after the other, falling into place so that it all works out for us."

  He grinned at me. He seemed to be in an exceptionally good mood, and for some reason this irritated me. It reeked of complacency. He had no concept of the trouble we were in.

  "You're happy we found the money, then?" I asked.

  He hesitated, as if confused by the question. He seemed to think that there was a trick embedded in it. "Aren't you?"

  "I'm asking you."

  He waited a second, then nodded. "Definitely," he said, his voice serious. "Without a doubt."

  "Why?"

  He answered quickly, as if this were something he'd already considered many times. "I can get back the farm now."

  He looked at me when he said it, to see my response, but I kept silent, my face expressionless. In a few minutes I was going to ask him to betray his only friend: it didn't seem like the right moment to inform him that he couldn't remain in Ashenville.

  "And I can have a family," he went on. "I wouldn't have before. I need to find someone like Sarah, and--"

  "Like Sarah?" I asked, startled.

  "Someone aggressive. You needed that, too. You were too shy to find someone on your own; she had to come and get you."

  I was a little bewildered to hear him say this, but at the same time I recognized it as true. I nodded at him, prodding him on.

  "Without the money," he said, "no one was ever going to come and get me. I'm fat" -- he patted at his stomach--"and poor. I was going to grow old and be alone. But now that I'm rich, all that'll change, someone'll come get me for the money."

  "You want someone to love you just for your money?"

  "I've never had anyone, Hank. All my life. If I can get someone now,
I'm not going to care why she's with me. I'm not proud."

  I leaned against the cemetery gate, watching him tell me this. His face and voice were very serious. This wasn't modesty or self-deprecatory humor; there was no sense of irony whatsoever. It was the truth, cold and shiny as a bone freshly stripped of its flesh: this was how Jacob saw his life.

  I didn't know how to react. I stared down at his massive boots for a moment, embarrassed, then said, "Whatever happened to Mary Beth?"

  He adjusted his glasses on his nose, squinted past me into the cemetery. "She's in there."

  "She's dead?"

  "Dead?" he said. "What do you mean? She was just here, you saw her."

  "Not the dog. Mary Beth Shackleton, from high school."

  Jacob frowned. "She's married, I think. Last I heard she'd moved to Indiana."

  "She liked you without the money, didn't she?"

  He laughed, shaking his head. "I never told you the truth about that, Hank. I was always too ashamed." He didn't look my way while he spoke; he stared off beyond me into the cemetery. "She dated me as a joke. It was a bet she made with some of her friends. They all chipped in and bet her a hundred dollars that she wouldn't go steady with me for a month. So she did."

  "You knew this?"

  "Everybody did."

  "And you went along with it?"

  "It wasn't as bad as it seems. It was mean of her to do, but she did it in a nice way. We never kissed or touched or anything like that, but we walked around a lot together, and talked, and when the month was up she still stopped to say hello to me when we passed, which she didn't have to do."

  I was shocked. "And you named your dog after her?"

  He shrugged, smiling strangely. "I liked the name."

  It was absurd, of course, the whole thing. I felt sorry for him, and ashamed.

  A car honked somewhere farther down in town, and we both paused, listening. The night was very quiet. The dog had reappeared out of the cemetery and was sitting now beside the gate.