Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [8]
And even more irksome, her hints in conversation with others that what she brought home was so much more than he did. But the two sums drew a little closer if you subtracted tips, which, Bud reasoned, was like taking charity. He told Lily to quit letting rich blue-haired grannies palm her a bill on their way out the door. It was demeaning for her, and even worse for him. Like he was married to a whore.
Lily said, No, I won’t quit taking tips. I earn them. It’s how the job works. You don’t have to eat the groceries I buy with them.
That kind of heartless remark, and the general misery of their marriage, was what lit a fire under Bud’s ass, so that before long he got ambitious and came into some money. One afternoon, Bud and his railroad friend, Billy, were smoking reefer and listening to the radio and bitching about their jobs when they should have been working. And out of nowhere Billy proposed a simple break-and-enter deal. Some rich guy he had done a little work for a while back. Surely his house would have enough pawnable stuff—watches and jewelry and silverware—to pay a couple months’ expenses and leave ample pocket money while they pondered their futures.
Bud had sort of halfway sworn off felonies. Teenager prison was bad enough, and he sure didn’t want to do time with big boys. But it would only be this once, and they’d be careful.
Except Billy’s guy was into some shady commercial real estate dealings or other lofty half-legal commerce demanding cash transactions. Stashed in his dresser drawer, alongside his wife’s jewelry and a fancy wristwatch, was a size 12 shoe box filled with stacks of money. And a few days after their job, Billy’s guy turned up floating in a big lake ten miles north of town, which was a puzzler and sort of sad, though not a major cause of concern.
The shoe box held bundles of bills, all tapped into strict rectangles and banded. Altogether, they stacked nearly to the box lid. The top layers were mostly worn ones and fives and tens. So at the moment they found it, they thought it was nothing more than a little lagniappe to the job. But later, when they dug to the bottom, they found that the final layers were perfect stacks of new hundreds wrapped in red bands.
Billy drove, so Bud counted a stack. That one little half-inch fucker was ten thousand dollars. Who would have guessed?
The first thing they did was go raise hell for a couple of days, and when Bud finally got home, he was still thoroughly drunk and exhausted. Lily, of course, took advantage of the situation and set right in on him. Where had he been? Drinking, obviously. Then she started cataloging all the ways he was worthless.
On fool impulse, as his most potent available argument against Lily, Bud stuck his hands into his coat pockets and pulled out the many bundles of hundreds and threw them on the bedspread. If you were honest and stupid, you worked a couple of lifetimes for that kind of money, doled out by the hour in pocket-change amounts by asswipe bosses.
Lily riffled through a few stacks and then began questioning where they all came from, because she knew for sure he’d never earn that kind of money, no matter if he lived as long as Methuselah.
Bud stretched out grandly on the bed among his winnings, his hands behind his head and a satisfied look on his face, saying nothing. Very shortly, unfortunately, he dozed off or passed out, one. When he woke late the next day, the money was gone and the room started spinning whenever he moved his head. Try to stand and the whole world tipped at a severe angle to gravity. He found himself banging against walls and knee-walking on the way to the toilet.
After a couple more rough days while his head cleared and his appetite came back, he started asking questions regarding the whereabouts of his money. Being cool, since he couldn’t exactly snatch it back and hang on to it now. He was the very bird that threw it out there on the chenille, trying to be the big man. And then gave Lily the gift of his unconsciousness, plus two additional