most of the time. The idea is to turn it into a family room for when the boys are older. These days it’s mostly inhabited by stray waterbugs.
When I reached the bottom step, I saw them. There are four metal support poles in the basement, near each corner. They had him lashed to a pole in the east quadrant, lashed his wrists behind him with rope found in the tool room. They also had him gagged with what looked like a pillowcase. His eyes were big and wide. He looked scared, and I didn’t blame him. I was scared, too.
“What the hell are you guys doing?”
“Just calm down, Papa Bear,” Mike said. That’s his name for me whenever he wants to convey to people that I’m kind of this old fuddy-duddy. It so happens that Mike is two years older than I am, and it also happens that I’m not a fuddy-duddy. Jan has assured me of that, and she’s completely impartial.
“Knock off the Papa Bear bullshit. Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet,” Neil said. “Just calm down a little, all right?”
“You haven’t called the cops. You’ve got some guy tied up and gagged in my basement. You haven’t even asked how Bob is. And you want me to calm down.”
Mike came up to me then. He still had that air of pit-bull craziness about him, frantic, uncontrollable, alien.
“We’re going to do what the cops
“It’s just an extension of the patrol,” Neil said. “Just keeping our neighborhood safe is all.”
“You guys are nuts,” I said, and turned back toward the steps. “I’m going up and call the cops.”
That’s when I realized just how crazed Mike was. “You aren’t going anywhere, man. You’re going to stay here and help us break this bastard down. You’re going to do your goddamned neighborhood
He’d grabbed my sleeve so hard that he’d torn it at the shoulder. We both discovered this at the same time.
I expected him to look sorry. He didn’t. In fact, he was smirking at me. “Don’t be such a wimp, Aaron,” he said.
2
Mike led the charge getting the kitchen cleaned up. I think he was feeling guilty about calling me a wimp with such angry exuberance. Now I understood how lynch mobs got formed. One guy like Mike stirring people up by alternately insulting them and urging them on.
After the kitchen was put back in order, and after I’d taken inventory to find that nothing had been stolen, I went to the refrigerator and got beers for everybody. Bob had drifted back to the kitchen, too.
“All right,” I said. “Now that we’ve all calmed down, I want to walk over to that yellow kitchen wall phone there and call the police. Any objections?”
“I think blue would look better in here than yellow,” Neil said.
“Funny,” I said.
They looked like themselves now, no feral madness on the faces of Mike and Neil, no winces on Bob’s.
I started across the floor to the phone.
Neil grabbed my arm. Not with the same insulting force Mike had used on me. But enough to get the job done.
“I think Mike’s right,” Neil said. “I think we should grill that bastard a little bit.’
I shook my head, politely removed his hand from my forearm, and proceeded to the phone.
“This isn’t just your decision alone,” Mike said.
He’d finally had his way. He’d succeeded in making me angry. I turned around and looked at him. “This is my house, Mike. If you don’t like my decisions, then I’d suggest you leave.”
We both took steps toward each other. Mike would no doubt win any battle we had, but I’d at least be able to inflict a little damage, and right now that’s all I was thinking about.
Neil got between us.
“Hey,” he said. “For God’s sake, you two, c’mon. We’re friends, remember?”
“This is my house,” I said, my words childish in my ears.
“Yeah, but we live in the same neighborhood, Aaron,” Mike said, “which makes this our problem.”
“He’s right, Aaron,” Bob said from the breakfast nook. There’s a window there where I sometimes sit to watch all the animals on sunny days. I saw a mother raccoon and four baby raccoons one day, marching single-file across the grass. My grandparents were the last generation to live on the farm. My father came to town here and ultimately became a vice president of a ball-bearing company. Raccoons are a lot more pleasant to gaze upon than people.
“He’s not right,” I said to Bob. “He’s wrong. We’re not cops, we’re not bounty hunters, we’re not trackers. We’re a bunch of goddamned guys who peddle stocks and bonds. Mike and Neil shouldn’t have tied him up downstairs — that happens to be illegal, at least the way they went about it — and now I’m going to call the cops.”
“Yes, that poor thing,” Mike said. “Aren’t we just picking on him, though? Tell you what, why don’t we make him something to eat?”
“Just make sure we have the right wine to go with it,” Neil said. “Properly chilled, of course.”
“Maybe we could get him a chick,” Bob said.
“With bombers out to here,” Mike said, indicating with his hands where “here” was.
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. They were all being ridiculous. A kind of fever had caught them.
“You really want to go down there and question him?” I said to Neil.
“Yes. We can ask him things the cops can’t.”
“Scare the bastard a little,” Mike said. “So he’ll tell us who was with him tonight, and who else works this neighborhood.” He came over and put his hand out. “God, man, you’re one of my best friends. I don’t want you mad at me.”
Then he hugged me, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with men doing, but to the extent I could, I hugged him back.
“Friends?” he said.
“Friends,” I said. “But I still want to call the cops.”
“And spoil our fun?” Neil said.
“And spoil your fun.”
“I say we take it to a vote,” Bob said.
“This isn’t a democracy,” I said. “It’s my house and I’m the king. I don’t want to have a vote.”
“Can we ask him one question?” Bob said.
I sighed. They weren’t going to let go. “One question?”
“The names of the guys he was with tonight.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. That way we get him and his pals off the street.”
“And then I call the cops?”
“Then,” Mike said, “you call the cops.”
“One question,” Neil said.
While we finished our beers, we argued a little more, but they had a lot more spirit left than I did. I was tired now and missing Jan and the kids and feeling lonely. These three guys had become strangers to me tonight. Very old boys eager to play at boy games once again.
“One question,” I said. “Then I call the cops.”
I led the way down, sneezing as I did so.
There’s always enough dust floating around in the basement to play hell with my sinuses.
