Bail

You’re gonna ask me to bail you out again? Seriously? You should be in jail. You’re a fucking criminal. There’s no money in the house and there’s no bailing you out anymore.

The place is quiet now. The sound of kids laughing from the house next door is even more amplified. The neighbors are getting ready to move out and I envy them for that. They were always friendly with him even if I never knew them. Another part of his life that was kept from me. His shit is everywhere. In every crevice. Littering the whole space like a pollutant. I’d burn it all if I cared enough. He’s no longer the charming gangster who scared and excited me when I was young and naïve enough to believe in him. What was once an anchor keeping me stable is now a weight pulling me down.

Thinking about all the bullshit he’s brought into her life, she becomes increasingly restless and furious in equal measure. She sets out to rid the house of anything he ever touched. An entire lifetime of detritus stuffed into fifteen hundred square feet. Clothes unworn in a decade or more. A seemingly endless amount of newspaper clippings with headlines like “New Zoo Attractions Expected Soon” and other historically unremarkable bulletins. Collections of magazines, many specializing in the repair of automobiles he never owned. Staring at a stack of Popular Mechanic magazines in the corner of what he called their spare room, which can be any room when you’re dealing with a hoarder, she realizes that the result of all this collecting was simply his wishes for what he could have been. These were mementos of a future life never to exist. This was the first time her anger gave way to something like sympathy. Maybe I don’t need to get rid of everything. Maybe getting rid of everything means getting rid of him too. She starts cleaning again, this time more deliberately. She picks up a stack of magazines and starts leafing through them, hoping to feel some sort of connection to him through this dead information. As she removes the endless mass of papers bit by bit, she notices an unusual thickness to what is the only issue of Field and Stream in the stack. She opens it up and out falls an envelope at her feet. She tears into it and finds five one hundred dollar bills neatly tucked inside. My god. Is he actually telling the truth about the money? With renewed curiosity and attentiveness she goes through the rest of his collections. Paper after paper, publication after publication, she finds nothing. Probably just the doings of a paranoid addict on a bender, she thought. She begins again to go about the business of collecting and discarding large swaths of garbage from the spare room with no expectation of finding anything of value. She reaches the last few small bags in the back of his closet and notices a mound of Harley Davidson vests intentionally piled in the corner of the closet. She lifts the vests up and finds a little black book underneath. She opens it up and sees what appears to be a ledger with various numbers written in scattered and scribbled lines. Next to the numbers are phrases like “five planks from bedroom wall” and “beneath the third blue tile”. What the hell was he up to? A curiosity gripped her. She sat reading the little black book for a time and then set off to find out what, if anything, was under the fifth plank from the bedroom wall.

The first task is deciding which fifth plank from which bedroom wall. She didn’t know his state of mind when he wrote this and certainly couldn’t guess when. And what exactly am I looking for? Do I really trust him enough to destroy my house at the possibility of him having buried some amount of cash under the floorboards decades ago? She pries open the little black book again and reads it through, cover to cover. Deciphering it the best she could, she reads “five hundred under the spare room dresser”. “Seven hundred in the ceiling above the refrigerator”. “Two thousand inside the walls of the hall closet”. Can this be real? Driven half mad at the possibility of finding a life changing sum of money hidden in her home, she sets out on this absurd treasure hunt.

At first, she is steady and unexpecting of any reward. She can only speculate at the accuracy and truthfulness of his claims. She begins with the first entry in the book. “Five planks from the bedroom wall”. Starting in the room he would have most recently called a bedroom, she puts her back against the wall closest to the bed and counts out five planks from where she is. The large mahogany floorboards make it easy to measure and she is thankful for that much, at least. Armed with a hammer and a pry bar she sets to work. Hesitantly, she hammers the pry bar into the wood and props up a plank. She aims her flashlight into the vacant space and notices a shiny reflection amidst the darkness. Her pulse quickens and her eyes go wide. A sudden anticipation seizes her. She reaches down and removes the object. She holds in her hands a small metal box with a handle and two clasps holding it shut. Oh my god. It can’t be. She opens the box and inside are old faded newspapers wadded up like trash. Unbelievable, she says aloud. A scavenger hunt for fucking garbage. I’m literally scavenging. She turns the metal box upside down in anger and hears a slight thump as the newspaper falls to the floor. She sifts through the old clippings and finds a bundle of green paper surrounded by rubber bands. She quickly removes the rubber bands revealing what seems like dozens of hundred dollar bills in pristine condition. In total disbelief, with her hands shaking, she hurriedly counts out the money. No way. No. WAY. She counts again, this time slowing down to ensure her accuracy. Three thousand and eighty. Three. Thousand. Eighty. He wasn’t lying. I’ll be goddamned, he wasn’t lying. She immediately grabs up the book again and moves on to the next entry. “Two thousand inside the walls of the hall closet”. Enthralled, she moves quickly to the hall closet and without hesitation she rips into the walls with abandon, throwing pieces of wood and paint everywhere. She tears the room apart in short order and begins to look around the floor for another container. Again she finds a roll of bills encased in rubber bands beneath the rubble she has just created. Inside are over one thousand neatly wrapped dollar bills. Her head swims at the possibility of perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars hidden in the coverings of her house. She immediately sets out again at the directions of the little black book. She is a mad person now, singularly obsessed with her mission. First, destroying the ceiling above the refrigerator. Then the space beneath the dresser in the spare room. Removing whole sections of drywall in her frenzied effort to uncover her fortune. Before she realizes it she has destroyed half of her home. She pauses for a moment, only to consolidate her findings. No time to count this out now. I’ll have plenty of time when it’s finished. Again, she follows the instruction of the little black book and returns to the dismantling. From room to room she moves with great intention and plunders like some ancient Viking horde turning her home into ruins as she goes. By the time it’s all over she is exhausted and bewildered. Feeling like she was outside her own body and watching herself demolish the only place she’d ever cared about. It’s all worth it, though. With what I found I can build a new place.

Once she awakens from her stupor she begins to collect and account for all the money. She removes the cash from their various entrapments and one by one she puts them in a pile. She’s never seen so much money in one place. Never seen money in what could be described as a “pile”. She begins to count and sort. Quickly but surely she figures her sums. She reaches the conclusion and is mystified. She counts again to make sure in her haste she hadn’t missed something. She had not. The final total was twenty thousand dollars exactly. How is this possible? How is there not more? All the totals in the book surely added up to more than that. She went back to the book and carefully calculated the tallies therein. The total sum of the ledger was just under six hundred thousand dollars. What did I miss? She began to think that her husband had misremembered the locations of the money. He wasn’t lying, just forgetful. She convinced herself that the money was there. She needed justification of her doings. She wouldn’t destroy her home on a whim.

Frantically, she sets to the destruction of every place she thought the money might be. Every standing structure was in her mind a potential place of concealment. Any object could contain her fortune. After an endless time, when she was finally overcome by exhaustion and her mania had subsided, she found herself surrounded by nothing but debris. Her home was a waste pile of her own making. There was no more money, or at least she hadn’t found it. Now, there was no more house either. At once overcome with emotion, she began wailing and thrashing about. Crying out at the man who had lied to her and put upon her such an unknowable grief. Unable to contain her sorrow, she cursed the person who had driven her to this place and the greed that enabled it. She hated herself for trusting him so much. She began to rip the little black book apart page by page. Destroying the thing that destroyed her. As she came to the very last piece of the book she noticed an almost imperceptibly small scribbling at the bottom of the page. She brought it close to her face and saw what appeared to be the nonsensical scribblings of a madman. “Mickey Mouse in red has five hundred thousand friends.” What bullshit. She had no idea what it meant or could mean. Most of this book had not contained the truth even if pieces of it were true enough. One last exasperating lie from a man full of them. Through sheer force of will she managed to pick herself up and drag her weary body to the front porch. It’s funny. From the outside you would never know what I’ve done to this place. What a waste it all was. She settles down into an old rocking chair and wonders what she will do next. If there will even be a next. She peers through the thicket of branches at the end of the porch and sees the neighbors packing up their final boxes, preparing to leave their old lives behind like she wished she could. Their youngest child comes clambering out of the door singing a silly song. His father follows closely behind him clutching a red backpack. Disney characters adorn each side. The rest of the family climbs into the car. They leave the driveway and she says aloud, almost absentmindedly, “Mickey Mouse in red has five hundred thousand friends.”