The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  Mother and daughter both pecked Abe goodbye and bounded off to catch a train.

  Joss seemed to study Sam down the stairs, and she wondered momentarily if her ruse had failed—if Joss understood that Mom had forgotten more about sampling rates than Dad had ever known—and had only made this final query to escape the apartment on a positive note.

  Other fictions existed between the couple. That Abe respected her managerial position at WNYC. That she believed his vow to start playing shows again—that those freelance audio-tech Fiverr gigs he’d parlayed fairly successfully into income were just temporary and not his professional endgame. That reuniting each night for dinner, they asked about the other’s day with anything like genuine interest.

  Sometimes Joss would make comments indicating she knew. “Gee, Dad, bitter much?” or, “I’d rather not be involved in this,” swirling her hand as though over a cesspool. Other times, she seemed oblivious, just a regular kid consumed by regular kid stuff.

  Either possibility broke Sam’s heart.

  The L train was late. As Joss practiced pirouettes idly on the platform, Sam stared up the track, squeezing the handle of her bag, her toes nudging over the yellow stripe. Her phone had continued its chiming, Laurel and Terri texting about meal times, shoe choices, whether Naples still served pitchers.

  Joss caught her checking her screen. “What? What’re they saying?”

  Sam stashed the phone in her jacket. “Oh, just blabbing about how I’m missing out.”

  “Which one, Naomi—the one who’s writing a novel? Or the famous blogger?”

  Laurel had written some for HuffPost, but “famous” was pushing it. Sam was okay with Joss idealizing her alma mater. Joss’s academics were solid, dance extracurriculars would help, but she hadn’t yet shown the kind of passion that propels kids to big-time achievement. Maybe meeting Laurel and others, and being exposed to Yale’s vibrant undergrad activism, would spark it.

  And if not? There were worse fates.

  “All of them,” Sam answered. “It’s a grand conspiracy to make me jealous.”

  She peered up the track again. Still no train.

  Next to her on the platform, a young guy in bikewear groaned. He flashed his phone around to his group, and they trudged off for the stairs.

  “Excuse me,” Sam said. “Sorry to bother you, but did you—er, is something up with this train?”

  Bike Guy raised his screen for her to see. Sam squinted. Some app she had no idea even existed reported a forty-three-minute wait for the L line with the reason Signal malfunction.

  Joss said, “Can we just get an Uber?”

  “No. Uber all the way to Manhattan is way expensive.”

  “It’s like ten dollars.”

  “It is not like ten dollars,” Sam said, starting for street level, pulling up her mental city transit map. “More like thirty or thirty-five, and given the reunion fees pretty much wiped our bank account, we need to economize.”

  Joss dragged a step behind. “Dad said he got two new gigs today. That’s like a hundred fifty dollars right there.”

  Sam bit her lip. How to explain to a teenager about budgets, and debt, and the way expenses keep coming at you like luggage off an airport carousel—only you have to grab every last one?

  She decided to keep it simple. “We live in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is expensive.”

  She could’ve added So are private ballet lessons.

  “Dad said he’d buy me new guitar strings,” Joss said. “Can we not even get those? They’re twenty dollars, basically how much an Uber would be.”

  They were crossing Willoughby Avenue now, Sam hurrying to enter the intersection ahead of the next traffic wave—which gave her cover to ignore her daughter’s niggling response.

  Abe never joined Sam on the financial-responsibility front, content to shower Joss with records and music goodies, reaping all the credit, making Sam the spoilsport. In fairness, he never spent a dime on clothes or gadgets for himself. He simply loved seeing Joss happy.

  In a marriage chock-full of grievances, Sam found this one hard to prosecute. Abe’s gig income from Fiverr roughly equaled hers from WNYC. The money was no more hers than his. He poured himself into Joss. Music instructor, English tutor, after-school snack chef: Abe was all these and more.

  Maybe he’d lost interest in Sam, but for Joss? Anything.

  The next best route to Penn Station was via the crosstown Fifty-four. Sam caught her mopey teenager by the wrist and urged her down Willoughby, shortcutting through Maria Hernandez Park, bags bumping thighs. Her friends’ texts continued furiously, each ding bright and fun and begging to be read.

  If they missed this 5:41 train to New Haven…ugh. Just thinking about it soured Sam’s stomach. Missing the first night on campus. Limping back to the apartment. (They couldn’t actually sleep on the street.)

  At last, they reached the corner of Myrtle and Hart—the bus stop.

  The Fifty-four had pulled away from the curb and was nosing into the center lane.

  “No way!” Joss stamped her clog on the sidewalk. “We’re totally missing this reunion, aren’t we?”

  Sam tuned out her own accelerating panic. “Nope. We are not freaking, got it? We shall not freak.”

  After briefly considering whether the Visa could support the Uber charge—in case she decided to cave, ceding all standing in the eyes of her only child—Sam consulted the posted schedules. There was a third transit route: the M.

  She hitched the duffel bag securely up her shoulder, oriented herself as necessary to the map’s colorful lines, and headed them for their new waypoint. A faint throb above her left heel heralded the start of a blister.

  The station was a straight shot up Myrtle. They needed to hustle.

  They needed that next M train.

  As her subcortex steered them past strollers and idling taxis, Sam’s larger thoughts were on Yale. Those sunny, blanket-lined quads where she and Laurel and Jamie Gallagher had discussed Nietzsche and taught each other linear algebra. Where Thom had founded the Razorlicks. Where ideas were big and you didn’t have to sweat signal malfunctions or feign ignorance about sampling rates.

  Sam knew forty-three-year-olds wouldn’t have the same conversations as twenty-two-year-olds. Once you’ve changed diapers or dealt with a rotten boss, you can’t go back to debating abstract versus figurative art. Not with a straight face.

  Still, she wondered if some core magic might remain. New ventures hatching over hors d’oeuvres. Common struggles discovered over a second glass of Chardonnay. She imagined the delights coming not from her closest friends, whose stories she knew from Facebook, but from refreshed acquaintances. Some boy she’d argued with in English 120. One of the food services workers she used to scoop shepherd’s pie alongside.

  Maybe she would connect with no one particularly but find the spark inside. Maybe this pinebox documentary could be it.

  Sam didn’t know quite where the project would go. She’d conceived it partly in memory of Jamie, whose life had been consumed by the Gallagher-Pruitt feud. Whatever had happened in Africa, she felt sure it traced back to the feud somehow. But maybe there was some greater underlying truth to be surfaced. Maybe as she talked to classmates about this conflict that played out across all their newsfeeds and televisions, something more would emerge—some comment on the way they lived.

  In another five minutes, Sam lugged her duffel bag onto the platform of the Myrtle Ave station and got her first break of the afternoon: a westbound M train, easing up to the curb.

  She exhaled, standing aside for Joss to board. Her daughter dumped her backpack and collapsed into the first seat by the door, forehead damp with sweat.

  She asked, “Are we gonna make it?”

  Sam wedged both their bags underneath the bench seat, careful of the Zoom. “Yes. We’re absolutely making it.”

  Chapter 3

  Rock Pruitt ignored signs for Reunion Parking, leaving his Maserati in front of Silliman College—the residentia
l quad designated for Yale ’96 this weekend—and tossing his keychain at the first uniform he saw.

  The kid protested, “I’m campus laundry—I just pick up towels.”

  “So do it in style,” Rock said.

  Deciding to officially check in later, he strode west through campus. Yale inhabited New Haven like a bitchy swan inhabits some polluted lagoon. Her Gothic towers rose above the urban blight, fine stonework facades alternating with vacant storefronts. Rock walked College Street, gazing up the grand pillars of Woolsey Hall, over the odd hive-like cube that was Beinecke Library, into the baronial classrooms of Harkness Hall where professors had tried convincing him to be embarrassed of Western civilization. Memories sharp and big. With each step, his anger grew.

  New Haven had few taxis. He flagged one immediately.

  “Mory’s,” he said.

  The driver asked, “Little early for the hard stuff, no?”

  “No.” Rock boomed shut the door. “There’s fifty bucks in it for every faculty member you mow down.”

  Oh, Rock had enjoyed Yale. College was college. Friends, sex, beer. Painting nipples on old Nathan Hale. But the place seethed hostility toward him and anybody like him. From man-hating “consent forums” to indigenous peoples-worshiping curriculum in freshman history, to Yale Debate rejecting him out of hand despite national championships in high school, to the dean of his residential college warning that “Branford is an inclusive space, and must remain so” his first day on campus—the crusty, washed-up poet knew exactly who Rock Pruitt was.

  Really, it was the clan’s own fault. He’d been a seventeen-year-old idiot—he went where his dad told him to go. And for the Pruitts, just like for Bushes and Clintons and Gallaghers, it had to be Yale. Generation after generation, they shipped off for that Eli cred, that imprimatur of class—no matter that the place had been rabidly anti-conservative since the sixties.

  They just kept sending their boys and girls and astronomical tuition check like it was 1795, and cigars and porters would be provided at orientation.

  Did they not know? Or care? Maybe the elders figured serving four years as a liberal punching bag toughened your hide, inoculation in case you chose a profession dominated by “the Effetes and Elites,” as standard-bearer Jonathan Pruitt used to quip.

  Well, Rock had punched back. He’d pissed in the debate team headquarters—sprayed that file cabinet top to bottom, turned their prissy white notecards yellow.

  And he wasn’t done punching.

  The taxi dropped him at Mory’s. Entering the taproom, with its mahogany paneling and Depression-era portraits, Rock felt at ease. He sat on a burgundy stool and propped his elbow upon the solid-feeling bar. The portraits showed football, baseball, lacrosse teams. Faces like his own—but in black-and-white and under neat center parts—stared back.

  1795 was exactly the idea here.

  “Rock Pruitt,” a raspy voice called over the bar.

  Rock couldn’t have been more pleased if a dozen Playboy playmates had appeared. “Johnston! Holy hell. I figured you’d be six feet under by now.”

  Johnston hobbled over, draping a towel over his starch-white jacket, and offered his hand.

  “Guess I should be.”

  In the shake, Rock felt the man’s gnarled skin like a rawhide ball glove. “What do you know, sir?”

  The bartender scowled outside. “Eh, lot of crap. Same as ever.”

  “I hear that. Amazing they keep you around, right? Shriveled-up white face like yours. You’re a walking, talking billboard for the patriarchy.”

  “What I am is cheap.” Johnston shakily unstopped a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s. “Besides, they can’t fire me. Get in trouble for age discrimination.”

  “There you go. Finally found yourself a minority.”

  Rock tossed back his bourbon in one gulp. Johnston gassed him back up and began putting the bottle away but Rock swiped it, pouring a second glass for the bartender. They drank to protected classes.

  Leading up to the reunion, Rock hadn’t corresponded with friends. He made new ones easily. Casting about for possibilities, he spotted a pair of coeds sitting near the fireplace.

  One had metal junk in her face. The other kept dragging her toe up the opposite calf under the table, making Rock absolutely crazy.

  Undergrads. Yum.

  Mory’s was founded in 1849. Most Yalies only ever went to the stodgy club-restaurant for Cups, the giant handled trophies you ordered by color—the tastiest being Purple, made with champagne and Chambord—and passed around a group, drinking until the last man could turn the cup upside-down on his head and stay dry.

  Rock had gone his first weekend at Yale with his freshman roommate, Derek Dickerson. They’d taken their whole dorm floor, a ragtag collection of dweebs and hicks and first-chair New Jersey violinists. Dickerson said he would order everything off his fake ID, recently obtained in Canada, but the old (even then) barkeep Johnston recognized Rock—having waited on many a Pruitt—and served them without question.

  Rock and Derek Dickerson became best bros. They bonded over a shared—and godlike—capacity for alcohol and willingness to go ugly early. They took all the same courses, large survey guts that left their social calendars free, and both pledged DKE.

  Wherever one yelled, “Are the proprietors aware this party sucks?” the other was sure to follow a short distance behind with grain alcohol to liven up the punch.

  Until March 12, 1993, when Derek died.

  Now Rock asked, “When is the naming ceremony?”

  Johnston rubbed his rag hard into a scuff on the bar. “Sunday. Unless they find a slaveholder in the Gallagher family tree before then.”

  “Don’t joke, someone might,” Rock said, finishing his third drink.

  The barman retrieved the bourbon again. The undergraduate girls by the fireplace were beckoning. He raised an unsteady finger their way.

  “You know the Gallaghers”—Johnston spat the name—“will have insulated themselves. Paid people off. Whitewashed anything embarrassing.”

  Rock shrugged. “Sometimes you miss a spot.”

  Yale was christening its newest residential college “Gallagher College” over reunion weekend. These namings had become tricky business in recent years, as protests had forced administrators to wipe the dedication plates of various buildings and monuments due to their honorees’ less-than-enlightened histories. The Gallagher name surely felt safe, that bastion of public service whose progressive roots stretched back to Revolutionary times.

  Charlotte Gallagher’s occasional twenty-million-dollar endowment gifts couldn’t have hurt either.

  “I hear Owen Gallagher might make an appearance,” Johnston said.

  “No kidding? There’s a guy I can’t wait to see exposed for a blithering dumbass,” Rock said of the Gallaghers’ presumed entry into the next presidential race. “Who else? How about Foxy Charlotte? Something about a woman rich enough to buy Norway makes me hard.”

  Johnston hadn’t heard anything about Charlotte Gallagher.

  Rock continued, “Tell you one Gallagher who won’t be there: her brother. Unless they move the event to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.”

  Johnston chortled as Rock cupped his hands over his cheeks like gills.

  Eight drinks in, he was finally buzzing. He felt confident. His anger had matured to a kind of generalized desire to take, to possess. Energy sparked through him. The burgundy stool seemed taller. He felt bigger in the pants.

  He glanced at the undergrads. “I should go introduce myself to the new generation of thought leaders. Put their next three cups on my tab, aye? Be sure they get a little kicker too.”

  The fossil of a bartender smiled.

  He bagged the pretty one. The friend, Ms. Pierced-Up Sourpuss, tried pulling her back to the dorms, but Rock talked her into staying with the help of (a) much alcohol, and (b) the tried-and-true technique of acting like the friend-protector is wiser and more mature—“Listen to Skyler, Skyler’s got a good
head on her shoulders”—until vanity kicked in.

  He took her in the Mory’s staff bathroom. Her weight in his hands, pinned against the porcelain sink, felt like steak. He lasted forever with all the booze in his system. He talked hard in her ear. She laughed thinking they were jokes, so he gave more. Plumbing rattled below and she whimpered at the end.

  Rock felt great walking out of Mory’s. The fact that her backpack had had a Greenpeace patch was a tasty cherry on top, but his satisfaction ran deeper.

  Twenty-three years ago, Yale had taken from Rock Pruitt. He’d arrived with astronomical expectations. Handsome. Self-assured. Articulate. An athletic standout and champion debater from one of the two most powerful families on the planet, who’d been elected a town alderman as a high school junior.

  Four years later, he’d left not as the future face of the Pruitts, as all had expected, but as a black mark on the clan.

  Yale had taken his legacy. Now he was taking back—with interest.

  Exiting to York Street, Rock beheld Sterling Library. The Gothic spires topping New Haven’s skyline. The mottled stone inset with statuary of knights and monks and angels, eagles, Latin script. High, narrow windows of stained glass—the sort of craftsmanship nobody bothered with nowadays. A breathtaking building full of books.

  Dead, dusty books.

  Rock circled around its backside, gazing up the south face. Were the balconies wider here? Nearer the roof?

  Hmm.

  This very land had actually belonged to the Pruitts in 1927, when construction of Sterling had begun. Rock’s great-grandfather Frederick had operated a repeating-rifle factory here, quite profitably, and refused to sell to the university. For close to a year, Yale excavated the site, digging right up to the Pruitt Riflery gate with no agreement in place. Finally, forced by various municipal tentacles brandishing “the public good” like a riding crop, Frederick accepted the university’s terms. And the liberals got their book altar.

  Now, Rock walked to a hardware store on Orange Street and bought a sledgehammer.