The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  Checking into the reunion formally, he stowed the sledgehammer in his assigned dorm room. It was four o’clock. Not dark, like he needed for tonight’s main event, so Rock wandered into the Silliman courtyard to mingle. Old classmates were streaming through the sun-streaked quad, picking up packets and Y96 tote bags, heaving suitcases up stairs, shooing their brats off to play on the rope swing.

  He ran into a DKE brother.

  “Hells yeah, Rock Pruitt!” the guy said. “I knew this weekend would rule.”

  Rock gripped him by the shoulder, and they banged forearms. A food service worker was wheeling kegs toward a catering tent. Rock commandeered one and they drank in the entryway, two hours steady, attracting three more DKE brothers and a stray SAE. Pinheads from the first-floor suites shot them looks going in and out of the bathroom.

  Rock pissed in their sink.

  The SAE was an investment banker and kept fishing for tips.

  “What’s next, man?” He spread his arms, just about popping a button off his shirt. “REITs, derivatives—the value’s gone. Where’s it go next?”

  Rock grimaced, bolting his beer. During his time at Pruitt Capital, after those bogus ethics charges ran him out of Congress, Rock had invented a complex financial instrument based on distressed medical debt. You bought it for pennies on the dollar—all these cripples or their widows who couldn’t pay their bills—then went back at the states or Medicaid for unclaimed subsidies. Absolute gold. Five hundred, six hundred-percent returns.

  Until the Senate Finance committee, a puppet of the Gallaghers at that point, introduced legislation banning them: the Predatory Healthcare Debt Act of 2009.

  Rock began, “Frankly, Henry—”

  “Harry.”

  “Whatever. Frankly, the value is in the same place it’s been since the dawn of time. With dumb people. Dumb consumers, dumb bankers. Dumb Chinese lusting after ultra-luxury condos. Find the dumb people, you find the moola.”

  Harry absorbed the advice with a cocked-brow squint. On his chin was either spittle or beer foam.

  Rock continued, “If you’re dumb yourself—and this feels like no great stretch—that’s alright. Find even dumber people.”

  He drank on. He donned a suit at some point. More hangers-on joined, forcing the conversation to the courtyard where it eventually joined the official reunion cocktail hour.

  The crowd grew five bodies deep as Rock held court. It was like being back on the campaign trail. Confidence swelled his chest. He dispatched hecklers—hell, eighty percent disagreed with every word he said—by logic or volume or very often both.

  When some dangerous topic arose, like race or gender, a revving would start in Rock’s gut. Red, raging glee. And he’d say the exact thing everyone knew to be true but didn’t have the balls or brains to articulate.

  A few engaged him on politics or the feud. Blair Olmstead (a male “Blair,” no joke), who’d served in the House too as a loony California Dem, seemed to think he’d ascended to a similar stature. Holding a champagne flute, ascot around his scrawny neck, he stepped into the ring.

  “The discourse has become so productized,” he mused. “You get entire ecosystems spawning around one worldview or another. Church, academia. Media of course—literally, every last news item is fundraising fodder. When politics infects every last one of our institutions, polarization becomes a fait accompli.”

  Faces turned from Blair to Rock, who’d been chatting up a married beauty who used to play lacrosse.

  Rock dipped his head thoughtfully. “The ascot is gay.”

  Blair tittered—hollow, nasal.

  “Not gay as in odd or merry,” Rock said. “Gay-gay. Effeminate. Homosexual. Signaling to others that you enjoy…”

  He gave examples of acts an ascot-wearer might enjoy.

  Dinner was barbecue fare on Cross Campus, the large central quad, and would include all reunion classes—not just his own ’96 but ’86, ’76, on down to the dinosaurs still hanging on from WWII and earlier. More Olmstead-esque pontification was inevitable, and Rock played his garrulous role.

  The organizers had lined the quad with wine-tasting tents featuring vintages either owned or operated by classmates. Rock reached past rows of quarter-inch pours in plastic cups, taking bottles by the neck.

  Questioned once, he said, “I’m supposed to invest on the basis of two measly sips? No.”

  As he awaited the late hour of his conquest, thinking longingly of the sledgehammer back at the room, he enjoyed himself. He gladhanded and recalled hijinks of younger days, and introduced a fresh-faced oh-sixer to the old “necking nook” of Harkness Hall. He filled up on burgers and tapenade.

  He saw other Pruitts. Other Pruitts saw him. He would nod their way and even talked at length to Arnold Junior, class of seventy-six, big deal at the American Enterprise Institute. But he wasn’t going out of his way.

  Every so often, he would gaze across the quad to Sterling Library.

  It goaded him.

  He imagined the face. That smug, superior face, trained on a book. We read, therefore our worldview trumps yours. Rock’s jaw tightened to the point where his eardrums hurt.

  The liberal stranglehold here hadn’t been supposed to matter. It was presumed he would float along among the privileged, tailgating with senators, sailing in Rhode Island over breaks, enlarging his already large name by charm and wit and the phenomenal talents all had observed through Rock’s adolescence.

  On his last day of prep school, bags packed for New Haven, an English teacher he’d frequently sparred with in class had said, “I can’t say it’s been a pleasure, Rock, but here we are. My grandkids will be amazed I knew you.”

  When Derek Dickerson had died—in the dorm room they’d shared, on a night when half the freshman class had seen them running riot over campus—the Pruitt machine had gone to work. They’d boxed out media and intimidated police, and kept Rock out of jail—but his foregone ascension to head of the clan was kaput.

  No more background shots of Rock at aunts’ or uncles’ swearing in. No more invites to be a fly-on-the-wall at Jonathan Pruitt’s cabinet meetings.

  In the twenty-three years since Dickerson’s death, Rock’s last name had opened plenty of doors. But the toughies, the ones with gold behind them, he’d had to bust down himself. The House seat in Georgia, the dinky third district, which should’ve been a Pruitt lock, he had won with zero family help. When Democrats in Congress went after him—that sexy beast Charlotte Gallagher’s fingerprints all over the trumped-up charges—he’d been left to fend for himself.

  After losing the House seat, Rock had caught on with Pruitt Capital and made them all boatloads of cash with his distressed-medical-debt instrument. Did anyone thank him? Did Jonathan Pruitt get off his high horse to acknowledge the multitude of campaign ads and whispered slurs Rock’s genius stroke had financed?

  Nope.

  Rock could still recall the Great Man’s words when he’d inquired after the ambassadorship of Thailand, a country Rock had toured with much pleasure in his early twenties. They were sitting in the Oval Office.

  “Scandal shall not tarnish the first Pruitt presidency.”

  That was Jonathan Pruitt. Like Robert E. Lee, the man had no vices. The Pruitt brand—upstanding, disciplined, righteous—superseded all other considerations.

  The refusal had sent Rock into a tailspin, the sort of rotten downward spiral Vegas can inspire. Rock next threw himself into a series of speculative ventures, a fourth New York airport, arctic fracking, a chain of private, values-based schools in the Midwest.

  Stubbornly, masochistically, he poured his time and fortune into each. The airport never found a borough. The schools went belly-up within ten months. The man running them turned out to be a pedophile—as the director who’d vetted him, Rock faced personal legal jeopardy.

  Only last month, he got final word from the drillers: Baffin Island had zip, two hundred thousand square miles and not a drop of unexploited oil. He briefly entertained
the idea of finding a plane and a brick of cocaine and shooting up every caribou and Arctic hare in the miserable, Godforsaken place.

  Instead, he came to this reunion.

  The sun set over New Haven, dirtying the sky to a pink-orange blear. Rock welcomed the cooler temps as his suit had gotten stuffy. He left the barbecue with juice in his step.

  Tonight’s sanctioned reunion activities were scant, some lecture and a Woolsey Hall concert. He skipped them to bar hop. His wife texted at the kids’ bedtime and he Skyped with them, doing his froggy face for Isabelle, threatening Rock Junior with merciless titty-twisting if he didn’t score at least three goals at hockey tomorrow.

  Hanging up, Rock polished off a pitcher with three junior anthropology faculty who declined his offer to snag a hotel room. “Sure? They know me at the Hyatt. I can have that jacuzzi roped off. Get those bubbles good ’n’ grimy.”

  At eleven thirty, he returned to his dorm in Silliman College. The sledgehammer was waiting in the center of the room. He hoisted it. In his alcohol-light hands, the thing felt wild and dangerous and like a tool of justice.

  He slipped into his billowy car coat and stashed the sledgehammer inside. Leaving his entryway, heading up College Street, Rock burned with anticipation.

  Any number of awful outcomes might occur. Rock felt this was the correct time and place for an awful outcome, surrounded by all this nostalgia and glorification of past. There would be symmetry in ending it here, where his life had derailed.

  Either Yale takes everything from me, or I cold-cock her one.

  The guard working the library vestibule wore a turban and neat beard. “We close in seven minutes, sir.”

  Rock lifted his cellphone, elbow brushing the concealed sledgehammer. “I’ll be speedy. Snapping a few pics for old time’s sake.”

  The guard smiled and waved him forward.

  Rock strode through Sterling’s spectacular reading room, where students were shelving volumes and scooping up notebooks to leave. Stained-glass windows lurked at either side, lead veined, deep blues and looming magentas. A woody, vanilla odor permeated the space.

  Rock, who was surely giving off aromas of his own, found it nauseating. This place, so staid and pompous, made him unwell. Bloodlust beyond anything he’d felt at Mory’s or elsewhere gripped him.

  At the bank of elevators leading to the stacks, another guard manned a desk. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Six minutes?” Rock preempted.

  The man pushed a button under his desk. Accordion doors folded open, permitting Rock onto a rickety elevator.

  The buttons numbered to twenty-three. Rock pushed for the top floor. The car clanked and wheezed, and began its groaning ascent.

  Rock’s heart galloped. The sledgehammer’s steel was cold through his shirt. He was close—and with every screeching inch of cable, closer. He felt like a prizefighter in a stadium tunnel, the way forward narrow and sweet violence ahead.

  The elevator opened at twenty-three. Rock exited to a landing, from which radiated a dozen aisles of books. A red Exit sign supplied the only light, casting dim crimson down one corridor.

  Visitors to the stacks were supposed to flip on lights as needed, but Rock didn’t want light. He headed down the center corridor, soft footsteps echoing, hundreds of yeasty books glaring at him from their dark recesses. He reached an oval window and peered through.

  In the distance was the New Haven skyline, modest, spotty.

  He wasn’t here for the view. He was here for what lay directly below.

  The balcony.

  The window’s brass lock was rubbed green. Rock tried thumbing it open, but the mechanism wouldn’t twist. He put his hip into it, then his shoulder, then his whole body—all six-four, two hundred fifteen pounds. Nothing budged the lock.

  He took out his cellphone and shined its flashlight outside. Through the oval glass, he saw an exterior bracket fixing the window to its stone casing. The bracket was bolted-on metal—a permanent, irreversible measure disabling the window.

  Damn.

  Rock cursed Yale’s nanny-state mentality and himself for not anticipating it. During his time here, access to the Sterling roof from twenty-three had been widely known. Naturally, so long as lawyers still lived and breathed, a small, unregulated joy like this couldn’t be allowed.

  He slugged the window. It burbled in place. Solid three-quarter-inch glass.

  Would the sledgehammer do the trick?

  It didn’t matter. The window was bisected by lead, and neither segment was large enough to fit through.

  He backtracked to the elevators. As he was boarding, an announcement came over the public address.

  “The time is now eleven forty-five. Sterling Library is closed. Please exit and bring all books to the front desk.”

  Rock rammed his knuckle into the button for twenty-two. The door folded shut. He rode down one flight. He burst off the car and into the center aisle, rambling, kicking books from the stacks in his wake.

  He reached the oval window, which looked identical to the one a floor up, and whipped out his cell.

  He looked out.

  No bracket.

  God bless lazy liberals. Quickly, the alcohol in his veins returning to a boil, Rock unlatched the window and stepped through onto the balcony.

  The night air was brisk, black, alive. Rock felt like he could dive forward and be carried—or fly if necessary—wherever he wanted. He felt he could swipe his fist out across this railing and rip every light from the city.

  He looked up. The balcony of Twenty-Three was four feet overhead, too high to reach—probably why they hadn’t bothered neutering this window. The underside of the balcony was artfully scalloped, its smooth, round stone giving no grip points.

  Rock thought for three seconds.

  The railing. He could reach if he stood on the railing.

  He rolled his shoulders forward, cracked his jaw.

  It was a bad idea. Not only using the railing here, but the whole shenanigan—he understood this in a blink, the way he’d once seen himself on a TV monitor during a debate, belittling an old tax-and-spender who used a cane, and known from the image alone that the takedown was a mistake. (In the following weeks, surrogates and robo-calls had accomplished the same with no likability hit to Rock.)

  Revenge against Yale would be magnificent, but wasn’t this pure symbol? It wouldn’t gain him a thing. It wouldn’t forge a path to that Virginia Senate seat coming open next year. It was adolescent, an elaborate raising of his middle finger.

  This truth was known to Rock’s brain—and if Rock was a man who decided matters with his brain, he might’ve stopped.

  Rock Pruitt was not such a man. He commonly walled off certain truths or episodes from conscious thought. Climate studies. The night of Derek Dickerson’s death. Watching Guys and Dolls as a horny fifteen-year-old desperate to snag a cheerleader.

  If the brain wasn’t subjugated—fully, brutally—it betrayed you. When weak parts of you wanted a thing, your brain served up the rationale, sure as some sycophantic aide slipping you a position paper he knows mirrors your opinion perfectly.

  It was what he hated about the left. When Charlotte Gallagher had struck gold with SmartWidget, flipping the money advantage the Pruitts had traditionally enjoyed, where had that Gallagher crusade for campaign-finance reform gone? Into Nantucket Sound, apparently. A cavalcade of professors had lined up to justify the hypocrisy, publishing opinion pieces explaining what overwhelming advantage the wealthy still enjoyed, academic papers measuring—by some tortured method—what outsize influence the rich had in politics, even net the boundless SmartWidget cash.

  Shrugging off the insanity of his pursuit, Rock hiked up to the railing. The stone was a good four inches wide, a gymnast’s beam. He stood with feet diagonal, the heels of his wingtips hanging over. His soles sent pebbles on three-hundred-foot dives. The rush constituted a new category of drug.

  A gust wobbled him. Rock swung one foot back behind
him, then forward, then bent his opposite knee and spread both arms wide for balance.

  Better get moving.

  He pivoted to face Sterling and reached high for the balcony above. He managed to gain its bottom with the fingertips of his right hand. While he was extending his left arm to firm up the grip and start pulling himself up, his jacket came open.

  The sledgehammer fell.

  Rock clamped his knees shut, catching its heavy head between his knees. He froze in this position, teeth grinding, the face of the sledgehammer digging into his suitpants, handle dangling in the chasm below.

  Five seconds.

  Ten.

  His knees quavered. The sledgehammer began slipping.

  He needed to reach down with a hand. Which one, though? His right must have the stronger grip. Sucking in a breath, he took his left hand from the railing, causing his body to swing momentarily above the Trumbull College courtyard below, and rolled that shoulder toward the ground, relaxing his kneecaps at the same time.

  It was a lot of coordinated movement, probably too much in his state.

  He missed.

  The sledgehammer began a sickening, end-over-end tumble for the ground. By reflex, Rock snapped his feet together and caught the handle between his shoes. The rest dangled out over the courtyard.

  Knowing this hold was even more tenuous, Rock raised both knees to his chest and transferred the sledgehammer from his feet to his hands—the motion kinking his body like a sweaty, desperate Slinky.

  Terrific pressure strained the arm still holding on above, the wrist torqueing, the shoulder joint crackling.

  Still, he kept his grip.

  He simultaneously pulled himself up another four inches and heaved the sledgehammer up, managing to cartwheel it between two wrought-iron bars of the twenty-third-floor balcony. The impact shook the stone he was holding—the boom must’ve been audible half a mile away.

  Now Rock could focus on getting himself up. Using the side of Sterling for leverage, he walked his wingtips up to a point where his body nearly paralleled the ground. Then he began working his hands up the spindles, biting his lip, feeling the effort in his armpits.