GigaNotoSaurus

Work, with Occasional Molemen

Posted by editor under Fiction
[6] Comments

by Jeremiah Tolbert

Topeka’s city lights make the low-hanging autumn rain clouds glow phosphorus orange. Against the clouds, I can see bats no wider than my hand. Not birds or moths. Bats. They make hairpin turns no bird could ever manage, snapping up the mosquitoes that have been so thick this summer. It’s a big happy bug hunt all taking place in the quiet dark.

I have never seen the bats before, even though I go for a walk (doctor’s orders on account of my blood pressure) every night along the same trail. It helps me calm down, and to stop thinking about the trouble I’ve gotten myself into.

It’s kind of freaky how something as simple as weather can reveal hidden truth. It’s not the bats themselves that get to me. I like them and their tricks, and without them, we would all be dying of malaria or something. What bothers me is that all this time, the bats have been flying only inches above my hat, and I just never knew. I didn’t know to look up.

It was the same with the mole men. I didn’t know to look down.

Sure, I’d heard of them. But there’s a difference between hearing about something strange and seeing it for yourself. Take my cousin Chet — my dad’s older sister’s oldest son, closest to me in age of the whole batch of us cousins — he never really believed in the saucer people—he swore up and down that the government made them and the War with Mars up to cover up something worse. That was until he was out fishing for catfish on the banks of the Shunganunga and had a disc hover overhead for ten minutes, shining green light on him. All his hair fell out three days later, but the doctors at Stormont Vail assured him that he didn’t have cancer or anything. At least that they can find. Not like the Old Man, our granddad, who has been fighting saucer cancer for 20 years. He’d fought in the War, and a lot of the vets ended up with that nasty stuff. Kills you slow.

Chet believes in the saucers all over again every time he looks in the mirror. I’d call him obsessed, but he’d say the same about me and the mole men. He’d be right, one of the few things we agree on anymore. We were pretty close before the mole men.

We were working a side-job together when I saw my first mole man. This was in the summer when the ants were really making a mess of things and the mild winter had let them spread all the way up from Arizona. Anybody could get trained up and receive an exterminator’s license on a Saturday afternoon at the Legion. We’d both been temporarily laid off from working at the plant, and the union fund payouts were not enough to live on, let alone make our loan payments to the family. The Old Man had personally instructed us to make money any way we could.

The state paid a $50 bounty on each beach ball-sized worker ant head (antennas not required). We’d been hoping to find the local queen in her warren. If we had, we would have made more money than winning the Kansas lotto, paid off our debts to the family, and still gone on one hell of a bender afterwards. A couple of boys in from Clay Center bagged her under the Santa Fe rail yards on the east side of the city, I read in the paper.

We were working the tunnels under Topeka West High, wearing our Maglites duct-taped to construction helmets that I’d found in the trunk of my car, left over from some odd job or another. The only thing we spent any money on was the class fee and six tanks of endosulfan. We were spraying down a lot more than anyone should really breathe in, but we were stupid in that way men get when they have dollar signs in their eyes.

We’d halfway finished the job when I saw the side passage. It wasn’t as big as the ant tunnels, and the grooves in the yellow clay walls from the digging were all wrong, not like ant scraping at all. “Hold up,” I said, sliding the poison tanks off my back and lighting up a cigarette while I took a look.

My cousin slowed, shooting me a pissed look that said I better not take too long. If he didn’t make it home to his wife Susie in time for dinner, he would catch hell. I’d told him marrying the daughter of a preacher would be nothing but trouble, but he never listened to me. Of course, nobody in the family did. Grandpa has always said that I think too much, and what Grandpa says is gospel in the family. So I’m the dumb one who thinks too much. Everybody’s got a role, and I’m fine with mine.

I did a year at K-State before dropping out and coming back home. That was more than anyone else in the family has done, and sure, give me a choice between a football game and a good romance novel and I’ll take the book.

I think a bit, but I’m no genius by any stretch. The family frowns on smarts. Anyone who’s got a brain might decide they’re better than us, and there’s nothing the family hates more than uppity folks. We work with our hands. Sometimes we come by the work honest, and sometimes not. Work’s work. We boys sure as hell don’t work any office jobs. In a pinch, one of the girls can get special permission to take a secretary job, but the Old Man won’t stand for girls having jobs permanently. To call him “old fashioned” would be understating things. He would not be happy with what Chet and I were doing to make money, but it was better than white-collar work for sure.

“What do you think made this hole here?” I asked after a minute of running my hands down the walls. They were rippled like corrugated aluminum, each dip about as wide as the fingers of my work gloves.

“Dunno. Mole men probably. Why do you care? We’re not getting paid to explore, Mel.”

“‘Mole men?’” I said. “That’s a real thing?”

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his broad, pasty forehead. He had to keep doing that every few minutes to keep the sweat out of his eyes, on account of having no eyebrows. “Sure it is. You never seen a mole man?”

I shook my head. “You?”

He tipped over his tanks of poison and sat down on them, took out a chaw of tobacco and slipped it into his cheek. I repressed a shudder and took a long drag off my cigarette. Nasty habit, chaw. They made us watch a video in junior high about how it can make your whole jaw fall off. I’d take lung cancer any day.

“Yeah, I seen one. Remember when I was working for KP&L digging ditches, before the saucers nuked off my hair?”

“You stayed over at my place a lot on that job, yeah? Susie was always screaming at you for tracking mud into the living room. Then you’d be banging on the door at 1 AM with a pillow in one hand and most times a six-pack in another.”

“Hey, I always brought the six-pack,” he said, hurt.

I waved it off. No big deal.

“We were running this line north in Mayetta. There’re caves in the limestone up there. I was running the backhoe when the whole dig damn near fell into a sinkhole. I fought that machine like a sumbitch, but I stopped it from going in. Couple of guys weren’t as lucky, dropped a good fifteen feet. One of them — you remember him from high school, Barry, about so tall and just as wide, played varsity at Shawnee High? He broke his arm, and we blew an hour jury-rigging a harness to haul his ass out.

“The foreman wanted me to climb down there and get the pick and shovel that Barry lost. I would have told him to do it himself, but Susie was pregnant again, so I shut up and let them tie that rope around me.

“Barry was lucky. He’d fallen onto a cliff, and in all around it, the cave fell off really deep. And you know my goddamned dumb luck—”

“The shovel and pick weren’t on the plateau,” I said, grinning.

“Fucking A. I tried to make the foreman forget it, but no, he was pissed and we were damned well going to get that equipment back or kill me in the process. Never did like me. So the other men went off and got more rope to tie together. My buddy Tommy, he had his camping gear in the back of his truck still from the weekend so he grabbed his Coleman and lit it up. I carried the lantern in one hand and held onto the rope in the other while they lowered me in.

“There was water about knee deep at the bottom of the cave, cold as the devil’s asshole. I splashed around, trying not to bite my tongue off because my teeth were chatterin’ so hard, dragging my feet looking for the shovel and the pick. I couldn’t see nothing in that water with the Coleman reflecting off the surface. The foreman really tore into me, shouting down that I couldn’t find my own ass with both hands. I was this close to telling him to go fuck himself when the mole man stepped into the light.

“What’d it look like?” Chet could tell a good story when he was sober. Not as funny as when he was soused though.

“About eight feet tall, covered in greasy black hair. His hands weren’t normal. They didn’t have fingers, more like nasty-looking claws as long as Grandpa’s skinning knife, all caked in dirt. His eyes were tiny and black like raisins, and he shielded them with his big claws from the light and to hide his ugly-ass face. When he did, he dropped the shovel.”

“What’d you do?” I asked.

“What the hell do you think? I picked up the shovel and beat that mole man into a bloody pulp. Like the Old Man says, there ain’t enough room for the one kind of people in this world.”

Chet spit chaw and it spattered in the dirt. I had to swallow to keep down my lunch at the smell of the used up tobacco.

“Never did find the pick though. Foreman took it out of my paycheck. That guy was an asshole.”

“Damn,” I said. We sat there in the dim light for a moment while I did some of my infamous thinking.

“So how did you know?” I asked.

“Know what?”

“How did you know it was a mole man?”

Chet held up his hands more than a foot apart. “This long.” Then stood up and slung his endosulfan tanks back on his shoulder. “Come on. I am not in the mood to get bitched at tonight.”

I sighed, stubbed out my cigarette, and went to stand up myself. When I looked back over my shoulder one last time at the passage, I saw him standing there, quiet as anything. He looked just like Chet had described, maybe a little scarier in the flesh. I stared for a moment, mouth open, soaking in the endosulfan fumes that Chet was already spraying again. The mole man raised one massive clawed paw above his head… and waved.

I didn’t know much what to do, so I did the friendly thing. I waved back, then turned around and hustled up the tunnel to catch up with my cousin.

A month later, I was back to work at the plant. Chet got himself a sweet workers comp claim on the first day the plant reopened by slipping his hand through a piece of machinery that fed rubber into the press. He was lucky; they saved two of his fingers and most of his thumb after six hours in the operating room.

I don’t know what was going through his head that he got himself mangled — probably thinking about the saucerfolk — but I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that mole man. I’d nearly injured myself twice while daydreaming.

There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but didn’t know who to ask. What was it like to live where there is no light? How did they see around? What did they eat? How come nobody ever sees mole women?

My crew was giving me a lot of shit for being distracted. Paul, a tall, lean Texan with a harelip, had transferred in to run our crew after the plant reopened.

“Hey, Mel, you been drifting off so much, I can only figure you’re getting laid six ways from Sunday by some hot young thing. What’s she look like?”

“Eight—Eight and a half on the right day,” I lied. I didn’t have a girlfriend at any part of the scale.

If girls really did prefer brains over brawn, then I had yet to see it. Didn’t help that I needed three drinks to work up the courage just to talk to a woman who I wasn’t related to. The last time I did, I’d thought things went well, but she had given me a number to a local suicide prevention hotline. Real damned funny. But you can’t let stuff like that get to you. Getting mad doesn’t do anybody any good, even if it feels as good as scratching chigger bites all over.

I was not in a good mood by the second week. There were already rumors about more closures, and I was taking double shifts to make up for the money I blew on the ant extermination stuff, which even after the couple of jobs Chet and I did, had left me in the hole. That endosulfan ain’t cheap.

Tuesday, I came home around sunrise. The only things on my mind were a beer and my bed, in that order. I staggered into my little kitchen, popped the door to the fridge, and it was goddamned empty. I’d been to the Food-4-Less the day before and filled the thing with frozen pizzas, lunch meats, and Coors.

I live on my own. The house is mine, mostly. My father left it to me, along with the mortgage owed to the Old Man. Dad worked most of his life for the city writing parking tickets trying to get free of it. Regular lung cancer had gotten him in the end. Two packs a day. I stick to one, figure I’ll live a couple of years longer.

Dad was on his third wife, Nancy, when he died. Boy was she pissed when it turned out he’d left the house to me in his will. Not that she would have wanted it. That would have meant owing money to the family. Dad didn’t tell her much about the family, but she knew enough to split after Dad was gone. I don’t think Dad wanted much to do with the family either, but he never broke things off totally. Nobody in the family has since Aunt Jessica, the dead aunt we never, ever talked about.

As for the missing food, I wasn’t too shocked about that. Half my cousins had keys to the place. My own key chain weighed a couple of pounds from all the spare house and apartment keys I kept for folks. Our family looks out for one another. We also tend to get drunk and lose our keys.

I figured I’d find a barely legible, poorly spelled IOU note somewhere if I looked around, but I was too damned tired and too damned pissed. They all knew better than to drink the last bottle of beer. I was going to whoop on somebody, just as soon as I could raise my arms above my head again.

Before I could stumble off bed, I heard a heavy thud in the basement. I had a little futon set up there for when Chet or one of my other dozen married cousins needed a place to sleep after a fight with their husband or wife. I also loaned the unfinished space out for when one of the younger cousins needed a place to take their girls for a little private time. Not the girls though — not that I was all that sexist or anything. It was just that the family elders would make sure the whole lot disowned me for facilitating soiling their honor and whatnot. No thanks.

I waited a second for the thumping to take up a regular beat, figuring the noise for a couple of love birds, but it never did.

Well then, I could at least give whichever of my extended family was responsible for my empty fridge an earful before getting some sleep. I carefully, quietly walked down the steps in the inky dark, pulling on the chrome chain attached to the bare bulb above the foot of the stairs with an exaggerated sigh and a carefully composed, pissed off look. I didn’t care if they were in the middle of screwing, I was going to give him a piece of my mind.

I blinked in the sudden bright light, and so did the three mole men who were slumped at drunken angles on my futon. Frozen pizza boxes and empties littered the floor. One of them hiccupped. A second barfed all over my throw rug with a loud spattering sound. The third, and most familiar-looking, made a groaning sound like the gate of an old abandoned churchyard and waved a paw weakly in my direction.

I stared at the scene for a few seconds longer. Worked my jaw a little to keep it from locking up. “Screw it,” I finally said, and stomped back up stairs. It was more than I could deal with right after a sixteen hour shift.

By the time I was up and moving around, the mole men had split. They hadn’t cleaned up after themselves, except for the puke, and I didn’t really want to think too hard about where that went. They had left a handful of dirty rocks atop the plywood cable spool I used as an end-table and tracked a hell of a lot of mud around. I hadn’t dreamed it, which is what I was thinking when I first opened my eyes.

I found their tunnel over by the washer and dryer by following the smell of wet soil. It was big enough for a mole man or a regular man to crawl through, and it went down at a steep angle. The concrete floor had been pried out in regular pieces and stacked in a neat pile against the foundation wall. How the hell they did that without tools, I had no idea. No way was I going down there after them, forget how angry I was.

I did a ballpark estimate of how much it would cost me to get the construction-working cousins over to fill in the hole and pour new concrete. Four, five hundred bucks and a dozen six packs of cheap beer, I figured. I’d have to make up a story about how the hole ended up there, but right then, I had no idea what that story would be. There were only so many ways you could end up with a man-sized tunnel in your basement, and the only thing worse than a cousin finding out I had a mole man problem would be someone getting it into their head that I was a “put the lotion in the basket” kind of guy.

I said a few nasty words down the hole — shouted, more like — and then returned to the part of the mess they’d left that I could do something about right now. I gathered up all the garbage and took it out to the curb. Then I crammed the rug, which still smelled faintly of puke, and the bedding from the futon, into the washing machine and set it on a heavy cycle.

A little bit worn out by the effort, I dropped down on the bare futon and, for lack of anything else to do while the washer spun, I picked up the handful of rocks the mole men had left.

They looked a little like cloudy glass, now that I had them up close. I held them up to the light, and hell if it didn’t look like they might sparkle a bit if I cleaned them up. I took the lot up to the kitchen, dropped them in my spaghetti strainer, and ran the tap over them. The water pressure was a little low with the washer running at the same time, but I got most of the dirt off.

They weren’t just rocks. They were gems. The diamonds were easy to spot. They were all cut into shape like you see on a wedding ring. Must have been lost by people down drains, and the mole men had collected them for some reason. Mixed in with those were little bits of things that I thought might be emerald and ruby. A couple of opals, too. I didn’t know a lot about rocks, but I had to do a rock project in the 6th grade, so I still remembered some of that stuff.

I made some adjustments to my itinerary for the day. I’d planned to run by Chet’s to check in on how he was healing up before my shift, but I could do that after I stopped in at the pawn shop to see what the mole man rocks might be worth. Maybe they’d cover fixing the damage to my basement.

I idled in the parking lot of Capital City Pawn, watching the store through the windows. Everyone in the family had to make a living, and everyone owed the family for something, but Aunt Livia’s kids weren’t made for legit work. You name an illegal way of making money — robbery, car theft, black market saucer goods, selling ant-juice to tweakers—they had their hands in it at some point. The family took a cut of their checks just like the rest of us.

Thankfully, Livia’s boys weren’t around. I stepped out of the car, patting my pockets to make sure I had the gems with me, and went inside.

Jerry the Jew looked up from an antique six-shooter he was cleaning as the door alarm beeped overhead. Of course he wasn’t actually a Jew — his family went to the same church as ours did, and anyway, I can count the number of Jews I’ve met in Kansas on one hand. Didn’t matter though. In the Old Man’s logic, Jerry was a money changer, and all money changers were Jews. Jerry did business with us anyway, and he was a decent enough fence for the dirtier side of the family’s schemes. I always figured Jerry got his revenge on us dumb racist hicks by under-paying.

Jerry greeted me with a rotten-toothed smile, which quickly turned into a frown when he recognized me. “Keeping your nose clean, Mel? Leonard and Charlie, them I expect to come slinking in here. Why don’t you give up the juice, throw out the booze. Straighten up. Your father would be—”

I shook my head. “It’s not like that, Jer. I found a box of this and that in my dad’s things in the attic and I wanted to see if they might be worth something. They’re talking about closing our plant again next month, you hear?”

He knew I was lying about the stones. The family had picked over the house right after dad died, taking everything short of the copper pipes. When one of the Kincaids die, our things get divided among the living. Immediate kin stake out their claims first. I took the house and some of the furniture, and everything else scattered to the four winds on the backs of my relatives.

Jerry sucked on his false teeth. “Sons of bitches. Times will get very tough around here if they moves the plant down under. Business will pick up for me though,” he mused.

“Australia? Why would they do that?”

“Shit, boy. Don’t you watch the news?” I shook my head. He gave me a look of disgust. “Your family wallows in ignorance, I swear. No curiosity in any of you.”

I shrugged. “I asked, didn’t I?”

He nodded, scratching the week old beard growth. “Sure enough you did. So present company excluded, but it’s been all over the news. And no, not Australia, the Kingdom of the Mole Men. The mole people sent diplomats to Washington in June. They’re working on a treaty special with the U.S. that will let companies move around between there, here, and Venus, if you can believe that. Those mole people work for next to nothing, on account of basically being slaves to their Queens. The saucer people are itching to start selling some of their tech down here without paying off-world taxes and tariffs. If you ask me, there’s no way it won’t pass. Millions of dollars in saucer money being spent bribing those assholes in Congress. Worse, if we don’t play ball, and they might just go make the deal with the Soviets.”

“Nah, the Venusians hate the Martians, and they’re all buddy-buddy with the Reds,” I said reflexively. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d turned on my TV, between doing errands for the family while I was laid off and then the double shifts. Maybe I should have spent a little more time on my lunch break reading the paper. I buried any thoughts of losing my job — I couldn’t handle it right now. “You’re right though. That sounds like it would mess a lot of things up.”

“No kidding. I’ve lectured you enough today.” He put his jeweler’s loop up to his squinty right eye. “Let’s see what you ‘found.’ Probably isn’t worth anything,” he warned.

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, and I pulled the gems out of my pocket and carefully placed them on the velvet scrap on the counter.

Jerry looked me in the eye for what felt like a whole cold winter, as if he could see into my soul and find the rot that we all saw in my degenerate cousins. Jerry didn’t believe my story. That was okay. He’d still do business. That was why the family used him.

“Found, my ass. You’ve been trading with mole men.”

I said nothing.

He shook his head sadly. “If your Granddad finds out you’re dealing with them, he will hang you out to dry, son.”

“It’s complicated. I didn’t trade with them. They broke in and tore up my basement, ate all my food. In the morning, they were gone, but they left these,” I said, already regretting telling the truth. I wasn’t sure I could trust Jerry.

“I don’t need to hear it. Now, these diamonds don’t sell for a lot. Nobody wants a used diamond, see? I can give you a couple hundred for what we have here, and that’s generous. These other rocks are rough, but I can tell they’re worth something. You’ll need to sell these to a gemologist.” He scribbled something on a pad of paper, tore off the sheet, and handed it to me. I pocked the raw gems, leaving the diamonds.

“Bobby over on Huntoon is a fair man,” Jerry said.

It was my turn to look him in the eye. All I saw was a milky film that was probably the onset of cataracts.

“How about you give me half that, and nobody from the family finds out I was here.”

“Done deal.” He rang out the sale and handed me my money in twenties. A little bit of my anger with the mole men faded away with each bill that crossed my palm. I was praising my good luck when the “somebody’s here” alarm chimed above the door. I could tell from Jerry’s grimace that whoever had walked in was from the family.

I took a punch right in the gut before I could turn around. Leonard towers over me by a foot, and his arms are about as big around as my thighs. He’s always been bigger than me, even though he’s two years younger. When he wasn’t ripping off decent people, he worked out in a gym a few blocks away from the Grandparents’ house. The family story was that Leonard’s father was a pro wrestler who had played a show in town. Aunt Livia had never married that I knew, but she did have a long-time boyfriend. Sometimes when Grandpa got drunk he’d call her a whore for not marrying. Leonard though was a favorite, one of the Old Man’s inner circle that went hunting for quail and pheasant with him every Fall. Leonard brought in a lot of money, dirty or not.

My cousin smirked and helped me right myself. The ache faded quickly enough. I didn’t hold it against him. This was just how he said hello.

“How’s it hanging, cuz?” He looked at Jerry. “You look a little nervous. You working something on the side? Something you don’t want the Old Man to know about, eh?” He spotted the diamonds still sitting on the counter. He grinned wider, bringing to mind those big sharks that jump out of the water on the animal channel. “You thinking about getting hitched?” The only thing more valuable to him than catching me running something on the side would be learning some juicy gossip before anyone else.

“Lenny, if I was holding out on the Old Man, I wouldn’t be here,” I said. Truth was, I had figured I was out early enough that I wouldn’t risk running into the criminal element of the family. “I’m just selling some heirlooms from my mother’s side. They’re exempt from the rules.” Jerry remained quiet. Money well spent, I thought.

“Oh yeah?” Leonard cocked his head, a comical gesture with a neck as thick as his.

“Yeah. Hey, I need to check in on Chet. I’ll see you at the fish fry Saturday,” I said, eyeing the door.

He slugged me on the shoulder. I winced. “Take it easy — oh, hey. I was talking to the Old Man and he was saying you haven’t been by with an envelope yet this month.”

Shit. I’d been working so many extra shifts that I’d nearly forgotten to make my payment. The twenties in my pocket wouldn’t quite cover it either, and my bank account was collecting cobwebs.

“I’ll drop one off today, I promise,” I said, backing away. Leonard just smiled. He knew he didn’t have to threaten me. The Old Man was threat enough.

I drove from there direct to the gemologist. He was an old codger who made Jerry look like a spring chicken. I never seen a jaw drop like his did when I showed him the stones. He stammered that he didn’t have that much cash on hand, but if I would take a check, he would gladly take them off my hands. I asked how much, and then I asked again because I was sure I had heard him wrong.

$20,000. Most of the stones were nice, worth a few bucks, but one of the stones I hadn’t recognized was something called alexandrite. It was named after one of them pre-communist Russian leaders, very rare. I asked for what he could pay me in cash and agreed to the rest as a check. The way his hands shook as he wrote it out, I figured he was cheating me, but I didn’t care. Twenty grand was more money than I had made all year, and definitely more money than I had ever held in my hand at one time.

I had already decided that I wasn’t going to share it with the family. I’d make my usual payments on time, maybe increase the amount a little bit, saying I’d sold some of my mother’s things to explain the extra cash. More than anything, I dreaded having to have a face-to-face with the Old Man to explain where I had gotten the money. Nobody lied to the Old Man’s face. His shrewd eyes saw through to the truth of any lie you ever told. If he didn’t believe gambling was a sin, he would have cleaned up in Vegas.

I deposited the check via an ATM into an account with a little local credit union on the south side of town. I had opened the account secretly after my father had died.

I had sat on the porch, watching my Gran take inventory of my father’s things, then casually mark down the names of other family members next to each object. My name was only next to the couch and the Laz-E-Boy— the house was more than my fair share, and Aunt Livia was downright angry that the family wasn’t putting it on the market and splitting up the cash.

It was while watching her parceling out my father’s life that it occurred to me that maybe I had the short end of the stick when it came to my family. I’d never questioned the relationship before. It’d always been there to help me. The Old Man had fronted me the money for my first year of college, even though he thought it was waste of time and money.

I saw then that my father never really owned any of the things that he thought were his. They all belonged to the family in the end. When I died, the same thing would happen to me and my things. I decided then that I wanted out. I opened the secret account the next day.

Judging the outside of his little one-floor 1950s prefab home, you would never guess that the Old Man was one of the wealthiest people in town. Especially not in East Topeka, not exactly the safest part of town (although the Old Man never had any trouble). Keeping down appearances was his way. The place was solid and had survived a couple of close calls with tornadoes mostly intact. The yard had gotten a little run-down especially since Gran had passed. No one else had taken any interest in planting the flower beds. The Old Man never left the TV room except to use the toilet, not even to sleep, so he could care less about the yard, and even if he knew about its state, he would probably have approved.

I parked in the driveway behind a Toyota pick-up that belonged to one of the younger cousins and blew the horn three times rapidly. The screen door opened and one of my crone aunts walked over to me. Susan. I could stand talking to just about any of them besides Livia, who was just as crooked as her kids and had several times skimmed money from my payment and then claimed I was short. Family trust always went with seniority, though, so I was screwed every time.

Since Gran had passed the year before, the aunts had taken to living with Grandpa in shifts. I don’t know if the Old Man even noticed Gran’s absence, the way they doted on him. Everyone owed him, some more than others, but you were born into the family owing him, and the debt only got deeper with time. He was quick to lend, but the terms were steep. I didn’t know of anyone who had ever paid off a family loan.

“Mel. Good to see you. Are you eating well? You look a little pasty.” Aunt Susan wore an old floral house coat that probably had belonged to Gran. Her hair had already turned deeply white, and she was cutting it short like old ladies all seem to do. I wondered about that. Was there some kind of letter they got in the mail on their 50th birthday from the AARP, dictating how long their hair could be? She held out her hand palm-up, resting it on the window. Her fingertips were stained deeply yellow from years of smoking. The old woman rapped me on my knuckles.

“Always thinking,” she muttered. “That’s going to get you in trouble one of these days.”

“Has plenty of times already,” I said. I handed her the envelope. “Tell Grandpa I’m sorry it was late. They only just reopened the plant.”

She eyed the envelope. I’d fattened it to make up for the late payment. “I hear tell they’re thinking about closing it up again.” She grinned, taking pleasure from the idea that I would end up taking out another loan and some day ending up in a hole as deep as hers and all the other elders. If I was laid off again, I probably would have to visit the Man with hat in hand. I didn’