Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  “It’s just a fancy ham and cheese!” she’d hollered in a limp effort to break up the argument.

  Then she’d capped it all off by spilling an entire stockpot full of fresh Shit-Bowl straight on herself and all over the staging floor.

  And now, as she simmered about her day, she dug her fork back into the cherry pie Muna had made for her at the end of his shift.

  “For you to try, Chef Nora,” he’d said, that wide, blindingly white grin of his insisting that here he had made a pie with miraculously zero calories. “Maybe you tell me if it will work in my bakery.”

  Muna had been talking about opening a bakery in the city for some time now. Give the man credit; he’d only been here a couple of months, and already, his vast talent had him dreaming big. Nora was proud of him, in truth, even if the selfish side of her was already dreading the day she would lose him as a line cook and sometimes pastry chef.

  “Fine, I’ll try it,” she’d said, and then Muna had run off like a child too embarrassed to watch his mother open the gift he’d made her for Mother’s Day.

  By now, she was halfway through the pie, just shoveling it in one forkful at a time, because Jesus, it had been a long fucking day, and Jesus, was this pie delicious—so delicious that she found herself having to lean into the counter on her elbow, like a troubadour stealing a moment’s rest from all the heavy lifting. In the act of dropping to an elbow, she shifted from one foot to the other and realized that an errant bean slurry from the spilled Shit-Bowl remained sloshing around in her left shoe.

  Nora brooded as she enjoyed another sweet bite of what was turning out to be the best pie she’d ever tasted, and she thought back to those somehow-even-worse minutes following the Great Shit-Bowl Disaster of 2016.

  She’d rushed off to empty her shoes and change clothes as quickly as possible so she could enjoy at least a few minutes of her customary hour-long break. She’d wanted to spend those few minutes bothering Evan a little. Maybe pull him away from his work in the admin shed and into a closet somewhere, make him all charmingly wobbly on his feet for the rest of the day. But instead, she’d found him at the machine shed, surrounded by an army of confused new residents and standing toe to toe with goddamned Elliot Larson.

  And what was the deal with Larson’s bodyguard? Nora had seen that cold statue of a woman before, back when Nora’d had a fling with Elliot, and back then, he’d insisted that she was his chef. What, did she just decide one day that she wanted to set down her knives and learn karate or whatever?

  Right.

  And how the hell did Elliot have the nerve to show up here? Never mind the awkwardness rendered by their brief and regrettable romantic history. Elliot Larson was the embodiment of the strutting, unaccountable everything that this Farm was attempting to overturn.

  Here to volunteer, my Aunt Fanny, Nora thought. Asshole’s up to something.

  At that very moment, in strode the asshole, clearly up to something.

  “Just the woman I wanted to see,” Elliot said as he sidled up to the counter.

  Though the counter separated the two of them, Nora had no desire to be even this close to Elliot Larson, so she stepped back from her pie.

  “The feeling could not be any less mutual,” she said.

  “Dinner?” Elliot said, indicating the pie.

  Nora gestured at the pie dismissively. “Have some.”

  “You’re not going to finish it?”

  When Nora was done rolling her eyes, her gaze landed on Elliot’s Nordic chef/bodyguard, who had just completed a catlike glide through the door and now stood sentinel in the darkest corner of the otherwise vacant cafeteria. Vigilance was that bitch’s name, Nora decided. And fuck her for parading around with that waistline of hers.

  Elliot took up Nora’s fork and shoveled a forkful of the pie into his mouth. Nora wasn’t sure whether to be disgusted by the implied intimacy of not bothering to ask for his own fork or intrigued by Elliot’s impending reaction to the spectacular pie.

  There was no reaction. Elliot just swallowed the bite and shoved back from the counter.

  “Truthfully, I was here to try this Shit-Bowl everyone’s been talking about.”

  “Kitchen’s closed,” Nora said.

  He set a hand over his heart. “You’re going to let a paying customer go hungry?”

  “What exactly are you going to pay with?”

  Elliot flashed his wristwatch. “Evan gave me one, just like everybody else. I haven’t spent a single Farm Buck yet today. I’m rich.”

  There was no patience left in Nora Pastor. “Just leave.”

  “Your legendary hospitality runs thin.” Elliot offered that smile that Nora hated herself for always delighting in. “At least compared to the last time I saw you.”

  “The last time I saw you, Evan—who’s my boyfriend, by the way—was eviscerating you at Jekyll Island. Just like he did again today when you first showed up.”

  Movement out of the corner of Nora’s eye caught her attention. The first move belonged to Vigilance. The Nordic sentinel sprang to attention at the sight of someone entering the building. That someone was Evan, and he’d apparently arrived just in time to hear Nora admit that he was her boyfriend, because she’d never called him that before, and the adorable little dufus suddenly looked like someone had just handed him a puppy.

  Don’t be stupid about it. She directed the thought in Evan’s general direction. I mean, what else the hell am I supposed to call you?

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it an evisceration,” Elliot said, turning to follow Nora’s gaze to the location of Evan’s arrival. “Ah, speak of the devil. The eviscerator himself. How’s your day going, kid?”

  The puppy joy melted from Evan’s expression, replaced by that same brand of annoyed exhaustion Nora had been carrying around since the morning. “Finally got everyone checked in,” he said. “Thanks again for all the new residents.”

  “Happy to help,” Elliot said, ignoring the obvious sarcasm, his eyes locked on Evan, unwavering, challenging.

  When the awkward tension of the moment reached Nora, she did what she always did when she sensed awkward tension: she started cooking. She grabbed this afternoon’s offending stockpot and started filling it with water.

  “What’re you doing?” Elliot asked, somehow seeing her even though he still hadn’t broken his gaze from Evan.

  “Cooking,” Nora said.

  Elliot finally pried his attention away from Evan. His grin was impish and hopeful. “Shit-Bowl?”

  “There’s my legendary fucking hospitality for you. Anyway, we’ll need more of it tomorrow. This day hasn’t been long enough yet. Might as well get a jump on the next one.”

  The annoying little billionaire honest-to-God clapped his hands together in excitement. Meanwhile, Evan stood ten feet out, either trapped in the tractor beam of Vigilance’s overvigilance or threatened by the alpha male huddling beside Muna’s frustratingly alluring pie.

  “I gotta tell you, kid,” Elliot said, now making a show of not looking at Evan, “I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it, but I just can’t imagine life without poor people.”

  “And here I’d heard you had such a legendary imagination,” Evan said.

  Nora was so proud of her boyfriend that she had to work hard to stifle the grin. The water had come to boil already, so she went to the pantry to grab a sack of rice.

  “Why would you want poor people in the world,” she asked as she returned.

  “It’s like your beans and rice,” Elliot said. “You call it Shit-Bowl for a reason, right?”

  She hated that he was right, so rather than answer, she just started pouring in the rice.

  “You offer that crap for basically nothing because it’s supposed to motivate people to work for better food,” Elliot said. “Poverty is the same thing. Without it, what would motivate people to work?”

  Evan chuffed.

  “My Shit-Bowls aren’t killing 250,000 people a year,” Nora said.


  “And poverty is?”

  “Every year,” Evan said. “And that’s just in this country. This supposedly rich, free country. The numbers in the third world would make your head spin.”

  Elliot bypassed the head spinning and performed a shrug instead. “You claim this place here is capitalist, yeah? Well, then you should understand this: that’s just the cost of doing business. If people don’t want to die of starvation, then they should just work harder.”

  Nora was so suddenly and completely offended that she dropped the damn stirring spoon into the pot. “That’s easy for you to say,” she said as she pawed around for the tongs she could use to retrieve the errant spoon. If she hadn’t been so miffed about Elliot’s point, she might have had time to hate how all of these gaffes were making her look. She was a damn fine chef. “You’re a billionaire. And anyway, didn’t you make your billions creating machines that make it harder for poor people to find work?”

  The billionaire ignored the latter point so he could address the former—and really, Nora was a little taken aback by his tone and color. She had never seen the man quite so put upon.

  “You think I don’t know what it means to work hard?” he said. He jabbed his finger into the counter to punctuate the point. “What do you think keeps rich people like me up at night? Why do you think there are so many stories about how we work eighteen-hour days and sleep for four hours?”

  Casually, Nora stirred the rice.

  “Loans,” Elliot answered for himself. “The productivity of this whole nation is all thanks to loans.”

  “The loans you get have basically zero interest,” Evan said dismissively.

  “And if it weren’t for cheap loans and low interest rates, there would be no one in this country burning the midnight oil, creating jobs. It’s as American as greed.”

  “Greed doesn’t motivate most people,” Evan said.

  “All the more reason to allow desperation to motivate them.”

  “That’s not the way a natural system is supposed to work.”

  “Natural?” Elliot was so worked up that he looked ready to laugh. “What is this, God’s economy? Can’t we have just one thing that’s ours? I mean, if everything worked like it did in nature, life would be so very boring.”

  Nora exchanged a baffled glance with Evan.

  “Come on, kid,” Elliot said. “Haven’t you ever been to a strip club? Desperation is fun.”

  Now Nora didn’t drop the spoon; she slammed it down. Both men on the other side of the counter startled at the sound. Though she couldn’t see Vigilance from this angle, Nora could imagine the narrow-waisted bitch springing into a defensive posture. “That’s exactly the kind of Make America Great Again bullshit that made you so nauseating the first time we met.”

  Elliot and Evan just kind of blinked at her for a while, the former taken aback and the latter awed.

  “It’s not just greed that makes America great,” Elliot said, startingly collected. “It’s need. People need money, and need makes you do anything your employer asks.”

  Evan sighed.

  “So what are you doing here?” Elliot said. “You’re removing need. This whole system of yours is destined to fail because there’s simply no means of motivation.”

  “Why exactly are you volunteering again?” Nora asked. The rice had finished, and now began the task of trying to look graceful while penguin-walking the stockpot over to the sink and the awaiting colander. “Because you sound like you think this is all a waste of time.”

  “Mostly I’m just curious.” He laced his hands behind his head in a leisurely fashion. “Truthfully, I came to watch this little experiment of yours turn into an exact replica of the American economy.”

  “How do you mean?” Evan asked.

  “It’s only a matter of time before one or two of them gain enough power that they start hoarding wealth.” He grinned in a self-satisfied way. “I’ll tell you, the hoarding of wealth is one of the great pleasures in life.”

  Penguin-walk complete, Nora set the pot on the counter beside the sink, the heat rising out of the water reflecting her own frustration. “That’s the biggest load of shit I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “What? You think I didn’t enjoy floating in here on my hundred-million-dollar yacht? You think I’d have rather taken a cab from the marina than my helicopter? You think I’d be fine bunking down in those barracks after spending half my adult life in a sprawling estate?”

  “How many bedrooms do you have, Elliot?” Evan asked.

  He chuckled. “I don’t even know.”

  “His has fifteen,” Nora said, immediately regretting saying it, since it was clear that Evan had misinterpreted her having this knowledge in exactly the wrong way. “He’s always bragging about the bedrooms in his mansion,” she said defensively. “I’ve never seen any of them.”

  This seemed to quiet Evan’s anxiety on the matter.

  “And anyway, I can see where my boyfriend is going with this, because I was going the same way.” She delighted in how Evan delighted in her accentuating the word boyfriend.

  “Maybe one of you could go there then,” Elliot said. “Because I’m getting bored.”

  “How many of those bedrooms do you actually sleep in?” Nora asked.

  Elliot didn’t answer.

  “You sleep in one of them. You’ve got at least fifteen beds in your own house and you still only sleep on half of one of them. You use the same shower every day. Shit in the same toilet, even though you have thirty of them. You also have thirty cars and drive the same one to work every day. So how’s all that hoarding going for you, douchebag?”

  “There’s no need for name-calling.” Elliot appeared genuinely hurt, but Nora knew him well enough to recognize that there was nothing genuine about it.

  “All your hoarding does is create waste. Poverty doesn’t motivate people to get rich. Hoarding wealth creates more poverty.”

  Before Elliot could answer, she wheeled around and poured the pot into the sink, steam screaming up from the colander.

  Evan flinched. Elliot did not.

  “I don’t need to take this,” Elliot said. When he stepped back, suddenly Vigilance was by his side, looking infuriatingly hot.

  “You know what you are?” Evan asked rhetorically.

  “What am I?” Elliot answered anyway.

  “You’re like that pot of hot water.”

  “I’m waiting for the punchline.”

  “A rich person is like a pot of hot water. It’s nice to have that heat to create things, but it’s incredibly expensive to maintain it.”

  “And wasteful,” Nora agreed.

  “All that gas and heat and money dedicated to keeping that water hot. Seems like we shouldn’t be expending so many resources to keep you rich.”

  “So we should expend resources to make the poor not poor anymore?” The concept made Elliot look like he wanted to yak up a hairball.

  “That’s the thing,” Evan said. “It’s also a waste of resources to keep poor people poor. A poor person is like a cold pot of water. That person can’t contribute to society exactly like cold water can’t help Nora cook.”

  “Being poor’s more like a pot of water chilled to absolute zero,” Nora offered.

  Evan gave a thoughtful nod. “That’s exactly right. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to cool something to absolute zero.”

  “You expect me to buy the idea that we’re spending resources on keeping people poor?” Elliot said. “Because I knew you were liberal, but that’s some crazy leftist shit.”

  “I’m actually not liberal,” Evan said, already tired of having to insist upon that all the time. Dude grew up trap shooting and hunting with his father in a county that had been blood red since before the New Deal.

  “So what are you then?”

  “A numbers man.”

  Nora loved how Evan paused to let his points sink in. Her affection for it made the prospect of having to open a dozen economy-sized cans of
beans sound almost appealing.

  “We are spending resources to keep people poor, Elliot. A homeless person costs their city tens of thousands of dollars a year to care for. You know how many homeless are in New York alone?”

  Elliot was pretending not to care for this conversation anymore.

  “Sixty thousand,” Evan answered for him. “They’re each costing the city about twenty-five grand to care for every year. That’s 1.5 billion dollars per year.”

  “What’s your net worth again, El?” Nora asked, her lips turning up at the corners.

  He didn’t answer.

  “C’mon, you’re always spouting off the number. I must’ve heard it six times on our first date.”

  Evan darted a glance at her in surprise. Immediately, she hated herself for using the word first. She would have a bit of explaining to do, next time she found herself alone with her boyfriend.

  “Last I read,” Evan said, “you make about three billion a year. That’s an impressive business you’re running, by the way.”

  Elliot allowed a “thank you.”

  A smiling Nora tapped lightly against her front teeth with the serrated edge of a bean can lid. She so enjoyed doing that. “Let’s see,” she said in a sing-songy way. “One and a half billion to keep the poor comfortable enough to stay poor, and three billion to keep you in a giant house and yacht you don’t use.”

  “I use the yacht,” Elliot insisted. “I was just on it this morning.”

  “It costs a lot of money to keep your lifestyle going,” Evan said. “But that’s where you’re wrong about poor people.”

  Elliot turned his wide-eyed attention to Evan for the last time.

  “If a poor person is like a pot of cold water, then it doesn’t take nearly as much to cause them to heat up.”