Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  Now Elliot sighed—long and loud, long and loud enough to announce how thoroughly done he was with this conversation. “Natalia, are we clear outside?” he called into the corner.

  Without a word, the sentinel catwalked outside, her head on a swivel.

  So it’s Natalia then, Nora thought, deciding at once that she would still call her Vigilance and would still hate her exclusively for her waistline. I mean, where does she even keep her kidneys?

  “You expecting a frontal assault out there?” Nora asked.

  Both men in the room ignored her.

  “That’s what we’re doing on this Farm, Elliot,” Evan said. “We’re applying just a small amount of heat in the form of small amounts of money. Now, when that poor person has money, they can take care of themselves. There’s no wasted energy. No need to spend the money it takes to keep a poor person alive because they’re doing it for themselves. And with that small amount of heat, there won’t be just a few of them who make something happen—nearly all of them will.”

  Vigilance returned, flashing a chiseled, picture-perfect eyebrow raise that said, “All clear.”

  “Excellent,” Elliot said to her. “We’re leaving.”

  Nora so enjoyed watching Elliot turn tail. She choked back a laugh. “Aw, but you haven’t had your Shit-Bowl,” she called after him.

  Now they were alone, and Evan laughed.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think your beans and rice will be enough to compel him to stick around?”

  As she stirred in the beans, Nora tried to think of a time in her life when she wanted to jump a man’s bones more than she wanted to jump Evan’s right there in that moment. Her lips curled up at the corners.

  Chapter 14 Movie Night

  Nature is self-organizing, mostly because of energy from the sun and the law of conservation of energy. In the same way, people living on the Farm organize themselves because they have money, and their self-interest organizes how they spend it.

  —Justin Wolfe

  The Farm’s newest structure was designed to serve as a classroom building, even if Valence Newton insisted on calling it a movie house.

  “You sure that speaker wire’s gonna hold up?” he asked, shifting nervously. “Because that only looks like, what? Fuckin’ sixteen or eighteen gauge? I mean, fellas, like, seriously, I can’t have the sound cutting out on opening night at my movie house.”

  From their knees, Jao Chen and Hap Matthews—who’d become something of an Odd Couple during the construction project—both glared up at Valence, their annoyance written plainly on their faces.

  “Yes,” Jao said flatly.

  This caused Hap to chuckle. Jao’s terse, monosyllabic replies often caused Hap to chuckle. The two of them—one a short, soft-spoken, hundred-twenty-pound tradesman and the other a hairy, mountainous, Jerseyite former real estate investor—could not have been more different, whether in physical build or cultural background, and yet here the Farm had brought together two kindred spirits. Since the day they’d first started working together on the classroom/movie house, you’d have been hard pressed to find a closer pair of friends.

  “I swear to Christ, Newton,” Hap said gruffly, “if you ask about this wire one more time, I’ll wring your turkey-ass neck.”

  Valence danced back two steps with all the grace of a welterweight boxer, his fists rising reflexively. This struck Evan as funny, because everyone on the Farm knew that here was a man who could attempt to punch a fly and then somehow wind up on his back.

  “Hey, Val,” Evan said, stifling laughter, “why don’t you go make sure you have everything squared away at the door? Less than an hour to movie time. People will be arriving soon.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right,” Valence said. “Good, uh, fuckin’ idea, boss.” He spun on his heel and sashayed for the door.

  A grateful Hap got back to work threading wire at the base of the wall while Jao followed behind him, reattaching baseboards over the trail that Hap had already completed. None of this work was entirely necessary, but Valence had insisted that he wanted his speaker system installed in-wall. And with less than an hour to showtime, we couldn’t have anyone stepping over any unsightly speaker wire now, could we?

  “I don’t know why he won’t just let us duct tape this damn thing down,” Hap said, mostly to Jao.

  Jao grunted in agreement.

  Hap chuckled.

  As he watched them work, Evan recalled how gratifying it had been to see how the two of them stepped up to help meet the need raised by Larson’s unannounced influx of new residents. Just as Evan had hoped, two industrious souls among the crowd had said to themselves, “I can give these people a better place to live if they just give me a little of their money.” Rather than sitting back and waiting for the Farm to take care of all these new people in tents, Jao—and later, Hap—had seen the situation as an opportunity. While some saw destitute people in a tent city, these two saw potential customers.

  Evan had taken great joy in how perplexing Larson had found this effort. More than once, Evan had regaled him about how this further proved one of the central points of the Farm. In the real world, the government was of course terrible at caring for homeless people, mostly because they would spend tens of millions of dollars—usually paid for on debt—to construct massive homeless shelters filled with huge staffs to feed and care for them.

  “As you can see,” Evan had told him, “these people can feed and house themselves. You just have to give them a chance to do it.”

  On occasion, Evan would also find himself daydreaming about telling off John the Deputy about his obvious xenophobia. The thickheaded cop, probably spurred on by the latest Trump rally, had left the scene under the assumption that he’d put all these dangerous illegal immigrants in their place. But ever since that day he’d hauled in the Sotos, one of those supposedly dangerous immigrants had stepped up to lead the initiative to build more and better barracks for the Farm. Jao Chen was proof positive that if you allow immigrants to contribute to an economy, then the economy grows. “The problem isn’t the immigrants,” he wanted to tell John the Deputy. “The problem is how we run the American economy.”

  And then there was Hap, an inspiration in himself. For months, Evan and Justin had been looking for someone with exactly his brand of expertise. They had needed a builder on more jobs than Evan could properly remember. And there, right under their noses—posing as one of the shakier members of the Addicts clique and one of the lazier members of the Consumers—was a man who had spent part of a failed career doing exactly that. Then, when the need for more housing and development presented itself, the true Hap had stepped into the light.

  Evan hadn’t known about Hap’s construction experience because everything he’d ever learned about him referenced only the latter half of his career, the one he had spent as a real estate investor. Coincidentally, Evan had first encountered the story of Hap Matthews several years before taking the job at the Farm. Back then, in grad school at Northwestern, Evan was an avid reader of the Chicago Tribune, the kind of reader who could recall the finer details of just about every story he’d ever read, details he would likely retain into perpetuity. He remembered the piece on Hap Matthews quite well, because it was something of a missing persons mystery, and there were few stories Evan dug more than he dug a good missing persons mystery. Unsolved Mysteries and Dateline had been his two favorite shows as a kid.

  As the Trib story went, Hap was a man who’d stood at the top of a middle-income apartment construction empire. There was a time when he’d owned a large chunk of the multifamily rental properties in north Jersey—and, paradoxically, in south Chicago. But then, pretty much all at once, he’d lost half his wealth to Bernie Madoff and the rest to the Great Recession.

  “Never tie your own name to residential developments,” he’d told Evan shortly after his arrival to the Farm. “You don’t ever want to be left holding the bag when the bubble bursts.” Hap had hocked a heavy loogie to punctuate his
point. “Oh, and never trust a guy who says his investments always outperform the markets. There you go, kid. Your life lessons for the day.” Then Hap had taken a long pull from his bottle of homemade wine and promptly gone to sleep.

  According to the Trib, sometime during the fallout from the recession, Hap Matthews had utterly disappeared. His wife, infuriated by his loose dealings, had divorced him and taken every scrap of their remaining possessions, including the three Cavalier King Charles spaniels that Hap loved more than he loved himself. All he had left was the roof over his head, but even that would be gone soon. By the time the repo men arrived at his sprawling house on Long Island, he’d already disappeared, seemingly into the ether.

  The article followed the reporter on the trail through Hap’s last known whereabouts. It was an intriguing piece, particularly since it ended with the question still open.

  No one knew where Hap Matthews had gone. He had disappeared from the grid. That was until seven years later, when his application for residence at the Farm showed up in the pile at the administration shed. That day, Evan became the first person in the world to learn the full truth about what had happened to Hap. Rather than stick around to face his own ruin, the former baron had boarded a Greyhound to Chicago, the city of his birth. There, he had disappeared into anonymity, just another nameless, homeless man wandering the streets.

  “Life’s a funny old spaniel,” Hap would later tell Evan. “I was probably living in the shadow of the Trib building when they did that article on me. Guess no one ever thought to check the homeless shelters for a former real estate millionaire.”

  Hap had seemed properly grateful for the opportunity to join the Farm, but then he’d spent his first three months in residence as a Consumer who showed almost no interest in kicking his prodigious alcohol addiction. Dude’s only remotely entrepreneurial endeavor in those early weeks had been to buy grapes from the market on the semiregular and then turn them into wine. The problem was he always drank so much of it that he’d have nothing left to sell. Evan had tried several times to get him to put down the habit, but in the end, he had no authority to make him stop. The Farm didn’t forbid substance abuse, even if it frowned upon it, and even if it offered regular AA meetings to anyone who wished to attend.

  In the end, it had been Jao’s arrival that finally broke Hap out of his spiral. An enterprising sort, Jao had been quick to rise to the occasion created by Larson’s unannounced arrival. Hap had watched from a distance as the project began. Then, when the Farm’s administrators calculated that income from the harvest justified the construction of a new classroom building, Jao took that job too—but only on the condition that he could assemble a second team of laborers to help him.

  To everyone’s surprise, Hap had emerged as a Consumer finally willing to contribute to the Farm.

  “You ever done anything like this before?” Justin had asked him.

  Hap had grunted. “You kidding? How do you think I started my empire? Kid, I been flipping houses since before that sorta shit got you on HGTV.”

  With that, Hap Matthews took up the leadership role of the second team of laborers. He and Jao would work separately for the six weeks that followed, each guiding their own teams full of amateur tradespeople who could barely swing hammers. Maybe it was their shared love of creating something with their own two hands, or maybe it was their shared exasperation about the haplessness of their teams, but whatever the case, as soon as Jao finished the barracks and joined the classroom/movie house project, he and Hap had become inseparable friends.

  Evan smiled at the memory, a smile he held onto as he looked to Nora. She extended her lower lip and blew her hair out of her eyes. Then she got back to whacking the popcorn machine. For the past hour, Nora had been cursing at this machine, because no matter how she adjusted her approach, it couldn’t seem to quit singeing every batch of popcorn to where it wasn’t quite perfectly palatable. Finally, she had come to realize that, to create the perfect popcorn in this finicky machine, she needed to turn it off ninety seconds earlier than anyone would have guessed. Once she figured that out, it was all copacetic, and she was churning out corn and dressing it up with parmesan and her homemade truffle oil. Evan’s stomach rumbled at the thought of the bag he would buy in a few minutes and then hopefully share with Nora during the movie.

  The fact that she had this machine to work with in the first place was a bit of a puzzler. In preparation for his first public movie night, Valence Newton had been saving his excess Farm Bucks for months. He’d gotten to where he had a savings stockpile large enough to buy either a high-end projector or some used speakers and a very used popcorn machine. He’d surprised just about everyone involved by purchasing the latter two items.

  “Isn’t the projector kind of important to the whole operation?” Evan had asked him.

  “Meryl said I could borrow the one she uses for her PowerPoints,” Valence said.

  “But that thing’s barely good enough to project her presentations. It was old when we acquired it, and I’m not even sure it’s ever had a bulb change.”

  “I checked it out,” Valence insisted. “It’ll hold up good enough. Fuckin’ well better, anyway.”

  “But what if—”

  “Trust me,” he interrupted, “people will put up with a shitty picture. As long as the image is big and the sound is good, I can fake it on picture quality for a while. Now, what I can’t fuckin’ fake?” He cocked his head and squinted one eye, as he often did when arriving at a point he thought was brilliant. “I can’t fake the fuckin’ popcorn. So yeah, popcorn machine, speakers, and if there’s anything left, a quality projection screen. That’ll be enough until I can save up some more for a new projector.”

  So there Nora stood, presiding over the popcorn machine. And there Hap and Jao worked, running the wire for Valence’s admittedly top-shelf speakers. And there Valence flounced, arguing loudly with someone on the other side of the entry to the building.

  With an inward groan, Evan went to check on the problem. Valence held his ground with arms crossed, his head shaking vigorously from side to side as he played bouncer at the door. Oscar Farsi slumped on the other side of this blockade, his hands out and his gaze imploring.

  “How many times have I helped you out?” Oscar was asking Valence.

  “Six,” Valence said without hesitation.

  His certainty on the number surprised even Oscar. “Six times? That many?” The indignation returned. “I’ve helped you out six times and you can’t help me out even this once?”

  “Look, I don’t make the fuckin’ rules. You don’t have any money, you can’t get in.”

  Oscar chose that moment to notice how Evan, the guy who ostensibly did make the rules, had arrived just in time. “Would you please tell him that, as the owner of this business, he’s free to make exceptions?”

  “What’s the problem here?” Evan asked.

  “He’s already spent his Farm Bucks for the day,” Valence explained. “And he still wants to get in to see the movie.”

  “You don’t have any savings you can use?” Evan asked Oscar.

  Oscar stared down at his hands, shamed. “I’ve never had savings,” he said sorrowfully. “You know that.”

  Evan did know that. On more than one occasion, he’d spoken directly to Oscar about how his plans to start a private investigator’s business would never get off the ground if he didn’t start saving some money so he could advertise in the local papers. He would need to solicit jobs from the general public, as there just wasn’t enough investigative work on the Farm to keep him in the black.

  “I’m sorry,” Evan said. “This is Valence’s business, so it’s not up to me.”

  “We’re opening to the public tonight,” Valence said. “I can’t be letting residents in for free or else how can I charge the public? It’ll throw the whole system out of whack.”

  Oscar looked up at them, teary-eyed. “But this is my favorite movie.”

  “Urban Cowboy is you
r favorite movie?” Evan asked incredulously. The whole thing had been leaving him incredulous since the beginning, in fact. Out of all the entries in the long canon of American films, Evan would never have guessed that Valence would choose to screen the bomb of a honky-tonk film that effectively killed the first half of John Travolta’s career. His disbelief about the choice had been such that he’d insisted Valence had meant Midnight Cowboy, but no, the aspiring entertainer was adamant that a country-western flop from 1980 would be the perfect opener for his new theater.

  “I’ve always had a thing for Debra Winger,” Oscar said with a shrug. “Mostly I just don’t want to miss the aftershow.” He looked at Valence admiringly. “I’ll bet you’ll have lots of interesting things to say during the aftershow.”

  “Not really,” Valence said, though the pride in his tone belied the sentiment. “Just gonna talk about the fallacy of taking a successful film concept and just dressin’ it up in a different fuckin’ hat. Then, we’re gonna do some line dancin’ and shit.”

  “See?” Oscar said, holding a hand out to Valence. “That’s what I’m here for. The line dancing and shit.”

  The two men stared at each other, neither of them backing down.

  “So why don’t you let an old buddy in for free?” Oscar said finally. “Just this once.”

  Valence sighed. There was a line forming behind Oscar. Dozens of people—Farm residents and a few scattered members of the general public—had indeed begun to show up for Valence’s much-anticipated opening night, terrible though the movie promised to be.

  “Maybe if you actually did some fuckin’ work around here,” Valence said, “you could make enough money that we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Oscar looked wounded. “But—”

  “He has a point,” Evan cut in. “I’ve been suggesting for weeks that you pitch in with Jao and Hap. They always need a hand.”

  “I’ve never so much as held a screwdriver in my life,” Oscar said.