Page 13 of The Bad Weather Friend

Following the murder of his father, Big Al, on a night in May, seven-year-old Benny went to live with his maternal grandmother, Cosima Springbok. His mother, Naomi, didn’t need time to grieve. She had been yearning to divorce Benny’s father for years but feared his violent temper. Now that Big Al had died as a consequence of a bar fight that he’d picked with the wrong man, Naomi’s migraines abated. The school district where he had taught and coached football had been a snake pit of violence where students and teachers alike were often targets of the gangs that ruled the institution, and a life-insurance policy was provided as a job benefit. A double-indemnity clause increased the payout if the cause of death was either an accident or homicide. Upon receiving a tax-free five-hundred-thousand-dollar payout, Naomi quit her job at the vintage clothing store, decided she wasn’t a vegetarian after all, stopped worrying that her carbon footprint might lead to the destruction of the planet, and booked a series of sea cruises to exotic ports that would keep her on the move for more than two years, until she met Mr. Right on a voyage around South America.

Enter Grandma Cosima, then forty-seven. She was about five feet eight, slim, with ink-black hair cut short and eyes as green as the plastic on certain Memorex high-density diskettes, which were still in use in those days. She always wore a full-length slinky dress or a silky Vietnamese tunic-and-pants ensemble called anao dai. Cosima moved so silently and fluidly that she reminded young Benny of a cat, except on those occasions when, unaware of him,she passed through an ill-lighted room, her distorted shadow stilting along a pale wall, which suggested to him that her humanity was a disguise within which lurked a spider from another planet.

The suicide of Cosima’s first husband and the death by train of her second left her financially secure, with no desire to have a man in her life. Although Benny was only seven years old when he was sent to live with her, she regarded him as a man in the making. He was unwelcome in her house, and it was her great pleasure to make him aware of that.

Benny wore black. Cosima bought his clothes, and black was the only color she provided. His pajamas were white when she purchased them, but she dyed them black. His sheets, pillowcases, and blankets were black as well, so that when he was lying abed, in the glow of the nightstand lamp, his pale hands appeared to be disembodied, as if they had been severed from the arms of another boy and placed in bed with Benny as a not-so-subtle threat.

In possession of a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees, one in psychology, Cosima was more than qualified to homeschool her grandson. Having already taught himself to read, with comprehension of text at a third-grade level, Benny didn’t require that most basic instruction; he was enough of an autodidact to improve his reading skills unassisted. Therefore, on the first day of class, Cosima got straight to the subject of death. During the next nine months, using books and gruesomely explicit video documentaries, she taught him much about nature’s infinite zoology of predators, with a particular emphasis on how they chased down prey, tore it apart, and often ate it alive.

Rather than instilling in the boy an abiding terror or at least a phobia regarding everything from tigers to coyotes to owls, this morbid instruction inspired in him compassion for the small,gentle creatures who were eaten and pity for the predators that nature had condemned to lives of violence by requiring them to consume a large amount of protein to survive. Tigers probably despaired at having to kill, kill, kill—but they didn’t have the option to be vegans. The child’s profound sympathy for prey and predator frustrated Cosima. Furthermore, he held fast to the idea that the way nature worked, as sad and scary as it was, must be the best of all ways it could work, because if there was a better way, then that would be how it would already work. This attitude not only frustrated his grandmother but also infuriated her. Although she’d bought him black sneakers, the shoes had small, white design elements that now she eradicated with a waterproof black Sharpie.

During the next nine months of homeschooling, they concentrated on geography, climatology, and planetary structure, so Benny would acquire an understanding of where, how, and precisely to what extent human and animal life could be snuffed out by hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, massive mud slides, blizzards, ice ages with mile-high glaciers, wildfires, earthquakes, and volcanoes. As was not unusual for a boy of his age, Benny found the spectacle of raging nature more exciting than frightening. The videos Cosima used in class during the day became Benny’s preferred evening entertainment. As for the victims of these natural disasters, he figured they were in Heaven, where nature hadn’t gone crazy, so they were happier than they had been down here. Around this time, his grandmother began cursing and drinking more than heretofore had been her habit.

For the next phase of the boy’s education, Cosima focused most intently on biology. The number of syndromes, conditions, diseases, and injuries that could result in disability and death werequite bewildering, and the long names given to many of them were hard to pronounce and harder to remember. Although his grandmother counseled him otherwise, Benny remained certain that none of those afflictions would befall him. She could not understand his attitude, and he did not explain that, having looked into the muzzle of the gun held by Big Al’s killer and survived, he felt protected and destined for a long and interesting life. Instead of inculcating in her grandson a severe case of hypochondria, she inspired in him such a sympathy for the vulnerability of humanity that he considered pursuing a career as a physician. Around this time, his grandmother began taking an occasional white pill from a pillbox and washing it down with vodka.

Intending to proceed to the subject of human cruelty and the homicidal tendency of the species, Cosima ordered documentaries on Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, the Soviet gulags, the Khmer Rouge, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others. Before these instructive materials could arrive, Benny’s mother returned from a cruise around South America, during which the captain of the ship had married her and Jubal Catspaw. The happy couple wanted to provide Naomi’s nine-year-old son with a loving environment, and he was adopted by his stepfather, whereafter his last name changed from Dockenfelder to Catspaw. A new and entirely unexpected phase of his life began.

NETWORKING

Benny Catspaw knew nearly every real-estate agent in the high end of the Orange County market. He was also friendly with all of them and a true friend to several. Because he had a sterling memory and a genuine interest in people, he remembered the names of their spouses and children and pets without much effort. He recalled birthdays, not merely of those who worked at Surfside but of those at Belle Maison and the other five major firms that specialized in properties north of one million dollars. This advantage accrued to him in part because of hustle, but mostly because he found the real-estate world as scintillating as Hollywood, the agents as glamorous as movie stars, the business as his best route to success and true happiness after a tumultuous childhood and adolescence. He regularly congratulated competitors on sales that he wished he had made, and he was sincerely happy about their success because he believed that what happened for them could happen for him if he worked hard.

After Jill Swift left him with the useless key to her house, which was less painful but as emotionally distressing as a knife in the heart, after half an hour of replaying the Bobby McFerrin song didn’t make him happier, and after the memories of Grandma Cosima that the song inexplicably conjured only made him nervous, he took steps to get his career back on track. Revealing his decision to leave Surfside, he texted the principals of five brokerages, all well known to him, announcing that he was open to a new professional relationship. He had an impressive two-year sales record, and they knew it, so he didn’t need to make a case for himself. He restrained from texting the founders of Belle Maisonbecause he didn’t want to make Jill Swift uncomfortable by working in the same company with her.

He changed into jeans and a T-shirt and spent the afternoon vacuuming and dusting, although nothing needed to be vacuumed or dusted. He cleaned the guest bathroom though no one had yet stayed there and though Mrs. Shinzel had cleaned it the previous day. As always, housework lifted his spirits. By the time he decided to check his phone at five thirty, he expected to have three or more responses to his text messages. There were none.

This dearth of replies surprised but did not worry him. Well, in truth, it worried him a little, but it didn’t unduly alarm him. The people he’d texted were all movers and shakers, at the pinnacle of the dirt business, and therefore crazy busy. Many probably didn’t fully review their scores of text messages until after dinner. They had to prioritize. Everyone who made it to the top in Orange County real estate needed to be a first-rate prioritizer. Every day, they had too many property showings to squeeze into too few hours, offers to convey to sellers, counteroffers to present to buyers, escrows to monitor, home inspections to attend, hands to hold, egos to soothe, and an avalanche of paperwork cascading on them from a government bureaucracy that measured its effectiveness by the number of people it could annoy and by the degree to which it could annoy them. Benny was sure he’d have enthusiastic replies from at least two or three brokers by morning.

When he woke on Wednesday and plucked his iPhone from the nightstand, his only text message was from his dry cleaner offering a discount for three-piece suits. He’d received no emails.

(This development no doubt pleases the bitter cynics among you, but I don’t like it at all. I would find it satisfying if some of those who cut Benny off were to die in a head-on collision with a gasoline tanker truck or suffer a humiliating bout of diarrhea in a public setting. However, if I did that, I would have become the kind of person I don’t want to be, so we’ll have to live with this sad turn of events.)

THE CRATE

After the Mayweather crew departed, Benny Catspaw was left with an immense crate in one of two empty spaces in his three-car garage. He had been expecting a package that a deliveryman could hand to him at the front door and that he would be able to carry to the kitchen island without risking a hernia.

The bill of lading identified the contents as books, offering no list of titles. Talmadge Clerkenwell had never mentioned books. He had called the bequest “a blessing” and “a wonderful thing.” Benny read books and enjoyed a good novel; however, if the crate actually contained books, Clerkenwell had exaggerated the value of this gift. According to the paperwork, the old man hadn’t paid for significant insurance on the shipment, suggesting the books weren’t valuable, collectible editions.

The crate was well constructed, framed with solid lumber and held together with scores of screws. To take it apart or even to open the lid, he would need a power drill with a reversible motor and a countersink screwdriver bit. That would require a trip to the hardware store. When disassembled, the enormous box would still be in large pieces—too many of them to put out for the weekly trash collection; he would need to call someone and pay to have it hauled away.

Benny was beginning to feel put-upon. He didn’t like feeling that way. Talmadge Clerkenwell might be eccentric, but there was no reason to suppose he didn’t mean well. Benny was convinced that most people meant well, but sometimes they just didn’t think hard enough about the consequences of their actions.

Furthermore, the longer he regarded the crate, the more that it disturbed him. The overhead fluorescent panels were inadequate,but the huge box seemed toresistillumination; it stood in shadows that appeared to be unrelated to the fall of light, as if a darkness as soft as soot seeped from the thing, gathering under and around it in a miasmic mist.

Benny was neither overly superstitious nor given to irrational fears. Even if vampires and zombies were real, life had taught him that there were worse things in the world, like husbands who beat their wives and grandmothers who hated their grandchildren and sociopaths who operated boarding schools and conducted secret medical experiments on young boys. Consequently, he told himself that the crate was a mere annoyance rather than a threat, that it contained nothing more than the gimcracks and gewgaws and fribbles that an eccentric great-uncle might feel were of enough sentimental value to dump on an unsuspecting nephew whom he had never met. He would have to buy the power drill necessary to open the damn thing and, depending on the value of the sorry contents, call Goodwill Industries or Got Junk to haul it all away. Although that task was not urgent, he decided to attend to it anyway, to take his mind off the recent hiccups in his career and love life.

Before driving to the hardware store, he went into the house to check his voice mail, email, and text messages. Nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Well, less than a day had passed since he informed the five firms of his availability. Besides, this was a Wednesday, always a busy day in the real-estate world, or at least as busy as any other; or if it wasn’t as busy as any other day, it was certainly busyish. The principals of each firm would need to meet to discuss the terms and conditions under which they would bring him aboard. Because his two-year track record was excellent, they would wantto craft their proposal carefully, aware that they would be in competition with other brokerages. After an initial spasm of anxiety, he now realized that the silence engendered by his text message was proof of his value in the marketplace; a less successful agent would by now have received a polite rejection or a boilerplate terms-and-conditions sheet. A day or so of silence, prior to a vigorous and satisfying response, was a sign of respect. All was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

ON THE WAY HOME FROM THE HARDWARE STORE, BENNY RECALLS A FORMATIVE DAY IN HIS LIFE

Jubal Catspaw, who married Benny’s mother, Naomi, on a cruise around South America, had inherited a fortune and dedicated himself to the enjoyment of everything money could buy. Jubal was especially enchanted by first-class travel and resided in his Beverly Hills mansion only for a week or two between what he called his “glorious expeditions.” When traveling by sea, he always booked the largest suite on the ship. Flying off to Paris for a month—or to Tuscany, or to Rio—required a private jet. Training through Europe or Japan or across the United States involved a lavishly appointed private railcar with a staff of three, including a chef. Jubal adored Naomi, and Benny was happy that his mother, having endured Big Al’s temper and violence and fecklessness, was highly valued and well treated.

Although Jubal adopted Benny, he was awkward with children and adamantly opposed to traveling with one. Initially, when Benny’s mom and stepfather were journeying, he was left in Beverly Hills, in the care of an English butler, Rudyard Bromley, and his wife, Sally. Mrs. Bromley served as cook and the senior of three housekeepers. Benny was homeschooled by a full-time tutor named Mordred Merrick.

The mansion included a game arcade, a home theater, no cockroaches, and three acres of grounds on which a boy with a vivid imagination could have many adventures.

Although Rudyard Bromley could occasionally be found standing at a window or tending some task while quietly weeping, his pale face glistening like a ball of his wife’s homemade burrata, he was a gentle presence. Mrs. Bromley was likewise kindly,although on days when she sipped too much sherry while attending to her duties, she couldn’t stop singing dour Celtic songs about death and oppression, sometimes with a bitterness that scared the two housekeepers who worked under her.

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