Innocent Foxes: A Novel

Tom O’Grady, the real-estate agent, was the person to know in those days. He was good at sizing the canyon folk up, at knowing which piece of property would suit them, and then charming them into feeling they got the best of the deal when he sold it to them. Truth was, though, never for a moment did Tom forget that he was an Abundance man. He fleeced every one of them.

Almost as good as the money he got for people was the gossip he gleaned. Because Tom spent so much time with the canyon folk, he always knew what was going on with them and it was often juicy as a mango.

The canyon folk brought with them a lifestyle that people in Abundance had only ever read about in stories. They bought ranches just because they liked the scenery and not because they had to make a living from it. They bought up, tore down, threw out and built back up again without ever once using a local man. The bathroom tiles came from Italy; the oak in the cupboards came from Vermont; the man who made it into a kitchen came from Mexico. The canyon folk did all that and then only lived in the houses a few weeks in the summer. This made no sense to anyone local but you still felt in awe of it.

Dane Goodman was the first big-name movie star to move into the canyon and stay there on a fairly regular basis. He bought Grampa Cummings’s ranch house up on Dry Creek and first thing he did was knock down the old porch on the west side and build a cedar deck. Then he installed a Jacuzzi hot tub and there was all sorts of gossip about naked starlets running through the woods. At the time, Dane Goodman was married to a well-known actress, but she only lasted four months before she went crazy and had to go back to California. So he took up with the screenwriter guy’s wife, which was all right because the screenwriter guy had already taken up with one of the naked starlets. Then Dane Goodman went off to do a movie and fell in love with someone else and brought her up from California. Meanwhile, the screenwriter guy’s wife moved in with Tim Mason. This shocked folk considerably, not only because Tim Mason was a local man but because everyone in town knew he was gay. There was no end of speculation about what Tim and the screenwriter guy’s wife were getting up to amidst the white wine, cedar decks and hot tubs.

Spencer Scott was the next big name to make the Abundance area his home, and after him came that director guy, who had done all those anguished movies about poor people, and finally the Writer From Back East. They thought they were being cowboys, but they behaved like mountain men, letting their hair and beards grow, clomping down Main Street in raggedy jeans and boots and getting very publicly drunk. Mostly, however, they liked owning things: Hummers, vintage pick-ups and cattle from breeds nobody local had ever heard of. Most of all, however, they liked to own land. It had gone beyond the land-rush days by this point. The canyon folk and their hangers-on now owned most of the river valley, the canyons and even the mountains themselves.

As a consequence, the look of the canyons changed. Roads were cut through the virgin forest. A landing strip was bulldozed down along the river. There was a helipad beside the highway just beyond Simpson’s Bridge. The novelty of having movie stars walking around had long since worn off for the residents of Abundance. Celebrity faces in the drugstore or the supermarket became an ordinary event. No one really noticed anymore. Not that the canyon folk were part of things now. They weren’t. They still kept themselves to themselves, while the Abundance folk went on as usual. Almost nobody mixed.

This wasn’t to say, however, that the canyon folk weren’t good to Abundance. One year they decided the town ought to have a Fourth of July picnic, like the kind you read about in books, with sack races and watermelon-seed spitting contests. They set up a committee, got money for it and organized it as well. It was good fun. There was a parade and a pig roast and a huge fireworks display at the end. Another time, the canyon folk decided there ought to be a pretty white wrought-iron gazebo in the park so that a band could come and play on Sunday afternoons in the summer and they got that done. And they brought live theatre back to Abundance for the first time in ninety years with what was probably the most star-studded local dramatics group in all of the West.

It wasn’t that the locals were ungrateful. These things were meant for everyone and the folk of Abundance really did enjoy themselves too. It was just that while a band playing in a gazebo on Sunday afternoon was nice, a new scanning machine for the hospital would have been nicer. This was the whole problem. The canyon folk only seemed interested in Abundance as a dreamy kind of place where they could do storybook stuff. When they got tired of the crappy internet connection or the bad coffee or having only two full-time doctors, they would fly away. For Abundance folk, however, Abundance was all there was.

On Tuesday evening when Dixie went to the funeral home to dress Jamie Lee, Main Street was alive with high-school kids ‘turning the point’, as they called the ritual of relentlessly driving around the two-block downtown area in their parents’ cars. Entering the mortuary was like stepping into another dimension. The heavy oak doors closed behind Dixie, and there was a sudden vacuum of silence before her ears adjusted enough to hear the softly piped organ music. Her eyes took longer to leave behind the summer evening’s brilliance for the mortuary’s shadowy interior of burgundy carpets and heavy velvet drapes.

The funeral director came out of his office to lead her down a dimly lit corridor to a small room adjacent to the chapel. Right in the middle of the room was what looked to Dixie like one of those little folding tables you put your dinner on when you eat in front of the TV. On top of it was the tiny blue coffin. Jamie Lee lay inside, swathed in a white baby blanket.

‘Is your husband coming?’ the funeral director asked.

‘He’s not my husband,’ Dixie replied softly as she bent to take the clothes out of the plastic carrier bag.

‘I just wondered if I should leave the door unlocked. It’s the kids, you know. They get up to mischief at this time of night.’

‘It’s not his little boy, you see.’

The funeral director looked at her.

‘I mean, he’s been good to Jamie Lee and all. Just like a proper daddy. He didn’t even mind about Jamie Lee being the way he was. But it got kind of hard. ’Specially right here at the end. Know what I mean? But Billy tried to be good to Jamie Lee. Better than Jamie’s real daddy. His real daddy never even seen him …’

‘It’s all right. I understand,’ the funeral director said gently.

‘I just didn’t want you to be thinking Billy isn’t here because he doesn’t care. It’s that he’s been working all day and he’s real tired. He’s just got a job out at the sawmill, running one of them strippers, and he comes home dog-tired from it.’

The funeral director nodded.

‘He’ll be coming tomorrow though,’ Dixie added. ‘He wouldn’t dream of missing the funeral. He was real attached to Jamie Lee.’

After the funeral director left, Dixie went over to the coffin. Jamie Lee lay on his back, his head turned slightly to one side, his eyes closed. The way he looked that moment, you really would have thought he was just asleep. He didn’t have that bluish colour of death about him. In fact, he looked better now than he had when he was alive. His poor little heart never could cope, so Jamie Lee had always looked a little blue. Now he was pink and rosy as any baby.

Dixie felt an almost overpowering urge to lift up his eyelids and see if his eyeballs were still there. She didn’t know why this insistent thought had come to her but she forced it away before it spoiled the moment.

Very gently she reached into the coffin. When she picked Jamie up he felt … odd, almost slippery; she hadn’t expected this so when his head lolled lifelessly to the side, she nearly lost hold of him. And he was so cold. Not that she hadn’t known in her head that he would be, but there’s a big difference between what your head knows and what your heart expects.

In the corner of the room was a white rocking chair. When the funeral director had shown her into the room the first time, he’d explained how sometimes mamas and daddies liked to hold their babies one last time and that was what the rocking chair was for. Taking Jamie Lee over, Dixie sat down. ‘I got you some nice new clothes.’ She laid him on her lap and reached into the carrier bag. ‘Look at what I bought you. Lookie here at these little jeans. See? Aren’t they cute? And this little shirt. It’s just like Billy’s rodeo shirt. And see these, Jamie Lee? These sweet little baby cowboy boots Auntie Leola got you? You’re going to look all snazzy when you meet Jesus.’

Tears came and she let them. It was safe here. No one to tell her not to get upset, to say how Jamie Lee had been going to die anyway, so it was better he didn’t have to suffer any more. No one to tell her she shouldn’t feel so bad, because with the kind of defects he had she should have been expecting it. No one here except the funeral man, and if he did this job every day, he had to be used to crying.

As she removed the babygrow, faintly stained with the funeral parlour make-up, Dixie thought how she had cried, too, when she’d found out she was pregnant. The last thing she’d wanted was Big Jim’s child. The relationship was already over; in fact, if it hadn’t been for Daddy making such a big deal out of saying ‘I told you so’, and how she only ever attracted trash, Dixie would have finished with Big Jim long before that. Then there she was, carrying his bastard baby. Sitting in the bathroom, with little splashes of pee still gleaming on the plastic pregnancy indicator, Dixie had stared at the thin blue line and cried so hard.

Mama, of course, had said there was no need to tell Daddy about it to begin with. You could fix things, she said, and men didn’t even have to know. But Dixie couldn’t do it. The baby was alive, and killing was killing. Maybe ordinary men wouldn’t know what she’d done, but Jesus would know and that’s what she told Mama.

Mama got angry when she’d said that. ‘You been born again or something?’ she said scornfully, ‘because this family’s not so churchified that we can give Jesus as an excuse for our own stupid behaviour. We accept ugly things need doing sometimes. That don’t make them right and that don’t mean we won’t have to pay on Judgment Day, but they still need doing. And it ain’t Jesus who’ll do them. You, of all people, should know that.’

Dixie cried then because she knew what Mama was referring to, but she still stayed firm. As ashamed as Mama and Daddy said they were of her for having a baby when she had no man, Dixie refused to get an abortion.

She’d cried again the day Jamie Lee was born, as the doctor stood over her explaining what Down’s syndrome was and how this meant Jamie Lee’s heart wasn’t made quite right and they might not be able to fix it. ‘You just done nothing but make me cry, little man,’ she whispered as she dressed his small, cold body.

Chapter Three

Spencer fiddled with the espresso maker, trying to get it to work. As always, it produced enough steam to power a locomotive, followed by a trickle of dark, murky liquid that looked like engine oil. He had been absolutely assured this was the best-quality machine around and yet it routinely turned out sludge that even Starbuck’s wouldn’t call espresso. ‘Sidonie!’ he shouted angrily and bashed the side of the machine in frustration.

When there was no answer, Spencer turned around. ‘Where the fuck is she?’

The boy, who was sitting at the kitchen island, shrugged. ‘How should I know?’ Cereal fell out of his mouth when he spoke.

‘What are you eating? You sound like a pig at the trough,’ Spencer said and came over to pick up the box of cereal.

‘Coco Pops.’

‘How the fuck did you get hold of them?’

‘The store,’ the boy replied derisively. ‘Sidonie bought them for me.’

‘Yes, well, that was a waste of money then.’ Spencer turned on the garbage disposal and emptied the contents of the cereal box into it.

‘Hey! What did you do that for?’

‘Because we don’t eat crap here. And I can’t imagine your mother lets you eat this junk either,’ he said, crumpling up the empty container. ‘She’s still in her vegan phase, isn’t she?’

‘As far as I know, they don’t kill anything to make Coco Pops,’ the boy replied.

‘Watch your mouth.’

The boy’s eyes went wide with fake innocence. ‘How am I going to do that?’ he asked and tipped his head as if trying to look down at his mouth. ‘Because my eyes are up here and my mouth is down here and I can’t see it.’

‘Cut it out.’

The kid leaped off his chair. ‘OK. So where are the scissors?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You said, “Cut it out,” so I’m just going to get the scissors.’

Angrily Spencer threw his espresso cup into the sink. There wasn’t the satisfaction of its breaking. It just clattered noisily against the metal. Coffee splashed everywhere. ‘Where the hell is Sidonie?’ he shouted at no one in particular. ‘Sidonie? Sidonie!’

The boy, his expression placid, watched Spencer storm across the kitchen.

‘I’m going out on the deck. When Sidonie finally turns up, tell her that’s where I am.’

The boy picked a bit of Coco Pops out of his teeth and flicked it off on the floor. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t yell at me. It’s not my fault I’m here. I don’t want it any more than you do.’

Spencer had only two children: Thomas and Louisa. They had been part of his ‘Life Before’ – that period of struggling early in adulthood when he was still nobody. He and Kathryn had been high-school sweethearts. Two kids in two years and a basement apartment followed, while he did Shakespeare in the Park and worked the night shift at the warehouse. His big break had come from the ignominious fact that he had been willing to play second fiddle to a ten-foot python in an experimental Off-Off-Broadway production. What that snake was getting up to with the scantily clad girl in the lead part proved so outrageously controversial that the play actually garnered an audience, although perhaps not for the reasons the playwright had intended. Spencer, seeing his chance, managed to successfully upstage both the girl and the snake.

Despite being so supportive during those lean years when Spencer was on the theatre circuit, Kathryn didn’t enjoy success when it finally came. She had liked being married to an artist but she saw herself as intellectually above being a movie star’s wife. Hers was an old Connecticut family and they didn’t ‘do Hollywood’, as she put it, which was OK with Spencer, as by that point he was no longer doing Kathryn. He had, however, taken seriously his obligations to her and to the kids, so when the divorce came, he provided well for all three of them, even in the later years, long after he and the kids had drifted out of regular contact. He paid for their braces, their private schools, their summers at camp. He paid for Thomas’s business degree at Harvard and Louisa’s long-drawn-out doctorate in ancient Persian culture, which seemed mainly to involve spending years in remote Arabian deserts peering into archaeological trenches; and he had done it all simply because they were his kids.

This boy wasn’t. Spencer didn’t care whose DNA the kid had. Phoebe had been just another of the countless good-looking girls who made it their life to follow fame. A groupie, elevated to a fuck-buddy, but nothing more. That was how the game was played, sex, drugs and fame being traded like so many casino chips. Nothing was meant for real. There was no relationship, no commitment and most definitely no baby.

She was wily, was Phoebe, and so much more of a player than Spencer had ever imagined at the time. He still found himself running those events back over in his mind, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, because he was no one’s fool. He’d always been so very, very careful to avoid just this situation. Certainly there’d been a lot of times with too much to drink, too many drugs, but even so, he’d always been careful, always taken responsibility himself. But Phoebe was just so brilliant at fucking. That was her secret weapon. If you do it so much, so often and in so many different ways, sooner or later a condom will come along that can’t cope. Either that or Phoebe had saved the spent condoms and done something kinky with a turkey baster. Spencer wouldn’t put that past her either.

When he found out about the pregnancy, Spencer thought he’d handled it all very coolly. He hadn’t got upset. He hadn’t blamed her in any way. In fact, he’d smiled and caressed her solicitously while reassuring her that he’d pay for the abortion and all her care.

Phoebe wouldn’t even consider it. No fooling that old fox. By the time Spencer had sent his lawyer around the next morning to help her see reason, she had already vanished into the mist.

The birth announcement arrived unceremoniously by email right along with the rest of the spam in Spencer’s inbox. Phoebe had named the boy ‘Tennesee’, of all things. She wasn’t even classy enough to spell it right.

Her lawyers’ letters started arriving only a few days later. It made no difference that Spencer had never wanted the child, that he had done all he could to prevent the boy’s conception and, indeed, his birth. The paternity test established Spencer was the father and that was it. The kid was the perfect blackmail tool. Whenever Phoebe wanted money, it was always ‘for the boy’ and the court always listened.

Worse was to follow, however, because motherhood didn’t suit Phoebe all that well. She frequently needed to ‘take a break’, disappearing for days, sometimes weeks at a time. To her mind it made perfect sense that she could just foist the kid on to Spencer any time she got fed up with him, because, as she pointed out, he was Spencer’s son too.

More lawyers followed and then more money, this time to hire a full-time, live-in nanny for the boy so that any time Phoebe felt the need to chant with the Indians in Colorado or beach comb in Baja, she could go. Even this, however, was not enough to free Spencer from the mess. In the latest turn of events, the new nanny had been found not to be Filipina after all but Mexican and illegal. Documents had been forged and God knows what else, and Phoebe hadn’t paid attention to any of it right up to the point where immigration officers turned up on the doorstep to take the nanny away.

A perfunctory email was all the notice Phoebe gave Spencer that she had plans to be in the Virgin Islands, so the boy was coming to him until all this nanny business was resolved. The way she worded it, you would have thought Spencer had hand-picked this crap nanny and then personally sent the immigration service in to get her. Before he could get her even to answer her fucking phone, the kid was in Montana.

Spencer was furious. The ranch had always been his private retreat. He only ever brought Sidonie. That was the whole point of Montana: to get away from the agents, the entourage, the hangers-on, the hustlers, the sycophants. The ranch was Spencer’s idyll. He hated Phoebe for tainting that, because he knew she’d done it on purpose. She lived to smear shit on anything he valued, and that’s all the boy was to him: shit.

Spencer considered those matters as he sat in the pinewood rocker on the deck. Slowly, the primeval motion calmed him. His gaze wandered to the mountains.

The ranch was tucked into the lower foothills of Lion Mountain. When sitting on the deck, his view of the massive range was oblique rather than full on, the mountains on the left of his field of vision, each rising one behind the other, their pine-covered foothills eroding down into the broad river valley below. It was a startlingly beautiful view that never lost its intensity for him. Whenever he took the time to really see it, he was always astonished by it all over again, and he liked that. It helped keep things in perspective.

‘Here.’ Sidonie appeared with a cup of espresso, properly made. She was wearing only her bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower. As she leaned down to hand him his coffee, the robe gapped to expose the moist roundness of her breasts. Spencer felt himself harden. He smiled and took the cup.

‘Do you want a croissant or anything?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m OK.’

She was barefoot. The perfume of her shower gel was still clinging to her, the robe short enough to show almost all of her long, long legs. He wanted to fuck her there and then. Spencer considered it, considered how they’d do it. He envisioned laying the robe open on the deck to make languid love there in the cool Montana morning sunshine.

Reality snapped back like a rubber band as the boy slid open the screen door and came out on to the deck. ‘Can I use your computer?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Spencer replied irritably.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I said so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I said no. I don’t want you messing up my stuff on it.’

The boy stood there. He was small for almost ten. Like his mother in that regard. Spencer had found Phoebe’s petite stature a turn-on when they’d first met. He liked his women young and nubile and Phoebe’s small size gave her a perkiness that had made her seem more youthful than she actually was. That small size wouldn’t do the boy any favours though. Women always preferred tall men.

‘Will you give me some money then?’ the kid asked.

‘What for?’

‘A game for my PlayStation.’

‘No,’ Spencer replied.

‘Why not?’

Spencer swung his arm out wide. ‘See this?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s called the out of doors.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘So go explore it.’

The kid quirked his lip up on one side in a disdainful expression. ‘And I want to do that because …?’

‘Because it’s there. Shit, Tennesee, what’s the matter with you? When I was your age, all I had was the street to play in. I would have killed to have somewhere wonderful as this.’

‘Good thing you didn’t get it then, huh? Or you’d be in prison now.’

Exasperated, Spencer rolled his eyes.

‘Can I go look around the stores in town then?’

‘When we drove through Abundance yesterday, did you see that big shopping mall?’ Spencer replied.

The boy’s expression lit up with interest. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Precisely.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘That Abundance has three thousand people living in it and it’s ninety miles from any place bigger, so you’re lucky to get milk and a newspaper. And that’s why we come here, Tennesee. That’s what we like about it. Otherwise we would stay in LA.’

‘There’s a DVD section at the back of the Pay’n Save. I could take him there,’ Sidonie offered. ‘Maybe they have games to rent.’

‘Yeah!’ the boy cried.

‘Sidonie, stay out of this. He can fucking well entertain himself.’ Spencer looked over at the boy. ‘Go down to the barn. Guff can show you the horses.’

‘I don’t like horses. They stink.’

‘I don’t care. Go down anyway. Hang out with Guff a while.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s a cowboy.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘A genuine cowboy, Tennesee.’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘So that’s cool. Cowboys are cool. He can teach you how to be a man.’

The look of contemptuous ennui on the boy’s face did away with any need for an answer.

‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ Spencer said. ‘Normal kids would be grateful for all this.’

‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ the boy replied. Then he turned and went back into the house.

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