Read Online Something for Nothing by David Anthony - Free Book Online

didn’t. And yeah, Martin’s brothers liked to mock him, calling him “the banker,” but that didn’t stop them from asking him for loans all the time. It wasn’t easy to get by as a photographer or a musician, was it?
    Martin watched the Pool Sweeper make its circuit around the pool. It was like a space ship patrolling the mini solar system of Martin’s pool. Its hoses swept around the pool’s bottom, blasting away at the algae. In some ways, Martin realized, the little machine was a real task master: it circled the pool all day and night, bringing order and cleanliness to this important part of Martin’s backyard. If you were an errant leaf or piece of walnut skin, you were in trouble.
    He sipped his coffee. It was cold. If he didn’t take the job (could you call drug smuggling a job?), he’d have to tell Linda that he was broke—that
they
were broke. And that would be very nearly as bad as giving up the Viking and the horse. Not because she’d be angry. She’d probably understand that it was the oil crisis that had done him in, rather than his own bungling (she didn’t know about the gambling debts, of course, but she didn’t know about the back taxes and the interest onthem, either). No, telling her was out of the question because she’d see him differently—look at him differently. She wouldn’t say anything, but he’d know. He’d be right back to being the guy who’d lied to her fifteen or sixteen years ago at a fraternity party in Berkeley. He’d been at Armstrong, and she was visiting from Boston for the summer, staying with her cousin. He crashed the party with a couple of friends, and when they met he told her he was a business student at Berkeley. He kept up the charade all summer, but then suddenly Linda was pregnant with Sarah. And that was that. She was Irish Catholic, and they had to get married. But he also had to tell her the truth—that he wasn’t a student at Berkeley, that the fancy house they were staying in didn’t really belong to his family (he was house-sitting for some friend of his boss’s at the car dealership where he was working), and that, yes, he’d swapped out the photos on the wall and the mantel for pictures of himself and his family.
    He’d never forget the way she’d looked at him . . . not at him, but into him. And what she saw was the person he’d tried to hide—not just from her, but from pretty much everyone. Including himself. And, he knew, if Anderson Aircrafts went bust, then the wall he’d built up brick by brick between himself and the outside world (Linda included) would come crashing down all over again. It wasn’t that he had something horrible to conceal. In fact, it was almost the opposite. His real fear was that, when exposed, the real Martin Anderson didn’t add up to much of anything at all.
    â€œFuck,” Martin said out loud, and with enough irritation that the dog’s ears went back.
    He stood up, threw the dregs of his coffee into the bushes, and within five minutes he was pulling out of his driveway and driving slowly down Miwok Drive. The realtor said that Miwok was the name of an Indian tribe that had lived in the area a hundred or so years ago. He’d pointed out that a lot of the neighborhood streets in Walnut Station had Indian names. Martin thought it was a little odd to name your streets after the people you’d exterminated to make room for you, buthe certainly wasn’t on a crusade. He wasn’t some anthropologist out from UC Berkeley looking to start protests, or put some ads on TV like the one with the Indian crying about roadside trash. Peter loved to make fun of that one. He’d recite it whenever Sarah left her socks or dirty dishes or whatever lying around the house.
    â€œSome people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” he’d say, affecting