Saul and Patsy (2 page)
What was he doing here? What was he doing anywhere?
From the house came the sound of singing: Mrs. O’Neill’s voice— Patsy didn’t sing—a choir-loft soprano, a thin Irish upper register, without resonance or depth but as piercing as a factory whistle. Saul listened, the skin on the back of his neck slowly beginning to prickle.
“Mi chiamano
Mimi,”
she was singing,
“il perchè non so. Sola, mi fo il pranzo da me stesa.”
She sang half the aria, the sound careening out of the house and dispersing in the yard. Saul felt his own mouth opening. A bird fluttered into the garage, changed course in an instant, and flew out, alighting at the top of Mrs. O’Neill’s flagpole. Saul wanted the garage door shut. He pressed the button. When he opened the door a minute later, Patsy was standing in front of it on the driveway, a plate of cookies in her hand.
“Aren’t you funny,” she said.
“She sings.” They looked at each other. “Where is she?”
“Yes, she sings. Still in the house. I noticed she had some opera records, and she said that she and her late lamented husband Earl used to listen to the Texaco broadcasts. She sings in church, as you can imagine.”
“Yeah, I guessed.”
“Anyway, she has all these records and CDs and she managed to learn some of the words. That was a demo she gave me. Want some of these cookies?”
“Of course. Dumb question.” He reached out and grabbed four off the plate. “I eat cookies while I’m deciding whether I’m going to eat any cookies.”
“She had some uncertainties about you.”
“About me? Uncertainties?”
“That’s why she wanted you to inspect her garage.”
“Oh.”
“She thought it was safe to ask me. Woman to woman.”
“What sort of questions did she have?”
“Oh, friendly questions, I think, or at least you could assume they were friendly.”
“Such as?”
“Does Saul eat cookies? Or is that against his religion?”
“Do Jews eat cookies.”
“That’s right. ‘Does he go to a temple?’ ‘Does he mind living here among us?’ She asked if we were rich. She asked if I was one of you.” Patsy bit into a cookie and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I said I was once an Episcopalian, sort of, but now I was your wife.”
“And what did she say to that?”
“She said she was glad that you liked cookies.”
“There she is.”
Patsy turned around as Mrs. O’Neill leaned out of the back door to wave them both inside. “I won’t sing anymore,” she shouted. “You two lovebirds can come in now. It’s safe.”
Through the summer they visited Mrs. O’Neill every two weeks for Sunday-afternoon picnics in the shade of her maple tree. Patsy found a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday job as a bank teller, a job that required very little training. They played Scrabble and Jeopardy, Trivial Pursuit and chess, and they listened to all their records and CDs at least twice. Patsy suggested that they travel north to explore the Upper Peninsula, but Saul said that travel was dangerous in those locales. When Patsy asked what dangers he was possibly talking about, he said that of course the Department of Natural Resources had kept the problem under wraps but that he, Saul, knew . . . things. She could not budge him. He just didn’t want to go anywhere.
They had an oddball marriage, and they both knew it. Their love for each other had created a magic circle around themselves that outsiders could not penetrate. No one who had ever met them knew what made the two of them tick; the whole arrangement looked mildly fraudulent, a Hallmark Card sort of thing. Saul’s mother, Delia, had had an unremarkable marriage and as a still-youthful widow could be gamely witty on the subject of matrimony. Her opinion was that marriage was a practical economic arrangement demanded by the raising of children. In her view, Saul was a fanatical husband, close to unpresentable when he was around Patsy. He should recognize this devotedness of his as a social problem. People who stay in that kind of love once they’re married are a burden to others, Saul’s mother intimated. They should learn to tone themselves down. They don’t mean to show off, but the show-offing happens anyway with the gestures and the endearments and the icky glances. In this regard, Saul and Patsy also perplexed their other relatives and friends, who sometimes wanted to know their secret and at other times just wanted to get away from them, quickly.
Because he loved Patsy so much, Saul was constantly disappointed with the rest of the world. It didn’t measure up. Having moved to Five Oaks, mingling with the Cossacks, Saul could feel his disappointment beginning to fester. Why couldn’t the world be more like Patsy? The rest of the world—especially where they had found themselves, here in the Midwest—presented itself as both bland and coarse. Intelligence and attention were wasted on it, he thought. It occurred to him sometimes that Patsy did not want to be loved the way he was loving her, that he was bedeviling her, but he did his best to put that thought out of his mind.
With all the time they had before school began, Saul and Patsy made love frequently as an antidote to their boredom, Patsy having decided that they should try it in every room in the house. One afternoon late in the month they spread out a blanket in the backyard, out of sight of the road, and worked up what Saul called love sweat. Patsy claimed she had never made love outdoors before and said she liked it, it was like going to the midway at the state fair, except for the grass on her bare back—they had crawled away from the blanket. She worried about ants, for which she had a repugnance. She said she liked looking into the sky and thought it would be neat to gaze at a cloud while coming. They waited for the perfect cloud, and then Saul watched her as she came. True to her word, she kept her eyes wide open, focused, on the distance.
Two
Saul having his hair cut: Five Oaks’s north-side barbershop contained four chairs, a black-and-white television set on a wheeled table, a set of old magazines, and one barber with a permanently downcast expression. An antique barber pole twirled listlessly outside the front door. The barbershop looked more like a bookie joint than a genuine barbershop. When Saul sat down in the chair, the barber, whose name was Harold, tucked his cover cloth under Saul’s collar and whistled between his teeth. “Don’t see hair like yours much around here,” he said. “It’s almost kinky, wouldn’t you say?” The barber looked young but acted old.
Saul said yes, it was almost kinky, and what he basically wanted was a trim.
The barber set to work, sneaking looks at
Days of Our Lives,
which appeared in a pointillist quilt of snow and interference on the television set. Saul closed his eyes but opened them five minutes later, feeling the barber’s hand resting peacefully on his shoulder, the scissors motionless in his hair. “Say,” Saul said, nudging the barber’s stomach with his elbow. “Are we awake here? Harold? Hello?”
The barber inhaled, exhaled, snorted, and said sure, of course he was awake. The scissors started up again, their tips scraping Saul’s scalp. “Could be I did doze off there a minute,” the barber said. “But it’s only the third . . . no, fourth time I’ve ever done that in this particular shop. I can sleep standing up, you see. Learned it in the army. Like a horse. The truth is, I have my troubles. I have woman trouble. It keeps me up part of the night, thinking about it. The soaps usually keep me awake. Are you from around here? We don’t see hair like yours too much in this town. It’s hard to cut.”
“We just moved here,” Saul said, to explain.
“From New York City, I’ll bet,” the barber, Harold, said. “They see hair like yours a lot in New York City, I hear.” He shook his head, as if to shake off his dreams. “But I imagine they have insomnia there, too. By the way, do you ever play basketball?”
Once classes at the high school had started, Saul’s route took him down Whitefeather Road for two miles before he turned left onto County Road E. On County Road E he pressed the car’s cruise-control button and removed his foot from the accelerator for the six-mile straightaway. There were no curves to the road; there never had been. With his foot off the accelerator, he ate his breakfast of Patsy’s muffins washed down with low-caffeine cola while he shaved with his electric razor and listened to the car’s tape deck, his early-morning music friend, Thelonious Monk, whose attitude toward daylight was offhand, smart, and antirural.
Three miles down County Road E and half a mile before it intersected with Bailey–Fraser Road was the morning’s bad news, standing on two legs on an average of three days a week. This bad news wore a hat and a jacket, sported gray socks and thick glasses—on some days he looked like the barber’s brother—and he stared at Saul with a mean, hateful expression.
The first few times Saul passed him, he waved. Saul didn’t expect a counterwave, and he didn’t get it. Like a sentry, the man stood glaring, an unwobbling pivot, his arms down at his sides. At last, in October, Saul slowed down on a Tuesday, and on the next day he stopped. Saul leaned out and said, “You want to say hello? Here’s your opportunity. The name’s Saul. Howdy.”
His greeting was returned with a blank look. Slowly, carefully, Saul lifted the finger to him and then hit the accelerator.
Saul to Patsy at dinner: “There’s this ghoul standing in his yard every morning giving me the Big Stare, and he’s got this hat
nailed
to his skull, and what I think is, he’s on to me, the schmuck hates Jews. Have I mentioned him? I have? He wants me out. One of these days he’s going to hoist a rifle and get me between the eyes.”
“You’re paranoid.” They were in the dining room and had been listening to Nielsen’s
Four Temperaments
Symphony, the anger movement. Choler spilled out of the speakers. It was not dinner music but an antidote to the rest of the day. Nielsen or Mingus, that was the choice.
“I’ve got a right to be paranoid,” Saul said angrily. “History encourages it. Plus, the man hates me. And for no reason: he doesn’t know me. I bet he’s a colonel in a Minuteman cadre. Or some militia or other. I’m going to get the Jewish Defense League on his case. They’ll blow him out of his yard straight into Lake Huron.”
Patsy stood up. “I’ll call Mrs. O’Neill.”
“You’d better not.” Saul looked alarmed. “What if she’s part of this conspiracy? She’d tip the rest of them off.”
Patsy shrugged. In five minutes she was back.
“Well?” While they ate, they had also been playing Scrabble, and when she was out of the room, Saul had traded two of his bad letters for better ones.
“Mrs. O’Neill says his name is Bart Connell.”
“A rabid anti-Semite.”
“Not exactly. He has Alzheimer’s. He lives with his daughter. They don’t let him stray out of the yard—we’re talking category-three dementia, living on his own private planet. He used to wander off onto the road. He flew bombing missions during the Second World War. Then he worked as a mechanic at a Ford dealership. Could fix anything. Now he can’t, quote, figure out how to put a key to a keyhole. Shame on you, Saul. He’s a plain good man with all his mind gone.”
Saul sulked.
“And put those two letters back,” she said. “I saw what you did.”
Saul’s students were younger than he remembered students were supposed to be for high school. Some were intelligent; others were not. How Saul performed in class didn’t seem to make that much difference one way or another. Those who were stupid stayed stupid, stubbornly. Some he inspired with an interest in American history, or with writing, or public speech. The work was hard, the preparations for his classes longer and more grueling than he had expected, the grading onerous, and the rewards only occasional, and he found himself now and then losing his train of thought from the effect of so many youthful eyes watching him, all those students wondering what he would do next. In the back of his classroom, the losers—those with learning deficiencies and antisocial habits—fell asleep or chewed gum or laughed inappropriately or wrote their illiterate little notes. Saul felt he should do something about them, and one of these days he would think of what that
something
would be. The mean-spirited, learning-disabled lost souls: he would attend to them sooner or later.
The Five Oaks School District was close to bankruptcy, and in his classrooms the fluorescent lights flickered or burned out and were not replaced. There was always a shortage of chalk, and the windows leaked. The district had pink-slipped its remedial-reading teacher the previous year.
In the teachers’ lounge, the talk was of their children, or health insurance, or places to go on vacation in July, or what had been on television the night before, or gossip. Sometimes Saul joined in. He often thought he was observing them and himself from a distance.
Now and then in his classrooms he watched, with sympathy and irritation, the boys and girls falling in love with each other.
One weekend evening in the late fall, an old blues guitarist whose music both Saul and Patsy liked was advertised as playing on the following Saturday night at Holbein College. The campus was on the other side of Five Oaks, about twenty minutes away. He would be performing in an auditorium in the campus student center, the ad said, and the event was open to the public, with tickets on sale at the door. The next weekend, Saul and Patsy dressed in the most drab-and-ratty clothes they still owned, to disguise themselves as postadolescent but preadult, and drove over to the campus one hour early, hoping that the concert hadn’t been sold out.
They parked in a visitors’ parking lot and walked hand in hand to the front entrance. It was a mild, cool evening with a hint of rain in the distance. Students called to each other and tossed Frisbees on the lawns. In the student union, undergraduates in the latest complicated fashions, with faces fitted out with contemporary distastes and forms of earnestness, walked past them in the foyer, paying no attention to them, transfixed with themselves alone. They were beautiful but wanted to be admired for their
minds,
of all things. Saul stopped to inhale.
“God,” he said. “I miss it. I miss being on a campus. I miss not being an adult, quite yet. I miss being twenty. I miss that stink.”
Patsy studied him. “Yeah,” she said, “you do have that nostalgia thing going on. Come on, Saul. Enough about you. I’m hungry. Let’s get me a bag of potato chips.” After buying the tickets—the concert was far from being sold out, the blues having little purchase here at Holbein College— they walked down the student union hallway to an alcove where some vending machines stood. On one of the vending machines, the dispenser of individually bagged snack foods, someone had taped a warning sign:
OUT OF ORDURE
“God, I miss it,” Saul said. “Cleverness. Verbal agility. I wonder if a French major put that up,” Saul said.
“Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette
ordure—”
“For Christ’s sake, Saul,” Patsy said, giving him a peeved look. “I know the poem.” She softened quickly. “You used to recite it to me, remember? To freak me out with Baudelaire?”
“Yeah, I was just being nostalgic. Just as you say.” They stood there and watched the students parading by, accessorized with their preoccupations, and Saul glanced over at Patsy and saw instantly that she had outgrown the glamour of youth, the metallic sheen of immaturity and total enraptured self-mindedness. She had been glad to get out into the world where she lived now; he had not. Involuntarily, he put his hand over his heart.
All through the concert he noticed from his wife’s stillness and concentration that, in fact, he understood the blues much better than she did. The old black guy up on the stage, with his gray hair and pressed pants and shoes spotted with flecks of mud, sang and played his heart out. Saul didn’t have to think about the music to get it; for him, no effort at translation was necessary.
Also, he was beginning to suffer from insomnia, just like Harold, the barber. During the day while teaching his classes, he would feel drowsy, but when his head fell onto the pillow, he would sleep for an hour and then wake with the sensation that a movie-premiere arc-light was shining in his face. Along his legs and his chest there fluttered a distinct feeling of insects. This sensation made Saul want to jump out of his skin, leave his body behind like an ill-fitting pair of pajamas. At these times, still in his cocoon-body, he lay there thinking that the meaning of a serious career and of adulthood generally had escaped him. In the middle of the night, life did not seem to be the trifling joke he once thought it might be, nor were its problems merely academic ones. Devils lurked. At such times he would take Patsy, awake or asleep, into his arms. He wanted to admit that he had made a terrible mistake and that they were suffering the consequences of his misjudgments.
After all, his brother, Howie, the entrepreneur, was on the West Coast, making West Coast money in various start-ups, fledgling technology and software projects of which Saul understood nothing. Howie was younger than Saul and already a millionaire, or so he claimed. Saul’s impression was that West Coast businesses were like West Coast football: you threw the ball up into the air and sort of expected someone to catch it, and usually someone did. Howie did not hesitate to call now and then to announce his various successes in vague incomprehensible detail. Then Saul’s mother, Delia, would call to talk about Howie’s successes to Saul, repeating the vague incomprehensible details at greater length and fuller incomprehensibility. Being an older brother whose idealism had resulted in a high school teaching job—this made Saul feel, during his bouts of insomnia at three in the morning, in his rented house, with midwestern farmland outside, as if he had been bested, outdone and undone. Sounds came up from the basement. Dream hounds bayed. Never again would he and his wife live in the fully human world. He had brought his wife out to this godforsaken place. The trouble with Patsy was that she said she liked it fine in Five Oaks. She could be sanctimonious about her adaptability. All he could do was hold on to her and wait for the hours to pass.
If anything should happen to her, he thought, he would surely die.
He climbed to the roof of the house to correct quizzes and tests. Staring out over the fields, he felt his attention disperse into the landscape, floating gradually into the topsoil, like pollen. Then he would look down and underline a sentence fragment in green ink.
Saul’s mother, Delia, had lost her husband, Saul’s father, Norman, to a premature heart attack some years ago, when Howie had been eight years old and Saul ten. In a traffic jam outside Baltimore, Norman Bernstein had died quietly and submissively inside his Buick, his head slumped over the wheel, his car clogging the already clogged arterial-highway. Thinking of this, Saul sometimes imagined his father’s coronary thrombosis producing a traffic thrombosis, blocking the flow of vehicles for hours. His self-effacing father would have hated his own death for its public-nuisance value. He would have preferred to die in a private manner that would have bothered no one.
As for Delia, Saul’s mother had had a wild youth, Saul had understood from one or two family friends who had reported that she had been a real “firecracker,” but he also inferred from her indifferent manner of talking about her husband that the marriage had been a convenience of sorts, a way of starting a family with a reliable man, a means of avoiding loneliness; and his father’s death, while certainly a shock, had not plunged her into mind-numbing grief. She had traded passion for reliability, and when a reliable man dies, he leaves behind a sufficiently huge sum of life-insurance money to take care of everybody, and Saul’s father had done exactly that. Saul missed his dull, sweet, and reliable father the way a child misses a favorite dog, but every time he tried to speak to his mother (who was still, after all, in her mid-forties) about his dad, she listened carefully but did not participate in his sorrow, perhaps on principle.
Musing about his mother, Saul recognized that she missed high school (not college, as he did) and the grand passions more than she missed her husband, who had been, in romance, a utility player. There was still an out-of-control quality to her emotions, an uncapped heat coming from her furnace heart that Saul was afraid of, both for her and himself. In her marriage, his mother had been undermatched. She was ready for a wonderful midlife crisis, and Saul was bracing himself for it.
Whenever she called, she disparaged the Midwest, and Saul’s career choice, though she was careful never to criticize Patsy, or Saul and Patsy’s unseemly love for each other. She would praise, incomprehensibly, Saul’s brother, and always refer to Howie’s good looks and his parade of girlfriends—Saul suspected his brother had boyfriends as well—and his income. It was as if Saul and Patsy’s marriage, with its crazy love, was an error in taste or judgment; it lacked the interesting variety to be found in Howie’s succession of bedmates. It lacked anecdotal value. If Saul would only return to Baltimore, his mother intimated, perhaps she could set him straight.
“Ma,” he said. “We’re staying here.” Any suggestion from his mother, no matter how sensible, had to be rejected, simply because it came from
her.
“Staying? Staying for what? For how long?”
“For as long as it takes.”
“As long as what takes? Honey, you’ll never have a normal life as long as you live there.”
“What’s normal? Explain that to me.”
“Ah, now you’re setting one of your traps. I know your tricks. You want me to say restaurants and concerts and good movies and book-stores, but I won’t.”
“They have some of those things here.”
“I didn’t say it!”
She waited. “Think of Howie’s wonderful life, out there in San Francisco. I worry about you, living on that dirt road. I don’t like dirt roads. I don’t like the people who live on them—”
“—You’ve never known anybody who lived on a dirt road, except those people, the Friedkins, who lived in that sixty-thousand-square-foot house out in that suburb where they—”
“—Let me finish. I’m not talking about the Friedkins. I’m talking about you. Earning such a lousy salary. Don’t think I don’t admire your wonderful idealism. Everyone in the family admires your wonderful idealism, Saul, you know that. But it’s like you’ve fallen into a . . .
cave.
”
“Like a bear,” Saul said, thoughtfully. “A bear in a cave. Now, that could be true.”
“So move out. Find an urban cave this time.”
“Don’t want to. I’m starting to like it here.”
“What’s to like? Dirt? Fields? Sheep?”
“They don’t have sheep here. No, I’ll tell you what there is to like about it, which you would discover if you ever came to visit.”
“What?”
“The indifference. Ma, I never lived with indifference before.”
“Indifference?”
she roared, and jingled her bracelets. He could smell her perfume over the phone. “You value indifference? Have you gone crazy?”
“You never gave me a moment of it. You never left me alone.” Saul felt himself getting angry. “You were always
kissing
me.” Actually, now that he thought about it, the kissing had occurred
before
his father died. After his father died, she stopped with the kissing. Some psychic economy had gone to work on her. He was careful not to say that his father had always been the recipient of Delia’s genial and friendly indifference. She wasn’t cold, just cool to
him.
Even as a boy, Saul knew that his father was not a passionate man, that his thermostat was set lower than his mother’s—even Saul as a boy could see that his parents’ marriage lacked something. Nevertheless, Saul’s father had managed to thrive on his wife’s indifference, until he died; in death he had finally achieved a greater indifference than hers.
“Indifference is a terrible thing, kiddo,” Delia was saying. “Awful. Cold. Cold at the heart.”
“How would you know? You’ve never lived with it,” Saul said, knowing that he was saying the-thing-which-was-not. “Imagine people not caring that much what you do. Imagine people
leaving you alone.
”
“You’re describing a nightmare.”
“Now you’re guessing. When did people ever leave you alone? When did they ever leave
me
alone? Never. That’s when.”
“Saulie, let’s not fight.” She sighed dramatically. “Furthermore, if you’re baiting me to talk about Norman, I won’t. Maybe you should move to another city. If only you were in Detroit. You have relatives in Detroit.”
“Exactly what Harold says. You been talking to him?”
“Who’s Harold?”
“He’s my barber. He says people look like me in Detroit. Or New York, I forget which.”
“Last time I talked to Patsy,” Saul’s mother said, changing the subject, “a couple of weeks back, she said you’d joined a bowling league.” Delia waited. “You, bowling? Jews don’t bowl.”
“Another eleventh commandment!” Saul protested. “Besides, what do you know about Jews?”
“I’m Jewish. That’s all I have to know about it. And I know you’re Jewish, and you’re trying to aggravate me.”
Saul felt his breathing passages getting clogged. He gasped for air. “Ma,” he said, “you’re giving me asthma. Let’s not discuss this.”
“Have you been to a doctor?” He replied with silence. “For your breathing, go to a doctor. Honey,” she said, “what am I going to say to my friends about you?”
“You can say Saul and Patsy are getting comfortable in Michigan.”
“All right, Saul. I give up. You want me to say that, that’s what I’ll say. Pour your life down the drain, if that’s your ambition. I accept it.” She sighed, a two-note sigh. “But let me tell you something, my friend. It’s not a normal life you’re leading out there.”
“Okay, Ma. I’ll bite. What kind of a life is it?”
“It’s
nothing,
and that’s my last word on the subject. You’re living in nothingness. It’ll eat you up. As anyone with a brain in his head would tell you. But I won’t interfere. Maybe nothingness suits you.”
“Oh, I thrive on it. It is my mother’s milk.”
There was a long pause.
“All right,
be
sarcastic,” she said. “I can tell we aren’t making progress. Goodbye, honey. I’ll call again in two weeks.” She made artificial and insincere kissing noises on the mouthpiece.
“Bye, Ma.” Saul hung up the telephone in the kitchen and walked into the living room, where Patsy was watching the Sunday-afternoon movie,
From Here to Eternity.
“Take off your clothes,” he said. “We’re going to mess around.”
She kept her eyes on the screen. “Not now. I don’t want to right now. At least not until this scene is over.” She glanced up at him. “Did the Marschallin call, sweetheart? You must’ve just talked to her.”
Saul waited impatiently until the movie was over.
In the April tournament held at the Aqua Bowl, Saul scored 201, 194, and 132, and at the party afterward at Mad Dog Bettermine’s summer house on the Tittabawassee River, he was exultant. Everyone had been told to bring a favorite CD to the party, and Saul, in an ironic mood that then gave way to earnestness, had brought Etta James singing Billie Holiday.
Mad Dog taught shop class and coached the wrestling team. No one had ever seen him button a collar around his own neck. For the party, his statuesque girlfriend Karla had prepared two huge casseroles, one with tuna and the other with chicken, and in the back room Mad Dog was busy rolling joints packed with the most powerful Colombian—grown, Mad Dog claimed, in the wet upper altitudes—that money could buy. Around the room on bookshelves were Mad Dog’s Lionel trains, including a complete model of the
Twentieth Century Limited
with baggage car, lounge, Pullman sleepers, diner, coaches, and engines. The track had been laid on top of a little red carpet. Sitting on a blue beanbag chair, Saul asked, his voice thickening with smoke, why Mad Dog didn’t run his trains on a layout but had set them up on a bookshelf display instead.
“These trains,” Mad Dog announced, “are too
good
to run.” He inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. “They’re classics,” he gasped. He slipped his fingers inside his shirt and started to scratch.
Saul nodded. He was wearing his bowling shirt with his name patch sewed on in front. In the next room, also thick with smoke, Patsy was dancing with Toby Finch, a fat man, as his name suggested, who taught social studies. On the other side of the room various people were tossing money on the floor as an incentive to someone to run down to the Tittebawasee River and jump into it. The money would be collected whether the daredevil wore clothes or not.
An hour later, Saul’s Etta James CD was playing, and Saul himself was standing upright in the middle of the living room, a bottle of Chablis in one hand, a cigarette in the other (he was not a smoker, but he was smoking—Saul insisted he could not be identified by the acts he occasionally performed). He was singing loudly, an unpracticed baritone. There was some muted applause and encouragement as Mad Dog appeared at one side of the room with another joint, and Toby appeared at the other, his clothes soaking wet. He was demanding cash.