A Christmas Blizzard Read Free Page A

and needy and he put his arms around her. “There’s no need to suffer,” he said. “How about I call a doctor?”
    “No need to waste a doctor’s time. It’s the common flu, darling, or whatever that jerk was passing around. I guess I’ll just stay in bed for Christmas.”
    He was going to say something about Hawaii and alternative medicine and decided not to. He put on a robe and walked barefoot across the thick gray angora carpet. A mirror hung on the wall and he ducked it. Didn’t want to see his face just now. His bland face with the light green, almost yellowish, eyes—“gecko eyes,” cousin Liz called them when they were kids. And into the hallway overlooking Lake Michigan and past the library and the dining room into the kitchen and out onto the terrace. Snow was falling. His big oak hot tub sat by the railing. He pulled off the insulated cover and steam boiled up into the cold night air. The floating thermometer said 110 degrees. He stripped off his pajamas and climbed in and sat, water up to his chin, snow falling on his head, and looked out into the darkness of the lake and thought about Hawaii. The sheer beauty of their estate at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau—and how, after a day or two, the sheer tranquility of the house and grounds worked its wonders on them. Some evenings, they would walk down the great lawn to the beach and drop their robes and walk naked into the sea and swim out a hundred yards and float there as the sun went down, to see the lights come on in the great house and the lanai and the portico around the pool, an ivory palace under the sheltering palms, as they floated in the arms of the everlasting sea, inhaling the salt air and the sweet blossomy breeze, listening to the chef’s little daughter play her one Chopin étude and the two of them transcended the Midwest and entered into a state of buoyant blessedness.

3. A brief background on how he came to acquire his enormous fortune
     
     
    H e was not sleeping well these days—ironic, considering that his financial empire was built from an energy drink called 4xPrime made from ionized chlorophyll from coyote grass; a broad-stemmed plant devoured by coyotes during mating season, that, to put it simply, gives you high energy and focus from dawn to midnight and then the equivalent of eight hours of sleep in just two hours. FourxPrime swept like prairie fire through the professional and managerial ranks in the late 1990s, word of mouth, no ads, completely under the media radar, a secret greenish liquid that millions of people knew about—a few drops in your coffee or tea and you were a monster of productivity. It didn’t work for everybody. Maybe only 20 percent of 4xPrime consumers got the full benefit, but for those people, it was rocket fuel. They worked late into the night and napped and awoke before dawn feeling fresh and ambitious and showed up at the 7:00 A.M. meeting full of fresh brilliance and maintained a killer pace all day and took home a briefcase bulging with work and delivered it in the morning all tidy and polished and never complained. All thanks to a grass that coyote eat to give them stamina to flirt and skitter and howl at the moon. The Sioux warriors who ate Custer’s lunch were tanked up on coyote grass.
    James bought the formula for $1250 from an old chemist in the Wrangler Saloon in Livingston, Montana. The man was in his cups and falling off the barstool and James was on the road selling aluminum shelving and peanut brittle. He was 32 and had no bright prospects in life, he was stumbling along from one budget motel to the next, a life of discolored TVs and lumpy beds and breakfast rooms with a ten-gallon dispenser of Cheerios and stale sweet rolls and bitter coffee. That fall, in South Dakota, he bought a ski mask and took up bank robbery, which he liked. There was stress, of course, and a constant fear of failure—you thrust the note at the teller (“Yes, you’re right. This is a robbery. Don’t push