A Christmas Blizzard Read Free Page B

that alarm button and nobody gets hurt. Put all your money in this bag and hand it over. Nice and slow. And then go to the bathroom and stay there for one half hour.”) and what if she laughed in your face and told you to take a hike? The “gun” in your pocket was nothing but a corn cob. On the other hand, the money was good and you kept banker’s hours. And there was plenty of time off between jobs. So there was the good and the bad. He had robbed banks in Mitchell, Pierre, Rapid City, and Billings, and was in Livingston to pull one more bank job and while he sat in his car in the parking lot, the ski mask on top of his head, composing the note, two men galloped into the bank wearing Halloween masks, pistols in hand. Their eyeholes must’ve been not lined up right because they ran right into a sculpture of a boy and his dog—one hit the boy, the other the dog—and whacked themselves in the groin and fell limp and helpless to the marble floor where a female security guard sprayed them with pepper spray. The sheer humiliation of it—to run around in Donald Duck masks and have your gonads dinged by a work of art and then get a shot of pepper in the snoot. James Sparrow gave up bank robbery in that minute. He threw away the mask and ripped up the note and went to the bar to celebrate when the old chemist leaned over and breathed on him and asked for a loan. James gave him a ten-dollar bill. The drunk looked at it and burst into tears and pulled out the formula, scrawled in pencil on Holiday Inn stationery, and offered it to him for a hundred bucks. “This is great stuff to put the lead in your pencil,” he said. The man had been fired after thirty-two years at Monsanto. He was on his way to Tucson to see his sister Kathy, he said.
    “You can’t get to Tucson on a hundred bucks.”
    The man said he had enough money for a Greyhound ticket. “They gave me a nice severance package.”
    “Where’s your stuff?”
    The man pointed with his right foot at a small red knapsack on the floor.
    “That’s it? That’s all you got?”
    He nodded.
    James got Kathy’s phone number from him. He called Greyhound and bought the ticket and called her and told her to pick up her brother Wednesday morning at 11:30 A.M. and handed him $1,250. He had enough dough, he thought it would be good luck to share. The man wept. He made James take the formula. James said, “I’ve got no use for that,” but the man insisted. “The world needs this,” he said. “That’s my baby. You take good care of her.” He slipped the paper into James’s pocket. And he picked up the knapsack and tottered out the door more or less in the direction of the depot. James took the formula to a lab in Chicago and, after some trial and error—part of the formula had been lost to whiskey stains—they came up with a compound that seemed to work. James marketed it through the Internet back when the Net was like a secret society, and within a year he had a factory in Antigua going full-steam and a mailroom with fifty employees shipping the packages out by the truckload. Oddly, 4xPrime had little or no effect on James. It only made him gloomy.
    A chance meeting with a whiskey-soaked chemist in a redneck bar in Livingston, Montana, a pool game in the background, a wiry guy with a cigarette on his lower lip and smoke in his face lining up a shot and Waylon Jennings singing about rainy-day women and a couple of them hanging around the pool game, and some scrawls on a motel notepad, and there was the start of Chapter 2 of his life, along with his hiring of some smart marketing people and a wizard accountant, and then he met Joyce and married her, and America poured money on his head, and now he was cruising at a comfortable altitude in life, and if he ran into turbulence, he could retreat to his Hawaiian estate, Kuhikuhikapapa’-u’maumau, a hundred acres walled off on the leeward side of Lanai, the old plantation house and guest house and his studio and the