Waveland by Frederick Barthelme

door at Monkey, who was on the other side of the screen looking in. “He's had his pills? Does Eddie know about the pills?” Vaughn said.
    “Yes,” she said. “I wrote everything down and marked the bottles.”
    “What about the Frontline?”
    “He's got a couple weeks yet.”
    “Eddie can bring him over sometime,” he said.
    “Yeah,” she said. “That'll be good.”
    “I'm thinking we take our stuff, make a beachhead, then head out for a movie or something. How about that?” “No movies until one, Vaughn,” Greta said, “lust an idea,” he said.
    Eddie rode over to the house with them to help with the move. Vaughn thought he just wanted to be included, or maybe wanted to see where Vaughn had come from.
    The house in Hidden Lake wasn't distinguished in design, or finishes, but it was more house than they'd had before— four bedrooms, three and a half baths, brick, two-story with wood floors and high ceilings, a glassed-in office off the deck, and a large kitchen. It was too big and they knew it, but they took it anyway. They got a good mortgage, so the payments weren't too bad. The lot was around an acre, maybe an acre and a quarter, and it curled along this small lake in the back and had a dead-end road in front, a cul-de-sac called Tilted Tree Lane. There were big oaks and sixty-foot pines in the front, and river birches and weeping willows out back. The house had a three-car garage, which was suddenly useful, though it had never been useful before, except as storage.
    Gail had money, family money, but it didn't show up too much in the marriage. Vaughn never asked. She had people that dealt with it. She'd get mail and occasionally telephone calls, but she had little interest in the money or what she could do with it, little interest in spending it. He knew they were safe buying the house, because if worse came to worst, she could just handle it. They mentioned this, but only in passing, when they bought, and it never came up again. Her money wasn't a source of difficulty for them, though therewas a sense in which they were both aware of it, a kind of lingering, out-of-sight
thing
between them.
    There were four bedrooms. Under the new arrangement, Gail had the master, he and Greta took two rooms on the south side next to each other, both rooms on the front of the house looking out on the yard and the cul-de-sac. There was a balcony that ran along the outside of the house between the rooms.
    Eddie came upstairs with the last of the suitcases. “This place is the shit,” he said. “I'd like to live here myself.”
    “You've earned it,” Greta said. “But you have duties in Waveland.”
    “There's another bedroom,” Gail said, adjusting her hair as she walked into the room. “We'll make it a foursome.”
    Eddie did a weird little head shake. “Can't. I've got to do my research anyway. My laboratory is over there. All my paperwork is there.”
    “What research?” Gail said.
    “He's keeping tabs on the government,” Greta said.
    “Yeah, just little stuff,” Eddie said. “Though I'm thinking this Pentagon conspiracy deal is real.”
    “Which Pentagon conspiracy is that?” Gail said.
    “Nine-Eleven. A lot of people think it was a rocket, maybe fired from an Air Force plane, that hit the Pentagon.”
    “Oh, for heaven's sake,” Greta said.
    “I don't make the stuff up,” Eddie said. “There's a whole theory; people are all over it—lectures, photos, sound recordings, proofs of all kinds.”
    “Charts and graphs,” Vaughn said.
    “So where's the plane? Wasn't there a plane?” Gail said.
    “I don't know where the plane is,” Eddie said. “I think that's part of the problem.”
    “Where do people say the plane is?”
    “They don't know where the plane is either,” he said.
    “It's probably still out there,” Vaughn said. “Flying around. Sort of like
Mr. Arkadin.”
Everyone looked at him. He said, “Orson Welles. Very famous.”
    “One of Vaughn's favorites, apparently,”