The Policy

by Little, Bentley

• ISBN13: 9780451209542
• ISBN10: 0451209540
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA

Summary

Unemployed, divorced, and living in a new state, Hunt Jackson would be considered a risk by most insurance companies. Lucky for him, he's found one that will give him a policy. All he has to do is sign on the dotted line-and note a minor provision: they require a pound of flesh for their investment. No backing out. No joke. No running away.

Author Biography

Born in Arizona shortly after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho, Bentley Little is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of thirteen previous novels and The Collection, a book of short stories. He has worked as a technical writer, reporter/photographer, library assistant, sales clerk, phonebook delivery-man, video arcade attendant, newspaper deliveryman, furniture mover, and rodeo gatekeeper. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, he and his Chinese wife were married by the justice of the peace in Tombstone, Arizona.

Excerpts

OneHe took off a day earlier than he'd planned, leaving in the middle of the night, halfway through Conan O'Brien, and two hours later Hunt Jackson found himself speeding past Palm Springs with the windows open, heading east. With the divorce finalized, there was nothing holding him back, nothing preventing him from doing whatever he wanted, going wherever he felt like going. He was no longer confined by the daily routines of married life, by the patterns and ruts into which he'd fallen, and he was filled with a delicious sense of freedom as he sped down the windswept highway. It was a moonless night, and the stars were out in force, great swaths of the Milky Way visible even through the darkened windshield of the Saab. The Saab. When had he turned into the kind of person who drives a Saab? He didn't know, but it was so far in the past that the question felt forced, something he thought he shouldask rather than a query to which he genuinely desired an answer. Through the windshield, briefly, he saw a shooting star, far above and to the right. Though they'd been fixtures of the Tucson night sky when he was growing up, he realized that he hadn't seen a single meteor since moving to Southern California. He'd heard mentions of meteor showers on the news, comical weathermen occasionally announcing the phenomena and explaining why-because of air pollution or light pollution or the marine layer-the showers would not be visible in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas. He hadn't cared, hadn't even given it a thought, but now, out here on the open road, he realized that he missed seeing shooting stars, missed seeing the sky. A semi flew past on the left, blasting its horn at him for some imagined slight. Feeling reckless, feeling brave, he flipped on his brights and leaned on his own horn, but the speeding truck was already far ahead and his attempted defiance fell flat, his high beams shining impotently on quickly retreating tires, his honk small and ignored. He hit Blythe by three, and was past Phoenix and heading south toward Tucson well before the sun started lightening the sky above Casa Grande to the east. He stopped for breakfast at a trucker's coffee shop by the side of the highway, ordering an artery-clogging, meat-heavy meal that Eileen never would have let him eat, before continuing on. Although the split was mutual-both of them had desperately wanted out of the screaming hell their relationship had become-he'd found himself thinking a lot about Eileen lately, his life with her and his life without her, and he'd tried to imagine the future, but he could not. He had decided that he didn't want to live in Southern California anymore, and it had been an easy decision to make. There was nothing tying him there. He'd been laid off at Boeing last month during the most recent round of cutbacks and hadn't yet caught on anywhere else. Eileen had gotten the house in the settlement, so he was temporarily living in an apartment complex on the border of Seal Beach and Westminster. He was freer now than he had ever been before and perhaps might ever be again. But where did he want to live? San Francisco was a possibility. Hell, he could go anywhere he wanted. His options were open. He could move to New Orleans or New York, Miami or Seattle, Chicago or Honolulu. But that wasn't what he wanted, was it? No. He wanted to go back to Tucson. It was where he'd been born, where he'd grown up and gone to school, where he'd met Eileen. Part of it was comfort, retreat-and there was an element of failure associated with that, the sense that he was crawling home with his tail between his legs. At the same time, he would be starting anew, jettisoning the generic middle-class existence he had created for himself and beginning again, perhaps taking his life in the direction it should have been going all along. And now here he was, at a truck stop in the desert, loadin