Innocent Foxes: A Novel

‘I’m going out on the deck. When Sidonie finally turns up, tell her that’s where I am.’

The boy picked a bit of Coco Pops out of his teeth and flicked it off on the floor. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t yell at me. It’s not my fault I’m here. I don’t want it any more than you do.’

Spencer had only two children: Thomas and Louisa. They had been part of his ‘Life Before’ – that period of struggling early in adulthood when he was still nobody. He and Kathryn had been high-school sweethearts. Two kids in two years and a basement apartment followed, while he did Shakespeare in the Park and worked the night shift at the warehouse. His big break had come from the ignominious fact that he had been willing to play second fiddle to a ten-foot python in an experimental Off-Off-Broadway production. What that snake was getting up to with the scantily clad girl in the lead part proved so outrageously controversial that the play actually garnered an audience, although perhaps not for the reasons the playwright had intended. Spencer, seeing his chance, managed to successfully upstage both the girl and the snake.

Despite being so supportive during those lean years when Spencer was on the theatre circuit, Kathryn didn’t enjoy success when it finally came. She had liked being married to an artist but she saw herself as intellectually above being a movie star’s wife. Hers was an old Connecticut family and they didn’t ‘do Hollywood’, as she put it, which was OK with Spencer, as by that point he was no longer doing Kathryn. He had, however, taken seriously his obligations to her and to the kids, so when the divorce came, he provided well for all three of them, even in the later years, long after he and the kids had drifted out of regular contact. He paid for their braces, their private schools, their summers at camp. He paid for Thomas’s business degree at Harvard and Louisa’s long-drawn-out doctorate in ancient Persian culture, which seemed mainly to involve spending years in remote Arabian deserts peering into archaeological trenches; and he had done it all simply because they were his kids.

This boy wasn’t. Spencer didn’t care whose DNA the kid had. Phoebe had been just another of the countless good-looking girls who made it their life to follow fame. A groupie, elevated to a fuck-buddy, but nothing more. That was how the game was played, sex, drugs and fame being traded like so many casino chips. Nothing was meant for real. There was no relationship, no commitment and most definitely no baby.

She was wily, was Phoebe, and so much more of a player than Spencer had ever imagined at the time. He still found himself running those events back over in his mind, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, because he was no one’s fool. He’d always been so very, very careful to avoid just this situation. Certainly there’d been a lot of times with too much to drink, too many drugs, but even so, he’d always been careful, always taken responsibility himself. But Phoebe was just so brilliant at fucking. That was her secret weapon. If you do it so much, so often and in so many different ways, sooner or later a condom will come along that can’t cope. Either that or Phoebe had saved the spent condoms and done something kinky with a turkey baster. Spencer wouldn’t put that past her either.

When he found out about the pregnancy, Spencer thought he’d handled it all very coolly. He hadn’t got upset. He hadn’t blamed her in any way. In fact, he’d smiled and caressed her solicitously while reassuring her that he’d pay for the abortion and all her care.

Phoebe wouldn’t even consider it. No fooling that old fox. By the time Spencer had sent his lawyer around the next morning to help her see reason, she had already vanished into the mist.

The birth announcement arrived unceremoniously by email right along with the rest of the spam in Spencer’s inbox. Phoebe had named the boy ‘Tennesee’, of all things. She wasn’t even classy enough to spell it right.

Her lawyers’ letters started arriving only a few days later. It made no difference that Spencer had never wanted the child, that he had done all he could to prevent the boy’s conception and, indeed, his birth. The paternity test established Spencer was the father and that was it. The kid was the perfect blackmail tool. Whenever Phoebe wanted money, it was always ‘for the boy’ and the court always listened.

Worse was to follow, however, because motherhood didn’t suit Phoebe all that well. She frequently needed to ‘take a break’, disappearing for days, sometimes weeks at a time. To her mind it made perfect sense that she could just foist the kid on to Spencer any time she got fed up with him, because, as she pointed out, he was Spencer’s son too.

More lawyers followed and then more money, this time to hire a full-time, live-in nanny for the boy so that any time Phoebe felt the need to chant with the Indians in Colorado or beach comb in Baja, she could go. Even this, however, was not enough to free Spencer from the mess. In the latest turn of events, the new nanny had been found not to be Filipina after all but Mexican and illegal. Documents had been forged and God knows what else, and Phoebe hadn’t paid attention to any of it right up to the point where immigration officers turned up on the doorstep to take the nanny away.

A perfunctory email was all the notice Phoebe gave Spencer that she had plans to be in the Virgin Islands, so the boy was coming to him until all this nanny business was resolved. The way she worded it, you would have thought Spencer had hand-picked this crap nanny and then personally sent the immigration service in to get her. Before he could get her even to answer her fucking phone, the kid was in Montana.

Spencer was furious. The ranch had always been his private retreat. He only ever brought Sidonie. That was the whole point of Montana: to get away from the agents, the entourage, the hangers-on, the hustlers, the sycophants. The ranch was Spencer’s idyll. He hated Phoebe for tainting that, because he knew she’d done it on purpose. She lived to smear shit on anything he valued, and that’s all the boy was to him: shit.

Spencer considered those matters as he sat in the pinewood rocker on the deck. Slowly, the primeval motion calmed him. His gaze wandered to the mountains.

The ranch was tucked into the lower foothills of Lion Mountain. When sitting on the deck, his view of the massive range was oblique rather than full on, the mountains on the left of his field of vision, each rising one behind the other, their pine-covered foothills eroding down into the broad river valley below. It was a startlingly beautiful view that never lost its intensity for him. Whenever he took the time to really see it, he was always astonished by it all over again, and he liked that. It helped keep things in perspective.

‘Here.’ Sidonie appeared with a cup of espresso, properly made. She was wearing only her bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower. As she leaned down to hand him his coffee, the robe gapped to expose the moist roundness of her breasts. Spencer felt himself harden. He smiled and took the cup.

‘Do you want a croissant or anything?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m OK.’

She was barefoot. The perfume of her shower gel was still clinging to her, the robe short enough to show almost all of her long, long legs. He wanted to fuck her there and then. Spencer considered it, considered how they’d do it. He envisioned laying the robe open on the deck to make languid love there in the cool Montana morning sunshine.

Reality snapped back like a rubber band as the boy slid open the screen door and came out on to the deck. ‘Can I use your computer?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Spencer replied irritably.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I said so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I said no. I don’t want you messing up my stuff on it.’

The boy stood there. He was small for almost ten. Like his mother in that regard. Spencer had found Phoebe’s petite stature a turn-on when they’d first met. He liked his women young and nubile and Phoebe’s small size gave her a perkiness that had made her seem more youthful than she actually was. That small size wouldn’t do the boy any favours though. Women always preferred tall men.

‘Will you give me some money then?’ the kid asked.

‘What for?’

‘A game for my PlayStation.’

‘No,’ Spencer replied.

‘Why not?’

Spencer swung his arm out wide. ‘See this?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s called the out of doors.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘So go explore it.’

The kid quirked his lip up on one side in a disdainful expression. ‘And I want to do that because …?’

‘Because it’s there. Shit, Tennesee, what’s the matter with you? When I was your age, all I had was the street to play in. I would have killed to have somewhere wonderful as this.’

‘Good thing you didn’t get it then, huh? Or you’d be in prison now.’

Exasperated, Spencer rolled his eyes.

‘Can I go look around the stores in town then?’

‘When we drove through Abundance yesterday, did you see that big shopping mall?’ Spencer replied.

The boy’s expression lit up with interest. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Precisely.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘That Abundance has three thousand people living in it and it’s ninety miles from any place bigger, so you’re lucky to get milk and a newspaper. And that’s why we come here, Tennesee. That’s what we like about it. Otherwise we would stay in LA.’

‘There’s a DVD section at the back of the Pay’n Save. I could take him there,’ Sidonie offered. ‘Maybe they have games to rent.’

‘Yeah!’ the boy cried.

‘Sidonie, stay out of this. He can fucking well entertain himself.’ Spencer looked over at the boy. ‘Go down to the barn. Guff can show you the horses.’