“He took a swing at me. Imprecise, but enthusiastic.”
“He didn’t know you. Misinterpreted the gray hair.”
Even under the grime, I could see that Amanda’s olive skin was approaching its palest state—which on her showed more as a spectrum shift from the deep reddish brown of summer to a slightly yellow cast that a few bright days in May would quickly dissolve.
“How long had he wanted to team up with you?” I asked.
She shook her head and shrugged.
“I don’t remember exactly. He came by the job here and tried to get me into a conversation. It took a while for him to come out and say he wanted to form a partnership. I tried to be polite, but all I could think was, how ludicrous. Then he left and I forgot all about it. Until he spotted me in the restaurant.”
Holding her, I thought she felt thinner than I’d remembered, more fragile.
“And what do you mean by damning evidence?” she asked.
“He was killed with my hammer stapler. I bought it last year to install the insulation in my addition.”
The worry on her face that had been competing with other emotions took over. Worry and disbelief.
“That’s just nuts,” she said. “How can they be sure?”
“Fingerprints. And it still had the bar code from the store. It’s mine.”
I explained what else they had on me. Including my footprints all over the scene.
“Of course your footprints were there. We went there together so you could show me all the wrong things they were doing. A lesson in crappy carpentry, I think is what you said.”
“You’ll need to say that, too,” I said. “About being there. You can hold on the construction critique.”
“Burton won’t let this get too far,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”
“Jackie’s my lawyer. Burt’s consulting.”
“You can’t ask for more than that,” she said, her voice pitched for ambiguity.
Jackie had defended Amanda’s husband after he’d tried to defraud her. There wasn’t much Jackie could do to save him from the foregone conclusion, but she mounted a spirited defense. Everything she did was spirited. But you couldn’t blame Amanda for having a few mixed feelings.
I cast about for a change of subject.
“Any more trouble with the houses?” I asked.
“Can’t do much more with this one. So I had a security company concentrate on the other site,” she said. “All quiet so far. The only thing worth reporting was a guy in an old Pontiac who drove by every day, slowing down when he
passed the house. I told them if he made a move to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“Is that your philosophy?” she asked. “Always play it safe?”
“Yes. In principle. More honored in the breach.”
“I think it’s safe enough to take a walk, what do you say?”
She took my hand and led me toward the street, then north toward the bay.
Eddie took the lead and we followed him through the neighborhood of plain but cared-for single-story houses that Amanda owned along the lagoon to the east. For years they’d been occupied by long-term, year-round renters, but most of those people had died, or retired to Florida, or wised up in time to buy a place of their own before real-estate prices in the Hamptons wiped out its own middle class. Now they were mostly seasonal rentals, though at least one had emerged as a full-time group home for an illegally large number of immigrant laborers.
I asked her about it.
“I can’t have the place teeming with people, but I’m not going to throw them out,” she said. “Everybody wants them to cut the lawns and clean the toilets, then just disappear at night like vampires in reverse.”
“You got bigger issues than that,” I said. “Like the DEC?”
She looked up at me.
“You heard? That was quick.”
“Jackie caught word of something down at Town Hall. I just guessed it was environmental.”
Several houses down from the group rental, right before a swath of wetlands that fronted the Little Peconic, was the house Amanda had grown up in. It was the freshest-looking place in the neighborhood. She’d had the exterior completely refurbished and the grounds professionally landscaped.
Nobody lived there, but housecleaners and gardeners came and went to maintain the property in its pristine, revitalized condition.
She squeezed my arm as we walked by, but whatever associations the sight of the house had stirred were left unspoken.
Eddie caught the smell of the wetlands and hurtled ahead, ears up and tail fully raised. The breeze picked up as we moved closer to the water, a sturdy northwesterly bearing the aroma of the saline, mildly putrescent tidal marsh tucked in behind the narrow pebble beach. Various species of seabird took flight in a burst of fluttery panic, flushed out of the tall grass by Eddie’s unwelcome arrival.
The road ran over a narrow causeway across the wetlands and stopped at the beach, which you entered by squeezing through a white-painted barrier intended to prevent SUVs from trampling the wildlife preserve. Amanda led the way to a dry strip just shy of the tidal line, where she dropped to the ground and lay flat on her back, arms out and feet crossed. I joined her, noticing the deepening blue sky for the first time, etched as always by the leisurely flight paths of gliding gulls and hulking terns.
“I’m screwed,” she said, after a few minutes.
“Put that in layman’s terms.”
“I’m thoroughly screwed.”
“Oh,” I said.
“The DEC has shut me down pending a further investigation into why they should or shouldn’t ruin my life.”
“I thought you had all that stuff worked out.”
“I had a full phase-one environmental study completed and approved.”
“I remember. I was there for the celebration. Party of two, as I recall.”
“I recall being issued building permits for a half dozen houses. One of which I’d be installing carpets in right now if it hadn’t been for the pyrotechnics.”
“The DEC trumps the local boys. Even I know that,” I said.
“The DEC were the ones who passed on phase one in the first place. I had a whole testing crew on the WB site for a week. I took them into every nook and cranny and fed them coffee and expensive pastries—even offered to launder their gaudy orange jumpsuits.”
“Must have changed their minds.”
She was quiet again for a minute.
“I guess. I don’t know. Who knows?” she said, finally.
“Are you allowed to clean up the burn site?”
“Probably not, technically. But I’m not losing that crew. Too hard to replace.”
“So you don’t know what caused the change of heart.”
“Nothing they’re willing to share. All I have is some bureaucratic gobbledygook about new information and my options for redress. That’s a laugh.”
“They might just want to double-check. Sniff around a little, write a report, hit the town and go back with tales of drunkenness and cruelty.”
She scooped up a handful of smooth rounded pebbles and tossed them at the water. I heard two or three plunks.
“That’s an uncharacteristically optimistic thing to say,” she noted.
“Always been a fan of a half-full glass.”
Some more time went by, which Amanda filled by tossing pebbles into the bay. Eddie checked in on us, licking our faces to make sure we weren’t dead. His breath was perfumed with the dross that collected along the bay shore.
“I’ve always just done what I’m supposed to do,” said Amanda. “I bought all the bullshit about how to be a person,
and all that’s ever come of it is crap. I used to have nothing and life was crap, and now I have so much, and it’s still crap. Tell me why I should keep trying to make something worthwhile out of all of this …”
“Crap?”
Amanda was a person I always had a hard time getting into focus. That was my fault, not hers. Even when she was right in front of me, or like now in profile, something about her or me made it impossible to know if I was really seeing her at all.
“I’ve been getting into Kant,” I added. “Maybe he knows.”
“Who else reads all the books the rest of us tried to avoid in college?”
“You need to meet more retired fighters. The heavyweights are a bunch of crazy existentialists. Just love
Being and Nothingness.”
“That’s sounds more up my alley.”
“Not if you ask me. If somebody said, ‘What’s up with that chick Amanda Anselma?’ would I say, ‘Oh, you mean Ms. Abject Fatalist? Ms. Existential Despair?’ No, probably not.”
“I can’t believe it. You’re actually trying to cheer me up.”
“That’s what I do. Spread cheer wherever I go. A mission from God.”
She laughed a not entirely cynical little laugh.
“Weren’t you the one who said God had a lousy sense of humor?” she asked.
“No. I said God wanted to be a practical joker, but had trouble coming up with jokes that were actually funny.”
“Maybe only to Him.”
“Another question for Sartre.”
“Maybe he knows why God doesn’t want me to develop Jacob’s Neck.”
“With all due respect, I think the Almighty’s got other things to do. The answer to that is entirely within our ability to grasp.”
“So you think there is something going on?” she asked. “Not just rotten coincidence?”
“Rotten, yeah. Not sure about anything else.”
“Meaning you’re only partly sure, but you’re not going to talk to me about it.”
“Engineers keep half-baked hypotheses to themselves.”
“Oh, now we’re engineers. Do they read Kant?”
“Only the empiricists. In between crossword puzzles.”
“Let me know when one of those hypotheses is ready to come out of the oven.”
“Only if we get to celebrate.”
“Half-full glasses all around.”
Eddie and I escorted her back to her burned-out house. I opened the door to the Grand Prix so Eddie had a place out of the way to curl up, which he was more than happy to do.
I spent the rest of the day helping Amanda and her crew pick through the charred remains and assess what might be saved. She was expecting experts to come by the next day, which is why she wanted to clear out as much of the clutter and destruction as possible.
It looked to me like the first-floor joist system and a big part of the northwest corner were salvageable. As were all the mechanicals in the basement. I pointed that out, which I pretended cheered her up a little.
It was dusk when we made it back to Oak Point. I’d dragged my homemade Adirondacks out to the edge of the lawn facing the Little Peconic at the first hint of warming weather. It was too cool for rational people to sit outside and drink, but that’s what we did anyway, which speaks to the prevailing state of our rationality. Amanda even had a special
concoction her friends in the City had stuffed into her suitcase, a customized cosmopolitan mix featuring Absolut Citron and pomegranate juice.
“What a thing to do to an innocent vodka,” I complained.
“Vodka’s never innocent, and even empiricists need to try something different once in a while.”
It wasn’t bad if chilled properly, especially after the second or third glass. And the air wasn’t as cold as it should have been, or maybe we were warmed by seasonal expectations, reflected back upon us by the iridescence of a moonlit Little Peconic Bay.
“I think I’m getting hungry,” said Amanda eventually “It’s all the pomegranate juice. Whets the appetite.”
“I’m too loopy to cook. But I bought lots of cold edibles that’re in the fridge.”
“After I wash this crud off of me.”
“Agreed.”
I went down the basement hatch and turned on the water to the outdoor shower. The faucets were already open, so the water would be warmed up by the time I stripped off my clothes. There was still a slight danger of freezing temperatures, so I was pushing the timing a little, but next to sleeping out on the uncomfortably chilly screened-in porch in early spring there was nothing like a stupidly frigid outdoor shower.
It was too dark to see the cloud of vapor, but I could feel it when I stepped into the enclosed shower stall. I stood motionless under the scorching stream for a few minutes, lost in the feeling of the water as it steamed away the day’s accretion of stress, effort and avoidance.
I kept soap and shampoo in a little cedar cabinet mounted to the wall. I think I was about to reach over to pop it open when a tiny click, like the snap of a very thin glass straw, went off somewhere deep inside my head. A shrill ring followed
the click, which would have drawn more of my attention if my throat hadn’t choked on the air and my heart rate hadn’t suddenly ripped into a thudding staccato. The floor of the shower stall began rocking like a washtub caught in a ship’s wake, sloshing up and down at random forty-five degree angles. And then all the way to ninety degrees and over I went, my left shoulder absorbing most of the fall.
The phrase “my heart beat right out of my chest” ran across my mind as I felt the pounding heartbeats interrupt every shallow breath. The shower stall by now was rotating like a carnival ride, and all sense of up and down, side to side vanished. The ring in my ears was escalating into a siren. I somehow made it to my hands and knees, feeling the slippery redwood slats that formed the floor.
The world continued to turn and spin, but I stopped caring about that and concentrated on slowing my heart. I wondered, how much can it take? Can a heart actually beat itself to death? I sat on the floor and wedged myself against the wall, steadily slowing my breathing, cupping my hands over my mouth to retrieve CO
2
.
Then I suddenly couldn’t breathe. My throat clamped shut and the siren in my head began to crackle, and then decayed into a wet scream. A scream no one could hear because it wasn’t audible to the world. It was all inside my head.
Another voice was in there, too, questioning, is this it? Is this what we’ve all been waiting for? Is this how the end feels—hot, wet and naked, screaming silently into your hands as you wait for the final ball of incandescence to burn it all away?
I didn’t get the answers, but I was still producing questions when I heard another click, or more like a dull thud, that instantly caused everything to go black as time, as consciousness and further interrogatives flicked into oblivion.