You could feel the rain coming, the air held a pregnant dampness and the wind was flexing its muscles. I headed back down the hill feeling like a foreigner, like none of the survival tricks that Brooklyn had taught me would serve in this strange place.
Three
THE LITTLE BASTARD WOKE ME UP at five o'clock in the morning.
"Poppy!" he bellowed. I came instantly awake, bolt upright in the bed, my heart pounding as my brain struggled to remember where the hell we were. "Poppy, the hoss!" I might have known. "He's getting away!"
"Jesus Christ."
"Poppeeee
"
"No yellin' in the house. Didn't I tell you that already? You probably woke up the whole damn neighborhood." I could hear Louis Avery in another room somewhere, chuckling. "Lemme see," I said, and rolled out of bed and went to kneel next to Nicky in front of the window. The horse was standing in the pasture behind the barn. In the early-morning light it looked cold outside. The storm or squall or whatever it had been had blown on past during the night. At the back of the pasture, right up next to the wagon track I had walked up last night, the storm had ripped a huge tree from the ground, roots and all, leaving a big black gout of exposed earth behind where the tree lay sprawled in the grass. "The horse is not running away, he's eating his breakfast. Did you brush your teeth and wash your face and hands and all that stuff?"
"No." He stood at the window, looking like he wanted to fly right through it, down to the pasture to go visit that stupid horse.
"Well, why don't you go do that? Then we can go look at the horse." Might as well resign yourself, I thought. No way he's letting you get any more sleep this morning.
Louis met us in the kitchen. "You lost a tree," I told him.
"Red oak," he said. "Seen it when I let the hoss out. Guess I'll have to cut her up for firewood. I was leaving that one, she was too pretty to cut down." He shook his head, looking like he'd lost some old and good friend.
"You need a hand chopping it up?"
"Kind of you to offah," he said. "Let's go take a look." Nicky was over at the window, peering out. "Come on, Nicholas," he bellowed, his voice as loud as Nicky's had been, "come on, let's get going."
I was thinking what a forgiving soul Eleanor Avery must be, all that noise in her house so early in the morning. I paused when I went through the door, looking down at the stairs to the Averys' yard. Some nocturnal drama had played to the sleeping house sometime during the night, leaving three small bloody footprints on the wood of the bottom step. Louis paid them no attention on his way past. Perhaps such markings had been a common occurrence in his life and therefore unworthy of comment, or maybe a guy who spends his life in the country is better acquainted with the base realities of existence and thus accepts as normal things which somebody like me does not, insulated as I have been from the real world by the amazing construct of steel, glass, concrete, and imagination called New York City. In my mind I had, up until that point, divided living beings into four convenient categories: humans, vermin, animals in the zoo, and animals on television. Birds didn't count.
We humans kill each other with numbing frequency. We do it because we are fucked up, deficient mentally or morally or both. We do it because we want the other guy's money, or his wife or his car, or because he made our son sit too long on the bench at Little League, or because he cut in front of us on the highway, or maybe he just pissed us off. Or for the rush, you know, for the hell of it. All of that is common knowledge, publicly reenacted every day, repeated so often that no one bothers to keep score. You have to either target a celebrity or else do something truly gaudy or vile to rate much notice. But that's just us, just the humans, and it's understandable because we are assholes, most of us, rash, ruled by our passions, blinded to our better natures by greed or stupidity. I know that you and I would both like to believe otherwise, but the facts are beyond dispute, really they are, all you have to do is pick up the newspaper.
My problem was, I had always assumed it was only us, that the natural world was better than we were, that peace or at least some kind of coexistence was the rule, that we were an aberration, that life was different, that if we could only open our eyes we would see it, that we could transcend our present travails and animosities, become nobler beings and live as God or Nature had truly intended. But there it was, right under my feet. It was the same old story, history written in the blood of the loser.
Louis came back to see what I was looking at. "Raccoon," he said. "Musta got a chicken." He went off into the barn to look, came out a minute later. "Don't see none missing," he said, shrugging. "You ready to go?"
Avery handled his chain saw like an artist. He hopped up on the trunk and walked its length, holding the saw one-handed and nipping off the small branches. When he got to the end he jumped down and went to work in earnest, filling the air with noise and smoke and small wood chips. Nicky watched from a safe distance, the way I'd told him to, his interest more or less evenly divided between the horse and Avery's chain saw.
Those of us who earn our living sitting on our asses, or even climbing up drainpipes to second-story windows, cannot truly appreciate the physical demands of doing a chore like cutting firewood. I found out that morning that lifting weights and working Nautilus machines is no substitute for wrestling with four-foot sections of tree, bending down, getting one end up in the air, leaning the thing against your shoulder, grabbing the bottom end and standing up, humping the surprising weight over to the truck, laying it down with enough care that it does not punch a big hole in the rusted bed of the truck, grappling over and over with objects supposedly inanimate, but which seem to take sadistic pleasure in ripping the skin from your hands. I got into it, though. I hadn't seen the inside of a gym since a couple of days before I bought the van. It felt good, even though I knew I was going to be sore the next day.
"Son of a ho-ah," Louis said, wiping his forehead and sitting down on the log he'd been cutting. "I can't keep up with you young fellas anymoah. You know how ta handle a standid?"
"A standid? Oh, drive with a clutch. Yeah, sure."
"Wiseahss," he said. "Why don't you run that last load on down the hill while I set here and catch my breath."
Louis's Jeep had no power steering, no synchromesh transmission, and the clutch engaged right at the bottom quarter inch of pedal travel, but I got it down the hill okay. I was shoving the logs off the back when a big Ford pickup about fifty years newer than Louis's turned into his driveway and powered smoothly and silently up the hill. "Calder's Blueberries" was stenciled on the door. A bearish-looking guy got out and ambled over. He was an inch or so shorter than me, but round, with thick black hair on his arms, a barrel chest, ample stomach, Coke-bottle glasses, short black beard, black hair thinning on top. "Sam Calder," he said, reaching out a hand. "You must be Manny."
I must have looked surprised shaking his hand.
"Small towns," he said with a rueful smile. "Word travels fast. We've got nothing better to do, you would think. I heard your car broke down, and that Gevier ordered the parts for it yesterday, and he thinks they'll be here day after tomorrow. And I know you have a little boy with you, whose name is Nicky."
"Jesus."
"Don't think poorly of us for it," he said. "All we have to talk about is each other."
"How come you don't have the accent?"
"I went to Columbia for six years," he said, looking wistful. "I lived on One hundred fifth and Riverside Drive."
"You sound like you miss it."
"Something wicked," he said. "I go back as often as I can manage. At least two weeks a year, that's what it takes to keep me sane." He looked at the pile of four-foot tree sections over by the entrance to the barn. "Louis working up in the woodlot?"
"No," I said. "He's cutting up a tree in the top end of his field, out back there. You need him?"
He nodded. "I have to talk a little business to him."
"You want a ride up?"
He looked at the Jeep. "In that?" He shook his head. "Louis is going to kill himself in that thing someday. He has to be the most stubborn man I've ever met. Suppose we walk."
"All right. Why do you say he's stubborn?"
Calder glanced back at the house, then at me. "He could afford a better truck if he wanted it. I've been trying to get him to come work for me for a good ten years. A regular job, with a steady paycheck. He's a smart guy, he's dependable, resourceful, just the kind of man you'd want to put in charge of, say, plant maintenance. He won't hear of it, though. He would rather scratch for a living on his own, you know, cut pulp logs and Christmas trees, rake blueberries, dig clams, put a new roof on somebody's barn once in a while. He works his ass off when he can find something profitable to do, and he starves the rest of the time. No pension, no health insurance, and he drives that wreck of a Jeep. Grows most of his own food, shoots deer out of season
. It's his life, I suppose, but Eleanor deserves better. Not that anyone asked me. He'd be much better off working for me, though, and I could really use him."
We started up the hill. "You come out to make another pitch?"
"Nah. Waste of breath. No, he owns a piece of property up in Eastport, and I've been trying to get him to sell it to me."
"That right?"
"Yeah. My father's trying to buy it to put together a development deal, and I don't want it to go through. We don't need any more damned industry up here. You want to live around developments, you should move to the city." He glanced at me. "I don't mean to bore you with local gossip."
"That's all right. You think Louis will sell to you?"
Calder shook his head. "Louis Avery is a stubborn, stubborn man. Actually, I don't care that much if he sells it to me or not. I just want to make sure he doesn't sell it to my father."
Louis was still sitting down on what was left of the tree, the bottom part of the trunk that had gone from the ground up to where the first branches had split off. It looked too big to cut, but I didn't think Louis would leave it there to rot. Just because I didn't know how to get the thing whacked into pieces small enough to burn in his woodstove didn't mean that he couldn't do it.
"Hello, Louis."
"Hi, Sam. How are you."
"Finestkind," said Sam. I assumed he was trying to sound indigenous. "I hope I'm not interrupting your work."
"No, no," Louis told him. "The boy's got me worn right down to the nub. A man shouldn't have to work this hard before he's even had his breakfast. I guess it takes a lot of wood to heat Noo Yok City. What can I do for you?"
Calder heaved a sigh. "I think my father's getting ready to make you another offer. You know I don't want him to go through with this, Louis. Between you and me, I want to match whatever he offers you."
"That right? Manny, you and Nicky want to go have some breakfast? I might have to slap old Sam around a little here, and it won't be pretty to watch."
Calder looked at me and rolled his eyes.
"C'mon, Nicky, let's go eat."
* * *
Eleanor was looking out her kitchen window at Sam Calder's truck, clucking her tongue. "Good morning," I said. "I hope Nicky didn't wake you up too early this morning."
"Oh, no," she said. "I was awake. Is Sam junior up there yammering at Louis about that damned field up to Eastpoht again?"
"Yeah. Says he doesn't want him selling to his father."
"Everyone has an opinion," she said. "I wish they would just leave us alone about it." She looked at Nicky. "Dear, would you like some breakfast? Do you like bacon and eggs?"
Nicky nodded. "Yeah," he said.
"You mean 'Yes, please,'" I told him.
"Huh?"
"Say 'Yes, please.'"
He looked at me, mystified. "Yes, please."
"Not to me, I'm not cooking your breakfast."
"Oh." He looked at Eleanor. "Yes, please."
"Why don't you have a seat right over at the table," she said to him. "Manny, would you like some coffee?"
"I'd love it." I saw Nicky give me a look. "I mean, yes, please." I felt a little weird about her waiting on me, though. Here I was, with my son, mooching off two people so broke that their only transportation was a horse and a Jeep about twenty years older than me, but there didn't seem to be much I could do about it right then. Eleanor handed me a cup of coffee.
"Milk and sugar?"
"No, this is fine, thanks."
She looked out the window at Calder's pickup truck. "That Sam," she said. "He sure is windy."
"You figure he's making any headway?"
She shook her head. "You can't talk Louis into doing something he doesn't want to do." She turned back to her stove. The sounds and smells of bacon and eggs cooking began to fill up the kitchen. "Sam's father wants to build an oil terminal up in Eastpoht," she said. "Up on the bay. He wants to unload tankers. Got some refinery company interested. It would mean work, so there's a lot that would like to see it happen. It's hahd to make a living this far up, you know. Most of the children who grow up here have to leave when they get out of school, go off and get a job somewhayah else. But if they build it, they would have to put in a big tank fahm, and pipelines and so on. There'd be big trucks hauling oil out of there all hours, and that would mean noise, and pollution. A lot of folks think that it would ruin everything, spoil the town and the bay, both. Tourists might stop coming, not that we get flooded with them now. But why would you drive all the way up heah to see oil tanks and whatnot? Anyhow, they can't build if Louis doesn't sell. And believe me, we could use the money, but neither of us wanted to be in the position of making the decision about whether or not the terminal gets built. That's what it seems to boil down to, though."