“HAPPY NEW YEAR, MAN,” Bobby said. They could hear the peal of the midnight bells from St. Ignatius, and the Episcopal and Methodist churches.
“Happy New Year, Tony.” Sara leaned in, hugged him, a buddy hug.
“Yeah,” Tony said. He was quiet, bitter, dejected. Happy fuckin new year, he thought. They were in the living room of the farmhouse. Noah was asleep upstairs. Earlier Linda had stopped by with Gina and Michelle, had stayed only long enough to exchange wishes. “I’m headin out,” Tony said. Then low, bitter, he quipped, “Three’s a crowd.”
“It’s goina be a good year, Man,” Bobby said. “I can feel it in my bones. I can really feel it. Tomorrow,” he paused, “today I guess, I’ll show you the plan.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. It was warm in the house, freezing outside, cold in the barn. “Right on.” There was no enthusiasm in his voice. He slinked toward the kitchen.
“Tony.” Sara stood like a schoolgirl with her hands and feet together. “We love you.”
Tony snorted. He hadn’t meant for her to hear it but she had. “Don’t give me any of that second-grade California empathy crap.”
“I’m not,” Sara said. She was not offended. Tony’s head was down, his eyes turned up. “I mean it,” Sara said.
Tony sneered, then said, “Maybe Josh can come out with me.”
“Sure, Man,” Bobby said. “You wanta call your folks?”
“Naw. Might wake the girls. I can’t believe she went out with Denham.”
“Tony!” Sara’s voice was laden with sympathy. “She didn’t. Really. It’s their group’s party. She said you could have gone.”
“Yeah. The monster and Miss Priss! Beauty and the Beast!”
“That story has a happy ending ...” Sara began.
“Not when Beauty’s lookin to be with Mister Rich Doctor.”
“Screw the self-pity shit!” Bobby snapped. “Tomorrow. I’m goina show it to Sara tonight. Tomorrow, Man, we get to work.”
Earlier that evening, after Linda had left, and left Tony in a funk, Brian and Cheryl and their children, Anton and Lara, had popped in for hot cider and Christmas cookies.
“Give me a week and I’ll explain to you what I’m thinking,” Bobby had told them.
“It’s okay,” Brian had said. Then he’d laughed. “But make us some money, huh? Two kids and Cheryl’s not back to work ...”
“I think it’s going to,” Bobby said.
Cheryl tried to hide her disappointment. Aside to Sara she said, “Why would anyone want to live out here?”
“I like the hills,” Sara countered. “And the pond. We went skating earlier and it was lovely.”
“You better be careful with that ice,” Cheryl said. “There was a boy who went through on the Loyalsock this week. He got trapped under and drowned.”
“Oh! I didn’t hear about—”
“The ice just isn’t thick enough yet.”
“That’s the river,” Sara had said. “The pond’s pretty solid.”
“But even this house!” Cheryl wrapped her arms about herself. “It’s so cold.”
“We’re planning to rebuild it,” Sara explained.
“Well—” Cheryl shook her head slowly, “I don’t know why. If you and Rob had just sold the place, we’d have the cash to move out of Miriam’s guest house. You could sell it for a subdivision like the new one over in Hobo Hollow. Then we’d all be rich.”
Bobby overheard her. “That would be one shot and gone,” he said. “Let me develop this plan, make this place pay you something every year. Besides, it’s like money in the bank. If it doesn’t work, we can always sell it later.”
Weeks earlier, months earlier, back to before they left California, Bobby had begun planning—game planning, financial planning, personal and business planning. It had gone slowly. The decision to split from his recent past had been made, yet the decision to step into his future had to be remade daily. What if it didn’t work? What if he took this opportunity and blew it—not only failing but causing hardship for others, digging a hole he would not be able to refill in a lifetime? What if he made something bad, something evil?
With patience, using all his design ability, Bobby had created a framework, a five-year, open-ended plan. Yet despite his efforts there were major gaps and unresolved problems. High Meadow would be the base for Environmental Energy Systems—EES—which at this moment wasn’t much more than a concept, and boxes of books, product pamphlets, technical reports and drawings. It would be a working farm, even if Bobby was not a farmer. It would be home—he had his family, his son to raise, his wife to cherish, and the house to rebuild. And High Meadow would be a gathering, a cause, an evolution of thought about energy, about veterans, about the self.
That was the design challenge. Financial planning was easier than planning a personal agenda, and that was easier than planning a code, an ethic for the times, a criterion of what presently was morally valid. “Values,” he’d told Sara, “can be ethereal. They change with the society, with the times.” He found he could not plot value projections in the same manner he once plotted income projections. To earn $30,000 a year in real estate commissions—the calculations had been simple. But how does one plan morality? Is it possible to project value goals? This year I will have 30,000 integrity points!
“Grandpa used to talk about living by a plan and a code,” he reminded Sara. “That’s the framework.” Yet as he’d tried to define it, refine it, it had become clouded and obscure. How do things work? How do children develop? What’s happened to the soldiers who fought in Viet Nam? What is the right way to live? Without a code could any plan, no matter how successful financially, produce the right, sustainable results? And if it did, would one know? And what were those “right” results? What is the final goal?
Even on paper it had become muddled, so Bobby had settled, temporarily, for Master Plan, Phase 1, Zero to Five Years; had settled, for one clamorous circuit of the carousel, one round with the calliope whizzing and banging, blaring and tooting.
Tony stopped, stared into the black overhead. He did not carry a flashlight. Beside him Josh too stopped, leaned lightly against Tony’s leg. The temperature had continued dropping. On the pond the ice expanded, fractured. Cracks shot out, split the ice for two, three, five hundred feet, the sounds long and fast like rifles firing. Tony remained motionless. More fractures, more eerie, cracking shrieks. Tony did not turn toward the pond. Overhead, north, just above the high meadow ridge, he saw Draco, the Dragon—a small-headed dragon, he thought—with its long tail curled about the Little Dipper. To the west, over the spillway, he identified Orion, the Hunter, seemingly aiming from his shoulder star, Betelgeuse, a double-barreled thumper at Draco. Yeah, Tony thought. Get some. Get some, Man. Happy New Year. Happy fuckin new year. Fuck Denham. Right now, Man, she’s probably unbuttoning his shirt. Screw the self-pity shit. New Year’s Eve and they don’t even have a beer! Not one fuckin beer. How the hell ken ya get fucked up without even one beer. Hot spiced cider!
Tony plodded forward into the dark shadow of the barn. He did not need to see. With one hand on the wood siding he edged downhill, into the wind, toward the tractor garage. His ears stung from the cold, his fingertips burned. Josh stayed next to him, bumping him every few steps. Tony reached down, ruffled the thick fur on the dog’s back. Somehow, Josh allowing him to do that was reassuring. “Fuckin women,” Tony muttered. “Playin games with men’s minds. Bitchin. Bitchin they’ve been kept down and cut out. But shit, so have we. So’s the average joe. They compare themselves with some wealthy motherfucker and call us chauvinist pigs. ‘We love you, Tony.’ Get off my fuckin ass, bitch. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Sure Linda. You woulda shit your pants if I’d said yes.”
Inside the tractor garage Tony worked his way to the forge. He’d dampened the firebox all the way down. Coals still smouldered and the stone and brick were warm. Josh nudged him. He grabbed the dog’s fur, ran his hands over Josh’s coat. “We could fire it up, huh, Boy? But that’d make a racket. Sara’d go through the roof if I woke Noah and Bobby’d have to come out and tell us to stop.” Tony crouched, pushed Josh’s jowls back, caressed the dog’s ears. “I bet right now,” he whispered, “she’s licking his nipples.” He stood, rolled his shoulders, thought to head back to his cubicle, his bunker. An immense cracking exploded from the far edge of the pond, blasted like artillery at him. He jolted, froze. Then whispered, “Tomorrow, Josh. Tomorrow ‘we get to work’! Like what the fuck have I been doing all my life?”
“Can you envision it, Sar?” They were cuddled together, in bed, excited, energized by ideas, by New Year’s resolutions, by plans.
“I think so,” Sara said.
“We’ve got the start-up capital from the sale of the house. We’ll probably never be in this position again.”
“I understand the part about the house,” Sara said.
“I’ve just made preliminary sketches,” Bobby said. “I want to change the roof line a little, and drop the collectors between the rafters. Then we’ll put the glazing on top of the rafters. The problem with most solar collectors is they’re ugly. But if the installation is beautiful ... if we can do it with this house, we could show it to people. It’s really going to look sharp. Really.”
“I believe you,” Sara said. “I know you can do it. But ... we’re not going to rip the roof off—”
“Oh! No. Not till summer. Or late spring.”
“Phew! I could picture us in here without a roof. And Cheryl’d be saying, ‘I don’t know how you can stand it.’”
Bobby chuckled. “You’d have to snuggle against me all the time.” He pulled her closer.
“I’d do that anyway,” Sara said. “But you’re getting so thin.”
“Naw. I’ve been gaining some back ever since we got here.”
“How much?”
“I’m one fifty-five, now. Anyway, I want to ask Tony to take over the farm.”
“You think he’s reliable?”
“I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about those guys. In San Jose. I’ve been asking myself, what happened to them? Good men. Most of em. Did you know Tony was a platoon sergeant?”
“Are you going to ask some of them to live here?”
“All I know right now is I’ve got to do something. Put em to work.”
“Building solar collectors?”
“Um-hmm. The whole works. Collection, control, storage. Retrofits. New construction. Whatever we can sell. Someplace along the line they gave up. Remember Granpa used to say, ‘Never give up.’ These guys learned to give up. They learned to be helpless. They can learn to achieve. I’ve got to show you it on paper. I can’t keep it all in my head.”
“Bobby, where are they going to sleep?”
“Well ... maybe ... in the barn ...”
“Could you convert that old pig house ...”
“Hey, the little barn! That’s an idea. We could look at it in the morning. If ... um ... you know ... like if we changed the roofline ... I’m sure the foundation ... then separate the length into cubicles ... it’d be like the hootches we had over there. Like a low barracks or a bunkhouse.”
“I could go back to work. Linda says the school system’s expanding. But I’ll need my Pennsylvania certificate.”
“Me too. If Nittany Mountain will accept those courses I took in California, I think I’m only a few credits shy of my degree. And I’ve got to get my contractor’s license. General and plumbing.”
Sara laughed. “You mean you’re going to be a plumber!”
“Yeah.” Bobby chuckled.
“My husband the skinny plumber.” Sara tickled him.
Bobby wiggled away, grabbed her hands. “And a roofer,” he said. “If we’re going to embed the collector arrays we’ll need to be roofers, too.”
“I could be a farmer’s wife, a plumber’s wife, and a roofer’s wife all at once.” Sara worked a hand free.
“And you could run the school. You could teach them everything they didn’t learn in grade school. And everything they forgot.”
“Ooo! All these men.” Again Sara laughed.
“Yeah.” Bobby laughed with her. Then he asked, “Do you remember what Granpa said about the self needing minimum maintenance? About being able to expand beyond one’s self?”
“Um-hmm. Opening oneself to teach, to create, to love.”
“How can you teach someone to expand beyond his or her self?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you know,” Bobby said. “That’s why you’re such a good teacher. That’s what you were teaching those spoiled brats in San Martin. That’s what I hope you’ll teach here.”
By eight thirty the next morning Tony had the forge roaring and the first iron bar glowing. His shirt was off. Outside the temperature was five degrees Fahrenheit. Wind gusts buffeted, bringing in the cold wall, then the pressure backed up and the hot air about the furnace surged out—oscillating, purging like freezing baths and hot saunas except better because his activity was also purging, requiring 100 percent concentration on the furnace, the metal and the turbocharger. Even the artillery bursts of ice fracturing on the pond didn’t divert his attention; even Linda was gone from his mind.
“Hè,” Bobby shouted. He was bundled up in hooded sweatshirt, jacket, a scarf over his mouth and nose. “Hè.” He shouted the Lenape word for hello, one of the few local Native American words he’d learned, found in a file tagged Monsee-Lenape in Grandpa’s office. No response. Between the turbocharger, the furnace roar, the wind and the ice Tony didn’t hear him. “Hey Man! Tony!”
Tony snapped his eyes over, then immediately back to his work. “Yo!”
“When you can, take a blow. I’d like to go over the plan with you.”
“Be a while,” Tony shouted. He did not divert his eyes.
“That’s okay.”
“We should fit the hinges on the posts,” Tony bellowed. “That set’s done.”
“Looks great.”
For a while Bobby stood watching Tony heat the bar then withdraw it, lay it on the old anvil and whale on it with the peen hammer, methodically flattening and forming the end of the thick bar into a hawk’s talon—the one strap alone a week’s work. Then he left, inspected the old pig shed, returned, watched Tony in his concentration. Finally he shouted, “I gotta show it to you.”
Tony sighed, leaned back, withdrew the bar and laid it in the ash bin, then hit the blower switch. Immediately the turbo wound down, the roar of the furnace sank to nothing more than the creaking of the firebrick. Again the pond fractures could be heard. “You make coffee?”
“Yeah. And Sara made fritters with syrup.”
“I gotta get these last two finished and the gate hung before it’s time to set out the taps.”
“Yeah. And more.”
In the kitchen Bobby laid out parts of the plan. “The structural design of the solar collector is flexible. The more we learn, the better we’ll be able to make them. Interested?”
“Hey.” Tony shrugged. “If that’s what you want, Man.”
“We build one, sell it.” Bobby could see Tony was not excited. “Build two, four, eight, sixteen. Sell em cheap. Get the venture rolling.”
“Fine.”
“And the farm’s got to produce, too.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“No, I don’t mean the way it’s been. You know that stuff you were doing for Granpa?”
“Yeah.”
“Double it. Triple it. Sugarbush. Strawberries. Feed corn. Apples and pears. Maybe vegetables. Maybe some chickens.”
“And alfalfa?”
“Yeah.”
Tony looked to the side. “Get serious, Man. That’d take ten people.”
“A whole squad, huh?”
Tony shifted uncomfortably.
“Maybe grapes,” Bobby said. “Run em up the hill at the north end of the pond. Like they grow em in Sonoma.”
“What the fuck!” Tony pushed his chair back.
“You were really getting into it, for Granpa. Getting inta those journals.”
“One crop, Man. I just thought we could make money with strawberries. There’s no fuckin ...” Tony peered around, through the hallway to the living room, through the doorway to the dining room. He didn’t want to offend Sara or anger her by cursing where Noah could hear. “There’s no fuckin way.” His voice was low, dispirited; his eyes cast to the back door.
“Figure a way.” Bobby was intense, leaning toward him. “You be in charge.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Do it slow. Let it evolve.”
“Where you comin from, Man?”
“Could you do it if you had ten people?”
“Who the fuck’s goina—”
“Roof rats.”
That stopped Tony short. His face came up, eyes suspicious.
Bobby broke the silence. “Better ’n sleepin on roofs?”
“Maybe.”
“Vets. Only vets. You be in charge. It’s time we took care of our own.”
“Wait a fuckin minute.” Tony slid his chair back to the table, leaned in, picked up his coffee. “In charge a what?”
“Our farm. Your squad. Your platoon. You teach em how to farm. Set em to work. Any income above expenses is for you and them to split. But it’s got to be done right.”
“How you goina get these guys, Man?”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “One at a time. How are we goina do it?”
“Well—” Tony put his cup down, gestured with his hands, “I could put the word out. The bartender at the White Pines, Holtz, he might—Hey, wait a minute.”
“You’re on, Tony,” Bobby said. “We’re looking for homeless guys. Down-and-out guys. Guys we can help. We want to bring em here. Let em help us while we help them. You with me?”
Again Tony eyed Bobby. “What about the solar collectors?” he asked softly.
“Guy wants to farm,” Bobby said, “he farms. Guy wants to build, he builds.”
“What’s all that other stuff you got there?”
“This?” Bobby ticked the fat file folder on the table with his fingernail. “That’s the ... ah ... program. Just ideas. It’s not finished.”
“For farming and building?”
“Yeah. And for rehabilitating the crop.”
In the afternoon Bobby sat in Grandpa’s office, alone. The roar of the forge two stories down was his background music, Sara’s enthusiasm his sustenance. How had she phrased it? “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day,” she’d quoted the old proverb. “Teach a man to fish and he’ll be able to feed himself for a lifetime.” Then she had added, “But give him a cause and he’ll learn to fish and he’ll teach others to fish, too. That’s how one learns to expand beyond the self. Give him a cause.” With that she had kissed him and taken Noah back to the house, leaving Bobby alone with his clutter of ideas, books and reports, papers and outlines, flow diagrams and fiscal projections.
In his mind he had kicked things off exactly as he’d wanted. Now he was lost. He needed to envision the next step. Bobby restacked his program papers, began relaying them out. Taken separately, each general category was easier to understand. For a while he worked on questions: What do we want to do? How do we transform attitudes, develop minds, attain and maintain defensible, sustainable life positions? At the foundation of every economic system there are people—what microsystem is best suited to the High Meadow community?
Bobby shifted to the more concrete sub-subcategory of jobs—job counseling, portable job skills, training and apprenticeships, practice. Then to detoxification. Then to leadership. (“Even if they’d only made corporal, or PFC,” he’d told Sara earlier, “they’ve learned something about leadership; and leadership principles are the same whether in the military, in business, or even within a family.”)
Bobby returned to the overall outline. He felt stuck. How could he integrate all the parts? For a moment he envisioned a circle, but that was cumbersome. Then he saw a vertical cylinder made up of vertically separate and removable leaves, or files. That, he thought, would work but the cross-referencing would be a bitch. A computer might be able to do it, but you had to be a major corporation or a university to afford a computer. Stuck. He was stuck. On a clean sheet of paper he wrote, “Overcoming Stuckness—A Program for Veterans.” Two stories down the high whine of the turbocharger slowed, lowered, ceased.
At the forge Tony was having trouble with the claw. His concentration was off. His back was cold, his front hot. He donned a T-shirt and rustic leather vest, returned to the forge. He’d been steamrolled. He’d been steamrolled in the kitchen, had been steamrolled by the last half decade. Even if he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t seen the steamroller at all, ever, he’d been flattened. He wanted to resist. He had no desire to run the farm. He didn’t even want to talk. “Your squad. Your platoon.” What was this shit? “Take care of our own.” Hey, he’d done that. In San Jose. Hadn’t he been the Catcher? But he’d barely been able to take care of himself. His stomach felt tight, bloated. He shut down the forge, went back to his cubicle, climbed into his sleeping bag, pulled the pillow over his face to shut out all light. “Fuck it, Man,” he mumbled. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.” Again and again like a mantra, trying to drive the thoughts away, wanting to toke up, to drink, to mellow out, to vegetate with the boob tube, to dose himself out of the confrontation with Wapinski’s challenge. Better en the roof. What the fuck does he know? Nobody asks you nothin on the roof. Steamrolled, Man. Just fuckin flattened. “If it doesn’t work, we can always sell it.” Don’t go fuckin settin me up.
Bobby rose. How could he unstick himself? He needed a break. For some time he simply stared out the window at the graying sky and the fading landscape. Then he poked into old files, files he’d packed away more than five years earlier.
There was the Newsweek magazine from June 9, 1969, the issue he’d found in the airport on his way home. He glanced at the cover, flipped open to the article and photo of Dong Ap Bia, Hamburger Hill, and was swept with feelings—disappointment, excitement, revulsion, nostalgia. He wondered about the men who’d served, about Tyrone Blackwell Dorsey with whom he’d lost contact.
The Nixon Administration, rattled by Congressional criticism over the battle, sought last week to disclaim responsibility for stepping up the pace of the war....White House aides insisted to reporters that there had been no escalation of military operations ... since President Nixon took office.... As with many arguments about the Vietnamese war, the truth in this case seemed to be ... elusive....
Again Wapinski was revolted by the article. In retrospect of Saigon’s fall, he found it even more abhorrent. As he looked at the photograph, he thought of the sacrifices of so many; thought of the men who’d become, in an instant, his men; thought of the cause for which the sacrifices had been made. He skimmed the article. In the back of his mind he was thinking about stuckness, about Sara’s “Give them a cause. That’s how people learn to expand beyond the self”; about criticism, responsibility and achievement; about John Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. In 1963 President Kennedy had talked about “America’s stake in Vietnam.” He had said South Viet Nam was “a proving ground for democracy in Asia. ... If this democratic experience fails ... then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy” to Asians. Senator Kennedy had countered in 1969, “even before the battle was over” (Newsweek), by characterizing Bobby Wapinski’s sacrifice and the cause for which he had made that sacrifice as an “outrage,” as “senseless and irresponsible,” as “symptomatic of a mentality and a policy that requires immediate attention.”
Wapinski clenched his teeth. The political, the controversial, was mixed and muddled with memories of the repeated assaults, of the WIAs who’d been left behind. What had become of them? Bobby squeezed his eyes shut. To sacrifice, he thought. To expand beyond one’s self. To expose one’s self. The country had committed us, had given us a cause greater than ourselves and we expanded to a higher level, to defend freedom and establish democracy in Southeast Asia. Then the country withdrew its commitment, denied the cause, devalued the sacrifice and said, at best, we were only fighting for ourselves. That in turn caused the collapse of our ability to expand beyond our selves, caused us to shy from exposure, to isolate ourselves in our fears.
In retrospect Alsop, in that same six-year-old issue, had been right.
What the Communist side is proposing, of course, is a Popular Front government, precisely patterned on the popular fronts established under Soviet sponsorship after World War II, as a prelude to total communist control. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the distinguished historian [described] ... the process as consisting of three stages: “Government by a genuine coalition of parties of the left and left-center, government by bogus coalition, and a final stage in which the bogus coalition was transformed into a monolithic block ...”
For Bobby there was a flash of clarity and the fog of neopolitical, historical interpretation.
Bobby took a new sheet of paper. “To become unstuck,” he wrote, “make a decision.” Again he paused. Perhaps this was not the right approach, he thought, but he realized it did not matter. To be stuck on theory or form was like attempting to decide, in the heat of a firefight, which weapon to use—thumper or M-16. One indeed might be superior but debate could make the point moot. There were people to care for. Practicality would have to dominate theory while theory was being developed.
He smiled, felt satisfied. Make a decision. That would work. In the outline under Personal he wrote, “Pursue Elation.” That’s important, he thought. “Without the pursuit of elation, responsibility, decisiveness, and self-authorization atrophy. Elation from expansion is the real aim of self-fulfillment. That is what satisfies. Being filled with our causes. When a cause is accepted a person will do anything, sacrifice anything. A man will assault a fortified enemy hilltop eleven times. This is grunt psychology. Debase the cause and you deny the pursuit of elation. Total debasement produces irresponsibility, indecisiveness, helplessness, stuckness, and resentment. In the wake come the disempowered, the indefensible, the unsustainable, the self-pitying, the dregs.”
Again Bobby paused. The potbellied stove had cooled, the sky had blackened. He rose, closed the thermal curtains on the bay window. Then he sat, pondered for a few more moments, grabbed another sheet of paper. In block letters he wrote: “WAS THE CAUSE JUSTIFIED? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? DID SOMEONE, SOMEHOW, GET TO OUR MINDS?”
The January thaw arrived almost as if it were scheduled. Beneath the snow cover rivulets trickled, in depressions puddles formed. The warm temperatures continued for ten days—above freezing each day, seldom dropping below twenty degrees at night. On Groundhog Day it rained. In the house Sara threw a “party” for Josh, and Noah, clinging to him, “cruised” for the first time. By midnight in the hill country the rain turned to snow and the snow stuck. At dawn, under a clear sky, Sara beamed to Bobby that the entire glittering, fluff-coated world was a winter wonderland.
An hour later Bobby and Josh walked to the tractor garage. Tony was up, out. The day was magnificent. “You’ve done it again, Lord,” Bobby muttered quietly. “Absolutely perfect.” He walked to the little barn, wished that Noah were with him, that his son could walk in the snow, or cruise holding Josh’s thick hair. Surrounded by this beauty, with Sara and Noah secure, inside, Bobby thought, Dear God, you’ve given me this day, this beautiful day. I don’t need any more.
Bobby caught up to Tony at the half-erected driveway gate. Tony had already bolted the second hinge set to the post and to the left swing section of the gate. Other than a perfunctory greeting and “Ready,” “Yup,” “Up,” neither spoke. Carefully they lifted the section, positioned it, aligned the holes. Then Tony pulled the thick carriage-bolt pins from his pocket, wiggled them through the first two holes on top, the first two on the bottom, then tapped them in with a piece of two by four.
“Geez, Man—” Bobby stepped back while Tony tested the swing, “they look great.”
“They work,” Tony said.
“They’re great, Man,” Bobby said. “Those are classic.”
“Hmm.” Tony backed to where Bobby stood, admired his work. The bottom hinge strap on each side ended as a hawk’s talon. The top on each side was a hawk’s head. Tony had first rough-formed each, had then, with chisel and hammer, detailed each, the beaks and eyes perfectly smooth, the neck and upper wing feathers each individually lined and detailed. The talons too were lifelike.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Bobby asked.
“Right there,” Tony said. “They do look pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Again the temperature dropped, the slush froze. All through February it remained cold and Bobby tinkered in the barn, built an expanded siting table, while Tony worked in the tractor garage rebuilding the old tractor engine, or in the barn readying the sugar taps, or in the sugarbush cleaning the crowns and collecting wood for the evaporator. In March the second thaw came, the snow melted, the surface soils softened. Inches below, the ground remained frozen, impermeable to the melt and runoff. Paths turned to slippery ribbons of mud. Bobby became irritable. In contrast, in the sugarbush the leaves of autumn had fermented and so sweet was the smell of organic decomposition, sucking in the warm air, Tony became almost intoxicated. He began to feel he could live at High Meadow forever.
The pond surface became mushy, slick. Bobby cautioned Sara and Tony about potential thin spots, yet he still walked Josh daily onto the hardest section in the shadow of the south knoll. Again it rained and an inch of water covered the ice. Again it turned cold. The water froze crystal clear over old opaque ice. It remained cold for a week but now the sun hit the ice from a higher angle. Leaves had sunk and frozen in the new ice and their deep color absorbed sunlight which passed through the clear glaze. Beneath the surface the ice melted in perfect leaf molds—yet the surface remained intact. Bobby studied these miniature collectors, thought how beautiful, how powerful.
The third weekend in March felt like mid-May. Linda came with the twins to visit with their father, but Gina and Michelle were only interested in playing with Noah.
“If you want to go find Tony, it’s okay,” Sara said to Linda.
“I can’t leave these two with you. You’ve got enough work.”
“Actually, when they’re here, Noah’s easier to handle.”
“Well, maybe, for a little bit. He’s so angry with me....”
“He doesn’t like Simon Denham very much, does—”
“That’s not really it, Sar. He’s just packed with anger.”
“Well, lately he’s seemed pretty happy.”
“Syruping, huh?”
“Um-hmm.”
“He’s always happy when he’s doing that. I’ve got no idea why. It’s not just a matter of being outside because he’s had lots of outside jobs.”
Tony was at the Sugar Shack unloading logs and branches from the tractor cart. He was not happy. He was bored, antsy, impatient. The oscillation in temperature should have produced treble the sap he’d collected. Things were no longer falling into place. The gate was finished. There was no more forge work. Seed had been ordered but it was too early to plant. He’d laid out an area for vegetables—nothing commercial, just a house garden—but the ground wasn’t ready for rototilling. The fields weren’t ready for turning, either, and there were no materials to begin the little barn project. Bobby had been spending so many hours tinkering in the barn that Tony felt invaded. And Bobby was insisting that he read something every day, something beyond farm journals. He’d fallen into the habit of reading the daily paper and was now convinced the Kremlin or the White House would soon blow half the planet to smithereens. He wanted to get his Harley from Linda’s—why it was still there he didn’t know. He had the urge to go, to move, split, change scenes—anyplace, anything, as long as it wasn’t High Meadow, as long as no one asked anything of him.
“Hi Babe.”
Tony started. He hadn’t seen her coming.
“How ya doing?” Linda’s voice was light, simple.
“Fine.” He straightened his back, looked down from the cart. Linda’s face caught the sun, her eyes glistened. “Where’re the girls?” He asked. She looked prettier today than she had since he’d come back, but immediately he focused on himself, told himself she found him horrible, deranged, repulsive. He looked away.
“They’re inside,” Linda said. “Playing with Noah.” She had not seen Tony like this in years. He was shirtless. His arms and shoulders looked sinewy, his stomach was flat, hard. “How’s syruping going?”
“Ugh.”
Linda interpreted his grunt as anger. “I saw Mr. Morris last week. Did you know he’s looking for syrup?”
“There’s not going to be much.” Still terse.
“Why?” Soft, concerned.
“I don’t know. It’s the trees.”
“Are they okay?”
“Um.”
“It’s been wet enough, hasn’t it?”
Tony jumped from the cart, kicked a branch into the pile. “Old Man Lutz cut in a foundation for a new barn. I think he hit the upper aquifer. It’s been draining steadily for months. You can see it. It’s like a giant ice floe.”
“Well, can’t they stop it?”
“I ...” Now Tony again looked at Linda’s face—those hazel eyes, that auburn hair, those beautiful lips. How incredibly attractive she was, and how repulsive he felt. “I didn’t connect it until you said that,” he said. For a while they talked about the maples, about telling Adolph Lutz about the problem, about what if it killed the entire sugarbush. “Want to ride up on the tractor?” Tony asked, smiled, suddenly wanting this person, this one person, to think him attractive, to like him again. He felt excited and happy when Linda climbed up with him and sat behind him on the sap tank, and he felt rending pangs because he knew he could not meet her expectations. Then he thought, she’s probably being nice so she can bring up the divorce.
The tractor rocked as it crossed from the dirt road to the high meadow to the path for the sugarbush. Gently Linda touched Tony’s shoulders. It had been so long since they’d touched, but he knew his shoulders were disgusting, crusty with that acne that never went away, that had turned to two strips where his pack straps had once rested, two dry, rough, cracking patches.
“Bobby’s thinking of putting in grapes down there,” Tony said as the tractor rumbled north of the pond. “Use a windmill to pump the water up to a big tank, then use a drip irrigation system on the vines.”
“Oh. What kind of grapes would you plant?”
“I don’t know. He wants me to go up to some winery in New York. Find out what they’re doing.”
“Can you grow them here? With the way the winters get?”
“They do in Europe. And New York. I got a book ...”
Trees. Grapes. Alfalfa. Linda listened, was easy to talk to. Maybe things were falling into place, he thought, but you just needed to show it to someone for you to realize it. At the edge of the sugarbush Tony loaded more cut branches into the cart. Linda bent to help. “Don’t do that, Babe,” he said. “You’ll get your clothes dirty.”
“I can wash them.” Linda smiled.
Deep in the sugarbush they inspected the trees, the taps, the crowns. Then Linda hugged him as if for the first time ever and Tony could barely control himself. She tucked her head into his chest, rubbed her cheek very lightly against his nipple, then looked up for a kiss. Then they were kissing and feeling like a midsummer’s day in Boston and thoughts and remembrances and fears were overridden by desire, love and lust. Then she said, “Wait.”
Coming down from the sugarbush Linda sat between Tony’s legs as he taught her how to drive the tractor, and nibbled on her neck. “‘They call me baby driver ...’” Linda laughed.
“‘... You’re on my pair of wheels ...’” Tony too laughed. He was hot, expectant. Together they sang, laughed about how the engine feels.
At the Sugar Shack the afternoon breeze turned cool. Tony unloaded the last of the branches, drained the scant few gallons of liquid from the sap tank. Linda kept him at bay. Again he felt her rejection, revulsion. Again he saw how deserving he was of that rejection.
“Babe,” Linda said tentatively. How hard it was for her to speak the words. “Do you want to come home?”
Tony looked at her, his eyes locked on hers, not with intensity but in pain. How he wanted to say yes. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
For Tony things became more complicated. Bobby had asked him to talk to Adolph Lutz about the aquifer and to tell him that Tony would plant the lower thirty-six acres this year. Tony had agreed, had talked to Old Man Lutz without satisfaction. To make things worse, Bobby had begun to push Tony on “our agricultural master plan.” Linda had come each of the next two Saturdays, had come into his bunker-cubicle, which even Bobby never entered, had cleaned it the first week!, made out with him, necked, petted, fondled without going “too far” the second; then didn’t show at all on the third.
More confusion: Tony, with Bobby’s help and the brand new EES Ford Econoline van, brought Tony’s Harley back to High Meadow—ostensibly to be used to visit the New York wineries. But the Harley meant, for the first time since he’d returned, that Tony had the means of splitting, of avoiding, evading the assault forces of civilization.
More yet: the bartender/owner of the White Pines Inn, Aaron Holtz, had come up to tell them a guy named Dale Ivanov, an ex-brown water navy man, needed a place to stay. “Can I tell im to check you guys out?” “That’s why we’re here,” Bobby’d answered. “He sometimes calls himself Ivanushka,” the bartender said. “Ivanushka Durachok. It’s some kind of joke.” “Guy down and out?” Bobby’d asked. Holtz had answered, “Seems to be. Drinks a lot.”
After Holtz had left, Tony had asked, “Where are you going to billet him?”
“That’s a good question. We haven’t really started the little barn.”
“Not in my bunker,” Tony said firmly.
“Ah, right. Do you think on the main floor ...”
Bobby turned the big three-oh. April passed. He paid the capital gains tax on Old Russia Road and suddenly found himself with much reduced funds. May came and went. Ivanov did not show. Still, in Bobby’s mind, the venture had begun. Bobby tinkered with solar collector plate designs, built three, mounted them on the barn roof—asking everyone who came for their reaction, their first impression—searching for something aesthetically pleasing, efficient, lightweight, cheap. He subscribed to the National Technical Information Service and was swamped with documents and data; his research advanced in leaps and bounds. He made trips to Pittsburgh, Williamsport and Harrisburg. He found potential suppliers everywhere. In Scranton he found a shower-door company that would make aluminum extrusions to any specifications, in any color, with any finish he wanted. He continued to experiment with materials; he set up the first test stations, the first assembly table.
At the same time he busied himself fixing parts of the old farm house—attempting to keep the lid on the can of worms he was certain any major renovation would open. He felt guilty if he worked for twelve or ten or even seven hours in the barn without returning to the house to relieve Sara—even if only for a few minutes—from the frustration of caring for a one-year-old. He postponed the house roof work because he wasn’t satisfied yet with the collector design. Then the well pump burned out and needed replacing, and a spring storm washed out the lower drive. Bobby and Tony spent two days cutting swales, installing drainage and a new culvert, and regrading the drive. Then the refrigerator went, then the clothes washer, then the upstairs bath drain pipe sprung a leak and the ceiling in the downstairs hall collapsed, and suddenly the after-tax capital from the sale of Old Russia Road, the start-up capital for the new venture, seemed inadequate, minuscule compared to the projected master plan. The barn became Bobby’s refuge. The plan, the program, the Grunt Theory of Psychology, and The Code were all put on hold. There was one and only one concern—sell a cash crop.
“Please come this way,” Bobby said.
“Into the barn?!” the woman said.
“My office is upstairs,” Bobby said.
“You understand we’re only looking,” the man said. “We’re exploring our options.”
“It would be foolish if you weren’t,” Bobby said. He led Mr. Jasper Vertsborg and Ms. Ellen Louwery-Vertsborg, husband and wife, into the barn, across the main floor to the rustic elevator Tony had built for Pewel.
“You don’t keep any animals?” the woman asked.
Bobby chuckled. “Only Josh and Tony.”
Neither Jasper nor Ellen responded. He was less than five seven, and frail. She was his height, taller in heels, about his weight. They were exploring the possibility of purchasing an old home in the Lutzburgh section of town. Jasper had just signed a three-year contract with the Mill Creek Falls Board of Education to fill the newly created position of school psychologist. Ellen, who was a children’s clothes designer, had just leased the small building on Third Street that had been Pete’s Barbershop. “This is quite a contraption,” Mr. Vertsborg said as the small wooden platform with the single handrail slowly rose. “Does your insurance company know you don’t have it fully enclosed?” He didn’t give Bobby a chance to answer (Bobby thinking, Thank you. What insurance company?) but continued, “Someone could fall off. If they fell from here, they’d be killed.”
“Yes,” Bobby said. “I guess. We use the lift mainly for materials. One of my men is building a set of regular stairs.”
“That’s good,” Jasper said. Then, as they entered Grandpa’s office, “Oh! This is very pleasant. What a nice view. I didn’t realize your pond was so large.”
“Please,” Bobby said. “Sit down. Let me ask you a few questions.”
For half an hour Bobby asked questions about the house they were considering. He knew the house. It had been the home of his fourth-grade friend, Bobby Conner. He asked about the old apple tree with the tree fort in the side yard and told Jasper and Ellen about the apple wars he and Bobby Conner used to have with Mickey Turley and Bobby’s brother, Brian. “Yes. Well ...” Jasper gave Ellen the high sign.
Bobby knew he was losing them. “Let me come out,” he said. “Let me draw a plot of the property, take some pictures and measurements. I think with the proper insulation that house could be eighty percent self-sufficient. Particularly ... you know the way the back of the house has those two inset porches ...”
“They remind me of my aunt Millie’s house in Scranton,” Ellen said disdainfully. “All they need are clothes lines running out to the trees and a couple of old biddies yakking between floors.”
“Picture that entire volume as a three-story greenhouse,” Bobby said. “It would unite the floors.”
“Hmm! That might be nice,” Ellen said.
“Put in a terra-cotta floor. Or maybe slate,” Bobby continued. With his hands he shaped the forms in the air. “Lay it in six inches of concrete over a foot of crushed stone to create a giant heat sink.”
“Um.” Ellen glanced at Jasper as if to go.
Bobby rushed on. “And even though it’s practical,” he said, “it’s also elegant. Think of it at night. Two and a half stories of glass, a glass canopy, the night crystal clear, the stars twinkling. Because the glass is thermo-pane you can actually have ... oh, an orange tree, some potted palms ...”
Now Ellen was interested. Bobby talked on, explaining the workings of an advanced Trombe wall system, how it worked as a massive collector, how its heating and cooling function could be expanded by encasing pipes and pulling off and storing heat in a huge basement water tank. The more he spoke, the more excited he became. Finally Jasper said, “Well, go ahead. Go out there. Work up a plan for us. And a price. By components though. We might not be in the position to do everything at once.”
After they left Bobby was riding on air. “Sar, guess what?! I think we’ve got our first job. And it’s a big one. We’d need a crew of five, at least, to do it right.” And to Tony, “We could make enough to buy a cement mixer and the sheet metal break I was telling you about. This could really get us started.”
Bobby set to work. For the Vertsborgs Bobby built the most elaborate model of Bobby Conner’s old house. Then he constructed the modular changes he would propose and he placed the model on the siting table. Carefully he tested the orbital track lighting to see not only how sunlight would hit the roof and walls, but even how furniture would cast shadows within a room or at what time on any day sunlight would enter the bedroom and hit the eyes of old sleepyhead. Bobby then priced out the materials, estimated the labor, and tacked on a minuscule profit margin. This was to be EES’ first renovation and in Bobby’s mind it had to be a showplace.
Roll me over, lay me down,
And do it again.
Oh this is number two,
Roll me over, lay me down,
And do it again.
Roll me ...
Softly Sara said, “What’s that racket?”
“Um?” It hadn’t awakened Bobby.
“Listen. Someone’s singing. Is that ... it doesn’t sound like Tony.”
“God.” Bobby propped himself on an elbow. “What time is it?”
“Three thirty,” Sara said.
From outside, at some distance, came, “... this is number four and I’m knocking on her door. Roll ... Hey! Anybody home? Oh geesh. Oh geesh!” Then quiet.
Bobby did not want to get up. He’d worked till one on the model greenhouse, creating openable bottom windows and roof vents—important in the summer for cooling. Sara, exhausted from a sleepless night with Noah, who had had a bad reaction to his second DPT shot, didn’t want to get up either.
Josh began barking. From outside, closer: “This is number seven and I’m at her little heaven. Roll me ... Son of a bitch! Wapishkis! Is thish Wapishkises? Thish is Ivan ... Oh Geesh! Ivanushka ... Ha! Hahaha! Ivanushka Durrag ... Durreg ... Oh geesh! Ha! Durachok. I need ... Ha! help.”
In his bunker cubicle Tony sat on the edge of his cot. He was angry, frightened. He did not turn on a light, did not flick on his flashlight. For months, at night, since shortly after those weekends in March when Linda had come, he had been expanding and reinforcing his bunker. He was not sure why. It was as if he were being directed by an outer force. Perhaps, he thought, it was because of all the nuclear freeze material he’d been reading. A bunker would be necessary to protect first against the nuclear storms the war would unleash, then the initial fallout, then the roving bands of starving survivors.
Tony had first pushed the back wall of his cubicle back three feet. Then he’d erected shoring and a false wall. Nightly, behind the false wall, he bored away at his three-foot-by-two-foot tunnel—first level with the tractor garage floor, then angling downward and back, under the barn foundation, toward the east ridge. There he’d begun to carve a room. “Fuck,” he’d muttered to himself in the throes of digging and shoring, “any asshole can see they’re on a course to fuck it all up. For good. Motherfuckers don’t give a flying leap. They got their bunkers. Kremlin’s building an ABM system and their bunker’s twenty stories deep. Plan, Tony had thought. I’ll show him a master plan. Tony tried to make two feet each night, picking, shoveling, chipping, at times using the big Milwaukee drill with a three-quarter-inch masonry bit.
On his cot Tony heard the commotion, the singing. He heard Josh bark. He was unarmed. His thoughts were barely coherent. It would be easy to slip out, to ambush. He needed to continue the work on his bunker. He could go down the tunnel, bring out another bucket of chippings, load it into the tractor cart. It had been easy dumping the chippings each morning before anyone rose, turning some of it in with the high meadow, some in with the lower thirty-six, using some out along the drive to reinforce the sides where the danger of washout was greatest. And Wapinski didn’t care, didn’t notice. He was completely absorbed with his Vertsborg project. The only real problem was the tunnel had again set off Tony’s dreams, nightmares. Nightly, after finally falling asleep, exhausted from farm chores during the day and chipping and shoring at night, Tony woke to the smell and feel of the rotted corpse breaking, being dragged over him. He did not wake in terror. His heart would not be pounding, preparing him to flee, but thumping, glubbing, pushing thick volumes, a slave, a resigned, depressed, manic indentured servant.
But this! This noise! This singing! In the dark Tony tied his boots, edged to the thick door he’d made, ostensibly to keep out winter cold. Quietly he unbarred the door, opened it on well-greased hinges, shut and locked it behind him. His cubicle had been stuffy, airless. The bunker room at the end of the tunnel would be worse. Once it was full size, he told himself, he’d begin work on ventilation. Maybe even a well. From the tractor garage he peered into the night.
“... Durreg ... Oh geesh! Ha! Durachok. I need ... Ha! ... help. Geesh. Oh God, I’m drunk. Wapishkish? Oh God. Drunker en a fly in a vodka vat.”
Dale Ivanov was rotund, chalk-white, flabby. He had pale blue eyes, long, wild blond hair, a brushlike mustache, perfect but unbrushed teeth. In the kitchen, before he said two sentences, with Josh sniffing his leg, and Bobby excitedly thinking he could help, Ivanov blew lunch onto the kitchen table and chairs, onto Bobby’s legs, onto the floor, splattering walls and cabinets as high as Bobby’s shoulders. Then Ivanov whirled. Bobby reached out to stabilize him, hesitated, reached but missed, and Ivanov collapsed out cold amid the puke and stench.
“Bobby,” Sara called, hushed. “Is everything okay?”
Muted. “Um-hmm.”
“Did he—”
“Um-hmm. I’ll clean it up. Go back to bed.”
“I can help.”
“Don’t—” Bobby began. His diaphragm lurched, he caught the motion, stifled it. “Don’t come down, Sar. I got it.”
It was dawn before Bobby finished. He’d swabbed and disinfected the entire room, he’d cleaned Dale Ivanov and had laid his pallid flaccid body on a blanket on the floor. Bobby’d bagged the towels he’d used for cleaning and put the bag out back. Then he’d gone up and showered and scrubbed himself raw, then returned and made the day’s first pot of coffee.
“What died?” Tony looked at the body. “Oh.”
“Dale Ivanov.” Bobby looked at the blob of a man on the floor. “Our first new vet.”
“Um,” Tony uttered somberly.
Then he looked at Bobby and let out a tiny chuckle. Bobby stifled a laugh. Tony rocked back, laughs forcing themselves out in bursts between tight lips. Bobby hunched, hands on his thighs, laughing loudly. “You shoulda seen im”—now both were laughing uproariously—“he wobbled ...” (God, it was so good to laugh) “... said something ... then ... gooooshh! And BAM!” Bobby flopped his arm over like a tree falling. “I haven’t seen anything that disgusting since Granpa found me in a gutter downtown....”
A week passed. Ivanov was set up in a corner of the main floor of the big barn. He, like Tony, came into the house for his meals. At first he was contrite, quiet. “Man, I’ll never forget this,” he said to Bobby over dinner. “You really got me out of a jam. Thanks, Man. Thanks.”
Daily he became more talkative. In the house, before Sara, even before Bobby, he was polite, almost formal. But in the barn, in the tractor garage, he was brash. “Man,” he spouted at Tony, “I don’t know who done it. Man, I was down there at the White Pines. Behind it, you know?”
“Yeah.” Tony was suspicious.
“There was this great big fat broad down there. A real idiot. Shee-it, I was already drunk. I didn’t give a shit what she looked like. I just wanted to get my dick wet. That’s the thing, right?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. He didn’t like Ivanov, didn’t like and didn’t understand Ivanov’s self-important, self-assured manner.
“Man, I’m fuckin away on this fat bitch. Jessie somethin. I don’t know if she even knows her name.”
“Big strong girl?” Tony asked.
“Oh Man, was she strong. Man, it took all my strength to pin her. Oh, but, Man, she loved it. She’s moanin’n groanin’n buckin like a racehorse. I’m fuckin my brains out. And somebody musta called the cops. Man, I grabbed my bottle and cut a chogie. There’s like three bubble-tops zoomin in, Man. Lights. Sirens. Shee-it. I didn’t do nothin illegal. I humped up through them nigger houses. Man, I walked right through that nigger section. I’m scared, Man, but I’m drunk. I got my bottle by the neck, ya know?”
“Um.”
“I figure any nigger try en butt-fuck this dude, he’s in for a world a hurt. Right?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“You ken fuckin bet on it, Man. Next thing I know, Man, I’m so fuckin far out in the boonies ... I’m singing my fool head off. And I remember ... Shit, I don’t know. Ha! I don’t remember. Somehow, next thing I know is I’m sleepin it off on the floor in there and I open my eyes and some gorgeous dome’s washin dishes at the sink and her tight little ass is packed in these jeans wigglin and twitchin ... What’s the matter, Man?”
No response.
“Tell me you wouldn’t fuck her.”
“I’m goin up the north end of the pond,” Tony said. “Comin?”
“Uh ...” Ivanov shrugged his shoulders. “Hey, I’m just kiddin, Man.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. Then, “I need to figure out a terracing plan. For grapes. See if we can bench it without retaining walls. Just cut it. You comin?”
“Ah ... ah ... Nah. Bobby said I could work in the barn.”
“Um.”
“Hey. You ever fuck anybody in your bunker?”
“I”—Tony stared at Ivanov—“fuck over anybody who tries to go in.”
“Vertsborg. Jasper Vertsborg,” Bobby said into the phone.
“There’s no one in the school,” the female voice said.
“Yes,” Bobby said. “I know. He’s the new school psychologist they’ve hired. Doesn’t he have to come in during the summer? Set up his office, or something?”
“I don’t know anything about a Doctor Vertsborg,” the woman said. “Perhaps you should try the Board of Ed number.”
Bobby was exasperated. He’d been trying for four days to reach the Vertsborgs. At first he’d thought nothing of the no-answer at their home phone. By the third day he’d become concerned. He had added a heat-loss analysis to his presentation and he wanted to explain all the facets and options he’d produced. He drove on to Old Pete’s Barbershop. Work had begun on the store, but no one was about. To be so ready, with such a superior package to present, and to be in limbo was maddening. He’d been able to sell Aaron Holtz on a four-collector array for the roof of the White Pines Inn. That’d be something. It would preheat the well water for the dishwasher so the electric elements wouldn’t have to bring the temperature up from its constant fifty-one degrees. But it was a tiny job compared to the Vertsborg project. Bobby wanted them both. And he wanted to put Dale Ivanov to work.
That night at dinner Ivanov said, “I’d be real happy to help. But I don’t want to handle the glass.”
“That’s not a problem,” Bobby said.
“I’m just afraid for my hands,” Ivanov said.
Tony looked at Dale’s pudgy hands, at the stubby fingers. “What’s with your hands?” he asked.
Ivanov held his hands before his face, palms toward him, fingers wriggling. “These are my ticket to fame and fortune.” He smiled broadly, resumed eating, waited, wanting someone to ask. Then, seeing Sara eyeing him approvingly, he went on. “I’m a musician. I’m probably the best bass guitarist in the East.”
“Oh!” Sara was thrilled. “Can we hear you play?”
“See, that’s the problem,” Ivanov said. “When I got in some trouble last time I hocked me git-ar.” He laughed. “I need six hundred bucks to get it out.”
“Six hundred!” Tony straightened. “For a guitar?”
“Oh, it’s probably worth five times that,” Ivanov said. “I was with the group that opened for The Stones.”
“Is that right!” Bobby was as enthralled as Sara.
“That’s why I was drinkin that night,” Ivanov said. He hung his head in repentance. “If I hadn’t found a brother vet ... Man, I’ll never forget what you did for me.”
“Aw geez, Dale,” Bobby said. “Really. Don’t think about it. You’d have done it if it’d been one of us.”
Tony coughed. Slid his chair back, coughed into his fist. He stood, turned away, turned back, indicated something had gone down the wrong way, turned away again.
“Tony, you all right?” Dale sprung to his feet.
Tony waved him back. He slapped his chest. Took a short breath, cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he rasped out. His eyes watered.
“... when I’m on my feet again ...” Ivanov was saying.
Another week passed. Bobby convinced himself the Vertsborgs had gone on vacation, taking the long Fourth of July weekend. Ivanov shadowed him everywhere, chatted constantly, ostensibly assisted him with the four collectors for the White Pines. For Bobby, Ivanov’s inane banter was an amusing break.
“Listen to the frogs,” Ivanov said one warm evening as Sara (she’d cleaned the kitchen and put Noah down for the night) joined the men on the back steps. “It’s like they’re in complete command of the farm. Just listen to that croaking concert, that raucous reverberation.”
“You could write a song about them, huh?” Sara said sweetly.
“Yeah,” Dale said. “It really takes me back. When we were young, my brother and I would walk in the fields and search for frogs in the spring when it was wet and lizards in the summer when the fields were dry, when they were parched by the sun. This was in Ohio, almost down to Kentucky. That’s where I grew up. My brother’d remember.”
“Does your family still live there?” Sara asked.
“No. They’ve gone,” Dale said. “I remember one time following an old creek bed, late one summer, following it up to the hills. Nick had a new bow and two new arrows. It may have been his birthday. We were after rabbits. Nick wounded one. That ol’ rabbit gave out this terrible cry, like a baby bein hurt. And it tumbled into a thicket. We couldn’t find it. We lost the arrow too. It was the last arrow we ever lost and the only rabbit. After that, Man, we only hunted lizards and frogs and those by hand.”
“Where’s your brother, now?” Bobby asked.
“Beats me,” Dale said. “When I got back they didn’t want nothin to do with me.”
“I know what you mean,” Bobby said.
“Yeah,” Ivanov said. “This is really somethin here. I was listenin to the frogs last night. I was trying to recapture that feeling I had but I’ve been removed from it too long. I could only recall, not recapture. And that’s different. The voices of the frogs are the only thing that seem not to have changed. Their voices and the moon, maybe.”
“Oh Dale,” Sara said, “that’s beautiful. You really should write a song about it.”
“Yeah,” Dale said. “Maybe. I’d call it ‘High Meadow.’”
The next day Bobby paid Tony and Dale Ivanov and Ivanov convinced Tony they should give Bobby and Sara a break and go to the White Pines for dinner and some beers. By eight Dale was tipsy, by nine loud and obnoxious, by ten in his first scuffle with a Jappo-biker that Tony dispatched with a single leg sweep. When the biker returned with two friends, Aaron Holtz threw them all out and the Catcher in the Alfalfa ended up pounding one guy’s head into the pavement while the other two kicked his sides and Ivanov ripped the plug wires from the three Jap bikes and somehow started the Harley—when he’d taken the key Tony had no idea—then waited for Tony to temporarily maim the other two, gain enough time to break contact and retreat.
At breakfast the next morning Ivanov raved about Tony’s strength, Tony’s fighting ability. “You shoulda seen im! These three guys were giving us the evil eye, ya know? Tony just lit into em. Man, I’d follow that guy anywhere.”
Later, alone, Bobby confronted Tony in the tractor garage. “What the hell’s this fighting shit?”
“I didn’t start it,” Tony said.
“You can’t go hitting somebody because they give you the evil eye.” Bobby was angry, tired, acting like a tired father with a nine-year-old son.
“Forget it, Man.” Tony clammed up.
“Damn it. I don’t want to forget it,” Bobby snapped.
“It’ll never happen again.” Tony was tense, defensive, angry.
“Fuckin better not!” Bobby stormed away.
Three days later, over dinner, Ivanov gave Sara a sheet of paper. “I’m going to dedicate it to you,” he said.
“Wha ...” Bobby looked at Sara reading.
“‘High Meadow,’” Ivanov said. “The song about a man trying to recapture feelings he had as a boy. I’m never going to forget you. And Sara. All you’ve done ...”
“Bobby ...” Sara nodded at him. Then to Dale she said, “This is very good.” Again she looked at Bobby. Bobby shook his head. Sara handed him the lyrics. “I think you should say it now,” Sara said.
Bobby cleared his throat. Glanced at Tony, at Sara, then looked at Dale. “Okay,” he said. “Dale, we’ll lend you the money to get your instrument out of hock. You can pay us back a little from each gig.”
Ivanov’s appreciation was excessive.
“I’m glad I finally caught you,” Bobby said into the phone. “How was your vacation?”
“We haven’t been on vacation,” Jasper Vertsborg answered.
“Ah ... Oh. I’ve finished the redesign of the Conner house. I think you’ll be impressed. The greenhouse is truly elegant. By shifting the staircase, the dining room flows in—”
“We’re not sure about a two-story greenhouse,” Jasper said.
“Let me just show it to you,” Bobby said quickly. “I’ve built a detailed model and it’s on the siting table right now. You can see exactly ...”
“Mr. Wapinski, we’ve changed our minds.”
“You’ve changed ...”
“Yes. You knew we were just exploring our options.”
“Of course. So at least look at it. It’s really beautiful.”
“Well, you know they’re developing a new country club—Whirl’s End ... I’m certain you already know—”
“Whirl’s ... No. No, I don’t know.”
“Oh, it’s going to be fabulous. Ernest Hartley’s one of the partners. It’s just above the section they call South Hill, or New New Town ...”
Bobby had to think fast. “Then you’re going to build?” he asked.
“Yes. The streets should be in this fall. We’re going to build in the spring.”
“Then let me design it for you,” Bobby said.
“Oh.” Jasper Vertsborg laughed amiably. “We’ve already found a splendid architect. Barnett and Robins. You’ve probably heard of them. They’re the best in the Northeast and ...”
Bobby heard no more.
“How many gallons of syrup did you end up with?” Linda asked. She was in the tractor garage with Tony. Bobby was in the house, making phone calls. EES did not yet have a separate line to the big barn. Sara, the twins, and Noah were on a “nature hike” to the apple orchard.
“Less than forty,” Tony said.
They were in the same state of gentle ambivalence that had generally characterized their relationship for the past seven months.
“Are the trees okay?”
“Seem to be.”
“Then Mr. Lutz ... where he broke ...”
“I don’t know. Maples need lots of water. Maybe that was a different seam. Or maybe just the top. Maybe the trees reached deeper but they needed the whole spring.”
“Oh. I hope it comes back.” Linda moved closer to where Tony was installing a new oil filter. His hands were black and shiny. “What about the strawberries?”
Tony looked at her. A dark feeling descended upon him. His tone changed. “I’m not making squat, you know.”
“Huh?” Linda was taken aback. She had lost six pounds and she’d hoped Tony would notice.
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” Tony tightened the can filter, cleaned the oil smear from the can and the drippings from the frame below.
“What what’s about?” Linda was hurt, defensive.
“This ‘how much did we make’ stuff.”
“I just asked because I—”
“You know what Ivanushka says?” Tony didn’t give Linda a chance to respond. “He said his wife says she lived it more than him.”
“Lived what?” Linda assumed the crossed-arm stance she used to scold the twins.
“His craziness,” Tony blurted. “His combat schizo shit.”
Linda squinted, pursed her lips. “Where is this coming from?”
Tony turned to her. He was leaning forward, one hand out as if ready to jab. “Look. When this place starts making money, I’ll give you my share. I don’t give a shit about money. I owe you. I know. I know you pay everything. Or maybe Denham helps—”
“Denham!” Linda yelled.
Tony clammed up.
“Is that what you think? You think I’ve come here for money?! You think Denham gives me money?! You ... you ...” Linda held her tongue. Then she blurted, “Your daughters’ daughters will live with your psychosis long after you and I are gone.”
That night Aaron Holtz called the Wapinskis. “Bobby ...”
“Speaking.”
“Holtz here.”
“How you doing, Aaron?”
“Good. Hey, this Ivanushka guy ... You give him some money?”
“Yeah. To get his guitar out of hock.”
“You can kiss it good-bye. He just left with some bimbo. They’re headin for the Jersey shore.”
“What?!”
“You might catch im. They were in a big brown Olds with a dented right front fender. Headlight’s cocked out.”
“Shit.”
“You want me to call the cops?”
“Naw. Thanks Aaron. I’ll ... ah ... call ...”