He kept walking.
It wasn’t over, though. Not like that.
Jonah picked up the longest piece of lumber in the pile. The damn thing was heavy. He pictured ninety-pound Foerster here days before, muscling one of these things around to build that bridge, then coming back every couple of days to make sure it was still there. Jesus. The motherfucker was a boy scout. Jonah slid the lumber out over the alley, pushing down hard on his side to keep the other end up. He slid it. He slid it some more. It was too short. It fell away, banging and crashing on its trip down.
‘Fuck!’
He heard laughter. He looked up and there was Foerster, leaning against the elevator shaft and smiling at him.
Foerster pantomimed a guy checking the time. ‘I could watch this all day,’ he said. ‘But I got places to be, all right?’
CHAPTER 2
The hot sun made her feel sexy.
Thirty-three year-old, bikini-clad Katie Gant reclined in a lounge chair on a massive stone terrace, floppy sun hat shielding her eyes. The terrace looked over the backyard of her giant Tudor style home in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. It was a bright afternoon, and from her lounge chair she could drink in the sloping and closely manicured back lawn, the sparkling blue water of the in-ground swimming pool, even the riot of plantings tucked against the back of the house that made up her own kitchen garden, which had seen quite a bountiful harvest this year, thank you. Although her eyes were open, she saw none of these things.
She had a lot on her mind.
For a little while, as the perspiration beaded and slowly rolled down her skin, she imagined a shirtless young man in jeans shorts and flip-flops down there cleaning the pool. Her husband was away on business, again, and frustrated housewife Katie was trying to get that sculpted Adonis of a pool boy to climb the steps to her. She couldn’t hold the image, though, and gradually it faded and was replaced.
She remembered a morning fishing trip with her dad when she was a little girl down in Beaufort, when at first light they flushed a heron out of the reeds by the shore. The great gangling bird flapped its huge wings and took off across the bay. It was so graceful, that bird, once it got going, gliding just a couple of feet above the water. A few minutes later, the sun came up over the saltwater flats, Dad was tying her bait, and all the world boiled down to just the two of them in a nine-foot aluminum jonboat. At that moment, she never wanted to leave. She wished that time would stop forever.
Yet she had run away from Beaufort soon after graduation. By eighteen, the town was too small to hold her. She was confident, she was blonde, she was beautiful – everybody told her so – and she loved to talk and meet people. The world seemed to hold such promise. There was so much to do and see, and she couldn’t wait to get started. Some kids were going to college, but she knew college would always be there when she was good and ready for it. First she wanted to taste adventure.
She moved to Washington, DC, with some vague sense that powerful people, movers and shakers, lived there. This was closer to the excitement, but somehow she always seemed to just miss out on it. Part of the problem was the jobs she could get. Secretarial jobs – she was always somebody’s secretary. One day, while working as an assistant at the law firm of Benton and Hoffman, she spent seven hours pushing the green START button on a Xerox copy machine. That morning, the machine developed a glitch. It would copy only one page at a time. She needed to make a dozen copies of a government contract that was nearly two hundred pages long. For some reason, unexplained, the job had to be done that day. And for some reason, also unexplained, they couldn’t send it out to Kinko’s or Copy Plus. So Katie did it.
‘Good job today, Katie,’ her boss said, and meant it.
When the day was over, she went home to the apartment she shared with two other girls and cried. At the age of twenty, her employer valued her because she could stand in one place all day long and push the same button more than two thousand times in a row.
Where was the promise? Where was the adventure?
The copy machine debacle helped her realize she wasn’t cut out for the business world. It wasn’t just that she felt humiliated. It wasn’t that she had been treated like a machine, or part of a machine. It ran deeper than that. She saw that if she were in her boss’s position, there was no way she could demand that someone push a button two thousand times. It was a soulless, spirit crushing thing. She wanted no part of it. She was too sensitive, she felt things too deeply.
As it turned out, she was actually an artist. When she was a child, she had loved to draw and to paint, and a life drawing class she took on eight Saturdays reminded her of this. She moved again, this time to Dewey Beach, Delaware, where there was open space, open air and open water.
It was a party town on the Atlantic Ocean, and she partied right along with it. On summer weekends, it seemed like half of the mid-Atlantic region descended on the beaches. She worked as a waitress, first at a bar and grill, then at a seafood place, then at a steak house. Sweating through the menial jobs didn’t bother her anymore. She was having fun.
All night keg parties at rented waterfront townhouses always seemed to end at dawn with eight or ten people nude in the surf. Katie was always one of them. Riding through town in late summer on the back of some guy’s motorcycle, high on pot, the sun sinking in hues of red and orange and gold. Steamy lovemaking sessions on the beach, in the outdoor shower, on the back porch, on sandy sheets, with all sorts of guys. A sun-bleached surfer one summer. An artist, like herself, who came to paint the fall foliage one November, and who stayed through until the following April. A married fireman from Philadelphia who shared a ramshackle house with five other firemen, and who came to town every two weeks. Her first and only black man, a retired football player named Ray.
Ray had spent three years on the Kansas City Chiefs without ever getting into a regular season game. The way he saw it, he made all that money and didn’t get hurt, and that made sense to Katie. She broke it off with him when he tried to get her into a menage a trois with a hard-bodied black woman he brought over from Baltimore.
‘Come on, baby,’ Ray said. ‘Look at that sexy thing over there. You know she looks good.’ The woman leaned against the living room wall in Katie’s small apartment. She had long braids and high cheekbones and tight buns. She looked damn good in a bikini. She had a body to envy, and her big brown eyes said she knew it. Her presence, and the question at hand, made it loud and clear that Ray was already sleeping with her.
‘Fuck you, Ray. No means no. It’s just not my thing.’
Ray held Katie’s face in both hands. He had soft hands for such a strong man. ‘Let her taste you then. I guarantee she drives you wild. She wants to do it. Ain’t that right, Bevie?’
‘Mmmm-hmmm. She look good to me.’ Bevie had a gap between her two front teeth. She said it meant she was sweet down below.
‘Tell you what, Ray. Both of you. Out of my house.’
But she felt sad and empty when he was gone. Even now, years later, he was still her image of the ideal physical man. She wasn’t tall, but she had a lot of body – she reminded herself of Marilyn Monroe. Ray was so big and strong he made her feel like a small and delicate flower. It was a beautiful feeling, while it lasted.
After Ray, she spent fall and winter collecting unemployment checks and walking the empty beach. When she looked in the mirror, she caught the first glimpses of something she had thought she would never see. Age. She was twenty-seven. Her skin had seen too much sun. Her body had seen too much alcohol and maybe too many lovers. She counted them and the number only came to twenty-one, less than the number of years she had been alive. She had come close with quite a few others, so close that she almost counted them, but didn’t. Twenty-one had received the gift, she decided. Still, it was more than she’d like. For the first time, she considered that she would like to be a virgin again.
The next one, she thought. I’ll take it slow and I’ll love him, and he’ll be the one I marry. It’ll all be innocent and like new.
Almost a year later, the next one was Tyler Gant. Handsome, fit and tough – in those days Tyler was every
