“Not my part of the deal, sir,” I told him. “I just hope it’s okay with his wife.”
He smiled broadly, thin laugh lines forming around his eyes and across his forehead.
“Oh yes, me too. That is a hot one Mr. Veneer has on his hands, indeed.”
“Well, no worries there,” I said. “I know she’ll be im -pressed.”
I asked him to get back over to his yard for his own safety before I climbed into the cab of the front-end loader. From there it was a simple matter of engaging the lowest forward gear and opening the throttle up as far as it would go. Given the tonnage and torque loads in play, I hardly felt a tremor as the chain clipped each lally free under the east girder, then it a gave off a slight bump when it scooped up the center stairwell, before clearing the remaining row of lallys. I envisioned the chain sliding up the poles, gaining purchase, and then snapping the flange at the underside of the laminated beam. Looking back at the chain I saw the loop finish the job by tearing a sizeable hole in the sill area as it exited the basement, bringing with it a section of wall, complete with siding, studs and a double-hung window.
The house overall looked pretty much the same, until you noticed a big dimple forming in the middle of the ridge line, the center of the house no longer able to hold as Tony Vaneer’s parallel universe slouched inexorably, and irredeemably, back toward the earth.
——
My only audience might have been a retired engineer after all. I saw him waving furiously at me to come back when I jumped out of the cab and trotted over to the pickup truck. I probably would have liked talking to him, but I thought it was better to get out of town and back to Brattleboro, where I returned the truck to the train station with its original plates. I had to put it in a different parking spot, but left five hundred in cash on the front seat as a sop to what I imagined to be my conscience.
I kept the chain saw, which came in handy that week when, inspired by my foray into deconstructionism in Vermont, I hired Walter and Antoine Bick to help make some modifications to the house I’d lived in for ten years in the woods above Stamford—this time focusing on the cosmetic rather than the structural.
You can say all you want about the benefits of regular workouts at the gym, but the Bicks agreed there was nothing quite like crowbars, sledgehammers and chain saws for exercising both body and spirit, temporal and transcendent.
NINE
“WERE YOU PLANNING to tell me, or do I always have to read about it in the newspapers?”
It was the morning after my pool game with Burton and Hayden, and my daughter was on the phone. This was an uncommon event, most of our communication being handled through postcards and the rare glorious time she came out from the City to spend a weekend. She was a graphic artist, and by my reckoning a first-rate talent, a fact too rarely appreciated by the long line of employers she’d already strung together since graduating from Rhode Island School of Design.
“Hi, honey. Nice to hear your voice.”
“Tell me it’s all a mistake.”
“A very big mistake. Definitely. I’m sure the paper had it all wrong. What did you see,
“Second-degree murder? Is that part right?”
“Well, somebody definitely killed the guy. It just wasn’t me.”
The phone went quiet, and my heart went cold. I hated those long empty pauses she bestowed on me when we talked on the phone. I hated the phone, period.
“How’s work?” I asked her, for which she rewarded me with another eternal silence.
“You told me you were on a program of self-improvement,” she said finally. “I assumed that meant no more fistfights.”
“He did all the fighting. I just got him to quit. You can ask Amanda.”
I gave her a thorough rundown of the situation as I saw it, pausing once in a while to make sure she was still on the phone, but not giving her much room to respond, even if she wanted to. I wanted to build up some momentum as a defense against the next span of dead air, which I tried to thwart by saying, “Okay, that’s where things stand at the moment. I’ll stop talking now so you can talk. Go ahead, it’s your turn. Say something.”
“I thought I was done worrying about you,” she said.
“That’s my line.”
“Burton Lewis won’t let anything happen to you.”
“He won’t. Neither will Jackie.”
“Why is it always like this with you?” she asked, not as a rhetorical question, but a matter of fact.
“Your mother taught you to ask unanswerable questions. From me you learned the biggest danger is trying to answer.”
“I think elegant evasion was part of the lesson.”
“Bob and Weave, two of my closest friends.”
There was another pause, but it had a chuckle built into it, which made everything okay.
“You could at least keep me informed of the situation,” she said.
“I certainly could.”
“Though you probably won’t,” she said.
“Jackie will. I’ll give her explicit instructions.”
“You’re way too old to be hitting people over the head.”
“Don’t tell your boyfriends,” I said.
“Boyfriend. A compound noun built on an interior contradiction.”
“Now who’s evasive.”
“I’m way too sleepy for this. Just keep me posted, okay? Can you do that?”
“Always.”
“Right. Bye, Daddy.”
A form of relief akin to joy swept through me after I hung up. I hadn’t let myself acknowledge how much I’d been dreading that call. That it happened so abruptly and painlessly sent my heart soaring like a hawk. And I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee. I put two fisted hands in the air and jumped up and down like I’d just scored a goal for Manchester United.
Eddie, picking up on the emotional vibe, barked and spun himself around, his claws clicking on the hardwood kitchen floor.
——
Frank Entwhistle Junior represented the third generation to run the family construction business. His grandfather had started out as a cabinet and molding maker and general woodworker in the service of the wealthy estate builders, who were about the only people building anything out here in those days. He worked out of a cluster of barns and outbuildings that had been a farm in even earlier times, which was subsequently surrounded by development flowing steadily out from Southampton Village. The buildings eventually became a base of operations, storage facility and handy custom shop for his son’s and grandson’s construction trade. Consequently, the Entwhistles were in a constant state of siege by their neighbors, mostly summer people in renovated shingle-clad Federal-style mansions, who thought the Village should do something about the sounds of table saws and planers, and the flow of pickup trucks and vans going in and out of the compound at all hours of the day. Most egregiously before seven o’clock on Saturday morning, when rational people were doing yoga or warding off hangovers.
My favorite part of the complex was a little white building housing the office where a woman named Glenda Ray Whittle worked for about fifty years as the shop’s secretary. These days Frank Junior liked to do his paperwork there, which had more to do with keyboards and liquid-crystal monitors than paper. I liked that he kept the rows of tiny oak drawers against the wall where they used to store file cards and spare parts for the machine tools, and calendars with paintings of hunters blasting pheasants, and airbrushed women in denim short shorts and gingham shirts tied off below their breasts holding half-ton adjustable wrenches like they were feather dusters.
Frank was a short meaty guy with a broad flat nose, round cheeks and a bald head. He was usually preoccupied with managing his business to the point of near obsession, but that never stopped him from having a friendly conversation or taking the time to ask how you were doing.
