good poison unit there. But last I heard, he was in a coma and they don't expect him to come out of it.'
Ralph spoke loudly. 'That homeowners' association killed him just as surely as if they'd put a gun to his head.'
Barry focused on his food. The conversation had obviously been pitched at such a level for his benefit, but he was at a loss and didn't know how he was supposed to respond. Or if he was supposed to respond. He finished his lunch in silence, paid his bill, then nodded good-bye and headed back out to the office.
What was that about? he wondered. They knew about his hatred of the homeowners' association. Hank did, at least. And there was no way they could think he'd be involved in any poisoning scheme. So why the cold shoulder?
He didn't know, but it bothered him, and after sitting in front of his computer for the next two hours and hacking out only a single paragraph, he shut everything off, closed up shop, and went home.
He was watching TV when Maureen arrived home from a meeting with her newest client, some bigwig at the bank, and she gave him a disgusted look as she put down her briefcase. 'Afternoon talk shows?'
'How else am I going to keep up with popular slang? I'm isolated out here. This helps me learn what people are talking about and the way they talk about it. This is research.' He grinned. 'I can take this off my taxes, right?'
'Try to be a person,' she said.
He followed her upstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a Diet Coke. 'I'm not used to all this ... selling,' she admitted. 'Back in California, I just had to convince people that I was the best accountant for the job.
I didn't have to convince them that they needed an accountant, period.
People are so backward here.'
'Yeah, but the scenery's beautiful.' Barry pointed out the sliding glass door.
Maureen laughed. 'Yes, the scenery's beautiful.'
They decided to go for a late afternoon walk, and Barry waited downstairs on the couch, watching two gorgeous women fight over a grotesquely overweight bigamist on TV while Maureen changed her shoes and filled up her sports bottle.
They walked out to the street, and Barry stopped. 'Which way?' he asked, looking in both directions. 'Up or down?'
'Let's go down the hill,' Maureen suggested. 'We'll save the hard stuff for last.'
They descended the steeply sloping street, walking slowly and holding hands so as not to accelerate unwantedly . They passed a handful of houses set back among the trees and some heavily forested lots before the road finally leveled off. Suddenly, the trees opened up and they were confronted on the right by what looked like nearly half an acre of denuded land.
'Jesus,' Barry said. He stopped short to take it all in. 'Look at that.' He pointed to the edge of the open space, where a group of shirtless men were lined up before a ditch, digging. An incongruously well-dressed man holding a black whip was standing behind the ditch on a raised section of ground, barking orders. It reminded him of a scene from some low-budget biblical epic or a revisionist in die film about the Old South.
But there were no cameras rolling here.
'What the hell's going on?'
'They're digging a pool,' Maureen said. 'And laying a foundation for a community center. Audrey said they're volunteers.'
The man with the whip cracked it. 'Faster!' he ordered. 'We're falling behind!'
'It doesn't look like they're doing this voluntarily to me.'
He realized that they were both talking low, as if afraid of being overheard, and Barry made a conscious effort to raise his voice. 'This must be a joke. This can't be real.'
'I don't know, they were doing the same thing yesterday, although without the whip hand. And they've sure done a lot of clearing and digging since then. That's a lot of work for a joke.'
'I thought the association had all sorts of brush and tree cutting prohibitions.'
'Not for themselves,' Maureen said dryly.
They walked slowly past the open area, watching the men work.
Maureen stopped and frowned. 'Is that Greg David son?'
He followed her pointing finger, saw a young man on the edge of the group who was half-hidden by a still extant manzanita bush. It did look like Greg, and Barry squinted at the man, trying to get a better view. 'I thought he and his wife were moving out:'
'So did I.'
'Greg!' he called out, but the man did not turn to look at him, did not respond at all, simply kept digging.
'Maybe it's not him,' Barry said. But he knew better. Obscured sight line or not, he recognized the man, and his gut confirmed what his eyes could not.
There was something wrong here. Greg Davidson was not only supposed to have sold his house and moved to Arizona, but he had been as fiercely anti-association as Ray or Barry himself--and had more of a reason to be so than either of them. So why was he still here, volunteering his time to help the association build a swimming pool?
He wasn't volunteering, Barry thought, and the idea made him shiver.
The overseer cracked the whip once again.
One of the other men looked familiar as well, a skinny guy with short brown hair, but Barry could not seem to place him.
There was no reason they could not walk onto the property and look around, find out if it really was Greg David son, ask the man with the whip what the hell he was doing. This was association land, owned jointly by all, and they had as much right to be on it as anyone else.
But they kept walking. Rights were different from reality, and without speaking they each knew that they were not welcome here, that there was something odd and decidedly threatening about this supposedly benign and communally beneficial volunteer effort.
They did not talk until they were well past the site and the road had rounded a copse of tall trees, and even then it was only to say, 'That was weird,' and 'Yeah.' What they had seen, what they'd felt, was not something that lent itself to casual discussion, and to say any more than that would invest it with a power neither of them wanted it to have.
Barry filed away the entire experience, as well as their reactions, in his mind, knowing that, like his introduction to Stumpy, it would one day come out in his fiction.
They continued walking, spotting a deer eating the azaleas that lined someone's driveway, seeing some sort of bright orange bird land on the dead limb of a juniper. It was like a different world, a perfect place where everyone and everything lived in harmony, and only the far-off pi inking of shovels behind them told him otherwise.
They took a cross-street to the section of Bonita Vista on the other side of their hill, and met Mike halfway up Sycamore Drive. He was standing by the side of the road, bent over and holding his side, breathing deeply. He smiled sheepishly when he saw them. 'That slope's a mother.'
Maureen laughed. 'Come on! If Barry can do it, anyone can do it.'
'I resent that,' Barry said. He looked over at Mike, who was still breathing hard. 'I thought you were supposed to be in shape. You said you played tennis.'
'Well, I stand there and hit the ball over the net. I don't run or anything. That's why Tina has me exercising out here. She doesn't think I do enough physical activity. By the way, if she asks, you saw me jogging out here, not gasping for air by the side of the road.'
Maureen laughed. 'Your secret's safe with us.'
'Where're you guys headed?'
Barry shrugged. 'Around the loop and back home.'
'Mind if I join you?'
'Be our guest.'
