now brought in grocery money. She raised her hand to shade the sun. Broker released Tank who trotted to Irene’s side.
“Still painting loons, Irene?” sang out Broker.
She smiled wryly as they came up the steps. The smile broadened into a grin. “Hey, Nina Pryce. You’re all grown up. I saw you on TV.”
“Hi, Irene.”
“Talk to my childless son.
Broker hugged her. “Irene believes our only purpose on earth is to replace ourselves.”
Irene grinned at Nina. “A fat little grandbaby would be nice, but for that you’d need a woman. What happened to your hand?”
“Guy bit me.”
“Don’t tell me.” Irene walked up to Nina and hugged her. “Speaking of women, you look way too fresh and on the intelligent side for Phil.”
Nina said, “That’s for sure. He’s a piece of work.”
“Yeah, yeah. Where’s the old man?” asked Broker.
Irene smiled tightly and nodded down toward the shore. “Counting rocks.”
Broker called Tank to his side and started down toward the water. Rock was what they had. Rock had been his cradle and his playpen. Like bedrock, Brokers were heavily connected by gravity to the earth. They were difficult to move and hard to the touch. This Broker learned in the silence, working beside his father.
He learned that anger and gentleness should be seldom shown so they were never squandered, so their emphasis was clear.
Now the clan was winnowed by death and geography. Now the developers and bankers laid their plans and waited for the tick of the clock.
He’d assumed the land would always be here, to come back to. He bowed his head and, with the dog at his left heel, went down the stone terraces toward his father.
Mike Broker, despite his injury, was still muscled like a troll at seventy-three. He sat on a throne of granite, facing out toward the horizon, sucking on an unlit pipe. Broker could almost see his father’s broad back smile, sensing his son’s approach. He turned slowly, a pugnosed man with a beard and thick longish unruly gray hair over a mat of bushy black eyebrows.
He’d been to Omaha Beach and Korea and had ridden with the wild biker-vets on the West Coast. Then he’d married Irene and stripped off his leathers and made his way laying stone and as a part-time high school teacher. History, civics, and hockey coach in the winter, before he went full time into the resort business. He’d served one term as the local police chief, then refused to run again because of the office work and politics. Broker’s first memory of his father was the smell of sweat. It was his favorite memory after his mother’s voice.
Broker had his mother’s eyes, her patience for fine detail, and, for better or worse, a large dose of her imagination. Misused, thus far, inside him he knew he had an unsmithed vein of German ore that was his father’s will.
When Broker was still several feet away, Mike asked casually, “What do you get when you cross a draft dodger and a crooked lawyer?”
“I give.”
“Chelsea.”
“Hi, Mike,” said Broker who had punished Bush for letting the Republican Guard get away into the Iraqi desert and put a check next to Clinton’s name.
“Hiya, kid,” said Mike, the diehard, Libertarian Perotista.
Broker sat down and pulled out his Spirits. Tank arranged his large body at Mike’s feet.
“Bad for you, the cigarettes, you know.”
“I know.”
“What happened to your hand?”
“Guy bit me.”
“What’s Nina Pryce doing with you?”
“Long story.”
Mike mulled this over and looked out over the water. “Do you ever think about death, capital D?” he asked.
After work came questions. Broker had sat on the rocks and been quizzed by his father and had been made to think. Later Broker came to understand the resemblance of this tutor-pupil relationship to the Socratic method. He was not surprised, when, in high school, he happened on the historical statue that reputed to be Socrates, and which bore a likeness to Mike Broker. Socrates was a stonemason.
“Not every day.”
“That’ll change when you turn fifty, then it’ll be every day. Now, when you turn
“You think, huh?”
“Yeah. I think he comes up and thumps on you like you’re a watermelon and then he listens to see if you’re ripe.”
“Break a knuckle on you,” said Broker. “Besides, you always said dying is one of the big whens, not an if.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yeah. One of your cautions against wishful thinking.”
Mike tapped his pipe against the stone, a sound that Broker associated with this spot and the watery heartbeat of the lake. He took a nail from his pocket and began to scrape the pipe bowl in a slow, regular motion.
“You get tired of police work yet?” he asked.
“Actually, Mike, I’m thinking of making a move.”
“Well, you gotta choose carefully. Rough economy out there. Downsizing you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Mike turned and faced his son. And Broker could see the complicated truss strapped under his overalls. “Phil,” he said, “I know you’ve been working with Fatty Naslund down at the bank to buy us some time, but I think we’re at the end of the rope.”
“So what are your plans?” asked Broker.
Mike averted his eyes and adopted a practical and it seemed practiced tone of uncharacteristic reasonableness. “Fatty’s lined up a developer who’ll give us a decent price for most of the place. We could pay off the bank and save one lot and build a house on it. Have a decent nest egg left over.”
Broker gazed across the beach at a particular curved plinth of granite that leaned out toward the water like the bowsprit of a dragon ship. It was called Abner’s Rock. Abner Broker had claimed the rock as his own in 1861, before he embarked downcountry to join the First Minnesota Regiment. In 1861 the Broker clan had comprised one fifth of the population of Cook County, Minnesota.
“And do what? Collect Social Security? Watch them build some tourist whorehouse next door? You’ll heal, you know. Maybe not like before but well enough to handle this place. We still have thirty days.”
“Hell, Phil, we’ve run down every option short of robbing a bank…”
Broker stared out over the water. As a boy, Irene had trained his imagination by coaxing him to read shapes in the endless play of light and shadow in the clouds, to decipher faces in the wind moving through the leaves on trees, to understand motion in the wrestle of the waves.
Forty-three years old and hard as a rake handle left out all winter, he could just make out a galleon, packaged in cumulus, on the horizon.
Which was probably why Nina had come for him.
“Let’s make a fire tonight. Down where we used to,” he said.
