Jimmy rolled his eyes. It was getting complicated. He shook his head, like a man trying to comprehend an absurd question. As Griffin drove away, Jimmy went immediately to the phone on the wall and called Gator.
“Griffin was just here throwing his weight around.”
Huh? In five seconds flat. Throwing his weight around, how? “What do you
“He was pushing at me. Accused me of messing with Broker’s truck, giving him a flat tire. I didn’t do that,” Jimmy huffed. He was careful to leave out the ski part. The obvious part, because everybody knew he didn’t cross- country. Whereas everybody knew Gator had a wall full of ribbons.
“Anything else?” Gator said.
“Ah, yeah,” Jimmy said, spanning the sins of omission with a hint of relief. “He says him and Keith will get Broker to apologize to me and Teddy. He caved.”
Moron, Gator thought, as he watched the black kitten wolf down the Chef ’s Blend through the open office door. He said, “That’s great, Jimmy. So you got what you wanted.”
“Ah, what about Griffin? Coming around. I don’t really want to mess with him, you know.”
“Aw, he’s probably just sticking up for his buddy. Nothing to it. We’ll just let Keith do his thing, like I said.”
“So everything’s all right?”
“Yeah, Jimmy. Everything’s cool,” Gator said. When he hung up, he didn’t share his brother-in-law’s sense of relief. Griffin showing up as a wild card was far from cool. They’d never crossed paths, and Gator hoped to keep it that way.
Distracted, staring at the clock on the wall, then at the phone on his desk; he didn’t think Griffin was anything to worry about. Yet. It’d blow over, the petty feud part. But the other thing…
He wiped off his hands on a rag and walked into the office. Chided himself. Stop watching the phone. Too early for Sheryl to check in. And she didn’t deal in maybes. She’d wait until she had something definite.
When he reached down to stroke the kitten, she darted away under the desk.
“You’ll come around,” he said. “Because I feed you and give you shelter. You need me.” Just like Jimmy and Cassie came around. He turned back to the tractor in his bay. It took time. Like the Moline. Be months before he could make it whole.
Gator held that the combustion engine resembled the human body; used fuel like food, used air just like lungs.
Then he paused and considered the plan he’d set in motion against Phil Broker’s life. Well, there was one fundamental difference between people and machines: once they turned Broker off, no way he was going to start up again.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Broker dropped Kit off at school,drove back through town, and turned north on Lakeside Road, which served as the frontage road for the west side of the lake. After about a mile, he wheeled toward the lake at the Glacier Lodge sign. A thick stand of balsam and spruce masked the empty parking lot in front of the gabled lodgepole pine building set on a rocky point. Didn’t see Griffin’s Jeep, just Teedo’s black Ford.
Broker parked and walked around to the lakeside, where the carpenters had put up a shelter, two-by-sixes and two-by-fours supporting a tent of black insulated tarps. Inside this tent, warmed by a propane heater, Griffin and Teedo had been laying a flagstone porch and patio-winter work, the lodge owner’s late February inspiration. He wanted the patio ready for fishing opener in May. Pallets stacked with Montana flagstone and sacks of mortar surrounded the tent. A Bobcat. The locker where Griffin kept his tools.
Teedo Dove, Griffin’s apprentice, was feeding pieces of familiar split oak into a fire he’d started in a length of steel culvert. That oak was Broker’s main contribution to the crew he was supposed to work on. Put all the days he’d actually handled the stone in a string, and it wouldn’t stretch two weeks for the whole winter. A mound of masonry sand heaped over the culvert with a half fifty-five-gallon drum of water heating on the top. A gasoline- powered cement mixer and wheelbarrow was positioned alongside. Teedo, at twenty-seven, stood six-two and went around 250. A Red Lake Ojibwa, he was soft-spoken, bearlike, light on his feet, and a quiet drinker. Hounded by Griffin, he sporadically attended the local AA meeting. He originally blamed his drinking on his decision nine years ago not to take the full-ride scholarship he’d been offered, playing right tackle at Bemidji State. Griffin’s simple advice on alcoholism was typically blunt: “Don’t put it in your mouth.”
He’d taken Teedo on as a reclamation project. Griffin was big on stuff like that. Interventions. Rescues. He’d been resocialized by Alcoholics Anonymous. Up to a point. Sometimes Broker glimpsed edges of the old Griffin, the brilliant but erratic risk taker in Vietnam. Broker had looked on their war as a job with really shitty working conditions. Griffin was more the dark romantic, in Broker’s opinion; a man who had been more than a little in love with death.
“Morning, Teedo,” he said. “Where’s the boss?”
“Ain’t here,” Teedo said with blank Zen presence. “Feed the fire. I’ll set up some stone. Then we’ll mix some mud.” He disappeared into the tent to arrange the stone.
After tossing more wood on the fire, Broker unscrewed the cup from his thermos and poured some coffee. He looked out over the lake, felt the warm sun on his face, saw it sparkle on the calm water. The temperature was thirty degrees and rising. If this kept up, they wouldn’t need the fire to warm the sand and water. They could peel back the tarps and work in the morning light.
The sunlight dissolved the harsh cold out of his crystallized breath. Panes of thin ice glistened, about to melt in the puddles. He could almost smell a softness in the air-sap rising-hear the tentative bird calls. A faint hush of green buds trembled in the branches of the aspen and birches.
Buoyed by the caress of the sun, he thought, Damn. It was just possible, that, like Persephone emerging from the underworld, he and Nina and Kit had survived their black winter.
Teedo plugged his radio into an outlet in the porch siding and filled the tent with a wail and groan of country music, punctuated with news of the war. Broker mixed mortar, shoveled it into the barrow, and wheeled it out of the sunlight into the limbo of naked lightbulbs strung in the tent. Teedo troweled the mortar down and leveled the patio flags.
Broker was mixing the second batch of mud when Griffin arrived and waved Broker over to his Jeep, then handed him the new improved bunny and the cat’s collar. Broker stuffed the collar in his pocket and, after inspecting the subtle repair job, said, “Thanks. I’ll tell her I found it jammed under the seat.” He put the stuffed toy in the Tundra, came back.
“I stopped off to visit with Jimmy Klumpe this morning,” Griffin said.
“You been busy,” Broker said carefully.
“Here’s the deal. You gotta come up with a face-saving gesture, something he will accept as an apology.”
Broker shrugged, “No sweat, sure. After what I saw and heard last night-”
“And he wants you to replace the shirt Teddy got bloody.”
“Jesus, you got me running the gauntlet,” Broker made a mock show of protest.
Griffin laughed. “Do you good. An exercise in making amends. Practice some humility. C’mon. Time to work.”
As the morning continued warm, they fell into a rhythm. Griffin sliced the flagstone sheets into irregular slabs with his heavy diamond-blade saw. Broker loaded the wheelbarrow, ferried the pieces into the tent, and arranged them in a pattern on the concrete patio footing. Teedo followed Broker, adjusting the spacing, leveling, and mudding them in place.
As Broker loaded the raw stone, he watched Griffin work. Years ago he’d speculated Griffin would watch
