Godspeed

by Nickolas Butler

  “Not much of a coffee drinker, myself,” he said. “But I’d take a tall glass of water.”

  They sat at a small circular table in her cramped kitchen, and she fed him well-buttered white-bread toast with homemade blackberry jam. She talked about her home, about how this place had grown a family of seven children, about how, with just those two tight bedrooms, it had been stuffed with people: kids sleeping in closets, kids sleeping in bunk beds, kids sleeping in the basement, and a single toilet for them all to share. Teddy stared out the window as he chewed his toast. His partners were already late, and he was beginning to wonder if they were coming at all.

  “These houses they’re building today,” the old woman continued, “you could fit ten of mine into any one of them. My lord, you could fit this whole home just in their garage alone. It’s an abomination, don’t you think?”

  He tilted his head, not entirely sure how to respond. “Well, ma’am, the thing is, a big house like you’re describing, I mean, that’s a lot of jobs for a lot of people. And for a long time, too.”

  “Honestly, I think it’s a big waste,” she continued. “All the people out there who are hungry and homeless. Think of the ways that money could be spent.”

  “Yeah, but this is America, ma’am. People don’t like to be told how to spend their money. Even homeless people.”

  He stood from the table and approached the window, gazing out at the street as he swallowed down the cold tap water. Cole and Bart were nowhere in sight. He checked his phone for messages and immediately spotted a text from Cole:

  We’re at the house site. Where ARE you?

  Teddy quickly texted back:

  Thought we were working on the old lady’s garage?

  Behind him she kept prattling on. “An eight-thousand-square-foot house and they live there, what, maybe two weeks a year? Pushing the taxes up, too. Another five years, I won’t be able to afford living here.”

  His phone vibrated again:

  Forget the old lady. We need you out here. PRONTO.

  He returned to the table and sat down heavily, felt her eyes on him.

  “Your partners aren’t coming, are they?”

  He glanced down at his boots. “The lumber we were expecting didn’t arrive,” he lied, finishing the glass of water. He rapped his knuckles on the table. “But next week is looking real good.”

  “I raised seven children,” she said quietly. “I know when I’m being lied to. And I don’t suffer fools either.”

  He stood again, placed the glass and plate in the sink. “Tell you what,” he said. “Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be right back with a new belt. Get that furnace up and running again.”

  “Son, I’m eighty-two years old. You don’t fix that garage soon, I may not be around to pay you for your work, if you catch my drift. My clock is ticking. Loudly.”

  From the front door he regarded her where she sat at the kitchen table nibbling at her toast. He did not believe her. This was a woman who might outlast the mountains.

  5

  The house site was still swaddled in morning shadow when Teddy reached the springs. Cole and Bart were flanking Gretchen as they all peered down at a set of blueprints laid out on Cole’s open pickup tailgate.

  “Mornin’,” Teddy called.

  “Teddy, hello,” Gretchen said. “This is my architect. Elizabeth Crown.”

  “Miss,” Teddy said, shaking her hand.

  The architect was a tall, thin woman with long black hair, and stylish eyeglasses she seemed to readjust more or less constantly.

  “Miss Crown will not be on the site very much, if at all,” Gretchen said. “She’s a young hotshot with a new firm in San José. I was lucky to snatch her up for this project. And I wish I could linger a bit longer, too, gentlemen, but I’ve got an early-afternoon flight. So, if you require any specific direction, please don’t hesitate to call. No doubt you’ll need to make a draw fairly soon. I assume you’re familiar with the title company?”

  “We know who they are,” Cole said. “I’d like to begin framing as soon as we can. Then get a roof on this. Seal up the box so weather isn’t a concern.”

  “Indeed. I’m glad you’re on the job.”

  “Us, too,” Teddy put in earnestly.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing,” Gretchen said almost offhandedly, her voice trailing off. “A gentleman I’d like you to meet.”

  Cole almost smirked; seeing in that casual delivery quite the opposite—a premeditated calculation: What was to follow meant to look like a second thought and had clearly been determined some time earlier. Had they been playing chess, he had no doubt Gretchen could have beaten him nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, but on this move, he’d anticipated her, seen her plans well-telegraphed. Or, then again, perhaps that was the point.

  “Follow me,” she said, and they did.

  Near the garage, two men stood leaning against the bed of a Ford pickup. There was something about their quiet discussion, the way their hands and forearms rested on that truck, that Cole recognized immediately as a friendship, a familiarity built over years. The two men were talking, yes, but Cole suspected that even without words they could know each other’s minds, or, at the very least, what was required of each other to complete the job ahead of them.

  “Bill,” Gretchen called out. “Bill, I’d like you to meet these three gentlemen.”

  Bill said one last thing to the young man, perhaps in his late twenties, before ambling over toward them. He was an extremely robust man, built like the professional wrestlers of yore, a six-foot-tall wedge of day-labor muscle and calluses. When he greeted the three men, it was with a hand as thick as a slab of rough-cut lumber, and about as hard, too. His eyes were clear and intelligent, Cole saw, as he sized them up, assessing the new situation.

  “Bill is my stonemason,” Gretchen went on. “He’s built the fireplaces in all my vacation homes. A true master.”

  At that introduction, Bill directed his eyes toward the gravel at his feet.

  “Anyway, Bill and his assistant, José, are the only two contractors left from . . .” Her voice trailed off momentarily. “From the beginning stages of construction. So, Bill, these gentlemen are the new generals: True Triangle Construction.”

  The men gave death-grip handshakes.

  “And now,” she said, stepping back down the driveway, her young architect trailing behind her toward the river, “I really must be taking my leave. We’ll be in touch.”

  Bill stood a moment longer, watching her go, then nodded his head silently at the men and, reaching into the bed of his truck, filled his arms with fifty-some pounds of stone before climbing up the stairs to the second story of the still-skeletal structure.

  Back down the driveway Gretchen and Elizabeth Crown drove off, leaving the three men standing there, a sweet symphony of sounds all around them: the seep trickling into the hot springs, the hot springs feeding the creek draining down toward the river, and farther away, the river itself, rushing always downhill, back toward civilization.

  Cole motioned for his partners to follow him down the driveway and then stopped at the middle of the bridge, where the three of them stared back at the house.

  “I’m gonna tell you boys something right now,” Cole said. “That mason is a goddamn spy.”

  “She all but told us he was,” Bart said. “But my main question remains: How the hell are we going to pull this fucking thing off?”

  “And what about that old lady’s garage project, by the way?” Teddy asked. “We told her we’d be done ages ago. I was there this morning, and she—”

  Cole’s eyes closed, and his hands framed his temples. “Teddy, forget about the old lady, okay?” he said. “If she wants to fire us, then she should do that. Right now, we got bigger fish to fry.”

  “But, I mean, we could pound out that garage in two days if—�
��

  “Teddy! Shut the fuck up, man,” Cole barked. “All right? This is a multimillion-dollar house. How ’bout a little focus, huh?”

  “You don’t have any qualms about any of this, then, huh, Coley?” Bart asked. “The schedule this lady’s imposed is dangerous. Working around the clock maybe seems doable at the onset, but, brother . . . I’m worried. Worried for you two bastards. Worried about us all. And I still think it’s fishy as hell about her other contractor. . . .”

  “I’m gonna level with you, Bart. I got zero qualms. So the lady’s got a tight timeline? At least all our expectations are out in the open, right?” Cole argued. “And, I mean, hell. Look, if we’re getting toward the end and we can’t make it in time, we sacrifice some of the bottom line to pay some subs for last-minute help. That ain’t the end of the world, is it?”

  Bart collapsed the distance between himself and Cole, spitting down into the dirt and tipping his chin up. “I’m willing to bet she’s the reason they quit, or were fired,” he reasoned. “Working after dark on a three-story house ain’t exactly a recipe for OSHA-approved safety. You think we can finish what they started, but, bub—I’m worried we could get fired, too.”

  “Yeah, well, we can’t worry about that now, can we?” Cole said. “We can’t waste time. So, for the love of Christ, come on you two—focus.”

  Teddy had grown up inside a house where his parents fought violently, and there was nothing he disliked more than confrontation. “All right, all right,” he said, settling his hands on his partners’ shoulders. “So how do we get on track here?”

  Cole exhaled and offered his hand to Bart, who warily accepted.

  “I need a cigarette,” Cole admitted, smiling wryly. “You guys want one?”

  “Naw,” Teddy said, wrinkling his nose.

  “Fuck, yeah,” Bart said.

  Cole shook two cigarettes out of a pack he kept stowed in his glove box and passed one to Bart, lighting it up for his friend. Both men inhaled.

  Bart shook his head, snickering to himself almost inaudibly. “Nothing I love more than these mountains,” he said, raising his arms. “This fucking project might be crazy as all get-out, and yet . . . here we are. In all this glory.”

  The cliffs above them were ablaze with light, and the only sounds were the gentle trickling of the mountain seep into the springs, and the creek as it wound downhill to the river’s roar. Far off, the plume from the road construction crew could be seen, but the river’s steady soundtrack rendered whatever noise they produced soundless.

  “I think we move a big shipment of lumber, joists, and plywood here as soon as possible,” Cole said. “We can store a lot of it in the garage. I think we move the windows here as soon as possible, too. And the roofing metal. We need to get a plumber and electrician on board. We need to schedule the solar installation. I like the idea of getting that solar up and running on the off-chance that the electricity goes out. Wouldn’t be a half-bad idea to get a heavy-duty generator here, too. Just in case.”

  “Me and Teddy can get a generator,” Bart offered.

  “Britney’s cousin is a plumber and just finished a job,” Teddy said helpfully. “You guys remember him? Zach? Just got back from Iraq about a year ago?”

  “Yep.” Cole nodded. “Good dude. Give him a call, Teddy. Bring him on board. Me, I’ll get our supplies rolling. And try to figure out who Gretchen’s old general contractor was. He prolly had subs all lined up who might still want the work.”

  “We’re gonna need a trailer or something, too,” Bart said. “If we’re gonna be stationed up here for the next four months, we’re gonna want shelter. Someplace other than that house. A place to cook food, change clothes, get out of the elements. What do you guys say?”

  “Sure,” Cole agreed. “That’s gonna be a chunk of change, but with that earnest money, we can afford something nice. Don’t skimp either, Bart. We need to project a sense of professionalism. Hear me?”

  “Copy that,” Bart said, giving Cole a flippant little salute.

  “We can do this,” Teddy said.

  Cole smiled. “We can definitely do this.”

  “All right, then, gentlemen,” said Bart. “Only way out’s through, I guess.”

  6

  There is a unique excitement that imbues the construction of a new house—and a sense of mystery, too. For the person holding the blueprints, yes, they know what the structure they’re building should look like in the end. But that doesn’t always make it so. A homeowner’s dream, for one thing, does not always perfectly correspond to a homeowner’s checking account. And there are any number of factors that cannot be predicted with real certainty. When drilling a well, for example, what comprises the bedrock beneath the site? A homeowner may have a general sense of the local geology and topography, but they cannot know with precision what strata of stone the drill will discover, or how deep the aquifer may lie waiting underground. Certainly, the homeowner cannot control the weather: howling winds, five-day storms that sock into the landscape like an unwanted houseguest. So much about the actual building of a house cannot be sketched out on a blueprint.

  For Cole, Bart, and Teddy, there was an overwhelming sense of satisfaction in watching subcontractors and suppliers slowly pull up the long gravel road toward the job they were overseeing. Grizzled old men would amble onto the site, peer up at the cliff-faces and then down into the hot springs, and rub at their heads or chins before saying something like, Never seen nothin’ like this.

  These men looked at the partners of True Triangle with a mixture of respect and envy, and the effect was intoxicating. It altered the way they spoke, the way they walked, the way they slammed their own truck doors, the confidence and volume with which they spoke on their phones. In a matter of days, they’d gone from living as working-class ghosts to feeling like other men were watching them and marking the things they said, the assuredness with which they executed orders. The day Bart pulled the new camper-trailer near the house, there was a palpable sense of awe in the air. How the hell did these unknown assholes score a project like this? And, Look at the money they’re spending already!

  “How much did this thing cost us?” Cole asked Bart, as they parked the trailer on a fairly level area before popping their heads inside for a quick look-see. It certainly was deluxe: a sleeping area, a bathroom, a small kitchen, and even a sort of living and dining space.

  “You don’t wanna know.” Bart grinned, knowing that the final tally was well over a hundred grand. “I put it on the company card. It’s all good. Hell, I even stocked the fridge.”

  “Guess this is our first official office,” Teddy quipped. “I like it.”

  “Yep. This here’s our headquarters,” Bart said, slapping at a thin wall of fiberglass and vinyl. “The ole HQ.”

  “And like most houses in America,” Cole said, shaking his head, “if it catches fire, it won’t burn. It’ll melt. A whole lot of plastic went into this.”

  As if on cue, they all peered out through the windows of the trailer to Gretchen’s house, where over a dozen men were scurrying around, performing their various duties.

  “There’s a house that ain’t gonna melt at the first errant matchstick,” Bart said. “We’re building one for the ages, boys.”

  “You’re right about that,” Cole agreed as he left the trailer. “So let’s get back to work.”

  * * *

  —

  In those fast-shortening days of late September and early October, with dusk coming on as quick as an encroaching thunderhead, the men worked long, long hours, arriving in the predawn blue-black of fading night, when the stars over the mountains were so near, so precise as to steal your breath and make you feel for a moment the truth of it all, that you were just a living speck on this great blue-green marble tumbling its way through outer space, beholden to so many invisible laws, and, against that sheer infinitude of blackness and
space, alive but an instant. At least that was what Cole felt, as he drove each morning along that gravel road. Sometimes in his rearview mirror he caught a glimpse of his partners rumbling up the same road behind him, their headlights separated by a mile or more, like a poorly strung necklace—Teddy probably checking in with Britney before he lost his cell phone signal; Bart flipping through the FM radio dial while he spit brown, tobacco-flecked Copenhagen-juice into the red Solo cup that would be lodged between his thighs.

  The three men worked as hard and as diligently as they could remember, arriving long before their subs came yawning and drag-assing onto the site. Already they’d be laying plywood over the floor joists, the generator howling and their nail guns going pfffttt, pfffttt, pfffttt. Their boots pounded the floors almost as loud as the boom box screamed Aerosmith or Metallica or AC/DC, something to keep them moving, moving, moving, something to keep the testosterone pumping, and even if Cole might have occasionally preferred something a little more mellow, fuck that: He needed Teddy and Bart flying around the worksite like demons. Needed them jacked-up and empowered and willing to meet the subs on the driveway and point to here or there with total authority.

  It took them almost two weeks to complete the roof. They might’ve been done sooner, but a storm settled over the mountains, thunder booming in the canyon and white-blue lightning piercing down to explode a nearby pine tree. Three full days they spent in their trucks or the trailer, peering at the skies, hoping against hope that the sun would burn a hole through those thick, low-slung banks of fog. But those days were wasted, and by the late afternoon of each day, with no relent in sight, they simply picked up their tools and headed for home.

  Eventually the storm passed, and the day broke bright and clear, buoying their spirits. How they ran along those rooflines, like bravehearted alpinists, like daring funambulists, balancing and tiptoeing as they went, imagining themselves dancing on tightropes, racing along Olympic balance beams. The roofing steel was incredibly high-quality and heavy, and the shifting rooflines demanded intense concentration. A mistake of mere centimeters on the western side of the roofline could mean an error of actual feet over on the eastern side. And of course, there could be no mistakes on this house. They knew this, and held this standard in their minds, like a mantra, and reveled in their newfound precision and care.