Godspeed

by Nickolas Butler

  It took Bart a few hours to gather his things: an aluminum cot, a sleeping bag, his toiletries, food, his tools, spare clothing, extra blankets. From his underwear drawer he found and packed the meth and his old glass pipe, both of which he wrapped in clothing and packed in the center of a big backpack. It felt like he was essentially moving out of the apartment for good. He thought about that for a moment. What difference did it make? His lease was month-to-month, and he had no nostalgia for the apartment—none. On a whim, he gave notice to his landlord, dragged all his furniture to the curb, and on a piece of cardboard scrawled, FREE, leaving this placard on the couch, mist already beading on the tired old Naugahyde and velour.

  He filled the bed of his truck with these supplies, along with a collapsible thirty-five-foot extension ladder he had very specific plans for, and not simply for changing a lightbulb or accessing the roof. Before driving off, he texted Cole that he was en route to the jobsite. Cole texted back a moment later,

  Not sure why, but good luck . . .

  Bart finally managed to reach the end of Gretchen’s road. The remains of the broken bridge sat on the turnaround side of the river, and beside that wreckage, the boulder. The river was running roughshod, and looking out over it all, Bart knew their chances of meeting the Christmas deadline were pretty well shot. He wondered if they’d even be able to complete the house now before next summer. Still, they had to at least try. Sitting around, he felt, was no option at all. They would certainly run out of time if that was their only tack. And he had a plan.

  Kneeling beside the river, he ran his hands through the turbid, icy water. The house was a scant hundred and fifty yards away; looking through the rubble of the bridge he could see it plainly. And the river wasn’t that wide. Maybe here, at this transect, his little plan wouldn’t work; the banks were disintegrating with every passing minute, and the channel was fairly wide. And farther downstream, the mountain rose too precipitously on the construction side of the river. But upriver, there might just be a place friendly enough for a crossing. A narrow distance between rock-solid banks to jury-rig a solution . . . And wouldn’t Cole shit a brick if somehow, Bart could find a way? If he could get over there and make himself useful somehow, maybe cutting and painting trim, or laying some of the flooring while they waited for the cavalry to arrive?

  He walked north, up the river, picking his way among huge boulders and occasionally sliding down the steeply pitched slope and then scrambling back up. A quarter mile upriver the channel narrowed tightly between two near-vertical rock faces rising some thirty feet up from the water it so rigidly constrained. The river here was no more than twenty or twenty-two feet wide. Bart grinned and walked back to the truck.

  The extension ladder weighed just forty-five pounds, but it was unwieldly enough to feel like he was carrying a baby giraffe through the thickly clumped pine trees and alder. It was hard to know how to move its long bulk most efficiently; Bart alternated between a side carry and humping it along awkwardly on his back. Soon enough his face was cut in multiple places from sharply broken tree branches, his arms marred by scratches and gouges. Sweating profusely, he reached the river’s bottleneck and simply dropped the ladder on the ground.

  The mist had stopped, and the sun shone weakly. Bart sat on a thick bedding of moss and regarded the river below and the mountainsides above. Then, from upriver, he heard a noise.

  He didn’t immediately identify the sound as a bear, but when the creature came closer, there wasn’t any doubt. It was a mature black bear, a boar, weighing upwards of five hundred pounds. Bart couldn’t be sure that the bear had either smelled or seen him, so he stood on a nearby fallen tree and shouted, “Hey, bear! Yo! Hey, bear!”

  The beast stopped, lifted its head into the air, and then, as if to match Bart, rose up on its hind legs.

  He knew there was no outrunning the bear. And as exhausted as he was, there really weren’t many other options. So he simply stood his ground, shouting at the animal. He had no idea whether this was helping the situation or worsening it. Once, the bear charged toward him, leveling a small aspen, but he yelled again and again and clapped his hands and even shook a nearby tree before tossing a few small rocks in the bear’s direction. Eventually the animal wandered off, leaving Bart to collapse with relief into the cool, thick moss.

  It was a strange thing, but just then, Bart thought of Panama, of the guidebook he’d bought years earlier with its brightly colored pictures: a wildly graffitied bus in Panama City, toucans in the branches of a banana tree, a coffee plantation high in the mountains. He had no wife, no children that he knew of; his parents were serenely retired and preferred to see him but once a year, his sister somewhat ashamed of him and his very evident lack of education or ambition. The only thing that drew him through his days now was the notion of finishing this house, of seeing the pleasure on Gretchen’s face and handing her the keys. And then he’d promised himself two things: The first was that he would take a long dip in those hot springs, a wish he was positive Gretchen would grant him—hell, maybe she would even join him—and the second was to buy himself a first-class ticket to Panama City. He was thirty-nine years old and he had never flown in an airplane, and this he desperately wanted to do. And he did not care to sit in the back of the plane with the rest of the cattle, no. Bart wanted his first flight to be like the movies from his childhood: wide seats, warm and generous flight attendants, and enough room to recline and stretch his long legs.

  Suddenly, in a strange burst of practical lucidity, he realized he did not have a passport. But there is time to deal with that, right? Because he’d just managed to avoid being mauled by a bear. He allowed himself to lie in the moss, watching clouds drift through the heavens. He realized his body was throbbing with adrenaline, and what he really wanted, what he needed, was a cigarette and a moment to catch his breath, to chill the fuck out. He studied the clouds for several moments, focusing on his breathing, laying a hand over his heart. He picked out a single cloud that looked like an anvil and thought, Please don’t fall on me.

  * * *

  —

  Spanning the river with the ladder was more of a production than Bart had imagined. His nerves were fried, and the effort of carrying the ladder upriver had left him exhausted and likely dehydrated. Still, with great concentration, and all his muscles trembling, he managed to expand the ladder up, and up, to its full thirty-five feet, using a nearby lodgepole pine as a kind of brace for balance. Then, moving ever so slowly, he walked the ladder over to the high bank and, as carefully as possible, guided the ladder’s descent all the way to the far side of the river. This was a loud and inelegant operation, but the ladder landed successfully in its place, and Bart allowed himself a moment of celebration, even as he reckoned that hours had by then scudded by. Retreating back to the truck, he took several long swigs off a canteen of cold water and bit into a granola bar before lighting a richly deserved cigarette. He stared across the river at the house, where it peered patiently back down at him. He loaded a backpack with clothes, food, a few tools, the pipe, and the meth, and locked up the truck.

  Then he worked his way back upriver. At the ladder, he sunk to his knees and began to slowly ease his full weight onto the ladder, which shuddered unevenly below him. The moment he was fully suspended out and above the river, his hands tightly clenching the rails of the ladder, every muscle in his body desperately flexing, he realized what a goddamn foolish thing this was to do. A surefire way to die, to spill off the jostling aluminum ladder, falling dozens of feet down onto the sharp awaiting rocks, his limp corpse swept downstream, possibly to feed the very same bear who had just antagonized him. A genius plan, really.

  He inched backward, but that was no good either; if anything, that felt more uncertain than simply plodding forward. So he pressed on, lowering closer to the ladder and essentially dragging his cowering body to the far bank.

  When he finally shimmied onto solid ground, he was bo
th exhilarated and jangly, shivering with disbelieving relief. He walked slowly to the trailer and, opening the refrigerator, quickly polished off a cold Coors, which, in that moment, tasted like the best bottle of beer in the world. He then drank a second beer, before exhaling deeply and giving himself the goal of measuring and cutting out trim; but in a thirty-eight-hundred-square-foot house, there would be damn near a country mile’s worth of trim. Maybe a couple of miles’ worth of decorative wood to accent the floor and ceilings, each piece to be cut precisely to adjoin its neighbor, no seams or rough edges. It was a putzy job, one that a more established builder would give to some lackey on the crew. But Bart was beginning to wonder how many subcontractors they could even count on for the homestretch of this project. There was something about the place that seemed to exude bad luck. First, the death of that previous worker. Now the bridge. And looming over all of it, Gretchen’s ludicrous deadline.

  Inside the house, Bart sat on the hearth and sifted through his bag, collecting his pipe, the bag of meth, and a lighter. He needed to know that he could handle this, and the empty house, well, it provided the perfect trial run.

  He flicked the lighter and was about to touch flame to pipe when he considered the building—the home—he was sitting in. He looked out the wide, thick windows to the countryside below. Looked down at those streamers of steam billowing up from the spring. Felt the stones beneath him. This house stood for something more than what he was about to get back into, so much more, that he couldn’t abide himself smoking inside. Couldn’t taint it. And so he left the house, walked down the path to the river, and stood on the bank, looking out over the wrecked bridge. That was more like it. The lighter sparked and caught, and he held the flame beneath the glass bowl of the pipe.

  He inhaled—

  To a RRRRRUUUUUSSSSSHHHHHHHHHH! There it was—the rush! Like, like, like fucking grabbing the tail of a COMET, like traveling at light speed even as he stood s . . . t . . . i . . . l . . . l, like diving from the tallest mountain and discovering that you’re a platinum fucking falcon falling from the highest reaches of heaven. Oh, fuck, the ecstatic RUSH.

  He pressed his hands to his face and felt his cheeks compressed by the gravity of the drug, the speed of the drug; he was flying. Oh, his face, he felt his skin, felt every ONE of his pores . . . felt every ONE of his whiskers, felt his hair, felt his teeth, touched his skin. Ohhhhh . . . Now his fingers explored the wood grain of an old, washed-up log and yes, yes, yes, that was something smooth, yes, smooth, though not as smooth as it would be in five years, or ten years, or twenty years, after the rain and wind had buffed it down, yes, rounded its corners, yes, sanded it smoother still, and . . . still . . . and still. . . .

  The river beside him! Look at the light on the river, the light, all that light, the last light of the day, and the stones beneath that cold water—they would be smooth and cold, and the water would be cold. . . . He fell to his knees and then to his stomach and stretched his arms down and thrashed in the water. Oh, that felt good, that felt real good, that felt like living inside a damn beer commercial. Yes, the total nirvana of those beer commercials of yore. Mountain streams and golden meadows, trout leaping into wicker creels and canoes plunging into V-shaped rapids . . .

  He laughed and laughed and laughed, and then he felt something, felt eyes upon him, a look, someone looking at him, watching him. Was it the bear? The bear he’d seen earlier? Could that be? No, no, no. That wasn’t it. He stood and fidgeted there beside the remains of the bridge, clutched that log and held on to it as if at the bow of some speeding boat crashing through an endless ocean of breaking waves at a speed surely meant to tear the boat to smithereens.

  Grab a hold of yourself now, he thought, gritting his teeth. No one here but us, but me, but the house over there. All alone now. Harness it now, Bart—harness it. And get down to work.

  As he walked back up toward the house, there was no exhaustion in his body any longer. Only fuel and fire, electricity that felt like it was sizzling his very synapses. SSSizzzzzzle. YESSS! All right now.

  16

  The house was bleeding her, and there was no tourniquet to quell the loss. In truth, it wasn’t even the house, the structure, that was the source of the hemorrhage. At the moment, it was the seven miles of partially ruined road and the mangled bridge that would end up costing her hundreds of thousands of additional dollars, if not millions. In building a house, there were costs that eventually provided pleasure, like a beautiful fireplace or a luxurious bathtub. But there were also costs that provided no gratification, really, none at all. And this road was one of those costs that only provided her pain. She sat behind her desk, listening to the joints of the high-rise around her sigh and murmur.

  In the hallway beyond her closed door she heard two partners talking about a forthcoming fishing trip to the Caribbean. The men in the firm seemed to have so much more time for such kibitzing, these jovial moments of hallway bullshitting, while the more senior women in the firm stayed behind closed office doors, rarely engaging in gossip or camaraderie, rarely displaying any personality, in fact, any individuality, save perhaps in the judicious flourishes of their appropriately subdued fashion: a pair of red Jimmy Choo pumps or a thousand-dollar scarf from a weekend jaunt to Paris.

  In a rare moment of real irritation, she slammed her hands against her desk and swiped the telephone base onto the floor. She heard the hallway conversation stop, then the dim sound of footsteps moving in opposite directions.

  She’d sell the other houses. She should have done so before, anyway. But there was the sense that liquidating them all at once or in succession might smack of some kind of signal. It was a fact: The wealthiest of the world’s population notice that kind of thing; they just did. So-and-so is off-loading that wonderful Schiele—but why? Why would they do that? And at auction! Does this mean a divorce? Or maybe that son of theirs is in legal trouble yet again. . . .

  Gretchen had always prided herself on maintaining a private life, a life of secrecy. She rarely consorted with the other partners and had never invited anyone from work to her home. She knew what they’d say, how they’d appraise the stillness, the cleanliness, and the order of her space. Rather than seeing her interior life as a testament to her commitment to the firm, they would simply come to look at her with sadness, even pity. A beautiful woman “wasted”—no husband, no children; no warm, brightly decorated suburban house. There really was no way to win. The firm asked only this: Eat what you kill—and kill everything you possibly can. So she had. She’d brought back tens upon tens of millions of dollars to the firm’s coffers. Her billables were obscene. And wasn’t that enough for everyone?

  Standing abruptly from her chair, she stepped around the desk and righted the telephone, then glanced outside the window. Selling the properties so abruptly would certainly cost her. But if the houses were to sell quickly, she’d be flush by January. And, as she reminded herself, she was only doing what would have had to happen anyway. This was just speeding things up a bit. A kick in the pants, really.

  She returned to her desk and exhaled slowly three times, then picked up the phone and dialed a Salt Lake City area code. She heard the phone ring four times and then the sound of wind riding over flat terrain and whiskers rubbing against some distant iPhone.

  “Well, now,” came a deep, gravelly voice, all familiarity and self-assurance. “What a pleasure. My favorite woman-attorney in the world. How can I help you, Gretchen? You ready to run away with me yet? ’Cause I can charter my plane to get you. We could go off to Tahiti, rub suntan lo—”

  “Look, Wally, I really don’t have time for niceties, I’m afraid. Right now, I just need your help.”

  “Well, darlin’, now you caught me on the third green here, and I’m looking down the barrel of about a twenty-foot putt, so—”

  “I need a bridge.”

  She heard the man laugh, heard him readjust the phone in his huge, swollen hands. />
  “Okay,” he said. “I reckon this ain’t foreplay, now, is it, Gretchen? Tell me more.”

  “I need a bridge built. And now, Wally.”

  “Darlin’, I don’t hear from you in four years and now you call me up outta the blue to ask for a bridge?” He laughed. “You got some kind of—”

  “Remember those projects of yours in Uzbekistan? The money you made there? How I helped you, ahh”—she paused—“compartmentalize those assets, so your wife would never know? And what was our favorite word for those kickbacks you were getting at the time—I can’t quite remember. . . .”

  “Enticements,” Wally finished.

  She heard him cough and spit. “Right,” she continued, “enticements. What a sexy way to say bribe.”

  “So, you want a bridge?” he said. “Where?”

  “I’m texting you the location right now,” she said, typing on her phone.

  There was a pause in their conversation and then a ding as her message found its way into his hands.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I gotta put on my cheaters.”

  She spun her office chair around to consider the view. The day was leaden, and below her, the city went about its business, brake lights glowing red, and far off, a crane swinging smoothly through the sky. Now she stared out the window, looking for her hawk, its nest. She could not see it, and the day was clear. The nest was gone. She stood from her chair and moved closer to the window, disbelieving the nest’s absence.

  “Middle of nowhere,” Wally grumbled. “The hell you need a bridge there for? Better off gettin’ yourself a mule.”

  “How soon can you help me?” she purred.

  She heard him sigh, imagined his big lungs and swollen gut expanding as he wiped his brow and inhaled again, considering the golf course in front of him, the secrets buried in certain bank accounts in the Caymans and Switzerland, the nights in a Tashkent hotel when he’d been blackmailed, two prostitutes tying him to a bed while they rode him—one on his delighted face, and the other on his pharmaceutically assisted penis—occasionally breaking to snap photos of their shenanigans on their cell phones. Too bad, he’d later tell his old college frat brothers. It was the best night of my life. Felt like a king.