Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  Hungerman’s eyes made a quick sweep of the table and came back to her. “Let’s pull back a bit. The proposed headquarters site is still confidential. There’s nothing binding the land yet.”

  Jules mimed zipping her lip. Eve said, “Everyone knows except her, Lew.”

  Hungerman leaned toward Meg. “In broad terms we want about six hundred acres to link downtown to the river.”

  In broad terms, it was breathtaking. Meg had sold a few ranches and had an idea of the scale but it was difficult to imagine where he would find that much land in the city.

  It was about equal to the size of the original town plat. And between downtown and the Colorado were rail lines and major thoroughfares, a mishmash of land uses and property owners, brownfields and homes, plus Las Colonias Park.

  “It’s finally time for a River Renaissance,” said Dan. “Thirty years since the clean-up along the river started and there’s still nothing there. The City hasn’t even grown grass.” McCallam ignored Eve’s glare. He rubbed his hands together as if placing them under a restroom drier. “We can poke along forever with an unfunded park improvement plan that’ll do squat for economic development or support Lew’s roadmap to do something truly transformative.”

  Transformative was not a Dan McCallam word and Meg doubted he could spell Renaissance but he seemed truly pleased to have used both. Hungerman rewarded him with a smile before he turned to Meg.

  “Since Las Colonias will be in Betterment’s front yard, we’d like the opportunity to, uh, guide its evolution toward discouraging incompatible uses.”

  Eve broke in. “For cripes sake. You’re not going to hurt any feelings here. Just say it in plain English.”

  Hungerman adjusted his Viking-raider blues to the sincerity setting. “Grand Junction is a bit rough around the edges. It’s encouraging to see you’ve begun to address vagrancy more assertively.”

  “We have a reputation,” said Vince.

  “As a generous, altruistic community,” Eve shot back.

  “But we are still in need of some comprehensive housecleaning,” said Dan.

  Hungerman reached across the table and placed his hand flat in front of Meg, as if he expected her to cover it with hers. “That’s why your involvement will be so critical.”

  My involvement.

  “Our investors won’t go forward in a contentious environment. This proposal can’t be seen as a direct move to seize control of the park or to extirpate a particular group of people—even if they’re derelicts.”

  Extirpate. What an odd word to use in conversation. It distanced everyone at the table from what he was suggesting. He withdrew his hand, picked up his towel and began folding it. “Betterment stands for progress. Uplift. Longevity. We are so very fortunate to have you and the Homeless Coalition out front on this, Meg.”

  Hungerman didn’t understand how the coalition worked. She looked for someone to correct him, but everyone was studying her, awaiting her reaction—everyone except Eve, who watched Hungerman square the white cloth, his fingers working around the edges.

  Then it struck her—the nausea and the realization at once. The meeting was over. This meeting they had staged for her.

  We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

  —The Promises, The Big Book

  Vaughn Hobart was a grown man mowing lawns in the desert, not exactly the wave of the future, when Meg Mogrin said she needed a handyman. He didn’t know the word for what he needed. He’d barely begun to see through his own bullshit after being stuck in the center of himself—not a bad man or even a selfish one but too damn aggravating and him too dumb to see it. One by one, good people tired of his slipshoddity and moved on with their own business. It had seemed they’d abandoned him, but he saw it differently now. Thirty years was a long time for a man to come around to knowing himself. You couldn’t make up for that much lost time. You could only start where you found yourself and make amends where possible. A few opened their arms. Others were content to let then be then. No one slammed the door in his face. He wondered if he ever was quite as worthless as he’d thought.

  One day Meg gave him the keys to her truck. Later she handed him keys to other people’s houses. The day she told him his last check would be late and he should think about going out on his own, he thought he was being fired. He almost went out and took a drink. Instead, he went home to feel sorry for himself. He realized as he walked through the door: sonofabitch, she was the one in trouble. Right then he began to believe he was finally on the right path.

  Vaughn pulled through the gate at Reiner’s half-finished mansion, not bothering to cut his lights. He hadn’t been able to surprise the squatters before and one time, for sure, they’d slipped away into the brush as he drove up. No way he was going to chase them down in the dark. No more warnings and deadlines. He’d sucked up plenty of patience in his time so he felt qualified to judge when enough was enough. He’d cut them some slack because of the kid and because they were keeping a clean camp and leaving the house alone. He had no desire to make their lives worse, but he told Meg he’d take care of it and now he had to follow through.

  His flashlight searched for the notice he’d left duct-taped to the trailer. Like the others, it was gone, and as before, their crap was still under the tarp. Vaughn cut the ropes securing the tarp and spread it to receive the squatters’ leavings. Probably Kip Reiner’s boat cover, but what the hell. No telling what might be in that rat’s nest after this much time. With a manure fork, he lifted a sleeping bag and a snarl of blankets. A sea duffle heavy with clothing. He scooped a couch cushion, rubber bathmat and tube socks rolled into balls and made shish-kabobs of food wrappers and Walmart bags. He speared an almost empty Kessler bottle, releasing a vapor he hadn’t tasted in seven years.

  Something fluttered over his head. He turned just in time to catch the next dirt clod with his chest.

  “Who’s that?”

  A third projectile sailed wide right and plinked off his truck. It gave him a fix on the thrower’s position in the brush. He raised the fork in that direction and said, “You’re done trespassing. You want to leave in the sheriff’s car, keep it up. If you care about any of this stuff, you better act more peaceable.”

  A man’s head emerged turtlelike from around the stern of the boat.

  “Peace, then, brother,” the man drawled, squinting from the pouched eyes and thickened brow of a boxer. No, more like a face real boxers had practiced on long and hard. The man made a peace sign with one hand but kept the boat between them.

  Vaughn held the pitchfork ready across his chest. “Who’s got the arm on him out there?”

  “Sorry about that. The boy don’t mind.”

  “Wonder where he learned that from? You saw the postings. I gave you plenty of time to move out.”

  The man rubbed his head, the crown shaved to the same black stubble that covered his face. “What postings?”

  “I stuck ’em right here.”

  “Never saw nothin’—but okay. Don’t call the cops. Looks like you got us half moved already. Glen Leary.” Leary’s horseshoe-hard grip said he’d been working. A half-smile exposed a tiny brownish Florida, his broken right incisor representing the panhandle and the rotted left standing in for the peninsula. “Figured this’d be temporary, but temporary’s gettin’ to be my permanent condition.”

  Vaughn had an idea what he meant. “Didn’t see any woman’s things. Is it just you and the kid?”

  “Kids,” said Leary, holding up two fingers again. “Hidin’ in the brush. I’d as soon they didn’t hear this. I’m tryin’ to sell this as a campin’ trip but they want to know why they’re sleepin’ under a boat. I was supposed to floor on this job here, then it never got started. Drove up from Cortez. I figured there might be more work around here. We went to the Walmart but they don’t allow overnights here, I guess. The truck broke down and we got towed. They wouldn’t let me get my tools out of the impound unless I paid the ticket and storage. Sto
ry of my life. Figured this bastard owed me something.”

  “He owes a lotta people,” Vaughn said. “This place belongs to the bank now.”

  Leary cast his squint toward Vaughn’s truck. “Hobart Home Inspections. I’ll work. I just finished pullin’ down a barn. Ten bucks an hour and free lockjaw. I don’t ’spose you got anything better?”

  “Only help I need right now is takin’ a load to the dump, unless you got a better idea.”

  “I might. Let me think for a sec. You ever married?”

  Vaughn could tell a question from a preamble, so he motioned to Leary to get the story off his chest.

  “Never marry a woman with the same name as her mother—that’s my advice,” Leary said. “We lived with Alice, the mother, starting out. Any time she wanted something out of you, she’d say, am I gonna have to start charging rent? It got old. You’d wake up and some strange guy’d be havin’ coffee in the kitchen and Alice’d say, oh, he’s just here to fix the car. She had three cars that never ran and three men that never stuck around. Shoulda been my first clue.

  “So I get this flooring job down in Pagosa and I tell Alice, my wife, we both need to get away from your mother, so why don’t you come with. We get back after a few weeks and my Alice says, hey, where’s my car? And her mother says, I drove it and it got stolen, and there’s this big fight about how could you let my car get stolen. Now we’re set back because Alice wasn’t covered for theft. One day we’re on North Avenue and Alice screams, there’s my car! And it was—same bumper stickers and everything—so we follow it to this parking lot, and the woman who gets out says I bought this car and Alice says well you bought it from the guy who stole it from me and the woman says, no I didn’t, I got the title transfer right here. And sure as shit, it said Alice Jones. Her mom up and sold it, no questions asked.”

  Vaughn dropped the tailgate with a bang. Leary took the hint. He said, “I pulled some copper off that scrap pile. Mind if I bring that? I didn’t touch nothin’ else.”

  It wasn’t much. Vaughn couldn’t see the bank hauling it down to the steel and salvage. They threw it on the tarp and folded the edges over. The bundle sagged as they hoisted it into the bed. Like a body, he thought, Leary’s life reduced to one load of dead weight.

  “Remember Hurricane Irene?” Leary said. “I’d heard about the good money after Katrina, so I headed out east replacin’ carpet and such. I come back, and my Alice’s run off, kids dumped at her mom’s. The trailer’s stripped out, I mean even the appliances were gone, with two months rent owing. My motorcycle, nothing left. It’d just took a while for her own Alice Jones to come out.”

  Leary pressed the gate closed and leaned against it. “After Alice, I should be big on honesty. But I can’t tell the kids we’re fucked. Everybody says lies only make things worse, but when the truth sucks, how much worse can a lie make it? What if makin’ shit up is all you can make? What if lies are all you got left to spend?”

  Leary seemed the type who expected credit for admitting failures, who considered I owe you as good as paying you back. Vaughn knew exactly how that worked.

  “You should be able to find some help with the kids,” Vaughn said.

  “Yeah, foster care. The county frowns on single daddies who live under tarps. Let’s get this shit show on the road.”

  Leary called out. Two pale children emerged from the brush. The boy wore a long-sleeve t-shirt and camo drawstring pants with bulging pockets, his feet running over the backs of dirty canvas shoes. The girl wore a pink hoodie over an otherwise identical outfit. Vaughn figured them twins, about six or seven. They had matching grey smudges under their eyes and identical brown pixie cuts. Even their ears stuck out the same, with tips slightly flattened as if they’d grown under the press of oversized hats.

  Leary placed his hand on one head, then the other: “This’s Gina… Gene, say you’re sorry.”

  Gene looked up at his father. “It was only a dirt clod.”

  Leary, his hand still clamped on the boy’s head, directed Gene’s face toward Vaughn.

  “Sorry,” the kid said. “I was just trying to scare you off.”

  “Well, that’s funny because I was trying to scare your dad off. Did you take down the papers I hung up?” Vaughn said.

  “They said to get out. Where would we go?”

  The kid could read. Maybe they were small for their age.

  Leary moved his hand down to his son’s shoulder. “This man came to give us a ride there.”

  Vaughn pushed up the center console and the kids scrambled into the cab. Leary fished out the belt and buckled in Gene, setting Gina on his lap.

  “Where to?” Vaughn said.

  “Not far. You hit the county road and I’ll show you.”

  Gene watched Vaughn steer the truck toward the gate. “Why do you sit crooked when you drive?”

  Leary tried to shush him but Vaughn didn’t mind. “A truck hit me, knocked me crooked,” he said.

  “We’re supposed to look both ways before we cross,” said Gina.

  “And you should. I wasn’t careful. I thought somebody’d stop for me, but he slid on the gravel.” He had been flagging down a ride to the liquor store.

  “I bet that hurt,” Gene said.

  “More than a dirt clod, for sure, but I don’t feel it any more.” Never even thought about it. For a long time the cant of his spine had been an excuse, and Vaughn had given up excuses.

  “But now you’re stuck that way forever?”

  “Yeah,” Vaughn said. The rest was for Leary. “But there’s worse kinds of bein’ stuck. Like when you see trouble coming and you’re scared to move.”

  Leary pointed to a dirt road that disappeared behind a screen of trees. A full moon had risen over the mesa and the night was brighter than in the earlier hour.

  “This land’s posted, too,” Vaughn said. The road ran to a gravel pit on the river. At best, they might get a day or two if they stayed out of sight from the hauling trucks.

  “I know what I’m doin’,” Leary said. “Just stop right up there.”

  Vaughn was about good-deeded out and ready to head home. Leary told the twins to stay put in the truck. Vaughn dropped the tailgate. The long load would’ve been easier to wrestle with both of them pulling from the ground but Leary had already climbed in to push.

  The bundle began to sag when it was about halfway off and Leary hollered, “Hold on for a sec.”

  Vaughn held up his end, waiting for Leary to take a share of the weight. Two faces watched through the back window, a matched set, right down to their concentration on the pitchfork in Leary’s hands.

  Funny how in the moment Vaughn’s mind crawled after the wrong things. The four eyes in the back window growing wide. Wondering whether Leary was going to stick him in his foot or through his gut. How germy the tines must be. But he also thought how men advertised their troubles, admitted their sins and drew on their former badassness so they didn’t have to show how scared shitless they were.

  Vaughn put up his hands and let the blue-shrouded remains of Leary’s miserable estate droop between them. “Can you paint?”

  “What?” Leary jerked up the fork as if to fend off the question.

  “You can rob me or you can help me,” he said, hoping rob would nudge Leary’s mind away from murder. “Which example you gonna show those kids?”

  Leary glanced over his shoulder at the window. When he turned back his ferocity seemed forced. “My family’s none a your business!”

  “You put ’em in this mess. I coulda called the law. I coulda junked your whole caboodle long ago. But I chose different because of your family. So—can you paint or not?”

  Leary’s face squeezed between hurt and relief. “That’s why I do flooring. Every knucklehead says he can paint.”

  “Then surely you’re qualified.”

  The pitchfork chanked into the hard earth and threw up sparks. Leary stood still, his fists clenched around the handle, his eyes pinched tight. “Where at
?” he croaked.

  “North of town. Mask, paint and clean up. It’ll be a full day’s work.”

  Leary turned and stared into the coppice. “Take a truck with the owner’s name on the side. Quite the plan, wasn’t it?”

  “So you didn’t mean to stay here,” Vaughn said.

  Leary’s slow shake of the head showed Vaughn a man ashamed of attempted robbery. He resolved then to put a week at a motel on his credit card and have Leary pay it off in labor.

  “Well, if you’re ready to think straight for a change, get back in the truck.”

  He figured Leary would try to soften things up but this was work now and Vaughn let him know he didn’t care to get deeper into it. Though he’d run his own tale through plenty of meetings, he didn’t know of any business arrangement improved by hearing the other person’s sob story.

  He’d been cut loose when he was eleven. It probably didn’t work that way any more now that Child Protection was spelled with capital letters. Even if there was a child welfare system then, Vaughn’s family was more likely to run into the Department of Wildlife than a social worker. His mother had squirted out her babies by different miserable men in spread-out places across multiple counties, abandoning them all in similar fashion. It had looked like luck when Abner Self took him in and put him in a bunkhouse with Abner’s nephew Leonard, who was older and didn’t much care for having a stranger kid to share it with. Work was part of the room and board deal. Abner didn’t accept that a boy Vaughn’s age was better at some things than others. The ranch wasn’t slavery, but neither was it the Ponderosa with Uncle Ben. Vaughn learned a little about a lot of things from Abner, the chief lesson being that hard work made you sour and inflexible.

  Alcohol was the first thing that ever made him happy. Tasting Abner’s brandy opened warm flower buds under his skin. He was young and craved a companion for the long party ahead and booze offered to drive, then took him home and tucked him into a bed of unconsciousness. He was never one of those morose, toilet-bowl-gripping drunks who made life miserable for others. Or so he thought until the day it finally dawned on him there were no others around for him to disconcert.