Joshua could see a vein on Sterling’s brow begin to throb, and he knew the self-possession it took for him to respond so calmly. “I don’t think so,” Sterling said to Susan. “This tree trunk is huge. My best guess is it’s been here more than seven hundred years. That’s before Columbus came to America. Think about that for a minute. This tree has been standing here looking at this view for centuries before any Europeans glimpsed it.” He was speaking clearly, but Susan did not seem to be absorbing any of it. He added quietly, “Not to mention long before they decided they could parcel it off and own it.”
“It is a great view, and that’s what’s going to sell, sell, sell these houses.” She looked at the tree again and frowned. “This one is right in a prime spot. Typical. So, anyway”—she seemed to brighten—“we thought we should sort of feature it, light it up from underneath and make the walls for the two yards on either side sort of angled to leave it in the middle. You would see it from the approach. If we have to keep it, we can at least use it as a selling point.”
“Let me think about it.” Sterling turned away at her callous apathy and walked under the tree. As Joshua watched, Sterling laid a hand on the trunk. Above his head, the branches arched gracefully from the huge trunk and almost brushed the ground, forming an open yet protected space, a natural cathedral.
Joshua joined him and they shared a pained look before Sterling walked back to continue his discussion with Susan. Motioning to Simon with a jerk of his head to come out of the sun and leave the two grown-ups to their debating, Joshua walked under the shade of the oak and leaned one hand against the trunk of the tree. As he did so, a vision came suddenly into his mind. It was a shape really, of a web in simple, fragile black lines. He pulled his hand away and the image disappeared.
Almost simultaneously, the sound of shots rang out across the canyon. Though they were clearly distant, Joshua noticed how Simon instinctively jerked his arms above his head, as though this was a long-learned reflex.
“What the hell was that?” Simon asked before he was able to recover his practiced indifference.
Joshua shrugged and his face tightened. “Hunters probably. It’s the start of the season. Or it could just be some idiots firing off their guns. I find shells all the time when I’m hiking.” He was remembering his father telling him how dangerous that kind of trash was for the animals, when a look at the ravaged landscape brought that trail of thought to a screeching halt. Compared with a couple of weeks of bulldozers and gigantic land-moving machines, littering the landscape with toxic lead remnants seemed relatively innocuous.
Simon didn’t appear to be listening to him. He was peering down into the shrubbery several hundred yards distant, where it was still thick in a ravine, the area from which the gun retorts seemed to have come. Joshua followed his look, but he could make out nothing.
“Little jumpy, aren’t you?” Joshua said, trying to make light of Simon’s reaction.
“Shit,” was Simon’s only response, but he grinned a little sheepishly at Joshua.
Sterling and Susan had walked back to the cars and Sterling was rolling up a blueprint as he called out to them, “Joshua, Simon! Let’s go.”
As they made their way down the hill, Joshua noticed that Simon fell behind, as though he was keeping Joshua between him and the line of fire, and he reflected that if he’d grown up in a world where people routinely got shot before they were eighteen, he’d probably be gun-shy himself. That must suck, he thought.
Susan was already driving away, spewing clouds of dust and clumps of earth as she sped off.
“So, are you going to take the job?” Joshua asked Sterling, sure that someone with Sterling’s interest in both aesthetics and the environment would never allow him to deal with citified developers.
“Yes. Because if I don’t,” he continued over Joshua’s disbelieving expression, “they’ll get somebody in here who’ll do exactly what they’ve done at every other site. They’ll plant a whole bunch of the cheapest, nonindigenous, water-thirsty, quick-fix shrubbery, and every other plant and animal in at least a ten-mile radius will suffer. At least I can steer them toward blending into the environment, and avoid too many invasive species on the edge of a national forest.”
He paused and looked past the huge man-made steppes of dirt that had been gouged into the hillside and then let his eyes rest on the natural folds and creases formed over thousands of years in the remaining undeveloped terrain; then he turned and fixed his disarmingly green eyes on first Joshua, and then Simon. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “we have to do what we can, even if it doesn’t seem like enough.”
They all climbed into the pickup truck and followed in the trail of Susan’s dust. They hit the temporary paved road of phase one and drove past seemingly endless frame-ups of houses. For now, Joshua could still see across the valley through their skeletons, but soon, he knew, there would be walls and fences, and anyone passing here would see nothing but garage doors and curtained windows.
To try to ease the claustrophobic feeling, he sat back and adjusted the air-conditioning vent a little more toward his face. They came to the main road, and Sterling stopped to wait for a passing car, looking hard over his left shoulder to see around the curve of the highway. Out of habit, Joshua followed his look and then checked in the other direction.
To his right, in a turn off the road, sat another truck. This one was a large white pickup, and on the side were painted the words FORTRESS SECURITY: THE KEY TO YOUR PEACE OF MIND, in black and gold lettering. But it wasn’t the whiteness of the truck or the precision of the lettering that arrested Joshua’s stare. It was the blood that dripped down over both. Laid across the hood was a large buck, his swollen tongue lolling out of a mouth opened at an unnatural angle. Standing around the hood looking at the deer were four men in combat fatigues with high-powered rifles sporting long-range sights balanced carelessly over their shoulders.
Joshua felt a strange fluttering in his chest, and an image appeared over the deer. A large gray owl was looking down at the dead animal with round, sad eyes.
“Fuck,” breathed Simon, next to him, dispelling the snapshot vision.
“Welcome to fall,” Sterling said dryly. “When any good ol’ boy with a couple hundred bucks can go to Wal-Mart and get himself a rifle and a hunting permit.”
It was legal, Joshua knew. In fact, it was a popular pastime. Yet the scene brought bile to Joshua’s mouth. It wasn’t the dead deer that moved Joshua particularly. In the end death, he thought, comes to us all. It wasn’t the hunting—that too had gone on since the origins of time, and he felt that in a way it was part of the natural order of things. It was the expressions on the faces of these particular men: looks of salacious pleasure and self-congratulation. Even as Joshua watched, two of the men shouldered their lethal weapons and high-fived each other over the body of the dead animal.
In spite of the heat, Joshua shuddered and looked away.
Chapter 15
By midmorning on Wednesday, the temperature had already reached the high nineties, and the continued dry wind added a brown haze to the sky that gave it the hue of coffee-stained gauze. Still, no clouds broke the monotony of the sun’s glare.
Even inside the salon, Greer could feel the air conditioners struggling to keep up. She was actually grateful for her small, windowless treatment room and the cool it afforded as she finished up a reflexology treatment by resting her hands lightly on the soles of her client’s feet. She remained in that position for a long moment and felt her hands heat up without moving as she focused on clearing any dark energy. Her client was a regular of about fifty named Valerie. She was a happy, relaxed woman, a career mother with a loving husband, and it was a pleasure for Greer to work on someone without hidden recesses of stress and what Greer liked to call city smut. Visualizing for one last time golden light passing up the left side of Valerie’s body and down the right, Greer took a deep breath and stood up from her stool near Valerie’s feet.
In a soft v
oice she said, “Take your time getting dressed. I’ll be up front.”
The trace of a smile on the unlined face and a murmured “Thank you” let Greer know that Valerie wasn’t sleeping and would be out before it was time for her next appointment in ten minutes. Greer always left enough breathing room between appointments to allow her clients to ease gently back into the world. She went out as quietly as possible and walked the short hallway to the main floor of the salon. Dario was so focused on a style that he didn’t even glance at her, but Jonathan blew her a kiss hello and she winked at him.
Up front, her receptionist, Celia, was on the phone. Greer felt a sense of accomplishment as she watched Celia confidently juggling appointments in the large book that broke up their days in vertical columns labeled by employee and horizontal lines for each ten minutes. The pages were heavily penciled with names and phone numbers with neat diagonal slashes to indicate the times blocked out, most of them in Celia’s tightly grouped writing. The nineteen-year-old had flourished since she began work there, and with Greer’s encouragement and willingness to offer a flexible schedule, she had enrolled in a community college where she was now studying for a business degree.
Celia’s dark hair was styled by Dario into chunky sections, and it created a flattering frame around her narrow face. The thin, smartly dressed girl hung up the phone and said, “Your one o’clock called and was running late, so I switched her with your four fifteen, who had wanted to add a facial, so I made time by slipping it into the five-thirty slot. Do you want to approve it?”
“No, I’m sure it’s fine,” Greer told the girl, and reflected happily for a moment that it was wonderful to be able to make that simple statement to Celia without adding on a profusion of reassurances. It felt good, giving someone responsibility that had grown in a few short months into confidence, and it was interesting, Greer thought warmly, to realize that most people really only needed the chance and someone—anyone—to believe in them.
On the sidewalk in front of the salon, a stocky man with a cell phone to his ear paced slowly, passing the window once, then turning and wandering in a preoccupied way back the other direction, before seeming to lose his momentum and coming to a full stop. He had his back to the glass doors, but Greer had gotten enough of a look at him to know that it was Rowland Hughs. She thought of the darkness she had sensed from Susan at dinner and suddenly felt compelled to enlist Rowland’s help in figuring it out. Greer was quite certain that Rowland Hughs would be incapable of listening to any metaphysical explanation of Greer’s, but she also felt certain that he was a loving husband who would welcome some stress relief for his obviously overworked wife.
So straightening her blouse and donning a pleasant smile, Greer went to the door and opened it. Rowland was scowling as he snapped his phone closed, but when he spotted Greer, his amiable face regained its pleasant, boyish expression. “Hi there!” He came forward quickly and shook Greer’s hand.
“Nice to see you again,” she said sincerely. The man had an enthusiasm about him that made him impossible to dislike. “What are you doing over here?”
Rowland looked up at the painted words on the door that she was still holding open, half in the cool of the air-conditioned salon, and half in the shake-and-bake heat. They read: EYE OF THE BEHOLDER BEAUTY SALON AND DAY SPA. He smiled at her. “Oh, that’s right—your ‘curl up and dye’ is right next to Mr. Fincher’s office. I remember now.”
“My . . . what?” Greer asked, confused.
“Curl up and dye, d-y-e, not d-i-e.” He grinned like an eleven-year-old who just told a good joke. “That’s what my girls used to call beauty shops when they were growing up in Florida.”
Greer laughed. “That’s funny. I’ll have to tell Dario that. Would you like to come in out of the heat?”
“Sure.” He looked relieved as he followed her into the chilled environment. “I was actually looking for your husband.”
“Boyfriend,” Greer corrected quickly, almost too quickly. “We just met a few months ago.”
Rowland looked genuinely surprised. “I just assumed. You seem so comfortable together.”
She wasn’t sure why, but Greer felt a wash of pleasure. It was nice to be recognized as a couple again. It had been a long time. “I take it Sterling isn’t in his office?”
“No, and I can’t get him on his cell phone; it keeps going to his voice mail. I guess he’s on it.”
“More likely he’s at one of his jobs where there is no service. You must have noticed that cell phone service is splotchy up here.”
“Yeah, I noticed. At the new site, there isn’t any yet.” A shadow crossed his face as though he’d been reminded of something distasteful. “That’ll be another improvement for this area: With so many new customers, I’m already talking to the server about putting up a new tower.”
Great, thought Greer, yet another ugly metal interruption in the already fractured sky. But what she said was, “I think he actually said that he was going out to meet your wife at the, uh, phase two?” she asked uncertainly. She and Sterling didn’t share too many mundane details of their work, preferring to focus on shared ideals and interests.
Rowland shook his head. “I wish she would let me do more of that kind of work. That woman just drives herself too hard.”
Perfect, an opening, Greer thought. “And speaking of which, I would love to offer her a massage, or a treatment, on me, just as a little introduction to the neighborhood.” She laid her hand on Rowland’s thick forearm. The smooth fabric of his suit sleeve was still hot from his pause in the sun. “Between you and me, I think it would do her a world of good. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I think I know when someone is really in need of a little R and R.” Greer hoped that she sounded like a coconspirator.
But she needn’t have worried. Rowland was already nodding with concerned enthusiasm. “I keep telling her,” he said in his quick but distinct southern drawl. “Frankly, I’m worried about her. She’s been driving herself so hard on this deal. I know it’s important to her—it’s the first time she’s been above the line on the deal—but you’ve got to have some balance between work and down time.” He pronounced the word down with two distinct syllables. Greer thought that it would be easy to misjudge this man as not very bright. She also noted that his eyes were worried. “I know she really thrives on it, but sometimes I just wish she would relax.”
Greer was a good businesswoman—though it wasn’t the aspect of what she did that she enjoyed most—and she knew that above the line meant that Susan was in for a portion of the profits, not just a salary. She also knew what that meant to many women who had struggled to break into what were still predominantly male professions; she had many clients who shared their frustrations with her on a daily basis.
“Listen, why don’t you insist that she take some time to come in and treat herself. I can do it on a Saturday when there might not be so many other pressing things to do.”
Rowland was smiling sadly. “You don’t know Susan. She doesn’t differentiate between a weekend and a weekday and a holiday. I have to remind her that not everyone who works for or with us is on the same schedule. It bugs the hell out of her.” Though he seemed genuinely frustrated, there was an unmistakable note of admiration in his voice.
“Well, I’m sure she loves you very much. Maybe she’ll do it if you ask her. I’m here, and I’d like to help if I can.”
She could see before she finished the sentence that he had mentally moved to a different subject. “There is something you could maybe help with,” he said, and reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out a single sheet of newsprint, folded several times until only a selected article was exposed. He handed it over to Greer and asked grimly, “Have you seen this?”
It was an editorial in the local paper. Greer had not seen this particular one, but she recognized it as one of a series on a theme, and that theme was being particularly virulent about the Golden Door development project in general and the Hughses
in particular. Greer glanced down at the body of the article and spotted the words disgusting, corporate land-grabbers, and disease.
“No,” she said honestly, “I haven’t seen this one, but there have been quite a few articles in the local paper. Not everyone is happy about the development; you must know that. I mean, the city council rejected the deal for over two years.” Greer watched his face, thinking that this must be par for the course for his business.
“But why?” Rowland asked, looking down at the paper. “I mean, I know there’s always some people who object to just about any change, but this guy is demanding a hearing, after we’ve gotten the approval.” He looked up with round, almost childlike eyes at Greer, and she wondered if his näïvete’ could be sincere.
“What do you want me to do?” Greer asked hesitantly.
“Well, I wondered if you know the guy who wrote this. He’s the head of some community action group, and he’s gotten the councilwoman to agree to a hearing about the impact of the next phase. I think that if people understood how nice these homes are going to be, if they really stopped and thought about how many jobs we’re creating and the business we’re bringing in, then maybe they would feel differently. I just thought . . . I mean, I know that people come in beauty parlors and talk, and maybe you could explain a little bit about that.”
When Greer had suppressed her amusement at having her business referred to as a beauty parlor, she looked into Rowland’s eyes and said with gentle frankness, “I don’t happen to know Mr., uh”—Greer glanced at the name on the article and struggled with the pronunciation—“Farrad? But I don’t disagree with all his points. I’m sorry, Rowland. You seem to be sincere about being happy to give people nice homes, and that’s important. But lots of people live out here because it feels more rural, and when it turns into a sea of homes, we lose that.”
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