The Contractor

by Paul Moomaw

  I suppose I should be bothered that I can still be aroused by the memory of having sex with Hiram, but I am not. I know I am not homosexual. I wondered for several years if I might be, and finally tried to do it with another man who wanted me, and could not even get hard. I think that young boy still lives in me, and has a right to; and one of the ways I honor him and keep him alive and well is to go fishing and then fuck Hiram in my dreams.

  Now I sit at the river’s edge and survey the water. Just upstream a riffle ends in a line of boulders, and a deep pool lies below that. I gaze into the pool, not focusing on anything, just letting my eyes swim through the water until they catch a flash of silver. A trout, invisible as long as it holds position, has twisted almost belly up to catch a morsel of food, probably a nymph, and the white ventral side shows itself to me. I roll from a sitting position onto my knees and creep along the bank until I am upstream of the pool. I tie a short tippet to my line, and a weighted nymph to that, and then, staying low, I cast the nymph into the riffle, just above the line of rocks. I leave ample slack in the line, so that the nymph can shoot over the rocks and into the pool, and then drift toward the trout. Nothing. I retrieve the line, as slowly and carefully as possible, so as not to startle the trout, and try a second time. Nothing again. I cast three more times, and finally decide the trout is simply not going to take my offering. I retrieve the line, carelessly and quickly this time, not caring if I frighten the stupid fish or not. Just as the leader and tippet are about to depart from the pool, I feel a bump and a heavy tug, and line is suddenly shooting off the reel. I palm the reel with my hand to slow the spin down, then begin to take line in. The trout suddenly appears, leaping into the air, a wet, flashing vision of silver. I jump up and race down the bank so that I am below the rocks and have an unobstructed retrieve from the pool. The trout leaps again. It is big, heavy and fat. It jumps one more time, and suddenly the tension on the line is gone. The fish has broken off.

  I reel the line in, satisfied. I would have released my catch anyway, and the fish has saved me the trouble. That is another legacy from Hiram. Long before catch and release was popular, Hiram never killed a fish. He always let them go. It has occurred to me at times that he treated fish and boys the same way. Catch them, play with them, and then let them go. Of course, when I fish for people, I never let them go. But trout, always.

  I spend the rest of the morning fishing, then return downstream to the little town of Kettle Falls. I stop there for an uninspired lunch, and then drive back down the road, through Chewelah, on to Spokane, and then home, where I arrive road weary and hungry, but not knowing what I want to eat. I answer that dilemma with my usual solution and pull out my omelet pan.

  As a young boy, I hated cooking, because it was part of my servitude to my father. For years after his death liberated me from his physical control I avoided kitchens and anything associated with them. I supported many restaurants and fast food franchises, and finally realized that I was spending excessively from what was then a limited financial base, and getting fat as well. One day it occurred to me that refusing to cook left me just as much in thrall to my father as being forced to cook had done. I taught myself to prepare food, one step at a time, and when I finally came to enjoy the process, I knew that I had freed myself from one more paternal ghost.

  Now I can enjoy the simple steps of making a meal for myself—beating the eggs in a bowl with a spoon of water, heating the pan, dropping in a pat of butter, and savoring the smell as it melts, tossing the eggs in and spreading them around the bottom of the pan so they cook in a thin layer, placing a slice of gruyere cheese, another of tomato, and a third of sweet onion onto the little sheet of egg and folding it over, then deftly flipping the folded omelet so that it levitates from the pan, rolls over, and lands on its other side. That is a small trick that took time to learn, and of which I am inordinately proud.

  I place the omelet on a plate. It is perfect, and that pleases me. Striving for perfection is another legacy from my father. Failing to achieve it, by his definition, was the door to a sure beating, with fists, belt, or whatever came to hand. Now he is gone, but I still try to do every job I undertake with the utmost skill. Then I did it out of fear. Now I do it for pleasure. My old psychologist would call that internalizing.

  I open a bottle of Barolo and pour a glass, then settle at my table to eat. I follow the meal with two fingers of Cognac, and then prepare myself for bed, and sleep, and the dream I know will come. It does, but instead of Hiram, Katherine Danner is there, hovering over me on the bed. I am naked, but she is dressed. She has false teeth, and takes them out of her mouth. She places them on the pillow. I try to tell her she is supposed to wrap them in a handkerchief, but no words come. She does to me the things Hiram always did, and I wake up hard. I begin to masturbate, but I cannot focus. Am I fucking Hiram, or Katherine? The effort is too much, and I lose my erection. I play with my flaccid penis for a while, but nothing wants to happen. Finally I drift off to a restless sleep.

  The next day I call Katherine at work and invite her to dinner. I am surprised at how difficult it is to pick up the telephone and make the call. I am even more surprised at how gratified and relieved I am when she says yes.

  Chapter 19

  Katherine and I sit at a window table at Ray’s Boathouse, on the canal that leads from Lake Union to Elliot Bay. She wears a beige dress of linen woven like fine netting that drapes her body in a way that hides and reveals at the same time. She has turned slightly and is looking out at the water. The place is softly lit, and a small candle lamp on the table makes her face glow. I am embarrassed by my inability to stop looking at her, and when she swivels and looks back at me I feel my ears tingle. She smiles, and I wonder if she can tell.

  “I haven’t been here for years,” she says.

  “I would think a lot of men would like to bring you here.”

  “Men don’t bring me anywhere,” she says. The smile fades. “I don’t date. I’m not sure I like men very much. I haven’t had very good luck with them.”

  “You came here with me.”

  Katherine nods. “I’m not sure why.”

  “I’ll try not to disappoint you.”

  “And I will suspend my disbelief in the meantime.” She returns her gaze to the water. “The last time I was here was a Fourth of July. The bay was full of boats for the fireworks display. Afterwards, one of them plowed into that piling right there.” She nods toward a wooden piling just beyond the window. “The skipper was drunk, I think. It was a big boat, about 30 feet, and it blocked traffic for hours.” She shook her head. “My date was drunk, too. On the way home, he refused to let me drive, so I took a cab. I heard the next day he had slammed into another car on Aurora. They said he was doing about eighty, and crossed into the oncoming traffic. He survived. The woman and two kids he hit didn’t.” She shakes her head and looks at me. “You can improve my impression of men tonight by just staying sober.”

  “As a judge,” I say. We let a few moments of silence play between us. “Never married, then?”

  “Did marry.”

  “Then Danner is your married name?”

  She nods again. “My maiden name is Angwin.”

  “You didn’t take it back? A lot of women do that.”

  Katherine plays with her fork and a shadow crosses her face. She looks up at me again. “That’s a long story.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Maybe some day.”

  The waiter appears and takes our order. I decide on fresh tuna, cooked medium rare, so that the dark red meat still gleams in the center when you cut into it. Katherine orders steak and crab, and we settle on a fairly bland merlot that will not clash with either dish.

  “You like to eat.”

  “Damn straight. It’s one of life’s pleasures. As long as I keep running, I can pork out all I want.”

  “What happens when you stop running?”

  Katherine shakes her head briefly and smiles. “Can’t ever stop
running. You don’t know what might be catching up.” She waves vaguely at the space around her. “Nothing is immune to fate. Think what happened to this place.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” I say.

  “It burned to the ground a few years back.”

  “Before my time.”

  “You’re not from Seattle?”

  I shake my head. “That’s a long story, too.”

  Katherine grins, and it makes her look younger. “You think we’ll like each other long enough to trade stories?”

  “I hope so. How about starting with the story of the fire.”

  She looks puzzled for a moment, then nods. “The one here, you mean. It was fifteen or twenty years ago. They think it was bad wiring. The place burned to the ground, totally destroyed.

  It took a couple of years to rebuild, but now it’s back.”

  “Phoenix rising from the ashes, its old self again?”

  “But not the same place.” Katherine shakes her head. “I bet the Phoenix was always a little different each time, too.” She toys with her fork again. “And even if the ashes are all cleaned up, the stink of the fire never goes away.”

  The salad course comes and for a while we concentrate on eating. Then Katherine asks, “You ever married?”

  “Never.”

  “Another long story?”

  “Right.”

  I pass on dessert and settle for coffee, but Katherine orders and eats a gigantic confection of peanuts, caramel, ice cream and fudge nested in an Oreo cookie crust, while I watch in amazement. She devours the sweet as if she had not eaten in a week, then sits back in her chair and smiles. “That should hold me until midnight snack time,” she says.

  I have picked her up at her house on Lake Washington, and now I take her back. Even at this late hour, traffic in Seattle is bad. The city has outgrown its streets, and they are always clogged.

  “It’s always rush hour,” I say.

  Katherine nods. “The city’s gotten too fat, and now it has hardening of the arteries. In fine weather, sometimes, I ride a bike to work. Most of the way is on the Burke Gilman, so it’s actually kind of nice.”

  We pull into her driveway and I leave the engine running, waiting to see what Katherine will do.

  “You want to come in for a nightcap?” she asks.

  I turn the engine off. “If you like,” I say. I realize I am reluctant to let her see how eager I am, and I feel foolish about that. I get out of the car, and Katherine is out the other door before I can go around and open it. She leads the way to her house, unlocks the front door, and motions me inside. I step through and look around. It feels better to be in the place legitimately. That surprises me.

  Katherine closes the door and steps past me. “Welcome,” she says.

  I look around, trying to seem as if I am seeing the room for the first time. “I like the inside as much as I liked the outside,” I say. That, at least, is true. My eye is caught by the paintings again. “I like those, too. They’re pretty intense.”

  “My mother painted those.”

  “Another story?”

  She nods.

  “We’ll have to stay friends. So many tales to tell.”

  “In the meantime, I have a confession,” she says. “I don’t have anything to offer as a nightcap. Lots of food, but not a drop of booze.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Instant.”

  “In Seattle, my God? I’ll pass.”

  “You do pass. If you had accepted instant, I’d have had to kill you right away.” She laughs. “Just joking,” she says; but once again the superstitious part of me wonders if she has picked up on something between us, and knows that death is meant to be a part of the equation.

  “Actually,” she says. “I just wanted to see you inside the house, to see if it accepts you or not.”

  “What would it do if it didn’t?”

  “I’m not sure, but I would know.”

  “So what does it tell you?”

  In response, she moves toward me, places her hands lightly on my shoulder, and kisses me. “That I want to fuck you,” she says.

  I am instantly hard, and pull her into me, so that our pelvises rock together. She moans and sinks her teeth gently into my neck, just under the jaw, then pulls away.

  “But not here,” she says. “I want to do it someplace else, like a motel. I want it to be a little tawdry. That feels safer.”

  I don’t care where we do it. My lust is rising, and there is an odd pleasure in pushing it back down, looking forward to a period of anticipation.

  “Let’s be safe then.” I extend a hand. She takes it and we shake. Then she begins to laugh. It is a long, drawn-out laugh, starting with a little bubble of mirth and ending in something closer to a shriek. I begin to laugh, too, and both of us are laughing as I go out the door and she closes it behind me.

  I go home and check my secure telephone. There is a message from Angwin, all roundabout and mysterious, but essentially complaining that I am taking too long, and when the hell is someone going to die, and maybe he should change the terms of the agreement and only pay me when a job is done. He is irritating, and I find myself wishing someone would pay me to add him to the list. I push the irritation away. It is a useless emotion.

  I erase the message, pour myself a Cognac and settle in front of my computer. I go on line and open up the web site for the Spokesman Review, the Spokane daily newspaper. Frost has made page one of tomorrow’s print edition, which is already on their e-site. He ruined a child’s birthday party when the tram operator opened the door of one of the little cable cars and Frost rolled out, right onto the little girl’s feet. Her mother was shocked, simply shocked, she said, and added that she planned to sue everyone in sight, from the tram operator to the mayor.

  I shut down the computer, open a locked drawer in the desk, and pull out the list Angwin has given me. I go over the names, then close my eyes and press a forefinger against the paper. When I open my eyes again, I see that the finger touches the name Towner Cooper Maxfield IV. Whoever he is, he will be next.

  I put the list away, refill my glass, and sit at the big window, looking at the city lights but not seeing them. Instead, I am back at Katherine’s house, our eyes locked together and our bodies brushing against each other. It is so real that I can feel the touch of her dress. Feelings ripple through me. Sexual desire, certainly, but more than that, an amorphous emotion that is soft, and dreamy, and fills me with yearning for something I cannot name. I have an overwhelming wish to be next to her again. I want to rest my head on her breast. I want her to run her fingers through my hair. A rush of something bittersweet makes me shiver, and I drain my glass and stand up quickly, and shake my head to keep sudden tears from filling my eyes.

  Chapter 20

  I go to Google, one of the few useful children of modern technology, and begin finding out about my new target. Towner Cooper Maxfield IV has made a reputation for himself by trashing both family fortune and name. His great grandfather ran cattle in Arkansas. His grandfather leveraged the farm to buy more land, and started a dairy operation. His father, not satisfied with selling milk wholesale, tried a vertical integration, adding retail milk and a cheese factory. The world was not ready, apparently, for Maxfield cheese, and the whole operation went bust; but Maxfield Three got lucky, because Arkansas was becoming a retirement home mecca. He went into land development, Maxfield Farms became Maxfield Farms Estates, and the family fortune was recouped just in time for him to die and leave the money to his only son.

  Maxfield Four took all that money and created Maxfield Enterprises. No one was ever sure exactly what the firm produced, but it began operations at the start of the dot com bubble and rose with the froth, buying up other little companies of mysterious worth, going public with an IPO that was big even for those frantic times, and becoming a minor conglomerate. When the bubble began to leak, Maxfield tried to cover his ass by creating companies to buy his firm’s products. The companies wer
e shells and the purchases and profits existed only in his dreams. Then he got his girlfriend pregnant and when she asked for a ring he told her to take a hike. She did, straight to the authorities, and Maxfield Enterprises began to crumble.

  Maxfield was charged with several kinds of fraud, as well as insider trading because he dumped most of his stock before anything broke, and sent the proceeds to the Caymans. No one ever traced most of the money, and the assumption is that he still has it. In the meantime, the prosecutor lost his star witness when the girlfriend, whose name improbably enough was Bubbles, died in an accident. Maxfield made a deal, pleaded guilty to some of the lesser charges, and spent three years in a federal bed and breakfast. When he was released he pronounced himself a changed man. He publicly repented of his misdeeds, although the repentance did not seem to extend to revealing the numbers of his hidden bank accounts. He said he intended to devote the rest of his life to doing something good, or at least harmless, for the world.

  Now he lives in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. He has an organic farm, and raises fruit, which he sells on-line and mail order with a pricey catalog. He also sells pinot noir grapes to weekend wine makers around the country. His web site offers views of the farm. It is an area that has been discovered by the cognoscenti, a place of small, boutique vineyards making mostly red wines. The climate is supposed to be much like northern France, with a short but intense growing season and misty autumns that concentrate the sugars in the grapes. My own view is that the wines are over-priced and overrated, but the countryside is nice.

  Chapter 21

  I have negotiated a compromise with Katherine. She wanted a tryst in a motel, the sleazier the better. I would have preferred her home. I would even have taken the risk of bringing her to my place. We have settled on the Ridpath in Spokane, agreeing to meet there on one of her trips to eastern Washington. Katherine has reserved the same corner room on the eleventh floor that I have stayed in so frequently. The coincidence is eerie. I will have a separate room on the tenth floor. That is Katherine’s idea, too. “That way all of our options will be open,” she says.