Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  Not a goddamn one of them—except the widow. That old woman was always coming around, asking questions and making trouble. From the beginning he was sure the old bitch had plans, ulterior motives underlying every kindness she showed him in the early days of his ownership. The day Amanda left, Mrs. Washington brought him a banana loaf and said she was sorry for him; by then they were no longer on speaking terms, and he did not want her sympathy. Suspecting that the loaf might be laced with rat poison he put it in the trash and did not even read the card she’d written, sure it contained some double-edged sentiment. From the beginning that woman was determined to destroy him. For all he knew, she had cast a spell over the whole neighborhood, was conjuring demons and the forces of darkness to rise up and consume them all. It was not for nothing that the kids in the neighborhood called her a witch.

  With the curtains closed Paul moves through his house. The stairs from the basement emerge in the kitchen where wooden cabinetry hides the appliances. He turns on the water at the sink and watches it run down the drain, out of the aquifer and back into the aquifer, a vast internal sea a few hundred feet down. At night, sleeping in his bunker, he dreams that the water is rising up through the sedimentary rocks, lapping at the foundations of the house. Some nights he has woken in panic, covered in sweat. Convinced the bunker is flooding, he has to place his hands on the floor, shine a flashlight into the corners, hold his breath and listen for the gurgling of water until he satisfies himself the bunker is sound and dry.

  Across the central hall from the kitchen, the den’s walls are lined with empty bookshelves. In the adjoining living room at the front of the house, windows look west and north. Back across the hall, the dining room is a mirror image of the living room, and a vestibular china closet returns Paul to the kitchen. He makes the circuit through the ground floor more than once, pausing each time to run his fingers over the empty bookshelves. When they moved in, the interior decorator filled the den with books. It was only two walls of shelves, but it still astounded him: surely only public libraries, schools, and universities had collections as big; he could not believe that a single person would ever own so many. Amanda wanted none of the books when she left and at the estate sale Paul sold them back to the same interior decorator, who purchased them for another client, another model home, in another part of the city. “No one reads books anymore,” the decorator said, “but they’re kind of decorative, and they make good noise insulation in condos.”

  Passing once again through the open pocket doors connecting the den and the living room, Paul slouches in the bay window seat, looking through a chink in the curtains at the roll of black-green lawn and the low ornamental wall that separates his front yard from the next-door neighbors, that shifty-looking bank manager, who certainly could have done something to help, with his equally suspicious partner, who may be an Arab or an Indian, it’s impossible to tell, but who seems to be home all the time with the little girl, pretending to be a normal family. No one is fooled.

  Paul paces the axis connecting the living room bay on the north side of the house to the dining room bay on the south, then spends ten minutes circling the central hallway, gazing at the main staircase before he can bring himself to go up to the second floor, where he inspects the four empty bedrooms, each with its own adjoining bath. Without the furniture that once filled these rooms, it is difficult to conjure memories of the ways he and Amanda and the boys inhabited them. He remembers laughter at first, a kind of raucous joy, and then, as months and years passed and the business began to fail, raised voices and tears, the adults always shouting, the boys either pouting or crying.

  The top floor of the house, high in the front gable, is a single room, lit by the French window with its pointed arch that opens onto the balcony and has views over the front yard, the whole neighborhood, the woods and fields and suburbs beyond, all the way to the broad flat river west of the city. When the boys were still here, toys packed the room. There was an old-fashioned rocking horse and solid wooden blocks passed down from Amanda’s childhood, and, from Paul’s mother, bright plastic machines full of electronic noise: action figures and gray space ships, a purple ray gun firing sparks in an enclosed plastic chamber, a laughing white skeleton with sparkling black eyes.

  Paul opens the window and steps onto the balcony. At this time of evening no one will be looking. Televisions flash, lights flare on and off, but the blinds and curtains of the neighboring houses are closed. After their house was finished, Amanda stood on the balcony, her hair blowing in a cold late autumn wind, and said she felt like Juliet, or Rapunzel.

  “Will we be okay?” she said, turning to him. The crash had already come. Houses were no longer selling.

  “Come on, Mandy,” he said, embracing her. “Don’t you believe in me?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “But I also believe the world is unforgiving. Tell me we’ll be all right.”

  “You have to trust me. I’m not gonna let you down,” he said, and lifted her up off the balcony, holding her in the air, leaning out over the railing. He felt her grow tense in his hands, her eyes staring into his own. “You do trust me, don’t you, Amanda?” Her lip quivered, she nodded, and Carson started to cry from the floor of the playroom.

  Now, alone on the balcony, it takes no effort for Paul to imagine casting his body into the air, being caught by thermals and borne aloft over the land. As a boy he often saw himself rising out of his chair at school and hovering up near the ceiling, looking down on his awestruck teacher and classmates, who would at last recognize and respect him for what he was: born to lead the world. Just as easily, bending over the railing, he can see himself dropping down, bouncing off the porch roof, and how his impact against the flagstone path between the driveway and front door might result in his immediate death. Lifting his feet in the air, he holds on to the railing to see if it will give under his weight: swinging, shifting his center of gravity, he senses the dizzy pull, how it would feel to plummet over the edge, letting the house itself be the agent of his death. The house is not just a part of him: he is the house. The house is the way he sees himself: the peaks and wings, the hard, undulant lines and disproportionate scale. If he must die, the house should kill him. Momentum tilts him forward: he nearly goes too far, at the last moment throwing his torso back and coming to land on the balcony, its beams shuddering under the sudden jolt of his weight. A solid house would not shudder. A house built to last would shake only under tectonic forces.

  Having spent so many early years in houses that fell short in one way or another, in neighborhoods so sterile and geometric that they thwarted happiness, Paul dreamed of creating instant communities, which would protect their inhabitants just as they invited a form of neighborly sociability tempered by privacy. He wanted not only to work on the construction of houses, as he had during summers in high school, not just to set up a carpentry and contracting business, but to design homes that aspired to a vision of residential America so distilled it could only improve the lives of the people within them. It had been his adolescent dream to design houses that would be places of safety as well as congregation, set in neighborhoods where the streets and public areas, the parks and sidewalks, would be half-enclosed by trees and low hedges, walls and fences, with pergolas and bandstands and gazebos: an idyllic small-town American space with enough land between houses that neighbors need never hear the secrets of one another’s intimate lives.

  “An architect?” his father said. “I’ve never needed an architect. I don’t—you have to understand, Paul—I don’t understand the point of being an architect. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I’m saying I think you could choose better. Why don’t you join the Air Force?”

  “I don’t like flying,” Paul remembers protesting. “I don’t even like birds.” He knew from an early age that military discipline wasn’t for him. His father had made Paul fold his clothes according to military rules: t-shirts in six-inch squares, underwear in tight wh
ite sausages. From the age of twelve Paul got a haircut every Sunday night after dinner. Ralph put down towels in the living room while Dolores used the electric clippers: number three on the sides and four on top. That was a compromise, because Ralph wanted his son’s hair shorter, buzzed all over, and Paul wanted it longer. As he sat in the chair, his father watching while his mother managed the clippers, Paul knew he was getting only the smallest taste of what real military life would be like.

  His father said that if he wanted to go to college instead of serving his country Paul would have to do it on his own. For Ralph, Paul understood, it was a matter of principle; there was nothing vindictive about the position. The Kroviks had always been military men and Paul was the first to fail in this legacy. His grades were decent but not good enough for a scholarship, so he knew that if he wanted a college education he would have to support himself. Ralph asked him to be out of the house by his nineteenth birthday, which was, thank God, a whole year after the end of high school, so Paul had time to get himself organized, save up money, apply to college. Friends of his were not so lucky, and found themselves, on the day they turned eighteen, shown the door by their parents. At least his mother kept saying to him, “I believe in you, Pablo. You can do it. You’re gonna make it.” She slipped him money, bought groceries on the sly, did whatever she could to help without Ralph finding out.

  Paul was accepted into the architectural studies program at State. He took out loans and worked three jobs. He spent two years in college but couldn’t keep up with the tuition and fees and left without a degree. Not long after that he met Amanda. She was already working in the city’s planning department, well on her way to having a good career. So while Paul got on his feet with the construction business and secured his contractor’s license, she supported them. Six months after their first meeting they were married.

  Looking at the neighborhood now, Paul understands that he lacked adequate training. In their finished form, there is something obviously wrong with both the design and execution of the houses, in the way he has situated them on their lots, the way the lots were apportioned and the streets laid out, even something amiss in the neighborhood’s landscaping: the sidewalks are too narrow, the parkways too broad, the berms designed to deaden the sound of traffic from the main road too angular, too steep, too high. The neighborhood looks expansive and yet insubstantial, the jerrybuilt back lot of a movie studio where houses exist only as façades, the gardens and parkways too immaculate to feel as though any of it grew up organically, one house at a time.

  The main stairs lead him back down to the foyer. He built the two sets of stairs believing that one day he and Amanda might have a live-in maid who would be restricted to the steep narrow “service stairs” while the family used the broad front staircase. It was a selling point for the development and a full half of the houses completed have this added feature, though as far as Paul knows not one of the families in Dolores Woods has any live-in help.

  As he opens the door, sniffing the warm air for signs of other people, he catches grass cuttings, pesticides, and the ozone exhaust of air conditioning units, the smell of a late evening barbecue, but no bodies. Leaving the door ajar, he walks down the path to the driveway and mailbox, itself a handcrafted miniature of the house, mounted on a brick pillar. Inside he finds several pieces of mail, all for the new owners, Nathaniel and Julia Noailles. How is the name pronounced? No-ales? No-els? No-ills? It sounds foreign. Taking the envelopes back up the driveway, Paul opens the lid of the shed that holds the garbage cans and throws the mail inside. People have to learn to be more responsible. They must be taught.

  Back behind the locked door he slumps to the floor. Beside him he sees a spot where he tracked in dirt, but when he tries to wipe it away with the cuff of his shirt the stain spreads—tar rather than dirt—and in the light coming in from the street he sees it expand, sharp lines of black breaking against the grain of the wood. He spits and rubs but the stain only gets larger and as he works at the mark tears erupt from deep in his viscera. By the time the stain has spread across the width of the hall he gives up. It is no longer his responsibility; the new owners can deal with the mess.

  In the basement Paul turns on all the lights over the recreation area to read the engraved brass plaque mounted in the wall: PAUL KROVIK BUILT THIS HOUSE. He feels the sharp indentations of the letters. Except for a low buzz the house is silent, and then, somewhere more distant, on the other side of the foundation walls, there is an irregular vibration, a scuffling sound he has not noticed in the past.

  Turning off the lights and dropping to his knees, crawling back across the floor and into the pantry, under the shelf at the back, through the open hatch, following the pinkish glow that comes from inside the bunker, fluorescent light reflecting off its deep red walls, pulling the hatch shut behind him, Paul throws its flimsy lock, then stands, heaves closed the containment door in a single movement, and engages its own lock. Listening to the bolts slide into place as he spins the combination dial, he rests his head against the cold metal surface. Breath comes in a pant; his hands are shaky, legs calf-wobbly.

  When the new family arrives he will have to come and go through the storm cellar at the back of his bunker, entering and exiting his home through the woods. It will take time and determination to turn things around, to rebuild his business and fight for his family. Apart from his truck, everything he now owns is in the bunker’s two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and living space, all of the rooms opening off the long hallway. The distance from one containment door to the other is nearly two hundred feet, long enough that he can run back and forth to keep in shape. He has mounted a bar in the door of the second bedroom and does chin-ups every morning before going out through the back entrance to look for work. He has a cell phone that costs him little each month and the tools he needs to perform small contracting jobs. He will build shelves and renovate kitchens and undertake structural repairs. He parks his truck on a different street every night. He will plan, prepare, and be ready to win back his sons, to rescue them before the final reckoning, returning them to this place of absolute safety.

  In the meantime, he will wait for the inevitable, for the arrival of people with a name he cannot say.

  I no longer remember when the first trees came down, but it was around the time Krovik laid out the roads, must have been five years ago, in the late autumn of the year he finished his own house, before the ground froze again and I put up the storm windows for another winter. I watched him cut his twisting snake deeper into the land, zing down stray cottonwoods at the edge of the arable fields. I grew acquainted with the clattering whoosh and thump of trees falling, the growling thunder of wood chippers and two-stroke screaming of saws, the cutting chains slicing into tree flesh. I might as well have been camped on a log run. When I inquired with the city if there was any way to stop Krovik felling more trees—conservation laws, public nuisance laws, zoning laws—a tart young woman in the planning office said, “The land belongs to Mr. Krovik now, he can do what he likes, Ms. Washington. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s breaking any laws.”

  “But these are good trees. There’s nothing wrong with them except they’re a little old.”

  “The health of the trees is irrelevant, ma’am. The property is his. You sold it to him, he can do what he likes, within the zoning laws, and he’s had the property zoned for residential development. Just be glad he’s improving the value of the land by putting up houses. It’s good for the tax base.”

  “I don’t see how that improves the value of land that had no need for improvement in the first place,” I said, hanging up before the woman could answer.

  I searched the city ordinances but could find no laws to curb Krovik’s felling. Laws against nature did not count. Laws against vandalizing a canvas of land as balanced in its composition as a fine painting are not on the city’s schedule of ordinances. Those trees saw the land through wars and droughts and fires, through crim
e and benefaction. They were trees of memory and witness.

  At last I mustered strength to speak to him, drew my body as tall as it has ever stood, marched up the road to face him and his chainsaw crew, my arms aquiver with rage.

  “Are you going to take them all down?” I shouted, pointing at the untouched shelterbelt and the body of woods that rides into the reserve. No longer knowing the slope of the land where his machines had flattened it, I stumbled and one of the men caught my arm before I fell to the ground. I could smell his meat breath and the sweat on his arms carving channels through sawdust.

  Krovik removed his headphones and baseball cap and raised a hand to tell his men to stop.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Is it your intention to fla—to take, I mean, to cut all of them down?” Words turned to prickly burrs and caught on my gums.

  “Take down what, Mrs. Washington?”

  “The trees! Are you going to take down every one of them? When I sold I said I didn’t want you chopping down the trees. You remember that?”

  He looked around, confused, a brute pillager. Opening his mouth, lips thin, hard-pink steel blades, he laughed—not a malicious laugh, but one of power and disregard.

  “Don’t you worry,” he said, cackling. “I’m just taking down a few to make room for the roads and houses. I’ll plant others if it looks bare. Don’t you worry. I’m a good guy, Mrs. Washington. I like trees too.”

  “But I insisted when I sold you this land that I wanted the trees left. I understood you were going to build houses but there’s no reason to be cutting down the trees. Lord, you promised you wouldn’t cut them down, not a one of them. You said you wouldn’t so much as touch them, that you’d build around them!”