The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  12

  A month after the negotiated conclusion of this dispute with his sister and Phillip Harrow, Abbie met Sherri Larimer for a drink. His son had been born, miraculously, and he’d have preferred to write the past out of his life entirely and, once more, start in a place that was wholly new, but he felt an obligation. The settlement hadn’t gone as Imlak had wanted, and now Arthur was suggesting that it might endanger their relationship, that, indeed, it might cause Imlak to try to find a means of reacquiring The Gamelands, through force or persuasion, which was unthinkable either way. The house was three-quarters complete, and they’d moved in upon Isaac’s birth. It had been a long labor, and Sarah bled a lot, so the hospital kept her an extra day to be safe. When she was sleeping, Abbie drove up the mountain to fuss with the furniture before his wife and son arrived. Before he drove back to the hospital, he walked around the property. It was night and far from town and every star was out. It was April and the air smelled of new leaves. Abbie walked to the edge of the woods and there felt a huge presence, as if the ridge on which he stood were the spine of the living world and the slow air through the leaves a kind of breath. “Here we are,” he said. Somewhere between the trees, something moved.

  Imlak, meanwhile, was surprised at the degree of his own displeasure. A good businessman should never be unprepared for an adverse decision; success was in the arbitrage between the least-bad and the worse. But Abbie had assured him that there was no way his sister or Harrow or their rat attorney would ever bring up Sherri Larimer. “No way,” he’d said. “Not with the whole thing with Jerry Jernicki.”

  “Are you sure, Abbie?” Imlak had asked. “Because I do not need that sort of thing coming back on me.”

  “Arthur,” Ben David said. They were in his office in Pittsburgh.

  “What?”

  “Practice not saying that sort of thing out loud.”

  Imlak pouted.

  In the conference room at the arbitration hearing, Imlak raged that Abbie had proven, once again, not to know shit about shit. And Abbie raged right back. Was it true what A. Christopher Jordan had implied? Was Arthur the prime mover? Hadn’t it been Sherri Larimer who’d nudged them in a certain direction in the first place? Who was really turning the wheels? Arthur slapped a paper cup full of weak coffee off the table. It splattered against an off-white wall. “There are no wheels, you fucking nut! Things just move!” Then he settled down and looked at Ben David. “Give me the verdict,” he said.

  Ben David said, “We’re fucked.”

  “Goddamnit.” He crossed his arms. “Abbie,” he said, and his big, rich voice was filled with a magical tone of universal ownership. “Abbie, I have plans for that land. Those are valuable acres. There are potential wellhead sites.” He launched into the lecture they’d heard before: “I am not haphazard in my acquisition of property. There is an energy revolution coming. While everyone is off grubbing around for oil in the Middle East, I am going to be part of a very particular cadre of people who gets very rich. The technology is not yet mature, but it will be soon. It will allow us to extract an extraordinary volume of carbon fuel from the rock formations beneath our feet. Appalachia sits on carbon reserves that make Saudi Arabia look like a dusty filling station. It is merely a question of getting to it. When the technology is available, and it will be within a decade, there will be a great gold rush into this region, and there will be a few men like me who preceded these gold diggers to the claims. Will these properties you hold, or your sister and her glad-handing overgrown handyman partner, materially alter my fortunes? No. Not really. But they are still worth millions of dollars to me, in the long run. A few million against many hundreds of millions, but still. We had a deal, Abbie, and you are reneging on it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abbie said. He was sorry, if not for any reason Arthur Imlak might understand.

  Imlak looked at Ben David. “What are we going to do? Can we buy the arbitrator?”

  “Gods below, Arthur, shut the fuck up,” said Ben David. “Didn’t I goddamn fucking tell you never to let that sort of shit pass your goddamn lips?”

  Imlak glared at him, then sighed. “Yes. You’re right.”

  “The whole point, the whole strategy was to make this an issue of Abbie’s, uh, whatever. Spiritual feelings. The arbitrator was going to conclude that Veronica and Phil never should’ve entrusted this wacko with whatever, but oh well, too bad for them. And you were going to look like a guy who took advantage in a perfectly legal, above-the-board, good-judge-of-character sort of way. But if they’re willing to blow it all up and possibly even expose their own, shall we say, questionable dealings with certain individuals, then the best thing we can do is cut a deal. Won’t be a total loss. They’ve got the advantage, but they’re not exactly negotiating from a position of strength. Remember, that’s how we ended up in arbitration to begin with. There are elements that, upon consideration, we all decided to keep out of the usual legal forums.”

  “Fuck,” said Imlak. “Okay.”

  “Do you want my opinion?” Abbie asked. “As the, you know, actual client.”

  “No,” said Ben David.

  Imlak stood up and said, “Do a deal.” Ben David left to find his counterpart and do just that. Arthur closed the door and turned back to Abbie. “Mayer,” he said, “I’m going down to Houston for a few weeks, and then I’ll be in Florida till June. And I’m going to go against the advice of my attorney, since he’s not in the room to squint at me, and say the sort of thing that he doesn’t like me to say. Take care of it.”

  “Take care of it?”

  “I want the whole shebang.”

  What, precisely, had he meant by that? Abbie elected not to ask him. Imlak went on to make his first implication that it might even be within his power to snatch The Gamelands back. “Don’t go to war with me, Abbie,” he said. “You’ll lose. Better keep me as a brother.” So in the end, Abbie met Larimer for a drink at the far end of the dim country club bar, surrounded by men who smelled of grass and leather gloves. Since becoming county commissioner, she’d taken to wearing bright pantsuits—“like Geraldine motherfucking Ferraro!”—and she’d joined the club. Abbie had suggested a more private meeting, but she’d told him, “I don’t take no private meetings. You might try to uh-sassinate me!” She howled. Abbie beat her to the bar and had already tossed down a large glass of vodka in order to acquire the courage for the conversation.

  “Listen,” he told her. “I need a favor.”

  “Yeah, well, I need a campaign contribution.”

  “Really?”

  “No, ya dummy. I’m pulling your leg. But I’m not really in the favor-granting business. I’m in the business of civic responsibility and shit.” She lit a smoke.

  “Yes, well. It’s at the, uh, request of our, uh, mutual benefactor.”

  “Who? Arthur? That sounds like some shit his fancy pants would say.”

  “Shh!” Abbie glanced around. “We’re in public!”

  She laughed at him. She hooted. “Public. Listen to you.” She turned in her seat and spied a tall man in khaki pants. “Hey, you! Caddyshack.”

  “Me?” The man looked away from his conversation.

  “Yeah, you. You gonna call the cops on me?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing,” Sherri said. “Fuck off.” She waved her cigarette at him. She turned back to Abbie.

  “Christ, Sherri. You’re bringing up the police?”

  “Fuck the police. I own them police!” She tapped the bar and grinned. “Now lay back on that couch, honey, and you tell Dr. Sherri what it is that she can do ya for.”

  After he told her, he drove back to The Gamelands. For no particular reason, he took the long way around, a meandering path that passed through the center of Uniontown, the empty parking lots and sooty courthouse and the high-rises from the years when it had been a prosperous place. Now it smelled like the polluted creeks that trickled through it, and its population was half what it once was, and the Walmart
and Kmart plazas on the west side of town had killed the last stores on Main Street. Main Street, really, the literalization of a political theme, some of the dark storefronts still sporting dusty window displays, as if the former owners had fled in the night from a war. The mansions were all funeral homes. The handsome old mainline churches were mostly empty. Worshiping Christians had decamped to the boxy megachurches that preached a prosperity gospel to a lot of laid-off workers who imagined the mines might come back and blamed their own unions for closing them. The town had lost fifty percent of its population in twenty years. What hope was there for a place like that? Maybe Imlak’s magic wells would one day employ people again, though wasn’t that just a recapitulation of the lost coal economy, a brief flush time until the veins or pools or reserves or whatever they were ran dry? But maybe when the oceans all rose, and the coastal cities sank, and the vast plain of the Mississippi turned once more into a shallow sea, the people who remained would return to places like Uniontown, nine-hundred-ninety-nine feet above sea level, the dust of its twentieth-century abandonment washed away by the tropical rains.

  Down Fayette Street; down the Old National Pike; past the Sweet Pea filling station; through Hopwood where cars were crowded around Roose’s from whose roof the giant white illuminated rooster crowed into the night; past the big white Greek Revival house surrounded by pines on the right where the on-ramp curved into Route 40; then angling up into the mountains; past the Watering Hole Restaurant and the Lick Hollow access road through the trees; past the scenic overlook and into the last sharp bend where the Summit Inn appeared a thousand feet ahead; over the blind peak and a sharp right onto Skyline Drive; past the Summit’s golf course and into the state gamelands for which, in a fit of whimsy, he’d named his own home, then right onto his own long driveway, which he’d already, habitually, begun to take too fast. He jammed the brakes and slid on the gravel. It would become a habit.

  He found Sarah sitting up with Isaac and watching an old western on TV. “You’re still up,” he said.

  “He woke up. He’s sleeping now, but I’m afraid to move. How was your meeting with Sherri?”

  “Friendly, threatening, cajoling. You can imagine.”

  “Yes. What did she say?”

  “She was cagey. She just said we’d hear from her.”

  “Why are you even doing this?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Arthur must have told you.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Really?” Abbie let himself sink into a big chair in their living room. He’d started to put on weight in those days, and he frequently felt exhausted. But, he reminded himself, it was also very late.

  “It isn’t true, Abbie, what you think. And even if it was . . . Anyway, you told me yourself that you don’t think there’s any way he could take the house.”

  “Should we have divorced?” Abbie asked. “Instead of coming here.”

  “If we had,” Sarah said, and she looked down at their son.

  “Selfish of us,” Abbie said. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do. It’s an unusual sensation.”

  “Jesus, Abbie. Try prayer.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “I wouldn’t know, clearly.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Sarah.”

  “No, I suppose not. Still.”

  Abbie rubbed his face. “Do you ever pray?”

  “You’re asking me if I pray?”

  “Sure. We’ve never really discussed it. Outside of temple, I mean. On a whim.”

  “I guess I do, actually. In a sense.

  “What do you pray for?”

  “I ask God to show me what it is that I really want.”

  “Hmm. What makes one desire worthier than another?”

  “Christ, Abbie. I don’t know. I’m going to bed. Take your son.”

  What did she think when she handed Isaac to him, letting his head drop a fraction of a centimeter from her hand into the bend of his arm? Isaac made a contented noise, like a giggle, in his sleep. When she was gone, Abbie stared at the boy for a long time. On the television, a lawman said, “I ain’t about to leave! If there’s only one honest man in this town, then it’s worth stayin’ and it’s worth a fight.” He took the boy to his room and laid him in his crib. Isaac made a sound and opened his tiny dark eyes. They watched each other for a long time.

  • • •

  Over the next several years, Veronica and Phil had proceeded with their plan, modified and moderated by their settlement-reduced acreage into a more typical project, a few subdivisions—bedroom communities, ahem—to be laid out on a cluster of small hills near California, PA, just south of where the new expressway crossed I-70, the curlicuing exchanges cradled in and carried on an eruption of immense earthworks that would one day, when it was all cleared away, when the last human survivors of the nuclear wars or the viral holocaust or the end of orderly seasons were long extinct, appear to the tool-bearing badgers or the clothes-wearing crows or the dolphins in their rolling suits full of seawater or whatever animal God next saw fit, if He did see fit, to curse with self-knowledge, as the mad devotions of an incredible elder race, something worshipful and inscrutable carved into the flesh of the world and then left to be whittled down to nothing more than a hint of itself, if even that. They’d moved as quickly as they could to lay out the streets and get the building underway, perhaps believing that to delay was to invite the still-slight possibility of another reversal of legal fortune that would yank the property away from them again. Holes had been dug and cinder block foundations laid and concrete poured and the first timber frames of all those future four-bedroom colonials were now rising like the skeletons of the Behemoths and Leviathans that preceded men and women into creation.

  Nothing untoward happened. If Sherri Larimer, for Abbie, or for Arthur, whichever of them she really served, or for herself, if in fact everything she did were ultimately for her benefit alone, had done anything to convince Veronica and Phil to sell the acreage that remained to them, Abbie hadn’t heard of it. And he felt a vague and mounting anxiety about it, especially as their first project began to take physical form. But Sherri never said anything about it, and Arthur, oddly, never brought it up again. The Gamelands was finished, and Arthur’s money was expanding in the variety of vehicles that he himself had recommended Abbie invest it in. He dreamed less frequently, although on occasion, when he saw families of deer making their frequent crossings of the property, he wondered if his God meant something by it. But of course he lived on a mountain in Appalachia. But of course there were deer.

  One night, Abbie was home with Isaac and Sarah, whose attention, he felt, had wandered even farther after the birth of the boy. He sometimes caught her regarding Isaac with a look of surprise that was something other than joy. He’d overheard her talking to him—Isaac was only a few years old—in a curiously confessional tone, in the lowered voice that she’d adopt in a restaurant or airport when she suspected that someone nearby might eavesdrop. He’d heard, or thought he’d heard, his own name in these murmured monologues, and sometimes when his son looked at him with those black eyes, pupil-less and dark as a cloudy sky over the ocean at night, he felt the terrifying presence of a competing vision, as if the boy could see what Abbie saw, or something more.

  The bell rang. Sarah was watching the news. Abbie was cooking dinner. Isaac was playing an impenetrable game with his feet. Abbie wiped his hands on a towel and went to see who it was. As he passed through the living room, Sarah looked up at him. “We have a doorbell?” she said.

  There were three men at the door. They had a look of savage impermanence, as if they’d been assembled by an alien sculptor with a passable but imperfect grasp of the human form. Abbie tilted his head. “Can I help you?”

  “Probably,” said the largest and baldest of them. He twanged slightly.

  “Who is it?” Sarah called.

  “Is that your wife?” the man asked.

&
nbsp; “I’m not sure if I should answer that,” Abbie said.

  “Whoa,” said the shorter, stockier man to his left. “That’s not very hospitable.”

  The big man grinned. It was not reassuring. “Would you be hospitable, Boochie, if a bunch of roughnecks just showed up at your door and you wasn’t expecting no one?”

  “Do you guys know Sherri Larimer?” Abbie asked.

  “Who don’t we know?” said the third man, who was nearly as big as the first.

  “Why don’t you come on in?” Abbie said.

  “Who is it?” Sarah called again.

  “It’s work,” Abbie yelled back, and then he watched warily as the men came into his house and, rather improbably, unlaced and removed their large brown work boots, which they set in a neat row by the door.

  What transpired between them? Abbie gave them beers, and Sarah put Isaac to bed and stood behind her husband with her arms crossed tightly, only moving from time to time to pour herself another glass of red wine. What did they propose, and how did he reply? They suggested something more than he was willing to suborn, and he countered with something so negligible that it called into question why he needed their services in the first place. “No violence,” he said, when they pressed the issue. “What do we look like?” they said. Sarah snorted. “Well, okay,” they said. “We know what we look like.” They stayed for perhaps an hour and drank a six pack between them. Abbie asked them why they’d bothered to come, when clearly they were operating under someone else’s orders and were going to do what they were going to do. “She’s your sister,” they said. “We aren’t gonna do anything you aren’t comfortable with.” Abbie said he wasn’t comfortable with any of it. “Well, okay,” they said. “Comfortable might not be the right word.” When they left, they laced their boots and stood in the entry hall. “This is a good house,” they said. “Good bones.”