Don Hoesel

by Hunter's Moon (v5. 0)

  “But th-this one’s legal,” Dennis said with no hint of humor. He tried some coffee, grimaced, and added a few sugar packets. “A house. Owner’s ripped everything out d-down to the studs. It needs new floors, sheetrock, s-some wiring. It’s all interior work.”

  “Sounds like a big job,” CJ said.

  “If we’re l-lucky, we can st-stretch it through winter.”

  CJ nodded. He could certainly use the money. Janet, who had been calling him every day—usually to recite the litany of things that were responsible for the dissolution of their marriage— stopped doing so yesterday. What that portended he didn’t know, except to suspect that it meant the increased involvement of lawyers and judges and more money than he was making as an author, and now at Kaddy’s. He’d opened a new bank account in which Matt had direct-deposited his last royalty check, but it would take him a long time to build up any kind of respectable balance. So on that consideration alone, Dennis’s offer was tempting. Too, there was the assault case hanging over his head. His lawyer had kept him up to speed on the civil suit. For all CJ knew, he might end up owing more to the critic than he would his wife.

  Even so, he found it difficult to manufacture excitement for Dennis’s project, and it wasn’t until he’d eaten half the food on his plate that he understood why. A project like this was, as Dennis intimated, a long one—designed to keep two men busy for at least a full season. Accepting it meant giving serious thought to how long he would stay in Adelia, and that was a question he’d relegated to the same part of his brain studiously avoiding the start of a new novel.

  As he ate, considering both of these questions, Dennis didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at him. The man had a natural Zen quality—evident even as a boy, and short-circuited only by the stuttering—that allowed him to make the offer and not fret the response. CJ suspected he could choose to pretend the invitation had never been extended and Dennis wouldn’t say another word about it.

  Rather than allow him to do that, though, CJ decided to do the opposite of what the little voices in his head were telling him to do.

  “Okay,” he said. “After work today, we’ll go and look at it.”

  Dennis was right about one thing. This project would take them all winter should they choose to accept it. But he’d been wrong about the project including only interior work. CJ had cast a critical eye over the place before they walked in, and knew they might have to tackle both the siding and the roof, which had a few bare spots where old shingling had slid to earth. Inside, things looked worse—or better, depending on one’s perspective. The interior had indeed been stripped, but it had also been left looking as if a tornado had been responsible for the denuding. They would have to spend days dragging the old sheetrock out, along with the pulled-up carpet and sheets of linoleum from the kitchen, before they could start the restoration work.

  Right off, CJ could see that a substantial portion of wiring would need to be replaced, as would some studs, and one load-bearing column in the great room. And that was just what he could see; who knew what they’d find once they got deeper into it.

  On the way over, Dennis had mentioned the owner considering wood floors throughout, as well as custom carpentry for the staircase. If these were added to the rest of the work, they’d be looking at March before they were finished.

  The house was one of the largest in Adelia, set back against the hills on the north side of town, skirting the county line. As a teenager, CJ had driven the Mustang through this area a few times, wondering what kind of money the people had who owned these homes. This one in particular had caught his eye all those years ago, principally for the wrought-iron gate backed by a tall hedgerow that kept prying eyes off of all but the topmost floor. At the time, CJ had wondered how the family home, the house on Lyndale, could have been so small compared to these that had sprung up almost overnight. He understood, now, that his family had enough money to build a home five times the size of this one, but there had been no need. That was actually something he appreciated about his upbringing; he’d been taught to eschew ostentation.

  Now that he was inside, CJ guessed this house to be close to five thousand square feet. Not quite the mansion it had appeared to be back then, but a large home nonetheless.

  Thor was busy investigating one of several piles of drywall and other refuse in the hallway, and CJ suspected there was a mouse or two in residence amid the rubble. By the looks of things, the crew that had stripped the place finished their work over a year ago, which had allowed a thick layer of dust, along with a general feeling of dereliction, to fall over the home.

  “How long has it been like this?” CJ asked.

  Dennis shook his head. “No idea. I g-got the job last week and told them it would t-take a while. They d-didn’t seem concerned.”

  CJ walked over to the window, pushing the dingy curtain aside. The backyard was enormous, with a garden that looked to have been well-maintained at some point. CJ’s guess was that the current owners were relatively new to the area, and they probably got the place for a song.

  “How much?”

  “We agreed on f-fifteen thousand,” Dennis said.

  CJ gave his friend a nod. Seventy-five hundred would pay a bill or two. “When do we start?”

  “How about th-this weekend?”

  “Okay, then. This weekend it is.”

  CJ wondered if he was up to it. In the short time he’d been at Kaddy’s, he’d rediscovered muscles he’d forgotten existed. There was no telling how he’d feel after this type of labor. He chuckled to himself. There were many things he was rediscovering the longer he stayed in Adelia, and he suspected sore muscles wouldn’t be the last of it.

  Small towns did to Daniel Wolfowitz what a single errant fringe in a throw rug did to an obsessive-compulsive. It was that almost subconscious feeling of disquiet that lodged like a sliver in the brain, coloring everything else with discordant notes. While it could be ignored for a while, eventually the thing would rise to prominence until he was down on his knees, smoothing the threads into uniform alignment.

  In Daniel’s case it was the idiosyncratic sameness of small-town America that did him in. In a large city, there was no way to measure the number of things going on at any one time, and Daniel reveled in all of it; and what kept it from becoming overwhelming was that the sheer volume of such things tended to become a comforting background noise. The problem with small towns was the mind-numbing boredom, accompanied by oddities that stood in stark relief against the surrounding normalcy. Daniel’s mind would want to slow down, to sync with a more linear lifestyle, but then he would round a corner and see something unexpected, something like one of the grotesques out of a Sherwood Anderson novel.

  In Chicago or New York, he was prepared for anything that happened along. Here, his vigilance would wane, and then he’d come upon something unexpected, like when he walked into the living room of the Baxter house to see Uncle Edward frightening the grandkids with the stump of his left arm, the detached prosthetic hand resting on his head. Or when he came into town to help Graham set things up with the VFW and witnessed a member of the local decorating crew—a man who looked to be in his midfifties and wearing badly stained work clothes—hanging from a telephone line in what appeared to be the center of Main Street. Directly beneath him, working the controls of a cherry picker whose basket rested on the road, was a similarly dressed, frantic man. A crowd had gathered, and inexplicably, no one seemed worried. In fact, this was one way that small-town life seemed to correlate with existence in the city, except that in the latter, people would have been looking up at someone perched on a ledge and urging them to jump. Daniel and Graham had hung around long enough to see the ground-based man gain control of the cherry picker and raise the bucket until the dangling man could drop into it.

  Nevertheless, Daniel was good at adapting to his surroundings, especially when doing so meant a decent payoff. Weidman had already spent a great deal positioning his pieces in just the right places. Bu
t everything hinged on Graham’s win—on the placement of a sympathetic ear in a position of influence. Graham’s win was the final piece to the puzzle. And Daniel’s job was to secure that victory—to make absolutely certain that nothing went wrong.

  The problem was that there was something going on here that eluded him—something that colored family conversation but that never poked its head into view. There was something Graham didn’t want to talk about, and while Daniel didn’t normally begrudge a man his secrets, he did when there was a chance the secret could derail the campaign.

  He’d asked around, and the consensus was that Ronny’s and Maggie’s were the two places to make nice with the locals. As much as he disliked small towns, they were good for one thing: gossip. If there was something going on that Graham wouldn’t talk about, there was a good chance someone in town knew about it. And Daniel was confident he could pull that information from the right subject.

  Before walking into Maggie’s, Daniel adjusted his tie, pulling it down and to the side. There was such a thing as looking too polished.

  Chapter 10

  CJ didn’t hear Julie come in over the sound of the miter saw. He and Dennis stood with their backs to the door, nary a piece of wood in sight, the saw roaring away as if it were newly bought, instead of having made a journey of several hundred miles less than a week and a half ago while crammed into the trunk of CJ’s Honda.

  They were still a long way from needing the saw, but Dennis had complained about the grunt work, how he didn’t feel he was accomplishing anything unless he could play with a power tool. So he and Dennis had carried it in, set it up in the kitchen, and let it rip.

  Julie stood in the doorway and watched them, two Wendy’s bags in her hands, and when they finally powered the saw down, she said, “Ben and I once paid a contractor to build a deck, and I’m certain that’s what I saw him doing.”

  The moment she started to speak, both CJ and Dennis jumped in surprise.

  “Ooh, sorry about that,” Julie said. She lifted the bags. “I brought lunch.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” CJ said, removing his safety goggles, “but I don’t have any fingers to eat with.”

  Dennis decided not to sully the moment with talking. Instead he accepted a bag, nodded thanks to Julie, and left the kitchen. Julie handed the other bag to CJ, and he peeked inside, then took a long sniff, his nose disappearing into the bag.

  “Bacon double cheeseburger and onion rings,” he said, and then looked up. “You remembered.”

  “Well, it is a pretty basic order.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  CJ removed the items from the bag and began to eat, using the counter as a tabletop.

  “To what do I owe the free lunch?” he asked even as an errant onion stuck out from between his lips.

  “No reason,” Julie said. “Just thought I’d do something nice for family.” She used her toe to tap a line of trim that Dennis had pulled down earlier that morning—a detail the previous contractors had missed.

  At her response, CJ’s chewing slowed. There was something that seemed wrong about hearing an old flame talking about being a member of his family. Of course, he knew that was the case. Still . . .

  His response was cut off by the sound of a drill coming from the other room, and this time it was Julie who jumped.

  “He did that on purpose,” she said.

  CJ shook his head. “Probably not. He just likes to play with power tools.”

  CJ ate in silence for a while, and Julie let him, and what might have been an uncomfortable silence wasn’t.

  Finally, Julie said, “Have you seen your family since the funeral?”

  “Nope.”

  Julie frowned, apparently at the glibness of his answer. But without saying anything else, she rose, crossed to him, and reached for the Wendy’s bag. From it she pulled a napkin and gestured for him to take care of the line of ketchup on his chin.

  CJ reached for the napkin, and his hand touched hers, where it lingered for longer than it should have. She pulled away and retreated to the other side of the room.

  “So have you enrolled in veterinary school yet?” he asked, just to break the tension.

  “Sadly, no. It was either do that today or bring you lunch and then go see Jack’s game.”

  “Well, I suppose you made the wise choice then,” CJ said, holding up the last bit of his sandwich, which brought the smile he’d intended. But it didn’t last, replaced by a puzzled frown.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?”

  CJ’s mouth was full, so he answered with a headshake.

  Julie leaned back against the kitchen counter and made a gesture that took in the surrounding house. “What are you doing here?” Once she’d said it, her cheeks colored, as if realizing the question sounded more abrupt than she’d intended.

  CJ didn’t answer right away. He slowly chewed the food in his mouth as if deep in thought, then swallowed, looked up at her, and shrugged. “A man’s got to pay the bills, doesn’t he?”

  It didn’t take long for that comment to earn him an exasperated look from his ex-girlfriend, and it came as a minor epiphany that he’d seen that expression on the face of every woman with whom he’d had any kind of meaningful relationship. It was an uncomfortable thought. Yet how could he sum up everything that was happening in his life in a way that fit their current surroundings, as well as the odd nature of their relationship? Discussing the deterioration of his marriage, the damage to his professional reputation, his sudden poverty, the scab ripped from the old family wound, and his newfound faith in God with a woman he hadn’t realized he still cared about until he walked into the house on Lyn-dale and saw her just wasn’t something he could do right now.

  Fortunately there was still a boon he could throw out.

  “The Atlantic has asked me to write an article about Graham,” he said. “So I need to spend some time here and do research.”

  Julie took that in, then said, “What kind of article?”

  That was a question that CJ couldn’t answer as well as he might have liked.

  “What kind of article indeed,” he said.

  Thankfully Dennis chose that moment to fire up the Sawzall, and this time there was an accompanying sound of splintering wood. CJ’s eyes widened, and after a frozen moment, he made for the door.

  Behind him, Julie called out, “I don’t think he’s just playing this time.”

  “Memory is a funny thing,” CJ said, and it wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, but Dennis, being the only one within earshot, apparently felt the need to nod his acknowledgment.

  “Think about it,” CJ went on. “There are people who can remember what they had for breakfast on Friday, July 7, 1972, but can’t describe the plot for the movie they saw yesterday.”

  Dennis seemed to give this profound thought the weight it deserved, finally saying, “I g-got a p-pay-per-view movie last night. Real g-good—lots of action. But I have no idea w-what it was about.”

  “You see? That’s what I’m saying. How can you trust anything you think you remember?”

  “P-pancakes and sausage patties,” Dennis said. When all that earned him was a puzzled look from CJ, he explained. “Breakfast on July 7, 1972. P-pancakes and sausage patties.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Of c-course I’m kidding. I wasn’t even b-born yet.”

  CJ chuckled. “Okay, you’re not allowed to mess with me when I’m trying to be philosophical.”

  “Is that what you c-call it?” Dennis countered, his eyes returning to the flat-screen TV hanging over the bar. Then he asked, “Was it really a Friday?”

  “Was what a Friday?”

  “July 7, 1972. Was it a Friday?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Well, it just seems to be an odd d-detail to throw in there if it w-wasn’t true.”

  “If you want to know about memory,” Rick chimed in, “you ought to talk to
some of these veterans who come in here. These guys can recount practically their whole tours, down to what they ate, what the weather was like on any given day, and everything about the guys they served with. It’s weird.”

  “And hardly any of it’s probably true,” CJ said. “A good story is better with details.”

  “I don’t know,” Rick said. He took a break from pulling glasses out of the dishwasher, wiped his hands on his pants, and joined CJ and Dennis at the end of the bar. “You ask these old guys to tell a story, and they recount it the exact same way. Every time.”

  “Tell a story enough times and even the made-up stuff sticks.” CJ paused and watched the hockey game for a few seconds and then looked back at Rick. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these men have some great stories. I remember how Uncle Edward used to talk my ear off about Korea. So who’s going to quibble about a point or two?”

  Rick seemed to consider that, and it seemed to CJ that Dennis had checked out of the conversation, even though he knew his friend didn’t miss much.

  “So where does that leave us?” Rick asked. “Memories, I mean.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” CJ said.

  While it may have been an unfulfilling end to an interesting topic, Rick simply shrugged off the metaphysical ramifications and returned to the task of unloading the dishwasher.

  But CJ couldn’t dismiss the question so easily. Because the opposite side of the coin from those who could recall the past in exhaustive detail were those who lived in the moment, because the past is like a ghost, or a novel with missing chapters.

  Most commonly, though, memory found a comfortable middle ground, where the past was sufficiently muddled to make recalling details an inexact process, and the present was given context by past experience.

  Yet even here in Adelia, there were exceptions. Some events had a certain substance that fused them permanently into one’s consciousness, where every detail could be called forth and replayed with exacting clarity. Usually these were brief moments—singular instances in which the emotional energy of the event—either for good or bad—preserved the scene like a fossil in amber, like the war stories Rick had heard.