Homefront pb-6

by Chuck Logan

  Less distinct was Kit’s grumbling as she stirred in the warm covers. Nina pictured her rotating her hips, planting her feet on the floor, rubbing her eyes, and staring at her father as he left the room and went down the stairs.

  Kit dressed, made her bed, descended the stairs. Breakfast; a muted clatter, far away. Nina continued to lie on her back, arms across her chest, motionless as a medieval statue on top of a tomb.

  Then she moved her arms, stretched, and enjoyed the movement. The inertia trembled around her, crumbling. She dry-washed her arms, her chest, ran her fingers over her face, touched her hair. Pushed off the invisible detritus. In the faint light creeping at the edges of the drawn window shades, she saw the first glow of a Monarch dawn.

  Broker entered the room wearing his busted-out work clothes. He cocked his head, seeing her sitting up in bed. He’d always been a man who approached you slow and quiet, reserved. Today he was too upbeat. A little jagged.

  “Sun’s out. You got the house to yourself. I’m going to hang with Griffin today, do a little work,” he said.

  Then Kit vaulted up on the bed and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Bye, Mom.”

  She waved vaguely, thoroughly enjoying the tactile glide of her skin through the musty air. Then she flopped back in the covers as Broker and Kit left the room. Again she studied the ceiling stains and cracks. Now they hovered; Delphic, potent.

  What had changed?

  The answer came as she heard them leave the house. She remembered…all of yesterday. Normally, in real-time sequence; not sliced in random wedges. The ceiling had not changed. It was the way she looked at it.

  For the first time in months her first thoughts were not of herself, but of Broker. Depression seemed to turn on a simple inside/outside trick. The more you climbed out of your own head, the more you broke its hold. So Broker. After he dropped Kit off at school, he’d go help Griffin at Glacier Lodge. Which was good. He’d been cooped up in the house all winter, and now he was starting to screw up, like leaving the garage open. Losing the cat. His explosion of nerves yesterday morning-raging at the towels in the washer…Then Griffin dropping in after supper. What was that about? She heard the door shut. The truck start up. She was alone.

  As she swung her feet off the bed, she felt the sheets and covers; they were dry. Cool to the touch. No longer sweat-fouled. She pulled on her robe, put on her slippers, and walked down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  Coming into the room, she paused, eyes downcast out of habit, and braced for her first look at the sky out the windows at the far end of the kitchen.

  Fear of clouds that would steal the light.

  Nina Pryce-B.A. in liberal arts, master’s in business administration, University of Michigan; Phi Beta Kappa; eligible for Mensa, too cool to accept-had come to exist on the superstitious level of an Egyptian peasant from the Middle Kingdom; paying homage to the sun.

  This morning she felt a blush of warmth eke in from the east and caress her face. Galvanized by the sunrise, she continued into the room. Broker had cleared away the debris of the previous night, loaded the dishwasher, straightened up the clutter, and wiped all the surfaces clean. A fresh carafe of coffee sat on the counter. She poured a cup, sheltering it close to her chest, and stood huddled in her robe. She faced east, staring out through the patio door, over the deck, the shoreline, and the broad gray expanse of Glacier Lake.

  The platinum flare of late-winter sun burned through the mist, revealing a layered dawn of burnished seashell pink and purple. She smiled, sipped the coffee, and watched the eastern tree line ignite into a happy morning sunrise that hurled bright skipping stones across the lake. Then long shadows jumped out from the cluster of paper birches in the yard. There were mornings she’d recoiled from the birches, seeing skeletal fingers in the crooked white trunks with their black markings. The shadows reaching for the house…

  Today they were just trees, and she was able to remember an afternoon when Griffin had stopped over with Teedo, the Indian guy who worked with him. Teedo had explained to Kit how the birches got their markings. Nanboujou, the Ojibwa trickster, had angered the thunderbirds who were pursuing him through the forest. He’d ducked into a hollow birch trunk. The thunderbirds, unable to stop, had smacked into the trunk, leaving for all time their skid marks…

  A normal thought.

  Just trees. The shadows they cast stopped midway up the yard.

  Nina set down her coffee cup and walked through the entire first level of the house, opening the shades and drapes, drenching the rooms with light. Stronger now, she refilled her cup and threw open the patio door, stepped onto the deck, and felt the pale sunlight on her face. The nip of the cold air.

  She went back in hungry. A bowl of Total, a banana. Toast and peanut butter. Fuel. For the weights in the living room.

  After breakfast, a tremble of doubt as the force of habit set in. A lingering whisper of the Crazy. A time of pacing on the deck, opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, brewing a second pot of coffee, waiting for the sunlight to slowly exorcize the darkness from the house. As the sun arced overhead, the shadows fleeing to the west would stall, retract, and began to shrink down and finally disappear. When the house was cleansed of darkness, she could finally begin her day.

  Not today.

  She poured the coffee into the sink, extinquished the cigarette, and went into the living room to confront the second challenge of the day.

  The weights.

  The dumbbells lined up on the broad seat of the bay window in the living room; nine pairs of them-five pounds to fifty.

  The numbing two-pound repetitions of the physical therapy had been completed. She raised her right arm, no longer anticipating the tug as it approached shoulder level. Rotated her elbow left and right. No tug. No pain. Okay. The soft tissue had healed. To a point. She drew her shoulder blades together, aligning the bones in her shoulder and her back like the tumblers on a combination. Almost audible clicks as she slowly elevated the arm over her shoulder. She paused there, evaluating the slight hitch. Lowered her arm. Encouraged, she picked up the ten-pound weight. Lifted it smoothly.

  She put down the ten and grasped the fifteen. Brought it up in a biceps curl. Then she raised her elbow and lifted her whole arm and felt the warning catch in the complicated architecture of her right shoulder. Just like yesterday. The impinged shoulder accepted ten, but protested and quit at fifteen.

  She inhaled and started up again. Sweat popped on her forehead. A strand of hair fell across her eyes. She huffed a breath, blew the hair away, and lifted the weight, got to shoulder level, and hit the solid lock of the blown-out bursa.

  Trembling, she lowered the weight. For a month she’d been telling herself: tomorrow, just keep gobbling down the Tylenol. Placate the inflamed bursitis. It’ll start mending tomorrow. Knit back together, then the strength would come…

  She let the weights fall to the carpet, turned, walked into the kitchen, out the door, and sat on the deck.

  Stop kidding yourself. It was time to face the truth.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Harry Griffin woke up feeling the warm impression Susan had left in his bed. She’d left early, in a hurry, driving to Bemidji. But her words were fresh in his mind, how he should help his friend.

  He unsheathed the notion slowly over breakfast, as he filled his work thermos with coffee, made a sandwich. Sort of laid it out on the table, looked at it. There was another layer to this thing. The skiing part kept coming back, didn’t track. Not for Jimmy.

  Susan had invoked the subject of Gator Bodine. Another local mystery man, living alone in his spooky woods with his treasure trove of antique tractors. Only came into town to get his groceries, or dicker over machine parts at Shulty’s Implements.

  And to ski the trails around the big lake.

  He pictured Gator, hard packed with his grease-monkey muscles. Convict pensive. Spiky hair and perpetual two-day beard like a sweaty wire brush. Sporting his famous tattoo. They had never actu
ally spoken, only nodded from a distance at the Last Chance Amoco or Perry’s grocery. Like two big dogs, maybe. Knew of each other by reputation, respected each other’s territory.

  Bound to collide eventually.

  So instead of driving straight to the job site, he took a run through town, out to Jimmy’s garage. Coming up on Klumpe Sanitation, he saw Jimmy’s brown Ford parked in front. Saw Jimmy through the open garage door, washing down one of his trucks in a billow of steam.

  Okay, let’s do a little community outreach.

  He parked next to the Ford and walked in through the open door.

  Jimmy, hosing down his best Labrie garbage truck, wearing high rubber boots, watched the red Jeep wheel into the yard. Knew it was Griffin. Knew every car and truck in town. Now what’s he want? He turned off the hose and waited for Griffin to approach through the cloud of steam rising off the wet concrete.

  They didn’t particularly care for each other.

  Like Keith, Griffin was one of the men in town Jimmy couldn’t intimidate. In fact, Griffin could be downright scary. Jimmy’d been in Skeet’s couple years back; the November night a group of drunk hunters, up from the cities, jumped Keith’s deputy, Howie Anderson, brained him out with a cue ball. Keith showed up a few minutes later with Griffin in tow for backup. The drunks unloaded a volley of pool balls, and Jimmy recalled in pins-and-needles detail how Griffin had flashed fast-forward into the drunk-footed crowd. How he had snapped off a pool cue in a corner pocket, butt-stroked two guys to the floor in blinding succession, and then jammed the jagged end of the stick up against this big dude’s throat.

  Jimmy clearly remembered the little beads of blood on the guy’s neck, Griffin looking unhappy it was ending, taunting in a voice that had given Jimmy the shivers, “What’s the spirit of the bayonet, motherfucker.”

  Happened so fast.

  No way Jimmy wanted Harry Griffin speeding up into his life. Not now, especially with the dicey arrangement he and Cassie had going with Gator. Uh-uh.

  “Morning, Griffin,” he said in a neutral tone.

  “Let’s skip the chitchat. You don’t like me, I don’t like you. But me and Keith had a talk with Phil Broker last night…”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s been some petty shit going back and forth. Nothing that can be exactly pinned on anybody. Is that a fair assessment?”

  “Fucker dumped his garbage in front of my office. That’s what I know, ’cause Halley, my driver, saw him leaving. So I called Keith. And his sneaky kid sucker-punched Teddy,” Jimmy said slowly, belligerently. Adding a scowl.

  Oh-oh, the scowl was a mistake.

  Because Griffin stepped in close and stabbed his right hand, stiff fingers tight together, into Jimmy’s chest. Hard, so it hurt. Jimmy’s hands started to come up defensively but stopped when he saw the merry anticipation in Griffin’s eyes, like he’d enjoy seeing Jimmy bleed at eight in the morning. Jimmy backed up. Griffin grinned, a sort of wild, mindless face, like an animal who smells fear. Damn.

  “What about you?” Griffin said slowly. “You been doing a little cross-country on the trails back of my place where Broker’s staying, huh? Sneaking around puncturing his tires?” The hand hovered, ready to strike again.

  “Not me,” Jimmy said sincerely.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Jimmy-”

  “No bullshit. I ain’t been on skinny skis since high school,” Jimmy said.

  “I thought so,” Griffin said slowly, watching Jimmy’s eyes. When he moved his hand, Jimmy winced, but Griffin only softly rubbed the spot on Jimmy’s chest where he’d poked him.

  “I got no quarrel with you,” Jimmy said, indignant. “What do you want, coming in here like this?”

  “Keith wants to nip it. Make it stop between you and Broker. So what do you need?”

  “No kidding?”

  “Hey, Jimmy, I’m losing daylight here. What will get us over this hump?”

  Jimmy thought about it. “He’s gotta apologize to me and Teddy in front of people. At the school. How’s that?”

  “I’ll talk to him, see what I can do,” Griffin said. “If he meets you halfway, in front of people, you’ll shake on it, okay?”

  Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “And he buys Teddy a new shirt to replace the one that got blood on it.”

  Griffin held up his hands. “That’s fair. I’ll get back to you.” He turned and started walking back to his Jeep. Then he turned and said, “You ain’t been on skis since high school, is that a fact?”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes. It was getting complicated. He shook his head, like a man trying to comprehend an absurd question. As Griffin drove away, Jimmy went immediately to the phone on the wall and called Gator.

  “Griffin was just here throwing his weight around.”

  Huh? In five seconds flat. Throwing his weight around, how? “What do you mean?” Gator said, going from zero to max exasperation. Fucking dummy. He had his cell phone wedged awkwardly between his shoulder and his ear as he jockeyed the clutch plate on the Moline. Actually hoping it was Sheryl who was calling.

  “He was pushing at me. Accused me of messing with Broker’s truck, giving him a flat tire. I didn’t do that,” Jimmy huffed. He was careful to leave out the ski part. The obvious part, because everybody knew he didn’t cross-country. Whereas everybody knew Gator had a wall full of ribbons.

  “Anything else?” Gator said.

  “Ah, yeah,” Jimmy said, spanning the sins of omission with a hint of relief. “He says him and Keith will get Broker to apologize to me and Teddy. He caved.”

  Moron, Gator thought, as he watched the black kitten wolf down the Chef ’s Blend through the open office door. He said, “That’s great, Jimmy. So you got what you wanted.”

  “Ah, what about Griffin? Coming around. I don’t really want to mess with him, you know.”

  “Aw, he’s probably just sticking up for his buddy. Nothing to it. We’ll just let Keith do his thing, like I said.”

  “So everything’s all right?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy. Everything’s cool,” Gator said. When he hung up, he didn’t share his brother-in-law’s sense of relief. Griffin showing up as a wild card was far from cool. They’d never crossed paths, and Gator hoped to keep it that way.

  Distracted, staring at the clock on the wall, then at the phone on his desk; he didn’t think Griffin was anything to worry about. Yet. It’d blow over, the petty feud part. But the other thing…

  He wiped off his hands on a rag and walked into the office. Chided himself. Stop watching the phone. Too early for Sheryl to check in. And she didn’t deal in maybes. She’d wait until she had something definite.

  When he reached down to stroke the kitten, she darted away under the desk.

  “You’ll come around,” he said. “Because I feed you and give you shelter. You need me.” Just like Jimmy and Cassie came around. He turned back to the tractor in his bay. It took time. Like the Moline. Be months before he could make it whole.

  Gator held that the combustion engine resembled the human body; used fuel like food, used air just like lungs.

  Then he paused and considered the plan he’d set in motion against Phil Broker’s life. Well, there was one fundamental difference between people and machines: once they turned Broker off, no way he was going to start up again.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Broker dropped Kit off at school,drove back through town, and turned north on Lakeside Road, which served as the frontage road for the west side of the lake. After about a mile, he wheeled toward the lake at the Glacier Lodge sign. A thick stand of balsam and spruce masked the empty parking lot in front of the gabled lodgepole pine building set on a rocky point. Didn’t see Griffin’s Jeep, just Teedo’s black Ford.

  Broker parked and walked around to the lakeside, where the carpenters had put up a shelter, two-by-sixes and two-by-fours supporting a tent of black insulated tarps. Inside this tent, warmed by a propane heater, Griffin and Teedo had been laying a flagstone porch and patio-wi
nter work, the lodge owner’s late February inspiration. He wanted the patio ready for fishing opener in May. Pallets stacked with Montana flagstone and sacks of mortar surrounded the tent. A Bobcat. The locker where Griffin kept his tools.

  Teedo Dove, Griffin’s apprentice, was feeding pieces of familiar split oak into a fire he’d started in a length of steel culvert. That oak was Broker’s main contribution to the crew he was supposed to work on. Put all the days he’d actually handled the stone in a string, and it wouldn’t stretch two weeks for the whole winter. A mound of masonry sand heaped over the culvert with a half fifty-five-gallon drum of water heating on the top. A gasoline-powered cement mixer and wheelbarrow was positioned alongside. Teedo, at twenty-seven, stood six-two and went around 250. A Red Lake Ojibwa, he was soft-spoken, bearlike, light on his feet, and a quiet drinker. Hounded by Griffin, he sporadically attended the local AA meeting. He originally blamed his drinking on his decision nine years ago not to take the full-ride scholarship he’d been offered, playing right tackle at Bemidji State. Griffin’s simple advice on alcoholism was typically blunt: “Don’t put it in your mouth.”

  He’d taken Teedo on as a reclamation project. Griffin was big on stuff like that. Interventions. Rescues. He’d been resocialized by Alcoholics Anonymous. Up to a point. Sometimes Broker glimpsed edges of the old Griffin, the brilliant but erratic risk taker in Vietnam. Broker had looked on their war as a job with really shitty working conditions. Griffin was more the dark romantic, in Broker’s opinion; a man who had been more than a little in love with death.

  “Morning, Teedo,” he said. “Where’s the boss?”

  “Ain’t here,” Teedo said with blank Zen presence. “Feed the fire. I’ll set up some stone. Then we’ll mix some mud.” He disappeared into the tent to arrange the stone.