by Tower, Wells
The conversation left me irritable, and I walked back to my cabin in a low mood. But I bucked up right away when I found George Tabbard on my porch, half of which was still bare joists. He was standing on a ladder, nailing a new piece of trim across the front gable. “Evening, sweetheart,” he said. “Got bored and whipped up another objet for you here.”
Of course he wasn’t intruding. We worked together on my house nearly every day, and ate dinner together nearly every night. George was in his late sixties, but we were two peas in a pod. His family had been in the area since the 1850s, but he’d gone through some wives, scattered some kids, moved around a good deal, before coming home to roost, a decade or so ago. He’d pretty much built my cabin himself, and he didn’t seem to mind that I could pay him only about half what he’d have earned in town. But even more than his labor, I cherished his company, which was like a gentle narcotic. He could laugh and drink and murder whole evenings rambling about chain saws, women, and maintaining equipment, and do so in such a way that you never felt there was anything more in the world to think about than these things.
A couple of groans with his screw gun, and he’d secured the item, a four-foot battery of little wooden pom-poms, like something you’d see dangling from the ceiling of a Mexican drug dealer’s sedan. I’d praised the first one he’d made, but now George had tacked his lacework fancies to every eave and soffit in sight, so that the house pretty well foamed with them. He came by with a new piece of frippery about every third day. My house was starting to resemble something you’d buy your mistress to wear for a weekend in a cheap motel. But there was no one around for my cabin to appall, so I didn’t see the harm. Though it had occurred to me that I was probably stuck with this hell of curlicued whimsies until George moved or passed away.
“There we are,” he said, backing away to get the effect. “Pretty sharp little booger, don’t you think?”
“Knocks me out, George. Thanks.”
“Now how about some backgammon?”
“Fair enough.”
I went inside and fetched the set, the rum, and a quart of olives I’d bought that day. George was a brutal opponent, and the games were a pointless rout, yet we sat for many hours in the cool of the evening, drinking rum, moving the lacquered discs around the board, and spitting olive pits over the railing, where they landed quietly in the dark.
To my surprise, Stephen called me back. He said he’d like to come, so we fixed a date, two weeks later. It was an hour and twenty minutes to the village of Aiden, where the airfield was, but when George and I pulled up, Stephen’s plane hadn’t come in. I went into the Quonset hut they use for a terminal. A little woman with a brown bomber jacket and a bulb of gray hair sat by the radio, reading the local newspaper. I’d been in and out of this airport a dozen times, but she didn’t let on that she recognized me, which seemed to be a general practice among the locals. The discourtesy was probably deliberate and, in its way, practical. Shake too many hands, and before long you’d have so many friends you couldn’t pick your nose without the whole county hearing about it. Still, it depressed me to have settled in a place where the salt of the earth would have out-brusqued a Newark stevedore.
“My brother’s flight was due in from Bangor at eleven,” I told the woman.
“Plane’s not here,” she said.
“I see. Do you know where it is?”
“Bangor.”
“And when’s it going to arrive?”
“If I knew that, I’d be somewhere picking horses, wouldn’t I?”
Then she turned back to her newspaper and brought our chat to an end. The front-page story of the Aroostook Gazette showed a photograph of a dead chow dog, under the headline “Mystery Animal Found Dead in Pinemont.”
“Quite a mystery,” I said. “ ‘The Case of What Is Obviously a Dog.’ ”
“ ‘Undetermined origin,’ says here.”
“It’s a dog, a chow,” I said.
“Undetermined,” the woman said.
With time to kill, we went over to the lumberyard in Aiden, and I filled the bed of my truck with a load of decking to finish my porch. Then we went back to the airfield. Still no plane. George tried to hide his irritation, but I knew he wasn’t happy to be stuck on this errand with me. He’d wanted to go gunning for deer today. George was keen to get one before the weather made hunting a misery. Loading your freezer with meat slain by your hand was evidently an unshirkable autumn rite around here, and George and I had been going out twice a week since the season opened. I’d shot the head off a bony goose at point-blank range, but other than that, we hadn’t hit a thing. When I’d suggested that we go in on a side of beef or something from the butcher shop, George had acted as though I’d proposed a terrible breach of code. Fresh venison tasted better than store-bought beef, he argued. Also, you were not out big money in the common event that your freezer was sacked by the meat burglars who apparently worked the outer county.
To buck George up, I bought him lunch at a tavern in Aiden, where we ate hamburgers and drank three whiskey sours each. George didn’t complain outright, though he did keep lifting his eyebrows at his watch and giving a pained sigh. Already, I felt a coursing anger at Stephen for not calling to let me know that his plane was delayed. He was the kind of person who had no qualms scuttling your entire morning if it saved him the cost of a phone call. I was brooding heavily when the bartender asked if I wanted anything else. I told him, “Yeah, tequila and cream.”
“You mean a Kahlúa and cream,” he said, which is what I’d meant, but between Stephen and the airport woman, I felt I’d suffered enough slights for one day. “How about you bring what I ordered?” I told him, and he got to work.
While I forced the awful mixture down, the bartender told me, sneering, that I was welcome to another, on the house.
When we rolled back by the airport, the plane had come and gone. A light rain was sifting down. Stephen was out by the gate, on the lip of a ditch, perched atop his bag with his chin on his fist. He was thinner than when I’d last seen him, and he had violet half circles under his eyes. The rain had wet him through, and what was left of his hair lay sorrowfully against his skull. His wool coat and wide-wale corduroys were as old as they were ill fitting. The wind gusted, and Stephen billowed like a poorly tarped load.
“Hey, buddy,” I called out to him.
His eyes flashed at me. “What the shit, Matthew?” he said. “I just stayed up all night on a plane to spend two hours sitting in a ditch? That really happened?”
“I was here three hours ago,” I said. “I had things on my plate today, Stephen. But now George is drunk and I’m half in the bag and the whole day’s shot.”
“Oh, good,” said Stephen. “Because that’s why I had them hold the plane. To inconvenience you.”
“What I’m saying, asshole, is that a phone call would have been considerate.”
“Call you how, shitball,” Stephen spat. “You know I don’t do cell phones. This is your fucking . . . region, Matthew. It didn’t occur to me that you’d need special instructions on how not to leave somebody in the rain.”
I wanted to point out Stephen could just as easily have waited with the radio woman in the Quonset hut, but I suspected he’d arranged himself in the ditch to present me with a picture of the utmost misery when I pulled up. He was a sad portrait. He was shivering, and his cheeks and forehead were welted over from repeated gorings by the terrible cold-weather mosquitoes they had up here. Right now, one was gorging itself on the rim of his ear, its belly glowing like a pomegranate seed in the cool white sun. I didn’t swat it away for him.
“Maybe you should cry about it, Stephen,” I said. “Maybe a good shit fit would make you feel better.” I did some theatrical sniveling, and he went livid.
“All right, motherfucker, I’m out of here.” His voice was hoarse with fury. “Been a great trip. Good to know you’re still a fucking asshole, Matty. Let’s do this again sometime, you prick.”
He shouldered
his bag and stormed off for the airfield. His tiny head and squelching shoes—it was like watching a stray duckling throw a tantrum.
The old satisfaction hit me in a wave. I jogged up behind Stephen and stripped the duffel bag from his shoulder. When he turned, I put him in a bear hug and kissed his brow.
“Get the hell off of me,” he said.
“Who’s an angry fellow?” I said. “Who’s an angry little man?”
“I am, and you’re a complete fucking bastard,” he said.
“Yeah. Sucks, doesn’t it? Come on. Get in the truck.”
“Give me back my bag,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
“Ridiculous,” I said, chuckling. I walked to the truck and levered the seat forward to usher Stephen into the club cab’s rear compartment. When Stephen saw that we weren’t alone, he stopped grasping for his bag and making departure threats. I introduced Stephen to George. Then my brother climbed in and we pulled onto the road.
“This is Granddad’s gun, isn’t it?” said Stephen. Hanging in my gun rack was the .300 Weatherby Magnum I’d collected from my grandfather’s house years ago. It was a beautiful instrument, with a blued barrel and a tiger maple stock.
“Yep,” I said, marshaling a defense for why I hadn’t offered the gun to Stephen, who probably hadn’t fired a rifle in fifteen years. To tell the truth, Stephen probably had a stronger claim to it than I did. As kids, we’d hunted often with our grandfather, and Stephen, without making much of it, had always been the more patient stalker and a better shot. Yet Stephen didn’t make a fuss about the gun.
“Hey, by the way,” he said presently. “The tab comes to eight-eighty.”
“What tab?” I said.
“Eight hundred and eighty dollars,” Stephen said. “That’s what the flight came to, plus a sitter for Beatrice.”
“Your daughter?” George asked.
“My dog,” said Stephen.
“George,” I said, “this is a dog that remembers where it was when JFK was shot. Stephen, are you still doing those bowel lavages on her? Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t need the picture in my head.”
“I’d like my money,” Stephen said.
“Don’t get a rod-on about it, Steve. You’ll get paid.”
“Lovely. When?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m going to pay you, Stephen,” I said. “It’s just I happen to be operating a fucking motor vehicle at this particular point in time.”
“Sure,” said Stephen. “All I’m saying is that it won’t blow my mind if I go home empty-handed here.”
“Oh, my God!” I roared. “Would you shut up, please? What do you want, collateral? Want to hold my watch?” I joggled the wheel a little. “Or maybe I just drive us into a fucking tree. Maybe you’d like that.”
George began to laugh in a musical wheeze. “How about you two stop the car and have yourselves an old-fashioned rock fight.”
I flushed. To be maneuvered into revealing this idiotic side of myself in front of George . . . My loathing for Stephen caught a fresh charge. “I’m sorry, George,” I said.
“Forget it,” Stephen said.
“Oh, no, Steve, let’s get you squared away,” I said. “George, my checkbook’s in the glove box.”
George made out the check, and I signed it on the steering wheel and passed it to my brother, who folded it into his pocket. “Voilà,” George said. “Peace in our time.”
Having been outplayed over the matter of the check, Stephen began plying George with a barrage of light and pleasant chatter. Had he lived here long? Ten years? Oh, fantastic, what a wonderful part of the country to retire to! He’d grown up here, too? How wonderful to have escaped a childhood in the exurban soul vacuum we’d been reared in. And George had gone to Syracuse? Had he heard of Nils Aughterard, the music biographer on the faculty there? Well, his book on Gershwin—
“Hey, Stephen,” I broke in. “You haven’t said anything about my new truck.”
“What’d it cost you?”
“Best vehicle I’ve ever owned,” I said. “V-8, five-liter. Three-and-a-half-ton towing capacity, with a carriage-welded class-four trailer hitch. Four-wheel drive, max payload package. It’ll pay for itself when the snow hits.”
“You’re really not going back to Charleston?” he asked.
“Probably not,” I said. From the back, I heard Stephen lift the lid of my cooler, and then the sharp lisp of a beer being opened.
“Pass me one of those?” I said.
“Roger that,” said George.
“While you’re driving?” Stephen asked.
“Yeah, while I’m fucking driving,” I said.
“Don’t yell at me,” Stephen said.
“I’m not yelling,” I said. “I’d just like one of my beers.”
“Holy Christ,” said George. He turned and reached into the cooler, grabbed two cans, and tossed one into my lap. “We happy now?”
“Yeah,” I said.
A minute passed and Stephen spoke. “So you and Amanda, that’s really off?”
“Yeah.”
“Ah, well,” Stephen said. “And I’d thought you were so hot on her.”
Stephen had made no secret of how much he’d disliked my fiancée. She was a churchgoer, raised in a conservative household, and the last time they’d met, they’d argued over the war in Iraq. Over dinner, Stephen had baited her into declaring that she’d like to see the Middle East bombed to a parking lot. He’d asked her how this tactic would square with “Thou shalt not kill.” Amanda told him “Thou shalt not kill” was from the Old Testament, so it didn’t really count.
In the rearview, I caught Stephen looking at me with pity and expectation, slavering for a few morsels about our split.
I took a tube of sunflower seeds from the dashboard and shook a long gray dose into my mouth. I cracked them with my teeth and spat the chewed hulls out the window.
“To be honest with you,” I said, “I just don’t see the rationale for anyone owning a vehicle that doesn’t come with a carriage-welded class-four trailer hitch.”
In silence, we rode through bleary rural abridgments of towns, down a narrowing vasculature of country roads, to the rilled and cratered fire trail that served as a driveway to my and George’s land. High weeds stood in the earthen spine between the tire grooves, brushing the truck’s undercarriage with a sound of light sleet. We passed George’s handsome cedar shake cottage, I dropped the truck into four-wheel drive, and the Dodge leapt, growling, up the hill.
My home hove into view. I was ready for Stephen to bust my balls a little over George’s fancy trim, but he took in the place without a word.
George ambled off to have a leak in the trees. I grabbed Stephen’s duffel and led him indoors. Though my cabin’s exterior was well into its late rococo phase, the interior was still close to raw. Stephen gazed around the cabin, and the squalor of the place impressed itself on me with my brother standing there. The floors were still dusty plywood. I hadn’t tacked the wainscoting up yet. The drywall stopped four feet from the floor, and pink insulation lay like an autopsy patient behind the cloudy plastic sheeting. The mattress I’d been sleeping on lay askew in the center of the room.
“Feel free to do a little embellishing when you write the Christmas letter this year,” I told him.
He went to the window and gazed out at the wiry expanse of leafless trees sloping down the basin of the valley. Then he turned and looked at the mattress. “Where do I sleep?” he said.
I nodded at a sleeping pad rolled up in the corner.
“You didn’t tell me we’d be camping.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s too much of a shithole for you, I can run you back to the motor lodge.”
“Of course not. It’s a great place. Honestly. I was expecting a modular chalet with tiered Jacuzzis and a four-car garage. This is nice. Simple.”
With the instep of my boot, I herded a pile of sawdust toward the wall, and a piece of silver solder winked from the heap. The stuff was
costly. I plucked it out and put it in my pocket.
“Next time you come back, I’ll strip nude and wear a barrel,” I said. “You’ll really be proud of me then.”
“No, I’m serious. I’d kill for something like this,” he said, reaching up to rub his hand along a smooth log rafter. “I mean, fuck, I’ll be forty next month. I rent a two-room apartment with no bathroom sink.”
“That same place?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “What about that condo you were looking at?”
“Well, yeah, but then all this stuff with the mortgage crisis,” Stephen said. “Just . . . I don’t know, I didn’t want to get rooked.”
“Fuck, man, you should have called me. The place still on the market?”
“No.”
“But that money, your Gram-Gram money? You still got it for a down payment?”
He nodded.
“Listen, you get back to Oregon, we’ll find you something. Look around, send me some comps, I’ll help you through it. We’ll get you into a place.”
Stephen gave me a guarded look, as though I’d offered him a soda and he wasn’t sure I hadn’t pissed in it first.
I wanted to get the porch wrapped up before dark, and I suggested that Stephen take a drink up to the summit, where I’d hung a hammock, while George and I nailed the decking down. Stephen said, actually, it might be fun to swing a hammer for an hour or two. So we unloaded the wood, and he and George got to work, while I stayed inside, slathering auburn Minwax on sheets of bead-board wainscot. Whenever I poked my head out the front door, I saw Stephen in an act of vandalism against my lumber. He’d bend every third nail and then gouge the wood with the hammer’s claw trying to correct his mistake. Water would pool in those gouges and rot the boards, but he seemed to be enjoying himself, so I didn’t ride him about it. Through the closed windows, I could hear George and Stephen chatting and laughing as they worked. I’d learned to tolerate long hours of silence in the months I’d been up here, to appreciate it, even. Yet it warmed me to hear voices coming from my porch, though in the back of my mind, I suspected they were laughing about me.