Читать книгу Inhabited - Charlie Quimby - Страница 14

Despite so many homes on the market, buyers can’t find what they want.

—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style

A text buzzed in from Eve Winslow:

So sorry to stand you up. Coffee? Stop by shop at 10AM.

Meg arrived at ten knowing the shop might not yet be open. Mariposa, like everything in Eve’s life except the start of City Council meetings, operated on Winslow Standard Time. She would say, I’m a bird not a plane. In other words, clock time was an imposition upon natural forces like Eve Winslow.

Meg waited on an outdoor bench for the bird to land. The morning was pleasant, the street too quiet for shopkeeper comfort. A fountain splashed on the corner, and the trees along the promenade rippled with a promising breeze. A man with a covered cup of coffee came out of the bagel shop across Main and circled the patio, testing the metal chairs for stability, adjusting the umbrellas, sitting, rising, moving from table to table, finally selecting a seat. Slim and tan, with slicked-back hair tucked behind his ears, he might have passed as a beach bum if he were not so overdressed in a wool shirt, lined windbreaker and topcoat. He extracted a book from his daypack and dropped a fistful of sugar packets on the table.

Eve burst out with a bright blue Mariposa shopping bag in hand. Pressing fifty, Eve shared the high end of a decade with Meg but passed for a woman of the next generation. Too plump to dress from her own shop, she wore its finer accessories. Her short feathered and frosted hair made grey seem her lifelong color.

“God, I heard you were down there. You must be out of your mind! Amy Hostetter’s in a coma. The best I can say is, the police have two suspects. It doesn’t matter who they are. The headline’s Woman cop assaulted by bums in city park. My voicemail is already full of calls screaming bloody murder, demanding we drag every vagrant out of town or shoot them on the spot. How’s the house tour coming?”

They crossed the street to the bagel shop and passed the beachcomber, who was marking pages in a thick red notebook with empty sugar packets. A blue yoga mat jutted from the pack between his feet, which were clad in immaculate white leather sneakers that seemed sizes too large for his thin frame. His eyes, striking against his mahogany skin, were nearly the same Caribbean color as the mat. Catching Meg looking, Eve rolled her eyes.

“What have you got against Yoga Man?” Meg asked when they were inside.

“Yoga? Honey, please tell me you’re kidding. You’ve been on the Homeless Coalition for months.”

Yes, and she was in sales, after all, supposed to be able to read people, but she had been practicing trying not to judge.

The bagel shop had absorbed adjoining buildings as its success grew, while it retained features from previous incarnations. Furniture was mismatched, the walls decorated with a combination of local art, antique kitchen utensils and unplayable stringed instruments. It felt like a place where patrons could donate a beloved but runaway houseplant, and it hummed with the prospect of running into someone you knew.

Eve chose a table in the corner with a clear view of the entry. “Where do I even start? This attack came at a very bad time. The town is already up in arms about the parks being taken over. I’ve got council members who believe parks themselves are a drain on the city—property permanently off the tax rolls, ongoing maintenance costs, serving only a handful of citizens, most of them hippies and derelicts.”

“Hippies?”

“Not my word. Anyone who hangs out, throws a Frisbee. You know, people who like to walk. Anyway, it’s not as if our long-range plan for Las Colonias has gone anywhere. The city’ll spend dribs and drabs, but not enough. Funding to make it a true community asset has to come from outside—state gaming funds, tourism grants, environmental dollars—none of which goes to projects people are fighting over.”

Eve snapped a biscotti and dunked a half in her Americano. “Zack Nicolai was with you yesterday, wasn’t he?”

“Zack was fine. A big help, actually.”

“All he cares about is attention. The very last thing we need right now is to become mired in poverty politics with protests and lawsuits over squatters’ rights. The Betterment project is not going to look favorably at a city with an intractable vagrancy problem.”

“Betterment?” It sounded like a company run by the Quakers.

Eve lowered her voice. “You know we have interest from a company about relocating here, yes? It’s time you knew the rest. A Michigan company called Betterment Health is looking for a new headquarters site, but they have even bigger plans. I’m not going into it all here, and you should keep this to yourself until we announce. This is for you.” She took the Mariposa bag from the chair next to her and set it on the table.

“This town is stuck between the people who think economic development is putting out milk and cookies for Santa and the ones with long memories. Some never learn and others never forget. Remember how Sundstrand was going to revitalize the economy with its aerospace manufacturing? We’ve still got a damn street at the airport with their name on it ten years after they pulled out! But we can’t let naysayers stop us. Betterment’s project will be the biggest chance in our lifetimes to make a difference. I’m talking about you and me, homegirl, people with some vision. I’ve got enough trouble with the Tea Partiers. I don’t want to have to fight through commie piss ants like Zack Nicolai, too.”

Meg’s coffee tasted scorched. Had they given her the dark roast by mistake? “I can’t be your spy on Zack.”

“Who said anything about that? I just want to make sure he appreciates the importance of business and economic growth. How the hell does he think we pay for affordable housing? We have enough people working on behalf of the poor in this town. Now we need some momentum behind job creation, building the tax base, increasing prosperity for everybody. You can talk about this stuff from a business perspective without all of that Chamber of Commerce chest-beating that turns off the liberals. Plus, you stand for home. I need the coalition’s support. Tell them they don’t have ten years to end homelessness. Our future is now.”

Eve replaced the lid on her cup, noted the berry-red print and applied a fresh gloss for the trip back to the shop. “Oh, and the tour. Lew’s from Michigan so nothing too deserty. You know how our summer can be a shock to those lake people. Sorry for all the paper but I don’t want emails in the system. We land Betterment and school children will sing our names after we’re gone.”

The mayor swept out, misting the cafe with waves of regret that she had no time to chat. Eve wasn’t heartless. She played a toughie because the good old boys always tried to discount her as a matron who ran a bead shop. Eve tended to spew emotive bullet points but Meg had never seen her this hyper. She peeped inside the Mariposa bag and riffled through the top layer of paper. An analyst report on healthcare IT services; business stories about Rochester, Minnesota’s plans to raise its profile as a destination medical city; a plastic-bound presentation from the local economic development board; and printouts from Betterment Health’s website. She looked for something about the exec who was coming out for the home tour. The corporate leadership page offered only short bios and no photos.

Chairman and CEO: Lew Hungerman? Meg pictured a dwarfish Edward Gorey character in an ankle-length fur coat, clutching a mutton leg—the sort of man who existed only in black and white. Of course he was single. What a fun day that was going to be.

She stepped onto the sidewalk with her homework in hand. A miniature forest of folded sugar packets sprouted from the grate of Yoga Man’s vacant table.

On the other side of the iron gate, a million-plus foreclosure loomed like a cruise ship run aground on a sandbar. Former owner Kip Reiner had also lost his car dealership, a coke dealership and his passport. Now he was in home detention in his girlfriend’s house, with the feds, the builder, two banks, the automakers and possibly a Colombian cartel after his hide. Everything about this place was off-kilter. Tuscan towers with red tile roofs flanked a Versailles staircase leading to a second-floor entry framed by a Corinthian-columned portico. A luxury builder’s greatest hits on steroids, not remotely marketable in this state. Trailered boats, storage containers and construction dumpsters accentuated its state of abandonment.

The remote wasn’t working. Meg pressed the button, waited, pressed again, waited, hoping the electronics were only slumbering and would eventually come back to life. Somewhere a software developer had surely targeted the real estate industry with a mobile app that would automate market studies, deliver virtual home showings and handle the ponderous paperwork. Managing repetition was easy. That’s why real estate was such a popular second career. But selling houses was still about appealing to emotions and irrational judgments and dealing with unpredictable little failures like this one before they sent the entire deal off the rails.

She located the security code.

“Let’s try the touch pad,” Meg said to Vaughn Hobart. She’d brought him along to help her spot any issues with the construction. Vaughn had worked with her enough to know let’s meant him. He unscrewed himself from the passenger seat, a move that required an extra rotation due to the long-ago collision that had fused his spine a quarter turn to the left.

The gate slid open. They entered through the triple garage in back. The rest of the windowless ground level consisted of concrete compartments intended as a home theater and a wine cellar with a walk-in humidor. Upstairs, custom kitchen cabinets awaited exotic wood doors that would never come. Fixtures had not been installed in the exposed electrical boxes. Blobs of plaster, nails and wire clippings littered the subflooring. The imprint of a table saw could still be seen in the sawdust where it had trimmed a stack of finish boards. Color samples had been dabbed on walls. None had been painted.

Meg snapped photos and jotted notes as Vaughn pointed out problems she didn’t see. They made an odd team, smooth and rough, detailed and sketchy, long view and one day at a time. She’d found him when she needed a property man to mow lawns, clean pools and spruce up dinged corners and peeling paint. At the interview, he shuffled like a man on a ledge afraid to take his eyes off his feet. A jackass of all trades, he called himself, a self-deprecating joke wrung of its originality in too many AA meetings. She was looking for someone younger, but Vaughn had a new-found and palpable thirst to make more of himself and she took the chance. His indifference to fine details sometimes collided with her insistence on perfection, but he showed up, did what she asked and made steady progress. As he rose closer to her expectations, she doled out symbols of her growing trust: a company cellphone, the keys to the pickup, the code to her lockboxes.

The housing market turned suddenly. Meg asked Vaughn to wait for his final paycheck. He not only waited, he came by to wash her truck and noticed things about her house she’d been meaning to repair. He penciled out a punch list in his grade school hand and insisted on working it down. I want to keep busy, he said, now that I know how good busy can feel. With her encouragement, he studied his way through guidebooks on home inspection. She helped him compose a company sell sheet, the bulletpoints summarizing his qualities punctuated with tears.

The bank would not like her report. Reiner’s property was too far along to knock down and would not sell as-is. People with manor-house money wanted to put their own imprint on a home, even if their taste was worse than a cokehead car dealer’s.

After completing a circuit outside, Vaughn came hitching over, his expression grave. She considered the owner’s ruined reputation. Surely Reiner wouldn’t have buried bodies here.

“Looks like scroungers,” Vaughn said.

He led her to two boat trailers parked at the back of the lot. One was empty and the other held a Lake Powell-sized power cruiser. On the ground between them a rumpled blue tarp appeared to have blown off the boat. Vaughn tugged on a rope threaded through one trailer’s side guard. The tarp drew up and formed a tent-like peak, its edges weighed and staked at the corners. He threw a knot to secure the rope. She leaned in. Light leaked through worn patches in the sun-struck fabric onto a brown and orange sleeping bag. She reeled from the musk of foot, rotted vegetation and overheated air.

“What’s this doing here?” she said.

Vaughn let the tarp drop. “Probably lookin’ for copper and such on the scrap pile. It’s been picked through. I expect they read the paper about Reiner, came by and saw the work stopped, decided to squat while they shopped.”

“They’re trespassing,” she said. “The bank doesn’t want any more trouble over this house.”

Vaughn studied the western sky as if it held vital information. He rolled his head from one shoulder to the other. She heard his neck bones grind. “Look at them starlings up there.”

The flock swirled and folded upon itself, transmuting from granular to solid and back again. A hillside of fluttering aspen leaves became a ribbon tying itself in a slipknot.

“It’s called a murmuration.” The beautiful word felt strange on her lips. Starlings were aliens here, like the tamarisk, like the white man.

Vaughn grunted, as if she’d offered him a tea cake. “There’s a big raven in the cloud. You can see it when they divide.”

The larger bird beat a slow circle through the maelstrom, disappearing and emerging, neither on the attack nor very intent on escape. The starlings at times seemed to tease it, ignore it and swallow it. Finally, the raven broke from the veil and as it lazed away, a small escort took turns dive bombing it from above.

“He’s pissed but he’s leaving,” Vaughn said. “Squatters don’t want trouble either. I’ll take care of this here.”

Meg killed a thousand screensaver starlings with a keystroke and called up a browser to fly her southwest. She found the highway that ran through the Hopi reservation and tracked it to the town where Brian’s school was one of the main industries. No sign of pueblos or ancient plazas, but newer compounds stood in bright geometric clusters that might have passed for a lunar space station: a sewage treatment plant, tribal police and business offices, government housing inside a security fence. On the school grounds, the empty parking lot was crisply lined like a circuit board awaiting components. Netless red and green tennis courts languished under whorls of dust that had also airbrushed one curve of the running track. It circled an artificial-turf football field with end zone markings and yard lines legible from space. She wondered if Brian still ran, and whether he circled this field or struck out across the desert. Around and around or point-to-point, he’d be pushing against that unbroken wind. She clicked back the zoom and watched the BIA roads disappear, then the specks of green, the names of the villages, the line marking the state highway and finally, the sacred mesas, reduced to sand-colored smudges on a green planet.