Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 10

FOUR DAYS LATER Lafleur stood knocking at the door of the pink-and-gray house. The door swung open and Ned Blaylock appeared. He had the greasy welder's skullcap on his head and a cigar in his mouth just as in the old days, but his skin was pallid and he'd put on weight. He leaned forward, making Lafleur lean back, and he peered out toward the drive and past the machinery stockpile toward the road as if checking to be sure nobody else was out there, then he held the door open and told Lafleur to come in. Lafleur stepped inside. The door sucked shut behind him. He followed Blaylock gingerly, unsure of his footing. The living room was in near darkness. No lamps were on and the drapes were drawn. What light there was seeped in around the drapes from the overcast sky outside. The chairs and couch, he made out, were covered with sheets, and the air of the place had the brackish reek of cats.

They moved down a hall and past the kitchen. Lafleur saw a bent figure flit by the stove and vanish through a doorway like the tentacle of something withdrawn. He remembered that. Blaylock's wife was never glimpsed except in retreat. On the stove a pot of liquid was boiling. Blaylock opened a door at the end of the hall and went into a room. Lafleur followed. In the center of the room stood a desk, and on the desk a lit gooseneck lamp, a pile of papers, an old-fashioned adding machine, a half-full bottle of Scotch. The window blinds were pulled. There was a single bed at one wall, the blankets on it in a heap, and along the edges of the room were shadow and chaos, piles of papers and manuals, clothing and cartons in the murky darkness. Blaylock apparently lived in here. A scampering thing caught Lafleur's eye, a cat-sized creature that flitted into sight, then dissolved back into the darkness. Blaylock moaned as he eased into a chair behind the desk, then motioned at another chair. Lafleur picked up a shirt from the chair and held it uncertainly. Blaylock lit his cigar. Lafleur dropped the shirt on a carton and sat, stretching out his legs.

Blaylock slouched down in his chair and stared into the smoke that flattened against his desk. His voice rumbled. “Brenneman called me.”

Lafleur had talked to the lawyer Louis Brenneman, too, once on Monday, then again after Louis had contacted Blaylock. Louis had told Lafleur that he thought the excavation company was treading water, leasing out just enough equipment and doing enough work to stay afloat, that Blaylock was starving the company while he fooled with the books and waited for the government bid to clear. He had said that he thought Blaylock had something else running on the side, another interest, maybe another company. Louis was checking into it. Lafleur went right to the point. “We have to be straight with each other. Otherwise it won't work, me taking up Dad's part.”

Without moving his body, Blaylock rolled his eyes to look at him. Lafleur felt the eyes holding him, but there was no sharpness in them, no edge. There was just gloom in the eyes. “You're not him,” Blaylock said.

Lafleur said, “That's true enough.”

“I don't need the money,” Blaylock said. “Let's get that straight. It's as a kindness that I agree to anything.”

Lafleur saw how things would be—confrontational and deceptive. “But I'm not going to work for your kindness,” he said. “That way's too loose for me.

“Fine.” The word sounded like a threat. Blaylock had not moved, not anything, body nor eyes. He held the cigar poised in front of his lips.

“I'll need an inventory of equipment and help, so I know what we're doing,” Lafleur said.

“You,” Blaylock said. “You need to know what the hell you're doing. I know what I'm doing.”

“Which is?”

Something in Blaylock's dark, bumpy face almost moved. It looked like a toad's body. “Sitting pretty,” he said.

Lafleur set his hands lightly on his knees. “Uh huh.”

“You can do the hiring,” Blaylock said.

“And the equipment?”

“It's there.”

Lafleur looked away to the one window in the room, or at the blind that covered it, pale with the light that came silver through the clouds. It might be drizzling out there by now. It had been threatening to start all day, and once it began, he knew it could sock them in for a week or more. He thought of the machine parked just outside the window, the LeTourneau. He thought about how much his father would have liked to drive it. He visualized the machine standing almost as high as the house, its eight-foot wheels, its cargo bed stretching the length of the house and protruding into the trees, the high, armored, insectlike snout of the engine compartment. He turned back to Blaylock. “I'll hire the help. That's fine. But I have to get a complete equipment inventory. Otherwise, it's no good.”

Blaylock lowered his eyes and gazed in the vicinity of Lafleur's knees. “I don't need the money,” he said.

Lafleur went on. “And I'll be on the payroll as field supervisor, and the rest of it, salaries and the division of interest into shares just the way Louis has discussed with you.” He stopped for a moment and studied Blaylock, who had not moved. “And I want the buy-back clause.”

The toad in Blaylock's face expanded, then ebbed. “What's that? Brenneman didn't say anything about that.”

“Bullshit,” Lafleur said.

Blaylock did not move.

“You have to let him go through the books, too, and see this bid you've floated,” Lafleur said.

“Brenneman?”

“That's right.”

“Buy back what?”

Lafleur knew that Louis had spelled it out to Blaylock, that Blaylock was toying with him, but he told him again: “My father's interest until it's back up to where it was. In his name and at value, what it's worth now, not what it was worth before you started starving the company.”

“If I wanted money, son, I could sell the goddamned company.”

Lafleur marked that—the third time Blaylock had said he didn't need money. He said, “Then you'd have it locked up in escrow by a court order.”

To Lafleur's surprise, Blaylock smiled, then laughed. The laugh emerged from his chest, dark and velvety, and when it came out it seemed disconnected. The eyes were dead. Suddenly Blaylock jerked open a desk drawer. Things rattled. “Like a drink?”

Lafleur eased back a little in his chair and took a breath. “Why not?” Blaylock removed two glasses from the drawer, then a rag with which he dug at the insides of the glasses. Lafleur was glad that the room was too obscure for him to get a good look at the rag, or at the glasses, for that matter, which probably had the grime of the house in them, the dust adhering to liver-colored whiskey stains in the bottoms. Blaylock poured the whiskey. A large gray cat leaped out of the darkness and landed noiselessly on the desk, startling Lafleur. The cat walked sinuously, rubbing up against Blaylock's elbow. Blaylock guided one glass across the desk. Lafleur leaned over and took it.

Blaylock sipped at his whiskey and stroked the cat's neck with two fingers. “Who fixes the price of the interest?” he said.

“We need an accountant. Louis and an accountant would do that.”

“I've got an accountant.”

Lafleur took a sip. The cat rolled onto its back, extended its legs, and gazed upside down at Lafleur with its yellow eyes. Slowly, Blaylock stroked the cat's belly. The warmth of the whiskey suffused Lafleur's throat. Tasting its sharpness on his tongue, and feeling it quickly in his blood, he found himself wanting to go deeply into the conflict. Carefully he positioned the glass on his knee. “But I don't trust your accountant, Ned,” he said.

Blaylock took his cigar out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray that was made out of a cut-off piston. He drank half his whiskey, set the glass down gently, and stared at Lafleur. He kept stroking the cat's belly, his thick fingers moving to and fro in the silvery fur. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Sorry as I am about Gus's condition, I'm not doing this for him, the jackass. It's survival of the fittest out here and he didn't make it.”

Lafleur looked away quickly, feeling heat in his eyes and acid in his throat. He remembered the monkey wrench poised in the air, and how Blaylock had looked at it as if startled by the wayward powers of his own hand. Lafleur thought about the utter chaos that would have engulfed Blaylock if he had actually struck his partner's son, about how there must have been a margin within Blaylock finally not crossed. Lafleur had never told his parents about the incident, out of the fear, perhaps—not understood, but felt—of provoking his parents' rage. Old enough then to have felt his capacity to trigger that rage, yet not old enough to comprehend it, he'd kept it secret in his weird, barren, mathematical nightmare.

He thought of the powers of children, not just of his powers when he was a boy, but of his children's powers, too, for absorbing shock, and of the resilient powers of children in general. He thought of the intractability of adults, especially of those locked into obsessive pacts with themselves, of the force of adult rage. He thought of his own present brittleness. He counseled himself to be patient. He told himself that Blaylock was an old bear, cranky, clumsy, omnivorous. Thinking this way, Lafleur came out on the other side of his anger, and he felt a curious, almost inquisitorial attraction to Blaylock again, this junk hoarder, this loathsome man to whose foulness he would probably end up coming as near as to that of a bed partner.

He was staring at the window blind. It had begun to rain. He could hear it whispering against the eaves. When he turned back to the desk, Blaylock was tickling the cat's abdomen, making the cat kick at his wrist with its hind legs. Blaylock looked up and laughed again. It was the same laugh, a dark, elongated chuckle. “You've got your lawyer and I've got my accountant,” he said. “That makes us even.”

“We've made our compromises with you,” Lafleur said. “No more.”

That seemed to stop Blaylock for a moment. He picked up his glass and finished off his whiskey, then his face jerked and he looked at Lafleur with his dead eyes. “We've got a bid out,” he said.

“I heard.”

“If we get it you'll have to supervise. But it's on my say-so.” Blaylock reached back, grunting heavily as his thick body twisted. He pulled out a three-foot cardboard tube, then stopped, holding the tube up in the air. “Do you understand? It's my say-so. Nobody else's. Not yours, not yet, no matter how free a hand you think you want. And not Clinton U's say-so, neither.”

“U?” Lafleur said.

Blaylock gazed at him and in the gaze—in the lifeless eyes and heavily folded flaps of skin below the chin, the jaw that despite the flab of flesh looked powerful enough to shake something to death, and the bony, darkened nose and broad face formed by trouble, work, predation, and whiskey—was a steadiness, perhaps the only steadiness Blaylock knew, that of distrust. Lafleur understood. “You can call him off,” Blaylock said.

Something kept Lafleur from saying that U had tried to contact him. Instead, he said, “I don't know Clinton U.”

Blaylock kept looking, distrusting and measuring. “Maybe not,” he said. He extended the end of the tube toward Lafleur.

Lafleur took it. “Blueprints?”

“Preliminaries. Keep them.” Blaylock picked up his cigar and relit it. “We should be moving on it in a week, so get ready.”

Lafleur placed his half-empty glass on the edge of the desk and caught Blaylock eying it. He thought Blaylock was going to pick it up and finish off the whiskey, but instead he slopped a little more into his own glass from the bottle. Lafleur set the end of the tube on the floor and balanced it with his fingertips. There was a muffled thumping sound from the direction of the hallway at Lafleur's back. It was Blaylock's wife, he guessed, chopping at something on a block in the kitchen. Lafleur asked, “Who is Clinton U?”

“Another fucking lawyer.”

“Why should I know him?”

“Maybe they want you on this project.”

“Me?” Lafleur said. “Who?”

“The owners,” Blaylock said, barely moving his lips. “U represents them.”

“Why?” Lafleur said. Blaylock stared at him. Outside, the rain hissed. “Why me?” Lafleur said.

Blaylock held his blank, brute gaze. “Fuck, I don't know,” he said.

Lafleur gazed back, measuring Blaylock.

“But you can't get the whole picture, especially of what you don't know, of what's not coming into the picture, or of how much there is of what you'll never know in a damn afternoon, or in a week, or in a year. You got to break in.”

That was true enough, Lafleur thought, but it was also an evasion. “You mean you told them I might be coming on the project.”

Blaylock blinked slowly. “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe you would.”

“Okay,” Lafleur said. “Okay,” he repeated, still not understanding. He let it lie. He turned the tube up to the light and looked at the label. It had one word printed on it—ROME. He had an absurd image of ground littered with shattered wine bottles, and hordes of cats in the shadows, torn parasols, monkeys climbing through thick vines that draped the crumbling walls of a ruin, and a blue, exotic Mediterranean sky. “A little out of the way, isn't it?”

“Oregon. Rome, Oregon,” Blaylock said. “Ever been there?”

Lafleur shrugged. “Desert.”

“Yeah.”

“It's a government project, right?”

“A prison.”

“Ah,” Lafleur said, pausing. “It's what—a county facility?”

“Hell, no,” Blaylock said. “It's a sixty-million-dollar project.”

Lafleur turned the tube in his fingers, hefting it. It was heavy. It made him a little afraid. “You've got the excavation contract?”

“No, son,” Blaylock said. “We've got the whole ball of wax.”

“Ah,” Lafleur said, startled.

Blaylock smiled and blew a thick cloud of smoke. The smoke twisted under the lamp like a snake, then spread and floated above the cat. Blaylock's head hung in the smoke above the cat, whose golden irises looked like O-rings around its pupils. Blaylock's smile deepened to a grimace. “I'm doing this for your mother and for Jewel. Not for you and not for that old fart. Don't you ever forget that.”

Lafleur stared in amazement. He set the end of the tube back onto the floor and ran his fingers lightly down to its center. Blaylock leered. His head looked disembodied as if it were hanging from the ceiling by a rope. “It's the ladies,” Blaylock said. “They suffer. God knows mine does.” He laughed eerily, then said, “Gus and me planned this expansion for three years, then he folded up just when we were ready to move. Now he's whining. Now I've got all the ducks out in the water and he wants to deal Henry in. Okay. Let's see if Henry can cut the mustard.”

Lafleur didn't speak. He revolved the tube slowly in his fingers. He was angry, but as fast as his anger grew it dissipated into a functional anger, not real, exactly. It made him feel dry. His mouth was dry with anger. His chest felt hollow with a lack of anger. He understood now why Blaylock was starving the company, why Gus was so anxious to insert his son into the company. Everything was pitched to a fundamental shift the old ones had devised. He imagined his father beside Blaylock, the one taken to the edge of death, burned clean and dry and all that remained in the shell the pure dust of his life, and the other, in fair if abused health, walking, talking, an obese, dangerous spirit. Outside, the rain hissed. The gray cat nuzzled Blaylock's chin and purred while Blaylock caressed its throat with his fingertips. Then he extended his hand across the desk. “Partners?” he said. Lafleur did not move for a moment, wondering how long he could live with anger that was not real, with emotion that was to be traded like coin, with this new kind of complicity. Blaylock leered at him again, widening his dead eyes until they looked like two fried eggs.