Читать книгу Broken Ground - John Keeble - Страница 8

The line between life and death is as translucent as the sac that bounds the bulging innards of the jackrabbit.

—Hector Zeta, Manifesto for Spirits

THE MIDNIGHT-BLUE PICKUP stopped at the curb in front of Gus and Jewel Lafleur's house. Henry Lafleur slid out of the cab to the pavement. On the pickup door was a plastic stick-on sign that said CUSTOM EXCAVATION. Under the words a phone number had been struck out with a stripe of black paint.

Lafleur stepped up onto the grass and then to the sidewalk, which had been fractured by the root systems of the big maple trees that lined the street. The trees were just leafing out. Evening light slanted against the trunks and spidery limbs and it glinted on the power lines. The neighborhood was an old one in Portland, Oregon, and the years had obscured the geometry of the street, sidewalks, power poles, and of the kit houses set back just so on the lots.

Lafleur turned onto Gus and Jewel's walkway. The stem tips of the almond tree that stood in the center of the yard had swelled, and beneath the tree a webwork of new green peeped through the pale of last year's grass. The plywood ramp that he'd built over the steps thudded softly under his boots. A huge azalea leaned ominously into the porch. Along the rail stood a row of pots in which Jewel had started her geraniums. The deck was dark gray, the wall of the house was a lighter gray, and the trim was white. A swinging divan with blue cushions hung from the ceiling, and for just an instant he saw the apparitions of three children sitting there, swinging. He paused for a moment before the doorway, deeply inhaling the fragrance of cooking food. He pulled back the screen, knocked lightly, and pushed the door open.

Jewel met him just inside, embraced him, and then leaned back, holding firmly onto his arms and smiling. She had a striking face, strong chin and cheeks, sharp eyes, and leathery, profoundly wrinkled skin. Lafleur smiled back, then glanced over her shoulder at Gus, his father, who was asleep in a reclining chair. Jewel moved to the chair and gently raised its back, making the old man fold in the middle. She held one leg against Gus's knees so that he wouldn't slide onto the floor. Gus awakened and stared blankly outward. Jewel bent and straightened him up. “Hank's here,” she said. Slowly, Gus focused on his son, and then executed the half-inch movement of his head that Lafleur knew as the remnant of his father's habitual friendly greeting from the old days. Now the pale skin of the face did not move and the eyes seemed bleached. Lafleur asked his father how he was. Gus nodded again, and grunted softly: “Ugh.”

Lafleur followed Jewel into the kitchen, where the fragrance grew dense—beef, bread, and vegetables. He murmured with pleasure. Jewel smiled at him. Her black hair was lined with silver. She had kept it long and let it hang in a loose rope down her back when she was home. Lafleur admired Jewel. It was not easy to be widowed, then to marry another man and a few years later have him become helpless. As he looked at her and received her warmth, his eyes welled with tears. This had been happening to him lately.

Jewel picked up a pot from the stove, strained the steaming liquid into the sink, then dumped the contents—broccoli—into a bowl. The strong scent was like a garden, like black earth, like leaves after a hard rain. She turned and set the pot down lightly on the counter. Her suppleness, the strength in her hands, and her hair belied her age. Lafleur carried the vegetables to the dining room, then the meat. He moved into the living room and stopped near his father, who still wore his old khaki trousers and plaid shirt, but whose body, like his nod, was a vestige of what it had been. The clothes were baggy. The ankles going into the worn slippers looked like sticks. He'd had a stroke and it had shocked his face into stillness and turned his skin white as porcelain. His silver hair was sparse and wispy. Lafleur feared for his ghostly father, for the stymied life in him.

Jewel rolled the wheelchair into the living room. The two of them maneuvered Gus into it. Jewel held Gus by hugging him full about the body and Lafleur steadied the operation by holding Gus's elbows. Once again, Lafleur was appalled by how light his father was, how limp and doll-like. As he wheeled his father to the table, he gazed down at the kidney-colored blotches that showed through the fine hair. Jewel came along with the catheter bag.

“Did somebody called Clinton U find you?” she asked.

Lafleur looked at her. “You?”

Jewel laughed softly and gestured with the bag, making the liquid slosh against the plastic walls. “I did the same thing. U as in T, U, V. Chinese, I guess.”

“Who is U?” he said. His mind knotted on the nonsense of the question.

As Jewel bent to attach the bag to the side of the wheelchair, her hair slid over her shoulder and touched the floor. She checked the connection between the tube and the bag, then straightened up, brushed back her hair, and said, “I don't know.” Lafleur nudged the wheelchair close to the table. Gus sat there still as a stone. Jewel sat down. Lafleur sat across from her. Between them rested the steaming bowls of broccoli, carrots, mashed potatoes, a fresh loaf of bread, a salad of blanched spinach and egg, and the beef dish—a feast.

The stewed meat smelled of garlic, sage, and bay. The herbs, Jewel would say, were there to combat the drugs Gus had to use, and his lack of activity. The garlic cleansed his system, the bay aided digestion, the sage mollified the midnight sweats. She'd told Lafleur that sometimes she would wake up at night and hear Gus moaning and feel his side of the bed drenched with perspiration. It was as if he came alive in his dreams where nobody could see him, she'd said.

Jewel was of the old school, a farmgirl from Nevada who had survived thirty years in the Multnomah County Auditor's Office. Arcane things appeared from her stores—blackberry root, nettle, and wormwood, or birch leaves to purify Gus's blood. With these armaments she waged war against her husband's infirmity. The linen cloth she'd spread across the table, the white Austrian china with its delicately painted rosebuds, and the glittering chandelier above their heads were also among the weapons. The table setting appeared and the chandelier was lit whenever guests came so she could show Gus that some things in life were still fine. Lafleur always handled the china cautiously. Along with the chandelier, it was an heirloom. Jewel had children of her own, a son in Minneapolis and a daughter in San Diego, and Lafleur sensed a perhaps angry orbit there and felt a vague guilt for what had befallen Jewel as a member of his family.

He said grace.

Then Jewel said, “I thought he was a salesman at first, but his suit was too expensive. He came in a Cadillac and had a ring with a stone big enough to choke on. He had glasses thick as bottle bottoms. He asked how your father was. He said he'd been trying to reach you on a business matter. I was sure you knew each other.”

“Never heard of the guy,” Lafleur said, then smiling, he added, “U.”

She looked relieved. “I told him you had no phone, that he should catch you at work.” She placed dollops of food on Gus's plate and looked across at Lafleur again. Her face shuddered. It was a stirring as of leaves by the wings of a small bird. “Eat,” she said.

He served himself. Jewel held a spoonful of potato in front of Gus. Gus opened his mouth and she put the potato in. Gus's eyes grew wider as he chewed. Jewel served herself. Lafleur slipped his fork under a chunk of broccoli. He stopped for a moment and inhaled deeply, inwardly marking his appreciation for the one homecooked meal he got during the week. It was a second, flashing prayer, one of gratitude for Jewel's generosity. He ate the broccoli, then said, “What's wrong?”

When Jewel sighed, Lafleur's eyes darted to his father. “No, Hank,” she said, meaning it was not Gus, that he was fine, or the same at least. She looked straight at Lafleur with her luminous gray eyes. “It's Ned Blaylock,” she said. “He's putting the squeeze on us.”

Lafleur set down his fork. Jewel went on. She told him that his father's company, the old partnership of forty years between Gus and Blaylock, had been taking losses and that Blaylock was applying his father's interest to offset the shortfall. He was expanding from excavation to general contracting, she said, though he and Gus had been planning that before Gus's stroke, or had been fighting over it. Lafleur knew about that, that each old man had tried to outdo the other by hatching one new scheme after another, but he'd had too many of his own troubles at the time to pay close attention.

Jewel touched the edge of her plate with her fingertips and said that now Blaylock wouldn't stop, or slow down, or listen. He'd fortified the gap left by Gus. He wouldn't give her figures. He wouldn't answer her questions. He hardly acknowledged her existence.

When Jewel paused, Lafleur said, “But he has to.”

“Supposedly.”

“You've got power of attorney.”

“I'm a woman. To a man like that, do you know what that means?” Jewel said. Lafleur squinted at her, not speaking. He guessed he knew. “To a man like that,” Jewel said, “power of attorney means you'd damn well better go out and hire the best one you can find.”

Lafleur remembered his father's periodic anger with Blaylock, and the bitter conversations at the dinner table, the anxiety Blaylock sometimes caused in his mother. He remembered Blaylock's drinking habits and being afraid of Blaylock himself when he was little, and just now as he stared at the spears of light Jewel's chandelier cast against the ceiling, a haunting from his boyhood flashed through his mind: the giant of a man seen usually back in a dim corner of the shop, or bent into a piece of machinery with a flashlight in his mouth and the neck of a pint bottle sticking out of the back pocket of his grimy coveralls.

Blaylock was a mechanic, which was how he and Gus had come together. The two young men, a diesel mechanic, a good one, and a heavy equipment operator, another good one, had joined forces after the war to make a company. Blaylock ran the equipment yard that through the years came to surround his big house down on the river, twenty miles south of Portland. He'd rarely spoken to Lafleur, the boy, who sometimes went up to the yard with his father from their house, which was less than a mile down the road from Blaylock's place. Lafleur remembered the few times Blaylock had, the man coming near and grasping his arm, bending down from above as he told the boy to stay away from something, or to get over there—to watch out!

Once Lafleur had been in a dozer cab, pretending to operate the controls. He heard Blaylock shout. When he looked across the yard, he saw the man darkening the doorway of a shop. The boy—Hank—started to climb out of the cab, but Blaylock shouted again, “Get off that!” As he slipped to the ground, Hank looked back and saw the big man striding toward him. He ran across the yard, heading for the front where he had left his father, but Blaylock cut him off at the side of the house and backed him into a corner. He grabbed Hank's shoulder and forced him down to the mud. Blaylock had a monkey wrench in one hand. Hank saw the wrench rising.

He saw the wrench glint above the man's shoulder. The man stared venomously at him and bent down, tightening the grip on his shoulder. Hank writhed in pain and shrank from the man's nearness, from the stink of sweat and of sweet, overpowering breath, and from the wrench poised against the sky, but suddenly Blaylock released him and straightened up, rocking slowly. He looked at his wrench. Hank didn't move. He hardly breathed. “It's you,” Blaylock said, meaning Hank, his partner's son, but looking at his wrench. “You,” Blaylock said, drawing the wrench close to his face and addressing it, or addressing the large, bruised, oil-smeared slab of meat that held the wrench, the hand—Lafleur thought now—the mark of the man in all things: levering and hoisting, bullying heavy articles and winching them out, and though big and blunt-fingered, capable of delicate nurse-like maneuvers with needle valves and gaskets and with tweezers picking out particles of steel from a cylinder, and of calibrating by touch the foot pounds applied to a turned-down bolt.

Blaylock had stared at his hand as if amazed, as if it, drawn from his essential being, had just issued him an astonishing ultimatum, then he dropped his hand to his side and wheeled away. He tottered, steadied himself, and lumbered off. Hank gulped for air and pulled himself up. The man weaved. He was drunk. Hank had understood that, frightened as he was. Blaylock's hands swung at his sides and the wrench glimmered, then his body tilted through the doorway of the shop and disappeared in the darkness.

Hank began to shiver. He went out front to where his father was chaining down a bulldozer on a trailer. Wiry and darkened by working in the sun, his father cranked the chains snug with a hand-operated winch, hooked the chain, then sprang to the ground and tousled the boy's hair with his hand as he passed by. It was as if nothing were wrong. When Hank got home his mother asked about his trousers, lightly touching the mud-caked knees, but he made an excuse. That night he had a dream that would become a recurring nightmare. In it were points in space that expanded into fathomless planes and then shrank again. The planes never intersected. The points never touched. He was in the dream, marooned. He could not move from one geometrical figure to the next. He could be tiny as a dot or swell to ghastly proportions. The dream was barren. It overwhelmed him with its disconnectedness.

From then on, Hank kept close to his father at Blaylock's place. He observed how his father dealt with the man—circumspectly and crisply. So far as he knew, exchange between the two consisted entirely of externals, the data of their business: equipment, what was ready and what was not, what was needed where and for how long, what needed to be loaded and when, what needed repair, what drivers they would have to hire. The boy knew vaguely that more had to pass between the two—contract bids, taxes, money, moments of friendship, even—but he didn't see that. What he saw was that his father was not afraid, that his father's crispness became formal when Blaylock was drinking, that the formality kept Blaylock out in the light, and that was what the boy eventually learned from the event—the uses of formality, distance, and circumspection.

Lafleur lowered his gaze to Jewel. “He's still drinking?”

Jewel was leaning toward Gus, spooning potato into his mouth. She tipped up the spoon and dragged it under Gus's lip in order to strip off the remains, as with a baby. “He's got his faculties, all right,” she said, “if that's what you mean.”

“It's hard to believe he's in that deep a hole, then.”

“He has work, but he's showing a loss. He has a new machine.”

“You bet.” Since his separation from his wife, Lafleur had been holing up in his father's toolshed at the old family place just past Blaylock's big pink house. In his trips up and down the road, Lafleur had glimpsed the snout of the new acquisition, an earth-moving machine, a monster parked behind the house. “The LeTourneau,” he said. “He wouldn't be able to touch that thing if he weren't solvent.”

“How much would it have cost?”

Lafleur shrugged. “It's used. Even so, probably a couple hundred grand.”

Jewel looked down at her plate and sighed, then looked up. “Your dad can't make up a loss.”

“Why should he?”

Jewel's voice rose. “How's he to make up a loss? Look at him.”

“Hey,” Lafleur said softly, reaching across and touching her hand. “I'm sorry.” She eased a spoonful of beef into Gus's mouth.

“He has his interest,” Lafleur said. He felt something childlike in him, like a cry rising in his throat. At the same time he felt a deep, adult despair—more trouble, another tangle.

“Yes,” Jewel said, “but we used to get money every month from the company. Now we get debit statements. He's upset about it,” she said, glancing at Gus.

Lafleur looked, too. The old man's once leathery, calloused hands lay on the wheelchair arms like two dead fish. His eyes were milky. It was true that he'd improved. A couple of months ago he hadn't been able to sit at the table. Now he could manage a few steps with his canes and he could even speak after a fashion—the guttural growls and grunts that Jewel translated for him. Maybe there was hope. Maybe there was none. Lafleur didn't know. Gus's jaw worked slowly and beef juice trickled from the corners of his mouth. Jewel dabbed at him with a napkin. Lafleur didn't know what to hope for with his father; for Jewel he hoped for some relief from the care, certainly, but for his father he didn't know at all—for minimal motor control or for complete recovery, for ambulation, for fluid speech, for laughter, for renewed, dynamic life, for a miracle, or for an easy passage in his sleep. “He knows?” Lafleur said.

“Yes,” Jewel said. “Blaylock's got a major project on line. They were planning to expand before your dad's stroke. Actually, they'd set up the purchase of that machine, too.” Lafleur nodded. He knew that. “Now Blaylock's gone ahead, but the company's going into the red,” Jewel said.

“I thought their credit was set in bedrock. You're not saying that Blaylock's deliberately scuttling the company.”

“No.”

Lafleur cut off a piece of meat and ate it. “They say you have to spend money to make it,” he said, although that whole gambit, what he had watched wear his father down as the company grew—talking to bankers and playing with the books, running loans against contract commissions, liquidating inventories, dodging deadlines, laying off help and taking it on, going into hock for supplies—was one reason why he had kept his distance from the partnership.

“Sure,” Jewel said. “But maybe not so much. Not so fast. Blaylock won't leave anything alone.” Her voice was rising again. “Either people move where he wants them or he beats them down. He's just an old man loaded up with sex and fear.”

Despite himself, Lafleur chuckled. “That's quite a picture.”

Jewel took a deep breath and smiled weakly back at him. “He's got an accountant writing the books so he can absorb your dad's interest.”

“He can't do that.”

“It increases the company losses on paper. The more the company loses, the more of your dad's interest Ned absorbs. Now he's about to finance this new project. He's figured out how to squeeze water from a stone.”

“It's a scam.”

“Of course, Hank. Good heavens.”

“I'd get that legal advice.”

“I've talked to Louis,” she said. “He says he could put a stop to it, but that it'd be better for us to come to terms with Ned. Louis tried to get your dad and Ned to divide their interest and put themselves on salary years ago so this kind of thing couldn't happen. It's a mess, Hank. Louis says he could probably force Ned to liquidate, but it might take forever. He says it would be best just to use legal action as a threat.” She fed Gus another spoonful of beef, then turned back. She held the spoon poised above her plate. “Otherwise, there might not be much left. And it would hurt your dad. Hank, we're practically broke.”

Alarmed, Lafleur straightened up in his chair and glanced at his father—bony nose and slowly working jaw. The old man blinked. “I wish you'd told me this sooner,” he said, and at the same time he thought, But I should have known, I should have asked months ago. I'm an idiot.

“You have your troubles,” Jewel said, looking directly at him. She held him with her eyes, and the exchange of their gaze grew long and searching. Something began to heave between them, something exquisite and frightful, a phantom that contained the complexity of his regard for her: she was in the position of his mother, but was not his mother; she was familiar to him through his knowing her and obliquely familiar through her mate, his father, and yet she was a stranger to him. He felt drawn into a flickering world of mortality which, though they were strangers in the blood, they shared quite explicitly. It was like a complicated algebra made up of corporeal and once-corporeal bodies:

His infirm father. Her husband.

His dead mother, whose shoes she filled. And her dead husband, his ghost on her back almost like Lafleur's own near-dead father.

His children, including one who had died—her step-grandchildren.

His estranged wife, Penny—her stepdaughter-in-law. And her friend, too. Penny came to visit more often than he did.

And himself, beset with such algebra: the idiot.

He looked into Jewel's clear gray eyes and traded with her on a subliminal, almost sexual level. He felt overpowered as if by sorcery. He had a glimmering of something coming, but he couldn't name it. He looked away, wondering, What now, where's this going?…Then she said, “Ned's charging your dad for the loss of his services. He says he'll stop if your dad puts something back into the company.”

Quite calmly—his calm surprised him—Lafleur replied, “And that's the squeeze?”

“That's the pinch. The squeeze is general. This is quite specific.”

“I see.”

“He has a point in a way,” she said. She turned and gazed at Gus for a moment, touching base with him, then to Lafleur she said, “Obviously your dad isn't working.”

“But he has the interest, the investment, the years put in to make that company float.” Lafleur paused, hearing his own voice rising. “Without him Blaylock would be nowhere.”

Jewel's body visibly gathered itself. “Yes.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “God, I'm sorry you have to go through all this.”

“I know, Hank.”

“I'll talk to Blaylock. If we have to, we'll dig up some money somehow until we get it straightened out.”

She gave him a worried look, then they were quiet for a moment. They ate. Forks clinked on plates and Gus gurgled softly as he swallowed. Liquid trickled into his catheter bag. Lafleur served himself seconds on meat, potatoes, and bread. Jewel smiled, pleased to see him eat well.

She got up to fetch the coffee. He watched as she passed into the kitchen, her body erect. She held it so against the world. He ate and looked around the dining room, at the cracks in the spackled ceiling. A hutch stood against the opposite wall and on its shelves were knickknacks from both Jewel's and his father and mother's past—ceramic and stone figurines, vases, centennial plates. Among them were articles from Quebec—religious items and French glassware. The artifacts of two long lives brought together late had bred in here with muted passion. Everything in the room, and in the living room and kitchen, was clean and pure as snow, but old and worn.

The house had been toiled over, the yard outside was kept up, and three times a week Jewel had to get Gus out into the car and to the hospital for therapy and back again, and otherwise care for the old man, haggle with the insurance company, balance the checkbook, take the trouble over the last several months to treat him—Lafleur—with kid gloves because of his difficulties, and to counsel Penny, and somehow through all of that maintain her sanity and even the slightly forbidding quality of her strength. On the wall to Lafleur's right hung the household crucifix, glittering in the descending slant of light from the windows at his left.

At his back hung photographs of his family together and then the two children separately. Without looking, he could envision the two—the professional, retouched portraits in which his children, Tricia and Andy, had fixed smiles, gleaming teeth, and angelic, unreal-looking skin. They were quite unlike the kids he'd dropped off across town a couple of hours ago—today, Saturday, his day with them.

When he'd arrived at their place early this morning, the drape in the living-room window flicked back and the edge of a long form appeared: Penny, with whom he no longer came face to face. The kids came out, darting across the lawn. As they clambered inside the cab, the drape swung back and settled.

He tended to indulge the children on Saturdays—the races, the zoo, the movies, the museum—and to handle them as fragile articles. He loathed that part of himself, his remorse, which made it hard for him to treat them as themselves. Today, they'd eaten at Wendy's, gone to see The Temple of Doom, and as it was a fine, rare, early-spring day, they played Frisbee and fed bread to the ducks in the park. The parkwise ducks, the mallards and pintails, widgeons, shovelers, mergansers, and redheads bunched up near the bank, and then some came out of the water. Andy, who was six, tossed handfuls to one side and the other. The ducks crowded after the morsels and teemed around Andy's ankles. Tricia, who was eleven, moved off and stared pensively across the pond. Lafleur gazed with her. A pair of whistling swans patrolled the far rushes, their heads imperious and erect, their bills perfectly parallel to the surface of the water.

When he returned the children, the front door opened as if driven by an automaton. The children's arms and heads glistened in the sunlight as they ran back to the porch. Like sprites they vanished into the zone he could no longer touch, what seemed like a spectral region made half of recollection and half of what had come to twist darkly in his imagination. He had sat still in his pickup for a moment, saddened, and feeling then, too, like an idiot.

There was a third picture on the wall behind him, an enlarged family snapshot in which he might have seen himself and Penny, and a healthy Gus standing with his arm around Jewel, and three children in front, including the small figure of Nicole. That picture captured the whole, horrifying gap in Lafleur's life. He glanced up at Gus. Gus blinked and curled his lip. He looked crazed. Jewel returned, carrying the coffeepot. “What about the river property?” Lafleur said. “You two have that free and clear.”

“Sell it?” she said as she poured coffee, first into his cup, then hers, then into an insulated mug for Gus. Gus had a startled expression. She added milk to Gus's mug. “And just let the company go down the drain?” she said.

Gus lurched and tried to speak. His mouth twisted. “Naw!” he said. It came out a soft, high moan that sounded like the caw of a distant crow. His arms shook as he tried to bring his body forward. He struggled to say more, but Jewel sat down and spoke for him.

“No,” she said. “He has that for you and your kids.”

“But we don't need that,” Lafleur said, addressing his father, and at the same time thinking, Don't you see? Everything's come apart. It's all different, now. He turned to Jewel and said, “But you do. Use some of it to make whatever arrangements you have to with the partnership and keep the rest. You need it.”

Gus's arms had stopped shaking and he held himself erect. His eyes were bright and moist. His set face had the vestige of the look it always took on when he made flat refusals. He spoke again. It sounded just like a big crow flying away over the trees. “Naw!” he cried.

“Careful,” Jewel said. Gently, she let her hand rest over Gus's on the arm of the wheelchair. “He won't sell the house and property and he doesn't want you to, either. He feels the same way about the company. It's the future. He needs the future he spent his life working for. I need him to have a future.”

Gus, apparently satisfied with what Jewel had said, looked at Lafleur with glossy eyes. “Something has to give,” Lafleur said.

Jewel looked down and stroked the handle of her coffee cup. Then she looked up and said, “He can put you in.”

“In?”

“Not money. Not ours and not yours, Hank, not what none of us has. You.”

“Work for him?”

“With him.”

“I see,” he said, but he thought, Of course. It was obvious. The room was still. He became aware of the refrigerator humming way back in the kitchen.

“I'm sorry. I hate to do this to you.” She nodded at Gus. “It's his idea.”

He looked at Gus. The acuteness still edged the old man's eyes, and he had a knowing smile on his lips, or held what Lafleur took to be that smile, a kind of half-controlled smirk now, but poking through, as if from behind a fog of uncooperative musculature, the exact self-satisfied smile his father had always presented in ticklish situations. Lafleur felt aggrieved, seeing the old smile, and he almost felt like laughing.

Jewel said, “We understand that you want no part of the company.”

“You do?” She'd put it much more definitely than he'd ever thought it.

“But we'd like to know how you feel about it now.”

“Oh?” He was a little taken aback by Jewel's approach. He felt his surprise in his face and in his eyes, which skittered away from her and back and away again, to Gus, to the opposite wall. Then his eyes stopped. He felt his face becoming calm. He grew absorbed by thought.

There'd never been serious breaches between himself and his father, but simply a divergence of ways. His ambition—when he had it, when he felt more collected than he'd felt for some time—was different, both more limited and more speculative, perhaps, than his father's. Gus had his roots in another age. He was a monumentalist, the son of a half-Montagnais Indian woman and a French Canadian. Gus's father, who'd been dead twenty years before Lafleur's birth, had ventured west to British Columbia as one of the last of the engagés of the then-foundering Canadian fur trade. He became a disengagé by ripping up his papers and fleeing south to Oregon, where he worked as a logger. He returned to Quebec, married a woman thirty years younger than himself, had four children, left for Oregon again, returned, and in his old age had one more child, Gus, and then died. What happened to Gus then, where his mother took him, what she did with him, taught him, told him, or what happened to the older children, was a mystery. Lafleur had the idea that his father was ashamed of her. There were stories there, Lafleur had thought, which if told might have explained things. It was another obscurity.

Lafleur, too, had been born in Quebec, in a small town up north near Quebec City. Once, when he was very young, his mother had taken him by train to Montreal to meet his grandmother. He remembered the city and the line of tall, decrepit tenements where his grandmother lived. He remembered going into one, a shadowy place that smelled of mildew. He seemed to remember that his grandmother was pleased to see him, but could remember nothing she'd said. He remembered how she looked sitting in a kitchen chair—a tough old bird with a hatchet face and dark, sharp eyes. She held herself straight as a post. He'd been five or six then. He remembered the torn linoleum floor and a wooden sink. The next year his mother had told him that his grandmother was dead.

Jewel's sinewy hand still lay over Gus's frail one on the arm of the wheelchair. There was a certain form of female stalwartness, Lafleur thought, that came in old age, something hard and erect in certain women that showed through after the years had worn down the flesh and compliance and convention.

Jewel glanced up and caught him searching her face. “It's an idea, that's all.”

“I understand.”

“If you want to consider it all, you should take some time,” she said. Gus struggled to grip his coffee mug and she turned to help him. She supported the bottom of the mug while the old man awkwardly squeezed the sides. Together, they lifted and he drank. Coffee flowed around his mouth and down his shirt. Jewel took the mug away and dabbed at him with the napkin. Gus smirked as if amused by his incapacities.

Lafleur wondered about his father, who'd come all the way back across the continent to the very place, Oregon, where Lafleur's grandfather had been. He wondered what tales had impelled the son to come, or what tales taken through the mother to her son, or what osmosis of tales, or perhaps what lack of them, or even what renunciation of the mother. There was spite there, maybe, a revenge against poverty. Lafleur didn't know. All he remembered was the talk between his mother and father before they left for Oregon. He'd been eight, then. The hopeful talk went on for months and Oregon was implanted in his mind as a place of riches, where big fish leaped out of the rivers into baskets and berries hung through the kitchen windows. There were trees as big around as houses, and when they were cut down new trees sprouted instantly out of the old trunks. The trees were immortal. There was gold in the creek beds and mountains where winter went on all year round and valleys where there was never any winter. The seasons were divided differently in Oregon. They would live in a valley where anything would grow whenever it was needed, where the air was sweet and deer wandered up onto the back porches, begging to be eaten for dinner.

Lafleur thought that there was another algebra in this, one that included an irrational integer, an obscurantism derived from too much hardship, too much darkness, too much silence, too much dreaming.

He'd known all along that it would please his father to see him come into the excavation company, although his father had never pressed the point. That was assumed, the lack of pressure, the choice left to the son, which was finally a most exacting form of pressure, and way back in college Lafleur had struck an inward bargain by taking degrees in architecture and structural engineering. After school he'd been with the Army Construction Engineers. He did a tour in Vietnam, where he worked on dikes and bridges mainly, designing them on the spot to be thrown up. For a short time he had been transferred to the Combat Engineers for whom he “read” existing designs and earth forms in enemy territory and composed demolition instructions. He'd been in the midst of the action, but somehow nestled safely as if in the eye of a hurricane. Except for a few instances, his days were filled with machines, drawings, and maps. He was cut off from the actual slaughter.

He'd spent the last few months of his hitch assigned to Army Intelligence in Alaska. There, he'd “read” photographic evidence taken by satellite over hostile territories, or so he presumed—Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Cambodia, maybe China. He didn't really know. He had only the faintest notion of what he was doing in Alaska. He was mustered out a captain and moved to Myrtle Point in downstate Oregon, where Penny and their first child, Tricia, had been living with her parents while he was gone. He found work. They had their second child and then, drawn as if by tropism, they moved back up to Portland, and he went to work as an excavation foreman for Zymanski's contracting firm—not his father's company. He began moonlighting with the backhoe, truck, and dozer he'd bought, thinking that someday he could have his own small company. In fact he'd come a step nearer to his father and Blaylock. It was like the very gradual, ineluctable closing of a jaw, his father's hopes and the resistance of Lafleur's nature, and his submerged expectation that someday he would defer to his father's hopes after all. Lafleur thought all this not in so many words, but in images: his grandmother in the rickety chair, the Oregon deer, the bridges and dikes in the jungle, the white Alaska night, the nameplate stuck to the door of his pickup with the phone number struck out. The images carried a cargo that he couldn't fully grasp.

Everyone at the table had been silent for several minutes. The atmosphere of the room had become heavy with their thinking. Lafleur glanced at Gus and saw the vestige of the amused, self-satisfied smile that Gus had always assumed in ticklish situations. The old man looked like a clown. Lafleur felt his own face quickening. He wondered if Gus was thinking that his son had been flushed from cover at last. “Has Louis heard about this?” Lafleur asked Jewel.

She gave him a sheepish look. “He didn't foresee any particular legal difficulties, if that's what you mean.”

“And Blaylock would allow it?”

“We think he's too greedy not to.”

Gus lurched sideways in his chair and looked up, clinging feebly to the arms, and said, “Yaw!” His affirmative word sounded almost exactly like the negative, and more than anything else it sounded like a solitary crow going away over the trees and down around the bend in a river.

Lafleur smiled. He felt his smile like a smirk, faint and self-satisfied and bemused just like the smile that had slipped back onto his father's face. “He says that? That Blaylock's too greedy not to?”

Jewel smiled, making a beak out of her lips. “He would.”

“Of course he would,” Lafleur said, considering that this was the way with the dead and infirm, that their power transpired to those nearest them, that in a way personal power—including the power of parents and even of lost generations over children—was immortal. He wondered if the name for his irrational integer was death.

Carefully, he placed his knife and fork next to each other on his plate and looked up. There was a curious air of levity at the table, as if the bemused, anxious smiling were there to mask something awful. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he repeated. He felt bedazzled. “I'll do it.”

Jewel inhaled and seemed to grow larger in her chair. Her eyes brightened and looked young in her old face, and in response Lafleur felt his eyes welling again. She said, “When that man Clinton U came here I thought you were making another deal.”

“No, I don't know him. And I should have thought of this myself,” Lafleur said. Then he asked, “What kind of project is it?”

“Blaylock's? I'm not sure. Maybe a government project.”

“Do you know where?”

“Southeast Oregon.”

Lafleur thought about that. “Out there it'd probably have to be a government job,” he said, thinking about the place—the desert. “A lot of money. Lots of concrete, I bet,” he said, thinking about government design, about tearing open the sand and rock and pouring concrete in the desert, about the trucks and their loads made vulnerable by the heat, about how fast the concrete would set up.

“You're going to talk to Ned?” Jewel said.

“And Louis,” he said. Despite himself, even he had begun to feel a little tickle of greed. “I want Louis right behind me if I need him.” The sunlight came through the window at a low slant and hit the chandelier, overwhelming the electric bulbs, but wildly activating the prisms. Small, rainbow-hued shafts of light glittered all across the ceiling and over the hutch and knickknacks on the opposite wall, and down to the passageway. It was like an elongated flower spraying its parts through the room. Lafleur thought about concrete, the slaked surfaces in the dry, desert air. “Government,” he said.