Storm Tide (24 page)

D
AVID

    High Street, Saltash, was two lanes wide. Local guys enjoyed a good conversation in the middle of it—windows rolled down, pickups idling, one facing east, the other west, as traffic and tempers built up in both directions. Sometimes it was a demonstration of local rights, a protest against the out-of-state license plate behind them; sometimes just business, the closest a working man came to a car phone. It was also the fastest way for news to get around, and the afternoon I took on the Department of Roads, Bridges and Waterways, they tell me cars were backed up for a quarter mile.

I’d been working the Carlson job. Bob Carlson was a friend of Marty’s and one of our best customers. Like a lot of affluent couples from the city, the Carlsons paid late and changed their minds on a whim. One Monday night, they decided on a party at their country home that weekend, for which they expected their fencing erected and their landscaping complete. I hadn’t scheduled the job until the middle of May. Much as I wanted to tell the Carlsons to shove it, we needed the business.

Although it was only mid-April, the air was sweet with narcissus and the acid tang of pine sap. Spring peepers trilled at sundown and clouds of gnats rippled the air like waves of heat. Even after I sent the crew home, even as the sun touched the treetops, I worked without a shirt. The Carlsons’ was one of the only houses in Johnny Lynch’s new development. When Bob Carlson heard that the lot across the road sold, he wanted a fence. Eight feet high, one hundred long, it had taken us three days to complete.

Just beyond the fence, I heard the growl of truck gears, heavy equipment climbing, and caught a glimpse of a front-end loader, the kind road pavers used, laboring up the hill. It was odd to be starting a job this late in the day. I couldn’t see the road crew but heard them horsing around. I didn’t think much about it. I was driving spikes in a tier of landscape ties, trying to finish before sundown. The stench of the diesel smoke, the noise of the big machine were unpleasant enough to ruin a mild spring evening, but when the loader’s engine started straining, roaring loud enough to explode, when I noticed the big rig rolling over the property line, I ran down the drive to take a look. The driver
was forcing the loader’s bucket under the root ball of a twenty-foot tree, attempting to lift it. The harder he gunned the engine, the farther forward the vehicle tipped, its rear tires leaving the ground. The light was fading. A thick blue cloud of smoke billowed down the hillside, but the lettering on the equipment was unmistakable. This was no moonlighting road crew working on Johnny Lynch’s road, this was the Saltash Department of Roads, Bridges and Waterways, and the idiots were three feet from my fence.

A couple of guys watched from the edge of the road—Harlan Bowman and Tony Brockmann among them—arms folded, beer bottles in their fists. When they saw me coming, they turned their backs. Tiny Sauvage ran alongside the machine, waving his arms, shouting instructions.

I called, “Hey guys.” They ignored me. “This is a private road. What are you doing here?”

Harlan Bowman lifted a baseball cap stained with motor oil and ran his hand through his hair. “Clearing trees.”

“It took my crew three days to put up that fence. Don’t you think he’s awful close?”

Harlan shrugged. “He’s a new guy.” The machine rocked, forward and back, spewing a shower of pebbles and sand.

I was shouting above the noise, “Well, get him out of there,” when the huge yellow rig sprang backwards, hit the ground with its rear wheels spinning, shot through two sections of my new cedar fence, lurched forward and died in the middle of the road.

Tiny Sauvage screamed at the driver, “You fuck, you stupid fuck!” The guys crept up cautiously, as if the big rear tires might suddenly come alive.

“You crushed the fence,” I said to Tiny. Didn’t seem to bother him a bit.

Harlan took a step backward, considering the twelve-foot gap of dangling staves and splinters. “Took a hit there. Yup.”

The door of the loader’s cab creaked open. A hand appeared, then a boot, dangling cautiously in search of a step.

“Look!” Tiny shouted, his finger pointing at the driver’s pants. “He pissed hisself! Sonofabitch pissed hisself!”

Sheepishly, the driver spread his hand over the wet splotch of his pants. “I had an accident,” he said. The collective laughter was uncontrolled.

“Guys. Listen to me.” I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. “The fence is going to have to be replaced.”

Tiny said over his shoulder, “We’ll take care of it.”

“When?”

“When we get to it.”

“When you get to it? Guys, my best customer’s coming up here tomorrow night. What am I supposed to tell him?”

Tony Brockmann spit in the dust. “Tell him you had an accident.”

“It’s dark now,” Tiny said. “We can’t do nothing in the dark.”

As long as I could remember, there were two-hour lunch breaks behind the ice skating rink, poker games in the town golf course locker room, municipal trucks cruising the highway with their radios screaming heavy metal rock. This was Saltash’s archaic welfare system, a sociopathic elite hired by Johnny Lynch and tenured by the town. But I wasn’t some teacher from Westchester whose electric line they’d accidentally cut. This was my work they’d destroyed and me they were laughing at.

“I want it fixed first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “I mean that. Or I’ll have to go over your head.”

Tiny looked from me to his men—is this guy an asshole or what?—and left me standing alone in the road.

For all the years I’d lived in Saltash, I could count the times I’d been in Town Hall, the only brick building in town. Its long dark halls, hot in summer and clammy in winter, were bleak and dreary and seemed to discourage invaders. “We are not complainers,” my father used to say. He was fond of declaring our standards. We tip well. We pay local tradesmen on time. A pitiful code of conduct to be sure, but one we adhered to in lieu of our religion and the customs we’d left where we came from. Throughout my life, in spite of lousy tableside service or a pipe that began leaking as soon as the plumber’s truck left the driveway, I tipped twenty percent, I paid my bills the day they arrived. I did not complain.

The town manager did not know me from my glory years. He was a tall soft tired man who listened with an interest that seemed directly calibrated to the amount of trouble I was likely to cause.

“Sir, I just want you to know I’m not a complainer,” I began, and outlined the situation from the misuse of town property to the gaping hole in the fence. Without interrupting, the manager made a phone call. “Could you get right up here?” he said, and five minutes later Donkey Sparks arrived.

“David Greene!” His cheeks were pink, his collar too tight. He wore a tie beneath an old cotton sweater that announced he might be management but still close enough to his rank and file not to betray them by wearing a suit. “Christ, it’s been years. Do you know this guy?” he asked
the town manager without waiting for a reply. Then to me: “You’ve been back in town how long? And did you come to see me?”

“I—”

“Best damned high school pitcher I ever saw. Damn, he was good. Went all the way to the Chicago Cubs, did you know that? Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine.”

“Mr. Greene was telling me about an incident he encountered up, where?”

“This the fence thing?” Donkey waved it off. “Those assholes. Got to watch them every minute. Don’t worry about it. We’ll have it all taken care of. So, Davey, what are you doing now? You think you’ll do some coaching for the Little League?”

“What do you mean taken care of?” I said.

Donkey was so named for a horsey staccato laugh, almost a bray, which escaped him now. “I mean we’ll order some sections of fence for you and as soon as they come we’ll get up there and make it good as new.”

“It was new. These are important customers to me. They’ll be up tomorrow night.”

“Hey, Davey. Spring is here, my friend. The whole town’s breathing down my neck. I told you. As soon as we can. Is that not reasonable?”

Complainers were people who didn’t listen to reason; troubled people who searched out trouble. I knew the more I made of it, the less my chances of the fence ever being fixed. “Look, these are difficult customers I’m talking about. They are going to hold me up for the whole job because of that stretch of fence. I’m not going to be able to pay my crew, okay? And why? Because your guys are out there drinking and operating heavy machinery—”

“Drinking?” Donkey glanced at the town manager.

“Yes, I think they were,” I said.

“You think.”

“They were holding beer bottles.”

“And you know what was in those bottles? You know positively that it was alcoholic beer? Because you’re making serious accusations, my friend.” The flush of his cheeks intensified; all the blood in his body seemed to collect in his face. His smile turned to warning: back off. “You collected those bottles and had them tested? Is that what you’re saying? You have the results?”

I didn’t have anything of the kind. “What were they doing up there after work, using town equipment on a private road?”

Donkey grinned. That was easy. “Making access for fire vehicles,” he said to the manager. “I asked them to put in a little overtime and they
were glad to do it. It’s all listed in the work detail.” Then, ignoring me, “Is there anything else?” Donkey waited, his short square body tensed for a fight.

When I emerged, the weather had turned. A cold fog settled over Saltash, driven by a northeast wind. I drove eighty-five miles to pick up the replacement sections of fence and worked well past dark cementing the posts.

“It’s over,” Crystal said, warming the meat loaf in a frying pan. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I ate because she had cooked, but I had no appetite. With no proof—they had taken their beer bottles with them—no witnesses, there was nothing I could have done. Moreover, the fence was fixed. Did I really want to pursue this further, put five men out of work? It was over, I told myself. Over.

Since I’d started seeing Crystal, I was spending less time with Judith, but Crystal considered herself at war. To the extent that she had studied the enemy, Crystal knew that Judith was well read and interesting to talk to; that she had traveled a good deal; that she had a local reputation as a fabulous cook and hostess; that she was quoted in the newspapers regularly, often saying something witty and outrageous. Moreover, Judith was affluent, genetically thin, and to the extent that it meant anything now, my mentor in local politics. This might have been enough to overwhelm any number of women, if they respected any of Judith’s virtues. Crystal did not. To Crystal, Judith was incomplete. “If you haven’t had a child,” she said more than once, “you’re not a real woman.”

Crystal had not only managed to neuter her enemy but to employ sex as her most potent weapon. She had asked more than once what Judith was like in bed (I would not talk about it), but was confident she was better. Or at least that she tried harder. For on no occasion that I spent the night with her, or as little as half an hour in a place with a door that closed (including my truck) did we fail to have sex. Crystal felt that an evening was incomplete until she had made me come.

Before we got into bed that night, I had told her honestly, sex was the last thing on my mind. Had I displayed the usual signs of disinterest, she might have believed me, but perversely, I was and remained hard as a pole. I simply could not get off. She squat-fucked me, facing front, then rear (coming twice herself in the process); she greased me with massage oil and pumped me with her fist; she sucked me until her jaw ached, all with no luck. “Where are you?” she said, rising from the bed sheets for air.

The photographs over the years show my father as a man with delicate
bones, an ever thinning pompadour, and a thick blue vein that ran from his hairline to the corner of his eye. He had borrowed a small fortune from my grandmother to buy into the curtain factory. He was up at three every morning, often loading the trucks himself. When I was eight years old, he scored the biggest order the company ever had, a thousand gross of gingham curtains for a department store chain in the Midwest. His stitchers worked double time to make the deadline. The order had to be delivered on or before the first of October. But because his truck driver had been drinking and had disappeared with both sets of the keys to the truck, the shipment never made it on time. My father was furious and fired the driver. That night, Johnny Lynch stormed into my living room. As my mother paced the kitchen, he called my father a heartless New York kike.

“I’m not doing it, Johnny, no.”

I was hiding in the hallway.

“Call.” Johnny’s voice carried the authority of law.

“The man’s a drunk, Johnny.”

“He has a wife and children.”

“So do I, Johnny. So do I.”

“Call him!”
Johnny shouted, and the house shook. “Or the bank calls your loan tomorrow. Tell him you apologize. Tell him you had a talk with me.”

I remember the ratchet of the old rotary dial, and my father’s forehead in the lamplight, the blue vein throbbing, seventeen years before the stroke that killed him.