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