slowing everything down, and the danger—in the height, in the slick surfaces—and a labyrinth of specifications, numbers, dates, and personalities compelled into a pattern. He watched Julia's pencil and tried to concentrate on the numbers she recited. He half listened to her, half dreamed. He became lulled by her soft voice and nearly hypnotized by her wavering pencil tip. She wore a sharp-smelling perfume. Then he realized that the voice had stopped and that the pencil no longer followed the columns. He felt her gazing at him. She had finished.
“I see,” he said, looking back at her.
The gaze between them grew searching, the meeting of their eyes deepening to contact. Her eyes, streaked in the whites, took him in, and for an instant the female creature that was in there behind the fatigue, the worn voice, and the numbers touched him, and triggered his desire for a woman, his ache.
Louis swiveled his chair around abruptly and landed with his elbows on his desk. “Ready?” he said.
“I don't think there's any question about the new project being written from inside the partnership,” Julia said.
“Ah,” Lafleur said. “Good.”
She passed a pen to him, brushing his fingers. He began signing the papers, sheet after sheet. Some of the totals were affixed to years: fifteen, twenty, thirty. In thirty years he'd be pushing seventy. He came to a sheet that listed his equipment: backhoe, bulldozer, and dump truck, even his pickup truck, and valued them at $ 110,000, of which he owed over $70,000. The same bank still held the titles, but under a different account number now, tucked into the numberings for Blaylock and Lafleur, Incorporated. He stopped there, alarmed, holding the pen poised above the paper. He was about to sign away his dream of going independent, of skimming the waters of finance with a streamlined outfit (and of returning to his children in the evening), of staying light and solvent day to day (and of being with his woman at night, their feet touching between the sheets, the blankets pulled up to their chins, the moon hanging in the window).
Suddenly, the idea that anything had ever been his seemed foolish—not the machines he'd carried like the image of a woman, not those machines he'd internalized: bearing, ball joint, armature, shaft, bucket, blade and track. He had dreamed them, how they moved and yielded, how they drew him and how they resisted, as he might dream a woman. All this was about to pass away and leave him in the shadowland of uncertain, functional possession and endlessly shifting numbers that he would wear always, irritating and hot like a set of Mormon underwear.
He stared at the list of machines. The print fuzzed in his vision. He wished not to see the numbers, not to understand them. His personal debt would be plowed into the company. What he had paid on his machinery would be set against a much greater indebtedness. He would be in debt to the company in which he was a partner. He would be in debt to himself. What had been his would be the company's, and paying off the debt would not be an alternative. The only way he would ever be free was to sell his indebtedness, his share, or to liquidate. He would never see the titles to his machines, and never own half the company, not any more than he could bend over and eat out his liver.
He felt the silence around him, Julia and Louis looking at him. He didn't raise his head but signed the sheet, and he felt a knot in his belly, then almost frantically he signed again and again to the right of the red X marks. He finished and looked up at Julia. She tapped the papers into a neat stack. Her face smiled at him. She placed the ballpoint in the center of the top sheet. He felt his body going rigid. He felt the way Mrs. Good's Abyssinian jackass had looked.
Julia turned her head and looked toward Louis. Lafleur didn't move, though he understood that her gesture was meant to refer him to Louis. He rejected her act of deference. Louis was either looking at him or he and Julia were exchanging a look of concern. It occurred to Lafleur that besides manipulating numbers the purpose of an accountant was to try to keep clients at a distance from the totals that had the air of finality to them, and then to defer obligations. Julia was trying to escape him. He stared furiously at her. She didn't respond. He thought that one should also keep one's distance from accountants, and not ever jostle their masks, because they were in a class along with lawyers, doctors, priests, insurance agents, and morticians, those who service death in its various aspects. He wondered if what wore Julia Rose down was always having to keep her eye on her escape route while she tended the portals to other people's horrors.
5
THE NEXT DAY he sat in his backhoe. Rain dotted the windshield and slid down to the rubber molding on the outside. The backhoe, which he'd just driven up into the bed of his dump truck, growled beneath him. He was at Zymanski's warehouse, loading his equipment—which was no longer his. He would take the equipment to the Rome project tonight. Phil Grimes, a heavy-equipment operator and an old friend, was to transport the LeTourneau. Lafleur had to finish here, then stop at the toolshed to pick up his dog and clothes, and be at Blaylock's by eight o'clock to meet Phil.
His truck was a recalcitrant starter in the wet and he'd left it running, too, as he loaded. The backhoe had its vibration and it took up the vibration that came through the steel bed of the truck, up through the bed mounts on the frame from the trembling diesel engine. Lafleur was eating a cheese sandwich that he'd bought from a machine. The height he was at gave him a westward view of Swan Island, an industrial park, of the docks on the Willamette, and to the southwest of downtown Portland. A cloud cover stretched from the Coast Mountains over the city, and the low area from Swan Island to downtown looked like a pool of darkness filled with tiny candles. It was raining gently.
He bit off a chunk of sandwich and looked out the right-hand window at the warehouse, an old brick building painted gray. A man in uniform walked by the front of it. He'd seen that one a few minutes ago, a figure too big, much too tall, and too young to be the watchman Lafleur knew, Dave Petra, an old man with hunched shoulders. But then Dave appeared from the side of the building, climbed the steps onto the loading dock, and went inside to the offices. He shambled behind windows. The other man came back around from the other side of the warehouse and moved to the end of a line of equipment that stretched from the corner of the warehouse behind Lafleur's truck to the street. He had a watchful air and a light step for such a big man.
When Dave came back along the windows inside the warehouse, the other one vanished behind the equipment. Dave stepped out onto the loading dock and glanced up toward Lafleur, then moved down the steps and headed off in the opposite direction from where the other one had gone, back around the building. It was the second time Lafleur had seen that tonight, the two men prowling in a kind of extended dance, always missing each other. It seemed odd.
He stuffed the last of the sandwich in his mouth, pulled on his gloves, pushed open the door, climbed down, and walked to the edge of the truck bed. The backhoe's arm angled upward and the toothed bucket hung like a dislocated mandible over his head. His trailer and Caterpillar bulldozer, still loaded from his last job, stood in Zymanski's line of machines. His truck stood out in the open with its bed cocked up a foot and bridged to the ground by the two steel ramps that he had used to load the backhoe. The backhoe was a good-sized one, a Case 280B, and the truck was a Mack ten-yard rig, but not even the two of them together seemed particularly big because of their company in the line of machinery: bulldozers, earthmovers, cranes, semi-trailers and tractors, lowboys and more dump trucks. They were a prehistoric-looking bunch, mammoth animals, queerly appendaged and heavily armored. He gazed tenderly down the line as if to bid the machines farewell, and looking in the direction of the street he saw the big man again, across the street, standing under the awning of a used-furniture shop. A flickering red neon light played on the man's figure and rainwater streamed from the edge of the awning. Lafleur guessed Zymanski had hired a second watchman, but he couldn't make out why the man was over there. The figure did not move.
Lafleur turned back into the bed of his truck, crouched over the first of four chains, and fastened it to the undercarriage of the backhoe. He moved around, fastening the other three chains. Each time he bent, a rivulet of water slid from the hood of his slicker. It had been raining all day. His gloves were soaked. His shirt collar and socks were wet, the cuffs of his trousers were wet, and the moisture had wicked up to his knees. Quickly, he worked around the backhoe the second time, securing the chains to eyelets welded to the corners of the truck