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