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