awful. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” he repeated. He felt bedazzled. “I'll do it.”
Jewel inhaled and seemed to grow larger in her chair. Her eyes brightened and looked young in her old face, and in response Lafleur felt his eyes welling again. She said, “When that man Clinton U came here I thought you were making another deal.”
“No, I don't know him. And I should have thought of this myself,” Lafleur said. Then he asked, “What kind of project is it?”
“Blaylock's? I'm not sure. Maybe a government project.”
“Do you know where?”
“Southeast Oregon.”
Lafleur thought about that. “Out there it'd probably have to be a government job,” he said, thinking about the place—the desert. “A lot of money. Lots of concrete, I bet,” he said, thinking about government design, about tearing open the sand and rock and pouring concrete in the desert, about the trucks and their loads made vulnerable by the heat, about how fast the concrete would set up.
“You're going to talk to Ned?” Jewel said.
“And Louis,” he said. Despite himself, even he had begun to feel a little tickle of greed. “I want Louis right behind me if I need him.” The sunlight came through the window at a low slant and hit the chandelier, overwhelming the electric bulbs, but wildly activating the prisms. Small, rainbow-hued shafts of light glittered all across the ceiling and over the hutch and knickknacks on the opposite wall, and down to the passageway. It was like an elongated flower spraying its parts through the room. Lafleur thought about concrete, the slaked surfaces in the dry, desert air. “Government,” he said.
2
IT WAS MAY, the second Saturday in May.
Lafleur would be able to name it months later as a beginning of sorts, although he didn't really believe in beginnings any more than he believed in endings. Maybe he believed in intersections as if bodies in space appeared from the gloom and sank toward one another, incandescent, and in rare instances adhered together and thickened to make something massy like a nodule on a stalk. But how such an occurrence was caused he had no idea. Nor could he say how it should be marked except as an illusion, a “functional” beginning…by a signature on a piece of paper, a photograph in a wedding album, a tiny footprint on a birth certificate, or an old mudprint, some seed, or mineralized egg. And for him, what encounters marked the “beginnings” in his short life—mother, stepmother, estranged wife, daughter, son, dead second daughter, infirm father, work, war…. He glanced back over his shoulder as he thought this as if to see his entanglement, the strands that clung to him, heavy as rope, endless, twisting and snarling in his trail.
What he saw, truly, was the inside of the toolshed, grown dark and littered. He'd just returned from his father and Jewel's place. He'd made a pot of coffee, fed his dog, then hunkered down next to the doorway of the shed in a patch of sun. He straightened his head and arched his back, pressing his shoulders against the clapboard. The shed stood between the river and the house his parents had built when he was a boy. The dog, Jones, was a Labrador retriever, a road waif that had adopted him several months ago. His coffee, one of his few luxuries, he made strong from freshly ground beans. He held the mug before his nose, inhaling the pungent steam as he looked up from under his eyebrows at the old family house. It was a rental, now. It had an elevated deck and pale-blue window sills. The cedar siding had begun to gray. He should bleach and refinish it.
In the old days, the shed at his back had been a place of fragrance—wood shavings, solvent, oil, and the flinty odor from the honing wheel. It had been a place where plans were studied and modified and tools kept as the house was built. As a boy of nine or ten, he'd looked up at the emerging house from this very spot: concrete foundation, studwork, the skeleton of the roof, then the raiment, skirting and stairway, plywood, the deck, siding, windows, roofing, the stone chimney. For a time the shed had been the germinating cell from which everything emanated. When he was eleven he and his parents moved into the house. He had a bedroom window from which he should have been able to see the shed, but only a patch of the shed's metal roof could be picked out, and sometimes on overcast days even it took on the precise coloration of air. The rest of the shed, hidden by a screen of ferns and blackberry bushes or camouflaged by age and weather to match the surrounding foliage, was quite invisible. He had considered that a great mystery.
When he'd been troubled, night after night when he was fourteen, after his mother died, he sat at the window and looked with longing down toward the old nearly invisible place of calm. Now that window was dark in the shadows. Looking at it and remembering filled Lafleur with longing, and he thought this a mystery, too, the transduction of the boy's longing into the more complicated, less acute, more chronic, and more comical longing of a tangled-up man.
Lafleur lowered his eyes to the dog, Jones. She had a crippled leg and a congenital overbite so extreme that she could not eat out of a dish. Her way was to tip the dish and spill the contents, then eat the food off the ground. She grunted as she ate. She had a fixation on her dishes. She carried them around, buried them, and slept with them. She had a stash of the chewed-up remains of five or six plastic dishes in a small open pit at the base of a blackberry bush. Lafleur had chained an aluminum dish to a timber, but she'd mangled the light metal until it came loose from the clasp. Then he tried a ten-pound cast-iron pot he'd found, thinking it might be heavy enough to discourage her, but he caught her carting it off, her neck muscles bulging with the weight of it as she stumbled drunkenly through the weeds. Now he chained the dog so that he could retrieve the pot when she was finished. He had tried simply pouring the food on the ground, too, but Jones refused to eat it. Not only did she covet her dishes, but she also attached a ritual to them.
The cast-iron pot lay on its side. Jones lunged at the heap of food, then lifted her head to chew with her back teeth. She wagged her tail and gazed at him with her golden eyes. Her shiny black coat rippled as she moved. Behind her stood his pickup truck. Its deep-blue hood hazily reflected the clear sky and the leaves and white limbs of the cottonwoods that lined the drive. A fly, trapped in a Coke bottle on the ground next to Lafleur, buzzed noisily. The cottonwoods rattled in the evening breeze. From the other side of the blackberry bushes he heard hoofbeats. There was a stable over there below the house, and a horse, a chestnut mare owned by the Goods, the people renting the house. For a moment the hoofbeats went fast enough to be two horses. Jones looked up, raising her ears and sniffing the air. The hoofbeats stopped. Lafleur could hear the river down below the shed, the soft, never-ending whisper of the water eating at the bank. His pickup's engine ticked as it cooled from the thirty-mile drive down from Portland.
He took a sip of coffee. Soon he would walk over to the Goods' place and use their telephone to call Ned Blaylock. For the moment he didn't move, but hunkered there and thought about Blaylock, whom he remembered even with some amusement now, and sardonically, as the perpetrator of his childhood nightmare: the hulking, forbidding man, a black welder's skullcap perpetually on his head, the hump of bone like a bolthead high under the inflamed skin of his nose, the sagging flesh of his face, and the whites of his eyes the color of rust. He thought about Jewel and his father, and about his mother, who back when he was fourteen had been brought home from the hospital because the doctors gave her no hope. She had brain cancer. The chemotherapy made her bones shatter. He remembered vividly how she had looked, skeletal and frail, her eyes and cheeks sunken, and he remembered the smell of her body rotting from the inside. It was as if she had already been buried, then unearthed to die again. In ten days she was gone. He remembered how, when he was younger, she never failed to kiss him goodnight, and how her dark hair fell across his face, how it smelled of the ground, and how that earthy darkness of her affection, her essence to him, seemed finally to merge with the shadow cast by her death. He thought about the house and his mother's happiness with it for three years. He thought about the shed at his back. He could almost feel the density and confusion in the narrow room, that darkness pressing against the root of his spine.
The shed was loaded with old things and his things—his cot and bedding, his hotplate and tiny black-and-white television, a small woodburner he had moved in,