“Well, don’t. Here, look at this here.”
Dessert arrived, a slice of cake with candles and two singing busboys. Wade smiled, seeing Joe’s mint-colored drink reflected in his eyes. Wade wondered if now was a good time to give him the envelope.
“Joe, do you miss your dad?”
Joe dipped the last scrap of duck into the congealed sauce.
“Never had one.”
“Yeah you did, everybody has a dad. You just said so.”
Joe coughed. “No, I meant I never knew him.”
“But didn’t you ever want to know?”
“Wade, does it really matter all that much?” Joe said, suddenly reddening. He picked up the check and stood up, digging a few crumpled bills out of his pocket.
“Damn,” he said, counting them, “This was supposed to last me the rest of the month.”
Wade went to the door to wait, pondering the reflections in the wide glossy windows, of dark couples talking, of golden sconces festooning the walls, of smoky air, wavering. Joe paid and they began the walk back to the trailer, Wade’s body full of dinner, his head full of ideas.
“How come you never got married, Joe; don’t you like women or something?”
“I just never cared all that much one way or the other.”
“Not even my mom either?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“How did you guys meet?”
“Oh, I was doing a highway job in a little town in Iowa, and used to eat in the diner where she worked. We went to a few movies. When the job was over I moved on.”
“Did you ever at least kiss or anything?”
Joe stopped. “I mean it, Wade; this’s getting on my nerves.”
“Okay.”
They continued down a long street of warehouses. Wade noticed they forgot to return their ties and jackets, and now he and Joe seemed like a pair of something, clowns or dancers or hobos. He bounced up the steel stairs to a loading dock, liking walking alongside Joe, being on different levels. For the rest of the way, he bobbed up and down the various platforms the rest of the way home.
“How come you came when mom went in the hospital?”
Joe unlocked the trailer.
“She wanted to make sure you got looked after.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much. She mostly slept.”
Joe still hungry for some reason, ate the remainder of Wade’s cake, while Wade lay on the job box looking up at the metal struts of the ceiling.
“I wish I knew everything that was ever going to happen.”
“Yeah, and I guess it’s about time we found a place for you, too.”
“What place?”
“Somewhere better than here. An orphanage or whatever. We can’t have you always hanging around like this.”
Suddenly, the metal struts felt like iron bars, and Wade sat up.
“Joe, do you think you’ll ever want to know about your father? What happened to him?”
“Wade, I warned you about that, didn’t I?”
“But wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Wade, for crying out loud, I don’t know anything about the guy.”
Wade leapt up. “I do!” he announced.
“What d’you mean you do?”
“I mean I don’t, but Evan Gallantine does.”
Joe jumped. “What do you know about Evan Gallantine?”
“He came by earlier. He told me to give you this.”
Wade handed over the envelope. Joe read it. Read it again. He looked up, his mouth thin.
“He told me to make sure you’re here tomorrow morning,” Wade explained. “He’s going to come by and talk to you about the. . .”
“Time for bed, Wade.”
Joe walked to the door and stepped out. Wade followed and stood in the open door.
“Joe, I don’t think I can sleep now.”
“Why not?”
“I keep wondering about my own dad.”
“Your mom told you didn’t have one.”
“But you said I did, and I believe you.”
“I didn’t say that, Wade. I said. . .oh never mind. Just get to bed.”
He walked down the step, and Wade quietly followed him.
“Joe, you said we need a place for me. I was thinking, what if we could find my dad? Maybe he’d still want me. Maybe. . .”
“Dammit, Wade!” Joe yelled, exasperated, whirling around so fast Wade lost his balance, and fell from the stairs onto the ground where his head smacked onto a large chunk of rock. Wild light shot across his eyelids; his eyes exploded with leopard spots, flashing sparklers and exploding starbursts, mysterious shouting reverberated in his mind. As he blacked out, mumbling “fireworks”, Wade realized one last thing, even one more thing to be happy about. The most dazzling birthday ever.
AFTER JOE CLEANED and dressed his eye out and went to bed, Wade lay in a kaleidoscoping darkness, all night his body a long peninsula of limbs, a short walnut shell. He would float. He would see across the screen of his eyelids first flickering then flashing then throbbing lights. There was a dull black knot behind the swollen eye where he had struck his head, where if he trained his mind he could soften the knot and a strange blindness would come over him; then he could sleep a while, before it began all over again.
The next morning, at daybreak, he was vaguely aware of Joe slipping out and tried to wake up but couldn’t. Later, as daylight filled the room, he got up. In the glass of the front door window, he examined the yellow bruise over his left eye. With his new short hair, his face was unfamiliar in the wavery glass; he seemed smaller, shorter, weaker, then larger, taller, stronger. For a second his mother’s face ghosted across his reflection, how she looked in the coffin, then his hurt eye burned as warm salty fluid ran down his cheek. He closed his eyes.
He heard tapping. Opening his eyes, his reflection was replaced by a familiar-looking adult standing outside the door, rapping his knuckles urgently on the door.
“How you doing, chief?”
Wade recognized the face, but couldn’t quite remember who it was. The man opened the door, and as Wade stepped back, slowly remembering, Evan Gallantine stepped in.
“He’s not here, is he?”
Wade shook his head, which made it hurt again, and he put his hands to his temples.
“Sorry,” he said.
Evan sighed. “What happened to your head?”
“I trimmed it myself.”
“Looks good, too. I didn’t mean your haircut, though. I meant the swelling around your eye.”
Wade thought for a minute. “I guess I fell.”
Evan examined his eye more closely. “Did anybody look at it?”
“What for?”
“A concussion, for one. You have any dizziness? Blackouts?”
“No.”
“No flashing lights?”
Wade shook his head again. Evan felt his forehead.
“Did you try putting ice on this?”
“We don’t have a freezer.”
As Wade closed his eyes, Evan’s hand left his forehead.
“Wade, I need you to think hard. Where can I find Joe?”
Wade looked up. “What day is it?”
“It’s Sunday.”
“There’s one place we could try, but I’d have to take you there.”
“Fine,” Evan said, “it’s a nice morning for a walk.”
A THIN FOG had settled in during the night, and as Wade led Evan toward the new tower where Joe might be, early sunlight fell on the mist making everything fresh and clean.
“Wade, has Joe said any more about what he has in mind for you?”
“We think I should go live somewhere like a cemetery.”
“Cemetery?”
“Orphanage, I mean.”
“Couldn’t you stay with him?”
“Okay with me, but it’d be hard on Joe.”
“Still, I imagine something can be worked out.”
Wade
smiled, running his finger in the moisture beading on the fence, less nervous about taking Evan Gallantine to Joe.
They walked among several truck trailers parked around the loading platforms and came out at the elevator cages. Wade pressed the call button, and one of the cars suspended high above began its descent. At least being Sunday, there was no one on site but security guards, who knew him and no longer paid much attention. Or even noticed as he walked Evan into the lift car when it stopped at his feet. He slid the door shut, click, and the car lifted rapidly, as fast as if it were falling.
As it rose above the fog, the air felt bluer, the sun warmer. Wade closed his eyes; bright red-orange swarmed inside his head as he ticked off the floors with each clank of the elevator, 37, 38, and at 43 his finger pulled away from the button, so at the next floor, they stopped.
At that altitude crosscurrents of air whipped across the open floor. In his feet, Wade could feel the building’s subtle sway in the concrete. A wall of plastic swelled from the steady wind on the south side. Wade pointed to it; Evan nodded, intuitively quiet. He leaned to speak in Wade’s ear. Above the rush of wind Wade understood he should give the two men a few minutes alone. As Evan went through a splice in the plastic wall, Wade sat against a cement pillar, where he was less exposed. Hoping it was all right to come here.
A PLACE OF rest. Joe Meeks on the 44th floor. Where you stood above it all, the firmament to yourself. Rising sun in full flare; strident magenta east, the west, dark. Sky, earth, sun, and air. Layers of it; thick and sooty near the earth, benzene pink then pallid green then above that aqueous swirls of blue, and above it all, the sun, as always. What things it must have seen, eon after eon, Joe thought.
North, the curving horizon, the round highlands, the crest of the Palisades and the Hudson, flat and burnished green. At his feet, the brick and steel city, a lichen feeding on the island bedrock. And hundreds of yards straight down, the excavations, the microbe machines, and those concrete pilings, toothpicks in sand.
He leaned against an outer column, feeling the tremulous sway of the entire structure, mere steel and concrete against the living earth, a furnace which could split ocean floors, spread continents, fold hundreds of miles of granite like a soft towel.
No one cares, he trumpeted to himself, proud nonetheless for going to mid-town yesterday though no one listened. He was used to that.
Behind him, the elevator clanked, and he stood motionless, eager to be unseen. Through the murky plastic, two figures, one short, one tall, come onto the open floor. The tall separated and emerged through the protective plastic.
Eyes met.
“The door was open,” Evan said.
Joe looked away.
That was the introduction. Evan expected no more, and walked to join Joe Meeks at the edge.
“Quite a cathedral you have here.”
Joe didn’t reply. Below a large tug boat nudged a solitary ocean liner slowly up river.
“I hear you think it won’t be stable.”
“When it settles. Just a matter of time. Same as happened in Boston with that skyscraper there. Probly worse. At least no one can say they weren’t told.”
Their eyes met again, looking one in the other for familial resemblances.
“Don’t the engineers make allowances for settling?”
Joe scoffed. “Sure they allow for it, but enough? These pilings are only set down in man-made fill, when not fifty feet below that is solid bedrock. They could avoid a big catastrophe, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Probably hard to prove that kind of thing.”
“Maybe I can’t, but time can. Three months, a fraction here becomes an quarter inch there. Six months they occupy all the offices, load up every floor, an inch, two, three or four. A year, better part of a foot. Floors buckle, windows break out, elevator shafts warp. Proof enough? A hundred years from now? They oughta’ve done it right. I did what I could.”
“You went to mid-town, you mean. To the managing agent.”
Joe crossed his arms.
To the west, at Newark, a jet drifted into a landing while simultaneously in the east, at Kennedy, another rose in takeoff.
“So what now?”
“Now nothin. I move on.”
“What about Wade?”
“Wade? We’ll get him into a good home somewhere.”
“But he’s your son.”
Joe toed the cement’s edge where it fell squarely into space. “What makes you think that.”
Evan laughed. “I’m a sucker for the obvious.”
“Well just because his mother died doesn’t presto chango make me a father.”
It grew quiet as the wind let up. The Hudson became a sheet of liquid metal in which an ocean liner spread a wake of veiny ripples.
“I never should’ve agreed to it,” Joe said.
“Agreed to what?”
“To any of it, even to going out there. I mean I hardly even knew her. It was only those couple months. Things happened, but we both of us knew it was never more than that. The work ended, I left, and we both figured that was it, except, then it wasn’t. By the time she was able to get hold of me, she’d already decided to raise him on her own. And she didn’t want anything from me, just to use me on the birth certificate because she thought it’d make things easier for him. Which was fine. I said I’d send her money, and I did, whenever I had any, though she never even asked for that. All this time she never asked for anything, until now. In the hospital.”
Joe stared into the slowly undulating plastic screen, and saw her looking up at him, her eyes dark, waxy, her face feverish, her hair falling out, her veins yellow. Saw her trying to talk, saying all those things, how they were both people who neither one ever cared about much, how she’d been lying for days thinking it over, feeling worse about that than she did about even dying, how she said Joe should marry her, before it was too late, right then and there, she said, so they couldn’t orphan Wade, so Joe could still have the chance she never did, and how she grabbed him, saying deep down it’s what he needed, and as he tried to tell her there was no way he could all of a sudden start being a father, she leaned up so fast he thought she’d yank the tubes out of her arm and said, You don’t need to be a father, Joe, she said, you need to be a human being.
He watched the ocean liner disappearing peacefully upriver.
“I knew she wasn’t all that healthy, but up to the last I sure never imagined it was that bad. She didn’t even make it past that afternoon. I wish I’d never listened. Wade would be better off if I’d done nothing at all.”
Wind caught the splice in the plastic, whipping it open, revealing the boy himself. Joe shook his head and walked over to him.
“Look at him, Evan. I’m no good for him. He needs some of those government offices to put him with decent people who’d know how to take care of him, not a harebrained misfit like me.”
“Good luck on that, Joe. People who take in nearly grown boys do it for money, tax breaks, that kind of thing, not because they want a son.”
“Look, Evan. I got the envelope. Why are you here, to lecture me about Wade?”
“Not exactly, although if you had better finances you wouldn’t need a lecture.”
Joe spit over the edge, and followed it as it fell to oblivion.
“You mean money?”
“A lot of money.”
“And the catch is it’s got to do with Frances Meeks, I suppose?”
“It does.”
“You know I don’t have anything to do with those people.”
“It’s no problem. I can deal with them for you.”
“Why, because you’re the top vulture now?”
“I think it’s time that land did everyone in this family some good.”
“Bravo for you.”
“You included, Joe.”
“Sorry. Not int’rested.”
“Not even for Wade’s sake?”
Joe felt Wade’s eye on him. His injured eye.
&nb
sp; “No, but I’m curious. What is your angle, anyway?”
“There’s a group of lower valley ranchers who have a consortium called the Hellwater Reservoir Corporation. It formed many years ago, in an effort to get the Hellwater dammed.”
“It already is damned.”
“The point is, they finally got their dam site approved.”
Joe’s eyes flickered. “Where at?”
“Bitterroot Gap.”
Joe laughed outright, then stepped back, suddenly feeling loopy and too near the edge.
“What’s so funny?” Wade asked.
“Nothing, really,” Evan said, “it means the dam is going to inundate the entire upper Hellwater and the Meeks ranch with it.”
“What’s inundate?”
“Drown it. All of it. Buildings, fields, sheep, cattle; the only livestock that place will produce then will be lake trout.”
“Better than ratty sheep and shit-ass cattle,” Joe said. “As far as I’m concerned, they couldn’t put that ranch under enough water if they built a dam right on top of it.”
Evan shrugged.
“If it’s going to drown, how could there be any money?” Wade asked.
Joe looked at Evan. “Wade must have read my mind.”
“There’s a way,” Evan said, biting a cuticle.
“Have a seat, Wade,” Joe said, sitting down, “this oughta be good.”
“It’s fairly straight ahead,” Evan began. “The HRC will have to pay compensation for any ranch their dam floods, but only at fair market value, which for upper Hellwater land is next to nothing. Those ranches are just subsistence operations, and the families are old and gone away, so HRC expects to pay very little. What they can’t afford, though, is to have any of those old timers stall on selling, or they lose time and eventually, if they can’t show progress, they could even lose the dam site itself.”
He squatted on his haunches, drawing imaginary figures on the floor.
“If I can offer them the entire valley, uncontested, they’d save a mint in legal fees getting those old timers out, and in exchange, they’d pay a premium for the land.”
“Good plan. Too bad you don’t happen to own the entire valley.”
“I spoke to all the ranchers involved, explaining the plan very carefully: They legally consign their ranches over to me, using my company as sole proprietor, which in turns sells to HRC. Once the money changes hands, my company then divides the profits among all the families equally, less expenses and a small fee.”
“You been in the California sun too long. You’ll never get those ranchers to agree with you.”