Today, Alfred wore his blue and gold Thunderhead Properties fleece vest over his golf shirt, and every time he saw his breath steam over the table and make ghost shapes on the window he wished he had brought the full-sleeved jacket too. It was as cold at the table as it was out there, out in the black center of the lake.
When Alfred wasn’t looking at Chap and Joshua he was casting dire glances at the thermostat. And at the data-crammed dial of his fat-faced watch. And when he wasn’t pondering these instruments he was nervously touching the unopened Barolo, which he had neatly basketed with a set of Austrian crystal glasses, a small genoa salami, a wedge of hand-cut Asiago and the blue and gold Thunderhead Properties Welcome To The Valley brochure.
Then Chap opened his mouth. “They say this Joe Buczko has a short fuse. Do you know that, Alfred? Your agent Greg knows it, I’ll tell you that. He says he’s lucky he still got a complete set of kneecaps.”
When Chap spoke he tugged at the blue Yogo sapphire in his right earlobe, as though it were a wart that hurt him.
The way he kept digging at it annoyed Alfred, who said, “if you don’t like the stone what do you wear it for? Just pull the thing out and put some Vaseline or something on the hole.”
Alfred turned to Joshua, who said nothing. But Joshua’s eyes glowed orange and he smiled as though the orange glow were from a halo. He looked like a Joshua, and he was called the Preaching Plumber. He didn’t need to open his mouth and preach for you to know why,
“You guys are all finished here,” Alfred said. “You’re sitting pretty.” He nodded to the right - at Joshua. “You did your pipes, perfect.” Then he nodded to the left - at Chap. “You did your walkways and fireplaces and garden walls, perfect. Soon as the coffee’s gone, so are the both of you. You take your trowels and torches and you’re out of here. Then the ball is in my court.”
“Or is the court in your balls?” Again Chap tugged at his Yogo-studded lobe, but this time it seemed to act like an on-switch, setting the corners of Chap’s mouth in motion until they formed the gloating grin of an animation-movie shark. Once more, Alfred turned morosely to Joshua, but Joshua was now off somewhere else, eyes glowing like embers – on the path he had never quite left since he installed the stove, the big Magma Six, with its special feature, a gizmo called The Sabbath Switch.
In his early life in The City, Alfred had heard of Orthodox Jews employing someone they called a Shabbas Goy – to turn stoves and lights on and off on the Sabbath. “Same thing, right?” he had asked Joshua. While Joshua just stood there, silent as the black lake.
When Joshua spoke he dropped his voice, the low decibels his way of conveying reverence and awe. “This was the first year our little band had The Passover. For the feast we made lamb. Then we finished it on Easter.” He paused for several beats. “Have either of you ever had The Passover?”
The comment shot Alfred way back to Queens. Why was he calling it THE Passover? Alfred thought he had at last become a westerner, having wandered up and down the old stump towns of the Great Divide since the real estate crash of 1987, sniffing boom in the air. But this Joshua, something about just listening to him made Alfred want to smell garlic meatballs and tomato gravy in his old grandmother’s kitchen. What he recalled even more, though, was a viciously different smell: how the pavement smelled on the day Joey Butch kneed him in the teeth and pistol-whipped him, ear to ear, right under the monster shadow of a Pan Am coming down onto the LaGuardia runway. The engine noise was so loud nobody ever heard Alfred scream, not even the ants swarming out of the cracked concrete to feast on Alfred’s bleeding, unconscious face.
“You don’t rob the robbers,” Joey had said in the car. “It’s uncouth.”
Alfred summarily gave up running numbers in favor of just running. He ran three thousand miles before he stopped - at a fence where he saw his first bison, the first one that wasn’t etched on a nickel. Then he busted hump to become the top agent at Thunderhead Properties. In time they made him the regional manager. When one of his agents sold the old Osprey Lodge on the lake, the hulk to end all hulks, the listing broker proudly shuffled into Alfred’s office to show him the Buy Sell. On a thin line at the bottom was a typed-out name and a madman signature. As manager, Alfred saw hundreds of Buy Sells, but the way this one grabbed his eyeballs it could have been an arrest warrant. His mind flew right back to the raging shadow of the plane. To the stink of blood and engine grease. And it dawned on him that this signature was the work of the same hand that had crunched into his belly, surgically dropping his jaw down just right to meet the rising knee.
The men drank up and dropped their Java Lava paper cups into the last of the black-plastic bags. Joshua visually scoured the room. He retrieved a Stanley tape measure from the floor, then lifted his eyes and locked them on the head of a Bighorn sheep hung high above a run of red birch cabinetry. It was a ram’s head, brow plated with a long, curvaceous sweep of horns. Every so often Joshua’s lips moved inaudibly, as though he were murmuring something only the ram could hear.
Like a dog shut in alone, Alfred started cocking his ear, paying extra attention to any sound in the vicinity of the front door. There was the slimmest of chances one final electrician from Valley Vulcan, the heating sub, would show up before Joe Buczko and his wife got in. The new owners were flying in for a late afternoon walk-through of the monster renovation – and then, of course, their very first night on the lake - in a bed whose hand-hewn posts towered over many of the old cabins strung around the former logging sites.
All Chap and Joshua were there for was the mop-up stuff. A little soldering here, some grout-work there. But their business was over and done with, and this was Alfred’s deal, a Thunderhead Properties exclusive. Big sale, manager level, no worming out of being there for the welcome.
“You speak for the company, Alfred. In this deal you ARE the company.” So said the email from the CEO, oblivious to the fact that, the last time Alfred met Joey Buczko regarding a business deal, he was clubbed with so much gun-steel his face cracked like the shell of an egg. Alfred was no beauty contestant, not ever. But since that day his only shot would have been a dog show, because his face was pushed in like an English Bulldog’s – and he even breathed in that labored, bulldog way.
Alfred considered, then dismissed making a desperate phone call to Roland Shelby, who had been the general contractor. Roland was a regular king shit out here - his Bozeman office had done the Ted Turner place in the Gallatin - but there was no point to making such a call, nothing to be gained.
The turntable way back in Alfred’s mind kept replaying Roland’s last phone speech:
Electrical nightmare? That’s an understatement. We’d have had a shot if they’d gutted the place, but their architect wouldn’t. That old tinder box has so much crazy wiring it’s like a giant spaghetti bowl back of the walls. It’s worst down in the boiler room. Every time they put in a relay it blows – and there goes the boiler. There was an old-timer who knew those wires like the veins in his hand, but he’s dead. None of the young guys can figure it out.
Chap stalked Alfred, mercilessly wagging finger and tongue. “You should look at yourself in the mirror, Alfred. You should see yourself the way I see you.”
He ticked off all the warning signals. Skin pouching and sagging everywhere. Purple under the eyes. The wattle. The Michelin Man rings of flesh. “Do you even walk on the golf course, Alfred? Or are you a cart man? If you don’t move, your bowels won’t either.”
Alfred turned and snapped, “You want to see me look young and pretty? Make the heat come on. My cheeks will get rosy real fast.”
This time Chap gave his earlobe a long tug and an upward twist, as though he were aiming the ear canal to receive transmissions from the ether. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, his eyes suddenly sharp as darts. “I want to tell you what I did, because I believe it saved my life. For fourteen days I lived on maple syrup and lime juice. I took it three times a day, no other food, and every morning I drank a quart of salt water. The fat melted off me, my blood pressure dropped, I mean really dropped. And best of all, Alfred, nothing bothers me any more. I’m clean, really clean. Twenty five miles of intestines and a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels, clean as a baby’s.”
As he listened, Alfred made a rough calculation of how fast two Hummers - the original dune monsters, not the new ones shrunken and gussied up for the American road – could make it in from the Valley airport. The word was that, on land, the Buczkos only traveled in Hummers. A His Hummer and a Hers Hummer. Then he rose from the table and said, “The two of you, why don’t you just take off.” He waved a hand at the gift basket. “There’s not enough wine and cheese.”
As Chap loaded the last of his tools on his truck he seemed determined to say something that Alfred would remember, once Alfred was left sitting there alone. Chap started talking about a friend of his, a Wyoming outfitter named Iver. According to Chap, this Iver once said, “if Joe Buczko likes you he can’t stop giving you things. One day he gave me snakeskin boots, the next day ostrich boots. Christ’s sake, he gave me more boots than I have feet for. He even tried to give me a Harley, just for showing him how to bow-hunt. But if Joe Buczko doesn’t like you…”
Back in the immense kitchen, Alfred wadded up a towel and went around obliterating the last motes of plaster dust on the various gleaming surfaces. It made no difference whether the material was stone or wood – whatever his bare hand touched had a glacial quality, not just cold but immutably cold. The afternoon’s drift towards evening was written in the continued fall of the thermostat, whose only heat stimulus was the shrinking threads of light still visible in the cloud-bound sky.
Alfred plunked himself down at the table again, listening for road sounds. His ice-white fingertips fiddled with the thatched weave of his Thunderhead Properties gift basket. All around him, the hall-sized room was armed to the teeth with shining appliances, but only one of these objects captivated Alfred – the big Magma stove with its six gas burners, each of which he saw as the approximate size of a Hummer hubcap. If the huge boilers were on the fritz, the gas that fed the stove certainly wasn’t. As always, Joshua’s gas pipes were infallible.
Alfred gingerly extracted one of the Austrian wine glasses and raised it, empty, to the ram on the far wall. He held the glass up and stared at the ram for a long while - until he felt the ram was possibly staring back at him. Then, for the longest stretch, he did nothing but sit and listen. He listened so hard for the Hummers he could even hear the ice forming, far out on the lake.
As the sky turned dark as the black waters, Alfred became obsessed with how fast the jets on the Magma Six, fed by Joshua’s flawless gas pipes, could push out molecules of gas. It would have to be enough of them, millions and billions, to push aside all those millions and billions of oxygen molecules already in the room.
There was only one way to know for sure: kill the pilot light, then twist all six burners to the ultra-high position. On a convenient shelf was the Magma Six operating manual. Alfred scooped it up, nosed through it and saw that, with a little jiggering, he could get the Sabbath Switch to do it for him.
But that was too big a decision to make all alone. So Alfred, his voice hushed like Joshua’s, stood before the wall and began to ask the ram.