Carry Me Home (79 page)

“Yeah. The monster and Miss Priss! Beauty and the Beast!”

“That story has a happy ending ...” Sara began.

“Not when Beauty’s lookin to be with Mister Rich Doctor.”

“Screw the self-pity shit!” Bobby snapped. “Tomorrow. I’m goina show it to Sara tonight. Tomorrow, Man, we get to work.”

Earlier that evening, after Linda had left, and left Tony in a funk, Brian and Cheryl and their children, Anton and Lara, had popped in for hot cider and Christmas cookies.

“Give me a week and I’ll explain to you what I’m thinking,” Bobby had told them.

“It’s okay,” Brian had said. Then he’d laughed. “But make us some money, huh? Two kids and Cheryl’s not back to work ...”

“I think it’s going to,” Bobby said.

Cheryl tried to hide her disappointment. Aside to Sara she said, “Why would anyone want to live out here?”

“I like the hills,” Sara countered. “And the pond. We went skating earlier and it was lovely.”

“You better be careful with that ice,” Cheryl said. “There was a boy who went through on the Loyalsock this week. He got trapped under and drowned.”

“Oh! I didn’t hear about—”

“The ice just isn’t thick enough yet.”

“That’s the river,” Sara had said. “The pond’s pretty solid.”

“But even this house!” Cheryl wrapped her arms about herself. “It’s so cold.”

“We’re planning to rebuild it,” Sara explained.

“Well—” Cheryl shook her head slowly, “I don’t know why. If you and Rob had just sold the place, we’d have the cash to move out of Miriam’s guest house. You could sell it for a subdivision like the new one over in Hobo Hollow. Then we’d all be rich.”

Bobby overheard her. “That would be one shot and gone,” he said. “Let me develop this plan, make this place pay you something every year. Besides, it’s like money in the bank. If it doesn’t work, we can always sell it later.”

Weeks earlier, months earlier, back to before they left California, Bobby had begun planning—game planning, financial planning, personal and business planning. It had gone slowly. The decision to split from his recent past had been made, yet the decision to step into his future had to be remade daily. What if it didn’t work? What if he took this opportunity and blew it—not only failing but causing hardship for others, digging a hole he would not be able to refill in a lifetime? What if he made something bad, something evil?

With patience, using all his design ability, Bobby had created a framework, a five-year, open-ended plan. Yet despite his efforts there were major gaps and unresolved problems. High Meadow would be the base for Environmental Energy Systems—EES—which at this moment wasn’t much more than a concept, and boxes of books, product pamphlets, technical reports and drawings. It would be a working farm, even if Bobby was not a farmer. It would be home—he had his family, his son to raise, his wife to cherish, and the house to rebuild. And High Meadow would be a gathering, a cause, an evolution of thought about energy, about veterans, about the self.

That was the design challenge. Financial planning was easier than planning a personal agenda, and that was easier than planning a code, an ethic for the times, a criterion of what presently was morally valid. “Values,” he’d told Sara, “can be ethereal. They change with the society, with the times.” He found he could not plot value projections in the same manner he once plotted income projections. To earn $30,000 a year in real estate commissions—the calculations had been simple. But how does one plan morality? Is it possible to project value goals? This year I will have 30,000 integrity points!

“Grandpa used to talk about living by a plan and a code,” he reminded Sara. “That’s the framework.” Yet as he’d tried to define it, refine it, it had become clouded and obscure. How do things work? How do children develop? What’s happened to the soldiers who fought in Viet Nam? What is the right way to live? Without a code could any plan, no matter how successful financially, produce the right, sustainable results? And if it did, would one know? And what were those “right” results? What is the final goal?

Even on paper it had become muddled, so Bobby had settled, temporarily, for Master Plan, Phase 1, Zero to Five Years; had settled, for one clamorous circuit of the carousel, one round with the calliope whizzing and banging, blaring and tooting.

Tony stopped, stared into the black overhead. He did not carry a flashlight. Beside him Josh too stopped, leaned lightly against Tony’s leg. The temperature had continued dropping. On the pond the ice expanded, fractured. Cracks shot out, split the ice for two, three, five hundred feet, the sounds long and fast like rifles firing. Tony remained motionless. More fractures, more eerie, cracking shrieks. Tony did not turn toward the pond. Overhead, north, just above the high meadow ridge, he saw Draco, the Dragon—a small-headed dragon, he thought—with its long tail curled about the Little Dipper. To the west, over the spillway, he identified Orion, the Hunter, seemingly aiming from his shoulder star, Betelgeuse, a double-barreled thumper at Draco. Yeah, Tony thought. Get some. Get some, Man. Happy New Year. Happy fuckin new year. Fuck Denham. Right now, Man, she’s probably unbuttoning his shirt. Screw the self-pity shit. New Year’s Eve and they don’t even have a beer! Not one fuckin beer. How the hell ken ya get fucked up without even one beer. Hot spiced cider!

Tony plodded forward into the dark shadow of the barn. He did not need to see. With one hand on the wood siding he edged downhill, into the wind, toward the tractor garage. His ears stung from the cold, his fingertips burned. Josh stayed next to him, bumping him every few steps. Tony reached down, ruffled the thick fur on the dog’s back. Somehow, Josh allowing him to do that was reassuring. “Fuckin women,” Tony muttered. “Playin games with men’s minds. Bitchin. Bitchin they’ve been kept down and cut out. But shit, so have we. So’s the average joe. They compare themselves with some wealthy motherfucker and call us chauvinist pigs. ‘We love you, Tony.’ Get off my fuckin ass, bitch. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Sure Linda. You woulda shit your pants if I’d said yes.”

Inside the tractor garage Tony worked his way to the forge. He’d dampened the firebox all the way down. Coals still smouldered and the stone and brick were warm. Josh nudged him. He grabbed the dog’s fur, ran his hands over Josh’s coat. “We could fire it up, huh, Boy? But that’d make a racket. Sara’d go through the roof if I woke Noah and Bobby’d have to come out and tell us to stop.” Tony crouched, pushed Josh’s jowls back, caressed the dog’s ears. “I bet right now,” he whispered, “she’s licking his nipples.” He stood, rolled his shoulders, thought to head back to his cubicle, his bunker. An immense cracking exploded from the far edge of the pond, blasted like artillery at him. He jolted, froze. Then whispered, “Tomorrow, Josh. Tomorrow ‘we get to work’! Like what the fuck have I been doing all my life?”

“Can you envision it, Sar?” They were cuddled together, in bed, excited, energized by ideas, by New Year’s resolutions, by plans.

“I think so,” Sara said.

“We’ve got the start-up capital from the sale of the house. We’ll probably never be in this position again.”

“I understand the part about the house,” Sara said.

“I’ve just made preliminary sketches,” Bobby said. “I want to change the roof line a little, and drop the collectors between the rafters. Then we’ll put the glazing on top of the rafters. The problem with most solar collectors is they’re ugly. But if the installation is beautiful ... if we can do it with this house, we could show it to people. It’s really going to look sharp. Really.”

“I believe you,” Sara said. “I know you can do it. But ... we’re not going to rip the roof off—”

“Oh! No. Not till summer. Or late spring.”

“Phew! I could picture us in here without a roof. And Cheryl’d be saying, ‘I don’t know how you can stand it.’”

Bobby chuckled. “You’d have to snuggle against me all the time.” He pulled her closer.

“I’d do that anyway,” Sara said. “But you’re getting so thin.”

“Naw. I’ve been gaining some back ever since we got here.”

“How much?”

“I’m one fifty-five, now. Anyway, I want to ask Tony to take over the farm.”

“You think he’s reliable?”

“I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about those guys. In San Jose. I’ve been asking myself, what happened to them? Good men. Most of em. Did you know Tony was a platoon sergeant?”

“Are you going to ask some of them to live here?”

“All I know right now is I’ve got to do something. Put em to work.”

“Building solar collectors?”

“Um-hmm. The whole works. Collection, control, storage. Retrofits. New construction. Whatever we can sell. Someplace along the line they gave up. Remember Granpa used to say, ‘Never give up.’ These guys learned to give up. They learned to be helpless. They can learn to achieve. I’ve got to show you it on paper. I can’t keep it all in my head.”

“Bobby, where are they going to sleep?”

“Well ... maybe ... in the barn ...”

“Could you convert that old pig house ...”

“Hey, the little barn! That’s an idea. We could look at it in the morning. If ... um ... you know ... like if we changed the roofline ... I’m sure the foundation ... then separate the length into cubicles ... it’d be like the hootches we had over there. Like a low barracks or a bunkhouse.”

“I could go back to work. Linda says the school system’s expanding. But I’ll need my Pennsylvania certificate.”

“Me too. If Nittany Mountain will accept those courses I took in California, I think I’m only a few credits shy of my degree. And I’ve got to get my contractor’s license. General and plumbing.”

Sara laughed. “You mean you’re going to be a plumber!”

“Yeah.” Bobby chuckled.

“My husband the skinny plumber.” Sara tickled him.

Bobby wiggled away, grabbed her hands. “And a roofer,” he said. “If we’re going to embed the collector arrays we’ll need to be roofers, too.”

“I could be a farmer’s wife, a plumber’s wife, and a roofer’s wife all at once.” Sara worked a hand free.

“And you could run the school. You could teach them everything they didn’t learn in grade school. And everything they forgot.”

“Ooo! All these men.” Again Sara laughed.

“Yeah.” Bobby laughed with her. Then he asked, “Do you remember what Granpa said about the self needing minimum maintenance? About being able to expand beyond one’s self?”

“Um-hmm. Opening oneself to teach, to create, to love.”

“How can you teach someone to expand beyond his or her self?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you know,” Bobby said. “That’s why you’re such a good teacher. That’s what you were teaching those spoiled brats in San Martin. That’s what I hope you’ll teach here.”

By eight thirty the next morning Tony had the forge roaring and the first iron bar glowing. His shirt was off. Outside the temperature was five degrees Fahrenheit. Wind gusts buffeted, bringing in the cold wall, then the pressure backed up and the hot air about the furnace surged out—oscillating, purging like freezing baths and hot saunas except better because his activity was also purging, requiring 100 percent concentration on the furnace, the metal and the turbocharger. Even the artillery bursts of ice fracturing on the pond didn’t divert his attention; even Linda was gone from his mind.

“
Hè
,” Bobby shouted. He was bundled up in hooded sweatshirt, jacket, a scarf over his mouth and nose. “
Hè
.” He shouted the Lenape word for hello, one of the few local Native American words he’d learned, found in a file tagged
Monsee-Lenape
in Grandpa’s office. No response. Between the turbocharger, the furnace roar, the wind and the ice Tony didn’t hear him. “Hey Man! Tony!”

Tony snapped his eyes over, then immediately back to his work. “Yo!”

“When you can, take a blow. I’d like to go over the plan with you.”

“Be a while,” Tony shouted. He did not divert his eyes.

“That’s okay.”

“We should fit the hinges on the posts,” Tony bellowed. “That set’s done.”

“Looks great.”

For a while Bobby stood watching Tony heat the bar then withdraw it, lay it on the old anvil and whale on it with the peen hammer, methodically flattening and forming the end of the thick bar into a hawk’s talon—the one strap alone a week’s work. Then he left, inspected the old pig shed, returned, watched Tony in his concentration. Finally he shouted, “I gotta show it to you.”

Tony sighed, leaned back, withdrew the bar and laid it in the ash bin, then hit the blower switch. Immediately the turbo wound down, the roar of the furnace sank to nothing more than the creaking of the firebrick. Again the pond fractures could be heard. “You make coffee?”

“Yeah. And Sara made fritters with syrup.”

“I gotta get these last two finished and the gate hung before it’s time to set out the taps.”

“Yeah. And more.”

In the kitchen Bobby laid out parts of the plan. “The structural design of the solar collector is flexible. The more we learn, the better we’ll be able to make them. Interested?”

“Hey.” Tony shrugged. “If that’s what you want, Man.”

“We build one, sell it.” Bobby could see Tony was not excited. “Build two, four, eight, sixteen. Sell em cheap. Get the venture rolling.”

“Fine.”

“And the farm’s got to produce, too.”

“That’s not a problem.”

“No, I don’t mean the way it’s been. You know that stuff you were doing for Granpa?”

“Yeah.”

“Double it. Triple it. Sugarbush. Strawberries. Feed corn. Apples and pears. Maybe vegetables. Maybe some chickens.”

“And alfalfa?”

“Yeah.”

Tony looked to the side. “Get serious, Man. That’d take ten people.”

“A whole squad, huh?”

Tony shifted uncomfortably.

“Maybe grapes,” Bobby said. “Run em up the hill at the north end of the pond. Like they grow em in Sonoma.”

“What the fuck!” Tony pushed his chair back.

“You were really getting into it, for Granpa. Getting inta those journals.”

“One crop, Man. I just thought we could make money with strawberries. There’s no fuckin ...” Tony peered around, through the hallway to the living room, through the doorway to the dining room. He didn’t want to offend Sara or anger her by cursing where Noah could hear. “There’s no fuckin way.” His voice was low, dispirited; his eyes cast to the back door.