Fellow Mortals (12 page)

The flat-cut sills are in position on the stones, fastened tight with anchor bolts and ready for the walls. They’ve set the girder on the piers, laid the joists, and nailed the flooring. It’s a satisfying platform, ten feet wide and fourteen long, its newness in the clearing seeming natural and clean.

“Taking a leak,” Henry says.

The two of them have found an easy rhythm in the work, most of their exchanges practical and brief.
Turkey or bologna? Watch your head there. Stop.
On the very rare days when Henry doesn’t visit, Sam sculpts from dawn to dusk, knowing if he doesn’t, then he’ll never leave the trailer. He’s gotten more muscular and calloused from the labor, able to exert himself for hours and rejuvenate fully overnight. He has energy to burn, a healthy spring he hasn’t felt since high school. He eats because he needs it, falls asleep fast, and wakes without cobwebs, but standing here now with the cabin floor completed, he begins to see the permanence of all his recent whims.

Henry zips up and says, “I brought meatball sandwiches and coleslaw.”

“I got that beer you like.”

“Great.”

Wing flounders in the weeds. He tries to bite a wasp and runs toward the cabin, where he basks in a sunny patch of flooring while they eat.

“How are Nan and Joan?” Sam asks.

“They’re okay,” Henry says. “Settled in. They’re looking for a house.”

“Must be tough.”

“I don’t think their hearts are really in it.”

“I mean about sharing your home,” Sam says. “How big’s your place?”

It’s the most they’ve openly talked in one continuous shot and Henry puts his sandwich down, a move more instinctual than courteous, it seems, with his stomach rumbling audibly and coleslaw sticking to his mustache.

“Fifteen hundred and thirty square feet, give or take,” Henry says. “That’s according to the public record but it feels a lot bigger, more like sixteen or seventeen hundred.”

Sam’s amused by his precision and his willingness to share. He’d likely tell him anything without reservation.

“What’s your credit card number?”

“Why?” Henry asks. “You need supplies?”

Sam shakes his head and takes a long sip of beer. “I was looking at my card the other day and noticed that the numbers made a pattern.”

Henry reaches into his pocket and surrenders his entire wallet. Sam plays along, reads the card, and says, “No, it must be nothing.”

“Check the other cards.”

Even after Sam empties out the wallet, Henry doesn’t ask him what the pattern might have been. Sam reads his driver’s license. Organ donor: check. He has twenty-seven dollars and a photo of his wife.

“How’s Ava holding up?”

Henry glances at his sandwich. “She’s fine. She’s great. It was oil and water with her and Nan but things are getting better. Thanks for asking, though. I’ll tell her you were wondering.”

“She doesn’t mind you being here?”

“No, of course not,” Henry says. “She encouraged it. I wasn’t sure I should … I mean, the first time I came, before we met…”

He trails away, lost, both hands on his beer. Sam continues watching him and eating in the lull.

“She worries,” Henry says, pressured to continue. “Ever since my surgery…”

“What surgery?”

“I got a coronary stent last year. I’m still on Coumadin. It’s why I bleed like a hog with every little scratch.”

“Is it serious?” Sam asks, twisting his bottle into the dirt.

“Nah, it’s no big deal,” Henry says. “Everybody has stents.”

“I wouldn’t have had you help…”

“Stop—you sound like Ava,” Henry laughs, looking panicked. “I had to fight three months before she let me use the mower. I shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s not an issue. That’s the truth.”

He picks his sandwich up and finally takes a good round bite. Sam reclines on his elbows, looking overhead, following the pixilated motion of the leaves.

“You fight a lot?” Sam asks.

Henry makes a noise swallowing his food.

“Me and Ava? No, you know … just married-couple stuff.” He puts his wallet back together, studying the picture. “I try to keep her happy so we’re always pretty good. I used to get her a flower every Friday after finishing my route. You’d be surprised how nice the roses at the Pump-n-Go are.”

Sam thinks of how he used to leave Laura little notes, scraps of paper in her coat or in the visor of her car—anywhere she’d find them when he wasn’t right beside her. They were short, like a lyric or a weird phrase they’d laughed about together. Maybe just
hello
or a drawing of a bird. He did it all the time the year that they were dating. Laura teased him for it, calling him the sensitive
artiste
, but that was half the charm—the element of play. Eventually he stopped. She mentioned it the month she accepted the late shift at the hospital pharmacy. They struggled with the rhythm of their separated days and he began to write her notes again, tucking them into her pockets and under the cap of her thermos, knowing she would find them in the middle of the night. But it wasn’t the same. He was too self-conscious, too aware he would have skipped it if she hadn’t brought it up. He finally let it go. It seemed a lot of work. He’s thought about it often in the weeks since the fire, how it could have been the last thing he said before she died instead of
bye
or
see you later
from the bottom of the stairs.

“What are you sculpting next?” Henry asks.

“I don’t know.”

He’s completed three more figures since
The Reacher
and
The Prisoner
with the wound—a man below an outcrop, pushing up the rock; another man shouldering the whole upper tree; and his favorite of them all, the one he calls
The Gazer
, hidden farther back above a clearwater brook. It’s a sugar maple, fallen horizontal like a bridge, with its uprooted trunk settled on the bank. He cut the tree in half, leaving just enough wood to form the shoulders and the head. The figure is a youth gazing down at his reflection, one hand clasping at his heart, the other reaching down toward a pool ringed with stones. In the evenings, Sam’s been covering the trunk in dirt and moss. Now it blends like it’s always been a feature of the bank, as if a boy had really stared until the forest overgrew him.

“You ought to try an animal,” Henry says. He settles back and chews his food, pondering the notion, looking like a man feigning inspiration. “At least get off the torture kick you’re on. Your stuff’s great—don’t get me wrong, you’re better than what’s-his-name … the really famous sculptor.” He snaps a couple times, trying to remember. “Doesn’t matter,” Henry says. “I’m just thinking that you might shift gears to something else. What about a bear—”

“I don’t need suggestions.”

“Yeah, no. I wasn’t trying—”

“Then don’t,” Sam says.

“Sam, I’m sorry,” Henry says, hives rushing up his neck. “Shoot, damn it. I didn’t mean to apologize, either. I know I promised—”

“I want to finish this wall before you go. We need the first four logs ready on the sides.”

Henry goes without a second’s hesitation, sneaker untied and threatening to trip him. There’s a cowlick on his crown and when he jogs, it’s with the jerkiness of someone playing dodgeball.

Sam keeps relaxing in the sun, sipping beer. He watches Henry wrestle with the logs on the pile. He’s lifted plenty worse but the morning’s worn him out and Henry’s skin begins to mottle as he’s scraping it along.

Wingnut stands, looking back and forth between them. Sam gets up and strolls around the platform, trying to imagine where the furniture will go. He’ll have a table and a chair, a loft to lay a mattress, and a woodstove back against the innermost wall. He’ll need to get a water tank and hook it to a sink. He’ll have to dig an outhouse and pile up supplies.

Henry struggles on, crimson to the ears—probably the color of a Pump-n-Go rose. Nobody would harbor a suspicion if he dropped, if he buckled from a heart attack and didn’t make it out.

Sam’s walking with his beer, looking up to see the leaves again, and suddenly he’s bending at the waist around a log. It’s the one they raised to cut, balanced on the horses, and he’s walked directly into it and moved it with his gut. He drops the beer and pulls the log back, trying to arrest it, but he pulls too hard and rolls it into his hips.

He stumbles in reverse, knocked beneath it with a bump. The horses start to tip and Sam tries holding up the log, but it’s all too rapid and impossible to stabilize. He and the horses topple down together. Now he’s lying on his back with the log across his chest. It rolls along his palms, moving to his neck. He wants to shout except the weight of it is resting on his diaphragm, squeezing out his breath and scraping at his chin. He can still hear Henry pulling wood across the clearing, too preoccupied to notice. Wing’s barking at the birds. The sun is overhead and there’s a bright-white cloud, like a rabbit or a lamb, shining in his eyes. He locks his jaw and pushes with everything he’s got, imagining a bench press, lifting it a foot. Once it’s up, he can’t sustain it and the log begins to fall. In a moment it’ll drop directly on his throat.

Henry finally notices and runs to pick it up. He cups his hands beneath the end of the log and orders him to
go
. Sam shimmies in the dirt until he’s clear of it completely. Henry drops it and the two of them are still, breathing heavy.

“Holy shit,” Henry says.

Sam trembles there awhile, staring at the log. His beer has left a small dark puddle where it fell. Wing waggles up between them, thinking it was fun, lapping at the beer from the puddle and the spout. The little bright cloud covers up the sun and suddenly it’s dark and even chilly on the ground. Sam can see it in the shade without looking up, an afterglow that never quite settles in his eyes.

“You should have let it fall,” he says.

The red in Henry’s face darkens like a stain. He grabs Sam’s arm and says, “Knock it off.”

“Let me go.”

“Hey …
look
.” Henry’s eyes are so blue, they’re difficult to bear. “I don’t want to hear that crap. Understand?”

“You don’t have the right—”

“The hell I don’t,” Henry says.

He loosens his grip and Sam escapes it with a flourish, shaking out his arm as if he’s broken free alone. Henry gets up. Sam walks away and stands aloof, not enough to look defeated, but his breathing comes in shudders and he wishes he could sit again. The sun returns, deepening his shadow on the ground, and he starts to think of Laura when he hears:

“Come and help me with the log.”

He tries ignoring it at first and yet he can’t, he really can’t. Henry’s standing like he always does, spitting on his hands, so insistent in his energy that Sam begins to move.

“Why don’t you just go.”

“Come on,” Henry says. “Over here. Chop-chop.” He lifts the end of it and holds it there, waiting for assistance.

Sam approaches it with caution; it’s the log that almost killed him. Then he’s lifting it with Henry, which they do in perfect sync. He’s distracted by the weight and by the shudder in his arms. They have to feel it out and move at equal speed, careful of their footing on the uneven ground. Soon they reach the pile and the satisfaction’s mutual. They lower it in unison and gently put it down.

13

Saturday morning, mid-July, a salad of a day enticing Ava out—farm stands, flea markets, barbecues, lakes, fifteen hours of sunlight and everything in play. She’s slept late and feels both languorous and rushed, satiny with sleep but eager to begin. Henry’s up and dressed and packing a cooler in the kitchen, and at first she almost wonders if he’s filling it for them.

“She’s awake!” Henry says.

He hugs her so emphatically her breasts jelly up. She holds him in a cling and doesn’t let go. He’s gotten noticeably firmer in a few short weeks, widening his back and rounding out his biceps, and even though his appetite has steadily increased, his stomach is tight and he has more definition to his jaw. All from pulling weeds and clearing up a trail. She suspects he doesn’t eat half of what he packs, finding some excuse to give it all to Sam.

“Let’s swim today,” she says, talking so close their mouths intermingle.

“I promised Sam … I’m already late,” he says, lazy and aroused by the sugar of her breath.

She slips a hand up his shirt and rubs the middle of his back while her hips sway counterrevolutions lower down.

“Ava…”

“Mmm.”

“Babe, I got to go.”

“Right,” she says, pushing him away.

He kisses her, a quick little peck atop the head. She may as well start breakfast—it’s an hour past dawn—but when she opens up the fridge they’re out of orange juice and cheese. She makes a mental shopping list, adding tile scrub and dryer sheets, remembering the mildew in the shower, and the laundry, and a promise to the Finns that she would drive them to the mall. Before she cracks an egg, her day is cut in stone.

“Good morning,” Nan says, walking into the kitchen.

Ava greets her with a smile, especially when Nan holds the newspaper up. The paperboy’s lateness is a shared consternation: they’ve been phoning in complaints as a team for several weeks, increasingly aware of their united sensibilities. With Henry off at Sam’s and Joan doing puzzles, they’ve spent the last few weekends cleaning, shopping, cooking, and landscaping together. They’re growing peppers, squash, berries, peas, and heirloom tomatoes—the garden, and the home, cooperatively cultivated.

“Sam says hi,” Henry tells Nan. “You wouldn’t believe those sculptures,” he adds for maybe the fiftieth time that week. “I hope you get to see them someday. You too, Av.”

Nan and Ava trade a look about the rank of invitation. He’ll do anything for Nan, he’ll speed right off to buy Joan another puzzle, and whatever’s going on, he’s always there for Sam.

“I’ll come today,” Ava says, turning from the stove.

Henry holds the cooler like she’s threatening to snatch it.

“I don’t know,” he says. “He wouldn’t know you’re coming. We should tell him. But he doesn’t have a phone and really, either way, he’s still pretty fragile.”