The Music of Chance (16 page)

“You sound scared, Jimbo. Not a good sign. It makes you look ugly.”

“I’m not scared. I’m just being smart.”

“Crazy, you mean. Keep it up, pal, and pretty soon you’ll be as crazy as they are.”

“It’s less than two months, Jack, no big deal. They’ll feed us, give us a place to live, and before you know it, we’ll be gone. Why worry about it? We might even have some fun.”

“Fun? You call lifting stones fun? It sounds like a goddamn chain gang to me.”

“It can’t kill us. Not fifty days of it. Besides, the exercise will probably do us some good. Like lifting weights. People pay good money to do that in health clubs. We’ve already paid our membership fee, so we might as well take advantage of it.”

“How do you know it will be only fifty days?”

“Because that’s the agreement.”

“And what if they don’t stick to the agreement?”

“Look, Jack, don’t worry so much. If we run into any problems, we’ll take care of them.”

“It’s a mistake to trust those fuckers, I’m telling you.”

“Then maybe you’re right, maybe you should go now. I’m the one who got us into this mess, so the debt is my responsibility.”

“I’m the one who lost.”

“You lost the money, but I’m the one who cut for the car.”

“You mean you’d stay here and do it alone?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Then you really are crazy, aren’t you?”

“What difference does it make what I am? You’re a free man, Jack. You can walk out now, and I won’t hold it against you. That’s a promise. No hard feelings.”

Pozzi looked at Nashe for a long moment, wrestling with the choice he had just been given, searching Nashe’s eyes to see if he had meant what he had said. Then, very slowly, a smile began to form on the kid’s face, as if he had just understood the punch line to an obscure joke. “Shit,” he said. “Do you really think I’d leave you alone, old man? If you did that work yourself, you’d probably drop dead of a heart attack.”

Nashe had not been expecting it. He had assumed that Pozzi would jump at his offer, and during those moments of certainty, he had already begun to imagine what it would be like to live out in the meadow alone, trying to resign himself to that solitude, coming to a point of such resolve that he was almost beginning to welcome it. But now that the kid was in, he felt glad. As they
walked back into the room to announce their decision, it fairly stunned him to realize how glad he was.

They spent the next hour putting it all in writing, drawing up a document that stated the terms of their agreement in the clearest possible language, with clauses that covered the amount of the debt, the conditions of repayment, the hourly wage, and so on. Stone typed it out twice, and then all four of them signed at the bottom of both copies. After that, Flower announced that he was going off to look for Murks and make the necessary arrangements concerning the trailer, the work site, and the purchase of supplies. It would take several hours, he said, and in the meantime they were welcome to have breakfast in the kitchen if they were hungry. Nashe asked a question about the design of the wall, but Flower told him not to trouble himself about that. He and Stone had already finished the blueprints, and Murks knew exactly what had to be done. As long as they followed Calvin’s instructions, nothing could go wrong. On that confident note, the fat man left the room, and Stone led Nashe and Pozzi to the kitchen, where he asked Louise to cook up some breakfast for them. Then, mumbling a brief, awkward good-bye, the thin man vanished as well.

The maid clearly resented having to prepare the meal, and as she went about the business of beating eggs and frying bacon, she took out her displeasure by refusing to address a word to either one of them—muttering a string of invective under her breath, acting as if the task were an insult to her dignity. Nashe realized how thoroughly things had changed for them. He and Pozzi had been stripped of their status, and henceforth they would no longer be treated as invited guests. They had been reduced to the level of hired hands, tramps who come begging for leftovers at the back door. It was impossible not to notice the difference, and as he sat there waiting for his food, he wondered how Louise had caught on so quickly to their demotion. The day before, she had been perfectly
polite and respectful; now, just sixteen hours later, she could barely hide her contempt for them. And yet neither Flower nor Stone had said a word to her. It was as if some secret communiqué had been broadcast silently through the house, informing her that he and Pozzi no longer counted, that they had been relegated to the category of nonpersons.

But the food was excellent, and they both ate with considerable appetite, wolfing down extra helpings of toast along with numerous cups of coffee. Once their stomachs were full, however, they lapsed into a state of drowsiness, and for the next half hour they struggled to keep their eyes open by smoking more of Pozzi’s cigarettes. The long night had finally caught up with them, and neither one seemed capable of talking anymore. Eventually, the kid dozed off in his chair, and for a long time after that Nashe just stared into space, seeing nothing as his body gave in to a deep and languorous exhaustion.

Murks arrived a few minutes past ten, bursting into the kitchen with a clatter of work boots and jangling keys. The noise immediately brought Nashe back to life, and he was out of his chair before Murks reached the table. Pozzi slept on, however, oblivious to the commotion around him.

“What’s the matter with him?” Murks said, gesturing with his thumb at Pozzi.

“He had a rough night,” Nashe said.

“Yeah, well, from what I heard, things didn’t go too good for you either.”

“I don’t need as much sleep as he does.”

Murks pondered the remark for a moment, and then he said, “Jack and Jim, huh? And which one are you, fella?”

“Jim.”

“I guess that makes your friend Jack.”

“Good thinking. After that, the rest is easy. I’m Jim Nashe, and
he’s Jack Pozzi. It shouldn’t take long for you to get the hang of it.”

“Yeah, I remember. Pozzi. What’s he, some kind of Spaniard or something?”

“More or less. He’s a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus.”

“No kidding?”

“Would I make up something like that?”

Again, Murks fell silent, as if trying to absorb this curious bit of information. Then, looking at Nashe with his pale blue eyes, he abruptly changed the subject. “I took your stuff out of the car and put it in the jeep,” he said. “The bags and all those tapes. I figured you might as well have it with you. They said you’re going to be here for a while.”

“And what about the car?”

“I drove it over to my place. If you want, you can sign the registration papers tomorrow. There’s no rush.”

“You mean they gave the car to you?”

“Who else? They didn’t want it, and Louise just bought a new car last month. It seems like a good one to me. Handles real nice.”

Murks’s statement hit him like a fist in the stomach, and for a moment or two Nashe actually felt himself fighting back tears. It had not occurred to him to think about the Saab, and now, all of a sudden, the sense of loss was absolute, as if he had just been told his closest friend was dead. “Sure,” he said, making a great effort not to show his feelings. “Just bring the papers around to me tomorrow.”

“Good. We’ll be plenty busy today anyway. There’s lots to do. Got to get you boys settled in first, and then I’ll show you the plans and walk you around the place. You wouldn’t believe how many stones there are. It’s about like a mountain is what it is, an honest-to-goodness mountain. I ain’t never seen so many stones in all my life.”

T
here was no road from the house to the meadow, so Murks drove the jeep straight through the woods. He was apparently an old hand at it, and he charged along at a frenetic pace—maneuvering around the trees with abrupt, hairpin turns, bouncing recklessly over stones and exposed roots, yelling at Nashe and Pozzi to duck clear of hanging branches. The jeep made a tremendous racket, and birds and squirrels scattered as they approached, bolting helter-skelter through the leaf-covered darkness. After Murks had roared along in this way for fifteen minutes or so, the sky suddenly brightened, and they found themselves on a grassy verge studded with low-lying bushes and thin shoots. The meadow was just ahead of them. The first thing Nashe noticed was the trailer—a pale green structure propped up on several rows of cinder blocks—and then, all the way at the other end of the field, he saw the remains of Lord Muldoon’s castle. Contrary to what Murks had
told them, the stones did not form a mountain so much as a series of mountains—a dozen haphazard piles jutting up from the ground at different angles and elevations, a chaos of towering rubble strewn about like a set of children’s blocks. The meadow itself was much larger than Nashe had expected. Surrounded by woods on all four sides, it seemed to cover an area roughly equivalent to three or four football fields: it was an immense territory of short, stubbled grass, as flat and silent as the bottom of a lake. Nashe turned around and looked for the house, but it was no longer visible. He had imagined that Flower and Stone would be standing at a window watching them through a telescope or a pair of binoculars, but the woods were mercifully in the way. Just knowing that he would be hidden from them was something to be thankful for, and in those first moments after climbing from the jeep, he began to sense that he had already won back a measure of his freedom. Yes, the meadow was a desolate place; but there was also a certain forlorn beauty to it, an air of remoteness and calm that could almost be called soothing. Not knowing what else to think, Nashe tried to take heart from that.

The trailer turned out to be not half bad. It was hot and dusty inside, but the dimensions were spacious enough for two people to live there in reasonable comfort: a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and two small bedrooms. The electricity worked, the toilet flushed, and water ran into the sink when Murks turned the faucet. The furnishings were sparse, and what there was had a dull and impersonal look to it, but it was no worse than what you found in your average cheap motel. There were towels in the bathroom, the kitchen was stocked with cookware and eating utensils, there was bedding on the beds. Nashe felt relieved, but Pozzi didn’t say much of anything, walking through the tour as though his mind were somewhere else. Still brooding about poker, Nashe thought. He decided to leave the kid alone, but it was hard not to wonder how long it would take him to get over it.

They aired out the place by opening the windows and turning on the fan, and then they sat down to study the blueprints in the kitchen. “We’re not talking about anything fancy here,” Murks said, “but that’s probably just as well. This thing’s going to be a monster, and there’s no point in trying to make it pretty.” He carefully removed the plans from a cardboard cylinder and spread them out on the table, weighting down each corner with a coffee cup. “What you got here is your basic wall,” he continued. “Two thousand feet long and twenty feet high—ten rows of a thousand stones each. No twists or turns, no arches or columns, no frills of any sort. Just your basic, no-nonsense wall.”

“Two thousand feet,” Nashe said. “That’s more than a third of a mile long.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This baby is a giant.”

“We’ll never finish,” Pozzi said. “There’s no way two men can build that sucker in fifty days.”

“The way I understand it,” Murks said, “you don’t have to. You just put in your time, do as much as you can, and that’s it.”

“You got it, gramps,” Pozzi said. “That’s it.”

“We’ll see how far you get,” Murks said. “They say faith can move mountains. Well, maybe muscles can do it, too.”

The plans showed the wall cutting a diagonal line between the northeast and southwest corners of the meadow. As Nashe discovered after studying the diagram, this was the only way a two-thousand-foot wall could fit within the boundaries of the rectangular field (which was roughly twelve hundred feet wide and eighteen hundred feet long). But just because the diagonal was a mathematical necessity, that did not make it a bad choice. To the extent that he bothered to think about it, even Nashe admitted that a slant was preferable to a square. The wall would have a greater visual impact that way—splitting the meadow into triangles rather than boxes—and for whatever it was worth, it pleased him that no other solution was possible.

“Twenty feet high,” Nashe said. “We’re going to need a scaffold, won’t we?”

“When the time comes,” Murks said.

“And who’s supposed to build it? Not us, I hope.”

“Don’t worry about things that might never happen,” Murks said. “We don’t have to think about a scaffold until you get to the third row. That’s two thousand stones. If you get that far in fifty days, I can build you something real fast. Won’t take me longer than a few hours.”

“And then there’s the cement,” Nashe continued. “Are you going to bring in a machine, or do we have to mix it ourselves?”

“I’ll get you bags from the hardware store in town. There’s a bunch of wheelbarrows out in the tool shed, and you can use one of those to mix it in. You won’t need much—just a dab or two in the right places. Those stones are solid. Once they’re up, there ain’t nothing that’s going to knock them down.”