by Chris Knopf
Things got a lot hillier when I hit the northwest corner of the Commonwealth. The Berkshires gave way to the foothills of the Green Mountains, which you ascend on narrow switchback roads that follow trout streams and old Indian trails through verdant tunnels made of hemlock and southern pine. Eventually I crested the ridge of a mountain and repeated the experience on a downward plane. Not long after that I was in Vermont.
Somewhere south of Bennington I hit Route 7 and headed north. I was relieved to be driving in a somewhat straight line, going up and over an endless succession of hills, past open fields with huge green mounds in the distance and through strange little villages of eighteenth-century inns, trailer homes and factory outlets.
Nearly hypnotized by the experience, I almost missed the sign for Route 125 East. I spun the front tires of my car over the pitted macadam as I made a hard turn and plunged into another narrow, deep wooded passage. Along the way I stopped for gas at a two-pump station outside Bread Loaf. I talked the sallow young woman behind the greasy glass-topped counter into filling my big paper cup with ice, over which I poured a couple fingers of bourbon and a fresh Coca-Cola.
From there it was an easy run over to Route 100 and then up to Warren where I owned a time-share that I’d never seen. Abby was the one who liked to ski, a pursuit that for me was never more than a theoretical construct. I understood the principle, something about sliding down snow-covered hills in frigid temperatures and periodically breaking your leg. It worked better for me as a vacation from my wife, who for over ten years would spend the bulk of her winter weekends and an occasional full week on the slopes.
I remembered the address from writing countless monthly checks to a place called Fox Run Borders, LLC, which always struck me as inherently contradictory. Even so, it took a lot of asking around town before I found someone to give me directions.
“Oh shoo-wa, that’s over thea towa’d the skiin’,” a red-nosed old guy in a black T-shirt and Red Sox cap told me. “Near Suga’bush. The place ya’re talkin’ about is up inna woods. Exclusive. Fulla New Yawkas.”
It was easier to find than he led me to believe, probably because of a sign on the road featuring a fox who was neither running, nor looking entirely secure within his borders. More ambivalent, which was how I was feeling.
The development looked like any suburban enclave you’d find down on the flatlands. Little two-story colonial houses with narrow clapboard siding stained a uniform blue-gray, scattered around a simulated town green in the middle of which they were building an octagonal gazebo. Encircling the observable area were tall, mature trees, but the landscape within looked freshly cultivated.
I slowly cruised along the gently curved streets, searching for number 35G. There was little danger of bumping into Abby. Her lawyer had told me she’d be away for a few weeks, that she’d left some papers for me to sign related to some proceeding he wanted me to attend, all of which as usual I ignored.
After searching most of the neighborhood I found 35G. A woman, probably in her late seventies, wearing oversized canvas gloves and a broad-brimmed hat was out on the lawn fussing with a huge, unruly bottlebrush buckeye.
“Excuse me,” I called to her through the open car window, “are you staying here?”
“Not me. I just thought this bush needed some trimming,” she said, without looking in my direction. “Of course I’m staying here,” she added, punctuating the statement with a deft snip of her pruning shears.
“Do you know Abby Acquillo?” I asked.
She stopped snipping and looked over at me.
“You mean Abigail Vaneer?”
“Vaneer?”
“She doesn’t like you to call her Abby. That’s what her husband told me in no uncertain terms. Rather grand of her.”
She stood next to the bush with one hand on her hip and the other firmly gripping the sharp little tool.
“And I’m talking to?” she asked.
“Friend of Abigail’s.”
“They’re not here. Went to ski in Italy. As if the winter here’s not enough for them. After that they’ll be at their other unit, I imagine. Not staying here. I’m on for the next two months.”
“I don’t know the other place. What if I want to leave a note?”
“Nothing to stop you. It’s just around the corner. 15A. Right off the common area. Original units. Not as well made, but the trees are bigger. All I’ve got are these disreputable Aesculus parviflora,” she said, swatting at one of the branches with her pruning scissors.
I thanked her and went to look for 15A. It was a little hard to drive through the misty, burning haze in front of my eyes. Surprise is always such an affront to the intellectually arrogant.
I tried to picture Abby with Tony Vaneer. I’d met him at a neighborhood party, maybe at our house, maybe someone else’s. I rarely cared one way or the other. Abby relished any form of social engagement with the Fairfield County social set, if only to have a go at the other women’s fashion sense or interior decor. These events took place on Saturday nights, so I was normally wrung out from an afternoon at the boxing gym and too weak to mount an effective defense. At least there was always plenty of booze and tasty finger food and occasionally a conversation that wouldn’t immediately trigger an attack of narcolepsy. Tony was always one of the guys there, with his wife, a washed-out, nervous woman with thin tufts of orangey brown hair who held her cigarette between her fingers like Audrey Hepburn. I remember her calling me a fellow ski orphan. That, like me, she hated the snow.
I don’t remember asking her where Tony went to ski, so little did I care. I think her name was Judith. When she talked to you it felt like she was really talking to herself. Distant, absorbed by her inner dialogue. Her husband, on the other hand, was verbose, and had dyed black hair combed straight back and a penchant for white turtlenecks, two things that set me on edge even though I didn’t know he was sleeping with my wife.
Number 15A was on a corner lot, with the front of the house perpendicular to the common area. I got out of the car and walked around the house, looking through slits in the drawn blinds. I didn’t really need to go inside. I got the gist of the place by the arrangement of the windows and the external dimensions. At least well enough to form a concept.
I got back in my car and drove all the way down to Brattleboro, where I was reasonably sure I’d find the necessary provisions. I spent the next two days securing what I needed, which took me to early Sunday morning, which was part of the plan.
I left the company car in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn and drove a pickup truck I’d stolen from the Brattleboro train station back to Warren. Along the way I stopped to grab a set of license plates off a pickup raised on blocks behind a roadside repair shop. I pulled into a picnic area next to a trout stream to have a late breakfast of bagel and sliced ham, after which I switched the plates. It was approaching midday when I got to Fox Run Borders.
At that time of year few of the units were occupied, the old lady in 35G notwithstanding. It was dead quiet when I pulled in with the pickup and went over to where they were building the gazebo. Through some sort of perverse providence they’d left a big Caterpillar front-end loader on the site, apparently brought in to sculpt the surrounding landscape.
The sunporch off the back of Tony’s house had been left open, providing excellent cover for breaking in through the rear door. Tony had equipped the place with an alarm, but hadn’t turned it on, another pleasant bit of good luck. I saw a photo of Tony and Abby on the mantelpiece. I resisted the temptation to search the rest of the living area and went down into the basement.
The support structure of the house was what I figured—a pair of central girders supported by a row of lally columns running the length of the building, interrupted in the middle by the basement stairs. Two-by-ten floor joists ran perpendicular from the sill to the tops of the girders.
I went back outside to the pickup and dug an eighteen-inch Stihl chain saw out of the back. I brought along a box of spare cha
ins in case I hit a nail, which would instantly render the chain saw almost useless.
Back in the basement I pulled the start cord, then immediately regretted the lack of ear protection. No matter how hard you try to plan for a weekend project you always forget something. The best I could do was stuff my ears with pieces of paper towel from Tony’s washer/dryer area and give myself a reminder about using angry little two-cycle engines in confined, concrete-walled spaces.
I stood on a step stool and quickly cut a pair of holes in the box above the sill plate, about eight feet apart, four feet to either side of the centerline of the house. I shut off the saw and ran upstairs. I looked around the neighborhood and it still looked abandoned. No curtains moving in the windows, no gardeners leaning on rakes looking my way.
I backed the pickup truck across Tony’s side yard so I could feed a heavy yellow polypropylene rope coiled in the bed down through the right hole in the sill. I ran back down into the basement and pulled the rope across the length of the basement, around the furthest lally column, then back across and up through the other hole, thus creating a continuous loop circumnavigating the whole row of lally columns holding up the house. I tied the end of the rope to the trailer hitch off the back of the pickup and drove slowly across the lawn, across the street and into the common area, watching in the rearview mirror as the yellow line payed out behind me, subsequently dragging along a lifting-grade industrial chain to which it was attached. In a few minutes I saw the end of the chain emerge from the second hole. I gave it fifteen feet of clearance, then drove back to the street where I parked the truck and retrieved the pull rope.
Back down in the basement, I put on a fresh chain and fired up the saw, which cut through the ends of the joists where they were loaded on the central girders like the proverbial knife through butter. I only bit about eight inches into the nominal ten-inch-wide lumber to avoid nails shot down from the subfloor above me. I still hit a couple, but had the replacement chains to keep production running along smoothly.
I checked my watch when I ran upstairs for the last time and was encouraged to see I’d only been on the job for about forty minutes. This took some pressure off the timetable for the next phase of the process, which was the most difficult to plan for.
I walked over to where the big Cat was parked next to the gazebo project. I assumed it would be tricky to get it started without a key. My father was a mechanic, and I’d literally grown up working on all kinds of cars and trucks, but only gasoline driven, with spark plugs and carburetors. I didn’t know much about diesels, except what I learned optimizing a refinery making diesel fuel.
The Cat was a lot bigger up close than it looked from a distance. The engine compartment turned out to be easily accessible and the engine child’s play to hot-wire, if your child understood the basic principles of twelve-volt electrical current and internal combustion. The most startling aspect was the noise—even with my chain saw-damaged eardrums the engine was disturbingly loud.
My fears then shifted from whether I could start the freaking thing to whether I could actually drive it.
I found the lever that lifted the bucket off the ground and the one that engaged the transmission. At first the sensation of steering from the articulated rear wheels was a little peculiar, though all I needed to do was drive in a straight line over to Tony Vaneer’s colonial ski chalet. I asked forgiveness from the ornamental shrubbery that fell on the way, but otherwise got there in good form. Once in Tony’s side yard, I swung the Cat around 180 degrees and gently backed it up until I was about ten feet from the house.
The heavy-grade chain was probably a lot more than I needed for the job, but I thought better safe than sorry. After a few minutes I had it hooked up to the thick pin seated within the massive structure bolted to the Cat’s rear end.
The subterranean rumble of the diesel engine finally rousted one of the neighbors, a short, balding guy with an accent that might have been Lebanese, or maybe Palestinian, like a lot of the engineers I worked with in the Saudi Arabian petrochemical plants. He took a friendly interest in what I was doing.
“I didn’t know Mr. Vaneer was planning on remodeling. I assume the association’s architectural committee approved,” he said to me while I was wiping the chain grease off my hands.
“Not my part of the deal, sir,” I told him. “I just hope it’s okay with his wife.”
He smiled broadly, thin laugh lines forming around his eyes and across his forehead.
“Oh yes, me too. That is a hot one Mr. Veneer has on his hands, indeed.”
“Well, no worries there,” I said. “I know she’ll be im -pressed.”
I asked him to get back over to his yard for his own safety before I climbed into the cab of the front-end loader. From there it was a simple matter of engaging the lowest forward gear and opening the throttle up as far as it would go. Given the tonnage and torque loads in play, I hardly felt a tremor as the chain clipped each lally free under the east girder, then it a gave off a slight bump when it scooped up the center stairwell, before clearing the remaining row of lallys. I envisioned the chain sliding up the poles, gaining purchase, and then snapping the flange at the underside of the laminated beam. Looking back at the chain I saw the loop finish the job by tearing a sizeable hole in the sill area as it exited the basement, bringing with it a section of wall, complete with siding, studs and a double-hung window.
The house overall looked pretty much the same, until you noticed a big dimple forming in the middle of the ridge line, the center of the house no longer able to hold as Tony Vaneer’s parallel universe slouched inexorably, and irredeemably, back toward the earth.
——
My only audience might have been a retired engineer after all. I saw him waving furiously at me to come back when I jumped out of the cab and trotted over to the pickup truck. I probably would have liked talking to him, but I thought it was better to get out of town and back to Brattleboro, where I returned the truck to the train station with its original plates. I had to put it in a different parking spot, but left five hundred in cash on the front seat as a sop to what I imagined to be my conscience.
I kept the chain saw, which came in handy that week when, inspired by my foray into deconstructionism in Vermont, I hired Walter and Antoine Bick to help make some modifications to the house I’d lived in for ten years in the woods above Stamford—this time focusing on the cosmetic rather than the structural.
You can say all you want about the benefits of regular workouts at the gym, but the Bicks agreed there was nothing quite like crowbars, sledgehammers and chain saws for exercising both body and spirit, temporal and transcendent.
NINE
“WERE YOU PLANNING to tell me, or do I always have to read about it in the newspapers?”
It was the morning after my pool game with Burton and Hayden, and my daughter was on the phone. This was an uncommon event, most of our communication being handled through postcards and the rare glorious time she came out from the City to spend a weekend. She was a graphic artist, and by my reckoning a first-rate talent, a fact too rarely appreciated by the long line of employers she’d already strung together since graduating from Rhode Island School of Design.
“Hi, honey. Nice to hear your voice.”
“Tell me it’s all a mistake.”
“A very big mistake. Definitely. I’m sure the paper had it all wrong. What did you see, Newsday?”
“Second-degree murder? Is that part right?”
“Well, somebody definitely killed the guy. It just wasn’t me.”
The phone went quiet, and my heart went cold. I hated those long empty pauses she bestowed on me when we talked on the phone. I hated the phone, period.
“How’s work?” I asked her, for which she rewarded me with another eternal silence.
“You told me you were on a program of self-improvement,” she said finally. “I assumed that meant no more fistfights.”
“He did all the fighting. I just got him to quit. Y
ou can ask Amanda.”
I gave her a thorough rundown of the situation as I saw it, pausing once in a while to make sure she was still on the phone, but not giving her much room to respond, even if she wanted to. I wanted to build up some momentum as a defense against the next span of dead air, which I tried to thwart by saying, “Okay, that’s where things stand at the moment. I’ll stop talking now so you can talk. Go ahead, it’s your turn. Say something.”
“I thought I was done worrying about you,” she said.
“That’s my line.”
“Burton Lewis won’t let anything happen to you.”
“He won’t. Neither will Jackie.”
“Why is it always like this with you?” she asked, not as a rhetorical question, but a matter of fact.
“Your mother taught you to ask unanswerable questions. From me you learned the biggest danger is trying to answer.”
“I think elegant evasion was part of the lesson.”
“Bob and Weave, two of my closest friends.”
There was another pause, but it had a chuckle built into it, which made everything okay.
“You could at least keep me informed of the situation,” she said.
“I certainly could.”
“Though you probably won’t,” she said.
“Jackie will. I’ll give her explicit instructions.”
“You’re way too old to be hitting people over the head.”
“Don’t tell your boyfriends,” I said.
“Boyfriend. A compound noun built on an interior contradiction.”
“Now who’s evasive.”
“I’m way too sleepy for this. Just keep me posted, okay? Can you do that?”
“Always.”
“Right. Bye, Daddy.”
