by John Enright
Morgan’s train was right on time at 12:17. They had lunch in Hudson, then drove back across the river. Morgan talked nonstop about the city and the contractors. She never mentioned Nemo or their meeting. Finally, Amanda had to ask. “How did you get my brother to come up here?”
“You know, I’m not sure. I did tell him you were hurt by his just disappearing like that. Maybe he’s stopping by to apologize. He did seem almost interested in how old the place is. He was headed up to the Cape anyway. It’s only a couple of hours out of his way. Who knows, with a strange dude like that? But when he shows up—if he shows up—let me deal with him. This part is business not family. You know, we might have to incorporate him?”
“Morgan, we really don’t need his money. We can finish the job with what we have now.”
“Sure, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a bigger pile when we start the next project? Look, we got the fish up to the boat. We’ll just play him along to see what happens.”
“Where did all these fishy images suddenly come from?” Amanda asked.
“Why, my daddy was a fisherman. You knew that. I remember once …,” and Morgan went off into one of her stories about her Tidewater girlhood and her adored daddy. Pretty soon she had Amanda laughing with her. The Chevy kept drifting to the left.
There was a county crew at where the creek had decided to cross the road, a couple of trucks and a front loader. There were orange traffic cones and yellow cop tape blocking off the road, but the crew wasn’t doing much, mainly standing around watching the water flow out of the creek. Two guys with shovels were knee-deep in the mud trying to do something. Amanda had to honk to get someone’s attention. An older guy not wearing a hard hat came over and told them it would be a while before the road was passable, “maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.”
“How about the old road by the river?” Amanda asked.
“I wouldn’t try it in that,” he said, pointing to Amanda’s car. “It’s trenched out pretty bad here and there. You the ladies staying up at the old Van Houten place? What’s that all about? Some sort of convent or something?”
Morgan leaned over across the front seat. “Is there a number we can call to find out when the road will be open?” she asked.
“You can call the Public Works number, ma’am. It’s in the book. Someone is usually there twenty-four seven.”
“Let’s go,” Morgan said, adding as Amanda backed-up, “Honkies can’t mind their own business.”
***
When Dominick woke up, Susan and her comforter and pillow were gone from the floor of his room. At first he forgot where he was. It looked like a barren hospital room. Then he saw the big bay windows and remembered. The room was bright with sunlight. He went to the bathroom down the hall. There wasn’t a sound in the house. The downstairs was deserted, too. He walked out onto the back veranda—an empty landscape. He made a pot of coffee. He had the place all to himself and rather liked it. Houses have a feel to them. You didn’t have to be a Chinese expert to sense if a place belonged exactly where it was.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Dominick knew that Wallace Stevens poem by heart. It was a page in his personal hymnal. He also knew houses well enough to feel the confidence that this place expressed. There are people who leave poems behind and people who leave houses. Dominick wondered who it was had built this house, in what—at the time—must have been wilderness. It exuded a familial warmth. It had known a hundred and eighty winters here; it had earned the right to many more. Maybe it was just the tall ceilings and windows, all the welcoming light. Silence suited it. He took his mug of coffee out to the front veranda. No Susan anywhere. The vista there was distant, out toward the valley where the river would be and the forested hills across the river. It took dominion everywhere. It took a minute for it to register that the one thing missing from this view was his car, which was no longer parked in the driveway.
Chapter 7
Amanda and Morgan had started out small, flipping row houses in Baltimore on the margins of gentrifying neighborhoods. That was back when property values always increased, and with the right purchase and some hard renovation work you could double your investment in a year or two. They had met, in fact, as competitors for a house they finally went in on together. It was a natural business partnership. Amanda had the sense for what had to be done but hated dealing with contractors. Morgan couldn’t care less about aesthetics, but the men they hired to do the work listened to her. Things had gone well for a number of years, then the bottom fell out of the real estate market, and the “correction” that followed closed them out. What they had left, they put into the Van Houten place purchase, picking it up from another speculator who was in even worse shape than they were. It seemed to make sense to go big, as only the top of the market was selling. With the money from Marjorie’s estate they just might pull it off, if they could find the right deep-pocket buyer.
Amanda started heading back to the Motel 6 for another night or however long it took for the road to be passable, but Morgan wouldn’t hear of it. They checked in instead at the fanciest inn in Catskill, separate rooms. It was a waste of money as far as Amanda was concerned. Morgan got into one of her dismissive funks and went off to her room. Amanda called Kathy and asked her to let the others know that it would be another night at least before they could all get home.
Morgan had her luggage with her, so she had other clothes. Amanda had only her purse and had been in the same clothes for two days. She remembered her wish list for new expensive underwear, but the only place to buy new clothes in Catskill was the Walmart Supercenter just south of town. She picked out a Walmart change of clothes, including an XL T-shirt to wear as a nightshirt. She picked up a toothbrush as well, and some toothpaste and a hairbrush. Then she pushed her shopping cart up and down the aisles, looking at things and trying to remember what she needed for the house, like garbage bags and dish soap. At the checkout counter the man in front of her in line was wearing a shirt that looked like it was made from a Confederate flag. The black girl cashier didn’t appreciate it much, Amanda could tell, but she didn’t say anything.
Amanda was leaving the store when her cell phone jingled. It was an irate Denise. “What do you mean locking the girls out of the house? Of course Morgan and you would wait till I was gone to evict everyone. There will be a serious price to pay for this.”
“No one has been evicted, Denise. What are you talking about?”
“Eviction, lockout, whatever you want to call it. What about their things? What about out agreement? You are just two heartless bitches.”
“Denise, there has been no eviction, no lock out. The road to the house got washed out, that’s all. No one can get there. Your girls had to find other places to stay for a night or two until the road is fixed. Jesus, Denise.”
“Don’t you lay that word on me. I heard that all the girls were told was not to come back to the house, and that means just one thing to me—war!”
Amanda tossed her purchases into the Chevy’s back seat, still listening to her phone. This was archetypal Denise—injured, bellicose, not listening, defensive, and of the opinion that the best defense was to be offensive.
“Denise, the girls can come back to the house whenever they want, as soon as the road is open.”
“You’re damn right they can. And don’t you and Morgan try any more of your tricks. My work here won’t be done for a few more days, but then I will come straight back, not stop in Buffalo as I had planned.” There may have been m
ore, but Amanda snapped her phone shut. The arrangement with Denise had been beneficial to all concerned, but it was good that it would soon be coming to an end. If some relationships were made in heaven, this one had come from someplace else and could go back there.
***
Nothing else seemed to be missing. Dominick made a quick check of his bags, and everything seemed to be there. His money clip felt a bit thinner, but seeing as he never knew exactly how much cash he had with him, he couldn’t say what was missing. His car keys were gone, of course, the only keys he carried. He thought about keys as he toured the now wholly deserted house, because the doors to most of the rooms were locked, and in his experience that was strange.
Dominick had stayed in many homes, and locked interior doors were rare. Some of these bedroom doors even had latches and padlocks. One latch held a cheap gym-locker combination lock. The problem with such latches and locks was that they could be used not only to keep people out but to keep people in. Dominick had vivid recall of the one time he had been locked in a room—a cell, actually, in a small-town Florida jail. It would just be for the night, and he had the cell to himself and there was a cot and he needed to sleep, but he couldn’t, not behind a locked door. He had pounded on the door until a deputy came to see what the problem was. After Dominick had explained, the deputy laughed at him and unlocked and opened the cell door. “Now shut the fuck up.” At the end of the cell block corridor was a locked gate, but that was alright somehow and Dominick had gone right to sleep.
That had been one of the rare times in his life when there had been no option of escape. Here was another. There was really nothing he could do but occupy the space and time he was trapped in, which was considerably more agreeable than a jail cell. Sooner or later someone would come—Amanda or Morgan or someone, maybe even Susan would return with his car—and meanwhile he had the old house to himself. The only unlocked room other than the one he had slept in he took to be Susan’s, which she shared with another woman. The green dress was dropped on one of the beds. The room was an untended mess with clothes strewn everywhere. On one wall were posters for bands with badly spelled names. A teenager’s room, lacking only stuffed animals. Now, there was a crime statistic for you—one car and one teenager, and the teenager steals the car.
The first locks were probably just fancy knots, like the Gordian one. When did that impulse give rise to invention? The impulse, the need, to create a locked space? Was it to lock something in, a cage that contained something dangerous or forbidden? Or was it to lock others out to guard what was yours? Was it capture or was it hoarding? A prison or a safe? Whatever, it got pretty complicated—all the different locks on his car, for instance, some mechanical, some electronic. And what good were locks if the key was stolen? Or in the case of the Gordian Knot if someone came up with a sharp enough sword? Ah, the key. If you had the key. The keys to the kingdom, the key to the city. Dominick knew the origins of that. The key that was surrendered would have been not the key to the city’s gates but the key to its defensive works, its armory, its parapets—the key to its fortress. Even the doors to what would be the house’s front parlor and formal dining room were locked.
Dominick refreshed his coffee and dug out from his luggage the prospectus file that Morgan had given him. Perhaps it could supply more information about the house. There was very little there—built before 1840, designed by the New Haven architect Rodgers Morton, paid for by a Rev. Vestal Van Houten. That was all. As he closed the file a receipt fell out from the back. It was from a Kinko’s in midtown Manhattan, dated the morning of the day he had met with Morgan, for the printing of one copy of the 13-page document he held. He really was being offered a singular deal, at least a deal with a singular audience.
Dominick went for a hike around the grounds, through the kitchen garden of immature plants out past the barn to a falling down stone wall. He found a comfortable seat on the wall and lit up a cigar, birdsong off in the woods behind him. The air was chilly, but the sun and the country stones of the wall were warm. From its knoll the place had views in all directions. He wondered how far it was to the river from here. He wondered about the Rev. Van Houten and what caused him to build here. He wondered about lunch. On his way back to the house he noticed a wrought-iron symbol high on its south wall between two second-floor windows. It was a pentagram, much like the ones he had seen on the walls of other New England houses, but this one was slightly different. He couldn’t remember another wrought-iron one, and the five-pointed star was enclosed in a circle.
***
The next morning the road was still closed. The backhoe was still there, stuck up to the tops of its treads in the mud where water still flowed over the creek’s broken banks, but there was no crew there. Morgan wanted her to try and drive through anyway, but Amanda demurred. The Chevy was not quite an off-road vehicle. “Let’s try the back way,” she suggested. “Maybe that has dried out enough.”
The back way was just a dirt farm road that circled between fields to another farm road that connected to their county road beyond the house—tractor roads, really, that in the winter went unplowed. Diligence was one of those townships whose population had steadily dropped from census to census, where roads led to nowhere outside the past, and parcels of land were named for families long since departed. The Van Houten place’s nearest neighbors now were two miles away on another county road. This depopulation was part of the area’s appeal for Amanda, along with fact that all the forests were second and third growth after having been once logged to nudity to build the big cities upriver and down. How many places were there these days making such backward progress? As the cities consumed their proximate countryside, hidden pockets of true rural country like this slipped quietly back toward wilderness. The coyotes and black bears were back, with rumors of panthers and wolves. Could the Iroquois be far behind?
Morgan, of course, cared nothing for any of this. Her major concern was that if the county road was not repaired soon, and well, the contractors with their heavy trucks and equipment could not make it to the house. “They ain’t coming this way, that’s for sure,” she said as the Chevy crawled between back road ruts. Having something to bitch about had brought Morgan out of her shell. “I suppose Barnett would know,” she said.
“Know what?” Amanda asked, stopping to look at the ruts ahead.
“Where he is.”
“Where who is? Barnett? I would hope so.”
“No, your brother, Captain Nemo. I mean if we missed his visit because of this rainstorm, how do we get back in touch with him? Go to the right, through the weeds.”
“There’s a ditch there.”
“This side of the ditch. There’s room.”
“Get out and direct me.”
“No way, girl, that’s nigger-eating mud out there. These shoes are worth more than this car. When are you going to get a proper vehicle anyway?”
Amanda nudged the Chevy ahead onto the weeds. Her voice spoke up: There she goes again, worrying about the man connection. First that creep Barnett and now your brother. Doesn’t she see that we don’t need them? That we can do this without them? Morgan can talk the talk about how useless men are, but when it comes to walking the walk there is still a seductive come-hither sway to her hips and her outlook. Maybe it is time to end all this, not just the deal with Denise and the girls, but Morgan as well. Just end it all, the whole show, house and all. Just take the money and go. That’s probably what your mom wanted you to do with it. That was always her position—move right along, buy something new, even time. You can buy time, you know, girl. Time stopped being free a long time ago.
The lane dipped down into a hollow with willow trees, and suddenly the way was blocked by a car coming at them. Only the car wasn’t moving. It was mired up to its bumper in the mud of the slough. It was a black Lexus with a Virginia plate. It was Nemo’s car.
“Well, that tops it,” Morgan said. “Now, that dude is totally lost.”
“That’s my brother�
�s car,” Amanda said.
“What? That’s Captain Nemo’s boat? What’s it doing here, headed out?” Morgan reached over and gave two long honks of the Chevy’s horn.
“What are you doing that for?” Amanda said, irked. “It’s not about to get out of the way, and there’s nobody in it.”
“How do you know? Maybe he’s asleep in the back seat or something.” But no head popped up inside the car. They sat there in silence for a while. Then Amanda put the Chevy in reverse and turned to look out the back window. “You’re not going to check?” Morgan said.
“Check what? There’s no one there.”
“Maybe he left a note or something.”
Amanda crept the Chevy backwards, getting used to mirror steering. “If his car is there, he’ll show up. Now we have to get ourselves out of here without having to hike.”
They had to back up maybe half a mile before they could find a safe place to do an eight-point turn and head out. It took almost an hour, and Morgan did have to get out and direct her in places.
“I am not doing any pushing,” she said, “so do not get stuck.” She left her shoes and stockings in the car.
***
Dominick had the Van Houten place to himself for another two days and nights. He amused himself by taking photographs, black-and-white shots, searching out shadows with dark straight lines or adjoining grays that contrasted somehow. The house was a treasure of shadows. In one sunset macro shot the peeling paint on a clapboard wall looked like scales on a petrified fish.
He was reduced to eating ramen and canned pork and beans. There was a large selection of teas, but no bread or eggs. He had set up a small space for himself on the back veranda with a comfortable porch chair and an end table out of the hallway. A pork and beans can served as an ashtray. He drank tea, sometimes iced. He read. There was nothing to read in the open rooms of the house, not even cookbooks or magazines; but he had a backlog of books with him, more histories. The days stayed clear and got hotter. By midday on the second day, Dominick thought the raised beds of the kitchen garden might need watering and he found Susan’s hose, but when he got there he discovered that the earth was still wet, so he left them alone and went back to his book about naval blockades.
