by Paul Auster
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.”
Murks rolled up the plans and slipped them back into the tube. Nashe and Pozzi then followed him outside, and the three of them climbed into the jeep and drove to the other end of the meadow. Murks explained that the grass was short because he had mowed it just a few days before, and the fact was that it smelled good, adding a hint of sweetness to the air that reminded Nashe of things from long ago. It put him in a pleasant mood, and by the time the little drive was over, he was no longer fretting about the details of the work. The day was too beautiful for that, and with the warmth of the sun pouring down on his face, it seemed ridiculous to worry about anything. Just take it as it comes, he told himself. Just be glad you’re alive.
It had been one thing to look at the stones from a distance, but now that he was there, he found it impossible not to want to touch them, to run his hands along their surfaces and discover what they felt like. Pozzi seemed to respond in the same way, and for the first few minutes the two of them just wandered around the clusters of granite, timidly patting the smooth gray blocks. There was something awesome about them, a stillness that was almost frightening. The stones were so massive, so cool against the skin, it was hard to believe they had once belonged to a castle. They felt too old for that—as if they had been dug out from the deepest layers of the earth, as if they were relics from a time before man had ever been dreamt of.
Nashe saw a stray stone at the edge of one of the piles and bent down to lift it, curious to know how heavy it was. The first tug sent a knot of pressure into his lower back, and by the time he had the thing off the ground, he was grunting from the strain of it, feeling as though the muscles in his legs were about to cramp. He took three or four steps and then put it down. “Jesus,” he said. “Not very cooperative, is it?”
“They weigh somewhere between sixty and seventy pounds,” Murks said. “Just enough to make you feel each one.”
“I felt it,” Nashe said. “There’s no doubt about that.”
“So what’s the scoop, old-timer?” Pozzi said, turning to Murks. “Do we move these pebbles with the jeep, or are you going to give us something else? I’m looking around for a truck, but I don’t see one in the vicinity.”
Murks smiled and slowly shook his head. “You don’t think they’re stupid, do you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nashe said.
“If we give you a truck, you’ll just use it to sneak out of here. That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? No sense in giving you an opportunity to escape.”
“I didn’t know we were in prison,” Nashe said. “I thought we’d been hired to do some work.”
“That’s it,” Murks said. “But they don’t want you welshing on the deal.”
“So how do we move them?” Pozzi said. “They’re not sugar cubes, you know. We can’t just stuff them in our pockets.”
“No need to get worked up about it,” Murks said. “We’ve got a wagon in the shed, and it’ll do the job just fine.”
“It will take forever that way,” Nashe said.
“So what? As long as you put in your hours, you boys are home free. Why should you care how long it takes?”
“God dang it,” Pozzi said, snapping his fingers and talking in a dumb hick’s voice. “Thanks for setting me straight, Calvin. I mean, hell, what’s to complain about? We’ve got our wagon now, and when you consider how much help it’ll be with the work—and the Lord’s work it is, too, Brother Calvin—I guess we should be feeling pretty happy. I just wasn’t looking at it in the right way. Why Jim and me here, we’ve got to be about the luckiest fellas that ever walked the earth.”
They drove back to the trailer after that and unloaded Nashe’s things from the jeep, depositing the suitcases and the bags of books and tapes on the living room floor. Then they sat down at the kitchen table again and drew up a shopping list. Murks did the writing, and he formed his letters so slowly and painstakingly that it took them close to an hour to cover everything: the various foods and drinks and condiments, the work clothes, the boots and gloves, the extra clothes for Pozzi, the sunglasses, the soaps and garbage bags, the flyswatters. Once they had taken care of the essentials, Nashe added a portable radio-tape-player to the list, and Pozzi asked for a number of small items: a deck of cards, a newspaper, a copy of Penthouse magazine. Murks told them he would be back by midafte
rnoon, and then, suppressing a yawn, he stood up from the table and began to leave. Just as he was on his way out, however, Nashe remembered a question he had meant to ask before.
“I wonder if I could make a phone call,” he said.
“There’s no phone here,” Murks said. “You can see that for yourself.”
“Maybe you could drive me back to the house, then.”
“What do you want to make a phone call for?”
“I doubt that’s any of your business, Calvin.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is. But I can’t just take you to the house without knowing why.”
“I want to call my sister. She’s expecting me in a few days, and I don’t want her to worry when I don’t show up.”
Murks thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not allowed to take you there. They gave me special instructions.”
“How about a telegram? If I wrote down the message, you could call it in yourself.”
“No, I couldn’t do that. The bosses wouldn’t like it. But you can send a postcard if you want to. I’d be happy to mail it for you.”
“Make it a letter. You can buy me some paper and envelopes in town. If I send it tomorrow, I suppose it will reach her in time.”
“Okay, paper and envelopes. You got it.”
After Murks had driven off in the jeep, Pozzi turned to Nashe and said, “Do you think he’ll mail it?”
“I have no idea. If I had to bet on it, I’d say there’s a good chance. But it’s hard to be sure.”
“One way or another, you’ll never know. He’ll tell you he sent it, but that doesn’t mean you can trust him.”
“I’ll ask my sister to write back. If she doesn’t, then we’ll know our friend Murks was lying.”
Pozzi lit a cigarette and then pushed the pack of Marlboros across the table to Nashe, who debated for a moment before accepting. Smoking the cigarette made him realize how tired he was, how utterly drained of energy. He snubbed it out after three or four puffs and said, “I think I’m going to take a nap. There’s nothing to do now anyway, so I might as well try out my new bed. Which room do you want, Jack? I’ll take the other one.”
“I don’t care,” Pozzi answered. “Take your pick.”
As Nashe stood up, he moved in such a way that the wooden figures in his pocket were disturbed. They pressed uncomfortably against his leg, and for the first time since stealing them, he remembered they were there. “Look at this,” he said, pulling out Flower and Stone and standing them on the table. “Our two little friends.”
Pozzi scowled, then slowly broke into a smile as he examined the minuscule, lifelike men. “Where the hell did they come from?”
“Where do you think?”
Pozzi looked up at Nashe with an odd, disbelieving expression on his face. “You didn’t steal them, did you?”
“Of course I did. How else do you think they wound up in my pocket?”
“You’re nuts, you know that? You’re even nuttier than I thought you were.”
“It didn’t seem right to walk off without taking a souvenir,” Nashe said, smiling as though he had just received a compliment.
Pozzi smiled back, clearly impressed by Nashe’s audacity. “They’re not going to be too happy when they find out,” he said.
“Too bad for them.”
“Yeah,” Pozzi said, picking up the two tiny men from the table and studying them more closely, “too bad for them.”
Nashe shut the blinds in his room, stretched out on the bed, and fell asleep as the sounds of the meadow washed over him. Birds sang in the distance, the wind passed through the trees, a cicada clicked in the grass below his window. His last thought before losing consciousness was of Juliette and her birthday. October twelfth was forty-six days away, he told himself. If he had to spend the next fifty nights sleeping in this bed, he wasn’t going to make it. In spite of what he had promised her, he would still be in Pennsylvania on the day of her party.
The next morning, Nashe and Pozzi learned that building a wall was not as simple as they had imagined. Before the actual construction could get underway, all sorts of preparations had to be attended to. Lines had to be drawn, a trench had to be dug, a flat surface had to be created. “You can’t just plop down stones and hope for the best,” Murks said. “You’ve got to do things right.”
Their first job was to roll out two parallel lengths of string and stretch them between the corners of the meadow, marking off the space to be occupied by the wall. Once those lines had been established, Nashe and Pozzi fastened the string to small wooden stakes and then drove the stakes into the ground at five-foot intervals. It was a laborious process that entailed constant measuring and remeasuring, but Nashe and Pozzi were in no particular rush, since they knew that each hour spent with the string would mean one less hour they would have to spend lifting stones. Considering that there were eight hundred stakes to be planted, the three days it took them to finish this task did not seem excessive. Under different circumstances, they might have dragged it out a bit longer, but Murks was never very far away, and his pale blue eyes did not miss a trick.
The next morning they were handed shovels and told to dig a shallow trench between the two lines of string. The fate of the wall hinged on making the bottom of that trench as level as possible, and they therefore proceeded with caution, advancing by only the smallest of increments. Since the meadow was not perfectly flat, they were obliged to eliminate the various bumps and hillocks they encountered along the way, uprooting grass and weeds with their shovels, then turning to picks and crowbars to extract any stones that were lodged beneath the surface. Some of these stones turned out to be fiercely resistant. They refused to unlock themselves from the earth, and Nashe and Pozzi spent the better part of six days doing battle with them, struggling to wrench each one of these impediments from the stubborn soil. The larger stones left behind holes, of course, which subsequently had to be filled in with dirt; then all the excess matter disgorged by the excavation had to be carted off in wheelbarrows and dumped in the woods that surrounded the meadow. The work was slow going, but neither one of them found it especially difficult. By the time they came to the finishing touches, in fact, they were almost beginning to enjoy it. For an entire afternoon they did nothing but smooth out the bottom of the trench, then pound it flat with hoes. For the space of those few hours, the job felt no more strenuous than working in a garden.
It did not take them long to settle into their new life. After three or four days in the meadow, the routine was already familiar to them, and by the end of the first week they no longer had to think about it. Every morning, Nashe’s alarm clock would wake them at six. Then, after taking turns in the bathroom, they would go into the kitchen and cook breakfast (Pozzi handling the orange juice, toast, and coffee, Nashe preparing the scrambled eggs and sausages). Murks would show up promptly at seven, give a little knock at the trailer door, and then they would step out into the meadow to begin the day’s work. After doing a five-hour shift in the morning, they would return to the trailer for lunch (an hour off without pay), and then put in another five hours in the afternoon. Quitting time came at six o’clock, and that was always a good moment for both of them, a prelude to the comforts of a warm shower and a quiet beer in the living room. Nashe would then withdraw to the kitchen and prepare dinner (simple concoctions for the most part, the old American standbys: steaks and chops, chicken casseroles, mounds of potatoes and vegetables, puddings and ice cream for dessert), and once they had filled their stomachs, Pozzi would do his bit by cleaning up the mess. After that, Nashe would stretch out on the living room sofa, listening to music and reading books, and Pozzi would sit down at the kitchen table and play solitaire. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they said nothing. Sometimes they went outside and played a form of basketball that Pozzi had invented: throwing pebbles into a garbage can from a distance of ten feet. And once or twice, when the evening air was especially beautiful, they sat on the steps of th
e trailer and watched the sun go down behind the woods.
Nashe was not nearly as restless as he had thought he would be. Once he accepted the fact that the car was gone, he felt little or no desire to be back on the road, and the ease with which he adjusted to his new circumstances left him somewhat bewildered. It made no sense that he should be able to abandon it all so quickly. But Nashe discovered that he liked working out in the open air, and after a while the stillness of the meadow seemed to have a tranquilizing effect on him, as if the grass and the trees had brought about a change in his metabolism. That did not mean he felt entirely at home there, however. An atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust continued to hover around the place, and Nashe resented the implication that he and the kid were not going to keep their end of the bargain. They had given their word, they had even put their signatures on a contract, and yet the whole setup was built on the assumption that they would try to escape. Not only were they not allowed to work with machines, but Murks now came to the meadow every morning on foot, proving that even the jeep was considered too dangerous a temptation, as if its presence would make it impossible to resist stealing it. These precautions were bad enough, but even more sinister was the chain-link fence that Nashe and Pozzi discovered on the evening that followed their first full day of work. After dinner, they had decided to explore some of the wooded areas that surrounded the meadow. They went to the far end first, entering the woods along a dirt path that appeared to have been cut quite recently. Felled trees lay on either side of it, and from the tire tracks embedded in the soft, loamy earth, they gathered that this was where the trucks had driven in to deliver their cargo of stones. Nashe and Pozzi kept on walking, but before they reached the highway that marked the northern edge of the property, they were stopped by the fence. It was eight or nine feet tall, crowned by a menacing tangle of barbed wire. One section looked newer than the rest, which seemed to indicate that a piece of it had been removed to allow the trucks in, but other than that, all traces of entry had been eliminated. They continued walking alongside the fence, wondering if they would find any break in it, and by the time darkness fell an hour and a half later, they had returned to the same spot where they had begun. At one point, they passed the stone gate they had driven through on the day of their arrival, but that was the only interruption. The fence went everywhere, encompassing the entire extent of Flower and Stone’s domain.
