by Paul Auster
They did their best to laugh it off, saying that rich people always lived behind fences, but that did not erase the memory of what they had seen. The barrier had been erected to keep things out, but now that it was there, what was to prevent it from keeping things in as well? All sorts of threatening possibilities were buried in that question. Nashe tried not to let his imagination run away from him, but it was not until a letter from Donna arrived on the eighth day that he was able to put his fears to rest. Pozzi found it reassuring that someone knew where they were now, but as far as Nashe was concerned, the important thing was that Murks had kept his promise. The letter was a demonstration of good faith, tangible proof that no one had been out to deceive them.
All during those early days in the meadow, Pozzi’s conduct was exemplary. He seemed to have made up his mind to stick by Nashe, and no matter what was asked of him, he did not complain. He went about his work with stolid goodwill, he pitched in with the household chores, he even pretended to enjoy the classical music that Nashe played every night after dinner. Nashe had not expected the kid to be so obliging, and he was grateful to him for making the effort. But the truth was that he was merely getting back what he had already earned. He had gone the full distance for Pozzi on the night of the poker match, pushing on past any reasonable limit, and even though he had been wiped out in the process, he had won himself a friend. That friend now seemed prepared to do anything for him, even if it meant living in a godforsaken meadow for the next fifty days, busting his chops like some convict sentenced to a term at hard labor.
Still, loyalty was not the same thing as belief. From Pozzi’s point of view, the whole situation was absurd, and just because he had chosen to support his friend, that did not mean he felt that Nashe was in his right mind. The kid was indulging him, and once Nashe understood that, he did everything in his power to keep his thoughts to himself. The days passed, and even though there was rarely a moment when they were not together, he continued to say nothing about what truly concerned him—nothing about the struggle to put his life together again, nothing about how he saw the wall as a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes, nothing about how he welcomed the hardships of the meadow as a way to atone for his recklessness and self-pity—for once he got started, he knew that all the wrong words would come tumbling from his mouth, and he didn’t want to make Pozzi any more nervous than he already was. The point was to keep him in good spirits, to get him through the fifty days as painlessly as possible. Much better to speak of things only in the most superficial terms—the debt, the contract, the hours they put in—and to bluster along with funny remarks and ironic shrugs of the shoulders. It was sometimes a lonely business for Nashe, but he didn’t see what else he could do. If he ever bared his soul to the kid, all hell would break loose. It would be like opening a can of worms, like asking for the worst kind of trouble.
Pozzi continued on his best behavior with Nashe, but with Murks it was another story, and not a day went by when he didn’t tease him and insult him and verbally attack him. In the beginning, Nashe interpreted it as a good sign, thinking that if the kid could return to his old rambunctious self, then perhaps that meant he was coping with the situation fairly well. The abuse was delivered with such sarcasm, with such an assortment of smiles and sympathetic nods of the head, that Murks barely seemed to know he was being made fun of. Nashe, who had no particular liking for Murks himself, did not blame Pozzi for letting off a little steam at the foreman’s expense. But as time went on, he began to feel that the kid was carrying it too far—not just acting out of innate subversiveness, but responding to panic, to pent-up fears and confusion. The kid made Nashe think of a cornered animal, waiting to strike at the first thing that approached it. As it happened, that thing was always Murks, but no matter how obnoxious Pozzi became, no matter how provocative he tried to be, old Calvin never flinched. There was something so deeply imperturbable about the man, so fundamentally oblique and humorless, that Nashe could never decide if he was inwardly laughing at them or just plain dumb. He simply went about his job, plodding along at the same slow and thorough pace, never offering a word about himself, never asking any questions of Nashe or Pozzi, never showing the slightest hint of anger or curiosity or pleasure. He came punctually every morning at seven, delivering whatever groceries and provisions had been ordered the day before, and then he was all business for the next eleven hours. It was difficult to know what he thought about the wall, but he supervised the work with meticulous attention to detail, leading Nashe and Pozzi through each step of the construction as though he knew what he was talking about. He kept his distance from them, however, and never lent a hand or involved himself in any of the physical aspects of the work. His job was to oversee the building of the wall, and he adhered to that role with strict and absolute superiority over the men in his charge. Murks had the smugness of someone content with his place in the hierarchy, and as with most of the sergeants and crew chiefs of this world, his loyalties were firmly on the side of the people who told him what to do. He never ate lunch with Nashe and Pozzi, for example, and when the workday was done, he never lingered to chat. Work stopped precisely at six, and that was always the end of it. “See you tomorrow, boys,” he would say, and then he would shuffle off into the woods, disappearing from sight within a matter of seconds.
It took them nine days to finish the preliminaries. Then they started in on the wall itself, and the world suddenly changed again. As Nashe and Pozzi discovered, it was one thing to lift a sixty-pound stone, but once that stone had been lifted, it was quite another thing to lift a second sixty-pound stone, and still another thing to take on a third stone after lifting the second. No matter how strong they felt while lifting the first, much of that strength would be gone by the time they came to the second, and once they had lifted the second, there would be still less of that strength to call upon for the third. So it went. Every time they worked on the wall, Nashe and Pozzi came up against the same bewitching conundrum: all the stones were identical, and yet each stone was heavier than the one before it.
They spent the mornings hauling stones across the meadow in a little red wagon, depositing each one along the side of the trench and then going back for another. In the afternoons, they worked with trowels and cement, carefully putting the stones into place. Of the two jobs, it was difficult to know which one was worse: the endless lifting and lowering that went on in the mornings, or the pushing and shoving that started in after lunch. The first took more out of them, perhaps, but there was a hidden reward in having to move the stones over such great distances. Murks had instructed them to begin at the far end of the trench, and each time they dropped off another stone, they had to go back empty-handed for the next one—which gave them a small interval in which to catch their breath. The second job was less taxing, but it was also more relentless. There were the brief pauses to slap on the cement, but they were not nearly as long as the return walks across the meadow, and when it came right down to it, it was probably harder to move a stone several inches than to raise it off the ground and put it in a wagon. When all the other variables were taken into consideration—the fact that they usually felt stronger in the morning, the fact that the weather was usually hotter in the afternoon, the fact that their disgust inevitably mounted as the day wore on—it was probably a wash. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
They carted the stones in a Fast Flyer, the same kind of children’s wagon that Nashe had bought for Juliette on her third birthday. It seemed like a joke at first, and both he and Pozzi had laughed when Murks wheeled it out and presented it to them. “You’re not serious, are you?” Nashe said. But Murks was very serious, and in the long run the toy wagon proved more than adequate for the job: its metal body could support the loads, and its rubber tires were sturdy enough to withstand any bumps and divots in the terrain. Still, there was something ridiculous about having to use such a thing, and Nashe resented the weird, infantilizing effect it had on him. The wagon did not belong in the hands
of a grown man. It was an object fit for the nursery, for the trivial, make-believe worlds of children, and every time he pulled it across the meadow, he felt ashamed of himself, afflicted by a sense of his own helplessness.
The work advanced slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees. On a good morning, they could move twenty-five or thirty stones over to the trench, but never more than that. If Pozzi had been a little stronger, they could have doubled their progress, but the kid wasn’t up to lifting the stones by himself. He was too small and frail, too unaccustomed to manual work. He could get the stones off the ground, but once he had them there, he was incapable of carrying them for any distance. As soon as he tried to walk, the weight would throw him off balance, and by the time he had taken two or three steps, the thing would start to slip out of his hands. Nashe, who had eight inches and seventy pounds on the kid, did not experience any of these difficulties. It wouldn’t have been fair for him to do all the work, however, and so they wound up lifting the stones in tandem. Even then, it still would have been possible to load the wagon with two stones (which would have upped their progress by roughly a third), but Pozzi did not have it in him to pull over a hundred pounds. He could handle sixty or seventy without much strain, and since they had agreed to split the work down the middle—which meant that they took turns pulling the wagon—they kept each load to a single stone. In the end, that was probably for the best. The work was grueling enough anyway, and there was no point in letting it crush them.
Little by little, Nashe settled into it. The first few days were the hardest, and there was rarely a moment when he was not dragged down by an almost intolerable exhaustion. His muscles ached, his mind was clouded over, his body called out constantly for sleep. He had been softened by all those months of sitting in the car, and the relatively light work of the first nine days had done nothing to prepare him for the shock of real exertion. But Nashe was still young, still strong enough to recover from his long bout of inactivity, and as time went on, he began to notice that he was becoming tired a bit later in the day, that whereas previously a morning’s work had been enough to bring him to the limit of his endurance, he was now able to get through a large part of the afternoon before that happened. Eventually, he found that it was no longer necessary to crawl into bed straight after dinner. He started reading books again, and by the middle of the second week, he understood that the worst of it was behind him.
Pozzi, on the other hand, did not adjust so well. The kid had been reasonably happy during the early days of digging the trench, but once they moved on to the next stage of the work, he grew more and more miserable. There was no question that the stones took more out of him than they took out of Nashe, but his irritability and moroseness seemed to have less to do with physical suffering than with a sense of moral outrage. The work was appalling to him, and the longer it went on, the more obvious it became to him that he was the victim of a terrible injustice, that his rights had been abused in some monstrous, unspeakable way. He kept going over the poker game with Flower and Stone, again and again replaying the hands out loud to Nashe, unable to accept the fact that he had lost. By the time he had been working on the wall for ten days, he was convinced that he had been cheated, that Flower and Stone had stolen the money by using marked cards or some other illegal trick. Nashe did his best to steer clear of the subject, but the truth was that he was not entirely convinced Pozzi was wrong. The same thought had already occurred to him, but without any evidence to support the accusation, he saw no point in encouraging the kid. Even if he was right, there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it.
Pozzi kept waiting for a chance to have it out with Flower and Stone, but the millionaires never showed up. Their absence was inexplicable, and as time went on, Nashe became more and more perplexed by it. He had assumed that they would come poking around the meadow every day. The wall was their idea, after all, and it seemed only natural that they should want to know how the work was coming along. But the weeks passed, and still there was no sign of them. Whenever Nashe asked Murks where they were, Calvin would shrug his shoulders, look down at the ground, and say that they were busy. It didn’t make any sense. Nashe tried talking to Pozzi about it, but the kid was off in another orbit by then, and he always had a ready answer for him. “It means they’re guilty,” he would say. “The fuckers know I’m on to them, and they’re too scared to show their faces.”
One night, Pozzi drank five or six beers after dinner and got himself good and drunk. He was in a foul mood, and after a while he began to stagger around the trailer, spouting all kinds of gibberish about the raw deal he was getting. “I’m going to fix those shitbirds,” he told Nashe. “I’m going to make that gumbo-gut confess.” Without stopping to explain what he had in mind, he grabbed a flashlight off the kitchen counter, opened the door of the trailer, and plunged out into the darkness. Nashe scrambled to his feet and went after him, shouting at the kid to come back. “Get off my case, fireman,” Pozzi said, waving the flashlight wildly around the grass. “If those turds won’t come out here to talk to us, then we’ll just have to go to them.”
Short of punching him in the face, Nashe realized, there wasn’t any way he could stop him. The kid was juiced, utterly beyond the pull of words, and trying to talk him out of it wasn’t going to help. But Nashe had no desire to hit Pozzi. The thought of beating up a desperate, drunken kid was hardly his idea of a solution, and so he made up his mind to do nothing—to play along and see that Pozzi kept himself out of trouble.
They walked through the woods together, guiding themselves by the beam of the flashlight. It was close to eleven o’clock, and the sky was overcast, obscuring the moon and whatever stars there might have been. Nashe kept expecting to see a light from the house, but all was dark over in that direction, and after a while he wasn’t sure if they would ever find it. It seemed to be taking a long time, and what with Pozzi tripping over stones and knocking into thorny bushes, the whole expedition began to feel rather pointless. But then they were there, stepping onto the edge of the lawn and approaching the house. It seemed too early for Flower and Stone to be in bed, but not a single window was lit. Pozzi walked around to the front door and pushed the bell, which again played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The kid muttered something under his breath, not half as amused as he had been the first time, and waited for someone to open the door. But nothing happened, and after fifteen or twenty seconds he rang again.
“It looks like they’re out for the night,” Nashe said.
“No, they’re in there,” Pozzi said. “They’re just too chicken to answer.”
But no lights went on after the second ring, and the door remained closed.
“I think it’s time to give it up,” Nashe said. “If you want to, we’ll come back tomorrow.”
“What about the maid?” Pozzi said. “You figure she’s got to be in. We could leave a message with her.”
“Maybe she’s a heavy sleeper. Or maybe they gave her the night off. It looks pretty dead in there to me.”
Pozzi kicked the door in frustration, then suddenly began to curse at the top of his voice. Instead of ringing a third time, he stepped back into the driveway and continued shouting at one of the upstairs windows, venting his rage at the empty house. “Hey, Flower!” he boomed. “That’s right, fat man, I’m talking to you! You’re a creep, mister, you know that? You and your little friend, you’re both creeps, and you’re going to pay for what you did to me!” It went on like that for a good three or four minutes, a belligerent outpouring of wild and useless threats, and even as it grew in intensity, it became progressively more pathetic, more dismal in the shrillness of its despair. Nashe’s heart filled with pity for the kid, but there wasn’t much he could do until Pozzi’s anger burned itself out. He stood in the darkness, watching the bugs swarm in the beam of the flashlight. Off in the distance an owl hooted once, twice, and then stopped.
“Come on, Jack,” Nashe said. “Let’s head back to the trailer and ge
t some sleep.”
But Pozzi wasn’t quite finished. Before leaving, he bent down in the driveway, scooped up a handful of pebbles, and threw them at the house. It was a stupid gesture, the petty wrath of a twelve-year-old. The gravel splattered like buckshot off the hard surface, and then, almost as an echo, Nashe heard the faint treble sound of breaking glass.
“Let’s call it a night,” he said. “I think we’ve had enough.”
Pozzi turned and started walking toward the woods. “Assholes,” he said to himself. “The whole world is run by assholes.”
After that night, Nashe understood that he would have to keep a closer watch over the kid. Pozzi’s inner resources were being used up, and they hadn’t even come to the halfway point of their term. Without making an issue of it, Nashe began doing more than his share of the work, lifting and carting stones by himself while Pozzi rested, figuring that a little more sweat on his part might help to keep things under control. He didn’t want any more outbursts or drunken binges, he didn’t want to be constantly worrying that the kid was about to crack up. He could take the extra work, and in the long run it seemed simpler than trying to lecture Pozzi on the virtues of patience. It would all be over in thirty days, he told himself, and if he couldn’t manage to see it through until then, what kind of a man was he?
