by Jaime Clarke
We didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t do it. The idea of going it alone appealed to us, and while we bore no confidence in our abilities, we were driven mainly by our collective desire to prove that it could be done. We felt sure we would employ any means necessary to accomplish the goal, and wouldn’t they be surprised? We imagined our parents’ reactions when they discovered what we’d done, and the reactions of droves of others’ parents when they heard. Our determination would be fabled, one for the annals of Garden Lakes, one that would be discussed year after year. And long after, no matter where we were in the world, our immortality would be resurrected every year as spring brought the first whisper of Garden Lakes—who would be nominated, who would be chosen—and if we strained our imagination, we just might hear the awed conversations beginning with “Did you hear about the fellows from the class of eighty-eight?”
“We all have to agree,” Figs said, calling for a vote. Figs and Hands raised their hands. Sprocket raised his hand as fast; he hoped to become the class proctor and planned to lobby Figs and Hands (and anyone else) for the commission. Roger flashed his palm and then let his hand fall back down on his knee. Lindy voted yes too.
Warren’s hand flew up in the company of hands thrown up by the sophomores, who had straggled in from the kitchen. His vote wasn’t just for continuation, but also for allowing Axia to stay, a fact that Figs had tipped him off to, Figs guaranteeing Axia could stay as long as Warren would help counter any arguments against Figs and Hands’s proposal to maintain the status quo. The zip in Warren’s vote was fueled by his happiness at not having to help Figs twist arms on the Axia front.
“We’ve got this, boys,” Hands said, sealing the pact.
The administration found the incongruous testimony about Axia unbelievable. Some reported that we believed Axia would be asked to leave, that a vote for continuation was a vote for Axia’s expulsion. Others thought Axia was to watch over the sophomores and their kitchen duty. What the testimony didn’t reveal was our secret longing to have her around, not only because she was a girl, but because we wanted someone to witness our acts of bravery. We wanted someone to cheer us on in success or buoy us after a day of defeat. We liked the idea that there was someone other than us, someone who, for no reason, we felt accountable to. And while we would not have been able to express this feeling in those terms, the Axia issue was dropped once we raised our hands endorsing continuation, and Axia blended into the background.
We were able to abide by the schedule for exactly twelve days.
We welcomed the structure of the daily schedule back into our lives. Conformity to the schedule brought the sense that we were steadily chipping away stone to uncover sculpture.
Eagerness woke us that first Saturday. Axia joined the sophomores in the kitchen and proved as adept as Mr. Hancock, her nearness motivation enough for the sophomores, who toiled with renewed purpose. She also served as another pair of eyes for sports, situating herself on the ever-shifting sand of the island in the lake bed to aid Sprocket in close calls. We offered to substitute her in during play, but she demurred. We did what we could to encourage her to join a team, but she would only let us set up goal kicks for her before and after games, Hands batting down every ball she shot.
We did make one amendment to the schedule, one we knew we could justify: Rather than breaking the sophomores and fellows up into pods for tutoring, we congregated in the dining hall, the sophs reading aloud George Washington’s Farewell Address, Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Samuel Gompers’s Letter on Labor in Industrial Society, etc., conversation periodically veering wide of the subject at hand, devolving into joke telling or a bull session about what Mr. Hancock intended by including a particular text in American Democracy. Our ability to digest and pontificate on the texts sharpened in Axia’s presence, her sitting at one of the back tables, where she listened quietly.
Construction continued apace. We made strides in beading and moved into the taping phase, careful to adhere to the taping sequence Mr. Baker, the future kidnapping victim, had laid out for us: fasteners, tapered-edge seams, butted seams, inside corners, outside corners—the precise order being important to avoid disrupting a flat seam when working the corners. We each slid a bucket of joint compound along as we worked, the rhythmic harrumph of pails scraping above and below marking the hours.
The next day, an impromptu tour sprang up, Hands showing off our progress to Axia, who had asked him about it during lunch. Hands detailed our work, allowing her to labor under the misimpression that we had erected the frame and poured the foundation, a falsehood none of us worked too hard to correct.
Hands’s attitude toward Axia improved once we accepted as true his innocence in the matter of Mr. Malagon and Smurf, so that four or five days in, Axia was taking her meals at Figs and Hands’s table. Hands even developed an avidity for astronomy once Axia coaxed Lindy into showing her the sky from the community center roof. We all became junior astronomers, electing to spend free time night after night huddled around Lindy and Axia, amazed by what amazed them.
Axia sat in on our poker games too, bluffing with an earnestness that fooled us every time. Had we been playing for real money and not poker chips, she would’ve bankrupted us all.
That Friday, the smoky fragrance of barbecue drifted through our windows as we changed out of our filthy work clothes for dinner. The source of the smell was not the kitchen but a barbecue pit Axia and the sophomores had dug. Axia and the sophs had moved fast to carve a pit into the lake bed, the idea sparked by an unopened bag of charcoal briquettes in the pantry. We were too enchanted to tell her the briquettes were for the Open House; that Mr. Hancock would not be present to strike up the celebratory barbecue lessened our guilt. So, too, did the chicken brushed with a homemade barbecue sauce that lured us in with the sweet taste of honey only to stab us with the heat of jalapeño. “My own recipe,” Axia said. We tried to convey its tastiness, but our eyes watered and our lips burned if we stopped eating, so we grunted our approval.
“What was your high school like?” Figs asked, chomping on a plump chicken leg.
“It was nothing special,” Axia said. “Not like where you guys go.” She described her teachers, some good, some bad. “I didn’t hate it or anything,” she said.
A game of truth or dare started up as the coals died out. Roger asked Warren, “Truth or dare?” hoping Warren would answer, “Dare,” so Roger could dare him to kiss Axia, but Warren didn’t oblige. Roger thought for a minute and then asked, “What’s the real reason you disappeared?”
Warren laughed. “I already told you.”
“The truth,” Roger reminded him.
A refrain of “Yeah” went around the barbecue pit.
Warren laid his hand across his heart. “I swear I told the truth,” he said, loving the attention.
“Tell them what you told me,” Axia said.
Warren blushed. “Well, I . . .”
“Out with it, weasel,” Roger said. Warren could take a little ribbing, and it felt good to let out a good-natured laugh at his expense.
“Answer me this,” Hands said to Axia. “Did he dance naked with the Indians?”
Axia spit out a mouthful of soda, the spray dousing the briquettes, a wisp of smoke rising on contact.
“I just said that I didn’t care if I didn’t go back,” Warren said.
We had hoped Warren’s admission would be something hysterical, something lighthearted to stoke our good time, but instead what he said sobered us and we stared ruefully into the desert night.
Lindy broke the silence. “Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Warren said. “I wasn’t out there long, but I liked the simple lifestyle. There weren’t so many . . . questions. It seemed to me”—he looked at Axia for reassurance—“that that other life is about labor and not about always trying to figure things out. That’s all.”
“True, true,” Axia said.
She nodded herself into a reverie, and some of us looked away embarrassedly, as if we were spying on her getting dressed.
“Don’t sweat it,” Hands said, throwing an empty soda can at Warren. “You’ll never figure anything out anyway.”
We loved Hands for bringing us back around. In turn, our guffaws brought Axia back, and we continued with the game, hoping one of us would choose dare, until it became another game not to, each of us not wanting to grant another the privilege. Instead, the night was saturated with earnestly rendered truths and half-truths (as well as some outright lies), each of us trying to impress Axia by telling a tale on ourselves, gauging the success of our stories by how hard she laughed, or by how well we elicited her sympathies.
A smaller game was being played on the outskirts of the circle. Figs was anticipating his turn, glancing furtively at Hands, who sensed something was up. He doubted Figs had the nerve to ask him the truth about Mr. Malagon as a part of the game, but as the right to ask someone “Truth or dare?” worked its way back to Figs, Hands announced that he was turning in for the night. Lindy followed, the next casualty in what was a slow drift of tired souls, Figs and Warren trying to outlast each other in a bid to be alone with Axia.
The sight of Mr. Baker’s truck drawing near inspired a current of panic through 1959 Regis Street; we weren’t unprepared for Mr. Baker’s inspection—we’d applied the skim coat of compound the day before—but we had not thought through what we would say to Mr. Baker’s inevitable questions about Mr. Malagon.
Without flinching, Figs shifted his paper mask down around his chin and met Mr. Baker’s truck, hailing him like a long-lost relative.
“Howdy,” Mr. Baker said, waving back. “How’s she lookin’?”
“I think you’ll be pleased,” Figs said, a master at making someone feel regal. “We’ve followed your instructions exactly.”
Mr. Baker shaded his eyes, looking for Mr. Malagon.
“Oh,” Figs said. “Mr. Malagon had to run out for some supplies. He said if he missed you that we should pay extra attention to your instructions for phase three.”
“What did you run out of?” Mr. Baker asked.
Figs gave a hearty laugh. “Kitchen supplies.” He glanced back at the community center as if to prove his point, Mr. Baker looking over his shoulder too. “And toilet supplies.”
“Okay,” Mr. Baker said. “Let’s have a look.”
A rare hush fell over the house as Mr. Baker worked his way from room to room, Figs following close behind. After pointing out several crowned seams—the result of too much compound spread over a taped section—that would need sanding, as well as several cracked seams running like lightning down the wall (“Compound dried too fast,” Mr. Baker said) and a cracked corner bead, Mr. Baker lectured us in the art of sanding, texturing, and painting—the finishing touches we would apply before the Open House.
“First,” Mr. Baker said, wiping his brow, “is that you must wear paper masks when sanding. I want you to write that down in capital letters.” He paused while we took down the warning. “Do you have the telescopic poles for raising a plastic wall?”
Mr. Baker looked to Sprocket for the answer, but before Sprocket could reveal that Hands and Roger had commandeered the poles to use in a spontaneous volleyball game a couple of nights ago, a forceful spike of the soccer ball by Roger buckling one of the poles, Hands said, “Yeah, I saw them in the back of the supply shed.”
Sprocket nodded idiotically to corroborate the misinformation.
“Good,” Mr. Baker said. “Just make sure the ends of the poles are buried in plastic before you wedge them into the floor and ceiling. Nothing like having a plastic wall come loose and wrap around you while you’re working.” Mr. Baker laughed as if it had happened to him more than once.
The previous class had had the luxury of electric sanders, but an accident had resulted in their removal (and the removal of a finger, according to legend), so they’d been replaced by manual pole sanders. Mr. Baker ran through the different sandpaper grits we’d need—“one-twenty grit for coarse work; one fifty for finer work”—showing us how to move our hand along the wall in front of a hand sander to scout out areas needing sanding.
Mr. Baker cautioned us against sanding the face of the drywall and about the dangers of oversanding. “If you oversand, you’ll have to reapply the third coat of compound, and another skim coat,” he said. We took this advice seriously, promising to defeat any temptation to erase a scratch or dent in the taping completely. “Just enough so it won’t show through the texturing and the paint,” Mr. Baker said.
Next we listened to the procedure for what sounded like the best part of the job, the knockdown roller finish we’d have to apply to the walls and ceilings before painting the whole shebang. “Most textures are applied with a hopper and an air compressor,” Mr. Baker said, “but there are a couple of ways to texture a wall by hand, and one is a knockdown roller finish. Its name gives you a clue as to how it’s applied. First you roll on a light coat of joint compound with a paint roller, then you take a trowel and follow by applying even pressure”—Mr. Baker pressed the flat of his hand against the wall at an angle and dragged it down the wall—“to knock down the peaks created by the roller. Very simple. The key is not to press too hard, or load the wall up with compound.” He looked at his watch and then out the paneless window at the community center. “How long do you figure till he gets back?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Figs said, stepping up.
“What about the other one?” Mr. Baker asked. “What’s his name? Hancock?”
Figs froze. He hadn’t accounted for Mr. Hancock’s absence, as Mr. Baker had hardly said more than hello to him. “He’s . . . sick,” Figs said lamely. “He’s lying down.”
Hands instinctively supported what Figs had said. “Stomach virus,” Hands said.
Mr. Baker grimaced. “I thought this project required adult supervision,” he said.
“Mr. Malagon really hasn’t been gone that long,” Figs said.
Mr. Baker looked at his watch again. “I’ve been here for close to an hour,” he said. “Maybe an hour and a half.”
“I think I saw him pull around behind the community center,” Figs said.
We craned our necks to look, but all we saw was Adam Kerr flinging a bucket of dirty mop water out the back door.
“I’m not sure when to schedule the final inspection before the Open House,” Mr. Baker said. “When is it?”
“The twenty-ninth,” Hands said.
“What is that? A Wednesday?” Mr. Baker asked.
We guessed that it was.
“Does Mr. Malagon have your phone number?” Figs asked. It took all his will to contain his desperation. “He has a mobile phone. He can call you with the information when he gets back. I’ll make sure.”
“Yeah, I’ll remind him,” Hands said.
“Would Mr. Hancock know?” Mr. Baker asked. “I’d like to clear it up before I go.”
“He’s awfully sick,” Figs said, “but c’mon, I’ll take you to him. We’ll ask.”
None of us dared to breathe, uncertain of what Figs was up to.
“I’ll go with,” Hands said. “I want to ask him something too.”
The three started out for Mr. Hancock’s residence, making it as far as Mr. Baker’s truck before a shrieking pierced the air. Mr. Baker raised his sunglasses and squinted at the display on his pager. “Shit,” he said, forgetting Figs and Hands for a moment. We watched from the house as Mr. Baker made Figs copy down the phone number from the decal on the passenger-side door of Mr. Baker’s truck, Figs’s promise to have Mr. Malagon or Mr. Hancock call him fading as Mr. Baker started the engine.
“Tell you what,” Figs yelled. “If they don’t call, that means all’s well.”
It was hard to tell if Mr. Baker was nodding in agreement or if he was shaking his head, insisting someone call. Figs and Hands deliberated on the subtleties of Mr. Baker’s head movement all through the dinne
r hour. Figs was convinced it was fine, that Mr. Baker was surely overwhelmed with more-important responsibilities. “So what if he does show up a few days before the Open House?” Figs asked. “By then, it’ll be over. We’ll be done.”
Mr. Baker showing up before Open House was not what worried Hands. “What if he calls Randolph when Mr. Malagon doesn’t call, to find out if he is supposed to do an inspection before the Open House?”
Figs suggested they wait a few days and then call themselves, telling Mr. Baker that Mr. Malagon asked them to call, a ruse for our benefit, Figs and Hands not letting on that Mr. Hancock’s mobile phone was inoperable. “Or we could call after hours and leave a message,” Figs said. Figs did his best to satisfy Hands that they had options, and time, but Hands knew Mr. Baker could single-handedly ruin their chances of completing the fellowship. The idea of having wasted the summer and not getting credit for the fellowship drove Hands’s fears. He remained unconvinced by Figs’s arguments and sought him out during free time to try to convince him otherwise. He checked in on Lindy, who was hosting the nightly sky-watching party on the roof of the community center, but Figs was not among the crowd. He stuck his head in on a poker game between me and Assburn and Sprocket, who asked him if he wanted to sit in. We told him that we hadn’t seen Figs since dinner. Hands wandered Regis Street to its end, thinking Figs might have gone back to the construction site, though the site was too dark at night to see.
A light in Axia’s living room drew Hands’s attention. He kicked through a mound of gravel that had been built on the sidewalk by the wind, scattering the pebbles. As he raised his hand to knock on the door, he leaned over and peered through the window. His fist dropped when he saw Figs and Axia on the couch, Axia practically sitting in Figs’s lap. Figs’s hand bounced on Axia’s knee as he spoke, and she laughed as Figs finished whatever it was he was saying.
