Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Once Praxis might have been a small family business—way back in the early 1900s. Then Alexander Praxiteles, a Greek immigrant to the United States and sometime fisherman, had started taking on paving jobs in the new beach communities of Pacifica, Montara, Moss Beach, and El Granada that began springing up as the now-defunct Ocean Shore Railroad made its way from San Francisco down the western side of the Peninsula. But now, more than a century later, the eagle-browed, silver-haired man sitting in court behind the defense table was the surviving grandson of Alexander Praxiteles—whose surname had long since been shortened to “Praxis.” The two gray-haired men sitting at his side were the great-grandsons of that earnest entrepreneur. All of them were prosperous and well-fed. None of them had ever lifted a shovelful of dirt in their lives, other than at some formal groundbreaking using brand-new shovels spray-painted in gold. Antigone Wells would have bet money on that.

  She finished questioning her expert witness and turned him over to the Praxis Engineering counsel for what was sure to be a perfunctory cross examination. As she did so, the thought again crossed her mind—although she would never mention it to the jury, even obliquely—that the Praxis people should have settled when St. Brigid’s made their offer. After all, the initial claim had only been for $140 million, and that was chicken feed in the current economic environment. Then Praxis Engineering & Construction could have gone after the subcontractors themselves for recovery. But instead they had held out from the beginning and then propounded that weak-kneed force majeure defense. It only made them appear brazen and callous—not to mention just a little bit stupid. … And juries loved that, too.

  * * *

  The San Francisco courtroom where the civil trial against his company was being argued was not, John Praxis decided, a place that seemed completely comfortable with technology.

  The tables where the lawyers sat were festooned with power cords and data cables leading down from their laptop computers to exposed junction boxes on the floor, rather than more modern, molded-in-place connections. The last-generation WIFI repeater with its upright horns sat on a makeshift shelf above the door to the judge’s chambers, with more wires hanging down. A flat-panel television screen—a full five inches thick, so not the latest generation—was bolted under the clock on the wall that faced the jury box and had its own dangling wires. The computer monitors on the desks of the clerk and bailiff were positioned at odd, oblique angles, so that those officials could perform their duties while still facing the court itself. Only the judge, high above the proceedings, operated in a virtual technology-free zone.

  Praxis knew his mind was wandering now. He had been sitting for the past two hours in the folding, theater-style seats for spectators behind the courtroom’s central railing. They were surprisingly small seats, more like transplants from a junior high school auditorium. They were too narrow for his hips and too close to the row ahead for his knees. With his six-foot-four-inch frame, Praxis could only perch stiffly upright, unable to cross his legs and afraid to move his arms for poking his sons on either side—and, Heaven knew, Leonard and Richard had resented such familiar contact even as boys.

  He looked at his watch. If the testimony of the plaintiff’s first witness took more than another hour, then the judge would call a noontime recess and send them all off to lunch. Praxis could wait that long. He was only putting in the obligatory, opening-day appearance. Then he and his sons would leave the whole matter with the attorneys they had on retainer and go back to the corporate headquarters on Steuart Street overlooking the Embarcadero.

  The woman speaking now, this Antigone Wells, was a pretty sharp lawyer. While she and her witness patiently worked through the massive snafu that had added refractory brick to concrete aggregate, Praxis recalled the color photographs she had sent scrolling across that big-screen television during her opening statement: cratered floors, collapsed bearing walls, and crumbling parking ramps, alternating with shots of damaged and tilting medical equipment, dented car roofs and hoods, entry doors X’ed across with yellow caution tape, and a sign at the gate reading “condemned” in big, red letters. Even John Praxis, hardened as he was to lawyers’ rhetorical tricks, had to admit it was damned effective.

  Antigone Wells was a trim woman. She still had her figure at—what? Fifty-something? Late fifties, probably. She wore her ash-blonde hair meticulously combed back in a wave and tied in a bun, like Tippi Hedren in that old San Francisco movie, The Birds. She dressed the part, too, in pastel-colored suits that might have come from Chanel. She even had gray eyes—but not smoky and smoldering, like some of the gray-eyed women Praxis had known. These eyes, when you saw them close up—as he had, during their various meetings for depositions, negotiations and, finally, the settlement offer—were sharp and hard, like agates. And that, too, was a bit of the old Tippi.

  He looked at the backs of the heads at the defense table. The team of attorneys representing Praxis Engineering & Construction were hunched over, already defeated even before their turn to cross examine. They had stacks of manila folders in front of them, full of construction orders, waybills, and inspection results. They even had rolled printouts of structural drawings on the old E-size vellum—although, of course, nobody drafted with ruler and T-square on paper anymore; all the design work was done in CAD these days. But still, none of that technical documentation could stand up to those pictures on the big television screen.

  Praxis looked slowly from side to side at his two sons. Leonard was the firm’s president and chief of operations. Richard was chief financial officer. Both of them sat stone-faced and slit-eyed. To the casual observer at a distance—someone in the jury box, say—they might not even seem to be awake. But Praxis could see beads of sweat at Richard’s hairline. The boy was terrified. Good!

  A hundred and forty million buck-a-ding-dongs was a terrifying number. And the actual cash amount was only going to go up from there. Since the start of the Continuing Currency Crisis—which the news media promptly shortened to “C3”—a couple of years ago, the value of money had been eroding faster than a sugar cube in hot tea. In previous inflations, that might have been a good thing: take on a big debt today, watch it become pocket change in a decade or so. But these were modern times, and everyone had access to fast computers. All future payments—and that included jury awards, which would not become final until the verdict was in, as well as any scheme for amortization or delayed distribution—were now made in constant dollars, calculated with the “C$” button on the latest banking apps, and indexed to the value of money at the point of sale or, in this case, the date of actual loss. By the time this lawsuit played out, PE&C might be in the hole for a billion dollars of current value. While that might not be such a horrific number in the sweet by-and-by, the prospect of it bearing down on future balance sheets gave everyone the heebie-jeebies.

  Technically, ultimately, the buck stopped with John Praxis himself as chief executive officer and chairman of the board—for even a private company had bylaws and needed the appearance of being run by a council of elders. However, for the past two years he had been transitioning into an emeritus position, heading for semi-retirement, and was trotted out mainly for diplomatic functions like ribbon cuttings with governors and heads of state. And for buck-forty-million foul-ups—all right, fuck-ups—like the St. Brigid’s contract.

  At sixty-four years of age, he was now the firm’s strategic thinker and hadn’t involved himself in its daily operations for six or seven years, and not at the technical level, the ground level, for a dozen years more. That level of involvement was where you walked the site, smelled the dirt, and used your eyes and brain and accumulated knowledge from a hundred other sites to know the land and its geology, know which way the water table flowed, and which part of a hill was likely to collapse in a slide. Where you occasionally put a bare hand into the outflow from the cement mixer and rubbed it between your fingers, to know the consistency and quality of the sand and gravel you were pouring. Where you could just look in
the eyes of your subcontractors and tell that a braying jackass like Stephen Macedo, their site superintendent on St. Brigid’s, wouldn’t question when his men started patching over cracks in the foundation. Where you could just shake hands with an operator like Howard Chisholm and tell from his distant, distracted manner that he didn’t know where he was getting his aggregate from and, furthermore, didn’t really care, so long as the price was right.

  Once John Praxis had those skills, because he’d worked his way up. Despite his standing as the sole male in the family’s third generation, and his holding an advanced engineering degree from Stanford University, his father Sebastian had still made John walk the ground, know the men, and run the numbers on each of his projects. At first, he was only allowed to assist a more experienced project manager. Only later, with experience of his own, did he get to manage the work himself. It was training he should have demanded of his own sons. But Leonard had never been any good at math, had flunked out of engineering while taking calculus and gone into art history, and finally earned a master’s degree in fine arts. He had come into the company on the administrative side, marketing and sales, and worked his way up from there. Richard, on the other hand, had the math skills but preferred the tidy columns of figures in an accounting ledger to the slippery numbers of strain coefficients and cohesion factors. He was a financial genius, John supposed, but he wouldn’t know anything about refractory brick or why it was so dangerous. Neither would Leonard, for that matter.

  At least there was some hope with his third child, Callista. She had started as an architect, doodling pretty houses full of Frank Lloyd Wright angles, had quickly grown bored with that, and transferred into architectural engineering. Callie might have smelled a rat at St. Brigid’s, but she happened to be in Dubai at the time.

  All of which still didn’t explain this hundred-forty-megabuck mistake. When Antigone Wells and her team had uncovered the whole sorry story of the crumbling brick, they had offered Praxis Engineering & Construction a settlement. Leonard had turned it down flat. He’d argued, behind closed doors, among the family, that computer glitches like that were simply acts of God. No one’s fault and in no way negligence. Hey, the paperwork had all checked out. The Chisholm order said “clean quartz gravel with 4% recycled construction materials.” The Yucca waybills all said “clean quartz gravel with 4% recycled construction materials.” The two samples they’d taken at the batch plant—by some law of unholy averages—showed “clean quartz gravel with fractional red brick and crushed concrete.” So how was anyone to know there was contaminated firebrick all over the site? Leonard hadn’t just argued against settling; he’d made it a test of his leadership, his place in the company. And John Praxis had let his first-born son have his way.

  In Leonard’s defense, and before twenty-twenty hindsight kicked in, it hadn’t been much of a settlement. When you added up all the clauses and stipulations, St. Brigid’s was asking for $1.55 on the dollar—which amounted to excess of damages plus court costs. It was an offer that gloated, that screamed, “We’ve got you nailed, sucker!” And, as the PE&C attorneys had argued, to pay it would amount to an admission of professional negligence—which might make it harder for them to go after the subcontractors.

  Now they were all going take a big dump. Praxis had seen it in the jury’s eyes as they looked at those slowly repeating pictures. There was just no acceptable explanation for what had happened. And when this case with St. Brigid’s was finished, and PE&C had lost, there would be more trials. The insurance bond wouldn’t cover the costs and damages, so PE&C in turn would have to sue the suppliers and their computer contractors. Praxis figured the whole thing would end up costing the company somewhere north of three hundred megabucks—or more like $3.33 on the dollar. And that was before the inflation clock kicked in.

  Oh well, it was only money. … Richard was going to have to give up buying Ferraris for a while. Leonard would have to sell one of his vacation homes and make do without the pretty, twenty-something, live-in housekeeper who came with it. And John himself? He was going home to his lovely wife and have a good, stiff drink.

  2. The Heart Stops Beating …

  “The Thunderbolt”—as John Praxis would later describe it—struck on the sixth green of the Cliffs course. It was only nine holes, the shortest of the Olympic Club’s three golf courses, but the fairways offered sudden, surprising views of the Pacific Ocean. The selection of the Cliffs that morning was part of a strategy, because it allowed someone to comment that the magnificent view must stretch all the way to China.

  Ever since he got out of bed, Praxis had been feeling tired and cranky. If it had been merely his choice, he would have stayed home with Adele and read a book or something. But he and his son Richard were scheduled to entertain the visiting Chinese Minister of Transportation, whose entourage included the president of Shanghai’s second largest bank. China was planning to extend its high-speed rail system westward from Chengdu into the Tibet Autonomous Region and Lhasa. With the Continuing Currency Crisis, American labor—especially of the advanced technical kind—was potentially the cheapest in the world, and Praxis Engineering & Construction needed to exploit every opportunity. Essential to their bid strategy was allowing these high-level functionaries to meet with the nominal head of the firm, practically one of its “ancestors,” in a social setting. An ancestor’s work, it seemed, was never done.

  And besides, Praxis had wanted the opportunity to take Richard aside and ask how they were going to handle the financial fallout of the St. Brigid’s mess. The verdict, and the wallop that would come with it, loomed larger each day as the trial drew to a close. But Richard was avoiding him this morning, wasn’t even making eye contact, and Praxis had felt himself getting angrier and angrier.

  Then he noticed, as he swung his Two Wood for the last time, that his shoulders were feeling achy. Also, he briefly thought he might have pulled a muscle in his left biceps—but he put that down to being out of practice. In truth, he had not touched a club in two weeks, maybe three. By the time he was on the green, however, he was panting—short, sharp, hard breaths—and the fairway wasn’t that steep. He thought the two Chinese officials were giving him anxious looks, but Richard was totally involved in his own golf game. Richard played seriously, to win, and not to make nice.

  Praxis was staring at his son, wondering why he couldn’t at least flub his putts once in a while, so their guests, who were good but not great players, might feel better about themselves, when someone hit him in the chest with a baseball bat. Wham! Pain shot across his whole front, as if his ribs and arms were being broken at the same time.

  Without remembering exactly how, Praxis was suddenly lying on his side. His vision was cocked. One eye seemed to stare across acres and acres of brilliant green grass, clipped as smooth as a billiard table, while the flag that was held by his caddy, Sam—whom everyone called “Peaches,” either because he had come from Georgia or because he brought peaches from home for a few favored members—was receding into the distance at a million miles an hour. The other eye was looking up at the edge of the tree line, with the soft, misty blue of a San Francisco morning sky looming beyond it, and a sea gull cartwheeling up there, drawing closer and closer.

  A face appeared above him, hidden by its own shadow. John Praxis thought he should know that face, but now he just couldn’t remember. All he could hear was the screaming of the gull, a single word repeated: “Papa! Papa!” Praxis knew he should be scared, but he was more concerned for that gull and its own sense of panic.

  Then somehow he was lying on his back, and a Caterpillar 120 road grader was driving across his chest. The pressure of those massive, cleated tires was making rubble of his bones while the shiny, angled blade cut deeper and deeper.

  His vision closed to a tiny white circle, a closeup view of smoothed feathers from the gull’s immaculate white breast, which glowed like white neon. And suddenly Johnny Cash was singing, in his ears or in his mind, “Down, down, down … to a burni
ng ring of fire …” as the earth sank beneath him and the darkness enfolded him.

  * * *

  Not until his father fell over on the golf course did Richard Praxis have any idea that something was wrong. The Old Man had always been the strong one, the healthy specimen, the sturdy oak among the bending, compliant willows and bamboo trees that were other men—including his own children. That morning his father had been playing slowly, sure, but then his golf game was usually careful and methodical, practicing his swings and assessing the ground before each shot. He had been rubbing his left shoulder a bit, but that could just be a touch of neuralgia or bursitis or whatever. There was nothing wrong with his father.

  When John Praxis toppled sideways, like a statue knocked off its pedestal, Richard suddenly understood the situation was serious. He dropped his putter—barely conscious of how its head nicked his ball and disturbed the lie—and rushed to his father’s side. “Papa!” he called. And again, “Papa!”

  His father’s eyes were open, their gaze fixed but at slightly different angles, almost cross-eyed. And he was not breathing—not straining or gasping, just not breathing. Richard realized his father was dying.

  “Papa!”

  He dug out his cell phone and tossed it to the caddy. “Don’t call nine-one-one,” he instructed. “That just gets you the Highway Patrol and a layer of bureaucracy. Call the clubhouse and tell them to call the nearest hospital with a helipad and arrange a medevac chopper. Get it out here now! Put any charges on the Praxis membership.”