“Interesting.”
“Yeah, I'd like to find out who did it and why. And my boss needs a phone number for the trustee of the trust, whoever that is. I plan to check the bank building tomorrow, but just in case I thought I'd come in and--”
“Hold on,” she said, “Let me get this down.” She grabbed a legal pad and a pencil and started taking notes. I repeated the name for her. “Do you know when she was born, or maybe when she died? If her family was rich, her obituary will be in the local paper.”
“Eighteen eighty-five, nineteen sixty-eight,” I repeated from memory.
She looked up at me and smiled. “Every historian needs an obsession,” she said. “I'll see what I can find out about these people for you. Of course anything I find out for you will also become part of the county archives, you understand.”
“Oh, absolutely. It's a deal. Anything we uncover is county history.”
“And I want to come see that graveyard.”
“Sure. I'll meet you there anytime you can get away,” I said.
She acknowledged the invitation with a slight smile. “What's your phone number?” she asked, pencil poised.
I gave it to her and watched her jot it down. “When can I expect you to call?” I asked.
“Let me see what I can find out for you first.” My expression must have changed at that moment, because she quickly followed with, “But it shouldn't be too long.” I smiled. She smiled. “Your ride is here,” she said, looking out the window behind me. “I'll call you. When I know something.”
“Thank you very much,” I said. “I'll be waiting on that call.” I headed to the door and turned for one last look.
“Bye now,” she sang.
I walked out to the curb and climbed into the Mighty Ford.
“What's wrong with you?” Steve asked.
“Not a thing, dude. Not a thing in the world.”
6. Data after Dark
The next morning, Steve left the Huddle House jammed between Randy and Jack in their Silverado, an agreement we'd reached over a shot or two the night before. They were scheduled to begin surveying an overgrown creek crossing and were grateful for the extra help. Watching them drive out of the parking lot, I briefly considered returning to bed, but I decided on an extra coffee to go, instead.
I drove downtown and pulled into the angled parking on Toombs, directly between the courthouse steps and the Sweeney County Confederate Memorial, a dead-eyed foot soldier of weathered bronze standing at attention in full field gear atop his fourteen-foot granite pedestal rising from the center of the square. Across the square, I had a clear view of Polk Avenue and the bank building. To my right, I could also see the White Horse Tavern. It was only eight o'clock, and by the largely empty spaces surrounding the square, I judged most of downtown had not yet arrived for work. A good time to catch up on paperwork. I know a mechanic who can only work inside his shop, surrounded by his various necessities, but one of surveying's gifts to the surveyor is learning to be completely at home wherever you find yourself. A good surveyor's office exists in his head. Swamp or sidewalk, either is fine.
Around forty-five minutes later, when I had neat stacks of nested data, and better, a clear idea of what I lacked, I turned to watch a black Lincoln Navigator pass. As it turned down Cobb, I got a feeling. When it turned left again and pulled into a spot directly across from the bank, I just knew that whoever got out would have the information I needed.
A tall white man stepped out and pulled on a beige linen jacket. He buttoned his jacket as he crossed the street and headed down the alley. As I came even with the bronze Confederate, I watched him enter that side door and disappear. I followed.
The doorknob turned for me, and the door opened. I stepped inside. “Good morning!” I called. No answer. I looked to my left, up the stairs. “Hello? Anyone here?” I started slowly up stairs. “Hello?” Still no answer came, so I kept climbing. At the top of the stairs was a doorway leading into an office, with couch to my left and an unattended receptionist's desk beyond to my right. I approached the desk and looked down. Unopened mail sat waiting to be opened. About half the envelopes were addressed to the Muskogee Timber Company LLC, a couple to Richard Polk III, and at least a third of them were addressed to the Conley Land Trust.
“May I help you?” I looked up to see the banker had doffed his jacket and rolled up his one hundred-percent cotton sleeves. “Do you have an appointment? This is a private office.”
“My apologies, sir.” I stuck out my hand. “Addison Kane, surveyor. I'm working on the highway expansion. It's nice to meet you.”
His handshake was firm; his hand was smooth as a baby's ass. “Richard Polk the Third, forester for the bank. And what can I do for you, Mr. Kane?”
“Just collecting information,” I said, pulling an orange field book and a pencil from my back pocket. “Collecting data and information is half of what I do all day,” I smiled. “Silly, redundant details. Now, this is the office of the Muskogee Timber Company?”
“It is.”
“And a good contact number would be? Just in case there's ever any issue of access, or anyone wants to know what I'm doing on your land, I'd like to have a number we can call.”
“Certainly. I'll give you a business card, how's that?”
“Perfect. And this is also the office of the Conley Land Trust?” I asked. He hesitated. “This is the address given on most of the deeds I've seen,” I explained, not mentioning the mail on the desk.
“Ah. Yes, well, the answer to your question is yes and no. For years we have collected rents and kept books in accordance with the wishes of the late Mrs. Burroughs. When she died, she made her son trustee, and he is supposed to be in Texas someplace. I believe I gave someone at your company that mailing address.”
“My boss, most likely, but would you have a phone number for the son?”
“The only number we have for him has been disconnected, but I will be happy to get it for you.”
“If you'll just write it on the back of your card, sir, I'll get out of your hair.” I smiled again.
He stepped away for a minute and returned holding a business card. “There you are. Muskogee Timber Company on the front and Ramon Burroughs' phone number on the back. But as I told you, this number is no good.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “At least I can tell my boss I got him a number. We'll let him find out it's been disconnected. You have a nice day, sir.” Card in hand, I headed for the door.
The first thing I did was call Mike with the number. He was almost predictably obnoxious. Predictably, he found a way to imply that I wasn't doing my job, even though I was doing exactly what he told me to do.
“Where'd you get it?” he asked.
“From the local office of the land trust. There's an office upstairs from the bank.”
“Where'd you get that information?”
“From the title filed at the country courthouse.”
A moment of silence on his end signified small victory on mine, and I smiled. “Same office as the Muskogee Timber Company,” I continued.
“What were you doing there? Why aren't you surveying?”
See? Predictable. You just have to be ready. “Because I'm here getting you the phone number you told me to get. Now you have it, and I can go back to work.”
“What's Steve been doing this whole time? Sitting in the truck?”
“Cutting line for Jack and Randy. They needed the extra help.”
Another brief moment of silence followed.
“Oh. Well, I suppose you have plans for tonight already.”
“Tonight?”
“Satellites are up. Seven in the sky after sunset.”
“Oh that,” I casually lied. “Yeah, I've got plans.”
“What are they?”
“Well...” I drew a blank. I had run skyplot data for a few potential control sites, enough to ascertain that there were no significant dead spots during the day. Just between us, though, because I p
ick good spots for setting control, the primary information gleaned from my running the data is when we will take lunch, which was whenever there were the least satellites available, and the answer to that day's Big Question was One-Thirty to Two-Twenty. I hadn't noticed nor given a moment's thought to tonight's constellation of satellites and what to do with the additional accuracy afforded by listening to eight or nine beeps instead of two to five.
“Well naturally,” I thought aloud, “I want to use that time to set control where it's most difficult, like, uh...” I thought of my textbook. “Like, you know, next to a forest where half the sky is cut out entirely. There is a lot of that here, as you know.”
“I was wondering when you were going to get around to setting control for your tree count.”
“Just been waiting 'til tonight. Just waiting on the satellites. Sure, I could set control down the road a bit, where it's wide open--”
“No, no, because then you'd introduce more error traversing from control to the property and back again.”
“See, I knew you'd say that. So I thought, 'Let's do this like Mike taught me, and get this data when the satellites are up.'”
“Good thinking, good thinking. So what's your plan for today?”
“I'm going to go see how Randy and Jack doing first, then spend the afternoon setting more control on the overall network. Of course, the Conley tree count is my high spot on the east side, south of the river, and I'll be getting that data tonight to bring to you tomorrow afternoon.”
“Alright, then,” he sighed, sounding genuinely disappointed to have so quickly run out of ways to bitch. “Get to work, and get something done. I'll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow.”
We hung up, and I sighed. I had a long day ahead of me. By now you know that surveying is all about data collection and that GPS works off the world's most accurate clock. The data is time-stamped, so if you tell the boss you plan to work after sunset, you'd damned well better collect some data after dark.
So you could blame it on Mike or the constellation of satellites, or you could call it fate or coincidence. If you like, you may fancy toga-clad Olympians gazing into a bird bath and playing with clay dolls, like in some Ray Harryhausen masterpiece. However you wish to understand it is fine with me. I'm still not sure I understand it at all, but that night was part of my destiny, one of the moments that made me the man I am today.
The peak period was between seven-thirty and ten. A total of thirteen satellites, roughly half the number in service at that time, would cross the available sky in some piece of a parabola. Some would rise briefly and fall, arcing no more than fifteen brief degrees and sneaking back below the horizon in less than half an hour; others would proceed at a leisurely pace across the broadest expanse of sky; all the others fell somewhere in-between. The peak number at any one time would be eight, and for most of that period seven satellites would provide steady beeps for triangulation calculations. More geek-droolery, I know.
I picked two spots across the road from the tree-filled lot, six hundred and thirty-five feet apart: close enough for a good visual check-in, yet far enough apart for good resolution of digital data. At each location we drove an eighteen-inch iron rebar into the ground until an inch remained above dirt, then I got out my metal punch and tapped a perfect dot right in the center of each one. We sprayed survey stakes orange and drove them in to identify the control points, then spray-painted ourselves little notes on the pavement, just in case some idiot ran over the stake. These details I include because non-surveyors are forever asking us what it is we're doing. Now you know.
It was seven o'clock. I looked at Steve, and he said what I was thinking.
“Set up the instruments now? Or take a little break?”
“Break,” we answered together.
“Cemetery?” Steve asked.
“Let's just hang by the truck. Drink some water. Kill a little time.”
“Ten-four, Addie.”
By the time I had poured myself some water and gotten comfortable on the tailgate, Steve had produced a joint. I looked up and down Thornton's Ferry Road, but the ferry hadn't run since the days of Talmadge and the three-dollar car tag, and there was no traffic. I nodded approval. Naturally, as soon as we lit up, a truck appeared. It didn't stop; the old boy at the wheel rolled past with a friendly wave.
We were halfway through the joint when Steve asked, “How'd you get to be a surveyor?”
“Two years ago I needed a job, and someone offered me this one.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“The way you talk about all this stuff made me think you'd been doin' it a long time. You're so... I don't know. You analyze everything, and you remember everything. Guess that makes you a good surveyor.”
“Makes me hell on Trivia Night, that's for sure. You want free beer, stick with me.” I took a hit. “I don't think of myself as a real surveyor. Not like Mike, or Randy, or Jack. Or even you. I like a challenge, and I hate doing the same thing every day. I like that part of surveying, and if I do the job well, that's why.”
He nodded. “Got any hobbies?” he asked.
“Well... let's see... I... Oh, I know. I like old movies, especially old horror and sci-fi. And sometimes I go to antique shows because I collect books. Not major collectibles, because I don't have the money for that. I like to go browse the tables and see what really cool old book I can find with a twenty, something like that. I got my Kipling that way.”
“Your what?”
“Kipling. 'American Notes', 1899 first printing. It's hilarious. Kipling was pretty cool. He liked Mark Twain. I like Twain, too.”
“So you like old movies, old books, and cemeteries.”
“I like a lot of things, man. I like old furniture, too. I like old buildings--”
“You like girls?”
“Very funny. Yes, I like girls.”
“You married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He didn't wait for me to answer that doozy.
“Got a girlfriend?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“What's that mean?”
“It means that first of all, she's no girl. She's rather grown, like forty-two, with two teenagers.”
“How long y'all been together?”
“We're not exactly together. I mean, she has a key to my apartment, but--”
“Y'all gonna get married?”
“Probably not.” I knew his next question, so I continued while he toked. “When I get married-- and make no mistake, I want to get married--, I want to have kids. My own kids. And Rita, the woman I'm seeing, has two nearly grown teenagers and doesn't want any more. That in itself is what you'd call a deal breaker. But besides that-- and this may be the weird part--, I've always thought that I want to go through that whole baby-making process with someone who, like me, has never done it before. Does that sound weird?”
“Not to a young man. Hell, that's what a young man should expect. But you got to think. You there ain't a whole lot of women your age still wantin' to have kids, them that don't already have 'em. And young girls, beggin' your pardon, look for young men, unless you're rich, which you ain't. Women check the shelf date before they buy somethin', you know. You never met a woman you wanted to marry? Ain't never got one pregnant?”
My response was instinctive: a long deep sigh that sounds a lot like a groan. “That's it; back to work. Just kidding, Steve. That's two questions, you know, and I already told you I'm not gay, so the answers are 'sure' and 'of course'.”
He looked like he was waiting for more, so I continued. “There was this girl in high school, right? I was seventeen; she'd just turned sixteen. She got pregnant while on the pill. We took it as a sign that we should get married and have a baby, but her parents didn't share our religious convictions. I don't think they liked me, either. They made her get an abortion. It was a total drag. Her parents banned us from seeing one another, and it really sur
prised me how easily she complied. Quickly, too.”
“Then there was Dina. I was twenty-five. Met this girl at a jukebox one night, and before I knew it, I was moving my record collection into her house. We spent almost three years together. When she told me she was pregnant, I immediately proposed, but she said it really wasn't necessary, since she had gotten this job at Turner and didn't have room for a child in her life. She had also decided that she didn't have room for me, anymore, either.
“There have been lots of hookups and meaningless sex. A couple of false starts. You know, you meet a woman, go out for a couple of weeks or a month-- or six months, or a year--, then something happens, and one or both of you realize you're wasting your time... You can waste a lot of time that way.”
The Dead Hand of Sweeney County Page 7
