Four

I live in a limestone turret because my grandfather was a bootlegger. There are other reasons-a courtroom scandal, a tanked business, a vaporized marriage-but it remains that, were it not for my grandfather, dead decades before I was born, I might still be tiptoeing around the fragrant puddles on the upper floors of the Rivertown Health Center.

My grandfather would have insisted he be called a brewmeister, because that’s how he apprenticed in Bohemia, but there were no brewmeisters in America in the twenties. Prohibition had made them all outlaws. Bootleggers.

As bootleggers went in those days, he was small time. He worked out of a dozen garages in Rivertown, brewing pilsner the right way for the Czechs and the other Slavs who lived on Chicago’s west side. Family lore had it that some weeks he made money, other weeks he lost. It depended on how often his operations got trashed by the police or his bigger competitors. He had more bad weeks than good, though, and died broke, of a heart attack, in 1930. But not without marking me. I would get his first name, Vlodek, and I would get the beginnings of his castle.

In the spring of 1929, six months before the stock market crashed, the illicit, big vat brewers and whiskey runners in Chicago started killing each other in a vicious series of gang wars. The police weren’t particularly distressed, viewing the wars as a kind of weeding, but they had to make a show of trying to stop it. For months, with the outfits and the cops so occupied, no one had time to raid my grandfather, and he enjoyed a season of unrivaled prosperity. He must have thought it was going to rain money forever. Because, flush for the first time, he did what anyone with too much money and a lunatic sense of grandeur would do: He began building a castle on the bank of the Willahock River in Rivertown. He had grand plans and bought a pile of limestone big enough for twenty rooms, four-foot-thick walls, and a five-story turret at each corner.

But within weeks of the delivery of his small mountain of limestone, the gangs reached an accommodation, and they and the cops slipped back into their old, comfortable routines of preying on tiny rivals like my grandfather instead of each other. And the money quit raining. My grandfather got only one turret and a small wood storage shed built before he died, broke, a year later.

My grandmother tried to sell the turret, the shed behind it, and the pile of limestone, but the Great Depression was in full fire by then, and the demand for limestone, let alone single turrets and medieval dreams, was nonexistent. The turret and the heap of blocks sat neglected until the end of World War II, when the city fathers of Rivertown, as slimy a bunch of lizards as had ever scuttled down a dark alley, raised up their heads and sniffed the coming of postwar prosperity. They would need a proper city hall from which to dispense building permits and accept donations and appreciations. And so it went. They condemned my grandmother’s pile of stone and the two acres on which it sat and built a four-story limestone city hall of magnificent executive offices and tiny public rooms, all set on terraced stonework leading down to the Willahock River.

They hadn’t wanted the rat-infested turret a hundred yards away, with its skinny windows, nor its rickety storage shed, and they sat empty for another six decades as ownership passed from my grandmother to my uncle and then to his widow, my aunt. Each tried to sell it, but always, the fees for clearing an old title clouded with murky, vague city liens were more than the property was worth. My aunt, in a last act of maternal protection, left the property not to her own four children but to me, her least favorite nephew.

In my right mind, I would have viewed the inheritance the way the owner of white carpeting sees the arrival of a St. Bernard suffering intestinal distress. But I was broke, exiting a ruined business and a failed marriage, and I needed a place to live. Of such is born delusion. I figured I could fix up the turret, clear the title, and sell it for a tidy profit, to get a grubstake for a new life.

I was full of new optimism, that day after Halloween, as I walked across the grass from the turret to city hall to get an occupancy permit. It had been less than a month since I’d met with Amanda’s lawyers and the Bohemian to dissolve my marriage, but it was a new day, a sunny day, bright and warm.

“How long you been gone?” the building commissioner asked. His name was Elvis, and I remembered him from high school. He’d been the mayor’s nephew. He’d slathered lots of Vaseline on his hair back then, and I used to wonder if a fly landing on his head could free itself before it dissolved. Now, it appeared he enjoyed hair spray, scented sweet, like coconuts. His hairline was in full retreat, but what was left, halfway back on his head, was sprayed straight up, like a little wall meant to hide the patch of shiny skin behind.

“Since high school, Elvis. I lived in the city while I went to college, stayed there when I got a job.”

“Heard about your job.” He smirked with his mouth open so I could admire his bad teeth.

“I was cleared.”

“Put your ass out of business, I heard. Got you throwed out of Gateville, too.”

A month earlier, I would have gotten in his face. Now, though, I was showering at the Rivertown Health Center while standing in what I hoped was just water. I needed the occupancy permit.

“Damned right,” I smiled. “I prayed I could be returned to my own kind.”

The top of his head glowed crimson all the way back to the hair wall, quicker than he could think. Instinct must have told him there’d been an insult, but the words had come too fast to process. He bent over the counter, head still glowing, and began filling out a form. When he was done, he hit it with a rubber stamp and pushed the permit across the counter.

I looked down. He’d stamped “Historic” in red ink at the bottom. “What’s this?”

“Your property is a historical. No changes.” He laid a dirty fingernail on a tiny drawing in the upper right corner of the permit.

It was a rendering of the turret. The City of Rivertown was using my turret as its symbol.

“What do you mean, no changes?”

“Check with us before you do anything, so’s you don’t spoil the integrity of the structure and we make you rip out what you done.”

“I want to make it into a residence.”

He shook his head. “No can do, even if it wasn’t a historical. It’s zoned municipal.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Mean’s the property’s only approved for city buildings.”

“I know what municipal zoning is. I meant, how can private property be zoned only for public buildings?”

“Your aunt approved it after she took sick.” The corners of his mouth twitched; something funny had penetrated his consciousness.

“Why the hell would she do that?”

“Might have been because of us waiving sixty years’ worth of unpaid taxes and penalties. Municipal property don’t pay tax, so there’d be no liens against her estate.” He showed me his bad teeth again, in the kind of feral grin hyenas give to fresh meat. “You been away a long time.”

“Does this mean I can’t live there?” I was struggling to maintain an even tone.

“It’s a municipal. Still, I suppose I could give you a temporary exception, so’s you can repair the place and all.” He batted his eyelashes like a virgin bride, dropped his head, and started making a notation on the permit. He wrote slowly, giving me time to fish in my pocket for a fifty to express my gratitude.

I didn’t have the fifty. Nor the gratitude.

He finished writing. I scooped up the permit before he noticed I wasn’t flashing any green and started for the door.

“Hey!”

I stopped and turned.

Elvis had his index finger in the air. “Just you can live there, and only to fix up the place on the inside. No wives,” he snickered, “no girlfriends. I catch wind of anybody else living there, you’re gone.”

I went out quickly, before I got stupid. Like the movie cop said, a man’s got to know his limitations, and mine were screaming to be let loose, all over Elvis’s oily head.

The next afternoon, I saw a zoning lawyer who told me, for a billable hour, that I’d been away a long time. Rivertown was under new management, he said. Grandson and granddaughter lizards had taken over, and the new lizards were college educated, not to be satisfied with small-change pimp and pinball money. They wanted Mercedeses, not Cadillacs, and for that they needed condominium developers with big, greasy wads of building application and zoning variance cash. But to get those developers, they first had to shake off the old Rivertown tank-city image of wet-floor bars, gambling houses, and strip joints. So they hired consultantswho came up with a marketing campaign. Rivertown Renaissance, they called it. To kick it off, they chose the turret-my turret-as the symbol of the rebirth of the town. They put it on the town’s stationery, police cars, fire trucks, and municipal Dumpsters. They even put it on the portable toilets in the town’s one park.

I could fight, the attorney said, but that would take money I didn’t have. Since I’d already moved in, he recommended I rehab cautiously on the inside and, when I could afford his three hundred an hour, take the City of Rivertown to court to change the turret’s zoning into something I could sell. Until then, he suggested I keep a low profile. Don’t provoke.

My hour expired. I left the lawyer’s office mumbling to myself. The dominoes of my life were still tipping over.


In the beginning, it wasn’t difficult to follow the lawyer’s advice. As November changed into winter, I had more pressing things than a zoning conversion to worry about. Like heat. I got a small personal loan at the bank, bought pipes, electrical conduit, and wiring-and three space heaters-and spent the winter clearing out seventy years’ worth of pigeon droppings and squirrel carcasses and repairing the rudimentary plumbing and wiring my grandfather had installed. With a used microwave oven and plastic washtub sink, the turret, with its bad roof, had all the comforts of camping out in an abandoned house, but as I reminded myself on an almost hourly basis, at least I was not at the health center. The zoning lawyer would have been pleased; through that winter and spring and into the summer, my profile was lower than a garden snake’s.


Late one afternoon, I was on top of the turret, leaning against the stone wall that rose five feet above the roof, arguing with Elvis. A long week had passed since I’d messengered my report to the Bohemian, and I’d stayed busy by calling every roofer in the yellowpages and trying to convince myself that the Bohemian was right in not going to the cops.

Elvis had seen the roofers’ trucks coming by all week, and each time one pulled away, he came blustering over to make sure I wasn’t violating any of his rules.

“A membrane roof is a big rubber sheet,” I said for the fourth or fifth time. I kicked at the loose stone pebbles on my roof. “It won’t leak like this tar and gravel. Besides, this wall hides it. I could put a pink roof on, and you’d never know.”

“I’d know.” Elvis touched a large dark red pimple on the tip of his nose. “I’d know.”

“You saw the buckets downstairs. This place leaks.”

“I’d know.”

The loving way he was fondling the zit was mesmerizing.

“I’d know,” he said again.

“What?” Engrossed by the way he was caressing his apple red nose, I’d lost the thread of what he was saying.

“If you were putting a pink roof on this place,” he said.

I’d paused, searching for the right one-syllable words, when my cell phone rang. A crisp British voice introduced herself as the Bohemian’s secretary and said, “Mr. Chernek requests that you go to Crystal Waters immediately. Mr. Novak will be outside the front gate.”

My heart started banging like an old pump. “What’s this about?” I shouted into the phone.

“Please go there, Mr. Elstrom. Immediately.” She hung up.

Elvis’s lips were working under his inflamed nose, but I couldn’t hear his words. Guilt had shut down my sound as my mind raced. Thirty pieces of silver, three grand; I’d been Judas. I’d sold out, hadn’t forced the Bohemian and Stanley Novak to go to the cops. For money, for a roof. Jesus. Now there’d been another bomb, and maybe somebody had died.

I hustled the startled Elvis down the five flights, mumblingsomething about a family emergency, jumped in the Jeep, and aimed it west.

I couldn’t risk getting stuck in the trucks clogging Thompson Avenue; I ran the stop signs on the side streets, past the bungalows and the dark shells of the abandoned factories, and shot back onto Thompson Avenue by the Fronts at the outskirts of Riverton, where the highway widens to four lanes. I raced along the highway, swerving around the slow-moving trucks, dodging the occasional car pulling out of one of the long driveways. Cars horns blared; drivers fumbled to lower their windows to scream at my recklessness. I didn’t care. I was Judas, and now people had died.

I got to the hill just east of Gateville and sped up toward the crest with my head out the side window, scanning the sky for black smoke. But the sky was clear and blue, and there were no sirens above the sounds of the traffic. I got to the top of the hill and looked down.

The white marble gateposts of Crystal Waters stood like Corinthian soldiers at rest, calm against the dark green yews by the entrance. No smoke, no flames, no flashing lights. Just three men standing next to a pale blue pickup truck parked on the grass outside the brick wall, right next to the entrance. I rode the brake down the hill, taking deeper breaths.

I got close enough to recognize Stanley Novak, talking to two workmen in pale blue coveralls. All three were staring into a hole in the ground like they were discussing planting a tree. They looked relaxed. I tapped my horn and waved to Stanley, swung around, and parked fifty feet down along the grass shoulder. He hurried up to the Jeep before I could get out.

“Chernek’s office told me to get right over here,” I said through the open side window. “What’s the rumpus?”

Stanley leaned closer to be heard above the traffic going past. “Something blew that lamppost out of the ground, but I don’t think it’s related to our problem.”

He opened my door before I could stop him. I got out.

“Those workers don’t know about the note,” he said, closing the door.

“Mum’s the word.”

We started toward the two workers.

The hole was rough-edged, three feet in diameter and three feet deep. Next to it, a black metal lamppost, jagged at the base where it had been ripped from its cement footing, lay on the grass like an uprooted tree.

The taller workman was down on his knees, sniffing inside the hole. “I still don’t smell anything,” he said, getting up. He looked at Stanley. “Best we call the gas company.” Next to him, the other worker nodded.

I bent down. The inside of the hole was strewn with chunks of broken cement. I couldn’t smell anything except the sweetness of freshly cut grass.

“Get your shovels and poke down in there first,” Stanley said quickly. “See if you can locate the pipe.”

Both workers looked at him, surprised. I did, too. “The shovels might give a spark,” the taller one said.

“Use the wood handles, then. Let’s make sure there’s a gas pipe down there before we call the gas company.”

Neither of the workmen moved.

“Look,” Stanley said to the tall workman, “after the explosion at Sixteen Chanticleer, any reporter getting hold of this will see it as the same kind of explosion, and then it will hit television or the papers. Let’s be sure it’s gas, is all I’m saying.”

The tall workman looked back at Stanley. “What else could it be?”

“Kids, with a coffee can full of cherry bombs.” Stanley turned and touched my elbow, ending the discussion. We started walking back to the Jeep.

I waited until we were out of earshot. “You really think that big iron lamppost was toppled by kids with fireworks?”

“Fourth of July was last week. Kids here, their parents buy themcherry bombs, M-80s, skyrockets. Put enough of that stuff together, you can blow up anything.”

We leaned against the hood of the Jeep and watched the workmen pull blue-handled shovels from their pickup truck. It occurred to me then that everything matched in Gateville: the truck, the workers’ coveralls, Stanley’s uniform shirt, even the shovel handles. It was all pale blue, the color of a clear sky, as if serenity could be painted on.

“Tell me what happened.”

Stanley looked at his watch. “Four hours ago, at two thirteen, I was making my rounds.”

I remembered the way he cruised Chanticleer Circle in his blue station wagon, lap after lap, scanning the empty lawns and the shut-tight houses for movement that didn’t belong. I used to wonder how he stood the monotony, because hardly anything ever moved in Gateville. The residents were never out. The women didn’t talk across hedges, their kids didn’t toss footballs on the lawns, their toddlers didn’t wobble big-wheeled tricycles down the sidewalk. The hedges had been grown tall, to seclude, not to talk over. There were no sidewalks. And the kids were shadows, invisible, gone after school to supervised activities and then later whisked down to basements, to numb themselves with home theaters and video games. What movement there was in Gateville came from landscapers pushing lawnmowers, house painters carrying cans from trucks, maids or nannies exiting beat-up cars left respectfully out on the street. Caretakers, silently serving unseen masters, like workers in ghost towns.

“I heard a loud noise out by the road,” Stanley was saying. “I looked up and saw dirt and dust in the air outside of the wall. I figured a car accident-a car rolled, kicked up dirt. I drove out the gate, met one of my guys running from the guardhouse. We saw that.” He pointed ahead at the lamppost lying beside the hole.

I looked at him. “No note?”

He shook his head. “I checked the Board’s mailbox right after the explosion. Nothing.”

In front of us, the two workmen, holding their shovels by the blade, poked gingerly into the hole.

We watched for another minute, and then Stanley asked, “Anything new at your end?”

It surprised me, because I thought he would have talked with the Bohemian. “I haven’t done anything since my report to Chernek. I told him the threat could be real, that you should take the letter to the police.”

“I was wondering if you are investigating other things.”

“I just did the letter and the envelope, Stanley.”

We went back to watching the workmen. They probed into the hole slowly with their shovel handles, as if at pythons coiled in a pit.

Traffic had picked up on the highway alongside of us. It was approaching six thirty, white-collar rush hour. Every few minutes, a Mercedes, B.M.W., or Jaguar, every third one of them painted black, slowed to turn into Gateville, their drivers oblivious to the workmen outside the wall. When I lived there, I used to wonder what it was with all that black. It wasn’t just the men with their luxury sedans. It was their pert, frosted blond wives, too, driving the most enormous of S.U.V.’s. Most of those were black, too, each looking big enough to haul four caskets, stacked properly. Amanda drove a white Toyota. Reason enough to love her, I’d told her once.

The tall workman set down his shovel, bent down, and began lifting chunks of cement out of the hole. Then he got down on his knees and started scooping out dirt with cupped hands. After a minute, he stood up and gave us a wave. We walked back to the hole.

“I don’t understand it, Mr. Novak,” the worker said, brushing off his hands on the sides of his overalls. “No gas pipe, just the wiring for the light post.”

I bent down to look into the hole. Electrical wires of every color, reds, blues, greens, yellows, and more, severed by the blast,spilled out of a ripped metal utility pipe and lay on the black dirt like multicolored baby serpents. There was no gas pipe.

I kept my face calm, trying to ignore the vein pulsing in my forehead, as I thought about how much force must have been needed to pulverize the concrete. Stanley cocked his head slightly, warning me with his eyes to say nothing. He turned to the workmen. “Loose-fill the hole so no one can fall in.”

I started back to the Jeep. He caught up with me.

“No way that was done with cherry bombs,” I said. I jerked open the door to the Jeep before Stanley could pull at it like a doorman, got in, and looked back out. His forehead sparkled with beads of sweat.

“Call the cops, Stanley, or I will.” I twisted the ignition key, fed the engine too much gas, and cut ruts into his precious green parkway as I lurched onto the highway.

Загрузка...