Hunter's Moon (14 page)

CJ nodded, seeming to understand the backhanded compliment. He appreciated the honest critique coming from someone like Artie, who had known CJ his entire life, and he appreciated as well what Artie had left unsaid.

In the silence that followed, CJ took a long look around the store, and when he returned his attention back to Artie, he asked, “Can you use any help around here?”

Chapter 9

When CJ stepped through the door, Maggie greeted him with a smile, which, after a week of making this his first stop of the day, he was beginning to realize was unusual for Maggie. He also realized that it was probably because he was working at Kaddy’s. CJ guessed the fact that he was helping out at the hardware store earned him a few points in Maggie’s book. It was obvious to CJ that Maggie had a soft spot for Artie—and if he were a wagering man, he would have bet the house that the soft spot went beyond just the generally
glad to see him
kind. In fact, the only one who didn’t seem to notice was Artie, who seemed oblivious to the talk around town.

CJ slid into a seat at the counter as Maggie placed a cup of coffee in front of him without his having to ask.

The place was buzzing with the breakfast crowd, with almost a dozen tickets hanging on the wire that ran the length of the short-order window. CJ was impressed with Maggie’s efficiency. With only herself, one waitress, and a cook, she seldom made anyone wait more than a few minutes for their meal, and no coffee cup remained low for long. Since making the decision to stay in Adelia for the time being, CJ had made Maggie’s a regular part of his morning routine, fueling up on strong coffee and whatever smelled the best coming off the grill that day.

In Tennessee, while under the watchful eye of his wife, CJ’s breakfast choices had ranged from fruit to anything with a large percentage of bran. On occasion, he could eat a bowl of frosted flakes with impunity. In the short time he’d been in Adelia, and notwithstanding his goal of once again reclaiming his size thirty-four waist, he estimated he’d put on five pounds. But it was a liberating five pounds. In fact, this morning he decided to order the fried eggs and sausage.

As Maggie wrote up his order and clipped it to the wire, CJ heard the jingle of the door opening and turned to see who it was. He was getting better at putting names with faces, and most of Maggie’s customers were regulars, which made it easier. What was especially interesting was seeing some of the guys he went to school with, now aged to look like their fathers, who used to come in here when CJ’s own father frequented it. To hear Maggie tell it, George still stopped by, but only once in a while and rarely for breakfast—and not at all since CJ had made the place his own eatery of choice. For some reason that pleased CJ —the possibility that he’d come between his dad and something he liked to do. Even recognizing how juvenile it was didn’t make him feel bad about it.

CJ’s first few visits had necessitated the expected thawing period, during which the regulars overcame their discontent that a newcomer—even a notable one like CJ —had infiltrated their ranks. But that had faded quickly, especially after Maggie made it a point of showing him a level of hospitality he hadn’t seen her bestow on anyone else. Then they’d laughingly accused him of moving in on Artie’s girl. Since then, he’d become just a guy eating breakfast, and he found he liked the anonymity.

This morning the door coughed up Dennis Jonathon. The man stopped just inside and scanned until he saw CJ, then made his way to the empty stool next to him. Almost before he was situated, a steaming cup of coffee materialized in front of him. Dennis slid a dollar across the counter.

“Morning, Dennis,” CJ said, and the other man nodded.

It never occurred to CJ that he would run into Dennis Jonathon again. He hadn’t thought about him in years, and that was something he’d regretted when the full-blooded Mohawk came into Ronny’s the night of Sal’s funeral. CJ had spent a fair amount of time with Dennis’s family at their home on the reservation. Then Dennis’s parents moved him to a private school, and the lack of proximity doomed the friendship a full two years before CJ ever left for college.

When CJ saw Dennis at Ronny’s, the man had slipped into the seat next to CJ, offered a single “Hey” that CJ barely heard, and CJ had found a friendship resumed that he hadn’t known he’d missed.

“I g-got a j-job for you if you’re interested,” Dennis said, leaning down over the counter so that he could blow across the top of his coffee without picking it up.

“I already have a job,” CJ said just as Maggie set a plate of eggs in front of him.

“This one p-pays better,” Dennis said.

Dennis was a man of few words, which was a trait he’d carried with him from childhood. It was something CJ had always appreciated about him, even if he made his own living stringing words together. What made Dennis verbally stingy, though, owed less to a limited vocabulary than it did to the fact that he stuttered. Since reconnecting, CJ had noticed an improvement in the malady, perhaps because there was far less stress associated with the life of an adult wage earner than for a typical high school student.

“The last time you talked about a job that paid better was in high school, and we both wound up in trouble.”

“But th-this one’s legal,” Dennis said with no hint of humor. He tried some coffee, grimaced, and added a few sugar packets. “A house. Owner’s ripped everything out d-down to the studs. It needs new floors, sheetrock, s-some wiring. It’s all interior work.”

“Sounds like a big job,” CJ said.

“If we’re l-lucky, we can st-stretch it through winter.”

CJ nodded. He could certainly use the money. Janet, who had been calling him every day—usually to recite the litany of things that were responsible for the dissolution of their marriage— stopped doing so yesterday. What that portended he didn’t know, except to suspect that it meant the increased involvement of lawyers and judges and more money than he was making as an author, and now at Kaddy’s. He’d opened a new bank account in which Matt had direct-deposited his last royalty check, but it would take him a long time to build up any kind of respectable balance. So on that consideration alone, Dennis’s offer was tempting. Too, there was the assault case hanging over his head. His lawyer had kept him up to speed on the civil suit. For all CJ knew, he might end up owing more to the critic than he would his wife.

Even so, he found it difficult to manufacture excitement for Dennis’s project, and it wasn’t until he’d eaten half the food on his plate that he understood why. A project like this was, as Dennis intimated, a long one—designed to keep two men busy for at least a full season. Accepting it meant giving serious thought to how long he would stay in Adelia, and that was a question he’d relegated to the same part of his brain studiously avoiding the start of a new novel.

As he ate, considering both of these questions, Dennis didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at him. The man had a natural Zen quality—evident even as a boy, and short-circuited only by the stuttering—that allowed him to make the offer and not fret the response. CJ suspected he could choose to pretend the invitation had never been extended and Dennis wouldn’t say another word about it.

Rather than allow him to do that, though, CJ decided to do the opposite of what the little voices in his head were telling him to do.

“Okay,” he said. “After work today, we’ll go and look at it.”

Dennis was right about one thing. This project would take them all winter should they choose to accept it. But he’d been wrong about the project including only interior work. CJ had cast a critical eye over the place before they walked in, and knew they might have to tackle both the siding and the roof, which had a few bare spots where old shingling had slid to earth. Inside, things looked worse—or better, depending on one’s perspective. The interior had indeed been stripped, but it had also been left looking as if a tornado had been responsible for the denuding. They would have to spend days dragging the old sheetrock out, along with the pulled-up carpet and sheets of linoleum from the kitchen, before they could start the restoration work.

Right off, CJ could see that a substantial portion of wiring would need to be replaced, as would some studs, and one load-bearing column in the great room. And that was just what he could see; who knew what they’d find once they got deeper into it.

On the way over, Dennis had mentioned the owner considering wood floors throughout, as well as custom carpentry for the staircase. If these were added to the rest of the work, they’d be looking at March before they were finished.

The house was one of the largest in Adelia, set back against the hills on the north side of town, skirting the county line. As a teenager, CJ had driven the Mustang through this area a few times, wondering what kind of money the people had who owned these homes. This one in particular had caught his eye all those years ago, principally for the wrought-iron gate backed by a tall hedgerow that kept prying eyes off of all but the topmost floor. At the time, CJ had wondered how the family home, the house on Lyndale, could have been so small compared to these that had sprung up almost overnight. He understood, now, that his family had enough money to build a home five times the size of this one, but there had been no need. That was actually something he appreciated about his upbringing; he’d been taught to eschew ostentation.

Now that he was inside, CJ guessed this house to be close to five thousand square feet. Not quite the mansion it had appeared to be back then, but a large home nonetheless.

Thor was busy investigating one of several piles of drywall and other refuse in the hallway, and CJ suspected there was a mouse or two in residence amid the rubble. By the looks of things, the crew that had stripped the place finished their work over a year ago, which had allowed a thick layer of dust, along with a general feeling of dereliction, to fall over the home.

“How long has it been like this?” CJ asked.

Dennis shook his head. “No idea. I g-got the job last week and told them it would t-take a while. They d-didn’t seem concerned.”

CJ walked over to the window, pushing the dingy curtain aside. The backyard was enormous, with a garden that looked to have been well-maintained at some point. CJ’s guess was that the current owners were relatively new to the area, and they probably got the place for a song.

“How much?”

“We agreed on f-fifteen thousand,” Dennis said.

CJ gave his friend a nod. Seventy-five hundred would pay a bill or two. “When do we start?”

“How about th-this weekend?”

“Okay, then. This weekend it is.”

CJ wondered if he was up to it. In the short time he’d been at Kaddy’s, he’d rediscovered muscles he’d forgotten existed. There was no telling how he’d feel after this type of labor. He chuckled to himself. There were many things he was rediscovering the longer he stayed in Adelia, and he suspected sore muscles wouldn’t be the last of it.

Small towns did to Daniel Wolfowitz what a single errant fringe in a throw rug did to an obsessive-compulsive. It was that almost subconscious feeling of disquiet that lodged like a sliver in the brain, coloring everything else with discordant notes. While it could be ignored for a while, eventually the thing would rise to prominence until he was down on his knees, smoothing the threads into uniform alignment.

In Daniel’s case it was the idiosyncratic sameness of small-town America that did him in. In a large city, there was no way to measure the number of things going on at any one time, and Daniel reveled in all of it; and what kept it from becoming overwhelming was that the sheer volume of such things tended to become a comforting background noise. The problem with small towns was the mind-numbing boredom, accompanied by oddities that stood in stark relief against the surrounding normalcy. Daniel’s mind would want to slow down, to sync with a more linear lifestyle, but then he would round a corner and see something unexpected, something like one of the grotesques out of a Sherwood Anderson novel.

In Chicago or New York, he was prepared for anything that happened along. Here, his vigilance would wane, and then he’d come upon something unexpected, like when he walked into the living room of the Baxter house to see Uncle Edward frightening the grandkids with the stump of his left arm, the detached prosthetic hand resting on his head. Or when he came into town to help Graham set things up with the VFW and witnessed a member of the local decorating crew—a man who looked to be in his midfifties and wearing badly stained work clothes—hanging from a telephone line in what appeared to be the center of Main Street. Directly beneath him, working the controls of a cherry picker whose basket rested on the road, was a similarly dressed, frantic man. A crowd had gathered, and inexplicably, no one seemed worried. In fact, this was one way that small-town life seemed to correlate with existence in the city, except that in the latter, people would have been looking up at someone perched on a ledge and urging them to jump. Daniel and Graham had hung around long enough to see the ground-based man gain control of the cherry picker and raise the bucket until the dangling man could drop into it.