A Builder's Tale - Chapter Nineteen

A Builder's Tale - Chapter Nineteen

                                                 CHAPTER NINETEEN

                                        Resolve is a tricky proposition

MacGuilties was packed that Friday when Brown, nursing his fourth coke, mumbled under his breath, “Bitch”.   And then, “To Hell with Jesus as he finally broke, fell off the wagon, removing the whiskey bottle slyly from the rack while dumping at least four ounces into his empty coke can.  No one took any notice except Joanie Tweedle.  Who, hearing the story of the chain saw, thought oh shit.  But, busy with a row of lawyers and their gooey-creamy variety of pumpkin smashes, had little time to advise or caution Brown.

     She did notice that Brown sat quiet… fuming, a slow burn about him, his body language suggesting someone deep in concentration.  The question was, how long would this continue?  Would it be for only one lapse or had Brown tossed sobriety to the winds?  Would he nurse the situation as she had seen him do before, through the night and the next day and perhaps for two or three more days of drinking, before his coals burst into fire?  Literally, like last Christmas when he and others had left her bar and wrecked that house, burning the walls and studs like so much kindling, while bellowing out Carols.  Brown was due.  But Joannie figured all was   manageable, unless he went for the Pumpkin Smashes, creamy or straight, the former leading to the latter. 

       If you had looked towards Brown, you would have seen a man seemingly in thought, deeper than you might expect from his clothing and the shabby baseball cap askew above his brows.  You would have noticed his eyes gleaming beneath the brim, bright enough to suggest there was more to him than his clothing suggested.  More than one might surmise after reading the logo, Diggers do it Deeper, Digger Brown Excavation, on his cap and jacket. 

     Moving then, past Brown and down the length of the bar toward tables and chairs and the empty barber’s chair with its hanging dunce cap, you would have seen the standard weekend is coming, end of the day, Friday crowd.  MacGuilties, a little more than half-full, with an assortment of construction workers, local inebriates, and working-class summer folk, turned into permanent residents.   

     Of course, the weekend festivities would summon some downstate folks to Beauville.  However, few, if any of these, would know of or venture to MacGuilties, with its shabby, almost threatening exterior.   The orange and black bunting that draped the walls, the corn shucks by the door, the patrons spotted with orange-black camo and orange baseball caps and vests.  These were all local ambience and part of another fall weekend, jammed between mid-October and the November hunting season.  In a way, it was the gateway of events to fill the fall and stop the monotony.   Had you paused at the parking lot, then decided to enter the bar, you would have seen most of these celebrators from the work-booted to the tassel-toed consuming a version of the Pumpkin smash.  And very few like Brown nursing sodas, spiked or otherwise. 

        The bar hummed with cacophonous weekend zest and expectation.  There were the humbugs, and those who saw a night ahead of shots and beers, smashes, hoopla and partying.  But some of those gathered were in for only one or two, just enough to shake off the day and prime the night for exploration, expectation, numbness or all three.  For it was the weekend of the tug tossing Pumpkin Splash and the weekend of the dancing pumpkins, the little ladies, daughters of many of the men now at MacGuilties, who would twirl, and skip to Janet Wainwright’s choreography.

      Brown stuck to himself, and those that knew him, those who were acquainted, and those who had never seen him before (which were few) all sensed his brooding.  The few who went up to joke soon retreated at his scowl or vacant stare.  He was thinking of the present and the past, his chain saw’s failure to start, which he could fix, and that year when his daughter had danced for the Wainwright woman, which he could not. 

     That year, when all the little girls were costumed in their ballerina finery and his daughter, probably because she resembled Brown (even at ten years old) with her ham size legs and substantial Northern Michigan shape.  Janet had said she was just too fat to be a ballerina and instead had made her into a Jack-o’-lantern, his little Shirley almost hidden, enclosed inside an orange sphere, her eyes peering from that paper-mache face, only her white tight clad legs exposed.  His daughter had cried so hard when the other children had laughed and joked that she resembled an orange rounder, Humpty Dumpty.  

     He had tried to fix it for her, but Janet Wainwright had needed a jack-o’-lantern and said “Really, Brown, she’s just too large for dance, and she should stop eating so many cakes or whatever he was overfeeding her.”  He remembered Janet’s lecturing, going on and on about proper nutrition, the benefits of grains, rice and vegetables, versus those “sausages you eat... Brown…Those pizzas and fast-food burgers…”  He thought about his drowned chain saw and the woman’s squawking.  Then he grabbed the whiskey bottle again, less slyly this time, while scratching his stomach, which was by any measure large.

      But that lecture was ten years ago, and since then there had been other run-ins, usually about his digging.  During those years when Janet had been on the zoning board and one of the township planners, hugging trees and saving water.  Silly woman, never had to work.  She cared nothing for people, but she sure liked trees, and the lake too, just the way she wished it.  Unless it was her septic tank polluting the pristine blue lake. If it was hers, and her money that required spending, she was conveniently oblivious to her own pollution, even as she lectured others. 

     Hypocrite, thought Brown.  But what about him? What had happened to his Jesus resolutions?  Had he been a hypocrite there too, or had he been only the charlatan as planned, or a bit of both? From this moment’s perspective, foreshortened by the whiskey, it was simple.  He was just not born-again material.  What had started as a convenient farce and then become almost real was drifting away with every thought and swallow back to farce again.  At any rate, Janet Wainwright was motivator, witch, and clown, in this moment’s circus.     

     With this thought fading, and a nod to Joanie, who in response took away Brown’s doctored coke, saying.  “Enough Brown if you’re drinking-drink.  I was on to you from the beginning.  Has it been a sham?  If this is what you are doing at home at night, you might as well drink with others.  Unhealthy to be alone, Brown, unhealthy.” 

“I’ve been pure as snow till now,” he says.  And she nods back saying, “sure you have and your Jesus wore a headdress too, I bet.”  

      Now the door burst open to hollering.  “Brown, I see you Brown. Where’s my trench?  And you’re drinking...Brown.  It’s about time.  Happy smash!” It was Walshinksi, the electrician, followed by his partner Woodbine… behind them Wilson.  Brown frowned, took a long slow swallow and nodded towards the men. 

     “How you doing, Digger?” said Wilson.  “Did you find your chain saw?”

     “Bitch threw it in the lake,” replied Brown.

     “I heard.  We all heard... Indian Dick.”

     “Yea, I’m sure he told you.”  

     The men ordered drinks from Joanie, all chose smashes-up, which for all the Pumpkin in them might just as well have been straight shots of Stoli.  These they chased with beers.

     “Raping the land again, were you Brown?” says Woodbine.   “All that nasty noise and cutting.  Soggy saw... Eh… I was thinking of going to church and finding salvation. Want to come?”

“Up yours,” says Brown.

And Woodbine starts to laugh, and Walshinksi says “lay off... want another…  Brown?”

With this, Wilson chugs his beer... “Gotta go, I’ll see you guys at the Splash... Maybe.  Oh… Tim and Daphne might be up this weekend.  If you go by the job and they are there…Be cool!”  

     “Not me unless you want to join me on the tug,” says Walshinksi.   “I’ve got the gun set… ready to go.” 

     “No thanks, but thanks,” says Wilson as he heads out the door thinking of Grace and home, music and solitude.  He hopes nothing comes of Brown’s escape from Jesus.  But what the hell, if it does it does… and Walshinksi will probably keep track of him, he thinks… hopes.  

     Grace… When he gets home, he tries to call her, but no Grace, and when he reaches the sister, she doesn’t know, and doesn’t know…  He again asks her to tell Grace that he called, wondering why she hasn’t contacted him.  Will he even see her again before Christmas, or even then…?  Might it be like two years ago when she simply vanished for a year?  This thought has fouled his mood.  So, instead of placing the exuberant joy of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth on the stereo, he heads for his old buddy Mahler and searches for the most foreboding melancholy passage he can find, the second movement of the fifth with its faint warning shadow of hope.   He pours some whiskey from a different form of fifth and after a few bars decides the odds of him going to town with all the crowds and hoopla are non-existent.  He’s seen the pumpkins sail before… But maybe if he takes his boat?  Don’t want to be driving because surely the cops will be watching, and the last thing he needs is a drunk driving. He takes another sip, and mentally charts the next week’s schedule, while imagining Tim and Daphne and the future as an array of challenges… so many windmills.  He has not heard from them but thinks it would be about right, if they showed up this weekend.  It has been over a month.  He knows they have returned from Europe.

     Wilson is correct in this premonition, because at that very moment, somewhere between Grand Rapids and Beauville, Tim and Daphne race and bounce along M-131.   No jet this weekend.

     “I hate this truck,” she says, and Tim grunts back, taking the Peter built cap from his head.  He is wearing heavy work shoes and lightweight Carhart overalls, encasing him in a rough light-brown cocoon.  Tim, costumed as the workman hauler, driving rugged, and pulling a trailer.  Daphne, as if to emphasize her contempt for their transport, is wearing chic, the contrast of the three, of course, ridiculous.  “I hate this truck,” she says again.   “Why didn’t you do as I suggested and have someone pull the boat?  Why are we doing this?”  Tim glances behind him.  “Because you bought all that crap already, and you wanted it up here.  You know the house will not be ready for it. It can’t be.  You heard what Wilson said.   I bet it isn’t even framed completely.”

     “He will find a place for it.  We can always ask him to store it at his house.  He could use some furniture.  He has a garage.”

     “Did you ask him?” says Tim?

“No,” she says.  “I forgot.  I was busy.”

     Tim shakes his head at this, adjusts his overall straps, and sighs as he swerves by a racing lumber truck, on two lanes now, then turns back to his wife. 

    “Do you like confusion?”  As if he doesn’t know after so many years with the woman.  In Daphne’s case, this lack of communication is not for confusion’s sake but rather the result of a ‘do whatever I feel like’ self-indulgent habit.  At least when he ignores someone or something, it is part of his plan. 

    “Is it your intention that this furniture gets wet and ruined over the next six months, just so you can complain?”

    “Now dear,” says Daphne. “I am sure it is… it will be fine.  You will make it so.”  And then, switching the subject, she adds, “anything happening with your new restaurants.”

    “I thought you did not care.  The one in Holland is half up. They say it will be done by February.  I’ve spent the week with the supply firm picking out the tables, glasses, plates, chairs, and china.  They have a girl....

     “I bet they have,” says Daphne.  “I wish you would use Philippe.  He is so creative.  So, what did he say, au courant?  He’s au courant.”  

    “You mean oh crackpot,” says Tim, erupting in laughter.  “I’m sticking with Celia, she knows.  Plus, you already have that Philippe involved enough.  We may need to get rid of him too, before it’s all over, you know!  His last bill was ridiculous, a hundred bucks an hour, a few pictures, some slashes in the air. Great job, if you can get it.”

     Daphne scowls at her husband, frowns, then gives him the look that would be launching a glass at his head in a different environment.  “Christmas,” she says.  “Why can’t I have Christmas?”

    “I thought we were going to Megeve…You can ask him again.   But you heard Wilson, next year and economies of scale… I did not follow… And maybe not even that.  Economies of scale, I thought that worked the other way, bigger is better and all that.  But we cannot rock the boat now.  Just stick to the plan.”

   “Ok,” she says, “I am looking towards our visit.  We can have a picnic.

      Janet sits in the auditorium, waiting.  Conrad walks the stage, hobbles really, old man and his silly crutch, she thinks, noticing that he is doing it backwards again, crutch in the wrong hand, on the wrong side.   He lists as he hobbles while reciting his prose to two captivated literary wan-a-bees.  Young women who seem to like his crags and flowing gray, his poems and the idea of speaking to a poet.  She listens as he recites some gibberish he has drunkenly called Ode to a Pumpkin. 

Oh pumpkin, orange, springing from the soil

You arise from the earth, just like a boil.

But one with greenery, vines attached.

For the earth

You’re a mighty match.

You grab its nutrients. This is true.

The succoring earth is there for you.

You grow round bright orange from the ground

And you do this all

Without a sound.  

     What did I ever see in him, thinks Janet?  His land, his big mop of hair, his money?  It is too long ago to remember.  Has it been a bad bargain… now with Conrad, old, and a curmudgeon?  And was his poetry always this awful… we make our beds.... Today the money is much less and shrinking, but there’s still some, enough she thinks.  But, her current cars are old and humble.  And Deer Haven, she pretends that it is simply quaint, the past preserved, but Wilson was right.  It’s falling apart.  They could sell and move inland… Never.  She would lose too much of herself if she lost the lake, her gardens, and her morning walks among the trees.  Her thoughts depart as the little girls begin to arrive. Conrad peers out from the stage and grabs the hand of one of the locals, who helps him down.

     “Oh little ladies of the night.”

     “Shut up, Conrad,” says Janet, “Quiet, here, here’s your flask...Sit here.” She gestures to the row beside her and ushers him to the aisle.  She has seen him before, galumphing through the seats, stomping on people’s toes, and this without a cane.  The aisle seat is necessary.   

     “Take a sip and then put that away,” she says as Conrad takes a swig. “Better yet,” she grabs the flask.  “I’ll take that, be quiet now, and no leering.”  Looking at her husband with his cast, and bulbous red nose, thinking how we return to children.  And Conrad… becoming a problem child.

     Conrad lets out a wet phlegmy wheeze, follows his wife with his eyes and then switches his glance toward the ceiling, then back towards the stage where the dancing pumpkins are starting to gather.

    The theater, if you can call it that, is only the gym, and a second-floor gym at that, located in the high school, two blocks from Beauville’s central core.  First there are two old and massive doors opening inward, set in dark and weathered granite.  Inside sits the ubiquitous trophy case full of bronze and brass and silver statues, plaques and chalices.  Pictures of past classes line the walls.  To the right, a large stairway climbs up and then back on itself.  From the basement an elevator rises, humming, loaded with props and scenery, in line are little girls dressed as pumpkins… white and orange, some with bows in their hair, others with gourd like paper pumpkin tops, the stem sprouting from red and brown and yellow heads, waiting to be carried to the 2nd floor where large steel I-beams and trusses support the ceiling, and then a roof.  Rust streaks the walls. Beneath the beams hang banners and pennants celebrating sixty years of the Beauville Buccaneer triumphs.  Some are frayed, old, and made of cotton, others are newer, sewn from nylon still as shiny as the day it came off the roll.  The most recent banner hangs in the center of the space... Class F.F.F. State runners up of 1989.

     Immediately inside, Formica tables form a barrier.  The central one holds two pumpkin daughters selling tickets.   Ten dollars gets you everything, the show and cider, and later Bratwurst in the park.  If you stay long enough, you can watch the fireworks and see the Pumpkin Splash.  But these events, unlike the pageant, are free, outside, and full of inebriation.

     All is hubbub and confusion as music stands are placed in a makeshift orchestra pit beneath a raised stage.  Some of the players are as young as their new and shiny instruments, others long past school age, carry brass or woodwinds, rubbed by time and showing age.  Among these musicians gather the dancing pumpkins, chattering like no vegetable should, hovering in a rotating mingling mass around a central Janet who is shouting out instructions for her pageant.  Little girls leap and spin, practicing and warming up as she tries to achieve control, which she does eventually.... Just in time for the arriving audience to miss most of the  preparation’s chaos. 

      Most of the attendees know one another, either through their children, their business, or from the village streets...the constant grinding rumor-mill of a small town where everyone knows or assumes to know everyone.  Shouts and greetings sound from one side of the gym to the other.  “Tough day Jim.  Sadie is my pumpkin.  It should be a good one this year, Janet...”

     There are few tourists.  It is Friday and most will still be on the highways North… the frantic race to God’s country; named like so many other God’s countries because The Big Planner would certainly have cared more for beauty than he did for the commerce of the South, where the many spend most of their lives amidst strip malls and confusion. Head north, the highways call, pulling, tugging on the people “come escape your humdrum, boring, dull, Skinner box lives.”  And on weekends, thousands do, leaving the land of the larger, busier, and better farms...the factories.  Because it is Southern Michigan that supports the state, where most of the money comes from.  Ford and GM, and all the mid-sized companies that feed the cars, the salesmen, the hustling lawyers and those who combine in financial grease.  They all reside to the south in close proximity to the almighty dollar.  But there is a tradeoff.  Because the land is less magnificent and the skies are more often gloomy… Hazy in the fall and summer, and in winter instead of the crisp cold and pristine snow of the north, the clouds hang low on the horizon, above streets and towns, gray and muddy with slush. Even by October, the skies have already begun to purge their color, filling up with haze. 

      Let’s go North, so many act and say, where the air is cleaner.  North, where the perception (perhaps now false) exists that there is a greater freedom, where one was once free to run amuck.  Although this freedom is now departing to the jeopardy of MADD woman, time and the asserting morality of too many trapped and fearful Christians, the hope of freedom lingers. 

     And still, the perception remains. Freedom and beauty beckon, go north to a land perceived as safer, cleaner, to a region whitely homogeneous.  A place to escape, to do whatever the hell you want, unless it is operating your boat while drinking, or smoking a joint, or speeding.  Unless you drive without a seat belt, or drink too much, unless the new fascists find you.  For they have come here too of late, so many, that you might wonder what this God of God’s country is up to.  Still, the grass is always greener, and in all seasons, Michiganders, Buckeyes, Hoosiers, Midwesterners head North, from time to time, for peace, and freedom to recharge.  And on weekends, on Friday nights, many are driving north, just like Tim and Daphne.  

     Few tourists, or part-timers, will attend the pageant.  It is scheduled purposely on Friday for the locals, and for their children, and of course for Janet Wainwright, who is the major duomo of the affair.  Producer Janet, conductor Janet, choreographer Janet, Pumpkin Pageant Janet.

      By 7:30 the gym is half full, and the orchestra (a band if not for four violins, a viola, a cello, a bass, a few woodwinds, and one kettle drum) is adjusting stands, searching for their music, and playing streams of notes.  The horns, strings and woodwinds all warming up in key, their note progression balanced.  However, some are adjusting pitch to the key of C, and others B-flat and still others waver about in both.  The effect would be sour to some ears, but it passes almost unnoticed in Beauville, the off-key this, the mistimed that.  Because the patrons are more occupied by the tittering of their little girls, the raspy commands of Janet, and the clattering of scenery behind the curtains.  Seven-thirty moves to eight and then to eight-fifteen when almost an hour late the lights dim and a trumpet sounds.

     Janet has written a fanfare to announce the pageant and an oom-pah march to lead her to the podium. She enters to the sound of trumpets, costumed in an overtly youthful and ethereal garment of deep black, oranges, and all the sunset’s reds.  The costume requires harps and floating, but instead Janet struts to the rhythm of an imagined march, her thin old legs, and long wattled neck ill-suited to her youthful, almost medieval clothing.

      As she reaches the center, she turns slowly toward the crowd. A smattering of claps meets her gaze.  She stares back, and these grow gradually into applause.  Janet bows, then rises to the podium.  She taps her baton against the stand, then pauses, and nodding to the orchestra, pulls out a pitch pipe. Three chords later they are under way as the curtains rise to an immense pumpkin in the middle of the stage.  A small face looks out on the crowd from the center of this fabric vegetable balloon held upright and billowing by three internal fans.  

     Little girls begin to twirl, and the music sounds, first from the orchestra, and then from Janet, who now and then must rush sideways to play a passage of piano. The Oom-pah turns to waltz, and then into a rhythm that mimics Copland’s Billy the Kid, and then completely out of place, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  But this goes unnoticed because Janet has only included the modern rhythms to display her depth, something lost to most of the audience… unnoticed except for the knowledge they disliked it.  Within measures, her creation hastens from atonal bashes into a sinuous tango, and then again, a march.  The dancers march, twirl, and slink to strobes and flashes, until the music switches again.  This time into America.  Then, with the first bars of Shenandoah, they form three lines in front of the Pumpkin.  And as Janet anoints them, one-by-one, with her baton, they place their hands upon their chests.  Words begin to whisper from the Pumpkin, becoming only slightly louder as the child gains confidence.  A little round face peering from her daddy’s spinnaker turned pumpkin, reciting the history of the festival. 

     As we know, history is in the wisdom, the eye, the words of the chronicler, and this history, according to Janet, somehow misses the inebriation of the founding fathers. Those bored realtors and attorneys who imagined it, twenty years before, primarily as a joke.  In Janet’s version, it has become a hodgepodge of Hosannas to freedom, thanksgiving and Halloween, with some bunting draped about.

     “It is twenty-one years ago today when a special few visionaries launched our festival,” says the small voice.  “Founded on the magic of commerce, and the size and circumference of our pumpkins.” The head stumbles on visionaries and circumference, and then continues. “These men, woman, citizens of vision, these movers and shakers, framed our festival” ... The child coughs, reddens and briefly a small scare crosses her face...  “In their wisdom they not only created commerce but also the orange fields, the beauty of the,” more coughs... “Commerce...livelihoods.”  The pumpkin head has now lost her lines, and pulls back the band around her neck to look down into the pumpkin, to find her hands, her crib sheet, to find her words, and as she vanishes ducking inside to retrieve the script, there is a rustling, a crack of wood... and then a crash and scream.  The face is gone, leaving a hole in the orange fabric. Now faceless, the pumpkin continues to speak... from deep inside, a small voice, hidden and barely audible.  “It was with their wisdom,” ...  but no one is able to hear.  

       The eardrums of the audience strain and Janet looks despairing toward the pumpkin, which now has begun to droop first along its left side and then on its right… Then there is another crack, but this is of electricity.  A breaker blows.  The fabric loses its illumination. And as the fans supporting it cease, the pumpkin collapses completely.  While she continues to glower at the flattened cloth, which has collapsed much like the puddled wicked witch of Oz, Janet raises her baton and abruptly starts the finale.  The little pumpkins twirl off the stage, and slowly as the pageant finishes, a tiny girl in Oshkosh clothing crawls out beneath the orange cloth.  A child so thin that a puff of wind might topple her. Her face is flushed, her ear bloodied, but her eyes gleam towards the audience.  And denied the dance, she now starts to prance about with the fanfare, twirling and skipping, left then right, her face shiny from the lights, dancing as the trumpets sound, the drums hammer, and the single Tympani reverberates from behind bright pasted jack-o'-lantern eyes.  Janet glares towards the stage at this inappropriate ad-libbing and then back to the audience.  One of the men shouts, “that’s my daughter,” and Janet thinks better of interfering, letting the little girl joyously twist until she conveniently topples with the final hammer of the tympani. 

      And this year, unlike former years when the curtains crashed, or the paper-mache pumpkin smoked and smoldered from faulty wiring.  Or the one ten years previous when Conrad went on a bottom pinching frenzy.  This year, thinks Janet…  not so bad.  They would have been deflating the pumpkin, anyway. 

     When the applause starts and builds, she is not surprised.  It appears everyone, except the mother of the pumpkin’s head, has enjoyed themselves.  And she, enthusiastic with her child’s final dance, only hesitates her clapping until she is sure the little girl is safe.  

     Janet has a triumph. She bows, and as the crowd departs, she basks in praise and compliments. 

     “Great job, this year, Janet.” 

     “Nice tunes.” 

     “The little girls were wonderful.” 

     “Charming Janet.” 

     “So what, if your pumpkin failed? I liked the music.”

Conrad, who has mercifully slept through the whole thing, awakens now, standing next to his wife, accepting the praise he assumes must be for his poetry.  Then he is pulling Janet with one arm as he hugs his crutch with the other.  And this time he has it right... His inclined stumble straightened as he heads out the door.  He and Janet and a few buddies in search of one more pumpkin smash.

     The finale was just in time because the tardy pageant has misled the people who think they have an untouched hour before them, to eat, or like Conrad, see if they can find a drink at Lucy’s Raw or at the Winking Eye… prime space for the splash, at the edge of the channel.    

     Within minutes, as the vodka flows, Walshinksi and his tug are coming back through the drawbridge, firing.  First lobbing pumpkin shells beneath the bridge and then above it and then amidst it as the bridge clangs and rises.  As the traffic stops, Walshinksi toots his tug and fires its vegetable charges skyward.  And Janet, who has grabbed hold of Conrad, dragging him from the bar, waits impatiently at the bridge, her part finished.

     Oh fire sharply, tug of night

     Oh fire out those pumpkins... bright

     Oh fire cannon, with barrel aflame

                “Oh shut up,” says Janet.

     She must now prepare for her party, the one for her friends and some of the little girls, and their parents... The people she cares for, or needs to care for.  There will be her circle of friends, and those she must invite, the social niceties, the necessary important. She looks forward to tomorrow, her party and her friends, and even those she is not fond of, like Longbottom, who she has invited because of his influence, his place in Beauville’s mix.  Janet and Longbottom have known each other a long while, and maybe, just maybe, she can still persuade him not to sell any more lots...to keep the land, a conservancy… pristine.  Since the chainsaw incident with Brown, she questions this invitation, too late, because Longbottom has informed her that the Stevens are coming to the party, too.  And who was he to invite anyone without approval?  But, yet and damn, she needs to know them.  They will be neighbors, won’t they?  The party’s preparation now occupies her mind as she and the less than willing Conrad wait for Walshinksi to finish lobbing pumpkins from his sewer pipe contraption… its barrel belching flame with every pumpkin.

     These splash beneath the fireworks, and disrupt the gold orange band of moonlight reflected east-west on the harbor’s surface.  Janet is fatigued, drained now and tired of the color. But pumpkin shades predominate.  Except for the occasional flare of red, white and blue, the sky is lit up with booming and exploding orange surrounding a harvest moon rising larger than the sun.  A moon just starting its climb, so low that it is both supporting and supported by the sky.  

     Wilson sees the same moon.  Hears the noise, the explosions, and notices that his cat has vanished.  It happens whenever there are fireworks, the poor animal is terrified.  He sips the fluid in his glass and checks to see if he has left her out.  He wanders outside to look for her and finding no cat he instead kicks the pumpkin at the entry, nudges it really, until he just grabs it and flings it at a tree, curious to see if it will merely splat or try to start a fire.  It does neither. The candle blows out and the pumpkin, deformed now, rolls towards the water.   

     He should have gone to town, and now he can’t, unless he wants to take the Anomie, but what a hassle, and with the fireworks he might burn the deck, sparks might nestle in his rolled-up headsail. And it is too late, anyway.  He thinks he should have planned ahead. He could drive, but he’s had a few and the police feed off celebration.  They will be out in force.  There are so many and they have to pay their wages somehow.  In fact, Beauville has gone wacky lately.  The police have become a growth industry, a crime-fulfilling, crime producing prophecy.  As if a town with few burglaries, except for summer folk’s empty cottages, needed five cops and seven sheriffs.  Thinking that they, the cops, should at least be pizza delivery men, too.  Then they could really invade the people’s privacy and think of all that spicy cheese. 

     But Wilson needs more government to hassle with, like he needs three feet to run upon.  No, he will not go driving. They might be lurking right outside his door, just past his drive behind that new billboard with Welcome, Beauville the Beautiful, plastered large upon it.  He hates the damn sign, but it is convenient.  He now just tells anyone looking for his drive to turn at beauty and… Oh, watch out for the police. Because they like to lurk there…behind the sign, ever since the Petunia people put it up at the beginning of the summer… behind those painted cardboard flowers.... waiting silently like vultures.  Nope, he will not go to town.  He has recently seen them hiding.  

     What the hell, he pours another, when the phone rings.  Grace, he wonders?  And although female enough for him to answer with “Grace, I was hope....”  It isn’t she.

“It’s Daphne, Wilson.”  He tries to sound alert, less fluid, wondering if you can sound loaded with a simple “Yes....Yes.... Daphne.”

     “We are here,” she says.  “How’s my house? I’m excited to see it, and I have great furniture.  A hutch like my grandmother’s, old, and Duncan Fife.  And you should see the paintings.”

      “How was your trip,” he says... furniture? Did she say furniture?

      “Antiques, I could not resist them.   I bought a table for the foyer,” and “The trip was wonderful, I shopped till I dropped.  Philippe knew all the right spots.”

    “Furniture?  There’s no roof yet, Daphne.”

    “Not at all,” she says.

    “Nope, we’ve finished the two floors, the bearing interior partitions, next week... Maybe, by the end of the week, we will have the trusses erected.

     “Selected,” she says.

     “Erected,” he replies, “erected,” wondering if she can tell, hear the whiskey in his speech, and what does it matter?  It’s Friday, anyway.

      “Can we put it in the basement?”

      “The basements awful damp, Daphne.  I was planning to pour the slabs once we’re closed in.  It could be months.  Even with the drainage.  The pea stone we’ve put there. I wouldn’t recommend it… No… It might get ruined.”   He can sense her displeasure over the phone.

     “I thought you would be farther along.  We haven’t been here for two months.”

     “Six weeks,” he says.  “And we just started.  I think you better find a storage room. There are new ones by the airport.  I can get the fellows to unload for you, if you wait till Monday.”

     He hears her shouting in the background, “Tim, Tim, he’s not ready.”

     Half-bright.... thinks Wilson.  Then, “Call me in the morning Daphne. It’s Friday, I have plans, the festival….”

     “Were headed downtown, maybe, you can meet us there.” 

     “Let’s plan on tomorrow, or Sunday.  That’s better for me.”   He hangs up the phone, adding, “Whenever you wish.”