This is Just Exactly Like You (38 page)

“This is going to be a little like an eclipse,” says Rena. And before he can ask her exactly what she means, she walks away, follows Butner as he drives the skid over the rubber mat and into the back yard.

Beth’s entire head will come off her body. She’ll
at the very goddamn least
want to know why he put it over here, instead of at their house.
How in the hell do you expect to sell it now, with the yard like that?
And he’s got a ready answer for that. This is what came to him riding back home. He doesn’t expect to sell it any more, he’ll say. He’s got a whole new plan. This is all for her. For them. They can move over here. This thing with Rena’s all but done. That much is sure. So they’ll move over here, and what he’ll do is find some way of finishing the kitchen off over there, and that one, with its walls already knocked through, with paint up on the walls, mostly, can be the one they sell.
3BR. 2BA. BRAND NEW KITCHEN.
She never liked that house, anyway. He’ll start in on the attic over here, get their little room put in over here. There’s already a good floor up there from where the old man had his workbench, from where he’d loaded up all his shotgun shells, getting himself ready. They’ll drop a new stove in this kitchen and be done with it. Leave the walls where they are for now. Nothing fancy. No demolition. A plain, simple house. Small rooms. More like their old rental in Burlington. Get everything back down to how it was. They can sit out back in the evenings, talk about whether they’ll ever get Hen to try out for something like Little League, look at the ground lights lit up around the sidewalk racetrack. He’s going to need some ground lights.

It’ll all work out, he thinks, even though he knows it can’t, or probably won’t, if he keeps going, if he gives the sign, tells Butner to go ahead and drop the blade in, start cutting the bed for the racetrack. But it could. It could. What he needs is some oversight, some kind of overarching intervention, a benevolent presence, a blessing. He needs a patron saint of lost causes, or damaged ones. Fatal flaws. Intentional missteps. Maybe it’s Yul Brynner. Maybe the dog has been here all along to officiate at these kinds of occasions. Or maybe it’s Hendrick. It really could be Hendrick. Jack’s head is starting to feel overfull.

He gets Hen out of the truck, gets the dog, takes them both around to the back of the house, where there’s mayhem. Butner’s in the skid steer, and the blade’s already in the ground, so none of it matters anyway, because go-ahead or not, he’s already carving a miniature road into Jack’s back yard. Another version of the tomato moat. Ernesto’s running a crew of three or four guys Jack’s never seen before, directing them as they hammer metal stakes and guide boards into the cut Butner’s leaving behind him. Another guy wheelbarrows a layer of gravel in over the bare ground. It’s clear everyone’s done this before, or something like it. Jack can’t figure out where all these people have come from. Butner sees him, hollers, wants to know
Do you want it to curve around this way?
Jack puts Yul Brynner in the house, leaves Hen with Rena, says,
Will he be OK with you for a minute?
Rena’s nodding
sure, sure,
and Jack walks out there, finds himself suddenly out in the middle of everything, pointing now to where he wants the racetrack to go, and Butner’s yelling back,
Yeah man, yeah
, and he changes direction to where Jack’s pointing, the skid giving off clouds of black smoke. It’s happening much more quickly than he had it figured. It’s like it’s as simple as Butner said it was. Ernesto’s over the top of his crew, saying
No, no, aquí, así
, and showing them where to run the forms out straight, where to pull them back around. The ground is red where Butner peels back the top layer of soil. Raw. Jack waves him down, meaning
over here, over here.
Butner shakes his head
yes,
puts the skid where Jack’s aiming. The eight’s already half-dug. It’s happening.

Randolph, of Randolph & Sons, comes up, introduces himself. The man’s given his business his first name. He wants to know if it’s time yet, and Jack says he doesn’t know. Randolph looks at Ernesto’s guys, says, “It looks like it might be time.”

“OK,” Jack says.

“I’ll call the rest of my boys. They’re just down the street getting some lunch.”

And soon enough there’s another pickup out front, more people in the yard. There’s a deeper rumble and the cement mixer backs out onto the street, turns around, rolls up onto the lawn, onto the wood and the rubber mat. The planking sinks down into the ground. Randolph’s leaning out the driver’s window and one of the Sons is motioning him back, saying C’mon back, ’mon back. All of them—Randolph and all the Sons—are sporting the same chubby necks. The Son gives a thumbs-up when Randolph’s got the truck in the right place.

Hendrick gets free of Rena and walks out toward Ernesto, one foot in front of the other in measured heel-to-toe steps. Jack waves to Butner in the skid, and Butner nods back:
I see him
. Ernesto says something Jack can’t hear, and hands Hen one of the hammers and a metal spike. Hen holds them by his sides a while, but then he leans over, hunches down, starts pounding the spike into the clay right in the middle of where the sidewalk will be. Jack’s throat goes tight: Somehow it’s this small, blunt, dumb thing that finally gets him. Hendrick is not touching the spike to each ear. He is not doing the cement guys’ jobs better than they are. All he’s doing in the world is knocking a spike into the mud, nothing more, which is beautiful in its own right, and now Jack’s crying, watching him, this boy doing plain boy things, and he tries to hide it, tries to wipe his eyes before anybody can tell. The metal hammer on the metal spike rings out over the rest of the noise like a bird. Randolph gets down out of the mixer, gives a signal, and the Sons start pumping concrete into the far end of the eight.

Butner idles the skid, walks over, starts shouting and pointing. “That shed’s kind of close to the edge of the track over there,” he’s saying into Jack’s ear, so he can hear him. “Want me to take it out? We should probably take that out. It’ll take five minutes with the loader. I mean, that fucker’s ruined as it is, right?” It is. It’s rotting into itself, leaning over ten or twenty degrees, made at least in part out of what looks like leftover fencing. There’s nothing in it but a couple of rusting galvanized trash cans. Maybe a paint bucket or two. It needs taking out one way or the other. Jack wipes his eyes again. “Sure,” he yells. “Go ahead. Whatever you want.”

“I’ll just pile it along the back there.”

“Great,” Jack says. “Fine.”

Butner goes back to the skid, spins it around, picks the blade up into the air as high as it’ll go, drives over and brings the blade back down, almost gently, on the shed roof. Everybody slows down to watch, all of them little boys now. Demolition. Hendrick marches in place. Jack sees Rena shake her head, laugh to herself. Butner brings the blade down further. The whole shed shifts. The loader throws out a column of black exhaust and the blade comes down a little more, and the structure gives in all at once, corner posts snapping and crumbling, the roof falling down through the center. Butner backs up, drops the blade down to the ground, then drives forward, pushing what’s left of the building off its foundation. He cuts the skid off, gets out, walks up to the pile, pushes at a few pieces with his boot, peers down in there. Something’s not right. While Jack’s still trying to figure out what that might be, up and out of the rubble comes a thin spiral, a helix, a stream of smoke, something alive—let it be ants, he thinks, even though he already knows that it can’t be, because that’d be too easy, that it’s got to be termites, an indictment, finally, long overdue, of what he’s doing here, a quick and easy reminder that no patron saint can save him from himself. There are so many, so fast. They’re like water, like somebody’s cut a hose on, thousands of termites flying out of the ruined shed, heading up into the air twenty or thirty feet and then getting pushed downwind, over the house and across the street, toward his and Frank’s houses and out into the neighborhood. Hendrick clenches and unclenches his fists, blows air through his nose in short bursts. He’s watching, for sure. Butner backs up until he’s standing next to Hendrick. The termites keep coming. Millions, Jack thinks. Not thousands. This is what millions of anything looks like. His ears ring. Ernesto holds one hand up, stops his crew. Randolph & Sons are standing at the other side of the yard in a little knot, mixer shut down. Without the engine noise the yard’s church-quiet. The termites keep on.

“What is it?” Rena asks, walking over.

“Termites,” Jack says.

“
Coptotermes formosanus,
” Hendrick says.

“What?” she says.

“
Coptotermes formosanus,
” he says. “
Coptotermes formosanus.
”

“What’s he saying?” Butner asks.

“It’s Latin,” Jack says, tears in his eyes again, just like that, because there’s his son, delivering species and genus name for the fucking termites. Next will be the declensions for numbers and kinds of girlfriends and wives. Jack wipes his nose, sniffs, takes stock of his half-destroyed back yard. “I think it’s the Latin word for termites,” he says. “The classification.”

“Where the hell would he have learned that?” asks Butner.

“Magazines,” Jack says. “We found some magazines.”

“Seriously,” Butner says. “You gotta get that kid on the news.”

“OK,” says Jack.

“You should call somebody.”

“I know.”

“I know a guy at Channel 14,” Butner says.

They’re landing on them, in their hair, their clothes. “Jesus,” says Rena, slapping at her arms. “Can these things get into your house?”

“Probably,” Jack says.

“Oh, shit yeah,” says Butner. “Termites can get in anywhere.”

Hen’s got one on his finger, and he holds it out in front of him, looking at it. The wings look too fragile to function. Butner gets back on the loader, fires the engine, moves the pile a few feet farther away. He tries to cover them over, but that just makes the termites come faster than ever. “It’s like locusts,” Rena says. “Like a plague.” Hen shakes the termite off his finger, holds it out, waits for another one to land on him.

Jack counts off the rest of the plagues: Boils, dead livestock, darkness. Firstborn sons. He can’t remember what kind of blood you need for the door. Lamb. He’s pretty sure it’s lamb.

Randolph comes over, wants to know if they should keep going.
Yes
, Jack tells him, not even having to think about it, because even if he knows nothing else by now, he knows that what he absolutely cannot do is leave this half-finished. You can’t have half a backyard sidewalk tricycle racetrack, termites or no. They’re either in the house, too, or they’re not. They’ll get in or they won’t. Finish things. He’s supposed to finish things.
Swarm
. He thinks about the word
swarm
. He tells Randolph
OK
.
Do it,
he says. And Randolph goes back to the Sons, and they go back to pumping cement into the forms. Butner brings the skid back from the shed, back to the cut, starts going over some of the high spots to get them flatter. He’s almost got the eight finished. The noise of the cement mixer and the noise of the skid cover everything over again. Ernesto gets his guys back in behind Butner, laying in the last of the forms around the edge. Rena stands with Hen, and Jack can smell the cement as it hits the ground, a kind of cold smell of fire, of burning, of sand and water. Two Sons in rubber boots stand in the forms, raking the slurry where they want it to go. Jack hopes Frank’s not watching from inside his house, wondering what the hell he’s got going in the back yard over here, wondering if the Neighborhood Association ought to be called. Or the health department. The termites keep coming, keep coming, and finally Jack leaves his post there near where the sidewalk will eventually cross itself at the middle of the eight, walks up into the side yard to see if he can tell how far the termites might be flying, if they’re landing on any of the houses, if there’s anything he could do about it if they were—and while he’s trying to figure that out, while he’s looking at what he’s done, Beth pulls the wagon into the driveway across the street, parks. She sits there in the drive, brake lights lit red, and here it comes. Here is what he’s wanted since she left. Here comes, after all this time, what’s next.

And even though he tries to push it away, what he thinks about is Sarah Cody. She just appears. In his head, she’s married, like Rena said, to some anesthesiologist. They’re rich. They have a media room. They have two good cars. They do not have a backyard sidewalk tricycle racetrack. There are not termites in their lawn.

She’s twenty-six. He’s a couple of years older, fresh out of med school. If they have a kid, she’s perfectly normal. One normal baby. Sophie. They buy her ruffled hats and tiny socks and they feed her apricots and put her to bed right at eight-thirty every night and sit on their expensive sofa and watch their expensive TV and think about the little family they’ve started, think about their good fortune. The baby monitor hisses quiet static from the end table. They do not fight about how to calm Sophie when she’s crying. They do not worry yet about whether they’ll have another child. They do not have affairs with their closest friends.
The craziest thing she ever did—
that’s what their friends want to know at dinner parties, other friends with brand new babies, too, the bottle of wine going around the table one more time, everybody half-tired, half-celebrating their deeply functional lives.
I don’t know,
she says.
Come on,
they say.
You must have done something.