The River

Ignorant of the stew brewing above, Nikki led Cas through the woods to almost exactly the same spot Robert had vacated so hurriedly a short time before. For a city kid, he moved well in the forest. He seemed to have an instinct for the least destructive path. He didn’t bull his way through like most people. He ducked branches instead of shoving them aside, and he avoided trampling anything that looked like it was struggling to live.

At first she wondered if he hadn’t spent more time in the woods than she thought but then it dawned on her that he was moving through the forest the same way he moved through his life – with the intent to remain invisible, to leave no mark of his passing that anyone not looking for it could find. What was he hiding from? Himself? The world? Pain?

She stopped when they came to the clearing. “This is it. The road’s going to come right through here. The river’s over there.”

Cas and Nikki Check on the Pepperells

There was, of course, nothing wrong at Amos and Molly’s when Cas and Nikki arrived there.  Molly was on the porch working on a water color of the pasture next to the barn.  The only element of it recognizable to Cas was the stone wall.  The rest was a riot of color and abstract shapes that spun across the canvas like pinwheels.  Looking at it made him dizzy.

“Leadfoot?  Robert?  Are you sure it was him?”

“It was him, Molly,” Nikki assured her.

“What’s that?” Cas asked, pointing at something in Molly’s painting that resembled a furball with some type of wing arrangement.

“What does it look like?”

“A furball with wings?”

“It’s a pixie.”

“Oh.  A pixie.  Of course.”

“They live in that bush next to the oak tree.  Very troublesome they are sometimes.”

“I can imagine.”

Molly fixed him with a glittering eye.  “You don’t believe in pixies, do you, young man?”

“Not usually.  But in a place like this, I think I could believe in almost anything.”

The Dancing Vampire Falls in Love

If you have noticed an uncharacteristic absence of Mave pushing to be the center of attention since Robert’s dramatic entrance, there’s a reason for that, and the potential siting of a chemical plant on Amos’ farm has nothing to do with it.

How can I put this?

What Robert experienced when DJ came out of Roger’s bedroom in nothing but a towel is what Mave experienced when Robert burst through Roger’s front door, eyes on fire and chest heaving: Cupid’s arrow punching through her ribcage. No one noticed at the time, of course, but her face turned a high pink and if you had put your hand to her cheek in that moment, you would have scalded it. Her breath began to come in shallow gasps and she stared at him in much the manner that you might stare if an Abominable Snowman walked into your living room and changed the channel on the tv because he didn’t want to miss Jeopardy.

These things are hard to chart and even harder to explain. It isn’t as if Mave had never seen or been with or been wooed by men twice as handsome and easily three times as intelligent. She had. In truth, Robert had nothing she hadn’t seen – and rejected – plenty often before. So why this time, she wondered, did the mere sight of a rube with whom she had nothing in common send shock waves down her spine and lubricate her until she dripped?

• He wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, although he was very good-looking by anyone’s standards;
• he wasn’t rich;
• he worked with his hands, which she could see were pretty rough (think of those rough hands on you, tearing your clothes off, squeezing your breasts, mauling your thighs – no, on second thought, don’t think of that – don’t, I said!);
• and he lived in the middle of nowhere. He wouldn’t know a designer dress from a fourth-rate Nicaraguan knock-off if it jumped up and down on his – (stop that!)

From the protected charm of a safe distance – a luxury Mave did not enjoy – we can afford to speculate, and we find that there are two possible explanations. The first is very scientific but the second may be closer to the truth.

The Fecal Matter Assaults the Air Circulation Device

Once they got inside, Mave flattered Roger beyond the bounds of wishful thinking, passing into the realm of absurdity at the twenty minute mark.  For the most part DJ was amused but every once in a while her forehead crinkled and she frowned slightly in a way that Roger might have found sobering had he seen it.

He didn’t, of course, basking as he was in the glow of Mave’s unusual – not to say rare as hen’s teeth – devotion and approval, items not normally found in her repertoire.  Yet he never paused to question their sincerity despite the fact that they were as out of place as a bishop in a porno flick.  The more outrageously disconnected her compliments were from reality, the more he preened.  Such is the power of love, even of an old love gone sour.

And the power of love is, of course, as nothing compared to the power of shameless flattery.

DJ had just about reached her fawning ex-wife limit for the year and was headed for the bedroom with its thick, near-soundproof door when Robert came roaring down the dirt track and screeched to a stop outside.

“Who’s that?” Roger broke off his basking long enough to ask.  “I’m not expecting anybody.”

“It’s Robert,” DJ said, peering through the front window past the Arts section of the Times as Robert jumped down from the cab.  “He looks all worked up about something.”

“Robert?  Robert never gets worked up about anything.”

“Who’s Robert?” Mave asked.  They both ignored her.

The Dancing Vampire in Roger’s Cabin

Mave followed Roger and DJ home after the meeting finally broke up an hour later without any sort of resolution that would deserve the name. Her reactions to driving on her first-ever dirt road are lost to history but her dismay upon sighting the cabin was too pronounced to miss.

“You live here?”

“Exactly right. I live here. Really live.”

“He built it himself,” DJ added, not boasting, simply as a point of information.

“He built what himself?” Mave asked in alarm.

“The house.”

“Cabin,” Roger corrected.

“Cabin,” DJ amended with a twinkle in her eyes.

In books like this, you often read about how a character’s jaw dropped to express astonishment but one must admit that one has never noticed a real person respond in that way unless they were deliberately overplaying their surprise as a sort of joke. Not until Mave did it, that is. In her case the dropped jaw was an entirely unselfconscious gesture of which she was not even aware, and both Roger and DJ would be willing to swear to it on a stack of Bibles.

Mave’s jaw dropped. “The whole thing?” she squeaked.

Nikki Works a Miracle

By one of those curious quirks of Fate or whatever, as Robert was barrel-assing up the mountain in his brand-new pickup pursuing DJ, Nikki was driving down the mountain with Cas in her compact Honda at a more leisurely rate of speed.  She intended to show him the place where the road would be so he could understand what all the fuss was about.  That he would be with her, alone, in the woods, on a beautiful, warm spring day with no one else around for miles, was a perk.  It was certainly not the reason she had suggested this little outing.  Not at all.

The real reason had more to do with avoiding the empty Band House and another scene like that of the night before.

Cas, for his part, was content to be where he was and with whom he was – at least for this moment he was.  He liked Nikki.  In fact, the more time he spent with her, the more he liked her.  For a beautiful girl, she was surprisingly unspoiled.  He couldn’t imagine her having a tantrum over somebody spilling wine on her dress, for example.

More important, she seemed to genuinely like him still, and it had been 24 hours.  That was usually when the girls he spent time with began to have doubts.  Nikki had doubts but fewer now than the night before, and that was a whole new experience for Cas.  He was starting to relax.  He was starting to enjoy it.  He was starting to enjoy her.  Anywhere she wanted to take him was fine.  Morocco would be a good start.

“What the hell–?” Nikki exclaimed suddenly.

Cas came out of his reverie in time to watch a pickup truck zoom by them doing at least 80.  Uphill.  “That truck must have a hell of an engine in it,” he said.

“That was Robert’s truck,” Nikki said.  “He doesn’t drive like that.  Unless–“

“Unless what?”

“Unless something is wrong,” she answered slowly.  “He’s Amos and Molly’s grandson and their farm is down that way. He could be coming from there.”

The Chemical Plant

Through the branches of his bush he could see three men, two dressed inappropriately in suits and hard-soled shoes, the other in sensible boots and a plaid shirt.  The tallest and oldest of the suits seemed to be in charge.

“Christ, it’s filthy out here.  Look at my pants.  What are those things?”

“Burrs,” said the plaid shirt.  “Just pick them off, they won’t hurt you.”

“This the place?”  Pick pick pick.  “Ow.”  Pick pick.

“This is it,” Plaid Shirt said, and pointed right at Robert who barely had the sense to prevent himself from leaping out of the bush in surprise..  “The westbound shoulder will begin there and the road itself will be right where we’re standing.”  He turned to indicate the slope beyond the opposite side of the clearing.  “The eastbound lanes will be over there.  We’ll level all this off, of course.”

“The westbound side is awfully close to the river,” the younger suit said tentatively.

“We’re outside the legal limit,” Plaid Shirt said.  “No problem.”

“I don’t give a damn about the river,” Old Suit snapped.  “What I’m concerned about is that goddamn hill.  It’s damned narrow in here.  You’re going to have to take half of it for the road as it is.  Where the hell are we going to put the chemical plant, on the side of a goddamn mountain?  I need a level surface area of at least fifty acres.  Where the hell’s it going to some from?”

Robert Muses As Best He Can

Robert skipped the meeting.  Juliette Rose would tell him what to do, and anyway he never understood that legal and strategy stuff.  That was Juliette’s territory and she was welcome to it as far as Robert was concerned.

The fact was that he didn’t care about the road that everybody else was so up-in-arms about.  They could build it or not, it was all the same to him.  They probably would build it and life would go on.  It always did.  He had something much more important on his mind.

On his mind?  It was tearing him apart.

He was in love with DJ and she was hooked up with somebody else.  Roger, of all people.  He liked Roger.  Roger was alright.  Roger treated him the same way he treated everybody else.  He didn’t call him a moron or talk down to him like he was a kid.  Robert didn’t want to hurt him but he wanted DJ and that meant hurting Roger, didn’t it?  It was a dilemma, and solving dilemmas was what Robert was least good at, so he did what he always did when he was confused: he went down to the banks of the Brewer’s River and stared out at the water swirling around the rocks while he tried real hard to think.

Mave Meets the Gang

Mave was all smiles when she reached the table, on her best behavior and with her soft Southern accent flying on all six cylinders. (I will not attempt to reproduce it. Use your imagination. That’s what it’s for.)  “Roger, darling,” she said in a voice that would have melted uranium.  “Here you are.”

“Yes, here I am,” Roger said.  “What are you doing here?”

“I told you I was going to stop by the office this morning.  It was naughty of you to forget our little…meeting.  Your girl told me you spend every Wednesday up here, and I finally found it.  Out of the way, isn’t it?  I needed a map and a compass to find it, like a Girl Scout on safari.”  She looked around at the cheerful clutter and the crush of doodads on every shelf.  “Charming,” she said, wrinkling her nose.  “Lots of…atmosphere.  It reminds me of that little store where we stopped for gas on our honeymoon.  Possum Trot, I think it was called.  They served Roadkill-in-a-Can, remember?”

“What girl?” Juliette asked Roger with arched brows.  “You don’t have a girl.”

“His secretary, I would imagine,” Mave said.  “A small woman, fat, mousy, you know the type.  In desperate need of a makeover and a membership in Weight Watchers.  Lifetime.”

“Oh,” Juliette said, “you mean Nina.”

“She cleans my office two days a week,” he explained to DJ.  “Wednesday is one of them because I’m never there.  But she’s not my secretary, she’s very nice, and she’s not fat.”

“Which PC term would you rather we used?” Juliette asked more innocently than was strictly necessary under the circumstances.  “Stocky?  Pudgy?  Horizontally challenged?  You’ve got to admit, Nina’s a few pounds west of Thin City.”

Juliette Rose Meets the Dancing Vampire

Juliette Rose had been prepared to face the latest of Roger’s conquests with equanimity.  There had been a raft of them the last couple of years and none had survived long enough to so much as move in a toothbrush.  Her first sight of DJ had confirmed her initial feeling that there was nothing for her to worry about.  Beautiful this girl wasn’t.  Attractive perhaps, in the right light and the right dress from the right angle, but hardly a threat.

Robert’s open-mouthed awe, however, and her realization shortly thereafter that the new broad had already moved in a helluva lot more than a toothbrush, had given her pause.  Maybe she didn’t want Roger – at the moment – but she didn’t want anybody else to have him, either.  Certainly not permanently.  They had a sort of understanding: when Roger got tired of playing around and Juliette Rose got tired of being worshipped, they’d get together.

Except that, technically, in order to have an understanding with another person, that person has to know about and agree to it.  Juliette Rose had skipped that minor detail, assuming that Roger would, of course, fall into line with her plans the way everybody else always fell into line with her plans: eventually if reluctantly.  The possibility that Roger might have plans of his own or fall into line with the plans of someone other than herself had, until the moment Robert’s jaw dropped, simply never occurred to her.  That wasn’t how her world worked.