Chuck Logan - Homefront

Teedo Dove, Griffin’s apprentice, was feeding pieces of familiar split oak into a fire he’d started in a length of steel culvert. That oak was Broker’s main contribution to the crew he was supposed to work on. Put all the days he’d actually handled the stone in a string, and it wouldn’t stretch two weeks for the whole winter. A mound of masonry sand heaped over the culvert with a half fifty-five-gallon drum of water heating on the top. A gasoline-powered cement mixer and wheelbarrow was positioned alongside. Teedo, at twenty-seven, stood six-two and went around 250. A Red Lake Ojibwa, he was soft-spoken, bearlike, light on his feet, and a quiet drinker. Hounded by Griffin, he sporadically attended the local AA meeting. He originally blamed his drinking on his decision nine years ago not to take the full-ride scholarship he’d been offered, playing right tackle at Bemidji State. Griffin’s simple advice on alcoholism was typically blunt: “Don’t put it in your mouth.”

He’d taken Teedo on as a reclamation project. Griffin was big on stuff like that. Interventions. Rescues. He’d been resocialized by Alcoholics Anonymous. Up to a point. Sometimes Broker glimpsed edges of the old Griffin, the brilliant but erratic risk taker in Vietnam. Broker had looked on their war as a job with really shitty working conditions. Griffin was more the dark romantic, in Broker’s opinion; a man who had been more than a little in love with death.

“Morning, Teedo,” he said. “Where’s the boss?”

“Ain’t here,” Teedo said with blank Zen presence. “Feed the fire. I’ll set up some stone. Then we’ll mix some mud.” He disappeared into the tent to arrange the stone.

After tossing more wood on the fire, Broker unscrewed the cup from his thermos and poured some coffee. He looked out over the lake, felt the warm sun on his face, saw it sparkle on the calm water. The temperature was thirty degrees and rising. If this kept up, they wouldn’t need the fire to warm the sand and water. They could peel back the tarps and work in the morning light.

The sunlight dissolved the harsh cold out of his crystallized breath. Panes of thin ice glistened, about to melt in the puddles. He could almost smell a softness in the air-sap rising-hear the tentative bird calls. A faint hush of green buds trembled in the branches of the aspen and birches.

Buoyed by the caress of the sun, he thought, Damn. It was just possible, that, like Persephone emerging from the underworld, he and Nina and Kit had survived their black winter.

Teedo plugged his radio into an outlet in the porch siding and filled the tent with a wail and groan of country music, punctuated with news of the war. Broker mixed mortar, shoveled it into the barrow, and wheeled it out of the sunlight into the limbo of naked lightbulbs strung in the tent. Teedo troweled the mortar down and leveled the patio flags.

Broker was mixing the second batch of mud when Griffin arrived and waved Broker over to his Jeep, then handed him the new improved bunny and the cat’s collar. Broker stuffed the collar in his pocket and, after inspecting the subtle repair job, said, “Thanks. I’ll tell her I found it jammed under the seat.” He put the stuffed toy in the Tundra, came back.

“I stopped off to visit with Jimmy Klumpe this morning,” Griffin said.

“You been busy,” Broker said carefully.

“Here’s the deal. You gotta come up with a face-saving gesture, something he will accept as an apology.”

Broker shrugged, “No sweat, sure. After what I saw and heard last night-”

“And he wants you to replace the shirt Teddy got bloody.”

“Jesus, you got me running the gauntlet,” Broker made a mock show of protest.

Griffin laughed. “Do you good. An exercise in making amends. Practice some humility. C’mon. Time to work.”

As the morning continued warm, they fell into a rhythm. Griffin sliced the flagstone sheets into irregular slabs with his heavy diamond-blade saw. Broker loaded the wheelbarrow, ferried the pieces into the tent, and arranged them in a pattern on the concrete patio footing. Teedo followed Broker, adjusting the spacing, leveling, and mudding them in place.

As Broker loaded the raw stone, he watched Griffin work. Years ago he’d speculated Griffin would watch Jeremiah Johnson one too many times, give up entirely on people, and migrate north clear through Manitoba into the territories.

Griffin reminded Broker of a story from his youth about a hermit who’d lived in the canoe country north of Ely, who resisted being relocated when the government created the Boundary Waters canoe area. When it became clear that the law would come in and forcibly move him, the guy had forted up on an island with a crate of dynamite, sat down, and lit the fuse.

Rather than return to civilization.

Griffin preferred to work alone. Or in Teedo’s large, quiet shadow, which was the next thing to being alone. And Broker wasn’t sure if the repetitious lifting and placing of the heavy stone was a meditation or a form of solitary penance. One morning, returning for a second consecutive day, he noticed that Griffin had torn apart a mosaic of stone Broker had laid out on the concrete base and then rearranged it to his own satisfaction. The gesture was consistent with a theory Broker had about his friend; that Griffin constantly tore himself down and reshaped his image.

Because he couldn’t accept who he really was.

It was a persistent point of tension between them, going all the way back to the old days when they first operated together in Vietnam. More than any man he knew, Broker believed Griffin should have stayed in the Army. Not a particularly kind observation. But a true one.

Half past eleven. Break time; they retrieved their lunch bags and thermoses, sat in a corner of the tent, ate sandwiches, and poured coffee. Then the jive games began.

Griffin squinted through the smoke from the Lucky in his lips at Teedo. “You notice how Broker kinda creaks when he moves, like’s got sand in his crank case? Hey, Broker, when’s the last time you got laid, anyway?”

Broker fired back without missing a beat. “I don’t know about you transplants from Detroit, but up on the North Shore, where I grew up, a guy only gets allotted about five hundred million erections. What can I say-when they’re gone, they gone.”

Undeterred, Griffin winked at Teedo. “He ain’t seen all the ads on TV; Viagra, Cialis…”

“That’s ’cause they ain’t aimed at him; they’re for old farts like you who can barely eat a little pussy between naps,” Teedo said.

Broker grinned and held up a Ziploc bag full of raw cut broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.

Teedo passed, wrinkling his nose.

Griffin grinned. “He don’t eat vegetables, among other things.”

Teedo grunted. “We got a word for people who eat too many vegetables.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” Griffin needled.

“Bad hunter,” Teedo said with flawless timing.

Broker felt the muscles of his face loosen in a genuine grin. Not to be outdone, Griffin appraised Teedo and said with great formality, “What I heard is you Indian guys don’t go in for oral sex.”

Teedo’s round face revealed nothing. “My daddy always said that Ojibwa can eat beaver and stretch it too.”

Griffin hung his head, laughing, unable to top that. After a pause, he turned to Broker. “Speaking of pussy, you ever find the cat?”

“No kitty; one way or the other, she’s gone,” Broker said. “Kit’s pretty bummed-the cat was all she had to play with.”

“Want me to find another?”

Broker ground his teeth lightly. “Might be best to get one back in Stillwater.”

“Oh?” Griffin raised his eyebrows. “You got something to tell me?”