Which was how John found out about his father-in-law’s attempt a year or so ago at the time of their civic center squabble to wrest his construction firm away, the thankless old fossil. Could have wiped John out. It would never have happened if Audrey were still alive, she the smart one in that pair, and loyal to John who’d helped her double their retirement fortune with his genius for investment, a fortune funding now Barnaby’s callous raid. Behind the wedding vows all those years before lay other contracts, silent shifts of wealth and property, unseen by most but sending ripples of rumor and anticipation through the town as in election years or before state championships or raffle draws. John’s ancestors had come to town as harness makers and blacksmiths, his great-great-grandfather a manufacturer of horse troughs and owner of the town’s first hardware store, or at least that was the legend. Paint and wallpaper had soon been added, a real estate agency and a sheet metal company, and his father Mitch had got into heating, refrigeration, and air-conditioning, landing lucrative wartime contracts through his political connections, even though almost everything had to be subcontracted out. Mitch had plowed his profits back into minerals, banks, and land, cheap farmland mostly, bought at mortgagors’ auctions and become prime sites when they put the highway through. Mitch had kept the land and investments but given John the family businesses to use as tokens in his nuptial dealings with the builder, a simple exchange that gave the boy a quarter of the new amalgamated construction firm and related enterprises, his wife’s power-of-attorney forms effectively making it a half. When Audrey died, they each, thanks to a will John had helped her to draft, had thirds, and John, then in his thirties and chafing at the bit, set about easing his grieving father-in-law into an early and hopefully distant retirement. Old Barnaby was a builder famous for his solid constructions, most of the best houses in town had been built by him, but he was slow and too expensive, such craftsmanship was for the rich, a limited market in such a town as this, and out of step with the throw-away times. John understood the common need, wanted to build not houses but whole developments, his own an art of most for least, quick, cheap, and functional, disdaining the vain illusions of perpetuity, a view which Barnaby understood but poorly, so causing them endless friction. And then, just when John had overreached himself in his civic center and newest mall constructions and faced a cash-flow crunch, there came an irresistible offer from an unexpected source: an upstate client of his sorehead cousin Maynard, an industrial and commercial paving company, looking for a merger. Their other chips included an insulation and roofing company, a small tile manufacturer, and a line in septic tanks and cesspools, as well as real estate; they wanted only thirty percent of the final package and were offering a three hundred grand cash investment to close the deal. It seemed too good to be true. “They think you’re hot,” said Maynard with a sour shrug, which John found he could only half believe. As they approached the signing stage and the negotiators came to town, John offered them free lodging at Dutch’s motel, joined Dutch in the old movie seats in the Back Room for once to watch the show, see who turned up and what got said. He figured there had to be a card they hadn’t shown yet. He hadn’t expected it, though, to be his father-in-law.
Maynard II, who had helped old Barnaby cook up the deal to get his company back, stolen from him by John, was not, it’s true, a happy man. It was he who’d caught the garter at the famous wedding when John’s fraternity brother shied from it, mindful not of its alleged foretellings but of the sweet warm leg from which it came; he who, having finally two years later, third time lucky, passed the bar, had then, feeling magnaminous, wed the gatherer of the bride’s bouquet, public boobs, bad rep, and all, a marriage that had lasted less than a year, though it had seemed a century or two longer than that; and he who, with one exception, loathed all women only slightly less than he loathed all men, that exception not being the thriftless screamer who was his present legal mate and mother of his only son. It might be said that Maynard had courted John’s wife all the six years before her marriage, her four in high school and two beyond, though as Maynard had no gift at courting, only he could have known that was what he was doing. Certainly she could have had no inkling, though she must have noticed he was always there, humble and serviceable as a pencil sharpener or a cafeteria tray. One day, the happiest of his life perhaps, she turned to him suddenly, the great distance between them dissolving for a moment as her gaze uncharacteristically penetrated his, and said (he’d just rethreaded and tightened the chain on her bicycle): “Maynard”—she always called him Maynard, even in casual haste, never “Nerd” or “Junior” as the others did—“Maynard, you’re really very sweet.” Or at least that was what she seemed to say, he could not be sure, his ears were ringing so. He thought for a moment then she was going to kiss him, a thought that nearly made him let go in his corduroys, but she only squeezed his hand (a hand that for some time after went unwashed) and then, as though without transition, she was gone again, their torrid romance ended when not yet begun. She married in due time his cross-cousin John, a ruthless cocksman who’d systematically cracked half the hymens in high school, as though he’d bought or won the rights to them, what did he need another for? The heartless egotistical hardballing sonuvabitch, how could he help but hate him?
Thus, though most men admired John, a model for all men, there were many among them who also feared him some, and even those who, resenting him for his usurpations, mistrustful of his success and power, would have been glad to see him fall, feeling the relief of a balance struck, as when gangsters or presidents die, or wars disturb the dull interminable peace.
But not Waldo. No, Jesus, he’d be dead without that beautiful bastard, John was all that stood between Waldo and the awful abyss, a mighty rock in a weary land, may he live and prosper to the end of time. Waldo was not from this town. He and John had been drinking buddies at college. Waldo had brought John into the fraternity, had protected him from most of the pledge horseshit, seen to it that John succeeded him in the chapter presidency. Those were the days, oh man, playing ball, boozing, screwing sorority girls, then all-night bridge and poker till the break of dawn, he and Long John and Knucks and Beans and Brains and old Loose Bruce, a fuck-off’s golden age. Waldo, in love with those times, couldn’t leave them, was still raising hell and drifting drunkenly through a series of worsening sales jobs, dragging Lollie and the kids about, when he ran into John at a home builders show in Chicago and overnight became an Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales for a number of John’s enterprises. Now about all he did was preside over John’s local paint and wallpaper business and run an errand now and then, like the one that helped to nail wicked old Barn, but he knew, whatever happened, shit, old John, good brother, would take care of him.