Eight Amphitrite was a handsome structure, a three-thousand-square-foot Craftsman bungalow, the only one like it in the neighborhood. The plot was ideally situated, up on high ground at the end of the road with no houses behind it. Sitting there on the front steps, Nevis felt a particular comfort in the place, an enlargement of the safe feeling he experienced in restaurants when he found a spot with his back to the wall and a good view of the door. Nevis checked his watch. Ten of five. He opened the bottle and tipped it back. He stretched his tongue, whispering a silent catechism: “Radiant-heat floors, four-acre lot, build to suit.”
Arn had just finished the last of the schnapps when a Swedish station wagon pulled into the drive. A young man got out, tall, with soft features, combed sandy hair, and a cornflower-blue shirt rolled to the elbows. He watched Arn Nevis pick himself up off the stairs and come toward him with his hand out. “Mr. Nevis?” the young man had to ask, for Arn did not much resemble the photograph on his website. His white shirt was badly wrinkled and yellowed with perspiration stains, and his hair looked like a patch of trodden weeds. His left eye was badly bloodshot and freely weeping.
“Urt! Guh,” Arn Nevis said, then paused in his tracks, opening and closing his mouth as though priming a dry pump. The client watched him, aghast, as though Nevis was some unhinged derelict impersonating the man he’d come to meet. “Guh — good day!” Nevis said at last, and having expelled that first plug of language, the rest flowed out of him easily. “Mister Mills? It’s an absolute delight, and I’m so glad you could pay us a visit on this fabulous day.”
“Daniel, please,” the young man said, still looking guarded. But the anxiety slowly drained from Mills’s features as Nevis rolled into a brisk and competent disquisition on eight Amphitrite’s virtues. “That nice overlay on the foundation? That’s not plastic, friend. It’s hand-mortared fieldstone harvested out of this very land. Clapboards are engineered, and so’s the roofing shake, so eat your heart out, termites, and fifteen years to go on the warranty on each.”
Nevis was ushering Mills over the threshold when his pitch halted in mid-stream. Nevis gaped at the empty living room, his mouth open, his eyes stretched with wonder. “My gosh,” he said.
“What?” asked Daniel Mills.
“My gosh, Ted, this is that same house, isn’t it?” Nevis said, laughing. “From Columbus. When you and Rina were still married.”
Mills looked at Arn a moment. “It’s Daniel. I–I don’t know any Rina.”
Nevis’s eyes moved in their sockets. He began to laugh. “Jesus Christ, what the hell am I saying?” he said. “My apologies. I’ve had this fever.”
“Sure,” said Mills, taking a step back.
“So over yonder is a galley kitchen,” said Nevis, leading the way. “Poured concrete counters, and a built-in—”
“Excuse me, you’ve got something here,” murmured Mills, indicating Nevis’s upper lip. Nevis raised a finger to his face and felt the warm rush of blood pouring from his nose, dripping from his chin, landing in nickel-size droplets on the parquet floor.
—
By his sixth week in Triton Estates, an exuberant insomnia assailed Rodney Booth. While his wife snored beside him, Rodney lay awake. His body quivered with unspent energy. His blood felt hot and incandescent. With each stroke of his potent heart, he saw the red traceries of his arteries filling with gleeful sap, bearing tidings of joy and vigor to his cells. His muscles quaked. His loins tittered, abloat with happy news. His stomach, too, disturbed his rest. Even after a dinner of crass size, Rodney would lie in bed, his gut groaning as though he hadn’t eaten in days. He would rise and go downstairs, but he could not find foods to gratify his hunger. Whether cold noodles, or a plate of costly meats and cheeses, all the foods in his house had a dull, exhausted flavor, and he would eat in joyless frustration, as though forced to suffer conversation with a hideous bore.
Exercise was the only route to sleep for Rodney. His ankles plagued him less these days, and after dinner he would rove for hours in the warm autumn dark. Some nights he strolled the shore, soothed to hear the distant splashes of leaping night fish. Sometimes he went into the hills where the houses stopped. The land rose and fell before him, merging in the far distance with the darkness of the sky, unbroken by lights of civilization. A feeling of giddy affluence would overtake Rodney as he scrambled along. All that space, and nobody’s but his! It was like the dream where you find a silver dollar on the sidewalk, then another, then another, until you look up to see a world strewn with free riches.
On these strolls, his thoughts often turned to Katherine Nevis, that fine, wretched girl imprisoned at the end of Naiad Lane behind the high white wall. He recalled the smell of her, her comely gruntings that day on the shore, the tender heft of her underjaw in his palm. One evening the memory of her became so intolerable that it stopped him in his tracks, and he paused between the dunes in an intimate little hollow where dust of surprising fineness gathered in plush drifts.
Rodney stooped to caress the soft soil, warm in his hand. “Listen, you and me are in a predicament here, Katherine,” he explained to the dust. “Oh, you don’t, huh? Fine. You stay right there. I’ll get it myself.”
With that, he unbuckled his pants and fell to zealously raping the dirt. The sensation was not pleasurable, and the fierceness of the act did not sit right with Rodney’s notion of himself, but in the end he felt satisfied that he had completed a job of grim though necessary work.
Floured with earth, he made his way to the water and swam vigorously for twenty minutes. Then he crawled into bed beside his wife and slept until the sun rose, minding not at all the pricking of the soft sheets against his salty skin.
—
The following night Rodney ranged along the shore and back up into the hills, yet his step was sulky and his heart was low. As with the pantry foods he did not care to eat, that evening the great open land had become infected with a kindred dreariness. Squatting on a boulder, Rodney gazed at the column of clean light spilling from the enclosure of the Nevis home. A breathless yearning caught hold. The desert’s wealth of joy and deliverance seemed to have slipped down the rills and drainages, slid past the dark houses, leached south along the hard pink berm, and concentrated in the glare above the one place in the Anasazi Basin where Rodney was not free to roam. He stood and walked.
Rodney told himself he would not enter the Nevis property. The notion was to loiter at the gate, have a glimpse of the courtyard, sport a little with the pull of the place, the fun of holding two magnets at slight bay. And perhaps Rodney would have kept his promise to himself had he not spotted, bolted to the top of a length of conduit bracketed to the wall, a fan of iron claws, put there to discourage shimmiers. The device offended Rodney as an emblem of arrogance and vanity. Who was Arn Nevis to make his home a thorny fort? The spikes were pitiful. A determined crone could have gotten past them. Rodney jumped and grasped in either hand the two outermost claws. With a strength and ease that surprised him, he vaulted himself over the hazard and onto the lip of the wall.
He dropped onto the flagstones and the agony in his ankles caused his lungs to briefly freeze with pain. Rodney held his breath, waiting to hear a barking dog or an alarm, but heard nothing. Beyond the batteries of floodlights, only a single window glowed in the far corner of the house. Rodney waited. Nothing stirred.
Crouched in the courtyard, a new oil seemed to rise in Rodney’s joints. His body felt incapable of noisy or graceless moves. He removed the screen from an open window and found himself in the Nevises’ living room. He paused at a grand piano and rested his fingers in a chord on the sheeny keys. The temptation to sound the notes was strong, so electrified was Rodney that the house was under his authority. The fragrance in the room was distasteful and exciting — an aroma of milk and cologne — and it provoked in him an unaccountable hunger. He padded to the Nevises’ kitchen. In the cold light of the open refrigerator, Rodney unwrapped and ate a wedge of Gruyère cheese. Then he had a piece of unsweetened baking chocolate, which he washed down with a can of Arn’s beer. Still, his stomach growled. Under a shroud of crumpled tinfoil, he found a mostly intact ham, and he gnawed the sugary crust and then went at it with his jaws and teeth, taking bites the size of tennis balls, glutting his throat and clearing the clog with a second, then a third can of his neighbor’s beer.