Alan Sincic

Not that a patch here, a pocket there was ever enough for him. No. Not for Barnett. First the ruins of the turpentine mill. Then the swamp. And then, bit by bit, decade by decade, the dump and the cesspool, the floodplain and the gravel pit and the derelict orchard, the deserted rail bed and the abandoned bombing range – half the damn territory while we were still frisking the Davenport for nickels.  Hence the hilltop and hence the Mormons and hence, not but a week later, the sinkhole.

            Off of Pine Hills Road, remember?  That crack in the egg, puncture in the crust of the pie big enough to swallow cars and trucks and steam shovels, tree-forts and houses and churches, the backstops and dugouts and crusty clay diamonds of Little league fields dusted with sunlight and speckled with boys in white flannel.  We laughed when he bought it.  Pennies to the acre he bought it, sure, but not even the city, not the county, not even the idiots up Tallahassee way wanted this burst of a blister, this thumb-hole in the heart of the map.

            And that’s exactly what we told him.  Again and again, and for the sheer pleasure of telling him, the bastard -- half-asleep there, sheeted up onto the chair like a burial at sea, frosted with Burma Shave and stinking of Aqua Velva. Slowly he rocked, side to side, in time to the tinny beat of some yodeler on the radio wailing

            There was three kings into the east,

            Three kings both great and high,

            And they hae sworn a solemn oath

            John Barleycorn should die.

Drummed his fingers on the fat of the leather seat. Waggled the silver tip of that Tony Llama like a conductor’s baton.

            It’s not for the roof above your head, said we, that you buy a house, no, but for the ground beneath your feet.  That’s what you count on — the bedrock, the rebar, the brick of the earth itself. Last thing you want to hear, in the middle of the night, is the crackle of the floorboards as the terra firma swallows you whole, as you and the house that holds you, it all of it – bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen -- banjo with the calf-skin fret, bust of Caesar, little yippy dog – slithers down that creamy funnel and into the belly of the Kracken.

            They took a plough and plough'd him down,

            Put clods upon his head,

            And they hae sworn a solemn oath

            John Barleycorn was dead.

            When Joe asked him what the hell he thought a sinkhole could possibly be worth, Barnett rose up out the chair, draped in white, the Barber’s smock still pinned to his collar.  He stepped up to the picture window.  “You tell me,” he said as he cocked his hands up into a little frame, you know, like a movie director. What am I bid for this? he said as he held it there, the frame, tipped it, and with it, the blue sky, the barrel staves of the water tower, the cloud a boutonniere the size of a city, even the window itself -- the flow of the red letters, Shave and a Shine brushed up onto the glass and trimmed in white like the piping on a cake -- what am I bid?

            “Two bits,” said Parish, voice like a rusty muffler, “if you throw in a shave.”

            “A shave and a blow-job,” said Maxie.  This got a laugh, but not from Barnett, no.  Course not.  His Majesty too busy sliding that viewfinder out over the cosmos front of Joe’s, past the barber pole dinged with BBs and mothy bits and the clumpy chalk of pigeons, out over the javelin fin of the Chevy parked at the curb and onward, panning leftward, out over the far square, the patch of green, the gazebo no bigger than a teapot in the distance and then near again, across the street and breaking into view, the shaggy oaks that fringe the diner and brush the awning raw and then onward, leftward, out over the clearing, out over the broken barn -- canted windward and crispy with termites -- onward, slowly, slowly, down the piney slope to the blip of silver where the pond (a catch-basin, really) simmered in the heat. 

            “That’s the treasure,” he said.  “Right there.”

            “Oil?”

            “Uranium?”

            “Water,” Barnett said.

            “The water?”

            “Water,” he said.

            “Okay,” said Joe.  “A watering hole. But what with the slope – ”

            “Hogs maybe,” said Maxie. “But cattle?  On an incline like that you’d have to – ”

            “Run a pump,” said Joe. “Pipe it up to a trough.”

            “Gotta have a spring up under there,” said Lynch. “Not much better than a cistern without you got a source of water up under there.”

            Joe shook his head. “Yeah, but a good rain…”

            “You’d get the run-off,” said Maxie, suddenly animated. “Hell, half the lakes around here – ”

            “Lakes, okay, lakes,” said Lynch. “But that’s not a lake.  What you got there – ”

            “What you got there is a puddle,” said Bidwell, hot towel over his head, blind to it all but speaking out some secret vision of his own.

            “Puddle with a purpose,” said Barnett.

            “The hell you say,” said Lynch.

            “With a purpose,” he said.

            “Now if that were a puddle of bourbon,” said Joe.

            “Oh ye of little faith,” said Barnett.

            “Here it comes,” said Lynch.

            “Having eyes, do you not see?” said Barnett.  “Having ears, do you not hear?”

            “God Junior.”

            “There is your treasure,” he said.  There, and stretched out his arm like Moses in the movie swinging round the flock to face the land of milk and honey.  There -- framed up in the caliper gap where the pink of the finger hovers just, just so, above the curl of the stubby thumb: a glint of silver no bigger than a dime, a distillation of the invisible air vivid as a shot of gin.

            “Water-view,” he said. “That’s what we call it. Water-view.”

            “So what are you selling, Barnett?  Swimming holes?”

            “Not the water, no. Something better than the water.”

            “Instant water, right?” said Lynch. “Just add water.”

            “I’m in the window business, boys.” Barnett rapped on the plate glass with that knuckle ring of his, Loyal Order of the Moose, All for One and One for All. “What I sell is the view.”

            “Glory be to Jesus,” said Lynch with that grouty voice of his, that slow percolation up out the gravely deep. “Cut me off a slice of that air.”

            “Me too,” said Joe.

            “Can you break a twenty?” said Maxwell.

            “An order to go,” said Cochrane, we all of us now keen to sing along, to broaden out the mockery into something masterful and grand. Not the yip of the dog. No. The cry of the wolf. The bay of the hound.

            “You take a trade-in? Got a picture of my old lady here got a couple thousand miles on it.”

            “GB! GB! I get my money back if the sun goes down?”

            “That come in, like, a version for the radio?”

            “Big discount for the blind.”

            “I bid a thousand dollars!”

            “Ten thousand!”

            “A million!”

            Still baking there up under the white linen, Bidwell lifted his hand. “You take a check, GB?” – the palm up, like boozer taking the pledge – “or you want I should cut you a picture of a check?”

            A solid blow. A joy to behold. Even the tips of the smokes they glowed a little brighter.

            Like any of that mattered to GB. Like he could give a damn. From under the smock he pulled the – you’d have thought it was the goddamned Gettysburg Address –deed to the parcel he’d skimmed off the Mormon deal. As if. All week he’d been gloating about this little slice of waterfront the width of a kiddie canoe, object of ridicule even, it seemed, to Barnett himself, who’d joked about the size of the claim (get yourself a post-hole digger you could bury a man upright) even as he’d invited us to (face down if he’s a sinner, said Lynch) join in the mockery.

            After all, we were the big shots. We were the ones bought up the primo land ahead of time, acres of lakefront off the market, out from under his nose. Lake Lawn. Not but a half mile across – hospital, prison farm, muck land on the far side, nothing but cat-tails on the near but golden, see, golden opportunity now that we’d pooled our resources and pitched in, the each of us, commensurate with his place in the pecking order to finally, and after all these years, make a killing.  The only way to get rich is to think rich, right? Think Winter Park dandy in the white summer suit and the Panama Hat and the skinny cigar. What does he hanker for? Waterfront property. Mansion with a dock. His very own private personal lake.

            Which is what made the deed such a joke, Barnett up there pitching that toothpick of a territory like it was a goddam caber toss. By now we’d heard such a confabulation of bone fides out of him, such a jambalaya of truthy lies and lie-speckled truths, sawdust plastered up into the shape of a tree, we were ready for anything.

            “So.” He shook the deed. Shivered the air with needles of light. “What am I bid for this?”

            Talk about laughter. Maxie let out a whoop. Bidwell and the boys howled. Even Lynch geigered up a little.

            “You got yourself a flume ride,” said Joe.

            “A ski ramp,” said Bo.

            “Bowl-a-Rama with a single lane,” said somebody out the back room.

            Even the cracker sheriff and that greasy deputy of his -- up from Orlo Vista for a trim and shine, shot of whiskey back of the package store, shot at that aero-dynamical waitress in orbit around the elliptical bar at the heart of the Checkerboard Grill – joined in, told him a phone booth’d be just the thing to build on it, or a shithouse maybe, shithouse with a pay phone.

            Not that it touched him in the least. Barnett thrived on abuse, rag-picker that he was, and the more you mocked him, the more he smiled. That was the angle he played. Always an angle. And not but a day later we saw what the angle was, saw, in the distance, through a gap in the brush where the oaks that wall the road give way to pasture, Barnett, Barnett and then, pinned up onto the skyline like a set of paper dolls, Barnett and Starr together. Not out front of Maxie’s or stirred into the shade trees back of Murph’s Auto or swiveled up into the steam, the strop of the razor, the bite of the lime and the clove and the ash in the air where the barber rambles and the boys argue and the door jangles with life but here, in the middle of nowhere, looking down from a gunpowder gray hump of shovel-blasted sand at a squad of convicts, road crew from the Prison Farm in the denim overalls and the wife-beater tees and the floppy denim caps all cut to a size.

            Word was he’d paid the Sheriff to muster the crew to dig (out of the goodness of their heart) a ditch from the G. Gordon Barnett snippet of waterfront to the G. Gordon Barnett sinkhole a quarter mile away. A watercourse he called it. A fact on the ground. To those who complained about the gash in the landscape, he laid a survey map out over the hood of his jeep and -- careful not to trespass, not even with the tip of his finger, so much as a crumb of private property -- traced the route the ditch followed. It followed the trail of a telegraph never built, a right-of-way chalked out ages ago to link a derelict foundry to a municipal aerodrome as invisible now as the day it was first envisioned. Eminent Domainis what he called it. Community Property. An invitation, an opening, a vacancy into which, as a member in good standing, and having risen to the occasion, Barnet inserted his (what would be the word for it?) member.

            Bastard. The Bastard. Turned the sinkhole into a lake. Diced the land up into itty-bitty lots, speckled the banks with a couple dozen little cracker-jack houses, European Villas he called them – fiberglass and gypsum and cinderblock, plaster of Paris birdbaths and aluminum lintels and a colonnade of particle board dipped in a marbley paint and topped with a head of Caesar the size of a tetherball. The whole she-bang (the Glory that was Greece, the Grandeur that was Rome) he pitched as a kind of Holiday in Pompeii, bacchanal in the center of Vesuvius, Water-View Estates, then sold it all of a piece to a Cincinnati dentist-cum-real estate mogul. Top dollar. Cash only.  “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” he said as he signed off on the map that rode with the deed, as he circled the words that sailed out over the blue at the heart of it all: Lake Barnett.

            When we complained that he was stealing our water, the original water, Barnett argued we should be the one’s to pay him.  Answer me this, he said as he decapitated the tip of his Cubano with a snip of them foldable little scissors, Which is more valuable – land or water? 

            “Depends on whose water you – ”

            “You don’t walk on the water, do you?”

            “No, but – ”

            “Don’t sleep on the water, build on the water – hell.”  He stopped.  Glanced out the window. It was the winter now. The ground no longer glowed like an oven. The stray dogs ambled out into the sunlight and sniffed the wind. “What the hell’s the good of the water when – think about it, you ever think about it? – you can’t even own the water.”

            “But you don’t have the right to – ”

            “To what?  To give you the land?”

            “No.  To – ”

            “Extra land?  For free?”

            “But – ”

            “Every time I drink another foot of water off of that lake of yours, that’s another acre tacked on to your land.”

            The thing was… he was right, the bastard.  How could you argue with that?  Not that it did us any good. Not after the slaughter-house opened across the lake, downslope of the prison farm, and the smell of offal filled the air, and the shit clung to the water lilies, and even the frogs began to curdle and die. Took a loss on the sale but it could’ve been worse. If we’d sold it to Barnett, who out-bid the gun club and the tannery, we’d have never heard the end of it. So we lied. Prior claim, we said, and a Pyrrhic victory, sure, whatever, but never, never did the crackle of small arms fire out over Lake Lawn in the evening sound so sweet.

            Not that it mattered, what with the onward march of the Boy Wonder out over the land, but a vision, see? A promise of glory. And who knows? God is good. God got a scale. God give him, maybe, like a limp or a cough. That’ll serve. Come the spring, when the grove sweetens with the fat of the orange and the lime, the tangelo and the peach, the plum and the pear and the melon, and the blue sky sings, and the bass bites, and into the lung of that Wonder the tubercular soil sifters and blooms, we’ll shake our heads, and whisper up a word of pity, and gather at the side of the grave with a sheaf of lilies and a fist of gravel at the ready to sing, sing the praises of a grifter gone to meet his maker, to meet the king of all the grifters, the God who fed us into the fire of life and left us there to burn. Mercy.