All of the regulars were there, in place and eating. They were unusually quiet when he walked in, and he had the unsettling feeling that they had halted their conversations as a result of his presence.
"Howdy, all!" he called out, smiling too broadly as he passed by the tables nearest the door.
Hank offered a curt "Hello," not bothering to look up from his plate.
Behind the counter, Bert merely nodded, and Barry sat down at his usual table, ordering his usual lunch from an uncharacteristically silent Lurlene.
He sipped his water and tried to catch the eye of one of his buddies, but no one was looking in his direction and they seemed to be making a concerted effort to ignore him. He felt the way he had that first day--unwanted and out of place--and it was all he could do to remain in his seat and not tell Bert to wrap up his food to go.
Gradually, conversation started up again, first over on the opposite side of the room, then at the tables closer to his wall seat. He wasn't listening exactly, didn't want to eavesdrop on other people's business, but when he heard Joe mention the phrase "Bonita Vista," his ears pricked up.
"This time they've gone too far," Lyle was saying.
Someone else agreed.
"And you know they're not going to be held responsible," Joe said loudly. "Nothing's going to happen to them. No one's going to get punished."
Lurlene brought over Barry's order. "His sister found him," she said, ignoring him and addressing Lyle's table. "She was going out to feed the dog, and he was next to the doggie bowl."
Hank cleared his throat. "You guys're talkin ' like he's dead. I thought they didn't know if he was going to be okay yet or not."
"They don't," Joe said. "But it don't look good. A chopper airlifted him to the Cedar City hospital. They got a good poison unit there. But last I heard, he was in a coma and they don't expect him to come out of it."
Ralph spoke loudly. "That homeowners' association killed him just as surely as if they'd put a gun to his head."
Barry focused on his food. The conversation had obviously been pitched at such a level for his benefit, but he was at a loss and didn't know how he was supposed to respond. Or if he was supposed to respond. He finished his lunch in silence, paid his bill, then nodded good-bye and headed back out to the office.
What was that about? he wondered. They knew about his hatred of the homeowners' association. Hank did, at least. And there was no way they could think he'd be involved in any poisoning scheme. So why the cold shoulder?
He didn't know, but it bothered him, and after sitting in front of his computer for the next two hours and hacking out only a single paragraph, he shut everything off, closed up shop, and went home.
He was watching TV when Maureen arrived home from a meeting with her newest client, some bigwig at the bank, and she gave him a disgusted look as she put down her briefcase. "Afternoon talk shows?"
"How else am I going to keep up with popular slang? I'm isolated out here. This helps me learn what people are talking about and the way they talk about it. This is research." He grinned. "I can take this off my taxes, right?"
"Try to be a person," she said.
He followed her upstairs to the kitchen, where she poured herself a Diet Coke. "I'm not used to all this ... selling," she admitted. "Back in California, I just had to convince people that I was the best accountant for the job.
I didn't have to convince them that they needed an accountant, period.
People are so backward here."
"Yeah, but the scenery's beautiful." Barry pointed out the sliding glass door.
Maureen laughed. "Yes, the scenery's beautiful."
They decided to go for a late afternoon walk, and Barry waited downstairs on the couch, watching two gorgeous women fight over a grotesquely overweight bigamist on TV while Maureen changed her shoes and filled up her sports bottle.
They walked out to the street, and Barry stopped. "Which way?" he asked, looking in both directions. "Up or down?"
"Let's go down the hill," Maureen suggested. "We'll save the hard stuff for last."
They descended the steeply sloping street, walking slowly and holding hands so as not to accelerate unwantedly . They passed a handful of houses set back among the trees and some heavily forested lots before the road finally leveled off. Suddenly, the trees opened up and they were confronted on the right by what looked like nearly half an acre of denuded land.
"Jesus," Barry said. He stopped short to take it all in. "Look at that." He pointed to the edge of the open space, where a group of shirtless men were lined up before a ditch, digging. An incongruously well-dressed man holding a black whip was standing behind the ditch on a raised section of ground, barking orders. It reminded him of a scene from some low-budget biblical epic or a revisionist in die film about the Old South.
But there were no cameras rolling here.
"What the hell's going on?"
"They're digging a pool," Maureen said. "And laying a foundation for a community center. Audrey said they're volunteers."
The man with the whip cracked it. "Faster!" he ordered. "We're falling behind!"
"It doesn't look like they're doing this voluntarily to me."
He realized that they were both talking low, as if afraid of being overheard, and Barry made a conscious effort to raise his voice. "This must be a joke. This can't be real."
"I don't know, they were doing the same thing yesterday, although without the whip hand. And they've sure done a lot of clearing and digging since then. That's a lot of work for a joke."
"I thought the association had all sorts of brush and tree cutting prohibitions."
"Not for themselves," Maureen said dryly.
They walked slowly past the open area, watching the men work.
Maureen stopped and frowned. "Is that Greg David son?"
He followed her pointing finger, saw a young man on the edge of the group who was half-hidden by a still extant manzanita bush. It did look like Greg, and Barry squinted at the man, trying to get a better view. "I thought he and his wife were moving out:"
"So did I."
"Greg!" he called out, but the man did not turn to look at him, did not respond at all, simply kept digging.
"Maybe it's not him," Barry said. But he knew better. Obscured sight line or not, he recognized the man, and his gut confirmed what his eyes could not.
There was something wrong here. Greg Davidson was not only supposed to have sold his house and moved to Arizona, but he had been as fiercely anti-association as Ray or Barry himself--and had more of a reason to be so than either of them. So why was he still here, volunteering his time to help the association build a swimming pool?
He wasn't volunteering, Barry thought, and the idea made him shiver.
The overseer cracked the whip once again.
One of the other men looked familiar as well, a skinny guy with short brown hair, but Barry could not seem to place him.
There was no reason they could not walk onto the property and look around, find out if it really was Greg David son, ask the man with the whip what the hell he was doing. This was association land, owned jointly by all, and they had as much right to be on it as anyone else.
But they kept walking. Rights were different from reality, and without speaking they each knew that they were not welcome here, that there was something odd and decidedly threatening about this supposedly benign and communally beneficial volunteer effort.
They did not talk until they were well past the site and the road had rounded a copse of tall trees, and even then it was only to say, "That was weird," and "Yeah." What they had seen, what they'd felt, was not something that lent itself to casual discussion, and to say any more than that would invest it with a power neither of them wanted it to have.