 |
 |
 |
|||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||
|
|
|
After a hasty bit of packing, Fir helped me load everything into his pickup and drove me, with unconcealed pleasure, over to Boss’s spread, which had a very different ambiance. The kind of wild, untended growth that I found so comforting at Fir’s house on the sideroad was, on this property, utterly nonexistent. The whole quarter-acre was regularly tended to by a very energetic Turkish gardener, quite fluent in English. (We later had some fascinating conversations about Middle-Eastern politics; it turned out that he was just as cynical as I on the likelihood of lasting peace in that region.)
There was only one out-of-the-way place for me to sleep on that estate: in the attic of the garage. And there I stayed, in the tent, for nearly a month. For reasons that will always remain mysterious to me, considering Boss’s overall manner (he is not a man given to innuendo), he never encouraged me to vacate the attic explicitly. His desire was clear, but his language was always indirect. It was almost as though he felt he owed me a certain minimum consideration or had a loathing of direct confrontation, which precluded outright eviction. His attitude on that point remains inexplicable to this day, but as I got to know him over the following months, his courtesy toward me wore very thin on occasion, and some of his inner nature was increasingly laid bare, exposing a set of values sufficiently appalling (in my eyes) to make me wonder how I could ever have been so naïve, etc., etc. To others, of course, he was just an ordinary businessman.
As can easily be imagined, sleeping in a tent, in the mostly empty, unheated attic of a fifty-year-old garage, on the property of a man whom you do not know well, and who would obviously prefer that you find other accommodations, is not an experience easily described in conventional terms. In a phrase or two, it was strangely comforting but inarguably bizarre. The moment that best fits the latter phrase occurred in the middle of one night, near the end of my tenure there. I had been deeply asleep when I was awakened in the dark by what I could have sworn was the sound, nearly terrifying in its proximity and implications, of hundreds of bats swarming around the tent and continually striking the underside of the garage roof. The mad, almost cyclonic circularity of the movement seemed unmistakable to my ears, but I should have known that a man with poor hearing, in a strange environment and a generally anxious state of mind, recently awakened from a (relatively) peaceful sleep, is not a reliable witness of aural phenomena. It was raining. That’s all. Heavily, yes, and for the first time since I’d moved in, but that’s all it was: waves of fat, semitropical raindrops washing across the steel sheets of the roof from east to west. Yet it still remains in my memory as one of the most fearsome sounds I’ve ever heard. Such are the pitfalls of irregular living. The one feature that made the garage liveable, at least for an outdoorsman, was its very dry roof. It was corrugated steel, diligently sealed at every gap with liberal applications of tar, then painted over with a thick coat of aluminum exterior enamel. We could date the structure to the day it was built by the few shreds of newspaper “insulation” leaking between the rafters—they were full of news about the buildup of Allied forces in World War II. Yet the structural weaknesses of the garage, of which there were many, were not the result of weather damage over the years, merely of amateurish construction. But creaky carpentry or not, the original owner, building from scratch, had apparently insisted that the roof not leak a drop, and it didn’t. |
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
