Chapter Three

Looking back it’s obvious that Tina’s desire to get right to work on my idea to collect climatological data had much more to do with her need to get out of that house than her desire to get back to her research. The closer we got to getting things set up the less she noticed how cold it was, and the happier she seemed. Had I known how focused she would become I might not have made the suggestion; but I did my thing and she did hers. Occasionally my thing got in the way of hers and then the real Tina came out to play.
“Exactly how long did you say it was gonna take you to get my lab built?”
“Your lab?”
“You know what I mean; where we’re gonna live.”
“It’s coming along. If you ever came over you’d know that.”
“How far along is it coming?”
“As soon as I finish my coffee I’m goin over there to get to work, you wanna come with me?”
She took a breath to say something and then let it back out. “Sorry,” she said getting up from the table. She poured herself a cup and then filled mine.
“I know I’ve been a bitch lately. Sometimes it’s just hard to separate work from life.”
“Thanks,” I said looking up.
“So you’re pretty far along?”
“Not too bad, most of the work has been in draggin the lumber up so high.”
“So you really did go up five floors?”
“I really did.”
“This I gotta see. I’m sorry I haven’t been helping you with it.”
“I’ve actually had help.”
“No kidding, who?”
“After I’d been working about a week, a couple guys showed up and asked me what the hell I was doing.”
“Just appeared, out of nowhere?”
“Yup. Turns out they used be students over at A&M; they had no family to go back to so they stayed here. They know where things are over on the campus, and they were looking for something to do other than read all day in the library.”
“So the three of you have been working for the last two months?”
“Not exactly.”
Tina’s eyebrows went up as she shook her head. “Not exactly?”
“Well… as it turns out there’s more like two dozen of us workin away over there.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. One sometimes two a day, people would show up asking if they could work on the project.”
“Where do they live?”
“Here and there around town at the beginning, now they all live in the houses around your lab.”
“What do they want?”
“I’d say they want what you want; to work at something they consider useful. I explained what it is you wanted to accomplish, and they pretty much all wanted to pitch in and help. There’s even an EE prof whose working hard on creating a radio setup that’d do data, voice and video. He says he may also be able to uplink to satellite if we can get permission down the line.”
“You have been busy.”
“Just trying to get you the best setup I could.”
“Why?”
“Same reason everybody’s working on this thing, to have something useful to do. The busier I am the less I have time to waste worrying about how things might’ve been or should.” I looked at the calluses on the palms of my hands remembering what it felt like to use them as they were meant to be used. “You ready to go?”
“Yea, I gues.”
We walked out the back door and down Jersey to the lot I’d made by bulldozing ten old rent houses at the corner of Texas and old Jersey. Tina kept bugging me about how it was George Bush drive now, but to me it’d always be Jersey. My first idea was to build on the golf course but on the off chance it did warm up a little in July and August I figured it might be fun to try to play a little golf if the grass didn’t get too long. We started building in April when temperatures got and stayed above freezing. Mid-June was a little warmer, maybe low to mid forties on the warmer days, thirties on average. Some nights snow would fall. Mostly it would melt during the day but there were spots where the snow had not melted from the previous winter. I long ago lost count of how many times people in the group would ask, “do you ever think it’s gonna warm up?” or “Is it spring yet?”
We used tractors and wagons to move lumber and other building materials from where we found them to the Project as everybody started calling it. There were right, it was a project, one that took on a life of its own. At first it was just about building the lab and the living quarters. As more people turned up the living quarters were expanded for a while until it became obvious that there were going to be more people then could comfortably live in one building. I took off a couple days and designed a small house that could be built quickly and insulated thickly enough to be comfortable for the most warm natured among us.
As concrete wasn’t available all the structures except the lab had to be built on piers. The lab I put on a stem wall foundations built on footers that we had to mix and pour by hand, one mixer load at a time. The thing that hit me everyday was that no one complained, except about the cold and that was just everybody’s way of letting out worry about the weather and what it was gonna do next.
“So you’ve had twenty guys workin hard over her for two months?” Tina said snapping me back to the present.
“Most of ‘em are guys.”
“You’ve got women over here?”
“Four most days, sometimes one or two more will come in to help or watch.”
“Whatca been feeding all these people?” she said as she stopped and turned to face me.
“Everybody hunts, some for game, some through stores and empty houses. There’s plenty of food if you’re willing to look for it.”
She turned and walked towards the building. It was easy to see standing twenty feet above the tops of the trees. There were two people up on the roof finishing up the shingling.
When we got there Tina asked me, “Are those two people up on the roof both women?”
“They are.”
“Who are they?”
I put my hand up along the brim of my cap as I craned my neck all the way back. I already knew who was up there. “Jennifer and Maritza. They’re the only two who’ll go up that high. Doesn’t seem to bother em at all. One day showing them how to shingle and then I didn’t have to worry about it any more.” While I was looking up she walked off. I followed her over to the where the little houses were going up.
Without looking back she asked,” How many of these are there?”
“So far, six. Eventually probably twelve at least.”
“I don’t understand why anybody’d want to live in one of these little houses when there are so many really nice ones around.”
“The really nice ones aren’t insulated very well, the windows are constantly fogged, there’s bathrooms inside that can’t be used…..”
“And?”
“And it used to be someone else’s house. There’s always ghosts.”
“The people who used to live there aren’t dead for God’s sake.”
“That’s true. It’s just the way the past has of creeping in on the present.”
“Like a ghost.”
“Yea.”
“You build one for us?”
“No way. Our place is up there,” I said pointing to the fourth floor.
“You’re kidding.”
“No.” As she turned back towards the tower I grabbed her sleeve and stopped her.
“It is still our place isn’t it?”
“Wow. I really have been a bitch haven’t I?”
“We’ve all been through a lot. Everybody has their own way of dealing with that kinda pain.”
“I’m sorry I took it out on you.”
“You really didn’t want to do all this mess did you? I mean it was pretty much my idea, not yours.”
“At the beginning, no I really didn’t. All I wanted to do was get the hell outta here, back then.”
“Then?”
“Then I started thinking about what you’d said about being here and doing real work here. Then after I got ahold of the people in Africa on the radio…”
“Wait, you got someone on that old radio? Why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“You were pretty focused on this,” she said waving her arm up and down.
“You wanna go upstairs and take a look around?”
“I would.”
When we went through the front door, which hadn’t been installed yet, she immediately asked, “What’s each of the floors for?”
“Fifth floor is the lab, Fourth is living quarters for us, first through third is currently unassigned space. Maybe library and work space. Maybe space for future labs and climatological scientists?”
Each floor was an open span and nothing interior had been framed out yet.
When we got all the way up to the top Tina asked, “Why are there two windows in each opening?”
I couldn’t find any decent double pane windows so I used two cheap double paned windows with an airlock in between. I’m hopin that when the weather gets really cold again we might be able to see outside.
“Jack?”
“Yes ma’am?”
“Is there any reason we couldn’t live up here and put the lab down a floor?”
“No, why?”
“Look at the view, you can see twenty miles up here.”
“Consider it done.”
“What’s the schedule on finishing all this?”
“We should be dried in by the end of this week, maybe Saturday if the weather holds out. After that we’re gonna break up into three crews. Six of us are gonna continue working on the interior framing and rough finishing.”
“What’s rough finishing?”
“We’ll frame it out and panel it out in solid wood. Sheetrock would mold really bad with no HVAC.”
“HVAC?”
“Heating, ventilating and air conditioning.”
“We are never gonna need AC again I fear.”
“Not for cooling for sure, but this close to the coast a little dehumidifying would go a long way. I just wish I knew how to plaster. Plaster would work. Anyway it’s a lot simpler to build a house the old fashioned way. We’ll get it all insulated with Styrofoam, put in the floors and move in.”
“That’s all?”
“I figure we can decorate and all that good stuff after we’re in.”
“What about plumbing?”
“Unfortunately there isn’t much need for plumbing without a water supply.”
“What about a well?”
“As far as I know nobody here can drill one, and even if we could we’d need a pump which would require electricity.”
“Isn’t all our equipment, computers and stuff gonna require electricity?”
“It is.”
“So why can we use some for pumps?”
“We’d hafta run the generators 24/7 to maintain any water pressure. I don’t maybe we could think about building some sorta cistern. I’ll talk to Jessie about it, she’s the engineer.”
“You’re gonna hafta introduce me to all these people you know,” Tina said turning to look out the window.”
“My name is Maritza Morales, I’m one of the people you need to meet.” Maritza said climbing down the ladder from the roof. I really liked Maritza’s accent. She was Cuban, and she was a beautiful woman.
Tina strode across the room with her hand straight out. “My name is Tina, Maritza.” Maritza shook her hand and said, “We’ve heard about you.” She said it straight out.
“Oh yea, what’d you hear?” she said turning back to look at me.
“We heard from Jack that you were an expert in climatology. That we’re building this tower so you can start to figure out what’s going on.”
Still shaking Maritza’s hand Tina replied, “That’s right, I’m up here to try to figure out what going on…”
Maritza pulled her hand back when she heard Jennifer come down the ladder. Tina walked past her again with her hand out.
“My name is Tina,” she said.
“So I heard from the roof. My name’s Jennifer, how you doin?”
“Fine. Today’s my first day up here and I want to try to meet everyone. I just met Maritza, and I wanted to meet the other woman with guts enough to work fifty feet up in the wind.”
“Sixty feet more nearly. It’s not so big a deal though. It needed to be done and it was a way that I could contribute. Mostly everyone else are busy building what’s gonna turn out to be my house over there,” she said pointing out the window. “You’ll have to come by and see it when you get a chance.”
“I will, thank you.” Jennifer walked off in the direction of the stairs followed close behind by Maritza. They said something that I couldn’t hear. Neither could Tina, but she didn’t look too happy.
“Any more pretty women I need to meet?”
“Well, I don’t know if they’re pretty or not but there are a couple more.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon introducing Tina to everyone I could find. I watched her face as she talked to each person, men and women. She searched each face. There was no way I could know for sure what she was looking for, but I had an idea. After meeting everyone we sat down on the steps of the tower and looked around for a minute.
“What do you think?”
“I’m impressed.”
“With?”
“I’m impressed with your ability to get a group of people all moving in the same direction. What in the world did you tell them that got them all working so hard?”
“Like I said before, they were all bored basically. I had what they needed.”
“I’ll bet.”
“And that means…..”
“I saw the way Maritza looked at you.”
“I believe you’re jealous,” I said as the woman herself walked up.
“I thought you two might be cold. Here,” she said holding out a thermos.
“What you got there Maritza?” I said doing my best to sound casual.
“Hot chocolate, I thought it might warm you two up,” she said smiling and then walking away.
“Well she seems to be very concerned with how warm you are,” Tina said grabbing up the thermos and opening it.
“Now I know you’re jealous. I gotta admit I’m surprised.”
“There’s no reason for you to be surprised. She looks to be your type.”
“And what exactly might my type be?” I said, playing along.
“Pretty, a little too feminine to be real and dumb as a bag of rocks.”
“Maritza is a double degreed civil and mechanical engineer that might just be able to get the plumbing to work.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope,” I said shaking my head.
“Shit.”
“She’s attracted to you you know.”
“I did get that feeling.”
“Did you do anything about it?”
“By do, you mean?”
“Are you sleeping with her?”
“Have I ever been missing from the house at night?”
“You know what I mean, are you fucking her?”
I wanted to tell her no right then, right that second. Something in me made me wait.
“Well,” she said, “I figured you had to be fucking someone, cause you sure as hell aren’t fucking me anymore.”
“You do like that word.”
“Should I not be pissed off?”
“No, you shouldn’t. There’s no reason for you to be.”
“So you haven’t?”
“No, I have not.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?”
“I was waitin for you to stop cussin long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.”
“Dammit Jack.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That’s not the point, is it?”
“Okay, that’s not the point. What the hell is the point?”
“The point is… I don’t know what the goddamn point is. All I wanna know is what’s goin on between you and me. Is there anythin goin on between you and me or is there not? Jack I gave up my family, my life everything I had for you.”
“Wait just a minute, I woulda taken you to the airport anytime you wanted. Hell, I woulda driven you to the Mexican border or any the hell else you wanted to go so don’t go layin all that on me. I’m just the guy who found you in a snow drift on the freeway.”
“What? Do you think if I had any other choice…..”
Her mouth slammed shut. I got up from the saw horse I was sitting on and said, “I gotta get back to work. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to set up your equipment. Is there anything else that you need that wasn’t on your list?”
She just looked at me and said, “Jack, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean….”
“I know. You mind if I don’t walk back with you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Thanks.”
She put down the cup from the top of the thermos bottle, walked across the plywood floor and down the stairs. She hadn’t said anything I didn’t already know but hearing it out loud was something I definitely coulda done without.
I climbed up to the roof to see if Maritza and Jennifer had gotten finished. They had done a very fine job, leaving only the attachment points of the antennae and the instrument package unshingled. These spots were covered in three layers of self sealing membranes on top of the load bearing point in the structure below. The sun was going down as usual but the reds and oranges outlining the clouds made a beautiful picture. It also let me know that I needed to get my ass down off the roof before it’d be too dark to see what I was doing.
“You satisfied boss?”
I turned to see Maritza’s head sticking above the shingles.
“I couldn’t have done better myself,” I said meaning it.
“C’mon Jack. It’s pretty good for a couple a rookies.
“It is an absolutely fine job. Is Jerry ready to install all the whatever it is up here tomorrow?”
“He’s been ready. I’d bet he’ll spend tonight getting all his stuff hauled up here so he can start winching it up at sunrise.”
“Really?”
“He’s been waiting and waiting.”
“I’m glad to see that somebody’s enjoying themselves.” I worked my way over to the ladder and climbed back down to the floor. Maritza had the hot thermos in one hand, and a full cup in the other which she held out in my direction.”
“Here, your lips are blue.”
“Thanks.”
Tina was right. Maritza was a beautiful woman. Long black hair, nearly black eyes, very beautiful.
“I guess she wasn’t very happy with you.”
“Huh?”
“I saw her when she left. She looked at me like she wanted to kill me.”
“She said that it was pretty obvious to her that you were attracted to me and she accused me of sleeping with you.”
“That is not what she said.”
“You heard?”
“Everybody working on the project heard, and I’d guess everyone else knows by now. What was she so pissed off about?”
She was looking up at me from where she was sitting. Waiting for an answer that I didn’t have. “She said she knew you were attracted to me and that seemed to make her angry.”
“When did you tell her that there were women working on the project?”
“Today.”
“You really haven’t told her anything about what we’ve been doing over her?”
“We haven’t really talked all that much these last couple months.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and get home? Get some sleep so you can watch Jerry do his thing in the morning.”
Handing the cup back to Maritza, “That’s the best idea I’ve heard today, thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Jack.”
I’d just about gotten below the floor when Maritza said, “She was right.”
That’s all she said. I stopped and looked back at her. She was looking right back at me before she climbed the ladder up to the roof high enough to see the work she’d finished. I had to leave then. I had to get out of there. On the walk home al I could think of was Tina and Maritza, Maritza and Tina. Analytically comparing and contrasting the two. Seeing them both, over and over. When I got back to the house the lights were on and Tina was sitting next to fire reading a book. She looked up.
“You didn’t stay very long. Did she send you home?”
“Who?”
“Maritza.” She said the name slowly drawing out each syllable.
“As a matter of fact she did. She said I needed to get home and talk to you.”
“No she didn’t.”
“You know this?”
“I know women.”
“So tell me, what’s going on? Cause I guarantee you I have no idea.”
“What’s goin on is that you, for some reason have decided that there is no longer any place for me in your life. You have your project, and all those people over there that you like to spend all your time with. Ever since we came here it’s been me over here and you over there.”
“And you wish you’d just taken that plane south when you had the chance.”
“The thought has crossed my mind a few times.”
“There’s no reason why you still can’t. I could drive you far enough south to where you could catch a plane.”
“You’d love that.”
“You know Tina I’m fairly good at figuring out how to build a wall or pitch a roofline or set a footing, but I gotta tell ya that I do not have the ability to figure out what is goin on inside your head. I don’t understand what it is that has gotten you so angry with me. Near as I can tell I haven’t done anything that would make you upset with me. So if I’m gonna understand what it is that you’ve got on your mind you’re gonna have to just tell me what it is so I can either quit doin it or start doin it, whatever the hell “it is.
“Jack, why don’t you just leave me alone, okay? If you feel like you need to ask such questions I doubt you’d have the capacity to understand the answers.”
“How will you know if you don’t try to tell me what’s on your mind?” In my head I knew then somehow that persisting in asking her such questions was a waste of time but something made me do it anyway.
“Jack, let me put this as simply as I can, okay? There is absolutely no reason why you and I would, under any other circumstances other than the ones we now live in, have found ourselves together. We have nothing in common. I don’t want you to think that I’m not grateful for everything you’ve done for me. You probably saved my life, and you’ve given me a purpose in my life that I don’t think I’ve ever had before. For that I am more grateful to you than you can know. I think in the beginning you misunderstood my being grateful to you for finding me for something more that I don’t have the capacity to give to you. I should have told you this long ago, and for that I am truly sorry.”
I let out a long breath. She continued, “I need to ask you for a favor.”
“Sure.” What else could I say?”
“Two things actually.
“Okay.”
“First, I don’t want to live in the tower. I’d like to like to set up in one of those little bungalows you designed, the one closest to the tower, and I’d like for you to set up the instrumentation and run the cabling there.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Could you please build an observatory tower next to my bungalow?”
“It’d be easy enough to do. Don’tcha think it’d be easier to have your place out on the periphery rather than right next to a tower that’s already there?”
“My thought was to try to keep from interrupting whatever little family you set up in the tower.”
“Interupting?”
“You know me marching up and down, up and down making observations when you and the little woman are gettin busy.”
“Tina…”
“Jack, I asked you a question, a simple yes or no is all I’m looking for here.”
“Right next to the tower, or out a ways?”
“You decide. Just let me know when I can get outta here, the sooner the better.”
“I’ll ah, get right on it.”
“Thank you,” she said turning away from me and picking her book back up.
Being dismissed I left the room. It took me about twenty minutes to get my things packed up and into the truck after which I drove over to the project and hauled it all up to the fifth floor and then drove back to the house leaving the keys in it. I didn’t walk directly back to the tower, I was in no hurry because I didn’t feel much like sleeping. I wandered the old golf course and found myself on the campus looking up at the dark buildings. I wandered around retracing steps I’d made twenty five years before. The old buildings were still there, there were many new larger ones. All dark. Old dirty snow drifts in the darkest corners, leaves piled everywhere the wind swirled. More than anything was the quiet, heavier than the dark it was. This place where there’d been tens of thousands of people a little more than a year before was now completely empty, it’s only residents the wind and the cold and the quiet.
I sat there next to the architecture building waiting for the sun to rise realizing that the sun rises most slowly when you’re waiting on it, wishing it would make its appearance. I got up walked around walked into a few buildings whose doors had been smashed as far as I could until the darkness drove me back out.
I thought about Tina, replayed all that she’d said in my head over and over until I realized that she was right. I didn’t have any feelings for her, never had, and therefore didn’t feel any loss. By the time the sun finally did rise the only feeling I had left was relief. I made my way back over to the architecture building just as the top floor was lit orange by the sun. I took out one of the two tools I’d brought with me, a reciprocating saw with a long metal cutting blade, walked right up to the front door and was happy to see that it was still locked. I figured it might be. I can’t image anybody would have figured there was anything of any real value inside a building where people doodled for a living.
The blade cut through the bolt of the lock in no time. I walked directly to the third floor design lab and found what I was looking for, both drafting tables and computers. I took a few notes to remind me what to get when I came back and left the building. There was more air outside, better air. Inside time had been frozen. There were still flyers and bulletins from two years ago, old yellow newspapers with the big headlines tacked to the walls.
I pulled out my drill and drilled enough holes in the door to get a hasp and a padlock set about chest high. The padlock was the biggest one I could find. There’s no way anybody’d ever cut it with a bolt cutter. I put my tools back up into my backpack and took off in the direction of the project. I could see the tower from the top of every hill in the golf course. By the time I got back to Jersey I could see what must’ve been Jerry up on the roof bolting something down.
The only thing I could think of the rest of the way was that I wasn’t sure we really needed all that equipment any more. I’d convinced myself that Tina would be leaving at her first opportunity. I couldn’t have been much more wrong. As usual I didn’t have any idea of the forces that had already been at work driving change at the project. That day was a turning point that I and everybody else would point back to for years. Changes in both relationships and in everybody’s first concern; the weather.