Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [87]
What impresses me more, though, is that he built the wraparound porch by himself, along with the chairs on which we’re seated.
The cigar in my hand has burned down an inch and a half, and its smoke, combined with the sweeter scent of Jim’s pipe, is a simple pleasure enhanced by the setting.
My eyes are on the small motorboat tied off at the dock, gentle waves giving the vessel a light bobbing against the taut line. It’s the same boat we took out to the center of the pond the last time I was here, when I’d failed to catch anything, even though the water was seeded with trout, which have bred to copious amounts within their liquid enclosure.
“I could get used to this.”
Jim chuckles and says, “I don’t think so.”
I look over at him, and his eyes are focused on some spot far beyond the pond. “Why?”
He taps his pipe in the palm of his hand. “While you’ve always had a bit of the hermit in you, this sort of solitude would drive you crazy.”
Jim has aged well, if such a thing can be said about the violating process of adding years at the expense of robustness. He is still slim but he’s also softer, which, I suppose, comes from the fact that he has a house, and a wife, and nothing left to prove in his field. And the solidness of his work, his research, means that he doesn’t have much left to defend.
“Maybe. But right now I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.”
“I would guess you said the same thing about Brazil, and Ecuador, and Burkina Faso, and Nizhniy Novgorod.” He leaves out Egypt. “It’s about the work, my boy. The setting is incidental.”
I don’t give him an answer because I’m not sure what to think of his assertion. The last five years would certainly seem to belie it but, considered through the filter of recent events, it sounds like a plausible hypothesis. I’m supposed to be back at Evanston soon, and I can’t remember a time when a place seemed like such a distant idea. Except, of course, for my cactus, which I can see in my mind’s eye withering on the windowsill beneath the winter sun.
Through the screen door I can hear Meredith and Esperanza moving about the kitchen. But except for a muffled word or two, their conversation remains their own. I’m not at all surprised they are getting on well. They’re cut from different parts of the same cloth.
“She’s a lovely woman,” Jim says.
The old professor remains sharp, his intuitive skill bordering on the eerie.
“I know,” I say.
He turns silent for a few seconds and then gives a small harrumph before taking a puff from his pipe. From somewhere out over the pond I hear a single bird call.
“You should have married her,” he says.
I have no answer, except to suspect that he’s probably right. He must sense that I’m not going to be baited, as if I were a grad student again and arguing some finer point of archaeological theory. He removes the pipe from his mouth and fixes warm and wise eyes on me.
“Are you going to tell me what you want?” When I don’t respond right away, he adds, “I know you didn’t come to the other side of the world just to sit on my porch.”
“Technically, I was already on the other side of the world. So it was only a matter of a few hundred miles.”
He shakes his head. “You were always saying something smart like that, as I recall. All right, have it your way. What is it that brings you a few hundred miles to here, Australia’s premier vacationland?”
There’s something inside me that doesn’t care to broach the subject. I’m more at peace right now than I can remember feeling for quite some time, and forcing the conversation to the events of the last couple of weeks can only serve to