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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781461623427 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bridgeworks |
| Publication date: | 06/17/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The yellow cur snaps to attention, roused by my sudden and reckless violation of his sacred space. Like a hellhound, his eyes are red and flaring; from his smoking muzzle drips a looping ribbon of viscous drool. He flaunts his terrible teeth.
"Easy, fella, easy, easy," I say, resisting the urge to turn and run for my life. "Let's not get stupid."
Perhaps sensing a bloodbath, the strutting red rooster abandons its mindless dirt pecking and implodes into the darkness beneath the farmhouse steps. A calico cat scoots behind a live oak. An eerie silence descends: Friendly stranger greets surly yard dog in rural tableau.
"Easy, easy," I repeat. "Nice doggy."
Trapped in the open like this, my options are limited. I can try to creep back to the safety of the car or cry for help or hope to use my shoulder bag as a shield should the animal attack. Either that or remain motionless and see what follows—counter the brute's hostile demeanor with unending restraint. That's what I do. For the next three minutes I cease to move, don't even bat a lash. A car passes on the gravel road running before the farmhouse but I am no longer here; I am an appeasing homage newly formed.
"Easy, asshole, easy."
As if rewarding my feigned submission, the yard dog cocks one hind leg high above his yellow back and liberally marks the spot. After first tongue-tasting the steaming puddle, he turns and saunters round the corner of the house, his outsized vanity trailing behind. Non-confrontation is always a vexing letdown to these hotheaded mixed breeds; like much of his species, he boasts a water pipe for a brain.
"Good Rover," I say, letting hold of my breath. "Go find a rabbit to chase."
Thirty miles north of Baton Rouge lies the Parish of Pointe Claire—my present whereabouts on this cloudless December morning. A glimmering shield of white frost blankets the fields and grass pastures along the roadside; a thin layer of brittle ice tops the ditch water. The high levee wall flanking the Mississippi casts its dark specter over the land. My own light-skewed shadow pitches awkwardly across the dirt yard to the foot of the wooden porch steps. The sun shines brightly but without heat. Not a merry soul in sight.
I've driven to Pointe Claire this sky-blue morning to see a man about his property, to examine and make note of his boundary lines, garner facts. I'm trying to solve a puzzle, hoping to draw conclusions from selected signs. It's part of my job. What's at stake, what all the fuss is about, is money. Great green stacks of it.
Having braved my face-off with the yard dog, I become aware of loud voices issuing from inside the farmhouse—a structure remarkable only in its ability to withstand a string of haphazard additions. Whole rooms have been cobbled together without regard to roof line or materials. Its windows lack shades or blinds, the surrounding grounds devoid of flowers or greenery, not the first hint of feminine treatment. The place looks like somebody's fishing camp. My lucky day.
In one corner of the yard is piled a confusion of empty beer and soft drink cans; a junked car sits marooned on four cement blocks. Inside the house, the several male voices rise to shouting.
"Says who?"
"Me, that's who."
"You and who else?"
"Who?"
"Shit."
As my arrival has surely been noted, a hasty retreat is out of the question. I cannot afford to appear meek or easily intimidated. First impressions are everything.
"Shit."
My first sense is one of foreboding, as if in the midst of these open fields and brown moo cows I have strayed upon a bedeviled farmhouse rife with contending voices. Few facets of the job are more unsettling than arriving for an appointment in the middle of a family fracas. This bunch sounds as if they're about to come to blows. Anything, for God's sake, anything but that.
Climbing the porch steps, I stand before the unpainted front door and knock twice, to which follows not the slightest response. Save for the ceaseless jabber of a television somewhere inside, there is suddenly no trace of life. My hollow stomach turns over; something like dread colors my emotions. After half a minute, I knock again.
The dented doorknob turns slowly on its wobbled axis and the door opens, allowing a gap between door and out-of-square doorframe. In the narrow opening appears one ogling eyeball. The amber eyeball rolls down to my tightly laced work boots, then slowly up my khaki pants and winter coat to my face, unflinching in its gaze. Feeling the skin crawl up the back of my neck, I realize I've just been mentally undressed. Steady, girl, steady. Adversity is what keeps this job interesting.
Remembering my skirmish with the family pet, I stand motionless in the deep shade of the porch. The creepy eyeball disappears and the door swings open, revealing a young black man dressed in overalls and a green fatigue jacket, and wearing a clear plastic shower cap over a head full of glistening curls. He does not speak.
"Good morning," I say, summoning my resolve. "My name is Diane Morris, with Anoco Oil Company. Here to see Henry Dunn."
The young man at the door stares up at me but makes no effort to reply. He appears somewhat disoriented by my height, as if greeting royalty. Is he mute? Disabled? Deranged?
"Who's that?" asks a voice from inside the farmhouse.
"Oil lady," the young man at the door answers. "Says she wants to see Daddy."
"Let her in, fool."
* * *
Mud Lake, the shallow no-man's-land bordering the rear of Henry Dunn's property, is a lake in name only, a forgotten backwater set in a queer and distant land. Fed by winter and spring rains, the water depth might reach four feet, swelling the lake's circumference to thirty acres. By mid-August, the water level drops to a foot or less and its surface area will shrink to the size of a small pond. The lake's sole possessors are the few dozen migratory ducks that winter there each year.
As to the lake's legal ownership, it's doubtful the locals ever had cause to worry about it. The low-lying fields surrounding the fluctuating lake shore have never been fenced or farmed; boundary lines are approximated; traditionally, the lands bordering Mud Lake have been treated as unclaimed, open range. Until now, when the entirety of the land beneath the lake will be affected by the next producing oil well. Now it could be worth a small fortune.
Here's the mystery: Who owns Mud Lake and its bottomlands and in what proportions? Are the calculations for ownership of the land underlying the lake to be made at high water or low water? Which of my three landowners bordering the lake has the best claim? Where are the obstacles I must prepare to face? Will I prevail?
My position with Anoco Oil Company bears the title of landman. The landman represents the company's interest in negotiations with private landowners, most often in realms of lease acquisition and drilling operations. To the engineers and bean counters who run Anoco, I am a necessary evil, an overhead expense they would rather do without. But they cannot. If Anoco hopes to drill oil wells on privately owned lands, someone has to negotiate with the landowners because the landowners want to trade face-to-face with a human being in the privacy of their own homes. They refuse to dicker over the telephone; they won't respond to offers posted through the mail or over the Internet; they decline to drive to town for an appointment. What Anoco requires is an envoy, a hired gun, someone willing to motor into the countryside and lock horns with the landowners. That's me.
To the landowners, I am two-parts Lady-of-Good-Fortune, one-part leering Shylock. They generally rank me and my kind somewhere below car salesmen but just above lawyers, the latter being untouchables. The landowners are always glad to see me but they never turn their backs. I'm either the best thing that's happened to them lately or a lying bitch; it depends on which landowner you talk to, the last landman with whom they dealt.
* * *
Like the exterior of Henry Dunn's farmhouse, the fishing camp motif of the interior is maintained to perfection: bare walls and simple furnishings; a state of cleanliness best described as derelict; from a bare lightbulb suspends an ancient and copiously bespeckled strip of flypaper. My first task becomes how to tactfully avoid taking a seat. Look but don't touch.
In the overheated front room, I meet in turn all three of Dunn's grown sons: Lester, Zach and Eugene. Outwardly grim and standoffish, the two older brothers, Lester and Zach, are thin and fluid of frame with long hair braided into coiling dreadlocks, while the younger one, Eugene, is short and muscled. They all have rich black skin and oval, handsome faces. Each of them greets my extended hand with a limp squeeze.
I've noticed that most country people, black or white, are reluctant to make physical contact with a stranger, as if those of us from the city might be carrying some germ, some dreaded measles capable of wiping out the locals. Shaking hands with a woman only heightens their unease.
Time to get this show on the road.
"Is your father around this morning?" I ask.
"He's in the back," Zach says. "Be out in a minute."
The three Dunn siblings and I stand in collective silence and wait. Try as they might, they cannot avoid staring. Eugene, the one wearing the plastic shower cap over his serpent-like curls, digs out a bent cigarette from his flannel shirt pocket and with much ceremony lights it, using a wooden kitchen match. After extinguishing the flame, he puts the still-smoldering stub in a hip pocket of his overalls. On the television in the adjoining room, the emcee of a morning game show plays affable straight man for his Hollywood celebrities, but no one at the Dunn residence is watching. Today's diversion stands stiffly in the middle of their front room, her mouth anointed with raspberry lip gloss.
Stay calm, take your time. Don't start babbling.
The total weirdness of this situation might have once driven me to a fit of stammering, self-conscious chatter, all in hopes of deflecting attention away from myself. Ten years of working with strangers has taught me otherwise; nowadays I just keep quiet and hold my ground. Breathe. Take it in, let it slowly out. Big smiles and lots of teeth. Likely as not the Dunn brothers are equally dismayed by my presence; at least I know the purpose of my visit.
Unfurled across a table against the back wall of the front room is a blue-lined ownership map, depicting what looks to be the elder Dunn's property. If nothing else, it will give the Dunn brothers and me something to talk about. As if bound to a common tether, the four of us move in guarded unison around the map.
"As I explained to your father last night when I called, I'd like to inspect the boundary lines at the rear of your property."
A uniformly sullen and suspect response is almost palpable. I might as well be bringing news of foreclosure. The evil landlord done up in gold-stud earrings and leather shoulder bag. I'm not the bad guy, I want to shout out, but cannot.
"What's wrong with them?" Zach says.
"Nothing," I say. "There's nothing wrong with your boundaries. I just want to see how your land borders the lake at the rear of the property."
"Mud Lake," Lester says.
"That's right, Mud Lake," I say. "I'd like to see how much of your property borders the shore of Mud Lake."
The Dunn brothers convene a tight huddle over the open map. It's not every day a giant white woman working for an oil company arrives on their doorstep with questions about property lines, and they don't seem to relish the novelty. Like all landowners, they have more confidence in the sanctity of paper and ink than in anything I have to say. Words, they have come to believe, mean different things to different people, whereas a map is something tangible upon which they can rely. They are wrong, of course, but I must proceed carefully. Keep it simple, keep it calm.
I lean over the table and place my hand flat on the map's blue-lined surface.
"This map here," I say, "it's called a Tobin map. It's only a representation of what your property looks like. It's like a picture or a drawing based on the records in the courthouse."
Lester, the darker tinted of the Dunn brothers, reaches out and puts his right thumb firmly on the map beside my hand; the contrasting black and white skin tones suggestive of our present divide. My fingernails are bitten and unpolished, his dirty and cracked. Unwittingly, I withdraw my hand.
"Lands of Theogene Dunn," Lester reads. "That's our grandfather. All this land here belongs to us."
"I know the land belongs to you," I say. "What I'm saying is this map is only a sketch of the physical property. The person who drew this map never set foot on the land itself. He drew this map based on the property description found in the deed in the courthouse."
"Who's he?" Eugene says.
"Who?" I say.
"Who drew the map," Eugene says. "Who's he?"
"I don't know the name of the man who drew the map," I say. "It might have been a woman."
"Who's she?" Zach says.
"I don't know," I say, waving my hands. "Look, it doesn't matter who drew the map."
"Says right here, Lands of Theogene Dunn," Lester says.
It's like bobbing for apples, trying to push a bean with your nose. I wet my lips and count to three. Easy, girl, easy. Stay cool. The Dunn siblings stand shoulder to shoulder, awaiting my reply.
"This land belongs to your family and no one disputes that," I say slowly. "What I'm telling you is the person who drew this boundary line from the front of your property back to Mud Lake never inspected the boundary line itself. He ... or she, just drew a line from point A to point B on a piece of paper."
Zach leans forward across the Tobin map looking into my eyes. His own eyes are black and hard, his expression pitiless. I've got better sense than to blink.
"What do you want?" he says, his dreadlocks writhing.
Time to cease this morning's cartography lesson and state my business. Despite all the puffed-up manly tension, it's a relief.
"What I want, gentlemen, is to inspect the boundary lines of your property and see how much of it borders Mud Lake."
"You heard the lady," says the grey-bearded figure standing in the doorway behind us.
Henry Dunn, it appears, is not in the habit of raising his voice when addressing his three grown sons.
"You, Zachary," he says, pointing with his black cane. "Bring the wagon round."
At last, a man I can deal with.
Excerpted from THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS by JOHN S. TARLTON. Copyright © 2001 by John S. Tarlton. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.