Pike's Folly Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  I - Little Rhody

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  II - The Independence Project

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  III - The Ocean State

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  IV - The Evil Source

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  V - Hope

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Endnote

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY MIKE HEPPNER

  Copyright Page

  For My Wife

  Praise for MIKE HEPPNER and Pike’s Folly

  “Pike’s Folly is clever, funny, endearing and well written. . . . A Faulknerian tour de force.” —Neil Peart, drummer of Rush

  “A bold, uncompromising author capable of negotiating the literary chasm between technological mumbo-jumbo and real emotional depth.” —Philadelphia City Paper

  “[His] prose ax is sharp, and he fells a great many American demons in putting forth his haunting and redemptive vision of New England’s past and present.” —Publishers Weekly

  “[Heppner] is a young master of this old art, we should be happy to see him arrive so splendidly.” —The Washington Post

  “An endearing look at life fully (or in this case overly) examined. . . . In Pike’s Folly, [Heppner] takes a ruthless but humorous look at the demoralization of an already imperfect world.” —Pages

  I

  Little Rhody

  1

  “They ate me alive,” said the excitable man sitting across from Henry Savage’s desk one June morning in Washington, D.C. “Absolutely tore me to bits. All I said was, ‘Those people are no more Native American than I am,’ which is true. Of course, you can’t say things like that in Rhode Island, so everybody went nuts. The Journal took their usual self-righteous stance, the cannibals. I lost all of my old business contacts. Even Buddy wouldn’t talk to me. People are so uptight these days, so goddamn conservative—and I say that to you as a fellow Republican.”

  “I’m not a Republican,” Henry said.

  “Oh. Then I say that to you as a fellow Democrat.” Nathaniel Pike took off his sunglasses, cleaned them with a neatly folded handkerchief and put them back on. In the interim, Henry saw that Pike’s eyes were a sparkling blue, like a beautiful woman’s. “Anyway, here I am, still dreaming, still going strong, even twelve years later. You can hate me, Mr. Savage, but you can’t keep me down, and you know why? Because I don’t hate anyone. I refuse to. I hate fakery, I hate falseness, but I don’t hate people.”

  Henry shifted in his seat. His erect posture behind his desk conveyed something about how he liked to conduct his business, with stiff formality and an unwillingness to be swayed by emotion. A similar bearing might’ve been useful in practicing meditation, if Henry had been inclined to such a thing.

  “My problem is, I get restless,” Pike confessed. “My mind’s always going a million miles a minute, and I can’t slow it down. It’s terrible how I can’t stay focused on any one thing, and even when I do, no one else gets it, you know? Whatever I think is beautiful, everyone else thinks is crazy.”

  Surrounded by his government-issue office furniture, Henry felt stifled by Mr. Pike’s overlarge presence. Pike was one of the wealthiest men in the United States and, with his good looks and wild reputation, more charismatic than most. Trace wrinkles in the corners of his mouth were the only indications that he’d aged at all since dropping out of high school. He’d kept in good shape simply by living life at a frantic pace. His arms and legs were both longer than seemed in proportion to the rest of his body, and he carried himself with the assurance provided by a healthy, well-stoked ego.

  The parcel of land Pike wanted to buy from Henry’s department was one of several properties that the Bureau of Land Management made available each year to the private sector, largely acreage that the Interior Department deemed no longer suitable for public use. Most of it was out west, in such land-rich states as Arizona and Colorado. Pike’s was the only parcel that the BLM still owned in the entire Northeast, and it consisted of seven and a half acres of untapped wilderness in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Henry had no idea why Pike wanted the land, just that he was willing to pay top dollar for it.

  Dressed smartly in his seven-thousand-dollar suit, Nathaniel patted down the top of his full head of brown hair and took a swig from a bottle of Poland Spring. “I’m not the kind of person that you normally do business with, isn’t that right, Mr. Savage?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what kind of a person you are,” Henry said.

  “Visionary. Ambitious. Passionate. Not afraid to stick my foot in my mouth. If I were a fruit, I’d be a banana. If I were a car, I’d be a sleek limousine. If I were a . . .” Pike snapped his fingers. “Gimmie something else to compare myself to.”

  “A TV show.”

  “If I were a TV show, I’d be a ten-hour miniseries, like Roots or The Thorn Birds. No Richard Chamberlain, though—that guy’s a joke.”

  Henry saw that Pike liked thinking of himself as a comedian, so he did the polite thing and smiled. “I don’t know, Mr. Pike. I worry about what’s in that head of yours.”

  “Well, don’t. And don’t listen to what other people say about me. It’s very easy to get a bad rap in a small state like Rhode Island.”

  Pike chuckled at this. He’d lived in Rhode Island his entire life, and over those forty-two years he’d built a reputation for wasteful, eccentric behavior. Most notoriously, he’d bought an old farmhouse in the East Bay, then surprised his neighbors by demolishing the house and rebuilding it piece by piece, down to the last detail—furniture included. No one knew why he did what he did or said the things that he said. To call him a provocateur didn’t quite capture it. A provocateur, yes, but a charming one, a persuasive one, maybe even a dangerous one. Everyone in the state had an opinion about him, usually either very good or very bad.

  Such audacity never failed to impress Henry. The playboy’s life was completely foreign to his own. He wondered, what makes a person like Nathaniel Pike tick? No responsibilities, no obstacles in his path. Is it just the money? Or is it some other characteristic that he has and I don’t?

  “We’ll have to do this properly, of course,” Henry said. “You’ll submit a bid, just like everyone else. I’m supposed to give preference to the neighboring landowners, so we’ll need to act now.”

  “Fine, fine . . . anything else?” Pike asked.

  “Yes. Just promise me that you won’t do anything crazy up there,” Henry said.

  His old-fashioned sense of integrity amused Pike. “I’ll promise you one thing. I will do nothing to that land that will not make it more beautiful.”

  “It’s beautiful as it is,” Henry protested.

  “Damn right. Everyone should get a chance to hike the White Mountains. I’ve got a lady friend who runs a ski lodge in North Conway. I keep trying to get someone to go up with me, but no dice. P
eople are intimidated by me, I think.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sadly so. I’ve got to learn to tone it down. A little less tempest, a little more tact.”

  They spent the rest of the meeting discussing Rhode Island politics, about which Pike knew a great deal. He spoke of his friends in the state senate as if they all owed him money, and in fact many of them did. His life sounded so renegade, so unlike anything that Henry had experienced in D.C. It thrilled him to hear about it, and he suspected that Pike probably had a similar effect on others.

  Leading him out of his office, Henry said, “I sure hope it cools off tonight. I’m taking my wife to a Beach Boys reunion concert in Annapolis. Do you like the Beach Boys?”

  Pike responded with exaggerated enthusiasm. “Gee, I haven’t thought about those guys in years. I once produced an independent film, you know, with Brian Wilson, back in the eighties.”

  “Really?”

  “Hell yeah. That was a wild time.”

  Henry, feeling outclassed, retreated. “Their music’s pretty corny, I suppose, but my wife won the tickets.” He cleared his throat. “What time’s your plane out of Reagan?”

  “Three o’clock. Don’t worry about me. I’m going to take a walk around the Mall. Strange name for it, don’t you think?”

  Henry escorted him as far as his outer office, then returned alone to brood behind his desk until lunch. His secretary, Rochelle, was still glowing from some compliment that Pike had paid her on his way out and was fairly useless to Henry for the rest of the morning.

  Pike flew out on an afternoon direct to T. F. Green Airport, which got him home before the commuter rush. That night, he took his personal assistant, Stuart, out for a bite to eat at Café Nuovo and bragged about his trip to Washington. Over the bar, Gregg Reese was prattling on TV to the news anchor from Channel 6. Always selling something, that one, Pike thought. Well, at least he’s trying.

  2

  Naked, Stuart Breen stood in the foyer of Siemens and McMasters, watching the foot traffic shuffle down College Hill into downtown Providence. It was late one morning in mid-November, and his head of curly black hair was still damp from the shower. A thin pane of glass separated him from the rain-dodging clusters of students and university professors trudging up the hill to their classes. No one noticed him, and he waited for what seemed like a minute before putting on his robe and stepping back into darkness, where the temperature differential between the inside and the outside of the building was so great that the windows had begun to fog. Stuart’s employer, Nathaniel Pike, lived on the top floor of the five-story brownstone and kept the thermostat pumped to seventy-six to heat the whole house. Because Pike liked working in binges, Stuart would sometimes stay the night rather than walk back to his own apartment. The last time he’d seen his wife was two days ago. Besides Stuart and Nathaniel, no one else worked at Siemens and McMasters; the name referred to a corporate account set up to protect Mr. Pike’s personal assets.

  Stuart lifted the intercom in the kitchen, buzzed the fifth floor, then listened to the thunderous sound of Pike bounding down the stairs. In the condensation of the kitchen windows, Stuart had scribbled an obscene sexual phrase, which he now wiped off with his sleeve.

  “Get any sleep last night?” he asked as they settled down to a breakfast of bacon rashers and black coffee.

  “A few hours.” Pike sighed. “Henry Savage called around ten. That did it for me. Watched the Lifetime Channel until four a.m. I love that channel, Stuart—love it, love it. Movies for women. ” He savored the words. “I’ll bet that Cathy Diego watches the Lifetime Channel.”

  Cathy Diego was a representative from the Public Interest Research Group in Concord, New Hampshire. The NHPIRG was a consumer-based activist group that monitored the state’s handling of its natural resources. State PIRGs kept in close contact with one another, collating information on land abusers from regions as diverse as New England and the Midwest.

  “What did Savage want?” Stuart asked.

  “Oh, he’s just getting nervous. Most people, Stuart, don’t have any vision. That’s the difference between me and Henry Savage. Everything that guy stands for is sensible, sane, dull, and ordinary. I stand for magic. I stand for mystery. Why don’t people like mysteries anymore?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never written one.”

  Pike cracked up. “You should. Maybe I could be your mystery.”

  Stuart’s face reddened. Working as Pike’s personal assistant had been a humbling experience and quite a comedown from seeing his first book in print. Three years ago, he’d published an arty little novel, My Private Apocalypse, which had sold some four thousand copies and earned him a nice mention in the Providence Journal. He and his wife, Marlene, had met around the same time and were married two years later. Marlene worked at a Citizens Bank a few blocks from their house on the East Side. She was quiet, unassuming and always did her best not to upstage her husband; if she had any ambitions for herself, she was kind enough not to share them. Being married to a published author was good enough for her.

  To the extent that it mattered, Stuart wondered what Marlene really thought of his book. The life that he’d described in My Private Apocalypse was as true to his own as he could make it. The main character, like Stuart himself, was an eastern-educated, narcissistic, sexually confused young man who— unlike Stuart—dealt with his confusion by consuming bits and pieces of his own body. This impossible premise now struck him as pretentious, but at the time he’d felt a keen empathy for his protagonist. He wanted his fiction to be dark and uncompromising because that was how he regarded himself. Writing the book was an act of literary exhibitionism, and like many such acts, he felt that once he’d completed it, he’d revealed too much.

  Nathaniel pushed away his plate. “You look preoccupied, Stuart. You’re not supposed to have any secrets from me, you know.”

  “And why’s that?” Stuart asked.

  “Why? Because it’s not healthy. That’s how you get cancer.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah . . . brain cancer, anyway. Sexual repression causes dick cancer and brain cancer.”

  “There’s no dick cancer.”

  “Sure there is. If you get it in your dick, it’s dick cancer. Repression causes dick cancer, and too much fat in your diet gives you a heart attack—so eat your fucking bacon.”

  After breakfast, they climbed a flight of narrow and listing stairs and entered a small library that reeked of a cigar Pike had smoked the night before. It was here that he and Stuart had spent many hours making arrangements with contractors for the parking-lot project, taking bids from building suppliers as far north as Nova Scotia.

  “How long are we going to be in New Hampshire?” Stuart asked as Pike bent to open a safe behind a panel in the bookshelves.

  “A few weeks, who knows?” Pike spoke with his head deep in the vault. “I’m hoping we can break ground by New Year’s.”

  “It’s hard to do anything in the winter,” Stuart observed, “particularly that far north.”

  Pike emerged from the safe clutching a fat, business-sized envelope. “We’ll make it happen. Besides, it’s just a parking lot. No foundation, so there’s no need to dig more than a few inches.”

  “But if the elevation—”

  “Oh, don’t worry.” Reaching into the envelope, he pulled out an arbitrary number of bills—fifties and hundreds—and transferred them to his pants pocket. “We’ll have you back to your life of bohemian squalor in no time. Meanwhile, think of all the money you’ll be making—really, Stuart—for doing next to nothing.”

  Stuart crept behind a Louis XV writing desk and sat down. The sight of so many books—voraciously collected, and most of them, he was certain, unread—exhausted him. The book that Stuart was reading right now was Something Happened. He’d never read Heller before but felt he ought to, particularly as it pertained to his own work. What had the author of Catch-22 done, he wondered, during that decade-plus period be
tween his first two novels? How did he make a living? How did he keep his spirits up? What had happened to Joseph Heller before Something Happened? Had he, like Stuart, spent the first few years of his career writing unpublishable garbage? How many novels had he started and never finished? How many had he finished but never published? Maybe Something Happened was just another book to him, one that he’d begun on New Year’s Day 1962 and completed ten or eleven years later. It was possible; after all, some writers just worked slower than others, and Something Happened was an unusually long book. Five hundred sixty-nine pages. Assuming ten years to write it, 365 days times ten, that’s 3,650 divided into 569, leaves you with roughly one-tenth of a page a day—not even a full sentence by Heller’s standards. One sentence a day, for ten years. What kind of a life was that? But Stuart knew—it was the life he’d always wanted for himself. Still, when he thought of what writers actually did with their time, the ratio of the number of beautiful, meaningful, valuable words that they’d left on the page to the minutes and hours that they’d spent simply existing, it depressed him.

  “Stuart! Look alive!” Stuart looked up to see Pike standing over him. “Quick: what are you thinking about right now?”

  Because he had to say something, Stuart said, “Oh, I was just thinking about this interview with Gregg Reese in the ProJo today. ‘Name three Americans who most influenced you as a young man,’ that sort of thing. It’s the usual puff piece. I’ll show it to you when we go downstairs.”

  Pike grunted. “I’ll tell you three Americans I’m not interested in. Susan Sarandon, Steven Spielberg, and everyone else on the planet. Everyone who has a conscience, because it’s wrong to have a conscience. It’s un-American. Emerson didn’t have a conscience. Emerson was a self-centered, self-aggrandizing, loathsome little bastard, and I love him for it. My only heroes are freaks and eccentrics. New England, and Rhode Island in particular, is a hotbed for eccentrics. Charles Ives was an eccentric. So was Emily Dickinson, and Whitman and Thoreau. That’s what makes being an American so unique: the right to live entirely for yourself.”