The Knights

by Todd Goddard

The Knights of Clark County break at twelve every Saturday night. That’s when Vic and me disappear to sabotage. We stuff exhaust pipes of bulldozers with dirt, rocks, and mud. We stab knobby tractor tires, wrenching saw blade knives into thick rubber deep to the inner tube. Some nights we splinter the studs of framed houses with huge dug-up rocks, or with a sledgehammer if we’re drunk. Vic calls it the sixteen-on-center slam. We dismantle staircases, pound holes in floors, crumble chimneys. Vic loves Sheetrock. He pretends he’s Mohammed Ali, his scrawny legs shuffling side to side, like a butterfly, he says, punching his angry fists thru the chalky board.

You see what’s funny, though, Vic works for the very same developers building the houses during the day. They don’t have a clue. Like Vic says, he’s low key. He’s never late for work and never says anything to anybody. Vic’s a model employee. He says he’s on the front lines, he has to be. I work landscaping, mowing and mulching, have been for ten years, same as Vic. I come in after the houses are already up. Vic sees the horror face to face: the Komatsu earthmovers strip the trees, the Caterpillars chew the fields. He’s a grunt.

At home Vic calls himself the King, and he is a King in a sense, since he holds the weekly meeting of the Knights at his house. He and Liv, his wife, they bought the small rancher from Liv’s parents five years ago when they joined a retirement community in Florida. Now they live on a golf course. Honest to god. They send postcards. Me, I rent in town, a short drive from Vic’s. Vic and me go way back. We met in junior high school, in detention hall. I’m his one and only best friend. There’s the three of us, Vic, Liv, and me. Vic’s thirty. He could pass for twenty though, with his shiny black hair and kid face. I turn thirty in one year. Liv’s older. She wasn’t with us in high school when we started the Knights. Liv came later. She’s like an honorary member. I like Liv. She won’t go with us at night to the construction sites, but she’s still a Knight. She understands why we smash up houses too, and why we war-fight. After all, there’s not much left. Houses are everywhere.

Saturday nights I bring a couple of six packs to the meeting of the Knights. It’s not really a meeting. I mean, nothing official. We drink and smoke and talk about Roach Brother’s money-greed, about the homes going up and woods coming down. We sit in the glow of the bug repellent candles. I like the smell of them. They remind me of Liv. They light up the back porch. The house is in the woods, pretty far back away from the new neighborhoods. The mosquitoes are really thick, especially this year. When the beer starts flowing, about ten or eleven o’clock, Vic starts yelling about how he’s the King, how the developers are mowing down his woods, marching toward his castle. Then I know he’s ready to go smashing. Liv just smokes quietly. She doesn’t get excited about the builders like me and Vic. She’s mellow, with her fingers long and so slender, she smokes. She doesn’t mash her cigarettes into the ashtray either. She’s got class. She rolls the cherry off, independently, to burn out. No smoldering, ever.

Things have really changed here in Clark County. Once, my dad and me could walk across our back lawn out into the cornfields and woods. One day we walked almost twenty miles, when his ticker was still wound up. We saw at least ten ringnecks. We walked through many woods and across the old bridge at Minetta Creek. He told me the Indians named it that: Minetta Creek. All that’s gone now. It’s all developments. Each house looks exactly like the other. I mean exactly. Signs say: Don’t wait. Buy Luxury Now! Pheasant Tail Circle. Morning Dove Lane. Pine Tree Road. There are no pheasants, doves or pine trees anymore. Vic says those signs brainwash the buyers into thinking they’re living in nature. He blames Roach Brothers Construction Company. He says they got the money hard-on. They’re dirty with money. Cockroach Brothers Incorporated. That’s what he calls them. Whatever the name, they’re scum, and that’s enough for the Knights.

Vic is one of the last tough people left in the world. He’s not tall, in fact he’s kind of short, and he’s not even big. He’s wiry. His dad fought in Korea, and when he was still alive, he’d march around the house, make Vic do push-ups and squat-thrusts. If Vic forgot to take out the trash, he’d get fifty pull-ups punishment. He’d take Vic hunting up at the Water Gap, they’d take a tent and stay out there. They wouldn’t come home until they both bagged a deer—no matter what the weather. Vic got frost bite once. They had to cut off half his big toe. Now it’s just a stub. Honest to god. It toughened him I think—his dad. When we’re hunting for whitetail in the fall he can set a tree stand fifty feet high for him and Liv, before I get even half way up.

Liv likes to hunt, but she doesn’t like to shoot anything. Liv climbs trees. She loves sitting up in the tree stand all day, hoping the deer stay away. Sometimes I think if it weren’t for Vic, she’d never come down. And not just when we’re hunting, either. She says her mother used to climb trees too, declare a strike from being a mother and a wife. Once the fire company had to come talk her down. They sent up a truck crane with a fireman in the basket, like for a frightened cat. The tree is still there, at their house. Vic put a tree stand up for Liv. I’ve seen her balanced on the edge of the fastened plastic seat, calm and carefree with her headphones cranked up, looking over the tops of the trees, like she was looking over her whole life, the bills, the marriage, everything.

Two months ago, Vic tells me the construction is escalating. He told me with his mouth full of enchilada at Tijuana Tamales, a Mexican restaurant two blocks from my apartment. We were sitting at our usual table, the one next to the taco shaped jukebox by the window with the plastic cactus. “The construction is escalating,” he said. “The Komatsus are mobilizing. They’ve crossed the thirty-eighth. We’ve got to get the bastards.” It’s the first thing he’d said all night. His fingers were twirling and wrenching around-he doesn’t know he does it, but he does when he drinks, the twirling-and he was talking like his pops, the military man, the way Vic does when he’s really drunk: maneuver this, deploy that, I’m going in, cover me. He wore his old man’s khaki jacket too—the one his dad tore up in the battle of Kosong—the one with the shrapnel holes in the sleeve where his dad took a hit. The sleeve looks like Swiss cheese. He must have been drinking all day. His eyes were lit up like billboards.

He said they had a fight, him and Liv. He was angry that Roach Brothers signed a new contract: two-hundred and fifty acres will be torn down by the end of the year and built into prestigious homes. Woodland Hollow Estates. He told Liv he wanted to quit his job, and he must have been drunk then too, since Liv had to remind him of the mortgage payments, the loan on his new truck—a true black beauty—and the money they owed to Liv’s parents. Vic said he left the house, told Liv he was leaving to quit, and that he’d quit her too if she didn’t like it. But instead he just went to Tijuana’s for drinks.

We never went to Vic’s that night, for a meeting of the Knights. There was no meeting, no usual one, but we closed Tijuanas. We bought a bottle of Mezcal from the bartender, Big Jimbo, before he locked up the bar, and drove Vic’s black truck up the old dirt road to the railroad trestle—the one we haven’t crossed since a dare in high school. It’s the one on the South side of Cold Springs Crossing, a new development, built right on a cornfield and a patch of oaks. That way, Vic said, the security guard won’t see his truck coming up through the front entrance.

There was a fog lying on the river below the trestle, some eighty feet down, covering up the rocks and foamy white spills. Vic dismounted. “Dismount,” he said. He swigged the bottle of tequila deep into his mouth and I could see the worm spin around down into the narrow bottleneck and disappear. He gunned the truck over the rickety wooden boards. The girders flew by. For a moment I felt like we were back again—twelve years ago, back in school, racing the train in Vic’s old truck—the way I still feel with Vic sometimes when we’re smashing a house up good, like my life is still stretched out before me and I can still make choices.

Vic jumped out of the truck at the back of the development on the muddy hillside, where Roach Brothers bivouacked their tractors, bulldozers, loaders. He put on his dad’s government-issued camouflage army hat, the one that he kept bunched up in the glove compartment, and stood up straight. He looked taller somehow, standing in half a uniform.

Vic didn’t say anything. He had stolen the key to a bulldozer Friday afternoon, after everyone had gone home. He climbed up onto the John Deere front-end loader, looked down at me in the passenger seat of the truck and smiled. He kicked the ignition over and rammed the dozer over the new sidewalk and up a green grassy lawn to the first finished house, the first of ten houses which sat on the hillside overlooking the valley. The tank-like tread crushed a white picket fence in the yard and the You’re Too Late, One More Luxury Home Sold sign, and he ran it right up to the porch, like a yellow dinosaur, not stopping to knock. First the pillar supports snapped and then the porch roof collapsed and Vic shifted, back-dragged the scrapped roof across the green lawn. He charged forward again into the charming and prestigious foyer. I remember now, though I didn’t think much of it at the time, how Vic looked, riding the armored bulldozer through the thin, prefabricated walls of the Roach Brothers’ house, with all of the child left in him, the choices, beaming through his whiskered face. He glowed, and not just from the Tequila either. He backed out of the foyer and advanced again over a thick line of hedge—a hedge my landscape crew installed the week before—and crushed into the dining room and the front of the house began to fold slowly inward. There was no going back.

Vic tore the machine free from the wreckage and maneuvered back down the lawn. He yelled from the gear seat, shouted over the greedy grumbling of the engine. Told me to drive his truck to his house and tell Liv he was sorry. “Tell her I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going to finish it off. Tell her I’m sorry.”

The security guard must have telephoned the authorities. I stopped the truck on the road below the hillside, and I could see rays of blue and red lights flashing, cutting the ceiling of dust and dirt kicked up from the wreckage above and the pale white headlights of the John Deere come to a stand still.

Liv was tough. “He’s not coming home,” I said. I had to. “He loves you. He’s not coming home.” She cried. She pounded my chest with her tight small fists. Then the call came. Liv stayed in the tree for two whole days. I slept on Vic’s couch. I made her peanut butter sandwiches and climbed them up to her. She had to eat, so I climbed. On the third day she agreed to come down. She posted bail and made arrangements for the house to be put up for sale to pay Roach Brothers restitution. They get every cent.

Last Saturday, a cold brutal night, we met in the visiting lounge at the County prison. The visiting room was pink. Vic wore blue, with faded letters across his chest, Property of Clark County Correctional Facility. The fluorescent bulbs buzzed, like the mosquitoes on Vic’s back porch. We all smoked, told jokes, and laughed, like the old days. But we were older. Liv was sapped, showing her age after everything, and Vic’s beard had grown thick on his face. We didn’t talk about Vic’s old boss, about the battle plans, the strategies, the developments. We talked about Vic’s prison meals, his possible work release option, his and Liv’s plans for the future, Florida. We all knew he had three months to serve, and then Vic and Liv would be off to live with Liv’s parents. Vic got a job working on the golf course, mowing lawns, raking sand traps, that sort of thing. Her dad had a friend. The house will be sold. There will be no more Knights.

Tonight though, after visiting hours, after I listen to Vic and Liv discuss their future together, and I drop Liv at home, I will borrow Vic’s truck, for sale now too, and drive it up to the new Woodland Hollow Estates. The houses will be built, almost completely finished. The woods will be gone. I’ll park the truck in a driveway on the smooth sloped asphalt, and I’ll look at the glimmering lights of Clark County, watch them stretch out of sight, maybe all the way to Florida, maybe not. The County prison tower will blink red. I’ll think of how I’ll soon be alone here in Clark. Maybe I’ll move to Florida too. Maybe not. I’ll pick up a stone from the roadside, one the construction company has yet to glean from its shiny surface. I’ll walk in the shadows to the middle of the shaggy green lawn of a large house, like a pitcher to the mound in the major leagues. I’ll wind up in a lunging stride and toss a stone right through the middle of the big brittle bay window and watch the reflections of the valley, the red pulsing prison light, Clark County, shatter into a thousand civilized pieces.