Pike's Folly

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. People 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 between 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.”

“So you're a libertine?”

“
Hell
yes. It's everyone's duty as an American and a free-thinking New Englander to have as much lewd sex as possible, in every position, in every room of the house—and even fuck your family members if that's what you want, because it's all beautiful.”

Hearing such licentious sermonizing reminded Stuart why he'd been drawn to Pike in the first place: his utter lack of self-consciousness. Stuart envied him his wit, his wicked tongue. What masqueraded as strong-willed convictions was really just the perverse ravings of a sadist. Pike didn't stand for anything, except maybe the need to stand for
something.

“Everybody wants me to be like Gregg Reese,” Pike said, “who has as much money as I do, and he's just as selfish as I am, but he feels
guilty
about it, and that's why there's the Reese Foundation, the Allison Fund, all that bullshit. What's wrong with people, Stuart?”

“Not enough lewd sex, I suppose.”

“How's that?”

Stuart grumbled; he no longer felt like playing. “Never mind, I'm just acting like an idiot.”

Pike grinned affectionately. “Well, anyway, you should get back to your wife.”

“She's at work,” Stuart said. He wasn't sure why he disliked talking about Marlene. Was he embarrassed by her? No. Well, a little. She made him angry sometimes, and impatient, and annoyed. She reminded him of that line in the old Flannery O'Connor story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “She would
have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot
her every minute of her life.”
It bothered him how much he liked that line.

He sighed. “Marlene can live without me.”

“Of course she can, it's
you
I'm worried about.” Pike knelt to close the safe, then came up again. “Next month won't be so bad. Once I get this straightened out with the DOI, we'll all be moving up to the White Mountains.”

Stuart shrugged. Moving to the White Mountains made about as much sense as anything else—that is to say, none at all. “I wouldn't mind living in New Hampshire,” he said. “But Marlene's tied to her job, so that's that.”

“They have banks in New Hampshire. I'll build one.” Pike chortled. “Now
there's
an idea—instead of a parking lot.”

The parking-lot idea wasn't a new one; in fact, he'd been joking about it for years, developing it the way a comedian might shape a particular routine, taking a little out, then putting it back: “You know what I'd like to do? Buy up a thousand acres of who knows what, maybe Yellowstone National Park, and just pave the whole thing over,” elaborating on it a few weeks later, “No, I'll build a parking lot in the middle of the woods, maybe up in Vermont or New Hampshire, miles and miles from the nearest access road,” the idea growing on him until it began to wake him up at nights, this silly image of a pristine parking lot consigned to the rocky barrens of the White Mountains, never driven upon, each pointless parking space meticulously detailed in bold yellow lines, waiting for no one, an affront and an insult and a fantastic jest. Smiling in bed, he imagined blue-and-white handicap spaces, maybe three of them at the end of each row, the rows stopping where the smooth black macadam butted up against a wild, encroaching border of ragged beech and twisted pines.

Visions like these had delighted him ever since he was a boy. He'd grown up in South County, Rhode Island, a hodgepodge of small and diverse villages that included a range of economic classes, from the millwrights and construction workers who lived in old duplexes on Route 1 to the nouveau riche who'd bought up property on Wickford Harbor. He was hyperactive as a teenager, so his parents moved him out of the sticks and enrolled him in a private school on Providence's East Side. Surrounded by new classmates, he began to spend less time at home and more time chasing girls. He loved being popular but didn't lord it over anyone. One of his closest friends was a tomboy from the East Bay, Sarah Cranberry, who was far less pretty than most of the girls who would've gladly gone out with him. Years later, after he'd dropped out of school and spent a decade producing a handful of mildly scandalous art films for the European market—
Vanessa's Caress
and
The Succubus
among them—before bottoming out as a filmmaker and investing all his remaining funds in the commodity exchange, after he'd gleefully rounded second base with some eighty-plus women in Providence County alone, Pike still kept in touch with Sarah and visited her several times a year at her ski lodge in North Conway, New Hampshire. She was his favorite excuse to get away from the office.

Nowadays, he didn't like to work much, though every so often he forced himself onto a plane to make a circuit of the various corporate HQs where he held stock. All of the buildings were clean and boxy. One company manufactured computer chips for the defense industry. Another built payloads for NASA. The whole trip took about ten days, from Providence to New York, Washington to Dallas to Sacramento (
great
Vietnamese place in downtown Sacramento!) and then back to Providence. Work dispensed with, he returned to what he did best: enjoying himself, putting food and drink into his mouth, and plotting more ways to provoke Gregg Reese.

Gregg Reese was Rhode Island's other megamillionaire. The Reeses were an old Rhode Island family that had made a reputation for themselves as philanthropists, good-deed doers and, some might say, indiscriminate supporters of social causes. Every year, the Reese Foundation gave millions of dollars to parks and universities, museums and day-care centers, using any excuse to fork over another half-mil to anyone willing to change the name of their organization to the Gregg Reese Center for the Poor and Pathetic. Pike couldn't deny it: Gregg was a good man, a kind, civic-minded individual. In private, the two rather liked each other. On some level, Gregg appreciated Pike's little publicity stunts. Both he and Pike were making a commentary of sorts—on wealth, on being privileged in America. Gregg believed in an America founded on philanthropy, good works, and Christian charity. Pike took a darker view.