Chapter 4

As Tim Brown sat down at the lunch table with Mike, he asked, “Do you like to fish?”

Not recognizing the voice, Mike looked up from his plate. He didn’t know Tim all that well, and it took him a second to recall the man’s name. In fact, he had only met Tim in a couple of meetings. The man was normally very quiet, but people tended to listen when he spoke.

He answered, “Yes, but I don’t have the time for it any more. My wife and I are fixing up our house. That kind of keeps us busy all of the time.”

“You’re fixing up a house?” Tim asked in a friendly manner while removing the plates from his tray. He set his tray off to the side and rearranged the plates in front of him.

“Yes. It was a mess when we bought it. We stripped the interior and are now putting it back together again,” Mike answered thinking that Tim didn’t sound that surprised by the fact that he was fixing up his house. He noticed that other people who normally ate with him for lunch were going to another table to eat rather than join him at his table.

“Could you use some help? I work cheap. All it will cost you is a beer every other hour or two,” Tim said with a grin. He made a gesture as if he were downing a beer before grabbing his fork.

“Sure,” Mike said with a shrug of his shoulders. He had a feeling that something else was going on besides a discussion about fishing or working on a house.

“Great, I’ll stop by on Saturday,” Tim said. He took a bite out of his lunch and watched Mike while chewing.

“Wear some old clothes. The work is still mighty dirty,” Mike warned him. Over the weekend they had only gotten about a third of the wallboard up. The panels that went on the ceilings were killers.

“I used to work in construction while going through school,” Tim said shrugging his shoulders as if to dismiss Mike’s concerns. He looked around the cafeteria and paused to watch a table. He said, “Unlike some, I had to work my way through school.”

Mike glanced in the direction that Tim was looking. Tim was gazing at the table filled with Chinese. Nodding his head, Mike said, “Same here, but I was lucky to have the GI Bill helping me out.”

“Yes. I spent a little time in the Marines, too. It helped cover some of the costs of going to school,” Tim said with a wink.

Mike looked at Tim for a second trying to remember if he had ever mentioned that he had been in the Marines. He couldn’t recall such a discussion ever taking place. Trying not to react too much, he nodded his head and said, “It helped us buy our house.”

“Lots of advantages to having served in the military,” Tim said. He turned his attention to eating and the conversation died. When he had finished his food, he rose and said, “I’ll see you Saturday afternoon.”

“Right,” Mike said. He watched Tim leave, realizing that the man hadn’t asked for the address of his house.

Although it was the middle of the week, Mike swung by the house rather than heading straight home. It was time to mow the yard again, and he decided that he’d rather do it after work than to use some of the precious time over the weekend. He pulled the lawnmower out of the garage and tied a piece of rope around the handle so that he could get it started. When he was about to yank the starter cord, the man who lived next door wandered over and said, “Hello, Mike.”

Dropping the starter cord, Mike said, “Hello, Bob.”

“It sure is nice to have a neighbor who takes care of the yard for a change,” Bob said gesturing to the lawnmower.

“Well, it’s still mostly weeds. I figure when we move in here, we’ll kill off the weeds with some weed killer and re-sod the lawn,” Mike said surveying the disaster that had been left behind.

“I’d tell you to get some of that weed and feed that I use, but I don’t think there’s any grass here for it to feed,” Bob said with a laugh. He had to use a lot of that to keep the weeds from Mike’s yard from encroaching on his lawn.

“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it,” Mike said shaking his head sadly with a chuckle.

“You can say that again.”

“We’ll get it in shape soon. Just bear with us while we’re fixing up the house,” Mike said. He knew that the folks in the neighborhood took a bit of pride in their lawns. It was all part of keeping up property values.

“Hey, we understand. After that last bunch that lived here, you’d have had to be a pretty bad neighbor before we’d complain. You need to get the house in shape to live in before you worry about the yard,” Bob said knowing that a nice lawn didn’t keep you warm in the winter.

“Thanks,” Mike said.

“The roofers did a great job,” Bob said gesturing towards the house.

While Mike was willing to take care of the interior of the house, there was no way that he was going to climb up and down ladders with his bad hand. He had hired a roofer to replace the roof of the house and they had done the job over the last week. It was a major improvement to the exterior of the house. The next big job on the exterior of the house was painting it. Mike nodded and said, “They did a good job. I hope they weren’t too noisy.”

“They worked during daylight hours. That was a hell of a lot better than the loud music we used to get at all hours of the night,” Bob said. He had called the police about once a week to complain about the noise coming from that house. If it wasn’t loud music, it was shouting matches.

“I’ll bet,” Mike said.

“Anyway, the reason I came over was to let you know that an FBI agent was by our house the other day asking about you,” Bob said looking around uncomfortably.

“I’m not surprised. They’re just doing a background investigation for my clearance,” Mike said with a smile. He had wondered how long it would be before someone came around asking the neighbors questions.

“That’s what I figured,” Bob said feeling a little relief at the explanation.

“I hope you told him all about our orgies and invited him to attend the next one,” Mike said with a wink.

Laughing at the joke, Bob said, “It completely slipped my mind. I’ll be sure to invite the next FBI agent who stops by to join us.”

At a little after nine in the morning, Tim knocked on the open door of the house and called out, “Hello. I hear that there’s some beer in here.”

Mike stuck his head out of the bedroom and shouted to Tim, “Come on in. We’re putting up wallboard in the bedroom.”

“I guess that explains the white dust that covers you,” Tim said with a chuckle. He looked around the interior of the house with a critical eye. He said, “It looks like you’re doing a good job.”

“We’re taking our time. I want to do it right,” Mike said without remarking that he found it odd that Tim was able to find his house without ever asking for the address.

“Let’s get to it,” Tim said. He had shown up ready to work. Despite the fact that he had a very different reason for being there, he had spent the week looking forward to the chance to do something constructive.

They worked together for the entire afternoon without once talking about work. Tim was a great help in putting the wallboard on the ceiling. With Karen and Tim holding up a panel, it was easy for Mike to nail it into place. True to his word, every hour or so Tim drank a beer.

An hour before dinner time, Tim helped pack up the tools. Once the house was straightened up, he looked over at Mike and said, “That was a lot of fun. Would you mind if I came out next Saturday to help?”

“I’d appreciate the help,” Mike said. The work had gone a lot faster with Karen and Tim holding up the wall board and him nailing.

“Great. I’ll see you next Saturday,” Tim said with a friendly smile. He shook Mike’s hand and then left.

Standing at the door of their house, Mike and Karen watched Tim drive off. Once the car had turned the corner, Karen looked at Mike and asked, “How well do you know him?”

“I’ve only met him a couple of times before today,” Mike answered. The entire day didn’t make sense to him.

“That was really strange,” Karen said.

“I know. We didn’t even talk about anything other than working on the house,” Mike said. Shaking his head, he said, “I really expected him to tell me something important, but the most personal thing he said was to ask for another beer.”

“I noticed that,” Karen said.

“It looks like we are going to have a Democrat in the White House,” Karen said looking over at her husband and her father. The two men were drinking a scotch and listening to the news. The polls leading up to the election were not good.

The early front runners of the Democratic Party had withdrawn from the race leaving behind a ‘peace at any price’ candidate to take the Party’s nomination. Mike suspected that it was because the smarter candidates had come to the realization that they would be inheriting a mess that didn’t have a real solution. He felt that they would rather serve later in their careers than have to reverse themselves on major campaign promises immediately upon being elected. Mike said, “You’re probably right.”

“I’m supposed to be apolitical, but this worries me,” Vincent said. As a military officer he was in the terribly difficult position that he was not allowed to publicly express his political opinions. When President Clinton was in office they weren’t even allowed to repeat political jokes that involved the President.

“We’ll be out of Iraq by June of next year,” Karen said as if it was a given fact.

Her mother, Sally, said, “I remember when we pulled out of Vietnam. That was one of the saddest days of my life.”

“That whole Vietnam mess was horrible. That is a fine example of where politics and especially politicians got in the way of winning,” the Captain said. He swirled his glass before taking a sip of the scotch before adding “We had that war won, until Nixon caved in to the media.”

Nodding his head, Mike said, “So is Iraq.”

“Personally, I couldn’t give a damn about what happens to the Iraqis after we leave. They didn’t step up to the plate and take control of their own country. It’s the message that we send to the brave men and women of our military by leaving Iraq that bothers me,” Sally said with more than a little venom in her voice.

“Down girl,” Vincent said with a smile. He earned a mild glare from his wife and withstood it until her ire disappeared.

“You’re right. I get too emotional about it,” Sally said. Her father had been killed in Vietnam and she was more than a little sensitive about the government sacrificing people without the intention of seeing the actions all of the way through to victory. Shaking her head, she said, “Those cowards who won’t let our soldiers do their jobs drive me crazy.”

Mike shrugged his shoulders and said, “I know what you mean. I think the thing that scares me the most is that they’ll repeal the Patriot Act, close down our detainment facilities, insist on public criminal trials, and tear apart the few effective intelligence programs that we have. We’re going to be defenseless in two years.”

“That’s right,” Vincent said.

Karen said, “You know that a lot of people feel that the Patriot act has elements that violate the first three amendments of the constitution.”

“Since when did foreign nationals who are attacking this country get full American civil rights? They aren’t citizens, but they have all the rights of a citizen except the right to vote. I really doubt that the founding fathers intended us to allow foreign powers to set up shop in this country for the purposes of making war against it,” Mike said.

Vincent nodded his head and said, “I agree with you on that, but I think our whole approach is wrong. We should be pursuing the terrorists under the old piracy laws.”

Mike reread a questionable section of a report on particle beam weapons and marked up one of the paragraphs that bothered him. The Americans had canceled a major research program in particle beam weapons development six months ago and the Chinese had started one at the same time. The principle researcher of the American program had returned to China and was now heading the effort there.