No more empty spaces, p.8
No More Empty Spaces, page 8
After wolfing his sandwich, Kevin lay down and appeared to be scanning the sky, his hand shading his eyes. He rolled onto his side, facing away from the rest of them, then reached behind him, his hand feeling around on the blanket. Will bent down and put his camera in his hand.
The boy seemed to be snapping pictures in a half dream. He tipped his head back to look at the camera’s settings, his bangs ruffled on his forehead in the light breeze. He flicked a knob, slid the focus in and out, squinted into the viewfinder, pressed the shutter. Click, click, click. Will followed the lens of Kevin’s camera to see where his son was aiming, but all he saw were puffy white clouds gathering in the distance.
Paula stood and stretched. She reached her hand out to Didi, and the girls wandered off to explore the fallen heads of this temple. Will lingered, watching Kevin and listening to him murmur to Buddy, who’d snuggled up to his master’s chest. Though they were close in proximity, he felt so far, so detached from him. He hoped Kevin would forgive him, that he’d come to understand that Will had done the only thing he could have.
He looked north and west, again following Kevin’s lens, and found the puffy white clouds were building into thunderheads. The wind had picked up.
“Time to go,” Will called out. “Storms build fast in the mountains.” Thunder sounded, as if to punctuate his statement. “I don’t want to take that road in a downpour.”
Cold, fat drops began to fall as they scrambled down the boulder field just before the last part of the trail.
“These rocks’ll get slippery. Didi, climb on,” Will said, stooping to pick her up piggyback. “Come on, you guys,” he said, looking back to check on the others. Kevin picked Buddy up and leapt from one rock to the next. Paula moved fast, nimble and steady, using both her feet and hands.
They were soaked through and chilled in the few minutes it took to get to the Land Cruiser. Didi shivered against him. But Will was more concerned with the condition of the road than their own condition. He’d turn the heat on to dry out and warm up on the way down.
“Load up! Fast,” he shouted over the building wind.
He had the wipers on their highest speed and still could barely see the road. Wind gusts slammed sheets of rain into the windshield. He caught a glimpse of the track with each swipe of the blades, but he was feeling his way more than seeing it. The sky darkened to steel gray. Though it didn’t seem possible, the rain got harder. Will eased to a stop.
“Maybe it’ll lighten up in a few minutes,” he said. “It blew in fast. It could blow out fast.”
The rain pounded on the roof, and the wipers beat back and forth. Kevin held Buddy against him, and Paula held Didi. No one spoke. Will turned the defroster up a notch.
The sound of the rain changed.
Hail? Will thought.
There were plinks and tinks against the metal of the roof. He strained to see out the windshield but didn’t see any hailstones.
Then something crashed onto the hood.
“What the. . .?” Kevin started.
“Shit!” Will jerked the Cruiser into gear. “We can’t wait. That’s dirt and rocks raveling off the cliff.”
He drove ahead as fast as he dared, occasionally scraping the side view mirror on the cliff face. Better that than losing a tire off the drop-off he couldn’t see but he knew was there on the right.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Then came a sound like a train approaching. Will pressed harder on the accelerator. He knew it could only mean one thing here where there were no trains—a rockfall. He hoped like hell it was behind them, not ahead, or worse, right above. The Land Cruiser curved around a bend and thumped over a rock Will couldn’t see in the track.
It got louder. Will gripped the wheel and leaned forward, though that didn’t improve his vision in the least. He pushed harder on the gas. Another crash. The air roared.
And then it was just the rain drumming and the wipers thrashing.
* * *
Off the mountain, at the intersection with the road to Malatya, Will pulled the Land Cruiser over and cut the engine. He exhaled long and loud. He was proud of his crew. Though their eyes were wide, they’d all hung tough during the storm and the rockfall. Even Buddy hadn’t so much as whimpered. He reached over and tousled the puppy’s ears.
As luck would have it, the rockfall had been behind them. No telling how far, but not very. Hadn’t Will been musing about feeling truly alive a few hours ago? The physical manifestations of fear and excitement were not so easy to tell apart, and on the trip down the mountain, his cells were singing in high C.
* * *
When Will pulled up to the house, he left Kevin and Buddy asleep in the passenger seat, climbed out of the Land Cruiser, and opened the door behind him. He and Paula did a slow-motion dance as she maneuvered out of the car holding his little girl. He slid his left hand under Didi’s dangling legs and reached his right around her back. His hand swept up the side of Paula’s body as he did, his fingers briefly noting each bone of her rib cage. Without thinking, he leaned down, and his lips brushed hers. Her eyes widened, then she closed them, raised her chin, and returned his kiss. Her lips felt warm against his, and he let it linger. He began to explore her mouth with his tongue, her teeth small and smooth, her taste sweet.
Didi shifted, and the kiss ended. Will scooped his daughter out of Paula’s arms and stepped back.
“I should get her to bed,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Quite a day. We were lucky.”
“Very. A ’benture, Didi would say.”
“What would you say?” Paula asked.
“I’d say I feel very lucky right now.” He leaned forward over his sleeping daughter and kissed Paula again.
ELEVEN
August 4, 1973
Dear Mom,
Merhaba! That means “hello” in Turkish. How are you? I’m fine. Dad said you guys just talked, and you were away the whole two weeks we’ve been gone. I hope you had a good time.
It’s pretty neat here. We’re in the mountains again. I hadn’t realized how much I missed them. It’s sort of like where we lived in Pakistan, hilly and almost like a desert. Our house isn’t as nice as it was there, and we don’t have any servants. We cook or go to the dining hall to eat. Dinners are better when we cook, but there are no dishes to wash when we go to the dining hall.
The best thing about being here is Buddy. He’s our puppy! Poor little guy was all by himself outside, and after we checked with the villagers and no one said they’d lost him, Dad said we could keep him. He’s the best dog ever. He’s an Anatolian shepherd and they can get really big, but Dad thinks maybe he won’t, because he was malnourished. He’s eating and growing like crazy now. I take him on a hike every day. We’ll do that until school starts on August 20. Seems kind of early for school to me. It’s almost a month earlier than the Turkish kids in the village start. We’ll be going to a school for all the American kids here at the dam.
Rob and Didi are fine. Rob made friends with a Turkish kid named Timur. He loves baseball too, only he’s a Mets fan. His uncle in New York sent him a Mets jersey. Rob’s pretty jealous, so maybe we can get a Phillies jersey for him for Christmas. Timur has his own baseball diamond, and he and Rob hang out there all the time. Some days, Timur’s cousins come up from the village and they make teams and get a real game going. I played a couple of times, but I’m bigger than they are, so it isn’t really fair.
Didi loves Buddy. Sometimes she pesters him, though. When I tell her to quit, she goes and works on her cartwheels. She’s learning to do handstands too.
We’re all learning some Turkish words. The teacher says we’ll learn even more when school starts. I guess that’s all that’s going on here. Miss you, Mom.
Love, Kevin
P.S. I’ll send some pictures after we get the darkroom set up.
* * *
Kevin reread the letter. It wasn’t exactly “all that’s going on here,” but he didn’t think his mother would appreciate hearing about how he really found Buddy, or the rockfall that nearly trapped them on Nemrut Dağı, or Paula. Especially Paula—whom they saw every day, who taught them the Turkish words they knew, who helped Didi with handstands, who baked the dog treats he used in Buddy’s training, and who he thought might be Dad’s girlfriend.
He folded the loose-leaf pages into the envelope Paula had given him. She’d offered him the stamps he needed, but he asked Dad if he could walk to Kayakale village on Monday to buy some at the postane, which meant “post office” in Turkish.
Since the week before, they all had chores—Kevin mopped the floors, Rob cleaned the kitchen, and Didi helped Paula with the laundry. When his father assigned their tasks, he took cleaning the “head,” which was what he always called the bathroom. Kevin thought he got the hardest task, but Dad took the worst one, so he didn’t say anything.
They got their allowances that day, so Kevin had some “walking-around money,” as his father called it. He’d buy the stamps and mail all their letters to Mom (which Paula said they should write). He’d check out the film in the village store too (even though he had enough for a while longer). Maybe he’d even get some dondurma, which meant “ice cream” in Turkish. Not that he’d admit it to anyone, but this was an adventure, and he was kind of enjoying it.
TWELVE
Will leaned over the drafting table in his office. He had two maps in front of him. One showed the boreholes from the site investigation, and the other showed the foundation grouting plan. He studied one, then the other, then he clicked some lead out of the tip of his mechanical pencil. Correcting for the maps’ differing scales, he marked the borehole locations on the grouting plan. Next, he slid the stack of borehole logs down from the corner of the table. One by one, he compared the logs against the records of the failed grouting operation.
It took hours. A niggling feeling that there was a problem started with the first few logs and grew as the hours passed. Something was wrong. What he thought might be a mistakenly located borehole or two was instead a disturbing pattern. Log after log noted long runs of Kayakale marble with only minor fracture zones, if any. But those boreholes were colocated with grout holes that had never stopped taking grout, indicating huge voids in the subsurface. One of the data sets was very wrong.
Will knew the grout hole locations were correct. The pipes, abandoned when the grouting program floundered, were still in the field to be measured. And he and Refik had done that—twice. The survey locations on the plan were correct.
He set his pencil down and massaged his temples with his fingertips, while staring at the maps and logs spread out before him. Could he trust any of the data gathered prior to his arrival? As he had every day in the field, he wished he’d found a way to bring his plane over. He was sure a view from above would give him clues that the ground work and this so-called data couldn’t. He ran his hands up and back through his hair. He considered what to do next. Measure the grout holes one more time? Or go talk to Borkan now? He drummed his fingers on the desk.
The metal chair scraped on the concrete floor when Will shoved back from the table. After one more glance at the bogus borehole logs, he left his office, crossed the open room where the junior engineers’ desks were lined up, and knocked on Borkan’s door. He stepped into his colleague’s office and closed the door behind him. “Something’s wrong.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Ross,” Borkan said, looking up from a pile of papers, pen in hand. “We are aware of that. I believe that is why you are here. No?”
In spite of himself and the problem at hand, Will smiled at Borkan’s formality.
“I don’t just mean with the foundation,” Will said, serious again. “I mean with the entire data set from the site investigation.”
“Perhaps you could be more specific,” Borkan said.
Will explained what he’d been doing since morning and concluded, “So either the drillers didn’t know what they were doing, or the borehole loggers didn’t, or the surveyors who put those locations on a map didn’t. Or some combination of the above. Or maybe those logs were fabricated. Maybe they didn’t do any drilling at all. They might as well not have, for the good it did.”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment.
“How can I use any of the data from the site investigation?” Will asked. “I can’t.” He answered his own question.
Borkan peered across the desk at him. “You are certain?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Who was responsible for that study?”
“I assume it was my predecessor here,” Borkan said.
“I figured,” Will said, sliding his hands into his pockets and leaning against the back of the door.
“You know, Erdem . . . may I call you Erdem?” Will paused. Borkan dipped his chin in assent.
“Browning told me he didn’t want me here. Maybe that’s because he knew I’d figure this . . . this”—Will waved his hands in front of him—“mess out. Is he trying to cover it up?”
“Perhaps he didn’t know of the errors. Assuming you are correct.”
“I am,” Will said.
“We can resurvey the grout holes. I will have that done.” Borkan made a notation on a pad. “We cannot go back and resurvey the boreholes, of course. The surface has been disturbed. I agree that if we cannot be sure of the data, we cannot use it.”
“So what’s next? Don’t we need to tell someone?”
“I do not see what good that would do.” Borkan tapped his pen on the notepad.
Again, the men looked at each other, silent for a moment. Then Borkan sighed. He picked up the pile of papers in front of him and tapped them to straighten their already-straight edges. He replaced them on the desk and glanced up at Will. “We must define the foundation conditions properly. I have been authorized to spend what is needed in order to do that. Please write the specifications for the field program you need, Will. May I call you Will?”
Will nodded.
“How soon can you have them done?” Borkan asked.
“Two days?”
“Please proceed then. We will go over them first thing Thursday morning.”
“I’m on it,” Will said over his shoulder as he strode out of Borkan’s office.
But when he got to his office door, Will decided not to go in. He’d been buried in the logs all day. His eyes felt bleary. He needed a break. He trotted down the office steps to go outside, get some air. With his hands on his hips, he stood and squinted up toward the sun. The hot, dry breeze of the August afternoon ruffled his shirt.
He remembered it was the kids’ first day of school, so he headed for the schoolhouse, thinking he’d have a quick look. The boys still seemed at loose ends to him, and he was hoping school would tie up some of the frayed bits of their lives, like work was doing for him. He climbed the schoolhouse stairs. There were windowpanes in the top half of the door, and Will stepped up and to the side, where he wouldn’t be visible from the classroom.
Paula stood at the front of the room. She wore a silvery gray skirt, straight and slim and down to just below her knees. He supposed it was meant to be conservative, but instead it accentuated her sleek figure. Her button-down shirt was bright white and neatly pressed. The sleeves were what Kat used to call three-quarter length, when she went on and on about her shopping excursions. They showed off Paula’s thin wrists and graceful hands, which fluttered a bit as she talked. She looked professional. Also lively. And pretty, from her head to her toes. These were not qualities that Will generally expected in one package.
He heard her lilting voice through the open windows but could only catch a word or two. From where he stood, all three of his children seemed as intent on Paula as she was on her students. Satisfied, he backed down the schoolhouse stairs. Better not to be seen, interrupt the lesson, and embarrass his kids. An ironic smile twisted his lips when he thought about how mortified he’d have been if his mother had ever barged into one of his classes.
The truth was his mother had never shown up at any school event, not even parent–teacher conferences. Will had always made excuses for her—at school, if not in life. She’d made it clear he was an inconvenience at best. Leaving him with distant cousins or accommodating friends for months at a time when he was a boy, she’d happily let him sign up as a Marine at sixteen. But when he finished college (which she’d repeatedly declared a waste of time while he attended) and landed his first professional job, then she crowed long and loud about all she’d done to make her son a success. As he walked across the compound, a short, sharp snort escaped him at the memories.
Before mounting the office stairs, Will looked back at the little schoolhouse and congratulated himself on how different a parent he was for his kids.
* * *
Kevin thanked his father for taking the day off, and he glanced over from the driver’s seat and smiled.
“Getting the darkroom set up’ll make this more like home. Besides, it’s the weekend, and I’m waiting to hear back on a big piece of work, so there’s really nothing for me to do. When was my last day off, anyway?”
Kevin thought a minute. “The day after we went to Nemrut Dağı.”
He recognized that his father just told him he was only doing this because it wasn’t interfering with something more important. It would be nice if, every now and then, their family was the something more important.
“You’re right. Wow, that’s something like a month ago. I’m due,” his father said, rubbing his whiskered chin.
“You’re growing a beard,” Kevin observed.
“I guess so. It’s just something I’ve done ever since field camp in college. If I’m working in the field, I don’t shave. There wasn’t a good option back then; we were camping. But I could shave now. I just haven’t. What do you think?”
“It’s okay,” Kevin said, but he noticed that Dad’s beard was even more silvery than his hair.
