End of the Road
Woodworker Bill had a shop across the island from my place where the trail I built and maintained through the interior popped out. Where it still does. The property was once the Snowdens, the folks who built Tyee Store in the 70’s, and it was one of the few places on the South End zoned commercial. For that matter, one of the few on the whole damn island. Not that Bill’s was exactly what you would call a commercial operation. He had a commercial quality shop in a huge pole building wired for power tools and set up for serious production.
The shop was set up for serious production but Bill wasn’t. Oh, he’d tackle an odd job here and there. Maybe build Jack Gunter, the gallery owner just down the road, an angular cabinet piece for one of his wild ideas like the Siberian series, something he’d later paint and gilt with gold flakes. The cabinet was the real work of art, nothing 90 degrees, everything skewed and slightly akilter, as if Escher had taken up woodworking. That cabinet took months, maybe a year. One thing about Bill, he was not in any hurry. Another thing, you couldn’t tell him how you wanted anything done — he’d fly off the handle and probably quit right then and there. And he wouldn’t give you a quote. Just an hourly. He sure didn’t want to be trapped in a bid.
His few customers, of course, were trapped in the math of multiplying hours. All of which explains why most days you could find Bill down at the Viking Café or Helen’s Kitchen drinking coffee refills all morning and late into the afternoon, slowly working his way through the paper or chatting it up with the waitresses and regulars.
Bill’s first wife had died young and suddenly of a brain aneurysm. His second died of cancer back in ’92 or so. He bought a Cortez, an industrial version of a travel trailer, and began living in it in the shop while he refitted it. A year later he motored down to Moab, Utah, drifted over to the aptly named Blanding, then after an incident with the trailer park owner, set off for Arizona where the Cortez broke down once and for all. He had it towed to a ramshackle park in Big Puddle or some hellhole of 50 people of similar xenophobic disposition, sort of a South End but without any north or east or west, just the end of the line for another hermit lost and broke in a heatbuckled highway of the 21st Century.
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