Chapter 29

July 2004

Things drifted back toward normal over the next few weeks.

By now it was the height of the construction season. As always, Randy had several jobs going. He didn't like to say that any one of them was more important than any one of the others, but some drew more of his attention.

The lodge extension at Three Pines was important, but almost routine; once the excavating work was done and the concrete was in, the job became about like the rest of the Three Pines jobs that Clark Construction had done over the last few years. Randy had put together a crew that did Three Pines work almost exclusively, and several men on the crew were from the reservation. It was still necessary for Randy or Carlos to run over there for various reasons two or three times a week, but that was less than it had been in the past. There was another new lodge building potentially in the cards for another year, and finalizing that took some time, too; at least there would be work on the books for the next year.

The pellet plant at Clark Plywood was only a few blocks away, so running over there to check it out was much easier. A fairly simple steel building, it went up quickly and was closed in before the end of June. However, there were a number of internal details that needed to be done and some secondary construction. Machinery for the plant was soon arriving a piece or two at a time, and the Clark Construction crew was pressed into service, along with some heavy equipment, to put it into place. Arrival and placement of equipment was now the pacing item on getting the plant done. It was something Randy had no control over, and from a Clark Construction viewpoint had no real interest in, but from a Clark Plywood viewpoint he had to be concerned about it. Fortunately, his father did most of the bugging of the fabricating company downstate that was building the equipment.

The job that drew most of Randy's attention, not surprisingly since it was so unusual, was the Newton house on Windmill Island. A week after Rachel and Jared arrived in Spearfish Lake, Don was ready to set up the stringers for the tower – they were made of laminated wood and were long and heavy. In spite of his determination to not bother the very senior construction superintendent, Randy decided that he really wanted to be there for that. One morning he paddled his kayak out to the island, and with the Newtons sat back and tried to stay out of the way.

The toughest part of the job was getting the first two stringers up, one of which had the ring already attached at the top that the rest of the stringers would fit into. It turned out to be anticlimactic; Jim Wooten had worked up a gin pole arrangement to make the first stringer and the ring easier to lift. It only took him a couple of minutes with the backhoe to get the pieces up and hanging with the stringer more or less in position and held with cable stays. It took a while to reset equipment to the opposite side and lift the second one, and then quite a bit of subsequent jiggling around to tie it into the ring and get it bolted into place, but once there it wasn't likely to go anywhere. The third and fourth stringers went up that afternoon, too, much the same way, and that stabilized the structure to the point where, the next day, pulleys and a direct lift could be used for the rest of the stringers, rather than having to fiddle with the the gin pole.

Randy wasn't there the next day for all of that, but paddled his kayak out late in the afternoon just to see how they were coming. By then the last stringer was going into place, and with the tower support in place Randy could see that it was going to be an impressive building indeed when it was finished. He tried to imagine how it would look with the building complete and the windmill blades attached, but the reality of the tower in front of him as he sat offshore in his sea kayak didn't quite match up to the appearance of the renderings. It was going to be so much more impressive!

With the tower up, the Newtons got into their Lake Amphibian and took off for home, promising to drop back by in a couple weeks to see how things were going. After they left, Randy pretty well made up his mind that he'd leave Don alone for a while; erecting the actual building was not only something Don knew how to do, but he could do it much better than Randy.

He got back to the office just as Rachel and Regina were picking up for the day. Rachel hadn't wanted to put off getting to work; it just put her old life that much further behind her, just as Randy had hoped. It turned out to be good timing; the summer intern they had hired hadn't worked out at all well, and on the Friday of the week Rachel and Jared had come to town, Randy and Carlos agreed that there was no point in putting up with him any longer. Although she knew almost nothing about construction, Rachel moved into the intern's office and took over at least some of his duties; Randy and Carlos had to take over the rest of them. Regina started Rachel out on keeping time sheets and reports, which could get a little confusing with people moving between jobs, but she soon got the hang of it.

One problem arose in the first few days. Randy had been out at the 484 job, and a couple things weren't going well, so a conference with Mike was needed, and that went past quitting time. He got back to the office to discover that Rachel wasn't there; she'd called Nicole to come pick her up from work.

"This is going to happen again," Randy said over dinner. "Rachel, I think we need to get you some wheels."

"But Randy!" she protested, "I haven't had a driver's license in years. Joel would never let me drive."

"So?" Randy said. "Do I have to give you the lecture again? I know you know how to drive. Tomorrow, I'll find the time to run you over to the Secretary of State's office, and we'll get you a new Michigan license."

"You're right, of course," she sighed. "But how am I going to pay for a car?"

"That's part of what you have a job for," Randy grinned. "Don't worry, Dad and I will help you out."

Under the circumstances Rachel didn't feel like she needed a really snazzy car, so the next evening there was a five-year-old Chevy Cavalier parked in the driveway. "It'll do for now," she said. "But Randy, you don't know how good it is to have my own car and be able to drive where I need to, when I want to."

"I went through something like that when I turned sixteen," Randy said. "I remember it, and you ought to, too."

After that they left for work about the same time unless Randy had to go in early for some reason or another, but Randy soon noticed that it always took Rachel longer to get to work than it did him. It was some time before he discovered that Rachel was taking the time to drive by the jail, park her car on the street, get out before flipping a middle finger at the building, getting back in and heading off to work. He said nothing about it, but couldn't help but wonder if Joel was seeing it, or what he might think.

If having Rachel and Carlos helped Randy out during the day to make his work schedule a little more slack than he'd been accustomed to in years past, the evenings made up for it. Randy made a point of trying to make it to at least a part of all of Jared's Little League games, and as it turned out he only missed a few innings. On the evenings that he didn't have practice or a game, if there was a nice breeze Randy and some of the others were out in the sailboat with Nellie, learning how to sail. It wasn't as complicated as Randy had feared, and it turned out that his experience with Scooter on the Felicity Ann a few years before gave him a running start. By the middle of June, Nellie told him that there was no reason that he couldn't take it out by himself so long as a hard blow wasn't in the forecast, but that she'd love to come along for the ride when there was room.

Randy found the evening sailing in the light breezes to be relaxing, and also gave him time to think. On occasion his mother came over to watch the kids, leaving the boat to Randy, Nicole, and Rachel. Those were almost always interesting evenings, and occasionally Rachel would talk about the hell she'd been through with Joel, just getting it out of her system. It was obviously going to be a while before she managed it totally, but she seemed continually happier as time went on. On occasion they'd drop anchor in some isolated spot at the far end of the lake and take the opportunity to go swimming – often in the nude if no one else was around, but wearing swimsuits if there were. Rachel was loosening up a lot, and getting to be more and more like the big sister Randy remembered.

A couple of different times during that period Dave and Ruth came up for the weekend, at least to be supportive and see how Rachel was coming along. However, they hadn't yet made it out to Grandfather Brent's hunting cabin, until one Saturday Randy took them out there in the pickup.

Ryan had been right – the place was sound, but needed work. Not so much repairs, but it looked like Brent hadn't cleaned it for years, and as far as he knew Brent hadn't been out there at all in the five years or so before his death. "Well," Dave sighed, "It looks like we've got a lot of work ahead of us if I'm coming up here for hunting season."

"Yeah, it looks like it," Ruth agreed. "I still like the idea of coming out here in the winter sometime. Randy, do those friends of yours still have their dog teams?"

"More of them than you can shake a stick at," he told them. "Frankly, a winter weekend out here with you guys sounds like a lot of fun to me. But rather than you guys going to a lot of trouble, why don't we just get the whole gang out here for a workbee weekend sometime? I mean, Dad, Mom, Nicole, and Rachel along with the four of us. That might make things go a little more quickly, and I'll bet Jared could be a big help."

It wound up taking a couple weekends, but the place was cleaned up adequately; Randy had a couple of his carpenters take on a little on-the-side extra work on the place, just to make sure everything was right.