Pike's Folly

by Mike Heppner

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Nathaniel Pike, a headstrong billionaire, is purchasing a piece of federal land in New Hampshire’s White Mountains and turning it into a huge, inaccessible parking lot. Orbiting Pike and his aspirations is a cast of perfectly flawed eccentrics: Marlene, who is shy and vulnerable but also a budding exhibitionist; Stuart, Pike’s assistant, who is Marlene’s husband and a failed writer; and Heath, who films Marlene’s public nudity and turns her into an Internet star. In this grand tale of the folly of the modern world, Mike Heppner skewers the extravagance of wealth, and the class that grows up around that wealth, even as he casts a humane look at the people involved.

Release date: December 18, 2007

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 336

Sample

“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.