There were lulls in the work when we were waiting for materials, so Lou sent me on other jobs. I crawled on my back under Carly Simon's house installing insulation in her new library. Then I knocked down her living room wall so we could add a new tea room. From her kitchen I called my agent in New York: Random House was sitting on the fence. Could I come down to New York to meet with a senior editor? Is the pope Catholic? On Carly's refrigerator there were pictures of her children and a photo of her mugging with Bill Clinton. Later she threw a party for all of us workmen and sang backup in a pickup band that played past midnight.

Back at Wetherell's the talk was all about the guesthouse and the impending Big Powwow to determine its fate. Something was going on with the archaeologists, the rumors said; something was about to give. The diggers had been there for eight months. Had they found anything or hadn't they? And if they hadn't, then what was the meaning of those times when they ran for the tripods and the cameras and took careful photos of the dirt?

By this time the archaeologists had moved to a new spot 20 yards from the first one. We knew that they were digging where the guesthouse was supposed to go. The Tribal Council was said to be opposed to siting it there as a matter of principle, but others said they were just looking to be bought off. The archaeologists cleaned up their site and said goodbye. They were done. The blue-jeaned one who had so entranced Booboo told me that she was to be married two weeks hence. She was from Texas. She gave me a kiss on the cheek when she said farewell. She never told me anything about what they did or did not find. The only thing we workmen wanted to know was whether we had built that house on an Indian burial ground. The diggers wouldn't say yes and they wouldn't say no. "I'm not supposed to talk about that," Texas said.

I saw Wetherell himself three times. One time I passed close to him and said hello. He did not say hello back. That was on the day of the Big Powwow, when everybody was very tense. Oh, that was a day for theater!

In actual fact I may have some sequences wrong; I don't remember exactly when the Big Powwow occurred, whether it was before or after the day that John Kennedy's plane went down off Noman's. That was a hot day, a Saturday; there were only a few of us there that day. I had gone up Squibnocket to make a form for a little concrete pad that was to hold an air-conditioning unit. That job was more tricky than it sounds, because the pad sat right next to a 6-foot-deep trench that had been redug for the umpteenth time to accommodate some pipe or wire. I had to reinforce the trench so the concrete wouldn't collapse it. So muggy, so hot that day: It was a suffocating fog and you couldn't see more than 50 yards. I knew that something big had to be up when I heard all the planes and helicopters overhead. There was no visibility! It was no day for flying. All the next week we watched the boats searching, and then, later still, the burial. Standing in the great room you can see miles and miles and miles, far out to sea.

A few times that summer -- before the Wetherell family had moved in, before the security system had been activated -- I drove up to the house late at night and walked around the place. It was the least light-polluted on our island. Standing on the back patio, by the pool, you could see the lights on the bridges of Newport, R.I., a million miles away.

The night watchman's name was Chip, a Wampanoag from Aquinnah, hired by the tribe to protect the dig. We talked about what may or may not have been there, under the earth, where we built that house. He didn't know much more than I did, but had heard some rumors. Like me, he had no opinions about ghosts or jinxes. But he told me something interesting: He said that the old ones, the Tribal Elders, had prophesied that the family "would not have one day of happiness in this house." Chip and I felt sorry for them.

I went down to New York, and my agent and I met with some editors: at Random House, at Scribner's, at some place down on the Lower East Side. Oh, it was very flattering and I got my hopes all up. But they rejected the book eventually; they just took longer and teased more than did the other houses. So I decided to publish my book myself. Not having any money, I sent a note asking Mrs. W if she wanted to invest, but I never heard back from her. I found some other sources. I worked deals using the phone in the boiler room on the far side of the theater.

The day of the Big Powwow came. Mr. and Mrs. Wetherell were there; Beverly Wright, the president of the Tribal Council, was there; the architect was there; two selectmen from Chilmark were there; the head archaeologist was there; and there was another person there who was rumored to be the state archaeologist from the state of Massachusetts. After setting up a conference table of sorts around the table saw, I ditched the vacuum and picked up a broom, vainly hoping that I would be mistaken for a Brazilian, and thus invisible, a nonperson. I was doing my "Chief Broom" shtick, from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Oh, how I would have loved to eavesdrop on that powwow! Alas, Glenn, the architect, asked me to leave just as they were rolling out the blueprints and preparing to get started. Damn! Back to carting trash to the dumpster!

Who knows what they talked about? I don't. People speculated that they talked about two things: bones and money. But nobody knows. Autumn came, and Hurricane Floyd came roaring in. In the rain I walked down through the wind-thrashed scrub and moor, wary of ticks and poison ivy, down to the dunes, across that magnificent spooky bowl known as the Devil's Amphitheater and on to the beach, hidden from the house a half-mile behind me. Had I been on Mars I could not have felt more removed from CMGI, from Random House, from dumpsters and NASDAQ and sinking foundations. The ocean churned and wind screamed and sand stung my face. And then I saw, out there by Noman's, halfway to Newport, the most astonishing thing: giant waves crashing in perfect left and right breaks, like the ones off Oahu that those insane guys surf -- towed in by jet-skis -- waves that seemed a thousand feet tall, and so perfectly breaking that the mere sight of them nearly stilled the surfer's heart in my chest. And then, more astounding still, inconceivable, really, I saw a trawler heading out to sea.

When I got back to the house I found that one of the balcony drains had gotten clogged and a bedroom flooded. The wood buckled, later, and the floor had to be replaced, as well as the ceiling below it.

It was a warm October and often on my lunch breaks I stripped naked and swam in the pool while Stevie donned his camouflage suit and disappeared down the hill with bow in hand. CMGI stock went up and up and up.

We finished the great room right before Christmas. The cherry floor shone, and the trim around all the doors and columns likewise. The walls and ceiling were painted white; the table saw had been moved to Lou's shop and our other tools to the basement. It was an austere room, more grand than friendly, but it was very well built and we were proud of it. We knocked off at noon and Lou sent me all the way to Oak Bluffs to pick up beer and pizza. By the time I got back to the house a giant, gleaming grand piano had been delivered and set up, the most wonderful device you've ever seen. The piano had brought along its tuner, and we sat on the floor before the fireplace where the wood stove had once radiated and we opened up those pizza boxes and wished each other Merry Christmas. Then we stopped talking as the tuner played a particularly ferocious bit of Chopin and the sun set over Noman's.

My book came back from the printer and I hit the road to promote it; then I got a job managing the Information Architecture group at Curl Corporation, a Kendall Square software start-up populated with dozens of the smartest MIT geeks you can imagine. At one point I heard that we were trying to get some of the top guys at CMGI to come to Cambridge for a demo, and I thought that it would have been pretty funny were old D.W. and I to wind up talking bits and bytes and strategic alliances. I wanted to ask him about the powwow. But it never happened.

CMGI fell apart, of course, when the new economy bubble burst. The stock hit its all-time high right at the turn of the millennium, and it has been trading at well under a dollar for months now, having lost 99.99 percent of its value. The talk on Yahoo's board is all about when the delisting is going to happen. I lasted two years at Curl before that bubble likewise burst, but that's another story.

There are lots of explanations for why the new economy died. It was a tulip bulb mania that had to end: That's what the pundits say. But I have another explanation. I think it burst because we built that house where we had no business building it. Looking at John Kennedy's plane being hauled up from the bottom, it was hard not to think of Icarus. And of course people will say the same about Wetherell. He is still a wealthy man, but nobody any longer believes that he can fly higher than allowed by physics. He's paid a price for his hubris, they will say. But I've paid a price too. I helped build that house, knowing that it would help me write my book.

Mrs. Wetherell filed for divorce two years ago and got the house. Last week another hurricane passed offshore. I drove up to Squibnocket to look at the ocean. Somehow I had hoped to go all the way up to the point, to see if those freakish swells were breaking off Noman's. But I had to stop at the lot by the beach. Where there used to be a chain at the end of the lot between two pillars there's now a giant electronically controlled gate watched by video cameras and motion detectors, and you're not allowed to go up the road to watch the waves from the point anymore unless you're rich.

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