Godspeed

Description

Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Award
 
In this riveting new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Shotgun Lovesongs, three troubled construction workers get entangled in a dangerous plan against an impossible deadline.

Why is it being built here, and why so quickly? These are the questions Cole, Bart, and Teddy, the three principals of True Triangle Construction, ask themselves when they are hired to finish a project for a mysteriously wealthy homeowner. Nestled in the mountains outside of Jackson, Wyoming, the house is a masterpiece, unlike anything they’ve done before. Once finished, it promises to be the architectural prize of Jackson and could put True Triangle on the map. But despite the project’s lure, the owner is intent on having it built in a matter of months, an impossible task made irresistible by the exorbitant bonus that awaits them if they succeed. A bonus that could change the course of their business, and their lives.

Up against the fateful deadline, and the looming threat of a harsh Wyoming winter, Cole, Bart, and Teddy are willing to do anything to get the money, even if it means risking life, limb, and family. And what becomes an obsession for all three quickly builds to tragic consequences for some. Struck through with heart-pounding danger and an arresting lyricism, Godspeed is a stark exploration of the haves and the have-nots, a cautionary tale of greed and violence that asks: How much is never enough?One of Lit Hub‘s 20 New Books to Get You Through the Week 

“An effective blend of rural fable and snow-lashed Rocky Mountain noir . . . The set-up is pure Hitchcock. . . . A finely tuned literary thriller and a portrait of small-town life as a Petri dish of hope and hubris.” –Financial Times

“Examine[s] questions about class and capitalism in America while delivering a thriller-style ride. The bad and bloody decisions could be made by any of us desperate enough to chase the real American dream.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Godspeed] has a ticking-clock momentum….Reminiscent of Treasure of the Sierra Madre or A Simple Plan, showing how greed can corrupt even the most upstanding of men.” –Madison Capital Times

“A suspenseful page-turner.” –Wisconsin State Journal

“Godspeed is set against a lush Jackson Hole background of mountains and meadows, mineral springs and wildlife. It contrasts the lifestyles of the very rich against the working poor and the disdain of wealthy faux cowboys for the real thing.” –Denver Post

“Examine[s] questions about class and capitalism in America while delivering thriller-style ride.” –GazetteXtra

“Butler’s award-winning talent as a storyteller (Little Faith) propels his characters on a heart-stopping, daring race with unexpected outcomes. Godspeed indeed.” ­–Library Journal

“As in his previous three novels, Butler brings sympathy and insight to the familiar rituals and dynamics of male friendship….An exceptional tale, once it gets going, of what money can do to those who need it.” –Kirkus Reviews

“This ambitious thriller from Butler highlights the conflict between wealthy transplants and blue-collar locals in the increasingly gentrified rural West.” –Publishers Weekly

“From triumph and tragedy to pathos and redemption . . . As real as anything you are likely to read this year. . . . It’s hard to walk away from Godspeed without being grateful for the life one has, and that in itself makes it more than worth reading.” –BookReporter

“A fast-moving, highly addictive novel of ambition, obsession, and long-festering dreams of the haves and have nots. I loved this book from start to finish and marveled at the expert construction and storytelling.” –Ace Atkins, author of The Revelators and The Heathens

“Godspeed is a page-turning, race-against-the-clock novel about fatal obsession, love, violence, addiction, and faith beautifully set in my home state of Wyoming. After you turn the last page it’ll stay with you for a long, long time.” –C.J. Box, author of Dark Sky

“A glorious novel, as lyrical as it is suspenseful—breathless, tense, and shimmering with the sweat of desperate men. Butler delivers mystery and tragedy against a beautiful, inhospitable backdrop, anchored in the struggles of a thrummingly vivid cast of characters.” —Steph Cha, author of Your House Will Pay

“Is there a novelist writing today more adept at revealing the conflicts in the psyche of the American male than Nickolas Butler? In Godspeed, a novel that moves with the power and velocity of an avalanche, he’s done it again—this time with a tale of men chasing dreams of riches—think The Treasure of Sierra Madre, though in the mountains of the American West—men whose desperation drives them relentlessly toward madness and murder. Butler’s characters, partners in a Wyoming construction company, have agreed to build a woman’s mountainside dream house. If they complete the project by what seems an impossible Christmas deadline, they’ll become wealthy; if they fail, they’ll walk away with nothing. As winter snows bear down on the Tetons, readers won’t be able to turn the pages of Godspeed fast enough.” –Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948 and The Lives of Edie Pritchard

“Set in an American West torn between its pinewood past and marble future, Godspeed is the story of three childhood friends and the construction contract that will make–or break–their lives. What begins as a novel of optimism and ambition morphs into a dark warning about the end-game of American capitalism. With his characteristically rich and transporting prose, Nickolas Butler continues the urgent examination of class and culture he began in his beloved debut, Shotgun Lovesongs.” –John Larison, author of Whiskey When We’re Dry 

“Not many writers can turn any subject into gold, but Nick Butler is one of them. In Godspeed, he tells the story of three buddies and business partners who get an offer that may be too good to be true. What begins as a construction project full of good work and good cheer soon goes off the rails, with dire consequences. This novel is about addiction, ambition, and America at the crossroads of its own demise, and in Butler’s brilliant, capable hands, it ends up feeling like a lived experience.” –Peter Geye, author of Northernmost

“Once again the great Nickolas Butler has expanded his already estimable fictional territory, this time with a page-turner of the highest order set in the New, if quickly vanishing, West. Featuring an unlikely foursome of hardscrabble, fallible characters, and a plot as chiseled and severe as the Wyoming landscape, Godspeed has enough energy to shake a house. As captivating and as durable as No Country for Old Men. Impossible to put down. And even harder to forget.” –Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water

“Godspeed reads like a modern fable or a contemporary western—a bloody and violent version of the American Dream in which ambition, addiction, and frailty are locked in what is at times an almost unbearably painful struggle with loyalty, love, and hope.” –Carys Davies, author of WestNickolas Butler is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Shotgun Lovesongs, The Hearts of Men, and Little Faith, and the story collection Beneath the Bonfire. Butler is the recipient of multiple literary prizes and commendations and has published articles, reviews, short stories, and poetry in publications such as Ploughshares, Narrative, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives with his wife and two children on sixteen acres of land in rural Wisconsin.

1

 

Outside Jackson, Wyoming

 

This was the house that would change their fortunes. They could feel it. Cole had barely steered his pickup off the highway and passed through an open cattle-gate before they began climbing the dusty canyon road north, and they could feel it-money-like a vibration in the crisp mountain air. It was humming out there, an expectancy, a promise, and they were driving toward it, cotton-mouthed, skin crawling. They could practically see it on the wind pushing the late-summer leaves, swaying the yellowing meadow grasses, smiling down upon the dappled river water below. The whole world here looked like money. Money just waiting to be plucked up off the ground-the leaves like greenbacks, the shimmer of the water like silver coins.

 

They needed this house, this break; they needed this work. Work for what sounded like as much as a year, maybe more. And not the thankless, backbreaking tedium they’d been reduced to for the past few years either. No, this was something to build a reputation on, a name, something to stake a man for decades. The kind of signature house a person could point to and proudly say, I built that-me. I built that. The kind of house that, thirty years from now, when they were all broken-down old men, they could travel to with their grandchildren and be welcomed, like masters of some dying art.

 

Bart rode in the passenger seat, blinking down at the chasm that had now fallen away just an arm’s length from the gravel road. Not even a mile off the highway and already the country was wild, wild, wild. Below the road snaked a river raging white and blue, cataracts tumbling, and above them, off the low mountainsides, wispy waterfalls spilled down like great lengths of silver-white hair.

 

A prominent dip of chew bumped out Bart’s lower lip, and by and by he spit into an empty Coca-Cola can. “I lived here almost twenty years, and I ain’t ever been down this road,” he said, peering over at Cole, who took the gravel track with white-knuckled respect. A blown-out tire wouldn’t just be a pain in the ass out here; it would put them behind schedule for their noon meeting with the homeowner. “You ever been back here, Cole?”

 

Cole shook his head no, fixing Bart with a meaningful look for as long as he dared before turning back to the road ahead of them. This is big, pristine, private country, the look communicated. You and me, we don’t just get invited back here.

 

“She told me she had a driveway punched in last summer,” Cole said. “Another two miles or so off this road.” He pointed an index finger up into the mountains. “Somewhere up in there, I’m guessing.”

 

“You imagine the kind of bread they’re spending?” Teddy put in from the backseat of the extended cab. “I mean, a two-mile driveway? Up here? That’s an Army Corps-type operation.”

 

“All that goddamn California money’s, what it is,” said Bart. “Hell, that state’s filling up. Cheaper for them to come out here and plop a house down on a mountaintop than it is to buy a nice two-bedroom in San Diego or Los Angeles. Cheaper to build a house in the clouds. Lunacy, you ask me.”

 

It had been an unseasonably warm spring and summer in western Wyoming, and now the mountain air was as sweet with sage, the late August sky overhead deliriously blue and gauzed in cottony clouds. In the backseat Teddy studied a gazetteer, biting his lower lip and running his fingers over the map. Bart hung an arm out the passenger-side window as the truck began to pull away from the canyonside. Soon they passed through a glade of trees and he reached out for the branch of a lodge pine, managing to snap off a handful of needles. Now the cab of the truck was filled with that smell, comingling with his Copenhagen chew-pine and mint and tobacco.

 

All three men were dressed just a bit more presentably than usual-unstained, newish Carhartt pants, plaid short-sleeve shirts with collars, scuffed work boots buffed up near to a shine. Cole glanced at himself in the rearview, tamping down his brown crew cut with his fingers and studying his newly shaved face-the razor burn beneath his jaw, his recently whitened teeth. Bart went to work with his pocketknife, cleaning beneath his fingernails, while Teddy sighed deeply and drummed his hands against his thighs.

 

Buzzed down practically to his scalp, Teddy’s blond hair betrayed a constellation of blotchy pink-purple birthmarks that Bart occasionally pointed to as proof positive he’d been born with a host of defects-a subpar IQ, a troublingly true moral compass, and a peculiarly deep pride in his wife of twenty years and the four young daughters they had brought into the world. Teddy was Mormon; Bart had once played drums in a death-metal band named Bloody Show. They loved each other like brothers; had ever since their childhood growing up together with Cole in the red-rock, box canyon country of eastern Utah, and then, later, as adults, moving out to Jackson Hole and this mountainous country, first as ski bums chasing near-endless winters of deep powder, tourist girls, and the intoxication of brushing shoulders with celebrities at the town’s bars and cafŽs, and then later still, as men wanting to prove themselves in that same environment, tired of being seen as just townies, the blank-faced ski-lift operators you forgot as soon as you were swept away and up the mountain, the compliant bartender perfectly willing to suffer yet another drunken insult if it meant a ten-dollar tip.

 

Which was why, a few years back, the three men formed True Triangle Construction, an honest-to-god LLC with business cards, letterhead-the whole nine yards. They bought three matching Ford F-150 pickup trucks, fixing a stenciled triangle on the middle of both doors, and for the first time in their lives felt perhaps what their own fathers had felt: purposeful. Yes, they would build houses and condos for the rich vacationers and tourists, sure, but more than that, they’d be building their own company, a legacy, something to leave behind when they could no longer swing a hammer or crawl onto another 11/12 pitched roof. Hell, by then, they’d have a suite of offices, a secretary or three, business lunches downtown, big cowboy hats, and the lean, sun-browned visage of the kind of old men you’d see about town, that particular style and gravitas endemic to old American men of the Rocky Mountains-stern, sinewy, taciturn. Solid as Sears, as their fathers once said.

 

Bumping upward along that gravel road, Cole pictured himself far off and into the future: Friday night at a comfortably appointed restaurant, the bloody remnants of a prime rib and baked potato on a plate, his elegantly aged wife across the table from him, a cup of strong black coffee, a forkful of chocolaty dessert, and then, that relaxation that passes over a contented man able to pay for his meal from a wad of pocket-cash before pushing back from a white-linen tabletop to work a toothpick at the ivories of his teeth.

 

“If we get this projec . . .” Bart began.

 

“When we get this project,” Cole said, pointing a finger into Bart’s biceps. “When, amigo. We need to believe we were destined to build this house. That it’s been, you know, waiting for us, up there in those mountains. Just waiting for our hands. These fucking hands. We need to believe that.”

 

Teddy leaned forward from the backseat until his face was framed by the jostling shoulders of his two friends. A former high school all-conference cornerback, he was susceptible to Hallmark greeting cards, impassioned locker-room speeches, populist politics, and the every whim of his four girls, most recently ballet lessons and a pair of Shetland ponies he and his wife could not quite actually afford.

 

“I mean, can you imagine the size of our fee for a project like this?” Cole nearly shouted. “And if we muscle down and don’t farm out a bunch of the work? Shit, man. This is it. This is our launching pad. This is where True Triangle Construction takes off. You can see it, can’t you? Building houses for rich actors and CEOs. It all starts right here.” He slapped the steering wheel for effect.

 

Cole had no problem imagining it. He had been imagining it, ever since the homeowner called him a week earlier, out of the blue. The truth was, he hadn’t slept much since, each night doubting himself, doubting his own capabilities; frankly, doubting Teddy and Bart. What business did they have, really? Building some multimillion-dollar house? For the past three years they’d been just scratching by, renovating apartments, ski rentals, the occasional commercial project; a shitload of drywalling, roofing, and siding work; and then the odd new construction here and there-a handful of duplexes and a retail strip mall-Jesus Christ, how were they possibly prepared for this?

 

But he’d met the homeowner just the same, in downtown Jackson, at some place called the Persephone Bakery. The baristas were cute if waifish little things, the bakery cases full of extravagant-looking pastries, the coffee strong and expensive, and he waited for her outside on a small porch with two fancy outdoor propane heaters challenging the morning chill.

 

Having worked in construction ever since graduating high school, Cole knew enough to be suspicious of this homeowner-as the customer was always, always referred to: the homeowner-before even meeting her. For starters, why had she selected True Triangle when there were so many better-established builders in the area? For two: He’d worked on dozens of new home constructions in his time doing this, and while it was more common than not for a woman to take charge of the details of a home (selecting tile, say, or cabinet pulls, light fixtures, paint colors-that kind of thing), Cole hadn’t heard this homeowner once mention a husband. Look, he didn’t fancy himself a Neanderthal or what not; maybe she was a lesbian-great. But she hadn’t alluded to that either. Her voice on the phone was just incredibly composed and businesslike, with none of the small talk other homeowners inevitably engaged in to butter up a contractor. They’d just agreed to meet at the bakery, and there she was, clutching a crisp paper cup of five-dollar coffee in one hand as she extended the other to him. Her grip was strong.

 

“Good morning, Mr. McCourt. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

 

His voice caught-she was one of the most attractive women he’d ever met. He could not have said whether she was forty or sixty years old, but she carried herself with a patrician assurance that only compounded his confusion as to, well, why he was the one she’d asked to meet her here. Her hair was long and chestnut red, streaked flinty gray in places; her eyes an arresting gold-on-green. He steadied himself as he sipped his coffee, briefly looking down at the table. In the treetops overhead, birds went on chirping, while out on the sidewalk, great wealth sashayed past in expensive duds looking extremely refreshed, unhurried, on its way to the next recreational diversion. Focus now, Cole thought.

 

“Oh, no,” he said, forcing himself to meet her eyes, “not long, not long at all.” For this woman, he thought, he would wait days.

 

She smiled, a bit wistfully, he thought.

 

“How many years have you been in business, Mr. McCourt? I must say, I looked for your website, but . . .”

 

“Well, around here, Miss-“

 

“Gretchen, please.”

 

“Right. Gretchen. Well, around here, so much of it’s just . . . word of mouth, you know? You do good work, people find you. So, in the three-plus years since we started True Triangle, we haven’t really needed none of that marketing stuff.”

 

“Still, you may want to consider branding yourself a bit more, lest a potential customer suppose all you aspire to is, well, framing and drywalling.”

 

Branding? he thought. He’d worked on his uncle’s ranch as a teenager, branding and castrating cattle; the sizzle and smell of burnt hair and flesh was nothing he wanted a part of again, least of all his own person.

 

“Or maybe that is all you’re interested in, and I’m wasting your time.”

 

He gathered himself anew. “Gretchen, all I can tell you is this: My partners and I have been working construction in and around these parts for about twenty years now. We don’t have any fancy offices, and we don’t live on big ranches or take our vacations down in Turks and Caicos, or anywhere like that. We’re just three hardworking guys, and if you do decide to hire us, I promise we’ll do right by you, ma’am. I’ll give you my word on that.”

 

She sipped her coffee. Cole was aware that beneath the table she was crossing her legs. He studied her face, realizing that the dark bronze freckles arrayed across her nose and cheeks were something he dearly wanted to touch; he imagined himself in bed beside her, in the morning, her earlobe in his mouth, her scent exotic tea and expensive perfume, or perhaps horses and honey, or just cold mountain air.

 

Cole and his wife were in the midst of a decidedly conclusive separation, and close, he knew, to officially divorcing. His life had taken on a wobbly quality. Cristina seemed to be living with her new guy, their once shared apartment now sitting largely vacant. He’d begun boxing up some of his possessions in a half-assed sort of way, willfully disbelieving that their separation was actually permanent. He’d been less than forthcoming with his partners about what was going on, though in the back of his mind was the dread that the most sensible thing for him to do was to move in with Bart, a surefire sign that his life was in retrograde.

 

“You do give the impression of a man who is trustworthy,” Gretchen said, blowing lightly on her coffee.

 

Trustworthy? He sure as hell was. Wasn’t him stepping out of a seven-year marriage. Though, sitting here, so close to Gretchen they might have been lovers out for their morning coffee, he did allow himself a moment to ponder what that might feel like-stepping out.

 

“I appreciate that,” he said.

 

“And discretion is certainly something I’d value, were I to choose your firm to construct my home.”

 

His firm. He briefly imagined the scope of the project. Imagined that website she had just mentioned-the one he hadn’t even thought to commission-and photographs of this house, in that style of glitzy, dream-home pornography where every image seems dipped in some kind of golden dew. And perhaps, in just a few photos, Gretchen standing beside him-the builder-on a panoramic porch, or leaning against a monolithic kitchen island, clutching mugs of chamomile. Let his future ex-wife ruminate on that. . . .

US