Borderlines (2 page)

“Hard not to in this town.” I watched her back out and drive north, up through town, and thought again of Gail. She, too, was younger than I, although in her forties. She was smart and strong and reasonable, both a successful realtor and an effective town selectman. She, like I, enjoyed being independent, and so we lived apart, getting together only when it suited us both, which had been less and less lately. It had been a while since we’d shared a laugh, or much of anything. I hadn’t told Gail I was leaving for Gannet until this morning, thereby highlighting the sorry state of our friendship. I’d decided beforehand what her response would be, and had thereby guaranteed it. She’d greeted the news, and its late delivery, with a chilling-cold anger. It had been a self-fulfilling prophesy, but it had nevertheless come as a shock. I’d orchestrated things so that only her pleas could reverse them. She, predictably, had passed on the opportunity.

I got my duffel bag out of my car and parked it inside the front door of the house. Then I started walking toward town on the left shoulder of the road. The sun had just set, the shadows were darkening, and the evening’s chill was now coming up around me like a blanket. The radio had predicted a low in the mid-twenties tonight. Gannet had no sidewalks, just the road cutting across driveways and the occasional scraggly front yard. A few of the houses, on my left, didn’t even face the street. The mobile homes, none of which would ever be mobile again, had a stranded look, as if they’d reluctantly put down roots after being abandoned beside someone else’s house.

There was a fence or two, a swing set, a few stray dogs.

Properties blended into one another, making it difficult to figure who might lay claim to the odd, rusted weed-strangled car that lay somewhere between two homes-what Gail, with her realtor’s acerbic eye, called “Vermont planters.” If there was a nucleus to Gannet, it lay in the large island of land ahead on my right, hemmed in by Gannet’s four streets. There, the houses were older but equally dilapidated. They faced the road like circled wagons, with unfenced back yards abutting one another, forming an untamed field of sorts in the middle, pockmarked by seemingly stray gardens, bushes, or leafless shade trees. During summers past, Leo and I had used this inner field, about the size and length of two football fields end to end, as a communal playground, and it was a natural magnet for every kid in the area.

As I came abreast of South Street, I saw the first real sign of life-four children playing with an incredibly mangy dog. They were dashing back and forth in the middle of the dirt road, chasing stones, sending up a thin cloud of dust that glowed in the dying light. I was struck by their identical tattered-quilt suits, reminiscent of what Chinese troops wore in the fifties, when I was being underpaid to fight them in Korea. I couldn’t tell if the kids were boys or girls-they all had long hair, tied back at the nape of the neck to keep it out of their faces. They stopped playing when one of them saw me. I waved, but to no response. They stood stock-still, ignoring the barking dog, staring at me not in wonder or curiosity, but as nervous animals might, transfixed by the sight of a dreaded predator. I was chilled by both implications: that I might be seen as a threat to these youngsters; and that they had been trained to see me, and presumably others like me, as blatant enemies. It made me feel there was a larger presence among us, an invisible authority dictating how people should be perceived.

The ominous spell only lasted a moment. The dog finally bumped one of the kids to gain its attention, and they all returned to their game with the same enthusiasm as before. But the episode startled me, and concerned me, too.

Buster had mentioned these people once on the phone. Oddballs, he’d said, members of a back-to-nature group that had bought most of the buildings on South Street and on the lower half of Atlantic. They didn’t use electricity, didn’t believe in money, didn’t own cars, and, according to Buster, had set up the only legitimate business enterprise the town had ever seen-something called The Kingdom Restaurant. The contradiction about money threw me off at the time, but Buster had merely laughed and said he wasn’t going to probe. Some of the people who came to eat there also topped up their cars at Buster’s garage.

The garage, on my left, was locked up tight, looking like a rusty beached Liberty ship, far from the sea. What little I knew about cars, I’d learned here, tinkering on an assortment of wrecks. I’d never known if they belonged to Buster, were headed for the dump, or were actually the property of paying customers. Directly opposite-once a demurely rotting erstwhile farmhouse-stood the Kingdom Restaurant, its windows glowing yellow. Several cars were parked out front.

I cut diagonally across the street to where a familiar figure was putting the final shine on the roof of a 1943 Chevrolet fire truck. He was standing on the running board and had his back to me, caught in the circular gleam from the sole streetlight by the road. The truck was parked in front of a two-bay firehouse with GANNET VOLUNTEER FIRE

COMPANY carefully painted in red on the wall between the first and second floors.

“Hello, Rennie.” Rennie, a man about my own age, turned with the rag still in his hand. He didn’t get down, but just looked at me from where he stood and smiled. “Joe Gunther, you son of a bitch. How the fuck are you?” I laughed and shook my head. “I’ve been better. How are you?” His familiar round, florid face broke into a theatrical scowl. He was a barrel of a man, short, square, and muscular, his body more a monument to hard work and fatty foods than to genetics. The diet had undoubtedly also contributed to his increasingly flushed skin tone, which by now had progressed to the stage where he looked either on the brink of blowing sky-high, or of having a major heart attack. He stepped down and shook my hand. “Pissed off. I told the others to be here to give the trucks their last wash and wax before winter, and I’m the only one that showed up. I’ve been here the whole fucking day.”

“Can’t compete with the deer.” “Deer, shit. Just a bunch of drunks with rifles. What’re you doing’ up here?” His eyes were shining, and he still hadn’t released my hand. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed his company.

“Temporary job for the State’s Attorney-moonlighting.” Rennie snorted, dropped my hand, and retrieved a can of car wax from the roof of the cab. “Well, that chicken shit needs all the help he can get.

What’s the job?” “Some town clerk dipping into the till. I’m supposed to dig up the proof.” “Murial’s dipping? Damn, you’d think she’d live better than she does.” “Not Murial, different town. I just thought I’d stay with Buster while I’m in the area.” He got behind the wheel of the fire truck. “Yeah?” he said nonchalantly, looking completely uninterested. “What town?” I grinned at him. “Nice try.” He started the engine with a tremendous roar and eased the truck backward into the station. The clearance between vehicle and doorframe was about an inch and a half on all three sides. Another truck-a ‘55 Chevy-stood at gleaming attention at the mouth of the second door. I crossed over to it as Rennie killed the motor and came around the front.

“Memory row, huh?” I smiled and patted the red fender. “I remember when Buster first rode this into town.” “Yeah, the only brand-new truck we ever had.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’m still partial to Engine 1, though, even if it is Army surplus. That son of a bitch has never been a problem.” “And this has?” Rennie shrugged. “I don’t like it as much.” I knew it wasn’t the truck-it was the fact that it was Buster’s baby. Buster was Chief-seemingly always had been-while Rennie had worked his way up to Assistant Chief through pure attrition.

During my first vacations up here, Rennie and I had been “junior firemen,” duped by that meaningless title into sweeping, cleaning, washing, polishing, waxing until we’d qualified as Grade-A maids, all seemingly under the stern direction of anyone and everyone in the department eighteen years or older. My willingness to “shovel the shit,” as Rennie put it, despite my connection to the Chief, had formed the initial basis of our friendship.

That had later blossomed as we’d graduated to manning equipment and fighting fires-albeit only the minor ones-always together, always a team. We’d even exchanged letters throughout the school year, comparing notes on how many ways adults conspire to torture teenagers.

We were young men by the time Buster rolled into town on the new Chevy in 1955-both veterans. That was the last time I was to spend more than a couple of days in Gannet at one time. My connection to Rennie faded in intensity after I signed on as a policeman in Brattleboro; the correspondence died of neglect and memories began to replace an updated friendship.

It had seemed reasonable to think that Rennie would eventually replace Buster as Chief. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Buster was in his eighties somewhere, and it looked like he would outlive us all. I imagined that fact, along with all the other intangibles that had grown between the two of them through the years, had created a kind of low-level but permanent friction.

Rennie, like most of the other people in Gannet, worked in St.

Johnsbury. He was a loading dock foreman for a large trucking firm, or at least he was the last time I saw him.

I walked to the back of the station, reflecting on how many hours I’d spent in this building, so many years ago. Attached to the 55’s backstep, I discovered two shiny new Scott-Paks, breathing tanks and masks used for entering smoky buildings. I raised my eyebrows and pointed at them. “Pretty fancy. When did you get those?” Rennie grinned. “Ever try one on?” “A few times. We used to carry them in our patrol cars in case we had to go in with the firefighters. We dropped it, though. The training was costing a lot and the Fire Chief felt his turf was being invaded.” “Too bad, they’re kind of fun. The Order gave ‘em to us-good will gesture, I guess.” “The Order?” “Yeah. The Natural Order. The cult, or whatever you call it.

Haven’t you heard about them?” I nodded. “I thought they didn’t support this kind of stuff.” “They don’t. But their leader is a real politician. He holds all the money, has electricity in his house, drives a car. He’s no fool-got the best scam running I ever seen. He gave us those and a couple of new portable pumps; he even tried to buy us beepers for when we get a call, except we don’t have a system that would trigger the beepers.” “What’s his name?” “Depends. If you’re a member, he’s called The Elephant; real name’s Edward Sarris. Nice enough for a nut; sure spreads the money around. Christ, when they moved into town, they paid top dollar for all those houses-cash, too.”

“Where’s the money come from?” “Damned if I know. The restaurant does good business, I guess mail order, mostly; you know, granola head stuff organic foods. Rumor has it when you join, you got to give all your money to Sarris, but for all I know, they could be printing it in the basement.” I glanced out the door. “Well, I better get going. Haven’t seen Buster yet. You coming down to the Rocky River later?” “Sure. Be along in a bit.” I continued my walk down the street, taking in the sights. The contrasts I saw were familiar and typical of the Northeast Kingdom.

Between and beyond the weather-blighted buildings and broken roads of the village, my eye was drawn to the land-wild, undulating, pristine.

Its beauty lay in its pocket vistas, rarely extending beyond a mile or two. Farther south, the Green Mountains offered breathtaking views of valley passes and river gorges. Up here, the whole earth was shoved up closer to the sky, its hills and dales more interconnected, less in conflict. Seeing this land, oddly arctic in appearance at this time of year, gave one a comforting, although false sense, that there were perhaps corners of the world where civilization had yet to set foot.

I’d always thought it was as much the remoteness as the beauty of the region that made the Kingdom a shrine of sorts to the citizens of Vermont.

I thought back to the man who had shot at me to protect both his freedom and his winter’s meat, which made me focus anew on how the once-familiar buildings of this town were being ground down without respite. The Kingdom would live on, but not as it had. The younger generations were already abandoning it, lured by the monied south, and those who had made that money were seeking new places, like the Kingdom, in which to buy real estate.

For the Gannets, tucked away from the main highways, on the outskirts of the commercial centers, things weren’t looking too good. I began to wonder if after decades of clinging to this land, Gannet was finally slated to die.

Considering that I’d come back here for some mental and emotional rest and relaxation, this kind of thinking was not the stuff of dreams.

The Rocky River Inn was the one glaring exception to the town’s generally muted architecture. It took up one entire side of North Street, with one wing at the corner of Route 114, and the other looking straight down Atlantic Boulevard. It was an enormous place, dwarfing any three buildings in town put together. It was also a first-rate Victorianstyle dump. It had a sagging rusty metal roof, diseased-looking, paintpeeling walls, and its windows were covered with either torn plastic sheets or dilapidated plywood. Although it had “wrecking ball” written all over it, it had looked that way for as long as I could remember.

It had once been a palace, of course, built in the middle of nowhere in the 1 850s by a lunatic logging king named Gannet, who had died one week after moving in. It sported turrets and bay windows, porches and balconies, and more gingerbread than any sane Victorian would have considered tasteful. Now, however, one of the turrets was draped with a moldy green tarp, the balconies had been declared unsafe, and the wraparound first-floor porch groaned under the weight of several cords of stacked firewood. The gingerbread was half gone, and two of the bay windows flickered with the garish light of several neon beer signs.