HardScape (4 page)

Chapter 4

Resident state troopers are a special breed, part Lone Ranger, part schoolyard bully. They rule the law-abiding in their vast territory by moral presence, and the lawbreakers by fear. Oliver Moody, who stood six-five and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, came up the slope like an armored personnel carrier. He was ten years older than me, but I suspected that in a footrace up the hill, he'd be waiting for me on top with his impact instrument.

I sat tight and watched, shooting glances around my tree. He moved cautiously through the undergrowth, playing the flashlight on the shadows. To my relief, he was looking at man height, not tree height. Slowly, I forced the wounded knee to bend, wondering if I would ever straighten it out again.

Oliver stopped. He aimed his light at something on the ground. He studied it, picked it up, and pocketed it. I couldn't see what he had found. Then, with one last pass through the brush, he started back to the house.

Something yowled in the treetops, crashed through the leaf canopy, and landed, thrashing and crying on the end of the limb I was sitting on. When it caught its balance and turned toward me, I saw in the moonlight the masked face of a raccoon. Oliver came pounding up the slope.

I am not unaware of the comic nature of the preceding events, but I wasn't laughing. Raccoons don't fall out of trees unless something is wrong with them, and we were in the thick of a rabies epidemic. Rabies turns them lethally unpredictable—frightened in one instance, aggressive in another. When he saw Oliver's halogen beam darting between the tree trunks, he backed away, closer to me. Finally, he sensed me and growled. I pointed the camera at him. He retreated back from where he came only to get hit square in the face by the light.

He was a horrible sight; he had clawed his own stomach open in his agony. He bared his teeth and growled down at the state trooper, who had come to a halt a few feet below.

“Oh, you poor son of a bitch,” said Oliver. “Now you just sit still. In a minute everything's going to be fine.”

From the house, Mrs. Long called, “Are you all right, Officer?”

“Found your prowler,” Oliver called over his shoulder. “Rabid raccoon. Go get a plastic garbage bag and stay inside until I call you.”

I pressed like bark against the tree, praying he wouldn't see me and hoping he wouldn't splatter rabid raccoon all over me with the cannon he wore at his waist. Then Oliver, who was, for a mean, simple bully, one surprise after another, gave up another one. He glanced back, making sure Mrs. Long couldn't see him, and reached down and pulled a little Beretta .22 from an ankle holster concealed under his pants. In all the years I had known him, I never knew, and no one ever said, that he carried a backup weapon. You learn something every day.

It was the right gun for the raccoon. Holding his light in one hand and the gun in his other, Oliver caught the animal's attention by talking to it, telling it everything would work out fine, and shot him neatly through the head. It fell at his feet.

“Bring the bag,” Oliver called.

Mrs. Long ran up her grassy slope; Oliver met her at the edge of the woods. Taking care not to touch the animal with his bare hands, he worked the bag around it and tied it shut. Then he sauntered down to the house, trailing the bag.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Mrs. Long.

“Landfill.” He walked around the house, slammed the Fury's door and drove off, as the burglar-alarm company's van raced up with a funny little blinking light on the roof.

***

There were lights in Town Hall, burning late as usual in the first selectman's office. As I drove past on deserted Main Street, the clock bonged eleven—amazingly early, considering my night so far.

My answering machine was blinking.

I went straight to the bourbon. Then I put the tape in the VCR and ran it on
RECORD
to erase it. I remembered Nixon and his missing eighteen minutes and wondered whether erased video recordings could be restored by computer enhancement. I played the tape on the TV: blizzards of snow. But what if Rose suspected I'd shot some footage before I got religion, and spent a bunch of Mr. Long's money on a rocket scientist hacker? What if the genius found Mrs. Long and her fella romping between the electrons?

I couldn't trash it. Recycling's very big up here, and a discarded video cartridge would be just the thing to catch the sanitation officer's eye. I was getting a little paranoid, but having decided not to participate in the Long divorce, I did not want to blow it by accident. If I had had a big fire burning in the hearth I could have burned it, I suppose, but it would have stunk to high heaven. So I hid it. Compared to a cell, a big old house has more stash holes than a maze.

I poured another drink and listened to my messages. No buyers had called, no brokers trolling Multiple Listings, not even an impatient New York detective. The only message was from Town Hall. Newbury's first selectman, a young woman named Vicky McLachlan, had phoned a reality reminder:

“A real estate broker who loses his driver's license for speeding is like a crow with one wing.”

Vicky and I had been what were called in my Aunt Connie's day “dear friends.”

We were two of the few single people in town in our age range and who liked each other's looks. Our mutual interest extended to my respect and admiration for her achievements and ambition and her slight awe of my multifaceted past. I think deep in her heart she regarded me as an interesting pet, the sort you'd keep in the barn. But her bio-clock was ticking and cast on me an unnatural glow, like the dark red blush from a bedside alarm that made me look better than I was.

I kept telling her that bright young politicians with a shot at the state legislature, and maybe governor by age forty, ought not to be seen hanging out with convicted felons, jailbirds, and other such riffraff. My noble sacrifice for the sake of good government had apparently had its effect. We hadn't seen each other in weeks.

But Mrs. Long and her happy fella had left me a little unsettled. In fact, I felt lonely, which was not usually my way. So I limped out of the house and up Main Street and stood outside Town Hall awhile, thinking, Well, maybe no harm in saying hello. Persuaded, I slipped in the unlocked side door, crossed the dark lobby, stuck my head in the first selectman's office, and rapped on the door frame.

“Got your message. Good to hear your voice.”

Vicky looked up from her heaped desk. She was a small and angular fine-featured woman whose enormous, curliqued thicket of chestnut hair made her seem bigger than she was. It caught the light in many hues of gold and brown and stood her handsomely in photographs; nor did she ever go unnoticed on the campaign trail. Pinned to her bulletin board under a sign that read “About Time” was a newspaper photo of the president's wife lobbying three femininely dressed U.S. Representatives.

“You know darned well you can't afford to pay your ticket.”

“Any chance of working it off with some community service?”

She said, “I'm too tired and hungry,” but she said it with a smile. If Vicky's hair got her noticed, her smile won her votes. It was warm and quick and straight from the heart, a smile that seemed to promise each and every voter, I am hardworking and honest and the only difference between us is that you don't have the time to run the government, so I'll do it for you. A seductive smile.

“How about I cook you an omelet?”

“I don't want an omelet.”

“Welsh rarebit and beer?”

I knew my woman. She practically rolled over and kicked her feet in the air.

“Come here. Let me look at you.”

I did.

“You're limping,” she said.

“Hurt my knee.”

“You look like hell. You look like you've been sleeping in the woods. There's
pine needles
in your hair.” She reached up and brushed them out. They fell on her desk.

She was good company when she wasn't too busy, but she was busy most of the time. And she was sexy in the easygoing way women get when they feel free to pick and choose with whom, where, and when. As for where, she was happier at her place, a tiny cottage secreted behind the Congregational Church. It had a kind of a kitchen-living room about the size of a Chevy Blazer, and a somewhat bigger bedroom, which the word
boudoir
would have described perfectly, if the down and lace coverlet weren't usually buried under paperwork.

“I'll just straighten up while you cook.”

We had stopped at my place for beer and ingredients. I opened a couple of St. Pauli Girls and started melting cheese on the stove.

“So how'd you hurt your knee?”

“Keep a secret?”

She came out, wide-eyed. “Sure. What'd you do?”

“This goes no further. No kidding.”

“I swear on the souls of my unborn children. Come on, Ben. What's going on?”

“A detective hired me to videotape a couple committing adultery.”

She looked puzzled.

“It's a divorce case.”

“You took
dirty
pictures?”

“I didn't. I was supposed to. I mean I agreed to. But I didn't.”

“You're weird, Ben.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Turned out it wasn't. I couldn't do it.”

“I should hope not.”

I told her about Alex Rose, and Alison Mealy's braces, and how the evening had gone downhill from there, leaving out the precise reason I had stopped filming. The raccoon sent her into stitches, until I told her how Oliver had shot him. She got misty-eyed.

“Had to put him out of his misery.”

“I know, I know. It's just that it's so sad, they're just living their lives and along comes this disease they've no defense against and we shoot them.”

Vicky had grown up in a big Irish-Catholic family in a close-in suburb and hadn't acquired the sterner eye you get when you farm at the edge of the forest. I said, “Why don't you tell Sally to look into oral vaccines? I read they're experimenting in Belgium.”

Sally Butler was the dogcatcher. Rabies vaccine seemed a good way to steer Vicky McLachlan away from the adultery-taping subject, which I saw still troubled her. And later that night, in the dark, she asked, “Why'd you do it?”

“Alison—”

“Don't blame the teeth.”

I told her my theory of 'Eighties dealmaking, wherein running the deal became far more important than the results.

“No,” she said, “you're always trying to walk on the edge. It's the only thing that excites you.”

“I got kind of excited a minute ago. Remember?”

“That wasn't me. You were remembering what you saw through her window.”

As I formulated a reply, Vicky rolled over and said she was going to sleep. I moved spoonlike behind her, the way she liked, and kissed her back. It took me too long to realize she was crying.

***

Newbury celebrates Labor Day the third weekend in September, partly because the bigger towns have huge parades that siphon off the crowd we need to buy tickets to our fire department cookout, and partly because summer shouldn't end on the first Monday of the month. Weatherwise, it's a little risky, as we occasionally celebrate in a sleet storm, but the morning after my exploits at the Longs' dawned warm and sunny as August.

Vicky sent me packing early; she had a speech to rehearse.

I limped home. My machine was blinking. Alex Rose.

I got
his
machine.

He called back.

“So how'd it go?”

“Lousy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How lousy? You get caught or something?”

For all I knew he had tapped the Longs' phone lines, in which case he would know the alarm had gone off. I told him the truth, in general terms. “I've decided against a rematch. I'll mail you your camera.”

“Hold on.”

“And your money,” I said, and hung up. The bank was open till noon on Saturday, as was the post office. I bought a blank videotape, went home, wrote Rose a check for his five thousand dollars, packed the camera in its bag in a box some books had come in, stuffed the empty spaces with crumpled newspaper and the spare tapes, and walked the whole thing down to the post office, where I mailed it and insured it for five hundred bucks. Then I went home and cleaned my grill and my long-handled tongs and spatula, and took them to the lawn behind Town Hall.

They'd wheeled out the fire engines for the kids to climb on and hung a banner that read
NEWBURY ENGINE COMPANY NO. 1, FOUNDED 1879
. Doug Schmidle, the Town Hall custodian, was hammering together a viewing stand. Gary Nello was setting up a soda machine lent by the Yankee Drover. Mildred Gill had rigged a forty-gallon corn boiler, and the ladies of the Newbury Engine Auxiliary were spreading paper plates, ketchup, relish, and mustard on folding tables.

We arranged the cooking grills in order of splendor. First was Rick Bowland's gas-fired volcano-stone, hooded monster that had enough instrument dials and gauges to monitor a public utility. We put him downwind, because he didn't know any better. In the middle was Scooter MacKay at his thirty-six-inch charcoal-burning Weber. Last, and upwind, was mine. I stuck in the extra legs, which raised it to waist height. Rick Bowland nudged Scooter. “What in hell is that thing Ben's got?”

Scooter was not about to take guff from anyone who cooked on bottled gas. He had a big voice. “You know what gets me?” he boomed. “Used to be a man would apologize for buying a gas grill; now the sorry 'suckers don't even understand they weenied out.”

“What?”

“You're a lost generation,” said Scooter. “Benighted mall babies.”

Rick tried to weasel out of it by ragging me. “Yeah, okay, but what is that you got there, Ben?”

“This is a triple-length charcoal grill for cooking meat, chicken, and vegetables out of doors. It's based on a hibachi design. I bought it on sale at Caldor's down in Danbury for nine dollars, and I fully expect old friends to toast marshmallows on it beside my grave.”