1.
You never know what people will do when they’re alone. It’s like a test. What if no one is watching?
Once, I was walking at twilight on a country road. A family graveyard was beyond the gravel road’s ditch, surrounded by an iron fence. The ditch was spanned by a rutted drive the width of a car, packed dirt pierced below by an old metal culvert. The culvert drooled a little greenish water over its corrugated lip into a puddle encircled by nettles and golden rod. Something splashed as I walked by, possibly a frog and a column of gnats whirled in column overhead.
I felt uneasy. Eyes were watching me. But there was no one around. A silo stood over the ruins of a barn squashed by a storm. A shelter belt of ragged trees jostled barn and silo. Wind stirred in the leaves.
It was best to get off the road, to lunge into the underbrush wrapped around the graveyard. The road was too exposed and the sky too menacing. Suddenly, I was running. Faster and faster. The pursuit came from all sides and, then, I was upended, falling through space. Impact knocked the breath out of me, but, after a minute or so, curled on my side, I shook my arms and legs, testing them to see if they were still properly attached. My trousers had been split apart and were hanging in shred from where the belt cinched them at my waist. My feet held and my legs and back seemed intact and, ashamed of myself, I took a few steps in the direction from which I had come. Hip-high, a strand of barbed wire was stretched between old, overgrown fence-posts. Black rags from my torn pants were dangling off the wire with its knotted barbs. Nervously, I groped the inside of my thighs and, then, around my knees. I was amazed to discover that I had slammed into the barb wire, been flung through the air, but was not injured. It seemed like a kind of miracle.
The night was dark and full of eyes, but I wasn’t afraid anymore.
2.
Our town is divided into quadrants. Each quarter mirrors the others; all have the same addresses (streets are numbered in our town), differing only according to whether the place is located in the Northwest, Southwest, Southeast, or Northeast. My address is SW, but, often, the post office delivers mail to me meant for my address but in the northwest part of town. A couple times, I put the improperly delivered mail in my post-office and the carrier took those items, only to return them to me again three or four days later. On one occasion, the mail erroneously delivered to me contained nothing more than slick-looking catalogues, requests for charitable donations, and a slim newsletter called The International Musician, a publication for the union members of the American Federation of Musicians. I paged through the periodical: pictures of people shaking hands, notices of job opportunities, ensembles in concert halls, an article about a counterfeit violin said to have been made in Cremona (but, in fact, Viennese early 20th century); it was claimed that the counterfeit had been played by famous violinists but this turned out to be untrue and there was a lawsuit pending. Management was engaged in unfair labor practices in Delaware and Washington State and some strikes had been settled while others were still underway. The newsletter was interesting but disposable I thought and, so, rather than put it and the junk back in the mail system, I just threw it all away.
About a month later, I found more mail bearing my address but in the northwest in the metal box on my porch. There was another copy of The International Musician with want ads and lists of benefit concerts, more junk mail, and an envelope from Social Security tucked in the newsletter – this looked important and I thought I would drive across town to deliver the mail to its proper recipient.
The NW quarter address was on a quiet street, a block from an old elementary school. Trees shaded the sidewalks where children had drawn faces and hopscotch boxes on the weathered concrete. The homes had small detached garages and fenced backyards where dogs barked nervously. The address belonging to the mismatched mail was a cottage with vines growing up one side of the building and an oval second story window above the front door. A porch had been enclosed forty years ago and, now, was packed with totes and cardboard boxes. A cat was exploring the base of some flowering bushes.
An old man came to the door, peering suspiciously at me sideways. The old man had white bristles on his chin and was wearing “cheater” reading glasses slid halfway down his crooked nose.
I told him that I had some of his mail and that there was a government document with the magazine and other advertisements.
“I thought I should hand-deliver this to you,” I said. “On account of the official mail.”
The man thanked me and took the magazine and other envelopes that I handed him.
“You should come in and get out of the rain,” the old man said. I looked over my shoulder. Dark, shiny clouds hung over the streets but the air was dry. “It’s not raining yet,” I said.
“You know, I’m guessing I have some of your stuff,” he said.
“Really?”
He gestured that I step through the open door and I followed him through several dark rooms that smelled of dust and mold to a kitchen. It was brighter there with light streaming through a sliding glass door that opened onto a back deck. I saw a grill on the deck, some lawn chairs, a couple of squirrels racing around the base of a tree that had shed some dark, jagged branches onto the lawn.
The man went to the counter next to the sink and pulled out a plastic bin. He lugged the bin over to the table and set it between us.
He lifted an envelope from the stack of catalogs and letters and read my name off the address.
“Yes, that’s me,” I said.
“If you’re alert, you can learn a lot about a person from looking at his mail,” the old man said.
“Such as?”
He told me some things about my marital status, the number of my children, subscriptions that I held, some charities that I supported and my current political party.
“Remarkable,” I said.
“It’s all there in the mail,” he replied. “Clues if you know how to read them.”
“Well, it’s all there in the mail if you – (I was about to say “snooped for it,” but I paused) – ...if you look for it.
“It’s a habit,” he said. “My vocation. So what do you know about me?”
He gestured to me that I should sit down at the table. I hesitated but followed his cue.
“Just that you get social security and that you must have been a professional musician, a member of the musician’s union.”
“Right, yes, right about the social security, but the musician part – that’s not correct.”
“Really.”
“I know just two songs: one of them is “The Star-Spangled Banner”; the other isn’t,” he said, apparently pleased with himself because he grinned and showed me several broken teeth in the front of his mouth.
“But the magazine?”
“That came to my wife. I’m a widower now. But she was a professional musician, played in several symphony orchestras. You have to look at the name to whom the mail is addressed. If you’d checked that, you would see that the subscription comes to my wife – or came to her. I haven’t canceled it yet.”
He spoke with authority: “So there’s a method.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m a snoop by nature. I was a private investigator, an independent adjuster, other things too – sold used cars, managed apartments, was an auctioneer...”
“Auctioneer?”
“You bet,” he said. “But I can’t help about the insurance investigator, private eye stuff. Old habits die hard.”
“Interesting,” I said.
He replied: “See, now you know some things about me. Even stuff about my personality. My wife’s been gone, passed away three years ago, but I never canceled the subscription on the magazine. What does that say?”
“I don’t know,” I told him.
“Lazy, indolent, maybe, a procrastinator,” he said.
“Maybe, you have a reluctance to cancel the subscription because it reminds you of your wife,” I said.
“Bingo!” he replied. “That’s a reasonable conjecture. And, you know, I also have a sense about you.”
“What is that?”
He shrugged: “Very honest, diligent. Most people would just throw the stuff away and not think about it at all.”
“Well, I was tempted,” I said.
“I was tempted too,” he told me, “but I kept your stuff here in this bin. Probably, I would have thrown it away sooner or later. But, you know, I’m a procrastinator – we’ve established that. So I never got around to it.”
I nodded.
He said: “See the test is how you behave when no one is watching you. I can tell you’re a very diligent fellow.”
“Maybe I think someone is always watching.”
“Well, with all due respect, I don’t read you that way. We both know: there’s no big eye in the sky.”
I nodded again.
“See you’re motivated to do things right, to follow the rules, to be a good citizen even when no one is watching. I’m the same way maybe. Most people are different.”
“Do you think so?”
“I was a claims adjuster, private eye for twenty years. I’m a pretty good judge of human nature,” he said.
“I suppose.”
“Let me tell you something about that,” he said. “It’s just a couple minutes. Five minutes. It gets lonely here and I want to have someone to talk to – there, I’ve said it. Right out loud. Do you feel contempt for me?”
“Why would I fell contempt for you?”
“I don’t know, but do you?”
I told him “no”.
He said: “Well, let me illustrate. It’s just a little story.”
The old man paused and cocked his head. It seemed that he heard something beyond the frequencies to which I was tuned.
“I worked on investigations,” he said. “Car crashes, dram shop, bar fights. Sometimes, I worked marital files.”
“Marital files?”
“You get hired to tail someone to find out if they’re having an affair. Torrid stuff, but interesting.”
I nodded.
“When men hire you, the answer is always the same: the wife has someone on the side. The proof is usually pretty much out in the open. It’s as if they want you to discover the truth, as if the whole thing is designed to send some kind of message. You don’t need much ingenuity at all. But men are different; they’ve got all sorts of motives and, frankly, you never know what you will uncover. It can be pretty strange...”
He went to the stove where there was a coffee pot on the range. The old man poured himself a cup and asked me if I wanted some. I wasn’t willing to make the commitment and so I shook my head: “Not now,” I said.
“There was one guy, a farmer with 800 acres free and clear and contracts to farm another thousand. His wife suspected monkey business and so she paid me to surveil him. The wife went to bed early, 8:30 or 9:00 and, then, she would hear her husband’s truck, a red Dodge Ram (that’s a detail I remember) – he would pull out of the garage at the home place, drive down the gravel road, and be gone for two or three hours. It wasn’t an easy assignment because these people lived out in the country, on dirt roads where there was no traffic so that a stranger’s vehicle would be noticed by everyone around, even the dogs barked at you, and there was no place to hide. I parked myself at the first intersection, but three-hundred yards from the crossroads so that my vehicle wouldn’t be visible on the dark road, but, even, then, some folks came out of a barnyard nearby, slid up to where I was lurking and signaled to me to roll down my windows; it was all fake polite – you know: “Can I help you?” when really they meant something like the “Get the hell out!” – and I had to look for another lane from which to watch the road. The next night, the farmer left his place at 9:30 but went in the opposite direction and, by the time, I got turned around to tail him, the truck was gone, not even a plume of dust behind it. For a couple nights, the guy stayed home and I was just burning money on those empty dirt roads, concealed sometimes on short drives stubbed off from the gravel and leading into the fields. I killed time there, above the ditch were frogs were fucking, I guess, croaking like crazy and, one of those nights, the sky was full of shooting stars, yellow-white tadpoles dropping out of the stars. I got behind the farmer once but had to hang back because the roads were all empty and white with dust under the moonlight that was painting everything silver, so bright you could read under the moon beams, and, when I got to the first or second intersection, I had to guess which way he had gone and I guessed wrong, rambling along in a maze of narrow lanes that went up and down the hills and crossed creeks on skinny iron bridges and, sometimes, ran along high ridges from which I could see the yellow lights of a town that I couldn’t identify. I was making no progress, but, then, my client called me and said that something had happened, that her husband was summoned to court on some kind of traffic ticket, she said, reckless driving or speeding and that this had occurred on one of his midnight forays and, so, she wanted me to attend the preliminary hearing or first appearance to see what the authorities knew.”
“It was a rural county and a little courthouse in a brick building that looked like it had been a school once. Lots of folks were gathered for appearances on a Monday morning, rough-looking customers escorted down to the tiny courtroom in orange jump suits, “in custody” for weekend domestics and bar fights and drunk driving and the judge looked worn-out, hungover, on the bench and you could smell the stale alcohol and cigarette smoke in people’s hair in the room. Lawyers in dark suits were lounging around, obviously bored to death – nothing was going to happen here that hadn’t happened a thousand times before – and the prosecutor had a stack of files on counsel table, spread out like cards in some kind of perverse game of solitaire and there were young women with their gaunt tweaker boyfriends, and mothers with adult sons who looked wary and all used-up, the typical parade of misery in a small county courthouse after a weekend when the moon was full and the werewolves were all out and about. I wanted to be inconspicuous and so I sat in the pew near the exit and scribbled on my note-pad as if taking notes and, then, the farmer arrived with his lawyer, obviously counsel a cut above the other courtroom rats gathered before the bench and, although there was a calendar of a dozen appearances before the farmer’s case would be called, the judge looked at the lawyer with him, beckoned that they should come forward, a professional accommodation to the attorney who, no doubt, had better and more lucrative places to be than this hot and smelly courtroom.”
“The Judge riffled through his files, found the farmer’s charges which he set in front of him, and noted that he appreciated that there had been a plea – for “disorderly conduct” he said. The farmer was wearing a blue suit with a green tie and he had his head pointed down to gaze at his shoes which were a little scuffed and unclean. There were more than a dozen people in the gallery, a couple inmates in their orange jail coveralls, and some of the defense lawyers, a couple young women in pants’ suits and an older attorney with a pencil-thin moustache, were seated in the jury box since all of the pews were full.”
“ ‘I’ll read the police report to lay the factual predicate for the plea,’ the Judge said. He put on his reading glasses and looked down over his nose and started to recite the content of the document he was holding, a couple typed sheets, identifying an intersection somewhere in the county, a time, the reporting officer’s name, and the fact that he observed a figure in a Dodge Ram parked in an irregular way, protruding onto the traveled upon portion of the two-lane asphalt road. The Judge read: “The officer approached the Dodge Ram and –‘ “
“Then, he paused, and inhaled sharply. ‘I think that’s enough,’ he said. He put down the police report and asked the defendant if he had read the charges. ‘I have,’ the farmer said. ‘Is it all factually correct?’ ‘It is, your honor,’ the farmer said. His face was slick with sweat and red. The Judge said: ‘I’ll accept the facts as correctly stated,’ the Judge said. Then, without any more comment, he sentenced the farmer to a fine for disorderly conduct and put him under probation for the period of two years. ‘No same or similar,’ the Judge said, asking if the defendant understood. ‘Yes, your honor,’ the farmer said. The Judge said ‘That’ll be all,’ and the lawyer with his client in tow stood and left the courtroom.”
“I went to the Clerk of Court and asked for a copy of the charges against the farmer and the minutes prepared by the court reporter who had been recording the hearing on a small dictaphone poised on shelf at the Judge’s bench. The Clerk was hostile and said that the materials hadn’t yet come out of the hearing and that I would have to wait. I asked: ‘How long?’ She told me that I didn’t need that stuff, that it was private anyway, and that what could be released would be available in several hours.
“I went to the café and had the “commercial special”, green beans, two scoops of potatoes with roast beef and gravy poured over them, a cup of fruit cocktail. The Clerk seemed disappointed when I came back after lunch. The courthouse was now silent and its hallways were empty. The parking lot was empty as well. The staff were drowsing behind their counters and plexi-glass windows. I paid a few dollars and was given a copy of the charges and some handwritten notes as to the Judge’s disposition of the “disorderly conduct” offense on the basis of the plea entered in Court.”
“The police report said that the cop had come to the Dodge Ram truck, walking from the police car shining its headlights into the cab of the vehicle and blocking it from fleeing down the roadway. In the cab, the farmer was seated behind the wheel, alone and wearing women’s lingerie over a red brassiere and panties. The cop reported that the subject’s penis was exposed and that he was masturbating. In his left hand, he was holding a loaded Glock 9 milimeter hand gun. The cop’s own weapon was drawn and he shined his flashlight in the subject’s eyes to blind him. The man in the lingerie, bra and panties, began to sob and he surrendered his firearm to the police officer. The officer asked him why he had the loaded pistol in his hand. The subject said that when he masturbated, he liked to put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth.”
The old man clicked his tongue: “So that was what was going on,” he told me.
“That’s quite a story,” I told him.
“Here’s another,” the old man said. “I’ve got a million.”
Rain suddenly pelted the window. It was as if someone had pitched water against the glass.
“Now it’s raining,” the old man said. “Do you want to hear about a pastor, a preacher-man?”
I nodded.
He said: “The pastor had a little congregation in town, a nice cozy church with an old altar and steeple poking up above the trees. He had a van for youth functions, a boy scout troop that met in the church basement, a choir, several circles of women’s groups who made cakes and potato salad for funeral luncheons, just about everything you could want in that line of work. The pastor’s wife played organ and led the choir, but she wasn’t happy. She was nervous about her husband’s behavior, suspicious, and wanted me to follow him.”
“I had to meet her in another town, at her sister’s house, about a half-hour away. She was concerned about people in the congregation seeing her with me, or learning that she had gone to my office. Everything had to be very hush-hush – in her business, appearances are everything. God may know your heart and innermost secrets, but the congregation knows everything else about you, about how things look on the surface and what seems to be the case. The pastor’s wife told me that she was together with her husband every Wednesday – that’s church night when kids go to confirmation and the choirs rehearse and youth groups attend movies or go roller-skating with ice-cream afterwards. Her husband was at the church every Wednesday, doing his duty, but the next night, the pastor left their home at seven p. m. and went somewhere to visit the sick or prisoners in jail or counseled couples with marital problems or prayed with the elderly at the nursing home – those sorts of thing, at least that’s what he told her, but the preacher was vague about these duties, evasive, and he told her that some of what he had to do was confidential so he couldn’t talk about it. That was true enough but between husband and wife there should be no secrets and asserting confidentiality was something new, a development that made her very uneasy because she was absolutely certain that he was hiding something. So she wanted me to watch him, see where he went and what he did every Thursday from seven to ten at night.”
“The pastor was a tall man with a grey beard. He had a long, narrow face and slender shoulders and walked with a kind of loping stride. I watched from my car as he pulled his vehicle out of the parsonage garage. It was twilight, soon to be dark, and I had no difficulty following him from about a block’s distance, although I had to remain alert – he had a heavy foot, speeded between stop signs and traffic lights, and rolled through controlled intersections without slowing to a stop. He drove out into the country, following a two-lane highway that ran parallel to the river, bending this way and that according to the stream. About six miles from town, he turned onto a gravel road. This required more care on my part because the road was lonely, angling through fields with parallel columns of trees on both sides of lane. Some low hills intervened between my car and his vehicle and, sometimes, I lost sight of his taillights. From the tops of the knolls, I could look across the open country. A few farms were scattered among the fields of growing crops, low-slung houses and hog barns beside old outbuildings all surrounded by palisades of shelter-belt. Each farm displayed a greenish yard light set on a pole between the buildings. The moon came up out of the ground, all distended at the horizon. Then, the pastor abruptly turned to his left, entering a copse of trees clustered around the driveway just beyond a flat ramp of bridge crossing a dark, meandered creek with dirt banks above the entrenched stream. I saw the pastor turn off the gravel road about two-hundred yards ahead of me. There was nothing coming and going on the lane where the plume of dust cast by his car was now settling. I put my vehicle in reverse, backed off the crest of the hill and pulled onto the shoulder. Then, I walked the distance to the dark circle of trees looming over a tangle of wet, dense underbrush.”
“Evidently, it was an abandoned farm site. The pastor’s car was parked beyond a couple of oblong puddles on the dirt driveway, next to a stark old farmhouse, a pale ledge of lathe and dark windows with a mutilated shingle roof and a wooden porch rotting into the basement beneath the building. A few mangled outbuildings stood in a thicket hazy with leaf and vines. Along the old paths cutting through an orchard, I saw fronds of wet fern suffocating footways that were now just faint game-trails. The jagged meanders of the creek zigzagged through a meadow and the low places were full of belching, raucous frogs. I assumed that the pastor had come to this out-of-the-way place to meet someone and, so, found a vantage, sitting on an upturned bucket between two old trees, and waited for the rendevous to occur. But no one came. Mosquitos harassed me and, after twenty minutes, I cautiously approached the ruin of the farm house.”
“It wasn’t easy to find a vantage from which I could see into the house. The walls were screened by tangled brush wrapped around the building and, as I approached, the claws of the shrubs that I displaced scratched at the wood. I was afraid that the pastor had heard me and expected to see him come out of the house, or, at least, appear at a window. But, perhaps, he was distracted. Windows were located at strange intervals, probably based on some eccentric division of interior space in the place. Some of the openings exposed narrow rooms with plaster and planks fallen on the floor, scarred wallpaper pale in the darkness. At last, I found a window which I could see the man that I was investigating. A faint glow lit the floor, a dome of wan light coming from a small battery-powered lantern. Somehow, the light blurred things and made it harder for me to see into the dark room. The man sat on a wooden chair, upright with his shoulder’s square. His hands were folded in his lap. He was motionless, not so much waiting as inert, still, as if he had passed-out erect in his chair. Little things crept through the house and the boards creaked and, in the brush, where I was watching, something stirred. The man didn’t move. I looked at my watch and timed thirty minutes – this was as much as I could bear because of the humidity, the gloom, the mosquitos buzzing in my ear. The window was scabby with grime and the pastor seemed a little blurry to me. During the period that I watched him, he didn’t speak, scarcely moved, at all, looked neither right nor left, even when sounds came from outside – a raccoon or opossum scuttling through the shrubbery, a dog barking at the end of some dark driveway, a truck passing on the road. When the time had passed, I backed away from the window and tiptoed away from the ruined farmhouse, walked along the drainage ditch and gravel lane toward my vehicle and, then, heard tires on loose rock behind me – the pastor’s car emerged from the drive-way into the farm-place, turned onto the road, and, then, passed by where I was crouched and hiding in my vehicle. I followed the pastor on the road, letting him lead a half-mile ahead of me. He took some back lanes, section roads, to the highway and, then, drove home.”
“I reported to my client that her husband had gone to deserted farm house, parked in the driveway and, then, sat silently in the ruined place for an hour or hour-and-a-half before going home. The pastor’s wife asked me who he was awaiting. ‘I don’t know,’ I told her, ‘no one came.’ “
“For three weeks, every Thursday, I followed the subject. On each occasion, he drove his car into the country and parked in the rough driveway next to the abandoned farmhouse. Then, he sat on the wooden chair in the front room, alone among plaster and lathe that had sifted down from shattered ceiling. No one came to the farm site. After an hour, or ninety minutes, during which time he sat motionlessly in the room, the pastor stood up, went to his car, and, then, drove home. I asked his wife if he had some connection to the farmplace, if had been raised there, or visited as a boy. She told me that the pastor came from the city and didn’t know anyone except his parishioners in the county. ‘Maybe, it reminds him of something important to him,’ I said. My client sniffed: ‘Unlikely,’ she said.
“I decided that on the fourth night of my surveillance, I would confront the pastor and ask him why he was sitting alone in the house. It was stormy with lightning flashing in lumpy-looking black clouds. A half-hour after I reached the farm place, rain began to fall. At first, it was a drizzle that made the trees and brush damp, but, then, a downpour. I retreated to my car under a cascade of rain lit by sudden flashes of lightning. Apparently, the house leaked because the pastor came from his room right behind me, hustled to his car, and sped away. There was no opportunity to talk to him.”
“The pastor’s wife asked me if I had solved the mystery. I told her ‘no’. She said that my engagement was at an end. She no longer had any need for my services.”
“ ‘I’m going to divorce him anyway,’ she said. ‘He’d rather spend time in some filthy ruin than with me.’ She told me that she had hoped to catch him in some lurid misconduct so that she could claim the high ground in the divorce. But, it didn’t matter, she said – the marriage was irrevocably broken in any event. I took my pay and closed my file.”
The rain outside had stopped. I heard water flowing in a drain-pipe. Some birds were singing.
“Did you ever figure out why the pastor was sitting alone in that house?” I asked.
“You draw conclusions about people from how they act,” the old man said. “If that fails, you interpret what they say. But, beyond that, there’s no evidence. I would be speculating to tell you what, if anything, I think on the basis of this proof. I didn’t get to ask him and, maybe, he would have lied in any event.”
