Black-out

 

The casino venue was small, but the crowd was appreciative.  It was a convenient place to perform – after her show, Jessie signed autographs and posed for selfies with her fans and, then, walked across the gambling floor to her hotel room in the adjacent tower.  The gamblers were pre-occupied and didn’t pay any attention to her.

Jessie’s crew loaded out the gear at the dock behind the stage and, within an hour, the instruments and amplifiers and their coils of cord were on the road.  Casino staff manned the mixing board and sound quality had been excellent.  Jessie’s tour manager commended the sound board operator and offered the man a job with the tour.  The operator was a slender man with long hair tied in a pony tail and silver-rimmed glasses; he looked young but was middle-aged when the lights came up in the auditorium at his mixng board.

“Too much time on the road,” the sound man said, “I’ve got a family.”

He said that he had toured with Sheryl Crow and the travels had taken a toll on him.

The tour manager shook hands with the sound board operator and they parted.  

Upstairs, Jessie sat on her bed and scrutinized the tour schedule.  The TV was turned-on for company but there was no sound and she wasn’t watching.  A slight scratchiness in her throat troubled her.  Her cell-phone rang: it was the tour manager praising her performance.  He was calling her from one of the casino’s bars.  Jessie could hear women talking loudly in the background and the distant circus sound of slot machines. 

“How do you feel?” the tour manager asked her.

“I’m tired,” Jessie said.  “Terribly tired.”

“Well, get a good night’s sleep,” he replied.

“I’ll try.”

The next show was in two days, four-hundred miles away.

Jessie dimmed the lights and pulled the black-out curtains across the window that looked down on the cement desert of a parking ramp’s top level.  She took her pills, put on the jersey in which she slept, and stretched out on the bed.

She was still awake at 3:30 in the morning.  Jessie sat up and stumbled into the bathroom to find her medicine.  She wondered if the first faint light of dawn was tinting the sky, but decided that, if she saw the sunrise, nothing at all would get her back to sleep, so, she didn’t part the curtains to look outside.

It occurred to her to phone her tour manager but she expected that he would ignore her call.

A half-full bottle of champagne was on the round table near the TV.  The television showed her ads for health care products, rejuvenation creams and balms to firm sagging skin and freshen the face.  The sound was turned down.  Jessie picked up the champagne bottle and flung it at the TV screen but missed.  The bottle rapped off the wall, spraying champagne in all directions.  A drizzle ran over the screen distorting the images.

Jessie retrieved the bottle which was now empty.  She pitched it onto the tile floor in the bathroom where the glass broke.  Then, she followed the bottle into the toilet, cutting the heel of her foot.  For some reason, she felt no pain at all.  

Jessie picked up the bottom-half of the broken bottle and held it close to her face.  She thought that if she gouged out an eye, she wouldn’t be able to perform and could recuperate in a hospital somewhere.  Lifting the bottle to her face, she scrutinized herself in the mirror.  Now what?  Her face was expressionless, a pale, haggard mask in a halo of shattered hair.

As she expected, the tour manager didn’t answer her phone call.  She thought about going to his room and pounding on the door, but, then, realized that she didn’t remember his room number.  She cut into the back of her left hand with a piece of broken glass.  To her relief, this was painful.  Then, she wrapped her hand in a wash rag and called her agent.  After a half-dozen rings, he answered.

Jessie told him what had happened.  He asked her to find the tour manager.  

“I can’t,” Jessie said.  

Jessie and her agent had been a couple for a few years, but the relationship had soured.  Jessie said that she needed his help.

“I’ll get in my car and drive up there,” the agent said.  He was in the city about four hours away.

He told her to leave her room and go down into the casino where there would be people around.

“Don’t make a scene,” he said.

“I can’t be with people,” she replied.

“I don’t trust you alone.”

She said that the situation was under control and that, as long as she knew that he was coming, everything would be fine.

“No, I want you to go to the casino and get something to eat,” her agent said.  He told her that he would call when he was a few miles from the venue.  “Keep your phone on,” he cautioned.

Jessie sat in the room for an hour.  Bad thoughts troubled her and, so, she put on slacks and went down to the casino.  

Jessie thought the waitress would “comp” her a drink since she had left her purse in the room in the tower and had no money.  But the waitress didn’t recognize her as the performer who had sold out the house the night before.  Her feet were bare and the gash in her heel had opened and was bleeding.  Security was called and she was ushered into a conference room where gauze and a large bandage from a first aid kit was applied to her heel.  The waitress brought her some chips and peanuts and a tall glass of Coca-cola with ice.

Her agent arrived a few hours later.  He asked her: “Now what?”  They had breakfast and, then, went to her room to pack.  The agent waited until nine in the morning and, then, made a half-dozen calls.  After that, they walked to his car in the parking ramp and began the drive to the city.

Jessie and her agent had forgotten about the tour manager.  Later, Jessie mentioned him and, as they were driving, the agent called and said that he was fired.    

****

She couldn’t drive because of her medication.  Jessie called an Uber to drive her to the studio.  

The backseat of the car was spacious.  Jessie was relieved that the driver didn’t recognize her and that his English was too sketchy for him to make small talk.  When she asked him to navigate the drive-through at a McDonald’s, he didn’t exactly grasp her request and she had to repeat herself several times and gesture to the right side of the road where the fast food place was located.  Jessie handed her driver a twenty and told him what she wanted from the menu; he didn’t have any trouble ordering – fast food is an international language.  The sleek and flawless upholstery in the new car smelled of aloe and mint.  The driver handed her the food and the receipt and fumbled in his pocket until Jessie told him to keep the change.  Before eating, Jessie found a pen in her purse and wrote a few words on the receipt which she, then, folded and put in the pocket of her slacks.  She ate her breakfast as if she were performing a duty of some kind.  Then, she leaned back on the seat and closed her eyes.  The morning traffic was heavy and the ride to the studio took another twenty minutes.

The recording studio was a concrete-block bunker embedded in a parking lot next to a bank and a mortuary built to resemble a New England Protestant church.  The session players hired for the occasion were overweight and disheveled – the opposite of the handsome athletic musicians with sculpted manes engaged for Jessie’s show-bands.  These were blue-collar workers who lived in the suburbs with their wives and petulant teenaged children.  Of course, the session players were accomplished musicians with an unerring ability to sight-read and improvise.  They were deferential to Jessie but kept their own counsel, ignoring her during breaks as they chatted about football and basketball.  At first, Jessie felt rusty and out-of-sorts and she thought her voice sounded raw.  “I’m just croaking,” she told the sound engineer.  He assured her that she sounded good but said that he would adjust the electronics to take some of the hard edges out of her voice.

The first couple tracks were slow going.  But by mid-morning, Jessie felt more confident.  Recording was different from singing in concert and required a different set of skills.  She had cut twelve records and, after a few hours, the discipline came back to her and the work went well.  The medications made her mouth dry and she drank Aqua Fina bottled water between takes.  Jessie sometimes closed her eyes when she sang and the darkness in her head swarmed with images, whirling lights and colors and tiny figures that seemed to be wrestling on a red stage.  She felt exhaustion like an ache in her belly and legs, a pervasive sore feeling that made her want to lie down on the couch in the break-room and sleep.  Every time, she shut her eyes to find a note or negotiate a turn in a song, she feared that she might fall asleep, drown in the darkness without finding a way up to the light.

The studio was engaged until three in the afternoon.  By two-o’clock, the tracks planned for the day were, more or less, complete.  Jessie’s eyes burned as if she had been smoking for hours although, of course, cigarettes were prohibited in the sound-proof cubicles of the studio.  (The session players went into the alley between the studio and funeral home to smoke.)   Her meds were sapping her strength and, sometimes, she felt as if she were dreaming.

The sound engineer suggest that they “knock-off.”  

Jessie said that she had a melody in her head that she wanted to record before she forgot it.

“We can pick it up tomorrow maybe,” Jessie said. “But I want to make a demo.”

“What song?”

“It’s a new one,” Jessie replied.

She went to the piano and sat down next to the keyboard player.  Then, she picked out a simple tune, playing it one note at a time and, then, tipping her head as if listening to something very faint and far away.

At first, the melody didn’t come out entirely right.  Jessie shook her head and said that the tune was wrong.  She turned some notes upside down and played one of the phrases backward and, then, nodded her head.

“That’s it,” Jessie said.

The keyboard player repeated the notes that she had played, picking out the melody from its beginning to end.  Then, he played the tune more quickly and added some chords.

“Yes, that’s it,” Jessie said.

A couple of other musicians repeated the melody on their instruments and the percussionist tapped at his symbols and built a back-beat with the bass drum.  Jessie said that she felt nauseated and left the recording studio for the corridor to the toilets.  She was gone a few minutes, long enough that the Sound Engineer conferred with the others as to whether someone should go and check on her.  But before the conversation concluded, Jessie had come from the restroom, walking slowly and unsteadily as if she had fallen and was now gingerly testing her limbs and joints for injury.

Jessie sat on the stool in front of the microphone.  She held in her hand a white ribbon of paper on which she had scribbled some words, nothing more than rhymes without the rest of the lyrics.

“Let me try to sing this,” Jessie said.

Her notes were written on a receipt that she held up close to her nose and eyeglasses.

The musicians played the melody and Jessie sang some lyrics, at first tentatively but, then, with more authority.  After a couple of takes, Jessie was singing with full-throat.  The melody slithered forward under her voice.  

“What do you call this?” the keyboard player said between takes.

“ ‘Backpack Angel’,” Jessie said.

****

The record climbed slowly on the charts.  The single, “Backpack Angel,” was covered, with some acclaim, by several other artists.  Jessie’s original, as a single, debuted at 8 on the Billboard charts and, then, made its way to number one.  The song held its position for almost half a year.  It was Jessie’s most successful single and became her signature song.  

When interviewers asked her what the lyrics meant, she said that she didn’t know.  

During a spot on public radio, the host asked Jessie about the song’s inspiration.

“You know, I can’t recall writing that song or recording it,” Jessie said.  “It was a dark time in my life.  There’s just a hole in my memory around that song.  It’s strange that I’m pretty well known for a song that I can’t recall writing or, even, singing in the studio.”

“That is strange,” the host replied.  

“Where does it come from?” Jessie asked.  

“What?”

“Music,” she said.  “I mean, music in general.  Where does it come from?”

An Election in our Town

It takes a firm grip and a strong hand to govern the people in our county.  They are stiff-necked, vain, and opinionated, prone to smash up things and be proud of the havoc.  We tend to imagine extravagant things that can’t be true, but that, nevertheless, we would like to wish into existence.  An arrogant and destructive people require a strong Sheriff and our folks tend to vote for power and confidence in public office as opposed to guile and prudence.  Therefore, many favored T.  B. Garrott for County Sheriff in the upcoming election.  Deputy Garrott was a young man and, if he found his way into office, might remain Sheriff for a full thirty years and, so, it was best to be circumspect about voting for him.  He had a following to be sure, but there were, also, some who thought he might carry things too far – there had been some violent traffic stops and a couple of shootings as yet unresolved by the State investigators – and other constituents were a bit dubious about his qualifications and obvious ambition.  And there was a sizeable group that just didn’t like how the man looked.  T. B. was a short, wiry man with a head affixed to his back and skinny shoulders that looked too big for his body.  His features were also too pretty many thought, a strong jaw and pearly white teeth and eyes that were movie-star blue, bright and hypnotic and aimed at you like the muzzles of two service revolvers.  He walked as fast as possible, leaning into his stride, and looked like velociraptor as he moved.  By contrast, Deputy Garrott’s opponent, the acting Sheriff, was a burly man with no neck and no waist to speak of, more than middle-aged with a squint and underbite.  Sheriff Naills had come to office by appointment from a position of union-protected seniority in the Department when his predecessor drank too much, crashed his private car, and died in the process.  County offices are ruled by incumbents and Sheriff Naills had held his position for 12 years without any meaningful opposition and, so, it was big news (and calamitous for morale in the Sheriff’s Department) when the deputy, T. B Garrott, announced his candidacy.  The deputies split into factions to the point that some officers were afraid that back-up during in-peril emergencies might be denied if they opposed Sheriff Naills - the dispatcher was reputed to be his girlfriend.  T. B. Garrott’s Election Committee purchased a couple hundred signs and began posting them on supporters front lawns and, also, in public places where ownership of the premises was uncertain.  The lawn-signs were big and broad, framed like a wide-screen movie, and featured a larger-than-life-size portrait of T.B., lips open in a smile surrounding his bright white palisade of teeth and his eyes, as detached and impassive as those of a space alien, actually seemed to swivel to follow you when you moved, a disquieting effect that more than one voter remarked upon.

I’ve said that people in our county are reckless and undisciplined and this was demonstrated on the weekend after graduation at the High School.  Someone left a side door to the school open and, after midnight, a drunken mob of recently graduated Seniors with accomplices in the Junior and Sophomore classes broke into the place, or, more accurately stated, walked right in, and, then, proceeded to vandalize the toilets and the corridors and, even, a few class rooms.  Of course, the kids were too drunk to consider the surveillance cameras pointed down the school’s hallways, except to the extent of throwing a few beer bottles at them, and making obscene gestures.  But it was, as they say, all caught on camera.  The vandals were too disorganized to do the damage that they intended.  They flung rolls of toilet paper down the corridors, greased toilet seats with vaseline, set a couple of small paper fires that burned themselves out on the tiles and shot bottle-rockets into the darkness at the end of the halls.  The worst of the damage was some spray-painting on rest room mirrors and a porcelain sink that was fractured by the detonation of a Black Cat firecracker.  The next day Sheriff Naills, with the city police chief, scrutinized the video on which the perpetrators were clearly shown.  To the dismay of authorities, most of the B-squad football team was involved, a half-dozen cheerleaders who goaded the boys to their destructive acts, and, also, in the Senior Class, the valedictorian and several other students who were not only prominent themselves, but, also, the children of prominent local citizens.  

T.B. Garrott, who had been excluded from the initial screening of the surveillance video, vowed that he would bring all perpetrators to justice without fear or favor.  Sheriff Naills was said to favor a more nuanced approach and stated publicly that he wasn’t in the business of wrecking people’s lives on the basis of single indiscretion.  So the matter of the vandalism at the High School also became fodder for the respective campaigns for Sheriff.  There was a public debate and T.B. announced without flinching that, if elected, he would proceed with full transparency, seek prosecution of all malefactors, and pursue restitution as well to make the School District whole.  This stance triggered a backlash and, by the light of the moon, a posse of Naills’ supporters knocked down as many of T.B.’s campaign signs as they could find.  The image of Garrott was on both sides of the big signs and, so, when they were kicked down and lying on the grass, the candidate’s startlingly blue eyes and impregnable white teeth were turned upward to face the sky.  I recall walking my dog along one of our main residential thoroughfares, a street lined with old trees and stately houses and, in each yard, I saw Garrott’s signs flattened against the dewy grass, the Deputy’s face pointed at the zenith.  The sky wasn’t as empty as it seemed and, floating overhead, there were legions of clouds, white fleecy things dangling down from the blue immensity of the heavens.  Garrott’s eyes implacably searched the heavens.  

Overnight, the weather changed cold and rain fell and, then, froze.  The campaign signs staring skyward were stapled to the grass by ice.  The wind blew the leaves out of the trees and they decorated the vandalized signs, dancing across their surfaces as if they were wintry ballrooms, and no one, it seemed, wanted to invest the time and energy required to pry the signs off the frozen sod, repair their posts and stanchions, and restore them upright over the lawns where they had been smashed flat.  A couple weeks passed and, then, it was election day.

I had volunteered as an election official and, so, I reported an hour before dawn to the gymnasium of the Middle School where the ward polling place had been set up.  In our county, mid-term elections for local officials are usually decided by margins of less than a hundred votes and so the count must be very precise.  It’s not high-tech: voters report to a folding table near the entry door, write their names on the list of registered voters and, then, are handed a numbered card; the voter carries the card to another table set up under the basketball hoop and, there, surrenders the card in exchange for a ballot enclosed in a privacy folder; the ballot is, then, carried across the gymnasium floor to where the bleachers had been folded up accordion-style against the wall next to six curtained cubicles where the form is marked by pencil.  Completed forms are fed into a mechanized vote-counter equipped with moving rollers to accept the ballot.  Seated on folding chairs, three election officials man each table.  A seventh volunteer guides voters to the booth and the eighth workers sits on a folding chair next to the vote counter.  This worker uses a clicker to hand-count the number of ballots fed into the machine.  We have implemented this voting procedure for more than a quarter century and believe our elections are accurate, secure, and reliable.  

It wasn’t as they say, my “first rodeo”.  On election day in our climate, the weather is usually rainy with cold mist stalking the streets and the desolate half-harvested fields.  Candy still wrapped from Halloween had fallen on the sidewalks and rotting pumpkins sagged on front porches and the stoops of houses.  Except for the legion of T.B.’s ads, the lawn signs are mostly still erect, sleek and hard-edged and bright against autumn’s foggy disarray.  

The polling place boss, a volunteer from the League of Women Voters, assigned me to the table with the ballots where election cards were collected.   The other two officials at that station were old men like me, wearing sweaters and corduroy slacks, near-sighted with bifocals.  Lanyards with our ID pictures, taken some years earlier and, so, now scarcely resembling us, dangled over our chests.  All was solemn but festive, like a church congregation preparing for Communion.  The election officials spoke in murmurs, remarks about the weather and football games and neighbors who were sick or dead or dying.  

As always the first voter of the day arrived at seven a.m., splitting the whistle that sounded at the packing plant a half-mile away.  The man was an old Vietnam vet wearing a black baseball cap decorated with the regimental colors of his combat unit.  The voter was a widower and he always smelled of stale booze and we knew him well enough to understand that after casting his vote, he would proudly march down the street for an eye-opener at Lefty’s Tap, doors already opened at the plant whistle for the night shift boozers.

“Lookin’ good, Howie,” the election judge at my side said to him.

“Feelin’ good too,” Howie said.

Howie slapped the numbered card down on the table as if it were a hand of cards.  I slid the ballot to him in its privacy folder, recording his ballot number on a form.  No one else had entered yet and, except for the election officials, the gymnasium all prepared for voters was empty.  Howie’s boots were wet; puddles stood on the sidewalk outside of the gymnasium.

“You know what I seen this morning?” Howie asked.

His buddy, the other election judge, asked him what he had seen.  The third election judge, a retired High School art teacher, looked away.  His disapproved of Howie and disliked his odor.

“I seen paratroopers comin’ down in the fog,” Howie said.  “I was walking my dog out by the airport and I seen them dropping out of the mist and rain.  They was landin’ hard, tucking and rolling.  Strange little chutes too.”

Obviously, the man was already drunk.  “You don’t say, Howie,” the poll-watcher next to me said.

We weren’t supposed to let inebriated people vote but, after all, a drunk needs a fair election as much as a sober man.  And who were we to judge?

Howie walked off in the direction of voting cubicles.  He seemed to walk without staggering or weaving.  Who were we to say that his vote was invalid?

“What do you think he saw?” I asked.

“Who the hell knows,” the man next to me replied.

“Delirium tremens,” the art teacher sniffed.  

For the next few hours, people trickled into the polling place, mostly retirees and a few housewives.  They brought the damp with them into the gymnasium.  The floor was moist and the election boss asked that the school janitor mop up the water a couple of times.  It was humid, but warm in the school.  The old man next to me at the table kept falling asleep, even snoring, and, a couple of times, I felt myself nodding-off as well.

My head suddenly tilted and my eyes snapped open.  A couple of tall men were standing by the registry table.  It seemed there was some problem finding their names on the list of voters in the ward.  One of the women at the table stood up and beckoned to the election boss and she walked over to the station, slipping slightly in a slick of water on the floor.  Voices murmured.  The tall men gestured and pointed at the list and, then, the election boss nodded her head.  The two men took their numbered cards and crossed the hard-wood gym floor to our table.  I saw that they were dressed identically in black hooded sweatshirts and grey slacks.  There were green grass stains on both men’s slacks at the knees and ankle.  The voters were very handsome, like actors in a television commercial for some product like pick-up trucks or on-line sports gambling.  Both of them had piercing violet-colored eyes and they moved like dancers.

I didn’t recognize either man.  But, upon presentation of their cards, I hand each of them a ballot in its wrap.  

After the men had gone to their voting booths, I scrutinized their registration cards, writing the numbers on my form.  The cards don’t show names: 1172 and 1173.  

“Who are they?” I asked the other election judges at my table.

“Brothers maybe,” the retired art teacher said.

“But who?” I asked.

“I know pretty much everyone in town,” the other judge said.  “But I can’t say I know them.”

“Newcomers?” the art teacher surmised.  

“I’ll have to ask the boss,” I said.

“Not really any of our business, I guess,” the man next to me replied.

There was a rush at noon.  Voters stood in queue.  There would be another crowd of voters late afternoon, after the plant closed but before supper time.  Usually, lines formed in the half hour before the polls closed.  Voting wasn’t heavy but mid-term light – nothing that we couldn’t easily handle.

Two more of the unfamiliar tall men with pale skin entered the polling place at noon, but we were busy at the time, and I scarcely noticed them.  Then, in mid-afternoon another man that I didn’t recognize entered the gymnasium, also very handsome with broad shoulders, wet hair slicked down to his skull, and with grass stains on the seat of his slacks.  The registration card for this voter was 1369  The confusion about these men’s voter registration had, apparently, been resolved because the good-looking man with broad shoulders was handed his numbered card without delay or hesitation.  

I watched voter 1369 glide across the shiny wood floor, stepping lightly as if he were about to, suddenly, side-step and surge across the court for a lay-up at the hoop hanging over our heads, the backboard aloft like a pale, scuffed moon.  The man marked his ballot swiftly and, then, hurried to the counter.  The machine inhaled his ballot and, then, the woman slipped a “I Voted” sticker into the palm of his hand.  He looked at the sticker as if it were some strange artifact excavated from the debris of an ancient city burned in an ancient war.  Then, he swiveled at the hip to walk toward the “in” door.  At that moment, an elderly lady entering the gymnasium glanced at him, gasped and put up both her hands, dropping her purse heavily to the floor.  The man passed by her. The woman’s lips moved, forming words that she didn’t speak, and, then, she opened her mouth into a round silent howl.  Her shoulders shook and, then, she fell backward, swooning into a dead faint.  The handsome voter (1369) was not supposed to exit the auditorium through the “in” door, but went that way, nonetheless, as we rose from out appointed places and hurried to the side of the fallen woman. The woman had fallen after 1369 had passed her and I don’t think he was aware of her collapse.  In any event,  I saw him exit out the wrong door, dropping the “I Voted” decal on the way; the red, white, and blue sticker fell, fluttering, to the floor.  

The old woman was sitting upright on the floor.  A couple poll-watchers were ministering to her.  The boss hurried to the drinking fountain and filled up a coffee cup that she carried to the lady.  The woman was clutching her purse to her chest as if it were a football that she was carrying down the gridiron.  She looked around and, then, asked where the man had gone. 

“What man?” the boss asked.

“He was just here,” the old woman said.  She was hyperventilating and the boss was afraid she would faint again.  “Maybe, I was dreaming or something,” she added.  “Maybe this is all a dream.”

“Just breathe,” the boss told her.

“I can get up,” she said.

“No, we’ve called an ambulance.”

The woman tried to rise, but fell back to the floor, grunting softly.

“I thought I saw my first boyfriend,” the woman said.  “A man looked familiar to me and, then, I knew him.”

“Who?”

The woman shook her head: “He was killed in a car wreck sixty years ago.  But there he was just now...he didn’t seem to have aged an hour since that last time I saw him.”

The boss looked up at the other female election worker who had placed her hand on the old woman’s shoulder.  Neither of them reacted in any way that I could see.

The ambulance arrived and two EMTs walked briskly into the polling place.  A few more voters had appeared and they were standing impatiently in front of the registry table which was now vacant.  The EMTs took the woman’s vitals and, then, a third man in pale blue surgical scrubs pushed a gurney through the door and to where the old woman was sitting, tears wetting her cheeks.  The EMTs fitted her with a rigid cervical collar and, then, rolled her on her side to lift her onto the gurney.

“He was killed,” the old woman muttered.  “Dead and buried.”

“Just a resemblance,” the boss said.  “A lot of people look like a lot of other people.”

They ambulance personnel pushed the gurney to the door, obligingly held open by another voter who had come to the polling place.  The voters were distracted, staring at the ambulance workers and the old woman.

“We got to get back to our posts,” the boss said.

“What was that?” the art teacher asked.

“Probably a UTI, urinary tract infection,” the boss replied.  “Makes you loopy.”

Some election workers arrived later with sandwiches from Subway.  The last people in line cast their ballots.  It must have been raining hard outside because the line was marked by a spatter of oval puddles in a row on the floor.  

“Not that many voters, light turn-out,” the boss said.

“Well, it’s a mid-term,” someone replied.  

“Well, we had people voting who never turned-up before,” the boss said.  

We shut the doors to the polling place and put up an orange cone on the sidewalk with a flag lettered “CLOSED” stuck into the opening at its top.  Then, we prepared to report vote totals.  Another worker went out and bought us cups of coffee and donuts.  

In County and State races, all incumbents were re-elected except for Sheriff Naills.  T. B. Garrott won the election for County Sheriff by 18 votes.  Naills called a press-conference and said that the election had been stolen from him.  He told the media that there were reports of voters dropping out of the sky and dead people casting ballots.  On that basis, Naills called for a recount.  Because of the recount, officials delayed certifying the election.  The recount found one ballot disqualified because illegible.  But two more votes for T. B. Garrott were found and duly recorded.

Sheriff Naills said he had hired lawyers and intended to litigate the election results.  “This was a highly irregular election,” Naills said.  The local newspaper reporter asked him for the name of his attorney.  Naills said that he wasn’t yet prepared to divulge that information.

Litigation is expensive and election lawyers costly.  There were no lawsuits and, in January, T.B. Garrott took office as our County Sheriff.  So far as I know, Naills never conceded.

A week or so after the election, I walked my dog along the wooded avenue lined with stately houses.  The trees were bare and the lawns were carpeted with leaves except where people had raked, piling up low brown and gold and yellow windrows along the curbs.  It was unseasonably warm and humid.  The skies were overcast and leaden and a hatch of tiny stinging insects rose like incense from the fallen leaves.  The ice locking the signs for Sheriff Garrott flat against the lawns had melted.  I saw a couple of people prying the signs off the grass.

We live in a political time.  Everything is politicized. I suppose the sky had voted.  If you solicit the franchise of the heavens, don’t be surprised if that vote is exercised.     

   

Haunted House

 

Haunted House

... well... the house is haunted, or supposed to be... never really a part of the neighborhood, older and set back from the lane, at the end of a corkscrew of sloping concrete among dark, hooded evergreens.  The other houses here show their faces eagerly to the street and press companionably against the white sidewalk, but there’s no sidewalk along the frontage for the haunted house, and, if you approach, you will have to walk in the street, then, slip through the gate where the fence is broken, and ascend that curlicue of driveway to the front step poured like a lump of sugar under a shingled hut tacked to the building to keep the rain from the shoulders of guests or trick-or-treaters come to the door.  Street lamp light scarcely pierces the battered palisade of evergreens and the house grows darker as you approach, the windows more intensely black and the ruptured siding seeming to ooze darkness and the rain-gutters are half-fallen, dangling from the eaves overhead like tomahawks.  There you stand, perhaps, regretting that you have made this wager with friends waiting behind and the house on its height shudders a bit with the impact of the wind and, then, with trembling finger you press the old ivory-colored door bell and, to your surprise, the thing still works and you hear it ring, more of a hiss really, like a discharge of electricity somewhere in the shadows of the home... This place is porous, when you press you face to the window panes, you can see that the inside has been invaded: squirrels, families of racoons, shredded carpet on the floor, and the steps leading upstairs all grisly with fallen plaster and broken ribbons of lathe, mold and fungus making a shelf across the top of a wall, the skeletal frame of a chair standing in stark contemplation of a wall mapped with continents of green-grey mildew – you ring again.  A house perishes when its borders are transgressed, when the outdoors pierces the walls and comes indoors.  You are supposed to hear chains clanking, something heavy being shoved across floor, moans and groans and, even, a banshee wail – but, it doesn’t happen tonight: you stand there pale and trembling, your sack full of Halloween treats dangling from cold hands, the other kids hooting and hollering on the street, carousing on the sidewalks among the more neighborly houses.  There’s no sound except the wind chiding the evergreens.  You’re relieved, perhaps, but, also, a bit disappointed.  Everyone knows the house is haunted, but there’s no presence here this Halloween, no sign of any kind at all –

A decade ago, an old brother with his old sister lived in the house.  One or both of them were demented.  People approaching the place, marching up that pig’s tail of driveway, were surprised to see tall pale figures, naked looming over an oak table the size of a rowboat in the dining room.  The figures were impassive, stretched-out like taffy, store mannequins that served some sort of therapeutic function for the old man and woman who lived in the place.  We thought it was their childhood home, a refuge to which they had returned when their own parents passed away.  Probably, they had lived in California in a big city and the woman, at least, had been married, or so it was rumored, but, now, they were alone, brother and sister in the big shadowy house among the white, narrow limbs and mask-like faces of the mannequins. Then, one day, they were gone and someone removed the naked mannequins, apparently ashamed of them, because the task was done under the cover of darkness and the half-dozen figures must have been buried in the backyard, between the abandoned rose hedges, or, perhaps, weighted and dumped in the river down the hill flowing through the municipal park.  After that, a collateral relative, a single mother with an autistic son, took possession of the house, but it was too large for her, too difficult to maintain, and, so, after several years the woman and her boy departed, leaving like the mannequins in the middle of the night, and, since there were home improvement loans secured by a mortgage on the building – loans, as it happened, but no improvements because the money had gone to pay household expenses –the bank filed papers to foreclose on the property.  The woman’s son had decorated some of walls with crayon marks, hatches as if to keep count of the days passing and outlines of his hand and clearly the property was in some distress.  It was at this juncture that an even more distant relative to the deceased siblings decided to cash out the house, a transaction that was proposed to the Irfan brothers, Sirhan and Sunyati, partners in real estate development.

The Irfans had the reputation of being slumlords, businessmen who bought distressed property, rented it out to students or newly married blue collar tenants, shirked making repairs or, even, fundamental maintenance, and, after exhausting tax credits for depreciation, sold the structures to developers who could use the bare lots (after bulldozing the wrecked homes) as building sites.  Something, however, impressed them about the old Victorian home with its many gables and complicated roof cut like the facets of a gem stone, tilting planes of shingles and carpenter’s gothic prisms high above the rose hedges and the dull sockets of the windows that were like extinguished candles or fire pits.  So Sirhan and Sunyati decided to invest in renovations to the house with the idea of flipping the property and turning a nice profit on the transaction.

Around this time, the elder brother, Sirhan, traveled to Iraq where a cousin had brokered a marriage for him.  For the first few days, Sirhan emailed his brother and said that he was planning to occupy the big house with his new bride.  But the woman proved to be unacceptable to Sirhan and, so, after a month, he left the old country and flew to Thailand where he became engaged to a girl that he met there.  Sirhan’s fiancee was not willing to immigrate to the United States unless he arranged for her sister to accompany her.  Although this was expensive, Sirhan managed it and returned to the Midwest and our city where his investments were mostly located.  Sirhan told Sunyati that once he and his wife were established, they would begin renovations on the big house on the hill.  He suggested that his younger brother apply himself to wooing Sirhan’s sister-in-law.  

An architect was retained and plans prepared for the home’s remodeling.  A general contractor was hired and the brothers’ partnership secured a loan for the work.  But, before any work could be done, there was trouble: Sunyati wasn’t interested in the match that his brother proposed to him.  Instead, he parleyed his encounters with Sirhan’s wife, intended as access to her sister, into a love affair.  As it turned out, the two women from Thailand turned out to be poor investments, at least, from a narrowly pecuniary perspective – both of them were addicted to gambling and lost large sums of money.  Sirhan’s wife drank to excess and the marriage deteriorated.  Nonetheless, Sirhan thought that moving into the big old house might save the relationship (he was hoping for children) and, so, he persisted with plans to repair the home.  The first thing that needed renovation was the structure’s battered roof.  Hail had shattered old shingles made brittle by the summer sun and storm winds had torn up the stainless steel flashing around the chimney and ventilation ducts.  Sirhan knew someone in the roofing profession, a contractor who had gone bankrupt but still hustled together crews to replace roofs, working for cash to evade the scrutiny of the Bankruptcy Trustee.  The contractor, JR Enterprises (“licensed and bonded” as per the placard on the contractor’s panel truck), gathered a six man work force to tear off the damaged shingles and replace them with cedar shakes.  JR said that he thought that his crew could accomplish the work in a single day assuming an early start and good weather.  The terms were cash money, half before the work and half when the job was completed.

The workers arrived in a rusty Honda van and pickup.  JR unloaded two cases of beer, a grill, and a couple pounds of skirt steak from his vehicle.  He had promised the crew a barbecue and beer after the job was done.  The workers spoke Spanish.  They eyed the big house with its high, steeply tilted pitches and gables with apprehension, even outright fear.  One of the men crossed himself before he buckled his tool belt around his waist.  Another man actually dropped to his knees, gazing up at the high perilous slope of storm-battered shingles; he crossed himself several times and mouthed a prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe.  JR slid two aluminum ladders out of the panel truck and the men aimed them skyward, tilting the ladders against the home’s old wooden siding.  Then, the men ascended onto the back and front of the house, gingerly clambering up to the highest point, the central ridge-line over the attic.  They explored the ramps and steep inclines of the roof, different slopes and angles tilted up into the blue sky.  JR loaded a bucket with strips of lathe and the men on the roof hauled these materials up to the crest of the house.  The lathe strips were nailed onto the roof where it was steepest, sloping upward at about a 45% angle, so that the workers would have toeholds to keep them from sliding off the steeply tilted surfaces.  Someone shouted words in Spanish and, then, there was a rending sound as crowbars tore through the old shingles so that they rained down, prickly with naked, exposed nails around the perimeter of the house.  One of the men had brought a boom box, mounting it the attic’s dusty, bird-lime spattered windowsill.  Ranchera music and polkas played with hooting accordion and tubas that gulped and belched in rhythm sounded over the ravaged back yard, the rose bushes with their blackened flowers, and the rank of sentinel evergreens wound around the house.  

JR left the site and drove to the brothers’ business offices in a strip mall at the edge of town.  He claimed the first half of his payment and told Sirhan that the work was well underway.  Sirhan said that he was concerned that the weather was volatile –  thunderstorms with high winds were forecast for later in the day.   JR said that his crew could work in the rain if required and that they would finish the job before the end of the day.  

At the ridgeline, the workers surveyed the bare roof decking, scarred by removal of the shingles, and knocked open in places by the crowbars that had peeled off the old shakes.  One of the men looked up and saw that the sky was green and swollen in the West.  It had become cloudy and, overhead, some white popcorn-shaped clouds skidded across the dark heavens. Thunder rumbled although it was so far away that it seemed scarcely a sound but more a vibration in the congested air, a faint emblem of things to come.  The smeared bruises at the horizon, gradually ballooned upward and reared above the house.  The men ate their lunches on the plywood decking, split open where old shingles had been ripped up, tearing apart patches on the roof.  The boom box merrily continued its serenade.  Someone muttered about the approachingstorm.  Slats of lathe were hammered onto the decking slopes so that the men could climb up and down on the shallow rungs pounded into the steepest sections of the roof.  A couple men went down the aluminum ladders to load new shingles in splintery sheaves into the hoist.  A couple of old men, one of them leaning on a cane, had come up from the neighborhood street to gawk at the work.  Methodically, working down from the ridgelines where shingles had to be bent and folded and, then, specially flashed to the roof, the crew began to cover the surfaces that they had laid bare.  One of the workers, rubbed his beard and said that they would be working in the rain in a half hour.

Before the storm began, a woman with two children in a small car pulled into the driveway and rounded the curves, winding up to front of the house.  She saw that the structure was ringed by torn shingles, dangerous with spikes of nail.  One of the men, working at the eaves line, leaned over the side to glare down at her suspiciously.  The woman said the name of her husband, but none of the men knew one another in that way on the job – they went by nicknames only.  The woman had heard her husband’s nickname at a backyard BBQ and so she used that word for him.  He slid down to the gutter, jamming his work boot into the stainless steel furrow on the edge of the house.  She looked up at him, a dark shadow hunching over the side of the house outlined against the bruised and chaotic sky.

The woman said in Spanish that immigration authorities had been seen in town and that they were at the canning plant were the pea-pack was underway.  She told her husband that the immigration officers were detaining people and hauling them away in handcuffs. Then, she cast a nervous look away from the house, as big as a mountain as far as she was concerned, to the car where the children were still buckled into the backseat.  The man said he would come down.

Suddenly, the rest of the crew stood, hitched up their pants and tightened their belts.  They looked from the top of the house across the small city, surveying the steeples and webs of millwright work over the grain elevators – there were no lights flashing yet.  The factory where the pea-pack was underway was hidden behind a hill.  Then, the men scrambled down the steep surfaces, slippery now that the shingles had been removed, moved single file to the ladders and began hurriedly clambering down.  They spoke in whispers as if fearful of incriminating themselves.  On the ground, the woman’s husband accompanied her to the car where the children were waiting and, after he was seated beside her in the front seat, she backed, turned, and drove rapidly down to the neighborhood, heading to a refuge somewhere and ignoring stop signs as she went.  The other men left the ladders still propped against the side of the house.  In the air above them, music sounded, bright and indifferent.  The workers hurried to the Honda van and the pickup and left the work site.

The gas grill, cellophane-wrapped trays of skirt steak, and the two cases of beer were left on the lawn, among the fallen leaves and burned-looking roses dropped from the hedges. The storm began with the wind inhaling the air so that it was sucked into the clouds and, then, replaced with a blast of cold rain, white like a jet of water falling over a cliff.  The leaves shook themselves free of the lawn and whirled up into vortices in the air.  Protected by the eaves, a man’s voice, high and piercing, cut through the hiss of the rain and the barrages of thunder.  The darkness turned everything dull green, a frictionless color in which veils of rain slipped over one another.  The intersections flooded and the gutters along the curbs filled with water running as cascades down the street slopes.  Some tarps that could have been spread over the bare roof and tacked down there, took flight, reluctantly, it seemed, flapping wet condor wings, then, going upward and sideways to be trapped by the rank of evergreens standing like hooded shadows around the edges of the house.                                                                                                                              

JR returned with an envelope full of greenbacks.  He saw the house standing stark and tall between the tilted brackets of the ladders.  No one was around.  JR tilted his head upward: somewhere in the house’s cadaverous facade mariachi music was playing.  An old man with a cane sat on the front steps under the little shingled box of the porch.  The old man winked at him and said: “Them all took off in a big  hurry.”  JR grabbed one of the tarps tangled up in the evergreens.  It was waterlogged and very heavy and there seemed to be no way that he could clamber up the ladder alone to drag the tarp over the rift in the roof.  He asked the old man for help, but, from within the shelter of the porch, the man said that he had a bad back and bad hips and was unable to assist.  A little later, lightning struck the top of one of the ladders and went to ground, blowing up a puff of leaves and mud.  JR pulled both ladders away from the house and left them stretched-out on the ground, next to the gas grill, the beer in half-melted cardboard boxes and the wet, red aprons of the skirt steak.  The lightning strike had shut down the music.  

Sirhan and Sunyati made claims against JR.  But, contrary to the legend on his truck’s side, he was neither bonded nor insured.  Furthermore, the Irfan brothers received a stern reproach from the Bankruptcy Trustee that no debts could be collected against JR since he was protected by his filing.  By this time, matters had deteriorated between the brothers, largely due to Sunyati’s affair with Sirhan’s wife.  Both women had serious gambling debts and had borrowed money from a same-day loan company operated by Laotian businessmen out of a local nails and therapeutic massage parlor.  Sirhan commenced both a divorce proceeding and a partition of partnership assets owned jointly with his brother.  Questions arose as to the valuation of the old house standing apart from the neighborhood with its complicated roof.  Two opposing appraisers as well as a neutral met on the premises.  The upper floors of the home, a warren of small chambers around a stairwell, were badly damaged with fallen plaster, sheaths of black mold on the walls, and ceilings with great sodden blisters full of fluid drooping down into the rooms.  Damage on the lower levels was mostly the result of animals invading the rooms.  

“Beautiful bones,” one of the appraisers said.  He dropped his mask that he wore over his lower face as a shield against mold spores.  The other appraiser lit a cigarette.  He stood on the driveway at looked up at the gaunt house with the pale boards of its roof exposed.  A tarp, pierced by sharp branches, hung among the belt of trees.  The third appraiser had stepped aside and was dictating something into a handheld recorder.  There was a faint stench: some beast had clawed apart a rotting sheet of skirt steak near the front door and the odor of the decaying meat tainted the air.

“Depressing,” the second appraiser said.  “You’re right,” he continued, “beautiful bones.  Look at the plaster work around the arched doorways on the first floor.  Real craftsmanship.  The stained glass panes in the side windows.”  The first appraiser said that he thought the craftsmanship applied to the built in cabinets was superb: “You could yank those out and probably sell them through an architectural detail place.”

The third appraiser, who was the neutral, had finished his dictation.  “Seen enough?” he asked.  “Yup,” the two appraisers replied and so they returned to their respective cars and drove away.

When graffiti began to appear spray-painted on the plaster surfaces of the first floor rooms, someone called a city inspector.  There were clotted knots of rags now in some of the rooms, evidence of small fires set on the floor boards, a stocking cap and a lost coat in the corridor leading to the kitchen.  Someone had torn the appliances out of the wall niches where they had been installed and stripped out the copper wires.  

The inspector condemned the house as dangerous and uninhabitable.  The housing official mailed notice to both Sirhan and Sunyaty that they should take immediate action to abate the public nuisance arising from the derelict structure.  Each of them claimed that the other was solely responsible for the home.  After several months, the City Council voted to demolish the house.  But actual demolition was delayed on the basis of legal complications.  Ownership of the house was disputed and the partition of partnership assets, subject to a court decree, was on appeal.  Furthermore, the marital interest of Sirhan’s wife in the property was problematic – it was plausible to believe that she had, at least arguably, a share in the house.  So nothing was done. 

 

After a trespasser somehow fell out of an upper story window, the city posted the premises as off-limits and wired shut the doors leading into the house.  Periodically, police visited the home, pulling up the long driveway to inspect the windows for flashes of light or the orange flare of a fire inside.  The cops took advantage of the isolated hilltop location and the screens of shaggy evergreens to nap or drink beer or make rendezvous.  

On Halloween, kids dared one another to depart from the street-lit sidewalk and climb the fishhook of the driveway to ring the “murder house’s” front doorbell.  By this time, the structure had acquired a fetid residue of horror stories and legends.  Enough kids took the challenge that the adventurers met one another coming and going on the driveway.   Once, so it was said, a boy rang the doorbell and the house answered from an upper window sill with a squeal of static and, then, the chatter of trumpets playing mariachi music.  No one knew what this meant and the phenomenon could not be replicated.

If you imagine the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor standing on her brick pedestal, the figure towers over excursion boats and ferries and tugs.  In her arm, the statue lifts her torch as the beacon of liberty.  The haunted house is raised above the rest of our town on the wooded hill where its ruins stand.  On the inevitable day that the house is set afire by some kid smoking meth or by vandals, the flames will make a spire in the night sky as tall as Liberty’s torch.  But, until that day, the place will just be a neighborhood haunted house.  There are many like it.