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.

Alone

 

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.”

Koshari and the Water Serpent

 Koshari and the Water Serpent

1.

Koshari was studying for his MBA in Berkeley when the tribal lawsuits about the mountain ski resort were tried and, then, appealed.  He didn’t pay much attention to those proceedings.  In fact, at that time, Koshari was acquiring other skills that he thought necessary for a successful career as an entrepreneur and, perhaps, politician.  Often on the weekends, he played golf with some young lobbyists in Sacramento.  He learned handball and tennis.  Koshari was naturally athletic and he excelled at these sports.  And, one weekend, with a group of friends, he traveled to Tahoe for skiing.  Koshari was well aware that the Hopi disapproved of skiing, at least on the San Francisco Peaks because those places were sacred to his people.  But he didn’t see any harm in learning to ski at Tahoe on mountains that were, presumably, sacred to some other tribe but not his own.

True to form, Koshari had no trouble with mastering basic skills on the slopes.  He had been water-skiing on Lake Powell in High School and had a knack for maintaining his balance on the ski-runs.  The bunny slopes were too easy for him after an hour or two and he spent the afternoon navigating trails marked with blue squares – that is, intermediate level ski routes that most of his friends favored.  The next morning, he attempted a couple of black diamond routes and, soon enough, was fearlessly streaking down the slopes.  His buddies were astounded at how quickly he became proficient on the mountain trails.  When he posted some pictures on instagram, his kin back on Black Mesa replied “Sacrilege!” and “Better Watch Out!”  Koshari knew that his cousins and uncles were joking with him.  But he noted that the mountain shown in the picture was not in Arizona and, so, its summit and slopes were not taboo.  Koshari was a good enough skier that he bought equipment and, after graduation, a couple years later, brought the gear back to Second Mesa where his family lived.  

Koshari stood for election to the tribal council as representative of Shungopavi, one of the Second Mesa villages, but, at that time, he was living in Flagstaff and working at a branch office of a big accounting firm.  There was too much home-cooking in the election and Koshari was soundly defeated.  He thought that his next venture into politics would be as a State Representative or, even, perhaps, a congressman on the federal level.  He accepted a transfer to the Phoenix office and busied himself in party politics on a part-time basis.  Everyone liked him and he was confident that he would be successful when he next ran for office. 

2.

We ascended to our Winter lodges on the mountain’s clean side after Niman, the harvest and leave-taking festival, and, on the mesas below, rain fell through crooked bars of lightning as the wet season began.  For the people, there is duration measured between our return to instruct as to the time for hoeing and planting and, then, the masked dances at intervals to preserve the ancient obligations and, then, Niman, when we return to the heights, but, for us, all times are the same and can be seen the way that the heights and forest and deserts are visible to the eye from the mountain’s peak, an uninterrupted unity without before or after, neither cause nor effect – all moments are equal: the crew building the government road, the true people emerging from a hole roaring with wind and clambering up into the fourth world, the drought withering the corn and squash and beans, the rivers running dry or flowing as floods, the huntsman chasing antelope in the grasslands or the hunting party spearing mammoth with lances tipped with fluted stone points, cities at cross roads, fire falling from the sky and tearing open the plateau, and the vista of the high plain under the mountain with scattered towns of stacked rock and round towers and ball courts cut into the earth, a pleasing prospect with each hilltop place visible from afar, lines of sight marked by bonfires, a network of trails with people coming and going between cultivated fields, and, in our glance, those same towns fallen into wind-stalked ruins, the gardens overgrown, the strange enemies on their short, wiry horses and the other enemies with wagons and cars and railroad locomotives, the ruin of the rivers and the befouling of fully one-half of the mountain, a volcano erupting and the black-capped flows of lava splitting apart and showing red veins and the little spatter cones with their whirligigs of molten rock, the snow falling and the hungry barren land after the snow-melt, the massacres, murders, rapes, the car crashes and train derailments, the wild-fires in the grass and forest, the villagers retreating into canyons to live beside their granaries in the cliff niches, the great blaze on the mountains and the silver beetles buzzing over the walls of flames and dumping water and foam – heat close enough to sear us except that our lodges both are eternally present and eternally absent so that, to us, all things including the fire on the mountain both are and are not --  

3.

The fire on the peaks was hard to see from Moenkopi on the western border of the Hopi Reservation.  At night, an orange glow hovered just above the horizon.  During the day, the San Francisco high country was shrouded in haze, rising milk-colored mist that the children were told rose from the lodge fires of the Katsinam or Kachinas.  So there was always smoke around the summits and, of course, with the forest on fire, the smoke was more dense, a thick white fog that concealed everything but the dull, grey shadow of the pyramidal mountain top.  Some of the more devout and thoughtful children were afraid that the towering walls of fire on the peaks would burn the Katsinam and drive them away from their people, either into underground caves or to a refuge high in the sky. The Hopi children were anxious and the TV reports on the fire, filmed on the high slopes, weren’t encouraging, but the teachers told them that the Katsinam were steadfast and that they fearlessly assisted the firefighters laboring on the hillsides, that they stood by their sides and protected them from harm and, even, guided the heavy planes buzzing over the peak and dropping water and foam, katsinam hovering airborne above the high ridges and the alpine meadows to show the planes where to dowse the flames below.  Some of the children drew Kachinas shaking hands with firefighters or raising their hands to shield them from the flames.  There were pictures of Kachinas flying through the air like Superman to lead the planes to where the fire was hottest.    

4.

Fires come and fires go – it is always burning and not burning.  It has been thus from the time of the meteor and the volcanos and the wooly mammoth.  But befouling of the slopes west of the divide, that is a desecration, and, of course, a more serious thing.  Tainting the snow poisons the streams and lakes and, ultimately, the water-table itself in the fissures in the lava mantle and, where water is poisoned, nothing can live. This angers the water serpents. And, all this so that, people can go on sticks down the slope of the mountain, gliding over the toxic snow – there is retribution coming for this sacrilege --

5.

The party bosses groomed Koshari for a seat representing Coconino County.  The western part of the Hopi Reservation was in Coconino County, but the tribe was aligned with the other Indian country occupying adjacent Navajo and Apache counties, places where the elected officials were intimately enmeshed with politics on the reservations.  The plan was for Koshari to return to Flagstaff, establish residency there within Coconino county, and, then, run for office during the next election cycle.  So the Phoenix operatives suggested that Koshari work to court voters in the Flagstaff area.  In late November, he traveled to a party fundraiser at the Lowell Observatory on a hill top overlooking Flagstaff.  There were some lobbyists in attendance, the Secretary of State, and representatives of the governor’s office.  The lobbyists who represented mining interests and tourism concessions suggested that Koshari spend the night in town after the fundraiser and, then, ski with them the next day at the Arizona Snowbowl on the flanks of Agassiv Peak in the San Francisco massif.  

The fundraiser was dull with too many speeches.  On the walls of the dimly lit observatory, pictures showed galaxies and nebulae in far reaches of space and there was a small exhibit describing how, in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, once thought to be a planet but, presentlym demoted to something on the order of an asteroid or a comet made of ice, a celestial snowbank. The great refracting telescope hung on its gantry over the politicians and their constituents.  Evidently, a native son had written a book about Saturn or Uranus or something and signed copies of the volume were on sale in the gift shop.  When the speeches were over, Koshari mingled with the guests and, then, went downtown to a cowboy bar where he had a nightcap with the mining lobbyist.  They confirmed their plans to ski the next morning.  

6.

This Koshari, this clown, I know him, and, of course, he knows better himself than to venture onto those filthy tongues of snow, white and lapping at the sides of the mountain the way a child licks an ice-cream cone.   But it’s not an intervention, this retribution.  The calamity has always happened, is happening now, and will happen forever.  In this world, betrayal corrects itself.

7.

The tourism lobbyist, Jason, was hungover and so they didn’t reach the basin hollowed into the side of the peak until 10:30.  The road through the ponderosa pine and douglas fir was steep with many sharp turns.  At this time of day, all traffic was ascending.

They made several ascents on the gondola.  From the station at the top, Koshari could see blue-green forests stretching to a horizon tethered in place by dark cinder cones.  Between mountain ranges, sloppy red streaks of slickrock lined the canyons.  It was clear and cold, bracing.  Koshari felt a tremor of fear, an uncanny sense that he was trespassing.  Perhaps, it was just jitters before the downhill run or a response to the icy wind blowing down from the rounded summit.  So this is what it looks like in the realm of the katsinams, Koshari thought.  Until he went away to school, Koshari had gazed at the distant mountains every day, wondering about them – he always imagined that the spirits lived in teepees of brightly painted tanned hide, dwellings of the sort in which TV Indians resided, not at all like the brown pueblos in which his people lived.  The upper slopes were empty, lifeless except for small pockets of wind-dwarfed brush clustered under tilted slabs of rock.

Eighteen inches of powder snow had fallen a couple days earlier, covering a ten-inch base largely deposited by the snow-making machines.  Wind had swept the powder snow off the flanks of the high summits behind them and the bare rocks and talus were incised with deep shadows from the raking sunlight.  Koshari skied alongside the mining lobbyist, Jared – they lazed down the mountain on several blue square routes, dodging skiers who were intimidated by the slope and so braking as they descended.  This wasn’t thrilling enough for Koshari and, so, he tried a black diamond trail, zooming down the mountain alone to meet the lobbyists at the Agassiv Lodge grill for lunch.  It was a little after 1:00.

Koshari ordered a club sandwich with fries and a bloody mary.  The drink was full of vegetables and very spicy – there seemed to be cayenne pepper in the ice cubes. 

Jason asked Koshari about his outfit.  He had purple snow-goggles dangling on a lanyard across his chest and his ski togs were zebra-striped black and white.  

“You look like a convict,” Jason said.  “It’s great but I’ve never seen gear like that.”

Koshari said that his girlfriend had picked out his ski outfit at a mountaineering shop in Santa Fe.  

“It’s colorful,” Jared said, then, correcting himself: “well, not really, just black and white.”

“My stocking cap is red and green,” Koshari said.  

“Christmas colors,” Jared replied.

Koshari had the feeling that the two men were ganging up on him.  He mentioned that his girlfriend was the meteorologist at CBS 5 in Phoenix.

“The weather girl?” Jason asked.

“She’s a trained meteorologist,” Koshari answered.

“Beautiful woman,” Jared observed.

Jason was eating a grilled chicken salad.  Jared had ordered a hamburger.

The tourism lobbyist said that the Arizona Snowbowl was an outstanding example of sound conservationist principles.  Jason said that his other clients aspired to do as well.

“Conservation?” Koshari asked.  “How so?”

Jason said that the snow-machines necessary to maintain the trails were operated on Grade A+ reclaimed water pumped uphill from Flagstaff’s wastewater treatment plant.

“You, my friend, are skiing on reconditioned piss-water and turd-slurry,” Jason said.

Jared was indignant: “Really, dude, I’m eating.”

“No, it’s completely safe,” Jason said.  “Not quite potable but all cleaned-up enough to be converted into snowflakes.”

“I didn’t know that,” Koshari said.

Jared said: “Dude, you go down those hills with reckless abandon.”

Koshari didn’t know if this was a compliment.

Jason asked: “You’re Dine, right?  Navajo?”

“No, Hopi,” Koshari replied.  

“Well, the tribes got with the Sierra Club and made a quite a ruckus about the water reclamation for the resort,” Jason said.  

“I must have been getting my MBA at Berkeley when that happened. Out of the State –“

“You have an MBA from the Berkeley Business School?”  Jared asked.

“Indeed,” Koshari said.

“And his girlfriend’s a network TV weather lady and he skis with reckless abandon,” Jason said.

“Very impressive,” Jared observed.

“The Sierra Club made arguments about nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient poisoning,” Jason said. “The tribe’s were upset about the sacred peaks, the spirits or gods.”

“The kachinas are supposed to live on the mountains,” Koshari told Jason.  “But they aren’t gods.  Supernaturals but not gods.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jason said.  “It just goes to show.  You try to be a good steward of the land, you reclaim water at great expense and recycle it and someone’s a got a beef with that.”

Jared asked Koshari where he had learned to ski.  

“I’m self-taught,” Koshari said.  Jared said that he had taken lessons from a professional ski instructor at Aspen.  

“It’s not that different from water-skiing,” Koshari said.

They finished eating and Jason picked up the tab.  “On the old expense account,” he explained.

The gondola loaded just outside the bar and grill and so they rode up to the top of the mountain to continue skiing.

8.

At the dances and festivals, the figure masked as the clown shows the people how not to behave.  He wears a flat white mask with eyes like apostrophes and has a black downturned mouth.  Corn husks sprout from his skull-cap like horns.  The clown’s body is painted white with horizontal black stripes and he wears high-topped leather boots.  When one of us inhabits this dancer, he is a negative example to the people – he does all things that are forbidden and has no respect for tradition or manners.  The other dancers reproach him but he whips them with a leather thong.  Serpents are his enemy.  

9.

On his third run, Koshari shot downhill on the Upper Volcano trail, a black diamond descent marked as 1421 feet long.  The trail looked like a long sloping fairway, lined by dark evergreens stooped under the burden of the wind.  The surface was groomed with moguls and Koshari, who was alone, could see a dog leg about a 900 feet downhill where the run turned to the right above a windrow of grey-red boulders. 

The moguls tossed him up and down like waves on the sea. It was exhilarating.  At the dog leg, Koshari veered to the right and powder snow fountained-up from under his skis.  The slope was steeper and, a hundred yards below him, he saw something stretched across the ski-run, a sort of sinuous hose or pipe, perhaps, a line running to one of the snowmaking machines.  The steepening grade rocked him foward, threatening to cast him over the pointed tips of his skis and, instinctively, he crouched to lower his center of gravity, but this only caused his speed to increase.  Koshari knew how to careen down the slopes but no one had ever taught him how to slow down or stop and, so, he plunged forward at the hose that blocked almost all of his path downward.  He veered to his left where there seemed to be a small gap between the pipe or hose or whatever it was and the stiff, sinewy little trees on the edge of the trail.  – This is pure negligence, Koshari thought, to not warn skiers about this water-line twisted across the run.  Then, he lost control, the tip of a ski embedded at the base of a mogul like a pole vaulters pole, and, so, he was flung upward, airborne, before crashing down in the deep powder under the pines.  

One ski unbuckled and fled downhill, uneasily slipping over the moguls.  Koshari knew his leg was broken, twisted unnaturally under him.  His goggles were knocked off his head and resting in the ungroomed snow between the pines.  Something was hissing as if the pipe or hose were full of steam venting over the slope.  Half-covered by brush, he saw the round mortar head of Super Polecat snow-cannon.  Koshari looked to the side and saw that the thing on the Upper Volcano trail was a great serpent, its undulating sides as thick as a barrel and mottled yellow and green.  The serpent reared its head over Koshari, long and narrow and flat, skull shaped like horse’s head with yellow equine teeth and a red tongue that flickered flame-like between fangs.  

“Koshari,” the snake hissed.  He writhed in pain from a broken femur and hip.

“Shame,” the water-serpent told him, “for shame.”  Then, the whole length of the mighty snake slowly slid past him, creasing the powder snow, as long as a freight train moving like a sidewinder into the pine forest.  

After a couple minutes, a man and woman wearing woolen masks with dark amber goggles skidded to a stop by where Koshari lay.  Koshari admired how they brought themselves to a stop, snow-plowing through the powder.  They asked him if he were hurt and Koshari said that he thought his leg was broken.  The woman knelt down by him and put her gloved hand on his side.  The man vanished in a cloud of upturned snow.  He asked her if she had seen a water serpent gliding over the trail and into the woods.  The woolen ski-mask and the goggles made her face inexpressive.  She muttered that she hadn’t seen anything unusual.  She was like an overgrown beetle or wasp with round, gold compound eyes and a head clad in wool.  

It’s bad form to fall while skiing and Koshari was embarrassed.  The ski patrol brought him on a toboggan to the bottom of the run and, then, hauled him cross-slope to the base of the gondola where there was a first-aid shed.  Someone informed the mining and tourism lobbyists and they appeared in the metal hut, clucking through their teeth with phony sympathy.  Only amateurs fall on ski slopes and only rank, unprepared amateurs sustain injury.  After wishing him well, the lobbyists hurried away.   

An ambulance arrived at the parking lot.  Koshari wished it wouldn’t sound its siren to attract attention to him.  The vehicle took him to the hospital at Flagstaff for x-rays and an MRI.  Koshari’s girlfriend, the meteorologist for the CBS affiliate in Phoenix was on-air that night, both at six and ten, and she wasn’t able to come to his bedside until the next day.

10.

Water is life.  Across time’s panorama, the peaks are mostly unspoiled.  Blink and you will miss the pollution, but, when it is present, it is an affront, a stench in our nostrils, a poison that runs in our veins and makes us bad-tempered.  But we are not neglectful.  Despite all betrayals, we will enter into time as is our custom, descend in February to mark the Spring planting of beans and squash and maize and, then, after six months during which we inhabit the masked dancers, we will ascend again to our thrones in the high mountains.  We are friends to mankind.

11.

Koshari told his girlfriend about the water serpent that he had encountered on the mountain.  She said that he was delirious with pain and had hallucinated the creature.  After that conversation, Koshari didn’t tell anyone else about what he had seen.