Unfinished Novel

PALISADES

A novel by: Jeff Smith

CHAPTER 1.

Cliff tilted his head, listening with his best ear. Nothing yet, and you could always hear them before you ever saw them.

Waiting for a helicopter in the night, again. Of course 25 years ago in Korea they were a heck of a lot louder. He shivered a little. What contraptions those old Bells were back then. But lately the machines that flew in here, and there were several of them in the last few years, were quiet, composed, and more civilized. Now they seemed to glide in rather than chopping and pitching like those during the war.

 He shivered again and not entirely because of the cold spring night. He double-checked his accommodations for probably the tenth time. The four vehicles were parked with their lights on. (Low beams to save on the batteries.) They glared at each other from opposing corners, their lights beaming across the large spread of the, now conveniently empty, employee parking lot. The plow truck, the one he was leaning against, had the rotating strobe on top and according to the standard instructions, was facing downwind -- although it was darn hard for him to divine any wind at all out here tonight. The helicopter would land facing him directly.

Might need to make a heliport. He considered it: lights, maybe a concrete pad, and a windsock so he wouldn’t have to worry about the wind direction.

 Mentally he again reviewed for any overhead hazards. No new wires had been strung since the last helicopter visit, no trees encroaching, no flagpoles placed, just the large expanse of asphalt.

He had parked his own pickup directly across from himself figuring it was the least vulnerable place should something go awry. He had little confidence in whirlybirds. On his right was the Institute’s sedan, a new Lincoln and to his left was his favorite, the old Cadillac ambulance. All were mutely pointing towards the center of the box.        

The call woke him at about 11. He knew that it would be a short night’s sleep even before he made his way out to the kitchen to answer the phone. These late night calls were thankfully becoming less frequent since limousine services were now more plentiful. Usually the call meant a drive down to the International Airport to chauffeur some terrified client back here to Maple Lodge. He even had a chauffeur cap to wear when he drove that big Lincoln. He resented that part, after all he was the Maintenance Supervisor here and that was no small title, but over the years he had worn many hats for the place.          

Being ground crew for a helicopter was rare and he liked it that way. These bigshots always came in at night, probably for the cover of darkness or, maybe, because they were so important that every moment of the day owned them. At least at night there were few employees using this lot. He only had to move 4 cars tonight. Poor tired night nurses, they surrendered their keys without question. In about 6 hours the lot would be nearly full.

               He took a last long drag and crushed out his cigarette. Reflexively he picked up the butt. He twisted off the remainder of the tobacco and the paper, pulverizing them. He then sprinkled the remnants about. Placing the filter in his jacket pocket, he dusted off his hands. One more butt would not contribute much, it was a hard smoking group out here, but he was in charge of these grounds. He took pride in his work and he sent a kid out here twice a week to police the area and pick it all up. He smiled and nodded slightly, after tonight that fan on the incoming would sweep it free of even pebbles. At least that was one good thing about this.

               Dr Archer had personally called him tonight. That meant a real VIP was arriving. Helicopters usually delivered government types, or royalty. One brought in a gray haired old chap who was then the British Foreign Secretary. There was a sheik or two, even a princess once. No matter where they came from on the earth, or in society, they all had something in common. They were out of control and scared to death and usually, stoned or bombed, or both, or more.

               He had seen Dr Archer’s new car when he pulled in. A beautiful thing, a little 280Z Datsun. She always had good taste in cars. If he had her kind of money though he’d get a Cobra. Or maybe a ‘Vette, if she didn’t have the kind of money he thought she had. Her driving up here tonight from the city meant that the royal treatment was in gear. Also he saw  Dr. Lumkin‘s conversion van parked by the medical unit. So this guy coming in tonight must be either a real wreck, or really important or probably both, or more.

               He listened intently. All was silent. He looked down at the lake. It sure was good to see the snow and ice gone. The ice went out a week ago. That was always a welcome sight, blue water reflecting the strengthening sun and adding some much-appreciated color where all had been white or gray or brown. Still there was yet no hint of green on the landscape.  That would be a few weeks, certainly. No peeper frogs either. The old timers always said the peepers were the first sure-fire sign of spring.

               There was once another spring night when Cliff was awakened at his farm. No phone call that time, but something had disturbed him just as surely. It was a few heartbeats before he realized what it was. Through the slightly opened windows, and borne upon the bracing drafts of spring air, came the first tentative chirps of a vanguard peeper improbably defeating winter single-handedly and bearing the standard for spring. It was a potent aria, every chirp a less vulnerable, vernal exaltation. He savored it that night and soon the soloist gained an accompaniment. The next night that plaintive, delicate sonic cairn was replaced by a majestic, cathedral chorale of peepers.

               He sniffed. Yes, he could smell spring. It was not the heady, earthy fragrance that would soon waft from the softening, receptive earth. No, this was snowmelt and running waters recently liberated from icy bondage and, maybe, a whiff of shallow mud overlaying the still deeply frozen ground. To Cliff every season in Minnesota had its signature scents. The seasons had their sounds and, naturally, their singular lights and shadows. Yet it was the smells that seemed to convey the most profound sense of season to him.

               He shoved his hands in his pockets, shrugged his jacket up around his neck and studied the lake. He could see the stars reflected there. He knew that soon old Orion, now just peeking over the western horizon, would be gone until next fall when a dark underline of burning leaves would support another assortment of seasonal aromas: fresh split wood, apple cider, pumpkin pie.

Hold on, he thought, don’t need to rush things here, one season at a time. He considered the long reflection of bright Sirius upon the lake. Suddenly he was startled to see a tiny red light there gliding across the surface.  

He wondered what the hell a boat would be doing out there at this hour, and so early in the season. Puzzling at it he was surprised by the realization that is was not a boat at all, but instead was the reflection of the approaching aircraft’s markers.

It was just then that he heard the sound and, not for the first time, wondered if his hearing was going, following his waning eyesight down the proverbial hill.

However, this machine was exceptionally quiet. It was fast too. It swung in smooth and low and circled his makeshift heliport several times while descending. Suddenly bright white lights on it were ignited, flooding the entire area. Cliff, shielding his eyes, returned to the cab of the truck. He didn’t favor the prospect of being sandblasted by rotor wash.

It was a good-sized ship. He studied it, no governmental markings, it looked civilian. Modern and expensive, it was like something executives would engage, a tool for those whose time really mattered.

The helicopter hung in the air for several moments, an ominous angel confronting him, awash in light and sound, hovering over the dark warehouse beyond. Those chopper pilots always seem to fart around up there, he recalled, like they just have to make everyone wait for them.

Then slowly it advanced, inching down towards the, now feeble by comparison, intersection of the  headlights. The big craft alighted as softly as a snowflake. This guy is good, Cliff had to admit it.

About this time, right on cue, Cliff could see the approaching lights of the foundation’s Suburban. The vehicle was a panel model, a large ¾ ton edition, outfitted inside like an ambulance but toned down on the outside. There were no lights or sirens or even a logo emblazoned upon its doors. Innocuous, innocent, and anonymous in appearance, (unlike the old Caddy), it was much more in line with the Maple Lodge formula.

Cliff, though, still considered it an ambulance and Dr Archer’s instructions to ready it, versus the Lincoln, suggested that this guy was pretty sick, or there was an entourage in tow, or more likely, both.

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, lamenting his lost hours of sleep. The helicopter’s engine spooled down and the rotors slowly stopped their rotation. Cliff punched off his headlamps to spare the pilot’s eyes and to provide a modicum of privacy.

Nothing happened for awhile. The machine just sat there silently bathed in its reflected brilliance. Dr Archer and Dr Lumkin exited the Suburban and waited. Then a rear door on the helicopter opened, a tall man emerged, nodded in the direction of the doctors, and then turned back towards the door.

He leaned back into the craft and, with some obvious effort, assisted another man from the helicopter. This man was large, not as tall as the first, but was clearly obese. He stood up and stretched with a tired unsteadiness.

This man had some kind of a long coat, or maybe a robe, draped over his shoulders. Cliff glimpsed a flash of jewels on the man’s plump hands and maybe on the hem of his robe. Oversized dark glasses covered his face. His hair was long and wild and jet black.

The man’s head began to sag, spilling the hair forward over his face. He leaned heavily on the thin man. I bet all this candlepower feels good on that guy’s spent eyes, Cliff thought, as a door on the other side of the machine opened. From this door another man emerged. This one was not as tall as the first two but was broad across the shoulders and had an air of strength about him. He stretched too and rolled his large head about on a truncated neck and he arched his shoulders back. Slowly he circled the front of the helicopter and cast a glance in Cliff’s direction.

Some sort of security, bodyguard, maybe secret service or something, Cliff surmised. Dr Archer and Dr Lumkin took a step towards the men. The thin one pointed towards the doctors and the dark haired man ratcheted his chin up slightly. He peered at the doctors from under his brow, through a greasy veil of black hair. He suddenly took a lurching step toward the doctors. This initial, unexpected motion was followed by a succession of stumbling, shuffling steps. His locomotion thus commenced, he continued headlong in an accelerating gait. As each successive step became more frequent, the length of each stride was being dramatically reduced. This formula paid the dividend of a remarkable increase in velocity. The thin man reached out in a futile attempt to arrest the fat man’s reckless progress. His roundhouse grab caught only the heavy man’s wake.           

Apparently Dr Archer and Dr Lumkin were caught off guard by this advance. Before they could react, the man collided with the Suburban. He folded over the hood of the truck as neatly as a jack knife. His head bounced off the sheet metal and Cliff could see the sunglasses wing off into the night. His progress now checked, amazing to Cliff, he remained perfectly motionless, sprawled across the hood.

Everyone, save for the short muscular looking man, hurried to the man’s side. The tall man bent over him and, while looking up at Dr Archer, he began to whisper or speak into the man’s ear. Dr Lumkin, it seemed, was taking the big man’s pulse.

Cliff had seen enough, too much. He chided himself for just sitting there watching this wretched little drama. He got out and he leaned against the truck, looking again at the lake. His commitment to privacy, to confidentiality here at work, was important to him. He lit a smoke and contemplated the stars.

His muse was short lived though. Soon, concerned imploring voices drew his attention back to the unfolding scene below the rotors. He was shocked to see that now the heavy man was on his hands and knees, obviously retching. Dr Lumkin seemed to be uncomfortably patting the man’s shoulder. Meanwhile the thin man was dabbing at the big man’s face with a scarf. Cliff noticed the fat man had several such scarves wrapped about his neck, hanging down into the rapidly expanding pool of vomit. Dr. Archer stooped near the man and seemed to be speaking to him. The broad, powerful looking man made no motion whatsoever.

The sick man looked up at Dr Archer through the cascade of shiny hair and began to shake his head back and forth emphatically. She leaned towards him and seemed to be in the act of explaining something, reasoning with him, when the man reached out towards her. Reflexively she withdrew but, unfortunately, her footing was not the best. High heels provide precious little purchase in vomit and her feet shot out from under her. She performed a frantic curtsey and landed daintily upon her seat and then her back, causing her legs to kick up into the air. The action somehow hiked her skirt and labcoat up about her waist. This arrangement offered more than a glimpse of black, seamed nylons. Cliff was astonished to witness black garters spanning a vanilla expanse of  inner thighs, crowned by panties. Were they red?

Cliff’s jaw dropped. The sight of those long legs caused him to stir in a way he would not have expected. It was a vision he would not quickly forget and one he would return to more than once.

The question of panty color was soon answered as, after several of those useless kicks, she barrel rolled onto her hands and knees. Her clothing suspended as before, bright red panties were boldly exposed heavenward, clinging to and passing between extraordinary hips. Riding up on the side now too, the red satin revealed a sensuous curve of pelvis to the fore.

Wow. Cliff noted the broad man finally moved, just a bit, as he craned his neck for the better view. The man’s behavior, although not unlike Cliff’s own, inexplicably irritated him. Cliff began to dislike the man immediately. The powerful man made no effort to assist the thrashing doctor.

Cliff had long been aware of the fact that Dr. Archer was an attractive woman. She was long of leg and fair of skin, with a head of lush black hair containing only the faintest suggestions of gray which, when he considered it, were the only visible concessions to her age. Although she was a desirable female, he was more than mindful that she was a formidable one as well. He respected her and, in spite of the fact that she was the director here and therefore his boss, they enjoyed a comfortable working relationship. At Maple Lodge they both went back a long ways. In fact Cliff was now at the very top of the seniority list. Yet he had been here only 2 months prior to her heralded arrival. If he had ever entertained any notions of her other than that of her being his boss, or as it evolved, his coworker, he could not recall it. And tonight’s perspective did little to change that. He was embarrassed for her and the whole night was becoming steadily more uncomfortable.

Cliff made no move to race over and offer help to Dr. Archer, even though he was angry with the muscular man for not doing the same. Cliff had long ago learned the danger in offering unsolicited assistance to Dr. Susan Archer. Apparently Dr. Lumkin had not been so informed or, under the circumstances, had somehow forgotten the lesson.

Don’t do it Cliff thought, but, as he watched, Dr Lumkin lumbered over to Dr Archer and grabbed at her wrist. Immediately she drew back vigorously. Dr Lumkin was never a deft or graceful man. These unfortunate characteristics, complicated by his slippery shoes and the element of surprise at Dr Archer’s unanticipated lively resistance, led to his promptly performing an awkward staccato fandango.  Being someone who is traditionally unaccustomed to rapid physical displays, naturally his legs shot out in a forward extension. He splashed down heavily into the pool. His body seemed to reverberate with the concussion.

Even though she had quickly wrested herself from his grip, Dr. Archer’s posture at that moment had been vulnerable. Her balance was tenuous at best and the surprising advance of Dr Lumkin, coupled with her spirited resistance and his prompt unconditional surrender, conspired to occasion her fulfillment of an impromptu pirouette. To Cliff she seemed, for that instant, a marionette at the mercy of a sadistic conductor. Arms arcing outwards, wrists flexing downward slightly, she twisted grotesquely as her toes desperately sought traction. She did an inexorable splits maneuver. Sadly her center of gravity was now to the posterior and her feet skated slowly forward as she sat down unceremoniously upon Dr Lumkin’s manifest abdomen. There was another flash of red panty and black seams. 

Cliff clearly heard Dr Lumkin’s “Oof!” as he convulsed under this surprise ballast. His legs bucked and he pushed back desperately against the gross tarmac with his now polluted elbows and palms. Dr Archer leapt to her feet as a result of the rebound afforded by the elastic recoil in Dr Lumkin’s buoyant belly. Dr Lumkin quickly sat up and stared, horrified, at his glistening hands and the viscous strands now draping from them.

There was nothing Cliff could do but turn around. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and drew himself onto his tiptoes. He dropped down then, back onto his heels. He repeated this ineffectual ritual several times as if he were some lost Dorothy wishing  to be back in Kansas.

Meanwhile the fat man kneeled, shaking his head, protesting violently. He covered his eyes and thrust a bejeweled finger at the helicopter. The thin man attended to him, and, ignoring the undulations of the two Drs, he scrambled for the sunglasses and placed them gently on the big man’s face. He swept the man’s hair back and again dabbed at his mouth with the scarf. He bent before the fat man and pointed towards the Institute and seemed to be pleading. Again the dark man resisted with an exaggerated shake of his head and then he heaved himself to his feet. He clutched at the thin man’s arm and gems sparkled there. He made for the open door of the helicopter and again, despite the thin man’s efforts, his momentum carried him heavily into the doorway where he sprawled prone into the cabin. His legs dangled out of the doorway. The thin man stooped down and hoisted the legs into the craft. The muscular man shrugged, turned, and circled the machine. He stooped through the other doorway and apparently hefted the big man into his seat.

When Cliff ventured a glance back at the scene he was relieved to see that the doctors had composed themselves. He was surprised that the fat man had obviously returned to the ship. Dr Archer was now the one shaking her head as she spoke at length with the thin man. Dr Lumkin was repeatedly wiping his hands on his trousers as he listened in and occasionally would nod in agreement. The thin man seemed agitated, he kept looking back at the helicopter and pointing towards it.

The brawny man was now at the side of the craft, plainly having his own animated conversation with the pilot. Finally he circled the front of the machine and joined the others. He interrupted them, now shaking his head he pointed to the helicopter and then dramatically to his watch. Dr Lumkin looked up and nodded towards Cliff. The man then turned his back to the others and set off in Cliff’s direction.

Cliff was astonished. In situations like this, where clients were involved, he was usually invisible. Now this muscle bound stranger was resolutely advancing upon his position.

As the man approached, Cliff noticed he was not as muscular as he had thought. He might’ve once been powerful and solid but now, Cliff saw, the muscle was being replaced by flab. The man’s clothes were shiny, almost gaudy and of a western cut it seemed. He sported cowboy boots and Cliff sensed that the boots had slight risers, or the soles were thicker than necessary, to add a measure of stature.

Without introduction the man nodded to the helicopter and growled, “Kaptain Kopter says his little radio there is only for the ‘Tower Com’, for flying stuff. Sheeeeit, what a prick.”

He cleared his throat, coughed, turned his head and spat. He continued, “ Look buddy, I need you to make a call for me, okay? That shrink said that you’re the man I gotta talk to.”

He made a half-hearted pat down of his pockets. “Gotta pen? Otherwise your gonna have to remember the number.” He tilted his head slightly, spread out his open hands and looked up at Cliff expectantly.

Shrink? A call? Cliff was shocked. This was well beyond his job description.. He was never called upon to be involved in a personal way like this. He stared at the man. He saw the man had reddish hair, slicked to the side and small blue eyes. The man raised his brow quizzically.

Cliff’s impulse was to refuse. He thought the man’s behavior uncouth, base, despicable. Still he found himself reaching inside his jacket for a pen.

The man wrestled a card from the hip pocket of his tight polyester pants and asked for a cigarette. “Sargent Rock said, ‘No smoking near the ship.’ God, what an asshole. These military types, all the same. Bunch of tightasses if you ask me. Think they’re cute, like to throw their weight around when you’re at their fuckin’ mercy. What a dick.” He shook his head and rolled his little eyes in exasperation. He took the cigarette Cliff grudgingly extended.

“Oh yeah,” he slapped the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, “He also said you don’t have much of an airport. Was pissed about having to come in over that big building back there. He almost turned around. Real fussy, the guy thinks he’s a regular Amelia Lindbergh for setting us down out here in the boondocks.” The man arched an eyebrow at Cliff and smirked at his little joke.

Cliff did not laugh. He was feeling suddenly defensive. He had always taken a bit of pride in his makeshift helipads. After all none of the other pilots had complained about it, that he knew of at least. Besides, hadn’t he just been following the instructions of the previous pilots?

He began to agree with the man that the ‘copter jockey must be some sort of prima donna. How could the flat warehouse cause any concern? Hell, he’d seen guys fly those things down river gorges in Korea, pick up a couple of wounded and blast off in the time this jerk diddled around hovering here tonight.

But then he reminded himself that this pilot might be only a few years out of Vietnam. Also, he tried to recall, had the new book warehouse been there the last time a chopper came in? He had to allow that it could present some problems, approaching and descending over a big black roof like that.

That settles it, he thought, have to build a heliport. He began to mentally catalog where on the campus to locate it.

The man interrupted his deliberations. “Hey, I need a light too. Left my Zippo back in the limo,” He snickered, “Gave it as a souvenir to a little chick. Least I could do. Goddamnit, she was hot. She coulda sucked a spud through a soda straw.”

The man hiked up his pants and tucked in his glossy shirt, sucking in his gut. Did the man give him a quick little conspiratorial wink? Cliff instantly realized the man’s boasts were, in fact, almost comically unflattering and that there was probably more truth than allusion in the man’s last statement. He briefly considered pointing this out to the man.

Instead he found himself holding out a match. In the flash he noticed the man's hands were pudgy, covered with freckles, and he too favored a large ring. The flame revealed wide graying side burns and some red stubble on the blossoming jowls. He closed his porcine eyes and  took the drag with obvious relish.

The man turned back towards the others who were still involved in a discussion. Cliff thought the thin man appeared less intense now, he seemed more resigned.

The man blew out his smoke and chuckled humorlessly, “Yeah, Stan’s really stepped on his pecker this time. Gonna be some ‘splainin' to do!”  As he said this he rocked his heavy head theatrically on his short neck. Cliff did not find it amusing.

The man, tilting his head to allow the smoke to clear his eyes, wrote a number on the card and thrust it towards Cliff.

Cliff took it and looked down at it. He angled it so he could read it in the glare of the helicopter’s lights.

The man said, “All ya gotta do is give that number a call. Tell them to fire up the jet, the big one. The King’s going straight back to Memphis. I’ll call them later, from the limo.”

The man turned his back to Cliff, said, “Thanks pal,” and strode off towards the machine. Just at the edge of the rotor he paused, glowered in the pilot’s direction and, arching back, took a long exaggerated pull on the cigarette. He then flicked it down and stomped on it beneath a pointed boot. He motioned towards the thin man (Stan, Cliff concluded), and just before boarding, dramatically exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke.

Cliff studied the card and the numbers written there. He turned it over in his hand and read the printing: Rusty Dupree it announced in bold black lettering. Just below his name was inscribed a bright flash of lightening. In the center of that yellow bolt were the initials, just as bold as those above, but in Italics: TCB.

Cliff looked up and Stan was at the door of the helicopter, he turned back towards Dr Archer and waved. She waved back, rather uncharacteristic for her, Cliff thought. The 2 doctors turned towards the Suburban. He looked again at the card and thought ruefully, what makes it impossible for a doctor to dial a phone?

TCB. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Some kind of cut rate Pinkertons, some type of rentacop or low budget security? He wondered what kind of cheap royalty would employ such riff raff?

Memphis? Cliff had a good head for geography. He read every issue of his National Geographic, cover to cover.

But more than that, after Cliff was first divorced and newly lonely, he would often spend evenings at his friend Denny’s place. Denny was a HAM radio operator. Cliff would put the little pushpins in the world map that spread across the wall in the “radio shack,” each pin representing another of Denny’s contacts. There were lots of pins in that map.

Cliff tried his knowledge: Memphis, let’s see, that’s Egypt isn’t it? Or maybe Sudan. This fat guy couldn’t be the king of Egypt, he concluded. No, they don’t have kings anymore. The last one was that other fat guy, the one in Look Magazine, the one on the beach with all those young babes. What was his name…King Farook or something? That king was really fat. The dark guy here tonight, although he was fat, was nowhere as obese as that other king of Egypt was.

As Cliff climbed tiredly into the plow truck, and as the turbine on the helicopter began to spool up, he decided that this guy must be the King of Sudan. Do they have kings in Sudan? But then again, Memphis was closer to Cairo, he believed. Khartoum was in Sudan.

He was wearily aware that he would have to look it up. He would not rest tonight until he had an answer.

Whoever he was, this King of Memphis was one sorry looking slob.

    

CHAPTER 2.



               Dr. Archer wheeled the Suburban up the lane towards the garage. She was vaguely aware that Cliff would have to walk back down the hill after retrieving each one of those vehicles at the landing site. For an instant she felt something that nearly verged on pity for Cliff, she momentarily pictured him on those return walks through the woods. She realized, too, that he necessarily had to make the same number of trips to get the vehicles down to the lot in the first place. Those walks were uphill. Her new sentiment, she was surprised to observe, was tinged with a dawning respect. It was an awareness of, and admiration for, the devotion to Maple Lodge made evident by his actions. It was a foreign notion to her, fleeting but nevertheless poignant.

She glanced over at Dr Lumkin who was sitting bolt upright, apparently trying not to foul the vinyl of the seat with his sodden clothing. He was rubbing his hands on his thighs.

“Well,” she asked, “What do you think?”

“Heavens,” he replied, stammering slightly, “I have, I’ve, I’ve never seen so much vomit.”

She took her eyes off the lane for an instant and studied him again by the wan light of the instruments. He clearly looked distressed.

“No, I mean his condition. Do you think he’s as bad as Stan said?”

Dr Lumkin looked up from scrutinizing his hands. He stared off through the windshield. “I don’t know… I didn’t get much time. I didn’t smell any ETOH, yet neurologically he was quite obtunded. His coordination, his gait especially, was…curious. I’d have to guess tranquilizers, maybe even antipsychotics -given what Stan has told us. But I don’t know, he was quite tachycaridic, maybe amphetamines too.” He returned to a minute study of his palms, holding them near the meager light of the radio lamp.

“Physically?” she inquired. Through her own observations she had already arrived at many of these same conclusions. But Dr Lumkin was a medical doctor, a respected internist and that is what she was paying him for. From her peripheral vision she noticed his pale hands fluttering on his pants again. Interesting behavior, she mused, annoying, really. Her question was more demanding than she had intended.

He shot a look at her and then gazing forward into the dark, he focused. “I didn’t get much of an exam. Like I said, he was tachycardic, rhythm was regular, it seemed, but not robust. He was diaphoretic and was short of breath. Of course he was struggling, but then again, not that much. I wish I could’ve got a stethoscope on him. His ankles were edematous for sure, pitting most likely. I’d have to conclude he is suffering some degree of congestive heart failure. Most probably he’s hypertensive, uncontrolled.

Metabolically I cannot guess much. Soon to be diabetic I would think. The light was so harsh I could not tell if he was icteric or not. I can’t speculate much more on his liver. However with the volume of his emesis, he certainly is not anorexic and I would suppose his pancreas is okay. Good Lord, I have never seen anyone vomit such a volume.”

He sniffed at his hands speculatively. “Not fecal, no obstruction. No evidence of GI Bleeding and so no espophageal varicosies, at least at the moment. He was incontinent, so his kidneys are still on the job to some degree.”

She pulled up, placed the truck in reverse and while glancing over her shoulder began backing into the stall. She arched a brow and asked, “ So, what do you think?”

He sighed, “Well, given what we know about his family history, I would say that without intervention I’d be very surprised if he lasts more than a year.”

She sighed too. She put the transmission in park and switched off the key. She got out of the truck and stared wearily into the dark for a moment. She was tired, defeated, and she also reeked. She was glad she had brought a change of clothes. Tonight she’d shower in her office and spend the night there on the sleeper.

Dr Lumkin stood, hesitating, tugging at his clothing, pulling his trousers from his legs. He looked at her. “I don’t know what to do, really. “ His thick lips quivered slightly. “I can’t really get in my van like this…I have a new one you know, I mean a new van and it has the velour….” He trailed off forlornly.

She turned and grabbed a pair of overalls off a hook by the door. She noticed “Cliff” in red embroidery over the pocket. “Here, try these. Cliff will want them back though.”

He gave her the kind of grateful look a drowning man would favor a lifeguard with. She suspected the fit would not be anywhere near approximate but it was better than despoiling precious velour, even if he just sat on them. She held them out and he snatched at them greedily, as if they were, indeed, a life ring.

“Thanks, oh, I’ll make sure I bring them back.” He began to struggle into them. She turned to walk towards the offices. This episode had been a little too personal for everyone involved and she wanted to grant the poor smelly man a shred of privacy, preserve a bit of dignity for him. She reflected that how one responds in the presence of vomit is often revelatory.

Hearing the approaching plow truck, she turned as she reached the door. The headlights illuminated Dr Lumkin briefly as he was making his way to his custom van. She turned away, shaking her head, smiling in spite of the night’s events. She inserted her key considering the vision she had just witnessed there in the lights. It seemed oddly fitting for a night like this one.

As Cliff approached the garage he hunched forward over the steering wheel, peering through the windshield. “What the hell?” he said to himself. There, for just an instant, he glimpsed Dr Lumkin as he scurried around the corner of the garage. Cliff had a slight feeling of irritation as he realized the doctor had appropriated his coveralls. Yet he had to laugh at the thief, in spite of the vexation.

The garment was not a good fit. The crotch, owing to the fact that the trousers portion could not be advanced further than midway up the doctor's expansive thighs, was located nearer to the knees than the groin. This inability to fully don the pants meant the trunk portion was likewise compromised. Thus the shoulders of the suit were now at a point about roughly even with the doctor’s breasts. The empty sleeves dangled down, terminating above his knees. His abundant abdomen would not permit use of the zipper beyond a point just below his belt. So in order for him to keep the coveralls from dropping down about his ankles, and to prevent the upper shoulders and arms from dragging, he had to compress the outfit against his sides by clamping his elbows tightly against his torso. His forearms were thus thrust forward yielding a posture that suggested the first fledging steps of a tentative toddler.

 The abbreviated inseam embarrassed comfortable ambulation. The good doctor staggered forward like a jolted prizefighter. The comically shortened stride was further accentuated by a necessary girlish twisting of his waist, precipitating a swinging of the hips, a weird wiggling.

At exactly the same instant Dr Archer and Cliff arrived at an identical impression. Dr Lumkin had, as revealed there now in the harsh highbeams while strangely waddling into his lengthening shadow, been transformed into a giant penguin. 

CHAPTER 3

The Center River is aptly, if not creatively, named. At its source it is nearly exactly half way between the Mississippi and the St. Croix Rivers, to both of which it contributes its waters. Oddly, through some geological chicanery, it sets a northward course for its 90 or so miles before forwarding its stream to the St Croix near Rush City, Minnesota. From there the confused waters can now relax as the St Croix bears them correctly southward to the Mississippi and thence onwards to the distant Gulf of Mexico.

               The aforementioned source of the Center River is the outlet of 4000-acre Lake Center. Why the lake is not called Center Lake is unknown. But that is not so unusual in Minnesota. Some lakes are just christened that way. For instance Lake Pepin is never referred to as Pepin Lake and so, too, Lake Minnetonka. Likewise is Lake Superior. On the other hand, any number of Pelicans, Muds, Rounds, and Longs all have the “Lake” title following. Interesting though, giant Mille Lacs Lake can play it both ways as it is often referred to as Lake Mille Lacs. Some purists insist on leaving the “s” silent, in deference to Des Moines and Illinois apparently. Just saying it that way is clumsy to the tongue and is sure to bring contempt from the locals. Usually it is just Mille Lacs, or “The Dead Sea” to those fishermen who have not invested enough of their time and talents there. In a state with over 10,000 lakes, some whimsy in the assignation of names is to be expected.

               Historically, native peoples visited the Center River Valley, but with no wild rice or other abundance of easy protein, their sojourns there were of a more nomadic nature.

               For decades prior to the Revolutionary War, the river was familiar to, if not frequented by, the voyageurs and others employed in the great multinational fur trades. The river was of little account to them as it did not offer much in the way of transportation or destination. It’s mighty competitors, the St Croix and Mississippi were the main arteries, and this land, as a result of that proximity, was soon depleted of pelt.

               Towards the middle of the 19^th century, after dubious treaties with the natives, insatiable “Yankee” lumbermen from New England descended upon the area and devoured the forests. As quickly as the resource was spent, so too the lumber barons and their workforce were gone

               The first permanent settlers were mostly immigrant Swedes, who established humble homesteads and fledgling communities in the wilderness left behind by the frenzied lumbermen. Their numbers would soon be multiplied by a rapid and large influx of German refugees.

               During the years of the U.S. Civil War a large migration of these refugees streamed into the more civilized, by comparison, sanctuary of the Center River Valley. They left behind, in their haste, nearly everything they had possessed or wrought on the prairies of Southern Minnesota. This exodus was launched by the explosive eruption of violence known as the Dakota Conflict. Indeed, many of the refugees from New Ulm, and its surrounding communities, would not stop their retreat until they had returned to Germany. Wherever their flight eventually took them, they all shared a common sentiment: They were lucky to be spared. The hostilities were bloody and discharged with lightening ferocity.

               For the Dakota, the retributive horrors would be more protracted.

               At the outlet of Lake Center one of those refugees would discover a suitable place to locate a modest mill. Soon others would follow and eventually a village would be established along the Northern Shore of Lake Center.

               That village first known as Heinz Mill, would later, after the turn of the century, be officially christened Lake Center, Minnesota.



               In the spring of 1976 there are nearly 2100 residents in the town of Lake Center. Still present in that number are many descendants of those original refugees, but over the years the strain has been very much diluted.

               Commerce is still centered on agriculture, dairy specifically, but that too is beginning to change as the urban gravitational pull of the Twin Cites begins to register. Manufacturing, retail, and services are all a part of a steady, almost robust, economy.

               Real estate, capitalizing on the recently completed Interstate 35 linking the Twin Cities to Duluth, is beginning to sizzle if not boom. And because of that freeway, less than 20 miles away, the lake resorts that have endured are beginning to note an increase in vacationers.

There was a time when the railroad was the primary vehicle for travel to and from the Twin Cities, 50 miles away. Back then this community was hailed as a prime, or more accurately, an exclusive tourist destination. But the depression, the wars, and especially, improved highways and better automobiles would all contribute to a dramatic decline in the popularity of Lake Center as tourist destination. It was too far away from the Twin Cities for day trips and too close for a vacation. The grand hotels, ballrooms and the amusement parks that once graced the town’s beaches have all been long erased. Save for the handful of resorts, nothing remains to testify to that lustrous era. Even the locals who experienced it from the servile side of the equation are beginning to fade away as well. 

               The main artery through the town, US highway 18, links the Twin Cities with North Western Wisconsin and cities like Chippewa Falls, Wassau and eventually Green Bay. There is no existing evidence, aside from memories and black and white photographs, of a handsome railway trestle that once spanned the river. And the highway bridge covers any remnants of Heinz’s mill.

There is a dam though. A WPA constructed low head dam spans the 50 yards of river just upstream from the highway, naturally at the outlet of Lake Center.

               Across the river from the village is Maple Lodge. The property is bounded on the north by the highway, on the west by the river, and extends in a southeasterly direction along the lake for nearly 2 miles of shoreline. The estate covers nearly 500 acres and includes additionally, and ironically, the undeveloped 3 acres of Stiller’s Island offshore in Lodge Bay. (During prohibition a popular, if sporadic, moonshine operation was located on the island.)

               For all its proximity and size, few of the locals give Maple Lodge much thought. To most of them it is something that is just there, few are directly involved with it and, strangely, those few who work “Up at The Lodge” offer very little information of a curious note.

Occasionally one of the more famous of The Lodge’s clients will materialize in church, or for instance at the post office but, the citizens of Lake Center, who invariably welcome a stranger will, just as surely, afford privacy when the desire for it is detected.

               And there has been more than a few celebrities who have called upon Maple Lodge over the years. It is an odd confluence of circumstance which yields a place that is distant to its very neighbors and yet to many others, from around the globe, is their only focus.

To those who journey there, and they inhabit the widest spectrum of rank imaginable, Maple Lodge represents an end of their present and the beginning of their future or, perhaps, just a fleeting wayside on an accelerating ride to their own demise. The common denominator that pasha and peon alike share on those grounds is the inability to control their own consumption. Their appetites have become unassailable.

Originally Maple Lodge, during the epoch of affluent tourism on Lake Center, was established as a Northwood’s retreat for a select brotherhood of Twin City second generation “new money.” Agriculture, lumber, milling, mining and transportation industries were all represented in that clubhouse 

In fifty years fantastic wealth had been amassed, borne upon the stalwart back of Minnesota’s physical endowments. Of the fortunes enjoyed by the young scions gathered to recreate at Maple Lodge in those days, not one was unrelated to the state’s natural bounty.

Unfathomable stands of timber had been felled. There would be abundant yields of King Wheat, wrought by new hybrid strains and the profoundly fertile soils of the Red River Valley’s bonanza farms. Rafts of logs and bushels of wheat would then be united at the Mississipi’s Falls of St Anthony.

The mills that would germinate at the falls were without peer on the entire globe. A modern metropolis, Minneapolis, would erupt there to meet the human demands of the hungry mills. This new city would soon eclipse its older, more dignified, neighboring sibling, St Paul.

To the North were the Iron Ranges. Three of them, first The Vermilion, soon followed by the legendary Mesabi and finally, the relative newcomer, Cuyuna, would deliver iron ore unrivaled in purity and quantity.

And of course these resources needed to be transported to the mills, and from there to market. Railroads were built. Fleets of Great Lake steamships began calling on Duluth and North Shore ports and from there the ravenous markets down lake. Steamboats plied the Mississippi, Minnesota and Red Rivers. It was a hectic heyday of frantic commerce. 

Naturally the commercial captains navigating those treacherous tradewinds, the roiled waters of wealth, would need a harbor, a sanctuary where the colossal demands of industry could be distanced. A calm respite in nature, or what remained of it, was found on Lake Center.

These titans can still be seen in curled photographs. They kneel on one knee, leaning on antique shotguns, behind rows of slaughtered waterfowl. They line up in back of a groaning line strung between  trees. Suspended on that curious clothesline are dozens of fish; giant northerns, huge walleyes and mammoth bass. They pose, leaning on rifles, before riddled antlered bucks hanging from some type of wooden gallows contraption. That gallows appears in another snapshot too, this time with a single hale fellow, posed with arms across his chest, feet spread, and jaw thrust forward. At his elbow dangles, improbably, a black bear.

Perhaps it is just a convention of the time, but is strange that in none of these portraits do the men seem relaxed. Although they are dressed casually, most sport beard growth and some have donned roughrider style hats, their posture seems tense, coiled almost. Their mien betrays no joy, they convey no sense of wonder or satisfaction at what they have accomplished in the field. Instead, they stare across the decades with what seems to be more of a sense of entitlement. They peer through the sepia in a hungry anticipation, ready to embark for more.

Local old timers who served these men still speak in wonder of the china and crystal, the sterling silverware and fine linens, the wine and delicacies, the phonographs and electric light plants. It was a gilded age for some and for those who came up to The Lodge to work, it was like a small opening had been rent in the fabric of their universe and they could peer, momentarily, into an alien dimension of wonder.

The next generation assumed command of Maple Lodge gradually, each year further diminishingh the ranks of the founders until an entirely new cadre had been established.

The fortunes were still intact but they depended very little anymore upon the fruits of the earth. By the Roaring Twenties the sportsmen, if one can call them that, were sowing and harvesting money. Investments, mergers, insurance, speculations, real estate, retail, entertainment along with some manufacturing, construction, and utilities were the engines of wealth that conveyed these men to the grand table in the Lodge’s Great Hall.

As the business interests of these chaps had evolved, so too had their sporting interests. As the game became scarce and thus, perhaps, the pursuit of it too strenuous, other quarry was sought. A herd of buffalo was engaged. Occasionally, down the highway, (which still serves as the Lake Center Main Street) there would wheeze through town a laboring truckload of caged dogs; wild, exotic looking, powerful beasts, snarling and snapping from their cages at the astonished pedestrians on the sidewalks.

There were strange and distasteful rumors whispered in the town. Cliff’s own father played a role in one of these stories although few outside his own family ever heard him speak of it.

Cliff’s land has been in his family since the late 19^th century. His grandfather had homesteaded it and upon his demise it was passed down to Cliff’s father and then, likewise, on to Cliff. The entire northern border of the 180acre tract is shared with Maple Lodge. Through the woods, as the crow flies, the main lodge is perhaps a little more than half a mile away from his farmhouse.

On more than one occasion Cliff’s mother and father had paused, perhaps on their porch swing of a quiet summer eve, to wonder at the strange whoops and roars and blasts filtering up through the trees from the revelers at their Maple Lodge retreat.

Maybe for this reason, and because of the proximity of the Lodge, Cliff’s father should not have been so taken aback when lodge affairs intruded into his usually uneventful life. But he was greatly surprised. In fact he startled so entirely that he kicked over the milk bucket, spilling its precious contents into the gutter. He could not be blamed though, he had never seen a Negro before.

Cliff’s father had been doing afternoon milking in the warm familiarity of the shadowy barn. Suddenly the barn door, just to the left of him, was yanked open. The brassy November sunlight smote his unaccustomed eyes and he reflexively raised an arm to shield his vision. As his arm arced upward his brain registered the fact that, silhouetted there in his barn’s door stood a big stranger. Not only was he a big stranger, he was a big black one. Cliff’s father’s arm did not pause to cover his eyes, in fact his other arm joined it in a defensive posture not unrelated to instinctive preservation. He pitched backward off his stool, kicking over the milk bucket. He probably shouted too, but history does not record it if he did. He once told Cliff he couldn’t have been more astonished had the door jerked open and FDR himself had sprang through it.

Assuming he had actually seen a white farmer before, Cliff’s father deduced that the black man’s lively response to him was in reaction to his own exaggerated vault from the stool. The man’s eyes widened, he howled and sprang backward, very adroitly, through the door. He remained in the sunshine for an instant, he quickly craned his neck about and then, with the same agility, sprang back into the barn, slamming the door behind himself. He quickly raised a finger to his lips and held out a hand to Cliff’s father.

“Mistah” he whispered, “I’d be wonderin’ if you can gi’ me a lift. I got some fellas aft’ me here ‘n’ I jez wants to git down de road a ways.”

Cliff’s father noticed the man was wet, drenched and dripping, shivering. He thought for a moment that the man must’ve been duck hunting on the lake and capsized his boat.

The man squeezed at his clothes, wringing out the water. “I needs to get outta here. Deys got dem hounds whipped up ‘n’ dey’ll be acomin’ f’me.”

“Who, what do you mean? What are you talking about?”  Cliff’s father stammered.

Pointing in the direction of The Lodge, the stranger continued, “All’s I be askin’ is for a ride to town, or for you t’ hide me here for a spell, jez ‘til dem mens from de big house tire a’lookin’ for me. Dey’z fools wid hounds. I know’d some ‘bout hounds for sure and dey doan know nuffin when it comes t’ hounds but I spect dose hounds might be smarter ‘n’ dem ‘n’ find my trail here jez de same.”

Cliff’s father was beginning to form a sickening idea about what this strange apparition was suggesting.

The man laughed a quick laugh, “Dem hounds cain’t smell a body ‘n’ de water so when dey says go! I lit out for dat lake I see’d, when dey took me back in here. But I knows dose hounds’ll get you trail when you comes out, you always haf to comes out ‘n’ dat’s when dey get de trial agin. I swum ‘bout as long as I can ‘n’ den I sees dis barn up here ‘n’ I knowed it’d at leas’ be warm in dare ‘n’ maybe I can git som’ un to hep me out or I mayb’ I can study up a plan.”

Cliff’s father thought he could maybe just make out the frenzied howls of agitated hounds.

Without further consideration he grabbed the big Negro and said, “Hurry!”

He hustled the man up to the farmhouse where Cliff’s mother had her opportunity to be shocked. She was peeling potatoes when Cliff burst into the kitchen with the big wet stranger in tow. Her kettle, the water and the potato skins went sailing across the kitchen floor. She was typically a self-possessed woman and she regained her composure quickly. She straightened herself, smoothed her apron and began to welcome this new guest into her home, begging forgiveness for the mess.

Cliff’s father said, “I’m sorry Bet, there’s no time for introductions here.” He turned to the man, “I don’t even no your name anyway.”

The man made an attempt to hold out his hand and speak but Cliff’s father cut him off. “We’ll introduce ourselves later. Bet, get me those old, er,” now glancing at the shivering man, “My other pair of overalls and a dry shirt for him. I’m going to run him to the station before the train leaves.”

He turned to the man again, “You want to go to St Paul?”

“Yep, St Paul’d be fine, sir.” He nodded.

Cliff’s father ordered the man to strip as Betsy hurried up the steps. Soon she tossed down a battered pair of bib overalls, a patched wool shirt of roughly the same vintage and, Cliff’s father noticed with just a momentary twinge of irritation, a real good pair of freshly darned socks. In those days clothing was never discarded. Often bits and pieces of a spent garment would find themselves grafted upon an article which was generations removed from the donor’s own manufacture.

To preserve his own modesty, probably more than that required of the stranger, Cliff’s father kept his back to the man as he gingerly circled around him. He picked up the clothing at the foot of the stairs and shot a glance up at his wife who silently mouthed an imploring “What?”

Cliff’s father made an impatient gesture with his hand and tossed the clothes to the man. “Here. I’ll get your wet stuff together.” The man handed them over.

Turning to the pantry, he grabbed a potato sack and began stuffing the soggy clothes into it.

While the man began fussing with the buckles, sliding them to their fullest extension, Cliff’s father wondered about dry foot ware. He then looked down at his own father’s boots, standing there in the pantry corner exactly as they had since the day his father died.

Naturally there were reminders of his father everywhere about the farm. The tools, the buildings, the orchard, all were part of his father’s legacy. Why had he left those boots here undisturbed in the pantry? They were stout boots. Boots too big for him to fill but, they served as a silent reminder to him that he must try. He looked over and noticed a swatch of red flannel patched over the knee on the overalls that the man was struggling into. He recognized it as a piece from a fine shirt he remembered his father wearing; first on special occasions, then, later, more for everyday and eventually, in pieces strung throughout an entire life’s wardrobe. Cliff realized that today he was filling his father’s boots. He grabbed them and said, “These were my father’s, they’re yours now.”

“Oh my,” the stranger looked down at them and then up at Cliff, “Dem are good boots, dey fine.”

“Yeah,” Cliff’s father said, “But my father no longer needs them and I believe he would be happy if you’d take them.”

The black man tugged at the laces, pulled the boots on and stood. For the first time in 7 years the boots were once again gracing the linoleum of that humble kitchen.

He looked down at the boots once more and then up at Cliff’s father, “Dem’s fine, sir. Deys like dey’s made f’me!”

Thinking he could hear hounds clearly now, Cliff’s father said, “C’mon, let’s go.”

And with that they were out of the kitchen and sprinting to the machine shed.

The black man motioned Cliff’s father into the driver’s seat and said, “Let me.”

Cliff’s father jumped behind the wheel, setting the spark and throttle while the black man circled to the front. He stooped. Cliff’s father nodded and with a powerful swing the man spun the engine of the model T. Cliff’s father would never forget the beautiful human arc described by the man’s simple graceful motion. The slumbering engine too, startled itself by that practiced crank, spun to life without cough or clatter.

He jumped on the running board as Cliff’s father accelerated across the barnyard. As they curved by the house, Betsy emerged with a floor sack. Cliff’s father brought the car to a stop and she said, handing the sack to the man, “It’s just a few hard boiled eggs and a bottle of buttermilk….I thought you looked hungry.’ Cliff’s mother always thought everybody looked hungry.

The man looked into the sack, there were at least a half dozen eggs in there, a hunk of buttered bread, the milk jar, and maybe even cake. Why he hadn’t had cake since…

Cliff’s father shouted “Hang on!’ and they lurched forward with the stranger looking back over his shoulder, giving his thanks to Betsy.

Cliff pushed the old Ford while trying as he always did to make a “What if” plan, should the train be gone.

Once on the road, the Negro, holding his soggy hat to his head, slapped his knee and gave a whoop.

“Old Roy sure give dem fools de slip!” He laughed.

Cliff’s father suddenly had apprehensions. This was a “What if” he had not seen. What if there was a genuine posse out there? What if this guy sitting in his Lizzy was a convict, a rapist, a killer? What had made him so readily assume the fellows at Maple Lodge would be engaged in such deplorable sport? He swallowed.

The Negro continued, “ ‘Spect dat right now dem hounds givin’ em fits. Dey’s fools wid hounds I see dat. I runs up da hills first, dat would tire dem out I know’d ‘case dem men all fat ‘n’ soft. Den I look back from a tree. Dey said dey would give me a hour befo they lets de hounds go but soons I got up ina woods dey must gone roun back to get dem old hounds. Cain’t hav’ been no hour. Den I see dey has guns, one a em has a big rope and ‘n’ I know’d dey was aft’ me.”

He snorted, “Dey brings me here, tells me dey gone give me a bull dollar for splittin’ de wood. When I get here I sees a big wood pile split up already ‘n’ I knows dat dey up to no good. So’s last night I aks one of dem girls dey brought along ‘bout dis ‘n’ she says dey bad mens ‘n’ for sure cain’t be up to no good. Her name be Shirley, she a fine woman too.” He paused reverentially, “She a fine woman.” He grinned over at Cliff’s father.

Cliff’s father cleared his throat and studied the road ahead.

“When Roy sees de rope he know dey not gonna give him no bull dollar like dey say dey would if Roy trick dem and de hounds ‘till it be full dark. Dey hunting Roy like a animal, dey gonna stretch him by de neck maybe. So I runs down the hill ‘n’ over it ‘n’ I comes to de crick. Den I splashes along up de brook a good piece ‘n’ go up a hill agin, dem hounds all barking ‘n’ wild ‘n the briars I crawlt through befo’. Den I was smart, I be real soft like, I stays in dat stream all da way to dat lake I seed ‘n’ in it I jumps ‘n’ swum away from dem.”

He slapped his leg again. “Sure wisht I coulda seen dem fatties goan up ‘n’ down dem hills!”

Cliff’s father was relieved to see the train still at the station. He swung the car up to the side and told the man to wait. He burst into the station and looked up at the big Regulator clock. The train was about to leave. He recognized old Gus Lindquist at the agent’s window, peering over at him through thick glasses.

Lindquist said, “If you want to catch her you better make it quick.”

You old codger, Cliff’s dad was thinking as he slid up to the window and said, “Listen, you like chicken don’t ya?”

The old man looked about the deserted depot and said, “Well, maybe I do.”

My wife’s butchering a fine fryer next week and I could run it over to your place if…”

“Well I like eggs too.” He offered without solicitation.

“Okay, Yup, a dozen eggs if you’ll…”

“Well,” the old man interrupted, he had played this game before and knew who held the cards. It was the depression and a different kind of economy was at work, “My son’s family likes eggs too.”

Cliff’s father leaned into the window and fixed the man’s eyes with his own, catching old Lindquist in that instant before he tried to look away.

“Listen, Gus, my little girl likes eggs too. I’ll give you 2 dozen then, and,” Lindquist looked up, perhaps expecting a tip besides, “I won’t mention to you again, or to anybody else, about how my father made up for the missing 22 bucks in the township’s balance when he went over the books back in ‘18. He thought it might’ve had something to do with your wife’s dyin’ from the Spanish flu. But lately I’m beginning to wonder if maybe you’re just a common thief.”

Lindquist looked away for a second and then directly at Cliff’s father. His face briefly illuminated with pain, he cleared his throat and said, “How can I help you?”

“I gotta get this guy to St Paul….”

There was no need to say more. Old Lindquist, in those first years of the depression, had made human cargo, or more accurately a human postal service, into nearly a cottage industry for himself. It was common knowledge in the town that for a price, usually barter goods or services, an inglorious transportation to St. Paul could be had upon the final train of weekends and holidays.

One would think that the sheer numbers who presented themselves to his window for the surreptitious service would alert in him some level of caution. But, like many others of his ilk, a talent for larceny was not wed to any particular genius. Still he never would be snared, even though his superiors had their suspicions, because Old Lindquist would choke to death on a chicken bone within a week of posting his last, and most inexplicable, human lading.

 The train whistled and Lindquist said, “Meet me at the back of the platform, hurry!”

Cliff’s father bolted through the door, found the Negro poised alongside the car. He motioned to the man and said, “The old fellow is gonna put you in the mail car, listen to him and you’ll make it to St Paul in a couple of hours and,” now turning to the man he extended his hand, “Good luck.”

The man took his hand and pumped it, “I gots nothin’ to give you but if you tells me your name I promise t’ name my son, if’n I’ver git one, after you sir, for helpin’ old Royal out. But I needs to knows your name.” 

“Joe.” Cliff’s father replied.

“Joe,” The black man seemed to find it agreeable, he nodded.

They rounded the corner of the station. At the other end of the platform a man was pushing a cart with kegs stacked on it. Old Lindquist waited on a little perch at the back of the last car, the passenger coach. This particular car had been modified to serve the U.S. Postal Service. There was a separated cargo area and was used for the accumulation of mail sacks along the route. It was empty on this run and Joe noticed Old Lindquist had opened the lower half of the Dutch doors.

Lindquist was clearly taken aback at the sight of this black stranger but the press of time limited any further reaction. He motioned to Royal and pointed into the door. Royal pounced onto the little platform and was about to scurry into the darkened compartment.

Lindquist caught him. Wagging a finger up at him he said, “There is one very mean bull down there in the yard at St Paul. Swings a big ball peen. He’d think nothin’ of killin’ a man, and the law would look the other way too, mind you.”

It was the same speech he gave everyone of his passengers. He had no idea if there was a mean bull or not down there but he also knew they did not know it. And in the case of this customer, if there was a bull down there, the part about getting killed and the law not caring was probably the truth.

He continued, clutching at Royal’s arm,  “When this train stops, when it stays quiet and you’re sure it has stopped, you count to 1000 and then slip out of this lower door. I am leaving it unlocked. See? Remember, you count to 1000 before you go out. Understand?”

The train lurched forward, Roy nodded and dove through the opening. Lindquist slammed the door shut and skipped onto the platform, slyly scanning its length

Roy did NOT understand, at least about the counting to 1000 part. He instinctively knew it would be prudent to wait a good spell before detraining. He also knew that 1000 was a big number. In the end he would wait four hours before he would silently slink out of that compartment, one he had found so luxurious compared to the other railroad accommodations he had contracted in the past. He then crept through the darkness, clutching a damp potato sack to his chest, and a nearly empty flour sack in his fist. He picked his way gracefully across dozens of shadowed parallel rails towards the St Paul skyline outlined above, wondering at his marvelous new boots.

That scene on the platform was the last that Joe saw of either of them. (Betsy would deliver a dressed chicken and 2 dozen eggs to Old Lindquist’s home one day when he was apparently at work. His daughter-in-law received it gratefully, always amazed at these acts of unexpected community generosity. It was puzzling to her when the largess literally disappeared after his interment.) Joe had no interest in answering any of the questions Lindquist was bound to have. He hurried to his model T still faithfully puttering there in the last of the sun. He wanted to get home, just in case, by sheer accident, the men of Maple Lodge had found Roy’s trail and followed it to his barn. He was worried.

In the end he had no reason to be concerned. He heard distant hounds howling while he finished his chores and later that night, they heard, deep in the woods, shots and calls.

Joe was not surprised the next day when “A big brown air cooled Franklin,” as he recalled, purred up his lane.

Joe came down the porch as a rotund man emerged from the car. Joe could see another man sitting in the car. This man was darker, smaller, intently staring straight ahead. He had a shotgun pointed towards the roof, the stock resting on the floor between his feet.

The large man stood, spread his legs and leaned back against the car, as if sizing Joe up. Joe sensed a slight weariness to the man’s motions, as if he were stiff, somehow spent.

The man hooked his thumbs in his belt, drawing his open jacket to the sides, exposing a leather hunting vest stretched across a prominent thrust of abdomen.

Joe approached the man and asked only, “Yes?”

The man flashed a toothy smile, memorable for its utter lack of humor and sincerity. The man’s cold eyes, behind round spectacles, confirmed the fact that this was a smile wholly unfamiliar with the usual emotions associated with the act. The eyes measured Joe and catalogued the fact that Joe had made note of the disarming frigidity in that smile. Further, and this was that cruel smile’s ultimate reward, was the man’s appreciation of the dawning awareness that registered on the recipient’s face when they realized the smile was calculated to evoke just that naked reaction.

 The smile was one of his greatest tactical weapons and he focused it on Joe, not because he needed to in this particular instance, but because he enjoyed the discomfort it occasioned in the weak when he unleashed it upon them. Besides, it was the only way he knew how to smile anymore.

Joe however, though briefly unnerved, reclaimed his footing promptly. He reminded himself that this man was here on his yard and was seeking information that only Joe possessed. He thought, I bet that shark smile works wonders across a big desk but here on my stomping grounds it will not cut such a wide swathe.

The man leaned his head back a little as if to give the impression he was looking down his nose at Joe. He knew a longer than expected silence helped to reduce a foe and to this man everyone was foe.

Joe responded by withdrawing a large knife from his pocket and, flicking it open with a practiced flash, he nonchalantly began trimming a callous.

“Well,” the man murmured, “We are your neighbors, so to speak. We’re from The Lodge.” It was an undisguised mock attempt at ingratiating Joe into their neighborhood. “We come here because we are, ah, concerned about a lost nigg…” he paused tilting his head slightly, amused with himself in a satisfied way, “A lost darky. He was part of our hunting party and he seems to have, ah, lost his way….or run off. They have a way of doing that, you know. Still we are a bit concerned that something might’ve happened to him. Perhaps something we, ah, wouldn’t like.”

Joe continued to saw away. Not looking up he asked, “Did ya call the sheriff?”

The man replied soothingly, “No need to. The sheriff was a guest of our party yesterday, and he is just as concerned as the rest of us are. In fact, Hubert suggested we check with some of our, ah, neighbors.”

Joe figured as much, a hog like Hub Paxton was sure to have his snout buried in a deep trough like Maple Lodge.

“Why ain’t he out lookin’?” Joe looked up and now focused behind the man, over the man’s right shoulder, as if studying something in the middle distance. He knew this could be distracting to someone who was annoying you, like a salesman for instance.

The man’s eyes slid to the side briefly, he licked his lips. “Well, as you might know, the sheriff is a church going man and he prefers to spend Sundays, when he can…his is a most demanding post…with his family. No lost, ah,  darky would ever keep Sheriff Paxton from worship with his family.” The man sniffed.

Church, Joe nearly laughed out loud. He knew the good sheriff was far more likely, at this moment, to have a Selzer in his hands than he was a Psalter.

“Well?” the man said, now loudly, finally opening his clenched teeth a little. Joe was a bit awed by the man’s ability to speak with his jaw clamped like that, barely moving his lips.

Joe shrugged, “A Negro did show up here yesterday. Do you think it might’ve been him?”

The man in the car gave a brief, bark of a laugh. He bounced the shotgun up and down tautly. He continued to stare straight forwards.

The big man, exasperated, snorted. Then he recognized, too late, the brief satisfied look on Joe’s face and, beyond that, the awareness that Joe had intended for him to see that satisfaction there.

Joe smiled now and his smile had everything to do with humor and satisfaction. And it was distressing to the man, as he had so seldom found himself a recipient of such a smile. Joe focused it upon the man not caring anymore how the man reacted. This indifference, too, the man found vaguely unsettling.

Joe was beginning to enjoy this exchange, He found it stimulating, almost amusing.

“Aw shucks,” Joe slugged the man playfully on the shoulder in a hayseed display of unsolicited country comradery, “I was just havin’ a little fun with ya is all.”

The man rocked back on his heels, planting his wide seat against the car.

Joe wished he had a stem of timothy weed to chaw on, to advance the desired effect. He continued, amiably, “He done some work for me. I give him 2 bits to split up ‘n’ stack my wood for me.”

The man in the car barked out his abridged laugh again.

Joe nodded to his massive woodpile, ordered and squared to perfection, it was a woodpile worthy of acclaim and waiting for a long hard winter.

The man looked at the wood and then back to Joe, “Well, where is he at then?”

Joe said, “I don’t know, I give him a ride to town. He was headed for the train most likely. The last people train comes through at suppertime, but a freight train comes through later. Headed up for Superior. Comes through sometimes. Can’t recall if I heard it last night. Seems the trains are drying up lately. Must be the highway taking away the business. ‘Course some say the new main road through Cambridge that’s doing in this spur. Why, just last week, Betsy, my wife….”

Joe knew there was no faster way to get rid of someone than to offer unsolicited imbecile observations with the air of a professional expert.

Malevolence was alive upon the man’s face. He no longer whispered his words, it was more guttural now. He seethed,  “Did he have much to say? You know about leaving us in the lurch like that, without a word of thanks for all our hospitality?”

Joe, feigning ignorance of the man’s contempt, responding with trite hesitation, chuckled and offered sheepishly, “Well, ah, he did, ah, say one thing.”

The man straightened, glanced at his companion and demanded, “What’d he say?”

Joe looked down at his feet and shrugged. He kicked at a horse turd with his boot and then, venturing a slow sly smirk, looked up at the man from under his brow. With an exagerrated cartoon wink and trying hard to keep his teeth clenched, he murmured, “He said, ah, you, ah, fellas, were kinda dull.”

Joe would see the big man once more, maybe ten years later. He’d see the man dead.

Those ten years would see the depression take root. Like some toxic weed it would blossom and branch, choking out all hope. Despair was just as evident upon the landscape as was the ever present dust. Yet in the cool lakeside shade of Maple Lodge, the party bravely endured the onslaught of economic woes felt elsewhere.

Another generation at Maple Lodge had been gradually, incrementally, assuming its own office there. Most of this new fold occupied positions of wealth several floors above those who threw themselves from their windows in the first throes of economic extremis.

Yet often upon reassembling at The Lodge for the traditional spring and fall forays, the group would make note of a newly missing face in their slowly dwindling brotherhood. Murmured cluckings were swapped and then the consensus would be sagely gained that the fallen lodge mate’s problems were precipitated via some type of flaw in family, character, or canniness. They’d shake their heads in concern, sigh a bit and maybe one or two would feel a coldly acid juice well up in their throats. They would turn towards the fire, toss their overcoats, clasp their hands together and call for a round.

Their appetites were just as glutinous as those who came before them but now the spoils were of a different nature.

Their action had moved indoors. Now cards, liquor, cocaine and women were the recreation. Ragtime bands were bussed in and there was plenty of “keep you mouth shut” money to be liberally apportioned. It was a time of frenetically attempted carefree excess and those men, returning to wife and family, appeared no more relaxed or rested than had those in the portraits of the generations before.

It is not curious that no photographs of this period exist. Perhaps it is because there was nothing worthy of documentation. More likely it was due to the fact that the “rules of the road” dictated secrecy and implied immunity from one’s own behaviors. Doubtfully it was from some vestigial sense of shame.

In those years there was no longer any need to employ local servants. Your own attendants could follow your Packard or Auburn in their own Chevys. And often times there were no servants at all present, at least of the domestic type, while the club members were assembled. The domestics would be dispatched to put the place in order after the men had returned to their lives in the city. It was typically quite a scene of wretched debauchery that confronted this staff upon their arrival at Maple Lodge. And sometimes there was blood.

Hearsay has it that there is more than one long forgotten shallow grave out there in the woods. Well, there is at least one for sure. And although by now it is surely forgotten, it was not ever forgotten by those who dug it, and one of those was Cabot Archer.

  The membership at Maple Lodge experienced an agonized irregular diminution as the depression wore on. For some of the former comrades, their estates had just plain been consumed, even great fortunes can be depleted when naught accumulates as withdrawals remain constant. For those men it was a simple inability to understand conservation that extinguished them. For others it was unbridled consumption which wrought their dissipations. Whatever the cause, by the end of the thirties only four members remained on The Lodge’s roster, and two of these were coasting upon precious little remaining momentum.

Those four rarely left the lodge anymore. The telephone, thankfully, relieved for them nearly any need of returning physically to society. Through that one invention any persisting intrusive business affairs could be addressed. Families, after an increasingly infrequent period of necessary sobriety, could be assuaged over the phone. And, most importantly, via this one helpful device, supplies could be ordered without ever having to leave an easy chair. The finest in booze and dope, and the lowest in ladies, could be summoned through an innocent little “Number please”.

Cabot Archer was one of that surviving foursome and he was intent upon playing the banjo. He had concluded, some years before, that he held great promise as a banjo musician and he sometimes pictured himself enthralling friends and family alike with his manifest talent. The fact that he had few, if any, friends left, and had not seen his wife or daughter in several months, did not intrude upon this fantasy when it returned to him one night.

Once he had badgered the banjo player from a Maple Lodge orchestra into giving him a lesson. The weary musician had been down that road before. It seemed to him there was a limitless queue containing those who were convinced of their own prodigy and that only “A few simple tricks” could unlock the floodgates impounding their inherent virtuosity. The banjo player demurred, gradually relenting as each sawbuck emerged from the vestpocket of his inebriated newfound virtuoso. By the end of the night’s instruction the musician had assured Cabot that he had never seen such promise in a banjo novice.

Cabot had forgotten all about his banjo aspirations until his water pipe had plugged. He had fashioned a coat hanger wire into a grimy plunger and it worked generally to great effect. On this particular night he had somehow misplaced the shaft. He was sure that it had, only moments or hours before, been at hand. Again he pulled mightily on the stem, but his efforts failed to be rewarded by even a wisp of smoke.

He picked lackadaisically at the black gob of goo in the bowl. He noted, in a detached sort of way, that his fingers were streaked with the tar, as was his shirt and trousers. And yet, on the low table before him, there beckoned an acorn sized luminous lump of green hashish. He scanned his proximity and still there was no wire to be found. He located his Scotch, though, and poured himself a shot, momentarily disturbed by his trembling hands. Was he cold? He pondered the question briefly. He didn’t think so. He poured a double.

With resigned determination he set off in pursuit of another coat hanger. He vacillated down the hallway to a closet. There, with unanticipated delight, he spied in the gloom, protruding from a mound of random debris, the headstock of the banjo. He lovingly extracted the instrument, cherishing it as if it were a long lost first lover. He weaved back towards his soiled easy chair, all thought of the coat hang wire now long evaporated in the warm glow of his old gay whimsy: himself as the center of attention at home, at hearthside, surrounded by appreciative banjo music lovers.

When he sat down he was reminded of the wire, it was plastered to the seat of his trousers. It skewered him slightly. He lifted a thigh and peeled it away from his pants. He held it up, recognized it affably and marveled at his compounding good fortune.

He had no idea how long he had been practicing when he first noticed the screaming. In fact, it seemed to him that the screaming had been going on for quite some time, actually. The shouts annoyed him, he found it a vexing irritation because his newfound banjo infatuation was work that required devotion beyond all distraction.

Initially he had found the strings were all loose and required much fiddling with the knobs to get them properly tight and it was still a bit sour sounding even after that effort had been expended. However he was convinced the sourness would be relieved when he precisely placed his fingers on the appropriate positions.

He could only recall one position the uppity banjo player had shown him. He had taught him three, he thought, but the one he remembered was the easy one. At the end of the neck he was supposed to place a finger on the fat string and then one on the skinniest one. Then pluck them both and then pick at each of the other strings just once, repeat it and then pluck the outside two again and then fan down across all of them. Repeat. Or something like that.

God it was hard to do that just right. He studied it in minute detail but yet the proper sequence eluded him. Then all the shouting began to further distract him. Persistent, annoying, bellowing…why wouldn’t it stop? A scream or two, now and then, was not so uncommon around The Lodge but this was the limit.

He flung the banjo, twirling it across the room. It struck the opposite wall with a discordant terminal twang and he looked at it. That hadn’t sounded half bad, he thought for a moment. Then the hollering began again. A hoarse shouting, “Cab! Cab! Cab!.”

That’s me he thought dully. Are you calling a cab? He chuckled slackly. That was always one of his snappy replies. His voice was dry, he took a swig of Scotch but to not much relief. He tried to croak it out again but all that came out was “You cab?”

There was a thudding now, too. Annoyed, he gathered himself and glacially made it to his feet. With the real good hash it was that way. Standing erect required determination and patience, it was as if the smoke wafted you to a more primitive reptilian state, a sort of reverse evolution.

Once it had taken him fully 40 minutes to arrive at a standing position from where he had been  sprawled upon the rug. Carefully moving, he had fleetingly discovered that each position change required a balancing countermeasure, he was astonished at how a human shape can not only fold and extend, but can also twist and topple and spin. When he had gained his full stature, he had forgotten why he had stood up in the first place. He had remained standing then, arms out as if surfing on a bucking, rail thin surfboard. It was too daunting a challenge, at that moment, to return to the floor. At least until he decided he needed another smoke. Lowering himself cautiously to all fours he found he could not coordinate locomotion from that complex position. Eventually he collapsed onto his belly and wormed his way back to the pipe.

But on this night, goaded on by the screams, he would get to his feet in a matter of moments. Once there however, he could only statically undulate.

 A different system of internal physics now held sway, and sway he did. His body was a tidal capsule, its contents, now provoked, responded with grotesque wave-like harmonics. He stood there, trying to capture the frequency that would propel him onward. It was a dispute between apathetic attenuation and recalcitrant compression. He oscillated.

He held up a finger in breakthrough delayed discovery, “It is the Scotch.” he announced to himself.

He swirled his head to the side and targeted the dark hallway. Where were the boys? Who was doing all that yelling and pounding? He dimly recalled the delivery of a woman, no, more like a girl. Was that this tonight? Probably the girl’s got old Elihu by the nuts, he thought. Probably had enough of that fat old boar climbing all over her. The guy ruts like billy goat.

With a lurch he stumbled towards the faint light draining out of the library. He concluded that the racket was coming from that quarter. As he approached he could, obliquely, see an upset lamp lying, shade askew, behind a toppled easy chair.

He clawed his way to the doorframe and, with all the righteous indignation he could muster, imperiously demanded, “What in the hell is it?”

As he surveyed the room, his first impulse was to laugh. It was the most exaggerated exhibition of carnal carousal he’d ever witnessed. And he had witnessed, even participated, in more than few. Sprawled there across the old bear rug was a pig pile of naked obesity, except for the girl who was thin and quite pale and little Shipley down at the base. The bear’s mouth gaped at him expansively, its eyes, long dulled, were now seeming to bulge.

Old Elihu and August Knox were unfurled, prone on the summit. Below them, just barely visible, were suggestions of the girl and Shipley. It was Shipley making all the noise. His heels were drumming frantically on the floor. Cabot could only see his 2 skinny white legs protruding from under the crowd. He noted that Shipley still donned one black stocking, the only article of clothing remaining on any of them.

Shipley shrieked, “Get me out! I’m smothering….can’t move. God, Cab get me out, I CAN”T BREEEEEATHE!!!”

“What the?” Cab resumed his inventory of the scene once more. Augie appeared passed out, he was snoring sloppily, his head resting between Elihu’s shoulder blades.

Something about Elilhu did not look right. His color was definitely off. In the murk of the battered lamp he could see that his massive dimpled thighs were mottled.

Cabot staggered forward a step in curious disbelief. He peered at Elihu’s face. His mouth was agape, tongue protruding not unlike the bear’s phony taxidermy pose. Elihu’s eyes were dull too, and also slightly bulging. Where he differed stylistically from the bear was in the jowls. The bear didn’t have any and Elihu’s, now dependent with his head sagging forward like that, were a dark purple, as if he had been lapping Concord wine from a dog dish.

Cabot told Shipley, “Elihu’s dead!” He backed up a step.

”I know you stupid bastard,” he gasped, “get them off me! I’m dying under, oh sweet Jesus!”

Their activity had obviously wedged them against the bookcase. Cabot pulled and tugged at Knox, startled by how unbelievably heavy the slack bodies were. Finally he managed to roll Knox over onto the floor. Knox flopped onto the rug, the bear’s head now under the small of his back.

Cabot thought that looked painful and considered repositioning Knox with one further roll. But the insistent struggling and stirrings of Shipley refocused his attention to the task at hand.

God he didn’t want to touch Eli. He grabbed at the girl’s ankle and pulled to no avail. Shipley was becoming ever more agitated. Finally he hooked his elbow under Elihu’s moist, still warm he wished he hadn’t noted, armpit and wrestled him towards the bear too. Elihu’s centrifugal inertia sent one of his errant arms flinging. A perfect “pop!” was heard as the dead elbow met with Knox’s unprotected right eye socket. Knox moaned thickly

Cabot turned back as little Shipley began to wriggle out from under the girl. Only whites showed  in her eyes, so extremely were they rolled upwards. Cabot recoiled at her scrawny dappled frame.

“Oh my God! Ship!!!! She’s dead too!”

Shipley, still struggling, “I know, you fool. I think Elihu must’ve smothered her. Oh Jesus!”

Shipley finally emerged, gasping. He hauled himself up on his hands and knees, panting, retching, puking nakedly. Cabot looked at him disbelievingly, then around at the scene in the library, and then down at himself.

He was coated with black resins. His clothing he hardly recognized as his own, so filthy and unkempt it was. He held his hands out in front of his eyes and, in spite of the gloom, he could see his nails were long, beginning to curl like some kind of wild animal’s. They were yellowed. He brought his hands to his face, he felt the ragged beard. He covered his face and tried to sob.

Knox snored flatuantly. The big grandfather clock ticked indifferently. Cabot wept dryly. Shipley began to blubber.

“It wasn’t me….it was that fat bastard Elihu, he’s the one killed her. God I thought she was enjoying it the way she moved and all...but it was that Elihu...you know he can't, you know, never get enough. Ever. Cab, right? My god, she died on me. They both died. Oh, I don’t know as I can live this down. I think I’m gonna remember this always, this is going to ruin my life, I know it. I wasn’t the one killed her….Jesus its that fat dead bastard who done it. Somehow we got turned over, I guess.” He asserted with a tone of bruised piety, “ And I was supposed to be the one on top! God, Cab, now what’s gonna happen? Oh awful, awful awful. What’re we gonna do?”

Cabot looked up at the clock. He swallowed and sighed heavily. “You’re gonna listen to me, is what we’re going to do. What has happened here will finish us for sure if we don’t use our heads.”

Shipley still gasping, turned towards him and readily agreed, nodding affirmatively.

“Get dressed.” Cabot ordered. Shipley began to paw through the clothing in the room.

Cabot, before his dissipation, was once a brilliant industrial tactician. He had steered his business around Depression perils that had tore the guts out of many a company. He was imbued with a keen appreciation for details, and how they need to be attended to. He had insured that there were others with that same appreciation at every tier of his organization.  In fact that is how he could afford to live in such a sorry state. Now in this present, wretched arena, his mind was sharpening, once again it was mating with his primal, oversized survival instinct.

First he grasped the big steps. Then the tiny ones, retracing them all, viewing them from different perspectives. Shipley would require keen direction. Unfortunately, neither Shipley nor Knox could be depended upon for anything beyond the most simple task oriented commands. And it looked like Knox was out of the game for quite awhile. He took stock of them. Both were essentially weak, drifting on tidal waves of wealth. In that regard they were not unlike himself but he, at least, had used his wits at one time. He had made an empire out of mere kingdoms. And he knew he was not weak. He corrected himself, at least there was a time when he was not weak.

He pondered the situation at hand. There would be an inquest, or at least the law would pay a call. Perhaps he could call a mortician in the city to come out. But the death of Elihu Brighton was going to be big news. Reporters, society columns and so forth, it was big press when someone of Eli’s stature died. The people on the street ate that sort of story up during bad times. He concluded there would not be enough money to pat out all the waves radiating from them trying to smuggle this immense carcass back into the city for a proper home death.

No, he would have to die here. Make it on the square though. Wryly he thought of how old Elihu had always lamented the timely death of old Sheriff Paxton. Eli had rued the sad fact that old “Back pocket Paxton’s” successor would turn out to be The Lodge’s only bordering neighbor. What a twist of fate that was. Cabot had often heard the story of the little run in that Shipley and Eli had once had with that neighbor, years ago, during his own father’s tenure at The Lodge. That tale had become legend, a part of Lodge mythology, “The One that got away.”

The sheriff would be involved then, no getting around it. The sheriff was enamel, too, as far as  money could influence, Cabot knew that. He’d deal with it.

He studied the dead girl. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. She looked half starved. What am I doing here, he thought absently, how did I become so abject?

He had a daughter of his own, back home in St Paul. He tried to remember her clearly, he realized he hadn’t seen her in months. What was she? Four, no, maybe five years old?

Well, there was nothing to be done about it. The girl was going to need to go in the ground. A couple hundred to the pimp, maybe less, and no questions asked.

Shipley was sniveling in the corner, buttoning his shirt. Cabot turned towards him and said, “We got to get rid of this girl. This is going to make big problems for us if we don’t do things right. We got a lot of work to do around here. Knox, too, has got to do his share when we can get him awake. We’re in trouble here, understand? We got to get Eli outside, he’s got to die outside, we don’t want anyone sniffing around in here. And we got to get rid of this girl. We got to get busy.’

Shipley, momentarily haughty at being bullied about by some young upstart, a good 20 years his junior, entertained briefly the notion of resisting. But his shoulders soon slumped under the awareness that what Cabot was saying was, indeed, the truth and even more of a burden for him was the persistent awareness that not one thread of authority was woven into his own personal fabric.

“Look,” Cabot continued, “I think there are some shovels and a wheelbarrow in the gardener’s shed. I am going to get a torch or lantern or something, you and me are going to bury this girl. Then we got to clean this place up, understand? We go to get rid of some of this stuff… look at this place. Jesus! We got a lot to do. Right now you can start by getting Eli dressed.”

Shipley grimaced and then nodded, he located his spectacles and placed them on his sharp nose. He began rummaging through the clothing on the floor. Knox snored weightily. He located some trousers half under the dead girl. He yanked them out from under her. He glanced down at the girl. Her irises now were a fraction visible, disturbed perhaps by his rough extraction of the trousers. It seemed like she was trying to roll her eyes down and look at him. He shuddered.

He was astonished by how difficult it was to dress a dead man, especially a massive one like Elihu. He needed to inch the underpants up in front, roll him and then pull them up behind, it was a tiring and tedious affair. Likewise the trousers.  The shirt was going to be murder and he was about to start with it when Cabot returned. Shipley could not help but feel a trifle proud of his hard-earned accomplishments.

There was a trail in the woods and a three quarters waning moon. Cabot praised God for that moon, the damn lantern was worthless. How he had found the things was nearly a miracle too. Everything in piles out here, tools, books, banjos, dishes, clothes, furniture, bodies, he shook his head. We’ve not been good stewards, he surmised. Ah, but the whole damn country has gone to hell in this depression.

They may not have needed the wheelbarrow for the girl, they were startled at how little she weighed. It was like picking up a sack of ticker tape and Cabot nearly fell over backwards when first he hefted her. Yet, it would’ve been a struggle lugging her down the trail with old Shipley, worthless as he was. Shipley had dumped her the first time he tried to drive the wheelbarrow. He couldn’t even carry the tools, for heaven’s sake, he was dragging them. They would need the wheelbarrow for Elihu though, in Cabot’s formulating plan old Eli would be taking a spin in it too.

Cabot had traveled this trail before. He admitted it to himself, sickeningly. He could not, or more likely would not, remember the details but, somehow he knew the way. He recalled something old Granger had intoned on that night, “Never use the lake boys, she’ll give up her secrets, sure enough. She’s a mouthy  old whore.”

He paused, yes this was it. Through the shadows he could make out the remnants of a clearing. A shooting range had once been in this location. Now long in disuse, the forest was steadily reclaiming it.

But it had not remained completely unused. Cabot knew the digging was easiest along the far fringe. He hoped they would not have to use the axe he brought, but if they did, he hoped it was for the chopping of roots only. The digging of a hasty grave mandates all manner of nasty contingencies.

He chose the spot after looking back towards the trail. The wheelbarrow, back on the trail, was not visible from where he stood, even in this fairly good light. This border of leafy moonshade would be likewise shaded in the sun. It was late September, soon leaves would fall and cover the freshly disturbed earth. It was as good a spot as any.

They bent to their labors and fortunately there was not much in the way of heavy roots, the soil was almost like sand.

In spite of the relatively easy digging, Shipley’s energy soon flagged. He repeatedly voiced his opinion that their excavation was sufficient. Cabot would’ve preferred a depth of 4 feet but concluded that perhaps nearly 3 would be adequate. He didn’t want some curious cur fetching a femur home to a local farmyard. Maybe someday he could come back and pile some stones on it. He was tiring too now, he leaned on his shovel.

“I think that’ll be deep enough,” he panted, “But I think we need to make it wider.”  He looked back at the girl’s body sprawled on the ground. He sized her up and then looked back at the hole and Shipley gasping in it. “I’m sure of it, let’s make it wider and dump her in and then we’ll be done. Here at least.”

Now he was beginning to feel a bit of relief, his own sense of achievement. After this is all over with, he thought to himself, maybe even this night yet, yes, tonight, I am going to pour myself a glass of Scotch and fix a good pipe. He felt sweaty, jittery, tense. On second thought, he allowed, might take a little nip when I get back up to the lodge.

A train whistled in the far distance. It sure was quiet out here in the woods at night. He stopped for a moment to take a breather and listen. The woods were still and dark, the shadows black and deep. The moonlight was waxen and there was not a breath of breeze.

Shipley had paused too, cocking his head, listening. He whispered, “Sure is quiet, isn’t it?”

Cabot stooped at the head of the girl, he nodded, “Grab her feet, let’s get this over with.”

They swung her over her grave and, characteristically, Shipley lost his grip. Her leg dashed down into the hole. Her body was becoming ever more rigid and the torque of the falling leg twisted her trunk in Cabot’s hands. Her head refused to loll now, instead her neck seemed to be arching. Cabot looked down, white sclera crescents were revealed in the dark shadows that had all but consumed her face. He nearly lost his footing and, unceremoniously, they tumbled her into that cheap grave.

The train was now louder, the bell peeled insistently. With rediscovered urgency they began to spade the dirt over her body.

The task nearly done, Shipley, winded, straightened himself. The locomotive could now be heard, straining, moving, gathering speed. He quipped, "Sounds like her train’s leaving the station!”

It was a feeble attempt at a joke, as were all of his. His sense of humor, (not to mention his timing), was nearly as weak as his chin. He looked to Cabot for some acknowledgement.

Cabot Archer’s face usually conveyed little of his emotion. It could when necessary, but stoicism was a cherished family mannerism; one that Cabot inherited as surely as the color of his hair. However tonight Shipley’s glance was met with ungoverned horror projected upon Cabot’s usually impenetrable face.

Cabot dropped his shovel. His mouth gaped open. Shipley saw the rows of perfect white teeth in the blackness there.

What now, Shipley thought. After all this… this dreadful night, the deaths, the dead, the dressing, the digging, that god awful obnoxious train and now Cabot Archer smitten with some type of terror…would this terrible night never end?

He dropped his spade too, looking around he blurted, “What is it?”

Cabot sprang across the mound of earth. He grabbed Shipley in a terrified embrace. He shouted under the mounting roar of the approaching train, “My God, Ship! They took the train out, the trestle…the train, it’s gone!”

Shipley wanted to sink to his knees, but Cabot’s clasp at first would not allow it. The mystery train thundered on through the woods, bearing down upon them, weighing on them, a howling vortex of  momentum and malevolence.

The whistled shrieked again, deafening them, falling to their knees now they covered their ears, their eyes, and their bowed heads. The earth shook and they screamed.

Then the pitch dropped. Reluctantly the tempo diminished. The whistle trailed off.  It had passed them by.

When it was quiet again and Cabot began to reclaim himself, he became aware of Shipley’s distress. He was rocking on the ground, clutching at his throat, coughing, gagging, choking.

Cabot helped him to his feet, he pounded Shipley’s back. Shipley waved him off. “I can’t take the smoke man,” He coughed, “It’s choking me!”

Cabot sniffed, looked around, he did not smell smoke.

“What smoke?” he asked.

“The smoke from that devil train, you damn fool…can’t you smell it?” He coughed, he covered alternating nostrils and blew his nose on the ground.

He squinted up at Cabot, “I can hardly see you, man.” He blinked and rubbed at his eyes. “Dear Lord, that light had no pity.” He blinked again, sneezing and coughing.

Light? Smoke? Cabot had seen no light, he sniffed again. Not a whiff of smoke either. In fact, to him, the air smelled fresh, as if cleansed. He told this to Shipley.

Shipley grabbed at his arm, “Surely you saw that light, man, didn’t you? How could you not? I could not escape it and the smoke and that heat….Oh my god! Cab, tell me you saw that horrible light…please, say it! Oh no, oh no, this is the end for me, I’m sure, this night is the end of me. I know it now for sure….” He fell to his knees again and began to weep.

Cabot hoisted him once more. “Look Shipley, I can’t explain the train, or the light or the smoke or any of this…but, look here, we’re still alive. We have work to do. Let’s do it and we’ll talk about this later, over a round of Scotch and we’ll make sense out of it, I’m sure. But first, there is work.”

Shipley licked his lips and nodding slightly, seemed to regain himself somewhat. Cabot felt a sense of inexplicable shame mentioning that Scotch. He found the thought of quaffing Scotch somehow revolting just then.

They bent to their task once more, distributing the last of the earth over the grave. Cabot turned to find sticks, branches, leaves, anything that could be strewn upon the earth.

“Look!’ Shipley, having obviously now recovered at least some of his vision, screeched.

Cabot wheeled about to find Shipley recoiling, pointing towards the grave. Cabot then saw, there in a tiny patch of wan moonlight, the girl’s hand, or more accurately, just a pale finger, poking, no, pointing up out of the soil.

“Christ, she’s pointing right at me, oh my God, the train, the blinding light, now the pointing, I’m the next one, Cab. I’m going to DIE! I know it.”

Cabot looked down again, it did not seem like the finger was pointing at Shipley, not exactly anyway. He knelt down and scooped a deep trough for the girl’s stiff arm. He gently placed it there, and covered it permanently.

That is when the idea came to him. Tonight, he realized, he had been standing at a midnight crossroads. That train, or whatever it was, had shook him, somehow he was not the same. He felt it, he knew it. He was beginning to have an idea. He was sure of it. He could not see the entire idea, not yet, but he was certain it would be revealed to him with time, and with work.

He knew that this soil, the soil his hands were in at that moment, were a part of the idea. This soil would belong to him and be a part of the plan. He patted the earth, he felt a lump form in his throat.

A tear welled in his eye. He wondered how long had it been since he had shed a tear? It was fitting to shed a tear at this spot. Someone owed this poor dead girl at least a graveside tear. It would be the first of many tears to be shed at this place, and not only by him. He was beginning to feel things and he was astonished that what he was feeling were, in fact, feelings.

He stood, brushed off his hands. He turned towards the cowering Shipley. He knew that neither of them would be emerging from this woods unchanged.

He tugged Shipley through the trees on another oblique, circuitous route back to the wheelbarrow. He did not want to leave any direct trail to what would become, to him, always, “The meadow.”

Shipley fell to his knees again whimpering, “My God, man…you didn’t see that light? It had no mercy, I swear…it shone, like, like an X-ray or a hot terrible beam, I just can’t get it out of my eyes. And the smoke!” He coughed and began to gag again.

Cabot knelt in front of him and took his chin, cupped it in his hand like a child’s. He felt the tears along Shipley’s jaw.

“Look,” he said softly, “I don’t know what that train thing was back there. Maybe it was some kind of shared hallucination or something. You know we both have been hitting the juice pretty hard lately. Haven’t we?”

Shipley sniffling, nodded.

“I mean,” he continued now with more reason in his voice than comfort, “I’ve seen things sometimes, you know bugs…that sort of thing, when I’ve been on benders. I think we all have, remember when Knox was picking that time? Remember how we all laughed at him…and then, some of us thought we were seeing them too? By the time Sal made his delivery we all were picking at ‘em, I think.”

Shipley nodded again.

“Well,” Cabot continued, now more soothingly, “I think that train was kind of like Knox’s bugs. I think it was, after all that has happened tonight, our imaginations, maybe…and the booze too.”

Shipley was dubious. He shook his head, looking down disconsolately, “I don’t know… I swear I still smell the smoke…I fear things are going to go badly.”

Cabot towed Shipley, stumbling along, up the path towards The Lodge. Cabot was sure, after a break, he could muster him back into some kind of service yet. It would take some time, some tact. He sighed, yes, and probably some Scotch.

Cabot looked ahead. He could see the trail. It looked new now, it was fresh with the moon higher. He began to dream, to calculate. Today’s problems were already behind him. They were of little concern to him, he would deal with it all. He knew it.

He paused at the bottom of the hill, Shipley sagging at his side. The Lodge was bathed in the now pearly luminescence of dear old Luna. It was transformed to him in that gentle light. No longer a brooding. clumsy, American interpretation of an English hunting lodge, he now foresaw welcoming French doors and white curtains in a tender breeze. Somehow there would be expansive green lawns and shady, peaceful benches. He realized he was seeing a completion of some sort already, but he did not know the middle yet. He knew, without a doubt, that right now was an unbidden beginning and that back there in the woods was an equally unanticipated end. He caught a whiff of the future just then and it was bracing.

He took a deep breath, grabbed Shipley’s arm and was about to steer him up the hill. It was then, from deep in The Lodge, more screaming began.

They found Knox, naked and flinching in the corner of the library. He greeted them with an exaggerated rotation of his head since his Rt eye was completely swollen shut.

“I killed Elihu!” he yelled, pointing across the room to where Elilhu was splayed.

“I,I.. don’t know how…but I killed him. He must’ve beat me terrible first. Look… My eye.” He tentatively probed at it.

 “And my back!” He groaned and reached behind himself, wincing, “Oh God I killed Elihu!!!”

He looked at them, appealing. “I must’ve had to kill him, you know…it’s kind of like self defense, surely you agree.”

Cabot and Shipley looked at him, then at each other and back at poor Knox.

“It was a case of theft, obviously, you two are witnesses. I just can’t believe I would’ve ever killed him though….He is a thief, I think it is in his family…remember those land grants? The family has had some skeletons in the closet, we all know that. Don’t we? But to think he would stoop this low. Oh god, and then I killed him over it, how could I? This sort of a thing, and over so little… he must’ve fought me like a panther!” He touched at his eye again and began to whimper.

Cabot took a step forward into the library “Theft?” he asked.

“Certainly you see it.” Knox looked at him imploringly and pointed, “He stole my trousers.”

 Joe was shocked by the deterioration that had taken place. In his youth he and his playmates would sneak down here and snoop around. He himself had spied from the woods when they demolished the old log lodge and built this new one in 1911 or ’12.

Times were tough all over but he was totally unprepared for the decline that had occurred here at The Lodge. Shutters were missing, one was poking up out of the long grass, apparently undisturbed since it made its decent. Paint was peeling and a window upstairs was coarsely boarded up. A smashed Edison phonograph lay in the weeds below the patched window. Obviously someone hadn’t favored the music.

Equally disturbing was the sorry, shakey lot who shambled up to greet him when he pulled up the lane in his Model A. A disheveled bunch to be sure. Trembling and ashen, they mopped at their brows incessantly. Nicks divulged the fact that a razor had only very recently been reacquainted with their faces.

And what about the portly fellow with the shiner? The smoked glasses did little to disguise it and besides, the day had become overcast. Getting colder too, winter sending a post card: “Be back soon.”

The young one introduced the other two men and then himself as Cabot Archer. It was to be a fortuitous introduction for both men.

Sheriff Joe Zink nodded to the men. On closer inspection, he was even more aghast at their appearance. He recognized the skinny older one, introduced as Seward Shipley, as the man with the shotgun in the Franklin that day when they came to his place in search of the black man, Royal. The man looked away nervously.

Joe noticed several scorched areas on the shoulders of Shipley’s coat.

Joe said, “Looks like you got too close to the fire.”

Shipley started and looked down at his shoulders, twisting his neck to and fro repeatedly, in apparent agitation. He then arched his shoulders and craned his head backwards to scan his upper back. Brushing at the burns frantically, he shot an angry, nearly accusatory glance at Cabot Archer. Shipley looked as if he was going to be sick. 

Cabot Archer shrugged.

Shipley coughed into his hand. He briefly looked into his hand, seemed satisfied to see nothing there, then he fleetingly met Joe’s eye. “Yes, sir, I did get too close.”

Cabot Archer then began to speak, “Sheriff, we called because our friend Elihu Brighton has died here today…”

Joe interrupted, “You mentioned that, so…”

Cabot stopped him by holding up a finger. He swallowed. What he was about to say was going to be improvised. It would in no way resemble what he had mentally scripted while scheming over those dead bodies so terribly early that morning.

He continued, “Sir, as you can plainly see, this vile congress assembled here before you has, steadily and surely, willfully debased themselves. That fact is plainly evidenced in the sad state of these buildings, our garments and, I’m sure, upon our haggard faces.”

Joe was thinking, what the hell is going on here? He looked at the men, Cabot returned his gaze unabashedly. The others looked down.

“Having submerged ourselves to a level that even in our mean estate we find to be loathsome. We  have signed and sworn,” Joe held up a tattered sheet with some sort of script upon it, “That from this day onward we shall never again indulge in any of the sordid behaviors that have delivered us to such a despicable status.”

Cabot was warming to the task. He had, in his day, enthralled many a boardroom and had, also unflinchingly, assailed, and assuaged, amphitheaters full of angry stockholders.

Joe scratched at the back of his neck. He knew embroidery when he saw it and as Cabot paused for breath he interrupted once more, “So where’s this dead fellow?”

Cabot blew out his air a bit. “I was getting to that…” Although the preamble had indeed been the truth, now, regrettably to him, he must manufacture events that supposedly toppled that mighty community pillar, Elihu Brighton.

Almost irritated he continued, “Today we each chose tasks that we felt would not only help in the reformation of ourselves but also promote the reconstruction, of Maple Lodge. We believe that by keeping busy, perhaps, we will not be so prone to indulge in our base appetites.

Our recently departed Elihu had taken it upon himself to begin by rebuilding the rock wall around the patio out front. He had a hand in its original construction and always...”

Joe started walking, “Let’s have a look at him.”

 A few large stones were strewn about, one near at hand to the body. The trusty wheelbarrow was on its side. Elihu was on his expansive abdomen. Cabot somehow knew that cadaver blood pools, the dusky jowls would’ve announced their ruse had they placed him on his back. Besides, he had heard that people always toppled forward when they died, or fainted.

As they trailed along in the sheriff’s wake, Cabot continued, “He was in no shape to be engaged in this sort of activity, I suppose. I am afraid his heart must’ve given out. At least he signed the pledge first. (Shipley developed a knack for forgery. Honed it as an adolescent, practicing his oft besot mother’s signature in his father’s own checkbook.) At least he died with hope.”

He was taking another breath when Knox elbowed him in the ribs. Cabot had a propensity to slather it on too thick sometimes. He could oversell, especially when he was energized.

Joe knelt by the body. Felt of it.

Not looking up, he asked, “How long do you think he’s been here, like this?”

Cabot answered. “He went out here this morning. We all were pretty busy with our various jobs and such. Judging by the fact that there’s not much work accomplished here, I’d say he must’ve collapsed soon after he began his work.”

“About what time was that?” The sheriff was examining Elihu’s nails.

Cabot thinking, God I’m glad I dozed his hands through the dirt, replied, “Oh I suppose 8 or so.”

The sheriff agreed that it had at least been that long. He didn’t have too much experience with dead human beings but plenty with livestock.

After closely examining the body, from the back of the dead man’s head to his heels, he said,  “Help me turn him over.”

The tugged on the body and with much effort wrestled him onto his back, each man dearly hoping to himself that this wold be the last time they would have to move that gross mass.

Joe knelt there, looking down at the man, confirming to himself that this was in fact the same man he toyed with on the yard that day nearly a decade ago. He reflected on how these city boys sure don’t know how to dress for fieldwork: Sunday shoes on, a vest. He thought to himself, shoot, I’d have a heart attack myself if I tried to squeeze into such a tight vest.

The man’s face was almost comically purple now. It looked as if he had immersed himself, face down, in a blueberry pie. The huge mottled tongue still protruded, curled licentiously to the side even though the heavy chin was sagging back and away. A glimpse of gold cuspid was revealed. The gold flash was the only vibrant remnant of the man.

Joe considered that grotesque face. Even death’s repose could not conceal the truth that not a shred of human kindness had ever dwelt there. Joe, judging by the man’s physical condition, concluded the man had long been living on borrowed time. And that, he speculated, was probably too bad. Joe remembered toying with him that day when he came looking for the black man, Royal. He recalled the man’s haughty airs, his patently obvious disdain for Joe, the man’s arrogant aura of dismissal of him even on his own farmyard. Joe thought to himself, “You fat old boar, you’re not looking so snappy now.”

He gave the body another cursory head to toe exam. He thought that surely the guy could’ve collapsed here, certainly if he was trying to lift these stones. He looked around again.

The ragged lot looked on, pallid and moist. What happened to the eye of that other fat guy? A struggle? He doubted that, neither of these men looked like they had enough ambition to struggle. The man did move slowly though, as if in pain. He recalled the man’s name was Knox.

He looked up at them and asked “Knox, you look to be sore, hurt your back or something?”

Knox startled a bit upon being addressed. He mumbled a faint, “Yes.”

Joe sighed and asked, “Yes, what?”

“I hurt my back, sir.” He replied dully.

“So what happened to your eye?” Joe asked, losing patience.

Knox explored his eye with a cautious finger. “I hurt it, too.”

“How?” Joe asked with irritation.

The man looked at Joe sadly and said, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Joe asked sharply.

“Drunk,” Knox said quietly, “I was drunk.”

Joe looked around once more, stood up, swept off his hands and said, looking at the wheelbarrow, “I wonder why all that fresh timothy is wound around that axle there. I don’t see any timothy here on this plaza. There’s plenty of it between the lodge and the woods. Looked to me, when I pulled in here, like someone’s been tramping through that meadow too. Why would he have gone parading around that meadow with this wheelbarrow?”

Shipley coughed again.

Cabot admitted to himself that this sheriff was more formidable than he had expected. He cursed himself for leaving the wheelbarrow there after dumping out Elihu. He thought at the time it was a nice touch but now regretted the decision. This sheriff knew straight away that Elihu was not using the wheelbarrow, the stones were already here.

Cabot said, “I left it there when I found him. I was using it.”

The sheriff lifted an eyebrow.

Cabot said, “Come, I’ll show you.”

As they circled The Lodge and approached the path, Shipley alternated between two impulses: screaming at Cabot, “What in the hell are you doing?” and the other: running away.

But Shipley trusted Cabot. He knew Cabot had been busy earlier while he and Knox had tried to get some sleep. He trudged wearily along, once again in the sheriff’s wake, the sheriff leading them to the path as if he knew the way himself. Shipley did not wish to go down the path again, he was feeling whoozy.

Meanwhile Joe was thinking that he had seen no sign of a struggle or foul play. Besides the human race, who would profit from the murder of this guy? Well, with a rich guy like that, probably lots of people would. But those same people wouldn’t have long to wait, judging by the shape he was in.

It didn’t look like anything was amiss here, but these fellows were certainly a strange lot. He wished, as he had often wished before, that this Maple Lodge outfit had chosen another county to foul.

Joe was concluding that the citizens of the county had better things for him to waste his time and their money on then with the further investigation of what was, apparently to him at least, a death by natural causes.

Cabot, interrupting Joe’s muse, said, pointing, “Here.” 

Joe could hardly fathom what he saw next. He actually smelled it first. Before them, on a rock pile, were dozens of broken liquor bottles. The shards of perhaps fifty of them, maybe more, glistened on the stones. Beer and wine bottles had been burst as well. Fragments of broken crockery, mysterious brightly colored glassware, and porcelain bits, some of which with elaborate oriental designs glazed into it, were also a part of the wreckage

Joe looked up at Cabot, curiously.

Shipley and Knox exchanged a brief, incredulous glance.

Cabot explained, “I told you we were giving it all up.” He looked down at the pile, “Cleaning out the spirits was my task.”

Back at his car Joe said, “You can have that funeral parlor from St Paul pick up the body. I don’t see any evidence of foul play. So,” He paused, “Just why did you call me here?”

“Look,” Cabot said, “We wanted this to be on the square. My attorney said to just have the mortician pick him up but, I thought that advice, although legally sound, failed to grasp the potentials.”

Joe opened his car door and paused, he looked back at Cabot.

“Say we take him to St. Paul. Someone hears he died out here. Word gets back to you, or some other official, maybe a politician wanting to make a score, and then an inquest, or worse, an exhuming is ordered. Elihu’s a bit of a celebrity, the press would be out here in droves seeking interviews, photographs, asking questions about his final days, his condition…you know, selling papers.

Look at this place, look at us. You tell me there isn’t a juicy story here? It’s not the Lindbergh Baby but still, it would take the average man’s mind off his own troubles, at least for a day or two. And it would be the public ruin of us, maybe it should be. But Elihu can’t do anything to redeem himself….we can, however.”

Joe considered this, nodded, tipped his hat and drove off. He saw the forlorn group in his rear view mirror. He thought rich people sure have screwy things to worry about.

Not 10 minutes after the hearse struggled out of the driveway it was followed by Shipley’s Packard and the Cadillac of Knox. Cabot alone remained at The Lodge. Before the sheriff had arrived and while the others had unsoundly slept, Cabot had made arrangements to purchase Knox and Shipley’s interest in the property. Cabot was sure, given Elihu’s recent decent and the business decline it chaperoned, that his heirs would be interested in the cash too. He had left instructions to conclude a deal after a respectable time period.

He had also made a call to a “personnel service.” Cash buyout, no questions asked. He inquired about the girl’s family…any relations? Again their policy was “No questions asked.” He later instructed his accountant to cut a check.

He could not see his plans in their entirety yet, they would reveal themselves with time and attention he was sure. A new decade was coming in 3 months. Even through his haze he could detect a new feeling in the country. Big things were going to happen, he was convinced.

Knox and Shipley had mumbled their shaken goodbyes. They vowed to make new starts themselves. They kept those vows as far as White Bear Lake where they rendezvoused at a roadhouse.

Knox would be gone in a year or two, his baseline jaundice ever deepening, one day he would clear his throat and then commence to vomiting gouts of bright red blood.

Shipley, no matter how tightly he closed his eyes and/or covered his head with a pillow, could never quite rid himself of that horrible light. Even the liberal applications of Vicks could not clear his nostrils of the acrid smell of sulphur. Towards the end he would play a little game with himself. He would take a pull out of a bottle of gin, then put a revolver in his mouth. Gin, take a pull, put the gun in. Gun. Gin. Gun. Gin. One day he just took a pull on the revolver.

It would not be easy for Cabot. He had 2 difficult calls to make. The first he had not anticipated.

Sheriff Joe Zink would be awakened and linger in his bed, hoping it was not his party line ring. He would reluctantly slouch out to the kitchen, grumbling to himself about the job. Who else would it be for at this hour? “Hello?”

A pause, “I need help.”

Cabot had believed a lot of things about himself, some were true, some he made true, and some were just plain bullshit. He thought he could just stop and ride it out in The Lodge. That was bullshit.

He made it through 40 hours of quivering, picking, and agitated pacing. Bellowing, ranting, cursing and praying, he ricocheted about The Lodge.

 He had enough selfawareness to wisely burst every bottle of liquor available. Drugs, paraphernalia, all were burnt or destroyed. He had the foresight to throw the keys to his Lincoln away. But, by the end, he was even inpawing around in Elihu’s abandoned Cadillac. Alas, the keys must’ve departed in Elihu’s pocket. Or maybe Knox’s, depending on who had whose pants on when they left that day.

Finally he went to the phone.  Above it “Liquor” and a number was scrawled into the plaster in big blue letters, just below “Whores” and another number.

He had even picked up the phone. That’s when he saw the first rat, fat bellied and clawing across the wall horizontally, like a fly. Another scampered overhead, along the ceiling. He dropped the phone and darted into the corner. Thousands of red eyes were boiling in the blackness of the fireplace, under furniture, at the windows

He grabbed a book and threw it, the rats retreated, just a bit. He panted there against the wall. He heard “Number please?”.

He raced to the phone, he asked for Joe’s number as a large furry spider crawled from his sleeve.  Lucky for him he would not remember much of what happened over the next 10 days.

Joe knew a guy or two in town that belonged to some type of alcoholic club. In fact, Lester Billing had been one of the most profligate drunks he had ever had the displeasure of knowing. But now, as far as Joe knew, Lester had been fully sober for nearly 5 years. To Joe, Lester being sober did not make him any more likeable. Joe called Lester anyway.

Lester was terse, as he expected, but understanding. It was Lester, and his society cohorts, who saved Cabot in those terrible days. They protected him from harm during the seizures. They fed him, literally…his hands shook so. There was no possible way he could’ve managed a cup, let alone a spoon. They read to him and sacrificed their own hours to help him through the long dreadful hours.

Cabot was correct about the new decade, big events would arrive, it just wasn’t the kind of events he had first divined alone there in The Lodge on that first night. World War II would divert everyone’s dreams to some degree. Cabot’s industries were vital to the war efforts and he was devoted to that effort. His dreams, although never far away, remained only that.

The second call he made from The Lodge was just as important as the first. No rats were glaring at him that time. But he did look at himself in the mirror long and hard before he asked the operator to please connect him.

When the party answered he asked, with a voice just as shaky as it was when he made the call to Joe a month before, “Can I come home?”

A son, Stanley would be born in December of 1940. Cabot was resolved to be a good father, certainly after the war he would devote himself to Stanley.

As for his daughter, he could not reclaim those years that he had abandoned her. This was made evident to him in how much she tried to please him, how tightly she clung to him.

And she certainly did please him. She would return to him proudly one day as Susan Archer PHD. She would join him in his calling at Maple Lodge, perhaps the most preeminent drug and chemical dependency treatment facility in the world. 

It was a perpetual source of wonder to him that from an indistinct notion so much could be realized. How from such a mean, despicable beginning, one day a sort of dignity could be salvaged. It took the tawdry death of an innocent martyr, and a midnight mystery crossing in the woods, to save him. He never forgot that and he used it to the best of his abilities.

He intentionally avoided reviewing the mystical events he had experienced that night in the meadow. He never once doubted what had happened there, but it was for fear that a close examination might dispel the magic. He accepted it and took from it, but to ask too much of it would’ve been, to him, like the picking a lovely wild flower.

Towards the end of his life, he would be found spending ever more time in Maple Lodge’s “Reflection Garden” or “The meadow” as he referred to it.

He had, over the years and at great expense, installed sculpture and benches there. He had gardens constructed and  fountains built. It was a place for solitude and open to everyone on the campus. It provided for many of them a peaceful respite from their own personal torments.

There was one bench in the meadow Cabot favored, a heavy, beautiful, granite affair. The bench faced, across a pebbled pathway, a large marble slab, tilted slightly and tucked in the shade at the edge of the woods. There was something in the singular luster of that stone which somehow seemed to compliment a person’s reflection.

Susan found him sitting on that bench one day. He was staring into the far distance. She sat down quietly beside him.

He took her hand and said, “When I was a small child, grandfather used to take me down to the levee in St. Paul with him, you know, down to the warehouses.

Well, there were still steamboats on the river in those days, actual paddlewheelers. I used to watch them. I’m sure they were dilapidated relics by that time, tramps more than likely, but to me at least, they were beautiful. Like big graceful wedding cakes gliding away to who knows where. I wonder where they went.”

He paused, looked down and blinked a few times, he swallowed, “Lately I think I have been hearing the train whistle.”

She had been staring into the woods too but now she turned to him. Was he getting senile?

He smiled and patted her hand. She was about to ask…

He looked at her, raised a finger to his lips and tilted his head slightly, now staring far up into the sky. “I was thinking it was a train whistle. But it didn’t sound that way. Then I thought maybe it was a trolley bell….you remember trolleys?”

She nodded, blinking now herself, a constriction in her throat.

He looked at the lucent marble slab again and then up at the woods, “Now I know what it is…what I’m hearing.”

He looked again at her, kindly, “It’s a riverboat’s whistle, I’m sure.”

He smiled, “Steamboat’s a’comin.’”

He gave her a wink, squeezed her hand and looked back into the woods.

  CHAPTER 4



               Cliff’s coveralls were gone. That was unusual. He rarely, if ever, wore them. About the only time he took them off the hook was to shake the dust off them, once a month or so.

               His pickup wasn’t there yet either. What did that mean? He was gone wearing his coveralls in his pickup somewhere?

               Al raised his hat, scratched his head and then hung his jacket up on the hook, avoiding Cliff’s hook – just in case Cliff should return.

               He switched on the lights and looked around the shop. He saw a note on his workbench. He looked across the shop through the passage door into the garage. The vehicles had been moved. He could tell. They were lined up, like Cliff preferred, but were not quite as symmetrical in their positions as they had been when Al last parked them there.

               Something happened last night, Al concluded. It must’ve got Cliff up in the early hours and he’s still sleeping, I bet. Have to go check those vehicles, all of them look as if they’ve been moved, see if they need gassing up.

               He casually made his way to the coffeepot. It surprised him that he   difficulty arriving everyday at eight in the morning, he had no problem staying there until late in the evenings. Especially when it wasn’t a school night. Cliff didn’t like it if he locked up late on school nights.

. He picked up the note and walked back to the coffeepot. He hooked his cup with a finger, put in 4 cubes of sugar from the little pink box and popped a fifth cube in his mouth. He liked to “prime” his mouth for that fist sip.

He read the note:

               Al, I’m sleeping in today. Might be around late but just might take the day off. I’ll

be reading up on this new intercom thing I have to install so call me at home if you

run into any problems. For today I got to ask you to clean out the front seats on the

Jimmy. There’s probably vomit on them. Not much but I looked in last night and there

is some. Do that right away so nothing gets too set in. Then you’ll find on my desk the   paperwork for the new boys I hired. They’ll be in around 11.Go over the usual stuff with them and initial your part like before. Have them sign that bottom sheet. Let them go home at 2 or so in case they got to go to church. I’ll go over all the other stuff with them next Saturday. I don’t think I’ll be in tomorrow either. Have a nice holiday –CZ                                                                                                          

Church? Al’s mind raced, he was momentarily disoriented. Holiday? What day was it today? Friday? Oh, yeah, he remembered. Some kids were forced to go to church that Friday before Easter. Poor devils. He remembered playing with buddies and suddenly they’d have to leave in the middle of a precious afternoon off from school. They would drop everything, shake their heads sadly, shrug, and peddle off lamenting, “Have to go to church.”

Good Friday, whatever the fuck that meant. Bad Friday if you have to go to church on it, as far as he was concerned. Wasn’t too good for Jesus either, if he remembered right it was the day he got bumped off. Goofy religious shit.

Easter, he shook his head, what a weird holiday. All that bunny crap, the candy sucked too. Those chocolate cheap ass hollow bunnies? What the hell? Jelly beans and those shitty bright colored eggs with that white crap inside them. Bunnies? Eggs? Dying on a cross and you’re God besides? Who thinks up this shit? And those puffy terrible yellow marshmallow chicks! Christ, does anybody like this wacky shit? Not me, he thought.

He took a sip, grimaced appreciatively. He emptied the grounds into the trash and tossed the note on top of it.

He walked over to Cliff’s office. The sun through Cliff’s window reminded him of previous Easter Vacations. Priceless brilliant reprieves from an endless gray expanse of school drudgery.

Those bright spring days promised an approaching summer and a future furlough of a more ample term. Another summer vacation coming up soon. Right around the corner. It was shaping up to be a good one. One more year of high school and then, maybe, most of his time spent with his buddies or here in the shop. He felt at home here. He belonged here.

Yet a tiny nagging reservation itched at him, chafing him ever so slightly: Cliff mentioning to him, more than once, that he should consider college. Gads, that would be the fuckin’ day. Maybe some sort of vocational school, if Cliff forced him. All he wanted to do, for the foreseeable future, was to work on machines here at Maple Lodge. 

He got out his keys, opened Cliff’s office. Cliff had his window opened slightly. Cliff liked fresh air and he always complained about the smell of Al’s coffee. The air in the office was fresh, alive with spring scents. Songbirds were trilling joyfully.

Al worried a little. Maybe  I should get at that tiller today yet. The new garden tractor was going to be delivered within 2 weeks. That would require some very deliberate assembly. Well, he figured, these new guys could keep up to the spring work with the Cub Cadet until he got the new one completed.

He saw that Cliff had pulled out a large blue print and had it unrolled across his desk. That wasn’t there last night. Al walked around the back of the desk and examined it. It wasn’t a blue print but a map, or a kind of a map, it was more like a survey or a plot or something. It showed all the buildings of Maple Lodge, the lanes, the lots, the trees, paths etc. What was Cliff up to? Planning something, but what?

               I bet their gonna build something. That would be cool. They hadn’t built anything for quite a while. The last thing was the book warehouse and he was only a kid then. Now he was Head Groundsman. Maybe he’d get to drive a bulldozer, or work on one. Maybe a backhoe?

               He looked at the map closely. Finally he found a square pencilled in an open area, beyond the far end of the employee parking lot. What in the hell could that be? Looked like he had drawn a little lane up to it too. A building of some kind, maybe another small garage? That didn’t make sense, really.

               “H.P.” was neatly printed in the center of the square. What was that? Heated Parking? No, couldn’t be that. The employees already had a row of electrical outlets for their block heaters.

               Whatever it was, it was big. It was a square about half the width of the parking lot. He shrugged. Time will tell if it was to be any of his business. Out here you never made anything your business. Your business was given to you and that was the limit of it.

Speaking of his business, he grabbed the neat pile of Employee Orientation packets off Cliff’s desk. A business card fluttered to the floor. He picked it up and looked at it, read Rusty Dupree and saw the TCB bordered in lightning. What the hell? He shrugged again and placed it back on Cliff’s desk. He locked the door and strolled across the shop to the garage.

               So someone barfed in the Suburban. Not a good way to start the day.

It was, after reconsidering, only the Suburban which was slightly askew. The others had been moved, he could tell they were lined up slightly aft of where he had last parked them. The plow truck, the Caddy and the Lincoln were squared off nicely but, the Suburban was a trifle diagonal to the others. He walked over to it sighing, let’s see how bad it is.

               Looking through the window he saw no obvious signs of vomit. That was a relief. He yanked open the door and took a sniff. Yup, puke. A closer examination revealed shiny streaks and splotches of someone’s heave. But on both the passenger’s and driver’s seats? None on the floor or dash, just on the seats. He wrinkled his brow and tilted his head, figuring. Who in the hell could’ve been driving around in the Suburban with puke on their butts like that? 

               Well at least it wasn’t a lot of puke. He could swamp it out in a couple of minutes and it would be as good as new.

He went to the hook in the cabinet, got the keys. Carefully leaning in without touching the seat he checked the gas, plump full. Did Cliff drive it far enough to require a fill up on the return? Did Cliff get full of puke? His note seemed to suggest he did not know for sure if there was much puke in it. Besides, someone else parked it there, it was out of proper alignment.

He checked the plow truck, the Caddy, and the Lincoln. All full of gas, no puke. He lifted up his cap, scratched his head, shrugged, returned the keys. Crap, no joy ride to town for a fill up.

He walked through the doorway back into the shop. He’d clean up the puke; get the dirty work done first was one of his rules. Then he would let it dry while he began on the tractor tranny. Then he’d run back to town, pick up the parts and have a little lunch maybe. Then he would straighten out the Suburban in its stall and begin buttoning up the Cadet

Oh shit, nearly forgot. Have to train in the new kids. Crap. Well today wasn’t much, just a beginning run through. First tell them the stuff about keeping everything they see here a secret, or else. Not looking at any of the “guests”, (“inmates’ as he called them, only to himself) at least not into any of their eyes. He had to walk them around the grounds. Teach them to mind his word as the official second in command to Cliff who always had a lot on his mind. If there was any time left over, before they had to go to church, he’d tell them about the history of Maple Lodge. He liked spinning that tale out. The new guys always enjoyed hearing about those rich degenerate drunkards going to hell out here and about the buried case of booze. All that stuff seemed to capture their imaginations. Soon, though, their wonder would be replaced by perspiration.

He’d show them the chow line, where to punch in, the lockers, tell them who the real pricks were and thus who to avoid… the usual stuff. Poor devils, a summertime of toil awaited them, little did they know.

He’d started in the same place himself. Pulling a rake, pushing a mower, dragging a sprinkler. There was no end to the groundwork at a place as big as this. Especially with people as fussy as these were. Statues had to be hosed down, scrubbed of birdshit, paths raked daily, cigarette butts picked up and holy hell these people smoked like Chevys around here.

These new recruits would welcome school with open arms after a summer of that shit. When summer was in full swing, the two starting today would be joined by two or three others. Almost every vista would include, in at least one corner of the canvas, an anonymous high schooler hunched over a rake or clipper.

For now they’d work only after school. The snows always practiced a scorched earth policy. Debris and dust and grime would be deposited in a reverent miniature memorial to the retreating glaciers that scoured the region 12000 years before. And the guests were always eager to get out of doors too. These new guys would be very busy after school for the next two months or so.

Al himself would be joining them as well. But he would see to it that he had every advantage his tenure could afford him. If the job required a vehicle, he would be operating it. If it required more than one, he’d be operating the coolest one. Such were the spoils of seniority.

He was eleven years old when he first peddled his Stingray down the lane. He would never forget that day.

Like any other lazy summer day, he was off on his bike looking for some action. Inevitably he found himself at “The Trails.” Nothing happening there. Hun Zimmer and Pinky Kopp were at one of the campsites smoking cigars. And shaving. Apparently they had swiped their dad’s kits and got their hands on a can of shaving cream.

The Trails were a blessed sanctuary for kids, a welcomed retreat, a place where a kid could seek libertine refuge from an adult-driven world.

It was a wild area, stretching along the riverbank just downstream of the dam. The woods there were crisscrossed with paths and trails, and were carved with campsites, all beyond the scope of adult authority.

 Adults seem unable to, or unwilling to, or just happy not to, penetrate the region. The river  seemed to provide some kind of psychic, as well as physical, barrier. It kept the town at bay.

Along the opposite riverside was located the town’s cemetery, Forest Hills. It was easier fishing along the bank there. And it was good fishing at the dam and from there on up to the lake. The highway bridge was another border dividing The Trails from the dam and the fisherman congregating there.

That cemetery so close made many a fitful night for the campers in the woods across from it. Al, early in his “sleeping out” years, had to remind himself, that ghosts were never seen in the water. Zombies yes, they were another thing, they could walk on the bottom of the goddam sea but, if there were zombies on the loose then everyone’s ass was grass.

Ghosts were a more singular issue, somehow more personal. But they seemed to shun water as far as anyone could ascertain.  But then someone had to come up with that story, “The Ghost Who Swum” and everyone’s sense of security was greatly reduced.

Al heard that one and he spent the night with one eye on the woods and the other on the river. Yet before the summer was over he would be retelling it himself, laying it on even thicker than when he first heard it, enjoying the troubled over- the- shoulder- into- the- woods glances he recognized on his, inching ever closer to the fire, audience.

Those campouts would come later in his boyhood Trails experience. Sleep outs were usually limited to back yards or dark corners of city parks until about the age of 13 or so. This was because the trails held at least one sociological condition that was very much in common with the adult world outside: a pecking order.  The order at The Trails was age related and was expressed, enforced actually, via the time of day.

During the day, like when Al rode in to see those older guys (maybe by 2 years) shaving, kids pretty much came and went. There could be found kids playing army in the woods, with helmets, toy machine guns and camp shovels for digging prematurely abandoned foxholes. Others might be tearing up and down the trails on their bikes, doing wheelies, jumps and shitties. Some would be relaxing with a smoke and maybe paging through a well-traveled Playboy, while others were swimming in the river, swinging on a rope.

As the evening approached older kids would gradually materialize. They were the kind that didn’t need to be home for dinner. Teenagers would infiltrate the area, smoking ardently and pointedly, necking, fighting, picking on any little kid unfortunate enough to wheel through.

Then, after dark, the older guys took charge; drifting around, drinking beer, lighting farts. Big guys could fart awesomely and impressively. Al had coveted the ability, but when he finally reached that hallowed plateau he never used it to any advantage. The worthiness seemed to elude him at that point.

At anytime of day or night a motorcycle or two might come wailing through, some denim vested Wild Angel wannabes tearing down the trail. A whine, a flash, and then a wake of dust and two cycle smoke.

But on this particular day it was just Zimmer and Kopp shaving. They steadfastly ignored Al as the bent to their task, studying a broken shard of mirror wedged into a tree limb. They fashioned all the necessary facies: applying traction with the opposite hand here, poking tongue into a cheek there, craning neck back, pulling upper lip down taughtly over teeth, or executing a stretched puckering to the side. All with a calm, matter of fact, practiced aplomb, while dodging the rank, smoldering, soap soaked, stogies stuffed in their mouths.

Al rode off thinking that he would like to try that sometime. Not smoke cigars, hell, he’d done that. Nearly killed himself late one night, he rode off the curb while trying to view himself and cigar in the window of Sheele’s drugstore as he peddled by. Besides, his mouth had tasted like shit for 3 days afterwards.

No the shaving part is what intrigued him. He’d never seen anybody do that in real life. He’d seen it in the barber shop of course, the barber was slopping shit all over some guy’s face and he was cranked back so far you could only see the soles of his boots anyway. In the barbershop it looked like some kind of pain in the ass adult thing and he never took much interest in it.

But somehow, seeing the necessary contortions, and the required equipment indispensable to the process, had been fascinating to him. He decided, maybe when he got to be their age, he’d give it a try. He would one day find it even less gratifying than farting profoundly.

He rode across the highway to the dam that afternoon. He bullshitted with old Einar there for a while, just killing time.

Einar was always fishing the dam, catching a mess of bullheads, suckers, carp…anything that didn’t have a limit on it. Einar was kind of simple. Once he told Al that he thought that the sun was about as big as a wagon wheel.

Al had asked, “How big is the moon then?”

 Einar looked up into the sun squinting, he scratched at his stubble and replied, “I s’pose about as big as a pie.”

“How about the stars?”

Einar, now hoisting on an bending cane pole, speculated, “About like a teacup.”

Shit, it was all Al could do to keep from rolling on the ground.

It had always stunned him at how stupid some adults could be. Here he was, ten or eleven years old and there was Einar, 70 or 80, or who the fuck knows how old, - shit, Einar himself probably didn’t even know – but anyway, Einar could drive all around in his old Plymouth and Al had to pump his ass on top of the lousy bike. Injustice, adults were all about it.

Al contemplated the fisherman’s path along the river, it traced the bank upstream to the lake. He decided to follow it. He’d been down the trail before, but not on his bike. He began to fantasize about starting an “Upper Trails,” one of his own, maybe that only guys his age could frequent. He soon reminded himself of the folly of that plan. All kinds of dumbass fishermen came up here, they would certainly ruin anything that would come natural to a kid.

There were little worn areas where fishermen had spent long hours. Muddy tufts, some still showing the imprints of, maybe last night’s, lawn chairs. He continues on. He got to the lake and followed the shore. More earthen patches, more trash, fishermen can be slobs he thought, beer cans, bait cartons, and the ever-present reek of dead bullheads and their ilk  All accompanied by the attendant buzz of myriad flies.

The trail petered out as the bank rose abruptly, becoming too steep to proceed, even too steep to climb. He sat there awhile, looking out over the lake. Someone was joyriding in a runabout. God, that looked like fun. He was gonna get a boat, someday, he decided.

Just then he was surprised by the sound of a motor. He turned around and saw a pickup drive by, just behind him, up the bank in the woods. It ambled along smoothly, curved along the bank and disappeared into the trees.

What the hell? How had he lived here all his life and didn’t know there was a road up there? Where did it go? Where did it come from? He rode back down the path to where the hill was not as steep. He got off, lugged his bike up through the brush and found a paved lane through the woods.

What’s this road? He looked back, the road just curved through the woods, out of sight. He looked down the road, the direction the truck had been going. Same thing, the road just climbed the hill and disappeared over the top. He began peddling through the shade and up the hill.

He reached the summit and saw the road arc down through the trees. He followed it. He coasted down, crossed a small, almost cute, bridge and began to climb another hill. He slogged up to the crest and found another steep decent ahead, again curving off to the left. He rode on.

He descended, picking up speed, he rounded the curve and suddenly, as if out of the forest, there was the pickup parked alongside the road. He noticed curbing now too but he scarcely had time to register it because, in front of him, spreading out and towering up over manicured lawns, rose the alabaster architecture of Maple Lodge.

He locked up his coaster brake, put his foot down, and rendered a beautiful black comma upon the tarmac behind him. Somewhere, subliminally, he felt fleeting satisfaction over his execution of that maneuver. But it was the most transient of titillation.

“Holy shit!” he said out loud. It was the fuckin’ rich guy boozer nuthouse, Maple Lodge.

He sat there astonished, perpendicular to the road, leaning over his apehangers, incredulous. He had to get out of there! He remembered how “Ike” Eiken’s big brother, the dumb ass one, Lawrence, and some other guys had got caught snooping around The Lodge. They got locked up here or something and their folks had to sign a bunch of papers to prove they weren’t insane. Al had figured that must’ve been quite a stretch as far as big, slow “Eenie” Eiknes was concerned.

He whipped his bike around, set to take off when a man’s voice said, “Hey kid, hand me that needle nose.”

Cliff was lying on the grass alongside the old Wheel Horse garden tractor, threading a belt around a complex of deck pulleys. A toolbox was opened on the grass near the pick up. Al learned that day what a needle nose was, what a cotter pin was for, and how to use a ratchet.

Later Cliff would give him a ride home in the pickup, down that immaculate, unblemished drive   to the county road. For more than a mile that lane curved and lifted through the woods.

Cliff asked him if he knew how to rake and if he wanted to make a few bucks. Al began riding out, taking his shortcut nearly everyday, helping out Cliff. Helping out the groundskeepers. Soon he was operating push mowers, and within a year or two, riding mowers. Taking his place as a full-fledged groundskeeper. Paying his dues.

But he was different than the others. He liked it here. He came during the winter, riding his bike through the snow and on the ice above the dam sometimes. He’d hang out in the warm shop, feeling comfortable there, fiddling with things. And when Cliff had time he’d teach him stuff, or just tell him to pull apart an engine, vacuum cleaner, chain saw or scramble under the Caddy and drain the oil. He learned a lot about motors and machines and most importantly, about tools.

There was an old long forgotten side-shaft Clinton Iron Horse on a low shelf in the parts room. At one time it had powered an old reel-type mower. One groundskeeper, generations before Al, had seized the engine on it. Perhaps he had dutifully drained the oil and forgotten to refill it. That would’ve been an unredeemable sin in Cliff’s book.

The old engine languishing there in the dark had captured Al’s imagination. He monkeyed with it at times, trying to turn it over with no success. One day Cliff came back there and found Al worrying at it. Cliff told Al he could have it if he could get it running.

It was the best gift he ever received. He took it into the shop and lovingly tore it down, piece by piece. He scrounged up parts, an implement dealer in town had carried the line. He carefully reassembled it and painted it all Ford Blue, his favorite color. When he fired it up, it ran like a watch. He was so proud when he showed Cliff that motor. Cliff had told him that he “Had done good.”

He took the engine home. Walked home with it, pulling it behind him in an old borrowed coaster wagon, certain that his blue prize impressed every passerby. He kept it by his bed. He’d start it sometimes four or five times a day, filling his room with exhaust, “opening her up” and then letting her run down, vibrating there nervously on the chipped cold floorboards. The deafening motor notes were music to his ears. He’d drift off some nights listening to the tiny pings it made as it cooled down, his hand resting upon the warm cowling.

He still had that engine in his room. He had intended to use it on a gokart, or a motorbike, but in the end he never did. Just left it there as a trophy, his first majestic mechanic’s medal.

              

He walked over to refill his cup, grabbed another sugar cube and returned to the papers. Let’s see who I’ll be stuck with this summer, he thought. Or really, who’s gonna be stuck with me. Woe to the innocent inductee who incurred his wrath. Al laid down the law early and that was usually all it took. But there had been a fuck up or two over the summers and then Cliff would have to take care of them. His job was to prevent Cliff from ever having to be involved with that, and if Cliff had to be, Al made sure it was sooner than later.

               He picked up the sheaf of papers. He scrutinized the first name: Randy Baker. He knew him. Pimply little 10^th grade weasle. Had him in one of his study halls last year. A wise ass but probably okay. At least he wasn’t a jock. No Einstein, but he wouldn’t need to be.

               Al mentally shrugged. He took a slug of coffee. He set Baker’s paperwork aside and looked at the other packet.

               He looked at the name: Scott Prentiss.

               His eyes read the name but his mind would not register it. For a brief instant his mind refused to recognize the name. Then having finally recognized the name, his mind feverishly made a desperate attempted to link the name with a different person. Mentally he grasped at the possibility that there could be more than one Scott Prentiss; if his brain just tried hard enough it would, momentarily, surely identify him.

His vision telescoped down onto the two words typed into the blank space on page one: Scott Prentiss. It seemed the room was closing in on him.

His brain told him it’s a joke. But his brain also told him that April Fool’s Day was last week, this was Good Friday, remember? A joke of this caliber was not a part of Cliff’s style.

A mistake? Not Cliff’s style either. With an all too familiar sense of resignation he fanned through the other sheets in the packet. All were bearing the same name. Shit, fuck, how could you do this Cliff? This asshole don’t need a job, his dad’s one of the richest guys in town. What the fuck?

Scott Prentiss.

No! No! Shit, NO! Shit, fuck, shit fuck, fuck, fuck! Fuck. Al hung his head. Why did life always have to kick him squarely in the nuts?

How in the fuck am I supposed to teach that tit- prick his job? He guessed that somewhere there was probably a guy who would love to have the opportunity to boss a suck-jock like Scottie-boy around. He was not that guy. He knew it and he guessed that Scottie knew it too.

He felt the tables turning on him. The balance was shifting already, and the son of a bitch hadn’t even crossed the threshold yet.

He filled the bucket, grabbed a sponge. He slouched over to the Suburban telling himself that Scottie didn’t know shit about motors, maybe. At least he had that on him. But he already knew that his skills would be sullied under the sarcastic scrutiny and the self-satisfied smirk of Scott Prentiss.

As he yanked open the GMC’s door he thought, how come I always have to put up with Assholes? A sour, bilious aroma, borne upon a fading new car smell, wafted up to greet his face. The odds were always fuckin’ stacked against him somehow. No way to ever measure up to some of these despicable peckerheads in this town.

Sadly he mopped at the puke smears. Little did he know, and at the moment it would have little mattered to him, that he was addressing none other than The King of Rock and Roll’s own puke. Delivered to him by doctors, no less.            

CHAPTER 5

              

               “Stanley!” Vera bellowed, “Line one!”

               Holy cow. Cliff just about dropped his drill. He could appreciate why they needed an intercom around here.

               He tried to recall, reviewing the Maple Lodge Christmas Parties, did Vera have a husband? If she did, he felt wholehearted pity for the man. Cliff could not imagine having to listen to that voice for a lifetime of wedded grief.

               Yet he allowed how someone like Vera was essential, running interference for the likes of Dr. Archer. She was impregnable, she jealously guarded Dr. Archer’s time and privacy. She viewed this new intercom system with thinly veiled suspicion.



               Susan, in the adjacent room, punched the flashing button on her phone, “Hello Stan, I thought you’d be calling.”

               “Susie.” She ground her teeth reflexively at hearing that moniker. Little brothers took liberties, especially, it seemed, when it could irritate.

               Stanley continued, “What’d you guys think? He’s bad isn’t he? I told ya. Ya shoulda kept him there, he’s not going to make it…I can see it.”

               Susan mentally sighed, she interrupted, “Stan, (resisting the urge to call him Stannie) Yes, he’s bad. We agreed, he’s in trouble.”

               “Then why can’t you do something? Ya shoulda kept him!” Stanley quickly covered the receiver as if that would contain his own outburst. With a self-conscious glance over his should he scanned the soda fountain from the stuffy confines of his corner cloister phone booth in Peabody’s Drug  Store on Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee.

               A chubby teenager, morosely nursing a sundae looked over at the booth briefly, then returned to his spoon.



               Susan sighed audibly this time. She pondered it, not for the first time: Her brother, Stan, personal attendant to the King of Rock and Roll, loyal lapdog to rinky-dink royalty.

               What supernatural spirals of fate could’ve swept Stan not only to Germany in 1958 but into the same Army tank with PFC Elvis Presley?

“Stan,” she responded, quietly, calmly, reasonably - she’d piloted these skies before, she knew the turbulence ahead, she knew what to skirt, what to dive-bomb through, and she was typically certain of the destination. It would either be passage, first class, to Maple Lodge or, a coach accommodation for an accelerating death spin into a bottle or some other chemistry set of choice.
               She heard herself continue, now on autopilot, “We spoke about false imprisonment…”

 She looked up and saw Cliff enter her office, carrying tools. Without casting a glance in her direction he knelt down by the opposite wall. Strange, she thought fleetingly, we all give each other so much space around here. Had he been in here before this AM? She looked down, yes, there were other tools and objects there by him. He had been working in here, she hadn't even noticed. She mused, we pass like ghosts around here, we walk right though each other’s lives like specters go through walls.

What was happening to her? Where were all these sentimentalities coming from?

“But he IS out of control, he’s dangerous to himself, I’m telling ya that.” Stanley was trying to match his big sister’s cool. But Stanley never tried too hard.

Stan, Susan thought, you should’ve been the PHD, but no, you had to go into the Army, just to piss father off. By any common expectation it should have been me with all the animosity, after all wasn’t father chronically inebriated until nearly my six birthday?

               She sighed, again inwardly. She of all people should understand the dynamics of her family. Intellectually at least. However understanding is not limited to the intellect alone, she knew that other internal organs sometimes intrude.



               Cliff looked with consternation at the hole that he had just drilled. A neat conical mound of plaster there on the hardwood floor as expected. But it also, to his dismay, was garnished with bright filaments of copper.

               Oh man. Now what? Doing anything in these old buildings was like capering through a minefield. He did a speedy mental inventory. Phone? No. For the first time he turned his attention to Dr. Archer and overheard what seemed to be an agitated party’s conversation spilling out past her ear, through the receiver. Briefly he thought that someone sounded upset.

               Power? The lights were still on, he could here Vera pounding away on her IBM Selectric. He sniffed, no smoke. Yet. He hadn’t got a shock.

               Some old long-forgotten dead wire? Could be, but most of that old stuff was ripped out years ago, a lot of it tube and curl, even.

               Thermostat? Maybe, but very unlikely.

How could there be a wire routed there? Who did it? What for?

               Whatever it was, he couldn’t ignore it now. Make a bigger hole? He didn’t want to do any more drilling until he was sure of his target. Why did these jobs always become more complicated than anticipated?

               A White Easter. That had put his entire schedule back. Ten inches of wet snow last evening. Heavy, particularly enamored to the shovel, it required not only hefting but a vigorous shaking of the scoop to dislodge it. Naturally he had instructed Al to remove the snowblowers, service them and store them. Then this. He had to arrive early today to shovel and scoop and scrape; the snow so heavy that at the bottom it was pressed into water by the accumulated mass above. Now, with the sun high, last night’s snow was already on the run, gushing down the gutters and gullies, nearly all gone. Only three hours ago he had to expend a mighty effort to clear some of the main walks, steps and stoops.

               He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a penlight. He got down on his hands and knees.



               Stan flopped down on the little bench there in the booth. Mentally he rolled his eyes. His sister droned on about constitutional rights. Why were educated people always so damn stupid? The King of Rock and Roll was dying, more like being poisoned, and nobody wanted to do a goddamn thing about it.

               With his finger he idly traced a heart carved in the wood of the booth. It read L.T. + and the other two letters had been scratched out, apparently vigorously. He wondered if the letters had been carved into the wood and then scratched out in the span of a single call.

               “Susan, you don’t understand. He IS dangerous. Not just to himself. Can’t you see that? He knows all this karate and has a bunch of guns around. He don’t know what the hell is going on. He THINKS he is in charge but he isn’t. Nobody is really. It is all out of control, it’s so bad I can’t even tell ya.”

               He turned on his little bench as a long legged blonde in a miniskirt strode into the soda fountain. Immediately he swept a hand back over his hair and sucked in his gut.



               Something had been nagging at Susan, and Stan’s call was reviving it. Vague unease had been recently nibbling at her. Somehow Stan’s appeals were coalescing with her recent dissatisfactions.

               The business was sound. No doubt about that. Luckily the actual inpatient treatment was not the engine anymore. Publishing, that is where the money was. Copyrights were exclusive, treatment theories were contagious.

               Maple Lodge, she had been sadly noting, had, ever so slightly, been losing its cachet. You treat one President’s daughter, she lamented, and a dogmatic disciple is born. So committed to the cause that she opens a competing operation on Long Island, siphoning away some of your own high-end clientele.

               A movie star or two comes through and then the desert around Palm Springs blooms with Treatment Centers based on the tried and true “Maple Lodge Model”.

She doodled coarsely on her notepad, ever darker, concentric, circles spiraling on top of each other. She fumed, her discipline was fraught with indoctrinated devotees, each successful treatment spawning a newly expert emissary, born again into the righteous radiance of sobriety. All capable of establishing missions of their own, far and wide.

               In fact such centers were sprouting now like spores. Insurance companies, hospitals, faiths, and civil organizations were entering the game. Although the pool to draw on was still big, the fish were getting less savory, at least to her palate.

Maple Lodge, which had always been a pioneer, was now an also ran. Should’ve seen it coming. Was it time for a new direction? Was Stanley offering her the catalyst?

Stan craned his head to see the blonde, the phone cable was mercilessly short.

“Listen Susan, this doctor’s killing him. He’s a goddamn quack for heaven’ sake. All he does is load him up with different pills ‘n’ stuff. Elvis himself thinks he’s a self appointed pharmacist. ‘S got a big old drug book full of little color pill pictures. They think they know what they’re doin’ but they’re really messin’ up. Why’m I the only one that see’s it?’

He found he could wedge himself to the corner of the booth. He efforts at veiwing the blonde were frustrated by this old-style booth with its bi-fold wooden doors and narrow windows. He peered though the glass, perturbed by whoever it was who thought that reinforcing the glass with thin little wire squares was a good idea. It just it distorted the view of her long, long legs.

The kid at the fountain looked over at her and directly sat up straight, cradling his tulip glass with a firm air of manly command. He took a spoonful of his sundae, appreciated it speculatively. She strode behind on spike heels to a corner booth. He licked his lips and began to sag back into the crumpled comma that was his usual posture. Stanley, if he tilted his head just so, and rested his chin on his chest, could gain an unobstructed view across the fountain to…her legs.

Susan’s vague idea began to take shape. It wasn’t entirely clear yet but she felt a big idea pending. In that way she was not unlike her father, she knew an idea when she felt it coming. She knew not to force it, it would be reveled in time.

Susan knew a judge or two; she had a fistful of markers across the land upon which she could call. She had the kind of memory that faithfully indexed every social debt, even potential ones.

If the going got rough, if push came to shove, she could have a magistrate in her corner, no problem. Secrets were a powerful capital

If not now, when?

If not Elvis Presley, who? There was no bigger fish in the known sea.

She could steamroll Lumkin, she knew. She could call upon a mercenary medical staff of fanatics, former clients all, who would embrace any of her ideas with sycophantic zeal. She admitted to herself, she had groupies. All were about as well rounded as any groupie. And speaking of groupies, she returned her attention to the Memphis Mafia Man himself, her brother Stan.

Stan was adamant, “I’m gonna take ‘im Susan. That’s all ’at’s to it. I owe it t’him, he won’t see that at first, I know, but he will in the end, once he gets all that shit cleaned outta his system. He’ll thank me. Then there’ll be some ass kickin’ ‘n’ house cleanin’ at Memphis. We’re gonna get rid of all those hanger’s on. The King’ll reclaim the throne ’m tellin’ ya.

 I’ll just drive off with ‘im, maybe into the Ozarks or somethin” Get a little cabin, live it clean a while. Nothin’ but home cookin,’ fresh air, maybe even some work, choppin’ wood or somethin’ like that….”

Sheeit, that blonde looked good. Might be a tad too old for him, he liked them about eighteen or nineteen, this one could even be as old as 25, about ten years younger than himself but still more than worthy, as far as he could see.

It was getting ever more difficult to pick up chicks the last few years, he lamented. Especially the young ones. Nowadays, ya mention to some of them that you live at Graceland, well, they might even laugh at ya. Like Elvis Presly was some kind of fuckin’ Burl Ives or Arthur Godfrey, for Christ sakes. Hell, he had to even buy that Peter Frampton record just to hip things up a bit, what a sorry day that was.

Sure, there was still plenty of opportunity to jump in the sack with the ladies. No problem once they found out you were one of the King’s Men. But what was the point? Most of the women it mattered to now were in their 30’s, even 40’s. Old cows like that, all so needy, and most of them kinda loony. It made him feel sad.

He liked them young and inexperienced, that way he could train them in, even if it was for only one night.

Oh, but there was a time though. What a time it was. Even after “The ’68” it had been great, for a while. It was high time for another comeback for the King of Rock and Roll. Stan was thinking he might be the only one who could engineer it.

Yeah, the blonde looked older than 18 or 19, more, well, mature, but oh, she had the goods. Probably married and 25…maybe a little bored? Why else would she be hanging around in a stupid drug store soda fountain? Probably married to some old businessman or something, maybe a doctor, and now she was caught in a pampered life with no excitement. Well, he could change that. He could spring this trapped tiger out of her cage.

Just how to do it? He checked, crap, he had no TCB jewelry on today, he’d need to use one of his lines. Let’s see, how about, “Ya know, I was tellin’ Elvis, just the other day, that he was all wrong about blondes….”?

Cliff got down close to the hole, directing his light through the opening. Darn these bifocals, he thought. He had to get his chin nearly on the floor to crane his head back enough to view the hole through the corrective lens

What a hassle, losing you r eyesight. It had surprised him at first. Seemed like there just wasn’t enough light, then it was that everything was too small, the printing, wires, screws, heck everything, it was just too darned small. Or too close. Finally he bit the bullet and went to the eye doctor.

That had nearly drove him crazy, “Which is better, number one or number two?”

Both looked crappy, or both looked swell. He felt pressured like he had to make a snap decision, what with the guy standing there alongside him, smelling like Old Spice, flicking that contraption back and forth. There was a difference in some, he could easily see that. Those were the easy one, fools could get them right.

But there were other lenses he was being asked to compare, much less distinct in the difference they afforded. He wanted to get it right, he didn’t want to spend good money on lenses unless they were the best ones for his eyes.

What a conundrum, “One or two?”

After a while the eye doctor seemed a tad exasperated. Cliff was beginning to suspect that there was no difference between some of the lenses. This eye doctor was just fooling with him – or maybe testing him, to see if he was faking or something? Aging so rarely furnishes easy choices.

Groaning slightly he put his cheek on the floor. What kind of wire was that back in there?

He thought about the guy he once worked with. A real bullshitter. Said his uncle had machined the nosecone on the first A-bomb. What was that guy’s name? Roland?

The guy said that his father was a housepainter, painted lots of ceilings and so forth. His father invented bifocals for the top of his lenses so he could see what he was doing without craning his head so far back when up there on top of the ladder. A vision of Michelangelo had sprung into Cliff’s head then. He could use a pair of Roland’s dad’s glasses right about now. That was the trouble with the best bullshitters, there always was that kernel of possible, believable, truth.

Susan took off her glasses and pinched her nose. These big glasses nowadays killed a person.

She would need to stall Stan a while, yet there wasn’t that much time, according to Lumkin at least. And she’d seen Elvis with her own eyes, it was shocking, even to her.

She would need a secure site. Maple Lodge had always been ahead of the pack. It was time to make an evolutionary step. But, she concluded, she couldn’t make that step here on the Maple Lodge grounds.

At that moment she was, or more accurately, her agents were, currently in negotiations for two properties in Florida. One near Fort Lauderdale and the other, more desirable to her thinking, was near Naples. It was becoming ever more evident that clients had little enthusiasm for receiving their treatments in Minnesota during the winter. And to the many who were unfamiliar with its climate, Minnesota’s winter extended from September first through the end of May.

And of course sometimes you had to go where the money was, too.

This deduction led her down a new mental route. Could it be possible to go mobile? Bring the treatment to the client? Chemical Dependency treatment to go? For security reasons it made a lot of sense. Offer the treatment in their own community where the client could arrange for his or her own security detail. It certainly would make for less of a stir, than if say, the Shaw or The Prime Minister or the CEO went inexplicably missing for a few months while in secret treatment in Minnesota, or Naples for that matter.

Maybe a mobile unit was what she had in mind. Perhaps an expert travelling team could be assembled. Even bogus “Groups” for the therapy sessions. Hell, she knew some former clients who could just about be considered professionals at Group.

The detoxification portion would provide the biggest challenges. But they could be met.

Her scheme would certainly violate many of the precepts the Maple Lodge Concept touted. She could deal with that. Sometimes she secretly doubted whether any of those vaunted canons made that much difference in the first place. Hence the apparently nearly similar success, and recidivism, rates at the store front shopping mall treatment centers, state hospitals, outpatient care centers, and the like.  She tiredly admitted to herself that maybe people just stopped drinking, or using, when they finally had enough of it.

She began to feel excited again, in a way she hadn’t for quite sometime. Professionally she had gone stale. The publishing business had proven so monumentally profitable that business offered little in the way of challenge.

Now here her little brother was offering her a key to a door for something that had roused her long dormant entrepreneurial creativity. Now she was about to get a leg up. She was going to service a market that had been there all along and she just hadn’t seen it. Changes were on the way and she was stimulated. Visionaries never see the obstacles. Big things were coming and all she had to do, she knew, was to be receptive. She was about to take an invigorating plunge. And then she saw Cliff’s butt.

Stan was slightly, inexplicably, taken aback. Was his sister planning on figuring out a way to help him out? It sounded like it.

He began to get butterflies. Holy shit, maybe this is going to happen. Now he’d be more involved than he would’ve been just dumping Elvis off the helicopter at his sister’s addiction hospital that night. Then, that night, Elvis was ‘sposed to see that he needed the cure.

He was going to be more like an accomplice now. Well, he could deal with it. The King was just about gone and the world needed him, and so did he.

Someone needed to save the King of Rock and Roll. He thought, why not me?

Suddenly the blonde looked at him. She gave a quick broad smile and a cute little wave, all very welcoming and receptive.

Oh man, wow. Stan sat up so fast he almost hit his head on the protruding coin slot. This was unanticipated. Stan, he told himself, ya still got it. He grinned and gave a slow wink and a flirtatious little limp wristed, finger wiggling wave in return.

She focused on him, frowning briefly she tilted her head and raised a brow quizzically.

Okay, Blondie, what’s your game here? He was about to extend his tongue, curl it and waggle it suggestively at her when she resumed her bright smile. She rotated towards him from the booth. She extended her arms, as if seeking his embrace.

Oh God. He was just about to tell Susan he’d call her back when a little pig-tailed kindiegarter girl skipped  past his booth waving some colored papers, shrieking, “Mommie!!!!” She dove into the blonde’s outstretched arms.

A big man; young, solid, and tan followed the little girl. He had a sweater knotted jauntily about his neck. He coolly approached the blonde. She stood and he gathered her into his powerful arms, kissing her while the little girl jumped up and down in the booth, giggling.

Stan whirled around in the booth, now trying to use the wood and the crosshatches for refuge, trying to hide himself from that big tan man.

Cliff snagged at the wire with a little hook he had extracted form his well ordered toolbox. He pulled at the wire gingerly and drew a small loop out through the opening. He craned his head to the side to get more light on the subject.

Speaker wire. Crap. He almost laughed, he craned a baleful look up at a speaker overhead on the ceiling. Should of known better. He installed that system himself, probably back in 1964 or ‘5.

That entire effort had advanced, if not conceived, in him his “Two percent rule.”

It was such a sterling example of an axiom that, at least to his theories, was becoming ever more prevalent in his culture. The rule that everything could be fine, everything could be ninety-eight percent perfect, and yet, human beings would strain mightily, beyond all sensible reason, to achieve that last two percent. Also the closer one would get to say ninety-nine point nine percent, the effort required to best it would aways be monumental. And thus the result would become ever more indispensable.

Some could have shag carpeting or exotic rugs on hardwood, a fine desk, draft free warmth and bracing air conditioning, lovely curtains or grand views, even an electric pencil sharpener but still, if their ears weren’t accommodated, everything else was just trash.

Consequently the wire in the wall. An effort, a brainstorm actually, of Personnel. Someone had read that workers are more productive when classical music was playing nearly inaudibly in the background. And a certain company, for a more than modest fee, would be pleased to provide the music for the underprivileged workers at Maple Lodge; as long as Cliff would install the system, and be responsible for changing the unwieldy tape reels every seven hours. No, it couldn’t be eight or twelve hours to cover an entire shift, it was seven and, if he was busy elsewhere, someone would surely be calling to cheerfully remind him that the music had stopped.

There were only 10 reels in the first set, it was supposed to be a subscription service. Yet sooner than any normal person would’ve expected, some in Administration were grousing about the repetition. Some even knew, and thus could predict, the order of the upcoming numbers. How productive could you be if you could listen to all that samey sounding fiddle and piano music and know seventy hours of it by heart?

When Cliff attempted to order the next installment he was not surprised to find the company had quietly went out of business. They must not have been playing their own music in their own warehouse.

Besides, nobody ever proved that Maple Lodge workers were more productive or that people’s attitudes were more rosey with the music. It hadn’t done much for Cliff’s attitude.

Anyway, people quickly began to find the tapes irritating in other ways. Soon a petition for “Why can’t we have music we like in our offices?” was a refrain heard more often than Bach.

Why not? Soon every office sprouted a transistor and you could here gospel, country, or acid rock - a foul gumbo of contrasting and competing sounds - ricocheting up and down the halls, generally annoying everyone.

Then the rule: “No more radios” was instituted. People still complained but soon forgot the issue as some other kind of distraction held their workday sway. Maybe someone got to order a new, special, snazzy office chair or something. Then a new whispered campaign would ensue, followed by another indignant movement until every office donned new chairs..

Cliff hated to think about the consequences of this new intercom, once the interoffice wind had carried its seductive scent to the other managers here in this old building.

 He shook his head. Just the lousy speaker wire. He could drill with impunity, in fact, he could drill with abandon.

Susan had just unintentionally, cast a glance at Cliff while her brother began an impassioned litany itemizing the excesses of his cohorts at Graceland. He seemed to be trying more to convince himself than he was her, of the need for decisive action.

Poor Stanley, how had their paths so diverged? Father and he had never spoke again after his decision to enlist. The family could be damn stubborn. It angered her when Stanley didn’t even come back for Father’s funeral.  “Security for the big Hawaii show” Yeah right. She did not think she was as stubborn as either of them  She was just resigned. And in a way she had been the bridge between the two of them, she was the thread that kept them in touch, not directly but vicariously.

 She was beginning to return to well traveled dead ends when she just casually, innocently, glanced across her desk at Cliff.

What was he doing? It looked as if he was sniffing the floor. She sat up for a better view when it struck her like a poleax, it nearly took her breath away, she sat back, but not too far as to spoil the viewof: Cliff’s splendid ass.

Wow. What a butt he sported! Had he always had such a fine ass? It was muscular, hard looking in those tight Levis. She wanted to jump on it right now.

Lordy, why haven’t I noticed THAT before?, she marveled. She could wrap her legs around something like that all night, she could imagine it grinding down on top of her, her just plain seizing it, capturing it between her knees, enclosing it, enveloping it, consuming it, no, devouring it.

My God, what is happening to me? she wondered, slightly panicked. Last week it had been Lumkin’s lips. She sat across the table from him in a Director’s Meeting and without warning all she could do was focus on the puffy, pouty, so smooth looking, unlined lips of Dr Lumkin.

She imagined them on her nipples nibbling, latching, releasing, slurping, sucking. And that flittering, nervous tongue, good God what she could do with that!

She had pulled at her blouse for fear her hard nipples were darting through the fabric. It was as if they had become some sort of ferrite bullets seeking the magnetic fields proffered by  his ripe, voluptuous lips. She could not wrest her attention from the Doctor’s mouth. He naively chewed on them, he puffed them and puckered them and pulled them out thoughtfully with a pudgy finger, all the while his glistening tongue would be making the briefest petite appearances, licking here, exploring there. She thought she was going to explode, she wanted to lather herself upon that mouth.

She had made herself so wet there in the conference room that she had to call for Vera to bring her lab coat for fear her dark skirt would reveal her desires.

She had cautiously laughed to herself in disbelief afterwards. All that over Dr Lumkin’s lips? It made her slightly queasy thinking of it all, especially when she considered the man those lips were attached to. She told herself that she had been captured by some kind of anomaly that day in the stuffy bounds of that dull boardroom. It was just an escape, something contrived by her mind to provide relief in an otherwise indifferent day. Similar to the role the lingerie she had been favoring of late played in her wardrobe, the silks, the garters, the fussy belts and straps just added a measure of interest, an appreciated diversion from a life that had lately seemed a trifle uninspiring.

But now, today, her thoughts worried her. She squirmed in her chair as she watched Cliff’s sleek ass rotating there, so close. Thank goodness he was absorbed with the little tools he was fiddling with because she could not tear her eyes away.

She was alarmed. I have never had such urges in my life, she admitted to herself. Is it some sort of late, last inning hormonal surge governing these absorptions? Not even during her ill fated, necessary foreshortened marriage had she ever experienced such desires.

And the worst of it, she was fixating on just body parts alone. Her behavior was nothing, in her estimation, if not that of a hormone addled adolescent male - or something even worse. She had no interest whatsoever in the whole of the person, she revolted at the thought of the rest of Lumkin’s body but, oh, that nimble mouth. And now again, here, Cliff’s muscled, powerful, somehow leonine, ass.

She did a quick psychological inventory on herself. She isolated no deterioration, she detected no discernable markers indicating an impending emotional crisis or even, as far as she could tell, some sort of latent, submerged issues now surfacing for long overdue attention.

She resolved to do some research pronto. She concluded that she needed to bone up on female sexuality, see if theliterature contained any data on the evolution of sexual fantasies in the premenopausal female. Surely Kinsey or Brothers or, she giggled to herself, Phil Donahue, would have some comforting information for her.

And then Cliff stood up. He stretched and rubbed the small of his back, arching his shoulders somewhat. She conceded his thin waist, smooth belly. Thoughtfully he stroked back his hair, scratching at the back of his neck for an instant. His hair was the color of maple syrup drizzled with champagne, or perhaps honey injected with the finest molten chocolate, and it flowed down towards the nape in languid little waves. The silver flecks in his trim sideburns suggested maturity, a kind of deliberation, the insistence upon taking his time.

His hands were rugged. Yet the fingers were long and agile, not delicate but also not the wide, almost webbed affairs offered by some of the males she saw - it looked to her like those men had a mittfull of carrots poking out from the ends of their stumpy arms.

To her surprised relief his ass did not disappear when he stood up, no flat ass on this guy. It curved tightly back there, a simple curve, yet complex in all that it conveyed. And his legs were strong, spread slightly, and tapered nicely to his boots. Even without his boots he must be over 6 feet tall, she calculated.

He put his hands on his hips for an instant, he inclined his pelvis as he tilted his head from side to side. Cords rippled in his neck. His buttocks seemed to pulse.

He looked down towards his work, contemplating it. He adjusted his glasses. He had a strong chin, cleft like Kirk Douglas’s, and his nose was refreshingly neutral, not mashed in like a pig’s, not cute or dainty and not honking either.

He wore a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Unbuttoned at the neck, she noticed a hint, maybe just a strand, of a more chestnut hued hair curling near the button. His forearms were lean and covered with a soft corona of cider colored hair. She corrected  herself, not hair actually, it was more like a halo of down.

Cliff’s white shirt was the one thing about him that she had noticed before. Always the white cotton shirt, not fancy but somehow professional in its appearance. He seemed to always have a tie at the ready should the need present. He never seemed to get his shirt stained either, and he handled some fairly involved tasks around here too. Then she recalled the overalls she had tossed to Lumkin the other night. She hoped Lumkin had returned them. Lumkin’s lips crossed her mind again, she dismissed them now with revulsion.

Thinking of it, she shot a glance at Cliff’s lips. The pink tip of his tongue slowly caressed the length of his chiseled lips, as he stood there absorbed in thought. Then he bit down gently on his lower lip.

Oh, yes! She had to turn away, trembling. She looked out the window. The grass was noticeably greener and the snow was retreating, almost as if it were evaporating in the day’s newfound heat.

Stan’s diatribe was flagging. Stanley, Stanley, Stanley. She should concentrate.

Her voice was husky, “How did things go for you when you got back?”

What’s with my voice? she thought as she cleared her throat, “I mean…did you get in any trouble when you got back home? That red headed guy seemed awfully hostile, did he cause you any grief?”

Stanley was shocked himself, once he had described them all to Susan, at how bad things had become around Graceland. Shit, and he didn’t even mention the stuff he was involved with. Everything was out of control and picking up speed. He had to save Elvis, there was no doubt about it. And he needed to save himself too…maybe.

Susan’s question startled him somewhat. What’s with her voice? It sounded so low, smoky-like. Was she crying about how bad things were for him in Memphis? With her intellect could she read between the lines and somehow guess at some of the stuff he was up to lately? Was she worried about her little brother? He was genuinely touched by her concern. It had been a long time, if ever, since anyone had asked him how he was doing.

“Rusty? Naw.” he replied with ungrounded bravura, “I can handle him.”

A lie, he had worried a great deal about what Rusty would say about their little helicopter junket. He had told Rusty it was just for a quick “Check up at the clinic” figuring he’d deal with the consequences after the King had checked in. But the King’s refusal had put him in a bad spot, he was plenty worried when they had lifted off that night. He had not planned on the King refusing, or Susan letting him leave like that.. Damn, sometimes the King could be tough. But as it was, no sooner had The King passed out again, and Rusty had, reluctantly at the demand of the chopper pilot, buckled his seatbelt, then his worries were cooled.

“Hell, some hooker in the limo ripped off all his blow before we even got on the helicopter to fly up to your, er, hospital. He didn’t find out about it until we were lifting off after seein’ you guys. Was he mad, he was “Gonna kill that lousy dame!” Shit, he just about tore up the Lisa M on the way back to Memphis, lookin’ everywhere for some coke. He was one strung out, nasty dude when we pulled in the gates. He just about ran for the house, for ‘is stash, before I could even stop the Caddy. You shoulda seen ‘im!” He laughed, then remembered that Susan might not find that kind of behavior amusing.

“How about Presley, did he say anything?” Cliff had left her office.

To Stan she sounded relieved, he appreciated that.

“Naw, he didn’t even remember doin’ the show in St. Paul when I just kinda asked him about it later. Besides, if he does remember bein’ out there, I’d be able to convince him we was just there to visit you. I had ‘im plenty well loaded up, didn’t I? I watch this quack doctor pretty close, I know how The King reacts.”

The soda fountain blonde sauntered by, with her family. She seemed to make a point of threading her entire ice cream cone into her mouth and then withdrawing it languidly as she passed by his booth, licking at her lips with relish. Stan just barely overheard the man laugh and whistle appreciatively as their shadows slowly edged by his booth. He curled himself into the booth, he shivered and licked his own lips.

Susan, more focused,  “Listen Stanley, I am going to go way out for you, past the end of the limb, do you understand?”

“Yeah, I got ya.” Stanley was feeling a trifle afraid now.

               “If this gets screwed up we could go down very big here. Kidnapping maybe. FBI stuff. Front page at every grocery check out. Walter Cronkite even. Understand?” She needed him to take this seriously, there was a kernel of truth in what she was saying, sure, but she would lace enough safety nets to catch them all. At least she thought she could.

               Stanley straightened up. “Yes.”

               “I am going to pull some strings and we may be able to do this but, if one thing goes wrong, we both crash real hard. Do you got that?”

He was beginning to fell a bit defensive, ”Yeah, I got that.” He said with all the cold determination he could msuter.

“You have to figure a way to get him here, or at least to me That’s all you have to do.

 I have to do some, major preparations on my end. Do not make any calls to me from the house there. You come up with a plan on your end. Stanley, I know you can deliver but, please, be careful. I have a lot to think about up here. You just worry about your end and give me a call, give me a month. Call me.”

That sounded better. He could come up with a plan in fact he had already been conceiving some vague plots in his head. "Susan, you can depend on me. Really. I’ve just about got it all worked out already.”

“Good, call me, I’ll give you my ideas and you give me yours. We’ll compare notes, critiq…we’ll make suggestions to each other and then work on it some more. Until we get it as right as we can okay? She  really watned to review HIS plan, commandeer it if need be.

She was already beginning to examine the big steps of her crystallizing scheme, turning them mentally in her mnd,, viewing the objectives from a variety of angles.

“You bet, and, “ he paused, “Susan, thanks a lot.”

She sighed, “Well, don’t thank my yet, kid. (Maybe older sisters did have the vocabulary to irritate a younger brother after all.) I think you and me (And a bunch of, at this moment, unsuspecting accomplices) can do it. It will take some work but I think we are on to something. Stanley, take care. Call me.”

“For sure.” He hung up the phone, staring at his hand upon it, wondering.

I think she almost said “I love you” there at the end. I think I would’ve said it back to her.

He shook his head quickly and shrugged. Something big was coming, he could feel it. He was sure of it. He was forming an idea, indistinct now but, he knew the rest would come to him if he just let it. He had confidence, it would be revealed.

He took a deep breath through his nose. He turned to the door and folded it to the side.

Susan hung up the phone calculating. First off, I got to find a place, preferably nearby, maybe temporary, a prototype. The grounds here were laced with paths and buildings and, frankly, even as indoctrinated as her staff was in the sanctity of privacy, the kind of security required by her plan could not be insured here on campus.

Cliff returned to her office with a big drill in his hands.

“I see you’re off  the phone” he nodded in the direction of her telephone, “Mind if I just drill a moment here…” He tilted his head towards the wall.

“Of course not, go ahead. Please.” Her voice sounded shakey, she thought.

He squatted down by the wall. Easy does it at first. Have to ream it, widen it a bit, but be gentle, don’t crack this old plaster. Just gently though the lathe with this bigger bit.

He was making the aperture wide. He was going to string in coax, as long as he was at it. He knew that sooner or later administration would find the need for TV’s in their offices. Who knows? Closed circuits or something like that, so they could argue or plot with each other without having to leave their expensive chairs. Anyhow, it was probably coming for one reason or another. He’d piggy back this cheap intercom wire the coax and leave an nice plate on the wall here. Most likely save himself some work down the road.

He strung the cord between his legs, hefted the drill and held it firmly there between his knees. He raced the drill a few times. Tilting his head back so he could look through his bifocals, he gently slipped the bit into the pilot hole. 

Susan observed, her mouth open. Cliff began to thrust his hips slowly forward,  easiong  toward the hole on the tips of his toes, gracefully arcing back and forth, back and forth, as the drill penetrated and then withdrew..

His butt seemed to vibrate there, especially on the thrusts.

She writhed in her chair.

Suddenly he pierced through the last bit of lathe and the drill leapt in his hands. He shuddered for a moment and then did a series of brief insertions and removals while revving the drill shrilly, spilling the powders at his feet.

Susan jumped in her chair, blinking behind her big glasses. Did she smell smoke?

Cliff got to his feet. Glanced at Susan, and said, “That outta do it.”

She swallowed, cleared her throat. “Yup” she nearly moaned it.

Yup? She had never used that word before in her life.

Coiling the cord, he left her office wondering, What’s with her voice?

And even more curious, What’s with that look she was giving me? Did I disturb her somehow? Better wait on asking about that heliport.

She bit the side of her finger, watching him as he left her office.

Then she had her epiphany. Actually it was two epipahnies.

CHAPTER 6



               “Why dontcha  shut up and just keep on fuckin’ me? C’mon.”

               It had been a hell of an Easter weekend for Al. Her answer to him Easter night, across the front seat of his Ford was the last straw for him. He broke up withher when he took her home. She just looked at him, kind of blankly, shrugged, got out of the car and walked up to the trailer without looking back. No tears, no anger, no , well no asking why.

               Actually he decided to dump her before that night across the front seat of his car. He looked down, paused midstroke. It was astonishing. He never opened his eyes while he was making out but, for some reason, he looked down at her and there she was, chewing gum and studying her nails by the light of the radio. When he asked her what she was doing, she answered with that.

She should ‘ve been any high school junior’s dream. A girl, a bit young, near the end of 9^th grade, but, she was stacked, And she jsut couldn’t get enough cock. At first he couldn’t believe his good luck.

Therw as a time when he thought she must’ve had a pretty cool old man to put her on the pill when she turned 14 but he began to wonder. Things just were not right.

She wasn’t like his other girlfiriends. He called her a few time but she seeemd bored on the phone. He knew form previous experience that calling in the evening was an expectation and he, often was the bored party

She had somehow turned the tables on him. She would be the one in the theater getting her hands in his pants…when he wanted to watch the movie. Damn, he missed half of The Emprie Strikes Back sqirming in his seat while she wasyanking on him and twisting him like the throttle on a Suzuki.

She made screwing almost boring. In the end he found that she didn’t care about anything else. Didn’t want to watch the sow, eat a pizza or anything. Hell a date for her would’ve been just driving a half mile down the road and pulling over and then bringing her home with his dick so uffy it was like he could hardly recognize it. Just pulling it out the next mor9ing to take a leak was excruciating.

The entire situation bothered him in ways he could not fathom. Somehow he wanted more than just sex, but what or why he could not define to himself and it was slilghtly embarrassing  admitting it to himself.

Her stock fell precipitously for him when she casually mentioned to him that she was “Bangin’” her school bus driver. He tired to digest that bit of lighthearted information with equinamity Tried to shurg it off like it was only natrual she should be engaging in something like that doing that with her next door neighbor. Even if the guy was married and had a couple of kids.

Then it dawned on him why the guy, standing there in his yard when he came to pick her up, always gave him such a badass look. He just stood there in his filthy sweatshirt, holding a beer, glaring. And some nights he saw the guy’s silhouette in the window of what was mostly likely the kitchen skin, peering out as Al let her off, late.

 It shocked him that she didn’t even seem to be aware that he might not dig news like that. It hurt his feelings but he admitted he didn’t own her, it was a new day, after all, free love or whatever the hippies had called it. He chastised himself momentarily for being so old fashioned. But still it bugged him.

He was trying hard to reconcile himself with this new information when he remembered she was on the pill. That means the guy was, like him, not wearing a rubber, probably. Shit. He recalled the health class films about VD.

God. He sat there in the car that night thinking about the bus driver while she liberated his dick from his levis. She could whip it out of those tight pants, even when it was at full extentl, faster than he could himself, for Chrissakes.

The school bus driver, he worked at the feed mill when he wasn’t on his route. A stubby, dark, squinty kind of guy with perpetual whiskers like Fred Flintstone. It seemed to Al that the guy would’ve still looked somehow grubby emerging from a month in a bubble bath.

It kind of pissed him off, really. If he would’ve been out banging someone else he would’ve at least had the integrity to never had ever told her aobut it and certainly he would’ve had enough principal to lie about it if confronted.

Than Al suddenly  had a nasty thought. What if the guy had been in Veit Nam? Holy shit, the more he studied it the more he was convinced the guy had been in ‘Nam. Oh shit, they had the worst VD on earth in ‘Nam. Everybody nknew that. They had that Black Syphilis or Black VD or Black Clap or wahtever the hell hthey call it. Made your dick turn black and fall off

[SO THAT”S IT FOR NOW]