Nashville: The Mood (Part 2)

by Donald H. Carpenter

  After a bitterly cold winter, and a fairly wet spring, Nashville had settled into the early days of summer. The rain had dropped off to a minimum, and the skies were mostly deep blue and cloudless. The temperature wasn’t bad yet; there were a lot of moderate and breezy days, almost spring-like but just a little warmer. There had been a lot of construction and road repairs in the downtown area during the spring, and the number of people visiting downtown had dropped off noticeably. Once the repairs ended in early June, downtown still seemed quieter than usual. There were times when one could walk up and down the streets and sense the strange quiet all around, knowing it wouldn’t last forever.

  On a Thursday in early June, a tall man in a grey suit walked up Third Avenue. He looked at the various addresses and windows and finally spotted a small turn-in that led into an office building. He made his way into the building and found the elevator. A security guard watched him idly from a desk in the center of the lobby. The man pushed the third floor button, and when he arrived there, he looked briefly at the numbering scheme before turning to the right. He eventually wound up at an office at the end of the hallway, where he paused at the doorway. There was no sign on the door, nothing to indicate what was inside. He hesitated for a few more seconds, then turned the knob and pushed the door inward.

  A young man seated behind a desk looked up immediately. He was around twenty-five years old, clean-cut, dark-haired, slender and athletic in appearance, with bright shining dark eyes that darted here and there. He didn’t stand when the man entered, but rather looked at him quizzically, as if his appearance had been totally unexpected.

  “I’m here to see Carl Edward Rentzler.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m Thomas Borgeria. I wrote to you last week.”

  The young man behind his desk immediately recognized the name and stood up. “Yes, I had all but forgotten today was the day you were coming by. I’m Carl Rentzler. How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. I appreciate your time. Are you the only one here?”

  “Yes, today, and most of the time, in fact. We have a small staff, but it’s mostly part-timers. I’m really the only full-timer.”

  The young man gestured to a chair on the other side of the desk from him, and Borgeria slowly took a seat there. He reached into his coat and produced a small notepad and a pen, and opened the notepad and began making a note or two. The young man watched him with interest, a look of muted excitement in his eyes.

  “As you know, Mr. Rentzler, when I got wind of your group, I was very intrigued. As the Director of Morals and Manners for the southern part of West Virginia, I naturally wondered if we might have a connection of sorts and could share information. I suppose I could have carried on this conversation by telephone or e-mail, but I thought it important enough to come and visit you.”

  “Well, I’m glad that you did.”

  “What got you interested in this subject?”

  “I noticed that Nashville has a problem. I’ve lived here half of my life. I went to college here. So I’ve seen what’s gone on the last fifteen years or so, and I compared it to other places I’ve lived or been in around the country, and I decided it was a problem worth tackling.”

  “Do you really think that Nashville differs from other cities significantly in that regard?”

  Rentzler grimaced slightly, and a look of frustration seemed to appear on his face, and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Yes, I do. I’ve studied it, I’ve analyzed it, and I do believe there is a problem here. How unique it is, is another question. It probably hits surrounding areas, surrounding states, surrounding cities, but I live here, and this is the area I care about. This is my home.”

  Borgeria nodded as he made notes. It was obvious that he liked Rentzler, and was sympathetic to what he was saying, but that he felt he had to try to be objective about understanding Rentzler’s position. “So you think that Nashville could become a leader in this regard if you could turn the tide here?”

  “Yes, very much so. We have to start somewhere, and as I say, I’m here. But if we could turn Nashville around in this regard, it would be a strong, symbolic move that would reverberate nationwide.”

  “One thing I worry about,” Borgeria said, putting down his pad and pen. “You have concentrated on a particular angle that I had never thought about. Quite frankly, I had never particularly thought of that as immoral behavior. On the other hand, as you know, we tend to concentrate in—other directions. Similar to what most organizations doAnd we have formed a strong alliance, very strong, with some of those organizations—quite a number of them, in fact.”

  “No, I wasn’t really much up on what you’ve been up to, or who you’ve aligned yourself with.”

  “Well, I took the liberty of checking out your organization with several of the groups we’ve been in touch with for a number of years in this area. None of them had ever heard of you before.”

  Rentzler shifted in his chair. The conversation was going where he had suspected it might go, and he was struggling to contain his impatience. “Well, I haven’t reached out to any of them, because as you say, we seem to be emphasizing different things. I’ve concentrated on what I think is the main problem, and I haven’t worried much about others who have differing views.”

  “Do you agree with the views of those organizations, at least to the extent that what they are fighting is a moral problem?”

  “I’m not certain that I do.”

  Borgeria nodded again, thinking about the conversation himself, where it was going. He was a man who was used to dealing with groups with differing opinions, and he knew that no two organizations were always on the same page, or they probably wouldn’t be separate organizations to begin with. He knew there were different focuses, different emphases, and that there would be personality differences between groups, and between leaders of groups. But he also knew there had to be a common ground, a relatively large area of agreement, in order for two groups to work together.

  There was a long silence in the room, which was a quiet room, anyway, tucked away in the corner of a building, deep in between city blocks. Borgeria cleared his throat a time or two, and Rentzler watched him cautiously, and although the silence was only for fifteen or twenty seconds, it seemed to both men like a long time. It was as if they had reached the end of the conversation, but had reached it so suddenly that neither one had been prepared to end it. And so they sat.

  “What I worry about,” Borgeria said very slowly, almost deliberately, allowing for a second of dead time between each word, “is that to follow through on the course you propose—to really peel back this kind of behavior—one is going to have to confront the established church in this area. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “I don’t mean one particular church, of course. What I mean is the body of churches that collectively form the established church in this area. Do you follow what I mean by that?”

  “Perfectly.”