The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

  •HarperCollinse-books

  The Good Neighbor

  THE

  GOOD NEIGHBOR

  A NO VEL

  WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  For Kasia, my little girl, and also

  young Ethan Lars

  Contents

  ‌

  Author's Note • v

  PART ONE

  Going Home • 3

  The End of the Golden Age • 11

  The Brass Ring • 25

  The Blood of Angels • 37

  A Historical Digression • 45

  PART TWO

  The Prescription • 65

  Things as They Ought to Be • 83

  Survival of the Fittest • 89

  The Chicken of Despair • 99

  Drink This to Make It Better • 107

  The Visitor • 119

  White Men from the Future • 125

  The Diary of Marly Musgrove • 137

  The Cemetery • 151

  Breathing • 161

  Zero-G • 169

  A Historical Digression (Continued) • 185

  iv

  CONTENTS

  PART THREE

  18

  Where Old Machines Come to Die • 207

  19

  Rumors • 225

  20

  Cruelty • 233

  21

  Disinterment • 243

  22

  The Necrophobe • 247

  23

  The Morgue • 261

  24

  The Collision • 267

  25

  The Confession • 271

  26

  Forgiveness • 279

  27

  Judgment • 297

  28

  The Offer • 309

  29

  Heading North • 327

  30

  The Hearing • 331

  31

  A Historical Digression (Concluded) • 341

  PART FOUR

  32

  The Turkey of Bliss • 353

  33

  Getting Ready • 365

  34

  Once More to the Apartment • 371

  35

  Everything Is Connected • 375

  36

  To Live at Adencourt • 387

  37

  Sold • 397

  Epilogue • 399

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by William Kowalski Credits

  Cover Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  ‌

  I would like to express my appreciation to my wife, Alexandra, my agent, Anne Hawkins, and my editor, Marjorie Braman, for their continued support during the writing of this book. Nathan Sidoli and Michael Wolfe were also helpful, and Paul Romaine gave generously of his time and energy in helping me see the world through the eyes of a professional stock trader. Larry Finlay, my editor in the U.K., has been a constant source of optimism and encouragement. Without these people and others, this novel would not have come to be, and they have my full and unending gratitude.

  The town of Plainsburg, Pennsylvania, is fictitious, and should not be confused with any actual place.

  William Kowalski

  Part One

  ‌

  1‌

  Going Home

  In the morning, the river seemed flat and still. At this early hour, there was no depth to it; it was as if one could bend down and

  pinch the water between thumb and forefinger and just peel it away, like a bandage, and underneath, the earth would be dry. There would be bones down there, and other secrets, too, whis pering of the things that had already happened in that place, as well as things that were to come—but they wouldn’t have known any of this, not yet.

  They came around that last bend in the road, where the bluff ends and the river plain begins, and the valley opened up before them like a drawing from a long-forgotten children’s book. There was the house on one side of the road, and the thin, silent river on the other. Growing along the river were trees in profusion— Francie saw wise sycamores, tentative birches, and weeping wil lows, as well as several sprightly young oaks and one stately old one. In their brilliant headdresses, they seemed to her like torches that had been stuck in the earth and left there to glower against

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  the ragged gray belly of the sky. It was fall, the best time of the year in that part of the world.

  Later, like jealous explorers, they would argue about who had seen the house first, Francine or Coltrane. It was difficult to deter mine, because the house wasn’t the only thing to come to the eye once one had swung around the bend. There was too much else to look at. There were the rumpled mountains in the distance, for example, unstriking in either height or appearance, but lending a softening distraction to the scene, as if they were not real but a background image done in paint or chalk. They looked like some thing you could jump into, Francie thought, like the park scene in Mary Poppins. Also, there was the river, and all around them, the broad, fecund fields, whose varying greenness was still defiant and bright, so early was it still in this new season of dying. There was the road, which unspooled over the hilltop in the foreground like a runaway ribbon. But, really, it was the trees that got you first, with their colors of priestly saffron and Martian red.

  Francie would later tell Colt that he could not possibly have seen the house first, because he was driving, and it was tucked away on her side of the car. She let him have credit for discovering the river, because she didn’t care about the river. She only cared about the house, and from the moment she saw it—it really was she who saw it first, though they both exclaimed about it at the same time—it was as if she’d never cared about any other place in her life until now.

  “Pull over!” said Francie, although Colt was already doing it. They parked at the side of the road, not daring the driveway,

  just looking up at the house. Then, after they’d sat in silence for several moments, she said to her husband, “I’d love to live here someday.”

  She expected him to make fun of her for this, but instead, to her astonishment, he said:

  “Yeah, so would I.”

  The Good Neighbor 5

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  One could see that this house was old, cut patiently by hand from living hardwood and frozen stone. There was a wraparound porch, ornamented with Victorian-style gingerbread cutouts and a swing on a chain, but the gingerbread was new and pretentious, clearly out of place. Whoever had put it there was trying too hard, Francie thought. If it was up to her, she’d take it down. There were three sto ries, plus what looked to be an attic, or a half-story of some sort. A small round window hinted that it might be interesting up there.

  “That’s where they kept the demonic stepchild,” said Colt. “Until it killed all of them in their sleep.”

  “Shut up,” said Francie. “Don’t ruin it.” Like you ruin everything else, she thought.

  “Can a place like this actually be empty?” Colt wondered.

  Timidly, they got out of the car and headed across the vast front lawn. Nobody came out to see what they wanted. No dogs barked. They went up the steps, Francie first, fearless now, and she pounded on the door. Without waiting for an answer, she went to one of the windows and put her face up to it, shading her eyes from the glare on the wrinkled old glass. She already knew that everyone was gone.

  “Don’t be so nosy,” said Colt. “Maw and Paw will come after us with a shotgun.”

  “It’s vacant,” said Francie. “Nobody lives here.”

  She showed Colt the sitting room. Clean outlines on the walls and floor proved that it had been occupied in e
xactly the same way for a long time, and then had suddenly been emptied all at once, like a sink whose plug had been pulled.

  “They were all murdered,” Colt said darkly. “I can tell.”

  “They were not,” said Francie. Normally it worked when Colt was trying to scare her, but this time she knew he was lying. “It’s got a . . . a feel to it. Alive. They liked it here.”

  6 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  “They? They who?”

  “Everyone. Right down to the cats,” she said. “Even the mice were happy.”

  “I wonder if it has termites,” said Colt. “Probably does.”

  Without bothering to stop and ask each other what they were doing, they wandered around to the back.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Colt and Francie hadn’t been in the market for a house. They lived in the city and had no intention of leaving it, in any permanent sense; they had only been out for a drive, which was Francie’s whimsical idea, because she was sick of breathing truck exhaust and wanted to go for a walk somewhere quiet. Again, to her sur prise, Colt had agreed. Usually, he didn’t want to be bothered with leaving the city. It seemed to take all morning just to get ready, and then they had to go a mile to the garage where he kept his beloved car, and then drive in weekend traffic through the Hol land Tunnel, across New Jersey, through the Delaware Water Gap and into Pennsylvania, which was where they both knew they would end up that day, though they hadn’t discussed it. Pennsyl vania held a kind of magic for Francie, because it was woodsy and quiet, or so she thought of it, and also because it reminded her of a childhood that hadn’t quite happened but easily could have. She even liked the way the word sounded, rolling out of her mouth like a cheekful of liquid silver: Pennsylvania.

  Colt never thought about Pennsylvania in poetic terms. He simply hadn’t driven his car, a rebuilt 1970 Camaro with a two- hundred horsepower V-8, in a whole month, and he was aching to feel it open up on the road underneath him. The engine and body of the car had a way of vibrating together at a certain speed— miniscule waves of motion shuddering throughout the whole ma chine, intersecting with each other perfectly and canceling each other out—so that it felt, for brief moments, like the car wasn’t

  The Good Neighbor 7

  even moving at all, when in reality it was roaring along like a bat out of hell. It was like hitting the sweet spot on a baseball bat or a golf club. Depending on the temperature, it happened at around seventy-seven miles per hour, and Colt loved this feeling so much that sometimes he fell asleep thinking about it.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  When they went around to the back of the house and saw what was there, they gasped. Francie reached for Colt’s hand. Their eyes, so accustomed to the unnatural foreshortening of the urban horizon, felt at first as though they were being stretched, cartoon- like, out of their heads. It didn’t seem possible that all this space could go with one house. The yard simply went on and on until it disappeared, the end of it hidden by a thick blur of trees that, for all they knew, might even be part of the property. Think of it! they said to each other. Owning trees! It was too good to be true. About a hundred yards from the house, and hidden behind it, there was a barn, velvet with age—a rough and unsteady creation of the last century that would certainly not make it through the next. It was already halfway through the process of collapsing, and seemed to have halted now merely out of surprise, or embar rassment. There was also a small and weathered fruit orchard con sisting of perhaps two dozen trees, organized not in neat rows but all in a huddle, like old men having a fire drill. Near them was a lit tle pond, overgrown with algae and reeds. As they approached, they heard the sound of dozens of tiny divers taking refuge in the

  murky water.

  “What’s that noise?” said Colt. “Fish?”

  “It’s not a noise, it’s a sound. And it’s not fish, it’s frogs,” said Francie, who knew about such things. Sweet memories of her childhood again came back to her, whether real or not, she couldn’t say, and she wiped her eyes. Colt had grown up in the city, and when, at that moment, Francie realized he’d spent his

  8 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  entire life without ever once hearing the sounds of frog-song on a midsummer night, she felt something not unlike pity, but with a sharper edge, whereas once upon a time she might have found it amusing that he didn’t know frogs from fish.

  “They’re scared of us,” she explained.

  “I wonder how many acres this is,” said Colt. He spun around slowly, scanning the horizon. “There are,” he announced, “no neighbors, except that one house on that hill. Which you can barely see. It’s quiet.” He said “quiet” with trepidation, like one beginning a bold experiment. The house he pointed to was indeed scarcely visible, though Francie knew that, in country terms, the owners had probably considered themselves to be practically rub bing elbows. They would have known each other ’s every intimate detail, every irregular thought. They would have been neighbors all their lives. They might even have been related.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  Colt shrugged. “There’s enough room back here for a whole golf course, practically.”

  “No! An English country garden.”

  “I could at least put in a putting green.” “Cross-country skiing in winter.”

  “Jesus,” said Colt, “we could build a whole resort back here.” “Let’s not,” said Francie.

  “Are we moving?” asked Colt. “Somehow, when I got up this morning . . .”

  “Can we at least talk about it?” Francie asked in return, know ing that he had already convinced himself, and that therefore the hardest part of it was already done.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Leaving the driveway in the Camaro, pausing to let pass a pickup truck that was weighed down with various items of junk, they

  The Good Neighbor 9

  noticed what they hadn’t earlier: a battered, rusty mailbox, lean ing like a drunk away from the road.

  “Hold on,” said Francie. She got out and went to look at the name as the driver of the pickup truck slowed curiously, peered at them from under a baseball hat, and sped up again. On the door of the truck were written the words FLEBBERMAN TOWING. Colt could tell what he was thinking: Strangers. He felt unnerved. In the city, people were not supposed to notice each other that obvi ously.

  “It says ‘Musgrove,’ ” Francie called, kneeling next to the rust- red, loaf-shaped mailbox. She hadn’t noticed the pickup truck. “Or at least it used to say that.” She got back in the car. “You can still see the paint. Barely. It was the Musgrove house,” she said.

  “Yeah, I heard you,” Colt said.

  His tone was sarcastic and impatient. Francie wondered, hurt, what had happened in the preceding three seconds to make him suddenly testy. They’d gotten through the whole morning with out a fight. For a Saturday, the only full day of the week they spent together, that was pretty good. She couldn’t have under stood that it was the driver of the pickup truck, staring at Colt in what he had already come to think of as his own driveway. He’d wanted to challenge the man, but he was gone too soon, and now he had adrenaline in his system, which made him touchy. To pun ish him, she kept her daydreams to herself for the next fifteen minutes. But they were both too excited to stay quiet for long, and soon they were chattering like schoolchildren on holiday as they wended their way back toward the city. She even got Colt to apologize, though he didn’t understand what for.

  2‌

  The End of the Golden Age

  The next Monday was September 25, 2000, a date that would later bear particular significance in Francie’s and Colt’s minds as a

  kind of freeze-frame snapshot of the planetary alignments that had determined the course of their future; it was a picture of late youth to regard in their geriatric years, when they would look back on themselves as they once were, and wonder what strange forces had caused everything to change. After all, no one is more attuned to the vagaries of the universe than poets, of
whom Francie generously considered herself one—despite the fact that she had written perhaps ten poems in nine years, all of them fail ures of inspiration and style. And for Colt’s part, there is no self- respecting financial trader who doesn’t hold at least a little stock in the mysterious powers of the cosmos; they all understand that no part of the universe is unconnected to any other part, that when you pull one string down another goes up, that all things under the sun, eventually, are reflected in the market, and that the market, in fact, is really only a reflection of everything, a model of the universe in miniature. Hence the good-luck charm he wore

  12 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  discreetly around his neck, tucked into his shirt—a simple gold ring on a chain, to remind him that all was one, and that success was only a fingernail’s breadth away.