by John Enright
He slept well in the old house. This time of year would have always been its halcyon days—the long amber sunsets lingering late into dusk, all the guest bedrooms filled with summer guests up from the city or down from Albany, children being put to bed, the day’s warmth lingering in the rooms, and with darkness the breeze coming up from the river billowing the open-window curtains. Simplicity was the essence of peace, the simplicity of a quiet summer’s day to be followed by its sibling.
On Dominick’s third morning there—or was it his fourth?—the foreign sound of an engine awoke him, a grumbling like a beast with a chest cold. The sun was already well up in the sky and slanting in his bedroom windows. In the driveway there were the sounds of human voices and car doors closing. The idyll was ending; the simple would soon be slaughtered by the complex. He swung his legs out of bed and put on his pants and shirt from the previous day, feeling like a soldier about to surrender. Just name, rank, and serial number, he reminded himself. Let them—whoever they were—make their own projections and assumptions. In the bathroom down the hall he emptied his bladder and splashed cold water on his unshaven face. Bring it on. There was no choice. He looked at himself in the mirror above the sink, once again a stranger to the face there. He decided against the wrinkled used shirt and went back to his room to change to something fresher.
As empty as the house had just been, it was now full. Voices, women’s voices, the sounds of people on the stairs and of doors being unlocked and opened. The toilet down the hall flushed and then a few minutes later flushed again. Footsteps passed in the hallway, a girl’s laugh came from somewhere downstairs. Dominick buttoned on a clean shirt. He went to the front window and looked out. There was just one vehicle in the driveway, a big squarish emergency vehicle with a row of lights on top and outsized off-road tires. “First responders,” Dominick said. He had a fondness for that term, an action noun with metaphoric possibilities. A winch was attached to the vehicle’s front bumper. How appropriate for a first responder to have a winch up front.
The door to the room opened and a woman was standing there, her back turned to Dominick as she called back into the hallway, “No, no. Check to see, but don’t let Dave go yet.” When she came into the room he could see it was Morgan. She was pulling a wheeled suitcase that resisted coming over the door sill into the room. She cursed at it softly and jerked it in. Then she saw Dominick standing there. She smiled. “So you did find the place after all,” she said.
“Yes. Hello, Morgan. So is this your room I have been sleeping in?”
“Morgan, Morgan!” A young woman came to the door.
“What is it, Kathy?”
“I can’t find Susan anywhere,” then seeing Dominick, “Who’s this?”
“This is Amanda’s brother. I’m sure Susan will show up now we’re back.”
“Has he been here all along?”
“I don’t know. Have you been here all along, Dominick?” Morgan asked.
“Susan went out a while ago,” Dominick said. Name, rank, serial number.
“Went out? What do you mean went out? Went out where? Went out how?” Kathy was getting excited. She came into the room.
“She borrowed my car,” Dominick said.
“And you just let her leave?”
“I hope you brought some food,” Dominick said. “There’s very little left that isn’t canned.”
“Where is Susan?” Kathy wanted to know.
“He’s said he doesn’t know, Kathy. We will have to leave it at that for now.” Morgan was giving Dominick a curious look. “You can inform the officer downstairs that Susan is missing, if you wish, Kathy. Though I think it may be premature, and you know that Denise does not like having the authorities out here. For a nonmember and a runaway at that.” Kathy turned and left, and Morgan closed the door behind her. “What really happened?” she asked.
“Susan stole my car and left a couple of days ago. That’s all I know.”
“We found your car stuck in the mud on the back road. No sign of Susan.”
“Is it still there?”
“Becoming part of the landscape.” Amanda pulled her suitcase out of the way. “I wouldn’t worry about Susan. She’s a teenager. They fly the coop as a matter of nature. She’s done it before. I think she runs out of dope and has to go into Catskill to score.”
Dominick had noted it at their New York meeting. Morgan had a way of making you feel as if you and she had been friends for a long while and that you were just picking up a conversation interrupted in another place and time.
“Who’s here?” Dominick asked.
“Amanda’s here and five of the girls. It’s Saturday so they’re not at work. The road’s still blocked, which is why no one came before, but the deputy sheriff gave us a ride around the blockage. Say, you better get a ride in with him if you want to get someone out here to free your car. He was going to head back right away. I’ll go down and stop him while you grab what you need for a night. You can leave your other stuff here. It will be safe with me. You’re not my size.”
Chapter 8
Dominick found the impulse mystifying. To get up every workday and put on a uniform then go out and enforce. The job had to satisfy some yearning that Dominick lacked—the need to constantly prevail, perhaps, or to have your already poor opinion of your fellow human beings serially seconded by experience. But then he couldn’t understand gamblers either, and for a few that was an addiction. And then there was the attitude, that I’m-right-you’re-wrong assumption behind every interaction, an attitude backed up by the unilateral right to use force to prevail. As an enforcer you relied upon the threat of force, and woe to those who dared raise a hand against you. What was it they were called, back in slavery times? Overseers. Only these overseers were nominally our public servants not our private masters. And with the uniform came a certain arbitrariness in how that threat of force or confinement could be employed. Crooks could make great friends—hell, everybody broke the law—but Dominick had never met a cop he liked. Of course that was unfair, because he had always avoided their company. He could not think of another entire class of people he wanted less to do with.
And then there was often a bad haircut, as with Deputy Dave. If Dominick had thought twice about it, he would have followed his bag into the roomy back of the Sheriff Department RV, but instead he climbed into the front beside Deputy Dave, who had been waiting for him with the motor running. He had the air-con on and the windows up even though the morning air was cool and fresh. “Well?” he said.
“Yes?” Dominick asked. Was there something he was missing, like his license to ride?
“Your seatbelt, sir. We can’t proceed before you put your seatbelt on.”
“Oh, that. Sorry.” Dominick found his seatbelt and fumbled trying to get it long enough to click in. He never wore seatbelts. He found them stupid and confining. He had read somewhere that Russians never wore them, that they thought of them as some sort of American joke. What were airbags for? The title Human Control Officer—like Animal Control Officer only more species specific—occurred to him. He finally got the belt clicked. “There we go.” And they went on down the driveway and left onto the county road.
“So, you staying up here?” Deputy Dave had to ask. Enforcers get to interrogate for no reason.
“Is the road just out in the one place?” Dominick said. He had long ago learned to answer control officers’ questions with questions whenever possible.
“Yeah, just the one place. That your car with Virginia plates stuck up on the Sullivan place?”
“Have you seen it?”
“Yeah, stuck pretty good. You’re not good at driving in mud, are you?”
“Is there a towing service available locally?”
“For that job you may have to go over to Hudson. That where you’re from, Virginia?”
“And are you from around here?”
They came up to where the creek had decided to escape. There was a full crew working at getting the
stream back in its banks and the road open. Part of the pavement had been washed away, and any immediate repairs would be temporary. Deputy Dave stopped his vehicle to let the crew and their front loader get out of the way.
“I’d like to see some identification, sir.”
“And why would that be?”
“So that I can make a report on who I transported, sir.”
“Is that important?”
“It’s required, sir. Your ID, sir.”
“And what if I declined to comply with your request?”
“Then I’d have to take you in, sir, and let the authorities deal with it.”
“But you are the authorities, aren’t you?”
“That would be my superiors, sir.”
“But I am your superior. I am a citizen and you are my public servant. I have done nothing wrong. What gives you the right to require anything of me?”
“You a lawyer or something?” Deputy Dave was not pleased, but he was coming alive. A conflict might be brewing, a situation wherein he could allow himself to excel in what he most craved—the sanctioned imposition of his own will. His right hand even moved to the handle of the pistol on his belt.
“Here you are officer, my driver’s license,” Dominick said, taking the laminated card out of his card case. “Now may I see your ID please? Perhaps we could become pen pals?” The rest of the drive into Catskill went without conversation.
***
It was a weird weekend with no cars. As happy as everyone was to get back to their rooms, they felt trapped in the house. When you lived in the country, distances shrank so that the eight mile drive to the nearest store seemed like nothing, and the twenty miles round trip for a burger or pizza or anything more was tolerable. Country roads, no traffic, no cops. But now all their cars were parked along the side of the county road on the other side of the washout. The road crew had said they would let them know when the road was open and send in a vehicle to bring them out, but the road crew wouldn’t be working on Sunday, and Amanda thought that the men seemed to be enjoying the women’s predicament.
Added to that was the fact that there was very little food in the house, and no one had thought to bring any supplies. Morgan went from room to room commandeering private stashes, which didn’t come to much, mainly cookies and crackers and candy bars. There was a sack of rice in the pantry and some bags of dried beans. Morgan fixed big pots of rice and beans. There weren’t enough greens in the garden to make more than a single salad. “Diet time, bitches,” Morgan announced. On Sunday morning she tried to reach her deputy sheriff to see if she could arrange a shopping trip in his vehicle, but he was off duty.
Denise had been in text or phone contact with all of the girls and had somehow turned all this into Amanda and Morgan’s fault. The girls had no problem in showing their hard feelings, and now that they had a shared complaint and common enemies their earlier internal squabbles vanished. Amanda hid in her room with the TV turned up loud.
At Sunday supper Morgan launched a counterattack. “It’s called an act of God,” she yelled at them, “a fucking act of God. Amanda and I did not cause the skies to open up and the creek to flood. If you want to blame someone, blame God. And in case you haven’t noticed, God does not speak through words. God speaks through actions. So maybe God is telling you girls that it’s time to toughen up, and maybe lose some weight. I’m telling you to shut up.”
It was on Sunday, too, that Susan returned, much to Kathy’s relief. Kathy had been obsessing about Nemo and her sister. For some reason every unexplained occurrence and coincidence had to become part of a conspiracy theory. As if any of these poor creatures were worthy of any actual conspirator’s attention, Amanda thought. Kathy had let Amanda know that she hadn’t liked Nemo’s appearance or the way he just slipped away. The fact that he had left in a police car had heavy unknown implications. Kathy even led some of the other girls on a search of the grounds for Susan—presumably for her raped and discarded body. But Sunday after supper, around sunset, Susan showed up to water the kitchen garden. She said she hadn’t missed an evening’s soaking. She thought the tomato plants were doing well.
The news of Susan’s return passed quickly throughout the house, and everyone gathered on the back veranda to hear her story. Amanda sat in a porch chair that Nemo must have moved there because beside it was an end table from the hall with a tin can on it filled with ashes and cigar butts. Susan didn’t want to talk, but she was quizzed by her sister and the others. Where had she been? Why had she left? Her story came out haltingly, in pieces, as if she were making up each part of it as she was quizzed. She hadn’t felt right sleeping in the house with just a man there. But no, he hadn’t done anything weird, though he did drink and asked her a lot of questions. Oh, she had stayed out in the barn. At night she would sneak back to water the garden and get food from the kitchen, canned stuff, crackers and peanut butter. She just wanted to avoid him, leave him alone. He would sit on the kitchen veranda as if watching for her, so she hid out.
Morgan asked her about the car. Oh, that. It got stuck when she tried to leave to get more supplies. She had slept there because it was warm and secure, no harm. She was afraid the man would get mad at her for getting his car stuck, so she hadn’t wanted to talk with him. She had watched him leave in the sheriff’s car. Was he under arrest? What had he done? Who had eaten all the greens from the garden?
“Did he rape you? Molest you?” Kathy wanted to know. “Is that why you are hiding, acting this way?”
“Really, Kathy,” Amanda said. “She’s already said no to that.”
“Who is she trying to protect? Your brother? You?”
“I think she is trying to protect herself,” Morgan said—she had been standing in the kitchen door listening—“against charges of grand theft auto. Done that before, Susie?”
“There weren’t any eggs or bread or cheese or milk in the house. I was just going to the store. It was a nice car to drive.”
The ladies on the veranda drifted away to their rooms.
***
When he was younger, Dominick had occasionally fantasized about actually settling in some place he would stop at along the way. If it happened—it hadn’t yet—it would be accidental. Some combination of people and circumstances would just keep him from moving on, and after a while he would realize that a life had accumulated around him and that his need to keep moving had lessened. Those things called roots would grow, and he would wake up one morning in a house where he had paid for the washer and dryer, with some pressing home repair job demanding his attention. It was a fantasy never realized. He would cruise a new town, imagining he lived there, pausing in front of houses that appealed to him, wondering what that would be like. But he always moved on. He hadn’t met the combination that could stop him. And so it was with Catskill.
Deputy Dave just dropped Dominick and his bag at the curb on Main Street downtown. It was a fine midday Saturday in the middle of the tourist season. Downtown was busy. There was some sort of art thing happening, but Dominick lucked out. On Main Street he found a taxicab, a converted aging Cadillac, whose driver, an equally aging black man, looked like a longtime local. Dominick explained his situation to him. His name was Vernon. Vernon knew of a B & B that might have a room available, and he knew a guy over in Hudson who had a big tow-truck rig and could probably get his car out. Dominick took the room—there had been a cancellation—and before heading over to Hudson he and Vernon had lunch at a cafe downtown. They found Vernon’s buddy in Hudson, but he couldn’t get to Dominick’s car before Monday.
Dominick couldn’t tell him where the car was, which raised some suspicion on the tow truck guy’s part, and Dominick had to explain that he was just visiting and someone had borrowed his car and got stuck. He said Deputy Sheriff Dave could tell him how to find it.
“Would that be old man Hetzel’s kid?” the tow truck guy asked Vernon.
“The same,” Vernon said.
“The car ain’t stolen, is it
?” the tow truck guy asked Dominick.
“No, it’s mine. My registration is in the glove compartment.”
“It will need some cleaning out if it’s that buried. I’ll bring it back here and give you a call. Keys?”
“All I can say is that I hope they are in it.” Dominick gave him the phone number of the B & B. He had to borrow a phone book to look it up.
The next few days Dominick got to spend not being captivated by Catskill. Oh, it was a nice enough little town, but if he hadn’t been stranded there he wouldn’t have stayed for more than a meal. Late Monday afternoon the tow truck guy called. He had gotten the car out and brought it back to his garage. The keys had been in the ignition, but the battery was dead. It was packed with mud up to the floorboards. The exhaust pipes were clogged. It would take him a while to clean her up. Say, after lunch tomorrow she’d be ready. Dominick wondered what all this would cost him, but didn’t ask. Early Tuesday afternoon he got Vernon to give him a ride back over to Hudson and picked up the car, which had a new smell—part dirt, part chemical. The bill was big, but he paid it without questioning.
There was just one lane now where the road to the Van Houten place had washed out, but it was open. When he got to the house, there were no cars parked in the driveway. On the back seat he had found a blanket and pillow. He took them into the house. As he was about to call out hello, he heard a door slam in the back. Still carrying the blanket and pillow because he didn’t know where to put them, he went up the stairs to his old room. The door was open. Morgan was sitting at the desk, a laptop open in front of her. Her back was to him. “That you, Dominick? Welcome back.”
