“What?” Frank looked at the coffee cup in his hand.
“Hmph.” Erica tossed her black curls, throwing off the scent of orange blossom as Edson cleared his throat and looked down at his feet.
Frank took another gulp of the lukewarm, watered-down brew, and dropped the cup into a massive trash can in the hall. Above it, a mural displayed brightly-colored stick figures skipping along the paper; the script below proclaimed Mrs. Willey’s 2nd Grade.
“Dad.” Erica tugged his sleeve and pointed across the room. “There’s that reporter I told you about.”
Frank squinted. “There are about two hundred people over there.”
“Oh, dang,” she said, and, with a little impatient jump, pushed her way across the back aisle. Dang? He’d never heard her use that word before.
She moved with quick grace and a smile toward a tall young man with dark skin and hair, who grinned and held out his hand to shake hers. Tossing her curls again, she shook it, then began talking and gesturing wildly with her hands. Frank watched her, his daughter, vivacious and spirited, a full-grown woman.
The room was noisy and humid, and smelled of teenage sweat and basketballs and coffee. Other people, he noticed, were drinking coffee in their seats. He found two seats near the back of the auditorium; and, still limping but damned if he was going to use that cane again, maneuvered in through the narrow row. At the front of the room, Leo Bailey, the postmaster, stood beside the podium talking to someone, and behind him at a long table sat Roz Allingworth, surrounded by mounds of paper. They were the only two people in the room he recognized. What did that mean? Frank had owned his cabin here for more than twenty-five years, and he’d always thought of Wild Mountain as his home base, his real home—but the people around him probably saw him as an outsider. The truth was, he had to admit, he hadn’t been involved in the community. This was the first time he’d come to a town meeting. Maybe it was time for him to get more involved. But did he want to get more involved? Definitely not on the school board, or on some other committee where he would die of boredom.
Frank took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the seat. The stiff canvas of the Carhartt didn’t give, and a small, white-haired woman behind him frowned at the intrusion into her space. He smiled apologetically and pushed it down, and it crinkled into an awkward heap. Erica appeared and sat down beside him, grinning like the cat who swallowed the mouse.
“Hey, Al!” shouted a woman behind Frank. “Isn’t she sick of you yet?” A man beside her broke into loud guffaws.
Then a rustling sound in the center aisle caused people to turn and look. Head held high, purple satin ribbons woven into her silver braid, Mona strode down the aisle on long legs sheathed in black jeans and cowboy boots. She stopped and leaned down to talk to someone, then laughed and swung up and back in a nimble bounce toward the front of the room. Mona was not exactly beautiful, but she had a dazzle, a kind of light that drew people’s attention, and as she passed, he could feel a change in the air, some rearrangement of the particles and molecules in the atmosphere, a quickening.
She hadn’t seen him. Well, she knew everyone in town—why would she look for Frank MacFarland? He strained to see the front of the room, but she had disappeared into the crowd.
Leo Bailey, solemn and officious—and, as far as Frank could see, the only person in the room in a tie and jacket—stroked his white goatee and stepped up to the podium. He banged his gavel. “Town of Wild Mountain,” he said in a rich bass voice that contrasted with his small stature. “Town meeting, called to order.” The shouting stopped, and the voices reluctantly subsided into muffled murmurs.
Erica leaned over and swept out her hand. “Sloppy old clothes and haircuts over the kitchen sink,” she whispered. “Anti-fashionista country.”
Frank scanned the room again. The gym was packed with gray-haired heads, men with scruffy beards, and women with no makeup or hair dye. Most people wore jeans and old shirts. There were a few of the Gore-Tex crowd, but even the spandex and sleek clothes were faded and stretched out. “Yeah,” he whispered back, “my kind of crowd.”
She gave him an affectionate punch. “All the old hippies and rednecks.”
Leo read the minutes of last year’s town meeting. Frank swung around in his seat and craned his neck, then stood up, trying to see the front of the room. Where was Mona?
Erica tugged on his sleeve, frowning, and he sat down.
Leo introduced the road commissioner, Harold Blank, a large blond man with a ponytail. Harold stepped up to the podium, cleared his throat, announced that his report and budget were in the packet, pointed out a line item amount for a new snowplow, and moved to sit down.
A hand shot up, and a woman stood. Leo pointed. “Louise Clement.”
A short, plump woman with gray curly hair and red-framed glasses, Louise Clement glared at Harold Blank. “I’d like to know why,” she said in a breathy voice and rapid run-on sentences, “when you have all these machines and crew, and you graded Pike Road every couple of weeks and Griffin Point at least six times, and, as everyone knows, it was a ’specially crazy winter, with freeze-melt, freeze-melt almost every month, you only did Rose Hollow twice?” Two people beside her nodded emphatically. “And we had to go to my mother-in-law’s in Brattleboro, and we got stuck in the mud already twice in March, and then we had to get out to take my husband to the hospital for his diabetes follow-up, and we were afraid to go out again, the road was so bad, and then, when my son came down for Easter, he saw someone else stuck there and had to get out his shovel—”
“Thank you, Mrs. Clement,” said Leo.
Amid a chorus of knitting needles clacking like a flock of chickens, Harold Blank, in a slow, steady voice, launched into just as long-winded an explanation of the different roads in the town and the number of times they had all been graded, the difficulty of getting his crew up in the middle of the night, and the pregnancy of one of the wives.
Erica was texting on her cell phone, occasionally looking up and smiling to herself, and Frank found himself staring out the high windows of the gym, thinking about the roast beef sandwiches he’d seen on the table in the hall, when a small man with thin, sandy hair and a handful of notes stood at the microphone in the aisle.
“When the taxes were raised in eighty-five…” he began in a monotone voice.
Nineteen eighty-five? How long would it be before he could take a break? And how could he maneuver through the crowd to get to Mona?
“Sixteen houses,” the man droned on, “appraised at ten thousand…closer to fifty thousand, so we voted to raise the taxes, though I myself did not vote…as I believe…originally stood for…
independence, as you recall…seceded from West Paris and Wild Mountain…with its own charter. Of course, I wasn’t in residence at that point in time, since…”
Someone in an enormous black cape was pushing his way into a seat a few rows in front of him, and Frank found his eyes drawn to the movement and the bright blue of the shirt when the cape came off. The shirt was topped by a black beard and a black ponytail.
Snyder rambled on for a good five minutes, and Frank discerned that there was really no thread at all in this speech except the man’s insistence on being heard.
Erica looked pointedly at Frank and mimed a big yawn.
“Time!” someone yelled.
Leo cleared his throat. “Okay, thank you, Mr. Snyder.”
“Although in ’fifty it was different,” Snyder went on, “because my dad was a kid then, and that was the year of the big snow, when—”
That dark beard in profile, the face that looked to be stuck in a smirk. There was something familiar about it. The head turned in his direction, and Frank saw that it was the guy he’d met at the bridge the other day. Somebody Duval, the name that had given Mona such a start. The guy seemed to sense that someone was looking at him, and smiled at Frank. A rather serene smile. And no sign of a gun. Frank nodded back. Why had Mona reacted so violently to that name? Was th
is her ex-husband? He did seem a little kooky, but he looked harmless, in spite of the gun.
“Thank you,” Leo said, and pointed to another raised hand at the front of the room. A young woman holding a baby stood up, but before she could speak, a man shouted, “Here!”
Standing behind Snyder at the microphone, a thin man with a gray beard so long it dipped below his waist was hunched over the mike. He pointed a finger in the air. “I’m next, Mister Moderator,” he shouted. He nudged Snyder, who reluctantly gathered his notes and stepped away.
“Charlie Perry,” Leo said.
Charlie Perry hitched up the straps of his worn denim overalls. “There’s something fishy here,” he said, holding up the annual report and waving it back and forth. “And it’s beginning to stink.” He looked around the room to a smattering of smirks and nods. “And the selectmen are going to have some answering to do.”
A visible stiffening of shoulders from the table in the front, where several people from the select board were sitting behind the podium, and a sudden quiet in the room as the knitting needles stopped.
“You!” Charlie Perry pointed a long finger at Harold Blank as he sat down at the head table. “YOU snuck in this item, just a little addendum here, of close to a MILLION dollars!” Oohs and aahs from the audience. “A million dollars ‘to rebuild the historic covered bridge.’ Now where the hell do you think the town of Wild Mountain is going to get a million dollars?” More heads nodded, and ten more hands shot up. “This ain’t a gold town here! We ain’t Stowe.” A burst of applause, more talking and shouting, and five or six people stood with their hands raised.
“Hear, hear!” The smirking Duval raised a fist.
“Order, order,” Leo said. “Please wait your turn. If you want to speak, go to one of the mikes.”
Frank craned his neck again to see Mona, but there were too many people between him and the front of the room. How was she taking this? The covered bridge was her baby.
“And let me clarify,” Leo added, “It wasn’t Harold Blank who added this item, but the select board, thanks to the hard work of the chairman, Roz Allingworth here.” He gestured toward Roz, who was sitting behind him at the table. She was looking even larger than usual in a turquoise silk jacket, and she smiled and waved.
“Fat dyke,” murmured a man behind Frank. Frank started and turned around, but there was only a row of bland, expressionless faces staring straight ahead.
“I still have the floor, Mr. Moderator,” Charlie Perry shouted. “And this is the point: you’ve got two different possibilities for a bridge there, and one of them will cost hundreds of thousands more. It’s a no-brainer. You build the cheaper bridge and save the taxpayers’ money.” To a few shouts and applause, he closed his report booklet and slammed it onto his thigh, then hobbled back to his seat, his hunched and feeble body a striking contrast to his powerful voice.
“We’ll hear the report from Chairman Allingworth,” Leo proclaimed.
Roz stood up and went around the table to the microphone.
“As Charlie pointed out, there are two options,” she said. “In one, we put up a simple steel-and-concrete bridge like the one in West Paris. Estimates say this would cost the town about two hundred thousand. The other option is to reconstruct the original covered bridge, keeping the historic character of the town, but it would cost closer to nine hundred thousand. But for that, there are state and federal funds available.”
A hand shot up, and Roz pointed to the man, a potbellied guy with a shaved head. “So how much would the town—”
“—raise taxes!” shouted a woman, to a chorus of yeahs from the audience.
“Most of that money,” said Roz, “will come from state grants and—”
“But what about the rest?” shouted Charlie Perry, standing up from his seat in the audience. “Even with state money, I figure it’s at least three hundred dollars a year more in taxes for every citizen of Wild Mountain! And where do you think the senior citizens are going to get that money?”
“That bridge is gone!” yelled a man from the back of the room. “Let it go!” Another chorus of voices murmured in agreement.
“There is no question about whether to put up a bridge,” said Leo. “It’s on one of the main corridors for east-west travel in this part of Vermont, and if it wasn’t there, people would have to travel an extra twenty miles to get across the river. The only question, as you will see in Article Twenty-five, is what kind of bridge.” He pointed to Heather, sitting in the front row with her hand politely raised. “Heather Brae.”
Heather, long hair flowing over her yellow shawl—the same one she’d had on at his house, Frank realized—stood and stepped up to the microphone. Calm and ethereal, and really, he thought, looking like an angel.
Someone behind Frank whistled, a long, low wolf-whistle, and a woman’s voice snarled, “She’s a dyke too, you asshole.” Frank jumped. Heather, the angel, a lesbian? He turned around, but behind him, the lineup remained impassive, pokerfaced.
Heather spoke softly and distinctly in a high, breathy voice. “The covered bridge should be restored.” She straightened up and pulled her shawl around her. “There’s a lot of history in that bridge. A lot of us grew up with it,” she said to a round of sighs from the knitters, “and it’s one of the things that makes Wild Mountain a historic Vermont town.” A unanimous letting-out of breath and a smattering of enthusiastic applause.
Charlie Perry shouted from his seat, “A million dollars!”
“Amen,” someone else cried.
Several people were standing along the side of the auditorium, among them the reporter, writing furiously in a notebook. A few feet from him, motionless in the midst of all the noise in the room, long gray hair neatly combed, stood that guy from up on Wild Mountain. Gus. Bundled in that same stained coat and overalls, even though the room now steamed with the heat of a hundred bodies, he seemed focused on some internal vision, still and silent, as if alone on the mountain. An original, a natural, Frank thought, someone who danced to his own rhythm. Again, Frank had the sense that he had known this guy before. Maybe he could catch him after the meeting and set a date to go talk to him up on the mountain. See how he did it, living off the grid.
A few rows in front of Frank, a young woman was also staring at Gus. With a buxom shape that would have been popular in the early 1900s and a cascade of curly, red-brown hair ornamented with an elaborate concoction of glittery, beaded chains, she watched Gus with a rapt expression. She was actually a teenager, Frank saw—that girl who worked at Mona’s deli counter.
Leo Bailey raised his hands and pushed them down in a quieting gesture. “Heather Brae has the floor,” he called.
“So, who’s going to pay for the bridge?” someone shouted.
“Taxes will go up a bit,” said Heather, “but remember, there are grants available, and I, for one, am willing to serve on a committee to apply for everything that’s out there.”
“Hear, hear!” a man’s voice shouted, amid new applause. At the side of the room, there was now an empty space where Gus had been standing, and the high, grilled windows of the gym rose above the congregation like a sentence, a judgment by a vanished prophet.
11
AN HOUR LATER, with the debate still raging, Mona came into view. Lightly stepping down the aisle, her body airy and nimble, she saw Frank, smiled and waved, then stopped, her eyes wide, the nimbus around her congealing into a brittle shell. She had noticed that Duval guy. She shuddered and shook herself, mobilizing some rugged determination to continue along the aisle. Frank stood, gestured to Erica that he would eat a sandwich, and squeezed past an obese couple to get out of the row. He followed Mona through the doors into the hallway.
She was standing at the food table, now depleted of all but two limp tuna fish sandwiches. He picked up a sandwich. “Who knew,” he said, smiling at her, “that rebuilding a bridge would cause World War Three?”
“You might be the only one who didn’t know.” Her voice
was bitter. “In this town, you have to fight to the death for every little change. One time, they wanted to raise taxes fifty cents to pay for some new dumpsters. They fought about it for six months before voting it down.”
“Amazing,” he said, trying to think of a way to prolong this conversation. Her wide, pale face, dotted with a few freckles; her pale blue eyes, maybe hazel; her silvery brown hair. She was so clear. Such a pure and clear-looking woman. He couldn’t stop smiling.
Yes, there had been many times when he’d felt this kind of urge, to be close, to combine his life with someone, to merge. Okay, many women, he admitted. But Mona was not some encounter in a place like London or Caracas, some isolated fire on the horizon of the world, however thrilling and intriguing those had been. She was an intrinsic part of this town, this environment, this mountain. She was here in this place, which was also his habitat—or, if not quite his yet, the place he wanted to be his.
“We Vermonters don’t like to part with our money,” she continued, prosaically dispelling his flight of fantasy. She picked up the last sandwich, then put it down again, looking back and forth between him and the doorway.
“But you, yourself, you’re for restoring the original bridge?”
“Totally.” She sighed. “But Charlie Perry and his crowd have a lot of power. When they fight, they usually win.” Her shoulders were slumped, and she looked so dejected.
He longed to take her in his arms, to tell her it would be okay, that he would rise to the challenge, fight the bad guys, win the battle, and bring his standard home to her. But she’d probably push him away and walk off disgusted. “Maybe I could serve on that committee with Heather,” he said.
Mona looked at him with a mixture of amusement and hope. “You could,” she said, “if you’re around.”
“I’ve decided to stay up here for a while,” he said, vowing to himself that, come what may, he would stay in Wild Mountain, rearrange his work schedule, do some of it online. Mona probably saw him as a fly-by-night, and he needed to dispel that notion.
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