He’d sometimes wished he’d been born earlier, so he could have been part of the student movements of the sixties, but back in the late seventies and eighties, when Reagan and me-ness was so prevalent, he’d felt he had been continuing the cause when he’d joined Plowshares, to speak out against nuclear power, and then the anti-apartheid movement in New York. Those were the days when he and Patsy were at their best, in sync in their beliefs about saving the environment and equality for people of color. They had worked together, indefatigable, inspired. Until the unthinkable—but inevitable—had happened.
He’d been at his peak, on top of the world, organizing, speaking, winning people over, high on life and the power to change things—and occasionally sleeping with other women, which, at the time, just seemed like part of the high. But when Patsy found him in bed with her best friend, there was no more arguing about Frank’s being out all night or negotiating about when and where he traveled and how many trips there would be. There was no more marriage.
He’d had years to revisit that scene, to learn to understand how he had taken her for granted, the wife, the baby, and how self-centered and entitled he’d been. Years to regret, to rebuke himself. But he’d also had years to hone his skills, to reshape his knack for organization and writing into a profession.
Frank finished the last bite of the tuna fish sandwich and looked at Mona. “I have some experience with nonprofits,” he said. Some of his customers had even called him the “wizard” of group work. “I can write grants, fundraise—”
But her face was red, and her fists clenched. Her attention was focused on someone behind him.
Frank turned around. That Duval guy, in the old-fashioned black cape that reminded him of Captain Hook, was approaching. “Hello!” He smiled with dazzling white teeth and cold blue eyes, greeting them as though they were old friends.
Mona shrank into herself, almost cringing. “Hi, Johnny,” she said in a small voice. “This is Frank.”
“We’ve met,” Johnny said, and laughed. “Such a farce.” He gestured toward the gym. “This tax-and-spend mentality. It’s almost as bad as Taxachusetts!”
Mona took Frank’s arm. “Well, we’ve gotta go.”
Frank did a double-take, surprised at the sudden intimacy, her arm in his. What was he supposed to do now? Pretend he was Mona’s boyfriend? Was he Mona’s boyfriend? He wouldn’t mind it…but maybe not so abruptly. He looked from Mona to Johnny, and quickly assessed: yes, Johnny must be her ex, and she wanted to avoid him. He could help her do that.
A flash of anger crossed Johnny’s face as the toothy smile turned into a snarl, then a smirk. He seemed to be taking Frank’s measure. Frank remembered the gun. Was this guy dangerous?
People were emerging from the gym now, and the hallway was filling with a chattering crowd of people. Frank could rise to the occasion. Straightening himself up to his full six foot two, he nodded to Johnny—who was shorter by about six inches—placed his other hand on Mona’s arm, and led her out of the building, under the open sky where the full moon hung like a spotlight on the world below.
“Dad!” Erica was suddenly beside him, the young reporter behind her. “This is Jake Perez. Jake, my dad, Frank MacFarland.” Jake, a dark, skinny kid with a winsome smile, put out his hand. They shook, and Frank saw that Erica’s face was glowing.
“Hi, Jake,” said Frank.
“This is Mona.” “Yeah, I know, the Bridge Lady,” Jake said.
Mona winced, still glancing back, at intervals, to the doorway.
“We’re going down to the diner in West Paris,” Erica said. “I’ll be back later.” She and Jake turned and walked toward the parking lot, launching into animated conversation.
As people milled about, lingering in small groups, prolonging heated discussions or mouthing halfhearted aphorisms, Frank and Mona stood silent. Opposite the moon, the constellations formed faint patterns in the sky. Orion with his bow, Canus the dog, bright Sirius. People fumed about the meeting and laughed, slammed car doors, and went home to stoke the fires and pull up the covers: small beings within this universe of stars and galaxies and endless space.
Johnny Duval was lurking at the school entrance, watching them.
Frank kept his hand on Mona’s arm, enjoying the warmth of her body and his role as protector. What could that guy do, anyway? “Would you like to go for a drink?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said with a wry smile, and they walked slowly through the parking lot to his car.
They got into the BMW, and he hoped she noticed it was much cleaner now. He inserted the key and turned on the engine. “Where to?”
“The Stone Tavern is the only place to have a drink around here.”
“The Stone Tavern, then.” They headed into town through the moonlit night. “So,” he said as he turned onto Main Street, “I assume Johnny is your ex-husband?”
She nodded.
“What’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed. “We’ve been divorced for eight years, but sometimes he just doesn’t get it. He thinks he can waltz in here and step into my life again.”
“When I talked to him at the bridge, he sounded like a libertarian. He said he’s into this Free State movement.”
“Johnny has his own interpretation of everything. He thinks most laws are unnecessary. So, when it suits him, he can ignore the fact that we’re divorced, and I have my own life that has nothing to do with him. He hasn’t bothered me for years, though, so I don’t know why he’s hanging around now.”
They pulled up to the Stone Tavern, a little bar attached to the Wild Mountain Hotel in the center of town. The street was quiet in the moonlight, like a ghost town, deserted and empty on a weeknight. Across from the hotel sat a Cumberland Farms convenience store, with its rutted pavement and gas pumps, and next to it, the Wild Café, its name painted across the plate-glass window in yellow script surrounded by pink and blue flowers. They turned the corner and parked along the green. The town green was bordered by the library, which was a small but imposing Greek Revival building; an unremarkable town hall in white clapboard; and five or six houses, Federal or early Victorian, all plain white and rooted to the earth as if they’d always been there, each with its individual faded charm.
They walked past the library in silence, crossed the street, and stepped up onto the porch of the hotel. Frank opened the door for Mona, and they went into the bar that was alive with people and noise, a sudden contrast to the empty town outside. At the bar, in the midst of the din, Cappy Gold, with his clipped haircut and trim and powerful build, nursed a beer. When he saw them, he lifted a finger in greeting.
“Hi, Cappy,” Mona called. Cappy nodded.
They eased themselves into the only unoccupied booth. “Looks like the town meeting moved here,” he said.
“It usually does.”
A hefty blonde girl dressed in a miniskirt and low-cut bustier came to take their order. When she leaned over to wipe off the table, Frank couldn’t help staring at the breasts that seemed ready to pop out of the black lacy top.
“Hi, April,” Mona said, “I’ll have a Bud on tap.”
“Sure, Mona,” April said in a cheery voice. She smiled at Frank, and her heavily-lined blue eyes didn’t seem to notice where his gaze was directed. “What would you like?”
Embarrassed, he looked up. “Do you have Otter Creek beer?”
“Naw. Bud. Heinie. Long Wind.”
“Long Wind, then,” he said, and April walked briskly away. Mona’s eyes were laughing.
Frank smiled sheepishly. In the booth behind him, loud voices shouted and argued.
“You on’y been here twenty years,” yelled the slurred voice of a young man, “so how do you know what people feel?”
From across the room, Cappy Gold spoke slowly and authoritatively. “I’ve seen enough of this town to know that there are decent folks who don’t want discrimination in Vermont.”
“Discrimination!?” shouted another boy, tall
and skinny with a tattooed forearm. He stood up and raised both arms. “What about us? What about the folks born and bred here, whose grandparents worked the land and made this town?”
“Yeah!” shouted two women’s voices from the same booth.
“Decent!” the skinny boy said, now standing in the middle of the room. “We want our kids to grow up decent, not with a bunch of dykes getting married and controlling things.”
“It’s an abomination,” a low voice in the booth behind Mona rumbled.
“Get that dyke out of office!” shouted the skinny boy, his fist raised.
“Take back Vermont!” a chorus of voices from around the room chanted.
April came back with their drinks and placed them on the table, then walked away. Frank looked at Mona, who was trembling in anger. “Take back Vermont?” he said. “Are they still using that phrase? I thought that movement died down a few years ago, after civil unions came in.”
“In Wild Mountain,” she said, “resentment doesn’t die down.” She took a sip of her beer.
The boy in the middle of the room started dancing on his feet, turning every which way like a fighter ready to take on any comer.
“I’d better do something before this escalates,” Frank said, and stood up. But Cappy Gold was already up and stepping toward the boy. “Take it easy, Robbie,” he said in a soothing voice, and with a steady gaze, tried to hold the boy’s attention. Cappy, though a full foot shorter than the boy, had an authoritative presence.
“Take it easy!?” the boy shouted and lunged toward Cappy. “You take it easy, Chief fucking Jew!”
“Hey, hey.” Frank moved to intervene, but Robbie shoved him aside, took a wild punch at Cappy, missed, and then punched again, hitting him in the eye. The other boy jumped in behind him. Cappy was down on the floor, and the bartender shouted and came around from behind the bar. An obese man sitting at the bar got up and moved closer. Finally, Frank and the bartender managed to restrain Robbie and his friend. The obese man was gasping for breath as he sat back on his barstool, and a ring of people formed around Cappy, a whimper coming from one of the women.
Frank bent over Cappy. “Hey, sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t quite fast enough.”
“Not your fault, buddy.” Cappy started to sit up.
Mona squatted on the floor next to Cappy, tears in her eyes. “You okay, Cappy?”
“Yeah, thanks, babe,” Cappy said. “Just a black eye.”
Babe? Frank looked at Mona, who gave him a sideways glance. Cappy got up slowly and smiled. “Everything’s okay, folks,” he announced. He looked around the room. “Robbie and his pals are gone, so just carry on.”
“But aren’t you going to call the police?” the whimpering woman pleaded.
“Nah, I’ll talk to Chief Spinelli tomorrow, and we’ll go see Robbie when he’s sobered up.” He sat back down on his barstool, and the other people followed his lead and went back to their seats.
Back at their table, Mona finished off her beer in one gulp, then looked up at Frank. “I’m ready to go.”
Out on the sidewalk again, they stopped, struck by the sudden silence. After the raucous atmosphere in the bar, the mountain air came fresh and cool, and the town was bathed in the enchanted glow of moonlight.
“Ah.” Frank lowered his voice. “The MacFarland moon.”
“What?”
“The MacFarland moon, lass,” he said in a Scottish accent and creepy tone. “’Tis the time to go a cattle-rustlin’.”
“Cattle-rustling?”
“Aye. The MacFarlands of Loch Lomond. At the full moon, they’d go out and about the countryside, raiding and rustling the other farmers’ cattle. They called the full moon MacFarland’s Lantern, a nice convenience put there by God to help them out. Throughout the Highlands, the full moon of April became known as MacFarland’s Moon.”
She stood still, an enigmatic smile on her placid face, and looked from the moon back to him. “Your ancestors, I take it?”
He nodded. “The illustrious cattle thieves.” Amazing, he thought, that a woman with gray hair could be so beautiful. Or maybe that he could appreciate this kind of beauty, seasoned and mature, but mysterious. “Aaooh!” he bayed. “I think I’m getting the urge right now. Maybe I’ll go snatch Robbie’s four-wheeler.”
Mona’s shoulders shook, and a giggle grew into a full-blown laugh.
Frank smiled. “Seriously, though,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Some of those folks seem pretty mad about gay marriage.”
“Robbie Fayerweather and his buddies, they’re such animals. They come into the store and carry on like that, shouting and bullying. And to imagine they feel superior to Roz and Heather, just because they’re gay.”
“Heather and Roz are a couple?”
“Yes, and they’re both my friends.”
It seemed only right to put his arm around her, and she sighed and leaned into him, her head on his shoulder. The inevitable next move was to embrace. Frank’s hands touched and explored Mona’s warm back beneath her fleece jacket, and his lips brushed her cheek before finding their way to hers. Her mouth was soft and yielding, and her body relaxed into his. She pulled away gently, and their eyes met, a comfortable, easy kind of meeting.
They walked to the car and drove to her house in silence, the roads deserted, the moonlight shining on the bare fields and hemlock woods. At her driveway, they got out of the car and walked to her door. They looked down at the broken bridge, the debris piled in the river that was still lined with chunks of ice. A roaring channel streamed over and through the debris and under the crumpled roof.
Mona turned to him and held out her arms. Frank opened his, and they came together again. Her soft hair gave off a spicy citrus smell, and he nuzzled his face down to kiss her cheek. She pulled away, smiled, and opened the door, where a little black dog appeared. The dog jumped up on Mona, and barked when it saw Frank. “It’s okay, Boris,” she said, bending down to pet and restrain him. Mona looked at Frank and hesitated. “Well…”
“Well?” Frank stifled his impulse to grab her and swoop her into the house as the dog started to snarl.
“I guess I’d better say good night.”
“Okay, then,” he said, fighting to constrain his resentment of the dog and maintain his buoyant persona. “Until next time.”
“Yeah.”
He stepped off the stoop, the hillside descending below him to the store. Its roof was gleaming, reflecting moonlight; the deserted road, the river with its fallen bridge, everything was sharply illuminated in the night. The sound of the river rushing through, with the dark mountain behind it, made it seem as if nothing else—buildings, bridges, people—mattered.
He started walking back to the car.
“Oh, and Frank,” she called.
He turned. “Thanks.”
12
MONA TURNED OFF WILD MOUNTAIN ROAD and onto River Road, riding high in her silver Ford pickup, a load of supplies from her Rutland distributor in the back. The sun was brilliant, and she sang along with U2, “All I Want is You,” on oldies radio.
There are times when the different elements of a person’s life come together, when past, present, and future converge into a single fierce moment and create a vortex, a force that sucks everything around it into a vibrating mass. Since last night, she’d been in the middle of that vortex. Suddenly, here were Johnny O., Cappy, and Frank, all in one day. Three men, three eras of her life. Frank, the potential relationship, the lightest element in the mix, but with a kind of power, the power of a window opening onto a garden of light, a new way to look at life. Johnny was the heaviness, the weight of a past that kept emerging, trying to drag her down. And in between, Cappy, steady, stable, the one who had helped her unbuckle the saddlebags and let that heavy burden slip away.
Eyes in a moon of blindness. She leaned into the words, the emotion—and as she sang the last line, she felt her cheeks dampening.
It
had been a long time ago, at least five years, but this had been their song, hers and Cappy’s. Seeing him at the bar last night had brought it all up again: paddling out to Windy Island, hiking over the rocks and into the secluded grove of birches and pines, eating the gourmet picnic he’d brought, and then lying down on the bed of pine needles. Ah, the lying down.
Stupid thing to do, when he’d been married and still was; but at the time, it had seemed inevitable, a tide of emotion that couldn’t be stemmed, and she’d gone with it, despite the consequences. Cappy had been the corrective to Johnny O., the remedial element, the cure. But after two years of secret meetings, two years filled with ecstasy and guilt, there had been four years without the ecstasy, but packed with longing, guilt, and shame. She’d thought it would never end, that longing. But somehow, it did end, and the feelings faded, and she got to the place where she could see him without the floodwaters rising—could work with him, even chat about nothing in the store or on the street.
There is something about music that doesn’t honor the passage of time, that bypasses all the healing and growth, the results of working through, the transformation into a new and mature self. The music just stays, in something deeper than the cells that die and are replaced. It remains in the body, or maybe in the air around it, or in the atmosphere, or the stratosphere…and when she heard the song again, she was back. Back in that place where sensation and emotion converged, a place she thought she’d left long ago.
All I Want is You.
When she’d first stepped into that canoe with Cappy, it was a bright April day like today. And last night, those feelings about Frank, like the first flowers of spring, little sprouts about to break through, fluttering and vibrating in her chest. Did she want Frank? Was she attracted to a man again? Yes and no. “No!” she shouted out the open window. She switched off the music.
The river ebbed and flowed in her vision, closer to the road, then further away—then receded even further, until the Perry farm appeared on her right. A big mess of a farm, with its perpetual mud of a farmyard and the hulks of all the tractors Charlie had ever owned, rusted and broken plows, hay rakes, seeders, balers, and a host of other machine parts strewn over several acres, the cows in the pasture behind with not much to chew on but rocks and mud. The front side of the barn, about three car lengths wide, was spray-painted in giant lettering: Take Back Vermont. Faded white block print over faded red barn paint.
Wild Mountain Page 8
