by Jonathan Dee
“I mean because they were gonna outlaw you,” Barrett said. “You heard about that, right?”
Hank’s face hardened, as if he were tired of the conversation already. “Still a free country,” he said.
“For now.” Barrett wanted to pull out a cigarette and light up, but he knew that wasn’t allowed, absurd as such a law was in a place that sold cigarettes. “So how long you been at this location? Long as I can remember. I used to come here when I was in high school.”
The old guy seemed like a kindred spirit; but now he was looking out his steamed-up window, and faintly grinning. “Maybe instead of gabbing,” he said, “you might want to get out there.”
Barrett looked through the glass pane in the door and saw what the old man was talking about: that motherfucking trooper, dressed up like he was Nanook of the North in giant boots and a hat with earflaps, was standing in front of Barrett’s car with his foot on the fender, writing in his little ticket book. Barrett ran outside, the bell attached to the shop door jangling behind him.
“I’m leaving, okay, I’m leaving right now,” he said, opening his driver’s-side door.
“Okay,” Constable said.
“Okay. So why are you still writing?”
Constable didn’t answer; he finished the ticket, tore it out, and stuck it under Barrett’s wiper blade.
“What the fuck?” Barrett said. “What’s your problem?”
“No problem. You’re parked illegally. You have thirty days to pay the fine or contest it. If you do neither, the fine will double.”
“But you saw I was leaving!”
“Not relevant,” Constable said, “and anyway, you haven’t left yet, have you?”
His boots crunched as he walked over the frozen crust left by the snowplow, onto the sidewalk to continue his rounds. He looked ridiculous, his job was ridiculous, his power was ridiculous. Barrett was a citizen, a taxpayer. He was Constable’s boss. How many times had he been fired for mouthing off to his boss the way Constable had just done? He turned on his wipers, to try to send the ticket flying into the snow, but it curled around the blade and stuck there. Finally he switched them off again, lowered his window, and pulled the piece of paper inside. A hundred and ten fucking dollars.
Barrett would never pay it, that was obvious, but he couldn’t put the incident behind him either. That smug little Nazi. He thought he was some kind of authority—he thought he was the law—but he was just a henchman, and what kind of “law” involved stationary cars anyway? It was so arbitrary, so petty, and it brought out pettiness in him as well, for instance the hour he spent on the internet trying to find Constable’s home address so he could go park his car right outside it. Or on his lawn. He tried to get Stevie interested in the subject, but she just said, “News flash, cops are assholes,” and that was it. Nobody wanted to do anything about anything.
Then he had an idea. Two could play at the surveillance game. He had a little handheld video camera, a pretty good one, that he’d bought secondhand a few years ago because he had an idea about a particular kind of sex tape, but then the idea wasn’t something Stevie was down with at all. The thing had a USB port, so he could figure out how to download a video onto his computer; how to take the next step and make a website to play that video was something somebody he knew was bound to be able to help him with.
—
He drove into town and nursed a cup of coffee at the Undermountain until he saw Constable passing by on the sidewalk. He paid, left, caught up with him, and turned the camera on, from a distance of about twenty feet. He didn’t make any attempt to hide what he was doing, but Constable still didn’t notice him for quite a while—five minutes or more—until he was writing his first ticket.
“What the hell are you doing?” Constable said.
Barrett said nothing, kept shooting.
Constable, red-faced in the cold, placed the ticket under the offending car’s wiper blade, maybe a bit more deliberately than usual, and continued his rounds. He came upon a truck parked rather poorly, Barrett had to admit, a good six feet away from the curb. Constable looked at it for a long while, angling his back toward the camera. Finally he took his book out again and began writing.
“What are you ticketing him for?” Barrett called.
Constable ignored him.
“What law is he breaking, Officer?”
Constable signed the ticket and pinned it to the truck’s windshield.
“You made Howland safe from that guy!” Barrett said. “Thank you, Officer!”
This was going to be great, Barrett thought. He hadn’t considered adding his own commentary to the footage, but once the idea came to him he understood how much this would improve the whole project. You could see from the cop’s face that Barrett was already getting to him. Constable walked all the way to the foot of Main Street and waited for the light before crossing over and working his way back up the other side. Even from behind, even with the parka on, you could see he was like a coiled spring. Barrett followed him, trying to think of witty things to say. He would come to town and do this every day. He would make this little penny-ante storm trooper’s life miserable. Constable stopped and began writing a ticket for a car that looked legally parked. It sat beneath a sign that read NO PARKING TU-TH 10 AM–6 PM. Barrett looked at his watch. “Hey,” he said to Constable. “Hey, what are you doing?”
Constable did not pause or look up.
“It’s 9:58,” Barrett said.
Constable put his foot on the car’s fender and rested his ticket book on his knee as he wrote.
“It’s not ten yet!” Barrett said. He started to close the gap between himself and the cop. “Here, look, the time’s on my viewfinder,” he said, extending the camera, ruining the shot.
“It’s ten,” Constable said.
“It’s not!”
“It is because I say it is,” Constable said, “and now you are under arrest for interfering with a police officer in the performance—”
“The fuck I am!” Barrett said. He lifted the camera to his eye again.
“Stop what you’re doing right now,” Constable said. “That is an order.”
“What am I doing?” Barrett yelled. “Tell me, what am I supposedly doing?”
“This is your last warning,” Constable said. He no longer seemed agitated; you could see him going through a kind of script or checklist in his mind.
“I will show the world what you’re up to,” Barrett said. “I will show everyone who you are. You can’t operate in secret anymore. You’re not above the law. You are a public servant—”
Constable reached out for Barrett’s wrist, as he’d been trained to do in order to turn him around and subdue him, but with the heavy coat on he was a little too slow, and Barrett skipped backwards, into the road. A car honked and swerved around him. The camera itself now lay in the street.
There were a few spectators on the sidewalk, outside the shuttered Creative Kidz. Barrett’s eyes slowly filled with intent. He had his audience, and they had seen it all. “Sic semper tyrannis!” he screamed, thinking maybe the camera was still operating, and with his hands in the air like he was flying he leaped onto Constable just as the trooper was unholstering his sidearm.
No one was sorry to see that year end, and then before they knew it another year had ended as well. Howland settled into a kind of dormancy. People grew accustomed to austerity, on every level; they internalized it. Without really collaborating on it, together they reached a cold equilibrium, and for a long while, little changed, except within some families, but that news was kept where it belonged, where no one else might mistake it for their business.
In a spasm of guilt, Haley’s father had given her outright the ancient Escort, telling himself that he only would have gotten a couple hundred for it anyway, and that Haley deserved a sixteenth-birthday present of some magnitude. She’d had a rough year. The serious look on her face, on the mornings she was with him, when she got behind the wheel to drive to sch
ool, was of way more value in his own life right now, he figured, than a few hundred bucks would have been, or even a thousand.
She pulled into the lot in front of Howland Regional High—the same lot where her dad had taught her to drive, in the summer when it was empty, with nothing but a few light stanchions to worry about hitting—and found a parking spot that wasn’t too intimidatingly tight. Her mom did not think she should be driving solo at all. One more little battleground for her parents. Thus the Escort stayed at Dad’s, even during the weeks when Haley herself did not. But she didn’t miss it when she didn’t have it. When she was with her mother, she rode to school in the passenger seat, and that was okay with her too. They were always obsessed with her routine, with not disrupting her routine, but what they didn’t get was that you could have two routines and that was just fine.
Life wasn’t all that unrecognizable, really, at least after the initial upset. She’d always had separate relationships with her parents. She’d always dealt with them differently. Now that difference was more structured. The more time went by—the more each of them relaxed into being fully themselves, without the other around to inhibit or goad them—the more Haley wondered how two such antagonistic people ever found each other in the first place. She even asked them that, and they didn’t seem to have much of an answer, at least not that they wanted to talk about. What she missed most was the old house, specifically her room, which was the only room she’d ever known. But that was still such a sore subject that she tried not to upset either parent by admitting that was the change in her life that felt most like loss.
Much more so than the change in schools. Something about that switch had proved tonic, enlightening even, although not immediately. The absences she felt most achingly that first September away from Mullins were absences she didn’t feel at all by October. Her close friendships there turned out to be too flimsy to survive the test of not seeing each other every day. She still kept in touch with some of them via social media, but that was more like good intentions than actual friendship. That seemed right, though, in a way. These were the years of impermanence, the years when everything that defined you was still in flux, even arbitrary to some degree, and it felt correct to be a little detached from all of it, from her classmates, her family, her hometown: a little above it.
Howland Regional helped in that regard. The classes were bigger—too big for anybody to make any real connection with you, least of all the teachers—and the work was so easy you rarely had to engage with it all that fully. She’d made a few new friends, though some of them backed off a bit when Haley made it clear she wasn’t going to drive them everywhere. She bounced up the worn steps and made it just in time for her 8:50 class, which was AP U.S. History.
The teacher, whose name was Mr. McMenamin—Mac to his students when he wasn’t in earshot, Mr. Mac when he was—did forty-five minutes on the civil rights movement and then, ominously, wrapped up about five minutes before the bell. He was famous for his ability to end his lessons on some kind of pithy zinger just at the moment the bell rang, almost as if he controlled it himself. Haley liked him; he could really talk, he enjoyed talking, and even when you thought you were tuning him out you’d be surprised later by some random fact you’d retained. The rumor was that he was fired from his previous job in Vermont for having sex with a senior, but the rumor was probably just a by-product of the fact that he was considered good-looking, if only because he was the one non-obese male teacher in the school. Over the course of her junior year he’d grown a beard, which in Haley’s opinion did not strengthen his case.
“End-of-year stuff,” Mr. Mac announced. “I know it seems far off but it’s not. This year, in addition to the final—”
Groans of protest from the students.
“Yes, in addition to it,” he said, “there will also be a research paper. Twelve to fifteen pages, due the last day of exam period.”
“That is so unfair,” said a girl near the front of the room.
“Hey,” Mr. Mac said, “this is AP. You all are the crème de la crème.” He smiled teasingly. “Anyway, this is a new requirement, district-wide, so there’s no use complaining to me about it. Not to mention that I happen to think it’s a great idea. But look, I had a thought that might possibly make it a little more fun for you.”
He glanced at the clock, a clock the students couldn’t see without turning around in their seats, and perched on the front edge of his desk. “We’ve been trying to reinhabit America’s past all year,” he said. “It’s not the ancient world or anything, but still, I know that even something as recent as the civil rights movement is pretty abstract to you. I can see it in your written work. I can see it in your eyes sometimes. But you know, there’s a hell of a lot of history right here under our feet, in the Berkshires. Howland was a town before America was even a country. So your assignment is to write a research paper about a piece of local history. Doesn’t have to be Howland, can be anywhere in southwestern Mass, within reason. There were Revolutionary War battles fought near here, for goodness sakes. Not that you have to go that far back. There’s more recent history here too.”
“Police-involved shootings,” one boy said, smirking.
“Nope. Meaning no, you may not choose that topic, and no, that isn’t funny. Massachusetts, people! The cradle of the American experiment! We’ve talked about it and talked about it. Now take a look at it. Pick a topic and get it approved by me by the fifteenth. That’s two weeks, for those of you who aren’t in AP math.”
The bell rang. Mr. Mac smiled.
She didn’t usually discuss her assignments, or anything about school, with her parents, but in this case she thought they might be of some help. Her dad suggested the mills on the Housatonic, some of which were still standing, though not operating, except as stores or galleries. But they’d done a unit on the mills in class, months ago, back when they were talking about the labor movement, and she felt they’d exhausted the subject then. Her dad didn’t seem to take it amiss when she rejected his first idea, but then he didn’t offer a second one. If there was one major difference in him, post-divorce, post-bankruptcy, it was that his feelings seemed more easily hurt. All winter the radiator in her bedroom at his place kept waking her up at night, but she never mentioned it to him, because any complaint about the place he was renting—especially if it was justified—made him go quiet.
Haley’s mother was more helpful, though not right away; first Haley had to listen to the usual complaints about the school. “Your Mr. Mcwhatshisface makes it sound like this is his idea,” she said, “but this all comes straight from the school board. Some new thing called the Patriotic Curriculum Initiative or some such bullshit. The board’s stacked with wackos now. They lose their minds if you get caught teaching anything about America that doesn’t make it sound like paradise on earth. A couple of years ago, the old history teacher had his kids debate the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and long story short, that’s why your Mr. Mac has that job now.”
But then she said something useful. “It seems like a no-brainer to me. Do Caldwell House. It’s got a ton of history, it’s well documented, and obviously you have a rare access to it. Done. Done and dusted, as my mother used to say.”
It wasn’t a bad idea—in part (though she wouldn’t have said so to her mother) because she’d always felt there was something a little shady about that place. Not its current operation, but the story of it. There was a little reek of the sentimental, the official—same difference—that always made her roll her eyes. Her mom, over the years, had bought into it pretty much completely. She’d gotten a title promotion and a raise, and that was their lifeline, no longer a backup or a contingency but the whole thing. She had to believe in the Caldwell narrative, like it was Tinker Bell. If people started questioning it, the whole structure it gave life to might vanish.
The library and its superior internet connection were gone, so in her room at her mom’s she Googled Winston Caldwell and started down that rabbi
t hole. It was so much worse than she’d imagined that for a while all she could do was find it funny. Caldwell started a coke business—coke was the raw material for the manufacture of steel: she remembered that from earlier in the year, mostly because the idiot boys in class kept snickering over it—with two friends from high school. Within a year he had casually screwed both those friends out of their founding stake. He sold the company to a larger company controlled by Andrew Carnegie and used the money to bribe Pennsylvania government officials into granting him contracts to construct and operate various trolley lines, a business about which he knew nothing. He knew how to save money, though, how to cut corners. He was threatened with arrest after a fatal derailment caused by faulty track materials; fortunately, the trolley was empty at the time, so only two track workers were killed.
Katarina Herzfeld was the daughter of a man who owned a company with which Caldwell wanted to merge. She was sickly and had trouble attracting suitors; Caldwell’s asking her father for her hand sealed the deal. His new father-in-law’s company, which built railway cars, had union problems. Caldwell promised to make them go away, and that he did. He sent spies to live in company barracks. He fired anyone who declined to sign a loyalty oath. He was on record as recommending, to a meeting of his fellow industrialists, a common pledge not to hire laborers of the “darker races,” like Italians or certain of the Irish. And when his best efforts were still unable to prevent a strike against the railway car company in 1902, he called in the Pinkertons, who shot and killed four strikers, claiming self-defense. The strike was broken and Caldwell’s reputation rose, for decades, with occasional antitrust actions to fight off, but otherwise no bumps in the road.
Even the story of how he first came to Howland turned out to be bullshit. He bought the land itself without even seeing it, on the recommendation of a fellow member of the Century Club in New York City who was pressed for cash. Caldwell was looking for a place his wife would like well enough to stay there for long periods without him, so that he could lead the kind of after-hours life in the city that he felt a man of his stature was entitled to lead. But when he got her up there, she declared the house and property both too small; she coveted the adjoining land, which belonged to a longtime Howland resident who owned a carriage business. Caldwell invited the First Selectman out to dinner, and gave him a cash gift for the town to spend as the First Selectman saw fit, and requested that he bring to bear what influence he could over the negotiation (though it was no such thing) for the purchase of the carriage maker’s land. The carriage maker was unmoved, and declined. Two months later, his stables burned to the ground. Caldwell House was built on their foundation.
