by David Downie
“Seek and thou shalt find,” she said slowly, savoring the words. “Actually I found it in the style of Picasso—‘I don’t seek, I find,’ Pablo said.” Her eyes sparkled bright as she fiddled with her pearl necklace. “It was blowing around right here where we’re standing freezing to death in near darkness.” She flipped a switch and another set of floodlights came on. “Now, I did guess or deduce plenty, but did you really think I had Sherlock’s powers? In my defense,” she pleaded, “I honestly thought that document had fallen out of the car or luggage of one of my clients. I found it five days ago, when we’d had several guests up from the city. It was a busy week. Which one? None of the names on the letterhead or in the handwriting corresponded to anyone who had stayed. I decided to email everyone who had been here during the week before I found the letter. But I’ll be damned if I could locate half their emails, and not everyone answered me. Those who deigned to reply said no, they had not lost any sensitive correspondence with a fancy lawyer from the city.” She paused, took the empty plastic bottle from James and waved it. “Come on inside out of this cold breeze,” she commanded, not waiting for him to answer.
Inside the kitchen, Beverley poured two glasses of Chablis and set the leftover cobbler and tiramisu on the table. “Now, you did not have any sweets at dinner, you were so busy with Taz and his confounded smartphones, but here it is, you’ll need brain food while you listen. And don’t forget to take the shopping with you, I spent $39.78, the receipt is in the bag, the salmon is Alaskan, smoked.”
James counted out forty dollars, put the cash on the table with thanks, and started to say he was too tired for dessert or talk, and the daylight was just about gone. Seeing Beverley’s eyebrows rising high on her pink forehead, he gave up halfway through the sentence. Abashed and curious, he sipped the Chablis and dug into the tiramisu and could not help declaring it outstanding, the best he had ever tasted, creamy and rich, yet light and fresh tasting.
“You bet it is,” Beverley said, beaming. “I’d give you the recipe if I thought you could do more than crack an egg and fry some bacon, but I can tell you’re the appreciative non-cooking type, like Number Three, the pancake mix maestro.” She dispatched a dishful of the dessert, sipped her wine, and began drumming the tabletop with her boneless fingers. “What would you have done in my place?” she asked rhetorically. “Go to the Tom Cat or Harvey? Call lost and found—there isn’t one. Would you have just thrown the letter in the trash? I don’t think so. So, I researched the names on Google and boy did I find some interesting stuff.” She savored the uncomfortable expression on James’s face. “Then I got to thinking, and I put two and two together and got five, so I asked young Taz what he’d do if he were me—I did not show him the documents, don’t worry, and I didn’t give him any names. Taz said, ‘Do an image search with the names, maybe you’ll recognize someone.’ That was smart. The problem was, I didn’t recognize these people from Adam and Eve. They looked very corporate, very liberal-loser type, millionaires from yesterday, if you see what I mean, before the election and the Downburst. Ancien régime if you want to sound sophisticated. One of them was a tall, lean fellow on leave of absence from some court or legal commission or other and, reading between the lines, it sounded permanent. Where was he? That got me thinking again, so I went to the bluff a couple times and stood near the fence and watched you for a while through that knothole. Strange fellow, I said to myself, strange habits, and why is he hanging around here for so long? Is he a bum or a crackpot? Not with a rig like that—and brand-new boots!
“Once I was sure it was you, I did you the honor of not searching too deeply for more information. See, you can fool that facial recognition software with your beard and hair, but you can’t fool Tater. I was about to ask you if the letter was yours, and give it back, when the tree came down and that darned Tom Cat showed up and spoiled things. Then you ran off after lunch before I could broach the subject.” She paused to gauge his reaction. “I guess you’re sore with me, but you ought not to be.”
“I’m not sore,” he said, “I’m baffled. It’s my body that’s sore.”
“Baffled is all right,” she said, smiling at his quip. “I don’t know why you’re here, or what you’re up to, and why you’re hiding in all that hair, but I’m guessing you have pretty good reason, judging by your behavior and background, as reported by about a thousand sources, two or three of them non-Russian and probably reliable. I would have hired you right off at the Waste Disposal District, what with your background and gumption. In my book it’s a mark of honor to be drummed out of the corps these days. You must have been on to something big when they set you up and knocked you down.”
James shook his head. “That was another life,” he protested, “I’m an early retiree and bereaved widower minding my own business.”
“And you dearly wish I’d do the same,” she said sympathetically. “Believe me, I have no intention of persecuting you or ratting on you. I’m not sure what impressed me more, the varsity football and ROTC stuff from way back, or your career and all the public service. I’ll bet the other guys at Carverville High hated you, the valedictorian and scholarship winner and tall, dark, and handsome to boot. It’s hard to imagine a boy from this Podunk town doing so well in the city.” She saw he was preparing to rise from the table, so she hurried to shoehorn in a few more words. “Sit down a minute. Were you aware that one of your junior-year classmates scanned the yearbook for 1974 and put it on Facebook? When you magnify the images, you can even read the comments, many of them off-color. Whoever heard of a chainsaw race? I sure hadn’t. You won that, too. I repeat what I just said. I’ll bet you were detested by every other guy in high school. It’s startling what you find on the Internet, not to say terrifying.”
James cradled his head. “The Internet is like that map Taz made,” he said, lifting his face and stiffly getting to his feet. “It’s incomplete. It’s full of gray areas and inaccurate material, like a staircase or a driveway that’s shown as a paved road.”
“I get the hint,” Beverley said, rising. “To be continued. You’d better get your rig and move it before the yokels start World War Three or the Tom Cat decides he likes your conversational skills.” She paused, feeling his discomfort at being outed. “What you do is go south on the highway about a quarter mile, past that billboard, and at the first gravel driveway on the right, turn in. I’ll get you the keys to the gates. There’s another gate a hundred yards down that private road. Lock them after you, please, otherwise the deer and the hogs and the teenagers get in. I hope the gates are not rusted stiff. Your RV will have to flatten the weeds and seedlings unless you want to do more gardening as you go, in the dark. I will meet you in the lower lot with a flashlight and the extension cord. I rest my case, Your Honor, and forgive me for sounding facetious, I realize you must be hiding something painful, beyond your wife’s passing, and I am making light of it for your own benefit. Play cards with me, James, metaphorically I mean, and you will feel better. You were raised a Catholic according to Google. Confess and be absolved. We are both fallen and unlikely to rise, but we can talk and garden and eat ourselves to health and happiness.” Looking more like a crocodile than a pink avocado, Beverley smiled and added, “Tomorrow I’m serving veal blanquette.”
EIGHT
I had not noticed the dilapidated billboard when driving north nearly two weeks ago. The poster on it was clearly several years old. It had peeled halfway off and flapped in the wind, catching my high beams. I could barely read the letters aking carverv reat gain. Another billboard fifty feet or so farther south, also on the inland side of the highway, was in better condition. It provided a succinct version of the Ten Commandments in antique-looking script, as if Moses had used Old English text when taking dictation. I drove by too fast to read the name of the local church that had sponsored it, but believe it is that white Carpenter’s Gothic temple off Pine Street, with the tall wooden belfry and the tinny synthesized bells that peal out of speakers every quarter ho
ur, around the clock.
As Beverley had mentioned, there was a driveway to the right before the bend and a reasonably recent eight-foot cyclone fence and gate closed with a chain and a case-hardened padlock. She had given me two sets of keys, not knowing which was which, and it was only on the second try with the larger set that the lock opened. I tried to remember which key went with which lock for the next time I would need them, in case I was in a hurry, then realized I was fussing or being manic, the way Amy said I had become toward the end, when she was dying. So, I stopped memorizing details and drove the RV through, locking the gate behind, the rustling leaves and grunts of animals making the hair rise on my arms. All the talk of feral hogs must be getting to me. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never been afraid of animals—or men for that matter.
The terrain seemed familiar yet changed. It was the same feeling I had when I first saw the property with Beverley. The trees were taller and thicker. The slope seemed steeper and the road shorter, but how good is the memory of a teenager when retrieved forty-odd years later and how much had Mr. Egmont and his successors, including “Number Three,” done to alter the resort? I am curious to know what happened to Egmont, and who took over after him, if anyone, before Beverley and her husband arrived. Egmont was a good man, conservative but fair, an admirer of Eisenhower. I wonder how he would have reacted to the state of emergency and subsequent events. I suspect Beverley is of a similar mind-set.
Luckily, as a precaution I had taken the pruning shears and the handsaw with me. The road is overgrown, the gravel a notional substance. I had to stop after twenty or thirty feet, get out and cut the eucalyptus saplings to the ground. Some were as thick as my wrist. They are astonishing, growing and spreading like wildfire despite drought, wind, and hostile saline soil. It pained me to cut them. I comforted myself in thinking they would grow back when I was gone. The trees would survive everything, even a tsunami which, if it happens, will certainly inundate and destroy the resort.
The scent of the resinous eucalyptus rose from the shears and the saw blade. I held up the blade and sniffed it. My hearing is not what it used to be, but my sense of smell has become more acute. The untrimmed hair in my nostrils is no impediment. I agree with Beverley that it is highly unaesthetic and should be removed. However, it probably does help confound the facial recognition software. We shall see.
With overhanging branches scraping the sides and top of the RV, I was able to drive another fifty yards before I had to stop and repeat the same kind of radical pruning operation on a large coyote bush. These are even tougher than blue gum. I have always been fond of their peculiar butterscotch scent. At times it is almost as heady as that of Escallonia resinosa, not the small pink escallonia flowers but the bright, glossy green leaves of the plant. My mother loved both. That struck me as strange when I was young, since she favored the kind of Victorian-era garden she had grown up with near Chicago, a garden full of begonias, daisies, dahlias, and roses. Her instinct should have been to destroy the barbarous native plants in her new garden. To her and Mr. Egmont I ascribe my early passion for plants. That my father was indifferent or hostile to them may also be part of the equation. I am loath to indulge in pop psychology.
To my father’s mind, the excessive fondness for ornamental plants was a sign of effeminacy. Plants were for eating, burning, and turning into furniture or crates, just as animals, especially fish, were for food, leather, or fertilizer. That is why we had no pets. They were verboten. That was the word he used. Verboten. Hunt a deer or a hog, he would say, trap a raccoon before it eats your salmon, that’s the most humane thing you can do. It always struck me as paradoxical, doubly so because he was a gentle, kind man in his own gruff way, and well educated in the sciences, a biologist.
My primary concern was to get through the second gate before the night became impenetrably dark. Dusk comes before sunset here because of the thickness of the woods on the property—the trees are being suffocated by invasive honeysuckle. The headlights created a tunnel of light, but around it the blackness erased the filigree of foliage. Thinking about this unintended mental lyricism as I crept along in the RV, I remembered the way Taz had said “foilage” then repeated “foliage” as if he were chewing the word. It is hard to imagine he had never heard it said before, especially since he lives in a rural setting in a house with a garden, and his education, though limited, can’t be that bad, or can it? Perhaps he was thinking of someone else saying it differently? I have known people to mispronounce foliage, saying “foilage” instead, but I can’t remember who. It is strange how some words take on a life of their own in our minds, often because we associate them with a person or situation, an episode in life that marks us for some reason, usually unknown, hidden in the foliage and filigree.
Luckily the second lock opened easily despite the rust, and I was able to drive as far as several piles of lumber, crab pots, and rusty old animal traps, all of them half covered by shredded tarps and tangled in that Japanese creeper. The eucalyptus seedlings and a few saplings I encountered as I drove forward gave way, bending and scraping the underside of the RV. The scratching sound made me queasy, evoking images of caged animals trying to escape, probably raccoons, as I heard so many times at the salmon hatchery, when my father let me go with him early in the morning before school.
The complete designation of the hatchery was NSHRC, the Native Salmon Habitat Rehabilitation Center. Since both the Wildlife & Fish Department and the hatchery were defunded and abolished several years ago because of pressure from the federal government, I don’t mind exercising my memory, unearthing that impossible dead acronym, an indigestible mouthful.
I suppose I might as well admit right here that my secret dream, my “dear diary” confession, is that I would love more than almost anything to revive that hatchery and fill the rivers and ocean with salmon again. Maybe I will. Maybe that’s why I came back, and I just don’t know it yet. Maybe it’s because I had no children and have militated since adolescence for birth control and family planning because there are too many of us, no matter how you spin it. Yes, I was brought up a Catholic, but my mother was a WASP and a religious skeptic, and she inculcated doubt and nature worship in me. Silent Spring was her Bible. Maybe the explanation is simpler. I’d just like to give back, not only to self-obsessed, anthropocentric humankind, but to the world, the Earth, in the larger sense.
I wonder how many trapped raccoons father shot for the good of the fish and the community, meaning the human consumers of the fish? The sight gave me nightmares. Shooting into a wire mesh cage at close range seemed especially cruel and made an ungodly mess his subordinates had to clean up. That did not help buoy his popularity, which was waterlogged from the day we arrived—we, the educated city folk with attitude.
His attitude extended to his family. More than once he forced me to stand there with him and take the raccoon or hog executions like a man. The war must have done that to him. Had he fired at close range on Germans and Japanese? I asked myself. In what ways had he been tortured when he was a POW? But that kind of information was verboten. He never talked about the war, and everything I learned about his experiences in Europe and Japan, and the torture that made him suffer for the rest of his life, came from my mother.
Mostly because of the massacring of raccoons and other wildlife, I took no pleasure in target practice and I refused whenever I could to go hunting with him, especially when it came time for the cull. The wild pigs were the hardest of all to trap and kill—they have human eyes and whimper and cry like children. But he was a stubborn cuss, to borrow from Beverley, and dragged me along too many times to count. He did not appreciate rebelliousness in his son, saying I had better know how to handle myself and a firearm, because man was a violent species and sooner or later another war would break out, maybe this time on American soil. Giving me Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here when I was fifteen, he made me read and summarize it to him. There was no Wikipedia back then, and no edition of crib notes on that book. Sadly,
not only could it happen here. It did happen here. Except for my time in ROTC, I have not picked up a firearm since leaving high school in Carverville. I hope to the god I no longer believe in that I never pick one up again, and never have to meet another man who has been tortured.
At the same time as I was remembering the dead raccoons and deer and feral hogs, and rolling along at two or three miles an hour in the RV on the access road, it struck me as courageous of Beverley to run the Eden Resort on her own at her age, when she clearly has limited energy and little practical knowledge of the business. The spot is as isolated and potentially full of dangers as ever. She is armed with her late husband’s pistols and rifles, as my father was, as other residents of Carverville surely are today, judging from the signs on houses and in yards everywhere. We Shoot to Kill. That ought to be the town’s motto. Does she live in fear as they do? Does she shoot the raccoons in the garden, as her third husband did, with alacrity? It seems unlikely. I detect little anger and no fear in her.
My impression is that, after a life of three marriages, two resulting in children, now estranged, and having held jobs in many cities, Beverley has come to the end of the line. The Eden is her Last Roundup Trailer Park. I borrow the name from the establishment the sheriff’s deputy recommended, south of town, which I spotted on the way in and made a note of because it seemed so insensitive a name. The place did not exist in the 1970s, to the best of my recollection. As the product of a peripatetic military family, with no real home, and having kicked around the country for the last three decades, I certainly empathize with Beverley. She has no last name. I have no home and no family.
Beverley apparently enjoys life in Carverville enough to stay, even if the cottages collapse and the garden goes to pot or slides into the ocean. I surmise that her pension as a civil servant, and her social security benefits, survived the economic collapse and the blanket privatizations, at least in part. From what she says of her third husband, the plumbing engineer, he prospered and presumably left her enough cash and securities to keep her afloat now, even if the vacancy rate at the motel is high. Beverley interests me on more than one level. She is blessed with the gift of the gab wedded to a sharp intellect. But I fear she may be suffering from a pathological need to talk, some form of logorrhea. In coming days, I am sure to find out more from her about her biography.
