Nelson Demille

by Spencerville(Lit)

  Street and sidewalk traffic was light, he noticed, and half the stores were vacant. The ones that remained open were discount clothing places, church thrift shops, video arcades, and other low-end enterprises. He recalled that Annie, in a few of her letters, mentioned that she managed the County Hospital Thrift Store located downtown, but he didn't see the shop.

  The three big buildings in town were also closed—the movie house, the old hotel, and Carter's, the local department store. Missing, also, were the two hardware stores, the half dozen or so grocery stores, the three sweetshops with soda fountains, and Bob's Sporting Goods, where Keith had spent half his time and most of his money.

  A few of the old places remained—Grove's Pharmacy, Miller's Restaurant, and two taverns called John's Place and the historic Post-house. The courthouse crowd no doubt kept these places afloat.

  Downtown Spencerville was surely not as Keith remembered it as a boy. It had been the center of his world, and without romanticizing it, it seemed to him that it had been the center of life and commerce in Spencer County, bursting with 1950s prosperity and baby-boomer families. Certainly, the movie theater, the sweetshops, and the sports store made it a good place for kids to hang out.

  Even then, however, the social and economic conditions that were to change Main Street, USA, were at work. But he didn't know that then, and, to him, downtown Spencerville was the best and greatest place in the world, teeming with friends and things to do. He thought to himself, The America that sent us to war no longer exists to welcome us home.

  You didn't have to be born in a small town, Keith thought, to have a soft spot in your heart for America's small towns. It was, and to some extent it remained, the ideal, if only in an abstract and sentimental way. But beyond nostalgia, the small town dominated much of the history of the American experience; in thousands of Spencervilles across the nation, surrounded by endless farms, American ideas and culture formed, took hold, nourished, and nourished a nation. But now, he thought, the roots were dying, and no one noticed because the tree still looked so stately.

  He approached the center of town and saw one building that had not changed: Across from Courthouse Square stood the impressive police headquarters, and, outside, among the parked police cars, a. group of police officers stood, talking to a man who Keith instinctively knew was Police Chief Baxter. He also noticed now, a few buildings away from police headquarters, the County Hospital Thrift Store.

  Keith drove around the massive courthouse, which was set on a few acres of public park. The administration of justice, civil and criminal, and the proliferation of bureaucratic agencies were still a growth business at the close of the American Century, even in Spencer County. The courthouse was once thought of as a boondoggle and a giant folly, but the visionaries who built it must have anticipated the kind of society that was to inherit the nation.

  Aside from the courts, the building housed the prosecutor's office, the Welfare Department, a public law library, the county surveyor, the state agricultural office, the Board of Elections, and a dozen other acronymic government agencies; the Ministry of Everything, its sixteen-story clock tower rising in Orwellian fashion above the decaying city around it.

  There were a number of people in the park surrounding the courthouse, kids on bikes, women with baby carriages and strollers, old people on benches, government workers on break, and the unemployed. For a moment, Keith could imagine that it was the summer of 1963 again, the summer he'd met Annie Prentis, and that the past three decades had not happened, or better yet, had happened differently.

  He came full circle around the courthouse, turned back onto Main Street, and continued toward its western end, where grand old houses stood. This was once a prime residential street, but it was run-down now, the big places given over to boardinghouses, informal day-care centers, a few low-rent offices, and the occasional craft shop that hopefully paid the mortgage and taxes.

  Main Street widened into four lanes at the sign that said, City Limits, and became the highway that led to the Indiana border. But it was no longer rural, Keith saw, and had become a commercial strip of chain supermarkets, convenience stores, discount stores, and gas stations. Huge plastic signs stood atop tall stanchions as far as the eye could see: Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Roy Rogers, Domino's Pizza, Friendly's, and other fine and fast-dining spots, one after the other, all the way out to Indiana, for all he knew, maybe all the way to California—the real Main Street, USA.

  At any rate, this was what had killed downtown, or perhaps downtown had killed itself because of a lack of vision, as well as a profound break with, and misunderstanding of, the past. In a perfect little hometown such as the ones he'd seen in New England, the past and the present were one, and the future was built carefully on the existing foundations of time.

  But Keith supposed that if he'd stayed here and seen the changes evolve, rather than experiencing them in five-year gulps, he'd be less nostalgic and not as startled by the physical transformation.

  There being not a single grocery store left in downtown Spencerville, Keith had to forgo that experience, and he pulled into the lot of a big supermarket.

  He took a cart and went inside. The aisles were wide, the place was air-conditioned and clean, and the goods were mostly the same as in Washington. Despite his longing for Mr. Erhart's chaotic grocery store, the modern supermarket was truly America's finest contribution to Western civilization.

  Ironically, Keith's urban shopping street in Georgetown was more like rural Spencerville than Spencerville. There, Keith, on his rare shopping trips, went from one small specialty store to another. The supermarket concept was alien to him but instantly understandable. He pushed his cart up and down the aisles, took what he needed, met the glances of housewives and old-timers, smiled, said Excuse me, and didn't compare prices.

  He was surprised at the number of people he didn't know and recalled a time when he'd wave to half the people downtown. However, there was a familiar face now and then, and some people seemed to recognize him but probably couldn't place his face or recall his name. He saw at least ten women of his own age that he'd once known and saw a man he'd once played football with. But dropping out of the sky as he had, he wasn't prepared to stop and identify himself.

  He didn't see any of his former best friends and, if he had, he'd have been a little embarrassed because he hadn't kept in touch with any of them and hadn't attended a single class reunion. Aside from his family, his only contact with Spencerville had been Annie.

  He saw her turning a corner and pushed his cart faster, then abandoned it and caught up with her. But it wasn't her, and in fact didn't look at all like her, and he realized he was having a tiny midafternoon hallucination.

  He went back to his shopping cart, and, without finishing his shopping, he checked out and took his bags to his car.

  A Spencerville police car with two officers inside was blocking him. He loaded his groceries and got into his Saab and started it up, but they didn't move. He got out of his car and went to the driver. Excuse me, I'm getting out.

  The cop stared at him a long time, then turned and said to his partner, I thought all the migrant workers left by now. They both laughed.

  This was one of those moments, Keith thought, when the average American citizen, God bless him, would tell the police to fuck off. But Keith was not an average American, and he'd lived in enough police states to recognize that what was happening here was a deliberate provocation. In Somalia or Haiti, or a dozen other places he'd been, the next thing to happen would be the death of a stupid citizen. In the old Soviet empire, they rarely shot you on the street, but they arrested you, which was where this incident was headed unless Keith backed off. He said, Whenever you're ready.

  He got back into his car, put it in reverse so that the backup lights were on, and waited. After about five minutes, a good number of shoppers had passed by and noticed, and a few of them had mentioned to the two cops that they were blocking the gentlema
n. In fact, the scene was attracting attention, and the cops decided it was time to move off.

  Keith backed out and pulled onto the highway. He could have taken rural roads all the way home, but instead headed back into town, in case the gestapo had more on their minds. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror the whole way.

  This was not a random incident of fascistic behavior toward a man with out-of-state license plates and a funny car. And Spencerville was not some southern backwater town where the cops sometimes got nasty with strangers. This was a nice, civilized, and friendly midwest-ern town where strangers were usually treated with some courtesy. Therefore, this was planned, and you didn't have to be a former intelligence officer to figure out who planned it.

  So at least one of the questions in Keith's mind was answered: Police Chief Baxter knew he was in Spencerville. But did Mrs. Baxter know?

  He'd thought about Cliff Baxter's reaction upon hearing that his wife's former lover was back in town. Big cities were full of ex-lovers, and it was usually no problem. Even here in Spencerville, there were undoubtedly many married men and women who'd done it with other people, pre-marriage, and still lived in town. The problem in this case was Cliff Baxter, who, if Keith guessed correctly, probably lacked a certain sophistication and savoir faire.

  Annie had never written a word against him in any of her letters, not on the lines or between the lines. But it was more what wasn't said, coupled with what Keith remembered about Cliff Baxter and what he'd heard over the years from his family.

  Keith had never solicited anything about Cliff Baxter, but his mother—God bless her—always dropped a word or two about the Baxters. These were not overly subtle remarks, but more in the category of, I just don't know what that woman sees in him. Or more to the point, I saw Annie Baxter on the street the other day, and she asked about you. She still looks like a young girl.

  His mother had always liked Annie and wanted her stupid son to marry the girl. In his mother's day, a courtship was prelude to marriage, and a reticent beau could actually get sued for breach of promise if he ruined a girl's reputation by taking her on picnics unchaperoned, and then not doing the decent thing and marrying her. Keith smiled. How the world had changed.

  His father, a man of few words, had nevertheless spoken badly of the current police chief, but he'd confined his remarks to areas of public concern. Neither sex, love, marriage, nor the name Annie ever came out of his mouth. But basically he felt as his wife did—the kid blew it.

  But they could not comprehend the world of the late 1960s, the stresses and social dislocations felt more by the young than by the old. Truly, the country had gone mad, and somewhere during that madness, Keith and Annie had lost their way, then lost each other.

  In the last five years since his parents had moved away, he'd had no other news of Spencerville, of Chief Baxter, or of how pretty Annie looked in a flowery sundress, walking through the courthouse park.

  And that was just as well, because his mother, though she meant well, had caused him a lot of pain.

  Keith drove slowly through town, then turned south on Chestnut Street, crossed the tracks, and continued through the poor part of town, past the warehouses and industrial park, and out into the open country.

  He looked in his rearview mirror again but did not see a police car.

  He had no idea what Chief of Police Baxter's game plan was, but it really didn't matter, as long as both of them stayed within the law. Keith didn't mind petty harassment and, in fact, thrived on it. In the old Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc, harassment was the highest form of compliment; it meant you were doing your job, and they took the time to express their displeasure.

  Cliff Baxter, however, could have shown a little more cleverness if he'd lain low for a while.

  But Keith suspected that Baxter was not patient or subtle. He was no doubt cunning and dangerous, but, like the police in a police state, he was too used to getting instant gratification.

  Keith tried to put himself in Baxter's place. On the one hand, the man wanted to run Keith Landry out of town very quickly. But the cunning side of him wanted to provoke an incident that would lead to anything from arrest to a bullet.

  In the final analysis, Keith understood, there wasn't room in this town for Keith Landry and Cliff Baxter, and if Keith stayed, someone was probably going to be hurt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next week passed uneventfully, and Keith used the time to work around the farmyard and the house. He cleared the bush and weeds from the kitchen garden, turned over the ground, and threw straw in the garden to keep the weeds down and the topsoil from blowing away. He harvested a few grapes from the overgrown arbor and cut back the vines.

  Keith gathered deadfall from around the trees, sawed and split it into firewood, and stacked the wood near the back door. He spent two days mending fences and began the process of cleaning out the toolshed and barn. He was in good shape, but there was something uniquely exhausting about farm work, and he remembered days as a boy when he barely had the energy to meet his friends after dinner. His father had done this for fifty years, and the old man deserved to sit on his patio in Florida and stare at his orange tree. He didn't fault his brother for not wanting to continue the hundred-and-fifty-year tradition of backbreaking labor for very little money, and certainly he didn't fault himself or his sister. Yet, it would have been nice if an Uncle Ned type had continued on. At least his father had not sold the land and had kept the farmhouse in the family. Most farmers these days sold out, lock, stock, and barrel, and if they had any regrets, you never heard about it. No one he knew ever returned from Florida, or wherever they went.

  In the toolshed, he saw the old anvil sitting on the workbench. Stamped into the anvil was the word Erfurt, and a date, 1817. He recalled that this was the anvil that his great-great-grandfather had brought with him from Germany, had loaded onto a sailing ship, then probably a series of riverboats, and finally a horse-drawn wagon until it came to rest here in the New World. Two hundred pounds of steel, dragged halfway around the globe to a new frontier inhabited by hostile Indians and strange flora and fauna. Surely his ancestors must have had second thoughts about leaving their homes and families, their civilized, settled environment, for a lonely and unforgiving land. But they stayed and built a civilization. Now, however, what Indians and swamp diseases couldn't do, civilization itself had done, and this farm, and others, were abandoned.

  As he worked, he was aware that chopping firewood for the winter was a commitment of sorts, though he could give away the firewood, come to his senses, and leave. But for now, he felt good taking care of his parents' farm, his ancestors' bequeathal. His muscles ached in a pleasant way; he was fit, tan, and too tired to indulge himself in urban-type anxieties, or to think about sex. Well, he thought about it but tried not to.

  He'd gotten the phone connected and called his parents, brother, and sister to tell them he was home. In Washington, not only was his number unlisted, but the phone company had no record of his name. Here in Spencerville, he'd decided to put his name and number in the book, but he hadn't gotten any calls so far, which was fine.

  His mail was forwarded from Washington, but there wasn't anything important, except a few final bills which he could pay now that he'd opened a checking account at the old Farmers and Merchants Bank in town. UPS had delivered his odds and ends, and the boxes sat in the cellar, unopened.

  It was interesting, he thought, how fast a complicated life could wind down. No more home fax or telex, no car phone, no office, no secretary, no airplane tickets on his desk, no pile of pink message slips, no monthly status meetings, no briefings to deliver at the White House, no communiqués to read, and nothing to decipher except life.

  In fact, though he'd finally informed the National Security Council of his whereabouts, he hadn't heard a word from them officially, and hadn't even heard from his Washington friends and colleagues. This reinforced his opinion that his former life was all nonsense anyway, and that the
game was for the players only, not the former stars.

  As he worked, he reflected on his years with the Defense Department and then the National Security Council, and it occurred to him that Spencerville, as well as the rest of the country, was filled with monuments to the men and women of the armed forces who served and who gave their lives, and there was the monument in Arlington to the unknown soldier who represented all the unidentified dead, and there were parades and special days set aside for the armed forces. But for the dead, disabled, and discharged veterans of the secret war, there were only private memorials in the lobbies or gardens of a few nonpublic buildings. Keith thought it was time to erect a public monument in the Mall, a tribute to the Cold Warriors who served, who got burned-out, whose marriages went to hell, who got shafted in bureaucratic shuffling, and who died, physically, mentally, and sometimes spiritually. The exact nature of this monument escaped him, but sometimes he pictured a huge hole in the middle of the Mall, sort of a vortex, with a perpetual fog rising from the bottom, and if there was any inscription at all, it should read: Dedicated to the Cold Warriors, 1945-1989? Thanks.

  But this war ended, he thought, not with a bang, but a whimper, and the transition from war to peace was mostly quiet and unremarked. There was no cohesiveness among the Cold Warriors, no sense of victory, no pomp and ceremony as divisions were deactivated, ships decommissioned, bomber squadrons put out into the desert. There was just a fading away, a piece of paper, a pension check in the mail. In fact, Keith thought, no one in Washington, nor anywhere, even said thank you.

  But he was not bitter, and, in fact, he was very happy to see these events transpire in his lifetime. He thought, however, the government and the people should have made more of it, but he understood his own country, and understood the innate tendency of the American people to treat war and history as something that usually happened somewhere else to someone else, and is, at best, a nuisance. Back to normalcy.