Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  Chaining himself to the columns of the portico had been difficult and dangerous. The front portico of the hotel, the columns, and the roof were a honeycomb of decay. He had checked out other parts of the building, but all were rotted. A hard shot anywhere, and it could all come down. He’d fed the heavy links of the chain around the two Doric columns of the rickety portico—it sagging like the bad side of his mother’s face—in through one smashed window beside the rotting door and out through the other smashed window, and then around himself and the rocker a couple of times. The padlock arm slithered into its socket and snapped to with a steely, conclusive clrokk!

  He sat there, dressed in his suit and wearing the tie Cray had given him, elephants grazing on a silk veldt. Orville had spent the dark hours rocking, chained to what the sign said was the GENERALWORTH HOTEL . As if the dear old hotel had become a Columbian biotech company. Rocking in the dark, waiting. Given Selma’s fashion show triumphs at the hotel when she was still beautiful, he half-expected to see her floating or flying. From time to time he scanned the sky, half-hoping. But no.

  “Okay, Doc,” Packy was saying now, “youse made your point, okay, so now unlock yourself and go home.”

  “Not until my demands are met.”

  “Demands, man?” cried Liebowski.

  “Damnit, I just knew you was gonna say that,” said Packy.

  “Dee-fuckin’-mands?”

  “What do you think this is,” Packy said, “one of them flower-power protests against ’Nam? They’re over, Orvy. The war’s over, okay?”

  “Maybe not. This is an emergency. Get the mayor.”

  Packy looked at Jeffrey, Jeffrey at Packy. Their level of discomfort rose.

  “Look, Doc,” Packy said, “we only get the mayor in an emergency.”

  “I know that,” Orville said, “and that’s why I said to get the mayor. This is one.”

  They thought about this, whispered about this. The bystanders were more numerous now, a real crowd. Someone shouted out, “Save the Worth, yeah!” and another shouted, “Go for it, Doc!”

  “Okay, Orvy,” Packy said. “We decided.”

  “Good. I like decisiveness.”

  “We decided we’ll go ahead and like, you know, wreck around you, okay?”

  “What?” Orville cried, terrified suddenly of what these dopes could do. A shock anywhere could bring the portico down on him. The end. Dead. Here? Like this?

  “Jeffrey says he can like just wreck around you a little, right, Jeffrey?”

  “Yeah, man, I can just wreck a little, yeah. Like you say to your patients, you won’t feel a thing.” He paused. “Man.”

  “So just relax, Doc,” Packy said. “We’ll start over there where the ballroom used to be, remember?”

  “No!” he said, thinking breakage! “No, you can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll kill me. This front part will come down on me.”

  “No, it won’t,” said Liebowski. “You don’t get me. We’re just gonna wreck a little, man, a little little, the side part, over there.”

  “The ballroom,” said Packy.

  “But it’s all connected.”

  “Which is why I’ll be extra-careful. No problem. I’ll wreck over there.”

  “Wreck?” Orville asked. “You’re not even in the wrecking part, Liebowski, are you? You told me in the office that you were in the upholstery division.”

  “I can see where you might question my competence, man,” Liebowski said. “But I assure you, you pick up a lot here and there. The problem is, the real wrecker’s in Vegas this week.”

  “No problem, Doc,” Packy said, “you just sit there and relax.”

  “Yeah, keep meditatin’, Doc,” Jeffrey said, laughing. “Think like nice peaceful thoughts!” He roared with laughter, shaking his head in disbelief as he went back to the wrecking crane and got into the cab and powered it up. His helpers put down the steel ramps to unload it from the flatbed. As the ramps slid out and clanked down on the pavement, the crane sat there idling, an unruly woolly mammoth, well-rested and ready, warming up.

  “You touch this hotel,” Orville called out, “my lawyer’ll sue you for all you’re worth!”

  At the word “lawyer,” everybody froze. Packy went over to Jeffrey in the cab of the crane. He shouted up at him, and Jeffrey shouted down. Orville couldn’t hear over the muttering of the crane’s diesel engine. Then Packy got out his walkie-talkie and clicked it on and put it to his ear and talked a little and then he screamed in pain and pulled it back away from his ear and clicked it off and sat down on the edge of the flatbed and lit a cigarette. The diesel wrecking crane, perched on the start of the downslope of the two ramps, kept idling—ka ba doommmm, ka ba doommmm, ka ba doommmm. To Orville the sound was a comfort, a throaty, oiled steel mantra on internal combustion.

  Nothing happened, except the crowd grew bigger. They were mostly passive, but a New Yorker put a flower in front of Orville. Then other people went to get flowers and put them in front of Orville, too.

  By the time the diminutive mayor’s big pink Cadillac El Dorado rolled up, stopped, rocked a little on its shocks, and disgorged Americo, the crowd, by Columbian standards, was huge. Some were chanting “Worth Saving!” and some were chanting “Worth Wrecking!” Americo was up for reelection, and it was the first time anybody had seen his new campaign slogan, on the Caddy’s bumper stickers:

  PUT A LITTLE ITALIAN IN YOUR LIFE

  A. SCOMPARZA FOR MAYOR

  Americo headed straight for Orville, looking as if he would kill him and eat him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  But then a bright light went on, and Orville and Americo turned toward it. A TV crew had just arrived and was about to capture on videotape whatever happened next to broadcast on the morning news and the noon news and the evening news and the late news and, if it were salacious enough, even on the national networks and in print—Time, Newsweek, and People. Maybe even into the two opinion leaders, The National Enquirer and The New Yorker.

  Caught in the spotlight, Americo shifted direction. He gathered himself and walked deliberately toward the portico where Orville and his cousin Packy were. To the TV camera Americo said, “As mayor of this fine town, I am outraged. Outraged!”

  He turned to face Orville and Packy, maintaining his good angle to the camera.

  “Yes, I am outraged by this!”

  His eyes went from Packy to Orville, Orville to Packy. It wasn’t clear which “this” of the two of them he meant.

  “Outraged at you, Officer Scomparza, to think that a public employee would aid and abet the demolition of this sacred old historical landmark hotel. Outraged that someone—some disgruntled citizen of our town—would even think to knock down this fine hotel. And though I disagree with your action, Dr. Rose, I fought in a war to protect your right to act like an—like a patriot. Free speech. I’m ashamed, Officer Scomparza and Mr. Liebowski, ashamed that you’d even of thought of knockin’ off this fine old historical hotel.” He considered, and, seeming to realize he had been too wordy for the TV camera, moved closer to it and said, “Freedom is due process for all Columbians!”

  The TV light went out. The crew started packing up.

  Americo turned to Packy and Jeffrey and shouted, “Why are you doin’ this?”

  “We was just followin’ orders, Mr. Mayor,” said Packy.

  “And who gave you your orders, Officer?”

  A pause. “Am I under oath?”

  “Not unless you wanna be.”

  “Nope. Okay.” He considered, brow furrowed in thought. “I forget who.”

  Americo shook his head and spat on the pavement. He looked up into the cab of the crane and shouted. “Liebowski?”

  “Yer ’oner?”

  “Come here. On the double!”

  Jeffre
y did so. He and the mayor and Packy conferred. The shouts of the crowd rose, but the officials ignored them until the shouts turned to screams as the wrecking crane without Liebowski in it began to move down the two steel ramps toward the street and the vehicles parked there, including the TV crew’s minivan and the mayor’s pink Cadillac.

  People scattered. It looked for a second as if the wobbly crane would topple over off the ramps toward the Worth and demolish it, and Orville thought he would die, but then it tilted back the other way toward a meticulously restored eighteenth-century whaling house with a widow’s walk, the bottom floor of which was now the high-end store called Misery Antiques.

  In a fit of bravery, Liebowski leapt onto the flatbed, mounted the crane like a cowboy on a runaway horse, and managed to keep it on the ramps until, going too fast, it hit the street with a terrible mmmronkch! which shook the old hotel ominously and set the columns creaking over Orville’s head, the dust raining down so thickly he feared the whole thing would collapse and that in fact he would end up dying there and then.

  It didn’t, but the impact with Washington popped a manhole cover and busted a pipe, which sent a geyser of suspiciously brown water up, and then down, spreading messily across and down the street. All cleared out except Packy, Americo, and Orville.

  The TV cameras gone, Americo said, “Unreal. So what the fuck you want, Orvy?”

  “That you keep the agreement we made at the hearing, where you don’t knock the hotel down for six months—and that you add another six months to it because of this.”

  “Done.”

  “And that you yourself sign a note to guarantee that personally.”

  “Personally? You want me to assume that kind of liability?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Kinda hard to do, chained up like this. I’m staying. Staying right here.” He looked around happily. “It’s nice here.”

  “Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll guarantee it politically, okay?”

  “What does that mean?” Orville asked.

  “Executive privilege. We’ll get the town lawyer to draft it, okay? Len Date?”

  “Isn’t he still suspended? Awaiting trial for what he did with that little—”

  “No, no, the little boy’s parents are settlin’ with ’im. For a bundle he’ll beat it.”

  “Looks bad for Columbia, though, if he stays on, doesn’t it?”

  “What doesn’t look bad for this place these days! I can’t argue with you there, but he’s blackmailin’ us to the tune that he’ll sue for some kind of bullshit federal workplace discrimination bullshit if we fire him. He’s one sick fuck, ya get me?”

  “Okay, as long as I get my own lawyer in on it too. Happy Thorne.”

  “Whoa!” Americo waved his hand up and down in front of his belly, palm up, in a gesture of admiration. “Them WASP lawyers out in Spook Rock are balls-out!”

  “That’s why I got him.”

  “Okay. So c’mon. Unlock yourself now, okay?”

  “Don’t have a key.”

  “He doesn’t have a key?” Americo asked Packy. “Did you know this all along?”

  “We didn’t get that far.”

  “He doesn’t have a fuckin’ key. So what—we’re supposed to find a blowtorch?”

  “But I know where you can get a key,” Orville said.

  “Where’s at?”

  “First we sign the document. Then we get the key.”

  “What the hell, Orvy—you’ve known me all your life—don’t you trust me?”

  “Americo, I’ve known you all my life—of course I don’t.”

  “Aw c’mon, don’t be a fuckin’ hard-ass. Think of the town, your town, my town, our town—this is an embarrassment, okay?”

  “Then you better hurry up. I’m happy. You can be happy too. I’ll wait.”

  It took a while to draw up the document and sign it, but it got done.

  “So where’s the key, Doc?” Packy asked.

  “In my office, on a table below the twelve-point buck, under the big bottle of Starbusol.”

  As he sat and rocked and waited, the saying that came to mind was “Beware the weak, the strong have no defense against them.”

  That afternoon, The Crier ran the photo on the front page, it taking up much of the space above the fold. Amy rushed the paper into Orville’s office. He stared at the massive crane facing the frail old hotel, at Officer Packy Scomparza and Mr. Jeffrey Liebowski, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, facing the smiling Dr. Orville Rose, in a suit and tie, in a rocker, in chains. One link of the spanking new steel chain was caught catching a ray of dawn sunlight and reflecting it back into the imperfect lens in a big dazzling X of light which, Orville mused, a postmodernist antiquer would falsify to the level of art. The caption read:

  TOWN DOCTOR SAVES HISTORIC HOTEL

  RISKS LIFE, LIMB, JAIL FOR CAUSE

  All that day as he doctored Columbians as usual, fielding their more intense interest now that he was a celebrity and answering their arguments pro and con about saving the Worth, and as he worried whether he could find someone to buy the practice because he didn’t want Bill to return to find it dead, a strange word kept floating through his head: ahimsa.

  It was Gandhi’s word, meaning “nonviolence.” He had heard it from time to time in disparate corners of the world when he worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. He had a vague recollection that the word didn’t really mean what everyone thought it meant, didn’t really mean “nonviolence.” But all day long he couldn’t recall what it did mean. He’d walk along and his feet would tap the pavement ahimsa, ahimsa. He’d eat lunch at the Hendrick Hudson Diner and chew his French fries ahimsa, ahimsa.

  Finally, late in the day, it popped into his mind.

  Last July at Lago d’Orta, perhaps even to the day, Celestina Polo had told him that the Sanscrit ahimsa is wrongly translated into English as “nonviolence.”

  “The true meaning, caro, is ‘creative love.’”

  · 28 ·

  Howdy, Doc,

  Cold and wet. Ugly place. Makes you not believe in God. Close as you can get to Antarctica. Babs wants to go there to see Emporer Penguins. Seen one penguin seen ’em all but that’s married life. Both bowels blocked bad. Worse than the Army. When you leave, lock office door and throw away key.

  Yr frnd, Bill

  The front side of the postcard showed a desolate mountain range, all ridges and hollows and no trees, overlooking a more desolate rocky beach. In the foreground was a single, piercing, scarlet and gold wildflower. Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America. So far south it’s always cold.

  Orville read the postcard while sitting in Bill’s chair. He realized that the ridges and hollows in the seat of the chair that had fit Bill’s big butt beautifully now fit his own fairly well. His very own Tierra del Fuego.

  It was late afternoon of August 6th, his real birthday.

  Weird, he thought, for the first time in my life after forty years, to celebrate my real birthday. Some celebration. No one except Penny and Miranda and Celestina knows. Celestina and Miranda are unreachable, and Penny is enraged and no longer speaking to me. Some celebration.

  In the almost two weeks since he’d chained himself to the Worth, things had gotten a bit better, and then a whole lot worse. Better because he had a brief high when he knew for sure he’d be leaving. He’d bought a ticket to Rome for August 27th and sent a telegram to Celestina with the details. Everything else was worse. No good deed goes unpunished, he’d say to himself as he walked from one disaster to another with his patients and his family.

  Word had gotten out that Milt was the culprit. Totally pissed at Orville, he denied being the one—maybe with Henry Schooner—who’d ordered the demolition. Maybe Schooner, yes. Orville realized that while he assumed from Milt’s mess
age that Schooner was part of it, he couldn’t be sure. As usual, to the naked eye everything about Schooner seemed obvious and clear, but when you looked deeper you realized that you knew nothing for sure. Henry hadn’t been in town the day of the chaining and hadn’t been back since.

  Orville had phoned the house and got Nelda Jo. She said he was on a fund-raising trip to Washington and then on to the Deep South and the Sunbelt. “He’s followin’ the money—that’s where the deep pockets are. My daddy has clout with the oilmen of Tulsa, and Henry’s buddies in the navy all seem to have settled in around golf courses in the desert, makin’ it hand over fist. He’ll be back on the tenth. Honey, I think what you did was great, brave and great. If we don’t save that dump, what won’t we save? Makes good business sense, an opportunity cost for tourist return. How ’bout droppin’ in? Or comin’ over for a barbecue on Sunday?”

  “Sorry, can’t.” He didn’t inquire about the fate of the mole.

  “Next time. I’ll tell the Great One you called.”

  That very night Henry called Orville back. Out of the phone came puzzled concern.

  “I’m shocked, shocked, at what Milt did,” he said, “and saddened, too. What is our great little town without due process. I swear on the Bible, Orvy, that I had nothing to do with it, and thank God you stepped in and saved that dear old lady. Your mother would be proud. God bless you.”

  Orville waited for “—and God bless America,” but it didn’t come.

  Amy was thrilled at what Orville had done, and Penny, trying to find a way into Amy’s life, had praised his public-spirited action. She allowed Amy to move in with him for the few weeks until he left. Amy was helping out at the office, functioning as receptionist, scheduling appointments, and helping with the billing. This made everything in the office run a lot better, and Columbians resented it greatly. In particular, they didn’t like having a set appointment time, a time when they could be seen without waiting.

  “Bill never saw us without waiting! When’s he comin’ back anyways?”