It had seemed reasonable to think that Rennie would eventually replace Buster as Chief. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Buster was in his eighties somewhere, and it looked like he would outlive us all. I imagined that fact, along with all the other intangibles that had grown between the two of them through the years, had created a kind of low-level but permanent friction.
Rennie, like most of the other people in Gannet, worked in St.
Johnsbury. He was a loading dock foreman for a large trucking firm, or at least he was the last time I saw him.
I walked to the back of the station, reflecting on how many hours I’d spent in this building, so many years ago. Attached to the 55’s backstep, I discovered two shiny new Scott-Paks, breathing tanks and masks used for entering smoky buildings. I raised my eyebrows and pointed at them. “Pretty fancy. When did you get those?” Rennie grinned. “Ever try one on?” “A few times. We used to carry them in our patrol cars in case we had to go in with the firefighters. We dropped it, though. The training was costing a lot and the Fire Chief felt his turf was being invaded.” “Too bad, they’re kind of fun. The Order gave ‘em to us-good will gesture, I guess.” “The Order?” “Yeah. The Natural Order. The cult, or whatever you call it.
Haven’t you heard about them?” I nodded. “I thought they didn’t support this kind of stuff.” “They don’t. But their leader is a real politician. He holds all the money, has electricity in his house, drives a car. He’s no fool-got the best scam running I ever seen. He gave us those and a couple of new portable pumps; he even tried to buy us beepers for when we get a call, except we don’t have a system that would trigger the beepers.” “What’s his name?” “Depends. If you’re a member, he’s called The Elephant; real name’s Edward Sarris. Nice enough for a nut; sure spreads the money around. Christ, when they moved into town, they paid top dollar for all those houses-cash, too.”
“Where’s the money come from?” “Damned if I know. The restaurant does good business, I guess mail order, mostly; you know, granola head stuff organic foods. Rumor has it when you join, you got to give all your money to Sarris, but for all I know, they could be printing it in the basement.” I glanced out the door. “Well, I better get going. Haven’t seen Buster yet. You coming down to the Rocky River later?” “Sure. Be along in a bit.” I continued my walk down the street, taking in the sights. The contrasts I saw were familiar and typical of the Northeast Kingdom.
Between and beyond the weather-blighted buildings and broken roads of the village, my eye was drawn to the land-wild, undulating, pristine.
Its beauty lay in its pocket vistas, rarely extending beyond a mile or two. Farther south, the Green Mountains offered breathtaking views of valley passes and river gorges. Up here, the whole earth was shoved up closer to the sky, its hills and dales more interconnected, less in conflict. Seeing this land, oddly arctic in appearance at this time of year, gave one a comforting, although false sense, that there were perhaps corners of the world where civilization had yet to set foot.
I’d always thought it was as much the remoteness as the beauty of the region that made the Kingdom a shrine of sorts to the citizens of Vermont.
I thought back to the man who had shot at me to protect both his freedom and his winter’s meat, which made me focus anew on how the once-familiar buildings of this town were being ground down without respite. The Kingdom would live on, but not as it had. The younger generations were already abandoning it, lured by the monied south, and those who had made that money were seeking new places, like the Kingdom, in which to buy real estate.
For the Gannets, tucked away from the main highways, on the outskirts of the commercial centers, things weren’t looking too good. I began to wonder if after decades of clinging to this land, Gannet was finally slated to die.
Considering that I’d come back here for some mental and emotional rest and relaxation, this kind of thinking was not the stuff of dreams.
The Rocky River Inn was the one glaring exception to the town’s generally muted architecture. It took up one entire side of North Street, with one wing at the corner of Route 114, and the other looking straight down Atlantic Boulevard. It was an enormous place, dwarfing any three buildings in town put together. It was also a first-rate Victorianstyle dump. It had a sagging rusty metal roof, diseased-looking, paintpeeling walls, and its windows were covered with either torn plastic sheets or dilapidated plywood. Although it had “wrecking ball” written all over it, it had looked that way for as long as I could remember.
It had once been a palace, of course, built in the middle of nowhere in the 1 850s by a lunatic logging king named Gannet, who had died one week after moving in. It sported turrets and bay windows, porches and balconies, and more gingerbread than any sane Victorian would have considered tasteful. Now, however, one of the turrets was draped with a moldy green tarp, the balconies had been declared unsafe, and the wraparound first-floor porch groaned under the weight of several cords of stacked firewood. The gingerbread was half gone, and two of the bay windows flickered with the garish light of several neon beer signs.
A combination hotel/bar/cafe//home, the Inn was owned by a mercurial woman in her fifties named Greta Lynn. She had run the Rocky River for the past twenty-five years or so, inheriting it from her equally eccentric mother, and lived there with a succession of mousy male companions whose names nobody could recall. Greta, Rennie, and I were, as they say “of an age,” and had run around with the same crowd when we were younger. In later life, after “Peanuts” had become a popular comic strip, I was convinced that somehow Charles Schulz had met Greta-and had found his inspiration for Lucy Van Pelt. I climbed its warped, cracked and creaking front steps and entered a huge entry hall.
A crumbling carved hardwood staircase rose directly ahead, and two equally large rooms opened on either side. The room to the right had been converted into a cafe//bar-where I’d slurped sodas of yore-and was segregated by a pair of ornate multi-paned pocket doors. The room to the left had no doors and spilled out into the entry in a seeming attempt to take it over. I turned left to what everyone called “The Library” to find Buster, for this was his home away from home-a room of paperback-cluttered halls, of tall dirty windows, clanking radiators, and derelict furniture, overshadowed by a gap-toothed, non-functional, cobweb-choked handelier. There, at the head of a semicircle of mismatched sofas, armchairs, and ottomans, like some long-dethroned king with his wery-bred entourage, Buster held court.
He saw me as I crossed the threshold and raised his beer high.
Goddamn, it’s the celebrity. Come here.” He struggled to his feet as I approached and placed one gargantuan arm across my shoulders. He was a huge man, fat and bearded, six and a half feet tall, with crooked, yellow teeth and bleary, misty eyes-a man with intimate knowledge f the bottle, yet whom I’d never seen under the influence. Or maybe ever seen sober.
I am no grasshopper myself, but standing next to Buster, I felt like a child posing with a hippo.
He waved his beer can at the small group of people sitting around e semicircle of chairs. “You know any of these guys? John The man finished for him. “John Secco.” “Right; not too good with names,”
Buster muttered. “This is Joey gunther-sorry, Lieutenant Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro Police department, my nephew. Remember hearing about that Ski Mask murder case down in Brattleboro? Well, Joey here nailed him.” Several heads nodded, I think out of pure politeness. He pointed at another man, hesitated, obviously groping for a name, and finally gave up on the general introductions. He pushed me to the chair to his right, settled back down himself with a grunt. He as about to ask me a question when Greta entered the room. “Thought I heard you in here.