Several plans of action began to form in his mind, and he remembered something old Judge Thornsby once said to him... "Sometimes a problem is an opportunity in disguise."
"That's it. This stupid bastard came right onto my turf. And what I couldn't do twenty-five years ago, I can do now. I'm gonna kill him... no, I'm gonna cut off his balls. That's it. Gonna cut off his balls and put 'em in a jar on the mantel, and Annie can dust it once a week." He laughed.
Chapter Seven
A hot, dry wind blew in from the southwest, originating within some ancient weather pattern that once swept prairie fires across the grassy plains and stampeded endless herds of buffalo, blind with panic, into the Great Black Swamp where their bones were still turned up by plows. But now the wind blew through a million rows of corn and a million acres of undulating wheat, through the small towns and lonely farmhouses, and across pastures and meadows where cattle grazed. It swept across Indiana and into Ohio, and over the Great Lakes, where it met the arctic mass moving south.
By mid-September, when the west winds died, Keith Landry recalled, you could sometimes catch a whiff of the north, the smell of pines and lake air, and the sky was filled with Canadian geese. One September day, George Landry said to his wife, Alma, "It's time we got smart like the geese." And they left.
The history of most human migration, however, was more complex, Keith thought. Humans had adapted to every climate on earth, and in ancient times had populated the world by their wanderings. Unlike salmon, they didn't have to return to their birthplace to spawn, though Keith thought that wouldn't be a bad idea.
Keith was acclimating himself to the almost suffocating dryness, the fine dust, the constant desiccating wind, and, like most northern Ohioans, he was thinking about the winter long before it arrived. But acclimating to the weather was easy; acclimating to the social environment was going to be a little more difficult.
It had been a week since his return, and Keith decided it was time to go downtown. He drove in at midday and headed directly for Baxter Motors, a Ford dealership on the eastern end of Main Street. His family had done business there for years, and Keith vaguely recalled that his father did not really care for those people. But the old man was perverse and felt that he could strike a better bargain with people he disliked, and he got a thrill from it.
He was not unaware that Baxter Motors was owned by the family of Annie's husband, and perhaps that influenced his decision, too, though he couldn't get a handle on that reasoning.
He got out of the Saab and looked around. The dealership was strictly Ford, with no foreign car franchise attached, as was common back east.
A salesman beelined across the parking lot and inquired, "How're you today?"
"Very fine. Thank you for asking."
The salesman seemed momentarily confused, then struck out his hand. "Phil Baxter."
"Keith Landry." He looked at Mr. Baxter, a baby-fat man in his early forties with more chins than a Chinese phone book. Phil Baxter seemed pleasant enough, but that came with the job. Keith asked, "This your place?"
Phil laughed. "Not yet. Waitin' for Pop to retire."
Keith tried to picture Annie married to one of these genetic fumbles, then decided he was being uncharitable and petty. He got to the point, perhaps too quickly for local tastes, and said, "I want to trade this customized Ford in for a new one."
Phil Baxter glanced at the Saab and laughed again. "That ain't no Ford, buddy." He got serious and said, "We try not to take foreign cars. I guess you know that."
"Why's that?"
"Hard to move 'em. Local folk drive American." He squinted at the license plate. "Where you from?"
"Washington."
"Passin' through, or what?"
"I'm from around here. Just moved back."
"Yeah, name sounds familiar. We done business before?"
"Sure have. You want to sell me a new car?"
"Sure do... but... I got to talk to the boss."
"Pop?"
"Yup. But he ain't here now. What kind of Ford you lookin' for, Keith?"
"Maybe a Mustang GT."
Phil's eyes widened. "Hey, good choice. We got two, a black and a red. But I can get you any color."
"Good. What's the book on mine? It's last year's, eight thousand miles."
"I'll check it out for you."
"Are you going to take the Saab?"
"I'll get back to you on that, Keith. Meantime, here's my card. Give a call when you're ready."
Keith smiled at the small-town, low-key approach to sales. In Washington, any car salesman could be an arms negotiator or Capitol Hill lobbyist. Here, nobody pushed. Keith said, "Thanks, Phil." He turned to leave, then the imp of the perverse turned him around and he said, "I remember a guy named Cliff Baxter."
"Yeah, my brother. He's police chief now."
"You don't say? He did okay for himself."
"Sure did. Fine wife, two great kids, one in college, one about to go."
"God bless him."
"Amen."
"See you later, Phil."
Keith pulled onto Main Street and stopped at a traffic light. "That was a stupid move, Landry."
He certainly didn't need to go to Baxter Motors; he knew they wouldn't want the Saab, he didn't even know if he wanted a Ford, and surely he didn't have to mention Cliff Baxter's name. For an ex-intelligence officer, he was acting pretty stupid — driving past her house, going to her father-in-law's place of business. What next? Pulling her pigtails? "Grow up, Landry."
The light changed and he drove west, up Main Street. The downtown area consisted of rows of dark brick buildings, three and four stories high, with retail space at ground level and mostly empty apartments above. Almost everything had been built between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression. The old brickwork and wooden ornamentation were interesting, but most of the ground-floor storefronts had been modernized in the 1950s and '60s and looked tacky.
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 Posthouse. 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, flourished, and nourished a nation. But now, he thought, the roots were dying, and no one noticed because the tree still looked so stately.