Borderlines

I was on the southbound lane’s divider line when I saw it-a flash of fluorescent orange-accompanied by a hunter’s heavy boots crushing the brush underfoot as he moved. “Stop where you are. I’m a police officer.” I began running the rest of the distance to the treeline, straight to where I’d seen that one bright flicker of color.

Just before I entered the woods, I glanced back to see the two parallel blacktop ribbons, my car, its exhaust pluming smoke in the crisp cold air, and the body of the deer. From this angle, the animal must have presented an almost irresistible target, its muscular outline highlighted against the black of the road and the pale horizon, a temptation only decency and sportsmanship might have stilled, and obviously had not.

I hadn’t walked ten feet into the woods before I was utterly enveloped in its dense, dark embrace. I stopped, listening. The hunter had bolted late in my approach, and could only have covered a short distance before I’d reached this spot. I scanned the dark curtain of trees before me, aware of only the absolute stillness, and of the sound of my own heart beating from the exertion of the run. “I’m a police officer. You’ve already broken one law; don’t add resisting arrest.

Come on out.”
The vapor from my words hovered briefly about my face and then vanished in the answering silence.

I looked to the forest floor, hoping to see some tracks, but tracking wasn’t one of my strengths, at least not in the woods. All I could see was a tangle of twigs, rotting leaves, and frozen brush. The sudden, blinding combination of a third rifle shot and the explosion its bullet made in the tree trunk next to me threw me to the ground before I could think, my Korea-bred instincts suddenly as keen as they had been many years earlier.

With my face to the ground, breathing in the damp mustiness of the near-frozen earth, I waited for the ringing in my ears to fade. Behind it, fading also, I could hear a body crashing away through the forest.

It had been a warning from a hunter whose initial purpose had not been sport. That deer in the road had not been shot for a trophy and some bragging, as I’d imagined. It had been meat, a hedge against the winter, a hungry and self-sufficient man’s necessity for survival, as he saw it. He had not missed killing me; he had warned me to back off. I got up slowly and brushed myself off. Ahead of me, some one hundred and fifty feet away, I saw an orange hunting jacket hanging from a tree branch a single bright beacon in an ever-darkening, cold and silent world. It was another warning; he was a hunter no longer, but a man with a gun, dressed to blend into his chosen environment. He could now stand with impunity next to a tree, invisible beyond fifty feet, and fill his rifle scope with my chest. I was now in Vermont’s so-called Northeast Kingdom-poor, isolated, thinly populated by people who had chosen to put their independence and wariness of the rest of the world above the hardships of living here. The man watching me had no interest in killing me, but he did want it known that he would if he had to. I stood absolutely still, watching, listening, aware now that my movements were my only relevant spokesmen. A line had been drawn: I could die defending the rights of a dead deer, or I could retire and leave the field to my unseen opponent and his more ancient, instinctive code of moral right and wrong. It wasn’t my kind of debate. I returned to my car, as depressed as I’d been angry when I’d left it in outrage. It had been a short and violent reminder of the limitations of legal authority.

Here, in this high, cold country, the law had less to do with rules, and more with personal honor. Often, they were one and the same, but not always. I got back behind the wheel, drove around the carcass, and continued north.

My trip to the Northeast Kingdom that late fall was an escape. I was heading for a temporary job a minor embezzlement investigation for Ron Potter, the Essex County State’s Attorney-but that was largely a pretense. I was also leaving in Brattleboro an accumulation of tensions, disappointments and heartache with which I’d felt I could no longer deal. In fact, I had telephoned Potter because I’d heard he was searching for a very short term investigator, a need imposed on him because he was the only Vermont State’s Attorney not assigned a full-time man.

He’d been tickled pink, for purely selfish reasons, no doubt. I had a feeling his delight and ready acceptance of my offer had less to do with my prowess than to the fact I’d been the first to nibble his hook. A stint as the Essex County SA’s investigator was not the stuff of legend in a resume. In fact, not even the SA’s job is full-time, and his office is located in St. Johnsbury, which isn’t even in the county he serves.

My call to him was also helped by the fact that we knew one another. Potter had been a patrolman in Brattleboro about ten years ago, trying to scratch together enough cash to pay his way through law school. He used to come by my desk for occasional moral support, both as a prospective student and as a fledgling cop. I hoped he was better at serving the people of Essex County than he had been working for me.

For nearly thirty years now, I’ve been a policeman in Brattleboro, starting as a patrolman and having just wrapped up a six-month assignment as Acting Chief, an event which went a long way in explaining why I was flirting with burnout. Tony Brandt, the man whose job I’d temporarily held, had been given a half-year suspension so the Town Manager and the Selectmen could save face over a case I’d reopened to prove an innocent man had been falsely jailed. The irony that they’d then asked me to take Brandt’s place should have prompted me to change citizenship and head straight for the border.

But I hadn’t, any more than I’d scared away the deer. In retrospect, the reasons for this lapse of judgment seemed inexcusably trite. The case, involving a hell-bent homicidal crusader in a ski mask, had attracted national attention, and I, in the public’s eye, had emerged the hero of the day. Perhaps I succumbed to the Selectmen’s wishes because my own view of myself was considerably less than heroic.

The outcome, as I saw it later, had been inevitable from the start.

innocent had been freed, most of the guilty had been punished one way or another-but I had been less the driving force in it all than the conductor, madly trying to maintain order on a runaway train. When the dust had settled, I was the only one left who’d looked good, and I felt unhappy enough with my performance to welcome the flattery of the Selectmen’s offer. Now, a mere lieutenant once more, I found the results of my foray into town government had been a lethal overdose of political soft-shoe, and a painful severing of cherished ties to the street. It had also helped to poison my friendship with Gail Zigman, the only woman I’ve really cared for since my wife died almost twenty years ago. Not bad for six months’ work.

So, through either my own stupidity or the simple workings of fate, I felt I’d taken two shots on the nose, one right after the other. I needed to retire to some cave and lick my wounded pride, and to do that, I had looked back over my personal history to find solace in its highlights and refuge in its memories.

I turned off at the Lyndonville exit, drove through town to connect to Route 144, and headed north toward Gannet-a tiny weather-beaten collection of boxy prefab buildings, tar paper-patched trailers, and, with one garish exception, an occasional, abused remnant of nineteenth-century rural architecture. Gannet was undoubtedly, in the eyes of tourists and outsiders, the epitome of “ugly,” but it was also the primary repository of precisely the type of soothing memories I was after.

At the end of every school year, my brother Leo and I would be eagerly packed into the car by my mother-leaving my father to tend to the farm and we’d drive north to spend the summers with my aunt and uncle. Although we lived in Thetford, only sixty miles to the south, the trip took most of the day, sometimes longer when the roads were out.

This afternoon, the trip had taken less than an hour, which was just as well, since my psychological needs were more pressing. Aunt Liz had died several years ago. She’d been a thin, nervous, somewhat scattered woman, given to much activity to little effect, a characteristic she readily admitted with good humor and grace. My uncle Buster had been her counterbalance, huge, benevolent, slow-moving. He owned and ran a ramshackle garage and service station in Gannet, known more as a halfway house for troubled kids than as a place to get your car fixed. A philosopher of sorts, he’d instilled in me the value of listening not just to what people were saying, but why they were saying it-a knack that was to help me considerably as a cop. Together, Buster and Liz had shown Leo and me an alternate way of life from the more isolated one we knew on our father’s farm one with a volunteer fire department, adjoining back yards, and a soda fountain at the local caf.

Route 144 heads off north-northeast, past the struggling Burke Mountain ski resort condominiums, the little village of East Burke, and on into the wilderness toward Island Pond and Canada a narrow, much-patched, rough ribbon of tarmac, following the connecting valley floors through a tangle of brush-choked forest and meandering streams.

The late afternoon sky was blue and cloudless, the low sun highlighting the bare trees, making them look pale purple brown from a distance. The violent coloration of fall had yielded to this timid replacement, a concession to the anticipated dread of winter. I passed several empty pickup trucks and 4 X 4s, parked awkwardly on the shoulder, all with gun racks barring their windows. In contrast to the brutal encounter I’d just had, hunting season was a time of quasi-religious importance to most rural Vermonters, when larders were stocked against the barren months ahead, and when young men with their fathers, carrying old 30-30s, entered a crucial rite of passage from childhood, as I had long ago with Buster. It was also a time when well-heeled flatlanders came north to hunt and drop some greatly needed cash in a region of the state that otherwise rarely attracted them. 1

stopped the car at the top of the low hill south of town. Below was Gannet, whose haphazard cluster of houses and buildings contrasted with the almost rectangular grid of its four streets, the only paved one of which was Route 114. Parallel to Route 114 was Atlantic boulevard to the east, with South Street and North Street connecting the two at the bottom and top of the rectangle. The entire layout was no more than some two hundred yards on its longest side. It was an absurdly regimented layout for such an unruly hodge-podge of buildings and trailers, since not one house was aligned with or looked like another.

About three hundred people lived in Gannet, half of them in town and the rest in the surrounding hills. I put the car back in gear and rolled down the slope, losing my slight aerial perspective and becoming one with the village. Buster’s home, an ancient but tidy ramshackle ex-farmhouse, was the first on the left. Originally a squat and clumsy copy of traditional Greek Revival architecture, one of only about five in town, its outer appearance had been transformed by the practical hand of hard economic times-a prevalent regional feature. The roof was a smattering of rusting and multi-hued, brightly painted corrugated metal panels; the walls, intermixed with a few remnants of the original white clapboard, consisted variously of unpainted plywood, asphalt shingles, battened-down tar paper, and more corrugated metal. And yet the whole structure had the appealing look of a neatly designed patch-work quilt.

Buster was no slob; he just made do. Subconsciously, like a proud apprentice, I picked out those bits and pieces of the building’s exterior that I had nailed into place in years past.

There was a car backing out of the dirt driveway as I pulled up.

It stopped, and an attractive young woman with pale brown hair pulled back in a ponytail got out. She stood uncertainly by her open door, but stuck out her hand tentatively as I crossed to meet her.

“You’re Joe?” “That’s right.” I smiled and shook her hand. It was strong and muscular, which threw me off a little, given her demeanor and her expression-she had the nervous, shy look of a young girl. I guessed her to be somewhere in her early thirties.

“Hi. I’m Laura. I clean your uncle’s house. He’s real excited about your coming. Asked me to do an extra special job.” Her hand went a little limp in mine and I realized I’d held it too long.

“Thank you. It’s good to be back.” She was wearing tight faded blue jeans, sneakers, and a thick sweater. She wasn’t skinny, but she didn’t carry any fat, either. I found her enormously appealing, even sensual, in a no-frills, down-home way. It jolted me a little, and made me think of Gail, whom I’d left behind in a rush in Brattleboro, almost without explanation, like a pain too big to bear.

She gave me a small, crumpled smile and looked at the ground. I’d been staring, and now we were both slightly embarrassed.

She put her hands in her pockets. “Well, I better get going.” “Is Buster inside?” She looked up again, her face clear. “No, he says it drives him nuts to watch me work, makes him feel bad. He’s probably at the Rocky River by now, or maybe at the garage. He’s real excited… I guess I said that. Do you know which room you’re in?” “Yup.” She smiled again. “That was dumb. Not like it’s your first time here, is it?”

“No, although it almost seems like it. I’ve been away so long.” “Buster told me you’re investigating something.” “Yeah. Not here, though. I just thought I’d stay with him while I’m in the area-you know, cheaper than a motel and a whole lot friendlier.” There was a long pause. I suppose neither one of us wanted to start talking about the weather, which was certainly all I could think of at the moment. She broke the silence by turning toward her car, repeating, “Well, I better get going.” I stepped back and shut her door for her. She rolled down the window. “It was nice meeting you.” “My pleasure. Hope I see you around.” She laughed, which made her face suddenly quite beautiful.