Spencerville (5 page)

He went to the back door and opened it with a key. The kitchen was small, dirty, and always smelled like bad plumbing. Annie, at least, for all her other faults, knew how to keep a house.

He took a look into the untidy living room, then walked into the first of two bedrooms. A woman in her mid-thirties lay sleeping on her side on top of the bed sheets, wearing only a T-shirt. The room was warm, and a window fan stirred the hot air. Her white waitress uniform and underwear were thrown on the floor.

Baxter walked up to the bed. The T-shirt had ridden up to her hips, and Cliff stared at her pubic hair, then regarded her big breasts and the nipples pointing through the pink T-shirt. The shirt said, "Park 'n' Eat — Softball Team."

She had a good body, good muscle tone, and good skin if you overlooked a few zits and mosquito bites. The short hair falling over her face was blond, but the hair on her crotch was black.

The woman stirred and turned on her stomach. Cliff looked at her rounded rump and felt himself getting hard. He reached out and squeezed a handful of cheek. She mumbled something, then rolled over and opened her eyes.

Cliff Baxter smiled. "Hey, good-lookin'."

"Oh..." She cleared her throat and forced a smile. "It's you."

"Who'd you think it was?"

"Nobody..." She sat up, trying to clear her head, then pulled the T-shirt down to cover herself. "Didn't know you were coming."

"I ain't come yet, sweetheart. That's why I'm here." She forced a smile.

He sat on the bed beside her and put his hand between her legs, his fingers entering her. "You havin' a wet dream?"

"Yeah... about you."

"Better be." He found her clitoris and massaged it. She squirmed a little, clearly not enjoying going from a sound sleep to having a man's fingers in her within sixty seconds. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing. Got to go to the bathroom." She slid off the opposite side of the bed and went out into the hallway.

Cliff wiped his fingers on the sheets, lay on the bed fully clothed, and waited. He heard the toilet flush, water running, gargling.

Sherry Kolarik was the latest in a long line of women that had begun before his marriage, continued during his courtship of Annie and through his engagement and all through his marriage. They never lasted too long, and he never had a real heartthrob, a girlfriend, or a full-fledged mistress — they were all just sport fucks of short duration. In fact, somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was incapable of any real relationship with a woman, and his ladies were simply targets of opportunity — the town sluts, women who ran afoul of the law, desperately lonely divorcees, and barmaids and waitresses who needed a little extra cash — the lower elements of small-town American society; they were all easy marks for Police Chief Baxter.

Now and then, he picked on a married woman with a no-account husband such as Janie Wilson, the wife of the station house janitor, or Beth Marlon, wife of the town drunk. Sometimes he got the wife of a man who needed a favor real bad, like a prisoner. He enjoyed these conquests more than the others because fucking a man's wife meant you were fucking the man, too.

He was careful not to try his act on wives who had husbands who could become a problem. He did ogle female attorneys, schoolteachers, doctors, and other professional women, married and unmarried, who turned him on; but he knew without admitting it to himself that he didn't have a chance with these women. He knew, too, or rather had a dim awareness, that even if he scored with one of them, they'd reject him after they got to know him better. His only major conquest on that level had been Annie Prentis. But at that time, Cliff Baxter was better-looking, a little more charming, and also gave it everything he had. And, in truth, there had been a war on then, and the pickings in Spencerville were slim, so that a draft-deferred cop looked good to a lot of young ladies. He knew all of this without actually acknowledging any of it to himself. Thus, Cliff Baxter's ego was intact, while his predatory senses were always alert, a lone wolf who knew what prey was weak and vulnerable and what was dangerous.

Still, he had rape fantasies about the snippy female attorney in the Bounty prosecutor's office, about the two female doctors at the hospital, and the uppity bitch bank president, and college girls home on vacation, and so forth. He knew that to fuck one of these women would be to fuck the whole class of people who looked down on him. Someday, he thought, he'd go for it. He'd cut one of the snobby ladies loose from the herd and lay the wood to her and dare her to make anything of it. Maybe she'd enjoy it. But for now, he'd settle for Sherry Kolarik and women like her.

She came back into the bedroom, and Cliff looked at his watch. "Now, I ain't got much time."

"I wanted to clean up for you."

"You don't got to clean up for what you got to do." He hopped out of bed and walked to the living room and left through the front door. He rang the bell and she came to the door and opened it, wearing a robe now. "You Miss Kolarik?"

"Yes."

"Chief Baxter. I'd like to speak to you." He backed her up and closed the door. "Miss, you got a hundred dollars in parking tickets downtown. I'm here to collect the money or take you in."

If Sherry Kolarik thought it was romantic of Chief Baxter to recreate how they'd met, she didn't say so, didn't laugh and put her arms around Cliff. Instead, she said, "I'm sorry, I don't have the money."

He replied, "Then I got to take you in. Get dressed."

"No, please, I have to go to work. I can pay you Friday when I get paid."

"You had three months to make good on these here tickets. So now you're under arrest. You come peacefully, or I cuff you and take you in just like you are."

In fact, she'd been wearing her waitress uniform when this scene took place a month before. But she'd felt just as helpless and exposed then as now. Only now she didn't owe the bastard a hundred dollars. But there was still the matter of her car that had to pass the state inspection, and Baxter Motors could overlook some defects. She said, "Look, I work at the Park 'n' Eat, you know, you've seen me in there, and if you come around Friday, about noon, we can go over to the bank with my check. Can't you wait?"

"No, ma'am, I dragged my butt over here, and I'm goin' back to the station with a hundred bucks or with you. Don't mess with me." He jiggled the handcuffs on his belt.

"I'm sorry... I don't have the money, and I can't miss a day of work... look, I've got about twenty dollars..."

Cliff shook his head.

"A postdated check..."

"Nope."

"I've got some jewelry, a watch..."

"I ain't a goddamn repo man. I'm a cop."

"I'm sorry. I don't know what to..."

He took the cuffs off his belt. They looked at each other a long time, and both of them remembered the moment when she'd figured it out. She asked, "Can you loan me the money?"

"What's in it for me?"

"Whatever you want."

"Had lunch."

"Look, all I've got is me. You want me?"

"You tryin' to bribe me with sex?"

She nodded.

"Well, let's see what you got for collateral before I decide. Take 'em off."

She unfastened her robe and let it fall, then pulled the T-shirt over her head and dropped it on an armchair. She stood in the middle of the living room, naked, while Chief Baxter circled around her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bulge in his pants.

"Okay, Miss Kolarik, you got real good collateral for a loan. Kneel right there. Park 'n' Eat, sweetheart."

She knelt on the rug.

He unbuckled his gun belt and put it on the armchair, then undid his belt and zipper and lowered his pants and undershorts. "Go for it, darlin'."

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and with one finger lowered his erect penis to her lips.

When it was over, Cliff said, "Swallow it." He pulled up his clothes, buckled on his holster, and threw a twenty on the armchair. "I'll take care of the tickets, but you owe me four payments."

Sherry nodded and mumbled, "Thank you." He'd said that the first time, and, for the last ten times, it had always been four more.

Cliff, not particularly sensitive, nevertheless saw she was a little upset and patted her cheek. "Hey, I'll see you later for coffee. Got to go..."

He left through the back door.

She stood, went into the kitchen, spit in the sink and washed out her mouth, then ran into the shower.

Cliff Baxter drove around Spencerville, feeling very good. He had, at the moment, two women, which was enough for one time: Sherry, mostly for oral sex, and a separated woman with kids, named Jackie, trying to live on what her husband sent her from Toledo. Jackie had a nice bedroom and a good bed, and she was a good lay. Cliff always brought groceries, compliments of the local supermarket. He had a third woman, he realized, his wife. He laughed. "You are all man, Cliff Baxter."

The mobile phone rang, and he picked it up. Sergeant Blake said, "Chief, I had Ward drive by Landry's place with binoculars, and he got the license number."

"Okay."

"So I called these clowns back in D.C., and I gave it to them."

"Good. What we got?"

"Well... they said this plate was some kind of special thing, and if we needed to know more, we got to fill out a form, tellin' why and what it's about..."

"What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"They faxed me this form — two pages."

"What kinda shit is that? You call those sons-of-bitches and tell them we need a make on this plate now. Tell 'em the guy was DUI or somethin', can't produce a registration or nothin'..."

"Chief, I'm tellin' ya, I tried everything. They're tellin' me it's somethin' to do with national security."

"National... what?"

"You know, like secret stuff."

Cliff Baxter drove in silence. One minute he's on top of the world, pipes cleaned, feeling good, and in charge. Now this guy Landry shows up from outside, from Washington, D.C., after how many years?.. Twenty-five maybe, and Cliff doesn't know a thing about him, and just finds out he can't even get a make on his car registration or driver's license. "Who the fuck is this guy?"

"Chief?"

"Okay, I want this bastard watched. I want somebody to swing by his place a couple times a day, and I want to know every time he comes to town."

"Okay... what are we lookin' for? I mean, why?.."

"Just do what the hell I tell you."

"Yes, sir."

Cliff hung up. "The man fucked my wife, that's why." And people in town knew, or they'd remember, or they'd hear about it soon enough. "I can't have that. No, siree, I cannot have that."

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.

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.

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 rundown now, the big places given over to boardinghouses, informal daycare 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 gentleman. 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.