“They don’t know what to do with themselves,” he said to Vincent in the hotel room, “they’re talking about formations of stones and cattle not moving.”
“Good. They’re almost ready to pick. How’s the resentment?”
“You can see it, hear it and smell it, especially the mill workers.”
Vincent nodded, looked out across the rooftops of the town, his back to the room.
“What about the company men,” he said, “when are they due?”
“Tomorrow, I heard. What do we do? They’ll ask questions.”
“Yes, they will.”
“What if they get to Jake? If they get to Jake and he spills his beans, the whole thing is done for.”
“They won’t. Leave them to me.”
There was a coffee stain on Lester’s shirt, specks of mud on his shoes.
“People don’t know shit, Lester. They stumble their way through life without understanding a damned thing about it. Without people the way they are, we don’t work. They wise up, we have no livelihood these last fifteen years. Now, the company men have agendas,” he said, moving away from the window, “they’ll look to blame, and to do that they need a good reason and a scapegoat. Do we want this to happen? No. Why? Because if the company finds a scapegoat, it doesn’t need to sell the land or the price can stay high. What we want is the company on its knees, the company at the point where it’s begging for a sale of any kind. That’s what we want. So, neglect is what we’re looking for. Neglect is what we want coming out of the loss adjuster when he gets here. Neglect on a grand and culpable scale.”
The first thing the two company men saw, arriving in Mission in crisp suits and side-parted hair, was a collection of people standing around the formation of stones like they were watching a dog-fight. The next, as they rolled their cases up the hill to the Station Hotel, was a family, spread across the width of the sidewalk, father, mother, two teenage boys and a younger girl, all flat-footed as penguins, all wearing juju chains and the father stopping them with an outstretched arm to hawk up and spit out something the size and consistency of a small jellyfish. And, sitting on a well-upholstered leather chair in the foyer of the Station Hotel, reading a newspaper, was Vincent Clay.
The men were from the mid-east, no older than Dan Cruck, and when they’d finished up with the desk clerk and had their bags taken up to their rooms, Vincent lowered his newspaper and, in his palegrey suit, began to speak.
He made them feel comfortable, to begin with. He put them at ease. He made it seem like that conversation in the foyer of a hotel with a complete stranger was the most regular thing to do. And, all the time, as they talked about the length and the comfort of the train journey, about where they were from and what their names were, he watched them: He saw how they checked with each other, how they looked across, made affirmations, smiled simultaneously. They were both married, just a few years, he figured, given the shine of the rings. They had new homes, young kids. One of them had a dog. They were churchgoers, non-smokers, athletic on a low-energy scale. They used moisturiser, Vitamin C products, took decaffeinated drinks and had present, dominant fathers who still tried to tell them how to manage their finances. He got the inner tension of one as around the shoulders and neck, the other as the feet, the shuffle of. And they were choosing not to say what they were there for.
“I’m a salesman, for my sins,” he said. “My father was a salesman and his father before him. I guess it’s part of the DNA.” He lowered his voice and drawing them in to a confederate point where he could smell the sports-based aftershave and the face-cream, “but I have to say, and this is only my personal opinion, you understand, that this is not my favourite town in the world to do business in.”
“It isn’t?”
“No, sir, it is not.”
The bellhops reappeared, handed over the room keys to the two men who, at exactly the same time, reached into their pockets and tipped them, the same amount. The company men waited, and then returned to Vincent. One of them drooped his shoulders a little, the other adjusted his feet.
“How come?”
“Well,” he said, “the people are naturally suspicious, for one thing. They don’t look at you straight. OK, you read the history of the place, you get that, it’s fixed in, I understand. They don’t trust people. They don’t take to strangers too well. They think they’re going to take something from them so they don’t have a word for welcome. I mean, I’m a regular guy who minds his own business, but I can feel it most places I go. It’s in the air. Plus, there’s the whole thing with the mill.”
Vincent mirrored a gesture he’d seen and done a thousand times: The tightened brow that narrowed the eyes, the pursed lips and the shake of the head. You don’t want to think about it, was what it said. You don’t want to go there.
“So, the mill burns down,” he said. “Bad enough. It’s the history of the place. It’s an identity, a way of life. It’s what the people know. And they’re shocked. I can see that. They’re overwhelmed that the place of work has gone. But then it turns. They start to blame the company. No investment, they say, no concern for safety, poor conditions, it’s a blessing no-one was killed. And so on. The company this, the company that. And then they get this idea.”
He enacted the quick look round, the furtive check. One of the company men tapped his toes inside his shiny, leather shoes.
“They figure the company set the whole thing up, for insurance reasons. They figure they paid some guy to come in and burn the place down.”
The two men looked across at each other.
“That’s what they’re saying. That the mill is worth more to the company destroyed. They also say the company are sending a couple of old guys over, to seal over the cracks.”
“When?”
“They don’t know. But they’re waiting for them. They’re ready. And those cracks are not for sealing.”
The one with the dog spoke, without glancing over first. He twitched his neck, flexed it. “We are those guys. The company sent us to check things out.”
Vincent went slack-jawed, open-mouthed. He went quizzical. Hold on a minute. Let me get this straight here. “When you say check things out, you mean apologise, right?” he said.
“Not exactly. The company thinks the fire was started deliberately, that it was a case of arson, but by someone here in the town, someone with a gripe, maybe. And we’re here to ask a few questions around the place.”
“That’s your opening shot? Looking for a culprit? In the town?”
The two men half-nodded, less convinced. Vincent looked around the room, at the upholstered chairs, the oil paintings of the town, the ornate clock with the roman numerals.
“Do you guys have kids?” he said, as if he was absorbing a dose of bad news, gradually.
“One each.”
“What are their names?”
“Max and Dexter.”
“How old are they?”
“Max is two.”
“Dexter’s four.”
“OK, listen to me,” he said, “this is from a guy who’s spent time and done business here, who knows how these people think. Get the fuck out. You start asking questions, noseying around, asking about culprits, you’ll get hurt, badly. Because as far as these people are concerned, the company has fucked them over. The company has abandoned them, left them to rot, with no work to go to, no livelihoods, and no futures. The company has put a nail in the coffin of the town. That’s what they’re saying. And you don’t have to take my advice, but go home, go back to your families, to Max and Dexter.”
“But the company sent us.”
Vincent moved in close again. “Take a look outside,” he said. “Go on. Take a look.”
The two men turned slowly, tried to see through the hotel doors.
“There’s a guy there already. Overweight, red-faced, keeps pacing up and down. Tell them you tried.”
“But…”
“Listen, in a couple of days there’ll be a loss adj
uster here. Those guys are like bloodhounds. If there’s anything, they’ll find it. If there’s a culprit, they’ll track him down. Trust me.”
The one without the dog shifted from foot to foot. The other checked back into the street, saw the hairy-eared man go past once more.
The mist sneaked in from over the hills, snaked its way through the town, suckered itself to the wind of the river. It hovered over the burial grounds, its belly like floss. It crept across the lawns of the Mallender estate and on around the waist of Rupture Hill, crawling up its bodice and crags. It wrapped like a crown around the monkish pate of Blessings Point, grovelling the valleys and groins. And it hung like dirty netting over the rough terrain, stretching its tendrils over towards the Cassidy land in the homestead of which John sat and waited, the photograph of Vincent Clay in front of him. He drank one of his father’s beers, put away the watch-chains and the stones from his pocket, the containers of beetles. The lights were out, the cellar door open, the shotgun propped against the bedroom wall. He waited just like he had in the makeshift ring, like he’d waited for the amphetamine sulphate to kick in, like he did and would some more, soon, with Jake Massey, like he would with Lester, with Abraham Stone, Lee Shaw and Ted Mallender, like he would with the town itself. He balanced himself, a twitch of his snout and a turn of his ear. He waited for Vincent to succeed, to buy up the grounds of the mill and to focus his attention on the Cassidy land. And then he’d be there.
There was a knock on the door. It was Delilah Morris, in a winter coat the colour of squid ink.
Later that evening, under cover of the late winter mist, with most of the mill workers, including Jake Massey, gathered in Harry’s bar, the two representatives of the timber mill company headed down the fire-escape of the Station Hotel to board the last east-bound train out of Mission.
They no longer wore the suits or the shiny leather shoes. Their hair was unparted, either mussed or swept-back, their cases ditched for kit-bags. The one without the dog felt the heat over his feet, and the church-going owner of the Japanese chow rolled his head from side to side to ease the grip on his neck. They’d called home, spoken to spouses and children, imagining them not as hazy and grainy from a distance but as though intensely detailed. They said nothing of heading home, nothing of the town of Mission and its mill, and nothing of their encounter with a salesman who’d saved their skin.
Down near the station a different group of people stood around the stones. The clock in the waiting room was three and a half minutes slow, and beetles scurried on the platform floor.
For the town, no mill meant no wages, no wages meant no spending power, and no spending power meant that every store in town took a financial hit. Harry’s profits started to dry up, in spite of the few diehards who tried to drink away their sorrows and savings. So, too, for Sizzlin’ Steve and his comfort steaks. Even old Mr Parker and his ruses couldn’t stem the loss. The only ‘businesses’ that survived, if not flourished, were Smithson’s loans, whose rates were emblazoned across the store window, and Dr Abraham Stone whose short-shrift diagnoses and medications were doled out on a regular basis no matter that those symptoms and complaints never seemed to change from one time to the next. One morning alone, forty-five people, men, women and children, all experiencing a grip on their breathing apparatus and sporadic headaches, were dispensed with the same catch-all trauma medication from his company back east. Take it twice day, after meals. Next, please.
More rock tumbled from the shoulders of Rupture Hill. More haystacks were upturned. The fixed chandelier in the Prairie View, so carefully restored after its fall, shed a single, pear-shaped bulb. There were marks on the church door, indentations and cleavages, ciphered by the looks. Some of the migrant workers, usually so passive, showed signs of agitation as they watched their homes checked for asbestos levels and fissure sizes. Dan Cruck, in an act of last-ditch desperation, proposed to Rita on the crown of Coronation Point. And Jake Massey, saboteur, was quivering from the lack of attention.
He was not cut out for holding his tongue. For Jake to stand in Harry’s bar, in sneakers still mud- and grass-stained, with the fading red welt of a burn on the back of his neck like a badge of honour, and listen to all those theories of how the mill had burned down and not be able to describe in glorious and meticulous detail how he’d climbed that log pile and done the deed himself, cranked him to the point where he could hardly swallow his beer for the words stuck in his gullet.
On the night the company representatives sneaked out of town and Rita said she needed more time, he heard those men talk about the loss adjuster as if he was the smartest brain in the state, as if his findings, his verdict, would offer the town the possibility of resolution, of something to move on from. He would be the one to discover the truth, they said, his would be the lizard’s eye.
The rumours of his arrival spiked the town. No two were the same. So, there was the tall man with the wire-rimmed glasses and the stocky figure with perspiration issues. There was the small, chiselled man with a colourful necktie, the bearded Easterner, the straight-backed loner. There was the gaunt, pale man with a limp and a lazy eye. And, in the closest thing to a consensus, there was the detached, unmarried forty-something, the suited, pinch-mouthed city-dweller with smooth, washed hands the pink of rats’ tails.
Some folks stood on the stone platform as the trains arced the prairie fields from either north or south. They watched for faces and hands and feet as they appeared in the windows and doors. sometimes they followed likely candidates. It was not exactly scientific, and as the days went on and no obvious contender emerged, it became based on a rationale that’d slackened to anyone who looked like they could count quickly in their heads. Every trail was a cold one, including the detached, unmarried forty-something who turned out to be a surveyor with a note-taking compulsion on a two-day delineation of farmland. And the reason for every trail being a cold one, apart from detection based only on hunches and hillbilly wiles, was that the loss adjuster, whose verdict on the mill was crucial to so many, was a thirty-six-year-old, short-haired woman called Frances Harte.
Frances had walked straight past the scouts and the scurrying beetles without being given a second glance. She’d spent three days in the town without anyone knowing who she was or what she was doing there. She rented a room on the edge of town close to the rail-tracks and, for those days of anonymity, she was as diligent and devoted as always. She walked the streets of the town, the southern neighbourhoods, across the land to the rickety bridge and as far as Coronation Point and the burial grounds. She had a rib-eyed steak in Steve’s and a cold beer in Harry’s. She had breakfast every morning in the coffee house; three cups of hot, roasted coffee, a couple of honey pancakes and half a chocolate muffin. She bought a local newspaper, sat at the window seat and read it cover to cover, circling various items in red or black, depending.
Of course, the mill was the main event. There were photographs new and old, articles and histories but, for Frances, about whom the sleuths had been right about one thing, her unmarried-ness, it was the non-explosion stuff that caught her: The block ads, the notices, the items wanted and those for sale. It was, for a bird-like woman with a degree in microbiology, the offer of second-hand farm equipment, the corn prices, the infestation of hornets in the chandlery cellar and the sprawl, or otherwise, of the travel agents’ net.
Apart from the printed page, what she got from plain observance, a good ear and an ability to absorb she was either cursed or blessed with, was that old Mr Parker was a charmer and a scoundrel both, that Lily Mallender had sent more than one scented letter of apology to her husband and that Rita Mahoonie, after some deliberation, had turned down Dan Cruck even though, so it was said, the ring glittered like a gold seam. She sensed too that, for some, the formation of stones, the beetles, the haystacks, the static cattle and the stopping of the station clock were not things of coincidence, and that, maybe, the spirits of the Indian lands were making moves.
Plus, on the day
she surrendered that anonymity by walking into the police department building and asking to see the files, there was the serious house fire out on the loop road south. A thirty-four-year-old man had been taken to hospital with second-degree burns, head injuries and the effects of smoke inhalation. The two women who also lived there, allegedly sisters, were working at the Serpentine meat factory at the time.
The secret was out. As soon as Ned Scarratt crossed the street to Parker’s store, ostensibly to buy more peppermint gum, but really to open his mouth about the skinny woman in her thirties with flecked grey hair and fingers like claws, Frances Harte ceased to exist as a nobody in the town of Mission and became very much a somebody.
It took a couple of days for the word to get around properly but by the time she made her way through the town to head for the mill site carrying more packed weight on her shoulders than a seasoned hiker, she was known. People looked in her direction. They mumbled her name after she passed them. Sometimes they pointed and, occasionally, they spoke, but never about the mill. As Abe Masterson suggested in his volumes, the default position of the vast majority of the townsfolk was deference. So, even though they had theories and accusations coming out of their ears, even the most resentful of mill workers zipped up when they saw her.
And Frances, in spite of sitting in Steve’s and Harry’s, in spite of the breakfasts, the root beers and steaks, was not a social animal, naturally. She lived alone. She travelled alone. She worked, whenever possible, alone. In fact, most of her six years at the large insurance company based out east had been spent in the industrial wildernesses of city-edge business parks and warehouses where her powers of detection had been trained on the world of objects found and details discovered rather than the slippery motivations of human beings. So, for her, the timber mill was different. Not only would she have to deal with people and their absurd social patterns and behaviours but also the only semblances of information she had were the files, sachets and sacks picked up from the police department, which were, at best, no more than fun-park brochures and candy-bags. Still, the company figured she could do it. And besides, no-one else wanted to travel out so far.
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