by Justin Scott
I saw a beautiful tulip tree, tall and straight as a square rigger’s mast, quiver against the sky. It leaned, slowly at first. Then, gathering speed, it fell with a nearly silent rush of leafless limbs and hit the ground with a tremendous whoommmp.
King, decked out in a shooting jacket, came running to me. He was red with anger and indignation. “Stop him!”
“I’ll try.”
There was real anguish in his voice. “We had four beautiful trees in the corner of the wall. You could step inside them. It was like a cathedral.”
I suspected that if DaNang weren’t standing guard, he’d have climbed the deer fence and tried to stop Butler with his bare hands. But the big yellow dog was standing guard, hackles stiff, ears flat back. Mr. Butler sat on the fallen tree and began nonchalantly sharpening his chain with a file.
“Turn off the fence,” I told King. He yelled at Mrs. King, who ran up to the house and threw the switch. “It’s off.”
I climbed through the wire. DaNang eyed me. I said, “Call him off, Mr. Butler.”
Butler looked up from his sharpening. “Stay!”
DaNang sank reluctantly on his hunches, like a gigantic rat trap set to spring.
“What do you want, Ben?”
“Mrs. King called me. They’re really upset about the trees.”
“Not their trees.”
“I know that….What are you cutting ’em for?”
“Pawloski’s paying eight cents a board foot.”
“Sixty bucks a tree?”
“For the poplar. More like a thousand for those oaks.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Proper veneer wood in some of ’em.”
They looked more like ordinary piss oak to me. I said, “Let me sell ’em to King.”
“What’s he gonna do with ’em?”
“Pay you the money and leave them standing.”
“Naw, I’d rather sell ’em to Pawloski.”
“Come on, it’ll save you snakin’ ’em out of here.”
He thought about it a while. Logging was back-breaking work and no fun at all with a light farm tractor. But if he asked Pawloski to send his dragger truck the price would drop even lower. And no Yankee worth his salt was going to turn his nose up at found money extorted from a city person.
“But King’s got to pay me more.”
“Give me a minute, I’ll see what I can do.”
I walked back to the fence, climbed through the strands, and spoke to King. The diplomat started trying to negotiate me downward until I asked, sternly, “Are you out of your mind?”
At last, I reported back to Mr. Butler. “He’s getting his check book.”
King came marching stiffly down from the house, across his lawn and through the fence that separated his field from Butler’s leased pasture. He shoved the check at Mr. Butler, But when the farmer reached for it, King snapped it back. “What guarantee do I have that you won’t cut them down when I turn my back?”
Mr. Butler regarded him for a long moment, while I tried to think of something to soften the insult. Before I could, he picked up his saw. “Guarantee? You would have had my word, you son of a bitch.”
He reached for his ear protectors.
“Wait!” King yelled. “What are you doing?”
“Cutting timber.”
“You’re destroying beautiful trees.”
“You’re lucky I’m not spraying Agent Orange.”
“What?”
“Or napalm.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Nope. My head’s fine. Memory, too.” He covered his ears and yanked the starter cord.
“Listen to me. We had a deal.”
Butler crouched beside the thick trunk of another tulip poplar. Of the original four in the corner clump, the three still standing were an awesome sight. In the summer, crowned green, they would touch the clouds. On this late winter afternoon, they were taller than anything in sight, even King’s house.
Mr. Butler revved the saw and scored the bark to mark the wedge he would cut to direct where it dropped.
King ran after him and grabbed his shoulder. Butler turned—real anger in his face, and something more, something a little crazy. I moved toward them, thinking, Boy I don’t want to get into this.
“Get away from him, Henry.”
I reached for Henry King and tried to pry him loose from Butler’s shirt. There was a slurry underfoot of mud and sawdust from the first cut, and all three of us were slipping in it. Mr. Butler whipped the saw around.
A chainsaw—for the uninitiated—consists of a motor-driven chain that spins around a flat metal bar. The chain is studded every inch and a half with sharp hooked teeth. You can get a nasty cut just brushing by it with the motor off. Running, it’s a circle of moving razors. A plastic surgeon once told me that they “didn’t leave much to work with,” and strongly recommended cutting wood in a motorcycle helmet and face shield.
I yanked King out of the way. I didn’t know if Butler had slipped or whether he had deliberately aimed for King’s face. My problem was, having yanked King aside the saw was now wheeling at my face.
It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to block with your hand. I tried to fall away from it.
Butler tried to arrest his swing.
But it was Henry King who saved me, inadvertently, or not, swinging his gloved hand between us. His cry mingled with his wife’s scream.
He and I tumbled to the ground. Butler choked the motor, and the sudden silence was almost touchable.
King stared in disbelief at the shredded fingertips of his glove. Slowly, fearfully, he pulled it off his hand. “Oh, God,” cried Mrs. King, creeping closer. I braced for the blood. But the chain teeth had miraculously pulled the glove away from his fingers and only cut the leather. A single bright drop balanced like a red BB on the tip of his index finger.
Mr. Butler laughed. Veins were popping in his forehead. “You’re a lucky bastard.”
King’s face was white as snow. “You tried to cut my hand off.”
“You tried to grab a chainsaw,” Mr. Butler retorted. “Damned fool.”
“I’m going to sue you.”
“Get off my land.”
“It’s my land.”
“Get. Off. My. Land.”
“You f—”
“DaNang!”
“We’re outta here,” I said, throwing a firm arm around King and marching him toward the fence. Just as Josh Wiggens came running down the lawn and vaulted the fence with remarkable ease for a man his age. The automatic pistol in his hand didn’t seem to unbalance him at all. “Call off the dog,” he yelled at Butler, “Or I’ll shoot him.”
Great. We’d just gone from chainsaws to guns.
I finished pushing King through the strands. “You want to put that away before someone gets hurt?”
Wiggens wasted no words. Without warning, and without taking his eyes from the dog, he flicked the gun at my temple as if he were swatting a fly.
I was still wired from dodging the chainsaw and not in a charitable mood.
I caught his wrist behind the gun, separated him and it, and tossed him on his back. He bounced like he had landed on a trampoline and tossed me on my back. Which surprised me, but not enough to keep me from getting to the gun first. I snatched it off the grass and threw it as far as I could onto King’s lawn.
Wiggens came at me, moving easily, all long arms and legs.
“This is getting silly,” I said. “You’ve got grass stains on a perfectly good suit and I’m going to be sore for a week. It’s clear we’re both capable of hurting each other.”
That was for sure. The spook wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Okay?”
His eyes were cold. King shouted something. Wiggens hesitated, then made a noise that might have been a chuckle. “Got any influence with the dog?”
“I’ll deal with Butler. You deal with King.�
�
Then I went back to Butler. “You okay?”
“Sure I’m okay.” The veins looked like snakes under his skin. I was afraid he would have a stroke.
“Where’s Dicky?”
“Out with some tramp.”
“Can you get up to the house okay?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t look too good.”
“I’m fine….Should have taken the goddammed money. Stupid.”
“I’ll talk to him when he cools down.”
“No.”
“You need money.”
“Who don’t?” He glared across at Henry King who was glaring back, then doggedly picked up his saw again.
“Wait! You know your little upper woodlot near the top? Where it’s real steep? Let me try and sell it.”
“I don’t sell land.”
“It’s steep as hell, there. You don’t cut the wood and you don’t farm it.”
“How much?”
“You could clear eighty thousand.”
“I don’t know, Ben. You get city people and they start complaining about the fertilizer and tractor noise, and first I know I got Henry King problems on the both sides of me.”
“You’re not farming near there. Except, what do you cut hay twice a year?”
“Eighty thousand?”
“Clear. After commission.”
His mouth worked. He didn’t like it. But it was a way out of a lot of problems for very little cost and less effort. He glared across the fence, again, where the Kings were trudging up the lawn toward the house. “But swear you’ll sell to good people. People’ll leave a man alone.”
***
The couple I had in mind to buy Butler’s acres were a pair of Price-Waterhouse lawyers living together in a midtown co-op they’d paid too much for. Which made them a little gun shy about overextending themselves, again. But they really wanted to build a house in the country and when I walked them over the land the next weekend, they were suitably enchanted.
When I hadn’t heard from them by Wednesday, I got nervous. I made a follow-up call. Turned out they’d been talking to one of our more larcenous builders who had quoted them a hundred and sixty bucks a square foot for quality construction, and they had begun to re-think in terms of two-week villa rentals in Tuscany.
“You’ll never get rent back,” I said. “Listen, I did a little research. Why not think of the house in two parts? One part is the necessary stuff: extra bedrooms, utility room, mudroom, offices, kitchen and garage. The other part is special: spectacular living room and drop dead fabulous master suite.”
“Which we can’t afford to build.”
“You build in top quality the living room and master suite. You attach for the other rooms a log cabin or cedar post and beam kit. Thirty bucks a square foot for the kit—ninety turn-key—will buy you a handsome, solid wood house that opens into a living room of pure glass. And a marble bathroom,” I added hastily, because both had grown accustomed to five-star hotels on the client.
When I’m good, I’m good, and it worked. They were suddenly so happy that they were terrified someone else would buy the land out from under them before the weekend, and actually sped up from New York after work that night to give me a binder. I drove immediately up Morris Mountain, despite the late hour, to press the check personally into Butler’s calloused palm.
Dicky wasn’t there. Mr. Butler stood in the doorway, with the TV blaring behind him.
“Congratulations. I got a binder on that property we discussed.”
“Changed my mind. I’m not selling.”
“But you said you need money.”
“Let’s see how we do with the false arrest suit.”
“But—”
“Warned you, Ben. I don’t sell land.”
“Mr. Butler, I gave my word to customers.”
“How do you know they aren’t fronting for King?”
“I beg pardon.”
“Maybe King’s paying them to steal my land.”
“In two acre chunks?” I retorted angrily. “At building lot prices? It’ll take him ten years and when he’s done you’ll be the richest man in Newbury.”
Mr. Butler shot back a reminder that while maybe nuts, he wasn’t stupid: “At forty thousand an acre it would cost him less than five million bucks. He’s got five million bucks, Ben. He’ll just keep chopping away until I’m gone.”
“Mr. Butler, I swear, these are ordinary people, a couple of lawyers who want to build a weekend house.”
“Lawyers? Lawyers working for Henry King.” He slammed the door in my face, and turned up the TV.
Chapter 6
Spring came and lingered, warm and remarkably dry—a sensual spring that early on obliterated all memory of winter. It should have been a wonderful spring to fall in love, and had I had my wits about me I’d have abandoned the past to do so.
Summer got better, though not at first.
Despite our best efforts to warn the voters that Steve LaFrance stood for the supreme rights of the greedy, Vicky trailed in the first selectman primary. She had everything going for her, a solid record of hard work, rock-ribbed honesty, and her cheery good looks. But Steve enjoyed the free backing of the radio and TV talkers who had learned that the appearance of a sense of humor could convince a worried electorate that cutting education, withholding food and shelter from helpless children, and bulldozing environmental protections wasn’t really short-sighted, mean-spirited and corrupt.
Then one day Vicky asked me to drive her to Hartford, the state capital, where she had lunch with a fellow of high estate in Connecticut’s Department of Transportation. Lord knows exactly what transpired in Le Bistro: suffice it to say wine had flowed and she slept with her head on my lap all the way home.
Soon after, yellow machines repaved Main Street and the shoulders of Route 7 for miles in both directions with asphalt as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Caravans of minivans set out for the Danbury Mall and within four days every man, woman and child in town owned Rollerblades.
Wrist sprains and road rash abounded, and old Doctor Greenan was considering returning to Yale to brush up on fractures. But the voters were happy and Vicky, who conducted the rest of her campaign on tiny wheels, locked Steve LaFrance back in his Liquor Locker, where he could listen to talk-media to his heart’s content. As Aunt Connie put it, “Thank God for our school children, not to mention Victoria’s ambition to get elected Governor of Connecticut.”
More good news was a very satisfying, hard-earned commission for selling the Yankee Drover Inn: hard earned, because the seller was a jerk and the buyers were pleasant, but still shrewd: satisfying, because they would run a friendly joint a short crawl from my front door. The sale more than made up for my (perverse?) refusal to list ugly McMansions, not to mention Mr. Butler reneging on my land deal, and when school let out I could afford riding camp for little Alison. In my innocence, I even thought that I had defused the cat debate.
The couple of times I bumped into Dicky Butler, he was in town running errands for his father. He looked healthy: a ruddy tan suggested he was helping on the farm; only the deerskin gloves flapping from his pocket reminded me that he was marking time. He kept mostly to himself and didn’t go looking for trouble. But trouble found him.
Some high school dropouts jumped him in the only alley in town—a short-cut between the General Store and the Town Hall theater parking lot—hoping to gain a name for themselves, losing teeth instead.
Trooper Moody bullied the victims into pressing charges. Tim Hall defended Dicky at a pre-trial hearing over in Plainfield, the county seat. Ollie had prepared his case diligently. Too diligently.
Tim, prepped by Ira Roth, asked Ollie to clarify the dates the incidents occurred. Then, professing astonishment that Dicky had assaulted all four men on the same day, he asked for the precise time of the incidents. The judge finished it for him, remarking acidly that a reasonable jury might c
onclude that the one man attacked by four had a right to defend himself. Then His Honor wondered aloud whether Dicky’s false arrest suit against Trooper Moody might have influenced this investigation.
Fourth of July, a biker from Derby named J.J. Topkis sucker-punched Dicky in the White Birch Tavern. Wide Greg, proprietor, reported that Dicky was a real gentleman about it, paid cash for the window through which he threw the biker, who figured prominently in outstanding warrants and did not wait around to press charges. (By the time Trooper Moody commenced his investigation, witnesses had called it an early night and Wide Greg was too busy sawing plywood to volunteer much information.)
But Ollie went after Dicky anyway.
I was driving mournfully home, late one night on the Morrisville Road, from dinner at the country house of Rita Long, a young widow who breezed in occasionally from New York or Hong Kong to thump my heartstrings like a heavy metal bass player. She was leaving in the morning for an indeterminate length of time and while the Fraser Morris gift basket of pâté de fois gras on the seat beside me was typically generous, it offered little consolation. Suddenly I saw Ollie’s flashers strobing the night red and blue. I slowed down for a look. The cruiser’s roof and search lights had pinned an elderly Ford pickup truck that looked like Dicky’s father’s.
Ollie levered his six foot five inches out of his cruiser, one hand near his gun, and in the other a long five-cell halogen Mag light that he had been known to confuse with a nightstick. Distracted by all his candlepower, or gripped by rage, he didn’t notice my lights coming up behind him. In one swift fluid move he yanked open the pickup truck door, pulled Dicky out by the shirt, and threw him to the road. A wine bottle fell out after him and shattered on the pavement.
Dicky was drunk. Trooper Moody let him climb halfway to his knees before he kicked him. He lined up another kick. I blinked my high beams, about as stupid a move as interrupting a wolf in the middle of dinner.
Ollie motioned angrily to keep driving.
I stopped the car, turned on the dome light to signal I wasn’t a threat, put both hands in plain sight on the steering wheel, and closed one eye before he could blind me with the Mag.