The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  Everything downtown is shut tight. The two restaurants stop serving at nine—ten o’clock on the weekends. CVS/pharmacy closes at ten. The bars close at midnight. The only living soul is Ronnie McBride, curled up asleep in the doorway of Crandall Investments, which happens at least five times a week ever since his wife died of cancer two years ago. Often one of the patrolmen wakes him around three-thirty when he drives by on his rounds, and tonight it would be Harry Pasquale, but tonight Harry will be busy elsewhere.

  Ever since the larger stores shut up shop—McGafferty’s Department Store, Mills Men’s Shop, and the rest—downtown Brewster has been in a steady decline, as the chains situate themselves in strip malls along Route 1. About every six months a new store starts up, but it usually closes in under a year. Two consignment shops, two beauty parlors, a tanning salon, an art gallery, a coffee shop called the Brewster Brew, a jewelers, the Brewster Times & Advertiser, Betty’s Breakfast, a karate school—I forget what kind—and a fluctuating number of gift and souvenir shops, the library, Rudy’s Pizza, and that about does it. Four churches and, oh, yes, four bars, a bowling alley, and the Brewster Inn, which is a forty-unit motel with half the units closed until May 1. Until five years ago it was called the Brewster Motel, but then the owner, Melody Baker, decided she could raise prices ten percent by changing the name to the Brewster Inn. Now she wants to change it to the Brewster Arms. The downside of a name change is she’ll have to slather the trim with a fresh coat of white paint, which it sorely needs. A fresh bed of geraniums wouldn’t hurt, either.

  Tonight she has three guests, though two of the efficiencies are booked through the month. In fact, one of her guests arrived thirty minutes ago, having driven down from Boston. His name’s Ernest Hartmann—he dislikes being called Ernie—and he’s an insurance investigator, though right now, as he told his office, he’s on vacation. In truth, he almost never takes a vacation, which was a contributing factor to his divorce six years ago. But in Boston he recently questioned a fellow who had unsuccessfully torched his own boutique as a way of coping with a small mountain of bad debt. When confronted, the fellow told Hartmann about some folks in Brewster—kidnappers or cultists or neopagans, it was hard to make sense of it, but it was something the fellow’s brother knew about, and the fellow thought if Hartmann was interested, and he should be, he might then agree with the state fire marshal that the fire was accidental. Yesterday he’d given Hartmann a brass coin with a five-pointed star within a circle on one side and a goat standing on its hind legs on the other, as well as some marks like letters, though Hartmann was sure they weren’t from any Western language. But Hartmann felt if he could turn this tip into a profit he might get that transfer to LA, where his two kids, twin nine-year-old girls, lived with his ex-wife. However questionable his current quest might be, it would be worth it if it let him spend more time with his daughters.

  Even so, Hartmann had about decided not to make the trip, but on Wednesday evening he ran into Tommy Meadows, a state health investigator, who told Hartmann he also had a question about Brewster, and if Hartmann could look into a few nooks and crannies, he, Tommy Meadows, would make it worth his while. So Hartmann had agreed. Still, he wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up as a wild-goose chase. As it was, he had only started at midnight and nearly turned around three times on the drive down.

  Hartmann put his bag up on the table next to the TV. He is a pudgy man in his late thirties, and he likes to wear a Hawaiian shirt under a blue blazer. What he has a lot of is hair, a thick dark brown mop that he combs back over his head and that gives him another two inches of height, and today it looks as it did when he was sixteen. He’s been lucky in the hair area, as he likes to tell himself.

  Hartmann took out his shaving kit and pajamas, then took out a photo of the twins, a pair of pretty blondes who, even in the photograph, looked like they had trouble standing still. Once into puberty they’d be holy terrors, and Hartmann believed if he weren’t living nearby, he could end up as a grandfather by the age of forty-five. Most nights before his wife left, he’d check on them two or three times just for the pleasure of seeing their blond hair tousled on their pillows. These days he was lucky if he got a chance to telephone, luckier still if they answered. No, he had to get to the West Coast, and whatever these cultists or kooks were doing, as long as it was illegal and moderately sensational, it might present him with a ticket to LA.

  Reaching again into his bag, Hartmann took out clean underwear and socks for tomorrow, as well as a black nine-millimeter semi-automatic that made a slight clunk as he set it on the night table next to the photograph. It was a thirteen-shot Browning Hi-Power that had belonged to his father, who had died before his daughters were born. Hartmann had fired it only on a practice range, though he’d been lugging it around for fifteen years. He never even needed to show it, but he always thought it might be useful, though he often left it at home. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought it tonight. Just hasty packing, most likely.

  Nothing was pretty about the pistol, a solid mass of chipped and scratched black metal, with black plastic grips. It was functional and matter-of-fact, more like a bouncer than a dancer. Glancing at it, Hartmann decided he didn’t want it next to his daughters’ photograph, so he moved it to the night table on the other side of the bed. After all, the pistol didn’t come from a world that Hartmann wished the twins to have any part of.

  If you think Hartmann is basically decent you’re right, and it could lead him down paths that others might have avoided. He did too many favors and good turns for people who didn’t deserve it. Looking at the twins’ photo as he pulled up the blankets and prepared to cut the light, he felt himself choking up. They were so goddamn cute!

  • • •

  Most likely you’ve visited a town like Brewster. The town isn’t poor, thanks to the taxes paid by summer people. The schools are good and the new police station on Water Street seems bigger and brighter than necessary, since the cops do little more than keep an eye on the closed-up summerhouses, nab drunk drivers on Route 1, and break up occasional domestic violence. At times one of the bars—Tony’s, in particular—offers a good fight on the weekend. What else? A funeral home is situated in an old mansion on Water Street. There’s the usual handful of doctors, lawyers, and dentists, and then the hospital, which is small but thriving. Oh, yes, downtown, on the top three floors of the four-story Metcalf Building—Brewster’s tallest building—The You Within You, a holistic health alternative, has set up shop in the former showrooms of Bates Home Furniture. Along with yoga classes—Kundalini, Vinyasa, Svaroopa, and Heated Baptiste Power Yoga—are classes in tai chi and meditation, classes in chanting, gong meditation, crystal ball meditation, even belly dancing. Or you might visit the various practitioners in Reiki, reflexology, polarity therapy, magnetic therapy, massage, and so on. Placebo U, it’s called by Dr. Balfour at the hospital. You-You, it’s called by everyone else. As an alternative health co-op, it has a warren of large and small rooms where various teachers, adepts, gurus, savants, masseurs, masseuses, and specialists in the aerobic and anaerobic, as well as yoga, can rent space, while all the day and half the night the old showrooms reverberate with people jumping, hopping, stretching, and striking martial attitudes. There’s lots of talk about energy flow, or qi, lots of words like moxibustion, Kampo, bagua, and Zang Fu organs. This isn’t to poke fun. You-You is Brewster’s biggest business and soon it means to open a store to sell lotions, potions, and pills, a whole catalog of items to wear, eat, sniff, or rub on your body.

  Two-thirds of the people in Brewster were born here, went to school here, work here, and will most likely die here—lifers, you might call them. They’re not entirely sick to death of one another, but they know one another’s secrets, or imagine they do, and turn gossip into a fine art. If you overheard two of them in the Stop & Shop, it might sound like this. Shopper 1: “Sonny’s on a tear again.” Shopper 2: “Tammy in Warwick?” Shopper 1: “Baby’s got a virus.” Shopper 2: “Can you blame hi
m, I mean considering?” Shopper 1: “Pop says the same thing over his eggs.” Shopper 2: “You can cry wolf on remission only just so often.” Shopper 1: “Knocked down his own mailbox.”

  Fill in the blanks, you’d have a novel; keep it short and it’s a play by Beckett.

  As for the remaining third, some are retired, some work, some commute, some fish, some just like the water, some hide out, some are trying a geographical cure, some are busy discovering themselves—much of which is also true of the lifers. Most might strike you as regular people, just plain folks, but hookers and rent boys regularly drive down from Providence. One of the hookers says, “When I was a kid, I’d go up and down streets like these and wonder what went on in the houses. Since I’ve been a working girl, I’ve found out.”

  Brewster has half a dozen AA groups. Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous—all have stories. A Gamblers Anonymous group started up after Foxwoods opened. The casino is a thirty-minute drive, and some people in town work there. You look at the social effects within fifty miles of a big casino, the jump in the number of thefts, divorces, suicides, traffic accidents, bankruptcies, you name it. In AA, you see a lot of cooks; in GA, you get a lot of lawyers; in NA, you get doctors and nurses. Each occupation has its own form of self-medicating. R. James Huntington was a lawyer in Brewster who attended Saturday-night GA meetings in the basement of St. John’s. He kicked the habit, but it didn’t help. One September night he walked outside and before going ten feet he took a pistol and blew his brains out. Father Pete had to hose down the stained-glass window on the north side of the nave before Sunday Mass and he still missed some sticky bits. Huntington had drained three of his clients’ trust funds. He had kicked the habit but was a million bucks in debt.

  These twelve-step meetings can give a taste of what goes on in these “hibernating” New England towns. Sister Chastisement, a dominatrix from Narragansett with a clientele in Brewster, spends two hours with her physical therapist working on her carpal tunnel after a busy night in Brewster. And she won’t even look at a client unless he’s college educated.

  But at two-thirty in the morning even Sister Chastisement has gone home to bed. Cats are on the prowl, as well as coyotes and a few fishers. Owls wait among the branches, and some nights you’ll hear a rabbit scream. As we rise above the town, we see street after street of darkened houses. The big Victorians on Oak, Spruce, and Water streets, the smaller houses around where the mill used to stand; then, as we move toward the edges of town, we find ranch houses and Cape Cods. Despite the hour, through some windows you’ll see a flickering TV and, this is strange, someone reading a book by the fireplace. In a town of seven thousand, half are sexually active. So either singly or in pairs, even a threesome, a few are still at it. The couples tend to have schedules, but for single folks, like Nurse Spandex, it’s catch-as-catch-can. As for other late-night diversions—crossword puzzles, card games, jigsaw puzzles, board games, computer solitaire—maybe fifty insomniacs are still busy. Look through the kitchen window of that split-level on Mason Street. Ginger and Howard Phelps are playing their five-thousandth game of gin rummy. Ginger has won 2,600 games to Howard’s 2,400, but Howard thinks he’s catching up. Mugs of warm milk with honey and slices of Ginger’s pecan-cranberry bread—some nights it can take them three hours to get to sleep.

  A few are still up because they work late. Larry Rodman got back to his small white clapboard house on Millman Street ten minutes ago, and right now he’s taking cold pizza out of the fridge. Larry’s forty-five and weighs the same as he did when he graduated from Brewster High: 150 pounds. He could eat pizza with double oil and double cheese all day and never gain a pound. He’s lucky that way. He lives in his parents’ house, which he inherited. His father died in 2000, his mother in 2005, and now the house belongs to Larry, though he had to buy out his older brother and sister, who live in southern California. No way were they going to move back to the “weather from hell.”

  As the pizza heats up—in the oven, not the microwave—Larry takes three stoneware cookie jars down from the shelf and sets them on the kitchen table. Then he digs a ring out of his pocket and holds it up to the light: a woman’s ring, fourteen-carat gold. That means the middle jar. The one on the left is for eighteen-carat, and the one on the right is for twelve-carat. Anything under twelve-carat, he ignores. Before he puts them back, he gives each jar a shake, taking pleasure in their heft. A fourth jar for engagement rings is still on the shelf. None of those tonight. But these jars and the jewelry they contain, they’re one of the perks of working at the Burn Palace.

  For others, what keeps them up is what a friend used to call “the four a.m. oh-my-Gods.” There’s Vicki Lefebvre chewing her knuckle at her living room window in a white colonial on Market Street. Nina, her sixteen-year-old, has been gone two nights. She had called earlier to say she was staying with a friend from school, but then the friend herself had called looking for her. A few times recently Nina had been gone all night or come back at three or four. But this is the first time she’s been gone two nights. Vicki’s ex-husband lives in Groton, and Vicki is tempted to call him, get him out of bed to share the pain, though she knows she’d only get his voicemail, just as she only gets her daughter’s voicemail. Where Nina goes on these nights is a mystery, except she comes home with mud on her shoes, and once with burrs stuck to the sleeve of her wool coat. When Vicki asks where she’s been, Nina says “nowhere” or “a friend’s house” or “it’s none of your business.” And when Vicki says, “Everything you do is my business,” Nina says, “Whatever.” This would be a worry in any case, but five days ago Vicki saw Nina with three others in the Brewster Brew, and these others, a man and two women, were in their twenties and thirties. One was positively gray-haired. They were laughing as if they’d known one another all their lives, Nina included. They weren’t teachers; Vicki didn’t know who they were. When she asked her daughter, Nina had said, “Nobody. They weren’t anybody.” So Vicki stands at the window, chewing her knuckle, and watches the branches blow back and forth. She knows she has to do something, but if she tries to ground Nina, Nina will only laugh. Then what will she do?

  Surely fear is the oldest emotion. Not love, not pride, not greed. The emotion urging you to run is older than the one telling you to embrace. Take screams, for example: screams of excitement, happiness, sex, laughter, success, terror. When Nurse Spandex screamed in the hospital nursery, those jarred from sleep didn’t wonder, “Hmm, what kind of scream is that?” They knew. And their bodies responded before their minds. We say their blood turned cold, but words can’t do justice to the terror that woke people from sleep. Jamie Shepherd, lying in bed with two broken legs, wanted to jump up and run; Mabel Flynn, ninety-seven years old and nearly flatlined, felt a surge of adrenaline that would send her crawling down the hall if she weren’t hooked to a dozen machines.

  As when a stone is dropped in a pond, the ripples activated by those screams spread outward—the terror of those jerked awake in the nearest rooms, terror down the hall, terror upstairs and downstairs. Then, more slowly through the sleeping town, telephones began to ring: first the police, then the hospital chain of command: nurses, nurse supervisors, doctors, department heads, chief of staff, chief of medical affairs, right up to the hospital administrator. From volunteers to members of the board of trustees, telephones jangled, buzzed, or chirped in the night. All had friends, and many felt a need to call them, and soon reporters were called, teachers, psychologists, social workers, and busybodies. Then it moved past Brewster, to the larger world, as people learned a baby had been stolen from the hospital and replaced with a snake.

  So there’s a difference between who is awake before two-thirty and who is awake after. But of those awake before two-thirty, let’s look at Carl Krause. Do you see the craftsman bungalow on the corner of Newport and Hope, the one with gray shingles? Do you see those two small lighted windows in the gable above the front porch? That’s where Carl is after a fight with his wife, Harrie
t; that is, he raged and she stood back. But instead of being asleep, he’s lying on his bed fully dressed; he’s even got his boots on. He’s a big man, with unruly black hair, and he needs a shave. Years ago the whole bedroom was done over in knotty pine paneling by Harriet’s first husband, and Carl’s lying very still, staring at the knotholes. He’s trying to catch them move; he knows they’re doing it. When he turns his head, he can see them shift from the corner of his eye. They don’t move a lot, only enough to be a worry. And they change their shapes. Those two above his head that look like two eyes in the top half of a face, Carl saw them blink. He saw their eyebrows move. Do you believe eyes are the windows to the soul? These souls are dark and nasty. Carl knows they don’t mean him any good. Sure, you could say any knothole looks like an eye, but can you say the knotholes have faces and heads, even ears? And they’re not necessarily human faces, not even animal faces, or not animals Carl has seen. Maybe reptiles or snakes. And some of the eyes look like dead people’s eyes. Even when they move, they look like dead people’s eyes.