by Brad Smith
‘In a manner of speaking,’ she told him. She really didn’t want him in her warehouse.
He turned to her. ‘This is smart, what you’re doing here. You caught yourself a wave, didn’t you? I’ve been thinking about doing some organic pork for a while now. Thing is, I’m not set up to market it the way you are. I mean, I could do it, but you’ve already got the customer base. Smart move would be for the two of us to throw in together.’
Frances smiled. ‘Well, that sure came from left field.’
‘Go big or go home, what I say. I sure as hell didn’t get where I am by following the pack.’
‘Then you don’t need to follow me,’ Frances said.
‘I don’t need you,’ he agreed. ‘You’re right. But I’m making you an offer anyway. This would open up a whole new market for you. And not just pork. I been thinking of exotic meats – caribou, wild boar, elk. That stuff is real popular these days, especially in the urban areas. People in the city have no concept of money. Hell, you could sell ’em organic pork chops for twenty bucks apiece and they wouldn’t bat an eye.’
‘Those dumb city people,’ Frances said. ‘Hell, they’d probably even pay you to take away their trash.’
Hofferman showed his aw shucks smile.
‘Because that’s what this is about, right?’ Frances went on. ‘You’re offering me a slice of pork pie in exchange for me changing my mind about the landfill.’
‘I never said any such thing.’
‘You didn’t have to,’ she said. ‘So what if I was to agree to it? HALT has over a thousand members. You got a deal for everybody, Mr Hofferman? A pig in every pot and a Hummer in every garage?’
Without waiting for a reply, Frances went back into the warehouse for another hamper.
‘Fighting the landfill is a waste of time,’ Hofferman said, waiting for her to return. ‘It’s gonna go through in the end. You can muddy the waters and cost everybody a lot of money for lawyers but in the end it’s gonna go through. Trash disposal is a necessity. You saying you don’t produce garbage yourself? Come on, Frances. People will listen to you.’
‘Not if I change my mind on this, they won’t,’ she said. She slid the hamper into the truck. ‘And I’m not going to. So you can forget about you and me going into business together. As much as that breaks my heart.’
Hofferman, smiling, reached into the truck and helped himself to an apple. As he began to shine it on his shirt, Frances took it away from him and returned it to the hamper. The cologne, whatever it was, was overpowering. Frances remembered her father using something similar. It had been novel to her when she was five.
‘I drove out here thinking I might ask you to dinner,’ he said. He was getting testy now. ‘But I see you for who you are now. For somebody running a glorified vegetable garden, you got a real high opinion of yourself. Where’s that come from?’
‘I was born with it,’ she told him, and went back inside.
‘You’re nothing but a big frog in a little pond,’ he said when she came back. ‘Frogs get to croaking, they can make a lot of noise. But if they get in the way, they have a habit of getting squashed too.’ He impulsively moved to block Frances from loading the hamper on to the truck. ‘You listening?’
‘That almost sounds like a threat,’ Frances said.
‘Let’s call it good advice.’
‘Sounded like a threat to me,’ Carl said.
He was approaching along the side of the building, wearing his carpenter belt, a pencil behind his ear. He had a framing hammer in his right hand and as he approached he flipped the hammer end over end before catching it and sliding it into the loop on his belt.
‘Lookit here,’ Hofferman said. ‘Killed any firemen lately?’
Carl walked up to Hofferman, who was a couple of inches taller than him and thirty pounds heavier. Hofferman was still blocking Frances from the truck. She could have stepped around him but she didn’t.
‘You’re in the way,’ Carl said.
‘What’s it to you?’ Hofferman asked. ‘You got a dog in this fight?’
‘My dog died,’ Carl told him.
Hofferman turned to Frances. ‘Hear that? He’s got no dog in this fight. Maybe there ain’t much fight left in the dog.’
‘Maybe not,’ Carl said. ‘We can discuss it. After you move out of her way.’
Hofferman looked at Carl, then glanced at Frances again, and this time his eyes showed a glimmer of self-doubt. She smiled and then he moved. Just a step, but he moved. Frances slid the basket into the truck before turning to Carl.
‘Mr Hofferman has a business proposal for me,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ Carl said.
‘Yeah. But I’ve instructed him to stick it up his ass so I think we’re just about done here. Unless there was something else, Mr Hofferman? I assume that dinner invitation has passed me by?’
‘I said this was a waste of time,’ Hofferman said. He leaned in toward Frances. ‘I’d remember today, though, if I were you. You might look back at it.’
‘You’re not all that memorable, Hank,’ Frances told him. ‘Go now.’
Hofferman shook his head, as if he pitied her, and he got in the Humvee and made a u-turn on the grass. When he was gone Frances took two apples from inside the truck and rubbed them both on her jacket and gave one to Carl.
‘So somebody sent him,’ Carl said as he took a bite.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He said he told somebody it was a waste of time.’
‘I don’t know who that would be,’ Frances said. ‘He’s the one with the most at stake. He’s the one sitting on five hundred acres.’
Chewing on the apple, Carl thought about that. ‘You know, I walked over there on Saturday. To the site. I was fishing the creek and I just kept walking. They can say what they want about containment. Water runs downhill. That property drains to the river.’
‘I saw your truck by the shed when we came home from market,’ Frances said. ‘I wondered where you were. What time did you get back?’
‘Just dark. You were entertaining your boyfriend.’
‘Was I?’
‘You were entertaining somebody.’ Carl took another bite.
Frances started to say something, then thought better of it. Instead, she mimicked him, smiling and taking a bite from her own apple. He was watching her, smiling, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to press her.
‘Well, I’d better get these apples over to the market in Palmerton,’ she said. ‘I promised them for noon.’
‘Perry not going?’
‘He’s cultivating that field in front of the bush,’ Frances said. ‘I’ll leave him to it, before the rain starts.’
‘Thanks for the apple,’ Carl said. He began to walk away, then stopped and turned back to her. ‘Somebody sent Hofferman, though,’ he said. ‘I wonder who.’
On the drive to Palmerton Frances thought back to Carl, munching on the apple while asking about her boyfriend. From a purely technical standpoint, she couldn’t say whether the man that Carl had seen that night was her boyfriend or not, at least at the moment when Carl had seen him. In a general sense Frances wasn’t all that comfortable with the term ‘boyfriend’, and she was even less at ease using the word ‘technical’ when describing any relationship, even just talking to herself.
Martin had called Thursday, having just arrived back in the country, and, after a few minutes catching up, had invited himself to dinner Saturday night. Getting off the phone, Frances reflected on the fact that she should have been the one doing the inviting, and wondered why she had not.
Having spent the day at the market, she’d been home for less than an hour when he arrived, carrying a bottle of wine and a gorgeous silk blouse he’d bought for her in Peru.
She threw together a salad and grilled a couple of steaks and they drank the wine. Afterward they sat at the dining room table while he showed her dozens of photos on his tablet, so many that after a while she lost track of which count
ry was which. He said ‘you would have loved it there’ so many times she thought she might scream. Instead, she sat quietly and drank a lot of wine. Finally, in an effort to get away from the travelogue, she modeled the blouse for him and then he slipped it from her and they made love in the front room on the leather sofa.
They took a walk afterward. She wanted to show him the new warehouse addition, although he didn’t show much interest in it when she did, preferring to tell her about the farms he’d seen on his trip, how beautiful they were, nestled in this valley or that, with an assortment of stupendous mountain ranges in the background. She pointedly mentioned Carl’s name several times but he never asked about him, even though he hadn’t been in the picture when Martin had left the country. He never inquired after Kate either, although he’d been aware of the trial. Thinking back, it occurred to Frances that in general he preferred not to know about certain things, especially things that didn’t fit into his aesthetic view of the world.
Early in the evening he mentioned that she was off someplace else, and then joked about it a couple times afterward, including immediately after they’d had sex. She told him that it wasn’t true, and she believed it when she said it, thinking that it was he who was acting differently. Still, when he told her he wasn’t staying the night, citing work to be done in the morning, she didn’t ask him to reconsider. It wasn’t until an hour later, when she was in the kitchen cleaning up, that she realized what it was that had been nagging at her.
In the weeks that he’d been gone, she couldn’t recall a time when she had missed him. Not even one.
Carl found Rufus Canfield sitting at the bar in Archer’s later that evening. Rufus was finishing a plate of ribs when Carl walked in and joined him. Carl ordered a beer for himself, and another for Rufus. It was shortly past eight and the place was practically empty. There was a couple drinking Caesars farther down the bar and a few kids shooting pool in the back room. The bartender was a thin woman with jet black hair and a tattoo of a rose, also black, on her wrist. Carl paid for the beer and tipped her. She took Rufus’s plate with her when she left.
Rufus made a half-hearted effort to remove rib sauce from his thick mustache before tossing the napkin on the bar. He wore his usual corduroy sports coat and a blue shirt. No tie. He picked up the newly arrived beer. ‘Why, thank you, sir,’ he said, as if speaking to the lager.
‘What’s new, Rufus?’ Carl asked.
‘Nothing is new under the sun,’ Rufus replied. ‘If we are to believe Mr Shakespeare.’
‘I always thought that was the Bible.’
Rufus considered this. ‘You might be right. And it could be Shakespeare too. Which means he stole it. Did you come here to disillusion me, Carl?’
‘I didn’t think you needed any help in that department.’
Rufus smiled and saluted Carl with his beer glass before drinking again. ‘Though I’m a little surprised to learn that you’re a Bible scholar.’
‘My mother sent me to Sunday school,’ Carl said. ‘I’m not sure that qualifies me as a scholar.’
‘It just might, in these parts,’ Rufus said. ‘I do suspect you’ve come looking for me, though. Newspaperman’s intuition. And I suspect it is not to question my literary references.’
‘Hank Hofferman paid Frances a visit today.’
‘Did he now?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what did he have to say?’
‘You want the short version?’ Carl asked. ‘He told her she’d be sorry if she kept fighting the landfill.’
Rufus thought about this as he took another drink, half emptying the glass. ‘And what did Frances say?’
‘You know Frances,’ Carl said.
‘Go fuck yourself, Hank Hofferman?’
‘You got it.’
‘Imagine my shock.’
‘You know better than anybody my history with Hofferman and the pig barns, Rufus,’ Carl said. ‘But the truth is, I don’t know much about the guy. Is he just a blowhard?’
‘You’re asking if he represents a genuine threat to Frances,’ Rufus said. ‘Do you mean in a physical sense?’
‘I mean in any sense,’ Carl said. ‘He’s got a lot of money tied up in that piece of property out there. Frances says he paid more than it’s worth as farmland, mainly because most of the owners weren’t looking to sell. If this thing falls through, then that’s all it is – farmland. And he takes a bath. Sound right to you?’
‘Inasmuch as very little to do with Hank Hofferman sounds right to me, yes,’ Rufus said. He sat smoothing his mustache for a moment, like a cat in its grooming. ‘I can tell you this. He’s clumsy and inarticulate, but on a base level he’s a rather clever fellow. He’s never left his fingerprints on anything, as far as I know. Even these disgusting hog barns – he owns the business and markets the animals to Beaver Lodge, but the barns themselves are owned by various individual farmers. If there is ever any kind of liability issue, with the lagoons or airborne pollutants, whatever, the small owners are on the hook, not Hofferman.’
‘Then what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. Does that help you?’
‘I have no idea. I was hoping you’d tell me he was nothing but a loudmouth.’
‘Would you have believed me if I had?’
‘I guess not.’ Carl turned on the stool as he took another drink. The pool shooters in the back were getting rowdy now. As Carl watched, a cue ball rocketed off one of the tables and hit the wall with a crack like a rifle shot.
‘The question here, quite obviously,’ Rufus said, ‘is not to what extent you want to be involved. The question is – to what extent can you be involved? I notice you don’t attend the meetings at the farm.’
‘I can’t go anywhere near it,’ Carl said. ‘All Hofferman has to say is, there’s the guy who killed a man the last time you people went up against me.’
‘Then again, you’re working for Frances,’ Rufus said. ‘And I believe you’re rather fond of her.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
Rufus laughed as he took another drink of beer, then held up two fingers to the rose-tattooed bartender, who was sitting down farther along the bar, leafing through a glossy magazine while ignoring the shenanigans in the back room. As Rufus waited for the beer, he looked thoughtfully at Carl, deciding something. When the draft arrived, he told the woman to put it on his tab and turned back to Carl.
‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘I very nearly told you this before but I was afraid you’d think I was trying to exonerate you in some way. Which is not the case. But it’s something you should know.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Red Walton was as drunk as the proverbial skunk the night he was killed. It was kept quiet for a long time after the fact. But I got it firsthand a few years back from the coroner who did the autopsy, on a night when he himself was in his cups. Walton had a blood alcohol reading of point two five when he died. Three times the limit, Carl. Pie-eyed. Four sheets to the wind. Pissed to the gills. No way he should’ve been allowed at that fire, let alone up a ladder. Furthermore, Red Walton got drunk at the fire station that day. He was out of work and spent his days there drinking. I’ve even heard rumors that some of his fellow firefighters were trying to kick him off the department. But they closed ranks when he died.’
Carl sat quietly for a while. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said finally. ‘If I hadn’t set the fire, he wouldn’t have died. That’s it.’
‘Or maybe he would’ve gotten behind the wheel that night and killed a family in a car crash. The man was a bleeding fucking idiot, Carl. You can’t predict anything in this life. So, while you were responsible for Red Walton’s death, so was he.’
‘But I was responsible,’ Carl said. ‘Hofferman will use it if he can.’
‘True,’ Rufus admitted. ‘Which means you have to stay out of it.’
‘That’s what it means.’
R
ufus finished one beer and pushed the glass carefully away, like a man making a move on a chess board. He reached for the full beer in the same deliberate fashion. ‘He could very well have been running a bluff on Frances,’ he said then.
‘I thought of that,’ Carl said. ‘I guess we’ll have to wait and see.’
Rufus took a long drink of beer. ‘Have you seen your daughter?’
‘No.’
‘I assume you’ve tried.’
‘Yeah.’
Rufus nodded and let it lay there. What Carl liked about the man was that he wouldn’t ask questions that had no answers. Maybe that was the lawyer in him.
‘I’m at a dead end, Rufus,’ Carl said. ‘A man reaches a certain age, he should know when to stop banging his head against the wall.’
Rufus Canfield smiled. ‘William Blake said that you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.’
Carl picked up the full beer from the bar. ‘You sure that’s not from the Bible?’
‘No,’ Rufus replied. ‘That one I got right.’
Bud Stephens, having boned up on Australian trivia via Google, invited Gina from Spinnakers to dinner Friday night. Before asking, he told her a heartbreaking and completely bogus tale of how he and his wife had recently separated and as a result he’d moved into the Four Seasons. They could have Thai food in his suite.
That afternoon he went to the opening of a new interior design store on Walnut Avenue. Walnut was a side street a few blocks from The Docks, a formerly depressed area that was becoming trendy due to that proximity. Secondhand stores and pawnshops were now boutiques and cafés. Clapboard houses slapped together during the Second World War were being renovated and quaint-ed up, their prices quadrupling in the process. The crackheads and junkies were being pushed toward Parkdale, where the dominoes had yet to fall. The crackheads and the junkies would have loved to stay in and around Walnut Avenue but they could no longer afford it.