The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

Which Todd found a somewhat disappointing attitude. There was nothing more exciting, more fundamental, than what he and Jack were engaged in together. He left the farm feeling, as usual, a strange combination of energy and sorrow. It was a sad scene, the old farmer and his younger, disabled wife. She tried to come out to the porch, at least, to wave goodbye to him, even though it was clearly hard for her to do. Not painful, he hoped. She always had the same expression on her face, a sort of petrified alarm or confusion; he didn’t know if it was the stroke that froze her features that way or if that was just the way she always felt now. He knew that on some level they hated having him there, hated having company of any kind. But he couldn’t help it. He and Jack were like partners at this point. And Todd’s real dream, which it still seemed too soon to mention, was to buy the farm itself and operate it exclusively for the restaurant—turn it into a sort of transparent farm-to-table operation, a teaching center for children and for chefs and just for people with an interest in the whole approach he was pioneering. It was too sensitive a subject to bring up with Jack for the moment, and yet every time he rolled back down their driveway to the road, Todd imagined that conversation in his head, and every time he did, the look on both their faces—Joanna’s too—was one of relief.

  May: green garlic, asparagus, rhubarb, beets, butter chard, flint corn, tomatoes, peppers, orazio fennel, soybeans, leeks, eggplants, poussins, mustard flowers, pea shoots, Dutch belted milking cows, Normandy milking cows, Tamworth pigs, stinging nettles, Mokum carrots, butter.

  The philosophy was this: We, meaning Americans—others too, but you had to keep it close to home, to instill a sense of pride and identity in your audience—are estranged from our food. Where it grows, how it’s made, how it gets to us. Just because I can have bananas delivered in the middle of winter, and can charge what I want in order to make up for the cost, doesn’t make that a good or productive idea. We are alienated from the most basic, defining experience of being alive, of being human, of knowing what it means to survive. Todd would build a place that would show the world what was possible within the confines of this idea—a restaurant infatuated not with the narcissism of technique, but with its own harmonic relationship to the land, the weather, the seasons. He could cook anything he wanted, anywhere in the world, at this point in his career; but he would let the specifics of this time and place dictate what he did, and from that commitment to humility, others would learn what was possible. A new way of cooking, of eating, of achieving beauty and refinement while still surviving in harmony with the earth, before it was too late for any of that to make a difference.

  And this spot in the Berkshires was perfect. It couldn’t have been more rural—New England was America, if you had any sense of history at all—but it was still close enough for New Yorkers to get there, if they were committed enough. So far the coverage had been rapturous. He expected a Michelin visit before the year was out.

  By the end of May the dining room started to fill up in a serious way. It was the high season around there; people came up for the summer, people who could afford to dine there semi-regularly. The occasional celebrity, which as a restaurateur you wanted a little of, but not too much. If there was one conspicuous absence, it was Philip Hadi, arguably a celebrity but more pertinently the First Selectman of the town in which Todd’s operation was putting down its roots. Todd didn’t want or need to schmooze him, he just felt that they were partners of sorts, kindred spirits who had seen the promise in this unspoiled little place; but Hadi had never come into the restaurant, not once. Not even when Todd invited him. He was famous for his frugal habits, Todd knew, so he tried not to take it personally. When Hadi did eat out, it was usually at the Undermountain, the diner just down the street from the Town Hall. He’d always order the patty melt. Every day the same. Just like he wore the same clothes. He was a little obsessive that way, people said. After the first ten or fifteen times he ordered the patty melt, they’d just renamed it after him—printed a new menu and everything—but he never asked for a menu anyway, so they weren’t even sure he knew about it.

  —

  Foreclosures, though there weren’t that many of them in the immediate area, seemed like a safe place to start—less money up front, more profit potential down the line—and when Mark mentioned that to Gerry, Gerry had a clever idea. Bank-auction listings were published first in the Gazette; the Gazette came out every Thursday, which meant Abigail Bogert had the information a few days before that. The two Firth boys took her out to lunch, to plead their cause: local entrepreneurs, not speculators from who knows where, and if by chance the Gazette’s published bank-foreclosure listings were shorter by a line or two, that only made Howland look better, right? Mark had assumed he would have to do all the talking at this lunch—older ladies loved him, and he had a lot of experience charming clients—but he had never really seen his brother in work mode before. By the time that lunch was over, tiny old Abigail was so red-faced from the attention that she probably would have let them rewrite the front page if they wanted to. They thought differently, spoke differently, the two brothers: all Mark’s life that had been a frustration, but now it was an advantage. In June they flipped their first property, for a modest $20K profit, and he gave Gerry twenty percent of it.

  One August morning there was a bank-owned house in Egremont Mark wanted to check out. He drove over right after breakfast, but maddeningly he couldn’t even see inside: someone—the crazy decamped owner, most likely—had taken the extraordinarily hostile step of painting all the windows black. Mark drove back to Howland and met Gerry at Daisy’s for lunch, expecting some sympathy, but Gerry just laughed at him. “They have this thing now,” he said, “called the internet?” Sure enough, when Mark got home it took him all of five minutes to find photos of the interior and a floor plan too. In his head he still heard the mocking voice of his brother, who loved to make him feel stupid. But this was his business, and when you paid people to work for you, that meant their good ideas were your good ideas.

  They picked up the Egremont house by borrowing against their three others, and those internet pictures, while structurally accurate, proved woefully out of date. Some kind of private or personal disaster had unfolded in that house. There was water damage everywhere, including most of the living room floor, which was warped. One of the toilets was cracked almost straight down the middle—puzzling, but not so bad—but then the waste pipe had been damaged too. The closets were ripe with mold, the window sashes looked like someone had been cutting at them with a knife or a scissors. Why? He knew nothing about the previous owners except that they had stopped paying their mortgage. Maybe their sad tale was somewhere on the internet too, like everything else seemed to be, but if so Mark had no desire to read it. A house was an asset, not a story.

  The Egremont place was more spacious than it looked from the street, with an exterior upstairs entrance and a capped gas line that could be used for a second kitchen; Mark thought the smart thing to do was divide it into two units. More rentable that way—certainly to the type of tenants they were looking for. It was work he could have done himself, but he would have lost a month to it, maybe more, depending what he found under that living room floor. He still had Barrett Taylor’s number in his contacts, so he reached out. Barrett said he’d take the job, since he could get the clock to restart on his unemployment after it was over. Mark thought he sounded drunk. He was a headache, but also one of the few guys Mark knew who could do more than one thing well. And this was the perfect job for Barrett, because when he felt like trying he did excellent work, and when he didn’t feel like trying, there’d be no homeowner there to get in his or Mark’s face about it. Barrett had a knack for offending clients—a compulsion, maybe. Mark had once had to fire him on the spot. Rich people disliked him, was Barrett’s own take on it, because he called them on their bullshit.

  Five weeks later Mark summoned Gerry over to the house to check out Barrett’s handiwork, before they started advertising for tenants. Gerry was grea
t at knowing what the local market would bear. Mark introduced them and they shook hands.

  “You bought me a beer once,” Barrett said. “At the Ship.”

  “I sort of remember that,” Gerry said.

  “Yeah. It was right after the last time your brother laid me off.”

  Mark rolled his eyes. “Well, there’ll be steady work now,” Gerry said. “These floors look great, by the way.”

  Barrett grinned. “Amazing what you can get accomplished when the boss is off site,” he said. “Like way off site.”

  “Yeah, hilarious,” Mark said, “so look. Here’s the thing I wanted to ask you. Those exterior stairs in winter will be like a lawsuit waiting to happen, plus it looks like a servants’ entrance, so I’m thinking there’s room for a staircase right inside the front door. What I want to know from you, Gerry, is whether cutting off the view of the street from what’s now the living room, in order to put in a front staircase, would affect it—”

  “Plus whether the construction is even doable,” Barrett said. “That’ll be a narrow staircase.”

  “It’s doable.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say. By which—”

  “Oh, well, excuse the fuck out of me then. I just thought you might want to check the code for the width of the stairs—”

  Mark’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket; it showed a 212 number. “Hold on,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’ll definitely devalue the house,” Gerry said. “For resale down the road, I mean. But no reason—”

  “I did check the code,” Mark said, “that’s all I—”

  “Resale?” Barrett said. “Then why would you—”

  “Just hold on,” Mark said, “I have to take this,” and he went through the front door and down the steps onto the overgrown lawn. “Mark Firth,” he said.

  “Mr. Firth? Hold for Greg Towles.”

  Mark walked across the lawn, toward the road, as he held. A semi—technically illegal on this county route, trying to bypass the slow traffic on 7—lumbered odiferously past. Across the street was a two-car garage, doors wide open and packed to its rafters with junk; beyond that, the autumnal trees waved in the shade of the valley.

  “Mark! It has been a long, hard road, and you have been very patient, but I am happy to say I am calling with good news. There’s a settlement. The judge in the case has appointed what’s called a Special Master, a kind of overseer in charge of distributing every recoverable nickel our friend Mr. Spalding tried to hide. In return, we’ve agreed to a formula for compensation, which is to say, basically, how many cents on the dollar you’ll recover, in terms of your original claim of loss.”

  “And how much is that?”

  “In your case, about forty-three cents on the dollar. Which is pretty good compared to yesterday when you were getting bupkis, right?”

  “That’s before or after your commission?”

  “Before. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think we earned it on this one. You have no idea how satisfying this is. We’re all jumping up and down over here.”

  “What happened—I mean, I’m not saying any of this out of ingratitude or anything like that, but just totally out of curiosity, what happened to the rest of the money?”

  “Guys like this—which is to say, thieves—they’re pretty good at hiding their assets,” Towles said. “You cannot believe how much work this represents, finding even this much of it. It’s all over the world. We’ve gone into his children’s IRAs, for Pete’s sake. We’ve been ruthless. The rest, he spent, or lost, or gave away.”

  “What do you mean, gave away?”

  “Like to charities. Lots and lots of money to charities. Go figure. Very hard to recover that money, even if, you know, we wanted to.”

  “Wow,” Mark said. “I would not have guessed that.”

  “I know, right? Bad conscience, maybe? Or maybe he knew we were coming and just wanted to put it out of reach. Well, even if he was doing it for bad motives, which who knows, at least we can console ourselves that the money’s doing some good in the world. Right? So anyway, what would be best, if you could see your way clear, is to make a trip to the city, look over the entire agreement, sign an affidavit of your consent, and we can begin the process of getting your money back to you. When might that be possible?”

  “Pretty much any time,” Mark said. “I’ve got a lot of flexibility right now. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Towles laughed. “That’s always the way, right? Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”

  Back in the empty living room, Gerry watched his brother through the window, fuming as the minutes dragged on. This Barrett guy would not shut up. He kept wanting to talk about high school, which then morphed into some strange rant about how much he hated working for Mark but every other general contractor in the Berkshires had a vendetta against him.

  “I say things,” Barrett said. “I can’t seem to be quiet when I should.”

  “Oh yeah?” Gerry said.

  “Political things, sometimes. Like, forbidden things.” Gerry turned to look at him. “I mean it’s this environment where you can’t say anything. Sometimes I just can’t help keeping it real. But you can’t even say what’s true, sometimes, because it’s suddenly not allowed.”

  “Well, that’s for sure,” Gerry said. He watched his brother put his phone in his pocket and then give what looked like a little fist pump before turning back toward the house. Take your fucking time, your highness. “Yeah,” he said, “people do not want you to speak, unless it’s in a certain way. Somebody can announce he intends to kill us all, but God forbid you should say anything offensive about him.”

  “People will suck up to their enemies,” Barrett said. “Every time.”

  Gerry looked at him with a sudden awakening of interest. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly right. Why do they do that, though?”

  “Damned if I know,” Barrett said.

  Mark walked in and told Gerry that the remaining design and construction decisions were entirely up to him. Whatever he thought was best, Mark would go along, and Barrett should get right to work on it. They could work out the pay. In the meantime he was taking the rest of the week off. He smiled and clapped them both on their shoulders and went off to his truck.

  “Douchebag,” Barrett said. Gerry thought about reprimanding him, to remind him of the hierarchy that Mark himself had just undermined by giving them both the same peremptory order; but even though he knew he should, he couldn’t bring himself to disagree. “Got any siblings?” he said instead.

  “Yeah. I’d chew my arm off before I’d work for any of them. Hey, can I ask you something?”

  Gerry couldn’t tell if this guy really thought they were pals now, or was just testing him. Sometimes guys like Barrett were aggressively friendly, intimate, like they were trying to push you to the point where you’d reveal that you thought you were better than them. Usually this happened in a bar, where it could be a delicate situation to get out of. “Ask away,” he said.

  “What are you two doing? Buying up these shitty places. I thought Mark fancied himself some kind of a fucking artist. I mean whatever, I don’t care what he does except I can’t figure out how this is more money than doing renovations for rich assholes you can charge whatever you want.”

  Gerry sighed. “If we rent to people below a certain income level, the federal government will subsidize that rent. On top of which we get these properties, which we bought for nothing, at zero percent interest. So they’re assets we can borrow against, assets worth two or three times what we paid for them. We borrow against them to buy more houses. If you just do it with one house, the revenue stream is pretty small. But mo’ houses, mo’ money, basically. And thanks to the feds, it’s all rigged, we can’t lose.”

  “Huh. And here I thought the rich people were where all the money was. But it’s the poor folks, eh?”

  “The government is where all
the money is,” Gerry said testily. “You can’t beat them. But you can exploit them.”

  “Fucking Mark,” Barrett said.

  Mark drove home and packed a bag. He didn’t even bother to look at a train schedule; if he got to the station in Wassaic and had to wait, he’d wait. On weekdays there was a train every two hours or so. Karen was in her office at Caldwell House; he sat in their empty kitchen and phoned her with the news.

  “What about Haley?” she said.

  “What about her?”

  “She gets off the school bus at four. I’m working.”

  “So leave early. What are they going to do, fire you?”

  “Maybe, yeah! But the point is I’m not just going to leave—”

  “You don’t need that job anymore anyway. That’s my point.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need. It makes no difference if you wait one day to go down there. Right?”

  It didn’t. And now that he was doing the math in his head, he wasn’t sure it was still possible to get to Towles’s office by five o’clock anyway. He’d been so excited he hadn’t thought through a single detail. But he wasn’t going to admit to a mistake like that. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go tomorrow, then. Just wanted to share the good news.”

  The next day he drove down to Wassaic and boarded the early train. He could have just driven the whole way into the city, but he’d tried that once many years ago and it hadn’t gone well: he’d gotten lost and honked at and ticketed for parking somewhere even though other cars were parked there too. He looked out the window at the pale blur of greenery for two and a half hours. At some point an idea took hold of him. That guy, that sketchy little guy, fellow victim of Garrett Spalding, the one he’d met in Towles’s office his last time down there—three whole years ago, now—maybe he’d be there again today. Why not? If they needed Mark’s signature, they’d need his too. The longer the whole nightmare of Mark’s compromised credit and ID theft had dragged on—and it still wasn’t over, he’d had to explain to an angry woman from some collection agency just a week or two ago that there was a real Mark Firth and a fake one—the more firmly he’d convinced himself that the little guy was behind it, that that whole strange day and night in the hotel room, with the guy going on about how traumatized he was, had been conceived as a scam, a con, from the very beginning. When he replayed those hours, remembered what they said to each other, he felt like a fool.