by Jonathan Dee
Elsewhere in town, nearly every local business held some kind of outdoor event or sidewalk sale. It was a delight to see the street looking much as it must have a century or more ago, with Main Street—closed to vehicular traffic for the day—a pedestrian mall and social gathering place. Events went on well after dark, with a concert by the high school orchestra at the bandstand, and a screening of Meet Me in St. Louis projected onto the wall of the old Foster mill, courtesy of enterprising minds at the Library!
The only black mark on the weekend came when official festivities were over. Several store windows were broken by one or more vandals on Main Street, and some graffiti was left. The affected stores included Berkshire Wine & Spirits, Diabolique, and Creative Kidz. Trooper Constable said the police would investigate thoroughly.
Still, all in all the first Railroad Days was an at-track-tion like no other! With crowds swelled by the curious from neighboring towns, the local economy got a much appreciated boost and a history lesson at the same time. One local merchant estimated his receipts for the weekend at “maybe two hundred and fifty percent” of what they were the weekend prior. Full steam ahead into the Holiday Season!
—
In order to qualify for the government backstop, which the banks required before they’d let you claim the maximum when you borrowed against the property, you had to rent to tenants whose income fell below a certain line. Mark did not like to stereotype people, but there were stereotypes and then there was direct experience, and he learned the hard way that there was a connection, there just was, between the amount of money people made and their responsibility as tenants. Not in every case, but in a lot of cases. And the issue wasn’t always with the rent itself. There were noise complaints from neighbors, there were tickets for trash-pickup violations when they didn’t put their stuff in the right-colored bin, or in any bin at all. There was damage to the mechanicals that they would demand to have fixed even when they were clearly responsible for the damage themselves. Basically they—or some of them, not all of them—refused to treat the place like it was their home, which of course, in a certain light, it wasn’t.
A fellow named Gage moved into one of the two new units in Egremont; he was a single father with two boys, he had a decent job at the transfer station, and Mark liked him right away. Not even two weeks later, Gage called him at ten o’clock at night to say that the bathroom faucet was dripping. My kid can’t sleep, he said. How one could be an adult male and not know how to fix a dripping faucet was something Mark could not fathom. Not to mention that those fixtures were brand new, which would strongly suggest that Gage or his sons had been screwing with them somehow. He told the tenant he’d come over tomorrow, the tenant said fine, and then half an hour later he called back. The worst part was that Karen was livid. “Did you even meet this guy before you rented to him?” she said. “You couldn’t tell he was a crackpot?” No, I couldn’t, Mark thought, but there was no point in saying it, because if it interrupted the whole my-husband-is-easily-taken-advantage-of narrative in her head, then she wouldn’t hear it anyway.
It wasn’t about income, it was about what you were worth; and he was now worth a lot. She didn’t want to concede that it was true, because, he felt, that would mean conceding that she’d been wrong about him. He’d been swindled by a con man, but that was one time, it could have happened to anybody, indeed it had happened to numerous other people, some of them with much more of a background in finance than he had. Why wouldn’t she want to be wrong about him? If you love someone, how can you not want that person to justify your love by succeeding? He didn’t get it. A couple of times, things had gotten so heated that he was pretty sure Haley must have heard them. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought so. Sound traveled in that house. It would certainly explain Haley’s distant attitude toward him lately, which Karen claimed was just about her getting older, learning to see her parents not as heroes but as they really were. Still, he vowed to keep better control of himself.
An offshoot of success, in his new field, was that he didn’t always have a great deal to do, day to day. It was the opposite of what he was used to; in his old life, success equated with keeping busy, with being overwhelmed by demands on his time. Minor maintenance he referred to Barrett. He could have handled these requests on his own and saved a bit of money, but he just couldn’t see himself unclogging a drain or fixing a door hinge at this stage. He still fielded all the initial complaints himself, though. He could have just given his tenants Barrett’s phone number but that struck him as risky.
He offered to drive Haley to school, but apparently the bus itself was now a sort of social scene that she couldn’t miss. He left for Daisy’s in the morning just as early as he used to when he was on his way to a job site, but then he hung out longer, and returned home when he was sure Karen had already left for work at Caldwell House. He made the mistake of remarking once—just trying to make conversation—that he had no idea what she did all day over there, and she replied that that was her favorite aspect of the job. One morning he invited his sister to meet him at Daisy’s for breakfast, just to catch up with her, and that didn’t go so pleasantly either.
“I can’t understand why you like this place,” Candace said. “It’s horrifying.”
“It is not,” Mark said, looking around to make sure no one had overheard. “It’s fine. It doesn’t change, that’s what I like. Why do you have it in for old Daisy?”
She pointed, not subtly, over his shoulder; he turned and figured out that she was indicating a new hand-lettered sign, hung among all the other corny signs, that read IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.
“I mean what is that shit?” Candace said. “Outraged about what?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said. “What, do you think it’s political?”
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
“So how is the new job? Still hard for me to imagine you as the kindly small-town librarian. I mean, I could tell some stories.”
Candace frowned. “It’s fine,” she said, “it’s a job. Mostly pretty simple stuff. More paperwork than you’d think. But I don’t have a boss, at least not one I have to see every day, so that’s a nice change.”
She looked at him appraisingly. “And you?” she said. “Settling into life as a slumlord?”
They all made light of him, disrespected him. His own family. It was galling because they were all unashamed to depend on him too: his wife, his brother, who’d be who knows where if Mark hadn’t invited him into the business, his father, whom he gave money every couple of months to tide them over in return for some sarcastic remark. Even Candace: he’d given her some money when she was between jobs, money she’d never hinted at paying back. He was effectively the patriarch, the head of the family, but no one treated him that way. Happy to benefit from his success as long as they didn’t have to acknowledge it. Hypocrites.
Back in his home office he was on the internet, toggling between real estate listings and extreme-sports videos, when his phone buzzed in his pocket. On his screen was the name Philip Hadi. He’d never deleted the contact; he always maintained business contacts, even after a job was over. He took two deep breaths before answering the call.
“Mark? It’s Phil Hadi. Listen, I have something I want to talk to you about, and I wonder if you could come over and see me. At Town Hall, I mean.”
“Yes, sir,” Mark said, and winced at his own response. “Of course. When’s a good time for you?”
“I was thinking of right now,” Hadi said, sounding confused.
Mark had a moment when he started, or wanted, to take offense at the idea that he could be summoned without notice in the middle of the day, or indeed at any time. But this was just Hadi’s manner, more a guileless absence of social grace than some arrogant power play. And Mark truly did have nothing else going on that day. And of course he was curious.
“I’m finishing up some things,” he said, “and I’ll come over as soon as I can.”
Despite the summons, Mark was made to wait ten minutes to see the First Selectman once he got there. There was no waiting room per se—the place had not been built for that—so he sat in a weak chrome-and-plastic chair up against the wall in the main hallway, near the Food Bank. At length Hadi’s secretary, the one he’d reputedly lured up here from New York with an astronomical salary, stuck her head into the hallway and gave him a tight little smile to beckon him inside. The door to the inner office was open. Mark walked through it and she quietly pulled it shut behind him.
A rendering of the town seal hung in a frame on the wall. Otherwise there were no pictures or objects of any kind, nothing of a personal nature on the desk—only an open laptop and several neat stacks of paper. Hadi had not personalized the space in any way, which was admirable, Mark decided—like it was more about the office than about the man. The desk itself was unlovely, indestructible, metal and gray and not much smaller than a pool table. The only two objects in the room that looked as though they dated later than the Eisenhower years were the laptop and Hadi’s ergonomically sophisticated chair.
“Mark,” Hadi said. “You’re well?”
“I am. I have to tell you, a little exchange we had, the last time I saw you, really made a huge impression on my life, for the better. I’m not doing general-contracting work anymore.”
“You’re not?” Hadi said. He looked crestfallen. “Why not?”
Mark grew flustered. “I’m dealing more in properties now. Local properties. You said I needed to look at them as assets, more in the abstract. Houses, I mean. And you were right.”
“Oh. Well, that may change things, although maybe not. You’re not doing construction work of any kind, then? Construction or installation?”
Mark suddenly felt embarrassed, and the unexpectedness of that feeling put him in a somewhat defensive posture. “Not really, no,” he said. “I’m past that.”
“Because what I wanted to offer you was a fairly simple job. I need two security cameras installed. They have to be above a certain height.”
“This is at your house?”
“No. At either end of Main Street, basically. Two should be enough to cover the length of it, unless there’s something, some obstruction, I’m not thinking of, in which case, I guess, there’d be a third. Not that different from what you did at the house, which is why I thought of you. What would you charge for that kind of work?”
“I don’t understand,” Mark said.
“Remember the vandalism back in September? Railroad Days? Just in case something like that happens again. Howland’s only got one assigned trooper, he can’t be everywhere. So this is just a cheap law enforcement tool. Having a second policeman would be overkill, and way more expensive besides. I mean, I’d be paying for it, not the town, but still.”
They sat for a few moments in a silence from which Hadi seemed to expect something.
“Why ask me?” Mark said.
“Because you’re my guy,” Hadi said.
Mark pictured himself in a cherry picker on Main Street, wiring and affixing surveillance cameras. He imagined his neighbors driving by, standing underneath him, asking him what he was doing.
“It’s kind of you to think of me,” he said. “But, as I say, I’ve kind of transitioned out of that line of work. It’s been really time-consuming, getting the new business off the ground. I don’t think I’d have the time to do it even as a favor.”
“Oh. Okay,” Hadi said. “Too bad. I’ll find someone else. Thank you for coming in.”
Mark might have mistaken Hadi’s abruptness for anger or rudeness if he didn’t know him. He smiled generously at the secretary on his way out, got in the truck, and was home before the school bus. He didn’t tell Karen about the meeting; in fact he didn’t tell anyone about it, which helped him to forget about it himself, and when the cameras went up at either end of Main Street—one on a telephone pole, the other on the cornice of the old Holbeck mill—he didn’t notice them there for a long time.
LARCENY
GREAT BARRINGTON—A 17-year-old from New Marlborough turned himself in on a warrant Feb. 8 to troopers at the Troop B barracks and was arrested for fifth-degree larceny, criminal mischief and interfering with an officer. The juvenile was released on a $10,000 surety bond and later appeared in Pittsfield Superior Court Feb. 10.
DUI
STOCKBRIDGE—Brendon Davis, Stockbridge, was arrested Feb. 4 and charged with driving under the influence and improper use of high beams. Davis was arrested after following the arresting officer with his high beams on for several miles. Davis was released on a $500 non-surety bond and is scheduled to appear in Pittsfield Superior Court Feb. 27.
BREACH OF PEACE
STOCKBRIDGE—Molly Clayton, 418 Lime Rock Rd., New Marlborough, was arrested Feb. 3 for an incident that occurred Jan. 14 and was charged with breach of peace. Clayton was released on a $1,000 cash bond and is scheduled to appear in Pittsfield Superior Court Feb. 27.
DUI
LENOX—Kenneth W. Novak, 38, 255 Newfield Rd., was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, evading responsibility, failure to obey a stop sign and reckless driving in a school zone during a Feb. 7 incident. Novak was released on a $500 non-surety bond and is scheduled to appear in Pittsfield Superior Court on Feb. 21.
DUI
HOWLAND—Penny Batchelder, 38, 711 Melville Rd., was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, evading responsibility, failure to obey traffic signal and disobeying an officer’s signal after a motor vehicle accident on Feb. 4 in front of Applebee’s. Batchelder was released on a $500 non-surety bond and is scheduled to appear in Pittsfield Superior Court on Feb. 14.
DUI
GREAT BARRINGTON—Richard Morey, 53, 52 Clark St., was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, failure to illuminate lights, operating without a license and interfering with an officer, during a Feb. 11 incident. Morey was released on a $2,500 bond and is scheduled to appear in Pittsfield Superior Court on Feb. 21.
—
His “job” was so nebulous, and the work it required of him so sporadic, that Gerry’s hours online began to seem more real to him. When he was off his blog (where traffic never really grew the way he’d dreamed of, but held steady), and off HotAir or Pajamas Media or other sites he loved or hated with equal passion, his thoughts drifted toward women. There were different ways to encounter women on the internet: the simplest and most immediate, of course, was porn, which he looked at once in a while, more in a spirit of amazement than arousal. Thank God, was all he could think, that he’d grown up in the previous century and not this one. The lengths he had gone to in those days, the risks he had taken, just to get a look at a Penthouse or a VHS tape! One of the bloodiest fights he and Mark had ever had was over an old Hustler they kept stealing from each other, because it was too shameful just to come out and ask to borrow it. Their father got so mad when they wouldn’t tell him what they were fighting about that he made them clean the floor of the garage. And it was worth it. Now, the most extreme or specific pornography was available to you for free as fast as you could type a request to see it. His parents wouldn’t have been able to get him out of his room, were he a thirteen-year-old boy of today. The fire department couldn’t have gotten him out of his room.
There were other avenues, less extreme, though their luridness was closer to home. A local Craigslist knockoff called soberklive.com mostly offered junk for sale or trade but also had an “Encounters” tab where anonymous women were offering massages. Massages! They were hooking, was what that meant, right there in the southern Berkshires, in Howland itself perhaps. Gerry had no desire at all for a massage, euphemistic or otherwise, but he almost replied to a few of the ads anyway just because he was dying to find out if he recognized one of these women who had a secret life. Maybe he’d gone to high school with her, or once had a beer with her husband, or sold them their house, back when he did that for a living. The idea that someone he knew, some respectabl
e local, might be driven by kink or by hardship into the netherworld of whoredom: now, that was titillating.
The same went, in a less lascivious way, for the dating sites. The fun part was breaking the code of people’s online identity; sometimes they didn’t even bother to make it hard. Some of the women used real photographs, and once in a while, in his browsing, he would see a woman he thought he recognized. Did they realize they were exposing their own need in this public way? Maybe they didn’t care. He recognized one woman who used to work as a bartender at the Ship. Short, with frizzy hair. He’d never really given her a thought at the time, but if he’d known she was that hard up he might have given it a whirl.
He thought about joining the site, creating a profile—he even had a thumbnail photo picked out, an old, black-and-white, crazy-eyed picture of George Orwell—but in the end, even with that to hide himself behind, he couldn’t go through with it. He was too afraid of getting some reply saying “Gerry Firth, is that you?” He told himself he was an old-school guy, with a pretty damn impressive record in the area of women, depending on how you chose to measure it, and if he was feeling the need to meet someone—not necessarily a one-night thing either, but with the object of maybe spending a little less time by himself—all he needed to do was get out into the world. First stop was the Ship, naturally; he knew the frizzy-haired bartender didn’t work there anymore but he found himself checking behind the bar for her anyway.