by Jonathan Dee
He thought he could put the whole Daisy’s matter aside and then he attended Howland’s annual Founders’ Day ceremony. It was a gimmicky little celebration tied to the day the town’s original charter was signed, just for locals really because it was too early in the holiday season for weekenders; the First Selectman read a tongue-in-cheek proclamation and the brass ensemble from the conservatory up in Lenox played a march or two and that was it. Marty Solomon used to wear a sort of Ben Franklin costume, even though that didn’t make any sense. They held it outdoors at the bandstand if the weather was good enough, or in the auditorium at Regional in case of snow, though it hadn’t snowed that early for several years now. This year the weather was so warm that some people brought blankets and coolers and made a little picnic out of it. Penny was there, but because it was a Saturday, they weren’t there together; she and her sons sat on a blanket eating out of deli containers with plastic forks and generally having a good time while Gerry stood and watched, holding a cup of coffee, about twenty feet away. In truth he was there mostly just to get a glimpse of them—of the boys with their mom. He hadn’t been to one of these ceremonies in years.
The conductor of the brass ensemble shouted “Hello, folks!” and then shouted it twice more, until the crowd understood that he was trying to ask them to be quiet. There were still two weeks until Thanksgiving but that didn’t stop him from welcoming them to what he hoped would be another joyous Christmas season in the Berkshires. He thanked the members of the ensemble, and their director, and the Friends of the Bandstand. He asked those who were sitting to please rise for the national anthem; after that was played, with some people singing and others not, the ensemble went right into one of those Sousa marches that everybody recognized but no one knew the name of, that instantly put you in a good mood.
Except for Gerry, who was scanning the faces on the bandstand and in the crowd for any reflection of what he was wondering. Where was Hadi? He didn’t even show up? What kind of leadership was that? If you wanted to run things, in this part of the world, you had better start with a little humility, with a willingness to acknowledge that you were no better than anyone else and didn’t harbor any delusions to the contrary. What better proof would you want that Hadi thought himself too good for all of them than that he would just blow off one of the town’s oldest traditions? Running a town was about more than writing checks. Gerry glanced at Penny, who was so absorbed in the boys—even when they started punching each other for no reason, out of sheer restlessness, just like he and Mark used to do—that she almost seemed not to know or care where she was. The band started another number—“Stars and Stripes Forever,” he was pretty sure it was—and he edged his way politely to the back of the crowd and walked to his car.
A couple of his windows needed new screens, so later that week he went down to the True Value, and ahead of him at the register he saw Tom Allerton, the selectman, the guy who was going to succeed Maeve Brennan until Hadi came forward, the guy to whom Gerry had sold a house way back when he worked for Century 21, back in century twenty. He felt a surge of nerves, like this was an opportunity, though for what exactly, he didn’t know. “Tom!” he said. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
“Sure do,” Allerton said, and shook his hand. There was a pause.
“Gerald Firth. I was the broker on your purchase of your house, on, was it Beacon Road?”
“Still is,” Allerton said.
“Beautiful place. Good investment too, the way things have turned out.”
Allerton smiled distractedly, waiting for the return of his credit card. “I’ve had two people in the last six months,” he said, “just come up and cold knock on my door and offer to buy the place. Insane.”
“Irrational exuberance,” Gerry said.
“That’s the phrase.” He tucked his card back in his wallet and picked up his bag; Gerry resisted the temptation to lean over and see what was in it. Something in him urged him to be bold, as this encounter, or at least the seeming naturalness of it, was a second from being over.
“Listen,” he said, “I need to talk to you about something. You free for dinner tonight?”
Allerton looked confused. He was a tall guy, a good six inches taller than most men, Gerry included.
“You know Talbot’s Inn over in Hillsdale?” Gerry said.
“Hillsdale, New York?” Allerton said incredulously.
“Yeah, I know,” Gerry said, “but no one will know us there.”
Without breaking their eye contact Allerton had started for the door, and so Gerry felt he had no choice but to follow him, laying his window-screen rolls on the floor before crossing the threshold onto the sidewalk. Allerton put his True Value bag on the roof of his car and fished around for his keys.
“If this is town business, or government-related business,” he said, “you know there’s an open town meeting first Thursday of every month. I’d recommend you bring it up there.”
Gerry shook his head, feeling the weakness in his own smile. He could see himself, reflected in Allerton’s downward gaze, as a nuisance, as a crackpot. But he was neither of those things. And the window of this chance, unofficial encounter was closing.
“I just have this sense,” Gerry said, “that you and I think alike. That we’re not drinking the Kool-Aid.”
“What Kool-Aid would that be?”
Gerry waited impatiently for a couple of strangers on the sidewalk to pass by them. “I just wonder,” he said, “if you know, if the other members of the Howland government know, that Hadi personally bailed out Daisy’s Restaurant when it went up for sale. His own money, the town’s money, what’s the difference at this point? I don’t know why he’d do that. He says he wants to preserve the place, like it’s all some kind of country-bumpkin theme park we live in, but there’s still such a thing as a free market.”
He paused, and when the pause was long enough for Allerton to recognize that that was all Gerry had, he laughed, not too kindly. “Daisy’s,” he said. “I didn’t know about that one.”
“That one?”
“Buddy, there are people in his office every week,” Allerton said. “Businesses. Charities. Individual homeowners even. It’s not a secret. I mean, whether or not they consider it shameful I don’t know. But it’s not a secret.”
Gerry said nothing. He felt his face darkening, not from anger but from embarrassment.
“What’s he doing?” Gerry said. “What’s—what’s his angle? His endgame?”
“Beats me, and I don’t really care,” Allerton said. “He is what he is. It’s the people who go to him who baffle me.”
He opened his car door and began folding himself inside.
“I don’t know,” Gerry said absently, quietly, looking down, almost as if Allerton had already finished fleeing from him. “It’s like you can’t stop it. The control gets taken away from you, but not even by force, you let it happen, you give it to them gladly and then thank them. How do you wake people up? I used to have this blog where I complained about things. It seems so childish now, that I thought ideas would make any difference. I called myself some cute fake name, PC Barnum. I ranted about Hadi like that would make any difference, like words would make any difference. Naïve! But whatever, right?”
Allerton took his hands off the wheel. “No shit,” he said, looking more interested now but also, unmistakably, disappointed. “That was you?”
—
Dependency was the virus. What you were dependent on—that didn’t matter, that was a red herring. The land underneath Gerry’s tires was invaded and tilled and consecrated by men who believed that only the pursuit of one’s own interest might multiply into the common good.
—
Barrett hadn’t worked since August, more than five months now. His unemployment would run out soon. Calculating exactly when would only depress him and wouldn’t change his situation in any way, so he didn’t do it. His wife Stevie was picking up shifts now at the old folks’ home in North Adams, whi
ch was a hike, but she did it without complaining, and occasionally there was a little bonus involved in the form of some prescription drugs from the dispensary. She could have stolen from the old people as well—it was so easy, she said, they were so out of it, if you told them they owed you twenty bucks they would just hand it to you, a lot of the night employees did it—but she considered that beyond the pale. Stealing from the company was one thing. She believed in karma, and so she left the residents and their useless assets alone.
It was enough for the two of them to get by on as long as Barrett didn’t go out, so he didn’t. He mostly just stayed in the house, in front of the TV, and he stuck to beer. His friend Kurt down the road let him have an incomplete set of free weights he’d picked up somewhere, and Barrett used them for a while so he wouldn’t turn into too much of a fat turd just sitting on the couch all day, but eventually that motivation petered out too. He inquired about jobs, but there wasn’t much new construction around, and it always seemed to come back to the same five or six guys doing all the hiring. He’d burned a lot of bridges, some he hadn’t even remembered.
The sun reflected so brightly off the snow some afternoons that he had to get up and close the shades, in the middle of the day. Then the snowpack melted and on the afternoon he noticed that even the parts of the property that never saw sunlight were dark with mud, he put his boots on and went out and cleared the yard. He was still out there when he heard and then saw Stevie’s car pull into the driveway, at two in the afternoon. Not good.
Her expression was so angry when she walked across the driveway to the house that he let her have a minute. When he went inside, she was at the kitchen table, halfway through a beer, her green hooded parka with the fake fur trim still on.
“They said I stole,” she muttered. “Those fuckers. I mean I did steal but never what they said.”
“So you told them you didn’t do it, right?” Barrett said calmly, trying to generate an atmosphere wherein he could safely touch her head or her shoulder.
She pursed her lips. “Things got a little heated,” she said.
They went on state assistance, but it couldn’t last. It wasn’t until their checking account went below zero for the first time that Barrett allowed himself to understand it might wind up costing them the house. If only he hadn’t hit Mark Firth in the face that time. Over nothing, and not nearly hard enough to be worth it. But Barrett was pretty good at steering his thoughts away from the past. The future too. When he and Stevie fought, he’d sometimes go down the road to Kurt’s, and drink Kurt’s beer, which was a form of economizing. On one of these visits Kurt asked him if he’d been over to Town Hall yet.
“What the hell for?” Barrett asked.
Kurt told him that the mayor or whatever he was called, Hadi, was giving people money to keep them from losing their houses, when times were tough. You had to tell him your sob story and then he just laid the money on you, like that.
“Like a loan?” Barrett said. Kurt shrugged his shoulders and smiled gnomically.
“What the fuck?” Barrett said, mystified, and then belatedly he recognized the name. “I worked on that fucker’s house,” he said, “five-six years ago. He’s nuts.”
“Nuts and loaded,” Kurt said. “Cool, so you already have a connection with him, even better. You should definitely try hitting him up.”
But it didn’t sit right. He had more pride than that, for better or for worse. And it went beyond pride, because he knew that if he’d had, say, a father, or a brother he still talked to, he would have borrowed money from them to get by or maybe even just accepted it as a gift. Nothing wrong with family helping each other out. It could bring you closer, make you humble. He’d even have taken help from Kurt if he didn’t happen to know that Kurt too was just scraping by. No: he hated that Hadi guy, and nothing would have made him feel more worthless as a man than acting in violation of his own avowed hatred. Way worse than just accepting charity. There was being humble and then there was betraying yourself.
For similar reasons he would never have accepted a handout from Mark Firth, not that any such thing was on offer. Still, that job was the last steady job he’d had, and he was good at it, and it was not impossible Mark might have cooled off since the whole episode that led to his firing. He couldn’t bring himself to go straight to Mark, but he thought maybe the better approach was through the brother, Gerry, who was a little weird and hostile but not so superior-acting and who’d never had any real beef with him as far as Barrett could tell. He’d lost Gerry’s number but he knew where his house was, so he folded up a note with his own number on it and stuck it in Gerry’s screen door. Gerry called him and suggested they meet for a drink at the Ship.
—
That place never changed, and neither did the people you found in there at three in the afternoon. They got a couple of Narragansetts and sat at a table instead of the bar, at Gerry’s suggestion. Barrett came right out and repeated what he’d said in his note, which was that he was hoping bygones could be bygones and he could get his old gig back.
“I doubt Mark would go for it,” Gerry said, “but to tell the truth, it’s kind of moot anyway, because he’s actually trying to cut back on the renovating, on the renting too. He’s going to stop renewing leases. All about buying and selling right now.”
“Oh.” Barrett slid his index finger up and down the beer bottle. He felt his mood blackening, the way it seemed to whenever he had to put his fate in the hands of these guys. “Well then, why didn’t you just tell me that on the phone?”
“Because it sounds like tough times for you, so I thought I could at least buy you a beer and commiserate,” Gerry said. “And because maybe there’s other ways I can help you.”
“Is this the Hadi thing?” Barrett asked glumly. Gerry raised his eyebrows. “Because I’m not fucking doing that.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t. Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” Gerry said.
“Rich people,” Barrett said. “They think their money, like, purifies them. That’s what they believe. And if I go to him for a favor, and he says yes, then I’m a part of it. I’m enabling it, I’m buying into it. I’m sure he doesn’t give a shit what I think of him, but still, that’s different than making him think I believe he’s my daddy, even if it would help me out to let him think that.”
“What will you do instead, though?” Gerry said.
“I don’t know, man. Starve. Go under. I know it’s stupid. But I’m like the scorpion, right? It’s my nature.”
“You married?”
“Why do you want to ask me about that, man?”
“Kids?”
Barrett shook his head no.
“Let me tell you something,” Gerry said, “something I think you already know. Nobody believes in heaven and hell anymore. So there’s no check on rich people, powerful people, doing whatever the fuck they want to do to the rest of us. No check except what the rest of us do to resist them. You know what I mean? You won’t be bought, and that’s admirable. But as this whole plan of his goes forward, there might be more to do than just passively opting out of it. You know what I mean?”
“Not really,” Barrett said. But he stayed at the table.
At length Gerry took out a checkbook from his inside coat pocket. “I made some money off this scheme of my brother’s,” he said. “I’ve come to have mixed feelings about it, about the shit I had to eat to get it. I’m going to get out of it. He’ll buy me out, I’m sure, and when he does I’ll have even more money, so look, will you accept this from me? Just to help out your family? No strings. I just…we have to help each other out, we have to stick together, against outsiders. Against one outsider in particular. There is something about him we don’t know.”
Gerry folded the check in half and searched for a dry spot to lay it down. Its presence on the table was compromising, so before too much longer Barrett slid it off and stuck it in his jacket pocket without looking at
it or unfolding it. They stayed and finished their beers without a further word.
—
Allerton was in his Town Hall office, feet on his desk, bouncing around various sports websites, when he got a text from that ballbuster secretary of Hadi’s, asking if he was in the building. He couldn’t very well say no. Even if she hadn’t seen him come in, his car was right out there in the lot next to Hadi’s. She summoned him to a meeting in the conference room in fifteen minutes. God knew what fresh enthusiasm had occasioned this summons; the only real way to avoid them, and him, was to stop coming in to Town Hall at all, but then you were removing yet another speed bump between the First Selectman and whatever the hell he felt like doing.
He’d never cared for Hadi, and in his own memory this distaste long preceded that night four and a half years ago when Hadi had stood up at the pre-election town meeting and high-hatted Allerton out of his rightful job as First Selectman. Everything about him reeked of the city. It wasn’t that he was fake, exactly—Hadi was pretty authentically, unapologetically who he was—but people from Manhattan in particular seemed to operate under the misapprehension that the life they were living was the real one, the important, consequential life, and everybody else was provincial and out of touch. When the exact opposite was true: there was no earthly specimen more out of touch with reality than a New Yorker. People who lived on an island and paid a million dollars for a bedroom and spent all day creating computer programs to trade each other things that didn’t exist—those were the unreal people. Like most Berkshire folk, Tom had a highly attuned radar for condescension, and he felt Hadi’s patronage in every remark, every friendly glance, in his very residence in the town.