Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  Life in the Adirondacks inevitably includes driving, and when you drive, unlike in more populated places, you generally only have one choice of how to get from here to there. To get from Tahawus to Newcomb to Long Lake to Tupper Lake there wasn't a best route, there was only one route, with no choices for scenic or quick. This made for easier trip-planning, but left me feeling a bit exposed on the drive back to my stomping grounds. I remembered how easy it had been for my ‘henchperson’ to spot Justin this morning, and thought about how similarly easy it would be for George to have a minion keeping an eye out for me anywhere along the road. It made me feel claustrophobic, even at high speed and with miles of wilderness in every direction, with only the occasional cluster/island of houses to break up the green ocean of trees.

  I turned off of my only routing option, Route 3, at the first opportunity, and took the smaller and windier Route 30 along the western shore of Upper Saranac Lake, thinking of places to stop and hide and think and nap for a couple of hours. I pulled in at Knapp's, a general store near the state campground at Fish Creek, to gas up and grab some food and cokes and Gatorade and HEET. I recognized a couple of people, but nobody spoke to me, and I decided that I should head for less crowded woods to hide and chill out for a few hours. On my way out, I dropped some change into the payphone outside the store to call Dorothy (cell-service, especially for my disposable burner-phones, is spotty outside of the towns in the Adirondacks).

  “Hello?” she picked up on the second ring, which was quick for her; I often had to live with leaving a message and getting a callback a few minutes later.

  “Hi Dorothy, it's me.” I said. “I'm all right, but bushed. I’m going to find a place to sleep for a few hours.”

  “Tyler, come back here and sleep at my place or upstairs at the shelter.”

  “Yuck to both, I'll be fine. I just wanted to check in and tell you that everything seems like it might be all right, although I still have to figure out what to do about the big problem.”

  “So are those two—” I cut her off, not knowing where she was, who she was near, or even what she was going to say, but no matter where she took that sentence, it couldn't improve things.

  “I delivered those two leashes, just like we agreed, but I'm tired, and need a nap before driving the rest of the way.” I was only about twenty minutes from any place in Saranac Lake, but it couldn't hurt to obfuscate.

  “Ok... well thanks for calling, and stop by when you get back into town.” she sounded both resigned and a little pissed, but relieved enough so that she would probably be able to concentrate on whatever she was doing until the end of her day.

  “I will... talk to you later... and thanks... for everything.” I couldn't pack enough, either in tone or words, into my thanks yet, but I wanted her to hear that statement as a place-holder for future discussions and thanksgivings.

  I hung up the phone and shook like a wet dog, thinking of Little Green Pond and the glorious campsites ringing it. It was only about seven minutes away from my current location. I could see, in my mind's eye, each turn and rise between Knapp's and the trees that I'd hang my backup hammock from when I got there.

  Little Green pond is at the end of a lengthy dirt road behind the fish hatchery in Lake Clear, NY. Almost nobody knows about the twelve campsites that are well-spaced around the medium-sized pond, and most of those in the know don't camp there; I don't know why, it's free and convenient and spectacularly pretty. It is a little civilized for me. Most of the time I don't generally like camping with the possibility of neighbors, but on a Sunday, any people that had camped there for the weekend would have likely left, so it wouldn't be crowded. In any case, I was willing to deal with neighbors because I was sore and tired and emotionally empty and tired and felt shaky and was also sore (I'm aware of the repetition, it was for emphasis). I drove back to my favorite site, #6, took a chance by just driving down the offshoot dirt road to the site, and was rewarded by a view of nothing but empty water and a thin ribbon of smoke from a campsite on the far side of the pond (#11 or #12 I guessed, but didn't care).

  I pulled the Element around so that it was facing down the path leading back to the main dirt road, and got out my short-stay-essentials: hammock, stove and fuel, food/drink, clean clothes, small gear bag (Swiss army knife, headlamp, matches, and book). I put some water on to boil on my alcohol stove, and walked down to the pond to dunk and scrub and change while the water heated. I dried off with my dirty clothes, wadded them up and threw them into the back of the Element, put on the new clothes, and then made a big serving of oatmeal (three packets in a freezer-weight Ziploc bag, so I wouldn't have any cleanup later). While the oatmeal was rehydrating, I found two suitable trees and hung my backup hammock, a Grand Trunk Double: no mosquito netting, but huge and comfy, and it's big enough to completely wrap myself in (which was just what I wanted to do in about ten minutes). I ate my oatmeal and drank a liter of Gatorade, and then tumbled into the hammock to think and sleep for a few hours.

  In the few minutes before I closed my eyes and went to sleep, I tried to think about why George wouldn't have come on this morning's treasure-hunt. He must have decided, again, that it made more sense to kill me than make a deal with me (again). Even though this was his second time coming to the same conclusion, it still seemed like insane troll logic to me, but I have never understood most of what humans do, much less understand why; minimizing my interface with the difficult ones had always been the best approach. The guys hadn't been visibly armed, but nor had they been visibly carrying a bunch of money for me. But I couldn’t know for sure considering they had been shot and dumped in an abandoned mineshaft before they knew what was happening. If they had seen it coming they would have been better prepared, and things might have turned out differently. While his muscle was gone, George was still in the picture, and could conceivably/ probably/certainly get more muscle, once he decided that his others weren't coming back. I was just feeling around the edges of what I knew about the present situation for a possible solution, when I fell asleep.

  Knapp's General Store, 7:04p.m., 9/9/2012

  I woke up too short a time later for the amount of rest that my body needed, but I had found out years earlier that you end up making do with what you've got. I got up and broke my simple camp, forced down some beef jerky and gummy peaches and two warmish cokes, and drove back to Knapp's knowing what I was going to do, but not how I would be able to do it... exactly. I bought a six-pack of coke, a chipwich, two quarts of 5W-30 motor oil, some fishing lures, two packages of hotdogs and hotdog buns, a big roll of duct-tape, two gallons of Coleman fuel, three huge jars of pickles, a cheap broom, a bottle of laundry detergent, a bottle of Windex and some paper towels, a three-pack of road-flares, and some candy bars... I paid in cash. Before pulling out of the parking lot, I dropped some change into the payphone again, and talked briefly with my acquaintance up in Canton, Gregory Simmons, and asked/told him to head out and do me a favor before it got to be too much later; I had done him what he considered to be a big favor some time ago, and told him that this made us even, or better.

  Hanging up, I drove towards Saranac Lake making two stops along the way to prepare for later in the evening. My first stop was for a cache of dangerous toys that I'd researched, and been interested enough to try after reading a book by Ed Abbey about five years ago. I didn’t want to throw them out after making them, but also didn't want to keep them at Smart Pig or in my car (as they might warrant an arrest simply by their presence in my car or office), so they stayed in a small ammo-can in the woods until I picked them up. My second stop took only a few minutes at a plow-turnaround on the nearly always deserted Forest Home Road (between the fish hatchery and Saranac Lake) to quickly rearrange some of my groceries; I ended up leaving a ginormous pile of pickles in the bushes for some hungry wildlife to enjoy (and then later probably regret). Saranac Lake on a Sunday night is pretty quiet, but I wanted to wait for a few hours before making my next move, to let things quiet down even further
. I drove around downtown, meandered through some backstreets and cruised the few roads between downtown Saranac Lake and Oseetah Lake. Having cemented the flow of traffic and one-way streets in the lesser-traveled roads of Saranac Lake in my internal maps, I was ready

  (-ish) for the next stage in my evening's plans.

  53 Broadway, Saranac Lake, 10:27p.m., 9/9/2012

  I walked around the block again, looking at the building from all sides, and was pleased to see that the spaces above the ground floor looked to be businesses, and at least half of them were sporting “Space Available” signs; I didn't want anyone but George inconvenienced by the trouble that I was about to start. I had parked the Element a few blocks up Olive Street and carried a backpack with the three one-gallon-sized pickle jars through the woods to the door behind the building, easily sticking to the dark side of the street, and ducking out of sight the few times a car came by. I couldn't see a soul on the street and was ready to take my chances that what noise I made wouldn't lead anyone to me before I could be somewhere else.

  I had a two-foot wrecking bar hooked over my belt and down the inside of my pants, and pulled a pair of flesh-colored nitrile gloves from my first aid kit over my hands as I moved to the door. I had wiped the wrecking bar and pickle jars and road flares down with Windex soaked paper towels to hopefully avoid leaving fingerprints and/or DNA. With one final look for road or foot traffic, I went over to the back door of the kitchen, shielded a bit by a dumpster, and used the wrecking bar to force the crappy door to open, despite a reasonably good lock. I grabbed the backpack, slipped inside, closed the door, and found my three targets quickly in the light leaking in through the big picture window at the front of the sub-shop. I balanced the jars and road-flares on the counter, put the wrecking bar in the backpack, got it back on my shoulders, and lofted the jars; one by the stove, another by some booths, and one at a wall with chips on display from floor to ceiling. The sound was incredible in the stillness of vacant room, but if anyone heard it from beyond the sub-shop it would have likely sounded like dropped recycling bins. I took the caps off of the flares, lit and threw them; it took barely as much time as it takes to tell. I walked briskly back out the door that I had levered open less than a minute earlier, and disappeared back into the woods leading away from Broadway, up towards Olive Street and my Element. By the time I was fifty yards away, I could hear a smoke alarm; by the time I had started my car and rolled the windows down, I could smell a nasty industrial smoke. As I drove away, I heard a low concussion (propane or natural gas tanks?) and the sound of the street front picture window blowing out.

  I drove quickly and made it out to the base of George's driveway in just a few minutes. I parked my car out of sight, about thirty feet up a neighbor's driveway; when I had come by earlier the neighbor’s house had shown no lights and felt like a summer place, so I hoped that I would be safe parking there for the short time that I planned on being there. George's driveway twisted and turned a few times during its length, to prevent the house from being visible from the road, and also perhaps to control the speed of people driving up the drive (or to impress them with the landscaping and views of Oseetah). I walked back to the first big turn from the road and scattered a couple of handfuls of caltrops across the whole width of the surface.

  I read about caltrops as an anti-vehicular device in Edward Abbey’s “The Monkeywrench Gang” and was intrigued. They were ridiculously easy to make using heavy gauge chicken wire; simply cut an inch back along each wire from an X weld, and bent so that one arm stood up. They made an effective toy for giving out flat tires. I had spent about two hours making hundreds of them obsessively one afternoon, and now (finally) was getting a chance to use them, to see how they worked outside of lab conditions. I walked back into the woods and waited for my test subject.

  George drove down his driveway at speed about ten minutes later, probably called by the fire department or somebody else who saw the sub-shop on fire. His Rover hit the patch of caltrops as he rounded the turn at what I guessed was roughly twenty miles per hour, and got at least two, and possibly more explosive flats. His ABS worked perfectly when he squashed the brakes a split-second later, and he came to a controlled skidding stop about ten feet in front of the big white pine tree that I was hiding behind. He sat at the wheel for eight seconds (I counted), cursing and breathing hard, and then got out to look at the flat tires. He shook his head and cursed his luck when he saw a driver's side flat, and then knelt to look for the problem. I walked quietly behind him and swung the wrecking bar down and across the back of his head. I swung hard the first time, because I didn't want to have to swing a second time; my understanding from research into the matter a few years ago indicated that a first hit was statistically much less likely to leave spatter evidence behind than multiple swings were.

  George fell like a bag of dropped groceries, sprawling on his face in the driveway without time (or awareness) enough to put his hands up. I rolled him face-up, and slapped a foot of duct-tape across his mouth and ears, rolled him back over and secured his wrists and ankles to themselves, then joined them to each other; the whole process took me under a minute. I got into his Rover, turned off the lights, and drove it slowly back up the driveway (a bit of guilty pleasure at the feel of squishy driving on the flats) to where it had been parked in a turnaround the other day when I had come to see him. I made sure that the dome light was off before I let myself out and walked back down the driveway. He hadn't moved, but I could hear his breath whistling out of his nose like a tea-kettle, so I didn't sweat that detail yet. I grabbed the broom from where it lay, on the ground behind the big white pine tree, and swept all of the caltrops off of his driveway and into the grass at the edge; with luck, they wouldn't be noticed.

  I walked down to the end of the driveway and looked for lights, while I listened for car sounds in either direction; the coast seemed clear, so I raced to my Element, drove back to George, levered him in the way back (with some difficulty), and threw the wrecking bar and the broom in next to him; all of it on top of a semi-disposable blue tarp from Walmart. I covered everything in the back with a dark blanket, stripped off my gloves, and drove away, mindful of the trap that this single road away from George's house was, watching for car lights both in front and behind until I had made some turns and gotten off of the straight line route from his house to Saranac Lake. I made a point of avoiding all of the best lit parts of town, especially the end of Broadway with his sub-shop and the fire department and police and the group of onlookers that always seems to show up to watch something burning.

  I was able to get out of town without driving past any moving cars, or people out strolling. The weather and fire and my carefully chosen route took care of most of that; my luck, which I generally don't believe in, (and had been conspicuously absent in the last week in any event), took care of the rest. I pointed the Element northwards, and kept the speed ten mph below the limit; I didn't want to get stopped for speeding, or hit a deer at this point. Once I got north of Paul Smiths College, and made the turn onto Route 458, I pulled over to vomit and shake and cry a bit. Seven minutes later, I grabbed a coke, a few hot dog buns, and a three musketeers bar, and rallied for the drive up to Jacob's farm. This night (and my life) was going to get significantly longer and stranger before it normalized again (if, indeed, it ever would).

  Route 458, near Santa Clara, 12:07a.m., 9/10/2012

  It's been not quite a week since I was driving these same roads under somewhat similar conditions: semi-conscious passengers who would likely prefer to be somewhere else, scared of me and what was going to happen to them; late-night driving through beautiful wilderness while thinking ugly thoughts about ugly people. The big difference was that six days ago, I was certain that I was the “White Hat”, fighting the good fight, nobly standing up for helpless and innocent victims, sneaking around the law simply to keep things simple; now I was uncertain of which hat (if any) I wore (white, black, grey, plaid, or otherwise). I was scrambling despera
tely to save myself, and hiding from the law so that I wouldn't go to jail forever (having committed more felonies in this single day than in the rest of my life to date). The beauty of the road and night and stars and emptiness was, for once, lost on me.

  I was juggling thoughts and doubts and silly wishes, and trying to balance right and wrong and moral absolutes and my surprisingly well-developed sense of self-preservation; thinking about how different the man making this trip less than a week ago was from the man making it tonight. I had never been in a fight that involved more than shoving and name-calling before a few days ago; and honestly, my first round with Justin and Barry was decidedly one-sided, you couldn't really call it a fight anymore than you could call what happened this morning and evening a fight. It seemed that I was a one-man embodiment of what the talking heads on CNN had been talking about for years; conflict had gone from men and armies standing toe to toe to asymmetrical and asynchronous in the space of a generation. I'm a firm believer that fighting fair is for suckers, proof of that particular concept was taped up and rolling around in the back of my Element every time I took these backcountry turns too tight.

  I had offered George and Justin and Barry chances (even enticements) to disengage at various points, but they had stubbornly insisted on trying to kill me; the outcome of our conflict was determined by their actions and my reactions. I didn't go into George's house at the beginning of all of this looking to kill him and his minions, it was a regrettable outgrowth of his hostile reaction to my proposals involving Cynthia and re-normalizing my life. I was shocked to find that I felt their deaths regrettable, not because of the violence committed and lives ended, but because of the hassle and risk to myself that they engendered. I found that I had made eye-contact with myself in the rear-view, looking for the new man capable of killing, and was surprised to find scared and sick and sad (but not remorseful) eyes staring back at me; I had reasons, but no excuses for the ways that I had behaved in the last few days.