Zodiac Pets, page 17
Delmore arrived first.
“What’s that smell, pizza?”
He slid on the couch and folded his fingers behind his head.
“Sit up! This isn’t a vacation.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
I shot him a hard look.
“I mean it,” he said. “Pretend I just got here. I don’t want to boss people around, and it seems like you do. Besides, we need a general.”
He was right. “Did you bring your laptop?”
He knocked his knuckles against the hard lump in his backpack.
“Get it.” I tossed the thumb-drive from the e-bird at him. “Read this.”
Delmore was a hardcore techy. Yet he had tried his hand at journalism, for which he was basically ill-suited, rather than frequent Computer Club, the after-school activity where he might have been king. It made no sense then, but now I respect it. If more people did what they wanted instead of what they are good at, the world would be a happier, if somewhat ricketier place. Like Maryland.
Another knock. I opened the door: Denise. She looked away. I pointed to the couch and she sat down and stared at her shoes.
“When’s lunch?” she asked, not looking up. Her head tilted. “Is that pizza?”
“Pizza’s in 18–21 minutes. Can we please all just focus. You’re a designer. Tell me what this means.”
I flung the red folder at her. It had some schematics mixed in with the legal mumbo-jumbo and corporate name-swirl.
“We may not be lawyers, but we can read pictures, right?”
“Yes, Wendy.”
I stormed off to the kitchen to turn on the oven light. (You can’t tell much of anything by oven light, but its promise lingers.) A little later I heard the nervous giggle of Sally Boone—fashionably late as usual. By then I was using the spatula to ease the Red Barons onto the pan so I could move them to the counter for slicing.
Even now, frozen pizza brings special pleasure (my mother would already be happy with this sentence) because remember that you cook it at home and the familiar aroma suffuses everything and nicely sets the scene for unwinding. For many of us, one good thing among all the dislocations that came out of the pandemic was joy in life’s small things, even junk. I know there is another way to look at it, but there are brief moments (March 2020 was one of them) when the political economy of citizenship requires little more of (many of) us than compulsive, mouse-like consumption. So you see, my abiding affection for Red Barons did not simply stem from a maternal quirk. It’s a residue of that time’s fleeting closeness—the last time like that for our family.
I watched them devour the pizzas. Not one among them a friend. This freed me from any special worry for their feelings or personal fates—an advantage, given our dicey task. Like Delmore said, I was a general.
“What did you find on that thumb drive?”
“I haven’t cracked it.”
“Denise: rifle?”
“Check.”
“Sally?”
She hoisted a thumb. “Josephine’s ready. Hitched to Pres. Pierce.”
“Rope?”
Delmore nodded.
“Let’s dance,” I said.
It’s a good thing we did. I heard my mother’s car pull in behind us just as we slipped onto the path that led to Pierce Dock. I didn’t like that the car windows were open and she was blasting “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes or the taller, male head beside her. For the obvious reasons, it felt like a betrayal. My note claimed I’d gone to a sleepover and said she’d better take good care of Arnie (whom I had, for caution’s sake, left in my room watching Graham’s old favorite, DOGTV). I remember thinking at that moment: I bet she’s as relieved at my departure as I was at hers.
Bobcats Clash with Forest Swine
Thirty minutes later we were way out in the middle of Governor Faubus Canal, keeping a nice clip. An even breeze brushed the water and sunlight flashed in the ripples. Sally steered while Delmore huddled on the slat floor. Denise was leaned back, trailing her fingers in the water. I stood at the bow—a knee raised, coiled rope in hand—and surveyed the passing town. From this distance, it had a dioramic quality, the open wreckage from defaced and abandoned shacks like colorful props of a seaside village diorama (shades of Captain Bob’s opening credits).
Posted high at the front like that, I felt the thrum of power, the Return of Old Wendy. It didn’t last. I don’t know what it was—the superficiality of my new confidence (as with a Zodiac boat, so with self-concept: beware of sudden shifts), that my reign was cast in fear, my crews’ clashing personalities, or merely the darkening weather (a fog had gathered)—but the mood grew solemn. The planks creaked. No one spoke, and the motor, with its incessant humming, was like the party’s biggest bore. Our course was steady; figuratively, we drifted. And as we drifted, a rancid and familiar tang wafted from the trees.
“I have to go,” Delmore said, his eyes closed. He had the lassitude of the solider with neither clear orders nor discretion.
“Can it wait?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you go at the—Sally: take us in.”
We sped to the nearest dock, a strip mall’s paved front, where I moored us with a bowline. This knot—make an X, slide the rope through the middle, tug—is versatile and simple and may be the only one you need. I knew many others. At Camp Molly Ockett, knots were a secret handshake, a status symbol of arcane, inside knowledge.
“Wow, how’d you do that?”
“Don’t they have Boy Scouts in this town?”
“It’s decayed.”
He bounced off the boat and ran for the woods. Minutes passed. The foul odor rose.
“He said number one.”
Denise shrugged.
“I’m going in.” I pointed at Sally, then down at the gun. “Follow.”
A loud, protracted squeak, like a slowly opening door, called us to a tangle of vines, and when we pushed through to a clearing, we found poor Delmore surrounded. Wild boars, in a tight, closing circle! Around them, a rank lair of loose grass, manure, and mud-holes. Delmore held a thin branch before him like a wand while pinching up his pants with the other hand and turning and stepping but there was nowhere to go. Fat boar heads swung toward us and broke into a chorus of grunts and squeals.
NNNNgggghgh. Neeee!
(Scruff scruff)
Eeeee!
“Wendy, help me!”
“Sally.”
I caught the gun, turned, and fired.
SLAP!
NNGH!!
Blue paint splattered. The boar turned and the bush swallowed it whole. The other boars reeled, then clumped together in a swarming mass of bristles and tusks.
Chick-chick—BANG. Chick-chick—BANG. Chick-chick . . . BANG.
The boars scattered and one streaked across the circle and knocked Delmore’s knee loose and he went down yelping.
“I’m hit! I’m hit!”
He lay face-down pounding the ground with his fists and kicking his feet up and down like a toddler. But the boars retreated, leaving only their reek.
“Go on, we won’t look.” We turned our backs for Delmore to get decent.
I wasn’t opposed to boars making their way in the world. But living among them like this was medieval.
I Ponder Penny Factions
We motored back out to Gov. Hutchinson Canal, and my thoughts shifted to dome-vote odds-making. Much would depend on the balance of local factions.
One faction, the Change Nothings, was broad but amorphous. At one end, it extended to Archie Simmons and other dyed-in-the-wool lefties. The Archie Clique, as the sub-faction was known, had saved the public schools many times over, most recently by beating back a Gravy Poole plan to bulldoze them. They were mold-plagued. But instead of building new ones, the plan was to raise a white flag and ship the kids elsewhere for a song. Gravy put out feelers to some Unitarian suckers in Eaton, then flung his scheme at the Board of Selectmen.
“Just jam ’em in that bus—”
“Or boat.”
“—and dump ’em at Hawthorne Corner. A world-class schooling—on them. Let ’em put their money where their mouth is. I’ll save my quarters for Takis!”
The Archie Clique slammed Gravy as a naïf. Patrician posturing was widespread in Eaton, they allowed. But in the end Eaton’s answer, even to desperate Pennies, was sure to be a stone-cold no. (Exhibits A, B, and C: the floods.)
“Or has the gentleman from Oakhurst never read Eaton Living?” asked Selectman Chuck Nardone, to guffaws.
Eaton Living was the lifestyle-magazine residue of that town’s former paper. I knew it well from my orthodontist’s waiting room. Whatever Penny pride I have owes a steep debt to this glossy apogee of Boston-exurb porn—or, rather, to my revolt against it. Its writers hewed to a single tone—gushing—for everything they covered, from the over-funded Eaton Museum and the town’s “stately” homes to basic amenities (the library, the pizza parlor) that resembled corporate law firms. Most Pennies were familiar with and reviled Eaton Living because someone kept dumping stacks of it at Quik Stop, as if to taunt us with the boring splendor.
Eaton Living inspired some teen-wit Pennies to crank out an answer publication, Penny Dying, which for a time gave the Beat a run for its money. Penny Dying admirably dwelled in self-laceration (canal humor, parody reviews), but the ’zine shut down after Eatonites got ahold of it and joined the Penny-bashing—suddenly not so fun. It seemed the same wiseacre who’d been humping Eaton Living to Quik Stop had smuggled Penny Dying into the Eaton Country Club. Or so I speculate. We’d tried to build a story around it, but our leads trailed off like smoke from a tiny birthday candle. (Like any place, Pennacook has a vast shadow history defined by all that’s missing.)
I sometimes think of Bedford Corners, the locus of my pre-pubescent childhood golden age (with a live father), as a sort of lost happy middle between those warring towns: a Penny Lane, no pun intended, of bourgeois concord and vivid civic bustle (for me, it helped that Bedford Corners was 11.3% Asian). I probably idealize it too much. But there is a salutary aspect for a child to such places, where things and operations, some as useful as making a cheese sandwich (though they needn’t be), are happening around you for their own sake, and enough adults stand ready to explain them. It’s the default dream of nurturing everydayness that many of us share (which is why everything else is News).
To the Archie Clique’s right, but still within the Change Nothings tent, stood the Middlers, who plumped for pickleball paint-lines and pine stilts but, without the Archie treatment, would support little else that wasn’t free. It was hard to gauge where they’d land on Phil Marconi’s plan with its strident promise of endless prosperity.
I worried more about a third sub-faction, the myopic Just Stoppers (Graham made up these labels, which stuck), who took a wary approach to nearly everything that crossed their desks, including all zoning exemptions that weren’t for private ice rinks.
“Why do you need a porch?”
“There’s a fine view of maples, you see. And on the other side, we’re hard by canal and can’t—”
“I said need, Henderson.”
Rustling papers.
“Hold ’er there, muleskinner. I ain’t through yit.”
“Whatever. I’m moving?”
The Just Stoppers’ question-blizzards often devolved like this into half-ass cowboy English. Two other Just Stopper specials were the marathon hearing and the sprawling sub-committee. Throw them a corner yield-sign proposal and they’d gum up town business for weeks. The Just Stoppers weren’t sure they even belonged in the Change Nothings. Before his “accident,” Archie often had to herd them back with flattery, reminding them that, whatever their reservations about the program, they shared a team virtue: good will.
“We don’t believe in this stuff, Archie,” one of them had pleaded as Archie pressed for a retired-teacher COLA.
“I know that, Billy, but remember Kenny Rogers Roasters?” he asked. He loomed over the Just Stopper and planted a hand on his shoulder. Long ago, the town had dangled marvelous incentives but failed to attract an outlet of the chain.
“Sure, boss.”
“And do you recall their slogan?” He squeezed the shoulder.
“How could I forget? ‘There’s goodness here.’ ”
“Exactly. Now, saddle up, pardner: let’s lasso some beans.”
A hardy slap, and the vote was sealed.
Turn Back Now, the town’s second major faction—and the Change Nothings’ nemesis—would support the dome, if only to sew chaos. The TBNers claimed to favor an energetic return to the town’s distant past (though not so distant that Indians might live there). A number of dams and barricades were implied, and a duty to snap at any perceived slight. For instance, a “hurtful” Beat exposé of yet another Kluck Klucker salmonella outbreak. I was convinced that TBN’s leaders—MGOP’s Leo Carbonara and Maggio and Silva, those boobs I’d overheard at Town Hall—believed in precisely none of this. Their whole grim-faced agenda, like their bullying tactics in Quik Stop’s alps, was a façade, little more than a put-on for stooge voters and vacant self-amusement (TBN was also the natural burrow for hardcore Penny racists).
Turn Back Now had none of the curiosity and only some of the playfulness that is required for human progress. In this, they contrasted with Graham, who, for all his flaws, had both in spades. Consider his inventions—or the brief exchange we’d had about the middle-school curriculum during an idle Wednesday when he caught my ear as I walked to the break room for chips.
“Hey-yo: what are the specials these days?”
“What?”
“At Pike Middle. You know: Shop, art. That stuff.”
“Shop, art, music, and”—only in Pennacook—“A.S.S.”
“Excuse me: ass?”
“A.S.S.: Academic Study Skills.”
He mulled this over sadly. “Study skills.”
“Like how to make a binder and use highlighters. Can I go now?”
“In my day we had Home Ec. That’s where I learned lasagna. Lasagna: at ten-thirty. Loved it ever since.”
“Is that all they taught you? No wonder they canned it.”
He looked hurt. “We learned all sorts of stuff from Miss Shortcake. The four food groups, how to match clothes. A big thing on sewing.”
“Like what?” Despite myself, I was intrigued by the quaint mandate.
“Oh, there was a variety of patterns. A lot of us made a puppy, or the girls favored the heart-shaped pillow one. I chose something else.” He gripped the desk’s edge and leaned forward. “The Take-Apart Cat.”
To make it, he explained, he had to stuff and stitch seven pieces—head, body, four legs, and tail—that could be stuck together with Velcro and torn back apart.
“To what end?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Why take it apart? It’s like a stuffed animal for a serial killer.”
“Well, to see what it looks like. Then the joy of reconstruction, I suppose. I don’t know: it was fun.”
It did sound fun. More intriguing for the possible mutant recombinations and, I speculated, more durable than my Stretch Monster, as Graham now confirmed.
“I still have it,” he said. He reached into a box of odds-‘n’-ends that he kept by his ankle. “Say hi to Tabby!”
He hurled it at me—shaggy, dirty, partly dismembered. I flinched, caught it, and flung it right back.
“No, thanks. I’m hungry.” I pointed to the break room and followed my finger away from him.
You see what I mean though, about playfulness and curiosity. Turn Back Now would have nothing to do with such a thing.
This insight came later, while writing this. As for my political analysis, at the time I felt I’d drawn a fair picture of Penny factions. I had to ask, though: was it dated? Mr. Susco had taught us that the economic carnage and “water issues” of recent years had “decohered” Penny government. The old lines had blurred, replaced by a cross-chopped sea. And it wouldn’t be just pols at town meeting. It’d be Pennies as a whole, or whoever showed up. Talk about a black box! There were so many unknowables it was like trying to fill in the Drake equation, which Sally Boone had taught us, for fixing the odds of smart alien life.
In sum, I didn’t know our chances, but I knew I didn’t like them.
Robo-Workers March on Bobcats
A few-hundred yards past the boar drift, we reached our next stop: a small hill descending to a submerged tennis court. After we’d hauled out the boat, Sally and Denise attached the wheels, then we lugged it over a soggy path to the closest marked port. But we were deep in the wilds now and no map could be trusted.
Along this path, we met another and clankier antagonist. Our first clue to its identity was a barrage of still more onomatopoeia.
Bvvvt bvvvvt. Bvvvvvvvt.
Ee-oo-ee-oo
SLAM SLAM SLAM
vvvvvvvvvvT
I summoned Sally with two fingers and we crashed into the woods. Branches opened, revealing a path—flat, wide, precise—that, in one direction, headed back to the canal and in the other turned a corner. The path was primly raked and neatly cut at the bottom and all the way up in straight walls made from snipped-off branches and leaves: neat as a corn maze on opening day. I heard talking—if you can call it that.
Blip. Blip BLEEP. “Welcome to Bounty Bag. The store is now open. Check out our ham-salad twin pack: $1.99 or two for three dollars!”
“Folks, you’ll always save with Bounty Bag. Our prices are 4% off—all items, all year. Shop now—and save.”
We moved sideways, back into the brush. I leaned forward and pried open the branches and a blinding light hit me. I made a visor with my hand and squinted. The light was coming from a tiny solar panel on a forehead. A peculiar dance played out in the woods. In contrast to the boars’ messy clearing, the robots’ lair had the sheen of—well, a trim supermarket. Along one wall, they’d carved a series of shelves and had neatly shaped and stacked bundles of twigs and pine-cones in there like boxed spaghetti and tomato cans. They had cleared something like an aisle down the middle and a DeliBot (as its sticker indicated) was working there, wielding an ample buzz-saw that extended from its arm to sculpt a small compartment.
