Zodiac Pets, page 5
Interviewer
“Dynamic.” You’re nuts. What would I be hiding?
GAB
Whatever it is that makes you want to hate me.
Interviewer
I’m not the one who shirked responsibility. I’m not the one who abandoned his team.
GAB
And I don’t think it’s our time at the Beat. You’re mad at someone. You’re mad at someone else who you can’t be mad at, and so you take that out on me, G2. Just like you did back then, on G1. They have whole books on this stuff at the Muskrat.
Interviewer
Can we—
GAB
I know, I know: back to the dome.
Graham Taps Archie
All through December and into the new year, I dispatched Bobcats to hunt for dome leads: zoning exemptions to scale the heavens, special permits for dome lattice-work. They found nothing. December turned frigid—uncharacteristically so for recent years but a flashback of sorts to my long-gone eighties childhood—and the deep-winter weeks, which would run to early March that year, commenced in bitter earnest.
Bitter, that is, but for the phenomenal canal ice. This was a surprise and relief after the floods wrecked the Hallenbuck Rink, which had held near-sacred status. That whole winter was a Penny ice carnival. Ice-hockey matches. Cocoa socials. Odd men with little egg-shaped tents ice-fishing for days on end. Over in Science Corner, Sally Boone compared Pennies’ random skate marks to the stochasticity of the water molecules in ice, which move and shift in ways you can’t predict. She noted the strangeness of how solid the molecules were together, as ice. I remember her writing something like: “Don’t fret that jiggly motion, Pennies. At a depth of four inches, your canal ice is ‘Beat safe’!”
One cold morning in late February, I laced up my skates and gingerly stepped onto the canal behind the Beat. I was off to visit Selectman Archie Simmons, leader of Pennacook’s lilliputian lefty contingent. If anyone knew what was up with the dome, surely it was Archie the True, as some called him.
I skated through an ice-hockey match (Friends of Tiki Shed vs. The Jack’s Four Regulars), where they tagged me an “NPC” and checked me in a snowbank. When I reached the back door to Andrew Johnson Memorial High School, I was wounded and wiped. And goddammit, I had once more forgotten to pack shoes! I plunked my ass down on the step and yanked off the skates and hung them on my neck. Once inside, I padded across the gym, hoisted the trapdoor, and climbed down the ladder to Archie’s office.
“Come in, come in,” Archie said. “Nails are for skates, and grab your favorite slippers.”
There were many slippers. I picked the wide ones and forced my fat feet in the leather. Archie’s bustling slipper-lending service told me I wasn’t the town’s only fool. Pennies weren’t used to juggling all this footwear. I whipped out my Dictaphone and pressed record. “Story idea: lifestyle bit on skate-shoe forgetfulness. Tentative headline: ‘Gone skating? Don’t forget your Crocs!’ Stop.”
“How’s the ice?” Archie asked as I slowly—achingly—lowered myself to the vinyl chair.
“Crowded,” I said.
“Good, though, I bet.”
“Lots of grins out there. If you could only freeze it year-round, you’d have some very happy voters on your hands.”
“My work would be done here. I could retire to St. Pete!”
I rubbed my neck. Archie frowned.
“Took a hit?”
“Little one.”
Archie opened a drawer, removed a tin case, and tossed it to me: Tiger Balm.
“Rub it on. It’ll work in a jiffy. Just don’t put your fingers in your eyes or you’ll never again vote Team Archie.”
Archie raised a drum of Advil that occupied a desk corner, but I waved him off, content for now with the Tiger Balm. I lifted my shirt and rubbed it on my back. Archie was right: the stuff was intense. While applying it, I scoped his new digs.
The bunker-like office had been a gift of sorts from Dr. Regina Chong, the high school’s principal and Archie’s longtime girlfriend. Dr. Chong had assigned it to Archie after he expressed rising security concerns about Town Hall, where he was literally outgunned (Archie didn’t pack heat) and where rhetoric had been set to a boil ever since the floods and Bounty Bag’s departure. No real nepotism was involved in the award of this minor perk. Archie was the only one who entered the office lottery. Others avoided it for fear of a ghost. The office’s prior occupant, the fearsome Mr. Lynch, a gym teacher, had carved out this hovel in the late seventies and then died there on the job at his desk like John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives (1848). My dirty little mind wondered if, in addition to Archie’s duties for the town, afterhours hanky-panky with Dr. Chong took place there.
I sealed up the Tiger Balm and tossed it back to Archie. My eyes had adjusted to the cage’s dim light, and I took note of Archie’s funny clothes, more Menlo Park than Pennacook. Archie used to be a suit-and-tie guy. Now, for some reason, he wore these stuffy black turtlenecks.
When I asked him about the dome gambit, he seemed, at first, to know nothing.
“I was going to ask you,” Archie said.
“You sound relieved.”
“It’s nice to know I’m not the only one out of the loop on this.”
“Er, dome.”
Archie smiled at the omnipresent and not particularly clever dome word-play. His phone buzzed and he raised a finger.
“Wait a sec—gotta take this: citizen call.”
I admired Archie for such moments. He was patient and easily the most responsive member of town government. To be sure, he didn’t often win Board votes. But he excelled in a quasi-lawyerly role, when he was called on to mediate a dispute or crisis (a diversionary spite-canal, a joyriding boat thief on the loose). Whatever their stripe, most Pennies liked him.
This may have been because Archie was an optimist where Pennies were concerned, and not just in theory. He had elaborated a whole practical politics about them. At last year’s meeting, he had confided to me that most Penny disputes were not to be resolved by ideology, which made sense because few Pennies had one.
“If Pennies do have a political theory, it usually boils down to ‘what is is what ought.’ ”
“Or ‘we’re going to hell in a handbasket’?” I asked.
“Yes: or that. Neither’s much use when you’re trying to fill a pothole.”
“Or dredge a canal.”
No, Archie contended, the way you sorted most things out was to throw Pennies in a room to talk.
“If there is any good faith in that room, usually something—maybe not the best thing, maybe not even a good thing, but something—will pop out at the end. Most Pennies will make a deal just to get along with the other people in the room. To face another day as a community. It’s not so much compromise as forgetting. Self-forgetting, you might say. You ever sit on a jury? Or listen to one of those supposedly starkly divided potential-voter debates they set up on the radio? That may sound like the worst Tuesday of your life, or five minutes of really bad programming. Sometimes it is. But strange and surprising things can happen. Same when Pennies get together, away from all the racket.”
The hardest part, Archie maintained, was getting Pennies into that room. If you voted, you might lose. Archie certainly couldn’t dictate or plan the result, which could almost feel random.
“Or at least it used to be like that,” I had said then, putting my finger on the change in tone after the town’s recent cataclysms, economic and aquatic.
“That’s the good-faith part I was talking about. It’s still there: just buried.”
Maybe, I thought. But dead things are buried, too. I also remember thinking, Archie is the type of person about whom another might say, “This man is dangerous and must be stopped.”
Archie hung up the phone.
“There is one thing,” he said.
He tapped his finger on a thick red folder stamped “CONFIDENTIAL.”
“The Bounty Bag parcels. Ever wonder what happened to them?”
The chain had owned a large swath of Pennacook and, since 2014, had kept a hog farm there, its attempted fix for the town’s wild boars. I had assumed that after the flood Bounty Bag had simply abandoned the land.
“I am now,” I said.
“They sold them.”
“Makes sense.”
“The price makes sense, too: a few shekels. What doesn’t make sense is to whom. After a wild shell game—sale after sale, to a series of private entities I’ve never heard of—they ended up with some nominee trust. The guy—or gal—who controls that trust—”
“And the land—”
“We don’t know who that is. It’s a secret.”
“Could be a domie.”
“Or someone else. It smells bad.”
Archie passed the red folder to me.
“You can have that. It’s a copy, raw stuff. I printed it up this morning for you. Well, half of it. The printer crashed. I’ll keep paging through it on my end, but the Register of Deeds is our best bet.”
“I’ll send a gopher.”
The records were intriguing. Still, I’d hoped for more, a plan of action to report on, or to hold in reserve till Archie was ready.
Archie turned to personal matters, as if sensing the conversation had exhausted its public purpose and needed to be ushered toward a graceful close.
“How’s the gal?” he asked.
“Didn’t you know? She left.”
I’d told Archie this before. So what? The man wasn’t perfect. He carried thousands of Penny files in his head! Still, I recalled with disappointment that we weren’t really friends, though I felt like we could be.
“How’s yours?”
“Splendid,” Archie said.
I raised an eyebrow. Like other Pennies—this is something I’ve learned at the Muskrat—I lacked the conversational resources to respond to both good and very bad news.
“It’s no paradise,” Archie added, reassuring me that there was at least a thin black lining to this puffy-white lovebirds’ cloud. “Sometimes we fight. She’s tough.” As if to confirm this, the turtleneck drooped to reveal a large bite mark.
In the swift-moving way of things at this time, personal tragedy outpaced me and started telling a story of its own. It struck just a few mild-weathered days after my meeting with Archie, in the form of a pontoon-boat “accident” that removed Archie Simmons from the field.
He was out with the Board of Selectmen on a so-called retreat-cruise down a fast-running Penny canal that hadn’t iced over. Dr. Chong, on high alert, stalked the pontoon boat in her Mini. There had been anonymous threats, a rising effort to bring Archie to heel. She drove alongside the glutted boat with its milling men, heat lamps, Christmas lights, and a long fold-out table crammed with foil tins overflowing with sauced chicken wings. Just as “Beat It” blasted from a wall of speakers, the road split and she zoomed up a hill, then back down in a rush to intersect it. She didn’t think they’d kill him, but she couldn’t rule out some rough stuff. Also, apart from these fears, Dr. Chong was possessive of Archie and liked to keep him close. They had a real dinner date in Eaton, and she planned to whisk him away at the boat’s first docking.
The others blamed a lamppost. Selectman Holt Maggio said it “just come up from behind and plumb knocked the feller out,” flinging him off deck. He splashed into the canal just as Dr. Chong descended another hill. Her swift breast stroke through the icy waters brought her to his body, which she rolled over and tugged to shore JFK-style, her teeth clenched around the strap for the life preserver, which Archie had worn despite the others calling him a dork. Safely ashore, she pumped his chest till he spewed water, then folded him clown-car fashion into the Mini and dashed off to St. Joseph’s, in Lowell. That night, he fell into a coma.
Interviewer
What happened to the red folder?
GAB
Pardon?
Interviewer
The red folder. Where’d you put it? Did you read it? Did you assign it out?
GAB
This was G1, remember? There’s lots of things I’d undo, if I could. Starting with that folder. I placed it, I think, in the center of my desk.
Interviewer
And what happened next?
GAB
At some point, it moved—I moved it.
Interviewer
Where?
GAB
The corner.
Interviewer
Why?
GAB
To make way for things.
Interviewer
What things?
GAB
Let me think. My Cup Noodles and a bourbon-and-Ballantine? That was my usual. Then it got buried in a blizzard of unrelated papers. Receipts. An old issue. A discarded adult coloring book that had failed to soothe. I don’t know: G1 stuff. It doesn’t really matter. The point—as you know—is I forgot it.
Interviewer
Thank you for that admission. Now, as we approach spring, I want you to talk about the “Town for Sale!” ad. How do you come to print it in the Beat? When do you suspect that it’s linked to the dome scheme?
GAB
Oh, right away.
Interviewer
Yet you ignored this. Why? Was it the money? I bet it was the money.
GAB
I thought you said you’re a camera. Cameras don’t judge.
Interviewer
I did mock trial for years.
GAB
God help me.
Town for Sale!
The PPD did little to solve the case of
Archie Simmons, and the other selectmen lawyered up with mysterious out-of-town counsel who had them pleading the Fifth on a simple sandwich question. They wouldn’t talk to me, either, and I dropped the story, except to print a small, red number in the top-right corner of each Beat issue, marking the days since Archie went down. By early April, the red number was up to forty-six, the canal ice had melted, and Penny spirits were flagging. This is when I got the e-mail for the big ad buy, funded by the Board of Selectmen (minus Archie), which would run to late May, when a key vote was scheduled.
I have the original.
(GAB hands over furry yellow paper
he has folded into a crane)
I forwarded the e-mail to Denise Zywicki, my crack art director, and swung by her desk.
“Kill that bloodcurdling font please. Also, crank up the color: ‘emergency red’ for the text’s what they’re asking.”
“Whatever that is.”
“And anything else to make it pretty. Comprende?”
“Yes, Mr. Bundt.”
“Graham: please. And buck up. We need this moola.”
Soon enough, scheming Pennies turned up at the Beat seeking intel they could ply to advance some angle. Pennies, let me tell you, are willing to appear in person for this sort of dirty work. Gravy Poole, the worst of them—a sort of anti-Archie Simmons—came knocking on Thursday and demanded a “hearing.” I knew him well. He had long ago and many times over earned a green Frequent Correspondent folder that I kept in a special cabinet alongside other names that vibrated with menace. To thwart his mental mapping of the Beat, I chose a zig-zag route past empty cubicles to the break room. Gravy bought chips from the vending machine, then sat down and placed a bid.
“Let’s talk price. Forty-two dollars.”
“Never!” I said boldly (I had no jurisdiction) and snapped open a root beer. I had switched from Perry White to Sharp Trader and braced for the worst.
Gravy pointed a chip at me and squinted. “Negative forty-two,” he clarified. He tossed the chip in his mouth and crunched. “This town owes me. You recall that little road they put in behind the Elks? Dead Man’s Drive.”
“Canal.”
“Whatever. I don’t use it.”
“Yes.”
“I paid for it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“With taxes. Is that right?”
“You live here.”
“I don’t use that road.”
“It’s a canal now.”
“I deliberately turn left. Tell me, Mr. Fancy Reporter, where in the Constitution it says I can have my pocket picked every time someone plunks down a byway.”
“Kids died on that road. That’s why they paved it.”
“Not my kid. Why don’t you report that?”
“When a kid dies on Dead Man’s Canal, you want us to report that it’s not your kid.”
“Don’t poke me! Don’t even try it again! And Belcher Road? I don’t use that either. In fact, I have here a document. Containing all the roads—”
“And canals.”
“—and canals I will never use. Spleen Street, Pigknuckle Place. The list goes on. Poop Lane. What kind of name is that? I drive right around it. I don’t even use city water. I don’t drink that. I don’t drink anything. No water. Not a drop. So why do I have to pay for the water lady?”
“Sewer.”
He sat up straight and raised a palm.
“No, sir, I do not. I do not use sewer, nor do I brush my teeth. I don’t shave, I don’t clean things. I don’t wash my hands or wipe. I do that at a restaurant. I get all of my water from a silver tap inside of a restaurant. In another town. I’ll show you. My personal usage is zero.”
He rummaged in his bag and threw me the bill.
“Where’s that in the Constitution?”
“One-hundred-and-thirty-two dollars!”
“That’s my kid.”
“That’s a lot of water.”
“He was an accident. A hockey-playing accident. Who takes many showers. Now you tell me where in the Constitution—”
