Caller unknown, p.7
Caller Unknown, page 7
After that close shave, his luck with the numbers improved. Bar the scratch in Hue, he was unscathed. Sixty thousand never made it back alive from the Suck. One in four deployed US Marines were designated KIA or wounded.
His father passed away during the first tour. Like his mom before, it was the big C. Cigarettes. People were beginning to make the connection by then, though America was still getting through half a million metric tons of them a year. Jim missed the funeral.
America was a different country from the one he had left when he returned to it from his first tour in ’69. Though he had dreamed of the lake for two years, he didn’t make it back to Tranquility. As he crossed the country, his uniform and buzz cut brought angry looks from people his own age. The narrative was anti-war and the pictures of napalmed children fleeing burning villages condemned returning servicemen as murderers of innocents. He’d gotten as far as Baltimore before turning back to San Diego to reenlist.
As the US began to pull out of Vietnam, the First Division hung on longer than any other outfit. They fought around Da Nang. More casualties in a hopeless cause. During Jim’s second tour he retrained as an explosive ordnance disposal expert, considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the Corps. There was a sea of unexploded bombs, mines, and booby traps in Da Nang. His newfound luck with the odds held.
He returned to Tranquility after six years in the Marines, in November 1973. Though he was only twenty-seven, he already looked old beyond his years.
In his absence they’d buried George Dove in the family plot in the Hadsville Episcopalian Churchyard ten miles from the lake. Jim stopped at the cemetery after he got off the Trailways bus. It was a cold day. He turned to the church on the hill. The November sky matched the drab gray granite of its stones. The stone panels of the belfry were painted an anomalous blood-red, the only splash of color in the whole piece.
In the cemetery he stared at the polished granite inlaid with his father’s names and dates in gilt lettering. His mother’s grave lay next to it. Eighteen years strangers and now back in bed together in the earth’s cold embrace. He didn’t know where that notion came from but it was strong and sad enough to make his eyes tear.
He walked back toward the gate and the country road. Even then he had had second thoughts. Turn back, wait for the Trailways bus to Bangor. Leave forever. Go back to California. But for what? The chances of employment for returning servicemen were slim. Many of his fellows had already ended up on skid row. At least he had a living, of sorts, here.
He tried thumbing a ride toward the lake, but the traffic was thin, as it always was after Labor Day. As he walked north, only logging trucks passed, each at the maximum permitted fifty miles an hour. They didn’t stop. Company policy was not to stop for anything. They were kings of the road and kings of the millions of acres of pine, spruce, and fir that lay all around.
After a half-hour Deputy Sheriff MacDonald pulled over in his cruiser and offered him a ride. In the six years Jim had been away MacDonald had acquired a paunch that pushed at the buttons of his uniform shirt, and some gray hair.
The deputy took him all the way out to the lake and left Jim in the weedgrown lot in front of the store. The hand-painted sign stood out front, with its faded stencilled lettering in a Wild West wanted poster style. It read “Dove’s Tack and Bait.” Beyond, the lake water was gunmetal blue, the mountains and conifers draped in sinuous wreaths of mist. The cold rain of late fall promised snow.
The place was as his father had left it the day he had been taken away to hospital in Bangor, never to return. There were two dozen graying unpaid bills crushed into the mailbox on the road. The store key was where he always left it—in a jar on the lintel ledge. Jim was surprised the place hadn’t been broken into.
The interior of the store had the dead air of every long-unlived-in place. Spiders had festooned the windows, rafters, and chairs. The worktable was strewn with a tangle of fishing tackle that his dad must have been unraveling right to the end. A tin ashtray held two fossilized butts—he’d never been able to kick the habit that killed him. There were some thirty fishing rods in racks behind the sales counter. Orange price tags hung off each one of their reels, written in his dad’s neat hand. Given inflation was running at about ten percent, they would no doubt be considered bargains now.
Under the thick coating of dust on the glass countertop were boxes of rifle ammo, elaborate flies and lures, specialist reels. There were still some outdoor slickers and hats for sale on the steel clothes racks and dusty shelves.
The guns were missing. He wondered if MacDonald had taken them for safe keeping or if some concerned person had sold them and was holding the money for him. He would have to ask about that.
It seemed the utility company had long abandoned its attempts to reclaim what was owed and had simply cut the place off. The old rotary phone was dead, and neither the lights nor the electric pump for the well worked.
Someone had taken bolt cutters to the padlock on the pump on the dock and the gas tank was, unsurprisingly, drained dry. He lit a hurricane lamp and found a propane stove to boil some water. He found a half-drunk bottle of Beam and some rust-speckled cans and made a rudimentary meal.
He contemplated his future over the whiskey. He had saved a little of his pay and now, with the stock in hand, there was just enough for when the place reopened in the summer.
That first winter Jim was back, the silence set and the banked snow lay about. Only the footprints of the house mice disturbed its virgin expanse, trails sometimes abruptly ended by the brush of a wing in the snow where a barn owl had swooped and taken them. Some nights wolves howled far away. These nights he stared into the bottom of a bourbon bottle or toked on the last shreds of his homegrown reefer and wished an AK-47 bullet or a mine had taken him in Nam. Or that whoever had removed the Remingtons and Winchesters from display had left one behind so he could eat its muzzle and pull the trigger.
The icicles by now were one- or two-feet needles hanging from the eaves. He spoke to no one, did not even have a TV for company.
Spring came slowly and indecisively, one step forward, two back, with snow flurries and nor’easters. But, finally, there was the raucous cry of crows and the drip of the eave icicles melting and falling like daggers. Then the lake ice broke with the sound of fracturing bones. The honking of the returning geese seeking clear water in the breaking ice sounded, and followed most gentle of all, by the soft hooting of the mourning dove; and, finally, the true sign of spring: the song of the white-throated sparrow.
In Maine this time of gray renewal lasted almost to the solstice and a man might wonder if he would ever see the yellow face of the sun again, but finally here it was, turning the lake blue and the forests a verdant green, shining on the retreating snowcaps of Nakuset and Katahdin. And with the sun came the summer people.
The store was busy from morning to dusk. The vacationers bought dry goods and cigarettes and gas for their boats, ammo and fishing equipment. Just as his Marine savings ran out, cash finally went into the register. The visitors might not have known what to make of the taciturn, scarred owner of the store. His answers were gnomic and in a language sometimes barely recognizable to them, like the obscure utterances of a minor character in an Elizabethan play. But all the outsiders knew this was the Maine way. Its people were fiercely independent, cautious in speech to strangers, slow to befriend, stoic and hardworking.
Over time, tentative conversations were struck up with Jim. There was roundabout talk about how difficult it was to find contractors to maintain the lake cabins since the passing of his father. Did Jim know of anyone? As the lake’s only year-round resident, the answer was plain enough. If you didn’t want to bring someone over from Hadsville, Jim was the only option. Negotiations on rates were indirect, oblique.
Jim first met Stuart and Bettie Constance during one of these roundabout exchanges. They had a cabin on the west side of Tranquility named Brantwood. It was just visible from the bait store a couple of miles down the western shore of the lake. Bettie had begun an explanation of the name of a house once owned by an English artist in the English Lake District. She’d pointed at a photo of a Victorian house. Stu and she had visited it on vacation. The lake in the photo didn’t look like much in comparison to Tranquility, that was for sure. The house and surroundings were a little polite and manicured compared to the wilderness here.
Jim didn’t know what to make of the Constances. They were not much like the other summer people, not involved in the social life of the lake, rarely, if ever, attending drinks parties or barbecues. Bettie seemed mousey and bookish, Stu was more outward-going but, Jim thought, a little slippery. He, too, liked reading, but, unlike the literature that Bettie devoured, his taste ran to Mickey Spillane.
The Constances had an adopted child. A silent, morose, unprepossessing boy, he looked Hispanic with his mop of dark hair and olive skin. He was the subject of gossip in the store. The Constances had stopped visiting their cabin for five years straight and had now returned with this mystery kid whom they had adopted in the intervening years. It didn’t take long for the rumors to crystallize into fact. He was one of the kids found out on Highway 11 back in ’70. Though the case was now some time ago, the gossip on the lakeside sparked with the thrill of notoriety. Everyone remembered the TV news reports, the banner headlines, the shocking pictures of the seven kids; five alive, two dead. Whenever he was seen in public, Ed was the target of everyone’s sideways glances and whispers.
Highway 11 had happened when Jim had been in the Suck. The media had called the kids the Apostles from the signs found hanging around their necks. From the Bible-studying of his youth, Jim thought of the Apostles filled with Pentecostal fire and speaking in tongues. There could be no greater contrast with this silent boy on the few occasions he braved the glances and whispering and appeared at the bait store. A gaumy, sulky-looking fellow with his hair falling over his acned face, hands always in the pockets of his jeans, never meeting Jim’s eyes. At fourteen he was getting quite tall for his age but not growing into it very gracefully. His body was permanently on the hunch. On his rare solo appearances at the store the kid silently shoved a list of necessaries across the counter to Jim and then paid in cash without uttering a syllable.
During the years they had been absent from Tranquility, Stu had brought in help from Hadsville, but the arrangement hadn’t gone well. That winter of ’74 an overhanging branch had fallen in a winter gale and dislodged shingles; water had gotten into the house. Despite repeated calls, the Hadsville guy had not been for weeks. Now Stu had water damage and mold. He needed a new handyman. He made the same roundabout overtures that all the summer people made to Jim, said he needed some “advice” on a job. Maybe Jim knew someone who would be good for it? Jim said, sure, he would have a think and be along about Monday when the store was closed.
He arrived at 7 a.m., not actually waking Stu, whose office hours fortunately extended into vacations. Jim eyed the damage to the roof and declared it to be a day or two of work for the right man, not in any way suggesting he was that man or was willing to do it.
“So how much would you expect a job like that to cost?” Stu asked.
“Depends,” Jim answered. “A hundred dollars might do it.”
“That seems a fair price,” Stu answered.
“Well, there’re shingles and nails in the truck. Could fix things up for now until a contractor comes,” Jim answered.
“That would be mighty good of you, Mr. Dove. I’ll make it right with you,” Stu said.
Jim gave him a look that suggested nothing was, in fact, likely to make it right with him. Nevertheless, he fetched a ladder from the pickup, leaned it against the cabin wall and went up with his toolbox. Not sure what else to do, Constance retreated into the cabin and conferred quietly with Bettie as the hammering and banging commenced over their heads. Whatever a quick fix was, this work of Dove’s was not quick. The work continued apace all morning. Mrs. Constance timidly came out and offered coffee but Dove politely declined and, as far as the couple could make out, he didn’t descend once, even for a call of nature.
Sometime in the late afternoon the hammering ceased, and they heard footsteps on the ladder and Jim’s blue coveralls descended past the window.
When Stu went out Jim was wiping his hands with a rag. “Reckon that will hold for a while,” he said.
Stu stepped out on to the gravel and craned up at the place where the damage had been. The repair was perfect and seamless. It appeared to be the work of a craftsman. As Jim fetched his ladder and toolbox Stu hurried back into the cabin, went to the tin where he kept his cash, quickly counted out a hundred in notes and got out just in time to catch Jim as he got in the truck. Jim rolled down the fly-stained window and looked at Constance without expression.
“For your time,” Stu panted, offering the fan of notes.
Jim glanced down at it. “It looks like there’s ’bout a hundred dollars there.”
“Well, you fixed up the roof, didn’t you?”
“Ayuh.”
“Well then, take the money. I don’t need a contractor anymore, do I?”
Jim took the proffered cash, folded it up and stuffed it into his bib pocket. “Obliged to ye,” he said, then rolled up the window, stuck the shift in reverse, and Stu had to step back smartly as Dove went back, turned and disappeared in a cloud of dust up the driveway.
A roundabout arrangement followed by which Dove would be invited to give more “advice” on repairs and improvements to the property, until, that was, the “real contractor” could come, and these fixes, never suggested to be permanent ones but in actuality permanent, Constance would readily agree to, and Jim somehow had always brought the very materials required to carry out whatever needed doing. When the Hadsville man finally did show a month or so later, he took one look at Jim’s work, silently disappeared and was not heard from again.
So Jim began working for Stu, but without either of them actually acknowledging it.
Jim didn’t need much company but got his first dog, Laramie, that spring, a Border collie who was biddable, quick, and loyal, riding in the back of his Chevrolet truck where he stored the mower and his tools. On the Sabbath, after the bait store closed early in respect of church hours, Jim’s religion was mainly the liquor bottle or the joint. But sometimes he was out walking Laramie when the Sunday exodus to church in Hadsville occurred. There was a regular convoy of vehicles heading to the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and Catholic churches in town, and the Constances’ foreign station wagon was no exception, joining the cavalcade up the Three Mile Road. The silent kid would be in the back, brushed up, in a suit and tie, looking grim. They said his captors had been some religious nuts, and Jim could well believe that the kid hated church.
In the summer Jim was up from dawn to dusk. Running the store and, when that closed, off mowing a stranger’s lawn or up on a ladder fixing their shingles or a gutter. The folk from away didn’t encourage their children to play outside when he was about these chores. Generally, the neighbor kids were happy to avoid the man with the teak face and savage scar and the Winston permanently clamped between his lips, who mumbled in the strange patois of Maine.
Sometimes clients wanted him to take them out on the lake fishing for smallmouth bass, lake trout, and pike. The excursions were not as frequent or as popular as they might have been if conducted by anyone but Jim; he was at best a taciturn skipper. Though they were paying clients, the vacationers were not exempt from criticism: a sharp rebuke from Jim for a tangled line, lost fly or clumsy unbalancing of the boat was common. Most didn’t come back for a second trip.
Stu had never asked for one of these excursions. In all the time he had been maintaining the Constance cabin, Jim had never seen a single item of hunting or fishing equipment around the place. There was a perfectly good boat in the lakeside shed that had never made it out onto the slipway.
The second season of their return to Tranquility, Stu turned up at the bait store one late-June afternoon and asked a favor.
“Say, Mr. Dove, you out in your boat much this summer?”
“Depends.”
Stu quirked an eyebrow. “On what?”
“Depends on the fish.”
Stu smiled. “But if they were biting, you’d go out?”
“I guess.”
“You wouldn’t be interested in a charter, would you?”
“A charter, Mr. Constance? I ain’t a tunny boat.”
“Well, maybe charter isn’t the word in these parts. Leastways, a trip, you know. I’d make it worth your while.”
“You the fishin’ type then?” Jim inquired.
“I was thinking more of the kid. He’s kind of moping about, needs to get out a bit. His birthday’s on July Fourth. If you could take him out the Sunday after, it’d be a belated treat for him.”
“Look, Mr. Constance, I ain’t got time for nannying a kid. Fishin’ is fishin’. You do it right or stay ashore.”
Stu held up his hands. “Hey, Jim—I can call you Jim, can’t I?” Jim gave no encouragement to being thus named but Stu went on: “Don’t get me wrong. The kid likes the outdoors. It’s just me and Bettie… I guess we just never got used to it—can’t teach him like you could. And on a Sunday… Well, all I can say is he doesn’t take to the church too well. You know his story, right?”
“Yeah, I heard,” Jim answered.
“So, what do you say?”
Jim looked at him evenly for a few moments. The Constances were not bad people. Soft and city-like, but they had showed they had good hearts by adopting a troubled kid, however weird he’d turned out. They didn’t harm no one by reading their books and leading the quiet life, unlike some of the jacked-up summer residents who were ignorant know-it-alls.
