The Duration Page 5

“I waited up there for an hour.”

  I looked over at him. He was smiling, but his face was red. He wouldn’t look back.

  “Haven’t seen you in forever. Random calls. I drove my ass all the way out here because you asked me to. And you leave me hanging.”

  Nothing.

  I picked up the envelope he’d left for me.

  “And what is this, anyway? Fleur-de-Lys and a picture of a dick.”

  Chickie looked up. Almost like he’d forgotten about the envelope. His face brightened.

  “It’s not a dick,” Chick said. “It’s a horn.”

  He crouched between the beds and inclined his right hand up and away from the bridge of his nose.

  “A horn. Get it?”

  A horn. I should have known that. Maybe I did.

  “I get it,” I said.

  In the spring of our seventh grade, our history teacher, Ms. Bitz, got caught in the weight room after hours, pinned under the captain of the wrestling squad. The sub, Ms. Flemmy, who was about a hundred and eight years old, came in looking to buy herself a week or two of adjustment time and immediately gave our class a project.

  “For the next week, each of you is to write a report about a famous historical figure who is buried in town,” she said. “Fifteen pages.”

  Jimmer had suggested we write about Ms. Bitz herself, since she was now both famous and buried, at least reputation-wise, but that seemed sort of cruel. Plus she was pretty hot, and who knew when and under what circumstances we might meet again. Maybe there was wrestling in our futures as well.

  Anyway, there was no shortage of candidates. What with the village’s history, the cottages and such, we’d been milking our ghosts for a hundred years already. Local lore was the go-to for every teacher from home ec to humanities. It was inescapable. Our high school mascot, the Gable Millionaire, was a rich dude in a top hat and tails running around the bleachers at home games, fake-smoking a cigar and handing out Monopoly money. He was our patron and sovereign and albatross all at once, the tycoon who’d carved up the woods so he had somewhere to go on the weekends. And none of us were even rich. We were all service-industry kids, ice-cream scoopers, lawn mowers. We walked your dog and delivered your paper. Our great-grandfathers kept Carnegie pools clean. Chandeliers swaying overhead and naked ladies in the gardens. Write about a famous figure buried around here? Shit, we would dig them up just to bury them again.

  As it happened, on the very day that Ms. Flemmy gave us the assignment, Chick and I were already a couple of hours into a report on Guy Van Nest, whose estate, Fleur-de-Lys, sat about 200 yards off of Bramble, past a chain-link fence and a marble gatehouse in disrepair. The property was hidden behind a brocade of pines and cedars and, from the road, if it was winter and the leaves were down, you might just catch sight of a ruined corner of the Italianate main building, maybe a column or two, maybe the edge of what was once a fountain. Nobody had been in there regularly for fifty years, roughly since the Sisters of Mercy bought it at auction in the 1940s and then didn’t have the money to restore it. A fire in the ’70s gutted the second floor and was locally attributed to a nun-sponsored insurance gambit.

  From the back of my house, it was a couple miles walk through the woods to get onto the Fleur-de-Lys property. We used to hike over there all the time, hunt for turtles in the old pools, look through the broken windows of the main house. Run around for hours, trails to more trails to statues and gazebos splintered by time. Cowboys and Indians. Capture the flag when we had numbers. The estate was a labyrinth, and the main mansion its center. All the windows were damaged, and the rooms inside looked dank and gangrenous. It was a mess. We snuck out to it every chance we got.

  Chick and I’d been there just the week before, in fact, trying to force open a window above the porch, when we were surprised by Officer Grevantz, the newest member of Gable’s police force. Slick son of a bitch was on an ATV, an appropriation for which the police department had lobbied just the past summer, and when folks asked what do you need an ATV for anyway, our jowly Chief Winston could probably have said “to bust kids trying to sneak into Fleur-de-Lys,” but didn’t.

  The ATV was loud as shit, but the window was nearly open, and we just weren’t paying attention. Grevantz jumped off that thing like he was roping a steer, light shining off his sunglasses, gum snapping between his teeth. He pointed at the two of us.

  “I know you two,” he shouted, I guess to forestall any thoughts we might have of escape. He was wearing a cross between a smile and a snarl. “Benecik and Johansson. I know your parents. Get your asses down here.”

  Grevantz was only about twenty-six years old at the time, in his second year on the job. Man, you just knew this was the best thing he’d done all week and that he could hardly wait to get back to the station. I think he was hoping we’d run for it.

  The thought did cross my mind. Chick gave me a look—part panicked, part thrilled. I shook him off. The ground was wet, we were wearing boots, and the motherfucker was on an ATV. Plus, he had a gun, not that he’d use it.

  Anyway, it was irrelevant. He knew us. Even if we shook him, he’d just be waiting at our houses.

  We climbed down. Grevantz called for a cruiser. A little unnecessary, I thought, until I noticed how cool his walkie-talkie was, and how staccato and totalitarian he got to sound speaking into it.

  Chief Winston was a big man with a wide head and an avuncular quality that I associated with gardeners and the ’80s Celts coach K.C. Jones, who I admired despite his having ruined my Magic-Johnson-loving childhood. Chief Winston was in-laws with George Harvey, our CYC coach, and had a daughter our age named Ava who went to private school in Connecticut. We knew her from the summers, from Tanglewood where we parked cars and she wandered with her private school friends through the mazes, girls with names like Karina and Ellis, girls who ignored us until they needed someone to smuggle in a fifth of blackberry schnapps and make out with and then throw up on. But nobody messed with Ava, probably because she was the daughter of the local police chief and maybe also because she didn’t make herself available, as if she felt a little torn between her school world and her home world and didn’t want to throw up all over the latter, at least not yet. And as long as she kept bringing hot chicks in to slum with us, that was fine.

  Maybe because we’d never tried to lay a hand on Ava, or maybe because he knew about the stuff with Bill Trivette, Chief Winston went easy on us. Grevantz had marched us to the rusted gates of Fleur-de-Lys and stuffed us into the back of a cruiser driven by another of our local cops—there were only six—named Mulvaney, who had been on the job forever and didn’t say anything to us except “watch your heads.” Then Grevantz had led the cruiser back into town on the ATV, like he was at the head of a big parade, a hunter towing in the bucks he’d brought down. People on Main Street stared at the cruiser. Chickie stared back. Sometimes he waved.

  In his office, Chief Winston fixed us with a glare he’d probably been practicing for years. An old yellow dog lay curled at the foot of his desk.

  “Where’d you stash it?” he asked, squinting first at Chick and then at me.

  We looked at each other.

  “Stash what?” I asked.

  “We didn’t stash anything,” Chick said.

  “So you have it on you?” Chief Winston said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, son.”

  “What?”

  The chief let me shake for a minute, then started chuckling. Man, these fuckers were bored. I recognize that now. At the time, I almost started to cry.

  Then he picked up his phone and dialed a number.

  “Yeah,” he said, after a pause. “They’re here. I’m sending them your way. If they aren’t there in the next”—he looked at his watch—“five minutes, let me know. I’ll send out the dog.”

  Chief Winston hung up the phone and snapped his fingers. The dog at his feet raised its head. The chief looked at us.

  “You’re wanted,”
he said, “at the library.”

  The town library was three-quarters of a mile away. Chick and I sprinted across the street, through the back parking lot of the Curtis, over the fence at Lilac Park, almost got hit by a car crossing Housatonic, and arrived at the doors just as the head librarian, a wizened octogenarian named Florence Banish, bent her bun to check her watch.

  “You are the miscreants?” she asked, holding the door handle with fine fingers, her bones sheathed in parchment. With her other hand, she pressed her glasses back over the crook of her nose.

  We were keeled over, wheezing, our hands on our knees.

  I looked up and nodded.

  “Chief Winston says you are here to write a book report on Fleur-de-Lys. An apologia of a sort. It is to be thirty pages long and is due by the end of the month. Fortunately for you,” she said, “I am the definitive resource.”

  She turned in the door and headed inside.

  “Follow me.”

  Guy Van Nest was the only child of Forsyth and Helene Van Nest, a late baby, a gift to the tycoon’s second wife when he was in his fifties and she was already pushing thirty-five. In photos from the late 1800s, Guy appears as a small boy in short pants, pale—but that might be the tint—and surrounded by knees. Forsyth had made his fortune in the West, sliding needles into mineral veins, fueling the factory fires of the Cuyahoga, the construction of highways across the Atlantic Coast, the general choke and rattle of the late Industrial Revolution. Perhaps in response, he built Fleur-de-Lys deep within the Berkshire hills, surrounded by trees and fields, an Eden, a solace, a place where he could pretend to be a naturalist. Fresh air and clean water. He shipped Helene and baby Guy up here and rarely visited, and when he died, not soon enough, he left the entire estate, all 36 acres and 900 statues and forty rooms, to the child, who was eight at the time.

  Life was a series of nannies and clowns and croquet parties for Guy and his lonely mother, who cared less for the sleepy hill towns and their inhabitants than her husband seemed to want of her. Guy made few friends among the local children, many of whose parents worked for him, and his summers were spent in carriage rides from one cottage party to another, social events where the bonhomie was largely ceremonial. After Forsyth died, Helene was less and less in residence, taking the train back into the city at every opportunity and more often than not leaving Guy behind, on his massive estate, with his handlers and his jugglers and his short pants. As he hit his teens, things got a little crazy: wilder parties, construction projects commenced and halted, visitors of all shapes and sizes. Skinny-dipping. Naked lawn bowling. He developed something of a reputation.

  Then, in his early twenties, Guy went big. He’d hosted a traveling circus at Fleur-de-Lys, putting them up for the entire summer, the performers in the main house and the animals in stables and tents he’d commissioned. In the evenings, servants regaled the uptown taverns with stories of bearded women and dwarves and sword-swallowers, and some days you could catch an occasional glimpse of great gray beasts wandering aimlessly across the property’s back fields. When that summer ended, rumor had it, Guy had kept a rhino.

  We learned all this from Florence Banish, who had a whole folder of Fleur-de-Lys material in a fireproof cabinet in one of the library’s archival spaces. At that point, Head-Connect hadn’t yet purchased the property, although some of the local realtors whispered of overtures from Lake Tahoe. Chick and I sat at a circular table and spread the contents of the folder out in front of us. Grainy pictures, newspaper clippings, yellowing photocopies of deeds. Florence Banish watched hawk-like as we sifted through them, her voice a cross between a croak and a flute: no bending, no drinks, careful with the artifacts. Of course no drinks. Jeez, couldn’t she see we had no drinks?

  By our third day of research at the library, I was bored and had started to try and work out how big we could make our margins. Chickie, on the other hand, was engaged.

  “Shit,” he said, sliding a frail slip of newsprint my way.

  It was a clipping from the Berkshire Record, an old weekly newspaper now subsumed by the Franchise, an inside page dated April 1927. The paper was brittle and the color of Florence Banish’s hands. It was an obituary. Guy Van Nest, erstwhile owner and sole occupant of Fleur-de-Lys, died of pneumonia at the young age of thirty-eight and was buried on Long Island.

  “Shit,” I said. I got it right away.

  Florence Banish hissed at me.

  “Shoot. Sugar. If he’s not buried here, we can’t use him for Ms. Flemmy.”

  We were combining our probationary report for Chief Winston with our history paper, of course, but the latter depended on the subject being buried in town. Now Guy Van Nest didn’t qualify. We could still use the material for Chief Winston, but the one for Ms. Flemmy was due in a week and that’s the one for which we were suddenly without a subject. Chick groaned. Then he began shuffling through the papers again.

  “Maybe he had a kid?”

  I checked the obituary. Van Nest was divorced, no kids.

  “No luck.”

  We itemized the papers. Records from a bankruptcy, deeds of transfer. World War I going on somewhere, the stock market heading south. We settled on a grainy black-and-white from late August 1914, according to the thin scratches along its margin. The steps to the Italianate main house, a spread of people in front, a white tent top off to the left. Thin and mustachioed Guy Van Nest at the center of the spread, on the pea-stoned entry, dressed for dinner and flanked by women with parasols, then farther out by dark and hairy and dramatic creatures, acrobats in jumpsuits belted at the waist, a pair of midgets, a body builder, a 7-footer. A bearded figure of indeterminate gender with his or her arm around a clown, and past them, housemaids and gardeners and livery on the upper steps. Everyone staring at Guy, who had a smile on his face, a lion at his feet, and an elephant looming behind him, its trunk draped around his shoulders like a shawl.

  “What about the rhino?” said Chickie.

  I looked up.

  “What rhino?”

  “The one he kept at Fleur-de-Lys after the circus left. What happened to that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Heck if I know,” I said, out of deference to Florence Banish. “How do we know if there even was a rhino at Fleur-de-Lys?”

  “There was a rhino at Fleur-de-Lys,” Florence Banish said. “There still is.”

  We looked at her. She was standing in the door of our little project room, leaning a frail hip against the frame and looking dreamily out a side window. If she’d had a thin cigarette, she could have been in a movie. After a second, she gathered herself, took a look out to the main reading room, and then crossed slowly to us. She moved some papers around and centered the circus photo before us. She stared at it for a moment, then bent a bony finger toward one of the housemaids, second step, third from the edge.

  “That’s my mother,” she said.

  Chick and I walked from his room at the Horse Head. He was limping a little bit, holding his left side.

  “What’d you do?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably nothing. Just getting old. The knee aches when it’s cold out.”

  He was twenty-eight, six months younger than me.

  I clicked the unlock, and the truck blinked. Chick had blown his ACL out in the second fight with Tim-Rick Golack, somewhere near our foul line, at the bottom of a pile of kids. It had never healed right. They had to call the game with six minutes left in the fourth quarter. Tim-Rick had been in a different pile of kids near the baseline, his head in the crook of my arm, but the game was in our home gym and he took the blame for the injury, both from the fans and, the next day, in the paper. Which is what made his resurrection as a local businessman such a surprise.

  “Nice ride,” Chick said, looking at the Escalade. “Not as nice as Jimmer’s, but not bad.”

  Jimmer was somewhere in Silicon Valley, doing something with numbers.

  I’d had the Escalade for two years, got it shortly after law schoo
l, a gift to myself from those bottomless first paychecks. It was a stupid ride to own in Boston, where everyone either took cabs or the T, and where 15 feet of available curb was hard to find. And driving it I always felt like I was heading to an AND1 Mixtape game. But I liked it. It looked good parked next to all those little BMWs in the South End, like a killer whale in a school of clownfish. It announced my presence in the city, a kid from the sticks no longer. I came to play. I came to scale the walls. Plus, it helped me to feel wanted, because someone was always moving a couch.

  My ride was the only ride in the parking lot.

  “Where’s your car?” I said.

  Chick opened the passenger door.

  “Don’t have one.”

  “How’d you get here, then?”

  He looked at me.

  “Where? Here, Gable?”

  “Like, here.” I motioned to the Horse Head. It was a long walk from anywhere. “Last night, how did you get here?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Buddy dropped me off.”

  “Buddy? Buddy dropped you off?”

  We didn’t know anyone named Buddy. And anyway what buddy did Chick have who was dropping him off at the Horse Head?

  “A buddy. Elvis LaBeau, from Misconic. You remember Elvis LaBeau.”

  I did not remember Elvis LaBeau. I got in the truck. Chick climbed in the passenger seat and looked around. He put his hands on the dash and pretended to be taking it all in.

  “Boston is treating you well, I see,” he said.

  So transparent. My head was starting to hurt.

  “Dude, hold up. Back up.”

  Chickie looked at me, then lowered his eyes.

  “I need a little chronology,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said, staring at his socks. “Can we do it over breakfast?”

  We drove into town and stopped at Gina’s, one of the few places where you could still order an omelet with the yolks. The waitress, a woman in her early twenties whose hair looked wet but was in fact dry, brought coffee.