The Duration Read online

  Eventually, the answers to those questions became clear, and the property was abandoned by 1920. Guy Van Nest retreated to a considerably smaller estate on Long Island, and was not seen in the Berkshires again.

  As for the rhino, those stable-hands who had accompanied Guy into the rolling woodlands were usually too drunk to be reliable, especially after they lost their jobs, but one or two spoke of following the rhino’s tracks, and, where the tracks were faint, of following a break in the undergrowth the size of a train tunnel, until they’d found the beast. They spoke of a fast march across hard earth, and then a short shale drop that opened onto the soft swamp below. They spoke of half a ton of animal at the bottom, upturned and fearful, already part buried, its eyes foggy and its chest rattling. They spoke of oaths and recriminations and curses, and, finally, of shots fired by the master of the house.

  We knew all this because we’d put it into our reports for Ms. Flemmy and Chief Winston, which wound up being probably just about the best goddamn reports you’ve ever read, probably. Got an A from the former and a paternal pat on the shoulders from the latter. We dropped in big block quotes from Florence Banish, pages at a time, the prose both flowery and square. The master of the house. The leveled muskets. Only thing missing was someone getting the vapors.

  “It was never seen again,” Florence Banish said, in the quote we ended on. “The beast of the wood, a secret locked away forever.”

  Far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. Good story, but once we turned in the reports I was ready to leave it behind.

  Chick wasn’t, though.

  These were the months after the Trivette stuff came out, and we’d been upping our time in isolation. The trails, the practice courts. We hiked Monument, found the West Normanton quarry. Chick started talking about his time with the bears. It was just easier to be out of town, I guess. Nobody giving us the look. Nobody changing the dynamics. Eventually, the next scandal would drop and we could return. So we shot threes and poked through the ruins of our environment, trying to find something else to process. A new identity, a cause. And then Ms. Bitz and good old Florence Banish came through.

  Once the weather warmed up and school ended, Chick took our report and began directing forays into the woods off of Bramble, expecting to stumble right onto the body of the rhino. Jimmer and Unsie came twice and then bailed. I stuck it out initially. First few times, nothing—looking for a shale cliff and a big lump of earth in those woods was like looking for a rotting tree. They were everywhere. The fourth time, a site felt promising and we lugged a couple of shovels through the woods from my dad’s shed, but all we hit was the rusted frame of a VW Bug.

  After that, I lost interest pretty quick. Shaunda Schoenstein was working concessions down at Tanglewood, and I was too busy trying to charm my way into her apron to want to waste more time in the woods. Plus, there was poison ivy back there, and no matter how many times you tell a girl it’s not contagious, she never believes you.

  Chick stuck with it. He had a little map that he’d worked on with Florence Banish, and he was checking off quadrants. We found the Bug here, he’d say, marking a spot with an x. We radiate out from that.

  “This is dumb, Chick,” I said one day, as I was urinating against a maple tree and eying a nearby vine suspiciously. Its leaves were shiny and triplicate and a little too close for comfort. “We are never going to find it.”

  Chick was shuffling around, looking at his map. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can go.”

  I put my junk away carefully, without touching it, by lifting the waistband of my sweats out and back. Go into the woods, brush up against a plant, put a hand down your pants—just to scratch your balls, for example—and presto, poison ivy on your dick. Happened to Mark Pacheco. More than once, I think. He was a weird kid.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Chick looked at me and shrugged. “What?”

  “Come with me.”

  He shook his head.

  “Can’t,” he said, smiling. “I’ve been called.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m calling you back. Shaunda and them are in the maze. Let’s go.”

  Chick looked up into the trees. The sun was bending away to the west and sending shadows down onto the forest floor.

  “Fine,” he said, folding up his map. “But we’re coming back. It’s out here. We can’t just leave it.”

  “Shit,” I said. “If it’s out here, it’s not going anywhere.”

  But it was, in fact.

  Head-Connect purchased the property in the fall of 1997 and set about bulldozing the grounds into someone’s idea of Sherwood Forest. They smoothed the hills and put down fresh cedar chip trails, color-coding the trees along the way. They unrooted the rot and dug out the poison ivy and the broken fountains and the VW and replaced them with reading nooks and meditation moments. They put really well-made footbridges over the creeks. You can always tell when developers are serious by the quality of their footbridges.

  If they found a big skeleton in there, we never heard about it. Of course, from the cockpit of a backhoe it might be hard to notice one among all the dead roots and boulders and such. Anyway, after they were finished, the woods were pristine and unrecognizable, and any reference points we might have hoped to use were gone. Chickie and I watched from Bramble as Fleur-de-Lys disappeared into a cocoon of all-weather siding and then re-emerged from fifty years of overgrowth as a bright ship of marble and glass. They built new wings for a gym complex and a test kitchen. Horses returned to half of the stables, while the other half became an aquatics center. The servants’ quarters were expanded and fitted with hot tubs. Gardens were seeded with astilbe and bee balm. Everything was sustainable, whatever that meant. The whole thing took about eighteen months, but pretty soon after that, strangers with unlined faces and southwestern roots started buying up the midlevel real estate on the outskirts of town, and limousines and livery cabs started pulling in from Bradley and Wassaic, ferrying stars with bad habits, overweight team-building executives, the one-percent looking for either an edge or a break.

  The Gilded Age had returned.

  Later that first summer, Chickie got arrested again, and released again, for trespassing in the woods around Fleur-de-Lys. At first the Head-Connect folks thought he was paparazzi and were sort of disappointed to learn he wasn’t. He was persistent, though, and eventually they put him on a special list of nuisances, like crabgrass and fire ants. They hung his picture in the contractor’s shack. The third time, Chief Winston and Chick’s mother negotiated an agreement to rein him in, and in exchange, the Head-Connect folks didn’t press charges. After that, he got really quiet whenever the subject came up.

  “What do you mean, it’s there?” I asked.

  We were still in the entryway of the library. Chickie looked around warily, like he was checking for eavesdroppers. I caught myself doing it too.

  “Well,” he said. “I get back, what, a month ago?”

  It was less than that, far as I knew.

  “Don’t know what I expected, but it’s all weird now. It’s not fun anymore. You’re gone. Uns is always busy. We're not kids like we used to be. But then, then, there’s this other part, it’s almost a ghost part, comes and goes, but it’s this part that feels like I never left. Been here the whole time. One day I wind up at the library, looking for old Banish, even though I know she’s gone. And instead I start chatting with this new librarian—you know how it is when you get them talking—telling her about how Banish had turned us on to the rhino and all that. Just for someone to talk to.”

  He was more animated than he’d been since early morning, jumping on my bed.

  “And she says, ‘You know Ms. Banish passed away in 2002, right?’ And I’m like, shit yeah, we were at her funeral. Except I didn’t say ‘shit,’ of course. And she felt so sorry for me, or something—these librarians stick together—that she takes me back to the office and opens a drawer and says, ‘This was her special file.’”

  He slung th
e backpack off his shoulder and dug a manila folder out of it.

  “Guess what was in it?”

  He pulled a small square of photo stock out of it, grainy and blurred at the edges. I squinted at it. It looked like a picture of a furnace.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a safe,” Chickie said.

  I looked again, more closely. He was right. There was the heavy door, partially open. There were the rectangular bars along the bottom, stacked like chocolates. Papers and small boxes took up the middle shelves.

  “A secret locked away forever,” Chick said, bending a finger over the picture and tapping on the topmost shelf. It was hard to see what was there. I brushed his finger aside and squinted, but all I saw was something that looked like a bat in a sack.

  “She knew the whole time,” said Chick. “That’s the horn.”

  We left the library an hour later with a plan. Or plans.

  Chickie’s plan was insane. It involved infiltrating Head-Connect via a sort of hillbilly parkour, sneaking into the basement of the main building—where Chickie was sure the old Van Nest safe remained—cracking the safe, removing the now 100-year-old rhino horn from its shroud, spiriting it back out of Head-Connect, and committing it to the woods in some druidic fashion. If we couldn’t locate the rest of the rhino, at least we could make it whole. A rhino’s soul is in its horn. It’s what it’s got. Something like that.

  My plan was, to my way of thinking, more realistic. It involved figuring out who we knew at Head-Connect—we had to know someone—and asking them if there was a rhino horn sitting around, or if they’d ever heard of one. Was there an abandoned safe on the property? It seemed unlikely. Even in his despondency, Guy Van Nest wouldn’t have just left his valuables behind, right? No safe meant no horn—if indeed there ever was one—and no horn, then, you know, no need for any insanity.

  My plan might have lacked the drama and excitement of Chick’s, but it was just about the limit of what I was willing to do. I’d borrowed upward of $75,000 to finance a law degree and, as tangled a history as we had, I wasn’t prepared to surrender it in the pursuit of Chick’s lunatic errand. There were legal and ethical issues to consider. As it stood I was due back in Boston for work by 8:30 Monday morning.

  “So, let’s talk to Unsie about this,” I said as we walked away from the library.

  Chick, so focused and impassioned a few minutes earlier, was now fidgety.

  “Uh, yeah,” he said, checking his watch. It wasn’t yet noon. “Can we do it later?”

  I shrugged. We were two blocks from Asgard.

  “Let’s do it later,” Chick said. “I actually have a thing in a few minutes.”

  “What thing?” I asked.

  Chick shrugged. “Just stuff. Errands.”

  I looked at him.

  “What’s going on, man?”

  Chick gave me his big smile.

  “Don’t worry about it, dude. Listen, we are going to find that thing, and it’s going to be great.” He looked me in the eye. “Thank you for helping me. It means a lot.”

  “You’re full of shit,” I said.

  A purple Trans Am idled at the corner of Church and Main, because in Gable it could always be 1983. Chick spotted it.

  “That’s my ride.”

  I scanned the Trans Am. A driver and the waitress from breakfast in the front. A guy in the back.

  We were outside the Heirloom. If Chick was going to pull this shit, I was going to extract a price, the past for the future.

  “Fine,” I said, hooking a thumb toward the door. “Meet me here at six sharp,”

  Chick looked up at the establishment, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Meet me here or come find me in Boston,” I said.

  The big smile came back.

  “Heirloom it is. Six o’clock.”

  I nodded skeptically.

  “See you then,” I said.

  Chick gave me an enthusiastic double thumbs-up and jogged off toward the waiting Trans Am. I watched him go.

  “What the fuck, dude?” I said to Unsie, when I found him in the back of Asgard, folding performance T-shirts into shiny squares. “Drugs, right?”

  Unsie kept folding.

  “I think so. I mean, it’s not my area of expertise, but sure seems like it.”

  “Ginny Archey says he’s been going back and forth to Sink City.”

  “I guess. Seems to me that there’s probably plenty of local options, no need to make the drive. Things are bad out here. But, again, it’s not my thing.”

  I picked up a shirt and folded it. His square looked better than mine. He took the shirt and shook it out, then folded it again.

  We’d smoked a little in high school, except Unsie, who was too focused on lung capacity and had already begun researching ways to up the red blood cell count in his plasma. Jimmer and Chick smoked the most, the former using his high to deconstruct the moral arc of certain video games, the latter sinking into a poetic stupor. Never anything harder than weed, though, almost never. There were plenty of kids we knew pushing pharmaceuticals, and once in law school I tried to convince Kelly that we should enhance a Hootie & the Blowfish concert with Ecstasy, but it didn’t work. I knew nothing about real drugs.

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  Unsie looked at me.

  “Hah,” he said.

  “Come on, man.”

  Unsie stopped folding the performance shirts.

  “You come on,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  I looked around the store. Eight or nine people were milling around, trying on fleece vests and alpaca socks.

  “Can you give him a job?” I asked.

  Unsie looked up and spoke firmly, as if he’d thought it all out already.

  “The kid is on drugs. I’m not going to give him a job. If he was not on drugs, I would consider it.”

  He gestured to the quiet store.

  “But look around. How long you think a job like this would hold Chick’s attention? How many shirts you think he could fold before he tied one around his forehead? Some days even I want to take a blowtorch to the place.”

  He sighed.

  “Look, Pete, I know you feel like you owe him.”

  He stopped. I sensed an opening, thin as it may be.

  “Kid saved your life,” I said. “You owe him too.”

  Unsie rolled his eyes.

  “Please.”

  “If I can get him to give up the drugs, you give him a job. If he screws up, fire him.”

  Unsie shook his head, but more in exasperation than in resolve.

  “You’re just going to get him to give up the drugs, huh?” he said. “What drugs is he on?”

  I didn’t know.

  “You should probably start there, don’t you think?”

  I nodded.

  “So that’s where we’ll start. Let’s find out what we’re dealing with.”

  The “we” was on purpose, again.

  “Hah,” Unsie said again.

  I decided to shift gears, circle back later and act like we’d agreed.

  “Hey, do we know anyone who works over at Head-Connect?”

  Unsie finished the shirts and walked over to an inventory console.

  “Yeah, sure. Why?”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “So,” I asked. “Who?”

  He tilted his head. I like people who have little unconscious tics that manifest when they’re thinking. It’s like you can see into their minds. I really like people who make little clicky noises with their tongues when they think. Like they’re micro-processing or something. I trust them, trust that they’re thinking. I’ve been working on emulating those gestures. They seem like useful gestures, deployable in a number of situations.

  “Well, some friends of friends work there. Sales, outdoor rec. I think Ava Winston is in there somewhere. They cont
ract out their snowshoeing and Nordic to us in the winter.”

  “What does it mean to contract out a Nordic?”

  Unsie looked up and made a sad face.

  “It means we lead the cross-country ski tours through the property. Out to the Magic Meadow, through the woods. Bunch of bankers and entertainment types, can’t ski worth a shit. But they pay well.”

  He clucked his tongue.

  “Longest ninety minutes of your life, though.”

  “That’s probably not true,” I said. “So, so far we know you and Ava Winston.”

  I thought for a second.

  “You ever get in there?”

  Unsie looked at me.

  “Ava?”

  “Head-Connect. You ever hang out inside?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  Unsie didn’t like the idea of fitness retreats, preferring the idea of fitness lifestyles. He was disdainful of anything that smacked of a shortcut.

  “What’s Ava Winston do?”

  Unsie returned to the console.

  “Don’t know. I never see her. But she was in the paper a few years ago when they promoted her. Local interest story, something like that.”

  “Her dad still around?”

  “Yeah, in the existential sense. He retired a few years ago. Moved west.”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  I looked around the showroom. A rack of skis. A fleet of kayaks.

  “You ever see a rhino horn down there?”

  Unsie looked up at me.

  “Are you on drugs too?”

  When we were sixteen, Unsie broke his leg playing spring soccer after sneaking out with us on a day that he was supposed to be grounded. His punishment was six weeks in a foot-to-hip cast and a cat that bit his exposed toes. One hot June day we sprung him from his house and drove him out to the quarry in West Normanton, where Shaunda Schoenstein and the other rising seniors on St. Eustace’s girls’ field hockey team had installed themselves as sirens. Shaunda had a plastic baggie full of pot and a two-piece bikini whose top she would untie when she was sunning on her stomach, and as we swung Unsie and his leg across the narrow creek that separated the access road from the winding path to the quarry, we discussed various ruses that we might use to get her to sit up suddenly. Jimmer said that if she, or frankly if any of the other girls there, put themselves in a compromising position, we should feign a drowning. They would probably feel compelled to dive in, breasts unfettered, to save us.