Go With Me (2 page)

“That ain’t the way it works,” the sheriff went on, “and that ain’t the way you want it to work.”

“Don’t tell me what I want.”

The sheriff didn’t reply. He looked across the desk at the young woman. He waited.

“Listen,” the young woman said. She set her coffee cup down on the desk. “Didn’t you hear me? He killed my cat. My fucking cat. He cut her fucking throat. So don’t tell me what I want.” She started to leave her chair.

“Sit down,” the sheriff said.

The young woman looked at him across the desk. She sat again.

“Why?” she asked. “Why should I sit down? You’re telling me you can’t do anything. You’re telling me I have to wait till he does something, till he gets to me, kills me, before you can do anything.”

“You could put it that way, I guess,” the sheriff said.

“How would you put it?”

“That way.”

“Well, then,” said the young woman, and again she half rose from her chair.

“Sit,” said the sheriff. “Have you got any people around? Any family?”

“No. Nobody.”

“Where are you from?”

“Upstate.”

“Go home,” said the sheriff.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Look,” the young woman said, “I haven’t done anything, here. Blackway has. Let Blackway go home.”

“Blackway is home,” said the sheriff.

They sat in silence for a moment.

“You have friends?” the sheriff asked the young woman. “Anybody? Down here, I mean? You were going with Russell Bay’s boy. With Kevin, weren’t you?”

“Kevin’s gone,” said the young woman.“ He took off. He ran out. I don’t have anybody else. I mean, I don’t know anybody else. And if I did, so what? You’re telling me nobody can help me, right?”

“I’m telling you the law can’t help you,” said the sheriff. “That ain’t quite the same thing, is it?”

The young woman sat back in her chair. She was listening to him now.

“No,” she said. “No, it’s not.”

“You know the mill?” the sheriff asked her. “Other side of town, big old place right on the road? Used to be the chair shop?”

“The chair company? I’ve seen the sign.”

“You might go there,” the sheriff said. “There’s usually a few fellows around there. Ask for Whizzer. Do you know him?”

“Whizzer?”

“Ask for Whizzer. Tell him I said you should go there. Tell him about Blackway. Ask him if Scotty’s around.”

“Scotty?”

“Scotty Cavanaugh,” said the sheriff. “He knows Blackway. He and Blackway have had dealings, you could say. Scotty might be able to help you with this thing.”

“Help me, how?”

“That would be up to him,” the sheriff said. “Wouldn’t it?”

“What if he won’t?”

“He will if Whizzer asks him to.”

“Who’s Whizzer?” the young woman asked.

“Oh, Whizzer’s kind of like the boss, down there,” said Sheriff Wingate. “It’s his place. Go see him. See Whizzer.”

2

THE DEAD RIVER CHAIR COMPANY

Alonzo Boot, the one they called Whizzer, awoke on the couch. He often spent the night there. No reason to go to bed. He didn’t sleep much anymore. He rolled onto his back and reached up to take hold of the rope hanging from one of the overhead beams. He hoisted himself upright. He grasped his legs and swung them onto the floor, then raised himself off the couch and into his cart. Seated, he could see out the office window: mist heavy in the mill yard and among the trees in the woods, but stirring, lightening, burning off.

Whizzer got his cart pivoted toward the door to the head. He switched on the motor, which started with a hum. Whizzer touched the throttle.

“Giddap,” he said.

The mill’s proper name was the Dead River Chair Company. It sat on the edge of the village, above the brook that had once driven its changing array of machinery. An old wooden sign on the road side of the mill said
DEAD RIVER CHAIR CO.
in faded gold letters a foot high. At any time in the past fifty years, however, if you had shown up at the mill looking to buy a chair, the people there would have laughed at you.

There had been a mill on that lot since before the Civil War. At one time and another, it had made about everything you can make out of the kinds of trees that grow in the Vermont foothills: not only chairs, but barrels and tubs, bowls, bobbins, window sash, shutters, boxes, children’s sleds, hockey sticks, baskets, gunstocks. The whole outfit had burned to the ground twice, to be rebuilt and refitted finally, around 1910, as the chair company, running out of a big new building with equipment driven, no longer by the brook, but by a steam engine.

The chair company had been owned by three generations of a family named Boot. For sixty years it was a thriving concern. Around the time of the First World War it employed forty people. Leaving out the time needed to season the wood, the mill in its prime could take a log of ash or oak, a log of rock maple, in at one end and pop it out at the other a couple of days later as a full set of good Windsor chairs.

The mill continued to make chairs through the time of Whizzer Boot’s grandfather and father, but by the time Whizzer himself took over, it was a diminished thing. Apparently they made a better Windsor chair in North Carolina, in Taiwan, than they did in Vermont. Whizzer nearly went bust. He sold off such of the mill’s machinery as he could and left the rest of it to gather cobwebs and bat droppings. He kept up the sawmill, but he moved it out of the mill building and into a metal hangar in the old mill yard. The new sawmill had power not from the chair company’s vast and temperamental boiler, but from a diesel engine the size of a TV that could run all week on a barrel of fuel while you drank beer and watched. Whizzer cut and sawed the logs himself until he had his accident. After the accident, he ascended to the level of management.

By and by the mill, which had at times given employment to a whole village, reached the point where it gave employment only to Whizzer and a couple of helpers. At least, that was the payroll. In fact, nobody at the mill was killing himself with overwork.

Whizzer’s accident, now ten years ago, had taken things from him, and it had given him things. The things taken were in the past; they were the past itself. The others continued. The accident had given Whizzer a new way of getting around, a new income, a new job. It had given him a new name. During his long recovery, when he was learning to use the new electric cart or wheelchair in which he was invited to spend the rest of his life, he and the men who idled about the mill, the beer passing among them, would take turns trying the machine out — ahead, back, port, starboard, half speed, full speed. They called the chair the whizzer, and eventually the name of the conveyance attached itself to the conveyed.

Whizzer’s accident had also given him his life’s only ride in an aircraft, though of that ride he had no memory whatsoever. In fact he had no memory of any part of the event. He had been skidding logs on Little Blue Mountain and had stopped the skidder, set the brake, and gotten down to take a piss. He woke up in the emergency room with a circle of people looking down at him under a bright light. None of them was anybody he knew. He tried to ask them where he was and what had happened to him, but he couldn’t seem to make them hear him.

A tree had fallen on him, an oak. They had been cutting oak. The wind had taken the top of an oak being felled; it had twisted off its stump and come down in the wrong place. It had come down on top of Whizzer. Oak’s a heavy tree. One that size weighs, maybe, a couple of tons. The oak had hit Whizzer so hard that, as Coop or D.B. or one of the others said, for five years after the accident he shat mostly acorns.

They got the tree off him, got him out of the woods and down to somebody’s pasture, where a helicopter picked him up and took him to the hospital. It took him to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital in New Hampshire. Several days later, when Whizzer understood where he was, he decided he was a gone man in more ways than one. For all that district, Dartmouth-Hitchcock was confidently known to be a waiting room for the Hereafter — or, not a waiting room only, but an export office, a kind of customhouse, where, as you took your departure, whatever you might have had in the way of an earthly estate was distributed without remainder among various members of the medical community.

“Dead or bankrupt,” Whizzer said. “Or both.”

But, no. Not at all. Ten years later he was alive and more or less solvent, collecting a full disability benefit earned the hard way, and enjoying the attention, the regard, the tender care of a small company of loyal friends whom he could no longer outrun.

Inside, the mill was a long, shadowy hall, poorly lit by filthy windows, where your footfalls on the wooden floorboards were louder than you wished. To either side of a central aisle the old benches, lathes, band saws, jointers, planers, and the rest sat in their dust, and overhead, cables, trolleys, belts, and wheels hung in the gloom. Only at the far end of the floor was there any real light, in the old manager’s office, where Whizzer held forth.

The office was a room ten feet square with a window looking out over the mill yard and the brook to the wooded hill beyond them and another window looking onto the mill floor. In the office was a cast-iron woodstove, Whizzer’s old leather couch much cracked and scuffed, two steel filing cabinets, packed to overflowing with useless and forgotten paperwork, and half a dozen chairs: rockers, canvas camp chairs, stuffed chairs.

Whizzer had never married, and the mill office, his domain, was neither bright, nor neat, nor clean. On the walls of the office, piled in its corners and on its shelves, stacked atop its cabinets, was an accumulation of the kind of cobwebbed mementos that generations of unsentimental men had hesitated to take to the dump. There were nailed boots and old harness buckles, there were rusty axes and long crosscut saws, also rusty. There were loose bars, sprockets, carburetors from chain-saw engines. There were brown photographs, framed, showing groups of men with suspenders and heavy mustaches standing in front of piles of enormous logs, the mill behind them.

High on one wall loomed the head and antlers of a great caribou. Whizzer’s late father had been a big-game hunter. He had brought the caribou trophy back from Alaska, where in 1948 he had been led into the Brooks Range by the great Elwood “Grizzly” Singleton, dean of Alaskan big game guides. The senior Boot had drawn a blank in the game department out there. In two miserable weeks neither he nor Singleton had so much as fired his rifle. The caribou had come from a taxidermist’s shop in Vancouver. As Whizzer’s father told the story, Grizzly Singleton had insisted on buying the head as a present to him before the disappointed hunter boarded the Canadian Pacific for the long haul back to New England. Singleton’s client had been promised a mount, and the Grizzly was an honorable man though, as was well known to every sportsman from San Francisco to Fairbanks, a lousy guide.

Another trophy in Whizzer’s office was his own: a great horned owl, which glared with its angry glass eyes from a shelf behind the door. It had turned up dead in the mill yard one morning long ago, and Whizzer, then a high school kid, had determined to stuff it. He found instructions in a boys’ magazine. He skinned the bird and had one of the men at the mill shape a kind of wooden football to fit inside it more or less, then he packed sawdust into the empty spaces, sewed the whole thing up, and wired it onto a branch nailed to a board. The glass eyes he mail-ordered from Chicago. They were the most satisfactory part of the exhibit — or the least unsatisfactory. Apart from the eyes, Whizzer’s owl hadn’t held up well. It looked like it ought, in the first place, to have been given a decent burial. It had developed a drunken lean to one side, and over the years mice had moved into its interior and nested there. When they frolicked, the stuffed owl could sometimes be seen faintly to jerk or twitch, as if in life. Some days, indeed, Whizzer’s owl got around the premises more than Whizzer.

Closing in on a hundred years old, built entirely of wooden timbers, studs, boards, and shingles, all of which were saturated with ancient grease, the mill amounted to a large firework waiting for a match. Whizzer couldn’t afford to insure it. The property existed on the town’s grand list like a crazy aunt in the attic, a painful embarrassment never to be discussed. At any time in the past fifteen years, the town might have seized the place for unpaid taxes, but they didn’t. Why would they? They didn’t want the mill. Nobody wanted it. It wasn’t worth demolishing. It wasn’t worth thinking about. One day, it would burn down.

Until that day Whizzer kept his little sawmill going off and on in the yard beside the old chair company building, and he kept a kind of club in the office. There was a coffeepot, and there was a cooler. There was the stove for winter and an electric fan for summer. In there, Whizzer sat with whoever turned up: men bringing logs to the mill, the kids he had helping him in the yard, passersby, and a fairly constant set of three or four men a little younger than he, who came and went. They sat in the office and talked — or didn’t. They watched the ball games on a little TV Whizzer had set up. If a quantity of beer should make itself available, they drank it. The time passed. The mill was no Mermaid Tavern, no, but it did what it had to do in its time. And anyway, how many Mermaid Taverns do you need?

3

YOU PEOPLE

Somebody drove into the yard.

“Who’s this?” asked Whizzer.

Coop got to his feet and went to the window. He looked out.

“Lady in a little car,” said Coop.

“Young?” Whizzer asked.

Coop bent to the window.

“I wouldn’t call it young,” he said. “It’s a ’ninety-two, ’ninety-three. A little Escort.”

“The lady,” said Whizzer.

Coop looked again.

“Young enough,” he said.

“Well, tell her to bring a couple of friends, then,” said Whizzer. “We’ve got a party going in here, tell her.”

“You tell her,” said Coop.

“Who is she?” D.B. asked him.