Eddie and I both have gum boots on, jeans, flannel shirts, and down vests. Upstate clothes. Eddie had them first and I followed, not deliberately — item by item — so it snuck up on me that I’d done it. Now here I am looking quite a bit like Eddie.
Eddie introduces us as new in town. True enough. Stopping by just to meet our neighbors, which is a stretch.
“Quite a layout here. What do you have, a hundred fifty, two hundred acres?” Eddie looks around as though searching for a boundary fence, though he already knows the dimensions of this place.
“Three hundred eleven,” she says. “All the woods there behind the creek and the hollow there, to the river. Right up to the Oswegatchie there.”
“Beautiful river,” Eddie says, like he’s complimenting her on a watercolor she’s made or a turkey she’s cooked. “Nice little town too. Pine. Nice place.”
The old lady tilts her head meditatively. “I guess it is.”
“Bit cold out here,” Eddie says. “You mind if we come inside a moment or two?”
Once inside Eddie finagles us tea and biscuits, and he starts playing therapist, nodding his head as the woman, Mrs. Berner, tells us about disasters in her life. She says the land has become a nightmare since her husband’s stroke two years back.
Eddie plays slow to agree.
“But you’ve got a real farm,” he says. “That’s the way to live, straight from the earth.”
“It’s too big for us. We haven’t been able to do a thing out there for years. It’s a waste,” she says. “And it’s not like we have a pension rolling in. We’ve got no income.”
He’s managed to get her to talk him into his pitch.
“You ever thought of selling the place, getting some smaller spot in town?” I ask.
Eddie shoots me a look: slow down. He’s training me so I can close this sale later on my own. He sips his tea, then places the cup on the table next to him so he can use his hands to paint the picture.
“What Randall means is that the two of you deserve to be living better,” Eddie says. “Lord sakes, you’ve earned it. What kind of life would you want if you could have anything you’ve dreamed of?”
“I’d say we’ve had… what we wanted,” the old man says, and he looks so pathetic it breaks my heart.
“Think big,” Eddie says. “Think of what you’d want if money were no object. I mean for me, I’d think of a new car, a speedboat, maybe a cruise to South America. You ever been to South America?”
The man lets out a sepulchral cough. Then he holds the handkerchief over his mouth and spits.
Eddie switches the conversation, to hunting and fishing, and finding no traction there asks Mrs. Berner about her children.
“Oh, they’re in California now,” she says.
“Think about visiting them,” Eddie says. “It’s a beautiful world out there.”
“I guess they’ve grown apart from us.”
She seems to want us to ask about this.
“Be nice to have a manageable place in town, don’t you think? And a little cash to take care of Mr. Berner,” I say.
“Sometimes I think that’s just what we need, and then we just can’t seem to say so long to this place. You know how that is. You go to sleep and you wake up, and you’re still here.”
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Berner points the way and lets me loose in her house.
I think about us sitting there in the Berners’ living room and it makes me angry at them. There’s no reason to be so trusting in a world like ours. A couple of months ago I read an article about an old couple that let a man into their house supposedly to fix their stove. They didn’t even have a problem with their stove, but they trusted him, and when they let him inside, he pulled a pistol on them. He made them lie down on the ground. He took everything they had in the house, and before he left he must have thought they’d had a long enough look at his face because he shot them both dead. I wander through the cold drafty rooms of the Berners’ house and I think about us being homicidal maniacs. We’re invited guests, in their house, and there’s no one around to hear us or see us. No witnesses. And there’s plenty here to rob. I sold at an antique shop one summer, and the Berners have possessions lying around that would bring a decent price: old snow globes; a gilded music box, mahogany it looks like; a tall grandfather clock with Westminster chimes and the wrong time, standing in the corner like a forgotten cathedral; a 1950 Winchester 12-gauge in an otherwise empty gun rack; a reading lamp with a silk shade and glass bead fringe. I flick the switch but then I see — there’s no bulb. There’s beautiful stuff here that doesn’t look like it’s been touched for years. Would they miss it if it was all gone one day? In the drawers of a maple chest in the dining room there are dusty porcelain teacups so thin they might crack the instant you lifted them to your lips.
We could steal everything in this house if we wanted and they probably wouldn’t notice.
In the bathroom I pick up crystal and silver perfume bottles, a magnifying glass with a mother-of-pearl handle that rests atop a pile of ancient Life magazines. I pocket one of the perfume bottles, covering it with tissues taken from their nightstand.
On my way back, I hear Eddie laughing too loud and saying, “You’re exactly right. You’re a hundred percent on the mark.”
Eddie gives them his card before we go, and he holds Mrs. Berner’s hand in his. “If you decide you need a change, give Randall here a call. I think we can work a nice deal for all of us.”
He turns to me. “I’ll wait for you in the car,” he says. He wants me to establish myself here. It will be my sale.
It will be easy. They’re already leaning our way. They even like us, for God’s sake. On my way out the door, I pull the perfume bottle out from the tissues and I hold it at my side, right there for them to see. Eddie’s out in the car waiting. I stand in the doorway.
“Is there anything else I can answer for you?” I say.
She sees nothing.
“No,” she says. “But I’m feeling sure there will be.”
Eddie has me going it on my own so that he can move to other properties. In the last year, he’s managed to buy two thousand acres of woodlands and waterfront in the Adirondacks, and our company has bought around seven times that. And these people really need the money from the looks of them. Ninety thousand dollars buys a new car, flat-screen TV, stereo and disc player, medicine and food for the next three years and a house on Collins Street, a block from the general store. Eddie’s girlfriend says it’s the Adirondacks. It’s a special part of the country. And it is. Six million acres. Almost half of it unmarked, not even a logging road or snowmobile trail. The Hudson River starts up not too far from here in Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds. It’s a lake almost a mile high, and I’ve been swimming there.
It’s not as if we’re building factories or a toxic waste dump. The houses and cabins we build are beautiful, state of the art: high ceilings, fireplaces, wraparound porches. And the outsides are left their natural wood color, or painted brown or grass green so they blend in with the earth. The way Eddie tells it, we’re giving people their retirement and we are, but we’re also making some coin. Like the Berners’ three hundred acres. We’ll split it into eight lots, each with a calendar picture of unspoiled Adirondack riverfront, and each selling for about four times what we’ll pay the Berners. Our company places ads in the New York Times with pictures of the Oswegatchie, of the triple falls, the water dropping into spruce green eddies. “Five hours from the city and you’re in God’s backyard.” People can’t afford to buy beachfront anymore. They’re sick of the suburbs, the shopping malls. We’re giving them what they’ve been missing their whole lives. There’s an interview process for the people who want to buy. “We want people who will respect the land,” Eddie says, “who love the outdoors; people who will be good neighbors.” I’ve never seen him turn down a buyer because he thought he’d be a bad neighbor. But people like to be interviewed. They want to think they’ve passed a test.