I spent the next hour on the porch, staring into the darkness.
The next day I made two phone calls, to the town hall and the police department of Nansen. I made gentle and polite inquiries and got the same answers from each office. There was no local or state law about boats coming to within a certain distance of shore. There was no law forbidding boats from mooring together. Nansen being such a small town, there was also no noise ordinance.
Home sweet home.
On my next visit Ron was wearing a bow tie, and we discussed necktie fashions before we got into the business at hand. He said, “Still having sleeping problems?”
I smiled. “No, not at all.”
“Really?”
“It’s fall,” I said. “The tourists have gone home, most of the cottages along the lake have been boarded up and nobody lakes out boats anymore. It’s so quiet at night I can hear the house creak and settle.”
“That’s good, that’s really good,” Ron said, and I changed the subject. A hall-hour later. I was heading back to Nansen, thinking about my latest white lie. Well, it wasn’t really a lie. More of an oversight.
I hadn’t told Ron about the hang-up phone calls. Or how trash had twice been dumped in my driveway. Or how a week ago, when I was shopping, I had come back to find a bullet hole through one of my windows. Maybe it had been a hunting accident. Hunting season hadn’t started, but I knew that for some of the workingmen in this town, it didn’t matter when the state allowed them to do their shooting.
I had cleaned up the driveway, shrugged off the phone calls, and cut away brush and saplings around the house, to eliminate any hiding spots for... hunters.
Still, I could sit out on the dock, a blanket around my legs and a mug of tea in my hand, watching the sun set in the distance, the reddish pink highlighting the strong yellows, oranges, and reds of the fall foliage. The water was a slate gray, and though I missed the loons, the smell of the leaves and the tang of woodsmoke from my chimney seemed to settle in just fine.
As it grew colder, I began to go into town for breakfast every few days. The center of Nansen could be featured in a documentary on New Hampshire small towns. Around the green common with its Civil War statue are a bank, a real estate office, a hardware store, two gas stations, a general store, and a small strip of service places with everything from a plumber to video rentals and Gretchen’s Kitchen. At Gretchen’s I read the paper while letting the mornings drift by. I listened to the old-timers at the counter pontificate on the ills of the state, nation, and world, and watched harried workers fly in to grab a quick meal. Eventually, a waitress named Sandy took some interest in me.
She was about twenty years younger than I, with raven hair, a wide smile, and a pleasing body that filled out her regulation pink uniform. After a couple weeks of flirting and generous tips on my part, I asked her out, and when she said yes. I went to my pickup truck and burst out laughing. A real date. I couldn’t remember the last time I had had a real date.
The first date was dinner a couple of towns over, in Montcalm, the second was dinner and a movie outside Manchester, and the third was dinner at my house, which was supposed to end with a rented movie in the living room but instead ended up in the bedroom. Along the way I learned that Sandy had always lived in Nansen, was divorced with two young boys, and was saving her money so she could go back to school and become a legal aide. “If you think I’m going to keep slinging hash and waiting for Billy to send his support check, then you’re a damn fool,” she said on our first date.
After a bedroom interlude that surprised me with its intensity, we sat on the enclosed porch. I opened a window for Sandy, who needed a smoke. The house was warm and I had on a pair of shorts; she had wrapped a towel around her torso. I sprawled in an easy chair while she sat on the couch, feet in my lap. Both of us had glasses of wine and I felt comfortable and tingling. Sandy glanced at me as she worked on her cigarette. I’d left the lights off and lit a couple of candles, and in the hazy yellow light, I could see the small tattoo of a unicorn on her right shoulder.
Sandy looked at me and asked, “What were you doing when you was in the government?”
“Traveled a lot and ate bad food.”
“No, really,” she said. “I want a straight answer.”
Well, I thought, as straight as I can be. I said. “I was a consultant, to foreign armies. Sometimes they needed help with certain weapons or training techniques. That was my job.”
“Were you good?”
Too good, I thought. “I did all right.”
“You’ve got a few scars there.”
“That I do.”
She shrugged, took a lazy puff off her cigarette. “I’ve seen worse.”
I wasn’t sure where this was headed. Then she said, “When are you going to be leaving?”
Confused. I asked her, “You mean, tonight?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, when are you leaving Nansen and going back home?”
I looked around the porch and said, “This is my home.”
She gave me a slight smile, like a teacher correcting a fumbling but eager student. “No, it’s not. This place was built by the Gerrish family. It’s the Gerrish place. You’re from away, and this ain’t your home.”
I tried to smile, though my mood was slipping. “Well. I beg to disagree.”
She said nothing for a moment, just studied the trail of smoke from her cigarette. Then she said, “Some people in town don’t like you. They think you’re uppity, a guy that don’t belong here.”
I began to find it quite cool on the porch. “What kind of people?”
“The Garr brothers. Jerry Tompkins. Kit Broderick. A few others. Guys in town. They don’t particularly like you.”
“I don’t particularly care,” I shot back.
A small shrug as she stubbed out her cigarette. “You will.”
The night crumbled some more after that, and the next morning, while sitting in the corner at Gretchen’s, I was ignored by Sandy. One of the older waitresses served me, and my coffee arrived in a cup stained with lipstick, the bacon was charred black, and the eggs were cold. I got the message. I started making breakfast at home, sitting alone on the porch, watching the leaves fall and days grow shorter.
I wondered if Sandy was on her own or if she had been scouting out enemy territory on someone’s behalf.
At my December visit. I surprised myself by telling Ron about something that had been bothering me.
“It’s the snow,” I said, leaning forward, hands clasped between my legs. “It’s going to start snowing soon. And I’ve always hated the snow, especially since...”
“Since when?”
“Since something I did once,” I said. “In Serbia.”
“Go on,” he said, fingers making a tent in front of his face.
“I’m not sure I can.”
Ron tilted his head quizzically. “You know I have the clearances.”
I cleared my throat, my eyes burning a bit. “I know. It’s just that it’s... Ever see blood on snow, at night?”
I had his attention. “No,” he said, “no, I haven’t.”
“It steams at first, since it’s so warm,” I said. “And then it gets real dark, almost black. Dark snow, if you can believe it. It’s something that stays with you, always.”
He looked steadily at me for a moment, then said, “Do you want to talk about it some more?”
“No.”
I spent all of one gray afternoon in my office cubbyhole, trying to get a new computer up and running. When at last I went downstairs for a quick drink. I looked outside and there they were, big snowflakes lazily drilling to the ground. Forgetting about the drink, I went out to the porch and looked at the pure whiteness of everything, of the snow covering the bare limbs, the shrubbery, and the frozen lake. I stood there and hugged myself, admiring the softly accumulating blanket of white and feeling lucky.