Over the years, as the Hill n’ Dale morphed into Karptown, it had expanded demographically in a way not unlike Bullock’s plantation. Misfits, losers, and former motorheads from all around Washington County had drifted into Wayne’s orbit and pledged their allegiance to him, the way that the failed dairymen, shopkeepers, and tradesmen with lost occupations had come under Bullock’s wing. There may have been a hundred or so adults and children living in Karptown now. The original twenty trailers had been rearranged, added onto, and filled in considerably. Since Wayne ran the general supply and the old landfill along with it, and had his crews out in the county constantly disassembling vacant buildings for their materials, his people could pretty much put up what they wanted to, and Karptown had evolved into a ramshackle masterpiece of twenty-first-century folk art. Wayne’s own domicile, befitting the chieftain of a large clan, was composed of three conjoined trailers around a kind of great hall built of logs, with a thick fieldstone chimney at its center. This was where their wintertime communions took place-and they were said to be a very communal bunch. In behavior, they were less like their own parents and forbears and more like the Iroquois who had inhabited the same area four hundred years earlier. Wayne’s Place, as this tribal headquarters was called unpretentiously, was renowned for its wild levees and holiday bashes. But Union Grove townies generally did not consort with them, and Karp’s followers were at this point, like Bullock’s people, a social world unto themselves. I had never been inside Wayne’s inner sanctum myself. However, the front gate to Karptown had no doors on it, and I had often glimpsed the scene inside when walking past it on my way to the general supply, or beyond to Cossayuna and Hebron.
The other dwellings were fancifully cobbled out of all kinds of materials, from turquoise enameled metal panels off old highway strip office buildings, to cinder blocks, to plate glass, to rustic timber framing, with a lot of inventive, storybook-like bays, turrets, and balconies. The lack of county code enforcement had a positive effect on the creative side of things there. Many of the trailers and cottages had totem poles in front too. Totem pole carving was something that seemed to have taken the place of TV and motor sports for them.
The buildings were arrayed on a modest street-and-block pattern like a classical Roman castrum. Over the years, in their endless quest for firewood (and totem pole stock), Karp’s people had pushed the forest back about two hundred yards from the periphery of the tight little village. In the zone of cleared land between the forest and the village, they grew mostly corn, which they roasted in great quantities in season. Their food growing efforts were otherwise rudimentary compared, say, to Bullock’s. But Wayne Karp’s position in the region was such that his operations enjoyed a substantial income in barter, and most of that was food, since he could scrounge everything else he needed on his own.
When we entered Karptown that evening, the sun was finally down but plenty of rosy light was left in the sky. It was a mild evening. At this time of year, a lot of their living took place outside, especially cooking. Dozens of smoke columns rose up in the breezeless air. The aroma of marijuana joined with that of grilling meat. Voices, laughter, and some shouting resounded around the village. No dogs barked. They didn’t keep dogs. They didn’t need them for work, and whatever meat they had, they wanted to eat themselves. Most of the villagers kept chickens, and they roamed freely pecking bugs out of the weeds. The horses they required for their daily endeavors were kept down the road on the grounds of the general supply. It was unnecessary for them to keep cows, since milk was the most abundant commodity in our corner of the world.
Inside the gate, as you first encountered the place, was something akin to a town square: a weedy quadrant with a wooden stage at center, sunken slightly, with split log seats rising in a semicircle of twelve rows above it-in essence, an amphitheater. When we came in, a man was onstage playing guitar and singing to an audience of a dozen others, who came and went languorously, some of them smoking their pipes. They ignored us.
“What’s that song?” Loren said. “It sounds familiar but I don’t remember the name.”
“Me either. Are you ready for this?”
“Well, we’re here,” Loren said. He looked a little green.
“Okay, then, let’s go.”
Wayne’s Place was on this square to the right. It occupied most of the north side. We stepped up to an elaborately carved door under a rustic wooden portico that had been appended to the central trailer of Wayne’s complex. The door carvings depicted a lone tractor-trailer on a highway, with an eagle soaring above it. Between the truck and the eagle hung a brass door knocker in the shape of a clenched fist. I rapped on the door smartly with it. The door swung open right away, startling us. Inside stood a woman around forty, in a turquoise halter top and cutoff blue jeans. Her frizzy brown hair was bunched up on top and sprayed out as though she were some kind of tropical bird. She had wings tattooed above her eyebrows in the clan’s customary way.
“Who’re you?” she said.
“I’m the mayor from down in Union Grove and he’s the constable.”
That made her smile.
“This ain’t the Grove,” she said.
“We know,” Loren said.
“What do you want, then?”
“We want to talk to Wayne. Is he here?”
“Oh, he’s here all right.”
She stood there giving us the hairy eyeball.
“Can you tell him we’re here and we’d like to talk to him?”
She sort of stiffened her back and said, “Wait here.”
After she closed the door, Loren said, “Where else would we wait?” He seemed to be growing grumpier by the minute.
“I think I know what that song is after all,” I said.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Loren turned to look at the guitar player, who was finishing his number with a flourish of strenuous arpeggios.
“I fucking hate that song,” Loren said. “But his arrangement isn’t bad. For a while there, I thought he was playing a folk song, you know, one of the old standards.”
“It practically is, now, after all these years.”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world could just forget some of those really awful songs?”
“Apparently the oral tradition is still in force,” I said as the door jerked open again.
“Come with me,” the woman with the topknot said.
We followed her through a series of dimly lighted rooms full of velour furniture and bad art until we arrived at the back end and came outside again to a kind of broad patio facing the cornfields at the edge of the woods. A trellis overhead supported grape vines. The fruit was just forming in miniature bunches. Wayne was entertaining three other men and five women, arrayed over a full complement of rustic furniture. Chicken quarters sputtered over a grill on a halved fifty-five-gallon steel drum. A big waterpipe made out of a laboratory flask sat on a wooden side table, and the smell of marijuana lingered on the still air. It was like a scene out of the old days. Wayne was half supine in a rustic lounge chair. He had a slingshot, the powerful kind they used to sell in outdoor catalogs, and was firing at crows out in the corn. On the slate paving beside him was a plastic bucket full of pebbles. As we stepped out he let one fly. It missed.
“If that was a ball bearing, that crow there’d be a dead crow now,” he said. Then he noticed us. “Well, got-damn. If it ain’t Fiddler Joe. Been a while.”