FRED DEVECCA is a writer and filmmaker who lives in western Massachussets. He's written extensively on music, movies and baseball and has turned two of his screenplays into movies - the film noir homage Hellhouse  Moon and a short film inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses - A Shout From The Streets. He works part-time in a bookstore and runs a funky, classic movie theater. He has a dog named Travis and a cat named Marlowe. Act Of Contrition is his first published fiction.
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PART ONE – 1971

 

I recall how it began. I recall it all quite clearly. I see it all projected in front of me as I sit on my porch at dusk as the fall chill creeps in. I can smell it and hear it too.

As with most beginnings, everyone was much younger then. Life smelled like blackberries, and blacksnakes, and blackmail, and it was all the same to me. The cot in the back room at O’Toole’s was a step up from the floor and a step down from the barstools, and Patrick would bring us spiders and we would eat beef and lamb from the Greek’s. Kearsie would put dimes in the jukebox and we’d all sing Beatles songs. Except when Fisher would lead us in a rousing "Let’s Kill Some Englishmen" IRA song or Bill would be the Virginia Judge, or the Scatman would promise he was never never never gonna speed again, or the Duke would remind me of a man, the man with the power. Is that what’s bothering you, bunky? In China they do it for chili.

We’d stay up all night at the Warehouse looking out the greasy crossed windows at the girls in their summer dresses, and the Goat would fingerpick an endless musicbox clockwork puzzle and I’d sit at the drumset and pretend I knew what I was doing. In those days, pretending was enough to make it real. And it was real.

College was easy. My books stayed fresh and white and slick with that sealed new smooth pasty smell. My teachers had a vague idea who I was. Until a test, or a paper or a project. Then they would ask "Who is this guy again?"

Once the chairman of the English department called me into his office to talk to me. He thought I had answers. I had none. I had questions. I asked him why he was letting his personal problems affect his teaching. I asked when things started to go downhill for him, when did the drinking get to be too much. He talked at me for 2 hours. He never got any answers from me. And he never spoke to me again.

I was known by a different name in those days. My name was Elijah Cain, a name I liked just fine. I have not used that name in thirty years as I write this. I was forced to change it, as you will soon see, or rather, it was changed for me, but that is not important. "My name, it ain’t nothin’," as Bob Dylan used to say.

I find things. That’s what I do. I’ve always found things.

It was an achy, bitter, January night when I first found the ghostly, possibly

Satanic, Norman Saturn.

Or, was it he who found me? I think now it was the latter.

Looking back on it, I recall that it was an old black man, a wiry, weathered fellow who spoke with an odd accent, who introduced him to our crowd at O’Toole’s.

Those were the days when the Wolf had just turned us all on to MDA, a semi-magical love drug which the kids today refer to as ecstasy, or so I am told. Norman Saturn (for I have never heard anyone refer to him by any name other than his first and last names together) was bearing a much different drug, an evil one (but then that is redundant, they are all, in the end, evil) known as crystal methedrine. He seemed to know the Wolf and sat with him at the end of the bar.

Norman Saturn sipped 7-Up after 7-Up and you could see right through him as if he had no insides and as if his skin was made of Saran Wrap. Except for his eyes, which were golden and could see right through you, as if your chest was zipped open and your heart was spilled out on the stony linoleum. His golden eyes were staring at me.

If you spend enough time in bars, you learn how to handle a bar stare. You perform an instant analysis and you either back down or you don’t, depending on what seems to be the healthier move at the time. I don’t usually back down. And I didn’t at first. I had nothing to hide. That’s the secret to getting through life in one piece, not having to hide. I knew that even then. Who would have guessed that all of what you are about to hear occurred because I was, despite this knowledge, hiding.

On that fateful day, though I had nothing to hide from Norman Saturn, I felt as if I also had nothing to give, and that is why I, eventually, turned away from his stare. It would not be the last time I turned away from Norman Saturn.

And when I looked up again, he was next to me, on the stool with the red vinyl patched with black duct tape, and his elbows were on the bar and he was turned at an impossible angle, the way a dead man’s head can be twisted around on his butchered torso by a crash or by a fall, as if his head had said goodbye to his body.

Norman Saturn leaned over to me, and with breath that had the clean, sparkling, slightly piney scent of 7-Up, said to me so softly that I think I unconsciously turned my right thumb and forefinger clockwise, to turn up the volume ever so slightly, "Adam Christoffer, you will begin working for me now."

Why he addressed me as Adam Christoffer I did not know. That was not my name then, as I have explained, though it is now. Despite this, I understood instantly, intuitively, and clearly that it was me he was talking to, and what he was talking to me about.

I, in fact, did begin working for him then. Norman Saturn was the Speed King of Greater Boston. He had factories, retail outlets, an established service area, many employees, and he delivered. He made the stuff, he sold the stuff, he transported the stuff. Hell, I think he invented the stuff. But he never used the stuff. For Norman Saturn was a smart man and crystal methedrine was, and still is, the most devious, destructive, soul-sucking, item on God’s Good Green Earth. It is not meant for smart men. It is not meant for any men.

My job was to be Norman Saturn. I was to do all the actions Norman Saturn could, or would, no longer do. I was to be his arms, his legs, his ears, his pockets, and his mouth. I would carry briefcases overstuffed with money like so much corned beef. I would carry suitcases of white powder, fluffy, yet surprisingly bulky and dense. I was entrusted with a deck of 52 aces-of-spades, his calling card so to speak, with which I was to scoop small piles of the sick powder into baggies and distribute to his minions, their only pay for slaving dark hours manufacturing the snowy schizophrenia which was Norman Saturn’s only product.

I would keep his books for him, add up numbers for him, negotiate with buyers and sellers for him, act for him, travel for him, eat for him, and sleep for him, for he never ate or slept, at least he was never seen to. I would live for him. For all practical purposes, I was him. But he was not me. I do not know what, if anything, or who, if anyone, was me. Perhaps there never was, and never will be, a me.

That’s another way we were alike. Because, you see, Norman Saturn did not exist. Norman Saturn was dead.

Three years earlier, on a dog-leg just west of Fitchburg, on a twisty mid-March night, at 110 miles-per-hour, a red MG crashed and burned and rolled down the bank where the police and firemen and emergency personnel found it still flickering, hardly lighting up the moonless sky at all as it faded like a dying shooting star.

No body was ever recovered. The workmen did find burnt bone fragments and some teeth and a strangely intact, but charred, glass bottle of 7-Up. According to the high-school boy with the ponytail who filled up the tank with premium and sold a 12 oz glass bottle of 7-Up two miles east and three minutes before the fateful crash, an oddly grim man meeting the description of Norman Saturn had been the only one in the car when it left the Sunoco station. The car was registered to a Norman Saturn of Boston.

How this dead man got to be the man for whom I worked, I did not know. It was none of my business. All I knew was that Norman Saturn was legally dead. He was a dead man. And, as would be expected among dead men, his comings and goings were unpredictable. He would vanish suddenly as you spoke to him, and would appear out of the dust when you would think about him. And he could read your mind. The universe was one big, open brain to him, all thoughts whooshing madly from one head to another, and all passing through his. He would answer your unasked questions and question your unspoken thoughts.

And, like all dead men, Norman Saturn could not be killed. All of us had heard the stories of bullets going through him and leaving him unharmed. I saw it happen. I swear I did. More than once, and it was not surprising. It was routine.

Though he couldn’t be killed, he could kill. He had killed hundreds, and he knew this, though his hands never got bloody. His job was to sell white death. He was sensitive enough to realize this and still he continued. It was easy and the money was great. And it’s really all he knew how to do.

And I was as guilty as he, for I, by assisting him, had also killed hundreds. We never talked about this, but I could see it in his golden eyes. There was no need to discuss it. It was just what we did. That is just the way it was.

I was given a home, a double-decker house in a nice residential neighborhood of nice white people in North Cambridge, a cloudy blue house in good repair, which was rented in my name, Elijah Cain (for at this time, that is what I was known as by all except Norman Saturn, who called me Adam Christopher, as I’ve already explained) and completely paid for by my boss, Norman Saturn.

I lived, alone, in the roomy, airy upstairs apartment, which had approximately seven million dollars worth of crystal methedrine stashed in the woodwork, the eaves, the floorboards, the closets, suitcases, and the refrigerator

The downstairs apartment, the entire first floor, consisted of a laboratory which operated 24 hours a day, staffed by the friends of Norman Saturn, if in fact Norman Saturn could be said to have friends at all, who processed and packaged the insidious drug.

There are many ways to manufacture crystal methedrine. I’m not a chemist and I don’t fully understand the process, though Norman Saturn employed chemists and I have picked up far more than a layman’s understanding of the process. The technique Norman Saturn used was not overly complex and did not require a laboratory more sophisticated than that of your average high school. He needed a sink, flasks, beakers, Bunsen burners, cooling units, funnels, condensers, and a number of chemicals, not all of which were easily available, but which he had ways of getting his hands on. He needed a good ventilation system, fans, a concrete floor with a drain, and good distillation glassware. He had all that and more.

Before I go further, I should tell you a little more about what crystal methedrine, speed, is. As I’ve said, it is evil, but the true evil of speed is not that it makes you feel high, it is that it makes you feel normal. You are filled with a crystalline energy and you see the world with such stony clarity that you can solve all problems and accomplish all goals. You wonder why things never looked this clear, this fine, before. You finally, for the first time in your life, feel that brave, pure strength we all must have felt in the womb, where we were safe and still all things were possible. Speed is energy. Speed is potential. You sigh, and let your breath out slowly, peacefully. "Why have I never felt this way before?" you ask. This is the way mankind is supposed to feel. This is normal.

When you come down though, and you always come down, you go into depths as dark as any existential despair ever felt by any imprisoned, tortured, dying, or lonely human. You see shadows, fleeting figures out of the corner of your eye, fleeting figures (and some not so fleeting) which are out to get you, and your nerves are at a heightened edge, this close, or closer, to breaking. Ever see a speed freak in a public place? He invariably sits at a chair positioned against a wall. This is so no one, real or imaginary, can sneak up behind him.

At this point, the world is as filled with doom and sludge as it was with possibilities before. Nothing is possible. Nothing is good. And you want to throw up, but you can’t because you haven’t eaten. And you are afraid. You are so sick you’re afraid you’ll die, and you’re so sick you’re afraid you won’t die. You are experiencing what speed freaks refer to as "Spider Theater".

There is, of course, one tried and true way to shut down Spider Theater and that is to do more speed. But you can’t put off Spider Theater forever, unless you do die. Die of speed, die of Spider Theater, sometimes it felt like there was no difference between the two.

These are some of the reasons, and there are others, why Norman Saturn never used his product. I, on the other hand, did use it. Oh, how I used it.

And it was on one wet April night, as the green spring freshness awoke in the land, I had been using it for 11 days straight, and there is nothing straight when you’ve been speeding for 11 days, I was sitting in the comfortable living room of my roomy, airy upstairs apartment just off Mass. Ave. in North Cambridge, reading a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic book, an old a Star Trek episode, I don’t remember which one, on the TV, a bottle of cheap wine at my side, when I was startled by the sudden brassy ringing of my telephone.

I answered it, and on the other end of the line was the always in control voice of Norman Saturn. His message was brief and to the point and, despite his urgency, was spoken in his trademark voice as soft as a whisper, but as imperative as a shout. I still recall his exact words – "Lie on the floor. Now. And then crawl out of there."

I didn’t even hang up the phone. When Norman Saturn tells you to do something, you do it, and as quickly as you can. I dived for the floor, made myself one with the floorboards, and, as I did, a bullet zipped through the window, shattering it, and passing the spot where my head had been a moment before.

I continued to lie on the floor for several minutes. More bullets flew by. I began an excruciatingly slow crawl towards the door of the apartment. I reached the door and carefully, but swiftly, raised my hand to the doorknob. Before I could reach it however, the door came crunching in on me like a felled tree. It literally landed on top of me, pressing me deeper into the splintery floor.

And I was pressed still further into the floor by twelve of Boston’s finest stampeding feet, attached to six of it’s finest police officers, which trotted across the battered down door and into the apartment.

I was assisted out from under the door and to my feet by a chubby man in a cheap brown suit, a man whose face was red with pock marks and whose sideburns were longer than my own.

This was Detective Glanville, as I was to learn as he handcuffed me and lead me around the apartment, pushing me into counters while his compatriots rifled the drawers, pulled up the rugs, and sliced through the mattresses, exclaiming like kids on an Easter egg hunt each time they unearthed a plastic bag of crystal methedrine or an envelope bulging with $500 dollar bills.

Detective Glanville then commanded me to take him downstairs. "Take me downstairs," was how he put it. He knew what was down there, just as he knew what was upstairs.

He pushed me out the now doorless frame and shoved me down the stairway. He held me tightly from the back, his fat fingers clutching the neck of my blue T-shirt to keep me from actually falling, as I choked and bumped into more walls on our two man parade to the downstairs speed lab.

My suspicion was that the downstairs space would be empty of people when we got there. I presumed the workers there had received a phone call similar to mine and that they would have had time to escape while the cops were busy with me.

I was correct. The cavern-like space down there had the just-vacated look of a Seventh Day Adventist Church after the Rapture as I unlocked the door for the detective, one door he did not get to knock down, and I think this disappointed him.

Cans of Coca-Cola sat plumply on tables, still-burning cigarette butts, now mostly ash, balanced precariously on their tops, gleaming piles of recently born speed lie on scales, their weights visible to any who wanted to know. And the ceramic, black, white and glass lab itself shone pristinely in the slanted late afternoon daylight which edged its way through the mostly curtained windows.

It was, frankly, an impressive sight to see. Detective Glanville had clearly never seen anything like it, for he expressed his surprise thusly- "Holy shit!" he said with a sneaking admiration.

He walked around the room shaking his head and muttering to himself, fingering an occasional snow-pile and putting the powder to his tongue. He was completely transfixed by his discovery, so much that he left me standing in the hallway, handcuffed but completely unattended.

It was one of those frozen moments you remember forever, like a black and white still from an old movie, like the instant you hear your own voice come out of your mouth while engaged in your first attempt at public speaking, or when you realize you are actually asking that girl you’ve been attracted to out on a date.

There was Detective Glanville walking through the lab. And there I was standing in the doorway. Alone. Nothing holding me back. Nothing preventing me from bolting out of there.

A fraction of a second is probably all that it took for me to digest these images. Then I was indeed bolting out of there, through the front door and onto the street. I ran along the sidewalk looking for something, anything, and the first vehicle to drive by was a yellow taxi, which I flagged down.

As I pushed the latch to open the cab door, a bullet from Detective Glanville struck me in the left hand, breaking several small bones.

The cab driver, having stopped his vehicle before any shots had been fired, let me enter and sit in the back and give the command "Bus station." Only then did he comprehend that a man was chasing us and, in fact, had shot at us.

He ducked instinctively down under the dash. "Fuck no, man," he managed to squeak out in a voice cracking like the just changing voice of a twelve year old. It was then that I realized that he was a kid himself, no older than me, probably younger, a skinny black kid with an Afro like a fuzzy black balloon balanced on his head.

"Drive… please." I yelled the first word. I whispered the second.

He took a look at me and a look at Detective Glanville and he sided with me. He didn’t know exactly what was happening, but Detective Glanville was clearly "The Man" and I was not. A moment later he peeled out of there as if it were he who was guilty of something, as he probably was, and he took evasive action turning corners, doubling back, and running red lights, all at an alarmingly high speed, while I sat there dripping blood on his back seat, blood from my still cuffed hands.

At the bus station, he pulled us around to the back lot where large, empty, dead, green busses were lined up like so many loaves of moldy bread and he backed his cab into a spot between two elephant-like busses where it could not be seen.

One of the busses had a destination plate which said "Hope." The other’s plate said "Friendship." These were, I knew, towns in Maine. Why do all the towns in Maine sound like places in a bad allegory? I wanted to get on the Hope bus. Immediately in front of us was a bus with a completely blank destination plate. I figured I’d actually probably end up on that one.

The cabbie silently motioned for me to follow him around to the back of the cab, where he opened the trunk and took out a jack. He expertly placed my handcuffs in the notch of the jack and, carefully as a surgeon, snapped the jack’s head down, severing the metal part holding my throbbing left hand, then did the same to the right. This kid had been around. He knew how handcuffs worked. He’d done things like this before.

He tossed me a relatively clean rag from the trunk and said "Get the hell out of here, man."

I handed him a $500 bill from my pocket, I still had a few of them, and he gave it right back. "You look like you’re going to need it more than me," he said.

I yelled "Thanks!" as he zipped out of there. He didn’t even keep his fare.

"No problem," he hollered back through the window as he disappeared from sight, "There’s enough pricks in the world."

I never forgot that- "There’s enough pricks in the world." I swore right then to, like that black kid, NOT be one of those pricks. It changed my life. Really. Simple things like that can change your life.

I wrapped my hand with the rag, went inside, and asked the clerk when the next bus to anywhere was leaving. "Albany, New York. Should have left 15 minutes ago, but it’s still there," she pointed, "You can still catch it."

So I did. I caught it and I counted my change as we pulled out merrily on our way to Albany. Albany was Anywhere, but it sure wasn’t Hope.

In Boston, it had been spring, but as the bus continued west through narrow passages between hills, and alongside swollen rivers, into backwater towns, each with one big factory, tool and die or textile mills mostly, most closed permanently, some still spewing out ashen smoke into the April air, I began to see patches of snow still on the ground, and thick piles of it where plows had pushed it months ago, a lifetime ago.

My plan, such as it was, was to sleep through to Albany and figure things out there, but I couldn’t fall asleep. And therefore I couldn’t dream. I missed not being able to dream.

Nighttime came and I watched the cozy light coming from the homes tucked away on the hillsides and saw the smoke curling up from the woodstoves, looking so much more benign than the garbagelike smoke from the factories.

Occasionally there were clusters of buildings huddled together along the ridge as we passed, towns looking like so many perfect, ghostly serene villages on a display under a Christmas tree, and I took notice of each of their names- Warwick, Wendell, Gill, Erving. New Salem. It was a very different world from the streets of the big city.

We passed by a corner of the Quabbin Reservoir, the water supply for Boston which was created in the 30s by evacuating and flooding out five small towns that once existed here in this valley, towns not at all unlike these I was noticing along our way.

These townspeople were forcefully driven from their homes and nearly all the buildings destroyed in preparation for the great reservoir. Even the graveyards were dug up and the bodies moved to higher ground. These were vibrant, alive, mostly farming communities and they were no more.

I have seen pictures of the towns when they were thriving and after they had been abandoned. For some reason, the powers that be did not tear down absolutely everything in these five towns. They left standing some steepled churches, some barns and some white shuttered homes, seemingly at random. Some of those buildings still stand today, underwater, or so folks say. Divers or boaters on a still, cloudy day, when the water is clear, can look directly down into the depths and still see village centers intact and as perfect as those I had been spying on my bus trip to who knows where.

And some say that the souls of those disturbed, uprooted people still haunt the Quabbin area. Many strange and impossible to explain events happen all the time around there. This sort of thing happens when souls are disrupted. But then strange things happen all the time everywhere.

And, as we passed through the Quabbin area and proceeded west, the bus would occasionally pass through the center of one of these postcard villages, the still alive villages. At one point, as I was leaning my head against the cool window of the bus, feeling the tiny bounces of the road vibrations and watching the world pass by, we stopped at a red light. It was the longest red light I had ever seen. It seemed like we were there for half an hour.

We were stopped next to an old white Victorian style home, with green trim around the windows, freshly painted and well kept, and so close to the road that I could have opened the window, reached out and, with a stretch, touched the house with my finger.

The windows of this house were right at my eye level, and there, at the nearest window, sitting at a kitchen table reading the newspaper, was an old man, thin and delicate, with a full head of white hair.

He wore a brown cardigan sweater and wire-rimmed glasses and had a cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate next to him. I could see the steam rise from the cup.

I stared at the old man while the bus idled. As I said, it felt like a long time. Just as the bus finally pulled away, as the light finally turned green, the man looked up and smiled. I will always believe he was smiling at me, although it really would have been quite difficult for him to notice me in his quick glance up, just as the bus started moving.

As the bus traveled, the vision of the old man stayed with me, and after a few blocks, the bus stopped to pick up some passengers.

That’s when I got off. The bus driver called out to me as I stood on the sidewalk outside "Hey buddy, this isn’t Albany."

"What town is it?" I called back.

"Shelburne Falls," he replied.

"New York or Massachusetts?"

"Massachusetts."

"Thanks, I’ll just get off here."

"There’s no refunds."

"That’s okay," I told him. I knew I had gone far enough.

*

I was not in a bus station. None of these little towns seemed to have bus stations. Sometime the busses stopped at convenience stores and sometimes just at an otherwise insignificant corner with a bench. Or without a bench. This was a gas station, artificially bright with a white florescent glow, with garish colors everywhere and with orange packages of bread and coolers stacked with red boxes of milk and friendly looking beer, and green wire newspaper racks.

A man stood there, leaning against the ancient Coke machine, an average sized man, with mid-length hair combed in a 1950s style, the square style, not the hipster style, and so greased down that no typhoon would ever dislodge one tiny hair from its assigned place. He wore black-rimmed glasses and an off-the-rack black suit. Off the Salvation Army rack. His shirt was supposed to be white, but it was yellow, and his blue- striped tie was clipped on. He had a neatly trimmed mustache, and he was about ten years older than me, maybe 30. He looked like your average middle-class life insurance salesman, or certified public accountant, but duller.

In a sense, it turned out that he was offering life insurance, but I didn’t know that at the time. He was waiting for me. That I did know. I knew that right away. And my instinct was not to run from him. He wasn’t a cop.

"Adam Christoffer?" he inquired, and my first thought was that it would have been neat if he was holding one of those hand printed cardboard signs like at the airports- "CHRISTOFFER." Nobody had ever done that for me.

Adam Christoffer. That was now my name, I guessed. That is what Norman Saturn called me from the moment he met me, and that’s how he spelled it on the few occasions he had to write it down. To the rest of the world, I had remained Elijah Cain, but now I supposed, I’d need a new name and Adam Christoffer was as good as any other. In fact, I kind of liked it. "Yeah," I responded.

"You’re supposed to come with me, kid."

And just as I had known what Norman Saturn meant when he told me I was to work for him, so did I instantly and naturally know what Benny Bopp, for, as I would soon learn, that was his name, meant when he told me I was supposed to go with him.

That’s what I did. I went with Benny Bopp. He lead me to a black Cadillac, ten years out of date and as large as some of the smaller nations in the world. I got in and rode next to him as he twisted the radio dial. Ballgames, music of all sorts, and talking voices came out in a jumble of static and mixed messages. Benny had his window open and his left arm draped out as he steered with his fingertips. I opened my window and draped my right arm out in a mirror image of Mr. Bopp. The breeze mussed up my long hair.

We didn’t talk for a while. There didn’t seem to be much to talk about. I was just going wherever I was going and wherever it was it would be the right place for me to go. And Benny didn’t seem to feel that he owed me any explanation at all.

Out of the dinny mush from the radio, one song eventually arose and became the first recognizable tune of the night- AMERICAN PIE by Don MacLean.

"That Bob Dylan is great," Benny Bopp told me.

"Yeah, he is," I replied, "But what makes you bring up Dylan?"

"That’s his new song there."

"That’s not Dylan," I informed him.

"Sure it is."

"No way. That doesn’t sound anything like Bob Dylan."

"But who else writes like that?" Bennie asked me.

"Dylan doesn’t write like that. He’s completely different."

"No… that’s Dylan."

"Fuck you," I said with a laugh. I had just met him and he was saving my life. Still I felt comfortable saying "Fuck you" to Benny Bopp. That’s the kind of guy he was.

The too cheery top forty announcer’s voice came clearly over the Caddy’s speakers, "That was Don MacLean with AMERICAN PIE."

"See," I said triumphantly.

"That’s what they’re telling you," Benny Bopp authoritatively informed me, "But I heard it was really Dylan under a false name. He does shit like that."

Again I said "Fuck you," and though I said it, in my heart I accepted what Benny Bopp was telling me. You couldn’t quarrel with the guy. I was wrong. He was right. That’s the way it was.

He handed me a beer, a Bud in a can, from a cooler he strained to reach in the back seat and we had a nice drive along some bumpy back roads.

Somewhere along the way, the radio played a song by Rod Stewart which Benny tried to tell me was by the Rolling Stones. I just drank my beer.

*

Benny Bopp proceeded to drive me as deep into the back New England countryside as I had ever been, deeper than I knew you could go. How far did we go? Picture yourself on a nice Sunday drive in the country. You’re on back roads already, and then you turn off the backest road you’ve been on all day, onto an even smaller dirt road, a rutted, washed out, nearly impassable rocky semi-pathway. You follow this for what seems like hours until you come to the tiniest one-horse village you’ve ever seen. It looks like it’s from a western movie, like it’s Dodge City, with a bar, a whore house, and a hitching post, and not much more. Certainly no sheriff’s office, for there is no law in these parts.

Can you picture it?… Dodge City?… Good. Well, now pretend you drive 10 miles out of this town, onto an even worse dirt road and follow that road for what seems like hours until you come to a "town", which seems like more of a waystation than a town, with two or three ramshackle, falling-down, shed-like structures in it, clustered around a crossroads, and nothing else. That Dodge City town you were just in was fucking Paris compared to this place.

Well, this was Canaan Mills. That’s where Benny Bopp took me. I wasn’t sure if it was in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, or Antarctica or Mars, and I’m still not.

There may have been a mill, or mills, in Canaan Mills at one time. That’s how it got its name I guess. But there were no mills there now. There was basically nothing there now.

Of the few shacks in the town, the main shack was a bar that Benny owned, named, appropriately, "Benny’s." Or I presumed it was named "Benny’s." That’s what people called it. There was no sign.

Or maybe I should say that the town itself was a bar that Benny owned, for that’s about all there was to the "town." There was a room in back of the bar where I was to sleep, and the bar itself consisted of one blue refrigerator stocked with one brand of beer (Budweiser), several cases of one brand of whiskey (Old Granddad), a stock of 7-Up, a line of frozen sandwiches which could be zapped in a prototype microwave oven, a jukebox whose most recent record was a Hank Williams number, eight barstools, three tables, bullet holes in the ceiling, an impressive library of paperbacks in the back consisting mostly of the best of William Shakespeare and Mickey Spillane, and a magnificent sounding upright Steinway piano, scrupulously tuned and kept up by Benny himself. This was my new home.

He kind of dumped me off there and left me on my own. It was clear what I was supposed to do- I was supposed to run the place.

And that’s what I did. I tended the bar, slept in the back, survived on the frozen sandwiches, watched my hand heal (with minimal medical assistance from a customer who was a "doctor"), and read the books. There was a regular crew of farmers, bums, ex-cons, current-cons, future-cons, and assorted ne’r-do-wells who frequented the place. I was probably the only one-armed, 19 year-old, on-the-lam, bartender in the world, or at least in the county, whatever county it was.

I hardly ever saw Benny. He came by every once in a while to collect the money, keep the bar stocked, have a drink, play around on the piano. He never stayed around for long and never said much.

I stayed there nine years.

Or was it ninety?… I’m not sure, but it seemed like several lifetimes. It was truly a place out of an old western movie. Over those nine years I witnessed fistfights, junkies shooting up at the bar (I guess that part didn’t happen much in the old west, but maybe it did), people having sex on the floor, shootings, stabbings, and even a birth. I watched this all, wide eyed and impervious, from a stool behind the bar while I read Shakespeare, the plays mostly. I also read the Spillane when the Shakespeare was done. Then I reread the Shakespeare.

Watch is precisely what I did, not much more. I observed, I studied, sometimes I laughed, sometimes I cried, but I didn’t participate. I wasn’t part of the insanity, but I SAW it all.

Until Marie showed up one sticky summer night when the sweat poured off my brow and the geriatric fan perched on the south end of the bar decided to up and die on me, sputtering, then finally giving up completely, which didn’t make much difference because it was mostly ineffective anyway.

We didn’t get too many women in there. Mostly when they came in they came in with a guy. A few came in alone. There were, I believe, some prostitutes and some women who hung around with some men in search of drugs. But Marie was different, different from anybody, anywhere.

She was the daughter of the man who owned the campground nine miles away on Dink’s Pond, which was actually more of a lake than a pond. She would come in and drink like the guys, swear like the guys, puke on the floor like the guys, and come back for more like the guys. She had long slippery hair, black as corner shadows where the sun never reaches, a body with dips and curves and a little extra padding for comfort, lacerating brown eyes, and a glow about her that warmed up the cold things inside me. She was nineteen years old, as was I.

We would take to walking through the woods behind Benny’s and we’d go swimming at her father’s lake. She was the one thing in my life that made sense. She was order out of chaos and she understood. That’s what was different about her. She understood.

We were together for the last four years I stayed at Benny’s. We made plans – a cabin on a hill. That was the big thing- a cabin on a hill. And marriage certainly, whether the legal kind or the kind we ourselves considered sacred, we weren’t sure yet. Kids?… Maybe. It was the one time in my life, right up to this day, that I felt unfiltered, unsullied, pure good and completely reciprocated love. She was, I believe, an angel.

Until she suddenly announced, one evil, sub-zero, January night, that she was leaving me and getting married to Del Crandall, not the ballplayer, but a man twenty years her senior who lived across the lake, a woodsman who trapped and collected snakes, who lived in a tar-paper box with 4 kids from several previous marriages, and with whom I did not even know she was acquainted.

She told me calmly, matter-of-factly, and without tenderness or love or feeling of any kind. The one person in the world who I was certain cared, had stopped caring, abruptly and unequivocally, and without explanation.

That night was the one night in my nine years at Benny’s that I got myself fucked up. I started chugging on the Granddad early in the evening, switched to Buds for a while, went back to Granddad in the early morning. I stayed up all night with the Mosher twins who had some smack which I shot up, and we snorted up half of Benny’s speed stash. I paced the floor, then I rolled around on the floor, hugging myself so the insides wouldn’t spill out. I banged my head against the bar and didn’t feel a thing. I sliced my cheeks with Bart Mosher’s switch blade, slowly just to feel the warm trickle of blood, and I considered using it on my wrists.

But I didn’t. The next day was the one day I did not work at Benny’s in my nine years there, including Sundays and holidays. I was unable to. I tried to sleep, tried to eat, tried to walk and failed at all. The Mosher brothers’ smack eased the pain pretty well though, and I was back tending bar the next morning, in a stunned daze.

The heroin was effective for the next week (say what you will about it, it is an excellent emotional pain killer) then I stopped cold turkey. I have not touched the stuff again to this day, and never will

On the seventh day after Marie left me, very late, I was behind the bar reading Measure For Measure again, Alexander Jones was passed out next to the jukebox which was broken, and Benny was sitting at the piano diddling on the keys. As I said, Benny was hardly ever around so it was unusual to see him there.

I had never heard him really play the piano, I mean really play it. Mostly he would just mess around on it, improvising long, pointless progressions of notes which had little or nothing to do with actual music, which flowed together in some kind of logical consistency, but which did not sound pleasant, or even jazzlike. Mostly it was, frankly, irritating.

This night he had been cranking out his usual disturbing, tired string of tones, when he paused and looked over at me behind the bar. The silence lasted two or three minutes and it was fine. The bar felt empty and silent and contemplative, like a church, and I would have been happy if it stayed that way right on through eternity.

Then, suddenly, with a verve and inspiration I had never seen in him, his stubby little fingers plunged into the keyboard as if God himself had commanded them. It was a piece so complex and gorgeous that I put down my paperback Shakespeare and just listened. Even Jonesy raised his head and took it in.

Benny Bopp’s hands were flying across those keys, and steam rose from them in the chilled barroom air, pudgy fingers flying seemingly at random, flailing like the legs of an insect turned upside down, playing a tune not connected to Benny Bopp himself, but coming from somewhere else, the place where perfect songs live, the place where any songwriter who ever wrote a classic song will tell you the song came from, out there in the cosmos somewhere where the great songs sit waiting to be plucked.

I broke down in tears as he finished. That’s how magnificent it was. Then, as I wiped away the tears and our cathedral was once again silent, I began a slow, heartfelt clapping and was joined in by Jonesy, still on the floor.

"What the hell was that?" I asked after an appropriate wait.

"Bach’s English Suite Number 7," Benny Bopp told us, "A Canaan Mills premiere. I’ve never played it before."

The next day I borrowed Benny’s Cadillac and drove into Greenfield, the nearest town with a music store. I wanted to get a recording of that piece. I didn’t have anything to play it on, except the juke box, which was broken, but I figured I could probably talk Benny into getting a record player or tape deck or something, depending on what format I found the piece on.

The music store didn’t have anything close to it on the racks, so I asked the curly haired manager about it. He looked through a thick catalogue, glanced up to me and said "Sorry, can’t help you. Bach only wrote 6 English Suites."

The wonderful composition Benny had played did not exist. I was not surprised. I drove back to Canaan Mills and never mentioned my search to Benny Bopp and I was never to hear him play piano again, until some twenty-one years later, which story I shall relate to you in good time.

*

The next night, as a nor’easter wound down outside the doors of Benny’s, crying and sending blue streaks of snow through the uninsulated cracks in the walls, Norman Saturn walked into the place. There was nobody there but the two of us.

I didn’t blink, just wordlessly poured him a 7 Up, and then we started talking, he in his familiar voice so soft you had to strain to hear it.

We didn’t talk of the event in Boston nine years ago, or of our lives leading up to the event, or of our lives after, or of Marie, or of Benny Bopp, or of Bach. There seemed to be no need of that, and it would all have been redundant anyway. Norman Saturn looked at me with those all-knowing eyes blazing through that translucent skin and we talked about Canadian geese and emperors of Ancient Rome and the nature of God and the Red Sox.

Norman Saturn had been at the bar for about two hours, when Benny Bopp came in, pulled a .38 from under his coat, pointed it at Norman Saturn and pulled the trigger hitting him straight in the forehead.

To my surprise, the bullet didn’t flow through Norman Saturn with no effect as I had seen bullets do before, but instead it blew his brains right into the ratty fake wood paneling.

"I told you he could be killed," Benny Bopp said, though he had never told me any such thing. I knew, however, that there had always been a band of disbelievers who agreed with that statement.

Benny handed me the .38, told me to keep it, and ordered me to get out of there, my time was up. "You’ll understand all this someday," was how he put it.

As I walked out of the bar for the last time, Benny Bopp turned to me and said "Go out and save something, kid. Lead a good life. There’s enough pricks in the world."

I walked a long way, in the snow, then hitchhiked the rest of the way into the town of Shelburne Falls. I eventually found that cabin on a hill, discovered I had a knack for finding things, and made a good life for myself.

I’ve been trying to save something, but I’ve had trouble finding things that need saving or, more importantly, things worth saving. I’ve tried to lead a good life and I have not been a prick, or at least I think not.

Though I’ve tried, I have not been able to expel those memories of hauling money and drugs all over Greater Boston for Norman Saturn, or of my days, and nights, at Benny’s, and I pray for redemption for whatever contributions I’ve made to the bad things that exist and thrive in this world. Sometimes my past seems like a dream, or an illusion, and I can almost convince myself that it did not happen, not really.

Then I reach into my top right desk drawer and touch the gun.

I still have the gun.

 

 

PART TWO -- AUGUST 29, 2001

CHAPTER 1

Summer was pulling away from me. I could feel it. The nights were still soupy warm and the days sticky enough that I’d walk down to the pond each afternoon with Joe Hill the dog and swim out to the dock. The droplets would still bead off my hands with each stroke, and they would still drip down making watery curtains between me and the colorful blurs on the beach, which were… well, I’m never sure what those blurs were. I don’t wear my glasses when I swim and I’m blind without them and I never think to look for those blurs when I’m on shore and I can see. I always thought of those blurs as other people, although the pond was on my land and not known to the public at large, though I never chase anyone away who wants to swim there. Maybe they’re ghosts. Wherever you find early death and unhappy souls, you find ghosts.

Summers are only good when they seem endless. This is what the Beach Boys sang about, and why those old surf songs resonate so universally. And summers only seem endless for that brief window when the corn stalks are still a deep bloody green, the nights are still fleeting, and the sun is still cruel. After that, summer pulls away slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way a lover does when she’s already left you in her heart, but still shows up each night to lie next to you in bed.

It’s funny though. I don’t love the summer when it’s arriving. Those first hot days seem uncomfortable and you don’t feel like moving or going anywhere. And I don’t love summer when it’s here. It feels oppressive and domineering and you yearn for relief. I only love it when it tries to leave, when I can sense it starting to leave.

It was late August, very late August, and it was muggy, and, if you tried, you could convince yourself it was mid August. And if it was still mid August, you could convince yourself summer would not start to leave for a while. I was trying to do that.

I finished up the swim and walked Joe Hill back to the cabin. Joe Hill was a handsome long-haired German Shepherd, now very soggy, who looked 30 pounds skinnier when the wetness slicked his red black coat against his body.

At the cabin, I turned on the fan to cool things off. After a few minutes, I realized things were already cool, so I turned off the fan. Then I realized that I wanted to need the fan, so I turned it back on. I wanted to need something. I wanted to need summer to stick around for a few more days before she left me.

I boiled up some corn on the cob and cut up two heavy, sweet tomatoes and poured a little olive oil and salt over them. That’s pretty much what you live on in the hills of Western Massachusetts in August. That and blueberries. So I ate some blueberries for dessert. Fresh corn, tomatoes, blueberries- they’re around so briefly, you grab them while you can. I’m not much for cooking, or eating really - I think eating is overrated - but these summer foods are too good to resist.

I was still hungry so I drove into Shelburne Falls and had a burger and a Harpoon IPA at Charlie’s Riverside Pub. I sat outside on the deck. There was no one out there but me. Nobody leaves home on Wednesday nights. Out there in the open, over the river with no one around, you could feel the deck vibrating and hear the falls roaring over the potholes with no competition from good conversation or bad music. The river kind of hypnotized me as it kept on rolling along with the lights from the town reflected in it, steady and forever, just another old man, like me.

Actually I’m not that old, late forties (very late forties) but most of the time I felt like late-140s, except for the times when I felt like fifteen. Tonight I felt, oh, late forties. It was a good night.

When the railroad whistle swelled up from over the bridge, a mournful, feral, coyote sound, I got up and made my way home. The moon was nearly full.

Beer, burger, alone on the deck, railroad whistle, waterfalls, full moon... It was all too fucking perfect. It couldn’t last.

At home, I sat on the porch, broke open another IPA, and Joe Hill crawled up on the couch next to me. We had the Sox game on the radio – they were in one of their patented end-of-summer swoons- and the crickets threatened to drown out Woody Michaels before the static did. The radio station from Greenfield had stopped carrying the games on their FM station, which I could pick up perfectly, and now I had to try to hear the games on AM, and the reception was horrible up here in the hills. I’d play "Name That Tune" with the songs that would drift in and out between the play-by-play. I heard Theme From a Summer Place by the Percy Faith Orchestra, and Dancing Queen, and something by Jerry Vale. Who plays this crap anyway? More importantly, who listens to it? Wouldn’t any thinking, feeling, breathing human in the universe prefer to listen to the Sox than to Jerry Fucking Vale?

I had the game on for a long time before I heard the score, at least 5 minutes, but I knew right away that the Sox were losing. You can pick it up from Woody’s voice. He’s been the Red Sox announcer for thirty-eight years. Born and bred in New England, his heart is intertwined with the Red Sox in an almost embarrassing way. He’s been through every close call - 1967, 1975, 1986. Years 38, World Championships zero. A shutout and not a pretty one. His emotions come right at you through those tiny transistor speakers.

He was never your typical jock announcer. He was literate and lyrical and was known to quote Shakespeare late at night and to make cultural references that nobody got. Woody was a poet. Here’s the way he once described an oncoming storm. I know the exact words. I wrote them down – "The dark clouds approaching from beyond leftfield look to be ambling across the sky in no apparent hurry. They know what trouble they are and are teasing the crowd with their distant growl."

Really. He said that. And he just made it up extemporaneously. On the spot. He didn’t write it out in advance or, worse, hire a speechmaker. That’s just the way his mind worked.

Here’s Woody reflecting on the brief flash of a score on the electric board – "The Yankee score is up. Soon it will be gone. It will flash away like a lightning bug into the moist and chilly Canadian night."

That’s why I listen to the games. That and the fact that I love slowly unfolding drama, the conclusion of which no one knows, which is exactly what a baseball game is.

I do not ask much of my baseball team. All I ask is to be entertained for the summer. Say what you will about the Red Sox and about Woody Michaels, they are entertaining.

Once Woody Michaels, literally, bumped into me at a game at Fenway. He was stumbling down a ramp in the fourth inning of a game against Cleveland in ’92 and ran right into me. I turned around and when I saw who it was I said "Sorry Woody," though it wasn’t my fault, and he looked at me for a second and then kept on going down the ramp. His eyes were puffy and his nose was red and there was the unmistakable scent of whiskey on his breath. As I watched him, he bobbed and weaved and fell against a railing. I walked over to him to see if I could help, and he mumbled something about trying to find a men’s room. I took him by the elbow and lead him to the nearest one, stood by while he took an endless piss and washed his hands, and I steered him back to the broadcast booth, all the while listening to him going on in an incomprehensible slurred voice about stuff that had nothing to do with baseball or with anything else as far as I could tell.

I had always presumed that the press had it’s own bathrooms somewhere and I still think that’s the case so I’m not really sure what brought him out into the public stands. In any case, when I got back to my seat, I turned on my transistor radio only to hear him waxing poetic, as usual, meticulously, flawlessly reporting the game, seemingly unimpaired, in control, and with as much poetry as ever.

I drew two conclusions from this incident – one- Woody is a lush, but that’s what thirty-eight years of never missing a Red Sox game will do to you, and two- he was so used to it, to being a lush, that he could announce a Red Sox game in any condition at all.

I found this somehow inspiring and I never heard his voice again without remembering that night.

Tonight, as I sat on my porch listening to his voice, I could feel the weather changing. You could hear the crackle of far-off thunder alternating with the low train whistle and with ol’ Woody. The neighborhood dogs were howling at each other across the valley. Or were they coyotes? Whatever they were, Joe Hill ignored them. He slept next to me on the couch.

Woody, Sox, thunder, howling dogs, sleeping dogs… As I said, it was all too fucking perfect.

I nodded off. I only know this for sure because I dreamt - something about falling out of towers and not being able to fly, something scary. I might even have been out for a few hours when I was rudely shaken back to the world of the living by Joe Hill’s husky voice barking, not his "guard the house" bark, but his "welcome friend" bark. Often, I dream of flying, or the inability to fly.

Woody Michaels had sometime in the night been totally overcome by the static and I thought I remembered something about a final score of 5 to 3, but I could have been wrong. I am frequently wrong.

I could barely make out Father Bob through the black night. He was making his way through the tunnel of drooping sugar maples whose limbs, heavy with moist leaves, hung over the path creating a mazelike approach to my house. He had on his priest uniform- there’s probably another word besides uniform, but I don’t know it - and if it wasn’t for that big fat orange moon reflecting off his white clerical collar and his pale face I would not have known who he was. The moonlit collar made it look like there was a reverse halo shining under his chin instead of over his head. He was unannounced and unexpected and he sat down on the folding chair next to me on the porch.

"Baltimore 5-3," he said as he reached into the paper bag he was carrying and pulled out a beer. Local brew- Berkshire Brewery Steel Rail Extra Pale Ale- the kind that only comes in the 22 oz. bottles, so you can honestly tell the cops you only had one or two beers, as you stumble drunkenly down the street.

The proliferation of great, small, local breweries was perhaps the only good new thing in the world, the only thing that redeemed life in the early 21^st century (and it still seems like I’m writing science fiction when I use that phrase, though I do enjoy referring to years by the prefix "aught", as in "I remember the night back in aught-one when Father Bob came to visit me on my porch late one summer night…").

"Fucking relief pitching blows," he went on. I do love it when priests swear. "Beck gave up a three-run homer in the eighth."

"Upper Deck Beck," I added, "Or do you prefer Boom Boom Beck?" We had fun giving dumb nicknames to the Red Sox players. "Bye-bye Beck?"

"I kind of like Way Back Beck," he replied.

"Tough night, Padre," I said.

"Yeah, summer’s ending. Feel it in the air." He echoed my thoughts. I wasn’t the only one feeling it.

"No shit," I replied, "What brings you out here this late… besides Rod Beck?"

"Oh, nothing… just Beck."

He came out here to talk sports. That’s one of the purposes sports serves among men, among certain men, frequently among fathers and sons. It gives you something to talk about. It doesn’t really matter what you’re talking about, of course, it only matters that you’re talking. I know men, adults, who, after the age of eighteen, have never talked to their fathers about anything except sports.

When I was a kid, reading comic books was frowned upon. Educators thought they would warp our little minds. My father thought my reading comic books was okay. "At least he’s reading," he would say, and he was right, for today I read voraciously, and not comic books, but good literature (mostly).

It’s the same thing with talking sports. At least you’re talking.

Yeah, ol’ dad was right about that, but I still couldn’t talk to him about anything besides baseball.

And dad was a lush too, like Woody. Maybe that’s why Woody seemed to mean so much to me.

But I’m getting off track. Father Bob had come by to talk about the Red Sox. Specifically about Rod Beck, a once talented, but now insignificant right-handed relief pitcher, who would be unceremoniously released after the season ended and never heard from again.

Yeah, right.

"What he hell time is it anyway, Padre?" I asked, "About midnight?"

Father Bob looked at his watch. "One-oh-seven," he answered, "In the AM."

"So what really brings you out here at one-oh-seven… in the AM, Bob?" I asked as we both sipped our 22 ouncers. He didn’t answer for a while.

"You ever hear a confession, Adam?" he asked me softly.

"None but my own. In my head."

"Of course not. When was your last confession anyway, your last real confession? The kind not in your own head. The kind in a confessional, into somebody else’s head."

"Bless me father, it’s been a good 30 years since my last confession, my last real confession. My last not in my own head confession."

"It’s never too late you know."

‘No?" I meant that question sincerely.

"No," I think he answered sincerely too.

Some clouds were drifting over us now, blocking out the full moon. The clouds were a psychedelic crimson. Red sky. Sailor’s delight. The thunder was louder now, crackling in the background. Closer.

Father Bob went on, "You can’t let them become routine, you know? I’ve heard hundreds of them, thousands probably, and each one you have to listen to and pay attention to. Each one is a sincere plea for absolution. You have to respect that. Each ‘think impure thoughts,’ each ‘said a bad word,’ they’re all important."

"Sounds like you gave out a lot of Hail Marys and Our Fathers this week."

"Too many. Too much fucking sin in the world."

"You want to hear my confession, Father?"

"You want to confess?"

"How much time you got?"

"All the time in the world."

"That’d just scratch the surface."

"I’m ready when you are."

We both stared over the porch railing into the woods. When you look into the darkness long enough, you start to see things, some of which are there and some of which are not. I was seeing rain. A quiet sprinkle had begun, falling softly on my patchy lawn. The night air had gotten crisper, friskier. I turned on the light so I could see Father Bob, but it was too sudden a change. It lit him up and washed him out like he was caught in a flashbulb. I turned it off.

"I have to tell you about this confession I heard," he finally said.

"Isn’t that illegal or unethical or something?" I asked.

"Yeah, both, actually. But I’ve been thinking this over for a long time. I don’t think I’ve got any choice here."

Bob was the priest for St. Michael’s, the small Roman Catholic church in Shelburne Falls. He was not a very worldly priest. Bob was an old fashioned humble priest with no pretensions, no ambitions, besides serving God, and not many parishioners. I had met him on one of my (still ongoing) spiritual quests and he became a good friend. It was a funny concept for me to grasp, that men of the cloth were actual humans who laughed, cried, and swore when they were not in their place of worship, and probably even when they were, the same way that I, who might look quite arrogant and unpleasant on the surface sometimes, could often be respectful and prayerful when I was alone. Humans have a funny way of being complex like that.

Bob had this common working man way about him like he was just another pipefitter or cab driver and I’d see him going in and out of St. Mike’s just like he was punching in and out at the local shoe factory, if we had a local shoe factory. There were no other priests at St. Mike’s, no one else besides Father Bob, not even a housekeeper for the modest apartment next to the church that Bob lived in. The diocese in Springfield pretty much ignored the small country churches and Bob, like me, lived and worked alone.

He worked only for God, he liked to say, but then, when you come right down to it, don’t we all?

I know I did - worked only for God. I was a "psychic detective." I actually had a private investigator’s license from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which gave me the right to be hired by private citizens to do investigations and get paid for it, and to carry a firearm.

Though I did possess one, I did not carry a firearm. In fact, I hate guns. And violence too. And wars. But all this is a long story, and not this one. Suffice it to say that I always try to be a peaceful guy.

Mostly what I do is find things, lost things, lost people, lost souls. I even do divorce work, which is really just another version of finding things- finding the truth, finding a philandering husband with his mistress, finding a way out of a marriage which wasn’t working. I’m actually kind of an expert on that- marriages which don’t work - having had a few of them myself over my lifetime. That’s also another story. Not this one.

Sometimes I couldn’t find what I was hired to find, but mostly I find something, some kind of guidepost, some kind of sign, something to cling to. Then I would advise my clients what to do next. If you can really call it advice. Really I tell them what I would do and let them figure out for themselves what they should do. I hate the idea of telling someone else what to do.

I work entirely on feelings, on instinct. The truth is, I’m not psychic, no more than anybody else is. I just pay attention, but people seem to really like the psychic part, so I keep using it. My business card reads "Adam Christoffer, psychic detective."

I should really be licensed as a therapist, since that’s a closer description to what I do than private investigator is. But that’s a funny thing about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts- you don’t need a license to be a therapist here. Anybody can hang up a shingle and say they’re a therapist.

So, that’s how I make my living - I have a license to be a detective, so I do that. I don’t need a license to be a therapist, so I do that too, in my way. Psychics don’t need a license either, mainly because officially they do not exist, so I do that as well. And all those things at the same time. I’m multi-talented. In fact, I’m fucking amazing.

Or I used to be, before all this happened.

I get by okay. My small cabin on 5 acres on the most remote dirt road I could find within Shelburne Falls town limits is long since paid for. I have no dependents except for Joe Hill the dog, few responsibilities, and only an occasional bad habit. I do, perhaps, spend too much money on books, but I solved that problem by taking a job working at my friend Roberta’s bookstore in town a grand total of six hours a week. I don’t ask her to pay me, instead I can buy books at cost, so it’s worth it.

Shelburne Falls is the kind of place where no one blinks at the idea of a psychic detective. The hills are crawling with alternative, new age practitioners of one kind or another, some of whom are charlatans and some of whom are the farthest thing from charlatans. There are reiki masters, past-life regressors, witches, massage therapists, yogis, and your plain, ordinary psychics who are not licensed investigators. You can talk to the plumbers and gas pumpers about their spiritual practices. The general store in town, the informal center of the village where, if you sit there long enough, you will eventually see absolutely everyone from a fifty mile radius, is a health food store known as McCusker’s. It’s much easier to buy tofu late at night than it is to buy roast beef. When you invite someone over for dinner, you just presume they are vegetarian. The only question is whether or not they are vegan. There are no Republicans.

Rumor has it that Shelburne Falls is at the center point of something called ARKHOM, which is the outer ring of the inner life, or so I’ve been told. I don’t really know what that means, but I’m told that it explains why so many of us are here. We are at the center point, in the entire world, of some kind of cosmic life energy source. This sounds impressive to me.

As I said, I don’t really understand it all, but nonetheless, I fit right in. It is a good place to be.

And now Father Bob was about to violate the sanctity of the confessional because there was something he had to tell me. He was quiet for a long time. I like it when people don’t speak. Usually it means they’re thinking.

Finally he did speak, "This guy, he had a soft voice. I had to strain to hear him. I had to lean in close to the screen." And Bob demonstrated this by leaning over to the invisible screen between us. "And at first it was pretty routine. The usual stuff. Then he starts talking about stealing a lot of money, or at least about getting a lot of money in some unsavory way, he wasn’t real clear. It was getting pretty deep, but still nothing I hadn’t heard before. Then he talks about killing a lot of people, about being responsible for hundreds of deaths. It’s getting real heavy now."

Bob stopped and took a good gulp of beer. I did the same. The rain was picking up and it was windier. The narrow birches bent in the wind.

"Then this guy starts to break down. He’s sobbing and I’m trying to comfort him, and not doing a very good job of it either. After a while he pulls himself together. And I ask him if he’s got anything else to confess. And he says ‘Yes" And then he paused for what seemed like two, three minutes and then he said, "I took the soul of Adam Christoffer."

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

My house is on a ledge. It’s a rocky, north-sloping edge of what some people call a mountain, but, in truth, there are no mountains in the east. It is a hill. The edge of a hill.

Back when I bought the place, there was a magnificent view down into the valley beyond my ridgetop. That was one of its selling points. You could sit there on the porch and see the river flowing below with the railroad tracks clinging next to it, like two snapping black whips. You could see the few houses scattered about the valley looking like sprinkles on a green Christmas cookie. At night, you could see the lights from each home down there bravely seeping through the hazy dim skies.

Over the years, my view has diminished. The trees along my slope have grown, faster than you think trees should grow, and today they block out most of the view. You can still see some of the beauty down there, especially in winter when the leaves are off the trees, and it’s still a good view. But the magnificent view is mostly gone.

It would not be hard to regain the magnificent view. I could cut down some trees. I wouldn’t have to cut all of them. I could pick a few of the larger trees, the ones with tops spread out like so many broccoli spears, and cut down only them. Or I could just top some of the trees, cut their tops off. Then my view would be back.

But I hate to cut down trees. Or even cut their tops off. I’m not sure why, but it seems cruel. It’s not that I can hear them scream or anything, and God knows I eat a cheeseburger now and then even though I hate to kill cows. But trees are so fresh and alive and I feel an affinity for them. They give us shade and, via photosynthesis, oxygen. They help us live. And they’re pretty. Are they more alive than cows? I don’t know. I’m not consistent. In any case, I haven’t removed any part of any tree much to the detriment of the view from my porch.

It is not easy to live on an edge of a hill. You can’t do much with the land. It’s hard to plant a garden. It’s hard to build. Sometimes, it’s hard to walk. The best feature of a hillside is its view and I’ve lost that.

I thought of all this as I listened to Father Bob’s story, which was, even for me, disturbing. There was only one person I had ever known who had killed hundreds of people, and even that was hard to establish given the difficulty in quantifying how many deaths about six tons of speed had caused.

I knew only one person who made a lot of unsavory money, and who spoke so softly you could barely hear him, and that person, if in fact it was a "person", had gotten his brains spilled out against the walls of a cheap bar twenty-one years, and several lifetimes, ago. And, oh yeah, this guy had also taken my soul, in a manner of speaking.

"What did you do?" I asked Father Bob.

"What did I do?… What could I do? I’m a priest. I absolved him. That’s what we do."

"You absolved him?"

"Yeah, that’s the rule. No matter how bad the sin, if they confess, and repent, they get forgiven."

"God has funny rules," I said, "Like that stuff about baptism. The rule is that you have to be baptized in order to go to Heaven. What about some innocent baby who dies before he has the chance to be baptized? He doesn’t get into Heaven. Is that fair?"

Bob replied, "Nobody ever said this stuff is fair. God has a lot of arbitrary and arcane rules, just like baseball. Catcher drops a third strike, the runner can go to first base. Does that make sense?"

In the dark I nodded a no.

Bob went on, "Or the infield fly rule, can you explain that one?" I nodded affirmatively and he continued, "That’s what all this atonement and absolution stuff is- God’s infield fly rule.

"We got to play by the rules. Guy confesses, I forgive him, or rather God forgives him through me, just like a fly ball to the infield with less than two outs and runners on first or second is an automatic out. That’s just the way it is. But I did give him the maximum sentence- ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. And I blessed him and he went on his way."

"Oh yeah," Father Bob continued, "He said a good Act of Contrition."

"Why do you guys always ask for a "good" Act of Contrition?" I asked, "Do some people give a BAD Act of Contrition? And does that negate it or something? Or don’t you still do that?"

"We still do it," he replied, "At least I do. That’s how they teach it to us in Priest school. It means sincere. It means you’re supposed to be sincerely contrite, sincerely sorry for what you’ve done, for your sins."

"I haven’t said it in years," I softly whispered to Father Bob, and then I continued, "I think… Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee… And I detest all my sins…"

And he cut me off. "Don’t do it by rote," he commanded, "Say it like you mean it. If you mean it."

I tried to get the words out of my mouth and mean them. I choked on them.

"Do I have to confess all my sins?" I whined.

"Yes. Otherwise what’s the point?" Bob replied.

I tried again, but nothing came out. "Can’t do it," I said.

"Then don’t."

So I didn’t. I muttered "Shit," instead.

The rain continued. Joe Hill chased a rabbit into the woods, gave up his quest quickly, and came back to the porch drenched. It was comfortable to be sitting under the porch roof while the rain came down out there. Most of the time in your life everything happens "out there". Then again, sometimes you get wet.

Father Bob was a tall, gaunt guy, malnourished and pale looking. There was a definite corpselike feeling around him and it was a good thing his once black hair was now graying or else everything about him would be either black or white, from his priest blacks to his collar to his shoes to his black rimmed glasses

I took a few swigs of beer. So did Father Bob.

"Eight games behind the Yankees now," Bob said.

"Fuck, " I replied, "Yanks win?"

He nodded in the dark, but I still saw it.

"Doesn’t look good for me," I said. I had predicted that the Sox would be in first place by the end of the year. It was more than a prediction actually. It was a bet, a bet with Father Bob. I had five dollars riding on that prediction.

"Standing by your prediction?" he asked.

"Sure. Prediction’s a prediction. Got to stand by it. That’s why they call it a prediction."

"Well, look, if you need to talk anything over, you know where to find me."

I nodded and Bob up and left, heading out on foot through the trees the same way he came in.

Joe Hill was still wet and he crawled up on the couch and huddled all his feet together, all four of them, while he pressed his body against a pillow. He was soaking that end of the couch in dog-scented moisture and creating a spot which would be unusable by humans until we had some sunlight and drier air to dry it out. But I’m not a large guy and I could still lie down at the other end as long as I folded my legs up and kind of curled them around the wet dog, being careful not to come in contact with him.

It was only a quick shower and soon the rain was stopping and the nearly full moon was visible again, perfect and complete. I lay there for awhile with my eyes open and watched it as if it had some answers. Was Norman Saturn still alive? And what was he doing in Shelburne Falls? And what did it all mean anyway? The moon didn’t give me any answers. I’d work on it tomorrow. For now, I’d curl up here on the couch next to the wet dog and go to sleep.

First I had to finish my beer. It was tasting medicinal now. I chugged the rest of it and lay back down. It was a nice night to sleep outdoors. We wouldn’t have many more nights like this.

Summer was almost gone. It was teasing me with its distant growl and soon it would flash away like a lightning bug into the moist and chilly New England night.

Copyright© 2004 Fred DeVecca