World Made by Hand

Fifty-seven

Jane Ann fixed us a quick supper of smoked trout with new potatoes and dill, and then we set off on foot for Karptown up the North Road, armed only with Bullock’s writs. The sun still hung above Pumpkin Hill when we set out, and it was a warm evening. Deerflies hectored us along the way. It was the first appearance of the year for these hateful pests, who went into orbit around your head and nearly drove you crazy before they came in for the painful bite. Near the turnoff to the Schmidt farm, where I had met up with Shawn Watling on that fateful morning weeks ago, we watched a pack of coyotes skulk out of the woods and cross the road perhaps twenty yards ahead of us. Several of them stopped for a moment to regard us and bared their teeth, then continued on their way and vanished into the trees on the other side. They were impressive animals. Over the years, it was said, the coyotes had been mixing with the red wolves coming down from Canada to our part of the country, where there were fewer people than there used to be. Judging by their size, it seemed that they were becoming less coyote and more wolf now. After seeing them, Loren and I cut ourselves a couple of stout walking staffs before continuing on our way.

When we got there, Karptown seemed a festive place. Formerly the Hill n’ Dale Mobile Home Park, it had taken on the flavor of something halfway between a frontier outpost and a medieval peasant village. For one thing, no cars or trucks were around. They’d all been sold for scrap during the Great Collection years ago. So the establishment was pleasantly inviting. The only motor vehicle on the premises was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Sportster model, mounted totemically over the ceremonial entrance gate that they had constructed where the Hill n’ Dale original driveway met the road. They had nailed up horizontal timbers between two oak trees on each side of the driveway about twenty feet above the ground. The Harley was up there in a wheelie pose. It was painted black, decorated all over with feathers, and had some small animal skulls dangling on rawhide strips from the ape-hanger handlebars.

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.”

I could practically see the machinery in his brain working as he recognized who I was and what happened last time we met. He seemed to have a pretty good buzz on. There were jugs and pitchers on a long table and everyone held a glass of something.

“Which one of you is the mayor?” Wayne said.

“That would be me,” I said.

“Since when.”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Well, if they had a got-damn newspaper around here, maybe some of us hillbillies would know what the hell is going on,” Wayne said, before turning to Loren. “That’d make you the other one, I suppose.”

“Right, I’m the constable.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I know you. You’re the preacher down there to the Grove, right.”

“I’m the minister of First Congregational.”

“Since when you church types become law enforcement types?”

“It’s the new thing,” Loren said.

“You don’t say? Like a fad?”

“Just around here.”

“Oh? Well, come on in and take a load off your damn minds. Mi casa es su casa. Bodie! Tiffany! Let these fellas sit down. Come on! Move your asses. In fact, all you all git. The shooting gallery is temporarily closed. Go on, git.”

The others downed their drinks, picked themselves up resentfully, and left, except the woman with the topknot.

“Brenda, why don’t you give that chicken a turn and offer these boys something to drink?”

We declined.

“Aw for shit’s sake, you must be thirsty,” Wayne said. “It’s a four-mile walk from the Grove, ain’t it?”

“We got whiskey, cider, and beer,” Brenda said, like a waitress in an old-time roadhouse.

“You want to shoot the shit with me,” Wayne said, “you better be prepared to drink with me. Go on, sit down. I didn’t pitch all that riffraff out for nothing.”

Loren surprised me and asked for whiskey. I said I’d have a cider. We sat down.

“You know, I’m kind of getting to like it with the electric off,” Wayne said expansively “We seen every got-damn DVD in the county and there ain’t no more cable anyways, whether the ’lectric’s on or off. I do miss my music, though. How are you all getting on down in town?”

“Mostly pretty well,” Loren said. “Except when we get breakins and crimes and stuff.”

“We don’t have any crime problem here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I rule with an iron got-damn fist,” Wayne said, and then brayed energetically at his own joke.

Loren took some papers out of his shoulder bag. “I’ve got some warrants here.”

“You don’t say.”

“I think this chicken’s done,” Brenda said.

“It ain’t done until I say it’s done.”

“Come have a look at it.”

“Just leave it and shut the fuck up.”

Brenda now left the patio area in a bit of a huff.

“Lemme see those things,” Wayne said. Loren got up and gave him the warrants. “Well, I got to hand it to Mr. Bullock in the penmanship department-no pun intended. Look at those Ws and Gs. These are as pretty as the got-damn Declaration of Independence. And the wax seal there, that’s a nice touch. Almost enough for me to take seriously.”

Wayne picked his slingshot off the slate floor and let fly at a crow perched on a cornstalk. To the amazement of us all, including Wayne, I think, the crow folded with the impact of the stone at the same time it emitted a particularly harsh and plaintive death cry and fell off its perch into the shadows.

“Score that Wayne one, crows zero,” Wayne said. “Mind refreshing my glass? I’d ask Brenda, but she’s not here.”

“I think your chicken’s getting away from you,” I said.

“Well, don’t just sit there. Get up and turn it.”

I was nearest to the grill, so I got up and turned the chicken while Loren poured Wayne another whiskey-and another for himself.

“You fellas are good guests,” he said. “Maybe you’ll come back some night with your wives. And you,” he said, meaning me, “you bring your damn fiddle. We’ll have ourselves a time.”

“What do you say about the warrants,” Loren said.

“I admire them. They have the right look and all. Can I keep them? They’d make nice silveneers.”

“Are you going to let us search for stolen goods?” Loren said.

“Of course not.”

“Are you going to surrender and come on in with us?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Are you going to turn over Bunny Willman.”

“Hell no.”

“Then your position is that you’re above the law?” Loren said.

“That ain’t my position, it’s my reality. How are you going to enforce this got-damn nonsense?”

“You’ll be surprised,” I said.

“Tell me. I really want to know.”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it.”

“Got me on that one,” Wayne said. He pointed my way and made a show of cracking up. “Well, as I see it, we got nothing further to discuss. But you did a nice job on the chicken there, Fiddler. If you want to run out into the corn and fetch that crow, I’d throw it on the grill for you.”

“No thanks.”

“Then I’ll take over from here.”

Wayne finally lifted himself out of the lounge chair and, in his catlike way, slunk over to relieve me of the grilling tongs.

“Oh, one other thing before you leave,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Have another stiff drink on me for the road. Night’s falling and you’re going to need it.”