Nature, and a little girl with pale, glowing skin, seeking in vain for a playmate to join her in her games.
I still had an old edition of a brochure called Maine Invites You given to me by Phineas. It was published by the Maine Publicity Bureau sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, as the letter of greeting inside the front cover was written by Governor Lewis O. Barrows, who was in office from 1937 until 1941. Barrows was an old-school Republican of the stripe that some of his more rabid descendants would cross the street to avoid: he balanced the budget, improved state school funding, and reinstated old-age benefits payments, all while reducing the state deficit. Rush Limbaugh would have called him a socialist.
The brochure was a touching tribute to a bygone era, when you could rent a high-end cabin for thirty dollars per week, and eat a chicken dinner for a dollar. Most of the places mentioned in it are long gone – the Lafayette Hotel in Portland, the Willows and the Checkley out at Prouts Neck – and the writers managed to find something kind to say about almost everywhere, even those towns whose own residents had trouble figuring out why they’d stayed in them, never mind why anyone else might want to travel there on vacation.
The town of Langdon, midway between Rangeley and Stratton, had a page all to itself, and it was interesting to note how many times the name Proctor appeared on the advertisements: among others, there was a Proctor’s Camp, and the Bald Mountain Diner, run by E. and A. Proctor, and R. H. Proctor’s Lakeview Fine Dining Restaurant. Clearly, the Proctors had Langdon pretty much all sewn up back in the day, and the town was enough of a draw for tourists – or the Proctors felt that it might be – to justify taking out a series of top-end ads, each one adorned with a photograph of the establishment in question.
Whatever appeal Langdon might once have had for visitors was no longer apparent, if it had ever been anything more than a figment of the Proctors’ own ambitions to begin with. It was now merely a strip of decrepit houses and struggling businesses, closer to the New Hampshire border than the Canadian, but easily accessible from either. The Bald Mountain Diner was still there, but it looked like it hadn’t served a meal for at least a decade. The town’s only store bore a sign announcing that it was closed due to a bereavement and would reopen in a week’s time. The notice was dated October 10th, 2005, which suggested the kind of mourning period usually associated with the deaths of kings. Apart from that, there was a hairdresser’s, a taxidermist’s, and a bar named the Belle Dam, which might have been a clever pun on Rangeley’s own dams or, as seemed more likely on closer inspection, the result of the loss of a letter ‘e’ from the sign. There was nobody on the streets, although a couple of cars were parked along it. Ironically, only the taxidermy showed any signs of life. The front door was open, and a man in overalls came out to watch me as I took in the bright lights of Langdon. I figured him for sixty or more, but he might just as easily have been older and holding off the predations of the years. Maybe it had something to do with all of the preservatives with which he worked.
‘Quiet,’ I said.
‘I guess,’ he replied, in the manner of one who wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case and, even if it was, he sort of liked it that way.
I looked around again. It didn’t seem like there was much room for argument, but maybe he knew something that I didn’t about what was going on behind all of those closed doors.
‘Hotter than a Methodist hell, and all,’ he added. He was right. I hadn’t noticed while I was in the car, but I had begun to perspire as soon as I stepped from it. The taxidermist, meanwhile, wasn’t so much sweating as self-basting. No-see-ums hovered around us both.
‘Your name wouldn’t be Proctor, by any chance?’ I asked him.
‘No, I’m Stunden.’
‘You mind if I ask you some questions, Mr. Stunden?’
‘You already are, far as I can tell.’
He was grinning crookedly, but there was no malice in it. He was just breaking the monotony of daily life in Langdon. He detached himself from the frame of his door and indicated with a nod of his head that I should follow him inside. The interior was dark. Antlers, tagged and numbered, lay on the floor or hung from the old rafters. A recently stuffed and mounted large-mouth bass was propped on top of a freezer to my left, and to the right were shelves lined with jars of chemicals, paint, and assorted glass eyes. Blood had dripped down the side of the freezer, hardening and then corroding the metal. The room was dominated by a steel workbench upon which currently lay a deer hide and a round-bladed shaver. Piles of discarded meat lay on the floor beneath the bench. I could see that he knew his business: he was being careful to scrape the hide down to the dermis, leaving no trace of fat that might turn to acid and cause the hide to smell, or the hair to fall out. Nearby was a foam mannequin of a deer head, waiting for the skin to be applied to it. The whole place stank of dead flesh. I couldn’t help but wrinkle my nose.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said. ‘I don’t notice it anymore. I’d talk to you outside, but I got this deer hide to finish, and I’m working on a couple of ducks for the same guy.’
He pointed at two clear containers of ground corncob, in which he was degreasing the duck carcasses. ‘Can’t shave a duck,’ he said. ‘The skin won’t take it.’
Since shaving a duck had never struck me as something I’d feel the inclination to do, I contented myself with observing that it wasn’t yet hunting season.
‘This deer died of natural causes,’ said Stunden. ‘Tripped and fell on a bullet.’
‘And the ducks?’
‘They drowned.’
As he worked the shaver, he began to sweat even more.
‘Looks like hard grind,’ I said.
Stunden shrugged. ‘Deer are hard. Waterfowl, not so much. I can take care of a duck in a couple of hours, and I get to indulge my artistic side. You have to be careful with the colors, else it won’t look right. I’ll get five hundred dollars for those ones. I know the guy will pay, too, and that’s not always the case. Times are hard. I take deposits now, and I never had to do that before.’
He continued shaving the deer. The sound was faintly unpleasant. ‘So, what brings you to Langdon?’
‘I’m looking for a man named Harold Proctor.’
‘He in trouble?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘No disrespect, but al’st I know is that you look like the kind of man calls about trouble.’
‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’
‘Doesn’t answer my question. Is Harold in trouble?’
‘He might be, but not from me.’
‘He coming into money?’
‘Again, he might be, but not from me.’
Stunden glanced up from his work. ‘He lives out by the family motel, about a mile west of here. Hard as a snowsnake to find, though, if you don’t know the road.’
‘The motel still in business?’
‘The only thing still in business here is me, and I don’t know how long more I’ll be able to say that. The motel’s been closed for a decade or so now. Before that, it was a camp, but motels seemed to be the way to go, or so the Proctors thought. Harold’s momma and poppa used to run it, but they died, and the motel closed. Never made much money anyway. Poor location out in the williwigs for a motel. Harold’s the last of the Proctors. Hard to believe. They used to run half this town, and the other half paid them rent, but they weren’t big breeders, the Proctors; or lookers, come to think of it, which might have something to do with it. The Proctor creatures were kind of homely, I seem to recall.’
‘And the men?’
‘Well, I wasn’t looking at the men, so I can’t rightly say.’ His eyes twinkled in the gloom, and I guessed that Mr. Stunden might have been quite the heartbreaker in his time, had there been anyone apart from homely Proctor women on whom to test his charms. ‘When they started dying out, the town died with them. Now we get by on what we can make from Rangeley’s overflow, which ain’t much.’
I waited as he completed his work on the hide. He switched off the shaver, and used dish soap to clean the grease from his hands.
‘I ought to tell you that Harold’s not too sociable,’ he said. ‘He was never what you might call outgoing, but he came back from Iraq – the first war, not this one – with a troubled disposition. He keeps himself to himself out there, mostly. I pass him on the road from time to time, and I see him at Our Lady of the Lakes in Oquossoc on Sundays, but that’s it. Best I can get out of him now is a nod. Like I said, he’s never been exactly friendly, but until recently he’d always give you the time of day, and a word or two on the weather. He used to come into the Belle Dam, and if he was in the mood we’d talk.’ He pronounced it ‘Belle Dayme.’ ‘In case you’re wondering, I own that too. During hunting season, I make a few bucks on it. The rest of the year, it’s just something to do in the evenings.’
‘Did he talk to you about his time in Iraq?’
‘Generally he preferred to drink alone. He’d buy his liquor in New Hampshire, or over the border in Canada, and bring it back to his place, but once a week he’d come out of the woods and relax some. He hated it over there. Said he spent most of his time either bored or scared shitless. But, you know—’
He stopped speaking, but continued drying his hands as he sized me up. ‘Why don’t you tell me your interest in Harold before I go any further?’
‘You seem protective of him.’
‘This is a small town, and barely that. If we don’t look out for one another, who will?’
‘And yet you’re worried enough about Harold to talk with a stranger.’
‘Who says I’m worried?’
‘You wouldn’t be talking to me otherwise, and I can see it in your eyes. I told you, I don’t mean him any harm. For what it’s worth, I’m working for the father of a former soldier who served in Iraq this time round. His son committed suicide after he returned home. It seems that the boy’s behavior had changed in the weeks before his death, and his father wants to know what might have brought that on. Harold knew the boy some, I think, because he attended the funeral. I just want to ask him some questions.’
Stunden shook his head in sadness. ‘That’s a hard burden to bear. You got kids?’
That question always gave me pause. Yes, I have a daughter. And, once, I had another.
‘One,’ I said. ‘A girl.’
‘I got two boys, fourteen and seventeen.’ He must have seen something in my face, because he said: ‘I married late in life. Too late, I think. I was set in my ways, and I never could get my head around girlin’. My boys live with their mother down in Skowhegan now. I wouldn’t want them to join the military. If one of my sons wanted to join up, then I’d let them know how I felt about it but I wouldn’t try to stop him. Still, if I had a boy over in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d spend every hour just praying for him to be safe. I think it would cost me some of the years left to me.’
He leaned back against his workbench.
‘Like I said, Harold’s changed,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean just because of the war, and his injury. I think he’s sick, inside.’ He tapped the side of his head, just in case I was under any illusions about the nature of Proctor’s troubles. ‘The last time he came into the bar, which was, oh, must be two weeks ago, he looked different, like he wasn’t sleeping right. I’d have said that he was frightened. I had to ask him what was wrong, it was so obvious to me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Well, he’d had a skinful by then, and that was before he even got as far as the Dame, but he told me that he was being haunted.’ He let the word hang in the air for a moment, waiting for the dead flesh and old hides to cover it and give it form. ‘He said that he was hearing voices, that they were keeping him from his sleep. I told him he should go see a military doctor, that maybe he was suffering from that stress thing. Post-traumatic whatever.’
‘What were these voices saying?’
‘He couldn’t understand them. They didn’t speak English. That was when I became sure that it was something to do with what happened to him over there. We talked about it some more, and he said that he might give someone a call.’
‘And did he?’
‘I don’t know. That was the last time he came into the bar. But I was concerned about him, so a week after that I took a ride out to his place to see how he was. There was a car parked outside his cabin, so I figured that he had visitors and decided not to disturb him. As I was reversing back down the hill, the cabin door opened, and four men came out. Harold was one of them. I didn’t recognize the other three. They just watched me go. But later, the three visitors came here, and stood where you’re standing now. They asked me what I was doing out at Harold’s place. The colored one who did most of the talking was real polite about it, but I could tell that he didn’t like the fact I’d driven out there. I told them the truth: that I was a friend of Harold’s, and I was worried about him, that he hadn’t seemed himself of late. That seemed to satisfy him. He told me they were old army buddies of Harold’s, and that Harold was doing just fine.’
‘You had no cause to disbelieve them?’
‘They were military men for sure. They had that bearing about them. The other one limped some, and was missing fingers from here.’ Stunden held up his left hand. ‘I took it for a war wound.’
Joel Tobias.
‘And the third?’
‘He didn’t say much. Big guy, bald head. I didn’t care for him.’
That was Bacci, I thought, remembering Ronald Straydeer’s annotated photograph. Karen Emory didn’t like him either. I wondered if he was the one who had first suggested raping me at the Blue Moon.
‘Anyway, the bald guy asked if I’d be able to preserve a person, and made some joke about trophies for his wall,’ said Stunden. ‘“Haji,” that’s the word that he used: haji trophies for his wall. I guess he meant terrorists. The other guy, his friend with the damaged hand, told him to shut his mouth.’
‘And you haven’t spoken to Harold since that night at the bar?’
‘No. Seen him once or twice in passing, but he hasn’t been back at the Dame.’
Stunden had nothing more to add. I thanked him for his time. He asked me not to tell Harold Proctor that we’d spoken, and I gave him that promise. As we walked to the door, Stunden said: ‘This boy, the one who killed himself, you say his father thought that he’d changed before he died?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Changed how, you mind me asking?’
‘Cut himself off from his friends. Became paranoid. Had trouble sleeping.’
‘Like Harold.’
‘Yes, like Harold.’
‘Maybe, after you’ve talked to him, I’ll go out there and see how he’s doing. Could be I can convince him to see someone before—’
He trailed off. I shook his hand.
‘I think that would be a good thing to do, Mr. Stunden. I’ll try to call by before I leave, let you know how it all went.’
‘I’d appreciate that,’ he said.
He gave me directions to Proctor’s place, then raised a hand in farewell as I drove away. I did the same, and the fragrance from the soap that Stunden had used to clean himself, and which had passed to me from his hand, wafted through the car. It was strong, but not strong enough, for underlying it was an animal smell of flesh and burnt hair. I opened the window, despite the heat and the bugs, but it would not disperse. It was on my skin, and it stayed with me all the way to the Proctor motel.