A hot, dry wind blew in from the southwest, originating within some ancient weather pattern that once swept prairie fires across the grassy plains and stampeded endless herds of buffalo, blind with panic, into the Great Black Swamp where their bones were still turned up by plows. But now the wind blew through a million rows of corn and a million acres of undulating wheat, through the small towns and lonely farmhouses, and across pastures and meadows where cattle grazed. It swept across Indiana and into Ohio, and over the Great Lakes, where it met the arctic mass moving south.
By mid-September, when the west winds died, Keith Landry recalled, you could sometimes catch a whiff of the north, the smell of pines and lake air, and the sky was filled with Canadian geese. One September day, George Landry said to his wife, Alma, "It's time we got smart like the geese." And they left.
The history of most human migration, however, was more complex, Keith thought. Humans had adapted to every climate on earth, and in ancient times had populated the world by their wanderings. Unlike salmon, they didn't have to return to their birthplace to spawn, though Keith thought that wouldn't be a bad idea.
Keith was acclimating himself to the almost suffocating dryness, the fine dust, the constant desiccating wind, and, like most northern Ohioans, he was thinking about the winter long before it arrived. But acclimating to the weather was easy; acclimating to the social environment was going to be a little more difficult.
It had been a week since his return, and Keith decided it was time to go downtown. He drove in at midday and headed directly for Baxter Motors, a Ford dealership on the eastern end of Main Street. His family had done business there for years, and Keith vaguely recalled that his father did not really care for those people. But the old man was perverse and felt that he could strike a better bargain with people he disliked, and he got a thrill from it.
He was not unaware that Baxter Motors was owned by the family of Annie's husband, and perhaps that influenced his decision, too, though he couldn't get a handle on that reasoning.
He got out of the Saab and looked around. The dealership was strictly Ford, with no foreign car franchise attached, as was common back east.
A salesman beelined across the parking lot and inquired, "How're you today?"
"Very fine. Thank you for asking."
The salesman seemed momentarily confused, then struck out his hand. "Phil Baxter."
"Keith Landry." He looked at Mr. Baxter, a baby-fat man in his early forties with more chins than a Chinese phone book. Phil Baxter seemed pleasant enough, but that came with the job. Keith asked, "This your place?"
Phil laughed. "Not yet. Waitin' for Pop to retire."
Keith tried to picture Annie married to one of these genetic fumbles, then decided he was being uncharitable and petty. He got to the point, perhaps too quickly for local tastes, and said, "I want to trade this customized Ford in for a new one."
Phil Baxter glanced at the Saab and laughed again. "That ain't no Ford, buddy." He got serious and said, "We try not to take foreign cars. I guess you know that."
"Why's that?"
"Hard to move 'em. Local folk drive American." He squinted at the license plate. "Where you from?"
"Washington."
"Passin' through, or what?"
"I'm from around here. Just moved back."
"Yeah, name sounds familiar. We done business before?"
"Sure have. You want to sell me a new car?"
"Sure do... but... I got to talk to the boss."
"Pop?"
"Yup. But he ain't here now. What kind of Ford you lookin' for, Keith?"
"Maybe a Mustang GT."
Phil's eyes widened. "Hey, good choice. We got two, a black and a red. But I can get you any color."
"Good. What's the book on mine? It's last year's, eight thousand miles."
"I'll check it out for you."
"Are you going to take the Saab?"
"I'll get back to you on that, Keith. Meantime, here's my card. Give a call when you're ready."
Keith smiled at the small-town, low-key approach to sales. In Washington, any car salesman could be an arms negotiator or Capitol Hill lobbyist. Here, nobody pushed. Keith said, "Thanks, Phil." He turned to leave, then the imp of the perverse turned him around and he said, "I remember a guy named Cliff Baxter."
"Yeah, my brother. He's police chief now."
"You don't say? He did okay for himself."
"Sure did. Fine wife, two great kids, one in college, one about to go."
"God bless him."
"Amen."
"See you later, Phil."
Keith pulled onto Main Street and stopped at a traffic light. "That was a stupid move, Landry."
He certainly didn't need to go to Baxter Motors; he knew they wouldn't want the Saab, he didn't even know if he wanted a Ford, and surely he didn't have to mention Cliff Baxter's name. For an ex-intelligence officer, he was acting pretty stupid — driving past her house, going to her father-in-law's place of business. What next? Pulling her pigtails? "Grow up, Landry."
The light changed and he drove west, up Main Street. The downtown area consisted of rows of dark brick buildings, three and four stories high, with retail space at ground level and mostly empty apartments above. Almost everything had been built between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression. The old brickwork and wooden ornamentation were interesting, but most of the ground-floor storefronts had been modernized in the 1950s and '60s and looked tacky.
Street and sidewalk traffic was light, he noticed, and half the stores were vacant. The ones that remained open were discount clothing places, church thrift shops, video arcades, and other low-end enterprises. He recalled that Annie, in a few of her letters, mentioned that she managed the County Hospital Thrift Store located downtown, but he didn't see the shop.
The three big buildings in town were also closed — the movie house, the old hotel, and Carter's, the local department store. Missing, also, were the two hardware stores, the half dozen or so grocery stores, the three sweetshops with soda fountains, and Bob's Sporting Goods, where Keith had spent half his time and most of his money.
A few of the old places remained — Grove's Pharmacy, Miller's Restaurant, and two taverns called John's Place and the historic Posthouse. The courthouse crowd no doubt kept these places afloat.
Downtown Spencerville was surely not as Keith remembered it as a boy. It had been the center of his world, and without romanticizing it, it seemed to him that it had been the center of life and commerce in Spencer County, bursting with 1950s prosperity and baby-boomer families. Certainly, the movie theater, the sweetshops, and the sports store made it a good place for kids to hang out.
Even then, however, the social and economic conditions that were to change Main Street, USA, were at work. But he didn't know that then, and, to him, downtown Spencerville was the best and greatest place in the world, teeming with friends and things to do. He thought to himself, "The America that sent us to war no longer exists to welcome us home."
You didn't have to be born in a small town, Keith thought, to have a soft spot in your heart for America's small towns. It was, and to some extent it remained, the ideal, if only in an abstract and sentimental way. But beyond nostalgia, the small town dominated much of the history of the American experience; in thousands of Spencervilles across the nation, surrounded by endless farms, American ideas and culture formed, took hold, flourished, and nourished a nation. But now, he thought, the roots were dying, and no one noticed because the tree still looked so stately.
He approached the center of town and saw one building that had not changed: Across from Courthouse Square stood the impressive police headquarters, and, outside, among the parked police cars, a group of police officers stood, talking to a man who Keith instinctively knew was Police Chief Baxter. He also noticed now, a few buildings away from police headquarters, the County Hospital Thrift Store.
Keith drove around the massive courthouse, which was set on a few acres of public park. The administration of justice, civil and criminal, and the proliferation of bureaucratic agencies were still a growth business at the close of the American Century, even in Spencer County. The courthouse was once thought of as a boondoggle and a giant folly, but the visionaries who built it must have anticipated the kind of society that was to inherit the nation.
Aside from the courts, the building housed the prosecutor's office, the Welfare Department, a public law library, the county surveyor, the state agricultural office, the Board of Elections, and a dozen other acronymic government agencies; the Ministry of Everything, its sixteen-story clock tower rising in Orwellian fashion above the decaying city around it.
There were a number of people in the park surrounding the courthouse, kids on bikes, women with baby carriages and strollers, old people on benches, government workers on break, and the unemployed. For a moment, Keith could imagine that it was the summer of 1963 again, the summer he'd met Annie Prentis, and that the past three decades had not happened, or better yet, had happened differently.
He came full circle around the courthouse, turned back onto Main Street, and continued toward its western end, where grand old houses stood. This was once a prime residential street, but it was rundown now, the big places given over to boardinghouses, informal daycare centers, a few low-rent offices, and the occasional craft shop that hopefully paid the mortgage and taxes.
Main Street widened into four lanes at the sign that said, "City Limits," and became the highway that led to the Indiana border. But it was no longer rural, Keith saw, and had become a commercial strip of chain supermarkets, convenience stores, discount stores, and gas stations. Huge plastic signs stood atop tall stanchions as far as the eye could see: Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Roy Rogers, Domino's Pizza, Friendly's, and other fine and fast-dining spots, one after the other, all the way out to Indiana, for all he knew, maybe all the way to California — the real Main Street, USA.
At any rate, this was what had killed downtown, or perhaps downtown had killed itself because of a lack of vision, as well as a profound break with, and misunderstanding of, the past. In a perfect little hometown such as the ones he'd seen in New England, the past and the present were one, and the future was built carefully on the existing foundations of time.
But Keith supposed that if he'd stayed here and seen the changes evolve, rather than experiencing them in five-year gulps, he'd be less nostalgic and not as startled by the physical transformation.
There being not a single grocery store left in downtown Spencerville, Keith had to forgo that experience, and he pulled into the lot of a big supermarket.
He took a cart and went inside. The aisles were wide, the place was air-conditioned and clean, and the goods were mostly the same as in Washington. Despite his longing for Mr. Erhart's chaotic grocery store, the modern supermarket was truly America's finest contribution to Western civilization.
Ironically, Keith's urban shopping street in Georgetown was more like rural Spencerville than Spencerville. There, Keith, on his rare shopping trips, went from one small specialty store to another. The supermarket concept was alien to him but instantly understandable. He pushed his cart up and down the aisles, took what he needed, met the glances of housewives and old-timers, smiled, said "Excuse me," and didn't compare prices.
He was surprised at the number of people he didn't know and recalled a time when he'd wave to half the people downtown. However, there was a familiar face now and then, and some people seemed to recognize him but probably couldn't place his face or recall his name. He saw at least ten women of his own age that he'd once known and saw a man he'd once played football with. But dropping out of the sky as he had, he wasn't prepared to stop and identify himself.
He didn't see any of his former best friends and, if he had, he'd have been a little embarrassed because he hadn't kept in touch with any of them and hadn't attended a single class reunion. Aside from his family, his only contact with Spencerville had been Annie.
He saw her turning a corner and pushed his cart faster, then abandoned it and caught up with her. But it wasn't her, and in fact didn't look at all like her, and he realized he was having a tiny midafternoon hallucination.
He went back to his shopping cart, and, without finishing his shopping, he checked out and took his bags to his car.
A Spencerville police car with two officers inside was blocking him. He loaded his groceries and got into his Saab and started it up, but they didn't move. He got out of his car and went to the driver. "Excuse me, I'm getting out."
The cop stared at him a long time, then turned and said to his partner, "I thought all the migrant workers left by now." They both laughed.
This was one of those moments, Keith thought, when the average American citizen, God bless him, would tell the police to fuck off. But Keith was not an average American, and he'd lived in enough police states to recognize that what was happening here was a deliberate provocation. In Somalia or Haiti, or a dozen other places he'd been, the next thing to happen would be the death of a stupid citizen. In the old Soviet empire, they rarely shot you on the street, but they arrested you, which was where this incident was headed unless Keith backed off. He said, "Whenever you're ready."
He got back into his car, put it in reverse so that the backup lights were on, and waited. After about five minutes, a good number of shoppers had passed by and noticed, and a few of them had mentioned to the two cops that they were blocking the gentleman. In fact, the scene was attracting attention, and the cops decided it was time to move off.
Keith backed out and pulled onto the highway. He could have taken rural roads all the way home, but instead headed back into town, in case the gestapo had more on their minds. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror the whole way.
This was not a random incident of fascistic behavior toward a man with out-of-state license plates and a funny car. And Spencerville was not some southern backwater town where the cops sometimes got nasty with strangers. This was a nice, civilized, and friendly midwestern town where strangers were usually treated with some courtesy. Therefore, this was planned, and you didn't have to be a former intelligence officer to figure out who planned it.
So at least one of the questions in Keith's mind was answered: Police Chief Baxter knew he was in Spencerville. But did Mrs. Baxter know?
He'd thought about Cliff Baxter's reaction upon hearing that his wife's former lover was back in town. Big cities were full of ex-lovers, and it was usually no problem. Even here in Spencerville, there were undoubtedly many married men and women who'd done it with other people, pre-marriage, and still lived in town. The problem in this case was Cliff Baxter, who, if Keith guessed correctly, probably lacked a certain sophistication and savoir faire.
Annie had never written a word against him in any of her letters, not on the lines or between the lines. But it was more what wasn't said, coupled with what Keith remembered about Cliff Baxter and what he'd heard over the years from his family.
Keith had never solicited anything about Cliff Baxter, but his mother — God bless her — always dropped a word or two about the Baxters. These were not overly subtle remarks, but more in the category of, "I just don't know what that woman sees in him." Or more to the point, "I saw Annie Baxter on the street the other day, and she asked about you. She still looks like a young girl."
His mother had always liked Annie and wanted her stupid son to marry the girl. In his mother's day, a courtship was prelude to marriage, and a reticent beau could actually get sued for breach of promise if he ruined a girl's reputation by taking her on picnics unchaperoned, and then not doing the decent thing and marrying her. Keith smiled. How the world had changed.
His father, a man of few words, had nevertheless spoken badly of the current police chief, but he'd confined his remarks to areas of public concern. Neither sex, love, marriage, nor the name Annie ever came out of his mouth. But basically he felt as his wife did — the kid blew it.
But they could not comprehend the world of the late 1960s, the stresses and social dislocations felt more by the young than by the old. Truly, the country had gone mad, and somewhere during that madness, Keith and Annie had lost their way, then lost each other.
In the last five years since his parents had moved away, he'd had no other news of Spencerville, of Chief Baxter, or of how pretty Annie looked in a flowery sundress, walking through the courthouse park.
And that was just as well, because his mother, though she meant well, had caused him a lot of pain.
Keith drove slowly through town, then turned south on Chestnut Street, crossed the tracks, and continued through the poor part of town, past the warehouses and industrial park, and out into the open country.
He looked in his rearview mirror again but did not see a police car.
He had no idea what Chief of Police Baxter's game plan was, but it really didn't matter, as long as both of them stayed within the law. Keith didn't mind petty harassment and, in fact, thrived on it. In the old Soviet Union and the former Eastern Bloc, harassment was the highest form of compliment; it meant you were doing your job, and they took the time to express their displeasure.
Cliff Baxter, however, could have shown a little more cleverness if he'd lain low for a while.
But Keith suspected that Baxter was not patient or subtle. He was no doubt cunning and dangerous, but, like the police in a police state, he was too used to getting instant gratification.
Keith tried to put himself in Baxter's place. On the one hand, the man wanted to run Keith Landry out of town very quickly. But the cunning side of him wanted to provoke an incident that would lead to anything from arrest to a bullet.
In the final analysis, Keith understood, there wasn't room in this town for Keith Landry and Cliff Baxter, and if Keith stayed, someone was probably going to be hurt.