Gourdfellas (2 page)

“I don’t know what to say, Nora. Isn’t Susan allowed to have a difference of opinion without being judged by her friends? She wasn’t being intentionally mean and she sure wasn’t being selfish. She’s not the only who feels that the casino is a pretty good way to make up for social and economic injustice. Nathaniel Bartle said it loud and clear at the very first meeting.”

Nathaniel and Susan
did
have a point, as did the people touting the economic advantages of bringing in the casino. But that was one side. The arguments on the other side, about safety and preserving the nature of the community, made a lot of sense, too. I’d begun to feel like a shuttlecock in a game of opinion-badminton. This casino business had turned the political into something personal.

In a few weeks, the community would vote on the issue—but meanwhile the rationality factor seemed to drop as the emotional factor went way up. Homeowners put up signs supporting the casino, and those signs disappeared in the middle of the night. Graffiti, not quite nasty but still unsettling, was scrawled across the wall of a store whose owner opposed the casino. Discussions in the diner and in shops all over town started at a decibel level usually reserved for talking back to the television news or scolding misbehaving dogs.

I flipped my directional signal and turned into town, joining the line of cars that snaked their way up the hill toward the Walden High School parking lot. From the look of things, everyone within twenty miles of town had something to say about this casino.

 

I didn’t know the man standing at the front of the stage, but I feared for his health.

His face, pale when he’d started to address the noisy crowd, had grown so red that I worried about burst blood vessels. His eyes bulged, and a geyser of fury erupted in a sibilant explosion from his thin mouth.

“Sin and salaciousness! Steal your money, sure, but casinos steal the soul of a place. Sorrow and sickness, that’s what’s in store!” A thick fist pounded the podium, rattling the microphone. His entire body trembled with righteous fury as his exhortation spilled over the packed auditorium of Walden High School.

I ducked, not wanting to get splattered with all that anger and alliteration. Melissa Paul, owner of the Taconic Inn, rubbed her toes and suppressed a giggle.

“A little over the top, but he’s right,” Nora whispered into my left ear. “You want to lose your money, go to Atlantic City. Don’t mess with my town.”

Elizabeth Conklin, seated on the other side of Nora, clenched her jaw. “And definitely don’t preach at me as though you’ve heard The Word,” she said.

Ira Jackson, a small, pinched man with a small, pinched mind, who just happened to own the land on which the casino was to be built, sprang from his seat two rows in front of us. “That’s a pile of horse manure. You all have any better idea how to pay for the roads and the schools around here? You done something lately to make jobs for the farmers run off their land by the corporations? You gonna donate a new wing for the county hospital? We need that damn casino, that’s all!”

Heads turned toward his reedy voice, and a tornado of shouts swirled through the room.

“It’s someone else’s time to speak. Sit down, Mr. Jackson!” Joseph Trent, the town council member who was chairing the meeting, tapped on the microphone.

“No casino in my town!” another voice shouted.

A compact, open-faced woman whose pixie haircut made her blue eyes seem huge, took the microphone from Trent’s hand and said, “Would you all calm down? This meeting is for the council to find out what the citizens of our town think about this damn casino. I want my voice to be heard. I’ll do whatever I can to keep Walden Corners just as it is, but we have to follow procedure. If you have something to say, sign up to speak, don’t—”

“We need jobs!” someone shouted from the back.

“Who was that?” I asked. “I thought she was going to turn things around for a second there.”

Nora said, “Trisha Stern. She’s lived up here for about three years. A physical therapist. This is getting way out of hand.”

“Order! Order!” Joseph Trent yelled into the mike, pounding a gavel on the table in front of him and glaring over the top of his glasses. “The chair recognizes Marjorie Mellon.”

The scheduled speakers, lined up in the center aisle, shifted forward as Marjorie headed to the stage. A stubby man in a denim jacket and battered John Deere cap moved to the front of the line. Susan Clemants and her red tresses followed right behind him. I glanced over at Elizabeth, who appeared to be looking at everything in the auditorium except Susan.

The crowd continued to hurl shouts as a string bean of a woman jogged to the microphone, her gray curls bobbing and her dark eyes focused straight ahead. Where was the civility, the due process, the tolerance for other points of view? This roomful of ordinarily respectable—and respectful—citizens was behaving like a mob driven by bloodlust. I half expected to see Sydney Carton kneeling in front of the guillotine as the crowd cheered.

“When other people spoke, I was quiet. Now I want you to give me my two minutes.” Marjorie’s back was erect and her face stern. “I may be a cleaning woman, but I know a thing or two about business around here.”

As she paused and scanned the crowd, I looked around too. Marjorie ran the only commercial cleaning service in town, which meant that the business climate in Walden Corners was of great importance to her.

“I know we need to build a new wing on the elementary school and buy two new snowplows. We need some kind of recreation center so that our children have something to do besides playing around with drugs and each other. Our police force has three computers that break down every other day and two cruisers with over one hundred thousand miles on them. The tax base of Walden Corners won’t even support those crucial things. Plus, with the cost of natural gas going out of sight, you all are going to have to send your kids to school in their parkas and mittens because where we’ll find the money to cover the heating bills is a big mystery. So one alternative for paying for these essentials is to raise the taxes of every single citizen in this town.”

Now Marjorie was the one who sounded like a preacher, but a call of yeses and a reply of hisses were the only responses to her sermon. I’d just paid the second installment of my annual property tax, and it shocked me to realize that it had taken me three weeks of hard work to earn that money. I was one of the lucky ones, with training and skills and enough energy to scramble for work that allowed me to make more than the minimum wage—usually.

“Nope, didn’t think you’d like that. So the other way is to let this one casino come in, and bring jobs and tourist money and new revenues. We can put clauses in the agreement to make sure it stays respectable and we can solve our money problems for years to come. Or we can raise property taxes. Pretty simple decision, I’d say.” Marjorie straightened her spine and leaned over the podium, making eye contact with key members of the crowd. Her pause was almost past the point of dramatic emphasis when she boomed, “I invite anyone who agrees with my way of thinking to join me in forming a consortium to make sure we get what we need around here. And what we need is that casino.”

A roar, whether in agreement or disapproval, filled the room.

“Like I need a cow with two heads!” a voice called from the rear.

“We have to keep this meeting orderly.” Bespectacled Joseph Trent spoke with surprising vigor. I’d only seen him in his day job behind the prescription counter at Trent Pharmacy, where he sported a perpetually worried look and a mild manner. “You want a civilized town, you have to behave civilly to each other.”

A woman two rows from the stage looked ready to leap over the seats and commandeer the mike. She shouted, “We need to keep our town safe. No gambling, no whores, no—”

A gabble of voices drowned her out and bodies blocked her way. People were on their feet, surging forward, placards bobbing dangerously close to heads and limbs. How had a town meeting about Oneida Gaming’s plan to build a casino turned into this cacophony of greed and guilt? From my spot near the far left aisle I felt my own anger grow. This wasn’t why I moved from Brooklyn to a small town one hundred miles to the north.

“I need some fresh air, you know, to clear my head,” I said. “If I don’t come back inside, I’ll wait for you at the car.”

Nora shook her head. “You go ahead. Melissa can drive me home. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I shouldered my way past three overall-clad women and pushed toward the side exit. But knots of people, jabbering and poking each other in the chest as though that would make their point, made forward progress impossible. I felt like Sisyphus, only instead of rolling a rock up the hill I was trying to roll myself.

“Hey, Lili, take a lesson from the martial arts. Resistance doesn’t work.” Seth Selinsky pressed his hand against the small of my back, turning me the way a tug turns a loaded ship. The swell of people pushed us toward the stage. Elbows and fingers and, once, a sharp-cornered pocketbook worthy of the Queen, jabbed various soft places on my body. When the crowd thinned, Seth took my hand and drew me past four laughing teens up the steps to the stage. Before I knew it, we were pushing through a heavy metal door and into the quiet of the parking lot.

“Go with the flow—isn’t that a karate principle? Anyway, it worked this time. Thanks, Seth.” Even in the dark, his eyes seemed to gleam, but I couldn’t tell whether it was pleasure, mischief, or a simple biological reaction to the absence of light.

“You going with the flow on the casino?” He sounded curious. We’d been to dinner the Saturday before but we hadn’t talked about the casino. As we walked through the ranks of parked cars, his shoulder brushed against mine. I moved away, still on edge after being in the middle of an unpredictable crowd. He was a single man who made a better than good living as a mortgage broker, and his livelihood depended on city people wanting to move to the southern half of Columbia County. It seemed a fair guess that he’d oppose the casino. We’d gone out at least a dozen times, but hormones and politics didn’t seem like a good mix.

“I’m a NIMBY on this one. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find that I gave up the energy and diversity of Brooklyn for a garish, late-night, traffic-generating magnet for sleazebags and desperados.”

His laugh was one of the things I liked best about Seth. “Not In Marino’s Back Yard, eh? Listen, I’ve got to go to Philadelphia next weekend to a mortgage products seminar. Deadly dull but there’s a Picasso exhibit at the museum that I plan to see even if I have to play hooky to do it. If you’d like to join me, I’d love the company.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got a gallery opening in New Hampshire.” Saying yes would have been a nice but problematic complication, ushering in a new era of weekends away, which might lead to shared vacations and who knew what else. I wasn’t ready for
maybe never
either, so I was relieved to have a valid reason to decline.

Seth’s smile might have been a dodged-the-bullet expression that mirrored my own relief, or simple cordiality. He took two steps toward me with The Look on his face, but before he could take me into his arms, shouts churned the warm spring night. I looked over my shoulder to see several dozen people in the rectangle of light spilling from the open doorway. Had the meeting ended already? They were only up to the eighth speaker, with ten more on the list and scores more who would try to get their sixty seconds of airtime before the mandatory ten o’clock end of the session.

“Something’s wrong,” Seth said, as the wail of a siren got louder and the twin high beams of a county emergency vehicle split the darkness. He started toward the building at a lope and picked up speed. I ran behind him.

The ambulance screeched to a halt at the open doorway. A tall man carrying a large plastic box and a shorter guy wielding a walkie-talkie hopped down and waded into the noisy crowd. When the cluster of onlookers stepped aside to let the two men pass, I saw Susan Clemants, sitting on the curb and holding a bloodstained handkerchief to her forehead.

Glad for my subway rush hour training, I pushed past several people to get closer to Susan. Except for the dark streak of blood that trickled toward her eye and the vacant, glazed look on her pale face, she appeared to be unhurt. Kneeling, I restrained my impulse to touch her shoulder or stroke her hair or otherwise comfort her and let the taller EMT poke and prod and check her out, while the shorter one, a sandy-haired blond boy I’d seen around town, held the crowd back.

“Susan, it’s me, Lili. The paramedics are going to take care of you. Is there anything you need? Jack’s still away on his fishing trip, right?”

Her pale lips parted, but before she could say anything, her eyelids fluttered and her body went slack.

Country hospitals are quiet. Oddly, people smile less than they did in Brooklyn. A ponytailed doctor with pretty blue eyes bent over a now-awake Susan, probed at the raw wound, then frowned as she waited for an answer.

Susan’s color had returned along with her consciousness. “No, I don’t know what hit my head. All I know is I was getting off the stage after I spoke. This thing came flying from somewhere to my left. And when it hit me, it hurt like hell.”

“Looks like it was probably a rock,” the doctor said softly. “There’s grit in there and I have to get it out. I’m going to numb it and then muck around until it’s clean. It’ll take ten, twelve stitches, but I know how to sew a fine seam. If you manage the wound care properly, it won’t get infected. So, you okay with me going ahead?”

Susan nodded, grabbed my hand, and held tight for the twenty minute procedure. I averted my eyes and let my mind drift. I’d followed behind the ambulance in my car and navigated the bustle of the ER in that state I call essential reality.

Only Susan and her needs existed. Now that the doctor was taking care of her, I had the mental space to wonder about what had happened in that packed auditorium in the few minutes after Seth and I left.