The Duration (10 page)

The rhino apparently heard the click as well. It lifted its head to the stairway. Its great flat snout dipped and sniffed, and then it pawed at the Italian tiles on the foyer floor. It assumed a stance recognizable by a hundred hay bales, and by Florence Banish's mother, as trouble.

At the top of the stairs, Guy Van Nest leveled his rifle and fired.

Guy Van Nest was not a rifleman, and the rifle he held was, as both a weapon and a metaphor, woefully unsuitable for the task at hand, and to nobody's surprise the shot shrugged off the rhino's massive shoulder, barely leaving a mark. The sound of the blast, however, echoed off of the marble walls of the foyer, a booming thunderclap, both sharp and rolling. It appeared to spook the rhino, which executed a hop-like pivot on its back feet and blasted through the mansion's front door, left partially open by a fleeing butler. The rhino widened that opening considerably, snapping one of the door panels clear off its hinges and sending the other careening into the building's outer wall like a sail in a storm. Guy Van Nest, rifle still in hand, hustled down the stairs, barely acknowledging Florence Banish's bleeding mother, and raced to the door. Past him, Florence Banish's mother could see the rhino, well down the drive, moving at a fast trot toward Bramble Street. For a minute, it appeared as if the animal might gain the road, perhaps pick up some momentum on Bramble and trot himself right down to Normanton. But then, as Florence Banish's mother watched, the rhino turned its head and charged off, across a side lawn, its tracks in the snow as straight as a rope. In seconds, it vanished into the rolling woodland.

Two hours later, after the front door had been braced and boarded, after Guy Van Nest had dressed and shaved and gathered several of the men who worked in the stables, after Florence Banish's mother had cleaned her lip and applied a packet of ice wrapped in cheesecloth to it, and after young Florence Banish herself had kissed her mother's cold damp hands, three large booms sounded in the forest. A bit later, Guy Van Nest and the stablemen came marching out of the rolling woodland, their own footprints obliterating those of the rhino. Guy Van Nest had a closed face and carried something wrapped in a towel. Two of the stablemen held grim larger-bore rifles of the sort that came in useful when one of the plow-horses splintered a fetlock. A third held a hacksaw. They'd dropped those in the toolshed and come back out with shovels.

Guy Van Nest did not mention the rhino again.

Some in the house staff concluded that Guy was humiliated by the whole episode, from the animal's impulsive procurement, to its apparent inadequacy as a talisman, to the disastrous finale. A young master's grand attempt to set himself up as a man of vitality, only to fall on his face. He'd picked his big fight and lost.

Others, including Florence Banish's mother, suspected that there were deeper emotions at work, having to do with the vagaries of the womb and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Whatever it was, the effect on Guy was profound. Time passed, silences were procured, and the property was restored, but Guy's absences from Fleur-de-Lys became more frequent and the parties less so. On the nights he was there, he no longer dressed for dinner and spent long evenings in his upstairs salon. He took to medicinals. The staff, which was always whispering, now whispered about money. Was it running out? Was there enough for them all?

Eventually, the answers to those questions became clear, and the property was abandoned by 1920. Guy Van Nest retreated to a considerably smaller estate on Long Island, and was not seen in the Berkshires again.

As for the rhino, those stable-hands who had accompanied Guy into the rolling woodlands were usually too drunk to be reliable, especially after they lost their jobs, but one or two spoke of following the rhino's tracks, and, where the tracks were faint, of following a break in the undergrowth the size of a train tunnel, until they'd found the beast. They spoke of a fast march across hard earth, and then a short shale drop that opened onto the soft swamp below. They spoke of half a ton of animal at the bottom, upturned and fearful, already part buried, its eyes foggy and its chest rattling. They spoke of oaths and recriminations and curses, and, finally, of shots fired by the master of the house.

We knew all this because we'd put it into our reports for Ms. Flemmy and Chief Winston, which wound up being probably just about the best goddamn reports you've ever read, probably. Got an A from the former and a paternal pat on the shoulders from the latter. We dropped in big block quotes from Florence Banish, pages at a time, the prose both flowery and square. The master of the house. The leveled muskets. Only thing missing was someone getting the vapors.

“It was never seen again,” Florence Banish said, in the quote we ended on. “The beast of the wood, a secret locked away forever.”

Far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. Good story, but once we turned in the reports I was ready to leave it behind.

Chick wasn't, though.

These were the months after the Trivette stuff came out, and we'd been upping our time in isolation. The trails, the practice courts. We hiked Monument, found the West Normanton quarry. Chick started talking about his time with the bears. It was just easier to be out of town, I guess. Nobody giving us the look. Nobody changing the dynamics. Eventually, the next scandal would drop and we could return. So we shot threes and poked through the ruins of our environment, trying to find something else to process. A new identity, a cause. And then Ms. Bitz and good old Florence Banish came through.

Once the weather warmed up and school ended, Chick took our report and began directing forays into the woods off of Bramble, expecting to stumble right onto the body of the rhino. Jimmer and Unsie came twice and then bailed. I stuck it out initially. First few times, nothing—looking for a shale cliff and a big lump of earth in those woods was like looking for a rotting tree. They were everywhere. The fourth time, a site felt promising and we lugged a couple of shovels through the woods from my dad's shed, but all we hit was the rusted frame of a VW Bug.

After that, I lost interest pretty quick. Shaunda Schoenstein was working concessions down at Tanglewood, and I was too busy trying to charm my way into her apron to want to waste more time in the woods. Plus, there was poison ivy back there, and no matter how many times you tell a girl it's not contagious, she never believes you.

Chick stuck with it. He had a little map that he'd worked on with Florence Banish, and he was checking off quadrants. We found the Bug here, he'd say, marking a spot with an
x
. We radiate out from that.

“This is dumb, Chick,” I said one day, as I was urinating against a maple tree and eying a nearby vine suspiciously. Its leaves were shiny and triplicate and a little too close for comfort. “We are never going to find it.”

Chick was shuffling around, looking at his map. “It's okay,” he said. “You can go.”

I put my junk away carefully, without touching it, by lifting the waistband of my sweats out and back. Go into the woods, brush up against a plant, put a hand down your pants—just to scratch your balls, for example—and presto, poison ivy on your dick. Happened to Mark Pacheco. More than once, I think. He was a weird kid.

“Come on,” I said.

Chick looked at me and shrugged. “What?”

“Come with me.”

He shook his head.

“Can't,” he said, smiling. “I've been called.”

“Yeah, well, I'm calling you back. Shaunda and them are in the maze. Let's go.”

Chick looked up into the trees. The sun was bending away to the west and sending shadows down onto the forest floor.

“Fine,” he said, folding up his map. “But we're coming back. It's out here. We can't just leave it.”

“Shit,” I said. “If it's out here, it's not going anywhere.”

But it was, in fact.

Head-Connect purchased the property in the fall of 1997 and set about bulldozing the grounds into someone's idea of Sherwood Forest. They smoothed the hills and put down fresh cedar chip trails, color-coding the trees along the way. They unrooted the rot and dug out the poison ivy and the broken fountains and the VW and replaced them with reading nooks and meditation moments. They put really well-made footbridges over the creeks. You can always tell when developers are serious by the quality of their footbridges.

If they found a big skeleton in there, we never heard about it. Of course, from the cockpit of a backhoe it might be hard to notice one among all the dead roots and boulders and such. Anyway, after they were finished, the woods were pristine and unrecognizable, and any reference points we might have hoped to use were gone. Chickie and I watched from Bramble as Fleur-de-Lys disappeared into a cocoon of all-weather siding and then re-emerged from fifty years of overgrowth as a bright ship of marble and glass. They built new wings for a gym complex and a test kitchen. Horses returned to half of the stables, while the other half became an aquatics center. The servants' quarters were expanded and fitted with hot tubs. Gardens were seeded with astilbe and bee balm. Everything was sustainable, whatever that meant. The whole thing took about eighteen months, but pretty soon after that, strangers with unlined faces and southwestern roots started buying up the midlevel real estate on the outskirts of town, and limousines and livery cabs started pulling in from Bradley and Wassaic, ferrying stars with bad habits, overweight team-building executives, the one-percent looking for either an edge or a break.

The Gilded Age had returned.

Later that first summer, Chickie got arrested again, and released again, for trespassing in the woods around Fleur-de-Lys. At first the Head-Connect folks thought he was paparazzi and were sort of disappointed to learn he wasn't. He was persistent, though, and eventually they put him on a special list of nuisances, like crabgrass and fire ants. They hung his picture in the contractor's shack. The third time, Chief Winston and Chick's mother negotiated an agreement to rein him in, and in exchange, the Head-Connect folks didn't press charges. After that, he got really quiet whenever the subject came up.

“What do you mean, it's there?” I asked.

We were still in the entryway of the library. Chickie looked around warily, like he was checking for eavesdroppers. I caught myself doing it too.

“Well,” he said. “I get back, what, a month ago?”

It was less than that, far as I knew.

“Don't know what I expected, but it's all weird now. It's not fun anymore. You're gone. Uns is always busy. We're not kids like we used to be. But then, then, there's this other part, it's almost a ghost part, comes and goes, but it's this part that feels like I never left. Been here the whole time. One day I wind up at the library, looking for old Banish, even though I know she's gone. And instead I start chatting with this new librarian—you know how it is when you get them talking—telling her about how Banish had turned us on to the rhino and all that. Just for someone to talk to.”

He was more animated than he'd been since early morning, jumping on my bed.

“And she says, ‘You know Ms. Banish passed away in 2002, right?' And I'm like, shit yeah, we were at her funeral. Except I didn't say ‘shit,' of course. And she felt so sorry for me, or something—these librarians stick together—that she takes me back to the office and opens a drawer and says, ‘This was her special file.'”

He slung the backpack off his shoulder and dug a manila folder out of it.

“Guess what was in it?”

He pulled a small square of photo stock out of it, grainy and blurred at the edges. I squinted at it. It looked like a picture of a furnace.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It's a safe,” Chickie said.

I looked again, more closely. He was right. There was the heavy door, partially open. There were the rectangular bars along the bottom, stacked like chocolates. Papers and small boxes took up the middle shelves.