The Vermonter

Painting by Greg Benson

He chose Houghton, a small town in southern Vermont (aren’t they all?) nestled between a few modest mountains. On first view it looked like the right kind of place, adequate in size and affluence, not too sprawly, not too quaint.

He said he wanted to buy a house outright, convert the finished barn into an art studio. To just fork over the money and have a house with a future studio. Fortunately, for him, he seemed able to do so. Not many people of his background had that kind of money. “Looks good,” he told the realtor after not even going upstairs. “Can I buy it?”

“Well, wow, um,” said Charlotte Shirley, the town’s best-known realtor, the only one with a billboard — or largish sign, really, since the state had outlawed billboards — the one you’ve probably seen if you’ve been up this way. Yep, the one with the blonde, colt-faced woman in a lime-green pants outfit flexing her right bicep. “HOUSING IS MY STRONG SUIT.”

“I’d like to move in by the end of the month, if possible.”

“Well, we might be getting a little ahead of ourselves,” laughed Charlotte, and then feared the wrong message was coming across. “I mean — of course, the house is yours if you want it. We could do it that way, cash — or cashier’s check —cash or check, whichever. Money order.”

“I won’t need to order any money. I mean, I’ve got the money.”

She was flustered, and she chastised herself for it. But no one who’d ever looked anything like this man standing before her had ever offered to buy a property with cash, right there, not even looking at the upstairs. She didn’t want to question his intentions, but wondered, in spite of herself, what his deal was. By “deal,” she had to admit she meant “intent.”

All these thoughts were sublimated with eyebrows raised high and a smiley frown that she hoped would come across as, “Say, this is good, right?”

“Ma’am, I — ” he started, but was cut off.

“Please! It’s Charlotte!”

“Charlotte, I know you don’t get too many offers like this, but I’m not good at the whole back-and-forth thing, you know, nickle-and-dimin’, fix this and then I’ll pay that, you know. I like the house and I’d like to buy it.”

Her heart melted, just a little. This young man comes up from somewhere “down there” and had chosen us, our town, to settle in, sight (and the upstairs) seemingly unseen, bought a house outright, saying, hey, I like what I like and I’m going to live here. If only everyone were more like that.

“We’re honored to have you!” Charlotte gushed.

“We?”

“I mean, the town, Houghton.”

“So that’s how you say that. Houghton.”

“Almost! More like, Houghton.”

“Houghton.”

“By Jove, I think you’ve got it!”

“Jove?”

Charlotte’s smile flattened, just a little. “Yeah, Jove? It’s from a movie maybe?”

Then came the uncomfortable silence that was not quite three seconds but seemed to her more like half a minute. “Well!” interjected Charlotte. “Let’s talk about a closing date.”

“Yeah, closing date. Let’s close this thing.”

Charlotte furrowed her until-now seamless brow. “Yes, sir.”

“I guess you’ll have to school me on that,” he said. “It’s my, well, it’s my first house. I mean, house that’s mine.”

“Right, well, okay, the closing date is when we sit down and sign all the papers.”

“Papers.”

Charlotte then explained to him, without sounding like she was explaining, that some time needed to pass before the momentous transaction could actually occur, enabling all the bases to be touched and Ts crossed.

“Ah, okay. So then after the closing I move in.”

“Yep! The moment all the papers are signed, sealed and delivered!”

“Delivered? Where to?

Charlotte flinched a little, wondering if it were possible this man didn’t know Stevie Wonder. “You know, to the lenders and all,” she said, hoping he’d drop it, because she wasn’t really sure about that.

“So I couldn’t just go to whoever and buy the house outright?”

Charlotte’s eyes got wide for half a second, then narrowed. “Well, you see, they hired me, I’m a realtor, and I get a percentage if the house sells.”

“Can I give you the cut, then pay whoever the rest?”

“I — I don’t know. I don’t think that’s ever happened.”

“Can we find out if we can do it that way?”

Charlotte’s patience, while not quite fraying, was being tested. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’d have to look that up.”

“Okay.”

They looked at each other for a few beats.

“Mr. Serene, are you in a huge hurry?” asked Charlotte. “‘Cause, if so, we can, you know, put this sale on high priority. You’d be in by the end of the month.”

It was July 16th.

“You can call me Trevian,” he said.

“Okay, Trevian.”

“Hmm, two weeks,” he said quietly. He looked around the living room, at the heart-pine mantle over the recently re-bricked fireplace, the bamboo flooring, the greige walls. “Got a lot of paintings to wrap and ship up from Brooklyn.” Charlotte almost interrupted him then with a question about his art, but stopped herself, not wanting to sound stupid. “Well, I guess that’ll be okay.”

“Great!” shrieked Charlotte. It was his turn to flinch. “So — are you a painter?”

“Been at it a while.”

“What…um…what sort of paintings do you make?”

“Well, they’re kind of nautical, kind of dramatic, kind of historical.”

“They sound wonderful!” gushed Charlotte.

“Well, lately, lots of folks seem to think so.”

“If you ever want me to show them to clients, I’d be glad to.”

“You can. Don’t know if I’ll have many available.”

“Great!” Charlotte wasn’t sure if they were done. “I mean, great for you. And them! I mean, whoever gets to buy the work!”

“Reckon.”

“Well! Bye, Trevian.”

“Later.”

She turned to go. Trevian watched her take a few steps, then turn back around to see if he was going to follow her. Trevian noted her panicked reaction to his remaining in the living room; only then did he follow her out. Charlotte didn’t see his car. She momentarily thought of offering him a ride, then kind of chickened out.

“Made a sale today,” said Charlotte to her husband, Grant, as he entered their home, a converted syrup warehouse just off downtown Houghton.

“Nice,” said Grant, sitting down on the mudroom bench to extract his paint-splattered sneakers. He’d spent the day painting a former textile mill being converted into a brewery. He’d already labored through 14 partial workdays doing so.

“Not just any sale,” Charlotte continued, knowing not to wait for a question from her husband of 22 years. “But a sale to a, well, an interesting person.”

“Good,” said Grant. “Nice job.”

“It was weird, though. He’s some bigtime artist. Somehow he didn’t know who Stevie Wonder is. And he wanted to buy it outright, with cash.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yeah, right? I mean, great, wow, he’s got that kind of money. But he wanted to go over to the Wilsons to pay them, and just move right on into the house. I think maybe, because of his background, you know, he might not know how it’s done.”

“Huh.”

“Exactly. I had to say, hey, wait a minute there, Buster.”

“His name is Buster?”

“No, Honey. His name’s not ‘Buster.’ It’s Tre — ”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I had to explain the whole process.”

“Maybe you’ll explain it to me some time.”

“Ha! So yeah, he’ll be living on Whoolford by the second week of next month. So, finally some diversity, right?”

“Got a family?”

“I actually don’t know.” Charlotte felt she’d dropped enough hints about Trevian’s race, but Grant was refusing to get it.

“You mean you didn’t ask?”

“He didn’t give me time!” Charlotte seemed a little hurt. “I mean, he was all business, just wanting to know who, whom to pay and when he can move in. I don’t think he mentioned a family.”

“Well, I guess Whoolford will find out.”

“And I think they’ll be fine with it.”

“Probably.”

“They’re a fairly pro-diversity kind of folk.”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

“Anyway! I’ve got to call Whitney and tell her the news.”

Grant remained seated in the mud room, thinking maybe this would be the day.

For a few weeks he’d been in a kind of texting volley with a woman. She was someone whose son had rented their converted barn out back for a few years before committing to college. They’d noticed each other, exchanged numbers “just to help me keep tabs on my son.”

Then, out of the blue, two weeks ago, she’d texted him: “Barn still for rent?”

“Naw — unless it’s just you,” quipped Grant, before he could stop his thumbs.

“It could be,” she texted back with a wink.

And so on.

At one point she asked him if he’d told his wife of their flirty correspondence. “No,” he texted back, then thought of her husband, a professor of neurology at Bennington College, if he remembered right. “You?”

“No,” she answered. “I haven’t told your wife a thing.” Wink emoji.

So, what would be the big deal if the two ended up at the same bar — not even a bar, really? A brewpub with a large outdoor seating area.

It was Friday, after all. A man, even in Vermont, sometimes went out on Friday and knocked a few back. More, if the occasion called for it.

Lord knows, he’d earned it. He’d worked outside all day, well, most of it, the temperature nearing 80 two different times. Charlie, his twenty-something helper, who prepped and rolled while Grant cut in, had seemed somewhat taciturn, almost sullen. Someone nearby had used a leaf blower. It was time to blow off a little steam.

After changing into his “play clothes,” a daily joke that seemed more fitting now, he walked into the sunroom, where Charlotte was still talking to her sister. Here was his chance. He conveyed his message to her with a Vaudevillian drinking pantomime, complete with staggering, which caused her to point a finger to the air even while she continued talking. That meant he was to wait.

While waiting, he thought, “What the hell am I doing?” He left the room to ponder that question in the bathroom while searching his face in the mirror for motives. A 48-year-old guy acting this way, meeting someone he hardly knew for some reason that was probably sexual in its roots?

He thought of their daughter Blige, probably studying in the study hall or library up at Middlebury. What would she think? It was worth contemplating. But Blige, whose first name was Ogden, after all, had world experience; he and Charlotte had made sure of that. They’d taken her everywhere: Dublin, Paris, Munich, the gamut. An old soul, she’d probably understand.

With Blige’s presumed blessing, he stepped out and found Charlotte standing in the hall, waiting for him. “This is such a banner day!” she gushed. “I almost want to join you.”

His heart did something like sinking and flipping at the same time, as a wounded perch might. “What?” he asked, hopefully facetiously incredulously. “You? In a drinking establishment?”

“Well, it’s a great day. Seems right to celebrate in some way.”

“Well, yeah. I’d say.”

“I’d have to change into something more, you know, bar-ry.” She was not referring to the town of Barre, some 120 miles north of them.

“Do you even have something more, eh, barry?”

“Hmm. You’re right. You go.” She winked. “We’ll celebrate later.”

“What kind of cake do you want?”

She didn’t laugh. Instead, she made her face soft and serious. Grant was that word that means a combination of intrigued and annoyed. “I love you so much,” she said, seemingly out of character.

Really, now?

His heart ripped, just a little. “Hey. I’m the one who loves you so much,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “You.”

Would bicycling to Quarks make him seem more manly? Or less? Screw it. Folding himself into his Outback seemed suddenly astronautical. Is this what he wanted to do? What was he doing, anyway? Oh, well! Song no. 4 from Nora Jones’s Little Broken Hearts album blared pleasingly from the speakers: “Miriam, that’s such a pretty name/I’ll keep on saying it/until you die.”

Driving slowly down his street, he took in the scene. He savored the view below him, the old brick and plaster-clad buildings, the pulsing river and quiet streets of Houghton.

He loved the neighborhood in which they lived. Old, well kept homes. Everyone, it seemed, showed a BLACK LIVES MATTER sign prominently in her or his front yard, except for that weirdo on Blasich Ave. The stickers on the bumpers of nearly all the Volvos and Outbacks were resoundingly secular and humanist. The Saabs, too.

He drove downward on Carley Ave. until it dead-ended on Main Street. He turned left and he was practically there.

He parked.

At the risk of sitting there and being spotted just sitting there in his car for some weird reason, he sat and thought of his last flirt-text exchange with Lauren, which happened during his workday. Then he realized he didn’t have to use memory; he could merely look at his phone and find the actual conversation.

“Well, let me know when you’re in town.”

“I’m in town now. Going to Quark’s tonight.”

“What? That’s where I go on Fridays!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Grant’s thumb had woodpeckered over the exclamation point, after which he’d sent the text just before realizing what his digit had done.

He remembered three dots dancing, forever, it seemed. Then, finally, “Calm down there, young man.” And a wink.

A little shaky, he’d thought it best to climb down the ladder from the 25-foot-high peak he’d been caulking while he texted. He’d managed a thumbs-up reply.

What was this feeling? Was it excitement? Knowing himself well enough to know the longer he waited in his idling car — even though it was well camouflaged between two other Outback wagons — the worse everything would go tonight, he turned his Outback off. The key stuck in the ignition. He fiddled with it for awhile before figuring, “Why are we even locking our cars anyway? It’s Vermont.” He left his Outback unlocked, key in place.

He was going in!

He did have to pause first at the concrete barrier at the foot of the front steps of Quark’s to view the Cagney River. It was always a majestic sight, whatever the level, the mighty Cagney; after a few days of heavy rain like they’d just gotten, it was a barely-harnessed force of nature. “You dirty rat,” he muttered, and climbed up the stairway to, at his age, the unknown.

The place was about a third full. A song from Nora Jones’s Pick Me Up Off the Floor album was playing out the P.A.

He looked for her — his date, not Nora Jones — while trying to appear not to. Was she seated? Was she outside? What would she be wearing? What did she even look like? He wasn’t sure.

“Grant!” It was Ray, a early-retired, big-shot, former something-or-other who’d moved up from Manhattan. He was standing at the bar; the bartender he’d been talking to seemed happy to foist him on someone else.

“Hey Ray. How’s the day?”

“Oh, not too horrible, how’s yours?”

He guessed he’d have to stand here awhile, next to the man who always seemed to have this liberaler-than-thou thing going — his electric Volvo, his Springsteen concerts and Broadway show attended. Like his facial features which all seemed to end at a sharp point, his actions were as consistent as an All Thing Considered episode. He’d even named his only son Tubold, after the father’s name in the Prince song “When Doves Cry.” Tubold Pettengill. It was impossible to think of it without chuckling.

“Just dandy,” Grant chuckled. “Hey Martin, when you get a chance, pint of Alchy Ale?”

Martin was already on it.

Grant looked at Ray and resigned himself to a conversation. Annoying as this was, maybe this was good. Ray could be his “beard.” Once he’d finally found his flirt-friend, he could “shave.”

Lauren! That was her name. Somehow he’d forgotten it between the car and the bar. It came to Grant in a flash when Ray had started talking about his trip to Key Biscayne, which was near Key Largo, which was also the name of a Bogart movie costarring Lauren Bacall. “You really can’t get the red snapper here that they have there,” droned Ray. “At least not nearly as fresh.” Grant nodded, noting how special that first sip of ale was after a partial day working outdoors.

“Someone here should open a Snapper Hut,” said Grant, hoping to trip Ray up so he’d stop talking for just a few seconds so Grant could scan the room.

“Ha! I’d be your silent partner,” offered Ray facetiously.

“If you could shut up that long,” said Grant, who immediately regretted his barb.

“Ha ha!” laughed Ray, who then pulled out his phone, because someone was calling him and he wanted Grant to know it. “Hello?” he asked his phone. “Who?”

Grant looked around. Two guys at the other end of the bar, one with a rat terrier on his lap lapping from a bowl of water on the next stool, the other with a mildly bulldoggish countenance, grunted at each other about the Red Sox. “How many they leave on base last night?” one asked.

“Seemed like twenty.”

A pair of young couples sat at a table under the only TV screen, which was tuned to MSNBC. Then, looking to the far corner, by the window looking out to the back deck of the place, he saw her — or the back of her. Lauren. She was speaking with what seemed like a silhouette of an African American male.

What was he supposed to do with this? Who was this guy? Then Grant checked himself and realized this guy had just as much right, if not more, to sit at a table with the woman he’d come here to meet.

The last recorded mugging in Houghton had occurred in 1983, when a man in a soiled Searsucker suit (according to the article in the Houghton Herald) approached a man leaving a seafood restaurant and asked, “Can I ask you a question?”

When the shellfish enthusiast responded with a snarky, “Was that your question?”, the assailant pulled a lead pipe from his pants and struck the victim seven times in the neck and head before taking his wallet.

“That was my question,” muttered the man, according to eyewitnesses. He went off into the night.

When the victim, after three weeks in the hospital and several grueling physical therapy sessions, recovered enough to regain his bearings, he found them (the bearings) altered somewhat. Bob could no longer stomach shellfish or his job as a stockbroker. He took the savings he had and opened Quark’s, which he hoped would draw a younger, nerdier crowd than that inhabiting most drinking establishments.

It kind of worked.

The irony grown stale after a few weeks, no one was using the axe-throwing lane any more, so he put the dart board back up. He stocked his cooler with kegs of Vermont-crafted beers. A restless success, he was considering changing the decor.

Grant was staring at an enlarged photograph of a large moose. Not quite in keeping with the spacey theme implied by the establishment’s name. Maybe he could convince Bob to acquire one of his old paintings in exchange for store credit. But not everyone was into Americana Futurism.

Why was he here? Well, he had a beer to finish. He slipped away from the still-on-his-important-call Ray and opened the storm door to the rear deck. He figured he could just kind of mosey around, making himself visible to Lauren, and then she’d get his attention to wave him back in.

And that’s just what happened. Feigning surprise, Grant reentered Quark’s and approached the table. The black man swiveled partly around and extended his hand. “Name’s Trevian, man. Trevian Serene.”

“Grant; nice to meet ya. Hello, Lauren.”

“Hello, Grant.” She wore a loose T-shirt, no bra underneath, and a supremely confident smile. Their handshake was sarcastically formal.

Now he’d have to make conversation with this guy Trevian. (Or was it Trevon?) But he didn’t want to ask anything resembling cloaked suspicion. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

“A Montane.”

“Ah, good one. And you?” he asked Lauren.

“Wine.”

“And me with a beer,” said Grant. “This table can’t make up its mind.”

“Really?” asked Lauren, shooting a wry smile Grant’s way.

Discomfort washed over Grant so completely he had to pull out his phone. “Sorry,” he said. “Just realized I hadn’t checked in with my daughter today.” He mimed texting.

“How old is she now?” asked Lauren.

“Blige is nineteen.”

“That’s a good age,” said Trevian. Was that a smirk?

Grant put his phone back in his pocket, but it was the pocket with his wallet already in it, so he pulled it back out and put it in the other one. “Y’think?” he asked Trevian. “You got kids?”

“Nope.”

Grant turned and looked at the TV. Someone was talking about an upcoming election.

“When you don’t have kids,” Lauren said, “they’re all good ages.”

Trevian nodded and chuckled and Grant laughed. Grant sensed Trevian’s laugh was not of the same nature as his.

As it didn’t look like this dark interloper was going anywhere soon, Grant’s big plan to veer close to adultery was scuttled. Near the end of his first pint, he debated getting out of there; he even got up, felt for his keys, which he remembered were stuck in his ignition. A quick glance at Lauren’s chest area changed his mind. He could use another (beer). In fact, he bought a round for the table he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to.

Why did he, then? Jealousy? He’d forgotten how that inescapable human malady felt.

His annoyance was buttressed by Ray’s appearance at the table. “Hey, gang, I’m Ray.” Handshaking. Small talk.

“How did you two meet?” asked Lauren, as if Ray and Grant were a thing.

“Don’t know, really,” replied Grant before Ray could. “It’s a small town, people cross paths.”

“I remember I was reading the 1619 Project here a while back,” said Ray, “and Grant asked me what it was. You hadn’t heard of the book, had you?”

“Of course I’d heard of the book,” Grant snapped back. “I get the Times.” Grant hated Ray for making him feel defensive about his Vermont lib cred.

“Anyway, if you haven’t read that book,” continued Ray, looking pointedly at Trevian and then Lauren. “I suggest you do.”

“Nah,” said Trevian. “It’s just stuff I already know.”

“No doubt,” said Ray. “It’s rough out there for people of color.”

“Is it?” asked Trevian, looking off somewhere, smiling a little.

All eyes seemed focused on him, even as they pretended to look elsewhere. Is this what the evening was to become? Grant began feeling miserable. And then Lauren’s shoeless foot touched his shoed one, and stayed.

It’s the little things that matter, mused Grant. Not to mention attitude. He realized his annoyance with those present at the table had more to do with his inability to roll with things than the actual people seated here before him.

“You seem a little keyed up,” said Lauren, tapping her foot on his.

“Baa,” he replied sheepishly. “Just had me a, you know, a day.”

“Well, we’ve all had days,” said Ray. “Some better than others, I’ll allow.”

“Looks like I’m going to acquire a few pieces of art,” said Lauren, seemingly out of the blue.

“Oh yeah?” asked Grant. “Whose?”

“Mine,” said Trevian.

“Trevian paints sinking slave ships,” Lauren informed them.

“Interesting,” said Ray. “Anything like Bierstadt?”

“Naw,” said Trevian. “Not really.”

Grant wasn’t able to divine whether Trevian knew who Alfred Bierstadt was. He wasn’t sure he himself knew. Probably a guy who painted ships, he figured. But it was his turn to say something positive about Trevian’s art, so he said, “Sinking slave ships, that’s…well, that’s pretty….”

“Pretty deep subject matter,” finished Ray.

When Lauren burst into laughter, Grant realized he’d better laugh too if he was to get anywhere with her.

Everyone curtailed their merriment when they saw Trevian wasn’t laughing.

“So, what’re your paintings run for a poor housepainter like me?” asked Grant, trying to get past his contempt for Ray. “And are you on Facebook?”

“Naw, dude. Don’t do the social media. It’s gush ’n’ ghost, you know, over and over.” Everyone nodded like they understood. “Five grand for the smaller ones,” said Trevian. “Big ones up to twenty.”

“Put me down for a few of those,” said Ray.

“Sight unseen?”

“I trust your judgment. Pick two out for me.” He laid his business card in front of Trevian. “I’ll be around tomorrow.”

Grant, feeling a bit on the spot, said, “Well, I’d like to take a look at these paintings that are selling like hotcakes. Not that anyone buys hotcakes any more. Heh heh. Where’s your studio?”

“Brooklyn.”

“He’s got a dealer there, but he’s nice enough to let us buy straight from him,” said Lauren.

Grant forced a smile at Trevian. “Nice.”

Trevian nodded, then looked toward the bar. Grant turned and looked also. He saw Bob, who owned Quark’s, standing behind the bar and looking his way. “’Nother round?” asked Grant. All expressed affirmative in their own ways.

While waiting for the drinks at the bar, he leaned toward Bob and said, “How ya been?”

“Good. You know that guy at the table?”

“Which one?”

“Not the white one but the other one.”

“Just met him, name’s Trevian.”

“Ah.” Bob furrowed his brow and looked down at the coasters before him. “I’m pretty sure that’s the fella I saw outside the bookstore in Manchester last weekend.”

“Northshire? Yeah?” Grant made a feigned gape toward the table. “So he’s a reader then.”

“Well, thing is, he wasn’t there to shop.”

So he’s a fucking writer too, Grant thought. Probably leaving his book-signing after selling 500 copies of his new novel.

“No?” he asked as he thought.

“He was beg — uh, holding a cardboard sign and soliciting donations.”

Grant was relieved, for some reason. “For what, you think?” he asked.

“You know, he was, in need.”

Begging! thought Grant before he could stop himself.

“Well, that doesn’t make sense.”

“No?”

“Well no, because apparently he’s this big-time artist.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s sold three or four paintings since I met him, and that was one beer ago.”

“Get out.”

Grant made a move toward the door, because that was one of his favorite jokes. Then he came back. “Here’s your drinks, sir,” said the bartender, who was young and didn’t figure into the story.

When Grant wheeled back around, Lauren was right there. Her figure was still appealing, he noted. Yoga pants. “Can’t let an old man carry four drinks by himself,” she said.

“This guy?” said Bob, who’d gone from perplexity to flirt mode in a flash. “We don’t let him carry any drinks.”

Lauren laughed, and Grant inwardly congratulated Bob for telling a derisive joke and at the same time letting a pretty lady know who was the boss here. They walked the drinks carefully back to the table. Grant made use of his nine seconds with a prospective paramour by asking, “Buying paintings from a guy you just met,” he said. “La de da.”

“Helps when your husband dies and you sell all his cars,” she said. “Not to mention two houses.”

“Too bad,” said Grant, loading up his second favorite joke: “You were so close to getting a hotel.” But he didn’t get to say it because of Ray.

“Grant!” Ray called from the table. “What was the name of that guy who used to live here who painted Southern plantation houses?”

“I don’t know. Buford T. Pussey?”

“Who? No, it was a weird name. Like Harmon Killebrew, but different.”

They were back at the table now, his time with Lauren expired. “Here ya go Mr. Montane,” Grant said, presenting Trevian with his carbonated water.

The recipient nodded: “Thanks man.”

They sat. Then they looked at each other.

Grant turned to Ray, which was rare. “Speaking of Harmon Killebrew, did I tell you I went to see Jim Kaat at Northshire Books in Manchester last weekend?”

“Who?”

“Jim Kaat. Pitched for the Twins and Phillies a few lifetimes ago. He’s selling a memoir.”

“So are you a fanboy of the Twins or Phillies?” asked Lauren.

“Well, the Phillies, of course.” (Grant had grown up in King of Prussia, Pa.)

“Did you boo Santa Claus?” asked Ray, who Grant believed really shouldn’t drink.

“What? No! That was in ’68, when Kaat was with the Twins, and it wasn’t at a Phillies game, it was the Eagles, and it wasn’t Santa Claus, it was a drunk guy making an ass of himself.”

Here I am, Grant mused sullenly, on defense again. And why is Trevian looking so bored? And where the hell is Lauren’s foot?

A few twenty-something guys a few tables away broke out in song, butchering it, whatever it was. Bob changed the station from golf to a PBS documentary on Stokely Carmichael. Ray applauded. Someone shouted, “Hey!” Chaos had broken out in Vermont.

Pretending to look pensively out the window to the deck, Grant focused instead on how he thought Trevian perceived him. He hated himself for that. He’s just a kid, he scolded himself. He knows next to nothing.

Lauren’s foot gave his a little tap. “What’s so interesting out there?” she asked. Grant leaned back, stretched his arms, and twisted his neck back around to the TV. Ronald Reagan, governor of California, was vilifying the Black Panthers, promising military action if things got out of hand. “Reagan,” said Grant, fake-yawning a little, attempting nonchalance.

“That was back when he was still a joke,” opined Ray. “Ever notice every Republican president starts out as a punchline? As late as ’77, they were making jokes about Reagan. Archie Bunker warned the Meathead he’d get Reagan in 1980. The audience laughed, guffawed.”

“Archie Bunker the prophet,” said Lauren.

“Then the first George Bush was just this pipsqueak,” continued Ray. “Reagan’s weak little sidekick. Guess who we got in ‘88?”

“Bush,” said Trevian.

“Right, and then his son in 2000. Dubya was just this cokehead ne’er-do-well.”

“‘Til he wasn’t,” muttered Lauren.

Grant listened, growing increasingly annoyed with Ray.

“Trump was just this loser celebrity wanna-be. But then the wingnuts, noticing how much we hated him, fucking elected him.”

“Not really,” said Grant. “Lost the popular vote.”

“Yeah, like that matters anymore,” said Lauren.

“They’re all the same,” said Trevian. “Even Obama. Mostly a white guy.”

The rest of the foursome, despite not really agreeing, chimed, “Yeah.”

“I mean, you try to tell those in power that, and it’s, you know, straight-to-voicemail.”

“Everybody’s a bunch of assholes,” concluded Grant, who tended to get punchily pessimistic near the end of his third pint. He raised his glass; Lauren and Ray clinked theirs; Trevian looked out the window, not noticing.

“You’re leaving him hanging, Trev,” said Lauren.

“Clink,” muttered Trevian.

Grant raised his eyebrows while he drained his pint, thinking, fuck this guy, fuck this evening.

“Well, I’m probably outta here,” he said, unleashing a belch.

“Y’sure?” Lauren asked, not looking hurt enough, at least to suit Grant.

“Yeah, you know,” he answered, trying to come up with an excuse that didn’t involve the uncomfortable subject of Charlotte, his wife. “Had a long day.”

“Fuck this 80-degree wasteland,” said Ray, who then laughed at his joke.

“And fuck you as well, sir,” retorted Grant, hoping the “sir” part softened the blow just enough. He stood up and addressed the table: “Always a pleasure.” He bowed, rose up again, and left without paying his tab. Bob marked it down; this hadn’t been the first time.

“I don’t think I’ll be collecting your paintings, asshole,” he said, alone outside now and noticing a darkening sky over the mighty Cagney. He wondered what it would be like to just plunge in, right in view of passersby. Would anyone jump in to save him?

Was jealousy what he was feeling? If it was, it was an old, annoying friend showing up unannounced, somewhat like Ray making himself at home at their table, trying to wreck everything Grant had built out of himself. But didn’t Ray always do that? Ray was just insecure, making everyone else suffer for it.

It was Trevian. Might as well stop denying it. But what, in particular? Did Grant envy the young man’s apparent rise to stardom in the New England art world? It had been years since Grant had even tried to make a picture, unless you counted the surprisingly realistic ribbon he’d rendered around a house he’d painted and hadn’t gotten paid for fast enough.

With the festive rendering, he’d wanted to convey he’d gifted the paint job to the absentee landlord who’d stopped returning his texts. He was especially proud of the bow and the false shadow it cast on the wood siding. When payment finally came, he’d had to go back and paint over the ribbon, and felt a strong pang of regret. Maybe he could have been somebody.

On cue, seemingly, the dark cloud over the town let loose with a sudden downpour. He trotted to his Outback and got in. He sat and watched, through his watery windshield, the fluid traffic stream pass.

Painting by Greg Benson

He pulled out his phone and texted Lauren: “Where did you meet Trevian?”

The dots seemed to dance less flirtatiously, somehow. Finally: “At a show in Burlington.”

“An art show?”

No response. Although Grant thought it a good thing Lauren didn’t engage in text conversations while seated with actual people, it further annoyed him that those actual people were the two with whom he was most annoyed.

The curtain of rain around the car lent Grant an anonymity he hadn’t felt in years — except while traveling in his car. This evening, he needed it. After putting Nora Jones back in her case, he pulled out a Gang of Four CD and inserted it into his stereo. “At home he feels like a tourist,” sang Jon King over the seething grunts of Andy Gill’s guitar. “At home he feels like a tourist.”

His phone vibrated. Lauren! No, it was Blige, his daughter, calling from Middlebury. Unprecedentedly, he declined the call. Grant didn’t think he could keep his mind on Blige’s complaints, not now, about her Minority Studies teacher.

What the hell was he doing in this car, listening to ’70s post-punk and taking up a parking space? That’s what the cop who knocked on his window, suddenly and intrusively, wanted to know. “You all right in there, sir?” the young officer asked after Grant pulled the CD and rolled his window down a few inches.

“Uh, yeah, waiting for the rain to stop.”

“I don’t think it’s stopping any time soon, sir.”

“Oh, really? Okay.”

“If you could either stop idling here or pull out, I would appreciate it.”

Was this the law? Grant wasn’t ready to die on this hill, but geez.

“Will do,” he replied, smiling. “Thank you, Slur. Sir.” Grant’s determination to not mispronounce his words had betrayed him. Just as he did, he saw Ray cross the street and cause a driver to slam his brakes. “But look at what he did!” Grant resisted saying.

Mollified, the cop went on his way. Grant pulled out onto the main street and drove south and kept going, which is what he did sometimes when he needed to think. Usually he kept a wide selection of CDs in the console between the seats, but he’d cleaned them out the day before, leaving only the Nora Jones and Gang of Four albums, and The Stranger, Billy Joel’s 1977 hit album — a birthday gift from Charlotte. He decided it would have to console him. So would the can of beer left in his cooler from a previous thinking drive. A Long Trail Ale, it was warm, but quite good.

He passed Ray, who was trotting down the sidewalk, shielding his eyes from the rain. He didn’t offer a ride.

Painting by Greg Benson

Sometimes after brokering a sale, Charlotte would call several friends, one of whom (usually Whitney) would meet her for a drink, which would end up being two shared bottles of wine at The Blue Nunnery, a general store with tables located a few miles outside of town on the way to Putney. They’d start out talking about grown kids and end up complaining about their husbands’ maddening habits and whether they could weather them for much longer.

This time, Charlotte had no pressing issues with Grant, except maybe the dried paint never quite scrubbed from his hands, so she instead spent her early evening at Persevere, a locally owned gym/spa. She fell in with a Zumba class and watched herself dance in tights via the wall-sized mirror. She was liking how she was looking. Her breasts didn’t seem to sag quite as dejectedly as they used to; her hips made nice undulating, symmetrical shapes as she moved. If she kept her eyebrows high she looked, surprisingly, ten years younger.

She’d worked up a nice sweat by the time the disco music stopped. Toweling off, she checked her phone. “I’m moving out,” read a text from Grant, who’d then sent off another before Charlotte could frown: “Forgot how much I live that song.” She hoped he’d meant “love” rather than “live.”

Then came, as she changed back into street clothes, another series of texted, declarative statements: “Taking a rainy drive.” “Man, its coming down.” “Hope I don’t have a heart attack ack avk ack a Co ack.”

She was a few years younger than Grant, but the difference was significant enough that she failed, or refused, to appreciate that essential Billy Joel album. He (Joel) sounded to her a bit coked up, too cocky for his own good. Save for lobster ravioli, she’d never really liked Italian food and hadn’t grown up with many Catholics. Hence a lot of the lyrical references were lost on her. She was glad Grant was considerate enough to play it within the confines of his car.

Grant, peering amiably through the rain pelting his windshield, felt as though there were never a better time to be listening to the album. Feeling as though “The Stranger,” the song, held extra significance tonight, he played it three times in a row.

“Once I used to believe
I was such a great romancer
Then I came home to a woman
That I could not recognize
When I pressed her for a reason
She refused to even answer
It was then I felt the stranger
Kick me right between the eyes.”

Billy Joel’s wistful whistling took the song out again, and Grant found himself alone, driving down route 7 in a downpour, with no particular destination.

His thoughts angled back again to Trevian. It wasn’t like the newcomer was living rent-free in Grant’s head; rather, it seemed more like Trevian was a virile young man, and Grant’s head was the roadside motor lodge where he’d stow Grant’s girlfriend for a twice-a-day quickie.

Lauren was still at the bar, apparently, with the stranger whose cool, above-it-all nature would never have him braving this rain on foot. It would keep him there until it stopped. Nowhere was important enough for him to rush off to. He was Trevian Serene, after all.

“What a fucking made-up name,” Grant muttered to himself, loud enough to briefly drown out Joel. The wind had picked up, flinging large drops broadside against his windshield. Soon he’d have to pull over, like several drivers already had, and park in the ten-foot-wide bike lane and wait for the squall to pass.

A painting by Greg Benson

Was it just the shady newcomer’s sway Trevian seemed to hold over Lauren that made Grant want to slash the guy’s tires, if the punk even had a car? Of course, Grant knew it wouldn’t come to that. Sure, he was a little jealous. But not enough to resort to vandalism. Slander, perhaps.

Grant’s thoughts pivoted to his own brief role as a budding artist, back in his Middlebury days. He wasn’t bad, right? His portraits of fellow students were almost dead-on, at times. At other times, yes, they resembled a Polaroid after someone had dropped it in the mud.

In his junior year, 1995, Grant submitted three paintings to a juried show; they were a blend, somewhat forced, of American sentimentalism, a la Rockwell, and Italian Futurism, which he’d just learned about in an art history class. None of the works were selected by Judy Chicago, the juror. And then it seemed like a lord/serf effect began to seep into the small art department — not just between the students who had or hadn’t gotten in, but between the instructors who had or hadn’t, too.

Grant toughed out the class for long enough to earn an “A,” as did each of the 17 students. But each artist knew the As carried asterisks footnoting to either “Artist” or “also-ran.”

Grant never painted another picture — save for the bow around the house.

The rain’s pace increased. It was time to pull over; he couldn’t see farther ahead than a few feet. Each oncoming car looked like a sinister snarl of metal with two pulsating, hypnogogic lights for for eyes. Grant decided to try to drive until Joel’s “Honesty” had finished.

“Everyone is so untrue,” Joel sang, and Grant wondered if that applied to the writer of the song, in which case the statement would actually be false. Perhaps Joel hadn’t thought it through or explored other lyrical options. “Not everyone is so untrue,” would afford room for the writer (Joel) to portray a truthteller. Instead, he seemed to be contradicting himself; if everyone is untrue, why even bother listening to the words of a song anyone writes? It was one of those universal conundrums, one which Grant would either have to beat senselessly into the ground, or make peace with.

The paradoxical song ended. Enveloped in cascading water (not from his eyes but down his windshield), he surrendered to the elements and veered into the bike lane, kicking a hundred gallons of standing water into someone’s front yard, which was now a blurry mote. Evidently it had been raining here, somewhere north of Bennington, for much longer than in Houghton.

And that’s where he and his car would sit for almost two hours. Fortunately he’d found a few more Long Trails under the passenger’s seat to keep him company. This wasn’t so bad. Now and then a car would pass and a dashing barrage of water smacked the driver’s side window, a periodic and abrupt reminder for him to think of something other than Trevian and Lauren. Occasionally a tractor-trailer — always a constant, however sporadic — would pass at an ungodly speed, slamming a shroud of slop against the Outback.

Harrowingly annoying as that was, Grant had to admit to himself that if he was a trucker, he wouldn’t care about his own safety, nor, probably, the safety of others. A new message buzzed his phone.

“You okay? Really coming down here.” Charlotte.

“Fine,” Grant texted back. “Was on way to Rutland Lowe’s but had to pull over.” A half-truth. (Everyone is somewhat untrue.)

“Be careful baby.” That was nice. Charlotte was nice. He loved that about her, that she was a liberal who behaved like one. Okay, maybe even lived like one, though she had recently become pescatarian-curious. Did she sometimes sneak to Rutland for a McDonald’s filet-o-fish? Probably. But it didn’t show on her perfect waistline.

Why was he so ready to cheat on her? Was it simply a case of craving variety? Was Lauren actually more suitable, more tantalizing to him, with her longer legs and more mischievous face? Did he really want to blow up his life?

Charlotte had a sense of righteousness, however halting at times, that Grant at times admired. She nearly always seemed to weigh her decisions, however trifling, with the guiding question: “What would a good liberal do?” Then she’d hand a few ten dollar bills to the man with the sign or buy Bush black beans instead of Goya. Charlotte was a well-above-average tipper. She walked the walk.

She texted again: “How was Quark’s?”

He replied, “Okay, except for seeing Rat and some new gut who annoyed me.” Grant had dropped his reading glasses into a nether region between the front seat and the console while opening a beer.

“Gut? An overweight man?”

“Just a guy too cook for school. Thinks he’s Dave chapel or someone.”

“A comedian?”

“No, more Luke a city guy whose seen every. Ng even though he’s not thirsty yet.”

“Huh?”

“Just a New York type, a narcissist you. Ng guy white people always seen to love.”

“So his name is Ng? Is he Asian?”

“No.” The exchange was making Grant tired. “Gonna try to drove again, live you.” There was no way he was pulling his car back out. If someone was coming up behind him, even with headlights on, he’d get rear-ended.

(Honesty is hardly ever texted, never mind heard.)

Image by Greg Benson

He just wanted to enjoy the solitude, and the clarity of mind the beer and the downpour enveloping his car provided. Insouciance. That was the word. Trevian was insouciant. Just like those insouciant assholes in art school who got into the show. Or those philosophy students in the coffee house, pretending to read Marx or Tolstoy. Insouciant little pricks. Insoucifying everyone they encountered.

After Grant had become an uninsoucified senior, and changed his major to journalism and then changed it again before realizing he didn’t want to major in anything, he’d asked his grandfather, a surgeon retired in Darby, Pa., for help on a downpayment on two adjacent farmhouses just outside of Middlebury. He’d fix up, paint and rent them to faculty. The monthly rent payments would cover their mortgages. Regular rent hikes soon substantially padded what he made as a housepainter.

At that point, though he kept his paint business going, he took jobs only from absentee landowners who couldn’t look over his shoulder, and resolved to focus more on his properties than on painting jobs except when painting his properties.

The plan worked, increasingly so. Though he hadn’t exactly kept it a secret from Charlotte since their marriage a few years later, he rarely mentioned the extra income. It excited him to have a little nest egg that was his only. Blige’s comfortable situation at Middlebury — she enjoyed a loft apartment overlooking the town, where she stared out at the spectacular view and sometimes thought about getting some art supplies and making some paintings — was provided more by Charlotte’s real estate success than anything Grant had done.

He rode out a driving rainstorm in a stationary vehicle. He wished he’d had the presence of mind to use the bathroom at Quark’s before he left. Once it assumed space in his bladder, the fourth beer found an urgent situation and pulled the alarm. The torrents of rain streaming down the car windows weren’t helping. The Stranger had ended, leaving Grant with scant stimuli to distract from his increasingly desperate need to evacuate what he’d imbibed in two hours.

For some reason, perhaps an internal Murphy’s Law operating full throttle, or merely a fleeting memory, he thought of the mighty three-falls in downtown Vergennes, near the southern tip of Lake Champlain, home of Champy, a mythical lake monster. Years ago, he and Charlotte had almost bought a house there. While Grant really liked the town and the house, Charlotte didn’t like Grant’s friend who lived there. On one occasion, after visiting that Vergenner friend there and forgetting to use that friend’s bathroom before leaving (evidently a recurring oversight), Grant had driven his Outback to a nearby park and beheld the majestic falls as he peed within the umbrella of a weeping willow tree. What relief that had been!

Another reason he thought of Vergennes was his certainty that Trevian Serene had paintings hanging prominently in one of the town’s three prestigious, still-surviving art galleries. Paintings of slave ships plunging into deep, churning waters would probably go over as well as falling water in that town.

Presently, ruling out stepping outside and getting drenched while providing an unmistakable, silhouetted silent movie (The Urinator) for other stranded motorists, Grant looked around him for a vessel, rain-hat or pair of galoshes. There was Charlotte’s water bottle she’d left in there when she’d borrowed the Outback a few weeks ago, a plastic tennis ball can, and a quarter-full gallon can of Sherwin Williams Echo semi-gloss pure white interior/exterior acrylic paint. Which of those would hold the most urine? Unable to debate for long, he frantically chose the Superpaint can. I won’t attempt to describe his shameful maneuvers and contortions in and around the driver’s seat to make this happen. Use your experience and imagination. I think it sufficient it to say he chose the right receptacle—the can barely accommodated the contents, but in the short-term it did indeed suffice. Assuming a sharp turn didn’t topple the can on the way home, causing a curious, off-white semi-gloss glaze to drench and permanently stain his floorboard and carpet, Grant had prevailed over nature.

His one remaining CD in the car he hadn’t yet played, found wedged between his seat and the “cupholder,” was kd lang’s Ingenue. One of the great stalking albums, featuring obsession and unrequited love, it was his go-to music during young adulthood breakups, one he’d never told his friends about. They wouldn’t have understood.

Was he breaking up? It seemed Charlotte should at least be informed. What could he tell her? “We don’t quite match perfectly.” What kind of middle-aged person says that with a straight face?

Their relationship, while not sinking like a slave ship, had been on an unacknowledged, downward trajectory since Blige left for college. Lots of quiet nights, each of them absorbed in essays and stories projected from their laptops. Perhaps more absorbing was the retreat from weekly intimacy, a tacitly mutual decision. But they didn’t fight, rarely bickered, and sometimes folded each other’s underwear. They were comfortable, which, while not a very American goal nowadays, had its benefits. Their minds, free of conflict, had room to roam.

So, why was Grant crying as he sang harmony with lang: “Save me, save me….” ?

Near the end of the spin class, Charlotte’s legs were giving out. She pumped harder, the peer pressure put on her by the twenty-something cyclist next to acting as pure adrenaline. She’d be damned if she was going to out herself as being as old and tired as she actually was. Her doctrine since turning forty had been, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

It was an adage asked by Satchel Paige, who was either a civil rights leader or some kind of sports player from long ago. Eventually, she assumed, he died, but she tried to push such thoughts from her mind.

She ended the session with a half-mile-long spurt of speed, nearing 20 mph at one point. Satisfied, she toweled off and left without speaking to anyone but herself: “Nice work, girlie.”

She noted on the way home that Cathcart Street lay under a few inches of standing water for almost a full block. She drove through it slowly, two hands on the wheel. If the rain kept up like this all night, she thought, by morning it would be impassable. Grant had better be heading home. His most recent text, “Dave me,” had her somewhat concerned about his lucidity. Who was Dave?

She wanted him home, sitting up in the bed with her, reading from their phones and commenting on things they’d read. Shared outrage at the behavior of well-known people far away from them helped maintain a solid bond between them. “Yep,” she’d say, “he doubled down on it.”

“Of course he did,” he’d reply, and they’d say good night and sleep soundly. Unless his snoring kept her awake — or the potential for his snoring keeping her awake, or her recent quirk of sleeping with her eyes open, which kept him from sleeping deeply. The next morning he’d inwardly blame his insufficient sleep on her until he’d gotten a few cups of coffee in him. Charlotte could sense it, but by this point had let it go.

On this day Grant was functioning on 5 1/2 hours sleep, but had chewed a fraction of a Delta 8 gummy in the early afternoon, a dessert that followed the sandwich he’d packed for his workday, and that had gotten him through it. The euphoric clarity the cannabinoid had given him had worn off, however, and the rhythmic barrages of water splashed against his car by those passing by were lulling him somewhere else, a place that was also getting rain. Perhaps more.

Suddenly it was nighttime, and Grant realized he’d just left a place that looked like downtown Houghton, but with parts of Middlebury and maybe Harvard Square mixed in. It had been raining hard there, and people were swimming in the street. Grant had seen them from a window on the second floor of a pub. He’d wanted to finish his beer before figuring out how to help them, but then he saw an old wooden ship coming down the street. Trevian Serene and a swim-suited Lauren were on its deck. With thrown ropes, they were fishing people out of the flooded street. Then Grant noticed they were pulling only women out, and the women were naked.

His brother-in-law Sean often joked that when debating whether or not he’d just successfully napped, he asked himself: “Did I just do or see a bunch of weird shit? Okay, yep, I slept.”

When Grant applied that question to what he’d just experienced, the answer was a resounding “yes.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hang onto the tainted majesty of Trevian’s selectively heroic actions in the dream. There was something somewhere in there about his childhood dog, Bridey Murphy, and he may have been partially naked himself — but a torrent of water from a passing truck washed that memory away.

He started the Outback and, thanks to the wide bike paths, made a U-turn, somewhat blindly. Having survived that, he drove north toward Houghton. He was suddenly overcome with a smell that took him back to gym class, sixth grade, and the denim bag that held his gym suit he never remembered to deposit into the hamper for his mother to wash. He felt behind him a gooey mess and realized the can of paint-urine had toppled and begun spreading across his floorboard.

“Goddammit!” And he looked around for a towel or drop cloth with which to mop some of it up. In doing so, he swerved into the path of an oncoming car, then wrenched the Outback back just before colliding. He pulled over into the bike lane and watched in the rear view mirror as lights that had at first annoyed him moved to his right and turned into flashing blue lights that grew until stopping right behind him.

He waited. The cop took his or her time, perhaps waiting for the rain to subside. Grant made himself busy by working on the spill. He found a hoodie with BURLINGTON LAKE MONSTERS printed across it, a gift from Charlotte. He got on his knees and faced the back, dabbing desperately, still thinking of gym class and the taunting and the degradation. A flashlight’s beam through the window showed a spill way worse that he’d thought. The entire left-side rear floorboard was covered with a few inches of gook.

He looked at the light beam, tossed the hoodie down and faced forward to face his fate.

A gloved hand motioned him to roll down his window. He did. A nose, then a face emerged, sniffing and wincing, then saying, “You frying chicken in there?”

“No sir,” replied Grant. “Just a little accident in here.”

“You almost caused one back there.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Have you had alcohol tonight, sir?”

“Hmm,” said Grant. “Well, maybe one or two. Drinks. It was a while ago.”

“I need to see your license and insurance, sir.”

“So do I, heh heh.”

The cop, a thick-bearded fellow with fogged goggles, either didn’t hear the joke or failed to appreciate it. “Could you step out of the vehicle, please?” Grant complied. They faced each other through the rain. “Sir, I’m smelling alcohol on your breath. Are you sure it was just a few drinks?”

Grant pretended to think about it, miming careful counting with his fingers, and replied, “I think it was two or three. Yeah. Two or three, that’s right.”

He couldn’t remember if the latest wisdom recommended he refuse the breathalyzer or go ahead and do it in an attempt to display cooperation to whatever judge would fine or sentence him whatever or wherever. He was an affable guy, especially when drunk, so he went ahead and blew, after which the cop handcuffed him, arms behind, and guided him into his back seat.

He was soaked, streams of droplets zagging down his face, which began to itch in several different places, and Grant suddenly realized how much he cherished using his hands and fingers. He looked around for something against which to rub his face, saw nothing but cold metal and glass, and stared ahead miserably. In the mirror he saw the cop wiping his own wet face with a wonderful white towel.

His knees pressed against the board dividing front from back, he squirmed to and fro in an attempt to get comfortable, failed, and then sought to distract himself from his predicament by trying to remember where the county jail was. Certainly it couldn’t be the historic Houghton Jail, whose trim he’d repaired and painted a few years back. He couldn’t remember if it was still accepting clients; certainly, no one had taunted or distracted him through the wrought iron bars and glass panes as he worked, as one might expect if it were inhabited by scofflaws.

Through the downpour, however, he could see that was where they were going. The cop snaked the car down a charming, narrow drive between the historic Houghton Pubbe (still operating) and the stone-clad jail. He parked the squad car in front of a double-wide trailer that sat, seemingly, too close to the rising river. There he was led. The cop spoke into a mounted box; the trailer door opened. “Evening sir,” said a hefty, uniformed lad sporting a soul patch under his lower lip.

“Evening,” muttered Grant.

The blaring fluorescent light inside was an assault on everything that was good to Grant. Squinting only made it worse, as rainwater stored in his thick eyebrows trickled down to cloud his vision. About seven feet high, a foot below the ceiling, a television displayed — on an endless loop, Grant would soon realize — a PSA directing incarcerated individuals to alert the nearest security guard should they suffer sexual assault.

As he looked for a guard, Grant realized there was a female occupant of one of the two cells, her back turned and her arms zip-tied to a wheelchair. She was cackling something, some rant about a fucked-up fucker.

The arresting officer led him to a blank wall (they were all blank), where he collected everything on Grant’s person, save for his clothes. His shoes were replaced by loose-fitting Crocs. He was fingerprinted and photographed, then led to the other cell, a much darker one in the far corner, and locked in.

He had about seven feet in which to pace, which he commenced doing immediately, since there were no vertical iron bars to grip. In the place of bars there was fortified Plexiglass. A bucket on a small bench caught drips caused, hopefully, by the rain. Strewn about the cell were open Styrofoam boxes containing remnants of fast food. Grant busied himself as he walked, picking up each box and enclosing it into another, until he’d made one six-layer box. Feeling useful helped him immensely.

Another officer entered, shaking his head and raving about something. “…smelled like Whiteout or Hubba Bubba or some…don’t know what he was doing in there.” It hit Grant then that this man had just driven his Outback to impound. He and the officer he was addressing turned to face him, and Grant pretended to be interested in the leaky ceiling.

What interested him in reality was getting the hell out of there and sleeping in a bed with his wife. Trevian could fuck Lauren from the rafters, whatever that meant, for all he cared. Would he get his phone call? They still do that, right? How could he possibly remember Charlotte’s phone number, if it came to that? Did he remember anyone’s phone number? Possibly his brother Ricky, who had a land line at his house in Stowe, a few hours north. But Ricky was still mad at him for the incident with the turkey baster two Thanksgivings ago.

For some reason, the officer at the metal desk decided to wheel the zip-tied, foul-mouthed woman from her cell and turn her to face his, only about ten feet away. Her round, red face sported several bruises. Immediately she leered at him and propositioned him lewdly, but his philandering days, as stated earlier, were finished. Besides, in spite of her ample breasts, her looks were repellant.

He pretended to ignore her and began singing, at first a Billy Joel song from The Stranger CD to which he’d listened just a few hours before, and then a more challenging undertaking, Queen’s second album in its entirety. “Come tonight!” he sang, decidedly worse than Freddie Mercury had. “Come to the ogre site! Come to ogre battle fight.” When he glanced at the woman, her mouth had formed a perfect O as she listened in seeming horror. Obviously she hadn’t seen many musicals, where people burst into song all the time, often when the setting doesn’t call in the least for such impulsive crowing — for instance, a cell in a modular jail.

“You sing like shit,” she snarled during the next pause, caused by Grant’s allowance for a searing Brian May guitar solo.

Grant ignored her and continued: “The ogre men are coming out from the two-way mirror mountain.”

Before the song ended, the soul-patched officer came out of what looked like a closet, moved ploddingly to Grant’s cell, unlocked the door and opened it. “’Mon out,” he muttered, and Grant did, following the lad and shuffling like a Parkinson’s patient to keep his Crocs from falling off. They passed through a doorway and into a small kitchen transformed into a meeting room. At the end of a table sat a plump woman looking at her phone. The officer pulled out a chair for Grant to sit in, which he did. The officer left. The anal rape PSA blared into the room.

They then sat for something like four agonizing minutes, Grant pretending to be first infatuated with his fingers and then concerned with the continuing downpour outside, before the woman let a sigh emit from between her purpled lips, slid her phone to Grant and said, “You can make a call.”

Who, or whom, to call? He remembered his mother’s phone number, but she was in Pittsburgh with her weirdo new husband. Blige? Maybe, but there was no reason to upset her if he didn’t have to. Charlotte was out of the question; she’d freak. Ray was a possibility, but he would show up with his smug face and feel even more superior. But Lauren….

He’d certainly memorized her number, not having saved and labeled it on his phone. He dialed it. She picked up on the second ring. “Well hello, mystery man,” she said slurringly cheerily. She wasn’t in a crowded place.

“Yeah, hi,” Grant began. “Ummm. Yeah. I got arrested?”

“What?”

“Yeah, DUI, I think. I’m needing. Umm, maybe someone, if you can get someone to come down here and post bail? At the building behind the old jail?” It sounded like song lyrics.

“Yeah, we can do that,” she replied. “Right?” She was asking whomever she was with.

“We?” asked Grant.

“Yeah, Trev and I.”

Grant’s heart, having already sunk to its lowest, remained there. “K, thanks.”

Soul Patch led him back to his cell after informing him his bail was set at $478.95. He sat and listened to the rain hitting the roof and trickling into the almost-full pail next to him on the bench, wondering how those setting the bail amount could be so specific. (Couldn’t they just add another five cents surcharge?) Trevian, probably, was going to pay it with money paid to him for his supposed slave ship paintings. Grant would have to pay him back with one of his credit cards, thereby preventing it being an issue with Charlotte.

He saw the purple-lipped woman emerge from the kitchenette, waddle across to the front door, open it, recoil in surprise, and then burst out. The hag in the wheelchair had fallen asleep. The young officer looked out through the open door, and hurriedly walked over to Grant’s cell and unlocked it. “We gotta situation,” he said. “Don’t look good out there, river’s almost up to the doorway.”

“But what about my bail?” Grant asked stupidly. “I mean, I’m good for it.”

“Okay. Whatever.” The young man got his jacket and hopped out without another word.

Grant called after him, pointing at the passed-out, zip-tied woman. “Hey!” He shook the woman. “Hey!” She stirred a little, looked up at him and burped. Then her chair somehow propelled itself backward, carrying its surprised and helpless occupant, until it slammed into her former cell.

“Shit!” she commented.

Grant had no time to think of why that happened. He needed to find his shoes, phone and wallet. Unfortunately, the cubicle in which they were locked was still locked. “Hey!” he called to the woman yet again. “Know where they keep the keys?”

“Fuck no,” she replied. “Think I live here?” Then her voice softened, just a bit. “Hey, cut my arms loose wouldja?”

Grant looked about him. Oddly, no knives were visible in the room. “Umm, let me…” he said, and the room tilted the other way, the wheelchair plowed forward until it rammed the opposite wall, the woman’s forehead smacking it hard, and Grant began to realize how fucked they were.

Most enslaved people, when they were loaded onto ships and crammed into their bowels, didn’t know they were floating on water. They thought they were inside large dwellings. In the first few hours after the ship pulled anchor for the cross-Atlantic trip, they must have experienced a lot of queasy denial before it dawned on them what was happening.

Unlike those enslaved humans, as well as the zip-tied wheelchair occupant, Grant had the luxury, if you could call it that, of surveying the situation by looking out the door, whose threshold was only six inches above murky, churning water. Only when he saw a tree, and then another, pass by did he realize the building in which he stood was floating down a river. An unoccupied Volvo floated past. Then an Outback, and two more Volvos. And maybe a Saab, but it was upside down and hard to identify. He turned back to look at the woman, who was still facing the wall.

“Are we fuckin’ floatin’?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, unable to come up with a plausible lie for why the building had started to keen the other way, sending the woman’s wheelchair rolling backward again.

“Will you fuckin’ cut me free you fuckin’ dork!” she screamed once she had recovered from another head-blow.

“If you believe you have been assaulted or penetrated anally at the facility without your consent,” blared the somehow-still-looping PSA, “alert the nearest guard or officer.”

Grant frantically looked for something, anything to cut the zip-ties. He looked up and saw the overhead light with a glass dome over it. “Thank God that thing’s still on,” he thought, “or else I wouldn’t be able to look around for something to cut the zip-ties with.” Then the light went out.

In this spartan interior, items just lying around were scarce. The woman struggled against the ties and bellowed a gravelly wail. Suddenly Grant remembered a large-breasted girlfriend of his, Gail, back in his early twenties. “Are you wearing a brassier?” he asked.

“What the fuck do you think?” she said. “My tits would be kissin’ my knees without one.”

“Good,” he said, and as she raced past him yet again, he stopped the wheelchair and began undoing her blouse.

“What in the holy fuck?” she asked, but Grant was determined, and before long he had exposed the bra. “You fuckin’ perv, what the fuck you doin’?”

“I need your bra. Can I take it off?”

“You wanna cop a feel when this fuckin’ house is floating down a goddamn river?”

“I have to do this,” said Grant, kneeling down and reaching around her with both arms.

“Oh my fuckin’ God!”

Ignoring her putrid breath, he found the clasp and undid it. When the bra was freed he pulled it off her, the breasts plummeting to her thighs. Although he tried not to look, he couldn’t help it. They were huge and pockmarked, the nipples facing downward like udder teats over a pail.

“Have a good look, weirdo,” she sneered. “You’re gonna drown anyway. Or worse.”

He had no time to contemplate or explain. He felt around the elastic understrap for the metal piece he hoped was there. It was. After forcing it through the fabric and freeing it, he began sawing at the zip-tie binding her left wrist, then the one around her right one. In a few horrifyingly intimate minutes, she was free. She stood and smacked his right ear with her left hand. “That’s for being a perv!”

He reeled backwards and almost fell out the door into the raging river. “Jesus!” he yelled, incensed.

She joined him at the doorway and looked out. “We’re fuckin’ fucked,” she said.

“Now if I can just find a rope,” he said, still pressing a hand to his ringing ear.

“Yeah, they got lots of rope around here,” the woman, whose name was Cheryl, said. “Just in case anyone wants to lasso a fuckin’ steer.”

“Can you help me please?” said Grant, averting his eyes from Cheryl’s breasts, which were swaying to and fro like bellwethers indicating which way the house was leaning. He began to disrobe.

“Oh my God,” cried Cheryl. “Oh my fucking God. Help!”

When Grant entwined his longsleeve shirt with his khaki pants, the result was still far too short to do them any good. He was in his underwear now, briefs, which somehow made his jailmate’s still-exposed breasts less offensive. The house, apparently caught against a tree, began spinning, then leaning until it stopped at a 45-degree angle. Grant crawled to the door and saw they were in Canby Park, where the Houghton’s weekly farmers’ market was held.

Water had begun forcing its way in through the doorway. “We are totally fucked,” sighed Cheryl. “I wish I had a beer.” A beer bottle floated in, but when she picked it up she found it full of brackish water. “Fuck me.”

It didn’t mean what it used to.

Grant had a thought. “Wish for a rope.”

“What?”

“Wish for a rope.”

“Okay, I wish for a fucking rope.”

They looked around. Implausibly, an end of a rope fell through the doorway. They heard shouting outside. Grant looked out and saw a silhouetted man standing on a parked Volvo. “Grab the rope!” he called.

Grant did. But then he handed it to Cheryl.

“Jump in!” called the man.

“Fuck no,” she called back.

“Okay, die then!” yelled the man.

Grant pushed her out and into the river she flopped, cursing, bobbing and wailing, her breasts seemingly acting as floatation devices keeping her top third above water. The man on the Volvo reeled her in like a dead manatee until she flopped, breasts down, on the hood of the car.

The water, still rising, dislodged the double-wide from the crook of the tree, sending the building, relatively level again, downriver, away from the Volvo lassoer, leaving Grant to fend for himself. He saw the old Esso station (converted into a funky secondhand store) pass, then the historic movie theatre and the small grocery store that still sold crab lump by the can. Was the rope man still trying to save him — or did he value only the life of the preposterously endowed, mean woman?

His ship seemed to be picking up steam, going nearly as fast as the fire engine he saw through the trees racing down a side street. The fluorescent lights, needless to say, had gone out, and the only light inside the jail was provided by the flashing lights of cop cars and rescue vehicles. So word had gotten out that buildings had turned to boats.

Image by Greg Benson

Of course, most boats are made in ways that prevent leaks from coming up through their floors and hulls. Noting the water bubbling up through the carpet at various places, he figured he didn’t have much time before he’d either have to swim or go down with his ship. His bare feet (and legs and torso) were getting cold, but so urgent was his situation he left the clothes and Crocs he’d shed on the wet floor.

He remembered watching news reports of in-town floods, the canoes snaking down streets and roads, the sandbags, the stranded folks on roofs. How did they get there? He ran to the meeting room and stood on a chair. Removing a ceiling tile, he saw a possible route: He’d have to burst through a sheet of plywood to make it to the roof.

Jails are notorious for their lack of availability of tools to achieve an escape. Knowing this, Grant decided to place his chair on the meeting table, stand on it and use another chair to hammer his way through to the roof. But he found the plywood unexpectedly hardy. It took him several clobbers before the nails began unfastening, but the task grew easier with each clobber. A 4x8 foot sheet flew off and into the river, allowing Grant to hold a joist with both hands and hoist himself up to the roof.

In actuality, he almost made it on his first few attempts. His third, complete with legs kicking frantically at the air, got him there. He climbed through and stood, a captain in his underwear, atop a vessel.

When one can see where he’s going, he feels more control of a moving vehicle, even if he has no access to controls or even a stick. The Cagney River, on Grant’s first ride down it, was now pretty much tracing the route of Houghton’s Main Street — but on the left side. Ahead Grant could see Norton Novelty, Burlington Branch Bank and, twenty yards past that, the textile mill he’d been helping convert into a brewery.

Houghton was a flurry of blurry light, mostly police blue, making silhouettes of the darkened buildings. Rain still fell steadily, but seemed lighter, satisfied with the chaos it had caused. Grant saluted to keep water out of his now razor-sharp eyes.

As rudderless vessels sometimes do, the house began to slowly spin, and Grant spun the opposite way to compensate. Not bad, kid. Then he ducked under the limb of a tree. He supposed immediately after he’d passed he could have grabbed ahold of it — his life was at stake, after all — but then figured he’d be stuck dangling for hours, on lewd display to all in the town, especially Ray and probably Trevian and Lauren. All options considered, it was best he remain atop a double-wide trailer careening down the churning Cagney River.

The novelty shop was seemingly spared of the storm’s wrath, perched on sturdy 8x8 posts as it was. Casting his eyes downward as he passed the bank, he saw there were no looters, hardly a worry in this part of New England. Then, through the rain, he saw the mill, his ladder still extending up 25 feet to the building’s back peak. He had a thought, then thought better. Thinking again, standing on the roof’s right edge, he wondered if he could somehow leap onto his ladder — and hang on.

As he was planning his maneuver, he saw a figure perched at the top of his goddamned ladder. So there was going to be looting, after all. But no, Grant realized the figure held a rope that looked very much like the one that saved the busty hag, and in the next instant he realized it was Trevian.

Would it be rude to just ignore him? was his first thought. Would he think me a racist? Then self preservation took over and he decided he would let Trevian help save him. Help. “Heyyyyyy!” he screamed, not wanting to give Trevian the satisfaction of thinking he’d remembered his name. “Buddy! Over here!”

Trevian flipped his rope with the expertise of a white water raft guide. It hit Grant in the face — the flashing blue lights were in his eyes — but he was able to pick it up and wrap it around his hand. Should he tie it to his waist, was his last thought just before Trevian yanked him right off the roof, reeling the rope in as he did so. Grant’s body smacked against the mill’s wood siding like a flounder on a chef’s chopping block. Dazed, he felt around for the ladder, grabbed its left upright, almost toppling the ladder as he did so. He looked up at Trevian, who held the rope from which Grant dangled with his right hand while clamping the crown facia of the building with his left to steady the ladder.

Grant was able to use his work experience at this point, feeling around with his right foot to find a rung of his ladder, seventh from the top, and gain purchase there. His face was at the level of Trevian’s crotch, and he went up a few rungs to get closer to his rescuer. “Thanks, man,” he said.

“’Salright,” replied Trevian, looking aloofly off somewhere.

“Welp, guess I’ll go on down now,” said Grant.

“Nowhere else to go,” said Trevian, who evidently was staying up there to be the hero a while longer. “See ya, little man.’”

Little man? Grant wasn’t sure at first he’d heard him correctly.

A small crowd cheered (or jeered?) him as he dismounted the ladder. Someone yelled, “Hell yeah.” Too exhilarated by the experience to recognize anyone, Grant let a paramedic usher him onto a bus. He took the fourth seat, behind an elderly woman whose clothes, a pants suit and matching felt derby, were completely drenched. The bus immediately pulled onto the Main Street, and Grant looked down and realized his briefs had slipped off. He was completely naked.

He wondered if any of the seven others aboard were aware of it. Though they seemed preoccupied with their own problems, perhaps they were just being polite. Grant wondered if there were any blankets in the vehicle, and if there were, why no one had offered one. Maybe they were all wet (the blankets).

He snuck another look downward. The uncontrollable factors of danger, wet and cold — not genetics — had shrunk his penis to its most miniscule stature, and though that should never be a concern during such a tragic night as this, he nevertheless yearned for people to know, as did George Costanza in that Seinfeld episode, that shrinkage is a thing.

Trevian probably had seen his penis. Would he describe it to Lauren? Not that it mattered; they could think whatever they wanted while having acrobatic sex in whatever who-knows-what kind of public space.

The only naked person riding the bus, Grant was also the only one — even more embarrassingly, perhaps — not holding a cell phone. Grant’s phone, impounded somewhere in an adrift, careening double-wide, would have easily covered his shameful genitalia and allowed him to contact loved ones. Was Charlotte okay? Was she worried sick? How could he find out?

The bus reached the end of the downtown strip, where it pulled into the parking lot of the local Democratic party headquarters, where a check-in tent sat at the entrance to the brick building. The occupants offboarded and waited in line silently, looking at their phones. (How had they stayed dry?) That being the apparent protocol, Grant didn’t feel permitted to ask for a blanket.

He realized he was holding in his belly. Vanity is the last vestige of dignity to fall, he mused. Somewhere, some remote and vile part of him, was thinking, “You never know; someone might be checking me out.” Not able to help it, he looked down again, even while knowing his penis may, at this point, have measured smaller than one of the zip-tied jezebel’s nipples. If only he were given a forum, a soapbox of some sort, from which to explain.

But he was alive! So fortuitous, yet somehow prescient, that he’d left that ladder where it was. Still, that opportunist Trevian, probably being hailed as a hero by the whole town, getting another one-up on him, almost ruined the whole experience.

Soggy survivors were being admitted into the tent one at a time. Grant found himself hunching into himself, trying to make himself smaller in keeping with his phallus. Someone groaned, “Oh shit.” That was when the news van arrived.

Charlotte had heard nothing from Grant for hours now, and searched her phone for news reports on car wrecks and drownings. From the wall of their living room, WCAX news in Burlington blared live footage of swollen rivers and creeks, caved in roads and fallen bridges. Two men near Brattleboro had died trying to reattach a cable to a satellite dish on top of their house; apparently one had been left dangling from a gutter and the other fell trying to save him. When the gutter gave way the dangler plummeted down and got impaled by a kinetic sculpture he’d recently purchased.

Although Charlotte was worried, she wasn’t as worried as she might have thought, which bothered her. Maybe she didn’t love him as much as she’d assumed. For how long would she miss him, really? Already she found herself constructing a new life from a new scenario, one where she and Blige bravely picked up the pieces, maybe went on a cruise somewhere far away, just to get away from all the memories.

She had to admit some of the Grant enmity came courtesy of daily conversations with her twin sister Charlemagne, who resented Grant for his refusing to honor her former daughter’s preferred pronouns, which had changed several times in the past year alone. (His joke, “So what are you, a ‘this’ now?” had gone over like a lead floatation device last Thanksgiving. He hadn’t meant anything by it; he just thought maybe it would help matters to laugh about it.) Though it wasn’t like the sisters disparaged Grant constantly during these phone calls, the omission of references to him spoke volumes.

Charlemagne lived about twenty minutes away, near South Jamaica, and had hired someone other than Grant paint her house the previous year. That was probably for the best.

The drone footage on WCAX showed Houghton’s own Cagney River overspilling its banks and sending a few lighter structures sailing. On the roof of one of them, double-wide trailer, a nearly naked man, his crotch pixelated, stood wobbly as it raced through downtown. She wondered if it was anyone she or Grant knew.

Now, live, a windbreakered reporter was standing on Main Street near the edge of the swollen river. “People here are stunned,” said Tamara Marinara-Blount, “as they watch their cars, their bridges, everything they’ve worked for get swept away.”

The camera panned across the river, back to the street, then rested on a line of people waiting to get checked into a triage center. It zoomed in on the survivors, one of them apparently naked, then quickly back to the reporter.

“Oh my God,” whispered Charlotte. “Oh my God.”

She was pretty sure the naked man was her husband.

Grant was led into the tent, where three blanketed people sat, eyes downward. A white-coated woman of about 30 led him to his chair, but when he sat, she advised, “I’m gonna need you to stand up, sir. Okay?” She felt around his rib cage. “That hurt? That? How about that?”

He realized now his fish-smack into the old mill had caused damage and loss to more than merely his pride and underwear. The woman went to corner of the tent not to get the blanket Grant had long coveted, but a roll of bandage, which she wound perhaps too tightly around his midsection. “You’re gonna have to ice it,” she said, and led him to the back exit of the tent.

“But blanket?” he managed to mumble.

“No, we can’t let warmth make those rib fractures cause more swelling.”

He exited, hands over his crotch, where a crewcutted policeman awaited him. “You Grant Shirley?”

“Yes.”

“Gonna have to put you in police custody.”

“But...”

“Escape incarceration, fleeing pursuing police officers.”

“But I was on a house.”

The cop looked down. “Indecent exposure.” He cuffed Grant in a way that caused nearly as much pain as the building’s blow. And again he was informed of his rights, put in the back of a police car, taken to the historic jail — on ground just high enough to keep it operable through a historic flood — and booked. Thankfully, he was given a pair of striped prison-issue pants. Unthankfully, the elastic waistband was broken. Having been genatalially exposed for over an hour, however, he was not about to complain.

Though this jail was more solid, more interesting and richer with stories, his treatment was about the same as in the double-wide. No one, neither the receptionist with the misapplied eyeliner nor the bullfrog-faced guard, was interested in what had happened to him earlier in the evening, as if they’d heard it all before — you know, the ol’ ridin’-a-house-down-a-river excuse. Maybe he needed to call his attorney, if only he had one; the only lawyer he knew mediated divorces, and he hadn’t seen him since he divorced his wife, a friend of Charlotte’s.

This time the cell was smaller, but with bars this time, and he had a cellmate, a grizzled man seeming to sleep at the end of the bench. There were no boxes to clean up this time, and singing was out of the question, lest the sleeping man wake up and smack him silly for being the cause.

Taking deep breaths had become excruciating for his rib cage. Laughing would kill him; thankfully, there was nothing at which to laugh. Just before midnight, through the bars, Grant was informed bail had been set at a nice, round $25,000, plus the previous unpaid bail. When Grant asked if there had been some kind of mistake, the guard explained, “You’re a flight risk.”

“Oh, come on!” answered Grant.

Then the officer leaned closer to Grant. “What is that smell in your car?” he asked. “It reminds me of my ole dog Blazer, my favorite dog ever.”

Grant furrowed his brow, and decided not to mention the paint-urine concoction he’d mixed, but instead to grab another rope being thrown his way. “Oh, well, that’s probably my dog you’re smelling,” he said. “Ol’ Sprinter. He rides with me a lot.”

“Is that right?” the guard said, smiling.

“Yeah.”

They looked at each and smiled, both surprised at the sudden connection they shared.

“Maybe I’ll adopt him once they send you to prison,” said the guard, and then Grant had to pretend to mourn the pending loss of a pet that didn’t exist.

Dejectedly he sat across from the grizzled, incarcerated man, who had somehow grown a smirk while sleeping. Finding a comfortable position, he closed his eyes and sensed that his own sleep was soon to come. He mused how freeing the complete loss of freedom can be, and then his own smirk started to form.

He figured it was close to his bed time, a ritual in his house that almost always was the best time to be with Charlotte, when her mind stopped racing and her body melted against his. Sitting on this relentlessly hard wooden bench, he pined for that experience, just one more time. Would he ever get to enjoy it again?

Was anyone doing anything to get him out? Vermont had always been amply supplied with folks who would help him at the drop of a Lake Monsters cap. He wondered if he was now in a terrain these people weren’t willing to traverse with him. He wondered if he was forgotten.

Which was, in its own way, also kind of freeing. He let out a long sigh.

“Eventually we all get forgotten,” said a voice close to him. “Just part of getting older, right? The natural order of things.”

The grizzled old man in the corner had awakened just in time to keep Grant from falling asleep.

“You don’t know,” murmured Grant. “How do you know?”

“Look at me. Look at me, man.”

Grant got a better look, and noticed a weathered yet soft face. The man’s hands were spotted with white paint. Another painter? Grant contemplated what the odds were. He’d been doing his job for long enough to know most of the Houghtoners in his field. He’d never seen this guy.

“Are you from Houghton?”

“Are you from Houghton?”

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you here?”

Grant wasn’t into playing this game, not now. “Look, can we just maybe leave each other alone so we can get some sleep?”

“No,” said the old hippie, and he started to laugh, exposing a jagged landscape of teeth and gaps in between. Grant thought fleetingly of the rocky coast of Maine, where he and Charlotte had gone for their honeymoon. He still had the lobster bib she’d bought him.

He heard a tap on glass, and when he glanced at the window near the guard’s desk, Trevian’s face was pressed against it. Grant pretended not to see or hear, and to be absorbed in conversation with the old man opposite him.

“Look, I really need to get some sleep,” he pleaded.

“You can’t ignore him,” said the crazy cellmate. “He’s everywhere!”

There was a pounding on the door, more tapping on all the windows now, and stomping on the roof.

“Question is,” the man continued, “what do I have you do about it?”

“That doesn’t…” Grant couldn’t continue, because now the guard was escorting Trevian toward the cell.

He’d been beaten badly. One eye was almost completely shut by swelling. “Here he is!” announced the old man.

Grant tried to shield his face, ashamed for reasons he wasn’t sure of. Trevian was pushed into the cell. He sat between the old man and Grant, staring straight ahead. “What now,” he said, not asking. “What now.”

The cell door slamming snapped Grant from his dream. The old man was being led to the exit, his stay there apparently completed. Before he went back out into the storm’s wake, he turned and smiled at Grant, then extended his middle finger. “Hope it ends well for you,” he said.

What the hell was that? Was he still dreaming?

Trevian was no longer there with him. He most likely never was. Grant spent the next hour trying to piece together the dream but the more he thought about it the less he remembered. His waking life had become an ongoing storm that washed away his dreams.

Ray paid the bail, as it turned out, having heard from Lauren of Grant’s predicament. He insisted Grant take his time paying him back; Grant would have none of that, even after the hefty fines and legal fees cleaned out his savings account. His dreams of a hotel washed away, he found a realtor (behind Charlotte’s back) and sold two properties, the adjacent farmhouses near Middlebury, in order to feel on solid ground again.

It didn’t help that his rescue had been filmed by some busybody watching it on that flooded night instead of minding her own business. The footage, featuring Grant’s pixelated privates, made national news, moving a well-known alt-country music star with Vermont ties (I can’t get into specifics; rest assured you know his music well. You know the song with the catchy chorus about “pitching in” and “pitching out?” Yep, that’s the guy. He’s got a large farm outside of Putney.) to grant Trevian $800,000 dollars anonymously, a sum the recipient accepted anonymously as well. Grant, meanwhile, did not have the luxury of anonymity, much to his confounded shame.

A recent visit to Quark’s failed to provide the solace he sought. His entrance brought an immediate drop in decibels, the way a local celebrity’s appearance often does, but very different from a greeting a local hero like, say, Trevian Serene would get. Bob the owner hardly acknowledged Grant, who sat alone at the bar hoping for someone, even Ray, to come drink with him, tell him, hey, keep your chin up, it wasn’t all that bad. Simultaneously he yearned for the respect for privacy seemingly granted to everyone but him. Feeling down on his luck, he drank two beers and left, ignoring the Cagney on the way out and wishing he felt the freedom to take a drive somewhere, anywhere else, listening to something that understood him. Instead, he whistled the opening and closing melodies, inspired by film noir movies, of Billy Joel’s Stranger song.

One evening, his ribs aching a bit, he sat on his back deck and smoked a filterless cigarette. He wasn’t hiding his habit any more, now that intimacy between him and Charlotte seemed also to have washed away as irretrievably as an empty crab lump can. Though he knew it couldn’t or at least shouldn’t have anything to do with the news footage of him outside the medical tent, sometimes he wondered. More likely, he thought, she suspected something had been up between him and this woman Lauren, and didn’t want to broach the subject after all he’d been through. Subtle sanctions weren’t off the table, however.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. It probably wasn’t anyone needing something painted. He had recently gotten a few messages from an area filmmaker who was developing a documentary on the Great Vermont Flood, and, expecting another pitch, he almost didn’t bother pulling the phone out. To his relief, it was Blige.

If she’d wanted money, she’d have called Charlotte.

“Just checking on you, Dad. How’s the midsection?”

“Fine, Honey. Only hurts when I’m awake. What are you up to these days?”

“Classes are fine. Got midterms next week.”

“How’s the social thing going?”

“Eh, fine, you know. No trouble in paradise.”

“Are you, you know, seeing anyone?” he dared ask.

He carried his phone into the dark bedroom, and turned on the dim light in the corner across from their bed, where Charlotte lay.

“Oh, you know, not actually seeing,” she said. “Just having some fun with this guy. He’s a painter.”

“Oh, man. Really? What’s he like?”

He nodded toward Charlotte, who watched with slightly open eyes.

“He’s a good soul. Very even keeled. We go for long drives and look at towns he hasn’t seen before.”

“Yeah?” He frowned at Charlotte as if to say, “Hey, good news here.”

“Yeah, like Brandon. And Barre. Benson. You know, places that, you know, because of his upbringing, he’d always felt out of place in.”

“Hmm. Well that’s cool.” Charlotte, Grant decided, was really asleep, though he couldn’t shake the feeling she was looking at him, pondering his fate.

“You’d like him, Daddy. He’s pretty laid-back. He’s more of a city guy, you know, had always lived in apartments. But now, because he sells a lot of art, he bought a few farmhouses outside Middlebury. He’s turning a barn into a big studio. I actually met him in a painting class.”

Was Grant’s hiccup audible to Blige? And was Charlotte smiling at him? Was she really asleep?