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Concert of Ghosts

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Daily, from first planting until final harvest, Harry Tennant attended his crop with the patient devotion of a man who has grown weary of society and wants nothing to do with the outside world. He'd go deep into the woods where the plants grew and with great care would pluck a leaf or bud, crushing it tenderly between thumb and forefinger to release the scent of resin. Eyes closed, he'd smell the liberated perfume of the plant. If he was pleased, he'd say something to Isadora, the Great Dane who always accompanied him. When he wasn't happy, he'd frown, and the dog, recognizing the expression, took to sulking among the trees.

The crop dominated Tennant's life. Whatever change in weather affected the plants affected him too. He was sensitive to frosts, to periods of extreme dryness, to the excessive rainfalls that came unfailingly to this part of upstate New York in late summer.

During one such monsoon he put on his mackinaw and an old Stetson and went down through the rattling trees to the crop. The Dane plowed after him with the kind of duty that transcends sodden discomfort.

When they reached the place where the crop grew, Tennant experienced an uneasiness he couldn't quite understand. Was it the way the dog, her snout quivering, had begun to scamper back and forth as if in pursuit of something unseen, a mystery? Or was it merely how the plants bent under the force of the rain? They looked fragile to him. In weather like this they could lose their potency, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do to save them. You had to recognize how powerless you were: The elements made you helpless in the end, as helpless as the plants themselves.

He walked back to his house in the clearing, pursued by echoes of the monsoon that crashed in a boisterous rage through the trees. At one point he stopped and wondered anxiously if he heard something other than the roar of rain, the muted engine of a small plane, say. He looked up into the dense clouds. He saw nothing. Perhaps the sound had been that of a tractor droning in a distant field.

He continued to walk. He thought: Farmers don't plow fields in weather this savage. When he reached his house, he went inside the kitchen and took off his hat and mackinaw and stood for a long time looking across the clearing at the woods. With wet fingers he lit a cigarette. The sky over the trees was gray and turbulent and finally mysterious, as if it concealed all manner of hidden menace. He wondered how many times he'd stood in this very place and observed the trees and the sky in the manner of a man assailed by the inexplicable instinct that something wasn't quite right with his life, that he stood on the edge of a revelation that, should it ever come, might emerge from an unlikely combination of leaf and cloud.

Bullshit, he thought. My life is fine, just fine.

That night he awoke fully clothed. It was raining still, though the sound was softer now. He had a sense of the axis of darkness having shifted in a slight way, as if something in the woods had changed. The notion disturbed him. His bedroom was cold and damp, the window open. He'd had a dream filled with images of a city that might have been San Francisco; the architecture was strangely angled and dreadful, the streets depopulated. An eerie emptiness had prevailed.

He didn't move for many minutes. In the lower part of the house a board creaked, and he thought of Isadora turning in her sleep on the sheltered porch. Then there was the sound of the screen door flapping gently against its frame, and he pictured the dog entering the house the way she often did during the night.

He got up, looked down the staircase, saw nothing because the night was moonless and cloudy. The air still held the smell of the eggs he'd fried hours ago for supper. His heartbeat had a clock's certainty. He called out the dog's name. No response, no thump of tail upon wood. He put his palm on the handrail and began to descend.

The first flashlight went on at the bottom of the stairs. A second flicked on immediately after. Tennant stood very still as the disks of light played against his face. He saw a dark coat streaked with moisture, the gloss of two black shoes beneath the slick wet garment, and he had an impression of Isadora, barely touched by either light, lying in the hallway, eyes closed, her tongue hanging from her huge jaw.

"Harry Tennant," somebody said, "you're under arrest."

Hands cuffed behind his back, Tennant was dragged away from the motionless animal and led out onto the steps of the porch, where rainwater dripped from the roof into his hair. The two cops who cuffed him had shot the Great Dane with a tranq gun filled, so they jovially said, with enough dope to bring down a bull elephant.

The woods beyond the house were astonishingly transformed by lights. Lurid blue and red lamps of cop vehicles strobed the darkness, flashlights and lanterns created fantastic shadows. Tennant was blinded by the extravagance of it all. Voices echoed through the trees. How many guardians of law and order had come? The noise suggested fifty, sixty, a preposterous number for an operation as insignificant as his. No—the night magnified sounds, and the restless flashing lights gave the impression of frantic activity. Ten men, a dozen at most. Some from the county sheriff's office, a few from the state police, perhaps an agent or two from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The specific affiliations of law enforcement officers meant nothing to Tennant. They were all heat, no matter what their badges said.

He had a sense of inevitability. Luck was a string; his had broken. A major thrust of adrenaline was going, but he wasn't sure yet if it was fear. He was distanced from events, a dazed spectator.

"What's going to happen to my dog?" he asked.

"She'll have a mother of a hangover," one of the cops said.

Tennant regarded this cop under the porch lamp. He was fiftyish and had sunken cheeks. He looked generally disappointed with life. Milky rings circled his dark pupils.

"If she wakes," said the other cop.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Tennant asked.

"She took a fair dose." The second cop was young, concave beneath his mackinaw. Tennant was sure he'd seen this one before—a local shop, a barn auction in Sterling Township. "She's a big un. Should be okay. Dog like that."

"I fucking hope so," Tennant said. "What happens next?"

The young cop said, "We wait for Sheriff Grabbe."

"Yeah, that's what we do," said the other. "Wait for the sheriff."

Tennant thought he had a memory of seeing Jack Grabbe election posters nailed months ago to telephone poles in the district. He couldn't be sure because he rarely paid attention to political hucksters. Politics was for people who bought into the system. Let the people be heard. Let them choose between one nondescript candidate and another in secret ballot. Tennant lived in that fringe place where politics had no dominion.

"Here he is," said the tall cop.

Sheriff Grabbe walked between the illuminated trees in the direction of the house. He had a small man's strut. He was wearing an ordinary raincoat and a dark suit. His thin hair was plastered by rain to his scalp in streaks so symmetrical they might have been drawn on his head by a finicky child with a black waterproof marker. When he came up on the porch, he squinted at Tennant.

"Harry Tennant?" he asked. "This your land?"

Tennant said it was. His voice wasn't quite right. He had to keep it lower. Firmer.

Grabbe flashed a piece of paper in front of Tennant's face. "Search warrant," and he jerked a thumb in the direction of the woods. "Looks like you got yourself a fine old plantation of cannabis. Lemme guess. You haven't a clue how it got there, right?"

Tennant stared into the trees, the carnival of light and shadow. He wondered how he could walk away from this mess. The cops had him cold.

"I haven't a clue, you're right," he said, and tried to sound bewildered.

"Maybe some campers came along and just tossed a few seeds around and wouldn't you know—there's a crop in your own backyard," Grabbe said, and smiled like a man who knows the score. "Something along those lines, Harry?"

"Could be. It's news to me. I don't go into the woods."

"I follow the letter of the law around here, Harry. No drugs. No dealers. No pushers. No growers. That's it. Straightforward as you can get." A rivulet of rain slithered along Grabbe's eyebrow like a quicksilver bug dissolving. "It's going to take some daylight calculation, Harry. But our first assessment is you got a real good harvest out there. Ten kilos. Maybe fifteen. Lotta reefer."

He stood on tiptoe and pushed his face forward. "You peddle the stuff yourself, Tennant? You hang around schools?"

Tennant said, "I wouldn't sell dope to kids. I wouldn't sell it period."

Grabbe shrugged and looked unexpectedly sympathetic. "'Tween you and me, I don't see much harm in cannabis in moderation. All kinds of people smoke the stuff and it don't seem to do them a whole lotta damage 'cept red-eye and a big appetite. They don't go out like crack addicts and mug folks. They don't get behind the wheel of a goddamn car drunk outta their skulls on seven martinis and kill pedestrians. Just the same, Harry, you're in some kind of shit, because Judge Stakowski don't share my private view. Stak says guys like you should be skinned and gutted, then deep-fried."

"I'll need a lawyer before I get cooked," Tennant said dryly. Stak. The abbreviation was ominously suggestive of a small-town clique, a private club of law enforcement officers and judges, secret agreements, whispered deals.

"Oh, you'll get one. Don't worry."

"When?"

"Soon's possible."

"How do you define soon?" Tennant asked. "An hour? A day?"

Grabbe ignored the question. He looked at the two cops. "Take him away. Lock him up nice and tight."

Lock him up. Lock. Finally. Tennant felt a distinct chill.

The notion of being confined in a small space filled him with dread. Locks turning, key rings rattling. Styrofoam plates. Plastic spoons. The sound of food being slurped. Whispers in the dark, people whimpering in their sleep. No. No way. There was an excess of nightmares in restricted places. People dreamed mad dreams. The concept of insanity terrorized him, those great shapeless prairies of the mind, the interior wilderness without boundaries. He had a great pressure inside his head, an urge to break free and run. He wasn't going to be stuck inside some awful airless room. Under no goddamn circumstances. An uneasy sense of familiarity touched him. Locked rooms. Small windows. Walking from wall to wall, pacing, counting every step only to find the arithmetic never varied.

If he'd been uncertain before, he knew now beyond a doubt: He was afraid.

The cops led him down the steps. The black muddy ground sucked at his boots. He tried to resist in a mule-like way by refusing to move, but one of the cops, laughing, clenched his fist and drove it into the base of Tennant's spine. Tennant went down on his knees, head slumped forward. Maybe the same cop, maybe another, struck him on the neck, a swift, stabbing blow. Pain roared in Tennant's brain. He was dragged to his feet and shoved against the side of a police car where, stunned, he was dimly aware of how the frame house had tilted to one side and the sound of the night rain had become a dull ringing noise. Confusion and pain. He barely felt the last assault, a knee jacked up into his groin. He couldn't breathe.

"Now you behave yourself, Harry," somebody said.

He was thrown into the patrol car. The cuffs cut into his skin.

"Judge Stakowski," said the hollow-cheeked cop who drove.

"Wowee," his spindly young colleague said.

Was that enthusiasm in their voices? Was Stakowski their hero? Was Stak somebody they admired? Or was their tone of awe a kind of put-on to further upset Harry and make him think he was going in front of a hanging judge? Cops played rough games. Only you never knew what the rules were or if it was really a game at all.

There was silence and rain and the blacktop gleaming in the headlights. A scent of onions was blown on the squall, flying out of dark fields where here and there a trailer sat, visible only because of pale blue TV lights that sometimes fell sadly from windows on the outline of a rusted tractor, the edge of a battered pickup, a child's swing, and on one occasion a solitary man smoking a cigarette on his stoop. A landscape of the lost, Tennant thought. The damned.

In this census he included himself.

He expected to be driven directly to the lockup in Oswego, but somewhere along narrow back roads the car went off on an unfamiliar route. He'd been studying the darkness anxiously and felt the change, not as a tangible switch in bearing, but as he might experience an unusual sensation. He looked from the window. Now the countryside was only a dark monotony of fields unbroken by either trailers or houses, the sky starless.

"Where are we headed?" he asked.

Neither cop answered immediately, and Harry had one of those moments of unease layered with deadly potential. He might be driven to a dark field, a drainage ditch, and shot in the back of the head. Obvious, simple, logical. Who would miss him? And if anybody ever inquired, he'd been killed trying to escape. Wasn't that the way things happened in the anonymous little counties, where officers were no more than licensed vandals, that constituted the Republic? People vanished, unclogging the legal system. Unidentifiable bones turned up years later. Nobody cared. To whom would an old skeleton matter?

He asked his question again.

The younger cop said, "Just you relax back there, Harry, unless you want more of what you got before."

In a voice strained by pain, Tennant said, "Why aren't we going straight to Oswego?"

"We're driving a different route if it's okay with you."

"Which goes where exactly?"

The cop with the unhealthy eyes said, "To the goddamn jail, Harry. What the hell do you think?"

Tennant said, "I think you're driving around half the county to unsettle me."

"Boy's got some funny notions, don't he?" said the older cop. "Probably smokes too much of his own product."

The cops laughed at this for what seemed to Tennant a long time. Rain rushed against the windshield and the wipers squeaked, and still the cops laughed in modulations that continued to change—now a murmur of merriment, next a higher tone of mirth that exactly resembled the sound of the wipers. The night was charged with lunacy and violence, Tennant thought, strange arrangements, human sounds syncopated with those of machinery.

Trying to forget his pain, he shut his eyes and listened to the scampering rain on the roof, and he imagined tiny bedraggled creatures, bats, birds, alighting briefly on the car only to be sucked away in the wet slipstream. The cops were no longer laughing. The young one whistled "Pennies from Heaven" and stared to the side. In back, Tennant might have been forgotten by his captors, like an old joke that didn't bear repeating. He saw no future in pursuing the matter of the car's direction or destination. He was a prisoner, and his questions could be answered or ignored as the cops chose. And if they decided to put a gun to his skull—

You die in a rainy field. One bullet was all it took.

His fear turned black, a spider in his head spinning a surreal design, infinite and complex.

Be still. Seek the center. The quiet eye of the cyclone. From what corner of his mind had that worthless little whisper of advice emerged? Some random discharge of electricity, the brain in turmoil, nothing else.

He squirmed in his seat, legs cramped and numb, stomach and head throbbing. He was over six feet tall, and weighed about 175, and it was goddamn hard to find the quiet eye of anything in the back of a cop car, especially after you'd just been casually beaten.

The car turned, turned again. A green road sign was abruptly illuminated but vanished before Harry could read it. He wasn't quite sure why in the absence of landmarks, but he had a sense of familiarity again, as if having traveled off the edge of the world the vehicle had found its way back. Houses appeared now, big Victorian homes set in large lots, places of ornate substance that rose up and up by means of steep narrow staircases into the darkness of attic rooms. These steadfast houses somehow reassured him, and the panic he'd felt before subsided—slightly, as a tide quietens when the wind drops for a while. But you know the wind will come again.

He recognized Oswego, the outskirts of which had seemingly loomed from nowhere. Pale lamps, quiet leafy streets, here and there a neighborhood tavern closed for the night. The blue oval of a Genesee Cream Ale sign floated in a window like a distorted electric kiss. Near the railroad tracks a couple stood beneath a tree, the man's surprised white face and the woman's parted lips caught for a moment in headlights.

"Took us a shortcut, Harry," said the older cop. "Surprised you, heh?"

"You got a bad case of nerves there, Harry," the thin cop remarked.

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Excerpted from Concert of Ghosts by Campbell Armstrong. Copyright © 1993 Campbell Armstrong. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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