D Carpenter - Infertile Grounds

The room fell silent. Everyone turned and stared as Chris scanned for the trooper. A lanky, grumpy looking man behind the bar said, “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Bert Nadeau,” Chris replied to the all-male audience. “The lady at the general store in Masardis said I could probably find him here.”

“That so?” The bartender said. “Hey, Bert. You here?”

A large, barrel-chested man, who had been leaning over the pool table lining up his next shot, stood upright and said, “I think so.”

Chris had been expecting a uniform, but hell, this was northern Maine. Flannel was a uniform.

“You’re a state cop?” Chris asked.

“I am,” he replied as he returned his attention to his shot.

As Chris walked across the room to the pool table, the silent stares continued. The man closest to him, clearly the oldest, wore a red and black checked wool jacket. Chris nodded at him, and he simply smiled back, baring a mouthful of gold teeth – several of which were missing, but those remaining were all gold. Bizarre.

“Nice teeth,” Chris said to him, after having just about enough of his annoying grin.

The old man brought up an arthritic finger and rapped on one of his canines with a thick, dirty fingernail. The disturbing tapping sound of fingernail on gold made Chris involuntarily grimace.

“That’s solid gold,” he said in a thick French-Canadian accent. “That damn dentist up in Presque Isle. He wanted to give me silver, but I said no. That silver’s poison and I know it. He was just trying to get rid of one more Frenchman. I told him to give me gold, or I’d take my sorry old ass someplace else.”

“Jesus Christ,” the burly, red-haired man across the room said. “Alby’s going to tell us about his teeth again.”

Several of the other men chuckled.

“Alby. We heard about your teeth before, and I’m sure this guy ain’t too interested,” a man who looked like Jerry Garcia, only maybe a little dumber and shorter and definitely less successful, said.

The sharp snap of two balls colliding silenced the men.

“Damn,” Bert said as the ten ball came to a stop on the lip of the side pocket. “Hey, Fern. You want to finish my game here?”

“Sure,” the Jerry Garcia want-to-be said as he did a well-practiced slide from his barstool and sauntered over to the table.

Bert walked over with his hand outstretched. “Bert Nadeau,” he said cordially.

“Chris Foster.” They shook. As Chris would have expected from his size, he had a grip like a vise. At six-two and about two-twenty, Chris had always considered himself big but he found himself looking up at this man who had at least four inches and a hundred pounds on him.

“What can I do you for?” Bert asked.

Everyone in the room watched intently. Apparently, Chris was the most interesting person to come in here in a while. Actually, that this lodge was even open in late June surprised him. Hunting season didn’t start for another few months. These guys were undoubtedly all locals with nothing better to do than hang out drinking, shooting pool and passing time until they can go out in the woods and legally shoot something else.

What he wanted to talk to Bert about would certainly liven up their night.

“Is there someplace we can talk in private?”

Bert furrowed his brow, rubbed his hands down his face and slapped them together before saying, “Sure, let’s go out onto the porch.”

As Chris shut the outside door the conversation inside started up again. He was surely the main topic.

“So, what’s going on, Chris?” Bert asked as he sat down in one of the well-used bentwood chairs lined up on the large rectangular porch. Before he could reply, Bert said, “You’re from Massachusetts.”

He followed Bert’s gaze, which was directed at his new Toyota Prius. One thing he’d learned over the years was that people in Maine, particularly this part of the state, didn’t hold people from Massachusetts in the highest regards. They thought all people from Massachusetts lived in downtown Boston and when not fighting off marauding gangs of ethnically diverse murderers and rapists, they were generally overpaid, arrogant asses – also known as, Mass-holes.

“Yes,” Chris replied, not wanting to get caught in that trap. “I inherited a small camp up on the St. Croix fifteen years ago from my grandfather. I usually spend two weeks a year up here fishing and unwinding.”

“How far up the river is it?”

“About eight miles.”

“Rust-colored?”

“Yeah, you’ve been that far up the river?” Chris asked. In all of his years coming here, he had only seen a handful of people actually that far up the river. It was a long haul. The water was usually too low to use a motor and sometimes even paddling was difficult. He preferred to pole – that was the best way to make good time in a river such as the St. Croix.

Bert nodded. “Nice little place. Good fishin’ up the other side of that creek.”

“It certainly is,” Chris replied, happy that Bert not only knew but appreciated what it was. “I’ve pulled a lot of trout out of that water.”

“Well, if you want to get away from it all, you’re not going to find a better spot than that.”

“If I couldn’t get up here for a couple weeks a year, I’d lose my mind.”

“That one of them hybrids?” Bert asked, nodding toward the car.

Chris looked over at the shiny white car. Up until four months ago he had driven a Jeep Wrangler but Karen had nagged him into going green. He had finally caved in, sold the Jeep and bought a Prius but had felt emasculated ever since. The self-righteous piousness he thought was exhibited by most hybrid owners eluded him. Maybe because he understood that the manufacturing process to make the batteries for them created more greenhouse gases then driving a traditional car for a hundred thousand miles and the metals and chemicals leftover after the batteries died were a toxic nightmare, or maybe because he truly loved the environment at a spiritual level, not at a “look at me, I care” one. That’s actually why he liked coming up here – to commune with nature, to reconnect.

“Yeah, the wife made me buy it,” Chris said. “Frankly, I hate the thing but it does get good mileage and it shut her up.”

Bert snorted as he pulled a pouch of Bugler tobacco out of his pocket and started rolling a cigarette. His meaty fingers nimbly performed the delicate task.

“The reason that I needed to talk to you privately is actually kind of incredible. I’m not sure I’d believe it myself if I didn’t see it with my own eyes”

Bert licked the paper and gave the cigarette a final spin. He looked up as he struck a blue-tip match on the arm of his chair.

Chris glanced inside and saw that the other men had returned to what they had been doing. The bartender was on the phone.

“So let’s hear it?” Bert asked.

Chris paused for a moment and stared at Mt. Katahdin looming majestically in the distance. The setting sun illuminated its jagged, mile-high stone edge, giving it the breathtaking appearance of a massive stone temple.

When he turned back, he saw that Bert was looking inside the lodge and he followed his stare. As he did so, the bartender turned his back to them. Bert dragged on his cigarette, coolly turning his gaze to Chris. His deep set, brown eyes sparkled as he said, “Go on.”

In the lodge the bartender was hanging up the phone. Considering the events of the day, Chris was naturally on edge. He reflected on everything that had happened and whether or not he should just blurt the whole story out. Partly because he didn’t want to come across as a lunatic but he was also starting to consider who he could trust. Bullet riddled pilots, people in planes with machine guns, viruses and this woman, Sarah Burns, were the unnerving makings of a great movie but as David Rose’s death proved, it was deadly real.