The Off Season
| 24 min read
The man behind the post office counter had a burn scar on the inside of his right wrist, shiny and about the size of a bottle cap, and Russ had watched that scar move over that wrist three days earlier while its owner wrapped two pounds of ground chuck at the IGA.
"You work the meat counter too?" Russ said.
The nametag stitched on the blue shirt said WALT. He set the certified envelope on the scale, punched something into the register, and said, "That'd be Denny."
"Denny."
"Denny Vollmer." He tore off the receipt and laid it on the counter without sliding it over. "Six eighty-five."
Russ counted out seven dollars. The wrist went into the drawer for change and came back with a dime and a nickel.
"Same build as you," Russ said.
"Lot of people around here look alike." Walt said it the way you'd say the road was icy. He was already reaching for the next thing, and there was no next thing, because Russ was the only customer and had been the only customer both times he had come in that month.
Outside, the flag on the pole made a sound like a hand slapping a table. Four parking spaces in front of the post office, three of them full of plowed snow, one of them holding Russ's truck. Across Fulton Street a Buick sat at the curb with two inches on the roof and the windshield scraped clean.
He had the report in his pocket that he'd meant to send and hadn't, because he'd sent the wrong one, and that was the kind of mistake he made now that nobody checked his work.
The association had hired him in September over the phone. Two hundred and twelve cottages on the west shore, plus the pavilion, the boathouse, the pier sections, four miles of private road. Twenty-four hundred a month, the caretaker's house on Third Street, a plow truck with a bad heater core. Marjorie Dunn had asked him twice whether he minded being alone and he had said no both times, and she had not asked what he did before, which he appreciated, and which he thought about later.
Before, he'd run buildings and grounds for a school district outside Toledo for twenty-two years. Then the levy failed twice and they folded his position into the transportation director's, and the transportation director was thirty-four and had a laminated org chart.
His daughter Claire lived in Columbus. His ex-wife lived in Perrysburg with a man who sold pontoon boats, which Russ had decided was funny and told people at first, and then stopped telling people.
October was closing cottages. He worked from a clipboard list in numerical order: shut the curb stop, drain the heater, blow the lines out at forty pounds, pour the pink antifreeze down every trap and into every toilet, prop the fridge open with a paint stir stick, set four snap traps baited with peanut butter, log the roof and the sill and the dock hardware. He got good at it and then fast at it. At 118 the previous guy had left the outside spigot open and the line had split behind the crawlspace access, and Russ spent a whole Tuesday on his back in six inches of frozen sand with a propane torch.
By November there was nothing to do outside but wait for snow, so he started driving.
That's how it began. Not with anything. He drove.
The town proper was six streets, and the six streets took eleven minutes at twenty-five miles an hour. Fulton had the post office, the IGA, Vollmer Hardware, the Wheelhouse, and the Anchor. Lake Street had the Methodist church and the elementary school and thirty houses. Bay Mobil sat where Fulton met the state highway, under a sign advertising night crawlers.
He started writing things down because writing things down was what he had instead of a job that filled the day. He used the back of the association maintenance log, a green ledger book with a cloth spine that Marjorie had mailed him in a padded envelope. He wrote the date, the temperature, the work, the miles. Then, one Thursday, under the miles, he wrote:
Burn scar, R wrist, size of a quarter. Post office (Walt). IGA meat (Denny).
The next week he added:
Left knee swings out when he walks. Red cap. Plow driver Tues. Bay Mobil Fri.
Chipped tooth, upper front, left side. Counts change twice, out loud the second time. IGA register. Bay Mobil register. Diner Sat.
He was not trying to prove anything. He was doing what he'd done for two decades with boiler serial numbers and filter sizes, which was to keep a record so he wouldn't have to trust his memory, which had never been good.
By the second week of December he had eleven entries and no twelfth.
Number four was missing the top joint of his left ring finger and wore his glasses on a cord. Number five had a white scar through her right eyebrow and six silver rings, three per hand. Number six was tall enough to duck at the IGA back door and had a beard he wore in a kind of blunt spade. Number seven hummed two notes, the same two, low then high, when she was working out a total. Number eight had a beige hearing aid and turned his whole body to hear you. Number nine used a cane in the mornings and not in the afternoons. Number ten was maybe twenty and had acne scars along his jaw and a truck with a hole in the muffler you could hear from Third Street. Number eleven had a gray braid to her waist and drove a Subaru with a Michigan Tech sticker gone white from sun.
Eleven people. Nine businesses, a church, a school with the hallway lights on and one car in the lot, a town hall open Wednesday mornings, a library open Tuesday and Thursday from one to five.
He knew the population sign said 8,412 because he'd passed it four hundred times. He looked it up on his phone anyway, sitting in the truck outside the boathouse with the engine running. Census figure, 8,412. A tourism page said the winter population was around three hundred.
Three hundred was a number he could have believed. Three hundred people spread over the township, out on the county roads, in the trailers behind the orchard, would give you an empty-looking town and a full-looking parking lot at the IGA on a Saturday. Three hundred would explain everything.
He had been there ten weeks and had seen eleven.
On the third Saturday of December he went to the IGA twice on purpose.
At nine the register was run by the woman with the chipped tooth. Her nametag said DIANE. She rang up his coffee and a box of drywall screws that the IGA had no business selling, counted his change into his palm, then counted it again out loud, and said the roads out by Kessler's were greasy.
At two he came back for bread. The woman at the register had a chipped upper tooth, left side. Her nametag said SHARON. She wore a green fleece instead of a gray one and her hair was down instead of clipped.
"Busy day," Russ said.
"Not too bad."
"You were on this morning too."
"That was Diane." She scanned the bread and hit total. "Three nineteen."
He put a five down and watched her hands.
"Diane's your sister?"
"Diane's Diane," Sharon said, and she laughed a little at the end of it, and there was nothing behind the laugh. She counted his change into his palm and then counted it again out loud.
He walked out to the truck and sat in it. Through the front window he could see her put the drawer money into a bank bag and set the bag under the counter, and then she came around the end of the register with a push broom and swept the entryway mat, which did not need sweeping, and did the same six feet of floor twice.
He wrote it down in the truck. Then he sat there long enough that the windshield fogged and he had to run the defrost.
Vollmer Hardware kept a card table by the woodstove with a coffee maker on it and a coffee can for a dollar a cup. The man at the counter was number four, the one missing the finger joint, and his nametag said TOM.
Russ needed a half-inch spade bit and a length of chain. He got both, and then he stood at the card table with the coffee and said, "You know if the association's had a caretaker before me?"
Tom took his glasses off and let them fall onto his chest. "Sure."
"Guy named Vance?"
"That sounds right."
"Tom Vance."
"Could be." He was rewinding a spool of nylon rope that didn't need rewinding.
Russ had found the name on a coffee can of drywall screws in the caretaker's house, masking tape across the lid, T. VANCE in ballpoint gone brown. He'd found a paperback western in the drawer under the stove with a Bay Mobil receipt in it at page ninety-one, dated the previous February, one coffee and one lottery ticket. He'd found a pair of green work pants hanging in the basement stairwell, 36 waist, 30 inseam, cuffs stiff with dried mud.
"He around still?"
"He's around," Tom said.
"You know him?"
Tom looked up then, and the look was patient, the way you look at a customer who has asked whether the store carries something the store has never carried. "Six of one," he said.
The nylon rope came to the end of the spool and he clipped it and set the spool on the shelf behind him, and then he took it down and rewound it the other way.
Russ paid for the chain. On the way out he stopped at the register and said, "How'd you lose the finger?"
Tom held the hand up and considered it like a part he'd pulled off a mower. The knuckle ended in a smooth pink cap. "Huh," he said.
He was still holding it up when Russ let the door swing shut, and the bell on the door was one of those flat brass ones that goes on ringing for a while after.
On a Tuesday he followed Diane.
He told himself it was not following, because he was going that direction anyway, and then he sat at the corner of Fulton and Third with his lights off for twenty minutes, which is not a thing a man does on his way somewhere.
She left Bay Mobil at six and drove a white Corolla to a ranch house on Orchard with an aluminum awning over the porch. The porch light was already on. She went in. At 6:20 the kitchen light went on, and at 6:52 it went off, and at 7:01 she came out in a wool coat and a pair of glasses she hadn't worn all day and walked, not drove, the four blocks to the Wheelhouse.
Russ moved the truck to the lot behind the church and walked back up the other side of the street.
She sat in the window booth. Number six, the tall one, brought her coffee and a piece of pie without her ordering, and then went back through the swinging door to the kitchen and did not come out again. She opened a newspaper. She read it, or turned the pages of it, for one hour. She did not eat the pie. At 8:00 her phone lit up on the table and she picked it up and swiped it and put it down, and then she stood, put on her coat, left money under the saucer, and walked home.
Nobody else came into the diner. The tall man stayed in the kitchen. The lights over the counter stayed on until nine, and at nine they went off from a switch somebody threw in back, and the sign in the window flipped itself, which meant it was on a timer.
Russ stood in the church lot with his hands in his coat and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding.
Fourteen lit windows on Lake Street. He had driven Lake Street at nine in the evening a dozen times and counted fourteen lit windows. He walked it now, slow, and looked at each one. Living room lamp, no television flicker. Kitchen fluorescent over an empty table. A bedroom with the shade down and the light behind it going off at 10:15 while he stood on the sidewalk, and then the one four houses down going off at 10:15, and then a third.
He had installed a hundred timers in his life. He'd bought them by the case for the district. He knew what a timer looked like from the street.
He called Marjorie Dunn about the split line at 118.
She was in Punta Gorda and had had her left knee replaced in October and told him about it for eleven minutes, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist who was from Bowling Green, the physical therapist she did not care for. Russ said mm-hm and looked out the kitchen window at the lake, which had ice out about two hundred yards and then black water past that.
"Marjorie," he said, "how many people winter over in town?"
"Oh, not many. It empties right out after Labor Day."
"Ballpark."
"A few hundred? The Vollmers are year-round. And the Kesslers, out the highway." She said it the way you'd recite something you'd been told. "Why, are you lonesome?"
"I'm fine."
"You'll get February. Everybody gets February."
"Marjorie, what happened to Tom Vance?"
There was a pause, and in the pause he could hear a television and a small dog.
"He retired," she said.
"He moved away?"
"He's around, I think. Russ, did you get the certified back on the roof rider? Because Gil needs that before the first."
He said he'd send it again. After they hung up he called Claire and got her voicemail, and he said it was Dad, nothing important, the lake was starting to freeze, tell Owen the ice gets thick enough you can drive a truck on it, which he was not sure was still true and had never been true here in his experience. Then he sat with the phone in his hand.
On the way back from the boathouse the next morning he stopped at the town limit and got out and looked at the sign.
WINNESAW, it said. POP. 8,412.
The green was the flat green that county signs are. The letters were white and had been rolled on by hand, not printed. He put his thumbnail on the 2 and dragged it sideways and a curl of white came off in a strip about a half inch long, and under the white there was more white, and under that there was a thin brown line of old paint, and under that, when he worked at it, a corner of black.
The sign was maybe an eighth of an inch thick with paint. In places along the bottom edge the layers showed like plywood.
He got back in the truck with a flake of it under his thumbnail and drove to the IGA and bought coffee from a woman with a white scar through her eyebrow whose nametag said DIANE.
Denny Vollmer waved him over on the ninth of January.
Russ was coming out of the post office with the association's insurance rider finally in the right envelope, and Denny was standing in the bed of the town plow truck at the curb, chipping ice off the tailgate with a hammer. He raised the hammer over his head and swung it in a big slow arc, the way you'd flag a boat.
"Meacham."
Russ crossed. The salt on Fulton was ground down to a gray paste.
"You've been counting," Denny said.
Russ stopped with his hand on the fender.
"Green book." Denny turned the hammer over and knocked the head against the tailgate to shake the ice off it. "It's a good habit. Vance never wrote anything down and it took him till March."
"Till March to what."
"You did fine with the Illinois car, by the way. Back in November. Silver Highlander, came through slow, went down Cottage Row twice and turned around at the boathouse." He climbed down off the truck bed one boot at a time, holding the rail, an older man's way of getting down. "You waved at him."
"I wave at everybody."
"He waved back and he left. That's the whole thing right there." Denny worked his glove back on. "Come Saturday I'll show you the second one."
"Second what."
"Second job." He said it the way a foreman says overtime. "Everybody's got two. You've been doing the first one since October and you're good at it. Now you learn the other one."
Russ looked at his wrist. The cuff of the glove covered it.
"Denny," he said, "were you at the post office window in November?"
"Nope."
"Man in there had a scar like yours."
Denny pushed the glove cuff down with two fingers and turned his hand over and looked at the inside of his own wrist, at the shiny place the size of a bottle cap, and he looked at it for four or five seconds the way you'd look at a stain on a shirt you were about to put on.
"Huh," he said.
Then he pulled the glove up and said the county hadn't sanded the hill on Kessler Road in two years and somebody was going to end up in the ditch, and did Russ know they'd cut the hill from the budget and put the money into a study, and the study cost more than sanding the hill for nine years, he'd done the math on a napkin at the Anchor.
He talked about it for a while. He got worked up about it. It was the most human thing Russ had heard anybody say in three months.
Saturday was clear and eight degrees. Denny picked him up in a personal truck, a green F-150 with a toolbox and a dog dish rattling in the bed, and drove him four blocks to a house on Lake Street that Russ had passed maybe six hundred times. White siding, black shutters, a maple in front with a rope hanging off the low branch and no tire on the rope.
Denny opened the door with a key on a plain ring and handed the ring over.
The mudroom smelled like dish soap and wet wool. There was a bench with a lift-up lid, three coats on hooks, a boot tray with an inch of gray water in it, and a leash on a nail.
"Coat's the brown one," Denny said. "It'll fit. Vance was about your size."
"Whose house is this?"
"It's the house."
"Somebody lives here."
"Somebody's going to." Denny went through into the kitchen and turned the tap on and let it run, then turned it off. "You run every faucet Sunday and Wednesday. The trap dries out and it smells and people notice a smell from the porch, don't ask me how, but they do."
There was a dog on a bed by the register, an old shepherd mix, white all through the muzzle. She got up in stages, back end last.
"That's Ruby," Denny said. "She's about eleven. She knows the route better than you will."
On the kitchen table there was a three-ring binder, and inside the binder were pages in plastic sleeves, and the pages were handwritten, and the handwriting changed every so often the way it does in a logbook that has been kept by a series of people. Russ turned to a sleeve near the back.
LAKE ST 3:10. Out the front, left, past the school, cross at Sedgwick, right on Third, up the alley, back in the side door. Dog stops at the hydrant and the second maple. Let her. 22 minutes.
Under it, in a different hand, blue ballpoint pressed hard:
If the buses are running you go at 3:05.
Under that, in a third hand:
Wave.
There were forty or fifty sleeves. WHEELHOUSE WINDOW, 7 TO 8, TU/TH/SA. Newspaper. Do not eat the pie. And PIER, SUNDAY 1:00, TWO PEOPLE, ten minutes, walk to the end and back. And ANCHOR, TH & SAT, one at the bar, one at the pool table. Take a shot every so often. Nobody watches long enough to see if you're any good.
Russ turned pages. In the front, the older sleeves had come loose from their rings and slid down and the paper had gone the color of weak tea.
"Who's it for?" he said.
Denny had the tap running again in the bathroom off the hall. "Anybody looking."
"That's not an answer."
"Sure it is." He came back drying his hands on his pants. "County assessor drives through in February. Insurance adjuster, June and December. There's a man from the state does the post office volume study every three years and if the numbers come in under, they close the window and we drive twenty-two miles for a package. School's on the consolidation list every single time they redraw it. Summer people come up in the middle of the winter to look at their cottage and they want to see a town, not a parking lot. You put a For Sale sign in front of a dead town and it stays up two years and the next one's cheaper and the next one after that is cheaper, and then it's over, and then it's over for good."
It was a good answer. Russ had heard versions of it in four school board meetings. It was the kind of thing men said in rooms with folding chairs, and he had believed it in those rooms, and he mostly believed it now.
"Eleven people," he said.
"That's about right."
"Eleven people can't hold a town."
"Eleven people and the timers and the sign." Denny shrugged. "It's not a trick. It's just work. You've been doing your half since October and you never asked who told you to check the boathouse Thursdays."
"Marjorie told me."
"Sure."
Ruby had come as far as the kitchen doorway and stood there with her tail going slow.
Russ said, "Denny, what's your name?"
"Vollmer."
"First name."
"Denny." He said it without a flicker. He picked the binder up, squared the pages against the table twice, and set it down. "It's Saturday, so it's not yours today. Monday's yours. Three-oh-five, on account of the buses."
"There are no buses."
"That's right," Denny said. "Three-ten, then."
At the door Russ stopped and said, "What was Vance's second job?"
"This one."
"And his first?"
Denny had the door half open and the cold was coming in around his legs. He looked at Russ, and it was not a cold look or a knowing one, and that was the part Russ kept coming back to later. It was the look of a man who has been asked what he had for lunch on a Tuesday nine years ago.
"He had one," Denny said. "I want to say he was up at the lake."
Sunday, Russ packed the truck.
He put his duffel behind the seat and the coffee can of screws in the toolbox because it was a good can, and he left the association's green ledger on the kitchen table with the last three months of work in it, sill by sill, cottage by cottage, because that belonged to them. He left the key to the caretaker's house on top of it. He did not leave the ring Denny had given him. He put that in his coat pocket and did not examine why.
He drove out Fulton to the state highway and past Bay Mobil, where number ten with the acne scars was scraping the ice off the pump island with a flat shovel, and past the sign, and up the long grade past Kessler Road, which had not been sanded.
Four miles out, the county line. He knew it by the change in the pavement, and by the fact that the plowing was different past it, which anybody who runs a plow can see from a quarter mile back. Winnesaw side, the road was black and wet and salted to the edges. Past the line the county's cut was narrower and the wings had left a windrow, and there was drift blown across in four places where the corn stubble ran up to the shoulder, and beyond that the road went white and even and unbroken all the way to the trees.
Nothing had come through since the wind died. He sat at the line with the truck idling and the wipers on intermittent and watched for six or seven minutes and nothing came the other way either.
He could have gone. The truck was four-wheel drive and the drifts were nine inches at the worst of it and he had a shovel and chains in the back.
He backed into a field entrance, and the tires spun once on the crown of it, and he came out the other way, and he drove back into town at forty because there was no reason to hurry.
The sign said POP. 8,412 in fresh white over old white over brown over black.
Monday at 3:05 his phone went off in his coat pocket while he was still on the porch of the white house on Lake Street. He'd set it himself the night before. He shut it off with his thumb through the fabric.
The brown coat fit through the shoulders and was short in the sleeve. He got the leash off the nail and Ruby stood up in stages and put her head through the loop herself, and they went down the front steps and turned left.
Lake Street at ten past three in January is blue at the edges and the plow banks are chest high at the corners where the wings have thrown them. He walked at a dog's pace, which is not a man's pace, and Ruby stopped at the hydrant and stood over it for a while without doing anything, and then went on.
The elementary school took up the whole block between Sedgwick and Third. Brick, two stories, 1954 by the cornerstone, aluminum windows that somebody had done wrong in the eighties. The hallway lights were on behind the glass in the front doors and you could see all the way down the corridor to the far end where the lockers started, and the floor had been buffed at some point and was holding the light in long stripes.
The bell rang at 3:10.
It came through the doors, and the sound of it in there was the sound of a bell in a big empty tiled room, which is a different sound than a bell in a full one. It rang for six seconds. Ruby did not lift her head.
Russ stood on the sidewalk with the leash in his glove and listened to it stop.
He was still standing there when the car came up Lake Street from the south, slow, a gray Equinox with Ohio plates and a bike rack on the back and a windshield full of afternoon. It slowed more when it got even with him. A woman was driving, and there was a man in the passenger seat with a phone out, holding it up to the window the way people do when they are looking at a house they might buy.
Russ raised his hand off the leash.
The man in the passenger seat raised his hand back, and the car went on down toward the water, and Russ watched it take the turn at Cottage Row, and then he clicked his tongue at the dog and started walking again, because at Sedgwick they crossed, and after Sedgwick came Third.