1
My quarry is intelligent, experienced, elusive. I make a slow turn off the main road and head into a development, easing my government-issue vehicle over the numerous speed bumps designed to keep the rate of speed through the neighborhood down to fifteen miles per hour. I’m craning to see if my fugitive is skulking somewhere behind the cultivated shrubbery or hidden deep in the landscape architect–designed three-acre parcels of this, the most exclusive of all of Harmony Farms’ neighborhoods. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to collect this particular miscreant. He has a taste for the good life, a sense of entitlement that frequently brings him here to this covenant-restricted monument to suburban living.
I throw the vehicle into park, sit for a moment, collecting myself, running a hand over my military-short brush of hair. This is the most likely place. It is also where I need to be on foot. It’s time to roll. I settle my cap on my head and gather up my equipment. I shut the driver’s door very carefully so as not to alert my fugitive. Unlike me, my quarry has extraordinary hearing. The element of surprise is the only weapon at my disposal and the only one that gives me any advantage. The good news is, it’s still early in the day, the better not to have interference in the proceedings. Once the neighborhood residents are up and about, my chances of capturing the escapee are pretty well shot. Nothing worse than a posse of vigilante home owners in pursuit of a trespasser.
Despite the similarities of tracking down an enemy or a felon or a missing person and tracking down this miserable runaway, there is no sense of danger, of imperative in this situation. Which, given my nightmares and panic attacks at the thought of returning to my former profession, is a good thing.
I shoulder the coil of rope and squat to examine a print in the dust, depending only on my eyes to tell me the whereabouts of my target. Back in the day, I would have depended less on my vision than upon my canine partner’s acute sense of smell to determine the direction of our quarry, his acute hearing to detect the slightest sound. This entire hunt would have been a snap with Argos by my side. I could have been blind and deaf and it wouldn’t have mattered. Now I’m just deaf.
It’s a pretty morning. The rising sun breaks rosy above the lake that is this town’s chief attraction—the view of which is the Upper Lake Estates at Harmony Farms’ chief selling point. The bucolic name of Harmony Farms belies the discordant undertones that have developed in the three decades since urban flight brought an influx of newcomers to the village. It was once simply a farming community, carved out of New England soil, etched into hillsides with drystone walls, its pastures grappled from the stingy fists of old-growth timber, itself then committed to use as fence posts, firewood, and farmhouses. Lake Harmony is still its centerpiece, a ten-acre, pristine jewel in the crown, complemented by the half dozen spring-fed ponds that punctuate the terrain between gentle hills. Much of the shoreline is privately owned now, but the conservation people have carved out a nice public beach on the Lake Shore Drive side, the less pretty side, my side. It’s where we swam when I was a kid, and where ice fishermen would slide their ice shacks out to the middle of the lake back in the day when it froze solid.
Old-timers like Deke Wilkins, whose family was one of the five original families given the charter for Harmony Farms back in the 1600s, have been pitted against the “new people,” who arrived back in the glory days of the 1980s. People like the first selectman, Cynthia Mann, who leads the charge for quality-of-life improvements to the roads, the school, and the gentrification of Main Street. Or her husband, Donald Boykin, who sits on the land-use committee and likes to write big checks as “lead gifts” for a variety of big-ticket charities here and elsewhere. Theirs are the names you see on the top of donor lists, the ones who know how to throw a party.
But with influence come accommodations. A few of the niceties. In other words, bring all of the things we like best about city life to this hamlet where we fled to avoid the pitfalls of city life. And besides, twenty miles is too far to go to get a decent cup of coffee. Deke Wilkins likes the sludge that Elvin sells at the Country Market. He doesn’t need any high-priced beverage too highfalutin to call itself small, medium, or large. Grande. He hoots when he says the word. At Elvin’s, he can get a small coffee, and that’s just fine with him. “Gimme a petit, will ya?”
I jog along a meticulously groomed driveway, following a scattering of prints pressed into the sprinkler-moist edge until I reach a gap in a determinedly trimmed hedge. On the other side, there’s a depression in the grass that might be a print; a little farther into the property, I find another. I spot the best indicator that my quarry has passed this way, a small pile of manure. And there he is, happily grazing upon the expansive flower beds of Harmony Farms’ wealthiest resident, Cutie-Pie, the miniature donkey, who has made a career out of escaping from his owners’ inadequately fenced-in yard.
I pull a carrot out of my back pocket. Cutie-Pie eyes me with suspicion, gives me a wink, and goes back to eating the no doubt expensive and probably imported late-summer flowers. His little brushy tail twitches in derision. The thing with these miniature equines is that they don’t think like real equines. They are independent thinkers. A horse will allow itself to be led. A miniature donkey will plant four feet and become an immovable object. A statue of a donkey. I swear that it’s Eddie Murphy’s voice coming out of Cutie-Pie. Say what? Yours truly get in that truck? I don’t think so. You’re jokin’, right? Cutie-Pie is only the size of a large dog. Not even as tall as Argos was.
Right now, my goal is to get a lead line attached to this animal. I hold out the carrot. Cutie-Pie, without moving his legs, stretches his neck to its full length, reaching with his prehensile lips for the carrot. I keep it just out of reach, making the donkey choose: Flowers? Carrot? Cutie-Pie finally takes a step, then another. As soon as the donkey is within reach, I snag his halter, snapping the lead line to it. At least I’ve finally convinced the Bollens to keep the halter on at all times, even if I haven’t convinced them to fix the freakin’ fence. Nice couple, one tick away from doddery. They treat this out-of-control equine like a baby. Mrs. Bollen was my third-grade teacher, so it’s pretty much impossible for me to threaten them with fines or confiscation. Besides, I really don’t want a donkey at the limited facility my part-time assistant, Jenny Bright, refers to as the “Bowwow Inn.” It’s barely adequate for the canine inmates. I mean, it’s better than it was when I arrived on the scene, but still pretty primitive.
Before I got here, there was no shelter, just the pound, which was nothing more than a wire run attached to the outside of the town barn. At least now the impounds have a proper kennel, proper care. Even if this isn’t a job I want, I still have the integrity of purpose to make sure my animals are safe and rehomed. No animal on my watch will be put down unless critically injured or unequivocally dangerous, and I haven’t encountered either of those circumstances to date, a third of the way into my twelve-month contract. I do that in memory of Argos. Argos, who could interpret what I was thinking even before I thought it. A pure white shepherd, his eyes deep brown, he was big for his breed, and maybe too pretty, but his magnificent nose was what made him the best of the best. Acute and never wrong. Not once. I shake off the thought. My shrink wants me to develop a mechanism to switch off those thoughts, develop what he calls “coping” mechanisms; adopt something that will bring me out of the past and back into the moment.
Half a bag of carrots later, I have the donkey crammed into the backseat of the town’s white Suburban, a cast-off vehicle from the building inspector’s department. Although I hope that Cutie-Pie doesn’t let loose in the ten minutes it’ll take to drive him home, I’ve set yesterday’s Boston Globe under his back end. I’ve really got to lay the law down with the Bollens. Armand Percy isn’t going to be too pleased to see his million-dollar gardens destroyed by a miniature donkey. Armand Percy isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of guy. We assume he’s some sort of venture capitalist who managed to survive the downturn. No one really knows what he does, just that he was one of the very first of the very wealthy to arrive in Harmony Farms thirty years ago.
What’s certain is, Percy isn’t likely to be the sort of fellow to overlook the destruction of his gardens. He’s more likely to be the sort of fellow who will demand restitution. In all the years that Percy has lived in Harmony Farms, there isn’t anyone who can claim to have seen him. Still, he keeps a cadre of housecleaners, yardmen, gardeners, and window washers employed year-round, most of whom come from the same side of the tracks as I did. Not the fancy side with the homes with a view of Lake Harmony and two bathrooms, but the rough side, where getting through high school was an accomplishment and home was often subsidized housing or one cheap rental after another, like the places we’d end up each time my mother left my father, dragging us boys with her.
Tina Bollen rushes up to meet me as I pull into the driveway. “I knew you’d find him!”
“Mrs. Bollen, this can’t keep happening.”
Copyright © 2015 by Susan Wilson
