The Quietside, Chapter 1 D2

This is my first chapter from my attempt at a novel. It's for my Novel class at school, and is still very much in the works. Grammar mistakes and other goofs may pop up (hopefully not, though).
To people who actually know where the Quietside is and have been there, please understand that this is a work of FICTION based off reality (as all fiction is).
I have many plans for Cole in the future beyond this one novel.

1

            Locals call it The Quietside. Bass Harbor’s faded and worn WELCOME sign approached me on the right, covered with little blue and green splotches. Paintball guns. It was something us kids used to do in Cutler in our free time, leaning out of the passenger window and tapping the trigger as fast as our fingers could, the cool metallic smell of carbon dioxide puffing out from the barrel as the muffled pop was unheard over drunken whoops and yells. I never much liked it to be honest, even though every ball I shot hit my target and I’d get a wet and smoky kiss from some girl in the backseat, two beers long gone.

            The billow of fog was beginning to settle in by the Bass Harbor Head Light as I drove by it just after supper on my first night patrol there. I drove through the fog in the Hancock County Sheriff’s cruiser switching between high and low beam headlights.

            I came from the thick spruce forest that held Bass Harbor against the sea, lifted off the gas and let the 4.6-liter V8 hum and slow. I drifted past Kennedy General, a closet of a building with two regular-only gas pumps in front and a diesel on the side. Across the street, two large garages loomed over a sign that read KENNEDY AND SONS CONSTRUCTION.

            It was about the time for the locals to start a good smudge that would burn until early morning, talk about the day, drink shit beer, laugh about relatives and fall asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillows. I had a good idea about how these people acted, and I liked that. Moving downeast to Portland right after I got out of the Academy, I had no idea how city folk acted. I’ve heard that a person’s overall temperament has a lot to do with your home state, but I think it’s more about the size of the town you grew up in and how people live there. I learned real quick that most city folk tend to go with the crowd and not think things through too well. Either that or they’d think about the smallest things, like if they’d manage to get in line for their coffee soon enough so they could still make their bus. The Quietside was just a tad bigger than Cutler, but in both towns they’d think you were joking if you told them people got in a hissy over their morning coffee.

            I continued to coast, letting the car come to a gentle stop right in front of Gerald’s Bar and Mainely Good Cookin’. Piles of weatherworn buoys decorated the front entrance. A plastic deer target with a wide hole above and a little left of the front leg stood leaning against the bar, head turned, staring blankly at me. The neon Budweiser signs were still on behind the bar, surrounded by stools and three booths. There wasn’t a television in Gerald’s like the bars in Portland had. Didn’t need one. I only got to go in a couple times, real brief, to talk to Gerald himself about an incident that happened, as I found out, after he purchased the bar. I never went in to drink. Used to vow against it, thanks to my old man, the notorious drunk Keith Bubba Wakefield. I bet he would’ve fit right in at Gerald’s place with the men whose time for work had passed and time for drinking didn’t have an end in sight. Men who had as many stories about fishing and fucking as I do about death.

            I tapped the gas so the bar was just behind me, stopped again and relaxed in my seat. I rolled the window down. The cool night air hit my face and made it tense up like it does after a couple beers. I smelled the salty water and the seaweed, the smell of hard work and sore bodies. Not a sound though. Dead quiet. I can remember realizing how fitting The Quietside was as another name. Cutler was just Cutler. People knew it was quiet, if they knew about it at all.

            A gust of wind whipped into the cruiser and I caught the smell of the distant but ripe clam-flats. The one and only time I took my girlfriend and future wife, Autumn, to meet my old man, she caught a breeze of the flats near my house and said it smelled like pure shit. I’d never made that connection before. Clam flats smelled like clam-flats—they’ve never been foreign to me. Autumn’s South Portland roots didn’t include clam-flats. She tarnished the smell, in a way, but I still think they smell like Cutler, and I did that first night patrol in Bass Harbor.

            I smiled, rolled the window up and let cruiser roll forward again, only to stop at a four-way intersection. I was going straight, towards Wayward Lane, past the church and then a left to Pier Drive. I’d been to Bass Harbor a couple times with the Sheriff to look at the house, enough to know my way around the fog. The town was no bigger than a couple blocks in Portland, a lot less ground then I was used to dealing with.

            A pickup with a rusty snowplow hanging off the front-end rolled to a stop directly across from me. The truck looked like an old Ford, maybe an 80’s model, but I couldn’t be sure because of the fog. I flashed my high beams to let the truck go, wanting to make a good impression. I wanted the locals to like me—better yet, respect me, so they could let their ideas about college pricks out of their heads long enough for me to get my foot in the door.

            The truck didn’t go. That couple seconds was enough to get me jittery enough that I went for the lights and was about to flick them on when I heard the diesel roar from ahead of me. The plow tilted upright, as if the truck was being thrown forward. I watched it go straight long enough to get a glimpse of some writing on the door, not clear enough to make out though thanks to the fog.

            I sat there for a good minute or two, thinking. I knew what just happened. It was a town where almost every kid at recess played as robbers and that one unlucky sonofabitch who was the cop would always lose. It was a town run by the locals and the locals only.

            Sheriff Wittenburg told me people this side of the island didn’t care for newcomers. Tourists hoping to see a true costal town instead of the t-shirt shops in Bar Harbor were told to avoid Bass Harbor by the spruce pigs, who followed their own preachings, even though Acadia National Park bordered the harbor. Most flatlanders couldn’t even find it and would turn around somewhere along the narrow winding road before they saw the shot up welcome sign.

            The day the sheriff drove me down to Bass Harbor to show me around, he made it very clear about how the locals viewed newcomers. “These people keep to themselves,” he said, “they like it quiet. We haven’t had any trouble, ‘till now. This town hasn’t seen a cop for, I dare say, oh, about a good ten years. Don’t expect they’ll be happy to see there’s one living here now.”

            I didn’t need to hear that. I could tell by the stares the Sheriff’s cruiser got that day. I spent more time staring back at people than at the town itself.

            I turned onto Pier Drive and stopped in front of house number 109. We were moving in the next day. Wittenburg was letting me off. The man’s a hard ass, but he has his redeeming qualities. He could have given the offer to anyone else in the station, all of who had better records than I did. But he didn’t.

            The deal was I live in Bass Harbor as a kind of “outpost,” as Wittenburg called it. I’d be the emergency responder here if things were to get hairy, which he seemed to think they would. Southwest P.D. started complaining just around a month before I arrived, bitching about how many calls they had to handle on top of Southwest’s issues. That’s where I came in. They gave me a foreclosed house and a cruiser and turned me loose.

            The house was as bland as my old man’s wardrobe. The siding was a dull yellow, closer to a cream with the wear and tear of seaside weather. The trim was a forest green and looked like it was a fresher coat than the siding. A covered porch wrapped around the front, slanted downward, heading towards the ocean. Some diagonal lattice had been tacked along the side, but was mostly rotted or flat on the ground. Wittenburg promised repairs, but I didn’t take his word for it. I’ve never been one to depend on another, at least people I don’t know too well.

            I pulled the keys out of the ignition and pushed the door open. The salty air hit me just like the fans they have in the big department stories, blasting more heat outside than the furnace in our apartment could in a whole day. Even though it was just four hours south, Portland was always a couple degrees warmer and the snow never stayed quite as long. Growing up in another coastal town prepared me for cold, but it felt like it’d dropped a good ten degrees in the time it’d taken me to get from the bar to the house.

            I walked across the lawn to the front door, past the foreclosed sign that still sat stuck in the dirt, sagging forward as if it was tired of its job. The tips of my fingers, my ears and my nose were already cold, turning white and stiff.

            I’d forgotten if I’d locked the door behind me when Wittenburg showed me the house and gave me the keys the other afternoon. When I asked him to turn around so I could check, he said that it’d be fine.

            “The people here are kind hearted, Cole. They’re not going rob you. No one’s even going think of robbing you here, neither. It’s a good bet this town has more guns than people. You’ll have a nice break in October when it’s hunting season, I’ll tell you that for sure.”

            The man couldn’t make up his mind about these folk. From what he was saying, I got the impression that one second they needed to be watched, the next they’d be bringing you warm blueberry pie and venison. Wittenburg wasn’t some mall cop. He knew people pretty well, which is why I think I got the job in the first place. Still, he couldn’t make up his mind.

            I pulled the screen door open and turned the stained door’s handle. Sure enough, I’d left it unlocked. The door creaked open as I pushed against it, revealing a dark, barren living room. The previous owners left a couch that must have been added before the doors were installed because of its size. A worn sheet covered it from dust.

            I kept thinking someone could have walked in the front door and could be waiting for me when I started to move in the next morning. No matter how hard I tried, I saw his eyes, squatting behind the oversized couch, .45 in hand, loaded. He was wearing that stained Miller Light t-shirt that hung from his scrawny shoulders. I went for my holster, still expecting the 9mm Glock, the hard polymer and the cool metal just about the grip only to remember halfway down that I wasn’t carrying it anymore. I took my Maglight instead, clicked it on, and shined it inside, expecting to see his eyes sparkle in the light before the crack of the gun. Or maybe my partner held at gunpoint again. There was nothing but the couch and a thin layer of dust on the wooden floor.

           

            My imagination would run off a lot like that, taking a bizarre trip to the past or the possible future. The therapists told me it would stop after more therapy sessions, imagery rehearsals, more bullshit. Of course they’d tell me that. A treated patient doesn’t make you much money at the end of the week. I stopped going to the sessions about a month before Wittenburg called me and told me he had a spot open and was looking for somebody with experience, right around the same time Autumn lost her job and things started to get tight.

            It was always at night, just before bed. Autumn would give me some books to read, happy ones, to take my mind off the sound in the kitchen, who was outside Tucker’s room, who was watching Maya’s crib for the right time, who was in the mirror. It never helped. I’d have all the lights on in the apartment, walk through the apartment once more, and make Autumn get up and shut them off as I got into bed.

            I’d talk in my sleep, screaming and thrashing until Autumn would run her hands through my hair to wake me up. She’d tell me Michael was gone and she was my only partner left, and I didn’t sleep until the next night.

            That was when we were still in Portland, only a couple months after it happened, when my imagination was more vivid than it was as a child watching the closet door.

            I scanned the room a couple more times with the Maglight and made sure to lock the door. I triple checked, fingers fully numb and nose running as I walked back the car. Inside the cruiser had already cooled off and would take a good ten minutes to warm up again on the way back to the station in Ellsworth. As I turned the ignition, I took another look at the house. I knew it was going to be the talk of the town the next day, not for the moving truck or the new family but because the Sherriff’s cruiser sitting in the driveway.