Fraud Read Free

viscous puddle for which, from my quick and queasy perusal, I am largely responsible. The bartender cleans it up without a second glance. Thoroughly unmasked, I settle up for dinner and take myself upstairs to sleep. And to all a good night.
     
    The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. Talking to someone is not always a bad thing—a great deal of viable human contact demands it—but if, for example, one were getting ready to climb a mountain of a drizzly, gray Christmas morning, with a fine mist of freezing rain falling, and no one has really either set up a breakfast table or made it clear where the cups were stored, conversation might not be at the forefront of one’s mind. Rather, conversation that doesn’t begin with the amusing gambit “Where’s the fucking coffee?” might not be at the forefront of one’s mind.
    There are two women, mother and daughter, seated at the only table that has any semblance of being set. There is also an older fellow in a flannel shirt with suspenders. His hair is as white as the china. If he is related to the mother and daughter, it is not by blood. More likely he’s a peripheral member of their group, someone else’s father-in-law, because his ceaseless joking would not be tolerated by someone who knew him better. (And it is ceaseless. Moreover, it’s the kind of joking that stops all conversation stone cold dead: “Good morning.” “Now, are you sure about that? That it’s a good morning? Maybe it’s only a fair morning.” His eyes dancing with what he clearly thinks is merry, elfin delight. After a slight pause, and a small, diplomatic smile, the mother says, “Oh, now. You’re just a joker, aren’t you?” like a weary waitress being relentlessly flirted with by a mildly annoying, but ultimately paying, customer.)
    The mother is in her mid- to late forties. It is evident even now that she was once Beauty Pageant beautiful and is not unattractive now, but a mild Parkinsonian shuddering has rendered her tremulous and self-conscious. Her daughter is twenty and, to give her her due, well spoken and quite cute—her pores are tiny—but she is intoxicated by her own allure. And, unlike her mother, she doesn’t have the bone structure to carry off that whole Mitford girl thing she has going on: all high spirits, pluck, and verbiage. When she hears what I’m about to do, she says, “Why, I was in a bar in St. Albans, Vermont, just the other night, and the subject of the Man Who Climbs the Mountain Every Day came up. All the way up in St. Albans. Imagine that.” She says “bar in St. Albans, Vermont,” as if she were saying “Les Deux Magots.”
     
    The floor of Larry Davis’s car is deep with litter. Bottles, cans, wrappers. The kind of garbage accumulated by the very crazy. I am relieved to learn that it’s detritus he’s picked up meticulously from the trails of the mountain. When he gets a chance, he’ll take it to the dump. Davis isn’t all that strange a man, as it turns out, unfortunately for the magazine story, I think regretfully. Every smoking gun of possible derangement turns out to be as benign as the trash in the car. A man who tells you he is “a bit of an extremist” and, as proof, tells you of the day he and a friend tried every brand of beer they could find makes for somewhat monotonous copy, albeit decidedly better company, say, than the man who, making the same assertion, shows you multiple cigarette burns on his forearms and the human feces he has lovingly smeared into his hair and clothing.
    I realize I have a child’s concept of mountains. I assume they just rise up suddenly out of the flat ground, like breasts. (I also happen to have a child’s concept of breasts.) It seems we drive for an eternity after we pass the sign at the entrance to Monadnock State Park, and I