DEVIL DAN DAVIS was a miser and a bad-tempered man who, like his bad-tempered father before him, had lived all his life next to the Allen place at the foot of Allen Mountain. Dan sold used parts and machinery out of his junkyard and did contract jobs requiring heavy equipment like his Blade. His avocation, however, was feuding with the Allens.
Dan’s sixty-ton D-60 Blade was the biggest bulldozer ever made—powerful enough, Dan said, to push over a courthouse. He cut logging roads and maple sugaring roads and farm roads and roads into gravel pits, doing great and irreparable harm to the environment. Dan Davis frequently proclaimed that there was no such thing as the environment. A small man with a sharp face like a meadow vole’s, Dan averred that the environment was a lie made up by the socialists who ran the government in Montpelier. Dan said that if anyone doubted him he would prove his point by running them over with the Blade. “Can you eat the environment?” he roared out at the March Town Meeting, where he fancied himself something of an orator. “No, you cannot. Can you sell it? No, sir, mister man. Can you put it in the bank and draw down two and a half percent interest on it? Not that I ever heard of.”
Every Monday morning Devil Dan changed the crankcase oil of the Blade whether he’d used the machine that week or not. He dumped the old oil into Allen Mountain Brook, which ran into the Kingdom River just below the meadow where Ethan and Gypsy played ball. When brown trout and rainbow trout and suckers and perch and bullpout and bass floated belly-up on the surface of the river, Dan said there were too many fish in the crick to start with—it was good for the fish to be thinned out now and again. Otherwise, they would become stunted and develop overly large heads. Dan said that if there had been such a thing as the environment, which there was not, it would be good environmental policy to cull out the weak fishes from the strong ones. Gypsy said the crankcase oil from the Blade would cull out Jonah’s whale, it was that toxic.
On the side of his machine shed, Devil Dan had painted a huge sign that said TAKE BACK VERMONT. Who from? Ethan wondered. Take Vermont back how? When? And where? He had no idea what the sign meant, and neither, Gypsy assured him, did Devil Dan. But “Take Back Vermont” sounded good to the junkyard owner, and to others of his mind who did not believe in the environment.
The older boys of the Common called Devil Dan’s junkyard Midnight Auto because late at night they would slip under his high-voltage Weed Chopper electric fence and strip junk cars of their antennas, radios, tape decks, and hubcaps. These forays were fraught with peril because Dan patrolled the yard with his shotgun at all hours and did not hesitate to pepper any trespassers with number-eight birdshot. Nor did he shoot first and ask questions afterward; Dan Davis prided himself on shooting first and asking no questions at all. Also, he kept a free-ranging billy goat with ferocious yellow eyes and large horns, which, along with Orton and Norton Horton, Dan’s state boys, was the bane of E.A.’s existence. The goat’s name was Satan. Sicced on E.A. by Orton and Norton, who were three or four years older and had shaved heads and swastika tattoos inked on their skulls, Satan Davis would shag E.A. all the way home from the railway trestle, butting him and sometimes rolling him into the ditch. E.A. didn’t dare tell Gypsy about these assaults because he was afraid she would shoot Satan, and perhaps Orton and Norton in the bargain, and have to go to jail. Then he’d be out a mother and a father.
The goat attacks had continued for more than a year and gotten worse rather than better until at last, this past spring, E.A. had confided his misery to the Colonel. After thinking for a minute, the old soldier said, “My advice to you, boy, is to cut you a stout ironwood stick, and the next time those rapscallions set upon you, do what you can with it.” He’d followed the statue’s suggestion and done considerable damage to both boys and gotten in a solid lick to Satan’s head as well, before Orton and Norton overpowered him and frailed the daylights out of him with his own stick. But since then they’d mostly confined their assaults to verbal abuse, calling him a woodchuck and a woodchuck-eater from a distance. The goat, too, stayed out of range of the stick. So the Colonel’s advice had worked in part, which the statue said was the most any advice had ever worked for him. Scarcely a night went by that E.A. did not append to his prayers to Our Father a short request to drown Orton and Norton and the goat in the river, or burn them up in a glorious junkyard conflagration, or arrange for them to slip and fall under the massive treads of Devil Dan’s Blade.