four

The upside to building a dump in a high-end town like Cold Spring Harbor is that town leaders will go to extraordinary lengths to mask the fact that the townspeople actually produce garbage. The creation and disposal of refuse was apparently a habit practiced in lesser zip codes. Cold Spring Harbor was a town that had banned unsightly garbage pails at curbs. Residents had willingly ponied up additional tax dollars to ensure their garbage men, recently renamed “recycling engineers,” would stroll unobserved to the back of their stately homes, retrieve the hidden pails, and return them to their rightful place—out of sight.

The state-of-the-art recycling facility had been built under careful supervision by the town’s Architectural Review Board. Normally assigned to critiquing, in excruciating detail, the exterior molding on renovated Victorians, the board spent three years arguing about appropriate street signage at the entrance to the dump. The final conclusion: no sign.

“Where the hell do I turn?” Frank barked.

I reached across the steering wheel and yanked right. “Here, between those two pine trees.”

The Gremlin took the road ruts like a trooper, bounding in and out of grooves like a Jeep on an African safari. Who knew? Maybe I’d get three more weeks out of the clunker.

“Left,” I said, motioning. “Bob’s house is down this road.”

“Road?” Frank questioned. “That’s a bit generous. This is a footpath.”

I looked in the rearview mirror and spotted Cheski and Lamendola in their black and white. So much for a police-grade GPS. We’d beat them by two minutes. “Tell them to back off. Barbara will freak out if she sees cops.”

Frank waved them off, and we approached the house alone.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Frank mumbled under his breath as he took in the circular yurt listing precariously on one side of a small clearing. Bob and Barbara’s living quarters were nothing more than a puzzle-shaped octagon fashioned out of corrugated metal and strips of repurposed construction materials.

I shrugged, unwilling to apologize for my fellow Freegans. Curb appeal zero; mortgage zero. How was this equation not attractive to Frank?

Barbara was around back tending to a small garden near one of the outer buildings.

“Barbara,” I called softly.

Barbara stood up slowly and rested a hand on her lower back. I’d put her age at about sixty-five. The lines on her face curved gently upward. She was a smiler. “Bob likes to laugh,” I had mentioned to Frank on the car ride over. “Barbara is his biggest fan.”

She placed the gardening shovel down and walked toward me. We embraced like the friends we were, and then she shook Frank’s hand. She was aware that Frank and I were dating, and she didn’t appear to be concerned about our visit.

“Bob told me about the Dawn doll,” she said. “I had to pull it out of his pocket to wash his pants, and then he insisted on sticking it right back in. Are you here to drop off more?”

“I’m fresh out, but I had hoped to show Frank around.”

“If you find Bob, let me know. It appears we’ve been on opposite schedules. I was at a friend’s house on the North Fork, and I just got back.”

I shot Frank a look. Barbara didn’t know where Bob was, or at least she assumed he was at work.

Barbara motioned to a small shed, one of a few shacks dotting the property. Frank looked at me uneasily, and I’m sure he was thinking hoarders. Every police officer, at least once in his life, will respond to a call that alters his view of basic humanity. Frank had told me about his first such call, ten years earlier. He responded to what he thought was a routine domestic violence complaint. As it had turned out, the call had been made by a man so fed up with his wife’s excessive hoarding that he had barricaded himself in a room filled with rotting garbage, refusing to leave until his wife received psychiatric treatment. It took a Hazmat-clad cleaning crew a week to dismantle and detox the house, but Frank had been scarred for years.

Barbara flicked the shed light on.

“Holy shit,” Frank blurted out.

The room was, in fact, filled with garbage, but it had been transformed into a gallery of sorts.

“What is this?”

“It’s called Outsider Art,” I responded. “Bob’s an artist. That’s how we met.”

Barbara proceeded to give Frank a tour of Bob’s work—an intricate series of dioramas, each telling a story painstakingly rendered in pieces of discarded junk. A bent fork rejiggered into a park bench, vintage buttons for hubcaps adhered to miniature cars built from tin boxes. Barbara positioned Frank at various vantage points. From a distance, the scenes were fluid, almost fanciful. As the viewer neared the display, each carefully selected piece materialized into its true form. The art, up close, was raw and primitive.

“This is amazing,” Frank said, bending over a scene from Cold Spring Harbor’s whaling history. Score one for the Freegans.

Bob had created a choppy ocean of water using recycled blue plastic bags, the kind that get tossed two seconds after the newspaper is removed. Bob didn’t bother to cut around the black print, which created a sense of depth and danger in the water. “I feel like it’s an impossible task,” Frank commented.

“Harpooning a whale?” I asked.

“Yes,” Frank replied.

“It’s perspective,” Barbara offered. “The whale’s tail is unnaturally large relative to the whaling boat, as is the size of the waves. He’s trying to convey a sense of futility.”

“But whales were captured,” Frank said. “Without a successful whaling industry, these towns would have perished.”

Barbara nodded, passing the baton to me.

“It’s hope. Bob also allows you to feel the potential.”

Barbara took Frank’s arm and pointed to the figure of the man holding the harpoon. “The sea and the whale are unnervingly large versus the size of the crew and their boat. But look at the harpoon.”

Frank took in the details of Bob’s artistry. “It’s too big for the man.”

“Now look closely at his face.”

Frank leaned into the diorama. Bob had reformed the doll’s mouth.

“Oversized and grinning.” Frank closed his eyes and reopened them staring straight into the whaler’s hopeful face. Big Bob wasn’t a man who just didn’t come home. I knew that, and now Frank did too.

He stood up and faced Barbara. “We need to talk.”