III
The motorist gave Vermont State Trooper Jennifer Julia Kennisaw his cell number after she helped him fix his blow out. He said that he felt an undying need to repay her help with dinner in Burlington. She smiled and reminded him to get a new spare for his Land Rover as soon as possible before returning to her squad car where she carefully deposited his number, Jerome’s number, next to all of the rest in her notebook of possible sex offenders who had previously given her their numbers.
Most of the guys who rewarded her with their personal information in the hopes of a date or more were lawbreakers. She always thought it amusing that these guys, after being pulled over for doing eighty miles per hour, would ask her out after they asked her how fast they were going. Jennifer always knew how fast she was going. She didn’t understand how anyone could not know how fast they were going. It didn’t make sense. You always at least knew that you were going faster than the law would allow. Even if they weren’t looking at the speedometer, they had to know that. And when she would pull out behind them, they had to look down and see their rate of speed before they tried in vain to slow down so that she might be kind hearted and forgive them the offense of endangering other drivers or the occasional wandering moose.
She remembered an instance where a 1969 VW Bug, powder blue where it hadn’t gone to rust, had taken it upon itself to tangle with a full grown bull moose. She never understood the attraction people had to Bugs. They were hollow in front. Being hollow in front meant that there was nothing between the driver and whatever it was that might find its way into the so-called trunk area at 70 MPH, which was about as fast as those old beaters could go. Sure, some were sooped up so they could reach higher velocities, but most of them were just about able to make it up a small hill if the wind was in their favor. There just didn’t seem to be much point in owning one unless you delivered pizza in a crowded city and needed to be able to parallel park in tight spots. So therefore there was absolutely no reason to own one in Vermont. So therefore Jennifer had no pity for the frat boys out of Bennington who thought it would be good fun to pile into the powder blue Bug owned by their newest pledge who was at the school on scholarship and worked for three summers to be able to afford the luxury of what some might call a car…but not her. They managed to get seven brothers and a sorority sister into the too tiny car one spring evening after too many kegs of beer. She never understood the attraction of squeezing into a small space with a bunch of other people. She liked air. She liked lots and lots of air. Being smushed into a small space, like the inside of a Bug, with a bunch of other people pretty much guaranteed that there would be too little air to go around. She was fairly certain that night when the six brothers of Rho Alpha Tau and their friendly little sister from Psi Phi were heading up the highway towards Montreal - as Vince Nickels, a survivor, recalled they were doing - that there was not nearly enough oxygen in the car for proper decisions to be made. Mix lack of oxygen, an abundance of alcohol, an idiotically unsafe small car and a randy bull moose and you are in for a long night of cleaning up the highway. Jennifer was still amazed at the resilience of that moose. He had been hurt some, but not as much as the septet in the spent pile of iron that was left of the Bug. The fire that erupted after the car flipped three times before hitting a large roadside tree didn’t help matters any for those inside. While Vince Nickles spent a few months in a body cast and some months in physical therapy after being thrown through the front windshield of the vehicle at the moment of impact - he bounced off of the moose, apparently - at least he had to good fortune of reducing the body count by one. His father, some kind of important lawyer from somewhere where they thought it was a fine idea to pay way too much money to send their kids to a mid-level college in a quiet Northeast town to keep them out of trouble, thought there must be someone, anyone he could sue. So he sued everyone from the governor down to Mary Phillips, the researcher for the Department of Fish and Wildlife who had been tracking the moose and his brethren for some kind of study about how often moose cross highways - apparently a matter of some concern. In the end, Mary was the only one who lost her case, but as she had nothing but the clothes on her back, her backpack and a small collection of novels by French surrealists, Thomas Nickles Esq. settled for her novels and authentic Spanish boda bag in which she kept red wine when she could get it for quiet nights with the likes of Paul Eluard and Andre Breton. She complained a bit to the courts about the ruling, but Nickles was determined to have some kind of recompense for his son’s stupidity and if it meant some dog-eared second hand library books and the remnants of a bottle of Chianti, he would have it. Mary petitioned the Department to be reimbursed for her losses and her superiors bought her a canteen and a Stephen King novel.
On a hunch, Jennifer pulled her squad car off the road at the next turn and waited patiently with her speed gun. Her hunches and patience were often rewarded. When she was ten years old, her mother told her there was nothing more powerful than patience. Her mother told her if she felt something in her bones to be true, then all she had to do was wait and not worry and things would turn out the way they should. If there was one thing Jennifer was certain about it was that her mother was never wrong. Never. Jennifer rarely made an important life decision without consulting her. Actually, Jennifer rarely made any decision without consulting her. Jennifer was madly in love with Shelley, who worked behind the counter at Osno’s Drug Store in Stansbury. She had been since the day she went in for a bottle of aspirin for her then partner, Sergeant Kurt. Sergeant Kurt didn’t like to leave the squad car during a patrol unless it was to eat. All other stops were Jennifer’s responsibility. She got his coffee. She bought his Twinkies. She took care of all the stops. She really didn’t mind. She had a hunch that if she worked with Sergeant Kurt, her service would be rewarded and so she was patient. She would be equally patient with Shelley because her mother told her that, given enough time, the girl would eventually find out that her prospects of finding a man as good as Jennifer in a town like Stansbury were slim because of the town’s curse and all. Jennifer never thought much of the Stansbury curse until her mother verified it.
Jennifer’s mother was sixteen years old the first time she realized that Stansbury was cursed. It was 1968 and every boy of draft age in town got drafted. Every last one that might have made a fine husband for her mother and even a few who would have been rather mediocre, but acceptable, given the options. But she had no options because the government pulled all of their draft cards over the course of a single month and each and every last one of them was set to be inducted on the very same day that Jennifer was conceived in an ill advised rendezvous with soon to be Private William Kennisaw - Billy to his friends and to all his girlfriends. Many of Billy’s girlfriends shared the important trait with Jennifer’s mother in that they found themselves pregnant sometime shortly after Billy, along with every last boy of draft age in Stansbury on a bus heading out to Basic Training at some far off exotic location in New Jersey or Alabama, ended up a casualty of a war he would never even fight in when his bus found its way into a ravine somewhere in the Catskill Mountains. The only survivor was the driver, Benjamin Hawthorne, a distant relative of both Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne who shared little in common with his illustrious ancestors. He also shared little in common with the dead soon-to-be-soldiers in his care, including the fact that he was not a resident of Stansbury and, therefore, not subject to its nasty little curse. He was, however, subject to a long stint in a New York State Penitentiary for a number of cases of manslaughter that, strangely enough, had nothing to do with the bus accident and everything to do with a psychotic episode involving a 65 Chevy truck and a bus stop full of people that Benny claimed he was trying to save from the horrors of dying on a bus. To this day, Jennifer still wasn’t sure how many of her schoolmates were her brothers and sisters. Her mother told her not to try to find out. She said that there was no real point in it. She said it wo
uldn’t make her life any better and it wouldn’t make their lives any better. Jennifer always listened to what her mother said.
Jennifer looked up as the Jeep Wagoner went speeding by. She didn’t need to use her speed gun to know that the SUV was going a little faster than the laws she enforced would allow. She flipped on the light bar on her cruiser and pulled out onto the highway. She recognized this one and would not be adding another name to her collection of sex offenders.