Forty Years of Municipal Sins

Chapter One: The Raccoon Was Within Its Rights

There are two kinds of men in Kinnaway, Michigan. There are men who know where the shutoff valve is, and there are men who call the men who know.

I am the first kind, which sounds like bragging until you understand it means my phone rings at four in the morning about a smell.

My name is Gary Belanger. I am fifty-three years old and I have been foreman of the Kinnaway Department of Public Works for twenty-two years, which is one year longer than my marriage has had a mortgage. Under my care sit eleven miles of sanitary sewer, nine miles of storm, one water tower with a perch painted on it, a marina with forty-one slips and one working pump-out, a bandshell, four plow trucks of descending dignity, and a hand-cranked swing bridge built in 1927 by men who assumed somebody would always be around who cared.

Also Big Stanley. Big Stanley is a fiberglass yellow perch nineteen feet long who lives on a cradle behind the salt shed eleven months of the year and gets craned onto a flatbed for the Perch Jubilee parade. He has been repainted eleven times. Under the current coat there is a coat of marine enamel, and under that a coat of school-bus yellow, and under that, if you dig with a fingernail on his belly where the bolt goes, a coat of something closer to gold.

I mention Big Stanley now because he matters later, and because if I start with the raccoon I'm going to get worked up.

Fine. The raccoon.

It was a Thursday morning in the second week of August, nine days before the Jubilee, and I was in the bandshell attic because Janine Trebek had called the village office to report a sound.

"What kind of sound," I said.

"Scrabbling," Janine said. She is the Jubilee chair and has been for nine years, and she says words like she is placing them carefully on a shelf where you can see them. "Above the stage. During the Kiwanis pancake meeting. Arlene thought it was ghosts."

"Arlene thinks the ice machine at the Legion is ghosts."

"Arlene has a radio show and I have four hundred folding chairs on order," Janine said. "Gary. Please."

So at seven-forty in the morning I went up the ladder into the bandshell attic, which is a triangular space eleven feet at the peak and full of eighty years of things nobody wanted to carry back down. Four rolls of red-white-and-blue bunting. A carton of programs from the 1988 Jubilee, which was the year they tried to change the name to the Cherry-Perch Festival and nearly caused a schism. A tuba. Not a case with a tuba in it. A tuba.

And a raccoon.

I want to be fair to the raccoon. The raccoon had done nothing wrong. The raccoon had found a dry, warm, dark place with a soffit gap you could drive a cat through, and had raised, by the look of the insulation, several generations of raccoons in it, and had every reasonable expectation that this arrangement would continue. I came up through the hatch with a flashlight in my teeth and a catch pole I have used perhaps five times in my life, and I made a sound I intended to be soothing.

The raccoon did not find it soothing.

What happened next took about a second and a half. I will describe it as if it took longer, because that is how I remember it, and because I want you to understand that at no point did I have a plan.

The raccoon came off the crossbeam. I got the pole up. The pole hit the rafter. The raccoon hit my chest. I sat down in eighty years of insulation, and the raccoon, being a professional, took hold of the meat of my right hand between the thumb and the first finger and applied itself, and then went out the soffit gap like water going down a drain.

I sat there in the dark. My hand was doing that thing where it doesn't hurt yet and you know it's going to.

Down below, Janine called up, "Is it ghosts?"

"It's a raccoon," I said.

"Did you get it?"

"We reached an understanding," I said.

I came down the ladder and Janine looked at my hand and stopped being the Jubilee chair for a second and became a person who used to be seventeen at the same time I was seventeen.

"Oh, Gary," she said.

"It's fine."

"That's a lot of blood for fine."

"It's a small amount of blood distributed enthusiastically," I said, and wrapped it in a shop rag, which I understand now was not the medical recommendation.

By nine-fifteen I was at the walk-in clinic in town, where a physician's assistant named Petey Salzman's cousin — Kinnaway is like that, everybody is somebody's cousin, we are one big family tree that occasionally forks — looked at my hand and said the words "rabies series."

"No," I said.

"Yes."

"It didn't have rabies. It had opinions."

"Did the raccoon consent to a blood draw?"

"It did not."

"Then it's a rabies series," she said. "Five shots. Immunoglobulin today, right into the wound, that part's not going to be your favorite. Then day three, day seven, day fourteen, day twenty-eight. And we don't stock it, so you're going to Grand Verne."

Grand Verne is forty minutes away on a road that heaves every spring and gets patched every summer by a county crew who have never once, in my observation, driven back over their own work.

"Five trips to Grand Verne," I said.

"Five trips to Grand Verne."

"The Jubilee is in nine days."

"The Jubilee will be there," she said, "whether or not you have a functioning nervous system. Roll up your sleeve."

I want to be honest about the immunoglobulin. They put it in the wound. Around it, into it, along the webbing of the hand, and my hand is a hand that has been broken twice and burned once and had a wood screw through it in 1998, and I have never in my life made the sound I made in that room. Somewhere in the strip mall, a dog started barking.

When I came out, my truck was where I'd left it and my phone had eleven messages. That is not unusual. What was unusual was that four of them were from the village office, and the village office does not call me four times in a morning unless something is on fire or Chip Dombrowski has had an idea.

I should tell you about Chip.

Chip Dombrowski is the village president. He owns Kinnaway Auto Spa and Dombrowski Auto Spa II in Grand Verne and a third one out by the county line that has a sign shaped like a wave. He is my age exactly. We were in the same kindergarten class, the same Little League dugout, the same 1989 graduating class of forty-eight people. In eighth grade he beat me by nine votes for class president on a platform of getting a soda machine, and there was no soda machine, and I have never in thirty-nine years fully let that go, and I am aware of how that sounds.

Chip is not a bad man. I want that on the record early, because I'm going to say some things about him. Chip is a man who read one book about municipal turnaround and has never recovered. He says "metrics" the way my grandmother said "amen." He wears a quarter-zip in July. When he shakes your hand he puts his other hand on top, which is a thing they teach you at a seminar.

I called the office back from the parking lot.

"Kinnaway village offices, this is Marcy."

"It's Gary."

"Oh, thank God. Gary, there's a man here."

"What kind of a man."

"He's got a laptop," Marcy said, and the way she said it, she might as well have said he's got a gun.

"Chip's man?"

"Chip's man." A pause. Marcy is sixty-one and has worked in that office since she was nineteen and she has an instinct for weather. "Gary, he's in the DPW files. He asked me for eleven years of payroll."

I sat in the truck with the AC blowing on my bandage and I looked out at Kinnaway.

Here is Kinnaway. Population 3,100, down from 5,900 in 1970. We used to can cherries. From 1911 to 1986, the Dombrowski Canning Company sat on the north side of the channel and employed four hundred people, and every summer the whole town smelled like pie filling and hot metal, and then in 1986 it closed in the way those places close, which is that everyone says it can't and then it does. Now the building is a self-storage place with a mural on it. We have a lake, a channel, a beach, and eleven thousand people a year who come for the Jubilee and buy fudge.

What we have instead of an economy is a bridge, a beach, a fish, and me.

I drove to the office.

The man with the laptop was standing in the conference room with a slide already up on the wall. He was maybe thirty-eight. He had the kind of haircut that requires a maintenance schedule. He was wearing a fleece vest indoors in August, which in my experience is the uniform of a man about to do something to you.

"Gary!" Chip said, coming around the table with both hands out, and then stopping when he saw the bandage. "Whoa. What happened to the paw?"

"Raccoon."

"Get him?"

"We arrived at an understanding."

"Ha! Classic Gary." He turned. "Gary Belanger, our DPW foreman. Gary, this is Colt Wadsworth."

Colt Wadsworth put out his hand. I put out my left hand, because my right one had been injected eleven times ninety minutes earlier, and we did that awkward crossed-hands thing that men do, and he said, "Colt Wadsworth, Wadsworth Municipal Strategies," like the second part was going to help.

"Colt's going to help us right-size," Chip said.

"Right-size," I said.

"Services delivery," Colt said. "Just an assessment. Nothing's decided."

He clicked. The slide changed. There, on the wall of a conference room where I have personally replaced two ceiling tiles for free, was a pie chart of my life.

I'll spare you the middle forty minutes. Here's the end of it.

Recommendation one: dissolve the Department of Public Works effective September 30.

Recommendation two: contract water, sewer, streets, and grounds to Trane County Municipal Services, a firm out of Grand Verne with a fleet of white trucks and a logo of a stylized water droplet shaking hands with a gear.

Recommendation three: sell the ten-acre DPW yard on Ferry Street — the yard with my salt shed and my garage and the pole barn my father put up in 1979 with his own hands and a borrowed forklift — to Harborline Development for a hundred and ten units of "lakefront-adjacent condominium product."

Projected annual savings, four hundred and twelve thousand dollars.

When he finished, everybody looked at me, which is what happens in a small town when somebody says something that everyone knows is going to hurt one specific person.

"Questions," Colt said.

"Just the one," I said. "Who's plowing Ferry Street?"

Colt smiled with a lot of teeth. "Trane County has a full winter maintenance division."

"Sure. Who's plowing Ferry Street."

"I just said—"

"You said a company. I asked who. Because Ferry Street is a nine-hundred-foot hill with a hydrant at the bottom of it, and if you plow it downhill you bury the hydrant, and if you bury the hydrant then in February when the Kowal place goes up — and it will, they heat with a woodstove and a prayer — the pumper spends nine minutes finding it. Nine minutes. I know that because in 2011 it took nine minutes." I looked at Chip. "So who's plowing Ferry Street?"

There was a silence.

"That's exactly the institutional knowledge we'll want to capture in a transition document," Colt said.

"A document."

"A transition document."

"How long a document?"

"We typically see about forty pages."

I laughed. It came out wrong. It came out like something falling off a shelf.

"Forty pages," I said. "Colt. There are ninety-one hydrants in this village and I could tell you right now, out loud, without notes, which eleven of them are dry, which two have a left-hand thread because they came from the cannery in 1962, and which one is not a hydrant."

"Which one is not a hydrant?"

"The one on Water Street by the Legion. That's a gas vault with a hydrant bonnet on it because a man named Butch Kinsler thought it was funny in 1984."

Colt wrote something down.

"Don't write that down," I said. "Now it's in a document and somebody's going to hook to it."

On my way out, Chip walked me to the parking lot with his hand between my shoulder blades, which is another seminar thing.

"Gar," he said. "Nothing's decided."

"You had a slide with a completion date on it."

"That's a placeholder."

"It said September thirtieth."

"That's a placeholder date."

I got in the truck. He held the door, which nobody has done for me since my mother.

"Look," Chip said, and his voice dropped into the register he uses when he means it, which he does have, about four times a year. "You know what our fund balance is? Two hundred and nine thousand. You know what a new sewer jet costs? We are one bad winter from insolvency and everybody in this town wants to talk about the fudge shop's awning."

"I know what the fund balance is, Chip. I read the same packet you do. I'm the only person at those meetings who reads the packet."

"Then you know I'm not making this up."

"I know you're not making it up," I said. "I know you're solving it with a guy in a vest."

He stepped back and let the door go. "Talk to your wife," he said.

And that, right there, is the third thing.

My wife is Lynn Belanger. We have been married thirty years this October. In April she ran for the open seat on the village council against a man who campaigned entirely on the idea that the beach should have more garbage cans, and she beat him by four hundred votes, and I made a joke at the victory party about how I'd finally have somebody on the inside, and everybody laughed, and Lynn didn't quite.

That morning at breakfast — before the raccoon, before the vest — I had said, in a light voice, buttering toast, "So this consultant thing."

And Lynn had said, "Mm."

"Chip's putting it to a vote?"

"Probably next Thursday."

"That's a week."

"That's how weeks work," she said, and she was looking at her phone, and she had that flat pleasant face she uses on people at the credit union who want a loan they aren't getting.

I put the knife down. "Lynn. How are you voting?"

And my wife of thirty years, the mother of my son, the woman who once drove me to Grand Verne with a wood screw in my hand and told the whole waiting room I'd done it on purpose for attention, looked up at me and said:

"I'm not going to talk about it at the table."

"You're not going to—"

"I'm not going to talk about it at the table, Gary."

And she took her coffee out to the porch.

So: bitten, injected, right-sized, and stonewalled in my own kitchen, all before ten in the morning.

I drove down to the channel because that's where I go. I parked on the north approach and I sat and looked at the bridge.

The Kinnaway swing bridge was built in 1927 by the Chapin Iron Works of Toledo. It is a center-bearing swing span, ninety-two feet, riveted, and it turns on a shaft the diameter of a dinner plate. There is an electric drive that works most of the time. There is also, behind a panel in the bridge house that looks like part of the wall, a manual crank the size of a ship's wheel, put there in 1927 by men who did not trust electricity, and they were right not to.

My father taught me the bridge when I was fourteen. He taught me the grease sequence, which matters, and the sledge sequence, which matters more, and he taught it to me the way you teach somebody a prayer, which is to say by making them say it back.

My father's name is Stan Belanger. He was the DPW foreman for twenty-nine years before me. He is seventy-nine and he lives at Bayview Meadows Memory Care in Grand Verne, which is a nice place with a locked door and a bird cage, and he does not always know who I am, and on the days he does, he mostly wants to talk about the sewer.

He also, in this town, is a man about whom there is a story.

In 1971, the Dombrowski Canning Company payroll — seventeen thousand dollars, cash, in a satchel, the way things were done then — went missing between the bank in Grand Verne and the cannery office. The man driving it was a bookkeeper named Ray Hurd who left town four months later. The state police came, and the insurance company came, and nobody was ever charged with anything.

And my father, who was thirty-one that year, who drank the way men drank then, who had a new boat that fall and could never satisfactorily explain the boat, was the man everybody looked at.

Nobody ever said it to his face. That's not how it works here. What happened instead was that for fifty years, at the Legion, at the boat launch, at every funeral lunch in the Methodist basement, when Stan Belanger's name came up, somebody would say "old Stan" in a certain way, and somebody else would say "heh," and that was the whole conversation, and it went on for half a century.

I grew up inside that "heh."

I have never had a drink in my life. Not one. I have been the sober, early, receipt-keeping, log-book-filling, thank-you-note-writing son of Stan Belanger for fifty-three years, and I built an entire personality out of being the corrected version of my own father.

I sat there in the truck with my hand throbbing and I thought about how the DPW yard was going to be a hundred and ten condos and how my wife wouldn't tell me how she was voting, and my phone rang.

It was Arlene Bick.

"Gary! You're on at one."

"I'm on what at one?"

"The show. Harbor E. coli. Two hundred and forty parts, Gary, people are calling me. Come on the show and reassure them."

Arlene Bick has hosted Kinnaway Calling on WKNW 1440 AM every weekday at one o'clock since 1994. She has a voice like a screen door and about four hundred listeners, which in Trane County makes her a media empire.

Now. I want you to remember three things about the man who said yes to that invitation.

One, he had slept four hours.

Two, he had been injected around the perimeter of an open wound with human immunoglobulin and had taken, on top of that, two of the horse pills they gave him for the pain, and had not eaten anything since a piece of toast he never finished.

Three, he had just been informed that his life's work was a pie chart.

"Sure, Arlene," I said. "I'll come on the show."

And that's how it started.