CHAPTER FOUR Benedict

W hat was it about small towns? Every single one I'd ever driven into had a sign stating the town's population. Were they bragging? Was it to make sure people still lived there by keeping count? Plentywood had one-thousand-something. Twice the size of the town I'd just left.

I spent the last twenty miles or so thinking about the guy at the gas station. He was rude, was my first thought. He was smoking hot was my second, third, fourth, and every thought since I drove away. A country hick, yet worldly in an odd way. I couldn't put a finger on what he had that made him interesting. Besides his looks, of course.

The road came to a four-way stop. Straight ahead, a sign read, ‘ Sixteen Miles to the Canadian Border .' Part of me wanted to step on the gas and hit the border hard, never looking back on rural America. But I could see hills in the distance, at least sixteen miles away. Canada looked exactly the same. Wooded. Empty. Not New York.

To my left was a road that disappeared into the wilderness. No houses, no barns, no life, for as far as I could see. I turned my signal to go right. Why, I wasn't sure. There wasn't a soul behind me and there hadn't been since Culbertson and hot Charlie.

Making a right turn and driving about an eighth of a mile, I found myself on Main Street. With little effort, I could see the end of Main Street two blocks away. My stomach fell to my feet. It was as bad as I thought it'd be. The next two blocks had old buildings on each side of the street. Many had the years they were built above their entrance doors.

I'd read that Plentywood opened its first business in 1900. From what I could tell, the town looked like it probably did back then. An odd story I'd read that was fascinating to me was that, in 1881, Sitting Bull and his band surrendered to US forces roughly at what is now Plentywood. Even crazier was that Butch Cassidy and other rustlers used a trail through Plentywood to move their stolen cattle into Canada.

I'd studied these people and their stories in elementary school. Now I was finding out my family had lived amongst a great Indian chief and his tribe, as well as a crime legend. If someone had told me in prep school that one day I'd live in a wild-west town that Sitting Bull had once lived in, I'd have choked on my low-fat, skinny latte.

Despite all the charming history of this town, a year could not pass fast enough. "Thirty-million-bucks, Ben. Thirty-fucking-million-bucks. You got this," I muttered, looking right and left as I drove through town.

An old-school laundromat was on my right at the beginning of Main, with a tavern named Smitty's sharing a wall with it. Each business shared walls on both sides of the street, as the town laid out in front of me. Several were old businesses that had closed shop. A quilt shop named Annie's Squares was long gone. Two restaurants, right next door to each other, both closed. Perhaps it's a bad idea to share a wall while competing for limited dollars.

Another four-way stop greeted me at the center of town. Straight ahead was another of the same block I'd just driven past. Looking left and right, I noticed streets that led to two more blocks on either side of Main Street. Rows of houses, some in disrepair, ran along those streets.

My notes read to go through Main, and once past the ‘ business zone ,'—laughable, really—I needed to take a right. Hawthorne Mansion would be on the first block at the corner. Taking the right, it was impossible to miss the Victorian-style mansion on the corner. I felt a bit sentimental knowing that my ancestors, lumber barons and baronesses, had helped settle this town. The arrival of the Great Northern Railway cemented their status by helping them sell goods far and wide.

A beat-up pickup truck sat behind the mansion where I parked. A sticker in the back window read, ‘ Obedient Women Seldom Make History. ' A ‘ Reagan/Bush 1980 ,' bumper sticker sealed the deal of contradiction. A feminist and a Republican?

I noticed the backs of heads through the window and an ENTER HERE sign stuck to the back door. The time was half past one in the afternoon and the clinic appeared busy. Besides the old truck with the stickers and my Benz, six or seven other vehicles—all 4x4 trucks—took up the remaining graveled parking spaces.

Not a single truck was clean. It would take a geologist a week to complete a carbon-dating survey of the last time one was washed. How would I keep my car clean? Leaving my luggage in the trunk, I headed up the steps to the backdoor. There was a chicken in a wire cage sitting in the foyer. "Jesus!" I mumbled, delicately stepping around the squawking creature.

Walking into the waiting room was like walking onto center stage with no idea what you were there for. Hands to mouths, hidden whispers of the assembled townspeople, many of them studying me from head to toe. This must be what Little Richard felt like when he performed north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

"Hello," I said, nodding and bobbing my head while everyone stared. "I'm Ben Hawthorne. The new doctor."

"How old are you, son?" asked one white-haired lady. "Surely you aren't a doctor. Are you a chiropractor?" she added.

"I'm a general physician. Family medicine, including pediatrics," I replied. "Small surgical procedures when needed."

"You went to doctor school in America?" Asked a man who had to be ninety if he was a day. "Or one of those computer school things?"

"Yeah, like Trump College," a lady in a full-length winter jacket, even though it was eighty degrees outside, stated. "I hear his school was a sham," she added. "Sure hope you didn't graduate from there."

"I graduated from Columbia School of Medicine in New York—with honors," I stated. "Then completed my medical residency at Mount Sinai. And an additional fellowship in pediatrics, also at Mount Sinai."

"Sounds fancy," the white-haired lady said. She held her hand up. "Can you burn a wart off? I've had it since the first President Bush was in office. Figured I had nothin' better to do, so I came over today. I'll miss my Maury reruns, but I've probably seen it already."

Oh, God! Save me.