The copters were in Central Oregon, officials from the U.S. Forest Service would later note, to do reconnaissance in advance of an Aug. 21 visit to the dry, wooded region by President George W. Bush. “They were doing routine surveillance,” according to Ron Pugh, a Forest Service special agent. The president planned to speak in Camp Sherman, a little town near Black Butte, and to call, controversially, for the “thinning” of 20 million acres of fire-prone public forests.

Don Berry is detached from the fray over Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative, but as the choppers flew near Sisters that day, he gazed skyward for much of their 90-minute flight. “They came right over the top of us,” he remembers, “and we watched them land, and then I looked up at the mountains, where they’d flown.”

“Chuck,” Berry said at that point, “I hope what I’m seeing out there is a cloud.”

It was not a cloud. That afternoon, Forest Service lookouts detected high columns of smoke rising from what would soon be called the Bear Butte and Booth fires. The fires were initially about 14 miles apart. They were first noted within two hours of one another — at 1:30 p.m. and 3:23 p.m., respectively — and they quickly became sprawling infernos. Still burning, they have now merged and have eaten across nearly 90,000 acres of remote forest dominated by lodgepole pine and Douglas fir.

The “B & B” fires were first noticed 11 days after Central Oregon’s most recent lightning storm, and they are now doing battle with 2,200 soot-smeared firefighters, most of whom are camping out on the rodeo grounds near Sisters. The fires have cost taxpayers over $20 million in firefighting fees; forced hundreds of homeowners to temporarily evacuate; closed roads; and thrashed Central Oregon’s tourist economy. As yet, though, no one knows how the fires started; no one can say whether the helicopters had anything to do with the flames.

Which means that speculation is spreading like, well, wildfire. On the virtuous, leftmost edge of Oregon’s political universe, out where the arugula is organic and the coffee shade-grown, a theory is taking root. Bush’s cronies set the fires, supposedly, so as to create the perfect backdrop for the president’s speech. It’s obvious. Just look at the photo ops he got out of the fires — at the way many Oregon TV stations appointed their stories on Bush’s visit with blazing footage from the B & B fires. When Bush addressed 600 invitation-only Republicans at a resort called Sunriver on Aug. 21 (he was smoked out of Camp Sherman), he didn’t even need to allude to the B & B Complex. His pyro henchmen had already ensured that that the videotape did all the talking. The trees gotta go, the pictures were saying, or every forest will burn just like this one.

The W-plays-with-matches theory emerges at a pivotal moment. Bush is now trying to rally support for a congressional bill that would give his year-old Healthy Forest Initiative some teeth. House Bill 1904 — passed by the House and soon to get a Senate hearing — would suspend environmental and judicial review of most fire-prone timber sales and would enable loggers to harvest some old growth trees that are not now federally protected. Environmentalists worry that the bill’s passage would give the president a ticket to make good on his stated hope of doubling logging in Western forests. They say they’re loath to let him market his plan by setting a couple of fires. As is common among liberals and leftists, there is much fuel for their anger — the 2000 Florida election, the erosion of civil liberties, the Iraq war. Here, environmental issues are especially important. They already hate Bush for weakening the Endangered Species Act and for derailing what they saw as a hopeful trend. Under Clinton, the Forest Service was getting greener. Now the agency is taking direction from a former timber lobbyist — Mark Rey, the undersecretary of agriculture.

Portland’s daily newspaper, the Oregonian, and Oregon Public Broadcasting have given serious coverage to the argument that Bush allies may have set the fire. But larger environmental groups such as the Oregon Natural Resources Council have shied away from it, perhaps for fear of appearing paranoid, and so the conspiracy theory may never get a full hearing outside of a few funky cafes.

Randy Wight doubts the helicopters had anything to do with the flames. Wight is a captain for the Deschutes County, Ore., Sheriff’s Office and the coordinator of the Central Oregon Arson Task Force, which is now single-handedly investigating the B & B fires — and planning to release a report on their cause next week. “I don’t have any indication that it was political arson,” Wight told me. “The only people discussing that is the media.” Wight went on to say that the fires could have been started by a lightning strike whose fire smoldered for days, held in check for a time by the rain that came with the thunder. “Humans could have ignited the fires accidentally,” he added. “We really just don’t know what started them, and at this point we’re not foreclosing any possibility.”

The task force is a 15-year-old group comprised, in part, of reps from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Oregon State Police and five local fire departments. Environmentalist Joe Keating is dubious of the group’s claims to neutrality. “The fox is guarding the chicken coop,” says Keating, the issues coordinator for the 500-member Oregon Wildlife Federation. (He is also a part-time issues coordinator for the Sierra Club.)

Keating notes that, if the fires are deemed to be human-caused, investigators will then take direction from the agency whose land is burning — in this case, the Forest Service. And, he argues, “the Forest Service has a vested interest in saying it wasn’t arson. Their boss, Mark Rey, likes Bush; he likes the Healthy Forest Initiative.”

Keating has made a solo, and as-yet unheeded, call on the FBI and the Oregon governor’s office to launch their own investigations of the B & B fires. “I smell a rat,” he says. “These fires were the perfect backdrop for Bush to talk about his forest plan.”

Keating, 60, is a former Army lieutenant and investment banker who lives near me in Portland, riding his bicycle everywhere, a fisherman’s hat askew on his sparse horseshoe of white hair. Over the years, he has helped launched Oregon’s Pacific Green Party and also headed up a “Yellow Bikes” program, which saw him scattering unlocked, donated old bicycles around Portland, so that pedestrians could hop on, gratis, and ride. He is a socially nimble fellow who has at times slipped into a gray suit and tie to lobby in Washington, D.C. But in his pursuit of fire justice, he has enlisted some rather fringy and colorful scouts to search for hard evidence. One of them is named Russ Taylor; I called him too.

“I’m backing up a logging road at the moment,” Taylor said over his crackling cell. “I’m following up on a credible lead from a woman here in Detroit, and –”

“Detroit?” I asked. Detroit is a small Oregon town over 20 miles northwest of where the B & B fires started.

“This woman,” Taylor continued, undeterred, “used to work for the Forest Service. She was the secretary for this guy who was a real 7-foot timber beast — they called him Chainsaw Dave — and her son, he was out in the woods here and he saw a young man in his 20s. This is way out in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt, and the young man was wearing a blue, lined fleece jacket. Now, I’ve been around pilots and that’s what they wear.” Taylor alleged that the pilot was a Bush operative, and that he touched down to set fires.

“But what difference does a fire in Detroit make?” I asked.

“You make it look like there’s a pattern,” Taylor explained. “You set a fire here, you set a fire there, and then everybody just says, ‘Oh, it’s just a dry day. The woods are burning all over the place.’

When I remained unconvinced, Taylor continued emphatically: “Look, we can’t give you a smoking gun on a silver platter. I’m sorry, but if you’re a real investigative reporter, you’ll need to do some digging around. You’ll need to go out to Sisters yourself.”

He was right, of course. I packed and got in the car.

The drive east from Portland, over Mount Hood to Sisters, 160 miles away, is essentially a journey from green, fecund lushness into a tinder box. You ride up through the rain shadow of the Cascades, and then, soon after you begin rolling down the east flank of Hood, the grass by the roadside becomes tawny and wispy. The smell of sage is pungent, and the woods are piled with the downed trunks of spindly, brittle dead trees. Here and there you see stands of completely charred forests: naked black trees straight and limbless as telephone poles.

Like much of the American West, Oregon has felt the ill effects of Smokey Bear and his 50-plus year campaign to tame nature and its inevitable wildfires. Though the Forest Service now manages “controlled burns,” many long-suppressed blazes are erupting with a coiled vengeance. Hundreds of thousands of forested acres have burned in Oregon over the past five years. House Bill 1904, co-sponsored by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., is a direct response to what he calls “catastrophic wildfires.” It’s also a sort of litmus test in ever-evolving Central Oregon.

The region, which encompasses Bend, population 52,000, and six or eight much smaller burghs scattered across the western fringe of Oregon’s expansive high desert, is emblematic of the new American West, where, mountain bikers, vegans and tourists commingle with rock-ribbed loggers and ranchers. It’s a region where the ham and eggs breakfast has been supplanted, in large part, by fresh bagels and cappuccino. The residents get along, mostly; they tend to refrain from frothing on political matters. But a plain fact is that the old stalwarts generally regard HB 1904 as a cool breeze of common sense. The newcomers and their allies tend to see the bill as a manifesto for butchery. They’re hoping to find a cigarette lighter with a “W” on it.

Hoping against hope, maybe. Forest arson is a damnably difficult crime to trace. There are no witnesses, typically, and the evidence burns. Ron Pugh, who also serves as an investigator for Central Oregon’s Arson Task Force, estimates that his group catches fire starters “less than 5 percent of the time,” and he notes that the Booth fire may prove uncommonly tough. The wind has shifted over the ignition point two or three times and the evidence, if such exists, has been quite thoroughly cooked and recooked.

Once I pulled into Sisters, population 1,080, and became acclimated to the smoky haze hanging in the cloudless sky there, I had little choice but to begin my digging at the local organic bakery/cafe, a place called Angeline’s. I bought a gluten-free muffin and then wandered back to the green grass of the patio and spoke with the members of a Sisters band called the Blue D’Arts, who were setting up to play an evening of acoustic folk.

“You’d think it wouldn’t be possible,” said the D’Arts’ lanky guitarist Dennis McGregor, “that Bush would start a fire just to be expedient. Would he really that be that deceptive, that cruel? Yeah, that’s how he does everything — the election, for instance.”

An hour or so later, McGregor was inciting the crowd. “Was it a brush fire or a Bush fire?” he crowed from the stage. “Who started the fire?”

“Bush!” The response was unanimous, and rather spirited. Angeline’s has a beer and wine license. By dusk, in fact, there were about 50 people sipping away in the cool evening air. I wandered among them. Several folks spoke of seeing three Marine One helicopters flying over the now-burnt areas early on the afternoon of Aug. 19. “They were flying so low, it was scary,” bartender Karly Lusby told me.

Up the street at a bar called Bronco Billy’s, a somewhat schnookered source, speaking on the promise that he would remain anonymous, told me that a Forest Service lookout spoke of the copters over his radio — and then heard his boss say, “You didn’t see that.” The story echoed something I’d read in an e-mail Russ Taylor forwarded to me — an anonymous note about a “guy … working in the woods” who suddenly found his cell phone inoperable, the signal scrambled, as the copters flew overhead.

I wanted something a little more solid, so I went back to Angeline’s and spoke to co-owner Henry Rhett, who, I’d been told, had the skinny on some timing devices supposedly found near the spot where the Booth fire began. “I feel sheepish even mentioning it,” he told me, “because what I heard was like fifth-hand.”

I decided, at this juncture, that I needed a drink. I ordered a Mirror Pond ale and then, luckily, found someone who could elucidate the rumors swirling around me. Bonnie Malone, 56, is a chiropractor/social activist who is arguably the dean of Sisters’ liberal community. (The Chamber of Commerce named her “Citizen of the Year” for 2002.) “People here are scared of what’s going to happen if House Bill 1904 passes,” she said. “Timber companies have stolen from the woods near here before.”

Malone noted that many Sisters residents still remember Layton and Bartlett, a Bend logging firm whose principals were, in 1990, found guilty of illegally cutting 1,800 trees — federally protected old-growth — about 10 miles south of Sisters. James W. Layton and Frederick W. Bartlett each drew 18 months in federal prison.

Now the loggers are “after our old-growth again,” Malone said. “It’s hard not to be skeptical of a forest plan that bypasses environmental review. Why do we have to cut these trees down so fast, without even considering the facts? Didn’t we just rush into the Iraq war like that?”

Malone wore a denim jacket and peace symbol earrings, and as she leaned toward me and spoke, her manner was quiet, concerned. She took pains to convince me that Sisters was not split asunder by forest politics. “Most of my friends are Republicans,” she said, and then she pointed me toward the most ardent among them.

John Zapel, 39, was reading a book on the aerospace industry when I met him the next day in the vinyl-upholstered booth of a Sisters restaurant called the Gallery. “I’m a nerd,” he told me. “I’m the guy who carried a briefcase in high school.” Pale-complected with sandy blond hair and glasses, Zapel ran a logging company until last year, when he sold his equipment and became, reluctantly, a logger for hire and a part-time lecturer on topics like “fuel load reduction” in dry forests.

“It was those guys who never take showers that drove me out of the business,” he said. “Earth Liberation Front types. For 10 years, I got vandalized constantly. The last time they did $420,000 worth of damage to my harvester. They burnt it to a crisp and then they wrote all over the cab: ‘Stop Killing Trees.’” Zapel showed me some pictures of the ruined machinery. “The lunatic fringe does exist,” he said, “and that’s the first place I’d look now. It’s a good bet that these fires were set by ELF or some goofy thing like that. Consider their track record — the apartment building they burned in San Diego, that ski lift at Vail.”

I couldn’t fathom why enviros would burn trees.

“The president’s coming and they believe in disruption of process. They’re saboteurs.” Zapel stabbed a fork at his french fries. His right hand was missing two fingers, thanks to an ax. “Eugene is just two hours away,” he reminded me, “and that’s the premier bastion of the whole anarchist movement.”

Eventually, Zapel and I stepped outside, onto the sidewalk. The smoky haze was still there, and the sight made him angry. “The most disgusting thing to me is that this didn’t need to happen,” he said. “We could’ve gone in there and thinned. We could’ve reduced the fuels on those forests. But now they’re gone, and for the next 40 years we’re staring at a Holocaust. That’s sad for everybody.” Back in Portland, I talked one last time with Joe Keating, of the Oregon Wildlife Federation, and his scout Russ Taylor. We met for morning coffee, and Taylor, a 50-something freelance photographer, showed up at the cafe wearing a white straw Stetson. In his arms, he bore an aerial photograph he’d taken of a forest ravaged by clear-cuts. “The pilot who flew me that day died a very mysterious death soon after the photo was taken,” he said. “His plane crashed just after takeoff, and there were no mechanical problems.”

“Russ,” Keating implored in soothing tones, “Russ.”

“Yeah, I’m one of those conspiracy theorists,” Taylor continued, “and this goes real deep for me. It goes back to when a logging truck ran over my dog when I was 4. It goes back to when I was 8 and a bunch of redneck kids stole the hunting knife my father gave me as he was dying.”

Keating had both elbows on the table now, and he was cradling his bald head in his hands, his brow wrinkled as he looked down at a newspaper. Here was a man trying to do something very old-school and American (it was Thomas Jefferson, remember, who championed “unremitting vigilance”), and yet he was finding himself mixed up with what he gently called “loose cannons and wing nuts.” What on earth enabled him to soldier on?

Optimism and chipper resolve. “We want to get to the bottom of this quickly,” he said, “before the trees are all gone, and I’ll tell you, if that report comes out and it says the fires were not arson, then I’ll scream and yell. Then I’ll bring in the Sierra Club and all the other big groups and we’ll say, ‘This is exactly why we called for an independent investigation.’ If they say it is arson, then I ask questions: ‘Are you considering political arson? What is your time frame?’ If the smell increases, I increase.”

Keating grinned. “These fires are my favorite thing to talk about right now,” he said, “but I gotta go.” He tapped his newspaper, rolled now, against the table one time and then he stood up, a sturdy old guy in a T-shirt with a picture of an artichoke on it, and he strolled away down the street toward his office. His campaign to “shine the light of truth” on the planet’s most powerful political figure was still on.

“Fuck!” Jackal said when he saw me. “I wish I had a fucking crowbar!”

His voice carried rage, certainly, but it was also convivial. Jackal was pleased, it seemed, to find someone intrigued by his labors, and me? I was quite curious. This gnarled, 25-year-old punk in baggy fatigues and a black hooded sweatshirt emblazoned “Profane Existence” seemed archetypal. Here was the angry soul of the anarchist horde that had, the night before, shattered windows and looted downtown Seattle, prompting the city’s mayor, Paul Schell, to call in the National Guard. Jackal had helped trash both McDonald’s and Starbucks. I stepped toward him, squinting in the shower of glass.

The car, it turned out, belonged to Jackal himself. Well, kind of: “My best friend gave it to me a couple days ago,” he said. “It was having mechanical problems, so he wanted us to beat the shit out of it.” Jackal pried the hood open and, with a screwdriver, tore a metal band off the carburetor. “Check it out!” he said. “No more VIN numbers.” The vehicle was bereft of license plates too — of any numbers that would make it identifiable to the police — and now Jackal announced plans to “hop in and go flying right into downtown. I ain’t gonna stop for any cop that comes near me,” he said. “I’m gonna leave this car there in the road, blocking everything.”

Jackal, who lives on the streets of Los Angeles, longed to become legendary. He wanted to become a hero back at “the squat,” the abandoned Seattle warehouse that he and roughly 100 other young WTO protesters seized on Nov. 28. The squat, which the protesters vacated late last week, had 12 cavernous sleeping rooms, a makeshift kitchen, even an indoors “anarchist basketball court” featuring a hoop fashioned out of a milk crate.

Jackal had helped make the place habitable, hauling 5-gallon buckets of water up a long flight of stairs into a kitchen that lacked running water. Still, his co-tenants spurned him. He was a hard-bitten thug, a virtually illiterate ex-con, and the anarchists around him were naifs. They were college kids and suburban teen runaways who’d taken over the building peacefully, in order to secure housing for Seattle’s homeless; they spent most of their time at the squat talking about things like veganism and animal rights. Jackal didn’t fit in, and his solitude became painfully clear now in the parking lot as two fellow squatters approached. Jackal told them of his plans to drive the Valiant through police barricades, into downtown.

“Like that car’s fucking bulletproof,” said one of the kids.

Jackal stuffed his hands in his pockets and backpedaled a couple steps toward the car. Then the other kids left and together he and I meandered away to talk over lunch.

How much can you believe of what you are told by a guy who gives you a fake name — a name that is typically used to describe wild dogs? I don’t know. All I know is that, over chicken burritos that afternoon, Jackal delivered a colorful story.

“My parents were heroin addicts,” he said. “I only met them once, when I was 16 and they’d just gotten out of prison. I was living in this abandoned building and they came by and chatted to me for 15 minutes and then left. They wanted nothing to do with me.”

Jackal was raised in Dallas by devoutly Baptist foster parents — a lawyer and a nurse, he claims — and at times his childhood was idyllic. He remembered Lake Ray Hubbard, near Garland, Texas, where he angled for catfish with his foster dad, and remembered a certain foster grandmother he loved. Violence was a more prevalent motif, though. “Ever since I was a little kid,” Jackal said, “I’ve had problems with having my space invaded. If I get put in a corner, I flip. I was the only white kid in an all-black [grade] school. Everybody hated me. They’d jump me, 15 people at once, and I’d try to tear their fucking heads off. I’d kick ribs. There’d be broken arms every once in a while, broken legs. I’d twist the body parts and listen to the bones snap.”

At home, Jackal had nightmares — “nightmares of dying by the government, of gunshot wounds. There’d be the sound of helicopters and of sirens, loud screaming fucking sirens. It scared me to death. I’d wake up shaking and crying. I’d hide under the bed. I didn’t tell my foster parents. I didn’t think they’d care, because whenever I told them about the fights at school, they were like, ‘So?’ They were cold.”

They were also liars, Jackal said. “One day when I was 10, I broke into my foster grandmother’s cedar chest, just to see what was in there, and I found my original birth certificate. I was disappointed. I was pissed off. I left my foster parents a note — “Why must you lie?” — and I escaped. I jumped out a second-story window with no plans of going back, ever.”

Jackal hitchhiked to California. He was on a mission to find his birth parents, but what he encountered first was a substitute family — a loose contingent of street kids known as the Hollywood Drunk Punks. “They were the only people who would accept me,” he said of the group he spent five years with, “and they were tough.” Jackal’s tenure began with an initiation rite: He had to prove himself worthy of wearing the Drunk Punks’ signature hairdo, a Mohawk, by “fighting for his ‘hawk,” brawling against a swarm of other boys in his posse. “My ribs were kicked in on both sides,” he said. “I was hospitalized. A lot of punk kids never fight for their ‘hawks, you know, and that’s wrong. The ‘hawk is a warrior symbol.”

We were sitting at the counter beside the coffee lids and the cream and Jackal was slugging the cream, drinking whole glasses full. I watched him. Each of the four fingers on his left hand was tattooed with a letter. “F-U-C-K,” read his fist. Jackal had done the needlework himself. In fact, Jackal had also wrought the tattoos coating his arms — the black skull, the indigo dragon, the logo of a punk band called the Misfits. He once inked skin for a living. Now he makes drawings that tattoo shops buy from him to use as templates. He earns about $200 a month — enough, he says, to get by.

“The Drunk Punks,” he explained, “they showed me how to survive. They showed me how to take a crowbar and bust open a building, and how to get food for free.” Jackal subsists mainly on stuff scavenged from dumpsters; sometimes he robs supermarkets. And sometimes he gets in serious trouble. “A few years ago,” he said, “I was in Florida with my road dog, David Owens, and I was on a bad acid trip. I went into this convenience store, and the guy told me he wouldn’t sell me milk, so I put a bayonet to his neck and I told him I was going to kill him. I didn’t, but they caught me. I got nine months in jail.”

We finished our lunch. We went outside, onto the sidewalk. It was drizzling now, and several teen protesters were huddled beneath a store awning. One was slender and pretty, with a single cheap handcuff inexplicably attached to her wrist. Jackal approached her, then toyed with the dangling cuff. The girl was too naive to be frightened. She smiled. Jackal related his war story.

“I’m not a peaceful protester,” he said. “Me and my friends, we tipped over some dumpsters last night. We broke the windows at Starbucks and looted the place. We got McDonald’s real good. It’s cool. People are standing up and fighting for what they believe in. They’re tearing down the corporations and battling the WTO because it’s screwing over the world.”

The girl, perched on a metal railing, said nothing. Jackal latched himself into her spare handcuff. “I want to kidnap you,” he said with coarse affection. “I want to take you so deep into the underworld that you won’t know where you’re at. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Oooo,” Jackal said, still teasing. “Now, that made me scared.”

He unlocked himself and the girl bolted and then, a few minutes later, Jackal and I were alone in the rain.

“I’m too ugly to have a girlfriend,” he said.

I tried to shrug the comment away. I laughed.

“Really,” Jackal persisted, “It’s true. I’m too ugly. Put that in your story.”

I didn’t see Jackal again until quite late that evening. He was hunched in the stairwell at the squat then, about to embark on what he cryptically called “a mission.” Outside, an emergency curfew was in effect: Black-clad anarchists were not likely to get a warm reception. Still, Jackal rounded up a couple of underlings — teenagers named Pixie and Real — and the squat’s self-appointed security guard, surmising there were no cops in sight, gave us clearance to exit. “Go! Go! Go!” he implored. We surged out the door and then, for roughly five minutes, kicked around, aimless, at a bus shelter.

“What are you guys going to do?” I asked Pixie finally.

Pixie had to think a moment. “If people are acting out against corporate greed,” he said, “well, then we’ll assist them.”

Soon a passerby told us of mayhem up on Capitol Hill, a mile away. We hurried off and found ourselves, eventually, in a thick cloud of tear gas in the parking lot of a gas station surrounded by police. The cops stepped toward us. One got down on his knee and aimed his gun at our heads. I could see his face behind his helmet visor. “Get back!” he said.

I retreated, hands up, but Jackal did not and, as I rushed down the hill, I heard gunfire. It occurred to me that maybe Jackal was dead, and that I could do nothing to help him. I took refuge in a bar, got a drink, made some calls. Then, as I left, I saw Jackal again. He was standing on the corner, holding a liter of water and salving the burning eyes of anyone who’d been stung by the tear gas. “Water?” he asked over and over. “Want some water?” The people who needed it took the bottle from Jackal and dripped it onto their eyes and groaned in relief and handed the bottle back and told Jackal, “Thank you. Thank you.” Jackal stood there until the bottle was dry. Then he walked home to the squat, perhaps happy that, for once, what he’d done mattered to someone.

The greatest myth floating about the post office that summer of 1976 was an ancient one, and it involved Gilmanton’s most famous writer, Grace Metalious, whose blockbuster 1956 novel, “Peyton Place,” aired the pettiness, the crimes and the carnality of, ahem, a small town in New Hampshire. “Peyton Place” spawned a movie and a TV series. It will be reissued today by Northeastern University Press, and reissued again this fall by Random House. But in Gilmanton, a town of 2,600 that I have lived in, at my grandmother’s house, every summer of my life, rumor still insists that Grace did not write the book.

Born Grace DeRepentigny, Metalious was a hard-drinking, sexually frank French Canadian from a rough working-class family and, according to legend, she was too drunk and too randy to compose cogent prose. She may have invented the seamy plot for “Peyton Place,” but she relied (supposedly) on her best friend, Laurie Wilkens — a Barnard grad and the Gilmanton correspondent for the local Laconia Evening Citizen — to actually write the novel. In the mind’s eye of many Gilmantonites, troubled Grace Metalious will be forever escaping her rented tar-paper shack on Loon Pond Road and trundling up Frisky Hill to find solace — and serious editorial help — at Shaky Acres, as Laurie’s commodious old farmhouse is called.

Grace died of cirrhosis in 1964, when she was 39. This spring I deemed it safe to finally investigate the rumors about who really wrote “Peyton Place.”

Laurie Wilkens is still alive. Now Laurie Wilkens MacFadyen, she is 86 and the proprietor of a Gilmanton dog kennel. I called her up and she was, it seemed, wearied by my probing. “Grace would come up here in the evenings,” she said, “and we’d sit by the fire and she’d read what she’d written that day in a lovely voice. That’s all there is to it. I never tried to change a word.”

I decided that an old friend of my grandmother’s, 82-year-old Gerri Besse, might be able to shed some more light on the matter. Besse has lived in Gilmanton since the early ’50s, and she intimated to me that Grace often spent long stretches of time, sometimes a whole week, up at Laurie’s. “Why else would she go up there,” she reasoned, “except to get help on the book?”

I asked Besse how she knew of Grace’s long visits.

“Well,” she said, “It’s just one of those things you hear and then you hear it again several times and then it just becomes old hat.”

Besse suggested that, for confirmation, I call Marion McIntyre, who ran the Gilmanton Corner Library for 23 years, until 1997. McIntyre started off by noting that once, on a warm day in July, Grace Metalious showed up at the Corner Store in a “long mink coat. There was nothing on underneath,” McIntyre said, “and she went into the phone booth and flashed herself! I wasn’t there, but this is what I’ve been told. In those days,” McIntyre continued, “morals were a lot different and …”

Eventually, I realized I needed to phone Roger Clark. Roger, 55, is the son of Al Clark, the leader of the old post office gang. He is also an ex-hippie and a sort of uncle to me. His son and I were best friends throughout adolescence, and many times in my youth Roger honored me with small wisdoms that my own parents — older, more stolid — could never impart. “A couple beers is OK,” he’d say, “but stay away from mescaline … If you get trashed and throw up, Bill, at least have the courtesy to clean up the mess in the morning.”

Roger was, it turned out, also certain that Grace was not the sole author of Peyton Place. “She couldn’t put two sentences back to back,” he said, “and Laurie was an educated, wonderful lady. She was an excellent writer and, as a reporter, she knew what went on in town; she probably knew more than Grace. There were poker games then where men would get together and gamble money that couldn’t be lost; someone’s house would be gambled away. And then there was a guy who drove out onto an icy pond with another man’s wife. The ice cracked and they both drowned.”

The poker players depicted in “Peyton Place” are the town’s gentry and, while the book does include two haunting lakeside trysts, they involve summertime swimming, instead of ice. “Peyton Place” is not a roman ` clef: It mainly distills, rather than exposes, Gilmanton. But somehow it felt like nonfiction to Grace Metalious’ neighbors; it spurred a few folks in town to murmur threats of a libel suit. And, Roger stressed, the book does culminate with a murder closely modeled after an actual killing. In 1946, a Gilmanton girl, 16-year-old Barbara Roberts, fatally shot her father, who had been molesting her for years, and buried his body in a sheep pen. In “Peyton Place,” teenager Selena Cross likewise murders her incestuous rapist (in this case, it’s her stepfather, Lucas Cross) and buries him in the family sheep pen.

“People talked about the dark things that went on in Gilmanton,” Roger said. “They talked about them all the time, but not publicly. You don’t put that stuff in a book. Seeing it in print — that was excruciatingly painful to a lot of people.”

There was a brief silence, so I could hear the crackling on the phone line, and then I asked Roger why, if Laurie wrote the book, she didn’t take credit for it.

“I suspect,” Roger said, “that she was protective of her reputation. She was well-liked; she was a gracious host. She and her husband owned one of the first TVs in town and often on a Sunday, there’d be 15 or 20 people in her living room. We’d be watching Ed Sullivan or whatever on the five-inch black-and-white screen, and Laurie would be passing out crackers and popcorn. She was the life of the party. Can’t you see why she wouldn’t want her name on that book?”

Well, kinda. What I think is that no book is wholly written by a solitary mind toiling away in a quiet room with the door shut. All writing is collaborative, the result of a dialogue between the writer and his editor and his friends and the people he meets in cocktail lounges. Some writing is shockingly collaborative. Ezra Pound, we now know, played a major part in refining “The Wasteland,” ostensibly written by T.S. Eliot. Likewise, editor Gordon Lish rigorously pruned the sentimentality out of Raymond Carver’s early stories. As a recent New York Times Magazine story makes clear, Lish cut literally half the words from the Carver collection, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and rewrote 10 of the 13 story endings.

No one will ever prove definitively that Laurie Wilkens wrote “Peyton Place,” but as I researched this story, I found, here and there, small suggestions that, well, maybe she did more than offer encouragement. First, there is the sad fact that all three Metalious novels after “Peyton Place” were poorly reviewed and that one, the 1959 “Return to Peyton Place,” was actually ghostwritten. (Metalious produced only a sloppy, booze-garbled draft, according to “Inside Peyton Place,” a biography by Emily Toth.)

Then, there are Wilkens’ undeniable literary gifts. The articles Laurie wrote for the Citizen in the ’50s are eloquent glimpses of a small town, sparkling vignettes that itch to transcend the limitations of daily journalism. “Up at this correspondent’s home,” she wrote after the national press swarmed Gilmanton, seeking Grace, “summer pickling was in process and workers in the garden, in the barn and in the house were suddenly horrified to see huge shiny cars zooming into the yard and parking all over the road, while bevies of men, all sizes and shapes, leaped out with purposeful gleams in their eyes.”

Laurie was 11 years older than Grace, and maternal. “In moments of crisis,” writes Toth, “Grace would call Laurie — 1 a.m. calls from the Plaza. Fearing something terrible, Laurie would rush to New York.” Is it possible that Grace also turned to Laurie in moments of literary crisis? All I know is that, on a 1994 video produced by New Hampshire Public Television, Laurie describes how the murder scene in “Peyton Place” came into being. She learned about it and then she told Grace and Grace “wrote it down,” Laurie says, staring straight into the camera, “almost exactly as I told it to her.”

I was pulling that tape out of my VCR the other day when the phone rang. Roger. Spring had arrived in Gilmanton, he said. The snow was melting, and the tree toads and the swamp toads were starting to croak. But he was curious what I made now of all those stories about Laurie and Grace.
I didn’t tell him right away because, as it turned out, we began clowning around. We spouted silliness, as we sometimes do, in thick, faux-Yankee accents. And then, just before we hung up, I swooped back toward the whole myth of Grace and I cracked a joke that had us both howling. “Rahjah,” I said, “ya didn’t think I was gonna go and wreck a good roomah, now did ya?”