Reunion at Red Paint Bay

by George Harrar

  By tradition the editor of the Register sat at the original oak desk facing the arching window that overlooked Mechanic Street and the tree-lined Common. When he bought the paper ten years ago Simon Greenleaf Howe did as his predecessors for the last century, letting anyone who wanted see into the offices, day or night.

  He sat alone now in the editorial room late Tuesday, production day. The overhead fluorescent lights swayed in the stiff currents of air coming from two floor-size fans in opposite corners. There was the faint hum of the large air conditioning units from the municipal offices next door. Otherwise not a sound. He felt groggy, as if overwhelmed by some sleep-inducing aerosol injected into the office. He rubbed his eyes, trying to bring focus to the page-one proof on his desk and the last-minute story that needed his attention.

  Mother and Child Saved

  from Fiery Crash

  by Ellen Collins

  Randall Caine admits he’s an impulsive man. Fortunately for one little girl, the auto mechanic didn’t think twice when he saw the Chevy Malibu in front of him skid off Dakin Road and burst into flames Monday evening. The 27-year-old Caine literally jumped into the fire to rescue a battered and bruised Viola Lang, age 5.

  The driver, Jennifer Lang, 29, was able to crawl from the burning wreck on her own. Mother and child are recuperating at Bayview Hospital in stable condition. The car and its contents were destroyed, except for a pair of lucky dice hanging from the rearview mirror, which were thrown clear during the spinout.

  Firemen from the Northside Firehouse were practicing ladder techniques in Portland that day and arrived at the scene only in time to douse the smoldering car. For his bravery, Caine is being hailed as “the hero of Dakin Road” by Mayor Joseph Samuels, who later this week …

  Simon pictured the scene—Randy Caine in his blood red RAISIN’ CAINE AUTO PARTS T-shirt plunging into the fire to save a little girl. Randy wasn’t a guy to hesitate while considering consequences. There probably weren’t any consequences worth considering in his world. There was just plunging into the fire or not. This time he plunged. Simon circled the headline with his black marker and wrote, “Inc to 36 pt.” In the body of the story he crossed out literally. How else could a person jump? He drew a line through the whole Northside Firehouse sentence. There was no need to portray the local firemen as practicing at their job while a car burned. It would gall them enough that a Caine, not exactly the first family of Red Paint, was being lauded for courage. The town rowdy had become a hero, and what was Mayor Samuels to do, give Randy a Get Out of Jail Free card? No doubt he would need it soon enough. Simon drew a star in the margin at the dice being thrown clear during the spinout, as if luck had saved them from cremation. It was the kind of quirky detail the Register was known for.

  He scanned the rest of the proof. Man Sues Town Over Landfill Mishap read the lead headline, and underneath: Big Toe Worth $500K? A provocative question indeed. Just below the fold, a grip-and-grin shot of First Red Paint Bank president John DeMonico handing out twenty-year service medals was cropped so tightly that the recipients looked like smiling heads on a platter. Simon scribbled, “These people have necks, don’t they? Recrop.” In a small box next to the picture was the headline 25th Reunion. He had run the notice for the last month, a recurring reminder of his own impending milestone. He could anticipate the question from classmates he hadn’t seen in decades—What happened, Simon? You’re the last person I expected to get trapped in Red Paint. The boy the yearbook had declared Most Likely to Go to Mars now owned the only newspaper in town and lived just a mile from the house he grew up in. There was his name on the last line of the box. Simon Howe—Reunion Publicity. It was hard to explain, even to himself.

  His eyes drifted to the bottom right corner of page one and The Weekly Quotation: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” —T. S. Eliot. “Intriguing choice, Barb,” he wrote to his newly divorced editorial assistant, “but how about something a little more upbeat next week?” That was it, another edition ready for press with barely a glimmer of hard news. On the positive side, he had stretched copy and enlarged pictures to cover all thirty-two pages. It was an achievement worth noting, but to whom? Did Pulitzer give an award for filling space?

  Simon dialed the pressroom, then cradled the phone at his neck as he pulled on his jacket. “I’m done marking up page one, Meg,” he said. “I’ll leave it on my desk.” A few moments later the rear door opened, and the rapist came in. How else could he think of him? It was the first time Simon had seen his new hire at the office. Rigero’s hair was trimmed to the scalp on the sides and his mustache was shaved off, which made him look ten years younger. But instead of seeming like a younger version of himself, he looked like an entirely different person, a complete change of face. It unnerved Simon a little to try to match up the image in his mind with the man in front of him.

  “Ms. Locklear sent me for the proof, Mr. Howe. She’s on paste-up.”

  Simon didn’t recognize the voice, either. It was lighter, with a kind of smoothness to the tone, nothing halting or clipped.

  “Mr. Howe?”

  Simon held out page one. “Here it is, David.”

  Rigero stared at the lead headline. “Kind of strange.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If a big toe’s worth a half a million, how much would fingers go for, or like a head or something?”

  “I don’t know of any blue book of body parts,” Simon said. “They’re worth whatever a jury says.”

  Rigero held out his left hand in a fist and opened his fingers one at a time, as if counting up how much each one could bring.

  There was something about Davey that seemed odd to Simon lately. The boy hadn’t grown noticeably. His hair was the same—gelled up to make him appear taller. His voice didn’t have any hint of adolescent timbre to it yet. He still dashed and crashed around the house, still curled up on the couch between them watching a movie on Friday evenings, still wanted to be read to at night and tickled to get out of bed in the morning. But there was an added dimension to all these things, something unfamiliar just below the facade. Like at this moment, standing in the driveway with an object in his hand, staring into the backyard. His chin was slightly turned up, inclining his gaze to the trees. Simon watched him for a minute and was amazed at how motionless the boy could be when he wanted to. Not a trace of hyperactivity. But what could make him want to stay so still? Simon pulled back from the kitchen window, went to the side door, and stepped outside. Davey’s hand was empty now. He was looking at his feet.

  “What’s up, buddy?”

  “Nothing.”

  Simon moved closer, trying to detect any bulge in a pocket or shirt that might hint at the hidden item. Then he saw the drawing on the front of Davey’s shirt, white on black, small skeletons floating in the air. He reached out and grabbed a bit of the cloth.

  Davey jumped back. “What are you doing?”

  Simon pulled the bottom taut, exposing the words—DEAD BABIES. “Where’d you get this?”

  The boy looked down at his chest. “I don’t know. I’ve had it for like forever.”

  “Mom didn’t buy it for you?”

  Davey shook his head. “I buy my own stuff.”

  “With our money.”

  “What am I supposed to do, get a job to pay for clothes?”

  The tone was combative, as so often lately, but Simon wouldn’t take the bait. “A paper route wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “You could earn your spending money.”

  “Sorry, Dad, but the only paper in town pays kids three bucks an hour.”

  “Plus tips.” Simon stared at the odd expression on the dead babies, as if they were in a blissful state of nonexistence. It wasn’t a gory depiction at all. Still, not appropriate. “I don’t want you wearing that to school.”

  The boy kicked the toe of his sneaker into the ground, sending up a clump of grass. “The teachers don’t care. They can’t stop you anyway. It’s like my freedom to wear what I want.”


  “Sorry, kiddo, but my responsibility as a parent trumps your freedom of expression. Dead babies aren’t a suitable thing to be wearing on a shirt anywhere, let alone at school. And don’t kick up the grass.”

  Davey stopped his foot in midair and set it down again. Then he put his hands on his hips, a provocative little pose. “Can I go now?”

  “Sure,” Simon said, and he really was happy at that moment for his son to get out of his sight.

  When Amy came through the front door, he was already pouring wine in the kitchen. “You’re late,” he called into her, “so I started without you.”

  She stepped out of her shoes, leaving them in the hallway. “I had to go to an antiviolence workshop in Portland. It ran over.”

  He poured the Merlot to the brim, red filling her glass. It was a challenge for him, how high he could go without spilling. “Change anybody’s mind from proviolence to antiviolence?”

  She took the glass in two hands and sipped, as if from a chalice. “You should realize by now your sarcasm is useless on me. It just doesn’t stick.”

  “That’s why I can be as sarcastic as I want. You don’t take it personally.”

  Amy opened the refrigerator and pulled out a celery stalk. She swirled it in her wine, then bit off the end. “Davey upstairs?”

  Simon nodded. “You know he’s wearing a T-shirt with dead babies on it?”

  She did seem to know. “I think it’s an undead, vampire kind of thing the kids are into. I don’t like it either. Maybe I’ll make it disappear the next time he puts it in the wash.” She turned onto the side porch and flopped on the wicker sofa. It was detox time.

  “So,” Simon said, sitting on the window ledge across from her. That was all he ever needed to say.

  “The climax of my day was the tarantula lady. She lives in one of those new monstrosities in Bay Estates. Three thousand square feet just for herself and a dozen tarantulas.”

  “She keeps tarantulas?”

  “She rescues ones that are injured or deformed. She’s actually quite famous in spider circles. She’s written books on baboon spiders, mouse spiders, bird-eating spiders.”

  Simon dipped the tip of his finger in the wine and ran it around the rim of the glass. It was a strangely pleasant sensation. “So why’s she seeing you—a troublesome tarantula?”

  “She’s obsessed with observing every little event in her life like it’s deeply meaningful. She’s all wrapped up in memory.”

  “That doesn’t sound so serious.”

  “It is for her. She never sees the big picture. She thinks her life is an accumulation of minutely analyzed experiences, and she feels compelled to relate every one of them to me.”

  Simon yawned at the thought of it. “I don’t know how you can listen to that stuff all day. It’s basically people saying, ‘Aren’t I a fascinating human being with all of these weird thoughts for you to interpret?’ ”

  Amy bit off another piece of wine-soaked celery. “And you know this from what, your nonexistent first-hand experience with treatment yourself?”

  “All I know about therapy I learned from you.”

  She wiped her lips with her hand. “At the end of the session I stood up, her cue to leave, and she says, ‘I feel like I’m just getting started. I want to go for another hour.’ I said, ‘Let’s keep to our regular schedule.’ She said she’d pay me double. She was desperate to keep talking about herself and I’m thinking, This is your problem, you consume yourself focusing on every stray bit of your life. I tried reasoning with her, I tried coaxing her, I tried being forceful with her, and then I decided that was wrong, I was playing into her, so I picked up the phone. She got the message. She left.”

  “Good, you—”

  “Wait, that’s not all. I went out to my car, checked my rearview mirror, and there she was, standing right behind me. If I hadn’t looked, I would have run her over.”

  Simon thought about the bizarre situation taking shape and the jeopardy Amy had been in. Driving over someone could never be explained, even if the victim was asking for it. “What did you do?”

  “I leaned out to talk to her, but she put her hands over her ears. So I hit the horn. She left.”

  He hoisted his glass in the air. “Congratulations. You won.”

  “Therapy isn’t a power struggle. I’m not supposed to induce anxiety in my patients. She surprised me, and I reacted badly.”

  He leaned across the space between them and gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I’m sure you’ll be ready for her next time.”

  The message on the postcard said: “What good are funerals? They offer no solace. If God had all possibilities in His hands at Creation, was Death really the best He could come up with as The End? Faithfully …”

  The signature was unreadable. The first letter looked like a ragged F or P. The rest of the name ran together, a row of inverted v’s, like a child’s drawing of waves. Simon turned the card over. GREAT SALT LAKE was scrolled atop a borderless expanse of water. On the side hung a white bag, thumbnail size, marked GENUINE GSL SALT. He rolled the bag between his fingers as he walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. Amy was at the breakfast table hammering the keys of her laptop. It was her day to enter session notes.

  He waited for her to look up. “Do we know anyone who died recently in Salt Lake?”

  “I don’t think people drown there. You can almost sit on the water.”

  “I meant in the city.” Simon held the card in front of her eyes.

  “It does make you think,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Why God created the kind of death we have out of all the possibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  “He could have had everyone die at the same age, or everyone die painlessly, or have the dead reappear as spirits to reassure us they’re doing okay on the other side—that one would have been especially nice.”

  “Maybe God created all those possibilities in other worlds. We just got the one with frequently painful death and unknown afterlife.”

  Amy pointed at the card. “Did you notice, this is addressed to Master Simon Howe.”

  He looked again. “I haven’t been called Master since my grandmother died and stopped sending me birthday cards.”

  Amy reached up and squeezed the bag of salt. “Sending a tourist card from a funeral, that sounds like something one of your cousins would do.”

  Simon took the postcard and slid it under the bright yellow fish magnet on the refrigerator, which is where they saved all the odd things they might need later.

  He stood in the semicircle of his reporters and wrote Story Ideas on the easel. The black marker squeaked across the paper, leaving a faint grade-school smell. Outside the window Erasmus Hall, Red Paint’s resident harbinger of the apocalypse, shook a fistful of tracts at anyone passing by. “Repent!” filtered through the glass, a scratchy, almost plaintive plea. Erasmus was losing his voice.

  A purposeful cough drew Simon’s attention back into the newsroom. “Okay, Barbara,” he said, “anything interesting from the Selectmen this week?”

  His editorial assistant stood up and smoothed her black skirt down her legs. “They just faxed over the agenda,” she said. “They’re supposed to debate the town meeting article on the Common improvements, but Jack Harris may show up again and make a fuss about them breaking the open meeting law a couple weeks ago. They had him thrown out last time.”

  Simon wrote Possible Chaos at Selectmen’s Meeting. “Sign up Ron to go with you in case Harris shows,” he said. “We don’t want to miss a shot of the Selectmen tossing him out the door this time.” Simon turned toward Joe Armin, a young man with an inch-long pin through his left ear, which he pulled at whenever anyone was looking his way. “How’s the reunion preview going?”

  Joe tugged at his ear. “Don’t take this wrong, chief, but your class was wicked dull. All anybody remembers is stealing the school bell and running somebody’s bra up the flagpole. Maybe because it’s been so long
nobody can remember anything interesting.”

  “It was only twenty-five years ago.”

  Joe whistled at the thought of it. “Man, I haven’t even lived that long.”

  It was true—no one on the staff except Barbara was within a decade in age of their editor. The paper couldn’t afford to pay for maturity or experience, and why would anyone with either choose to work in Red Paint, Maine? Simon glanced at the railroad station clock jutting from the back wall as he did reflexively a half-dozen times a day, even though time was stuck there at 7:45. A.m. or p.m.? When exactly did time stop at the Register?

  His gaze returned to the front of the room. “Check with Holly Green over at the bank, Joe. She was president of our class. She’ll come up with some stories. Okay, Ellen, what do you have on the features side?”

  A woman in jeans and a sleeveless yellow top straightened in her chair. “I got a call from a woman at 33 Larkspur Drive,” she said, flipping through her black reporter’s notebook. “Elizabeth Nichols. She says the Virgin Mary appeared in her backyard.”

  Ellen laughed a little, as did Simon, but no one else. “I guess none of you was here when she showed up in the freezer frost at Bay Market,” he said. They looked blankly at him, confirming his assumption. “So Ellen, how has Mary chosen to incarnate herself this time?”

  The reporter’s face contorted, as if she were imagining herself in the Virgin’s predicament. “She’s sitting in a mound of dirt. The family was putting in a therapeutic spa for their son …” Ellen checked her notes again. “… John. He’s the boy who was paralyzed from the waist down playing football last year. His mother said that yesterday morning she felt something calling to her to look out her bedroom window, and there was the Virgin. She made the workers stop digging right away.”

  Donna, the most timid woman who had ever worked for him, raised her hand, which he had made clear was never necessary in his newsroom. He nodded her way. “How does Mrs. Nichols know it’s really the Virgin?” she said in a voice so low everyone had to lean toward her to hear.