“I heard he stopped,” said Maurice. “Beena told me he called Maisy and swore to her he was all done with booze, that he’s taking AA lessons in Watertown.” Ronny considered this.
“Does AA stand for Alcoholic Always?” he asked.
“You mean he didn’t go?” Maurice said.
“He went once,” said Ronny, “but some social worker had come around and put the fear in him. By the next day, I guess, the fear had went away.”
“Did he stop drinking?” asked Sally.
“Do nuns go into heat?” Ronny answered. Maurice thought about this.
“I don’t know,” Maurice said. “Do they?”
“No, Maurice, I’m afraid they don’t,” said Ronny. He cracked another noisy peanut. There were some subtle things, Ronny Plunkett knew, that one couldn’t learn from a satellite dish.
“You mean to tell me he’s still drinking?” asked Maurice, and shook his head sadly.
“I ain’t surprised,” said Sally. “Beena’s little girl goes to Al-A-Tot in Watertown. That’s for the kids of alcoholics. Beena’s been reading all kinds of material on it. Her ex-husband was a flaming alcoholic, you know. It’s a disease, is what it is, like cancer or anything else.”
“Come on,” said Maurice. “A man could quit if he really wanted to.”
“And it’s inherited,” said Sally. “That’s what Beena says. She says it’s passed down from one generation to another.”
“Really?” said Maurice. “I guess our family was lucky to just get the bad-luck gene passed on. Almost everybody died young, but at least there was no alcoholics.” Ronny looked at Maurice Fennelson. It was obvious that a little of the stupid gene, too, had rubbed off on the past proprietor of The Crossroads.
“You know what I think we ought to do?” Ronny asked. Maurice and Sally raised eyebrows simultaneously, another genetic trait some families pass down.
“What?” said Sally.
“Well, everybody’s been moping around here, missing Billy and not saying much about it,” said Ronny. “You know we have. We been feeling bad about Conrad, and even Pike, and we been acting like a morgue down here.”
“So?” Sally replied. “That’s the general idea, ain’t it?”
“But listen to me, people,” said Ronny, and he could hear Billy’s voice, could hear The Kid himself: What you folks missed when you was tromping through the fucking forest to find the goddamn trees is the whole point of my little talk. “Ain’t our Irish ancestors famous for raising hell at a wake, instead of being all hangdog and miserable? I been to a wake over there in Dublin, an uncle of this girl I met in the Canary Islands. We had a hell of a good time. And that’s how our ancestors meant for it to be. But we crossed the ocean, and all our good rituals fell into the hands of women like Prissy Monihan, and now we’re sitting with our fingers up our asses and waiting for the enemy’s next move. Let’s celebrate, goddamnit! Let’s say good-bye to Billy the right way. You know that’s what he’d want.”
“What about Conrad?” said Sally. “Won’t it seem disrespectful?”
“To who?” asked Ronny. “To Prissy? You know, in your own heart, how you feel about Conrad. Why care what this town will say?”
“Only Booster will come,” said Maurice, his eyes sparkling like the true Irish descendant he was. “And I think if Pike’s still drinking, he might as well come too.” The phone rang, a sweet long bleat. Sally took her chin off her hands to answer it.
“That’s all we need,” said Ronny. “Just us. Just our little group. Let’s close the old Crossroads down the right way! Let’s see Billy Plunkett go out in style. Our way, not Prissy’s.” Maurice’s eyes were now glowing, the sparkle having burst into magnificent flame. “And let’s not wait until tonight,” Ronny added. “Let’s start right now. Booster’s probably home. His skidder is broke again.”
“All right!” Maurice said, and pounded his fist on the bar. Ronny smiled. He could hear Billy Plunkett’s voice in the soft whine of the microwave, in the blinking lights of all the Christmasy beer signs, in the old jukebox sitting silent, waiting for quarters.
“That was Dorrie,” Sally told them. She had put the phone back on its cradle and was now tugging at the little hairs that grew beneath her lip, something the electrolysis kit she’d ordered off the shopping channel on television had failed to remove, as promised. “Grammie Fennelson died a couple of hours ago.”
“Lord,” said Maurice, “what next?” He was wondering if the Mattagash hit squad could, in some way, blame him for that, too.
“Poor old soul,” said Sally. “It’s a sin to say it, but it’s only about twenty years overdue.”
“And this was her old house, you’ll remember,” said Maurice. “Built in 1906.”
“In 1896,” said Sally.
“Both going out on the same night,” Maurice said. “Both going home.”
“They say death happens in threes,” said Sally. “She’d be the third.” A look of relief washed over Maurice’s face.
“Well,” Ronny said. “I guess you ought to call Booster. We got all kinds of reason for an Irish wake now.”
***
At the outset of the party, when the first round went about the bar, compliments of Maurice, an extra bottle was opened for Billy Plunkett. It sat, in his honor, on the bar in front of Billy’s favorite stool, the one closest to the jukebox. Sally had already punched “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” and “’Til I’m Too Old to Die Young.”
“Here,” said Pike Gifford. “We might as well do this right.” His eyes were crimson with the effects of a long drinking binge without much sleep, and he was anxious for the little extra shot of vodka to kick in, to take away in a warm wave the uncomfortable feeling he was experiencing, even among his best cronies. Pike suspected they were less than happy with his role in the deaths of Billy and Conrad. But, goddamnit, all he had done was try to shut Lynn’s big mouth. It wasn’t Pike Gifford who pulled the trigger, although every face he’d seen in the past week had seemed to say just that to him. Pike had taken to avoiding faces as a result, hanging out at Billy’s, sleeping in Billy’s bed, touching Billy’s things as though The Kid were still in them. And now and then, if he allowed himself to get a bit sober, he felt unfathomable guilt. It was Billy he missed, Billy he yearned for, Billy who spun around in his nightmares. It wasn’t Conrad. He had tried, a thousand times, to pull the boy’s face up in his mind’s eye, but it was never Conrad. It was always Billy—Billy on his first bicycle, Billy picking hazelnuts along the river, Billy sinking a steady stream of quarters into some jukebox.
“Here,” Pike said again, pulling Billy’s Damn Sea Gulls! hat from his pocket, straightening it out a bit, and draping it from the neck of the lonesome beer bottle.
“Where’d you get that?” Sally asked. Pike had reached down and picked up the hat the night of the shooting. Billy was on his way out the door, on a stretcher carried by two strangers, and Pike wanted him to have something familiar to take along with him. But the doors to the ambulance had already closed and Billy was whisked away in a whirl of flashing blue lights and shrieking noise. The ambulance looked like an old Wurlitzer jukebox to Pike as it squealed over the icy yard and out onto the road to Watertown. Conrad was in that ambulance too, but all Pike could think of was telling Billy, at some future date, “You looked just like you was inside an old Wurlitzer, Bill. I guess all them quarters you spent in your day has guaranteed you a spot in jukebox heaven.” But he would never get the opportunity to tell Billy any such thing.
Sally tacked Billy’s “The Solved Secrets of the Great Monuments” onto the microwave door, next to the infamous skunk sheet. The partyers sat about the horseshoe shape of the bar and stared at Stonehenge. The little group of stick men were all still there, all still busy pulling the large bluestone about on wooden rollers, the air around them no doubt filled with Neolithic swear words and slang. Some jobs
never end, just as Keats’s bride will always be on her Grecian urn, on the way to her wedding, even if, a hundred years ago, she changed her mind about marriage. Decided the guy was a jerk. Dreamed of a career in the Women’s Royal Air Force. Some people are simply stuck doing what they’ve always done.
“You think there’s any chance we might—” Maurice began, his eyes on the huge bluestone, but Ronny interrupted.
“No, Maurice darling,” said Ronny. “This old building will crack in two like a glass box if we try to move it. So get that out of your head.”
“Maybe I will buy that piece of land from Jack Bishop, like Billy suggested,” said Maurice. “Maybe I’ll just go ahead and build me a new bar.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Booster Mullins, cousin to Maurice, grandson also to Mathilda. Now he and Raymond Monihan were stuck with their wives, Dorrie and Lola, every goddamn night of the week. Watertown was too far to drive for hardworking men, but popping by The Crossroads for a couple of fast ones had been a cinch.
Ronny surveyed the scraggly group. Their faces were longer than totem poles as they listened to George Strait sing, “All my ex’s live in Texas. That’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee.” This was not Ronny’s idea of a rollicking Irish wake. Billy was his brother, dammit, and if anyone missed The Kid sorely, it was Ronny Plunkett. And if it had to be Ronny Plunkett to get the show on the road, so be it.
“You ever hear the story about Billy and the schoolteacher?” Ronny asked. Everyone had, but stories in Mattagash are told many times, embellished by the tellers, appreciated greatly, polished with time, and then passed on into folklore. “It seems Bill had disappeared from class one afternoon and never come back. So the next day she asked him where he’d been.” The others sipped their beers, smiling, waiting for the sweet punch line to roll them off once again into a ball of good Mattagash humor.
“Mrs. Dubois,” Sally added, with a woman’s instinct for clarification, and Ronny nodded.
“Mrs. Dubois asked Bill where he’d been. ‘Me and Roberta—’ Billy started to tell her, but she stopped him. ‘Roberta and I,’ says Mrs. Dubois. ‘Roberta and I,’ says Billy, ‘was out in—’ Again she stops him. ‘Were, Billy,’ she says. ‘Roberta and I were out in, but yes, go on, out in what?’ ‘That there old barn at Albert Pinkham’s,’ says Billy. ‘No, no,’ says Mrs. Dubois. ‘I’m sorry but that’s inappropriate grammar. You were out in that old barn of Albert Pinkham’s.’ So Bill says, ‘Roberta and I were out in that old barn of Albert Pinkham’s.’ Mrs. Dubois is so happy she almost pees her pants. ‘Yes! Yes!’ she says. ‘That’s it, Billy. Now please go on. What were you doing?’ ‘Fucking our brains out,’ says Billy. ‘Or should that be fucking out our brains?’” The laughter came up around them in a soft blanket, wrapping them with memory, enveloping them with a sense that some things do last, that maybe death isn’t the big deal it pretends to be.
“I better go upstairs and bring down another case of beer,” Sally said. It looked as if Billy would get his big send-off, after all.
“You ever hear about the time Billy drove all the way to Caribou with one of them automatic garage-door openers?” asked Booster, taking the baton from Ronny, carrying the tradition forward, polishing the folklore like precious family silver. “He managed to open three or four doors between here and there,” Booster went on, “before a cop stopped him and asked what he was doing. ‘I’m with the Neighborhood Crime Watch,’ Billy told him.” And again the laughter came, the sweet, warm wave that must have rolled in at all the best Irish wakes, back in the old country.
“Remember that fisherman from Boston, this past summer, who got me to order him a case of some strange red wine, something French, so it’d be here when he come down from three weeks on the Mattagash River?” Maurice asked, and the others nodded. “And he comes in one night and sits over there by the door, and he signals to me he wants a bottle of his wine. So I get out a nice plastic ice bucket and load it up with ice, stick a bottle of wine in it, and tell Billy to take it over to his table.”
“And the fisherman says to Bill,” Pike interrupted, taking the ball of the story into his own hands, “he says, ‘What are you doing to my wine? This here is expensive French wine and you’re supposed to serve it at room temperature.’ So Bill looks at him a second—you know that look of Bill’s—and he says, ‘I don’t know about France, mister, but right now you’re in Mattagash, Maine. Room temperature around here is usually ten below. You want me to get you some more ice?’”
“What’s the matter with you?” Maurice asked. Sally had returned to the bar without the case of beer. She had been up in one of the old bedrooms of the house, now a storage room for filled beer cases, as well as empties. Maurice was also using it as a halfway refrigeration area for his microwave sandwiches, leaving it closed off and unheated when the weather turned vicious, hoping to rescue his electric bill from extravagant heights. “You look like you just seen a ghost,” Maurice added.
“I think I just did,” said Sally. She reached for her beer and noticed that her hands were trembling. “When I opened the door to the front bedroom, I saw a white shadow fall across one of the walls. A second later, it was gone.” She struck a match against its flint strip again and again, until Booster took the matchbook from her and lit one up. The tip of Sally’s cigarette turned orange with fire.
“Jesus,” Sally said. She blew a frantic fan of smoke from her mouth.
“It’s the reflection of snow, combined with headlights,” said Ronny. “A car probably went by just as you opened the door.”
“It’s too early for headlights,” said Maurice.
“Not with a storm sky like I saw when I come in,” Ronny argued.
“But it looked kinda like a woman,” said Sally. “I swear. I ain’t making this up. Grammie Fennelson always said this house was haunted.”
“Go get us some beer, Maurice,” said Booster. Maurice looked at him earnestly. No way in hell was Maurice Fennelson going up into that blasted room, in the dim afternoon light, no matter how many times Ronny called him sweetheart or darling, as Billy used to do.
“Tell you what,” Maurice offered. “If someone goes and gets it, the case is on me.” Damn them. They really knew how to hurt a man, right in the old pocketbook.
“Grammie Fennelson always claimed that the ghost of Jennie Monihan was in this house,” said Sally. “She was the wife of the man who built it.”
“Bullshit,” said Booster. “Grammie Fennelson used to claim all kinds of crazy stuff. But she could stop blood, I’ll admit that.”
“There ain’t no such thing as ghosts,” said Ronny. His voice held the accent of authority. Ronny Plunkett had, after all, been around the goddamn world a couple of times.
“Jennie died in childbirth,” Sally told them. “I wrote this all down for the historical society. Lots of folks claim they seen her ghost.”
“Old-timers,” said Booster. “Younger folks don’t tell them kinds of foolish tales anymore. They got the television to entertain theirselves. That makes a big difference.”
“Old Alfred Hart claimed he saw Bigfoot’s footprint once,” said Pike. He’d been listening to another playing of “’Til I’m Too Old to Die Young,” and speculating as to what Billy might’ve said about ghosts. “Come to find out, it was where three horses had all stepped in the same track. But Al still slept with a rifle leaning by his bed, right up to the night he died.”
“Old-timers,” Booster repeated.
“And old Sarah-Tom probably still believes there’s alligators living in the sewers of Watertown,” said Pike.
“Now, I’m not so sure that ain’t true,” Booster said. “They’d have plenty of Frogs to live off of.”
“Old Sarah-Tom was so afraid of alligators hiding in the grass that she used to start up the lawn mower and push it in front of her every time she went to her garden for a cucumber.”
�
��Grammie said people used to see Jennie standing in that upstairs window,” said Sally, ignoring them, “in the very room where her and her baby died. And she’d be rocking nothing at all in her arms, just rocking herself back and forth, humming a lullaby.” Sally had, on the spur of the creative moment, added the lullaby part herself, enlarged the tapestry of Jennie Monihan’s unfortunate life. Her voice had lowered itself to the hushed tone of ghost stories, captivating her listeners, especially the easily frightened Maurice. “Standing there in that white satin wedding gown of hers,” Sally added. “Just rocking and humming.”
“Boo!” Ronny shouted, and grabbed the nape of Maurice’s neck with cold-beer-bottle fingers. Maurice flailed his arms, knocking his Budweiser from the bar. It careened in spin-the-bottle fashion about the floor, leaving a foamy wake behind.
“Goddamn you, Ronny Plunkett!” Maurice said, his voice choked with fright. “That was my last bottle!” Now someone would have to go for a case, and Maurice would be damned if that case would be free.
“Maurice, darling,” said Ronny. He had learned well in his apprenticeship to brother Billy. “You’re gonna end up a Prissy Monihan before you die if you keep this nervousness up.”
“Don’t you ever do that again,” Maurice muttered.
“Laugh if you want to,” said Sally. “But I swear I saw a shadow that looked a whole lot like a woman holding something.”
“Maybe it was our case of beer,” said Booster. “Somebody better go up there quick before she drinks it all.” Laughter swirled again, the nimble bons mots of old Irish wakes and new Irish wakes still to come—for hope, not religion, is the opium of the masses.
“What’s so funny?” a voice asked from the door, and the partyers looked up in surprise to see Paulie Hart, the nouveau riche of northern Maine, standing there, a thin powdering of snow about his shoulders. “It’s snowing like a bitch out there,” said Paulie.
“Well, well, well,” said Sally. “If it ain’t the Howard Hughes of Mattagash. Where the hell you been?”
The Weight of Winter Page 42
