Piper

by John E. Keegan

  “Early?” He never varied from the schedule. The employees in the doghouse joked reverentially that when Tom Scanlon was called by his creator he’d look at the calendar on his watch first to see how many days it was until the next issue.

  “We’ve got something hot.” He was holding a sheet of hard copy by the edges, curled over on itself so I couldn’t see what it said.

  This was weird. I’d screwed up and for my consequence he was going to let me in on something hot. Dad kept a saying on his desk, a little wooden plaque in a brass stand, that read: “Transgressions require consequences, not punishment.” I would have more readily understood it if he’d asked me to clean the dirty wax out of the seams between the molding and the linoleum with my toothbrush. He was the prodigal, taking joy in the return of his wayward daughter.

  “Except for John, nobody else has seen this.” He choked up as he said it and I thought this must be the issue announcing the sale of the paper. “Treat it with the respect it deserves.” He sucked in through his nostrils. “I haven’t had as much difficulty writing something since your mom died.”

  Oh, God, I’d misjudged the whole situation. He wasn’t letting me off at all. He was going to rub my nose in it. He was going to have the last word after all. “It’s about Mom, isn’t it?”

  His voice was on the verge of breaking. “Here … read it.” He set the copy on the crooked stack of cardboard boxes against the wall and left the room.

  With the copy stretched between my hands, I backed my way over to the chair without even looking where I was going. When I glanced at the headlines, it was as if a big stone had been lifted off my chest and I was taking in new air so fast I was hyperventilating. Or maybe I wasn’t taking in any air at all. The buzzards were overhead, but it wasn’t Mom they were circling.

  MORE CHARGES FILED AGAINST CITY LEADER. Cascade County Prosecutor Seth Armstrong announced today that John Carlisle is being charged with thirteen counts of child molestation in the first degree. The charges, involving children under the age of twelve, arise out of complaints made by parents of boys who have resided at the Lake Spigot Summer Camp, a facility endowed with funds donated by the Carlisle family.

  These charges are in addition to the rape and sexual misconduct charges for which Carlisle is scheduled to go on trial tomorrow. “I see no reason to delay the first trial,” says Armstrong.

  John Carlisle chose to make no statement in response to the new allegations, which represent potent aftershocks to the quake that rocked the county less than three months ago.

  The Prosecutor’s statement alleges that Carlisle engaged in illicit “touching and fondling,” including incidents with boys he led on overnight “survival campouts” in the Mt. Pilchuck foothills. The campouts are part of a Lake Spigot manhood ritual.

  One of the parents said, “I became suspicious when the first charges were brought.” Another one said, “It’s despicable what this man has gotten away with in the name of charity.”

  My hands were shaking by the time I finished the article, which also included the obligatory mention of Renfred Carlisle, John Carlisle’s great grandfather and the first mayor of Stampede at the turn of the century. Renfred must have been turning over in his grave. I was past disbelief and into the garden of make-believe with goblins and harpies. What happened to Dad’s counteroffensive, the information he had on Carlisle and Mom? Was he saving it for another aftershock? I tried to study the piece again for grammatical errors, punctuation, and syntax, but my critical powers were mush. In a vague way, I felt a responsibility to tell Dad that Dirk’s charges had been made up, but in the face of so much corroboration I wasn’t sure whether I believed Dirk’s disavowal anymore.

  I stumbled toward Dad’s office, steadying myself against the stack of Xerox boxes and the door jamb, and plopped into the nearest armchair, the article drooping from the pinch of my fingertips like a soiled flag. I wanted to show the respect for the situation I felt. “What did he say?”

  Dad nodded his head, took a hard swallow, and whispered. “He’s comatose.”

  They suspected the fire started at the gas pump, which was in the breezeway just outside the print room, then spread to the inks and solvents, and the rolls of paper on deck ready to be fed into the press for the morning run of the Herald. I heard the phone ringing at home, the door slamming, and sirens wailing in the distance while I was trying to go to sleep. I knew it had to be more than the Stampede station because there were two different siren pitches and one of them was coming from the north, which meant they’d called in help from Machias. From my window I could see the glow over the downtown like the aurora borealis.

  There was a crowd in the street when I arrived and a young policeman was pushing people back to the sidewalk opposite the entrance to the Herald. I could feel the heat from the flames that had broken through the roof and blown out the windows. Payton Miller, the veterinarian, stood next to me.

  “The tar in that roof is like corn to a hog,” he said in a husky voice.

  “Have you seen my dad?” The thought had occurred to me once I got there that I’d only imagined the phone ringing and the door slamming.

  “Sure haven’t.”

  There was a fireman standing by the tailgate of the pumper truck parked askew in the middle of the street, and I made a dash for him. I could hear the policeman yelling at me as I grabbed the fireman by the front of his rubbery yellow jacket.

  “Is anyone inside?” I yelled over the noise of the pumps. He put his gloved hand to his ear. “Have you checked for people?”

  He nodded his head and put a heavy hand on my shoulder. His badge read “Machias Volunteer Fire Department.”

  “My dad’s the editor,” I said.

  He shrugged, like so what.

  Judging from the fire licking the sides of the building, I tried to figure where it was in relation to Dad’s office. I looked up to see if the Machias fireman was watching, but he was scratching himself under the brim of his helmet and staring off in the direction of the breezeway that separated the Herald from the Horse and Cowboy next door.

  I snuck around to the front of the truck, running my fingertips along the polished metal sheathing, then with my hands in my pockets made a slow, deliberate walk toward the front door of the newspaper, which was open. Willard had always told me that you could walk into the nicest hotel in the world and use their swimming pool and towels if you just kept reminding yourself that you belonged there. Well, I belonged. I knew the floor layout better than any fireman from Machias did. As I stepped over the bulging canvas fire hose that snaked through the front door, somebody grabbed me from behind.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Oh, God,” I said, wrapping my arms around Dad and squeezing him.

  He walked me across the street and into the portico of The Stamp Box. We just stood there gawking back at the flames erupting from the bowels of the building. Dad stroked the outside of my arm in a distracted way. The pumper truck was deluging the roof with an arc of water that oscillated between the parapets, and several fighters worked on foot from the breezeway, directing water through the blown windows. I felt as if we were losing a member of our family and I didn’t even particularly like the place. I could only imagine how devastated Dad must have been.

  “Can you rebuild it?”

  “That’s John Carlisle’s call.”

  “Can’t you start your own?”

  “Hah! You must be mixing us up with the Kennedys. We’re the shanty Irish, remember?” I knew he didn’t really believe that. He was just discouraged.

  “Nobody knows more about newspapers than you do.” I wasn’t fishing for affection, but it sure felt good when he pulled me real tight against him. “What about the John Carlisle story?”

  “The dailies in Seattle will probably pick it up in a few days, run their usual two column inches. But bad news carries well here by word of mouth.”

  “It wasn’t something you really wanted to publish anyway, was it?”
<
br />   “Not much choice was there?”

  Louise Mead came by in a rumpled pea jacket and threw her arms around Dad, dropping ashes from her cigarette down the back of his coat. All she probably wanted was the same thing everyone else at the paper wanted: for Dad to tell her it wasn’t really happening. Then a man in black slacks and a pocket protector in his shirt came by and introduced himself as the fire inspector. Dad shooed us off with his eyes and Louise transferred her grief to me, slipping her hand inside my arm.

  The owner of Monkeyshines was hosing down the front of his store, making sure an errant spark didn’t catch in the folds of his awning and burn up his inventory of old furniture, and we walked out into the street to avoid his spray. The crowd in front of Marge’s had swelled—more people from the paper, other Commercial Street shopkeepers, kids from school. I looked for Rozene, but she wasn’t there, neither was her mom. The light was on in Marge’s and I noticed she’d set out a stack of cups, cream and sugar, and day-old donuts and cookies on a table by the coffee urn. Colonel Thurgood walked by with a baseball cap pulled down over his face, his hands in the pockets of Dirk’s Chicago Bulls jacket, and I wondered what Dirk was doing the night before a trial he knew he wasn’t supposed to be in.

  When Louise had snubbed out her last butt on the sidewalk, she left me to find some OPs. “Other people’s,” she said. I didn’t feel particularly sociable anyway, which was normal for me, and I remembered how encouraged I was when I read that despite Albert Einstein’s passionate sense of social justice he shunned contact with other human beings. They were great if you didn’t have to deal with them.

  As I leaned against the brick, I realized this wasn’t just John Carlisle’s paper or even my dad’s. The Herald was the eyes, ears and larynx of Stampede and, the way Dad ran it, its conscience. Things could be said between customers at Marge’s, or by the checker at Ned’s, or from the pulpit at St. Augustine’s, but until it showed up in the Herald it hadn’t really happened. The paper validated a story’s importance to the larger community. God only knew how few people would run for a city council position paying twenty-five dollars per meeting if there wasn’t the reward of getting their name in the paper. How could a town survive its inferiority complex without a newspaper?

  Somebody bumped my shoulder, knocking me off balance, and when I turned, Condon Bagmore was standing there with a cigarette stub stuck to the mucous on his lower lip.

  “Hey, if it isn’t skinny Scanlon?”

  I elbowed him back, eying his cronies, Jesse Little and Clete Oster. “Who let you guys out of your cage?”

  He ignored my comment. “Hey, doesn’t your grandpa live with you? Stubby little fart wears one of them construction vests?”

  “So?”

  “He’s a flaming pyromaniac.” Bagmore’s boys chortled at their leader’s adroitness with redundancies.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He reached out to put his hand on top of my shoulder and I squirmed away. “We saw him with a smoking gun, if you know what I mean.” Another chortle from his boys. “Right over there”—he pointed to the breezeway between the Herald and the Horse and Cowboy—“I saw him running outta there ‘bout two hours ago. Looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “You’re full of shit, Bagmore.” That’s what I said at least.

  “Ask Clit.” That’s what he called Clete Oster, who’d take any abuse to be one of Bagmore’s allies. “He was with me, weren’t you Clit?”

  “Had a dog with ’em,” Clete said. “Fucking red-haired dawg.” Clete wasn’t smart enough to have made this up. What you saw with Bagmore’s boys was what you got.

  “He sometimes does the janitor work,” I lied.

  “So you’re saying he was burning garbage, huh?”

  “I’m not saying anything, asswipe.”

  “Ooh!”

  I wanted to make a deal with him to keep his mouth shut, but I couldn’t think of anything I had that he wanted. All I could do was devalue his information. “My dad already knows about Willard being here.” As dry as my mouth was, I managed to roll a goober and spit it onto the sidewalk between Clete’s and Jesse’s feet. “See you boys in church.”

  I was probably as transparent as Saran wrap, but I had to have a strong exit.

  I went straight home, but Willard wasn’t in his room. Billy, Churchill, and Diller rose to be petted, but Willard and the terrier were AWOL. Dammit, Willard! What the hell have you done?

  I went up to my room and tried to read the Eva Peron biography I’d picked up at the library, listening all the time for Willard to clatter the basement door shut. The glow over the downtown had faded and it was an ordinary starless night in Stampede again. My mind kept wandering over my conversations with Willard. What had I said, Kill the newspaper? Sometimes I wondered if I had the brains to be in Bagmore’s gang.

  I’d totally misjudged Willard. He wasn’t the Simple Simon met a pieman I’d built up in my mind. After all, he’d grown up where justice meant field justice, executed in the language of machetes that could sever an asparagus stalk with the flick of the wrist. Maybe Willard was more like me than I thought. The ends justified the means.

  Dad came home about three a.m. and I cracked my door to listen. I was sure he thought I was asleep, which was just as well because I didn’t want to talk to him until I knew for sure what had happened with Willard. Dad had enough to worry about without Willard right now. The liquor cupboard over the refrigerator popped open. Then I heard ice clinking into a drinking glass. He was probably having a Jamison, the whiskey he drank when his brother Seamus stayed with us. I heard the chair at his roll-top desk squeak, followed by silence. The living room lights were off, which meant he was sitting there in the dark. The thought flashed through my head that it wasn’t Jamison in his glass but the bug poison he kept in the same cupboard.

  I crawled out to the top of the stairs and lay on my belly so I could hear what was going on through the banisters. He was talking on the phone. All I could make out were snippets of the conversation. Then he said, “I love you, Seamus,” and I heard the receiver nestle into its cradle. My God, he was talking to his brother. He never talked to his brothers. I felt a cavernous pang of inadequacy, realizing how much Dad missed an adult companion. The chair creaked again as he changed positions and I put my hands on the steps to push myself back up. That’s when I heard a groan of the kind I imagined death would be like. I went rigid, every cell of my body just listening. There were three short, strangled releases of breath like the shots from an air gun, followed by a deep, convulsive sob. I’d never heard my dad cry like that, and it was a melancholy sound. I knew I should have gone down there, but I was chicken to see him that way.

  When I finally heard him blowing his nose in the bathroom, I snuck down to the basement to see if Willard had come back. He wasn’t there so I lay down on his bed in the dark, flat on my back, and stared up at the ceiling. There was a chill in the room, so I pulled a crumpled sheet and blanket from out of the pile at the foot of the bed and spread them over me, shoes and all.

  And that’s how I slept, like a corpse, until the coarse tongue of a dog on my face woke me the next morning.

  18

  Three of the dogs had climbed up on the bed and were standing over me, probably wondering what I’d done with their master. I lifted the pillow next to me, leaned over and checked the floor, but there was just me. I could understand Willard fleeing; I couldn’t understanding him doing it without his dogs. He must have been hit by a car or stumbled and broken his leg. Then it occurred to me the dogs weren’t as interested in Willard’s whereabouts as they were with breakfast, so I gathered up their rubber dishes and scooped a fistful of dry dog chow into each of them. I had no idea how much they were used to, but the sound of kibbles hitting the rubber put them on their best behavior.

  While they were eating, I looked in Willard’s drawers for a note or some clue as to what he’d done and where he’d gone. The dirty shirts had been wadded up and
stuffed back next to the clean ones, none of the socks had been paired, and there were underpants in every drawer. At the bottom of a drawer full of sweaters and knotted neckties I found a rubber-banded stash of photos. One of them was a black-and-white, matte finish of Willard and Grandma Carol that must have been done by a professional because the background was all wispy and ethereal. Carol was pretty in a technical sort of way, but the irritation at having to hold the pose for so long showed. In Willard’s easy grin, on the other hand, I could see Mom. There was no question whose daughter she was. The picture underneath was a little girl sitting on a pinto Shetland pony with one hand on the saddle horn and the other waving limp-wristed to the camera. She was in a ruffled taffeta dress that exposed her bare knees and the patent leather mary janes didn’t even reach the stirrups. On the back of the photo it said in a woman’s hand, “Kathryn, Easter, 5 years.”

  Dad was already gone when I went upstairs, but I knew where he’d be. It didn’t matter the place had burned; it was habit. He was like the expectant dog who waits by the front door for his master.

  The fire was still smoldering when I arrived, emitting an odor akin to old tires burning. A fireman was hosing down the building in what appeared to be a case of overkill because there wasn’t much left to burn except for the blistered panel sign on the brick facade: Home of the Herald Stampede. Firemen with gas masks, axes and flashlights wandered in and out of the front door while a small crowd huddled in the middle of the street behind a yellow tape strung from blocker to blocker around the building. I counted thirteen Herald employees, including Les Showalter, the smokeless tobacco-chewing driver of the doorless hearse I’d thrown bundles out of for the paper carriers. This would have been his delivery day.

  As I got closer, I realized the crowd was watching Dad, who was being positioned in front of the rubble by a KZIT television reporter with a pink bow around her ponytail and a microphone in her hand. They must have come for the Carlisle trial and caught the fire as a bonus. I knew Dad didn’t suffer TV journalists gladly. “They’re ambulance chasers,” he’d told me. “They leave the heavy lifting for the print media.” He was as unyielding as a kid getting his face washed as the reporter turned him at different angles in response to the hand signals of her cameraman, but once the camera was rolling he seemed at ease with his words.