Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  The two girls nodded politely at Prudence Lattice in her lilac dress as she shook the lock on her Tea Shoppe "to be sure." They passed the pharmacy and the Dingley Day, where through the broken window they saw Mr. Hayes twisting his hair as he read. They passed the cream brick building where both Dr. Scaper and the two Mr. Abernathy lawyers had their offices. Then, just as they reached the post office, Polly wheeled around, yelled, and flung a flamboyant wave at Luke Packer half a block behind them. Caught off guard, his composure deserting him, his body broke loose and hurled him through the door of Sammy Smalter's pharmacy. Joy laughed without looking back.

  Around the circle, beyond old Town Hall and next to the older but newly painted First Congregational Church, was George Webster Dixwell Library. The dungareed girls climbed its smoothed stone steps, Joy pausing to rest on the way, and interrupted Sidney Blossom, the successor to Miss Gladys Goff, who had finally died, to most people's relief, seven years ago. Mr. Blossom, in his early thirties, always pretended not to notice that off in a corner of the second floor adolescents were reading Henry Miller's works and other books that the sour Miss Goff had banned in the old days when she had tyrannized over the literary habits of Dingley Falls. Now he turned from Mrs. Canopy and welcomed the girls with a wink. Polly liked Mr. Blossom, who told her stories of the great rebellions of the sixties, and he liked her.

  Driving home from Litchfield, where he had retrieved from a bridal shower his fiancée (the impishly christened Emerald Ransom), Arthur Abernathy, Winslow's son and partner, slowed down for Wild Oat Ridge. He was happily ignorant of the fact that five hundred yards away his mother, Beanie, lay under an oak tree with an obscene poet.

  Beatrice and Richard had been wandering, lost, through Birch Forest for more than an hour. Now they rested beneath the oak to eat the rest of the Thespian Ladies' leftovers. It was not his female guide but the city dweller, Rage, who confessed himself "totally wiped, whap!" by their exertions. Beanie indeed was a woodswoman of long standing, a blue-star trailmistress in East Woods and a weekly hiker around Lake Pissinowno just north of town, where she collected mushrooms for her marvelous stews.

  "Gosh, I'm sorry. I guess I shouldn't have suggested a walk. I've never been lost before," sighed with chagrin a climber of Cadillac Mountain, mortified that she had failed one whom, for some reason, she wished to be proud of her.

  "Vice versa," sighed Rage as Beanie slipped off his loafers and massaged his soft, pink, blistered feet with her long, strong fingers.

  Circulation returning, he was tingled into composing an ode in her honor, and attempting to stroke her shapely calf like a lyre, the Bathroom Baudelaire extemporized, in a gravelly talking croon copied off record albums from Johnny Cash:

  Your cream coming Is cleaner I know Than snow hidden below That old lost road That old goat thug Frost Chose against choosing.

  Great jugs jiggle loosening.

  Squat, squat your holy twat Hot on the dick of human Dick Rage.

  Free falling unfallen Beatrice.

  To Dante Unaged.

  I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love With a wonderful gal.

  Except for the last line, which had a kind of ring to it, this poem was as Greek to Beanie as Mount Holyoke French had been. It was nothing like the verse that Tracy Canopy, the only other person ever to write poetry to her, had left only last week inside a lopsided blue jar perched atop the Abernathy mailbox like an overweight jay:

  Dear Beanie remember, how once in December, We shopped for a pot in Poughkeepsie.

  Here's one to betoken the one that got broken.

  (You dropped it because you got tipsy.)

  I'm only teasing, Tracy.

  "What do you think?" Rage asked the once again tipsy Beanie.

  "I like your voice," she said.

  "The idea's to take the dirty words, you see, and show that they're the ones saying the most sacred things, you see? They're the cleanest."

  "Oh."

  "Poem stinks. All right, you don't have to tell me. I've got no traditions, no background. That's it. I'm a monarchist deep down. So how can I be a poet without any background? Tell me that."

  "I don't know. Use somebody else's." Beanie had more than enough background for them both. She had, in this country alone, three hundred years of lineally recorded past that she had never even touched and would have been glad to lend to Rage, had she known how. "Look at the sun over there to your left," she said, turning the conversation from Art to Nature. "So round and bright. I don't know why, but it makes me want to bake you a lot of big red apples."

  I don't know why either, but I think I love this broad, thought Richard Rage, baffled.

  chapter 6

  The Ransoms were giving a party. Dinner at 8:00 for sixteen. It was now 6:30 and two of their list (Beanie, one of them; Richard Rage, their guest of honor, the other) were missing. From the pale oak secretary in her off-beige bedroom, Priss Ransom called Evelyn Troyes.

  Mrs. Troyes was home listening to a recording of Manon Lescaut, having, an hour earlier, returned Jonathan Fields with his now dazzling aquamarine eyes to the impatient Father Highwick.

  "Where in h. is Beanie?" Priss wanted to know. "What's she done with this scatological Rage?"

  "Mais je ne sais pas!" gasped her wispy friend. "When I picked up ma Mimi et ta Kate, they seemed to think Mr. Rage was supposed to join them for a swim ou quelque chose at the Club. But then he never came, et je…"

  "There's no need to say 'my Mimi' like that. It's been twenty-one years, Evelyn. I ought to know by now which child is whose," snapped the frazzled Priss, who was further irritated by Mrs. Troyes's unconscious lapse into intermittent French when first startled or upset. It was struggle enough for such a Francophile as Mrs. Ransom to forgive her friend for having lived twenty years in Paris, without hearing that lilting luck sung in her ear over the phone.

  "Yes, it's just a habit, I'm sorry, Priss. Oh, I do hope they'll be along shortly. I have to tell you, I have just now received the strangest letter, quite unsigned and most obscure. I found it pushed under my wipers and of course jumped to the conclusion that it was another silly parking ticket from that terrible Mr. Haig. I've told him I simply cannot remember to put the coins in those meters he keeps sticking up all over town. We never had to before, did we, and…"

  "Evelyn…"

  "Then I thought, but no, it must be one of Tracy's cunning little notes, but I'm afraid it isn't that at all, not at all."

  "Evelyn! My dear, I haven't time to hear about it now, I'm completely at my wits' end."

  "Oh, I am so sorry, why?"

  "Everyone's expected at eight, and now Beanie seems to have misplaced Mr. Rage. What's worse, Pru Lattice did not send me one of her regular girls from the Tea Shoppe to help Wanda serve. She sent a refugee called Chan or Chin or something, a Vietnamese with a black eye."

  "A Vietnamese, here in Dingley Falls? You mean someone struck her in the eye?"

  "How in h. should I know? I don't think she speaks a word of English. That asinine war!"

  "But wasn't President Ford trying to be helpful, taking them all in?"

  "I can't argue politics with you now, Evelyn. But someone with a little experience would have been more helpful tonight."

  "Oh, dear, shall I send you Orchid? I could call her, should I?"

  "No, no, we'll manage. Just try not to be terribly late, will you, Evelyn? And be sweet and take over the rector for me. Try to keep him from telling everyone for the thousandth time about the g.d. jewels the Romanoff duchess dropped in his pocket while the Lusitania sank."

  "Oh, Priss, I don't believe Sloan ever said it was the Lusitania!"

  protested Father Highwick's rival, always fair to her foe.

  "Evelyn, à bientôt. I haven't dressed, and Ernest is home. I hear his golf bag thudding in the foyer."

  Ernest Bredforet Ransom trod heavily up the steps to his wife's room. He had lost the light step but kept the face and much of the form of an unusually
handsome man. Had sexual self-consciousness ever illumined his looks, he would have been irresistible to women.

  As it was, he continued to resemble Tyrone Power—for whom, many years ago, he had twice been mistaken, once by Priss Hancock, who first saw him at a Mount Holyoke VJ Day dance to which the wounded war hero, now back at Yale, had been invited by his childhood friend Beanie Dingley.

  Now Ransom almost kissed his wife's high cheek as she went by him to her closet. "Wanda tells me," he said conversationally while emptying his pockets onto the dresser top, "that there's an assaulted Chinese girl in her kitchen crying, and she adds that it makes her feel 'creepy.'"

  "Oh, for God's sake, I'll go down. After your shower I'd love a martini. How was your game?"

  "Poor. My leg." He rubbed it. There was a steel pin in Ransom's thigh for which in 1944 he had received a silver star.

  "People are coming at eight. You want to see about the wine and check the cabinet."

  "Yes. Where are the girls? Is Kate home?"

  "Who knows? I hope Arthur picked Emerald up. Kate is probably out somewhere looking for that moronic poet she dragged here from Poughkeepsie for Tracy."

  "Is he lost?"

  "Beanie took him on an educational tour of Dingley Falls. If you can imagine our monosyllabic Beanie in that role."

  "This late?"

  "I know. Unless she's teaching him lacrosse in the dark, I can't imagine what they're doing."

  Spread beneath the oak tree, on her hands and knees, her soft plaid skirt wadded around her waist, her splendid buttocks glazed in the setting sun, Beatrice Dingley Abernathy was being, as her ancestor Elijah would have phrased it, "rogered" by an inspired Richard Rage. First slowly, then with abandon, with one hand on pine needles and the other on Beanie's mossy firmament, he thrust lustfully home, at last believing, after thirty-nine nihilistic years, that, sure enough, home is where your heart is.

  "Funny…but nice," decided Beanie, grasping the trunk of the oak tree as Richard shot a shower of sperm into her with such a jolt that a less sturdy woman would have toppled. Pulling out, he slid under her backwards, reverent as a mechanic under a Rolls-Royce.

  His beard twined in her vagina, Rage then did something Winslow Abernathy had never done.

  Below her head, like a stalagmite, his glistened organ dripped beads on its shaft. From down where he was doing the something he mumbled at her. It sounded like "I'm your mother, you're my mother, suck each other (or utter) (or udder),"—all of which was peculiar.

  But she did feel a brand-new urge to put that shiny flesh in her mouth, so when it sprang away from her, she grabbed it without thinking, pulled the head inside, and sucked.

  Something funny was happening to her, something she thought she ought to get away from.

  "No," she said. "No, I won't." But "Yes," he laughed. "Yes, you will. Yes."

  chapter 7

  Along the low, tidy shelves of Sammy Smalter's pharmacy, whose entire stock the boy had long since memorized, Luke Packer scuffed his tennis shoe. Just now that stupid Polly Hedgerow had scored on him, had spooked him into the clearly uncool move of diving through the screen door of a drugstore while Joy was there to see it.

  Gable would have stood his ground and grinned.

  Luke Packer had sought a self in the movies for half his sixteen years. He watched the old ones on television and went to the new ones at the Hope Street Cinema which Mr. Strummer owned. He liked the old ones on television better because he sought a large self—heroic, romantic, magic in its self-possession—and only the old stars had size enough to carry such definitions. Still, because Mr. Strummer was Joy's father, Luke had recently given the Hope Street theater faithful attendance, even sitting at some Saturday matinees like a sulky Gulliver among rows of swarming brats who, shrieking in relentless delight and terror, screamed at dumb werewolves and giant mutant Venus flytraps.

  Most of all, like many of his fellow Americans, Luke liked violent crime. Taking his native folklore from films and television, he had concluded that the only vocations that mattered (or, indeed, existed) were the commission and solution of violent crimes.

  Detective films had led Luke, in secret, to books. Now, near the dusty crutches and artificial limbs that all the kids in Dingley Falls tried to walk with until Mr. Smalter caught them at it, he stopped at the revolving stand of paperbacks. Most of these books wanted to change your life into something better, or to expose the author's own. Others had pictures of frenzy-eyed girls racing away from blue moon castles in the doors of which stood cruel-eyed men holding riding crops. Luke's sister read them. (So did Prudence Lattice and Evelyn Troyes; Sarah MacDerrnott had started one last Christmas, but had never found time to finish it.) Slowly turning the stand, Luke looked to see if the new Ben Rough was in: Heather Should Have Died Hereafter. There it was, with Heather dangling stiffly over a water bed, a pair of panty hose tied tightly around her neck.

  Luke skimmed the blurb on the back; sometimes they put new jackets on books he'd already read. Political graft, mob syndicates, police corruption, brutal beatings; fast sex, cars, and guns—that was all familiar. But the private eye, Roderick Steady, jilted by a quiet librarian? That was new.

  Suddenly from behind the counter Sammy Smalter appeared with a quick jerk at his yellow bow tie. You always thought you were alone in the pharmacy until the diminutive owner came out at you.

  Strangers sometimes jumped, but Luke was used to Mr. Smalter, and to the yellow tie and the three-piece suit the midget always wore, summer or winter, and to the baby-fine yellow hair circling his bald crown like a wreath of duckling feathers.

  "I saw you were still open. Is this new Rough book any good?"

  "Hello, Luke. How are you this evening?" Mr. Smalter insisted that even the young observe the few civilities of life.

  "Fine. How about you?"

  "Well, thank you." Now he answered the question. "I'd say, not up to Die Quickly, but at least better than the last two. Rough was in a slump. Just for a handful of silver he left us." One of Smalter's few self-indulgences was his constant conversational use of quotations from Victorian poets. Since almost no one ever caught his allusions, and no one was impolite or interested enough to ask him what he was talking about, most Dingleyans classified the pharmacist as a nut or an egghead (terms nearly synonymous), though the majority agreed that his mental peculiarity was understandable given his physical one: despite painful surgery as a child, he had never grown taller than he had been at eleven.

  Luke shook his salary from its A&P envelope. "I'll take the book, okay? And about that job, I tell you, school's out tomorrow, you know, and then I start part-time for Mr. Hayes at the Day."

  "Ah, well, the lure of journalism."

  "But, see, with the groceries, well, I get the tips, so, I mean it was nice of you to think of me, but I think I'd come out ahead."

  "I see." The bespectacled blue eyes stared up at Luke. "Your drive is admirable."

  "No, I just want to get out of this stupid dump."

  "Outside this dump, Luke, are dumps just like this one, just bigger. Here, no charge on Heather. You let me know how you like it.

  Yes, the world's not very different from Dingley Falls. Of course, Life insists that you not believe me for an instant; Life wants you to leap before you look. It's how she does her magic trick, the illusion of progress."

  "I guess so."

  "'Therefore I summon age / to grant youth's heritage.'"

  "Well, thanks for the book." Mr. Smalter was pretty weird; Luke could see why he made some people nervous. But at least he was interesting, which was more than could be said for most of the stupid jerks at Dixwell High.

  "Ben Rough still your favorite?" The pharmacist asked this every time Luke bought a book.

  "Sure, next to Chandler."

  "Ah, well," agreed Sammy Smalter.

  The bell on the screen door chinkled. Luke turned, but it wasn't Joy. It was the post office lady whom Mrs. MacDermott had been blabbing all about Maynard H
enry to in the checkout line. He noticed that she looked tense. She was a tall woman with her hair twisted around the nape of her neck the way nobody wore her hair these days. And she had remarkably blue eyes without anything done to fix them up. Her clothes looked different, too, as if she didn't much notice what she (or other women) wore. They looked good on her, though, because she had that kind of body, nice breasts, and a straight way of standing. Sort of an Ingrid Bergman look to her, he decided. Not sexy, nothing of course like Jean Harlow, who reminded him of what Joy Strummer was going to look like in a few more years.

  "Mrs. Haig. I was waiting. I have it ready." Mr. Smalter vanished behind his shelves.

  Mrs. Haig didn't nose through the store like most people; she just stood there. It annoyed Luke to think of her being married to a police chief, for almost all of them were stupid and corrupt like the guy in Killer in the Rain. That bully Haig, pulling you over at night when you were just out on your bike, minding your own business, waving you over and yelling out of his car, "Know what time it is? Let's head on home now."

  The woman gave Luke a funny look, and he realized he'd been staring at her. "Hi," he mumbled, then called over the counter, "See you, Mr. Smalter."

  The pharmacist pulled himself up on his stool. "Listen, I'll go another seventy-five cents an hour, okay? Think it over." The adults watched the boy run out. Smalter smiled. "More energy than we need when we have it, and always gone when we finally discover something worth using it on. They burn up, and we burn out .

  "Here. Ida Sniffell called this in for you. Four times daily, and Otto gives you, it says here, unlimited refills."

  "Yes"

  "I," he mumbled, "have heart trouble myself." Mrs. Haig's head jerked back as if he had slapped her. For Mr. Smalter hurt her enough already simply by the fact that he was occasionally grinned at by another customer as he stood with his packages at the post office counter and raised them up for her to reach over, take them, and relieve him of their weight. That should be a fair share of suffering.