Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  "I don't like to pry."

  "Of course not. Yes, you must know all our secrets, all our lives passing through your hands day after day."

  She frowned, blushing. "It's very impersonal. I mean, I don't look at them."

  "No, of course not. But wait, wait, we are surely old friends?" His overlarge blue eyes stared up at her through the grille with an odd mixture of wryness and expectation.

  Mrs. Haig's mouth very slowly formed her serious smile. "Yes," she answered. "Yes, we are."

  "Then don't you wonder? Ask me something."

  There was nothing she wanted to know. She already knew two things about Sammy Smalter. Because she was the postmistress, she could not avoid knowing that he sent packages and letters to publishers, that he received packages and letters back. For the same reason that she felt her husband John's pain before he felt it, she could not avoid knowing that Mr. Smalter was, hard for her to say the phrase, in love with her. It was unavoidably present in his eyes, as was his effort not to reveal it. Her duty was not to give him the pain of realizing that she saw it and pitied him for it. So there was nothing she needed to ask him. But he stood there and needed her to speak. "Ask away," he said again.

  "All right. You're a writer?"

  He laughed; he had small, white teeth like a child's. "Ah, well," he said. "Not in fact the question most people are shy about asking me. Yes, I'm afraid it's true. Just popular pulp though." His smile went to his eyes and shut out the other look. "But no one in Dingley Falls knows, and you mustn't tell a soul. When I came back home I decided not to mention my hobby. But you were bound to know. No, no, I'm glad you finally asked me. Well, I won't keep you from your work. But I'm glad somebody knows, and I'm glad that it's you. Have a good day now. In our prime, you know." He patted the countertop briskly, turned, and left the post office.

  In front of the Tea Shoppe, Luke Packer leaned his old bike against Polly Hedgerow's new one, as Mr. Abernathy got out of his son Arthur's Audi, which Arthur then drove away.

  "Hi, Mr. Abernathy," Luke waved. But the thin, graying man walked right past him, and, embarrassed, Luke lowered his hand to pull his ear.

  Then the lawyer turned. "Oh, sorry. Hello, Luke. Woolgathering, I guess." His voice was muffled with preoccupation as he searched through his pockets. With a nod he hurried on, finally having found the key to open his office door.

  Luke's face was pressed against Miss Lattice's window when Mr. Smalter poked a short finger in the boy's spine. "'You're covered, Shades,'" the druggist quoted. "'Let me see all nine of those fingers point at the Big Dipper.'"

  Luke spun. "Hi. I know. Ben Rough, Murder by Machine Gun, right?"

  "Absolutely. Well, tomorrow then, we start in together waiting for someone to buy something. We'll get a lot of reading done. Glad you changed your mind."

  "Sure, I'll be there, nine o'clock."

  "Going in for a late lunch?"

  "Just messing around. I've got to be over at Mr. Hayes's at three.

  Just looking for a friend now."

  The little man straightened his yellow bow tie. "Like us, all.

  'Love is best,' Luke. Good luck."

  The friend Luke sought was, as he expected, inside the Tea Shoppe. The place was crowded, but not with the clientele its proprietor would have preferred. To Miss Lattice's horror, the dread day had come again; school vacation was upon her. Gathered to slouch in her cane-backed chairs were not only half the "townies" at Dixwell High School, but all the stray boys cutting class from Alexander Hamilton Academy. Miss Lattice's Tea Shoppe had fallen on younger days, which was not at all what Prudence Lattice had intended to happen.

  At Joy Strummer's table, Luke saw to his chagrin not only Joe MacDermott Jr. and Tac Hayes, but the academy hotshot Ray Ransom and one of his nerdy roommates. And with them sat Polly Hedgerow—ostentatiously reading a book.

  "Hiya."

  "Hiya."

  Luke dragged over a chair, bumping it along the floor. (Miss Lattice winced.) Ray Ransom was shooting off as usual. "So I said, 'Who, me shoplift? You think I need to steal a stupid tube of airplane glue from this dump?' Then I charged a new amplifier to my mom; man, that shut him right up. That jerk Barnum."

  "That's right." The nerd nodded. "Then he walked right out with a whole box of the glue right there under his raincoat!"

  "Oh, everybody does it," modestly admitted Ray. No one had a comment. Ray Ransom was the only local boy to board at Alexander Hamilton. The academy had obliged Ernest Ransom, chairman of their board of trustees, by making an exception for his son, and for the same reason Walter Saar restrained himself from expelling the young man who had absolutely nothing to offer but looks, wealth, and a quick tongue. It was enough to get by on, though not enough to get Joy Strummer.

  Luke poked Polly too hard in the arm. "Whatcha reading, dope?"

  "A book."

  "Thanks a lot."

  The young men crunched ice cubes and wolfed cheese sandwiches brought to them by Chin Henry. Miss Lattice had turned a deaf ear to all requests for hamburgers, french fries, and pizzas. Let them petition McDonald's to come to Dingley Falls, she said. Let them leave her alone.

  The young men devoured pastries and tried to outwait one another, though the victor—the last one left with Joy—would then shuffle away, too, no troth plighted other than, "You be here tomorrow, huh, Joy?" The instinct herding them with their rivals was as yet still stronger than romance.

  And in their midst, Joy reposed. Her pink, scooped jersey was imprinted KEEP ON TRUCKING. Her pink shorts were embroidered with rainbows and comets. Wooden clogs enclosed her pink feet. Her blond hair curled, her starry eyes shone, her stung lips blushed. "Boy, now that is one foxy lady," Ray Ransom informed his roommate, who replied, "Sure. But if you get caught off limits with a townie, Saar will put your dick through a meat grinder."

  "Up yours, you'd love it."

  "Up yours, you've done it." And so on and on until sleep silenced them.

  Joy did not know how centrally she figured in the nightly débats of Academy Hall, but the news would not have surprised her. The pleasant discovery that she was unusually beautiful had been verified in the past year beyond the need for further testimonials. She knew she was gifted. Now she had only to give the gift away. Had only like pollen plume of the spring-blooming birch to float. To float until wind, fate, choice, swept her down to where, of all possibilities, earth was rightest and ripest for her.

  And, tapping time to "Let It Go All Over," by the Stabbo-Massacrism Band, his UMass ring click-clacking on the steering wheel of his Jaguar, Lance Abernathy was riding into town. Up the pike he tooled in his birthday present from his mother, Beanie. Every few miles he tossed a quarter into the state's collection plates with the flip unpremeditation of a cardinal throwing pennies at Parisian peasants in June 1789. For Lance was soon to be overthrown.

  His less handsome, more methodical twin, Arthur, had never gotten through to him at his Forest Hills motel; Lance, when not on the courts, was out courting in sporty bars. Actually, Arthur had rarely in their thirty-two years (thirty-one ex utero) gotten through to his twin brother. So this time, as had always been his habit in the past, he left a message. Like "Get your junk out of my closet!"

  "Return my pullover!"

  "You owe me ten dollars!" this one was exclamatory and might have been rephrased "What did you do with my mother?!"

  Of course, Lance didn't have her. The news that a stranger did, he found, in retrospect, less of a gas than he had originally remarked to Notta Choencinheiska, a curvy Ukrainian on whom in last night's mixed doubles he had scored. And by the time Lance downshifted on Wild Oat Ridge, the thought of Beanie's abduction made him mad as hell. Perhaps some ultrasensory effervescence of Rage's outrage lingered there, in the forest, and wafted onto Route 3. At any rate, the son's nostrils flared and his fingers stopped tapping.

  Mom was out of her mind, he decided; Jesus God, pretty damn humiliating for the rest of the family. Poor old Dad. And this punk
poet, this pig, this prof, he was about to get his teeth knocked down his throat. A hell of a nerve, an egghead like that making off with an old lady (making out with her, too, but that part of the picture Lance promptly threw a drop sheet over). When he spun into Dingley Circle, Lance was so choked up that his Jaguar spit to a stop in front of Ransom Bank. Just as well. He'd go there first. He leaped out of the sports car, and, three at a time, up the stone steps he bounded, swung past the Doric columns, and jumped into the quiet, cool interior of the bank. Clerks looked up, their eyes pulled in his direction by the magnetism of outdoor energy in so indoors a place. Ernest Ransom in conversation with his secretary, followed her glance.

  "Help you, Lance?"

  "Hey there, Irene; what's the word, Ern? Just got in. Is my mom, you know, back?"

  "No. I don't know. Haven't you been home?" Ransom tried to pinpoint when it was that Lance had begun, uninvited, to address him as "Ern."

  "Nope, thought I'd drop by town first. Seen Dad? How's he taking it?"

  "Lance. Really, I think it would be better if you—"

  "Okay, okay, I'll go over to the office. Wouldn't mind putting it off though. It's going to be rough, you know what I mean?"

  "For Winslow, yes, I expect it will." Ransom was annoyed.

  Lance's unfocused vitality (he almost shadowboxed as he stood there) rasped the banker's composure.

  "Rough on a guy to see his folks fall apart. Gets to you. Well, see you around, I'm just here to bounce a check."

  The banker lent him a smile. He watched this young man, this embodied cigarette ad, stride up to the young female teller with a grin. Tanned and tall in a white-ribbed sweater and white pleated trousers, Lance needed only surf and sand to lope along while he inhaled some satisfying smoke in order to look as if he had been cut out of a glossy magazine and pinned above a young girl's bureau.

  Ransom had to admit that Lance was much better-looking than Arthur, his future son-in-law. Lance with his chestnut hair like Beanie's, with her warm brown eyes, most of all with her—Ransom searched for a word—her physicalness. Still, he preferred Arthur, who, like Winslow, was contained and containable, and who called him "Mr. Ransom."

  Cecil Hedgerow entered the bank and joined them at the teller's counter. "What are you doing in here, Cecil? Trying to mooch a loan for a cabin cruiser?" Lance grinned.

  "No, Ransom is too hard a trout to land. I'll stick to pike."

  "And not pikers, eh?" joked Ransom, who matched his manner to his material if possible and was so inoffensive that he could refuse loans to people who then advised him to run for governor to make the state the kind of place in which they could get their loans approved. "Good to see you, Cecil." The hand swung out from the broad Brooks Brothers shoulder and shook Hedgerow's, then the banker returned to his secretary.

  "How's life?" asked Lance.

  "Hard work," answered Hedgerow, then each went about his own business.

  Cecil Hedgerow was the town's third selectman; in other words, the loser in the race for first selectman; in other words, the Democratic candidate. Like the second "selectman," Ramona Dingley, he'd been in office for years, repeatedly elected by a coalition of workers from Madder, where he had grown up, and Dingleyans who did not choose to oblige Ernest Ransom by voting for whomever the bank president had selected to run the town that term. Arthur Abernathy had been his most recent choice. Arthur had obliged Ransom not only by becoming his first selectman, but also by selecting Ransom's daughter Emerald to be his wife. Cecil Hedgerow did not like Arthur Abernathy, or for that matter Ernest Ransom. Ransom did not like Cecil Hedgerow either.

  But the antipathy made financial negotiations an agony to Hedgerow, whereas they affected Ransom's decisions not at all.

  Like his only child, Polly, Hedgerow was thin and wore glasses; unlike her, the widower's hair, step, and personality no longer had much spring. Still, Madderites admired him because he had married into a good Dingley Falls family when he married Pauline Moffat, and because they thought he owned Hedgerow Realty Company, which Carl Marco, Sr., really owned. Marco, in fact, who everyone assumed owned only a supermarket, even owned much of Hedgerow Realty's real estate. And Ernest Ransom's bank owned the Hedgerow home. Of major purchases, all that Cecil Hedgerow owned was a very expensive violin, a car that he hated, and a motorboat that he loved. He was a religious fly-caster; the grail that he worshiped and pursued was the smallmouth black bass, and every weekend in his aluminum boat he renewed his quest on Lake Pissinowno. In the past, Lance Abernathy had sometimes swooped down, in the Piper Cub he rented on Saturdays, to buzz Hedgerow—a surprise attack that had never ceased to terrify the fisherman or to delight the pilot.

  Hedgerow interrupted Lance's conversation with the now giggling teller to say, "You ought to come out and do some fishing. Been a long time."

  "Sure thing. See you around."

  The realtor then returned to the trailer near Astor Heights, Carl Marco's new development south on the road to Argyle that most people thought belonged to Cecil Hedgerow. There he was only occasionally required to set aside Field and Stream in order to show a former Madderite, ready to come up in the world, a blueprint of the American Dream.

  At the Tea Shoppe, while Miss Lattice kept her eyes fixed on the clock, Luke had persuaded Joy to laugh at his imitation of their stuttering history teacher, Ms. Rideout, who had announced today that she would not be returning in the fall because they had driven her, in a single year, to a view of human nature that was not only incompatible with the pacifism in which she had once believed, but incompatible with her personal sanity.

  "I agree with Ms. Rideout," Polly said.

  "You would," sighed Joy.

  Luke had outlasted even Ray Ransom, but Polly Hedgerow would not leave. She kept on stubbornly reading as if she sat there alone. Finally with a pounce he grabbed the book away from her.

  "Okay, what's so fascinating?"

  "Give that back!" she hissed.

  "Anna Karenina?" Despite himself, Luke looked at the back cover.

  Even worse, he asked Polly a question. "Who is this guy, the writer?"

  Polly gave him the sneer she'd seen last Saturday night on Bette Davis in Dangerous. Channel Six. Luke had seen it, too, but failed to recognize the replica. "Tolstoy is a very famous Russian novelist," she said in disgust.

  "Yeah, well, is he any good?"

  "Any good, ha, ha!" The Davis eyebrow went up into Polly's uncombed bangs. "He's not exactly Mickey Spillane, if that's what you mean."

  "Oh, screw you." Luke could sense that Joy, blowing bubbles through her straw, was bored. Why was he doing this, wasting time over a stupid book with stupid Hedgerow? "Well, have you ever read Raymond Chandler?"

  "Of course I have," This was a lie, and she felt compelled to modify it. "But not much."

  "You like mysteries?"

  She did.

  And for fifteen minutes, Joy forgotten, they swapped murderous plots, women axed to pieces, men shot full of holes, greed, ambition, jealousy, hate, all those passions that wade in pages of blood.

  "Boy, this is really dumb," said Joy with a sigh. "Listen, you guys, I'm going. School's supposed to be over, in case you didn't know."

  Miss Lattice, who still gazed at her clock like a novitiate at the Cross, now spoke in rapture. "Three-fifteen, ladies and gentlemen. I have to close. Checks, please!"

  "Joy, wait. Damn, I'm late to work, do me a favor, will ya, Polly?

  Can you pay this for me? I'll pay you back tomorrow. I promise."

  Luke gave her his check as he ran out the door with a placating smile for Joy, who ignored him.

  "Jerk," Joy said.

  "I guess," Polly replied. They sucked on their straws a last time.

  "Hey, Joy, listen, want to ride bikes this afternoon? No, listen, this is serious. Really. There's something I want to show you," she whispered quickly, "out near the marshlands. It's some kind of 2001 kind of thing. Nobody knows about it. It's really spooky."

  "All t
he way out to Route 3? Forget it, it's too hot to ride bikes anymore. Anyhow, I don't know, I've been feeling rotten. My arms hurt. I'm tired."

  "Oh, come on, you always say that."

  But Joy had gone up to pay Miss Lattice, who waited with resignation as this newly perfected body somnolently approached her in pink slow motion. Polly scrambled after, spilling her books. "Listen, Joy, honest, it's something special out there, I'm not kidding."

  But Joy was not listening. A warm ache poured from Polly's heart out to her cheeks and reddened them. Today, when she had offered the queen of her secrets collection, to be so treated! Joy wasn't even interested. Polly had lost her friend.

  "Your change." Miss Lattice coughed. "Polly! You dropped your change."

  "Gosh, I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention."

  None of them ever does, thought the little shopkeeper of sixtyfive slender years, who had once, to cheers and whistles, danced the Charleston atop the captain's table as the Queen Mary sailed across the waltzing seas. And that girl had paid no attention to the frowns on old deadened faces.

  chapter 17

  Fate is very old and tired. She leans more times than not now on those hackneyed tricks that cost her no imaginative energy. With the same trite scenarios she used on Sumerians, she indiscriminately joins and sunders us, destroys or saves us. She's done it so often, and it must be hard to tell us apart. Hollywood's screenwriters are far more ingenious than she in bringing together a boy and a girl.

  Movies had led Joy Strummer to believe that someday her prince would come in a blackout, or a flood, or on the Orient Express, or on horseback, or at a masked ball, or out of the sky in a parachute. But Fate works on a tighter budget.

  So, down the bank steps danced Lance Abernathy, vaulted into his Jaguar, roared around half of Dingley Circle, and braked with a blare of horn as out of the Tea Shoppe floated Joy Strummer, straight toward the front of his car.

  "Hey!" he yelled, without looking, annoyed. "Hey!" he called in a new voice, seeing her.