Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  Scaper watched Priss step away from the door to let Lance and Ransom inside. Then he turned to the others who still stood at the curb. "Arthur, I want you to take Evelyn back home now. Limus, just go on home, please. I don't know what in damnation you're doing out riding around here on that motorbike this time of the night anyhow. Everybody go on." The old man stuffed his hands down in the pockets of the enormous shabby bathrobe he'd grabbed when he'd run over from next door as soon as Ernest Ransom had phoned. Mrs. Troyes was in a bathrobe, too. She held the hem away from the dew as she went away with Arthur Abernathy across the lawn.

  "Just a minute, Sammy." Scaper called back the pharmacist, who wore a raincoat over his pajamas. "Give me a match. Well, thanks for helping out. I swear, some folks hear a siren and they act like they got an invitation to a fair." Finally the doctor found a cigar butt in his bag; he wiped it on his robe and lit it. "Goddamnit to hell."

  The two men stood beneath the stars. After a long silence, Scaper threw the cigar into the gutter. "Well, let me go check on that boy. You got any Seconal, Nembutal, something?"

  "At the pharmacy."

  "What'd you say? Speak up."

  "No. Not here. Ah, wait a minute. Priss Ransom ought to have some Valium. I filled a prescription for her yesterday."

  Scaper spluttered his lips. "Doctors! All they can think of to do is drug out the fact that life hurts." He rubbed his ear behind the hearing aid. "Sure. Now I'll go on over to Glover's Lane and give that child's mother and father a couple of Valiums apiece, and then I'll tell them we got to drive over to the hospital now because your little girl that's not even twenty years old, that's always been just as healthy and pretty as a picture, your daughter's dead of a heart attack, and don't ask me to tell you why, because there's no reason.

  Tell them, just like Hanoi doesn't know and Washington doesn't know what in goddamn hell happened to your son, Bobby. Because there's no lousy reason in this world that makes any sense at all."

  Smalter patted the doctor's immense arm. "Otto. She drowned.

  No one was there, and she drowned. Why do you say heart attack?"

  "That child's been in swim camp up at the lake every summer of her life, and she didn't drown in any two feet of water!"

  "People do. People get cramps. I'm sorry, but I don't understand."

  "Hell! Hell! She was dead when she fell in. Hell's bells, don't tell me my business, Sammy. I know what I'm talking about. This is my responsibility, because I let all this go on too long now, and let people like A.A. and Ernie make me think I was off my rocker or something. I'm going to find that little girl's cocker spaniel tomorrow and run some tests on him."

  Disturbed, Smalter looked up with alarm at the broad, crease-lined face. "I don't follow you, Otto. What are you talking about? What's her dog got to do with this? Look, let me go over to the Strummers' with you, all right?"

  Scaper shook himself like a bear. "Naw. I'm going now. The fewer intruding the better. Lord knows I've had to say the words too many times in one lifetime. You know, I almost lost that girl's mother in a hard delivery the night she gave birth to Bobby. Listen, you want to help, go see what's keeping Winslow, tell him to come drive Lance over to the hospital. The poor dumb bastard's busted a couple of his fingers on that car hood. Okay, I'm going on over there. Tell Priss to give Ernie one of those Valiums, tell him to go to bed. Next time I tell him, and some others, too, there's a serious problem in this town, I want them to think about tonight. Because something's going on, and I don't care if you think I'm nuts or not. I'm right." The old doctor stooped with a grunt to pick up his bag.

  chapter 44

  No sirens had reached the shoulder of the highway where Judith Haig sat knitting in one of the plastic-covered green plaid chairs that belonged to her husband's family room furniture. On the rug around her, scraps of yarn lay in piles of different colors. It was late; Joe MacDermott hadn't driven her home until his TV show was over.

  Sarah and she had done the dishes together, then Judith had read to Francis, quietest of the MacDermott sons. He had wanted to sit on her lap until his mother explained that he was too heavy and Aunt Judith wasn't well. Mrs. Haig had been relieved. The boy's large, rimless spectacles reminded her of Sammy Smalter.

  This scarf too was in some way connected with the pharmacist.

  Hadn't she been thinking about him when she began it? Perhaps, at Christmas, should she give him the scarf, just a token gift? No, what would someone think, offered such a ridiculous present, remnants knotted together, a scarf of scraps? It was nothing to give. His eyes were asking for gifts. She had none. She couldn't give him height, or health, or heart's desire. Mrs. Haig walked to her kitchen. Hours ago she had promised her husband not to forget her medication. John had called at midnight:

  "Jude? Hi, honey, it's Hawk. Couldn't get you earlier. You had me a little worried so I called Joe.…Right. He said you'd been over there.…Right. That's what he said. That was real nice of them. You have a good time? Getting out of the kitchen for a while?…Good.

  Honey, you feeling all right?…Good. The thing is, Joe said something about how Sarah'd claimed how you'd let Maynard's wife, or whatever she calls herself, get you all upset about him being in jail. That's right where he belongs, and you just aren't in any condition…Oh. Oh.

  Okay. Good. Well, I figured. It just didn't sound like something you'd…Well, you know Sarah; you have to divide everything she says by ten.…Good. You're probably getting a little lonely on top of everything else, that's all. Been a rough week. I know. You sent some flowers to Mama Marco?…Good. Service all right?…Good, good. Well, I guess it's just the way things go, honey, just an act of God, poor old Alf, but you can't take things so much to heart. So, listen, I ought to be back tomorrow for sure, around suppertime. The reason I was calling, I've got some great news. Jude, I found it, I think. It was the old needle in the haystack, but I think I've hit the jackpot on that engineer's report. It was a fix, hon, and Ransom has got to have been in on it.…What? The highway, what do you think I'm talking about? You know, honey, I'm sitting on dynamite. I bet I could get myself elected on the ammo I've got now. I could end up in the State Assembly. I'm not kidding, you wait and see. Well, no sense talking about this business over the phone, long distance. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.…Right. So you better get in the bed. How's the house doing, no problems?…Good. Good." He sounded happy. She was relieved.

  Judith had been married to John "Hawk" Haig for a long time.

  She didn't know him very well, though she knew him a great deal better than he knew himself. In high school she had gone out with him because he had been so baffled and unhappy and angry whenever she tried to refuse. As for Hawk, the fact that he had been taunted by his popular friends for being in love with Judith Sorrow was a fact of the same order as learning in his senior year that a damaged kneecap would cost him a college football scholarship, and therefore college. He felt sorry for himself on both accounts. Ironic that he, captain of his team and his class, who could have any girl in Dixwell High, had wanted the one, the only one perhaps, oblivious of, or indifferent to, his public desirability. As ironic as having his knee crushed because he stepped out of a friend's car just when some hot rodder didn't watch where he was backing up. Both were acts of God, punishments exacted (if not for personal sins—like self-abuse and skipping Mass—and Father Crisp had assured the young man they were not—then for the disobedience of Adam and Eve). What could he do but accept the facts?

  As for Judith, she had married Hawk for the same reasons that she had dated him. If he had opened the door of his friend's car a moment earlier or later, she would not be Mrs. Haig now. For the football star, rich in collegiate fraternalism, would not have begged her. He would have forgotten Dingley Falls and Dixwell High and her. He'd now live, like Arn Henry, in a Colonial ranch in an executive subdivision with a wife who remembered her years in the sorority as the happiest of her life. He would not have gone to night school while working full-time, he wou
ld not still live in Dingley Falls, elected only to the office of police chief in a town where only stray dogs and adolescents required policing. He would not have been outdistanced by lesser men of his class, not be in debt to rumors of wealth that were canceled along with the highway on which he might have driven himself out of insignificance. His property was to have been his baby. Judith and he had none. She had been relieved when they were told their barrenness was her fault, not his. Even so, he was baffled and unhappy and angry at this latest act of God. Still, he loved his wife, Judith, though he didn't know her well. He'd always secretly thought that she'd be a perfect wife for a state assemblyman, even for a congressional candidate. It was not merely her beauty that impressed him. She had a dignity and reserve that awed him. While it cost him comfort, ease, and even—on the rare occasions when he pushed against it—frightened him, he took pride in her distance. Her distaste for sex he took to be evidence of her spiritual superiority; Judith had, after all, been raised by the holy Sisters.

  Her passive remoteness in bed assured him of her purity, fidelity, and indeed enhanced her desirability. So whenever Haig pictured his wife to himself he imagined her not in any intimacy, but seated, her hands folded, on a dais next to the podium from which he was addressing his constituents. Only rarely did the guilty fantasy intrude in which his wife, sometimes dressed as a nun, was the victim of his sexual assault.

  As for Mrs. Haig, she had no such fantasies. She tried not to imagine her husband at all, for doing so she saw his face as the hot rodder's car ground his leg against metal. She saw his face as he frowned, bloodeyed, over a textbook at one in the morning, as the doctor commiserated with their barrenness, as the nurse pulled the curtain around his father's hospital bed, as he told her they'd stopped the highway and with it his dreams. She did imagine what she might have done if she hadn't committed the sin of will-lessness that had led her to agree to marry him. She imagined returning to the Sisters of Mercy. She imagined going mad, muffling, behind quilted walls, the screams she could not will herself not to hear. She imagined being killed by the dogs. And tonight, suddenly, to her confused shock, she found herself imagining what it might be like to be married to Winslow Abernathy. It must be, she thought, because he was coupled in her mind with the girl, Chin Lam, and with the visit to Dr. Scaper's, and so with the question of what troubled her heart—physically and really. The lawyer was a stranger who had involved himself, with kindness. By that kindness they were, in some peculiar way, joined. Behind the communication must lie some sort of unspoken knowledge he had of who she was, as well as her strange, unexpected sense that she knew who this man Abernathy was better than she knew John.

  In her immaculate kitchen Judith took her pill, rinsed and dried the glass, then returned to her knitting. She wanted to think of Alf Marco, but she thought of Winslow Abernathy's life, of his ease with wealth and degrees, of his sons—one a lawyer like himself, the other remarkably handsome—she recalled someone laughing in an officer's uniform. The picture hurt her for John, who had neither sons nor ease. She imagined Abernathy's wife, Beatrice Dingley Abernathy, who received letters from charities and almost daily catalogs from fashionable stores. A handsome woman with a kind smile. She imagined her as someone rather like Rose Kennedy, who had once visited the Madder orphanage. Beatrice Dingley Abernathy. She must be the type of woman John would have wanted. A woman of gracious dignity, refined by breeding and education, mother of successful sons, benefactress of charitable institutions, a woman who with her husband had undoubtedly always done quiet good in the world, good like Abernathy's willingness to help Chin Lam Henry. Judith untangled a skein of green yarn. But the man's eyes in repose were heavy with a sad confusion, his hands moved uneasily, his mouth strained for composure. Winslow Abernathy wasn't happy. Why? She imagined a man so troubled by the injustice and misery others endured that no private joy could solace him. She imagined herself.

  For Judith Haig imagined too much. The sorrow of the world arrested her heart as the concept of infinity arrests the mind. When Judith watched the news, she imagined each of the stories spilling over the frame of the lenses. Those who had worked a lifetime to own a house that fire or flood annihilated in an hour. "Insurance won't cover it, so I guess we're wiped out," they would say with nonchalant voices and baffled eyes to the television cameras. How could reporters bear to hear it? How could they bear to record the sobs of survivors of plane crashes still in flames; of widows of soldiers lost to war as the women sat politely in their living rooms, telegrams still in their hands; of parents of children that same day lost to disease, lost in hospital wards, in refugee camps, in hungry villages, lost in city streets? How could reporters bear to thrust a microphone up to the sorrow of the world and record its piercing, unending scream?

  The Sisters of Mercy had always told Judith she imagined too much. They told her to be happy. They told her that being a Christian did not mean she had to suffer every pain ever felt by her fellow man. They said only Christ could bear to feel so much, and that He did feel it so that she wouldn't have to, so that she could be a happy child. Wasn't she young and healthy, well fed, warm, and graced with prettiness and a good mind? But she could not will herself to stop. They told her it was a sin to despair when God wanted her to rejoice in His gifts. They told her she made God unhappy, too.

  Judith tied a piece of black yarn to the green. Then she heard her husband's clock over the family room fireplace, where electric logs glowed orange but never burned. The new old-fashioned clock beat three times into the silence. The bolt was locked, the chain was on.

  Judith turned off her lamp and forced herself to draw open the new drapes that covered the picture window of John's new house. High in the jet void around her, stars held their places, unmoved by the sorrows of the world. There was the bright star the Sisters had told her to wish on, when, like geese with wings spread, they had rustled on warm evenings down the corridors to bob good night beside each bed. Wish for God's grace and a good Christian husband.

  And yet it couldn't be the wishing star that she saw now, Judith thought. In so many years the heavens had shifted. She had been a young girl then, when she had wished for her heart's desire. She had gone to sleep more easily, hours earlier, while Venus still brightened the summer night. While she dreamed that the mystery of her parentage would end happily ever after with the recovery of some beautiful mother and noble father, or the discovery of how the two had died together in some tragic, romantic way, leaving her the sole testament to their love. As she fell asleep then, sometimes she would imagine reunions; the faces of her parents faces of different men and women she had seen in Dingley Falls, or whose pictures she had saved from magazines.

  In her prayers tonight Judith didn't wish for her own happiness; it was not something she expected to be given or knew how to want, though she knew (the nuns had told her so) that she had little justification for this failure of feeling. After all, she had never lived in a time, or at least not in a town, in which the streets were strewn with scab-oozing bodies everywhere struck down by plague. There were no rotting heads of those who had displeased arbitrary rulers shoved onto pointed sticks and stuck atop bridges. Never in the night had she or anyone she loved been carted off into slavery because of their color, or marched to the stake because of their faith, or herded to death because of their race. No child of hers had starved while she watched, no lover had been buried in dirt. She had known neither fire nor shipwreck nor earthquake. She had no enemies and could think of no one really that she herself even disliked, except perhaps the appliances store merchant Limus Barnum, who stared at her surreptitiously with such ugly, naked feelings. She wanted to be able to wish for Limus Barnum's happiness, too, and told herself that she did so.

  The star winked at Judith Haig's wishes and pulled a cover of clouds across its face.

  CONCERNING SCENARIOS

  Larger dramas than Dingley Falls's had their complications as well. The failure of Daniel Wolton and Bob Eagerly to return the helicopter (a
nd pilot) to the U.S. Army post from which they had borrowed it eventually was reported to the chief warrant officer on duty there, who phoned his regimental commander in Transportation Corps, who wanted to know who the hell the jerks were who had taken the thing, and why didn't the CWO just send somebody to find them. Yes, sir, the chief warrant officer did understand that the army couldn't afford to misplace a helicopter that belonged to American taxpayers just because two birds wanted to go for a joyride in it, but, just a second, yes, here it was, a major general had requisitioned that machine for them.

  The regimental commander eventually got in touch with the attaché of a major general of the Chemical Corps Division, who interrupted his employer's electronic tennis match with a next-door neighbor. The major general told his attaché to call G-2, the Intelligence Division.

  Meanwhile, at army G-2, eyes-only letters were being eyed. On a captain's desk now was a memorandum from Daniel Wolton of the OSS requesting that all relevant material on one Operation Archangel be made available for immediate investigatory purposes.

  They found a memorandum from Robert Eagerly, White House, requesting the same material, P.D.Q. Two memorandums, each a week old. The spotlight was on. What was the play?

  "Never heard of it," said the intelligence captain.

  "Oh, yeah, you know. Long time ago, that test lab, whatever it was, off in the boonies somewhere. I think it closed down," said another intelligence captain.

  "I thought that was NIC. Wasn't that old Commander Brickhart's show?"

  "Oh, hey, yeah. In Connecticut, wasn't it? But I think CIA was behind the scenes on that one, I don't think it was NIC," said the first, and slapped his thigh. The captains were secretly watching, without the sound, the Orioles play the Yankees on television.