When Limus Barnum examined himself in this way for possible psychic disturbance, he did so like everyone else, through highly selective lenses. For instance, from his perspective he saw nothing problematic in his neo-Nazi party membership. In his honest opinion, and everybody had a right to his own opinion, the only salvation for America lay in its swift embrace of a Fourth Reich against the Third World. In his honest opinion, America was not going to be strong and clean until even in good places like Dingley Falls (which at least had not been overrun by niggers and spics like all the big cities) America got rid of the trailer park trash and Jews like Cecil Hedgerow, and intellectual left-wing faggots like Sidney Blossom, and freaks like Sammy Smalter, and women that wouldn't behave like women—rich bitches like Mrs. Troyes and pervert ballbusters like Mrs. Ransom with her plastic prick stuffed up her. Given these honest views, Barnum did not much brood over the reasonableness of his hostility toward his fellow Dingleyans. For example, the anonymous letters (which he thought he had started as a genuine political response by a concerned citizen to Dingley Falls's so-called leaders) had seemed cause for concern only when no one would acknowledge that they were being written. The silence of others had forced him to lie, to claim to have been threatened himself. Perhaps the letters had gotten a little out of control, but it had been just a joke, just something he had gotten into doing. There had been no chance of getting caught, and most of what he wrote was probably true anyhow. They had it coming for the contempt with which they belittled him by their bland, disinterested faces. He knew he was smart, picked up on things; caught, he said, vibes that others missed. He could see through them all so easily. Yet they never noticed how well he had read them over all these years. They had annihilated him by never noticing his hate.
Nothing he did could slap the smiles off their faces.
That's what caused his rushing panic. Because it seemed that no matter how much he was pulled out of control—not insane, he said, just blowing his cool—they made no move to stop him. Because they were forcing him into exposure where his whole life could be ground to a halt, he could be thrown into jail and locked in a cell room.
Because writing letters was one thing, or riding a motorcycle at a kike kid for a joke; but trespassing on Ernest Ransom's property, spying on his wife, or destroying other people's property like Hayes's window or that cat—that sort of stuff was out of line. Sure, it was important to teach Dingley Falls a lesson, but he couldn't bear the responsibility all alone. For the violence that must rivet the foundations of an American Reich a man needed comrades, battle brothers. Lime had too few to get his demands met. He had to communicate with his fellows through the mail, through magazines, though the mirror. They wouldn't read his newspaper, refused to have his news at the pharmacy newsstand or the library newsstand. The people in his life didn't like him, or didn't like him enough, or weren't the right people, or there weren't enough of them, or something was wrong.
How was he going to make it when he couldn't keep himself behind the counter of his lousy store? How was he going to make it when the dumb turkeys of this snotty town would rather have a lousy Jew selectman instead of him? He couldn't even make his lousy dick stand up. She had done this to him, safe there behind her bars, looking right through him like she was blind, pretending not to know what she was making him do. Locked behind the brass grille of her counter, and married to the law, she thought she was safe enough to torture him.
They were all like that, but it was mostly her now. That lousy bitch.
She would not even look into his eyes. Barnum pulled his robe closed.
He locked up his room, dressed, locked his house, hurried to his garage, and pulled out his motorcycle. He had to go where he would be seen.
Sarah MacDermott popped her gum. "Joe, honey, slide over so Lime can sit down. Hard liquor? Take my advice, that stuff will rot a hole through your liver big enough to bury you in, believe me, I ought to know, Lord love us, I come from a long line of dead drunks, God rest them. I won't touch a thing but beer."
"How's it going, Joe? Hot enough?"
"Yes, Joe has practically got heat whatchacallit, prostate. A man his size really suffers in this kind of heat, don't you, honey? I told him, come on, we'll just walk down to Fred's and cool off with a beer, because if a fifteen-year-old boy can't even baby-sit his own little brothers one Friday night in his lifetime, if you can believe that, then I wish I'd had all girls, and I know I've said so a thousand times. But it would have been nice just once in a while to have pulled open a diaper without getting a squirt in the eye. Excuse me, Lime. Joe, tell Lime he'll have to excuse me. I'm just a little bit snockered. Anyhow, it must be the heat. And all those beers. But come on, sit down and join in, Lime. 'It's Friday night and I just got paid. Fool about my money…'" Sarah began to snap her fingers and sing, grinning around the booth at her husband and at their friend Wanda Tojek.
"Thanks anyhow, but I guess I'll just catch the Yankees on the tube over there. Everybody take it easy." With a nod at Joe MacDermott, Barnum walked away. Why, he wondered, didn't MacDermott shut his wife's mouth? A loud, foul-mouthed slut, talking about her own sons' sex organs, with her hand right there on her husband's thigh. Bleached rat's nest coming out of black roots.
The stocky merchant, dressed for his visit to the neighborhood bar in his denim sports jacket, open paisley shirt, and shiny tasseled loafers, jostled his way, stiffly smiling, back to the counter. Fred Fry, owner of the Madder tavern erroneously called Fred's Fries, or Fred's, or Bar and Grill, had died in 1950, and subsequent owners, striving for the veneer of a timely prosperity, had updated the diner chrome, plastic, and linoleum of Fred's era a dozen times since then. The present owner had removed the overhead lights, installed fake dark walnut paneling everywhere, and carpeted everything that wasn't paneled in cheap dark brown carpeting.
At ten o'clock, Mrs. MacDermott was on the phone, standing where doors marked "Bucks" and "Does" on painted cutouts faced each other at the end of a dim corridor. Behind the one for men, Limus Barnum stood at the urinal. Three drinks in succession had left him with a frustrated sense of imbalance, but had at least relaxed him enough to relieve his bladder: what if his body should refuse to obey him altogether and stop functioning? He shook out the urine angrily. From outside the door Sarah MacDermott's voice yowled and screeched at him. Still here, wasting all this money on beer, half-drunk, when she claimed the whole time she could only pay thirty a month on that color Zenith. Sometimes he thought the Irish were as bad as the niggers. That trashy blouse she was wearing looked like she'd stolen it from one.
On the phone Sarah was telling Eddie that his father was on the way home because they had forgotten the wallet accidentally, so if the little ones were still awake or Eddie had let all hell break loose, he had better hide the traces fast before that door opened; and she hoped that his Aunt Orchid was being given some slight chance to sleep in peace. As she hung up, she turned and was face to face with Maynard Henry, who had waited, unnoticed, for her to finish. "Mary, Mother of God! You scared me to death!" Indignantly she refastened some bobby pins in her topknot, as if Henry had frightened them loose. "How in the world did you get here? You didn't escape, did you? Joe's nowhere around, and I hope you're not going to try to start something with him."
"I'm out on bail, no thanks to some I could name. Humped it from Argyle and I'm looking for Chin now. You know where she is?"
"Maynard, now be fair, Joe does his duty, that's all, just like any other man. You know Hawk Haig is his boss, and what's more—"
"I got no grudge against Joe. Where's Chin? My trailer had a damn lock on it. Some kid's marked some kind of shit mess all over it."
"Not one of my boys, I guess I would—"
Henry jammed his hands in his pockets; his eyes moved quickly to watch both of hers. "Listen to me," he said sharply. "I'm looking for my wife. Has Haig fixed it so she got sent away? Because if he has, you better believe it, I'm going to tear that cocksucker's guts out.
; Okay?"
Sarah puffed air up to her bangs. "Honey, talking like that is no way to make somebody want to tell you something. That exact same thing has always been your problem ever since you was little. Arn always said—"
His voice lashed out at her. "Will you cut the crap! Look, I've walked ten miles on no food. I want to find Chin, and I don't want to hear some dipshit crap about my fucking personality. I'm beat to shit."
"You see what I mean? Maynard, if you'd just hold your horses, maybe we could figure this whole thing out. Now, you checked everybody you know and nobody's seen her?"
Pushing out a breath of air like a swimmer, Henry leaned rigidly back against the corridor wall, his hand inside his pocket beating the gun against the side of his thigh. He held himself in check, waiting.
Sarah frowned as she thought, her arms folded over a sleeveless blouse of electric-blue nylon, a present from her sons. She peered around into the bar, then back at Maynard Henry. Finally she spoke.
"I haven't seen her in ages and I don't think she's been in the trailer park since you got arrested, but you know that little lunch place next to the pharmacy on Dingley Circle? Well, she got a job there, just something temporary to tide things over in case, well, anyhow, you had to stay in Argyle or wherever. Of course, that doesn't help you now because the Tea Shoppe's closed, but still. That's what she's doing, and I don't want you to think she's been taken off."
"Where's she staying?"
"How should I know? She didn't come to me for help. But if you want my advice, because my motto is if somebody asks you for water don't give them vinegar instead, the only person I know of where Chinkie—"
"Her name's Chin Lam, okay? It's not Chinkie, it's not Chink.
It's Chin."
"Maynard, you know I don't mean anything by it. It's just what everybody's gotten used to. Hi there, Doris, how they treating you, tips rotten as ever?" Sarah squeezed the arm of a waitress who passed them on her way to the toilet. "Anyhow, the only place I can think of where she could be staying is Judith Haig's house. I don't know if you remember Judith, but she's Hawk's wife, now just calm down, now wait a minute, I wouldn't be telling you this if I thought you were going to break out in a rash about it, and what's more, Maynard, this is the pure and simple truth, Hawk had nothing to do with it, he's been out of town on business. Judith is my best friend and that's why I know about it. I know she was just trying to help because Chinkie went and asked her to."
"Bullshit. I don't believe it. Why should she?"
"I get the feeling Judith started feeling sorry for Chinkie, and she never had any kids of her own, and I guess she just took her in.
Because the day after she found out about it, she started working on your case (now I'm telling you this in secret, Maynard, because I think you deserve it, but I'll kill you if it gets back to Hawk), but she was doing everything she could to help you, even going against her own husband, even calling Arn up in Massachusetts to come get you out, and I guess it worked, too. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary! Hey, what's the matter with you? Stop acting like a nut before they throw you out of here!"
Maynard Henry, cursing loudly against the Haigs' trespass on his life, had kicked out, in a sudden spasm, at the flimsy paneled wall.
Behind it, Limus Barnum felt the tremors of anger with a thrill.
Sarah's voice sharpened; she spun Henry away from the wall.
"Jesus love us! If I let myself fly off the handle whenever I felt like it like you do, they'd have put me in a nuthouse years ago. Jesus! I'm trying to help you, and I have to look at enough temper tantrums at home without having to watch you have one at your age. Now you can think anything you want to, but it won't be true. If Chink, Chin, is staying out at Judith's, the thing for you to do, wait a minute, let me get a pencil, here, I'll write it down.…See you, Doris. Hon, Wanda's sitting over there by herself, would you tell her I'm in the can and I'll be out in a sec? Thanks…is call her and tell her you're coming out there. And if you'll take my advice, you'll just thank her for trying to be a good neighbor and let bygones be bygones. Now, Hawk'll be at the station most of the night, that's why I say try her now. I'm not trying to make a big deal out of anything, but I wouldn't tell you if I didn't know he wasn't going to be there because I get the feeling you and Hawk had better keep out of each other's hair until everybody's cooled off. Just tell Judith you want to take Chinkie back home."
"Take her back home! This is fucking unbelievable! He throws me in the jug and his wife muscles in on Chin. Who the shit does she think she is? Fucking Christ? No way!"
"I'm not going to listen to you take the Savior's name in vain like that."
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry, it's nothing personal, okay?"
"Well, it really gets my goat. Now, do you want me to call for you? Why don't I?"
"No. I'm going to take care of it."
"Well, Joe would kill me if he found out I told you, because you got to admit, people got a right to wonder about you when you start going crazy and bulldozing Puerto Ricans down the side of a mountain. 'Course it sounded to me like Raoul had it coming in the first place, but still. It makes it kind of hard for me to keep telling people, 'Oh, listen, his bark is worse than his bite,' when they hear stories about you eating off ears."
Suddenly Henry smiled, shifting the bony surfaces of his face into the youth it had almost never revealed. It was that rare, oddly sweet smile that Winslow Abernathy had noticed in the visitors' room of the Argyle jail. "Hey," he said. "Thanks, okay?"
"Well, just don't yell at Judith like that. She'll drop dead. She's not used to it the way I am. The nuns raised her."
In the bathroom, Limus Barnum still waited. He waited until after a long silence, then he slowly opened the door. On the shelf under the wall phone was a chewing gum wrapper with a number written on it. No one was in the corridor when Barnum dialed. The phone rang at least eight times, then a female voice, catching its breath as it spoke, said, "Hello?" Barnum said nothing. "Hello?" the voice repeated. "Hello? I'm sorry, is someone there? Hello?" Then she was silent. He waited. Each could hear the other's breath. Quietly he replaced the receiver.
After the artificial coolness of the bar, the heat outside felt briefly pleasant. Barnum could see Henry with his dog; the man walked slowly, almost as if he limped, and the two had not yet reached the end of the block. When he passed them, the large shepherd darted out at the motorcycle. Barnum kicked out at it as he sped away toward his house on Glover's Lane. There, stumbling through the small, dark rooms, he ran to his bedroom, felt under the bed, and pulled out his revolver. He fitted it carefully into his jacket pocket. If asked why, he would have explained, and believed, that the man now on his way to her house was a criminal. Everyone said he was violent, unmanageable, one of those whose mind had been lost in Vietnam, something that sounded like a rabid animal. Barnum believed that he was hurrying to see if Mrs. Haig needed to be saved. He was thinking that if he brought Henry in to Hawk Haig, it would foster a friendship between him and the police chief. Haig had a lot of political influence locally and it would be helpful to have the man in his debt. He was thinking that Henry might get out of line and have to be shot, and that if he saved her life by killing a criminal, that would get him in good with everybody. The scenario toward which he raced, rehearsing, was vivid in his mind. But, in fact, all Barnum really knew was that finally something was going to happen. He was going to press his hand against life and feel that it had the glaring intensity of the world in the mirror.
chapter 53
Judith sat in the dark and waited for the phone to ring again. Since the anonymous call, she had sat, her legs tucked up in the green armchair, with the lights off, because it was more frightening to her to be seen than not to be able to see. She continued to knit by feel, soothed by the orderly sound. She had closed the doors to the family room so that in less space she might feel less vulnerable. One of her discomforts with her husband's new house was that there were so few doors to close; rooms gaped into one another as
if their occupants, smothering under the pressure of the low ceilings and close, windowless sides, had snatched sledgehammers and bashed down the walls. The living room drifted into the dinette and so into the kitchen and so onto the patio. Judith disliked being in the living room because its size and its barren modernity more radically exposed her and forced her to feel how radically her body, like the tentacles of an oozy jellyfish, held her trapped in its soft, defenseless flesh. The family room could be closed, and was therefore her favorite.
Mrs. Haig had been trying to occupy her mind with meditations on her husband. It was only a little past ten, but she was already dressed for bed in a nightgown and bathrobe, for she had wanted to give herself time to fall safely asleep before John's return from the station. Then the phone call had come, and the still-heard sound of that breath so close to her ear, the threat of that intimate silence, had violated her escape and made sleep impossible. While waiting, then, she was finishing the scarf and thinking about her husband.
She thought unhappily about him, with deep pity in her heart. He worked so hard to defeat failure, but felt himself defeated. This unnecessary house they couldn't afford, the unused furniture he had so carefully arranged according to the store display, the early morning and long evening hours he struggled to make the earth grow for him. Judith's heart swelled with sadness for John, because she could not love him as he deserved to be loved. Tonight had been horrible to her, more than it had been before, even more than in the early days of their marriage when she had been given instruction on how to will herself to love him. Why had he not cast her aside as barren, annulling the marriage? But he had never charged her with that loss of progeny. By choice, he would end his family with his life with her.
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