Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  And believe me, boys, we knelt right down and spread our cheeks so wide in 'Nam, I swear to God above, I'd be surprised if we could ever get it up again! But Svatopluk here, I know he'd say the same. He ran a tight ship. And so unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep, now free from the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil. In hope of the Resurrection to eternal life when we all gather at the river, irregardless of race, creed, or color, and meet with our Savior in the sweet by-and-by. Amen."

  And with a torch Commander Brickhart set the base on fire.

  Throughout the evening as the four men ate a late supper at the Round-Up, off in the woods the strategically placed gasoline barrels ignited when the fire reached them and loudly exploded the flames forward. Microscopic particles of the unfinished Svatopluk experiments danced in the fire, swirling up into the atmosphere.

  At the airport hangar, Brickhart bid "adios amigos" to the three government men, whom, in his contempt, he had called interchangeably by various combinations of their nebulous names. His CO pal who had lent him the demolition team had also sent, at the commander's request, a present, one that the old naval fighter had carried, in its straw-cradled crate, tenderly in his arms on the ride back down the bumpy road chased by fire. He took it from the car.

  Now at eleven o'clock at night, his uniform muddy and sooty but his eyes still pure and blue as a frontier sky, Hector Brickhart gave thumbs up from the cockpit of his borrowed single-engine plane.

  Then, guided back to the base by firelight and moonlight, grinning and his heart in a dance, the commander dropped dead on target a little incendiary thermite bomb with a high explosive charge that shot fire roaring through the woods at a run. He did it for fun, for a last fling before returning to the deathly earnestness of business cartels that he didn't much understand and didn't much like. They spoke a different language. Not that he would have to put up with their crap much longer since apparently he was going to lose this goddamn sneaky war with cancer no matter how hard he fought.

  Still, he'd been lucky and lived a good long life and done the state some service, whether they knew it or not. And having loosed with that dangerous innocence so foreign to Thomas Svatopluk an instrument of destruction far more sophisticated than himself, that bomb he called his honey and his sweetheart and his baby, away Commander Brickhart flew into night.

  On the land from which the secret of Operation Archangel was now being removed (along with abundant beech, birch, cedar, sycamore, and other natural things), there had once lived, in a harmoniously heartless life struggle, abundant deer, bears, wolves, foxes, otters, beavers, minks, raccoons, and other wildlife that was, as William Bredforet used to say of the old great fortunes, "all gone now." Indeed, their pelts had gone to make those fortunes in the shapes of hats, gloves, rugs, collars, and coats. Little but the unprofitable porcupine had not been stolen for a stole. The profligate rabbit had also survived, and the skunk, and the homely woodchuck.

  The human inhabitants of that time before Dingleys had been proud to own everything in sight (abundant Algonquin, Matabesecs, Mohegans, and Pequots) had been created with neither the strategic stench of the skunk, nor the reproductive stamina of the rabbit. So unlike those creatures, the Indians were all gone now, too.

  Harried westward by westward movers founding little towns along the way.

  part six

  chapter 56

  "There's been something the matter with Mrs. Haig's heart," Dr. Ruth Deeds explained to Chin Lam Henry outside the door to the hospital room. "That's why we have to have her here for a day or two, just to keep a check on her. But she's going to be all right. Which, really, is pretty fantastic considering the horror story that woman went through."

  Chin Lam nodded politely. She had herself seen so many horror stories and had heard of so many others that in fact the sight of Mrs. Haig, alive with eyes and ears and all four limbs, propped up on snowy pillows with watchful attendants around her, was not especial cause for grief. And husbands were often killed. Bruises would heal. Chin had not been told of the rape, but rape was not uncommon, and after all not as bad for an adult woman as for a child, and not as bad when a single rapist, and after all there were far worse things than even rape.

  Some of them she had looked at. Chin Lam Henry was not a particularly callous young woman, but her perspective had not been trained on the sanctity of the individual and that individual's right to freedom from violation and to freedom from misfortune, as had the perspectives of the Americans, Judith Haig and Ruth Deeds.

  Last night at 1:00 A.M. (presuming upon, he said, his age and her youth), Otto Scaper had phoned Dr. Deeds to ask if she would save an old man's life by driving to Argyle to check on a patient they had just called him about. Because, he growled, if he didn't get a few hours' sleep tonight, she could have his office equipment tomorrow.

  Scaper had already brought Judith Haig's case to Dr. Deeds's attention as one of the victims of that unnatural heart trouble. When the woman doctor sleepily arrived at the hospital (in a 1947 RollsRoyce), she read on the chart that Mrs. Haig had been brought into Emergency as a victim of shock and of "possible sexual assault." The opinion of the young resident on duty was that Mrs. Haig was in a state of psychotic withdrawal. After visiting Judith, Dr. Deeds told the resident, with a little more stridency than she'd planned, that the woman was not psychotic, but that she had suffered a mild heart attack and that she had been raped, both vaginally and rectally, and that she had been severely beaten, and that if that was what he called "possible sexual assault," she hoped it happened to him sometime. The resident shrugged. Women were hysterical and there was no sense in letting it get to you.

  At the nurses' station Ruth shared a cup of coffee with a young RN, also African-American, who addressed her as "Sister." They talked about Judith Haig. Dr. Deeds was angry. In the Chicago years before she began to concentrate exclusively on research, she had seen a great many raped and beaten women brought into emergency rooms. She was inured to the sight, but not to the fact. "I don't want her to start thinking somehow it was her fault that whoever did this to her got killed, or that her husband got killed, because she got raped. She's got to get angry instead of ashamed. Right?"

  "Right on, honey," said her sister, then looked at the chart Ruth was scribbling on and added, "Hey! You're a doctor! Right on, right on!"

  By Saturday morning it was evident that Mrs. Haig was in no real danger of heart arrest. She was wheeled into a room across an opened curtain from a tired, affable woman close to her in age, who announced at once that though she had just lost one of her breasts, she felt confident that the doctors had caught the tumor in time and that she would be able to keep the other one. "Actually I don't know if one's better than none or not, it's hard to say. But staying alive, that's the main thing, isn't it?" she asked with an expectant nod.

  Judith turned her head on the pillow and looked at the woman.

  "Yes, it is," she replied.

  "My name's Betsy," said the woman, and burst into tears.

  "I'm Judith," Mrs. Haig told her, and began to cry, too.

  Those were the first words Mrs. Haig had spoken. When Dr. Deeds returned to check her at 10:00 A.M., Judith still had said nothing to the police about what had happened Friday night. All they had were two bodies, a weapon, and a few very rushed pictures of the room, taken under frantic circumstances while firemen hauled at the photographer's arms. Now a detective sat in the waiting room, waiting to hear what Mrs. Haig would say. She floated up out of sleep to see an attractive black female face with a wide halo of hair bent down over her. Dr. Deeds explained that she had been sent by Dr. Scaper to keep an eye on his patient, and that she had been there last night but Mrs. Haig had been under sedation.

  "I'm all right now," Judith said.

  The doctor's hands moved gently as she changed bandages behind the pulled curtain. "Are you doing okay here? Want me to try to find you a private room?"

  "
No, this is fine."

  "Well, I don't see why you'll have to stay more than a day or two.

  We'll run some tests and let you rest and probably put you on a bunch of new medications. Now the problem is, I guess you know there's a cop waiting to talk to you?" Dr. Deeds smoothed the covers over Mrs. Haig, then stepped back, her hands stuffed in the wide white pockets of her jacket. "This is the last thing in the world you ought to have to talk to those jerks about. So don't you let them give you a rough time. You just tell them to buzz off. Or you send for me and I'll be glad to get rid of them for you. They've been trained to kowtow to medical mumbo-jumbo. Promise? Okay. That's right, you get some sleep."

  Judith with some effort murmured, "Thank you," touched her fingers to those of Ruth Deeds, then drifted back asleep before the door fully closed.

  Without speaking, Polly Hedgerow and Luke Packer walked side by side along the rotary that circled the town green where Elijah Dingley sat, still laughing despite the disasters that had set upon his namesake. Under heavy rain and heavy traffic, Falls Bridge had finally given way and tumbled down the waterfall, just as everyone had been predicting it would do for decades, and its splintered beams now bobbed in the Rampage. Carl Marco had already intimated privately to Arthur Abernathy, first selectman, his willingness to replace the loss with a modern bridge entirely at his own expense, a new old-fashioned Marco Bridge to welcome the world to Dingley Falls.

  Apart from the bridge, Dingley Falls looked the same, but nothing was as it had been. Stores and offices wore mourning. Wreaths, donated by Carl Marco, marked the doors of the police station where death, passing by, had paused. At Arthur Abernathy's order, the flag of Dingley Falls's post office (which, the town was surprised to hear, it would soon be losing because the government was losing money on it), the flag that the postmistress had raised each work day for eleven years, had been lowered to half-mast for Police Chief John "Hawk"

  Haig. Luke and Polly walked slowly by Barnum's Antiques, Hobbies, and Appliances store. Though not empty, it was not open for business; police squeezed between the cluttered rows of dusty, broken things that Barnum had sold to vacationers. Next door, the Lattice Tea Shoppe was closed, and next to that Smalter's Pharmacy was also closed. Out-of-town reporters were lounging all over the front office of the Dingley Day. A man stood beside A.A . Hayes's desk and used his phone while the editor raised a paper cup to his lips.

  In the cream brick offices shared by Dr. Scaper and Abernathy & Abernathy sat only Ida Sniffell (who had forced the old physician back home to bed) and Susan Packer (who told people that Abernathy Jr. was at Town Hall dealing with the disaster, and that she had no idea where Abernathy Sr. might be). A new postmistress and a new mail carrier were in the tiny office. The weekend volunteer librarian sat alone in George Webster Dixwell Library. And Ransom Bank was always closed on Saturdays. People milled around the circle as if expecting a parade. At one end of the green, teenaged boys tossed a football; at the other, small children fell into somersaults while their young mothers waited on benches. A couple in white took pictures of Elijah's statue.

  Earlier in the morning, Luke had knocked on Polly's door and had said only, "Let's just go for a walk, all right?" And she had said only, "All right." Neither mentioned Joy. Upstairs Polly's father slept, mildly sedated for the pain of his burns. Cecil Hedgerow's hair was singed. His hands lay outside the sheet like two white boxing gloves someone had placed there in tribute. He deserved, he said, to sleep until noon. He was a hero. Dozens of hands had slapped his back and flashbulbs had popped spots in front of his eyes and a microphone had been nudged under his nose to find out how he had felt when his hair caught fire. "Hotheaded," he'd replied, with a sooty grin, and the little crowd that ringed the camera had cheered.

  Tonight when this moment was replayed on television, Democratic party people in the district would begin to wonder if Hedgerow, Dingley Falls's third selectman, might not be a possibility to challenge the incumbent Republican congressman, who, they said, was a sycophant with his hands in the pockets of local business and his head in a golf bag; another possible choice of theirs, John "Hawk" Haig, was written off by the story of his tragic death on the same news program.

  So the hero Cecil Hedgerow slept, his battle won. For Dingley Falls stood. The Federalist houses were not even seared. Around the town green the white brick and gray slate buildings looked much as they had looked last week, indeed last century, except for a fine drizzle of soot that was far less than what fell in pollution on most modern cities every day. Dingley Falls stood, saved by the work of men like Cecil Hedgerow and by four hours of torrential summer rain, but everywhere the town was in a buzz of shock. For north of the highway, geysers of smoke still steamed from the black wasteland that yesterday had been forest and marsh grass. Wild Oat Ridge was charred bare and looked to one Catholic reporter like Golgotha. Hawk Haig's house had burned. Live cinders blown by the wind had caught the roof on fire. Nothing remained but the blackened brick shell. But that was the only human structure lost, and, said the Argyle fire chief, people ought to thank their lucky stars. The little Rampage River had saved Dingley Optical Instruments, and so saved Madder.

  Westward, water in a storm of rain had battled fire past dawn, had held the line at the edge of East Woods and had defeated the flames before one touched Dingley Falls at all.

  Still, Dingleyans were stunned. For not only had they suffered a major forest fire (and though the vacation cabins and the little airport north of the lake were intact, the mountain greenery looked so horrible that Bicentennial summer tourism was bound to suffer, too); they had also suffered on the same night a double murder of their police chief and an active local merchant. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Naturally enough, they had said the same of some dozens of earlier misfortunes, including severe winters, the spring the Rampage flooded, the Depression, and the riots when old Luke Madder had started a union strike in the otherwise gay nineties. But this was definitely the worst in a long time. Their privacy would be intruded upon by a scavenging pack of journalistic hyenas sent, wrote A.A. Hayes, to feed on their personal troubles, then haul the carcasses out into the Colosseum of the world for vultures to pick at.

  Even by Saturday noon, Dingleyans were uncertain about the specifics of the calamities that had befallen them. Rumor had outraced fire and had burned up most of the town and killed half the citizens before the rain stopped. As for the gunfight murders, first it was thought that one or both of the Haigs had been burned to death in their house. Then the shooting news started. A burglar had shot both the Haigs, had shot just Hawk Haig, Hawk Haig had shot a burglar; Judith Haig had shot a burglar and/or had shot Hawk Haig.

  Limus Barnum had shot Hawk Haig. Hawk Haig had shot Limus Barnum. Limus Barnum had been Judith Haig's lover. Limus Barnum had come to fight the fire and had been accidentally shot by either Mr. or Mrs. Haig. Somebody else had shot all three. All three had been burned to death in the fire. Somebody else had shot Barnum and Haig and had wounded Mrs. Haig. Finally the word went out that Judith Haig had been raped. A few Dingleyans, of course, didn't care at all about any of it, and a few who scarcely knew the names of the principals cared with voracious hunger. A few had even fallen prey to still another rumor, that a maniac or something had poured a secret poison or something into the reservoir and that everyone in the town was dying, but this incredible tall tale caught the ears of only the most desperate thrill-seekers and soon expired.

  Most Dingleyans simply waited with some degree of curiosity for the evening television news to show them what had happened.

  Among that group were Polly and Luke, who could not help but find fire and fire trucks momentarily exhilarating, and who were programmed to find murder per se an even more thrilling disaster than fire, and who wondered what the firemen would say when they found the remains of the deserted base. But all this news stirred busily in the far distance, while three-dimensional and huge, the death of their friend Joy closed in on them like humid
air that slowed their steps up Cromwell Hill Road.

  Both tall, lanky, free-limbed, both in jeans, loose shirts, and jogging shoes, Polly and Luke were immediately, automatically labeled by passing motorists as generic American teenagers, indistinct as to age or social background or economic status, barely distinguishable by sex, pretty much warranted against fear and want, burdened largely only by their own almost limitless self-expectations and by the trials that adolescent flesh is heir to—acne, lust, emotional havoc, and other drawbacks to happiness from which the government, though it tries, cannot guarantee protection. Among those drawbacks, the dirty tricks of that foe to the free world, Death, rankled as injustice in the hearts of Polly and Luke.

  As they scuffed past St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Polly noticed Sebastian Marco at work again in the bright colors of the garden. Nearby a black Lincoln sat in the gravel drive, its trunk open. Father Highwick must be back from New York. With disgust Polly realized that thoughts of all the horrific news there was to tell the rector had bubbled up in her at the sight, as if it was exciting that so much had happened while he was away. But of itself the bubble burst. She imagined someone who had been herself standing beside the red bicycle innocently bartering with Father Highwick the secrets of Dingley Falls. She could no longer be that person.

  Before turning back, she and Luke walked as far as Dixwell High School. They peered into dark windows at classrooms left for the summer as though the students had just stepped outside into the hall.

  They found their history room, the podium still in place from which Ms. Rideout had made her valedictory speech with its stuttering confession that she could not cope with their abuse.

  "If she thinks we're rough, why is she going to law school?" Polly said.