Kune literally staggered, and that was not easy since he sat in a morris chair. Mice whimpered. Joel-Andrew, as an expert on the Lord, did not figure the Lord would help on this one. The Lord expected people to take some hand in their destinies.
“A burger franchise,” Kune said, stunned. “Defiled. Perverse. Satanic. Doom.” Kune turned to Joel-Andrew. “I told you,” he whispered. “There’s no hope, no hope for any of us. August Starling is a creature from hell.”
Chapter 18
As the men sat in stunned silence interrupted only by chirps of terrified mice, the all-seeing tower looked into the heart of Point Vestal. Ghosts popped, as Gerald reported. Among more shallow ghosts, at least, the return of August Starling seemed the most important event in the past hundred years. Even wise ghosts were intrigued.
Because, as Maggie might point out, there is nothing fine about captivity. All very well, perhaps, to spend thirty or forty years sitting at the end of a bar. The Loyal Order of Beagles could tell us that. Bar talk being what it is, however, the joy of anchoring a bar fades as a century passes.
And proud duty, itself, is too stern for long wear. The ghostly Crocker twins, for instance, would have us ponder their careful question: How many times can you jump off a cliff and still put your heart in it? The Sailor, dying each Wednesday at 4:00 PM, would inquire: How many times can you die at 4:00 PM on Wednesday, and still have it mean anything?
Throughout Point Vestal, questions echoed. Over and over the ghosts had howled, tinkled, chimed, woo-wooed and woe-woed. They had rattled chains, sobbed, screamed, stomped, pattered, flowed, been ethereal. They had, on the whole, done a sturdy job; but the grim fact was, they were having a hard time going to work. A few managed to hold matters together for important dates, Halloween or their birthdays; but starting in approximately 1950, ghosts began sloughing off.
Take The Sailor. He was to be chain-whipped by the morose cop. During the early years, The Sailor died miserably. During the rest of each week he suffered anxiety, depression, fear, regret; and even hoped for atonement from sins he might have committed and could not remember. During those early years The Sailor existed in a living purgatory as real as anything found on Her Majesty’s ships.
It went equally hard for the skinny cop. In the early years he took some satisfaction in duty, although no joy. It was terrible to chain-whip a man, terrible to hear the screams, the choking; terrible to see last flickers of life depart from a horribly battered body. By 1950 the skinny cop figured something would have to be changed, or he would become a butcher; an Eichmann, or a Secretary of State.
A compromise developed. At first, the skinny cop went light on his blows. The Sailor exaggerated his screams. Years passed. A pattern emerged. By 1970 the skinny cop indifferently smacked chains against a wall. The Sailor, untouched, might have won an Emmy for screaming and choking. By 1973 they sometimes swapped. The Sailor beat on the wall; the skinny cop screamed and choked. No one in Point Vestal noticed, and so—as The Sailor put it—“If they don’t give a bloody farthing, mate, why in the weeping world should we?”
Thus—except for Maggie, Gerald, and a few spectral preachers—every ghost in Point Vestal faked it—at least when Gerald was not around.
The all-seeing tower watched ghosts dropping all pretense toward duty in favor of dancing, singing, and skipping school. They could not bear their traditional work, and there was no other work they could do. A new purgatory rose. The ghosts despaired. The Parsonage did not favor what went on, but it said nothing to the men and mice who caucused in the basement.
“Starling brings in the stock market. Real estate. A burger franchise.” Kune’s voice broke. Tears dilated his yellow eyes. The morris chair creaked in sympathy. “Next there will be condos, subdivisions”—Kune’s voice sank to a horrified whisper—“used car lots.”
“Smuggling,” Joel-Andrew said. “Murder. Mayhem.”
“Smuggling is traditional,” Gerald said. “We pretend we don’t see it as long as the stuff goes through town and doesn’t stay here. Our Founding Fathers . . .” Gerald removed his hat, bowed his head.
“I am not a contentious sort, but I am well acquainted with your Founding Fathers,” the Irish cop muttered, “for I have scraped them out of many a gutter. Pig-slime.”
Gerald put his hat on, assumed a cop-like demeanor.
“Dog-droppings,” the Irish cop said. “Auld friend,” he said to Gerald, “forgive it, but I know those men.”
“We are in distress,” Joel-Andrew said kindly, “and that makes us forget the main problem. The main problem is that Mr. Starling is so far astray from principled behavior . . .” Joel-Andrew heard his own words. They sounded like bird gravel on the floor of a birdcage. “Oh, dear, that sounded phony.” He looked at Kune. “Whether it’s hamburgers or real estate, we’ve got to turn this Starling cat around. Quit yelping and come up with something.” The mice seemed impressed.
Gerald, unaccustomed to hearing that the founders of Point Vestal were scumbags, still looked at the Irish cop.
Joel-Andrew rubbed a mouse’s ear, felt the tiny body shiver.
“Shoot him!” Kune said to Gerald, his voice savage. “Shoot Starling. He was supposed to be dead in 1922, anyway.”
Joel-Andrew felt overwhelmed with sadness. It was always like this. He ministered to cops, solid citizens, professors of psychology; the shapers of society who preached the dignity of systems. Joel-Andrew asked them to love each other, and the most they could do was buy more guns.
It was always this way for Joel-Andrew, but Joel-Andrew was a child of the Lord. He played from a position of strength.
“Uh-huh,” Gerald said to Kune, “shoot Starling. Yep. Sure. But there will have to be a town meeting at Janie’s Tavern. I expect you’ve been at some town meetings?”
Kune twitched. He had attempted to suppress his feelings and imagination. Now, the first feeling he allowed himself was a recommendation for murder. Kune reflected on his own version of bird gravel.
The Irish cop watched Joel-Andrew. The Irish cop expected Joel-Andrew to come up with something—and it had better be fast—and it had better be right.
“At this I’m an expert,” Joel-Andrew said with misery. “I think I know everything about evil.” He nearly choked. The memory of a young girl standing in an alley nearly silenced him. “I know suffering. Even when suffering is necessary, all suffering is evil.” He looked at Kune. “You know that. You remember Shirley’s suffering, and your own. Makes no difference whether it’s natural causes or induced, the result of suffering is a kind of death. When you kill a killer, it spreads the killing.”
The love of the Lord filled the room. “For some of the awful things in this world,” Joel-Andrew said, “there are cures. Mostly there are only treatments.”
Above them, in the empty hallways of The Parsonage, echoes of ministerial voices held their breath. The screams of Point Vestal history paused momentarily. Suffering. The presence of evil twisted, whirled, churned like red shadows on the walls of the Starling House when August Starling danced with a corpse.
“I used to understand that.” Kune’s yellow eyes showed old pain. “I took the Hippocratic oath. These days I ain’t much, but I’m still something.”
“Suppose,” Joel-Andrew said to Kune, “and just for the sake of argument—suppose the Lord is interested in this affair. How would He proceed?”
“Brimstone,” the Irish cop said.
“That’s church talk,” Joel-Andrew murmured. “Not fit for the real life of the world.” He looked at the Irish cop, Gerald, and Kune. “All the Lord has is us,” he said. “Maybe that’s quite a bit.”
Above them The Parsonage approved silently, although The Parsonage would not swear to its reasons.
“We can’t shoot August Starling,” Kune said.
“And yet,” the Irish cop said, “the monster must be abated.”
“Have him committed,” Kune said. “The modern nut ward is strikingly different from the Victorian
madhouse. Everything is clean, and the food acceptable. Tortures are only chemical and electric, a few lobotomies.”
“You can trump up anything to hold a guy, but a case needs evidence,” Gerald said.
“Get ghosts to testify,” the Irish cop said. “If some dear souls can be found unburdened by prejudice.”
Gerald sat on the stair step, his face haunted by frustration. “It wouldn’t stand up,” he told the Irish cop. “It’s called ‘spectral evidence,’ inadmissible since 1693.”
The two mice chirped confidentially. Whispers gathered overhead. The Parsonage settled firmly on its foundation. From the all-seeing tower came echoes of ministerial voices. Lamplight flickered in the basement, and Kune’s long yellow hair looked white. His eyebrows knitted a straight line as he diagnosed the situation.
“We don’t try just one thing, we try several,” Kune said. To Gerald, he said, “Watch Starling every minute. He isn’t accustomed to the twentieth century. He may fail to pay his income tax.”
Kune looked to Joel-Andrew. “You’re pretty good at what you do,” Kune admitted. “Take some heavenly shots. It is a fertile little situation because of Starling’s associates. You get to take holy shots at gunmen, the Chamber of Commerce, drug runners, the city council . . . actually, the field seems unlimited.”
Kune looked at the Irish cop, whose jaw would have jutted were he not slightly overweight. “You have the toughest job,” Kune said. “Keep a constant eye on Collette.”
“Starling is after Collette,” Gerald explained. “Starling looks for a new dancing partner.”
The cop’s jaw stopped jutting. He sat silent, surprised; then, finally, unsurprised. He looked at Kune.
“If ye be expecting a scene,” he said, “let the thought be leaving. Be ye thinkin’ of drink and Irish curses, ye can forget it.” The cop no longer sounded merry.
“Don’t kill Starling,” Gerald told him. “You know what our jail looks like.”
“The dead d’na feel pain,” the Irishman’s voice became cop-like. “I will carry my end of this stick.” The cop watched Kune. “What will you be about?”
“It’s delicate,” Kune told him. Kune looked worried, and also a little frightened. “I’ll be drifting in and out of the servants’ entrance at the Starling House. Sooner or later, at some place in history, there’ll be a document or an action that will accuse Starling. Something must exist that puts him in jail or back in the nuthouse.”
Chapter 19
August Starling slipped into town the last Sunday of November. A couple of Seventh-day Adventists and a hungover fisherman saw him standing the deck of a rumrunner dating from the 1920s. The rumrunner was a sleek eighty-footer, painted as gray as the tumbling waters of the Strait.
August Starling stepped to the pier, looked at moored fishing boats, and at werelight above downtown buildings. He looked at the tall brick building he had just purchased, the same one that in 1888 had held his own trading company.
The rumrunner backed into the channel, spun its nose, headed to the Strait where a distant Panamanian freighter wallowed at three knots. August Starling watched, his smile tender, dutiful. Then he walked the deserted street. His boyish face was now smooth shaven. His Victorian wool had given way to a conservative business suit. He went directly to his room at the old hotel. August Starling knew the ways and customs of Point Vestal. Duty or not, nothing in the line of “progress” would happen on Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning, whether 1888, or 1973, or today, our churches steam along like a parade of hardworking tugboats. Church bells clink, dong, clank.
Some congregations talk about the holiness of labor, while others examine the sins of labor unions. At least a dozen diaper their children with dogma blaming nastiness on Eve; while more timid congregations discuss the economic ramifications of the theory of entropy. Here and there a congregation breaks silence to praise the responsibility of doing good, while ignoring thoughts of goodly being.
Ideas ebb, flow, return and then again return; a stern seventh wave rising from the restless tides of history. Puritan certainty overtakes the town. Mists of history murmur that Puritans had trouble with love, Victorians had trouble with sex—and the twentieth century has trouble with both—and mists murmur that each group solved (or solves) its troubles by wrapping itself in the comforting cloak of questionable duty.
August Starling experienced, with clinical detachment, the movings and murmurs, the flutters and outcries of a troubled civilization. It would soon develop that he had doped out every problem confronted by the twentieth century.
Imagine him, then, standing in his hotel room on Sunday morning, staring into gray and vacant streets while simpering toward the darkened windows of Collette’s antique shop. Imagine his chuckles, his dream filled eyes as he ruffled his knowledge like a cardplayer shuffling eight aces. August Starling knew progress was a smoke screen. More importantly, he knew everyone in Point Vestal still believed in progress. In the name of progress, all criminal behavior was still possible.
He laid his plans that Sunday, and then, perhaps, he rested.
Starling appeared bright-eyed and chirpy when he entered Jerome’s newspaper office the next day. The newspaper office was inky, smudged, capably lighted. In older days it served to warehouse furs of bear, cougar, beaver, and sea otter. Old perfumes still lingered in the bricks, mixing with scents of a hundred years of journalism. Over the lintels of doorways Jerome placed significant headlines from Point Vestal history. T. Roosevelt Hunting Party Visits, Shoots Cow. Author Twain Addresses Sunday School, Superintendent Miffed. Explorer R. E. Byrd Recruits Local Samoyed for Dog Team.
Jerome recalls seeing Starling arrive that day. Jerome tipped his green eyeshade upward in time to see a tiny sneer behind August Starling’s friendly smile. Jerome has reported war, plague, devastation. He covers visiting carnivals, snake oil salesmen, faith healers, revivalists. Jerome knows every grift, shill, con, scam, and lanternslide in the book. He would not be taken in by August Starling’s medicine show.
“Because,” Jerome explains, as we sit in The Fisherman’s Café, “there are more things unreported in the newspaper, than are ever reported.” He looks carefully at each of us: Samuel and Bev and Collette and Frank. “Because,” he says, “back in 1973, an awful lot of information came across the desk. I would not print happenings until I had a handle on the facts.”
This morning the doughnuts are blueberry, colored with lemony yellow sprinkles. The wind wangs and bangs something fierce. It is already January, and we have been writing this history for an awfully long time. The windows steam, so Mikey Daniels’s milk truck is a vague blob moving thumpedly before the wind.
“. . . would blow a crab out of a crab pot,” Samuel mutters about the weather. “I never thought writing a book would do such extraordinary things to a person’s dreams.”
“I always thought a book was about what was,” Bev admits, “and now I find they are more likely to be about what might have been.” She looks at Frank, and Frank is confused.
“It is a history,” Bev explains, “but it’s becoming our history, not just town history.” Her smile is sad, but Bev is tough and brave. “We might have been better people.”
“Not me,” Frank tells her. “I behaved adequately, thank you.” Frank leans over the warmth of his mustache cup. “Decorum,” he says. “Protocol. Decent behavior.”
“I was such a kid,” Collette mourns. “It takes such a long, long time to grow up.” She looks at Bev, a look asking for another woman’s understanding. “Starling sent a dozen white roses every other day. You can see how a person’s head would get turned around.”
“None of us did our shining best,” Bev tells Collette. “Kune and Joel-Andrew keep looking better, and we keep looking not so good.”
Samuel looks patriarchal. Of course, at his age, Samuel is a patriarch. “A lot of information came across your desk,” he says to Jerome. “What information?”
Jerome pulls a notebook from hi
s jacket. We have always known Jerome as a good newsman. These voluminous notes prove it.
“Roses to Collette,” Jerome says. He settles back. “Item one: The increase of time jumps grew larger than anyone except Gerald and I imagined. They were largely Chinese. However . . . Item two: A persistent time jump appeared in the vicinity of the Starling House.” Jerome looks apologetic. “Perhaps I should have reported this one.”
“Which was?”
“The woman Starling killed back in 1888,” Jerome says. “She had never made a spectral appearance in Point Vestal history. In 1973 she began appearing. Her name, as you know, is Agatha.”
“What manifestation?”
“She danced,” Jerome says. “That, of course, is reasonable. The dance began slowly, slowly speeded up, and ended in fury. She caused a vortex in the mist.”
“Scares me even now,” Collette admits. “Maybe it’s best you didn’t report it.”
“Item three,” Jerome mutters. “Miscellaneous. Unexplained. Twenty dancing ducks performed on North Beach. The fishing vessel Northern Lights reported a talking porpoise. The porpoise said, ‘Howdy.’ Tone of voice, sarcastic. Mice began emigrating from downtown basements to uptown churches. A flight of ravens argued in iambs. Except for Maggie, every Indian left town to visit relatives.”
“I expect those ducks were mergansers,” Samuel says. “Mergansers have always struck me as imaginative.”
“Mallard sports most likely,” Frank mutters. “Mallards miscegenate with anything.”
“Those ducks were muscovy,” Jerome tells us, “but that may not be the point. The point may be that Nature smelled a rat.’’
“What else was happening,” Bev whispers. She watches Samuel who watches her. “I’m beginning to form a notion,” she says only to Samuel. “August Starling was the worst man of his century, Kune was one of the best of his. Joel-Andrew was timeless.”
Samuel shudders, controls his pomposity, reaches to touch her hand. “Perhaps you are correct,” he murmurs.
The Off Season Page 13
