by Jack Finney
Maxie's Lunch was closed up – for good, apparently, because the counter stools were unbolted and lying on their sides on the floor. Across the street, the Sequoia had put a placard in the closed box office, and it read Open Saturday and Sunday Evenings Only. A shoe store still had some Fourth-of-July advertising in the window, some children's shoes grouped around it, and over the polish of their leather lay a fine layer of dust.
I noticed again, as Becky and I walked along the street, how much paper and litter there was; the city trash baskets stood full, and torn sheets of newspaper and tiny drifts of dust lay in the corner of store entrances, and at the bases of street lamps and mailboxes. In the vacant lot between Camino and Dykes, the weeds were high, untended for days, though there was a city ordinance against it. Becky murmured, "The popcorn wagon's gone," and I saw that it was; for years a red-wheeled, glass-and-gilt popcorn wagon had stood by the sidewalk at the front edge of this lot, and now there were only weeds.
Elman's restaurant lay just ahead; the last time I'd eaten there I'd wondered vaguely why there'd been so few customers. And now I wondered again, as we stopped to glance in through the plate glass, for only two people were having lunch at a time when it should have been crowded. Fastened to the window, as always, was the day's menu, hectographed in faded purple ink, and I looked at it. There was a choice of three entrées, and for years they'd always had six or eight.
"Miles, when did all this happen?" Becky gestured to indicate the length of the semi-deserted street behind and ahead of us.
"A little at a time," I said, and shrugged. "We're just realizing it now; the town's dying."
We turned away from the restaurant window, and Ed Burley's plumbing truck passed, and he waved, and we waved back. Then, in that queer silence that occasionally came over the street, we could hear our footsteps on the sidewalk again.
At the corner, at Lovelock's Pharmacy, Becky said, trying to sound casual, "Let's have a Coke, or some coffee, or something," and I nodded, and we turned in. I knew she wanted, not a Coke or coffee, but to get off this street for a minute or so; and so did I.
There was a man at the counter, which surprised me. Then I was surprised that I should have been surprised; but somehow, after our walk down Main Street, I'd almost have expected any place we might have gone into to be empty. The man at the counter turned to glance at us, and I recognized him. He was a salesman from some San Francisco wholesale house; I'd once treated him for a twisted ankle. We took the two stools next to him and I said, "How's business?" Old Mr. Lovelock looked at me inquiringly from down the counter, and I held up two fingers and said, "Two Cokes."
"Lousy," the man next to me answered. There was still the remainder of a smile on his face from our greeting, but it seemed to me that a hint of hostility had come into his face. "At least in Santa Mira," he added. Then he sat looking at me for several moments, as though debating whether to say any more; down the counter, the soda-water syphon coughed as our Coke glasses were filled. Then the man beside me leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and said, "What the hell's going on around here?"
Mr. Lovelock came carrying our Cokes, then he set them down carefully and slowly, and stood there for a moment or so, blinking benignly. I waited till he turned away and shuffled off to the back of the store again before I answered. "How do you mean?" I said casually, and took a sip of my Coke. It tasted bad; it was too warm and it hadn't been stirred, and though I looked around, there wasn't a spoon or straw in sight, and I set the glass down on the counter.
"You can't get an order any more." The salesman shrugged. "Not to amount to anything, anyway. Just the staples, the bare essentials, but none of the extras." He remembered, then, that you mustn't knock the home town to a resident, and he smiled jovially. "You people on a buyers' strike, or something?" Then he gave up the effort, and quit smiling. "People just aren't buying," he muttered sullenly.
"Well, I guess things are a little tight around here at the moment, that's all."
"Maybe." He picked up his cup and swished the coffee around in the bottom of it, staring morosely down at the cup. "All I know is it's hardly worth coming into town lately. Hell of a place to get to now, for one thing; takes an hour and a half just to get in and out of Santa Mira. And for all the good I do, I might as well pick up what orders they got by phone. And it isn't just me," he added defensively. "All the boys say so, the other salesmen. Most of them have quit coming around; you can't make gas money in this town any more. You can hardly even buy a Coke most places, or" – he nodded at his coffee cup – "a cup of coffee. Twice, lately, this place has been out of coffee altogether, for no reason at all, and today when they have it, it's lousy, terrible." He finished the coffee in a gulp, making a face, and as he slid off the counter stool the hostility was plain in his face, and he didn't bother to smile. "What's the matter," he said angrily, "this town dying on its feet?" He pulled a coin from his pocket, leaned forward to lay it on the counter, and, his face close to mine, spoke quietly into my ear, with suppressed bitterness. "They act as though they don't even want salesmen around." For a moment he stared at me, then he smiled professionally. "See you, Doc," he said, nodded politely at Becky, then turned and walked to the door.
"Miles," Becky spoke, and I turned to look at her. "Listen, Miles" – she spoke in a whisper, but her voice was tense – "do you think it's possible for a town to cut itself off from the world? Gradually discourage people from coming around, till it's unnoticed any more? Actually almost forgotten?"
I thought about it, then shook my head. "No."
"But the road, Miles! Only one way into town now, almost impassable; that doesn't make sense! And that salesman, and the way the town looks – "
"It's impossible, Becky; it'd take a whole town to do that, every soul in it. It'd have to be absolutely unanimous in decision, and action. And that would include us."
"Well," she said simply, "they tried to include us."
For a moment I just stared at her; she was right. "Come on," I said then, laid a quarter on the counter, and stood up. "Let's get out of here; we've seen what we came to see."
At the next corner, we passed my office, and I looked up at my name in gold leaf on the second-storey window; it seemed a long time since I'd been there. When we turned off Main then, onto my street and Becky's, she said, "I've got to step in at my house and see my father, and, Miles, I hate to; I can hardly bear seeing him the way he is now."
There was nothing I could say to that, and I simply nodded. A block south of Main, just ahead of us now, lay the old, red-brick, two-storey public library, and I remembered it was Saturday, and that the library closed at twelve-thirty for the week-end. "We'll have to take a minute to step in at the library," I said.
Miss Wyandotte was at the desk as we walked up the wide library steps from the street door, and I smiled with real pleasure, as always. She'd been librarian since I was a grade-school kid coming in for Tom Swift and Zane Grey books, and she was the exact opposite of the conventional notion of what a librarian usually is. She was a grey-haired, intelligent-eyed, brisk little woman, and you could talk in the main reading-room of her library, if you weren't too loud about it. You could smoke, too, and she'd bought ash trays and placed them around the room, and there were comfortable cushioned wicker chairs beside low magazine-strewn tables. She'd made it a nice place to spend a pleasant hour or afternoon, a place where people met friends to talk quietly, smoking and discussing books. She was wonderful with children – she had an enormous natural and interested patience – and as a kid, I always remembered, you felt welcome there, and not an intruder.
Miss Wyandotte was one of my favourite people, and now as we stopped at her desk, and greeted her, she smiled, a bright, really pleased smile that made you glad you were here. "Hello, Miles," she said. "Glad to see you're reading again," and I grinned. "It's nice to see you, Becky," she said. "Say hello to your dad for me."
We answered, then I said, "Could we look at the Tribune file, Miss Wyandotte? For last spr
ing; the first part of May, say from the first to the fifteenth."
"Certainly," she said, and when I offered to go get the file myself, she said, "No, sit down and relax; I'll bring it to you."
We took a couple of wicker chairs by one of the tables, lighted cigarettes, then Becky picked up a Woman's Home Companion, and I began glancing through Collier's. It took a while before Miss Wyandotte came out from the file room again; I'd finished my cigarette, and noticed it was twelve-twenty, before she appeared, smiling, with the big, cloth-covered, newspaper-sized book stamped Santa Mira Tribune, April, May, June, 1953. She laid it on the table beside, us, and we thanked her; the date-line on Jack's Santa Mira clipping had been May 9, and I opened the big book and found the Tribune for the day before.
Both of us scanned the front page, glancing carefully at each story; there was nothing there about giant seed pods or Professor L. Bernard Budlong, and I turned the page. In the upper left-hand corner of page three was a rectangular hole, two columns wide by five or six inches deep; a news story had been neatly sliced out with a razor blade, and Becky and I glanced at each other, then scanned the rest of that page, and page two. We found nothing of what we were looking for, nor did we find it in the remaining three pages of the May 8 Tribune.
We turned to the May 7 issue and began with page one. There was nothing in the paper about Budlong or the pods. On the bottom half of the May 6 Tribune's first page was a hole seven or eight inches long and three columns wide. On the bottom half of the May 5 issue was another hole, just about as long, but only two columns wide.
It wasn't a guess, but a sudden stab of direct, intuitive knowledge – I knew, that's all – and I swung in my chair to stare across the room at Miss Wyandotte. She stood motionless behind the big desk, her eyes fastened on us, and in the instant I swung to look at her, her face was wooden, devoid of any expression, and the eyes were bright, achingly intent, and as inhumanly cold as the eyes of a shark. The moment was less than a moment the flick of an eyelash – because instantly she smiled, pleasantly, inquiringly, her brows lifting in polite question. "Anything I can do?" she said with the calm, interested eagerness typical of her in all the years I had known her.
"Yes," I said. "Would you come here, please, Miss Wyandotte?"
Smiling brightly, she walked around her desk and crossed the room toward us. There was no one else in the library now; it was twenty-six minutes past twelve by the big old clock over her desk, and the only other patron had left a few minutes before.
Miss Wyandotte stepped beside me, I glanced up at her, and she stood looking down at me, her expression pleasantly inquiring. I nodded at the hole on the front page of the newspaper before me. "Just before you brought us this file," I said quietly, "you cut out all references to the seed pods found here last spring, didn't you?"
She frowned – bewildered by this accusation – and leaned forward to stare down in surprise at the mutilated paper on the low round table.
Then I stood up to face her, my face a few inches from hers. I said, "Don't bother, Miss Wyandotte, or whatever you are. Don't bother to put on an act for me." I leaned closer, staring her directly in the eyes, and my voice dropped. "I know you," I said softly. "I know what you are."
For a moment she still stood, glancing helplessly from me to Becky in utter bewilderment; then suddenly she dropped the pretence. Grey-haired Miss Wyandotte, who twenty years ago had loaned me the first copy of Huckleberry Finn I ever read, looked at me, her face going wooden and blank, with an utterly cold and pitiless alienness. There was nothing there now, in that gaze, nothing in common with me; a fish in the sea had more kinship with me than this staring thing before me. Then she spoke. I know you, I'd said, and now she replied, and her voice was infinitely remote and uncaring. "Do you?" she said, then turned on her heel and walked away.
I gestured at Becky, she stood, then we walked on out of the library. Outside, on the sidewalk, we took half a dozen steps in silence, then Becky shook her head. "Even her," she murmured, "even Miss Wyandotte," and the tears shone in her eyes. "Oh, Miles," she said softly, and glanced around, first over one shoulder, then the other, at the houses, quiet lawns, and the street beside us, "how many more?" I didn't know the answer to that, and I just shook my head, and we walked on, toward Becky's house.
Chapter thirteen
There was a car parked in front of Becky's, and as we approached, we recognized it: a 1947 Plymouth sedan, the blue paint faded from the sun. "Wilma, Aunt Aleda, and Uncle Ira," Becky murmured, and looked at me. Then she said, "Miles" – we were almost at the house, and she stopped on the sidewalk – "I can't go in there!"
I stood for a moment, thinking. "We won't go in," I said then, "but we've got to see them, Becky." She started shaking her head, and I said, "We've got to know what's going on, Becky! We have to find out! Or we might as well not have come back to town." I took her arm, and we turned in at the brick walk leading up to the house, but I stepped off it immediately, pulling Becky off, too, and we walked in silence on the lawn beside it. "Where would they be?" I said. When she didn't answer, I shook her once, almost roughly, my hand still on her arm. "Becky, where would they be? The living-room?"
She nodded dumbly, and we walked silently around to the side of the house, and the wide old porch that passed under the living-room windows. The windows were open, we heard the murmur of voices behind the white living-room curtains, and I stopped, lifted a foot, pulled off my shoe, then took off the other. I glanced down at Becky, and she swallowed; then, holding to my arm, she pulled off her high-heeled pumps, and just beyond the living-room windows, toward the back of the house, we crept silently up the porch stairs. Then, beside the open window, we sat down on the porch, very carefully and slowly. We were out of sight, completely sheltered from the street by the big old trees and high shrubbery of the lawn.
"… like some more coffee?" we heard a voice, Becky's father, saying.
"No," said Wilma, and we heard the clink of a cup and saucer set down on a wood surface, "I've got to be back at the shop by one. But you and Uncle Ira can stay, Aunt Aleda."
"No," Wilma's aunt replied, "we'll get along, too. Sorry to have missed seeing Becky."
I moved my head to bring an eye just above the window sill, at the side of the open window. There they sat: Becky's grey-haired father, smoking a cigar; round-faced, red-checked Wilma; tall old Uncle Ira; and the tiny, sweet-faced old lady who was Wilma's aunt; all of them looking and sounding precisely the way they always had. I turned to glance at Becky, wondering if we hadn't made some terrible mistake, and if these people weren't just what they seemed.
"I'm sorry, too," Becky's father replied. "I thought surely she'd be home; she's back in town, you know."
"Yes, we know," said Uncle Ira, "and so is Miles," and I wondered how they could possibly know we were back, or that we'd even been gone. Then something happened, without warning, that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle and stand erect.
This is very hard to explain, but – when I was in college, a middle-aged Negro had a shoeshine stand, on the sidewalk before one of the older hotels, and he was a town character. Everyone patronized Billy, because he was everyone's notion of what a "character" should be. He had a title for each regular customer. "Mornin', Professor," he'd say soberly to a thin glasses-wearing businessman who sat down for a shoeshine each day. "A greetin' to you, Captain," he'd say to someone else. "Howdydo, Colonel," "Nice evenin', Doctor," "General, I'm pleased to see you." The flattery was obvious, and people always smiled to show they weren't taken in by it; but they liked it just the same.
Billy professed a genuine love for shoes. He'd nod with approving criticalness when you showed up with a new pair. "Good leather," he'd murmur, nodding with a considered conviction, "pleasure to work on shoes like these," and you'd feel a glow of foolish pride in your own good taste. If your shoes were old, he might hold one cupped in his hand when he'd finished with it, twisting it a little from side to side to catch the light. "Nothin' takes a shine
like good aged leather, Lieutenant, nothin'." And if you ever showed up with a cheap pair of shoes, his silence gave conviction to his compliments of the past. With Billy, the shoe-shine man, you had the feeling of being with that rarest of persons, a happy man. He obviously took contentment in one of the simpler occupations of the world, and the money involved seemed actually unimportant. When you put them into his hands, he didn't even look at the coins you had given him; his acceptance was absent-minded, his attention devoted to your shoes, and to you, and you walked away feeling a little glow, as though you'd just done a good deed.
One night I was up till dawn, in a student escapade of no importance now, and, alone in my old car, I found myself in the run-down section of town, a good two miles from the campus. I was suddenly aching for sleep, too tired to drive on home. I pulled to the curb and, with the sun just beginning to show, I curled up in the back seat under the old blanket I kept there. Maybe half a minute later, nearly asleep, I was pulled awake again by steps on the sidewalk beside me, and a man's voice said quietly, "Morning, Bill."
My head below the level of the car window, I couldn't see who was talking, but I heard another voice, tired and irritable, reply, "Hi, Charley," and the second voice was familiar, though I couldn't quite place it. Then it continued, in a suddenly strange and altered tone. "Mornin', Professor," it said with a queer, twisted heartiness. "Mornin'!" it repeated. "Man, just look at those shoes! You had them shoes – lemme see, now! – fifty-six years come Tuesday, and they still takes a lovely shine!" The voice was Billy's, the words and tone those the town knew with affection, but – parodied, and a shade off key. "Take it easy, Bill," the first voice murmured uneasily, but Billy ignored it. "I just loves those shoes, Colonel," he continued in a suddenly vicious, jeering imitation of his familiar patter. "That's all I want, Colonel, just to handle people's shoes. Le'me kiss 'em! Please le'me kiss your feet!" The pent-up bitterness of years tainted every word and syllable he spoke. And then, for a full minute perhaps, standing there on a sidewalk of the slum he lived in, Billy went on with this quietly hysterical parody of himself, his friend occasionally murmuring, "Relax, Bill. Come on, now; take it easy." But Billy continued, and never before in my life had I heard such ugly, bitter, and vicious contempt in a voice, contempt for the people taken in by his daily antics, but even more for himself, the man who supplied the servility they bought from him.
