Peter was clearly surprised by the question. “What do you want me to tell him?”
In truth, Sully didn’t know. “Tell him his grandfather’s an asshole, I guess. Tell him it runs in the family.”
“Thanks.”
“I wasn’t thinking about you,” Sully said truthfully. He’d been thinking about his brother and how much like Big Jim Patrick had become before he’d been killed in the head-on collision.
“Thanks again,” Peter said.
“You really planning on staying around here after the first of the year?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I thought I might.”
“Every day won’t be like today,” Sully promised.
“No?”
“Your mother’s right, though. You’d be better off to go back to your college.” When Peter didn’t say anything to this, Sully said, “You want to hear something funny? I liked college,” he confessed, for the first time, to anyone.
Peter studied him, surprised. “You quit, though.”
Sully shrugged. “I didn’t say I belonged there. I just said I liked it.”
“Where do you belong, Dad?”
They’d arrived at City Hall, and Sully pointed up the stone steps at the lighted police department door. “Right here, I guess,” he said. “For tonight, at least.”
“I’ll look after things the best I can,” Peter promised seriously.
“Okay,” Sully said. “Good.”
“You want me to come in with you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Good,” Peter said.
To their mutual surprise, they shook hands then at the foot of the steps. “I’ll see you before you know it,” Sully said. “Pray for snow.”
They both looked up at the cloudless sky, then Sully limped up the Town Hall steps. When Sully got to the top he went inside and let the door swing shut behind him, then came back out again. “Don’t forget to feed the dog,” he called.
Peter had forgotten all about Rasputin, who was presumably still chained to the kitchen cabinet in the Bowdon Street house. “It’s not going to be easy being you, is it?” he called back.
Sully raised his hands out to his sides, shoulder level, as if he were about to burst into song. “Don’t expect too much of yourself in the beginning,” he advised. “I couldn’t do everything at first either.”
THURSDAY
Downtown Bath, first light. Both traffic signals blinking yellow. Caution.
Clive Jr., sitting in his Lincoln outside the North Bath Savings and Loan, three large suitcases safely stowed in the trunk, was in a contemplative mood. The way the parking space angled toward the curb, he was able to see both blinking yellows in the small rectangle of his rearview. Caution. And then again, in case anyone missed the first, caution. Funny how over a lifetime meanings changed. Caution was what he’d been taught in school, but experience had taught him other meanings and the blinking yellow had come to mean You Don’t Have to Stop Here, or Do Not Accelerate. For years now he had gone through blinking yellows with his foot poised midway between brake and gas, vaguely thankful that these indulgent yellows were not reds. And every time he rolled beneath the signal, You Do Not Have to Stop Here fired somewhere in the back of his brain, where the deepest truths of human understanding lie untroubled, unquestioned. Mistaken.
The yellow traffic signals continued to blink caution relentlessly in Clive Jr.’s rearview, their original meaning fully restored now. Too late, naturally. The more he thought about it, life’s truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understandings of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and our world? Well, yes, perhaps, Clive Jr. conceded. No point getting carried away, epistemologywise. It did no good to lament the loss of innocence or to suspect that the child might indeed be father to the man. He was no longer the little boy he’d once been when he and his father had visited the Capitol and Clive Sr. had interpreted traffic signals for him as they waited to cross at a busy intersection. He was now the chief executive officer of the financial institution before him, an institution whose edifice, at least, was constructed of solid granite, stone strong enough to withstand ill winds, like the ones again tunneling up Main and making the deserted street feel lonesome and ghostly. And if he himself was not made of stone, well, neither was he made of paper to be blown about like a hamburger wrapper from the Dairy Queen on Lower Main.
Speaking of ill winds. The van that carried huge bales of the Schuyler Springs Sentinel pulled up behind him, did a three-point turn in the empty street and backed up to the curb in front of the Rexall. The driver got out then, opened the rear hatch and dropped a bale of Sentinels into the darkened, recessed doorway. Clive Jr. already had a copy of the Sentinel on the front seat next to him, having driven from his golf course town home into Schuyler Springs at four-thirty in the morning to buy one. Not that anything in the paper was news to him. He’d gotten a call from Florida late yesterday afternoon, so he knew, of course, that Escape Enterprises was now, at the last minute, pulling out, refusing to exercise its option, having chosen instead to build their amusement park near Portland, Maine. The Sentinel had reported the reasons they’d given for this most recent decision. The tract of land between North Bath and the interstate that had seemed so huge to residents of the region had seemed to the developers only marginally adequate, and adequate only if they could content themselves not to expand at a later date. The fact that the land itself was swampy had not been the impediment, as many had feared. What was Disney World but a reclaimed swamp? But you couldn’t invent more swamp to fill later on if you wanted to double the size of your park, and expansion was the name of the game. Plus the tax structure and regulations in Maine were more conducive to development, and given the fact that this resort was going to be basically a summer operation, the Maine demographics and climate also made more sense. There were other reasons for people to go to Maine, which had the ocean and L. L. Bean, whereas if they built in Bath they’d have to be the reason.
The Sentinel had run an editorial right on the front page attacking this stated rationale for the developer’s eleventh-hour about-face. Normally, the Schuyler Sentinel wouldn’t have sympathized with the plight of its smaller neighbor, but this was different. The Ultimate Escape was to have been a boon for the entire region, not just Bath, and in a magnanimous gesture the editors of the newspaper had apparently decided that the whole region had been slighted, not just their neighbors. And for no good reason. The proposed site, they pointed out, had not become suddenly smaller than when negotiations began, nor had the tax structure and inadequate incentives the developers now complained of been raised as issues before. The location hadn’t changed, and neither had the climate. There was a resort town just up the road with a racetrack and baths and a summer concert series. What were the real reasons for the pullout? the Sentinel editorial had asked significantly, even hinting that the state of Maine might have greased a few palms. It also suggested that the decision had nothing to do with the cemetery controversy the Schuyler paper had done so much to publicize. No, it had to be something else.
Clive Jr. knew the real reason, because he’d asked the same question of D. C. Collins of Escape Enterprises, who’d called him personally from Texas yesterday afternoon to apologize for the decision. “I know how hard you folks worked,” Collins admitted. “You did everything we asked.” Beyond which he hadn’t wanted to explain, and he wouldn’t have done so either if Clive Jr. hadn’t pleaded with the man so abjectly, not even bothering to conceal his personal frustration. “Well, okay,” Collins had finally agreed, “if you really want to know why, I’ll tell you. This is between you and me, though, and I’ll deny it later if I have to. But here’s the deal. Straight scoop. I’m the one made this decision, and I’ll tell you why. We’re looking to invest, what, about ninety million dollars. That’s a fair
piece of change, Clive. It’s more than that. It’s an investment of time and material, and it doesn’t stop there. When we finally get the son of a bitch built, we’re going to hire a lot of people in the area. We have to do that, because we can’t afford ill will. We need a supportive environment. Now this is where I don’t want you to get me wrong. I know your people have all been cooperative. What I’m talking now has more to do with … what’s the word?… ambience. Here’s the deal. A lot of the people up in your neck of the woods behave funny. Hell, Clive, no offense, but they look funny.”
Collins had paused to let this sink in. “You got yourself some real beautiful country up there, and I mean that. Nice trees especially. But you also got yourself some people who look like they live in trees, and that’s the cruel goddamn truth. We need a different ambience entirely. We need people who look more like people look in southern Maine. Massachusetts, really.” This is what it had come down to. People in Bath looked funny.
At that moment a noisy garbage truck marked SQUEERS WASTE REMOVAL roared around the corner onto Main from Division Street, having apparently interpreted the traffic signal, in conjunction with the time of day, as meaning You Do Not Have to Stop Here. Three small, powerfully built men in filthy jeans, navy blue hooded sweatshirts and heavy orange plaid outer coats clung to the sides of the truck like flies. One of these men, whom Clive Jr. recognized as the same fellow who frequently tagged along with Sully, lost his footing on the side of the truck (the other two men seemed to occupy safer positions along the rear bumper, which provided a wide, flat surface to stand on) and had to hang on with both hands to a metal loop, his booted feet frantically searching the side of the truck for a foothold. Before they were able to locate one, the truck skidded to an abrupt halt behind Clive Jr.’s Continental, and the morose-looking Rub Squeers let go and leapt to the pavement, where he hit an icy patch and ended up on his behind. His two companions dismounted more gracefully, grinning at each other as they did so. One signaled a thumbs-up to the driver, who was grinning into his big passenger side-view mirror. Rub picked himself up without comment, ignoring his companions, who wanted to know if he was okay, and went to fetch the metal garbage can that sat in the doorway of the Rexall next to the stack of newspapers. The other two men lumbered off in the direction of other cans.
Clive Jr. watched them, especially Sully’s friend Rub. Well, he conceded, people in his “neck of the woods” were funny-looking. These garbage men, these Squeers, taken together, looked like some failed genetic experiment—round-shouldered, waistless, neckless, almost kneeless, to judge from the way they lumbered. When one of the two Squeers who had been riding on the back of the truck returned with a garbage can and paused to remove his cloth hood and scratch his dome, Clive Jr. noticed that the hair on top of his skull was exactly the same length as the stubble on his chin, and suddenly Clive Jr. was certain that D. C. Collins, who had twice visited Bath, had witnessed this same scene. Clive Jr. had tried to control what Collins saw during his visits to the region, introducing him to Bath’s better-educated and more successful business people, then hustling him out of town and to dinner at one of Schuyler Springs’ finer restaurants, using that city’s proximity, as he always did, as a recruiting tool. But on one or two occasions Collins had been slippery, and one morning when Clive Jr. had gone to Collins’ Schuyler Springs hotel, he’d learned that the man had headed into Bath in his rental car. Clive Jr. had found him at Hattie’s, of all places. He now imagined Collins getting out of his rental car just in time to see the Squeers garbage truck careen around the corner, various and assorted stubbly Squeers clinging stubbornly to its sides like cockroaches. Lord.
Sully’s Squeers, perhaps the funniest-looking of the lot, his face a thundercloud of resentment and grievance, grabbed the garbage can angrily from the doorway of the Rexall and started to return to the truck. He carried the heavy garbage can by its handles, balancing it against his hip so that the bottom of the can stuck out a good distance, and when he passed Clive Jr.’s car, Clive heard the bottom of the can graze the side of the Continental. The young man looked up then, surprised, as if the car had that moment materialized, magically, in his path. He looked even more surprised to discover that the vehicle had an occupant. Apparently the driver of the garbage truck had also witnessed the incident, because when Clive Jr. got out and shut his own door, he heard the truck’s door slam angrily and saw a fourth Squeers, the shortest of the lot, come running over. In fact, all four Squeers convened at the Continental’s tail end to examine the scratch Rub had put there. The Squeers boys, standing together like that, bore an eerie resemblance to four human thumbs. “Now you done it,” said the driver, glaring at the angry scratch, a gash really, in Clive Jr.’s paint job.
Rub sighed. “I wisht I’d seen you there.”
“The only car on the whole damn street, and you got to bang into it,” the driver said. “Jesus Christ on a crutch!”
The other two Squeers were looking at Clive Jr. expectantly.
“I’m real sorry about this, Mr. Peoples,” said the driver, surprising Clive, until he remembered having met the man once before, having turned him down, in fact, for a loan to purchase the very truck he was now driving. “We’ll take care of it, I promise you that.”
Suddenly Clive Jr. was sorry he hadn’t loaned this Squeers the money, remembering how the man had gotten all dressed up in an ill-fitting suit to ask for it. “Well, hell,” Clive Jr. said, risking a comradely profanity. “These things just happen, I guess.”
“To some people more than others,” the Squeers man said, eyeing Rub. “I sure appreciate you not getting all bent out of shape, Mr. Peoples. You get that fixed and send me the bill. If we could just handle the whole thing without involving the insurance people, I’d be grateful.”
“We don’t have no use a-tall for them fuckin’ scumsuckers,” ventured another Squeers, the one who’d removed his hat to scratch. He was apparently buoyed by the fact that they were all getting along so well.
“I’d like to shoot ’em all, just to watch ’em die,” said the only one who hadn’t spoken.
“Don’t you guys have nothing to do?” said the head Squeers, who apparently saw himself as the management arm of the firm.
Well, it was true, there was plenty to do, and so off they went, cuffing Rub as they left, leaving the management Squeers and Clive Jr. alone, two struggling businessmen. Squeers knelt next to the Continental and ran his index finger along the scratch. “We’ll make this good, Mr. Peoples,” he said again. “You can trust me.”
“I know I can,” Clive Jr. said, feeling an odd, warming trust welling up in his chest. Also welling up, a little nausea, perhaps due to the proximity of the garbage truck.
“You just let me know the damages, and I’ll be right there. You won’t have to ask no second time.”
“That’ll be fine,” Clive Jr. agreed.
And so there was nothing left to do but examine the scratch one last time, as if to acknowledge its seriousness and the resultant bond of faith between them. “How’s your business going?” Clive Jr. decided to ask when the silence and goodwill between them became insupportable.
“Good,” Squeers said, adding philosophically, “There’s always trash, no matter what. People don’t like to let it build up, except in New York City. I figured we wouldn’t go broke, and we haven’t.”
“I’m glad,” Clive Jr. said, sensing that the turned-down loan application was hovering there, tangible, in the brittle air between them. Both men seemed to be searching for a way to say there were no hard feelings.
“So I guess they aren’t going to build that new park, huh?” Squeers observed after another long moment of silence. He seemed to be enjoying this opportunity to talk seriously with a banker, and he kept looking around the deserted street as if hoping there’d be a witness to him doing it.
“No,” Clive Jr. agreed. “I guess not.”
“Well, to hell with them, then,” Squeers said. “We done without ’em bef
ore, I guess we can again.”
“I guess we will,” Clive agreed.
“Too bad, though,” Squeers added. “I figure it would have just about tripled the trash around here.”
They shook hands then, and Clive Jr. was surprised that Squeers’ hand, once removed from the work glove, looked and felt clean.
When the Squeers were gone, Clive Jr. climbed back into the Lincoln, backed out of his space beneath the new banner that had been hung yesterday before the news broke. Its message was typical Bath boosterism of the sort that Clive Jr. himself had been guilty of fostering back when he still believed that caution lights meant “You don’t have to stop here.” The banner’s meaning, however, seemed different today than it had yesterday. What it said was: 1985: THE FIRST YEAR OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES.
Clive Jr. headed south on Main past the doomed IGA and out of town via the new spur, where he would pick up the interstate and head north toward Schuyler Springs and luck. This route was the long way, but at least he wouldn’t have to drive past his mother’s house. It was one thing to face the collapse of The Ultimate Escape, a project huge in imagination and planning and execution. It was another to realize he’d been unable to effect even so small a personal design as to get Sully, finally, out of his mother’s house. True, Sully’d promised to be out by the first of the year, but then he’d gotten himself thrown in jail, which meant the first would be impossible, and Clive Jr. realized now that Sully would never be gone, not really. He’d not only wanted Sully out of his mother’s house, but out of her affection, outside the circle of her protection, so that Sully could at last complete the task of destroying himself, a task begun so long ago and drawn out far too long already. It was still beyond Clive Jr.’s understanding that Sully’s destruction was taking so long. Sully, after all, was a man who ignored not only blinking yellows but strident reds. Maybe that was the point. If you were going to be reckless in this life, you needed total commitment to the principle.
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