by Tom Drury
“A driver’s license.”
She sighed and began looking through her purse. “I’ve been doing this three years,” she said. “All over the United States and Canada. I like the South a lot. I like the Midwest too, but I could do without the cold. Did you ever go home to a cold room? That I could live without, easy. Not that I’m looking for company. That’s the last thing I need. I’m talking about the weather.”
“What’s Fort Myers like?” said Dan.
“What’s it like?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, man. It’s beautiful? It’s warm? The sun shines every day? What else? The grocery stores are very clean, with aisles of beautiful fruit? Someday I’ll go back in style and they’ll all come out to greet me. That’s the Fort Myers I know. Someday I’ll return to the land of decent weather and get out of this godforsaken deep freeze at last.”
“I hope your wish comes true,” said Dan.
“Oh, it will, believe me.”
They shook hands, and Dan left the bar and went back to the sheriff’s office. He picked up the radio. “Morrisville, come in, Morrisville.”
“Go ahead.”
“Yeah, Dan Norman here. Will you tell Chris or Irv that I talked to the stripper at the Basement but she doesn’t know the guy. Her name isn’t Barbara or Pamela. It’s Marnie.”
“Marnie?”
“That’s right,” said Dan. “She’s from Florida and she’s going back home just as soon as she can.”
“Maybe we should take up a collection.”
“Why don’t you do that.”
“Ten-four.”
He went back to painting his signs. It seemed as if in the short time he had been gone, someone had moved them. His mind wandered from the election frequently these days, and possibly he had just forgot where he left the signs. Then Mary Montrose and Hans Cook showed up.
“We’re on our way home from the movies,” said Mary.
“What did you see?” said Dan.
“The one where the fellow makes his children very small,” said Mary.
“Well?” said Dan.
“Hans liked it. I was somewhat disappointed.”
“It wasn’t anything extraordinary—just a good yarn,” said Hans.
“To me, once you knew they were small, there was no place for the movie to go,” said Mary.
“What do you think of my signs?” said Dan.
“Pretty good,” said Hans.
“They say Johnny White has a following,” said Mary.
“Have you seen his commercials?” said Dan.
“How could you miss them?” said Hans. “They’re saturating the airwaves.”
“The people get the sheriff they want,” said Dan. “That’s why it’s a democracy.”
Mary sat on the bench, and Hans went in back and stood in a cell with his hands on the bars.
“I’m innocent, I tell you,” he said.
“I wouldn’t give a nickel for Johnny’s crew,” said Mary. “He was on the news the other night, talking about alcoholic this and alcoholic that. Why, he’s no more alcoholic than the man in the moon. My uncle was an alcoholic, and believe me, I know what they are.”
Dan dipped his brush in paint and paused with it halfway to the sign he was working on. “I tried to make that very point to the League of Women Voters. I’m not sure they understood me. And then he produced that DWI arrest from Cleveland in 1982. Well, that doesn’t prove he’s an alcoholic.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” said Mary. “You’ve got to cut him down to size, just like this fellow did to his kids in the movie. If it were me, I would look him smack in the eye and say, ‘Johnny, you’re a goddamned phony.’”
“I did use some fairly strong language at the League of Women Voters,” said Dan.
“I bet you didn’t call him a goddamned phony.”
“No, that’s true,” said Dan. “I am wary of dwelling on the alcoholism claim.”
“I can see that,” said Mary. “It’s kind of a no-win situation.”
“I’m going to talk to Claude Robeshaw,” said Dan.
“He might know something,” said Mary.
Then they were silent a moment and could hear Hans humming the song “Una Paloma Blanca.”
“What do you hear from Louise?” said Dan.
“Not a lot,” said Mary. “Carol says she’s all right, but I don’t know. My family—they should do a long-term study. This is really why I stopped, Dan. I think you should try going to get her.”
“I have tried,” said Dan.
“Well, try again,” said Mary.
“I went up a couple weeks ago,” said Dan. “I asked her to come back. I really pushed the issue. But she wasn’t ready. Well, I guess you know she’s delivering newspapers.”
“Yes,” said Mary.
“Evidently she supervises a number of younger carriers,” said Dan. “One of them has come down with mono. So she wants to run this girl’s route for her until she’s better.”
“Hell, Dan, mono can go on for months,” said Mary.
“I know it.”
“This is Carol’s doing,” said Mary. “I’m not saying the girl doesn’t have mono. She may have mono. I’m no doctor. But you have to understand Carol. Carol is an enigma. Carol is a very lonely lady. She wanted children, but instead of having children she has sunk all her energy into this fishing camp.”
“It’s a pretty nice camp,” said Dan.
“No one’s denying that,” said Mary.
The next morning was Sunday, and Dan went for a drive in Louise’s Vega. It was clear and cold; there was frost on the windshield. Louise had always kept a cluttered car, and the floor and the bead-covered seats had tissue dispensers, paperback books, and beer bottles on them. It seemed to Dan that he had married her without knowing her, did not know her now, and might never know her, but that these things she had thrown off had some magical power over him.
There was a guy who always sold flowers on Sunday from a cart at the intersection of Highway 8 and Jack White Road. Dan almost never saw anyone buying flowers. There was hardly room to stop.
Dan bought a mix of flowers, violet and orange and white.
“I’ll bet these are for that girl,” said the man.
“Excuse me?” said Dan.
“She was with you last week. About this high.”
“You’re mistaken,” said Dan.
“Sure she was.”
He drove up to North Cemetery. Larkin Brothers of Romyla had set the gravestone late in the summer. Brian Larkin carved the inscription, which read:
IRIS LANE NORMAN
BY THIS MAY I
REMEMBERED BE
MAY 7, 1992
It was a small, flat stone of blue-gray slate, its surface about flush with the ground. Brian Larkin said this was how an infant’s grave should be. It was a good stone, but because it was horizontal, the leaves and dirt that landed on it in the normal course of cemetery life tended to stay. Ants traveled the grooves of the letters. You would think rain would wash it clean, but sand floated onto the slate and remained in delicate whorls after the rain had evaporated.
Dan took the flowers from the car, along with a bucket and chamois cloth. There was an iron pump in the middle of the cemetery, and he pumped water into the bucket. Over at the grave he removed the flowers that he had left the week before and dipped the chamois in the water. He washed the stone and dried it with a red handkerchief and put the new flowers down. He took the old flowers to the iron fence bordering the cemetery and tossed all but one over the fence into the grassy ditch. The flower that he kept he threw into Louise’s car with everything else. Then he went back and took a last look. Already a leaf had landed on the stone. The task was never-ending. He sat with his back to a tree and wondered if Iris had felt pain or perhaps only a fleeting sensation of something changing. He remembered her face as untroubled. Actually he was forgetting her face. The nurses had given them Polaroid snapshots, but these did not do her justice.
Dan had Sunday dinner with Claude and Marietta Robeshaw. You can’t miss the Robeshaw farm if you go from Grafton to Pinville. The barns are light blue and a porch wraps around the big white house. For years the place was known as the one with the “Impeach Reagan” banner on the machine shed, but with Reagan gone back to California, that had been put away. The house was plain and spare inside, except for mementos of JFK, whom Claude had met once in Waterloo. Among their collection, the Robeshaws had two dozen Kennedy dinner plates, an autographed copy of Why England Slept, and a rare tapestry of PT 109. Young Albert liked to tell his friends that Kennedy himself was in the attic.
Of the six Robeshaw children, Albert was the only one still at home. The rest were grown and moved away. On Sundays, combinations of them came home to eat. Today Rolfe, Julia, Nestor, and Susan had returned with spouses and children.
So the meal had to be big, and the cooking was done mostly by the women. The exception would be Nestor cooking the Swiss chard, but this is deceptive. Nestor liked cooking Swiss chard, and it was assumed that if he were to walk away from it for any reason, one of the women would have to take over before it burned. Nor would anyone ask Nestor to cook anything but the Swiss chard. In other words, his sisters, wife, and mother might be there cooking beside him but did not have his freedom to pick and choose. Let’s take Susan, for example. She had been assigned the cooking of the yams. If she did not feel like cooking yams, too bad—she had to anyway. The bad part of this arrangement for the men was that they had nothing to do. They sat around listening to Vaughan Meader records and drinking Claude’s Olympia. In the old days they would have been out threshing.
At the Robeshaw table the food and the eaters were opposing armies, and if you did not overeat, you were considered a traitor. Marietta reacted to the words “No, thank you” with a hurt and puzzled smile, as if you had cursed her in a foreign language. She also had rules for how and when things were to be passed, and nobody understood these rules, so they were constantly being broken.
Talk was fragmentary amid the pings and scrapes of cutlery. Nestor and Rolfe argued about hybrid grain.
“They have oats now that will grow on rocks.”
“That’s crazy talk.”
Claude buttered some bread and said, “I’ve seen things I never would have expected. Take that deal they got out West.”
“What deal is that, Papa?” said Julia.
“You know, that Biosphere,” said Claude. “That big pillow in Arizona.”
“A pillow?” said Susan, the vehement disbeliever.
“It’s a sealed environment in which they are trying to evolve a new society,” said Albert.
“What’s wrong with the one we have?” said Marietta.
“It just never would have been done years ago,” said Claude. “Nobody would have thought to do it.”
“Did I hear that thing was leaking?” said Dan.
“Leaking?” said Susan. “Leaking what?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan. “Some gas.”
Rolfe rolled a potato onto his plate. “Carbon monoxide,” he said, so decisively that he was clearly guessing.
“Isn’t that interesting?” said Helen, schoolteacher and wife of Rolfe. “Like car exhaust.”
“That’s right.”
“Do they have cars?” asked Nina, who was married to Nestor.
“Yes,” said Nestor.
“They’re trying to make do without cars,” said Claude. “That’s the whole idea.”
“They drive the same model Buick that we do,” said Nestor. “The Skylark.”
“This sure is good food, Mama,” said Julia.
“Food tastes better off these forks than any other forks,” said Nestor.
“Why is that?” said Julia.
“It’s a toxin in the silver,” said Albert.
After dinner Marietta and Helen did a mountain of dishes while Claude took a nap and the children played football on the grass. The game was two-hand touch, which everyone seemed clear enough about, but Rolfe tackled Dan hard, for no reason.
The wind was knocked out of Dan, and though Rolfe said he was sorry, the issue was not resolved. Later, when Dan passed the football so that it hit Rolfe in the forehead, the two had to be held back to keep them from fighting. Albert came to Dan’s defense. “Knock Rolfe down,” he said.
The game ended. Claude was up from his nap and standing on the front porch with his hands inside the bib of his overalls. He and Dan took a walk down the lane to hear the drying fans on some grain bins built over the summer.
“You’re in trouble,” said Claude.
“I know it,” said Dan.
“The Whites have done more with TV than has ever been done in this county,” said Claude. “I wouldn’t be surprised if half the people think Johnny is already sheriff.”
“I’ve run a good campaign,” said Dan.
“You have, in a sense,” said Claude.
“I can’t control what people think,” said Dan.
“You know, they talk about the old days and the smoky rooms where things got decided,” said Claude. “And I’m not saying we weren’t highhanded at times. But at some level we wanted to do good for the community. Why? Because our hearts were in the right place? Hell, no. Our hearts were in the same place as anybody’s heart. But we needed people to be for us, and this was the only way we knew how. Nowadays the parties are worthless and everything is television. Claude Robeshaw doesn’t mean a goddamned thing to Jack White.”
“I think the western half of the county is mine,” said Dan.
Claude took a cigar from the pocket of his jacket. “Can I ask you something? Where is Louise?”
“At her Aunt Carol’s, in Minnesota.”
“People wonder,” said Claude. “They get ideas. They make assumptions.”
“It’s none of their business,” said Dan.
Claude lit a cigar and smiled indulgently. “No, that’s right. That’s right. But still…”
“Even if she wanted to come back, I wouldn’t put her in the campaign,” said Dan. “People know who I am.”
Claude blew a smoke ring and patted Dan on the back. He closed his eyes, sniffed the air. “Somebody’s burning cobs,” he said. They walked out into the evergreen grove, where parts of old machines lay rusting in the white grass.
Marnie Rainville called the sheriff’s office late on the afternoon of election eve. Marnie said the guy who had interrupted her act was at that moment coming up the back stairs dragging a big suitcase.
“Where are you?” said Dan.
“Home,” she said. “I don’t go in until six-thirty. Typically I have an early supper and then do some yoga until showtime. I was putting the milk away when I saw him coming up to my building.”
“Don’t let him in,” said Dan.
“Shall I pretend not to be home?” said Marnie.
“Yes, good idea,” said Dan.
“I better shut off the radio.”
“Do.”
She did so, and came back to the phone. “I’m at Two Forty-six East River Street, apartment nine. Come down the alley between River and Railroad. I’m at the top of the stairs.”
“Don’t open the door,” said Dan.
He barreled across town with siren and lights. He turned on the police radio, but instead of the emergency band got the local FM station. He had been meaning to get this radio looked at.
“Are you the type of person who never forgets a face?” said the announcer. “Do someone’s features stay in your mind for months at a time? Or do they begin to fade after a matter of days? If the latter is true, scientists say, you are like the great majority of the rest of us. So why not order an attractive reminder of your loved one, in the form of a portrait photograph from Kleeborg’s Portraits of Stone City.”
Marnie Rainville lived by the railroad tracks in a building that Dan had not even known was residential. He ran up the fire escape she had called the back stairs. He did not wish for the woman to
be in danger, but a rescue might help his frame of mind. The door to apartment number nine was open and he ran in, only to find a man kneeling on a threadbare piece of carpet.
“It’s all right, Sheriff,” said Marnie. She sat on a chair in the corner of the room, surrounded by cardboard boxes. “I was wrong. I tried to call you. It’s only a guy selling vacuum cleaners. I’m sorry to drag you out here, but I saw that big suitcase and I guess I got scared.”
“You did the right thing,” said Dan.
The man on the carpet looked at Dan over his shoulder. “You’re welcome to join us,” he said. “This is not, repeat not, a sales pitch. I love this cleaning system so much I have to show it off. I would imagine that a floor covering can really take a beating in law enforcement.”
“Just say your piece,” said Dan.
“Imagine never being troubled by dingy carpets again,” said the salesman. “I have just emptied on Marnie’s carpet a mixture of ashes and soot such as you might find on a chimney sweep’s boots at the end of the day. Although come to think of it, you don’t see many chimney sweeps anymore. I wonder why that is.”
“I don’t know,” said Marnie.
“Because they still have chimneys.”
“How much longer will this take,” said Dan.
“But I think we can all agree that no ordinary vacuum cleaner can touch grime like this,” said the salesman. He turned on the vacuum cleaner and made several passes over the rug. The machine roared and hissed and shot water everywhere. The soot and ash had left a shadow that would not come up.
“There,” said the salesman.
“It’s still there,” said Marnie.
“For all intents and purposes it’s gone,” said the salesman. “I think any reasonable person would agree that no ordinary vacuum cleaner could come as close as this one has.”
Dan ordered the guy to pack his case and go. “Are you all right?” he asked Marnie.
“Yes,” she said. “If you have a minute, you could help me carry a few things down to the car. As you can probably tell, I’m moving on.”
“Where you going?” said Dan.
“Home,” she said.
“Florida?”
