“You plannin’ goin’ to Cold Flat Junction, too?” He sounded affrighted. “I ain’t got the time for that.”
“No, I don’t want to go there; it’s just a question, Delbert.”
“Oh. Well, it’s about the same as from here. Same distance. We’re south of Hebrides and Cold Flat Junction’s west.”
“Like a half hour from either place?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
I settled back in my seat and rode northward. If you were the police, you’d time it exactly to see if an alibi held up. There didn’t seem to be all that much exactness to the investigation of the Rose Queen murder, though.
Out of my window, farmland slipped by like a length of green silk unrolling. Barns, farmhouses, fences. Horses, their tails swishing away flies, came up to a white-painted rail fence to watch. I wondered why the cab interested them. The farm-house sat way back, maybe a half mile from the highway, on a straight-as-a-die dirt road, hemmed on both sides by more of the white rail fence. More horses grazed within its boundaries and I guessed it was a horse farm. By this time it was behind us and I could see it only in my head (where I saw most things).
I decided Henrietta Simple and her family lived on just such a farm. I wished I hadn’t told the Windy Run crowd that Henrietta had a retarded brother, for I now felt he might disturb the tranquility of what I saw as a peaceful scene. But it was too late, too late to get rid of the brother unless I just killed him off. He could be up in a tree, maybe swinging from a limb, and fall into the creek below.
Then I started wondering if William Faulkner had similar problems with his characters. Once he’d created one, if he decided he didn’t like him, could he just go back and erase the person altogether? Most people would say “Sure,” but I wondered. It might appear that if a writer was making the person up anyway, then he should be able to go back and unmake him. Maybe it wasn’t that simple; maybe it was more complicated than that. Once William Faulkner (who was an incredibly powerful writer—!ook at the effect he’d had on Dwayne and me: I still thought of Lena even after only a dozen or so pages)—once he made you up, you stayed made up. Yes, you stayed and stayed and if you were yanked out of the story, you’d just come back as somebody else. There must have been characters William Faulkner was sorry he invented. Take that “Flem” person. How disgusting. But I also imagine William Faulkner’s disgust threshold was a lot higher than mine. The idea, though, was worth thinking about when I had more time: that a person could peel right off the page and go wandering around (causing trouble, mainly) until William Faulkner found another place for him. Even the name of the character couldn’t be changed after a certain point of getting used to. Names were like barnacles and limpets, crusted to you so it would need a saw or ax or something to get the name off.
“Why you goin’ to the feed store? You ain’t got animals at the Hotel Paradise, last time I looked.”
Delbert must have been trying to work this out all the while we’d been driving. It really annoyed me, as I’d been having a nice time until he broke in. “I just want to talk to him.”
“Smith?”
“Yes.”
“We’re goin’ all this way just to talk? Well, my goodness, girl, why not just call him up on the phone?”
“Because I want to talk in person. There’s a difference.”
Delbert grunted. “Beats me. Words is words far as I’m concerned.”
I was sorely tempted to grab his neck and squeeze. Words is words. William Faulkner turned over in his grave. I could feel it.
“We’re in Hebrides,” Delbert called like we’d just landed on the moon.
Houses flashed by, big trees lining wide streets, and drive-ways, cars, bicycles, basketball hoops—all let us know Hebrides was a thriving city, which it was, about as far from Cold Flat Junction as you could get in prosperity. We waited at a traffic light that marked the town’s center where my favorite store stood. This was the Emporium. I loved this store, the way the headless mannequins posed with their hip bones jutting. We turned right and were soon passing the Nickelodeon, which showed the latest movies a week before our own Orion got them (if it ever did). Across from the movie house was Barb’s Beach House, although there weren’t any beaches around; the nearest one might even be in Florida. Barb’s was where Ree-Jane had come in her white convertible to get her bright new swimsuits. (Too bad she lost them in Miami Beach and had to wear that old brown one.) The windows of Barb’s were always covered with sand and shells and whatever else caught her fancy as she dressed them. I bet she had a fake palm tree somewhere I could have borrowed.
I really liked Barb; she seemed to live in a sun-and-sand fantasy land, which was swell with me. In the window today was a huge blue and green striped beach umbrella with nothing but four feet jutting from under it, one set wearing flippers. Barb sold water-sport equipment too. Indeed, except for boats themselves, she had furnished out her shop (and her mind, I guessed) with just about everything relating to beaches and cruises.
We were now past the Hebrides town limit, going east, and Delbert was asking me if I wanted to drive back with him.
“Of course, what did you think?”
“There’s a charge for waiting time, you recall.” “I know because you must have told me twenty times when you waited at the library the other day. There it is!” I pointed to our left. Delbert turned into the big parking lot of J. L. Smith’s Feed and Garden Supply.
I got out and walked to the wide open garagelike door, thinking that I should have been spending my time during the ride rehearsing what I was going to say instead of thinking about William Faulkner. What was I going to say? Mr. Smith, I would like you to search your memory ... Mr. Smith, twenty or so years ago ... Hi! Mr. Smith. You don’t remember me—I’m kin of Ben Queen ...
I stood stalk still in front of bags of fertilizer and pruning shears, thinking.
“Hello, little lady!”
I wanted to snub whoever’d said that. I squeezed my eyes shut to get control of myself.
“What can I do you for?”
He seemed to be all teeth. The teeth glistened white above his red apron. Oh, how I hated expressions like that old tired “do you for” phrase, supposed to be funny. But I put on my phony smile and asked him if Mr. Smith was here. (Mr. Smith, I suddenly realized, could easily be dead.)
“Which one?” he asked, and laughed as if he were just the funniest person on God’s green earth (as my mother likes to say). “I’m one of ’em. Then there’s Pa and Grampa. All three of us in business like beans in a row.”
I stretched my mouth in a wider smile imitation. “It’s not you, but it might be your dad, if he was here twenty years ago.”
This really stumped him, not whether his dad had been here, but that he didn’t have a set response to fit the occasion. He was worse than Delbert. “Why’d you want to see someone from back then?” He struggled with the question as if he were just learning to read.
“I just do, Buddy.” That was the name stitched in blue on the bib of his red apron.
Buddy scratched his neck as if I’d just given him a rash and finally said, “Yeah. They both were. Store’s been in the family for over seventy-five years. Yeah, they were both here back then. He’s over there.”
I got the impression that Buddy felt he came up lacking because he himself hadn’t been here, and wasn’t of interest even to a twelve-year-old kid. I guessed I should feel sorry for him, being this insecure, but I didn’t. He was standing here wasting my time. Then he turned and walked off, and I went over to where his father was standing, passing the time with another man who looked like a farmer in his feed hat. This Mr. Smith wasn’t wearing an apron (probably thinking it against his dignity to do so, which I agreed it was), but his name was stitched on the pocket of his shirt: Smitty. This definitely was the right person. And he was obviously old enough to have been here twenty years ago, or thirty, even.
It was kind of hard to browse in a feed store. I wandered over to the wall behin
d him and looked at some gardening tools. Every once in a while, Lola Davidow would don some of these “Greenthumb” gardening gloves and go down to our big garden along the gravel road that went by the Pink Elephant. It was usually after a brunch of several Bloody Marys that she did this and would bring back a cabbage or runner beans. Once she even got Ree-Jane to go with her and I tagged along just to see what would happen. What happened was Mrs. Davidow would pull up potatoes or snap off beans and hand them up to Ree-Jane, who just stood there being bored.
I don’t know how long I stopped there, running over this scene in my mind, but in a while a voice said, “Hello, there.”
Mr. Smith—Smitty—I liked immediately. He asked “Can I help you” in exactly the same voice he’d use talking to an adult, instead of that stilted, slow-paced, singsongy manner adults use for retarded people and children.
I said, “Yes, sir. The Queens over in Cold Flat Junction asked me to pick up about fifty pounds of fertilizer? But I’m not sure what kind, and you seem to have several kinds here? Something else they wanted, too, but I can’t remember it right now.” I squinted up at him as if they’d told him, too.
“Fertilizer’s easy. Maybe you’ll recall what the item was after we’ve dealt with the fertilizer.”
This was a very sensible and relaxed person, I thought. I was immediately calmer. It could be nerve-racking, thinking up ways to get information.
Mr. Smith looked the fertilizer over, searching, I guessed, for a certain kind. He found it and said, “Here we are. Fifty pounds, you’d want two twenty-pound and a ten-pound bag.” He started hauling the bags out to the aisle.
This was going too fast and I better think quick. “Maybe there was other stuff they usually get you might know about?”
I was trying to think of a way to introduce Ben Queen into the fertilizer pickup when he said, “Well, when George picks up he gets chicken feed, usually. Could that be what they wanted?”
I smiled widely and said, “That’s it. Thank you. I guess you know the Queens pretty well.”
“Oh, yes. Known Ben and George for years and years. Ben’d come in every other Thursday like clockwork. Right here’s the feed. It’s good quality.”
Like clockwork.That’s what I was interested in. “I never knew him. Of course, now he’s out of jail, maybe I’ll meet him. That all sounded real bad, what happened.”
Smitty shook his head and his eyes looked as if a pool of sadness had gathered in them. “Ben Queen. I just could hardly believe all that business. You know, he was in here that day and not a trace of any behavior that would have said he was upset or bad tempered. He was just as usual. We caught up with each other like we always did, could’ve talked the afternoon away.” Smitty laughed. “I’m a terrible talker. ”
“That must’ve been the day he had to get his truck fixed?” I kind of held my breath, hoping he’d forgotten I was only twelve and what interest would I have in that day?
“I do believe that’s right; he said he’d had it over to Carl’s shop that morning. Something wrong with the carburetor. I guess I remember pretty good because of what happened.”
He was pulling out the chicken feed and didn’t notice that I was nearly doing a tap dance. He was here, he was here, I knew he was here.
“I was mighty puzzled when Ben confessed. You’d never have made me believe it otherwise.”
That was the reason Mr. Smith hadn’t said anything to the police: the so-called “confession”—which hadn’t been a confession at all, but a silence. I looked at him, a very nice man, and wondered how he’d feel, finding out he could have supplied Ben Queen with an alibi.
Mr. Smith called his son over to load the fertilizer into the cab. I could take the sack of chicken feed. I figured Buddy could take Delbert’s one hundred questions as well as I could, about what was being put in his cab and why. I went to the cash register and paid for all the fertilizer and feed. Mr. Smith had said he could just put it on the Queen’s account, but I said, no, I’d rather pay. I told him I’d really enjoyed meeting him and he seemed pleased at that.
Delbert went on and on about the three bags of fertilizer as we drove to La Porte. His talk was more a humming in my ears as I stared out the passenger’s window—I’d slid over to the other side to watch everything go by in reverse. I was so elated that what I’d believed to be true, was true, and now all that remained was to convince the Sheriff. “All”? It wouldn’t be easy.
It was so strange that what Ben Queen had been doing that afternoon had been here all along in Mr. Smith’s mind and no one had known. But Ben Queen knew it, knew he had an alibi and would have used it, I suspected, if he hadn’t thought it would call down even greater harm on someone. So where he had been or if he had been anyplace other than at the house made no difference as far as he was concerned. He was determined to take the blame upon himself.
It was almost funny about Mr. Smith. Smitty, a deus ex machina, come out of nowhere to finally straighten things out. And he didn’t even know it. I wondered, as we again passed the horse farm, if you could be God and not know it. If God didn’t know he was God.
Here was a question for Father Freeman.
The fertilizer had taken all my taxi money and then some. Delbert would love that.
56
Cold Turkey
Delbert was really put out that I’d spent all my money on fertilizer. He had to wait until I ran in and took the fare from the cash box in the back office. I asked since he had to wait anyway, why couldn’t he unload the fertilizer? He argued it wasn’t like suitcases, that suitcases were part of a person’s trip, but fertilizer wasn’t. I got him to do it by saying I’d give him a big tip (which I wouldn’t). Finally, he left, mumbling curses which I would report to Axel, if Axel ever got within speaking distance.
It was time for dinner. I left the fertilizer on the front porch and half walked, half ran to the kitchen, taking the short cut on the wooden walk to the kitchen’s side door.
Walter, dependable as always, was just taking Salisbury steak out of the oven, a more dignified version of hamburger. There would be my mother’s dark rich gravy to pour over it.
“I took ’em in their first course. Melon balls. I didn’t have much to do so I made some.”
In a glass dish were perfect little rounds of watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe. I congratulated Walter on his inventiveness.
“Miss Jen called, too. They’re on their way back. Miss Jen said the sun was something fierce.”
“Did you tell her it was Florida?”
Walter hawked a laugh around and shook his head.
Of course, Miss Bertha objected to her Salisbury steak, fussing her fork around her plate as if poking and prodding meat and potatoes would turn them into whatever glamour dish she had in mind.
I told her, “It’s not hamburger; it’s a high-quality ground beef. Ground round, I think I heard my mother say.”
Mrs. Fulbright had taken a bite and proclaimed it delicious. She did this all the time, like a fond parent trying to get a baby in a high chair (a pretty good description of Miss Bertha) to mimic her actions. But Miss Bertha only demanded, as usual, something else besides “this muck” to eat.
Referring to anything my mother cooks as “muck” is the same as calling gold or silver shavings “sawdust,” but my day had been so spectacularly successful (at least as far as I was concerned) that I could rise above my daily and ordinary self and offer something else. My mother had left, exclusively for me, some ham pinwheels. These are made of pastry dough spread with perfectly seasoned ground ham, and then rolled up and sliced (something like icebox cookies). After baking they are lathered with rich cheese sauce. This scrumptious dish, beloved by me, is also a favorite of Miss Bertha’s, at least as much as she favors anything.
So this dinnertime I offered Miss Bertha a ham pinwheel in place of the Salisbury steak. This was such an instant success that I decided not to mix a lot of fiery English mustard into her cheese sauce as I was tempted to do. And
I reminded myself to divide the cheese sauce three ways (for I was also going to let Walter have a pinwheel), which did not mean an equal three ways, for my portion would be biggest. (Now, I will say this for Aurora Paradise, and that is she eats just about everything. I mean, unless she throws it at you instead, like the chicken wing and the stuffed tomato.)
The two old ladies’ meal proceeded in relative peace after Miss Bertha got her ham pinwheel. My own and Walter’s dinners were also peaceful. I had the largest pinwheel, half a Salisbury steak with my mother’s lucious gravy, the au gratin potatoes, and peas as green as an Irish meadow. I saw to it Walter got just the same meal, except for not as much cheese sauce.
Following dinner, I stayed in the Pink Elephant saying good-bye to all of my new friends at the Rony Plaza, who pleaded with me to come back next year, telling me I was the most entertaining guest they had ever had. The manager said he would hold “my room” and was even considering putting a bronze plaque on the door with my name. I think he would even have offered to hold a sunset.
What a day, what a day.
I wrapped the cord around the fan and lay the palm tree against the wall and scooped sand back in the bucket. Will and Mill had been agitating to get their fan back, needing it (they said) to “create a disturbance.” I told them please to keep it away from me.
I hauled the fan up to the Big Garage and knocked at the door. The noise behind it quickly subsided as if someone had shot it dead. When Will finally came to the door, he refused to open it more than an inch or two, as usual.
“Here’s your fan.”
“Good. Leave it.”
“Why not open the door and take it inside.”
“Just leave it.”
“This is really stupid. I’ve already seen what you’re doing, haven’t I?”
“Leave it. Good-bye.”
I heard laughter. There was a girl’s voice, probably June’s, and Paul’s crazy laugh. As I walked away, I thought it wasn’t what the secret was but the whole nature of secretive-ism that Will and Mill loved. It didn’t matter that I’d seen some of the “production.” Simply leaving it behind restored the secret of it.
Cold Flat Junction Page 37
