by Howard Owen
“Tell me more.”
“Four idiots from Blackwell, I think it is, from the address, apparently jumped this guy, just as he was getting out of his car. But they didn’t realize, I guess, that there were, like, three men sitting on the porch across the street, talking.
“They said the would-be victim almost beat one guy to death, and the guys from the porch gave the other three a pretty good pounding before they ran them off in the direction of Hollywood Cemetery. The cops caught up with them later. The guy they tried to jack was driving some kind of vintage car, a Corvette, I think. Said he used to be a boxer.”
“The Corvette was red?”
“Yeah. I saw it.”
“Walker Johnson.”
“How the hell did you know that, Willie?”
Goat Johnson’s brother was two years older than I was. It was the classic Hill family. Goat’s the president of some half-ass college in Ohio. Walker was a professional boxer for a while before a romantic entanglement with cocaine led to his early retirement and a brief stint as a guest of the state. Bad man to mess around with, even if he’s got to be almost fifty-five now.
When I was growing up, coming to Oregon Hill to prey on the citizens was like going into a lion’s cage to steal his dinner. It’s good to know that, even with the current gentrification, some things haven’t changed.
“They’re talking about charging the guy with attempted murder.”
“With his fists?”
“Well, he was a boxer.”
What a bunch of bullshit. I hope sanity prevails. It’s depressing sometimes how seldom that happens, though. The little punk will probably sue him.
I tell Sarah to hang on for a few more days and ask her to transfer me to Ed Chenowith.
“Another favor?” he says, sounding like his dance card is pretty much full.
“How’d you know?”
“Nobody calls unless they want something.”
I bring up old times.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re right. You’re not a complete asshole. What do you need?”
It’s about as close to a compliment as Chenowith offers these days. As with a lot of his newsroom compatriots, much of his good will disappeared at about the same time that his raises and matching 401(k) contributions stopped and his pension was frozen. Why can’t people eat shit gracefully?
I tell him that I’m trying to track down Frances Flynn’s relatives, if there are any. All I know from Jumpin’ Jimmy is that everybody had left by the time he visited her grave and that they were supposed to have moved to Massachusetts. And Jimmy remembered her parents’ names, William and Eleanor.
“That’s about all I know, though. She might have had some other family, maybe siblings.”
I tell Chenowith a little of the story, just enough to get his juices flowing. I know he’s addicted to research and won’t be able to stop until he finds Frances Flynn’s family, if there’s any of it left.
I lay a big smooch on Ed’s ass. He says he’ll call me when he has something.
I go back into the hospital and, after many false starts, get in touch with the person who can try to explain to me how Les Hacker should be kicked out of the hospital.
“We just can’t do anything else for him,” the woman says. She’s about half my age and has that same empathy for the human condition as the average human resources drone.
I point out to her that he had a stroke on their watch, or un-watch as it turns out.
“Well,” she says, “according to my information, he was on around-the-clock surveillance. Sometimes, these things just happen.”
When I note that this is a piss-poor way for a hospital to explain ruining what’s left of a man’s life, she closes her little folder and suggests that the decision has already been made, that she’s sorry and that there’s nothing that can be done.
I suggest that there sure as shit is something that can be done, but I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to do it.
She gives me a tired smile. I almost feel sorry for her. She’s probably got a degree in history or psychology, and it’s either this job or join Andi and her legion waiting tables.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
Not much else to do but leave.
On the way back home, I take a left on Fifth Street, just for the hell of it. The empty parking space right beside Penny Lane is an obvious sign I’d be foolish to ignore. I pull in and walk in. I have a light supper of fish and chips and three Harps. Better to keep dinner simple at Penny Lane. “English” and “cuisine” are two words that do not often go well together.
While I’m standing in the men’s room, contemplating a fourth Harp and whatever follows that, my phone rings. It slips from my hand, and only the kind of reflex action common to great athletes and drunks lets me catch it in midair before I piss all over it.
It’s Ed Chenowith.
“I think I have something for you,” he says. It’s been less than four hours since we talked. I compliment him on his fast work.
“The father is dead,” he says. “Died a year after his daughter. The mother married again, a guy named Roger Fairchild. They settled in Worcester, Massachusetts.”
“Do you have an address?”
“She died, too, last year. And she outlived her second husband, too.”
“So, dead end.”
“Not exactly.”
Chenowith has knocked himself out. He’s gone that extra mile and found out that Eleanor Harshman Flynn Fairchild had, in addition to two kids from her second marriage, another son, Frances’s younger brother. Adair Flynn. Eleanor also had a brother, a little younger than her. He was born March 7, 1925, so he’d be eighty-seven years old now.
“And he’s still alive. Still lives in Wells, too. I don’t know if he’s got all his marbles, but as of five days ago, he was still alive.”
I get his name. August Harshman. And his address. Chenowith has his phone number, too. He doesn’t seem to have e-mail. Probably doesn’t tweet, either.
“I owe you about a case of Early Times,” I tell Ed.
“You can’t do better than that?” he says, and hangs up.
I zip up, make my way out of the world’s smallest bathroom, pay my tab and leave. The scent of a good story is just about the only thing that can get me to quit after just a few. Well, maybe that and Cindy Peroni.
I stop by the paper, go online and find Wells, Vermont. It’s not that far from Albany, where I’m told planes take off and land on a regular basis. I call Cindy and ask if it would be possible to impose on her good will for one more little junket. She says she has classes tomorrow that she can’t miss. She’s already bagged too many following me to exotic places like Tallahassee and Fayetteville.
“But let me see what I can do,” she says.
She calls me back and tells me that she’s gotten her brother to pull some strings, and I’ll be on a very cheap flight to Albany, New York.
Cindy seems impressed that I am in my own abode not long after nine P.M.
“I thought you might call a little earlier,” she says. I explain that between trying to keep Les from being thrown out of the hospital and trying to find the dregs of Frannie Fling’s family, I’ve been a little busy. I realize that the lovely Cindy Peroni, who must have much better prospects than me on her social calendar, has probably blown her evening waiting to hear from me.
I promise to do better. Promising to do better is one of the things I do best.
Chapter Fifteen
THURSDAY
The seven fifteen a.m. flight to Albany seems like cruel and unusual punishment for a man who cut his evening short by a good three hours in order to embark on what stands a good chance of being a wild goose chase.
I get to the airport by five thirty and barely make my plane. I look down, as I’m in my seat, and realize I’ve left my belt in the plastic tray where I deposited it and pretty much everything else on my person to appease the smiling, friendly security folks. Ah, well. They probably sell belts a
t the Albany airport. Then, having hurried up, we wait. Somebody sneezes in Chicago and the whole aviation system loses two hours. But flying beltless and late beats the hell out of driving all the way to Wells, Vermont.
We land before noon, even with the change in Newark, and my rental car and I are on the road, headed east.
I CALLED August Harshman last night. On about the sixth ring, someone picked up.
“Yes,” he said. “What is it? Whatever you’ve got, I don’t want any.”
I assure Mr. Harshman, who sounds hale enough to be irritable, that I am not a telemarketer. I tell him about my story, on a minor-league baseball team nearly fifty years in the rearview mirror.
“I was told that your niece, Frances Fling, er, Flynn, was friends with one of the players on that team who is now deceased.”
There is a long silence.
“You know that my niece is long since dead, I presume.”
I tell him that I do. I have the feeling that he’s about to lump me with the solicitors for the Deputy Sheriff’s Benevolent Society and hang up.
“But a man who worked for the team back then told me what a wonderful girl she was, and I wanted to hear more about her, for the story.”
Maybe he knows I’m blowing smoke up his ass. Maybe he just wants to get me off the phone but doesn’t want to hang up on me. Finally, he agrees that, if I come by tomorrow, he thinks he can find a few minutes to talk to me about his late sister’s late daughter.
It would have been impolite, to say nothing of stupid, to wonder out loud why an eighty-seven-year-old man is so pressed for time that he can only spare a few minutes. But if he knew me, he’d know I’m like cockroaches. Once you let me in the door, it’s damn hard to get rid of me.
I FIND the house on only the third drive through Wells. The locals give me directions that seem to presume that I know the names of every person and identity of every tree and bush in the neighborhood.
I stop a man walking to his car from the hardware store. He describes a route that seemingly would take me through the majority of the New England states. When I point out that, according to my map, the Harshman estate seems to be somewhere on the gravel road somewhere up ahead, he throws his hands in the air and says, “Well, go that way then, if you want to!”
Finally, on that gravel road within eyesight of such Wells, Vermont, as there is, I see the mailbox, half-hidden by a rose bush, with “Harshman” painted on the side.
August Harshman’s house is halfway up a sizable hill. I cross a bridge over a creek that seems to be about one thunderstorm short of overflowing. The house, a wooden Victorian, faces west, and the view of the mountains makes me wonder what housing prices are like up here.
I knock and, after a minute or so, I can hear a faint tapping that grows louder. Finally, the door opens.
“You’re late,” August Harshman says, leaning on his cane. He turns his back to me, and I follow him, very slowly, inside. He’s a tall man, still over six feet despite what I assume is some octogenarian shrinkage. He’s thin, and I sense that he’s always been thin. An old dog of mixed ancestry with a suspicion of strangers looks up from the wooden floor with yellow, baleful eyes. When he tries to bark, he sounds as old as Harshman. Harshman tells him to hush, and he does. A small and welcome fire crackles.
He offers me nothing. When he sits, in a Barcalounger that has adjusted to his contour and absorbed his smell, I take the next-most-comfortable option, a straight-backed wooden dining-room chair. It is a poor second, but at least I’m in the door, talking to Frannie Fling’s nearest living relative that I’m able to track down.
I ask Harshman if he lives there alone. He says he has a daughter who lives in San Francisco.
“She comes to see me twice a year,” he says, “and she doesn’t want to do that. I can tell.”
Have you thought, I want to ask him, about buying her a more comfortable second chair? Might make a difference.
He does allow, though, that his daughter would like him to move out west with her.
“So she can take care of me,” he says, spitting it out like she’d cursed him. “I won’t do it, though. They’ll never get me west of the Hudson, I can tell you that.”
I let him talk awhile. I thought New Englanders were supposed to be a close-mouthed bunch, lots of ay-ups followed by long silences. I certainly would have expected that of August Harshman. Like a lot of tight-lipped people, though, once you get him going, he’s like the damn Energizer Bunny. Just keeps going and going.
His sister, he says, married beneath her. The Flynns were “shanty Irish,” but the late Eleanor was taken by Willie Flynn’s charm and good looks, “so-called.”
“Frannie, she was beautiful,” he says, his tone softening. “She had that wild streak, though, just like her father. Willie drank, you know. Grown man named Willie, not William or Bill, you had to know he was the irresponsible type. No offense.”
I opt not to tell Mr. Harshman that Willie’s my given name. It would just get in the way of the information, which is what I’m here for.
I spend a couple of hours with August Harshman, and he tells me as much as anyone living could about Frances Flynn.
She was, as I’ve already been told by Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon, a good student who decided that her future did not include Wells, Vermont.
“They would have sent her to college,” Harshman says. “Mary and I had offered to help, but not long after that, she ran away.”
The Flynns didn’t hear from their daughter for some months.
“She had done some things that didn’t set well with her parents, or at least with Eleanor, and I think there had been a falling out.”
By the time Frannie came back to Wells with her tail between her legs, it soon became obvious that she was pregnant.
“Eleanor was funny,” Harshman says. “She married this fella who was about two steps up from the town drunk, but she had this moral side. Maybe she just wanted Frannie to have a better life than she’d had.
“We tried to stop her from kicking Frannie out, and I know Willie was against it. But Eleanor ran that house. She controlled everything except Willie’s drinking. Nobody could control that.”
And so Frannie went to live in the home of a friend whose parents weren’t quite as judgmental.
“And then, that spring, we heard she was gone again, back down south.”
When notified of Frannie’s death, Eleanor Flynn went from hard-hearted mother to avenging angel. She threatened a lawsuit and more or less called down the wrath of God on the New York Yankees.
“Nineteen sixty-five, that was a sad year,” Harshman says as he gets up to stoke the fire and put another couple of pieces of wood on it. The dog follows him with his eyes wherever he goes.
“We lost Frannie in March, and then Willie … well, I think it killed him. He’d never needed much of an excuse to drink, and now he had every reason in the world to try to drink the world dry.”
Willie Flynn died that November. They found his frozen body by the same creek I drove over on the way to Harshman’s house. His widow was so angry at him that she had him cremated and his ashes thrown away, Harshman says.
“He should have been stronger. If nothing else, he should have thought about the boy.”
“The boy?”
He looks at me like I’m slow. Maybe it’s my southern accent.
“Her brother. Dairy. He was the only one they had left, and instead of getting closer to him, holding him tighter, they all just seemed to go their separate ways.”
His name was Adair. Adair Enoch Flynn. Adair had been his father’s mother’s last name. Enoch was his mother’s father’s name. Hell of a moniker to put on a kid.
Dairy Flynn was eight years younger, so he was ten when Frannie went south the first time, eleven when she died.
“He was real fond of his big sister,” Harshman says. “In some ways, I think it was worse on him than on Eleanor and Willie. He kept a picture of her in his room until after she died and
Eleanor came in one day and threw it away. They had a big fight over it, she told me. She said he came after her with a baseball bat. Willie had to take it away from him.”
August Harshman sighs.
“You know,” he says, “they were too hard on her. I heard about how she went back down there to get that fella, that ballplayer, to marry her. But I really think that, if they had took her in and accepted that girls do get that way sometimes, no matter how well you raise them, and offered to take care of that child like it was their own, she would have stayed up here and none of what happened would have happened.
“But it was 1964. You didn’t get pregnant until you got married, although some did and just took care of things without a lot of fuss.”
He says Eleanor told him once, many years later, that she would have given anything to have saved Frannie, if she had known how it was going to turn out.
“Didn’t stop her from doing what she did about Dairy, though.”
I think about Peggy, about how she must have felt, younger even than Frances Flynn, when her parents told her she had to leave with her bastard, mixed-race baby in tow. I am here either because Peggy was a stronger person than Frannie Flynn or because of plain damn good luck.
After Willie Flynn froze to death in the late fall of 1965, Eleanor moved with her son to Worcester, Massachusetts, where a cousin was able to get her a job as a secretary. Despite the fact that she was in her early forties, she was still apparently quite an attractive woman. Within two years, she had caught the eye of one of her bosses, Roger Fairchild, and within four years, he was divorced and they were married, in 1969.
It turned out, Harshman tells me, that Roger Fairchild wasn’t really in the market for a package deal. He was more than happy to take the mother, but when it came to Dairy, it was “no sale.”
“Dairy was kind of difficult. He got in some trouble down there in Worcester. Never did learn all about it. He’d come up here and stay with us for a week in the summer, and even that long, he could be a pill. Damn near burned the barn down last time he visited.”
