God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  Her cry of pain was overpowered by the grinding of the machine and the crushing of cereal boxes and the chewing and tearing of a thousand plastic wrappers and sticky paper plates and wads of computer printouts and broken toys and torn underwear and smashed dishes and wastebasketfuls of miscellaneous rubbish. With a violent effort that tore the ligaments around her fractured bone, Hope wrested her foot from her captured shoe, and Ananda pulled her free, as Jefferson Grandison’s compactor crushed and swallowed the household debris of a hundred Concord families and solidified it into a grisly welter of flattened fragments, to be hauled away and buried somewhere in the town of North Andover.

  They lay still, side by side, with their faces pressed into the dirt and Ananda’s arm thrown over Hope. The machine was shuddering to a stop. The droning whine died away. In the sudden quiet they could hear Jack Markey weeping.

  At least, thought Hope, he had the grace to take it hard. Poor old Jack, he thought Ananda Singh had been ground up into little pieces, and it caused him pain. Angrily Hope pressed closer to Ananda, and he squeezed her tighter, and she prayed that Jack Markey would climb back into his car and drive away without checking to see if a random arm or leg was sticking out of the jaw of the machine, unconsumed.

  They lay still, listening, as Jack’s snuffling became a torrent of sobs, as if he had been holding back tears all his life and were letting them out now in a single flood.

  Jack’s weeping went on and on. At last it petered out into gulping sobs. They could hear his stumbling footsteps. The car door slammed. The engine purred. The car moved softly away, jouncing on the rough dirt road.

  Slowly, hardly daring to think themselves safe, they sat up. Ananda’s head was swollen and aching, Hope’s leg was broken in two places.

  “I heard a wood thrush today in Gowing’s Swamp,” murmured Hope.

  Tenderness welled up in Ananda, and he took her in his arms.

  As Jack Markey turned out of the landfill onto Route 126, he was too anguished to remember to turn on the headlights. He wanted only to get away. Violently he pressed his foot on the accelerator. The car leaped forward and plunged along the road in the direction of Route 2.

  But he couldn’t get away from the falling stars, which were still catapulting from the heavens. In the narrow band of sky between the overarching trees he saw one star drop, and then another. Jack screamed, and screamed again, as a pale horse rushed upon him, pounding toward him with Death on its back and Hell following after.

  Sarah and Pearl didn’t know anything terrible was happening. Miraculously they had negotiated the crossing of Route 2 by arriving at the intersection just as the light changed to green. Gaily they plunged straight across in front of the stopped traffic, and galloped down the road. The darkened car that careened toward them was a shock, and Pearl was so surprised she dug in her forelegs and stopped cold. Poor Sarah was tossed forward, and she banged her head hard on Pearl’s neck, but she wasn’t really hurt.

  But Jack Markey completely lost control. Screaming, he drove off the road and struck a tree with shattering force. Instantly he was crushed between the smashed windshield and the crumpled hood.

  Sarah was oblivious of death and destruction at the side of the road. The noise of the impact of Jack’s car against the tree was lost in the tremendous accelerating roar of the trucks starting up at the traffic light on Route 2. Sarah righted herself on Pearl’s back and clucked at her, and they started off again. Soon they were cantering smoothly along Route 126, keeping to the narrow shoulder, and they didn’t slow down until they came to a house with a vegetable garden, where Pearl stopped of her own accord and began helping herself in the dark to some juicy carrot tops.

  Far behind them at the scene of the accident, a police ambulance came streaking through the night, its siren wailing, and pulled up beside the shattered car.

  There was nothing the two men in the ambulance could do to help Jack Markey. Instead they picked up a couple of young people who hobbled up to them, supporting each other, barely able to walk. In spite of their obviously traumatic injuries the two kids were grinning hugely.

  “Were you in the car?” said one of the medical technicians, helping them into the ambulance.

  “What car?” said Hope.

  “That car, over there against the tree. You mean, you had nothing to do with the accident?”

  “What accident?” said Ananda.

  It was very strange. In the milling confusion of puzzled medics, and police officers routing traffic around the ambulance, and cruisers with blinking lights, and the loud blatting of the intercom, and the shouted questions of inquisitive people leaning out of passing cars, nobody understood it at all.

  In the ambulance Hope and Ananda lay on two cots, smiling at each other.

  “Excuse me,” said the medic, stepping over their clasped hands to apply a splint to Hope’s leg.

  “Pyar karta ho,” said Ananda in Hindi, squeezing her hand tightly.

  “What does it mean?” whispered Hope.

  “It means, ‘I love you.’ I have never said such words before.”

  “Oh, ouch,” said Hope. “Oh, Ananda, I’m so glad. I love you too.”

  “Excuse me again,” said the irritated technician. In the performance of his duties he had never before been hindered by love.

  63

  GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL.

  DO NOT PASS GO,

  DO NOT COLLECT $200.

  Chance card, Monopoly

  Mimi Pink had a habit of tippling a little too much on Saturday nights. After a hard week of running from one store to another, keeping things moving along smoothly, poking a little here, scolding a little there, trying to keep things under control while uneasy rumblings grumbled below the surface, Mimi felt she deserved a glass of wine, and then another and another.

  Tonight something was vaguely lurching and yawing at the back of her consciousness, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Muzzily she polished off the bottle of Chianti. It was only after she dropped off to sleep right after supper and awoke two hours later in total darkness with her head on the table that it struck her with an awful jolt what it was.

  The money—what had happened to the three hundred and fifty thousand dollars Jack Markey had promised to deliver yesterday afternoon? Oh, God, he had come, he had certainly come, he had walked right into the Porcelain Parlor, he had given her a significant look, and he had set something down on the counter.

  But she had been in the middle of that awful fracas with the mad-looking ragged woman with the stroller. And then when the confusion was over and things settled down, Jack was gone, and Mimi had completely forgotten him because she was still so furious about the unspeakable creature who had violated the sanctity of her pretty shop and smashed an important piece that had cost her nine hundred dollars wholesale.

  Mimi sat in the dark trying to order her thoughts, which were tumbling over each other, bright flashes of perfect recall intermingled with foggy lapses of memory. Had Jack Markey brought her the money or hadn’t he?

  Her head swarmed with sodden recollections of other temper tantrums, old half-forgotten explosions, like the time Lee-Ann had shrieked with gloating laughter and snatched at Mimi’s Monopoly money and screeched, “That’s mine! You landed on Park Place! You did! It’s mine, mine, mine, all mine!” And it had been so awful, so unbearable, that once again Mimi had slapped her hard and thrown the whole game on the floor.

  Then with a sharp pang of dismay, Mimi remembered what had happened. Jack Markey had been carrying something pink, a pink plastic bag, and he had set it down on the counter. Mimi closed her eyes in the dark. By a supreme effort of concentration she summoned up a crystalline image of the dumpster behind the Porcelain Parlor. She saw herself hurling the bag lady’s stroller into it with all its contents. She had a vivid recollection of a conversation with the driver of the flatbed truck that came once a week to transport the dumpster to the landfill. He had come this very morning, and they had exchanged a few sharp wo
rds.

  “I will thank you not to litter my premises,” Mimi had said.

  “I got no interest in littering your premises,” shouted the driver, leaning out of his cab. “Just don’t fill the goddamned thing so full.”

  And then he had maneuvered his truck out onto the busy street. The last Mimi had seen of the trash she had thrown out during the week was a pink bag wobbling on top of everything else. A pink bag! It was Jack Markey’s pink bag, it was Mimi Pink’s pink bag, trembling and jiggling on top of the dumpster as the driver whirled the steering wheel and the big truck lumbered out of sight around the curve of Walden Street, heading for the other side of the highway and the Concord landfill.

  Mimi didn’t stop to gather her wits. She didn’t stop to think. She didn’t put on flat-soled shoes for walking or gloves for burrowing, she didn’t bring a shovel for digging. Emptyhanded she tore out of her condominium apartment, clattered down the stairs in her high-heeled shoes, leaped into her car, and sped down Route 2. As she turned the corner on Route 126 she had to slow down, because a tow truck and a couple of police cars were occupying half the road. An ambulance moved past her with flashing lights, and a traffic policeman beckoned her forward. Mimi hoped they were all too busy to see her turn into the entrance to the landfill.

  The place was new to her. She peered into the dark as her car bobbed up and down on the dirt road. Where in this godawful place would the dumpster have been emptied? Blindly she passed the compacting machine and headed for the mountain of rubbish at the top of the rise. Surely the pink plastic bag containing her three hundred and fifty thousand dollars was somewhere in that colossal pile.

  Jumping out of her car, Mimi hurried over the uneven ground, staggering on her stiletto heels. Swiftly she clawed her way to the top of the mountain, her hands digging into the soft covering of dirt, her heels puncturing the plastic bags just below the surface. At the top she stood up, balancing with difficulty, and looked around, feeling desolate. She was alone, all alone. There was no one in the whole world to help her now.

  Somewhere below her lay the pink bag of money. She must find it, she must. Bending over, Mimi began the search, thrusting her fingers through the layer of dirt, clutching at one of the submerged bags. Her sharp fingernails pierced a hole, and at once her ankles were engulfed in a tumble of cat-food cans. Before long she was down on all fours, reaching for bag after bag, and then she lay full length on the hill of debris, hauling bags aside, dragging out one bag after another, seeking a smaller one, a paler one, a pink bag stuffed with money. One of her shoes came off and lost itself in a sea of damp paper towels. Her delicate panty hose were ripped from hip to toe. She was engulfed in smelly fish papers and greasy wads of aluminum foil and sticky jam jars and noisome tissues and prickly chicken bones and oily butter wrappers.

  The daily effluvium of Concord’s domestic life was different in detail from the expensive schlock lining the shelves in all her sumptuous stores, but not in its essential nature. Mimi’s merchandise was not toxic to human life, but it was still pollution. In the mounded trash of the Concord dump she found at last the Park Place and Boardwalk that were hers by right.

  For two desperate hours Mimi crept and crawled and slithered among the sedimented rubbish without finding the pink bag full of money. At last, shaking with frustration, she gave up. Trembling with anger and self-loathing, she tottered to her knees and made her way, slipping and sliding, back down the hill of mounded garbage to her car.

  She did not drive back to her condominium. Jerking the car into action, she bucked it out onto Route 126, darted left and then almost immediately left again into the Pond View Trailer Park, and pulled up with a squeal of brakes beside one of the mobile homes. Leaping out, she stumbled in her wrecked stockings up the steps, and pounded savagely on the door.

  Lee-Ann opened it and stared at her sister. Mimi’s hair was in strings, her face was streaked with dirt, her clothes were grimed with filth. There was scrambled egg in her ear, dog food crusted on her blouse, nameless slime stuck to her from head to toe.

  “Christ, Mimi,” said Lee-Ann, “there’s people here. Jesus, what happened to you?” Then she took Mimi by the shoulders and shook her, and whispered, “My money! Did you bring me my money?”

  Mimi pushed violently past her sister. She had no regard for the people who were visiting Lee-Ann. “No,” she shouted, “I didn’t bring your money. There isn’t any money. Where the hell do you think I’m going to get any money?” And then she reached out her foul hands with their broken fingernails and scratched the pink pudding of Lee-Ann’s face.

  Lee-Ann fought back. “What do you mean,” she whimpered, grabbing Mimi’s hands in a fierce grip, “there isn’t any money?”

  “Because there isn’t,” wept Mimi. Jerking her hands free, she shoved Lee-Ann to the floor and fell on her.

  Homer Kelly and Julian Snow jumped out of their chairs and pulled them apart. Mary Kelly dragged Honey Mooney to her feet. Charlotte Harris hurried into Honey’s kitchen and dampened a paper towel and dabbed at Mimi Pink’s face and hands, while Mimi sobbed and blubbered.

  It was just like always. Mimi was in the wrong. She always got the blame. Nobody knew what she had been through. Nobody understood. Lee-Ann always won, Mother’s little honey-child.

  64

  Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

  Walden, “Higher Laws”

  In her furious rage against her sister, in her vengeful anxiety to destroy her, Mimi told everything. She stood amid the smoking ruins of her life, shaking her fist. Oh, it had been good to Lord it over Lee-Ann, to keep her on a string and tell her what to do, to dole out money in dribs and drabs. Now everything was smashed up, but it didn’t matter, as long as Lee-Ann was smashed up, too, and so was Buzzie, and so was Annie.

  Look at Buzzie Grandison! Just look at him now! He had married Annie Finney, not Mimi, and then he got rich, and after that Annie turned up her nose at Mimi, and only the other day she had passed Mimi on Newbury Street in Boston as if she didn’t recognize her at all, only of course she did, because Mimi saw that little flicker in her eyes before Annie looked away.

  Mimi did not merely talk to Homer Kelly, she babbled, she gushed, she spouted, she divulged everything.

  Homer listened and tried to make sense of the deluge, as he sat in Mimi’s condo apartment, which was all white, with puffy white sofas and pictures that were white on white and lampshades white as the driven snow. “You’re telling me your sister poisoned Shirley Mills?”

  “Exhume the body,” cried Mimi. “You’ll see. She did it! Lee-Ann did it!”

  “And Alice Snow? Your sister struck her with that heavy lamp?”

  “Oh, she’s strong,” gibbered Mimi. “I’ve got scars, the things she’s done to me.”

  “Wait a minute.” Homer remembered Dr. Stefano’s missing files, and he framed his next question carefully. “Your sister killed Alice Snow first, although Alice was an invalid, and everybody thought she didn’t have long to live anyway.”

  Mimi smiled wickedly. “That woman wasn’t sick, she was just lazy, she liked being waited on. I had private information.”

  “Private information? You mean Dr. Stefano’s files?”

  Mimi laughed, flaunting her cleverness. “Oh, yes, that was me. I was sitting there in the waiting room and his receptionist asked me to cover for her while she went down the hall to use the public phone. I saw my chance, and I pulled out all the Pond View files and stuffed them in my attaché case. So I knew she was lying, Alice Snow. I knew she was healthy as a pig.”

  “So it’s true, your sister was picking on the younger ones. I remember telling her to be careful for her own safety, because she was the youngest one in the park.” Homer smiled grimly.“So those burned curtains of hers were just an act, to make herself look like one of the targets.”

  “Naturally.”

  “But what about the hole in Julian Snow’s gas pipe, and the sabotage to his machine at the landfill? What abou
t Porter McAdoo’s collapsing jack? What about Charlotte Harris’s electric iron and the fire in the Ryans’ place, what about the bullet that killed Pete Harris?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Mimi, shrugging her big shoulders. “Ask her.”

  “Now just let me be sure I’ve got this straight.” Homer shifted his big frame among the white pillows on the white sofa. “The point of this entire exercise was to remove all the residents from the trailer park, to free it up so that it could be acquired from the state of Massachusetts to be used for another purpose? What was that purpose? It wasn’t just the restoration of the natural landscape? Your sister isn’t an enthusiast for the forest primeval?”

  “Ask her!” Mimi leaped up, exultant. “Ask Jack Markey! Ask Buzzie Grandison!”

  “Buzzie …? You mean Jefferson Grandison? He wanted this property, too? Not just the high school land, but Pond View, too? He wanted to develop Pond View?”

  And then Mimi made the hierarchy clear. Lee-Ann Mooney had taken orders from Mimi Pink, Mimi had been in partnership with Jack Markey, and Jack had answered to Jefferson Grandison. “I don’t know what the hell Buzzie wanted to do with the place. Ask him, go ahead, ask him.” Mimi ended with a shriek of laughter. “And give him my love! Give him all my love!”

  The final result of Homer’s interview with Mimi Pink was the indictment of her sister, Lee-Ann “Honey” Mooney, for the homicides of Alice Snow and Shirley Mills. Mimi herself was indicted for conspiracy to commit homicide, even though she had never harmed a hair on anybody’s head.

  Then, while her shrewd defense attorney sweated over her case, Mimi disposed of all her properties on Walden Street and the Milldam, turning in all the playing pieces of her private Monopoly game, all the little green houses and red plastic hotels. The dice vanished, too, the ones she had tossed and tossed and tossed—and at last the playing piece called Mimi Pink disappeared altogether from the board.