Cast in Stone

by G. M. Ford

  "You're kidding."

  "Yeah, I'm renowned for. being a real barrel of laughs. Ask anybody. They'll tell ya."

  He picked up the volume nearest his left arm and worked toward the back. "Talk about steppin' in shit. One crummy picture and Moe and Larry manage to stumble on it. Nineteen eighty only. Nothing in either seventy-nine or eighty-one." He tapped the book, "hist this one."

  I walked around behind his chair. The black-and-white image was captioned "Fall Sports Banquet." Standard-issue yearbook photo. The flash had captured the front three and a half tables of what the receding shadows revealed-to have been a much larger gathering. Thick-necked young men in rented formal attire. Chiffon off the shoulder for the young women. Grandma's jewelry. Good bones. Good teeth. Corsages and boutonnieres. The scattered place settings and facial expressions confirmed that dessert had long since come and gone. This party was well into the shank of the evening.

  I studied the female faces at the center table. The stark light of the flash had washed the edges from their features, leaving only the man-in-the-moon eyes, nose, and mouth floating off-center in amorphous auras of dull white. I leaned closer, nearly resting my nose on the page. No help.

  I ventured a quick glance back Carl's way. He met my gaze. I shrugged. Shaking his head, he placed the tip of his index finger slightly above the coiffured head of a gorgeous brunette seated at the rear of the center table. There, at the next table back, her face adrift now above Carl's fingernail, was a younger, thinner, but easily recognizable Allison Stark. A brunette back then. Caught off guard by the flash, her expression showed neither the forced gaiety nor the weary waxiness of those around her but instead revealed an intensity of focus discernibly inappropriate for the occasion.

  "Sure enough," was all I could think to say. "What else do you notice?" he asked. "Why don't we just save time and have you tell me." "Go on, look."

  I looked. I was about to plead for mercy when it struck me. "She's sitting between two women."

  "Good, Leo. Very good. Notice how at every other table we can see the seating order is like it ought to be—boy girl, boy girl. Except right there where our girl is, suddenly it's three girls in a row."

  "No empty seats, either," I said.

  "Not a happy camper."

  "Look at the dress."

  This one was easy.

  "She seems lost in it."

  "Yeah," he said. "It's way too big for her. Way out of style too."

  As usual, Carl was right. The voluminous dress with what appeared to be fabric roses sewn onto the shoulders reminded me of one of those thirties nightclub movies.

  "Maybe she just had bad taste," I suggested.

  "More likely she borrowed the dress."

  We sat in silence staring at the picture. Finally, Carl sat back in his chair and cast a glance at the door.

  "Shall we?" he asked.

  "You think you can stand all that affability?" "I'll grin and bear it," I said. We called in unison, "Pamela!"

  15

  State route 78 weaves two lanes through the smooth green hills of southern Wisconsin, through Daleyville, past the cutoff to Forward, and south to Blanchardville, where you either turn west toward the shores of Yellowstone Lake or stay on 78 as it continues south down toward Illinois. The blustery morning wind had climbed above the trees. Thin shards of cloud, low in the bright blue sky, kept pace as we drove south. Summer had lingered here. The leaves on the native oaks and maples had only just begun to turn color at the tips. Under different circumstances, it could have been a scenic trip. Not today.

  Forty miles of log trucks and motor homes had sapped what minuscule patience Carl had started with. We'd been stuck behind a load of small cedar logs for the past twenty miles. The truncated front end of the van, when combined with Carl's maniacal tailgating, reduced me to stomping imaginary brakes as he simultaneously chain-smoked and manipulated the hand controls like a deranged railroad engineer.

  "How much farther?" he groused, inching even closer to the logs. I could count the growth rings. Metal cutouts of naked women undulated on the swaying mudflaps. A hail of loosened bark and kicked-up gravel ticked rhythmically off the van. Again, I involuntarily pumped the brakes like a dog scratching dream fleas.

  "Four or five miles and we should be on the outskirts of beautiful Argyle, Wisconsin."

  "I'll gird my loins for the excitement."

  For the umpteenth time, he slipped a foot of the van out into the northbound lane only to be very nearly vaporized by oncoming traffic.

  "Assholes," he muttered as a blue-and-white tour bus whizzed by, nearly taking the mirror.

  "Yeah," I agreed. "Bastards got some nerve driving north."

  "Stuff it, Leo. You hear me. You got me out here followin' these fuckin' Lincoln Logs up the road from the twelfth century to see a broad whose sole claim to fame is being the Badger alumni chairperson for nineteen-eighty. Yeah, I'm betting the ranch on this one."

  "You never know till you try. All we want her to do is put a name on a face for us."

  "Yeah, from a fifteen-year-old dinner party."

  "We'll show her the composite you made. Maybe that will help."

  "Maybe pigs will fly."

  "She's not only alumni chairperson, she's also in the picture. What else could we ask for."

  "Trust me, Leo, right about now I got a hell of a list of other things I could ask for."

  "It's worth a try. People let themselves get appointed alumni chairpersons because they want an excuse to keep their noses in other people's business. They just have to know what's going on. They know who's having a baby, who's getting a divorce. They send just the right little card for each occasion. They like that crap. That's why they do it."

  "So you keep telling me."

  "Maureen Hennesey is the alumni liaison for my class."

  Car] shot me a sideways look.

  "The charity dame with the Margaret Thatcher hair?" "The very same."

  Maureen had, as they say, married well. While her husband, Lester, busied himself at the task of massaging the family millions, she divided her time between a series of short-lived affairs with sundry instructors and serving on the boards of nearly every charitable institution in King County. No solvent business-person had been spared Maureen's tireless fund-raising efforts. Her grandiose style of coercive insistence was legendary. I had his attention now.

  "Really," he said.

  "No shit."

  "Last time she hit me up for the opera"—he removed both hands from the wheel, pointing his palms at the headliner—"like I give a shit about the opera. I tried to poor-mouth it, you know, like business was off, I was cutting back my charities, that sort of shit. She's real polite and understanding and all. And then proceeds to read me chapter and verse of every gift I've made in the past year and a half. She even knew about some bags of cement I'd donated to the neighborhood Pony League. I mean stuff I bought on my own and had Mark deliver. She even knew about that, for chrissakes."

  "Maureen knows everything. See?"

  "Hmmm," was as close as he got to agreeing.

  We travelled the last three miles in silence.

  It took some doing to get Carl inside. The three steps up to the front door were out of the question. Reading my mind, Carl stepped out of character and tried to make things easy.

  "Forget it, Leo. You'll rupture yourself and then I'd have to haul your big ass all the way back to Seattle. Go get 'em. I'll wait here."

  I threaded my way through a maze of bicycles up

  onto the front porch and rang the bell. Almost instantly, the door was opened by a slight woman in her thirties. She was dressed for jogging. White Nike tank top, shiny blue synthetic shorts, new blue tennies. She stuck out her hand. "I'm Anne Siemons. You must be Mr. Waterman." I said I was.

  Peering over my shoulder, she spotted Carl in the van.

  "Isn't your friend going to join us? Pamela at the university said there were two of you."

  "He's in a wheelchair
," I said.

  "Oh. I'm sorry." She looked at her front porch with new eyes. "What a mess. My apologies. The kids are at the lake. Seems like there just aren't enough hours in the day since Bud left."

  I waited for an explanation of Bud, but didn't get one.

  "The garage is at ground level. He can come in through there."

  She backed the Volvo station wagon out of the garage so we could roll Carl in through the kitchen. Even then it was tight. In order to get Carl past the washer and dryer, I had to lift the front of the chair while Carl inched incrementally forward. We repeated the process several times, until we conquered the corner and rolled into the kitchen. Handicapped access had obviously not worked its way down to suburban home design.

  I followed Carl and Siemons down a short hall into the living room. What had once been expensive furniture was now frayed and threadbare. Folded laundry was piled on nearly every flat surface. A newspaper and magazine collection worthy of the. Library of Congress lay strewn about the floor. Seated on a stained blue couch was a large blond woman of about Siemons's age, wearing a red sleeveless dress of indeterminate shape. No shoes. No jewelry. No smile.

  "This is my friend and neighbor, Janet Behnoud," said Siemons. "Janet was going to the lake with the kids, but I made her stay."

  We introduced ourselves as we settled in around a smoked-glass coffee table covered with round watermarks. On the table, amid flecks of ashes and what appeared to be blobs of grape jelly, a copy of the Badger Annual of 1980 was propped open like a tepee.

  I pulled a copy of the banquet picture from my pocket and smoothed it on the table. Janet Behnoud took a quick look and sat back heavily on the couch. Anne Siemons watched her friend as if expecting directions, then turned her attention to the photo.

  "That's me," she said, indicating a younger version of herself, -bottom center of the photo.

  "Yes," Carl confirmed.

  "Jimmy Furchert," she pointed again. "He was my date."

  Using the chipped nail of her right index finger, she began to move clockwise around the picture. "And Kelly Hill and Dave Dennett, Maranda Mallory and Cory Flynn, Mike Williams with Julie Miller, Jeff Swogger and his date." Again, the women locked eyes. Siemons tried to talk past it. "They're married now. And Janet. And over here—where you can't see"— she pointed to an area on the right that had been cut off by the photographer—"were Milt Hagen and Katie Seaver."

  She stopped, looking at us as if for the first time. Somewhere in the house, a washer was in spin cycle.

  "Milt owns a—" Again she stopped.

  The distant washer began to refill. Again Anne Siemons looked to her friend. More loud silence passed between the two women.

  "I feel like I'm in one of those gothic novels," I finally said.

  The women stared.

  "The kind where the suspects sit around the drawing-room table and cast these meaningful glances at one another as the music rises behind them. These looks you two keep passing have got me waiting for the music. Somebody want to clue me in here, or what?"

  When it became apparent that explanations were not forthcoming, Carl leaned forward to the coffee table, stuck his thumb into the propped-open yearbook, and eased it over. Fall sports banquet. Page two hundred fifty-three.

  "Lucky guess?" he asked.

  "When Pamela called from the university—" Anne Siemons began.

  "We were there when she called you," I interrupted. "She just asked if you'd help us identify somebody in the book. No page number or anything."

  "We've come a long way," said Carl.

  "It's about her, isn't it?"

  A sudden chill caused me to shudder.

  "Her, who?" Carl asked.

  "Her," Siemons said. "The little dark one in the back there." She nodded at the picture in my hand as if unwilling to even point. Siemons blinked twice, sliding her gaze from the book to Carl to me then back to the picture in my hand.

  "That's why I asked Janet to stay."

  Reaching out now she pointed to the figure nearest the camera on the bottom right. Much thinner, not quite as blond, but the resemblance was easy to see now.

  I addressed myself to her. "So Ms.—" "Ben-nowed," she pronounced for me. "You won't believe how people butcher the pronunciation. Ben-nowed," she repeated.

  "So, Ms. Behnoud, what was it that takes two of you to tell?"

  Siemons adjusted the blue plastic band in her hair. "This is so embarrassing," she said. "She was following him," Behnoud blurted. "Following whom?"

  "Jeff Swogger." She touched the curly head of an uncomfortable-looking young man at the head table. "They didn't have a word for it then, but she was stalking him. That's what they'd call it now."

  "He didn't even know her," Anne added quickly. "He was only a freshman, but he started in the defensive backfield somewhere, which was really unusual. That's how come he was in the picture at all. It turned out later that she had followed him from all the way back where he came from."

  "Which was where?" Carl asked.

  "Someplace in Washington State," Janet said.

  "All the way to Wisconsin. This girl followed some perfect stranger from Washington to Wisconsin. That's pretty damn weird," Carl said.

  "You don't know the half of it," giggled Siemons.

  "Let's back up here," I suggested. "This guy Swogger." I pointed to the curly-haired specimen sitting next to the gorgeous brunette. "This is him, right?" They both agreed it was. "Who was his date for the party?"

  "The girl next to him." Anne Siemons touched the brunette. "She was his high school sweetheart. The only girl he'd ever dated. They got married right after he graduated. I don't know exactly when. I'd graduated by then. They're still married. We exchange cards."

  Carl and I exchanged a meaningful glance of our own.

  "Who brought the girl then?" I asked.

  "Nobody."

  "How'd she get in?"

  A shrug. "She had a ticket."

  "How?"

  "God only knows. It was strictly by invitation," said Janet. "So what happened then?" "A scene."

  Anne rolled her eyes. "The scene to end all scenes."

  "So, Swogger is there with his future wife, and this girl who got in God knows how is there too, glaring at them from the next table."

  "Nobody really noticed her until way after dinner, when she started screaming at them."

  "Screaming?"

  Behnoud rose from the couch and moved slowly to the center of the room. "After the dinner was over and everything"—she measured the room with her arms—"the band started playing again, and everybody got up and danced. Jeff and his date stayed at the table."

  "I don't think his religious beliefs permitted dancing," Anne said. "And?"

  Janet swam her arms again. "And, we're all out there dancing around, and right over the top of the music, and I mean the music was loud, you start to hear this screaming start. Biblical verses. Scripture of some sort. About whores and whoremasters and concubines and eternal damnation for the wicked and about how Jeff was her eternal intended."

  I look to Anne Siemons for confirmation.

  She held up her right hand. Girl Scout's honor. "That's the exact words she used, 'eternal intended.'"

  "Absolutely at the top of her lungs," she added.

  Janet carried on.

  "Yeah, and by this time people have stopped dancing and are drifting over to see what's going on. It wasn't like you could ignore it or anything. Hell, even the band stopped playing." She brought her arms •j-- "tu„*v ,„hpti
  ing about how she'd known from the first moment she'd seen him in his football uniform back home that he was her intended. About how she'd made a pilgrimage here just to be near him. I mean, the place was in dead silence by then."

  "What did Swogger do?"

  "He tried to help her."

  "Help her what?" Carl asked.

  "Help her get control of herself, I guess."

  Carl's confusion was palpable. Anne Sie
mons piped up.

  "You'd have to know Jeff, Mr. Cradduck. Jeff was everything the rest of those football knuckleheads weren't. He was thoughtful, sincere and kind and sensitive and ... I know it sounds corny, but Jeff was just a genuinely nice person. He was a philosophy major. Became a minister. You'd have to know him to really understand."

  Janet jumped in. "His first reaction was that this screaming maniac was a person who needed help. That was just how he was. He always put other people first. The rest of us, I mean, we were glued in place. Nobody knew whether to shit or go blind."

  "How did he try to help her?"

  "He went over to try to calm her. To help her get a grip."

  "And then?"

  This time, the women looked toward opposite walls. Finally, Anne mumbled. "And then she took out her breasts." "She what?"

  "You heard right," Janet said. "She reached down into this huge old gown she was wearing and pulled her tits out."

  "No!"

  "Yes." In unison. "And?"

  "And what? She offered them to him. Held them in her hands and started yelling at him that these were her gifts to him."

  "Jesus," Carl whispered.

  "I'm afraid to ask what happened then."

  "Well, about that time some of the other girls started to realize that their big, strong, football player boyfriends weren't going to be of any help. The guys, they were just standing there taking this all in. I mean these gonzos are there just staring at this poor thing's chest, you know, drooling. At that point, a bunch of the girls took matters into their own hands. They pushed her out a side door into the alley—with her screaming all the way, I might add."

  "Did somebody call the police?"

  "She ran off up the alley."

  "Wow," was all I could think to say.

  "Tell them what she said," Janet said to Anne.

  "I can't. It's too embarrassing."

  "Anne was one of the girls who got her out of there. Go ahead, tell him. I'll get the words wrong. You tell it better."

  I suspected that this particular story had been the narrative highlight of innumerable baby showers and Tupperware parties. Anne didn't require further encouragement.

  "Okay, so she's standing there in the alley, tucking herself back into her dress. Breathing hard, but really calm all of a sudden. Like the cold air has brought her back to her senses or something. And I was really mad at that point. I mean she'd ruined the whole darn evening that I'd worked so hard for. I almost never swear, but I did this time. I yelled at her. I yelled something like 'What the hell is the matter with you?' Something along those lines anyway, and do you know what she said?"