Whatever Ruth Spinks had come roaring across the quad to bother Happy with, it was forgotten now: her conviction slid off her face like a custard pie. Happy folded her arms and savored the moment. Her weapon slapped away, sapped of her power, Ruth assumed at last the slack jowls, the glassy eyes, of the small-town spinster-librarian that she was. Her cheeks pinked, than turned livid, revealing the spots and scars of a mediocre life, and her eyeglasses began to steam over. From behind their gray veil the eyes came dully into focus, and the lips parted with an audible pop, and Ruth said, “You—you’re a married woman!”
The poor thing knew how foolish these words were, and a shiver seemed to go through her, and her shoulders sagged. Happy forced a laugh—for, honestly, she wasn’t made of stone, and part of her raged at Kevin Russell’s betrayal—and then struck the death blow.
“You’ll have to defer to my experience in that arena, dear,” she said. She leaned close. “There’s a reason he’ll never marry you, you know. You aren’t worth the bother.”
And off she stalked, down the hill toward her house. She was tempted to look back, to watch her enemy bleed to death in the snow—but she resisted. Never look back. Never.
Kevin Russell, a double agent! She had to admit, it had never occurred to her. Well—it hardly mattered now. She was almost finished with him anyway.
32. An incomprehensible and very annoying rasp
Around a quarter to eight that night, Archie plucked the town hall key off its hook and walked through the orchard toward the village. It was really over now, the apple season: he would leave the stand up for sunny days, but the apples were picked and in storage, and for the next several months he was more or less out of a job.
What would he do with his time? Put up Christmas lights, he supposed. One year he had bought dozens of strings of the little white kind and draped them over half the orchard. That was a fun year—people stopped their cars, wandered in among the apple trees. He invited them in for cocoa or coffee. The following year a few of the strings wouldn’t come on, and he’d had to scale down the display. A few more had failed every year since. Now he had maybe three or four left, and nobody stopped in at all anymore. He could buy new lights, of course, but that would be pathetic, wouldn’t it—a lonely old man luring people to his lair.
Besides, he’d lured Happy to his lair and it hadn’t made him feel better. He longed for her now, as he would all winter. He couldn’t imagine sleeping with Ruth again—her eyes squeezed shut, her body moving barely if at all, the faintest mousey cries escaping her lips, like little questions: huh? huh? She preferred being in her head to being in his bed, and he could hardly blame her for it. Happy had shown him how far he’d been from living.
So what would he do? Read, research, relax and think. He’d go down to Nestor twice a week to check books out, read pomological stuff on the web: reports, discussions, discoveries. He would bide his time, along with all the other apple growers. Who’s to say he couldn’t enjoy that? The quiet outside, walks in the snow, the warmth of a fire—the pleasures of solitude. Not, perhaps, the life he would have chosen, but the life he had.
It occurred to him that he had defined himself by Mary’s death, not her life. “I can’t live without you,” he’d told her in the final weeks. “Of course you can,” she replied, and, distracted by dying, failed to conceal how little faith she had in those words. He’d meant what he said, and she knew it, and it had made her dying more painful.
Such were Archie’s thoughts as he trudged, head down, to the town hall; and so he didn’t notice that there were townspeople behind him, following, and some coming down off the hill, and some approaching from far ahead. He didn’t notice that dozens of feet had already packed the sidewalk snow. Only when the hall finally came into view did he see the crowd waiting to be let in: almost fifty people so far. They stood on the lawn, muttering, debating, a cloud of winter breath and cigarette smoke hovering above them. Their heads rose as he approached and their faces registered a range of unsettling expressions: hope, despair, resolve, doubt. The murmur quieted, as if clearing a space for him to speak. He stopped, and saw at last the town converging around him. He said, “What’s going on?”
Everyone spoke at once. The college—my house—shutting down—buying up—selling out. Happy’s name was uttered in uncharitable tones, accompanied by choice epithets. Archie put his hands in the air, waved the key. “Inside!” he shouted, and the townspeople moved to let him by.
Ruth was at the front, by the door. The look on her face was grim, the lips pressed together, the jaw in constant circular motion as though grinding stones. Her gray woolen coat was buttoned to the neck and her foot tapped the icy walk. She met Archie’s eyes as he slipped the key into the lock.
“What,” he said, foolishly.
Ruth shook her head. “You had to go and screw her, didn’t you.”
Mercifully, the door came open and he fell inside. His hand found the light switch. The hall was tidy, a peaked roof over a wooden floor, with his folding table in the front. He said to Ruth, “Help me with the chairs,” and wordlessly they went to the back room and brought them out by the armful.
But they oughtn’t to have bothered—there weren’t enough, and nobody wanted to sit in them anyway. The room filled up, the voices grew louder, and Archie pulled the folding table back until it was pressed against the wall. And through it all Ruth glared from behind steamed-over glasses. How did she know?
“She told me, you prick,” she said, answering the unasked question, and in response he climbed onto the table—easy there—and shouted: “I am calling this meeting to order!”
He had always used to look forward to the December town meeting. Nobody ever came.
The voices quieted, and pale faces turned to him. Already the room was blazing hot—he hadn’t even got around to turning up the thermostat. Kathy, the clerk, was nowhere to be found; presumably she was out there, somewhere, in the mass of citizens. There had to be a hundred, two hundred even: more students than he’d ever seen at one time, and their teachers, and the handful of townies who had resisted Happy’s overtures. They gazed at him as if he were a real mayor, a genuine leader, and he felt himself shrinking before them. And before Ruth, who stood with arms folded, hat askew, slowly shaking her big gray head.
“Ruth,” Archie said quietly. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”
She stared at him for long seconds, and then with a sigh pulled up a folding chair and stood on it. She turned to the crowd.
“Archie hasn’t heard and maybe some of you haven’t either. So I’ll recap. The college has just had its accreditation taken away, and the trustees are selling it to Happy Masters. That’s why we’re here.”
The students in the crowd threw their fists in the air and began to scream. The people around them backed away, squeezing into the corners. A chant began to emerge: What do we want?”
In response, a rousing but incoherent mumble.
“When do we want it?”
“Now!!!”
Archie climbed onto the folding table and shouted. “Order! Order!” He stamped his foot and the table wobbled underneath him like a rowboat. The chant died out. The students quieted.
“Can somebody tell me,” he loudly inquired, already realizing perhaps that it was not the correct question, “what is so terrible about—?”
He didn’t get to finish. The room erupted. Even the townies shouted now; they were yelling at Archie. “Impeach! Impeach!” the students began to scream, and this one caught on: townies and students alike pumped their fists and demanded, with thunderous unanimity, Archie’s removal from office.
Well, he was more or less inclined to give it to them, just now: he’d about had it. He stood, head bowed, afraid to get down, afraid to remain. The only one in the room, he noticed, who hadn’t joined in the screaming was a skinny Asian girl pressed against the side wall: her face was wet and she shivered, as if she weren’t buried in a quilted ski jacket the size of a small car. Below
Archie, beside the table, Ruth was waving her arms. “Quiet!” And when this didn’t work, she bent over and screamed it: “Quiet!!!”
In time, a tenuous quiet emerged. Ruth had retained some authority over the students, it seemed. Her voice was hoarse as she said, “According to Janet Ping, Happy Masters does not intend to reopen the college.” A small gasp went up. Archie, of course, was among them. Ruth turned. “That’s what’s so terrible, Archie,” she said, and with her eyes added, about your new girlfriend. “Janet,” she went on, “tell them what you heard.”
The girl shrank into her coat, backed herself into the wall. She looked at Ruth, and then out at the crowd. Archie didn’t believe she would speak, but she did.
“I was working for her. I overheard a…a conversation. She wants to tear down the college and…and put up a museum. A doll museum. And a sort of theme park, or something. That’s what Happyland is. On the sign.”
More mumbles, mutters, and shouts. “She tricked me!” came a voice.
Heads turned. Space cleared. It was Jennifer Triesman, looking thinner and stranger than ever, with her arms stiff at her sides like splints. Her hair was wild and her voice sounded like a blender full of rocks. Beside her, her family stood in apparent fear: soft, bunchy Bud, with his boys leaning wide-eyed against him.
“She knocked down my fucking garage and ice-cream stand! Then she pulled out of the fucking deal! We’re fucking broke ‘cause of her! She fucking fucked us, Archie, she fucked us!”
“She paid for the Sally Streit lecture!” Janet Ping cried now. “She was the donor! I said I wouldn’t tell!”
“I made the video,” sobbed another girl standing nearby, her round red face wet with tears. “She told me she just wanted to see. She gave me…a hundred…dollars!”
“She drowned Glenda in the lake!” someone yelled.
“She tore down our Inn!”
“She ran our bar out of business!”
“She bought out the hair salon,” a heavy woman wailed in the back. “Then she fired me because I was fat!”
“She sued me over my property line!”
“Stuck-up bitch!”
“Whore!”
“Let’s go fucking kill her!”
This, finally, came from Jennifer, whose bruises stood out on her red face like war paint. It was met with a rallying cry a minor third lower than the ones that preceded it: testosterone had flooded the collective bloodstream. Poor Janet Ping, the bringer of bad news, slid a few inches down the wall that supported her and looked up at Archie as if for salvation. But he had none to give. He was helpless. Violent intent rippled across the space like a sonic boom, and the temperature notched up to unbearable. And Archie wondered, quite unexpectedly, where on earth Dave Dryer was.
* * *
As it happened, Dave Dryer was on his way over. He had seen the citizens tramping obliviously past his former bar, and among the handful of rational thoughts still capable of battering their way through the haze of alcohol, medication, and encroaching lunacy in his head was: were they so ungrateful, these former patrons, that they couldn’t so much as turn to glance at the site of their revelries past? No, evidently not. They had forgotten. The only visitor he’d had in the past week had been the ghost of Thomas Crim, who had repeatedly pestered him with knocks on his door, phone calls, and gravel against the upstairs windows, in an effort, Dave surmised, to get him to expose himself, to catch him off-guard. Well, he hadn’t caved in. He was no fool—that dead white motherfucker could pound on his door until the cows came home, but Dave Dryer wasn’t going to fall for it.
Now, however, Dave’s curiosity got the best of him. Against what was left of his better judgment he cracked open the door and stuck out his head.
If you’d happened to be walking by at that moment and looked up, you would have been quite startled by the sight of this head, for Dave Dryer looked as though he had just crawled out of a car wreck. A large bandage, evidently the remains of an old tee shirt, encircled his face. It was stained brown at the cheek where his poultice had been applied, and reeked of ammonia and skunk. The cheek itself, and indeed Dave’s entire jaw, was horribly swollen, the skin shiny, the lips dry and cracked, the nostrils crusted with pink. His eyes were bloodshot, and jittered as if mounted on springs. Every move he made, however slight, seemed to set them darting around in their sockets, and though this might have given the impression that Dave couldn’t see properly, he had had no trouble shooting holes in the portrait of Happy he had rendered on a scrap of plywood and nailed to a tree out back.
But nobody did look up, so focused were they on their mission. Maybe if they had, some general alert might have gone out—the police might have been called, or a doctor. But, then again, probably not. It was not in the nature of Equinoxians to interfere in other people’s business.
As for what Dave saw: his own awareness of his thoughts and actions was compromised by a pain that had transcended the mere word, had incubated in his nerves and been reborn as a separate entity, a living, pulsing creature that clung to his head and neck with vampiric tenacity, pausing in its ceaseless squeal now and then only to take a large bloody bite out of his hot, disfigured face. What remained of his rational mind was occupied by the whirling storm, which had somehow become infected; it had taken on a swollen, raw appearance, like a gelatin mold, and seemed to be raining blood and pus, casting a sickly pink scrim over Dave’s field of vision. And from his own throat came a peculiar sound, not quite speech, rather a sort of static, an incomprehensible and very annoying rasp.
So afflicted, Dave Dryer observed the gathering of his fellow-citizens down the block at the town hall, and it was with slow, dreamlike movements that he gathered up his coat and boots and slipped out the front door—carefully, so as not to rouse the lurking ghost. He had the presence of mind to choose not the short woolen pea coat that a bar patron had once left behind, and which he normally wore in winter, but his raincoat, which was floppy and extended down to his ankles. It didn’t protect him from the cold, but Dave, gripped as he was by a fever, wasn’t bothered by cold. It did, however, conceal his firearm from view.
He walked down the front steps of the bar (his footprints would be temporarily preserved by the break that was about to occur in the snowstorm, and would be much commented upon later, by the grimly curious) and across the quiet street. Ahead, the town hall seemed to pulse with activity; its windows were lit and fogged over, and the sound of angry voices could be heard from within. The clock tower’s deformed knell sounded out across the grayblack sky. Dave stopped in the side yard, watching and listening, as snow fell around him. His head throbbed underneath its blanket of painkillers, and steam from his face rose past his eyes in a constant faint curtain, giving the impression that he was sinking, forever sinking into the ground. He felt ill, doubled over, spat bile and blood into the snow. A chill went through him. Time to go inside.
Instead, the doors flew open and the townspeople flowed out into the street. Arms raised, faces black with anger underneath hatless heads; mouths open, screaming, belching clouds of steaming breath: the citizens of Equinox looked like demons loosed upon the earth. They flowed onto the sidewalk and into the street, insectile in their unified purpose, a swarm coordinated by anger. Some reckoning was close at hand, something grand and cataclysmic, and Dave Dryer had no choice but to follow.
* * *
Archie watched them go. Ruth watched Archie watching. The hall began to clear of people and cold air rushed in to replace them. “Well?” Ruth said, stepping forward. Archie got down from the table.
He couldn’t face her, nor avoid her gaze. Head hung, he looked up at her with tired eyes.
“You should warn her,” she said.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
She answered with a shrug. “I don’t need you,” she told him. “I never did.”
It was the simple truth, though she had said it to hurt. It remained to be seen if he needed her. He didn’t have her anymore, that was certain. He s
aid, “When this is over, I’m resigning.” He met her eyes now. “You should be mayor.”
“You should warn Happy,” she replied.
After a moment, he nodded, and went to the back to phone her. When he returned, Ruth was gone. The room was empty. The only sound was the sound of the braying mob, blocks distant now. He fumbled in his pockets for the keys, to lock up the town hall. His trembling hands grasped them, dropped them on the muddied floor. And then, somehow, it sank in, what they meant to do. He left the keys where they lay and ran for the door.
* * *
“They’re coming for you,” is what he had told her.
“Oh, it’s you,” Happy said, not without pleasure. Alone here tonight, waiting for the next phase of her project to begin, her thoughts had turned to Archie more than once. “You shouldn’t call here, Mr. Mayor—my husband will be in town tomorrow. You do have my e-mail, don’t you?”
“I’m just calling to warn you,” his voice intoned, without expression. “Don’t answer the door.”
“Who’s coming, Archie dear?”
He said nothing for a moment, and she felt a tiny abscess open up somewhere between her heart and her loins, a little pocket of poison. Eventually he spoke. “Is it true? Are you really planning to shut down the college?”
“Who on earth told you that?” she said, though she knew.
“And the video. You paid that girl to make it.”
She forced a laugh. “People have been telling stories, haven’t they.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Archie said. “They’re coming. The town. Lock up.”
“I’ve turned them away before, darling.” But did she detect the slightest trill of unease in her own voice?
Archie hung up, and the kernel of unease cracked open and blossomed into fear. She shivered and set down the phone. Then picked it up again. Tried to remember a number. Failed. Slammed the phone back down and pulled her cell from her pocket.
“Evenin’,” said Kevin Russell.
Happyland Page 31