Sunday evening in late July. When the radio at supper introduces Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and the television crackles a small round eye in the front room; when a car vibrates in silence, crawls almost apologetically into a fresh blacktop driveway, and the kids pile out, cranky and whining; when a bicycle whirrs past with a catcher’s mitt on the handlebar and a bat shoved through the wire basket in the rear; when the churchbell tolls; when the park is closed.
Sunday evening in late July.
When I stand alone with a gun in my hand.
The Cock’s Crow had been conceived and constructed in 1938 by an enterprising New Yorker who had slipped out of Albany (his hometown) in hopes of draining from Oxrun Station some of the money that he thought had lain fallow during the years of the Depression. Most admitted it wasn’t a half-bad idea. If you did not eat at the Chancellor Inn or the Centre Street Luncheonette, and you didn’t have the means or the time or the energy to make the drive north into Harley, you were usually stuck in your Formica kitchen staring at leftovers. It seemed a natural and probably might have been, under more reliable, less greedy supervision. But Eban Thonger had no idea what the Station was like save what he heard through gossip; no idea at all. So a perfect mile from the village he built a long, low building of log cabin design that faced Mainland Road from behind a graveled parking lot and beneath a sign that, when lighted, could be seen from the hill in the middle of the park. Then he added glaring lights inside, small tables, the largest jukebox in the state, waitresses who didn’t mind showing the backs of their knees when they delivered an order at the next table, and a bar that carried more beers and cheap liquors than any four dives in Hartford.
He was an obsequious, pencil-mustached man and his lack of understanding sent him bewildered into bankruptcy less than a year later.
The following summer Susan and Todd Kranepool picked up the pieces and renamed it after themselves. They threw out the jukebox, the waitresses, the beer and the liquor, clapped aluminum across the front and called it a diner instead of a roadhouse. They were a charming if somewhat coarse couple from Hartford, and they managed to reach the spring of 1941 before the bank moved in and they moved out.
In 1942 a local man, Wallace Inness, picked it up at sheriff’s auction and somehow managed to tum it into a bordello that lasted a full six months before a church warden blew the whistle.
In 1943 it nearly burned down when a rails rider caught himself on fire while smoking a cigar and drinking his daily sterno ration.
Then it sat for two years, black and ugly and falling prey to the rain before I gave up my old job and bought it myself. It was, in part, a celebration: the end of one life, the beginning of another. The first thing I did was strip off that hideous aluminum. Then I restored its old name and proceeded to dim the lights and widen the tables; I added a mahogany bar ten feet long in a leather-and-brass-rimmed crescent, had four waitresses working in two shifts each day (except for a trio on Saturday nights), and found a cook in Bangor who didn’t much care for whites but couldn’t bring himself to stay away from the salary I paid him and the new equipment I let him pick out. The walls were paneled with a shimmering black oak, the pegged floors sanded and polished, and the fresh blacktop over the parking lot was swept clean every morning.
It was bonecracking, absolutely masochistic work restoring that place, and it gave me calluses where I never believed they could crop up on a human being. But it also gave me a chance to do something with my hands that had no connection at all with writing out speeding tickets, holding a gun on a nervous, two-bit burglar or climbing a tangled willow to fetch Mrs. Bartlett’s fat-butt tom who didn’t have the brains to remember he was scared to death of heights.
And in spite of all the complaining I did, all the swearing, all the imprecations against gods determined to prevent me from resting at last, I loved it. I had built myself a small cottage back in the trees behind the roadhouse, and when I woke up in the morning I could look out my kitchen window and see the Cock’s Crow. Sitting there. Sleeping, waiting, maybe seeing Righteous O’Hara there on the back stoop with his first cigar of the day, enjoying the air. His white cap and apron would already be on, and smoke from the warming ovens would be wafting from the chimney. If I were lucky, he’d be in a good mood and I wouldn’t have to make my own breakfast.
And as I’d hoped—knowing I would fail otherwise, just like the others—the roadhouse became a place where folks who didn’t have the price of a couple of hours in the Chancellor Inn could come and enjoy themselves—with twenty-four different kinds of sandwiches (most of them hot), lots of conversation, a drink or two; they could, most importantly, relax and have a fine time without someone over in the corner glaring as if they were shouting in a library. Those who didn’t like it—and there were a few, quite a few—never came back; those who did came often, became regulars, and it was no time at all before I could haul myself out of bed most days and not once miss getting into a uniform.
“I don’t care,” said Paul Hollander late one Friday afternoon when I mentioned this feeling to him. “You stand back there in your shirtsleeves, or you sit by the register, your eyes watching every damn thing that moves, you still look like a cop.”
“I really appreciate that, Paul.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Just keep those thoughts to yourself from now on, if you don’t mind.” He grinned, shifting jowls and wattles far too numerous for a man his age. “Remember, we’re the ones who’re supposed to be telling you our troubles, not the other way around.”
“Troubles I don’t have at the moment, thank you,” I told him.
“And I’m not a bartender, damnit. I’m just filling in—”
“Until Sandy gets here,” he finished for me.
We laughed, as we always did every Friday afternoon. It was ritual; sometimes tedious, but nonetheless a comfort. He, and most of the other high school and grade school teachers, made it a point to stop by once classes were over and their paychecks cashed. Luckily, the bar had not been intended to be the Crew’s drawing card, because few of them wanted to start blurring their weekends so early, especially now, as summer sessions drew to a close and their vacations loomed with munificent temptations. As a matter of fact, I never had serious problems with drunks, even on Saturdays. There was something about the place, about the people who liked it and claimed it for their own, that prohibited inhibitions from ranging too far from home.
Sandy Fielder came in just about then, puffing as though he’d run all the way from the village, shucking his coat onto the rack by the front door, stopping once at a table to listen to Harry Jackson complain about the barkeep’s son’s grades in junior English. Sandy did what he always did: he promised to switch the boy (who was a foot taller and forty pounds heavier), and offered the teacher a drink on the house. I didn’t mind all that much. Sandy practically lived here, and one glass of bourbon wasn’t going to break me.
“Sorry, Tom,” he said as he slid into place. The hair that gave him his name was cropped in a marine’s cut, his shoulders as broad, his paunch poised to engulf his belt.
“No sweat. How’s Marie?”
He shrugged. His wife had been stricken with polio nine years before, and though the doctors had told her she could walk if she tried—with an aid, of course—she apparently had grown to enjoy the special bed in her room, and the service it brought her . . . and the guilt it gave her husband whenever he left her.
We didn’t have much time to talk after that. The dinner hour arrived, and Righteous bellowed for my help back at the stoves. I worked with him gladly, saying nothing, watching the concentration on his walnut-dark face until the flow eased. Then I grabbed myself a hamburger and went into my small office where I ate, changed my shirt, washed my face and returned to the front to see who was left for the passing of the night.
And was stopped by the almost perfect silence that filled the room.
I looked to Sandy. He tilted his head to the left-hand front corner.
One of them was Rexall Joseph Stephenson.
Not really a character, I suppose and if I have to be honest. A mainstay, rather, and a friend. And, like most of my friends, just a little bit lonely. He was well over six feet tall, heavyset, a man who moved slowly with a slight swaying shuffle, almost as though he were permanently aboard ship. His hair was deep black, his full beard thick and lumberjack wild, and he sat in that corner every Friday night daring folks to catch him with a poetry line. He loved verse, any and all kinds from Donne to doggerel, and as long as I’d known him he’d never once had to pay the check for his own meals or drink. He was also about the most morose man I ever met. If it wasn’t the North Koreans who were currently leading us into Armageddon, it was the inflation that ate the inheritance his mother had left him. He wept when the American League lost the All-Star game, when Ohio State took the Rose Bowl, when I installed air conditioning to keep the customers from fainting on nights like this. Nothing pleased Rex. Nothing ever would.
And tonight he was sitting at his table with the biggest grin a man could muster.
I took a seat opposite him, my back to the room, and folded my arms on the table. Though I was nearly as tall (not nearly as brawny), I felt like a child before a slightly plastered uncle.
Ritual, then; always the ritual before the evening began. Put a nickel in the slot and wait for the music. The music, for me, however, was a couple of hundred years old.
“ ‘Its passion will rock thee,’ ” I said, in a monotone that destroyed the poem I was quoting, “ ‘as the storms rock the ravens on high’ ”
Rex sighed loudly and shook his head at my shame. “Shelley,” he told me, just this side of disgust. “The Flight of Love. Thomas, you are going to have to do better than that.”
“I’ve been sick,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to hide a smile. And I didn’t dare tell him that it took me nearly a week to dig that one up; he would have pitied me, at the top of his marvelous voice, for the rest of the night.
“Do you have another?” Lord, it was like watching the proverbial cat at a veritable feast of canaries. The man just would not stop grinning.
Before I could answer, though, Harry Jackson squirmed between tables and stood beside me. Harry was Rex’s potential nemesis, more likely (except to Harry) Rex’s Abbott to Harry’s determined and ill-fated Costello.
“Fire away,” Rex told him, with a soft wink to me.
Harry pulled himself up confidently, though not confidently enough to lift his voice above a whisper. “ ‘This must be done with haste, for night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast.’ And by god, I didn’t misquote it this time.” He waited. “So?”
Rex stared at him, at me, looked up to the ceiling in the most blatant of feigned concentrations I have ever seen outside the dual cogitations of Harpo and Chico Marx. It was a terrible sight, and without looking I could see Harry beginning to wilt.
“The trouble is, you see,” Rex said, “I don’t really care for Shakespeare all that much.”
Harry groaned.
“And I especially don’t like that little bastard, Robin Goodfellow. They call him Puck, but I’ve another word for that . . . and I suspect, strongly suspect, that the original folio that contains the play holds the same word I’m thinking of now.” He leaned forward, then, his forearms on the table, looking at Harry earnestly, as though the two of them were about to decide the fate of Asia. “I mean, really, Harry, don’t you think he’s a bit much? All the other faeries, sprites, whatever you want to call them, they’re sweet, they’re harmless, their pranks aren’t dangerous at all. Puck, on the other hand, is a first class, A-number one—”
“Rex,” Harry interrupted, “would you mind finishing me off so I can go back to my table?”
Rex, clearly, was disappointed. He definitely wanted to carry on, and Jackson was taking away much of his fun. “Damn. All right. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, okay? The second act . . . no, the third act, the second scene. Little bastard.”
Harry nodded once, sharply, and left. Then Rex turned to me and the grin was back. “You have a pitcher in the bullpen, I assume?”
“Just one,” I said.
“Well?”
“You’ll be gentle?”
“Thomas,” he warned. The ritual, apparently, was interfering with whatever news he had that was waiting too long for the telling he wanted.
“Okay, okay. ‘Now is come a darker day, and thou soon must be his prey.’ Wise guy.”
“Lord,” he said, “you really are depressed tonight. Shelley, again. Notes Written in the Euganean Hills, North Italy. Or words to that effect. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “You, however, never cease to amaze me.”
“Want to bet? How about this: Thomas Gaines Hancock, I am in love.”
“Yes?” I didn’t bat an eyelash, a feat that disconcerted him.
“You doubt me, right?” he said. His Princeton tie was straight, his hair combed, his black-rimmed glasses set square in their place. “Well, I don’t care, you hear me? I, sir, am in love. Period.”
This time my smile was strained. I felt uneasy because I didn’t know, after all these years of predictability, how to handle this change, this alteration of ritual. But as the background conversations renewed themselves and the evening began in earnest, I decided to let him have that benefit of those doubts. And he was right: doubts I had. Another thing Rex did with persistent regularity was fall in love. Though I had to admit that he’d never grinned before. Usually it was a solemn proclamation, accompanied by a deep grumbling in his chest as though a Gregorian chant were struggling to break free. He would then index her qualities, admit to her faults and once even talked himself out of it before he had shut up.
But by god, the man had never grinned before.
“Her name,” he said, “is Elizabeth Corey.”
I tried to place her, to put a face to the name. The Station isn’t so small that you know everyone who lives here, but names are hard to forget, especially when learning them and remembering had once been part of my job. But Elizabeth Corey did not strike the faintest of echoes.
“You don’t know her,” he told me, sensing my loss as if it were indeed my loss. He leaned back and pulled his beer glass toward him, studied the foam head thoughtfully, then looked down at me over the tops of his lenses. “Funny,” he said. “It’s funny. It’s like one of those movies, you know? You say to yourself that something like that can never happen, not in a million years, and the next thing you know you’ve been written into the script. Funny.”
“What?” I said quietly. “What’s funny about it, Rex?”
“Well, I was coming home from a meeting late last Tuesday, and I saw her—Elizabeth—coming out of the park. There was a little girl with her. The girl was crying and holding her arm, so, being the naturally gallant gentleman, I offered them my services. The lady accepted and, as it turned out, the wound was little more than a nasty scrape easily cleaned and bound with my handkerchief. We walked, then, the three of us, and before I can say nay there was a late dinner at the Inn—sorry, Thomas, but I was frankly out to impress; damn, sorry again—and when the little girl told me they were out looking for a boardinghouse, I happened to let it drop that I had occasion to rent out a room now and then, for special people.” He smiled apologetically, knowing I hadn’t realized his finances were so tight. “Since Mother died, it isn’t easy keeping such a large house, even with the money she left me.”
I wave
d away the explanation; coming as it had from a friend of long standing, it wasn’t at all necessary.
“Anyway, I assured her of my intentions, as they used to put it, and the invitation was accepted. Ah, Thomas, you have no idea. You have no idea at all!”
I did, but I wasn’t about to say anything and, break his bubble, and I couldn’t have done it even if I’d wanted. At that moment he straightened suddenly, brightened, and when I turned around there were no introductions needed.
Elizabeth Corey was not particularly stunning, nor ethereal, nor even what the English call handsome. Nevertheless, there was something about her, the way she moved from the door to the table, the way her dress fell in velveteen folds to the tops of her shoes, the way her hair took fire and sun to her shoulders . . . It was the way of her, and for a moment I had never felt more lonely in my life.
And it was the way, too, of the child who walked with her. A darker version of the same woman, petticoats and saddle shoes, white ribbons in her hair. I guessed her about ten, and certainly no more, probably less. And I might have been more polite, I suppose, had I not seen the way her mother held her hand—so tightly the child’s fingers were nearly turning red. The girl didn’t seem to mind, however, the shyness of her glance perfectly matching a nosegay of four violets pinned to her white collar.
I rose, nodded to the woman, smiled at the child and backed off to leave them. She had said nothing to me, but I didn’t have to hear her. The voice would be quiet, perhaps a Virginia-born lilt, and the child would be the same, only crystal and high. I didn’t have to hear her, and it was just as well I didn’t; there’s not much an ex-cop and roadhouse proprietor can say to someone like that.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror) Page 7