The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  “That’s enough for today,” I suggested.

  And so to bed.

  The next day was the Fourth of July. Mittie did not return home, but clues as to his whereabouts filtered in throughout the afternoon. He was not reconciled. Marlin found a note taped over the theater doors informing all customers that the building was quarantined because of pestilence within. We took it down. The flag on the roof had been lowered to half-mast. We raised it.

  Around five, Mrs. Thurston called us in some agitation from the house. She screamed at us to return immediately, then she hung up.

  When Joely and I squealed to a stop in front of the steps, she was standing outside waiting for us.

  “Oh, Devin, honey,” she moaned, “that poor boy has gone totally out of his mind.”

  “Is he here?” I asked.

  “No. I couldn’t hold him. He shoved me, pushed me physically aside, and went on his mad way. Reasoning had just no effect on him at all. Thank the Lord above that Leila had taken those babies off to the fair.”

  “What was he doing here?” Joely asked her.

  She told us as we led her up the steps back toward the house. “When I returned home from a little shopping, which I had walked into town to do (she looked reproachfully down at the Austin we had arrived in) because after all, we do have to keep eating, and somebody has to provide, I found him, found him right here.”

  She had led us into the kitchen. Now she flung open the oven door and pointed inside with a dramatic forefinger.

  “‘Mittie,’ I called out to him, ‘Mittie, think of what you’re doing!’ That’s when he pushed me, without a word, and left this house.” She sat down at the table, sadly scraping off a bit of dried food with her fingernail. “It was just what I went through with Leila’s Aunt Nadine. The same exact thing. Devin, what is the matter with people? What is in their minds?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” I told her.

  Joely pointed out the kitchen window at a coil of rope hanging from a broken branch in the backyard. The branch was very slender. We still didn’t know how seriously to take Mittie’s warnings, if that’s what they were supposed to be.

  That evening, we ate dinner in silence. No one mentioned Mittie. Or Spur. Leila said she was taking the kids back to ride the rides. On my way out of the house, Maisie called to me from Leila’s room. I found her lying on the bed there, thoughtfully staring at the ceiling.

  “What does this spell?” she asked. “W-H-O-R-E?”

  “What?”

  “See?” She pointed over her head. “‘F-U-C-K. Fuck them all, you W-H-O-R-E.’ What does that mean?”

  I looked up. The words were painted in black letters on the ceiling right over the bed. A message from Mittie to Leila, I assumed. Mrs. Thurston had followed me into the bedroom. She grabbed Maisie off the bed and came back in a moment with a can of Ajax and a sponge. So passed the day.

  The holiday performance of Our American Cousin went on as scheduled with Ashton again taking Mittie’s part and Fitzgerald doing a record business at the concession stand, selling red, white, and blue popcorn.

  Then, partway through the play, a voice came over the theater loudspeakers—Mittie’s voice, interrupting the actors, who undoubtedly thought first of Spurgeon’s return. They all froze. The voice was drunk and sonorous as it intoned:

  “On this anniversary of our country’s independence, it is fitting that we pause to commemorate the tragic instant when at this precise moment in Our American Cousin, a great leader was treacherously slain, and the cause of freedom mortally wounded.”

  The voice stopped. The players and the audience waited, in awe, or expectation. A few seconds went by. Then Mittie (who must have climbed up a ladder in the wings) jumped down on the stage. He stumbled, righted himself, and stood there dressed and made up to look like John Wilkes Booth. Then he yelled, “Sic semper Tyrannis,” and pulled Hedda Gabler’s pistol from his frock coat. The players edged off the stage; then people in the audience started to scream. Mittie drunkenly raised his arm slowly, and fired two shots at the spotlights, putting out the lights once more.

  “He’s going to burn the place down!” someone irrelevantly yelled. People stood up and looked around. Gun in hand, Mittie jumped off the stage and pushed his way through the crowded aisles, thus hurrying the departing guests, who, like Lady Macbeth’s, stood not upon the order of their going, but shoved, jostled, and elbowed each other to the exits.

  Onstage, Joely yelled, “Calm down, calm down, it’s all part of the show. Take your seats, please. There’s no cause for alarm. Please.”

  But no one paid any attention to him. He told Seymour to call the sheriff and told the actors to get back onstage. He called out her next line to Suzanne Steinitz three times before finally she delivered it; the others came back on stage; the play went on. Gradually, with pockets of nervous laughter throughout the theater slowly subsiding, what was left of the audience settled back into their seats.

  Handing the prompt book to Margery Dosk, Joely told me to follow him. We went out the backstage door. Outside in the parking lot, the Fourth of July carnival was crowded with celebrators. Boat rides, rocket trips, Ferris wheel, carousel, tilt-a-wheel, all gaudily twirling in the night. Garish signs announced the easy promise of prizes, the temptations of chance. We spotted Mittie by a chain of cars swooping up and down a circular track; a long ribbed top closed over the cars, opened again, then closed, muffling the screams of the riders. The Caterpillar, it was called.

  Mittie was easy to follow; his frock coat and the look on his face left a wake of backward glances we could track by. In and out of faded canvas booths, we chased him. Guess-Your-Weight, Tell-Your-Fortune, Test-Your-Strength, See-the-Freaks-of-Nature.

  I saw Leila on the carousel, serenely swaying up and down on a flowered unicorn. Davy was on her lap and Maisie in front of her on a one-eared black horse. Mrs. Thurston stood by the ticket booth holding Leila’s pocketbook. We saw Mittie notice them. He stopped and watched, still removed, but interested, as though they were on film. We were afraid if we came up on him from behind, he might shoot at them; he still had the gun. We stopped too.

  They hadn’t noticed him. The merry-go-round kept circling in time to the bleat of its mechanical organ; the black horse and the white unicorn swung into sight, rocked past Mittie, then slowly, languidly, floated away.

  We started walking quietly toward Mittie. But Mrs. Thurston, who had bent down to remove a speck of dirt from her white pump, saw us, upside down, behind her. Then she saw Mittie.

  “Mittie Stark!” she announced.

  Mittie flung himself around in a circle, realized he was flanked, and raced toward the creek at the far end of the parking lot.

  “Maybe we should just leave him alone,” I said to Joely. “We’re chasing him like he was a criminal, or something.”

  A police car had pulled up in front of the theater. Mittie saw it, turned upstream, and ran across the bridge.

  “I don’t know.” Joely banged his head with his fist. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You don’t think he’s going to burn the theater down, do you?” I asked.

  Joely was pulling on his hair as though he could force it to think for him. “No, no,” he mumbled. “But, he could do something crazy. What’s he going to do, what’s he going to do?”

  Then he started running. I ran after him. We were halfway over the bridge that forded the creek when the explosions began. The first one threw us down. At the second, we scurried in a crawl back toward the lot.

  The carnival crowd was rushing to the bank.

  “Oh, look!” they exclaimed. “It’s like a fairyland. Oh, it’s beautiful.”

  “I thought the fireworks weren’t supposed to start ‘til later.”

  “I think something’s wrong. It’s happening awful fast. I mean, so many of them going off all at once.”
<
br />   The sky burned brightly as a Las Vegas postcard. Flares, comets, stars, twisters, blue streams, gold bursts, green clusters flashed and sputtered out above us. Then stripe by star the spangled banner of the American flag exploded into outline, followed by a huge explosion.

  Joely clutched my arm. “Oh, Mother of God.”

  A policeman was hurrying to the bridge. We ran too. I saw Leila pushing her way through the crowd behind us.

  On the ground where Joely was kneeling, Mittie lay twisted; his arms still bunched around his head, his hands waxy and blistered like oil burnt. One leg was bent out sideways from the knee. His foot was caught in a charred coil of electric wires.

  Chapter 14

  I Enlarge My Circle of Acquaintances

  “We’re very sorry, Mrs. Stark,” they told her.

  She nodded.

  “I am sorry as I can be,” the sheriff said. “A horrible accident.”

  A deputy gathered, with meticulous reverence, the remains. All artifacts were now talismans, as sacrosanct as the body: a cracked watchband, a blackened key chain, a gleaming belt buckle. These they placed in a crisp manila envelope with Mittie’s name on it. Mittie they took to Saul Fletcher Morticians’ place of business.

  And the sightseers, having seen until there were no more sights, went back to the fair satisfied. We went home and sat down in stunned silence.

  There followed through the long evening a series of conferences. The sheriff, Gabe Booter, a tall, gaunt, loud-voiced man, came and interviewed us, first together, then individually. He asked if in our opinion Mittie had been an arsonist, or if he had smoked and been careless with matches, or an anarchist, or if there was a history of insanity in his family. Mrs. Thurston shone in these, to her, familiar surroundings. She summed up her anger at the sheriff’s insinuations by saying that she was positive the entire thing had been a dreadful accident and the town of Floren Park ought to be sued for leaving wires and cables around where someone could trip over them and drop a cigarette into an opened box of fireworks.

  I went in Leila’s room and called Verl. Then I called Mama. I thought that if I could hear myself saying it had happened, by their believing it, I could believe it too.

  Dr. Ferrell came to say he had seen the body and signed the papers; he kissed Leila and gave her some capsules. She put them down on the side table next to where she was sitting, leaning back in the corduroy armchair that had been most often Mittie’s. She didn’t seem to be listening, or to be listening to anything going on. There was just the methodical motion of her arm rising to her mouth with cigarette after cigarette.

  Wolfstein brought, without asking her to acknowledge him, a glass of scotch. She would drink from the glass, hold the liquid in her mouth a long while, remember it was there, and swallow it. Several hours went by.

  Mr. Saul Fletcher came in crepe soles along Mrs. Thurston’s plastic runners. Under his seersuckered arm, he pinched a black catalog book. Introductively clearing his throat, he whispered that there was the question of arrangements. Without looking at him, Leila spoke tiredly, “Maybe you’d like to put him in the display window and have ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’ piped in over the coffin.”

  Her mother burst into tears, and Mr. Fletcher nodded at her supportively out of his twenty-three-years-in-the-same-location understanding of the irrational bereaved. Then he whispered that perhaps it would be better if he came back later. No one disagreed.

  Most of the members of the theater company were there, clustered in the living room or on the front porch. There was nothing to be done, but everyone wanted to be there—as if there were a pelting storm outside and we huddled together for warmth and safety.

  Leila rose; everyone stood up and stepped aside for her. She went to her room, closed the door, dialed the phone. I heard her ask for Portland, Oregon. Person to person. Bruno Stark.

  We sat there. Downstairs, Maisie and Davy slept. Mrs. Thurston had put them to bed long before the rest of us had returned home. They had not seen what happened at the fair, nor had they asked about Mittie, and didn’t in days to come either, perhaps already knowing, perhaps not knowing how to know. I don’t know when Leila told them.

  I felt hungry. I felt guilty for feeling hungry, but unwilling to accept the guilt and go surreptitiously to the refrigerator. So I left and walked downtown to the Streetcar Diner, where I ate a lot of food I couldn’t taste.

  I wanted, if possible, to know exactly what I felt. The waiting in the living room had seemed, finally, inconclusive. Were we doing nothing because it was assumed inappropriate to do anything for some unspecified period? And were the others waiting in a way different from me? With some sureness of sorrow? I couldn’t tell.

  But in downtown Floren Park, I found no visible evidence that would help define the meaning of the loss. No lights dimmed, shopshutters closed; no one stopped to ask, “Didn’t you know Mittie Stark?” It isn’t so much that there isn’t a gap in nature, I saw. There is rarely even a reference.

  Walking back toward the road that leads up the climb to Leila’s, I passed a signpost on which was carved, CHAPEL OF ST. LUCY’S. I saw a small wooden church, hardly larger than a cabin, cloistered by trees on an incline away from the street. There was a single light on inside, white as the moon.

  I began to feel a little tired and lay down on the dark slope. I looked up at the night sky. The stars had not changed either.

  I had heard and discounted the noise twice before the yellow Triumph pulled to the curb. Verl got out and went up the path. The light in the church got brighter a second, then dimmed again. For some reason, I made no effort to call to Verl, even to raise my hand. That puzzled me. I had the strongest sensation of immobility. It wasn’t that I was too exhausted, or in need of solitude, or grieving. I wasn’t any of those things. What was strange was that I wasn’t anything—except that I couldn’t, didn’t want to, move.

  Some time later, they came out. I turned my head on the grass to watch them. Leila had a white shawl on her head, lace. I was so surprised to see her wearing something like that, I didn’t wonder until afterward what she was doing in a Catholic church. I had thought she no longer believed in it. Verl was leaning down toward her talking softly, nodding his head, as they walked to his car and got in. After a while, they drove away.

  Leila came back to Floren Park from Oregon six days after she left. Bruno Stark had wanted his son returned to him. So Mr. Fletcher’s morticians, apart from some long-distance phone calls, didn’t get to make any arrangements other than transportational, after all.

  While she was away in Portland and then in Los Angeles, where she flew with Mr. Stark to settle matters about the house, I guess, and the insurance, we of the Red Lagoon Players carried on. That was Mrs. Thurston’s advice and self-directive—that we all should get organized, be productive, and carry on.

  And so, under her counsel and exemplum, we did. It was by her motion, for example, that at our first emergency assemblage we changed the name of our company to “The Mittie Stark Memorial Players.” Joely voted against it; the Red Lagoon Players already was Mittie Stark, he said.

  New posters were printed with a black border and with a brief threnody Mrs. Thurston had composed on Mittie’s tragic accident and his (prior to that) love of the Floren Park community, his work (which brought happiness to old and young alike), his family, and his friends.

  “Devin,” she told me as I helped her fold sheets at the Laundromat, “we must realize that if we who are so intimately concerned appear to be close-mouthed or secretive regarding what happened to poor Mittie, others will think the Worst.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Now, that is the way of the world. Yes, it is. People Will Talk. And what they will say will not be very nice for my Leila or her babies. I can just imagine what those young people down at the boarding house have already been conjecturing, after that strange and peculiar incident we were all subje
cted to at the dinner table the very night before Mittie passed away.”

  “I don’t think anybody’s going around talking about Mittie,” I reassured her.

  “Of course they are! Of course they are! And I’m sorry to be the one to have to say so, but you are a fool, Devin, if you think otherwise.”

  Her annoyance with my innocence was such that she snapped my end of the sheet we were folding out of my hands. It fell to the floor, and she scooped it up into a washer, took a quarter from her clear plastic coin purse, and started it on a new cycle. We went back to our work. The dance of folding sheets with Mrs. Thurston was as brisk as a mazurka. Her partner had to memorize intricate forward and backward patterns synchronized in fixed sequence, through which even stubborn contour sheets were popped, snapped, and creased into a surface fit for a frictionless puck.

  After another sheet, she decided to forgive me and go on. “Oh, I know by sad fortune that persons about whom you would never think such a thing are perfectly capable of destroying the gift of life. And I am the kind of individual, Devin, who is prepared to accept a truth that is flatly staring you in the face.” She looked down as if she saw her disgruntled sister, Nadine, on the linoleum floor. “But,” she continued, dismissing that image, “those are not the clear facts of this situation. Are they?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Should I have insisted that my papa did not fall, but deliberately propelled himself into the attachments of his tobacco machine?”

  “No, ma’am,” I mumbled from behind the stack of laundry she had doweled up my arms.

  “And, Devin, I am as sure as my own name that in their secret hearts, Bruno and Emily Stark are placing the entire blame for their loss on my Leila. That man has always disesteemed me. Though, naturally, there is only his own defensiveness behind it. However”—she resealed her box of Tide with a strip of masking tape—“we may as well acknowledge that Leila has left herself liable to all sorts, yes, all sorts, of conjectures. And my only prayer”—she emptied the lint tray into a waste basket—“my only prayer is that from now on she will understand the importance of watching your step.”