Stooped down now, he worked his way through brambled hedge growth, westward, away from the aborted road, west to where, beyond a tangle of thick, dark conifers, the old Indian path led to the marshland. Until yesterday, when Otto Scaper's chance remark had called back up that devastated stretch of earth that looked so uncomfortably like the pictures of bombed terrain ten thousand miles away which, in the 1960s, obsessive liberals had broadcast over and over, with such unfortunate results; until yesterday Ransom had really almost forgotten about the land. He'd sold a great many things since 1972, and talk about scandals had died away after the new president had pardoned the old, leaving him to repent in private as he would. The country was absolved of guilt. A decent man, promising to awaken those troubled from their nightmares, enjoined his fellow citizens to think of themselves as decent men.
Ransom already did so.
Privately, the banker had long since assumed he must have come upon a testing site for military hardware—some experimental flamethrower. He had assumed the information to be classified, the installation to be a military secret. Faith in one's superiors, orders without explanations, the importance of security, all these were a part of Ransom's heritage. In his time as an army officer, he had obeyed without asking questions, and he had ordered without answering them. So while he felt ill at ease, he had never queried the representative about his government's objections to the proposed highway; there could be, he assumed, no legitimate reason for discomfiture, since whatever they had built there obviously had its purpose, all to the good. And obviously, now that its purpose had been served, it would be gone. The war was over. He told himself today that he was wasting his morning only to confirm what he already knew.
Ransom slowly worked his way through the matted wilderness.
He felt ridiculous, a fifty-four-year-old man, a bank president, spying as if to protect himself against a government in whose capacity to protect him and his he had always placed absolute faith. Finally he climbed out of undergrowth into the clearing. It was still there.
What he had told himself he would not see, and had feared that he would see, was still there. That cold black plot of unnatural earth seared into his inherited land. Why, in all that time, had no grass, no weed, thrust through the cracked soil? What weaponry could kill the earth forever?
In his tailored suit Ransom stood there. He stood there until his breath was quiet. Then he looked away, looked past it, looked toward the marsh grass, alive, yellow, and moving, looked beyond the marsh to woods, green and moving. Sweat felt cold in his hair and in his hands, and he took out his handkerchief to wipe it away. He knew now that he wouldn't go into the woods. He was too old and too busy to put himself through hours of hard hiking through the woods and marsh to where he had seen that compound. The buildings wouldn't still be there anyhow. But if they were, he could only not know it by not going. But, of course, they weren't. But if they were, they would have some new purpose all to the good. He turned and walked back the way he had come.
A big rotted elm had fallen years ago across the old path.
Ransom sat there in the shifting speckled light and smoked a cigarette. He very rarely smoked, but kept the lighter and gold case because it was his habit to keep things that had been given to him.
The banker told himself that he had been silly to come there again. He really should get back to work. It was none of his business anyhow, and everyone else had forgotten. It wasn't his land anymore.
chapter 14
Unlike Sloan Highwick, through whom the evils of gin (like the evils of life) passed without the slightest effect, A.A. Hayes had a hangover. Even when Hayes felt his fittest, Limus Barnum gave him a headache, and today, before noon, his quarrel with his wife after last night's party as unpatched as the Ransoms' glass robin, Dingley Falls's editor could scarcely bear the sight of Barnum. Indeed, he prayed that the gym-muscled merchant would miraculously drop dead in the office doorway where he now stood, baring his shiny teeth in a smile. But Barnum didn't, and Hayes remained the atheist he had become in high school.
"How's it going, A.A.?"
"All right."
"Whatcha up to? Anything going on?"
"Just gathering the news of the Dingley day."
"Guess there's not much of it, is there?" The emigrant from Worcester, Massachusetts, snickered at the emigrant from Thermopylae, North Carolina. "What a hole this place is."
"No, I guess there's not much." But as a matter of fact, Hayes guessed just the opposite, guessed that among Dingley Falls's few thousand human souls was all the news the world could bear. Of course, it was not news fit to print. That common news, the mutually agreed-upon mass communiqué of which the Dingley Day was the local medium, that news was now being copied off the wire service and slipped from syndications in the back room by Mr. Coleman Sniffell, who with Hayes himself comprised the entire staff of the town journal. That public news everyone in Dingley Falls already knew, since they saw it on television, quite often, mused Hayes, as it was happening. Ford Falls Down Gangplank. Rape Gang Falls Upon Grandmother of Twenty. African Government Topples. Stocks Topple.
Prices Soar. Consumers Sore. Former President Seen Alone on the Beach. These were not the "goings-on" that Barnum wished to know about.
Could Hayes, as he occasionally imagined, publish the town's true acta diurna , he felt there were broadsides enough to topple Dingley Falls, too. News universal in its particularity of pathos and passion: Dingley Heiress Beds New York Poet on May 31; Husband the Last to Know. Local Banker Admits, "These Are Not the Best of Times."
Town Midget Mocked by Local Owner of Antiques and Appliances Store.
Elderly Tea Shoppe Owner Fears Death. Local Editor Fears Life. Wife of Local Editor Longs to Hatchet Family; Claims They Have Stolen Her Life. Local Banker Adds, "These Are Not the Worst of Times Either."
"So, how you doing, A.A.?" asked Barnun again.
"All right."
"Family?"
"Fine." (Civilization is a lie.) "You?" There was no "yours," for Barnum was, natch, a bachelor. At least that's what Hayes thought.
In fact, the merchant had been divorced by his wife just before he moved to Dingley Falls.
"Can't complain," said Limus, but found he could for about ten minutes. Business was nothing to shake a stick at. The editor knew no one who might want a great deal on a Jap color TV that was slightly scratched, or a turn-of-the-century brass spittoon in the same condition. Nor did he know where all the damn tourists were hiding.
"If you want to know what's going on, I'm the last person you ought to come to," said Hayes. "Nobody ever tells me a thing." He instantly regretted having made this remark; it gave Barnum the opening he had pushed his way through for the past ten years—that as they were both outsiders they should stick together and show the snotty locals what was what. Nothing irked Hayes more than hearing Limus Barnum say things that he himself had felt. He had never been able to decide whether he cared if he were an outsider or not; but he did know he didn't want to be out there, looking in with Limus Barnum.
"These snoots wouldn't tell you if your coat was on fire, A.A. No way they can hush it all up about the Abernathys though. Huh? You hear about that? I hear she skedaddled with some hippie college prof.
That's the kind of guy we got teaching kids in college these days.
Make you sick, doesn't it? Guess old Abernathy wasn't giving her enough of what she wanted, huh?"
"Couldn't say." (Society is a sewered conduit.)
"You could tell, that lady was hot to trot, couldn't you, huh?"
Cornered, Hayes broke out from behind his desk on which the appliances dealer was seated, by one buttock, a tasseled loafer swinging to and fro like a shoe store sign. He felt asphyxiated by Barnum's presence. "I'm a little pressed for time," he said, though it was space really. "Something in particular, Lime?" Hayes offered the nickname as compensation for wanting to pitch the man out a window.
"Something about your ad?" Spend time with Lime, and
spend less.
"No, guess I'm going to go with it. Can't catch a fly without honey, and honey costs money." Lime snorted. Suddenly he snapped his face into solemnity as if he were going to salute somebody. "It's those damn dirty letters, A.A. What's being done about them? Zero, goose egg, that's what. Now women and children are being scared out of their ever-loving minds by all this filth."
"Oh, I don't think so."
"Hell, yes, they are. Hell, yes. Lives are being threatened, did you know, that?"
"Like whose?"
"Like mine, old buddy" was the triumphant reply.
Bayes was surprised. "You got one of the letters?" Frankly, he had thought the anonymous scandal monger who had begun a few months ago to address accusatory notes first to the town's public officers, then to its private citizens, was interested only in Dingley Falls's civic and social leaders, neither of which Limus Barnum could claim to be.
"You're damn straight I got one." Barnum had it ready in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt which sported red stripes vertical against the red stripes horizontal of his tie. The cheap paper and awful typing were the same as those on the letter Hayes had found for himself a month ago, lying in the bottom of the tin mailbox in his office.
Barnum's letter read in part (that is, the part Barnum read to Hayes), "Somebody ought to put you away for good, you scum, and I'm the kid to do it. Nobody's going to stop me. Nobody gives a shit."
An irrational connection sparked in Hayes's brain where it was almost regretfully recircuited: maybe he had sent Barnum that letter while intoxicated. Of course he had not. Nor was he to learn what the preceding (unread) part of Barnum's note said. It said, "Fuck cunts," typed a dozen times in punctuationless succession, followed by: "All of them stupid cunts. Can't get it up, can you. Your too dirty for a good woman. Think your so nuts about your mother. You hated her dirty guts. And that other bitch too."
"Maybe it's some kid with an unfortunate sense of humor," suggested Hayes.
But Barnum swiped this possibility away with his red fuzzy arm.
"Listen, don't kid yourself, we're dealing with a maniac and I'm getting tired of waiting round. Now I think we ought to get a committee together. The selectmen are dragging their asses as per usual.
Arthur Abernathy couldn't be bothered, and that old biddy Ramona Dingley ought to be put to sleep. You know we can't even count on Cecil Hedgerow to wipe his own butt. Now why don't you get with me on this, A.A.? Get the paper behind it."
"Limus, it's nothing but a bunch of silly letters."
"You don't know what it could be. Get on that ass Haig. Can you believe having a wife looks like that and he spends all day in the woods shooting at birds and all night over in Madder pestering a couple of old whores too lazy to get out on the street anyhow! Now if we had the kind of government we ought to have in this country, we'd have some police we could count on. How do you know this guy isn't going to stop writing someday and start shooting, huh? What about your window there? Who broke it, Haig checked into that?
Some cop!"
"I broke it." (Actually, Hayes had no idea how the window had gotten smashed. Nor was he certain why he was being so perverse as to lie about the fact.)
"You're crazy." Barnum's eyes narrowed. "Why don't you get it fixed?"
"Too stuffy in here."
"You're really nuts, Hayes. You ought to go see somebody."
"Probably."
Barnum then shoved across another of his letters to the editor criticizing the federal government. The editor agreed to print it.
Why not? Wasn't this a free country large enough to tolerate Limus Barnum's condemnation, and besides, who apart from Barnum and Tracy Canopy ever bothered to write the Dingley Day? The ass, thought Hayes, simply wants his name in type, identifies himself by his echo, exists only when reflected. It was known that Limus Barnum took such pleasure in the duplication of his image that he spent nearly all the proceeds of his Antiques, Hobbies, and Appliances store to advertise himself in the paper, on balloons, and even on television, where he had played the main role in six thirty-second commercials long familiar to local insomniacs. He was Dingley Falls's only screen star. How could he have so missed his calling? It was clear, thought Hayes, the gods had meant Barnum to sell used cars in Los Angeles, but had set him down by mistake too far to the east.
"Now Lime," he cautioned, "if I were you, I wouldn't let the FBI in on this letter scandal just yet. You know how they are, they're liable to get it all wrong, probably infiltrate your committee and arrest you for being an agitator."
"I'm no agitator."
"For being agitated then."
"Very funny."
The editor walked his concerned citizen toward the front door and with a neighborly pat privately hurled him through it into oblivion. But before dropping off, Barnum jerked his head in the direction of Kate Ransom, who had just walked sulkily past them, having circled the green in anticipation of an accidental confrontation with the perfidious Richard Rage, who she refused to believe was gone.
"How'd you like some of that?" Lime grinned.
"Some of what?"
"That!" His auburn hair, blown dry and sprayed, bounced stiffly at the retreating anatomy of Mr. Ransom's younger daughter.
"No, thanks," answered Hayes, and closed the door. He didn't even much want some of what he did have.
Back at his desk, the editor picked up the folded newspaper that Barnum had left there. He threw it in the trash can without looking at it. He knew what it was and had seen Barnum leave it and had known Barnum left it on purpose. For in addition to wanting Hayes to join him in rebuffing the slights of native Dingleyans, Limus Barnum had for years wanted the editor to join him in reading the news that an American neo-Nazi party considered fit to print.
Two buildings down, at the Lattice Tea Shoppe, Mrs. Vincent Canopy and Mrs. Ernest Ransom were anatomizing "Beanie's behavior."
"Inexplicable," Priss concluded, keeping an eye on the window, for she continually expected something more from life, though she had no particular anticipation in mind. "My God, there goes Kate again. Why does she have to slouch like that?"
"Shall I stop her?"
"I wouldn't dare! Kate hates to be seen with me in public.
Apparently it defines her or represses her or something unforgivable." They watched Kate wander by. "Inexplicable," Mrs. Ransom continued. "Leaving Winslow in a rush of menopausal madness.
Unless that poet of yours forced Beanie at gunpoint…No, she would have knocked the gun away and broken his arm."
"Priss!"
"Ah, Ching Chang!" called Priss to the woman she had employed last night, Mrs. Maynard Henry, now one of Miss Lattice's girls.
In her colonial bonnet and long, ruffled calico skirt, with her purple bruised eye, the young Vietnamese looked, thought Mrs. Canopy, dreadfully unhappy. Still, she assumed, it must be better than Saigon. "Chinkie," war-orphaned only child of a minor bureaucrat who had made a killing on the black market before being killed by a bomb, had been brought to Connecticut without being asked whether she would prefer it to Saigon or not.
"Ah, yes, some more coffee, please." Hieroglyphically, Priss held up her cup. "And I think a pastry." She pointed to the tray of desserts on a side table, then elaborately stuffed an imaginary cake in and out of her mouth. "Pastry? Yes. You, Tracy? No?" She touched her breast with a single index finger. "Just one then. One pastry. Thank you."
The ladies waited until their novice waitress quite cleverly returned with the tray and the coffeepot and the pastry. Tracy smiled in encouragement as Chin poured, and thanked her exuberantly when she left.
"Wherever does poor Prudence find them?" Priss wondered.
"Remember years ago the loud woman with that gazebo of dyed yellow hair? I think Evelyn said she was Orchid O'Neal's sister. The middle of lunch that day she bellowed out that William Bredforet had his hand up her skirt while she was clearing his table."
"Didn't she hit him with her tray?"
"Yes, yes, and then poor Prudence flung herself between them and was knocked to the floor. Hordes came running from all over the circle, hoping somebody'd been killed. Of course, I'm sure that little old goat was pinching her!"
The ladies laughed.
"I'm sure William has spawned litters all over the place in his time."
"Oh, Priss."
But such remembrances were not solving Beanie's problem. "It won't be the same tomorrow without her," Tracy said. On Wednesday a few of the Thespian Ladies were taking the train (her interest in which Beanie had left with all her heart to Winslow) into Manhattan. There they would see the premiere of an avant-garde film sponsored by PATSY—an organization titled Protect Artists Through Saying Yes that supported creative people offensive to the Establishment, an organization to which Mrs. Canopy had said innumerable yeses, one of them the summer home on Lake Pissinowno that Habzi Rabies accidentally had set on fire with an acetylene torch; another of them her townhouse in the East Sixties where the sculptor Louie Daytona was now staying after his release from prison.
"Really, Tracy," Priss laughed. "You know Beanie never gave a good g.d. about our Wednesdays. She slept straight through that wonderful revival of Candida, and last time we heard a lecture at the Metropolitan, she wandered out in the park and joined a Puerto Rican softball game."
The ladies laughed. "Oh, our Beanie!" Tracy sighed. But then, Beanie wasn't theirs anymore, was she? Strangely enough, the only time their prosaic friend had ever stayed (at least stayed awake) through an entire poetry reading, she had wandered off with the poet.
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