Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  May I take a message?" Judith said she had only wanted to know if the girl was all right, since last night she had seemed upset. "Oh, I didn't realize you knew Chin," Miss Lattice replied. "Yes, of course, it's an awful situation. What can we do?" Mrs. Haig said she didn't know.

  Then she made her third phone call, asking for an appointment to speak with the senior partner of Abernathy & Abernathy.

  "Yoo-hoo, day off today, Lord love me," caroled Sarah MacDermott as she thrust open both big wooden doors at once so that the sudden sun made the postmistress cover her eyes. Sarah was, she said herself, in a fantastic mood wholly unsupported by reality. "But every time I get out of that stockyard at the A&P, it makes me so damn happy I feel like going over there and peeking in the window, just to watch somebody else punching those buttons all day long. They'll bury me and my ears'll still be ringing. Ping! Two for ninety-nine. God rest her soul. Ping! And those crazy bra burners are out screaming how women have the right to get out of the kitchen and go to work! Every one of them ought to be forced to work at the A&P, that's all I can say."

  "Good morning, Sarah." Mrs. Haig made her effort to smile.

  At her leisure Sarah wore slacks and a sleeveless blouse of slick orange synthetics. It had blue stripes that nearly matched her blue straw sandals with strawberries painted on them. Her yellow topknot nearly matched her big yellow plastic handbag with the Golden Gate Bridge painted on it. She clopped over to the counter and dropped a sloppy package down in front of Judith. Wrapped in an old A&P bag, taped erratically, and tied with five feet of string, the box was addressed in giant chartreuse letters. "A pair of pjs for my brother, Eddie. I guess they still wear them, even out in California, you think? Better make it special delivery, I totally forgot him and he's real touchy about his birthday. Orchid said it was tomorrow. What can you do? He's out of a job, too. Went out there because there was nothing here, and then there's nothing there.

  Makes you wonder where it is. See, his plant lost all their army contracts and, anyhow, they just slammed the doors in everybody's face that didn't have whatdoyoucallit, longevity. But I told him, 'Eddie, if you got to be laid off it might as well be where the sun always shines so you can at least get out and get a tan and not be here freezing your fanny off.'"

  "I suppose so."

  "But, hey, anyhow, I hear you had a visitor last night. Honey, what in the world was she doing out at your place? Chinkie. Joe says it was after midnight when you called him to come and get her. Jesus love us!"

  "She was upset about her husband."

  "I guess so! I'd be upset too if I'd come all the way and sneaked into America and ended up with a jailbird. Men and women! Arn always did say that Maynard would turn bad. He was always too dead-set on things; sort of, you know, fixated. Anyhow, what's it all got to do with you?"

  "She thought I could help her. I don't know why."

  "Help her! I guess you don't know why, 'cause there's not a blessed reason. America is just too nice, that's all. Honey, you take my advice, don't get mixed up in any funny business. Joe just couldn't believe she'd gone over there, bothering you, with you sick and all.

  'Wait'll Hawk hears.' That's what Joe was saying this morning. How much is that package? Are you kidding? That's more than the pajamas cost! I might as well buy a ticket and fly them out to Hollywood myself. Maybe meet a movie star, have a little fling!" Sarah rolled her eyes and popped her gum with cheerful lasciviousness. "Heaven help us, Judith, if they keep on with this inflation, there's not going to be a thing left that ordinary folks like me and you can afford to buy.

  Can't afford to mail a package, can't afford to turn on the furnace, can't afford to put gas in the car. But what can you do? Judith, Joe and I are buying a house. Finally we just said it's now or never. The way things are going, in six months they'll double the price and leave off the roof. But we got to go, my boys are hanging from the beams where we're renting now."

  "Yes, I know you're—"

  "Crowded? Honey, we might as well, all seven of us, be Siamese twins, we're so mushed up together! So I'm seeing Cecil Hedgerow about one of those nice new Cape Cods over in Astor Heights. The one on Pilgrim Boulevard. Did I tell you this? With the green dutch doors? I sure wish you two'd bought down there instead of building out in the middle of nowhere. 'Course, I mean, you got a gorgeous house. But we could have been neighbors again, like on Long Branch."

  "Well, John wanted—"

  "Say no more! What can a wife do but grin and bear it? Now, you know me, I wouldn't trade Joe and the boys for all the coffee in the A&P, but not a day goes by when I don't wish one or the other of them would get eaten by a bear and save me the trouble of buying a gun to shoot them. Lord, you've ruined me; that ten was supposed to lay away Tommy's overcoat. Once you break a ten these days, it's like a dollar used to be, you might as well flush the change down the john. Come over and take pot luck with us tonight, no sense to cook just for yourself what with Hawk away. Liz Taylor's going to be on channel six, too; I can't help it, I'll just watch anything she's in.

  Well, anyhow, you call me if you change your mind and get lonely.

  And you tell Chinkie Henry there's not a thing you can do. You got to take care of yourself now, Judith. I know. You scared me so bad yesterday, I went over and made Dr. Scaper listen to my heart. He said I shouldn't have bothered, said I'd live forever. But my father, and his father before him, both died of their hearts. 'Course, you don't drink, but still."

  If the allotment of heartbeats to glasses of alcohol was inevitably predetermined with arithmetic precision, and if A.A. Hayes had kept count of his daily drinks in his thirty years of daily drinking, he could now calculate his own demise and scoop Death for his paper. But in that time Hayes had lost count of much more than bottles. He drank in order to lose count; not like Walter Saar, to get in touch with who he was, but to stay out of touch with who he might have been.

  Still, he congratulated himself that, as yet, he had not taken to antemeridian imbibing. Even this morning, with all four of his incomprehensible children home on three months' parole from school and already bored, with his wife, June, locked up with another migraine, with his colleague Coleman Sniffell in a (if possible) more than typically rotten mood, still, Hayes could boast, he was not drinking. He was smoking, gulping coffee, sucking cough drops, chewing pencils, and feeling all his fillings with his tongue. He was twisting his hair, biting at his cuticles, picking at his ears, and rolling his book pages between his fingers. But he wasn't drinking.

  The Dingley Day was a misnomer; the paper had ceased daily publication in 1931. Even weekly now, it filled no more than two dozen pages. They included not only summarily treated national affairs, but those communal reports closer to the hearts and purses of Dingleyans—PROPERTY TAX HIKE LOOMS. BATTLE WAGED TO SAVE FALLS BRIDGE. VOLUNTEER FIREMEN DEMAND NEW HOSES . And there were personals ("Please give me a home. I am a perky kitten with lots of personality and no tail"). And more than anything else, there were advertisements:

  The Prim Minster. Since 1726 / Hedgerow Realty.

  Traditional Homes at Old-Fashioned Prices / Step into the Past at The Tea Shoppe / Happy Hour All Day Long at Fred's Fries Bar and Grill / Today Thru Thurs. ONLY. Jaws! Hope Street Cinema / Join Us in a Yard of Ale at Beautiful Old Towne Inn / Spend Time with Lime, and Spend Less Once A.A. Hayes had dreamed of the speech with which he would accept the Pulitzer Prize awarded him for toppling corruption in his government or laying bare the stinking fat carcass of high finance. Then for a while he daydreamed that the same prize might be given instead in recognition of his quiet decades as the editor of a small-town weekly whose muted clarion calls for all the right things had been always written with the style of Adlai Stevenson and the ethics of Eleanor Roosevelt. Those decades had passed. Now he daydreamed in the mornings of an afternoon drink, and in the afternoons he daydreamed of lives he might have lived and now was quite sure he never would. He had not made it. There were only so many mirrors in the house of fame, and he was
never to see his face in one of them. Some people have better luck, or timing, or help, or skills, or fewer children, or none, and no wife, and so A.A. Hayes, reflecting, passed his sober morning.

  A cricket call of key tapping glass caught his ear. Someone waved at him, then fluttered inside. "Alvis, I'm so sorry to bother you, I think one should never bother a man when he's busy at work."

  And she isn't even being sarcastic, thought Hayes, as he stood up from his daydream to welcome Evelyn Troyes. She swayed inquisitively toward him, slender as a jonquil in a green dress and yellow hat with matching shoes and purse.

  "No bother." He smiled. "Not doing a blessed thing. Evelyn, we should do a list of the best-dressed women in town and you'd be first every time."

  "Why, thank you. I always say you southerners are the only American men to take the trouble to notice the trouble a woman may have taken, you know what I mean, don't you? But I have one little question and then I'll leave you alone. We'll be in New York this afternoon, the Thespian Ladies will, and oh, I'm so sorry, I called your June earlier, and she has another of those awful migraines, doesn't she, and can't join us again. So awful for her, isn't it?"

  "Yes, apparently they're very painful. Here, let me get you a chair."

  "No, no, I'm already behind this morning. Alvis, I want to buy a signature for a friend, and I know you have so many yourself, famous signatures, so I thought you could advise me where I could get a Bach, or if not, perhaps a Mozart or a Beethoven, or even a Brahms would do. I did try Altman's, but they had mostly those presidents nobody ever heard of. Oh, and Napoleon's mother! They wanted two thousand dollars for her. He was only fifteen hundred, and his mother was two thousand, isn't that cunning?"

  Hayes explained to Mrs. Troyes that even Brahms would not be cheap, but he wrote down for her some agents in Manhattan who handled names. She fluttered away.

  It was true that the editor had in his den a collection of famous names, framed with engraved faces on velvet cloth. They were mostly signatures of Union generals—Grant, Sherman, McClellan, Polk—handwriting of the devil, as his southern relatives had called them; for each of those bold official scrawls might have, long ago, ordered the loss of an ancestor of theirs, or the burning of a town square. Hayes had collected them in his youth not merely because fame intrigued him, but in order to be perverse: "What makes you like to fly in everybody's face that way?" his family had asked him with sad and puzzled reproach. He'd answered, "I thought you'd be tickled to see all those Yankees dead and hung up before your eyes," and then he'd grinned at them with the superiority of his first year at college, which was one more year than any of them had had.

  Later his collection had turned to criminals—a natural progression, his relatives would have said. To be made history, to be defined by one act, an act that might have taken no more than the minute needed to murder—that was fame, too. And besides, the existential act of crime, the willingness to choose the act and then perform it, fascinated Hayes with what he suspected was envy. Those who could concentrate rage or greed or madness (as a painter might concentrate skill) had the advantage of that distillation over those whose impulses were diffused into the ordinariness of normal compromise.

  Just as a nuclear bomb has an advantage over dynamite. Just as his wife, shut in inviolate darkness with the blind concentration of a migraine headache, had an advantage over him, with his simple hangovers that aspirin could cure. Just as Maynard Henry, the man whose story he had heard and now thought he would add to his collection, the man who had shoved someone's car off a cliff for daring to abduct his wife, had that advantage of absoluteness over Winslow Abernathy, who, when his wife was stolen, had allowed himself only a drink at the Prim Minster. The mad get away with murder.

  Hayes's office door slammed. Well, at least it wasn't Limus Barnum.

  "Got a match, A.A.?" bellowed Otto Scaper. "Why don't you fix that damn window, hey? The weather keeps warm, this place will be crawling with bugs."

  "I want that hole there so you can blow your stinking cigar smoke into it. What have you been up to? Haven't seen you around for a while. Coming over to Cecil's for the game tonight?"

  "Guess so, if folks give me a chance. Too much business, too much." The old doctor lowered himself, grunting, into a chair and licking his fingers, rubbed them against his eyelids. "Old fellow, Jim Price, remember, used to be a night watchman out at the factory?

  Had a coronary yesterday. Lived in the trailer park over there. One of the Puerto Ricans found him."

  "Somebody told me you lost the old nun at Mercy House, too.

  She was the last of them, wasn't she?"

  "Yeah. Monday. Endocarditis. Lot of it, too much. I'm beginning to wonder if every damn person in town isn't going to walk in with a heart condition. Well, I don't know. Overworked and ignorant.

  Overaged, too. Ernie Ransom told me flat out a couple of days ago that I ought to retire."

  "Fat chance."

  "Old folks die, I guess. Young ones, too. Well. Lucky, I had a birth this morning. Vacationers up at the lake; weren't expecting 'til July, they said. Had a girl. Sort of set me up. Things have been bad."

  "Listen, Otto, I hear you went out and got our water supply checked." Hayes grinned. "Got a story for me? You don't still think somebody poisoned Pauline Hedgerow, do you?"

  Scaper shook a vast paw at the editor. "Goddamnit, don't get facetious with me, Alvis, I won't stand for it. I loved that gal. Hell's bells, man, dying's more than a column in a damn newspaper. I swear I think you fellows would film them sweeping up your mother's brains off the highway if the wreck was big enough to make it onto the six o'clock news. What a verminous profession you got yourself into."

  "I don't know that yours has got much luster left to polish either.

  But I'm sorry if I sounded facetious, I didn't mean it that way."

  "Well, all that booze has soured your insides, that's all. Gimme one of your cigarettes. This goddamn thing tastes like a bedpan."

  The doctor threw his cigar butt across the room into a trash can.

  "So? What about our water?"

  "Pure as a baby's tears. Nah, there's nothing there. I've been thinking about something else. Dogs."

  "Dogs?"

  "Ever think about how Vince Canopy's dog died about the time he did, didn't it? And old Mrs. MacDermott went all to pieces about that yapper of hers going, then next thing we knew she was gone, too. And this fellow Price over there eating out of the same garbage just about as all those mutts."

  "I don't follow you, what's the connection?"

  "What?" Scaper turned his head and Hayes repeated the question. "I don't know. Just funny all of them being dog nuts, sort of.

  Pauline's old collie."

  "Are you saying they died because of their dogs?"

  "I don't know what I'm saying just yet." Scaper rubbed his huge arms.

  The phone buzzed. Hayes listened, then held out the receiver.

  "It's Ida. Oglethorpe up at the academy just collapsed; they think he's in shock."

  Scaper lunged from the chair like a whale. He grabbed the phone. "The nurse there? She got him wrapped up? On my way." He dropped the receiver on its hook. "A.A., that your car out front?

  Give me the keys, I walked in."

  Fishing in his pocket as they hurried out the door, Hayes offered to drive the doctor.

  "No, thanks, not if you pay as much attention to the road as you do to this back seat. Why don't you clean your car up sometime?

  Looks like the goddamn inside of a goat's stomach."

  "It's symbolic."

  "Bull roar. It's sloth."

  All Dingley Falls was awake now. Onto the track of the town cir- cle at some point in the day came all the chariots known by their colors and styles to every local citizen. Green Audi: Arthur Abernathy.

  Old Rolls: old Bredforets. Yellow MG Midget: Sammy Smalter (a private joke). Blue Volvo: Tracy Canopy. White Mercedes: Ernest Ransom. Battered green Ford: Cecil Hedgerow. A blur of gray
Chrysler meant Evelyn Troyes and a blur of red Firebird meant Ramona Dingley and Orchid O'Neal. All came but the Abernathys' copper Seville which was now being towed away from Bank Street in Greenwich Village, where Beanie Abernathy slept late with Richard Rage.

  Here sped a maroon Jaguar out of the Dingley Club. Down High Street, past Alexander Hamilton Academy and then the Prim Minster, past Dr. Otto Scaper rushing in Hayes's dirty brown Plymouth the opposite way, past the Bredforet estate, it roared confidently to its destination. Lance Abernathy wheeled it into Glover's Lane. Here down the walk skipped Joy Strummer with her little golden spaniel. She came to meet the wave of a brown hand in a blue leisure jacket. Beneath her dress she wore a blue bathing suit, just the color of her dew-blue eyes. Out Lance leaped to seat her, and off they drove to float in blue pool water. The sun frisked and frolicked all over the shiny hood, caroming from chrome to chrome. All around her the wind whisked her sky-silk scarf. She smiled. He smiled. They laughed at the sun. O Love Divine, all loves excelling. Joy of Heaven, to earth come down.

  And like gold scarves the little spaniel's ears fluttered against his mistress's fluttering heart.

  chapter 26

  Out into a crisp noon sun (Cecil Hedgerow had been wrong—it wasn't at all muggy), Judith Haig walked from the post office next door to the cream Georgian building that the Abernathys' law firm shared with Dr. Scaper. Along Dingley Circle came a black and cinnamon Rolls-Royce; in its front seat beside his chauffeur, old William Bredforet sat puffing a Fatima while his wife breathed easier in the back. Bredforet swung his trim gray head along the line of Mrs. Haig's step as they drove past her. He nodded. "That's what I'd call a good-looking woman. Fine carriage. Fine form. Pride there. Bones,"

  he added, staring back as they passed. "Looks like somebody. Who?

  Looks like my sister, that's it! Look at her. Amazing."

  "Got no mind to be cranin' that old neck of your'n out of a window at a lady, man as close to the cemetery as you is," snorted his driver.