Teeth bared, Walter Saar grimaced his Mr. Hyde's face into the mirror above the train's grimy sink. There had been a time when his power to create such ugly intensity had frightened him. Now the mugging was just a habit. He didn't even much hate his stepfather anymore, or hate himself for having once accepted money to try to "cure" himself, or seriously worry that he might lose control at a Concord Christmas party and kiss full on the month one of his stepfather's business associates. He did feel he had no right to go out of control in Manhattan. Unlike Oglethorpe's irresistible pain, Saar's pain was not, he chided himself, beyond the will's power to deny it.
Someone was trying to open the door of the toilet. Who could it be? the headmaster snarled at the mirror. Ernest Ransom? Both the old Bredforets? Everyone else in Dingley Falls known to the good Dr. Jekyll was obviously on this train. Why not those three? Why not the entire board of trustees? You deserve this, losing your driver's license to a hustler. Mr. Hyde grinned. The evil image cackled at the unfortunate Walter Jekyll's discomfort.
"Know what I did this morning?" Dingley Falls's postman asked his superior.
Judith Haig turned toward Alf Marco, who slumped forward in his chair beside the table where they sorted outgoing mail that the truck from Argyle would pick up at five.
"Know what I did?" he repeated. "I got up real early. I went up to the lake. And I went fishing." Marco's drawn, pinched face, so at variance with his fleshy torso, looked up at the postmistress with more significance expectant in it than his remark would have seemed to indicate.
"It must have been beautiful," Judith said.
He nodded slowly. "I hadn't gone, you know, for twenty years. I guess it's been. Maybe not."
"But you went this morning?"
"I don't know why."
Mrs. Haig tied the sack of letters and packages, then sat down across from the postman. Usually Marco left for Astor Heights immediately after completing his duties. Now he seemed in no hurry.
"I woke up real early, and I got to thinking, out of the blue, it'd be nice out on the lake right now. Quiet and pretty. I used to fish some when I was little, go along with Carl and his pals, tag along, kid brother. Not so much the fishing, you know, but I liked going on the boat. And being out there. I liked it the way everything was so green and quiet."
This, by far the longest and most personal remark Marco had ever made to Mrs. Haig, disturbed her for that reason. He was not himself. The man's eyes, which appeared to see the lake water as he spoke, staring somewhere beyond her, looked bruised, two smears of soot deep in the sockets. Rubbing his hands along his calves, her colleague now slowly blew out a sigh. "Well, what happens? To time, you know? You don't even notice. All those years. And I never went back. I don't know why. Never even remembered I'd forgotten it.
The time just went." He gave a quick, uncomfortable laugh. "Funny, I guess. Reach over to turn the TV set off for the night. And you look at your hands. And you see you got old somehow." His hand, which he held out now, trembled.
"You're tired, Alf. You shouldn't have tried to do the route today, in the heat and all."
"It was a nice day though, wasn't it? Well, I ought to go on.
Keeping you here past time." He stood, but his legs shook, and with a surprised stare he sat down again. "Guess I am pretty beat, huh?"
"Yes. Don't try to leave just yet. Just rest, catch your breath.
Would you like me to call your brother?"
"Nah. Don't bother anybody, it's nothing." They sat silently for a while. "Carl's kid," he then began to speak again, almost at a whisper. "Carl Jr.'s got a rowboat he keeps up there with the big boat.
I took it out a ways. You know Matebesec Cove?"
"No, I'm sorry, I don't. Are you feeling all right?"
"It's just a little place. It's real pretty though. Lots of pine trees.
The way the water sits, quiet and clean, different colors. You know?
You ever notice how when the new pine needles come out on the tips of the branches and they're a light-colored green and the old needles are a dark-colored green? I was noticing that this morning.
Red pines. I think. Maybe. One time I…I got a book of Sebastian's one time. We were little. Mama got him picture books. We thought he'd be something special. He could draw anything, anything there was, you show him something and he could sit down and draw it just the way it looked."
"Alf? Should I call Dr. Scaper?"
"This book though. It told all the names of trees and showed their pictures. I got so, so I knew. Ash. Beech. Hemlock. Locust. I'd figure them out. Taking the mail. Red pine. Ash, and, and maple.
Red pine."
"Alf! What's wrong? What's the matter?"
"I, I don't know. I guess I don't feel too good."
"Please, sit still, sit still. I'm going to call." Judith ran from the room to a small side office where there was a telephone. She pushed against the panic that was closing in on her as she dialed the police station, whose number she knew by heart. Finally Joe MacDermott answered. "Joe. This is Judith. At the post office. Could…" Then, in the mail room, she heard wood scrape against the floor. There was a sharp crash, then another crash, duller, heavy, and terrifying to her.
The noise swept the panic up and swirled it through her voice.
"Please. Quick. Help me. Alf 's ill. Please call Dr. Scaper. An ambulance. Come quick. Please. Please."
There was no noise anymore except her own voice whispering, "Please, please, please," as she ran back to where, on the floor, Alf Marco lay facedown beside the overturned chair.
chapter 28
"Got anything for me today, Sergeant?"
"Hello, Hayes. Don't you have anything better to do with your time? Get them to lower taxes, give me a raise, something like that?"
"Like all Americans, you greatly overestimate the power of the press to do anything but jerk skeletons out of closets. Indecent exposure's our racket. So, men we can manage—even presidents. Money, we can't budge."
"No presidents in here just now."
"Well, jails are my hobby."
"It's not much different here from outside, just a little more clearcut, and smells worse maybe."
"You're a philosopher, Fred. That's another reason I came to Argyle. To sit at your feet."
"Sit in a bar be more like it."
"That's another reason, I admit. So, anything much?"
"Naw. The usual. Drunks. Disorderlies. Guy took a lug wrench to his wife; twelve stitches. Kid broke into the record store; a music lover. Couple of hookers, couple of pushers. Oh, we still got that old colored nut in here."
"Who's that?"
"Fellow named Tim Hines. Got caught out in Meadowlark Hills exhibiting himself to kids. So the charge goes. Pretty cheerful old bugger. In there all day, laughing, playing a harmonica, tap-dancing.
Got these beer caps tacked onto his shoes. A nut."
"Yeah, he sounds too pleasant to be sane. Didn't actually harm anybody, did he?"
"Naw, too puny if he wanted to. But you never can tell. Talks gibberish. Could be senile. Couple of the women over in Meadowlark pretty up in arms about it, so they'll probably put him away for good."
"What about this guy Maynard Henry over my way? Rammed somebody's car over the ridge with the somebody in it."
"Aggravated assault. Maybe. Yeah, he's here. The D.A. may go for attempted homicide. John Haig's pushing for it hard. Can't say I blame him. This guy's a real nasty bastard, believe me. A chip on his shoulder a mile high. Two arrests out in California, but dropped. He was over in Vietnam a long time, too long probably. Sometimes in the brig, sometimes getting decorated, what it sounds like. Don't guess you ever knew his big brother, Arn Henry? He was a kind of big football hero around here awhile back. High school. Then went to one of the Big Ten. Lives in Boston now, selling insurance. Never can tell. Good seeds and bad."
"Football builds character," said Hayes. "Think Henry'd talk to me?"
"Maybe. He's in there with Tim Hines, and he's n
ot much of a music lover, so he might want an excuse to get away. Not much of a talker either, though, far as I can tell."
"Not like you and me, huh?"
"Takes all kinds."
"So they say. Problem is they never mention what it takes all kinds for."
"Keep God from getting bored."
"Fred, tell the truth, ever read Spinoza?"
"Never read anybody but Eric Ambler."
"Close enough. Well, show me your prize specimen."
He looked like, what? A caged animal? That was too easy. Prisoners always looked like caged animals. A cheetah, anyhow, Hayes thought. A thin meanness, and the wheat-colored clipped hair, the weak chin, and eyes that raced ceaselessly around the visitors' room, white-heat eyes running instead of the legs that twitched with impatience on either side of the straight wood chair. Legs much too long for the thin chest.
"Maynard Henry?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm A.A. Hayes, I'm the editor of the Dingley Falls paper."
"Yeah?"
No, Hayes decided, he looks more dangerous than a cat.
"Appreciate your taking the time off to see me." Stupid thing to say, thought Hayes, as he looked up at the irony in the pale, humorless eyes. What's time to him?
"Got a cigarette?"
"Sure. Here, take the pack."
Henry took only one and slid the rest back across the wood table. His hand was wide but thin, rubbed a raw pink, so clean that Hayes assumed they must have him washing dishes or laundry. His blue work shirt and jeans were starched stiff, both as pale as his eyes.
"Got yourself a lawyer?"
"They sent some dipshit around. I figured you for another one."
"No, sorry. I just drop by here once in a while, talk to folks, see if anything needs reporting. Thought you might want to tell me your side of the story."
Behind the smoke Henry's eyes flicked past Hayes as they swept the room. Finally he spoke. "Fuck you." He said it flatly and quietly.
Hayes smiled. "Okay. I guess that means you don't want to. Who knows, though? I might be able to help."
"Can you walk me out of here?"
"You've been indicted. Bail set at what?"
"Enough to be too much. If I'd robbed a bank instead, maybe I could come up with it."
"Instead of what? Okay. Don't you want bail? You like it here?"
"It sucks. You can write that. It sucks."
"Been here before?"
"Look it up, you're the reporter."
"I did. You've been in the can before."
"No shit." There was hardly any interest behind the voice. An indifference that flattened the obscenities into ordinary words, devoid of their usual signals. They were almost not insulting.
"How 'bout your brother?"
"How about him?"
"Well, I hear he was a big honcho around here, star of the gridiron and all. Those things carry weight. Couldn't he arrange bail for you? Get you a good lawyer?"
Irony skittered across the eyes again, but Maynard Henry didn't reply. He was pulling matches one by one out of the paper book, lighting them, placing them to burn in a symmetrical row in the ashtray.
Hayes was reminded of photographs of western settlers—miners, ranchers, gunmen, workmen. Pale yellow and brown group pictures.
All men, few of them old, posed or captured imposed in flat, raw settings. Dirt streets, pine storefronts, tents, sod huts. Men surrounded by the machinery and timber of unfinished mines, unfinished railroads, unfinished towns. At times a dozen men in one picture, each of them solitary and isolate even in camaraderie. Some in their dark bowlers and white shirt-sleeves, some with ties and vests, some collarless, some mustached, some beside lanky, stifflegged dogs, some beside rifles, some squinting into pans for gold. Like this prisoner, all of them angular, raw-boned, hard-eyed, and hard-lipped. In every face a pinched alertness and suspicion. In every body a skitterish readiness for hard work or hard drink and barbarically hard times. Cold chastity in their whoring. Innocent indifference to murder or death. Thin, alacritous male faces, turned westward, ready to move, accidental founders of states.
"You finished getting a good look at me?" asked Henry.
"Look, you were in Vietnam, right? I hear you got some medals over there, and then you ran into a little trouble. That true?"
"You ask a lot of questions."
"Guess I do."
"They gave me some fucking medals. Then they busted me.
Then they gave me some more fucking medals. Then they gave me the fucking boot. I wasn't supposed to think it was funny either time." The voice was again disinterested.
"No, the military's never been known for its sense of humor."
"Some tough shit."
"Bounce you for drinking?"
"You got a sense of humor."
"Drugs?"
"You wanna know? Okay, I was trying to grease a guy but he had on the wrong uniform."
"Grease?"
"Kill, shoot, eliminate the cocksucker. He was a dink. They were on our side."
"I remember."
"Good for you." Henry tore into pieces the empty matchbook and stood, his fingers stretched on the table, his leg jerking against the table's leg. "Okay, okay, you here to do good, do me something, okay? They got me in there with a spade about a hundred years old, and the dude's flipped, I mean he's nuts, okay? I got to get him out of there. I can't hack that guy freaking on me in the middle of the fucking night." The voice accelerated, whirred higher. "I got to get things cooled out, I got to get back home."
"You married?"
The eyes dashed back to Hayes. "You stay the shit away from her, you got that? She's none of your fucking business!"
"Sure. Sorry." Here was, Hayes thought, the quicksilver plunge he'd seen precipitant in Maynard Henry's body the whole time he'd been in the room. The bolting of the horse. "Listen, I'll ask the desk about the old man. Seems like the smartest thing, though, would be to find somebody to put up bond for you so you could get out yourself."
"I'll get out, you'd better believe it. And you can tell that fat cop that I'm going to cream him. Okay? There's a story for you, you can write it because it's going to happen. I'm going to beat the crap out of him. He's been begging a long time. It's going to happen." Henry's hands sprang up from the table as if twitched by strings. He went to the door and rapped it with his fist.
"Sure, fine. Thanks for the chat. Sure you don't want my cigarettes?"
"Your brand's for shit." The door slammed behind the prisoner.
"I know what you mean," Hayes said to the empty room.
"You were wrong, Fred."
"How so?"
"He can talk."
"What'd he say?"
"Well, if you're the fat cop he had in mind, I got the feeling he's fixing to do you in."
"They all feel that way sometimes. It's mutual."
"He asked me to look into something, doesn't seem too unreasonable. Appears he's really bothered by his cellmate. Your harmonica player. He says the old man's insane."
"Probably is. Harmless though."
"Well, it upsets him. Couldn't you just move him? What's the difference?"
"I'm not running a Holiday Inn here. First come, first served. No place to move him to. It's just temporary anyhow. Christ, after all that time in Vietnam, you'd think he'd be pretty used to listening to people go nuts."
"True. Well, like you say, anything to keep ennui away from the Lord. Take it easy. I got to get back to work."
"Shit, I know where you're going. Drink one for me. I'm not an intellectual like you. I got to work for a living."
"Quit and write a book. Words of Wisdom from a Small-Town Warden. "
"I got nothing to say that hadn't already been said since the year one. Why should I write a book?"
"If you feel that way, you're right, you're not an intellectual, Fred. What'll I drink for you if I should happen to walk into a bar by mistake? Scotch or bourbon?"
"Just drink me a beer. I
can't afford Scotch."
"Write a book, Fred. There's a book in you waiting, I can hear it hollering to have its sentence commuted. 'Let me out of here.'"
"You know, Hayes, I bet you and Hines would get along like a house on fire. You want to meet him, see him dance? Why don't you and him write a book?"
"Oh, we've written lots already—me and old black Hines. Ever hear of Faulkner?"
"Yeah, I've heard the name. Wrote Westerns, didn't he?"
"Well. There you go."
chapter 29
Because Evelyn Troyes had searched everywhere without success for a Bach, Beethoven, or even a Brahms, the Dingley Falls ladies arrived at the loft in Sheridan Square only as the big event began.
They found the whitewashed, bare-beamed room crowded with lovers of cinematography—and of the cinematographer, Marjorem Harfleur, feminist writer, director, producer, and star of A Day in the Bed of an American Woman, a film that the artist herself called Elliptic Ellipsoid. Tracy, Priss, and Evelyn had only a second to find throw pillows to fall on before the projector whirred and the Harfleur logos (a nude female corpse hanging from a garter belt to a meat hook in a supermarket freezer) flashed, then froze before them.
As her day in bed bounced on the screen, split in two, triplicated, sped up, retarded, inverted, negatived, and was otherwise subjected to psychic and filmic disorders, Ms. Harfleur herself swung upside down, dangled from a rope in front of the wall where her life was being shown. Dressed in black and white leotards, the live Harfleur inscribed with red chalk in both hands her emotional response to this particular screening of the filmed Harfleur.
"I had no idea," whispered Priss, "that American women were entitled to so full a day, or so full a bed! I feel quite deprived, don't you?"
"My!" said Tracy, who had just glimpsed (as the live Ms. Harfleur flew by on the outswing and cleared the screen) a giant poodle attempt to sodomize a man in a Nixon mask as he attempted to copulate with a woman in a Red Army uniform. They squirmed on the crowded mattress where the star, dressed in nothing at all, sat smoking a water pipe like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.
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