Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  "She thinks we need more women in power. Women have to get into the same positions men are in. They should have the right to do what men do." Luke sat down on the steps of the school to pour gravel out of his shoe, while Polly did the same to hers.

  "That's dumb," she said. "I don't think men should have a right to do what men do, much less the other half of the human race yelling they want to do it too. You know what I mean? Let's go home now."

  "Hedgerow, that's not the point," began Luke, and then they both started to talk and were still talking when they reached Polly's house on Glover's Lane and still talking on the porch when her father, just awakened, appeared with his head wrapped in a bandage, like the flag bearer in The Spirit of '76, and said to his daughter, "I see life goes on, and if a hero can't sleep because his only child is outside yelling about how mean men were to poor Madame Curie, then it's too bad for the hero. So how about some eggs, you two? If life's going to go on, we might as well eat."

  chapter 57

  Meetings of the Thespian Ladies Club were postponed until further notice. The president and the vice-president, Mrs. Canopy and Mrs. Ransom, were not speaking. The president and the chairlady of the refreshments committee (Mrs. Canopy and Mrs. Abernathy) were leaving in a few days for a few weeks abroad, without, however, the secretary (Mrs. Troyes), who had declined their invitation on the basis of other plans to which the president was not privy.

  With Beanie out of town, with Priss out of touch, with Evelyn behaving in that sly, shy way she had when she was keeping secrets, Tracy Canopy was feeling a bit more lonely than she thought was good for her. Automatically she walked to the phone. The telephone cord was to her what the television cable was to her friend Evelyn—an umbilicus joining her to the life-sustaining world. For on it she daily called a "mayday" and was rescued from solitude. This morning she held the receiver like a lover's hand against her cheek. She spoke to a number of local acquaintances about the fire and murders, then, still unsatisfied, she began to make long-distance calls. To her travel agent, to her sister-in-law, to Beanie in New York.

  Finally she called Bébé Jesus in Miami because she had been planning to write him to say she wished to buy the J. Edgar Hoover-in-tin wastepaper basket to go with her Castro toilet bowl.

  He had, amazingly enough, he admitted, already sold it. To a retired tax lawyer whose Palm Beach penthouse was, said the artist, "lousy like dee fleas on dee perro" with modern art, none of which was worth a spit. Still there was money in art, indeed "mucho moola in dees beesneece, cara Canopy. But artist heeself, he geet nada dollair.

  Everybody reech, reech like puercos peegs selling, buying all dee art, while leetle artist, leetle limosnero, seeting out to freeze, even no coat to wear. Ees a good ting? I do not tink so." Mrs. Canopy did not think so either, though she felt obliged to inquire if it were really that cold in Miami this June, despite her willingness to allow artists that license to lie called poetic which in ordinary persons like herself she would have thought mendacity.

  By coincidence, or the concentricity of design, Tracy was to enjoy a second communication from one of her artists that day, for shortly before noon, as she sat working on her accounts and paying some bills, she heard a noise that she thought was the garbage truck.

  But it was Louie Daytona, who drove one of the few 1949 Cadillac hearses still on the streets, and perhaps the only one with a cyclorama of the film Quo Vadis covering it from grille to fin, a mural that had been painted years ago by Daytona's friend Habzi Rabies. With a bleat of his horn, the sculptor kicked open the door right where a lion gnawed on the legs of a beatifically indifferent Christian starlet whose arms stretched up to the roof of the car and so on to heaven.

  Mrs. Canopy ran out to greet her friend and hurry him inside.

  Louie Daytona was certainly handsome (as guests at the Harfleur film premiere on Wednesday had commented). Six months in prison had, if anything, improved a physique that was eminently visible in a tight-fitting blue jumpsuit that had belonged to a member of an Italian pit crew at Monte Carlo. That mechanic, like many other brief encounters of both sexes, had disappeared from Daytona's life and memory. The shirtless young man currently in his hearse, with his last-of-the-Mohicans haircut and his scar from ear to lip, did not look to Tracy's practiced eye like an artist, but rather (as she later told Evelyn) like a karate teacher who believed in Charles Manson; it was a remark she regretted not being able to make to Priss. Still, she greeted the gentleman politely. But he stared with sour blankness straight ahead, as if life were something rancid and far away.

  "Hey, doll!" caroled Daytona, his arm flung around Mrs. Canopy as he walked her with his long-legged rumba into her house. "I don't call this civilization, you call this civilization? Where am I? Where'd you get this town? M-G-M? It's half burned down anyhow, did you know that?"

  "But Louie, what are you doing here? And however did you find me in Dingley Falls? No, wait, but what about your friend, shouldn't we ask...?"

  "Nah, he can't switch onto that socialization scene, you know what I'm saying? Just leave him sit, he'll be okay, he's out of his gourd."

  "Well, if you're certain." She closed the front door behind them.

  Daytona took his patroness by the shoulders. "Listen good. I'm about to blow you away, Tricia."

  While not certain of the expression's exact meaning, Mrs. Canopy felt a surge of unease. Daytona was, after all, a former convict. Might he plan to harm her? Or perhaps to tell her that he had set fire to her Manhattan townhouse, just as his friend Habzi Rabies had burned up her lake cabin years earlier? Art was a very expensive hobby. "What do you mean?" she asked, jaw thrust up at him.

  "They cut off your phone or what? I been trying to get you since last night. Then I just couldn't hold it in; I had to split and lay it on you right away."

  "Lay what?"

  "Jack! That's what! Lady, you are one rich dame!"

  "Well, of course, I'm certainly comfortable, Louie, but, now, just a minute, couldn't I fix you a cup of coffee, and perhaps your friend out in the car would—"

  "Yeah, well, I was nosing around those extra bedrooms you got in the back of your pad."

  "Louie! Those were locked!"

  "Yeah, I know, but come on, Trina, this is big stuff, man. Catch me later with the lecture, okay? You know what's back in those rooms?"

  "I certainly do. Personal belongings of my late husband's, and I feel that I must say—"

  "I ain't talking about the clothes and junk, I'm talking paintings, couple dozen paintings, maybe fifty, you know what I'm saying?

  Leaning against the walls."

  "Of course. They're just some things I bought from some artists a long time ago. Presents I picked out for Mr. Canopy over the years of our marriage, and I really don't think you should have gone—"

  "Doll! Doll! You chose 'em yourself? Yeah? What'd you pay for them? Nothing, just about frigging nothing, right? Hang on, Louie, don't space out! You know what you got there? You got de Kooning, you got Pollock, oh, madre mia, you got Jasper Johns and Rothko.

  Tracy, baby, listen to what I'm telling you! You're sitting on Lichtensteins, Rauschenbergs, Motherwells, Stellas, and I'm just talking Americans now. Yeah, well, you can nod, but, lady, you think what opening the door on an A-bomb scene like that could do to an acidhead like Louie here! You gotta put up a warning! Those are the Number One jammers, that's all. You got a big show, doll, and it's all prime time. They insured?"

  "Well, yes, the whole house is insured, that is. I suppose you're saying that they appreciated then over the years?"

  Daytona did a quick samba side step. "A million." He held up his hand as a pledge. "More. All I can tell you is, you got an eye!

  Millions. No hype, you with me?" He spun around on his way into her living room. "Now. I'm going to level with you. You been okay, you know; give me the pad, and bread. That's right, true, true, I mean it, you're okay, doll. So listen, I was about this far from pulling the hustle on you. I mean total ripoff. Me and
that Guggenheim you're sitting on would have been gonee. But that's not my bag, Trixie."

  "Tracy. You were going to rob me? Louie, you've surprised me!

  Really!"

  "Yeah, well, what can I tell you? Let me give you some free advice, Mrs. C., no jazz. Don't ever trust a sculptor. Don't trust a painter or a writer and don't even talk to musicians. Because we are desperate folk, lady, and we're working for a mean fuck of a master, you know what I'm saying?"

  "You mean Art."

  "You got his name. So, okay, it's a horse race, but look at you.

  You got in for a buck and you come away with a bundle. You don't need the jack, put those things in a museum, get a good tax man to work on it with you. Oh, when I opened that door! Bootiful!

  Bootiful! I cried, I'm gonna tell you that, I cried." On his dancing way to the mantel to see his friend's canvas, Fingerpaint on a Widow's Fur, over which he shook his head, Daytona swooped a book off the butler's table. "Hey, I know this guy. Nice guy. Real nice." In his hand was Mrs. Canopy's copy of Poetry Sucks!, on its back cover, the laughing, tawny-bearded author, Richard Rage.

  "Oh, my, is he , Louie? Is he nice?" She caught the sculptor's arm.

  "If you don't mind, I have the most vital reasons for wanting to be sure. Do you think he's a good man?"

  Daytona looked down, puzzled at the round, earnest, bespectacled eyes. "Hey now, doll. Sure thing. They don't make 'em any nicer. Him and you got something on? Small world."

  Scarlet, she shook her head vigorously. "No. No. Nothing like that."

  "Yeah, well, you couldn't do better if you go that route. Guy's just not very smart, that's all. Brains ain't everything, you with me?"

  Mrs. Canopy gave him her valiant smile and nodded yes.

  Flurrying past the hearse, Evelyn Troyes was slipping through Tracy's white picket gate to see if she should phone the police for her friend, when coming toward her in the arms-swinging, fingersnapping, hip-sliding step that had made him king (and queen) of Manhattan discos strutted Louie Daytona, and Evelyn's heart stopped at the sight. At the sight of those black satin curls and molten blue eyes, at the dark arrow of hair pointing down from the bare chest into the half-zipped jumpsuit, down to the plump bulge between legs moving toward her. Mrs. Troyes's lashes fluttered and so did her knees. Hugo Eroica, all those years ago! That first time in the conservatory practice room when he had set aside the violin and taken up her. When he had moved her hand down that arrow of hair and over that bulge. His batocchio, they called it in private. And hers, campanella, the bell. They had hidden everywhere—in his study, friends' homes, cars, parks, hotels, and finally across an ocean to Paris—so that Hugo and she could touch. A beautiful man. Had he not been killed, he would have come back to her, she believed that. Who cared for what mistaken cause he had been silly enough to run away and fight? A beautiful man.

  "Evelyn! This is Louis Daytona; I don't think you met on Wednesday. He's here on a business matter. You remember he did Vincent's statuary for me, and we're just going to have a look at it before Mr. Daytona and his friend there have to leave. They're on their way to Texas, it seems. Was there something you wanted?

  Evelyn?"

  "Ah, oh, I'm so sorry, ah, Tracy, but have you any, ah, ah, any…"

  Mrs. Troyes seemed unable to force her eyes away from the sculptor.

  "Any, merde! Ah, oh, olive oil?"

  "I have no idea, but help yourself, I'll be right back." Tracy was going to punish Evelyn just a little bit for being so secretive about not coming to England with her and Beanie. "Louie, shall we?"

  "With you, doll. Nice ah meet yah," he said to Mrs. Troyes and winked. She floated into Tracy's house.

  As they climbed to the top of the town burial ground, Mrs. Canopy and Mr. Daytona saw a young couple in white photographing Victory over Death, Louie's abstract expressionist rendering from rendered Buicks. He didn't like it anymore. "That's a piece of junk," he told the admirers, but they, moving away, shook their heads in affable disagreement. "That's not art." He confessed to his benefactress that he'd been wrong in what he'd said to her on Wednesday.

  Hab did have something going for him on the pipeline. It was time to stop messing in the minimal and the personal and the farcical Marxical. They'd all gone wrong, back the last ten years, jumping off the bandwagon and then barfing on it. All that pop and op and color field and do your body like dumb old Porko Fulawhiski sticking a knife in himself for a couple of photographers from small-time newspapers. No, Habzi was leading the way, like always. It was time to go public and monumental and stoic heroic. And he, Louie, was on his way now with a commission to do in Carrara marble The Siege of the Alamo, double life-size, in the mall of a Houston shopping center. He and New York were splitting up, so he would just say "So long" for a while, and here was the key to her townhouse, and believe it or not, the furniture was still in it. And maybe they never got around to making it, but she was okay. And before she could stop him, he kissed her.

  "You treated me right. I won't forget ya, Trudie."

  "Tracy."

  "Yeah. Well, time to play on down to Lone Ranger land. Louie, Louie, can you take it?! I'm gonna rodeo on Michelangelo!" And in a disco beat the handsome sculptor shimmied down the incline of tombstones and spun with a kickout into his hearse.

  chapter 58

  The only time Winslow Abernathy knew of when his death was an imminent possibility (no doubt there had been countless near car crashes, viral epidemics, black widow spiders that he had never noticed) had been a sunny Pacific afternoon when a kamikaze crashed into the foredeck of the battle cruiser on which he served as ensign, the plane exploding just far enough from where he sat reading Livy not to kill or even maim him but to knock him through space so that somehow, a second after he turned a page, he was dangling, arms around a broken metal beam that stuck out over the churning ocean miles below. For minutes, hours, days, Abernathy clung there, arms and legs locked on the beam—as he'd never been able to do in gym class—until someone helped him back onto deck, where flames and smoke and screaming men blurred. Only then had he realized that not only was he bleeding, but, worse, he'd lost his glasses when struck. The odd part was (he couldn't be sure, of course, but it had seemed to him) that while hanging there like a monkey, literally clinging to life, he had been able to see perfectly well without his glasses.

  This kamikaze experience had been so abruptly extraordinary, so discontinuous with the life of Winslow Abernathy, that he attached to it no personal meaning—except that he still ducked in a sweat at the sight of low-flying planes. But Saturday at 5:00 A.M. he thought of it again, for life, after simply leaping the last thirty years forward, had flung him through air again out to that same precarious clarity suspended over chaos. He was too old for it, he told himself, lying awake at 5:00 A.M., exhausted and unquiet. But in fact, even young, he'd had no desire to live life at the peak—more than one social event a weekend depleted his small store of extroversion. How long could he keep holding on now as loud debris flew past and waves snatched up at him? How long could he see without his glasses?

  Beanie had left minutes, hours, years ago? Lance hurt, the girl's death, fire, when? And the rest?

  Last night. Abernathy thought back again to where he had brought Lance twenty-four hours earlier, the fluorescent corridor of the hospital emergency entrance glowing an evil absinthe green.

  Where everything was clean but looked dirty. People, mostly poor, lethargic on benches, some with heads in hands, wills yielded to the wait, submerged in pain or fear, as blank-eyed as if they waited for buses. Down the corridor came five people, a family, awkwardly clinging together even as they walked. All were crying, the males without a sound, as behind them a doctor tried to herd them along while appearing to comfort them. As they passed, the man supporting the loudest weeping woman turned his own teary eyes, embarrassed, from Winslow. Even now, thought the lawyer, even in the midst of death, he is ashamed to be exposed in the weakness of grief, in his failure to keep th
e woman from tears. But hadn't Winslow, too, feared women's tears?

  Tonight at the nurses' station when he had arrived after 1:00

  A.M., a woman nearby, manic and noisy, had heard him asking for Judith Haig. Under the lights her hair was lime yellow around the enormous green plastic curlers. She was a woman in her early forties who wore a boy's lettered football jacket, a black and white housecoat, and straw sandals. Eyes puffed red, tears running from her nose, she introduced herself to him as "Judith's best friend." He was repelled, then disgusted by his snobbery. Surely Mrs. MacDermott had a right to claim friendship. More than he. Who was he to Mrs. Haig?

  "Of course you don't know me from Adam, but somehow I got this intuition from what people in town have said about you that you'll stick by Judith. I've been sobbing my eyes out ever since Joe told me (my husband, Joe, Chief Haig's second in command). I said to him, Joe, that poor thing has had nothing but misery since she was left on the church stoop to freeze or live as God saw fit. And now this!

  Poor, poor Hawk. Voted most likely to succeed. We were all green with envy. Oh, you have to excuse me. Please. Oh, poor, poor thing!"

  Abernathy took her to one of the hard plastic couches and sat with her and waited, nodding, until she collected herself.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Abernathy, but it's only human. I got to tell you something, you being a lawyer, and you advise me what you think. I haven't said a word to Joe either, and what's more, won't either, until I can talk to Judith. Blessed Mary, pray for her in her hour of need.

  This is all my fault! Oh, Jesus love me, oh, please, here I go again, just excuse it, Mr. Abernathy, just a sec, I'm okay. Slobbering all over you. The thing is, nobody knows what really happened out there. But I got to tell you there's a chance that Limus Barnum didn't come 'til later and, because it was Maynard. Yes . Maynard Henry. I sent him out there to get Chinkie! Just shooting my mouth off. But I don't know if he ever went, and that's why I don't dare to say anything to Joe until Judith comes to, saints look over her, because there's no sense kidding ourselves, if Maynard's name gets into this after what him and Hawk have said about each other, poor Maynard won't have much more of a chance of getting out than Hitler in a synagogue. But I'll say this, if the little bastard did that to Judith, then God have mercy on him because I'm going to have trouble doing it myself."