This early in the morning Clive Jr. had the spur all to himself. Off to his left was the cemetery that had given rise to controversy, and beyond it the huge tract of land that was to have been The Ultimate Escape—both of them graveyards now. Clive Jr. tried to imagine the boggy land cleared, filled and paved, a huge roller coaster and double Ferris wheel, sky blue corkscrewing water slides in the distance. Brightly colored landscaping reminiscent of the Judy Garland Oz movie. The image had been the staple of his imagination a couple of days ago, but now the land looked defiantly swamplike. It not only looked like a swamp right this minute, it looked like the sort of swamp that would reassert its swamp nature. He’d been assured by engineers that it could be filled and built upon, but he was no longer sure it would be wise to try. In twenty years the concrete in the huge parking lot would begin to ripple and crack, emitting foul, pent-up swamp gases. Weeds would push up through the cracks faster than they could be poisoned. It would be discovered that the Ferris wheels had been sinking an inch a year. In fact, the whole park would be subsiding gradually. State inspectors would be called in, and they’d scratch their heads thoughtfully and inform county officials that this whole area had once been wetland, and deep down still was.
When Clive Jr. arrived at the small subdivision of the Farm Home subsidy housing Carl Roebuck was building on the edge of Ultimate Escape land, he pulled off onto the gravel road and studied the half-built, no-frills, three-bedroom ranch houses. Now here, he thought, was a Bath-size, small-potatoes, strictly fringe financial venture. Imaginationwise, it was one small step above Squeers Waste. A lot of area small businesses that had made plans contingent upon the existence of the theme park were going to be in serious trouble now. He’d heard a rumor that Carl Roebuck was building these houses not with an eye toward selling them but rather to be compensated for them when he sold the land. If true, they wouldn’t even pass an honest inspection. Of course, for the right price, he could get the right inspection, just as Clive had managed to get a high appraisal on the tract of swampland that was to have been The Ultimate Escape and would now be worthless again, much to the astonishment of the investors. Clive Jr. couldn’t help but smile. He had long wanted to be the most important man in Bath, a man who, like his father, everyone knew. Well, in another week—another few days, probably—he was going to be famous.
Clive Jr. sat with the engine running, visible exhaust billowing from the Continental’s tailpipe. His mother had been right, as usual. There would always be bad locations. And, also in accordance with her prediction, he’d discovered this truth by investing in this one, personally and professionally. Where had he gone wrong? In Texas and Arizona, he had learned about faith and land. D. C. Collins, years ago, had explained it to him, taken him out to the middle of the desert where there was nothing but stone and sand and cactus and sun. That and a promotional billboard announcing Silver Lake Estates. “See the lake?” Collins asked, pointing off at nothing. Clive Jr. had seen no lake and said so. “You’re wrong, though,” Collins had explained. “It’s there because people believe it will be there. If enough people believe there’s going to be a lake, there will be one. It’ll get built somehow. Look at this land.” He offered a sweeping gesture that took in the whole desert, from the ground they were standing on all the way to California. “What’s the first thing you notice?” Before Clive Jr. could speak, Collins answered. “No water. Not a drop. So how come these cities keep growing? Dallas. Phoenix. Tucson. It’s because people believe there will be water. And they’re right. If people keep moving, they’ll pipe water all the way from Antarctica if they have to. Trust me. You come back here in two years, and there’ll be the prettiest little lake you ever saw, right out there, a fountain in the middle of it, shooting water fifty feet in the air. The only thing that can stop it from happening is if about half the people who have already invested their money get cold feet. If that happens, there won’t be enough water out here to support a family of Gila monsters. We’re talking faith here, Clive. Trust that billboard, because it’s the future, sure as shootin’, or if it isn’t we’re all fucked.”
Clive Jr. had learned his lesson, trusted the billboard. The first thing he’d done was put up one of his own, announcing his faith in the future. It had seemed to him that Collins was right and that he himself, Clive Jr., was the man to bring the message home. Bath’s problem, he saw, in light of this revelation, was a lack of faith, a timidity, a small-mindedness. Two hundred years ago the citizens of Bath had not believed in Jedediah Halsey’s Sans Souci, his grand hotel in the wilderness, with its three hundred rooms. Imagine. Scoffing at a man’s faith in the future. No wonder God had allowed their springs to run dry.
From where Clive Jr. sat alongside the road at the entrance to Carl Roebuck’s development, he could see the demonic clown billboard in the distance on the other side of the highway. A couple of months ago he’d overheard two employees at the bank agree that the clown bore a striking resemblance to himself. No doubt they’d soon be referring to the failed project as Clive’s Folly. He adjusted his rearview so that he could see his own reflection, examine his own features “after the fall” to see if he could spot the resemblance. Not much, he decided. Actually, he took after his father, a fact for which he’d often given profound thanks. And yet, it now occurred to him, imagining Clive Sr. the way he’d looked when Clive Jr. was a boy, his father had what could only be described as a pointed head, which was why he always wore a baseball cap, even in the house when Miss Beryl would let him. Clive Sr. had seemed to understand that when he took it off, with his virtuous, close-cropped hair and his large ears, he was, well, funny-looking.
Clive Jr. readjusted the rearview, regarded the gray exhaust escaping from the Continental’s tailpipe and tried, as he’d been trying all morning, to stave off panic, the worst panic he could recall feeling since he was a boy fearful of a beating at the hands of a gang of neighborhood bullies. Were he sitting in a closed garage, it occurred to him, this very same behavior would be the death of him. But as it was the plumes of blue smoke dissipated harmlessly, or at least invisibly, into the wide world of air and earth and water.
Had Sully been the sort of man to indulge regret, he’d have regretted not having done his laundry before going to jail. Socks seemed to be the main problem. Or rather, the complete absence of clean socks. Dirty ones were his long suit. He thought of Carl Roebuck’s bureau, so full of socks and underwear, a month’s supply, and felt a stab of envy. “We gotta make a quick stop at the men’s store,” he called out to Wirf, who snorted awake on the sofa where he’d fallen asleep watching television while Sully was in the shower. “What?”
Sully slipped into his dress shoes, barefoot. “I gotta get some socks.” Silence a moment for this to compute. “How does a man in jail run out of socks?”
“Easy,” Sully explained from the doorway. “I was out of socks when I went in. This look okay?”
In addition to having no clean socks, he was also missing the pants that matched his suit jacket. Had he been a betting man, and he was, he’d have bet they were at the dry cleaner’s and had been since the last time he wore his suit. Which would have been when? Things he took to the dry cleaner’s usually stayed there until he needed them again.
“Spiffy,” Wirf said without much interest. “I’m not sure I’d even bother with socks. You don’t want to overdress.”
“Spoken like a man with only one foot to freeze,” Sully said. “Let’s go.”
Wirf stood, looked at the television all the way across the huge living room. “You need a remote control for this thing,” he observed.
Sully looked around the room, did a quick inventory. He needed a lot of things. A remote control wouldn’t even make the list. Still, he had the impression, indeed had felt it as soon as they’d entered, that there was something different about the flat. Nothing was missing, nothing misplaced so far as he could tell, yet it still felt different, somehow. An atmospheric shift, he decided, of the sort that always registered
after one of Clive Jr.’s unauthorized visits, except that Clive’s presence was easy to detect because of his aftershave. This was a more subtly sweet smell that he couldn’t quite place. It smelled like something young, he finally decided.
Or maybe it was just his own absence he was smelling. A week of no rank work clothes piling up on the floor of his bedroom closet. Which reminded him that in two days, the first of the year, he was supposed to be permanently absent from this flat. “Where’s this apartment I’m supposed to look at?” he asked Wirf.
“On Spruce,” Wirf said. “Two fifty a month.”
“One bedroom?”
“Two.”
“I don’t need two, really,” Sully said, pulling on his parka over his suit coat. The bottom of the parka came about eight inches above the bottom of the suit jacket.
“Jesus Christ,” Wirf said. “You don’t own an overcoat?”
“What would I do with an overcoat?” Sully said. “Two-fifty a month is more than I pay here,” Sully said.
“You could stay in jail,” Wirf suggested. “That’d solve your housing problem. I could spring you for weddings and funerals.”
“I make more money in there, actually,” Sully said. During his six days of incarceration he’d won over two hundred dollars playing cribbage with three different cops.
Together the two men made their slow way down Sully’s front stairs, Sully limping and groaning, Wirf stumping and puffing. “I hope all the others aren’t cripples,” Wirf said at the landing.
In point of fact, Hattie’s bearers were not an able-bodied crew. In addition to Wirf and Sully, there were Carl Roebuck, who had a quadruple bypass on his recent medical résumé; Jocko, whose knees, ruined by high school football, had twice been replaced and sometimes clicked audibly; and Otis, who got red-faced getting into and out of cars. And Peter, thank God. On short notice they couldn’t have done much better without recruiting women. Old Hattie’s casket would have been in safer hands with Ruth and Toby Roebuck and Cass and Birdie at the handles. In feet, Sully could think of only two women in town who wouldn’t have been a physical improvement. One was his landlady and the other was in the casket they were going to bear. But custom was custom, and custom, in this case, demanded six men, never mind in what condition.
Thinking of his landlady, Sully decided to look in on Miss Beryl, whom he hadn’t seen since the morning he’d discovered her covered with blood. According to Peter, who’d looked in on her a couple times, she was doing fine. “You know my landlady?” he asked Wirf.
“I’m her attorney,” Wirf said.
“No shit?”
“I need a few paying customers to offset my pro bono work.”
“Meaning me?”
“No,” Wirf said. “You’re my pro bonehead work. You I do strictly for laughs.”
Sully ignored this, knocked on Miss Beryl’s door and opened it all in the same motion, calling, “You still alive in here, old woman?”
Miss Beryl was not only alive but dressed for the funeral. She had her hat on, in fact. “I thought you were still in the hoosegow,” she said.
Sully entered, Wirf following reluctantly, unused to barging into the living quarters of elderly women without invitation.
“I’ve got a good lawyer,” Sully explained. “He can spring me for funerals.”
“Just the ones he’s responsible for,” Wirf corrected, this in reference to old Hattie’s bizarre end. Sully still wasn’t sure he believed it. He’d gotten the story separately from Peter, Wirf, and Carl Roebuck, and while their versions differed in tone according to their personalities (Peter maddeningly detached; Wirf sentimental and apologetic; Carl choking with hilarity), nevertheless the facts were consistent, and so Sully guessed they must be true, however improbable. Peter, as far as Sully could tell, hadn’t the imagination to think up such a lie, Wirf was too kind, Carl too self-absorbed.
What had happened was this. After Sully’s brainstorm to set up the old cash register at Hattie’s booth, the old woman had been content, ringing crazy, random totals every time one of her customers passed her on the way out of the diner. Some of these customers, who had ignored her for years when she sat small and blind and nearly deaf, though still malicious-looking, in her booth by the door, now found it easy to stop on their way out and argue good-naturedly about the price that sprang into the cash register’s window, into the clogged nest of previous numbers. One of these had been Otis Wilson, who may have wanted to convey to the old woman that he held no grudge against her for hitting him behind the ear with her salt shaker. On the fateful morning in question, old Hattie had gradually slumped down in her booth until she looked like she was in danger of slipping beneath the table and onto the floor. Other than her daughter, who was usually too busy, Sully was the only one who ever took the liberty of grabbing the old woman by the shoulders and righting her on his way out. Certainly Otis wouldn’t have dared touch the old woman, whom he considered lethal, though he was inclined to play to the assembled crowd by loudly refusing to pay twenty-two fifty for a cup of coffee. “Pay!” the old woman had predictably cackled, leaning forward, squirming, struggling to lever herself up straighter just as Otis hit the total key of the old register, which usually had the effect of clearing the nest of numbers in the register’s window. This time, for reasons still unexplained, the cash register’s drawer, long frozen shut, shot forward with the force of long-repressed desire, nailing the poor old woman in the middle of her forehead. She had died, without protest, on impact, sitting straight up.
Miss Beryl went over to her drop-leaf table, picked up a legal-size envelope sitting there and handed it to Wirf. “Since you’re here … you’re authorized to pursue both matters we discussed.”
Wirf took the envelope, a little reluctantly, Sully thought. “You’re sure you feel okay about this, Mrs. Peoples?”
Sully frowned at them. Another riddle. Since getting out of jail, he’d been feeling increasingly disoriented. He wouldn’t have dreamed he could fall so far behind on current events by spending a few days in the Bath jail. Had the whole town gone crazy in his absence?
“As to this house, it’s time, Abraham,” she said, not exactly answering his question. “Only a stubborn, selfish old nuisance of a woman would have put it off as long as I have.” She looked at Sully now and nodded. “While old Harriet was alive and always trying to fly the coop I knew I wasn’t the battiest old woman in town. With her gone I just might be the oddest creature around, so I decided to take care of things before I’m the one you all have to start chasing with a net.”
Wirf put the envelope into his pocket. “You understand you may not be able to undo this next month if you change your mind.”
Miss Beryl, who followed the envelope into her attorney’s pocket with a wary eye, looked like she might have changed it already. “I won’t,” she assured him. “If I’m to be seeing Clive Sr., star of my firmament”—here she indicated her late husband’s photograph on the mantle—“again in the near future, I need to put things in order. Lately he’s been chiding me.”
“Well,” Sully said. “If you’re hearing voices, it probably won’t be long.”
Miss Beryl, who usually enjoyed Sully’s mordant humor, now stared at him with the expression she reserved for those occasions when he’d been an especially bad boy. “Donald,” she said. “You and I have known each other for more years than I care to add up. Might I offer a personal observation?”
“You always do, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully said. In fact, he’d been wondering when she’d get around to chastising him for his latest round of misdeeds. Doubtless his punching a policeman and getting thrown in jail for the holidays struck Miss Beryl as conduct unbecoming a man of his years, a man with a son and a grandson and a handful, at least, of adult responsibilities he’d not succeeded in dodging. When was he going to grow up? Since Miss Beryl was the only person he allowed to lecture him, he took a deep breath and prepared to take his medicine.
“It’d give me great pleasure
to overlook the matter,” she began ominously enough, fixing him with her stern gaze, “but I cannot. Try as I might to ignore your shortcomings, I feel compelled to mention that you are not wearing hose this morning and that you look positively ridiculous as a result.”
Sully looked down at his shoes and bare ankles. “It’s our next stop,” he promised.
“Well, I should think so,” she said. “I’ll thank you to remember that when you leave this house, you reflect upon me as well as yourself. There are times, I suspect,” she added significantly, “when you forget this.”
This, Sully realized, was his lecture. “I’m sorry if I do, Mrs. Peoples,” he said, because he genuinely was sorry. “I never mean to shame you.”
“It’s true,” Wirf put in. “Most of the time he’s content to shame himself.”
“Well, no man is an island,” Miss Beryl reminded them both. “Do you recall who said that?”
Sully nodded. “You did,” he said, his standard response when his landlady began lobbing quotations at him. “All through eighth grade.”
Miss Beryl turned to Wirf. “It frightens me to think, Abraham, that I helped to shape this life. What will God say?”
“Be just like Him to blame you,” Sully agreed. In his experience, people usually got blamed for the very things they were most innocent of. It happened to himself so frequently that he’d come to think of the phenomenon as a facet of divine Providence. Its corollary was that the things a person really was guilty of were mostly ignored. His father, for instance. Big Jim had never even been charged in the matter of the boy who’d been impaled on the spike. The lifelong drunken cruelty he’d inflicted on his family had gone unpunished. He’d died well fed, untroubled by conscience, happily playing grab-ass with nurses who considered him full of spunk. As near as Sully could figure it, there was something in human nature that sought to ignore or absolve obvious guilt on the one hand even as it sought to establish connections and therefore responsibility in the most unrelated things.
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