The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  Templeton was crystalline in the predawn that morning. The Buds had gone up Lake Street, past the great brick Otesaga Hotel, a grande dame sunning herself on the water; they turned left up Nelson, past the tennis courts. Right up Main Street, passing the courthouse and florist, crossing the railroad, turning left down Winter Street. Now, I approached them from behind. From two hundred yards away, I could hear them, the low murmur of their voices and the slap of their old feet against the ground. From a hundred feet away, I could smell them, the sweat deep in the fabric of their running clothes, the little poots they made when they thought the others wouldn’t notice.

  They were:

  Johann Neumann, the father of Laura, a girl in my class. Every time Johann went home to Germany, he came back with fat tubes of marzipan for me, and he taught me, over the course of one frustrating summer, how to play tennis.

  Bearlike Tom Irving, who sold used cars and gave me my cruddy hatchback nearly for free, and who, when I was eight and walking home from school, sobbing about how mean the other kids were to me, sat down on a bench and put his arm around me and let me cry until I was all cried out.

  Tiny Thomas Peters, my pediatrician, so small I could look him in the eye when I was ten, whom my mother called whenever something went wrong with Averell Cottage, because he was as good with houses as he was with children and cheerfully fixed anything.

  Sol Falconer, about whom there was always a great deal of gossip, as he’d had three wives, and he was rich and childless, and who, because I’d asked him, let me have my tenth birthday party at his house, with his huge pool, and, because he didn’t know any better, had it catered. His family was a long-standing one, all the men named Sol Falconer, and when some people bridled at his money, they called him Sol Falconer the Filth, instead of Sol Falconer the Fifth.

  Frank Phinney, whose family had owned the Freeman’s Journal forever and who gave me my first internship in college, writing captions for photographs, a man who wouldn’t stop telling knock-knock jokes until they were like tickle-torture, fun that was so not fun.

  And last, Doug Jones, my high school English teacher, not unlike an aging Jim Morrison, who always had giggling girls staying after school for help with Shakespeare. He cast me as Desdemona in the school play, and when I babysat his three sweet little girls, he’d coach me on my lines. “No, no, Willie. Say it with feeling!” he’d shout, and his daughters would chortle like a little chorus of songbirds.

  As I approached, I grinned at their oblivious backs, feeling a great upwelling of affection. At the moment, Doug Jones was saying, “…just jealous because she always turned to me when she was asking questions, weren’t you, Big Tom? I thought you were about to seize up on camera.”

  To which the rest of the men guffawed, and Tom Irving said, “Hilarious, Dougie, hi-lar-i-ous. True, though. I never thought when I went on the Daybreak! show I’d have to play second fiddle to you dorkuses.”

  Then Johann said, in his little German accent, “That Katie Doyle really vas a vhippersnapper, vasn’t she? Much prettier in person. Much prettier.”

  It took me a moment, but I realized they were talking about an interview they must have done for a national morning talk show, probably something to do with their role in discovering the monster. I was about to step up next to them and ask them about it, already savoring the Heyyy! they always shouted, when a garbage truck briefly pushed between us, and, when the driver nodded down at me, I was seized by a horrific thought. I stopped running altogether and watched the Buds pull away down the street.

  It was possible, I’d thought, that any man in town could have been my father. The garbageman, for instance; the Running Buds. Or Dr. Cluny, the sculler who had found the monster. Or my elementary school principal, or the rotund little mayor, or the post-man, or the dry cleaning guy at Kepler’s. The baseball museum director, the baker at Schneider’s Bakery, John-John the mechanic at Dwight’s. Dwight. Dwight’s mentally retarded twin brother, Derek. My track coach, my orthodontist, any of the three mute ancient men who played chess all summer in Temple Park. Mr. Clapp the mortician, the pastor at the Presbyterian Church, the Catholic priest, the railroad magnate, the biologist at the Biological Field Station, the town librarian, my friends’ fathers, oh God, anyone, any man, could, actually, have been my father. Aristabulus Mudge, even! A man invoked at third-grade sleepovers in the hushed and daring tone one used for the devil himself, a man who looked like the devil himself, all horny calluses and shining pickled-looking skin, a crooked-backed, hollow-cheeked man with eyes set so deep in his sockets no one had ever seen their whites, he who once walked into a cloud of butterflies and made them fall dead like dropped pennies in his wake, even he could have been my father, even Aristabulus Mudge could have been the man who wormed his way into and out of my life in the zip of a zipper and a hiss of relief. I felt my heart slip out of rhythm, and thought, in my melodrama, that I would die of this grief.

  But my heart, of course, started up again, and at the end of the street the Running Buds turned left to go back up toward the gym. I felt sick. I felt like the birdie in that terrible children’s book by P. D. Eastman, the one that wanders around and asks everything—the cow, the dog, the airplane—“Are you my mother?” I gagged into the gutter and stood up, still feeling ill.

  I was now by the elementary school, a squat brick Lego of a building. I would run back to town by Walnut Street, then Chestnut, sidle down Main, and pick up my car from where I stashed it, opposite the baseball museum and next to the post office. I would drive it up into the driveway and drag inside Averell Cottage all of my clothes and books, everything that made home comfortable. And there I would rot until either the Lump came out or Primus Dwyer called, and not, I vowed, until then. Until I talked to Primus Dwyer, I wouldn’t decide anything on the Lump, and there was no way I could call him myself. I didn’t let myself think of what would happen if he never called me.

  And I had to pick up the car without running into anyone I knew, which happened every time I came home. The last time I was in Templeton, two years earlier, I had stopped to pick up some groceries at the Great American for Vi, and saw a girl who was in my graduating class. She was staring at the granola, paying no attention to her three children in the cart. They were horrifying, with thyroidal eyes and snotty noses. And then Cheri turned her head and saw me, and for at least five minutes I was in acute discomfort, Cheri latching on to me as if we had been best friends, showing off her children for my admiration, talking about getting together for a beer sometime. I was so uncomfortable I forgot what I was supposed to pick up and practically ran home. I later drove all the way out to the Price Chopper in Hartwick so I wouldn’t have to return to the Great American and risk seeing her still there, with her glassy eyes and the changelings throwing handfuls of sugar cereal into the aisles. When I thought of Cheri, even standing there beside her in the grocery store under the Muzak and fluorescents, I thought of her in bed, sweating and grunting, making more of those frightening children of hers. Some people you just look at and see sex.

  That morning I jogged to Main, jittery and furtive. Schneider’s Bakery was pumping its old-fashioned doughnut smell into the street, and with the waft came layers of memory. There, the dollhouse furniture store owned by the parents of a rock star, now a baseball card store. There, the candy shop that sold gourmet jelly-beans. There, the baseball cap store that only sold caps from minor-league teams, a place where I worked for a summer so that even now I could list a few off the top of my head: Louisville Bats, Toledo Mud Hens, Montgomery Biscuits, Tulsa Drillers, Batavia Muckdogs, Lansing Lugnuts. I ran down the street, beyond Cartwright Field, and there were no cars out yet, no traffic on the street. Farkle Park, where Santa’s house sat in winter, and where the high school druggies sat in summer and played with their hackeysacks or ballsacks all day. Mudge’s Pharmacy in the copper-clad corner building. Then Pioneer Street and the Smithy building, the Bold Dragoon, an ancient pub, crouching beside it. Augur’s Books. Druper’s Gener
al Store. The great baseball museum with a crowd of enthusiasts already out in force, waiting beside the velvet ropes to ooh over balls and bats. It was all there, unchanging, save for a few more baseball-related stores every year, a couple fewer interesting small-town places for the locals.

  This, too, had been a change. In the past, the tourists had never really taken up much of our attention: they held no part in the social strata of Templeton: they existed in our periphery, essential but unimportant. Since the hospital came in 1918, the doctors had made up the highest base, filling the town with money and brains, running the country club, opening up galleries. The only rung above them held our few millionaires: the ambassador, the railroad magnate, the wonderful wealthy woman who made sure there were flowers everywhere, the Falconers with their beery fortune, not to mention both sides of my family until we lost it all. Below the doctors were the other white-collar people: hospital administrators, attorneys, librarians, and below them the farmers, who used to be important, but with the decline of the New York dairy heifer were now associated with malt liquor and bonfires and hickishness. Below them the random townies who filled the Bold Dragoon on weekends. When the new Opera House opened in 1986, we reluctantly opened ranks for the Opera visitors with their couture gowns and Mercedes, but even they were eventually shunted off to Springfield on the other side of the lake. When the Park of Dreams opened in a cow field in Hartwick Seminary, south of town, we thought that a few Little Leaguers wouldn’t be able to change the topography of the town that much. We didn’t expect that they would bring their parents, and that the parents (cheesy, loud people with cellulite under their shorts and minivans soaped up with TEMPLETON OR BUST! and CHESTERTON CHARGERS ARE #1!) would demand cheap restaurants and a better grocery store and plasticky chain hotels and miniature golf. We had no idea that the Park of Dreams would expand to hold eight teams of Little Leaguers every week throughout the summer, 1,200 screaming baseball brats per week, plus about 600 of their awful parents. Though we tried to keep them relegated to Hartwick Seminary, three miles south of Templeton proper, we didn’t know that such demand would transform the face of the town. The sewing store, the dollhouse store, the toy store, even Farm and Home would become stores that merely slutted themselves to baseball. Now, nearly every store was brimming with memorabilia or bats. The tourists were getting hard to ignore.

  And there, in a crowd of stinking young boys in jerseys talking excitedly about Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, was my hatchback in front of the post office. Stuffed to the gills with books and clothes, the bumper precariously near the ground. And there was a tow truck backing its beeping rear end into my poor little car, like the automotive prelude to a humping.

  I moved fast, thankful that I’d left the keys in the ignition. In Templeton, even on Main Street where the tourists congregated, everyone leaves the keys in the ignition, either from mass stupidity or an inbred honor code. Now I slid in and reversed as the tow truck was backing into my car, keeping a coy three-foot gap between us for a hundred feet until I hit Fair Street at the end of the block. At which time, the tow truck stopped, the driver hopped out and walked back to my car. He was a tall man with a potbelly and slouching walk, wearing a Carhartt jumpsuit with the top half rolled down to his waist. He beamed under his hunting cap, an orange the color of a scream.

  “You ain’t going to let me haul your ass away, are you?” he called.

  I stuck my head out the window and said, “No, sir. I’m doing a U-ey right here in Temple Park, and hauling my own ass elsewhere, okay?”

  By now, his head was in my window, and a moment later, I felt the deep and sinking recognition. Zeke Felcher. Oh, Lord.

  “Well,” he said, grinning down at me, “if it isn’t Miss Queenie, 1991.”

  I cringed: I had been at one point the world’s most eccentric choice for a homecoming queen, having been both nerd and jock, but never quite a beauty. I am tall and thin, true, but only pretty, and even back then I was politically correct, superfeminist, more prone to picketing Miss America than entering it. Yet, when I found myself that day on the football field being crowned in the wet, cold mud, my hypocrite’s heart rejoiced.

  And Zeke Felcher, the man in my window, had been my homecoming king.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Felcher, is that you?”

  “Well, don’t you look a sight,” he said. I frowned, but a sight to Felcher must have been a good thing, because he then whistled his chewing tobaccoey breath into my face and said, “I always knew you’d end up a hottie, Willie. Now come on out and give your king a hug.”

  That is how I found myself on the corner of Main and Fair, pressed against the beer belly of a man I’d tried very hard to ignore in high school. He had been gorgeous then, with a soccer player’s body and green eyes and a head full of blond curls, but also with a bad reputation for kissing and telling. At least in high school I’d had enough sense to stay away from the rotten ones.

  “Damn,” he said, releasing me, running his fingers through my short hair. “I like this look on you. What are you doing home?”

  “Oh,” I said, looking away. “Finishing my dissertation. Needed a little peace and quiet.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I always forgot you were a smart one, with your degrees and all. Only college I went to was the School of Life. School of Hard Knocks. Teaches you more than any damn hoity-toity private liberal arts nonsense.”

  “Ah,” I said, feeling weakened by the cliché he’d become, “how true.”

  He said, “But my two boys, they’ll be like you. Brilliant little guys.”

  “Kids?” I said. “Christ, Felcher. Are you married now? I had no idea.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m not married. Don’t believe in it.”

  There was a queer little moment between us, I now looking at Felcher with full focus for the first time, he gazing at me with narrowed eyes. “What,” I said, “what don’t you believe in?”

  His mouth twisted a little, and his hick accent fell away when he said, “Oh, the hegemony. The institution itself is both corrupt and exclusionary.” Then he snorted to see the look on my face and said, “Don’t look so surprised, Willie U. You aren’t the only one to get over fifteen hundred on your SATs. Just because I stayed home in Templeton doesn’t mean I’m stupid as all that.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I was thinking at all.”

  “Oh, yes it was,” he said. “But I forgive you.”

  There was, again, a long silence as I looked at my shoes and he smirked. And then I stuttered, for the sake of saying something, “Well, who is it you’re not married to, then?”

  Now he was the one to look down, and he frowned and kicked at a little crack in the asphalt. “Melanie?” he said. “Mel Potter? But we don’t see each other much. Share the kids, that’s all.”

  “Oh, Mel,” I said. She had always been the ringleader of his personal set of groupies, with great boulders for breasts and a pretty teddy-bear face. “Neat. Well,” I said. “We should get together for a beer or something sometime. But I kind of have to get back home because my mother’s making me breakfast and everything.”

  “Already?” he said, and his face fell, a little. “All right, then.”

  He looked so oddly crestfallen that I put a little flirtation in my voice and touched his shoulder when I said, “So, what do I have to do to liberate my car?”

  He took off the orange cap, smiling again, and scratched his scalp. His curls were gone now, and his forehead had expanded into the center of his crown, where the honey hair began, though darker, after all these years. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “You were a bad girl, Queenie. Parked illegally for over forty-eight hours. I just don’t know.”

  I pouted a little, and he laughed and said, “Tell you what. Make good on your offer for a beer, and I’ll let you go scot-free. How’s that for a deal?”

  “Sounds good,” I said, sliding into my car. “Thanks, Felcher. Owe you one.”

  “Anything for my girl,�
�� he said, closing my car door for me gently. Then, leaning in my window, he said, “And, Willie, nobody calls me Felcher anymore. Who knew, but Felcher’s quite the dirty term. Call me Zeke, or Ezekiel. My buddies call me Zeke.”

  “Zeke,” I said. “Ezekiel. Sounds funny, but okay.”

  “All right, then,” he said, and slapped the top of my car as if it were the rear of a horse and I were a cowgirl off to rope the year-lings. I did my U-turn in the Temple Park and sped away, down toward the slate blue of the lake. I was already halfway home before I started to laugh: in high school we had called him Felcher as a sort of incantation against his charm and impossible good looks, as a way to bring him down a little into the realm of mere mortals. We had no weapons against him other than his name, a reputed sexual penchant whereby a person sucks semen from a rectum with a straw. Ten years after high school, he had fallen so far all by himself that it wasn’t necessary to call him Felcher. Now he was among the mortals, and we felt safe enough to give him back his name. Ezekiel. I couldn’t stop laughing until I parked in the driveway of the house.

  VI WENT TO work in the morning, and by afternoon, I had grown tired of spying on the monster’s tent from my room. A crane had arrived to transport the dead beast somewhere, but nothing was happening yet to lift it. From where I stood in the open window, I could hear the low murmur of the crowd, the soft-drink hawkers, the newscasters practicing their lines.