by Tom Drury
“You’ll win the primary,” said Louise.
“He’ll go Independent after that,” said Dan.
“Really?”
“Sure,” said Dan. “Jack would never put up the money if he was just going to drop out. And everybody is aware of that. The Lions were treating him with kid gloves like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Give an example.”
“Foot patrols,” said Dan. “As you know, we have three people working a county that is two hundred and ninety six square miles. And Johnny says they should be on foot. Say, what a good idea. We’ll walk from Morrisville to Romyla when somebody wraps their car around a tree. But these Lions, they lap it up. Johnny says we’re understaffed. The Lions nod seriously. Well, no kidding. But I don’t have a printing press. I can’t make money.”
Louise washed out an insulator, poured a beer into it, and handed the insulator to Dan. “Don’t worry. Johnny won’t win.”
“He’s calling himself John,” said Dan. “John White.”
“He can call himself John Shaft, he still ain’t gonna be elected,” said Louise.
“Miles Hagen is one thing. I don’t mind Miles Hagen. At least he was a police officer at one time.”
“Who is Miles Hagen?”
“The guy the Republicans always put up.”
“Isn’t he deaf?”
“No.”
“Who am I thinking of?”
Dan said he didn’t know.
“Johnny won’t get past the primary,” said Louise.
“Like I say, he’ll become an Independent.”
“So that’s what’s up his sleeve.”
“Yeah, I just said that.”
Louise smiled. “I guess I’m not paying attention,” she said. “I keep thinking about the baby moving her hands. It was about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I wish I would have been there.”
“Let me tell you something else,” said Louise. “They gave me a handout on anesthetics, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be knocked out. I want to be awake. Whatever you do, don’t let them knock me out.”
“I won’t let them knock you out,” said Dan.
“You have to be my advocate,” said Louise.
Dan cooked hamburgers and broccoli while Louise dropped baby clothes into the dryer. After supper, while they were doing dishes, Claude Robeshaw dropped by to advise Dan about the campaign. Claude was still very influential among Democrats around the county.
Dan and Claude sat down at the kitchen table, and Claude lit a cigar and rolled it slowly on the edge of an ashtray. He tipped his head back and looked downward through his glasses to read Dan’s campaign brochure. He said nothing, leading Dan to think that he must hate it.
“First thing I’d do is schedule a pancake supper in Grafton,” said Claude. “Grafton is the heart of your support and the geographical heart of the county.”
“I’ve done that,” said Dan. “Actually it’s a spaghetti supper. Jean Jewell has agreed to play the folk guitar.”
Claude shook his head.
“You don’t like the guitar,” said Dan.
“I have no problem with the guitar,” said Claude. “I haven’t heard Jean play but, in general, music is good.”
“Jean is amazing,” said Dan.
“No, it’s spaghetti I don’t like, and I’ll tell you why,” said Claude. “Pancakes are cheaper to make. Thus you raise more funds, and after all, it is a fundraiser. Pancakes are easy on the system. If you keep a person up all night because your spaghetti sauce hasn’t agreed with them, they tend to remember. Lastly, spaghetti has a foreign connotation that you avoid altogether with pancakes. Steer clear of tacos for the same reason.”
“Oh, come on,” said Dan.
“Do you remember Everett Carr?” said Claude.
“The name is familiar.”
“He was a state senator, and once upon a time at a campaign supper he served a goulash that made a number of people ill. When Election Day rolled around, we had a new state senator.”
Louise took an armload of clothes from the dryer. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said.
“It is dumb,” said Claude. “It’s very dumb. Politics is a dumb game.”
Louise went upstairs. She felt slightly strange about the election, having gone out with Johnny White, married Tiny, and then married Dan. She felt as if she were exerting some improper influence on public affairs. She felt like the sun to their revolving planets.
Dan had painted the baby’s room a deep and soft color called Shell Ivory. It was a small room with a dresser, a wicker rocker, and a boxed and unassembled crib that leaned against the wall.
Louise folded the clothes and put them in the drawers of the dresser. They felt great in her hands. She loved the softly coarse fabrics, the pebbled rubber feet of a pair of pajamas. She looked into the mirror above the dresser. Could she be a good mother after all the false starts and wrong turns? She had her doubts. But she also had a feeling she rarely got—of life as a path leading directly to this moment. She was rocking in the chair and thinking about this when Dan and Claude came clinking and clanking up the stairs with beers and a socket set.
“We’re going to put up the crib,” said Dan.
This took longer than might have been expected. Twenty minutes after starting, they were still sifting through the pieces and frowning at the instructions. Dan would say, “Fit cotter pin A to post flange D,” and then he would repeat the words “cotter pin A” very slowly, and he would ask Claude if cotter pin A didn’t look shorter than the other cotter pins in the instructions, and if so, where was the damned thing. But they worked on, joining the pieces and components in a painstaking and bewildered fashion, until all of a sudden they were done, with pieces left over.
“Maybe those are extras in case you lose some of them,” said Claude, but they didn’t look like extras, and the gate on one side would not lower the way it was supposed to. “Push that side up against the wall,” said Claude. “Then it won’t matter if it opens or not.” This is what they did, and then they sat on a braided blue and white rug in the middle of the floor, drinking their beers and talking about the weather, as Louise rocked gently with one hand resting on her stomach. The baby kicked, turned, settled.
Claude finished his beer and stood. “You two seem good,” he said. “Now I have to go see Howard LaMott, the fire chief. He wants to talk about my son Albert.”
“What did Albert do?” said Dan.
“He put cake in the boots of the firemen,” said Claude.
“That sounds like Albert,” said Dan.
“Howard claims this delayed them responding to a fire.”
“Howard LaMott is a big windbag,” said Louise.
“I’ll hear him out,” said Claude.
He left. Louise and Dan went down the hall and to bed. Dan read aloud from a book called Planets, Stars and Space, which he had found in the attic with the inscription “For Jeannie with love on her ninth birthday, July 20, 1962.” Dan remembered hearing somewhere that infants in the womb liked being read to.
“Considering its influence upon the lives of people, animals, and plants on the earth,” Dan read, “the moon is the second most important object in the sky. It is the illuminator of the night. It is responsible for the month as a calendar unit, and, working with the sun, it produces the important rise and fall in the earth’s waters—the tides. In ancient times, calendars depended solely upon the moon, and lunar calendars are still used by many people for religious purposes. The dates of Easter and Passover are determined by the motions of the moon.
“Because the moon goes around the earth instead of around the sun, it is not a planet, even though it resembles the planets in many respects. It is a satellite, one of 31 in our solar system.”
• • •
While this was going on out at the farm, in town Mary went to see Alvin Getty. Alvin lived in a tall and nearly paintless house, one block north of the park and not far from the Three Sister
s of the Jewells. Mary almost tripped on an uncoiled Slinky on the sidewalk. She saw Alvin standing on the porch in the hazy glow of a bug light.
“What’s happened to the store?” said Mary.
He took a long drink from a bottle of Falstaff beer. “I’ve persuaded new investors to lend me their backing,” he said.
“Alvin, you are bankrupt.”
“Says who?”
“Well, aren’t you?” said Mary.
“Pammy,” called Alvin. “We have company.”
Pam Getty was in the kitchen. She had black hair and moved heavily in a quilted housecoat. Mary could see her through the open door.
“It’s Mary Montrose,” said Alvin.
“Leave me alone, Alvin,” she said, searching violently through the pantry. “I’m making a Fizzy and I don’t want any of your shit.”
“Hi, Pam,” said Mary.
“Pam, Mary is speaking,” said Alvin.
Pam’s hands shook as she got the Fizzy into water. “I don’t care. That was my money.”
“It was both of our money,” said Alvin. “Why not cool it for one second and say hello to a guest in our house.”
“Not after what she did to King,” said Pam. She left the kitchen, and Mary did not see her again.
“Pam is angry at the world tonight,” said Alvin.
“It was not me that let a biting dog run loose,” said Mary.
“You were hard on that animal,” said Alvin.
“I don’t think so,” said Mary. “But I’m not here about King.”
“There is no reason to panic,” said Alvin. “Pam and I are working closely with our creditors. We will be open again on Monday, and if not Monday, then the following Monday. Everyone will get their groceries in due time.”
“But people are hungry now,” said Mary. “Alvin, they took your cash register. The store isn’t going to open again.”
Alvin sat on the steps. “No, it probably won’t,” he said.
“What happened?” said Mary.
“People didn’t shop.”
“Goodbye, Alvin,” said Mary.
Alvin shook her hand. “Go quietly,” he said.
“And yourself.”
Mary walked through Grafton in the dark. Two cars sat in front of the Lime Bucket, looking lonelier somehow than no cars. The rest of Main Street was deserted except for a dented maroon van by the old Opera House. Vans disturbed Mary, although she could not have said exactly why. She passed through the business district and into her neighborhood. In the windows of the houses she could see people washing dishes, huddling before the flickering fire of television, reading magazines in chairs. Arriving home, Mary found her back door standing open. She turned on the light in the kitchen as she always did, put her keys on the counter, and went into the living room. A deer stood not ten feet away, eating from the tangled vines of her ivy plant.
In the broken light Mary could see the steely black eyes and the stiff bristled hair along the shoulders. She could see the mouth tearing the dark leaves that she had been growing for years. The deer was not afraid of Mary. It wanted the ivy and would have it, that simple. It looked at her out of the corner of its eye. It smelled like a river. The head butted the coffee table as the teeth made that soft ripping sound. Mary turned and left the way she had come. She raised the garage door, got into her car, locked the doors. She did not know what to do. She had been a schoolteacher early on in her career and had always taught the children that the answers were near at hand for those who would look. But at this moment she didn’t know where to look or what she would find.
THIRTEEN
THE SENIOR PLAY was set in the fifteenth century. Jocelyn Jewell had won the role of “the ill-fated Maria,” who would be bitten by a spider during the play and who would dance herself down to exhaustion and finally death. The spider was played by Dustin Tinbane of Morrisville.
Louise and Dan would have stayed home but for the involvement of Jocelyn. Louise was expected to deliver the baby in seventeen days. She wore a long black dress and a necklace of red beads to the play. Her cheeks were rosy and her hair hung thick and dark down her back. Under her arm she carried a green pillow, with which she hoped to cushion the hard dark bleachers of the Grafton gym.
Dan held Louise’s hand as they walked up the sidewalk. His thoughts were drifting, and the weather could not make up its mind. The sun balanced on the edge of the fields. The light was thin and clear, falling against the bricks of the school. Cheryl Jewell came up behind them and put her arm around Louise’s shoulders. Cheryl wore a pink hat with light green stitching. “This reminds me of being late for typing,” she said.
The Grafton School had been one of the last old prairie schools, and although the classrooms were empty the building remained in decent shape. Three stories, each with a band of windows, rose between piers on the east and west. The top of the east pier had been the principal’s office, and the top of the west pier the Red Cross room, containing one chair, one desk, and one bed for children who were not feeling well or for young women with their periods. The gym, round-roofed and democratic, stood on the east end, connected to the school by a low lobby with oak doors. GRAFTON was spelled out—for pilots—in large yellow letters on the black roof. Only fragments of letters could be seen from the ground.
Dan, Louise, and Cheryl entered the lobby. Display cases held loving cups, oxidized to a smoky color, that had been won by people who were now either dead or very old. The shop and hygiene teacher Richard Boster sold tickets beneath a banner saying, “Tarantella—A Musical—Cast And Directed By Edith Jacoby.” Mr. Boster was an absent-minded teacher who habitually scratched the backs of his hands and who once totally confused a class of ninth-graders by saying that during sex the penis gets “hard and crusty.” Now he pushed three tickets across a counter. “They’ve got quite a production this year,” he said.
But this was said every year, and indeed it was hard to imagine a senior play so lame that it would not be considered outstanding. There were a couple of reasons for this. Coming on the eve of the students’ entry into perilous adulthood, the senior play took on the power of an omen. To find fault with a particular drama would be like jinxing the new generation, and no one wanted to do that. Also, people came to see the senior play who might not see another live drama all year, and for them even theatrical basics, such as lighting, costumes, and shots fired offstage, could be dazzling. It was backward in a way—children acting sophisticated for the benefit of adults—but in Grouse County, as elsewhere, theater was not universally accepted as a worthwhile activity beyond the high school level. Making up stories, acting them out—people just got uneasy. Out in the country if a man were to go into a tavern and say he could not play cards that night because he was going to see Finian’s Rainbow, it would be an odd moment. But anyone can go to a school play.
The basic plot of Tarantella was the proven one of lovers who are separated and die. Jocelyn Jewell played a maiden who falls in love with a young shopkeeper. The shopkeeper agrees to cater a banquet for a haughty and powerful judge but instead escorts the maiden on a picnic after her date falls through. On the picnic they find an intriguing spider and put it in a jar. Meanwhile, the banquet is a disaster, the judge’s political hopes are dashed, and the judge, frustrated, kills the shopkeeper in a duel. The spider then grows to human size and bites Jocelyn, sending her into a dancing mania.
Thanks to Jocelyn Jewell, who seemed to be good at everything she tried, it really was quite a production. The singing was strong if sometimes uncertain, no one fell down during the dance sequences, and Edith Jacoby, whom a third of the audience could see standing in the wings, kept the action going and seemed particularly skilled in the staging of loud arguments. But Dan was not paying much attention and lost track of the story. Something had happened the night before that he could not stop thinking about.
The phone had rung late—say, ten or ten-thirty. It was Sergeant Sheila Geer of the Stone City police. “Can you meet me at Westey�
��s Farm Home?” she whispered. Dan drove over. It took twenty minutes or so. The yard was sparsely lit, and Sheila’s cruiser had the parking lights on. Dan could see the outline of her head in the car.
Sheila suggested they go for a walk. The yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence, but Sheila had a key, as one who patrols the area well might. She led the way past cinder blocks, clothesline posts, and the dull black blades of tractor tires.
Finally they sat together on a bench swing. “Let’s talk about the election,” said Sheila.
“O.K.”
“Look, there’s someone on your side who should not be trusted,” said Sheila.
“There aren’t that many on my side,” said Dan.
Then Sheila said that Deputy Earl Kellogg was providing department files to Johnny White. “I can’t prove this in a court of law,” she said. “But they consider you vulnerable. They think the cases go against you. You remember the heavy machines that disappeared.”
“Of course.”
“And the gamblers.”
“Right.”
“And Quinn. That baby Quinn.”
“What about him,” said Dan.
“I don’t know,” said Sheila. “They think the mother should have been prosecuted.”
“We never found the mother.”
“Yeah, except everyone knows you did.”
“All right,” said Dan. “This was a woman with mental disorders going back years ago. She was not capable of deciding for herself. And you’re going to prosecute her? Why? Put her name all over the paper? There’s no reason… And besides, read the charter. Prosecution isn’t up to the sheriff.”
“They know her name. They know everything about her.”
“If they make an issue out of her, they will be sorry,” said Dan. “And you can tell Johnny I said that.”
“We don’t have contact.”
“You know a lot for not having contact.”
“Well, I can’t say. I really can’t say.”
“Earl’s worked seven years for me,” said Dan.
“I always wondered why that is.”