by Elaine Ford
At Grace’s prodding, on Monday and then again on Tuesday Owen limped over to Millard’s to make a higher offer on the bunk beds. But both days Millard had risen at dawn to drive his pickup loaded with furniture the 120-mile round trip to Aurora and back. Damned if he’d pay a moving company to do what he could perfectly well do himself, he explained to Vi Leighton in the post office, when she ventured to inquire why his pickup was idling out front, crammed to the gunnels with bed frames and kitchen chairs and supermarket boxes. Just asking for another heart attack, Vi said on the phone to Grace, stubborn old skinflint.
Quarter to six Wednesday night Owen drove across the road to pick up Millard, just as he’d done every Wednesday night since the fall of 1989, except when he was in the hospital. But Millard said, from behind the screen door, no he didn’t think he’d be going to the all-you-can-eat fish-fry tonight, Uncle Nippy’s haddock just hadn’t been settin’ well on his stomach lately. He was sorry, but Owen should go on without him.
Very well, Owen replied, why don’t you let me know when your stomach is up for haddock? Briskly he got in his van and drove back across the road and microwaved one of the frozen pot pies Marvella Look had baked for him.
That was Owen’s version, as he reported it, a mite sheepishly, to Grace—men of the cloth were expected to turn the other cheek, after all. Nobody knew Millard’s side of the story. Millard wasn’t talking.
It went on that way for weeks: Owen mad at Millard for abandoning him by fixing to move to Aurora, and Millard mad at Owen for abandoning him by fixing to die. After the first week nobody could summon the courage to mention the name of one to the other. Spindle Road became like a moat between the two houses, which were in fact almost within spitting distance of one another.
Millard’s Ellsworth Realtor erected a big sign next to the mailbox and took out ads in the county newspaper and, buckling under pressure from Millard, in The Boston Globe. Of course nobody bought the property because Millard had put way too high a price on it. The trailer on his son’s land in Aurora was all spiffed up, ready for him to move in, but Millard lingered on in his house, camping out with just a few sticks of furniture and a pot or two. If you’d run into him in town he’d confide that a couple from Boston, professional couple, had made an offer on the house and were waiting to hear on their mortgage—but nobody believed him. Every once in a while, Owen told Grace, he’d look out his kitchen window and spot Millard propping up the Realtor’s sign, which had blown to the lawn in the wind.
Meanwhile, Owen’s sermons were becoming even more disorganized than usual. Truth was, you couldn’t make head or tail of them. And he looked strained, his hands gripping the lectern, almost as if he’d keel over if it weren’t there. He’d forget to show up for Church Council meetings or Bible study. One Sunday morning Grace went into the bathroom in the church basement right after Owen had used it and found blood on the floor. She decided just to mop it up and not say anything, since Owen had made it clear that a possible recurrence of the tumor was not a topic open for discussion. He was cured, and that was that.
October arrived. The maple in Grace’s front yard shrank into itself and discarded its leaves like so many sandwich wrappers. Grace stood on the porch steps, broom in hand, and noticed Owen’s van bumping over the bridge. Off to that meeting of the people trying to organize a soup kitchen, Grace thought. When the van turned below her house and chugged up the drive she figured he had in mind roping her into yet one more save-the-world rescue operation. Definitely not, she thought. This time I’m going to say no and make it stick. She waited for him to burst out of the van and yell hello, how are ya, Grace, but he just sat there in the driver’s seat. She leaned the broom against the railing and walked over to the window.
He’d rolled it part way down.
God, he looked awful. Cheesy yellow patches under his eyes. She sucked her breath in.
“Grace, do you think you could drive me to Ellsworth in this thing?”
“I don’t know, Owen. It doesn’t look very reliable,” she said, but when he didn’t smile, she said, “Sure. I’ll just get my jacket.”
“I set out, but I realized I wasn’t going to make it without help.”
“I’ll only be a minute.”
As she was grabbing her jacket off the hook in the mud room she realized that before the silly squabble over the bunk beds, Millard would have been the one he’d have asked. He wouldn’t even have had to ask. Somehow Millard would have known and had the pickup all gassed up for the journey.
At the hospital in Ellsworth they didn’t bother to admit him; instead they sent him on to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor in an ambulance. CAT scans and other complicated tests were performed and the deacons scrambled to find a substitute minister. While Owen was in EMMC Millard finally locked his doors, loaded the last items of furniture into his pickup, and moved to Aurora.
The following day, when Grace and Lizzie Pinkham went over to Owen’s to clean out the refrigerator, they found, neatly stacked against the bulkhead, a number of planks of various shapes and sizes, freshly painted blue.
ELWOOD’S LAST JOB
They didn’t hear him over the roar of the washers and the flopping of clothes in the dryers, so he said it again, louder this time. “Nobody move. This is a stickup.”
The Widow Balch looked up from the afghan square she was knitting and saw Elwood Tibbetts standing in the doorway with a plaid cloth suitcase in his hand. In the other he held what appeared to be a gun. Mrs. Balch peered over her half moons. “Stop that foolishness, Elwood,” she said.
“It ain’t foolishness.” He stepped into the laundrymat and set the suitcase down. Then he turned the lock in the glass door behind him.
By now Elwood had the attention of Rena Guptill and Mandy Clukey, who were seated in molded orange chairs near Mrs. Balch’s. In her third-grade-teacher voice, which she hadn’t lost in twenty years of retirement, Mrs. Balch said, “Put that away, now, Elwood. It’s not polite to go waving guns around, even if it is a toy.”
“This ain’t a toy,” Elwood said.
True, the gun had the heavy, black, sober look of an honest-to-goodness weapon. “Where’d you get it?” Mandy asked.
“Never you mind.”
Must have sent away for it, Mandy thought, from one of those mail-order places that advertise in gun magazines. She pictured Elwood laboriously penciling the address on a rumpled envelope, enclosing a money order he would have bought at the post office. Elwood worked there, sweeping the place out and emptying the trash bins. You could also see him shoveling snow at the Congregational Church or in summer mowing its lawn and trimming the hedges. He was a hulking, paunchy man with little in the way of a chin and shoulders sloped from decades of menial jobs.
“Why would you want to rob a laundrymat?” Mandy said. “Nothing worth taking in this crummy place.”
“She’s got that right. Left my diamond tiara at home, ha ha.” Rena found a cigarette and lit up, in spite of the flyspecked sign that forbade bare feet, shirtlessness, smoking, overloading the washers, dyeing, and loitering.
Suddenly Elwood took aim at the change machine, pulled the trigger, and fired. BLAM. Mrs. Balch dropped a stitch and Mandy the damp copy of House and Garden she’d been thumbing through. In the center of the machine was a hole like a belly button where once a lock had been.
When their eardrums had recovered from the blast, Mrs. Balch said, “My stars,” and Rena said, “Well, there. I guess you showed that ole change machine. Just let it try to cough back our raggedy bills now.”
From his pocket Elwood drew a black plastic garbage bag. “You,” he said to Mandy, “over here.” Mandy was eight months pregnant, her first kid, and these days you practically needed a winch to budge her. In addition, she was not used to taking direction from Elwood Tibbetts. She had trouble wrapping her mind around this departure from the normal order of things. However, she heav
ed herself out of her chair and waddled toward the change machine.
Elwood handed the bag to Mandy and pried up the machine’s hinged door. He ordered her to scoop quarters out of the three metal troughs inside the machine, which were the size of smallish shoeboxes, upended. “Holy shit,” she exclaimed. There were way more quarters inside this machine than Mandy would ever have imagined, enough to do the whole town’s wash, maybe the whole county’s wash—and dry it, too. Encouraged by the sight of the gun, she got to work, and fistfuls of coins began to go tumbling into the bag, ringing merrily. The bag got heavier and heavier.
In fact, Elwood had underestimated the combined weight of a serious quantity of coinage. As Mandy was finishing emptying the last trough, the bag’s bottom seam burst open, and a torrent of quarters poured onto dirty linoleum. Some rolled under the chairs Mrs. Balch and Rena were sitting on.
“Drat,” Elwood said. “S’posed to be a heavy-duty bag.” Pointing the gun in turn at all three ladies, Elwood looked around the laundrymat. He seized a pillowcase from one of the baskets and tossed it to Mandy. “Okay,” he said, “pick up them quarters.”
“Why don’t you get Rena to do it? I’m in no condition to go crawling around on the floor.”
“I’ve got a bad back,” Rena said. “Elwood knows about my back, don’t you, Elwood? Remember how I always mention it when I see you in the PO?”
“You won’t get away with this,” Mandy said to Elwood. With a groan she knelt and began to gather heaps of quarters into the pillowcase. She wondered how come nobody in Clip ’n’ Curl next door had heard the shot. She wondered how come nobody arrived with their laundry and pulled on the door handle and peered through the glass and sized up the situation and ran to call the sheriff. It seemed like everyone in town had magically vanished, leaving the three ladies to the mad whims of Elwood Tibbetts.
“What are you going to use the money for?” Mrs. Balch asked conversationally, fishing for the dropped stitch.
“I ain’t sayin’.”
Mrs. Balch noticed Elwood was sweating in the moist heat of the laundrymat. His sparse straight hair was all mussed. She remembered when he was in her third-grade class and he always hid slumped in the back row so as not to be called on. The other boys picked on him because he was slow and because he couldn’t throw or catch a ball to save his soul, and she’d felt sorry for him, but when teachers butted into children’s affairs it only made life worse for the victim. You just had to pray the tormentors outgrew the nonsense before too much damage was done. Mrs. Balch recalled that one of Elwood’s classmates was killed in Vietnam. Another drowned, dragged from his lobster boat by his own gear. But most of them moved away, because they couldn’t find work here that paid enough. Elwood was one of the few left in town.
“I bet you’re running off with somebody,” Rena said. With her pinkie nail she picked a shred of tobacco out from between two front teeth. You could see the gold inlay in her dog tooth. “The new check-out girl in Conklin’s Variety, maybe.”
“No girls,” Elwood said with conviction, as if he’d already considered such a plan and decided a female companion would be more trouble than she’d be worth. Based on his experience with his mother, Rena thought, he’d be right. Nasty old biddy, Gladys Tibbetts. One of the washers screeched to a halt, and Rena said, “That’s my load. Mind if I put it in the dryer?” She squashed her butt under her shoe. “I’m in a hurry. I have to bake a lemon meringue pie for the Vets Club supper.”
“I guess that would be okay,” Elwood said reluctantly. “Just don’t try anything.”
The gun trained on her, Rena wheeled one of the laundrymat’s carts over to the washer and removed a tangle of sheets and underwear from its innards. Behind her, Mandy crawled under a chair to retrieve a quarter. The knees of her maternity pants were now filthy from the floor, which hadn’t been mopped in years, possibly decades. Her bleached hair was coming undone from its rollers.
This is like a movie, Mandy thought, dragging the heavy pillowcase behind her. She tried to picture what would happen next. The sheriff would burst in, guns blazing. Or the most unlikely one of the hostages—yes, she decided, they were actually hostages—would disarm the gunman and save the day. That would have to be Mrs. Balch, but Mrs. Balch was proceeding with her afghan as calmly as if this was just an ordinary occurrence on an ordinary day. Mandy’s baby kicked her bladder, and she realized she had to pee.
Rena stuffed her wash into one of the dryers, then remembered she was out of change. She waved a dollar bill, which looked as if it had been through some previous wash itself, in Elwood’s direction. “Could I turn this in for some of the quarters in the pillowcase?” she asked. “As you know, the change machine has a little problem at the moment.” Without waiting for a reply, Rena handed the bill to Mandy and received four quarters, which she deposited in the coin slots. Her sheets and underwear began to rotate behind the dryer’s foggy window.
Back in her chair, Rena said, “So, are you planning on taking the loot over to the Union Trust? You know what Monica’s going to say when you show up with that pillowcase there? Monica’s going to say, ‘Where’d you get all them quarters, Elwood? Whaja do, rob the laundrymat? Ha, ha.’ ”
“Ain’t taking ’em to the bank.”
“What are you going to do?”
Not that it was any of their business, but he’d be on the 11:45 bus to Bangor, he told them. And from there on the next bus out of town. Never coming back, neither.
All three ladies absorbed this for a while. None of them could imagine the town without Elwood Tibbetts cutting the church lawn in crooked swaths. Or standing in front of the nursing home in a red and black wool jacket and matching hat with earflaps, selling homemade crafts like reindeer lawn ornaments he’d constructed out of birch logs. Or raising a cloud of dust in your face in the post office, smiling bashfully if you bothered to pass the time of day with him.
Mandy hauled herself to her feet and thrust the pillowcase at Elwood. Must be hundreds of bucks worth of coins in there, she thought, but he was so numb he didn’t know he wouldn’t get very far on that. She plunked herself back in a chair, hoping she’d get to pee soon, now that he had what he came for.
Not quite yet, though. The next thing Elwood did was to extract a wad of paper money maybe three inches thick from the machine. The ladies’ eyes bugged. Here they’d thought all he was getting was quarters, a lot of quarters to be sure, but still, pocket change. Actual bills—including fives and tens—were a whole different kettle of fish. Calmly Elwood dropped the wad into the pillowcase. While they were still digesting the size of the take, Elwood held the sack open in front of the three ladies, who sat in a row in their molded orange chairs. He was like a kid trick-or-treating, a large middle-aged kid toting a gun. “Put your stuff in,” he said. “Money, any jewelry you got on you, any other val’ables.”
“Why Elwood,” Mrs. Balch said. “Robbing the laundrymat is one thing, but robbing us is quite another. We’re your friends.”
“Naw,” he said. “You ain’t.”
Mrs. Balch remembered the D minus she’d given the boy in penmanship, although he’d struggled so hard even to hold the pen properly, never mind form the letters. She wrestled her wedding ring off her finger and dropped it in the pillowcase. In her pocketbook, she knew, was a ten-dollar bill and some singles. She added the pocketbook, then the garnet earrings she’d inherited from her mother. Mrs. Balch wondered sadly if she’d ever see them again.
Rena remembered all the times she’d walked past Elwood’s pitiful little stall in front of the nursing home and never bought a thing—well, why should she have? Bunch of junk. Into the pillowcase went her purse with the forty dollars she’d been about to spend for the week’s groceries, then her diamond engagement ring, which she’d been wearing on her right hand for three years, ever since she and Phil went their separate ways. Dammit, she might not be married anymore, but she’d e
arned that ring. She didn’t like the way this was going at all.
Mandy remembered how she and her friends used to shout Hey, Smellwood, where’d you lose your chin? at him as they rode past on their bikes. She didn’t have a wedding ring, not yet, but she had two hundred dollars she’d just taken out of the ATM to give to Donnie Dorr, who was adding a porch onto her trailer and would work for less if you paid him under the table. She put the wallet containing those crisp new twenties into the pillowcase, plus her beloved gold chain anklet engraved with her initials. Geez, she needed to pee so bad. And now she felt sort of sick to her stomach, nervous sick. She always thought Elwood was harmless, poor old doofus, but maybe she’d been wrong.
“Elwood, dear,” Mrs. Balch said, “if you go your mother will miss you terribly. Why don’t you reconsider? Maybe the laundrymat people will overlook the damage you did to their change machine if you give the money back directly.”
Rena glared at Mrs. Balch. Reminding him of his witch of a mother was the last thing to convince him not to bolt.
“You’ll be leaving behind witnesses, you know,” Mrs. Balch went on in a kindly voice. “The police will put up a roadblock and arrest you long before the bus gets to Bangor.”
Christ on a crutch, Rena thought. Why did she have to bring up the subject of witnesses? Who knew what Elwood was capable of, bashful grin or no? He could shoot them as easy as any change machine. “Shut the hell up, you old windbag,” she hissed at Mrs. Balch.
“There’s no need to be rude,” Mandy said, beginning to sniffle.
“You can shut your mouth too,” Rena said, “like you should’ve shut your legs when that worm digger came around, and would’ve if you had any sense.”