Now, here I came, blowing in like the dry wind that carries grit and sand across the railroad tracks, and no one seemed to think it peculiar that this was the fourth time I’d been here, unaccompanied, as usual, by any adult. The first time, Louise Snell had asked, in a friendly and not nosy way, where I was from, or what I was doing here in her Windy Run Diner. My reason had been that my dad’s car had broken down and it was being fixed over at the Esso place. The times I had come before today had been information-gathering events. Once for Toya Tidewater (who I never found) and again for Jude Stemple (who I did).
“That car done been fixed yet?” asked Billy.
This question was not asked in a joking manner, but in a small-talk way. Would that car still be at the Esso station after nearly three weeks? But this didn’t faze them one bit. Nothing much did. Things just didn’t seem to change here, at least that’s my impression. It accounts, I guess, for the mysterious quality of Time, as if Time had been misplaced and we all had to get along as best we could without it. I remembered one of our hotel guests who explored a lot, talking about his travels in Tibet: the farther up he went into the mountains and the villages in them, the more time rolled back until he got to one so far up he felt completely outside of time.
I’d finished looking at the menu, still making up my mind as I waited for Louise Snell to come for my order, and she did.
“What’ll it be today, hon?”
Thinking of the ham pinwheels with cheese sauce my mother had left for our lunch, I had to check with my stomach to see how it felt about the hot roast beef sandwich. It told me the roast beef would be too much, and I had better just settle for pie and a Coke. The pies were displayed in a cupboard behind glass. The chocolate cream looked really good so I ordered that.
Instead of starting right off with asking Louise Landis’s whereabouts, I decided that mentioning Ben Queen would be the best route to take to her. After all, it’d been all over the papers that police were looking for him “to assist in their inquiries” into the shooting death of Fern. Since Ben Queen came from here, they’d regard the place itself as more or less famous and would be glad to talk about it. I smiled at everybody to get them feeling friendly toward me, but it was a wasted smile, as they were always glad to see a stranger here, even if the stranger was a kid.
I asked, “Doesn’t that man police are looking for live in Cold Flat Junction?” I mustered up my dumb look. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew it really was dumb, for the question set off a spate of reactions that would go on and on until doomsday and would never get to Louise Landis.
“Those policemen got it all wrong,” said Billy, who, as usual, led off. “Ben Queen never killed nobody, and that’s a fact.”
The woman in the booth put in, “Ben’d never kill anyone and sure not his own child.”
Everyone nodded and muttered words of agreement.
Louise Snell said, “There’s just some folks in this life that’ve got to be scapegoats.”
Scapegoats. It’s exactly what Ben Queen and I were talking about that night by the spring.
The husband part of the couple in the booth turned around and said, “Well, but Ben was kind of wild.”
His wife slapped the hand holding his spoon of soup and all the others more or less turned on him. It was not a popular opinion.
“Where you goin’ with this, Mervin?” Billy turned on his stool as if meaning to make something of it.
“He ain’t going nowhere, Billy.” Mervin’s wife whispered something to him and gave his hand another crack.
“I was only sayin’—”
Billy waved a dismissive hand at the two and turned back to the counter. Just as Louise Snell passed him with my pie, he said. “Don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”
Louise Snell stopped and leveled a look at him as she pointed her head in my direction.
Billy slid a look off me and said, “Oh. Sorry, ma’am.”
Ma’am? Me? Mervin sticking his nose in had kind of calmed things down, so I stirred them up. “Maybe he’s hiding out here somewhere—somewheres.” (I thought it would make them take to me more if I adopted a few little habits of speech.)
“Round here? You mean in Cold Flat Junction?” Don Joe’s voice slid up on a rising scale of notes, ending in a kind of astonished squeak.
Up and down the counter they regarded one another as if this was crazy but interesting. “I just thought if he came—come—from here, well, it’d be where he’d want to hole up.”
“Hole up” was good, I thought.
Don Joe frowned. “It’d be the first place police’d look.”
How naive, I thought.
Don Joe went on: “If I was Ben Queen, ’d’ve hotfooted it right to the border.” He slid one hand off another in imitation of the speed he’d fly off with.
“What border?” asked the woman in the thick glasses.
“Who cares? Alaska. That’s where I’d go. Yes, sirree. To get me back to the U.S. of A. they’d have to exterdite me.”
Louise Snell was leaning against the pie cupboard. “That’s part of the United States, Don Joe.”
“Since when, woman?”
“I don’t know when. It just is. Has been for a long time.”
“Twenty-one years,” I put in, thinking if I appeared knowledgeable, they’d be more inclined to pay attention. I didn’t know how long Alaska had been a state. I’m not even sure I knew it was. I knew there were two states added on to the forty-eight, but they could have been Nova Scotia and the Florida Keys for all I knew. For all any of us knew. They turned to me with something like respect. I looked around at their softly blinking eyes. What they reminded me of was the forest creatures’ eyes peeping into the dark where Snow White lay asleep. But I felt more like Cinderella than Snow White, for Cinderella had those evil stepsisters. It would take two to make up one Ree-Jane.
I told myself to stop thinking about fairy tales and get back to the real world and its problems. But then I wondered, looking into the sleepy-seeming ring of eyes: were the seven dwarfs any more of a fairy tale than what we’d got going here in Cold Flat Junction? I shook myself a little, for I felt spell-bound, or about to be.
They seemed to be waiting—Billy and Don Joe and the others—for further historical revelations. I remembered Hawaii. “Number fifty’s Hawaii. That’s been a state for, oh, ten or eleven years, at least.” We were way off the subject. I squinted my eyes up and said, “Now, what were we talking about? Oh, this Ben Queen. But if he’s from here, he must have ... kin (a good word) around here.”
Evren entered the conversation. “Well, now, I dunno whether he’s still got kin or not in the Junction.”
How could anyone not know everyone who lived in Cold Flat Junction? Especially the Queens?
“Of course he does, Evren,” said Billy. “Queens has lived here long as we have. That big house over on Dubois Road. Ben’s brother and sister-in-law, that Sheba, live there. Ben lived there with Rose and Fern when their house was gettin’ built.”
“Who was Rose?” As if I didn’t know.
“Pretty girl from over Spirit Lake way. Yeah, ol’ Ben, he really give us a surprise there.” Billy was fingering a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket.
I was hoping someone would nose in with “What surprise?” but all they did was nod and murmer, so it was left to me. I imagine I knew as much as they did about Rose Devereau Queen.
But my purpose in coming here hadn’t yet been served.
“I’ll bet this Ben Queen’s got some kind of good friend here who’d help him out.”
They pursed their lips and looked thoughtful. For heaven’s sakes, why was it so hard to remember Louise Landis had been Ben’s steady girl before Rose?
Louise Snell, who had lit another cigarette, leaned her weight against the glass-enclosed cupboard again and said,
“Well, if Ben wanted help, there’s always Lou Landis.”
At last!
“Yeah, L
ou, she was always sweet on him,” said Billy.
“Hard to think,” said the chain-smoking woman in glasses,
“she’d be living all these years in the Junction.”
Don Joe leaned so he could look past Billy and down the counter. “Why’s that? The Junction ain’t a bad place. I growed up right here all my life!” He slapped his small hand on the counter.
She turned to him. “I never said it wasn’t a nice place. But Louise Landis, shoot, she’s too smart and educated to spend her life here teaching in that little no-account school. She graduated college. Then she went to some big university and got herself a—whaddayacallit?—an Advanced Degree.”
I could hear the capitals she gave those words and wondered what kind of degree.
The husband in the booth put in his second contribution. “Master of Arts, that’s what.”
Wow! I thought. What was Louise Landis doing in Cold Flat Junction? “Is Ben Queen? Educated, I mean?” I knew he wasn’t, but I wanted to hear more about the two of them.
Billy snorted. “Hell, no—’scuse my French—Ben, he couldn’t hardly sit still for stuff like that. He was one wild kid,” he added, obviously forgetting he’d laid into the man in the booth for saying just that.
I waited for more on Ben’s “wildness,” but Billy just clammed up, not giving thought to Ben Queen, but merely to the fact everyone here knew him. I drew little but air and ice through my straw and said, “I hate school.” They all smiled and nodded because that was what a kid should do. Hate school. But they didn’t say anything more about Louise Landis. “This Miss Landis, she must be a good teacher.”
“Absolutely,” said Louise Snell. “Of course she’s wasted here because she’s oversmart, even though she’s the principal. And the school only goes up to fifth grade. Then they have to go to Cloverly to the big school.”
“Real nice person,” said Billy. “Ev‘ry year she has a treat for them orphans that live up to that institution outside Cloverly, takes ’em out to lunch and stuff. Real nice woman.”
There was I guess you’d say a “respectful silence.” Then Don Joe asked Louise Snell, “Does Lou Landis still live over there in the Holler?”
I could have clapped. Here’s the information I wanted. At the same time, I felt just a trifle irritated because I myself hadn’t wormed it out of them.
Louise Snell nodded. “Surely does. Same house her folks lived in all along. They’re dead,” she said to me, as if it was information I might need. “It’s an awful big house just for one person.”
“That’s over where Jude Stemple lives,” said the woman with the thick glasses. “You got to go on a ways from his house.”
I stayed looking down the length of my straw and hoped it wouldn’t jog their memory that I’d been here not long ago asking about an Abel Stemple. But they didn’t remark on that.
“There’s some really big houses here,” I said. “I guess hers is one of them.” But it would be no problem at all to find out which it was, as all I’d have to do is ask Jude Stemple. We were by this time by way of being friends.
“Kind of pretty. Sort of a leaf-green,” said Louise Snell as she began to polish glasses with a tea towel.
With a final clatter, I set down my Coke glass. “Well, it’s real nice talking to you. I guess I better be on my way.” I smiled brightly and slid from the stool, then looked up at the big clock, gasped, “Oh, I’m late,” and rushed to the cash register with my check before they could ask where I was off to.
22
Flyback Hollow
I walked along Windy Run, which meant passing Rudy’s Bar and Grill on one side and the Esso station on the other, sitting in its own couple of acres of sandy ground. There were no cars in sight being fixed or filled up with gas. A wind tunneled down the road (which is where the road got its name, I guess), and blew a Milky Way wrapper against my foot.
As I looked across at the Esso station and wondered how business was, I asked myself why I hadn’t just gone there to find out where Louise Landis lived. Gas station attendants always know everything. Why had I gone to the diner and more or less created a lot of confusion? For I knew they’d all disagree about any topic, including the whereabouts of some villager. I suppose Lola Davidow would put it down to just being “troublesome” (which she’d told me I was on many occasions).
But this was my roundabout way. I think it had to do with what the answer came out of, how it came about. Yet, what difference does it make if the answer comes out of a long, out-of-the-way conversation, or just comes out as a simple answer? I don’t know; it just does.
It’s said the older you get the more philosophical you become. I’ll be thirteen in a couple of months. I have always looked forward to my teens, but now I’m not sure. I really don’t want to get more philosophical than I already am.
As I passed Rudy’s Bar, I stopped to look in the window. I couldn’t see much but my own reflected self right above a blue neon sign that said BEER—EATS. I would have liked to cup my hands around my face and peer through the window—it was really dark in there—and see if anybody was “drunk and disorderly.” (I enjoy police terms, when the Sheriff says them: “drunk and disorderly” sounds almost poetic.) But I didn’t stare in. I told myself it was because I respected people’s privacy, but it was more because I didn’t want Rudy coming out and yelling at me to get away from the window. I am not a risk taker.
Walking on, slowly, I kicked up leaves that skittered along the pebbly ground. Why were there dead leaves on the path in this early summer? The land all around looked as if it were between seasons. Or you’d think the place had only a single season that had to make do for all four. I had this sinking feeling as I always did in Cold Flat Junction when I was alone, just looking around. Often, there was no one else around, and when I did see others, they were few and far away. There was something collapsible about all of this, as if it were a plan of a village, a mock village, or a replica, a village cut from cardboard and put up as an experiment in lastingness. And everyone was surprised it had indeed lasted, the way that tall, thin people outlive dumpy, fat ones (or at least that’s what Ree-Jane keeps telling me).
I had come to Schoolhouse Road. The school always looked to me more like a church than a school, with its white clapboard and steeple bell. The playground was empty even of the girl I’d played Pick Up sticks with the first time I’d been here. That was scarcely three weeks ago, yet it seemed like months, years even. Time, here, stretched to breaking.
I knew exactly where Flyback Hollow was and where the Queens lived on Dubois Road, and the post office, too—a square, gray, cinderblock building. I went in and found no one about, as there hadn’t been before—no one at the window selling stamps or anything. I stopped at the bulletin board where I was glad to see there was no “Wanted” poster for Ben Queen. The Drinkwater brothers were still up there looking mean, and I wondered if the FBI had forgotten about them. I also wondered how effective the FBI was, as the Drinkwaters had been “at large” for nearly a year now. They might be up in Alaska.
“At large.” I supposed it meant being all over, being out there in some helter-skelter way, hardly visible, anonymous. I left the post office and walked on, wondering if this was a good description of me.
On Dubois Road, I stopped out in front of the Queen house. I wound my hands round the white and peeling fence pickets, and leaned back and wondered if they were home and could see me. Would they remember me from being here with Mr. Root? Of course they would, for hadn’t they told the Sheriff about me? It felt as if months had passed since I’d seen them, and I wondered if Time were like a glass of water or a Cold Comfort: if you poured too much into it, it would spill over onto any available surface. If Time has to contain too much—too many murders or lost people found or chicken wings thrown—does it have to expand to take care of it all?
I walked on, thinking about this, until I got to Flyback Hollow.
If Cold Flat Junction was a place where Time worked in strange
ways, Flyback Hollow was its midnight. Dubois Road ended here, where the name “Flyback Hollow” was painted in whitewashed letters on a large rock. Trees and foliage grew around the place where it began. It had got nearly all of the trees in Cold Flat, as if they’d got together as saplings and decided to stick together and Flyback Hollow was where they stuck.
The branches above me lapped across the narrow road and created a tunnel of coolness and partial dark. It was like a little park in here, almost, the road dividing and arcing around a couple of acres where Jude Stemple’s house sat. There were other houses, little ones, square and uninteresting and dropped about as if Aurora Paradise had tossed playing cards on the floor, which she sometimes did.
I slowed down and picked a black-eyed Susan, humming and pulling its petals. It was so nice not having to be anywhere, not having anyone to serve at dinner except for Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright. I turned around and around in quick circles like a skater, my arms thrown out and my head back. I did this until I was too dizzy to stand and had to go and lean against an oak. Then I did it again, this time moving the circles forward down the road. I suddenly stopped, wondering why I was dawdling this way and making myself dizzy when I had important things to do, like talking to Louise Landis. I hadn’t even given thought to what I was going to say.
Jude Stemple had been building the wooden fence around his house, sawing wood, when I first came across him. The fence was finished and I opened the gate. I didn’t see him outside, or hear any sawing noises coming from the shed behind the house, nor did I hear noises coming from inside, either. His hound dog was lying on the porch as usual. I walked the path up to the porch and the dog beat its tail, though it did not rise. There was a screen door and behind it the front door was open. I knocked on the doorjamb and called out, “Mr. Stemple!” I knew the open door didn’t necessarily mean anyone was home; people didn’t bother locking their doors around here.
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