A Wedding on the Banks

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Oh, Mr. Pinkham,” a voice rang out from across the yard. “Yoo-hoo!” It was Thelma Ivy, leaning precariously out of number 1. “Mr. Pinkham, we’d like breakfast in our room tomorrow.”

  Even in his stupor, Albert was aghast. How many times that day alone had he asked Thelma Ivy to show him, on the Albert Pinkham Motel sign, just one place where it said restaurant.

  “Anything you want, Miss Ivy,” Albert lifted his head to say. “We aim to please.”

  “Continental, if you don’t mind,” said Thelma, who seemed not at all surprised that the proprietor was flat on his face.

  “Continental. Oriental.” Albert waved his arm. “You just name it.”

  “Thank you,” said Thelma, and disappeared back inside number 1.

  It was ten minutes later that Albert Pinkham adjusted his key into the lock of his door and swung with it, as it flew open, into his own warm kitchen. He had left the bottle outside, in cold shards on the ground next to his spill. He had another one, by God, the one that deer hunter from Boston had given him. Albert found it on the bottom shelf of the cupboard and broke its seal.

  “Here’s to you, you city son of a whore,” Albert toasted the donor of the blessed bottle. “You couldn’t hit an elephant in the ass at ten feet,” he added. Bruce ran to the sofa as Albert staggered to the kitchen drawer and slid it open. There beneath the nickels and pennies, the pencils and paper clips, was the tintype of the old barn builder. More of his face was missing now, wasn’t it? Albert tried to focus. A bit of the right cheekbone was gone, almost the entire left pupil, a good part of the nose. The old barn builder was disappearing by the second.

  “Please come back,” Albert whispered, but the tintype didn’t answer. Only Bruce whined a pitiful response. Albert put the picture down on the table and then opened his refrigerator. He took the carton of eggs, eight of them still growing out of their paper cups. He took the half pound of bacon and a bottle of orange juice. From the cupboard he added a loaf of white bread and a can of Folgers coffee. He staggered to the door, Bruce following out of curiosity.

  At Thelma’s door Albert kicked twice. If Junior Ivy could kick doors, by Jesus, Albert Pinkham could too. Thelma opened it. Expecting Junior at any minute, she was still in her housecoat. Her eyes were lined with her trademark dark circles and her hair fluttered in unruly wisps.

  “Lord love a duck,” said Thelma, as Albert kicked the door wide open. She screamed, then ran back to cower on her bed.

  “You want breakfast in bed, miss?” Albert said, in his best proprietor’s voice. “Well, the Albert Pinkham Motel is here to serve you.” Then, amidst the shrill echoes of Thelma’s screams, Albert splattered the room with eggs. They ran like mutant daisies down the walls. He slung all the slices of bread, large snowflakes, at Thelma before he opened the orange juice and poured it about on the floor. Thelma clutched a pillow to her head. The bacon buzzed above her, stuck to the wall like strips of brown tape, then dropped to the floor.

  “Coffee?” Albert asked. The grounds came at her, a brown swirling snowstorm. Thelma was thankful that she had not been so quick to give up her Valiums that day, despite her promise to Junior.

  “Enjoy,” said Albert Pinkham.

  He stepped out onto his cement walkway, an engineering idea that had occurred to him after seeing Atlantic City’s famous boardwalk on TV. He looked at number 2, the bridal suite, with snow piled up on its knob, with nothing but silence coming from the box springs within. A wave of loneliness washed up inside Albert Pinkham, mixed with a little nausea. He followed the building, as though the shingles were braille characters, around to the back, to where number 3 blared its yellow light out at him.

  “Violet,” Albert whispered. Bruce was not there to whine in memory with his master. He had stayed behind in number 1 to helpfully clean up the strips of bacon from the floor.

  Albert knocked gently and Monique Tessier, expecting Junior, opened the door in a gossamer yellow negligee, which glowed around her shapely body like a halo.

  “Violet?” Albert whispered. All he wanted, he tried in vain to tell this vision, was what she’d promised him that autumn afternoon, ten years earlier, as the red and orange leaves of a dead year piled like colored rain on the roof.

  “Mr. Pinkham!” Monique scolded. Her eyes were large as her nipples. Albert could barely decide which he should gaze at as she spoke. “You’re drunk!” Monique tried to close the door again, but Albert’s work boot lodged itself into the crack.

  “Please, Violet,” he said. “They’re all gone now. Sarah, Belle, Mama, Daddy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Granddaddy’s gone, too,” Albert said. “I’m the only one left now, Violet.” He reached a thin arm inside the crack of the door and touched Violet’s velvety one. She was warm, cozy as autumn. She was on fire, with pink walls flaming all around her, with rose petal walls looming.

  “I need you,” Albert said. “I only want what you promised.” Monique Tessier opened the door.

  “Come in,” she said, and stepped aside. Albert had difficulty lifting his heavy boots although inside them his feet felt light as a dancer’s. His legs, however, were heavier than the trees he had refused to cut, all those years ago. He staggered past Monique Tessier and into number 3.

  “Thank you, Violet,” he said, as Monique brought a J. C. Penney’s brass table lamp down with genuine force on Albert Pinkham’s head.

  Albert fell out across the floor of the room, seeing only pink stars in his last seconds, knowing only that Violet La Forge, the slut, had tricked him again. Monique Tessier held a hand to her mouth. It occurred to her that perhaps she had been a tad too hasty. Perhaps the motel owner was richer than he appeared. She was reminded of newspaper stories about country bumpkins who had buckets of gold stashed in their wells or beneath the shit piled up in their outhouses. Crusty old men who slept upon mattresses stuffed with silver dollar certificates. But no, surely every single female in Mattagash would be in heat for Albert Pinkham if this were true. Junior was right. This was not a town in which one could successfully stage a secret.

  “Mr. Pinkham,” Monique said, and pushed her toe against Albert’s side. “Are you alive?” She tried to pull him, by one booted foot, out of her room. But Albert’s drunk body had settled inside its bones with the same certainty as the massive ice chunks along the Mattagash River. Albert was dead weight.

  Monique was about to panic. She feared what Junior would think if he found Albert in her room. She was close, very close, to securing Junior for her own, and then money would fly.

  “Please leave my room,” Monique said loudly, in case even the snowflakes were Mattagash spies. “Now!” she warned. A rattling sound broke out of Albert’s mouth, followed by a small waterfall of spit.

  “Dammit!” said Monique.

  Something had to be done before Junior returned from reporting the Caddy missing. Monique pulled on a sweater and a pair of sweat pants. She put on her ankle-high boots and trod next door to Randy’s room. The light was off, but then, Monique knew, all of Randy’s lights were out these days. He hadn’t even questioned her vacationing in Mattagash at the same time as the Ivys. There was no response to her knock, and there were no telltale tracks going into the room. Even the snow was a gossip bag in Mattagash, Maine.

  Monique returned to number 3 only to find Albert Pinkham still unconscious on her floor. But she had formulated a plan. Women without means always have plans. She wrapped a white bath towel about her head, hiding her luxurious chestnut hair, and pinned it snugly. She dug in her purse for her sunglasses and plopped them over her lavender eyes. She looked at the ghoulish image in the mirror. Mysterious, yes. Deathly, maybe. Elizabeth Taylor, not on your life.

  At number 1 Monique was saved the problem of knocking on the door. It was wide open, allowing a trail of wind-blown snow to cascade into the room. Having consumed a
half pound of bacon, Bruce bounded past her, in search of what might be left of his master. Monique was shocked at the condition of Albert’s second most-rented room. It was in a culinary shambles.

  “Hello?” Monique said. “Anybody home?”

  When no one answered, she stepped inside. She could hear mouselike noises coming from the bathroom. She stepped over the bread and splattered eggs and peered around the corner at Junior’s wife, who was leaning against the washbasin. Thelma Parsons Ivy had just washed a couple more Valiums down and was beginning to feel a calm settle about her stomach and her senses. So what if Albert Pinkham had assaulted her with breakfast items. He was only expressing himself in a most creative way. Men should go to war in just such a fashion. Women could clean up behind them.

  “Hi there,” Monique said, and Thelma heard the throaty words bounce off all the noisy bathroom acoustics. She looked up to see a person in dark glasses and a terry-cloth turban peering at her with great interest.

  “Ahhh!” Thelma screamed and threw Albert Pinkham’s water glass, one that had been filled with jelly just months earlier, into the bathtub. The glass bounced twice before it broke in a crescendo of tinkling tones.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Monique assured her. “I’m your neighbor. Around back.”

  Thelma stared at her with suspicion. No one said this was Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, but she knew this woman, didn’t she? Where had she heard that voice before? Was she one of the models on The Price Is Right? Let’s Make a Deal?

  “What do you want?” Thelma asked.

  “I need you to help me,” said Monique. “Mr. Pinkham has had an accident in my room.”

  “He had one here, too,” said Thelma.

  “Can you come help me get him into his house?”

  Thelma knew, with Valium certainty, what was in the air. A spy! Junior had sent some Mattagash spy to test her. Well then, let the games begin. She would simply dust the snow off the gauntlet and take that sucker up.

  Back at number 3, Bruce was sitting at Albert’s head and whimpering sadly.

  “You take that leg and I’ll take this one,” the spy in the turban instructed Thelma. Bruce growled in disapproval and startled Thelma so that she dropped Albert’s foot.

  “Be careful,” she warned herself. “Try to remember that this is a test. This woman is a spy. This dog could be one, too.”

  “Okay now. Pull!” Monique said, and Albert’s body moved off the floor of number 3, over the hump of the doorway, and out onto the cement walkway.

  “Let’s turn him on his back,” Monique suggested. “Or we’ll rub all the skin off his face.” Thelma wasn’t so sure that a little cosmetic surgery for the motelier was a bad idea, but she helped turn Albert anyway. They were a team, the woman in the turban and the woman on Valium. They dragged Albert Pinkham across the snowy expanse of his motel yard and up to the front door of his house. Behind them, on the ground, they left a wide trail, a track, as though the tired workhorses of old were back at work yarding out pine logs and leaving trails in the snow.

  Pausing for breath, Thelma looked at Monique Tessier’s finely shaped nose, which poked out beneath the sunglasses. Oh, where had she seen this strange woman? They pulled Albert Pinkham into his kitchen.

  “We can’t lift him, so let’s leave him here on the floor,” Monique said. “At least he’ll be warm until he sleeps it off.”

  As Marvin Sr. drove Junior into the driveway of the Albert Pinkham Motel, his car lights caught two women walking across four inches of new snow between the house and the motel. One had a bath towel on her head and was wearing dark glasses. The other was Thelma.

  “What the—?” asked Junior.

  “I’m not even going to ask,” said Marvin. “I’ve got a long day tomorrow. You handle this.”

  Back on Albert Pinkham’s floor, the snores were rolling evenly out of the grandson’s mouth. On the table, in the tintype, the grandfather’s hollow eyes picked up the beam of light that raced around the room as Marvin Ivy turned his car in the driveway. What was left of the lips still curved upward in a memory of the log drives and the first burly lumberjacks. The grandfather’s hands were calloused from the last barn ever built in Mattagash with style. Albert Pinkham was right. A way of life was disappearing.

  THE PINES ARE ALIVE WITH MUSIC: BEING A GIFFORD MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY

  Folks in a town that was quite remote heard

  Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo.

  —“The Lonely Goatherd,” Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music

  It was almost 1:00 a.m. when Roy Vachon signaled a turn into Albert Pinkham’s motel and steered the Watertown sheriff’s car into the unplowed drive. Behind him, happily ensconced in the driver’s seat of the exotic Caddy, was Patrolman Wayne Fortin. On the thirty-mile drive to Mattagash, Wayne had turned every knob and button he could find on the magical dashboard of the car. Roy Vachon had no choice but to drive Lola Craft home after he put the car thief safely in jail. There was only one cell in the Watertown jail and Lola was, after all, a female.

  “You understand, of course, Miss Craft,” Roy Vachon warned her, “that you’re what is called an accomplice.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” Lola cried, thinking of what Winnie would say when she found out. Lola had burst into tears when she first saw the blue light swirling around behind the Caddy, and had stopped only long enough to give her name, tearfully, to the Watertown sheriff.

  “Since I’ve got to drive her home anyway,” Roy Vachon said to his patrolman, “you might as well follow me in the Cadillac. I got a feeling that asshole from Portland is gonna ring our phone off the hook until he gets it back.”

  Wayne Fortin hated to return to Mattagash, even to drop off the Cadillac. But the notion of driving one of those babies for thirty miles took the edge off the situation.

  “Okay,” Wayne Fortin had said to the sheriff. Then he had gone into the tiny cell where Randy Ivy pressed his face against the bars. When prisoners did that—and prisoners to Wayne Fortin had been only drunks and petty thieves in the past—they always reminded Wayne of babies pressing their faces against the wooden bars of their cribs.

  “We’ll be back in an hour or so,” he told the baby-faced prisoner.

  “You don’t understand,” Randy Ivy had pleaded yet again. “I’m Marvin Randall Ivy the Third. The car belongs to my old man.”

  “Sure,” said Wayne Fortin. “And my old man owned the Titanic.”

  “I’d believe it,” Randy said. “You probably helped sink it.”

  “Why can’t you show us any identification?” Wayne asked.

  “I’m a goddamn kid!” Randy shouted. “I ain’t got any identification. I used to have a license but a judge took it.”

  “I can see why,” said Wayne Fortin, as he paused to stare into the bloodshot eyes of the prisoner. His haircut alone spoke of nonsocial behavior. Even the tiny pimples about the chin and forehead looked guilty as hell. People who had titles such as Little Snot-Snot the Third, people who had numbers tacked after their names, didn’t look like this kid. Rich kids didn’t have pimples, for crying out loud. Their parents paid so many dollars per blackhead to have them removed.

  “If your name ain’t Gifford,” Wayne Fortin had said to his captive, “then mine ain’t Fortin.”

  “I know your name ain’t Fortin, you boob!” Randy had screamed after him, exciting all his pimples. “It’s Fife. Barney Fife!”

  Now in the comfortable seat of the Cadillac, Wayne Fortin watched Roy Vachon’s breath coming out of his nostrils in cold puffs as he knocked on the door of number 1. Wayne fumed. The pimply little SOB. What rankled him more was that it wasn’t just Mattagashers who likened him to Andy Taylor’s deputy from Mayberry. Even his own cohorts in Watertown did the same. He’d been listening to these insults for the entire two years he’d been on the force.

&nb
sp; Wayne Fortin slid out from behind the wheel of the Cadillac and handed Junior the keys.

  “Which Gifford was it?” Junior was asking Roy Vachon, as he ducked his head into the car and gave it a quick checkup. It all seemed to be there.

  “We don’t know yet,” said the sheriff. “He refuses to give us his real name.”

  “Your hubcaps are gone,” said Wayne.

  “The son of a bitch,” Junior said, and kicked the front tire. “He’s a lucky man there ain’t a scratch on this car.” Junior ran his hand along the smooth side.

  “He had a girl with him,” the sheriff added. “We’ll get his real name if we have to take fingerprints. But I’ve learned that a sobering night in jail serves well enough to jar a man’s memory.”

  “I’d like to jar his balls,” said Junior. “Was he drinking?”

  “Loaded,” said Roy. “And by his eyes, I suspect that wasn’t all. The college kids in Watertown have begun bringing marijuana up from downstate.”

  “I tell you,” said Junior, having navigated the circumference of the car on a slow inspection, “he’s a lucky man to be in jail. If I’d gotten my hands on the bastard, well, there’s no telling.”

  Roy Vachon and Wayne Fortin stared at the owner of the wondrous Cadillac. Maybe if he fell on someone there would be no telling how they’d end up.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Junior said, finally satisfied that the hubcaps had been his only loss. “I’ll stop in tomorrow and press charges.”

  “Whatever you say,” Roy Vachon said.

  “In the meantime,” Junior yelled over his shoulder, “you keep that son of a bitch Gifford locked up.” He was carefully retracing his deep footprints in the snow.

  “That’s the funny part,” said Roy Vachon, as he opened the driver’s door to the patrol car. “He’s been telling us his real name is Marvin Randall Ivy the Third. And that he’s really your son. Ain’t that a hoot?”