He got to the side of the car. The door was still open.
And Hillary was sitting up screaming bloody murder because she'd awakened from her nap and everyone had left her behind.
Joe imagined the therapist's bill for her, when she was about seventeen, several thousand dollars—all because when she'd been three, they'd left her in the Buick for ten minutes by herself in the middle of nowhere.
He unstrapped her from her harness and took her up in his arms. "Hilly, Hilly," he said, rubbing his nose softly against hers.
Her face was wet with tears. She stopped crying and inhaled deeply. She said nothing. She knew enough words, but she'd gotten really good lately at withholding her thoughts from him as a form of punishment.
She's a fast learner.
He kissed her cheek and hugged her tight; turned and waved to Jenny and Aaron, who were fast approaching. "It's okay," he said.
His wife grabbed Hillary from him and swung her up. "My big baby."
Things were great between them, right? Really great, only notice how she takes the kids from me when she can, like she's afraid some kind of weakness of character is going to rub off from my hands? Or maybe another one will die because of some karmic debt I've built up. And hell, she may be right.
"She scared the deer off," Aaron sulked.
"There'll be other deer," Joe said,
Hillary put her small fists up to her eyes to wipe them of the leftover tears and said, "Hungee, Mommy, I hungee."
Jenny glanced at Joe. "We're all a little hungee, right?"
Joe said, "There'll be a place in town. We can eat before we see Gramma."
"You mean 'the witch'?" Aaron asked.
Joe glared at Jenny, who glared at Aaron, who said, "What I do?"
Jenny said, "You know what you did."
Aaron shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his jeans and watched the ground as if he could focus his shame in the dirt.
"God," Joe sighed, and then shouted, "I HATE THIS PLACE!"
His voice echoed along the river. The Paramount River flowed, eventually, to the New River, or maybe it was the Kanawha, Joe couldn't remember. His voice would echo down its stony corridors. But he had lied in his pronouncement; it had been his home he hated, a particular house, on River Road, not haunted or ugly or dull. But a house of nightmare, nonetheless.
"You're going to scare her, shouting like that, Joe, Jesus," Jenny said, clutching Hillary ever tighter. "Come on, it's not so bad. We'll only stay a week. You at least owe her that."
Aaron looked up at his father. "I kind of like it here, Daddy," he said. "I want to have another gramma, too. Even if she is a you-know-what."
And she is, Joe thought. A witch. A nightmare in a housecoat. The woman who gives a bad name to bitches. Mommy Fearest. What would she be, now that she was sick? A shriveled, tired, whining creature with claw hands and iron-gray head? Am I going to have to love her and care for her now? What had she said about his first novel in her letter? "It's like being invited to a great restaurant, with wonderful linens and silver and waiters and fine wine, and sitting down at the table, and having the waiter bring over a huge covered silver tray, setting it down in front of me, and as he lifts up the cover, I see that all that's there is a pile of dung. You'll never support yourself, except maybe as a pornographer. Why don't you just go back into the car business?"
And that had actually been one of her finer moments. She had shined at distant relatives' funerals, when she could go up to the family and tell the recent widow what a terrible wife she'd been to the deceased; or with his father, how she'd driven him into the ground practically inch by inch over the years of Joe's youth. Her affairs over the years, her cheapness, her open condemnations of others.
Am I going to have to love her now?
And then, one other thought before he got back behind the driver's seat of the car.
I don't want to feel sorry for her. I want to remember all the bad things she did.
It had taken him nearly seventeen years to make it back to this hellhole, and now he wished he'd done what he intended back when he was eighteen: burn the fucker down.
But still, he drove on up to Colony.
2
The town itself, beyond the lovely countryside, was not a feast for the eyes; but whether or not it deserved to be burned to the ground was a question best left unanswered. The rows of shops and houses up and down Main Street and Queen Anne Street and its vectors had been built during the Federal period, and then there was the PO and town hall, miniature Greek Revival buildings, gone to gray seed from neglect and lack of funds. Overseeing the business district, you would have an impression of green glass in windows and old hearthstone brick and black shutters. The streets were empty at noon, busy by three or four, and dead again as darkness seeped in. The shops had no defined hours of business; whenever proprietors felt like being there tended to be the hours of operation. Where the flat-topped roofs of the business district ended, the sharp corners of the neighborhoods began. Private houses grew like feeble crops from the center of town outward. People had a degree of wealth, once, along the Paramount River's banks, for every fourth house was enormous and sprawling, now owned by poor relations who would board up broken windows rather than fix them, and wrap tarp over a leaky roof. Now and then, there had been a fire, through lightning or arson, and the blackened foundation and chimney of a hundred-year-old house would stand amidst a peaceful neighborhood; so in its history, whether through an act of God or man, Joe Gardner had not been the first to wish the town would go up in flames.
Dale Chambers, a third-generation Colonian, didn't have anything on his mind as spectacular as burning the town down. He was thinking more along the lines of murder.
Murdering someone, particularly someone you care about, is never a simple matter of planning and then executing. Things go wrong, fate steps in, life tosses in a screw or two. Dale Chambers was finding this out on this fairly chilly day in November when he felt, at the age of forty-eight, that life was still good and that his prime had not passed. These feelings were mainly because of his thing with Lannie.
As affairs went, Lannie Barnes's with Dale Chambers was going pretty well—she had companionship at least three nights out of the week, and he got some nooky that his wife Nelda had been denying him for the past twenty years. It couldn't be said that the affair was a secret, but it also could be maintained that Nelda didn't give a flyer who her husband put it to as long as he didn't come wagging it at her. Dale had always lusted after Lannie, ever since the days he worked at the factory before he'd turned seventeen, long before he switched careers. All those times he had seen her on his drive home, at sixteen, on summer evenings, necking with farm boys out at the river.
That had been years ago, of course, when Lannie was still the tease of the county, and was known for not wearing any underwear underneath her crinolines; later, she earned the title of town tramp; as time went on, she was known as liberated but deadly. She looked a bad forty, and had spun a hundred eighty degrees in the other direction from her bare-assed youth—she ordered silky underwear from the Victoria's Secret catalog just to entice the men. She had reached the stage where she felt to be attractive she had to hide more than she revealed.
They were, at the moment Joe Gardner and his wife Jenny and their two children were heading towards the town, in a desperate embrace, tangled in the moth-eaten sheets of the Miner's Lodge. They had a private room upstairs, and had greedily devoured a plate of oysters and cheeses, and had downed a jug of Chianti. Lannie's blue eye shadow had rubbed off on Dale's navel. Dale wore Cherries-In-The-Snow lipstick imprints on some places on his body that even he had never seen. What made this an important coupling for both of them was that Lannie announced her impending pregnancy right at the moment Dale was about to enter her—his spirit wilted as quickly as did his flesh.
"I think I heard you wrong," he said, pulling away from her, the suction of skin slurping as he did so. And then, thoughtlessly, he added, "An
d you're too old, for God's sake."
She drew back against the pillows and covered her breasts with the sheet. "As it would turn out, Dale, hon, I'm not. I saw Dr. Cobb on Tuesday and it seems there's a little Dale just gettin' his fingers."
This was about the point when Dale decided to kill her. It wasn't the most logical process. He didn't want his wife Nelda to know, of course, that he had gotten the town tramp knocked up; neither did he want to be a father. He had one bastard in town already, and didn't think there was room for more. To top this all off, he was furious with Lannie for letting this happen. She was supposed to be on birth control pills, which Dale felt was the woman's duty, and so she must've wanted to get pregnant—Christ, at her age—as a trap for him.
Well, it wasn't going to work.
Dale had killed someone once before, years ago, and no one had found out. It had been an accident, really. He had only been eight or nine, and it was another little boy who had tried to touch his weenie. That was a no-no as far as the Gump was concerned. So he had taken the kid to one of the old mine shafts that had since been covered over because of just such incidents, and shoved him down it. His intention then was not to really kill the kid, but just to put him someplace where Dale would never have to see him again. Nobody ever looked down the shaft; the boy was gone for good; and Dale's conscience barely gave him a tweak over the incident. Dale Chambers was not quite as smart as he thought, though, because as he got older he would occasionally get the odd letter typed on a cheesy old Royal typewriter (he figured this out later, when he started using the ancient typewriter his wife used to write her pathetic poetry on). The letters said: I saw you. You're naughty. Or, I know you inside and out.
He had been scared of the letters at first. But the letters stopped just a couple of years before, and nothing had happened.
So, the idea of murdering Lannie because of her pregnancy was not that far-fetched. He knew it could be done—he had studied murder cases in his off-hours, and a few on the job, as well. He knew that sometimes people got away with it; and the ones who didn't were stupid or scared or just plain wanted to get caught. Killing Lannie wasn't the problem, not for Dale, it was all the baggage that went along with it: the time, the place, the alibi, the proper technique. He was a particular fan of true crime books, mainly dealing with serial killers, his idols being Ted Bundy and the Zodiac Killer, in particular, although he certainly was an avid reader of anything having to do with Jack the Ripper, too. Jack was amazing—he got away with it, apparently. That Black Dahlia Killer, from the forties, he got away with it, too. It could be done.
He leaned against Lannie, pressing himself closer, and kissed her cheek. She couldn't read his mind, could she?
"You want me to get rid of it, don't you?" she asked, sounding like a whiny kitten. "Well, I'm a good Baptist girl and I ain't gonna do it."
He kissed her sweetly. Like she was already a mother. She had always had baby hunger, hadn't she? She had been spreading her legs since she was twelve, and it wasn't for pleasure or money or acceptance, it was for the basic reason, the most essential reason for having sex. It occurred to him that Lannie Barnes might be the most old-fashioned girl in all of Colony, because she probably had only ever viewed lust's main function as procreation! And after nearly three and a half decades of trying, she had finally gotten the bun in the oven.
"We'll have the baby," Dale Chambers whispered. "But let's keep it secret for a while. You didn't tell Virgil who the father is, did you?"
She shook her head. Tears in her eyes; smile on her face. "Dr. Cobb ain't the type to spread stories, if that's what you mean. But I wanted to tell you first, before I told anybody else. I didn't want it to get back to your wife. Not yet. Not something this special. You love me, don't you, Dale? And you'll love the baby, too, won't you?"
He answered her with kisses.
After a bout of lovemaking where he pummeled her good, Dale Chambers showered, dressed, left the Lodge, and stood out in the early evening shadows, with the streetlamps humming to yellow life. He wondered just how he was going to put Lannie Barnes out of her misery.
He got in his car and leaned out the window to wave to Virgil Cobb, possibly the oldest practicing country doctor in the county, let alone the whole state, who was carrying three sacks of groceries to his old beat-up car. "Well, hey, Doc, how goes the trade?"
Virgil was nearly seventy, but in pretty good shape, "spry" as the young called the old when the latter group could barely bend at the waist to pick up a penny, or manage a smile on a hot day. He was wearing his traditional Scots plaid bow tie, heavily starched white shirt, and tweed jacket; always in khakis, always with the argyle socks, always in penny loafers—Virgil was a walking ad for 1958, which happened to be the year that Virgil's wife had left him and gone off to New York for a bigger life. Virgil set the groceries on the sidewalk and practically trotted over to Dale. The old man leaned into the car window and said, "Hey, Sheriff."
Dale Chambers smiled, and thought: You don't know the real me, old man, I have a secret and nobody in this town knows the inside me, the thing I am inside, the one who gets the letter telling me how naughty I am, the one who's gonna make sure Lannie Barnes never sees too many more sunrises. The Gump is gonna do it, 'cause he's my inside man, my innard self, ho-ho.
3
After he spoke with Sheriff Chambers, Virgil Cobb picked his groceries back up and took them to his car. He was beginning to notice the change—not just in the temperature, although with this first nightfall of November, it was dropping fast—it might get as low as forty tonight, maybe some snow down here in the lowlands in the next couple of weeks.
But something else, too.
Like a reminder of his youth, he felt it: the town was changing in some way, maybe because half the young people left as soon as they could drive, and the other half took off when they turned legal age. It was a place people didn't want to stay in anymore. He'd only had a handful of patients in the past two years, mainly the ones close to his age who had always been coming to him. These days, most of his patients drove over to Stone Valley to the spanking new HMOs and medical centers—they didn't trust an old man with their ailments. In the winters, which could get harsh, come January, the Malabar Hills cut the town off whenever there was a good storm coming through; the summers had become unbearable with the mosquito population and the excessive humidity. And jobs. There were no jobs. People like Virgil couldn't even afford to retire—he knew it was just a matter of time before he got forced out because of his age, but how were young people to ever keep the lifeblood going in a town where the jobs were so limited, and so coveted? When he had been a boy, he had seen how Vidal Junction, at the pass in the hills, had dried up and become a ghost town, and there were other places, too, small corners of the state that had died when the mining towns had closed or had dried up and blown away because there was nothing solid to keep them in place. Towns had lives just like people did, Virgil knew. You had to feed them, you had to nurture them, you had to keep their lifeblood pumping.
Something his little brother Eugene (rest his soul) had told him once, when Virgil had first studied biology in high school. Hemogoblins. Virgil pricked Eugene's finger to get some blood to test and see what blood type he was, and he tried to explain about blood, about white corpuscles and hemoglobin, but all Eugene had repeated back was, corporals and hemogoblins.
Whenever he thought of poor Eugene, he remembered those silly childhood things.
For a moment, he saw a face through a darkened shop window, and it startled him until he realized it was his own face. Looked like a ghost, he thought, for just a second, thought it was a ghost.
But it was the Virgil Cobb that had grown creaky and cobwebbed and stooped from what had been a rather handsome youth, who had once turned down the advances of a few ladies because of his pursuit of the life of the mind: books and medicine. Loved books too much, maybe. Lived in them most of the time. Escaped into them, you could say. Half his bed at home was taken up
with books and papers; he slept on the other half, occasionally feeling the spine of a hardcover as if tucking his wife in.
Tried to die, though, but can't. You can't die when you never really lived, can you? It would be redundant. Virgil drew the collar of his herringbone tweed jacket up around his neck. Getting cold. He knew his thoughts were too depressing; maybe it was just his age. Maybe you live life long enough and you expect the world to die before you do. Maybe you expect all of them to disappear, the candle to extinguish, before yours gets snuffed. Virgil had been over the hill recently to see another doctor—well, not a doctor, who was he fooling?—a psychiatrist, which is a doctor, but not the kind that you could talk about openly in Colony—and the doctor had asked him to describe his symptoms. "Tired, forgetful, worn out. And sometimes I wake up thinking: it's a good day to get in the car and die."
The psychiatrist had asked, "Die?" Virgil had chuckled, "Did I say that? No. I mean, it's a good day to get in the car and drive. Just drive, anywhere."
"Dr. Cobb," the psychiatrist had said, "you said, 'die.'''
And he had.
He knew he had.
Virgil Cobb didn't think he wanted to die, but the concept just crept in there, under the fence.
He put his groceries in the car and locked the doors. Used to be, you didn't have to lock anything in Colony, least of all your car; things had changed. He was going to go for a walk out to the cemetery, see his brother. Hadn't seen him in a long time. It'd be cold, but old Eugene had been out there with no one to check on him since maybe August. Virgil figured he ought to talk with him awhile, get some advice.
Virgil was beginning to wonder if most of his friends and family weren't out there, at Watch Hill, the ten-acre boneyard just bordering the Paramount River, within the town limits. He could name at least nineteen people he knew who were currently (and indefinitely) underground, and might only be able to name another ten to twelve who were above.
Nights Towns: Three Novels, a Box Set Page 7