At nine o’clock, Father Slomcenski knocked once, stuck his long hangdog face in the doorway and asked if Father Lombardy wanted to go down to the basement and play a few games of table tennis. Father Lombardy declined, saying he wanted to write some letters and go to bed early. He went on brooding.
Just after four in the morning he opened his eyes and realised he had fallen asleep with his clothes on. He felt hot and sticky with sweat. As he groggily undressed he told himself that the Pomar children had to be kept away from that place. And he had to do something.
He would have to return there.
‘I’m telling you, the way that chick sits there, day after day…’ Dave Lutz stood in the kitchen of his apartment, a full bottle of vodka in one hand and a full bottle of KC tonic water in the other. On the formica counter behind him was a cardboard box containing several other bottles of liquor and mixers. ‘Knees back and forth,’ he continued with a sly smile on his face. ‘Ever so gently, ever so innocently, one crotch shot after another.’ He swung his hands together and then apart in a slow but steady rhythm. ‘Jee-zuzz!’
Martin Lasker grinned broadly. He leaned back against the wall by the kitchen table. ‘Does she have any brains?’
‘Enough to know what she’s doing to me.’
‘If it’s so bad, why don’t you move her to a seat in the back of the room?’ Lasker’s grin wouldn’t go away. He enjoyed listening to Lutz’s weekly list of complaints about teaching. The two had been neighbourhood friends through grammar school and high school in Millville, and now that they were both back working in their home town they got together a couple of times a week for a meal, or to listen to music and drink.
‘Move her to the back of the room?’ Lutz looked at Lasker incredulously. ‘Are you kidding — and miss all that?’ He moved his hands back and forth again. ‘It’s the only thing that gets me through to eleven o’clock and coffee.’
‘Uh-hunh. Are you going to stand there with those bottles all night, dreaming of Angie Allen’s thighs, or are you going to make me a drink?’
‘Right. I’m going to make drinks,’ Lutz replied, turning to the counter. ‘Don’t worry, I’m in complete control.’ He took two large glasses from the cabinet in front of him and began pouring generous measures of vodka in each.
‘When do you finish for the summer?’ Lasker asked.
‘Eleven working days, a mere eternity.’
‘That’s not bad.’
‘Easy for you to say. I’m the one who has to face those dunderheads. Honestly, most of them are so dim they make Cheeta the chimp look like Einstein.’ Lutz shut the freezer door and handed Lasker a drink. ‘Try that.’
Lasker sipped from the tumbler. ‘Strong. It’s almost pure vodka.’
‘Drink up. Life is hard.’
They moved from the kitchen to the living room, which was cluttered with newspapers, magazines, half-open paperback books, a carton of ginseng capsules, dirty laundry, drinking glasses, record albums, dead potted plants, school papers and other items. Still lives like a college student, Lasker thought — as he did every time he visited his friend.
‘Are you going to look for a summer job?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lutz answered. ‘I think what I’d really like to do is commit amnesia for the next two and a half months.’
‘Commit amnesia?’
‘Sure. Wash out my head, but good. Then I’ll be ready to start teaching the next crop in September and go through it all again. Those kids are too much. They aren’t learning from me; I’m unlearning from them.’
‘Ah, bull,’ Lasker said amiably.
‘I’m not kidding,’ Lutz said quickly. ‘The other day I stopped into Murph’s to get a full tank of gas and when the guy came to my car I couldn’t get a complete sentence out. Honestly. I couldn’t form it in my head, it was like a total block, paralysis of the thought process behind the act of speaking.’ Lutz’s eyes were wide with astonishment, as if he found his own story amazing to hear. ‘Normally I’m fluent enough, even glib, they tell me in the teachers’ lounge, the bastards, but all I could say to this guy was “Gas… gas”: Naturally the guy thought I was weird, he didn’t know I work at the high school, right? So he says, “Yeah, what about it?” Finally I managed to say “Filleruplease,” like that, one word. I need a long vacation. I don’t think I’ll look for a summer job,’ Lutz finished, suddenly arriving at an answer to Lasker’s question.
‘You need a woman.’
‘And how, but I won’t find one in this town. Nothing here but old men, wild dogs and Barbie dolls, not to mention the real drawbacks. How about you? What’s Millville’s answer to Woodward and Bernstein doing these days?’
‘The usual nonsense,’ Lasker said. ‘You’ll be happy to hear that the Little League opened its season the other day.’
‘Never mind that. Have you found out who the mayor’s fucking these days?’
‘The taxpayers, as usual. They’re going to put parking meters on Walnut Street, Hill Street and Echo Lake Road.’
‘Shit.’
‘My interview with the police chief about the problem with teenagers at the plaza was a bust’
‘Really? I didn’t see it.’
‘Because it didn’t appear. It was so boring even the typesetter fell asleep halfway through it. Phippsy was kind-hearted about it when he told me he had reduced it from eleven hundred words to a one sentence paragraph saying the police promised action to prevent rowdies from causing trouble at the plaza.’
‘What the hell. Have another drink.’
While Dave Lutz poured another round of drinks in the kitchen, Martin Lasker thumbed through a stack of records on the floor. Dave must spend all his extra money on albums and drink, he thought Not necessarily in that order. Lasker extracted a 1939 recording of Count Basie and Lester Young, and glanced down through the liner notes.
‘What about that guy who died in a pizza parlour?’ Lutz said, returning with the drinks.
‘Above a pizza parlour,’ Lasker corrected. ‘Now that is interesting, but nobody can get a handle on it, so we’ve just been running the police statements — which say nothing in the usual way.’ He sipped the drink and found it as strong as the first one.
‘Sounded pretty — ghoulish. From what I heard on the radio.’
‘It was. The poor bastard was tom to pieces, and the same thing happened to a cow only a few days before.’
‘A cow? You’re kidding.’
‘No, honest’
‘I didn’t hear about that.’
‘The police and the medical examiner think it was some kind of violent wind, like a mini-tornado or something.’
‘Wind?’ Dave Lutz sat forward in his chair. His brow wrinkled.
‘Yeah, it sounded pretty feeble to me. If the cow had been out in a field, or Donner had been walking down the street — then, maybe. But both were indoors, so it’s a hard theory to believe.’
‘I don’t find it hard to believe. It happened to me.’
‘What?’
‘The wind. Indoors.’
‘Are you kidding?’ But Lasker sensed already that his friend meant it. Lutz faced him squarely, soberly.
‘No. I’m telling you, I felt a strange wind, in the classroom one day, week before last.’ Lutz went on to relate the incident in the school. ‘It sounds trivial and insignificant, I know, but after what you said it makes me feel kind of nervous.’
‘Well,’ Lasker said, exhaling slowly, trying to digest what he had just heard. ‘That makes three times, if it’s the same thing. Maybe four, if the car is related.’
‘What car?’
‘Somebody’s car was demolished the night before Donner died. Totally wrecked. It was parked in front of his house. I didn’t see it, so I don’t know. Everybody seems to think it was vandals, but the only witness, who apparently put down a lot of beer and isn’t too reliable, claims nobody did it, that it just happened.’
‘A cow, a car, a dead man and some flapping papers o
n a schoolroom bulletin, board — it doesn’t add up.’
‘No, it doesn’t, but something’s happening and it isn’t very nice.’ Lasker’s mind roamed over the unresolved items. After talking to Doctor Schmidt the reporter had put the matter aside, but hearing Lutz list the incidents again, one after another, adding his own experience with the putative wind, brought the whole thing crashing back into the forefront of his consciousness. And he didn’t like that, because it seemed there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
‘So you’ve got a riddle, Marty. Things aren’t so dull after all. But that wild wind idea sounds right to me. I don’t know anything about weather, except not to stand out in the rain, but I suppose the wind can do strange things.’
‘You sound just like Sturdevent.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘The chief of police.’
‘Well, if the wind can blow up, I guess it can die down or blow away.’
‘Yeah, sure…’
‘Why don’t you call up the state weather bureau — where is it, Windsor Locks? — and ask somebody about how winds behave? Certainly more interesting than covering the next pitch-and-putt tournament.’
‘Maybe. But that’s not all. Some woman has been calling up reporting flying saucers and I have to go talk to her.’
‘Terrific. If you want to see some green-eyed monsters, come on over to the high school. I have them by the roomful’
‘No thanks.’
‘Well, I don’t see why you’re complaining, Marty, with all these strange doings in a small town. I ought to get in this newspaper business too — and I would, except I’m illiterate. Do you want some spaghetti?’ Lutz rose and moved towards the kitchen.
‘Not unless you have real tomato sauce. I’m tired of having to eat ketchup every time you make spaghetti.’
‘All right, already,’ Lutz shouted back over his shoulder. Lasker sat thinking. The ice melted in his vodka.
CHAPTER SIX
Church Street was one of several quiet thoroughfares on the periphery of Millville town centre. It was largely residential but it contained a fair number of small shops and businesses that had spilled over from the main streets. The houses were old two-and three-storey structures that dated from the Twenties and Thirties. Many of the ground floors had long since been converted into stores, but in recent years the trend had begun to reverse itself as townspeople made more and more use of the large shopping plazas that had sprung up around Millville and nearby towns. At any given time six or eight For Let or For Sale signs could be counted in the space of a couple of blocks.
Children played in the street, as front yards were virtually non-existent and the nearest playground was on the other side of the river, across Millville’s famous Bailey Bridge. Famous because when it was built in the late Thirties it cost the citizens nearly as much as the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a simple steel girder construction, not much more sophisticated than something the United States Army might sling across a small river in wartime. There had been a scandal at the time but no one ever found out just whose pockets all that money had filled.
At six-thirty in the evening Church Street was pretty quiet. The business people had all gone home and most of the residents were inside finishing their meals. Dogs lazed on stoops. Even in summer, darkness gathered early here, as the street was at the base of the valley, adjacent to the river.
On this Monday evening, just after six-thirty, all the windows on one short block of Church Street blew out in rapid succession. Nine buildings were hit, including Ralph’s Barber Shop and Shepard’s Photographic Studio, which had large picture windows. The sidewalk and street were strewn with shards of broken glass. For a few minutes the air in the neighbourhood was filled with a heaving, booming sound, dull but powerful, as thunder or artillery fire. Then all was quiet again.
Surprisingly, only two people were injured as a result of the destruction. Both were elderly. One was a woman who had been standing in her living room flipping through the TV Guide when her window went. She fainted immediately and in falling to the floor gashed her forehead superficially on a corner of the coffee table. The wound looked much worse than it actually was. The other person was a retired milkman who was just about to unlock his car and drive to Waterbury to visit his sister. He heard the sound as the first windows exploded and stood as if hypnotised, car keys in one hand, watching. Even when it reached 127, his own house, he could not move. His face and hands were pitted with small cuts and a large piece of broken plate glass sheared into his left leg just above the knee, almost completely severing it.
*
Father Lombardy felt silly, sitting on a rock a few yards away from the clearing by himself and with nothing happening. This was the third day of his vigil and he was beginning to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a waste of time. When would it come? In the meantime, what if someone saw him there? It would look peculiar, to say the least Yesterday he had seen a group of school children on the hill, several hundred yards in the distance, but they showed no sign of having spotted him. He had felt even more foolish, crouching uncomfortably lower in the tall grass.
The conversation with Art Pomar had not gone very well. Father Lombardy was unable to work out any coherent or sensible line of explanation and so he had fallen back on the feeble argument that the site was dangerous, and the children should not be allowed to play there or even pass by on their way home from school. Pomar readily agreed to this but he had expected a good deal more from the priest.
‘Father, Joey says you saw Her too. Is that right?’ The parent’s anxiety came through on the phone, loud and clear.
‘No, Art, that’s not right.’
‘He lied to me, and about a priest?’
‘No, wait a minute, Art. Calm down. Joey didn’t lie, not exactly.’
‘Well, what then, Father?’
‘I saw something. We both did. That much is true.’ Father Lombardy worried the press-buttons on the address pad beside the telephone.
‘You did see.’
‘Something,’ the priest stressed, wondering if that was hope he heard in Pomar’s voice. ‘It was a cloud of gas or something., I don’t know what. Maybe pollution and smoke.’
‘Oh.’ Pomar sounded unconvinced.
‘But it was most certainly not Our Lady.’
‘You’re sure of that, Father?’
‘Absolutely.’
After a brief, uneasy silence, Pomar said: ‘Joey told us She threw you in the air.’ It sounded like an accusation.
‘It was not She,’ Father Lombardy repeated as forcefully as he could without shouting. ‘When that cloud settled on us, Art, and it happened pretty suddenly, we jumped and, uh, fell. Then we got out of there as fast as we could. Besides the Virgin Mary doesn’t go around throwing people through the air.’
‘You ran, Father?’
‘I told you, Art, whatever it is it isn’t healthy. In fact, it’s probably dangerous. A pocket of gas from a factory, maybe. If I had been alone that would be one thing, but I wanted to get your boy safely out of there.’
Even now, as he sat on the rock, Father Lombardy felt annoyed with himself for twisting his way out of an honest answer. But he was also beginning to think that perhaps he had been right about the cloud. Whatever it was, it had not appeared again. Perhaps the cloud had dispersed in the air, harmlessly. Perhaps he had imagined more than actually happened that day with Joey Pomar. Perhaps he had psyched himself into a state of expectation before the cloud had arrived, and when it did he had over-reacted. Perhaps he only imagined those faces.
But the thought of evil came back to him, and it was much harder to explain away. He had been very upset that night, confused and upset. After a couple of hours out here, waiting for anything, the cloud began to seem less evil and more bizarre. Odd. The kind of thing people write about in the Sunday newspapers. Strange experiences.
Father Lombardy glanced at his watch. He would give it another ten minutes. Sweat trickled down the side o
f his body.
Click-click.
The priest looked up and saw a fat grey squirrel perched on the rocks above the clearing. The animal worked rapidly on an acorn. Tiny bits of shell dropped through the empty air.
Over breakfast that morning Father Connors had seemed to make a point of not asking about the Pomar children. Father Lombardy didn’t want to talk about it but felt obliged to say something. Eventually he had asked, ‘What if the children did see — something?’
‘The last thing we want to do is give the Protestants reason to think we’re reverting to the Middle Ages,’ Father Connors had replied drily.
*
Ed Tuttle dropped an empty paper cup into the waste basket on his way out of the office. He was a librarian, and it was closing time at the Millville Public Library. Alison Maxwell, the young lady he had employed a few months ago, was date-stamping books for someone. Ed glanced into the magazine reading-room, found it empty as expected, and then walked to the front desk.
‘Can I drop you anywhere, Alison?’
‘No, thanks, Mr Tuttle. I have to clean up a few things here and then stop at the supermarket on my way home.’ She spoke in the same firm but friendly tone of voice she used at least three nights a week when Ed Tuttle offered her a ride. She knew she was neither especially pretty nor a flashy dresser but that didn’t seem to bother Ed Tuttle, who eyed her appreciatively at every available opportunity. She didn’t mind; he wasn’t pushy.
‘See you tomorrow,’ Tuttle said, wearing his smile of resignation. He waved as he walked to the door.
‘Good night.’
She went back to the book she was reading, Car by Harry Crews, a novel about a man who tries to eat an automobile. She had one more page to the end of the chapter and she wanted to finish it before leaving.
Alison Maxwell was twenty-two. She had graduated from Boston University a semester early but, to the chagrin of her teachers and family, she had decided not to go on for a master’s degree, at least not for the time being. She wanted to take some time off, perhaps a year, so she had returned home for a vacation. When the job at the library came up, that settled the matter. It was easy, undemanding work, leaving her plenty of time and energy to pursue anything else that took her interest. Now, a little over four months into the job, she was beginning to have second thoughts. It was too quiet, too relaxed here. Perhaps when the hot summer was over she would be ready to go back to Cambridge. It was a lively place and she needed things to respond to. Millville, by contrast, was a non-event. Pleasant, like inertia, but only in controlled doses.
The Fates Page 9