by John Updike
We have spies. The clergy mingle and bring back reports of intelligent, uplifting conversations; the only rudeness they encounter is the angry shouting (“Animals!” “Enlist!”) from the passing carfuls of middle-aged bourgeoisie. The guidance director at the high school, wearing a three days’ beard and blotched blue jeans, passes out questionnaires. Two daring young housewives have spent an entire night on the hill, with a tape recorder concealed in a picnic hamper. The police, those bone-chilled sentries on the boundaries of chaos, have developed their expertise by the intimate light of warfare. They sweep the rocks clean every second hour all night, which discourages cooking fires, and have instituted, via a few quisling hillies, a form of self-policing. Containment, briefly, is their present policy. The selectmen cling to the concept of the green as “common land,” intended for public pasturage. By this interpretation, the hillies graze, rather than trespass. Nothing is simple. Apparently there are strata and class animosities within the hillies—the “grassies,” for example, who smoke marijuana in the middle area of the slope, detest the “beeries,” who inhabit the high rocks, where they smash their no-return bottles, fistfight, and bring the wrath of the town down upon them all. The grassies also dislike the “pillies,” who loll beneath them, near the curb, and who take harder drugs, and who deal with the sinister salesmen from Boston. It is these pillies, stretched bemused between the Spanish-American War memorial urns, who could tell us, if we wished to know, how the trashy façades of Poirier’s Liquor Mart and Bailey’s Pharmaceuticals appear when deep-dyed by LSD and ballooned by the Eternal. In a sense, they see an America whose glory is hidden from the rest of us. The guidance director’s questionnaires reveal some surprising statistics. Twelve percent of the hillies favor the Vietnam War. Thirty-four percent have not enjoyed sexual intercourse. Sixty-one percent own their own automobiles. Eighty-six percent hope to attend some sort of graduate school.
Each week, the Tarbox Star prints more of the vivacious correspondence occasioned by the hillies. One taxpayer writes to say that God has forsaken the country, that these young people are fungi on a fallen tree. Another, a veteran of the Second World War, replies that on the contrary they are harbingers of hope, super-Americans dedicated to saving a mad world from self-destruction; if he didn’t have a family to support, he would go and join them. A housewife writes to complain of loud obscenities that wing outward from the hill. Another housewife promptly rebuts all such “credit-card hypocrites, installment-plan lechers, and Pharisees in pin curlers.” A hillie writes to assert that he was driven from his own home by “the stench of ego” and “heartbreaking lasciviousness.” The father of a hillie, in phrases broken and twisted by the force of his passion, describes circumstantially his child’s upbringing in an atmosphere of love and plenty and in conclusion hopes that other parents will benefit from the hard lesson of his present disgrace—a punishment he “nightly embraces with grateful prayer.” Various old men write in to reminisce about their youths. Some remember hard work, bitter winters, and penny-pinching; others depict a lyrically empty land where a boy’s natural prankishness and tendency to idle had room to “run their course.” One “old-timer” states that “there is nothing new under the sun”; another sharply retorts that everything is new under the sun, that these youngsters are “subconsciously seeking accommodation” with unprecedented overpopulation and “hypertechnology.” The Colorado couple write from their gallery to agree, and to suggest that salvation lies in Hindu reposefulness, “free-form creativity,” and wheat germ. A downtown businessman observes that the hillies have become something of a tourist attraction and should not be disbanded “without careful preliminary study.” A minister cautions readers to “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” The editor editorializes to the effect that “our” generation has made a “mess” of the world and that the hillies are registering a “legitimate protest”; a letter signed by sixteen hillies responds that they protest nothing, they just want to sit and “dig.” Dig? “Life as it just is,” the letter (a document mimeographed and distributed by the local chapter of PAX) concludes, “truly grooves.”
The printed correspondence reflects only a fraction of the opinions expressed orally. The local sociologist has told a luncheon meeting of the Rotary Club that the hillies are seeking “to reëmploy human-ness as a non-relative category.” The local Negro, a crack golfer and horseman whose seat on his chestnut mare is the pride of the hunt club, cryptically told the Kiwanis that, “when you create a slave population, you must expect a slave mentality.” The local Jesuit informed an evening meeting of the Lions that drugs are “the logical end product of the pernicious Protestant heresy of the ‘inner light.’ ” The waitresses at the local restaurant tell customers that the sight of the hillies through the plate-glass windows gives them “the creeps.” “Why don’t they go to work?” they ask; their own legs are blue-veined from the strain of work, of waiting and hustling. The local Indian, who might be thought sympathetic, since some of the hillies affect Pocahontas bands and bead necklaces, is savage on the subject: “Clean the garbage out,” he tells the seedy crowd that hangs around the news store. “Push ’em back where they came from.” But this ancient formula, so often invoked in our history, no longer applies. They came from our own homes. And in honesty do we want them back? How much a rural myth is parental love? The Prodigal Son no doubt became a useful overseer; they needed his hands. We need our self-respect. That is what is eroding on the hill—the foundations of our lives, the identities our industry and acquisitiveness have heaped up beneath the flag’s blessing. The local derelict is the only adult who wanders among them without self-consciousness and without fear.
For fear is the mood. People are bringing the shutters down from their attics and putting them back on their windows. Fences are appearing where children used to stray freely from back yard to back yard, through loose hedges of forsythia and box. Locksmiths are working overtime. Once we parked our cars with the keys dangling from the dashboard, and a dog could sleep undisturbed in the middle of the street. No more. Fear reigns, and impatience. The downtown seems to be tightening like a fist, a glistening clot of apoplectic signs and sunstruck, stalled automobiles. And the hillies are slowly withdrawing upward, and clustering around the beeries, and accepting them as leaders. They are getting ready for our attack.
The Tarbox Police
Cal.
Hal.
Sam.
Dan.
We have known them since they were boys in the high school. Good-natured boys, not among the troublemakers, going out for each sport as its season came along, though not usually among the stars.
Indeed, they are hard to tell apart, without a close look. Cal is an inch taller than Hal, and Dan has a slightly wistful set to his jaw that differentiates him from Sam, who until you see him smile looks mean. Downtown, they don’t smile much; if they started, they would never stop, since they know almost everybody passing by. If you look them in the eye for a second they will nod, however. A bit bleakly, but nod. In the summer they wear sunglasses and their eyes are not there. In their short-sleeved shirts they would melt into the summer crowd of barefooted girls and bare-chested easy riders but for the knobby black armor of equipment, strapped and buckled to their bodies in even the hottest weather: the two-way radio in its perforated case, the billy club dangling overripe from their belts, the little buttoned-up satchel of Mace, and the implausible, unthinkable gun, its handle peeking from the holster like the metal-and-wood snout of an eyeless baby animal riding backward on its mother’s forgetful hip.
They not only know everybody, they know everything. When dear Maddy Frothingham, divorced since she was twenty-two and not her fault, upped and married the charmer she met on some fancy island Down East, it was the Tarbox police who came around and told her her new husband was a forger wanted in four states, and took him away. When Janice Tugwell fell down the cellar stairs and miscarried, it was the police who knew what house down by the river Morris’s c
ar was parked in front of, and who were kind enough not to tell her how their knock brought him to the door fumbling with his buttons. It is the police who lock up Squire Wentworth Saturday nights so he won’t disgrace himself; it is the police, when there’s another fatal accident on that bad stretch of 87, who put the blanket over the body, so nobody else will have to see. Chief Chad’s face, when the do-good lawyers come out from Boston to get our delinquents off, is a study in surprise, that the court should be asked to doubt things everybody knows. We ask them, the police, to know too much. It hardens them. Young as they are, their faces get cold, cold and prim. When in summer they put on their sunglasses, little is hidden that showed before.
They want to be invisible.
In an ideal state, they would wither away.
My wife and I had an eerie experience a year ago. Our male pup hadn’t come back for his supper, and the more my wife thought about it the less she could sleep, so around midnight she got up in her nightie and we put on raincoats and went out in the convertible to search. It was a weekday night, the town looked dead. It looked like a fossil of itself, pressed pale into black stone. Except downtown—the blank shop fronts glazed under the blue arc lamps, the street wide as a prairie without parked cars—there was this cluster of shadows. I thought of a riot, except that it was quiet. I thought of witchcraft, except that it was 1971. Cal was there. His blue uniform looked purple under the lights. The rest were kids, the kids that hang around on the hill, the long hair and the Levi’s making the girls hard to distinguish. Half in the street, half on the pavement, they were having a conversation, a party in the heart of our ghostly town.
My wife found her voice and asked Cal about the dog and he answered promptly that one had been hit but not badly by a car up near the new shopping center around four that afternoon, without a collar or a license, and we apologized about the license and explained how our little girl keeps dressing the dog in her old baby clothes and taking his collar off, and, sure enough, we found the animal in the dogcatcher’s barn, shivering and limping and so relieved to see us he fainted in the driveway and didn’t eat for two days; but the point is the strangeness of those kids and that policeman in the middle of nowhere, having what looked like a good time. What do they talk about? Does it happen every night? Is something brewing between them? Nobody can talk to these kids, except the police. Maybe, in the world that’s in the making, they’re the only real things to one another, kids and police, and the rest of us, me in my convertible and my wife in her nightie, are the shadows, the pale fossils. As we pulled away, we heard laughter.
But they have lives, too. The Sunday evening the man went crazy on Prudence Lane, Hal arrived in a suit as if fresh from church, and Dan wore a checked shirt and bowling shoes that sported a big number 9 on their backs. Dainty feet. Chief Chad had to feather his siren to press the cruiser through the crowd that had collected—sunburned young mothers pushing babies in strollers, a lot of old people from the nursing home up the street. All through the crowd people were telling one another stories. The man had moved here three weeks ago from Detroit. He was crazy on three days of gin. He was an acidhead. He went crazy because his wife had left him. He was a queer. He was a Vietnam veteran. His first shot from the upstairs window had hit a fire hydrant—ka-zing!—and the second kicked up dust under the nose of the fat beagle that sleeps by the curb there.
The crazy man was in the second story of the old Cushing place, which the new owners had fixed up for rental with that aluminum siding that looks just like clapboards until you study the corners. The Osborne house next door, without a front yard, juts out to the pavement, and most of the crowd stayed more or less behind the house, though the old folks kept pushing closer to see, and the mothers kept running into the line of fire to fetch back their toddlers, and the dogs raced around nervously wagging their tails the way they do at festivities.
It was strange, coming up the street, to see the cloud of gunsmoke drifting toward the junior high school, just like on television, only in better color. The police crouched down behind the cruiser, trading shots. Chief Chad was huddled behind the corner of the Osbornes’, shouting into his radio. The siege lasted an hour. The crazy man, a skinny fellow in a tie-dyed undershirt, was in plain sight in the window above the porch roof, making a speech you couldn’t understand and alternately reloading the two rifles he had. One of the old folks hobbled out across the asphalt to the police car and screamed, “Kill him! I paid good taxes all my life. What’s the problem, he’s right up there, kill him!” Even the crazy man went quiet to hear the old man carry on: the old guy was trembling; his face shone with tears; he kept yelling the word “taxes.” Dan shielded him with his body and hustled him back to the crowd, where a nurse from the home wrestled him quiet.
The plan, it turned out, wasn’t to kill anybody. The police were aiming around the window, making a sieve of that new siding, until the state police arrived with the tear gas. While the crazy man was being entertained out front, Chief Chad and a state cop sneaked into the back yard and plunked the canisters into the kitchen. The shooting died. The police went in the front door wearing masks and brought out on a stretcher a man swaddled like a newborn baby. A thin sort of baby with a sleeping green face. Though they say that at the hospital, when he got his crazy consciousness back, he broke all the straps and it took five men to hold him down for the injection.
“Go home!” Chief Chad shouted, shaking his rifle at the crowd. “The show’s over! Damn you all, go home!”
Most people forgave him, he was overwrought.
Bits of the crowd clung to the neighborhood way past dark, telling one another what they saw or knew or guessed, giving it all a rerun. Experience is so vicarious these days, only recollecting it makes it actual. One theory was that the crazy man hadn’t meant to hurt anybody, or he could have winged a dozen spectators. Yes, but on the corner of the Osbornes’ you can still see where a bullet came through one side and out the other, right where Chief Chad’s ear had been a second before. Out of all that unreality, the bullet holes remained to be mended. It took weeks for the aluminum-siding man to show up.
And then, this March, in a town meeting, the moderator got rattled and ejected a citizen. He was the new sort of citizen who has moved into the Marshview development, a young husband with a big honey-colored beard. They appear to feel the world owes them an explanation. We were on the sewer articles. We’ve been passing these sewer articles for years and the river never smells any better, but you pass them because the town engineer is president of the Odd Fellows and doing the best he can. Anyway, young Honeybeard had raised four or five objections, and had the selectmen up and down at the microphone like jack-in-the-boxes, and Bud Perley, moderator ever since he came back from Okinawa with his medals, got weary of recognizing him, and overlooked his waving hand. The boy—taxpayer, just like the old cuss at the shoot-out—had smuggled in a balloon and enough helium to float it up toward the gym ceiling.
LOVE, the balloon said.
“Eject that man,” Perley said.
Who’ll ever forget it? Seven hundred of us there, and we’d seen a lot of foolishness on the town-meeting floor, but we’d never seen a man ejected. Hal was over by the water bubbler, leaning against the wall, and Sam was on the opposite side joking with a bunch of high-school students up on the tumbling horses observing for their civics class. The two policemen moved at once, together. They sauntered, almost, across the front of the hall toward the center aisle.
And you saw they had billy clubs, and you saw they had guns, and nobody else did.
Actually, young Honeybeard was a friend of Sam’s—they had gone smelt-fishing together that winter—and both smiled sheepishly as they touched, and the fellow went out making a big V with his arms, and people laughed and cheered and no doubt will vote him in for selectman if he runs.
But still. The two policemen had moved in unison, carefully, crabwise-cautious under their load of equipment, and you saw they were real; blundering old Perley
had called them into existence, and not a mouth in that hall held more than held breath. This was it. This was power, our power hopefully to be sure, but this was it.
The Corner
The town is one of those that people pass through on the way to somewhere else; so its inhabitants have become expert in giving directions. Ray Blandy cannot be on his porch five minutes before a car, baffled by the lack of signs at the corner, will shout to him, “Is this the way to the wharf?” or “Am I on the right road to East Mather?” Using words and gestures that have become rote, Ray heads it on its way, with something of the satisfaction with which he mails a letter, or flushes a toilet, or puts in another week at Unitek Electronics. Catty-corner across the awkward intersection (Wharf Street swerves south and meets Reservoir Road and Prudence Lane at acute, half-blind angles), Mr. Latroy, a milkman who is home from noon on, and who is also an auxiliary policeman, directs automobiles uncertain if, to reach the famous old textile mill in Lacetown, they should bear left around the traffic island or go straight up the hill. There is nothing on the corner to hold cars here except the small variety store run by an old Dutch couple, the Van der Bijns. Its modest size and dim, rusted advertisements are geared to foot traffic. Children going to school stop here for candy, and townspeople after work stop for cigarettes and bread, but for long tracts of the day there is little for Mr. Van der Bijn to do but sit behind his display windows and grieve that the cars passing through take the corner too fast.