“I’d known Francis all along. He was a soldier too, although he was never called to war. He was stationed at the Pentagon where I was working as a secretary. He liked me. We’d gone out a few times to movies or restaurants. But I’d never thought about marriage.”
“Then why …. ?”
“Soon after I found out your dad had been killed, my body told me I wasn’t alone. Unmarried women didn’t have babies in those days. I didn’t know what to do, who to tell. I told Francis. He immediately offered to marry me. So, just before Christmas, we got married.”
Blondie slumped on the bed and tried to make sense of it. It wasn’t the kind of story he ever would have expected. It sounded like the plot for one of those stupid daytime shows housewives watched — Edge of Night, Secret Storm, Brighter Day.
“Tell me about him,” Blondie said.
A happy look creased her eyes and lips.
“Howard was brave, decisive, kind, the type of man any woman would want. He had an inner strength, a sureness about himself — and passion. That’s something I’ve never had from Francis.”
For a moment, the sad look returned.
“Please don’t be angry with me for keeping this from you so long,” she continued. “I didn’t want you to ever question that you had two parents who loved you. But I can understand if it’s a crushing thing to hear. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”
Crushed? Disappointed? That wasn’t what Blondie was feeling at all. He felt elated. His father had been a lover, a hero! And Blondie was his lineage. Even more, Blondie now had a secret in his past, a damned good one. He was special.
“I always wondered what you saw in dad,” Blondie said. “No wonder you find him so boring.”
His mother’s eyes flashed in anger, but when she spoke, her voice was soft.
“Francis is a hero too. He accepted you as his own son and brought you up with all the love and care a father could give.”
Blondie chose not to quibble with that. For a while, they just looked at each other. Blondie realized neither of them understood the etiquette for such a situation.
“Would you like to see a picture of your dad?” she asked after a while.
Blondie wasn’t sure. What if he didn’t look like a warrior? What if Blondie didn’t look like him? He nodded anyway.
His mother reached out and grabbed a lacquered Chinese box she kept on her bureau. She opened it and removed a small square object wrapped in tissue paper. She pulled the paper aside to reveal a silver frame with a sepia photograph inside. She held it out to Blondie. He took it gingerly in his hands.
The man in the picture was handsome and proud, his hair the color of butter. He stared out at Blondie with a confident look tinged with a trace of humor. Ribbons were pinned to his uniform. Blondie asked his mom if he’d killed anyone.
“I don’t know. Not when I knew him. He hadn’t even gone to war. The ribbons were for leadership and marksmanship.”
“Can I look again?” Blondie asked as he gave the picture back to her.
“Of course, any time.”
She looked into his face for a few moments longer, then kissed him lightly on the cheek and walked from the room.
Blondie’s initial rapture gave way to a slight queasiness. He wasn’t who he thought he was. Still he liked being the son of Howard, even if he didn’t know his last name.
A few days later, his parents were gone and, for the first time in his life, he faced a lengthy time alone. It was a delicious prospect.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
As Blondie remembered it, the Beer Bank was Dispatch’s idea. He, Feller and Dispatch had been riding around in the P-mobile, engaged in a hypothetical discussion about how many beers the Club drank in an average week when Dispatch suggested they research the issue — “do a study.”
“That’s not feasible,” Feller argued. “We’re too drunk by the end of the evening to remember how many beers we’ve had.”
“We could keep all the empties and count them up,” Dispatch answered.
“Right,” Feller scoffed.
“Wait a minute, Feller,” Blondie said. “Dispatch may be on to something. We might find out we play a major role in the local economy.”
“What? On the index of leading alcoholics? Anyway, where are we going to put them? I guarantee my parents won’t be impressed by a mountain of Pabst cans in the corner.”
“There’s always my house,” Blondie volunteered. “But I don’t want a pile of empties on the floor. We need something to put them in.”
Dispatch jammed on the brakes and wheeled the P-mobile through a gas station.
“Where’re you going?” Feller asked.
“To Safeway.”
Dispatch drove straight to the loading dock behind the store. It was empty except for one large corrugated box. Fortunately, it was a large one. According to the legend on the side, the box had once safeguarded 144 rolls of toilet paper from the hazards of cross-country trucking.
“Appropriate,” Feller commented.
It was too big to fit in the car, so Blondie held it outside the window as Dispatch inched his way back to the Reimers’ house to keep the wind from ripping it from his grip. They installed it in a corner of the family room.
Feller asked Blondie if he had a couple pieces of wood.
“What for?”
“Just trust me.”
“I’ve got a ruler. My mom has one, too.”
“Bring them to me … and some adhesive tape and a crayon.”
Feller made a cross from the two rulers and taped it to the box. He wrote “R.I.P.” beneath it.
“That’s kind of sacrilegious.” Dispatch said.
“Exactly,” Feller answered.
“But it gives the wrong message,” he argued. “Drinking is about having fun.”
“All right, Dispatch, what’s your idea?” Feller demanded.
“I don’t know. Why can’t we just think of it like a bank? Where we put our deposits.”
“I suppose they are deposits,” Feller conceded. “Good for five cents each if we take them back.”
“Why not call it the Beer Bank,” Blondie suggested.
“Yeah,” Dispatch agreed.
Feller crossed out his first effort and wrote “Beer Bank” in big letters across the box.
“Should I take the cross down?” Feller asked. “A bank with a cross — that’s a mixed metaphor.”
“Who gives a shit?” Dispatch said.
“How many empties do you think it’ll hold?” Blondie asked.
“Hundreds,” Feller guessed.
“Do you think we can fill it?”
“We have all summer.”
While Dispatch was backing the P-mobile out of his driveway, Blondie happened to glance over toward Potter’s house. Potter was standing on the front porch, arms crossed, watching them. He gave Blondie the creeps.
There was good news on the horizon, though. A few days later, Dispatch told him Barnwell and Purdy had taken jobs out of town.
“Jobs? Barnwell? Purdy? What could they do?” Blondie asked.
“Someone said they were flipping burgers at the beach.”
Beach? What beach? Dispatch didn’t know and Blondie realized he didn’t care. All that mattered was that they were out of his hair for the summer.
Weeks merged with each other in a repetitious sameness. Days of sleeping late, shooting pool or just hanging out around the house. Nights cruising in the P-mobile with the gang or having them all over for suds and conversation. And occasional nights of passion with Flossie on his parents’ queen-sized bed.
Day by day, the Beer Bank grew. By mid-July, the box was half full. Sweet, sweet, no-school-in-sight summertime. What could go wrong?
Then came the call. It was late and he’d just crashed after a number of beers at Grouper’s Overlook with the gang. The phone’s ring blew away the beginning of a dream. 1:30 a.m. Who would call him a
t that hour?
His mom.
“Where’ve you been?” She sounded pissed.
“Bowling with the guys,” he lied, his head muzzy with barley and hops.
“Are you sure?”
Her voice was harsh. What was eating her?
“Sure. What’s the matter?”
She began crying.
“How could you …. ?”
How could he what? What did she know anyway? She was three hundred miles away.
“Orgies …. ”
Orgies? Blondie’d never heard his mother use the word before.
“What are you talking about?”
“And drinking.”
Sweat broke out on Blondie’s brow. She was getting closer to home. Somehow, his parents had found out he’d been having a good time.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom.”
“It’s all in a letter I received today.”
“What letter?”
“A letter from Fenton. It tells all about what you and your despicable friends have been up to.”
She began sobbing.
“Who sent it?”
“I don’t know,” she sniffled. “It isn’t signed.” Her voice hardened. “Your dad and I have decided. I’m coming straight home.”
Blondie’s breath disappeared. She couldn’t come home. Summer was barely half over.
“Don’t be rash,” Blondie pleaded. “It sounds like some crank to me.”
There was silence at the other end.
“Well, what does the letter say?” Blondie asked.
“How can you be so cool? What’s happened to my little boy?”
“Nothing, mom. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s it say?”
“It says you’ve been having orgies every night in our house. With naked girls and loud music and lots of alcohol.”
“Yeah?” That sounded neat. Then, indignation welled within him. He’d been wrongfully accused … to a degree.
“It’s all lies,” Blondie said. “It’s must be that crazy Potter next door. Mom, he’s a psycho. He watches me all the time.”
“Well, Mr. Potter is a little strange,” Blondie’s mother conceded. “He told Francis our crab grass was invading his lawn. Our crab grass.”
She stopped crying.
“Tell me the truth, Bernard. Have you had any girls over?” she asked.
“Well, Flossie’s come over a few times …. “Blondie figured he had to confess to something. ” … but we just watched television. I always had her home by midnight. You can ask her parents.”
His mom was silent. Blondie could almost hear the gears shifting in her mind.
“How about the part about drinking?” She returned to her inquisition. “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“Mom, I don’t even like the taste of beer.”
That wasn’t a big lie. He still wasn’t sold on the taste of beer. He just liked the results.
“Well, I would like to stay up here with Francis.”
Blondie felt the hook wriggling from his skin.
“The letter is written in terrible English,” his mom said with distaste. Blondie realized his mom had turned the corner. To an elementary school teacher, no accusation could stand under the weight of poor grammar.
After a few more minutes of verbal dodging and weaving, his mom’s agitation dissipated and she hung up. He’d talked her out of coming back early! Blondie flopped his head down against the pillow and exhaled. He hadn’t dodged a bullet — it had been a mortar shell.
His relief soon gave way to resentment. So many accusations and so few of them true!
Blondie had just tucked his brewing hangover back into bed when the phone rang again. Blondie was surprised when he looked at his clock. Nine hours had passed. It was Dispatch.
“I need to talk,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“Not on the phone. Can I come over?”
“Sure.”
Within the hour, the P-mobile belched up to their house in a blue fog.
Dispatch plopped down on his mom’s flower-print sofa, his face a scowl.
“What’s the problem?” Blondie asked.
“Marriage.”
“You’re not getting along with Meryl?”
“What’s not to get along with? She adores me.”
Dispatch stared at his mom’s painting as if it were a firing squad.
“Then what is it?”
Dispatch pursed his lips. He placed his fingertips together.
“There isn’t any baby.”
“No baby?”
“I kept waiting for Meryl’s belly to swell, but it didn’t. Yesterday, I found a box of Tampax in her closet. I could tell it had just been opened. When I confronted her, she told me she’d had a spontaneous miscarriage.”
“You’ve been had,” Blondie said.
“I know. And I’ve got to get out of it.”
Dispatch’s jaw tightened. He looked like he could eat luggage.
“Why don’t you get a divorce?”
“You have to have a reason unless your partner wants a divorce too. But Meryl loves being married. It’s what she’s always wanted to be — the little lady of the house.”
Little?
“So what can you do?” Blondie asked.
Dispatch turned his face toward Blondie. Blondie sensed his eyes burning behind his bangs.
“What can we do, you mean.”
“Me? Where do I come in?”
“I’ve got a plan.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A breeze blew up. On a summer evening, that meant rain. Blondie, in tee shirt and shorts, began to shiver. He looked up at the sky. It was growing dark, but it was still clear. He and Dispatch were sequestered in a copse of dogwoods about fifty feet from where Fishers Lane began a steep decline before it dead-ended at the bottom of the hill.
“I don’t see how this can work,” Blondie said.
“It’ll work,” Dispatch replied, his jaw set. “You just wait and see.”
He was wearing a hunter’s camouflage jacket over a pair of canvas pants. Instead of a gun, he held an old Brownie camera with a flash attachment.
“I can’t believe you talked Shakes into fucking your wife,” Blondie said.
“It wasn’t easy. Even Shakes has standards. I promised to lend him the P-mobile occasionally. Anyway, he’s never been laid before. I told him Meryl was all right.”
Blondie had picked Dispatch up in the Dart — his folks had taken the Pontiac to New York. It now was hidden by bushes on a spur off the dirt surface of Fishers Lane. The plan had been set. Shakes had talked Meryl into picking him up near his house for a “quick tryst” as soon as Dispatch left. For his part, Dispatch had told Meryl he wouldn’t be home “until way after midnight.”
“How do you know she’ll go through with it? After all, she’s your wife.”
Dispatch gave Blondie a disbelieving look.
“I’ve got faith in Meryl. She’d fuck anybody who asked her.”
It bothered Blondie that Dispatch said it so casually. If Blondie ever got married, he wouldn’t want his wife to be unfaithful. But then, Dispatch’s marriage couldn’t be confused with the real thing … like the kind of marriage he’d have, say, with a girl like Tammy.
The wind picked up. It sounded like a migration of rattlesnakes as it whipped its way through the leaves. The sky had turned charcoal.
“It’s going to rain,” Blondie said.
“It can’t rain,” Dispatch responded, as if that settled the matter.
“Why’re we here so early?”
“Just in case. I told Shakes to get here as soon as he could. But who knows? Meryl may have more class than I think. She may not want to fuck him until the sun’s down.”
Time passed. Shadows merged and filled the spaces between the trees. Dispatch began melding into the darkness.
“I told him to stop before the road heads down the hill. Anyway, I brought him out here for a trial run day before yesterday.”
“What if someone else comes along?”
“No one else will come here. They’re all afraid of the hook man.”
“Who?”
Blondie looked around.
“Some homicidal maniac who preys on young lovers. They say he’s about six-six, wears an old felt hat, and has a hook for one hand. The way I heard it, he put his hook through some guy’s gut and then raped his girlfriend.”
“Who says?”
“I don’t know,” Dispatch grouched. “It’s just common knowledge.”
“Has anyone ever seen him?”
“Supposedly — about five or six years ago.”
“And he was back here on this road?”
Blondie heard the quiver in his voice.
“For Christ’s sake, Blondie. If such a thing ever happened, don’t you think it would have made the papers?”
“How do you know it didn’t?”
“Because I looked,” he answered sheepishly.
The wind picked up and the temperature went down. Goosebumps materialized on Blondie’s legs. Why hadn’t he worn long pants? Because it’d been a scorcher that day, he reminded himself. He asked himself how he’d allowed himself to be dragooned into participating in such a ridiculous scheme — trying to prove Meryl was an adulteress by taking a picture of Shakes screwing her. Dispatch had told Blondie he needed him along for “moral support,” but there was nothing moral about what they were doing.
“No one will believe you just happened to be walking in the woods with a camera when one of your best friends drove up and began copulating with your wife in your car,” he’d told Dispatch.
“I’ll tell the judge I was suspicious and followed them here.”
“But one of your best friends?”
“Happens all the time.”
“Dispatch,” Blondie’d said as tactfully as he could, “your wife isn’t very good-looking.”
“Look at the other side, though. Shakes isn’t either.”
The rest of the “plan” called for Shakes to undress Meryl and then pull her down on top of him in the P-mobile. When Shakes stomped his heel against the window, Dispatch would run over and photograph the two of them in full rut.
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