Cocked back on his head was a filthy fedora that looked straight out of a 1950s film noir, the kind where all the women have big bazonkas and all the men talk fast around the cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths. And yep, poking up from the fedora’s hatband, like an old-fashioned reporter’s press pass, was a yellow card. Once it had probably been a bright yellow, but much handling by grimy fingers had turned it bleary.
When my shadow fell across his lap, the Yellow Card Man turned and surveyed me with bleary eyes.
“Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, only it came out Hoo-a fuck-a you?
Al hadn’t given me detailed instructions on how to answer questions, so I said what seemed safest. “None of your fucking business.”
“Well fuck you, too.”
“Fine,” I said. “We are in accord.”
“Huh?”
“Have a nice day.” I started toward the gate, which stood open on a steel track. Beyond it, to the left, was a parking lot that had never been there before. It was full of cars, most of them battered and all of them old enough to belong in a car museum. There were Buicks with portholes and Fords with torpedo noses. Those belong to actual millworkers, I thought. Actual millworkers who are inside now, working for hourly wages.
“I got a yellow card from the greenfront,” the wino said. He sounded both truculent and troubled. “So gimme a buck because today’s double-money day.”
I held the fifty-cent piece out to him. Feeling like an actor who only has one line in the play, I said: “I can’t spare a buck, but here’s half a rock.”
Then you give it to him, Al had said, but I didn’t need to. The Yellow Card Man snatched it from me and held it close to his face. For a moment I thought he was actually going to bite into it, but he just closed his long-fingered hand around it in a fist, making it disappear. He peered at me again, his face almost comic with distrust.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I’ll be damned if I know,” I said, and turned back to the gate. I expected him to hurl more questions after me, but there was only silence. I went out through the gate.
4
The newest car in the lot was a Plymouth Fury from—I think—the mid-or late fifties. The plate on it looked like an impossibly antique version of the one on the back of my Subaru; that plate came, at my ex-wife’s request, with a pink breast cancer ribbon. The one I was looking at now did say VACATIONLAND, but it was orange instead of white. As in most states, Maine plates now come with letters—the one on my Subaru is 23383 IY—but the one on the back of the almost-new white-over-red Fury was 90-811. No letters.
I touched the trunk. It was hard and warm from the sun. It was real.
Cross the tracks and you’ll be at the intersection of Main and Lisbon. After that, buddy, the world is yours.
There were no railroad tracks passing in front of the old mill—not in my time, there weren’t—but they were here, all right. Not just leftover artifacts, either. They were polished, gleaming. And somewhere in the distance I could hear the wuff-chuff of an actual train. When was the last time trains had passed through Lisbon Falls? Probably not since the mill closed and U.S. Gypsum (known to the locals as U.S. Gyp ’Em) was running round the clock.
Except it is running round the clock, I thought. I’d bet money on it. And so is the mill. Because this is no longer the second decade of the twenty-first century.
I had started walking again without even realizing it—walking like a man in a dream. Now I stood on the corner of Main Street and Route 196, also known as the Old Lewiston Road. Only now there was nothing old about it. And diagonally across the intersection, on the opposite corner—
It was the Kennebec Fruit Company, which was certainly a grandiose name for a store that had been tottering on the edge of oblivion—or so it seemed to me—for the ten years I’d been teaching at LHS. Its unlikely raison d’être and only means of survival was Moxie, that weirdest of soft drinks. The proprietor of the Fruit Company, an elderly sweet-natured man named Frank Anicetti, had once told me the world’s population divided naturally (and probably by genetic inheritance) into two groups: the tiny but blessed elect who prized Moxie above all other potables… and everybody else. Frank called everybody else “the unfortunately handicapped majority.”
The Kennebec Fruit Company of my time was a faded yellow-and-green box with a dirty show window barren of goods… unless the cat that sometimes sleeps there is for sale. The roof is swaybacked from many snowy winters. There’s little on offer inside except for Moxie souvenirs: bright orange tee-shirts reading I’VE GOT MOXIE! bright orange hats, vintage calendars, tin signs that looked vintage but were probably made last year in China. For most of the year the place is devoid of customers, most of the shelves denuded of goods… although you can still get a few sugary snack foods or a bag of potato chips (if you like the salt-and-vinegar kind, that is). The soft-drink cooler is stocked with nothing but Moxie. The beer cooler is empty.
Each July, Lisbon Falls hosts the Maine Moxie Festival. There are bands, fireworks, and a parade featuring—I swear this is true—Moxie floats and local beauty queens dressed in Moxie-colored tank bathing suits, which means an orange so bright it can cause retinal burns. The parade marshal is always dressed as the Moxie Doc, which means a white coat, a stethoscope, and one of those funky mirrors on a headband. Two years ago the marshal was LHS principal Stella Langley, and she’ll never live it down.
During the festival, the Kennebec Fruit Company comes alive and does excellent business, mostly provided by bemused tourists on their way to the western Maine resort areas. The rest of the year it is little more than a husk haunted by the faint odor of Moxie, a smell that has always reminded me—probably because I belong to the unfortunately handicapped majority—of Musterole, the fabulously stinky stuff my mother insisted on rubbing into my throat and chest when I had a cold.
What I was looking at now from the far side of the Old Lewiston Road was a thriving business in the prime of life. The sign hung over the door (FRESH UP WITH 7-UP on top, WELCOME TO THE KENNEBEC FRUIT CO. below) was bright enough to throw arrows of sun at my eyes. The paint was fresh, the roof unbowed by the weather. People were going in and coming out. And in the show window, instead of a cat…
Oranges, by God. The Kennebec Fruit Company once sold actual fruit. Who knew?
I started across the street, then pulled back as an inter-city bus snored toward me. The route sign above the divided windshield read LEWISTON EXPRESS. When the bus braked to a stop at the railroad crossing, I saw that most of the passengers were smoking. The atmosphere in there must have been roughly akin to the atmosphere of Saturn.
Once the bus had gone on its way (leaving behind a smell of half-cooked diesel to mix with the rotten-egg stench belching from the Worumbo’s stacks), I crossed the street, wondering briefly what would happen if I were hit by a car. Would I blink out of existence? Wake up lying on the floor of Al’s pantry? Probably neither. Probably I would just die here, in a past for which a lot of people probably felt nostalgic. Possibly because they had forgotten how bad the past smelled, or because they had never considered that aspect of the Nifty Fifties in the first place.