Conlan imagined the nests of hair under her arms.
THUNDER rolled away across the northern scarp. Hat brims dripped and shingles glistened. Inside the rain-battered cups of columbine and tiger lily, bees died of exhaustion.
“Lemon phosphate.”
“Cherry phosphate.”
The twins exchanged looks in the blue mirror. Their faces were as identical as their coifs, bicycles, leg-of-mutton sleeves.
“With ice, please,” they said.
The temperature swing brought on by the storm made the brother ill. His skin was clammy and he trembled. With disagreeable vividness came recollection of the home left near forty years ago, tea and treacle by a peat fire.
“And extra straws.”
The matched white faces looming, dead white under freckles.
AS Conlan swept the porch, he heard stones click in the lapping water. The lake at its deepest was said to be twelve hundred feet. It was terribly cold there and all the fish were blind. The music room and parlor, as Conlan peered through the windows, seemed deep in that forbidding way. He shivered, imagining the piano keys’ slick cold like some ancient ice unpleasantly preserved. Red-brown geometries floated up. He turned away, mouth curling around the taste of foreign carpet.
LORETTA said, “This is the weekend I go to New York.”
The brother understood about interest on a loan.
“I’ll need new pajamas,” he said.
He took his wife to the station with an hour to spare. Alone on the platform, they watched and were watched by a murder of crows.
“Your brother,” Loretta began.
Desperately inspired, her husband emptied his pockets of change, fell on his knees to retrieve it, and she pointed out coins with the triangular toe of her boot.
“Phone me tonight,” he said.
She smiled from the compartment window, pretending not to hear, subtle as tailings.
“HELP yourself, Conlan,” said G.T., Jr.
The squash were enormous, the cucumbers ready to explode. Tunbridge, in pressed green overalls and striped engineer’s hat, enhanced a proprietary gleam. He was proud of the family fertilizer, a secret blend. Knowing the invitation as otherwise meant — he was free to take, but invisibly, please — Conlan still bit a tomato, inhaling seed clumps like frog eggs, only warm. Tunbridge caught the gesture, but maintained his gleam, sharpened it.
“We used to call them love apples,” he said. “A member of the nightshade family.”
OBSESSIVELY, the brother thought about sherbet. He stared out the bay window, past his backwards name in gold paint shaded with black. The street stayed empty, the main street without a policeman to patrol it. Azalea sherbet? Rosemary? Mushroom? French monks had recipes, and sultans did. Knowledge was money, history was money, and so on. The brother wiped the marble counter until he could see himself wiping. The veins in the marble, unlike the veins in the body, were confused and led nowhere. Blue veins in orderly fashion shipped blood the color of sherbet, an essence. If fact was fact and the street was empty, why not a supernatural sherbet? One that removed the power of speech and made music.
IT felt safest to enter by the kitchen. The Ford refused to turn over in the falling chill, and now Conlan was inside the house, drawn to white surfaces — cupboards, stove, and sink — which made the most of last light. But he heard things like dance steps on the lake and voices from under the carpet. Conlan had always understood the way of being alone, and to lose that would leave him with nothing. When he stole something from the house last summer, it had been a little picture book that no one would miss; it had been a gesture for himself alone. Pictures had nothing behind them, were only themselves. We would miss you, Conlan. He began searching every drawer for candles.
MUNICIPAL NOIR
MADRID, IN NEBRASKA’S SOUTHWEST corner, in the wide terraced plain below the Platte, had a Hog & Hominy Fest annually until 1978. There are three taverns in the town, two hardware stores, a Boys’ Club, a pistol range, and Strunk Fabrication, where crèche figures and baptismal fonts are made by a system of injection molding.
IN August of 1977, Ron Maddox was planning a future there. He had come to his wife’s country from North Dakota. Ron’s Pythagoras ABM Silo Group Commander, Lieutenant Benkelman, had been the best man at the wedding in Minot. Bonnie was expecting a child, but she wasn’t pregnant yet.
IT was only the fact of having once received a Visible Man anatomy doll for Christmas that prepared Kallinger for what he was to find all over the kitchen of Unit No. 6 at the mobile home park just off the county blacktop midway between Madrid and La Paz. Interim Coroner Perk Feed had so little to work with that even a preliminary finding seemed unlikely. Feed’s right leg was some two and one quarter inches shorter than his left, due to a fraternity initiation.
WAS Fran the kind of woman who would go all the way to Yankton for bridgework? Why had Lute Strunk rotated his best acres into sorghum? His CB handle was “Fledermaus,” and some said he had peculiar ideas about Jews.
AT 9:15 a.m. on Friday, Miss Clara Musil reported that her collection of little glass animals had been vandalized by a one-armed man. The light-blue hatchback had been abandoned next to the Elks Hall. Both Reverend and Mrs. LaFollette were treated for hyperventilation.
KALLINGER, at the subsequent awards dinner, wearing a strap-in-the-back “Go ’Huskers” baseball cap, refused to eat his portion of tapioca pudding until someone had tasted it first, and later proposed a curious toast “to Negro banking interests.”
“HE wanted the best of both worlds,” said a bureau insider.
Donna, Benkelman’s estranged wife, disagrees. Living in San Diego now, she has legally adopted Fran’s two sons and works as a commercial illustrator.
“Gas spectrometry is fine. Fiber analysis is fine. But people want a good, human story, and in this case they didn’t get it.”
SUSPICION of multiple sodomy focused on a “drifter” with a history of bronchiectasis. Someone had caused Jud Musil’s feed troughs to be infected with hog cholera. These were theories congruent with mutual distrust.
“We lacked a fallback position,” one resident later observed. “Pictures just didn’t tell the story.”
AND then on a crisp October morning, during the final hour of Ingo Feed’s Stop & Swap radio show, a strangely insistent man phoned in to offer his entire collection of bat-wing fans in exchange for “the global freezing design.”
BY now people were beginning to ask hard questions about the investigative reporter in their midst. Complicitous terrorist supplying atrocity photos to clients in Melbourne, Rome, Pernambuco, and Dubai? Semiliterate impostor becalmed in a delusional world of Mod Squad reruns?
OVER treacherous, ice-glazed roads, normally temperate, circumspect farm families drove the forty-five miles to Arbeiter Mall so they could dine at a Polynesian restaurant. Owner Gus Triandos would boast once too often about his acquaintance with high-level research. The baby back ribs were moist, tender, imaginatively sauced.
TRIAL proceedings, convened at the county seat of Bogota, began the first week of the new year under the guidance of Judge Pangloss LaFollette, no relation.
Dr. Shah, for the prosecution, explained that, as an “outsider,” he’d had little success in convincing the authorities, even in the face of corroborative evidence from a degreed caseworker, that the dozens of cigarette burns on the chest were cause for alarm. Dr. Zweig, for the defense, described Ron as “a man without qualities.” Fran, according to the testimony of a Chicago psychic, was operating a barge on the Loire.
“QUITE simply, there are no words to describe what Mrs. Maddox has already paid in suffering,” said a friend of the family.