To Miss Beryl’s way of thinking, the most objectionable thing about this objectionable conversation was the fact that the child was listening to it. Since the little girl was still staring at her, Miss Beryl picked up her red, two-headed Foo dog from the coffee table and showed it to the little girl. The dog had the same grinning head on both ends of its body.
“See my Foo dog?” she said, offering the stuffed animal to the child, who made no move to take it. Miss Beryl rotated the dog so that the child could see its two heads, that it was the same at both ends. If the little girl noticed this unusual feature, she gave no sign, though she studied the animal dully.
“You know what a Foo dog says?” Miss Beryl asked.
The child’s good eye found her again.
“Foo on you,” Miss Beryl said, hoping for a smile.
The little girl’s eye again found the animal, again studied it seriously, as if to determine whether the dog in question would say such a thing.
“I call him Sully,” Miss Beryl said, “because he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.”
This time when she offered the animal, the child took it, without enthusiasm, almost as if she were doing Miss Beryl a favor.
“Yeah … yeah … yeah,” the child’s mother was saying. “Okay, I’ll go upstairs if I can talk her into letting me. Call me up there in half an hour. You should see the phone I’m talking into. It must’ve been made during the Civil War.… Okay.… Go back to work.… Yeah, okay.”
When she hung up the phone, the young woman picked the little girl up and rubbed noses with her. “False alarm, Birdbrain. Daddy pulled a fast one on Grandma. He’s probably real proud of himself too. Daddy doesn’t get to outsmart people very often.” Then, to Miss Beryl, “You gonna let us go upstairs, or what?”
“I guess if you know Mr. Sullivan, he won’t mind,” Miss Beryl said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know him,” said the young woman on her way to the door. “He’s been balling my mother for about twenty years, though. She’s the one who knows him.”
Once again, Miss Beryl was speechless. She watched her visitors go, watched the door close behind them, watched it open again. “Here’s your dog back,” the young woman said, setting the Foo dog back on the table. “And thanks again for the phone.” She cast a half-amused, half-contemptuous glance around Miss Beryl’s flat. “You’re missing the boat. You should charge admission to see this place.”
When she was gone again and the child’s and the mother’s footsteps had climbed the stairs and entered the room above, Miss Beryl found her voice again. “Well,” she said to Clive Sr. “What do you think of that?”
Before her dead husband could answer, the phone rang. “Now what?” Miss Beryl said.
It was Mrs. Gruber, whom Miss Beryl had forgotten completely.
“I’m coming,” Miss Beryl told her. “Keep your girdle on.”
There were only half a dozen paved roads into and out of North Bath. In addition to Route 27A, the two-lane blacktop that became Main (Upper and Lower) within the city limits, there were five other narrow two-lanes linking Bath to its neighbors: Schuyler Springs to the north and smaller communities like Shaker Heights, Dollsville, Wapford, Glen. And there was the new four-lane spur that linked Bath to the interstate that ran between Albany and Montreal. The new spur was just three miles long, traversing the large tract of marshy land that separated Bath from the interstate, the future site, according to a large billboard planted just off the roadway, of the five-hundred-acre “Ultimate Escape Pun Park,” an “extravaganza of water slides, roller coasters, a Wild West town and a fantasy village where fairy-tale characters spring to life.” The majority of the huge billboard was a garish clown’s face, and there was something about this face, about its lewd grin perhaps, that suggested more malice than fun, and small children who had the sign pointed out to them by their mothers as they sped by had been known to burst into tears of fright. Adults were disconcerted also to notice that within sight of the billboard, just before you entered the village of North Bath, was the new cemetery, a stark, treeless place of, for the most part, horizontal gravestones. There was considerable speculation that the cemetery would have to be relocated once construction on the fun park got under way. Already the juxtaposition of the two “ultimate escapes” had become a dark local joke.
This midmorning, thanks to the grand opening of the new supermarket at the interstate exit, there was more traffic than usual speeding down the spur toward the demonic clown billboard. For the most part, the motorists were housewives hurrying back toward town, the back of their vans and station wagons loaded down with groceries. They’d gotten carried away in the festive new store and bought twice as much as they normally would, purchasing items not available at the North Bath IGA. As they flew home, feet bearing down a little more heavily on the accelerator than was their custom, contemplating their greater-than-anticipated expenditure of time and money, they were greeted by an unsettling apparition in the form of a hitchhiker attempting to thumb a ride into town. These housewives, many of whom had small, fussy children with them, were not the sort to pick up even decent-looking hitchhikers, and so they were not even fleetingly tempted to stop for this one, who was so besotted with mud that the speeding housewives concluded, despite the fact that there was no prison within a hundred-mile radius, that the man must be an escaped convict, a murderer surely, who had spent the night in the marsh to escape the dogs. Either that or he was a premature burial from the nearby cemetery who had clawed his way out of his casket and up through the black earth and into the air. Where most hitchhikers at least attempted to look friendly or, failing that, pitiful, this one looked just plain dangerous. Something about the way he held out his thumb suggested that the fist attached to it might contain a live grenade. One young woman driving a station wagon full of groceries actually swerved into the left lane when she drew near him, as if she feared he might lunge at the car and grab the door handle as she hurtled by.
Nothing could have been further from Sully’s intention. If he was dangerous, he certainly wasn’t dangerous in the way the young woman feared. His murderous expression was simply the result of spending the morning doing a thankless job on a bum knee, getting his truck stuck in the mud, spending half an hour of fruitless exertion trying to get unstuck, during which time it had occurred to him what Carl Roebuck, the man he’d sworn he’d never go back to work for, would say when he found out what Sully’d done. Carl Roebuck would say he’d been wrong — that the job had been one Sully could fuck up after all, a remark Sully did not want to hear uttered outside the precincts of his own thoughts. Every time Carl said it, even within those precincts, Sully threw him out the window. To make matters worse, he could hear his young philosophy professor snickering an I-told-you-so about free will.
Also his father, who lay buried in the cemetery another half mile up the highway, a man with whom Sully had not yet made peace. In fact, on the way out to Carl Roebuck’s development, he’d done what he always did when he drove by the cemetery. He’d rolled down the window, cold be damned, and given Big Jim Sullivan the finger as he flew by. Unlike most of the residents of Bath, Sully didn’t care much whether The Ultimate Escape Fun Park got built or not, except that if it did, they’d probably relocate the cemetery, which meant they’d have to disturb his father’s eternal rest. Sully hated to think of his father at rest, and had there been a way, and if Sully’d had the money, he’d have left instructions to have Big Jim dug up every decade or so, just to make sure he didn’t get comfortable. And so, right now, he was hoping to get a lift past the cemetery so his father wouldn’t have a chance to get a close-up look at him in his present condition. Whenever he was on a stupid streak he was conscious of the faraway sound of his father’s laughter. His next-to-last stupid streak, a little over a year ago, had begun when he fell off a ladder and injured his knee. Anybody could fall off a ladder, of course. That hadn’t been the stupid part. The stupid part had been the reason he’d fallen. Halfway up the ladder, he’d heard a man laughing raucously, and off across the job site, on the other side of the chain-link fence, Sully’d spotted a big man who, from a distance, was a dead ringer for his father. Dead ringer he would indeed have been, since Big Jim had himself been dead for several years. Whoever the man with the horselaugh was, Sully was paying attention to him and not to his footing. He’d fallen twenty feet and then listened to the distant sound of his father’s laughter all the way to the hospital. Right now, so close to the cemetery, the sound of laughter was nearer, was ringing, in fact, in Sully’s ears.