He handed her the jar and ate the Wickle. “Jesus, Annie, my mouth may never unpucker.”
She laughed, displaying her few remaining teeth. “They best with bread n butter n a nice cold RC. Or a beer, but I don’t drink that anymore.”
“What’s that you’re knitting? Is it a scarf?”
“The Lord shall not come in His own raiment,” Annie said. “You go on now, Mr. J., and do your duty. Watch out for men in black cars. George Allman on the radio talks about them all the time. You know where they come from, don’t you?” She cocked a knowing glance at him. She might have been joking. Or not. With Orphan Annie it was hard to tell.
Corbett Denton was another denizen of DuPray’s night side. He was the town barber, and known locally as Drummer, for some teenage exploit no one seemed exactly clear on, only that it had resulted in a month’s suspension from the regional high school. He might have been wild in his salad days, but those were far behind him. Drummer was now in his late fifties or early sixties, overweight, balding, and afflicted with insomnia. When he couldn’t sleep, he sat on the stoop of his shop and watched DuPray’s empty main drag. Empty, that was, except for Tim. They exchanged the desultory conversational gambits of mere acquaintances—the weather, baseball, the town’s annual Summer Sidewalk Sale—but one night Denton said something that put Tim on yellow alert.
“You know, Jamieson, this life we think we’re living isn’t real. It’s just a shadow play, and I for one will be glad when the lights go out on it. In the dark, all the shadows disappear.”
Tim sat down on the stoop under the barber pole, its endless spiral now stilled for the night. He took off his glasses, polished them on his shirt, put them back on. “Permission to speak freely?”
Drummer Denton flicked his cigarette into the gutter, where it splashed brief sparks. “Go right ahead. Between midnight and four, everyone should have permission to speak freely. That’s my opinion, at least.”
“You sound like a man suffering from depression.”
Drummer laughed. “Call you Sherlock Holmes.”
“You ought to go see Doc Roper. There are pills that will brighten your attitude. My ex takes them. Although getting rid of me probably brightened her attitude more.” He smiled to show this was a joke, but Drummer Denton didn’t smile back, just got to his feet.
“I know about those pills, Jamieson. They’re like booze and pot. Probably like the ecstasy the kids take nowadays when they go to their raves, or whatever they call them. Those things make you believe for awhile that all of this is real. That it matters. But it’s not and it doesn’t.”
“Come on,” Tim said softly. “That’s no way to be.”
“In my opinion, it’s the only way to be,” the barber said, and walked toward the stairs leading to his apartment above the barber shop. His gait was slow and lumbering.
Tim looked after him, disquieted. He thought Drummer Denton was one of those fellows who might decide some rainy night to kill himself. Maybe take his dog with him, if he had one. Like some old Egyptian pharaoh. He considered talking to Sheriff John about it, then thought of Wendy Gullickson, who still hadn’t unbent much. The last thing he wanted was for her or any of the other deputies to think he was getting above himself. He was no longer law enforcement, just the town’s night knocker. Best to let it go.
But Drummer Denton never quite left his mind.
12
On his rounds one night near the end of June, he spotted two boys walking west down Main Street with knapsacks on their backs and lunchboxes in their hands. They might have been headed off to school, had it not been two in the morning. These nocturnal promenaders turned out to be the Bilson twins. They were pissed at their parents, who had refused to take them to the Dunning Agricultural Fair because their report cards had been unacceptable.
“We got mostly Cs and din’t fail nothing,” Robert Bilson said, “and we got promoted. What’s so bad about that?”
“It ain’t right,” Roland Bilson chimed in. “We’re going to be at the fair first thing in the morning and get jobs. We heard they always need roundabouts.”
Tim thought about telling the boy the correct word was roustabouts, then decided that was beside the point. “Kids, I hate to pop your balloon, but you’re what? Eleven?”
“Twelve!” they chorused.
“Okay, twelve. Keep your voices down, people are sleeping. No one is going to hire you on at that fair. What they’re going to do is slam you in the Dollar Jail on whatever excuse they’ve got for a midway and keep you there until your parents show up. Until they do, folks are going to come by and gawk at you. Some may throw peanuts or pork rinds.”
The Bilson twins stared at him with dismay (and perhaps some relief ).
“Here’s what you do,” Tim said. “You go on back home right now, and I’ll walk behind you, just to make sure you don’t change your collective mind.”
“What’s a collective mind?” Robert asked.
“A thing twins are reputed to have, at least according to folklore. Did you use the door or go out a window?”
“Window,” Roland said.
“Okay, that’s how you go back in. If you’re lucky, your folks will never know you were out.”
Robert: “You won’t tell them?”
“Not unless I see you try it again,” Tim said. “Then I’ll not only tell them what you did, I’ll tell them about how you sassed me when I caught you.”
Roland, shocked: “We didn’t do no such thing!”
“I’ll lie,” Tim said. “I’m good at it.”
He followed them, and watched as Robert Bilson made a step with his hands to help Roland into the open window. Tim then did Robert the same favor. He waited to see if a light would go on somewhere, signaling imminent discovery of the would-be runaways, and when none did, he resumed his rounds.
13
There were more people out and about on Friday and Saturday nights, at least until midnight or one in the morning. Courting couples, mostly. After that there might be an invasion of what Sheriff John called the road rockets, young men in souped-up cars or trucks who went blasting down DuPray’s empty main street at sixty or seventy miles an hour, racing side by side and waking people up with the ornery blat of their glasspack mufflers. Sometimes a deputy or an SP trooper would run one of them down and write him up (or jail him if he blew .09), but even with four DuPray officers on duty during weekend nights, arrests were relatively rare. Mostly they got away with it.
Tim went to see Orphan Annie. He found her sitting outside her tent, knitting slippers. Arthritis or not, her fingers moved like lightning. He asked if she’d like to make twenty dollars. Annie said a little money always came in handy, but it would depend on what the job was. He told her, and she cackled.
“Happy to do it, Mr. J. If you throw in a couple of bottles of Wickles, that is.”
Annie, whose motto seemed to be “go big or go home,” made him a banner thirty feet long and seven feet wide. Tim attached it to a steel roller he made himself, welding together pieces of pipe in the shop of Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service. After explaining to Sheriff John what he wanted to do and receiving permission to give it a try, Tim and Tag Faraday hung the roller on a cable above Main Street’s three-way intersection, anchoring the cable to the false fronts of Oberg’s Drug on one side and the defunct movie theater on the other.
On Friday and Saturday nights, around the time the bars closed, Tim yanked a cord that unfurled the banner like a window shade. On either side, Annie had drawn an old-fashioned flash camera. The message beneath read SLOW DOWN, IDIOT! WE ARE PHOTOGRAPHING YOUR LICENSE PLATE!