“Funny,” said Peyton, as he stepped down from the fence, “but I don’t eat so much anymore. I used to have a hell of an appetite, but now some breakfast and a snack in the evening does me just fine. I even had to make an extra hole in my belt to stop my damn pants from falling down.”
There was an unreadable expression on Artie Hoyt’s face as he glanced down at his own belly and reddened slightly. Peyton winced.
“I didn’t mean anything by that, Artie,” he said quietly. “When Rina was alive, I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. She fed me up like she was going to slaughter me for Christmas. Without her…”
He trailed off and looked away.
“Don’t talk to me about it,” said Artie after a moment had passed. He appeared anxious to keep the conversation going, now that the long silence between them had at last been broken. “My wife doesn’t believe it’s food unless it’s deep fried, or comes in a bun. I think she’d deep-fry candy if she could.”
“They do that in some places,” Peyton said.
“You don’t say?” Artie looked mildly disgusted. “Jesus, don’t tell her that. Chocolate’s the closest that she gets to health food as it is.”
They began walking toward the pond. Peyton let Molly off the leash. He knew that she had sensed the presence of water, and he didn’t want to torment her by forcing her to walk at their pace. The dog raced ahead, a streak of brown and white, and soon was lost from sight in the tall grass.
“Nice dog,” said Artie.
“Thank you,” said Peyton. “She’s a good girl. She’s like a child to me, I guess.”
“Yeah,” said Artie. He knew that Peyton and his wife had not been blessed with children.
“Look, Artie,” said Peyton, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to say for a while.”
He paused as he tried to find the right words, then took a deep breath and plowed right in.
“In church, that time, after Lydia had come home, I-Well, I wanted to apologize for staring at her, you know, her…”
“Ass,” finished Artie.
“Yeah, that. I’m sorry, is all I wanted to say. It wasn’t right. Especially in church. Wasn’t Christian. It wasn’t what you might think, though.”
Suddenly, Peyton realized that he had wandered onto marshy ground, conversationally speaking. He now faced the possibility of being forced to explain both what he believed Artie might have thought Peyton was thinking, and what, in fact, he, Peyton, had been thinking, which was that Artie Hoyt’s daughter looked like the Hindenburg just before it crashed.
“She’s a big girl,” said Artie sadly, saving Peyton from further embarrassment. “It’s not her fault. Her marriage broke up, and the doctors gave her pills for depression, and she suddenly started to put on all this weight. Doesn’t help that she eats enough for two, but that’s part of it, you know, the eating. She gets sad, she eats more, she gets sadder, she eats even more. It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t blame you for staring at her. Hell, she wasn’t my daughter, I’d stare at her that way too. In fact, sometimes, it shames me to say, I do stare at her that way.”
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” said Peyton. “It wasn’t…kind.”
“Apology accepted,” said Artie. “Buy me a drink next time we’re in Dean’s.”
He put his hand out, and the two men shook. Peyton patted Artie on the back. He felt his eyes water slightly, and blamed it on his exertions.
“How about I buy you a beer when we’re done here? I could do with something to toast the end of a long day.”
“Agreed. Let’s water your dog and get the-”
He stopped. They were within sight of the sheltered pond. It had been a popular trysting spot, once upon a time, when both Artie and Peyton were much younger men, until the land changed hands and the new owner, the God-fearing man whose estate was now being fought over by his godless relatives, had let it be known that he didn’t want any adolescent voyages of sexual discovery being embarked upon in the vicinity of his pond. A large beech tree over-hung the water, its branches almost touching the surface. Molly was standing a small distance from it. She had not drunk the water. She had, in fact, stopped several feet from the bank. Now she was waiting, one paw raised, her tail wagging uncertainly. Through the rushes, something blue was visible to the approaching men.
Bobby Faraday was kneeling by the water’s edge, his upper body at a slight angle, as though he were trying to glimpse his reflection in the pool. There was a rope around his neck, attached to the trunk of the tree. He was swollen with gas, his face a reddish-purple, his features almost unrecognizable.
“Ah, hell,” said Peyton.
He wavered slightly, and Artie reached up and put his arm around his companion’s shoulder as the sun set behind them, and the wind blew, and the host bowed low in mour hi qlow in mning.
CHAPTER TWO
I TOOK THE TRAIN to Pearl River from Penn Station. I hadn’t driven down to New York from Maine, and I hadn’t bothered to rent a car while I was in the city. There was no need. Whatever I needed to do here, I could do more easily without an automobile. As the little single-car train pulled into the station, still barely altered from its origins as a branch of the Erie Railroad, I saw that any other changes to the heart of the town were also purely cosmetic. I climbed down and walked slowly across Memorial Park where a sign close to the unmanned Town of Orangetown police booth announced that Pearl River was still the town of friendly people. The park had been created by Julius E. Braunsdorf, the father of Pearl River, who had also laid out the town itself after purchasing the land, as well as building the railroad station, manufacturing the Aetna sewing machine and the America & Liberty printing press, developing an incandescent lightbulb, and inventing the electric arc light that illuminated, not just this park, but the Capitol area in Washington, D.C. Braunsdorf was one of those guys who made most people look kind of sluggish by comparison. Along with Dan Fortmann of the Chicago Bears, he was Pearl River ’s proudest boast.
The Stars and Stripes still flew over the memorial at the center of the park, commemorating the young men of the town who had died in combat. Curiously, these included James B. Moore and Siegfried W. Butz, who had died, not in combat, but in the course of a bank raid in 1929, when Henry J. Fernekes, a notorious bandit of the time, tried to hold up the First National Bank of Pearl River while masquerading as an electrician. Still, at least they were remembered. Murdered bank clerks don’t often qualify for a mention on public memorials anymore.
Pearl River hadn’t shaken off any of its Irish roots since I’d left. The Muddy Brook Café at North Main, on the far side of the park, still offered a Celtic breakfast, and nearby were Gallagher’s Irish butcher, the Irish Cottage gift store, and Healy-O’Sullivan Travel. Across East Central Avenue, next door to Handeler’s hardware store, was the Ha’penny Irish Shop, which sold Irish tea, candy, potato chips, and replica Gaelic football jerseys, and around the corner from the old Pearl Street Hotel was G. F. Noonan’s Irish bar. As my father often remarked, they should just have painted the whole town green and been done with it. The Pearl River movie theater was now closed, though, and there were chichi stores selling crafts and expensive gifts alongside the more functional auto shops and furniture stores.