It turns out I’m right too. We never did find hair nor hide o’ Reggie, His body never washed ashore and sure as shootin’ we couldn’t dredge the whole Atlantic. I put out a flock o’ tracers to try to find some relatives but no one ever came forward. It’s like he come out o’ nowhere and plain disappeared.
Frankie mourned him for awhile but Oz was always around to comfort her and ’twarn’t long afore she seemed to forget Reggie Van der Breughe. Six months later she and Oz got married in the Cripple’s Bend Community Church with Parson Beam performin’ the ceremony.
That must a-been nigh on to five years ago ’cause their oldest son, Johnny, is goin’ on four now.
I guess that’s where the story ought to end and it would have if Maw hadn’t got it into her head to visit her sister down to Ogunquit last summer. Course, she had to drag me along too. Now Maw’s a great hand for amateur theatricals and when she learns there’s a road company playin’ in the town, nothin’ will do but that we go and see ’em.
The play warn’t much and I’ll have to admit I dozed through the better part of it. Then, when everyone else is filin’ out, Maw lags behind.
She says, “Paw, I’m goin’ back stage and you’re a-comin’ with me.”
I don’t argue. There ain’t no use with Maw. When we get back, she insists on seein’ some actor named Bruce. His dressin’ room is pointed out and Maw ploughs right in, with me at her heels tryin’ to stop her.
There’s two young fellers in the room that ain’t no more than a cubby-hole. They look up startled; then one of ’em turns away quick.
Maw walks straight up to him and says, “Hello, Reggie.”
He glances at her, his face blank. “You must be making some mistake, ma’am.”
“No, I ain’t. Sure as God made green apples, you’re Reggie Van der Breughe.”
I look this feller over. He’s got short medium brown hair in a crew cut and light gray eyes. I remember seein’ him on the stage. He ain’t got no paunch nor no struttin’ walk. I don’t see no resemblance betwixt him and Reggie. I reckon Maw’s gone plum daft. Then he gets up. There’s a strength about his face I ain’t never seen in Reggie but his tight, mockin’ smile is familiar.
He says in a heavy voice, “Supposing I am, what are you going to do about it?”
Maw don’t seem to hear him. She’s musin’, “Dye that hair red and give it a marcel. Wear contact lenses and a pad around your middle. Walk in the jerky way and talk in a squeakin’ voice. You were good, Reggie. You really were.”
He laughs. “I thought so too. If you don’t mind my askin, how’d you spot me, ma’am?”
“A man can’t change his features. His ears, the shape of his forehead and the like. But I’ll tell you what set me to thinkin’. All through the show you was twirlin’ and flexin’ that cane you was carryin’. It was a dead giveaway. It’s a habit you ought to break.”
He grins at her. “I’ll try, Ma’am. I really will.”
There ain’t no one else back stage now. Maw says, “Frankie Wilcox hired you to make Oz Bilbo jealous, didn’t she?”
He shrugs. “I guess there’s no reason to deny it any longer. You’ll have to admit I did a good job, even if I did ham it up now and then. I hear she’s married to the stupid jerk she was angling for. So she got her money’s worth, didn’t she?”
I’m workin’ up to a boil, gettin’ madder every minute. I stammer out, “I ought to put you under arrest. Frankie too.”
Maw lays her hand on my arm. “Now calm down, Paw. What laws did he break?”
She’s got me stumped. I says, “I can’t think of any right off. But give me time and I guess I can dig up one or two.”
Maw says, “You ain’t doin’ nothin’ o’ the kind. Frankie and Oz have got a right to happiness and you ain’t spoilin’ it just because she made a fool of you.”
I’m still fumin’ but there ain’t much I can say. I reckon if the truth ever comes out, I’ll be the laughin’ stock o’ the whole o’ Pisquaticook County. But I’m not confessin’ that to Maw. I reckon it’s better to convince her that I knew Reggie was a fraud all the time and I was playin’ along so that Frankie Wilcox could have her tragic love affair and Oz could spend the rest of his life comfortin’ her. Come to think of it, mebbe it’s true. There was a lot o’ times when I didn’t quite believe in Reggie Van der Breughe.
What’s It All About?
by Stephen Dentinger
How many times have you wondered what was in the mind of that hit and run driver just before he struck? Just before he ran into that old woman — or that child... What were his thoughts, in his all too brief moment of mastery over life and death, as he saw his victim...
The engine coughed once and then caught, throbbing to life as I eased down on the accelerator. Then I was traveling, heading across town to the expressway where I could really open her up. The dark came late on these summer nights, and even now at past nine-thirty a sort of red-orange glow lingered in the western sky, as if reluctant to vanish completely.
I had all the windows open and the breeze felt good, and I wondered where I was going. Not that it mattered. It never mattered when was behind the wheel, feeling the power of the engine as we tore through the night — just it and me. Maybe that was the only taste of power — real power — I got in an otherwise dull life. Five days a week I could work away like all the other jerks, and walk the streets during the lunch hour with that set expression of pleasant boredom, but when Friday nights came I was master of myself, driving two tons of steel along a gray ribbon of highway.
It was at times like this that I knew what the air aces of the First World War must have felt when they took to the sky in their Spads and Fokkers and Sopwith Camels. This, right here now, speeding along the expressway at seventy miles an hour, was what life is all about. I flipped on the radio but then turned it off again. I didn’t need it. I didn’t need anything but the speed and the power and the certainty that I was going somewhere.
But where tonight? I jacked up the speed to eighty-five, taking a long low hill as if it didn’t exist, roaring down the other side with all the fury of the night around me. I passed a little sports car with a girl at the wheel, turned sharply in front of her and debated having some fun. But no, I had other things on my mind. She might remember me, or the license number, and report it to the cops later. I couldn’t take a chance on anything like that.
Further along, pressing ninety, I caught an Animal in, the road — a rabbit, probably — and pinned him to the pavement before he knew what hit him. All right, all right. No faster, or they might pick me up. I slowed it back gradually, seeing the lights of the city off on my right.
And turned off into downtown. The city reminded me of the resort season in Florida. Flowering sport shirts, girls in shorts, open-topped convertibles prowling the streets. Friday, Friday night, the beat beat beat of the rock place as I passed. “Hey, cat.” Sure. I remembered Florida, and the old man I’d caught on the crosswalk there.
Friday night was alive, with the blood of the city throbbing in its veins, and I was its master, as long as I stayed behind the wheel, as long as I saw it all only through the windshield specked with the guts of a dozen dead bugs.
I cruised some more, thinking about where to go. Maybe down to the Negro section. I could hit a kid in the street and keep on going. They’d see a white man driving away and that would be enough for a nice riot on a hot Friday night. Or maybe down to the beach, where there’d be a crowd even after dark. They were never individual people when I had them in my sights, never men or women or children when I gunned the car forward in that final second. They were only objects like bags of sand.