“No I won’t. You forgot your TV dinner, Chief.”
“Yeah!” he said. “I’ll go home and take off my shoes and watch how those television cops do it. You know, sometimes an empty house is a nice rest. See you, Eth.”
I liked Stoney. I guess he is a good officer. I wonder where the line falls.
I was closing up shop, drawing in the fruit bins from the doorway, when Joey Morphy sauntered in.
“Quick!” I said, and I closed the double front doors and drew the dark green shades. “Speak in a whisper.”
“What’s got into you?”
“Someone might want to buy something.”
“Yeah! I know what you mean. God! I hate long holidays. Brings out the worst in everybody. They start out mad and come home pooped and broke.”
“Want a cold drink while I draw the coverlets over my darlings?”
“I don’t mind. Got some cold beer?”
“To take out only.”
“I’ll take it out. Just open the can.”
I punched two triangular holes in the tin and he upended it, opened his throat, and drained it into him. “Ah!” he said and set the can on the counter.
“We’re going on a trip.”
“You poor devil. Where?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t fought over that yet.”
“Something’s going on. Do you know what it is?”
“Give me a clue.”
“I can’t. I just feel it. Hair on the back of my neck kind of itches. That’s a sure sign. Everybody’s a little out of synch.”
“Maybe you just imagine it.”
“Maybe. But Mr. Baker doesn’t take holidays. He was in one hell of a hurry to get out of town.”
I laughed. “Have you checked the books?”
“Know something? I did.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Once I knew a postmaster, little town. Had a punk kid working there, name of Ralph—pale hair, glasses, little tiny chin, adenoids big as goiters. Ralph got tagged for stealing stamps—lots of stamps, like maybe eighteen hundred dollars’ worth. Couldn’t do a thing. He was a punk.”
“You mean he didn’t take them?”
“If he didn’t it was just the same as if he did. I’m jumpy. I’m never going to get tagged if I can help it.”
“Is that why you never married?”
“Come to think of it, by God, that’s one of the reasons.”
I folded my apron and put it in the drawer under the cash register. “Takes too much time and effort to be suspicious, Joey. I couldn’t take the time.”
“Have to in a bank. You only lose once. All it needs is a whisper.”
“Don’t tell me you’re suspicious.”
“It’s an instinct. If anything’s just a little bit out of norm, my alarm goes off.”
“What a way to live! You don’t really mean that.”
“I guess I don’t. I just thought if you’d heard something, you’d tell me—that is, if it was any of my business.”
“I think I’d tell anybody anything I know. Maybe that’s why nobody ever tells me anything. Going home?”
“No, I think I’ll go eat across the street.”
I switched the front lights off. “Mind coming out through the alley? Look, I’ll make sandwiches in the morning before the rush. One ham, one cheese on rye bread, lettuce and mayonnaise, right? And a quart of milk.”
“You ought to work in a bank,” he said.
I guess he wasn’t any lonelier than anybody else just because he lived alone. He left me at the door of the Foremaster and for a moment I wished I could go with him. I thought home might be a mess.
And it was. Mary had planned the trip. Out near Montauk Point there’s a dude ranch[61] with all the fancy fixings you see in what they call adult Westerns. The joke is that it’s the oldest working cattle ranch in America. It was a cattle ranch before Texas was discovered. First charter came from Charles II. Originally the herds that supplied New York grazed there and the herdsmen were drawn by lot, like jurors, for limited service. Of course now it’s all silver spurs and cowboy stuff, but the red cattle still graze on the moors. Mary thought it would be nice to spend Sunday night in one of the guest houses.
Ellen wanted to go into New York, stay at a hotel, and spend two days in Times Square. Allen didn’t want to go at all, any place. That’s one of his ways of getting attention and proving that he exists.
The house boiled with emotion—Ellen in slow, dripping, juicy tears, Mary tired and flushed with frustration, Allen sitting sullen and withdrawn with his little radio blasting in his ear, a thumping whining song of love and loss in a voice of sub-hysteria. “You promised to be true, and then you took and threw, my lovin’ lonely heart right on the floor.”
“I’m about ready to give up,” Mary said.
“They’re just trying to help.”
“They seem to go out of their way to be difficult.”
“I never get to do anything.” Ellen sniffled.
In the living room Allen turned up the volume. “… my lovin’ lonely heart right on the floor.”
“Couldn’t we lock them in the cellar and go off by ourselves, carotene, dear.”
“You know, at this point I wish we could.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the pounding roar of the lovin’ lonely heart.
Without warning a rage came up in me. I turned and strode toward the living room to tear my son to shreds and throw his lonely lovin’ corpse on the floor and trample it. As I went loping through the door the music stopped. “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin. Officials of New Baytown and Wessex County were this afternoon subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury to answer charges ranging from fixing traffic tickets to taking bribes and kickbacks on town and county contracts....”
There it came—the Town Manager, the council, the magistrates, the works. I listened without hearing—sad and heavy. Maybe they had been doing what they were charged with, but they’d been doing it so long they didn’t think it was wrong. And even if they were innocent they couldn’t be cleared before the local election, and even if a man is cleared the charge is remembered. They were surrounded. They must have known it. I listened for a mention of Stoney and it didn’t come so I guess he had traded them for immunity. No wonder he felt so raw and alone.
Mary was listening at the door. “Well!” she said. “We haven’t had so much excitement in a long time. Do you think it’s true, Ethan?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “That’s not what it’s for.”
“I wonder what Mr. Baker thinks.”
“He went on a holiday. Yes, I wonder what he feels.”
Allen grew restive because his music was interrupted.
The news and dinner and dishes put off our trip problems until it was too late for a decision or for further tears and quarreling.
In bed I got to shivering all over. The cold, passionless savagery of the attack chilled right through the warm summer night.
Mary said, “You’re all goose lumps, dear. Do you think you have a virus?”
“No, my fancy, I guess I was just feeling what those men must feel. They must feel awful.”
“Stop it, Ethan. You can’t take other people’s troubles on your shoulders.”
“I can because I do.”
“I wonder if you’ll ever be a businessman. You’re too sensitive, Ethan. It’s not your crime.”
“I was thinking maybe it is—everybody’s crime.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t much either, sweetheart.”
“If there was only someone who could stay with them.”
“Repeat, please, Columbine!”