That morning in April Joe came out of the rectory with a beer case and two bags, a small one of brown cloth, a larger one of brown paper. He put the beer case in the trunk of his black Dachshund, the bags on the front seat, and got in beside them. He took the pen from the desk set above the dashboard and made a list on the memo pad there: BANK, BEER, DUMP, BOOZE, HOSP. He started the car and, with nothing coming from either direction, backed into the street. The next thing he knew he was almost run into by a speeder. He wasn’t surprised when he saw who it was, Brad, and called to him out the window.
“After all you read about safe driving.”
“Not in my column, you don’t, Padre, and never will. That’s a promise. Ciao.”
Joe made an unscheduled stop in the next block, spoke to a child playing in the street, a boy, who then left his tricycle in the street, at the curb, and looked pleased with himself, saying, “Park car, park car.” Joe pulled in to the curb, behind the tricycle, and the boy looked pleased saying, “Park car, park car.” “Yeah, yeah,” Joe said, getting out, lifted the boy onto the tricycle, and pushed it up the nearest driveway. When Joe returned to his car, the boy was saying to his (as Joe had taught him), “Park car on walk, not in street.”
Approaching Inglenook’s period shopping mall — cobblestones, gas lights, board signs — Family Grocer & Fruiterer, Apothecary, Ironmonger, and so on — Joe noticed that the weather ball, from which the mall took its name, Ball Mall, and for which a color code too often appeared in Hub’s Column (Hub being Brad’s nom de plume) in the Inglenook Universe—
When weather ball’s red as fire,
Temperature’s going higher;
When weather ball’s white as snow,
Down temperature will go;
When weather ball’s royal blue,
Forecast says no change is due;
When weather ball blinks in agitation,
Watch out, folks, for precipitation—
was gray, not working.
Joe turned into the Yellow Brick Road, the service lane that ran around the Mall and was roofed over with fiberglass, primrose dappled with daisies. He drove up to one of the bank’s kiosks and dropped the brown cloth bag, the Sunday collection, into the chute. The teller on the TV screen, recognizing Joe, held up an empty bag, apparently a nice clean one. Joe nodded, saying through the voice tube, “Much obliged,” meaning it. And wondered once again if there was anything in the idea of reviving the practice of coin washing — ladies’ maids, he’d read, had done this in the past — a small service that banks could perform, and would if they cared as much as they said they did in their advertising. In any case, what about paper money? Before it was put back into circulation it could be dry-cleaned and pressed on the premises. If banks were looking for a new approach (as they should be, to judge by their advertising), a way to worm themselves into the hearts of depositors, one that would really work, well, there it was…
He followed the Yellow Brick Road around to the Licensed Vintner’s, where, fortunately, the part-time employee, the old man, was on duty, and not the Licensed Vintner or his son — a couple of slobs to whom a beer case was a beer case. The old man removed the nice clean one from the trunk of Joe’s car and was gone for some time. Joe, though he couldn’t see him, could hear bottles clinking. When the old man returned with the case, he said, “Same one you had before, sir,” and then of some stacked nearby, “No telling where they been, sir.” “Much obliged,” Joe said, meaning it, and after he’d paid, knowing the old man to be untippable, thanked him again, this time by name (Mr Barnes).
On the outskirts of town, Joe slowed down when he came to the dump, but saw Jim Gurrier prospecting, and drove on. He looked the other way until he’d passed the dump and the unfinished house in the next field. The Gurrier place — black with tar paper, still waiting for Jim to put on the siding; the PARTS sign in the front yard; the old cars multiplying in the weeds; the tire hanging from the big tree; the limp clothesline — depressed Joe. The Gurriers depressed him. He had moved Jim and Nan and their three (now there were five) children from the inner city. He had found the unfinished house for them and the down payment on it. He had thought that a suburban parish like his own needed people like the Gurriers, a leaven of God’s poor. He had tried to see the Gurriers as the Holy Family, Jim and Nan as Joseph and Mary, only with more children. It couldn’t be done, not by Joe anyway, not with the Gurriers. Jim, who Joe had hoped would shape up in time, still avoided all parish functions, including Mass, and Nan still went to everything — at first she’d inspired and embarrassed people with her talk of holy poverty in the inner city, now she bored them with it. If the Gurriers did move back to the inner city, as they said they might (to be close to the action), Joe wouldn’t be sorry. It hadn’t worked.
Joe was passing the Great Badger, “the discount house with a heart,” which meant not only that the savings it realized through its wise volume purchases were passed on to you, the customer, in the usual manner of discount houses, but that your dependents in the event of your death would get to keep whatever you had been buying on time, with no further payments or charges of any kind. The Great Badger also hired the aged and handicapped. It was flourishing. Its real competitors were the big department stores in the city and other discount houses in fringe areas — and not the smocked and gaitered tradesmen on the Mall. They couldn’t keep up, they knew it, and they were bitter. While they had more or less gone into hibernation after the Christmas rush, the Great Badger had staged a series of colossal interlocking sales during which it had stayed open, according to its ads, until??? And now, to serve its customers better, it was staying open six nights a week until nine, Sundays until five. They were very bitter about this on the Mall, and Joe couldn’t say he blamed them. The Great Badger itself, a forty-foot idol — its enlarged, exposed, red neon heart beating faintly in the sunlight that morning — sat up on its hunkers in the middle of the parking lot and waved a paw at cars going by. Joe did not, though he sometimes did if he had a passenger, wave back.
Joe was passing an industrial park, coveting the grass and geraniums, where once had stood the small machine shop that begat the medium-sized defense plant (Ketteridge Cartridge) that begat the giant Cones, Casing, Inc., which, with branches at home and abroad, was so important that it could afford to advertise not its many products — nose cones for missiles as well as ice cream cones, casings for bombs as well as sausages — but its humble birth, using only an artist’s sketch of the small machine shop (looking like the village blacksmith’s place of business in the poem) and three words, CONES + CASING = PEOPLE. Cones (as it was called) owned the corporation that owned the Mall, and was said to be so diversified that it was crisis-proof. Joe hoped that this was true, since many of his parishioners earned their daily bread there, but he also hoped that those who earned it by producing doomsday weapons could find other work. For Joe to say nothing, living among and off them and feeling as he did, was prudent but hard when a whiff of self-righteousness came his way, hinting that he was beholden to the freedom-loving military-industrial complex for protecting him from its opposite number in freedom-hating you-name-it. But then, running a parish, any parish, was like riding in a cattle car in wintertime — you could appreciate the warmth of your dear, dumb friends, but you never knew when you’d be stepped on, or worse.