Part Three 5 page

There were two ways to get over there. You could hop onto the Interstate and then get off at the next exit, or you could take Garah's Mill Road that more or less paralleled the Interstate until it came to the Frederick traffic circle that spun you off in any direction you wanted. Most of the time they took the Mill Road because they timed it once and it was four minutes faster from door to door, although you could really blow your car out for a mile or two on the Interstate.

I knew all of this because I had gone bowling with them once, and on the way over, the four of them discussed the ins and outs of Wednesday and Friday nights.

On the night of their accident, they took the Interstate. Larry came down the exit ramp too fast in his lavender 442. He hit a long patch of ice, and fishtailing from side to side, took out the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. A Stix, Baer and Fuller trailer truck broadsided them and pushed the car almost two hundred feet up the road.

Larry's whole side was crushed, and it was a wonder that he wasn't killed. His wife, sitting directly behind him, broke both legs and her right hand. Phil got a severe concussion, and his wife broke her collarbone.

None of it was supposed to happen, according to the journals.

I heard about it from Anna, who called me from the county hospital. She told me straightaway what had happened. Her voice was thin and frightening. I totally misunderstood why until she reminded me.

"I don't know what any of this means now, Thomas." I could hear things bustling, people talking, someone being paged over the loudspeaker in the background.

"What what means?"

"This is the first thing that has gone wrong again since you started writing the biography. I don't understand what's going on."

"Look, Anna, it doesn't mean anything. You just got your hopes up too high before. How can things start to go right until the book is written?" As I spoke, I realized how convinced and confident I sounded. Like it was all a snap now: I would just finish writing this book, and bango, there would be Marshall France, back from the dead.

A Dr. Bradshaw was paged while I waited for her to speak.

"Anna? Is there anyone there with you?"

"Richard." She hung up.

I started working like a man possessed. Two, three, four pages a morning, research in the afternoons, three or four more pages at night.

I had never gotten over the initial shock of "discovering" Galen, but being there every minute of the day forced me to accept it. I was the moth and the town was the flame, and the damned place had me going in such circles that I didn't know what to do much of the time except to keep writing.

I was living in the middle of the greatest artistic creation in the history of the world. In my own tiny way, I was chronicling the life of the man who had done it. Whether that chronicle would bring him back to life… No, no, that's not true. I was going to say that it made no difference to me whether that chronicle brought him back to life, but that's a bunch of bullshit. He had said that it was possible, and then his daughter had chosen me to do it. That's partly why I sent Saxony away. The other "part" was of course Anna, but after the car accident we didn't make love much. I assumed that old Richard was still socking it to her, but even that didn't really bother me that much, because all of my energy – all of it – was going into the work. I would like to have known, though, why she slept with him, but I had a sneaking suspicion now. Suppose Richard had gotten bored with living in Galen. Since Anna and he were the only two "normals" in the town, how could she keep him there? Simple: go to bed with him. Never in his wildest imaginings would a guy like him have thought (or hoped!) of having someone like Anna France. So, so long as she kept him hot and bothered and interested, he was hers. And Galen's. I wondered if his wife knew what was going on between them.

I went out very rarely. Mrs. Fletcher started cooking for me, and Anna came over once in a while to see how things were progressing. Saxony called a couple of times, but our conversations were short, dry, and stale. I didn't ask about Geoff Wiggins and she didn't ask about Anna. I was too tired by then to want to play games, but I did realize that it would be better not to tell her how celibate I had become. Nevertheless, she got so fed up with our conversation one time that she called me a sourpuss and hung up.

Joanne Collins gave birth to a bouncing baby boy who was supposed to be a bouncing baby girl according to the journals.

Anna came over and demanded to see my manuscript. I astonished myself by holding fast and not letting her. She went away but was not at all happy.

Saxony called and asked if I was aware of the fact that she had already been gone a month.

I wrote Tom Rankin back and told him that I would try very hard to get back for his graduation in June.

My mother wrote, and feeling guilty for having been out of touch since September, I called her and chatted on about how wonderful things were for me these clays.

Joanne Collins went in to take care of her new baby one morning and found a three-week-old bull terrier fast asleep in the crib.

I had had enough work for one day and decided to go over to the Green Tavern for a drink. It was nine at night and the town was dead quiet. The snow was slushy in the streets, but up on the sidewalk it was still white and crunchy under your feet. A silent, nasty wind drilled through the dark. Once in a while it stopped, waited for you to come up out of your shell, and then shot back, sniggering. The telephone wires were glazed over, but when the wind gusted it shook them and the ice fell into the street in short straight pieces. By the time I got to the bar I knew I either should have stayed at home or else taken the damned car. It was that cold.

The place had a thick oak front door that you really had to get your shoulder behind to open. A warm blast of stale heat, cigarette smoke, and George Jones's voice from the jukebox. The bar dog – really a dog, as far as I knew – whose name was Fanny, came over wagging her tail. The official greeter. I took off a glove and patted her head. It was warm and wet.

Because of the dark outside it didn't take long to get accustomed to the dark fog light in the bar.

I knew most of the people in there: Jan Phend, John Esperian, Neil Bull, Vince Flynn, Dave Marty.

"How are you doin', Tom?"

I turned around and squinted into the darkness. Richard Lee got up from a table and came over.

"What're you having, Tom?"

I sniffed back my runny nose. "I guess a beer and a shot."

"A beer and a shot. That sounds good to me. Johnny, two beers and two shots."

Richard smiled and came closer. He slapped me on the arm and kept his hand there. "Come on over and sit down at the table with me, Tom. Fuck these up-your-ass bar stools."

I took off my coat and hung it on a wooden peg by the door. There were other smells in the room now: perfume, potato chips, wet leather.

"So, kid, how're you doing over there at Goosey's? Here's the drinks. Thanks, Johnny."

I took a sip of beer and a taste of whiskey. One bitterer than the other, the whiskey thick and fiery in my stomach. But it felt good after being outside so long.

"I bet I know one thing for sure, buddy. Ever since Phil Moon's accident, I bet Anna ain't so happy with you, is she?"

"You've got a point there." I drank some more whiskey.

"Yep, that's what I figured. Did you hear about the Collins baby?"

"Yes. Is it still… a dog?"

Lee smiled and drank off the rest of his beer. "I guess so. The last I heard it was. Things are changing around here so fast lately, you never know." He drank some of the whiskey and stopped smiling. "I'll tell you one thing, buddy, it scares the hell out of me."

I hunched in close to the table and tried to talk as quietly as possible. "But why you, Richard? I can see it for the others – the worrying, I mean – but you're normal." I lowered my head toward him and said the word in a whisper.

"Normal, shit! Sure I am, but my wife isn't, and neither are my kids. You know what's been happening to my Sharon lately? I rolled over in the bed one morning last week, and there was fucking Krang on the pillow next to me! Can you believe that?"

I didn't say anything, but I believed it. I had seen it happen the night we went over there for dinner.

"I'm not shitting you, Tom. All of a sudden all of Marshall's characters are beginning to run together. Not only aren't things going like they're supposed to in the journals, but now they're mixing up all together, changing back and forth. Look at the Collins kid. One minute it's a kid and the next it's a fucking dog!" He snatched up my glass of whiskey and drank it off with one flick of the wrist. "What the hell is a man supposed to do, huh? I can't even turn around nowadays without being afraid that my wife or one of my little girls is going to be different. And then what'll happen if one day one of them stays that way?"

"How are they reacting to it?"

"How the hell do you expect? They're scared shit!"

"How many people has it happened to so far?"

He shook his head and turned the shot glass upside down on the table. "I don't know. Not that many yet, but everybody's scared that they'll be next. What I want to know is when you're going to finish that goddamned book."

The jukebox was still playing, but the talking had stopped all around us.

I fought down a yawn and wanted very badly to be out of there. "I've done a lot. But there's still so much more to go. I have to tell you that. I don't want to lie about it."

"That don't answer his question, Abbey."

"What can I say? What do you want me to say? That it will be done in ten minutes? No, it won't be done in ten minutes. You all want this thing to be good and right, but then you all want it done now. Argh, there's a contradiction there, don't you see?"

"Fuck your contradiction, asshole!"

"All right, fuck it! Fuck it! You say that because you're not writing it. If it stinks in the end, then nothing is going to happen here. That's why France was so great, don't you understand? That's why you're all here. He could write like no one else in the world. For God's sake, why don't you understand that? Whoever writes this book has got to try to write it as well… I don't know, better than he wrote his books…. The journals, everything, everything that he wrote. It's got to be better. It's got to be."

Another voice climbed out of the swampy gloom at the bar. "Fuck that noise, Abbey. You just get that book done soon or we'll fuck you up like we did that other biographer."

The door opened and a fat man and woman came in, beaming. I had never seen them before and assumed that they were from out of town. Normals. The man was slapping his hat against his leg. "I don't know what the hell the name of this town is, Dolly, but so long as they got a drink for me, then it's friendly territory. How are you doin' there, friend? Colder than the dogcatcher's heart out there, huh?"

They sat down on bar stools in front of me and I was so glad that they had arrived, I could have kissed them. I got up to go. Richard had an empty whiskey glass in his hand and was slowly turning it round and round on his fingertips. He watched me get up but didn't say anything more. I went over to get my coat. I glanced at the bar and saw the fat couple talking animatedly with the bartender.

When I got outside, the wind ate me alive, but this time it felt like ambrosia. A Ford Econoline van pulled into the parking lot. The Priest of Spiders from The Land of Laughs got out and turned up the collar of his red mackinaw. He saw me and gave a half-wave. "How arc you doing, Tom? How's your book going?"

He loped over to the big oak door and went through it, still the Priest of Spiders.

I stopped where I was and waited to see what was going to happen. If the fat couple hadn't been in there, it would have been all right, but they were there, and who the hell was going to explain what they were seeing?

The door flew open and three men came racing out, the Priest of Spiders held fast in the middle. The door bammed shut, and the only sound was feet moving through the slush. They were almost to the van when Mel Dugan saw me and stopped.

"You finish that fucking book, Abbey! You finish it or I'll cut off your fucking balls!"

I checked the TV Guide for late movies. Cafй de la Paix was on at 11:30. It was 11:25, SO I got a Coke from the icebox and some green-pepper cheese that I had bought at the market.

The television was an old wooden Philco black-and-white with a huge screen. It also made a great foot warmer on cold nights. I pulled my rocking chair up, arranged the TV table with the Coke and cheese, and put my stocking feet on the side of the set. The music stomped on a combination of "The Marseillaise," "Rule Britannia," and "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." You've got to remember that the film was made in 1942.

A shot of the Eiffel Tower. A slow pan down the Champs-Elysйes. It's plastered everywhere with Nazi flags. Cut to a tabac where a little fat guy in a beret is selling newspapers to a kid, cigarettes to an old man, then a bunch of magazines from under the counter to a hand which takes them but doesn't pay. Shot of the fat guy's face as he hands them over. Pure adoration. He says "Merci" as the sound comes up. The camera moves slowly up – the hand, the arm, the face. His face. He winks and walks out of the tabac, the magazines up under his arm. A morning's read at the corner cafй.

I had a slice of cheese in my hand and was about to eat it when I started crying.

He walks slowly down the street – this guy is in no hurry. Tanks rumble past him. Motorcycles with sidecars full of important-looking men in German uniforms.

I got up out of my seat and turned off the sound. I just wanted to watch him. I didn't want to think about the movie, the plot, or the action. I wanted to watch my father. The lights were off in the room. Only the castoff glow from the set onto the living-room floor.

"Pop?" I knew it was crazy, but suddenly I was talking to the screen, to him. "Oh, Pop, what am I going to do?" He walked into a corner bakery and pointed to three pastries that he wanted inside the display case.

"Pop, what the hell am I going to do?" I closed my eyes as tightly as I could. The tears cut wet lines in my face that I felt when I put my hands up to cover it. "Jesus God." I squeezed the heels of my palms into my eyes and watched the perfect colored patterns explode outward. When the pressure began to hurt I took my hands away and watched him through the last of the receding colors. He was in the back of the bakery now, climbing down the steps of a trapdoor ladder. Right before his head disappeared, he stopped and took off his hat. The sound was off but I knew what he said. "Watch my hat, Robert. I just got it for my birthday and she'll boil me in oil if I get it dirty!"

"Fuck you! Fuck you, Father! Everything's always so good for you! Your fucking new hats and everybody loves you. You even get to die the right way. Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" I turned off the set and sat in the darkness watching the screen grow gray, brown, black.

My eyes opened and I was wide-awake. I looked at the green glow of my watch and saw that it was three-thirty in the morning. When I click awake like that I can't get back to sleep for a long time. I put my arms behind my head and looked into the darkness above me. The only sound was the frantic ticking of my watch and the wind blowing outside. Then there was something else. Outside. Outside in the wind and the blue-black night. I turned my head to the window. It was right there, its face and paws pressed up and squashed against the glass. Its body glowed like an unlit white candle.

The moment I heard Mrs. Fletcher drive away, I pulled my suitcase out of the closet and started yanking sweaters, shirts, and pants off hangers. One bag. What the hell did I need? One of Saxony's skirts fell on my head. I tore at it and threw it on the floor. I told myself to be calm, be cool, you have at least an hour before she'll be back. You can be packed and out of here in fifteen minutes if you don't flip your lid, I stopped and tried to breathe regularly. I sounded like a dog in heat.

What do you take when you're running away? When you know that every nightmare you've ever had is breathing down your neck? Things. You throw a lot of things in a bag and slam it closed and you don't even try to think, because that takes time and you don't have any time.

The phone rang. I was going to ignore it, but people knew that I was at home, Anna knew I was home, and I wanted everything to appear normal right up to the moment I jumped into my car. I got it on the fifth ring. That in itself was bad, because by now people knew that I was a one– or two-ring answerer.

I cleared my throat a couple of times before speaking. "Hello?"

"Oh, Thomas, you are there. It's me, Saxony. I'm down at the bus station. I'm here. I'm in Galen."

"Oh, Christ!"

"Well, thanks a lot! I'm sorry if –"

"Shut up, Sax, shut up. Look, uh, look – I'll be down there in ten minutes. Just wait for me. Be out there in front and wait for me. Don't move."

"What is the matter with you? What – ?"

"Look, do what I say. Stay where you are."

She must have sensed the fear in my voice because she only said, "All right. I'll be in front," and hung up.

I wrapped a green blanket completely around my suitcase and carried it outside, held in front of me. If anyone was watching, I wanted them to think that it was only a package or some dry cleaning to be done. I pushed a half-smile onto my lips and walked jauntily to the car. I skidded on a patch of ice and almost fell down. When I regained my balance, I was sure that hundreds of eyes were boring into me from everywhere. I stared straight ahead.

"Abbey just came out."

"What's he doing?"

"He's got some kind of package or something in his arms."

"It isn't a suitcase, is it?"

"I don't think so. It looks like… No, I don't know what it looks like. Maybe you should have a look for yourself."

"Or maybe we should call Anna."

By the time I had the keys out and was fumbling by the car door, I knew any moment I would hear a shout and a stampede of feet. I got the door unlocked and oh-so-casually leaned in and placed the blanket-wrapped suitcase on the backseat.

Key in the ignition. Vroom. I had to wait two minutes to let it warm up because I always warmed the car in the morning. No Le Mans start today, much as I wanted to. Nothing suspicious. My eyes flicked from the windshield to the rearview mirror looking for Anna's gold-and-white Dodge or Mrs. Fletcher's black Rambler.

The wheels spun when I pulled out onto the street, but then they caught and moved forward. That was the first of a dozen heart attacks I had on the way to the bus station. Once I thought I saw the Dodge. Once my car started to fishtail in the middle of the street. Then a freight train went by with 768 cars, all crawling along at a snail's pace.

While I waited there, some smart-ass kid threw a snowball at the car. It hit a side window and I pulled a muscle in my neck wrenching around to see what was about to eat me. The only thing I saw was his little measly body running away.

The last car of the train passed and the crossing gates went up. The bus station was two blocks away. My plan was to pick up Saxony, take the road right out to the Interstate, and drive for at least two hours before I stopped again to breathe.

She was talking to Mrs. Fletcher. The two of them were standing in front of the blue bus station. I could see the vapor of their breath puff out in cold smoke signals.

"Well, what do you think of this, Tom? I was coming back from shopping, and there she was, standing out in the cold. She came in on the morning bus."

Saxony tried to smile but gave up.

"Now, I won't hold you up any longer. I'm on my way home. I'll see you two later." She touched Saxony's arm, gave me a dirty look, and disappeared around the corner of a building.

"Come on." I picked up her suitcase and started back across the street. I heard her behind me. She coughed. It was a thick, wet, racking cough that went on and on. She barely managed to get out a "Wait!" I turned around and she was bent over, one hand on her stomach, the other over her mouth.

"Are you all right?"

She kept coughing but shook her head at the same time.

I put my arm around her and pulled her to me. Panting, wheezing, she leaned into me and gave me her full weight. I led her around to the other side of the car and opened the door for her. She sat down and let her head fall back on the headrest. The coughing stopped but her eyes were teary from exhaustion.

"I'm really sick, Thomas. I've been sick ever since I left you. But it's gotten much worse recently." She rolled her head on the headrest and looked at me. "Camille, huh?" Her eyes tightened and she started coughing again.

"Nothing. There's nothing that can be done."

"Anna, for God's sake, come on! You can't be that horrible!"

I got Saxony home and put her into bed. Luckily she went right to sleep. As soon as I could, I shot out of the house and over to Anna's.

"It has nothing to do with me, Thomas. It was in the journals. It was written. It is done."

"But everything else in the journals is screwed up. Why can't you screw this up too? She went away, didn't she? She did what you wanted."

"She shouldn't have come back." Her voice was very cold.

"She didn't know anything, Anna. I never said a word to her about anything. She's scared to death. For Christ's sake, have a little compassion for once in your life!"

"Thomas, the journals say that if unnecessary people stay here for a long time then they will get sick and eventually die. If they go away, they'll get better. Saxony wasn't sick when she left, was she? You said yourself that she wasn't. So the journals are screwed up now anyway. She went away and got sick. It was supposed to happen the other way around. I have no control over any of this anymore." She spread her hands and even looked a little sorry for the first time.

I knew long before anyone else that it was either Saxony's presence, or her proofreading the manuscript, or our combined presence that normalized Galen.

As soon as she was rested, she read over everything that I had written since she'd left-and cut it to pieces. This was wrong. Why didn't I talk about this here instead of this? This had no bearing whatsoever, this was just silly to include…. She told me to keep perhaps a third of what I had done.

Mrs. Collins went into the kitchen to feed the bull terrier four days after I started rewriting with Saxony's suggestions in front of me. The woman found a baby girl asleep on the freshly torn newspaper in the box beside the stove.

Sharon Lee, who had taken to staying inside the house all the time (along with a number of other people, including the Priest of Spiders), was seen in town shopping again, smiling as if she had won the Irish Sweepstakes.

And Saxony stopped coughing. I told her that Anna and I weren't sleeping together anymore, but I still didn't tell her anything else.

When I understood how necessary it was for her to be there for the success of the book, I spent a morning with Anna explaining what I knew now was the truth. She listened but said that she would have to see for herself. After the Collins baby, she agreed with me. We would tell Saxony nothing, but she was allowed to stay.

Nothing more unexpected happened in Galen.

I heard her flip-flopping into the room in the fuzzy slippers I had bought for her at Lazy Larry's.

She never bothered me when I worked, so I put the pen down and turned to face her. She looked so much better now. Her cheeks had gotten some color and her appetite had returned. In fact she was holding a chocolate-chip cookie in her hand with a half-moon bit out of it. Yours Truly had baked them that morning.

"How far are you now?"

"The same. I'm just copying some stuff over. France is getting on the train to come here. Why?"

She threw the cookie in the wastebasket and looked at me. I looked at my cookie in the wastebasket.

"I have a couple of things to tell you, Thomas. They're two of the reasons why I came back here. But when I arrived I didn't know if I should or not. Then I was sick…. But I've got to tell them to you." She came over and sat down in my lap. She never did that. "Have you ever heard of Sidney Swire?"

"Sidney who? Sounds like an English actor."

"Sidney Swire was the man from Princeton who came out to do the biography of France."

"Really? How did you dig that up?" Saxony was the absolute queen of research. I had been convinced of that months ago, but I was inevitably astonished when she dug up some other totally undiscoverable gem.

"That was one of the reasons why I went to St. Louis. It's not important how I found out."

"Wiggins?" I leaned as far back in the chair as I could.

"Oh, come on, Thomas, please. This is important! Sidney Swire came to Galen for two weeks. When he left, he was supposedly going to California, where he had a brother living in Santa Clara." She licked her lips and cleared her throat. "But he never got there. He got off the bus in Rolla, Missouri, at a rest stop and disappeared off the face of the earth. No one has seen him since, including his brother."

"What do you mean?" The lizard walked halfway up my spine and waited for her to speak before he moved again.

"He disappeared. Nothing. No trace. Nothing."

"Well, what about his brother? What did he do?" I pushed her off my lap and stood up.

"The Swire family had the police out, and then, when they didn't find anything, a private-detective agency spent six months looking around. Nothing, Thomas."

"Well, that's intriguing." I looked at her, and she wasn't smiling.

"There's a second thing I want to tell you that I found out when I was there. Please don't get mad at me. Did Anna ever tell you about a man named Peter Mexico?"

I sat forward in my chair. "Yes, he was her lover when she was in college. He died of a heart attack."

"No, Thomas, it wasn't a heart attack. Anna and Peter Mexico were in a subway station in London and he fell in front of a train."

"What?"

"Yes. There was an investigation, and some things were never cleared up. Besides a drunk who was there, they were the only two people on the platform."

"Anna? What happened to Sidney Swire?"

"Sidney Swire?" She smiled at me and blinked her eyes fast a couple of times. Very flirty and cute. "Sidney Swire left here and, thank God, no one ever saw him again."

"What is that supposed to mean?" I tried to sound curious rather than scared.

"He disappeared. Poof. He left here, took a bus over to Rolla, and disappeared. The police were here for days and days looking around and asking questions. Thank God he wasn't living in town when he vanished. That would have been big trouble for us."

"Didn't it bother you?"

"No, not at all. He was a pompous ass, and good riddance."

"That's a pretty rough thing to say about a guy who's probably dead by now."

"So what? Am I supposed to say I'm sorry? I'm not. One look at him and you could tell that he would never have been able to write Father's book."

As a surprise, I had decided to give her a copy of what I had written. The rough draft of the first section of the book was done, and I thought that it would be a perfect idea to let her see how far along Saxony and I had gotten. Sort of as added insurance for letting Sax stay.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 583