Part Three 6 page

There was so much more to do on the manuscript before it was done that I hadn't, until then, thought about what would happen to us after we had finished. I knew that there were a lot of dangerous possibilities, but it was all in a distant, cloudy future that was both tantalizing and ominous.

Of course I knew that the biography could never be published if it succeeded. Stir up new interest in Marshall France so that people would come gaping and poking at Galen to see where the great man had lived? No, the book was the means to one end. We all knew that. Except Saxony.

But what would happen if I didn't succeed? What did Anna have in mind for us if we failed? Make us live in Galen? Make us vanish like Sidney Swire? Kill us? (How well I remembered now what the guy in the bar had said that night about what they did to the other biographer.) I considered all that, but it was all a long, long way off. Months and months. One thing at a time. Saxony was well again and the book flowed out of me like Niagara Falls, and there were no more Krangs in town or things looking in my window….

Anna handed me a piece of pound cake. Austrian gugelhupf to be exact. It was the one thing that she made well.

"Thomas, how long will it take you to write the scene of Father's arrival here?"

"How long? It's almost done now. I already wrote it once, but Sax said that it should be more drawn out and dramatic. She said that there wasn't enough importance in it."

"Yes, but then how long?"

I nibbled on my cake. "I don't know. Today's what? Tuesday? I guess by Friday."

"Could you… ?" She smiled and looked at the floor shamefacedly, like she had been about to ask an impossible favor.

"What? Could I what?" Seeing Anna embarrassed and shy was a rare thing.

"Do you think you could finish it before five-thirty in the afternoon?

"Sure. Why?"

"Superstition. You see, he arrived on a five-thirty train and… I don't know." She shrugged and smiled. "Superstition."

"No, no, I can understand that, Anna. Especially around here I can understand it!"

"All right, well, I wasn't going to tell you this, but I'm going to have a party for the two of you to celebrate Father's arrival."

"Then you'd better wait about six months and keep your fingers crossed."

"No, I mean symbolically. As soon as I saw how far you had gotten, I got this idea to give you a party on the day he arrives in town in your book. It was going to be a surprise, but just pretend that it is one when everyone comes running up to you."

"You're planning on inviting the whole town?"

I was kidding, but her face lit up and she took both of my arms and pulled me down next to her on the couch. "Well! I guess I have to tell you the whole thing now to let you see what I have in mind. This is the way I want it, Thomas: you write the section on his arriving, all right? But you have to tell me on exactly what day you will finish it, okay? Then on the day, all of us from town will go down to the station at five-thirty and pretend that he is coming in on a train."

"But no passenger trains stop in Galen anymore, do they?"

"No, no, it's pretend! Wouldn't it be great? It will be like a Midwinter Festival! Five or ten minutes later we'll march back up to your house and have a big potluck dinner."

"At my place?"

"Yes! You and Saxony are the ones who will be bringing him back, so we'll bring you offerings. Offerings to the Gods of the Typewriter!" She pulled me over and kissed me on the cheek. I realized how long it had been since we had made love. "Won't it be wonderful? It will be like an old torchlight parade. You and Saxony will be in your house, and then all of a sudden you'll hear this big bunch of us coming down the street. You'll both look out your window and see these hundreds of people carrying food and torches, and they'll come right up to your doorstep. It's marvelous!"

"It sounds like a Ku Klux Klan meeting to me."

"Oh, Thomas, don't be cynical and horrible for once."

"I'm sorry, you're right. But can't we come to the train station too? I mean, if we're the bringer-backers and all?"

She bit her lip and looked at the floor. I knew that she was going to say no. "Do you want me to tell you the truth? We've already talked all of this over, and everybody would appreciate it if you would just let us be there. Is that a terrible thing for me to say? Have I really hurt your feelings?"

Yes, she had, but I understood why she said it. No matter how important we were in bringing Marshall France back, we would never be part of Galen. Never.

"It's fine, Anna. I completely understand."

"Really? Are you sure? I'd hate to think that I –"

"No, look, don't say anything more. I totally understand. We'll stay home and wait for your procession to arrive." I smiled at her and twinked her cheek. "And I promise to be done before five-thirty on Friday."

Saxony liked everything about what she called "The Phantom Homecoming" party except for the fact that Anna would be there. She didn't want to see Anna. Not even in a crowd. So far, they had successfully avoided each other, but that was only because Sax had been in the house for so long.

In the end I was able to convince her that even if the old girl was there that night, there would be so many other people around that she could easily avoid any kind of confrontation.

I spent an afternoon just studying the Galen railroad station so that I was able to go into detail about what it looked like inside and out. It had been built in 1907, but time had laid a light hand on it. I walked out on the platform and looked up and down the track. Nothing. Not even a boxcar on a siding. There were still patches of snow on the ground, sparse and dirty.

But Marshall France had arrived here. That was one of the reasons why he was so fascinated with train stations. Arrivals and departures. Beginnings and endings and in-betweens. That's from his journals, not me.

While I stood there looking at the dull silver rails, I wondered how I would end up changing the biography so that at the end of his life, instead of dying of a heart attack, he would… Have an attack but somehow survive it? Go off someplace and then later return to the town? I didn't know. That was all such a long way off. I shook my head and walked back to the car.

For the rest of the week Galen was jumping. The stores were jammed with people, everyone who passed you on the street looked like he was running from one important job to another, even the voluntary fire department brought the trucks out onto the street and washed them, preparing for the parade. There was a kind of pre-Christmas excitement in the air, and it was fun just walking around and soaking it in and knowing that I was the cause of it. Me.

"Hiya, Tom! All set for Friday? We're going to have some party!"

"Tommy, you just finish up that part that you're doing and leave the rest up to us!"

I got a free drink at the Green Tavern and all in all spent the whole time feeling like the conquering hero.

Once in a while someone would do something strange like run for his car and slam down an open trunk lid when he saw me coming toward him on the street, but I assumed that they were making special foods or little presents for us and wanted it all to he a surprise on the big day. I was all for that.

I finished the scene at ten o'clock Friday morning. It was eleven and a half pages long. I brought it in to Saxony and stood in a corner of the room while she read through it. She looked up at me and gave a professional nod.

"It's just right, Thomas. I really like it now."

I called Anna and told her. She sounded delighted and told me that my timing was perfect because she had just come back with hundreds of bags of flour and after calling everybody, would get right to work on the gugelhupfs. She reminded me to tell Saxony not to even go near the stove-they would do everything.

Before lunch I went out for a walk, but the streets were almost completely deserted. All of this anticipation was floating around in the air – you could feel it – but the streets were as empty as a ghost town, with the exception of a car zipping by now and then on a secret mission. I gave up and went home.

The scent of some delicious meat sneaked down from Mrs. Fletcher's all the rest of the day. In spite of my vast hatred of parties and social gatherings, I was tremendously excited about the evening to come.

Around four o'clock Saxony stopped work on her newest marionette head – a bull terrier, no less – and barricaded herself in the bathroom behind her bubble bath and shampoo.

I tried to read Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, but it was no use. I wondered if Saxony had slept with Geoff Wiggins. Then I tried to figure out what was cooking upstairs.

At 4:45 Mrs. Fletcher went to the door without saying good-bye or leaving instructions about her roast upstairs. I watched her walk down the street, and as soon as she was out of sight I knew that I wanted more than anything to be at that train station at 5:30 to see what they were going to do. I told myself that I had every right to be there. They should have invited us in the first place, dammit!

I got up and went over to the bathroom door. I hesitated for a second or two, then went in. It was steamy gray, and the dampness made me feel hot and sweaty.

"Sax?"

"Yes?" She poked her head out between the shower curtains and squinted at me. Her head was turbaned in white lather.

"Sax, I'm going to sneak down to the station and watch what they do anyway. I just have to see what they're going to do."

"Oh, Thomas, don't, really. If anyone sees you over there they'll get really angry and –"

"No, no, no one will ever see me. I'll sneak over at a quarter after five and easily be back here in time for the parade. Come on, Sax, this is great."

She curled her finger for me to come over. "I love you, Thomas. I thought about you all the time that I was away. Please don't let anyone see you out there. They'll be so mad!" She took hold of the back of my neck, and dripping water down my back, pulled me over for a hard wet kiss.

It had been full dark for almost half an hour before I left the house and tiptoed down the stairs like one of Ali Baba's thieves. The first feel of night made me think that it would snow again. It wasn't as cold as it had been. It was very still, and the sky was that milk-chocolate brown it gets just before the flakes start to fall.

It has taken me over three years to figure out why I didn't throw Saxony in the car at that moment and get the hell out of Galen while all of them were still down at the station preparing for the "arrival."

He asked me one day when we were in Grindlwald, looking up at the Eiger from a sunny terrace restaurant in the middle of town. I glanced at him, but the morning sun was right on his shoulder, so I turned back to the mountain.

"God knows, I should have. Jesus, it would have been so damned easy! But you've got to look at what was going on: I had never thought in a million years that I had an ounce of the artist in me. Suddenly I was on the verge of… of… I don't know, being Prometheus or something. Stealing fire from the gods! Through my art, or through our art rather, we were going to recreate a human being. And the person that I would be doing it with was my lover! The person I knew I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. There were all kinds of other things too. There always are at times like that. The Galeners loved me again, and naturally that was a total ego trip. Anna was even doing what I told her…. When Saxony came back, things stopped screwing up in that town immediately. I felt invulnerable. As long as we were there together, nothing could happen to us. How could it? We were the new Marshall Frances, you know? We had his power. We controlled the whole fucking town."

"And you never once thought…" He looked at his coffee cup so as not to embarrass me.

"Not in a million years." I picked up my espresso spoon and placed it inside my cup.

The houses on both sides of the street were lit up and cheery, but there was no sign of life in them. All of the people were at the Galen station, all happy to be out of their houses for a while, together, anticipating the moment in the future when Marshall France would really come back and take over the direction of their lives forever.

The smell of pine and car exhaust stayed with me all the way down to the railroad crossing that I had passed hundreds of times. I looked at my watch. It was 5:21. It would take five to eight minutes to walk the street parallel to the railroad tracks all the way to the station. That would be cutting it thin, but it was exciting, and already I could feel my heart thumping hard in my chest.

I took a right and went east on Hammond Street, breaking into a little run every once in a while. There was some snow on the sidewalks and I felt it up under the soles of my shoes – like walking over sharp stones.

I was breathing hard and my arms pumped back and forth at my sides, pushing me forward. What would they do down there? How would they all look right at 5:30? What would… ? And then I heard it off in the distance. I stopped and my eyes blurred. There were two short hoots and then a long one. A long one that rose and stayed in the air like an eerie animal calling out to someone. I leaped off the sidewalk and into the street. The whistle blew again and I knew that it was closer, almost there, the train almost in Galen station. But passenger trains didn't stop at Galen station anymore…. The street ended in a small circle, but I vaulted the low stone wall there and kept running. I saw the station for the first time. It was so brightly lit that you would have thought that they were filming a movie. Where had the lights come from? There were hundreds of people milling around out on the platform. I was still too far away to distinguish between any of them, but there was so much noise, voices all talking at once. Then someone yelled, "There! There!" and the voices fell away. From the blackness on the side of the station away from me, from the East, from New York and the Atlantic Ocean and Austria, a pale yellow light appeared, and when I stopped running, I saw the engine pulling into the station. I stood there and my whole body shook. The engine was so old and black, and it was puffing sparks and steam out of its stack. It lumbered in and pulled out again, hauling its gleaming silver passenger cars up parallel to the platform.

It stopped. It was quiet except for the hissing and the clanking of the engine.

I just barely saw a conductor descend the steps and the crowd push up tight to one of the cars.

Then a wave of incredible heat moved out over everything. I could actually see it coming, and when it passed over me it felt like a strong hot summer breeze. Not stronger. Pleasant. I remember thinking that it was very nice.

People down there started to jam even closer to the train. Their noise returned.

And then from behind me the explosion came. This huge sound ripped through the sky, and without thinking, I turned around to see what it was. An oleo-yellow cloud of flame blossomed up and fell halfway back down to just above the tops of the houses and trees. Separate flames kept swimming up and away.

I turned back to the station and saw them mobbed around something on the platform. No one had turned toward the explosion. The train hooted twice and began to chug forward.

I was running up Hammond Street again, running for my house. I heard the train whistle, I saw the flames in the sky in front of me.

The train was picking up speed and was right behind me when I reached the crossing and turned left again up my street. I saw the flames, and now I knew the house. I wanted to stop and look for a moment and take in what was happening. The right of any person whose house is burning down, wife is shot, child is run over. The right of the already doomed to see what their future is about to be. But I didn't stop. I heard the train pass behind me, and I kept running. The house was a kid's sparkler in the middle of the street.

"AN-NA! AN-NA! YOU ARE SO FUCKING SMART! YOU WERE SO FUCK-ING SMAAAAART!"

That's all that was really necessary, wasn't it. Have us write a first draft that was so good that it didn't need to be fixed or redone. Write it right up to the moment that Marshall France arrives in Galen. Go down to the train station then and see if it works, see if it comes in at 5:30… if he comes in at 5:30. If he doesn't, then you've lost nothing. If he does, all you've got to do is get rid of your writers, get rid of your evidence. They're unnecessary now. Father's home.

I watched the house burn from the other side of the street. I couldn't get any closer. There was debris strewn everywhere, some of it still burning: a pillow, an upside-down chair, books. And there was part of a body near the front gate. It wore the shredded remains of the bright red mackinaw that I'd bought at Lazy Larry's.

I didn't know how much time I had, but I needed every bit of it. My car was parked a few feet away. The fire owned everything. I was in the car, the yellow light flickering across the dashboard. I remember thinking that I wouldn't have to turn on the headlights for a while because it was so bright. I put it into gear and slowly drove away. There was another explosion while I was still driving down the street. The oil heater? Another stick of dynamite? Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw things flying high in the air over the house, high and in slow motion.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 654