Now and Forever (5 page)

CHAPTER 17

Elias Culpepper leaned forward to scan Cardiff's notepad.

“You got any more doubts, indecisions, or opinions?”

Cardiff mused over his notes. “There don't seem to be any roaring businesses in Summerton.”

“A few mice but no buffalo.”

“No travel agencies, just a train station about to sink in the dust. Main road is mostly potholes. No one seems to leave, and very few arrive. How in Hades do you all survive?”

“Think.” Culpepper sucked on his pipe.

“I am, dammit!”

“You heard about the lilies of the field. We toil not, neither do we spin. Just like you. You don't have to move, do you? On occasion, maybe, like tonight. But mostly you travel back and forth between your ears. Yes?”

“My God!” Cardiff cried, clutching his notepad. “Hideaways. Loners. Recluses. By the scores of dozens. You're writers!”

“You can say that again.”

“Writers!”

“In every room, attic, broom-closet, or basement, both sides of the street right out to the edge of town.”

“The whole town, everybody?”

“All but a few lazy illiterates.”

“That's unheard of.”

“You heard it now.”

“Salzburg, a town full of musicians, composers, conductors. Geneva, chock-full of bankers, clockmakers, walking wounded ski dropouts. Nantucket, once anyway, ships, sailors, and whale-widow wives. But this,
this
!”

Cardiff jumped up and stared wildly toward the midnight town.

“Don't listen for typewriters,” advised Culpepper. “Just quiet things.”

Pens, pencils, pads, paper,
thought Cardiff.
Whispers of lead or ink. Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.

“Writers,” murmured Cardiff, spying this house or that, across the street, “never have to get up and go. And no one knows what color you are, by mail, or what sex, or how tall or how short. Could be a company of midgets, a sideshow of giants. Writers. Godfrey Daniel!”

“Watch your language.”

Cardiff turned to stare down at his companion. “But they can't all be successful?”

“Mostly.”

“Would I know any of their names?”

“If I told you, but I won't.”

“A beehive of talent.” Cardiff exhaled. “But how did they all wind up here?”

“Genes, chromosomes, need. You've heard of those little writers' colonies? Well, this one's big. We're soul mates. Similar people. Nobody laughing at what someone else writes. No alcoholics, however, no bats out of hell, or wild parties.”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald can't get in?”

“Better not try.”

“Sounds boring.”

“Only if you lose your pad and pencil.”

“You one of them?”

“In my own quiet way.”

“A poet!”

“Not so loud. Someone might hear.”

“A poet,” Cardiff whispered.

“Mostly haiku. At midnight when I put on my specs and reach for my pen. Semi-haiku, too many beats.”

“Example?”

Culpepper recited:

 

Oh, cat that I truly love,

Oh, hummingbird that I madly love.

What are you doing in the cat's mouth?

 

Cardiff whooped with delight. “I never could write that!”

“Don't try. Just
do.
”

“I'll be damned. More!”

 

A pillow of snow by my warm face.

A snowdrift at my touch;

You are gone.

 

Culpepper quietly reloaded his pipe to cover his embarrassment.

“I don't recite that one often. Sad.”

To break the quiet, Cardiff said: “How do you writers stay in touch with the outside world?”

Culpepper stared off into the distance toward the empty train tracks beyond the silent road.

“I take a truck full of manuscripts to Gila Springs once a month, so we mail out from where we are
not,
bring back windfalls of checks, snowfalls of rejections. The wheat and chaff go into our bank, with its one teller and one president. The money waits there, in case some day we have to move.”

Cardiff felt sweat suddenly break out all over his body.

“You got something to say, Mr. Cardiff?”

“Soon.”

“I won't push.” Culpepper relit his pipe and recited:

 

A mother remembers her dead son.

Today how far might he have wandered,

My mighty hunter of dragonflies.

 

“That's not mine. Wish it were. Japanese. Been around forever.”

Cardiff paced back and forth on the porch and then turned.

“Good grief, it all fits. Writing is the only activity that could support a town like this, so far off. Like a mail order business.”

“Writing
is
a mail order business. Anything you want you write a check, send it off, and before you know it, the Johnson Smith Company in Racine, Wisconsin, sends you what you need. Seebacko-scopes. Gyroscopes. Mardi Gras masks. Orphan Annie dolls. Film clips from
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Vanishing cards. Reappearing skeletons.”

“All that
good
stuff.” Cardiff smiled.

“All that good stuff.”

They laughed quietly together.

Cardiff exhaled. “So, this is a writers' township.”

“Thinking about staying?”

“No, about
leaving.
”

Cardiff stopped and put his hand over his mouth as if he had said something he shouldn't have said.

“Now what does that mean?” Elias Culpepper almost started up from his chair.

But before Cardiff could speak, a pale figure appeared on the lawn below the porch and started to climb the steps.

Cardiff called her name.

By the door the daughter of Elias Culpepper spoke. “When you're ready, come upstairs.”

When I'm ready!?
Cardiff thought wildly.
When I'm
ready
!

The screen door shut.

“You'll need this,” said Elias Culpepper.

He held out a last drink, which Cardiff took.

CHAPTER 18

Again, the large bed was a bank of snow on a warm summer night. She lay on one side, looking up at the ceiling, and did not move. He sat on the far edge, saying nothing, and at last tilted over and lay his head on the pillow, and waited.

Finally Nef said, “It seems to me you've spent a lot of time in the town graveyard since you arrived. Looking for what?”

He scanned the empty ceiling and replied.

“It seems to me you've been down at that train station where hardly any trains arrive. Why?”

She did not turn, but said, “It seems both of us are looking for something but won't or can't say why or what.”

“So it seems.”

Another silence. Now, at last, she looked at him.

“Which of us is going to confess?”

“You go first.”

She laughed quietly.

“My truth is bigger and more incredible than yours.”

He joined her laughter but shook his head. “Oh, no, my truth is more terrible.”

She quickened and he felt her trembling.

“Don't frighten me.”

“I don't want to. But there it is. And if tell you, I'm afraid you'll run and I won't ever see you again.”

“Ever?” murmured Nef.

“Ever.”

“Then,” she said, “tell me what you can, but don't make me afraid.”

But at that moment, far away in the night world, there was a single cry of a train, a locomotive, drawing near.

“Did you hear that? Is that the train that comes to take you away?”

There was a second cry of a whistle over the horizon.

“No,” he said, “maybe it's the train that comes, God I hope not, with terrible news.”

Slowly she sat up on the edge of the bed, her eyes shut. “I have to know.”

“No,” he said. “Don't go. Let me.”

“But first … ,” she murmured.

Her hand gently pulled him over to her side of the bed.

CHAPTER 19

Sometime during the night, he sensed that he was once more alone.

He woke in a panic, at dawn, thinking,
I've missed the train. It's come and gone. But, no—

He heard the locomotive whistle shrieking across the sky, moaning like a funeral train as the sun rose over desert sands.

Did he or did he not hear a bag, similar to his own, catapult from a not-stopping train to bang the station platform?

Did he or did he not hear someone landing like a three-hundred-pound anvil on the platform boards?

And then Cardiff knew. He let his head fall as if chopped. “Dear God, oh dear vengeful God!”

CHAPTER 20

They stood on the platform of the empty station, Cardiff at one end, the tall man at the other.

“James Edward McCoy?” Cardiff said.

“Cardiff,” said McCoy, “is that you?”

Both smiled false smiles.

“What are you doing here?” said Cardiff.

“You might have known I would follow,” said James Edward McCoy. “When you left town, I knew someone had died, and you'd gone to give him a proper burial. So I packed my bag.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To keep you honest. I learned long ago you leaned one way, me the other. You were always wrong, I was always right. I hate liars.”

“‘Optimists' is the word you want.”

“No
wonder
I hate you. The world's a cesspool and you keep swimming in it, heading for shore. Dear God, where
is
the shore? You'll never find it because the shore doesn't exist! We're rats drowning in a sewer, but you see lighthouses where there are none. You claim the
Titanic
is Mark Twain's steamboat. To you Svengali, Raskolnikov, and Hitler were the Three Stooges! I feel sorry for you. So I'm here to make you honest.”

“Since when have you believed in honesty?”

“Honesty, currency, and common sense. Never play funhouse slot machines, don't toss red-hot pennies to the poor, or throw your landlady downstairs. Fine futures? Hell, the future's
now,
and it's rotten. So, just what are you up to in this jerkwater town?”

McCoy glared around the deserted station.

Cardiff said, “You'd better leave on the next train.”

“I got twenty-four hours to steal your story.” McCoy squinted at the shut sunflowers that lined the road into town. “Lead the way. I'll follow and trip over the bodies.”

McCoy hoisted his bag and began to walk, and Cardiff, after a beat or two, jogged to catch up with him.

“My editor said I'd better come back with a headline—one thousand bucks if it's good, three if it's super.” As they walked, McCoy surveyed the porch swings motionless in the early morning breeze and the high windows that reflected no light. “You know, this feels like super.”

Cardiff trudged along, thinking:
Don't breathe. Lie low.

The town heard.

No leaf trembled. No fruit fell. Shadows of dogs lay under bushes, but no dogs. The grass flattened like the fur on a nervous cat. All was stillness.

Pleased with the silence he sensed he had caused, McCoy stopped where two streets intersected, panoplied by trees. He stared at the green architecture and mused, “I get it.” He dropped his bag, pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket, which he licked, and began to scribble in a notepad, pronouncing the syllables as he wrote. “Leftover town. Stillborn, Nebraska. Remembrance, Ohio. Steamed west in 1880, lost steam 1890. End of the line 1900. Long lost.”

Cardiff suffered lockjaw.

McCoy appraised him. “I'm on the money, right? I can see it in your face. You came to bury Caesar. I came to stir his bones. You followed your intuition here; I came thanks to an itching hunch. You liked what you saw and probably would have gone home and said nothing. I
don't
like what I see, past tense.” He stuck the pencil behind his ear, jammed the notepad in his pants pocket, and reached down to heft his bag once more. As if propelled by the sound of his own voice, he continued striding down Summerton's streets, proclaiming as he went, “Look at that lousy architecture, the gimcrack scrimshaw rococo baroque shingles and hang-ons. You ever see so many damn scroll-cut wooden icicles? Christ, wouldn't it be awful to be trapped here forever, even just
two
weeks every summer? Hey, now, what's
this
?” He stopped short, looked up.

The sign over the porch front read,
EGYPTIAN VIEW ARMS. BOARDING.

McCoy glanced at Cardiff, who stiffened. “
This
has got to be your digs. Let's see.”

And before Cardiff could move, McCoy was up the front steps and inside the screen door.

Cardiff caught the door before it could slam and stepped in.

Silence. The obsequies over. The dear departed gone.

Even the parlor dust did not move, if there ever
had
been any dust. All the Tiffany lamps were dark and the flower vases empty. He heard McCoy in the kitchen and went to find him.

McCoy stood in front of the icebox, which was opened wide. There was no ice within, nor any cream or milk or butter and no drip pan under the box to be drunk by a thirsty dog after midnight. The pantry, similarly, displayed no leopard bananas or Ceylonese or Indian spices. A river of quiet wind had entered the house and left with the priceless stuffs.

McCoy muttered, scribbling, “That's enough evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“Everyone's hiding. Everything's stashed. When I leave—bingo!—the grass gets cut, the icebox drips. How did they know I was
coming
? Now, I don't suppose there's a Western Union in this no-horse town?” He spied a telephone in the hallway, picked it up, listened. “No dial tone.” He glanced through the screen door. “No postman in sight. I am in a big damn isolation booth.”

McCoy ambled out to sit on the front porch glider, which squealed as if threatening to fall. McCoy read Cardiff's face.

“You look like a do-gooder,” he said. “You run around saving people not worth saving. So what's so great about this town that's worth the Cardiff Salvation Army? That can't be the whole story. There's got to be a villain somewhere.”

Cardiff held his breath.

McCoy pulled out his pad and scowled at it.

“I think I know the name of the villain,” he muttered. “The Department of—”

He made Cardiff wait.

“—Highways?”

Cardiff exhaled.

“Bingo,” McCoy whispered. “I see the headlines now:
ACE REPORTER DEFENDS PERFECT TOWN FROM DESTRUCTION.
Small type: Highway Bureau Insists on Pillage and Ruin. Next week:
SUMMERTON SUES AND LOSES.
Ace Reporter Drowns in Gin.”

He shut his pad.

“Pretty good for an hour's work, yep?” he said.

“Pretty,” said Cardiff.