The Early Stories (104 page)

They want to be invisible.

In an ideal state, they would wither away.

My wife and I had an eerie experience a year ago. Our male pup hadn't come back for his supper, and the more my wife thought about it the less she could sleep, so around midnight she got up in her nightie and we put on raincoats and went out in the convertible to search. It was a weekday night, the town looked dead. It looked like a fossil of itself, pressed pale into black stone. Except downtown—the blank shop fronts glazed under the blue arc lamps, the street wide as a prairie without parked cars—there was this cluster of shadows. I thought of a riot, except that it was quiet. I thought of witchcraft, except that it was 1971. Cal was there. His blue uniform looked purple under the lights. The rest were kids, the kids that hang around on the hill, the long hair and the Levi's making the girls hard to distinguish. Half in the street, half on the pavement, they were having a conversation, a party in the heart of our ghostly town.

My wife found her voice and asked Cal about the dog and he answered promptly that one had been hit but not badly by a car up near the new shopping center around four that afternoon, without a collar or a license, and we apologized about the license and explained how our little girl keeps dressing the dog in her old baby clothes and taking his collar off, and, sure enough, we found the animal in the dogcatcher's barn, shivering and limping and so relieved to see us he fainted in the driveway and didn't eat for two days; but the point is the strangeness of those kids and that policeman in the middle of nowhere, having what looked like a good time. What do they talk about? Does it happen every night? Is something brewing between them? Nobody can talk to these kids, except the police. Maybe, in the world that's in the making, they're the only real things to one another, kids and police, and the rest of us, me in my convertible and
my wife in her nightie, are the shadows, the pale fossils. As we pulled away, we heard laughter.

But they have lives, too. The Sunday evening the man went crazy on Prudence Lane, Hal arrived in a suit as if fresh from church, and Dan wore a checked shirt and bowling shoes that sported a big number 9 on their backs. Dainty feet. Chief Chad had to feather his siren to press the cruiser through the crowd that had collected—sunburned young mothers pushing babies in strollers, a lot of old people from the nursing home up the street. All through the crowd people were telling one another stories. The man had moved here three weeks ago from Detroit. He was crazy on three days of gin. He was an acidhead. He went crazy because his wife had left him. He was a queer. He was a Vietnam veteran. His first shot from the upstairs window had hit a fire hydrant—ka-
zing!
—and the second kicked up dust under the nose of the fat beagle that sleeps by the curb there.

The crazy man was in the second story of the old Cushing place, which the new owners had fixed up for rental with that aluminum siding that looks just like clapboards until you study the corners. The Osborne house next door, without a front yard, juts out to the pavement, and most of the crowd stayed more or less behind the house, though the old folks kept pushing closer to see, and the mothers kept running into the line of fire to fetch back their toddlers, and the dogs raced around nervously wagging their tails the way they do at festivities.

It was strange, coming up the street, to see the cloud of gunsmoke drifting toward the junior high school, just like on television, only in better color. The police crouched down behind the cruiser, trading shots. Chief Chad was huddled behind the corner of the Osbornes', shouting into his radio. The siege lasted an hour. The crazy man, a skinny fellow in a tie-dyed undershirt, was in plain sight in the window above the porch roof, making a speech you couldn't understand and alternately reloading the two rifles he had. One of the old folks hobbled out across the asphalt to the police car and screamed, “
Kill
him! I paid good taxes all my life. What's the problem, he's right up there,
kill
him!” Even the crazy man went quiet to hear the old man carry on: the old guy was trembling; his face shone with tears; he kept yelling the word “taxes.” Dan shielded him with his body and hustled him back to the crowd, where a nurse from the home wrestled him quiet.

The plan, it turned out, wasn't to kill anybody. The police were aiming around the window, making a sieve of that new siding, until the state police arrived with the tear gas. While the crazy man was being entertained
out front, Chief Chad and a state cop sneaked into the back yard and plunked the canisters into the kitchen. The shooting died. The police went in the front door wearing masks and brought out on a stretcher a man swaddled like a newborn baby. A thin sort of baby with a sleeping green face. Though they say that at the hospital, when he got his crazy consciousness back, he broke all the straps and it took five men to hold him down for the injection.

“Go home!” Chief Chad shouted, shaking his rifle at the crowd. “The show's over! Damn you all, go home!”

Most people forgave him, he was overwrought.

Bits of the crowd clung to the neighborhood way past dark, telling one another what they saw or knew or guessed, giving it all a rerun. Experience is so vicarious these days, only recollecting it makes it actual. One theory was that the crazy man hadn't meant to hurt anybody, or he could have winged a dozen spectators. Yes, but on the corner of the Osbornes' you can still see where a bullet came through one side and out the other, right where Chief Chad's ear had been a second before. Out of all that unreality, the bullet holes remained to be mended. It took weeks for the aluminum-siding man to show up.

And then, this March, in a town meeting, the moderator got rattled and ejected a citizen. He was the new sort of citizen who has moved into the Marshview development, a young husband with a big honey-colored beard. They appear to feel the world owes them an explanation. We were on the sewer articles. We've been passing these sewer articles for years and the river never smells any better, but you pass them because the town engineer is president of the Odd Fellows and doing the best he can. Anyway, young Honeybeard had raised four or five objections, and had the selectmen up and down at the microphone like jack-in-the-boxes, and Bud Perley, moderator ever since he came back from Okinawa with his medals, got weary of recognizing him, and overlooked his waving hand. The boy—taxpayer, just like the old cuss at the shoot-out—had smuggled in a balloon and enough helium to float it up toward the gym ceiling.

LOVE, the balloon said.

“Eject that man,” Perley said.

Who'll ever forget it? Seven hundred of us there, and we'd seen a lot of foolishness on the town-meeting floor, but we'd never seen a man ejected. Hal was over by the water bubbler, leaning against the wall, and Sam was on the opposite side joking with a bunch of high-school students up on the tumbling horses observing for their civics class. The two policemen
moved at once, together. They sauntered, almost, across the front of the hall toward the center aisle.

And you saw they had billy clubs, and you saw they had guns, and nobody else did.

Actually, young Honeybeard was a friend of Sam's—they had gone smelt-fishing together that winter—and both smiled sheepishly as they touched, and the fellow went out making a big
V
with his arms, and people laughed and cheered and no doubt will vote him in for selectman if he runs.

But still. The two policemen had moved in unison, carefully, crabwise-cautious under their load of equipment, and you saw they were real; blundering old Perley had called them into existence, and not a mouth in that hall held more than held breath. This was it. This was power, our power hopefully to be sure, but this was
it
.

The Corner
 

The town is one of those that people pass through on the way to somewhere else; so its inhabitants have become expert in giving directions. Ray Blandy cannot be on his porch five minutes before a car, baffled by the lack of signs at the corner, will shout to him, “Is this the way to the wharf?” or “Am I on the right road to East Mather?” Using words and gestures that have become rote, Ray heads it on its way, with something of the satisfaction with which he mails a letter, or flushes a toilet, or puts in another week at Unitek Electronics. Catty-corner across the awkward intersection (Wharf Street swerves south and meets Reservoir Road and Prudence Lane at acute, half-blind angles), Mr. Latroy, a milkman who is home from noon on, and who is also an auxiliary policeman, directs automobiles uncertain if, to reach the famous old textile mill in Lacetown, they should bear left around the traffic island or go straight up the hill. There is nothing on the corner to hold cars here except the small variety store run by an old Dutch couple, the Van der Bijns. Its modest size and dim, rusted advertisements are geared to foot traffic. Children going to school stop here for candy, and townspeople after work stop for cigarettes and bread, but for long tracts of the day there is little for Mr. Van der Bijn to do but sit behind his display windows and grieve that the cars passing through take the corner too fast.

There have been accidents. Eight years ago, around eleven o'clock of a muggy July morning, when Susan Craven had been standing on her sidewalk wondering whether she should go to the playground or Linda Latroy's back yard, a clam truck speedily rounding the corner snapped a kingbolt, went right up over the banking, swung—while the driver wildly twisted the slack steering wheel—within a foot of unblinking, preoccupied Susan, bounced back down the banking, straight across Prudence Lane, and smack, in a shower of shingles, into the house then
owned by Miss Beulah Cogswell. She has since died, after living for years on her telling of the accident: “
Well
, I was in the kitchen making my morning
tea
and naturally thought it was just
another
of those dreadful sonic booms. But,
when
I go with my cup and saucer into the front parlor, here
right
where my television set had been was this dirty windshield with a man's absolutely
white
face, mouthing like a fish, the carpet
drenched
with shingles and plaster and the corner cupboard three feet into the room and not one, would you
believe
it, not a single piece of bone china so much as
cracked!
”

Now her house is occupied by a young couple with a baby that cries all night. The Cravens have moved to Falmouth, selling their house to the Blandys. And the Latroy girls have heard that Susan is married, to a pilot from Otis Air Force Base; it's hard to believe. It seems just yesterday she was brushed by death, a rude little girl with fat legs.

Long before this, so long ago only the Van der Bijns and Mrs. Billy Hannaford witnessed the wreckage, a drunken driver took the corner too fast in the opposite direction from the truck and skidded up over the curb into the left-hand display window of the variety store. No one was hurt; the Van der Bijns were asleep upstairs and the drunk, well known locally, remained relaxed and amused. But the accident left a delicate scar on the corner, in the perceptible disparity between the two large plate-glass panes: the left one is less wavery and golden in tint than the right, and its frame is of newer molding, which does not perfectly match.

Somewhere between these two accidents there is an old man down from New Hampshire, lost, blinded, he said, by blazing headlights, who drove right over the traffic island, straddling it in his high 1939 Buick, shearing off the Stop sign and eviscerating his muffler on the stump. And lost in the snowy mists of time is the child who sledded down Reservoir Road and was crushed beneath a big black Peerless, in the days before cars could be counted on to be everywhere.

It is strange that more accidents do not occur. Everyone ignores the rusty Stop sign. Teen-agers begin drag races down by the wharf and use the traffic island as a finish post. Friday and Saturday nights, there is screeching and roaring until two and three in the morning. Trucks heave and shift gears, turning north. Summer weekends see a parade of motor-boats on trailers. The housing development, Marshview, on the east end of town, adds dozens of cars to the daily flow. The corner has already been widened—the Van der Bijns' house once had a front yard. Old photographs exist, on sepia cardboard, that show fewer wires on the poles, a great beech where none now stands, a front yard at the house that
was not then a store, the dark house across from the Blandys' painted white, no porch at the Blandys', no traffic island, and a soft, trodden, lanelike look to the surface of the roadway. When the Van der Bijns move or die (the same thing to the town clerk), their house will be taken by eminent domain and the corner widened still further, enabling the cars to go still faster. Engineers' drawings are already on file at Town Hall.