Songs in Ordinary Time Page 3

  She walked faster. It wasn’t his fault. She couldn’t believe she’d just done that, gone in there for a job, into Cushing’s, where of course they’d all known. She could tell, especially that old lady with her patronizing smile: I used to play bridge with your grandmother Fermoyle. Say it! Say, You’re Sam’s daughter. Damn! Why had she done that? Why couldn’t she ever stand up to her mother? “Cushing’s!” she’d almost shrieked this morning, standing over her mother as she swept up the broken glass. He got drunk. He kicked in the cellar window and put his fist through the back door pane, so now she’d pay. Her, the one whose fault it all was, would always be. “Cushing’s,” her mother’s dead voice repeated, not even looking up, daring her to argue, daring her to be ashamed, daring her to be afraid, for fear was the worst offense. Cowards were afraid, and damn it, Marie Fermoyle wasn’t working her ass off to raise cowards, so if her younger son Benjy was afraid of water, then he’d damn well spend every day this summer at the public pool, and if her daughter was afraid of what people might think, then she’d march straight into Cushing’s to offer herself, Alice Fermoyle, Sam’s daughter; Sam and Marie; the worm in her mother’s unwed belly, the reason for it all—her, the shameful, sinful, lustful reason. Her brother Norm was lucky. He wasn’t afraid of anything. She envied him his good looks, his strength, his confidence, his quick brutality, his rawness that was so much like hers, their mother’s.

  “How about Birdsee’s?” Lester was saying as they waited for the light to change.

  She shook her head.

  “The luncheonette!” he said as they passed Eunice Bonifante’s restaurant on the corner. Eunice was his aunt. She was a widow now, and, so the rumor went, having an affair with Lester’s father, her dear sister-in-law’s husband.

  “I’d hate that,” she said. “All those people at the counter staring at you.”

  “They don’t stare at anyone,” he said. “They just stare. Like my father does. He chews and he stares.” He looked at her and seemed to realize for the first time how upset she was. “What’s wrong, Al?”

  “I hate this town!” she said, walking faster now, because her eyes were filling with tears. “I hate these dinky stores and these crummy streets and people watching you every minute; like right now, every place we go by, somebody’s looking out, saying, ‘There’s that Fermoyle girl, what’s her name, she never says two words, and that’s Lester with her, his father’s Sonny Stoner, the chief of police, and Lester is valedictorian of his class, such a smart boy, wonder what he sees in her!’”

  Lester laughed. “They don’t say that!”

  She looked at him. “Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be invisible? You could do anything you wanted and go anyplace and no one’d know.”

  Lester stepped in front of her now and whispered, “Yah, and you could see what everyone else was doing. Can you imagine, being invisible up at the Flatts, looking in all the windows at the parkers.” He grinned, his small bright eyes glowing the way they had in his darkened kitchen when he had her listen to the calls coming over his father’s police radio. “It’s better than TV,” he had whispered above the static. “It’s almost like being God,” he’d said, laughing.

  A garbage truck rumbled down the hill, leaking rancid juices from its seams, its stench everywhere.

  “I could get a job at the lake!” she said suddenly. “Mary Agnes said there’s a couple of waitressing jobs at the hotel. She said I could….”

  “No!” Lester said, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. “I’ll never see you!” His voice quivered, reminding her of a chemistry class last year when some kids switched beakers on Les, and when he put his on the Bunsen burner, the smoky explosion of ashes blackened his face.

  She didn’t know what to say. They’d only been going out for a month and Lester was her first boyfriend. He looked the way he had in chemistry that time, mad enough to cry.

  “They all stay in this dumpy cabin behind the hotel,” he said, his eyes blazing with indignation. Spittle frothed the corners of his mouth. “And there’s no adult supervision and there’s drinking every night and parties! And I know for a fact Mary Agnes had Tony spend at least one night there last summer, because his mother’s call came into the station, and I heard my father on the radio send Victor out in the cruiser, and sure enough, that’s where they found him. With her, Mary Agnes, that tramp!”

  “Les! She’s not a tramp.” Mary Agnes had been her friend since second grade. But in the last few years Mary Agnes’s best friend had been Tony.

  He glared at her, his mouth puckered sourly. “Take my word for it! She’s a tramp and I know!” He always seemed to know all that was bad or tainted in town. Alice wondered how many calls he’d heard concerning her father. Thank God, Norm hadn’t called the police last night.

  Lester walked alongside her in rigid silence. Pale-eyed and pink-skinned, he was always too serious, too smart, too polite, too good. Tall and slim, he moved with this ramrod intensity that adults valued as ambition, high-mindedness, an intensity his classmates had always mocked.

  The closer they got to Lester’s house, the more distant her troubles became. Here, the air was sweet and green and still. Lester’s shoulder brushed hers and her eyes blurred and her legs felt weak. Her insides burned. Yesterday he had touched her breasts for the first time. Neither one spoke now as they came up the brick walk toward the trim white Cape.

  Inside, her eyes raced hungrily over the living room, with its gold plaid sofa and matching club chairs, its rust-and-green braided rug. The lampshades were patterned with eagles, as was the pale green wallpaper, its gold eagles perched atop crossed fifes and drums. She’d give anything to live in a house like this, where the slightest drip of a faucet or squeal of a door would not be allowed. She wished they could sit up here, but Lester always hurried her downstairs to the paneled rec room.

  She waited down here now while he ran up to relieve his mother’s day nurse. Lester’s mother had been sick in bed since Easter. Though no one would speak the word, they all knew it was cancer. Alice put on her glasses and spread her books and notes over the coffee table. Finals started tomorrow, but it was no big deal for seniors. Most either had their jobs lined up or knew what colleges they were going to, so these final grades wouldn’t even really matter.

  Alice had been accepted at the state university, but after her mother’s initial thrill had come days of depression about where the money would come from. It came up daily now, in every conversation. Lester had also been accepted at UVM, but his father wanted him to go to Castleton State so he could be near his mother these last few months. According to her doctors, Mrs. Stoner wouldn’t live to see Christmas. Alice had heard that from her brother Norm, whose best friend Weeb’s mother was Mrs. Miller, the nurse Les was showing out the front door now.

  “The pills were by the bed again,” Mrs. Miller was saying. She sounded irritated.

  “I had to leave early. I had my first final,” Les said. Alice glanced toward the stairs. Lester had left early to walk her to school. He hadn’t had a final.

  “I told you yesterday, Les. They’re awful strong.”

  “I know. I forgot.”

  “And she’s in so much pain now, sometimes she can’t think straight. She’s liable—”

  “I’ll go put them on the dresser,” Les said.

  “In the bathroom’s best,” Mrs. Miller was saying. Her voice seemed to be out front now. “Then when she needs one, somebody’ll have to get it.”

  “I’ll go right up and move them now.” As soon as the front door closed, Lester bounded down the stairs and onto the couch.

  “Your mother’s pills!” she said.

  “She’s sound asleep,” Les said, leaning against her as he reached up to turn out the light.

  She took off her glasses, surprised; usually there was the pretense of homework for at least fifteen or twenty minutes. He fell against her, clenching her arms so tightly that they hurt.

  “Don’t go,” he begged,
kissing her eyes, her cheeks, her neck. “Please don’t go to the lake,” he whispered against her lips. “Don’t leave me alone here, please.” His mouth was open, his tongue shoving against her tongue until she finally opened her mouth. It was strange the way he could be so irritating, such a sissy, until he was down here in the dark, pressed against her, kissing her so frantically, running his hand so hard up and down her thigh that she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t even picture what he looked like, and for a moment as he pushed her bra up over her breasts, she wasn’t even sure who he was. This was a different Lester. She had this power over him. She could make him do bad things. A sharp ache filled her chest and she was afraid she was going to cry.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang. The boardinghouse shook with Claire Mayo’s heavy footsteps. Claire was the younger sister, square-jawed and stocky, the one with the head for business. It was Claire who berated the grocer’s delivery boy for worms in the lettuce or the linen service for stained sheets.

  “You will not!” she barked from the front parlor. “You most certainly will not! This is a—”

  A man’s heedless voice engulfed hers.

  Upstairs, May drew the afghan over the Judge’s lap. Her wrinkled fingers lingered on the swollen crotch. Her breath grew short and her ears began to ring and her heart began to pound until the whole house throbbed with its blind ruckus.

  When the door flew open, she did not clearly see or hear them, though she knew they moved about the room in a commotion of heat and anger.

  “He’s dead!” her sister, Claire, wailed, falling back against the bedpost. “The Judge is dead, sister. He’s dead!”

  “Don’t look at me,” Sam Fermoyle cried, lurching back out the door. “I didn’t lay a hand on him. As God is my witness,” he sobbed drunkenly as he tripped and staggered down the stairs and onto the street and through the horn-blowing traffic with dogs snapping at his heels and little boys stumbling and laughing after him, teetering on curbstones, bouncing off telephone poles.

  May opened her eyes and watched curiously as they careened through the park, where Joey Seldon cocked his doughy head to hear the little boys parrot Sam, “The Judge is dead! Jesus Christ, the Judge is dead!”

  Joey Seldon spun dizzily in his ramshackle stand. “Wait!” he called. “Tell me what happened!” he shouted, pawing the air with enormous hands. He groped for the door, then made his way to the sidewalk and waited, listening up and down the street for someone to tell him what had happened.

  To make sure he wouldn’t run into his father again, Benjy came through the woods that horseshoed the eastern edge of town and sloped from the wild flatlands that were the foothills of Killington Mountain. He had been in here before with his brother, Norm. But now, as he ran alongside Moon Brook, he realized that this was the first time he had ever been in these woods alone. If he stayed with the brook, at some point soon it should curve around a huge boulder, which would put him almost directly behind his street.

  In here the heat was thinner, the trees pale with new growth and far enough apart so that sunlight slanted down in wide silvery bars. He stopped running now and began to walk. His eyes flickered warily to the left, toward that menacing ridge of pine woods beyond which lay the Flatts, where people lived in tin-roofed shacks and trailers. They were all blonds and redheads with strange first names like Bonaparte and Fantasia and Benito and Hemingway and Coolidge and Blue. Their last names might be Carper or Mansaw or Hunsen or Kluggs or Wallace, but they shared the same flattened brows and close-set, palely lit eyes, and ghostly pallor that seemed to devolve, not only whiter with each brood, but thinner; so that there glowed in their flesh now that cold depthless translucence of blue ice, like wintry mountain runoff, that marked them as offspring of cousins, so that husband and wife often looked enough alike to be brother and sister.

  Though she wasn’t related to any of those people, Benjy’s own mother had lived for a time in the Flatts, in a small house her father had rented from Grondine Carson, the pigman, whose hog farm was next to the town dump. His feet were wet, his shoes heavy with the ooze of the spring forest. The usually narrow cut of the brook had swamped in every direction through the wild laurel and the white cedar and stunted pines, and nowhere could he see the boulder.

  He had come too near the Flatts. Here, the trees grew closer, and he thought he could hear the eerie squeal of pigs in the distance. He went on a few feet more, heading for a rocky incline; then he stopped and listened, certain he had just heard a voice. No, he kept telling himself as he climbed, it’s the pigs. It’s got to be the pigs. It couldn’t be his father.

  Suddenly, when he had reached the top of the hill, he darted back and fell to one knee, crouching in the tangled sweep of a willow tree. Below, in the clearing, stood two men, a young black man and a tall, barrel-chested white man in a white suit and a straw hat, which he pressed to his chest. The young man was shorter and wiry, and now as he moved catlike toward the white man, Benjy thought he saw the sharp glint of metal in his right hand.

  “Don’t!” the white man said. “Please! I been your friend.”

  “Which is why you took out your knife, right?”

  “I was only tryna make you listen to reason,” the white man said in a Southern accent, a drawl much like the young man’s.

  “Well I got the knife now, so it’s your turn to listen, Omar,” said the young man.

  “First put that down!” the white man said, waving the hat. “You hear me, boy. Down, I said!”

  “I don’ wanna hurt you,” the young man warned. “Just give it over, so’s we can get on home.”

  “Now, Earlie.” The white man laughed weakly. “You and your grandpa been paid, and Luther, too. Fair and square, what more do you want?”

  “You know what I want,” the young man growled.

  “You got the car and everything I own in it!” the white man whined, wagging his head. His slick black hair gleamed in the sun. “I gotta have a few dollars. I deserve th—”

  “Just give it over,” said the young man, taking another step. “Give me the money!”

  “I been good to you!” the white man cried, then whipped his hat at the stealthily approaching young man. “I put shoes on that old man’s feet, and I put food in your bellies, and you know, every time you asked, Earlie, a woman in your bed, and—”

  “Give it!” the man named Earlie snarled.

  “And back there I could’ve run off when they started waving that woman’s check around, but I didn’t, did I? Not only that, but I went and paid bail. I sat outside all night. All night long, waiting for the courthouse to open. I could’ve run, but I didn’t! I could’ve told them it was Luther that changed them figures, but—”

  “No, you couldn’t!” Earlie cried, and stamped his foot in outrage. “’Cause Luther don’t read and Luther don’t write!” He gestured angrily and his palm flashed white in the sun. “You was the one that changed them checks and the old man damn knows it now. Just like he knows they ain’t no black old folks’ home, and they ain’t no Stankey Magazine Company, Incorporated. They’s all lies you made up, just like them Bibles we been giving, half the pages empty and no damn good, like you, Duvall!” The young man moved closer. “And I bet none of them subscriptions ever once came to them people. ’Cause you kept all that money, didn’t you? And no five dollars neither. Ever’ check for five we brung back you changed to fifty, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” he snarled, hunching closer.

  “Now you just settle down,” the white man sputtered. “You’re makin’ a mighty big commotion outta one desperate little incident,” he said, sidestepping; and so did the young man, in a rippling crouch, shoulder muscles taut beneath his bright red-and-yellow diamond-patterned shirt, every step pacing the white man’s, another step, and another, until they were directly below the boy, whose gaze fixed in horror on the blade in the young man’s hand. Just then, there came the high-pitched squeal of a rooting sow. The young man’s head jerked up and his yellow-shot eye snagged on the boy
’s thin face peering down through the pale willow leaves. And in that instant of hesitation, the white man, seeing his chance, pivoted, then sprang toward the pine woods, toward the pig farm. The young man wheeled after him, and then they were both gone. And so was the boy, back down the hill, and through the woods, his heart pumping his heavy wet feet until they met pavement, one street over from his own.

  Benjy sat on his sagging back steps with six-year-old Louis Klubock, who lived next door. It had been a terrible day, but he felt safe now in this naked heat with chubby Louie beside him and the Klubocks’ old black Lab dozing at their feet. Delicate music drifted across the driveway from the open windows of the newly painted yellow house as Mrs. Klubock played the piano and sang in a high sweet voice. Sometimes when Mr. Klubock joined in, Benjy’s heart would almost split in two with joy and longing. Mr. Klubock was at work now in the butcher shop. Louie was lucky. He had everything.

  “My uncle Renie used to have a dog,” Benjy said, reaching down to pet Klubocks’ dog. “His name was Riddles. My mother said my aunt poisoned him. But Uncle Renie said he just took off. He’s got a cat now in his store. But it’s a secret cat. Nobody knows about him.”

  Benjy knelt down and scratched the white ruff on the dog’s chest. The dog rolled onto its side.

  “I like cats,” Louie said.

  “We had one once, a kitten, a little white one.”

  “Yah, I remember that,” Louie said. “Your mother brought him home and then she took him away. How come she did that?”

  “I don’t know.” Careful. With so much not to tell, so many feints and dodges, and all the bobbing and weaving, he could feel his brain become this fluid, slippery, shimmying mass behind his eyes. “She says cats are the worst pets of all.” He continued scratching the dog’s chest. “She says they’re just like people. All they care about’s themselves. She says boy cats are the worst, ’cause they’re just like men, staying out all night and getting into fights and dragging home in the morning just to have a place to sleep.”