‘I’m all right. I’m where I’m supposed to be. I think.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I had wandered out onto the deck. In the distance thunder rumbled. It was hotter than hell, not a breath of breeze stirring. The sunset was fading to a baleful afterglow. The sky in the west looked like the white of a bloodshot eye.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I have an idea the situation will clarify itself. I’ll meet you at the airport.’
‘Okay,’ he said, and then, in a hushed, almost reverential voice: ‘Eighty million motherfucking American dollars.’
‘It’s a whole lotta lettuce,’ I agreed, and wished him a good night.
I drank black coffee and ate toast in the kitchen the next morning, watching the TV weatherman.
Like so many of them these days, he had a slightly mad look, as if all those Doppler radar images had driven him to the brink of something. I think of it as the Millennial Video Game look.
‘We’ve got another thirty-six hours of this soup to work through and then there’s going to be a big change,’ he was saying, and pointed to some dark gray scum lurking in the Midwest. Tiny animated lightning-bolts danced in it like defective sparkplugs. Beyond the scum and the lightning-bolts, America looked clear all the way out to the desert country, and the posted temperatures were fifteen degrees cooler. ‘We’ll see temps in the mid-nineties today and can’t look for much relief tonight or tomorrow morning. But tomorrow afternoon these frontal storms will reach western Maine, and I think most of you are going to want to keep updated on weather conditions. Before we get back to cooler air and bright clear skies on Wednesday, we’re probably going to see violent thunderstorms, heavy rain, hail in some locations. Tornados are rare in Maine, but some towns in western and central Maine could see them tomorrow. Back to you, Earl.’
Earl, the morning news guy, had the innocent beefy look of a recent retiree from the Chippendales and read off the Teleprompter like one. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s quite a forecast, Vince. Tornados a possibility.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Say wow again, Earl. Do it ’til I’m satisfied.’
‘Holy cow,’ Earl said just to spite me, and the telephone rang. I went to answer it, giving the waggy clock a look as I went by. The night had been quiet — no sobbing, no screaming, no nocturnal adventures — but the clock was disquieting, just the same. It hung there On the wall eyeless and dead, like a message full of bad news.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr. Noonan?’
I knew the voice, but for a moment couldn’t place it. It was because she had called me Mr.
Noonan. To Brenda Meserve I’d been Mike for almost fifteen years.
‘Mrs M.? Brenda? What — ‘
‘I can’t work for you anymore,’ she said, all in a rush. ‘I’m sorry I can’t give you proper notice — I never stopped work for anyone without giving notice, not even that old drunk Mr Croyden — but I have to. Please understand.’
‘Did Bill find out I called you? I swear to God, Brenda, I never said a word — ‘
‘No. I haven’t spoken to him, nor he to me. I just can’t come back to Sara Laughs. I had a bad dream last night. A terrible dream. I dreamed that . . . something’s mad at me. If I come back, I could have an accident. It would look like an accident, at least, but . . . it wouldn’t be.’
That’s silly, Mrs M. , I wanted to say. You’re surely past the age where you believe in campfire stories about ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties.
But of course I could say no such thing. What was going on in my house was no campfire story. I knew it, and she knew I did.
‘Brenda, if I’ve caused you any trouble, I’m truly sorry.’
‘Go away, Mr. Noonan . . . Mike. Go back to Derry and stay for awhile. It’s the best thing you could do.’
I heard the letters sliding on the fridge and turned. This time I actually saw the circle of fruits and vegetables form. It stayed open at the top long enough for four letters to slide inside. Then a little plastic lemon plugged the hole and completed the circle.
yats,
the letters said, then swapped themselves around, making
stay
Then both the circle and the letters broke up.
‘Mike, please.’ Mrs. M. was crying. ‘Royce’s funeral is tomorrow. Everyone in the TR who matters — the old-timers — will be there.’
Yes, of course they would. The old ones, the bags of bones who knew what they knew and kept it to themselves. Except some of them had talked to my wife. Royce himself had talked to her. Now he was dead. So was she.
‘It would be best if you were gone. You could take that young woman with you, maybe. Her and her little girl.’
But could I? I somehow didn’t think so. I thought the three of us were on the TR until this was over . . . and I was starting to have an idea of when that would be. A storm was coming. A summer storm. Maybe even a tornado.
‘Brenda, thanks for calling me. And I’m not letting you go. Let’s just call it a leave of absence, shall we?’
‘Fine . . . whatever you want. Will you at least think about what I said?’
‘Yes. In the meantime, I don’t think I’d tell anyone you called me, all right?’
‘No!’ she said, sounding shocked. Then: ‘But they’ll know. Bill and Yvette . . . Dickie Brooks at the garage . . . old Anthony Weyland and Buddy Jellison and all the others . . . they’ll know.
Goodbye, Mr. Noonan. I’m so sorry. For you and your wife. Your poor wife. I’m so sorry.’ Then she was gone.
I held the phone in my hand for a long time. Then, like a man in a dream, I put it down, crossed the room, and took the eyeless clock off the wall. I threw it in the trash and went down to the lake for a swim, remembering that W. E Harvey story ‘August Heat,’ the one that ends with the line ‘The heat is enough to drive a man mad.’
I’m not a bad swimmer when people aren’t pelting me with rocks, but my first shore-to-float-to-shore lap was tentative and unrhythmic — ugly — because I kept expecting something to reach up
from the bottom and grab me. The drowned boy, maybe. The second lap was better, and by the third I was relishing the increased kick of my heart and the silky coolness of the water rushing past me. Halfway through the fourth lap I pulled myself up the float’s ladder and collapsed on the boards, feeling better than I had since my encounter with Devore and Rogette Whitmore on Friday night. I was still in the zone, and on top of that I was experiencing a glorious endorphin rush. In that state, even the dismay I’d felt when Mrs M. told me she was resigning her position ebbed away.
She would come back when this was over; of course she would. In the meantime, it was probably best she stay away.
Something’s mad at me. I could have an accident.
Yes indeed. She might cut herself. She might fall down a flight of cellar stairs. She might even have a stroke running across a hot parking lot.
I sat up and looked at Sara on her hill, the deck jutting out over the drop, the railroad ties descending. I’d only been out of the water for a few minutes, but already the day’s sticky heat was folding over me, stealing my rush. The water was still as a mirror. I could see the house reflected in it, and in the reflection Sara’s windows became watchful eyes.
I thought that the focus of all the phenomena — the epicenter — was very likely on The Street between the real Sara and its drowned image. This is where it happened, Devore had said. And the old-timers? Most of them probably knew what I knew: that Royce Merrill had been murdered. And wasn’t it possible — wasn’t it likely — that what had killed him might come among them as they sat in their pews or gathered afterward around his grave? That it might steal some of their force —
their guilt, their memories, their TR-ness — to help it finish the job?
I was very glad that John was going to be at the trailer tomorrow, and Romeo Bissonette, and George Kennedy, who was so amusing when he got a drink or two in him. Glad it was going to be more than just me with Mattie and Ki when the old folks got together to give Royce Merrill his sendoff. I no longer cared very much about what had happened to Sara and the Red-Tops, or even about what was haunting my house. What I wanted was to get through tomorrow, and for Mattie and Ki to get through tomorrow. We’d eat before the rain started and then let the predicted thunderstorms come. I thought that, if we could ride them out, our lives and futures might clarify with the weather.