Before retiring to Palm Springs in the late eighties, Maxwell William Devore had been a driving force in the computer revolution. It’s primarily a young people’s revolution, but Devore did okay for a golden oldie — knew the playing-field and understood the rules. He started when memory was stored on magnetic tape instead of in computer chips and a warehouse-sized cruncher called UNIVAC was state-of-the-art. He was fluent in COBOL and spoke FORTRAN like a native. As the field expanded beyond his ability to keep up, expanded to the point where it began to define the world, he bought the talent he needed to keep growing.
His company, Visions, had created scanning programs which could upload hard copy onto floppy disks almost instantaneously; it created graphic-imaging programs which had become the industry standard; it created Pixel Easel, which allowed laptop users to mouse-paint . . . to actually fingerpaint, if their gadget came equipped with what Jo had called ‘the clitoral cursor.’ Devore had invented none of this later stuff, but he’d understood that it could be invented and had hired people to do it. He held dozens of patents and co-held hundreds more. He was supposedly worth something like six hundred million dollars, depending on how technology stocks were doing on any given day.
On the TR he was reputed to be crusty and unpleasant. No surprise there; to a Nazarene, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And folks said he was eccentric, of course. Listen to the old-timers who remember the rich and successful in their salad days (and all the old-timers claim they do), and you’ll hear that they ate the wallpaper, fucked the dog, and showed up at church suppers wearing nothing but their pee-stained BVDS. Even if all that was true in Devore’s case, and even if he was Scrooge McDuck in the bargain, I doubted that he’d allow two of his closer relatives to live in a doublewide trailer.
I drove up the lane above the lake, then paused at the head of my driveway, looking at the sign there: SARA LAUGHS burned into a length of varnished board nailed to a handy tree. It’s the way they do things down here. Looking at it brought back the last dream of the Manderley series. In that dream someone had slapped a radio-station sticker on the sign, the way you’re always seeing stickers slapped on turnpike toll-collection baskets in the exact-change lanes.
I got out of my car, went to the sign, and studied it. No sticker. The sunflowers had been down there, growing out of the stoop — I had a photo in my suitcase that proved it — but there was no radio-station sticker on the house sign. Proving exactly what? Come on, Noonan, get a grip.
I started back to the car — the door was open, the Beach Boys spilling out of the speakers —
then changed my mind and went back to the sign again. In the dream, the sticker had been pasted just above the RA of SARA and the LAU of LAUGHS. I touched my fingers to that spot and thought they came away feeling slightly sticky. Of course that could have been the feel of varnish on a hot day. Or my imagination.
I drove down to the house, parked, set the emergency brake (on the slopes around Dark Score and the dozen or so other lakes in western Maine, you always set your brake), and listened to the rest of ‘Don’t Worry, Baby,’ which I’ve always thought was the best of the Beach Boys’ songs, great
not in spite of the sappy lyrics but because of them. If you knew how much I love you, baby, Brian Wilson sings, nothing could go wrong with you. And oh folks, wouldn’t that be a world.
I sat there listening and looked at the cabinet set against the right side of the stoop. We kept our garbage in there to foil the neighborhood raccoons. Even cans with snap-down lids won’t always do that; if the coons are hungry enough, they somehow manage the lids with their clever little hands.
You’re not going to do what you’re thinking of doing, I told myself. I mean . . . are you?
It seemed I was — or that I was at least going to have a go. When the Beach Boys gave way to Rare Earth, I got out of the car, opened the storage cabinet, and pulled out two plastic garbage cans.
There was a guy named Stan Proulx who came down to yank the trash twice a week (or there was four years ago, I reminded myself), one of Bill Dean’s farflung network of part-timers working for cash off the books, but I didn’t think Stan would have been down to collect the current accumulation of swill because of the holiday, and I was right. There were two plastic garbage bags in each can. I hauled them out (cursing myself for a fool even while I was doing it) and untwisted the yellow ties.
I really don’t think I was so obsessed that I would have dumped a bunch of wet garbage out on my stoop if it had come to that (of course I’ll never know for sure, and maybe that’s for the best), but it didn’t. No one had lived in the house for four years, remember, and it’s occupancy that produces garbage — everything from coffee-grounds to used sanitary napkins. The stuff in these bags was dry trash swept together and carted out by Brenda Meserve’s cleaning crew.
There were nine vacuum-cleaner disposal bags containing forty-eight months of dust, dirt, and dead flies. There were wads of paper towels, some smelling of aromatic furniture polish and others of the sharper but still pleasant aroma of Windex. There was a moldy mattress pad and a silk jacket which had that unmistakable dined-upon-by-moths look. The jacket certainly caused me no regrets; a mistake of my young manhood, it looked like something from the Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’ era.
Goo-goo-joob, baby.
There was a box filled with broken glass . . . another filled with unrecognizable (and presumably out-of-date) plumbing fixtures . . . a torn and filthy square of carpet . . . done-to-death dishtowels, faded and ragged . . . the old oven-gloves I’d used when cooking burgers and chicken on the barbecue . . .
The sticker was in a twist at the bottom of the second bag. I’d known I would find it — from the moment I’d felt that faintly tacky patch on the sign, I’d known — but I’d needed to see it for myself.
The same way old Doubting Thomas had needed to get the blood under his fingernails, I suppose.
I placed my find on a board of the sunwarmed stoop and smoothed it out with my hand. It was shredded around the edges. I guessed Bill had probably used a putty-knife to scrape it off. He hadn’t wanted Mr. Noonan to come back to the lake after four years and discover some beered-up kid had slapped a radio-station sticker on his driveway sign. Gorry, no, ‘t’wouldn’t be proper, deah. So off it had come and into the trash it had gone and here it was again, another piece of my nightmare unearthed and not much the worse for wear. I ran my fingers over it. WBLM, 102.9, PORTLAND’S
ROCK AND ROLL BLIMP.
I told myself didn’t have to be afraid. That it meant nothing, just as all the rest of it meant nothing. Then I got the broom out of the cabinet, swept all the trash together, and dumped it back in the plastic bags. The sticker went in with the rest.
I went inside meaning to shower the dust and grime away, then spied my own bathing suitie, still lying in one of my open suitcases, and decided to go swimming instead. The suit was a jolly number, covered with spouting whales, that I had purchased in Key Largo. I thought my pal in the
Bosox cap would have approved. I checked my watch and saw that I had finished my Villageburger forty-five minutes ago. Close enough for government work, Kemo sabe, especially after engaging in an energetic game of Trash-Bag Treasure Hunt.
I pulled on my suit and walked down the railroad-tie steps which lead from Sara to the water. My flip-flops snapped and flapped. A few late mosquitoes hummed. The lake gleamed in front of me, still and inviting under that low humid sky. Running north and south along its edge, bordering the entire east side of the lake, was a right-of-way path (it’s called ‘common property’ in the deeds) which folks on the TR simply call The Street. If one were to turn left onto The Street at the foot of my steps, one could walk all the way down to the Dark Score Marina, passing Warrington’s and Buddy Jellison’s scuzzy little eatery on the way . . . not to mention four dozen summer cottages, discreetly tucked into sloping groves of spruce and pine. Turn right and you could walk to Halo Bay, although it would take you a day to do it with The Street overgrown the way it is now.