‘When did you have this conversation, Bill? Do you remember?’
‘Coss I do,’ he said. ‘Same day she come down to take delivery of those plastic owls. Only I raised the subject, because folks had told me she was asking around.’
‘Prying?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ he said stiffly, ‘you did.’
True, but I thought prying was what he meant. ‘Go on.’
‘Nothing to go on about. I told her there were sore toes here and there on the TR, same as there are anyplace, and ast her not to tread on any corns if she could help it. She said she understood.
Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. All I know is she kep’ on asking questions. Listenin to stories from old fools with more time than sense.’
‘When was this?’
‘Fall of ’93, winter and spring of ’94. Went all around town, she did even over to Motton and Harlow — with her notebook and little tape-recorder. Anyway, that’s all I know.’
I realized a stunning thing: Bill was lying. If you’d asked me before that day, I’d have laughed and told you Bill Dean didn’t have a lie in him. And he must not have had many, because he did it badly.
I thought of calling him on it, but to what end? I needed to think, and I couldn’t do it here — my mind was roaring. Given time, that roar might subside and I’d see it was really nothing, no big deal, but I needed that time. When you start finding out unexpected things about a loved one who’s been dead awhile, it rocks you. Take it from me, it does.
Bill’s eyes had shifted away from mine, but now they shifted back. He looked both earnest and
— I could have sworn it — a little scared.
‘She ast about little Kerry Auster, and that’s a good example of what I mean about steppin on sore toes. That’s not the stuff for a newspaper story or a magazine article. Normal just snapped. No one knows why. It was a terrible tragedy, senseless, and there’s still people who could be hurt by it. In little towns things are kind of connected under the surface — ‘
Yes, like cables you couldn’t quite see.
‘ — and the past dies slower. Sara and those others, that’s a little different. They were just . . . just wanderers . . . from away. Jo could have stuck to those folks and it would’ve been all right. And say
— for all I know, she did. Because I never saw a single word she ever wrote. If she did write.’
About that he was telling the truth, I felt. But I knew something else, knew it as surely as I’d known Mattie had been wearing white shorts when she called me on her day off. Sara and those others were just wanderers from away, Bill had said, but he hesitated in the middle of his thought,
substituting wanderers for the word which had come naturally to mind. Niggers was the word he hadn’t said. Sara and those others were just niggers from away.
All at once I found myself thinking of an old story by Ray Bradbury, ‘Mars Is Heaven.’ The first space travellers to Mars discover it’s Green Town, Illinois, and all their well-loved friends and relatives are there. Only the friends and relatives are really alien monsters, and in the night, while the space travellers think they are sleeping in the beds of their long-dead kinfolk in a place that must be heaven, they are slaughtered to the last man.
‘Bill, you’re sure she was up here a few times in the off-season?’
‘Ayuh. ‘T’wasn’t just a few times, either. Might have been a dozen times or more. Day-trips, don’t you know.’
‘Did you ever see a fellow with her? Burly guy, black hair?’
He thought about it. I tried not to hold my breath. At last he shook his head. ‘Few times I saw her, she was alone. But I didn’t see her every time she came. Sometimes I only heard she’d been on the TR after she ‘us gone again. Saw her in June of ’94, headed up toward Halo Bay in that little car a hers. She waved, I waved back. Went down to the house later that evenin to see if she needed anythin, but she’d gone. I didn’t see her again. When she died later on that summer, me and ‘Vette were so shocked.’
Whatever she was looking for, she must never have written any of it down. I would have found the manuscript.
Was that true, though? She had made many trips down here with no apparent attempts at concealment, on one of them she had even been accompanied by a strange man, and I had only found out about these visits by accident.
‘This is hard to talk about,’ Bill said, ‘but since we’ve gotten started hard, we might as well go the rest of the way. Livin on the TR is like the way we used to sleep four or even five in a bed when it was January and true cold. If everyone rests easy, you do all right. But if one person gets restless, gets tossing and turning, no one can sleep. Right now you’re the restless one. That’s how people see it.’
He waited to see what I’d say. When almost twenty seconds passed without a word from me (Harold Oblowski would have been proud), he shuffled his feet and went on.
‘There are people in town uneasy about the interest you’ve taken in Mattie Devore, for instance.
Now I’m not sayin there’s anythin going on between the two of you — although there’s folks who do say it — but if you want to stay on the TR you’re makin it tough on yourself.’
‘Why?’
‘Comes back to what I said a week and a half ago. She’s trouble.’
‘As I recall, Bill, you said she was in trouble. And she is. I’m trying to help her out of it. There’s nothing going on between us but that.’
‘ I seem to recall telling you that Max Devore is nuts,’ he said. ‘If you make him mad, we all pay the price.’ The pump clicked off and he racked it up. Then he sighed, raised his hands, dropped them. ‘You think this is easy for me to say?’
‘You think it’s easy for me to listen to?’
‘All right, ayuh, we’re in the same skiff. But Mattie Devore isn’t the only person on the TR livin hand-to-mouth, you know. There’s others got their woes, as well. Can’t you understand that?’
Maybe he saw that I understood too much and too well, because his shoulders slumped.
‘If you’re asking me to stand aside and let Devore take Mattie’s baby without a fight, you can forget it,’ I said. ‘And I hope that’s not it. Because I think I’d have to be quits with a man who’d ask another man to do something like that.’
‘I wouldn’t ask it now anywise,’ he said, his accent thickening almost to the point of contempt.
‘It’d be too late, wouldn’t it?’ And then, unexpectedly, he softened. ‘Christ, man, I’m worried about you. Let the rest of it go hang, all right? Hang high where the crows can pick it.’ He was lying again, but this time I didn’t mind so much, because I thought he was lying to himself. ‘But you need to have a care. When I said Devore was crazy, that was no figure of speech. Do you think he’ll bother with court if court can’t get him what he wants? Folks died in those summer fires back in 1933. Good people. One related to me. They burned over half the goddam county and Max Devore set em. That was his going-away present to the TR. It could never be proved, but he did it. Back then he was young and broke, not yet twenty and no law in his pocket. What do you think he’d do now?’
He looked at me searchingly. I said nothing.
Bill nodded as if I had spoken. ‘Think about it. And you remember this, Mike: no man who didn’t care for you would ever talk to you straight as I have.’
‘How straight was that, Bill?’ I was faintly aware of some tourist walking from his Volvo to the store and looking at us curiously, and when I replayed the scene in my mind later on, I realized we must have looked like guys on the verge of a fistfight. I remember that I felt like crying out of sadness and bewilderment and an incompletely defined sense of betrayal, but I also remember being furious with this lanky old man — him in his shining-clean cotton undershirt and his mouthful of false teeth. So maybe we were close to fighting, and I just didn’t know it at the time.
‘Straight as I could be,’ he said, and turned away to go inside and pay for his gas.