‘ . . . Keith Moon of The Who . . . Brian Jones of the Stones . . . that cute li’l Florence Bollard of the Supremes . . . Mary Wells . . . ‘
Articulating her worst fear, Mary asked: ‘How old were you when you came?’
‘Cass Elliot . . . Janis Joplin . . . ‘
‘Twenty-three.’
‘ King Curtis . . . Johnny Bumette . . . ‘
‘And how old are you now?’
‘Slim Harpo . . . Bob ‘Bear’ Hite . . . Stevie Ray Vaughan . . . ‘
‘Twenty-three,’ Sissy told her, and on stage Alan Freed went on screaming names at the almost empty town common as the stars came out, first a hundred stars, then a thousand, then too many to count, stars that had come out of the blue and now glittered everywhere in the black; he tolled the names of the drug OD’s, the alcohol OD’s, the plane crash victims and the shooting victims, the ones who had been found in alleys and the ones who had been found in swimming pools and the ones who had been found in roadside ditches with steering columns poking out of their chests and most of their heads torn off their shoulders; he chanted the names of the young ones and the old ones, but mostly they were the young ones, and as he spoke the names of Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, she heard the words of one of their songs tolling in her mind, the one that went Oooh, that smell, can’t you smell that smell, and yes, you bet, she certainly could smell that smell; even out here, in the clear Oregon air, she could smell it, and when she took Clark’s hand it was like taking the hand of a corpse.
‘Awwwwwwlllll RIIIIIYYYYYGHT!’ Alan Freed was screaming. Behind him, in the darkness, scores of shadows were trooping onto the stage, lit upon their way by roadies with Penlites. ‘Are you ready to PAAAARTY?’
No answer from the scattered spectators on the common, but Freed was waving his hands and laughing as if some vast audience were going crazy with assent. There was just enough light left in the sky for Mary to see the old man reach up and turn off his hearing aid.
‘Are you ready to BOOOOOGIE?’
This time he was answered — by a demonic shriek of saxophones from the shadows behind him.
‘Then let’s go . . . BECAUSE ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE!’
As the show-lights came up and the band swung into the first song of that night’s long, long concert — ‘I’ll Be Doggone,’ with Marvin Gaye doing the vocal — Mary thought: That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.
Home Delivery
Considering that it was probably the end of the world, Maddie Pace thought she was doing a good job. Hell of a good job. She thought, in fact, that she just might be coping with the End of Everything better than anyone else on earth. And she was positive she was coping better than any other pregnant woman on earth.
Coping.
Maddie Pace, of all people.
Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn’t sleep if, after a visit from Reverend Johnson, she spied a single speck of dust under the dining-room table. Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sullivan, used to drive her fiance, Jack, crazy when she froze over a menu, debating entrees sometimes for as long as half an hour.
‘Maddie, why don’t you just flip a coin?’ he’d asked her once after she had managed to narrow it down to a choice between the braised veal and the lamb chops, and then could get no further.
‘I’ve had five bottles of this goddam German beer already, and if you don’t make up y’mind pretty damn quick, there’s gonna be a drunk lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food on it!’
So she had smiled nervously, ordered the braised veal, and spent most of the ride home wondering if the chops might not have been tastier, and therefore a better bargain despite their slightly higher price.
She’d had no trouble coping with Jack’s proposal of marriage, however; she’d accepted it —
and him — quickly, and with tremendous relief. Following the death of her father, Maddie and her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort of life on Little Tall Island, off the coast of Maine.
‘If I wasn’t around to tell them women where to squat and lean against the wheel,’ George Sullivan had been fond of saying while in his cups and among his friends at Fudgy’s Tavern or in the back room of Prout’s Barber Shop, ‘I don’t know what’n hell they’d do.’
When her father died of a massive coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother minded the house — or did, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good hard shot to the ear) that she had a house which needed minding.
When the news of his death came, the two women had looked at each other with silent, panicky dismay, two pairs of eyes asking the same question: What do we do now?
Neither of them knew, but they both felt — felt strongly — that he had been right ir, his assessment of them: they needed him. They were just women, and they needed him to tell them not just what to do, but how to do it, as well. They didn’t speak of it because it embarrassed them, but there it was — they hadn’t the slightest clue as to what came next, and the idea that they were prisoners of George Sullivan’s narrow ideas and expectations did not so much as cross their minds. They were not stupid women, either of them, but they were island women.
Money wasn’t the problem; George had believed passionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke’s Big Ten
in Machias, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dollars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your place and kept your garden tended and knew how to put by your own vegetables come fall. The problem was having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling shirt just over the foul line of lane nineteen (and goddam if he hadn’t picked up the spare his team had needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.
It’s like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie thought sometimes. Only instead of looking for the road, or a house, or the village, or just some landmark like that lightning-struck pine out on the point, I am looking for the wheel. If I can ever find it, maybe I can tell myself to squat and lean my shoulder to it.
At last she found her wheel: it turned out to be Jack Pace.
Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true all of the time, it was close enough for government work in Maddie’s case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration — ‘Don’t fool with George Sullivan, dear,’ they’d say. ‘He’ll knock the nose off your face if you so much as look at him wrong.’
It was true at home, too. He’d been domineering and sometimes physically abusive, but he’d also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pick-up, the chainsaw, or those two acres that bounded their place to the south. Pop Cook’s land. George Sullivan had been known to refer to Pop Cook as one armpit-stinky old bastid, but the old man’s aroma didn’t change the fact that there was quite a lot of good hardwood left on those two acres. Pop didn’t know it because he had gone to living across the reach in 1987, when his arthritis really went to town on him, and George let it be known on Little Tall that what that bastid Pop Cook didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him none, and furthermore, he would disjoint the man or woman that let light into the darkness of Pop’s ignorance. No one did, and eventually the Sullivans got the land, and the hardwood on it. Of course the good wood was all logged off inside of three years, but George said that didn’t matter a tinker’s damn; land always paid for itself in the end. That was what George said and they believed him, believed in him, and they worked, all three of them. He said: You got to put your shoulder to this wheel and push the bitch, you got to push ha’ad because she don’t move easy. So that was what they did.