about something.
I still hadnt told anybody I had been fired, and I certainly didnt want to share the news with a stranger. So I said I couldnt help being unhappy about the ice caps and the deserts and the busted economy and the race riots and so on.
He told me to cheer up, that 1,000,000,000 Chinese were about to throw off the yoke of Communism. After they did that, he said, they would all want automobiles and tires and gasoline and so forth.
I pointed out that virtually all American industries having to do with automobiles either were owned or had been run out of business by the Japanese.
And what is to prevent you from doing what Ive done?¨ he said. Its a free country.¨ He said that his entire portfolio consisted of stocks in Japanese corporations.
Can you imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese in au
tomobiles would do to each other and whats left of the atmosphere?
I was so intent on getting away from that typical Ruling Class chowderhead that I did not see Pamela until I was right next to her. She was sitting on the ground drinking blackberry brandy, with her back to the Shultzes tombstone. She was gazing up at Musket Mountain. She had a serious alcohol problem. I didnt blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.
The inscription on the grave marker was facing me.
The diphtheria epidemic that killed so many people in this valley took place when almost all of Tarkingtons students were away on vacation.
That was certainly lucky for the students. If school had been in session during the epidemic, many, many of them might have wound up with the Shultzes, first where the Pavilion now stands, and then next to the
HERMANN SHULTZ
1830X1893
SOPHIA
HIMMLER SHULTZ
1841X1893
FREETHINKERS
stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
And then the student body got lucky again 2 years ago. They were all away on a recess between semesters when habitual criminals overran this insignificant little country town.
Miracles.
I have looked up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Wills, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.
Hermann and Sophia Shultz werent the only victims of the diphtheria epidemic. Far from it! But they were the only ones who asked to be buried on the campus, which they said on their deathbeds was holy ground to them.
Pamela wasnt surprised to see me. She was insulated against surprises by alcohol. The first thing she said to me was, No.¨ I hadnt said anything yet. She thought I had come to make love to her. I could understand why she might think that.
I myself had started thinking that.
And then she said, This has certainly been the best year of my life, and I want to thank you for being such
a big part of it.¨ This was irony. She was being corrosively insincere.
When are you leaving?¨ I said.
Never,¨ she said. My transmission is shot.¨ She was talking about her 12-year-old Buick 4-door sedan, which she had gotten as part of her divorce settlement from her ex-husband. He used to mock her efforts to become a serious artist, even slapping or kicking her from time to time. So he must have laughed even harder than everybody else when her 1-woman show was blown off its pedestals in Buffalo.
She said a new transmission was going to cost $850 down in town, and that the mechanic wanted to be paid in Yen, and that he hinted that the repairs would cost a lot less if she would go to bed with him. I dont suppose you ever found out where your motherin-law hid the money,¨ she said.
No,¨ I said.
Maybe I should go looking for it,¨ she said.
Im sure somebody else found it, and just isnt saying anything,¨ I said.
I never asked you to pay for anything before,¨ she said. How about you buy me a new transmission? Then, when anybody asks me, ĽWhere did you get that beautiful transmission? I can answer, ĽAn old lover gave that to me. He is a very famous war hero, but I am not free to reveal his name.¨
Who is the mechanic?¨ I asked.
The Prince of Wales,¨ she said. If I go to bed with him, he will not only fix my transmission, he will make me the Queen of England. You never made me Queen of England.¨
Was it Whitey VanArsdale?¨ I said. This was a mechanic down in town who used to tell everybody that he
or she had a broken transmission. He did it to me with the car I had before the Mercedes, which was a 1979 Chevy station wagon. I got a second opinion, from a student, actually. The transmission was fine. All Id wanted in the first place was a grease job. Whitey VanArsdale, too, is now buried next to the stable. He ambushed some convicts and got ambushed right back. His victory lasted 10 minutes, if that. It was, Bang,¨ and then, a few minutes later, Bang, bang,¨ right back.
Pamela, sitting on the ground with her back to the tombstone, didnt do to me what Zuzu Johnson would soon do to me, which was to identify me as a major cause of her unhappiness. The closest Pam came to doing that, I guess, was when she said I had never made her the Queen of England. Zuzus complaint would be that I had never seriously intended to make her my wife, despite all our talk in bed about our running off to Venice, which neither one of us had ever seen. She would open a flower shop there, I promised her, since she was so good at gardening. I would teach English as a second language or help local glassblowers get their wares into American department stores, and so on.
Zuzu was also a pretty good photographer, so I said she would soon be hanging around where the gondolas took on passengers, and selling tourists Polaroid pictures of themselves in gondolas right then and there.
When it came to dreaming up a future for ourselves, we left GRIOTTM in the dust.
I considered those dreams of Venice part of lovemaking, my erotic analogue to Zuzus perfume. But Zuzu took them seriously. She was all set to go. And I couldnt go because of my family responsibilities.
Pamela knew about my love affair with Zuzu, and all the hocus pocus about Venice. Zuzu told her.
You know what you ought to say to any woman dumb enough to fall in love with you?¨ she asked me. Her gaze was on Musket Mountain, not on me.
No,¨ I said.
And she said, ĽWelcome to Vietnam.¨
She was sitting over the Shultzes in their caskets. I was standing over a severed head which would be dug up by a backhoe in 8 years. The head had been in the ground so long that it was just a skull.
A specialist in Forensic Medicine from the State Police happened to be down here when the skull showed up in the backhoes scoop, so he had a look at it, told us what he thought. He didnt think it was an Indian, which was my first guess. He said it had belonged to a white woman maybe 20 years old. She hadnt been bludgeoned or shot in the head, so he would have to see the rest of the skeleton before theorizing about what might have killed her.
But the backhoe never brought up another bone.
Decapitation, alone, of course, could have done the job.
He wasnt much interested. He judged from the patina on the skull that its owner had died long before we were born. He was here to examine the bodies of people who had been killed after the prison break, and to make educated guesses about how they had died, by gunshot or whatever.
He was especially fascinated by Tex Johnsons body. He had seen almost everything in his line of work, he
told me, but never a man who had been crucified, with spikes through the palms and feet and all.
I wanted him to talk more about the skull, but he changed the subject right back to crucifixion. He sure knew a lot about it.
He told me one thing Id never realized: that the Jews, not just the Romans, also crucified their idea of criminals from time to time. Live and learn!
How come Id never heard that?
Darius, King of Persia, he told me, crucified 3,000 people he thought were enemies in Babylon. After the Romans put down the slave revolt led by Spartacus, he said, they crucified 6,000 of the rebels on either side of the Appian Way!