Nightmares and Dreamscapes Page 18

  Joe was buried next to his wife and child on the last day of November. It was a hard, brilliant day and the only person from Castle Rock to attend the service was Alvin Coy, who drove the Hay & Peabody funeral hack. Alvin reported that one of the spectators was a young, shapely woman in a raccoon coat and a black cloche hat. Sitting in Brownie's and eating a pickle straight out of the barrel, Alvin would smile mordantly and tell his cronies that she was a jazz baby if he had ever seen one. She bore not one whit of resemblance to Cora Leonard Newall's side of the family, and she hadn't closed her eyes during the prayer.

  *

  Gary Paulson enters the store with exquisite slowness, closing the door carefully behind him.

  "Afternoon," Harley McKissick says neutrally.

  "Heard you won a turkey down to the Grange last night," says Old Clut as he prepares to light his pipe.

  "Yuh," Gary says. He's eighty-four and, like the others, can remember when the Bend was a damned sight livelier than it is now. He lost two sons in two wars--the two before that mess in Viet Nam--and that was a hard thing. His third, a good boy, died in a collision with a pulpwood truck up around Presque Isle--back in 1973, that was. Somehow that one was easier to take, God knows why. Gary sometimes drools from the corners of his lips these days, and makes frequent smacking sounds as he tries to suck the drool back into his mouth before it can get away and start running down his chin. He doesn't know a whole hell of a lot lately, but he knows getting old is a lousy way to spend the last years of your life.

  "Coffee?" Harley asks.

  "Guess not."

  Lenny Partridge, who will probably never recover from the broken ribs he suffered in a strange road-accident two autumns ago, pulls his feet back so the older man can pass by him and lower himself carefully into the chair in the corner (Gary caned the seat of this chair himself, back in '82). Paulson smacks his lips, sucks back spit, and folds his lumpy hands over the head of his cane. He looks tired and haggard.

  "It is going to rain a pretty bitch," he says finally. "I'm aching that bad."

  "It's a bad fall," Paul Corliss says.

  There is silence. The heat from the stove fills the store that will go out of business when Harley dies or maybe even before he dies if his youngest daughter has her way, it fills the store and coats the bones of the old men, tries to, anyway, and sniffs up against the dirty glass with its ancient posters looking out at the yard where there were gas-pumps until Mobil took them out in 1977. They are old men who have, for the most part, seen their children go away to more profitable places. The store does no business to speak of now, except for a few locals and the occasional through-going summer tourists who think old men like these, old men who sit by the stove in their thermal undershirts even in July, are quaint. Old Clut has always claimed that new people are going to come to this part of the Rock, but the last couple of years things have been worse than ever--it seems the whole goddam town is dying.

  "Who is building the new wing on that Christly Newall house?" Gary asks finally.

  They look around at him. For a moment the kitchen match Old Clut has just scratched hangs mystically over his pipe, burning down the wood, turning it black. The sulfur node at the end turns gray and curls up. At last, Old Clut dips the match into the bowl and puffs.

  "New wing?" Harley asks.

  "Yuh."

  A blue membrane of smoke from Old Clut's pipe drifts up over the stove and spreads there like a delicate fisherman's net. Lenny Partridge tilts his chin up to stretch the wattles of his neck taut and then runs his hand slowly down his throat, producing a dry rasp.

  "No one that I know of," Harley says, somehow indicating by his tone of voice that this includes anyone of any consequence, at least in this part of the world.

  "They ain't had a buyer on that place since nineteen n eighty-one," Old Clut says. When Old Clut says they, he means both Southern Maine Weaving and The Bank of Southern Maine, but he means more: he means The Massachusetts Wops. Southern Maine Weaving came into ownership of Joe's three mills--and Joe's house on the ridge--about a year after Joe took his own life, but as far as the men gathered around the stove in Brownie's are concerned, that name's just a smokescreen. . . or what they sometimes call The Legal, as in She swore out a pertection order on him n now he can't even see his own kids because of The Legal. These men hate The Legal as it impinges upon their lives and the lives of their friends, but it fascinates them endlessly when they consider how some people put it to work in order to further their own nefarious money-making schemes.

  Southern Maine Weaving, aka The Bank of Southern Maine, aka The Massachusetts Wops, enjoyed a long and profitable run with the mills Joe Newall saved from extinction, but it's the way they have been unable to get rid of the house that fascinates the old men who spend their days in Brownie's. "It's like a booger you can't flick off the end of your finger," Lenny Partridge said once, and they all nodded. "Not even those spaghetti-suckers from Maiden n Revere can get rid of that millstone."

  Old Clut and his grandson, Andy, are currently estranged, and it is the ownership of Joe Newall's ugly house which has caused it . . . although there are other, more personal issues swirling around just below the surface, no doubt--there almost always are. The subject came up one night after grandfather and grandson--both widowers now--had enjoyed a pretty decent dinner at Young Clut's house in town.

  Young Andy, who had not yet lost his job on the town's police-force, tried (rather self-indulgently) to explain to his grandfather that Southern Maine Weaving had had nothing to do with any of the erstwhile Newall holdings for years, that the actual owner of the house in the Bend was The Bank of Southern Maine, and that the two companies had nothing whatever to do with each other. Old John told Andy he was a fool if he believed that; everyone knew, he said, that both the bank and the textile company were fronts for The Massachusetts Wops, and that the only difference between them was a couple of words. They just hid the more obvious connections with great bunches of paperwork, Old Clut explained--The Legal, in other words.

  Young Clut had the bad taste to laugh at that. Old Clut turned red, threw his napkin onto his plate, and got to his feet. Laugh, he said. You just go on. Why not? The only thing a drunk does better'n laugh at what he don't understand is cry over he don't know what. That made Andy mad, and he said something about Melissa being the reason why he drank, and John asked his grandson how long he was going to blame a dead wife for his boozing. Andy turned white when the old man said that, and told him to get out of his house, and John did, and he hasn't been back since. Nor does he want to. Harsh words aside, he can't bear to see Andy going to hell on a handcart like he is.

  Speculation or not, this much cannot be denied: the house on the ridge has been empty for eleven years now, no one has ever lived there for long, and The Bank of Southern Maine is usually the organization that ends up trying to sell it through one of the local real estate firms.

  "The last people to buy it come from uppa state New York, didn't they?" Paul Corliss asks, and he speaks so rarely they all turn toward him. Even Gary does.

  "Yessir," Lenny says. "They was a nice couple. The man was gonna paint the barn red and turn it into some sort of antique store, wasn't he?"

  "Ayuh," Old Clut says. "Then their boy got the gun they kep--"

  "People are so goddam careless--" Harley puts in.

  "Did he die?" Lenny asks. "The boy?"

  Silence greets the question. It seems no one knows. Then, at last--almost reluctantly--Gary speaks up. "No," he said. "But it blinded him. They moved up to Auburn. Or maybe it was Leeds."

  "They was likely people," Lenny said. "I really thought they might make a go of it. But they was set on that house. Believed everybody was pullin their leg about how it was bad luck, on account of they was from Away." He pauses meditatively. "Maybe they think better now . . . wherever they are."

  There's silence as the old men think of the people from uppa state New York, or maybe of their own failing organs and sensory equipment.
In the dimness behind the stove, oil gurgles. Somewhere beyond it, a shutter claps heavily back and forth in the restless autumn air.

  "There's a new wing going up on it, all right," Gary says. He speaks quietly but emphatically, as if one of the others has contradicted this statement. "I saw it comin down the River Road. Most of the framing's already done. Damn thing looks like it wants to be a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. Never noticed it before. Nice maple, looks like. Where does anybody get nice maple like that in this day n age?"

  No one answers. No one knows.

  At last, very tentatively, Paul Corliss says, "Sure you're not thinking of another house, Gary? Could be you--"

  "Could be shit," Gary says, just as quietly but even more forcefully. "It's the Newall place, a new wing on the Newall place, already framed up, and if you still got doubts, just step outside and have a look for yourself."

  With that said, there is nothing left to say--they believe him. Neither Paul nor anyone else rushes outside to crane up at the new wing being added to the Newall house, however. They consider it a matter of some importance, and thus nothing to hurry over. More time passes--Harley McKissick has reflected more than once that if time was pulpwood, they'd all be rich. Paul goes to the old water-cooled soft-drink chest and gets an Orange Crush. He gives Harley sixty cents and Harley rings up the purchase. When he slams the cash-drawer shut again, he realizes the atmosphere in the store has changed somehow. There are other matters to discuss.

  Lenny Partridge coughs, winces, presses his hands lightly against his chest where the broken ribs have never really healed, and asks Gary when they are going to have services for Dana Roy.

  "Tomorrow," Gary says, "down Gorham. That's where his wife is laid to rest."

  Lucy Roy died in 1968; Dana, who was until 1979 an electrician for U.S. Gypsum over in Gates Falls (these men routinely and with no prejudice refer to the company as U.S. Gyp Em), died of intestinal cancer two days before. He lived in Castle Rock all his life, and liked to tell people that he'd only been out of Maine three times in his eighty years, once to visit an aunt in Connecticut, once to see the Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park ("And they lost, those bums," he always added at this point), and once to attend an electricians' convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. "Damn waste of time," he always said of the convention. "Nothin but drinkin and wimmin, and none of the wimmin even worth lookin at, let alone that other thing." He was a crony of these men, and in his passing they feel a queer mixture of sorrow and triumph.

  "They took out four feet of his underpinnin," Gary tells the other men. "Didn't do no good. It was all through him."

  "He knew Joe Newall," Lenny says suddenly. "He was up there with his dad when his dad was puttin in Joe's lectricity--couldn't have been more'n six or eight, I'd judge. I remember he said Joe give him a sucker one time, but he pitched it out'n his daddy's truck on the ride home. Said it tasted sour and funny. Then, later, after they got all the mills runnin again--the late thirties, that would've been--he was in charge of the rewirin. You member that, Harley?"

  "Yup."

  Now that the subject has come back to Joe Newall by way of Dana Roy, the men sit quietly, conning their brains for anecdotes concerning either man. But when Old Clut finally speaks, he says a startling thing.

  "It was Dana Roy's big brother, Will, who throwed that skunk at the side of the house that time. I'm almost sure 'twas."

  "Will?" Lenny raises his eyebrows. "Will Roy was too steady to do a thing like that, I would have said."

  Gary Paulson says, very quietly: "Ayuh, it was Will."

  They turn to look at him.

  "And 'twas the wife that give Dana a sucker that day he came with his dad," Gary says. "Cora, not Joe. And Dana wa'ant no six or eight; the skunk was throwed around the time of the Crash, and Cora was dead by then. No, Dana maybe remembered some of it, but he couldn't have been no more than two. It was around 1916 that he got that sucker, because it was in '16 that Eddie Roy wired the house. He was never up there again. Frank--the middle boy, he's been dead ten or twelve year now--he would have been six or eight then, maybe. Frank seen what Cora done to the little one, that much I know, but not when he told Will. It don't matter. Finally Will decided to do somethin about it. By then the woman was dead, so he took it out on the house Joe built for her."

  "Never mind that part," Harley says, fascinated. "What'd she do to Dana? That's what I want to know."

  Gary speaks calmly, almost judiciously. "What Frank told me one night when he'd had a few was that the woman give him the sucker with one hand and reached into his didies with the other. Right in front of the older boy."

  "She never!" Old Clut says, shocked in spite of himself.

  Gary only looks at him with his yellowed, fading eyes and says nothing.

  Silence again, except for the wind and the clapping shutter. The children on the bandstand have taken their firetruck and gone somewhere else with it and still the depthless afternoon continues on and on, the light that of an Andrew Wyeth painting, white and still and full of idiot meaning. The ground has given up its meager yield and waits uselessly for snow.

  Gary would like to tell them of the sickroom at Cumberland Memorial Hospital where Dana Roy lay dying with black snot caked around his nostrils and smelling like a fish left out in the sun. He would like to tell them of the cool blue tiles and of nurses with their hair drawn back in nets, young things for the most part with pretty legs and firm young breasts and no idea that 1923 was a real year, as real as the pains which haunt the bones of old men. He feels he would like to sermonize on the evil of time and perhaps even the evil of certain places, and explain why Castle Rock is now like a dark tooth which is finally ready to fall out. Most of all he would like to inform them that Dana Roy sounded as if someone had stuffed his chest full of hay and he was trying to breathe through it, and that he looked as if he had already started to rot. Yet he can say none of these things because he doesn't know how, and so he only sucks back spit and says nothing.

  "No one liked old Joe much," Old Clut says . . . and then his face brightens suddenly. "But by God, he grew on you!"

  The others do not reply.

  *

  Nineteen days later, a week before the first snow comes to cover the useless earth, Gary Paulson has a surprisingly sexual dream. . . except it is mostly a memory.

  On August 14, 1923, while driving by the Newall house in his father's farm truck, thirteen-year-old Gary Martin Paulson happened to observe Cora Leonard Newall turning away from her mailbox at the end of the driveway. She had the newspaper in one hand. She saw Gary and reached down with her free hand to grasp the hem of her housedress. She did not smile. That tremendous moon of a face was pallid and empty as she raised the dress, revealing her sex to him--it was the first time he had ever seen that mystery so avidly discussed by the boys he knew. And, still not smiling but only looking at him gravely, she pistoned her hips at his gaping, amazed face as he passed her by. And as he passed, his hand dropped into his lap and moments later he ejaculated into his flannel pants.

  It was his first orgasm. In the years since, he has made love to a good many women, beginning with Sally Ouelette underneath the Tin Bridge back in '26, and every time he has neared the moment of orgasm--every single one--he has seen Cora Leonard Newall: has seen her standing beside her mailbox under a hot gunmetal sky, has seen her lifting her dress to reveal an almost non-existent thatch of gingery hair beneath the creamy ground-swell of her belly, has seen the exclamatory slit with its red lips tinting toward what he knows would be the most deliciously delicate coral

  (Cora)

  pink. Yet it is not the sight of her vulva below that somehow promiscuous swell of gut that has haunted him through all the years, so that every woman became Cora at the moment of release; or it is not just that. What always drove him mad with lust when he remembered (and when he made love he was helpless not to) was the way she had pumped her hips at him. . . once, twice, three times. That, and the lack of expressio
n on her face, a neutrality so deep it seemed more like idiocy, as if she were the sum of every very young man's limited sexual understanding and desire--a tight and yearning darkness, no more than that, a limited Eden glowing Cora-pink.

  His sex-life has been both delineated and delimited by that experience--a seminal experience if ever there was one--but he has never mentioned it, although he has been tempted more than once when in his cups. He has hoarded it. And it is of this incident that he is dreaming, penis perfectly erect for the first time in almost nine years, when a small blood vessel in his cerebellum ruptures, forming a clot which kills him quietly, considerately sparing him four weeks or four months of paralysis, the flexible tubes in the arms, the catheter, the noiseless nurses with their hair in nets and their fine high breasts. He dies in his sleep, penis wilting, the dream fading like the afterimage of a television picture tube switched off in a dark room. His cronies would be puzzled, however, if any of them were there to hear the last two words he speaks--gasped out but still clear enough:

  "The moon!"

  The day after he is laid to rest in Homeland, a new cupola starts to go up on the new wing on the Newall house.

  Chattery Teeth

  Looking into the display case was like looking through a dirty pane of glass into the middle third of his boyhood, those years from seven to fourteen when he had been fascinated by stuff like this. Hogan leaned closer, forgetting the rising whine of the wind outside and the gritty spick-spack sound of sand hitting the windows. The case was full of fabulous junk, most of it undoubtedly made in Taiwan and Korea, but there was no doubt at all about the pick of the litter. They were the largest Chattery Teeth he'd ever seen. They were also the only ones he'd ever seen with feet--big orange cartoon shoes with white spats. A real scream.