Salem's Lot Page 4

  Much of the northeast quadrant was open land--hay, timothy, and alfalfa. The Royal River ran here, an old river that had cut its banks almost to the base level. It flowed under the small wooden Brock Street Bridge and wandered north in flat, shining arcs until it entered the land near the northern limits of the town, where solid granite lay close under the thin soil. Here it had cut fifty-foot stone cliffs over the course of a million years. The kids called it Drunk's Leap, because a few years back Tommy Rathbun, Virge Rathbun's tosspot brother, staggered over the edge while looking for a place to take a leak. The Royal fed the mill-polluted Androscoggin but had never been polluted itself; the only industry the Lot had ever boasted was a sawmill, long since closed. In the summer months, fishermen casting from the Brock Street Bridge were a common sight. A day when you couldn't take your limit out of the Royal was a rare day.

  The southeast quadrant was the prettiest. The land rose again, but there was no ugly blight of fire or any of the topsoil ruin that is a fire's legacy. The land on both sides of the Griffen Road was owned by Charles Griffen, who was the biggest dairy farmer south of Mechanic Falls, and from Schoolyard Hill you could see Griffen's huge barn with its aluminum roof glittering in the sun like a monstrous heliograph. There were other farms in the area, and a good many houses that had been bought by the white-collar workers who commuted to either Portland or Lewiston. Sometimes, in autumn, you could stand on top of Schoolyard Hill and smell the fragrant odor of the field burnings and see the toylike 'salem's Lot Volunteer Fire Department truck, waiting to step in if anything got out of hand. The lesson of 1951 had remained with these people.

  It was in the southwest area that the trailers had begun to move in, and everything that goes with them, like an exurban asteroid belt: junked-out cars up on blocks, tire swings hanging on frayed rope, glittering beer cans lying beside the roads, ragged wash hung on lines between makeshift poles, the ripe smell of sewage from hastily laid septic tanks. The houses in the Bend were kissing cousins to woodsheds, but a gleaming TV aerial sprouted from nearly every one, and most of the TVs inside were color, bought on credit from Grant's or Sears. The yards of the shacks and trailers were usually full of kids, toys, pickup trucks, snowmobiles, and motorbikes. In some cases the trailers were well kept, but in most cases it seemed to be too much trouble. Dandelions and witch grass grew ankle-deep. Out near the town line, where Brock Street became Brock Road, there was Dell's, where a rock 'n' roll band played on Fridays and a c/w combo played on Saturdays. It had burned down once in 1971 and was rebuilt. For most of the down home cowboys and their girlfriends, it was the place to go and have a beer or a fight.

  Most of the telephone lines were two-, four-, or six-party connections, and so folks always had someone to talk about. In all small towns, scandal is always simmering on the back burner, like your Aunt Cindy's baked beans. The Bend produced most of the scandal, but every now and then someone with a little more status added something to the communal pot.

  Town government was by town meeting, and while there had been talk ever since 1965 of changing to the town council form with biannual public budget hearings, the idea gained no way. The town was not growing fast enough to make the old way actively painful, although its stodgy, one-for-one democracy made some of the newcomers roll their eyes in exasperation. There were three selectmen, the town constable, an overseer of the poor, a town clerk (to register your car you had to go far out on the Taggart Stream Road and brave two mean dogs who ran loose in the yard), and the school commissioner. The volunteer Fire Department got a token appropriation of three hundred dollars each year, but it was mostly a social club for old fellows on pensions. They saw a fair amount of excitement during grass fire season and sat around the Reliable tall-taling each other the rest of the year. There was no Public Works Department because there were no public water lines, gas mains, sewage, or light-and-power. The CMP electricity pylons marched across town on a diagonal from northwest to southeast, cutting a huge gash through the timberland 150 feet wide. One of these stood close to the Marsten House, looming over it like an alien sentinel.

  What 'salem's Lot knew of wars and burnings and crises in government it got mostly from Walter Cronkite on TV. Oh, the Potter boy got killed in Vietnam and Claude Bowie's son came back with a mechanical foot--stepped on a land mine--but he got a job with the post office helping Kenny Danles and so that was all right. The kids were wearing their hair longer and not combing it neatly like their fathers, but nobody really noticed anymore. When they threw the dress code out at the Consolidated High School, Aggie Corliss wrote a letter to the Cumberland Ledger, but Aggie had been writing to the Ledger every week for years, mostly about the evils of liquor and the wonder of accepting Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior.

  Some of the kids took dope. Horace Kilby's boy Frank went up before Judge Hooker in August and got fined fifty dollars (the judge agreed to let him pay the fine with profits from his paper route), but alcohol was a bigger problem. Lots of kids hung out at Dell's since the liquor age went down to eighteen. They went rip-assing home as if they wanted to resurface the road with rubber, and every now and then someone would get killed. Like when Billy Smith ran into a tree on the Deep Cut Road at ninety and killed both himself and his girlfriend, LaVerne Dube.

  But except for these things, the Lot's knowledge of the country's torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there.

  FIVE

  Ann Norton was ironing when her daughter burst in with a bag of groceries, thrust a book with a rather thin-faced young man on the back jacket in her face, and began to babble.

  "Slow down," she said. "Turn down the TV and tell me."

  Susan choked off Peter Marshall, who was giving away thousands of dollars on "The Hollywood Squares," and told her mother about meeting Ben Mears. Mrs Norton made herself nod with calm and sympathetic understanding as the story spilled out, despite the yellow warning lights that always flashed when Susan mentioned a new boy--men now, she supposed, although it was hard to think Susie could be old enough for men. But the lights were a little brighter today.

  "Sounds exciting," she said, and put another one of her husband's shirts on the ironing board.

  "He was really nice," Susan said. "Very natural."

  "Hoo, my feet," Mrs Norton said. She set the iron on its fanny, making it hiss balefully, and eased into the Boston rocker by the picture window. She reached a Parliament out of the pack on the coffee table and lit it. "Are you sure he's all right, Susie?"

  Susan smiled a little defensively. "Sure, I'm sure. He looks like...oh, I don't know--a college instructor or something."

  "They say the Mad Bomber looked like a gardener," Mrs Norton said reflectively.

  "Moose shit," Susan said cheerfully. It was an epithet that never failed to irritate her mother.

  "Let me see the book." She held a hand out for it.

  Susan gave it to her, suddenly remembering the homosexual rape scene in the prison section.

  "Air Dance," Ann Norton said meditatively, and began to thumb pages at random. Susan waited, resigned. Her mother would bird-dog it. She always did.

  The windows were up, and a lazy forenoon breeze ruffled the yellow curtains in the kitchen--which Mom insisted on calling the pantry, as if they lived in the lap of class. It was a nice house, solid brick, a little hard to heat in the winter but cool as a grotto in the summer. They were on a gentle rise of land on outer Brock Street, and from the picture window where Mrs Norton sat you could see all the way into town. The view was a pleasant one, and in the winter it could be spectacular with long, twinkling vistas of unbroken snow and distance-dwindled buildings casting yellow oblongs of light on the snow fields.

  "Seems I read a review of this in the Portland paper. It wasn't very good."

  "I like it," Susan said steadily. "And I like him."

  "Perhaps Floyd would like him, too," Mrs Norton said idly. "You ought to introd
uce them."

  Susan felt a real stab of anger and was dismayed by it. She thought that she and her mother had weathered the last of the adolescent storms and even the aftersqualls, but here it all was. They took up the ancient arguments of her identity versus her mother's experience and beliefs like an old piece of knitting.

  "We've talked about Floyd, Mom. You know there's nothing firm there."

  "The paper said there were some pretty lurid prison scenes, too. Boys getting together with boys."

  "Oh, Mother, for Christ's sake." She helped herself to one of her mother's cigarettes.

  "No need to curse," Mrs Norton said, unperturbed. She handed the book back and tapped the long ash on her cigarette into a ceramic ashtray in the shape of a fish. It had been given to her by one of her Ladies' Auxiliary friends, and it had always irritated Susan in a formless sort of way. There was something obscene about tapping your ashes into a perch's mouth.

  "I'll put the groceries away," Susan said, getting up.

  Mrs Norton said quietly, "I only meant that if you and Floyd Tibbits are going to be married--"

  The irritation boiled over into the old, goaded anger. "What in the name of God ever gave you that idea? Have I ever told you that?"

  "I assumed--"

  "You assumed wrong," she said hotly and not entirely truthfully. But she had been cooling toward Floyd by slow degrees over a period of weeks.

  "I assumed that when you date the same boy for a year and a half," her mother continued softly and implacably, "that it must mean things have gone beyond the hand-holding stage."

  "Floyd and I are more than friends," Susan agreed evenly. Let her make something of that.

  An unspoken conversation hung suspended between them.

  Have you been sleeping with Floyd?

  None of your business.

  What does this Ben Mears mean to you?

  None of your business.

  Are you going to fall for him and do something foolish?

  None of your business.

  I love you, Susie. Your dad and I both love you.

  And to that no answer. And no answer. And no answer. And that was why New York--or someplace--was imperative. In the end you always crashed against the unspoken barricades of their love, like the walls of a padded cell. The truth of their love rendered further meaningful discussion impossible and made what had gone before empty of meaning.

  "Well," Mrs Norton said softly. She stubbed her cigarette out on the perch's lip and dropped it into his belly.

  "I'm going upstairs," Susan said.

  "Sure. Can I read the book when you're finished?"

  "If you want to."

  "I'd like to meet him," she said.

  Susan spread her hands and shrugged.

  "Will you be late tonight?"

  "I don't know."

  "What shall I tell Floyd Tibbits if he calls?"

  The anger flashed over her again. "Tell him what you want." She paused. "You will anyway."

  "Susan!"

  She went upstairs without looking back.

  Mrs Norton remained where she was, staring out the window and at the town without seeing it. Overhead she could hear Susan's footsteps and then the clatter of her easel being pulled out.

  She got up and began to iron again. When she thought Susan might be fully immersed in her work (although she didn't allow that idea to do more than flitter through a corner of her conscious mind), she went to the telephone in the pantry and called up Mabel Werts. In the course of the conversation she happened to mention that Susie had told her there was a famous author in their midst and Mabel sniffed and said well you must mean that man who wrote Conway's Daughter and Mrs Norton said yes and Mabel said that wasn't writing but just a sex book, pure and simple. Mrs Norton asked if he was staying at a motel or--

  As a matter of fact, he was staying downtown at Eva's Rooms, the town's only boardinghouse. Mrs Norton felt a surge of relief. Eva Miller was a decent widow who would put up with no hanky-panky. Her rules on women in the rooms were brief and to the point. If she's your mother or your sister, all right. If she's not, you can sit in the kitchen. No negotiation on the rule was entertained.

  Mrs Norton hung up fifteen minutes later, after artfully camouflaging her main objective with small talk.

  Susan, she thought, going back to the ironing board. Oh, Susan, I only want what's best for you. Can't you see that?

  SIX

  They were driving back from Portland along 295, and it was not late at all--only a little after eleven. The speed limit on the expressway after it got out of Portland's suburbs was fifty-five, and he drove well. The Citroen's headlights cut the dark smoothly.

  They had both enjoyed the movie, but cautiously, the way people do when they are feeling for each other's boundaries. Now her mother's question occurred to her and she said, "Where are you staying? Are you renting a place?"

  "I've got a third-floor cubbyhole at Eva's Rooms, on Railroad Street."

  "But that's awful! It must be a hundred degrees up there!"

  "I like the heat," he said. "I work well in it. Strip to the waist, turn up the radio, and drink a gallon of beer. I've been putting out ten pages a day, fresh copy. There's some interesting old codgers there, too. And when you finally go out on the porch and catch the breeze...heaven."

  "Still," she said doubtfully.

  "I thought about renting the Marsten House," he said casually. "Even went so far as to inquire about it. But it's been sold."

  "The Marsten House?" She smiled. "You're thinking of the wrong place."

  "Nope. Sits up on that first hill to the northwest of town. Brooks Road."

  "Sold? Who in the name of heaven--?"

  "I wondered the same thing. I've been accused of having a screw loose from time to time, but even I only thought of renting it. The real estate man wouldn't tell me. Seems to be a deep, dark secret."

  "Maybe some out-of-state people want to turn it into a summer place," she said. "Whoever it is, they're crazy. Renovating a place is one thing--I'd love to try it--but that place is beyond renovation. The place was a wreck even when I was a kid. Ben, why would you ever want to stay there?"

  "Were you ever actually inside?"

  "No, but I looked in the window on a dare. Were you?"

  "Yes. Once."

  "Creepy place, isn't it?"

  They fell silent, both thinking of the Marsten House. This particular reminiscence did not have the pastel nostalgia of the others. The scandal and violence connected with the house had occurred before their births, but small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.

  The story of Hubert Marsten and his wife, Birdie, was the closest thing the town had to a skeleton in its closet. Hubie had been the president of a large New England trucking company in the 1920s--a trucking company which, some said, conducted its most profitable business after midnight, running Canadian whisky into Massachusetts.

  He and his wife had retired wealthy to 'salem's Lot in 1928, and had lost a good part of that wealth (no one, not even Mabel Werts, knew exactly how much) in the stock market crash of 1929.

  In the ten years between the fall of the market and the rise of Hitler, Marsten and his wife lived in their house like hermits. The only time they were seen was on Wednesday afternoons when they came to town to do their shopping. Larry McLeod, who was the mailman during those years, reported that Marsten got four daily papers, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and a pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. He also got a check once a month from the trucking company, which was based in Fall River, Massachusetts. Larry said he could tell it was a check by bending the envelope and peeking into the address window.

  Larry was the one who found them in the summer of 1939. The papers and magazines--five days' worth--had piled up in the mailbox until it was impossible to cram in more. Larry took them all up the walk with the intention of putting them in between the screen door and the main door.

&nbs
p; It was August and high summer, the beginning of dog days, and the grass in the Marsten front yard was calf-high, green and rank. Honeysuckle ran wild over the trellis on the west side of the house, and fat bees buzzed indolently around the wax-white, redolent blossoms. In those days the house was still a fine-looking place in spite of the high grass, and it was generally agreed that Hubie had built the nicest house in 'salem's Lot before going soft in the attic.

  Halfway up the walk, according to the story that was eventually told with breathless horror to each new Ladies' Auxiliary member, Larry had smelled something bad, like spoiled meat. He knocked on the front door and got no answer. He looked through the door but could see nothing in the thick gloom. He went around to the back instead of walking in, which was lucky for him. The smell was worse in back. Larry tried the back door, found it unlocked, and stepped into the kitchen. Birdie Marsten was sprawled in a corner, legs splayed out, feet bare. Half her head had been blown away by a close-range shot from a thirty-ought-six.

  ("Flies," Audrey Hersey always said at this point, speaking with calm authority. "Larry said the kitchen was full of 'em. Buzzing around, lighting on the...you know, and taking off again. Flies.")

  Larry McLeod turned around and went straight back to town. He fetched Norris Varney, who was constable at the time, and three or four of the hangers-on from Crossen's Store--Milt's father was still running the place in those days. Audrey's eldest brother, Jackson, had been among them. They drove back up in Norris's Chevrolet and Larry's mail truck.

  No one from town had ever been in the house, and it was a nine days' wonder. After the excitement died down, the Portland Telegram had done a feature on it. Hubert Marsten's house was a piled, jumbled, bewildering rat's nest of junk, scavenged items, and narrow, winding passageways which led through yellowing stacks of newspapers and magazines and piles of moldering white-elephant books. The complete sets of Dickens, Scott, and Mariatt had been scavenged for the Jerusalem's Lot Public Library by Loretta Starcher's predecessor and still remained in the stacks.