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.”“That girl died, didn’t she?” asked Lola.“In a car wreck?”“The baby too.” Dorrie nodded.“Sometime after she went back down to New Jersey.But I bet Miss Charlene Perfect never got wind of all them goings on.”“Someone ought to tell her,” Lola said, and looked at Dorrie.Dorrie looked back suggestively.“Maybe someone will,” Dorrie said.“What say we put this behind us and enjoy the nice, sunshiny day?” Lola asked.She relaxed.Following the school bus had forced Dorrie into a sensible pace.By the time the bus driver signaled the go-ahead for her to pass, Dorrie would regain her composure.“What’s the bus doing out at this hour?” Dorrie asked.“The kids got a basketball game in Houlton tonight,” said Lola.“They must be on their way.” She fumbled in her purse for her big double pack of Juicy Fruit.She offered Dorrie a stick.The gum was sweet on their tongues, almost as sweet as the gossip about Charlene’s family skeletons, almost as sugary as the words about babies born marked, of women scorned, of men cornered.“Sidney’s father used to call it Fort Prix for a long time after that,” Dorrie said, suddenly remembering old Grant Hart sitting up in front of the big Warm Morning stove at Betty’s Grocery, back in the days when Betty’s father owned the store, and entertaining legions with his puns and witticisms.“That was when Sidney was stationed at Fort Prix,” Grant would say, and a warm volley of hoots would ring out around the jars of molasses and the cloth sacks of flour.In the telling now, in 1989, the same joke found the same home, and laughter bounced again about the cab of Booster’s big pickup/plow, its huge yellow lip cutting a bright picture on the road to Watertown.This was a laughter descended, a genetic laughter, a trousseau.“Speaking of Fort Prix,” Lola said.They were just passing Amy Joy Lawler’s house and a thought had occurred to her.“Do you suppose it’s been Bobby Fennelson that Amy Joy’s seeing? Do you suppose that’s why Eileen left?” Dorrie thought about this.“I don’t think Amy Joy is Bobby Fennelson’s type,” Dorrie replied after a few seconds of pondering.“He’s spent all that time in the army, like Ronny Plunkett did, and that changes a man.They get used to them city women with their brash, rude ways.You’ll notice Ronny Plunkett ain’t dated anybody since he’s come home, not to my knowledge, not more than a night or two anyway.I don’t think Bobby Fennelson would give Amy Joy the time of day.”“Well, you can just drop your suspicions about Davey,” said Lola.“Just because we saw him out driving around last night don’t mean he’s up to anything.He thinks Charlene hung the moon, why I don’t know.” Davey was, after all, her first cousin, and Lola had always liked him.“Them’s the kind to watch the closest,” Dorrie said.“Hey, I got an idea.” The earlier humiliation was dying away.“What?” asked Lola.She had just caught sight of her daughter in a back window of the bus.They exchanged a wave as Dorrie pulled out to pass the lumbering vehicle.It would be a sweet day after all, sweet as Juicy Fruit, sweet as gossip.“Let’s go all the way to Madawaska,” Dorrie said.“Just in case Elvis is back at Radio Shack.”***A half mile from his brother’s filling station, Davey Craft pulled his car onto an old river road and sat there, engine off, while the outside cold crept deeper into the upholstery, crept into his fingers, into his very bones.The tip of his nose had begun to sting, and yet he could not bring himself to turn the engine back on, to flick the switch that would send warm air from the heater into the automobile.If he turned the engine on, he might never shut it off again.He might find himself a length of hose.He might sit there with his car idling, his brain idling, his life idling, as the precious perfume of carbon monoxide swirled up about him and carried him away.It was tempting to follow his brother Benny’s unwavering footsteps into the abyss, but the terrible truth was that he couldn’t abandon Charlene and the kids that way.Davey had read about carbon monoxide poisoning.When it’s all over, your blood is a bright cherry red, and there was something enticing about such a brilliant red, as welcome as the first burst of wild cherries on the mountain after the longest of winters.But the vivid memory of his family was like a sharp slap to his face.He had been on his way to ask his big brother, proprietor of Mattagash’s only filling station, if he could lend him money.The first time he had ever had to ask Peter for assistance was several months earlier.“Sure,” Peter had said quickly.“Hell yes.” And he’d taken out his checkbook and dashed off a check for a thousand dollars, a payment on the skidder and the car.“Never hesitate, kid,” Peter had said proudly to Davey.And as much as it had hurt, Davey had appreciated it greatly.The second time was four months ago, after Davey had mortgaged the house.Peter was a little slower in taking out his checkbook that time.But he did, the pen less fluid as he wrote the zeros out in a thick black line.Davey had stared at them, feeling very much like a zero himself.The third time he came to ask Peter for money was only a month ago, and that time Peter was ready for him, had met his eyes firmly and said, before Davey could let the dreaded words fly, “This has been my worst month, kid.My own back is against the wall.”“Hey,” Davey had said, his arm waving erratically, his hand trying to shuffle off the notion as unfounded.“I was just coming by to shoot the shit,” he lied.But Peter could tell, as most folks can, the bent, beaten stride of a man going under, his eyes vacant as someone who has just drowned, his feet waterlogged.Now he was hoping Peter would be able to help once more—brothers were like lotteries sometimes—but he could not bring himself to drive on.The determination to beg had suddenly gone out of him.He had been the family’s shining star, hadn’t he? He’d been the one born with the caul over his head, an event that had midwives and other, just plain wives talking excitedly of the truckloads of good luck it would bring him.The good-luck caul, passed down to him from his great-great-grandmother Sadie Craft.The gift Benny Craft had not been lucky enough to inherit.“I had the caul at birth when I had Davey,” he could remember his mother saying a thousand times in those long, lazy growing-up years.“It covered his head.Davey was my good-luck baby.” Now the goddamn thing was smothering him like some horrible wet shroud.Davey sat in his car on the snowbound road to the river and thought about how green money can grow in a man’s mind, especially when he’s stuck in the white of winter.HISTORICAL PRESERVATION: THE GREAT PYRAMID AS A TAVERNO whiskey,Soul o’ play and pranks,Accept a bardie’s gratefu’ thanks.—Robert Burns, another boozer of Scottish tiesMaurice was propped up at the bar, watching his Crossroads sign, his Where Good Friends, Like the Rivers, Meet slogan, being dashed about in a frightening wind.But that was still not quite so frightening as the wind Maurice had been hearing lately about Prissy Monihan and her temperance squad.They had managed to procure enough signatures to entitle them to an emergency town meeting.The wet-versus-dry issue would be aired again, and this time Prissy meant to win.Maurice ran a winter-white hand through his thinning hair and thought about his rebuttal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]