Bullet Park (2 page)

Vital statistics? They were of no importance. The divorce rate was way down, the suicide rate was a secret; traffic casualties averaged twenty-two a year because of a winding highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil. The winters were too inclement for citrus fruit but much too clement for the native white birch.

Hazzard drew his car up in front of a white house with lighted windows. “This is the property I had in mind for you,” he said. “I hope she won’t be in. She’s not much of a
saleswoman. She said she was going out.” He rang the bell but Mrs. Heathcup opened the door. It appeared that she was preparing to go out but had not quite made it. She was a stocky woman with skewered silver-gilt hair, wearing a bathrobe. On the tip of one of her silk slippers there was a cloth rose; on the other there was none. “Well you’re welcome to look,” she said in a hoarse, carrying voice. “I hope you’ll like it well enough to buy it. I’m getting a little tired of having people track mud through the place and then decide on something else. It’s a lovely house and everything works—you’ll have to take my word for that—but I’ve known people around here to sell houses with dangerous wiring, backed-up septic tanks, obsolete plumbing and leaky roofs. There’s nothing like that here. Before my husband passed away he saw that everything was in apple-pie order and the only reason I’m selling is because there’s nothing here for me, now that he’s gone. Nothing at all. There’s nothing in a place like this for any single woman. Speaking of tribes, it’s like a regular tribe. Widows, divorcées, single men, the tribal elders give them all the gate. Fifty-seven is my price. That’s not my asking price, it’s my final price. We put twenty thousand into the place and my husband painted it every single year before he passed away. In January he’d paint the kitchen. Saturdays and Sundays and nights, that is. Then he’d paint the hallway and the living room and the dining room and the bedrooms and then next January he’d start all over again in the kitchen. He was painting the dining room the day he passed away.
I was upstairs. When I say that he passed away I don’t want you to think that he died in his sleep. While he was painting I heard him talking to himself. ‘I can’t stand it any longer,’ he said. I still don’t know what he meant. Then he went out into the garden and shot himself. That was when I found out what kind of neighbors I had. You can look all over the world but you won’t find neighbors as kind and thoughtful as the people in Bullet Park. As soon as they heard about my husband passing away they came over here to comfort me. There must have been ten or twelve of them and we all had something to drink and they were so comforting that I almost forgot what had happened. I mean it didn’t seem as though anything had happened. Well here’s the living room. Eighteen by thirty-two. We’ve had fifty guests here for cocktails but it never seems crowded. I’ll sell you the rug for half of what I gave for it. All wool. If your wife wants the curtains I’m sure we can work something out. Do you have a daughter? This hallway would be a beautiful place for a wedding. I mean when the bride throws down her bouquet. Now the dining room …”

The dinner table was set for twelve with soup plates, wine glasses, candlesticks and wax flowers. “I always keep my table set,” said Mrs. Heathcup. “I haven’t entertained for months but Mr. Heathcup hated to see an empty table and so I always keep it set, sort of in memory. An empty table depressed him. I change the setting once or twice a week. There are four churches in the village. I suppose you know about the Gorey Brook
Country Club. It has a good eighteen-hole course designed by Pete Ellison, four en tout cas courts and a pool. I hope you’re not Jewish. They’re very strict about that. I don’t have a pool myself and frankly it’s something of a limitation. When people start talking about pool chemicals and so forth you’ll find yourself left out of the conversation. I’ve had an estimate made and you can have one put in the back garden for eight thousand. Maintenance comes to around twenty-five a week and they charge a hundred to open and close it. The neighbors, as I’ve said, are wonderful people although they take some knowing. You might think Harry Plutarch, who lives across the street, a little odd unless you knew the whole story. His wife ran off with Howie Jones. What she did was to have a moving van come to the house one morning and take everything out of the place except a chair, a single bed and a parrot cage. When he came home from work he found an empty house and he’s been living with a chair, a bed and a parrot ever since. Here’s a copy of the evening paper. It might give you some idea of what the place is like …”

As Mrs. Heathcup flushed toilets, opened and shut doors, the stranger, whose name was Hammer, felt a lack of interest in her house increase until it seemed like a kind of melancholy, but the tragic and brightly lighted place was commodious and efficient and one lived in such places. There was the ghost of poor Heathcup, but every house has a ghost. “I think it’s what we want,” he said. “I’ll bring Mrs. Hammer out tomorrow and let her decide.”

Hazzard drove him back to the railroad station then and left him there. Suburban waiting rooms are not maintained and the place had been sacked. Broken windows let in the night wind. The clock face was smashed. The hands of the clock were gone. The architect, so many years ago, had designed the building with some sense of the erotic and romantic essence of travel, but all his inventions had been stripped or defaced and Hammer found himself in a warlike ruin. He opened the paper and read: “The Lithgow Club had its annual dinner on Thursday evening at Harvey’s restaurant. The program began with a parade of sweethearts—wives of the members—which was followed by a demonstration of the hula given by Mrs. Leonard A. Atkinson who was accompanied by her husband on the ukelele …

“Seventeen debutantes were presented to society at the Gorey Brook Country Club …

“Mr. Lewis Harwich was burned to death last night when a can of charcoal igniter exploded and set fire to his clothing during a barbecue party in the garden of his home at 23 Redburn Circle …

“School taxes expected to increase.”

He caught the 7:14.

H
oly Communion. Sexagesima. Nailles heard a cricket in the chancel and the noise of a tin drum from the rain gutters while he said his prayers. His sense of the church calendar was much more closely associated with the weather than with the revelations and strictures in Holy Gospel. St. Paul meant blizzards. St. Mathias meant a thaw. For the marriage at Cana and the cleansing of the leper the oil furnace would still be running although the vents in the stained-glass windows were sometimes open to the raw spring air. Abstain from fornication. Possess your vessel in honor. Jesus departs from the coast of Tyre and Sidon as the skiing ends. For the crucifixion a bobsled stands stranded in a flowerbed, its painter coiled among the early violets. The trout streams open for the resurrection. The crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming. St. James and Revelations fell on the first warm days of summer when
you could smell the climbing roses by the window and when an occasional stray bee would buzz into the house of God and buzz out again. Trinity carried one into summer, the dog days and the drought, and the parable of the Samaritan was spoken as the season changed and the gentle sounds of the night garden turned as harsh as hardware. The flesh lusteth against the spirit to the smoke of leaf fires as did the raising of the dead. Then one was back again with St. Andrew and the snows of Advent.

This division of Nailles’s attention during worship had begun when, as a young boy, he had spent most of his time in church examining the forms captured in the grained-oak pews. In certain lights and frames of mind they seemed quite coherent. There was a charge of Mongol horsemen in the third pew on the right, next to the font. In the pew ahead of that there appeared to be a broad lake—some body of water—with a lighthouse on a peninsula. In the pew across the aisle there was a clash of arms and in the pew ahead of that there seemed to be a herd of cattle. This lack of concentration did not distress Nailles. He did not expect to part with his flesh or his memory in the narthex. His concerns in church remained at least partially matter-of-fact, and on this winter morning he noticed that Mrs. Trencham was carrying on her particular brand of competitive churchmanship. Mrs. Trencham was a recent convert—she had been a Unitarian—and she was more than proud of her grasp of the responses and courtesies in the service; she was bellicose.
At the first sound of the priest’s voice in the vestarium she was on her feet and she fired out her amens and her mercies in a stern and resonant voice, timed well ahead of the rest of the congregation as if she were involved in a sort of ecclesiastical footrace. Her genuflections were profound and graceful, her credo and confession were letter-perfect, her Lamb of God was soulful, and if she was given any competition, as she sometimes was, she would throw in a few signs of the cross as a proof of the superiority of her devotions. Mrs. Trencham was a winner.

There were chrysanthemums on the altar. The cloth was purple. Only the two candles that represent the flesh and the spirit burned. Charlie Stuart came in and took a forward pew. Something about his appearance perplexed Nailles. His clothing hung on him loosely. He must have lost weight; but how much? Forty pounds. Fifty pounds. The voluminousness of his jacket gave him a shocking, wasted and decrepit look. Cancer, Nailles wondered. But their wives were good friends and if it had been cancer he would have heard. Truths and rumors of cancer moved through the neighborhood as freely as the wind. The sight of his stricken friend forced onto him some heavy thoughts about the mysteriousness of infirmity and death. Thoughts of death brought him around to the fact that Charlie’s father had died in an airplane crash in South America six months ago and this brought him around to the cheerful conclusion that Charlie was wearing his father’s suits. How simple it all was! He beamed
at this triumph of practicality over death. Then the strangers came in.

The handful of men and women who attended Holy Communion were all well known to Nailles. New communicants were seldom seen, and his curiosity was legitimate. They were perhaps in their forties—the man’s hair was brown—superior products of heterosexual monogamy. She genuflected deeply, curtsied in fact. He gave the cross a stiff nod. At the mention of the Virgin Mary in the Credo she genuflected again while he remained standing. She had been a very pretty woman and would probably never lose the authority this good fortune had given her when she was younger. His face was scrubbed, decent and bright. But for its brightness it might have seemed commonplace. They spoke the responses in a clear voice.

She was, Nailles thought, in her grace and loveliness one of those women who seem to bask in the extraordinary and visionary state of holy matrimony. Regret, he thought, had not left a line on her face. She would excel in all her roles—ardent, clever, sage and loving. Matrimony seemed invented for her kind; indeed her kind might have had a hand in its invention. Someone less sympathetic than Nailles would have singled him out as one of those men who, at the summit of their perfection, would be discovered to have embezzled two million dollars from the accounts entrusted to him in order to finance the practice and blackmail of his savage and unnatural sexual appetites. The same critic would imagine her to be bored, vindictive, a secret sherry drinker who dreamed nightly of being debauched in a male harem.
But to Nailles, on this rainy morning, they seemed invincible. Their honor, passion and intelligence were genuine. Their lives would not be undangerous but they would bring to their disappointments and their successes an immutable brand of common sense.

When the peace that passes understanding was dispersed among them, the priest left the altar and muttered a prayer from the vestarium. The sounds of muttered prayer seemed to Nailles to have an organic antiquity; to fall on his ear like the grating sound of a wave. The acolyte extinguished the lights of the flesh and the spirit, Nailles finished up his devotions and went down the aisle behind the strangers.

“We’re the Hammers,” the stranger said to the priest.

Nailles did not think this funny, anticipating the fact that almost everyone else in the neighborhood would. How many hundreds or perhaps thousands of cocktail parties would they have to live through, side by side: Hammer and Nailles. Nailles claimed not to be a superstitious man but he did believe in the mysterious power of nomenclature. He believed, for example, that people named John and Mary never divorced. For better for worse, in madness and in saneness they seemed bound together for eternity by the simplicity of their names. They might loath and despise one another, quarrel, weep and commit mayhem, but they were not free to divorce. Tom, Dick and Harry could go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death could separate John and Mary. How much worse was Hammer and Nailles.

“Welcome to Christ’s Church,” the priest was exclaiming.
“Welcome to Bullet Park. Father Frisbee did write to me about you.” Father Frisbee had probably not gone into their finances, but Father Ransome, at a glance, guessed them to be good for at least five hundred a year; although he had experienced many disappointments. The Follansbees, for instance, who kept saddle horses and went to Europe every summer, dropped a dollar into the plate whenever they came to church and let it go at that. On top of this they very likely claimed a tax exemption of a thousand. Live and learn. “Mr. and Mrs. Hammer,” he said, “may I present your neighbor Mr. Nailles.” He laughed.

The look they exchanged was deeply curious and in some ways hostile. The stranger evidently anticipated the unwanted union that the sameness of their names would enforce in such a place. Nailles, who detested genealogy, crests, idle investigations into the elegance of time gone, spoke from a conflict of feeling when he said: “Our name used to be de Noailles.”

“I’ve never looked into the history of our name,” said the stranger. He could have been unfriendly. He took his wife’s arm and left the church.

“Tell me,” the priest asked Nailles, “what’s happened about Tony and the confirmation class.”