Out of Their Minds (5 page)

At the door she turned and asked Duncan, “You're coming to the program tonight, aren't you?”

Duncan grinned with his snaggled teeth. “Haven't missed one yet. Not for many years. Don't reckon I'll start now.”

She opened the door then and was swiftly gone. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her marching purposefully down the street.

Duncan came out from behind the counter and shambled toward me.

“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.

“My name is Horton Smith,” I said. “I made arrangements …”

“Now, just a minute there,” said Duncan quickly, peering closely at me. “When your mail started coming in, I recognized the name, but I told myself there must be some mistake. I thought maybe …”

“There is no mistake,” I said, holding out my hand. “How are you, Mr. Duncan?”

He grasped my hand in a powerful grip and held onto it. “Little Horton Smith,” he said. “You used to come in with your pa …”

“And you used to give me a sack of candy.”

His eyes twinkled beneath the heavy brows and he gave my hand an extra hearty shake, then dropped it.

It was going to be all right, I told myself. The old Pilot Knob still existed and I was no stranger. I was coming home.

“And you're the same one,” he said, “as is on the radio and sometimes on television.”

I admitted that I was.

“Pilot Knob,” he told me, “is plumb proud of you. It took some getting used to at first to listen to a home-town boy on the radio or sit face to face with him on the television screen. But we got used to it at last and most of us listened to you and talked about it afterwards. We'd go around saying to one another that Horton has said this or that and we took what you had to say for gospel. But,” he asked, “what are you doing back? Not that we aren't glad to have you.”

“I think I'll stay for a while,” I told him. “For a few months, maybe for a year.”

“Vacation?”

“No. Not a vacation. There's some writing that I want to do. And to do that writing I had to get away somewhere. Where I would have time for writing and a bit of time for thinking what to write.”

“A book?”

“Yes, I hope a book.”

“Well, seems to me,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand, “you might have a lot to put into a book. Maybe a lot of things you couldn't say right out on the air. All them foreign places you was in. You were in a lot of them.”

“A few of them,” I said.

“And Russia? What did you think of Russia?”

“I liked the Russian people. They seemed, in many ways, like us.”

“You mean like Americans?”

“Like Americans,” I said.

“Well, come over to the stove,” he said, “and let us sit and talk. I ain't got a fire in it today. I guess one isn't needed. I can remember, plain as day, your pa sitting in one of these chairs and talking with the others. He was a right good man, your pa, but I always said he wasn't cut out to be a farmer.”

We sat down in two of the chairs.

“Is your pa still alive?” he asked.

“Yes, he and Mother both. Out in California. Retired now and very comfortable.”

“You got a place to stay?”

I shook my head.

“New motel down by the river,” Duncan said. “Built just a year or two ago. New people, by the name of Streeter. Give you good rates if you're staying more than a day or two. I'll make sure they do it. I'll speak to them about it.”

“There's no need …”

“But you ain't no transient. You're home folk, come back again. They would want to know.”

“Any fishing?”

“Best place on the river. Got some boats to rent and a canoe or two, although why anyone would risk their neck in a canoe on that river is more than I can figure.”

“I was hoping for a place like that,” I said. “I was afraid there would be none.”

“Still crazy about fishing?”

“I enjoy it,” I said.

“Remember when you were a boy you were rough on chubs.”

“Chubs made good fun,” I said.

“There're still a lot of people you will remember,” said Duncan. “They'll all want to see you. Why don't you drop in on the school program tonight? A lot of people will be there. That was the teacher that was in here, name of Kathy Adams.”

“You still have the old one-room school?”

“You can bet we have,” he said. “There was pressure put on us and some of the other districts to consolidate, but when it was put up to a vote we beat it. Kids get just as good an education in a one-room school as they would get in a new and fancy building and it costs a whole lot less. Kids that want to go to high school, we pay their tuition, but there aren't many of them that want to go. Still costs less than if we were consolidated. No use spending money for a high school when you got a bunch of kids like them Williams brats …”

“I am sorry,” I said, “but when I stepped inside I couldn't help but hear …”

“Let me tell you, Horton, that Kathy Adams is a splendid teacher, but she is too soft-hearted. She is always standing up for them Williams kids and I tell you they are nothing but a gang of cutthroats. I guess you don't know Tom Williams; he came floating in here after you had left. He worked around on some of the farms, but he was mostly good-for-nothing, although he must have managed to save a little money. He was well past marrying age when he got hitched up with one of Little Poison Carter's daughters. Amelia was her name. You remember Little Poison, don't you?”

I shook my head.

“Had a brother that was called Big Poison. No one now recollects their rightful names. The whole tribe lived down on Muskrat Island. Well, anyhow, when Tom married Amelia he bought, with the money he had saved, this little shirttail piece of land a couple of miles up Lonesome Hollow and tried to make a farm of it. He's got along somehow; I wouldn't know exactly how. And every year or so there was a kid and him and Mrs. Tom let those kids run wild. I tell you, Horton, these are the kind of folks we can get along without. They cause no end of trouble—Old Tom Williams and that family that he's raising. They keep more dogs than you can shake a stick at and those dogs are worthless, just like Old Tom himself. They lay around all day and they eat their heads off and they ain't worth a lick. Tom says he just likes dogs. Have you ever heard a thing like that? A trifling kind of fellow, with his dogs and kids and the kids are always in some kind of trouble.”

“Miss Adams seemed to think,” I reminded him, “that it's not their fault entirely.”

“I know. She says they felt rejected and are underprivileged. That's another favorite word of hers. You know what underprivileged means? It means someone who has no get-up-and-go. There wouldn't need to be no underprivileged if everyone was willing to work and had a lick of common sense. Oh, I know what the government says about them and how we got to help them. But if the government just would come out here and have a look at some of these underprivileged folks, they'd see in a minute what was wrong with them.”

“I was wondering,” I said, “as I drove along this morning, if there still are rattlesnakes.”

“Rattlesnakes?” he asked.

“There used to be a lot of them when I was a kid. I was wondering if they might be getting thinned out some.”

He wagged his head sagaciously. “Maybe some. Although there's still a bait of them. Get back in the hills and you'll find plenty of them. You interested in them?”

“Not especially,” I said.

“You'll have to come to that school program tonight,” he said. “There'll be a lot of people there. Some of them you'll know. Last day of school and the kids will all perform—get up and say some pieces or maybe sing a song or put on little plays. And afterwards there'll be a basket social to raise money for new library books. We still hang on to the old ways here; the years haven't changed us much. And we manage to have our own good times. A basket social at the school tonight and a couple of weeks from now there'll be a strawberry festival down at the Methodist church. Both of them good places to meet old friends of yours.”

“I'll make it if I can,” I promised. “Both the program and the festival.”

“You've got some mail,” he told me. “It has been piling up for a week or two. I still am postmaster here. The post office has been right here in this store for almost a hundred years. But there's talk of taking it away from us, consolidating it with the office over at Lancaster and sending it out from there by rural route. Government isn't satisfied leaving things alone. They got to always be trying to make things over. Improving service, they call it. I can't see, for the life of me, what's wrong with the kind of service we been giving the folks of Pilot Knob for the last hundred years or so.”

“I had expected you might have a bundle of mail for me,” I said. “I had it forwarded, but I didn't hurry to get here. I took my time and stopped at several places I wanted to look over.”

“You'll be going out to have a look at the old farm, the place you used to live?”

“I don't think I will,” I said. “I'd see too many changes.”

“Family by the name of Ballard lives there now,” he said. “They have a couple of boys, grown men almost. Do a lot of drinking, those two boys, and sometimes are a problem.”

I nodded. “You say this motel is down by the river?”

“That's right. You drive down past the schoolhouse and the church to where the road bends to the left. A little ways beyond you will see the sign. Says River Edge Motel. I'll get your mail for you.”

4

The large manila envelope had Philip Freeman's return address written in a scrawling hand across its upper left-hand corner. I sat in the chair by the open window, turning it slowly in my hand, wondering why Philip should be writing or sending anything to me. I knew the man, of course, and liked him, but we never had been close. The only link between us was our mutual affection and respect for the grand old man who had died some weeks before in an auto accident.

Through the window came the talking of the river, the muttered conversation it held with the countryside as it went sliding through the land. The sound of its talk, as I sat there listening, brought back in memory the times when my father and I had sat on its bank and fished—always with my father, but never by myself. For the river potentially was too dangerous for a boy of ten. The creek, of course, was all right if I promised to be careful.

The creek had been a friend, a shining summer friend, but the river had been magic. And it was magic still, I thought, a magic compounded of boyhood dreams and time. And finally here I was again beside it; here I would live beside it for a time and now I realized that I was afraid, deep inside myself, that living close beside it I would get to know it so well that the magic would be lost and it would become just another river running down another land.

Here were quiet and peace, I thought—the kind of quiet and peace that could be found in only a few other backwater corners of the earth. Here a man might find the time and space to think, undisturbed by the intrusion of the static that was given off by the rumblings of world commerce and global politics. Here was a country that the rush of progress had swept past, barely touching it.

Barely touching it, and thus leaving it with some of its old ideas. This place did not know that God was dead; in the little church at the upper end of the village the minister still might preach of fire and brimstone and his congregation would give him rapt attention. This place felt no overwhelming social guilt; it still believed that it was meet and proper that a man, should work to earn a living. This place did not subscribe to deficit spending; it tried to get along with what it had and thus hold down the taxes. Once good and sterling virtues, but no longer so if measured against modern attitudes. And yet, I thought, not buried in the trivia of the outside world—escaping not only the physical trivia, but the intellectual and the moral and the aesthetic trivia as well. Still able to believe, in a world that had stopped believing. Still holding fast to certain values, even if mistaken values, in a world that had few values left. Still fiercely concerned about the fundamentals of life and living while much of the world long since had escaped into cynicism.

I glanced about the room, a simple place—small and bright and clean, with a minimum of furniture, with paneling on the wall and no carpet on the floor. A monk's cell, I thought, and that was the way it should be, for a man could do little work smothered in an overburden of conveniences.

Peace and quiet, I thought, and what about the rattlesnakes? Could this peace and quiet be no more than a tricky surface, the millpond water that masked a whirlpool's violence? I saw it all again—the cruel, skull-like head hanging over me—and as I remembered it my body ached with a recall of the tension that had frozen it into immobility.

Why should anyone have planned and executed such a bizarre attempt at murder? Who had done it and how had it been carried out and why should it be me? Why had there been two farmhouses so alike that one could scarcely be differentiated from the other? And what about Snuffy Smith and the stuck car that wasn't really stuck and the Triceratops that after a little time wasn't there at all?

I gave up. There were no answers. The only possible answer seemed to be that it had never happened and I was sure it had. A man could imagine any one of all these things, perhaps; he could not, certainly, imagine all of them. There must, I knew, be an explanation somewhere, but I didn't have it.

I laid the manila envelope aside and looked at the other mail and there was little of importance. There were several notes from friends wishing me well in my new place of residence, but most of the notes had a trace of false joviality about them I was not sure I liked. Everyone, it seemed, thought that I was slightly crazy to bury myself in what to them was wilderness to write what probably would turn out to be a very lousy book. There were a couple of bills I had forgotten to pay and there were a magazine or two and some advertising.