Skeleton Crew (6 page)

“Okay?” I asked, and he nodded, still breathing fast. “Come on back to the house, then. I can fix you up with a beer.”

“Thank you,” he said. “How is Stephanie?” He was regaining some of the old smooth pomposity that I disliked.

“Very well, thanks.”

“And your son?”

“He’s fine, too.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Steff came out, and a moment’s surprise passed over her face when she saw who was with me. Norton smiled and his eyes crawled over her tight T-shirt. He hadn’t changed that much after all.

“Hello, Brent,” she said cautiously. Billy poked his head out from under her arm.

“Hello, Stephanie. Hi, Billy.”

“Brent’s T-Bird took a pretty good rap in the storm,” I told her. “Stove in the roof, he says.”

“Oh, no!”

Norton told it again while he drank one of our beers. I was sipping a third, but I had no kind of buzz on; apparently I had sweat the beer out as rapidly as I drank it.

“He’s going to come to town with Billy and me.”

“Well, I won’t expect you for a while. You may have to go to the Shop-and-Save in Norway.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Well, if the power’s off in Bridgton—”

“Mom says all the cash registers and things run on electricity,” Billy supplied.

It was a good point.

“Have you still got the list?”

I patted my hip pocket.

Her eyes shifted to Norton. “I’m very sorry about Carla, Brent. We all were.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.’

There was another moment of awkward silence which Billy broke. “Can we go now, Daddy?” He had changed to jeans and sneakers.

“Yeah, I guess so. You ready, Brent?”

“Give me another beer for the road and I will be.”

Steffy’s brow creased. She had never approved of the one-for-the-road philosophy, or of men who drive with a can of Bud leaning against their crotches. I gave her a bare nod and she shrugged. I didn’t want to reopen things with Norton now. She got him a beer.

“Thanks,” he said to Steffy, not really thanking her but only mouthing a word. It was the way you thank a waitress in a restaurant. He turned back to me. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“Be right with you,” I said, and went into the living room.

Norton followed, and exclaimed over the birch, but I wasn’t interested in that or in the cost of replacing the window just then. I was looking at the lake through the sliding glass panel that gave on our deck. The breeze had freshened a little and the day had warmed up five degrees or so while I was cutting wood. I thought the odd mist we’d noticed earlier would surely have broken up, but it hadn’t. It was closer, too. Halfway across the lake now.

“I noticed that earlier,” Norton said, pontificating. “Some kind of temperature inversion, that’s my guess.”

I didn’t like it. I felt very strongly that I had never seen a mist exactly like this one. Part of it was the unnerving straight edge of its leading front. Nothing in nature is that even; man is the inventor of straight edges. Part of it was that pure, dazzling whiteness, with no variation but also without the sparkle of moisture. It was only half a mile or so off now, and the contrast between it and the blues of the lake and sky was more striking than ever.

“Come on, Dad!” Billy was tugging at my pants.

We all went back to the kitchen. Brent Norton spared one final glance at the tree that had crashed into our living room.

“Too bad it wasn’t an apple tree, huh?” Billy remarked brightly. “That’s what my mom said. Pretty funny, don’t you think?”

“Your mother’s a real card, Billy,” Norton said. He ruffled Billy’s hair in a perfunctory way and his eyes went to the front of Steff’s T-shirt again. No, he was not a man I was ever going to be able to really like.

“Listen, why don’t you come with us, Steff?” I asked. For no concrete reason I suddenly wanted her to come along.

“No, I think I’ll stay here and pull some weeds in the garden,” she said. Her eyes shifted toward Norton and then back to me. “This morning it seems like I’m the only thing around here that doesn’t run on electricity.”

Norton laughed too heartily.

I was getting her message, but tried one more time. “You sure?”

“Sure,” she said firmly. “The old bend-and-stretch will do me good.”

“Well, don’t get too much sun.”

“I’ll put on my straw hat. We’ll have sandwiches when you get back.”

“Good.”

She turned her face up to be kissed. “Be careful. There might be blowdowns on Kansas Road too, you know.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You be careful, too,” she told Billy, and kissed his cheek.

“Right, Mom.” He banged out of the door and the screen cracked shut behind him.

Norton and I walked out after him. “Why don’t we go over to your place and cut the tree off your Bird?” I asked him. All of a sudden I could think of lots of reasons to delay leaving for town.

“I don’t even want to look at it until after lunch and a few more of these,” Norton said, holding up his beer can. “The damage has been done, Dave old buddy.”

I didn’t like him calling me buddy, either.

We all got into the front seat of the Scout (in the far comer of the garage my scarred Fisher plow blade sat glimmering yellow, like the ghost of Christmas yet-to-come) and I backed out, crunching over a litter of storm-blown twigs. Steff was standing on the cement path which leads to the vegetable patch at the extreme west end of our property. She had a pair of clippers in one gloved hand and the weeding claw in the other. She had put on her old floppy sunhat, and it cast a band of shadow over her face. I tapped the horn twice, lightly, and she raised the hand holding the clippers in answer. We pulled out. I haven’t seen my wife since then.

 

We had to stop once on our way up to Kansas Road. Since the power truck had driven through, a pretty fair-sized pine had dropped across the road. Norton and I got out and moved it enough so I could inch the Scout by, getting our hands all pitchy in the process. Billy wanted to help but I waved him back. I was afraid he might get poked in the eye. Old trees have always reminded me of the Ents in Tolkien’s wonderful Rings saga, only Ents that have gone bad. Old trees want to hurt you. It doesn’t matter if you’re snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Old trees want to hurt you, and I think they’d kill you if they could.

Kansas Road itself was clear, but in several places we saw more lines down. About a quarter-mile past the Vicki-Linn Campground there was a power pole lying full-length in the ditch, heavy wires snarled around its top like wild hair.

“That was some storm,” Norton said in his mellifluous, courtroom-trained voice; but he didn’t seem to be pontificating now, only solemn.

“Yeah, it was.”

“Look, Dad!”

He was pointing at the remains of the Ellitches’ barn. For twelve years it had been sagging tiredly in Tommy Ellitch’s back field, up to its hips in sunflowers, goldenrod, and Lolly-come-see-me. Every fall I would think it could not last through another winter. And every spring it would still be there. But it wasn’t anymore. All that remained was a splintered wreckage and a roof that had been mostly stripped of shingles. Its number had come up. And for some reason that echoed solemnly, even ominously, inside me. The storm had come and smashed it flat.

Norton drained his beer, crushed the can in one hand, and dropped it indifferently to the floor of the Scout. Billy opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again—good boy. Norton came from New Jersey, where there was no bottle-and-can law; I guess he could be forgiven for squashing my nickel when I could barely remember not to do it myself.

Billy started fooling with the radio, and I asked him to see if WOXO was back on the air. He dialed up to FM 92 and got nothing but a blank hum. He looked at me and shrugged. I thought for a moment. What other stations were on the far side of that peculiar fog front?

“Try WBLM,” I said.

He dialed down to the other end, passing WJBQ-FM and WIGY-FM on the way. They were there, doing business as usual . . . but WBLM, Maine’s premier progressive-rock station, was off the air.

“Funny,” I said.

“What’s that?” Norton asked.

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

Billy had tuned back to the musical cereal on WJBQ. Pretty soon we got to town.

The Norge Washateria in the shopping center was closed, it being impossible to run a coin-op laundry without electricity, but both the Bridgton Pharmacy and the Federal Foods Supermarket were open. The parking lot was pretty full, and as always in the middle of the summer, a lot of the cars had out-of-state plates. Little knots of people stood here and there in the sun, noodling about the storm, women with women, men with men.

I saw Mrs. Carmody, she of the stuffed animals and the stump-water lore. She sailed into the supermarket decked out in an amazing canary-yellow pantsuit. A purse that looked the size of a small Samsonite suitcase was slung over one forearm. Then an idiot on a Yamaha roared past me, missing my front bumper by a few scant inches. He wore a denim jacket, mirror sunglasses, and no helmet.

“Look at that stupid shit,” Norton growled.

I circled the parking lot once, looking for a good space. There were none. I was just resigning myself to a long walk from the far end of the lot when I got lucky. A lime-green Cadillac the size of a small cabin cruiser was easing out of a slot in the rank closest to the market’s doors. The moment it was gone, I slid into the space.

I gave Billy Steff’s shopping list. He was five, but he could read printing. “Get a cart and get started. I want to give your mother a jingle. Mr. Norton will help you. And I’ll be right along.”

We got out and Billy immediately grabbed Mr. Norton’s hand. He’d been taught not to cross the parking lot without holding an adult’s hand when he was younger and hadn’t yet lost the habit. Norton looked surprised for a moment, and then smiled a little. I could almost forgive him for feeling Steff up with his eyes. The two of them went into the market.

I strolled over to the pay phone, which was on the wall between the drugstore and the Norge. A sweltering woman in a purple sunsuit was jogging the cutoff switch up and down. I stood behind her with my hands in my pockets, wondering why I felt so uneasy about Steff, and why the unease should be all wrapped up with that line of white but unsparkling fog, the radio stations that were off the air ... and the Arrowhead Project.

The woman in the purple sunsuit had a sunburn and freckles on her fat shoulders. She looked like a sweaty orange baby. She slammed the phone back down in its cradle, turned toward the drugstore and saw me there.

“Save your dime,” she said. “Just dah-dah-dah.” She walked grumpily away.

I almost slapped my forehead. The phone lines were down someplace, of course. Some of them were underground, but nowhere near all of them. I tried the phone anyway. The pay phones in the area are what Steff calls Paranoid Pay Phones. Instead of putting your dime right in, you get a dial tone and make your call. When someone answers, there’s an automatic cutoff and you have to shove your dime in before your party hangs up. They’re irritating, but that day it did save me my dime. There was no dial tone. As the lady had said, it was just dah-dah-dah.

I hung up and walked slowly toward the market, just in time to see an amusing little incident. An elderly couple walked toward the IN door, chatting together. And still chatting, they walked right into it. They stopped talking in a jangle and the woman squawked her surprise. They stared at each other comically. Then they laughed, and the old guy pushed the door open for his wife with some effort—those electric-eye doors are heavy—and they went in. When the electricity goes off, it catches you in a hundred different ways.

I pushed the door open myself and noticed the lack of air conditioning first thing. Usually in the summer they have it cranked up high enough to give you frostbite if you stay in the market more than an hour at a stretch.

Like most modem markets, the Federal was constructed like a Skinner box—modern marketing techniques turn all customers into white rats. The stuff you really needed, staples, like bread, milk, meat, beer, and frozen dinners, was all on the far side of the store. To get there you had to walk past all the impulse items known to modem man—everything from Cricket lighters to rubber dog bones.

Beyond the IN door is the fruit-and-vegetable aisle. I looked up it, but there was no sign of Norton or my son. The old lady who had run into the door was examining the grape-fruits. Her husband had produced a net sack to store purchases in.

I walked up the aisle and went left. I found them in the third aisle, Billy mulling over the ranks of Jello-O packages and instant puddings. Norton was standing directly behind him, peering at Steff’s list. I had to grin a little at his nonplussed expression.

I threaded my way down to them, past half-loaded carriages (Steff hadn’t been the only one struck by the squirreling impulse, apparently) and browsing shoppers. Norton took two cans of pie filling down from the top shelf and put them in the cart.

“How are you doing?” I asked, and Norton looked around with unmistakable relief.

“All right, aren’t we, Billy?”

“Sure,” Billy said, and couldn’t resist adding in a rather smug tone: “But there’s lots of stuff Mr. Norton can’t read either, Dad.”

“Let me see.” I took the list.

Norton had made a neat, lawyerly check beside each of the items he and Billy had picked up—half a dozen or so, including the milk and a six-pack of Coke. There were maybe ten other things that she wanted.

“We ought to go back to the fruits and vegetables,” I said. “She wants some tomatoes and cucumbers.”

Billy started to turn the cart around and Norton said, “You ought to go have a look at the checkout, Dave.”