The News of the World (11 page)

Before I leave in the morning, I come back in and point at it and tell her: “The bedspread.” She is under the covers and it cannot matter. When I come home from the hospital at night, the spread is back in place waiting to trick me again.

So it is the main topic in my conversations. Oh, not with the other janitors, I do not mention this affliction to them. I talk to Jerome, the son, the offspring of our hearts. He is married, but does not live in the city. At their house, Lilly fixes the coffee and Jerome tells me to forget it, to purchase an electric blanket if I am cold. That I become chilled is not the point. Lilly tells me not to worry about it, and Lorraine concurs by saying nothing, but asks instead about seven topics which they have going by and by. I have stood up at their own table, interrupting everything, to indicate that I do worry and I should worry about these occurrences in my household which have begun at so late a date.

This is not a way to act and I know it, and when I have apologized, Jerome asks then if I have any theories, if perhaps I should pin the bedspread to the blanket. I will not stoop to pins, and I am shouting. I love Lilly as my own. She is so dear I tremble for her happiness, and I am blessed to have my own son, Jerome, married to such loveliness. It is a heartache that she thinks that I am no longer a sensible man.

Then, every week when we visit them, I shut up, but it leaves me unable to think. I stare at the table and Lilly's flowers and see only the spread knotted on the floor. My staring bothers Lilly, and my heartache is multiplied. Lorraine is not worried. She knows me, and she drinks her coffee. There have been worse items in a marriage. Luckily, it is not affecting my work.

From time to time, when I talk to only Jerome about it, he is logical, and I appreciate that, but it does not help. I took his advice once and stayed up until after three in the morning, sitting in a chair watching the bedspread, but it did not move, and I wore the next day across my back like a fire. I cannot ask Lorraine, my wife, to sit up for me. That she is steady is at least a minor comfort in this tribulation. Then Jerome begins to get the look on his face for me too, and he has new and final advice.

I TOLD
the man I am sixty-six years old and feel odd renting this machine. He rewound the reels and then ran the pictures of ourselves in the showroom. He pointed to the man next to him in the television and told me that it was me. The picture was all gray, but they were my clothes.

That night, when Lorraine is asleep, I am up again, assembling the cords and the components. The components fit easily, like the man said, and I am like a boy on the carpet, plugging everything with three prongs together and everything with two prongs together. Erected, the camera does not look like something that belongs in my house, but it will do for one night. Because I have only four hours of video tape, I must sit until two in a chair with one lamp and the hospital newsletter. When it is after two and the camera sees it all, I climb into the bed wondering if I can sleep now with the small lamplight.

Lorraine cannot sense my exhilaration in the morning when I wake and the spread is gone away again, and the camera is still turning. I have recorded it all. “Do not touch this rented equipment,” I tell her. “I will be home this evening and talk to you.”

This is a wonderful day with a purpose. It is a very clean hospital, and the staff receives notice of their good work from Dr. Richter. He speaks to me personally, and his questions show his respect for me, which I return. And the drive home is like a long breath. I am free, going home to see at last the solution to the problem. There is simplicity in the way all the cars go in their ways.

At home, I start with Lorraine, but she is not interested in the equipment and what I have done. She goes after a while to the telephone to talk to her friends of other topics. After rewinding the equipment, I sit in the chair in the bedroom and begin witnessing the videotape. Though I can stop it with a switch, I ask Lorraine to bring my dinner in, because the show is almost four hours in length.

The light is gray, like in the showroom, and I see myself go in bed. Though I do not look like that, I trust the machine. The spread is over the man and the wife; the man is on the near side. I know his thoughts, and I think I can see the instant sleep arrives for him. I watch the two people sleeping while I eat my dinner. Lorraine looks for a minute, but moves elsewhere in the house. She is moving in the way she does before she goes in bed.

The tape seems endless, reel to reel, and I watch the grayness of sleep. Lorraine comes to bed and turns off her lamp. She is a kind woman, and I have known her for a long time in this life. Her form under the covers is the continuity of my days. On the screen the gray light does not change; the equipment hums like sleep.

Lorraine is breathing up the night, and I sit in my chair until the gray light goes white and then the tape slaps and flickers, so I turn off the equipment. I have watched the entire program, and I trust the machine. Near the end I could see the bedspread on the floor. After a while the man arose in his pajamas, and I could see his feet standing by the rumpled spread. I watched the entire videotape, and I did not see it move. It was on the man; then it was on the floor.

I dismantle the components and coil the cords, and I climb onto the bed with my wife Lorraine. We were born in the same year. I pull the covers to my ears, feeling the quilted bedspread in my fingers. I put my hand on Lorraine's side, and she turns halfway to me, not asleep at all. “You thought it was me.” She laughs, moving the bed. She laughs with enjoyment. “You thought,” the bed is moving, “that it was me.” This requires that I too laugh, and she moves to me fully now, laughing in our bed. The bedspread will work its little magic every night, a new thing I must accept within this life.

FIRST
of all, I'm not one of these people who ever wanted to see a UFO, an unidentified flying object. I have never wanted to see an unidentified anything. The things in my life, I identify; that's good with me. I'm not one of these people who is strange or weirded-out over unexplainable phenomena. I don't want any phenomena at all, and we're lucky in Cooper, because there isn't much phenomena. About the time there is a little phenomena, I identify the phenomena and throw them in jail.

I'm the sheriff.

So I'm not a weirdo. Things happen sometimes and I do my best. My name is Derec Ferris, and I've traced the Ferrises back all the way to Journey City, near the border, and there isn't a weirdo in the whole bunch. Now, I'm the sheriff; you notice I didn't say I'm the law around here. Whitney used to say he was the law around here. That was when he was sheriff. I can tell you exactly when he stopped saying that. Four years ago in September. We were together in his car late one night after coffee at The World, and we nailed this speeder right down from the high school. A rented Firebird, gunmetal gray. Actually we flashed him on the curve of Quibbel's Junk Yard and it took us the whole mile of town to slow down.

We pulled him over in front of Cooper Regional, where Whitney and I had been Cougars for four years together. It was about two in the morning. Whitney put his hand on my arm and went up to the Pontiac. I could see he was working up his sarcastic rage; he used to say that eighty percent of being a good sheriff was acting. Anyway, he starts: “Who do you think you are, endangering the lives of the citizens of Cooper by whipping through here at eighty-two miles an hour?” And the guy goes: “I'm Dan Blum, and I'm late. Who do you think you are?” Whitney loves that, an opening. “I'm Whitney Shields and I'm the law around here.” Well, Dan Blum, as his name actually turned out to be, thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, and after a little chuckle, he said, “Say, that's great. So, it's your wife that sleeps with the law.” That comment seemed to confuse Whitney, even though he slapped the guy for seventy-five big ones, and he never said that about being the law again.

That was, like I said, four years ago, and since then Whitney's in-laws have had troubles outside Chicago, and he and Dorothy, who was also a Cougar with us, and whom I had also known for forty-one years, moved over there, and they might as well be on another world for all I hear from them. This is all to say, I'm not the law. I'm fifty-five years old and I've lived in this county all my life, except for fourteen months when I lived in Korea employed by Uncle Sam. My name is Derec Ferris and that's who sleeps with my wife.

The fact is, I'm still surprised that Whitney left. I mean, where is he? I still expect to see him squashing his stool at the counter at The World every time I walk in there. Hell, he grew up here along the river just like I did; he and I and Harold were the three musketeers. We worked for Nemo at Earth Adventure two summers in high school, and we gained four hundred and forty-four yards passing as Cooper Cougars in 1949, setting a record that stood until 1957. Then: poof! he's gone, and I'm sheriff. I've got his car and everything. It still smells like him.

I don't want to talk about it. At all. What I want to talk about is the Unidentified Object that has come into my life, the whole unidentified flying object day, so that you can see I'm not a phenomena weirdo; I'm only Derec Ferris, the sheriff here in Cooper.

First of all, I'm not going to give you any theory, because I don't have any. And I don't want any. Where did it come from? I don't care. I've been here in Cooper all my life and it might have come from over in Mercy or even Griggs. It kind of looked like something from Griggs. I don't care. It was a UFO. It might have come from Korea; try to tell me that's on this earth. And why did it come?
Please.
I'm going to give you the day, the whole day, and—really—nothing but the day.

First thing: Sarah calls. She says we received a card from Derec; that's our son, same name. He works for a textbook publisher in Palo Alto, California, and he's a painter. Paints pictures. Well, it's a little news, because we haven't seen him in five years, and we don't get that much mail. Every time I drive by Cooper Regional I think about him, though. Even then when he was in high school refusing to play football, he said he couldn't wait to get out of here, Cooper, and go to California. Which he did. I feel bad about it, and I miss him, but I figure it this way: at least somebody got what he wanted.

Sarah says that Derec is going to have a show. Well. I don't know what that is, and she explains that it is a show of his paintings and it is good news. She wants to go. She is excited on the telephone. I tell her great, but there's a radio call coming in, I'll talk to her later, and I hang up. I thought: I want to go, too.

I want to go and hold down my stool at The World and drink my gallon of coffee, but Arvella the dispatcher says it's something from Nemo out at Earth Adventure, a bear attack or something. So I lock up and I drive out to Earth Adventure.

On the way out I'm thinking about Derec and his show, and I'm kind of blue thinking about what he ever thinks of his old man. Did you ever do that, wonder what your grown kids think of you? The times you tried, the times you didn't try. No matter who you are, I think, you still want your boy to be like you. Derec
is
like me, with his ears, and he's got the build, but the rest … I don't know.

Old Earth Adventure is about on its last legs. If you didn't know where you were going, I doubt you could find the place. The two terrific signs Nemo put up before Harold, Whitney, and I worked for him are all peeled to hell, and a Chinese elm has taken the best one, the one with the dinosaur peeking over at the boatload of people. You can still see the profile of the dinosaur poking up above the sign, but you can't read a word through the bushes.

It turned out not to be a bear attack. I knew it wouldn't be. Nemo's bear, Alex, hasn't been awake for about two years. It turned out to be Monty, the old cougar, who must be forty now and who's lost most of his hair and teeth and whose skin sags off his bones like it was somebody else's suit; Monty had fallen out of a tree and broke his hind leg on the hood of some tourist's Ford. By the time I arrived, Monty had already dragged himself into the women's restroom and he was growling in the corner like an old man getting ready for his last spit. His poor old rheumy eyes were full of tears. Hell, I'd known him from a kitten when they found him west of Mercy at the Ringenburgs', crying in the barn being harassed by a dozen swallows. I'd fed that cat a lot of corndogs the summer I was seventeen and worked the boats.

So I kept guard by the women's room door, so nobody would get a surprise, while we waited for Doctor Werner to come out from town. The guy from the Ford was arguing, or trying to argue, with Nemo about the damage and the scare and the hazard, and all Nemo would do was point at me and say, “There's the sheriff.” But the guy wasn't coming near me or the shack where Monty was dying. Finally he left and the vet pulled up in his black van. I stayed with him while he drugged the big old cat. Then Werner and Nemo had a little talk outside while I watched Monty's tongue loll farther and farther out of his mouth. Just above him in the stall, somebody had carved “Kill All Men” in uneven printing.

When the two men came back they had decided that this was it for Monty, and Werner said he'd haul him off. But Nemo said no, said to put him to sleep right there in the women's room, so Werner did. Monty, who was already asleep, didn't even quiver.

Then Nemo and Werner argued about money for a while, Nemo trying to give the doc a twenty and the doctor not even looking Nemo in the face, saying, “No way, Nemo, not this time. No charge.” They pushed that twenty back and forth twenty times like two men in a restaurant, and finally the vet climbed in his van and headed out.

Nemo stood there with his twenty still in his hand in the middle of the dirt road and said he was pretty close to it this time. If he lost any more animals, Earth Adventure would have to close. You couldn't charge people four bucks a car to drive along a half mile dirt road to see one bear sleeping in a way that showed his worn out old ass, a plastic tiger Nemo had gotten from the Exxon station in Clinton, six peacocks, and four hundred geese. “It was different with a mountain lion,” he said. “Monty was
something.
”