Chapter 2 #3
“Thanks, but this is fine,” I said, and it was. Any more sweetness and I thought my head would explode. And it was strong—like drinking carbonated espresso.
The kid gave me a grin that was as sweet as the stuff in the frosted mug—there was none of the amused disdain I’d felt emanating from the Elvis wannabe outside. “We read a story in school,” he said, “where the locals eat the tourists if they show up after the season’s over.”
“Frankie, that’s a hell of a thing to tell a visitor,” Mr. Anicetti said. But he was smiling when he said it.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve taught that story myself. Shirley Jackson, right? ‘The Summer People.’ ”
“That’s the one,” Frank agreed. “I didn’t really get it, but I liked it.”
I took another pull on my root beer, and when I set it down (it made a satisfyingly thick chunk on the marble counter), I wasn’t exactly surprised to see it was almost gone. I could get addicted to these, I thought. It beats the living shit out of Moxie.
The elder Anicetti exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling, where an overhead paddle fan pulled it into lazy blue rafters. “Do you teach out in Wisconsin, Mr.—?”
“Epping,” I said. I was too caught by surprise to even think of giving a fake name. “I do, actually. But this is my sabbatical year.”
“That means he’s taking a year off,” Frank said.
“I know what it means,” Anicetti said. He was trying to sound irritated and doing a bad job of it.
I decided I liked these two as much as I liked the root beer.
I even liked the aspiring teenage hood outside, if only because he didn’t know he was already a cliché.
There was a sense of safety here, a sense of—I don’t know—preordination.
It was surely false, this world was as dangerous as any other, but I possessed one piece of knowledge I would before this afternoon have believed was reserved only for God: I knew that the smiling boy who had enjoyed the Shirley Jackson story (even though he didn’t “get it”) was going to live through that day and over fifty years of days to come.
He wasn’t going to be killed in a car crash, have a heart attack, or contract lung cancer from breathing his father’s secondhand smoke. Frank Anicetti was good to go.
I glanced at the clock on the wall (START YOUR DAY WITH A SMILE, the face said, DRINK CHEER-UP COFFEE). It read 12:22. That was nothing to me, but I pretended to be startled. I drank off the rest of my beeyah and stood up. “Got to get moving if I’m going to meet my friends in Castle Rock on time.”
“Well, take it easy on Route 117,” Anicetti said. “That road’s a bugger.” It came out buggah. I hadn’t heard such a thick Maine accent in years. Then I realized that was literally true, and I almost laughed out loud.
“I will,” I said. “Thanks. And son? About that Shirley Jackson story.”
“Yes, sir?” Sir, yet. And nothing sarcastic about it. I was deciding that 1958 had been a pretty good year. Aside from the stench of the mill and the cigarette smoke, that was.
“There’s nothing to get.”
“No? That’s not what Mr. Marchant says.”
“With all due respect to Mr. Marchant, you tell him Jake Epping says that sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”
He laughed. “I will! Period three tomorrow morning!”
“Good.” I nodded to the father, wishing I could tell him that, thanks to Moxie (which he didn’t carry… yet), his business was going to be standing on the corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road long after he was gone. “Thanks for the root beer.”
“Come back anytime, son. I’m thinking about lowering the price on the large.”
“To a dime?”
He grinned. Like his son’s, it was easy and open. “Now you’re cooking with gas.”
The bell jingled. Three ladies came in. No slacks; they wore dresses with hemlines that dropped halfway down their shins.
And hats! Two with little fluffs of white veil.
They began rummaging through the open crates of fruit, looking for perfection.
I started away from the soda fountain, then had a thought and turned back.
“Can you tell me what a greenfront is?”
The father and the son exchanged an amused glance that made me think of an old joke.
Tourist from Chicago driving a fancy sportscar pulls up to a farmhouse way out in the country.
Old farmer’s sitting on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe.
Tourist leans out of his Jaguar and asks, “Say, oldtimer, can you tell me how to get to East Machias?” Old farmer puffs thoughtfully on his pipe a time or two, then says, “Don’tcha move a goddam inch. ”
“You really are an out-of-stater, aren’t you?” Frank asked. His accent wasn’t as thick as his father’s. Probably watches more TV, I thought. There’s nothing like TV when it comes to eroding a regional accent.
“I am,” I said.
“That’s funny, because I could swear I hear a little Yankee twang.”
“It’s a Yooper thing,” I said. “You know, the Upper Peninsula?” Except—dang!—the UP was Michigan.
But neither of them seemed to realize it. In fact young Frank turned away and started doing dishes. By hand, I noticed.
“The greenfront’s the liquor store,” Anicetti said. “Right across the street, if you’re wanting to pick up a pint of something.”
“I think the root beer’s good enough for me,” I said. “I was just wondering. Have a nice day.”
“You too, my friend. Come back and see us.”
I passed the fruit-examining trio, murmuring “Ladies” as I went by. And wishing I had a hat to tip. A fedora, maybe.
Like the ones you see in the old movies.
6
The aspiring hoodlum had left his post, and I thought about walking up Main Street to see what else had changed, but only for a second.
No sense pressing my luck. Suppose someone asked about my clothes?
I thought my sport coat and slacks looked more or less all right, but did I know that for sure?
And then there was my hair, which touched my collar.
In my own time that would be considered perfectly okay for a high school teacher—conservative, even—but it might garner glances in a decade where shaving the back of the neck was considered a normal part of the barbering service and sideburns were reserved for rockabilly dudes like the one who had called me Daddy-O.
Of course I could say I was a tourist, that all men wore their hair a little long in Wisconsin, it was quite the coming thing, but hair and clothes—that feeling of standing out, like some space alien in an imperfectly assumed human disguise—was only part of it.
Mostly I was just plain freaked. Not mentally tottering, I think a human mind that’s moderately well-adjusted can absorb a lot of strangeness before it actually totters, but freaked, yes.
I kept thinking about the ladies in their long dresses and hats, ladies who would be embarrassed to show so much as the edge of a bra strap in public.
And the taste of that root beer. How full it had been.
Directly across the street was a modest storefront with MAINE STATE LIQUOR STORE printed in raised letters over the small show window.
And yes, the facade was a light green. Inside I could just make out my pal from the drying shed.
His long black coat hung from his coathanger shoulders; he had taken off his hat and his hair stood out around his head like that of a cartoon nebbish who has just inserted Finger A in Electric Socket B.
He was gesticulating at the clerk with both hands, and I could see his precious yellow card in one.
I felt certain that Al Templeton’s half a rock was in the other.
The clerk, who was wearing a short white tunic that looked quite a bit like the one the Moxie Doc wore in the annual parade, looked singularly unimpressed.
I walked to the corner, waited on traffic, and crossed back to the Worumbo side of the Old Lewiston Road.
A couple of men were pushing a dolly loaded with bales of cloth across the courtyard, smoking and laughing.
I wondered if they had any idea what the combination of cigarette smoke and mill pollution was doing to their innards, and supposed not.
Probably that was a blessing, although it was more a question for a philosophy teacher than for a guy who earned his daily bread exposing sixteen-year-olds to the wonders of Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shirley Jackson.
When they had entered the mill, rolling their dolly between the rusty metal jaws of doors three stories high, I crossed back to the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT sign hanging from it.
I told myself not to walk too fast, and not to peer all around me—not to do anything that would attract attention—but it was hard.
Now that I was almost back to where I came in, the urge to hurry was almost irresistible.
My mouth was dry, and the big root beer I’d drunk roiled in my stomach.
What if I couldn’t get back? What if the marker I’d dropped was gone?
What if it was still there, but the stairs weren’t?
Easy, I told myself. Easy.
I couldn’t resist one quick survey before ducking under the chain, but the courtyard was entirely mine.
Somewhere distant, like a sound heard in a dream, I could again hear that low diesel wuff-chuff.
It called to mind another line from another song: This train has got the disappearing railroad blues.
I walked down the green flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard and high up in my chest. The torn scrap of paper with the chunk of concrete on top of it was still there; so far so good. I kicked at it gently, thinking Please God let this work, please God let me get back.