Chapter One #3
“You shouldn’t have bothered. I keep writing to that son of a bitch in the White House.
I keep telling him I see right through him, right through this whole goddamn mess.
If we cut off Japan’s oil, I said, Japan’ll come after us.
But you know what? He wanted them to come after us, because he couldn’t wait to get us into this thing.
He just about puts the whole Navy in one port, and now we’ve got more than two thousand men dead.
Some of them didn’t even have time to put their pants on.
” Everett leaned sideways and spat. “The day you were born and one of your legs come up short, the doctor said you were healthy except for the deformity and right then I thought, well, that’s it.
If we get into another big one, he’ll never be in it. ”
Wanting to put space between himself and his father, and the word deformity, Cal said, “All right, Pop, I’ll see you in about a week,” and started toward his car.
“Hey,” Everett called. A moment later: “Goddammit, stop!”
Cal kept walking. How poorly thought-out this entire day had been. When would he learn? When would he stop trying to impress the old crank? He reached the Nash and was opening the driver’s door when something smacked hard against the back of his coat.
A snowball, it turned out. Shaped and hardened by tired, arthritic hands. Everett stood several feet away, huffing from having moved so quickly, his breath crystallizing in front of him. He said, “I’m glad, is what I’m trying to tell you.”
—
The next day, Cal considered growing a beard.
He considered moving to a new town where nobody knew him and going by his middle name, Maurice Jenkins, glad to meet you, all for the sake of being able to claim he’d been in the war and had gotten wounded and had been sent back home with a limp.
By late morning, he was dollying bags of concrete mix into an enormous, bone-cold shed at work and feeling loathsome for even having such a thought.
By late afternoon, all he wanted was to drown his frustrations in a root beer float.
He spent the rest of his shift hosing off trucks while he stood in a soup of melted snow and rock paste.
Then he clocked out, did a quick washup in one of the utility sinks, and drove through the slush to Fink’s Drugstore.
Before going in, he caught sight of his reflection in the window: the same green-and-black-checkered coat he’d worn in high school, scarf pulled up to his nose, stocking cap.
When he pulled the cap off and ruffled his hand through his hair, a cloud of concrete dust rose from his head and drifted down Fordham Street.
There were two people sitting at opposite ends of the long wooden lunch counter and several women in one of the booths, eating sandwiches and drinking sodas.
The women wore pastel sweaters with unit patches sewn to the sleeves.
One of them had a set of officer’s bars pinned to her collar, a souvenir sent home from her husband or boyfriend, no doubt.
Cal shed his winter gear and piled it onto an empty stool at the counter. He sat down and blew his nose into a napkin. More concrete dust. He asked for a root beer float.
Mary Lisnik, who was nearing fifty and had worked at Fink’s since she was seventeen, raised both eyebrows and, hoping to entice, said, as if surprised, “We’ve got a new dessert item.”
“I don’t think so,” Cal said.
“Give me a chance. It’s made with peanut butter and banana, and it’s called Paratroop Pie.” She motioned with her cigarette toward the grease board behind her, where the name was printed, next to a little drawing of a parachute. “Goes down easy. Get it?”
“Just the float, thanks.”
“God grant,” Mary Lisnik said, pushing the cooler lid open with the heel of her hand.
—
Four seats over, just around the bend in the lunch counter, Becky Hanover sat with an open book and a cup of tea.
The book was Murder on the Orient Express.
Agatha Christie, Becky knew from a magazine article, had vanished once for ten whole days.
It was supposed that she’d been stricken by amnesia and had gone wandering in a fit of confusion.
During the time she’d been missing, her friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had given one of her gloves to a spirit medium in an effort to find her.
Then, with the help of the spirit medium or not (the article hadn’t said), Christie had been found residing in a hotel several towns away.
It was suggested that marriage troubles had prompted her disappearance: she’d simply wanted to be gone for a little while.
Becky had helped solve a mystery once. When she was nine, her friend Norma Shefflin’s father had gone out one evening for cigarettes during a freezing rain and had never returned.
Mr. Shefflin became an official missing person, and after the police had looked for him for several days, his wife admitted that the two of them had been quarreling and he’d been angry when he walked out, so maybe he’d just—left.
Neighbors went from discussing the mystery of the disappearance to discussing the gall of a man who would cut out on his family.
A month later, Becky was in the Shefflin’s yard building a snowman with Norma and a couple of other girls when she heard Mr. Shefflin’s voice in her head, crystal clear.
Tell them I’m not far away.
She stopped rolling her snowboulder. Listened.
Again, Mr. Shefflin’s voice said, Tell them I’m not far away.
“Your dad’s not far away,” she told Norma.
In the general commotion that followed—Norma’s confusion, Norma’s mother’s alarm—Becky explained that the missing man had spoken inside her head, twice.
Mrs. Shefflin called Becky’s parents, who sounded dismayed and apologized for their daughter’s behavior.
That night, Ida and Roman Hanover sat Becky down at their dining room table and asked her to explain herself. Soon, Ida was looking at the ceiling and Roman was half-squinting at his daughter, as if trying to see behind her face. “That’s it?” he said. “You heard someone speaking who wasn’t there?”
Becky nodded.
“Don’t do that.”
“But what if I hear his voice again?”
“Don’t hear his voice again,” her father said. “No more voices.”
Then spring came, and the nearby Laurie River thawed, and in the stretch that ran alongside the state road a mile outside of town, a man fly-fishing in waders discovered Mr. Shefflin’s car—with Mr. Shefflin in it.
Norma stopped being her friend, and the Shefflins moved to Virginia the following year.
But Mr. Shefflin had been right, and so had Becky: he hadn’t been far away.
It was frustrating that no one seemed to appreciate that, but it helped explain why, as the years went by, she continued to hear voices in her head—men and women, sometimes children—telling her things she didn’t know.
Tournesol, for example. A girl who wasn’t there had whispered C’est un tournesol inside Becky’s ear once while she was drawing a sunflower, and she had to go to the library and look the word up in a French dictionary.
After struggling a bit with the spelling, she found it. Tournesol: sunflower.
J’aime tes cheveux. The little girl had said that to her too. I like your hair.
Becky believed the dead lingered mostly because they still had something to say—though a few also showed up to listen.
She believed you shivered in this life when someone in the future walked over your grave, and she believed your scalp tingled when a stranger contemplated you.
As she sat reading, her scalp began to tingle.
She looked up from the book and studied first the man at the end of the counter who had wide, suited shoulders on which his head rested like a sack of potatoes, then the three women sitting in the booth having sandwiches, then the pharmacist in the back who had one pair of glasses on his face and another pair on his bald head, then the woman behind the counter who had a braid sticking out over each ear and was smoking and reading a newspaper, and finally Becky studied the blond young man with his elbow on the bar, his head resting in the well of his hand as he drank from a straw sunk into a tall fluted glass.
She recognized him from school. The cute boy who limped, who didn’t play any sports. They’d never spoken.
She gathered her cup and saucer and book and moved over to the stool next to his.
“Were you just contemplating me?” she asked, startling him.
She wore a black beret and a red cape. Cal said no, but she cleared her throat and told him she was very intuitive.
“They’re bombing Australia,” Mary Lisnik said from behind the counter to no one in particular.
The sack-headed man looked up from his sandwich. “That was last week.”
“This is today’s paper,” Mary Lisnik said, “so I guess they were still bombing it yesterday.”
“I intuited that you were contemplating me,” Becky told Cal. “Which means if you weren’t, you will be soon.”
“Well, I guess I am now,” Cal said.
“This is called Murder on the Orient Express,” she said as if presenting a book report in school. “It’s about a terrible man who does terrible things and then ends up on a train with almost everyone he’s done them to. I won’t spoil it for you by saying more.”
Cal already knew she was Becky Hanover, the compact, pretty, and slightly odd girl who’d been a year behind him in school.
He vaguely remembered her reciting “The Raven” at an afternoon assembly.
She had a pleasing, round face in the middle of all her curly dark brown hair.
He’d seen her sitting alone in the lunchroom, and in the bleachers at an afternoon football game, and he’d thought of approaching her and saying hello but had never worked up his nerve.
Hers was the first beret he’d ever seen that wasn’t on someone in a movie.
“I love mysteries. What do you like to read?” she asked.