Kind of makes you feel like you could fly right over the roofs, doesn’t it?”
“Yes sir.” I’d been thinking the exact same thing just a minute or so
before.
“Oh, don’t ‘sir’ me. Call me Vernon.”
“Cory’s been taught to respect his elders,” Dad said.
Vernon looked at him with an expression of surprise and dismay. “Elders?
But we’re the same age.”
Dad didn’t speak for a few seconds. Then he said, “Oh” in a careful
voice.
“Cory, come here and run the trains! Okay?” He was standing next to a
control box with dials and levers on it. “Express freight’s coming through!
Toot toot!”
I walked to the control box, which looked as complicated as dividing
fractions. “What do I do?”
“Anything,” Vernon said. “That’s the fun of it.”
Hesitantly, I started twisting dials and pushing levers. Some of the
trains got faster, others slower. The steam engine was really puffing now. The
signal lights blinked and the whistles blew.
“Is Moorwood still here, Vernon?” my father asked.
“Resting. He’s upstairs, resting.” Vernon’s attention was fixed on the
trains.
“Can I see him?”
“Nobody sees him when he’s resting,” Vernon explained.
“When is he not restin’, then?”
“I don’t know. He’s always too tired to tell me.”
“Vernon, would you look at me?” Vernon turned his head toward my dad, but
his eyes kept cutting back to the trains. “Is Moorwood still alive?”
“Alive, alive-o,” Vernon said. “Clams and mussels, alive, alive-o.” He
frowned, as if the question had finally registered. “Of course he’s alive! Who
do you think runs all this business stuff?”
“Maybe Mr. Pritchard does?”
“My daddy is upstairs resting,” Vernon repeated with firm emphasis on the
resting. “Are you a milkman or a member of the Inquisition?”
“Just a milkman,” Dad said. “A curious milkman.”
“And curiouser and curiouser you get. Pick up the speed, Cory! Number Six
is running late!”
I kept twisting the dials. The trains were zipping around the bends and
racing between the hills.
“I liked your story about the lake,” Vernon said. “That’s why I painted
the lake black. It’s got a dark secret deep inside, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, si—Vernon,” I corrected myself. I’d have to get used to being able
to call a grown-up by his first name.
“I read about it in the Journal.” Vernon reached out toward a hillside to
straighten a crooked tree, and his shadow fell over the earth. Then, the task
done, he stepped back and gazed down upon the town. “The killer had to know
how deep Saxon’s Lake is. So he has to be a local. Maybe he lives in one of
those houses, right there in Zephyr. But, if I’m to understand the dead man
was never identified and nobody’s turned up missing since March, then he must
not have been a local. So: what’s the connection between a man who lives here
and a man who lived somewhere far away?”
“The sheriff would like to know that, too.”
“Sheriff Amory’s a good man,” Vernon said. “Just not a good sheriff. He’d
be the first to admit it. He doesn’t have the hound-dog instinct; he lets the
birds fly when he’s got his paws on them.” Vernon scratched a place just below
his navel, his head cocked to one side. Then he walked to a brass wallplate
and flicked two switches. The room’s lights went off; tiny lights in some of
the toy houses came on. The trains followed their headlights around the
tracks. “So early in the morning,” he mused. “But if I was going to kill
somebody, I’d have killed them early enough to dump them in the lake and be
sure nobody was coming along Route Ten. Why’d the killer wait until almost
dawn to do it?”
“I wish I knew,” Dad said.
I kept playing with the levers, the dials illuminated before me.
“It must be somebody who doesn’t get home delivery from Green Meadows,”
Vernon decided. “He didn’t think about the milkmen’s schedules, did he? You
know what I believe?” Dad didn’t answer. “I believe the killer’s a night owl.
I think dumping the body into the lake was the last thing he did before he
went home and went to bed. I believe if you find a night owl who doesn’t drink
milk, you’ve got your killer.”
“Doesn’t drink milk? How do you figure that?”
“Milk helps you sleep,” Vernon said. “The killer doesn’t like to sleep,
and if he works in the daytime, he’ll drink his coffee black.”
The only response Dad gave was a muffled grunt, whether in agreement or
in sympathy I didn’t know.
Mr. Pritchard returned to the darkened room to announce that dinner was
being served. Then Vernon turned off the trains and said, “Come on with me,
Cory,” and I followed him as Dad went with the butler. We walked into a room
with suits of armor standing in it, and there was a long table with two places
set, one across from the other. Vernon told me to choose a seat, so I sat
where I could see the knights. In a few minutes Gwendolyn entered, carrying a
silver tray, and so began one of the strangest dinners of my life.
We had strawberry soup with vanilla wafers crumbled up in it. We had
ravioli and chocolate cake on the same plate. We had lemon-lime Fizzies to
drink, and Vernon put a whole Fizzie tablet in his mouth and I laughed when
the green bubbles boiled out. We had hamburger patties and buttered popcorn,
and dessert was a bowl of devil’s food cake batter you ate with a spoon. As I
ate these things, I did so with guilty pleasure; a kid’s feast like this was
the kind of thing that would’ve made my mother swoon. There wasn’t a vegetable
in sight, no carrots, no spinach, no Brussels sprouts. I did get a whiff of
what I thought to be beef stew from the kitchen, so I figured Dad was having a
grown-up’s meal. He probably had no idea what I was assaulting my stomach
with. Vernon was a happy eater; he laughed and laughed and both of us wound up
licking our batter bowls in a sugar-sopped delirium.
Vernon wanted to know all about me. What I liked to do, who my friends
were, what books I liked to read, what movies I enjoyed. He’d seen Invaders
from Mars, too; it was a linchpin between us. He said he used to have a great
big trunk full of superhero comic books, but his daddy had made him throw them
away. He said he used to have shelves of Hardy Boys mysteries, until his daddy
had gotten mad at him one day and burned them in the fireplace. He said he
used to have all the Doc Savage magazines and the Tarzan and John Carter of
Mars books and the Shadow and Weird Tales and boxes of Argosy and Boy’s Life
magazines, but his daddy had said Vernon had gotten too old for those things
and all of them, every one, had gone into the fire or the trash and burned to
ashes or been covered in earth. He said he would give a million dollars if he
could have them again and he said that if I had any of them I should hold on
to them forever because they were magic.
And once you burn the magic things or cast them out in the garbage,
Vernon said, you become a beggar for magic again.
“‘I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,’” Vernon said.
“What?” I asked him. I’d never even seen Vernon wearing shorts before.
“I wrote a book once,” he told me.
“I know. Mom’s read it.”
“Would you like to be a writer someday?”
“I guess,” I said. “I mean… if I could be.”
“Your story was good. I used to write stories. My daddy said it was fine
for me to have a hobby like that, but never to forget that someday all this
would be my responsibility.”
“All what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He never would tell me.”
“Oh.” Somehow this made sense. “How come you didn’t write another book?”
Vernon started to say something; his mouth opened, then closed again. He
sat for a long moment staring at his hands, his fingers smeared with cake
batter. His eyes had taken on a shiny glint. “I only had the one in me,” he
said at last. “I looked and I looked for another one. But it’s not there. It
wasn’t there yesterday, it’s not there today… and I don’t think it’ll be there
tomorrow, either.”
“How come?” I asked. “Can’t you think of a story?”
“I’ll tell you a story,” he said.
I waited.
Vernon drew a long breath and let it go. His eyes were unfocused, as if
he were struggling to stay awake but sleep was pulling him under. “There was a
boy,” he began, “who wrote a book about a town. A little town, about the size
of Zephyr. Yes, very much like Zephyr. This boy wrote a book, and it took him
four years to get everything exactly right. And while this boy was writing his
book, his daddy…” He trailed off.
I waited.
“His… daddy…” Vernon frowned, trying to find his thoughts again. “Yes,”
he said. “His daddy told him he was nothing but a fool. His daddy said it
night and day. You fool, you crazy fool. Spending your time writing a book,
when you ought to know business. That’s what I raised you for. Business. I
didn’t raise you to spend your time disappointing me and throwing your chances
away, I raised you for business and your mother is looking at you from her
grave because you disappointed her, too. Yes, you broke her heart when you
failed college and that’s why she took the pills that reason and that reason
alone. Because you failed and all that money was wasted I should’ve just
thrown it out the window let the niggers and the white trash have it.” Vernon
blinked; something about his face looked shattered. “‘Negroes,’ the boy said.
We must be civilized. Do you see, Cory?”
“I… don’t…”
“Chapter two,” Vernon said. “Four years. The boy stood it for four years.
And he wrote this book about the town, and the people in it who made it what
it was. And maybe there wasn’t a real plot to it, maybe there wasn’t anything
that grabbed you by the throat and tried to shake you until your bones
rattled, but the book was about life. It was the flow and the voices, the
little day-to-day things that make up the memory of living. It meandered like
the river, and you never knew where you were going until you got there, but
the journey was sweet and deep and left you wishing for more. It was alive in
a way that the boy’s life was not.” He sat staring at nothing for a moment. I
watched his chocolate-smeared fingers gripping at the table’s edge. “He found
a publisher,” Vernon went on. “A real New York City publisher. You know,
that’s where the heart of things is. That’s where they make the books by the
hundreds of thousands, and each one is a child different and special and some
walk tall and some are crippled, but they all go out into the world from
there. And the boy got a call from New York City and they said they wanted to
publish his book but would he consider some changes to make it even better
than it was and the boy was so happy and proud he said yes he wanted it to be
the very best it could be.” Vernon’s glassy eyes moved, finding pictures in
the air.
“So,” Vernon said in a quiet voice, “the boy packed his bags while his
daddy told him he was a stupid fool that he’d come back to this house crawling
and then we’d see who was right, wouldn’t we? And the boy was a very naughty
boy that day, he told his daddy he’d see him in the bad place first. He went
from Zephyr to Birmingham on a bus and Birmingham to New York City on a train,
and he walked into an office in a tall building to find out what was going to
happen to his child.”
Vernon lapsed into silence again. He picked up his batter bowl, trying to
find something else to lick. “What happened?” I prodded.
“They told him.” He smiled; it was a gaunt smile. “They said this is a
business, like any other. We have charts and graphs, and we have numbers on
the wall. We know that this year people want murder mysteries, and your town
would make a wonderful setting for one. Murder mysteries, they said. Thrill
people. We’re having to compete with television now, they said. It’s not like
it used to be, when people had time to read. People want murder mysteries, and
we have charts and graphs to prove it. They said if the boy would fit a murder
mystery into the book—and it wouldn’t be too difficult, they said, it wouldn’t
be too hard at all to do—then they would publish it with the boy’s name right
there on the cover. But they said they didn’t like the title Moon Town. No,
that wouldn’t do. Can you write hard-boiled? they asked. They said they needed
a hard-boiled writer this year.”
“Did he do it?” I asked.
“Oh, yes.” Vernon nodded. “Oh, he did it. Whatever they wanted. Because
it was so close, so close he could taste it. And he knew his daddy was
watching over his shoulder. He did it.” Vernon’s smile was like a fresh wound
in scar tissue. “But they were wrong. It was very, very hard to do. The boy
got a room in a hotel, and he worked on it. That hotel… it was all he could
afford. And as he worked on that rented typewriter in that mean little rented
room, some of that hotel and some of that city got into him and made its way
through his fingers into that book. Then one day he didn’t know where he was
anymore. He was lost, and there were no signs telling him which way to go. He
heard people crying and saw people hurt, and something inside him closed up
like a fist and all he wanted to do was get to that last page and get out of
it. He heard his daddy laughing, late at night. Heard him say you fool, you
little fool you should’ve stood your ground. Because his daddy was in him, and
his daddy had come with him all that way from Zephyr to New York City.”
Vernon’s eyes squeezed shut for a few agonized seconds. Then they opened
again, and I saw they were rimmed with red. “That boy. That stupid little
foolish boy took their money, and he ran. Back to Zephyr, back to the clean
hills, back where he could think. And then that book came out, with the boy’s
name on it, and he saw that cover and knew he had taken his child and he had
dressed that beautiful child up like a prostitute and now only people who
craved ugliness wanted her. They wanted to wallow in her, and use her up and
throw her away because she was only one of a hundred thousand and she was
crippled. And that boy… that boy had done it to her. That evil, greedy boy.”
