nodded and let his lip fall back into place. It was something of a relief.
“Teeth never have been much good,” Rutledge said indifferently. “When I get workin” again and can afford me a good set of dentures, I'm gonna have all of “em jerked. Fuck em. Point is, I had my two front teeth there on top before I headed up to Haven week before last to check on Gramp. Hell, they wasn't even loose.”
“They fell out when you started to get close to Haven?”
“Didn't fall out,” Rutledge finished his beer. “I puked “em out.”
“Oh,” Leandro had replied faintly.
“You know, another brew'd go down good. Talkin's
“Thirsty work, I know,” Leandro said, signaling the waitress. He was over his limit, but he found he could use another one himself.
Alvin Rutledge wasn't the only person who had tried to visit a friend or relative in Haven during July, nor the only one to become ill and turn back. Using the voting lists and area phone books as a starting point, Leandro turned up three people who told stories similar to Rutledge's. He uncovered a fourth incident through pure coincidence-or almost pure. His mother knew he was “following up” some aspect of his “big story,” and happened to mention that her friend Eileen Pulsifer had a friend who lived down in Haven.
Eileen was fifteen years older than Leandro's mother, which put her close to seventy. Over tea and cloyingly sweet gingersnaps, she told Leandro a story similar to those he had already heard.
Mrs Pulsifer's friend was Mary Jacklin (whose grandson was Tommy Jacklin). They had visited back and forth for more than forty years, and often played in local bridge tournaments. This summer she hadn't seen Mary at all. Not even once. She'd spoken to her on the phone, and she seemed fine; her excuses always sounded believable… but all the same, something about them-a bad headache, too much baking to do, the family had decided on the spur of the moment to go down to Kennebunk and visit the Trolley Museum-wasn't quite right.
“They were fine by the one-by-one, but they seemed odd to me in the whole bunch, if you see what I mean.” She offered the cookies. “More “snaps?”
“No thank you,” Leandro said.
“Oh, go ahead! I know you boys! Your mother taught you to be polite, but no boy ever born could turn down a gingersnap! Now you just go on and take what you hanker for!”
Smiling dutifully, Leandro took another gingersnap.
Settling back and folding her hands on her tight round belly, Mrs Pulsifer went on: “I begun to think something might be wrong… I still think that maybe something's wrong, truth to tell. First thing to cross my mind was that maybe Mary didn't want to be my friend anymore… that maybe I did or said something to offend her. But no, says I to myself, if I'd done something “ I guess she'd tell me. After forty years of friendship I guess she would. Besides, she didn't really sound cool to me, you know
“But she did sound different.”
Eileen Pulsifer nodded decisively. “Ayuh. And that got me thinking that maybe she was sick, that maybe, God save us, her doctor had found a cancer or something inside her, and she didn't want any of her old friends to know. So I called up Vera and I said, “We're going to go down to Haven, Vera, and see Mary. We ain't going to tell her we're coming, and that way she can't call us off. You get ready, Vera,” I says, “because I'm coming by your house at ten o'clock, and if you ain't ready, I'm going to go without you. -
“Vera is-”
“Vera Anderson, in Derry. Just about my best friend in the whole world, John, except for Mary and your mother. And your mother was down in Monmouth, Visiting her sister that week.”
Leandro remembered it well: a week of such peace and quiet was a week to be treasured.
“So the two of you headed down.”
“Ayuh.”
“And you got sick.”
“Sick! I thought I was dying. My heart!” She clapped a hand dramatically over one breast. “It was beating so fast! My head started to ache, and I got a nosebleed, and Vera got scared. She says, “Turn around, Eileen, right now, you got to get to the hospital right away!”
“Well, I turned around somehow-I don't hardly remember how, the world was spinning so-and by then my mouth was bleeding, and two of my teeth fell out. Right out of my head! Did you ever hear the beat of it?”
“No,” he lied, thinking of Alvin Rutledge. “Where did it happen?”
“Why, I told you-we were going to see Mary Jacklin-”
“Yes, but were you actually in Haven when you got sick? And which way did you come in?”
“Oh, I see! No, we weren't. We were on the Old Derry Road. In Troy.”
“Close to Haven, then.”
“Oh, “bout a mile from the town line. I'd been feeling sick for a little time -whoopsy, you know-but I didn't want to say so to Vera. I kept hoping that I would feel better.”
Vera Anderson hadn't gotten sick, and this troubled Leandro. It didn't fit. Vera hadn't gotten a bloody nose, nor lost any teeth.
“No, she didn't get sick at all,” Mrs Pulsifer said. “Except with terror. I guess she was sick with that. For me… and for herself too, I imagine.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, that road's awful empty. She thought I was going to pass out. I almost did. It might have been fifteen, twenty minutes before someone came along.”
“She couldn't have driven you?”
“God bless you, John, Vera's had muscular dystrophy for years. She wears great big metal braces on her legs-cruel-looking things, they are, like something you'd expect to see on a torture chamber. It just about makes me cry sometimes to see her.”
At a quarter to ten on the morning of August 15th, Leandro crossed into the town of Troy. His stomach was tight with anticipation and-let's face it, folks-a tingle of fear. His skin felt cold.
I may get sick. I may get sick, and if I do, I'm going to leave about ninety feet of rubber reversing out of the area. Got that?
I got it, boss, he answered himself. I got it, I got it.
You may lose some teeth, too, he cautioned himself, but the loss of -a few teeth seemed a small price to pay for a story which might win him a Pulitzer Prize… and, just as important, one which would surely turn David Bright green with envy.
He passed through Troy Village, where everything seemed fine… if a little slower than usual. The first jag in the normal run of things came about a mile further south, and from a direction he wouldn't have expected. He had been listening to WZON out of Bangor. Now the normally strong AM signal began to waver and flutter. Leandro could hear one… no, two… no “ three… other stations mixed in with its signal. He frowned. That sometimes happened at night, when radiant cooling thinned the atmosphere and allowed radio signals to travel further, but he had never heard of it happening on an AM band in the morning, not even during those periods of optimum radio-transmission conditions which ham operators call “the skip.”
He ran the tuner on the Dodge's radio, and was amazed as a flood of conflicting transmissions poured out of the speakers-rock-and-roll, countryand- western, and classical music stepped all over each other. Somewhere in the background he could hear Paul Harvey extolling Amway. He turned the dial further and caught a momentarily clear transmission so surprising he pulled over. He sat staring at the radio with big eyes.
It was speaking in Japanese.
He sat and waited for the inevitable clarification -'This lesson in Beginners” Japanese has been brought to you by your local Kyanize Paint dealer,” something like that. The announcer finished. Then came the Beach Boys “Be True to Your School.” In Japanese.
Leandro continued to tune down the kHz band with a hand that shook. It was much the same all the way. As it did at night, the tangle of voices and music got worse as he tuned toward the higher frequencies. At last the tangle grew so severe it began to frighten him-it was the auditory equivalent of a squirming mass of snakes. He turned the radio off and sat behind the wheel, eyes wide, body thrumming slightly, like a man on lowgrade speed.
What is this?
Foolish to speculate when the answer lay no more than six miles up ahead… always assuming he could uncover it, of course.
Oh, I think you'll uncover it. You may not like it when you do, but yeah, I think you'll uncover it with no trouble at all.
Leandro looked around. The hay in the field on his right was long and shaggy. Too long and shaggy for August. There hadn't been any first cutting in early July. Somehow he didn't think there was going to be any August cutting, either. He looked left and saw a tumbledown barn surrounded by rusty auto parts. The corpse of a “57 Studebaker was decaying in the barn's maw. The windows seemed to stare at Leandro. There were no people to stare, at least not that he could see.
A very quiet, very polite little voice spoke up inside him, the voice of a well-mannered child at a tea party that has become decidedly scary:
I would like to go home, please.
Yes. Home to Mother. Home in time to watch the afternoon soaps with her. She would be glad to see him back with his scoop, maybe even more glad to see him back without it. They'd sit and eat cookies and drink coffee. They would talk. She would talk, rather, and he would listen. That was how it always was, and it really wasn't that bad. She could be an irritating thing sometimes, but she was…
Safe.
Safe, yeah. That was it. Safe. And whatever was going on south of Troy on this dozy summer afternoon, it wasn't at all safe.
I would like to go home, please.
Right. There had probably been times when Woodward and Bernstein felt that way when Nixon's boys were really putting the squeeze on. Bernard Fall had probably felt that way when he got off the plane in Saigon for the last time. When you saw the TV news correspondents in trouble-spots like Lebanon and Tehran, they only looked cool, calm, and collected. Viewers never had a chance to inspect their shorts.
The story is out there, and I'm going to get it, and when I collect my Pulitzer Prize, I can say I owe it all to David Bright… and my secret Superman wristwatch.
He put the Dodge in gear again and drove on toward Haven.
