Pandora by Holly Hollander

“They won’t give no name.”

Megan said, “He only calls when Larry’s gone. Or if he calls when Larry’s here Larry won’t admit he talked to him.”

“What’s he say?”

“Nothin’.” That was Molly.

“He just says, ‘Let me speak to Sergeant Lief.’ When we say Larry’s not here, he hangs up.”

“Sergeant Lief? I thought Larry was a lieutenant.”

Molly stood up and smoothed her dress, looking proud for a minute. “He was a sergeant first, Holly. It was what they call a battlefield commission.”

“It’s not what this guy says,” Megan put in. “It’s the way he sounds. Sometimes when I hear him, I wonder whether Larry’s coming back at all.” She looked at Molly. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

I didn’t think she should have either. Molly wasn’t strong on lips at the best of times, and when Megan came out with that beauty her mouth looked like the cut a can opener makes. She reached down under the counter by the cash register and came up with a .38 snub-nose, not pointing it at us but just laying it there on the glass and turning it around and around with one long bright-red fingernail. “Maybe I never went to no college, but I witness that I learned to shoot from my brothers, and it was a hard school. You might want to pass it around town that the day Larry don’t come home somebody else won’t eat no supper either.”

“You put that away before you get us all busted,” I said. The Barton cops are damn near afraid to touch their own guns.

Molly picked up the revolver again and held it, weighing it in her hand. “You tell them what will happen if sometime Larry don’t come home,” she said; but after a second or two she stuck it back under the register.

“How long have you been learning the business?” I asked Megan, trying to pretend that nothing had happened.

“Two hours, maybe.”

“Then come on before you suffer terminal brain-strain. I need you to help me pass judgment on a new blow- drier.”

It must have sounded retarded as hell, but Molly wasn’t the type to notice; hair was serious business for her, and it let me pull Megan out of the shop.

When she was up behind me on Sidi she whispered, “He names guys sometimes, and then he gives a year. Corporal Raglan, nineteen seventy-two. Like that. It isn’t just that, either. I think he’s told Molly that Larry’s got another girl someplace.”

I guess my face must have looked about like Molly’s had in the shop; it’s a damned good thing Megan couldn’t see it. “She know who it is?”

Megan said no, and reeled off a list of suspects, none of them Elaine. By the time she got to the end I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention. Across from the Redman Lounge a black sedan was pulling away from the curb, and I hadn’t seen anybody get into it.

How Uncle De Witte Sinclair Played Postman

Maybe this is where I should write a transition. You know, “The big yellow summer sun grew brighter each new day. Me and Leslie and Megan, and Kris and Adam and John lolled around our pool and Les’s pool and the pool in the park. Locusts buzzed in the elms like spaced-out doorbells, and the hamburger smell from the fast-food joints up on the highway came drifting through the shadows like smoke.”

There—I knew I could do it. What I’m really trying to say is that summer dragged along about like it usually does. On TV, reruns of utterly ghastly shows got pushed aside by first runs of the most utterly god-awful summer tryouts the world has ever seen. I went on strike about Elaine wanting me to drop karate. Everybody was sick to death of movies, but it wasn’t nearly time to think about the homecoming dance yet.

What it was time to think of, naturally, was the Fair. And all of us got mixed up in it one way or another. We were all so bored we would have mixed into a sparrow fight.

I guess it was a good thing; Lord knows there was plenty of donkey work to do. There were cards you had to talk the stores and eateries into sticking up in their windows, envelopes by the thousand to address and stuff, and the whole damned high school to get ready. I think I already mentioned that there was always a book sale. It was put on by the Friends of the Barton Public Library, which is not the same as the Women’s Club, though a lot of people belong to both of them. The Friends is supposed to be for men as well as women, and there are actually some men in it—seven or eight the last time I looked. Also there are kids in it, because all the librarians belong and if you hang around the library very much they bring you coffee and cookies from their Common Room and talk a little about the Greatest Writer in the World (meaning whoever you just discovered that you didn’t think anybody else knew about; for me then it was Baroness Blixen, or maybe the Englishman who wrote the Father Brown mysteries) and first thing you know they’re shoving a piece of paper in front of your nose.

Then you say, “Oh, gee. Well, gosh, it’s fifteen bucks a year. Honest, Ms. Sudden, I don’t have fifteen bucks.”

Then Ms. Sudden, who’s gone through this maybe fifty times and probably gets a new chain for her glasses whenever she signs up another kid, says, “Darling, don’t worry about a thing. The Friends will just send a bill to your home, and I’m certain your parents will be delighted that you want to become involved.”

Now right there was where she slipped it past you. Become involved. That means that when the book sale looms over the old horizon the Friends are going to call you up, and next thing you know you’re bouncing along in the back of a truck with four or five other slave-labor kids, heading for a house you never knew existed down at the end of a dirt road to load up a hundred tons of books some lady’s father left behind when he passed on during the Coolidge inauguration.

“Oh, dear,” says the old lady. “I didn’t know you’d bring so many children with you.”