A Wedding on the Banks (30 page)

“Let's turn him on his back,” Monique suggested. “Or we'll rub all the skin off his face.” Thelma wasn't so sure that a little cosmetic surgery for the motelier was a bad idea, but she helped turn Albert anyway. They were a
team
, the woman in the turban and the woman on Valium. They dragged Albert Pinkham across the snowy expanse of his motel yard and up to the front door of his house. Behind them, on the ground, they left a wide trail, a track, as though the tired workhorses of old were back at work yarding out pine logs and leaving trails in the snow.

Pausing for breath, Thelma looked at Monique Tessier's finely shaped nose, which poked out beneath the sunglasses. Oh,
where
had she seen this strange woman? They pulled Albert Pinkham into his kitchen.

“We can't lift him, so let's leave him here on the floor,” Monique said. “At least he'll be warm until he sleeps it off.”

As Marvin Sr. drove Junior into the driveway of the Albert Pinkham Motel, his car lights caught two women walking across four inches of new snow between the house and the motel. One had a bath towel on her head and was wearing dark glasses. The other was Thelma.

“What the—?” asked Junior.

“I'm not even going to ask,” said Marvin. “I've got a long day tomorrow.
You
handle this.”

Back on Albert Pinkham's floor, the snores were rolling evenly out of the grandson's mouth. On the table, in the tintype, the grandfather's hollow eyes picked up the beam of light that raced around the room as Marvin Ivy turned his car in the driveway. What was left of the lips still curved upward in a memory of the log drives and the first burly lumberjacks. The grandfather's hands were calloused from the last barn ever built in Mattagash with style. Albert Pinkham was right. A way of life was disappearing.

Folks in a town that was quite remote heard

Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo.

—“The Lonely Goatherd,” Oscar Hammerstein II,
The
Sound
of
Music

It was almost 1:00 a.m. when Roy Vachon signaled a turn into Albert Pinkham's motel and steered the Watertown sheriff's car into the unplowed drive. Behind him, happily ensconced in the driver's seat of the exotic Caddy, was Patrolman Wayne Fortin. On the thirty-mile drive to Mattagash, Wayne had turned every knob and button he could find on the magical dashboard of the car. Roy Vachon had no choice but to drive Lola Craft home after he put the car thief safely in jail. There was only one cell in the Watertown jail and Lola was, after all, a female.

“You understand, of course, Miss Craft,” Roy Vachon warned her, “that you're what is called an accomplice.”

“I've been called worse,” Lola cried, thinking of what Winnie would say when she found out. Lola had burst into tears when she first saw the blue light swirling around behind the Caddy, and had stopped only long enough to give her name, tearfully, to the Watertown sheriff.

“Since I've got to drive her home anyway,” Roy Vachon said to his patrolman, “you might as well follow me in the Cadillac. I got a feeling that asshole from Portland is gonna ring our phone off the hook until he gets it back.”

Wayne Fortin hated to return to Mattagash, even to drop off the Cadillac. But the notion of driving one of those babies for thirty miles took the edge off the situation.

“Okay,” Wayne Fortin had said to the sheriff. Then he had gone into the tiny cell where Randy Ivy pressed his face against the bars. When prisoners did that—and prisoners to Wayne Fortin had been only drunks and petty thieves in the past—they always reminded Wayne of babies pressing their faces against the wooden bars of their cribs.

“We'll be back in an hour or so,” he told the baby-faced prisoner.

“You don't understand,” Randy Ivy had pleaded yet again. “I'm Marvin Randall Ivy the Third. The car belongs to my old man.”

“Sure,” said Wayne Fortin. “And my old man owned the
Titanic
.”

“I'd believe it,” Randy said. “You probably helped sink it.”

“Why can't you show us any identification?” Wayne asked.

“I'm a goddamn
kid
!” Randy shouted. “I ain't got any identification. I used to have a license but a judge took it.”

“I can see why,” said Wayne Fortin, as he paused to stare into the bloodshot eyes of the prisoner. His haircut alone spoke of nonsocial behavior. Even the tiny pimples about the chin and forehead looked guilty as hell. People who had titles such as Little Snot-Snot the Third, people who had numbers tacked after their names, didn't look like this kid. Rich kids didn't have pimples, for crying out loud. Their parents paid so many dollars per blackhead to have them removed.

“If your name ain't
Gifford
,” Wayne Fortin had said to his captive, “then mine ain't Fortin.”

“I know your name ain't Fortin, you boob!” Randy had screamed after him, exciting all his pimples. “It's
Fife
.
Barney
Fife!”

Now in the comfortable seat of the Cadillac, Wayne Fortin watched Roy Vachon's breath coming out of his nostrils in cold puffs as he knocked on the door of number 1. Wayne fumed. The pimply little SOB. What rankled him more was that it wasn't just Mattagashers who likened him to Andy Taylor's deputy from Mayberry. Even his own cohorts in Watertown did the same. He'd been listening to these insults for the entire two years he'd been on the force.

Wayne Fortin slid out from behind the wheel of the Cadillac and handed Junior the keys.

“Which Gifford was it?” Junior was asking Roy Vachon, as he ducked his head into the car and gave it a quick checkup. It all seemed to be there.

“We don't know yet,” said the sheriff. “He refuses to give us his real name.”

“Your hubcaps are gone,” said Wayne.

“The son of a bitch,” Junior said, and kicked the front tire. “He's a lucky man there ain't a scratch on this car.” Junior ran his hand along the smooth side.

“He had a girl with him,” the sheriff added. “We'll get his real name if we have to take fingerprints. But I've learned that a sobering night in jail serves well enough to jar a man's memory.”

“I'd like to jar his
balls
,” said Junior. “Was he drinking?”

“Loaded,” said Roy. “And by his eyes, I suspect that wasn't all. The college kids in Watertown have begun bringing marijuana up from downstate.”

“I tell you,” said Junior, having navigated the circumference of the car on a slow inspection, “he's a lucky man to be in jail. If I'd gotten my hands on the bastard, well, there's no telling.”

Roy Vachon and Wayne Fortin stared at the owner of the wondrous Cadillac. Maybe if he fell on someone there would be no telling how they'd end up.

“It's freezing out here,” Junior said, finally satisfied that the hubcaps had been his only loss. “I'll stop in tomorrow and press charges.”

“Whatever you say,” Roy Vachon said.

“In the meantime,” Junior yelled over his shoulder, “you keep that son of a bitch Gifford locked up.” He was carefully retracing his deep footprints in the snow.

“That's the funny part,” said Roy Vachon, as he opened the driver's door to the patrol car. “He's been telling us his real name is Marvin Randall Ivy the Third. And that he's really your son. Ain't that a hoot?”

Junior lost his balance at this and stepped off his well-blazed trail into fresh snow. So help him God Almighty, but he would kill Randy deader than ever he planned to kill a Gifford.

“Yes, well,” said Junior. “Whoever he is, a night in jail will be, as you said, sobering for him.” Then Junior went inside number 1 and rammed his fist into the motel wall with such force that it was almost enough to bring Thelma back from one of her deep, trouble-free Valium dreams. It was force enough, however, to topple all of Monique Tessier's well-placed lipsticks on the wooden table in number 3.

***

The Plymouth-shark was the last creature out on the snowy main road of Mattagash. The river road. Everyone else had early mornings, the men to the woods, the women to their housework, the children to school. And, of course, Mattagash's three entrepreneurs, called the three musketeers by their envious townsfolk, each had his own calling. Albert Pinkham had his motel, Peter Craft his filling station, and Charles Mullins would have his hot dog/snack stand come June. In the meantime, Charles was back at work for Henley Lumber until summertime arrived and the canoes full of noisy tourists began their city assault upon the peaceful Mattagash River. Vinal and Pike Gifford, on the other hand, simply had to hit their living room couches when the beer and lack of sleep compelled them. Vinal was addicted to two soap operas, which decreed he rise by noon in order to catch them. With that single responsibility between them, Vinal and Pike were the only souls rootless enough to be wallowing about on the road that ran past the houses of town, the darkened houses whose occupants were in bed by twelve thirty and now asleep. Ordinarily a Sunday night would have tucked everyone in by nine o'clock, and this one would have too, if boy crazy Amy Joy Lawler hadn't insisted on getting married May first. A
Sunday
. It was almost sacrilege. But the whole town, like a reluctant family, had given in to the whims of what they thought was a future bride. Only in Kevin Craft's house was a soft yellow light still blazing out of the bedroom, one stream of it reaching down to the black river, the other stretching out to the milky road.

“I want a divorce,” Bonita Craft was telling Kevin as Vinal and Pike Gifford cruised past their house, the noise of the Plymouth's engine echoing in the dip of the road as they left the Crafts and their heartbreak behind. All of Mattagash already knew, anyway, what Bonita Craft had finally said, because what is said in bedrooms always surfaces in kitchens. No doubt Bonita Craft had told her very best friend that she intended to ask Kevin for a divorce. And Bonita's very best friend told a very good friend of her own, who wasn't so particularly fond of Bonita. No one in Mattagash is so good a friend that they put secrets away like old recipes. True, there must have been many honorable people to come and go over the years. But they are the unsung heroes who have taken their secrets with them to the grave, where they are finally safe.

“Kevin Craft's still up,” Vinal Gifford had said to Pike, as they slipped quietly past on the white road.

“I hear they're getting a divorce,” said Pike, and opened another beer. And then the Plymouth had ducked out of sight and left the light of the Craft house behind, left Kevin Craft himself reeling in disbelief, the last person in Mattagash to learn that, yes, he would soon be divorced.

“Stay far enough back from the sheriff's car and the Cadillac that they don't see your headlights,” Pike warned Vinal, who slowed the hulky Plymouth.

At Albert Pinkham's motel, the Plymouth sped up and went past, seemingly oblivious to the excitement taking place in the motel yard as Junior inspected the car and learned that his own son, his spoiled seed, as Marvin had once called Randy, was the culprit. The shark turned around at the Mattagash bridge, closed its yellow eyes, and watched through the leafless elms in Albert's yard to see what would unfold.

As they expected, the sheriff and the patrolman left and Junior went inside and turned out the light of number 1. The Giffords knew this would happen. They were sociologists of the highest order.
This'd be a good time to get a close-up look at them tires behind Craft's Filling Station, Vinal.
The Ed Sullivan Show
's on tonight.
They were doctors.
This
ain't caused by no inflammation of the ligaments, doc. I seriously think that lifting that stick of pulp forced my spinal structure to absorb more stress than it can tolerate.
They were lawyers.
It's against the law to knowingly write a bad check, Pike. But they got to prove that
knowingly
part. That's the clincher.
They were archaeologists.
Look
at
the
gas
cap
in
that
taillight! The first year that Cadillac did that was 1941.
Like writers, they followed a profession that bordered on all walks of life. Now they seemed more like concerned meteorologists, watching the soft, engulfing snow. It was no longer falling but instead spread itself like a heavy quilt from the old country on all its children, on the entire town, on the big family that had grown out of the first pioneering settlers.

“It's kinda sad Kevin and Bonita are gettin' divorced,” said Pike, in one of his poetic moods. “It ain't like we're friends or anything, but it's still sad.”

“Yeah,” Vinal agreed. “Not only that, but she has a real nice ass. I hope it ain't true she's moving to Connecticut.”

The brothers sat like awkward twins joined at the beer can. Chang and Eng on a bender. What was it Goldie had said of them?
Different
shells
with
the
same
meat
inside.
They sat and waited for Junior to sink like a heavy snow farther down into his fleshy dreams. They waited with their eyes on the fancy Cadillac, a much more interesting creature to the men of Mattagash than a strange, fancy woman.

“You think you can jump-start it?” Vinal asked his brother, the better technician.

“Does the Pope wear a funny hat?” Pike answered.

***

For two solid hours Pike and Vinal Gifford drove the Cadillac, the color of sweet meringue, up and down the main road of Mattagash. They immediately helped themselves to Junior's tape deck, but were disappointed to find that the only eight-track tapes he had in the car were disagreeable to Gifford tastes.

“Take that shit off!” Vinal lamented after Pike had shoved
Roger
Williams, Mr. Piano
into the machine. “You want to ruin my ears for life?”

The
Golden
Voice
of
Mario
Lanza
fared no better. Vinal was disturbed by Pike's choices.

“Do I look like a fruit to you?” he asked as his brother tossed
Mr. Piano
and
The
Golden
Voice
out the window of the Cadillac.

“This looks interesting,” said Pike, and held the tape closer to the interior light for proper reading. “‘I Got You Babe,'” Pike read. “By Sonny and Cher.”

“Ain't she the spittin' image of Loretta Lynn?” he asked Vinal, who swerved the Cadillac in order to answer properly.

“Pike, please find us some musical entertainment,” Vinal pleaded. “I ain't listened to anything in my life but an old car radio fading out on me every time you go around a turn or hit a pothole.”

“You can pick up Boston on a frost heave,” said Pike, as he rolled down the side glass and pitched Sonny Bono, along with his wife Cher, out into the night. They landed with a heavy
thunk
beneath a swath of baby cedars, a hundred yards from where Roger Williams and Mario Lanza were slowly being buried alive in the drifting snow.

“Will you play a tape?
Any
tape?”

“Julie Andrews,” Pike said. “
The
Sound
of
Music.
That's Missy's favorite movie.”

“Well,” said Vinal. “It ain't Kitty Wells or Loretta. But it'll have to do.”