Dandelion Wine (22 page)

He stood there, white as a mushroom, with his hands at his sides, staring down into the ravine.

“Get home!” cried Francine.

He did not hear.

“You!” shrieked Francine. “Get home, get out of this place, you hear? Get home, get home, get
home
!”

Douglas jerked his head, stared at them as if they were not there. His mouth moved. He gave a bleating sound. Then, silently, he whirled about and ran. He ran silently up the distant hills into the warm darkness.

Francine sobbed and cried again and, doing this, walked on with Lavinia Nebbs.

 

“T
here you are! I thought you ladies'd never come!” Helen Greer stood tapping her foot atop her porch steps. “You're only an hour late, that's all. What happened?”

“We—” started Francine.

Lavinia clutched her arm tight. “There was a commotion. Somebody found Elizabeth Ramsell in the ravine.”

“Dead? Was she—dead?”

Lavinia nodded. Helen gasped and put her hand to her throat. “Who found her?”

Lavinia held Francine's wrist firmly. “We don't know.”

The three young women stood in the summer night looking at each other. “I've got a notion to go in the house and lock the doors,” said Helen at last.

But finally she went to get a sweater, for though it was still warm, she, too, complained of the sudden winter night. While she was gone Francine whispered frantically, “Why didn't you
tell
her?”

“Why upset her?” said Lavinia. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow's plenty of time.”

The three women moved along the street under the black trees, past suddenly locked houses. How soon the news had spread outward from the ravine, from house to house, porch to porch, telephone to telephone. Now, passing, the three women felt eyes looking out at them from curtained windows as locks rattled into place. How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors. Strange the hot rooms with the sweating people pressed tightly back into them behind the bronze knobs and knockers. Baseball bats and balls lay upon the unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn, white-chalk game of hopscotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk. It was as if someone had predicted freezing weather a moment ago.

“We're crazy being out on a night like this,” said Helen.

“Lonely One won't kill three ladies,” said Lavinia. “There's safety in numbers. And besides, it's too soon. The killings always come a month separated.”

A shadow fell across their terrified faces. A figure loomed behind a tree. As if someone had struck an organ a terrible blow with his fist, the three women gave off a scream, in three different shrill notes.

“Got you!” roared a voice. The man plunged at them. He came into the light, laughing. He leaned against a tree, pointing at the ladies weakly, laughing again.

“Hey! I'm the Lonely One!” said Frank Dillon.

“Frank Dillon!”

“Frank!”

“Frank,” said Lavinia, “if you ever do a childish thing like that again, may someone riddle you with bullets!”

“What a thing to do!”

Francine began to cry hysterically.

Frank Dillon stopped smiling. “Say, I'm sorry.”

“Go away!” said Lavinia. “Haven't you heard about Elizabeth Ramsell—found dead in the ravine? You running around scaring women! Don't speak to us again!”

“Aw, now—”

They moved. He moved to follow.

“Stay right there, Mr. Lonely One, and scare yourself. Go take a look at Elizabeth Ramsell's face and see if it's funny. Good night!” Lavinia took the other two on along the street of trees and stars, Francine holding a kerchief to her face.

“Francine, it was only a joke.” Helen turned to Lavinia. “Why's she crying so hard?”

“We'll tell you when we get downtown. We're going to the show no matter what! Enough's enough. Come on now, get your money ready, we're almost there!”

 

T
he drugstore was a small pool of sluggish air which the great wooden fans stirred in tides of arnica and tonic and soda-smell out onto the brick streets.

“I need a nickel's worth of green peppermint chews,” said Lavinia to the druggist. His face was set and pale, like all the faces they had seen on the half-empty streets. “For eating in the show,” said Lavinia as the druggist weighed out a nickel's worth of the green candy with a silver shovel.

“You sure look pretty tonight, ladies. You looked cool this afternoon, Miss Lavinia, when you was in for a chocolate soda. So cool and nice that someone asked after you.”

“Oh? ”

“Man sitting at the counter—watched you walk out. Said to me, ‘Say, who's that?' Why, that's Lavinia Nebbs, prettiest maiden lady in town, I said. ‘She's beautiful,' he said. ‘Where does she live?'” Here the druggist paused uncomfortably.

“You didn't!” said Francine. “You didn't give him her address, I hope? You didn't!”

“I guess I didn't think. I said, ‘Oh, over on Park Street, you know, near the ravine.' A casual remark. But now, tonight, them finding the body, I heard a minute ago, I thought, My God, what've I done!” He handed over the package, much too full.

“You fool!” cried Francine, and tears were in her eyes.

“I'm sorry. Course, maybe it was nothing.”

Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat. She held out her money automatically.

“There's no charge on those peppermints,” said the druggist, turning to shuffle some papers.

“Well, I know what I'm going to do right now!” Helen stalked out of the drugshop. “I'm calling a taxi to take us all home. I'll be no part of a hunting party for you, Lavinia. That man was up to no good. Asking about you. You want to be dead in the ravine next?”

“It was just a man,” said Lavinia, turning in a slow circle to look at the town.

“So is Frank Dillon a man, but maybe he's the Lonely One.”

Francine hadn't come out with them, they noticed, and turning, they found her arriving. “I made him give me a description—the druggist. I made him tell what the man looked like. A stranger,” she said, “in a dark suit. Sort of pale and thin.”

“We're all overwrought,” said Lavinia. “I simply won't take a taxi if you get one. If I'm the next victim, let me
be
the next. There's all too little excitement in life, especially for a maiden lady thirty-three years old, so don't you mind if I enjoy it. Anyway it's silly; I'm not beautiful.”

“Oh, but you are, Lavinia; you're the loveliest lady in town, now that Elizabeth is—” Francine stopped. “You keep men off at a distance. If you'd only relax, you'd been married years ago!”

“Stop sniveling, Francine! Here's the theater box office, I'm paying forty-one cents to see Charlie Chaplin. If you two want a taxi, go on. I'll sit alone and go home alone.”

“Lavinia, you're crazy; we can't let you do that—”

They entered the theater.

The first showing was over, intermission was on, and the dim auditorium was sparsely populated. The three ladies sat halfway down front, in the smell of ancient brass polish, and watched the manager step through the worn red velvet curtains to make an announcement.

“The police have asked us to close early tonight so everyone can be out at a decent hour. Therefore we are cutting our short subjects and running our feature again immediately. The show will be over at eleven. Everyone is advised to go straight home. Don't linger on the streets.”

“That means us, Lavinia!” whispered Francine.

The lights went out. The screen leaped to life.

“Lavinia,” whispered Helen.

“What?”

“As we came in, a man in a dark suit, across the street, crossed over. He just walked down the aisle and is sitting in the row behind us.”

“Oh, Helen!”

“Right behind us?”

One by one the three women turned to look.

They saw a white face there, flickering with unholy light from the silver screen. It seemed to be all men's faces hovering there in the dark.

“I'm going to get the manager!” Helen was gone up the aisle. “Stop the film! Lights!”

“Helen, come back!” cried Lavinia, rising.

 

T
hey tapped their empty soda glasses down, each with a vanilla mustache on their upper lip, which they found with their tongues, laughing.

“You see how silly?” said Lavinia. “All that riot for nothing. How embarrassing.”

“I'm sorry,” said Helen faintly.

The clock said eleven-thirty now. They had come out of the dark theater, away from the fluttering rush of men and women hurrying everywhere, nowhere, on the street while laughing at Helen. Helen was trying to laugh at herself.

“Helen, when you ran up that aisle crying, ‘Lights!' I thought I'd
die!
That
poor
man!”

“The theater manager's brother from Racine!”

“I apologized,” said Helen, looking up at the great fan still whirling, whirling the warm late night air, stirring, restirring the smells of vanilla, raspberry, peppermint and Lysol.

“We shouldn't have stopped for these sodas. The police warned—”

“Oh, bosh the police,” laughed Lavinia. “I'm not afraid of anything. The Lonely One is a million miles away now. He won't be back for weeks and the police'll get him then, just wait. Wasn't the film wonderful?”

“Closing up, ladies.” The druggist switched off the lights in the cool white-tiled silence.

Outside, the streets were swept clean and empty of cars or trucks or people. Bright lights still burned in the small store windows where the warm wax dummies lifted pink wax hands fired with blue-white diamond rings, or flourished orange wax legs to reveal hosiery. The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters.

“Do you suppose if we screamed they'd do anything?”

“Who?”

“The dummies, the window people.”

“Oh, Fran
cine
.”

“Well …”

There were a thousand people in the windows, stiff and silent, and three people on the street, the echoes following like gunshots from store fronts across the way when they tapped their heels on the baked pavement.

A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzed like a dying insect, as they passed.

Baked and white, the long avenues lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women. Seen from the courthouse peak, they appeared like three thistles far away.

“First, we'll walk you home, Francine.”

“No, I'll walk
you
home.”

“Don't be silly. You live way out at Electric Park. If you walked me home you'd have to come back across the ravine alone, yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, you'd drop dead.”

Francine said, “I can stay the night at your house. You're the
pretty
one!”

And so they walked, they drifted like three prim clothes forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete, Lavinia watching the black trees flit by each side of her, listening to the voices of her friends murmuring, trying to laugh; and the night seemed to quicken, they seemed to run while walking slowly, everything seemed fast and the color of hot snow.

“Let's sing,” said Lavinia.

They sang, “Shine On, Shine On, Harvest Moon …”

They sang sweetly and quietly, arm in arm, not looking back. They felt the hot sidewalk cooling underfoot, moving, moving.

“Listen!” said Lavinia.

They listened to the summer night. The summer-night crickets and the far-off tone of the courthouse clock making it eleven forty-five.

“Listen!”

Lavinia listened. A porch swing creaked in the dark and there was Mr. Terle, not saying anything to anybody, alone on his swing, having a last cigar. They saw the pink ash swinging gently to and fro.

Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything felt locked up in brass and iron and steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on along the baked summer evening sidewalk. And above us the lonely street lights shining down, making a drunken shadow.