Dead End in Norvelt (23 page)

Once the prop stopped spinning I ran up to greet him. “What were you doing?” I asked. “We watched you buzzing that one house over and over.”

“Oh, I was off having a little fun,” he said with a grin. “I have to move that house to West Virginia so I was just using it to practice my dive-bombing technique.”

“Well, I’d say you blew it to West Virginia,” I confirmed.

“Next time I’ll get some balloons,” he suggested. “And fill ’em with water. That’ll be fun.”

“We can drench them from the air,” I said, including myself in the bombing raid.

“No, you won’t,” Mom said from over my shoulder. “You will not be doing that with your father, so don’t even ask.”

Just then the telephone rang.

“I’ll get it,” I yelled, and took off for the kitchen.

It was Miss Volker. “What is your father doing?” she hollered in a voice as shrill as the fire whistle. “I just got a call from Mrs. Vinyl and she said she thought Norvelt was being invaded by the Russians and that she was having a spell.”

“Did you call the ambulance?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she replied. “I told her to take a Bayer aspirin and have a glass of dandelion wine and relax in a hot bath. And why does your father have a plane anyway?” she asked.

“He wants to fly out of town and never come back,” I replied. “He said his slice of the American pie is too thin in this town.”

“He doesn’t know what thin is,” she said with a great helping of scorn in her voice. “In the Depression you had pie made out of grass clippings. Believe me, if he leaves he’ll find out it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. The grass clippings are not always greener on the other side.”

“That’s kind of what Mom says,” I replied.

“Well, let’s hope he is wise enough to listen to her,” she said, and then the phone dropped and clattered across the floor.

“Are you okay?” I yelled into the receiver.

“Dang hands!” she hollered from a distance, and I could just imagine her pitching a fit. “Goodbye,” she hollered again, and the phone went dead.

23

Maybe something else
went dead too. Over the next few days Miss Volker had me telephone Mrs. Vinyl’s house about twenty times to check up on her like we did with Mrs. Dubicki. Finally Miss Volker was worried enough to call me down to her house. All the way there I was filled with fear that Dad had killed Mrs. Vinyl.

“You don’t think my father gave her a heart attack?” I asked when I let myself into Miss Volker’s living room.

“No,” she replied. “Because I spoke with her the next day and she had one of your mom’s casseroles for dinner.”

“That’s right,” I said, recalling that I took it to the Community Center and gave it to Mr. Spizz.

“Well, we better drive to her house and pay her a visit,” she suggested. “Help me out to the car.”

“Do you want me to wear my Grim Reaper costume again?” I asked, and took her hand.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I have a suspicion the reaper has already paid number B-19 a visit.”

That reminded me of something. “Why do you have a dressed skeleton in your trunk?” I asked as we turned onto the Norvelt road.

“My sister left it in there,” she said. “She used it for a drawing model.”

“Well, it scared me half to death,” I said.

“Thank your lucky stars it was only
half
to death,” she replied. “You could have gotten the full dose.”

When we entered Mrs. Vinyl’s house we saw the result of a
full
death. Mr. Huffer’s stretcher on wheels was already in the hallway.

“That man has a nose for death,” Miss Volker said, noticing the stretcher.

“No kidding,” I replied.

“She’s in the bedroom,” he called out when he heard our footsteps. His respectful, whispery voice sounded like air leaking out of a crypt. “I’ve already called her daughter.”

“Did she opt for cremation?” Miss Volker asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a disagreeable tone in his voice. “All these kids live too far away to care about giving their mothers a proper service. It’s just cheaper and easier to have me mail them the ashes so they can put mom in a mantelpiece vase, or in a shoe box in the back of the closet. But mark my words, people will still want to be buried in the ground. A tombstone is a carved page in a book of human history. It will last forever. A jar of dust just looks like something you emptied out of a vacuum cleaner.” After that unusual outburst he struck his sad little teapot pose. I didn’t know how sad he really was, because now he could buy her house and move it to West Virginia. But I didn’t say that to Miss Volker because she would have put him in a shoe box.

“How did you know she was dead?” I asked Mr. Huffer.

“Spizz told me,” he replied. “He stopped by to collect the newspaper money and found her.”

“That busybody is into everyone’s business,” Miss Volker remarked with contempt. “He probably helped her kick the bucket.”

“I don’t think so,” Mr. Huffer said. “Looks like she had a fit of some kind while having a midnight snack.”

“Jack, you stay here,” Miss Volker said as she and Mr. Huffer stepped toward the bedroom. “She may not be properly dressed and I promise you don’t want to see a naked old dead person.”

I didn’t argue that point. I stayed in the kitchen, and like Bunny I opened the refrigerator. Aside from some wrapped-up pieces of Mom’s dinners, there wasn’t much. I was just going to take a slice of mushroom and cheese casserole when Miss Volker came out complaining about how some people were selling their houses to Eleanor, West Virginia.

“Well,” Mr. Huffer said without giving himself away, “this town can’t remain a museum piece. Plus there is a lot of good land here that could be useful again.”

“I don’t want it to be a museum,” Miss Volker said. “I want it to be a shining city on a hill—an example of what a Roosevelt community should strive to be.”

“Times change,” Mr. Huffer said weakly.

“Time has nothing to do with it,” Miss Volker said strongly. “We have a choice! It is the people who live here that can change Norvelt for the better or the worse.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” said Mr. Huffer as he shrugged.

I just knew what Miss Volker was going to say. I could hear the bile in the pit of her stomach boiling and the words steaming up in her mouth before her lips parted. And then she fired off the red-hot words. “History lasts
forever
,” she snapped. “And we’ll be judged by our history.”

“History may last forever,” Mr. Huffer said in his humble sad-man voice. “We just won’t.”

Miss Volker lifted her hands and put them around Mr. Huffer’s neck. “If my hands were good enough I’d strangle you,” she said, and then smiled.

So did Mr. Huffer. “Are your hands good enough to sign this death certificate?” he asked.

Miss Volker nodded at me. “He’s my hired hands,” she said with a chuckle, and as we had done before, we held the pen between my hand and hers and managed to scrawl out a signature.

We left Mr. Huffer behind to collect the body and returned to Miss Volker’s house. I took my place at the desk, and she began to breathe deeply and pace the living room and twist herself left and right and all around like a Slinky, and before long I was writing the obituary as quickly as I could.

“Seventeen years ago,” Miss Volker joyously cried out as if she were addressing a theater audience, “Mrs. Vinyl had the best birthday party of the year. This was during the war and so having a birthday cake was pretty rare because of the rationing of flour and sugar. We all had eggs and milk because of our chickens and dairy cows. But somehow the friends of Mrs. Vinyl managed to save up enough tablespoons and teaspoons of flour and sugar and they made her a huge cake, and it had to be huge because they also made their own hand-dipped wax candles which were thicker than normal birthday candles and colored with cherry, dandelion, and grape juice—and there were sixty candles! It was a splendid cake and we all gathered around for the lighting of the candles and the singing of the birthday song. But before Mrs. Vinyl could make a wish and blow out the candles, those little flames joined together into one massive flame that was tall enough to scorch and melt the light fixture hanging over the table. I think the wicks in those candles must have been taken from a roll of dynamite fuses. They sure burned hot and fast, and while everyone was trying to save the light fixture the heat from the candles burned a coal black crater into the top of the cake. Well, it looked awful, but that didn’t stop us from eating it. Afterward everyone had crusty black lips as if they had eaten a plateful of ashes. We just laughed and laughed and Mrs. Vinyl laughed the loudest. She was a great woman and her sons both served honorably in the war and as a nation we honor her.”

Then Miss Volker lowered her head in prayer and after a quiet space of time, when she once more began to speak, her voice had dropped as if a shadow had passed over her heart.

“Given that this is August 6 it would be impossible not to remember that this is the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Most people think that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was necessary for ending the war,” she continued. “And there is some truth to that, given that the Japanese were prepared to fight to the last person to protect their country. But what the atomic bombing of Hiroshima should teach everyone is that you don’t win a war by being more moral or ethical or nicer or more democratic than your enemy. And God has nothing to do with winning or losing. There are over four thousand religions in the world, so it is impossible to claim that one God is more powerful than another God. Keep in mind that there are plenty of good civilizations full of God-worshipping people that are now lost to history. The American Indians were nicer than the settlers and look where it got them. Dead! No, you win a war by being tougher and meaner and more ruthless than your enemy. You beat, burn, and crush them into the ground. This is the historic rule of winning a war. Look what we did to the Japanese. Hiroshima was not a big military target. Nor was it even a battle. It was an out-and-out sneak-attack slaughtering of innocent people. It was a massacre. We killed seventy thousand civilians in one atomic blink, and seventy thousand more died a little later on. No nation has ever before been this cruel and inhumane and killed more people so quickly in the whole bloody history of the world.

“So as we remember Mrs. Vinyl and honor her heroic sons, let us remember that the only way to turn enemies into friends is with respect,” she stated firmly. “Never call them ‘Japs’ again. That won’t do. Remember what the Bible teaches us, ‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

I typed it up as she settled down on the couch like a cat curling into a comfortable shape. Then she wrapped her afghan around herself and bowed her head as if it were the lowering of a theater curtain. After I typed a page I looked back and her eyes were closed. Her breathing was like a cat purring.

I finished up and ran the obit down to Mr. Greene. He skimmed it over, and with his pipe jammed deep into one tobacco-stained corner of his mouth he spoke out the other. “Mrs. Vinyl was only seventy-seven,” he remarked as he rocked back and forth on the soles of his heavy black boots. “A shame how the good die young.”

“What about Marilyn Monroe dying yesterday?” I said. “She really died young.”

“That was a crime,” he insisted, and removed his pipe then sharply pointed the stem at me. “Mark my words, there is something fishy about the way Miss Monroe died and I think there is something fishy going on in this town.” He pulled the pipe out of his mouth and poked the air with it as if typesetting an exclamation point on his accusation.

I stepped away from him as he kept his hard eyes fixed on me. When I reached the door I turned and sped home.

*   *   *

The next morning Mrs. Vinyl’s obituary ran in the paper.

As Dad read it I could read his face and I knew he was annoyed. “Ex-soldiers like me who fought in the war,” he said with checked anger, “are busy trying to forget what horrors we went through and she’s just reminding us of how bad it was.” He pressed the paper down on the table with both hands, then stood straight up. His face was like a movie screen of unhappy memories.

“Maybe she thinks that remembering it is a good thing,” I suggested. “Because if you do something bad and forget about it, then you might do the same bad thing again. But if you always remember it, then chances are you won’t do the bad thing twice.”

“I suppose,” he said, and cracked his knuckles out of habit. “But believe me. Nobody has forgotten Hiroshima. If fact, what we did to the Japs is what we fear the Russians will do to us. See,” he said pointedly to me, “one war leads to another and another and each just gets worse. Speaking of wars,” he added, turning on me in the only way he could, “you need to get back to work on that bomb shelter. Now that Miss Volker has got us all worked up about the atomic bomb, we have to put our energy into surviving it.”

“Why can’t we just put our
energy
into not having any atomic bombs?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be a lot easier?”

“It would be a lot easier if everyone just listened to me,” he suggested, and jerked his thumb toward the door. “Now go dig the shelter.”

“But you said it’s a fake shelter,” I replied. “So why bother?”

His voice jumped right back. “Because now that I’ve been reminded of Hiroshima I don’t think the shelter should be fake. See, Miss Volker has changed my mind already. Her talk of history has me fearing the
future
!”

I could tell that it would be a lot better if I just went outside and dug the shelter. “Hey, Dad,” I asked, “can I borrow your transistor radio?”

“I just got it,” he moaned. “It was expensive.”

“Well, I could listen to the Pirates game,” I said, “while I dig.”

“They don’t play ball in the morning,” he said. “Nice try.”