Dewey Defeats Truman (39 page)

“So where’s the victor?” asked Carol.

“Gone for the moment,” crowed Mrs. Bruce, who had already collected her kiss of gratitude. “He stepped out a few minutes ago, after getting a call from New York.” Mrs. Bruce was still not sure whether the call had been from a reporter or someone with the Dewey campaign, but she did know it hadn’t required any arranging by that co-ed, who was sitting across the room and having, by Mrs. Bruce’s count, her third glass of champagne. “Here,” she said to the Fellers, handing them an open bottle. “Drink up!” Carol thanked her, and went with Harold and Harris Terry to a card table beneath a blow-up photo of Peter and Dewey from the
Chicago Sun-Times
. “Let’s stay awhile,” she said. There was more room in here than at the City Club, and the atmosphere was a lot better than the weirdly subdued one on the streets outside.

The only candidate in the room was Harvey P. Angell, who an hour ago had come over from Corunna to offer Peter Cox his congratulations. He had stayed on to talk with the state-senator-elect’s mother, who had brought along a gentleman from the
Dallas Morning News
who was staying a
floor above her in the Hotel Owosso. The three of them had gone through their own bottle of champagne and moved, at Mrs. Cox’s insistence, from talking about Peter to about how nice the winter weather in Dallas could be.

A little before midnight Harris Terry hung up the phone he’d been on and, more grim-faced than before, rejoined the Fellers. “Iowa’s gone for Truman,” he said in a whisper.

“Oh, come
on!
” said Harold, who was in his cups by now and determined to hold Harris to his pledge not to be a wet blanket. “I don’t believe you.”

“Add up those numbers,” said Harris, pointing to the blackboard, whose figures showed what seemed to him the one certain Republican victory of the night.

Harold put on his eyeglasses and affected great concentration. “A landslide,” he said. “Sort of. For our overly handsome, generally exasperating and, with any luck, soon-to-be-departing young associate.”

“Not the
result
, Harold. The
total
, for the two candidates together. What does it tell you?”

“Nothing,” said Harold.

“I think what Harris is trying to say,” said Carol, “is that Sherman Welch may be stuck with a lot of unused paper ballots.”

“If Republican voters in Shiawassee County aren’t coming out the way they were supposed to,” said Harris, “how do you think it is in parts of the country that
don’t
call Tom Dewey their favorite son?”

Harold gave his partner a good-natured poke in the ribs and went up to the radio, which for the last hour had been switched back and forth, through friendly shouts of disapproval,
between the dance-band station and one with the returns. “Do you mind?” he asked the couple next to it.

“Be my guest,” the husband said.

Harold slurred the dial over to NBC and Mr. Kaltenborn, who after a moment said that Mr. Truman might, even at this late hour, be a million ahead in the popular count, but when the rest of the farm vote and the West came in, the President would be beaten for sure.

“See?” said Harold, coming back to his wife and Harris for a refill.

O
UT ON
M
AIN
S
TREET
, B
ILLY
G
RIMES PEDALED WEST ON HIS
Columbia bicycle. Anticipating the sort of snarled traffic there’d been a couple of weeks ago, he’d left his Ford parked in his father’s garage. He was on his way with the camera to the Dewey birthplace, hoping to get some good exterior shots. It was 12:20
A.M.
, and the canvas of his empty
Argus
delivery-boy’s bag clucked in the night breeze. At 11:55 the Campbells’ managing editor had announced that there would be no Extra proclaiming Dewey’s victory. The results were still too close to call, and Owosso readers would have to wait for tomorrow’s regular edition. So Billy had told the sales manager to save him fifty copies of that one, which would still have considerable value, if not quite what it would have with the word EXTRA emblazoned across the front. For now, he’d just get on with the picture taking, though he couldn’t say much for this particular spot. Beneath Charlie Bernard’s second-floor apartment, the bunting left over from October 23 hung limp and unlit, and outside the modest brick building where Thomas E. Dewey came into the world on March 24, 1902, not a soul was standing.

H
E
’
D FOUND A BROOM AND DUSTPAN IN THE BASEMENT AND
swept the carpet and stairs so completely the school-board people never realized a coffin containing Mr. Sinclair’s old friend had spent a night in the main room of James Oliver Curwood’s castle.

Since then the box of bones had been up in the turret, where he’d dragged it. The Owosso Casket Company’s small brass plate, all cleaned up, glinted in the light from the lamp over which Tim had draped a sweater. (The kerosene was long since gone from the old man’s lantern.) The coffin makers had good reason to put their names so proudly on their work: the box had held up beautifully over fifty years. There were one or two patches of rot, but the whole thing was still intact and sealed shut. Only the lining must have disintegrated; as he’d dragged and pushed it up the winding stairs Tim could hear the skeleton rattling against the sides.

He had not been tempted to raise the lid, but he had never felt spooked, either. So this was suicide. How unfinal it appeared to be. Jonathan Adams Darrell seemed, in a way, still
here
. Tim could remember how the old man, while telling the poor guy’s story, had every so often looked over to the box, as if he expected the person in it to nod or correct him. Somewhere six feet under Bloomington, Indiana, Tim figured, Ross Lockridge was still here, too, not as completely gone from the world as he’d hoped to be.

He wished he had
Raintree County
with him now. In the two and a half weeks he’d been in the castle, he’d had to make do with the Curwood novels on the shelves near the fireplace downstairs. Once through
Green Timber
and
The Courage of Captain Plum
, he’d given up, preferring to imagine
his own stories from the movie posters lining the walls up to the turret. He’d even been tempted to write something himself, maybe the tale of his adventures since August, on the big black L. C. Smith typewriter near the staircase. But there was no paper in the drawer beneath it, and no telling whether the sound of the keys would carry to the houses over on John Street.

Mixed in with the movie posters was a framed front-page Extra from the
Argus
,
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
’
S ILLNESS FATAL
, said the headline for August 14, 1927. He’d been sick with a streptococcic infection for just ten days, and the suddenness of his departure made the paper talk about him as if he were missing instead of dead. Maybe no one was ever more than halfway into eternity; maybe everyone was ready to spring back to something like life, on the order of Jonathan Adams Darrell, or that replanted ghost regiment his mother was still saluting.

A clanging noise made him jump. He turned to the casket, as if to ask the bones: Did you hear that? Someone was definitely downstairs. He reached under the sweater to click off the light as quietly as possible, but a second after he did, he could tell that the big chandelier a floor below had flared to life. And now the staircase light had come on. Somebody was coming up.

“Some fortress,” said a sarcastic voice. It was Peter Cox, the lawyer Margaret couldn’t stand, the one who worked for her father. “All I had to do was pry off a rusty grate over one of the basement windows.”

“I got in the same way,” said Tim, with an eagerness that made no sense, except that this was the first conversation he’d had with anyone since the night he brought the old man in.

“Introduce me to your friend,” said Peter, pointing to the casket.

“His name’s Jon.”

“Right. And he disappeared, sort of like you, a long time ago.” Peter sat down at the typing table. “You look almost as skinny as he must be, Tim. Did the old colonel tell you that his friend killed himself?”

“
I
never tried to kill myself,” said Tim.

“Then just what did you try to do?”

“I tried to come
alive!
” His voice was full of indignation and just a hint of teenage self-pity. Above all, it was bursting with the desire to tell somebody besides befuddled old Mr. Sinclair his story. “I had to get away from that house I was living in. It was more a coffin than the one
he’s
in! And my dead brother was more alive than me.” The words trailed off in a sudden, unexpected exhaustion.

“Where did you go?”

“A big field outside Kerby. I knew about this abandoned shed where I could hide the plane.”

Peter laughed. “Ten miles?” The kid hadn’t traveled outside the district he’d just won.

“A little less,” said Tim, more proud than defensive.

“And you needed a plane for that?”

“Yes,” he said. “If I took a plane, people would assume I went farther away. It would be easier for me to hide.”

“The purloined letter.”

“Huh?”

“Who helped you?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody? What have you been living off?”

“A locker full of stuff I had in the plane. Plus stuff I’d put in the shed beforehand.”

“What about here?”

“Some boxes of stuff I brought in two weeks ago. I hitchhiked with them in the middle of the night. Some guy thought I was a rich kid coming home.” His voice dropped from pride to worry. “I’m starting to run out.”

“Does Gus Farnham know where you are?”

“No.”

“Margaret Feller?”

“No! Have you seen her? What’s been happening to her?”

“She’s had a broken ankle on top of her broken heart, and now she’s dating your best friend.”

“Does anyone besides you know I’m here?”

“No.”

“How did you find out?”

“I’ve been keeping my eye on the old man. Tell me why you came back.”

“For her. For Margaret.” Peter said nothing.

“I think I love her,” said Tim, rushing to fill the void. He was still so famished for company he feared Peter might leave if he stopped talking. “I’m in over my head,” he said, now on the verge of tears. “I’m afraid to come out. I’m afraid that my mother will have a heart attack, that they’ll arrest me for stealing Gus’s plane, or for sending the police on a wild-goose chase. I’m afraid Margaret won’t have anything to do with me, that she won’t forgive me.” He struggled to get hold of himself. “I only wanted to disappear. I thought I could resurface somewhere else, creep out of that mausoleum I’d been living in since 1944. I thought I could figure everything out in that shed. But I stayed drunk for the whole first
week, and then the three whiskey bottles were gone. I haven’t had a drink since. After a couple more weeks I started going stir-crazy. I’d only come out at night to hitchhike someplace and then come back. I finally decided to come here. I thought I could look out on everybody without their seeing me and I’d finally figure out what to do. Instead I’ve been in here with this dead body. On top of everything I made this crazy promise to the old man that I haven’t been able to keep. In the middle of the night, just after he left, I managed to fill up the hole on the other side of the river. But I need a car to do the rest, and I haven’t been able to steal one.”

Peter could see the boy trying to put the particular complication of Horace Sinclair and Jonathan Adams Darrell out of his mind as he walked across the turret to one of the tiny windows on the opposite side. “See?” he said, pointing across the river toward the high school. “Sometimes at lunch the kids come down on the riverbank. Once or twice I’ve seen her with her girlfriends.” He turned back around from the window. “Did you ever have anybody in love with you when you didn’t deserve it?”

Peter, who had not gotten up, didn’t answer. He was thinking about the Margaret Feller he’d last seen at her parents’ dinner table: a polite young lady, half dead behind the eyes.

“I’ve got to talk to her, Mr. Cox. Away from here. Out of town. But I’m afraid if I try to get in touch with her the cops or her parents will find me first.”

Why, Peter wondered, as he’d been wondering for two weeks, should he resurrect this boy for Margaret Feller? The kid would be back on the bottle inside of a week, after he’d
ravished the girl like a hungry parolee. He was as bad a risk as you could find in this town.

But at least he was a risk. “All right, buddy boy, listen up. At eight o’clock tomorrow morning you’re going to be at Ruby’s Cafe, at the highway junction in Perry. You know where that is? Good, because that’s where you’re going to be waiting for her.”

“How am I going to get there?”

He felt like Winchell bringing in Lepke. “I’m going to take you.”

“Now?”

“No, sometime after 3
A.M.
That’s when I’ll be coming back here for you. And before we head over to Perry, we’re going to bring Mr. Darrell home.”

“You mean bury him? Where?”

“Right where he was. As fast as two of us can dig, by the lowest flame my Ronson will hold.”