Disappearances (28 page)

Warden stared down at Mason. Meanwhile Uncle Henry was doing something under the table with the coffeepot. He turned toward Warden. “Let me help you to more java, Superintendent,” he said.

Further down on my side of the table Hank and Harlan were looking at my father with reverence. He winked at them and made a fiddling gesture with his hands. They laughed and nudged each other.

“No, no,” Warden said. “No touching, boys.”

“Boys?” my father said. “They're forty-five Christly years old.”

His eyes were very blue. He had laid Walter's fiddle conspicuously on the table in front of him, and I knew he was working himself up to something Warden would not soon forget.

“You've got a quiet well-run place here, Superintendent.”

“It was being badly mismanaged,” Warden said, pouring himself more coffee. “Extravagant grocery expenditures. Gross fiscal unaccountability. Consumption of alcohol on the premises.”

“What, drinking on the premises? Did you hear that, Rat? No wonder they brung in your brother.”

My father raised his voice to address the table. “He'll straighten affairs out for you, folks. He used to be the best warden in Vermont, you know. There wasn't a poacher alive that could put nothing over on him. Was there, Henry?”

“It's getting close to lights out,” Warden said.

“Lights out? They ain't even gone on yet as near as I can see. How's about just one little tune for the people?”

“No exciting music,” Warden said.

“That's true, I keep forgetting. Say, folks, did you hear how Superintendent swum over the falls down to the Common as his last official act as warden?”

“One song might not hurt,” Warden said. “Make it a slow one. A nice slow waltz or something.”

“True for you,” my father shouted. “True for Superintendent Kinneson. You're a white man through and through. What'll she be, ladies and gents?”

“None of your fast ragtime now,” Warden said. He was pouring more coffee. His face was quite flushed.

“‘Turkey in the Straw,'” Mason Cobb said. “They don't come much slower than that, Bill.”

While my father tuned Walter's fiddle other people called out suggestions. “‘Under the Golden Eagle,' Bill. The ‘Frenchman's Breakdown.' ‘The Grumbling Old Man and the Cackling Old Woman.' ‘The Devil's Dream.'”

“‘The Devil's Dream'?” my father cried out incredulously. “That'll put you to sleep in your chairs. Not ‘The Devil's Dream.'”

“That's the one,” Warden said. “‘The Devil's Dream' or nothing, Bonhomme.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Hurry up now and get it over with.”

“The old ‘Devil's Dream,'” my father shouted. He was off and fiddling. I had never heard the song played slowly before and suspected that the pace would soon increase. White heads nodded time. My father nodded at Warden. Uncle Henry had the coffeepot under the table again. This time I knew what he was doing with it. Walter Kittredge appeared and slid in beside Abiah. Warden didn't seem to notice this infraction. He was very busy with his coffee.

After five minutes my father was still playing. He knew many variations of the old “Devil's Dream,” and went through each one in several different keys. Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Warden's thick finger began drumming on the tabletop. Uncle Henry poured him more coffee. Up and down the table people sighed and relaxed. Rat began clacking two spoons together. Warden's heavy hog jowls wrinkled. He was smiling.

Hank and Harlan stood up and clasped their right hands together, like two persons shaking hands. They began to shuffle around in a strange simulation of a stepdance. Mason Cobb did a brisk jig. Prof Corbitt snapped his suspenders and looked at Warden as though sizing him up for a flogging. Warden nodded with approval as Uncle Henry poured a generous shot of straight Seagram's into his cup.

I got up and went out to use the bathroom. There was a men's latrine somewhere back by the kitchen but I also remembered a small water closet off the superintendent's office next to the dining room. The office door was ajar, and the green-shaded desk lamp was on. I stepped inside.

The room was a shambles. One corner was heaped with empty bottles. Papers were strewn all over the floor around the desk. Dr. Tettinger's framed oil paintings of ducks and trout had been piled carelessly on the leather couch.

The door to the water closet was locked. I had supposed everyone was in the dining room. Then I remembered that Dr. Tettinger always locked the water closet himself when he had beer cooling inside the stool. Probably Warden hadn't found the key yet.

Just as I started to leave, the office door opened and Little Gretchen stepped inside. Wild fantasies raced through my mind. Here was an opportunity to redeem myself in her opinion and my own. This was too good to be true.

Little Gretchen shut the door, put a bony finger to her lips and walked past me to the desk. She opened the top drawer and reached up under the bottom panel of the desk top and brought out a piece of adhesive tape to which a key was stuck. Without saying a word she handed me the key and pointed at the water closet. Well, I thought, at least we wouldn't be interrupted.

I unlocked the door, and discovered that I had been right about the closet being occupied. Tied to the stool in a straitjacket with a large white bandage over his mouth was Dr. Tettinger.

My disappointment was sharp but short-lived. An assignation with Little Gretchen could be arranged any time. I was so angry I could barely unlace the thongs of the straitjacket. I wanted to kill Kinneson, and thought my father probably would when he found out what had happened.

“Thank Christ,” Dr. Tett gasped when I yanked off the gag. “He was going to send me to the lunatic asylum. I came back to get my paintings this afternoon and he hit me from behind. He's going to send Hank and Harlan too, Billy. They're coming tonight for us. I need a drink.”

“Wait here,” I said. “Dad's getting Kinneson drunk. I'm going to tell him. Don't you worry, Dr. Tett. We'll fix Kinneson.”

Back in the dining room pandemonium reigned. Everyone who could stand up was dancing. Someone had built up the niggardly little fire in the fireplace into a fine manorial blaze. As good as his word, my father was still playing “The Devil's Dream.” Warden was leaning back in his chair, leering and drinking out of the Seagram's bottle.

“He had Dr. Tett tied up in the toilet,” I whispered into my father's ear. “Little Gretchen gave me the key. They're coming tonight to take Dr. Tett and Hank and Harlan to the lunatic asylum.”

My father nodded and smiled. He inclined his fiddle toward Warden, who was looking at us suspiciously, and played a rapid series of ingratiating syncopations. “Tell Henry to come over here,” he said to me. “This couldn't be working out better.”

His leg was swollen nearly twice its normal size and pulsing visibly, perhaps in time with the music, but I had never seen him happier.

The next hour was full of unexpected events. First my father instructed Uncle Henry to go into Tett's office and call the LaChance brothers at the Common Hotel. “Tell them to get right up here if they want their whiskey,” he said. “Remember now, we ain't supposed to know their name. Just ask for the two Frenchmen that own the big Buick. Tell them to leave their vehicle down by the barn and come up to the front door.”

“They're on their way,” Uncle Henry reported five minutes later.

“Good,” my father said, smiling at Warden, who was trying to learn how to play the spoons. He said something else I didn't catch, and Uncle Henry left the room again and motioned for me to follow him. When we were out in the hall he told me to return and tell Warden two men were waiting in his office to see him.

“What?” Warden said, dropping his spoons on the floor again. “Already? Well, that's all right if they are. This will be a good example for the others. Tell them I'll be right in, boy.”

I ran into the office and warned Uncle Henry and Dr. Tettinger that Warden was on his way. As he lurched into the room Uncle Henry pinned his arms to his side. “It's chilly in here, Superintendent,” he said.

“Just slip this jacket on,” Dr. Tettinger said.

A minute later Warden was locked in the water closet and Dr. Tettinger was making his triumphal entry into the dining room. Everyone cheered. Hank and Harlan fell over each other to be the first to hug him. “I'll flog you until you can't stand up if you ever desert us again,” shouted Prof Corbitt. To demonstrate that he meant business he began unfastening his suspenders. His pants collapsed around his ankles, and he joined the general laughter. “Attention, scholars,” he roared. “Aeneas has returned from the underworld.” It was a supreme compliment, which Dr. Tett graciously acknowledged after draining the last of the Seagram's from the bottle by Warden's place.

“Rat,” my father called out, “fetch us up some more good cheer from the handcar. Take Mason along to help.”

“Not mine?” Rat said.

“No, no, yours won't be touched. Where's R.W., boys?”

“Out of harm's way,” Uncle Henry said.

“We bundled him up tight,” Dr. Tettinger said. “He won't catch cold. Good heavens, Quebec Bill. That's a terrible wound. I didn't see that at first. What on earth happened?”

“Just a scratch, Tett. I think there's still a sliver in it. You might bring your tongs when you have a free minute.”

The party gained momentum. Rat and Mason Cobb brought in one of the two milk cans from the handcar. Walter Kittredge got a huge tin washtub and he and Mason and Rat began filling it with whiskey. “Eureka,” shouted Prof Corbitt, stepping out of his trousers and into the tub.

A short while later Uncle Henry ushered in the LaChance brothers. They were wearing their tan coats over double-breasted suits with pronounced bulges under their coats. They stood uncertainly on the edge of the crowd around the table and watched Dr. Tettinger work on my father's leg.

My father continued fiddling throughout the operation. From time to time he shouted lay advice into Dr. Tettinger's ear. "Probe deeper, Tett. You ain't through the hide into the meat yet.”

When Dr. Tettinger finally extracted the slug my father grabbed Prof Corbitt's flogging suspenders off the table beside him and fired the hunk of lead out of them into the pine mantel above the fireplace, where it imbedded itself half an inch deep, having just missed the head of one of the LaChances. The bootlegger turned to his brother and said in French, “This is a most curious place, eh, André?”

“I do not like this place at all, Origène. I hope that is not our whiskey in the tub with the old man.”

Two stocky men in white uniforms appeared in the doorway. “I'll handle this for you,” my father said to Dr. Tettinger, who was trying to stanch the flow of blood from the wound. He handed his fiddle to Mason Cobb, who began to scrape away at “The Devil's Dream.” “Wild Bill, you and Henry lug me over there to greet our newest arrivals.”

“We're Croggins and Hathaway,” the younger of the two men said. “We're looking for the superintendent.”

“How do you do?” my father said. “I am Superintendent Kinneson.”

“I'm Croggins, Superintendent. This is Hathaway. We're from the lunatic asylum. I see what you meant on the phone. Things seem to be a little out of hand here. What happened to your leg?”

“Old Tettinger put the fire poker through it in one of his drunken rampages,” my father said. “He's tied up in his office now; he won't be any trouble to you. It's the other two you'll have to watch out for. Don't look straight at them or they'll know something's afoot. They're the two in overcoats standing back by the fireplace. Them are very dangerous, them two.”

“What?” Croggins said. “Them two re-tards you told us about? Don't worry about them. Show them your bottle, Hathaway. See that little blue bottle of Hathaway's? That's chloroform. We'll slip up behind them and they'll be out like a light. Then into the restraints and off we go in the van. By midnight they'll be in their own padded cell.”

Hathaway tapped his bottle. “Great little equalizer, Superintendent. You ought to keep a supply on hand for times like this.”

“Where are the restraints?” my father said.

“Just outside in the hallway,” Hathaway said. “Can you get them out there?”

“That shouldn't be difficult.”

“Good,” Hathaway said. “Let's get on with it.”

“That Hathaway,” Croggins said admiringly to my father as his partner stepped into the hall. “He loves a chloroforming more than anything. He'd arrange for his own mother to be committed if he could be the one to put her under. Hathaway studied for years to be an anesthetist, you know. He'd get them to go to sleep pretty good, but they didn't always wake up.”

Hathaway suddenly reappeared. “Do you have to tell that every time we go out on a call?” he said angrily. “There's not a grain of truth to that, Superintendent. This is merely the quickest and cleanest way to do a nasty job.”

“Let's not argue about it, Hathaway,” Croggins said. “If you weren't damn good at your job you wouldn't be on the squad to begin with.”

Rat and I carried my father over to the LaChance brothers. Their guns were quite prominent under their coats. “Let's go get the whiskey,” my father said to them in French.

They looked at Uncle Henry, who nodded.

“Who are those two men?” André said.

“They're orderlies that work here,” my father said. “They help with the more high-spirited folks. Give them their medicine and put them to sleep and so forth.”

“I like this place less and less,” Origène said.

“You'll soon be out of it all,” my father said. “Lead on, boys. We'll be right behind you.”

The LaChances led the way into the hall. Before they had gone five steps Hathaway leaped out from behind a clothes tree, armed with a cloth in each hand. He slammed their heads together with a loud crack and held his cloths over their faces until long after their struggling subsided. Meanwhile Croggins got the straitjackets on them.