Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (19 page)

Art by Mark Evan Walker

 
Tom Tolnay describes himself as a short-fiction devotee and
says he reads more than 200 short stories a year for pleasure. His own short
stories have been published in widely different types of magazines, from mystery
to literary to mainstream. Most recently, his stories have been featured in
The Iconoclast, Hardboiled,
and
Carpe Articulum.
The
author also runs a small press that publishes many letterpress poetry books and
anthologies of short fiction and essays.
 

 
In the old days Bartleby Jargon would’ve been known as an
“eccentric” . . . an odd duck who, though out of step with the rest of the
community, was appreciated by most because his weird originality made life a bit
more colorful. Nowadays, in a world impatient with the uncommon, a world far
less generous, Bartleby was called a “flake.” To the citizens of Gopher that
meant he was adrift somewhere between the moon and stars, someone no good to
anyone, least of all himself. But to me, Bartleby was just a misplaced person
without a past or present.

Bartleby wasn’t born in Gopher, yet no one could say exactly where he came from
or how he happened to show up at this speck of pepper on the map. He just
was
and
had been
for some time. What made him hard to
figure out, I guess, was that he’d never learned how to give a direct answer,
and always went round and round with a puzzled look in his eye. Under that gob
of hair with the texture of clay was a plain, unmarked face that could’ve passed
for thirty-five or sixty-five. Plus, he had oversized ears that tended to wiggle
when he spoke, distracting us from thinking about anything beneath the man’s
surface.

With his natural attraction to nuts and bolts, no one was surprised to hear he
took a job at Cowley’s Hardware over on Main—even flakes, I mean
eccentrics,
have to pay rent and buy baloney. If eccentrics are
different from regular folks it’s because they get things done by way of their
own mysterious logic. Like the time his boss, Zack Cowley, was away at a
hardware show in Chattanooga, and Bartleby, left behind to mind the store,
handed over shovels, hoes, rakes, and God knows what else to a family of migrant
farmers passing through. Either the family skipped town without paying, or
Bartleby saw fit to give the stuff away. All Zack knew for sure was that a batch
of tools was missing from his store, and there wasn’t enough cash in the
register to account for the merchandise. But he didn’t sack his assistant, as
everyone expected—in some cases
hoped
would happen, and I figure it was
because no one else in town would’ve sorted screws and brads and washers with
such enthusiasm and at such cheapskate wages. . . . They say it took Bartleby
Jargon ten months to pay back Zack Cowley for those wayward tools.

Because Bartleby never expected anything from anyone, and yet was always willing
to extend a helping hand to neighbors or strangers, I found myself doing little
things for him. I’d bring him a coupla apples from the twisted tree out back our
house, or I’d drop off the sports pages after I’d finished reading the local
weekly: Like any red-blooded American, he had a soft spot for baseball. But he
usually seemed embarrassed by my friendly gestures, so I had to hold back from
time to time before I’d say to my wife, Maggie, “Think I’ll drop over to
Jargon’s and see if he can use a little help with his mailbox—snowplow knocked
it off the post two months back.” At which Maggie would look up from her
knitting, over the wire rims of her glasses, and say: “I could use a little help
stopping my kitchen faucet from dripping.” Reactions like that have taught me to
do my thinking with my head and not with my mouth.

Bartleby’s behavior reminded me of an old song they used to play on the radio
that goes something like this: “I start for the corner, but turn up in Spain.”
One day Zack sent him to deliver an imported copper teapot to the Brandon place;
it’s that sturdy white Victorian up on the hill, overlooking the village like
God in His heaven looking down on us. Only Bartleby never reached Brandon’s
mansion—ended up digging poppies out of fresh flower beds in the village square
and transplanting them into his teapot. Then he goes and leaves this flower
arrangement on the steps of the town jail. “What in God’s name was that flake
thinking?” townspeople asked each other. To one of them, Myra Crane, I answered,
“Nothing at all—he was just being Bartleby.” What I’d meant was, he was always
doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and usually for some
reason that made sense to no one but him. That’s why everyone in Gopher seemed
to have a favorite Bartleby story. Whenever the men gathered for their Friday
night card game at the Grange, or the women met in the basement of the Methodist
church to organize a
fund-raiser on Saturday afternoon, they seemed to
spend more time telling Bartleby yarns than dealing cards or planning a
chicken-and-biscuit dinner.

 
If there’s one chapter in the story of Bartleby Jargon’s life in
Gopher that stayed in people’s minds it would surely be the time he was drafted
for public office. In my hometown the same half-dozen people keep their elected
posts so long we didn’t really need to vote, though we sort of did anyway just
to make sure folks in surrounding communities didn’t start calling us “commies.”
Fact is, the few times someone else had the gall to put his or her name up
against the standing Village Clerk, Village Truant Officer, Village Justice of
the Peace, we, the citizens of Gopher, looked upon it as an act of aggression.
Far as we’re concerned, Alice Archer is the Clerk and Artie Frome is the Justice
of the Peace, and so on—that’s their job, their livelihood, and running against
them was like trying to run them off their deeded lands. But several years ago
Nickie Bumppo, the Village Collector for the previous twenty-nine campaigns, up
and died on us.

You can’t run a town—even one small as Gopher—without a collector. Once a year
for a whole month the Village Collector collects the dues to operate the
Volunteer Fire Department (housed in a rickety barn on the abandoned MacKenzie
place), to run an ambulance (an ancient hearse fitted up with a cot and
first-aid kit), to plow the snow (a World War II Jeep with no doors) on roads
the county ignores, and other such vital services. We call this money the
Village Dues for the good reason that Gopherites find it easier to pay smaller
dues for special services in summer than higher overall taxes at year’s end. A
member of each household—we got maybe a hundred fifty households in Gopher—would
drop off a check or an envelope with cash over to the Bumppo house, have a cup
of coffee in Martha’s ballyard-sized kitchen, trade two cents’ worth of gossip,
then go about their business. Lately, a few of the town’s better-heeled folks,
like the Brandons and the Whitneys, came around waving credit cards like these
things were the Lord’s Prayer sealed in plastic. But Nickie never got around to
accepting “the devil’s tool” for payments since he believed we’d already let
thingamajigs take over too much of our business. Except for figuring out who
owed what and then collecting it, don’t ask me what Nickie did as collector the
rest of the year. But he did it, I know, because it got done.

When a public official in Gopher passes on to the Great Collector in the
Sky—that’s just a bookish way of saying “croaked”—the spouse, or son, or
daughter is expected to move into the vacated post without so much as a ripple
in the town’s routine. Saves the time and expense of calling a new election.
Under this system of handing over the power we’re able to pay our dues at the
same house and be assured of getting a decent cup of coffee. (No one around here
can abide by surprises, especially in their coffee cups.) In the case of Martha
Bumppo, she’d been the Village Collector behind the Village Collector ever since
the start of Nickie’s reign. The money was handed over to the man of the house,
but the woman of the house kept the records and sent out the overdue notices and
typed up the reports. So while all the glory had been going to Mr. Bumppo, all
the work had been falling on Mrs. Bumppo, and with four kids to cook for and
keep patched up, she already had too much to do. For years she’d been wanting to
visit her ma in Missouri. Now, with her husband cooling down in a plot behind
the Baptist church, and a little insurance pay dirt coming her way, and with all
but one kid out of the house, she was determined to give up the collectorship
and climb on a bus heading west. No matter how hard Annabelle and Daisy tried to
convince her otherwise, she wouldn’t budge: “I ain’t doing it no more, so stop
asking.” Her “stubborn-headedness” upset them plenty, as if they believed
sidestepping this civic duty shed a bad light on everyone in Gopher.

Martha’s refusal to move into the vacated post was further complicated by the
fact that the rest of us already had jobs at the pharmacy or barbershop or
general store or dry goods outlet or repair shop/gas station. As for weekends,
we had too many loose drainpipes and wobbly banisters and drafty windows and
leaky faucets to repair at home to take on an extra duty. Besides, none of us
knew
how
to be the Village Collector. With not one candidate stepping
up to the plate, the phone wires of Gopher—even a few computers equipped to send
out mail on the wings of electricity—heated up, and they didn’t cool down until
after my boss, Sylvester Masterson, a member of the Village Council, looked up
from the pill he was crushing with his pestle and said to me: “Mitty, let’s put
Bartleby up for collector.”

“Bartleby!” I yelped, nearly dropping the bottles of aspirin I was setting out on
a shelf.

“He’s the perfect man for the job.”

“What makes you say a thing like
that?”
I asked, glancing over to make
sure there wasn’t a “pulling-my-leg” grin on his sunken face.

Sylvester must’ve thought all this out earlier because he came out with three
“damn good reasons” without blinking. First, Bartleby liked everyone, and
everyone tolerated Bartleby. Second, he could add up prices on a complicated
list of plumbing materials without using a calculator. Third, and most
important, he didn’t know how to say no.

 
Following a long night of being coaxed by Sylvester over several
hands of poker at the Grange, Rolf Larsen, Gopher’s resident entrepreneur—he
owns the general store and laundromat and heads the Village Council—marched into
Cowley’s Hardware first thing next morning. With Zack out back taking an
inventory of stovepipe, Rolf asked Bartleby point-blank if he could think of any
good reason why he shouldn’t become the Village Collector.

Bartleby thought about this awhile, then said, “Can’t say as I can.”

“That settles it,” said Rolf. “You are hereby nominated to become Gopher’s new
collector.”

Without a word Bartleby scratched his ass, went out the front door, looked into
the slot in the mailbox on the sidewalk, then disappeared down the street. Or so
they tell me. That night at the Grange there was a bucketful of grumbling about
putting up a “flake” for public office, but the simple fact was that no one else
wanted anything to do with that opportunity. As for the few who supported the
nomination, I suspect they were just trying to play a joke on the good people of
Gopher. Next afternoon, in an emergency meeting of the council staged at the
schoolhouse (which is in dire need of a new roof), Bartleby’s “election” was
carried by a landside. The only dissenting member of the council was Zack
Cowley, who expressed concern that the duties of Village Collector would get in
the way of his duties as a hardware clerk.

“Needn’t worry ’bout that, Mr. Cowley,” Bartleby assured him. “I’ll chase down
those stray mutts at night after your store shuts down.” This was the first hint
we had that Bartleby may have misunderstood the nature of the collections he’d
been elected to undertake.

Bartleby’s acceptance speech consisted of a promise to be the “best collector
this town’s ever seen,” and true to his word, Bartleby began collecting with the
same zeal he brought to sorting concrete nails and wall anchors at Cowley’s. On
his way home from work he’d stop unannounced at random residences to collect
used clothing for the town rummage sale; on bingo nights he was seen collecting
cigarette butts and candy wrappers off the plank floor of the Grange; Saturday
evenings he put aside to chase down stray dogs and cats and even a coupla
squirrels. On Sundays he could be found handing the collection plate down the
pews of the Baptist and Methodist churches. Bartleby would collect anything that
struck him as collectible, and the big joke back then was that you’d better keep
moving or else Bartleby would come along and collect you too.

On hearing that Bartleby Jargon had taken to collecting every raindrop in Gopher,
outsiders might’ve thought he wasn’t a flake so much as flat-out stupid. But if
anyone had ever said that about him to my face, he would’ve had a fight on his
hands. (I may be skinny, but I’m wiry.) Bartleby was simply a good neighbor and
an earnest public servant, a throwback to the days when a man went out of his
way to help someone less fortunate, when a man performed his workday job like it
was a patriotic duty. Why call him stupid or flaky just because he got left
behind in all the changes that’ve taken place? I don’t mean like the new cash
register that plays a song in Rolf’s general store or the high-speed
teat-tweaker out at Joad’s farm. I’m talking about the changes that have crawled
into the minds of the citizens of this land. The way the Almighty Buck is
worshipped. The way people look out only for themselves. The way we let the TV
tell us how to live.