Fade (30 page)

Ozzie frolicked on the sidewalk, laughing and dancing, jumping around, giving himself up to frenzy—God, how he hated this town and what a joy it was to attack it like this, to get his revenge, for himself and his Ma.

I'll show you worse than this, he vowed as the cruiser's spotlight illuminated the damage he had created, this is nothing at all. People emerged from the buildings bewildered, rubbing their eyes, while a young cop pushed back his cap and shook his head as a final sheet of glass in the liquor store window suddenly let go and smashed into a thousand pieces of glass on the sidewalk.

Ozzie let out a whoop.

Gliding toward the alley, he saw the old man swaying, drunk as usual, looking at the damage.

“What do you think, old man?” Ozzie said.

And the old man jumped as the voice without a body reached him. In his high spirits, Ozzie hit the old guy. Wanted to do to him what he did to the town. Bopped him good on the head, which sent him reeling back against the brick wall of the alley. Then let him have a blow to the mouth, saw the blood spill, saw the piece of tooth fly out of his mouth. Heard the old man's bellow of pain as he collapsed to the ground. Somebody on the sidewalk looked toward the alley, began walking toward Ozzie.

He left the old man in a heap on the ground. Enough damage for one night. Better get back to the convent. Hated to leave the scene of his triumph, another cruiser arriving with siren wailing. But went anyway. Through the alley to the woods.

That was very nice.

He waited a few days before venturing to town again, although he was impatient to see the evidence of his attack. Caution, he told himself.

Wiping the stuff from his nose, he went down the back steps of the convent and through the courtyard looking for a place to hide in for a while. He saw old man Pinder thrashing out of the woods and into the yard. The old man was agitated, flecks of foam at the corners of his lips, the old eyes red and bleary as usual but something else in his eyes now, something sharp and alert.

“What's the matter, old man?” Ozzie asked. He had never come out to the convent before.

“There's a stranger in town,” the old man said, spit flying every which way from his lips. “And he's looking for you.”

knew he was there, nearby, somewhere in the town, the instant I stepped off the bus. Something in the air, like a distant note of music only my ears could hear. An aura, a mood, which I tried to pin down but found elusive as I stood in front of a converted railroad car that obviously was a diner although it had no sign. The morning aromas of coffee, bacon, and other fried foods wafted through an open window, bringing a feeling of normality that did not quite dispel the alien atmosphere the town presented to me.

At first glance Ramsey reminded me of the cowboy towns in the old Saturday matinees at the Plymouth. Wooden sidewalks, warped boards. Iron railings to which horses had been tethered in earlier times. Slanting roofs above the sidewalks supported by wobbly posts. Only the parking meters shattered the illusion of other times.

In an encyclopedia at the Monument Public Library, I had learned that Ramsey had long ago been a prosperous resort town, famous for mineral waters that attracted thousands of visitors, including President Grover Cleveland. The springs had dried up, however, and time passed the town by. Now it was only a whisper of its former self, without industry or shopping malls, population fewer than 3,000, according to the most recent U.S. census. No motels or even a movie theater. One dubious hotel, the Glenwood, at which I had succeeded in making reservations for three nights despite the lack of interest on the part of the clerk who manned the telephone. Thus, I had been prepared for a slumbering backwater but not for the desolation and damage I observed as I walked up Main Street to the hotel.

Ramsey, in fact, resembled a town under siege. Or a town recovering from an assault. Several windows had been boarded up at a store whose sign proclaimed
KELCEY'S GROCERY
in faded print. Smashed streetlight globes whose broken remains had not yet been removed. The shattered tubes of a neon sign that had once advertised Dempsey's Drug Store. The small windows of the parking meters had all been smashed.

At the Glenwood Hotel I stepped into a lobby with a cracked tile floor, a sagging sofa whose color had long ago faded away. A bell stood on a small end table, the kind of bell the sisters at St. Jude's had on their desks. I rang the bell and listened to its forlorn echo.

I should not be here, I told myself. I should be back in the safety of Frenchtown. Before leaving, I had weighed all the risks. Suppose I could not control the fade in a strange town I had never visited before? Suppose the fade happened on the bus or the train or while I walked the streets of Ramsey, Maine? I finally turned my back on the fears. Finding the fader who was my nephew was more important than lapsing into the fade. The risk was small, really. Sometimes months passed without the fade occurring.

Now, in the lobby, my fears were somewhat placated. In a few moments I would have a room to which I could flee if the fade occurred unexpectedly, just as my tenement in Frenchtown was always a refuge.

A middle-aged man descended an uncarpeted stairway. He was small and thin, a few strands of hair combed to cover as much of his bald head as possible.

“I called last week,” I said. “For reservations. The name is John LeBlanc.”

Realizing that I was venturing into the unknown, into the mystery surrounding the fade, I had withheld my real name, feeling absurd for the moment but allowing instinct to guide me.

“I know,” he said, still uninterested. Taking a skeleton key from his pocket, he said: “We're a residence hotel, we don't get many transients.”

I paid him in advance, doing business as we stood in the lobby, no reservations desk in sight. As he beckoned me to follow him, I asked: “What happened to the town? Looks like a hurricane hit it….”

“Vandalism,” he said. “Young punks, probably from Ban-gor, tearing up the place.”

The room he led me to on the second floor was surprisingly comfortable-looking, dominated by a four-poster bed with a George Washington bedspread, a highly polished mahogany bureau, and a Boston rocker.

“Mrs. Wright's place,” he said. “But she spends August in Canada. Only room available, you're a lucky man. Nobody comes to Ramsey anymore. No reason to. Town's gone to pot.”

He waited. I realized he had actually been asking me what had brought me to Ramsey. My story was ready. “I'm a writer,” I said. “I'm doing a book on old resort towns. This is a preliminary visit to check a few details….”

He nodded curtly and stepped through the doorway, closing the door gently behind him. I realized that he had not once looked me in the eye from the moment he came down the stairs until he left the room.

Which I soon learned was the usual practice with strangers in Ramsey, Maine, at least on that particular day.

I spent the morning roaming the town, making small purchases in the stores—razor blades in Dempsey's Drug Store, a box of Kleenex in Kelcey's Grocery, a
Newsweek
in Dunker's Convenience Store—and no one paid me any attention. At the registers, the cashiers—middle-aged men who were probably the proprietors—barely acknowledged my presence as they rang up the sales and handed me the change.

The Ramsey Public Library and the Pilgrim Congregational Church, with a clock in its steeple, stood across from each other at the far end of Main Street. The library, a redbrick building with a sagging roof, showed no signs of life. A notice posted on the front door announced that it was closed for renovations.

Town Hall was located at the opposite end of Main Street and contained the police and fire departments. Across the street, the town common was deserted, a gazebo its centerpiece, an ancient cannon guarding the entrance.

I ate lunch in the Ramsey Diner, where patrons ordered a beer and a shot of whiskey to go with the noontime special, which that day was meat loaf. The counterman did not look at me as he took my order and later slid the plate along the tiled counter top. No one else in the place looked at me either.

In the afternoon, I struck out on foot, following a winding highway for about two miles. I finally reached a clearing where a wooden sign proclaimed
Sisters of Mercy
in faded Gothic script. Following a gravel road, I came upon an ancient stone building with a single steeple, a small gold cross at the top. Ivy clung to the building with a thousand green fingers. The windows were tall and narrow, giving away no secrets.

I rang the bell and heard chimes echoing unendingly through distant corridors. After a few moments, the heavy oak door swung open, revealing a tiny woman, enclosed in the black-and-white habit seldom seen these days. Her pink cheeks glowed like polished apples.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“I wonder—is it possible for me to attend mass in the chapel?”

“We cannot welcome visitors on weekdays,” she said, voice and eyes full of regret. “Only on the first Sunday of the month. I'm sorry …”

She paused for a moment, as if to offer consolation, and slowly closed the door.

As I started away my flesh turned cold, as if someone had raked a fingernail across my back. I knew instantly that my fader either was here or had been here. Somewhere in the vicinity, in the convent itself perhaps. My first tendency was to ring the convent bell again. But I held back. I was not ready to see that nephew of mine who was the fader. Not yet. Somehow he was connected in my mind with the damage I had seen in the town. I did not know why I should make that assumption but there it was. The call of the blood again. The links. Between my uncle Adelard and myself. And now, myself and this Ramsey boy.

Back in town, twilight brought a chill. Until this moment the town had seemed sterile, without weather of any kind, as if under glass. My visit took place toward the middle of August, but it might have been any day of the year on a distant planet that resembled earth.

“Taxi?”

Turning, I encountered an old man wearing a faded baseball cap,
RED
sox faintly stitched across a dirty visor. Bloodshot eyes, face pinched and wizened, teeth broken, nose awry from an old fracture, a purple grape of a lump fresh on his forehead.

“You the cabdriver?” I asked, although I knew how ridiculous the question sounded.

“Hell no,” he said. “This town, in fact, don't have a taxi. But I could arrange a ride. Tommy Pinder at your service.” He had brought a variety of smells with him: alcohol and vomit and an odor I remembered from the old dump on the edge of Frenchtown. Shooting me a shrewd glance, he said: “Find what you've been looking for?”

“What am I looking for?” I asked. His eyes were red and watery, but intelligence flickered in them.

“Well, I figure you must be looking for something,” he said. “Saw you all day, wandering the streets. Buying stuff you don't need in the stores. Bought a magazine in Dunker's and tossed it into a rubbish barrel without reading it. Said to myself: He's looking for something, that fellow.”

“I'm a writer,” I said. “Doing a book on old resort towns. Thought I might include a chapter on Ramsey.”

The old man shrugged deeper into his clothes. I could see a raincoat under his nondescript topcoat and at least two sweaters.

“You from?” he asked.

“Down in Massachusetts …” As another drift of alcohol reached me, I asked: “Buy you a drink?”

“Is the pope Catholic?” The grin he attempted gave his face a grotesque look.

I made the writer's leap at that moment, and saw how much the old man resembled the town. Both in ruins, damaged, ancient. Behind the old man's easy manner, I sensed apprehension, nervousness, or did he merely need a drink badly?

“Let's find a bar,” I said, although I had seen no bar in town, merely the Ramsey Diner where patrons drank beer and whiskey with their lunch.

“I prefer the out-of-doors,” the old man said with a touch of dignity. “The gazebo there in the common across the way. If you offer me a dollar or two, I can go into Dempsey's and buy us a good bottle of muscatel. Or whatever you prefer …”

Taking money out of my pocket, I said: “Nothing for me. I'll meet you in the common.”

The common was modest in size. The gray barrel of the cannon was covered with meaningless graffiti. Whoever had assaulted the town had ignored the common. A spotlight, spared from the vandalism, showered illumination on the gazebo. The old man and I sat on the steps, looking at Main Street across the way, almost eerie in its stillness. A few people came and went, flitting through the shadows, emerging into the light from the stores and then disappearing into the gloom.

The old man did not drink immediately and seemed to be taking pleasure from merely holding the bottle in his hands. He had neatly folded the paper bag and slipped it into an inside pocket.

“How do you like this town of ours?” he asked expansively, his hand waving in the air, as if he were offering the town to me as a gift.

“Not the friendliest place in the world,” I said. “All day long, hardly anybody said hello.”

“People here don't talk too much,” he said, brooding, studying the bottle as he held it up to the light.