John's Wife: A Novel (18 page)

Over the recent years, while a haunted Ellsworth, unbeknownst to the public at large, wrestled daily with a novel-once-in-progress now seriously imperiled by the Stalker’s trespass, a few discerning readers (his friend Gordon, for example) might have noticed a gradual decline in the quality of
The Town Crier
, but most in town, like the Artist’s admiring Model in the novel, were so in awe of anyone who could put two words together and spell them right that they found their old hometown rag, as they called it, not only as delightful as ever, but actually improving. In part, this was the Stalker’s doing, for Ellsworth, increasingly engrossed in his narrative dilemmas, had come to rely more and more upon other contributors to keep the weekly newspaper going, and they in turn had each their own fans, most especially their own immediate families. Thus, the high school journalism students, in addition to their traditional scholastic and athletic reporting, now provided regular book, movie, and music reviews (which amused their elders, even as they shook their heads at the dubious tastes of this new and noisy generation:
The Teen Choir
, some wryly called the paper now), the Chamber of Commerce secretary turned in a weekly business notes column called “You Can Bank On It!,” the meaning of life was explored, mostly by members of the Ministerial Association, in a back-page box entitled “Afterthoughts,” and just about everybody, sooner or later, wrote up something for the popular guest column, “I Remember.” Some of these recollections were quite frivolous, such as those having to do with past fashions, dead pets or prewar prices, vanished landmarks, grandma’s favorite recipes, and Halloween pranks in the days of outdoor privies, but others, such as Veronica’s description of overcoming asthma to become a high school cheerleader, or Otis’s as-told-to account of learning about his father’s self-inflicted death while lying wounded in a jungle hospital, or the nurse Columbia’s loving tribute to her dead brother Yale, were deeply moving and often clipped and kept by the townsfolk. Tributes to those who had passed away were a common theme of course in the “I Remember” column—the librarian Kate’s elegant remembrance, for example, only shortly before her own death, of her friend Harriet, the doctor’s wife, whom she called “one of those great humane readers, impatient with grandeur and pretense, who profoundly transform the simplest work, utterly and for all time, merely by the act of reading it with an open heart,” or John’s wife’s simple tribute to her Parisian friend, who on her visits to the town had won the hearts of all who knew her, or the editor Ellsworth’s own sentimental memorial to the long-suffering mother of his good friend Gordon the photographer—but there was room for the other emotions, too, everything from humor to horror. Beatrice the preacher’s wife recalled that day, just after they’d arrived in town, when she locked herself out of the manse by mistake with little Zoe inside and yelling her head off while her husband Lennox with the only other key was out making pastoral calls, so zealous in those early days that he didn’t come home until ten at night, and then without the car which he had apparently left somewhere that he couldn’t remember. “It was a real trip,” she said in her typed draft, which the editor altered to “a real experience.” She also said that what most impressed her about the place was that it was “a flat town, good for pushing babies around in,” and that it was so friendly that “God Himself would feel right at home here just like we do.” Trevor, the accountant and insurance broker, on the other hand, told of the horrific day he came upon the crushed body of the little six-year-old boy, killed on his bicycle by an unknown hit-and-run driver in a back alley behind the accountant’s offices. Trevor, as he explained in his graphic yet delicate “I Remember” column, was so traumatized by the experience that he lost the sight of one eye for a time, as though the eye could not bear to see what it was seeing, Alf explaining that what he had had was a sort of minor stroke and that it might eventually clear up, allowing him to drive again. As, over time, happened. Trevor had offered a personal five-thousand-dollar reward (he reaffirmed this offer in his “I Remember” column) for any information leading to the arrest of the guilty driver, but so far this had not been collected.

Floyd could top that one, but when asked, said no. Floyd now managed John’s downtown hardware store, but he was not from this town and no one in town knew much about his life before he came here, or thought much about it either. A traveling salesman who blew in out of nowhere, they knew that, an ignorant redneck with some familiarity with the Bible (the kids called him Old Hoot) and a marked reluctance to talk about his past, but once John had hired him, they all accepted him as he was (not much) and mostly forgot about him except when they needed a new door lock or toilet plunger or a lug wrench. But traveling, before he got here, was mostly what Floyd had done all his life, some of it selling, some trucking, a lot of it running from the law, the only settled times being those when they’d caught up with him and clapped his iniquitous ass into one prison or another, which was where he’d picked up his Bible knowledge and honed his cardplaying, the bowling came natural. Edna had been his girl in high school before they both dropped out, and she’d stuck with him through all the bad times, though not even she knew all he’d done. The things he’d been caught at, sure, the thieving and hell-raising they’d charged him with in one town or another when he didn’t get out fast enough, but not everything. Some things nobody knew. There was the woman trucker who lured him on her CB radio to that lonely highway pullover, for example, the filthy drunken whore. Had a wart on her eyelid and a tuft of black hair on her chin. The old fleabag wanted fifty bucks for a quick ride. Got a quicker one than she counted on. She still turned up in Floyd’s nightmares, wart and all, and sent him to his knees beside the bed in fervent prayer. It wasn’t so much the sticking, he’d killed others, God save his shit-soaked soul, but the way he cut her up so badly and the places he dicked her after. I Remember. There were others, too, and none of them pretty—that fat cowboy with the false dentures who waved him over to help with a flat tire on his camper, then offered him a blowjob, for example, or the rich bitch in Santa Fe with the hairless tattooed pussy who wanted to hire him to knock off her husband, or that snot-nosed longhaired kid with rings in his ears he picked up outside Cheyenne, who made the mistake of saying he didn’t think God existed, but if He did He was an asshole, that swoll-up shit-for-brains got it good. And that was the worst of it. Floyd repented of his sins but kept reliving them, knowing that for all his praying and promising, there was no meanness that had happened that couldn’t happen again, and same way all over. It scared the bejabbers out of him but also somehow gave him the juice to get from day to day, and that was worrisome, too. What no one knew, except Edna maybe, was how damned vulnerable he felt, how closely the dark powers dogged his heels. John had saved his life with this hardware job, but if he ever got let go or the store got shut down, Floyd strictly hoped somebody would kill him before he walked out that fricking door.

That store Floyd managed probably should have been closed long ago or at least moved out to one of the malls, but it had been in the family a long time, always on that same corner of Sixth and Main, literally the cornerstone—or cornerstore—of the family legend, so John was reluctant, history sparing what history had abandoned, to shut it down, at least so long as his father was alive, and Mitch, though he had turned over most of the local day-to-day operations to his son and had announced his retirement more than once, showed no intention of cashing his chips in soon, on the contrary. Mitch’s wartime profits had made him the largest landowner in the county and an influential business leader throughout the state, he was a major player in the area and felt that staying in the game was what kept him in the pink and his golf score down. He did not want to get in John’s way, though, so, complying with the old wild oats dictum, once his to lay on John, he moved his financial dealings away from home and out into the national and international markets, crossing paths with his boy only when it came to a profitable exploitation of his local landholdings. John was just a kid, still in his mid-twenties when they worked up their first big project together, a neighborhood mall on the road out to the golf course, the town’s first. Barnaby was still very much in the picture then, so it was a shopping center solid as Main Street and appealingly brick-cottagey, built in a semicircle around a parking lot with a fountain in the center and potted bushes lining the border, but it was soon found to be, as John had chafingly predicted, woefully inadequate. John called it a misuse of light and space, meaning he wanted more blacktop and more glass and less superfluous detail. The bushes blocked the display windows, the fountain (long since paved over) collected excrement and graffiti as wishing wells caught coins and used up valuable parking space, the heavy brickwork inhibited turnover renovations and the personal expression of the shopkeepers, and Barnaby’s ban on marquees and neon and rooftop signs, Mitch’s son felt, was like banning popcorn in the movie theaters. Worst of all was the lack of expansive unobstructed brightly lit shop floorspace, America’s no-tricks answer to all the mirrored Versailles of the world, a mistake that John, riding over his father-in-law’s muttered objections, put right on all his future shopping centers, but one never resolved in that first mall, now limited to arts and crafts boutiques, beauty parlors, and home video outlets. Barnaby’s latest fiasco, his attempted raid on the family company, Mitch found repugnant and in fact completely loony, as though Audrey’s death might have knocked Barn off his rocker, but, father to one, longtime business crony of the other, he did understand what divided John and his father-in-law, at least while the old curmudgeon was not yet himself so cruelly divided. John’s first constructions had been high school and college theater sets: fantasy structures thrown up and knocked down in a day, and sufficient unto it, as the saying went, constructions Barnaby would never even acknowledge as such. Barnaby’s first was his own home, a classic pictured to this day in books on twentieth-century American architecture, books John scoffed at as the purblind trivia of academic twinkies who wouldn’t know which end of the hammer to pick up.

Clarissa, diminutive queen of the mall rats and the pool punks, would have loved her grandfather’s description of her daddy’s constructions as “fantasy structures.” Especially the malls. Pure magic. They were, always had been ever since she was little. Like fairy kingdoms, sun palaces. They let her run wild in them back then and she could do no wrong and everybody smiled at her and gave her treats and presents, it was very exhilarating. Her daddy used to bring circus acts and musicians and famous comedians to the malls to draw the crowds, and there were always coin-operated machines to ride or play and free badges and balloons from the stores and special decorations for every season with Valentine redhots and chocolate Easter bunnies and Fourth of July fireworks and Halloween masks and corn candies and Christmas Santas. When she was only five years old she was a model in a spring swimsuit show out there, and she never forgot how they laughed and cheered, especially her daddy with his dazzling eyes lit up, when, in the middle of her routine, she tucked one arm in and, with a smile like the ones she’d seen on television, let the shoulder strap fall to her elbow. It was electric. Then her daddy built the new mall with the big food court in it and that became her favorite. Still was, even though there was an even fancier one now out by the highway. All the big kids started hanging out there in the food court, and lots of intense things were going on, grown-up things, though in the beginning she didn’t know exactly what. Just that they seemed too important to miss. And now, for the first time, she was no longer allowed to run free, she always had to be with her mother or Granny Opal, the only grandmother she had left, so that just proved it. Something was happening. Luckily, there was a video games arcade right next to the taco bar and she could always get them to take her and Jennifer there (they were best friends now and both curious as cats), and then go for a coffee and leave them alone. It helped when her granddad had his stroke, because the retirement home was out near the mall and Granny Opal or her mother, whichever one was with them, often slipped away then to pay him a visit. Anyway, Clarissa was in high school now and too old to be chaperoned, and she said so in no uncertain terms. This was her
real
life and it wasn’t fair to let her miss it. Jen, who was a preacher’s kid, loved it at the malls just as much as Clarissa did; her word for it was “spiritual.” She said she thought there was something phony about church and Sunday school with their blowhard Moseses and dead Jesuses, the malls were where God was going to show Himself (or Herself) if anywhere at all. You could just
feel
it. She and Jen figured out most things out there—the dare-me shoplifting, the ripped-off stuff for sale, the alcohol snuck into the rootbeers and milkshakes, the secret pot smoking and the funny pills and the furtive dealing, what was going down at the far end of the parking lot when people paired up and went out there for a while, all that—and they started dressing in printed album-cover tee shirts and leather jackets and chains and torn designer jeans so as to fit in better. Jen even got herself a nose ring, though she never wore it back home at the manse, she said it really freaked her mother. Clarissa was not so sure about this. Jennifer’s mom used to be a hippie, and she was still spaced out a lot of the time. Which could be fun, she now knew. There was a lot of cigarette smoking going on out at the mall, too, of course, it seemed like everyone had the deathweed habit, but Clarissa didn’t go that far. It was the one completely serious thing her father had ever said to her: “Clarissa, please. Promise me. Don’t.” And she had promised, and she’d never break her promise either, though she took it for granted if it wasn’t tobacco, it was okay. Her dad loved her, but he was no square.