The books were different enough to qualify as schizoid. One, with a playing-card bookmark about three quarters of the way through, was the paperback edition of Richard North Patterson’s Silent Witness. I applauded her taste; Patterson and Demille are probably the best of the current popular novelists. The other, a hardcover tome of some weight, was The Collected Short Works of Herman Melville. About as far from Richard North Patterson as you could get. According to the faded purple ink stamped on the thickness of the pages, this volume belonged to Four Lakes Community Library. That was a lovely little stone building about five miles south of Dark Score Lake, where Route 68 passes off the TR and into Motton. Where Mattie worked, presumably. I opened to her bookmark, another playing card, and saw she was reading “Bartleby.”
“I don’t understand that,” she said from behind me, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the books. “I like it—it’s a good enough story—but I haven’t the slightest idea what it means. The other one, now, I’ve even figured out who did it.”
“It’s a strange pair to read in tandem,” I said, putting them back down. “The Patterson I’m reading for pleasure,” Mattie said. She went into the kitchen, looked briefly (and with some longing, I thought) at the bottle of wine, then opened the fridge and took out a pitcher of Kool-Aid. On the fridge door were words her daughter had already assembled from her Magnabet bag: KI and MATTIE and HOHO (Santa Claus, I presumed). “Well, I’m reading them both for pleasure, I guess, but we’re due to discuss “Bartleby’ in this little group I’m a part of. We meet Thursday nights at the library. I’ve still got about ten pages to go.”
“A readers’ circle.”
“Uh-huh. Mrs. Briggs leads. She formed it long before I was born. She’s the head librarian at Four Lakes, you know.” “I do. Lindy Briggs is my caretaker’s sister-in-law.” Mattie smiled. “Small world, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s a big world but a small town.” She started to lean back against the counter with her glass of Kool-Aid, then thought better of it. “Why don’t we go outside and sit? That way anyone passing can see that we’re still dressed and that we don’t have anything on inside-out.”
I looked at her, startled She looked back with a kind of cynical good humor. It wasn’t an expression that looked particularly at home on her face. “I may only be twenty-one, but I’m not stupid,” she said. “He’s watching me. I know it, and you probably do, too. On another night I might be tempted to say fuck him if he can’t take a joke, but it’s cooler out there and the smoke from the hibachi will keep the worst of the bugs away. Have I shocked you? If so, I’m sorry.”
“You haven’t.” She had, a little. “No need to apologize.” We carried our drinks down the not-quite-steady cinderblock steps and sat side-by-side in a couple of lawn-chairs. To the left of us the coals in the hibachi glowed soft rose in the growing gloom. Mattie leaned back, placed the cold curve of her glass briefly against her forehead, then drank most of what was left, the ice cubes sliding against her teeth with a click and a rattle.
Crickets hummed in the woods behind the trailer and across the road.
Farther up Highway 68, I could see the bright white fluorescents over the gas island at the Lakeview General. The seat of my chair was a little baggy, the interwoven straps a little frayed, and the old girl canted pretty severely to the left, but there was still no place I’d rather have been sitting just then. This evening had turned out to be a quiet little miracle… at least, so far. We still had John Storrow to get to. “I’m glad you came on a Tuesday,” she said. “Tuesday nights are hard for me. I’m always thinking of the ballgame down at Warrington’s.
The guys’ll be picking up the gear by now—the bats and bases and catcher’s mask—and putting it back in the storage cabinet behind home plate. Drinking their last beers and smoking their last cigarettes.
That’s where I met my husband, you know. I’m sure you’ve been told all that by now.” I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I could hear the faint tinge of bitterness which had crept into her voice, and guessed she was still wearing the cynical expression. It was too old for her, but I thought she’d come by it honestly enough. Although if she didn’t watch out, it would take root and grow. “I heard a version from Bill, yes—Lindy’s brother-in-law.”
“Oh ayuh—our story’s on retail. You can get it at the store, or the Village Cafe, or at that old blabbermouth’s garage… which my father-in-law rescued from Western Savings, by the way. He stepped in just before the bank could foreclose. Now Dickie Brooks and his cronies think Max Devore is walking talking Jesus. I hope you got a fairer version from Mr. Dean than you’d get at the All-Purpose. You must’ve, or you wouldn’t have risked eating hamburgers with Jezebel.” I wanted to get away from that, if I could—her anger was understandable but useless. Of course it was easier for me to see that; it wasn’t my kid who had been turned into the handkerchief tied at the center of a tug-of-war rope. “They still play softball at Warrington’s?
Even though Devore bought the place?”
“Yes indeed. He goes down to the field in his motorized wheelchair every Tuesday evening and watches.
There are other things he’s done since he came back here that are just attempts to buy the town’s good opinion, but I think he genuinely loves the softball games. The Whit-more woman goes, too. Brings an extra oxygen tank along in a little red wheelbarrow with a whitewall tire on the front. She keeps a fielder’s mitt in there, too, in case any foul pops come up over the backstop to where he sits. He caught one near the start of the season, I heard, and got a standing O from the players and the folks who come to watch.”
“Going to the games puts him in touch with his son, you think?” Mattie smiled grimly. “I don’t think Lance so much as crosses his mind, not when he’s at the ballfield. They play hard at Warrington’s—slide into home with their feet up, jump into the puckerbrush for the flyballs, curse each other when they do something wrong—and that’s what old Max Devore enjoys, that’s why he never misses a Tuesdayevening game. He likes to watch them slide and get up bleeding.”
“Is that how Lance played?” She thought about it carefully.
“He played hard, but he wasn’t crazed. He was there just for the fun of it. We all were. We women—shit, really just us girls, Barney Therriault’s wife, Cindy, was only sixteen—we’d stand behind the backstop on the first-base side, smoking cigarettes or waving punks to keep the bugs away, cheering our guys when they did something good, laughing when they did something stupid. We’d swap sodas or share a can of beer. I’d admire Helen Geary’s twins and she’d kiss Ki under the chin until Ki giggled. Sometimes we’d go down to the Village Cafe afterward and Buddy’d make us pizzas, losers pay. All friends again, you know, a ter the game. We’d sit there laughing and yelling and blowing straw-wrappers around, some of the guys half-loaded but nobody mean. In those days they got all the mean out on the ballfield. And you know what? None of them come to see me. Not Helen Geary, who was my best friend. Not Richie Lattimore, who was Lance’s best riend—the two of them would talk about rocks and birds and the kinds of trees there were across the lake for hours on end. They came to the uneral, and for a little while a ter, and then… you know what it was like? When I was a kid, our well dried up. For awhile you’d get a trickle when you turned on the tap, but then there was just air. Just air.” The cynicism was gone and there was only hurt in her voice. “I saw Helen at Christmas, and we promised to get together for the twins’
birthday, but we never did. I think she’s scared to come near me.”
“Because of the old man?”
“Who else? But that’s okay, life goes on.” She sat up, drank the rest of her Kool-Aid, and set the glass aside. “What about you, Mike? Did you come back to write a book? Are you going to name the TR?” This was a local bon mot that I remembered with an almost painful twinge of nostalgia. Locals with great plans were said to be bent on naming the TR. “No,” I said, and then astonished myself by saying: “I don’t do that anymore. I think I expected her to leap to her feet, overturning her chair and uttering a sharp cry of horrified denial. All of which says a good deal about me, I suppose, and none of it flattering. “You’ve retired?” she asked, sounding calm and remarkably unhorri-fled. “Or is it writer’s block?”