Culpepper stared off into the distance toward the empty train tracks beyond the silent road.
“I take a truck full of manuscripts to Gila Springs once a month, so we mail out from where we are not, bring back windfalls of checks, snowfalls of rejections. The wheat and chaff go into our bank, with its one teller and one president. The money waits there, in case some day we have to move.”
Cardiff felt sweat suddenly break out all over his body.
“You got something to say, Mr. Cardiff?”
“Soon.”
“I won’t push.” Culpepper relit his pipe and recited:
A mother remembers her dead son.
Today how far might he have wandered,
My mighty hunter of dragonflies.
“That’s not mine. Wish it were. Japanese. Been around forever.”
Cardiff paced back and forth on the porch and then turned.
“Good grief, it all fits. Writing is the only activity that could support a town like this, so far off. Like a mail order business.”
“Writing is a mail order business. Anything you want you write a check, send it off, and before you know it, the Johnson Smith Company in Racine, Wisconsin, sends you what you need. Seebackoscopes. Gyroscopes. Mardi Gras masks. Orphan Annie dolls. Film clips from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Vanishing cards. Reappearing skeletons.”
“All that good stuff.” Cardiff smiled.
“All that good stuff.”
They laughed quietly together.
Cardiff exhaled. “So, this is a writers’ township.”
“Thinking about staying?”
“No, about leaving.”
Cardiff stopped and put his hand over his mouth as if he had said something he shouldn’t have said.
“Now what does that mean?” Elias Culpepper almost started up from his chair.
But before Cardiff could speak, a pale figure appeared on the lawn below the porch and started to climb the steps.
Cardiff called her name.
By the door the daughter of Elias Culpepper spoke. “When you’re ready, come upstairs.”
When I’m ready!? Cardiff thought wildly. When I’m ready!
The screen door shut.
“You’ll need this,” said Elias Culpepper.
He held out a last drink, which Cardiff took.
CHAPTER 18
Again, the large bed was a bank of snow on a warm summer night. She lay on one side, looking up at the ceiling, and did not move. He sat on the far edge, saying nothing, and at last tilted over and lay his head on the pillow, and waited.
Finally Nef said, “It seems to me you’ve spent a lot of time in the town graveyard since you arrived. Looking for what?”
He scanned the empty ceiling and replied.
“It seems to me you’ve been down at that train station where hardly any trains arrive. Why?”
She did not turn, but said, “It seems both of us are looking for something but won’t or can’t say why or what.”
“So it seems.”
Another silence. Now, at last, she looked at him.
“Which of us is going to confess?”
“You go first.”
She laughed quietly.
“My truth is bigger and more incredible than yours.”
He joined her laughter but shook his head. “Oh, no, my truth is more terrible.”
She quickened and he felt her trembling.
“Don’t frighten me.”
“I don’t want to. But there it is. And if tell you, I’m afraid you’ll run and I won’t ever see you again.”
“Ever?” murmured Nef.
“Ever.”
“Then,” she said, “tell me what you can, but don’t make me afraid.”
But at that moment, far away in the night world, there was a single cry of a train, a locomotive, drawing near.
“Did you hear that? Is that the train that comes to take you away?”
There was a second cry of a whistle over the horizon.
“No,” he said, “maybe it’s the train that comes, God I hope not, with terrible news.”
Slowly she sat up on the edge of the bed, her eyes shut. “I have to know.”
“No,” he said. “Don’t go. Let me.”
“But first…,” she murmured.
Her hand gently pulled him over to her side of the bed.
CHAPTER 19
Sometime during the night, he sensed that he was once more alone.
He woke in a panic, at dawn, thinking, I’ve missed the train. It’s come and gone. But, no—
He heard the locomotive whistle shrieking across the sky, moaning like a funeral train as the sun rose over desert sands.
Did he or did he not hear a bag, similar to his own, catapult from a not-stopping train to bang the station platform?
Did he or did he not hear someone landing like a three-hundred-pound anvil on the platform boards?
And then Cardiff knew. He let his head fall as if chopped. “Dear God, oh dear vengeful God!”
CHAPTER 20
They stood on the platform of the empty station, Cardiff at one end, the tall man at the other.
“James Edward McCoy?” Cardiff said.
“Cardiff,” said McCoy, “is that you?”
Both smiled false smiles.
“What are you doing here?” said Cardiff.
“You might have known I would follow,” said James Edward McCoy. “When you left town, I knew someone had died, and you’d gone to give him a proper burial. So I packed my bag.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To keep you honest. I learned long ago you leaned one way, me the other. You were always wrong, I was always right. I hate liars.”
“‘Optimists’ is the word you want.”
“No wonder I hate you. The world’s a cesspool and you keep swimming in it, heading for shore. Dear God, where is the shore? You’ll never find it because the shore doesn’t exist! We’re rats drowning in a sewer, but you see lighthouses where there are none. You claim the Titanic is Mark Twain’s steamboat. To you Svengali, Raskolnikov, and Hitler were the Three Stooges! I feel sorry for you. So I’m here to make you honest.”
“Since when have you believed in honesty?”
“Honesty, currency, and common sense. Never play funhouse slot machines, don’t toss red-hot pennies to the poor, or throw your landlady downstairs. Fine futures? Hell, the future’s now, and it’s rotten. So, just what are you up to in this jerkwater town?”
McCoy glared around the deserted station.
Cardiff said, “You’d better leave on the next train.”
“I got twenty-four hours to steal your story.” McCoy squinted at the shut sunflowers that lined the road into town. “Lead the way. I’ll follow and trip over the bodies.”
McCoy hoisted his bag and began to walk, and Cardiff, after a beat or two, jogged to catch up with him.
“My editor said I’d better come back with a headline—one thousand bucks if it’s good, three if it’s super.” As they walked, McCoy surveyed the porch swings motionless in the early morning breeze and the high windows that reflected no light. “You know, this feels like super.”
Cardiff trudged along, thinking: Don’t breathe. Lie low.
The town heard.
No leaf trembled. No fruit fell. Shadows of dogs lay under bushes, but no dogs. The grass flattened like the fur on a nervous cat. All was stillness.
Pleased with the silence he sensed he had caused, McCoy stopped where two streets intersected, panoplied by trees. He stared at the green architecture and mused, “I get it.” He dropped his bag, pulled a pencil from his shirt pocket, which he licked, and began to scribble in a notepad, pronouncing the syllables as he wrote. “Leftover town. Stillborn, Nebraska. Remembrance, Ohio. Steamed west in 1880, lost steam 1890. End of the line 1900. Long lost.”
Cardiff suffered lockjaw.
McCoy appraised him. “I’m on the money, right? I can see it in your face. You came to bu
ry Caesar. I came to stir his bones. You followed your intuition here; I came thanks to an itching hunch. You liked what you saw and probably would have gone home and said nothing. I don’t like what I see, past tense.” He stuck the pencil behind his ear, jammed the notepad in his pants pocket, and reached down to heft his bag once more. As if propelled by the sound of his own voice, he continued striding down Summerton’s streets, proclaiming as he went, “Look at that lousy architecture, the gimcrack scrimshaw rococo baroque shingles and hangons. You ever see so many damn scroll-cut wooden icicles? Christ, wouldn’t it be awful to be trapped here forever, even just two weeks every summer? Hey, now, what’s this?” He stopped short, looked up.
The sign over the porch front read, EGYPTIAN VIEW ARMS. BOARDING.
McCoy glanced at Cardiff, who stiffened. “This has got to be your digs. Let’s see.”
And before Cardiff could move, McCoy was up the front steps and inside the screen door.
Cardiff caught the door before it could slam and stepped in.
Silence. The obsequies over. The dear departed gone.
Even the parlor dust did not move, if there ever had been any dust. All the Tiffany lamps were dark and the flower vases empty. He heard McCoy in the kitchen and went to find him.
McCoy stood in front of the icebox, which was opened wide. There was no ice within, nor any cream or milk or butter and no drip pan under the box to be drunk by a thirsty dog after midnight. The pantry, similarly, displayed no leopard bananas or Ceylonese or Indian spices. A river of quiet wind had entered the house and left with the priceless stuffs.
McCoy muttered, scribbling, “That’s enough evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“Everyone’s hiding. Everything’s stashed. When I leave—bingo!—the grass gets cut, the icebox drips. How did they know I was coming? Now, I don’t suppose there’s a Western Union in this no-horse town?” He spied a telephone in the hallway, picked it up, listened. “No dial tone.” He glanced through the screen door. “No postman in sight. I am in a big damn isolation booth.”
McCoy ambled out to sit on the front porch glider, which squealed as if threatening to fall. McCoy read Cardiff’s face.
“You look like a do-gooder,” he said. “You run around saving people not worth saving. So what’s so great about this town that’s worth the Cardiff Salvation Army? That can’t be the whole story. There’s got to be a villain somewhere.”
Cardiff held his breath.
McCoy pulled out his pad and scowled at it.
“I think I know the name of the villain,” he muttered. “The Department of—”
He made Cardiff wait.
“—Highways?”
Cardiff exhaled.
“Bingo,” McCoy whispered. “I see the headlines now: ACE REPORTER DEFENDS PERFECT TOWN FROM DESTRUCTION. Small type: Highway Bureau Insists on Pillage and Ruin. Next week: SUMMERTON SUES AND LOSES. Ace Reporter Drowns in Gin.”
He shut his pad.
“Pretty good for an hour’s work, yep?” he said.
“Pretty,” said Cardiff.
CHAPTER 21
“This is gonna be great,” said James Edward McCoy. “I can see it now: my byline on stories about how Summerton, Arizona, hit the rocks and sank. Johnstown flood stand aside. San Francisco earthquake, forget it. I’ll expose how the government destroyed the innocents and plowed their front lawns with salt. First the New York Times, then papers in London, Paris, Moscow, even Canada. News junkies love to read about others’ misery—here’s an entire town being strangled to death by government greed. And I’m going to tell the world.”
“Is that all you can see in this?” said Cardiff.
“Twenty-twenty vision!”
“Look around,” said Cardiff. “It’s a town with no people. No people, no story. Nobody cares if a town falls if there are no people in it. Your ‘story’ will run for one day, maybe. No book deal, no TV series, no film for you. Empty town. Empty bank account.”
A scowl split McCoy’s face.
“Son of a bitch,” he murmured. “Where in hell is everyone?”
“They were never here.”
“No one’s here now, but the houses get painted, the lawns get mowed? They were just here, have to have been. You know that and you’re lying to me. You know what’s going on.”
“I didn’t till now.”
“And you’re not telling me? So you’re keeping the headlines to yourself to protect this pathetic little ghost town?”
Cardiff nodded.
“Damn fool. Go on, stay poor and righteous. With you or without you I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Gangway!”
McCoy lunged down the porch steps, onto the street. He rushed up to the adjacent house and pulled open the door, stuck his head in, then entered. He emerged a moment later, slammed the door, and ran on to the next house, yanked open that screen door, jumped in, came out, his blood-red visage quoting dark psalms. Again and again he opened and closed the doors of half a dozen other empty houses.
Finally, McCoy returned to the front yard of the Egyptian View Arms. He stood there, panting, muttering to himself. As his voice drifted off into silence, a bird flew over and dropped a calling card on James Edward McCoy’s vest.
Cardiff stared off across the meadow-desert. He imagined the shrieks of the arriving trainloads of hustling reporters. In his mind’s eye he saw a twister of print inhaling the town and whirling it off into nothing.
“So.” McCoy stood before him. “Where are all the people?”
“That seems to be a mystery,” said Cardiff.
“I’m sending my first story now!”
“And how will you do that? No telegraphs or telephones.”
“Holy jeez! How in hell do they live?”
“They’re aerophiles, orchids, they breathe the air. But wait. You haven’t examined everything. Before you go off half-cocked, there’s one place I must show you.”
CHAPTER 22
Cardiff led McCoy into the vast yard of motionless stones and flightless angels. McCoy peered at the markers.
“Damn. There’s plenty of names, but no dates. When did they die?”
“They didn’t,” Cardiff said softly.
“Good God, lemme look closer.”
McCoy took six steps west, four steps east, and came to…
The open grave with a coffin gaping wide, and a spade tossed to one side.
“What’s this? Funeral today?”
“I dug that,” said Cardiff. “I was looking for something.”
“Something?” McCoy kicked some dirt clods into the grave. “You know more than you’re telling. Why are you protecting this town?”
“All I know is that I might stay on.”
“If you stay, you cannot tell these people the whole truth—that the bulldozers are coming, and the cement mixers, the funeral directors of progress. And if you leave, will you tell them before you go?”
Cardiff shook his head.
“Which leaves me,” said McCoy, “as guardian of their virtues?”
“God, I hope not.” Cardiff shifted by the open grave. Clods fell to drum the coffin.
McCoy backed off, nervously staring down at the open grave and into the empty coffin. “Hold on.” A strange look came over his face. “My God, I bet you brought me here to stop my telephoning out, or even trying to leave town! You…”
At this, McCoy spun, lost his footing, and fell.
“Don’t!” cried Cardiff.
McCoy fell into the coffin full-sprawled, eyes wide, to see the spade fall, loosened by accident or thrown in murder, he never knew. The spade struck his brow. The jolt shook the coffin lid. It slammed shut over his stunned and now colorless eyes.
The bang of the coffin lid shook the grave and knocked down dirt showers, smothering the box.
Cardiff stood amazed and in shock, a mile above.
Had McCoy slipped, he wondered, or was he pushed?
His foot dislodged another shower of dirt. Did he h
ear someone shrieking beneath the lid? Cardiff saw his shoes kick more dirt down into silence. With the box now hidden, he backed off, moaning, stared at the tombstone above etched with someone else’s name, and thought, That must be changed.
And then he turned and ran, blindly, stumbling, out of the yard.
CHAPTER 23
I have committed murder, Cardiff thought.
No, no. McCoy buried himself. Slipped, fell, and shut the lid.
Cardiff walked almost backward down the middle of the street, unable to tear his gaze from the graveyard, as if expecting McCoy to appear, risen like Lazarus.
When he came to the Egyptian View Arms, he staggered up the walk and into the house, took a deep breath, and found his way to the kitchen.
Something fine was baking in the oven. A warm apricot pie lay on the pantry sill. There was a soft whisper under the icebox, where the dog was lapping the cool water in the summer heat. Cardiff backed off. Like a crayfish, he thought, never forward.
At the bay window he saw, on the vast lawn behind the house, two dozen bright blankets laid in a checkerboard with cutlery placed, empty plates waiting, crystal pitchers of lemonade, and wine, in preparation for a picnic. Outside he heard the soft drum of hooves.
Going out to the porch, Cardiff looked down at the curb. Claude, the polite and most intelligent horse, stood there, by the empty bread wagon.
Claude looked up at him.
“No bread to be delivered?” Cardiff called.
Claude stared at him with great moist brown eyes, and was silent.
“Would it be me that needs deliverance?” said Cardiff, as quiet as possible.
He walked down and stepped into the wagon.
Yes was the answer.
Claude started up and carried him through the town.
CHAPTER 24
They were passing the graveyard.
I have committed murder, Cardiff thought.
And, impulsively, he cried, “Claude!”
Claude froze and Cardiff jumped out of the wagon and rushed into the graveyard.
Swaying over the grave, he reached down in a terrible panic to lift the lid.