Part 32 (1/2)

'Who's that?' Mary asked Sissy.

'Some oldtime disc jockey who used to run a lot of these shows. His name is Alan Tweed or Alan Breed or something like that. We hardly ever see him except here. I think he drinks. He sleeps all day - that I do know.'

And as soon as the name was out of the girl's mouth, the coc.o.o.n which had sheltered Mary disappeared and the last of her disbelief melted away. She and Clark had stumbled into Rock and Roll Heaven, but it was actually Rock and Roll h.e.l.l. This had not happened because they were evil people; it had not happened because the old G.o.ds were punis.h.i.+ng them; it had happened because they had gotten lost in the woods, that was all, and getting lost in the woods was a thing that could happen to anybody.

'Got a great show for ya tonight!' the emcee was shouting enthusiastically into his mike. 'We got the Big Bopper . . . Freddie Mercury, just in from London-Town . . . Jim Croce . . . my main man Johnny Ace . . . '

Mary leaned toward the girl. 'How long have you been here, Sissy?'

'I don't know. It's easy to lose track of time. Six years at least. Or maybe it's eight. Or nine.'

' . . . Keith Moon of The Who . . . Brian Jones of the Stones . . . that cute li'l Florence Bollard of the Supremes . . . Mary Wells . . . '

Articulating her worst fear, Mary asked: 'How old were you when you came?'

'Ca.s.s Elliot . . . Janis Joplin . . . '

'Twenty-three.'

'King Curtis . . . Johnny b.u.mette . . . '

'And how old are you now?'

'Slim Harpo . . . Bob 'Bear' Hite . . . Stevie Ray Vaughan . . . '

'Twenty-three,' Sissy told her, and on stage Alan Freed went on screaming names at the almost empty town common as the stars came out, first a hundred stars, then a thousand, then too many to count, stars that had come out of the blue and now glittered everywhere in the black; he tolled the names of the drug OD's, the alcohol OD's, the plane crash victims and the shooting victims, the ones who had been found in alleys and the ones who had been found in swimming pools and the ones who had been found in roadside ditches with steering columns poking out of their chests and most of their heads torn off their shoulders; he chanted the names of the young ones and the old ones, but mostly they were the young ones, and as he spoke the names of Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, she heard the words of one of their songs tolling in her mind, the one that went Oooh, that smell, can't you smell that smell, and yes, you bet, she certainly could smell that smell; even out here, in the clear Oregon air, she could smell it, and when she took Clark's hand it was like taking the hand of a corpse.

'Amon, but Freed was waving his hands and laughing as if some vast audience were going crazy with a.s.sent. There was just enough light left in the sky for Mary to see the old man reach up and turn off his hearing aid.

'Are you ready to BOOOOOGIE?'

This time he was answered - by a demonic shriek of saxophones from the shadows behind him.

'Then let's go . . . BECAUSE ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE!'

As the show-lights came up and the band swung into the first song of that night's long, long concert - 'I'll Be Doggone,' with Marvin Gaye doing the vocal - Mary thought: That's what I'm afraid of. That's exactly what I'm afraid of.

Home Delivery.

Considering that it was probably the end of the world, Maddie Pace thought she was doing a good job. h.e.l.l of a good job. She thought, in fact, that she just might be coping with the End of Everything better than anyone else on earth. And she was positive she was coping better than any other pregnant woman on earth.

Coping.

Maddie Pace, of all people.

Maddie Pace, who sometimes couldn't sleep if, after a visit from Reverend Johnson, she spied a single speck of dust under the dining-room table. Maddie Pace, who, as Maddie Sullivan, used to drive her fiance, Jack, crazy when she froze over a menu, debating entrees sometimes for as long as half an hour.

'Maddie, why don't you just flip a coin?' he'd asked her once after she had managed to narrow it down to a choice between the braised veal and the lamb chops, and then could get no further. 'I've had five bottles of this G.o.ddam German beer already, and if you don't make up y'mind pretty d.a.m.n quick, there's gonna be a drunk lobsterman under the table before we ever get any food on it!'

So she had smiled nervously, ordered the braised veal, and spent most of the ride home wondering if the chops might not have been tastier, and therefore a better bargain despite their slightly higher price.

She'd had no trouble coping with Jack's proposal of marriage, however; she'd accepted it - and him - quickly, and with tremendous relief. Following the death of her father, Maddie and her mother had lived an aimless, cloudy sort of life on Little Tall Island, off the coast of Maine. 'If I wasn't around to tell them women where to squat and lean against the wheel,' George Sullivan had been fond of saying while in his cups and among his friends at Fudgy's Tavern or in the back room of Prout's Barber Shop, 'I don't know what'n h.e.l.l they'd do.'

When her father died of a ma.s.sive coronary, Maddie was nineteen and minding the town library weekday evenings at a salary of $41.50 a week. Her mother minded the house - or did, that was, when George reminded her (sometimes with a good hard shot to the ear) that she had a house which needed minding.

When the news of his death came, the two women had looked at each other with silent, panicky dismay, two pairs of eyes asking the same question: What do we do now?

Neither of them knew, but they both felt - felt strongly - that he had been right ir, his a.s.sessment of them: they needed him. They were just women, and they needed him to tell them not just what to do, but how to do it, as well. They didn't speak of it because it embarra.s.sed them, but there it was - they hadn't the slightest clue as to what came next, and the idea that they were prisoners of George Sullivan's narrow ideas and expectations did not so much as cross their minds. They were not stupid women, either of them, but they were island women.

Money wasn't the problem; George had believed pa.s.sionately in insurance, and when he dropped down dead during the tiebreaker frame of the League Bowl-Offs at Big Duke's Big Ten in Machias, his wife had come into better than a hundred thousand dollars. And island life was cheap, if you owned your place and kept your garden tended and knew how to put by your own vegetables come fall. The problem was having nothing to focus on. The problem was how the center seemed to have dropped out of their lives when George went facedown in his Island Amoco bowling s.h.i.+rt just over the foul line of lane nineteen (and G.o.ddam if he hadn't picked up the spare his team had needed to win, too). With George gone their lives had become an eerie sort of blur.

It's like being lost in a heavy fog, Maddie thought sometimes. Only instead of looking for the road, or a house, or the village, or just some landmark like that lightning-struck pine out on the point, I am looking for the wheel. If I can ever find it, maybe I can tell myself to squat and lean my shoulder to it.

At last she found her wheel: it turned out to be Jack Pace.

Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true all of the time, it was close enough for government work in Maddie's case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration - 'Don't fool with George Sullivan, dear,' they'd say. 'He'll knock the nose off your face if you so much as look at him wrong.'

It was true at home, too. He'd been domineering and sometimes physically abusive, but he'd also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pick-up, the chainsaw, or those two acres that bounded their place to the south. Pop Cook's land. George Sullivan had been known to refer to Pop Cook as one armpit-stinky old bastid, but the old man's aroma didn't change the fact that there was quite a lot of good hardwood left on those two acres. Pop didn't know it because he had gone to living across the reach in 1987, when his arthritis really went to town on him, and George let it be known on Little Tall that what that bastid Pop Cook didn't know wouldn't hurt him none, and furthermore, he would disjoint the man or woman that let light into the darkness of Pop's ignorance. No one did, and eventually the Sullivans got the land, and the hardwood on it. Of course the good wood was all logged off inside of three years, but George said that didn't matter a tinker's d.a.m.n; land always paid for itself in the end. That was what George said and they believed him, believed in him, and they worked, all three of them. He said: You got to put your shoulder to this wheel and push the b.i.t.c.h, you got to push ha'ad because she don't move easy. So that was what they did.

In those days Maddie's mother had kept a produce stand on the road from East Head, and there were always plenty of tourists who bought the vegetables she grew (which were the ones George told her to grow, of course), and even though they were never exactly what her mother called 'the Gotrocks family,' they made out. Even in years when lobstering was bad and they had to stretch their finances even further in order to keep paying off what they owed the bank on Pop Cook's two acres, they made out.

Jack Pace was a sweeter-tempered man than George Sullivan had ever thought of being, but his sweet temper only stretched so far, even so. Maddie suspected that he might get around to what was sometimes called home correction - the twisted arm when supper was cold, the occasional slap or downright paddling - in time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to speak. There was even a part of her that seemed to expect and look forward to that.

The women's magazines said marriages where the man ruled the roost were a thing of the past, and that a man who put a hard hand on a woman should be arrested for a.s.sault, even if the man in question was the woman in question's lawful wedded husband. Maddie sometimes read articles of this sort down at the beauty shop, but doubted if the women who wrote them had the slightest idea that places like the outer islands even existed. Little Tall had produced one writer, as a matter of fact - Selena St. George - but she wrote mostly about politics and hadn't been back to the island, except for a single Thanksgiving dinner, in years.

'I'm not going to be a lobsterman all my life, Maddie,' Jack told her the week before they were married, and she believed him. A year before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she'd said yes almost before all the words could get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots of her hair at the sound of her own naked eagerness), he would have said, 'I ain't going to be a lobsterman all my life.' A small change . . . but all the difference in the world. He had been going to night school three evenings a week, taking the old Island Princess over and back. He would be dog-tired after a day of pulling pots, but off he'd go just the same, pausing only long enough to shower off the powerful smells of lobster and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee. After a while, when she saw he really meant to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for him to drink on the ferry-ride over. Otherwise he would have had nothing but one of those nasty red hot-dogs they sold in the Princess's snack-bar.

She remembered agonizing over the canned soups in the store - there were so many! Would he want tomato? Some people didn't like tomato soup. In fact, some people hated tomato soup, even if you made it with milk instead of water. Vegetable soup? Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her helpless eyes roved the shelf display for nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she could help her with something - only Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed she would tell all her friends at high school tomorrow, and they would giggle about it in the girls' room, knowing exactly what was wrong with her - poor mousy little Maddie Sullivan, unable to make up her mind over so simple a thing as a can of soup. How she had ever been able to decide to accept Jack Pace's proposal was a wonder and a marvel to all of them . . . but of course they didn't know about the wheel you had to find, and about how, once you found it, you had to have someone to tell you when to stoop and where exactly to push the d.a.m.ned thing.

Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache.

When she worked up nerve enough to ask Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said: 'Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.'

Were there any others he specially liked?

The answer was no, just chicken noodle - the kind that came in the can. That was all the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and all the answer (on that particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf. When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole d.a.m.n case of the stuff out back.

She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actually carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot all about asking why she wanted so much - a lapse for which his long-nosed wife and daughter took him sharply to task that evening.

'You just better believe it and never forget,' Jack had said that time not long before they tied the knot (she had believed it, and had never forgotten). 'More than a lobsterman. My dad says I'm full of s.h.i.+t. He says if draggin pots was good enough for his old man, and his old man's old man and all the way back to the friggin Garden of Eden to hear him tell it, it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain't - isn't, I mean - and I'm going to do better.' His eye fell on her, and it was a stern eye, full of resolve, but it was a loving eye, full of hope and confidence, too. ' 'More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobster-man's wife is what I intend for you to be. You're going to have a house on the mainland.'

'Yes, Jack.'

'And I'm not going to have any friggin Chevrolet.' He drew in a deep breath and took her hands in his. 'I'm going to have an Oldsmobile.'

He looked her dead in the eye, as if daring her to scoff at this wildly upscale ambition. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it a million times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them - or, better, both of them together. Yes, Jack; had there ever in the history of the world been two words, which made such beautiful music when laid side by side?