The Church of Dead Girls (22 page)

At Bud's Tavern this was also Hark Powers's subject. Sheila Murphy was tending bar and she supplied Hark, Jeb Hendricks, Ernie Corelli, and Jimmy Feldman with pitchers of beer, as well as pork rinds and potato skins. The room was smoky and there was the click of pool balls. Country music and sometimes an old Sinatra song played on the jukebox.

“I saw a TV show,” said Hark, “where the killer put the body in the graveyard. He took dirt out of a new grave and stuck the body right on top of the coffin. I bet the state cops haven't even checked the graves. You do something like snatching a girl and it's only so long before you snatch another. It's a sickness.”

And his cronies thought about this sickness and about how it could be stopped.

Dr. Malloy and his family spent their night at home with the Leimbachs. They tried to have a fairly normal Saturday evening with dinner, television, and conversation but they knew they were doing nothing more than waiting for the phone to ring. My cousin Chuck Hawley sat outside Dr. Malloy's house in a patrol car listening to talk radio. Over at the Friends of Sharon Malloy a dozen volunteers, including Donald Malloy, were mailing out posters. Captain Percy was home in his neat little ranch house in Potterville reading the reports submitted to him by the Sharon Malloy task force. There was nothing in them he didn't know.

At eight o'clock, just as I was making myself a bowl of soup, Barry was leaving Landry's bowling alley. He got in his rusty Ford Fairlane and drove to the sub shop downtown because he was hungry and had grown bored watching people bowl. He had talked to no one but it was too early to go home, where his mother would ask where he had been and if he had had a good time. Then she would look at him with a worried expression.

There were no parking spaces in front of the sub shop so he parked a block away. He disliked parallel parking and needed a lot of room, two spaces instead of one. It was a cool evening with half a moon in a clear sky. Barry paused to see if he could hear any geese. He liked it when they flew high over the town with their distant and energetic honking. This night he heard nothing except the jukebox from Bud's Tavern. Barry didn't like country music. He preferred a group called Phish. But in general he didn't see much purpose in music.

At the sub shop he ordered a veggie and cheese and a large Coke. He thought of eating at a table but there were five teenage boys in the shop who kept looking at him and grinning. Having just come in from out of doors, Barry knew he was blinking more than usual. And when he was at the counter with his back turned to the boys, he heard one of them say, “Little Pink.” Although Barry hated how he looked, he had become fairly stoical about it. He no longer considered dyeing his hair, using makeup, and wearing tinted contact lenses—fantasies he had had in the past. But he didn't wish to eat his sandwich while being gawked at.

He walked back up Main Street toward his car. He would drive over to the college campus and eat his sandwich there. If he went home, his mother would ask him why he had wasted his money at the sub shop when she could have made him a perfectly good sandwich out of the food in their icebox.

When Barry was half a block from his car, someone called to him: “Hey, Little Pink, wait up.”

Hark Powers and three other men were crossing Main Street toward him. Barry had an almost overpowering wish to run but he kept still.

Hark joined him on the sidewalk, standing between him and his car, which he could see parked in front of Weaver's Bakery. Barry recognized Jeb Hendricks but he didn't know the other two.

“Where're you going, Little Pink?” asked Hark.

“Home.”

“What's the hurry?”

“I just want to go home, that's all.”

“Is your mother expecting you?” asked Hark. “You wouldn't want to be late.” Hark and Jeb Hendricks wore jean jackets. The other two wore dark sweatshirts.

“It's not that. I just want to go home.”

“Whatcha got there, Little Pink?”

Barry's Coke was in his left hand and his veggie and cheese, rolled in white paper to the size of a thin football, was in his right.

“Just a sandwich.”

“Let's see.” Hark plucked the sandwich from Barry's hand, unwrapped it and dropped the paper on the sidewalk. Then he took a bite. “Um, veggie and cheese. It's still warm. I like veggie and cheese. Want a bite, Jeb?”

Hark gave the sandwich to Jeb, who took a bite and gave the sandwich to Ernie Corelli. Barry watched the three men chewing.

“No meat?” asked Ernie.

“I don't eat meat,” said Barry.

“Meat's bad for Little Pink,” said Hark. “It makes him pink.”

Barry started to ask for his sandwich back but he decided he didn't want it anymore. Hark took another bite.

“What're you drinking, Little Pink?” asked Hark, with his mouth full.

“Coke.”

“Lemme see.”

Barry held the cup to his chest and stepped away. “No, it's mine.”

Hark reached out and knocked the cup from Barry's hand. Half the Coke spilled down Barry's new blue shirt and the rest splashed on the sidewalk.

“Looks like you spilled your Coke, Little Pink,” said Hark.

Barry turned and began walking toward the sub shop. He didn't have enough money to get another sandwich but he meant to wait inside until Hark and his friends were gone. His wet shirt felt cold and sticky.

“Hey, I'm talking to you, Little Pink.”

Barry kept walking. Although he was afraid of Hark, he was even more afraid of crying.

Hark grabbed his shoulder, spun him around, and slammed him up against the brick front of a building. “I said I was talking to you.” Hark's face was about eight inches from his own. Barry's head had knocked against the brick and it hurt.

“Leave me alone,” said Barry.

Hark lightly slapped his face. “I'm the one who gives the orders,” he said pleasantly.

Barry saw someone in front of the sub shop watching them. He realized it was Aaron.

Hark slapped him a little harder. “I'm talking to you, Little Pink. Why don't you tell us about Sharon?”

“What do you mean?” asked Barry. Out of the corner of his eye, he still saw Aaron, not moving, just watching.

“You wanted to touch her, didn't you?”

“Sharon? Why should I touch her?” Barry wanted to call to Aaron. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the front of his shirt. The Coke was cold against his skin.

“I heard you were the one who took back Sharon's clothes,” said Hark.

Barry looked at him. He smelled beer on Hark's breath.

“Her clothes?”

“Did that Arab give them to you?” He pronounced it with a long
A: A-rab.

Barry turned quickly to his left and began running toward the sub shop. He hadn't gone five feet before Hark leapt on his back, knocking him to the sidewalk. Barry slid on his belly and his glasses fell off. Hark turned him over and tried to punch Barry in the face.

“I didn't say you could do that!” Hark shouted.

Barry covered his face with his arms and lay on his back with Hark astride him. Hark kept slapping at his arms, hitting his elbows and wrists.

Then Hark seemed to leap backward. Barry opened his eyes. Through the blur of his vision, he saw that Aaron had grabbed Hark's long hair and was dragging him backward. Hark scrambled to his feet and tried to take a swing at Aaron, who kicked him. Then Jeb Hendricks swung at Aaron, then Ernie Corelli and Jimmy Feldman. Aaron tried to defend himself, putting his back to a parked car and swinging, but he wasn't a fighter. Barry curled himself up into a ball on the sidewalk and covered his head with his hands. He couldn't stand the sound of the men hitting Aaron, the thunk of their fists. He wished he wasn't a coward.

Aaron was knocked to the sidewalk and Hark and two of the others tried to kick him, but they got in one another's way. Barry heard footsteps running toward them. He looked between his fingers to see Ryan Tavich.

“Police!” shouted Ryan. He grabbed Hark by the collar and yanked him away. The other men stepped back from Aaron, who continued to lie on the sidewalk.

“They attacked me,” said Barry. He tried standing up but his knees felt weak. “They ate my sandwich. Aaron tried to stop them.” He wiped his eyes and looked around for his glasses.

Ryan held Hark Powers's arm. About a dozen other people had run over, including the teenagers who had been in the sub shop.

“Ask them about Sharon Malloy,” said Hark.

Aaron got to his feet. There was blood on his face. He bent over and picked up Barry's glasses from the gutter. A police car with its flashers on pulled up on Main Street. Aaron gave the glasses to Barry.

“You should be careful, Hark,” said Aaron. “You've only got one ear left.”

Hark was still being held by Ryan Tavich. Aaron took a step forward and kicked out, hitting Hark hard in the crotch. Hark gasped and doubled over, breaking loose from Ryan. Immediately, one of the policemen grabbed Aaron from behind.

I
was four when my father was sent to Korea, which was the last I saw of him. My mother moved back to her mother's house in Aurelius. We had been living in Utica, though I remember little of it: big people, busy streets. My grandfather was dead by then, but my grandmother was quite healthy, active in her bridge group and at Saint Luke's Episcopal Church. My father's family came from Utica. I hardly knew them. Occasionally an uncle would drive through on his way to Binghamton and stop for half an hour or so. I should have been unhappy that my father was gone, but I was glad. Secretly glad, that is, because my mother missed him and when word came that he had been killed she cried for days. Naturally I felt terribly guilty to feel glad, and when he was killed I even thought—irrationally, of course—that it was my fault because I was pleased to have him out of the house.

We moved back in summer and Aurelius was green. There were flowers everywhere. I was with my mother all day long every day. She read to me and we went for walks. She would tell me stories about the people who lived in the houses we passed. I remembered my father as rough. He liked to tickle me and throw me into the air, which frightened me. It seemed more convenient with him away. If three is a crowd, then he was the one who made it a crowd. After he was killed, I rarely thought of him. Of course, I received lots of sympathy. People patted my head and said it was so sad that I didn't have a father. And this made me guilty as well. As for my grandmother, she was a slower and softer version of my mother and she, too, read to me and took me for walks. It was a happy several years.

Aurelius was a busy place in the early 1950s and there was still train service to Utica. The county fair in Potterville was a big event and every summer Aurelius had its own Firemen's Field Day with rides and games of chance. I looked forward to it and was quite smug about my ability to pop balloons with darts, though I doubt it was anything special. At the Strand there were double features every Saturday afternoon. Once a hypnotist came and did tricks. He hypnotized half the audience and I felt there was something awfully wrong with me that I couldn't be hypnotized. Those fortunate people who were easy subjects got to sit onstage and quack like ducks and cry at an imaginary sick puppy and skip rope without a rope, which was very funny.

What I am saying is that the town felt like an extension of my mother's house. There was no place I couldn't wander, though my mother told me to stay away from the train tracks and not go near the river. But on weekends I climbed on empty boxcars to my heart's content and there were few pleasures to equal throwing stones in the river or dropping them off a bridge. I had half a dozen friends, though these were not terribly close friendships because I was not good at sports. But to wander anywhere and to be assured of people's goodwill was something I took for granted. Maybe I would avoid a certain street because of a rough dog or even a bully like Hark Powers, but there was no fear. Korea and Communism were far away. And there were enough veterans around and enough talk about World War II to make one think that the wars were over for good.

I don't know if I would call my childhood ideal. I often felt lonely and different from other children, partly because I didn't have a father, partly because I wasn't good at sports, partly because I wore glasses. I was sometimes called a sissy and I didn't like that. My cousin Chuck was several years younger than I. He was the oldest of four children. I saw them often but they were too little to be taken seriously. Chuck's mother was my mother's sister, and she was one more woman who was nice to me. Indeed, their refrigerator and cupboards were always open to me. If I was on my bike and was hungry, I might just as easily go to my aunt's house for a snack as to my mother's.

My aunt is an old lady now. My mother and grandmother are dead. Chuck is the only one of my cousins who stayed in Aurelius, and though we sometimes talk, we aren't close. At Christmas I buy him a bottle of whiskey and his wife buys me a tie. But in the time of which I am writing Aurelius seemed the bare bones of the town it was forty years ago. There was no longer a sense of the town as an extension of the home.

When I first came back to Aurelius from New York City twenty years ago, I expected to find the Aurelius of the early fifties. But already the train station had become a pizza parlor and there were empty storefronts on Main Street. Still, compared to New York, it seemed ideal. People never locked their houses or their cars. Several years ago when Jack Shelbourne got an alarm for his BMW, high school students took great pleasure in setting it off to hear it wail. No one had heard a car alarm before.

It was easy to know several generations of Aurelius families. I knew Hark Powers's father. He was a farmer about ten years older than I. And I knew his grandfather as well. Hark's father made Hark play in Little League, and people said that if he played badly or struck out his father hit him. For a few years a long time ago Hark's father had a 1949 Ford coupe with the hood ornament and trunk latch removed and sanded over and the whole car painted a glossy maroon with bright speckles. The muffler had a low musical sound and on Saturday nights he would drive around and around the four blocks of downtown with his friends. Or perhaps he and a friend would double-date and take girls down to the drive-in theater in Norwich. By the age of nineteen he was married, and Hark's oldest brother was born within the year.

Hark's mother came from Morrisville. I'm sure I never laid eyes on her before she had been married for some months. Then she was pointed out because she was so pregnant. She had very soft-looking sandy hair, almost like a baby's hair, and large blue eyes. She had four boys in seven years, then a fifth, Hark, ten years later. I remember one time when we still had a Woolworth's downtown that Hark got lost in the store. When I saw him, which might have been the first time I ever saw him, he was surrounded by racks of women's underwear, bawling his eyes out. He was about three and very round. The Woolworth's had wooden floors and as soon as he began to yowl people hurried toward him and their feet on the wooden floors made hollow clomping noises. I don't know what the occasion was but Hark was wearing a blue sailor suit with blue shorts. When he yowled, he squinched his eyes tightly shut and his tears seemed to pop horizontally from between his lids. His mother hurried over, picked Hark up, and gave him a little shake, then kissed him. She glanced around, almost defiantly, to see if anyone was responsible for making him cry. I was standing a dozen feet away and she glared at me quite sharply, as if I had poked her little boy or had made a face at him. Hark's mother died when he was still in high school. I don't know if it was cancer or something else. In any case, she never saw him with only one ear.

Now on my daily constitutional I would see my neighbors and not only would I see their uncertainty but it would be exaggerated by my own, as if my uncertainty were the pane of glass through which I viewed the world. And it was hard not to recall how they had been in happier, more tranquil times.

Harry Martini, principal at Knox Consolidated, had been a chubby boy with black bangs who told everyone he met he could spell
antidisestablishmentarianism.
Not satisfied with that great skill he soon bragged that he could spell it backwards. He would go into banks by himself and display his spelling ability before the tellers. He would even stop people on the street to show off his bag of tricks.
Escutcheon
was another word he was good at, though no one, including Harry, knew what it meant. I don't claim a love of proper spelling led him to become a high school principal, but I wonder.

Phil Schmidt, our police chief, was a high school football star. People said that he nearly got a football scholarship to Syracuse but it went to a colored boy instead. And shortly after that, Jim Brown became famous playing for Syracuse and I always thought, incorrectly I'm sure, that Jim Brown had gotten Phil Schmidt's scholarship.

Our mayor, Bernie Kowalski, used to have parties at his parents' cottage on Round Lake. I went to one when I was seventeen. There was beer, and couples necked or danced to “Teen Angel.” The drinking age at that time was eighteen, which seemed sensible. Bernie wouldn't let anybody touch the record player. He smoked Pall Malls from a red pack and had a girlfriend from Norwich by the name of Suzie who was said to be very experienced. I stood on the dock and skipped stones across the water. I was afraid that if I drank beer my mother would smell it on my breath. I was afraid that if I danced with a girl her perfume would get on my clothes. I had come with some other boys and couldn't leave until they did. It was June, just before school let out. Around midnight some kids were thrown into the lake, girls mostly. A football player by the name of Hercel Morgan threw me into the lake because, as he said, he didn't like the expression on my face.

Years later, when I came back from New York, Cookie Evans was a cheerleader in high school. She was tiny enough to be thrown high in the air, the sort of girl you never saw without a smile. She wore a thick blue letter sweater with a golden
A
on the front. Her voice was very high, almost squeaky. Even then she was known as a chatterbox. In her senior year she at last grew a bit taller and her voice deepened, which her mother said was too bad because otherwise she could have gotten a job in the circus.

I look at Megan Kelly today, a heavyset woman who barely supports herself by cleaning houses and doing odd jobs like taking care of Sadie Moore. When younger, Megan was quite beautiful in a large, muscular way. She had four daughters and they were all Girl Scouts. When the scouts sold cookies in the spring, my mother would buy her cookies only from Mrs. Kelly's daughters. Later these girls formed a singing group. They called themselves the Kellyettes and twirled batons as they sang “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” People wrote letters trying to get them on
Ted Mack's Amateur Hour
but nothing ever came of it.

Sometimes I think of Janice McNeal or Franklin or Ryan Tavich as children. None of them lived here, of course. They would have heard news of Vietnam and listened to the Beatles. They had bikes. There were movie stars and sports figures about whom they had passions. They put posters on their bedroom walls. They had dogs or cats to whom they told their secrets.

Allen and Donald Malloy grew up outside of Rochester, in Spencerport, I believe. Paul Leimbach has said they had sailboats on Lake Ontario. They still like to sail and Dr. Malloy was teaching sailing to Sharon. A year or so ago Dr. Malloy had a party for his fiftieth birthday. The announcement showed a photograph of the doctor as a child. He must have been about eight years old. He wore shorts and a jacket, a white shirt, and a tie. His face was as round as a penny and his short blond hair stood up straight in a flattop. He was very somber and stood on the front stoop of a house with white clapboard. He was holding out his left hand and on his palm was a yo-yo. On the bottom step, at his feet, sat Donald, three years old and resembling a little tub. He stared up at the yo-yo in his brother's hand as if staring at a religious object, and his mouth was slightly open.

Paul Leimbach was two years behind me in school. He was a thin, very serious boy who was reputed to be a math whiz. He had stacks of baseball cards and liked to ask other children, even older children, how many doubles Ted Williams hit in 1956 or how many bases Jackie Robinson stole in 1955. He knew these facts without having to look at his cards. That nobody cared didn't bother him. He had a little blue satchel in which he carried his baseball cards. They were an area of expertise separating him from other children. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and thick dark eyebrows and he liked to stand as still as a totem pole, holding his satchel of baseball cards against his leg. One imagined endless numbers streaming through his brain. What did he think then of his future? Now he is a CPA in a small town. And his niece has disappeared.

I walk through Aurelius and notice these people with their complicated lives, some happy, some unhappy. Of course, I have known the young people practically from the day they were born. Aaron as a child was entirely different from what he became; he was open, friendly, and good-natured. I have said how I would see him delivering papers on his bike with his dog running behind him. The fact that his father taught with me made Aaron more conspicuous, and long before I knew about his mother's promiscuity, I noticed Aaron and his dog all over town. The dog had a passion for retrieving sticks. He would even bring them to strangers and bump them against your shin until you took notice. Eventually he was killed by a truck out on the state highway. Aaron kept his paper route until he was fourteen. His father, Patrick, would brag that Aaron bought his own clothes and I felt that was rather cheap of Patrick since he made a good salary. I didn't say anything, of course. After junior high Aaron started becoming what he is today: quiet, somewhat mysterious, a man whose actions often seem without rational cause.

Barry Sanders was a pink and pudgy child with white hair and thick glasses. I never saw him running or playing. As I said, his father disappeared when he was two, and his mother was quite bossy. She always made him wear a hat in the summer, a red straw cowboy hat. Other children snatched it from him and Barry begged them to give it back. Often the hat would wind up on the head of the bronze Civil War soldier holding a musket in front of City Hall. I would drive by and see the red straw cowboy hat on the soldier's head and imagine Barry weeping someplace. We had a policeman in those days, Potter Malone, who has since retired and moved to Florida. He was an affable fellow who made it his duty to return Barry's cowboy hat to him. Indeed, this often seemed his only job, so that it was once remarked at a city council meeting that the city employed an officer just to return Little Pink's hat.

When Sadie Moore visits me and sits on the couch doing her homework or reading
Anne of Green Gables,
I see not only her present face but also her past faces, back to the eight-year-old with chocolate smeared around her mouth. Sometimes she sits at my kitchen table staring at the little hairless rat, Tooslow, in its glass jar. Her elbows are on the table and her face is about six inches from the rat's face. “Once,” she might say, “Tooslow was crossing a street when a truck came along and you know what happened?”