MR. MINGO. Murmurs. He murmurs when he’s reviewing his life.
DUVALL. (Calls out across the room) Hogs on the thirty and driving! (Gets no response) The Texas thirty! (Still no response)
MR. MINGO. (Looking at Avalon brochure) Avalon. That’s where they carried King Arthur, you know.
MR. PALFREY. Who?
MR. MINGO. King Arthur. He was wounded in battle. A terrible head wound. Ruth Buttress came by in her van and took him away to a place called Avalon. We hear nothing more of him after that.
DUVALL. (Claps both hands to his head) I can’t believe it! Another fumble!
Fern enters.
FERN. The strangest thing! There’s a man lying on a bed!
MR. PALFREY. Where? What bed?
FERN. Back there off the hall. There’s a kind of dark alcove with a bed in it. He’s lying there like a dead man with his mouth open.
MR. PALFREY. A dead man!
FERN. I didn’t say he was dead, I just said he looked dead. A man in white clothes. I didn’t want to touch him.
MRS. VETCH. In the alcove, you say. I don’t remember a bed back there. Do you mean a day bed or a couch?
FERN. No, it’s an ordinary double bed. An iron bedstead with a bare striped mattress on it.
MRS. VETCH. But I don’t understand. A man sleeping in a public place like that.
MR. PALFREY. You don’t reckon it’s Ramp, do you? Barbers wear white. Maybe they didn’t carry him off to that death ranch after all.
MR. MINGO. I don’t see how he could have been lying there all this time.
MR. PALFREY. Unless he is dead and nobody noticed him. (To Fern) Is it a little old man with a sharp nose?
FERN. His mouth is open. I don’t know about his nose. It’s dark back there.
MR. MINGO. Wait. I know. It might be Kate’s boyfriend. Yes, it might very well be Prentice. Having a nap.
MR. NIBLIS. Prentice is a gangster.
MR. MINGO. A criminal anyway.
MR. NIBLIS. Prentice is a scoundrel.
MR. MINGO. A thief anyway. (To Fern) Is he wearing white jail coveralls?
FERN. White something. And heavy black shoes.
MRS. VETCH. Wearing his shoes on the bed?
MR. MINGO. I’ll bet it’s Prentice. Kate must be hiding him here.
FERN. Her boyfriend is a criminal?
MR. MINGO. Yes, and it’s hard to keep him in custody. He was in jail at Hot Springs until two or three days ago, when he climbed over the fence in the exercise yard.
MRS. VETCH. Kate says he’s not really a crook.
MR. NIBLIS. Barbers don’t wear heavy black shoes. They wear these soft white leather shoes with a lot of little air holes in them.
MR. MINGO. Prentice steals equipment from unguarded construction sites, with his low-boy trailer. He steals backhoes and front-loaders—these ungainly machines that creep about scraping the face of the earth.
MRS. VETCH. Now you don’t know that to be true, Mr. Mingo. Kate says it’s his brother-in-law that does all the stealing. He takes the low-boy trailer out at night without Prentice’s permission. She says the state police have had it in for Prentice for a long time.
MR. PALFREY. It still could be Ramp, you know. He’s not cutting hair anymore and he might have gone over to a heavier, darker shoe.
MR. MINGO. Unknown man on bed. Who could it be? That’s the question we need to address.
MRS. VETCH. We could get Duvall to look into it.
MR. MINGO. Yes, I think that might be the thing to do.
A pause. They all look at Duvall across the room but do and say nothing.
MR. PALFREY. If you could ever tear him away from his ball game. Well, what can you expect, Mr. Mingo, it’s a different country. These new people don’t want to work, not like you and me had to work, from daylight to dark, six days a week, rain or shine. Dine and dance, that’s all they want to do. When they’re not watching their TV shows. You and Mr. Niblis and me might cash in tomorrow. The last yellow-jacket of the season might sting us to death. We might check out next month, with the first killing frost, but it won’t matter much, and you know why? Because we’ve seen the best of this country.
MR. MINGO. But you know, I never really did any hard work. I managed to escape all that. Nobody in the Mingo family ever put himself out much.
FERN. How did you make a living?
MR. MINGO. I spread panic for a living. I worked here and there for different newspapers.
FERN. You mean you wrote things in newspapers?
MR. MINGO. I’m afraid so, yes. The Mingos have traditionally gone into undemanding fields like that—journalism, government service, pharmacy, photography, usury. Mingos have been beekeepers, and night clerks in motels. They have operated small ferry boats at remote crossings on narrow streams. It was my curious fate to become a writer of newspaper editorials.
FERN. Really? That must have been interesting. It never occurred to me that—
MR. MINGO. No, you don’t think of them as being composed by anything human. It’s a dead form, like opera. It was dead when I started too, but that didn’t discourage me. Day after day I gave political advice, economic advice, military advice, agricultural advice. Lapidary comment for all occasions. I gave freely of myself.
MR. NIBLIS. Vain labor. All those idle words.
MR. MINGO. I offered artistic advice, engineering advice, cooking advice. I gave moral instruction. No one paid the least bit of attention to anything I wrote. I knew that, of course, but then a change came over me. I came to believe that people were after all, listening to me, acting on my counsel, heeding my lightest word. It was a crushing responsibility.
MR. NIBLIS. One day real soon now, Mingo, you’ll have to answer for every last one of those idle words.
MR. MINGO. I spoke to my publisher about this feeling and he had me put away in a hospital. Quite a well known clinic, specializing in the treatment of journalists and their delusions. Journalists and other bystanders, onlookers, eavesdroppers and talebearers. It wasn’t a bad place. The doctors said I was suffering from intrusive thoughts. They put me on some dope and told me to eat a lot of bananas. I soon recovered. I was soon back at work, if you can call it that, and I did well enough for a time.
MR. NIBLIS. Spewing out more vain words.
MR. MINGO. No doubt, but they didn’t seem vain to me at the time. I was conscientious in my work. I was never afraid to be dull, for instance. To drone a bit.
MR. NIBLIS. Nobody will dispute that.
MR. MINGO. I did well enough for a time and then a darker change came over me. It was slowly revealed to me that my words were withering the grass and turning everything brown. I felt personally responsible for extensive crop failures. So you can understand why I had to stop writing.
MR. NIBLIS. And how the readers must have cheered, Mingo, when you laid down your busy pen.
MR. PALFREY. But I don’t know why you had to stop writing. Things like that happen. I once give a man some mortgage advice and he lost his house. That didn’t stop me from talking.
MRS. VETCH. But I don’t see—I mean—surely yours were printed words, Mr. Mingo. It’s not as though you were speaking on the radio and spewing out your poison words willy nilly into the air. Where they could then waft across the countryside and settle on the flowering crops.
MR. MINGO. Don’t ask me to explain the mechanics of it, Mrs. Vetch. I suspect the contaminants were not airborne, but something more in the nature of a malignant radiation. I can only tell you that I saw the blighted fields for myself, and how those fields were perfectly congruent with the circulation area of my newspaper. And how those same fields quickened and greened up when my articles no longer appeared in the paper.
MRS. VETCH. Nobody would want to turn the earth brown with his words. No decent person.
MR. MINGO. No, indeed, and I saw then what I had to do. It was the only honorable thing I could do—take early disability retirement.
FERN. (Musing) “Intrustive thoughts.” I didn’t realize
they could put you away for that.
MR. PALFREY. It’s amazing what the government can do these days. What these federal judges take on themselves. It’s a different country, Fern.
MR. MINGO. I was a middle-aged man when I received my first disability check. Young middle-age, really. My face had not yet dropped, from gravitational stresses. My nose and ears were still of modest size. That was many years ago and I haven’t done a lick of work since that day.
MR. NIBLIS. (Shouting) Look, the van is here! It’s Ruth Buttress! Time to go, everybody! All aboard for Avalon!
MRS. VETCH. (Reaching for her things) Oh my goodness! Already?
MR. NIBLIS. Time to go! Ruth Buttress is here with all the latest news from Hell! All aboard! It’s roundup time! On to the slaughter house!
MRS. VETCH. But I’m just not ready yet!
MR. MINGO. No, wait. Mr. Palfrey, your legs are better than mine. Would you mind taking a look out the window? To see if—
FERN. Here, I’ll go. (Goes to front window) There’s no van. Just that tan car with a man sitting in it.
MR. MINGO. I suspected as much. One of Mr. Niblis’s childish jokes. When he’s not brooding he’s making a nuisance of himself, crying out false news bulletins.
MR. NIBLIS. (Shrugs, rolls another cigarette) Well, it’s something to do.
MRS. VETCH. He claims to be some kind of prophet.
MR. MINGO. One of the very minor prophets.
MRS. VETCH. He’s some kind of outdoor preacher. He’s not really ordained.
MR. NIBLIS. Correction. Ordained, but not ordained by man or by any corrupt institution of man. I am fully ordained in the Invisible Church, which is the only true church. We know who we are.
MRS. VETCH. That may be so, Mr. Niblis, but I would not feel at all easy in my mind, going away on my honeymoon, if you had conducted the marriage service.
MR. PALFREY. But where is this Avalon anyway? I see that old fat gal on TV talking about it all the time.
FERN. “There’s always room for you—at Avalon.” That’s what she keeps saying.
MRS. VETCH. Yes, that’s Ruth Buttress. She’s the Matron of Avalon.
MR. NIBLIS. She’s a front for Dr. Lloyd Mole. A so-called doctor.
MRS. VETCH. “No waiting list ever,” she says. “On the Special Value Package.”
FERN. I wonder how they manage that.
MR. PALFREY. But just where is the place?
MR. MINGO. It’s somewhere over there in the Chinkypin National Forest, deep in the woods. In that great swamp called the Chinkypin Bottoms.
MR. NIBLIS. On Chinkypin Bayou [Pronounced “Bye-O”]. Far from prying eyes. They say it’s so dark in those woods that the owls fly in the daytime there, and the bats flit.
MR. MINGO. And the nighthawk, with his fine white throat.
MRS. VETCH. It used to be a Boy Scout camp. Camp Chinkypin.
MR. NIBLIS. It was too rough for the Scouts. The Scouts couldn’t take it, so they’re shipping us over there.
FERN. Is it a nursing home or a retirement village or what?
MR. MINGO. A little of both, I think. An internment center, in any case. Some sort of terminal warehouse for old people. A place to languish and die.
MRS. VETCH. Duvall told me that some of the ladies are put up in their own little rose-bowered cottages at Avalon. But I wonder if that can apply to me, being on the Special Value Package.
MR. NIBLIS. Duvall doesn’t know the first thing about Avalon.
MR. PALFREY. There’s a lot of snakes in the Chinkypin Bottoms. I drove down there one time to buy some steel drums off a fellow and ever where you stepped there was another snake. Spreadin’ adders, coachwhips, copperheads, canebrake rattlers, blue racers, big rusty moccasins—ever kind of snake in the world. I stayed the night at that fellow’s house and you couldn’t sleep for the squirrels barking and the hogs bumping up against the floor. It come a shower of rain in the night and these big pine rooter hogs, don’t you know, got up under the house and snorted and made a big hog commotion.
FERN. Wasn’t there something in the paper about Dr. Mole?
MR. MINGO. Oh yes, he’s been in and out of the news for years. You may be thinking about that business in Florida. His red vinegar therapy and his controversial yeast injections.
MR. NIBLIS. The big Fungometrics scandal. That’s when they run him out of Florida.
MR. MINGO. I think he sold babies at one time too.
MR. NIBLIS. Little newborn babies, still red and puckered-up.
MR. PALFREY. The well water at that fellow’s house was brown. It had a sulfur smell to it and it tasted like alum. And the mosquitoes drove me crazy. I cleared out of there before daylight.
MR. NIBLIS. Without your steel drums?
MR. PALFREY. My drums was already loaded and tied down, Mr. Niblis.
MR. NIBLIS. That’s what Ramp did too. He cleared out early. Before Ruth Buttress could get aholt of him.
MR. PALFREY. Maybe he’s already over there at Avalon.
MR. NIBLIS. Not him. He’s too smart. He got out while the getting was good. Ramp was smarter than us.
MRS. VETCH. (Sighing) It’s just so hard, making a change like this at my age.
MR. PALFREY. Well, I guess you’ll just have to make the best of it, won’t you? I don’t have to worry about that myself. You’ll never catch me in a place like Avalon. I raised my chirren up right and I have two loving homes to go to.
Pause.
MR. MINGO. You know, I’ve never told anyone this before, but he’s gone now and I can’t see that it will do any real harm. (Looking about, lowering voice in confidential manner) Mr. Ramp took food to his room.
MRS. VETCH. But we all took food to our rooms, Mr. Mingo!
MR. MINGO. Some more than others. Your little cans of red sockeye salmon did not escape my notice, Mrs. Vetch.
MRS. VETCH. But Miss Eula didn’t really mind! She never enforced that rule, as you well know! She winked at her own rule! My goodness, everybody did it! You could hear munching and smacking in every room! Even with the doors shut!
MR. MINGO. One night I saw Mr. Ramp ducking into his room with a plate of finely chopped nuts. The kernels had been chopped to a uniform fineness. He tried to conceal that plate from me. I’m convinced he was keeping some small animal in his room.
MR. NIBLIS. Mingo thinks Ramp had a roomful of canary birds.
FERN. Wouldn’t you have heard them cheeping and warbling?
MR. MINGO. One or two birds, I suggested. I never said a roomful. I never said an aviary.
MR. NIBLIS. More likely it was just some pet mouse or spider or lizard, like these prisoners keep in their cells. Trying to teach a roach, you know, to sit up and beg.
MR. MINGO. I was particularly watchful of Mr. Ramp in those last days. I was on stakeout, you might say. Another week or two and I would have gotten to the bottom of that mystery.
MR. NIBLIS. Ramp was too clever for you.
Sound of thunder, followed by rain beating against glass. Fern goes to the front window and looks out, her hand shading her eyes.
FERN. Well, here it comes.
MR. PALFREY. Did you roll the windows up?
FERN. Yes…Still no sign of Lenore…That tan car is still out there.
MR. MINGO. With two men in it?
FERN. It looks like just one.
MR. MINGO. A state police detective. They come and go.
DUVALL. It’s a new one out there today.
MR. PALFREY: Keeping an eye on this honky tonk.
MR. MINGO. No, it’s not that. They’re waiting for Prentice. It’s another stakeout. They know he’ll turn up sooner or later to see Kate. Where the nectar is, there will be the bee also. The first principle of the manhunt.
FERN. (Musing) Betrayed by their own love for each other.
MR. PALFREY. (Musing) He knew it was dumb but he just couldn’t stay away from his honky tonk sweetheart.
Enter Delray, with his Daily Planner, a memorandum book. He marches d
irectly to Mr. Palfrey.
DELRAY. This is not, repeat not, a honky tonk. Will you people please stop using that term? Is that too much to ask?
MR. PALFREY. What is it then?
DELRAY. Delray’s New Moon is going to be a very smart supper club, sir, with a strict dress code, and a slender white candle on each table. How many times do I have to go through this? We’re not going to have louts in here clumping around in boots and hats, drinking beer out of cans. And we’re not going to have a disgusting mob of kids dancing to their stupid music. Everybody has the wrong idea.
FERN. I wouldn’t think there would be enough people around here to support a—
DELRAY. Excuse me, M’am, you’re thinking local. My vision is national. Right out there, a mile away, is Interstate Thirty, one of the very busiest of cross-country thoroughfares. It’s the new Broadway of America. My highly select guests will be coming from far and wide. In one year’s time this place will be as famous as that drugstore in South Dakota that tourists flock to. Thousands of people—civilized people—will plan their trips around an evening of dining and dancing at Delray’s New Moon. You’re going to see night club history made here. (Looking about proudly) I’m having it all done up in an oyster shade.
MR. NIBLIS. What was all that? What did Delray say?
MRS. VETCH. (Raising her voice) An oyster shade! He’s having it all done up in an oyster shade!
MR. MINGO. There’s an unknown man back there on the bed, Delray.
DELRAY. (Not listening, goes to Mrs. Vetch, takes her hand) Well, now, look at you! Don’t you look nice today, Mrs. Vetch! I just know you’re going to be crowned queen of hearts at Avalon!
MR. NIBLIS. The van is late, Delray.
DELRAY. What is this, Mr. Niblis? Drooping spirits? On the day of your big adventure?
MR. NIBLIS. Where is Ruth Buttress?
DELRAY. Ruth Buttress is on the way. She’ll be here any minute now.
FERN. There’s a strange man back there lying on a bed. I didn’t want to touch him.
DELRAY. What bed?
MR. MINGO. In that alcove off the hall.
DELRAY. (Not listening, looking at his Daily Planner) I don’t know what you’re talking about.