Twilight

  “How’d I do?”

  “Brilliant,” I told her, knowing it was true, even if I hadn’t actually been there the whole time to hear her.

  “You were totally, awesomely mayoral,” David assured her. “I mean, I didn’t actually see you do your thing, but I know you were.” He liked her, and the feeling was mutual. She patted his cheek affectionately, something I could never have gotten away with, and thanked him.

  I thought of her questions to me earlier and, on impulse, said, “David, if you knew of an old railroad line that had been torn up and converted into a hiking path, but you wanted to put that long, narrow strip of land to some other use—something that might be controversial, but which might make some people a lot of money—what would that be?”

  “The obvious,” he said promptly.

  Mary and I gaped at him.

  “Which is?” she prodded.

  “Another railroad, of course,” he said, as if we were both idiots for not having thought of it. Which we were, all of us.

  “Pete’s tie tacks!” I cried. “His passion for trains!”

  “Light rail!” Mary exclaimed. “Ardyth Kennedy’s been going on and on about the ‘connections’ linking every town from here to Boston!”

  “Mary, it’s federal land. They can lease it or give it away or sell it anytime they want to, to anybody they want to, for any use they like. If the feds can hand over national forests and Indian burial grounds to the lumber companies, and if they can hand over off-shore property to oil exploration companies, and if the deficit is as big as we think it is, and if the park service is as broke as it says it is—there is nothing stopping them from selling, or leasing, or giving away our insignificant little strip of federal parkland, just to be rid of the expense of maintaining and administering it.”

  “Great idea,” David said. “A train into Boston?”

  Mary and I stared at him again, and then she laughed. “I kind of like the idea, myself, but then I’m no hiker. And I still don’t like to think about the way Pete helped finagle all that land away from those owners ten years ago.”

  “Pete would say that was just smart business,” I told them, knowing that from my family’s bitter experience with his cutthroat methods. “But I wonder what those people will have to say about his plans, if indeed David has hit on the truth?” I pointed to a large and noisy group of men and women who were purposely making a commotion as they gathered around our ticket booths.

  They were carrying signs.

  But these weren’t fundamentalists, not fundamentalist Christians, anyway—they were Lewis Riss and a much, much larger group of First Things Firsters.

  Pulling David with me—and telling Mary to head for the far opposite corner of the common, so that she wouldn’t alienate any voters—I started trotting toward the ecoterrorists, who thought they were saving God’s Highway for the squirrels. I wondered, as we hurried there, just how many squirrels died every day under the tracks of railroads, no matter how “light” they were!

  By the time we got there, I had ecoterrorists to the left of me and religious fanatics to the right of me. The Halloween protesters had arrived, dressed in baby blue choir robes. The members of both groups were carrying signs and staring suspiciously at each other, all of them milling about and blocking the entrance from our paying visitors.

  “Could you folks please make your circle a little more over that way?” I requested of the blue-robed protesters. “Thank you so much!” As they moved off, rather sweetly obedient even to my dubious authority, I moved in on the First Things Firsters, aiming for the First among equals.

  “Lewis?”

  “Hey, babe, I warned you, don’t say I didn’t!” He was sleek as a seal in black lycra tank top and bicycle pants. “You mess with parkland without checking with us first, we’re going to let the world know you don’t give a damn about spotted baby tree toads.”

  As if you do Lewis, I thought.

  “Lew, honey?” 1 took hold of his biceptual right arm and began to tug him off to the side. His cohorts were busy hoisting signs and warming up their vocal chords, so they didn’t try to intercept us. “There is one thing I have to tell you before you carry on today.”

  But then I realized I was making a tactical error:

  I wanted Lew’s gang to hear this.

  So I tugged him back into the heart of them and made sure I talked loud enough to be heard by all of them, and everybody else in the vicinity. Lew was telling me, self-importantly, how I couldn’t stop them, when I said, “Oh, I’m not trying to, Lew. I think you have every right to protest any little old issue you care about so deeply. I just thought you might want to know that I’ve heard that the nature trail may be turned back into a railway, for light rail this time. It’s federal land, as you know, and I’ve heard that some of our local bigwigs are lobbying to get the government to turn over all those miles for a little old commuter railroad to run between here and just about everywhere else.”

  “What?”

  It was a single strangled cry from a dozen throats at once.

  Lew’s face was turning a deeper shade of tan, perhaps mixed with purple. “Are you saying that we’re busting our butts to protect that trail so somebody can put a railroad through there again?”

  His gang went crazy, gesticulating, shouting at me, at Lew, at each other, while I just kept discreetly murmuring disclaimers like, “Now, it’s only a rumor, Lew. It’s what some people think, it might not even be true. Although, it makes a certain kind of sense, doesn’t it? It’s really the perfect use for that land if you don’t use it for a nature trail … but I don’t know if any of this is actually true …”

  A woman yelled, “No rail on the trail!”

  Immediately, the others took it up, until the air vibrated with their new battle cry. As for Lew, in the midst of the mutiny, he suddenly put his hands on his hips and gave me a long look.

  I leveled one right back at him.

  He shrugged. “What the hell. I love action, whatever it is.”

  Ever the man of principle, I thought.

  It was then that David’s good arm shot out, and the fist at the end of it hit Lew in the nose, knocking him to the ground. Then David stood over him, making threatening gestures and noises.

  Damn, I had totally forgotten that David was convinced that the First Things Firsters had wrecked him and beat him. In fact we still didn’t know that they hadn’t done it.

  Lew scrambled like a boxer to his feet, blood pouring from his nose, fury on his face. “What the hell did you do that for?” All of his new muscles tensed in preparation for launching a counterattack against David, who was, I was frightened to realize, in absolutely no shape to defend himself.

  Lew dived toward us.

  I grabbed David’s T-shirt and pulled the back of it for all I was worth, jerking him off-balance so he nearly fell, but also ruining Lew’s aim, so that he stumbled to the ground again, this time landing on his hands and knees.

  Not waiting for Lew to recover a second time, or for his pals to wake up and jump in to support him, I yelled, “Come on!” to the kid, following that up with, “David, come on, he’s got a gun!”

  Even David Mayer was smart enough to get scared at the sound of those words, and off we ran—me hanging on to his shirt and he clutching his left arm to his side to keep the jarring down on his broken bone, which must have hurt like hell, nonetheless.

  We burst past the ticket booths and ran into the crowd until I felt sure we were inconspicuous there. I guided David to a booth where people were selling tie-dyed vests to benefit something or other, and I bought him one and made him slip it on, even though it clearly hurt him to do it. Then I followed that up with a white baseball cap, which I bought at another booth to take the place of his usual black Star Trek hat, and then I made him put on a full-face Halloween mask of Jason the movie madman. Finally, I declared him unrecognizable, except for the fact that he was still hanging out with me.

  Through the mask, he mumb
led, “Did he really have a gun?”

  “Uh, no.”

  David was indignant, and the mask came whipping up off his head. “He didn’t?”

  “I lied about that”

  “I could have beat the shit out of him, I could have dragged him over to the cops, I could have made a citizen’s arrest—”

  “You could have gotten badly hurt, and then you could have gotten arrested for assaulting him, and then you could have gotten sued because they may not be the people who hurt you!”

  “Shit!”

  I took a deep breath. “David.” I took another breath, observed how many people were now staring at us, and lowered the volume of my voice. “David. I’m sorry. I keep getting you into bad situations. I think maybe this was a bad idea, you staying with me. I’m fine. I can take care of myself. And, frankly, I have things to do, and I want to enjoy my festival. So let’s split. You go back and find Geof and make sure he knows that Lew Riss is here, and I’ll go off on my own again.”

  “No,” he said, looking angry and stubborn. “I have a job to do.” David eyed me grimly. “And I will protect you if it kills me. Or, I kill you first.”

  I had to smile and then to laugh.

  He didn’t, which worried me.

  25

  “HI, JENNY! COULD YOU HAVE ORDERED A MORE PERFECT DAY?”

  “We’re having a great time, Jenny!”

  “Fabulous day, Jenny.”

  Over and over again, wherever I strolled, that was the happy refrain I heard. People were having fun! Money was being spent. Every time I ran into one of my busy board members, she was beaming. All around, Port Frederickans wore their volunteer T-shirts proudly. My heart felt full as a beer barrel, and I was as intoxicated by my own success as if I’d drunk it all. Luckily, I had my own personal teenager beside me to keep me humble. David, still steamed at me for removing him from the scene of battle, kept up a running commentary of sarcasm, most of it along the lines of, “What are they making such a big fuss over you for? Running a festival? Big deal, any android could do it.”

  I soon ran nearly out of cash, just buying food to keep his mouth occupied. While David was still gnawing on a huge roasted turkey leg, I made him stop with me at the booth where Melissa Barney had set up her pumpkin-carving demonstration.

  I was fascinated to see that she was carving caricatures out of pumpkins that had been earlier scooped out and that were now capped and empty shells, awaiting her artist’s knife to give them personality.

  We watched her talking to a little boy who told her, when she asked, that he would be “eleven in a couple of months.” He was surrounded by several other boys of a similar age, who were obviously egging him on to be the guinea pig of the group, before they committed their own three dollars apiece to immortalizing themselves in pumpkin.

  “What’s your name, sweetie?” Melissa asked him.

  I didn’t see her own boys; they must have scampered off to roam the festival grounds while their mom worked. She was wearing her black jeans and black T-shirt and sandals, and her red hair showed orange highlights to rival the pumpkins.

  “Chapman,” the kid said.

  I looked more closely at him and suddenly recognized him as Pete Falwell’s grandson, the nice kid I’d met the week before.

  “Is that what your friends call you, Chap?”

  “No,” said one of them, who crowded close, “we call him dumbbutt!”

  The whole little gang of ten-year-olds broke into giggles at that, while Chappie, as his grandpa had called him, turned red and vainly attempted to hush them.

  “Chappie,” he said, valiantly answering Melissa’s question.

  First, she took his head gently in her hands, pushing his brown bangs off his forehead, getting a good look at him while she made faces at him that made all of the other boys laugh. They seemed a sweet bunch, no more scatological than your average group of ten-year-old boys, and good-natured in their fun. It looked to me as if Melissa was tactfully feeling the shape of his head, as if she were blind, but with her eyes open.

  “Nice head,” she said to him, which set his pals off in a fit of teasing giggling. Several times they poked him and repeated, “Nice head, Chappie’s got a nice head!” One of them swaggered like an adult man and said in a mock-deep voice, “That young man’s got a good head on his shoulders!”

  While they had their fun, Melissa sorted through her pumpkin shell pile, eliminating perfect round ones and lopsided ones, and finally picking up one that was shaped uncannily like the child’s own skull: longish, with a high forehead (if a pumpkin could be said to have a forehead), and concave indentations at the “temples,” curving out into long “cheeks,” and then rounded off in a dimpled chin.

  “Okay, sit on the ground, sweetie,” she instructed him, and she sat, too, in her chair beside a card table.

  Her “model” plunked down cross-legged on the ground at her feet, close to her sandals, while his friends hurried around to stand behind Melissa so they could both see what she was doing and point and make fun of Chappie, as well. She asked him to put his hands between his legs and then to raise his chin and look up at her: instantly, you could see why she did it that way—it gave his face a sweet roundness, despite the hourglass shape of his head; suddenly, he looked all cheeks and eyes and mouth.

  “Now don’t bother us for a minute,” she chided his friends, but she didn’t shoo them away from where they crowded at her back. This was the first I had ever seen her appear relaxed, and even close to enjoying herself. You could see she was used to having boys around, and she liked them. “And don’t make him laugh, okay?”

  Quickly, Melissa set to work, pulling the empty pumpkin shell into her lap, holding it between her legs and tilting the shell so its “face” was looking up at her, just as the child was.

  Hardly looking at the pumpkin, keeping her eyes on the child, her right hand flew over the orange face, sketching a portrait in black ink. In only two or three minutes, I saw the child’s face magically, or so it seemed, transferred from his own body to the pumpkin.

  The boys behind her were noisily impressed.

  “You oughta see this, Chapman, it looks just like you!”

  “Yeah, like a pumpkin head!”

  Giggle, giggle, giggle.

  “You can move now, sweetheart,” she told him.

  “Thanks!” he exclaimed. “I was gettin’ stiff!”

  “Bet your nose itched, too, didn’t it?” she said, as she picked up her carving knife.

  “Oh, boy, did it, how’d you know that?”

  He was on his feet by then, and he came around behind her to butt his way into the center of his friends, and to stare as his own face appeared out of the pumpkin, more of it appearing with every quick, confident slice of her knife.

  “It’s a law,” Melissa informed the boys while, quick as a slasher, she sliced and diced and carved. “When you sit real still, your nose has to itch. Also, you have to want to sneeze. And usually at least one of your elbows will itch, too, so bad you think you’ll go crazy if you can’t scratch it.”

  “Oh, yeah!” he agreed, and wildly scratched at his left elbow with his right fingers. “How do you do that?”

  “I inherited the ability,” she said, as her knife poised above the pumpkin’s left eye. “My father was Peter, Peter, the Pumpkin Eater, and my mother was the wife he couldn’t keep, not until he put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.”

  “Oh, gross,” one of the boys exclaimed. “She’s cutting your eye open, Chappie!”

  Melissa responded in a sepulchral voice, accompanying word to deed: “And plucking it out!” She handed the chunk of pumpkin back over her shoulder for one of the boys to grab. They had a field day after that, turning every twist of her knife into a bloody surgical procedure.

  “She’s slicing your nose!”

  “Stabbing your other eye!”

  “Drilling your teeth without any anesthetic!”

  Gross, gross, gross w
as the operative adjective in the short five minutes it took Melissa to complete her pumpkin bust of Chappie the almost-eleven-year-old. When she was finished, and had neatly wiped out his “eyes, mouth, and nose,” with a wet rag, she turned and handed it to him, placing it in his hands, its face looking up toward his face, which was staring down, open-mouthed, at it.

  “Awesome,” was all he could manage to say.

  “Me, next!” cried one of his pals.

  They jostled to be next in line for the privilege of being turned into a pumpkin like Cinderella’s coach.

  But a grown-up swaggered among them and asserted his prerogative.

  Thank God, I saw him coming in time to get David out of there.

  Quickly, I dug into my pockets until I came up with my last two dollars in change. “Cranberry fritters,” I said to David, knowing food was the only bait I could dangle to lure him away. I also knew the cranberry fritter booth was clear across the field on the other side, and that it was so popular it had one of the longest lines of customers at the festival. “For both of us, please.”

  Still gnawing on his turkey leg, with the walkie-talkie hung on his belt, David ambled off, and I breathed more easily again. I stepped behind a tall man and peeked around him.

  “Sorry, boys,” said Lew Riss to the ten-year-olds. “I’m next in line.”

  “No, you’re not!” one of them bravely asserted.

  Lew ignored the children, who didn’t have much choice but to back away from him. I was surprised that none of the adults who were watching objected to his pushiness, but there was certainly something about him now, with all those muscles, that would have made almost anybody hesitant to mess with him. The boys looked terribly resentful, as well they should, and I badly wanted to stand up for their rights, but I didn’t think they would benefit from witnessing what Lew might do if he noticed me—and then came looking for David again. They had probably heard worse language and seen worse violence that very morning on television, but still …