The Last Fair Deal Going Down, page 2
“He wears three rings on his left hand.”
“Is the engineer, the one with the red badge, right-handed?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Only four fingers on his right hand.” They were drinking and Father was coming into his own.
“What should the woman in the green dress do?”
“Stay in bed a couple of days to get rid of her cold.”
“Who did the kid with the short hair belong to?”
“Mrs. Johnson.”
“What did she have on?”
“Pink and white checked dress, black shoes, and a wrist watch.”
“What did the boy keep saying?”
“The boy was a girl and ‘she’ kept yelling, ‘Stop wheel.’”
“What troubled the man with the brown leather suitcase?”
“Someone had taken his seat.”
“Who?”
“A young blond man.”
“Did he get it back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He was ashamed to ask for it.”
“What did he finally do?”
“Went back to the next car.”
“Who left the candy wrapper?”
“A woman with a blue hat on.”
“Why did the man in new overalls leave hurriedly?”
“Because he was irritated that whoever he was waiting for didn’t come.”
“Why should he be careful in driving home?”
“Because his left rear wheel is falling off.”
“What disturbed the woman with the green hat?”
“That she wasn’t as young as the woman with the leather handbag.”
“Who did the old man hope to get money from?”
“The young man who met the woman with the leather handbag.”
“Why did he think he could get it?”
“Because he was nervous.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.”
“Because she was married to someone else, who isn’t too far away.”
“You’ve won. I missed one.”
Father took his last drink of whiskey. “Four,” he said. “The cat is a male, the man with the leather suitcase finally came and got his seat back, and it will rain tonight — coming from the east.”
“That’s not about the railroad,” said Tickie.
“It will be,” said Father.
“We start here at nine o’clock ... six days a week. Forty dollars a month. If you and your wife will check with a Mr. Nelson he may be able to fix you up with a house.”
“Good afternoon,” said Father, rising.
“Good afternoon,” returned Tickie and rolled down his sleeves. “Sledge,” he called before Father had reached the door, “because you’re not from around here I think I better tell you something about Des Moines . . . something that most people here take for granted . . . something they’ve lived with so long that they don’t notice and assume everyone else knows . . . something that after you learn may change your mind about staying.” And it should have.
Father turned around and stood waiting for him to continue: the reality of the cabin, he feared, had marked his face, and Tickie, able to see the marks, was about to tell him something — something about the world — that because of his isolation he could not understand. But he did, and with a profound indifference that he managed to pass on to me (though it was not his intent), and that has destroyed the rest of our family, even him.
“There is a City here,” said Tickie. “Not a city like Des Moines itself, but an inner City of Des Moines . . . or a lower City. It is at the bottom of this gigantic hole in the ground. At the base — the beginning of the City — is a ghastly, stone, concrete wall surrounding the City, looming some twenty-five feet in the air. It encircles the City and is believed to be over two miles in diameter. Higher than this, along the wall, are seven monuments — giant monuments of awful creatures. These monuments, if you approach them from the outside, will open up and move back into the wall, letting you walk inside. Then they close. No one has ever gotten out of the City . . . the monuments will not reopen. No one knows what the inside looks like . . . except those who have gone in, I suppose, if they can see: the wet heavy air — fog — has over the years collected in the hole and the sun does not go more than a hundred feet into it. The children are afraid of this place. There are many stories about it. Occasionally teachers from the college talk about it, but to the rest of us it is neither evil nor godly. We ignore it.”
“Is that all?” asked Father.
“Yes,” Tickie answered.
Mr. Nelson took Father to the house. He (Nelson) wore a green, ill-fitting suit that looked to Father as though it might be slick to the touch, as though even water might slide off it. The house was not in good condition and Nelson knew that it would be difficult to sell — that it had to be sold.
Father was not listening. He looked at the house. It was built from oak trees, cut and gouged out by hand, nailed together as though the square was the only construction pattern and design that the builders knew; worn by the rain and sun, unpainted, fastened together with baling wire and pieces of corrugated steel tacked over the joints and corners that had been eaten away by insects and stagnant rainwater. A windmill to the side of the house pumped water into a wooden storage tank, and due to the weight of the water on itself a bathroom upstairs and a sink in the kitchen worked (as long as the water level was higher than the faucets, of course). The furnace burned coal. Electricity, none — though after World War II Father bought a generator that ran on diesel fuel from an orange tank.
Mr. Nelson told Father where to go to obtain a loan to finance the purchase of the house. Father did this and they, Nelson, Father, and a man at the bank, signed papers and handed them back and forth. Afterwards, they shook hands and Nelson told Father what a good house he had bought. Father asked the banker if the house was his now and the banker said that it was unless he stopped sending money in — in which case it would be the bank’s. Mr. Nelson shook Father’s hand again and Father told him to never come to his house, to never even walk by it if he could help it. Nelson was offended. The banker hurried back into a sectioned-off office, smiling.
Luke and Andrea drove home then. She was pregnant but did not know it. Neither did he. They were anxious to explore their new home. They arrived. Andrea went inside and said that the house had a “good feel.” Luke found some old tools in the basement and felt — though he knew it wasn’t so — that he had swindled Nelson. He looked at the furnace and opened all the doors he could find, looking in and poking around with the wooden handled screwdriver. His wife called him and he went upstairs. Unfamiliar with the house and the way sound moved through its rooms, he wandered for a short time before he found her on the back porch. He came out and stood beside her; she pointed down away from them. “What’s that?” she asked. When he looked (and it was not right away because the porch seemed to Luke a likely place for someone to leave tools behind) he saw a large — very large — cavity, perhaps two-and-a-half miles across, that began in less space than forty feet from the porch steps where the grass ended and the dark sides of the hole began. (I can remember thinking when I was small that a volcano had once lived there and then had sunk down into the ground, leaving the ground around it level.) They walked to the edge and looked down. It was not so steep as it had looked from the porch — not so steep that someone couldn’t walk down; but they were unable to see farther into it than twenty-five feet because of the heavy fog. Luke looked out across the pit. A faint putrid smell seemed to be down there. The same road that passed by the front of his house wound in a circle around the hole. Other houses stood beside the road. The buildings of Des Moines spread out in all directions from them; it was a clear, hot day and he could see all the way around the cavity. At seven places streets, macadam and brick, fled off down into the hole and disappeared in the fog.
“That’s the City,” said Luke.
“The City?”
“There’s a City down there,” he said, and up from the fog came a long sound like a giant boulder dropping several feet into a grass-lined pocket of earth.
“What’s that?” asked Andrea.
“One of the monuments closing,” he said and went back inside to look for more tools.
Chapter II
JOHN CHARLES WAS THE OLDEST. THE PATH THE REST OF US walked to the Independent Public School #4 he had made. The letters SLEDGE had been carved into the wooden desk tops and filled with ink before any of the rest of us had come. What we did as children John C. had done first; not differently, but first. And Mrs. Candlewine had seen us all. She had sat behind her desk and called the name John C. Sledge from a sheet of paper, had looked out across the room and had seen a hand rise, had looked into a pair of dark brown eyes half closed from want of sleep and thought to herself, “Bring the children unto me.” Then she more straightened her wirelike body, tucked a loose fold of dress up under her thigh, caught a glimpse of a strand of once blond, virgin hair, and read Richard L. Stephens. She had seen all of us — John Charles, Mary, Nellie, Walter, Will, Paul, and myself — walk through the first-grade door and raise our hands after our names had been read. She had walked beside us while we stood in line along the cinder-block hall waiting to be let outside, punished us for throwing erasers, and even once had gone in front of the town council screaming, “The children . . . The children . . . What you do to the children,” for us.
Mrs. Candlewine drove to our house one afternoon after school, parked her car next to the windmill (which is not important in itself), and walked around to the back porch, conscious that by doing so she was admitting, assuming, a familiarity with our family. John Charles, then eight, answered the door and pushed it aside for her to enter.
“Hello, John,” she said. “Is your mother or father at home?”
“No,” he answered, still holding the door, waiting for her to come in.
“Do they know you are playing with your father’s pocketknife?”
“It’s mine,” he answered.
“Do you know when they will be back?”
“Dad’s at work and he’ll be home in a couple hours.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’ll be back, I think, in a little while.”
“Where’s your sister, John? Is she sick?”
“I don’t know.” John Charles had slowly closed the screen door, reasonably content that Mrs. Candlewine had no intention of coming inside.
“How is school going for you?”
“O.K.”
Andrea Sledge came walking up onto the backyard out of the fog. She was five-and-a-half months pregnant. “Here’s Mom,” said John C. Mrs. Candlewine turned to face her and began talking before she had completed the steps up the porch.
“Hello, Mrs. Sledge. I’m Mrs. Candlewine, Mary’s teacher at school, and Mary hasn’t been to school this last week, so I thought I’d come out and see if there was any trouble and if I could help in any way. I’ve brought some work for her to do here at home so she won’t be so far behind when she comes back. She’s such a lovely girl, Mrs. Sledge.”
Andrea sat down on the upper step and put her hands to her head as though to rub something away. “She’s gone . . . Mary’s gone.”
“Gone?” asked Mrs. Candlewine, wondering not so much about Andrea’s choice of word but of what the word had to do with Mary. John Charles had gone back into some farther room in the house.
“Yes,” Mother answered, staring out away from the house. “Into the City. The City has taken my baby.” And she began to cry. Mrs. Candlewine rested a minute against the side of the house and sat down beside Andrea. She did not know what to say but felt guilty just watching, the way it is funny to see someone fall down on the ice and break a leg — but not funny when they are watching you laughing.
“Mrs. Sledge, you’re mistaken. She’s probably just wandered away — to a friend’s house or something. You know how children are.”
“Not Mary, she’d never do that,” Andrea said, still crying. “She was such a good baby ... I wish I had never come here. I wish I had never left Wisconsin.”
“Now, Mrs. Sledge, be strong. When was the last time you saw Mary?”
“Sunday afternoon. She was out here in the yard. I wasn’t paying too close attention to her — but watching her just the same. She was playing some kind of game, chasing those little yellow butterflies, trying to get near enough to blow on them.... I hate this wretched place.” When she had said this last thing she was not crying.
“Now where might she have gone, Mrs. Sledge? To a friend’s house maybe. Have you checked with her playmates?”
“I’ve been a good mother, Mrs. Candlewine.”
“I know, Mrs. Sledge, but . . .”
“No you don’t. You don’t think that at all. You think it’s my fault that my baby’s gone into the City — that I didn’t whip her, or make her help with the washing, or do her Sunday School lessons. But she was always good . . . never unhappy.” Her eyes were dry now and she pointed down into the fog. “It’s That . . . that.”
Mrs. Candlewine went inside the house and told John Charles to stay with his mother while she went away, and to stop playing with his pocketknife. She drove to the police station, the highway patrol, the homes of the other children in Mary’s class, to the amusement park, and to the zoo. Late in the evening she returned to the Sledges’, where she found Luke and Andrea sitting on the back porch. The afterdark had come.
“Mrs. Candlewine, this is my husband,” said Andrea.
“Hello,” said Mrs. Candlewine.
“Mrs. Candlewine was Mary’s teacher,” Andrea told her husband, who acknowledged the fact by lowering his eyes.
“I’ve checked with Mary’s friends and none of them have seen her. I’m sure that if we have patience and pray, she will turn up. Children have been known to wander off into the woods and be gone for weeks.”
“Mary’s in the City, Mrs. Candlewine. Somehow she walked down there and a monument opened and she went in. It is an insult to tell ourselves lies.”
“No,” said Mrs. Candlewine, her whole body quivering but her voice steady and flat. “She is not in the City. She is not. God protects the innocent. He would never let such a thing happen. Were I to believe that I’d walk in there myself and find her.”
“No you wouldn’t, Mrs. Candlewine — just like you won’t now. Just like I won’t.”
“She’s not in the City,” said Luke, being careful to talk to neither woman in particular. “Even she wasn’t that stupid. But she’ll never come back either — someone has killed her — perhaps by accident, in an automobile, was afraid and sank her in the river . . . or perhaps intentionally; there are such people.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Mrs. Candlewine, “the way you think,” and went home and waited. She waited for a week, then two, and then three. Once she stopped John Charles in the hall and asked if his sister had returned home yet. “No,” he answered and she never asked again. She waited, and continued to wait. She read the names Nellie Sledge, Walter Sledge, waiting — Will Sledge, Paul Sledge. Then she quit waiting and told me once while I fumbled with sticks of colored paraffin to fill up the hollow spaces between the outline of distant characters in my coloring book: “I knew your sister, Mary, before she got on the train that took her away.” I wanted Mrs. Candlewine to help me with the crayons because the colors kept running over the lines and leaving blotches inside the hollow spaces but she said I was doing fine and walked on down the row of desks to watch another colorer, of whose style I was envious.
When John Charles was twenty he was in love with a girl whose name I did not know for a long time because Nellie and Walt and Father had forgotten it. The idea of being in love excited him. That would have been in 1933 when the railroad was only running one train a week through to Chicago and that one didn’t stop. The farmers had weathered the depression well and we had made out by what John C. and Father could steal and what was given to us out of conscience. He was in love with a girl who lived on the western side of Des Moines. They went to Missouri because he had been indirectly offered a job with a stone quarry by Tommy Robinson, a man from St. Louis he had met playing horseshoes. She was excited and a little afraid because John C. had told her St. Louis was a tough town.
He wrote home once, two years later, and Nellie had kept the letter and showed it to me. The paper had turned yellow and was dissolving the ink: “Doing fine. Read in the paper the other day that the railroad is starting up again. Life is hard out here and you have to be tough to stay alive, but I’m doing fine. Hope to be home for a visit soon.” On December 22, 1939, Father met him at the station. Two railroad hands lifted the box out of the freight car and set it on the platform. Tickie unfastened the letter held by three achromatic thumbtacks from the lid and gave it to Father.
L. Sledge, Mang.
Des Moines Depot
Des Moines, Iowa
Dear Sir:
We regret to inform you that on November 19, 1939, John Charles Sledge was found guilty of Section 31 of Chapter 18 of the Missouri Penal Code, Judge Garnold presiding. Executed at 5:10 A.M., December 21, 1939, Missouri State Penitentiary and pronounced dead by State Coronor Bill Mallory.
(Casket and shipping charges paid by the State of Missouri)
Elliot Winfield
Public Relations Dir.
St. Louis, Missouri.
Father and Tickie carried John Charles inside the depot and Father took him home in the pickup after work. He showed Andrea the letter and she read it. Nellie cried while she held me against her in the rocking chair. From her bed Mother looked at Luke and then he went into the living room. Walt and Will were not at home yet and Paul played his guitar until Father told him that if he wanted to play it to go out on the porch. Then Paul began to cry.
