4.
The newest car in the lot was a Plymouth Fury from-I think-the mid-or late fifties. The plate on it looked like an impossibly antique version of the one on the back of my Subaru; that plate came, at my ex-wife"s request, with a pink breast cancer ribbon. The one I was looking at now did say VACATIONLAND, but it was orange instead of white. As in most states, Maine plates now come with letters-the one on my Subaru is 23383 IY-but the one on the back of the almost-new white-over-red Fury was 90-811. No letters.
I touched the trunk. It was hard and warm from the sun. It was real.
Cross the tracks and you"ll be at the intersection of Main and Lisbon. After that, buddy, the world is yours.
There were no railroad tracks pa.s.sing in front of the old mill-not in my time, there weren"t-but they were here, all right. Not just leftover artifacts, either. They were polished, gleaming. And somewhere in the distance I could hear the wuff-chuff of an actual train. When was the last time trains had pa.s.sed through Lisbon Falls? Probably not since the mill closed and U.S. Gypsum (known to the locals as U.S. Gyp "Em) was running round the clock.
Except it is running round the clock, I thought. I"d bet money on it. And so is the mill. Because this is no longer the second decade of the twenty-first century.
I had started walking again without even realizing it-walking like a man in a dream. Now I stood on the corner of Main Street and Route 196, also known as the Old Lewiston Road. Only now there was nothing old about it. And diagonally across the intersection, on the opposite corner- It was the Kennebec Fruit Company, which was certainly a grandiose name for a store that had been tottering on the edge of oblivion-or so it seemed to me-for the ten years I"d been teaching at LHS. Its unlikely raison d"etre and only means of survival was Moxie, that weirdest of soft drinks. The proprietor of the Fruit Company, an elderly sweet-natured man named Frank Anicetti, had once told me the world"s population divided naturally (and probably by genetic inheritance) into two groups: the tiny but blessed elect who prized Moxie above all other potables . . . and everybody else. Frank called everybody else "the unfortunately handicapped majority."
The Kennebec Fruit Company of my time was a faded yellow-and-green box with a dirty show window barren of goods . . . unless the cat that sometimes sleeps there is for sale. The roof is swaybacked from many snowy winters. There"s little on offer inside except for Moxie souvenirs: bright orange tee-shirts reading I"VE GOT MOXIE!, bright orange hats, vintage calendars, tin signs that looked vintage but were probably made last year in China. For most of the year the place is devoid of customers, most of the shelves denuded of goods . . . although you can still get a few sugary snack foods or a bag of potato chips (if you like the salt-and-vinegar kind, that is). The soft-drink cooler is stocked with nothing but Moxie. The beer cooler is empty.
Each July, Lisbon Falls hosts the Maine Moxie Festival. There are bands, fireworks, and a parade featuring-I swear this is true-Moxie floats and local beauty queens dressed in Moxie-colored tank bathing suits, which means an orange so bright it can cause retinal burns. The parade marshal is always dressed as the Moxie Doc, which means a white coat, a stethoscope, and one of those funky mirrors on a headband. Two years ago the marshal was LHS princ.i.p.al Stella Langley, and she"ll never live it down.
During the festival, the Kennebec Fruit Company comes alive and does excellent business, mostly provided by bemused tourists on their way to the western Maine resort areas. The rest of the year it is little more than a husk haunted by the faint odor of Moxie, a smell that has always reminded me-probably because I belong to the unfortunately handicapped majority-of Musterole, the fabulously stinky stuff my mother insisted on rubbing into my throat and chest when I had a cold.
What I was looking at now from the far side of the Old Lewiston Road was a thriving business in the prime of life. The sign hung over the door (FRESH UP WITH 7-UP on top, WELCOME TO THE KENNEBEC FRUIT CO. below) was bright enough to throw arrows of sun at my eyes. The paint was fresh, the roof unbowed by the weather. People were going in and coming out. And in the show window, instead of a cat . . .
Oranges, by G.o.d. The Kennebec Fruit Company once sold actual fruit. Who knew?
I started across the street, then pulled back as an inter-city bus snored toward me. The route sign above the divided windshield read LEWISTON EXPRESS. When the bus braked to a stop at the railroad crossing, I saw that most of the pa.s.sengers were smoking. The atmosphere in there must have been roughly akin to the atmosphere of Saturn.
Once the bus had gone on its way (leaving behind a smell of half-cooked diesel to mix with the rotten-egg stench belching from the Worumbo"s stacks), I crossed the street, wondering briefly what would happen if I were hit by a car. Would I blink out of existence? Wake up lying on the floor of Al"s pantry? Probably neither. Probably I would just die here, in a past for which a lot of people probably felt nostalgic. Possibly because they had forgotten how bad the past smelled, or because they had never considered that aspect of the Nifty Fifties in the first place.
A kid was standing outside the Fruit Company with one black-booted foot c.o.c.ked back against the wood siding. The collar of his shirt was turned up at the nape of his neck, and his hair was combed in a style I recognized (from old movies, mostly) as Early Elvis. Unlike the boys I was used to seeing in my cla.s.ses, he sported no goatee, not even a flavor patch below the chin. I realized that in the world I was now visiting (I hoped I was only visiting), he"d be kicked out of LHS for showing up with even a single strand of facial hair. Instantly.
I nodded to him. James Dean nodded back and said, "Hi-ho, Daddy-O."
I went inside. A bell jingled above the door. Instead of dust and gently decaying wood, I smelled oranges, apples, coffee, and fragrant tobacco. To my right was a rack of comic books with their covers torn off-Archie, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Tales from the Crypt. The hand-printed sign above this trove, which would have sent any eBay aficionado into paroxysms, read COMIX 5 EA THREE FOR 10 NINE FOR A QUARTER PLEASE DON"T HANDLE UNLESS YOU INTEND TO BUY.
On the left was a rack of newspapers. No New York Times, but there were copies of the Portland Press Herald and one leftover Boston Globe. The Globe"s headline trumpeted, DULLES HINTS CONCESSIONS IF RED CHINA RENOUNCES USE OF FORCE IN FORMOSA. The dates on both were Tuesday, September 9, 1958.
5.
I took the Globe, which sold for eight cents, and walked toward a marble-topped soda fountain that did not exist in my time. Standing behind it was Frank Anicetti. It was him all right, right down to the distinguished wings of gray above his ears. Only this version-call him Frank 1.0-was thin instead of plump, and wearing rimless bifocals. He was also taller. Feeling like a stranger in my own body, I slid onto one of the stools.
He nodded at the paper. "That going to do you, or can I get you something from the fountain?"
"Anything cold that"s not Moxie," I heard myself say.
Frank 1.0 smiled at that. "Don"t carry it, son. How about a root beer instead?"
"Sounds good." And it did. My throat was dry and my head was hot. I felt like I was running a fever.
"Five or ten?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Five-or ten-cent beer?" He said it the Maine way: beeyah.
"Oh. Ten, I guess."
"Well, I guess you guess right." He opened an ice cream freezer and removed a frosty mug roughly the size of a lemonade pitcher. He filled it from a tap and I could smell the root beer, rich and strong. He sc.r.a.ped the foam off the top with the handle of a wooden spoon, then filled it all the way to the top and set it down on the counter. "There you go. That and the paper"s eighteen cents. Plus a penny for the governor."
I handed over one of Al"s vintage dollars, and Frank 1.0 made change.
I sipped through the foam on top, and was amazed. It was . . . full. Tasty all the way through. I don"t know how to express it any better than that. This fifty-years-gone world smelled worse than I ever would have expected, but it tasted a whole h.e.l.l of a lot better.
"This is wonderful," I said.
"Ayuh? Glad you like it. Not from around here, are you?"
"No."
"Out-of-stater?"
"Wisconsin," I said. Not entirely a lie; my family lived in Milwaukee until I was eleven, when my father got a job teaching English at the University of Southern Maine. I"d been knocking around the state ever since.
"Well, you picked the right time to come," Anicetti said. "Most of the summer people are gone, and as soon as that happens, prices go down. What you"re drinkin, for example. After Labor Day, a ten-cent root beer only costs a dime."
The bell over the door jangled; the floorboards creaked. It was a companionable creak. The last time I"d ventured into the Kennebec Fruit, hoping for a roll of Tums (I was disappointed), they had groaned.
A boy who might have been seventeen slipped behind the counter. His dark hair was cropped close, not quite a crewcut. His resemblance to the man who had served me was unmistakable, and I realized that this was my Frank Anicetti. The guy who had lopped the head of foam off my root beer was his father. Frank 2.0 didn"t give me so much as a glance; to him I was just another customer.
"t.i.tus has got the truck up on the lift," he told his dad. "Says it"ll be ready by five."
"Well, that"s good," Anicetti Senior said, and lit a cigarette. For the first time I noticed the marble top of the soda fountain was lined with small ceramic ashtrays. Written on the sides was WINSTON TASTES GOOD LIKE A CIGARETTE SHOULD! He looked back at me and said, "You want a scoop of vanilla in your beer? On the house. We like to treat tourists right, especially when they turn up late."
"Thanks, but this is fine," I said, and it was. Any more sweetness and I thought my head would explode. And it was strong-like drinking carbonated espresso.
The kid gave me a grin that was as sweet as the stuff in the frosted mug-there was none of the amused disdain I"d felt emanating from the Elvis wannabe outside. "We read a story in school," he said, "where the locals eat the tourists if they show up after the season"s over."
"Frankie, that"s a h.e.l.l of a thing to tell a visitor," Mr. Anicetti said. But he was smiling when he said it.
"It"s okay," I said. "I"ve taught that story myself. Shirley Jackson, right? "The Summer People.""
"That"s the one," Frank agreed. "I didn"t really get it, but I liked it."
I took another pull on my root beer, and when I set it down (it made a satisfyingly thick chunk on the marble counter), I wasn"t exactly surprised to see it was almost gone. I could get addicted to these, I thought. It beats the living s.h.i.t out of Moxie.
The elder Anicetti exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling, where an overhead paddle fan pulled it into lazy blue rafters. "Do you teach out in Wisconsin, Mr.-?"
"Epping," I said. I was too caught by surprise to even think of giving a fake name. "I do, actually. But this is my sabbatical year."
"That means he"s taking a year off," Frank said.
"I know what it means," Anicetti said. He was trying to sound irritated and doing a bad job of it. I decided I liked these two as much as I liked the root beer. I even liked the aspiring teenage hood outside, if only because he didn"t know he was already a cliche. There was a sense of safety here, a sense of-I don"t know-preordination. It was surely false, this world was as dangerous as any other, but I possessed one piece of knowledge I would before this afternoon have believed was reserved only for G.o.d: I knew that the smiling boy who had enjoyed the Shirley Jackson story (even though he didn"t "get it") was going to live through that day and over fifty years of days to come. He wasn"t going to be killed in a car crash, have a heart attack, or contract lung cancer from breathing his father"s secondhand smoke. Frank Anicetti was good to go.
I glanced at the clock on the wall (START YOUR DAY WITH A SMILE, the face said, DRINK CHEER-UP COFFEE). It read 12:22. That was nothing to me, but I pretended to be startled. I drank off the rest of my beeyah and stood up. "Got to get moving if I"m going to meet my friends in Castle Rock on time."
"Well, take it easy on Route 117," Anicetti said. "That road"s a b.u.g.g.e.r." It came out buggah. I hadn"t heard such a thick Maine accent in years. Then I realized that was literally true, and I almost laughed out loud.
"I will," I said. "Thanks. And son? About that Shirley Jackson story."
"Yes, sir?" Sir, yet. And nothing sarcastic about it. I was deciding that 1958 had been a pretty good year. Aside from the stench of the mill and the cigarette smoke, that was.
"There"s nothing to get."
"No? That"s not what Mr. Marchant says."
"With all due respect to Mr. Marchant, you tell him Jake Epping says that sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story"s just a story."
He laughed. "I will! Period three tomorrow morning!"
"Good." I nodded to the father, wishing I could tell him that, thanks to Moxie (which he didn"t carry . . . yet), his business was going to be standing on the corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road long after he was gone. "Thanks for the root beer."
"Come back anytime, son. I"m thinking about lowering the price on the large."
"To a dime?"
He grinned. Like his son"s, it was easy and open. "Now you"re cooking with gas."
The bell jingled. Three ladies came in. No slacks; they wore dresses with hemlines that dropped halfway down their shins. And hats! Two with little fluffs of white veil. They began rummaging through the open crates of fruit, looking for perfection. I started away from the soda fountain, then had a thought and turned back.
"Can you tell me what a greenfront is?"
The father and the son exchanged an amused glance that made me think of an old joke. Tourist from Chicago driving a fancy sportscar pulls up to a farmhouse way out in the country. Old farmer"s sitting on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe. Tourist leans out of his Jaguar and asks, "Say, oldtimer, can you tell me how to get to East Machias?" Old farmer puffs thoughtfully on his pipe a time or two, then says, "Don"tcha move a G.o.ddam inch."
"You really are an out-of-stater, aren"t you?" Frank asked. His accent wasn"t as thick as his father"s. Probably watches more TV, I thought. There"s nothing like TV when it comes to eroding a regional accent.
"I am," I said.
"That"s funny, because I could swear I hear a little Yankee tw.a.n.g."
"It"s a Yooper thing," I said. "You know, the Upper Peninsula?" Except-dang!-the UP was Michigan.
But neither of them seemed to realize it. In fact young Frank turned away and started doing dishes. By hand, I noticed.
"The greenfront"s the liquor store," Anicetti said. "Right across the street, if you"re wanting to pick up a pint of something."
"I think the root beer"s good enough for me," I said. "I was just wondering. Have a nice day."
"You too, my friend. Come back and see us."
I pa.s.sed the fruit-examining trio, murmuring "Ladies" as I went by. And wishing I had a hat to tip. A fedora, maybe.
Like the ones you see in the old movies.
6.
The aspiring hoodlum had left his post, and I thought about walking up Main Street to see what else had changed, but only for a second. No sense pressing my luck. Suppose someone asked about my clothes? I thought my sport coat and slacks looked more or less all right, but did I know that for sure? And then there was my hair, which touched my collar. In my own time that would be considered perfectly okay for a high school teacher-conservative, even-but it might garner glances in a decade where shaving the back of the neck was considered a normal part of the barbering service and sideburns were reserved for rockabilly dudes like the one who had called me Daddy-O. Of course I could say I was a tourist, that all men wore their hair a little long in Wisconsin, it was quite the coming thing, but hair and clothes-that feeling of standing out, like some s.p.a.ce alien in an imperfectly a.s.sumed human disguise-was only part of it.
Mostly I was just plain freaked. Not mentally tottering, I think a human mind that"s moderately well-adjusted can absorb a lot of strangeness before it actually totters, but freaked, yes. I kept thinking about the ladies in their long dresses and hats, ladies who would be embarra.s.sed to show so much as the edge of a bra strap in public. And the taste of that root beer. How full it had been.
Directly across the street was a modest storefront with MAINE STATE LIQUOR STORE printed in raised letters over the small show window. And yes, the facade was a light green. Inside I could just make out my pal from the drying shed. His long black coat hung from his coathanger shoulders; he had taken off his hat and his hair stood out around his head like that of a cartoon nebbish who has just inserted Finger A in Electric Socket B. He was gesticulating at the clerk with both hands, and I could see his precious yellow card in one. I felt certain that Al Templeton"s half a rock was in the other. The clerk, who was wearing a short white tunic that looked quite a bit like the one the Moxie Doc wore in the annual parade, looked singularly unimpressed.
I walked to the corner, waited on traffic, and crossed back to the Worumbo side of the Old Lewiston Road. A couple of men were pushing a dolly loaded with bales of cloth across the courtyard, smoking and laughing. I wondered if they had any idea what the combination of cigarette smoke and mill pollution was doing to their innards, and supposed not. Probably that was a blessing, although it was more a question for a philosophy teacher than for a guy who earned his daily bread exposing sixteen-year-olds to the wonders of Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shirley Jackson.
When they had entered the mill, rolling their dolly between the rusty metal jaws of doors three stories high, I crossed back to the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT sign hanging from it. I told myself not to walk too fast, and not to peer all around me-not to do anything that would attract attention-but it was hard. Now that I was almost back to where I came in, the urge to hurry was almost irresistible. My mouth was dry, and the big root beer I"d drunk roiled in my stomach. What if I couldn"t get back? What if the marker I"d dropped was gone? What if it was still there, but the stairs weren"t?
Easy, I told myself. Easy.
I couldn"t resist one quick survey before ducking under the chain, but the courtyard was entirely mine. Somewhere distant, like a sound heard in a dream, I could again hear that low diesel wuff-chuff. It called to mind another line from another song: This train has got the disappearing railroad blues.
I walked down the green flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard and high up in my chest. The torn sc.r.a.p of paper with the chunk of concrete on top of it was still there; so far so good. I kicked at it gently, thinking Please G.o.d let this work, please G.o.d let me get back.
The toe of my shoe kicked the chunk of concrete-I saw it go skittering away-but it also thumped to a dead stop against the step. Those things were mutually exclusive, but they both happened. I took one more look around, even though no one in the courtyard could see me in this narrow lane unless they happened to be pa.s.sing directly in front of it at one end or the other. No one was.
I went up one step. My foot could feel it, even though my eyes told me I was still standing on the cracked paving of the courtyard. The root beer took another warning lurch in my stomach. I closed my eyes and that was a little better. I took the second step, then the third. They were shallow, those steps. When I took the fourth one, the summer heat disappeared from the back of my neck and the dark behind my eyelids became deeper. I tried to take the fifth step, only there was no fifth step. I b.u.mped my head on the low pantry ceiling instead. A hand grasped my forearm and I almost screamed.
"Relax," Al said. "Relax, Jake. You"re back."