He still hadn’t looked at Betsy, and she moved over to lean against the rail around the monument. They were both exhausted, pained, frustrated. “Why do you stay?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m one of the few people around here who remembers what it was like to be proud to work for the government.” Hennessey paused a bit. “You’re a good kid. I wish you could have experienced this town during Truman—when I came onboard—or even under Kennedy.” He paused again. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I brought you here so you could have some privacy.”
“Privacy?” Betsy grinned and looked over at the line of idling tour buses in the parking area, the gangs of American and European tourists going to and fro.
“You know what I mean,” Hennessey said.
“Isn’t the phone in my closet good enough?”
“The enchanted telephone isn’t appropriate for what I’m about to tell you,” Hennessey said. He threw away his cigarette, turned to face Betsy, and drew himself erect, suddenly looking very much the government official.
Betsy remembered getting a tooth pulled once when she was a girl. Once the decision had been made and the go-ahead had been given, the dentist and his assistant had suddenly shifted into a higher gear and got the job done with startling speed. Ruthless, practiced efficiency. In a way, it seemed cold. But it was better that way.
Hennessey was operating in that mode right now, doing something he had obviously done many times before. He’d made the decision and nothing could stop him. He took a step closer to Betsy, reached out, and grasped her upper arm firmly, looked her straight in the eye. Then he spoke some words to her that she didn’t hear. But that didn’t matter, because at some level she already knew, had known the moment Hennessey had reached her on the enchanted telephone.
The sweating, tired tourists circling dutifully around the Iwo Jima memorial were distracted, for amoment, by a woman’s scream. It was a cry of anguish, not of fear. A heavyset female had collapsed to her knees and thrown both arms over her head and was clenching her thin auburn hair with both hands, as if she wanted to rip it all out. An older gentleman was bent over her with one hand on her shoulder, talking to her quietly. Some of the older tourists, who included many Marine veterans, felt a strange sensation of jumping back in time to the late 1940’s, when the young widows of America’s war dead had gone to the dedications of monuments such as this one and suddenly been overcome by grief.
This woman was far too young to have known anyone who had died in the war. The milling tourists could only speculate. But the older ones knew what they were seeing.
October
Chapter Thirty-Four
Columbus Day weekend was nearly over, and Tab Templeton still had not shown up for work. Clyde had arranged with him last week to help out with some demolition in the basement of the apartment building. Demolition always went quickly when Tab was involved.
Clyde had encountered Tab at Hardware Hank a couple of weeks ago, pushing a cart loaded with PVC pipe. Rumor had it that Tab had been working regularly, doing odd jobs for someone or other, and Clyde had learned that he could no longer simply cruise the streets, pick him up off a park bench, and put him to work; he had to have an appointment.
But for Tab to make an appointment and for him to remember it were two unrelated propositions. He’d apparently forgotten this one. Clyde had spent the weekend dithering. He would pound away with the sledgehammer for a while, grow tired, and remember that Tab could get this work done four times faster; so time spent searching for him should be time well spent. He would get in the car and cruise by Tab’s usual park benches, vacant buildings, bars, and restaurant Dumpsters, then become despondent after an hour or two when he thought of all the time he had wasted. He would go back to the sledgehammer and repeat the cycle. Now twilight was approaching on the last day of the three-day weekend. He had an appreciable heap of debris in the back of his truck but nothing close to what he’d planned on. And he was due to pick up Maggie from one of the Dhonts in another hour or two.