4
Alvin Rutledge wasn't the only person who had tried to visit a friend or relative in Haven during July, nor the only one to become ill and turn back. Using the voting lists and area phone books as a starting point, Leandro turned up three people who told stories similar to Rutledge's. He uncovered a fourth incident through pure coincidence - or almost pure. His mother knew he was 'following up' some aspect of his 'big story,' and happened to mention that her friend Eileen Pulsifer had a friend who lived down in Haven.
Eileen was fifteen years older than Leandro's mother, which put her close to seventy. Over tea and cloyingly sweet gingersnaps, she told Leandro a story similar to those he had already heard.
Mrs Pulsifer's friend was Mary Jacklin (whose grandson was Tommy Jacklin). They had visited back and forth for more than forty years, and often played in local bridge tournaments. This summer she hadn't seen Mary at all. Not even once. She'd spoken to her on the phone, and she seemed fine; her excuses always sounded believable ... but all the same, something about them - a bad headache, too much baking to do, the family had decided on the spur of the moment to go down to Kennebunk and visit the Trolley Museum - wasn't quite right.
'They were fine by the one-by-one, but they seemed odd to me in the whole bunch, if you see what I mean.' She offered the cookies. 'More 'snaps?'
'No thank you,' Leandro said.
'Oh, go ahead! I know you boys! Your mother taught you to be polite, but no boy ever born could turn down a gingersnap! Now you just go on and take what you hanker for!'
Smiling dutifully, Leandro took another gingersnap.
Settling back and folding her hands on her tight round belly, Mrs Pulsifer went on: 'I begun to think something might be wrong ... I still think that maybe something's wrong, truth to tell. First thing to cross my mind was that maybe Mary didn't want to be my friend anymore ... that maybe I did or said something to offend her. But no, says I to myself, if I'd done something ' I guess she'd tell me. After forty years of friendship I guess she would. Besides, she didn't really sound cool to me, you know
'But she did sound different.'
Eileen Pulsifer nodded decisively. 'Ayuh. And that got me thinking that maybe she was sick, that maybe, God save us, her doctor had found a cancer or something inside her, and she didn't want any of her old friends to know. So I called up Vera and I said, "We're going to go down to Haven, Vera, and see Mary. We ain't going to tell her we're coming, and that way she can't call us off. You get ready, Vera," I says, "because I'm coming by your house at ten o'clock, and if you ain't ready, I'm going to go without you.-
'Vera is - '
'Vera Anderson, in Derry. Just about my best friend in the whole world, John, except for Mary and your mother. And your mother was down in Monmouth, Visiting her sister that week.'
Leandro remembered it well: a week of such peace and quiet was a week to be treasured.
'So the two of you headed down.'
'Ayuh.'
'And you got sick.'
'Sick! I thought I was dying. My heart!' She clapped a hand dramatically over one breast. 'It was beating so fast! My head started to ache, and I got a nosebleed, and Vera got scared. She says, "Turn around, Eileen, right now, you got to get to the hospital right away!"
'Well, I turned around somehow - I don't hardly remember how, the world was spinning so - and by then my mouth was bleeding, and two of my teeth fell out. Right out of my head! Did you ever hear the beat of it?'
'No,' he lied, thinking of Alvin Rutledge. 'Where did it happen?'
'Why, I told you - we were going to see Mary Jacklin - '
'Yes, but were you actually in Haven when you got sick? And which way did you come in?'
'Oh, I see! No, we weren't. We were on the Old Derry Road. In Troy.'
'Close to Haven, then.'
'Oh, 'bout a mile from the town line. I'd been feeling sick for a little time -whoopsy, you know - but I didn't want to say so to Vera. I kept hoping that I would feel better.'
Vera Anderson hadn't gotten sick, and this troubled Leandro. It didn't fit. Vera hadn't gotten a bloody nose, nor lost any teeth.
'No, she didn't get sick at all,' Mrs Pulsifer said. 'Except with terror. I guess she was sick with that. For me ... and for herself too, I imagine.'
'How do you mean?'
'Well, that road's awful empty. She thought I was going to pass out. I almost did. It might have been fifteen, twenty minutes before someone came along.'
'She couldn't have driven you?'
'God bless you, John, Vera's had muscular dystrophy for years. She wears great big metal braces on her legs - cruel-looking things, they are, like something you'd expect to see on a torture chamber. It just about makes me cry sometimes to see her.'
5
At a quarter to ten on the morning of August 15th, Leandro crossed into the town of Troy. His stomach was tight with anticipation and - let's face it, folks - a tingle of fear. His skin felt cold.
I may get sick. I may get sick, and if I do, I'm going to leave about ninety feet of rubber reversing out of the area. Got that?
I got it, boss, he answered himself. I got it, I got it.
You may lose some teeth, too, he cautioned himself, but the loss of -a few teeth seemed a small price to pay for a story which might win him a Pulitzer Prize ... and, just as important, one which would surely turn David Bright green with envy.
He passed through Troy Village, where everything seemed fine ... if a little slower than usual. The first jag in the normal run of things came about a mile further south, and from a direction he wouldn't have expected. He had been listening to WZON out of Bangor. Now the normally strong AM signal began to waver and flutter. Leandro could hear one ... no, two . . * no ' three ... other stations mixed in with its signal. He frowned. That sometimes happened at night, when radiant cooling thinned the atmosphere and allowed radio signals to travel further, but he had never heard of it happening on an AM band in the morning, not even during those periods of optimum radio-transmission conditions which ham operators call 'the skip.'
He ran the tuner on the Dodge's radio, and was amazed as a flood of conflicting transmissions poured out of the speakers - rock-and-roll, countryand-western, and classical music stepped all over each other. Somewhere in the background he could hear Paul Harvey extolling Amway. He turned the dial further and caught a momentarily clear transmission so surprising he pulled over. He sat staring at the radio with big eyes.
It was speaking in Japanese.
He sat and waited for the inevitable clarification -'This lesson in Beginners' Japanese has been brought to you by your local Kyanize Paint dealer,' something like that. The announcer finished. Then came the Beach Boys 'Be True to Your School.' In Japanese.
Leandro continued to tune down the kHz band with a hand that shook. It was much the same all the way. As it did at night, the tangle of voices and music got worse as he tuned toward the higher frequencies. At last the tangle grew so severe it began to frighten him - it was the auditory equivalent of a squirming mass of snakes. He turned the radio off and sat behind the wheel, eyes wide, body thrumming slightly, like a man on lowgrade speed.
What is this?
Foolish to speculate when the answer lay no more than six miles up ahead ... always assuming he could uncover it, of course.
Oh, I think you'll uncover it. You may not like it when you do, but yeah, I think you'll uncover it with no trouble at all.
Leandro looked around. The hay in the field on his right was long and shaggy. Too long and shaggy for August. There hadn't been any first cutting in early July. Somehow he didn't think there was going to be any August cutting, either. He looked left and saw a tumbledown barn surrounded by rusty auto parts. The corpse of a '57 Studebaker was decaying in the barn's maw. The windows seemed to stare at Leandro. There were no people to stare, at least not that he could see.
A very quiet, very polite little voice spoke up inside him, the voice of a well-mannered child at a tea party that has become decidedly scary:
I would like to go home, please.
Yes. Home to Mother. Home in time to watch the afternoon soaps with her. She would be glad to see him back with his scoop, maybe even more glad to see him back without it. They'd sit and eat cookies and drink coffee. They would talk. She would talk, rather, and he would listen. That was how it always was, and it really wasn't that bad. She could be an irritating thing sometimes, but she was ...
Safe.
Safe, yeah. That was it. Safe. And whatever was going on south of Troy on this dozy summer afternoon, it wasn't at all safe.
I would like to go home, please.
Right. There had probably been times when Woodward and Bernstein felt that way when Nixon's boys were really putting the squeeze on. Bernard Fall had probably felt that way when he got off the plane in Saigon for the last time. When you saw the TV news correspondents in trouble-spots like Lebanon and Tehran, they only looked cool, calm, and collected. Viewers never had a chance to inspect their shorts.
The story is out there, and I'm going to get it, and when I collect my Pulitzer Prize, I can say I owe it all to David Bright ... and my secret Superman wristwatch.
He put the Dodge in gear again and drove on toward Haven.
6
He hadn't gone a mile before he began to feel a bit ill. He thought this must be a physical symptom of his fear and ignored it. Then, when he began to feel worse, he asked himself (as one is apt to do when he realizes that the nausea sitting in his stomach like a small dark cloud is not going away) what he had eaten. There was no blame to be laid in that direction. He hadn't been afraid when he got up that morning, but he had been feeling a lot of anticipation and high-spirited tension; as a result he had refused the usual bacon and scrambled eggs and settled for tea and dry toast. That was all.
I would like to go home! The voice was now more shrill.
Leandro pushed on, teeth clamped grimly together. The scoop was in Haven. If he couldn't get into Haven, there would be no scoop. You couldn't hit 'em if you couldn't see 'em. QED.
Less than a mile from the town line - the day was eerily, utterly dead - a series of beeping, booping, and buzzing noises began to come from the back seat, startling him so badly that he cried out and pulled over to the side of the road again.
He looked in back and at first was unable to credit what he was seeing. It had to be, he thought, a hallucination brought on by his increasing nausea.
When he and his mother had been in Halifax this past weekend, he had taken his nephew Tony out for a Dairy Queen. Tony (whom Leandro privately thought was an ill-mannered little snot) had sat in the back playing with a plastic toy that looked a bit like the handset of a Princess phone. This toy was called Merlin, and it ran on a computer chip. It played four or five simple games which called for simple feats of memory or the ability to identify a simple mathematical series. Leandro remembered it had also played tic-tac-toe.
Anyway, Tony must have forgotten it, and now it was going crazy in the back seat, its red lights flashing on and off in random patterns (but were they? or just a little too fast for him to catch?), making its simple series of sounds again and again and again. It was running by itself.
No ... no. I hit a pothole, or something. That's all. Jogged its switch. Got it going.
But he could see the small black switch on the side. It was pushed to Off. But Merlin went on booping and beeping and buzzing. It reminded him of a Vegas slot-machine paying off a big jackpot.
The thing's plastic case began to smoke. The plastic itself was sinking ... drooling ... running like tallow. The lights flashed faster ... faster. Suddenly they all went on at once, bright red, and the gadget emitted a strangled buzzing sound. The case cracked open. There was a brittle shower of plastic shards. The seat-cover started to smolder underneath it.
Ignoring his stomach, Leandro got up on his knees and knocked it onto the floor. There was a charred spot on the seat where Merlin had lain.
What is this?
The answer, irrelevant, nearly a scream:
I WOULD LIKE TO GO HOME NOW PLEASE!
'The ability to isolate a simple mathematical series.' Did I think that? The John Leandro that flunked general math in high school? Do you mean it?
Never mind that, just bug OUT!
No.
He put the Dodge in gear and drove on again. He had gone less than twenty yards when he thought suddenly, with crazy exhilaration:
The ability to isolate a simple mathematical series indicates the existence of a general case, doesn't it? You could express it this way, come to think of it:
ax[2] + bxy = cy[2] + dx + ey + f = 0.
Yup. It'll work as long as a, b, c, d, and f are constants. I think. Yeah. You bet. But you couldn't let a, b, or c be 0 - that'd f**k it for sure! Let f take care of itself! Ha!
Leandro felt like puking, but he still uttered a shrill, triumphant laugh. All at once he felt as if his brain had lifted off, right through the top of his skull. Although he didn't know it (having pretty much dozed through that part of Nerd Math), he had reinvented the general quadratic equation in two variables, which can indeed be used to isolate components in a simple mathematical series. It blew his mind.
A moment later, blood burst from his nose in an amazing flood.
That was the end of John Leandro's first effort to get into Haven. He threw the gearshift into reverse and backed unsteadily up the road, weaving from side to side, right arm hooked over the front seat, blood pouring onto the shoulder of his shirt as he stared out through the back window with watering eyes.
He backed up for almost a mile, then turned around in a driveway. He looked down at himself. His shirt was drenched with blood. But he felt better. A little better, he amended. Still, he didn't linger; he drove back to Troy Village and parked in front of the general store.
He walked in, expecting the usual gathering of old men to stare at his bloody shirt with silent Yankee surprise. But only the shopkeeper was there, and he didn't look surprised at all - not at the blood, not at Leandro's question about any shirts he might have in stock.
'Look like your nose might've bled a tetch,' the storekeeper said mildly, and showed Leandro a selection of T-shirts. An inordinately large selection for such a small store as this, Leandro thought - he was slowly getting hold of himself, although his head still ached and his stomach still felt sour and unsteady. The flow of blood from his nose had scared him very badly.
'You could say that,' Leandro said. He allowed the old man to thumb through the shirts for him, because there was tacky blood still drying on his own hands. They were sized S, M, L, and XL. WHERE TH' HELL IS TROY, MAINE? some said. On others there was a lobster and the slogan I GOT THE BEST PIECE OF TAIL I EVER HAD IN TROY, MAINE. On others there was a large blackfly which looked like a monster from outer space. THE MAINE STATE BIRD, these proclaimed.
'You sure do have lots of shirts,' Leandro said, pointing to a WHERE TH' HELL in an M size. He thought the lobster shirt was amusing, but thought his mother would be less than wild about the innuendo.
'Ayuh,' the storekeeper said. 'Have to have a lot. Sell a lot.'
'Tourists?' Leandro's mind was already racing ahead, trying to figure out what came next. He had thought he was onto something big; now he believed it was one hell of a lot bigger than even he had believed.
'Some,' the storekeeper said, 'but there ain't been many down this way this summer. Mostly I sell 'em to folks like you.'
'Like me?'
'Ayuh. Folks with bloody noses.'
Leandro gaped at the storekeeper.
'Their noses bleed, they wreck their shirts,' the storekeeper said. 'Same way you wrecked yours. They want a new one, and if they're just locals - like I 'spect you are - they ain't got no luggitch and no changes. So they stop first place they come to and buy a new one. I don't blame 'em. Drivin' around in a shirt all over blood like yours'd make me puke. Why, I've had ladies in here this summer - nice-looking ladies, too, dressed to the nines - who smelled like guts in a hogshead.'
The storekeeper cackled, showing a mouth that was perfectly toothless.
Leandro said slowly: 'Let me get this straight. Other people come back from Haven with bloody noses? It's not just me?'
'Just you? Hell, no! Shittagoddam! The day they buried Ruth McCausland, I sold fifteen shirts! That one day! I was thinkin' about retirin' on the proceeds and movin' to Florida.'
The storekeeper cackled again.
'They was all out-of-towners.' He said this as if it explained everything - and perhaps in his mind, it did. 'Couple of 'em was still spoutin' when they come in here. Noses like fountains! Ears too, sometimes. Shittagoddarn!'
'And nobody knows about this?'
The old man looked at Leandro from wise eyes.
'You do, sonny,' he said.
Chapter 6. Inside the Ship