Murder in Mount Holly Read online

  Like most old men he wore his watch to bed. He had forgotten the last time it was off his wrist. But he remembered distinctly the time he got it, a bargain at the Fort Sam Baker PX in Missouri, two dollars and sixty cents. It was a huge watch and ticked very loudly. The chrome had flaked off and revealed brass underneath. The watch was so big that even Mr. Gibbon could wind it. And Mr. Gibbon had very thick fingers.

  Mr. Gibbon’s other valuable possessions were his .45 caliber pistol (he had killed a man with it, he said), his canteen with the bullet hole through the side (it had foiled the killing of Mr. Gibbon), a picture of his wife and two daughters in a bamboo frame he had bought somewhere near the equator somewhere on an island somewhere, also his army discharge papers, his khakis, his clips of bullets, his hunting knife (“A man should own enough knife to protect himself with,” he said), his neatly made bed, his paper bags and his tennis shoes.

  Of these last two items the bags were the most important; the tennis shoes were more of a sentimental thing. Mr. Gibbon made it a practice to carry paper bags wherever he went, wrinkled brown-paper bags. It was hard to tell what was in the bags since they were not bulky enough to show the outlines of any distinguishable object. Even if they did contain a large object they were wrinkled enough to conceal the object’s identity. Often the paper bags contained nothing more than many carefully folded paper bags. Mr. Gibbon enjoyed the stares of people who were perplexed by a particularly huge brown-paper bag he had carried into town one day. He did not take the bus that day. Instead he walked all the way home, past all the eyes of most of his neighbors. What was in the bag? More bags. Mr. Gibbon smiled and tucked his secret under his arm. Many times he hailed and hooted a good morning to another old man merely because the other man was also carrying a bag. He imagined a fraternity of old men carrying armloads of wrinkled bags. He saw them all the time.

  The tennis shoes replaced his army boots, which he saved for special occasions (riding in a car, resting, cleaning his pistol). They were black basketball sneakers—the kind that a high school student wears after school. The canvas was black, the rubber was white. In spite of the thick rubber soles they added no spring to his step. He walked along the sidewalk with a pflap­-pflip-pflap-pflip of the canvas and rubber, the long lacings trailing several inches behind. Over the anklebone there was a round label which read:

  OFFICIAL TENNIES

  “The Choice of Major Leaguers!”

  He wore no socks. Usually his trousers were baggy and long enough to conceal the fact, but sometimes his white ankle flesh could be seen over the black tennis shoes as he walked along the sidewalk looking very much like a little wooden man marching down a plank, weaving from side to side.

  What nearly everyone noticed first about Mr. Gibbon were his eyes. They were cloudy, pearly and ill-looking. It was his eyes that got him discharged from the army and not the fact that he was at retirement age. He had changed his age several times on his file card to make absolutely sure that he would die in the army. There was no way to disperse the fog in his eyes. He could see all right, his eyes were “damn good” and he had never been sick a day in his life. Yet his eyes looked wrong. They were the wrong color. Indeed, there seemed to be something seriously wrong with those eyes. They were the color of nonfat milk.

  Mr. Gibbon’s nose was sharp, as was his chin and the ridge of his head where the skull sutures pushed against the skin. His neck was a collection of wattles, folds and very thin wrinkles. The base of his neck seemed small, bird-like, as if it had been choked thin by a tight collar for many years.

  And his mouth. “I’ve got fifteen teeth,” Mr. Gibbon was fond of saying. The teeth were not visible. They were somewhere within the shapeless lips, which stretched and chewed even when Mr. Gibbon was not eating. It was the kind of mouth that caused people to think that he was a nasty man.

  From the rear he looked like nearly every other man his age. His head was wide at the top, not a dome, but a wedge. The back of his skinny neck was an old unhappy face of wrinkles. There was even a wrinkle the size of a small mouth, frowning from the back of Mr. Gibbon’s neck. His ears stuck out, his shoulders were bony and rounded, his spine protruded. He was vaguely bucket-assed, but not so much bucket-like as edgy, a flat bottom that is known as starchy, as if it contained a large piece of cardboard.

  “You can’t rile me,” Mr. Gibbon said. It was mostly true. He stayed calm most of the time, and when he was angry did not speak: instead he wheezed, he puffed, he blew, he sighed, he groaned. And maybe he would mumble an obscenity or two.

  His favorite song was the National Anthem, and the less violins, the more brass, the better. An old song, he said, but a good solid one. You’d be proud to get up on your hind legs and be counted when it played—it was that kind of song, a patriotic song. “If you wanna name names, I’m a patriot,” said Mr. Gibbon. He liked the anonymity of citizenship and patriotism. He wanted to be in that great bunch of great people that listened, that saluted, that obeyed the country’s command whether at home or abroad, whether down at the pool hall or far afield, at work or at play. The song ran through him and charged his whole body and made it tingle. Mr. Gibbon wheezed and spat when he was angry, but he also wheezed and spat when he was emotionally involved; he got choked up. Something of a patriotic nature always brought rheum to his eyes: hearing the anthem, seeing the flag or his army buddies. Or just the thought of them.

  He had resigned himself to being out of the army as much as he could. You couldn’t do it completely. He knew that. It was in the blood. It was something that wouldn’t leave you for all your born days. Something you wouldn’t want to leave even if it were possible. Something great and good. Something powerful.

  It was a sad day when the army doctor took a last look at Mr. Gibbon’s cloudy eyes and said, “There’s something sick about them eyes. I don’t know what medical science would say, but I don’t like the looks of them . . .”

  That was all there was to it. In a few days Mr. Gibbon was out of the army. He had been in for thirty-eight years. “That’s a lifetime for some people, thirty-eight years,” he would say. And when he was feeling very low he would say, “That was my lifetime, thirty-eight years in Uncle Sam’s army. Just hanging on now for dear life, and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

  Mr. Gibbon was smart enough to know that things were different in the army. Life was better, if not richer. There was good company, a nice bunch of kids. Raw kids, greenhorns, but they learned in the long run. They learned to pitch-in and fall-to. Life in the army was a constant reward. It was Mr. Gibbon’s first real haircut, grammar school, a trip to the zoo. For a man who had never had a youth that he remembered, and who could not remember whether (or not) he had passed through puberty, the army was a tremendously satisfying experience. Not really the romance of the recruiting poster, although there was more of that in it than people ordinarily thought. In the army you were someone, a man in khakis, a full-time threat to the enemy; Mr. Gibbon was “Pop” to a lot of young kids and a buddy to a lot of the others. Need a little advice on VD, a needle and thread, some notepaper, card tricks, funny stories? Want to know what the Jerries were really like? Ask Pop Gibbon.

  Now he was out of the army and it pained. Maybe it was the weather, but the weather had never caused him to pain before. Pain in his back, his neck, his finger joints. Or his clothes were damp. His clothes had never been damp before. And when he did not pain he felt sticky, or maybe one of his teeth would be giving him a time. In the army he never had a sick day, although the Doc and others examined his eyes now and then and pre­scribed “rest, lots and lots of rest for them eyes,” or “try a little epsom salts, Charlie, bathe them and then get some rest, lots of . . .” Worse than all the civilian aches and pains was the one thought that occurred to him over and over again, the thought which zipped into his mind one morning and which stayed there, for good it seemed. Mr. Gibbon had been on his way to take a bath
and did not feel a need to take the precaution of wearing a robe (besides, nakedness always reminded Mr. Gibbon pleasantly of the army). He was padding along the hall placidly, with a towel over his arm and his comb in his hand, and wearing his tennis shoes for slippers, and he passed one of the bedrooms and caught a glimpse of someone moving. He stopped and peeked through the door. He was right. In the full-length mirror he saw an old man, almost totally bald, carrying a broken comb and a tattered towel and wearing a suit of shrivelled fat.

  It brought Mr. Gibbon up short. He tried to cover himself with the towel, but to no avail. The towel was too small and too shredded. Mr. Gibbon spilled over into the mirror. When he turned away from the mirror he got the most revolting view of all, a rear view, dying flesh retreating, and it was not starchy at all. It was just awful.

  He could not forget the old man in the fat suit walking stupidly, awkwardly away from the full-length mirror. It had not been like that in the army. He had been a big strong man in the army. The army had promised to train Mr. Gibbon. They had kept their promise. They had trained him to check the firing pins on various large caliber shells; they had trained him to cook boiled cabbage and greens for upwards of three hundred hungry, dog-faced foot soldiers; they taught him to weld canteens, shout marching orders, cure rot, detect clap, and execute a nearly perfect about-face. These trades had kept Mr. Gibbon wise, his muscles in tune. In his thirty-eight army years Mr. Gibbon learned many trades up and down.

  When he was discharged he found that army trades were not exactly civilian trades, although there were some similarities.

  At first Mr. Gibbon did not try to get a job, but as he said, he had always been “on the go.” It was the army’s way to be always on the go. So twiddling his thumbs did not appeal to him. He was not a man of leisure. He took pride in making and doing a little each day. He had some money and a little pension, but it was not a question of money. Raising chickens was out, so was drinking coffee with unshaven men in the Automat, watching people go by, remembering number plates, spotting cars and playing cards. Mr. Gibbon was a little foolish, but he was not stupid and, perhaps worst of all, he had not yet been blessed with the time-consuming affliction of senility. He was in the still-awake period of dusk, which exists for old people in retirement between the last job and the first trembling signals of crotchety old age and near madness. Still lucid.

  He could be useful. To himself and his country. But he was worried when he thought of his training; the army had trained him well, but what use is a firing-pin fixer, rot curer, cabbage boiler and canteen welder in the civilian world? What good? No good, Mr. Gibbon concluded. He took odd jobs at first, and even saw the humor in this. Gibbon, the taker of odd jobs. That’s what it had come to.

  His first odd job was with the Municipal Council of Lower Holly, directing a road-fixing crew. But the workers would not be threatened with demerits and they did not have the respect (and fear) that recruits generally had for Mr. Gibbon. If Mr. Gibbon gave an order they paused, shuffled their feet, and from the middle of the group of workers another order would be shouted back: “Go back to the old folks’ home, Grandpa!” Once a man told him to go suck his thumb.

  His next jobs were as an usher at the movies, a special policeman at the Holly Junction bathing beach and as a cab­driver on the late shift of the We-Drive-U-Kwik Cab Company. It was not long before Mr. Gibbon retired his flashlight and braided usher’s cap, his badge and night-stick. The odd job with the cab company bore some fruit, killed some time, and it even showed signs of speeding Mr. Gibbon right into his grave with no stopover at senility or madness.

  It was his third week on the job that finished him. The week of the teeth. Mr. Gibbon had just gotten an ­upper plate of new false teeth.

  “New false teeth,” Mr. Gibbon had said to the dispatcher. “New false teeth. False and new. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

  The cab dispatcher said that he had known a lot of people that had new false teeth. They liked them, the new false teeth. So why should Mr. Gibbon think they were so crazy?

  “I didn’t say I thought they were crazy,” Mr. Gibbon corrected. “I said new false teeth sounded crazy. Like new used cars sounds crazy.”

  The cab dispatcher did not see Mr. Gibbon’s point at all.

  The teeth, both new and false, did not fit well. Or maybe it was Mr. Gibbon’s gums that did not fit. Whatever it was, it made his mouth sore, and Mr. Gibbon said he’d have to get his gums in shape before he could stand them a full day. It was toward the end of the third week that the accident happened. The teeth were resting on the seat beside Mr. Gibbon as he drove down Main Street late one night. Then he heard the familiar squawk from the sidewalk and whipped the cab over to the customer. The customer got in and sat on the front seat; Mr. Gibbon said, “Where to, Johnny?”

  But when he said it he realized that his teeth were under the man. He reached for them. The man, far from indignant, took Mr. Gibbon’s arm and happily guided it. The two-way radio crackled. Mr. Gibbon gasped and struggled with the giggling man for full possession of his hand, his teeth, his wits. The car veered sharply and tore down the wrong lane of Holly Boulevard with the two reaching men, one grasping and wheezing, one delighted, in the front seat. The cab dispatcher back at the We-Drive-U-Kwik office listened to the wheezing and giggling. The cab dispatcher yelled into the microphone. Mr. Gibbon lunged for the radio. In doing so he lost control of the car completely and rammed a utility pole. Two voices—one from the radio, one from the seat next to him—sassed him, told him he was a useless old fool, a flop, and a tease.

  The door slammed and the radio went dead. Mr. Gibbon left the We-Drive-U-Kwik Cab Company that same night. His sat-on teeth were broken, his pride had been toyed with, his age mocked once again, and for the first time in his life Mr. Gibbon had been chewed out. In a matter of minutes his job was taken from him. And it was a long time before he found another one.

  Six months later Mr. Gibbon became a quality control inspector in the military department of the Kant-Brake Toy Factory. And, like all the other workers in the same department, he wore a uniform showing his rank and months of service. Medals were given for safety, punctuality, and high bowling scores. Mr. Gibbon was in heaven.

  It was the logical place to go, but somehow the thought had not even occurred to Mr. Gibbon. Why not a toy factory? It was the only place outside of the army itself that made murderous weapons a speciality. Kant-Brake manufactured soldiers, millions of planes, gunboats, bombers, bullets, sub-machine guns, tents, tanks, Jeeps, and even little officer’s quarters right down, as the catalogue said, “to the geraniums on the general’s lawn.” Every weapon of war, murder, spying or sabotage could be found under the Kant-Brake roof. Some designs, which were under construction, had only just appeared on the drawing boards in the Pentagon. The Kant-Brake Company bragged that it turned out more planes, more ships, and more tanks “than all the world’s man-sized factories put together!” They made a nuclear sub that could fire sixteen high-powered missiles. The missiles alone that appeared at Kant-Brake were so many that they were equal in number “to all the bombs dropped by both sides during World War II.”

  The emphasis was on realism, on craftsmanship. Now the toy soldiers could be wounded, bandaged, cared for. “They bleed real blood!” the ads ran. And everything they said was true—you could hardly tell it from the “real thing.” Each item was perfectly formed, expertly detailed; the colonels frowned, the captains were grim, the faces of the foot soldiers were twisted in fear, pain, anxiety. Midget canteens held real water. The bombs fumed, the tanks groaned, the rockets were guaranteed to light up any child’s playroom in a red glare.

  Mr. Gibbon was good with his hands, and his memory for army details was infallible. He could spot an imperfect M-1 several feet away. He studied rocketry in the evenings, and he had plans for complicated war games that he hoped would be accepted by the Games Department. Kids nowadays, he sai
d, didn’t give a hoot for Chinese Checkers and Old Maid. Kids had a vital interest in the world. War toys stimulated kids to keep up with current events. War toys were good for kids; a well-armed kid could work out all his aggressions in a single Christmas morning.

  The director of Kant-Brake also held surprise inspections. The company picnics were called “maneuvers.” The annual convention in West Holly was called a “bivouac.” The company prospered.

  Mr. Gibbon stood at attention near the conveyor belt and squinted at the grey specks moving toward him. As they passed he gave a snappy salute, made a notation on his clipboard and said “Roger.” Mr. Gibbon watched the parade of toys pass.

  3

  Miss Ball taught kindergarten, loved her country and things with catchy names. Her house was full of things with catchy names: Stay-Kleen, Brasso, Reck-Itch, Keen-tone, Kem-Thrill, Kwickee-Treets and Frosty-Smaks. At school she had Ed-U-Kards in her Ed-U-Kit, Erase-Eez and all the Skool-Way products. She also had a Snooz-Alarm Clock (“. . . It lets you sleep”) and hundreds of other things with catchy names. They kept her in the swim, she said.

  She knew the value of a dollar, and even though she always bought things “on time” she paid her bills. It was not that she owed no man. She owed everyone. But she always paid up.

  And so when her lover, Juan, the school janitor, needed a few extra two-bits, she always paid. She called it “pin-money.” Juan’s demands became more and more, and still Miss Ball paid or promised to pay. She had no intention of dropping Juan just because there wasn’t enough money in the jam jar. When Juan grew impatient and muttered in the broom closet, Miss Ball had the presence of mind to take a day off from school.