“You won’t get an answer out of me, Melba,” said Mr. Sack. “You say you’re not like the other students, but how can I trust you? Any one of them would say the same thing. Principal Benjamin trusted you and you know what happened to him.”
Melba felt as though her body had spun a few degrees around her vertebral column. She leapt to her feet, steadying herself against Mr. Sack’s desk.
“What happened?” she demanded. “What happened to Principal Benjamin?”
Mr. Sack’s eyelids were drooping. His chin bobbed against his shirtfront.
“Mr. Sack,” said Melba. “You can trust me, Mr. Sack.”
Mr. Sack’s voice was so thin Melba could barely make out the words.
“Miasma,” rasped Mr. Sack.
“Miasma?” repeated Melba.
“Not jelly,” rasped Mr. Sack. “Miasma. Time.”
“Oh!” cried Melba, but before she could form another thought, Mr. Sack slid down his chair onto the floor. He dragged his torso beneath the desk and drew in his legs. Melba stood in the empty-looking office. She’d felt like she was the only person on the earth and retreated quickly into the hall.
There in her mother’s kitchen, Melba had tried and failed to summon that same feeling of solitude. She was excruciatingly aware of her mother’s presence, of her mother coming toward her, her mother lunging across the kitchen in fifteen-pound ankle-weights. Melba shifted her palm gingerly. Part of the snail adhered to her palm and part of the snail adhered to the wall. Melba rubbed her palm against the wall. Her mother was almost upon her, and she rubbed harder, reducing the snail to a dark and textured patch, indistinguishable from the other dark and textured patches on the wallpaper, just as her mother’s final lunge brought the toes on her left foot in contact with the dado.
“What are you doing, Melba?” asked Melba’s mother, mildly. Melba thought quickly.
“I’m generating static electricity,” she said. “Otherwise I fall asleep in the middle of the day. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Safe!” snorted Melba’s mother. “What about Bret Glenn?”
“I don’t know about Bret Glenn,” said Melba.
“Of course you do,” said Melba’s mother, her voice vibrating from the exertion of maintaining the lunge. “Bret Glenn!” said Gigi Zuzzo. “He was repairing our television and rubbed his knees on the area rug one too many times. The static discharge made him jump so that he sent his head through the picture tube.”
“Did he die?” asked Melba.
“I should say so,” said Melba’s mother. “You don’t see Bret Glenn in town anymore!”
“What did he look like?” asked Melba. “Did he always wear an amulet?”
“No,” said Melba’s mother. “His hair brushed his collar, ever so lightly. Sometimes you almost thought it wasn’t quite reaching, there was no contact, but then, when you got closer, you could see it, you could hear it, Bret Glenn’s hair brushing his collar.” Her mother gripped Melba’s arm and steered her through the kitchen, so they could look down into the sunken room where her mother stored the exercise equipment.
“It happened right there,” said Melba’s mother, “by the Smith machine. He was so happy! He loved doing favors for friends. He didn’t just repair televisions! He dug the septic tank! Sometimes he drove you to elementary school, Melba. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”
“He didn’t die right there,” said Melba, uneasily. “Wouldn’t he have died somewhere else? In a hygienicized venue? The hospital in Henderson?”
“Dr. Buck was napping upstairs when it happened,” said Melba’s mother. “But by the time I got him showered and fed and properly awake, there was nothing Dr. Buck could do for Bret Glenn.”
“Dr. Buck! He’s been to our house!” Melba shrank back against the doorframe. Gigi Zuzzo looked at her with irritation.
“He’s been to everyone’s house,” she said. “He’s a doctor. Mayor Bunt made him keys. Sometimes he comes into the house in the night and tiptoes around, just to check on everyone.”
“You were telling me about Ann Dump,” Melba burst out, desperate to change the subject. “Why does Ann Dump want to lure the snails to the town hall?”
Gigi Zuzzo’s lower jaw jutted forward and she dropped into a furious squat.
“Addiction!” she sneered. Melba gasped. She had never joined the clusters of children licking snail and slug trails on the rubber tiles around the condemned Dan Mats & Flooring Emporium, and she had always doubted their reports of hallucinogenic experiences — red foxes playing bouzoukis and long beards growing at tremendous speeds on every face they saw — but she knew at least two of them, Em and Perry Blake, now lived behind the emporium in a hut and did nothing else.
“Ann Dump licks snails?” said Melba.
“Only nitwits lick snails!” snorted Melba’s mother. “That Ann Dump is no nitwit. It’s the toad she’s after. She’s infiltrated the reptile trading community with her boxes of snails. Every day, she sends the reptile trading community a fresh box of snails. One of these days, she thinks they’ll send her the toad. In the meantime, she doesn’t care how many snails run wild in the town hall, what they do to vital records. I’ve seen the records, Melba! It’s as if you don’t exist! There’s a hole where your name used to be! It’s like you’ve never been born!”
“That Ann Dump,” repeated Melba’s mother, but Melba suspected that the blame did not rest squarely on Ann Dump. The blame could not be conceived of as a regular polygon, contained and conventionally dimensional. The blame was a bigger, murkier object, with a drifty quality that frightened Melba. The blame hung in the sky over the valley. It was like humidity! Or a curse!
“In Dan, we all live in the shadow of blame,” said Melba to herself on her stool in the well-lit bakery. But shouldn’t her generation be blameless? Surely they hadn’t done anything wrong. And the next generation? The infants? What did Bev Hat’s infants have to do with the curse of Dan?
When Melba was a young child, far too young for high school, a group of women had disappeared from Dan. They were older women, old enough to bear some responsibility for Dan’s circumstances. Nonetheless, Melba had admired the women. She had enjoyed watching the women eat their meager lunches outside Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail.
In those days, Dan had several businesses in addition to the bakery, and a hosiery district. Mayor Bunt encouraged the production of fine hosiery through financial incentives to hosiers, and quite a few people in Dan had responded to the call. A great deal of hosiery was manufactured in Dan and stored in several warehouses, of which Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail was the largest. Unfortunately, the roads leading into and out of Dan were not stable enough to bear the weight of freighted trucks and it proved impossible to empty the warehouses, or, at least, to empty the warehouses profitably, delivering the goods to points of sale. The warehouses were emptied at a loss. Small barrel fires stoked by tube socks could be seen burning brightly in the hosiery district at night.
Melba was warned by her mother not to visit the hosiery district at night, although other children enjoyed the festive atmosphere and played complicated finger games with elastics cut from the big spools that overflowed the dumpsters.