None of it really worked. Not Mrs. Dornfeld, nor Mrs. Berryman, nor the twins, nor any of the others. Pigs, all of them. None of them really helped him get over Clothilde. He was sure Clothilde knew—you couldn’t hide anything in this stinking little town—and he hoped it made her feel bad. At least as bad as he felt. But if she did feel bad, she didn’t show it.
“Two o’clock is happy time,” Mrs. Dornfeld said.
It was enough to make a man throw up.
Mrs. Dornfeld started the motor and fluttered off. He went back and sat down on the chair tilted against the wall. Coyne came out of the garage, wiping his hands. “When I was your age,” Coyne said, looking after the Ford disappearing down the highway, “I was sure it would fall off if I did it with a married woman.”
“It doesn’t fall off,” Thomas said.
“So I see,” Coyne said. He wasn’t a bad guy, Coyne. When Thomas had celebrated his seventeenth birthday Coyne had broken out a pint of bourbon and they’d finished it off together in one afternoon.
Thomas was wiping the gravy of the hamburger off his plate with a piece of bread when Joe Kuntz, the cop, came into the diner. It was ten to two and the diner was almost empty, just a couple of the hands from the lumberyard finishing up their lunch, and Elias, the counterman, swabbing off the grill. Thomas hadn’t decided yet whether or not he was going to visit Bertha Dornfeld.
Kuntz came up to where Thomas was sitting at the counter and said, “Thomas Jordache?”
“Hi, Joe,” Thomas said. Kuntz stopped in at the garage a couple of times a week to shoot the breeze. He was always threatening to leave the force because the pay was so bad.
“You acknowledge that you are Thomas Jordache?” Kuntz said in his cop voice.
“What’s going on, Joe?” Thomas asked.
“I asked you a question, son,” Kuntz said, bulging out of his uniform.
“You know my name,” Thomas said. “What’s the joke?”
“You better come with me, son,” Kuntz said. “I have a warrant for your arrest.” He grabbed Thomas’s arm above the elbow. Elias stopped scrubbing the grill and the guys from the lumberyard stopped eating and it was absolutely quiet in the diner.
“I ordered a piece of pie and a cup of coffee,” Thomas said. “Take your meathooks off me, Joe.”
“What’s he owe you, Elias?” Kuntz asked, his fingers tight on Thomas’s arm.
“With the coffee and pie or without the coffee and pie?” Elias said.
“Without.”
“Seventy-five cents,” Elias said.
“Pay up, son, and come along quiet,” Kuntz said. He didn’t make more than twenty arrests a year and he was getting mileage out of this one.
“Okay, okay,” Thomas said. He put down eighty-five cents. “Christ, Joe,” he said, “you’re breaking my arm.”
Kuntz walked him quickly out of the diner. Pete Spinelli, Joe’s partner, was sitting at the wheel of the prowl car, with the motor running.
“Pete,” Thomas said, “will you tell Joe to let go of me.”
“Shut up, kid,” Spinelli said.
Kuntz shoved him into the back seat and got in beside him and the prowl car started toward town.
“The charge is statutory rape,” Sergeant Horvath said. “There is a sworn complaint. I’ll notify your uncle and he can get a lawyer for you. Take him away, boys.”
Thomas was standing between Kuntz and Spinelli. They each had an arm now. They hustled him off and put him in the lockup. Thomas looked at his watch. It was twenty past two. Bertha Dornfeld would have to go without her visit today.
There was one other prisoner in the single cell of the jail, a ragged, skinny man of about fifty, with a week’s growth of beard on his face. He was in for poaching deer. This was the twenty-third time he had been booked for poaching deer, he told Thomas.
IV
Harold Jordache paced nervously up and down the platform. Just tonight the train had to be late. He had heartburn and he pushed anxiously at his stomach with his hand. When there was trouble, the trouble went right to his stomach. And ever since two-thirty yesterday afternoon, when Horvath had called him from the jail, it had been nothing but trouble. He hadn’t slept a wink, because Elsa had cried all night, in between bouts of telling him that they were disgraced for life, that she could never show her face in town again, and what a fool he had been to take a wild animal like that into the house. She was right, he had to admit it, he had been an idiot, his heart was too big. Family or no family, that afternoon when Axel called him from Port Philip, he should have said no.
He thought of Thomas down in the jail, talking his head off like a lunatic, admitting everything, not showing any shame or remorse, naming names. Who could tell what he would say, once he started talking like that? He knew the little monster hated him. What was to stop him from telling about the black-market ration tickets, the faked-up secondhand cars with gear boxes that wouldn’t last for more than a hundred miles, the under-the-counter markups on new cars to get around the Price Control, the valve and piston jobs on cars that had nothing more wrong with them than a clogged fuel line? Even about Clothilde? You let a boy like that into your house and you became his prisoner. The heartburn stabbed at Uncle Harold like a knife. He began to sweat, even though it was cold on the station, with the wind blowing.
He hoped Axel was bringing plenty of money along with him. And the birth certificate. He had sent Axel a telegram asking Axel to call him because Axel didn’t have a telephone. In this day and age! He had made the telegram sound as ominous as he could, to make sure Axel would call, but even so he was half-surprised when the phone rang in his house and he heard his brother’s voice on the wire.
He heard the train coming around the curve toward the station and stepped back nervously from the edge of the platform. In his state he wouldn’t be surprised if he had a heart attack and fell down right where he stood. The train slowed to a halt and a few people got off and hurried away in the wind. He had a moment of panic. He didn’t see Axel. It would be just like Axel to leave him alone with the problem. Axel was an unnatural father; he hadn’t written once to either Thomas or himself, all the time that Thomas had been in Elysium. Neither had the mother, that skinny hoity-toity whore’s daughter. Or the other two kids. What could you expect from a family like that?
Then he saw a big man in a workman’s cap and a mackinaw limping slowly toward him on the platform. What a way to dress. Harold was glad it was dark and there were so few people around. He must have been crazy that time in Port Philip when he’d invited Axel to come in with him.
“All right, I’m here,” Axel said. He didn’t shake hands.
“Hello, Axel,” Harold said. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t come. How much money you bring with you?”
“Five thousand dollars,” Axel said.
“I hope it’s enough,” Harold said.
“It better be enough,” Axel said flatly. “There isn’t any more.” He looked old, Harold thought, and sick. His limp was worse than Harold remembered.
They walked together through the station toward Harold’s car.
“If you want to see Tommy,” Harold said, “you’ll have to wait till tomorrow. They don’t let anybody in after six o’clock.”
“I don’t want to see the sonofabitch,” Axel said.
Harold couldn’t help feeling that it was wrong to call your own child a sonofabitch, even under the circumstances, but he didn’t say anything.
“You have your dinner, Axel?” he asked. “Elsa can find something in the icebox.”