Nancy braked her car to a quick stop next to Merle, and reaching over, cranked down the window and asked if he wanted a lift into town. She liked the old man, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the old man intrigued her, as if she believed he knew something about the world they all lived in together that she did not know and that would profit her greatly if she did know. So she courted him, fussed over him, seemed to be looking after his comfort and welfare, behaving the way, as she once said to Noni, his daughters ought to behave.
Merle apparently knew all this, and more, though you could never be sure with him. He got inside the low, sleek car, slammed the door shut and surrounded himself with the smell of leather and the pressure of fan-driven heat. “Morning, Mrs. Hubner. A fine, crispy morning, isn’t it?” he said.
She agreed and asked him where she could drop him. A fast, urgent driver, she was already flying past the intersection of Old Road and Main Street and was approaching the center of town. She drove so as to endanger, but she didn’t seem to know it. It was as if her relation to the physical act of driving a motor vehicle was the same as her relation to poverty — abstract, wholly theoretical, and sentimental — which made her as dangerous a driver as she was a citizen. She was the type of person that believes poor people lead more wholesome lives than rich people and what poor people lack, and rich people have, is education. It was almost impossible for her to understand that what poor people lack, and rich people have, is money. And as for the wholesomeness of the lives of the poor, her notions were not all that different from Bruce Severance’s, since the basis for both sets of ideas was a fear and loathing of the middle class that they themselves so perfectly embodied.
Merle and Nancy exchanged brief remarks, mostly solicitous on her part as to the present condition of Merle’s arthritis and mostly whining on his part as to the same thing. Merle probably knew that by whining he could put Nancy at her ease, and in encounters as brief as this one he, like most people, surely enjoyed being able to put people at their ease. It made things more interesting for him later on. Stopping in front of Hayward’s Hardware and Sporting Goods Store, where Merle was headed for traps, she suddenly asked him a direct question (since she was now sufficiently at her ease to trust that he would answer directly and honestly and in that way might be brought to reveal more than he wished to): “Tell me, Mr. Ring, is it true that that woman Flora in number eleven, you know the one, is raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer?”
“Yes,” he said, lying, for he had heard nothing of it. “Though I’m not sure of the numbers. It’s hard to count ’em over a certain point, sixty, say.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little … disgusting? I mean, the filth. I think the woman ought to be put away, don’t you?” she asked, still trying to get information.
“What would you do with all those guinea pigs then?”
“Why, let the S.P.C.A. take them, I suppose. They know how to handle these things, when things like this get out of hand. Imagine, all those tiny animals crowded into a trailer, and remember, number eleven is not one of the larger trailers in the park, as you know.”
“I guess you’re right, the S.P.C.A. could kill ’em for us, once we’d got Flora locked up someplace. The whole thing would probably drive her right over the edge anyhow, taking away her animals and killing ’em like that, tossing ’em into that incinerator they got. That’d push ol’ Flora right over the edge. She’d be booby-hatch material for sure then, whether she is now or not.”
“You’re making fun of me, Mr. Ring. Aren’t you?”
“No, no, no, I’m not making fun of you, Mrs. Hubner,” he said, opening the door and stepping out, not without difficulty, however, because of the shape of the car and his stiff back. “I’ll check into it for you, ma’am. Get the facts of the situation, so to speak. Because you’re probably right. I mean, something will have to be done, eventually, by someone. Because those kind of animals, rodents and such, they breed fast and before you know it a hundred is two hundred, two hundred is four, four is eight, and so on. So I’ll check into it for you.”
“Thank you so much, Mr. Ring,” she said with clear relief. He was such a nice man. She wondered if there was some way she could make his life a little easier. At his age, to be alone like that, it was simply awful.
Merle closed the door, waved and walked into Hayward’s, and Nancy drove on to Ginnie’s Beauty Nook, on Green Street across from Knight’s Paint Store, where Ginnie and her ex-husband Claudel had lived in the upstairs apartment back when their trailer had burned down. That was over three years ago, maybe four. Nancy couldn’t remember, until it came back to her that it had happened in the summer, when Ginnie and Claudel had returned from a weekend on the Maine coast to discover that their fancy trailer had burned to the ground in their absence, and then she remembered that was the summer Noni turned fifteen and started having migraines and saying she hated her, and then she remembered that was the summer her husband had died. So it must be over four years now since Ginnie and Claudel moved into town and rented that apartment over Knight’s Paint Store. Isn’t it amazing, how time flies when you’re not paying attention, she reflected.
A week later, Merle woke late after having spent most of the night out on the lake in his ice-house, and because the sun was shining, casting a raw light that somehow pleased him, he decided to visit Flora Pease and determine if all this fuss over her guinea pigs was justified. Since talking with Nancy Hubner, he had spoken only to Marcelle Chagnon about the guinea pigs, and her response had been to look heavenward, as if for help or possibly mere solace, and to say, “Just don’t talk to me about that crazy woman, Merle, don’t start in about her. As long as she don’t cause any troubles for me, I won’t cause any troubles for her. But if you start in on this, there’ll be troubles. For me. And that means for her, too, remember that.”
“Makes sense,” Merle said, and for several days after he had succeeded in going about his business — ice-fishing, eating, cleaning, reading the Manchester Union-Leader, puttering with his tools and equipment — slow, solitary activities that he seemed to savor. He was the kind of person who, by the slowness of his pace and the hard quality of his attention, appeared to take a sensual pleasure from the most ordinary activity. He was a small, lightly framed man and wore a short white beard which he kept neatly trimmed. His clothing was simple and functional, flannel shirts, khaki pants, steel-toed work shoes — doubtless the same style of clothing he had worn since his youth, when he first became a carpenter’s apprentice and determined what clothing was appropriate for that kind of life. His teeth were brown, stained from a lifetime of smoking a cob pipe, and his weathered skin was still taut, indicating that he had always been a small, trim man. There was something effeminate about him that, at least in old age, made him physically attractive, especially to women but to men as well. Generally, his manner with people was odd and somewhat disconcerting, for he was both involved with their lives and not involved, both serious and not serious, both present and absent. For example, a compliment from Merle somehow had the effect of reminding the recipient of his or her vanity, while an uninvited criticism came out sounding like praise for having possessed qualities that got you singled out in the first place.