“Mrs. Cullum, you should go in before you catch your death of c—”
“What did you save him from?”
“I beg pardon?”
“I know that’s why you came. I prayed on it while you and Andy were out there on the porch. God sent me an answer, but not thewholeanswer. What did you save him from?”
I put my hands on her shivering shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Marnie… if God had wanted you to know that part, He would have told you.”
Abruptly she put her arms around me and hugged me. Surprised, I hugged her back. Baby Jenna, caught in between, goggled up at us.
“Whatever it was, thank you,” Marnie whispered in my ear. Her warm breath gave me goosebumps.
“Go inside, hon. Before you freeze.”
The front door opened. Andy was standing there, holding a can of beer. “Marnie? Marn?”
She stepped back. Her eyes were wide and dark. “God brought us a guardian angel,” she said. “I won’t speak of this, but I’ll hold it. And ponder it in my heart.” Then she hurried up the walk to where her husband was waiting.
Angel.It was the second time I’d heard that, and I pondered the word in my own heart, both that night while I lay in my cabin, waiting for sleep, and the next day as I drifted my canoe across still Sunday waters under a cold blue tilting-to-winter sky.
Guardian angel.
On Monday the seventeenth of November, I saw the first whirling flurries of snow, and took them as a sign. I packed up, drove down to Sebago Village, and found Mr. Winchell drinking coffee and eating doughnuts at the Lakeside Restaurant (in 1958, folks eat a lot of doughnuts). I gave him my keys and told him I’d had a wonderful, restorative time. His face lit up.
“That’s good, Mr. Amberson. That’s just how it’s s’posed to be. You’re paid until the end of the month. Give me an address where I can send you a refund for your last two weeks, and I’ll put a check in the mail.”
“I won’t be entirely sure where I’m going until the brass in the home office makes up its corporate mind,” I said, “but I’ll be sure to write you.” Time-travelers lie a lot.
He held out his hand. “Been a pleasure having you.”
I shook it. “The pleasure was all mine.”
I got in my car and drove south. That night I registered at Boston’s Parker House, and checked out the infamous Combat Zone. After the weeks of peace on Sebago, the neon jangled my eyes and the surging crowds of night prowlers—mostly young, mostly male, many wearing uniforms—made me feel both agoraphobic and homesick for those peaceful nights in western Maine, when the few stores closed at six and traffic dried up at ten.
I spent the following night at the Hotel Harrington, in D.C. Three days later I was on the west coast of Florida.
CHAPTER 12
1
I took US 1 south. I ate in a lot of roadside restaurants featuring Mom’s Home Cooking, places where the Blue Plate Special, including fruit cup to start and pie à la mode for dessert, cost eighty cents. I never saw a single fast-food franchise, unless you count Howard Johnson’s, with its 28 Flavors and Simple Simon logo. I saw a troop of Boy Scouts tending a bonfire of fall leaves with their Scoutmaster; I saw women wearing overcoats and galoshes taking in laundry on a gray afternoon when rain threatened; I saw long passenger trains with names likeThe Southern FlyerandStar of Tampacharging toward those American climes where winter is not allowed. I saw old men smoking pipes on benches in town squares. I saw a million churches, and a cemetery where a congregation at least a hundred strong stood in a circle around an open grave singing “The Old Rugged Cross.” I saw men building barns. I saw people helping people. Two of them in a pickup truck stopped to help me when the Sunliner’s radiator popped its top and I was broken down by the side of the road. That was in Virginia, around four o’clock in the afternoon, and one of them asked me if I needed a place to sleep. I guess I can imagine that happening in 2011, but it’s a stretch.
And one more thing. In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs.MENwas neatlystenciled over one door,LADIESover the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It saidCOLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable. I hoped the dads and moms who might have led their children down to whatever facility waited below were able to identify those troublesome bushes for what they were, because in the late fifties most children wear short pants.
Therewasno facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn’t poison ivy or poison oak) and squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a shit. Maybe in the pouring rain.
If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.
2
I settled sixty miles south of Tampa, in the town of Sunset Point. For eighty dollars a month, I rented a conch shack on the most beautiful (and mostly deserted) beach I had ever seen. There were four similar shacks on my stretch of sand, all as humble as my own. Of the nouveau-ugly McMansions that would later sprout like concrete toadstools in this part of the state, I saw none. There was a supermarket ten miles south, in Nokomis, and a sleepy shopping district in Venice. Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, was little more than a country road. You had to go slow on it, particularly toward dusk, because that’s when the gators and the armadillos liked to cross. Between Sarasota and Venice, there were fruit stands, roadside markets, a couple of bars, and a dancehall called Blackie’s.Beyond Venice, brother, you were mostly on your own, at least until you got to Fort Myers.
I left George Amberson’s real estate persona behind. By the spring of 1959, recessionary times had come to America. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, everybody was selling and nobody was buying, so George Amberson became exactly what Al had envisioned: an authorial wannabe whose moderately rich uncle had left him enough to live on, at least for awhile.
Ididwrite, and not on one project but two. In the mornings, when I was freshest, I began work on the manuscript you’re now reading (if there everisa you). In the evenings I worked on a novel that I tentatively calledThe Murder Place.The place in question was Derry, of course, although I called it Dawson in my book. I began it solely as set decoration, so I’d have something to show if I made friends and one of them asked to see what I was working on (I kept my “morning manuscript” in a steel lockbox under my bed). EventuallyThe Murder Placebecame more than camouflage. I began to think it was good, and to dream that someday it might even see print.
An hour on the memoir in the morning and an hour on the novel at night still left a lot of time to be filled. I tried fishing, and there were plenty of fish to be caught, but I didn’t like it and gave it up. Walking was fine at dawn and sunset, but not in the heat of the day. I became a regular patron of Sarasota’s one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the little libraries in Nokomis and Osprey.
