Mastodonia

TEN

Willow Bend is a small town, its business section no more than a block long. On one corner stands a small supermarket, across from it a drugstore. Straggling up the street are a hardware store, a barber shop, a shoe store, a bakery, a clothing shop, a combined real-estate and travel bureau, an electrical store and repair shop, a post office, a movie house, a bank and a beer joint.

I found a place to park the car in front of the drugstore and went around to open the door for Rila.

Ben Page came hurrying across the street to intercept. us.

“Asa,” he said, “it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. You don’t get down this way too often.”

He held out a hand and I took it. “As often as I need,” I said. I turned to Rila and said, “Miss Elliot, meet Ben Page. Ben is our mayor and the banker.”

Ben thrust out his hand to Rila. “Welcome to our town,” he said. “Are you staying for a while?”

“Rila is a friend,” I said. “We were in the Middle East together on a dig some years ago.”

“I don’t know how long I’m staying,” Rila said.

“You from New York?” asked Ben. “Someone told me you were from New York.”

“How the hell could anyone know?” I asked.

“You’re the first person she has met.”

“Hiram, I guess,” said Ben. “He said the license plates were New York plates. He told me someone had shot Bowser with an arrow. Is that right?”

“Someone did,” said Rila.

“I tell you we got to do something with these kids,” said Ben. “They’re up to something all the time. They have no respect for nothing. They are just running wild.”

“Maybe it wasn’t a kid,” I said.

“Who else would it be? It’s just the kind of thing they’d do. They’re a bunch of monsters, I tell you.

Some of them let the air out of my tires the other night. Came out of the picture show and I had four flats.”

“Now why would they do that?” asked Rila.

“I don’t know. They just hate everyone, I guess.

When you and I were kids, Asa, we never did stuff like that. We used to go fishing, remember, and hunting in the fall. And there was the time you had all of us digging in that sinkhole.”

“I am still digging in it,” I said.

“I know you are. Finding anything?”

“Not much,” I said.

“I got to be getting on,” said Ben. “I have some people coming in to see me. It was good to meet you, Miss Elliot. I hope you have a pleasant visit.”

We watched after him as he went bounding down the sidewalk.

“An old pal of yours?” asked Rila. “One of the gang?”

“One of the gang,” I said.

We went across the street and into the supermarket.

I got a cart and started wheeling it down the aisle.

“We’ll need potatoes and some butter,” I said, “and soap, and I guess a lot of other things.”

“Don’t you make out a list?”

“I’m a disorganized housekeeper,” I said. “I try to keep it in my head and I always miss an item or two.”

“You know a lot of people in this town?”

“Some. Some from when I was a boy, folks who stayed on and never left. Other new ones I have met since I came back.”

Slowly we loaded the cart. I forgot some items and Rila, running through a hypothetical shopping list, reminded me of others I would have forgotten. Finally, I wheeled the cart up to the checkout counter. Herb Livingston was ahead of us, putting down an armload of purchases.

“Asa,” he said, the way he always talks, as if he is breathless with delight at seeing you. “I was going to phone you for a news item. I heard you had company.”

“Rila,” I said, “meet Herb Livingston. He is another of the old gang, and now he owns the weekly paper.”

Herb beamed. “I am glad that you came to see us,” he told Rila. “I hear you’re from New York. New York City, I mean. We don’t get many people from New York.” He pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and a short pencil from his shirt pocket. “What is your last name, if I may ask?”

“Elliot,” said Rila. “Two l‘s and one t.”

“And you’re visiting Asa. I mean that’s why you’re here.”

“We are friends of long standing,” said Rila shortly.

“We worked together on an archaeological dig in Turkey back in the late fifties.”

Herb made hentracks in his notebook. “And what are you doing now?”

“I’m in the import-export business.”

“I see,” said Herb, scribbling furiously. “And you’re staying out on the farm with Asa.”

“That’s right,” said Rila. “I came to be with Asa, I am staying with him.”

When we got back to the car, Rila said to me, “I’m not sure I like your friends.”

“Don’t pay any attention to Herb,” I said. “As a newspaperman, he is a little short on tact.”

“What I can’t understand is why he should be interested in me. My being here simply isn’t news.”

“To the Willow Bend Record, it is. Nothing ever happens here. Herb has to fill the paper with comings and goings. Mrs. Page holds a card party with three tables and it’s a social event. Herb writes it up in detail. Tells who was there and who won the prizes.”

“Asa, you don’t mind? Maybe I should leave.”

“Hell, no,” I said. “Why should I mind? Flying in the face of convention? You can’t do anything that doesn’t fly in the face of convention in a place like this. And with this time-travel business, with Hiram. going after Catface, it would be plain desertion if you left. You’ve got to see this thing through with me. I need you.”

She settled into the seat as I got behind the wheel.

“I hoped you would say that,” she said. “I don’t know about this time-travel business, but I do want to stay.

Half of the time I believe travel in time is possible and the rest of the time I tell myself, Rila, stop being a fool. But I’m curious about Hiram. Nothing more than Hiram? He must have another name.”

“His name,” I said, “is Hiram Biglow, but most people have forgotten the Biglow part of it. He’s just Hiram, that’s all. He was born in Willow Bend, and at one time he had an older brother, but the brother ran away from home and, so far as I know, has not been heard of since. The family was an old family, reaching back into the time the town was founded. His father’s name was Horace, an only son of a son of one of the founders of Willow Bend. The family lived in the old ancestral home, one of those Victorian piles set back from the street, with an iron fence enclosing a lawn filled with trees. I remember that I used to hang on the fence when I was a kid and wonder what it would be like to live in a place like that. My family was relatively poor at the time, and we lived in just an ordinary house, and the Biglow place seemed like a mansion to me.”

“But you told me Hiram lives in a shack down by the river.”

“He does and I am getting to that. Hiram’s father was the town banker, in partnership with Ben Page’s father…”

“I don’t like Ben Page any better than I like that Herb person.”

“You and almost everyone,” I said. “He’s not the sort of man who inspires a lot of confidence or admiration, although in recent years, he may have changed.

There are people now who swear by him. Well, anyhow, when Hiram was ten years old or so, his father drowned in a duck-hunting accident. By this time, Theo older brother, who was seven or eight years older than Hiram, had lit out for parts unknown, so there was only Hiram and his mother left. The old lady lived a secluded life after that. She never left the house and she discouraged friends from calling. Hiram had always been a strange kid, backward in school and not getting along with the other kids, but no one thought too much about it. As the years went past, I suppose, his mother must have known that he wasn’t exactly normal, and so she hid away with him. Pride is a dreadful thing anywhere, and in a small town, it’s deadly. The two of them just sort of withdrew from life, and while people knew, of course, that they were there, they were fairly well forgotten. Which, I suppose, is what Mrs. Biglow had hoped would happen. By this time, I was long gone, of course, so what I tell you from here on is what I’ve heard from people after I came back.

“It turns out, finally, when the estate was settled, that Hiram’s father didn’t have too much interest in the bank. A few shares and his job, that was all. No one could prove it, of course, but people I talked with later were convinced that Ben’s father had slickered Hiram’s father out of the bank. Apparently, there was a little money left, but not much, and the old lady and Hiram managed somehow until she died. By this time, Hiram must have been twenty-five or so. When it came time to settle his mother’s estate, it was found that the Biglow house was mortgaged to the bank. The bank, pleading it had carried the family as long as it could, foreclosed. By this time, Ben had taken over the bank, his father retiring, and he donated some money and got a few others in town to donate a bit more and they built this shack down by the river and gave it to Hiram and he’s lived there ever since.”

“The town adopting him,” said Rila. “Taking care of their own. Today he’d be on relief. Or in some state institution.”

“I guess you could say that,” I said. “The town looks after him, sure, but not too kindly. Some people treat him okay, of course, but he has become a sort of municipal scapegoat and a lot of people laugh at him and make fun of him. They don’t think that Hiram knows; so they think it’s safe to make fun of him. But Hiram knows. He knows his friends and he knows who laughs at him. He may be considerably strange, of course, but he’s not as stupid as a lot of people think.”

“I hope he’s getting some sleep,” said Rila. “This is his first night of sitting up for Catface.”

“He may have to spend several nights. Catface is not all that regular in his habits.”

“I sit and listen to us talking like this,” said Rila.

“I know we are talking like this, but then I ask myself if we are really doing it. It’s not sane, Asa. This whole thing. Most people wouldn’t be thinking what we are thinking, saying what we are saying.”

“I know what you mean,” I told her, “but I have more evidence than you. I went into the Pleistocene and almost got run over by a mastodon. Bowser did bring home those bones.”

“And yet we let ourselves think only so far,” she said. “We accept the dinosaur bones and the Folsom point and the mastodon, but we don’t allow ourselves to go beyond that. We keep ourselves from saying out loud that Catface is an alien creature that can engineer time tunnels and that he somehow escaped when an alien spaceship crashed here thousands of years ago.”

“Maybe we’ll come to it,” I said. “We’ll have to wait and see what Hiram manages.”