'Salem's Lot(10)

Town government was by town meeting, and while there had been talk ever since 1965 of changing to the town council form with biannual public budget hearings, the idea gained no way. The town was not growing fast enough to make the old way actively painful, although its stodgy, one-for-one democracy made some of the newcomers roll their eyes in exasperation. There were three selectmen, the town constable, an overseer of the poor, a town clerk (to register your car you have to go far out on the Taggart Stream Road and brave two mean dogs who ran loose in the yard), and the school commissioner. The volunteer Fire Department got a token appropriation of three hundred dollars each year, but it was mostly a social club for old fellows on pensions. They saw a fair amount of excitement during grass fire season and sat around the Reliable tall?-taling each other the rest of the year. There was no Public Works Department because there were no public water lines, gas mains, sewage, or light-and-power. The CMP electricity pylons marched across town on a diagonal from northwest to southeast, cutting a huge gash through the timberland 150 feet wide. One of these stood close to the Marsten House, looming over it like an alien sentinel.

What 'salem's Lot knew of wars and burnings and crises in government it got mostly from Walter Cronkite on TV. Oh, the Potter boy got killed in Vietnam and Claude Bowie's son came back with a mechanical foot - stepped on a land mine - but he got a job with the post office helping Kenny Danies and so that was all right. The kids were wearing their hair longer and not combing it neatly like their fathers, but nobody really noticed anymore. When they threw the dress code out at the Consolidated High School, Aggie Corliss wrote a letter to the Cumber?land Ledger, but Aggie had been writing to the Ledger every week for years, mostly about the evils of liquor and the wonder of accepting Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior.

Some of the kids took dope. Horace Kilby's boy Frank went up before Judge Hooker in August and got fined fifty dollars (the judge agreed to let him pay the fine with profits from his paper route), but alcohol was a bigger problem. Lots of kids hung out at Dell's since the liquor age went down to eighteen. They went rip-assing home as if they wanted to resurface the road with rubber, and every now and then someone would get killed. Like when Billy Smith ran into a tree on the Deep Cut Road at ninety and killed both himself and his girl friend, LaVerne Dube.

But except for these things, the Lot's knowledge of the country's torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there.

5

Ann Norton was ironing when her daughter burst in with a bag of groceries, thrust a book with a rather thin-faced young man on the back jacket in her face, and began to babble.

'Slow down,' she said. 'Turn down the TV and tell me.' Susan choked off Peter Marshall, who was giving away thousands of dollars on 'The Hollywood Squares', and told her mother about meeting Ben Mears. Mrs Norton made herself nod with calm and sympathetic understanding as the story spilled out, despite the yellow warning lights that always flashed when Susan mentioned a new boy - men now, she supposed, although it was hard to think Susie could be old enough for men. But the lights were a little brighter today.

'Sounds exciting,' she said, and put another one of her husband's shirts on the ironing board.

'He was really nice,' Susan said. 'Very natural.'

'Hoo, my feet,' Mrs Norton said. She set the iron on its fanny, making it hiss balefully, and eased into the Boston rocker by the picture window. She reached a, Parliament out of the pack on the coffee table and lit it. 'Are you sure he's all right, Susie?'

Susan smiled a little defensively. 'Sure, I'm sure. He looks like . . . oh, I don't know - a college instructor or something.'

'They say the Mad Bomber looked like a gardener,' Mrs Norton said reflectively.

'Moose shit,' Susan said cheerfully. It was an epithet that never failed to irritate her mother.

'Let me see the book.' She held a hand out for it,

Susan gave it to her, suddenly remembering the homo?sexual rape scene in the prison section.

'Air Dance,' Ann Norton said meditatively, and began to thumb pages at random. Susan waited, resigned. Her mother would bird-dog it. She always did.

The windows were up, and a lazy forenoon breeze ruffled the yellow curtains in the kitchen - which Mom insisted on calling the pantry, as if they lived in the lap of class. It was a nice house, solid brick, a little hard to heat in the winter but cool as a grotto in the summer. They were on a gentle rise of land on outer Brock Street, and from the picture window where Mrs Norton sat you could see all the way into town. The view was a pleasant one, and in the winter it could be spectacular with long, twinkling vistas of unbroken snow and distance-dwindled buildings casting yellow oblongs of light on the snow fields.

'Seems I read a review of this in the Portland paper. It wasn't very good.'

'I like it,' Susan said steadily. 'And I like him.'

'Perhaps Floyd would like him, too,' Mrs Norton said idly. 'You ought to introduce them.'

Susan felt a real stab of anger and was dismayed by it. She thought that she and her mother had weathered the last of the adolescent storms and even the aftersqualls, but here it all was. They took up the ancient arguments of her identity versus her mother's experience and beliefs like an old piece of knitting.

'We've talked about Floyd, Mom, You know there's nothing firm there.'