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Re In Car Nation
- University Press of New England
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RE IN CAR NATION % darby constable howard elman woke with the mocking words of the Voice still in his head. You are 87 years old and you still have not done that great thing to allow you to pass on into the next realm in peace. Peace! I never cared diddly-squat for peace. And, hey, maybe I’m not 87, only 85. It doesn’t matter. In your long life you have never accomplished a single great thing and you never will because you are too average. What about the Re In Car Nation of the property? That’s not a great thing—it’s just peculiar. “After his wife died Howard Elman succumbed to peculiarity” is what Dot McCurtin is saying about you, Howie. Howard sat up and reached with his feet for his slippers on the floor. Ever since Elenore died Howard no longer slept in their marital bed in just his shorts. He slept barefoot but otherwise fully clothed in his forest-green work outfit on the couch in the parlor under a “Darby Old Home Day” quilt Elenore had made. He never liked the idea of “going to bed.” It seemed to him more like “going to bedlam,” the bedlam of regrets, or maybe the bedlam of egrets, those weird birds that Charlene, his eldest living daughter, talked about in her emails. Feet in slippers, he stood, put his hands on his hips and bent backwards to loosen his spine. He used to tell Elenore that he envied her ability to sleep soundly ten hours a night, but actually he didn’t; actually, he liked being a light sleeper. Dreamland was an entertainment medium, better than tv. There’s more to it than that, Howie. You figure that the day you fall into a deep sleep that will be The End. And just what is that end? 3 He tried to put himself in line with Elenore’s hybrid Catholic thinking , that there was a heaven, a hell, a purgatory, and a limbo, which was some kind of waiting room for the souls of dead babies. Soul? What’s a soul? A flat fish. No, that’s spelled different. Constable Elman grabbed his cap from the end table and put it on his tender, bald head. The cap, like his matching trousers and shirt, was the same deep green as his grandson Birch Latour’s Dartmouth green. On the peak of the cap, in white, were the words Darby Police. He owned half a dozen such hats that he had specially made and that he’d paid for himself after he was elected town constable as a joke, the year Darby had voted to turn the town’s law enforcement over to the state police. The unpaid constable position was purely honorary, though in theory the constable had real powers. Or so said Birch, his favorite grandson, who this year had moved back to Darby with Missy Mendelson, his best friend from his rather bizarre childhood. Missy had a baby; her husband was another Darby playmate, Bez Woodward, a computer whiz and drone pilot fighting in a far-off war he was not allowed to discuss. Birch and Missy had started a computer business Howard didn’t know much about. Howard stoked the fire in the woodstove, started coffee, put on his black and red wool coat, and, as was his daily habit, stepped outside to admire his property. He would come back in when his slippered feet whined about the cold. It was a gray November dawn, no bird calls, no lament from wind dying in the tops of the trees. He cranked up his hearing aid to listen to the occasional car that drove Center Darby Road; maybe he’d have luck and hear honking geese flying south, too. He hoped for kindly late fall weather. He and some volunteers were moving Cooty Patterson and his cabin today. “Rain or shine” said the flyer on the bulletin board of Darby’s condemned town hall. Howard carefully negotiated the concrete blocks that served as steps to the front door and walked to the middle of the gravel driveway so he could please his eye with a view of his property. Quite a sight. I’m proud. [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:30 GMT) 4 Pride is a sin. Yeah, maybe for a Catholic. For me it’s the branch sticking out of the cliff that I’m holding on...