Bishop's Road (13 page)

Harvey has managed to dig his way out of the backyard and makes a beeline for Bishop's Road. Whines at the front door but nobody hears him. Scratches until the mud from his feet is well embedded in the paint. Lies down and takes a dog nap. Ruth falls over him when she goes out for beer, curses, but remembers she is happy and lets him in the house. He snuffles all over the place for a minute and then heads up the stairs to the attic and Ginny Mustard who is delighted to see him. She decides that a nice basket on the floor near the cradle would be a lovely place for the puppy to sleep. He can keep an eye on the baby when she is cooking, since no one likes her idea of bringing the bones to the
kitchen, yelled at her, in fact, when she broached the subject. It doesn't occur to Ginny Mustard that Harvey will have to go home. If this is where he is then this is where he should be.

Maggie has been talking a blue streak. For hours. About her dad and her mother. Six years of silence and now the lid is off. When Maggie was carted away she kicked and screamed until someone jabbed her with sedation. When that wore off she cried for a day and a night. No one cared. There was no comfort. She stopped talking. Laughing. Smiling. Crying. And now she's spilling out all over the place, following the others from room to room, yelling through closed doors, not caring if they listen. Enough that they are present. She won't shut up, though Ruth asked her to, nicely, several times. All night long she talks and in the morning she is slowing down a little but far from empty. They go about their business and still she follows. They don't bother to hide. By unspoken consensus they let her rip. Eventually she'll have to fall asleep, they reason, and then someone else can get a word in.

Judy is less patient than the others. By her calculation, Maggie has a good $1440 from all those twenty-dollar bills her mother put in the letters and she's eager to get out and help her spend it.

Ruth is busy finding something to wear for her date. She has had a shower and a long bath. Shampooed her hair twice and done four lots of make-up. Pickings are slim in this house. Judy has some garish eye shadow and pure white powder, blue mascara, nasty looking lipstick. The others have nothing at all. Having spent every cent she had on beer, there was no option but to head out to the drug store and sample their wares. On her last visit the sales clerks decided she was never going to buy anything and
asked her not to come back. But she looked pretty good by then and told them to stuff it, gave herself a liberal dose of Poison on the way out and went home to wait for Sergeant Patrick Fahey.

There is no place in the world more wonderful than this city at the height of summer. Winter has its moments. When the fog is in but the snow falls anyway - at night - and they compete to be the prettiest thing in front of the street lights, watched from windows or wandered about in when you're alone and everything is hushed so sweetly there might be no one else in the world. Or on a freezing morning after the rain paints everything, every tree, bush, leftover weed, rickety fence, the most brilliant silver. And the sun comes out and blinds you silly and there's no safe place to put your foot until the salt trucks get out around so you might as well stay put and have a coffee and stare. And the spring, when the earth thaws and smells so deliciously sexy and there's rain and more fog and it seems there'll never be anything green again until that day when it turns, overnight, to summer and the old ladies come out of hiding and sit with their cats on the front steps and the boys wear tee-shirts and the girls find their short dresses and they all drive around with car windows open and the music is loud when they pass by. And you put on your lipstick and think you might like new earrings one of these days and if your hair is still wet when you go out, no matter, it'll dry soon enough in the warm wind. And the park fills with children and moms and dads and there's music on the downtown corners and open guitar cases lying on the sidewalk for your offerings. And someone decides to head out for England in a small sailing boat and everyone goes to see him off and if he's coming from the other direction, to cheer him home. And people walk the hills again, mind the gullies
because you don't see them until you're almost over the edge and gone for good. And the flowers bloom and in a good year the cold fog stays out far - you can just see it on the horizon - and maybe it won't come ashore until the Folk Festival is over and the Youth For Social Justice might get a weekend of sunshine to spread the message. Summer here is magic. It doesn't strut its stuff so much as melt its way into your being. There is no hurry. No one cares if service is slow. The work day ends on time and you can waltz your way through the rest of it. The streets are full of merriment long after the moon is down and only the honestly sad can feel the
blue horror of dawn.

Ruth and Patrick eat and drink and wander. They talk all night and when Patrick puts his hand on the back of her neck as they walk along Water Street she feels that's right where it should be and their steps match and in a few minutes she can't tell where her skin stops and his begins, the heat and the touch blend so nicely. They watch the sun come up over the water from Ruth's favorite perch on the hill among the bracken and the blueberry bushes. A dozen times one or the other says, “We have to go - it's really late”, but they can't seem to take it seriously and Patrick ends up going to work without changing his clothes and Ruth doesn't even brush her teeth before falling into bed.

The others let her be for most of the morning so she can sleep but when the flowers arrive curiosity gets the better of them and, en masse, they present themselves at her door to hear about the big date. And the flowers, unwrapped, are the prettiest anyone has ever seen, enthusiastic flowers, happy to meet you flowers. The old plaster walls perk themselves up, suck in the yellows, pinks and violets and throw them back, even to the deepest corners of the shabby closet, into worn slippers and empty pockets. Someone finds a big old pretend crystal vase and it overflows and Ruth says, “Take some. Everyone have some flowers.” And they do. Carry to their rooms, jam jars and drinking glasses of flowers.
And when the second bouquet arrives they fill the sitting room and the kitchen. With the third, the house starts humming and Ruth calls Patrick at work and tells him to stop it or he won't have any money left and she isn't interested in going out with a pauper.

Ms. Know it All, whose real name is Dorothy Blake, Dorrie to her friends, Ms. Blake to Howard James, is knocking at Mrs. Miflin's front door. She has come to find Harvey, missing for several days. When Howard remembered that Ginny Mustard said she lived at a Mrs. Miflin's house, he tracked down the address and sent Dorrie over on the off chance the stupid animal might have shown up there. Dorrie has had just about enough of working for H. James and Company. She spends her time fighting with a photocopier when she's not running around picking up laundry and coffee for his nibs or scraping shit off his carpet and, during her most recent bout of PMS, wrote up her letter of resignation. She is waiting for the right time to present it. Thinks, as she stands in the rain banging on the front door, any damned second now.

Judy towers over the tiny Dorrie, says she never heard tell of any dog around here and if she wants to look she had better get a search warrant. From somewhere in the house comes the sound of barking and laughter. This is not a good day to be pissing off Dorrie Blake. “Listen you big freak, if that goddamned dog is here I want it and I think you're lying through your teeth. I've put notices all over the city and I spend more time looking for that bloody animal than I do sleeping. Bring him out here. Now!”

“Well. Why don't you come right on in and take him if you're so friggin' tough. Good luck getting him away from Ginny Mustard.”

That's the name Mr. James couldn't remember. Came up
with Jane and some sort of condiment. All he could think of was chutney. “Jane Chutney,” he said. “Something like that. She's black with long yellow hair. You'll know her when you see her.”

Judy marches out of the house and down the road to the playground. Dorrie stares after her for a minute before going inside. Calls out hello and when no one answers takes herself from room to room, listening for barking and laughter. But the house is quiet now. As she walks to the third floor she can hear movement and goes to the attic. To Ginny Mustard in her new rocking chair, in her pretty nursery, eyes closed and singing to a cradle of bones.
Hush little baby, don't say a word.
Close by, the dog raises his head, smiles at Dorrie and goes back to sleep.

The sound of Dorrie hitting the floor when she faints is exactly the same as the sound in Ruth's dream. Of her father hitting the wall with his fist, punching a hole so that her mother would have to hang a picture over it, too low to see comfortably but at least no one would know. No one ever knew. She is startled from her sleep and thankful that it's over before it really got out of hand. Hears the dog barking. Runs to the attic to see what's going on now for God's sake.

Ginny Mustard knows for sure that Dorrie is a thief. Wealth does not come without its share of worries and it's hard enough keeping Judy out of her room. She looks around for something to tie up the little woman until she can get the police to come and arrest her. Ruth is more concerned that one of their secrets is out. “For God's sake, Ginny Mustard, how could you not hear her coming up the stairs? Are you deaf?”

“I was singing the baby to sleep.”

“That baby's been asleep for decades. You sure as hell don't have to sing to it. What the hell are we going to do? She had to see it or she wouldn't have fainted. Though anyone wearing a skirt like that might keel over. She must have it painted on.”

The captive is coming to her senses, staring up at the
women standing over her. She readies herself to let out a good scream. Ruth claps a strong hand across Dorrie's mouth and tells her not to make a sound. “Get something to tie her up with. We might as well gag her too. Give me that thing you've got around your head. Quick. We have to figure out what to do.”

But once poor Dorrie has been bound and shuffled to the rocking chair, Ruth is fully awake and approaching the realization that they may well have complicated matters for, in addition to bones in the attic and a body in the freezer, it seems kidnapping is on their growing list of crimes. What are they doing? What was she thinking? No - she wasn't thinking at all. A bliss hangover. No less than she deserves, either. Muddle-headed and then there are those damned flowers to keep you like that until you're weak and can't think straight. “Damn it all to hell, anyway. This is just great, Ginny Mustard. Once people notice that she's missing they'll be all over the place.”

From downstairs comes the sound of Judy stomping about. She's in a mood and no amount of swinging in the rain has helped. She's wet to the bone. Hungry. “Where's everybody gone around here? Are we having anything to eat or what?”

Ruth tells Ginny Mustard to go down and get that one to shut up. She's loud enough to wake the dead. And she laughs, leading Ginny Mustard to believe that everything will be all right now so she goes to fetch Judy, who tells them that Dorrie has only come to get the dog and what did they have to go and tie her to the rocking chair for anyway, lunatics.