Murder in Mount Holly (2 page)

The next day Herbie kissed his mother goodbye and took the bus to Holly Heights. When he arrived he bought a newspaper. First a room, then a job, he thought. His eye was caught by an ad for a room. He called the number. A woman answered and, though her voice was a trifle shrill, seemed nice. She said he'd have to come over. Herbie agreed. Herbie mentioned Kant-Brake Toys. She said she had another boarder at Kant-Brake Toys. Herbie said that sounded just fine. He went right over.

2

Mr. Gibbon was a fuddy-duddy, not a geezer, but he was old, chewed his lips, dressed horribly and so often he was taken for a geezer. He lived in Miss Ball's house on the second floor.

He had few possessions. Each possession had a special signifi­cance. There was his comb. It was
part
of a comb, about five plastic teeth at various distances apart on a bitten spine. Mr. Gibbon had used that same comb since boot camp. It was the last thing his aunt gave him. In fact, it was the last thing his aunt gave anybody, since she died on the railroad platform waving goodbye to the seventeen-year-old Charlie Gibbon as his train pulled away bound for New Jersey. So the comb was special. He used the comb often. The strange and even sick part of it all was that he used it without a mirror. He would stand, one arm crooked over his head; his eyes on an object so distant that it had no name, and he would scrape away at his scalp with those five plastic teeth.

Like most old men he wore his watch to bed. He had forgotten the last time it was off his wrist. But he remembered distinctly the time he got it, a bargain at the Fort Sam Baker PX in Missouri, two dollars and sixty cents. It was a huge watch and ticked very loudly. The chrome had flaked off and revealed brass underneath. The watch was so big that even Mr. Gibbon could wind it. And Mr. Gibbon had very thick fingers.

Mr. Gibbon's other valuable possessions were his .45 caliber pistol (he had killed a man with it, he said), his canteen with the bullet hole through the side (it had foiled the killing of Mr. Gibbon), a picture of his wife and two daughters in a bamboo frame he had bought somewhere near the equator somewhere on an island somewhere, also his army discharge papers, his khakis, his clips of bullets, his hunting knife (“A man should own enough knife to protect himself with,” he said), his neatly made bed, his paper bags and his tennis shoes.

Of these last two items the bags were the most important; the tennis shoes were more of a sentimental thing. Mr. Gibbon made it a practice to carry paper bags wherever he went, wrinkled brown-paper bags. It was hard to tell what was in the bags since they were not bulky enough to show the outlines of any distinguishable object. Even if they did contain a large object they were wrinkled enough to conceal the object's identity. Often the paper bags contained nothing more than many carefully folded paper bags. Mr. Gibbon enjoyed the stares of people who were perplexed by a particularly huge brown-paper bag he had carried into town one day. He did not take the bus that day. Instead he walked all the way home, past all the eyes of most of his neighbors. What was in the bag? More bags. Mr. Gibbon smiled and tucked his secret under his arm. Many times he hailed and hooted a good morning to another old man merely because the other man was also carrying a bag. He imagined a fraternity of old men carrying armloads of wrinkled bags. He saw them all the time.

The tennis shoes replaced his army boots, which he saved for special occasions (riding in a car, resting, cleaning his pistol). They were black basketball sneakers—the kind that a high school student wears after school. The canvas was black, the rubber was white. In spite of the thick rubber soles they added no spring to his step. He walked along the sidewalk with a pflap­-pflip-pflap-pflip of the canvas and rubber, the long lacings trailing several inches behind. Over the anklebone there was a round label which read:

OFFICIAL TENNIES

“The Choice of Major Leaguers!”

He wore no socks. Usually his trousers were baggy and long enough to conceal the fact, but sometimes his white ankle flesh could be seen over the black tennis shoes as he walked along the sidewalk looking very much like a little wooden man marching down a plank, weaving from side to side.

What nearly everyone noticed first about Mr. Gibbon were his eyes. They were cloudy, pearly and ill-looking. It was his eyes that got him discharged from the army and not the fact that he was at retirement age. He had changed his age several times on his file card to make absolutely sure that he would die in the army. There was no way to disperse the fog in his eyes. He could see all right, his eyes were “damn good” and he had never been sick a day in his life. Yet his eyes looked wrong. They were the wrong color. Indeed, there seemed to be something seriously wrong with those eyes. They were the color of nonfat milk.

Mr. Gibbon's nose was sharp, as was his chin and the ridge of his head where the skull sutures pushed against the skin. His neck was a collection of wattles, folds and very thin wrinkles. The base of his neck seemed small, bird-like, as if it had been choked thin by a tight collar for many years.

And his mouth. “I've got fifteen teeth,” Mr. Gibbon was fond of saying. The teeth were not visible. They were somewhere within the shapeless lips, which stretched and chewed even when Mr. Gibbon was not eating. It was the kind of mouth that caused people to think that he was a nasty man.

From the rear he looked like nearly every other man his age. His head was wide at the top, not a dome, but a wedge. The back of his skinny neck was an old unhappy face of wrinkles. There was even a wrinkle the size of a small mouth, frowning from the back of Mr. Gibbon's neck. His ears stuck out, his shoulders were bony and rounded, his spine protruded. He was vaguely bucket-assed, but not so much bucket-like as edgy, a flat bottom that is known as starchy, as if it contained a large piece of cardboard.

“You can't rile me,” Mr. Gibbon said. It was mostly true. He stayed calm most of the time, and when he was angry did not speak: instead he wheezed, he puffed, he blew, he sighed, he groaned. And maybe he would mumble an obscenity or two.

His favorite song was the National Anthem, and the less violins, the more brass, the better. An old song, he said, but a good solid one. You'd be proud to get up on your hind legs and be counted when it played—it was that kind of song, a patriotic song. “If you wanna name names, I'm a patriot,” said Mr. Gibbon. He liked the anonymity of citizenship and patriotism. He wanted to be in that great bunch of great people that listened, that saluted, that obeyed the country's command whether at home or abroad, whether down at the pool hall or far afield, at work or at play. The song ran through him and charged his whole body and made it tingle. Mr. Gibbon wheezed and spat when he was angry, but he also wheezed and spat when he was emotionally involved; he got choked up. Something of a patriotic nature always brought rheum to his eyes: hearing the anthem, seeing the flag or his army buddies. Or just the thought of them.

He had resigned himself to being out of the army as much as he could. You couldn't do it completely. He knew that. It was in the blood. It was something that wouldn't leave you for all your born days. Something you wouldn't want to leave even if it were possible. Something great and good. Something powerful.

It was a sad day when the army doctor took a last look at Mr. Gibbon's cloudy eyes and said, “There's something sick about them eyes. I don't know what medical science would say, but I don't like the looks of them . . .”

That was all there was to it. In a few days Mr. Gibbon was out of the army. He had been in for thirty-eight years. “That's a lifetime for some people, thirty-eight years,” he would say. And when he was feeling very low he would say, “That was my lifetime, thirty-eight years in Uncle Sam's army. Just hanging on now for dear life, and I don't know whether I'm coming or going.”

Mr. Gibbon was smart enough to know that things were different in the army. Life was better, if not richer. There was good company, a nice bunch of kids. Raw kids, greenhorns, but they learned in the long run. They learned to pitch-in and fall-to. Life in the army was a constant reward. It was Mr. Gibbon's first real haircut, grammar school, a trip to the zoo. For a man who had never had a youth that he remembered, and who could not remember whether (or not) he had passed through puberty, the army was a tremendously satisfying experience. Not really the romance of the recruiting poster, although there was more of that in it than people ordinarily thought. In the army you were someone, a man in khakis, a full-time threat to the enemy; Mr. Gibbon was “Pop” to a lot of young kids and a buddy to a lot of the others. Need a little advice on VD, a needle and thread, some notepaper, card tricks, funny stories? Want to know what the Jerries were really like? Ask Pop Gibbon.

Now he was out of the army and it pained. Maybe it was the weather, but the weather had never caused him to pain before. Pain in his back, his neck, his finger joints. Or his clothes were damp. His clothes had never been damp before. And when he did not pain he felt sticky, or maybe one of his teeth would be giving him a time. In the army he never had a sick day, although the Doc and others examined his eyes now and then and pre­scribed “rest, lots and lots of rest for them eyes,” or “try a little epsom salts, Charlie, bathe them and then get some rest, lots of . . .” Worse than all the civilian aches and pains was the one thought that occurred to him over and over again, the thought which zipped into his mind one morning and which stayed there, for good it seemed. Mr. Gibbon had been on his way to take a bath and did not feel a need to take the precaution of wearing a robe (besides, nakedness always reminded Mr. Gibbon pleasantly of the army). He was padding along the hall placidly, with a towel over his arm and his comb in his hand, and wearing his tennis shoes for slippers, and he passed one of the bedrooms and caught a glimpse of someone moving. He stopped and peeked through the door. He was right. In the full-length mirror he saw an old man, almost totally bald, carrying a broken comb and a tattered towel and wearing a suit of shrivelled fat.

It brought Mr. Gibbon up short. He tried to cover himself with the towel, but to no avail. The towel was too small and too shredded. Mr. Gibbon spilled over into the mirror. When he turned away from the mirror he got the most revolting view of all, a rear view, dying flesh retreating, and it was not starchy at all. It was just awful.

He could not forget the old man in the fat suit walking stupidly, awkwardly away from the full-length mirror. It had not been like that in the army. He had been a big strong man in the army. The army had promised to train Mr. Gibbon. They had kept their promise. They had trained him to check the firing pins on various large caliber shells; they had trained him to cook boiled cabbage and greens for upwards of three hundred hungry, dog-faced foot soldiers; they taught him to weld canteens, shout marching orders, cure rot, detect clap, and execute a nearly perfect about-face. These trades had kept Mr. Gibbon wise, his muscles in tune. In his thirty-eight army years Mr. Gibbon learned many trades up and down.

When he was discharged he found that army trades were not exactly civilian trades, although there were some similarities.

At first Mr. Gibbon did not try to get a job, but as he said, he had always been “on the go.” It was the army's way to be always on the go. So twiddling his thumbs did not appeal to him. He was not a man of leisure. He took pride in making and doing a little each day. He had some money and a little pension, but it was not a question of money. Raising chickens was out, so was drinking coffee with unshaven men in the Automat, watching people go by, remembering number plates, spotting cars and playing cards. Mr. Gibbon was a little foolish, but he was not stupid and, perhaps worst of all, he had not yet been blessed with the time-consuming affliction of senility. He was in the still-awake period of dusk, which exists for old people in retirement between the last job and the first trembling signals of crotchety old age and near madness. Still lucid.

He could be useful. To himself and his country. But he was worried when he thought of his training; the army had trained him well, but what use is a firing-pin fixer, rot curer, cabbage boiler and canteen welder in the civilian world? What good? No good, Mr. Gibbon concluded. He took odd jobs at first, and even saw the humor in this. Gibbon, the taker of odd jobs. That's what it had come to.

His first odd job was with the Municipal Council of Lower Holly, directing a road-fixing crew. But the workers would not be threatened with demerits and they did not have the respect (and fear) that recruits generally had for Mr. Gibbon. If Mr. Gibbon gave an order they paused, shuffled their feet, and from the middle of the group of workers another order would be shouted back: “Go back to the old folks' home, Grandpa!” Once a man told him to go suck his thumb.

His next jobs were as an usher at the movies, a special policeman at the Holly Junction bathing beach and as a cab­driver on the late shift of the We-Drive-U-Kwik Cab Company. It was not long before Mr. Gibbon retired his flashlight and braided usher's cap, his badge and night-stick. The odd job with the cab company bore some fruit, killed some time, and it even showed signs of speeding Mr. Gibbon right into his grave with no stopover at senility or madness.

It was his third week on the job that finished him. The week of the teeth. Mr. Gibbon had just gotten an ­upper plate of new false teeth.

“New false teeth,” Mr. Gibbon had said to the dispatcher. “
New
false teeth. False and new. It sounds crazy, doesn't it?”

The cab dispatcher said that he had known a lot of people that had new false teeth. They liked them, the new false teeth. So why should Mr. Gibbon think they were so crazy?

“I didn't say I
thought
they were crazy,” Mr. Gibbon corrected. “I said new false teeth
sounded
crazy. Like new used cars sounds crazy.”

The cab dispatcher did not see Mr. Gibbon's point at all.