was, this day, no one behind it. No sounds came from the inner room, and nothing moved except the ceiling fan, making its slow, faintly whistling rounds.
I supposed the person could be using the toilet, so I waited. I read the Most Wanted posters and mused about the lives of the two men pictured there. One of them was named Drinkwater, which definitely caught my eye. The other was named Waters. But they must have been related, probably brothers, for they looked so much alike, and one or the other of them had simply shorn a syllable off or added a syllable in some infantile attempt to change the name. They really did look alike. Then I dimly remembered having seen other posters and they all looked pretty much alike, too. I made a mental note to ask the Sheriff why this should be. Why did all Most Wanteds seem to have dark hair and spidery little mustaches that slanted down to the corners of their mouths? And small, beady eyes. I stood with my hands clasped behind me, rolling on the balls of my feet, reading about these men. Armed robbery, both of them. Robbery was pretty boring, except if you went armed, which I guess made it more interesting. I shot both of them with my thumb and finger.
Still, no one appeared to take my order. There was a rack of postcards of places like La Porte and Cloverly and the Cold Flat station and the church. I selected the station and the Tabernacle ones. Myplan was to buy two stamps to make my presence here reasonable and then to ask casually about the Tidewaters. The Drinkwaters (I was sure they were brothers) made this even easier, for I could laughingly tell the postmistress (or -master) that I had nearly died looking at the poster, thinking the name was Tidewater. This wasn’t, but could easily have been, true. But clever as this story was (cleverer, I was sure, than the Drinkwaters would be when they got caught), I was unable to put it into action, for no one appeared, even though I hung around for another ten minutes. It was no way to run a country. I put two dimes on the counter and pocketed my postcards and left.
Then I stopped on the walk outside and pulled out the postcard, wondering once again how I could be so dumb. The First Union Tabernacle, of course! The minister or reverend or whatever he was would not only most certainly tell me where the Tidewaters lived, but also what they were like. Just from reading his expression, I would probably know if they’d all gone to hell, or were regular churchgoers, or whatever.
A church steeple rose in the distance, and since I saw no other churchlike building, I hurried towards it. Just then, a bell tolled. I took this as a sign that I was on the right track. I walked on and listened to the tolling and then realized what it had tolled: four o’clock. That didn’t give me much time until the only train I could take came through. It would be impossible even to walk as far as the church and get all the way back to the station.
Defeated, I turned and trod back.
And never a Tidewater had I seen.
EIGHT
When the First Union Tabernacle bus was letting off its passengers on this Sunday, I looked for the girl I had seen on the station platform. Ever since I had seen her there, it had bothered me the way she seemed not to fit in Cold Flat Junction. It was like suddenly being pulled out of a fantasy in a movie house when someone walks in front of the screen and casts his shadow over the actors there. But I did not see her, so I guess she wasn’t of the First Union Tabernacle faith.
The bench outside Britten’s store was occupied on this particular day by the same old man, who always had a wad of chewing tobacco he pulled at the way I do at taffy and who always wore a faded blue railroad cap. After I’d left Britten’s with my box of jujubes, I sat down at the other end to wait for Ubub and Ulub. The old man looked over at me, probably thinking that something really interesting might be happening today since there was this new person on the
Alaska Angelini
Cecelia Tishy
Julie E. Czerneda
John Grisham
Jerri Drennen
Lori Smith
Peter Dickinson
Eric J. Guignard (Editor)
Michael Jecks
E. J. Fechenda