Baptism in Blood(45)
Gregor went back into the house and into the kitchen. It wasn’t much of a kitchen, by Gregor’s standards. It was open on two sides to the dining area and the living room, and there were hardly enough cabinets to hold a decent set of baking pans. Still, there was a paper and a pencil and a refrigerator nearly coated with little magnets. Gregor wrote David a note—Gone for a walk; be back soon—and stuck it on the freezer door. The magnet he used to stick it with was a bunch of letters jumbled together that spelled out: THE TIME TO BE HAPPY IS NOW. If Gregor remembered correctly, that was a quote from a famous nineteenth-century freethinker named Robert Ingersoll. Freethinker was the nineteenth-century euphemism for atheist.
Gregor went out the front door this time, and then up the slatted wood walk that led over the sand to the sidewalk. Out here he could smell nothing but clean wild ocean. He could hear nothing but birds, cawing frantically above his head as they circled. The house next to David’s looked as if it had been badly damaged in the hurricane. Parts of its roof were missing and one of the pilings that held it up was cracked and out of true. Its windows were still boarded up, meaning that its owners, other vacation people like David, didn’t intend to occupy it anytime soon.
At the sidewalk, Gregor did the proper city thing and looked both ways to check the traffic on the beach road, saw that there wasn’t a car in sight, and crossed. He found himself on a sidewalk corner between two small white houses, both battered-looking but full.
Maybe just because he was finally doing something in particular, Gregor suddenly felt a lot better.
2
IN VERY SMALL TOWNS in the United States, all the real action happens in one of two places: on Main Street, or in the main room of the nearest McDonald’s. Gregor thought the nearest McDonald’s must be some ways away. Main Street was already humming. The grain-and-feed store was actually open, with big wooden bins placed outside its front door and filled with Gregor couldn’t determine what. The other stores he saw—a religious gift shop; a bookstore—weren’t open, but they were lit up inside, testimony to the fact that the people who owned them really meant business. Gregor walked down the street. Bellerton gave a very good impression. The sidewalks were well kept. The street was clean and swept. The brick Town Hall had been recently washed. Maybe all that was the result of the cleanup they had all had to do after the hurricane, but in Gregor’s experience, keeping a town looking spruce and cheerful took active commitment. When that commitment was lacking, things fell apart in a hurry. Just look at New York.
It took Gregor a couple of blocks before he found what he was looking for, and then it not only met his expectations, it exceeded his hopes. It was called Betsey’s House of Hominy, and it was so full of people, they looked as if they were going to start spilling out the windows at any moment. It wasn’t a real diner—meaning a restaurant in a retired railroad dining car—but it had been made up to look like one, and there was a sign across two of the front windows in neon script that said: Get Your Grits. This being North Carolina, Gregor supposed you really could get grits. The few times he had tried grits, though, he hadn’t much liked them. All the men Gregor could see were wearing short-sleeved camp shirts made of various colors in polyester. All the women had big hair. Gregor didn’t really believe, in a town that catered to this many tourists, that all the men in it had the kinds of jobs that required going to work in your shirtsleeves—but he did believe that this might be the kind of town where men had to pretend to have that kind of work. In cases like this one, the character of the town or the neighborhood where the crime had happened was vitally important, and it was so hard to work it all out.
Gregor worked up his courage and went in through Betsey’s front door. The place was crowded, but not as crowded as it had seemed from outside. Most of the customers seemed to like to sit in the booths that were pressed up against the windows. The booths in the back were all full, too. The counter around the cash register was mostly empty. Gregor sat down on one of the stools and waited for the girl behind the counter to notice him.
Gregor had had Bennis Hannaford working on him for years. He knew better than to call women “girls,” but in this case he thought he was justified—and as soon as the girl behind the counter turned around, he knew he was. Gregor didn’t think she could be more than fifteen. In spite of the hair and the thick coat of makeup, she looked like she still needed a baby-sitter. She looked not so much innocent as bone ignorant, and not bright enough to do anything about that. Gregor sat patiently on his stool with his hands folded in front of him. The girl contemplated him as if he were a toad who had suddenly decided to order breakfast.