Living Witness(121)

Franklin Hale hated Chris Matthews, and Anderson Cooper, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. He hated Barack Obama and John McCain. He hated Chelsea Clinton and Susan Sarandon and all three of the Dixie Chicks. He hated Barbara Walters and all the women on The View. He hated both his senators and his congressman, and most of all he hated every single faculty member of every single university in the Ivy League. But here was the thing—his hate was simply a mental tic he paid very little attention to, as long as all these people stuck to the bargain. That was what was really wrong with the country. It wasn’t that hotshots at Harvard thought gay guys should marry each other or that snooty little Hollywood starlets looked down their noses at him because he believed in what God Himself had set down in the Bible, instead of all this Darwin evolution crap. No, that wasn’t the problem. That kind of thing had always been true. He remembered it from all the way back in his childhood, the way people like Annie-Vic rolled their eyes at the stupidity of the local yokels, the way people like David Suskind pontificated about the mental weaknesses of the ordinary voter.

No, Franklin thought, that wasn’t the problem, that was just life. But up to now, up to just the past twenty years or so, there had been a bargain. Those people lived in their world, and Franklin lived in his own, and neither world told the other world what to do. They had no right, those people, they had no right to come in here and tell him and all the good people of Snow Hill that they had to live the way Hollywood wanted them to live, that they had to think the way Harvard wanted them to think. They had no right to crowd into the nooks and crannies of American life and suck up all the air. That was what it felt like. They sucked up all the air, and more and more, Franklin Hale felt as if he couldn’t breathe.

No wonder Marcey was a wreck. No wonder his own home life was an endless saga of pills and liquor and that Ferris wheel of Marcey’s mood swings. They sucked up all the air, those people did. They turned the entire world into their backyard, where all the standards were theirs, where all the judgments were theirs, where nothing counted as success unless they wanted it to. That was what was wrong, Franklin knew. If their kind of success was the only kind of success there was, then everybody else was a failure. Everybody.

The cars in front of the police station now included some from the state police. Franklin pressed himself up against the plate-glass window of the Hale ’n’ Hardy Tire Shop and watched. There was Dale Vardan, who thought he was God’s gift, and a lot of people Franklin didn’t know. There was Gregor Demarkian, wearing a good winter coat over what looked like a good winter suit. What was it with these guys, that they never seemed to own parkas, like sensible people. There was Gary Albright. There were half a dozen people from those vans. Franklin hated those vans. He’d seen what they produced, Snow Hill on the news, night after night, the story of a bunch of hillbilly hicks who still thought the earth was flat.

There was a cough behind him, and Franklin turned to see Louise Brooker hovering near a large pyramid pile of snow tires. Why did they have the snow tires out? It was nearly past the snow season—nobody would put snow tires on their car now. Franklin took a deep breath. Louise looked apologetic.

“It’s your house,” she said. “It’s your sister Lynne. It seems that Marcey—”

“Yeah,” Franklin said. “She was that way when I left. That’s why I called Lynne.”

“Yes,” Louise said. “I think you’d better talk to Lynne. She seems to think that Marcey may have, I don’t know, may have taken, uh, may need to go to—”

“—the emergency room,” Franklin said.

“Maybe you’d better talk to Lynne,” Louise said again.

Franklin turned back to look at the cars and the vans, at Gregor Demarkian still standing out there in the wind, talking to the newspeople with the cameras set up. Why wouldn’t these people wear hats? They didn’t wear parkas, they didn’t wear hats, they walked around in the cold and never seemed to catch anything. How did Alice McGuffie put it? It was as if they had a secret, and they wouldn’t share that secret with anybody else. People thought Alice McGuffie was stupid, but Franklin Hale knew better.

“Franklin,” Louise said.

“I don’t care,” Franklin said. Then he looked up at the ceiling. There was nothing there, except those foam panels they’d put in to help with the noise, but it was as good a place to look as any. He’d told the truth. He didn’t care if Marcey lived or died. He didn’t care if she went to the emergency room and got caught by every cameraman from New York and Atlanta. He didn’t care. It had all been going on and on and on this way for as long as he could remember, and he thought he was done.