The Hotel Eden(31)
Mr. Royaltuber handles all the television and monitor maintenance and repair for the Spinard Institute. He has also helped us with the satellite dish and the cable connections we use at home. He’s a nice man, and I have lunch with him from time to time. We’ve become, under the circumstances and in this barren place, friends. I met his wife only once, when I was at his home. It was less than pleasant.
MR. WILD JOHNNY HATERAS, RADIO PERSONALITY, KGRG
IF ANYBODY PRETENDS to be hurt or surprised by our little prank, they’re bad actors. Everybody in this burg knows what we do on Halloween with the “important news bulletin” and the hook. We’ve been doing it since I started spinning platters here twelve years ago. Nick goes out and slips a dozen of the phony hooks on car doors, and then I interrupt the program with my announcement about the maniac. I think of it as our little annual contribution to birth control, all those kids jumping up when I cut into “Unchained Melody” with my homicide-and-hook news brief. When we started, we used those plastic hooks from the costume shop in Orpenhook, but, sad to say, gang, it’s impossible to scare anybody anymore with a plastic hook. Don’t tell me the world’s a better place. So now we get them in Bark City, little steel hooks that at least look authentic for a few minutes. But this will probably be the last year we send Nick out with anything at all, because of the trouble up by the nuthouse, and because he’s afraid of getting shot. Can you believe that? You go out on Halloween to have a little fun anymore and you run a good chance of getting plugged? Hey, Griggs, wake up, all is not well. If you can’t harass the teenagers without running the risk of getting killed, this town is in trouble.
MRS. CASSIE ROYALTUBER
IT’S FUNNY WHAT people think. You try to put a pair of kitchen scissors in the doctor’s wife one afternoon and they think (a) you’re crazy, or (b) you’re desperately in love with your sweet husband, or (c) you caught her in bed with your husband, with whom she’s been sleeping for two years, and therefore you’re just slow to catch on, since everybody, absolutely everybody else in this village, which is not exactly full of geniuses, has known about the affair since the first week, or (d) that you’re all three: crazy, in love, and slow to catch on.
Well, it is simply exhilarating to be liberated from (a) the slings and (b) the arrows of public opinion and to take it for what it is, which is (a) irrelevant and (b) as absolutely wrong as it can be.
Who in their right mind—which is where I find myself—would consider that the television repairman’s wife might have another reason? Who would grant the past its due, the vast sweeping privilege of history and justice? Who would guess that (a) I knew Mrs. Narkenpie before she and her doctor moved to Griggs, in fact before she was Mrs. Narkenpie, when she was simply Margaret Rayne, and that (b) she was the prime reason I had been forcibly removed from my one true love so many years ago, and that (c) I had chosen those scissors not for the convenience of their being right there in the drawer but because they were appropriate—I wanted to cut her the way she cut my Howard.
And the things I screamed I screamed on purpose. How are you going to get into the loony bin unless they think you’re loony?
ROD BUDDAROCK
WHAT HE DOES is take the beer. This seems to be his only deal as a cop, to drive around on weekends and take beer from kids. And he keeps the beer. Some kids just go ahead and buy his brand, which is the Rocary Red Ale—fifteen dollars a case at any Ale and Mail. Isn’t there any crime to stop? How do you get a job like that—free car and free beer? Hey, I’ll sign up. As is, I’m glad I’m a senior and out of here next spring. He comes into our Halloween party last Saturday, the same night that there’s a maniac with a hook roaming all over Griggs, attacking kids, slashing at everything in sight, and he busts us, scaring everybody shitless and causing Ardeen Roster to break her nose running away in the bushes, and he writes me a ticket for it. Then, while some monster with one arm has practically taken over the whole town, he takes our beer, and there’s still about three and a half cases of Red Pelican—which you have to drive to Orpenhook to even find—so I’m forced to live the rest of my life picturing this civic wart pounding down our Pelicans every afternoon on his deck while he dreams up his next law enforcement strategy. Life is hard on the young, man, count on it.
MR. HOWARD LUGDRUM
I’M GOING TO NEED to get my hook back. There’s a lot of work up here that requires two hands. We’ve got leaves to rake, tons, and a lot of other seasonal preventive maintenance—storm windows, snowplow prep work—and I can’t load and deliver firewood effectively without my prosthesis. I’d appreciate its return as soon as possible.