The Auctioneer (27 page)

“We’ll just sit tight and see if what you think’s goin’ to happen really happens,” he said, and turned to stand fast against Mim’s flaring temper.

But Mim wasn’t listening to him. She had stopped midway in one of her journeys across the kitchen and was standing, her eyes glazed, listening to something outside.

John and Ma caught their breath and listened too.

“Tractor comin’,” Ma said.

“No,” Mim said. “Somethin’ bigger.”

The high hard groan grew suddenly louder as the invisible machine crested the hill and began to move steadily down the road toward them.

The sound dulled momentarily, then burst forth anew in a harsher gear. There was a high whine, a lull, then a shuddering crash giving way again to the grumble of the motor.

“Jesus,” John said. He grabbed his jacket from the hook and set off down the lawn at a run.

That’s our woods,’ Mim gasped. She fixed Hildie with her eyes and said, “You stay here. I’m goin’ too.”

Mim caught up with John as he crossed the bridge over the stream. They ran together around the bend and started up the hill.

The bulldozer was smashing out the beginning of a new road where an old logging trail had been. It had knocked over a dozen spindly birches and was running a sizable pine off to one side.

“They can’t do that,” John cried, but his voice was sucked away by the commotion of the bulldozer. “They can’t
do
that!”

He started to run again. “John!” Mim called, and then ran after him. At the edge of the raw space, John stopped, insignificant as one more tree beside the huge yellow machine. The driver wasn’t anyone they knew. A sign stenciled on the door said, “Lynch, Inc., Concord.”

John signaled to the high cab, but the machine just backed up and made another rush.

John loosened Mim’s hold on his arm. When the buldozer moved again, he ran into the clearing in front of it and stood windmilling his arms at the driver.

“Johnny,” Mim screamed. She started after him, but stopped when she saw the ram of the machine bearing down on her. The bulldozer came to within eight feet of John, then stopped.

The driver rolled down his window. “Out of the way,” he shouted over the roar of the machine.

“It’s my land,” John shouted back. “You can’t do this.

The man was big and overweight and ordinary. He could have been from Harlowe, though he wasn’t. “Look,” he hollered. “You them characters squattin’ in that house down by the pond? I been warned about you. This is what they told me you’d do. Well give up, will you? You can’t argue with a bulldozer.”

“It’s my land,” John insisted. “I’ll get the law on you.”

“Look,” said the man, cutting the motor and leaning out further. “I got my orders from the president of the corporation. He wants a road in here and four house lots. And the guy he sent up here with me last week to mark it off’s a cop in Harlowe. If he dont know who the land belongs to—”

“What corporation?” John said. “President of what corporation?”

“Perly Acres?” said the man sarcastically.

“Perly Dunsmore’s a crook and so is every cop in town.”

“Oh yeah?” said the man. “Funny, they told me you’d say that too. You must a pulled this before, huh? The big cheese showed me his deed, Mac. The cop showed me his badge. Now whom I supposed to believe?”

John stood silent.

When it looked as though the man was about to start up again, Mim cried, “But it
is
our land.”

The man looked at her and at John. “Sorry you feel that way,” he said. He began to roll up his window.

Suddenly John came alive. He leaped onto the step leading to the cab. “You son of a bitch,” he screamed. “I’ll kill you!”

“You will, will you?” said the man, looking down at John from his high perch. “Guess I’ll worry about that when I see a gun. The cop claims you’re one of them peace types that don’t keep guns.”

The engine raced and the man eased it forward again, aiming at a large beech only a few feet from where Mim was standing. John jumped free of the machine, and he and Mim backed into the road.

The bulldozer made such a racket that they didn’t hear the car until it was practically upon them. It swept past without hesitating —a blue Dodge with two people in it.

“Hildie!” Mim cried. “She’s just settin’ there with Ma.” She started off down the hill toward the house at a hard run. At the bridge she had to stop, a pain knotting in her side with every breath. John pounded past her and she ran again, stumbling.

The Dodge had stopped in the dooryard, but the two people were still sitting in it. John stopped in back of the car and Mim joined him without speaking. Looking down into the low car, they watched a white-haired couple pass a thermos cup of something steamy back and forth, gazing around them as though they were parked to look at a Scenic Vista.

When the woman caught sight of John and Mim, she started slightly, then laughed and spoke to her husband. She opened the car door and stepped out a bit stiffly. “How do you do?” she said. “We’re the Larsons—Jim and Martha. We’re thinking of buying into Perly Acres, and we’re interested in the site of the recreation center. Is that the barn they plan to make over? Does that bulldozer up there mean they’re really on schedule? You know,” she said with a short laugh, “when you’re as old as we are, you can’t afford to...”

Mim’s face had gone taut with astonishment. She felt John stiffen beneath her hand, then expand gradually as he took a deep breath.

“Get off my land!” he roared, taking a step toward the woman. “I’ll wring his goddamn neck for sendin’ you up here.”

“Heavenly days,” murmured the woman, backing hastily into the car and pulling the door to after her. Her husband fumbled hurriedly with the car and managed to get it going with a jolt. He made a hazardous U-turn and rumbled off up the road.

John paced the kitchen as if it were a cage. Hildie retreated to a corner with a blanket and sucked her thumb. Ma sat in the chair, shivering and ignored. And Mim, determined that they must go— that nothing mattered now but that they go—silently arranged and rearranged the things they had to take, trying to make it possible for them to sweep everything into the truck and go in two minutes flat as soon as John said the word.

The caterwauling of the bulldozer filled the room. When they spoke, their voices were dimmed as if with distance and, although they could see the trees by the edge of the pond bending and straightening, they could hear the wind only in the pauses between the bulldozer’s assaults.

At about ten, a truck glided into the yard, materializing on the waves of sound as if it were perfectly silent. Mim swept Hildie into her arms, then paused. It was Mickey Cogswell, alone. “He wouldn’t be the one to...” she said.

John put his knife on the table and went out. Mim stuffed Hildie into the chair beside Ma. “Now don’t say a word, hear? Not one word.”

Hildie hid her face in her grandmother’s lap. “Stop tellin’ me. I know,” she cried, her shout muffled by the folds of Ma’s dressing gown.

Cogswell didn’t get out of the truck, just opened the door and waited. His flesh and clothes were stained dark gray. The lines on his face were traced in black and his eyes were rimmed with red.

“What on earth... ?” Mim asked as she approached. Then she smelled the smoke on him.

He shook his head. “God knows,” he said. “The whole town’s goin’ up in smoke. We been fightin’ a fire at Sonny Pike’s. Not enough he gets shot, but now forty acres of his pine are gone and his barn’s started. Seems like the house is a goner too. Then there was fire bustin’ through the roof of Pulver’s barn when I went by. They was wettin’ down the house, but it’s attached and the wind’s all wrong. Cogswell stopped and rubbed his face, pushing the soot into dark streaks.

The wail of the bulldozer rose and fell around them. Cogswell shook his head. “Perly sic that on you?”

John stood with his arms folded. He nodded.

“Couldn’t even wait...”

“We ain’t goin’,” John said. “Thought I told you that.”

Cogswell looked at John, his blue eyes more focused than they had been in months.

“What I want to know is what you’re doin’ here,” John said, “with your deputy buddies in all that trouble?”

“Well, you know, they got the Powlton fire department now, and Babylon and Walker comin’. Trouble is, we just heard that the Ward place they cut up and sold—that’s on fire too, in a couple of different places, and it’s way to the other side of town. That was about the last straw. Me and James and Stone and a bunch of other deputies with houses of their own to worry about took off. Poor Sonny was jumpin’ around screamin’ at us to help. But I got visions of my own dry fields. Half of them ain’t even cut this year. And some of them from Powlton quit workin’ too and got to arguin’ about whose town is it anyway, and why should they risk their necks with us takin’ off. Meantime, the fire’s runnin’ up the hill curlin’ up trees like leaves, workin’ its way up to the Geness place.”

John stood listening, his face grim.

Cogswell ran his hands through his hair. “If I shoot off the shotgun three times, will you come give me a hand?” He glanced at Mim, then at John. “Look,” he said, swallowing, “I know it’s your side settin’ them fires. And I don’t say my side ain’t got it comin’, but does that mean you and me got to be at war?” He reached for John and touched his sleeve. “What can I do, Johnny? There’s no fire department left to come.”

John looked up the road toward the sound of the bulldozer, considering. “So, half the town’s on fire,” he said slowly.

Cogswell pulled himself wearily around behind the wheel. “Maybe you’re right, Johnny,” he said, slamming the door. “We don’t any of us deserve to live till mornin’.”

As he headed up the road, Mim ran past John to the truck and pulled the door open, running to keep up with it. “Why don’t you all leave, Mickey?” she cried.

“I can’t, Mim,” he said, braking to a stop. “Agnes keeps askin’ till I can’t hardly stand it. But I can’t. How can I? It’s just another way of dyin’.”

John came up behind Mim and leaned past her to grasp Cogswell’s arm. “You hear that fellow up there knockin’ over my woods?” he asked. “You think you can do somethin’ about that?”

Cogswell looked startled. Then he fingered the gun in his holster and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess maybe I can. I can try anyhow.” And, instead of going home, Cogswell turned around and went back up the hill toward the bulldozer.

John and Mim stood together in the yard, listening. The bulldozer stopped work almost immediately. There were no shots and they were too far away to hear voices. Presently, the big motor roared again, then gradually began to recede.

Mim looked at John. “He was only up there an hour,” she said.

“This time,” John said.

Mickey drove past them with a grin. John returned his salute with a shout of reassurance.

The wind curled around the chimney and slid off the steep roof with a whine. It rattled the doors and worried the plastic over the windows. In the room that had been Hildie’s, splinters of glass continued to pull away from around the bullet hole and sift to the floor. The rest of the day passed somehow and no one else came.

“Thursday gone,” Mim said in their bedroom that night, “and no one from Perly except that bulldozer.”

“Fires are keepin’ them busy,” John said. “But you can bet Perly’s already switchin’ and schemin’ how to have us dead and buried one way or the other, all of us, deputies included. And him left to sell off the whole empty town.”

It was so cold they took Hildie into their bed and piled her quilts over their own for warmth. Impatiently, they waited for the long night to pass. Finally, the dawn appeared over the frost line on the windows and they could see gray clouds blowing like dust balls over a dead-white morning sky.

“Snow up there,” Mim said. “We ought to go this mornin’ quick, before we get snowed in.”

“Back of that truck’d be cold as the bottom of a well,” John said.

“Well get a stove in Concord. You said yourself he’s goin’ to bury us all, and we’re the first ones in his path.” She was pleading now. “Johnny, please.”

John got up without answering, pulled on his overalls and jacket and went down to see to the stoves. After breakfast, he took up a stick and his knife. Hildie climbed up next to him and watched, wide-eyed and still, as one by one the chips fell away and the stick disappeared.

Mim pulled on her jacket and went out to the well for water.

“That snow won’t wait,” she insisted when she came back. “It’s comin any minute and here we’ll be.” She was fretful and peevish. She kept making work for herself in the kitchen, then abandoning it halfway through. “Were gettin’ this one last chance,” she kept saying. “And you two won’t budge.”

“Go then,” said Ma. “You and the child.”

“How can I, Ma?” moaned Mim. “And leave you and Johnny here?”

The clouds piled up overhead thick as pudding. They waited all morning for the next move. But nothing happened. Even the snow held off.

Four o’clock was already darkening into another night. They heard the motor and said nothing. Mim swept up Hildie, lifted their coats off their hooks, and moved to the door.

It was the yellow truck. She stared, half believing that what she saw was only one more repetition of the vision she had suffered so often during the long days of waiting. It was not until the truck was so close that she could pick out the features of Dunsmore and Mudgett that she took Hildie’s arm and rushed her out the back door.

Ma made her way into the kitchen and stood by the sink, upright between her canes. John stood behind the closed door waiting.

Perly led the way up the walk, unarmed as always, moving with big-boned ease. He was a perfect target for a sniper hiding, say, behind the unmended upstairs window. As if he read John’s thought, Mudgett, following warily behind the auctioneer, his hand near his gun, glanced upward at the second-story windows, then with a quick darting motion, turned to his left to check the dark opening to the barn.

John opened the door himself and the two men stepped inside and stopped with their backs to the door, the cold spreading from them.