Furnace. Muriel Gray
making him consider the possibility of backing up and turning on a soft verge, when without any warning or apparent reason, the road started to widen.
A house, set back in the trees, neat and spacious with the stars and stripes flapping listlessly on a flagpole by the porch, appeared on his right, followed by another three in a row almost identical a few hundred yards further on. No backwoods cabin these, but substantial suburban houses with trimmed gardens and decent wheels parked out front. Josh raised an eyebrow. This was what truckers called car-farmer country. The backwoods of the Appalachians were home to a thousand run-down trailers and cabins, sporting a statutory dozen cars and pick-ups half buried in their field, like the hicks who’d left them there to rot were hoping their ’69 Buick would sprout seeds and grow a new one.
Even on the main routes, Josh had been glared at by enough one-eyed crazy lab-specimens lounging on porches to know that this wasn’t exactly stockbroker belt. The kind of tidy affluence quietly stated by these houses was a surprise. But it was a welcome surprise to a man who needed his breakfast and wouldn’t have to buy it from a drooling Jed Clampit with a shotgun raised at his chest.
So half a mile and a dozen or more smart houses later, it was with relief that Josh hit the limits of the town to which these uncharacteristic middle-class dwellings were satellites. He drove past the brief and concise metal sign with a smile.
Furnace.
The wide street was now lined on either side by houses only slightly smaller than those on the edge of town. Standard roses bobbed in the breeze and hardy azaleas and forsythia were beginning to form islands of colour in a sea of smooth lawns.
It was five before seven and although it was early, people were about and Josh was heartened by the town’s potential for hot food to go. A kid rode past on a BMX, a sack of papers on his shoulder; two guys sweeping the road stood jawing against a tree, brushes in hand; a woman walking a dachshund on a ludicrously long leash stopped and waved to someone out picking up their paper from the front step. It was cosy, affluent, peaceful and ordinary. But it certainly was not what he had expected high up in this backwater of Virginia. Here, Jezebel felt ridiculously out of place, rumbling self-consciously through the street at little more than running pace, as though lack of speed could hide the bulk and noise of the Leviathan. The quiet street waking to its new day was like any other, but the affluence and suburban smugness was starting to jog a memory in Josh he didn’t like.
The Tanner ice cream sign.
A dumb, irrelevant memory, and one he tried to sideswipe. But it was there.
That ice cream sign.
For Josh as a child it stood at the corner of Hove and Carnegie like a religious icon; a circular piece of tin with the advertisement painted on it, supported at two points by a bigger circle of wire on a stand that let it spin in the wind. Judging by the arthritic squeaking of its rotations, it had stood at the end of his street like that for years, that dismal street his mother had brought them up on, a strange juxtaposition of the classes that Pittsburgh boasted, where the unwashed poor lived only a block away from their bosses, separated by no more than just a strip of trees or a row of stores.
Or an ice cream sign.
The Tanner girl and boy had big rosy cheeks and were licking the same cone of ice cream, vanilla topped with chocolate sauce. But when the wind blew the sign would spin and the picture, identical on both surfaces except for the children’s mouths which were closed on one side and open on the other, would animate into a frenzy of darting, licking tongues. Dean thought the sign was kind of spooky, especially when the wind was strong and the tongues went crazy. But Josh liked it. He liked it because it marked the beginning of Carnegie Lane, and more importantly, the end of Hove Avenue, an end to the crowded street that contained their tattered house. In Carnegie the houses were elegant and tall, keeping watch over their own spacious gardens with the demeanour of large wealthy women sitting on rugs at a race meeting. And unlike the regiment of dreary wooden houses that included the Spillers’, every one was different. Some were brick with wide white columned porches tangled with wisteria and honeysuckle. Others had stone facades and glass conservatories, or European affectations of mock battlements and balustrades. And in addition to the neat front lawns that were uniformly green all the way to the sidewalk, each, Josh knew for sure, had generous and private back yards.
School, the stores and everything that Josh needed to service his uneventful life was at the eastern end of Hove. In other words there was no call to go west into Carnegie at all. It merely led to wealthier parts of town, parts that were decidedly not for the Spillers. But he’d lost count of the times he’d found himself strolling past the squeaking Tanner ice cream sign, stepping into Carnegie with a roll to his pre-pubescent gait that tried to say he lived there.
At least he had until one searingly hot August. Josh was eleven and the day had been long and empty. His mother’s return from her job at a drug factory, moving piles of little blue and white capsules along a conveyor belt all day with a gloved hand, had been a cranky and irritable one. Particularly since she discovered that neither Dean nor Josh had made any attempt to prepare supper, but had instead been throwing stones up at the remains of an old weathervane that clung to a neighbour’s roof, in a contest to free it finally from its rusting bracket.
Joyce Spiller had sat down heavily on the three car tyres piled by the back door they used as a seat, and glared at the boys, but particularly Josh, with tired, rheumy eyes. Her voice was full of sarcastic venom.
‘Sure do appreciate you workin’ all day long, Mom. So to thank you for that act of kindness, please accept this cool glass of lemonade and a big juicy sandwich that me an’ my shit-for-manners brother have had all friggin’ day to prepare.’
Dean had blinked at his boots in shame, but for some reason, looking at this woman in her short nylon workcoat, her thin brown hair tied back with a plain elastic band, and her face that looked ten years older than her numerical age, Josh had suddenly despised her. Why should he look after her, when other kids got to come home from school and be met by a Mom who’d fetch them lemonade and a sandwich? What kind of a raw deal was this, having a mother who worked all day, sometimes nights too, who was always in a foul mood and looked like shit? The absence of a father, a taboo subject in the Spiller house, was bad enough, but the fact that they lived in this shambolic house and never went on vacation was all this failure of a woman’s fault.
Josh had stared back at her with contempt and then run from the yard out into the street.
He thanked God that until her dying day, his mother had taken that action for a show of shame and remorse. It was anything but. He’d seen the Tanner’s ice cream sign slowly rotating in the searing hot breeze and had headed straight for the leafy calm of Carnegie, where the people lived who knew how to treat their children. Maybe if he stopped and spoke to a kid up there, they might get friendly and he’d be asked in. He’d often thought of it. That day he decided he would make it a reality. Then she’d see. She’d come home and he’d be in one of those yards drinking Coke with new friends, who had stuff like basketball nets stuck to their walls and blue plastic-walled swimming pools you climbed into from a ladder. There’d be no more kicking around in a dusty yard with nothing to do except scrap with Dean and wait for a worn-out mother to come home and cuss at them.
He ran as far as the sign, then slowed up and turned into the shimmering street with a casual step. The sign had been making a wailing forlorn sound, a kind of whea eee, whea eee like some forest animal’s young looking for its parent. Josh strolled into the splendour of the street and walked slowly, gazing up at the grand houses, smelling the blooms from their gardens. There had been nobody about except for one man who was rooting around in the trunk of a car parked out front.
Josh got ready to say hello as he approached, but on catching sight of him the man straightened up with legs apart, putting his hands on his hips in the manner of a Marine drill sergeant expecting trouble.
He stood like that, staring directly and aggressively at Josh, never taking his eyes from the small boy until he walked by. Josh had felt his cheeks burn.
It was then that he had noticed the sounds. Just background noises at first, but with the blood already beating