(which would go to Vin Marchant when the loudmouthed old bitch popped off, George Meara thought, and good riddance to you, Evvie) and smoking a Herbert Tareyton. She bellowed a greeting at Meara—her deafness had apparently convinced her that everyone else in the world had gone deaf in sympathy—and then shouted that they were going to have the hottest summer in thirty years. Hot early and hot late, Evvie bellowed leather-lunged into the drowsy eleven-o’clock quiet, and hot in the middle.
“That so?” George asked.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Is that so?” That was the other thing about Aunt Evvie; she got you shouting right along with her. A man could pop a blood vessel.
“I should hope to smile and kiss a pig if it ain’t!” Aunt Evvie screamed. The ash of her cigarette fell on the shoulder of George Meara’s uniform blouse, freshly dry-cleaned and just put on clean this morning; he brushed it off resignedly. Aunt Evvie leaned in the window of his car, all the better to bellow in his ear. Her breath smelled like sour cucumbers.
“Fieldmice has all gone outta the root cellars! Tommy Neadeau seen deer out by Moosuntic Pond rubbin velvet off’n their antlers ere the first robin showed up! Grass under the snow when she melted! Green grass, Meara!”
“That so, Evvie?” George replied, since some reply seemed necessary. He was getting a headache.
“What?”
“THAT SO, AUNT EVVIE?” George Meara screamed. Saliva flew from his lips.
“Oh, ayuh! Aunt Evvie howled back contentedly. ”And I seen heat lightnin last night late! Bad sign, Meara! Early heat’s a bad sign! Be people die of the heat this summer! It’s gonna be a bad un!”
“I got to go, Aunt Evvie!” George yelled. “Got a Special Delivery for Stringer Beaulieu!”
Aunt Evvie Chalmers threw her head back and cackled at the spring sky. She cackled until she was fit to choke and more cigarette ashes rolled down the front of her housedress. She spat the last quarter inch of cigarette out of her mouth, and it lay smoldering in the driveway by one of her old-lady shoes—a shoe as black as a stove and as tight as a corset; a shoe for the ages.
“You got a Special Delivery for Frenchy Beaulieu? Why, he couldn’t read the name an his own tombstone!”
“I got to go, Aunt Evvie!” George said hastily, and threw his car in gear.
“Frenchy Beaulieu is a stark natural-born fool if God ever made one!” Aunt Evvie hollered, but by then she was hollering into George Meara’s dust; he had made good his escape.
She stood there by her mailbox for a minute, watching him go. There was no personal mail for her; these days there rarely was. Most of the people she knew who had been able to write were now dead. She would follow soon enough, she suspected. The oncoming summer gave her a bad feeling, a scary feeling. She could speak of the mice leaving the root cellars early, or of heat lightning in a spring sky, but she could not speak of the heat she sensed somewhere just over the horizon, crouched like a scrawny yet powerful beast with mangy fur and red, smoldering eyes; she could not speak of her dreams, which were hot and shadowless and thirsty; she could not speak of the morning when tears had come for no reason, tears that did not relieve but stung the eyes like August-mad sweat instead. She smelled lunacy in a wind that had not arrived.
“George Meara, you’re an old fart,” Aunt Evvie said, giving the word a juicy Maine resonance which built it into something that was both cataclysmic and ludicrous: faaaaaat.
She began working her way back to the house, leaning on her Boston Post cane, which had been given her at a Town Hall ceremony for no more than the stupid accomplishment of growing old successfully. No wonder, she thought, the goddamned paper had gone broke.
She paused on her stoop, looking at a sky which was still spring-pure and pastel soft. Oh, but she sensed it coming: something hot. Something foul
A year before that summer, when Vic Trenton’s old Jaguar developed a distressing clunking sound somewhere inside the rear left wheel, it had been George Meara who recommended that he take it up to Joe Camber’s Garage on the outskirts of Castle Rock. “He’s got a funny way of doing things for around here,” George told Vic that day as Vic stood by his mailbox. “Tells you what the job’s gonna cost, then he does the job, and