they just say, “Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?”
He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.
“Herbert?”
He turned around, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know yet. They’ve got me on hold.”
“On hold? At quarter past two in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not Johnny, is it? Nothing’s happened to Johnny?”
“I don’t know,” he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about How these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension ...
Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, “Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your closet.” That would earn him Vera Smith’s Sweet Smile for Unbelieving and Hellbound Husbands. At two o’clock in the morning, and on hold to boot, he didn’t think he could take that particular smile.
The phone clunked again and a different male voice, an older one, said, “Hello, Mr. Smith?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. Sergeant Meggs of the state police, Orono branch.”
“Is it my boy? Something about my boy?”
Unaware, he sagged onto the seat of the phone nook. He felt weak all over.
Sergeant Meggs said, “Do you have a son named John Smith, no middle initial?”
“Is he all right? Is he okay?”
Footsteps on the stairs. Vera stood beside him. For a moment she looked calm, and then she clawed for the phone like a tigress. “What is it? What’s happened to my Johnny?”
Herb yanked the handset away from her, splintering one of her fingernails. Staring at her hard he said, “I am handling this.”
She stood looking at him, her mild, faded blue eyes wide above the hand clapped to her mouth.
“Mr. Smith, are you there?”
Words that seemed coated with novocaine fell from Herb’s mouth. “I have a son named John Smith, no middle initial, yes. He lives in Cleaves Mills. He’s a teacher at the high school there.”
“He’s been in a car accident, Mr. Smith. His condition is extremely grave. I’m very sorry to have to give you this news.” The voice of Meggs was cadenced, formal.
“Oh, my God,” Herb said. His thoughts were whirling. Once, in the army, a great, mean, blond-haired Southern boy named Childress had beaten the crap out of him behind an Atlanta bar. Herb had felt like this then, unmanned, all his thoughts knocked into a useless, smeary sprawl. “Oh, my God,” he said again.
“He’s dead?” Vera asked. “He’s dead? Johnnys dead?”
He covered the mouthpiece. “No,” he said. “Not dead.”
“Not dead! Not dead!” she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. “O God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that You show Thy tender care and loving mercy to our son and shelter him with Your loving hand we ask it in the name of Thy only begotten Son Jesus and ...”
“Vera shut up!”
For a moment all three of them were silent, as if considering the world and its not-so-amusing ways: Herb, his bulk squashed into the phone nook bench with his knees crushed up against the underside of the desk and a bouquet of plastic flowers in his face; Vera with her knees planted on the hallway furnace grille; the unseen Sergeant Meggs who was in a strange auditory way witnessing this black comedy.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Yes. I ... I apologize for the ruckus.”
“Quite understandable,” Meggs said.
“My boy ... Johnny ... was he driving his Volkswagen?”
“Deathtraps, deathtraps, those little beetles are deathtraps,” Vera babbled. Tears streamed down her face, sliding over the smooth hard surface of the nightpack like rain on chrome.
“He was in a Bangor & Orono Yellow Cab,” Meggs said. “I’ll give you the situation as I understand it now. There were three vehicles involved,