on the second floor—the penthouse, he called it—where you could stand in your tux like Ramon Navarro, a big slug of Ripple wine in a balloon glass, and look down upon the vast, beating heart of Cleaves Mills: its hurrying after-show crowds, its bustling taxis, its neon signs. There are almost seven thousand stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.
Actually Cleaves Mills was mostly a main street with a stop-and-go light at the intersection (it turned into a blinker after 6 P.M.), about two dozen stores, and a small moccasin factory. Like most of the towns surrounding Orono, where the University of Maine was, its real industry was supplying the things students consumed—beer, wine, gas, rock ‘n’ roll music, fast food, dope, groceries, housing, movies. The movie house was The Shade. It showed art films and ’40’s nostalgia flicks when school was in. In the summertime it reverted to Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns.
Johnny and Sarah were both out of school a year, and both were teaching at Cleaves Mills High, one of the few high schools in the area that had not consolidated into a three- or four-town district. University faculty and administration as well as university students used Cleaves as their bedroom, and the town had an enviable tax base. It also had a fine high school with a brand-new media wing. The townies might bitch about the university crowd with their smart talk and their Commie marches to end the war and their meddling in town politics, but they had never said no to the tax dollars that were paid annually on the gracious faculty homes and the apartment buildings in the area some students called Fudgey Acres and others called Sleaze Alley.
Sarah rapped on his door and Johnny’s voice, oddly muffled, called, “It’s open, Sarah!”
Frowning a little, she pushed the door open. Johnny’s apartment was in total darkness except for the fitful yellow glow of the blinker half a block up the street. The furniture was so many humped black shadows.
“Johnny ... ?”
Wondering if a fuse had blown or something, she took a tentative step forward—and then the face appeared before her, floating in the darkness, a horrible face out of a nightmare. It glowed a spectral, rotting green. One eye was wide open, seeming to stare at her in wounded fear. The other was squeezed shut in a sinister leer. The left half of the face, the half with the open eye, appeared to be normal. But the right half was the face of a monster, drawn and inhuman, the thick lips drawn back to reveal snaggle teeth that were also glowing.
Sarah uttered a strangled little shriek and took a stumble-step backward. Then the lights came on and it was just Johnny’s apartment again instead of some black limbo, Nixon on the wall trying to sell used cars, the braided rug Johnny’s mother had made on the floor, the wine bottles made into candle bases. The face stopped glowing and she saw it was a dime-store Halloween mask, nothing more. Johnny’s blue eye was twinkling out of the open eyehole at her.
He stripped it off and stood smiling amiably at her, dressed in faded jeans and a brown sweater.
“Happy Halloween, Sarah,” he said.
Her heart was still racing. He had really frightened her. “Very funny,” she said, and turned to go. She didn’t like being scared like that.
He caught her in the doorway. “Hey ... I’m sorry.”
“Well you ought to be.” She looked at him coldly—or tried to. Her anger was already melting away. You just couldn’t stay mad at Johnny, that was the thing. Whether she loved him or not—a thing she was still trying to puzzle out—it was impossible to be unhappy with him for very long, or to harbor a feeling of resentment. She wondered if anyone had ever succeeded in harboring a grudge against Johnny Smith, and the thought was so ridiculous she just had to smile.
“There, that’s better. Man, I thought you were going to walk out on me.”
“I’m not a man.”
He cast his eyes upon her. “So I’ve noticed.”
She was wearing a bulky fur coat—imitation raccoon or something vulgar like that—and his innocent lechery made her smile again. “In this thing you couldn’t tell.”
“Oh, yeah, I can tell,” he said. He put an arm around her and kissed her. At first she wasn’t going to kiss back, but of course she did.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he said, and rubbed her nose companionably with his own before