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 Neadeauseen deer out by Moosuntic Pond rubbin velvet off'n their antlersere the first robin showed up! Grass under the snow when shemelted! Green grass, Meara!'
'That so, Evvie?' George replied, since some reply seemed necessary. He was getting a headache.
'What?'
'THAT SO, AUNT EVVIE?' George Mear screamed. Saliva flew from his lips.
'Oh, ayuh!' Aunt Evvie howled back contentedly. 'And I seen beat lightnin last night late! Bad sign, Meara! Early beat'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, hecouldn't read the name on 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 madeone!' 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 mad 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 then he charges you what he said it was gonna cost. Funny way to do business, huh?' And he drove away, leaving Vic to wonder if the mailman had been serious or if he (Vic) had just been on the receiving end of some obscure Yankee joke.
But he had called Camber, and one day in July (a much cooler July than the one which would follow a year later), he and Donna and Tad had driven out to Camber's place together. It really was far
out; twice Vic had to stop and ask directions, and it was then that he began to call those farthest reaches of the township East Galoshes Corners.
He pulled into the Camber dooryard, the back wheel clunking louder than ever. Tad, then three, was sitting on Donna Trenton's lap, laughing up at her; a ride in Daddy's 'no-top' always put him in a fine mood, and Donna was feeling pretty fine herself.
A boy of eight or nine was standing in the yard, hitting an old baseball with an even older baseball bat. The ball would travel through the air, strike the side of the barn, which VIC assumed was also Mr. Camber's garage, and then roll most of the way back.
'Hi,' the boy said. 'Are you Mr. Trenton?'
'That's right,' Vic said.
'I'll get my dad,' the boy said, and went into the barn.
The three Trentons got out, and Vic walked around to the back of his jag and squatted by the bad wheel, not feeling very confident.
Perhaps he should have tried to nurse the car into Portland after all.
The situation out here didn't look very promising; Camber didn't even have a sign hung out.
His meditations were broken by Donna, calling his name nervously. And then: 'Oh my God, Vic -'
He got up quickly and saw a huge dog emerging from the barn. For one absurd moment he wondered if it really was a dog, or maybe some strange and ugly species of pony. Then, as the dog padded out of the shadows of the barn's mouth, he saw its sad eyes and realized it was a Saint Bernard.
Donna had impulsively snatched up Tad and retreated toward the hood of the jag, but Tad was struggling impatiently in her arms, trying to get down.
'Want to see the doggy, Mom ... want to see the doggy!'
Donna cast a nervous glance at Vic, who shrugged, also uneasy.
