In the late summer and early fall of 1979, Zingers had been successfully test-marketed in Boise, Idaho, Scranton, Pennsylvania, and in Roger's adopted Maine hometown of Bridgton. Roger had told Vic with a shudder that he wouldn't let the twins near it with a ten-foot pole (although he had been pleased when Althea told him the kids had clamored for it when they saw it shelved at Gigeure's Market). 'It's got more sugar than whole grain in it, and it looks like the side of a firebarn.'
Vic had nodded and replied innocently enough, with no sense of prophecy, 'The first time I looked in one of those boxes, I thought it was full of blood.'
'So what do you think?' Roger repeated. He had made it halfway through his sandwich as Vic reviewed the dismal train of events in his mind. He was becoming more and more sure that in Cleveland old man Sharp and his aging kid were looking again to shoot the messenger for the message.
'Guess we better try.'
Roger clapped him on the shoulder. 'My man,' he said. 'Now eat up.'
But Vic wasn't hungry.
The two of them had been invited to Cleveland to attend an
'emergency meeting' that was to be held three weeks after the Fourth of July - a good many of the Sharp regional sales managers and executives were vacationing, and it would take at least that long to get them all together. One of the items on the agenda had to do directly with Ad Worx: 'an assessment of the association to this point,' the letter had said. Which meant, Vic assumed, that the kid was using the Zingers debacle to dump them at last.
About three weeks after Red Razberry Zingers went national, enthusiastically - if gravely - pitched by the Sharp Cereal Professor ('Nope, nothing wrong here'), the first mother had taken her little one to the hospital, nearly hysterical and sure the child was bleeding internally. The little girl, victim of nothing more serious than a low-grade virus, had thrown up what her mother had first believed to be a huge amount of blood.
Nope, nothing wrong here.
That had been in Iowa City, Iowa. The following day there had been seven more cases. The day after, twenty-four. In all cases the parents of children afflicted with vomiting or diarrhea, had rushed the kids to the hospital, believing them to be suffering internal bleeding. After that, the cases had skyrocketed - first into the hundreds, then into the thousands. In none of these cases had the vomiting and/or diarrhea been caused by the cereal, but that was generally overlooked in the growing furor.
Nope, not a single thing wrong here.
The cases had spread west to east. The problem was the food dye that gave Zingers its zingy red color. The dye itself was harmless, but that was also mostly overlooked. Something had gone wrong, and instead of assimilating the red dye, the human body simply passed it along. The goofed-up dye had only gotten into one batch of cereal, but it had been a whopper of a batch. A doctor told Vic
that if a child who had just died after ingesting a big bowl of Red Razberry Zingers were the subject of an autopsy, the postmortem would reveal a digestive tract as red as a stop sign. The effect was strictly temporary, but that had been overlooked too.
Roger wanted them to go down with all guns firing, if they were to go down. He had proposed marathon conferences with the Image-Eye people in Boston, who actually did the spots. He wanted to talk with the Sharp Cereal Professor himself, who had gotten so involved with his role that he was mentally and emotionally torn up over what had happened. Then on to New York, to talk to the marketing people. Most important, it would be almost two weeks at Boston's Ritz-Carlton and at New York's UN Plaza, two weeks Vic and Roger would spend mostly in each other's hip pockets, digesting the input and brainstorming as they had in the old days. What Roger hoped would come out of it was a rebound campaign that would blow the socks off both old man Sharp and the kid. Instead of going to Cleveland with their necks shaved for the drop of the guillotine blade, they would show up with battle plans drawn to reverse the effects of the Zingers snafu. That was the theory. In practice, they both realized that their chances were about as good as they were for a pitcher who deliberately sets out to throw a no-hitter.
Vic had other problems. For the last eight months or so, he had sensed that he and his wife were drifting slowly apart. He still loved her, and he damn near idolized Tad, but things had gone from a little uneasy to bad, and he sensed that there were worse things - and worse times - waiting. just over the horizon, maybe.
This trip, a grand tour from Boston to New York to Cleveland, coming at what should have been their at-home season, their doing-things-together season, was maybe not such a hot idea.
When he looked at her face lately he saw a stranger lurking just below its planes and angles and curves.
And the question. It played over and over in his mind on nights when he wasn't able to sleep, and such nights had become more common lately. Had she taken a lover? They sure didn't sleep together much any more. Had she done it? He hoped it wasn't so, but what did he think? Really? Tell the truth, Mr. Trenton, or you'll be forced to pay the consequences.
He wasn't sure. He didn't want to be sure. He was afraid that if he became sure, the marriage would end. He was still completely gone on her, had never so much as considered an extramarital fling, and he could forgive her much. But not being cuckolded in his own home. You don't want to wear those horns; they grow out of your ears, and kids laugh at the funny man on the street. He
'What?' Vic said, emerging from his reverie. 'I missed it, Rog.'
'I said, "That goddam red cereal." Unquote. My exact words.'
'Yeah,' Vic said. 'I'll drink to that.'
Roger raised his pilsner glass. 'Do it,' he said.
Vic did.
Gary Pervier sat out on his weedy front lawn at the bottom of Seven Oaks Hill on Town Road No. 3 about a week after Vic and Roger's depressing luncheon meeting at the Yellow Sub, drinking a screwdriver that was 25 percent Bird's Eye frozen orange juice and 75 percent Popov vodka. He sat in the shade of an elm that was in the last stages of rampant Dutch elm disease, his bottom resting against the frayed straps of a Sears, Roebuck mail-order lawn chair that was in the last stages of useful service. He was drinking Popov because Popov was cheap. Gary had purchased a large supply of it in New Hampshire, where booze was cheaper, on his last liquor run. Popov was cheap in Maine, but it was dirt cheap in New Hampshire, a state which took its stand for the finer things in life -
a fat state lottery, cheap booze, cheap cigarettes, and tourist attractions like Santa's Village and Six-Gun City. New Hampshire
was a great 'Old place. The lawn chair had slowly settled into his run-to-riot lawn, digging deep divots. The house behind the lawn had also run to riot; it was a gray, paint-peeling, roof-sagging shambles. Shutters hung. The chimney hooked at the sky like a drunk trying to get up from a tumble. Singles blown off in the previous winter's last big storm still hung limply from some of the branches of the dying elm. It ain't the Taj Mahal, Gary sometimes said, but who gives a shit?
Gary was, on this swelteringly hot late-June day, as drunk as a coot. This was not an uncommon state of affairs with him. He did not know Roger Breakstone from shit. He did not know Vic Trenton from shit. He didn't know Donna Trenton from shit, and if he had known her, he wouldn't have given a shit if the visiting team was throwing line drives into her catcher's mitt. He did know the Cambers and their dog Cujo; the family lived up the hill, at the end of Town Road No. 3. He and Joe Camber did a good deal of drinking together, and in a rather foggy fashion Gary realized that Joe Camber was already a goodly way down the road to alcoholism. It was a road Gary himself had toured extensively.
'Just a good-for-nothing drunk and I don't give a shit!' Gary told the birds and the singles in the diseased elm. He tipped his glass.
He fatted. He swatted a bug. Sunlight and shadow dappled his face.
Behind the house, a number of disemboweled cars had almost disappeared in the tall weeds. The ivy which grew on the west side of his house had gone absolutely apeshit, almost covering it. One window peeked out - barely - and on sunny days it glittered like a dirty diamond. Two years ago, in a drunken frenzy, Gary had uprooted a bureau from one of the upstairs rooms and had thrown it out a window - he could not remember why now. He had reglazed the window himself because it had let in one crotch of a draft come winter, but the bureau rested ,exactly where it had fallen. One drawer was popped out like a tongue.
In 1944, when Gary Pervier had been twenty, he had single-handedly taken a German pillbox in France and, following that exploit, had led the remains of his squad ten miles farther before collapsing with the six bullet wounds he had suffered in his charge of the machine-gun emplacement. For this he had been awarded one of his grateful country's highest honors, the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1968 he had gotten Buddy Torgeson down in Castle Falls to rum the medal into an ashtray. Buddy had been shocked. Gary told Buddy he would have gotten him to make it into a toilet bowl so he could shit in it, but it wasn't big enough.
Buddy spread the story, and maybe that had been Gary's intention, or maybe it hadn't.
Either way, it had driven the local hippies crazy with admiration.
In the summer of '68 most of these hippies were on vacation in the Lakes Region with their wealthy parents before returning to their colleges in September, where they were apparently studying up on Protest, Pot, and Pussy.
After Gary had his DSC turned into an ashtray by Buddy Torgeson, who did custom welding in his spare time and who worked days down to the Castle Falls Esso (they were all Exxon stations now, and Gary Pervier didn't give a shit), a version of the story found its way into the Castle Rock Call. The story was written by a local-yokel reporter who construed the act as an antiwar gesture. That was when the hippies started to show up at Gary's place on Town Road No. 3. Most of them wanted to tell Gary he was 'far out'. Some of them wanted to tell him he was
'some kind of heavy'. A few wanted to tell him that he was 'too fucking much'.
Gary showed them all the same thing, which was his Winchester
.30-.06. He told them to get off his property. As far as he was concerned they were all a bunch of long-haired muff-diving crab-crawling asshole pinko fucksticks. He told them he didn't give a
