Paul Theroux - Murder in Mount Holly

Mr. Gibbon was a fuddy-duddy, not a geezer, but he was old, chewed his lips, dressed horribly and so often he was taken for a geezer. He lived in Miss Ball’s house on the second floor.

He had few possessions. Each possession had a special significance. There was his comb. It was part of a comb, about five plastic teeth at various distances apart on a bitten spine. Mr. Gibbon had used that same comb since boot camp. It was the last thing his aunt gave him. In fact, it was the last thing his aunt gave anybody, since she died on the railroad platform waving goodbye to the seventeen-year-old Charlie Gibbon as his train pulled away bound for New Jersey. So the comb was special. He used the comb often. The strange and even sick part of it all was that he used it without a mirror. He would stand, one arm crooked over his head; his eyes on an object so distant that it had no name, and he would scrape away at his scalp with those five plastic teeth.

Like most old men he wore his watch to bed. He had forgotten the last time it was off his wrist. But he remembered distinctly the time he got it, a bargain at the Fort Sam Baker PX in Missouri, two dollars and sixty cents. It was a huge watch and ticked very loudly. The chrome had flaked off and revealed brass underneath. The watch was so big that even Mr. Gibbon could wind it. And Mr. Gibbon had very thick fingers.

Mr. Gibbon’s other valuable possessions were his.45 caliber pistol (he had killed a man with it, he said), his canteen with the bullet hole through the side (it had foiled the killing of Mr. Gibbon), a picture of his wife and two daughters in a bamboo frame he had bought somewhere near the equator somewhere on an island somewhere, also his army discharge papers, his khakis, his clips of bullets, his hunting knife (“A man should own enough knife to protect himself with,” he said), his neatly made bed, his paper bags and his tennis shoes.

Of these last two items the bags were the most important; the tennis shoes were more of a sentimental thing. Mr. Gibbon made it a practice to carry paper bags wherever he went, wrinkled brown-paper bags. It was hard to tell what was in the bags since they were not bulky enough to show the outlines of any distinguishable object. Even if they did contain a large object they were wrinkled enough to conceal the object’s identity. Often the paper bags contained nothing more than many carefully folded paper bags. Mr. Gibbon enjoyed the stares of people who were perplexed by a particularly huge brown-paper bag he had carried into town one day. He did not take the bus that day. Instead he walked all the way home, past all the eyes of most of his neighbors. What was in the bag? More bags. Mr. Gibbon smiled and tucked his secret under his arm. Many times he hailed and hooted a good morning to another old man merely because the other man was also carrying a bag. He imagined a fraternity of old men carrying armloads of wrinkled bags. He saw them all the time.

The tennis shoes replaced his army boots, which he saved for special occasions (riding in a car, resting, cleaning his pistol). They were black basketball sneakers — the kind that a high school student wears after school. The canvas was black, the rubber was white. In spite of the thick rubber soles they added no spring to his step. He walked along the sidewalk with a pflap-pflip-pflap-pflip of the canvas and rubber, the long lacings trailing several inches behind. Over the anklebone there was a round label which read:

OFFICIAL TENNIES

“The Choice of Major Leaguers!”

He wore no socks. Usually his trousers were baggy and long enough to conceal the fact, but sometimes his white ankle flesh could be seen over the black tennis shoes as he walked along the sidewalk looking very much like a little wooden man marching down a plank, weaving from side to side.

What nearly everyone noticed first about Mr. Gibbon were his eyes. They were cloudy, pearly and ill-looking. It was his eyes that got him discharged from the army and not the fact that he was at retirement age. He had changed his age several times on his file card to make absolutely sure that he would die in the army. There was no way to disperse the fog in his eyes. He could see all right, his eyes were “damn good” and he had never been sick a day in his life. Yet his eyes looked wrong. They were the wrong color. Indeed, there seemed to be something seriously wrong with those eyes. They were the color of nonfat milk.

Mr. Gibbon’s nose was sharp, as was his chin and the ridge of his head where the skull sutures pushed against the skin. His neck was a collection of wattles, folds and very thin wrinkles. The base of his neck seemed small, bird-like, as if it had been choked thin by a tight collar for many years.

And his mouth. “I’ve got fifteen teeth,” Mr. Gibbon was fond of saying. The teeth were not visible. They were somewhere within the shapeless lips, which stretched and chewed even when Mr. Gibbon was not eating. It was the kind of mouth that caused people to think that he was a nasty man.

From the rear he looked like nearly every other man his age. His head was wide at the top, not a dome, but a wedge. The back of his skinny neck was an old unhappy face of wrinkles. There was even a wrinkle the size of a small mouth, frowning from the back of Mr. Gibbon’s neck. His ears stuck out, his shoulders were bony and rounded, his spine protruded. He was vaguely bucket-assed, but not so much bucket-like as edgy, a flat bottom that is known as starchy, as if it contained a large piece of cardboard.

“You can’t rile me,” Mr. Gibbon said. It was mostly true. He stayed calm most of the time, and when he was angry did not speak: instead he wheezed, he puffed, he blew, he sighed, he groaned. And maybe he would mumble an obscenity or two.

His favorite song was the National Anthem, and the less violins, the more brass, the better. An old song, he said, but a good solid one. You’d be proud to get up on your hind legs and be counted when it played — it was that kind of song, a patriotic song. “If you wanna name names, I’m a patriot,” said Mr. Gibbon. He liked the anonymity of citizenship and patriotism. He wanted to be in that great bunch of great people that listened, that saluted, that obeyed the country’s command whether at home or abroad, whether down at the pool hall or far afield, at work or at play. The song ran through him and charged his whole body and made it tingle. Mr. Gibbon wheezed and spat when he was angry, but he also wheezed and spat when he was emotionally involved; he got choked up. Something of a patriotic nature always brought rheum to his eyes: hearing the anthem, seeing the flag or his army buddies. Or just the thought of them.

He had resigned himself to being out of the army as much as he could. You couldn’t do it completely. He knew that. It was in the blood. It was something that wouldn’t leave you for all your born days. Something you wouldn’t want to leave even if it were possible. Something great and good. Something powerful.

It was a sad day when the army doctor took a last look at Mr. Gibbon’s cloudy eyes and said, “There’s something sick about them eyes. I don’t know what medical science would say, but I don’t like the looks of them. .”

That was all there was to it. In a few days Mr. Gibbon was out of the army. He had been in for thirty-eight years. “That’s a lifetime for some people, thirty-eight years,” he would say. And when he was feeling very low he would say, “That was my lifetime, thirty-eight years in Uncle Sam’s army. Just hanging on now for dear life, and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

Mr. Gibbon was smart enough to know that things were different in the army. Life was better, if not richer. There was good company, a nice bunch of kids. Raw kids, greenhorns, but they learned in the long run. They learned to pitch-in and fall-to. Life in the army was a constant reward. It was Mr. Gibbon’s first real haircut, grammar school, a trip to the zoo. For a man who had never had a youth that he remembered, and who could not remember whether (or not) he had passed through puberty, the army was a tremendously satisfying experience. Not really the romance of the recruiting poster, although there was more of that in it than people ordinarily thought. In the army you were someone, a man in khakis, a full-time threat to the enemy; Mr. Gibbon was “Pop” to a lot of young kids and a buddy to a lot of the others. Need a little advice on VD, a needle and thread, some notepaper, card tricks, funny stories? Want to know what the Jerries were really like? Ask Pop Gibbon.