Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

Earl felt at the center of this web of activity, seated as he was at the position of power in the long, shadowed study, in his father’s chair, facing the imposing desk with its row of clocks and phones. But it was, he thought, a sensation of spurious privilege; he was, in truth, isolated from the lines of important function anywhere beyond this house. He was bitterly aware of that. Unconnected in any way to the powers of Harlequin or Summitt City.

The feeling he had talking to Sergeant Ledge, the furious, belittling anger, was intensified now by the faint laughter from his mother’s room. He was never really at the center of things...

He remembered Ledge, silent, weathered-burned features, eyes that hadn’t respected him. Urgent, the man had said, serious matters, but not for Earl Thomson, those serious matters always swirled tantalizingly beyond him.

The name was in the local phone book, a quick check disclosed — Harry J. Selby, with an address on Mill Lane, R.D., Muhlenburg.

Intelligence was the “eye of the command,” they had taught him at Rockland, and reconnaissance was its “brains and nerves.”

Tearing up the notes he had made of Ledge’s call, Earl dropped them into the fireplace where they burst into flames on the glowing logs.

A small farmtown on Route One between Philadelphia and Baltimore, Muhlenburg was only twenty-odd miles from the Thomson estate in Wahasset. Within half an hour after Ledge’s call from Summitt City, Earl Thomson’s red Porsche turned at Pyle’s Corners in Muhlenburg and headed up Fairlee Road toward Harry Selby’s farm.

A housing park appeared, a lighted sprawl of trailers and motor homes. Several miles beyond it Earl came to Mill Lane, a narrow, curving blacktop. A young girl was riding a bicycle up the road toward a gate marked by split-rail fencing. Thomson saw a sign that read selby glowing in his headlights.

Passing the girl in the dusk, Earl had only an impression of blond hair held back with a ribbon, thin white legs pumping hard, and tight denim shorts. In his rear-view mirror he saw the girl turn into the driveway marked selby and pedal through a row of trees toward a house where a dog was barking...

At a bar on the main highway, Earl had a bag of potato chips and two bottles of beer. He smoked several cigarettes and played a pinball machine. It was dark when he drove back to Mill Lane. The Selby house was set back from the road. He could see the lights through the trees. Now he didn’t hear the dog.

He drove past the gate and down a short hill to Fairlee Road. Making a U-turn, he went back up the blacktop, slowly this time with his window rolled down.

The silence put him on edge, and so did the slow, heavy rush of wind in the trees. At the top of the hill, Earl noticed an overgrown entrance to an old logging road, a narrow trail that seemed to run across the top of the Selby meadow. The gully in front of it was floored with weather-warped logs and the entrance itself was choked with honeysuckle and thin saplings.

Earl turned into the opening, fed gas to his powerful car and slowly forced a way through the undergrowth. Soon he was clear of it, topping a rise that gave him a view of a shining pond, a grove of squat fruit trees and the Selby house beyond them, bright with lights on two floors, like a small ocean liner in the darkness.

A woman moved about on the first floor. He could see her through the window, a wide-hipped, indistinct figure. She seemed to be clearing a table.

Taking binoculars from the glove compartment, Earl studied the house. Smoke rose from a chimney, a spark flared occasionally. Lamps mounted on tall posts illuminated the driveway and garage. Beyond he made out a small log cabin, a kennel run and neatly stacked rows of firewood.

Movement at the second floor window caught his eyes. It was the girl he’d seen on the bicycle. She was taking the ribbon from her hair. Adjusting the scopes, he brought her face into sharp focus. She was shaking her head, loosening her hair and letting it tumble back and forth around her shoulders.

He could see her red mouth, and the shine of her lips when she moistened them. She looked so close in the scopes that he could imagine putting out his hand and touching her.

Harry Selby’s daughter.

The “eyes of command” told him she was the key to their problem. Her father must love her very much. If she had trouble of some sort, an accident, say, Harry Selby would return quickly. No question about it...

The excitement he’d felt earlier was intensified by something free and defiant in the way she shook out her hair and pulled off her blouse. They always knew what they were up to, even when they assumed they were alone and no one would see, keeping in practice...

She unbuttoned the waistband of her shorts. They were so tight she had to wriggle her hips to get them off. A falling coldness settled into his stomach and loins. He was oblivious to everything else around him. The riot in his blood nearly betrayed him. He didn’t hear the furious barking until it was almost too late.

The dog raced toward him across the meadow, huge and black in the moonlight, a German shepherd with a small boy running behind him.

“Blazer, Blazer, what is it?” he had shouted, and it was this sound that alerted Earl and broke his rigid trance.

He hadn’t cut the engine, the Porsche was idling softly. Earl backed rapidly from the logging road, smashing recklessly through the thick coils of underbrush.

As he accelerated and drove away, the blast of the engine drowned out the fading challenge of the big guard dog.

Later that evening Harry Selby drove back to the motel in Memphis. The party at Jarrell’s had been frustrating and — what the hell was the word for it — opaque, that was it. He had faced what seemed to be unreflecting surfaces wherever he turned. A dozen or so people had been there, enjoying baked chicken and a huge salad of fresh vegetables.

Clem Stoltzer, Lee Crowley and the Ledges were on hand, and a neatly groomed man with horn-rimmed glasses, the environmental director, Froelich Nash.

Crowley and Froelich Nash chatted with him. “As Mr. Nash can tell you,” Crowley said, “Summitt’s an old-fashioned kind of place. But it’s like a mirror of the future. That’s why it works.”

Jazz tapes sounded loudly. Subdued lights from fluorescent tubing played across the plants and ferns.

Froelich Nash said, “Crowley’s point is simplistic. Summitt works because we control the value of our money.” He removed his glasses and polished them carefully. “We control the price of foodstuffs and shelter. We have our own beef and poultry farms. Rents are controlled by the council. We’ve stopped inflation here.”

Sergeant Ledge took him away to meet his wife, a woman with large, calm eyes. Later Stoltzer explained with serious intensity some things he had neglected to mention about productions operations and estimates.

Jennifer brought him a plate of food and told him an amusing story about falling asleep in the sauna that afternoon and waking to find that — lie had missed the rest of it because someone turned up the music.

The flow of guests from room to room and the endless, cheerful talk created a porous barrier between him and Jarrell, and prevented them from talking. It wasn’t until he was leaving that they had a moment alone.

Selby said, “I’ve enjoyed meeting your friends, but I think we should get our business settled. I’ll come back tomorrow, okay?”

His brother had rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead as if to press away an insistent pain. “It’s not those goddamn lots, is it though, Harry? It’s the old man, and I understand that. But I’m not sure I knew him myself. Sometimes I’d think I was getting close to him, and then he’d slam a door in my face. Sometimes I almost can’t even remember what he looked like. There were times he wouldn’t let you know what he was thinking and that drove my mother crazy. A lot of things he didn’t leave us, a lot of things weren’t included in the old man’s estate. Our mutual father couldn’t have been so smart after all” — he was speaking rapidly, his voice rising — “spent half his life in the army and ended up with nothing.”