Frankie Jones came back to town for the first time since 1954. He slouched behind the wheel of his eight-year-old Chevy. He recognized a storefront or two as he cruised slowly down Main Street. Broxell's jewelry shop was still there to his amazement. It looked shrunken, however, a reduced fragment of what he carried in his memory. The whole street looked as if his old hometown had borrowed it from somewhere else and transplanted it here.
Curtains covered some of the storefront windows; Frankie recognized low-income pads when he saw them. Other windows were boarded up. Some were plastered with posters to save kids from drugs or something. The old street just moved out to a mall somewhere, Frankie thought. He couldn't count how many fractured towns like this he had seen in years of driving the country.
The iron company had vanished. He remembered its huge buildings, yards, and tracks running from the river all the way to the other end of town along Dutch Creek. It had given the town its reason for being in the old days. It defined the place as Frankie remembered it. In the dark nights when he was a kid, he would hear the huge overhead crane grinding its way across the open hearth. He would hear whistles signaling action at critical moments. This would make him feel that the town was an important place, where people from town made important things. The sounds never left his mind in all the years. Now that he found that their source was an empty space, Frankie's already-strained feelings worsened. The refrain that had been dogging him for the last hour, as he headed for the town, intensified in his head. You don't have to be doing this, it said.
Frankie left the town when he was nineteen and never returned until now. It was during the Korean war. He volunteered for the draft and after basic training at Fort Benning shipped out to the Far East. He did his tour in the Transportation Corps in the odd war that was not supposed to be a war and got out with a moderate wound in the leg. The foster parents who raised him lost little love on him, and he didn't think they wanted to see him again. He was a loner in high school. There were no good friends to pull him back. Except Marie Pietra. And she was dead. When he hit California and mustered out, he stayed and started driving a tractor-trailer, a skill he owed to Uncle Sam. Driving truck became his life. The road became his home. There he grew old and weary. Even in retirement he kept moving.
When he came to the west end of Main Street, where the town grid began to break up, Frankie turned left on Walnut Road, which used to form the outer edge of town. Now on his right he saw blocks of houses where he remembered fields. His Chevy seemed to be setting its own course. When it came to Whitehouse Road, it turned right and headed into the neighboring township. After a mile or so, it crossed the stone bridge across Pickring Run and then took a left onto Straw Spring Road. It was as if Frankie were just along for the ride.
But he was by now growing aware that he did have to be doing this after all. He probably had been wanting to come here for forty-five years but could never quite be conscious of it. It wasn't that his car had gained a will of its own.
Just beyond the bridge on the corner of Straw Spring Road, he saw that the township had put an administration building. His old Chevy pulled into a parking space near the woods in back where it would not stand out.
Then Frankie began walking along the road toward Straw Spring. He remembered it might be a half mile at most. On the way, of course, he knew he would have to pass the old Sunday School building.
When he was in high school, Straw Spring was a trysting place for kids with cars. It wasn't much of a place. Just a concrete trough where water pooled from a pipe in the ground. The water ran out of a spill at the top of the trough into a shallow stream. The stream paralleled the road down to the Pickring. The spring lay off the road a little distance so that five or six cars could comfortably pull in. During the day townspeople came and filled bottles for drinking at home. At night, the lovers listened to the tinkle of the water while they did their secret things to one another.
An etiquette surrounded the place in those days. No one in a car ever said boo to the people in another car. The rule was, don't look, don't talk, don't tell. Occasionally a township cop would harass a kissing couple by tapping on a window and then retreating. The young couple had to guess whether they should stay or go. If they stayed, he might come back and see who they were. Odds favored staying and most of them stayed most of the time, including Frankie and Marie. The cop seemed to behave like a benign kennel keeper.
In the months when they went together, before he left for the service, Frankie's old junker was a regular fixture at the spring. The customs of the place suited their furtive ways. Funny, he thought, remembering. Even though they grew up in the same part of town and knew each other since they were little, they never felt anything between them until their senior year in school. When they started hanging around, they both felt self-conscious about the town seeing them. They tried to keep out of sight. Mostly, they would meet in the alley at night and drive out to the spring.
Frankie walked along the edge of the narrow road with a quick nervousness. Because of his old wound, he had to throw his left leg so that he appeared to limp slightly. He came to the old Sunday School building before he realized it. He stopped walking and stared. He couldn't remember ever seeing the embedded stone in the wall that said 1882. Someone had added onto the original structure and made a comfortable home. The cellar well blazed in his mind but the new construction had covered it over. Probably the people living there didn't even know what had happened--although Frankie had a hard time imagining that.
A dog barked by the algae-covered pond. It pulled at its rope and the commotion made Frankie want to move on before someone wondered what he was doing there. He waited awhile nevertheless, staring. So this is all, he thought.
When he arrived at the remains of the spring a little farther up the road, he also just stood and stared awhile. The water no longer flowed. A rusty cap was on the pipe. The water trough was a battered hulk of concrete, filled with earth and topped with fast-food trash. Some houses had gone up in the farm field just beyond the row of trees along the stream. Cars parking at the spring at night would annoy the owners, Frankie thought. He saw "No Parking" signs nailed to two nearby trees.
He finally slumped on the edge of the trough and stared at the ground with his shoulders hunched over, no longer able to evade the embossed memory of Marie. This was the last place he ever was with her. His number was coming up in the draft, so he volunteered to go right away. Here in the old junker she said she loved him. While Frankie never could say things like that, he allowed himself to believe then that he loved her too. The morning after, he left for Benning.
A week or so later, police came from home to pull him out of the training rotation and ask him questions. In his memory, he sat through their interrogation as if he were out of body. Their questions and his answers seemed to take place in his absence. They had greeted him with the information that Marie Pietra's battered body had been discovered stuffed down the cellar well of the old abandoned Sunday School building on Straw Spring Road three days after he left town. That information sent Frankie somewhere else. It didn't occur to him that they thought of him as a possible murderer until after the whole episode ended and he was back in his barracks.
They couldn't build a case against Frankie on their findings, and he never heard from the police again. He bought the hometown paper by mail and followed the story until it petered out. The paper trafficked in theories after it exhausted the facts. The Mafia killed her as repayment for something done by someone in her family. A GI from the Army hospital picked her up and raped her. A driver accidentally ran her down while she was out walking and hid her body.
But Marie Pietra's murder was never solved. On anniversaries of the event, the town paper would resurrect the story and kindle the horror again. Sometimes, as he traveled the highways, Frankie would hear about it again. In time, he learned how to avoid feeling anything about it. He would roar the engine. He would take the outside lane for a long stretch. Eventually, though, he would have to ease off the pedal; he would have to move out of the passing lane. Straw Spring Road would remain on his itinerary whether he liked it or not.
Frankie stood for a final moment and looked at the remains of Straw Spring. He was hurting as he walked back along the road toward his car. He felt as if the rundown town and the redone Sunday School building and defunct Straw Spring had conflated into a hard ball. The ball had flown into his stomach and had knocked the breath out of him. By the time he reached the Chevy, he was starting to breathe more regularly. Something like relief, long-awaited, began to happen to him. He had waited so long he almost had forgotten that he had never stopped waiting.
Pulling out of the parking lot of the township administration building, Frankie passed a police car coming in. As he drove by, the young cop behind the wheel eyed the old Chevy and the old guy in it with curiosity. Frankie pulled out carefully and drove straight to the Expressway. Frankie Jones was gone from town for good.
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11 July 1999 Copyright © 1999
Richard P. Richter
