Butcher's Moon

Three

A copper plate on a stone monument in front of the State Office Building on River Street explains that John Tyler, tenth President of the United States, delivered a speech on that spot during the presidential campaign of 1840, and that the name of the town was subsequently changed from Collinsport to Tyler in honor of the occasion. The copper plate doesn’t mention that Tyler was running for Vice-President at the time, on a slate headed by William Henry Harrison, nor that Tyler never did run for President himself but simply inherited the job when Harrison died a month after inauguration; but the omission has been more or less corrected by a historic-minded vandal who has written on the stone, just below the copper plate, in orange spray paint: “Remember Tippecanoe.”

By the time Collinsport became Tyler, it was already a prosperous river town on one of the principal waterways connecting the Mississippi with the Great Lakes. Lumber and farm produce were shipped through there, and industry started with a furniture plant and a small company that made farm wagons. At the turn of the century a typewriter factory opened, and a while later the wagon company switched to automobile bodies. The First World War added a paper-box factory, the Second World War added electronics plants, and the boom years of the sixties added computer manufacturing.

Tyler, with a population just under one hundred fifty thousand and a median income comfortably above the national average, was rich and soft and easy in its mind. Encircling the city, there was no wall.

Parker arrived at Tyler National Airport at two in the afternoon. The summer sun was shining, and the flat land all around the airport baked in the dry heat. The cab Parker got into had a sticker on the side window saying it was air-conditioned, but the driver explained the air-conditioning had broken down at the beginning of the summer and the boss was too cheap to get it fixed. “Because we’ll turn this one in anyway in September, you know?”

Parker didn’t answer. He watched the billboards go by, advertising hotels and airlines and cigarettes, and after giving him one quick look in the rear-view mirror, the driver left him alone.

They came into the city through the used-car lots. There was an election going on locally, with posters slapped up on telephone poles and board fences and leaning in barbershop windows; by the time they reached downtown, Parker knew that the two candidates for mayor were named Farrell and Wain. There were three or four times as many Farrell posters as Wain posters, which meant that Farrell had the most money to spend. Which meant Farrell had the support of the people who ran the town. Which probably meant Farrell would win.

Ohio House was a businessmen’s hotel near the railroad station, thirty years past its prime. Sheraton and Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn were all clustered together half a dozen blocks away, in an urban-renewal section by the river. Parker had chosen Ohio House because it was still a salesmen’s hotel, seedy but respectable, and for his purposes, the most anonymous possible place in town. Nowhere else would it be more likely for two male guests, both traveling alone, to know one another and want to get together for drinks before going on their separate ways.

Parker’s room was on the third floor front, with a good view of London Avenue, the town’s main street. Off to the right, Farrell had a banner proclaiming his candidacy spread across the street, hanging from light poles. Oh, yes, that was a winner.

There was a black-and-white television set on the dresser, covered with Scotch-taped handwritten notices from the management. On it, Parker watched reruns and game shows and local news programs until dinnertime. He ate in the hotel dining room with half a dozen other men, each of them alone at a separate table, most reading newspapers, one studying the contents of a display folder. Parker looked less like a salesman than the rest of them, but it wasn’t an impossible idea. He might have sold Army surplus equipment, or burglar alarms, or special materials to nightclubs.

After dinner Parker went back to the room again, but didn’t turn on the TV set. He sat in the dark in the one armchair and looked toward the windows, watching the reflected light from the traffic down below. It was a week night, so the noise level never got very loud.

At eight-thirty there was a knock at the door. Parker switched on the light and opened the door, and Grofield came in, grinning, saying, “A charming establishment. The chamber pot in my room is autographed A. Lincoln. Do you suppose it’s authentic?”

“Hello, Grofield,” Parker said. “Let’s go out to the park.”