Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

Winter Hiatus by James Powell

West sat down at his desk. A moment later the coffee cart arrived, the attendant’s sloppy grin announcing they’d issued another brandy ration because of the trouble outside. West sipped at the three fingers of cheap, hacksaw-edged liquid in the styrofoam cup. When it was gone, he turned back to the doorway and poised his pen as if he was working.

Probably James Powell’s darkest and most pungent vision since his “A Dirge for Clowntown,” which won the EQMM Readers Award for 1989...

The fields flashed by, all stubble, stooks, and golden sunshine. Then the train entered a shady slope of trees. Suddenly the trees fell away and there was the sun again, glinting on the church steeples of the town.

West felt the slowing of the train. Then he heard a familiar, unhurried voice say, “Happy Valley. Next stop is Happy Valley.” Still smiling, he turned from the window just as Mr. Vining, the conductor, leaned across to collect his ticket. The man had a dependable face and the visored cap with the Greenfields and Eldorado Line badge sat squarely on his head. “Welcome back, Mr. West. You’ve been a stranger.”

Before West could answer, the train gave a jolt and everything went dark.

When the light returned, it was dim and electric. West found himself back on the other train, the crowded commuter which, a second before, had slid to a stop deep inside Grand Central Station.

None of the passengers moved or spoke. For the first few moments, the railway car was ears and heartbeats. The week before, a roving band of street people and dentists — one of those strange alliances of the moment — had jumped the passengers as they surged out onto the platform, hitting them hard and mauling them badly. The passengers might have withstood the street people just by not showing fear. But dentists expect fear. Not finding it brought an extra frenzy to their attack.

So today the passengers listened until they were satisfied nothing was amiss before moving toward the exits. Those who hadn’t formed into fours did so now and went back to an old commuter custom of playing bridge on the train. Few had the nerves for the game any more, but a foursome remained the basic defensive unit.

West’s foursome let the drift toward the door bring them together. Out on the platform, West took the point. He’d been there the longest. The others called him the Old Man, although he was only thirty-five.

During the bunch-up at the platform gate, West noticed the singleton with the good shoulders and the alligator briefcase watching them again from the edge of the crowd. West’s people had christened the man the Hyena. Singletons were always eyeing foursomes, looking for someone showing the strain, someone whose place they might take. West glanced around at his people as they passed through the gate, wondering if the Hyena had seen something he’d missed. Then his mind turned to leading the way as they elbowed through the peripheral doubletons and singletons into the mainstream of foursomes heading for the downtown subway trains.

The passageway was a dark, littered, bloodstained slope as cold and endless as the turbulent streets above their heads. West set his jaw and lengthened his stride, eyes alert for trouble. But, God, his nerves were shot, his body utterly exhausted. And they were only a month into Winter Hiatus, those terrible weeks between the Christmas rush and Easter when the city, without tourists or daytrippers to feed on, feeds on itself.

West tensed. Up ahead where several passageways entered a small rotunda, a large black man with a scarred face and a filthy bandage on one hand was coming down an exit to the street holding a garbage can over his head. Moaning like a hurt child, the man hurled it into the fast-moving column of people. It hit a woman in a business suit sprinting at the edge of the crowd. She collapsed in a heap. West let himself be swept on by. There was no way to help her. The city demanded its daily quota of blood. Her blood, a tourist’s blood, West’s blood, it didn’t care.

Suddenly West remembered where he’d seen the guy with the garbage can before. He’d worked just down the hall in the public relations wing of the City Hall Annex when West first started on the taxi desk. What was his name? He hadn’t had the scars then.

Morgan. Morgan made himself something of a P.R. legend by concocting this phony jazz form — the Big Apple sound, he called it — and this whole stable of imaginary musicians who played it and the out-of-the-way clubs they worked. He planted items in the jazz magazines and staged photographs showing the Rhythm Rajahs playing at Fat Clive and Lady Kat’s or Skoobie Hitchcock packing them in at the Licorice Stick Lounge.

He even came up with Potemkin Records, the label they recorded for. Pretty soon all kinds of out-of-town jazz types were wandering around late at night in parts of the city where they didn’t belong, looking for Mr. Whitey’s After-Hours Club to hear the Strideman Standish Trio, and a lot of them didn’t come back alive. And ditto those who went hunting for Ozzie’s Platter Barn (“Hard-to-find Potemkins Our Specialty”).

West’s own job with Public Relations wasn’t anything that flashy. A million tourists go back home with five million horror stories about city cab drivers. West’s job was essentially damage control. He fed the media weekly stories of the Stradivarius Left in Taxi Returned by Honest Cabbie in Time for Carnegie Hall Concert variety to help offset all the bad word-of-mouth. Sometimes he tried to kid himself he was restoring people’s faith in their fellow man. But not now. Come Winter Hiatus, you just held on tight and tried to survive any way you could. Such as with Happy Valley, this little town he’d dreamed up over the years. If things got too tough, West would close his eyes and imagine himself on a visit there. Happy Valley was his secret strength, a place he’d never hinted about to anyone — not even to Fran, his wife.

The hurrying crowd pounded up a short flight of steps, along another corridor, and down more steps to the subway platform where a train stood with its doors open. The crowd flowed inside.

West found a seat beside a pole. His people stood around him. As the train started up, West saw the Hyena watching from the end of the car. What did the man want? West turned away and closed his eyes...

He was coming down the steps from the railway station, past borders of red geraniums and white impatiens. It was late afternoon on a warm autumn day and the slanting sun made church windows of the bright trees. Before he’d gone a block, Merle and Mert, the Blandish twins, had hailed him by name from their big old car to ask if he wanted a lift. Smiling, he shook his head and patted his stomach, as if to say thanks but I need the exercise.

He strode on down the long broad street, knowing that he could turn in at any gate and be greeted with open arms. “It’s Mr. West, Mother — set another place at the table,” freckly-handed Cedric Loomis would boom. He had a baritone voice and a job at the Widget factory, where the workers sang songs all day on the production line. And after dinner, West and the Loomises would push their chairs back from the table and talk. When West spoke, they would nod and listen as if his words had weight. And their answers would be well considered, for they knew West to be a serious man on a mission so important they would not allude to it without lowering their voices. Is everything going all right? And West would lie and say everything was fine.

But tonight West turned in at no gate. He continued on his way, enjoying his walk into the deepening twilight. He had decided he would eat in the dining room at Happy Valley Lodge, where the young waitress was in love with him. Afterward he’d go to his room there and finish his paperwork.

Which reminded him: on his last visit back, he’d once again sensed that someone had stayed there during his absence. It was a presence like a perfume in the air. A familiar perfume. And he thought to himself, what if Fran had dreamed up Happy Valley, too? What if—

Something thumped down hard on the subway-car roof. West sprang to his feet, wide-eyed and alert. Not long ago they’d found an entire subway train filled with dead passengers and crew in one of the tunnels. Somehow one of the moleys, the people who inhabited the underground darkness, had dropped down onto a roof and worked his way up to the motorman, stopping the train where his buddies waited along the tracks. Fran had cried watching the story on the evening news.

West and his people locked arms and stood in a tight square, each facing outward, ready to kick hard with both feet if the threat came in his direction. There was gunfire on the roof and West got a glimpse of a body plunging by the window. The crew had had somebody up there laying for the bastard. Farther along the tunnel, he thought he made out a sullen line of faces beside the tracks.

A few minutes later, West’s foursome was clattering up the stairs from the subway into a street thick with smoke and gridlocked traffic. In the distance, horns were honking. But here at the intersection, the drivers were out of their vehicles and at each other, using fists, tire irons, bottles, anything, in an almost joyful, clenched-teeth frenzy, like a berserker’s rush to death. West avoided the fighting and led his people over the bumpers and through the intersection. Then they teamed up with others going their way in a kind of flying wedge of foursomes. Behind them they heard rifle fire. A sniper working from a rooftop. They hurried on. He was somebody else’s problem.

A city helicopter cudgeled the air overhead, maybe bringing in Carmody, West’s immediate superior. Helicoptering in and out was a perk of the top brass during Winter Hiatus. But Carmody was really paying for his key to the helipad on the roof. The city’s blood appetite was growing. Carmody’s new job was to set things up so that a busload of daytrippers could vanish into thin air every other week without anybody making a fuss about it. Now how the hell do you pull off something like that? West shook his head, glad it was Carmody’s problem and not his.

Morgan’s problem hadn’t been his, either. Morgan’s trouble was he felt for the jazz fans he was putting in harm’s way. Didn’t he like the stuff himself? So the job got to him and he tried to cut out. But you don’t eat the city’s bread and run. The boys in the yellow slickers nailed him in the Holland Tunnel. West had heard enough stories to know what happened next. You get pushed face first from a moving car minus your wallet and shoes and end up sharing rat-on-a-stick over burning garbage with three guys that look as bad as you do and smell worse in some basement in a looted and burned-out neighborhood where even the pigeons don’t come any more.

There was automatic-weapons fire down a side street around the police station. The firemen had the place surrounded. As West dashed by, he caught the flash of an antitank gun aimed at the precinct door. The firemen must have faked that armory four-alarmer for stuff like that. Their grudge against the boys in blue was an old one.

West’s foursome reached their corner and turned onto the street. But what they saw stopped them cold, panting and cursing quietly. Last week a discussion on Predestination at the theological seminary across from City Hall Annex turned into a riot that might have spilled out into the street if the police and firemen hadn’t forced it back inside. But there were no truncheons or water cannons today. After looting the shops on the street to build a bonfire, the rampaging student factions were manhandling passers-by, the one side forcing them to sing “Que Sera, Sera,” the other “I Did It My Way,” while they lugged out armfuls of the seminary library to feed the flames.

West’s people waited for him to decide if they were going to turn back. The local Doberman lady eyed them from the doorway of the boarded-up coffee shop on the corner, looking as if she’d just crawled out of a hole. The woman smiled, showing her empty gums. As if on cue, her five dogs supplied the teeth.

West had to go in. This morning was his weekly meeting with Carmody. “I’m good for twenty,” he said. The others came up with thirty between them. It wasn’t enough.

Another voice said, “I’m in.” It was the Hyena, offering a smile and a twenty. West hadn’t known the guy worked at the City Hall Annex.

The woman stuffed the money into her skirt and ordered, “Okay, boys, give old Gracie a cuddle.” West, his people, and the Hyena huddled around her as she doled out the dog leashes. The five snarling animals formed a moving circle and escorted them through the theological fury and over to the Annex’s sandbagged entrance. The security people opened the iron grille wide enough to pull them through.

West hurried upstairs to his small, doorless office. All the inside doors had gone to board up the windows or to make beds for sleep-overs in the cafeteria if things got too hairy. He’d had the office to himself since the day Morelli went screaming down the hall tearing his clothes off and had to be sent away.

West sat down at his desk. A moment later the coffee cart arrived, the attendant’s sloppy grin announcing they’d issued another brandy ration because of the trouble outside. West sipped at the three fingers of cheap, hacksaw-edged liquid in the styrofoam cup. When it was gone, he turned his back to the doorway and poised his pen as if he was working.

The distance to Happy Valley Lodge was flexible, depending on how long West wanted to walk. The sun had slipped below the tree-tops, leaving the gibbous specter of the moon to accompany him like a ghostly assistant, an Igor to his Frankenstein. He passed a yard where children with well modulated voices played graceful Happy Valley games. Here at least was a corner of the world you could bring children into. Here even darkness was a friend.

Suddenly West thought he saw someone cross the road a block ahead of him and disappear down a side street. “Fran!” he called and broke into a run. But when he reached the corner, she was gone. Looking back the way she’d come, he recognized Colonel Ramsay’s street.

West walked until he reached the two stone pillars topped with lanterns at the foot of the Ramsay driveway. Hudson was on duty, dressed like a gardener, pretending to be putting down mulch on a flowerbed. He returned West’s nod with a smile. West knew there would be another man watching from the house.

He found Ramsay in the dim around back, a large, rather overweight old man down on his knees classifying a freshly dug pile of dahlia roots with an indelible pencil by the light of a kerosene lantern. “My dear chap, what a pleasure to see you,” said Ramsay as the new arrival helped him to his feet. “And I you, sir,” said West, marveling to himself how he always seemed to acquire an English accent around Ramsay. The old man paused a moment to brush off his knees before saying, “Is it getting bad, old man?”

“Yes, sir. Very bad,” said West.

Ramsay’s sympathetic look changed quickly to a frown. “Still, isn’t it a bit early to be drinking?”

“There was a brandy ration, sir. They might have become suspicious if I hadn’t taken it.”

Ramsay looked relieved. “Quite so,” he said. “I hope you understand how vital they are to us, those reports of yours. Information from the very belly of the beast.” He put a hand on West’s shoulder. “Just hold out a few months longer. A year. Two at the most. Doctor Vasco’s going great guns with his creep-deflection ray. We’ll be in production within—”

“Sir, I thought I saw my wife just now.”

Ramsay looked away. “I was afraid you had,” he said. He pursed his lips and added, “All right, Fran is working for us, too. Mayor Farr and the town council had to be sure you wouldn’t betray us. We’ve only survived this long because the city doesn’t suspect we’re here. So Fran was ordered to meet and marry you. The falling-in-love part was her own idea. But she thinks the city’s become too dangerous for you. She came here just now to plead with me to order you home.”

Ramsay shook his head. “I wish we could, old man,” he said. “But when the creep-deflector devices are in place, the city will slide right around us without even knowing we’re here. Then you can both come back for good. And we can tell the whole town what you’ve risked for us all — you and a few others. The Few, that’s what they’ll call you. They’ll sing songs about you at the Widget factory. And one day when the cities have all crept together and ground themselves to powder, we will emerge, a little island of sanity amid the asphalt madness.”

Colonel Ramsay gestured toward the horizon. “And then the sound of the jackhammer will ring out across the land as we reclaim the fertile soil beneath parking lot, freeway, and—”

Someone knocked on the doorjamb. West jumped and swung around in his chair. The Hyena was standing there with a stack of files and a desk calendar under his arm. He smiled and introduced himself. “Mr. Carmody told me to bunk in here. Said you could use a hand.”

West went cold inside. Was this it? Was he the one the Hyena expected to replace in the foursome? He forced a smile. “The more the merrier,” he said.

“Hey, I like your work,” said the Hyena, flapping the arm with the files. “My favorite’s that joint promotion with Air India, the Indian Tourist Bureau, and the Sabu film festival at the Museum of Modern Art: HIMALAYANS CHEER CABBIE HERO RETURNING SACRED EYE OF GODDESS.” They both laughed.

West took some comfort from the laughter. Maybe he was getting paranoid. “Did Carmody show you my latest — the Melba Dinwittie one?” he asked. “What did you think?”

The Hyena busied himself arranging his things on the empty desk. His faint “Hey, great” stayed with West in the elevator all the way up to his boss’s office on the twenty-eighth floor.

Goddamn it, Melba Dinwittie was good stuff. There she was, delegated by her church to come to the city to buy a second-hand Nutley Trill-Master organ. To her horror, the Nutley man informs her that the congregation’s five years of pot-luck dinners and bake sales still came up a thousand shy of the price of a used Trill-Master. In the cab returning to the hotel, she tells her woes to the kindly driver. She’s so distraught by things she leaves her purse with the church-organ money in the back seat of the taxi. What shall she do? How can she ever face the congregation again? She passes a sleepless, tearful night. But come dawn the desk calls to inform her that a few moments before, some cab driver had returned her purse and gone away without leaving a name. Melba Dinwittie flies downstairs. Not only is the church money intact, but someone has added the extra thousand needed to buy the organ!

West stepped from the elevator and strode down the hall to Carmody’s office. All right, so maybe Melba Dinwittie wasn’t in a class with the Sacred Eye of the Goddess. But it was a solid piece of work with a nice little twist at the end.

West found Carmody standing at a window, looking out across the city and rattling the change in his trouser pocket. He was a nervous, balding little man. At his desk, he was constantly picking things up and putting them back down. Carmody turned from the window and gave West his hurt-puppy-dog look. Why was West forcing him to be the heavy? “Melba Dinwittie won’t hack it. Not by a long shot,” he said, glancing at the ceiling. “The big boys upstairs couldn’t swallow that extra thousand. They think you’ve lost your touch. Know what? So do I. I can’t carry you any longer, kid. I’ve got my own problems. Like how to make goddamn busloads of goddamn daytrippers vanish without nobody blinking a goddamn eye.” He rattled his pocket change again, his thoughts on his own troubles, waiting for West to speak.

West worked his lips but nothing came out.

Carmody said, “But I’m not leaving you high and dry. You just need a break from the pressure. I’ve been checking around. There’s an opening over in B Block.”

West found his voice. “For what, pushing a coffee cart?” He knew what that meant. On coffee-cart pay he’d have to move back to the city. Fran had as much as told him she’d walk out the door before she’d do that. So there he’d be, alone and holing up in a cubicle at the Y and going sloppy, nipping the brandy and missing days. And when you’d missed enough, the City cut you loose. After that, it’s three squares from a dumpster, sleeping in a cardboard box, wearing your socks until they dissolved into slime in your shoes, and never daring to look at the desperate thing shuffling along next to you when you pass a store window.

“So big deal,” said Carmody heartily, going over and sitting down at his desk. “So you push some cart. Meanwhile, I’m looking around. I’ll find you another slot when you’re rested. When you’re up to it.”

West took his boss’s place at the window. Somewhere down by the docks, a thick column of oily black smoke from a chemical fire coiled up into the grey sky. Well, this was it, he told himself, time for a big career decision, time for the singing to stop at the Widget factory. West turned from the window. “I’m up to it now,” he insisted. “Give me the goddamn busloads of goddamn daytrippers.”

Carmody raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m listening,” he said.

“So let’s meet Cyrus Dumple, daytripper,” began West, the words falling from his mouth with the ease of a public-relations man fighting for his life. “Dumple and his wife and forty other members of the Jolly Oldsters Club of Chickentown, Pennsylvania, have charter-bused it into the city for a day of shopping, the Radio City Musical Hall matinee, and early dinner at Mama Leone’s. But Dumple decides he doesn’t want Italian, so he strikes out on his own to try one of those Rockefeller Center places where you can eat and watch the skaters.

“Now Dumple knows full well that the bus that picks them up again in front of the Winter Garden Theater between seven and seven-ten won’t wait for the tardy — but he underestimates the distance back and is a few minutes late as the theater marquee hoves into view. But what’s this heading toward him? It’s his bus! But now it has the words HAPPY VALLEY EXPRESS in the panel above the windshield. As it passes, Dumple sees the Jolly Oldsters out in the aisle dancing as spry as you please to the music of a live combo. He runs out into the street, shouting and waving his hands over his head, chasing after it.

“He catches up as the bus slows in crosstown traffic. He jumps and slams his hand against a window, trying to attract somebody’s attention, and catches a glimpse of his wife laughing at something Warren Rupp, the retired insurance man, says. Before Dumple can jump again, the traffic is moving and the bus glides forward. Dumple runs after it, shouting, ‘Wait for me! Oh, please, wait for me!’ But the bus picks up speed, turns the corner, and disappears downtown.” West folded his arms and looked at Carmody.

His boss picked up his letter opener, looked at it, and put it back down on the desk. “I don’t get it,” he said flatly. “What the hell’s Happy Valley?”

West told him. One by one, he gave up each of his creations: Mr. Vining, the railroad conductor; Colonel Ramsay, the dotty old dahlia grower who thought he was a spymaster; Mayor Farr; Dr. Vasco, the crackpot inventor; the Blandish twins; Cedric Loomis, the baritone; the waitress at Happy Valley Lodge who loved him. He named each quiet street, described the principal buildings and landmarks, told what it looked like on a winter night when the lights from the houses colored the snow and how the honeysuckle smelled in the summer darkness.

“Sounds like my kind of place, kid,” admitted Carmody a touch wistfully. “But, like they say, so what?”

“So we’ve got our work cut out for us, spreading the word about this wonderful Shangri-la of ours. I see lots of magazine articles and picture spreads: Small Town America Alive and Well in Happy Valley. Down Home Food Best for What Ails You, Says Cancer Specialist Praising Happy Valley Cookbook.”

Carmody got the idea. “‘A Voice in a Million, Modest Cedric Loomis, Unsung Village Nightingale,’” he suggested.

West nodded, adding, “‘The Ramsay Dahlia: Doubtless God Could Have Made a More Beautiful Flower but Doubtless He Never Did.’”

“I like it,” grinned Carmody.

“And how about we play up His Honor Otis Farr, Mayor of Happy Valley, Cracker-Barrel Philosopher — slash — Nobel Peace Prize Nominee?” said West. “We hire some actor for the part. There’s one of the Fruit-of-the-Loom boys who might just fill the bill. And we get a CUNY prof to write his stuff — things like ‘Those who think history repeats itself will be forced to relive it.’”

Carmody leaped to his feet. “How about ‘I’ve never met a payroll I didn’t like?’” He punched the air and shouted, “I love it! We’re talking Donahue at least. Maybe even Johnny. By the time we’re done, we’ll have every dumb sucker in the world thinking the ones who disappear are the lucky ones. They’ll go to their graves wishing it’d been them on those buses!” He grabbed the phone. “I’m taking this one upstairs to the big boys right now.”

As Carmody spoke into the receiver, West turned back to the window. Well, it was done. It was all over. He saw his sad face in the glass and smiled at it. You poor, stupid bastard, he told himself, where’d you get off thinking you were cut out to be one of the Few?