Pale Kings and Princes

Back at the motel, loose, warm, full of oxygen, I did some push-ups and sit-ups in my room and took a shower. At quarter of ten I was in my car heading into downtown Wheaton. I had my Colt Python in a shoulder holster under my leather jacket. Since I’m a size 48 and so is the Python, I’d had to shop extensively to find a leather jacket that fit over both of us.

I stopped at a Friendly’s restaurant on the corner of Main and North streets in Wheaton for breakfast, listened to the other diners talking about weather and children and what they saw on the Today show, picked up no clues, paid the tab, got a coffee to go, and sat in my car to drink it.

The cops were no help. Valdez had filed no story and whatever notes he’d kept were missing. I needed someone to talk with, anyone who would mention someone else and lead me to talk with them and they would mention someone else and so on. I put the car in gear and cruised up Main Street. Kyanize paints, the District Court of Wheaton, the Wheaton Fire Department, the Acropolis Pizza, the Wheaton Cooperative Bank, the Olympic Theatre Two Dollars at all times. At the head of town, clustered around a narrow-gorged, deep-cut river, were four or five red-brick nineteenth-century textile mills. Now they were factory clothing-outlets, and woolen and yarn shops. An attempt had been made to gentrify the mills, by painting windows and doors with contemporary pastel trim, and putting some green plants around. But the attempt was feeble. The riverbed was strewn with boulders, jumbled by the centuries of white water that had surged through the channel. There was low water in the river now, frozen perhaps, or dammed off upstream. Like the town.

I went around a rotary under some railroad tracks and headed back down Main Street, past a True Value hardware store, and Wally’s Lunch, and turned right onto North Street. A block uphill on North Street was the Wheaton Free Library in a big old red-brick building that looked like the town hall and had probably been done by the same architect and built at the same time. I parked on the street in front and went in.

There was an old man using the Xerox machine, two men past retirement were reading newspapers in the periodical area, and a strong-featured woman with short black hair was behind the desk. Her nose was straight and considerable, her back was straight, she was wearing a fuzzy pink sweater, her breasts were high and prominent, her waist was small, and the rest was hidden behind the counter. If the bottom matched the top, she was an excellent candidate for trained investigative surveillance. I strolled over to the side of the desk and read one of the posters advertising a production by the Wheaton Spotlighters of Oklahoma. Then I glanced casually back. She was wearing light gray slacks. The bottom matched. My instincts are rarely wrong.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for a history of Wheaton. Is there such?”

She looked up from her card file. There were light smile lines at the corners of her mouth, and gentle crow’s-feet at her eyes. Her mouth was very wide.

“Not yet,” she said. “In fact, we’re in the process of compiling one.”

“Really,” I said. “Who is the we?”

“The Historical Commission, myself, two others.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “Talk about luck. How far along are you?”

“We’ve been compiling data on index cards,” she said. “I’m afraid we’re a long way from finished.”

“Too bad,” I said. “I guess it’s too early to help me much.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said. “But perhaps if you had specific questions I might be able to help you.”

A teenage girl came in with her hair combed over to one side and pulled back. She wore heavy eye makeup and brilliant lipstick and very high heels and very tight tapered pants that ended at the anklebone. She was chewing gum and looked like a horse’s ass to me, but not probably to the senior boys at Wheaton High. She checked out two books, a collection of essays on The Scarlet Letter and a picture book about Ricky Nelson.

“Well,” I said, “in fact, I’m interested mostly in the history of the Colombian migration to Wheaton.”

Her smile lines deepened. “That’s a larger question than I can answer right here,” she said. “The connection exists in a man named Abner Norton, who ran the largest textile mill here in Wheaton and also had business interests in the town of Tajo in Colombia. He was having trouble getting people to work in the mills so he imported labor here from Tajo and the connection formed. It was Mr. Norton’s grandfather who donated the money for this library.”

“And is Mr. Norton living around here?”

“No, the mills failed, as you may know. Much of the industry moved south and Mr. Norton moved with it. The Colombians remained, largely impoverished.”

“Un huh. What about the impact of so substantial a group of very different people on a small city?”

“And so insular an area,” she said. “The impact has been substantial.”