buy back the four acres this side of the road. That’s the agreement. It’s in a letter of stipulation Stan signed after Kathy died. Like the one we signed for Miss Fairlie. We pro-rate it at what we paid her, plus the cash he’s put in.”
It was that simple to Spig O’Leary.
“Let’s hope the house they’re talking about isn’t too fancy, then,” Joe Cameron said. “I still wish to God we could get the Commissioners to pass a zoning law for this county. Nobody’s safe until they do. I don’t see why Sudley can’t see it. The road isn’t a year old and look what’s happened to it—right up to his own cow pasture. It’s a crime.”
It’s worse than a crime. Spig O’Leary told himself that twice a day, five days a week, driving back and forth to work in Washington. Coming home, he didn’t need the Colonial signpost in the parkway planting of dogwood and laurel to tell him he was entering Devon County. Dave’s Drive-In (For White) on the left and Cab’s Overnight and Eatery (For Coloured) on the right were like a pair of watchtowers on the county line, where the Governor had cut the broad, white ribbon, officially opening the new highway around Devonport to the bridge. “My friends of this great and lovely county in this great and lovely State . . .” Spig could still hear him as he stood bareheaded, scissors in his hand, flowers on his tongue. “Be ceaseless in your vigil, tireless in your guardianship. Let this magnificent artery of peace and prosperity be a boon and a blessing. Do not let it become a menace to your children, a curse to you.”
And Devon’s answer stretched from the county line to the Sudley pastures, for five miles on both sides of the road. “Devon Death Strip,” the Washington and Baltimore papers called it . . . a nightmare in flowing neon, red, green and shocking pink. Liquor. Beds. Beer. Dance. Soft Drinks. Gas. Oil. Fried Shrimp. Package Goods for Fishing Parties. TV. We Never Sleep. Nor did anyone else within range of the sonic attack from the jukes, the callipoe at Colby’s Carnival and the perpetual grind of the slot machines. Five miles of taverns, motels, gas stations, wooden shacks and cut-rate liquor stores had erupted like atomic mushrooms almost before the concrete was dry. The merchants of Devonport had rushed out to help reap the golden harvest. There were super-markets, hardware and farm implement stores, new and used cars, a branch of Sudley’s bank cheek by jowl with the Breezy Inn. Along both sides, five miles of cut-throat competition, the turf in the centre parkway chewed up with tyre gouges, littered with beer cans, paper cups and empty bottles, from the county line to Bill’s Live Bait, Blood Worms and Peelers next to Sudley’s winter wheat on the left, across from the Three D (Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance) next to Sudley’s cow pasture on the right.
From there, the highway ran between Sudley’s new white-painted fences, mile-long ribbons, to the woods of Eden’s Landing and down through them, fifty feet from Sudley’s line, into the Plumtree Cove tract to the bridge crossing the Devon—a little over two miles in all. That was what was left of Devon’s highway that was not a shambles.
And it was safe. Sudley loved the land and by Devon standards was a rich man. Old Stan Ashton was the high priest of highway sanctity. Miss Fairlie was eccentric, but not eccentric enough to chop down the woods of Eden to build a shopping centre two hundred yards from the gate on the old road that she still padlocked every night and all day Sundays. At Sylvan Shores the Home Owners’ League was fighting off a boat repair yard, and at Chapel Creek a canning factory. But the O’Learys and the people like them who’d socked their last dime into the homes on Eden’s Neck—they were safe.
Or so they thought until Monday evening the second week in June.
Spig O’Leary saw the men putting the signboard up in the corner of Sudley’s buttercup-gold and green pasture as he slowed down, blinded by the sun glinting on the blue glass octagon of the Three D (Your Last Chance to Dine, Drink and Dance). He took it for granted it was the sign for the County Fair, held every year on the Sudley Farm. The red light blinking on one of the sheriff’s cars at the front door of the Three D caught his eye, and he saw the sheriff himself then, standing by a yellow convertible with two kids in it, neither of them more than seventeen. He saw Spig and motioned to him to pull in.
“. . . If I catch you in this county again,” he was saying. “Now get going, punks. Get the hell out of Devon County and stay out. You hear?”
The driver gunned the motor and the car roared out into the road, across the parkway, ripping the turf open, both of them laughing, not hearing Buck Yerby’s bellow.
“Damn them,” he said violently. “I wish this road had never come here. I just dropped in for a pack of cigarettes or Nick’d be on the floor with his head open. He caught ’em putting slugs in his slot machines and that punk driving had a bottle ready to brain him.”
“No use blaming the road,” Spig said. “It’s these joints . . .”
“Yeh, I know.” Yerby was still burned up. “I heard you at the commissioners’ meeting Thursday night. I don’t need you or the Home Owners’ League to tell me what goes on. Look—when I took this job, I had one part-time deputy, ran myself an automobile business and went fishing Saturdays. Now I’ve got eleven full-time deputies, twelve radio cars, uniforms, what-have-you. You don’t have to tell me—I’ve got kids same as you. All I stopped you for was to tell you I need a new deputy out here on Eden’s Neck and you’re it.”
“Not me, I’m not,” Spig O’Leary said.
“You. O’Leary, the hot shot of the Eden’s Neck Branch of the Home Owner’s League. There’s not one of you people contributes a damn’ thing except to live here and bellyache. You could all go to hell for me. Except Miss Fairlie. I’m worried about her, with this new set-up.”
“What new set-up?”
Yerby looked at him. Then he shrugged. “Why don’t you take a week off and stick around, O’Leary?” he said sardonically. “You might get the score. But you be in at eight to-morrow morning and take your oath. And take it seriously. I don’t pass out any gilt badges just for laughs.”
He started to his car and turned. “And thanks, Spig. I sure appreciate . . .”
“You go to hell.” O’Leary’s grey eyes lighted. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Buck Yerby grinned. He looked at his watch. “How about a quick drink on it? You got time?”
“Not for this lousy joint, I haven’t.”
There was a sudden, smouldering fire in Yerby’s eyes. “I figure it doesn’t hurt the Three D for the sheriff to drop in for a drink if a drink doesn’t hurt the sheriff,” he said evenly. “Nick’s a citizen. He’s got his place over on Shad Creek. His kids go to school with yours and mine. Maybe he is a Greek with lousy taste in blue glass—like that ex-brother-in-law of yours says he is. But you couldn’t print what Nick thinks about Stanley S. Ashton. Kathy was a friend of Nick’s when he had that Greasy Spoon on Church Street.”
O’Leary’s face flushed, the heat smouldering in his own eyes. “That’s no business——”
“Right. And it’s no business of Ashton’s if Nick likes blue glass, and you can tell Ashton the quicker he gets out of here the better everybody’s going to like it. And there’s a lot of people think you’re just as big a heel as he is a louse, O’Leary—sounding off on Sudley the other night. So what if he doesn’t believe in zoning laws? There’s nobody in Devon hates gambling and the slots the way he hates ’em. He’s done a lot more for this county than any of you people. And personally, I don’t think you’re a heel, O’Leary. I think you’re a plain sucker.”
He
