Jasper was crushed. Literally, I mean. Not humiliated, nonplussed, defeated, whatever: it's not a thing about words at all. He was crushed. I'd just gotten home, and was settling in to finish up some Kentucky Fried and The Black Dwarf, when I heard it. For no particularly good reason, I'd turned on the TV to amuse the affable old Colonel, and there was John Bachgruber--one of those more-or-less ponderously good-looking anchorman-types, the kind whose mouths are always just a little higher on the left than the right so that they appear to be sneering dismissively through even the most pathetic catastrophes--reading the news. I looked indifferently towards his sneer. What it said was: "A rural Oak Rapids man was crushed this afternoon when the car he was working under slid off its blocks, landing on the man's chest. The man, identified as Jasper Odell, died before help could arrive. Pictures at 11." John moved on to his partner, Janet Henderson ("Elkader is awash; Janet Henderson has the story. Janet?") who reported an item about a sewer system backup in Elkader; I moved into the kitchen to hunt up the bottle of Old Grandad; not the kind of Kentucky evening I was figuring on, for sure, but now a more appropriate one. Poor Jasper. I told him that 67 wasn't a dependable car, and sure enough, it wasn't. It didn't even back up like Elkader's sewers: just fell off. Jasper was my best friend, not that that explains much of anything. He was--well--what? Look, if you hold a clear glass full of Old Grandad (we used to use canning jars, better yet) up to a light bulb, the liquor will light up golden-brown, but the light bulb will blur. Or put it another way--when you see the picture on a movie screen, it's just a composite of millions of particles. Reality is what perception, blurred or cohering, makes of it. Jasper loved his Old Grandad (the one in the bottle, he never knew his real one), and also loved to fool with reality, blurring it, or making it clearer, whichever. At least it seemed that way to me--not everyone felt the same way. And here we are talking in the past tense already, about movies and the like, and even would-be Everyman John Bachgruber's reliability aside, it's going to be hard to believe that the show is over.

Movies. We'd been planning for some time to go see The Town that Dreaded Sundown. It's been at the Arcade for weeks now and, unaccountably, Jasper and I hadn't gotten around to it. It's one of those nowhere movies that hangs on and on throughout dry summers in dusty nowhere towns, with Ben Johnson in it, or someone like him, about a killer in Arkansas, I think it is, with a paper bag over his head. Jasper told me that at one point in the movie, the bagman stabs a woman to death with a knife strapped to the slide of a trombone, the woman strapped to a tree. Fearless symmetry. Now, smuggle in a little bourbon in a paper sack like the bagman's, and you have an evening to look forward to. Back when we were in high school, when we'd finish with the bourbon, we'd roll the bottle under the seats all the way to the front of the theater, and it would clatter and clunk into chair legs before making a subtle splash into a little puddle always accumulated at the low front of the auditorium, driving old man Zapruter into a frenzy. Arlo Zapruter, that is--a tall bald funny-looking man after the fashion of the duck in You Bet Your Life,who always wore a blue suit, white socks, and brown shoes, and who had managed the Arcade for, allegedly, generations. His temper was nasty, but his nerves were shot, and it was fun to aggravate him, and no doubt still would be, except that we unfortunately grew up and had to be more responsible. He hasn't changed, though, as far as I can see, and he still looks at us like a couple of diseased Legionnaires when we visit his theater, although his son is now the one who runs it. He was, as Jasper once said, not the man you'd invite to dinner if you were entertaining the Pope. But Jasper wasn't Catholic, and I'm not altogether sure what he meant by that, precisely.

Back in high school, I remember, Jasper really thought in triple negatives about Zapruter's son, Wilmo. Wilmo was kind of a strange kid, annoying to almost everyone because he was kind of creatively stupid. Not that he ever let it stand in his way, mind you. Like, he made himself enduringly famous in Mrs. Hoakle's fourth grade class by yelling from the left rear corner of the room, in answer to a question, that the Gulf of Mexico was where rich Mexicans like Fidel Castro played golf. That sort of thing. He hadn't changed much by high school, arguing at some length to Mr. Molinaro's encouragement and bemused attention that the Norman Invasion was somehow associated with Leslie Gore, somehow getting "It's My (Political) Party" into the mix. Well, the word jackass comes to mind. Anyhow, Jasper I guess disliked him eventually less because of his (Wilmo's, not Jasper's) lunacy than because he was dating Nancy Sue Harkrader. Jasper coveted Nancy Sue--she was supposed to be "fast." Wilver Sandeen told us once that she once proposed to him a game of strip poker, and that the first item she elected to remove for his delectation was her bra, but, in the first place, nobody ever believed anything Wilver said, and, in the second place, it would seem unlikely that she would have taken off her bra without first having taken off her blouse, although Jeannie Persichetti later showed me at a beach-party movie festival at the drive-in that it could indeed be done, albeit via a neither very revealing nor graceful process. I hope that Old Grandad begins to kick in--I mean, you can't just stare at it in front of a light bulb forever. Jasper was thinking about Nancy Sue just the other night; she was the only thing he'd ever seen as fast as that 67, he said. I'm not sure that Wilmo ever figured it all out, but I think the attraction to him on Nancy Sue's part had to do more with free movie tickets than with physical or mental traits pertaining to Wilmo . Anyhow, he was always talking, Wilmo was, about how every night he'd go over to Nancy Sue's house, just to "hang around." This used, for reasons I won't go into right now, to infuriate Jasper. So one night--summer of 61, I think it was--Jasper went out and hog-tied Wilmo and suspended him from one of those big oak trees in front of the Harkrader house over on East First; then he called Nancy Sue and told her that Wilmo was "hanging around," aetherialized (Jasper's concept, my word), really walking on air, right there in her front yard. Nancy Sue looked curiously out the window, and then went out and cut Wilmo down, but their romance kind of dwindled after that. She finally married Arthur Grotenagle, and Jasper shot the tires out on Art's car as they tried to drive away from the church.

Well, I did want to see that movie. Trombone murders don't come along so often that you can afford to pass them up and that kind of craziness is best experienced vicariously, if at all. Other kinds of craziness I look to my Old Grandad for guidance with--he's all the family I've got. Besides, what's crazy? When I got my degree in Creative Writing from LaSalle Extensivestudy College in the mail, old Jasper went to a dictionary--one of the fes times in his life that he did that, as far as I know--to look up what a LaSalle was. With some quasi-puzzling help from a librarian, he found that it was a town in southern Quebec. This not proving very useful, damned if he didn't go to an encyclopedia to verify that it was in fact also a defunct type of car. Now this, more than Quebec, was Jasper's own turf. He didn't bother with the pronunciation (fortunately, it turned out), so he thought it was LaSall-y, his French being really no better that Wilmo Zapruter's. Anyway, what did Jasper do? Well, first he called Sally Jo Pitlock, who had worked as a stripper at O'toole's back in the days when they had bachelor parties and the like there. Since a public ordinance a few years before this had deprived her of an outlet for her terpsichorean talents, Sally Jo had taken to leasing herself out for various purposes, although I'm not altogether clear on what all the purposes were, nor do I want to be. Then Jasper went to Neill Brothers' scrapyard (in point of fact, it was Benny Neill's scrapyard, just as Neill Brothers' Marathon was Benny's; he never had a brother, so I expect he just liked the sound of it, although Jasper told me that the businesses were half-named after Dr. Joyce Brothers, for whom Benny conceived great admiration when she appeared on The $64,000 Question) and stole a bunch of assorted old car parts. I was sitting home sipping some Old Grandad, musing about my diploma and the non-campus of dear old LaSalle, when I heard Jasper's knock at the door; it was easy to tell Jasper's knock, because he'd howl "It's Jasper!" while knocking. So I opened the door, and there (predictably) was Jasper, with (unpredictably) this big, shadowy metallic thing behind him lurking out by the street. Here, in this strange warbling sort of voice, said Jasper, is your school mascot, the LaSall-y. And damned if this big metallic thing, actually Sally Jo, right out there on the sidewalk, doesn't start peeling off all these obscure car parts: headlight rims, reflectors, gaskets, attractive hub-caps at the shoulders. When she was finally pretty-much naked, Jasper slipped her a bill; she shrugged her now hub-cap-less but nevertheless attractive shoulders, and walked off down the street. She later got picked up for indecent exposure. At the hearing, she admitted to the exposure part, but she told the judge, Oren Whitlock (the Pitlock-Whitlock affair, people called it--at the time I assumed they did so more for sound than sense) that she doubted she was indecent in any meaningful sense of the word. The judge, partly because of predisposition (as I later found out), and partly because his brain was pretty thoroughly pickled by a case of Wild Turkey that had mysteriously appeared on his doorstep the night before (Jasper may have had some role in that) bought her rationalization and sold justice down the river, and dropped the charges. Jasper came up after Sally Jo walked off down the street, and told me to write a poem on this the eve of my graduation, but all I could come up with was:

Doggerel. But , as Jasper later said, doggerel and Old Grandad don't necessarily make for a bad evening.

Oh, yeah. Evening. Sundown. The Town that Dreaded Sundown. They say that at the end of that movie, the bagman either, a) escapes, or b) does not escape, and you don't know which. Life itself is more conclusive than that. Evening is not only a time of day, the song by Vanity Faire to the contrary--it's a concept as well. What I mean is something like "evening things up." It's a concept that demands the moral high ground, which makes most people avoid it, not just because most people prefer the moral quagmires of their daily lives, but also because, let's face it, it's dangerous. A common complaint about Jasper is that he's--was, sorry--prone to doing "crazy" things, but I think that almost everything he did was based on some controlling idea. If that tends to subvert the assumption that the things were "crazy," that's someone else's worry, not mine. What exactly his controlling ideas were may be kind of obscure, but go back to the bourbon--wait a second--in front of the bulb. That the bulb is dimmed out, obscured, doesn't mean that it's not there. It "informs" the bourbon, so to speak. What this means, who knows? One thing I've learned in all these years since dear old LaSalle, is that you can get away with a lot of obscurity, if you throw in some high-sounding Theory. But, OK, case in point, an example, not obscure.

In the first place there's the Condors. Not the birds, the gang. The "gang" had really only four members, and they used to hang around the Neill Brothers' Marathon (the more I think about Jasper's explanation of the name, the more I like it) and terrorize the likes of Wilmo Zapruter as they'd ride self-consciously by on their bicycles. I don't know that the Condors ever really did anything, but then, I don't know that I ever really do anything, either. Anyhow, the gang had four members. The leader was Phil Stucker. Actually, now that I think about it, what the Condors did was give substance to their names--no mean feat. Phil Stucker was about six-feet-three, three hundred pounds, always dirty, and usually, inexplicably, polite; he was known as Heavy Phil, not directly because of his weight, but rather because he once saw a sign out on highway 211, right where the McDonald's now is, by one of the swampy spots where the town dumps boulders, tree stumps and the like, that said "HeAvy PhiL WanTEd" (spelling in Oak Rapids gives good chase to French pronunciation in the inaccuracy derby), and decent guy that he is, he stopped to ask if they wanted him. That is supposed to be a true story; the next one I know is true. Second in Condorian line was U. L. Smith, and U. L. was his Condorian title. His real name was Uncle Lloyd Smith; it seems that he was the fifth boy child in a family of eight, and his mother had been after his father for some years finally to name a child after her uncle Lloyd, so the father, Arky, apparently in a pique (and, quite possibly a pickled, too), went out and did exactly that. Hence, U. L. Smith. The third Condor was Harvey Groves--since infancy, his mother had called him her "Little Gem," so he came to be known as Gemmy Groves. The family lived on the patriarchal fruit farm known as Groves' Groves, and she called her husband Her Big Gem. This name duality may have been distasteful to the young Gemmy--dunno--but anyhow he was characterized by nothing so much as his parricidal tendencies. When Gemmy said I'll throttle that Old Bastard if he don't kick off soon, you knew he wasn't referring to some football situation (well, the football coach was often referred to as an Old Bastard as well, but I don't think Gemmy was a football fan). The fourth, youngest, and smartest Condor was called, simply, Wilbur Artz. You had to know Wilbur--he's the type who can't live up to any name, really, so it's hard to load a nickname on top of him. Eventually he went off to college at Northern, and came back in a few years bearing the nickname Liberal (Liberal Artz, get it? Comforting to know that collegiate creativity isn't much ahead of Oak Rapids local), which served rather to sever his connections with the other (non-Liberal) Condors. That's later, though, and at this point he's plain old Wilbur Artz.

The Condors, then. In the second place there's Mr. Fischbein. Not Mr. Fischbein, really, more Mrs. Fischbein. Mr. Fischbein was head--Great Elk, whatever--of the local B. P. O. E. Mrs. Fischbein was head of the aspiring middle class--professionally, more or less. Together (I assume) they had a daughter, Lorraine Fischbein, who ran in the same circles (literally, and figuratively) as Nancy Sue Harkrader. Anyway, circles--Mrs. Fischbein had a social one. This one time that comes to mind, late September, I think it was, several years ago, she was planning a soiree for it (she pronounced it soy-wray, as if in honor of the versatile bean and the actress who tamed King Kong; as noted, French pronunciation in Oak Rapids was always a chancy affair). And that is about all that anyone should ever want to know about the Fischbeins.

OK, there are the ingredients. Jasper and I had been out burning up the back roads in a 54 Studebaker that he'd acquired at an auction the week before, and had been working at diligently ever since. It was a creamy beige color as I recall, and it had a button, I guess you'd call it, mounted on the dashboard by the driver's left knee that you'd pull out to kick it (the Studebaker, not the knee) into overdrive. Ostensibly we'd been out experimenting with kicking the Studebaker into overdrive, but practically I think we were just kicking around and kicking up dust on old county road 61. On the back way into Oak Rapids, we passed by the Fischbein house (it was located out of town, on Stone Quarry Road), which had a lot of cars parked around it, for a reason that Jasper must have guessed. Now I should probably explain that Jasper disliked the Fischbeins, partly because of what they represented (Jasper wasn't at all anti-symbolical), partly because they were dear friends of the Branch family (and Jasper's dislike for the latter amounted almost to vendetta), partly because when Jasper's parents died in the fire, the Fischbeins sent a large cheerful floral arrangement that benignly proclaimed "Bon Voyage!"--although I always attributed that faux pas (fox pass: Mrs. Fischbein) to Fowler the Florist, or one of his minions--partly because the Fischbeins thought Jasper, and me too no doubt, trash. Be that as it may, we passed the Fischbein house in overdrive, successful in our experiment, and drove on into the city, such as it is, stopping at the Marathon station (Neill-Brothers'!) for gasoline. There, to the surprise of no one, were the Condors. Jasper asked Uncle Lloyd (who was mysteriously and precariously perched atop the "Regular" pump--for some reason, I suppose) to fill the car with Premium. When Heavy Phil came within hailing distance, Jasper remarked something to the effect of not understanding why a group of young (the Condors being some six years younger that Jasper and I) hell-raisers like them weren't out to view the delectations at the party at the Fischbein house. Weren't invited, muttered U. L., now mysteriously down on his back under the Studebaker's muffler. Heard of a crash?, Jasper asked. People jumpin' out of windows and all, O goddamn, said Wilbur, apparently having confused some high school lesson about 1929 needlessly into the mix. Jasper looked Wilbur straight in the eye; Nuts, he said (I don't know whether this was meant as description or exclamation). Crash the party?, Heavy Phil asked shrewdly. Jasper shrugged. Phil looked over to me; I stared studiously at the Marathon sign, aglow like a large opalescent shield. Figured I'd loan you the Studebaker to get out there, Jasper offered. Hell, yes, said Uncle Lloyd, suddenly from the car's driver's seat, the first reasonably logical location he'd been in as yet. Jasper pulled Heavy Phil aside; Gemmy Groves sidled up to me and informed me, in a rather amiable whisper, Old Goat's still drawing breath, and I knew he was not talking about the quadrupedal sort of goat. I'd not like to be an insurance company with a double-indemnity-for-murder clause in the elder Mr. Groves' life policy. Jasper and Phil Stucker wandered back up--I seem to remember distinctly Jasper cautioning Phil to "remember pageant jaws." Cryptic as this might seem, it need not have been totally nonsensical; it could, say, have been an allusion, an oblique reference, to the time that our almost-Toto bit our almost-Dorothy, played by a howling Isabel Sandeen, in our grade-school Easter play, though I don't think anyone knows how The Wizard of Oz came to be our Easter pageant in the first place, and therefore can't rationally see why anyone would want to refer to it cryptically, obliquely, or any other way. Anyway, what this really shows is how imperfect human communications are.

The true text of Jasper's little caution to Phil was soon enough to become apparent. Jasper steered me off to O'toole's (although it wasn't the bar we'd normally be most likely to go to), and all that I really know about the following is what Lorraine Fischbein later told me. She and her sister Zelma were up in her room studying; their mother was having her soy-wray below. Suddenly two young men, one in pajamas, the other naked, jumped in through the girls' open window (it was a warm and quiet night). The former was Wilbur Artz, the latter Gemmy Groves (who later explained that he couldn't help it, that he never wore pajamas, ever, and that he just wouldn't). At the same time the front doors downstairs drifted open to reveal the pajamaed forms of Heavy Phil Stucker and U. L. Smith. Evidently, Jasper's message had been: Remember, pajamas! See how it went? The Condors had Studebakered out there expecting a luscious pajama party with Lorraine, Nancy Sue and compatriots, and instead they found--well--a Tupperware party with Mrs. Fischbein and her Oak Rapids matrons. The merchandise might not have been exactly Tupperware, but it was something along that kitcheny-promotional line; certainly, the merchandise was nothing like that the Condors had had in mind. Naturally, the matrons were as distressed to find three pajamaed Condors and one nude one in their midst, as the Condors were at being there under those circumstances, but actually, at anything other than a symbolic level, I don't think it was much of an event. Some of the matrons tittered, some squealed, some yelled Get Out!, but the Condors were sort of paralyzed, too confused to move, so it was a standoff. It might have remained a standoff, Lorraine told me, had not she and Zelma come down and passed cookies and coffee out, to matrons and Condors alike. Gemmy alone proving objectionable, he was dispatched to the front porch. Before the evening was out, Heavy Phil had purchased a one-quart airtight food container, and, he later said, a very good food container at that, and that it contained air very well.

All right, you may say, but so what? Evening is what. Jasper and I sat around at O'toole's, drank some bourbon, and waited around for the cross-section of Oak Rapids that always accumulated there. The first time that I heard "Fischbein" was at 10:20--Hank Bork, the high school janitor, told Jasper and me that Benny Neill told him there'd been an orgy out at the Fischbein place. The point here is not so much the point of Hank's story, or even its merit; the fact is that Mrs. Fischbein would have gone ballistic--damn, bad choice of words--at the idea that her name could even pass through the lips of Benny Neill, much less Hank Bork. By eleven, her name was in everybody's mouth. At quarter-after eleven, Judge Whitlock came in (I could see Sally Jo Pitlock sitting outside in his Cadillac; suddenly it became crystal clear what the Pitlock-Whitlock affair truly was), wondering if it were true that a band of naked conjurors (in his cups, perhaps he'd misconstrued Condors?) had vivisected (visited?) the Fischbeins. And so on. It wasn't a big deal, but to a gambler (Jasper was a gambler), any deal is better than none. Senses of humor and revenge were always curiously mixed in Jasper. Well, revenge isn't quite right. He just wanted to shake things up, to mix up the deal and the hands, to--how to say?--even things out by way of juxtaposition. It's supposed to be true that if you move even one atom, you move all others in the universe. Jasper liked moving atoms; he was, I guess, some sort of Moral Atomist. I don't know what makes me say that, but then, I'm often not aware of what makes me say anything. I don't believe that Jasper thought that he himself had any real power, but he may have believed that with proper arrangement and then a little not-so-random motion he could affect some small alterations in things. He could, that is, not do anything substantial to the Fischbein social circle, but simply by throwing the Condors into it (as it were) he could temporarily derail its self-defining and self-rewarding symmetry. And since "proper" self-definition is so important to people like the Fischbeins--well, you'll see the point. Evening is the point.

And in case you're worried about the Condors, and whether they were "used," and how they fared, you needn't be. In the first place, to the Condors, anything was a (pardon the mixed ornithological metaphor) lark. In the second place, Zelma Fischbein, coincidentally, at the time of the Condor influx, had been reading "The Eve of St. Agnes" for her English 10 class, and the ingress of Wilbur Artz, in pajamas, struck her as--well--a vision (there's no accounting for visions). From that evening on, she pursued him pretty arduously; when you'd seen the right pajamas, she told her sister, your envelope of Fate had been stamped, sealed, and addressed, and had to be delivered (Zel was pretty young at the time). Anyhow, Wilbur's Fate was sealed--his Condor had turned to Goose, and his Goose was cooked. When he came back from college years later, Zelma married him (imagine what Mrs. Fischbein thought about that--more "evening" than Jasper could have hoped for), and Jasper was a groomsman. I suppose that Wilbur married Zelma too, but there's reason to doubt that he had anything much to do with it.

As if there's much reason for anything. Tonight Jasper and I should be at the Arcade, watching those cumulated light particles on the screen add up to a violent trombone. Instead, Jasper is gone. Well, no, not "gone"--that makes it sound like he's off for a weekend visit to Mason City. Dead. What a word. Anglo-Saxon, straightforward; what I didn't get at LaSalle Extensivestudy in etymology I also didn't get in causality, although the latter is something Old Grandad offers some insight into. If Jasper was crushed, so am I, so are a lot of things. You can stare through the liquid at the light, but it's just not as bright as it ought to be.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Well, damn the town, but dreading sundown isn't a bad idea. The town doesn't really dread sundown anyhow--it dreads "evening." Funny, in a speculative sort of way. But not as funny, as Jasper would have pointed out, as watching Judge Whitlock, after he left O'toole's, trying to explain to his wife (who was outside pounding at the Cadillac's steamed windows, because Sally Jo had locked herself inside of it) why Sally Jo was in there wearing only a trenchcoat ( his trenchcoat, at that), from the warped glass of O'toole's front window. Someone once told me if you watched warped action through warped glass, the action normalizes. I doubt it. Maybe that's how it is in books. That's how it is in The Black Dwarf: abnormal actions, abnormal glass, net result-- normalcy. Voila. QED. Not in Oak Rapids. That's a book, this is life. I don't know, I think maybe I'll take a pass on Sir Walter for a while. "Pass on"--what a phrase. Warped. And the evening is still young.