Prentice had changed so much in twenty years. You could stop by the little
local historical society at the County Fairgrounds and look at photographs of
the way the town used to be, but pretty much every striking thing you would
encounter on the walls there had been knocked down –the old courthouse with the
ornate cupola, the Prairie School bank downtown, and the beautiful
turn-of-the-century railroad depot: all gone—and the place was now just another
anonymous town comprised of nothing but squat, rundown neighborhoods surrounded
on all sides by retail colossi: superstores, multiplexes, giant warehouses full
of everything from office supplies to pet food to hardware to electronics. All
sorts of useless 24-hour everything.
Some people, of course, were appalled by all the change, and galled by the
complicity of their fellow citizens. It went well beyond complicity, in fact;
for the most part the townspeople seemed to love this acknowledgement from the
outside world that their dollars were important, and they were excited to
suddenly have so many shopping and dining options, including many they had
always associated with the big cities.
The downtown saloons and corner taverns had been all but abandoned, and many
of them had closed entirely, most of their old clientele having taken their
business to the sports and motel bars that were prominent features
of the commercial strips just outside town. Increasingly the community’s
more churlish and entrenched residents found themselves drinking alone at home
and watching movies that they found at the only locally-owned video store still
left in town, a Mexican place that rented American films that were likely
pirated and often subtitled or poorly dubbed in Spanish.
Even with all the new development you still couldn’t properly call Prentice
a city. Its population had been stalled at around 20,000 for almost thirty
years. Yet in the not-so-distant past Prentice had been a town of distinct
neighborhoods and ethnic character. There was a time when every neighborhood
had its own market, its own church, bakery, and bar.
A man named Martin Ankeny had once owned all the little markets around town,
as well as the dairy that supplied milk and cheese to his markets. He also had
some kind of deal worked out with the German brothers who owned the
slaughterhouse in town, and would get meat for his markets every day, fresh
from the abattoir. Ankeny
had butchers on the premises, cutting steaks and roasts and churning out
sausage and hamburger for the neighborhood customers.
All the men who worked in the slaughterhouse –the Germans, Italians, Irish,
and Poles– had their own little sections of the town, but they all lived
within walking distance of one of Martin Ankeny’s markets. Over time Ankeny had also acquired
a great deal of other property in and around Prentice. He owned many of the
taverns, or the buildings in which they conducted business. Most people in town
assumed that Ankeny
was a tough businessman, but he was also a highly respected member of the
community and was generally regarded as honest. And though he was widely
suspected to be among the community’s wealthiest residents, he lived quietly
and simply, in a modest house across from the big Catholic Church downtown, a
church to which he contributed large sums of money.
Ankeny had
never married, and he had long shared his home with his severe and pious old
mother. She eventually died, and Ankeny
stayed on in the house alone. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, the managers of
Ankeny‘s many
businesses received letters informing them that he was embarking on a long
journey, and was appointing a mysterious stranger by the name of Lester
Nightengale to oversee his little financial empire.
So far as anyone in town knew, Nightengale had only recently arrived in
the community. He’d been seen in conversation with Martin Ankeny, and had
apparently spent several afternoons accompanying him on his rounds. Nightengale
aroused some suspicion right from the start; something didn’t seem quite right
about the man. He had a lean, almost starved-looking face and a prominent cleft
chin and high forehead. He also wore eyeglasses that were too big for his face,
and, with his shiny wingtips, smart fedora, and long cashmere coats, dressed
like someone from the big city.
Not long after Ankeny left town on his
journey, Nightengale announced that he was closing several of Ankeny‘s neighborhood markets. No explanation
for this decision was offered, but a short time later a brief item
appeared in the local paper noting that Nightengale had acquired some land for
a new development just outside of town and had made known his intentions of
building a giant market and car wash complex on the property.
Almost immediately after breaking ground on this project, Nightengale
announced plans to expand the development to include a multi-screen movie
theater and several national restaurant franchises. This news was once again
accompanied by the closing of several more of Ankeny‘s neighborhood markets in town.
The reaction of much of the local citizenry was one of initial trepidation
tempered with a sort of helpless bumpkin excitement. Their town was growing so
swiftly; these new businesses that were going up in what was all of a sudden
being referred to as "the Nightengale Development," were big city
things, and this notion did something irresistible to the townspeople’s concept
of their little community.
In the midst of all this excitement there was mounting speculation regarding
Martin Ankeny’s prolonged absence. What sort of journey had he undertaken?
And when was he expected to return? Lester Nightengale offered no answers to
these questions, and it appeared that Ankeny
had told no one of his intentions or destination.
One day, then, after Ankeny had been gone many months, Emil Schenk, who was
the old janitor at the Catholic church, became suspicious and was surprised to
find the back door of the Ankeny home unlocked. He ventured inside and made his
way through the murkily lit home. As he moved from the kitchen and into the
living room he saw nothing amiss, and he proceeded down the narrow hallway to
the back bedrooms, both of which he found absolutely tidy, with the beds made
up and nothing out of order. Just to put his suspicions entirely to rest, Emil
flicked on the light switch in the bathroom at the end of the hall, and what he
found there –a pair of eyeballs floating in the toilet bowl, still trailing
rusty streamers of blood– drove him yowling from the house, and touched off
the biggest scandal in the little town’s long history.
Emil Schenk, upon discovering the eyeballs in Martin Ankeny’s toilet bowl,
ran back across the street to the rectory behind the church. Father Petrick,
who was officially retired and spent most of his time alone and lost in rambling flights of dementia at the picnic table
in the back yard, was the only priest
home at the time. The younger priests, Monsignor Dunn and Father Stryken, were
downtown, playing racquetball at the YMCA.
Emil Schenk was incapable of making any sense, and Father Petrick could not
have understood him even if Emil had somehow been able to communicate his
dismaying discovery. Laura Halvorson, who did some housekeeping for the
priests, happened to come along just as Emil was going through his
traumalogue–complete with hysterical pantomime– one more time. Emil took
Laura by the arm and led her across the street and through the open back door
of Martin Ankeny’s house, where he steered her down the permanently
crepuscular corridor to the bathroom and directed her attention to the
horrible evidence in the toilet bowl.
Shocked as Laura Halvorson was by this sight, she nonetheless calmly made
her way back across the street to the kitchen in the basement of the church,
from where she placed a call to the town’s emergency services.
By evening half the town was gathered outside Martin Ankeny’s home, inside
which virtually the entire Prentice police and sheriff’s departments were
sequestered. At some point Lester Nightengale arrived at the scene and was
shepherded through the throng by two deputies.
By the next morning, of course, speculation was rampant. The local police
tore up Martin Ankeny’s house looking for further evidence of foul play, but
turned up nothing. Though the entire town by this time had concluded that
Lester Nightengale was surely guilty of some crime, and perhaps even murder,
the authorities could apparently find no evidence linking him to the mysterious
chain of events. There was also the thorny matter of the letters Ankeny had written before
his departure, authorizing Nightengale to run his business concerns in his
absence. Frank Drake, a local lawyer who had had a long professional
relationship with Ankeny, vouched for the authenticity of these letters, and
also produced another document that Ankeny had drawn up and had notarized
before his disappearance, granting Nightengale full power of attorney over his
estate both in his absence and in the event that something should happen to
him.
The eyeballs were obviously seized as evidence, but this was before the days
of scientific testing that might have proved that they had, in fact, once
belonged to Martin Ankeny. After a lengthy investigation Nightengale was
eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, immediately after which he announced the
closing of the remainder of Ankeny‘s
businesses, and began to sell off sub-developments in his growing tracts of
land outside of town.
A year passed, and then two years, and eventually virtually all of the
businesses in town were either closed or relocated to one of the sprawling new
developments that now surrounded the community. These developments were in
short order cut off from the town proper by a growing system of highway
interchanges and freeway ramps that funneled traffic to the new strip malls,
restaurants, and super stores. There was no longer a single compelling reason
for anyone passing through to actually drive into Prentice, and the town became
a dark and moldering afterthought, huddled in the shadows of the
slaughterhouse.
Though widely reviled, Lester Nightengale became fabulously wealthy and
built a giant mansion in the country outside of town. He also had a private
jet, which he used to make frequent and increasingly longer visits to a home in
Florida.
And then one day early in the summer, several years after his initial
disappearance, Martin Ankeny was found wandering along a road not far from the
little municipal airport. He was blind, of course, and where his eyes had once
been were now terrible, puckered scars. Ankeny
was neatly enough dressed, but terribly confused, and almost completely deaf.
He was transported to the hospital downtown –where there was now a new wing
that bore Lester Nightengale’s name– and was interrogated at frustrating
length by doctors and local authorities, who determined that he was suffering
from some form of dementia with amnesic complications. He was unable to shed
any light whatsoever on his whereabouts over the last several years, and was
also unable to say with any certainly what had become of his eyes. They’d been
poked out, he would occasionally offer, but he could proceed no further than
that with an explanation. It was clear enough that he’d suffered some terrible
trauma, and he quietly lived out his days in the local ElderRest center,
where despite occasional outbursts of nonsense he apparently never strayed any
nearer to offering up a satisfying resolution to the sad mystery of his last
years.
Upon Ankeny‘s
death, Lester Nightengale saw to it that Martin’s remains were housed in
the largest and most ostentatious sepulcher the local cemetery had ever known.
Engraved upon the monument were the words: A Great Friend to the Community.
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