If You Could See Me Now

One __________

No story exists without its past, and the past of a story is what enables us to understand it (perhaps that I believe this is the reason I teach novels and not poems, where the internal history may be only a half dozen slewfoot lines), but because — precisely because — I am so aware of the past pressing in on my story, I wish to allow it to leak in when it must, and not butter it over the beginning. I know, and here speaks the lecturer in literature, the sort-of professor of contemporary fiction, that each story, however freighted with history, is a speaking present unit, a speaking knot, a gem. We may appreciate a diamond more if we know its history of association with bloody feuds and failed dynastic marriages, but we do not understand it better. The same point could be made of love, or of lovers — the history of indifferent wives or loafing husbands, even the paraphernalia of personality, is strewn about there on the floor, waiting to be put on with their clothing. So I begin this story, so far along in this maladroit paragraph, with myself driving my car, a decade-old Volkswagen, from New York to Wisconsin in the last breathless weeks of June. I was in that limbo between youth and middle age when change is most necessary, when new possibilities must replace the old dying visions, and I had been divorced a year. Divorced spiritually, not legally: because my wife had died six months after she had left me, I would never need the formal decree. (Impossible to conceal the bitterness, even after Joan’s death.)

I had been driving for a day and a half, going as fast as my Volkswagen and the highway patrol would permit, and I had spent the intervening night in an Ohio motel of shabby aspect — a motel so characterless that I forgot its name and the town on the heel of which it squatted the moment I rejoined the freeway. Having had a particularly disturbing nightmare, I was gasping for freedom, for new air. Every cell and nerve of my body was choked with malignancy, the residue of gasoline fumes and repressed outrage; I needed dull green peace, fresh days in which to finish (actually, to write most of) the dissertation which would enable me to keep my job.

For as I have said, I am not a professor: not even, to be truthful, a “sort-of” professor. I am an instructor. An instructor of the last gasp.

Automobiles, especially my own, make me irritable and prone to accidents of temperament. Each man sits alone in his six-foot metal coffin, and traffic jams are like noisy graveyards. (I may be mechanically incompetent, but I can reduce death to a metaphor — the day after dreaming of it!) I am likely to “see” things, whereas normally all my hallucinations enter through another organ — I mean my nose. (Some people see things, I smell ‘em.) In Massachusetts once, during a time when I was teaching Tom Jones, I was driving late at night on a country road well out of Boston. The familiar roadsign picked out by my headlights indicated a sharp curve. Entering it, I saw the road begin to ascend steeply, and pushed the accelerator down hard to the floor. I like to go up hills as fast as possible. When I had swung fully into the curve and had begun to ascend — little Schnauzer engine barking furiously — I heard a terrific clatter from the brow of the hill. A second later, my blood thinned: just beginning to careen down the hill was a stagecoach, obviously out of control. I could see the four horses racing in the straps, the carriage lamps flickering, the driver hauling uselessly on his reins. His face was taut with panic. The high wooden box of the coach jounced down at me, veering crazily across the road. It seemed like my last moment on earth. I fumbled in fear at the controls of my car, not knowing whether to change gears, shut off the engine, or risk my luck on speeding past the plunging carriage. At the last moment my mind began to work and I turned sharply to the right. The coach sped past me, missing the car by four or five inches. I could smell the sweat of the horses and hear the creaking of leather.

When I had calmed down, I continued up the hill. It must have been a fraternity or club prank, I thought, college madmen from Harvard or B.U. But after I had gone on no more than a quarter mile, I realized that it was very late for that sort of prank — past three in the morning — and that you don’t race stagecoaches downhill. They crash. And I could not be sure that I had seen it at all. So I turned around and went back. I followed the road five miles the way I had come — long enough to catch up, more than enough to find the wreck. The road was empty. I went home and forgot about it. A year later, idly listening in my bath to a phone-in program about the supernatural, I heard a woman say that while she had been driving on a country road well out of Boston, she had turned up a hill late at night and seen a careering stagecoach racing toward her. My asthmatic heart nearly folded in half with shock. Driving, I still remember this. When the other world comes up and slaps me in the face, it will happen when I am in a car.

Teagarden’s the name, pomposity’s the game.

I was sweating and in bad temper. I was perhaps thirty miles from Arden, and my engine was rattling, and on the back seat noisily shook a carton of books and papers. I had to do that book or the Advancement and Promotions Committee — seven well-padded scholars on Long Island — would fire me. I was hoping that my cousin Duane, who lives in the newer farmhouse on what used to be my grandparents’ farm, would have got my telegram and had the older wooden house cleaned up for my arrival. Duane being himself, this seemed unlikely. When I reached a town I knew called Plainview, I stopped at a lunchroom for chili, though I was not hungry. Eating is affirmation, greed is life, food is antidote. When Joan died, I stood up beside the refrigerator and gobbled an entire Sarah Lee creamcake.

Plainview is where my family always stopped for lunch when we drove to the farm, and I had to make a longish detour to get there. In those days, it was a hamlet of one street lined with feed stores, a five and ten, a hotel, a Rexall pharmacy, a tavern, our diner. Now I saw that the town had grown, and the second feed store had been replaced by the Roxy cinema, which itself had bankrupted so that the marquee read C ARLTO HESTO IN HUR. Good work, Carlto! The diner was externally unchanged, but when I stepped inside I saw that the churchy wooden booths along the wall had yielded to new banquettes padded with that plastic luncheonette leather which is forever gummy. I sat at the far end of the counter. The waitress idled over, leaned on the counter staring at me and missed a few beats with her gum while I gave my order. I could smell baby oil and tooth decay, mostly the latter.

Though she smelled of nothing of the kind. As I’ve said, I have olfactory hallucinations. I smell people even when I’m talking to them on the telephone. In a German novel I once read about this phenomenon, and there it seemed almost charming, pleasant, a sort of gift. But it is not charming or pleasant, it is disquieting and unsettling. Most of the odors I catch hook the nerves.

She wandered away, scribbling on a pad, and rejoined a group of men attending to a radio at the other end of the counter. The men were huddled together, ignoring their plates of hash and steaming cups of coffee. I could see it was a matter of serious local interest, both by the men’s attitudes — anger in those, hunched shoulders, anger and bafflement — and by the broken phrases which came to me from the radio. “No progress in the shocking… discovery of the twelve… a bare eight hours since…” Some of the men glanced sullenly at me, as if I hadn’t the right to hear even so much.

When the waitress brought my bowl of chili I asked, “What the devil’s going on?”

One of the men, a skinny clerk in rimless glasses and a shiny double-breasted suit, clapped his hat on his elongated pink head and left the diner, slamming the screen door.

The waitress blankly watched him go and then looked down at her stained blue uniform. When she brought her gaze up to my face I saw that she was older than the high-school girl I had taken her for; her sprayed white bubble of hair and bright lipstick rode uneasily on her aging face. “You’re not from around here,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said. “What happened?”

“Where’re you from?”

“New York,” I said. “Why does it matter?”

“It matters, friend,” came a male voice from down the counter, and I swiveled to look at a burly young moonface with thinning blond hair and a high corrugated forehead. The others grouped behind him, pretending not to hear, but I could see their bicep muscles tensing in their short-sleeve shirts. My friend with the football forehead leaned forward on his stool, palms on knees so that his forearms bulged.

I deliberately took a spoonful of chili. It was warm and bland. Greed is life. “Okay,” I said, “it matters. I’m from New York. If you don’t want to tell me what’s happening you don’t have to. I can hear it on the radio for myself.”

“Now apologize to Grace-Ellen.”

I was dumbfounded. “For what?”

“For swearing.”

I looked at the waitress. She was leaning against the wall behind the counter. I thought she was trying to look offended.

“If I swore at you, I apologize,” I said.

The men sat staring at me. I could feel violence thickening about them, not sure which way to flow or whether to flow at all.

“Get the shit out of here, wiseass,” the young man said. “Wait. Frank, get the number of bigshot’s car.” He held up a massive palm in my direction while a small man in suspenders, a natural flunky, jumped up from his stool and ran out and stood in front of my car. Through the window I saw him pull a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and write on it.

My friend lowered his meaty palm. “I’m taking that number to the police,” he said. “Now are you gonna sit and bullshit me some more or are you gonna leave?”

I stood up. There were three of them, not counting no ‘count Frank. Sweat glissed coldly down my sides. In Manhattan such an exchange might last fifteen minutes with all parties knowing that they will do nothing more violent at the end than walk away. But the muscular balding blond young man had no trace of New York relish in insult and feigned toughness, and I risked only one further remark.

“I only asked a question.” I hated him, his distrust of strangers and his manner of the village bully. I knew I would hate myself for fleeing.

He looked at me with flat eyes.

I walked slowly past him. All of the men were looking at me now with expressionless faces. One of them edged a contemptuous half inch out of my way so that I could open the door.

“He’s got to pay for that chili,” said Grace-Ellen, coming to life.

“Shut the fuck up,” said her defender. “We don’t need his goddam money.”

I hesitated for a second, wondering whether I dared to drop a dollar on the floor. “Whatever it was,” I said, “I hope it happens again. You deserve it.” Then I wheeled through the door and flipped the little pinwheel catch on its outside and sprinted toward the Volkswagen. Grace-Ellen’s voice was screaming don’t bust that door when I got the car started and drove off.

Five miles out of Plainview, my mind was a stew of fantasies. I imagined retorts witty and threatening, attacks sudden and brutal. I saw a hundred things I might have done, from reasonable discussion to mashing my bowl of chili into Wrinklehead’s face. Eventually, I was trembling so severely that I had to stop the car and get out. I needed release. I slammed the door so hard that the whole car vibrated; then I raced to the back and kicked one of the rear tires until my foot ached. For a while I hammered on the beetle’s engine cover, pounding with my fists, seeing Wrinklehead’s face in my mind. When I was exhausted I half-fell into the dust and grass at the side of the road. Hot sun scored my face. My hands throbbed, and I noticed finally that I had torn a triangular flap of skin from my left hand. The palm was rilling with blood. I clumsily wound my handkerchief around it. When I held the handkerchief tightly, the wound throbbed more but hurt less, both satisfactory sensations. A memory hit me and came pulsing out with my slow blood.

This was a memory of marital disharmony. A memory of disorder. Most of my marriage was disordered, in fact, the blame for which was neither Joan’s nor mine but lay in the mis-mating of two wildly divergent temperaments. It was tomaytos — tomahtos, eether — eyether in every possible sphere. My favorite movies had people shooting guns, hers had people speaking French; I liked to read and listen to records in the evening, she liked parties where she could pick fights with stuffy gents in white shirts and striped ties; I was monogamous by nature, she polyandrous. She was one of those people for whom sexual faithfulness is simply not possible, for whom it would be something like death of imagination. Seven months before Joan died, she had gone through, to my knowledge, five lovers during our marriage, each of them wounding to me: the last of these was one (let’s call him) Dribble. She was swimming with him, drunk, when she drowned. On the occasion I remembered, we had gone for dinner at Dribble’s house. Amidst the usual posters of the time (Che’s iconic face, War Is Unhealthy for Children and Other Living Things) and the paperbacks by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, we ate chili and drank Almaden Mountain Red. Only during the musical part of the evening, while Joan and Dribble were dancing to a Stones record, did I realize that they had become lovers. Once home I became a Mars of the coffee table and the dining room curtains — I had thought we were in a good patch, I felt betrayed. I accused. She denied hotly and then hotly refused to deny. I slapped her. Oh, these errors of an optimistic heart. She gasped, then called me a “pig.” She said that I had never loved her, that I had stopped loving anything but Alison Greening. It was all that could be said, it was a deliberate foray onto my sacred territory. She stormed off to Dribble, I drove to the all-night university library and played clown to students in the corridors. My six years’ marriage was over.

It was the memory of that last messy scene that assaulted me while I sat in the dust beside my car. I almost smiled. It may have been from shame — it makes me blaze with shame, that I struck her — and it may have been in response to an odd and powerful sensation which visited me then. This sensation was, centrally, of freedom: of having a purer vision of myself settling down upon me, of being cast out forever from my old life. It felt like cold air, like blue cold water.

The connection between these two scenes, as you will have noticed, is anger — as it was anger, I only now observe, which rebounded back on me to grant the sensation of a central freedom. Anger is an emotion not typical of me. Generally, I mess through life, seeing everybody’s point of view. But the month to come, certainly the strangest of my life, brought as much anger as it did fear. In my normal life, back on Long Island, I was shy and something of a clown, a clown from shyness. Since my adolescence, there seem to have been secrets of competence and knowingness from which I was locked away. Innocently, I had always imagined that anger created its own moral authority.

I rose from the dust and got back into the car, breathing hard. Blood had seeped through to the outer layers of the handkerchief, and I was vaguely aware of blood on my shoes, which I scuffed against the backs of my trouser legs. An echo of a dream caught in my mind, dislocating and severe. This I shook off by attempting to start the car. My assault on the engine must have offended the touchy little motor, because it sputtered and tut-tutted a long time and then eventually flooded. I sat, still breathing noisily, for a while and then tried it again: it chuffed, and went back to work.

When I had gone about half of the distance to Arden I turned on the radio and twisted the knob until I found the Arden station. Then I discovered what the peculiar scene in the diner had been all about. My up-to-date reporter, Michael Moose (so it sounded), was coming to me with the news and all the news on the hour and the half-hour with a full five minutes of local roundup and world events. In his deep hollow announcer’s voice, he said, “Police report no progress yet toward discovery of the perpetrator of the most shocking crime in Arden’s history, the sex-murder of Gwen Olson. The discovery of the body of the twelve-year-old sixth-grader was made early this morning by fishermen crossing a deserted area of waste ground near the Blundell River. Chief Hovre reports that he and his team will be working on this case full time until it is solved. A bare eight hours since…” I turned it off.

Though any urban American gets this story with most of his breakfasts, it was not callousness that made me switch off the radio, but the flicker of a penetrating certainty — the certainty that I would be seeing Alison Greening again, that she would honor a pact we had made twenty years before. My cousin, Alison Greening — I had not seen her since that night, when the consequence of a nude swim had been our total separation.

I cannot explain this sudden half-conviction that Alison would keep her vow, but I believe it had its birth in that earlier flood of wonderful high feeling, that grip of freedom as I bled into my handkerchief. When I knew and loved her, she embodied freedom to me, freedom and strength of will — she obeyed only her own rules. Anyhow, I savored this sensation for a moment, my hand still on the knob of the radio, and then I packed it away in my mind, thinking that what would happen, would. I knew that the keeping of my half of our vow was an equal part of my return to Arden.

Eventually the four-lane highway ascended a hill I knew, and then, going sharply down, traversed a high metal bridge which was the first true landmark. Going down the hill, my father would say, “We’ll fly over it this time,” and pull back on the wheel while accelerating. I would scream with expectation, and even as we raced past the bolts and girders of the bridge it was as though we had for a moment taken flight. From here I could have jogged to the farmhouse, bad heart, thick waistline, suitcases and cartons and all, and I glanced at the long flat cornfields on both sides with spirits momentarily high.

But between the bridge and my grandmother’s farmhouse were many more landmarks — I knew the roads, the few buildings, even the trees by rote from my childhood, when they had been all washed in the glow of being on vacation — all of them important, but at least three of them vital. At the first crossroads past the bridge I left the highway, which continued, going over another, low metal bridge, on to Arden, and joined the narrower road into the valley. At the very edge of the entrance to the valley, when one first becomes aware of the wooded hills sloping up from the far side of the fields, was the yet narrower and rougher road to Auntie Rinn’s house. I wondered what had happened to that sturdy little wooden structure now that the old woman was surely dead. Of course children have no proper idea of the ages of adults, forty to a ten-year-old is only a blink away from seventy, but Auntie Rinn, my grandmother’s sister, had always been old to me — she was not one of the fat vital shouting farm women conspicuous at church picnics in the valley, but of the other common physical type, drawn and thin, almost stringy from youth on. In old age, these women seem weightless, transparencies held together by wrinkles, though many of them work small farms with only the most necessary assistance. But Rinn’s day had long passed, I was sure: my grandmother had died six years before, aged seventy-nine, and Rinn had been older than her sister.

Rinn had owned a considerable reputation for eccentricity in the valley, and visiting her always partook a bit of the adventurous — even now, knowing that the old wraith’s home was probably inhabited by a redfaced young farmer who would prove to be my cousin at several removes, even now the little road up the hill to her house looked eerie, winding up past the fields to the trees. Her house had been so thickly surrounded by trees that little sunlight had ever fought through to her windows.

I think Rinn’s oddness had been rooted in her spinsterhood, always something of an anomaly in farm country where fertility is a sign of grace. Where my grandmother had married a neighboring young farmer, Einar Updahl, and prospered, Rinn had been tenuously engaged to a young Norwegian she never met. The match was arranged by aunts and uncles in Norway. It is the only sort of engagement I can imagine Rinn accepting — to a man thousands of miles away, a man in no danger of impinging upon her life. The story, as I remember it, was that the young man ceased to threaten Rinn’s independence at the very time he drew nearest to it: he died on board the boat bringing him to America. Everyone in the family, save Rinn, thought this was a tragedy. She’d had a house built for her by her brother-in-law, my grandfather, and she insisted on moving into it. Years later, when my mother was a child, my grandmother had visited Rinn and come upon her talking volubly in the kitchen. Are you talking to yourself now, asked my grandmother. Of course not, said Rinn. I’m talking to my young man. I never saw any sign that she was on excessively familiar terms with the departed, but she did look as though she were capable of tricks not available to most of us. I knew two versions of the story of Rinn and the heifer: in the first, Rinn was walking past a neighbor’s farm when she looked at his livestock, wheeled around and marched up the track to his house. She took him down to the road and pointed to a heifer in the pen and said that animal will die tomorrow, and it did. This is the predictive version. In the causal version, the neighboring farmer had offended Rinn somehow, and she took him into the road and said, that heifer will die tomorrow unless you stop — what? Crossing my land? Diverting my water? Whatever it was, the farmer laughed at her, and the heifer died. The causal version was certainly mine. As a child I was scared to death of her — I had half-suspected that one glance of those washed-out Norwegian blue eyes could turn me into a toad if it was a toad she thought I deserved to be.

She must be imagined as a small hunched thin old woman, her abundant white hair loosely bound by a scarf, wearing nondescript farm dresses — working dresses, often covered by various amazing coats, for she had kept poultry in an immense barnlike structure just down the hill from her house, and she sold eggs to the Co-op. Her land never was much good for farming, being too hilly and forested. If her young man had come, he would have had a hard time of it, and maybe when she talked to him she told him that he was better off wherever he was than trying to plant corn or alfalfa on a heavily wooded hillside.

To me she had chiefly spoken of Alison, whom she had not liked. (But few adults had liked Alison.)

Six minutes from the narrow road to Rinn’s old house, set off the main valley road on a little dog-leg behind the valley’s only store, was the second of my landmarks. I spun the VW into the dirt parking area before Andy’s and walked around in back to have another look at it. As comic and sad as ever, but with all of the windows broken now and its original slight listing become a decided sprawl of the whole structure, it sat in a wilderness of ropy weeds and high grass at the edge of a vacant field. I see now that these first two landmarks have both to do with marriages frustrated, with lives bent and altered by sexual disappointment. And both of them are touched with strangeness, with a definitive peculiarity. I was sure that in the past fifteen years. Duane’s monstrous little house had acquired among the valley children a reputation for being haunted.

This was the house that Duane built — my father’s apposite joke — the house he had singlehandedly built for his first love, a Polish girl from Arden detested by my grandmother. In those days, the Norwegian farmers and the Polish townsmen mingled very little. “Duane’s Dream House,” my parents had said, though only to one another: his parents pretended that nothing was wrong with the house, and any jocularity about the subject met with insulted incomprehension. Duane had worked to plans in his head, and they had evidently been stunted there, for the house he had lovingly built for his fiancée was about the size of a small granary — or, say, a big dollhouse, a dollhouse you could stand up in if you were under five foot seven. It had two stories, four equal tiny rooms, as if he had forgotten that people had to cook and eat and shit, and all of this weird construction now leaned decidedly to the right, as if the boards were stretching — I suppose it was about as substantial as a house of straw.

As was his engagement. The Polish girl had fulfilled my grandmother’s worst expectations of those whose parents did not work with their hands, and had run off one winter day with a mechanic at an Arden garage — “another shiftless Pole without the brains God gave him,” my grandmother said to my mother. “When Einar was trading horses — Miles, your grandfather was a great horsetrader here in the valley, and there never was a lazy or a stupid man yet who could see what a horse was made of — when he was going off for a few days with a string, he always used to say that the only thing an Arden Pole knew about a horse was he was supposed to look at its teeth. And that he didn’t know which end to find them at. And that if he found them he didn’t know what he was supposed to see. That girl of Duane’s was just like the rest of them, running off into damnation because a boy had a fancy car.”

She had not even seen the house he had just finished building for her. As the story gradually came to me, Duane had wanted the girl’s first sight of her house to be as he was carrying her into it after the ceremony. Had she come out with her mechanic one night for a look and run off on the spot? Duane had gone into Arden to see her, the week before Christmas in 1955, and her parents had been weepy and hostile. It was a long time before he learned from them that she had never come home the night before — they blamed him, a Lutheran and a Norskie and a farmer, for the loss of their daughter. He ran up to her room and found everything gone: all her clothes, everything she had cared for. From there he raced down to the five and dime where she clerked and heard that she had told the supervisor that she wasn’t going to come in any more. And from the store he went to the filling station to meet the boy whose existence had never exactly been confirmed. He too had disappeared: “Run off last night in that new Stude,” the owner said. “Musta been with your girl, I spoze.”

Like a character in a parody of a Gothic novel, he had never spoken of the girl again, nor had he ever visited this terrible little house. It was never mentioned before him: he was pretending that his engagement had never happened. Four years later he met another girl, the daughter of a farmer in the next valley. He married her and had a child, but that too turned out badly for him.

The absurd frame structure was leaning as though a giant had brushed against it, in a hurry to get somewhere else; even the window frames had become trapezoidal. I walked across the dust and into the thick high weeds and grass. Burrs and bits of fluff adhered to my trousers. I looked in through the two windows facing the rear of Andy’s store and the valley road. The room was, to be straightforward, a mess, a mess of desolation. The floorboards had warped and rotted so that weeds thrust up at various places into the room, and bird and animal droppings littered the floor — it looked like a filthy vacant coffin. One corner held a tangle of blankets from which radiated a semicircle of dead cigarette butts. On the walls I could distinguish the scrawls left by felt-tip pens. My spirits began to dwindle as I looked in at my cousin’s folly, and I turned away, snaring my left foot in a thick fist of weeds. It was as though that malignant dwarf of a house had snatched at me, and I kicked out with all my force. A thorn stabbed my ankle as decisively as a wasp. Swearing, suddenly cold, I walked away from Duane’s little house and went through the dust around to the front of Andy’s.

This, the third of my landmarks, was much more comfortable, much more touched with the grace of normality. My family had always made a ritual stop at Andy’s before continuing on to the farm, and there we invariably loaded up with bottles of Dr. Pepper for me and a case of beer for my father and Uncle Gilbert, Duane’s father. Andy’s was what people used to mean when they said general store, a place where you could buy almost anything, workshirts and trousers, caps, ax handles and beads, meal, clocks, soap, boots, candy, blankets, magazines, toys, suitcases, drills and punches, dogfood, paper, hoes and rakes, chicken feed, gasoline cans, silage formula, flashlights, bread… all of this ranked and packed and piled into a long white wooden building raised up on thick stilts of brick. Before it, three white gaspumps faced the road. I reached the steps and went up through the screen door to the dark cool interior.

It smelled as it always had, a wonderful composite odor of various newnesses. When the screen door banged behind me Andy’s wife (I could not remember her name) looked up at me from where she was sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. She frowned, glanced back at her paper, and when I began to thread my way through the aisles of things, turned her head and muttered something toward the rear of the store. She was a small darkhaired aggressive-looking woman, and her appearance had become dryer and tougher with age. As she glanced suspiciously back, I remembered that we had never been friendly, and that I had given her reason for her dislike of me. Yet I did not think, that she recognized me: I have changed greatly in appearance since my early youth. The chemistry of the moment was wrong, I knew this; my earlier elation had ebbed away, leaving me flat and depressed, and I should have left the store at that moment.

“Anything I can do for you, Mister?” she asked, in her voice the valley’s lilt. For the first time it sounded unfriendly and alien to me.

“Andy in?” I asked, coming closer to the counter through the massed smells of newness.

She wordlessly left her chair and disappeared into the cavernous rear of the store. A door closed, then opened again.

In a moment I saw Andy walking toward me. He had grown fatter and balder, and his pudgy face seemed sexually indeterminate and permanently worried. When he reached the counter he stopped and leaned against it, creasing his belly. “What can I do you for?” he said, the jokiness of the phrase out of key with his rubbery defeated face and his air of country suspicion. I saw that gray had eaten nearly all of the brown in his fringe of hair. “You’re not one of the drummers. Reps, they call themselves now.”

“I wanted to come in and say hello,” I said. “I used to come in here with my parents. I’m Eve Updahl’s boy,” using the shorthand that would identify me in the valley.

He looked at me hard for a moment, then nodded and said, “Miles. You’d be Miles, then. Come back for a visit or just a look-see?” Andy, like his wife, would remember my little errors of judgment of twenty years before.

“Mostly to work,” I said. “I thought the farm would be a peaceful place to work.” An explanation when I had planned to give none — he was making me defensive.

“Don’t think I recall what kind of work you wound up doing.”

“I’m a college teacher,” I said, and the demon of irritation made me take pleasure in his flicker of surprise. “English.”

“Well, you were always supposed to be brainy,” he said. “Our girl takes shorthand and typing over to the business college in Winona. She’s getting on real good up there. Don’t suppose you teach around here anywhere?”

I told him the name of my university.

“That’s back East?”

“It’s on Long Island.”

“Eve always said she was afraid you’d wind up back East. So what’s this work you got to do?”

“I have to write a book — that is, I’m writing a book. On D. H. Lawrence.”

“Uh huh. What’s that when it’s at home?”

I said, “He wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

Andy swung his eyes up to mine with a surprisingly roguish gesture which was somehow girlish at the same time. He looked as though he were about to lick his lips. “I guess it’s true what they say about those colleges out East, huh?” But the remark was not the invitation to masculine revelation that it could have been: there was a sly malice in it.

“It’s only one of a lot of books he wrote,” I said.

Again I got the wink of roguishness. “I guess one Book’s good enough for me.” He turned to the side, and I saw his wife lurking in the back of the shop, staring at me. “It’s Miles, Eve’s boy,” he said. “Coulda fooled me. Says he’s here writing a dirty book.”

She came forward, glowering. “We heard you and your wife got divorced. Duane said.”

“We were separated,” I said a bit harshly. “Now she’s dead.”

Surprise showed in both their faces for a second.

“Guess we didn’t hear that.” said Andy’s wife. “Was there something you wanted?”

“Maybe I’ll pick up a case of beer for Duane. What kind does he drink?”

“If it’s beer he’ll drink it,” said Andy. “Blatz, Schlitz or Old Milwaukee? I guess we got some Bud around here too.”

“Any one,” I said, and Andy lumbered away to the back room where he kept his stacked cases of beer.

His wife and I looked uncomfortably at one another. She broke the contact first, darting her eyes away toward the floor and then out to where my car was parked. “You been staying out of trouble?

“Of course. Yes.”

“But you’re writing filth, he says.”

“He didn’t understand. I came here to write my dissertation.”

She bristled. “And you think Andy’s too dumb to understand you. You were always too good for us up here, weren’t you? You were too good for ordinary folk — too good to follow the law too.”

“Wait, hold on,” I said. “Jesus, that was a long time ago.”

“And so good you don’t think about taking the Lord’s name in vain. You haven’t changed, Miles. Does Duane know you’re coming?”

“Well sure,” I said. “Don’t be so bitchy. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been driving two days and I’ve had a couple of funny experiences.” I saw her glance at my handkerchief-wrapped left hand. “All I want here is peace and quiet.”

“You always made trouble,” she said. “You and your cousin Alison were just alike that way. I’m glad neither of you was raised in the valley. Your grandparents were our people, Miles, and we all took to your father like he was one of us, but now I think maybe we got enough trouble without having you here too.”

“Good lord,” I said. “What happened to your hospitality?”

She glared at me. “You wore out your welcome here the first time you stole from us. I’ll tell Andy to take your beer down to your motor. You can leave the money on the counter.”

I silently watched Andy load the beer into the back seat of the Volkswagen, shoving in the case beside the paper boxes full of notes and books. “Hurt your wing, huh?” he said. “Wife says you paid up there. Well, give my regards to Duane, and I hope your mitt gets better.” He backed away from the car, wiping his hands on his trousers as if he’d dirtied them, and I wordlessly got in behind the wheel. “Bye now,” he said, and I looked at him and then took off out of the dusty little lot. In the rearview mirror I saw him shrugging. When the curve in the road by the red sandstone cliff took him out of sight I snapped the radio on, hoping for music, but Michael Moose was droning on again about Gwen Olson’s death and I impatiently turned it off.

When I had got as far down the valley as the shell of the school where my grandmother had taught all eight grades I pulled over and tried to relax. There is a special feeling in the mind that represents the creation of alpha waves, and I deliberately sought that mild state. This time I failed, and I merely sat in the car, staring alternately at the road, the long green field of corn to my right, and the shell of the schoolhouse. I began to hear the buzz of a motorcycle, and soon I saw it flying down the road toward me, growing in size from the dimensions of a horsefly to the point where I could see the black-jacketed, helmeted rider and the blond passenger behind him, her hair whipping out in the wake and her thick thighs gripping him. At the curve by the sandstone cliff the sound altered, and then it died away altogether.

Why should your old sins be permanently pinned to your jacket? For all to read aloud? It was stupidly unfair. I would do my shopping in Arden, despite the inconvenience of making a ten-mile drive whenever I wanted anything. The making of this decision helped to dispel my temper and after a minute or two of further brooding I began to feel as though I might be producing an at least feeble tranquility.

Where, you might ask, was the clown, the reluctant wag I have proclaimed myself to be? My own abrasiveness surprised me. A woman like Andy’s wife would think the word “bitch” scandalous applied to any sphere but the canine. It was an emotional morning. My former thefts! Yet I supposed that it was too much to expect anyone to have forgotten them.

A hundred yards past the deserted school was the church: Gethsemane Lutheran church is a red brick building with quite a sturdy, pompous, peaceful air to it, probably conferred by the Palladian columns at the top of the stairs. For the sake of my grandmother, who was already very weak, Joan and I had been married in this church. (My mother’s idea.)

After the church the land seems to open up, and the corn takes over. I passed the Sunderson farmhouse — two pickup trucks parked on the high sloping lawn, a rooster strutting in the red dust of the driveway — and saw a burly man in overalls and a cap just coming out of the house. He stared at me and then decided to wave, but I had not generated sufficient alpha waves to return his greeting.

Half a mile past the Sunderson farm I could see my grandmother’s old house and the Updahl land. The row of walnut trees at the edge of the lawn had put on weight, and now they looked like a row of heavy old farmers standing in the sun. I drove by the front of the property and swung into the driveway, passing the trees and feeling the car jounce on the ruts. I expected to feel some strong upwelling of feeling, looking at the long white house again, but my emotions seemed flat and dull. It was just a two-story house with a screen porch, an ordinary farmhouse. Yet when I got out of the car I smelled all the old odors of the farm, a rich compound of cows and horses and fertilizer and milk and sunshine. This pervades everything: when people from the farm had visited my family in Fort Lauderdale, it hung on their clothes and hands and shoes. Smelling all this again made me momentarily feel thirteen years old, and I lifted my head, straightening out the kinks in my neck and back, and saw a heavy form moving down the screen porch. By his shovel-handed, lumbering walk I knew it was Duane, who had been sitting invisible in the corner of the porch just as he had been on that terrible night twenty years before. When Duane came out of the porch into the sun I tried to smile at him. What the first sight of my cousin had brought back to me was how much hostility there had always been between us, how little we had liked one another. It would be different now, I hoped.

Two __________

“Have a case of beer, Duane,” I said, mistakenly trying for a bluff friendliness.

He appeared to be confused — really, confusion was stamped all over his big plain face — but his mechanism was set for holding out his hand and saying hello., and that was what he did. His hand was huge, a true farmer’s hand, and so rough it felt made of a substance less vulnerable than skin. Duane was a short barrel-like man, but his extremities might have come from someone a foot taller. As we clasped hands and he blinked at me, half smiling, trying to figure out what I meant about the beer, I noticed that he had obviously come in from a morning’s work: he wore heavy stained denim coveralls and workboots crusted with mud and excrement. He radiated all of the usual farm odors, compounded with sweat and underlain by his true odor, his inner smell, which is of gunpowder.

Finally he released my hand. “Did you have a good drive?”

“Sure,” I said. “This country isn’t as big as we think it is. People zip back and forth on it all the time.” The persistence of habit: although he was nearly a decade older, I had always taken this tone with Duane.

“I’m glad you had a good drive. You sure surprised me when you said you wanted to come out here again.”

“You thought I was lost among the fleshpots of the East.”

He distrusted the word “fleshpots,” being not quite sure what it meant. That was twice I had taken him off balance. “I was just kind of surprised,” he said. “Say, Miles, I was sorry about your wife. Maybe you wanted to get away?”

“That’s it,” I said. “I did want to get away. Did you take time off from your work to greet me?”

“Well, I didn’t want you to come in and find nobody to home. The kid’s gone out somewhere, and you know kids, you can’t count on them for anything. So I thought I’d wait around after lunch and say hi. Make you feel welcome. And I thought I might listen to the radio in the porch there, see if anything new happened on that terrible business. My kid knew that Olson girl.”

“Will you help me get these bags and things inside?” I said.

“Huh? Oh, sure,” and he reached in, bending over the seat, and lifted out two heavy boxes of books and notes. Upright again, he asked, “Is that beer in there for me?”

“I hope it’s your brand.”

“It’s wet, ain’t it?” He grinned. “I’ll put it in the tank when we got you squared away.” Before we went toward the porch, Duane twisted his head and looked at me with a surprisingly embarrassed expression on his face. “Say, Miles, maybe I shouldn’t have said that about your wife. Because I only met her that once.”

“It’s all right.”

“No. I should never open my mouth about anyone else’s woman troubles.”

He was referring, I knew, to his own history of marital disaster and to something else as well. Duane was suspicious of women — he was one of those men, sexually normal in every other respect, who are at ease only in male company. I think that he had a radical dislike of women. For him they primarily had been sources of pain, with the exception of his mother and grandmother (about his daughter I could not then speak). After his first disappointment, he had married a girl from one of the farms in French Valley, and this girl had died giving birth to their child. He’d had one numbing humiliation at the hands of a girl (the humiliation not salved by his grandmother’s evident satisfaction in it) followed by four years of being between women, his romantic life joked about in Arden bars, then eleven months of marriage and the rest of his life without adult feminine companionship. I suspected that his suspicion of women contained a fair portion of hate. For Duane they had approached and then abruptly withdrawn, still holding whatever mysterious sexual secret they possessed. In the old days, when the Polish girl had been giving him trouble, I had often sensed that his attitude toward Alison Greening was edged with something darker than mere desire. I think he hated her, hated her for evoking desire in him and for finding his desire laughable, a thing of no consequence or value. Alison had found him absurd.

Of course Duane was physically vigorous, and his celibacy must at times have been a torment: yet I suspected him of being the kind of man who is shocked and upset by his own fantasies, and is comfortable with women only when they are safely married to his acquaintances. He had submerged his sexuality in work for so long that he expected other men to do the same, habit had become transformed into principle, and he had his success to justify him. Duane had purchased two hundred neighboring acres, and was; now at the limit of what a man could farm by himself if he worked ten hours a day; as if to demonstrate the physical law that actions have equal reactions, sexual starvation had fattened his bank account.

The immediate evidence of his prosperity struck me when we carried the boxes and suitcases into my grandmother’s old house. “My God, Duane,” I said, “you bought new furniture for the place!” Instead of my grandmother’s spare old wooden furniture, her threadbare old sofa, the room held what I suppose could be called nineteen-fifties lounge furniture: heavy patterned chairs and matching couch, a blond coffee table, starkly functional table lamps instead of kerosene lamps, even framed reproductions of mediocre paintings. In the setting of the old house, the nondescript new furniture had a tactless chic. The effect of all this on the austere farmhouse living room was to make it resemble a freeway motel bedroom. But there was another resemblance I did not immediately identify.

“I suppose you think it’s funny to get new stuff for an empty house, don’t you?” he asked me. “The thing is, I get people stopping up here more often than you’d think. In April, George and Ethel were here, and in May Nella from St. Paul, and—” He went on to enumerate a lengthy list of cousins and their children who had stayed in the house for a week or more at a time. “Sometimes this place is like a regular hotel. I guess all these city folks want to show their kids what a farm looks like.”

While he talked I noticed that the old photographs of the grandchildren still hung on the walls, as they always had. I knew them all: I identified a picture of myself at nine, my hair in a cowlick like a ruff, and one of Duane at fifteen, scowling suspiciously at the camera as if it were about to tell him something he wouldn’t like. Below this was a photograph of Alison which I sensed glowing at me but lacked the courage to look at directly. The sight of that beautiful wild face would have knocked the wind out of me. And then I noticed that the house was immaculately clean.

“Anyhow,” Duane was saying, “up over to Arden, a warehouse full of office furniture had a clearance sale just when I got my rebate. So I thought I’d do the old place up since all the furniture was going pretty cheap. Took the truck down and just humped all this stuff back with me.”

This was the resemblance I had been unable to name: the room looked like an office in a down-at-heels concern.

“I like the modern way it looks,” said Duane, perhaps a shade defensively. “And it cost less than a second-hand disc.” He glanced at me, then added, “Everybody seems to like it.”

“It’s great,” I said, “I like it too,” distracted by the throbbing and glowing of Alison’s photograph on the wall. I knew this photograph well. It had been taken in Los Angeles near the end of her childhood, before the Greenings were divorced and Alison and her mother moved to San Francisco. It showed only her face. Even when she was a child, Alison’s face was beautiful and complicated, magic, and her father’s photograph showed it all, the beauty and the magical complications. She looked as though she knew and embraced everything. The thought of that overwhelming expression on her childhood face made my stomach tingle, and to avoid looking at the photograph I said, “I wish you had picked up a desk while you were at it. I need a desk to work at.”

“That’s no problem,” said Duane. “I got an old panel door and a couple of sawbucks we: could lay it across.”

“Well,” I said, and turned toward him. “You’re a good host, Duane. The place looks clean, too.”

“Mrs. Sunderson down the road, you remember her? Tuta Sunderson? Her husband died a couple of years back, and she lives up there now with her boy Red and his wife. Red farms pretty near as good as Jerome did. Anyhow, I talked to Tuta and she said she’d come over here every day to cook your breakfast and dinner and clean for you. She was in here yesterday.” He paused, having something further to say. “Said it would be five dollars a week and you’d have to buy your own groceries. She can’t drive since: she had her cataract operation. That okay?”

I said it was fine with me. “Actually, let’s make it seven dollars,” I said. “Otherwise I’d feel like I was stealing from her.”

“Whatever you say. She said five, though, and you probably remember her. Let’s get that beer into the tank.” He clapped his hands together.

The two of us went back outside into the hot sun and the farm smells. Duane’s gunpowder odor was stronger in the open air, and to escape it I reached into the car first and pulled out the case of beer. He trudged beside me up the long path past the baking metal of the pole barn, the granary, and well past that, his white clap-boarded house, to the tank beside the cattle barn.

“You said in your letter you were working on a book.”

“My dissertation.”

“What’s that on?”

“An English writer.”

“Did he write a lot?”

“A lot,” I said, and laughed. “A hell of a lot.”

Duane laughed too. “How’d you pick that?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I expect to be pretty busy, but is there still anyone around here that I used to know?”

He considered that as we passed the brown scar where the summerhouse used to be. “Didn’t you know Polar Bears Hovre? He’s the Police Chief over to Arden now.”

I almost dropped the case of beer. “Polar Bears? That wildman?” When I was ten and he seventeen, Polar Bears and I had spitballed the congregation from the choir loft at Gethsemane church.

“He settled down some,” Duane said. “He does a good job.”

“I ought to call him up. We used to have fun together. Even though he always liked Alison a little too much for my taste.”

Duane gave me a peculiar, startled look, and contented himself with saying, “Well, he keeps pretty busy now.”

I remembered another figure from my past — really, the sweetest and most intelligent of all the Arden boys I had met years ago. “What about Paul Kant? Is he still around? I suppose he went off to a university somewhere and never came back.”

“No, you can see Paul. He works in Arden. He works in that Zumgo department store they got over there. Or so I hear.”

“I don’t believe it. He works in a. department store? Is he manager or something?”

“Just works there, I guess. He never did much.” Duane looked at me again, a little shyly this time., and said, “He’s a little funny. Or so they say.”

“Funny?” I was incredulous.

“Well, you know how some people talk. Nobody would mind if you called him up, I guess.”

“Yes, I do know how they talk,” I said, remembering Andy’s wife. “They’ve said enough about me. Some of them are still saying it.” Now we were at the tank, and I leaned over the mossy rim and began putting the bottles down into the green water.

The cap on one of the last beer bottles caught my handkerchief when I was pulling my hand out of the tank, and the wet cloth separated from my hand and sank down on top of the bottles. Chilly water tingled and ached in the exposed wound, and I gasped. Blood began to come twisting out like smoke or a flag — I thought of sharks.

“You meet up with something that didn’t like you?” Duane had insinuated himself beside me and was staring heavily down at my hand bleeding into his tank.

“It’s a little difficult to explain.” I snatched my paw out of the cold water and leaned over the tank and pressed my palm against its far edge, where moss grew nearly an inch thick. The throbbing and stinging immediately lessened, inhibited by application of magic substance. If I could have stayed there all day, pressing my hand against that cool slimy moss, my hand would have healed, millions of new cells would have formed every second.

“You dizzy?” Duane asked.

I was looking out across the road to his fields. Alfalfa and tall corn grew in alternate bands on either side of the creek and the line of willows and cottonwoods; a round shoulder of hillside further up was perfectly bisected by the two crops. It was for silage- — Duane had years before given up everything but beef cattle. Up from the bifurcated hillside grew the woods climbing to the top of the valley. They seemed impossibly perfect, like a forest by Rousseau. I wanted to take a handful of moss and go up there to camp, forgetting all about teaching and my book and New York.

“You dizzy?”

Blood was oozing down through the thick moss into the water. I was still looking at the edge of the field, where the rise of trees began. I thought that I had seen a slim figure duck momentarily out of the trees, glance toward us and then slip back into cover like a fox. It might have been a boy. By the time I was fully aware of it, it had vanished.

“You okay?” Duane sounded a little impatient.

“Sure, I’m fine. Do you get many kids wandering around up in those woods?”

“They’re pretty thick. Nobody goes in them much. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.”

“We still got a few animals up there too. But they’re no good for hunting. Unless you got a rifle can shoot around trees.”

“Andy’s probably got a few of those.” I lifted my hand from the moss. It immediately began to sting and pulse. Due to removal of magic substance.

Magic substances are those with a sacred, soothing and healing content. When Duane said, “Let’s go up to the house and I’ll bandage that mitt of yours,” I surprised him by ripping out a handful of the thick moss, exposing a gray, rusting section of the lank, and by gripping the green slippery stuff in my wounded hand. I squeezed it tightly, and the stinging pain lessened a bit.

“Used to be an old Indian woman around here who’d do that for you,” Duane said, looking at the pulpy mess in my hand. “Make medicine out of herbs and like that. Like Rinn did, too. But what you got there is liable to get pretty dirty. We’ll wash her out before we put on the gauze. How’d you get a thing like that, anyhow?”

“Oh, it was just a stupid fit of temper.”

The moss had become dark with blood, an uncomfortably soggy thing to hold, and I dropped the messy handful onto the grass and turned to walk up the drive to Duane’s house. A dog lying panting by the granary looked attentively at the bloody pad.

“You get into a fight?”

“Not really. I just had a little accident.”

“Remember that time you totaled that car just outside Arden?”

“I don’t think I could forget it,” I said. “I just about bought it.”

“Wasn’t that after that time out at the—”

“It was, yes,” I broke in, not wanting him to utter the word “quarry.”

“That was a hell of a time,” he said. “I was in my truck going down the road right after you, but when you turned right on 93, I went the other way toward Liberty. I just drove around. After about an hour—”

“Okay, that’s enough.”

“Well, you know, I was going to—”

“That’s enough. It’s all in the past.” I wanted to shut him up and was desperately sorry we had ever got on this topic. Several steps behind me, the dog began growling and whining. Duane bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at the animal; I kept walking straight ahead. I was holding my hand out from my side, letting my blood drip steadily down my fingers, and I imagined that skulking creeping black-and-white beast crawling toward me. The stone connected; the dog yelped, and I could hear it pelting off to a safe distance. I looked around and saw a trail of bright drops on the grass.

“You gonna call Auntie Rinn today?” Duane had reached the cement steps to his house, and was standing down there, his head tilted up at me. “I told her you were coming, Miles, and I guess she understood. I think she wants to see you.”

“Rinn?” I asked, incredulous. “Is she still alive? I was just thinking that she must have died years ago.”

He smiled — the infuriating disbelief of an insider. “Dead? That old bird? Nothing can kill her.”

He came up the stairs and I followed him into his house. The door opened onto a hallway off the kitchen, which was much as it had been when Uncle Gilbert had been alive: patterned linoleum on the floor, a long Formica-topped dining table, the same porcelain stove. But the walls looked yellowish, and the entire room had an air of dirt and neglect only partially explained by the greasy handprints on the refrigerator and the stack of dishes by the sink. There was dust even on the mirror. It looked like the sort of room where an army of ants and mice are poised behind the walls, waiting for the lights to go off.

He saw me gazing around. “The damn kid’s supposed to keep the kitchen clean, but she’s about as responsible as a…” He shrugged. “A cowflop.”

“Imagine what your mother would say if she could see it.”

“Oh, I’m used to it this way,” he said, blinking. “Besides, it don’t do to hold to the past like that.”

I thought he was wrong. I have always held to the past, I thought that it could, would, should be repeated indefinitely, that it was the breathing life in the heart of the present. But I couldn’t speak of this to Duane. I said, “Tell me about Auntie Rinn. Were you hinting that she’s deaf?” I went to the sink and held my dripping hand over it.

“Hang on while I get the gauze and tape,” he said, and lumbered away toward the bathroom. When he returned he took my hand and held it under a stream of cold water from the tap. “You couldn’t say she was deaf. You couldn’t say she was blind. The way I make it out, she sees what she wants to see and hears what she wants to hear. But don’t mess; around with her. If she wants to hear it, she’ll hear. She’s sharp. She knows everything that’s going on.”

“Can she get around?”

“She doesn’t leave her place much. Neighbors buy her groceries, the little she needs, but she still has her egg business. And she rents out her little field to Oscar Johnstad. I reckon she gets by. But now she’s in her eighties, we don’t even see her at church.”

Surprisingly, Duane was a good nurse. As, he talked, he quickly dried my hand with a dishtowel, pressed a big pad of absorbent cotton onto the wound and wrapped a broad strip of tape around the base of my hand, winding it around both sides of my thumb. “Now,” he said when he was finishing. “We’re gonna make you look like a farmer.”

Farms are notorious for accidents: slings, bandages and amputated limbs are commonplaces in rural communities, as are suicides, mental instability and sullen temperaments. In the latter particulars, but not the former, they resemble academic communities. Both are usually thought of as havens of serenity. I entertained myself with these reflections while Duane made his final pass with the roll of tape, tore it with his blunt fingers, and anchored the loose end firmly at the base of my hand. I looked like a farmer: a good omen for the completion of my dreadful work.

Oh, for it was dreadful, an insult to spirit. As the fingers of my left hand began to tingle, suggesting the possibility that Duane might have wound the tape over-tightly, I realized how much I disliked writing academic criticism. I decided that once I had finished my book and had made my job secure, I’d never write another word of it.

“Anyhow,” Duane said, “you could call her up or just go over.”

I would. I thought I would drive over to her farm in the next day or two, after I had settled in at the old farmhouse. Auntie Rinn, I thought, was inhabited by spirit, she was spirit in one of its forms, like the girl whose photograph could make my tongue a stone. I heard the door open and close behind me.

“Alison,” Duane said matter-of-factly but with an undertone of anger. “Cousin Miles has been wondering where you were.”

I turned around, aware that I did not look normal. Gazing sardonically, even contemptuously at me, though with a trace of interest — the contempt seemed defensive and automatic — was a rather thickset, thoroughly Nordic blond girl of seventeen or eighteen. His daughter. Of course. “Big deal,” she said. She was the girl I had seen that morning, clinging to the rider of the motorcycle. “He looks sick. You threaten him or something?”

I shook my head, still trembling but beginning to recover. It had been stupid of me not to remember her name. Heavy-breasted in her T shirt, large in hip and thigh, she was still an attractive girl, and I was aware of what an odd figure I appeared to her.

Duane looked, over at me, then looked again, observing that I was shaken. “This is my girl Alison, Miles. You wanta sit down?”

“No,” I said. ‘I’m fine, thanks.”

“Where were you?” asked Duane.

“Why is it your business?” said this stocky warrior with lank blond hair. “I went out.”

“Alone?”

“Well, if it’s any of your business, I was with Zack.” Again, that flat glass-breaking glare. “We passed him on the road. He’d probably tell you anyhow, so I might as well.”

“I didn’t hear the bike.”

“Jesus,” she groaned, her face an ugly mask of disdain. “Okay. He stopped down by the other house so you wouldn’t hear. I walked up the road. You satisfied? Okay?”

Her face twitched, and I saw that what I had taken for disdain was only embarrassment. It was that torturing embarrassment of the teens, and aggression was her weapon against it.

“I don’t like you seeing him.”

“Suppose you try and stop me.” She strode past the two of us into another part of the house. A television set went on a moment later; then she called from another room, “You ought to be out working anyhow.”

“She’s right,” Duane said. “What do you want to do? You look a little funny.”

“I just felt a little faint. What’s wrong with Zack? Your daughter—” I was not yet ready to call that surly warrior Alison; she seemed, in my imagination, to be stalking and slashing through a forest, lopping trees off at their knees. “She seems to know her own mind.”

“Yeah.” He managed to smile. “That’s one thing she really does know. She’s a good girl though. As good as you can expect anything built female to be, anyhow.”

“Sure,” I agreed, though the qualification made me uneasy. “What’s wrong with Zack?”

“He’s no good. He’s a weirdo. Listen, Alison’s right, I ought to be out doing some work, but we still should set up your desk. Or I could just tell you where everything is and you could set it up yourself. It’s no work.”

Over the noise of the television set, Duane told me where to find the door and the trestles in his basement and then said, “Make yourself at home,” and went outside. I watched him through the side windows of the kitchen as he lumbered toward the pole barn and emerged from it atop a giant tractor. He looked comfortable and at ease, as some men look natural on a horse. Somewhere he had acquired a peaked cap which I could see when the tractor had taken him behind the tall rows of corn up in the far field.

The sound of the television drew me into the unexpected room where Alison Updahl had gone. When I was a child this room had been cramped, linoleum-tiled like the kitchen, and occupied chiefly by a sprung davenport and an inefficient television. Duane had evidently rebuilt it; his skills had grown since the days of the Dream House. Now it was three times its former size, thickly and luxuriously carpeted, and furnished in a manner which suggested a great deal of expense. My cousin’s daughter, sprawled on a brown couch and watching a color television, looked, in her T shirt and jeans and bare feet, like a teenager in an affluent suburb of Chicago or Detroit. She did not look up when I entered. She was rigid with selfconsciousness.

I said, “What a nice-looking room. I haven’t seen it before.”

“It stinks.” She was still looking at the television, where Fred Astaire was sitting in a racing car. After a second I saw that the car was up on blocks in a closed garage.

“Maybe it just smells new,” I said, and earned a glance. But no more than that. She snorted through her nose and returned to the movie.

“What’s the film?”

Not bothering to look up again, she said, “On The Beach. It’s great.” She waved off a fly which had settled on her leg. “Suppose you let me try and watch it?”

“Whatever you say.” I went to a big comfortable chair at the side of the room and sat. I watched her for a minute or so without either of us speaking. She began to jerk her foot up and down rhythmically, then to toy with her face. After a while she spoke.

“It’s about the end of the world. I think that’s a pretty neat idea. Zack said I should watch it. He saw it before. Do you live in New York?”

“On Long Island.”

“That’s New York. I’d like to go there. That’s where everything is.”

“Oh?”

“You should know. Zack says everything is going to end pretty soon, maybe with people throwing bombs, maybe with earthquakes, it doesn’t matter what, and that everybody thinks it’ll happen in New York first. But it won’t. It’ll happen here first. There’ll be bodies all over the Midwest, Zack says.”

I said that it sounded like Zack was looking forward to it.

She sat up straight, like a wrestler on the mat, and took her attention off the screen for a moment. Her eyes were very pale. “Do you know what they found at the Arden dump a couple of years ago? Just when I was starting high school? Two heads in paper bags. Women’s heads. They never found out who they were. Zack says it was a sign.”

“A sign of what?”

“That it’s beginning. Pretty soon there won’t be any schools, any government, any armies. There won’t be any of that shit. There’ll just be killing. For a long time. Like with Hitler.”

I saw that she wished to shock. “I think I can see why your father doesn’t like Zack.”

She glared at me and returned her gaze sullenly to the screen.

I said, “You must have known that girl who was killed.”

She blinked. “Sure I knew her. That was terrible.”

“I suppose she helps prove your theories.”

“Don’t be creepy.” Another pale-eyed, sullen stare from the little warrior.

“I like your name.” In truth, and despite her foul manners, I was beginning to like her. Lacking her confidence, she had none of her namesake’s awesome charm, but she had her energy.

“Ugh.”

“Were you named after anybody?”

“Look, I don’t know and I don’t care, okay?”

Our conversation seemed to be concluded. With an air which suggested that she would stay in that position for life, Alison had returned to the television set. Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner were strolling across a field arm in arm, looking as if they too thought the end of the world was a neat idea. She spoke again before I could rise and leave the room..

“You’re not married, are you?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you get married? Didn’t you used to be married?”

I reminded her that she had been at my wedding.

Now she was staring at me again, ignoring Gregory Peck’s twitching jaw and Ava Gardner’s trembling breast. “You got divorced? Why?”

“My wife died.”

“Holy cow, she died? Were you upset? Was it suicide?”

“She died by accident,” I said. “Yes, I was upset, but not for the reasons you’re imagining. We hadn’t lived together for some time. I was upset that another human being, one to whom I had been close, had died senselessly.”

She was reacting to me strongly, in an almost sexual way — I could almost see her temperature rising and I thought I could smell blood. “Did you leave her or did she leave you?” She had curled one leg beneath herself and straightened her back on the couch so that she was sitting up and staring at me with those flat seawater eyes. I was better than the movie.

“I’m not sure that’s important. I’m not sure it’s any of your business either.”

“She left you.” Accent on both pronouns.

“Maybe we left each other.”

“Did you think she got what she deserved?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“My father would. He’d think that.” I saw the point of these odd questions finally, and felt an unexpected twinge of pity for her. She had lived all her life within her father’s suspicion of womankind. “So would Zack.”

“Well, people can surprise you sometimes.”

“Hah,” she granted. It was a proper rejection of my cliché then she twisted herself back around, almost flouncing on the couch, to watch the movie again. Now my audience was truly over, and this complicated little warrior queen was bidding me leave.

“You needn’t bother to show me the way out,” I said, and left the room. On the other side of the kitchen, in the little vestibule before the door was the entrance to the basement. I opened this second door and fumbled for the light. When I found the switch and flicked it up, the bulb illuminated only the wooden staircase and a pool of packed earth at its foot. I began carefully to descend.

It still bothers me that I did not go to Duane to discuss his daughter’s loony theories. But I have heard proposals more bizarre from my students — many of them my female students. And as I navigated Duane’s basement, stooping over, hands extended, going to what I hoped was the west wall, I considered that he had surely heard it all by now, his daughter’s ventriloquial act: he had said this Zack was a weirdo, and I was inclined to agree. We had presumably judged on the same evidence. And their family problems were secondary to me, or tertiary, or quaternary, if I counted Alison Greening, my work and my well-being as my interlocking priorities. Mea culpa. Also, I would not have given Alison Updahl more problems than daughterhood had.

The pad of my bandage bumped a clean flat surface and sent it rocking. With my right hand I reached to steady it, and grasped by accident a smooth long wooden handle. It too was swinging. The object, I realized after a moment’s further groping, was an ax. I saw that I could have jostled it off its peg and severed my foot. I swore aloud, and felt gently around for more axes in the air. My hand brushed another long depending handle, then another, and after it a fourth. By this time my eyes had begun to adjust to the cellar’s darkness, and I could discern the four shadowy handles hanging down in a row from one of the ceiling supports; rakes and garden hoes hung beside them. I worked my way around them, threading through bags of cement and Qwik-Ferm. I stepped over a stack of equipment catalogs. Beyond them a row of things like skinny dwarf mummies leaned against the wall. After a second I knew they were rifles and shotguns in soft cases. Shell boxes were stacked up at one end of the row. Like most farmers, Duane did not find it necessary to put his guns on display. Then I saw what I was looking for. Leaning against the wall, just as Duane had described it, was an old white paneled door, a perfect flat surface for a desk. It had odd doorknobs, but they could easily be taken off. Perhaps Duane would want them — as I got closer to the door, I saw that the knobs were glass, thousand-sided. Beside the door were stacked two trestles, Duane’s sawbucks, like insects in the act of copulation. And beside these was a case of empty Coke bottles, the old eight-ounce variety. The top had been ripped off to expose the open, sucking mouths of the bottles.

I thought of calling for Alison Updahl’s help, but decided not to. It had been a morning of mistakes, and I did not wish to commit another and upset the delicate peace between us. So I took the trestles up first and put them on the grass outside Duane’s back door, and then went back down for what would be my desktop.

The long heavy wooden rectangle was far more awkward to handle, but I managed to get it up the stairs without knocking down a shotgun or dislodging an ax or shattering the old cello-hipped Coke bottles. After I had muscled it up the steep wooden steps, I was sorry I had not called for Alison’s help, for my chest leapt and pounded as though a trout were dying in it. My torn hand ached. I slid the door across the linoleum crumpling several small hooked rugs, and then banged the screen door open with my elbow and wrestled the door outside and down the concrete steps. I was sweating and breathing hard. Mopping my forehead with my sleeve, I propped the door against the trestles and looked at it in dismay. Spider webs, dust and insects made scurrying lacy patterns over the white paint.

The solution, a garden hose, lay at my feet. I twisted the knob set into the base of the house and played the hose over the door until all the filth had been sluiced away. I was tempted to run it over myself. My hands were black and my shirt was ruined, and sweat poured out of my scalp. But I merely held my hands one after the other in the jet of cold water, wetting the bandage as little as possible. Application of magical substance.

Cold water!

I dropped the still-spurting hose and went across Duane’s patchy lawn in the direction of the barn. When I looked to the right I could see my cousin’s head and upper body grinding along atop the invisible tractor, as if he were floated by a perverse, bumpy wind. I went over the gravel and dust of the drive. The dog began to curse me with big windy arrogant curses. I reached the tank and plunged my good hand into the greenish water and closed it over a beer bottle to which clung my bloody handkerchief. This I threw into the weeds. I extracted the dripping bottle. I had just twisted off the cap and begun to pour into me the tingling liquid when I saw the blond-fringed face of the Tin Woodsman staring at me from the kitchen window. She winked. Suddenly we were grinning at each other, and I felt the snarl of emotion which the day had caused in me begin to loosen. It was as though I had found an ally. Really, it could not have been easy for a high-spirited girl to have my cousin Duane for a father.

Three __________

After I had stripped it of the knobs and set it up in the empty upstairs bedroom of my grandmother’s house, the desk looked sturdy and serviceable, a present-day echo of all the desks I have known and used. The room itself, small, white and pine-floored, was a perfect place for literary work, since the bare: walls offered vistas for contemplation and the single window which faced the barn and the path to Duane’s house, opportunity for distraction. Soon I had all my paraphernalia arranged on the desk — typewriter, paper, notes, the beginning-of my draft and my outline. Typex, pens, pencils, paperclips. The novels I placed in several neat piles beside the chair. For a moment I felt that spirit lay in labor in hard work, the more recondite and irrelevant the better. My dogged dissertation would be my linkage with Alison Greening; my work would summon her.

But that day I did no work. I sat at my desk and looked out of the window, watching my cousin’s daughter cross and recross the grass and the path as she-went to the equipment shed or down to the barn, glancing curiously at my window, and then watching Duane ride up from the road on his giant tractor. He put it in the polebarn and then lumbered back across to his house, scratching himself on the bottom. I felt — I suppose I felt — lonely and elated, primed for an event and still flat and hollow at the same time, as though I were not what I was pretending to be, but were merely an actor waiting for the role to begin. It is a feeling I often have.

I sat there watching the sky darken over the barn as the path lost its definition and the tops of Duane’s house and the barn first stood out with greater clarity against a background of darkening blue and then were absorbed into the sky, as if bites were taken out of them. Lights appeared in Duane’s house in series, each window lighting up as though it were timed to go on a moment after its neighbor. I thought Alison might appear on the path, her T shirt shining in moonlight as she sulkily walked toward me, the lank ends of her hair swinging in rhythm with her heavy thighs. After a time I fell asleep. I could have been out no more than an hour, but when I opened my eyes only one light was on in Duane’s house and the territory between our two dwellings seemed as dark and pathless as a jungle. Hungry, I groped my way downstairs and into the kitchen. The house was clammy and musty, and everything was cold to my touch. When I opened the refrigerator I found that either Duane or Mrs. Sunderson had stocked it with, enough food for that night and the following morning — butter, bread, eggs, potatoes, two lamb chops, cheese. I fried the chops and wolfed them down with slices of bread and butter. A meal without wine is not a meal for a grown man. I gnawed at the block of cheddar for dessert. Then I dumped the dishes in the sink for the cleaning woman and went burping back upstairs to the bedroom. When I looked in at my workroom I saw a single light still on in Duane’s house, but at its far end. Alison’s bedroom, presumably. As I stood looking at it I heard the buzz of a motorcycle going up the road. It increased in volume until it came about level with my position and then it abruptly shut off. My desk looked malevolent, like the fat black center of a spider web.

My bedroom, of course, had been my grandmother’s. Yet I see that it is not of course, for she had moved to the chillier, smaller bedroom upstairs only after the death of my grandfather; for this reason it had a newer bed, and for that reason I chose it. It was as far as you could get from the old bedroom and still be in the house — on the opposite side and up the narrow stairs. My grandfather had died when I was a small child, so all my memories of my grandmother are of her as a widow, a wrinkled old woman who climbed the narrow stairs to go to bed. As some old women do, she swung in size between extremes of heaviness and thinness, alternating every three or years, and finally settled on being thin, and died like that. Given that the narrow little room had this history, it is unsurprising that I had a dream about my grandmother; but I found the emotional violence of the dream shocking.

I was in the sitting room, which was furnished not with Duane’s office contraptions but in the old way. My grandmother was seated on her wooden-backed sofa, nervously looking at her hands. — Why did you have to come back?

— What?

— You’re a fool.

— I don’t understand.

— Haven’t enough people died already?

Then she abruptly stood up and walked out of the room onto the porch, where she sat in the rusty old swing. — Miles, you’re an innocent. She raised her fists to me and her face contorted in a way I had never seen. — Fool, fool, fool! Fool innocent!

I sat beside her. She began to beat me around my head and shoulders, and I bent my neck to receive her blows. I wished for death.

She said — You put it in motion and it will destroy you.

All the life went out of me, and the setting receded until I was suspended in a blue fluid, far away. The distance was important. I was in a far blue drifting place, still weeping. Then I understood that it was death. Distant conversation, distant laughter filtered to me, as though through walls. When I became aware of other bodies floating as mine was, hundreds of them, thousands of bodies spinning as if from trees in that blue horror, I heard the sound of loud handclaps. Three of them. Three widely spaced loud claps, unutterably cynical. That was the sound of death, and it held no dignity. It was the end of a poor performance.

Sweating, I rolled over on the bed, gasping. The dream seemed to have lasted for hours- — I seemed to have been caught in it from the first moments of sleep. I lay panting under the great weight of guilt and panic. I was held responsible for many deaths; I had caused these deaths, and everybody knew.

Only gradually, as I saw light begin to crawl through the window, did rationality appear. I had never killed anyone. My grandmother was dead; I was in the valley to get work done. Easy, I said out loud. Only a dream. I tried to produce alpha waves, and began to breathe deeply and evenly. It took a long time for the enormous sense of guilt to dissipate.

I have always been a person with an enormous excess of guilt. My true vocation is that of guilt expert.

For three-fourths of an hour I tried to fall asleep again, but my system would not permit it, my nerves felt as though doused in caffeine, and I got out of bed just past five. Through the bedroom window I could see dawn slowly beginning. Dew lay silvery over the old huge black iron pig trough in the field near the house where my grandfather had kept hogs. The field was now used for grazing a horse and a neighbor’s cows. Beside humped cows, the tall chestnut mare was still asleep, standing with its long neck drooping down. Further up began a sandstone hill, pocked with shallow caves and overgrown with small trees and intensely curling vines and weeds. It looked much as it had during my childhood. A very light gray fog, more like a stationary mist than fog, hung in the lowest parts of the field. As I stood by the window, absorbing peace from that long green landscape edged with fog. two things happened which made me momentarily and at first without realizing it hold my breath. I had let my eye travel up across the road and the fields — the colors of Duane’s corn were beautifully muted by the gray light, and the woods seemed blacker than in the sunlight. Light fog like smoke came curling out of the mass of trees. Then I unmistakably saw a figure emerge, embraced by the fog, and hover for a moment at the boundary between wood and field. I remembered my mother telling me of seeing a wolf come from those woods forty years before — of seeing a wolf pause perhaps at that exact spot and stand tense with hunger, leveling its muzzle at the house and barn. It was, I was almost certain, the same person I had seen the previous afternoon. Like the wolf, it too stood and paused and looked toward the house. My heart froze. I thought: a hunter No. Not a hunter. I didn’t know why not, but not. In the same second I heard the bee-noise of a motorcycle.

I glanced at the empty road and then back up to the tree line. The figure had disappeared. After a moment, the motorcycle entered my frame of vision.

She was hanging on behind him, wearing a blanket-like poncho against the morning chill. He wore uniform black, jacket to boots. He cut the engine just after they passed out of my sight, and I wrestled myself into my bathrobe and hurried down the narrow stairs. I quietly stepped onto the screen porch. They were not kissing or embracing, as I had expected, but were merely standing in the road, looking in different directions. She put her hand on his shoulder; I could see his skinny intense enthusiast’s face, a wild face. He had long upswept oldfashioned rock ‘n’ roll hair, raven black. When she removed her hand, he nodded curtly. The gesture seemed to express both dependence and leadership. She brushed his face with her fingers and began to walk up the road. Like me, he watched her go, walking along with her stiff Tin Woodsman’s walk, and then he jumped back on his bike, gunned it, wheeled around in a flashy Evel Knievel circle and roared away.

I stepped back inside and realized that the inside of the house was as cold and moist as the porch. On my chilled feet I went into the kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove. In a cupboard I found a jar of instant coffee. Then I stepped back outside onto the damp boards of the porch. The sun was just beginning to appear, huge and violently red. After a minute or two Alison reappeared, coming quietly around the side of her house, taking long slow strides. She crossed the back of her house until she reached the last window, where the light still burned. When she stood before it she levered the window up until she stood on tiptoe and then she hoisted herself into the bedroom.

After two cups of the bitter coffee, gulped while standing in bathrobe and bare feet on the cold kitchen floor; after two eggs fried in butter and a slice of toast, eaten at the old round wooden table with the sun beginning to dispel the traces of fog; after appreciation of the way cooking had warmed the kitchen; after adding more greasy dishes to those in the sink; after undressing in the bathroom and with distaste scrutinizing my expanding belly; after similar scrutiny of my face; after showering in the tub; after shaving; after pulling clean clothes out of my suitcase and dressing in a plaid shirt, jeans and boots; after all this I still could not begin to work. I sat at my desk and examined the points of my pencils, unable to rid my mind of that awful dream. Although the day was rapidly warming, my little room and the entire house seemed pervaded with cold breath, a chill spirit I associated with the effect of the nightmare.

I went downstairs and took the photograph of Alison off its hook in the living room. Back upstairs I placed it on the back of the desk, tilting it against the wall. Then I remembered that there was another photograph which had hung downstairs — indeed there had been many others, and Duane had presumably packed most of them away with the furniture after our grandmother’s death. But only one of all those photographs of various grandchildren and nephews and children of nephews concerned me. This was a photograph of Alison and myself, taken by Duane’s father in 1955, at the beginning of the summer. We were standing before a walnut tree, holding hands, looking into the incomprehensible future. Just thinking of the picture now made me shiver.

I looked at my watch. It was still only six-thirty. I realized that it would be impossible to get any work done in my mood and at such an hour. At any rate, I was unused to doing any sort of writing before lunch. I felt restless, and had to get out of my workroom where the typewriter, the pencils, the desk itself rebuked me.

Downstairs, I perched on Duane’s uncomfortable sofa while I sipped a second cup of coffee. I thought about D. H. Lawrence. I thought about Alison Updahl’s nighttime excursion. I rather approved of that, though I thought her company could have been better chosen. At least the daughter would be more experienced than her father; there would be no Dream Houses for her. Then D. H. Lawrence began to rant at me again. I had written much of the middle portion of the book, but I had saved the beginning and ending for last — the ending was fully outlined, but I still had no idea of how to begin. I needed a first sentence, preferably one with several scholarly clauses. From which forty introductory pages could eloquently, commandingly flow.

I went into the kitchen, once again cold and damp. I lowered my cup into the sink with the other dishes. Then I walked around the table and took the telephone book from its shelf beneath the old wall phone. It was a thin volume, about the size of a first collection of poems, and on the cover was a pastoral photograph of two small boys fishing from a pier. The boys were surrounded by blue cold-looking river water nicked by a million ripples. Though barefoot, the boys on the pier wore sweaters. Across the river massed a thick unbroken line of trees — like an eyebrow across a thug’s face. When I had looked at it for longer than a second, the photograph seemed less pastoral than ominous. It was menacing. My own feet had been bare on cold boards; I too had been suspended above indifferent blue water. In the photograph the sun was dying. I folded the cover back and flipped to the page I wanted and dialed the number.

While the phone trilled at the other end I gazed dumbly through the window facing the lawn and the road, and through the trunks of the walnut trees saw Duane already mounted on his tractor, plying majestically across the field near where the trees began. He reached one end of his course and made the heavy tractor twirl around as easily as a bicycle. On the third ring the receiver was lifted. She did not say hello, and after a moment I spoke myself.

“Rinn? Is that you, Auntie Rinn?”

“Of course.”

“This is Miles, Auntie Rinn. Miles Teagarden.”

“I know who it is, Miles. Remember to speak loudly. I never use this terrible invention.”

“Duane said he told you I was coming.”

“What?”

“Duane said — Auntie Rinn, could I come up to see you this morning? I can’t work, and I couldn’t sleep.”

“No,” she said, as if she already knew.

“May I come? Is it too early for a visit?”

“You know farm people, Miles. Even the oldsters get up and doing early in the day.”

I put on a jacket and walked across the dew-sodden lawn to the Volkswagen. Condensation streamed off the windshield. As I swung into the road where I had seen the Tin Woodsman make her curious and emotionless departure from the boy who could only be Zack. I heard my grandmother’s voice, speaking quite clearly some words she had uttered in my dream. Why did you have to come back? It was as though she were seated beside me. I could even smell her familiar odor of woodsmoke. I pulled off to the side of the road and wiped my face with my hands. I wouldn’t have known how to answer her.

The trees which began toward the end of the ratted road to Rinn’s house, just where the valley begins to climb up into the hills, had grown taller and thicker. The pale early sunlight came slanting down, spangling the corrugated trunks and the spongy, overgrown earth. A little further along the narrow road, some of the rags of light struck the side of Rinn’s chicken coop, the top of which was fully illuminated by sunlight. It was a big barnlike structure, long and high as a two-story house, painted red; little comic-strip windows like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle arbitrarily dotted the side facing me. Further up the rise stood her house, which had once been of white boards but now badly needed paint. The three-room structure looked as though a cobweb had settled over it. The trees had marched right into her tiny area of lawn, and big thick branches wove together over her roof. As I got out of the car, Rinn appeared on her little porch; a moment later she opened the screen door and came outside. She was wearing an ancient blue print dress, calf-high rubber boots and an old khaki army jacket with what seemed to be hundreds of pockets.

“Welcome, Miles,” she said, with that Norwegian lilt in her voice. Her face was more wrinkled than ever, but it was luminous. One of her eyes was covered with a film like milk. “Well. You haven’t been here since you were a boy, and now you’re a man. A nice tall man. You look like a Norwegian.”

“I should,” I said, “with you in my family.” I bent to kiss her, but she held out her hand, and I took it. She wore knitted fingerless gloves, and her hand felt like loose bones wrapped in cloth. “You look wonderful,” I said.

“Oh, goodness. I have coffee on the stove, if you’re a coffee drinker.”

Inside her tiny, overheated kitchen she thrust sticks of wood down into the heart of her stove until the iron pot bubbled. Coffee came out in a thin black stream. “You’re not always up so early,” she said. “Are you troubled?”

“I don’t really know. I’m having trouble getting started on my work.”

“It isn’t your work though, is it, Miles?”

“I don’t know.”

“Men should be workers. My young man was a worker.” Her good eye, almost as pale as Alison’s and a thousand times more informed, examined me over her cup “Duane is a good worker.”

“What do you know about his daughter?” I was interested in her opinion.

“She was misnamed. Duane should have named her Jessie, after my sister. That would have been right, to name her after his mother. The girl needs to be guided. She’s high strung.” Rinn peeled a cloth off a plate loaded with round flat discs of a breadlike substance I knew well “But she is much nicer than she wants you to think.”

“You mean you still make lefsa?” I said, laughing, delighted. It was one of the great treats of the valley.

“Lefsa and sonnbockles. Of course I make them. I can still use a rolling pin. I make them whenever I can see well enough.”

I spread thick butter on a piece and rolled it up into a long cigar shape. It was still like eating bread prepared by angels.

“Are you going to be alone this summer?”

“I’m alone now.”

“It’s better to be alone. Better for you.” She meant me specifically, not mankind in general.

“Well, I haven’t had much luck in my relationships.”

“Luck,” she snorted, and hunched further over the table. “Miles, do not court misery.”

“Misery?” I was genuinely startled. “It’s not that bad.”

“Miles, there is great trouble here now. In the valley. You have heard the news. Do not associate yourself with it. You must be alone and apart, doing your work. You are an outsider, Miles, a natural outsider, and people will resent your being near. People know about you. You have been touched with trouble in the past, and you must avoid it now. Jessie is afraid that you will be touched by it.”

“Huh?” It was with talk like this that she had terrified the wits out of me when I was a child.

“You are innocent,” she said — the same words my grandmother had used, in my dream. “But you knew what I am talking about.”

“Don’t worry. No matter how provocative they get, little girls don’t tempt me. But I don’t get what you mean by innocent.”

“I mean that you expect too much,” she said. “I think I am confusing you. Do you wish more to eat or do you care to help me gather my eggs?”

I remembered her comments about work, and stood. I followed her outside and through the trees down the slope to the henhouse. “Go in quietly,” she said. “These birds can be excited easily, and they might suffocate each other in panic.”

Very gently, she opened the door of the tall red structure. A terrible stench came to me first, like ashes and dung and blood, and then my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw hens sitting on their nests, in tiers and rows like books on a bookshelf. The scene was a parody of my Long Island lecture halls. We stepped inside. A few birds squawked. I was standing in a mess of dirt, sawdust, feathers, a pervasive white substance and eggshells. The smell hung acrid and powerful in the air.

“Watch how I do,” Rinn said. “I can’t see in this light, but I know where they all are.” She approached the nearest nest and inserted her hand between the bird and the straw without at all stirring the hen. It blinked, and continued to stare wildly out from either side of its head. Her hand reappeared with two eggs, and a second later, with another. A few feathers were glued to them with a gray-white fluid. “You start at that end. Miles,” she said, pointing. “There’s a basket on the floor.”

She covered her half before I had coaxed a dozen eggs out of half as many unhappy hens. Duane’s thick bandage made for clumsy work. Then I went up a ladder where the air was even denser and stole more eggs from increasingly agitated birds; one of the last ones pecked me in the hand while I held her three warm products. It was like being stabbed with a spoon.

Finally we were done, and stood outside in the rapidly warming air beneath the looming trees. I inhaled several deep, cleansing breaths. At my side, Rinn said. “Thank you for helping me. You might make a worker some day. Miles.”

I looked down at the thin hunched figure in the outlandish clothes. “Did you mean to tell me that you talk to my grandmother? To Jessie?”

She smiled making her face look Chinese. “I meant that she talks to me. Isn’t that what I said?” But before I could respond, she said, “She is watching you, Miles. Jessie always loved you. She wants to protect you.”

“I guess I’m flattered. Maybe-—” I was going to say, maybe that’s why I dreamed about her, but I was hesitant to describe that dream to Rinn. She would have made too much of it.

“Yes?” The old woman was looking alerted to a current inaudible to me. “Yes? Did you say more? Often I don’t hear properly.”

“Why did you think I would get involved with Alison Updahl? That was a little farfetched even for me, don’t you think?”

Her face shut like a clamp, losing all its luminosity. “I meant Alison Greening. Your cousin, Miles. Your cousin Alison.”

“But—” I was going to say But I love her, but shock choked off the startled admission.

“Excuse me. I can no longer hear.” She began to move away from me, and then stopped to look back. I thought the milky eye was turned toward me. She appeared to be angry and impatient, but inside all those wrinkles she may just have been tired. “You are always welcome here, Miles.” Then she carried her basket and mine back up to the little house darkened by trees. I was already past the church on the way home when I remembered that I had intended to buy a dozen eggs from her.

I parked the car in the gritty driveway and went along the porch and through the front room to the narrow staircase. The house still felt damp and cold, though the temperature was now in the upper seventies. Upstairs I sat at my desk and tried to think. D. H. Lawrence seemed even more foreign than he had the previous day. Auntie Rinn’s final words about my cousin both thrilled and upset me. To hear another person allude to Alison Greening was like hearing someone else recount your dreams as his own. I riffled the pages of The White Peacock, far too nervous to write. Mention of her name had set me on edge. I had used her name as a weapon against Duane, and Rinn had used the same trick on me.

From downstairs I heard a sudden noise: a door slamming, a book dropped? It was followed by a noise of shod feet hushing across the floor. Alison Updahl, I was sure, come around to flirt while expounding her boyfriend’s crazy philosophy. I agreed with Rinn, Alison was a far more agreeable person than she wished anyone to know, but at that moment I could not bear to think of anyone casually usurping my territory.

I thrust my chair away from the desk and went thundering down the narrow steps. I burst into the living room. No one was there. Then I heard a rattling noise from the kitchen, and imagined her nosily exploring the cupboards. “Come on, get out of there.” I called. “You tell me when you want to come over, and maybe I’ll invite you. I’m trying to get some work done.”

The clattering ceased. “Get out of that kitchen right now,” I ordered, striding across the room toward the door.

A large pale flustered-looking woman appeared before me. wiping her hands on a towel. The gesture made her large loose upper arms wobble. Horror showed on her face, and in her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses.

“Oh my God,” I blurted. “Who are you?”

Her mouth worked.

“Oh my God. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“I’m—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please sit down.”

“I’m Mrs, Sunderson. I thought it would be all right. I came in to do work, the door was open… You’re — you’re Eve’s boy?” She backed away from me, and almost fell as she stepped backwards over the step down into the kitchen.

“Won’t you please sit down? I’m honestly sorry, I didn’t mean to—” She was still retreating from me, holding the dishtowel like a shield. Her eyes goggled, the effect made even worse by her glasses.

“You want cleaning? You want me to clean? Duane said last week I should come today. I didn’t know if I should, what with, I mean since we, since this terrible… but Red said I should, take my mind off, he said.”

“Yes, yes. I do want you to come. Please forgive me. I thought it was someone else. Please sit for a moment.”

She sat heavily in one of the chairs at the table. Her face was going red in blotches.

“You’re very welcome here,” I weakly said. “I trust you understand what I want you to do?”

She nodded, her eyes oily and glazed behind the big lenses.

“I want you to come early enough to make breakfast for me, wash all the dishes, and keep the house clean. At one I’ll want lunch. Is that what you agreed to do? Also, please don’t bother about the room I’m working in. I want that room undisturbed.”

“The room…?”

“Up there.” I pointed. “I’ll be up and working most mornings when you arrive, so just call me when you have breakfast ready. Have you ever done any work like this before?”

Resentment showed in the puffy face for a moment. “I kept house for my husband and son for forty years.”

“Of course I should have thought. I’m sorry.”

“Duane explained about the car? That I can’t drive? You will have to do the shopping.”

“Yes okay I’ll go out this afternoon. I want to see Arden again anyhow.”

She continued to stare dumbly at me. I realized that I was treating her like a servant, but could not stop. Embarrassment and a fictitious dignity made me stiff. If she had been the Woodsman, I could have apologized,

“I said five dollars a week?”

“Don’t be silly. You deserve seven. I might as well give you the first week’s wages in advance.” I counted seven dollar bills out onto the table before her. She stared resentfully at the little pile of Mils.

“I said five.”

“Call the extra two dollars hardship allowance. Now you don’t have to worry about making breakfast this morning since I got up early and made my own, but I’d like lunch somewhere around one. After washing the lunch dishes, you’ll be free to leave, if the downstairs rooms look clean enough to you. All right? I really am sorry about that shouting. It was a case of mistaken identity.”

“Uh,” she said. “I said five.”

“I don’t want to exploit you, Mrs. Sunderson. For the sake of my conscience, please take the extra two.”

“A picture is missing. From the front parlor.”

“I took it upstairs. Well, if you will get on with your work, I’ll get on with mine.”

I sat dumbly at my desk, unable to summon even a single coherent thought about D. H. Lawrence. I realized that I had never liked more than two of his novels. If I actually published a book about Lawrence, I was chained to talking about him for the rest of my life. In any case, I could not work while imagining that guilt-inducing woman shifting herself about through Duane’s furniture. I bent my head and rested it on the desk for a moment. I felt Alison’s photograph shedding light on the top of my head. My hands had begun to tremble, and a vein in my neck pulsed wildly. I bathed in that melting, embracing warmth. Application of you know what. When I got up and went back downstairs, I found that my knees were shaking.

Tuta Sunderson peeked at me from the corners of her eyes where she knelt before a pail of water as I went wordlessly by. Understandably, she looked as though she expected me to aim a kick at her backside. “Oh, a letter came for you,” she tittered. “I forgot to tell you before.” She gestured weakly toward a glass-fronted chest and I snatched up the envelope as I went out.

My name was written in a flowing hand on the creamy outside of the envelope. After I got into the baking interior of the VW I ripped open the letter. I pulled out a sheet of stationery. I turned it over. Confused, I turned it over again. It was blank. I groaned. When I grabbed the envelope up from the floor of the car I saw that it bore no return address, and had been posted the night before in Arden.

I shot backwards out of the driveway, not really caring if another vehicle were coming. At the sound of my tires squealing, Duane far off in the field turned his head. I sped away as if from a murder, the blank page and envelope lying on the seat beside me. The car’s engine began to sputter, lights flashed as if the hand of Spirit had momentarily thrust in and touched them; by instinct I looked up across the fields to the woods. No one stood there. No figure not a hunter but a wolf. If it was a trick, a worthless joke, who? An old enemy in Arden? I wasn’t sure I still had any, but I hadn’t expected Andy’s wife still to carry hostility toward me like a raised knife. If a sign, of what? Of some future message? I grabbed the envelope again and held it clamped to the wheel with both hands. “Damn,” I muttered, and dropped it back on the other seat as I floored the accelerator.

It was from this moment that all began to go wrong, askew. My mistake with Tuta Sunderson, the maddening letter — perhaps I would have acted more rationally if the threatening scene in the Plainview diner had never occurred Yet I think I knew what I was going to do in Arden long before it was a conscious thought. My old response to stress. And I thought I might know the handwriting on that envelope.

Speeding, I recklessly zoomed up the twisting hilly road to Arden. I nearly forced a tractor off the road. Bunny Is Good Bread; Surge Milking Machines; This Is Holsum Country; Nutrea Feeds; Highway 93; DeKalb Corn (orange words on green wings); Broiler Days: the billboards and roadsigns flashed by. At the crest of the long hill where the road opens into a view like that in Italian paintings, endless green and varied distance dotted with white buildings and thick random groups of trees, a tall sign with a painted thermometer and pointer announced that the goal of the Arden Community Chest was $4,500. I switched on the radio and heard the hollow, spurious voice of Michael Moose. “… report no progress in the shocking—” I turned the dial and let loud rock music assail me because I hated it.

An area of frame Andy Hardy houses, the R-D-N Motel, and I was going down Main Street, past the high school, where Arden lay at the bottom of the last hill. Pigeons were circling over the brick fortress of the courthouse and town hall, and in the odd quiet of the moment I could hear their wings beating after I had swung into a parking space before the Coast To Coast Store and shut off the motor. Wingbeats filled and agitated the air like drumming; when I got out of the car I saw that the birds had wheeled away from the courthouse-town hall and bannered out over Main Street. Apart from an old man sitting on the steps to Freebo’s Bar, they were the only visible living things. A tin sign clacked and banged somewhere behind me. It was as though some evil visitation had drawn everyone in Arden inside behind locked doors.

I went into the store and picked up enough groceries for a week; the two women in the aisle looked at me oddly, and would not meet my eye. The atmosphere in the grocery seemed almost ostentatiously hostile, almost theatrical — those women glanced at me, then quickly lowered their eyes, then pierced me with covert glances from the sides of their eyes. Who are you and what are you doing here? It was as though they had spoken. I counted my money down onto the counter and went hurriedly back outside and locked the grocery bags in the VW. I had to get a bottle of whiskey.

Down the street, just passing the corner of the Annex Hotel and the Angler’s Bar, walking toward me with his hunched bustling walk, accompanied by his sour-looking wife, was Pastor Bertilsson. He was my least favorite clergyman. He had not yet seen me. I looked around in panic. Across the street was a two-story building labeled Zumgo, a name I recalled having heard before. It was where Duane had said Paul Kant was working. I turned my back on the Bertilssons and hurried across the street.

Unlike the Plainview diner, Zumgo’s had resisted any efforts to bring it up to date, and my first response was to relish the oldfashioned fittings of the store — change was sent, enclosed in metal cylinders, racketing down on wires from an office suspended below the ceiling, the counters were wooden, the floors of boards worn smooth and sent rippling by time. A moment afterwards I noticed the threadbare, depressed look of the place: most of the tables were only scantily covered by goods, and the salesladies — even now staring at me with displeasure — were aged shabby horrors with rouge enameling their cheeks. A few overweight women desultorily picked at underwear strewn across a table. I could not imagine Paul Kant at work in such a place.

The woman I approached seemed to share my attitude. She drew her lips back over false teeth and smiled. “Paul? You a friend of Paul’s?”

“I just said, where is he working? I want to see him.”

“Well, he isn’t working. Are you a friend of his?”

“You mean he doesn’t work here?”

“When he’s in he does, I guess. He’s home sick. Least that’s what he told Miss Nord. Said he couldn’t come in today. Looks funny, I think. You a friend of his?”

“Yes. I used to be, at least.”

For some reason, this caused her canine, hungry interest in me to become merriment. She gave me a glimpse of her plastic-coated gums and called to another woman behind the counter. “He’s a friend of Paul’s. Says he doesn’t know where he is.” The other woman joined her laughter. “A friend of Paul’s?”

“Christ,” I muttered, turning away. I went back to ask, “Do you know if he will be in tomorrow?” and got only malicious staring eyes for my answer. I noticed that two or three of the customers were staring at me. Auntie Rinn’s advice came back to me. Certainly some of the women seemed to resent the presence of a stranger.

Baffled, still angry, I paced around the store until even the first old woman had ceased to giggle and gossip about me with her partner. I had a purpose I did not then wish to admit to myself. I examined unspeakable clothing; I regarded sad toys and dusty envelopes and yards of material best suited to the backs of horses. The old response to stress became conscious: I took a five-dollar bill and folded it into my palm.

I was helpless before my own advice to get out.

On the second floor I spun a rack of paperback books. One of the jackets and titles snagged my attention. My Ph.D. supervisor, a famous scholar, had written it. It was Maccabee’s most popular book, The Enchanted Dream. Actually a mechanical treatise on nineteenth-century poets, it had been tricked out with a jazzy cover showing a long-haired young man apparently inhaling an illegal substance while a slightly less beautiful nude maiden coiled lambent legs and tendrils of hair about him. Unable to control the impulse which was my purpose — I hadn’t thought of such amazing luck — I took the book off the rack and slid it into my jacket pocket. It had been Maccabee who had suggested I write on Lawrence. Then I turned cautiously around (when it was too late for caution) and saw that no one had witnessed my theft. My chest thumped with relief; the book hung unobtrusively in my pocket. I twitched the pocket flap up over the top of the book. When I passed the cash register I dropped the bill on the counter and continued out onto the street.

And nearly into the arms of Bertilsson. That hypocritical pink moonface and wet smile were directed, I swear, toward the pocket with Maccabee’s book before Bertilsson decided he wished to favor my face with them. Balder and fatter, he was even more repulsive than I remembered him. His wife, several inches taller than he, stood stock-still beside him, her posture suggesting that I might be expected at any moment to commit an act of disgusting perversity.

As I suppose I had, in her eyes. When Joan and I were married, Bertilsson had taken pains to incorporate into his homiletic address some allusions to my past misdeeds; later, on a drunken night during our honeymoon, I wrote him an abusive letter and posted it on the spot. I think I said that he did not deserve to wear his collar.

Perhaps the recollection of that statement was what put the malicious icy chips in his eyes, far behind the sanctimony, when he greeted me. “Young Miles. What have we here? Young Miles.”

“We heard you were back,” said his wife. . “I’ll expect you at tomorrow’s services.”

“That’s interesting. Well, I must—”

“I was grieved to hear of your divorce. Most of my marriages are of the enduring kind. But then few of the couples it is my privilege to unite are as sophisticated as you and your — Judy, was it? Few of them write notes of thanks as distinctive as yours.”

“Her name was Joan. We never did get divorced in the sense you mean. She was killed.”

His wife swallowed, but Bertilsson, for all his oiliness, was no coward. He continued to look straight at me, the malice behind the sanctimony undimmed. “I am sorry. Truly sorry for you, Miles. Perhaps it’s a blessing that your grandmother did not live to see how you…” He shrugged.

“How I what?”

“Seem to have a tragic propensity for being nearby when young woman are lost to life.”

“I wasn’t even in town when that Olson girl was killed,” I said. “And Joan was anything but nearby when she died.”

I might as well have been speaking to a bronze Buddha. He smiled. “I see I must apologize. I did not intend my remark in that way. No, not in the least. But in fact, since you bring up the matter, Mrs. Bertilsson and I are in Arden on a related mission, a mission of mercy I think I may describe it, of the Lord’s mercy, related to an event of which you seem to be in ignorance.”

He had long ago begun to speak in the cadences of his tedious sermons, but usually it was possible to figure out what he was talking about. “Look. I’m sorry, but I have to get going.”

“We were just with the parents.” He was still smiling, but now the smile expressed great sad meretricious gravity.

My God, how could he think that I had not heard of that?

“Oh, yes.”

“So you do know about it? You have heard?”

“I don’t know what I’ve heard. I’ll be going now.”

For the first time, his wife spoke. “You’d be wise to keep going until you get back where you came from, Miles. We don’t think much of you around here. You left too many bad memories.” Her husband kept that grave, falsely humble smile on his face,

“So write me another blank letter,” I said, and left them. I recrossed the street and stepped over the nodding drunk into Freebo’s Bar. After a few drinks consumed while listening to a half-audible Michael Moose compete with the mumbled conversation of men who conspicuously avoided catching my eye, I had a few more drinks and attracted a little attention by dismembering Maccabee’s book on the bar, at first ripping out one page at a time and then seizing handfuls of paper and tearing them out. When the barman came up to object I told him, “I wrote this book and I just decided it’s terrible.” I shredded the cover so that he could not read Maccabee’s name. “Can’t a man even tear up his own book in this bar?”

“Maybe you’d better go, Mr. Teagarden,” the bartender said. “You can come back tomorrow.” I hadn’t realized that he knew my name.

“Can tear up my own book if I want to, can’t I?”

“Look, Mr. Teagarden,” he said. “Another girl was murdered last night. Her name was Jenny Strand. We all knew that girl. We’re all a little upset around here.”

It happened like this:

A girl of thirteen, Jenny Strand, had been to the Arden cinema with of her friends to see a Woody Allen movie, Love and Death. Her parents had forbidden her to see it: they did not want their daughter to receive her sex education from Hollywood, and the title made them uneasy. She was an only daughter among three boys, and while her father thought the boys could pick things up for themselves, he wanted Jenny to be taught in some way that would preserve her innocence. He thought his wife should be responsible: she was waiting for Pastor Bertilsson to suggest something.

Because of the death of Gwen Olson, they had been unusually protective when Jenny said that she wanted to see a friend. Jo Slavitt, after dinner. — Be back by ten, her father said. — Sure, she agreed. The picture would be over an hour before, that. Their objections were silly, and she had no intention of being restricted by anyone’s silliness.

It did not bother her that she and Gwen Olson had looked enough alike to be taken, in a larger town — one where everyone’s family was not known — for sisters. Jenny had never been able to see the resemblance, though several teachers had mentioned it. She was not flattered. Gwen Olson had been a year younger, a farm girl, in another set. A tramp had killed her — everybody said that. You still saw tramps, bums, gypsies, whatever they were, hanging around town a day or two and then going wherever they went. Gwen Olson had been dumb enough to go wandering alone by the river at night, out of the sight of the town.

She met Jo at her house and they walked five blocks in sunshine to the theater. The other girls were waiting. The five of them sat in the last row, ritually eating candy. — My parents think this is a dirty movie, she whispered to Jo Slavitt. Jo put her hand to her mouth, pretending to be shocked. In fact they all thought the movie was boring.

When it was over, they stood on the sidewalk, empty of comment. As always, there was nowhere to go. They began to drift up Main Street toward the river.

— I get scared just thinking about Gwen, said Marilyn Hicks, a girl with thin fair hair and braces on her teeth.

— So don’t think about her, snapped Jenny. It was a typical Marilyn Hicks comment.

— What do you think happened to her?

— You know what happened to her, said Jenny, who was less innocent than her parents supposed.

— It could have been anyone, said another girl in a shuddery voice.

— Like Billy Hummel and his friends over there? said Jenny, ridiculing the other girl. She was looking across the street, where some of the older boys from A.H.S., football players, were wasting time hanging around the telephone company building. It was getting darker, and she could see the white flock of the letters on their team jackets reflected in the big phone company window. In ten minutes the boys would be sick of watching themselves in the window and would drift off down the street.

— My dad says the police better watch someone real close.

— I know who he means, said Jo. They all knew whom Marilyn’s father meant.

— I’m hungry again. Let’s go to the drive-in.

They began to trudge up the road. The boys took no notice of them.

— The food at the drive-in is junk, said Jenny. They put garbage in it.

— Sourpuss. Look at ole sourpuss.

— And that movie was dumb.

— Sourpuss. Just because Billy Hummel didn’t look at you.

— Well, at least I don’t think he murdered anyone.

Suddenly she had had enough of them. They were standing in a circle around her, waiting for her to move, their shoulders slumping, their faces empty. Billy Hummel and the other boys in team jackets were walking the other way, back into town. She was tired and disappointed — with the boys, with the movie, with her friends. For a moment she wished passionately that she were grown up. — I’m fed up with the drive-in, she said, I’m going home. I’m supposed to be home in half an hour anyway. — Awcomeonnn, moaned Marilyn. The whine in her voice was enough to make Jenny turn decisively away from them and begin to walk quickly down the street.

Because she could feel them staring at her she turned into the first sidestreet. Let them gawk at an empty street, she thought, let them my goodness! one another.

She walked straight down the middle of the unlighted street. Windows shone in the houses on either side. Someone was waiting up ahead, just a shape on the grassy sidewalk, a man washing his car or getting cool evening air. Or a woman getting away from the kids.

At that moment she nearly saved her life, because she realized that she was hungry after all, and almost turned around to go back to her friends. But that was not possible. So she put her head down and walked up to the next corner, vaguely planning a route that would take most of the half hour she had of freedom. When she went past the shape on the sidewalk, she half-noticed that it was not a man but a fat bush.

The next street was shabbier, with two vacant lots between the mean houses like vast blots of darkness. Trees towered and loomed overhead, black and without definition. She heard slow steps behind her. But this was Arden and she did not begin to be fearful until something hard and blunt touched her back. She jumped and whirled around and when she saw the face looking at her she knew that the worst moments of her life were beginning.

Four __________

At that moment I would have been skeptical about the odds on my returning to take up the bartender’s invitation for Sunday, but twenty-six hours later I was in Freebo’s, not this time at the bar but in a booth and not alone but in company.

I realized that I was drunk only when I found that I was pounding the VW along in second gear; chanting to myself, I messily, grindingly slotted the shift up a gear, ending the howl of anguish from the engine, and zoomed home, no doubt weaving through lanes as rakishly as Alison Greening had done on one night years before — the night I had first felt her mouth issuing warmth over mine, and felt all my senses rubbed by her various odors of perfume, soap, powder, contraband cigarettes and fresh water. About the time I reached the red thermometer in the Italian vista I recognized that the Strand girl’s death had been the reason for the hostile stares I’d received from the Arden townspeople. After I spun into the driveway I left the car slewed at a telltale angle before the garage and lurched out, half-sprawling over the front fender. The maddening envelope and blank sheet of paper, along with several torn balled-up pages of Maccabee’s book, bunched in my pocket. I heard footsteps inside the house, a door closing. I went unsteadily across the lawn to the door of the screen porch and entered. It seemed I could feel the chill of the boards even through my shoes. The cold house seemed full of noises. Tuta Sunderson appeared to be in two or three rooms at once. “Come on out,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”

Silence.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can even go home, Mrs. Sunderson.” I looked around, called her name in the direction of the old downstairs bedroom. Duane’s furniture was immaculately cleaned and dusted, but no one else was in the room. I shrugged and went into the bathroom.

When I emerged, the noises in the old house had magically ceased. I heard only the singing of the plumbing in the walls She had nervously decamped; I swore to myself. wondering what I would have to do to get her back.

Then I heard a cough unmistakably originating from my workroom. That I had yet to complete a sentence in that room made her offense against its privacy triply serious. I gave myself a shove toward the stairs.

But when I burst into the cold little room I stopped short. Through the window I could see the stout form of Tuta Sunderson huff-puffing down the road, her handbag bobbing on its strap; and seated in the desk chair absolutely at ease, was Alison Updahl.

“What—” I began. “I don’t like —”

“I think you scared her off. She was already pretty upset but you finished her off. But don’t worry, she’ll come back.”

We stayed there silently for a moment — oddly, she made me feel as though I was intruding on her. I could see her assessing my condition. To forestall any comment, I said, “I don’t like people in this room. It has to be kept private, mine. Other people louse up the atmosphere.”

“She said she wasn’t supposed to come in here. That’s why I did. It was the only quiet place to wait for you.” She stretched out her blue-jeaned legs. “I didn’t take anything.”

“It’s a question of vibrations.” At least I did not say “vibes.” Alcohol cheapens the vocabulary.

“I don’t feel any vibrations. What do you do in here, anyhow?”

“I’m writing a book.”

“On what?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m stuck anyhow.”

“A book about other books, I bet. Why don’t you write a book about something real? Why don’t you write a book about something fantastic and important that other people can’t even see? About what’s really going down?”

“Did you want to see me about anything in particular?”

“Zack wants to meet you.”

“Swell.”

“I told him about you and he was really interested. I said you were different. He wants to know about your ideas. Zack cares a lot about ideas.”

“I’m not going anywhere today.”

“Not today. Tomorrow around noon. In Arden. Do you know Freebo’s bar?”

“I suppose I could find it on a bright day. Did you hear about another of your pals getting killed?”

“It’s on all the news. Don’t you pay attention to the news?” She blinked, and I saw the fright beneath her pretended indifference.

“Didn’t you know her?”

“Sure I did In Arden you know everybody. Red Sunderson found her body. That’s why old Tula was so touchy this morning. He saw her in a field off Highway 93.”

“Jesus.” I remembered how I had treated her, and then I could feel my face begin to burn.

So the next day I found myself entering the scene of my second disgrace in the company of Alison Updahl. Underage though she was, she sailed through the door as if, given any resistance, she’d knock it down with an ax. By now I of course knew to what extent this was purely a performance, and I admired its perfection. She had more in common with her namesake than I had thought. The bar was nearly empty. Two old men in coveralls sat before nearly full glasses of pale beer at the bar and a man in a black jacket sat at the last booth The same fleshy grayhaired bartender who had been there yesterday leaned against the wall beside the cash register surrounded by the flashing sparkling lights and perpetual waterfalls of beer advertisements. His eves glided over Alison, but he looked at me and nodded.

I followed her to the booth, watching Zack as we went. His eyes flicked back and forth between us and his mouth was a taut line. He appeared to be charged with enthusiasm. He also looked very young. I recognized the type from my youth in Florida — the misfits who had gathered around gas stations, paying great attention to their hair, cherishing their own failure even then dangerous kids, at times. I didn’t know the type was still in style.

“This is him,” said my cousin’s daughter, meaning me.

“Freebo.” Zack said, and nodded to the bartender.

As I sat in the booth facing him I saw that he was older than I had at first taken him for; he was not a teenage but in his twenties, with those wrinkles embedded in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. He still had that look of displaced, unlocated enthusiasm. It gave a sly cast to his whole character. He made me very uneasy.

“The usual Mr. Teagarden?” asked the bartender, now standing at the side of the booth. Presumably he knew what Zack wanted. He avoided looking at Alison.

“Just a beer,” I said.

“He didn’t look at me again,” said the Woodsman after the bartender had turned away. “That really slays me. He’s afraid of Zack. Otherwise he’d throw me out on my butt.”

I wanted to say: don’t try so hard.

Zack giggled in the best James Dean fashion.

The bartender came back with three beers. Alison’s and mine were in glasses. Zack’s in a tall silver mug.

“Freebo’s thinking of selling this place.” the boy said, grinning at me. “You ought to think about buying it. You could snap it up. Be a good business.”

I remembered this too: the ridiculous testing. He smelled of carbon paper. Carbon paper and machine oil. “For someone else. I’m about as businesslike as a kangaroo.”

The Woodsman grinned: I was proving whatever it was she’d said about me.

“Far out. Listen. I think we could talk.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re unusual. Don’t you think unusual people have something in common? Don’t you think they share things?”

“Like Jane Austen and Bob Dylan? Come off it. How do you get your seventeen-year-old girlfriend served in here?”

“Because of who I am.” He grinned, as though that were both Jane Austen and Bob Dylan. “Freebo and I are friends. He knows what’s in his interest.” I was getting a full dose of his sly enthusiasm. “But almost everybody knows what’s in his interest. The Big One. Right? It’s in our interest to talk, to be seen together, to explore our ideas, right? I know some things about you, Miles. People still talk about you up here. I was knocked out when she said you were back, man. Tell me something. Do people keep laying their trips on you?”

“I don’t know what that means. Unless it’s what you’re doing now.”

“Hoo,” Zack uttered softly. “You’re cozy, man. Make ‘em work, huh? I can see that, I can dig it. Make ‘em work, yeah. You’re deep. You’re really deep. I got a lot of questions for you, man. What’s your favorite book of the Bible?”

“The Bible?” I said, laughing, spurting beer. “That was unexpected. I don’t know. Job? Isaiah?”

“No. I mean, yeah, I can dig it, but that isn’t it. Revelations is it. Do you see? That’s where it’s all laid out.”

“Where what is all laid out?”

“The plan.” He showed me a big scarred palm, lines of grease permanently printed in it, as though the plan were visible there. “That’s where it all is. The riders on the horses — the rider with the bow, and the rider with the sword, and the rider with the scales, and the pale rider. And the stars fell and the sky disappeared, and it all came down. Horses with lions’ heads and snakes’ tails.”

I glanced at Alison. She was listening as if to a nursery story — she had heard it a hundred times before. I could have groaned; I thought she deserved so much better.

“That’s where it says that corpses will lie in the streets, fires, earthquakes, war in heaven. War on earth too, you see? All those great beasts in Revelations, remember? The beast 666, that was Aleister Crowley, you know Ron Hubbard is probably another one, and then all those angels who harvest the earth. Until there’s blood for sixteen thousand furlongs. What do you think of Hitler?”

“You tell me.”

“Well Hitler had the wrong thing going, you see, he had all this heavy German stuff around him, all that shit about the Jews and the master race — well, there is a master race, but it’s nothing crude like being a whole nation. But he was one of the beasts of Revelations, right? Think about it. Hitler knew that he was sent to prepare us, he was like John the Baptist, see, and he gave us certain keys to understanding, just like Crowley did. I think you understand all this, Miles. There’s like a brotherhood of those who catch on to all this. Hitler was a screw-up, right, but he had insight. He knew that everything has to go smash before it can get better, there has to be total chaos before there can be total freedom, there has to be murder before there can be true life He knew the reality of blood. Passion has to go beyond the personal — right? See, to free matter to set matter free, we have to get beyond the mechanical to uh,myth maybe, ritual, blood ritual, to the physical mind.”

“The physical mind,” I said. “Like the dark seat of passion and the column of blood.” I quoted these catch-phrases despairingly. The end of Zack’s tirade had depressingly reminded me of ideas in Lawrence’s writing.

“Wow.” said Alison. “Oh, wow.” I had impressed her. This time I nearly did groan.

“I knew it, man.” continued Zack. He was just gleaming at me. “We gotta have more talks. We could talk for centuries. I can’t believe that you’re a teacher, man.”

“I can’t believe it either.”

This sent him into such happiness that he slapped Alison on the knee. “I knew it. You know, people used to say all this stuff about you, I didn’t know if I could really believe it all, about the stuff you used to do — I got another question. You have nightmares, don’t you?”

I thought of being suspended in that blue drifting horror. “I do.”

“I knew it. You know about nightmares? They show you the revelations? Nightmares cut through the shit to show you what’s really going on.”

“They show you what’s really going on in the nightmares,” I said. I didn’t want him to analyze my dream-states. I had ordered another two beers while he ranted, and now I asked Freebo for a double Jack Daniels to soothe my nerves. Zack was looking as though oil had come pouring out of his scalp, as though he expected to be either stroked or kicked, His face was wild and skinny, framed by thick sideburns and that complicated ruff of hair. When the whiskey came I drank half of it in one gulp and waited for the effect.

Zack went on. Didn’t I think the situation had to be loosened up? Didn’t I think violence was mystic action? Was selfhood? Didn’t I think the Midwest was where reality was thinnest, waiting for truth to erupt? Didn’t two killings prove that? Couldn’t they make reality happen?

Eventually I began to laugh. “Something about this reminds me of Alison’s father’s Dream House,” I said.

“My father’s house?”

“His Dream House. The place behind Andy’s.”

“That place? Is that his?”

“He built it. You must have known that.”

She was gaping at me. Zack was looking irritated at this interruption in his sermon. “He never said anything about it. Why did he build a place like that?”

“It’s an old story,” I said, already sorry that I had mentioned the place. “I thought it would have a reputation for being haunted.”

“No, nobody thinks it’s haunted,” she said, still looking at me with determined curiosity. “Lots of us kids go there. Nobody bothers you there.”

I remembered the mess of blankets and cigarette butts on the ruined floor.

Zack said, “Listen, I’ve got plans—”

“What was it for? Why did he build it?”

” I don’t know.”

“Why did you call it his dream house?”

“It’s nothing. Forget about it.” I could see her begin to look impatiently around the bar, as if to find someone who would tell her all about it.

“You’ve got to know about my plans—”

“Well. I’ll find out from someone else.”

“I’ve been doing some things—”

“Just forget about it,” I said. “Forget I ever mentioned it. I’m going home now. I have an idea.”

The bartender was beside us again. “This is an important guy, you know,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “He wrote a book. He’s some kind of artist.”

“Also,” I said, “I think I’m going to give you some novels. You’ll like them. They’re right up your street.”

“I considered we might see you in church today.” Duane was still wearing his suit, the old double-breasted pinstripe he had been wearing to church for ten years or more. But the new informality had touched him too: beneath the jacket he wore a tieless open-collared shirt blue with patterns of lighter blue. Alison must have given it to him. “Do you want some of this? It’s Tuta’s day off over at your place, isn’t it?” He lifted one big hand toward the mess that Alison had left bubbling on the stove — it looked like pork and beans., with too much tomato sauce. Like the general disorder of the kitchen, this too would have riled his mother who had always prepared gigantic lunches of roasted meat and potatoes boiled so long they crumbled like chalk. When I shook my head no, he said, “You should go to church. Miles. No matter what you believe in, going could help you out in the community.”

“Duane, it would be the most blatant hypocrisy,” I said. “Does your daughter usually go?”

“Sometimes. Not always. I reckon she has little enough time to herself, taking care of me and doing for me the way she does around here, so I don’t grudge her some extra sleep on Sunday. Or a couple of hours with a girlfriend.”

“Like now?”

“Like now. Or so she says. If you can ever trust a female. Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“Well, she has to get along to see her friends sometimes. Whoever the hell they are. Anyhow, Miles, this is one day you should have gone.”

Then I heard the emphasis I should have heard the first time. And wasn’t it unusual that Duane was still wearing his suit an hour after the service? And that he was sitting in his kitchen instead of doing an hour or so of work before lunch?

“I’ll bite. Why today, especially?”

“What do you think of Pastor Bertilsson?”

“I’ll spare you. Why?”

Duane was crossing and uncrossing his legs, looking very uncomfortable. On his feet were heavy black brogues, immaculately polished. “You never exactly liked him, did you? I know. He maybe did go a little out of line when you and Joan got married. I don’t think he was right to bring up all that old stuff, even though he did it for your own good. When I got married, he didn’t talk about any of my old mistakes.”

I hoped that his daughter would forget all about my reference to the Dream House — it had been a serious betrayal. While I was trying to think how I could tell him that I had let his secret slip out to his daughter without actually telling her anything about it, Duane got over his own nervousness and finally got to the point.

“Anyhow, like I was saying, he said a few words about you today. In his sermon.”

“About me?” I yelped. My guilt disappeared like flash powder.

“Wait, Miles, he didn’t actually name you. But we all knew who he was talking about. After all, you made yourself known around here, years ago. So I guess most everybody knew who he was talking about.”

“You mean I’m actually having sermons preached about me? I guess I really am a success.”

“Well, it would have been better if you’d been there. See, in a community this size — well, a small community like this sort of draws together if any trouble happens. What happened to those two girls was a terrible thing, Miles. I think a man that can do something like that ought to be slaughtered like a pig. The thing is, we know none of us could have done it. Maybe some over in Arden, but none of us here.” He shifted in his chair. “While I’m talking on this I ought to say something else. Look. It might be better if you didn’t go around trying to see Paul Kant. That’s all I want to say about that.”

“What are you saying, Duane?”

“Just what I said. Paul might have been okay when he was a kid. but even then you didn’t know him all that well. You were only here in the summers.”

“To hell with that,” I said. “Suppose you tell me what was the point of this sermon of Bertilsson’s.”

“Well, I guess he was just saying how some people—”

“Meaning me.”

” — some people put themselves outside normal standards. He said that’s dangerous, when everybody’s got to pull together, times of trouble, like now.”

“He’s guiltier of that than I am. Now I wish you’d tell me what crime Paul Kant is supposed to have committed.”

To my surprise, Duane flushed. He turned his eyes toward the pot bubbling on the stove. “Well, it’s not a crime, exactly, not that you could say a crime, exactly. He’s just not like the rest of us.”

“He puts himself outside normal standards. Good. That makes two of us. I’ll make a point of seeing him.”

We stared at one another for a moment or two, Duane fidgeting, looking out of his depth. He appeared to be afflicted with moral uncertainty. In a dubious cause he had acted dubiously. He obviously wished that he had never brought up the questions of Bertilsson and Paul Kant. I remembered the idea I’d had in Freebo’s Bar — an idea brought up by my tactless mention of the Dream House. “Shall we change the subject?”

“Hell, yes.” Duane looked relieved. “Do you feel like having one of those beers?”

“Not now. Duane, what did you do with the rest of the stuff from Gramma’s house? The old pictures, and all the furniture?”

“Well, let me think. I put the furniture down in the root cellar. It didn’t seem right to sell it or throw it away. Some of that stuff might be valuable someday, too. Most of those old pictures I took down I put in a trunk in the old bedroom.” That was the bedroom on the ground floor, where my grandparents had slept during my grandfather’s life.

“All right, Duane,” I said. “Don’t be surprised by anything you hear.”

I found the trunk immediately. In fact, I had known where it was the moment Duane had said that it was in the old bedroom; it was an ancient Norwegian sea chest, not truly a trunk, a small brass-bound wooden case brought to America by Einar Updahl’s father. It had carried everything he owned in a space just about large enough to hold four electric typewriters. It was a beautiful old thing — the wood was handcarved, filigreed with scrolls and leaves.

But the beautiful old thing was also padlocked, and I was too impatient to go back and ask Duane where he’d misplaced the key. I slammed out of the house onto the porch and went down its length to the far door. In surprising heat, I tugged open the old sliding doors of the garage and went inside. It smelled like a grave. Damp earth smells, a general odor of mold and beetles. Old tools hung on the walls, just as I had remembered. Rusted saws from the log-clearing days, three ten-gallon gas cans, hatchets and hammers, all on nails driven into the walls. I took a crowbar off its nail and went back into the house.

The lip of the crowbar fit neatly into the gap between the lid and the body of the chest; I pressed hard on the bar, and felt wood yielding. The second time I pressed on the bar I heard a splintering sound; I put all my weight on the bar, and the wood above the lock popped away from the lid. I fell to my knees, the wound on my palm throbbing where I had unknowingly, unfeelingly been gripping it against the crowbar. With my right hand I banged open the lid of the chest. The inside was a disorder of framed and unframed photographs. After a second of pawing through them ineffectually and seeing several versions of Duane’s square face and my vanished cowlick and many pictures of orthodontia at work on the toothy Updahl smile. I impatiently turned the entire chest over and sent the sheets and frames across the hooked bedroom rug.

It stared up at me from four feet away, self-isolated from the other photographs; someone had removed it from its frame, and it was curling slightly at either end But there it was, and there we were, seen by Uncle Gilbert as we must have been seen by all, our spirits flowing toward each other, more one than two drops of blood in one bloodstream, no longer children but trapped in the beautiful amber chrysalis of the teens, our hands clasped and our faces smiling out in the summer of 1955.

If I had not already been kneeling, it would have brought me to my knees — the force of that face next to mine squeezed all the breath from me. It was like being punched in the stomach with the handle of a rake. For if we were both beautiful, stuck there in ignorance and love in June of 1955, she was incomparably more so. She burned my intelligent young thief’s face right off the paper, she canceled me, she was on another plane altogether, where spirit is incandescent in flesh, she was at the height of being, body and soul together. This live trumpet-blast of spirit the illumination, put me altogether in shadow. I seemed almost to be levitating, carried by the currents of magi and complication of spirit in that face which was her face. Levitating on my knees, my knees already-rubbed sore by the hooked rug!

That face which was her face. By telepathy, we had been in communication all our lives — all my life I had beep in touch with her.

Then I knew that all my life since our last meeting had been the project of finding her again. Her mother had retreated in shock back to San Francisco; after I had stolen a car and wrecked it in a spectacular crash not forty feet from the spot where the painted thermometer overlooked an Italian distance, my parents had clapped me in a prison-like boarding school in Miami. She was in another state; she was in another condition. We were apart but (I knew) not finally apart.

After an incalculable number of minutes I rolled over onto my back. Moisture dripped into the hair at my temples. The back of my head was embedded in crushed photographs and long splinters of Norwegian wood. I knew I would see her, that she would return. That was why I was there, in my grandmother’s house — the book had been an evasion. Wood dug into the back of my head. I had never intended to finish the dissertation. Spirit would not permit it. From now until she came, I would prepare for her coming. Even the blank letter was part of the preparation, part of the necessary trial of spirit.

I was in the final stages of the transformation (I thought) which had begun when I had torn open my hand on the VW’s engine cover and felt the freedom which was her freedom invading and sluicing through me. Reality was not a single thing, it broke through the apparently real like a fist. It was this knowledge which had always trembled in her face. Reality is merely an arrangement of molecules held together by tension, a veneer. In her face was there not the face she’d had at six? Also the face of herself at fifty? As I lay sprawled on the hooked rug in a confusion of paper and splintered wood, the white ceiling above me seemed to dissolve into white sky. I thought fleetingly of Zack, and smiled. Harmless. Harmless clueless nut. When I lost normal consciousness, I dreamed not of being suspended adrift in a far blue horror, but of Alison swimming toward me.

This image rang through my suspended mind. Everything was a part of this surge of feeling, my ripped hand, the unimportant discomfort in my neck, even Zack’s prattle about reality being thinnest in the Midwest, even my theft and destruction of Maccabee’s terrible book. The proof would occur on the twenty-first of July. There were no impossibilities. I slept. (I passed out.)

And woke full of purpose. When I had said to Duane, don’t be surprised by anything you hear, I’d had a plan which I now saw to be absolutely necessary. I had to begin the preparations. I had to be ready for the day. I had about three weeks. It was more than enough time.

I began by tearing a photograph out of the nearest frame that looked the right size and sliding the picture of Alison and myself inside it. Idly, I tore the other photograph in half, and doubled the pieces and tore it again Dropping the torn bits of glossy paper and letting them flutter to the littered floor, I took the photograph into the living room and hung it where the first photograph of Alison had been.

Then I looked around at the room. Most of it was going to have to go. I was going to make an Alison-environment: I was going to recreate, as nearly as possible and with a few added embellishments, the room of twenty years before. Duane’s office furniture could go down into the root cellar where my grandmothers old furniture now sat. I wasn’t sure that I could singlehandedly manage some of the heavier pieces down the rough steps of the root cellar, but there was no other choice It was what I was going to do.

The doors to the root cellar were set into the ground at a slightly elevated angle just at the end of the porch. You swung them up and let them drop open to the sides — it was the most oldfashioned and rural of arrangements and I suspected that Duane’s dark cellar, though modernized by the introduction of a staircase leading down from the body of the house, was originally of similar construction. With some effort I pulled one of the doors up and open, nearly straining my back; time had cemented the two doors together.

The earthen stairs looked treacherous, half-crumbled away and very steep. Some of the damage was old, but Duane had shredded some of the steps when he had taken the old furniture down. I put one foot on the first of the stairs and tested my weight. The earth was reassuringly resilient and firm. After trying a few more steps I became careless and put my foot down without looking, and the earth gave way beneath it, sending me sliding three or four feet down across a terrace of crumbling dirt. When I was steady again I put my feet solidly on a thick step and braced my shoulder under the other door and pushed with my body and legs. The door strained and flew open on complaining hinges. Now light entered nearly the whole of the root cellar. That wonderful old furniture lay in heaps and piles like stew bones. Like the garage, the cellar smelled like a grave. I began to pull my grandmother’s furniture out of the dark hole of the root cellar and up into the sunlight.

I worked at this task of reclamation until my shoulders and legs ached and my clothes were covered with dirt. There was more furniture in the cellar than I had thought, all of it essential. I needed every footstool and end table, every lamp and bookcase. Too exhausted to continue, I went inside and made sandwiches from Saturday’s groceries. When I had pushed down the food, I went back out with a pail of soapy warm water and washed off what was on the lawn; that completed, I went back down the crumbled steps and began to wrestle out more things. I could remember where every stick of it had been placed, I could see the room as it had been twenty years before and would be again. She had touched every bit of this furniture.

By the time the light had begun to fail, I had it all out on the lawn and washed. The fabrics were worn, but the wood was clean and shining. Even on the lawn beside the white house in the fading light, it all looked magically appropriate — that is to say no more than that it had the tightness of all things made and used with care. That beautiful worn old stuff could make you weep. The past was enshrined in it. Just sitting out there on the lawn in the dusk, it evoked the entire history of my family in America. Like them, it was solid, it was right.

Unlike Duane’s office furniture, which merely looked naked and stunned and stupid when dragged outside. There was less of it than there had seemed. It had a negative relation to spirit.

I made the mistake of taking the lighter pieces, the dreadful pictures and lamps and chairs, down into the root cellar first. Under one of the lamps I found two neatly folded dollar bills. Under different circumstances, I might have admired the gesture, but it was proof of how badly I had acted. I finished with the light things in a disproportionately bad temper. That left me with the job of handling the heavy couches and the two heavier chairs when I was almost too tired to move them further, and in the dark. I had only the light from the porch and pale early moonlight, and the battered earthen steps, in many places now worn to a continuous pitted incline were visible only at their top. The first chair went down easily; I carried it in my trembling arms and felt my way slowly along the ruined steps. But when I tried it with the second chair, I lost my footing on an incline of dirt and fell all the way to the bottom.

To complete that Buster Keatonish stunt I should have landed on the dirt floor seated comfortably in the embrace of the chair; but I landed sprawled half-over, half-under it, with pain radiating out from all of my left leg ankle to thigh. It did not feel broken, but one of the chairs legs was, dangling from ripped fabric like a dead tooth. Cursing, I ripped it off and threw it into a corner. I disposed of the chair in much the same way.

After that, I had no patience with the couches. I was not going to baby them down the slope. I shoved the first up to the lip of the cellar, nudged it over until it was set. and let go of the arm. It crashed down to the bottom. I grunted with satisfaction and was turning to the second when I became aware of a flashlight bobbing toward me.

“Goddam you, Miles,” Duane said. The flashlight was held on my face. In a moment he had moved into the area of light from the porch.

“You don’t need a flashlight to see it’s me.”

“No, even on a dark night I’d know it was you.” He flicked off the flashlight and stepped closer to me. His face was savage. “Goddam you. I wish you’d never come back here. What the hell were you thinking of anyhow? You fucking bastard.”

“Look,” I said, “I know it looks funny, but—” I realized that as far as anger was concerned I was an amateur. Duane’s face seemed to be inflating.

“Is that what you think? You think it looks funny? Now you look. If you had to go and talk about that goddam house, why did you have to talk about it with my daughter?”

I was too stunned to reply.

He glared at me for another long moment, and then whirled to the side and banged his hand against one of the porch supports.

That was when I should have started to worry — when I was given special dispensation.

“Don’t you have an answer? You shit, Miles. Everybody’s forgotten about that house by now. Alison was never going to find out. In a little while, the goddam thing was going to fall over anyhow. She’d never know. Then you come along and tell her it was my ‘dream house,’ huh? Then she can get one of the drunken bums in Arden to tell her all about it, can’t she? I suppose you wanted to get her to laugh at me, just the way you and your cousin used to do.”

“It was a mistake, Duane. I’m sorry. I thought she knew already.”

“Bullshit, Miles, bull shit. My dream house, isn’t that what you called it? You wanted to make her laugh at me. You wanted to humiliate me. I should pound you into the ground.”

“Maybe you should,” I said. “But if you’re not going to, then listen to me. It was an accident. I thought it was something everybody knew.”

“Yeah, that makes me feel real good. I should break you up.”

“If you want a fight, give it a try. But I’m apologizing to you.”

“You can’t apologize for that, Miles. I want you to stay away from my daughter, hear that? Stay away from her, Miles.”

He might not ever have noticed the furniture around us if I hadn’t thumped his hand into the couch. Pure furious astonishment replaced the rage in his face.

“Now what the hell are you doing?” he screamed.

“I’m putting back the old furniture,” I said, my heart sinking and the foolishness of my entire project momentarily clear. “When I go you can change it all back again I have to do it, Duane.”

“You’re putting back — nothing’s good enough for you, is it. Miles? You have to spoil everything you touch. You know, I think you’re crazy, Miles. And I’m not the only one around here who thinks so. I think you’re dangerous. You oughta be locked up. Pastor Bertilsson was right about you.” He flicked the flashlight on again and shone it into my eyes. “We’re quits. Miles I’m not gonna throw you off the place, I’m not gonna pound the crap out of you, but I’m sure as hell gonna keep my eye on you. You can’t get away with squat from now on without my knowing it.”

The light came off my face and played on the few items of furniture still dotted around the lawn. “Goddam you, you’re out of your skull. Somebody ought to put you away.” For a moment I thought that he probably was right. He turned away without bothering to look at me. After he had stomped or six feet away, I got the flashlight treatment again, but this time he was unable to hold it steadily on my face. “And remember, Miles,” he called. “You stay away from my kid. Just keep off of her.”

It was too much like Auntie Rinn. I wrestled the other couch over to the abyss and savagely pushed it down. It crashed satisfactorily into the one already at the bottom. I thought I heard wood breaking. I kicked the doors over and shut. It took me another half hour to get the old furniture inside the old house. I just let it sit where I dropped it. Then I opened a bottle and took it upstairs.

Five __________

All my life I have been engaged in Sisyphean and hopeless tasks, and given the ache and flutter in my muscles, it may not be odd that I dreamed of pushing my grandmother uphill in a wheelchair through an obscure territory. We were surrounded by brilliant light. My grandmother was surprisingly heavy. I felt great dread. The smell of woodsmoke burned my nostrils. I had committed a murder, a robbery, something, and forces were closing in. They were vague as yet, but they knew about me and they would find me.

— Talk to Rinn, my grandmother said.

She repeated — Talk to Rinn.

And again — Talk to Rinn.

I ceased pushing the wheelchair. My muscles could no longer bear the strain; we seemed to have been going uphill for hours. I placed my hand on her head and bent over. Gramma, I said — I’m tired. I need help. I’m afraid. The woodsmoke smell swarmed up, occupying the spaces within my skull.

When she turned her face to me it was black and rotten.

I heard three bare, cynical handclaps.

My screams woke me up — think of that, a man alone in a white bedroom, screaming on his bed! A man alone, pursued only by himself. My body seemed heavy and incapable of motion. My mouth burned and my head felt stuffed with oily rags. Result of abuse of magic substance. I gently swung my legs out of bed and sat up bowing my back and holding my forehead in my palms. I touched the place where my hairline used to be, now smooth and oily skin instead of soft hair. My foot encountered the upright bottle, I risked a glance. It was more than half empty. Evidence of mortality lay all about me. I stood on long sensationless legs Except for the boots, I still wore Sunday’s clothes, now smudged and crusted with dirt from the root cellar. I could taste my screams.

The stairs were navigable as long as I planted my hands on the close walls.

The furniture at first startled me. It was the wrong furniture in the wrong places. Then I remembered the scene of the previous night. Duane and the flashlight stitching, into my face. That too seemed to have the quality of drunkenness. Effects can leak backward and forward in time, staining otherwise innocent events. I sat heavily on the old couch. I feared that I could fall straight through it into another dimension. On Sunday I had told myself that I knew the precise, proper location of all my grandmother’s things. Now I saw that was an illusion. I would have to experiment until the room clicked shut like a tumbler in a lock, itself again at last.

The bathroom. Hot water. Drinking water. I pushed off the couch and avoided the haphazard furniture and came into the kitchen.

Alison Updahl was leaning against the Counter, chewing something. She wore a T shirt (yellow) and jeans (brown). Her feet were bare, and I could feel the chill of the floor as if it were penetrating my own feet.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s too early for company.”

She finally finished chewing, and swallowed. “I have to see you,” she said. Her eyes were large.

I turned away, aware of the presence of a complication I was in no condition to handle. On the table was an untouchable plate of congealed scrambled eggs and shriveled bacon.

“Mrs. Sunderson made that for you, I guess. She took one look in the other room and said she would clean in there after you decided how you wanted the furniture. And she said you busted that old sea chest. She said that was a valuable antique. Her family has one like it and a man from Minneapolis said it was worth two hundred dollars.”

“Please, Alison.” I ventured another look at her. Beneath the tight yellow shirt her large breasts hung heavily, comfortably. They looked like Claes Oldenburg torpedoes. Her feet, surprisingly, were small, white, slightly puffy, beautiful. “I’m too wrecked to go public.”

“I came for two reasons. The first is, I know I did a stupid thing by talking to Daddy about that house. He really blew up. Zack warned me, but I went right ahead and asked him anyhow. That was stupid, all right. What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Are you hung over? And why are you putting all that old furniture and stuff back upstairs?” She was speaking very quickly.

“I’m working on a project.”

That stumped her. I sat down at the table and shoved the cold food away before I could smell it.

“You don’t have to worry about Daddy. He’s real mad, but he doesn’t know I’m here. He’s out in the new fields. That’s way down the road. He doesn’t know about lots of things I do.”

I finally saw that she was being very chatty — too chatty.

The telephone began to shrill. “Shit,” I said, and weakly stood. When I plucked the earpiece off the box, I waited for the caller to say something. Silence. “Who is it?” I got no response. “Hello, hello.” I heard a noise like wings, like the whuffle of a fan, like beating air. The room was cold. I slammed the earpiece down on the metal hook.

“They didn’t say anything? That’s weird. Zack says that telephones can lock you into these waves of energy from outer space, and he said that if everybody took their phones off the hook at exactly the same second all over the world you could get pure outer space energy coming in waves through the receiver. Another idea he had was that if everybody in the world called the same number at exactly the same split second, there’d be some kind of energy explosion. He says that electronic and things like telephones are all making us ready for the apocalypse and the revelations.” There was a doll-like brightness in all of this.

“I need a glass of water,” I said. “And a bath. That’s a hint.” I went to the sink and stood beside her while I watched cool water rush into a glass. I drank it in two or three large inhalations, feeling the water seem to sparkle along veins throughout my chest. A second glass failed to reproduce these sensations.

“Did you ever get any of those calls in the middle of the night?”

“No. I wouldn’t answer it if I did.”

“I’m surprised. It looks like a whole lot of people around here don’t like you very much. They talk about you. Didn’t something bad happen to you once a long time ago? Something did, didn’t it — something all the old people know about?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. My life has been limitless bliss from infancy. Now I’m going to take a bath.”

“Daddy knows about it, doesn’t he? I heard him say something, well he didn’t really say anything, he was talking about it without saying it straight out, on the telephone a couple nights ago. I think he was talking to Zack’s father.”

“It’s hard to think of Zack having parents,” I said. “He’s more the head-of-Zeus type. Now scram. Please.”

She wasn’t going to budge. The water had awakened a sharp floating pain high behind my forehead. I could sense the tension in her, stronger now than my hangover. Alison crossed her arms over her stomach, consciously squeezing her breasts together. I caught her blood smell. “I said I had two reasons. I want you to make love to me.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“He won’t be back for at least two hours. It doesn’t take very long anyhow,” she added, giving me more insight than I wished to have into Zack’s sexual life.

“What would good old Zack think about it?”

“It’s his idea. He said it was so I could learn discipline.”

“Alison,” I said, “I’m going into the bathroom now. We can talk about this later.”

“We could both fit into the bathtub.”

Her voice was light, her face miserable. I was terribly conscious of her thighs in the tight brown jeans, of the large soft breasts, the plump pretty feet on the cold floor. If Zack had been there, I would have shot him.

Mildly, I said, “I don’t think Zack is very fair to you.” She abruptly turned and wheeled out, slamming the door.

After my bath I remembered what my conversation with Duane on Sunday had resolved me to do, and I went immediately to the telephone book jacketed with the two small boys suspended over cold water. Paul Kant lived on Madison Street in Arden, but when he picked up the telephone his voice was so faraway and small that he might have been in Tibet.

“Paul, this is Miles Teagarden. I’ve been around for a week or so, and I tried to see you a few days ago.”

“The women told me,” he said. “I heard you were in town.”

“Well, I heard you were in town,” I said. “I thought you would have been off long ago.”

“Things didn’t happen that way, Miles.”

“Do you ever see Polar Bears any more?”

He gave an odd, bitter laugh. “As little as possible. Look, Miles, it might be better… it might be better if you didn’t try to see me. It’s for your own good Miles. Mine too, probably.”

“What the hell? Are you in trouble?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.” His voice was strained and very small.

“Do you need help? I can’t figure out what’s going on, Paul.”

“That’s two of us. Don’t make things worse, Miles. I’m saying that for your own good.”

“Christ, I don’t understand what all the mystery is about. Didn’t we used to be friends?” Even through the telephone I could detect an emotion I had begun to recognize as fear. I said, “If you need any help. Paul, I’ll try to help. All you have to do is ask. You should have been out of that burg years ago. It’s not the right place for you Paul. I’ll be coming into Arden later today. Could I drop in to see you at the store?”

“I’m not working at Zumgo’s any more.”

“That’s, good.” I don’t know why, but I thought of the Woodsman.

“I was fired.” His voice was flat and hopeless.

“Then we’re both out of a job. And I’d think it’s an honor to be fired from a mausoleum like Zumgo’s. I’m not going to force myself on you, Paul, I’ve gotten involved in something that will probably take up nearly all of my time, but I think I should see you. We were friends way back then.”

“I can’t stop you from doing what you’re determined to do.” he said “But if you’re going to come, it’d be better to come at night.”

“Why do you—”

I heard a click a second of the silence Zack had told my cousins daughter was laden with waves of energy from outer space, and then the noncommittal buzz of the dial tone.

While I was pushing the old wooden furniture around, trying to reconstruct the sitting room as it had been twenty years before, I heard from the second of my two old Arden friends. I set down the chair I had been moving across the room and answered the telephone.

A man asked, “Is this Miles Teagarden?”

“That’s me.”

“One moment, please.”

In a few seconds another telephone lifted. “Hello, Miles. This is Chief Hovre.”

“Polar Bears!”

He laughed. “Not many folks remember that any more. Mostly people call me Galen”. I had never heard his real name before. I preferred Polar Bears.

“Doesn’t anyone dare call you Polar Bears any more?”

“Oh, your cousin Du-ane might. I hear that you’ve been making a few waves around here since you came in.”

“Nothing serious.”

“No, nothing at all serious. Freebo says if you went in every day he wouldn’t have to be thinking of selling his bar. Are you workin’ on another book now, Miles?”

So Freebo had passed on my impromptu story about Maccabee’s book. “That’s right,” I said. “I came up here for the peace and quiet.”

“And walked smack into all our troubles. Miles, I was wondering if I could arrange to see you sometime soon.”

“How soon?”

“Like today?”

“What’s it about?”

“Just for a friendly talk, you could say. Were you going to make it in here today?”

I had the disturbing feeling that he had telepathically overheard my conversation with Paul Kant. “I thought you’d be pretty busy these days, Polar Bears.”

“Always time to spare for an old buddy, Miles. How about it? Could you drop in for a talk sometime this afternoon? We’re still around the back of the courthouse.”

“I guess I can make it.”

“Looking forward to it, Miles.”

“But I wonder what would happen if I said I couldn’t.”

“Why do you think something would happen, Miles?”

But why? It sounded almost as though Polar Bears (Galen, if I must) had been monitoring my movements since I had come to the valley. Had one of Paul’s enemies seen me pocket Maccabee’s fraudulent book? If so, they would surely have stopped me before I left the store.

Still thinking of this, a little upset by the seriousness of Polar Bears’ tone, I went upstairs and into the work room and sat before the panel desk. It all felt unbelievably remote, as though another man had removed those diamond-faceted doorknobs and set the flat door upon the trestles. My pitiful notes, my pitiful drafts. I flipped open a folder and read a sentence. “Recurrent in Lawrence’s work is a moment of sexual choice which is the choosing of death (or of half-life) over fully engaged, personalizing life.” Had I actually written this sentence? Uttered stuff like this before students? I bent down and scraped a random lot of books off the floor. I tied them into a bundle with twine and went out of the house and up the path.

“I’ll never read these,” Alison Updahl told me. “You don’t have to give me anything.”

“I know. You don’t have to give me anything either.” She looked at me unhappily. “But at least this was my own idea.”

“Would you mind — would you mind if I gave them to Zack? He’s the big intellectual, not me.”

“Do anything you want with them,” I said. “You’re just saving me the trouble of throwing them away.” I started to turn away.

“Miles,” she said.

“It’s not that I wasn’t tempted,” I said. “I find you extremely tempting. But I’m too old for you, and I’m still your father’s guest. And I do think that you ought to get away from Zack. He’s screwy. He’ll never do anything but injure you.”

She said, “You don’t understand.” She looked terribly unhappy, standing just outside the door on the concrete steps and holding the little heap of books.

“No, I guess I don’t,” I said.

“There isn’t anyone else like him around here. Just like there isn’t anyone like you around here either.”

I wiped my hand over my face. I was sweating like a band drummer on a hot night. “I won’t be here long, Alison. Don’t make me into something I’m not.”

“Miles,” she said, and stopped, embarrassed. Her habit of assertion saw her through. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s too complicated to explain.” She did not reply, and when I looked into her blunt face I saw the expression of another person whose problems were too complex to be fit easily into verbal patterns. I wanted to take her hand, and nearly did. But I could not lay claim to the spurious authority of age which that would imply.

“Ah…” she said as I turned to go again.

“Yes?”

“It was partly my own idea. But you probably won’t believe me.”

“Alison, be careful,” I said, meaning it as much as I have ever meant anything in my life.

I went back to the old house through the sunlight. My hangover had receded to a not unpleasant sensation of light emptiness. By the time I reached the VW parked before the frame garage I realized that the sun was warming my face and shoulders. Twenty yards to my right the mare grazed in the torn uprooted field, pretending for the sake of a full belly that it was a cow like its neighbors. The walnut trees ahead of me were thick and burly, emblems of long health. I wished the same for Alison Updahl and myself. I could feel her back there on the concrete porch, watching me go. I wished that I could do something, something strong and direct, to help her. A hawk swung far above the hills across the valley. Down the drive and across the road stood the birdhouse mailbox on its metal stalk. Tula S. had probably left before the arrival of the mailman in his dusty Ford.

At the box I pulled out a thick pad of folders and envelopes. One after the other I sailed into the ditch letters addressed to Occupant. The last of the letters came in the same envelope as the one addressed to me, and it was written over in the same flowing handwriting. For a moment I thought I read my name on it. Like the previous letter, it had been posted in Arden.

When I finally saw what the envelope said I glanced across the cornfields to the beginning of the woods. No figure stood there gazing with waiting aloof Olympian calm. My hands were trembling. I looked again at the envelope — I was not mistaken. It was addressed to Alison Greening. Care of (my name), RFD 2, Norway Valley, Arden. The sun seemed to penetrate behind my pupils and give me a searing touch. Clumsily, still trembling, I inserted a finger beneath the flap and tore it open. I knew what I would find. The single sheet unfolded itself in my hands. Of course. It was blank. Neither a heart pierced by an arrow nor a black spot nor anything but creamy paper.

Down the road, her handbag pumping at her side, Tula Sunderson toiled toward me. I waited, gasping with emotion, as long as I could and then ran toward her.

“Something come for you?”

“No, yes,” I said. “I don’t know. Mrs. Sunderson, you can’t clean the living room yet. I’m not through in there. You might as well go home. I have to go somewhere.” Remembering the phone call of the morning, I added, “If the phone rings, don’t answer it.” I pelted up the road toward my car.

Smashing the gears, making the VW howl in torment, I shot across the lawn, twisting the wheel at the last moment to avoid the walnut trees. I came rocketing out onto the valley road in the direction of Highway 93. Fat Tuta Sunderson still stood where I had left her; mouth open, she dully watched me zoom past.

But this was not how I wanted to meet Polar Bears, I could not be dragged manacled before him by a slack-faced Arden constable, and I slowed to forty descending the hill past the R-D-N motel. By the time I reached the flat near the high school, I was proceeding at an almost-legal thirty. People were visible on the sidewalks, a cat cleaned itself on a windowsill, other cars trolled before mine: Arden did not have the deserted, eerie look it had had on my earlier visit, but was a normal small town in a normal condition of sleepy bustle. I pulled into an empty spot before Zumgo’s and stopped as gently as a dove. I felt like a man poised on an eggshell. The folded envelope distended my pocket. I knew only one sure way to conquer that awful weightless expectant eggshell feeling. Hearing no wingbeats but the sound of voices, I crossed the pavement to enter Zumgo’s.

Happily, the store had a good crowd of women shoppers. Mostly overweight, dressed in obscene halters and skirts excessively short, they would be the audience for my autotherapy. From them rose a mass smell of compost and barren backyards, of dime taps of Leinenkugel beer and soggy pretzels. I began to drift, in an attitude of abstracted busy specific search, through the aisles and around the tables. The women, including the harridan of my previous visit, scarcely noticed me. I was some husband on some errand. I thought and felt myself into this role.

I am no kleptomaniac. I have a letter from an analyst setting that down in black and white, pica type. I took a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and folded it between the second and third fingers of my right hand.

Now it is time for two comments. The first is obvious. I thought that I knew the handwriting on that envelope. I thought that Alison Greening had sent it to me. This was crazy. But it was no crazier than that she would return on the twenty-first of July to keep her vow. Perhaps she was signaling to me, telling me to hold out until that day. The second comment has to do with stealing. I do not think of myself as a thief — except perhaps at a gritty subconscious level that pumps guilt up into my dreams. I hate stealing. Except for Maccabee’s book, I had not stolen anything for at least fifteen years. Thinking of the thefts of my boyhood, I once asked an analyst if he thought I was a kleptomaniac. He said, of course not. Put it in writing, I said. He told me it was my fifty minutes and typed it out on a piece of notepaper. Yet at moments of great unease, I know that I can put my mind right — if at all, if at cost of a wider displacement — by only one means. It is like eating — like stuffing food down your throat long after your hunger has died.

So what I intended doing was a repetition of my mime of thievery: I was going to surreptitiously pocket goods and then drop the ten dollars at the cash register on the way out. Temptation struck first in household novelties, where I saw a corkscrew on a table. Next to it lay a rank of clasp knives. I hovered over the table, ignoring a dozen opportunities for palming the corkscrew and one of the knives. The whole business suddenly seemed labored and stupid.

Revulsion for the charade made me turn away. I was too old for these tricks, I could not allow myself to be so foolishly self-indulgent. But still I suffered. I went upstairs where the books were kept.

Slowly I revolved the rack: you will not steal again, I said to myself, you will not even pretend to steal. Romantic novels with jacket pictures of girls running from castles predominated. I could see no more copies of The Enchanted Dream. Finding even one had been fantastic luck. With feigned idleness I scanned the spines side-view. Still nothing.

And then I saw a natural second choice. There, crammed in one of the bottom divisions, was a novel written by Lamont Withers, who had been the gabbiest, most annoying member of my Joyce seminar at Columbia and now taught at Bennington — A Vision of Fish, an experimental novel disguised by its jacket drawing of two embracing androgynies as a romance. I extracted the book and examined the back of the cover. “A sensitive tour de force… Cleveland Plain Dealer. Stunning, witty advance… Library Journal. Withers is the coming man… Saturday Review.” My facial muscles contracted; it was even worse than Maccabee. Temptation reared up, and I nearly tucked the book between arm and elbow. But I would not give in to this gluttony; I could not be ruled by the responses of twenty years past. I gripped the book in my hand. I went down the stairs. At the cash register, an orderly man, I paid for the book and accepted my change.

Breathing hard, flushed of face, at peace, I sat in my car. Not stealing was so much a better feeling than stealing, or mime-stealing. Not stealing, as I had in fact known for years, was the only way to shop. I felt like an alcoholic who has just turned down a drink. It was still too early to see Polar Bears, so I touched the folded letter in my pocket and decided to go — where else? — to Freebo’s, to celebrate. In the midst of death and breakdown, a successful mission.

As I walked across the street, a sharp atom neatly bisected my back between the shoulder blades. I heard a stone clatter on the surface of the road. Stupidly, I watched it roll and come to rest before I looked at the sidewall. People were there, still simulating that sleepy smalltown bustle, walking from Zumgo’s to the Coast To Coast Store, looking in the bread-filled windows of Myer’s bakery. They seemed to be avoiding looking at me, avoiding even looking in my direction. A second later I saw the men who had probably thrown the stone. Five or burly middle-aged men, two or three in dungarees and the others in shabby business suits, stood in front of the Angler’s Bar. These men were watching me, a general smile flickering between them. I could not stare them down — it was like the Plainview diner. I recognized none of them. When I turned away, a second stone flew past my head. Another struck my right leg.

Friends of Duane’s, I thought, and then realized I was wrong. If they were merely that, they would be laughing. This businesslike silence was more ominous than stone-throwing. I looked over my shoulder: they still stood, bunched together and hands in pockets, before the dark bar window. They were watching me. I fled into Freebo’s.

“Who are those men?” I asked him. He came hurriedly down the bar, wiping his hands on a rag.

“You look a little shook up, Mr. Teagarden,” he said.

“Tell me who those men are. I want their names.”

I saw the drinkers at the bar, two thin old men, pick up their glasses and move quietly off.

“What men, Mr. Teagarden?”

“The ones across the street, standing in front of a bar.”

“You mean the Angler’s. Gee, I don’t see anybody there, Mr. Teagarden, I’m sorry.”

I went up to the long narrow window overlooking the street and stood beside him. The men had vanished. A woman with her hair in curlers pushed a baby carriage in the direction of the bakery.

“They were just there,” I insisted. “Five, maybe six, a couple of farmers and a few others. They threw rocks at me.”

“I dunno, Mr. Teagarden, it could have been some kind of accident.”

I glared at him.

“Let me get you a drink on the house,” he said. He turned away and put a shot glass beneath one of the upended bottles. “There. Put that inside you.” Meekly, I drank it in one gulp. “You see, we’re still all upset around here, Mr. Teagarden. It was probably because they didn’t know who you were.”

“It was probably because they did know who I am,” I said. “Friendly town, isn’t it? Don’t answer, just get me another drink. I have to see Polar Bears, Galen I mean, in a little while but I’m going to stay in here until everybody goes home.”

He blinked. “Whatever you say.”

I drank whiskies, taking my time over them. Several hours passed. Then I had a cup of coffee, and after that another drink. The other men in the bar regarded me surreptitiously, shifting their eyes toward the mirror when I raised my glass or leaned on the bar. After an unendurable time of this, I took Withers’ book out of my jacket pocket and began to read it on the bar. I switched from whiskey to beer and remembered that I’d had nothing to eat.

“Do you have sandwiches in here?”

“I’ll get one for you, Mr. Teagarden. And another cup of coffee?”

“And a cup of coffee and another beer.”

Withers’ book was unreadable. It was unbearably trivial. I began to tear out pages. If you find a pattern, you should stick to it. Now the other men in the bar no longer bothered to conceal their stares. I recognized in myself the buzzing frontal lobes of intoxication. “Do you have a wastebasket, Freebo?” I asked.

He held up a green plastic bucket. “Is that another one you wrote?”

“No, I never wrote anything worth publishing,” I said. I pitched the ripped pages into the green bucket. The men were staring at me as they would at a circus ape.

“You’re shook up, Mr. Teagarden,” Freebo said. “See, it won’t help any. You’ve had a few too many, Mr. Teagarden, and you’re kinda upset. I think you ought to go out in the fresh air for a little bit. You’re all paid up in here, see, and I can’t serve you any more. You oughta go home and have a rest.” He was walking me toward the front of the bar, talking in a low, calming voice.

“I want to buy a record player,” I said. “Can I do that now or is it too late?”

“I think the stores just closed, Mr. Teagarden.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow. Now I have to see Polar Bears Galen Hovre.”

“That’s a good idea.” The door closed behind me. I was standing alone on a deserted Main Street; the sky and the light were darkening, though it would not be dusk for at least two hours. I realized that I had spent most of the day in the bar. Signs on the bakery and department store doors read CLOSED. I glanced at the Angler’s Bar, which seemed from the outside to be as empty as Freebo’s. A single car went past in the direction of the courthouse. Once again, I could hear the beating of pigeons’ wings, circling way up above.

At that moment the town seemed haunted. The Midwest is the place for ghosts, I realized, the truest place for them; they could throng up these wide empty Main Streets and populate the fields. I could almost feel them around me.

With these thoughts in my mind, I started when I heard footsteps behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw only an empty street lined with cars like the deserted hulls of insects. When I turned my neck, I again heard the footsteps, a crowd of them. I began to walk quickly, and heard them follow. The street lay wide and deserted before me, lined with empty cars and blank deserted shops. I heard the electric buzz of a neon sign, in the window of a kitchen supplier’s. Reality’s veneer seemed on the verge of dissolution, even the pavement and the brick storefronts were stretched taut over a drumming void. I began to run, and heard them running behind me. I turned my head again, and was almost relieved to see a crowd of thick-waisted men making down the street toward me.

The courthouse was four blocks away, in a straight line up Main Street, but I didn’t have a chance of getting there before they caught me. In the brief glimpse I had, some of them seemed to be carrying sticks. I pumped around the next corner and doubled back into an alley. When I reached the rear of Freebo’s I hunched down beside a group of large silver garbage cans; I did not have time to reach the end of the alley. The group of men had clearly divided; two of them appeared at the alley’s entrance and began to half-trot toward me. I crouched as low as I could get behind the big silver cans. Their footsteps approached, and I heard them breathing hard. They were even less accustomed to running than I was.

One of them distinctly exclaimed, “Shit.”

I waited until I heard them returning; they passed my hole, and then clattered toward the alley’s entrance. When I peeked out, I saw them turning right to follow the rest of the group. My back to the buildings, legs ready to spring, I edged down the alley’s length. I looked cautiously out at Madison Street. Two blocks down, they were rocking an old car parked before a peeling, shabby house. One of them swung at the car with a long stick, ax handle or baseball bat. Glass popped and exploded.

I couldn’t make sense of it. Were they just rowdy drunks looking for the nearest target? Hoping that the noise they were making while destroying the car would keep them from hearing me, I ran across Madison Street into the alley on the other side. Shouts and yells told me that they had seen me. I nearly fell down in terror. I pelted through the alley and came out on Monroe Street, turned right with the thick boiling noise gathering behind me, and wheeled around the corner back onto Main. At the last possible second, I yanked at the door-handle of a car and rolled inside. Then I scrambled over the seat and lay, heart pounding, in the well before the back seat. A candy wrapper fluttered before my nose; dust seemed to pour dryly up from the floor, acrid and foul. I closed my nostrils with my fingers, and after a time the impulse to sneeze left me. I could hear them coming quickly up the street, banging with fists or clubs on cars in frustration.

The edge of a greasy shirt passed the window I could see. A hand pressed against it, flattened and white like a dead starfish. Then I saw only darkening sky, I thought: what if I die here? If my machinery fails and dumps my corpse into this odorous car? Who would find me? It was an image of utter hopelessness. After a while I was strong enough to sneak a look over the top of the seat. They were not far down the block, evidently confounded by my disappearance. There were only four of them, fewer than I had thought; they did not look like the men who had stoned me. They were younger. They ran ahead a few steps. Then they began to walk up Main, looking from side to side, rapping their bats On the sidewalk. They were the only people on the street. When a car passed, they bent to examine the driver’s face. I waited until they had gone several blocks past the courthouse and then I crawled over the seat and came crouching out onto the sidewalk.

The four men were across the street now, far up ahead, nearly to the bridge over the Blundell River. The courthouse lay about halfway between us. I began to walk toward it. The men had reached the bridge, and I saw them leaning on it, talking, lighting cigarettes. Bent over, moving as quickly as possible without running, I gained another fifty feet. Then one of the men threw down his cigarette and pointed at me.

I lifted my elbows and knees and discovered for the first time in my life what running was. It is rhythm, all rhythm, long easy beats made by coordinating every muscle. They were confused that I ran toward them, but when I reached the courthouse and turned easily on one leg and pounded, stepping high, to the back, they flew shouting after me. I fisted my hands and made arcs in the air with them, my chest bowed out and my legs sailing across the asphalt parking lot. I reached the police cars just as they came into the lot. I heard them slow down, scuffling, calling out to me.

The words were inaudible. A roaring sound kicked to life in the corner of the parking lot, and I saw a black-jacketed man tear off on a motorcycle. It looked as though it could have been Zack; I wasn’t sure. The sudden noise made my followers panic. By the time I reached the yellow door with thick glass inset above the word POLICE, they had scattered. My throat felt like burning paper.

The uniformed man rolling a sheet of paper into a typewriter turned his chubby face toward me. I closed the door and leaned back against it, breathing hard. Still holding the paper in his hands, he half-rose, and I saw the stumpy pistol strapped to his hip. “My name is Teagarden,” I said, “and I have an appointment with the Chief.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and lowered the paper with deliberate slowness on top of the typewriter. My chest was heaving.

“I just won a race. Try not to shoot.”

“Just hold it right there.” He came around to the front of the desk, not taking his eyes from me nor removing his hand from within panic distance of the revolver. His left hand found the telephone; when he had the receiver to his ear, he glanced at the row of buttons at the base of the phone and punched one and then dialed a single number. “Teagarden’s here.” He set the phone down.

“You can go right in. He’s been waiting for you. Take that door right there, and then it’s the door marked Chief.”

I nodded, and moved toward the door “right there.” Polar Bears’ office was at the end of the hall; it was about ten by twelve, mostly filled with green filing cabinets and a worn old desk. Most of the rest of it was filled by Polar Bears.

“Sit down, for God’s sake, Miles,” he said, waving at the chair before his desk. “You look like you had a hard old day.” Looking at him, I could see the difference in our ages more clearly than I ever had before — he had been nearly Duane’s age, though his cheerful rowdiness had made him younger in my eyes. In this solidly massive man with a serious square face I could see few traces of the boy who had spitballed Bertilsson’s sheep. Even the reason for his name had vanished: his furry cap of astonishingly white hair had darkened and receded to a brownish dusting from his ears to his rubbery-looking scalp.

“You look like you’ve had a hard old life, but it’s nice to see you again,” I said.

“Yeah, we had some good times together, didn’t we? Some real good times.”

“I had an especially good time on the way over here. A gang of your citizens chased me with baseball bats. I barely made it.”

He tilted his head back and pushed his lips out. “Would that be the reason you’re sort of late for our reunion?”

“Our reunion is the reason I’m here at all, and not broken up in the alley behind Freebo’s. They only stopped chasing me because I made it into your parking lot.”

“You were at Freebo’s. I’d say you spent quite a time in there.”

“Does that mean you don’t believe me?”

“Some of the bucks around town are getting all riled. I can believe you, Miles. I don’t suppose you saw these boys close enough to identify them.”

“I was trying hard not to get that close.”

“Simmer down, Miles. They’re not going to get you. You’re going to be safe in here, having a little talk. Just simmer down. Those boys will leave you alone.”

“Some others of your local boys threw rocks at me this noon when my back was turned.”

“Is that so? You get hurt any?”

“It’s so and no, I didn’t. Do you want me to forget about that too? Just because they didn’t dent my skull?”

“I don’t want you to go getting yourself worked up over a bunch of hotheads. I’d say that some of the good people decided that you’d be better off leaving town.”

“Why?”

“Because they don’t know you, Miles. It’s simple as that. You’re the only man in about a century and a half had a sermon preached about him. You weren’t thinking of being run off, were you?”

“No. I have to stay here. I’m involved in something.”

“Um hum. Real good. Any idea how long that might take you?”

“Until the twenty-first. After that I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s not far away. I want to ask you to consider staying up there at Duane’s until we get some things straightened out around here. Is that all right?”

“What the hell is this all about, Polar Bears? Don’t leave town until the police give me permission?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that. I’m asking you for a favor.”

“Am I being questioned?”

“Hell no, Miles. We’re having a talk. I want your help on something.”

I leaned back in the stiff chair. I couldn’t feel the alcohol any more. Galen Hovre was regarding me with a half-smile which held little warmth. My senses were confirming a theory of mine, that when a man’s nature changes his essential smell changes with it. Polar Bears once had carried a dense, pleasant odor of closely packed earth, strongest when he was racing a jalopy at seventy down the curves of Highway 93 or stuffing a mailbox with rocks; now, like Duane, he smelled of gunpowder.

“Can I count on your help?”

I looked at this large square-faced man who had been my friend, and didn’t trust a thing he said. “Sure.”

“You’ve heard about these girls who were killed. Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand. Your neighbor Red Sunderson found that Strand girl, and she wasn’t a pretty sight. My deputy, Dave Lokken out there, lost his cookies when he saw her.”

“He’s still upset,” I said.

“Any normal man would be,” Hovre said amiably. “Truth is, we’re all upset around here. This crazy son of a bitch is still walking around. He could be anybody, and that’s the one that gets them by the nuts, Miles. We pretty well know everybody, and folks don’t know what to think.”

“Don’t you have any ideas about who it might be?”

“Oh, we’re sort of keeping an eye on someone, but even he’s not very likely, according to the way I see it. Now I’d like to keep this local. I’ve been Chief here for four years, and I want to get reelected so I can keep my family in hamburgers. Now you’re new around here. You might see things we don’t notice. You had a good education, you’re observant. I wonder if you’ve seen or heard anything that might help me out?”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Do those people who chased me think I did those things? Those killings?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“Christ,” I said. “I’ve scarcely even thought about them. I’ve been busy with my own problems. I didn’t come here for this.”

“Seems to me it might help you out too if you could think of anything.”

“I shouldn’t need that. I shouldn’t have to help myself that way.”

“Seems to me should doesn’t have much to do with it.”

He had a point. “Okay, I can see that. I don’t think I’ve noticed anything. Just a lot of people acting queer, afraid. Some of them hostile. I met one strange kid, but…” The “but” was that I did not want to say anything that would bring suspicion on Zack or Alison. Zack was just a nutty theorist. Polar Bears lifted his eyebrows in a gesture of uninvolved patient anticipation. “But he was just a kid. I don’t even want to name him. I don’t know what I could say that would help.”

“Not yet, maybe. But you might remember something. Just keep it in mind, will you, old buddy?”

I nodded.

“Yeah. We could have this all on a plate by the twenty-first, so don’t do any unnecessary worrying. Now I got a few other little points to bring up with you.” He put on a pair of thick black glasses, making himself look like a scholarly bald bull of melancholy temperament, and took a sheet of paper off a messy pile. “I guess you got into a little trouble over in Plainview a while ago. I got a report on it just yesterday. A fellow named Frank Drum took the number of your car.”

“Jesus,” I said, thinking of the slinking little clerk who had been dispatched out of the diner.

“This was after an incident in Grace’s Restaurant over there. Do you remember it?”

“Of course I remember. They were like your gang of happy hooligans who tried to beat in my head with bats.”

“Who chased you.” He looked sharply up from the paper.

“It’s the same thing. What happened was ridiculous. I saw these guys listening to a radio and they looked like some trouble had happened and I asked what it was. They didn’t like my face. They didn’t like my coming from New York. So they threw me out after they took my license number. That was all. It was around one of the day somebody found the first girl.”

“Just for the record, do you know where you spent the previous night?”

“Somewhere. In a motel somewhere. I don’t know.”

“You don’t have a receipt or a check stub?”

“It was in a crummy little dive off the freeway. I paid with cash. What the hell do you want to know for?”

“I don’t want to know. There’s a cop named Larabee over there who wanted me to ask, that’s all.”

“Well, tell Larabee to shove it up his ass. I was in a crummy motel in Ohio.”

“Just fine, Miles, that’s fine. Real good. No need to get lathered up all over again. How did you hurt that hand of yours?”

I looked in surprise down at my bandaged hand. The tape was filthy and beginning to unravel. Loose wispy trails of dirty gauze leaked from beneath the tape. I had nearly forgotten about Duane’s bandage. “I had an accident with my car. On my car. I cut myself.”

“Dave Lokken can fix you up with a new bandage before you leave. He’s real proud of his first aid skills. When did that accident happen?”

“That same day. After I left the diner.”

“According to another fellow in that restaurant, a fellow named Al Service — he’s the official weedcutter in that part of the county — you made a funny remark before you left. According to Service, you said you hoped another girl would be killed.”

“I didn’t mean that. I was angry. I didn’t even know anyone had been killed then. I just said something like, ‘Whatever it was, you deserve to have it happen again.’ Then I ran like hell.”

He took off the glasses. He rested one jowl in his meaty hand. “I guess that makes sense, Miles. They got you riled. It happens to everybody. Why, you even got old Margaret Kastad worked up, I hear.”

“Old who?”

“Andy’s wife. She gave me a call after you left the store. Said you were writing pornography and I should run you off.”

“I won’t waste time talking about that,” I said. “She holds a few ancient mistakes against me. I’m a different person now.”

“All of us are, I guess. Guess it doesn’t mean we can’t help each other out. You could do something for me right now, and write out what happened in that restaurant and date it and sign it so’s I can have a copy sent to Larabee. It’s for your own good.” He fished around on his desk and pushed a sheet of paper and a pen across the surface. “Just in general terms, Miles. It doesn’t have to be long.”

“If I have to.” I took the paper and wrote down what had happened. I returned the paper to him.

“You’ll give me a call whenever you remember or notice anything?”

I put my hand in my pocket and felt folded paper. “Wait. Just wait a second. Here’s something you can help me with. Who do you think sent this to me? There was a blank sheet of paper inside it.” I took out the envelope and smoothed it on his desk. My hands were shaking. “It’s the second one. The first was addressed to me.”

The glasses went back on, and he bent over the desk to take the envelope. When he saw the name, he glanced up at me. It was the first genuine response I’d had from him. “You got another one of these?”

“Addressed to me. With a blank sheet of paper in it.”

“Would you let me keep this?”

“No. I want it. What you can do is tell me who sent it.” I had the sense of taking a great risk, of making a huge error. It was strong enough to weaken my knees.

“I hate to say this, but it looks like your writing, Miles.”

“What?”

He held up my statement alongside the envelope and then turned them so I could see them together. There was a certain superficial similarity. “It’s not my writing, Polar Bears.”

“Not many people around here remember this particular name any more.”

“All it takes is one,” I said. “Just give me the envelope back.”

“Whatever you say. Only experts can really tell about these handwriting things anyhow. Dave!” He was bellowing at the door. “Get in here with your first aid kit! Pronto!”

“I heard you callin’ him Polar Bears. Not many does that any more.”

Lokken and I were walking down Main Street in the late humid darkness. The few streetlights had come on; I could again hear the buzz of neon signs. Lights burned in the windows of the Angler’s, spilling a rectangle of yellow onto the sidewalk. My hand was encased in gleaming white.

“We’re old friends.”

“You’d have to be. That name Polar Bears just drives him up the wall. Where’s your car at, anyhow? I think you’d be safe now.”

“I’m not taking the chance. He said for you to walk me to my car, and that’s what I want you to do.”

“Shit, there’s nothing to be ascairt of. There ain’t nobody out.”

“That’s what I thought last time. If you don’t call him Polar Bears, what do you call him?”

“Me?” Lokken guffawed. “I call him Sir.”

“What does Larabee call him?”

“Who?”

“Larabee. The chief over in Plainview.”

“Excuse me, but you musta lost some of your marbles, Mr. Teagarden. There ain’t nobody named Larabee over there in Plainview and even if there was he wouldn’t be chief because Plainview ain’t even got a Chief of Police. They got a sheriff named Larson, and he’s my second cousin. Chief Hovre calls in there once or twice a week. It’s his jurisdiction, like all these little towns roundabout, Centerville, Liberty, Blundell. He’s chief of it all. Where’s your car at, now?”

I was standing motionless in the middle of the wide dark street, looking at the VW and trying to assimilate what Lokken had said. The condition of my car made it difficult.

Lokken said, “My God, that’s not yours, is it?”

I nodded, my throat too dry to form words.

The windows were smashed, the top and hood bent and battered. One of the headlights protruded like an eyeball on a thin stalk. I ran to look at the front tires, and then went around in back. They were untouched, but the rear window had been smashed in.

“That’s property damage. You want to come back and tell the Chief about it? You should fill out a report. I gotta make a report too.”

“No. You tell Hovre about it. This time he’ll believe me.” I could feel anger building up in me again, and I gripped Lokken’s arm and squeezed it hard, making him yelp. “Tell him I said I wanted Larabee to handle it.”

“But I just told you my second cousin—”

I was already in the car, torturing the ignition.

The dangling headlight clattered onto the street before I had gone a block, and as I gunned the car up the first of the hills, just past the high school, I heard a hubcap roll off into the weeds beside the road. Through the starred windshield, I could see only a quarter of the road, and even that was fogged and blurred by the condition of the glass. My single headlight veered between illuminating the yellow line and the weeds, and my emotional condition swung wildly about a giant sense of betrayal. Larabee, was it? Was it Larabee who wanted to know how I’d cut my hand? Was it Larabee who wanted to get reelected?

I suspected that it was Larabee who would not push very hard to find the men who had tried to attack me, and who had wrecked my car in their frustration.

Fighting the shuddering car around a tight, ascending curve, I realized that the radio was playing: I had accidentally brushed the button some miles back, and now it was unreeling yards of drivel. “… and for Kathy and Jo and Brownie, from the Hardy Boys, I guess you girls know what that means, a good old good one, ‘Good Vibrations.’” Teenage voices began to squeal. I slammed into a lower gear, trying to watch the turning of the road through the web of the windshield as the announcer inserted a voice-over. “The Hardy Boys, far out.” Headlights raced toward me, then slipped past, flaring like the car’s horn.

The next car flipped its lights up and down twice, and I realized that my single headlight was on bright; I hit the dimming button with my foot.

“Too much, really too much. Those were the good old days talkin’ at ya. Now for Frank from Sally, a real tender one, I guess she loves you, Frank, so give her a call, huh? Something from Johnny Mathis.”

On the rises I could see nothing but black empty air beyond the roadbed; I kept the accelerator to the floor, releasing it only when I had to change gears or when the bolts in the car’s body began to shimmy. I flew past the Community Chest thermometer, seeing it only for a second in the headlight. All the beautiful green distance was one-dimensional dark.

“Hey, Frank, you better watch that little fox, she’s gonna get you, baby. She’s just stone in love with you, so be cool. Little change of pace now — for the junior gym class and Miss Tite, a blast of soulful Tina Turner, from Rosie B — ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. “

My tires complained as I suddenly braked, seeing a high wooded wall of stone before me instead of the black road; I cramped the wheel, and the back end fished out and then righted itself in that way which suggests that an automobile is constructed of a substance far more elastic than metal. The oil light flashed and went dead again. Still going dangerously fast, my mind filled with nothing but the mechanics of driving, I came over the last hill and began the straight slope down to the highway in a deep well of unheard music.

Without bothering to brake I spun out onto the deserted highway. The music pulsed in my ears like blood. Over the low white bridge, past where Red Sunderson must have found the second girl’s body; then a sharp left onto the valley road. I was breathing as hard as if I’d been running.

“Whoo-ee! Tell that to anyone, but don’t tell it to your gym teacher! All the weirdos are out tonight, kiddies, so lock your doors. Here’s something for all the lost ones, I kid you not, that’s what the card says, for all the lost ones, from A and Z. Van Morrison and ‘Listen to the Lion.’ “

At last I became conscious of the radio’s noise. I slowed, passing the narrow drive to Rinn’s house. Dark mounted high on either side — I seemed to be entering a tunnel of darkness. From A and Z? Alison and Zack? “Listen to the Lion” — that was the name of the song. An untrained high baritone glided through words I could not distinguish. The song seemed to have no particular melody. I switched the radio off. I wanted only to be home. The VW sped past the shell of the old school, and a few moments later, the high pompous facade of the church. I heard the motor grinding arhythmically, and pushed the button to bring the headlight back up to bright.

Before the Sunderson farm the road makes a tight bend around a red outcropping of sandstone, and I leaned forward over the wheel, putting all my attention onto the two square inches of clear glass. The beam of yellow light flew over the corn. Then I saw something that made me slew the car over to the side of the road and brake. I hurriedly got out and stood on the ridge beside the seat so that I could look over the top of the car to the end of the fields.

It had not been a mistake: the slight figure was there again, between the field and the black rise of the wood.

I heard a screen door bang shut behind me and looked up over my shoulder, startled. Lights in the Sunderson home showed a tall husky man in outline on the high sloping lawn. I looked back across the fields, and it was still there. The choice was simple because it was not a choice at all.

I jumped down onto the road and ran around the front of the car.

“Hey!” a man shouted.

In the next second I was over the ditch and already running down the side of the cornfield, going toward the woods. Whoever was up there was watching me, I thought, letting me approach.

“Stop! Miles! Wait up!”

I ignored him. The woods were a quarter of a mile away. I could almost hear music. The voice behind me ceased to shout. As I ran toward it, the figure went backward into the woods and disappeared.

“I see you!” the man shouted.

I didn’t bother to turn around: the vanishing of the figure into the woods made me run even harder, even more clumsily, forgetting the technique I had learned in the police parking lot. The ground was hard and dry, covered with a light stubble, and I pounded along, keeping in view the place where the figure had last been. Beside me, the corn was higher than my head, a solid dark mass beyond the first rows.

The boundary of the first row of fields, from the highway to the farm just beyond Duane’s, is formed by a small creek, and it was this that gave me my first difficulty. The plowed and farmed land ended about eight feet on either side of the creek; when I reached the end of the corn planting, I looked to my left and saw an area of beaten-down tall grass and flattened weeds where apparently Duane customarily drove the tractor through to the upper fields. When I ran there and began to approach the creek, I saw that the ground had been churned by the tractor so that the whole area was a muddy swamp. There the creek was four or five feet wider than anywhere else, spilling out into the depression the tractor had made. I walked back along the bank; birds and frogs announced themselves, joining the cricket noises that had surrounded me since I had left the road. My boots were encased in soft mud.

I pushed tall fibrous weeds apart with my arms and saw a narrowing of the creek. Two hairy grassy bulges of earth made an interrupted bridge over the water; the bulges, about a yard and a half apart, were supported by the root systems of two of the cottonwood trees which grew all along the creek’s length. I circled one of the trees and edged out on the root-hump and jumped across, banging my forehead and nose into the trunk of the tree on the opposite side. Crows took off in noisy alarm. Still clutching the tree with both arms, I looked back over the cornfield and saw the VW parked on the valley road before the Sunderson house up on its hill. Light came beaming out from both house and car — I had forgotten to turn off the engine. Worse, I had left the key in the ignition. Mrs. Sunderson and Red were standing at one of the windows, cupping their hands to their eyes and staring out.

I jumped down from the humped tangle of roots and, after struggling through another area of thick weeds, began to jog up through the next field. I could see the place where I thought the figure had slipped into the woods, and pushed myself up over a rise where alfalfa gave way to corn again. In a few minutes I was at the beginning of the trees.

They seemed sparser, less a thick homogeneous mass than they had appeared from the road. Moonlight made it possible for me to see where I was going once I had begun to run through the widely spaced trees. My feet encountered the edges of large rocks and the yielding softness of mold and beds of pine needles. As I ran deeper into the trees the impression of sparseness quickly diminished: the ghostly pines and birches slipped behind me, and I was moving between oaks and elms, veterans with rivered barks which blocked out nearly all the light. I came to a jog and then stopped, hearing an excited rustle of movement off to my left.

I turned my head in time to see a deer bounding for cover, lifting its haunches like a woman leaving a diving board.

Alison. I plunged blindly off to the right, hindered by my heavy boots. She had appeared to me, she had signaled. Somewhere, she was waiting for me. Somewhere deep in the darkness.

A long time later and after I entered a circle of trees, I admitted that I was lost. Not finally lost, because the slope of the forest’s floor told me which way the fields and the road were, but lost enough not to know if I had been circling. More disturbingly, after I had fallen and rolled against a lichen-covered boulder, I had become unsure of lateral direction. The woods were too dark for me to see farmhouse lights in the distance — in fact, distance did not seem to exist at all, except as an infinity of big close dark trees. I had edged my way into one clearing, perhaps half a mile back; but it may have been up, not back, and was at least some distance up, for I had come down the slope before going right again. All in all I thought I had been looking for nearly an hour, and the trees about me seemed familiar, as if I had been at this same spot before. It was only the little clearing, blackened at its center with the cold ashes of a fire, which proved I had gone, anywhere at all, and not turned and turned in the same place before the same trees until I was lost and dizzy.

Because, really, it did look familiar — the giant bulge of a trunk before me had been before me earlier, I had looked up at an identical thick curve of branch, I had knelt on an identical shattered log. I shouted my cousin’s name.

At that moment I had an essentially literary experience, brewed up out of Jack London and Hawthorne and Cooper and Disney cartoons and Shakespeare and the brothers Grimm, of panic which quickly passed into fear. The panic was at being lost, but the fear which rushed in after it was simply of the woods themselves, of giant alien nature. I mean that the trees seemed inhabited by threatening life. Malevolence surrounded me. Not just nature’s famous Darwinian indifference, but active actual hostility. It was the most primitive apprehension of evil I had ever known. I was a fragile human life on the verge of being crushed by immense forces, by forces of huge and impersonal evil. Alison was a part of this; she had drawn me in. I knew that if I did not move, I would be snatched by awful twigged hands, I would be shredded against stones and branches, my mouth and eyes filled with moss. I would die as the two girls had died. Lichen would pack my mouth. How foolish we had been to assume that mere human beings had killed the girls!

From this frozen encounter with spirit it was terror that finally released me, and I ran blindly, plungingly, in any direction I could find — in far greater fear than I had run from the hooligans in Arden. Low branches caught my stomach and brought me crashing down, rocks skittered under my slippery feet, twigs clutched at my trousers. Low leaves rustled at my eyes. I was just running, glad for running, and my heart whooped and my lungs caught at breath.

I fell many times. The last time, I peered up through creepers and nettles and saw that the malevolence had gone; the god had departed; human light was darting into the vegetation, the light which represents our conquering of unreason, and I brought my body complaining up into a squatting position to see from where the light was coming. I could feel Alison’s letter in my pocket. My personality began to reassemble. Artificial light is a poem to reasonableness, the lightbulb casts out demons, it speaks in rhymed couplets, and my body began to shake with relief, as if I had stumbled into the formal gardens of Versailles.

Even my normal cast of mind returned to me, and I regretted my momentary betrayal of belief. It was betrayal of Alison and betrayal of spirit. I had been spooked, and spooked by literature at that.

As this specific Teagardenish guilt whispered through me, I finally saw where I was and knew the house from which light fell. Yet my body still trembled with relief when I made it stand and walk through the domesticated oaks.

She appeared on the porch. The sleeves of a man’s tweed jacket hung below the tips of her fingers. She was still wearing the high rubber boots. “Who is that out there? Miles? Is that you?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “I got lost.”

“Are you alone?”

“You’re always asking me that.”

“But I heard two of you.”

I just stared at her.

“Come on in, Miles, and I’ll pour you some coffee.”

When I came up on the porch she scrutinized me with her good eye. “Why, Miles, you’re in a terrible condition! You’re all over dirt. And you’ve torn your clothes.” She looked down “And you’ll have to take off those boots before you can come; into my kitchen.”

Gently I removed the mud-laden boots. I was aware of numerous small aches and sores on my face and hands, and I had somewhere banged my leg in the same place I had when I had accompanied the chair down the stairs of the root cellar.

“Why, you’re limping, Miles! What were you doing out there at night?”

I lowered myself into a chair and she placed a cup before me. “Auntie Rinn, are you sure you heard someone else in the woods? Someone besides me?”

“It was probably one of the chickens. They do get out and make an awful ruckus.” She was sitting poised on a chair across the old wooden table from me, her long white hair falling to the shoulders of the gray tweed jacket. Steam from the cups rose wispily between us. “Let me take care of your face.”

“Please don’t bother,” I said, but she had already bounced up and was at the sink, dampening a cloth. Then she took a covered pot from a shelf and returned. The cloth was cool and soothing against my cheekbones.

“I don’t like saying this to you, Miles, but I think you should leave the valley. You were troubled when you first came here, and you are more troubled now. If you will insist on staying, I want you to leave Jessie’s house and come to stay here.”

“I can’t.”

She dipped her fingers in the pot and dabbed a thick green mixture on my cuts. It made my entire face throb. A woodsy fragrance snagged in my nostrils. “This is just an herbal mixture for your cuts, Miles. What were you doing out there?”

“Looking for someone.”

“Looking for something in the woods at night?”

“Ah, yes, someone broke most of the glass on my car and I thought I saw them running up this way.”

“Why were you trembling?”

“I’m not used to running.” Her fingers were still rubbing the green mixture into my face.

“I can protect you, Miles.”

“I don’t need protection.”

“Then why were you so frightened?”

“It was just the woods. The darkness.”

“Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.” She looked at me fiercely. “But it is never right to lie to me, Miles. You were not looking for a vandal. Were you?”

I was conscious of the trees bending over the house, of the darkness outside her circle of light.

She said, “You must pack your things and leave. Come here or go back to New York. Go to your father in Florida.”

“I can’t.” That thick smell hung over my face.

“You will be destroyed. You must at least come here to stay with me.”

“Auntie Rinn,” I said. My entire body had begun to shake again. “Some people think I have been killing those girls — that was the reason they attacked my car. What could you do against them?”

“They will never come here. They will never come up my path.” I remembered how she had terrified me when I was a child, with that look on her face, sentences like that in her mouth. “They are only town people. They have nothing to do with the valley.”

The little kitchen seemed intolerably hot, and I saw that the woodstove was burning, alive like a fireplace with snapping flames.

I said, “I want to tell you the truth. I felt something monstrous out there. Something purely hostile, and that’s why I was frightened. I guess; it was evil I felt. But it all came out of books. Some toughs chased me through Arden, and then Polar Bears shook me up, as he would say. I know the literature about all this. I know all about Puritans in the wilderness, and it caught up with me. I’ve been repressed and I’m not myself.”

“What are you waiting for, Miles?” she asked, and I knew that I could prevaricate no longer.

“I’m waiting for Alison,” I said. “Alison Greening. I thought it was her I saw from the road, and I ran up into the woods to find her. I’ve seen her three times.”

“Miles—” she began, her face wild and angry.

“I’m not working on my dissertation any more, I don’t care about that, I’ve been feeling more and more that all of that is death to the spirit, and I’ve been getting signs that Alison will come soon.”

“Miles—”

“Here’s one of them,” I said and took the crumpled envelope out of my pocket. “Hovre thinks I sent it to myself, but she sent it, didn’t she? That’s why the writing is like mine.”

She was going to speak again, and I held up my hand. “You see, you never liked her, nobody ever liked her, but we were always alike. We were almost the same person. I’ve never loved any other woman.”

“She was your snare. She was a trap waiting for you to enter it.”

“Then she still is, but I don’t believe it.”

“Miles—”

“Auntie Finn, in 1955 we made a vow that we would meet here in the valley, and we set a date. It’s in only a few weeks from now. She is going to come, and I am going to meet her.”

“Miles,” she said, “your cousin is dead. She died twenty years ago, and you killed her.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.