Out of Their Minds

8

The first lilacs were coming out and in the cool, damp evening they had filled the air with a faint suggestion of that fragrance which, in the weeks to come, would hang a heavy perfume along all the streets and footpaths of this little town. A wind, blowing up the hollow from the river, set the suspended street lights at the intersections swinging and the light and shadow on the ground went bouncing back and forth.

"I'm glad that it is over," Kathy Adams said. 'The program, I mean, and the school year too. But I'll be coming back in September."

I looked down at the girl walking at my side and she was, it seemed to me, an entirely different person than the one I'd seen that morning in the store. She had done something to her hair and the schoolteacherish look of it was gone and she'd put away her glasses. Protective coloration, I wondered—the way she'd looked that morning, a deliberate effort to make herself appear the kind of teacher who would gain acceptance in this community. And it was a shame, I told myself. Given half a chance, she was a pretty girl.

"You said you'll be back," I said. "Where will you spend the summer?"

"Gettysburg," she said.

"Gettysburg?"

"Gettysburg, P.A.," she told me. "I was born there and my family still is there. I go back each summer."

"I was there just a few days ago," I said. £1 stopped on my way here. Spent two full days, wandering the battlefield and wondering what it had all been like that time more than a hundred years ago."

"You'd never been there before?"

"Once before. Many years ago. When I first went to Washington as a cub reporter. I took one of the bus trips. It was not too satisfactory. I've always wanted to be there on my own, to take my time and see what I wanted to see, to poke into all the corners and to stand and look as long as I wished to stand and look."

"You had a good time, then?"

"Yes, two days of living in the past. And trying to imagine."

She said, "We've lived with it so long, of course, that it's become commonplace with us. We have pride in it, naturally, and a deep interest in it, but it's the tourists who get the most out of it They come to it fresh and eager and they see it, perhaps, with different eyes than we do."

"That may be right," I said, although I didn't think so.

"But Washington," she said. "There is a place I love. Especially the White House. It fascinates me. I could stand for hours outside that big iron fence and just stare at it."

"You," I said, "and millions of other people. There are always people walking up and down the fence, going slow and looking."

"It's the squirrels I like," she told me. "Those cheeky White House squirrels that come up to the fence and beg and sometimes come right out on the sidewalk and sniff around your feet, then sit up, with their little paws dangling on their chests, looking at you with their beady little eyes."

I laughed, remembering the squirrels. "They're the ones," I said, "who have it made."

"You sound as if you're envious."

"I could be that," I admitted. "The squirrel, I should imagine, has a fairly simple life, while our human life has become so complex that it is never simple. We've made a terrible mess of things. Maybe no worse now than it has ever been, but the point is that it's not getting any better. It's maybe getting worse."

"You're going to put some of that into your book?"

I looked at her in surprise.

"Oh," she said, "everybody knows that you came back to write a book. Did they simply guess or did you tell someone?"

"I suppose that I told George."

"That was enough," she said. "All you have to do is mention anything at all to a single person. Within three hours, flat, everyone in town knows exactly what you said. Before noon tomorrow everyone will know that you walked me home and paid ten dollars for my basket Whatever possessed you to make a bid like that?"

"It wasn't showing off," I told her. "I suppose some people will think that and I am sorry for it. I suppose I shouldn't have done it, but there were those three louts over against the wall…"

She nodded. "I know what you mean. The two Ballard boys and the Williams kid. But you shouldn't mind them. You were fair game to them. New and from a city. They simply had to show you..»

"Well, I showed them," I said, "and I suppose it was just as childish of me as it was of them. And with less excuse, for I should know better."

"How long do you plan to stay?" she asked.

I grinned at her. "I'll still be here when you get back in September…"

"I didn't mean that."

"I know you didn't. But the book will take awhile. I'm not going to rush it. I'm going to take my time and do the best job of which I'm capable. And I have to catch up with a lot of fishing. Fishing I've been dreaming about all these years. Maybe some hunting in the fall. I imagine this might be a good place for ducks."

"I think it is," she said. "There are a lot of local folks who hunt them every fall and all you hear for weeks is when the northern flight will start coming through."

And that would be the way of it, I knew. That was the lure and the pull of a place like Pilot Knob—the comfortable feeling that you knew what other people were thinking and were able to join with them in a comfortable sort of talk, to sit around the spittle-scarred stove hi the store and talk about when the northern flight would be coming through, or about how the fish had started to bite down in Proctor's Slough, or how the last rain had helped the corn or how the violent storm of the night before had put down all the oats and barley. There had been a chair around that stove, I remembered, for my father—a chair held at once by right and privilege. I wondered, as I walked through the lilac-haunted evening, if there'd be a chair for me.

"Here we are," said Kathy, turning into a walk that led up to a large, white, two-story house, all but smothered in trees and shrubbery. I stopped and stared at it, trying to place it, to bring it out of memory.

"The Forsythe place," she said. "The banker Forsythe place. I've boarded here ever since I started teaching here, three years ago."

"But the banker…"

"Yes, he's gone. Dead a dozen years or more, I guess. But his widow still lives here. An old, old woman now. Half blind and gets around with a cane. Says she gets lonesome in the big house all alone. That's why she took me in."

"You'll be leaving-when?"

"In a day or two. I'm driving back and there is no big hurry. Not a thing to do all summer. Last year I went to summer school, but this year I decided to skip it."

"I may see you again, then, before you leave?" Because for some reason which I didn't try to figure out, I knew that I wanted to see her again.

"Why, I don't know. I'll be busy…"

"Tomorrow night, perhaps. Have dinner with me, please. There must be someplace we can drive to. A good dinner and a drink."

"That might be fun," she said.

"I'll call for you," I said. "Will seven be too early?"

"It'll be quite all right," she said, "and thanks for seeing me home."

It was a dismissal, but I hesitated. "Can you get in?" I asked, rather stupidly. "Have you got a key?"

She laughed at me. "I have a key, but there'll be no need to use it. She's waiting for me and watching us right now."

"She?"

"Mrs. Forsythe, of course. Half blind as she is, she knows all that's going on and keeps close watch of me. No harm will ever come to me as long as she's around."

I felt amused and a little angry and upset. I had forgotten, of course—forgotten that you could go nowhere, nor do anything, without someone watching you and knowing and then passing on the information to everyone in Pilot Knob.

"Tomorrow evening," I said a little stiffly, conscious of those eyes watching through the window.

I stood and watched her go up the steps and across the vine-hung porch and before she reached the door, it came open and a flood of light spilled out. Kathy had been right. Mrs. Forsythe had been watching.

I turned about and went through the gate and down the street. The moon had risen over the great bluff to the east of the town, the Pilot Knob which had been a landmark used by pilots hi the old steamboating days and which had given the town its name. The moonlight, shining through the massive elm trees which lined the street, made a checkered pattern on the sidewalk and the air was tinged with the smell of lilacs blooming in the yards.

When I came to the schoolhouse corner, I turned down the road that led to the river. Here the village dwindled out and the trees, climbing up the high slope of the bluff, grew thicker, muffling the moonlight.

I had walked only a few feet into this deeper shadow when they jumped me. I'll say this for them—it was a complete surprise. A hurtling body slammed into my legs and bowled me over and when I was going down something else lashed out and struck me in the ribs. I hit the ground and rolled to get out of the way and in the road I heard the sound of feet. I got my knees under me and was halfway up when I saw the shadowy outline of the man in front of me and sensed (not really seeing, just glimpsing a flash of motion) the foot hitting out at me. I twisted to one side and the foot caught me a glancing blow on the arms instead of in the chest, where it apparently had been aimed.

I knew that there were more than one of them, for I had heard the sound of a number of feet out there in the road, and I knew that if I stayed down, they all would rush hi, kicking. So I made a great effort to get on my feet and made it, although my stance was shaky. I backed away in an effort to get my feet more squarely under me and I backed into something hard and knew, from the feel of the bark against my back, that I was against a tree.

There were three of them, I saw, poised out in the shadows, darker than the shadows.

The three, I wondered, who had stood against the wall, making fun of me because I was an outsider and fair game. And then lying in wait for me after I'd taken Kathy home.

"All right, you little bastards," I said, "come on in and get it."

They came, all three of them. If I'd had the sense to keep my fool mouth shut, they might not have done it, but at my taunt they did.

I got in just one good lick. I put my fist squarely into the face of the one in the center. The punch I threw was a good one and he was rushing me. The sound of the fist hitting his face was like the sound a sharp axe makes when it hits a frosty tree.

Then fists were hitting me from every side and I felt myself going over and as I fell, they left off with their fists, but they used their feet, I rolled, or tried to roll, up into a ball and protect myself as best I could. It went on for quite a while and I guess I was fairly dizzy, or maybe I passed out for a short while.

The next I remember I was sitting up and the road was empty. I was alone and I was one vast ache, with a few places where the pain had localized a bit. I got to my feet and staggered down the road, reeling a little at first from the dizziness, but finally getting so I could navigate on an even keel.

I reached the motel and got to my room and went into the bathroom, turning on the light. 1 was far from a pretty sight. The flesh around one eye was fairly well puffed out and beginning to darken. My face was smeared with blood from half a dozen cuts. Gingerly, I washed off the blood and inspected the cuts and they were not too bad. For several days, of course, I'd have a beauty of an eye.

I think it was my dignity that was hurt worse than the rest of me. Come back to the old home town a minor celebrity from being seen on television and heard on radio and then, one's first evening home, to be beaten up by a gang of rural punks because I had outbid them for the teacher's basket.

Christ, I thought, if this story ever got known hi Washington or New York, I'd never hear the last of it.

I felt over my body and I had some bruises here and there, but nothing serious. I'd be sore for a day or two, but that would be the end of it. I'd have to put in a lot of fishing in the next few days, I told myself. Stay out on the river and out of the sight of as many people as I could manage until the swelling around the eye went down. Although, I knew, there was no hope of keeping the story from the good folks of Pilot Knob. And there was my date with Kathy—what would I do about that?

I went to the door and stepped outside to have a last look at the night. The moon now was high over the frowning bluff of Pilot Knob. A slight breeze stirred the trees and set up a furtive rustling of the leaves and suddenly I heard the sound, the far-off cry of many dogs, baying out their hearts.

I caught just a snatch of it, a piece of sound that had been caught and wafted by the wind so that I could hear it, but it now was gone. I stiffened to attention, listening, remembering what Linda Bailey had told me of the were-pack that ran in Lonesome Hollow.

The sound came again, the wild, insistent, heart-chilling clamor of a pack closing in upon its prey. Then the wind shifted once again and the sound was gone.