Twilight

William Gay
BOOK ONE
INTO THE TERRITORIES

T he wagon came out of the sun with its attendant din of iron rims turning on flinty shale, its worn silvergray fired orange by the malefic light flaring behind it, the driver disdaining the road for the shortcut down the steep incline, erect now and sawing the lines, riding the brake onehanded until the wheels locked and skidded, then releasing it so that wagon and team and man moved in a constantly varying cacophony of shrieks and rattles and creaks and underlying it all the perpetual skirling of steel on stone.

Patton’s store. A grinning man would halt the wagon with an upraised arm but it would not halt. When he noticed the quiltcovered cargo the wagon transported, he called, What you got there, Sandy?

The driver turned and spat and wiped his mouth and glanced back briefly but he didn’t stay the wagon. Dead folks, he said. The wagon went on and vanished like some ghostwagon in the vaporous mist rising from the river.

Coming into Ackerman’s Field the wagon and its curious freight accrued to itself a motley of children and barking dogs and a few dusty turtlebacked automobiles and such early risers as were stirring and possessed of enough curiosity to join the macabre parade to its ultimate end on the courthouselawn.

Before he even stepped down from the wagon the man said, Get Sheriff Bellwether out here.

A fat man in overalls had approached the wagon. Bellwether’s done been sent for, he said. Who all is it, Sandy?

The man pulled back the quilt covering with the faintest flourish, not unlike a nightmare magician offering up for consideration some sleightofhand.

Goddamn it, Sandy, that girl’s half naked. Did you not have enough respect to cover her up?

The man they’d called Sandy spat. I ain’t Fenton Breece, Hooper. All I undertook to do was bring em in. That’s all the undertakin I aim to do. You want to handle em, then you cover em up.

The dead exhibited in the strawstrewn wagonbed. A man or the bloody remnants of one. A rawboned middleaged woman with one bare and dirty foot protruding from the makeshift shroud. A girl with hair the color and sheen of a bird’s wing. About her throat an arrowhead tied to a leather thong, and the thong wound tightly into the bluelooking flesh. A boy of fourteen or fifteen and another younger yet and over all a welter of congealing blood. Aligned so and staring at the uncaring sky they are beyond any commiseration you might have for them and you’d be hard put to come up with a sin they might have committed enormous enough to have brought them to so shoddy an end.

The fat man in faded Duck Heads shuffled his feet awkwardly. Behind him the malign sun had burned away the last of the morning mist and the falsefront stores and tacky houses assembled themselves almost apologetically, dimensionless and makeshift props for the darker tableau that has playedbeyond the curtain.

There are some sorry son of a bitches in this world, the fat man said inadequately.

I believe about half of em are runnin wild in the Harrikin, Sandy said.

Who’s runnin wild? Who done this mess, anyway?

God knows. Or more likely the devil. Old man Bookbinder got jumped by Granville Sutter and faced him down with a horse pistol. There’s a Tyler boy lost in there wanderin around with a rifle and some story about a dead sister and Fenton Breece misburyin dead folks. Turned up at my house two or three o’clock in the morning half out of his head. Said we might ought to open some graves. I ain’t much for graverobbin but after this I’d believe most anything.

Well, I’ll be goddamned, the fat man said suddenly. I never noticed that. He pointed. A bloody mound of curly hair. A dog in there.

He brought out a taffycolored dog. Some breed of terrier. The dog’s eyes were open and its distended tongue as purple as a chow’s. Strangest of all, the dog’s ears had been pierced and it wore a gaudy pair of dimestore earrings.

Well, I’ll be damned. I don’t believe I ever seen a dog wearin earbobs.

Reckon why whoever it was killed the dog anyway?

I’ve thought about that some, Sandy said. I believe it was just all there was left to kill.

They came up through the stand of cypress that shrouded the graveyard, the pickup hidden off the road in a chertpit clottedwith inkblot bowers of honeysuckle. There were two of them, a young woman and a gangling youth who appeared to be younger still. A leaden rain out of the first slow days of winter had begun some time after midnight and the cypresses wept as they passed beneath them, the tools the pair slung along in their hands refracting away such light as there was and the pair pausing momentarily when the first milkwhite stones rose bleakly out of the dark. Behind and below them the church loomed, a pale outraged shape, no more, and only the impotent dead kept its watch.

The girl moved ahead amongst the gravestones with a sense of purpose but the boy hung back as if he’d had second thoughts or had other places to be. She turned a flashlight on and off again immediately though in truth she hadn’t needed it.

Here, she said. This one here.

Yeah, the boy said. Rain ran out of his hair and down his face. His clothing was already soaked and you could hear the water in his boots as he walked. This is crazy as shit, he said.

This seemed so selfevident she didn’t even reply. He drove the spade into the earth mounded atop the grave and leaning his weight into the work began to remound the earth in a pile next the grave. She seated herself on a gravestone and crossing her legs at the ankles and shielding her lighter from the rain with her body lit a cigarette and smoked and watched this curious midnight shift at work. A car passed once below them snaking the curves, the lit cypresses rearing out of the windy rain and subsiding and there was a fragment of girl’s laughter and a flung bottle broke on macadam. Gone in a roar of gutted mufflers and dark fell final and absolute and she could hear his breathing and the steady implacable work of thespade. She was on her third cigarette when metal scraped on metal and when it did, something she couldn’t put a name to twisted in her like a knife.

The scraping ceased. Bring me the light, he said.

Come and get it.

Goddamn, can’t you do anything?

I don’t want to see. Come and get it.

Silence. The soft sough of the windy rain in the trees. He said something indecipherable and clambered up out of the grave all gummed with mud and his claycovered boots outsized and clownish and crossed between the stones, a grotesque figure halfcomic here in this township of the dead. He wordlessly took the light and descended again into the grave. When the spade struck the casket this time she stopped her ears with the flat of her hands but she could still hear the wrench when the lid came free.

Nothing for some time. Then he came up to the gravestone and hunkered there in the rain. There was a ragged sound to his breathing but she couldn’t tell if he was crying or just out of breath.

What we thought?

Yes. Worse. The son of a bitch-

She leant forward abruptly and stopped his mouth hard with the palm of her hand and they just sat there, his dark face like rainwashed stone and his wide frightened eyes burning palely out of the dark.

On the last mild morning of an impending winter and on what was one of the last peaceful days of his life, Fenton Breeceame out of his undertaking establishment and stood for a moment on the edge of his manicured lawn just breathing deeply the morning air. He looked about and there was reassurance in all he saw on this December morning in the year of our Lord nineteen-fifty-one. Past the glass sign that told in gothic script breece funeral home he could see the intersection of Oak and Maple, and on opposing corners there were three churches. The Centre Church of Christ, the Cumberland Presbyterian, the First Methodist. He had stood so as a child with his father’s hand clasping his own and he had no reason to doubt it would always be so.

The trees had bared and even as he stood listening to the distant sounds of commerce from the town a few last gold maple leaves drifted with the breeze. Winter was coming. He exulted in this knowledge, there was something warm and comforting about it. He’d live in his own cozy rooms, venturing out only when he had to, as comfortable as Badger from Wind in the Willows. He’d see few people, and most of them would not see him back, business was always good in the winter, old folks were always going to sleep and just not waking up.

Here in this land of Duck Head overalls and felt hats he was a model of sartorial elegance. He wore a fawncolored topcoat over a tan gabardine suit with a matching vest buttoned over his wellfed belly and an offwhite shirt with a green tie of iridescent watermarked silk. He wore a brown Stetson with a rolled brim and a flat crown, and he carried an umbrella though there was no cloud in sight.

He looked at his watch. It was time for his morning coffee break. He figured he’d take it at the Bellystretcher Cafe this morning, and he leisurely ambled that way. Townfolk he met nodded formally to him. Sometimes if they were women whoappealed to him in some way and whose death he anticipated with relish he’d tip the Stetson and watch their eyes skitter away to somewhere else and they’d hurriedly walk on.

Folks were always doing that. Their eyes would sidle away to study intently something they hadn’t noticed a moment before. They had been known to cross the street to avoid meeting him. Some loathsome bird. His penguinlike waddle, some dark and unlovely bird of paradise. He’d smile his one-size-fits-all smile. That’s all right, he would think. Laugh at me while you can. The last laugh is mine, for it is my stainless steel table you will lie on. The water that flushes away your blood and offal and the last perspiration you ever perspired will be charged to my bill. We’ll see how you like it then when there’s no one left in the round world to snigger to.

At the Bellystretcher he seated himself next to a pair of oldtimers in overalls and denim jumpers and ordered his coffee. He nodded to the two men and they gave him back little nods so distant as to barely qualify as greetings. A fierce anger perpetually ached in him but he’d learned to bank it. The living are capable of revenge the dead cannot exact. He just went back to sugaring his coffee.

He had a horror of people but he’d learned to control this too. All he had to do was imagine them naked and dead on his table with the pump humming their blood away and he’d be able to hold his own.

But on this morning one of the old men would not let him be. He kept sniffing the air ostentatiously and nudging the other oldtimer in the ribs, and after awhile he said, Somethin sure does smell sweet.

The other nodded. Flowers damn sure in bloom somewhere, he said. Breece pretended he didn’t hear him.

The man said, Somebody sure does smell good in here.

Breece turned to face him. He dreamed the old man’s face ashen and slackjawed, the rheumy eyes dry and staring.

Well, it’s obvious it’s not you, he said conversationally. You smell like cow shit and Sloan’s liniment.

It took all he had to say it. He commenced drinking his coffee though it was so hot it almost scalded his throat. The man next rose with his coffee and moved a few stools down. Breece finished his coffee and set the cup down hard. He laid too much money on the counter and rose and went out. The door closed behind him and the small bell chimed once and ceased.

You best leave him alone, Shorty, one of the men called. He ain’t just right in the head. One of these days he’s going to pull out a sawedoff shotgun about a yard long and put you to sleep. Then he’ll drag you by the hair of the head up the street to his parlor and embalm your dead ass.

Hell, I didn’t do nothin, Shorty said. The truth shall set you free. He did smell good. Put me in mind of an old gal off Tom’s Creek I used to go with.

It rained for four more nights and Tyler and his sister opened as many graves. These were nights of cold winter drizzles and sullen heavens with no one about and they felt perhaps rightly that the dark belonged to them. She seemed possessed by this folly. He’d begun to think her mad. Had begun to accept that this madness had infected him as well. For they both by now moved in a peculiar detachment from reality. Asort of outraged disbelief that such things could be.

She didn’t go to work. He didn’t know if she’d quit her job and he didn’t ask. He didn’t know if she slept during the day or whether she’d reached some curious state of grace in which she was sustained not by food and sleep but by the fixation that drove her. He would lie up and sleep in a dreamless state of exhaustion and awaken in the same position he’d held when sleep took him. He would have expected nightmares but then he came to suspect he was getting his full quota of them during his waking hours and that no more were allotted. His hands were raw with bleeding blisters from the shovel and his fingers felt permanently cupped to fit its handle.

Each day he swore was the last. Each night they’d be abroad with the tools in the bed of the old truck. It was a wide world with no shortage of graveyards, and he began to think of the earth as ripe and fecund with the dead, stick a spade anywhere and you’d strike a corpse. Nor was it lost upon him that they were wresting secrets from the millennia. Burial is sacred. It is secret. When the lid is sealed, it is for all time. For all time. The earth with its cargo of dead shuttles through the black dusty void while empires rise out of nothingness, others fade into the same. Days clock into night and back again and the seasons cycle their endless repetition while the dead repose with their clasped hands and their dreamless sleep and it is all the same to them.

A cold detachment had seized him. He was wrenching open the forbidden with a crowbar and each atrocity he was uncovering seemed worse than the last. An old man in a shirt and tie and a gray suitcoat and no more. He was buried a eunuch though he’d not been one in life. A woman who had been buried with these missing or other similar genitalsbetween her thighs. As if he’d alter these helpless folk to his liking. Or was yet some mad geneticist burying his mistakes and starting anew.

Some of the caskets had garbage in them. He recorded all these minutiae with a spacey disbelief. Coke bottles, candy wrappers, half an apple, old newspapers, emptied ashtrays. The ultimate garbage disposal. Someone had just swept up the trash and disposed of it forevermore.

There was a body with no coffin at all laid a foot or so beneath the earth in windings of stained bedsheet. An old woman shared her resting place with a young man who’d had his throat straightrazored, and he lay humped athwart her thighs as they lay arm in arm in eternal debauchery.

At first she had refused but now she was looking too. Cataloguing these forbidden exhibits. From a carnival freakshow wended here from the windy reaches of dementia praecox. He hadn’t known there were perversions this dark, souls this twisted.

What do you think? Corrie asked.

I think he’s one sick son of a bitch.

We know that. I mean what else do you think?

I think he’s fixing to be sicker.

She sat studying him. By the yellow light her eyes were depthless and opaque. He had never known what she was thinking.

What do you think we ought to do? she asked.

Do? Put his sorry ass away. Tell the law and let them open the graves themselves. Put him away forever in some crazyhouse. They’d have to.

You think they would?

I know they would. What would you do with him? There’s supposed to be respect for the dead. It’s the way we evolved or something. It’s genetic. This man here…he wouldn’t cull anything. He’d do anything.

He’s rich.

I don’t care how rich he is. Rich is no good here. All these dead people’s folks…we just opened up a few of the graves. There’s still worse covered up. Somebody’s husband or son would kill the sorry son of a bitch. It’s more than the craziness. The sick stuff. It’s contempt, just emptying the trashcan into somebody’s casket before you close it and haul it to the graveyard. It’s beneath contempt. Somebody’ll kill him.

He’ll hire a team of sharp Nashville lawyers, she said. There’ll be some publicity about it. He might even lose his license or whatever you have to have to operate. They’ll send him to talk to some psychiatrist for a while; then they’ll say he’s cured, and he’ll be back at the same old stand. We’ve got to get him ourselves. We’ve got to get more evidence.

He thought she’d taken leave of her senses. More? What more do we need? There’s enough now for a lynch mob and enough left over to tar and feather him. Anyway, what’s all this we mess? It’s not our job. Let the law or somebody dig up a few more graves. There’s your more.

The law. Seems like we never had much luck with the law. Daddy never did.

Bootleggers hardly ever do. It’s an occupational hazard.

Well. You know so much about it. I doubt a bootlegger’s son would, either. Anyway, don’t start on Daddy. He’s dead and gone and you hated him anyway. I never hated him.

You hated him because he beat you. You hated me because he never hit me.

No. That’s the one thing I was grateful for. If he had ever beat you, I’d have had to fight back. Or kill him. The way it was, I could take it and go on. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Like you say, he’s dead and gone.

I never understood how you did that. How you just took it and went on, as you say.

Because it all balanced out. Because I knew something that he didn’t know.

What?

I knew he was going to die and I’d still be alive.

She was silent for a time studying him. She shook her head. You’ve got a hell of a way of looking at things, she finally said. But let’s get back to Fenton Breece. I’ve been thinking about this, and I know how to make him pay where it’ll hurt him the worst. In the pocketbook.

How long have you been thinking about this?

I guess from the minute you saw him hauling that vault back to the funeral home that was supposed to be in Daddy’s grave. From the time I seen the way he done Daddy when he was past doing anything to help himself.

Tyler was wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. This is crazy and you know it, and whatever you’ve got in mind, you can include me out.

This time it’s not that easy for you You can’t be included out of a family. It’s not that easy. Once you’re in one, you’re in it for life. You can’t turn away from blood. Will you help me?

No. Not only no but hell no. This mess is too crazy for me

The first time Fenton Breece saw Corrie Tyler had been in the spring of that year. She was walking past the cafe as he had his nine o’clock coffee. She was wearing a tight black skirt, and he was watching the side-to-side movement of her hips when the man next to him said, I wouldn’t kick that out of bed.

Breece turned on the off-chance the man might be speaking to him, but he wasn’t. He was talking to the man on the other stool. Unless there was more room on the floor, he added.

Who is that, anyway? the man two stools down asked.

Old Moose Tyler’s daughter. Don’t know who she got her looks from, but she damn sure never got em from Moose.

Breece watched her out of sight. He felt the weight of eyes and when he turned the man was watching him with sardonic amusement, as if he had looked not at Breece but into him and read his thoughts. Breece flushed and looked away.

A bootlegger’s daughter, he had thought. White trash who had probably done it with every man in town save him. He remembered a phrase his mother had used long ago in some old cautionary fable. He had forgotten the fable and disregarded the caution but the phrase was with him still: anybody’s dog who wants to go hunting. It seemed applicable here.

But back at his desk he closed his eyes and let her body drift in his mind like the remnant of a dream that will not fade. He had already decided to learn what there was to know about her.

He found she worked in the garment factory, and he used to cruise by sometimes in the afternoons and watch for her coming out of the plant. She drove an old primerspottedpickup truck that seemed held together with baling wire and blind luck. She never came out in the groups of girls that strung across the parking lot laughing and talking. She didn’t seem to have any friends. He was encouraged by this. Half a dozen times he had intended to pick her up. He had his lines meticulously rehearsed but when he saw her the spit would dry up in his mouth and the carefully chosen words roil like leaves in the wind.

The day he finally did speak to her he was in the white Lincoln. It was the first warm day in May and he had the top down. The Lincoln had a beautiful red interior it still held that newcar smell of money and he thought that would get her if all else failed. His cheeks were shiny and freshly shaved and he was redolent of some special pheronomic aftershave he’d mailordered from California that was supposed to be made from the glands of male hogs and possess aphrodisiac properties. He was wearing one of the new seethrough nylon shirts that were just beginning to catch on and he didn’t see how he could fail.

Apparently the truck wouldn’t start for she had the hood aloft and was standing hipslung before it staring into the engine.

He stopped the Lincoln.

Car trouble? he called. Can I help?

She turned and glanced briefly at him. Her face was harried and irritated. I was just about to send for you, she said. I believe this thing is deader than hell.

I’m not mechanically inclined, but I can give you a ride somewhere, he said. He was listening to his own calm voice say these things, and he was thinking: Mechanically inclined. That wasn’t half bad.

If it’s not too much trouble, she said. She turned toward him again.

The voice he could manage, but he couldn’t make his eyes behave. They kept darting about as if they had independent wills of their own. One wanted to go up, the other down. They’d lock onto her sharp breasts, then drop to her crotch, then back up to the breasts, and he thought if he could just grasp his eyes with his hands and point them into her face he’d be all right, but he could not.

It’s a little ways out there, she said. Where I have to go. My brother’s the only one who can keep this thing running.

That’s fine, that’s fine, he told her crotch, and she fell silent watching him. She shook her head and looked away toward town. She didn’t make any move to get into the car.

He reached across and opened the door on the passenger side. Just jump right in here, he told her. It took an enormous effort to raise his eyes to the level where her navel would be could he have seen it.

I guess I’ll just walk, she said. She turned and struck out for the street.

He was cranking the car. Wait a minute, he called in confusion. He didn’t know if he was coming on too hard or too easy. He’d had it and thrown it all away. He slipped the car into gear and followed a little way behind her, riding the brake.

Come on and get in, he called. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.

She just waved him away onehanded and didn’t look back.

We could drive over to Columbia for dinner, he called, and sure enough his eyes dropped to the tight denim between her legs and he could have clawed his eyes from their bloody sockets.

Fuck off, she said.

He just stared. What? What?

You heard me.

No, I didn’t. Say it again.

You sick bastard.

This time she kept on walking and he didn’t follow. He just sat in the white Lincoln watching her form diminish down the street. He kept thinking about how she’d looked. The way her eyes had snapped and the way her fall of straight blonde hair had tossed when she said Fuck off.

Sooner or later, he promised himself. One way or another.

It is told by Squire Robnett at the Bellystretcher Cafe:

I never cared for undertakers in general and Fenton Breece in particular. There was just always something about him. I done some work for him out there when he was buildin that mansion he built, but times was hard and I’d of worked for Hitler if he’d of been hirin.

Whatever it was, he was born with it because I knowed him when he was a boy, and he was just as peculiar then as he is now. Fenton was a rich kid, and that’s when I first begun to suspect rich ain’t all it’s made out to be.

Fenton’s daddy was a undertaker, too, but they had plenty of money besides. That’s one reason why I never understood him takin up undertakin. Why not medicine, or the law? Now I don’t know if you choose your trade or the trade chooses you, but at the very least you’ve got to have an inclination for it. I’ve always believed that Fenton just liked foolin aroundwith dead folks.

He just didn’t fit in. Didn’t or couldn’t. He used to get dead animals off the side of the road and play like he was embalmin em. Cut em up and see what they was made out of. If he couldn’t find none and the mood was on him he took to killin em hisself. Strangle em. There for a while he was hell on the neighborhood cat population.

He’s got that smarmy act down pat, but a act is all it is. You know that hangdog sorrowful look that he can turn on and off. But the truth is he just don’t give a shit. He ain’t got no respect for the dead. I was workin out there at his place buildin a rock wall around what he called his duck pond when one of these fellers works for him drove up in a flatbed truck with a casket strapped to the back. It was some feller that had died off from here, and they hauled him back to be buried with his folks. You would have thought he would take it on into town to the funeral home, but he didn’t. It set right out there in the boilin sun all day. Like a piece of machinery or a load of lumber or somethin while he was prissin around settin out peonies and box elders.

What I’m sayin is that it ain’t that he’s a undertaker. Undertakin’s just a job, like anything else. It’s him. There’s just somethin about him that makes your skin kindly crawl, like turnin over a rotten plank and seein one of them slick brown centipedes. I never wanted him pawin over any kin of mine, and that’s why when my sister passed away we took her to Ackerman’s Field. And that’s why when I kick off, the arrangements is done made for a feller in Memphis to cremate my ass and spread the ashes in them hills back of Allens Creek, back in the Harrikin where I was raised. I sleep a little better ever night knowin he won’t ever lay them soft white hands on me.

Here was wealth beyond measure. Beyond even Tyler’s powers of comprehension. Set on the gently rolling slopes of grass, the house might have been the counting house of some wicked ruler living in exile. Or yet an evil magician with spells cast on the rightful heirs, legions of familiars to do his bidding.

Scarcely five years old, already the house is part of the folklore of the region. There is conjecture as to just how many miles of electrical wire, how many miles of copper tubing. So far does the hot water travel there must be an auxiliary water heater to maintain Breece’s chosen temperature. The glittering bricks came wrapped five to the bundle and woe to the mason who marred one in the laying. The tile came from Italy, the light fixtures from France. The bay windows are roofed with braised copper, and the workmen who installed it spoke no language the local workers could understand. Some kind of Chinese gobbledygook, they said.

There was even an interior decorator imported from Memphis who talked with a slight lisp and whose airy hand gestures were of great interest to local craftsmen. Just to listen to that son of a bitch talk, you’d think the only thing on God’s green earth that mattered was winder curtains, one of them said. He could talk about drapers till you never wanted to hear about drapers again. This decorator’s vision of the house clashed with Breece’s and he left in a snit, pressing upon Breece in parting a slip of paper whereon was written the name of the builder of a Beale Street whorehouse. The house had started out vaguely Georgian but ended up with a decided bent for the grotesquely opulent. Gables and peaked roofs and turrets had been added seemingly by Breece’s whim or a coin toss so that the house came to resemble the temple of some old king overthrown solely because of his sorry taste.

Tyler had been watching the house all day, and so far nothing at all had happened save the movement of light and shadow and he was about ready to give it up when Breece came out of the house and got into a silvergray Cadillac hearse and drove away toward town. Tyler sat for a time waiting to see if there was to be further movement but he didn’t expect any and he was proven right. He came out of the spinney of sassafras he’d been concealed in and wended his way down the slope to the house.

For a time he just wandered around the outside of the house staring upward. He felt a deeprooted contempt for Breece but at the same time he couldn’t help being impressed by the sheer size of the house. Breece had simply outdone himself here, and Tyler wondered at the number of unoccupied rooms and the number of caskets sold and crying kids and widow women it had taken to accomplish this.

He didn’t know what he was looking for. Or where to look. Something he could hold in his hand, something incriminating. The gun still warm and smoking, the dagger with a drop the color of claret forming at its tip.

In a land where folks seldom even locked their doors Breece was an anomaly: there was no way in save stoning out a window, and his desire for evidence fell short of that. He tried every door, but they were all locked, and there was no key hidden about that he could find. He looked under matsthat lied welcome, in flower urns, and ultimately decided that the only keys existing rode in Breece’s pocket.

He came on around the house, wandering through curious oriental-looking hedges he didn’t have a name for and strange dwarf twisted trees and to a covered carport laid in flagstone where sat a Lincoln convertible with the top up. The car gleamed and the flagstones were still damp and he guessed Breece had been washing it, he hadn’t been able to see this side of the house from the slope.

The hearse made so little noise it was almost too late when he saw it. He couldn’t believe it was already back. Breece must have only gone to the mailbox. Sunlight off its lustrous surface caught his eye and it was already wending its way up the curving drive past marble fountains and the stone eyes of arcane statuary and he looked about wildly for somewhere to flee to: the woods were too far away and the way to them open territory.

At the end of the stone floor opposite the house was a garage or shop but he had no doubt it was locked and no time to try for it anyway and he had barely made the cover of the far side of it when he heard the Cadillac’s tires hissing smoothly on the concrete drive. He sat crouched against the glittering brick wall fearing he’d left some spoor, triggered some crafty snare that would show evidence of trespass.

He heard the no-nonsense click of the hearse’s door closing, footsteps crossing the flagstones. He grew bolder and chanced a look.

Breece was standing behind the Lincoln, a tan leather briefcase by his side. He had a set of keys in his hand, unlocking the trunk lid. He raised it and set the briefcase carefully inside and slammed the lid. He stood for a moment as if abstractedby some new notion, then strode purposefully to the back door of the house and withdrew yet another set of keys and unlocked the door of the house and went inside and pulled the door to after him.

Tyler didn’t plan his next move or even think about it. There was just something in the careful way Breece had stowed away the briefcase. If Tyler had thought about it, he wouldn’t have done it, but the keys were still in the trunk of the Lincoln and in an instant he had darted across the carport and wrenched up the trunk lid and seized the briefcase. He was already fleeing with it when the door of the house opened and the undertaker came down the steps.

Tyler was running full tilt up the grassy slope toward the line of trees with the briefcase swinging choppily along and his shirt blown out cartoonlike behind him like some halfcrazed and ill-dressed commuter chasing a fleeing train. He was holding his breath and expecting the crack of a gun and buckshot snarling about him like angry hornets but all that came was a hoarse cry like the cry of some wounded animal hopelessly snared, a strangled ululating shriek of outrage or despair.

Once he reached the cover of trees he kept on going, crashing through brush with saplings whipping past him and his breath coming ragged, and when he thought how ludicrous the picture of portly Fenton Breece leaping brush and fallen trees was he stopped and sat on a stump to catch his breath.

He listened intently but all was silence save the hammering of his heart against his ribcage. He sat for a time staring at the briefcase. He had to see what manner of beast he had here. There was a businesslike lock on the strap buthe didn’t even try forcing it. He just took out his pocketknife and cut the strap and looked inside.

Papers. He leafed hurriedly through them, glancing occasionally at the woods. Invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Copies of orders placed with various firms for chemicals, caskets, clothing. Curious the trades men follow. Beneath the sheaf of papers lay a flat zippered pouch of the sort businesses use to carry deposits to the bank. His heart sank. A sack of goddamn money, he thought. I take a chance on getting shot and get chased through the woods by a fat undertaker and all I’ve done is prove I’m a thief.

He unzipped it with trepidation.

The first thing he saw was a pair of lavender silk panties. They were discolored up one side and hip with a faded rustbrown stain that had long soaked into the very texture of the fabric and appeared very old. He didn’t even want to know what it was or how it came to be there. He laid them aside and stared at them in a kind of appalled wonder.

Here was more. A rubberbanded stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. He slipped off the rubber band to rifle hastily through them.

He dropped them suddenly as if they’d seared his hand. Or he’d been handling one of those clever medieval boxes with their springloaded needles cunningly hidden and tipped with curare. He felt infected, poison freezing his nerve and brain.

The photographs had scattered, some face up. He stared at them in fascinated revulsion. They were all of nude women. Some young, some old. Some pretty, some not. They were arranged in grotesque configurations they’d probably not aspired to in life and they were all unmistakably dead. Legsspread flagrantly, some grouped in mimicry of various acts of sexual congress. Their faces painted in carmine smiles. Their weary eyes, their sagging flesh. He’d used some sort of timer with the camera for here was Breece himself, nude and gross and grinning, capering gleefully among the painted dead.

He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell.

She took the underwear up delicately by its unstained hem. Laid it aside.

Where do you suppose he got them?

He shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. Why might be a better question.

Well, you certainly outdid yourself. I suppose you know what this means. We’ve got the son of a bitch. We’ve got him in a way nobody’s had him before, and it’s going to cost him.

I’ll tell you what, Corrie. You’ve got him. Not me. I want nothing whatever to do with him. I don’t want to talk to him, to see him, to ever hear his voice. I don’t even want to know he’s in this world. I’ve seen some sorry things, but Jesus.

I do. I want to watch his face when I tell him.

He didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. She was studying the pictures clinically, one at a time, laying them aside. Watching her face by the lamplight, he thought she looked somehow fevered, her rapt eyes fired by something akin to religious frenzy. Sister of some secret sect, perusing its dark devotional. Prayers offered to a horned deitysquatting just beyond the rim of firelight. Watching her so he was touched with pity. She’d come up hard. A childhood that passed with an eye’s blinking. Stepping over sleeping drunks on the way to school. With girlhood came the whistles and catcalls on the schoolyard. Hey, Corrie, how about a piece of that? You’ve done it with everybody else, how about me? He’d fought over her and he remembered the coppery bright taste of blood in his mouth. She tried to be like everybody else. To be one of the freshfaced town girls with their air of entitled confidence. She wore the same kind of clothes the other girls wore but somehow without the right flair, and ultimately all her efforts underlined the fact that she was just another piece of the puzzle that did not quite fit.

Why are you looking at me like that?

I was thinking I’ve known you all my life, and yet I don’t know you at all.

There’s nothing to know. I get up, I work, I do the housework. I cook, I go to bed. Then tomorrow I get up and do the same thing over again.

He didn’t answer.

I don’t know you. I don’t know where you go when you’re wandering around. What you think. No one’s ever known what you think. You get what you think out of a book. It’s like you hardly ever talk and when you do it’s in some foreign language. Some language nobody even speaks. But one thing you can know about me is that I’m going to shove the knife in Fenton Breece and twist it. That’s the main thing about me right now.

I wish you’d forget about Fenton Breece. He’s like that card on the wall, the invisible listener at every conversation, the guest at every meal. You may develop a taste for him. He’s going to put us on Easy Street.

This is absolutely crazy as shit. There is just no way he’s going to smile and start counting hundred-dollar bills into your hand. Just no way.

Hellfire, Kenneth, what can he do? Run to the law? There’s nothing he can do but pay up. Try to put yourself in his shoes.

I don’t want in his shoes, Tyler said. And if I was I’d cut my throat.

During the last few years of his life Tyler’s father would reach a certain stage of drunkenness during which he used to sit and watch Tyler with a peculiar speculation, as if he’d see what manner of beast this was he’d sired. Tyler walked a narrow line those years, it didn’t take much to set the old man off.

When Tyler was twelve or thirteen he took to sleeping in the attic. It was quieter up there, and quiet was at a premium, for the house was ofttimes full of drunks by turns convivial and quarrelsome. There were two doors between the attic and the ground floor and on one of these Tyler had installed a lock he’d come by. He liked the slope of the dark oaken rafters over his iron bed, and there was a window you could open to the weathers in the spring and summer. This window faced the back of the house and looked out upon a stony field sloping toward the cedared horizon. There was a hiding place in the boxing over the door for books he chanced upon. The old man possessed an enormous contempt for the writtenword and those who would decipher it.

That year the old man fell to beating him when the notion struck him, and it struck him more often as time drew on. Young Tyler grew wary and careful and watchful as a cat. All his movements seemed provisional and subject to change at a moment’s notice, he seemed always poised for flight.

A schoolteacher who’d befriended him came once to visit. She sat for a time under the malevolent gaze of the old man, glancing about with nervous skittery eyes. She never came back. You better quit hangin around them goddamn schoolteachers, he said, wiping a hand across his mouth. Grayyellow stubble flecked with ambeer and spittle. Washedout blue eyes veined with meanness. You won’t amount to a goddamned thing.

It was a summer of storms that year. Lightning walked the ridges all that July and August and conjured out of the night in strobic configuration stormbent trees writhing in the windy rain. Images of heightened reality rendered instantly out of the flickering night then snatched so instantly back into the absolute darkness they seemed never to have existed at all.

After the old man beat him he’d flee into these windtossed nights. Something in all this chaos seemed to find its counterpart in his own chaotic heart and he’d turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him, to char his heart and boil the blood hammering in his veins and seize and short the circuits in his head but this was not to be. Once he followed a light through sheets of windy rain, and in the riverbottom a lightningstruck pine burned like a solitary candle flaring down the night. Set there like a sign to read could he but decipher it. Then he quit crying altogether and took the beatings he couldn’t escapewith a kind of stoic and sullen outrage.

In his fourteenth year he heard the old man’s step on the stair and snapped the thumbbolt. The steps ceased and there was no sound anywhere save the whippoorwills measuring out the dark. He was holding his breath and waiting for the steps to start their descent when the old man’s shoulder abruptly slammed against the door.

He was sitting on the cot with his back against the wall and his arms laced around his knees. He figured the lock to hold. The lock did, but on the third stroke of the old man’s shoulder the top hinge gave and the very door itself toppled into the room with the old man athwart it like some demented carpetrider and Tyler was out the window and gone. He went hand over hand down a trellis crept with ivy with the ivy tearing away in handfuls and the trellis itself tilting away from the wall like a toppling ladder, and he jumped the last few feet and was up and gone into the cedars.

The wind that night was out of the south and warm and balmy and there was a smell of freshly turned loam on it. From the sanctity of farther woods whippoorwills were calling each to each and he walked on toward them.

This time he just kept on walking, as if the boundaries of his world had suddenly dissolved and the landscape before him become limitless. He crossed thin dark woods with light falling in broken shards about him and owls calling inquiringly and when the woods ended fallow fields began so white in the starlight they appeared ghostfields. He went on in a straight line, steering by the stars. Through a cornfield so dry with ancient autumns he moved steadily in a conspiratorial whispering of cornblades and finally out of anything at all attended by men and he guessed he was in the edge of the HarrikinHe came to a creek or river and waded into it. When his feet lost the bottom he drifted downstream awhile then dogpaddled to the far side. He climbed a bank strung with honeysuckle slick black in the moonlight and through such a heady reek of their blossoms he seemed drunk on them and he staggered on.

Daylight found him where he’d never been. He went down a bloodred ravine cut out of clay by old floodwaters and came out in a field with the tilted ghosts of old cornstalks leached thin and fragile as ancient parchment. The sun came smoking up out of the mist and hung above the black treeline and it was almost instantly hot. After a while his clothes began to steam. Below him an abandoned farmhouse and fallen barn and fences gone to kudzu and wild roses. There was no sign of life in all that he surveyed, then he looked upward and a hawk wheeled against a flawless void and it glittered in the sun like some sinister contrivance of flesh and chrome.

He wandered aimlessly about the farm, his mind reconstructing old lives. Old long-silent voices told him tales. Beseeched him to remember them and carry them back to the world they’d lost. Folks were born here, grew old here. Died here, for he found tilting tablets of stone and sunken oblong declivities in the earth beneath the sawbriars and orange bells of cowitch. Old rooms papered with newsprint and flour paste, and he’d wander the house reading this surreal mural of old news as if it had something to tell him.

He felt remote, utterly alone. With the cool earth against his back he awoke sometime in his second night and he could feel the earth wheeling on its mitred course through eternity. Here the sky was clear and so strewn with stars there seemed no darkness between them but simply a vast phantasmagoria of light. Weak with hunger he watched loom out of the night strange gaudy constellations like great wheels rolling toward him and turning endless in the void as if here in the Harrikin even the heavens were ancient and strange. They seemed to alter night to night as if the universe itself was still in flux. Once a shower of falling stars that seemed to have fallen prey to some celestial epidemic but instead of them showering around him he felt the pull of the earth fall away from his back and he became weightless, rising toward their streaking light like ofttold tales of souls raptured upward.

On the third day he came upon an apple orchard reverting to wildness. Most of the trees were dead, black twisted trees like the skeletons of profoundly deformed beasts. Yet one was thick with fistsize summer apples. The earth beneath strewn with them and the drone of bees and the musk of apples everywhere. They were sweetly tart and full of winy juice and he wanted nothing better. He seemed to have reached some curious point where he wanted nothing at all save the fall of night and the configurations of the stars to study as if he’d decipher some message there. Some sign.

On the third or fourth night in a dream or vision an old man came to him who would lead him out of this blighted waste. He’d been sent, he said, he couldn’t say by whom. The old man’s flesh had wasted away on his bones and beneath the faded chambray shirt he wore his arms were thin and fragile as sticks. In times past he’d been shackled in irons, hands and feet. He wore them yet but the chains had been sawn away, they were just heavy bracelets at the ankles and wrists with the sawn links appended like fey adornments.

Tyler had a fire going he kept feeding sticks and balls of grass. He on one side of the fire and the old man at the otherlike ancients at council. Somewhere in the night foxhounds bayed then passed in a hollow below them and the wind brought voices or ghostvoices of men. He shook his head and told the old man he guessed he’d find his own way out. He couldn’t be beholden to another. In order to survive in this world and then make a life in it he had to do this on his own. At last he lay back and slept with his head pillowed on an arm. He awoke once in the night and raised up and looked through the smoke of the dying fire and he was alone.

The next day his sister and a schoolteacher named Phelan and a hunter they’d hired as guide named Tippydo found him and took him home. It didn’t seem to matter. All things and all places had come to seem transitory at best and he seemed to have arrived at some idea of where he fit or did not fit into the scheme of things.

The old man was contrite. He grasped Tippydo’s hand and pressed into it a twenty-dollar bill. Twin tears crept down his pouched cheeks, etching paths of cleanness out of the grime. He’d never do it again. Wouldn’t have done it then but for bad whiskey. There seemed little whiskey that was good that year for soon he was at it again. He seemed in a constant state of anger which Tyler seemed to bring into focus.

By the time he died Tyler could have whipped him instead, but he never did it. He never hit him, never cursed him, just did his best to stay out of his way. Honoring some biblical restraint of parental honor.

Already he was groping for a way to live, to accommodate himself to the world or it to him. He felt that if he fell upon his father with murder in his heart that he had proven irrevocably that he and the old man had the selfsame cankered blood in both their hearts and if this was so all was lost. The day the old man died he was standing on the stairs to the attic. He’d stopped a minute to rest and catch his breath, and then he’d come on and batter at the door. Tyler imagined the door charring beneath his ceaseless tirade of invective. Against Tyler, against the uncaring God who’d let such twisted fruit of his loins thrive.

The way Tyler always imagined it God had been sitting before the fireplace with his feet propped up on the hearth. Or maybe just on midair-God could do that. He was reading an old hymnbook or maybe a seed catalog. Listening with one ear and trying to concentrate on his reading. Finally after years and years of this just getting totally fed up and throwing his book against the wall of Heaven and turning and fixing the old man with his fierce eye. God’s eyes flickered with electric blue light and the old man’s heart exploded in a torrent of black blood and corruption and he just dropped like a stone, dead before his body touched the stairs, and God went back to his seed catalog.

For the first week after the briefcase disappeared from the trunk of his Lincoln, Fenton Breece lived on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Dark visions haunted him waking and sleeping. The faceless burglar in an alley or a stone culvert hurriedly slashing open the briefcase and dumping out its spare contents, expecting money or who knew what but certainly not expecting the neat stack of photographs. Riffling through them an act of sacrilege. A greasy thumbprint perhaps on the pale bloom of a breast. A thin fingernail of ice traced the nape of Breece’s neck and down hispine.

I’ve just got to do something, he thought in his brisk businesslike manner. But there wasn’t anything to do.

Then in a few days a measure of reason returned. No one had called him. Nothing sinister in the mail, the sky had not fallen. At length he began to see the faceless thief glancing at the rubberbanded photographs in disgust and tossing them away in a ditch. Mud, debris, shards of broken glass, and clotted leaves hid them modestly from prying eyes. Yellow water opaque with mud sent them turning dreamily, pale washedout ghosts of themselves, toward the muddy sanctity of the Tennessee River.

The woman behind the desk had an officious manner and carefully coiffed bluelooking hair. She seemed to have appraised the girl by some abstract standard she kept in her head and found her wanting.

Mr. Breece is not in right now, she said.

I reckon I’ll just wait then, the girl said.

It may be a good while, the woman said.

Then I reckon I’ve got a good while to wait, the girl said. She crossed the narrow office and seated herself in a contoured yellow chair. She took up a magazine and sat staring at it though she could have told you no word that it said. She could hear the woman shuffling papers importantly about. After a while the woman cleared her throat.

What was it about?

It was about me seeing Fenton Breece, she said. She went back to her magazine.

He may not be in for a while. Perhaps I could help you. You couldn’t unless you’re Fenton Breece, and I don’t believe you are.

After a while the outer door opened and Breece himself came in. He was wet and coldlooking and beyond him rain fell slantwise in the wind. She hadn’t known it had begun to rain. Breece folded his umbrella and stood it in the wastebasket to drain. Messy out, he said brightly. A pale hand to the smooth bird’s wing of his hair.

A lady to see you, the woman said grudgingly.

Breece turned, and for an instant recognition and something other flickered in his eyes. Then nothing. He glanced back at the woman behind the desk. He looked at his watch.

You can go any time, Mrs. Cothron, he said. My office is back here, he told the girl. He pointed down a narrow hall. She got up and followed him.

She sat primly on the edge of an armchair. Worn purse clutched bothhanded in her lap. Her eyes on Breece’s face were fierce and intent and unwavering, and they made him nervous.

You buried my father, she began.

He nodded unctuously. He couldn’t wonder what this was about. He remembered the girl, and he remembered the old man, but he couldn’t fathom what she wanted unless someone else was dead. He kept glancing at the purse, and he couldn’t remember if it had all been paid or not. Maybe she owed him money.

Mann Tyler, she said. He had an insurance. We paid for an eight-hundred-dollar steel vault to go over his casket, and it’s not there anymore.

The room was very quiet. She could hear rain at the window. Breece got up and crossed the room. He peereddown the hall and closed the door. He went back and sat down. His hands placed together atop the desk formed an arch. He was watching her and she could see sick fear rise up in his eyes.

Just not there, she went on. And that’s not all. He’s buried without all the clothes we bought for him, and he’s been…mutilated.

She just watched him. A tic pulsed at the corner of one bulging eye like something monstrous stirring beneath a thin veneer of flesh.

Absurd on the face of it. I’m a reputable businessman; no one has ever questioned my professional ethics. My work is exemplary, a matter of pride to me, and you are treading on dangerous legal ground if you intend to accuse me of misconduct.

Misconduct, she said. Her mouth twisted with the taste of the word. She had leant forward, elbows on knees. She smiled slightly. From the street the faint sound of a car door closing, an engine starting up. The bluehaired lady drove away. Breece was staring past the girl’s shoulder through the window to the street.

Dangerous ground indeed, he murmured. A matter to be taken up with my counsel. But for the sake of discussion, just speaking hypothetically, suppose that such things were true. How would you come to know of it?

We dug him up, she said.

You what?

We dug him up. We had reason to suspect something was wrong about his burial, and we were proved right. Then just to be sure we dug up several more. I forget how many. I don’t even want to think about the things we found. No one wouldexpect to find the things we did, not in a thousand years.

Graverobbers. Vandals digging up graves and committing atrocities. Desecrating the corpses. I’ve often heard of such things but I never expected to find it in the town I live in.

I’ve heard of them myself. But none where these vandals took pictures of you and a bunch of naked dead women and then hid them in the trunk of your car. Why do you reckon they did that?

His eyes darted away. They were a hard glassy blue, slick as wet marbles. The open-shut eyes of a doll. The hands were pale, fleshy spiders, the fingers meshing endlessly. One hand trembled violently, and he stayed it with the other. She thought he might weep.

My car was vandalized. So it was you that did that.

I bet you ran straight to the law, too. I bet there’s an all-points bulletin out about those pictures.

What do you want?

You’re finished. You don’t begin to suspect how finished you are. When all these people hear about what you’ve done to their folks, they’re just going to mob you. They’d hang you, but you won’t last that long. They’ll tear you apart like a pack of dogs.

What do you want?

I want the things you done to my daddy made right. I want him buried with the decency you expect your folks to be put away with. I want that waterproof vault we paid for around his casket.

Breece was nodding. Head bobbing metronomically. Of course, he said. If you aren’t satisfied, I’ll do anything I can to satisfy you.

I’m a hell of a way from satisfied. Of course, I’ll refund your money. No question about that. I could even give you a liberal sum for what they call, ah, punitive damages.

And what would you expect in return for that?

He was silent for a long moment. The pictures, of course, he finally said. I’d have to have them back. They’re subject to misunderstanding, a delicate subject, part of an experiment you wouldn’t understand.

I expect you’re right about that. I was wondering about the panties. Are they part of the experiment, too?

He flushed a deep crimson. I’d want your agreement to remain silent. I’d have to have that in writing; I trust you have been circumspect so far. Again, I’m trying to avoid misunderstanding. I have a position in the community, a reputation to maintain.

I want fifteen thousand dollars. That’s nothing to you, pocket change. I could ask for a lot more, and you’d have to pay it, but I’m not going to be greedy. All I want is the money you cheated us out of and a fair amount for the grief you’ve caused us.

Whatever you call it, it’s extortion. Blackmail. Both of them are against the law.

She shrugged. All right. We both go before the grand jury and tell our stories. We’ll see how it all comes out when they dig up a grave or two.

I don’t keep that kind of cash around. I’d have to make a withdrawal.

Then make it. You’re getting a bargain and you know it.

I can have it for you in a day or two. I may have to convert some bonds into cash.

Then you’d best be converting. You don’t get the picturesor the panties, until I’ve got the money in my hand. We’ll be waiting on you.

She rose. She was halfway to the door when he made some curious strangled noise. She turned. He was watching her. He shrugged helplessly. You must think me terrible, he said.

She didn’t have an answer for that. She went out and pulled the door to behind her. She went down the hall and through the office and so into the street. She stood for a moment letting the rain wash over her. A cold wind smelling of trees, the wet streets, woodsmoke. She looked up and let the rain course down her cheeks. The rain felt cold. Clean.

He sat unmoving while the day drew on, and still he sat with dusk gathering at the windows, and ultimate dark fell unnoticed with the rain fading to just a persistent murmur at the glass, and he didn’t turn on a light. The dark suited him very well and soothed the seething turmoil of his mind.

What to do. Options presented themselves only to be discarded and alternates sought. Nothing seemed feasible. The dread thought of the retribution she’d spoken of left him weak and clammy with cold sweat. He closed his eyes. Tried to clear his mind, to force order onto the chaos of his thoughts. He imagined his mind a slate, an eraser moving methodically across it. Then what had been at the bottom of his mind all along surfaced, like a rotten log in a swamp brought up by its own putrescent gases. A headline from last summer’s newspaper: local man indicted for murder. A measure of peace returned to him. A feeling of self-confidence, of being in good hands.

Granville Sutter, he thought.

Early in June of that year Lorene Conkle came out of the drugstore and Sutter was there the way she had known he would be. He was leant against a brick wall with a toothpick cocked up out of the corner of his mouth. When she walked past him, he unleant himself, elaborately casual, and followed her as if he’d been going that way all along and was just waiting for the notion to strike him.

The drygoods store then. She’d look up from whatever garment she was fingering and glance covertly through the glass and there he’d be, this time leant against the column that supported the striped awning. A tall, gangling man with the false appearance of sleepy indolence. Warped and twisted by the bad glass as if this glass had the property of character analysis and showed the world what you were like inside your skin. He caught her looking and just looked levelly back, and she dropped her eyes.

Was it something I could help you with? the clerk asked. He had approached silently behind her and startled her. A prissy little man with an oldmaidish air about him.

She seemed to make up her mind about something. She laid the gown carefully atop the pile. I reckon not right now, she said. I may be back later.

Sutter wasn’t watching her now. When she stopped in front of him he was looking off toward the railroad track where the train was uncoupling boxcars. He seemed finally to notice her and turned toward her. High cheekbones with the leathery brown skin pulled taut over them. A blade of a nose broken once and healed slightly askew so that the face looked different from side angles, a face with two different profiles. The eyes were brown and flecked in their depths with gold so they looked almost amber.

I want you to stop watchin me.

Then don’t stand in front of me. Folks don’t always get what they want. It’s people in Hell cryin pitiful for Eskimo Pies, but they ain’t handin none out. It’s a free country and I can watch who I want to.

You been followin me, too. And this is not the first time you done it. I seen you parked across the street from my house a few days ago.

I was just visitin a feller lives down there. Besides, you don’t even know I’m followin you. You in a drygoods store. That’s a public place. I might have had in mind to buy me a set of drawers or a pair of socks or somethin.

I want you to let me be. And my husband Clyde, too. I hadn’t said anything to Clyde, and I don’t want to go to the law. It’s been too much about trials and lawyers already. I don’t want no part of it. If I ever mention it to Clyde, he’d have to talk to you, and you don’t want Clyde ahold of you.

You know who I am, don’t you?

Yes.

Why don’t you just mention it to Clyde? He might not even want ahold of me.

You just let it be. Clyde couldn’t help bein on that jury, and he couldn’t help votin what he knew was right. What does it matter anyway? You got out of it, didn’t you?

It took a year out of my life. Two trials. I’d of been acquitted the first time if your old man hadn’t been bound and determined to send me to Brushy Mountain. Eleven votin not guilty and he had to hang the jury.

Yeah. Eleven people afraid you’d burn them out like youdid old Mrs. Todd. Clyde wasn’t afraid of you.

You think I burnt that old woman’s house?

I know good and well you did. And so does everbody else. What you can’t buy off you scare to death with threats.

You come down mighty hard on me, Sutter said. You believe too much of what you hear. I’m just like everbody else. I had a old daddy and a old mama, and I come up hard the way everbody else did around here. You think you’re better’n me, don’t you?

He had leant his face to hers, and she backed away. Her expression was a mixture of anger and contempt.

Cause your old man works in a drugstore, he went on. Wears a little white apron and mixes up pills and nerve tonic and shit all day behind a counter. Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am. I reckon you think your shit don’t stink.

You watch your nasty mouth with me or I will go to the law. I swear I will. Such law as there is in this town. And yes, I do think I’m better than you. Not because of my husband but because I mind my own business. I don’t burn people’s houses in the middle of the night or steal from them or poison their livestock.

Aww, you just got me all wrong. You was to get to know me better you wouldn’t be so down on me. Hell, catch me right and I’m a likeable sort of feller. You right nice lookin. A little long in the tooth maybe, but you’re holdin up all right. Me and you just might get together sometime.

She just stared at him utterly aghast, as if such a bizarre circumstance was beyond her powers of comprehension.

Sutter was fumbling in the bib pocket of his overalls. He withdrew a worn leather wallet secured by a clasp chain. He opened it and for a surreal moment she thought he was tryingto give her money, for what she couldn’t say.

Here, he was saying. I keep tryin to tell you I’m like everbody else. I was a innocent babe the same as you. Now this here’s my first-grade picture.

He was pressing upon her a photograph, and in a moment of confusion she took it from his hand and stared at it.

A fairhaired child of five or so stood facing the camera. Perhaps it was even Sutter. His arms were upraised, and each hand was clasped by a disembodied adult hand, one large and one more diminutive. The woods he stood in were sundrenched, and the child was squinting into the sun or the eye of the camera. He was naked and superimposed over his genitals was an enormous drooping penis that reached nigh to his ankles. A great bull’s scrotum. His stomach was covered with a thicket of dark pubic hair.

She dropped the picture as though it had seared her hand and whirled away, her face gone pale with embarrassment and anger. She walked blindly away.

Course it’s growed a inch or two since then, he called after her. Sutter was retrieving the picture where it had fluttered to the sidewalk. Can’t lose this, he mused to himself. My old mama toted this in her pocketbook till the day she died.

So long, widow Conkle, he called to her departing back.

She didn’t even halt. I’m not a widow, she said.

Not yet, Sutter said.

That stopped her. She turned and raised a hand to shade her eyes and just stared at him.

Granville Sutter lived in a tiny house he’d built himself. Twominiature rooms, a kitchen and the front room he slept in. Most nights. Other nights he slept wherever he might be when night fell on him. The house was painted white with green shutters and trim, and it looked like a little fairytale cottage or a house in a fabled wood where a gnome might live. It had a neat cobblestone walk curving toward the blacktop and a great walnut tree on the south side in whose shade he could be found on warm days taking his leisure, sitting on one Coke crate with his feet propped on another and his back leant against the trunk, watching the infrequent traffic with heavylidded eyes, the cars dropping off the grade toward the river and the Lick Creek community and ultimately the edge of the Harrikin. Sometimes a wagon creaking along behind plodding horses until the man would snap the lines and say, Come up there, and the horses would step out smartly, their shoes ringing on the macadam until they passed the house. If there were children, they would turn and stare back at this figure of nightmare dread who’d been used to scare them into behaving, but the adults would generally keep their eyes straight ahead as if something of enormous interest were about to appear around a curve in the road. Figuring perhaps it was best not to attract his attention, wary mouse easing past a drowsing cat. If you don’t look, he’s not real.

This particular gnome had estimated the time of Conkle’s arrival to within fifteen minutes. He thought: She told him at work, but he ain’t about to leave work. He’ll work on till five so as not to piss off old man Wipp or jeopardize his cushy job, and then he’ll jump in the car and head out here.

Sutter was sitting on a Coke crate with a rifle across his lap, and he had a polishing rag in his hand, and when a car passed he’d take a swipe or two at the stock, but it didn’t need it.

Conkle was driving that year a dark green ’47 Studebaker, the model that looked almost the same front or back, and when the car hove into view Sutter smiled a tight little smile to himself; it had looked for a moment as if Conkle were coming at him sixty miles an hour in reverse.

The Studebaker was still fairly rocking on its springs when Conkle leapt out and slammed the door and came striding around the car. Conkle had been in a bad fire once and his face was scarred slick and plasticlooking over his cheek and forehead and these scars were white as dead flesh against his livid face. You son of a bitch, he was saying. You’ve finally done it this time. He was already coming up the walk, he still had his druggist’s apron on and he looked slightly ridiculous.

There was a robin singing somewhere in the top branches of the walnut. Sutter was listening to it instead of Conkle when he drew the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.

Conkle saw the rifle and Sutter’s intent simultaneously and he threw up his hands as if to bat away lead with bare flesh.

Sutter shot him in the left temple and the right side of his head exploded in a pink mist of blood and bonemeal and he was flung backward and fell limp and ragged as if he’d been stuffed with sawdust. The robin hushed. It had grown very still. The echo of the rifleshot came waving back across the river bottom.

Sutter approached and with the rifle at a loose present arms bent over and stared into Conkle’s face. The eyes were open, and Sutter leant further to study these eyes as if he might see the soul fleeing out them in ectoplasmic spiral or death rise up in them like a face at a window but he didn’t seeanything at all.

He went into the house and put the rifle away. He came back out with a tow sack. He grasped Conkle’s hair and raised the head and onehanded spread the sack beneath it and released the head and it hit the cobblestones with a soft plop. The scar on Conkle’s forehead angled up into the hairline, and the hair that grew there was fine and thin.

Sutter grasped him by one leg and pulled but the other leg splayed out and kept hanging, and, breathing hard and cursing Sutter leant and took up the other foot. Conkle’s ankles were thin and he wore winecolored socks with clocks on them, they didn’t say what time, Sutter guessed they’d run down. He had to keep replacing the sack under Conkle’s head.

To get him into the front room he had to prop the screendoor wide and drag him through. He left him by the door. Conkle was studying the ceiling with a look of bemused whimsy.

He went back out with a bucket of water and a broom and dumped the water on the bloody stones and scoured hard with the bristles of the broom and threw rinsewater. He repeated it a time or two until he was satisfied.

He went back in and sat across the room on an old carseat that served him as davenport and studied the body critically as if it were some new piece of furniture he’d come by and wasn’t sure where to place. After a while he got up and took the heavy iron firepoker from behind the wood heater and laid it in Conkle’s right hand. He studied the effect. He smiled onecornered to himself and leant and moved the firepoker right hand to left.

There was a long zigzag crack in the plastered courthouse ceiling, and Sutter spent a lot of time staring at it as if somehow he were above these dull proceedings. The hard back of the oak chair against the base of his skull. Smoking wasn’t permitted, and he worried a small slice of tobacco in his jaw and swallowed the juice while the prosecution went on around him. All this ceremony. All these legalities. He paid it little mind.

The crack in the ceiling became a canyon grown with hemlock and cedar, and he was scrambling down its stony sides toward an ultimate abyss. He came out on a rocky outcropping and lay flat on his stomach on the warm stone and looked down and past the tops of trees so far away they looked like mockups of trees. A river crept like a winding silver thread drawn amongst the rocks.

Then the crack was Flint Creek, where he’d grown up long ago, and he was wandering down it in the warm June sun of youth with a rolled fishline in his pocket just looking for the right cane to cut. A world incredibly green and saturated with sun and scented with the riotous spring growth.

Sutter’s lawyer was named Wiggins. He wasn’t very good, but he was cheap, and Sutter didn’t figure he needed one anyway and had hired him simply as a matter of form. Wiggins wore plaid sportcoats of an almost audible hue, neckties with pictures of mallards flying south on them, and he had the soft indefinable manner of a professional drunk. He always seemed slightly harried, as if he’d like to get all this over with and retire somewhere behind closed doors with a bottle.

Early in the defense he spoke eloquently of the sanctity ofthe home. Of man’s God-given right to defend it. Then he put Sutter on the stand.

Sutter told his tale in a dry, emotionless voice and sat calmly awaiting cross-examination. Without saying so directly he had managed to leave the impression that the whole thing had started as an altercation over Conkle’s wife.

The state prosecutor that year was a young man named Schieweiler. He was extracted from the Swiss who’d settled Ackerman’s Field. He had intense, slightly protuberant eyes and no political debts to pay, and he adhered to a straight and narrow path. He had a great deal of difficulty understanding the fear folks in Centre had for Sutter. He was an earnest young man appalled by the story Sutter had told after laying his hand on the Holy Bible. He sensed a miscarriage of justice in the making here, and he was determined to head it off.

Mr. Sutter, in your long and varied life have you ever previously had occasion to shoot someone who was attacking you with a firepoker?

Sutter seemed to study awhile. I reckon not, he said. I don’t recall it. But if I did, I ain’t on trial for it here.

No. But bear with me. If you had, I think you would see a pattern begin to emerge. A man shot in the head with a high-caliber rifle would be flung backward. Perhaps he would lie on his back with his arms flung wide, the palms of his hands upwards, the way Mr. Conkle was found. What is really remarkable is that the poker, with an unerring homing instinct, would defy the laws of gravity and physics and follow the man across the room and come to rest in his palm. Do you have any explanation for this?

No, I don’t. I never went very far in school. I can’t explain the world to you. Things happen one way, they happenanother. I reckon he was hangin onto the poker and then he opened his hand up.

Mr. Conkle was righthanded, yet the poker came to rest on his left palm. How do you explain this lapse of your judgment?

Objection.

Sustained.

I’ll rephrase it. Do you know of any reason why a righthanded man would attack you with a weapon in his left hand?

Sutter cleared his throat. He grinned at the jury. Maybe he was just spottin me a few points, he said.

The judge leaned from his oaken bench. Answer the question put to you, Mr. Sutter. And one more example of facetiousness and you will be in contempt of this court.

I didn’t know whathanded he was. All I seen was a firepoker comin at me. I never thought it would come any easier lefthanded than any other. It was a goodsize poker and wouldn’t feel too good whatever hand you got hit with.

It’s common knowledge there was bad blood between the two of you. Mr. Conkle had the misfortune to stand by his convictions, a character trait that probably amuses you. What is it with you, Mr. Sutter? Do you think you can kill the whole world? Slaughter a long line of jurors who vote their consciences? Can you silence them all? Do you have access to that many firepokers? You’d have to hire assistants in your war against order. You’re a busy man, Mr. Sutter. All those widows to create, homes to burn, land to salt. I’ve been checking on you, Mr. Sutter. That’s the way you’ve lived your entire life.

Wiggins was objecting vehemently. The defendant is not on trial for his entire life, he told the judge. Only a particularsegment of it.

Confine yourself to the matter at hand, the judge told Schieweiler. The jury is instructed to disregard the prosecutor’s remarks, he added.

Is it not a fact that you addressed Mrs. Conkle as ‘widow’ just prior to her husband’s shooting?

Don’t pop your bug eyes at me, Schieweiler, Sutter said. I don’t know what you want from me. All I was doin was defendin myself. I come and got the law myself, I never tried to hide nothin. Why would I lay a poker in the wrong hand and then call the law?

I don’t know, Mr. Sutter. I’m here to try to extract the truth from you, not psychoanalyze you. Did you call her ‘widow Conkle’ or not?

No. I swear to God I did not.

When the trial was over and Sutter acquitted, Schieweiler still could not let it be. He followed Sutter to the courthouse steps in a rage he didn’t even try to conceal.

You may think this is over, Mr. Sutter, but I can assure you that it is not. I’m going back to Nashville, and there is going to be an investigation of this case and this tainted jury from the top to the bottom. I’m going to get you for something if it’s only spitting on the sidewalk.

You just a bad loser, Sutter said. He grinned like a Cheshire cat. Small yellow canary feathers about his jaws.

Your day is drawing to a close. You can intimidate these people with threats, but you can’t intimidate me.

Sutter was fumbling about his overalls pockets. He heldan imaginary pencil poised over an imaginary pad. Now what did you say your street address was? I might want to drop in on you some night. I’m over in Ackerman’s Field ever now and then.

The first cold spell of winter has routed the old men from their habitual benches on the courthouse lawn and the warm stove in Sam Long’s store has drawn them as a magnet attracts iron filings.

What always got me about him was the way he could just slide out of anything. Killin, burnin, sellin whiskey. He sold bootleg whiskey out of the front door of his house for fifteen year and never even got arrested. They used to worry old man Moose Tyler to death raidin him and finally did send him up to Brushy Mountain for a year or two.

Yeah. And killin folks. He told me one time, said, it’s more people than Fenton Breece can bury somebody. Everbody knowed he killed Clyde Conkle in cold blood, but he never drawed a day for it. They let him walk. You take old man Bookbinder up in the Harrikin. His wife took up with one of them Hankins boys and run off and sent Hankins back to get a bedstead or somethin. Bookbinder was goin to run him off, and he wouldn’t run. They took to scufflin and Hankins got killed. They stuck a stamp on Bookbinder and mailed him straight to the penitentiary. He done ten year. I guess he never had none of Sutter’s luck.

It was the middle of the night when Breece knocked but almost immediately the tiny door-within-a-door opened and a goldflecked eye was regarding him.

Whoever sent for you lied, Sutter said. I’m still alive and kickin.

Breece guessed this was Sutter’s idea of a joke. He wasn’t amused. I need to talk to you on business, he said. Let me in. It’s cold out here.

The door opened. Sutter was fully dressed, as if he slept in his clothes or he slept not at all. The room was dark save a warm orange glow from the woodstove.

Turn the lights on. I can’t see where I am.

You in my front room and you ain’t been here thirty seconds and you done givin me orders.

Breece wandered around in the halfdark and finally seated himself in a bentwood rocker by the fire and spread his hands to the warmth of the heater. He seemed ill at ease, someone who must soon be off.

Turning colder, he said awkwardly.

What can I say? It’s December. But I could of stuck my head out the door and told that. You didn’t have to drive all the way out here to give me a weather report.

Like I told you, it’s business.

If it’s whiskey business, you’re shit out of luck. They cleaned me out last week. The fuckin revenuers. I’m under indictment again. Out on bond. The son of a bitches just won’t let me be here lately. Somebody’s got it in for me. I’ve paid these goddamned local laws enough money to buy a farm in Georgia and the niggers to work it and not a word of warning do I get. They didn’t even fool with the county. You know what they done? A nigger come walkin up out of the woods and Isold him a pint. He shoved it in his hip pocket and walked back down in that holler. A nigger in woreout overalls and bustedout shoes, and I thought he’d been down there diggin sang or somethin. Then when the feds came in a big black car with their warrants, there set the son of a bitch right in the front seat wearin a suit of clothes and a necktie. The front seat. Black as the ace of spades. The slick son of a bitches. Who’d of thought they’d send a nigger?

Breece’s eyes had adjusted to the halflight from the open hearth, and by it he was covertly studying Sutter’s face. Sutter wouldn’t have noticed anyway. He seemed to be abstractedly talking out of a store of rage he’d laid by and a hot but unfocused anger burned in his eyes.

It was the first time they had ever talked face to face and Breece divined in a moment of dizzy revelation something about Sutter that no one had noticed before. Why, he is mad, Breece thought. He’s not what people say about him at all. He’s not just mean as a snake or eccentric or independent. He’s as mad as a hatter, and I don’t know how they’ve let him go so long.

What is it you want, anyway?

Someone has something that belongs to me, and I’m being blackmailed. I’ve got to have it back, and I think you’re the man to get it for me.

Sutter was rolling a cigarette. Who is it?

Well, there’s two of them in together, I think. A brother and a sister named Tyler. The girl is the one who actually approached me about the money, but I know for a fact the young man is the one who stole the article out of my car. That’s what I want back, and I’m willing to pay for it.

The article. Yes.

Say I try to do it for you. Do I get to know what the article is, or do I just wander around finding things that look like they might have belonged to you?

Of course, you’ll know what it is.

Then let me in on it.

All right. Some photographs were taken of myself and a…young lady. They are potentially very damaging. The photographs are of a very incriminating…a very intimate nature. The young woman is connected politically, and they are threatening to go to her husband if I don’t pay them fifteen thousand dollars. I’ve been in a quandary. If anything goes wrong, my position in this community will be ruined.

This story was so monumentally absurd that Sutter did not even take offense at being lied to. He was even a little impressed. The idea of Fenton Breece doing things of an intimate nature to a politically connected young woman while someone else took potentially incriminating photographs was so far beyond the realm of probability that he permitted himself a small smile.

Of course, we both know that’s bullshit, he pressed on. But it’s your business what you done and what specie of animal you done it with. Pictures then. And you want em back. If they’re as bad as you say, why don’t you just give them the fifteen thousand dollars. That’s chickenfeed to you. What do you think, I’m goin to do it cheaper? I ain’t no bargain basement, ain’t runnin no sales.

Breece was silent for a time. He seemed unused to speech, as if he’d gone too long without the companionship of the living. He studied a bit and then he said, I flatter myself that I know something of human nature. I can read people. Ifit were simply a matter of the fifteen thousand dollars, I’d pay it and be done with it. However…there was something in the Tyler woman’s eyes. It was clear she means to ruin me. She’ll take the money and then want more. Or perhaps they’ve already had copies of the pictures made and she’ll show them about anyway. There was a vindictiveness in her face. Utter viciousness.

This utter viciousness, where do you reckon it came from? Wait a minute. I’m gettin an insight into human nature. Let me guess. You was doin things of an intimate nature to this Tyler gal, and then your attention wandered to this gal who was politically connected, and the Tyler gal got pissed and aims to run you out of the undertakin business.

It’s not necessary to ridicule me.

Then quit actin like I’m a goddamn fool. Quit jerkin me around and get on with it. Make me an offer or get the hell out of here.

Very well. I’ll give you the money. All fifteen thousand dollars, half now and the rest when I have the pictures. I’m sure you could use a sum of money like that in your…legal difficulties. I’ve had no experience in that area, but I’m sure that would buy several lawyers.

Judges is what I’m shoppin for. And why are you goin roundabout like this if she offered to sell you the pictures straight out?

I told you. She wants to ruin me.

Sutter had an actual insight of his own then into human nature. He gave Breece an acute look. It’s not just the pictures, he said. They’ve got some kind of a deathlock on you and you want it off. You want me to kill them.

No, no, certainly not. I can’t condone murder, hire murderdone.

Sure you can. You just don’t want to know about it. You don’t even want to say it. You keep dancin all around it. You want me to do it for you.

You must be aware that you have a certain reputation. Your words would carry more weight than mine. Perhaps violence wouldn’t be necessary. Perhaps you could just talk to them.

Perhaps I could.

Breece was hesitant. How many…how many people have you killed?

You don’t owe me for them.

Will you tell me that if I tell you something of my own past?

What is this, you show me yours and I show you mine? I don’t care about your past. And whatever I done, I done it because it was what I had to do at the time and it’s yesterday’s news anyhow.

I’m aware you killed Conkle. I could hardly have avoided knowing that. Breece hesitated, studying Sutter warily. But this was business, and money had been promised. He didn’t have it on him, and that weighed in his favor.

You killed Conkle and laid a poker in his hand so you could claim self-defense. But Conkle was righthanded and you put the poker in the left hand. How smart was that?

In the warm halflight Sutter was smiling. I knowed he was righthanded.

Say you did? Then why did you mess up?

Sutter’s voice grew confidential, conspiratorial. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I didn’t mess up. I did it on purpose.

Why would you do a thing like that?

I don’t know. For sport, maybe. For sport? What the hell kind of an answer is that?

For sport, you know what sport is, don’t you. Anyway, I done it. And I’d not have even as sorry a piece of shit as you thinkin I didn’t know whether a man I was about to kill was righthanded or lefthanded.

Well. I was just curious. I killed someone myself once, while I was still in college. I killed a whore in Memphis.

Sutter just gave him a quick glance of dismissal as if murdered Memphis whores did not quite meet whatever arcane criteria he judged peers by. He leant and spit into the fire and rose and laid another stick of wood in the sparking coals.

I killed her with a Pop-Cola bottle.

This evinced some small interest. I expect that would do it, Sutter allowed.

Breece fell silent. Perhaps wandering down the alleys and byways of his curious past. Other whores, other bottles.

What’d she do, take your money and run out on you and you busted her head with it?

Oh, it wasn’t anything like that. She took to bleeding. You never saw so much blood. The bedclothes were soaked, white sheets with great crimson centers, like flowers…the bottle broke something loose inside her, punctured her in there somewhere, and all the blood ran out of her.

Inside? Sutter wondered, then he stared at Breece as comprehension came over him. I don’t want to hear anymore of this perverted shit, he said. You just keep anymore stories you got about Pop-Cola bottles to yourself.

Breece just sat bemusedly, hands laced across his corpulent belly. He seemed to be intently inspecting the shine of his shoes. After a time, he said, Did it ever occur to you that we’re a lot alike? Not hardly.

We’re both to a great degree involved with death. You in your way, I in mine. It’s only natural that a person as intimately associated with death as I am would think quite a lot about it. There’s a poem I’ve remembered that seems to best sum it up. Do you want to hear it?

Why, hell yes, Sutter said. I believe it’s been a day or two since I’ve had anybody in here quotin rhymes at me.

It’s by Auden, W. H. Auden. Are you familiar with Auden?

Sutter leaned and spat into the coals again. Seems like I knowed him when he lived over on Jack’s Branch, he said.

As poets have mournfully sung,

Death takes the innocent young,

The rolling-in-money,

The screamingly-funny,

And those who are very well hung.

Sutter watched him with something approaching disbelief. This mad quoter of poetry, nightmare minister to the dead so far beyond the pale light could never fall on him.

Did you find it amusing?

Let me get this straight. You want the pictures and you want it hushed up. This threat to your social standin removed. Is that about it?

Breece thought it over for a moment. Yes, that’s what I want. What I really want is for everything to be back like it was before they stole my pictures.

He thought some more. He was aware that things could never really return to the way they were, for Sutter knew about it now, but he had already done some thinking about that. When the time came, he could take care of that himself.

Give me the money. I’ll have to get it from the bank. I don’t carry that kind of money around. I’m not a fool.

Sutter let that pass. Tomorrow, then.

Breece rose. He stood awkwardly a moment as if about to proffer a hand to seal this bargain, then thought better of it and made ready to leave.

I’ve kept you up long enough, he said. The money will be ready tomorrow.

When Breece was gone, Sutter closed the hearth door and turned down the damper and lay back on the bed still fully clothed with his hands clasped behind his head and stared at the ceiling and thought about the money. Fifteen thousand, but it could be readily turned into more. If Breece wanted the pictures desperately at fifteen, he would want them only a little less desperately at twenty. Perhaps twenty-five.

But it was more than the money. Something in his life that had been without form was taking shape. A dark, cauled shape that stood to the side and watched him with hooded, expressionless eyes. In some curious way he intuited that all his life previous had simply been a rehearsal for this.

By three o’clock Tyler had the roof of de Vries’s store painted and was cleaning out his brushes with gasoline. His hands and clothes were so smeared with red ochre he looked like the survivor of some terrible highway calamity. He wiped gasoline out of the brushes and stored them in the old milkcrate in the back of the truck and while he was loading the ladders de Vries came out. De Vries crossed the alley and stood on tiptoes against the building on the other side thebetter to see his own roof. Then he came back to where Tyler was.

You done me a good job, he said.

Well. It’s painted, anyway.

De Vries had taken out his wallet and was carefully thumbing through bills. He took out a sheaf of them and counted money into Tyler’s hand. He held a five poised in midair as if in momentary indecision then laid it atop the others and put away his wallet.

That’s five more than we agreed.

You did me a good job. No accidents. You stayed with it and got done in good time. You’re a careful worker. Last time I had it done Clarence Treadway done it drunk, and he dropped a paintbrush loaded with bright red paint right on the hood of Clyde Tookie Bell’s car, and Clyde was drivin a white Buick that year.

You hear of anybody else wants anything done, try to get word to me. I’ll try most anything once.

I sure will. I’ll get you some work.

I better get on home then.

He started toward the truck parked in the mouth of the alley but something in de Vries’s manner or in his face made him hesitate.

De Vries cleared his throat. Hold on a minute, he called.

Tyler waited.

It’s a feller been hangin around out front waitin for you to get done. He figured you was up on top and said tell you he wanted to see you. He knowed you was down, I guess he’d done be back here.

Who is it?

Do you know Granville Sutter? I just know of him.

If you know of him, then you know he’s got a bad name.

What does he want with me? Did he say?

No, he didn’t, and I didn’t ask. Didn’t figure it was any of my business, and Granville would of let me know that right quick anyhow. Reason I told you back here, I figured if you wanted to give him the slip, you wouldn’t have to go around front. You could just head up the alley there.

Well, I don’t mind talking to him. I never stepped on his toes that I know of. He may need some work done.

De Vries’s look said that this was not a strong likelihood. Any work Sutter needs doin you’d be well advised to pass on, he said. If he didn’t do nothing else, he’d figure a way to beat you out of your money. But you suit yourself on that.

I’ll talk to him.

There was an empty bench against the front of the store but Sutter was hunkered against the brick wall waiting with the calm patience of the country folk you used to see sitting about the town square. This bench was usually filled with loiterers or old men settling world affairs but Sutter’s mere presence seemed to have cleared it. Tyler approached him and for no reason he could name there was a tight empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Something in Sutter’s remote eyes told him that this was the knock on the door at midnight, the telegram slid under the door in the dead of night.

You looking for me? I’m Tyler.

I know who you are. You old Moose’s boy. You don’t look much like him. Old Moose was heavy and built right close to the ground. You kinda rangy. Must of took after your mama’s side of the family.

Tyler didn’t say anything. Sutter dropped his cigarette. Ground it out with a conscientious foot.

Or who knows, he shrugged. Maybe you do look like your daddy. Names and blood don’t always go arm in arm.

Tyler was momentarily off balance. He stood studying Sutter as if measuring his size against his own. Finally he said, You might ought to watch your mouth. Anyway, I don’t reckon you been hanging around here waiting to talk to me about my daddy.

As a matter of fact I ain’t. Let’s take a walk, Tyler.

He started off toward the railroad tracks and after a moment’s hesitation Tyler fell in beside him. He was torn between curiosity about Sutter’s purpose and the desire to just walk away. More’s the fool he didn’t, Tyler thought, but the moment when he could have just walked off down the road and made this never be had passed and it would not come again. Somehow this all felt preordained and out of control, as if someone was behind the curtains mimicking voices and controlling the strings. As if for all the years of his life he and Sutter had been passing and repassing in the dark and now here they were face to face in God’s own daylight and there was nothing for it.

They walked past the drygoods store down toward the railroad track. Poolroom loungers watched them pass with curiosity. Mentor and protege, perhaps, warlock and aspiring wizard. People they met seemed to defer to Sutter, to give him more room than was necessary for his passage. Grimes’s carlot. Grimes’s cars sat forlorn and lustreless under the leaden sky, and the pennants strung on wires snapped and fluttered in the stiff wind.

Sutter didn’t talk for a time. He built himself a careful cig Sutter dropped his cigarette. Ground it out with a conscientious foot.

Or who knows, he shrugged. Maybe you do look like your daddy. Names and blood don’t always go arm in arm.

Tyler was momentarily off balance. He stood studying Sutter as if measuring his size against his own. Finally he said, You might ought to watch your mouth. Anyway, I don’t reckon you been hanging around here waiting to talk to me about my daddy.

As a matter of fact I ain’t. Let’s take a walk, Tyler.

He started off toward the railroad tracks and after a moment’s hesitation Tyler fell in beside him. He was torn between curiosity about Sutter’s purpose and the desire to just walk away. More’s the fool he didn’t, Tyler thought, but the moment when he could have just walked off down the road and made this never be had passed and it would not come again. Somehow this all felt preordained and out of control, as if someone was behind the curtains mimicking voices and controlling the strings. As if for all the years of his life he and Sutter had been passing and repassing in the dark and now here they were face to face in God’s own daylight and there was nothing for it.

They walked past the drygoods store down toward the railroad track. Poolroom loungers watched them pass with curiosity. Mentor and protege, perhaps, warlock and aspiring wizard. People they met seemed to defer to Sutter, to give him more room than was necessary for his passage. Grimes’s carlot. Grimes’s cars sat forlorn and lustreless under the leaden sky, and the pennants strung on wires snapped and fluttered in the stiff wind.

Sutter didn’t talk for a time. He built himself a careful cigalmost dizzy with shock. He wished himself fleeing along the railroad tracks. All this over and forgotten or never been.

Course a man can get the bigeye thinkin about all that money. I can understand that. That’s why we can get this mess straightened out right here at the start and make it easy on everbody. All he wants is the pictures back. He’s willin to forget the rest of it, the blackmailin charge, the theft, just to get his property back. There might even be a small piece of money, call it a finder’s fee, say five hundred dollars, when you lay them in my hand.

Apprentice blackmailer though he was, even Tyler knew something about this did not quite ring right. He knew it was more than the pictures. Breece and Sutter knew it as well, for the pictures were only symbols for the dark perversions of the waiting graves: the graves lay ticking like timebombs, untold numbers of them, dividing insanely like the malignant cells of an embryonic cancer. The pictures didn’t mean anything.

I’d like to help you out, Tyler said. Lord knows I could use five hundred dollars. I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Pictures of what?

Sutter was quiet for a time. He seemed to be studying the cordwood haulers. They had the truck unloaded now and had jumped down from the bed. Tyler could smell the hot winy odor of curing wood. The sun had descended further and what he could see of the world lay half in shadow, half in thin light splayed out across the houses clustered on the hillside across from town.

He chose to ignore Tyler’s last words, as if they were so ludicrous they didn’t deserve comment or perhaps his acknowledgment might lend them a credibility they didn’t deserve. Course I took into consideration maybe it wasn’t all your doin. Maybe you just easy led, and I ought to went to her to begin with. But I believe a man’s accountable for the actions of his womenfolks, don’t you?

No, Tyler said. I don’t believe one person can be responsible for another person’s life. We’re on our own.

Sutter shrugged. Still, I figured man to man between me and you would be better. We ought to be able to come to terms. What it is, you don’t quite see the whole picture. You’re lookin at it, but you’re not seein all the details. You’ve got some idea about Fenton Breece and you’re judgin me by him. Fat and soft and very likely some specie of queer. Let’s get it straight right now that me and him ain’t nothin alike. Right? If we was, he wouldn’t have me agentin for him to begin with. He’d of just took care of it hisself.

What’s he paying you?

I won’t lie to you. He’s payin me plenty. Because he’s got a lot to lose and because he thinks I can stop up the holes where it’s spillin out. And make no mistake about it, Tyler, I can. I’m the fix-it man, and you’re the problem I been hired to fix.

I don’t have them, Tyler said.

Maybe not. But you know where they live. Whatever you have to do, you better get your mind right to do it. Because I’m not foolin around, and I don’t want no mistake about it. If you have to talk to her, you better let her know I’m dead serious.

Tyler didn’t say anything. The cordwood truck had gone, and a cool blue dusk lay over the railroad yard. Across the tracks where happenstantial shanties spilled yellow light, three young blacks strolled toward town, and a woman’svoice, faintly ridiculing, called something after them.

I got to get on, Tyler said. He’d thought he was able to handle whatever befell him but this was something new. Something far outside the borders, and he could feel a panicky fear like cold waters rising about him. He didn’t know how deep they were and he didn’t know if he could swim in them. Anywhere seemed preferable to here but when he made to go Sutter’s hand on his arm stayed him.

Not just yet, Sutter said.

The hand tightened on Tyler’s biceps, then moved away.

None of this means anything, Tyler said. It’s all just a waste of time. If I went to the law, it would all be out the window anyway.

If, Sutter said contemptuously. If a frog had a glass ass, he’d only jump one time and bust like a dropped teacup. We both know you’re not goin to the law. If you did, there’d go your big money. Which is gone anyway, you’ve kissed it goodbye and never knowed it. And on top of that, graverobbin and foolin with corpses ain’t never been too highly thought of in this part of the country.

We never robbed any graves.

Sutter shrugged. You got your story, Breece has got his. He’s prepared to swear in a court of law that he caught you and your sister diggin up graves and doin stuff to the bodies. Desecratin em, he called it. I guess the first tale told is the one that gets listened to.

I got to get on. I have to think what to do.

Then while you’re at it, think about this: I’ll do what I have to do. It’s a hell of a lot of money, and it would move me pretty far down the line, and it looks like I need to be there. All these son of a bitches. Push and push and keep on and I’ve hadabout all I want of it. I’m goin to lay some folks out to cool if I have to, and I don’t particularly care who. But what I want you to think about is the worst thing that can happen. You know when somethin bad happens, how folks kind of console one another? They say, well, it could of been worse. This or that could of happened. Well, not this time. Believe it. I am absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you.

I just don’t know.

You better know. If you don’t, ask around about me. I don’t carry no references, but folks’ll tell you. And you better let me know somethin one way or another by tomorrow night. If you don’t, it’ll be on your head.

What will?

Whatever happens. Whatever it takes. It’s enough that you know that Fenton Breece ain’t the only man can bury the dead, and the grave ain’t the only place to put em.

Tyler rose to leave, and this time Sutter made no move to stop him. He just sat unmoving, letting night take him and sinking into darkness as if he kept some obscure watch against whatever of dread might be approaching the town.

Tyler went woodenly back up the street. His mind wouldn’t work. Everything seemed jammed, overloaded. He went past closed and shuttered stores, a lit cafe where shards of brittle music fell about him and diminished with his passage. A voice called Tyler after him, but he didn’t heed it. Where a neon sign blinked billiards he went through a paintscaled door and down a halflit stair to where smoke drifted in the glow of fluorescent lights strung over pool tables and where there was a loud clanging of pinball machines and a hubbub of human voices. He bought a Coke at the counter and went to a long bench anchored alongside the wall and sat drinking andwatching a pill game in progress.

Hey, Tyler, a man called Woodenhead yelled at him. Want to play some pill?

I got to get home here in a minute.

Draw me a couple of pills then. I need a change of luck, and you the luckiest fucker about pill I ever seen.

Tyler shook the canister and spilled out two red wooden pills onto his palm. He looked at the numbers on them. Not tonight. The four and the twelve. He passed them to Woodenhead. Sorry, he said.

Woodenhead looked at them. Grimaced. Goddamn, Tyler. I meant from bad to better. I could of went to worse myself.

Damn, there’s old T-Texas Tyler, another sang out. He fell to studying Tyler’s carminesmeared clothes. Hell, he’s been in a terrible wreck. Was anybody killed in it besides you, Tyler?

Oh, he’s just got ahold of one with the rag on, Woodenhead said. Hell, Tyler, if you couldn’t of waited a day or two, the least you could of done was take your britches off.

Tyler just grinned weakly and didn’t say anything. There was something reassuring about this ribald camaraderie, but he knew he must be off. He drained the Coke and set the bottle aside, and so into the night.

When the last streetlight stood vigil against the night and the highway dropped and curved sharply, he was thinking about Sutter as he rounded the curve and was suddenly hurled into absolute and inexplicable darkness. Reflexively he locked the truck down in a caterwauling wail of protesting rubber and ceased in the middle of the road with his hands clamped whiteknuckled to the steering wheel. Faroff and faint headlights were wending toward him, and he felt for the lightswitch. He hadn’t even remembered to turn on the headlights.

I’m going to the law, he said.

No, you’re not. That would be the end of it. The money and everything. This is our last chance to get away from here.

It’s not mine.

He’s bluffing. Trying to scare us. Looks like he did you, too.

You didn’t hear him, Tyler said. But she was implacable as stone. His words rolled hollowly out, and her hardened face just turned them back to him and they began to sound craven even to his own ears.

Think what it would be like, Kenneth. Us somewhere else, some city, Nashville or Memphis maybe. With all that money, thousands and thousands of dollars. Dressing fine, driving a fine new car. Doing what we please. And the law won’t help. Daddy always said the law was like two people fighting over a blanket on a cold night. The one that’s the biggest and the strongest winds up with most of the cover. And the last time I looked that wasn’t you.

Give me the pictures.

What are you going to do with them?

Hide them. Just in case.

She went out of the room. When she came back in, she laid them on the table. He took from his pocket a square he’d cut from a canvas tarp, and he wrapped the pictures carefully and taped them and slid them into a Prince Albert tobacco tin.

She watched him wordlessly. He finished and rose and just as wordlessly went out into the night.

He was sitting at the bottom of the basement stairs in the courthouse drinking a dope when a deputy came through a side door with a sheaf of warrants in his hand. He went past Tyler without speaking and stood for a moment before a door marked sheriff’s office fumbling out keys. He unlocked the door and went in. He was in there for a few minutes. When he came back out, he didn’t have the warrants and Tyler was still there. He’d finished the dope and sat holding the empty bottle as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

You want something?

I wanted to see the sheriff.

He ain’t in.

I figured that by the door being locked, Tyler said. The deputy stood waiting as if there might be more forthcoming, but there was not.

What did you want with the sheriff? The deputy was a small stoopshouldered man with fiery red hair and a long, aquiline nose, and his eyes veered warily as if he didn’t know whether to suck up to you or push you around.

I wanted to talk to him, Tyler said.

I’m a duly sworn deputy sheriff, the deputy sheriff said. If it’s got anything to do with breakin the law or enforcin the law, then you can take it up with me.

When do you reckon he’ll be back?

He’ll come when he comes, the deputy said. He ain’t responsible to me. You through with that bottle, it needs to go back upstairs by the dopebox where it belongs.

It was a good half hour before the high sheriff came, and when he did the deputy was with him. They stood before thedoor unlocking it, and Tyler wondered vaguely what there was to steal. The world was all locked doors. Watchdogs, keep off signs. As he turned the key, the deputy nodded toward Tyler. Him, he said.

Uh-huh, the sheriff said.

They went in and Tyler sat a few minutes longer debating whether to stay or leave. He’d about decided to leave when the door opened halfway and the deputy’s head poked out.

He’ll see you now, he said.

Tyler rose and went in. The sheriff was seated behind his desk with his palms laid flat on it. He was a big man. He wore pressed khakis, and his shirtsleeves were folded back a neat turn. He was dark, and his hair was brilliantined back into ornate and intricate waves. He wore a thin mustache of the sort favored by certain movie stars of the nineteen-forties and he was considered to be something of a ladies’ man.

Something I can help you with, young feller?

I hope so. I don’t know, but I thought I’d ask and see.

Take a chair there. To begin with, who are you?

I know him now, the deputy said. I told you I thought I knew who he was. That’s old Moose Tyler’s boy.

Uh-huh. What can I do for you, Moose Tyler’s boy?

Now that he’d come this far, he didn’t know what to say without saying too much. It seemed to him that with the mention of his father’s name a line had been drawn with him on one side and them on the other. He’d lived too long on the outskirts of the enemies’ camp to ever dine at their table.

My sister and I have been having some trouble with Granville Sutter. He’s done a lot of talking about what he’s going to do. He’s threatened to rape my sister and kill both of us. The sheriff was watching him, deceptively casual. How’d you happen to wind up on the wrong side of Sutter?

Well, it sort of come up about my sister.

The deputy laughed. I’ll just bet it come up about his sister, he said. He turned to the sheriff. He’s got a hell of a nicelookin sister.

Hush up, Harlan. You want to elaborate on this business about your sister, Tyler?

He tried to go out with her, and she wouldn’t go. He didn’t want to take no for an answer. He slapped her around some and threatened to shoot us.

Where do you fit into this?

What?

Why’s he threatening you?

Hellfire. I don’t know. Because I took up for her, I guess.

Uh-huh. Listen close to me, Tyler. I’m going to explain something to you. You’re young and you ain’t been around and you’ve got a lot to learn. You take a man wants something real bad and don’t get it, he’s likely to say some things he don’t mean. Sort of in the heat of the moment, you might say. When he cools down a bit, it’ll all be forgot. Likely he’s done forgot it, and you worrying yourself to death about it.

And that’s it? You’re not going to do anything? Talk to him, or anything?

The law’s a funny thing, Tyler. It requires that a crime be committed before a man’s arrested for it. If we arrested everybody that thought about doing something illegal, there wouldn’t be jails to hold em. And if everybody Granville Sutter threatened to kill wound up dead, Fenton Breece would have to hire him a couple of helpers and put on another shift. If Sutter roughed her up like you say and she swears out a warrant for assault, that’s another matter. But she’ll have to do it. You can’t do it for her.

But then if she did, you’d have to serve the warrant and arrest him? He’d be in jail?

Till he made bond. Which knowin Granville would be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen minutes. And then he would be madder than hell. Which you wouldn’t want. My advice to you would be to let bygones be bygones.

Whiskey, the deputy said suddenly.

What? the sheriff asked.

This has got to do with whiskey or I miss my guess. This boy here’s got into it with Granville over whiskey the same as his daddy did. Probably set up back there in one of them hollers in the edge of the Harrikin and Sutter’s got wind of it. Man go prowlin around back in there, no tellin what he’s liable to find.

Tyler had risen. Unnoticed, his chair toppled sidewise against the wainscoting and fell. His face was white with anger.

I ought not to have come here, he said. He was staring down into the sheriff’s face. The face was bland and almost politely inquisitive. I knew better all along and by God I came here anyway.

You watch your mouth, boy. Anybody cusses in my office I kind of take it they’re cussing me, and nobody cusses me.

Tyler went out without speaking and left the door ajar. The deputy’s voice said, Wouldn’t mind takin little sister a round myself.

He went on in a kind of cold detached rage up the stairs and into the failing winter light. Dusk was falling and a purple mist seemed to be seeping up out of the earth itself andobscuring the town. Buildings looked blueblack and dimensionless. He stood for a moment looking back down the stairs, then he shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders and went on.

Two stone lions stood sentinel at the gate of the house, but they were chipped and weathered and their ancient eyes were blind. They might have guarded some city long sacked and forgotten: the house they actually watched was subtly going to seed, and the gate itself canted on one twisted hinge.

Tyler went up the cracked concrete sidewalk. A plaster mother duck and six plaster ducklings wended their way singlefile through the sere winter weeds, but like the lions they were weathered and blind and seemed to have lost their way.

He went up the steps to the gloom of the porch. Somewhere behind the curtain windows a light glowed and he could hear soft jazz playing within the house. He rapped on the storm door then opened it and knocked on the peeling white door. He waited awhile and knocked again. After a time he could hear soft footfalls and a porchlight came on over his head. The door opened.

Kenneth?

Hello, Mr. Phelan.

A pair of limpid eyes behind the thick lenses of reading glasses. A thin scholarlylooking man in a white shirt and a blue necktie. Phelan’s cheeks were slick and freshly shaven, and he smelled of Lilac Vegetal. His hand clutched a thin leatherbound volume a forefinger marked his place in.

I thought you were in Knoxville, Kenneth. Well. No. Not yet.

If you wanted to talk to me about it, this is not really a good time for me. Could you come back tomorrow, perhaps in the afternoon?

I did want to talk to you, but not about that. I need some advice about something. Could I come in for a few minutes?

Well. Sure, I guess so. Come on in, Kenneth. He ushered Tyler into a neardark room and made no move to turn on the lights. The room was warm. A gas furnace burned with a soft hissing sound and a thin blue flame. A door opened off this room to what Tyler remembered was the kitchen, and Phelan kept glancing nervously toward it. There was a warm spicy smell of Italian food cooking.

If I’ve come at a bad time-

Oh, no, not a bit of it. Well, to tell you the truth, I was just having a guest over for dinner.

I’ll just be getting on.

Stay a few minutes as long as you’re here. I was just surprised to see you. I’d assumed you’d gone to east Tennessee.

The kitchen door filled with a shadowy form. A heavyset girl in a white dress. A girl Tyler remembered from school. A junior then. A semipretty girl with soft uncertain eyes. At length a name floated into his memory to match the face: Retha Ellison.

Phelan became agitated. There was a curious mixture of humility and defiance in his face. Suddenly it all made a kind of sense to Tyler. Phelan laid a hand on Tyler’s arm.

Kenneth, you remember Retha.

Yes. Hello, Retha.

Hello, Kenneth. How have you been?

Just fine. The grip on his arm had tightened and seemedto be moving him gently toward the door. Tyler felt that for days folks had been taking him by the arm and guiding him places he did not want to go on his own. The anger that Phelan’s kind, familiar face had dissipated returned, seethed just beneath the surface. He jerked his arm hard, and Phelan’s indecisive hand fluttered away.

I guess I’d better get on, Tyler said. He wondered what madness had driven him here to begin with. What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he’d been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter’s dead eyes.

Well, Kenneth, if you must, then I suppose you must. Tomorrow night, then?

I doubt it.

It wasn’t anything urgent, then?

No. No, it wasn’t anything much. I’ll let you get back to your guest.

Ushered in, ushered out. The hand was at his elbow again as if he were blind or halfwitted and must be forever shown the way.

I’m sorry you have to rush away into the night. But we’ll do it another time. I just had Retha over for some tutoring and we decided to have a bite to eat. You know how things are.

He smiled a quick nervous smile and gave Tyler a conspiratorial wink. Tyler looked away. Beyond the limits of the porchlight the streets lay already dark and slicklooking and empty. Yeah, Tyler said uncertainly, as if the way things were would forever be a mystery to him.

Phelan waved an arm goodbye. His hand still clutched the book, and he looked down at it as if he had forgotten it.

Tyler started down the steps. What are you going to read to her?

Pardon me?

Browning, I’ll bet. You’re going to read her Browning, aren’t you?

For a moment Phelan’s face was empty and dead. You were never a petty person, Kenneth, he said. I wouldn’t start at this late date. You don’t have the flair for it, and it doesn’t become you.

Goodbye, Mr. Phelan. He went on but at the gate he turned and looked as though he might say something further but Phelan had already gone back inside and closed the door. He stood for a moment in the line between light and dark as if he didn’t quite know where to go or what to do.

Well, he thought. We tried the law and we tried the Poet’s Literary Tea Society. I guess I do it my damn self.

Sutter was sitting under the walnut tree with the Coke crate cocked against it when the county car pulled into the drive and stopped. A deputy got out and crossed the yard and squatted before him like some great ungainly bird. He didn’t speak.

Ezell, Sutter said after a time.

Part of Ezell’s jaw had been shot away and surgically reconstructed and the plastic surgery hadn’t taken properlyso that he looked like a partially healed escapee from some mad scientist’s laboratory.

I heard something you’d maybe be interested in, he finally said. There was a curious vibration to his voice, his disfigured jaw lent it the residual hum of some stringed instrument strummed gently and laid aside.

Sutter was paring his nails with a switchblade knife. He did this in silence a time. Then he said, Well, are you going to tell me, or are we playin guessin games? You’d give some kind of a hint might make it easier. Just somethin to let me know what general area it pertains to.

You remember that state prosecutor you got into it with at your trial? Schieweiler, from over at Ackerman’s Field? He’s trying to get you a new trial, and get it moved out of the county. Maybe at Ackerman’s Field.

Hellfire. They can’t try me again on that. They done tried me on it. It done got thowed out.

Well. They claimin jury tamperin. Perjury too, what I hear.

Jury tamperin? I never tampered with a one of them son of a bitches. Never had to. They was already scared shitless.

I just told you what come down. Like I always do. He’s workin with Sheriff Bellwether, over at Ackerman’s Field.

Sutter took out a bag of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it. I appreciate you warnin me, Ezell, he said, his voice slightly furred from the smoke.

Ezell was silent a time. Finally he said, I’m takin a chance just tellin you. It’ll be my ass they ever catch me out here.

Well. I said I appreciated it.

Still the deputy sat. Sutter was tempted to just wait him out, to see would he sit hunkered there while darkness fell and be there still when dawn broke, his Adam’s apple bobbingevery time he swallowed.

Was there somethin else?

Well, Ezell buzzed. Last time you gave me a little somethin.

Sutter took out his wallet. Peered inside. Just how little was this somethin I give you?

Last time you give me forty.

If I did it must of been good news, Sutter said. This only qualifies for twenty. Hell, by all rights you ought to be payin me.

Ezell rose and took the proffered bill. By some sleight of hand it disappeared into his khaki pocket. Just whatever, he said. I’m always lookin out for you.

He crossed the yard to the car and got in. Lifted a hand farewell and drove away. Sutter went on sitting. Everbody’s always lookin out for me, he said. He thought of Schieweiler. His bulging earnest eyes. Of Bellwether, the sheriff who wasn’t for sale. An anger that would not dissipate seethed somewhere inside his chest.

All these son of a bitches, he said aloud.

His old mama died in the madhouse, you know. Died huntin a butcher knife she swore she’d hid and couldn’t find. She’d get up in the mornin and hunt all day like a man puttin in a day’s work. She’d’a hunted all night if they hadn’t of strapped her in.

They’ve always told that when Granville was a boy he woke up one time in the middle of the night and she was settin on the side of the bed watchin him and she was holdin a butcher knife. Said she was watchin him, but it was like shewasn’t really seein him. He laid awake the balance of the night waitin to see what she’d do, then he took to sleepin in the woods or in the barn. Just wherever. She’d set up all night like she was studyin about somethin. They took to hidin all the knives.

Then finally she tried to kill old Squire Sutter. They kept her locked up awhile, and when she got to be more than they could handle, they put her in the crazyhouse. They was funny folks, them Sutters. The last time Granville even seen his mama was the day they come and hauled her off, and if he ever regretted not seein her before she died, he never said so.

Then later on when the old man took sick and got down, I heard he was bad off and went down there. That old man was in a hell of a shape. He hadn’t been took care of. He hadn’t been shaved or washed since God knows when, and with Granville doing the cookin, no telling what he’d been eatin. If anything.

Granville was grown then and about ready to leave the nest. He already had that look in his eyes. That look like he’s lookin not just at you but right on through you to whatever you’re standin in front of. He was settin on the front porch, I never heard tell of anybody catchin him workin. I told him I heard his daddy was bad off. Asked if they’d had the doctor out there. He said there wadn’t any need for a doctor nosin around his business. The way he said it, I could tell he meant me, too. Hell, I wadn’t nosin around. I always liked the old squire, even if he was funny turned. I told him they didn’t have one, his daddy would likely die. He just looked at me. Well, he said, if he lives, he lives. If he dies, he dies.

I left and I didn’t know what to do. He put me on a spot. Iknowed I ort to send a doctor, and I’d always worry about it if I didn’t, but at the same time Granville was goin to hold it against me, and somewhere down the line I’d have cause to remember it.

I sent old Doc Powers down there. That was before Pierce ever come here. Paid him out of my own pocket to go, but when he did Sutter was already dead. Granville was on the wing then, and there wadn’t nobody left to call him back. I knowed right then that Sutter was always goin to make people feel that if they done the right thing, like anybody would, a ticket was goin to be made on it, and sooner or later they’d have to pay it. I don’t like to feel like that myself, so I’ve steered clear of him.

And never regretted the loss of his company.

All day doves cried close to the house and all day Corrie moved in an impending sense of dread. Long a believer in signs and portents she felt this was one of the worst and signified a death in the family. Why don’t he come on? she wondered. She did everything about the house she could think of, and then she cooked his supper.

The day drew on. She went out once to look up the road to see if the truck was coming. She stood in the packed earth yard. A hand to shade her eyes. Wanly pretty, slightly harried. Her shadow was long before her. She stood gazing up the road in an attitude of listening but there was nothing to hear nor did she see the truck. She waited for a moment in seeming uncertainty, and then she went back in.

The house had seemed empty since the old man died. Hisghost hovered yet in dark corners; the air seemed forever resonant with his voice. Once she’d forgotten and set his place for supper. Before twilight she went about the house turning on lights, dispelling shadows though light still lay redly at the western windows. He didn’t come and he didn’t come. She went out again to listen for the truck, but there was nothing. Even the doves had fallen silent. Nothing she could name drew her eyes to the hillside. Black slashes of inkblack trees against a mottled red sky. An angular shadow, one among other less substantial shadows, moved as if in some curious way the weight of her eyes had given it life or at least the kinetic semblance of it, and it rose from where it had been crouching there in the twilight and ambled down the slope toward her. She stood motionless and mute. A hand to her mouth. When she saw the rifle, there was a moment not of apprehension but of relief, for she thought: a hunter. When the figure reached the fence it didn’t come around to the gate like anyone else would have done but simply stepped across it as if to show what he thought of fences and the folks who’d built them. He carried the rifle aloft across his chest like one fording deep waters, and when the light struck his face, she saw then it was Sutter. As with a terrible inevitability she’d known it had to be.

Hidy, he said.

She didn’t say anything. He skirted a planter made of an old cartire turned wrong side out and its edge scalloped and sat on the edge of the porch.

I been waitin up there, he said. I been kinda holdin off thinkin he’d come, but I don’t think he’s goin to. He may have left plumb out. He may be across the Alabama line by now. He sat idly tapping the stock of his rifle against a booted foot. Just a weary traveler taking brief respite from the road. Soon to be off again.

Then you ain’t seen him?

Not today, Little Sister. But I was supposed to. Ain’t you goin to ask me in to supper?

No. I don’t know what you’re doin here in the first place. Kenneth’ll run you off when he gets in.

Kenneth couldn’t run water through a garden hose. And nobody’s runnin me anywhere. Not today. I come here on business, and I ain’t leavin till it’s finished.

He had risen and stepped onto the edge of the porch. In the failing light his face was all angular shadows and with the skin drawn tight seemed composed solely of the skull beneath it and out the wells of dark the yellowflecked eyes as compassionless as a cat’s.

Let’s go in, he said. He would grasp her arm but she jerked away and whirled as if she’d slap him then thought better of it. She went through the door fast and tried to slam it on him, but he kicked it hard with her shoulder against it and she fetched up on the front room floor with her head against a toppled end table and a ringing in her ears. She wiped her forehead with a hand and the hand came away bloody.

It would save time, Sutter said, if we just cut through the front part and go right to the end. The front part is where I ask for the pictures and you tell me you don’t know what I’m talkin about. None of that is in question. I know you got em. You tried to blackmail Fenton Breece with em, and he sent me to get em back. Now come up with em before you do somethin to put me in a bad mood.

She was on her hands and knees. The pattern on the linoleum floor went in and out of focus. Geometric white tilesA single drop of blood dropped off her nose and splattered into a crimson star.

You can kiss my ass, she said.

Temptin as that offer is, I’m goin to have to let it slide. Maybe later. I hardly ever mix business with pleasure.

She looked up at him. His face was stony and remote.

Let’s have em, he said. Where are they?

Where you’ll never find them.

Well, we’ll see. But then I got a ace in the hole. I got you to show me.

He leant over her and grasped her hair and pulled her to her feet. He twisted his fist in her hair and pulled her head back. His face was very close to her own. He was detached, and there was nothing at all of life in the emptylooking eyes. They might have been shards of agate flecked with iron ore.

He slapped her. She had begun to cry. He’ll kill you, she said.

It’s been tried before, he said. By better men than he is. I figured you for a harder case than this. Folks into blackmailin and extortion need a harder shell than what you’ve showed.

You ought to know.

He released her hair. She settled back to the floor. Her head drooped. She sat with her legs folded beneath her.

Get over on that couch and set, Sutter said. I’m goin to look around a bit. Don’t get up. Don’t even think about slippin out that door. If you do, I’ll hear you and I’ll drop you in the front yard like I was killin hogs. Do you believe me?

She didn’t reply, but she believed him anyway.

He began in the front room. He emptied out drawers, checked their bottomsides, pored over their contents. He took the backs off picture frames and looked behind them. Fromtime to time he glanced sharply at her. She wondered where Tyler was, she’d wish he’d come and then she’d hope he didn’t. She sat trying to think. She didn’t know what to do. She’d been holding something of an intricate design, and it had collapsed in her hands, and she didn’t know where the pieces went. It was dark outside. The windows had gone opaque and all they showed her was the reflection of the room.

Be putting this shit up, he told her. I don’t want this place lookin like it was turned wrong side out. He wandered into the kitchen.

She got up listlessly and began to store away papers in the drawers. She could hear him in the kitchen opening and closing doors. When she had the room tidied up, she looked toward the kitchen door and he was standing there watching her speculatively.

What’s them pictures show, anyway? he asked.

Just dead folks.

Dead folks? Why’s he wantin pictures of dead people so bad?

She shook her head mutely. There was no way to explain even if she had wanted to.

Is he screwin dead women or what?

She didn’t reply. She wondered idly if it had been the money Breece was paying him or just a perverse desire to see the pictures that had set him in motion.

He crossed the room toward her. Maybe you got em on you.

I ain’t, though. I’m not that stupid.

It might be fun to look.

How much is he paying you, anyway? Sutter considered a moment. A thousand dollars, he said.

They’re worth a lot more than that. Me and Kenneth’ll give you five thousand and all you got to do is leave us alone.

He just looked at her.

Half, then.

It’s a hard fact that half of nothin is nothin, too. That’s what you’ve got and what you’re goin to wind up with.

He grasped her shirt, a hand to each side of her collar. When he yanked buttons spun off and she stood with the shirt hanging open. When she made to hold it together, he slapped her. He unpocketed the knife and pressed a button on its mother-of-pearl side, and the blade snicked out. He slid the blade between her breasts, dull side in. Let’s see what’s under here, he said. When he pulled the knife outward, the narrow edge of cold steel sliced the strap between the brassiere cups. He uncovered her breasts, studied them clinically. No pictures here, he said. Nothin here but titties.

She was crying. You’re going to pay for this, you son of a bitch.

She could hear the truck laboring up the hill. He heard it too, stood in an attitude of listening, the knife still clenched in his fist. A moment later and the walls moved with the shadows of treebranches, the fence, sliding along the wall like illusory images propelled by some enormous wind.

He got a gun in that truck?

I don’t know what he’s got.

You holler and I swear I’ll kill you. I’ll cut your throat, then hide behind the door and cut his.

Crazy, she said, so softly she might have been talking about herself.

Footsteps crossed the porch, and the door opened. Tylerstood for a moment framed darkly against the paler dark outside. He held a thermos bottle in one hand; a toolbelt dangled from the other. His eyes grew wide and seemed to take in the whole room at once. His mouth opened but he didn’t say anything.

Everything looked harsh and surreal: What he saw was Sutter standing slightly behind her holding her left arm twisted between her shoulder blades. The blade of the knife lay across her throat. She was attempting to hold the shirt closed but her right breast was exposed. She had her eyes clenched shut, and her face was twisted in pain.

I don’t believe you thought I was serious, Sutter said.

He released the girl and stepped away from her. He closed and pocketed the knife. Fix them clothes, he told the girl. He grinned at Tyler. She can’t keep her clothes on. Somethin about me affects women that way. She’d’a had mine off, you hadn’t of showed up when you did.

Sooner or later I am fixing to kill you, Tyler said. If you don’t kill me first. You had no business going after my sister any such chickenshit way as this. You already told me. I thought you’d be man enough to come after me.

Sutter shrugged. Whatever works, he said.

He watched intent form in Tyler’s eyes, and when Tyler threw the thermos he sidestepped and heard it smash against the wall somewhere behind him. When Tyler came for him he just feinted left and slammed Tyler in the side of the head with his fist. Tyler staggered and swung the toolbelt hard but Sutter caught it onehanded and jerked and when Tyler came stumbling into range Sutter drove a fist into Tyler’s abdomen and the boy’s breath exploded outward in a harsh whoosh and he sat down hard and rolled over. By the time he got upSutter was sitting on the couch with the rifle across his lap. Now get out the memory box and let’s look at them old family pictures, he said.

I don’t have them, Tyler said. Someone’s keeping them for me.

Sure they are. You just handed them over for somebody to keep a few days. You think I just fell off the haywagon? Shit, Tyler, you can do better than that.

I went to the law with them. Sheriff Odel’s got them. I told them the whole thing, and they’re going to be looking for you. You better not touch my sister again.

Fact is, I know you went to the law. But you went with some cock-and-bull story about me and your sister. Odel done talked to me about it. We had a laugh and a little drink, and he left thinking you was either a troublemaker or kind of light in the head. A blackmailer runnin to the law is one of the stupider things I ever heard of.

There is just no way you can get away with this.

Watch me. We’re in the process of me getting away with it right now.

Tyler was silent a time. He glanced at his sister. Don’t tell him, she said, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

They’re in the truck, Tyler said at length.

Sutter rose from the couch. We’ll see if they are, he said. You go first. Little Sister stays with me. I’ve got a knife on her, and you try anything even approachin what you done awhile ago, she gets another slit cut in a place where she’s got no use for one.

The truck sat facing the house. Tyler was wishing he’d left it pointed outward bound. A cool wind was looping up through the pines. They sighed softly. A three-quarter moon the colorof bone hung suspended over them, and the truck gleamed dully.

Where in the truck?

They’re taped under the dash. If you want them, you’ll have to get them out.

Not in a million fuckin years.

Tyler opened the truck door and lay back across the seat. Hands behind his head and fumbling under the dashboard. A myriad of wires here. He felt the tobacco can ducttaped behind the radio.

Hell, it’s gone, he said.

Involuntarily Sutter leant forward as if he’d look too. Tyler kicked him in the chest as hard as he could with both booted feet and before Sutter struck the ground he was immediately scrambling to get under the steering wheel. He was already cranking the truck when Sutter dropped the rifle and went stumbling backward and fell. Get the hell in here, Tyler was yelling. Move it.

She jumped in and sat holding the door handle. When the engine caught Tyler popped the clutch and spun it backward in the gravel not knowing or caring where Sutter was or even if he was under the wheels. He slammed the shift lever into low and went sidewise out of the driveway with the rear wheels fishtailing onto the road. Shut the door, he said, but she just sat there. She seemed not to know where she was. She was very pale. He glanced back once, but he didn’t see Sutter, which was just as well, for there was an explosion behind them, and both windshields erupted in flying pellets of safety glass. What the hell do we do now? he asked aloud, but he was already doing all there was to do. Get down, he told her. Shut that door and lay down in the seat. She slidobediently down in the seat but left the door flopping and when Tyler reached an arm across her to close it they were already going too fast for the curve.

He was trying to correct the skid the truck was in but the rear tires were already schoolhopping along on the packed chert when there was a dull boom and a tire went and the truck spun with the windshield opening an elongated frieze of fleeing trees and inexplicably the house itself sliding toward the edge of the world. The truck was riding eerily sideways on the embankment with brush whipping the rocker panels and headlights lost in the halfgrown pines they were riding over. He was afraid to break the truck’s momentum by slowing and he had some halfcrazed idea he might get back on the road where the curve ended if he could just keep the truck from flipping. The right side of the truck was topmost and it kept defying gravity and bouncing playfully upward then returning to the ground again. Her weight had slid against him and the door kept banging. If he’d continued downward he might have made it but where his course intersected the road he cut right and when he did the right side of the truck lifted and would not settle back. It stood eerily balanced for a moment like a carnival trickrider then rolled upward and over in a cacophony of rending metal and breaking glass and the grating shriek of steel sliding across stone. She’d slid away from him when the truck rolled and when it slid again she was gone.

The truck righted pointed downhill with headlights cocked into the onrushing trees that were just a whirlpool of light he was driving into. He was in the floorboard when the truck slammed into a tree and ceased in a final outrage of breaking glass and he was out immediately to find her. His next thought was for the cover of the trees, he wanted it desperately.

He could not feel anything broken but something had peeled the skin from his shin and he was bleeding into his boot. All the while he was feeling for broken bones he was looking wildly about for her and he could hear brush popping somewhere and he knew that Sutter was already coming at a run.

A white body strewn on the homemade road they’d constructed. He leapt deadfalls of broken pine skinned bonewhite in the moonlight to where she was sprawled and caught her up under the armpits and dragged her toward the truck. She seemed slack and unwilled as a sack of grain and he kept talking to her but she didn’t answer.

At the truck he dragged the rifle from behind the seat. He untaped the Prince Albert can from beneath the dash. His hands were shaking and it seemed to take him forever. Something kept dripping out of the truck and onto the leaves, drip, drip, some vital fluid, his truck was bleeding to death. He shoved the can in his hip pocket and caught her up again and started for the woods. All the breath he had was just a ragged sob in his throat. He won’t shoot, he was thinking; he don’t know for sure where the pictures are. To show what he’d learned of Sutter the moon rode from behind a skiff of ragged clouds and a bullet thocked solidly to earth, sending chunks of dirt skittering away across the girl, and another sang off somewhere in the treebranches.

He’d stopped stockstill, mindless of the bullets, just staring at her. She lay with her head pillowed facedown on her breast. Arms outflung defenselessly. As if the world was coming at her at a blinding rate of speed and she’d thrown up her hands to thwart it. All he could see was the dishwaterblonde of the back of her head and when he gently righted it it moved without resistance like something moving underwater. Her eyes were open with the exposed whites rolled upward and he could see the dark freckles against her colorless face and her pale breasts bared without shame and her hair all caught with leaves and sticks like some luckless soul drowned and beached here by a receding tide.

He’d begun to cry. Keening some inarticulate grief over her broken body. All the cruel things said and done, the kind ones saved for later. Could I but do it over.

He lowered her head gently and closed her eyes and took up the gun. He’d thought when he made the woods he might lie up in the brush and kill Sutter but the light was chancy at best and what he wanted most right now was to hear her voice, for things to be the way they had been scant minutes before with her weight against his shoulder but the clockhands would not roll backward. What he needed was distance. There was a hellhound on the trail and when the dark sanctuary of trees swallowed him he just kept on going.

Yet sometime past midnight he came cautiously back through the timber again, and the field was alive with activity. He watched with an almost dispassionate bemusement varicolored lights flickering like spirit lamps, dark folk moving about the field. Disembodied voices almost surreal in this clockless hour drifted to him without clarity or coherence. The staccato static of a scanner like a dispassionate chorus commenting on the depths his life had fallen to. An ambulance backed out onto the roadway and tires slewed on gravel and it sped offtoward town. He waited for a siren but there was none forthcoming. It vanished in silence and he sat watching its lights wind up into the hills. A bitter grief lay in him like a stone.

Another vehicle backed around and its headlights swept the field and ceased and he could see black figures moving about in the light. A wrecker with its revolving strobe. A figure at the wrecker was paying out cable across the field toward Tyler’s truck.

He sat getting his courage up. His story straight. At length he rose and started to enter the field and then he stopped. There was a dread familiarity about one of the figures. The angular unmistakable shape of Sutter. Shouting something back from where Tyler’s truck sat canted against the tree. Instructions, directions, who knew? Overseeing all this perhaps. The world had turned strange and seemed to proceed without logic, or any logic he could follow. Even as he watched the cable tautened and the wrecker backed further into the field to provide more slack, and Sutter hooked the cable and shouted. Once more the cable grew tight and the creaking winch slowly drew Tyler’s wrecked truck back into the field.

He hunkered at the edge of the wood and watched this shabby tableau. A wind stirred, clashed in the drying leaves. Leaves drifted about him but he did not notice. The wrecker was leaving with the pickup, climbing the steep embankment to the roadbed, its lights canted upward briefly limning moving trees then the clouds absorbed them and there was only a faint glow like some celestial light flaring behind them and the wrecker cut into the road with the headlights clearing out its path. Other engines cranked; all this seemed to be drawing to a close. One by one the other cars followed the wrecker likemourners in a funeral procession. Then the field lay dark and revenantial and silent and there came the cry of an owl.

Still he sat. He seemed to have nowhere else to be, no one in all the world to talk to. The image of the ambulance lights wending upward over the horizon of dark hills would not fade, it seemed to have seared itself onto his retinas. A lifetime ago she strolled up the roadbed toward the school bus, books clutched defensively against her breasts, her face already closed against the anticipated catcalls and whistles. A lifetime ago she led him to the first-grade door and released his hand and consigned him to life. Little sister Death, commended to Fenton Breece.

The house sat in the haunted glade. Fairytale cottage, gingerbread house, but where is the playful troll? The warlock seems not about. Somewhere about his rounds perhaps. A pale ribbon of nighcolorless smoke rose plumb from the flue and dissipated in the windless air.

Tyler pillowed his face against the polished walnut and squeezed the trigger. A windowlight went and he heard glass fall somewhere inside. He waited. A rifle barrel might appear at a shotout window. A warping face appear like a face from a nightmare. He profoundly hoped it would. He just lay there with the sun warm on his back shooting out window glasses. Playing X and O with the six-pane windows. When at length he was bored with this he reloaded the rifle and with it yoked across his shoulders he went off down the slope toward the house.

No soul about. The room still held a vestigial heat thoughthe fire had burned down and the heater when he laid a palm to it was only warm. He looked about. The room was neat and austere. Yesterday’s dishes washed and put away on the drainboard. Cot carefully made.

He opened the door and looked into the stove. A bed of coals waxed and waned in their delicate cauls of ash. Suddenly he wrenched the heater over. It toppled on its side in a hail of falling stovepipes and drifting soot. He scattered the coals with a foot. The linoleum darkened, then bubbled beneath them. He piled on the neat chintz window curtains, torn pages from old farm magazines, whatever seemed combustible. He knelt and blew his fire. A flame flickered, caught, a thin cutting edge of fire.

He went out.

Most of the morning Sutter was hid out by the Tyler place waiting for something to happen. The law to return, the boy to turn up. He’d had time to alter the scene in the field to some degree by calling the law himself and he wasn’t overly worried about the local law but Tyler might have it in his head to make it to the state or to Bellwether and he had to have the pictures before that happened. But this morning nothing happened at all. The place seemed vacant, abandoned, a dreamlike place where no one lived anymore.

He went down and searched some more. He didn’t find anything. Memorabilia, relics, the castoff souvenirs of life. They seemed to have possessed precious little worth keeping. He went out and hunkered in the yard watching the road and thinking while he smoked a cigarette. If I was arabbit, he thought, and a fox jumped out of the bushes on me, which way would I run? Would I stick to the road where there was other rabbits, or would I head for the deep pineys? In his heart he knew. A rabbit would cut for the deep pineys every time. And if the rabbit had any idea of making it to Ackerman’s Field, the shortest way was across the Harrikin. If the rabbit was fool enough to chance it. He stood up. There seemed little point in rushing in blind. He’d ask around a bit.

By midday he was in Patton’s store. He was eating cheese and crackers and drinking a dope when a man said with a patently spurious air of concern, Shore sorry to hear about your house, Granville. Did you manage to save anything?

Do what? he asked in a spray of cheese and crackers.

Did you manage to get any of your stuff out of the fire?

I’m a son of a bitch, he said. He slammed the bottle down on the dopebox and went out.

It was true what the man had said. He crouched before the quaking ashes. The day had turned chill and he held his hands outstretched for the warmth. He just sat staring mutely at all that was left of his home as if his mind would not quite accept it.

Rabbit my ass, he said at length.

He thought of a rabbit he’d run down and caught as a boy, hemming it in the tall grass. Its soft fur shrouding the delicate bone, its eyes almost confused with fear, its fierce little heart hammering against his cupped hands.

The deputy carefully laid the warrant back on the highsheriff’s desk. He shifted his weight in the folding chair. He cleared his throat.

I’m supposed to serve that?

The sheriff finished paring his nails and put away the penknife. Well, it’s a state warrant. I figured you still planned on drawin your pay the fifteenth. Christmas comin on and all.

Hell, he’ll go right through the roof. You know he shot it out with Radio Atkinson that time. Run him plumb off.

Then he’ll just have to go, Odel said. If you hang up your badge and retire, then somebody else’ll just have to go. He’s goin through the roof all the same.

Yeah, but I won’t have to see it.

Suit yourself.

You want to ride out there with me?

About as much as I want acute appendicitis.

The deputy drove out the Riverside Road. He drove slowly, taking in all the scenery. The day was very bright and he felt it just might be the last of his life. All this he might never see again. Sweet scrub blackjack. Beer cans and Coke bottles and windblown candywrappers pressed like dubious gifts onto the honeysuckle. Shotgun shanties with folk sitting about their leaning porches taking their ease. They seemed in no immediate peril. No warrants for Granville Sutter riding like malignant melanoma in their breast pockets. Before he reached Sutter’s gingerbread house he braked the car and checked the load in his revolver and placed it on the seat between his legs.

Piss on it, he said aloud. Let’s go get the big mean son of a bitch.

But the gingerbread house was gone. In its place mounded gray ashes. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was oneof those miracles when the gods pity and spare you that only happens once in a life. He kept looking about the still empty woods and back at the ashes. He approached them. There was yet a faint and fugitive warmth.

He sat in silence. The day had perceptibly brightened. All the sound there was was the car idling and the faroff calling of a mourning dove.

Gone like a bigassed bird, he breathed. He looked across the folded dreamlike horizons to the far blue timber of the Harrikin.

If you drove out the Riverside Road through the flatlands and crossed the high trestle bridge over Little Buffalo, then went on past the alluvial riverbottoms to where the earth begins to rise in a series of folds that become hills and hollows and sheer limestone bluffs, and if you kept roughly parallel to the river at some indeterminate point, you would be in the Harrikin. The road would fade to a ghostroad, the timber would thicken, the earth begin to climb in ascending hills. You would begin to come upon abandoned farms whose acreage bore only the faint spectral traces of tillage. Fallen houses with their broken ridgepoles and blind windows and windscattered shakes that are home now only to the foxes and dirtdaubers and the weathers. Tiny gray crackerbox shacks with dark, doorless apertures and tin roofs skewered with rusted stovepipes. Landscaped by the winds with the fallen leaves of decades. A series of them like a housing development brought to fruition by the profoundly impoverished. The roads meander and cross each other. They deadend and vanish. There are occasionally the ruins of houses where no road ever existed, once occupied by folk who had no need for anything wider than a footpath.

Once this land was privately owned. Now it is owned by companies or conglomerates of companies in Atlanta, Chicago, New York. By people who have never seen it, are perhaps unaware even of its existence.

It was bought up in blocks by other companies in the first days of the previous century for next to nothing. It was rich in phosphate, in iron ore. There were boom times for a while. A town sprang up virtually overnight. Originally it was the county seat of Overton County, though the Harrikin itself extends over into two other adjoining counties. A railroad bisects it, but the track is unused, as are the roads, and honeysuckle and kudzu cover its rails with impunity. There was a company store, a jail, a post office. Graveyards, one black, one white. Flush times. The heads of these companies grew very rich. The miners subsisted. They made enough for their families to survive. Those with other inclinations made enough to support the whiskeymerchants and whores and cardsharks who had materialized the first payday by some intuition of money approaching magic and these selfsame cardsharks and whores when the mines were shut down vanished like rats scuttling down capsizing decks.

The earth was sunk with vertical shafts, with horizontal tunnels. Great pits were eaten to the surface with pick and shovel and machinery, and some of this machinery is there yet, rusting back into the earth.

When the mines closed and the railroad shut down the town died and the money quit the people left like the Maya abandoning their cities to build other cities and all thatremained were the few families who’d refused to sell their land and itinerant squatters staking dubious claim to what no one else wanted and misanthropic misfits who felt some perverse kinship with this deserted, tortured land. Some of these folk did not, in a sense, exist. They paid no taxes, were listed on no courthouse rolls. They owned no Social Security numbers, having neither applied for nor received anything from the federal government, in fact only vaguely aware of its existence, its distant machinations only rumored to them. Census taking in the Harrikin was haphazard at best. There were folks born here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead.

The Harrikin grew wild. Trees sprouted up through the works of man. Kudzu and wild grapevines climbed the machinery until ultimately these machines seemed some curious hybrid of earth and steel. Roads faded and the woods took them until there was nothing to show that wheels or hooves or feet had ever passed here. Brush and honeysuckle obscured the sunken shafts, and horses or whatever trod here might abruptly have what they’d taken for solid earth suddenly vanish beneath their feet. Livestock wander into the Harrikin and are seen no more. Hunters have vanished as well, folks who thought they knew the woods lose their sense of direction in these woods, even compasses go fey and unreliable.

It was called the Harrikin long before the thirties when the tornado cut a swath through it. Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another. This one came up through Alabama in 1933 and set down in the Harrikin as if it had had its ticket punched for there all along. It ripped away the roof of the old Perrie mansion that had stood since the eighteen-forties, and lesser houses it reduced to kindling wood or just whisked off to somewhere else. It snapped off trees and hurled them into hollows like flung jackstraws, and when it was gone the Harrikin was more of a maze than ever. Roads and paths were blocked, streams dammed and rerouted. The woods were full of deadfalls. Most of the folk who’d been dispossessed, and some who hadn’t, moved on somewhere else. The Harrikin was becoming a symbol for ill luck.

A time would come within twenty-five years when all this would be changed. When timber began to thin the companies who owned these half-forgotten properties realized their potential, and paper companies bought the timber and ravaged the land again and planted pine seedlings, and the Harrikin did not exist anymore.

But all this was not yet. When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protege, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.