A spring came out of a rocky hillside and rusted steel pipes virid with moss had been driven back into the rocks. There was a tin cup affixed to a cutoff sprout but Tyler drank from his cupped hands then washed his face in the cold water. All he could hear was the rushing water and the air was heady with the scent of peppermint.

He had come up a rainwashed gully through a clutter of floodleft debris, old bottomless buckets and washtubs and mudclogged cartires worn out so finally there were booted holes in them. The gully ascended in a tangle of blackberry briars and leveled out into a walnut grove, and he could see the back of a house. Whitewashed, respectable, middle-class. He moved to the cover of a shed and skirted a rotting grape arbor with gray deadlooking vines and past a curious machine from which wires appended to poles led to the house. He scaled a sedgecovered slope into the sun and went on to the summit and lay in the warm grass watching the house. Somewhere off in the distance a tardy cock crowed daybreak.

After a while a heavyset woman came out of the house carrying a dishpan. He judged her to be middleaged. She went purposefully up the roadway to a gardenspot andstooped and began to gather turnip greens.

He didn’t think there was anyone else about: there was no stock to see after, and the place seemed to be going to seed, as if there were no husband about to keep it in repair. He decided to chance it, he didn’t figure he really had a choice anyway. He went around the back side of the ridge and down to the shed again and up the back steps of the house. The door was ajar as if in standing invitation to whoever might chance by. There was only a screendoor, and that was unlatched.

A cool, serried gloom smelling of years, decay. The sun was faint and heatless through dirtspecked glass. He was in a storeroom stacked nigh to the ceiling with boxes and boxes of what looked like old farm magazines, seed catalogs, newspapers. Cases of empty fruitjars. He was looking for a larder or a kitchen, and this wasn’t it. He went cautiously out.

Into a hall smelling of lemon oil and floor wax. Doors stood open, and he peered in to see if there was anyone else about. A bedroom with a cherry fourposter bed. A picture in a heavy oval frame. From it a young couple stared at him across time with vaguely accusing eyes.

The kitchen had a window above the sink and it gave him a view of the yard but not the garden and he figured he better hurry. In a cupboard there was a stack of brown paper bags folded and laid up for reuse and he took one and began to search for food. Under a cloth on the table he found the remains of breakfast. Here was provender beyond his expectations: biscuits and leftover sausage patties and a pint jar of what appeared to be strawberry preserves. He dumped the sausages and bread into the bag and turned to look for more. In a piesafe he found a loaf of homebaked bread and twobeautifully browned pies. He slid one carefully into the bag, cradling it so as not to crush it, and turned about and stood a moment as if in indecision and then took the other one as well. He found a tin can half-full of ground coffee and took that and was already at the door and outward bound when the thought of the strawberry preserves struck him. He’d read once it was bad practice to shop on an empty stomach and so was forewarned. The strawberry preserves were his undoing. When he had them in the bag and had turned to leave there were heavy footsteps. A shadow darkened the room. There was only one door out of the kitchen and the heavyset woman was standing in it staring at him with eyes huge with surprise.

Well, if you ain’t the beat, she said. Sneakthievin in broad daylight.

Tyler was gripping the bag bothhanded and ready should she give him leeway through the door but she was standing in it with the dishpan of greens on her hip and there was not room to get past her.

What’ve you been up to, you thievin little scoundrel? What’ve you got in that sack?

Just food, Tyler said. What was left from breakfast mainly.

Well, if you don’t take the ribbon. I reckon you was just too proud to knock on the door and ask for somethin to eat. You don’t seem too qualmy about sneakin in the back door and helpin yourself, though.

I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been here, Tyler said. There’s a man lookin for me, and I’d just as soon he didn’t know which way I’m going.

I’ll just bet there’s a man lookin for you, the woman said. It’d be my guess he wears a badge and got a paper in hispocket with your name on it.

No, not the law. This man aims to kill me. I’m looking for the law, going to find Sheriff Bellwether.

Well, he ain’t in my kitchen, she said. Her eye had wandered to the piesafe. The telltale door ajar. Her eyes narrowed. And if you been in them apple pies I baked for the church social, I aim to kill you myself. Them was as fine a apple pies as I ever made, and they wadn’t made for the likes of you.

She made a tentative step or two toward the piesafe and when she did Tyler made a run for the outside world. He made the door but not through it for she had anticipated him and stepped back and slammed him with a heavy hip into the door frame then bonged his head hard with the dishpan.

Goddamn, he said.

Blaspheme in this kitchen again and I’ll lay this pan upside your head a little harder, she said. Now you set right there a minute.

She stepped across him through the door, and he heard another door abruptly open and as abruptly close and she was back with an enormous shotgun breeched down and she was fitting a shell in the chamber. The gun was nigh as long as Tyler was tall and its elongated barrel was lustreless and crept with brown lichens of rust.

Now let’s see what all you’ve helped yourself to, she said. Dump that poke out.

Tyler’s miserable chattel aligned on the kitchen floor. The pies had been illy used. He’d fallen on them and one was broken into two sections and the other was crushed flat on one side and dripping apple juice. She just looked at them in silence. After a time she slowly raised the barrel until it was pointing into Tyler’s face. Now mister, she said, you fix them pies.

Do what?

Man oughtn’t to break nothing he can’t fix. Fix em like they was.

Hellfire, he said. I can’t fix them. You can’t fix pies. They’re broken. Anyway, you did it. You pushed me down on them.

He’d fallen into the hands of a madwoman here. Someone too long alone who dwelt in a surreal realm where the punishment for piethievery was death by shotgunning and the alchemy by which crushed pies were made whole was commonplace.

He shrugged helplessly. I’ll pay you for them.

A wisp of irongray hair curled over one eye. She blew it away. She still held the gun trained on him, and she was watching him with fey cunning.

If you got money, then how come you sneakin in my back door sackin things up?

I told you. There’s a man looking for me, and I don’t want him to know where I am. He’ll probably be around here asking questions, and the less you know, the less you can tell him.

What makes you think I’d tell him anything atall?

You’d tell him all right. He’s clever. He’d find out.

Where you from, anyway?

He didn’t know why he lied, but he did. He just did it instinctively. Shipp’s Bend, he said. Over on the other side of Centre.

I know where Shipp’s Bend is. You got a name? And this feller after you, he wouldn’t be named Tyler, would he? Man from over on Lick Creek?

What makes you think that?

She didn’t answer immediately but she lowered the gun. All the meanness around is one reason I always been in the Harrikin. Now I reckon you’ve tracked it in here. You hear about that girl getting herself killed over on Lick Creek?

No.

Tyler girl got killed in a truck wreck. Heard about it this mornin. Her and her brother both drunk and her killed when they turned the truck over. A young girl layin out dead in a field with whiskey all over her and inside her. I’d hate to meet my maker with whiskey on my breath, wouldn’t you?

I get that close I don’t expect to have much of a breath left, Tyler said. He couldn’t have told you what words he spoke. His mind was full of what she had told him about the dead girl in the field.

Make sport of me if you want to. It ain’t me found dead cut all over from a broke whiskey bottle. Nor me that’s run off and hid and bein hunted by the sheriff for manslaughter neither.

I got to get on, Tyler said.

Get on where? To find some other house to break into? I reckon not.

Just let me pay for this mess, and I’ll get on out of the way.

Oh, you’ll pay, all right. I’m still studyin on that one. In good time maybe you’ll go. Why do you think a feller would leave his sister in a fix like that and run just worryin about hisself?

I don’t know, Tyler said.

The old woman’s eyes had turned hard and bitter. Whiskey, she said contemptuously. I wonder when folks’ll ever learn that more comes out of a whiskey bottle than card games and loose women.

Something in her vindictive tone made Tyler ask, Was your man a drinker?

Cecil was a Church of Christ preacher, she said, as if oneprecluded the other.

Anyway, I got to go.

She seemed to have come to some decision. You aim to paint that Delco before you go anywhere, she said.

That what?

That Delco. It don’t make the lights anymore, but I want it painted anyway. Things is went down around here without a man on the place. Cecil painted it ever year right up till the year he died. It quit right after that, too. Ain’t that peculiar?

I don’t even know what one is.

You just before findin out. Sack that stuff back up, and after that Delco’s painted you can have it and be gone with ye.

They went down a narrow corridor that smelled of time and solitude. Tyler could see into rooms piled nigh to the ceiling with mounded clothing and stacked newsprint. As if she expected to live forever and had laid by a permanent supply of raiment and reading matter.

She kept prodding him with the gun. Quit that, he said. I can walk without being shoved along with a shotgun.

Stop and study this picture, she told him.

She gestured wallward with the barrel of the shotgun. You might learn something, she said. You might learn ever act you commit moves you one way or the other. Towards Heaven or towards Hell. Hadn’t you rather be moving towards Heaven as the other place? Study this picture. If you wind up down there roastin in Hell rollin and tumbling in them hot coals it won’t be for lack of bein told.

Like visitors in some curious museum they stood side by side looking at a painting. Faint mottled light from a dingy bedroom window. The picture showed a graveyard. Tombstones capsizing, graves exploding upward, the air full of cemetery dirt. Folks in their graveyard shrouds or funeral silks ascending skyward like startled birds, their arms stretched winglike in supplication or benediction, their faces rapt in the beatific light that hovered over them.

That’s the rapture, she said. When the dead awakes and them what’s goin goes.

Her voice was touched by a nostalgic yearning, as if she had her ticket in hand and foot already raised to climb on board.

Where do you reckon you’ll be on that great getting up morning?

Tyler thought about it. He studied the picture. As far away from this mess as I can get, he said. I reckon I’ll just wait till they get up another load.

I know where you’ll be, she told him with satisfaction. And you’re not goin to like it.

They went out the front door and around to the back of the house. The generator was behind the shed. delco, raised letters on the side said. She had found a bucket of paint and an old illcleaned brush. He pried the lid off the paint bucket with the blade of his pocketknife. The paint was turgid and a vile green. A slick, oily scum rode the top of it. He stirred it with a stick. The woman had brought a lawn chair and seated herself to watch with the gun laid across her knees.

You don’t need the gun, he said. I’ll paint this crazy thing for you, whatever it is, without a shotgun being held on me.

I feel better with it, she said. Desperate folks around here lately, seems like. You never know what’ll come bustin out of the woods next.

He dipped the brush into the paint. You better hang onto itthen, he said. Because the next fellow out of the woods is a lot more desperate than I am.

He began to paint the generator. Upon contact with the paint the brush had swollen up to twice its size and become virtually unmanageable and it was like trying to paint with a halfgrown housecat.

You got a better brush?

That’s the only one I know of, sonny. Just do the best you can.

You want all these little wires and everything painted?

Just paint where Cecil did. Where it was painted before. It wouldn’t surprise me if the lights come on and the icebox worked after you get a good coat of paint on it. It’s goin to be a comfort havin this thing painted even if they don’t, though. You know, I never noticed that grape arbor goin down like it is. That thing’s nearly rotten, ain’t it?

The grapevines are dead anyway.

They may come out in the spring. I’ve seen em do it before. I believe we’ll just put a good coat of paint on it when we get through with this Delco.

It’s about rotted down. Paint won’t help that.

He wanted desperately to be gone. He didn’t know if she’d shoot or not and he didn’t know if she was as crazy as she acted and he halfsuspected she had known all along who he was and was just trying to keep him here. To collect the reward for a manslaughterer perhaps. He had a nightmare vision of Sutter leaping upon him while this old woman forced him at gunpoint to paint everything on the place this vile green.

She was studying the grape arbor musingly. You may be right at that, she said. We took a couple of them old palins ouof the barn yonder and braced it first, it’d be better. Can you drive a nail as well as you steal apple pies?

Just about, he said.

I got a hammer and some nails in the house. You reckon I could trust you to go on paintin while I go in the house and get em?

I don’t know what you’ve got to lose besides an unpainted grape arbor. Anyway, I can’t outrun buckshot.

You’d be the very fool to try it, though, she said. I believe I’ll just take this with me and keep a eye on you out the winder. You use your own judgment about whether you can outrun shot or not. She shouldered the shotgun and trudged heavily toward the house.

He looked at the sun. Pale washedout sun of the winter solstice. It stood at midmorning. He looked back to his work and went on painting until the screendoor slammed to behind her. He made one last stroke and wiped the brush on the rim of the bucket. He put the lid on the bucket and tapped it home with a fist and laid the brush neatly atop it and walked off rapidly toward the walnut grove. He was already in it and moving fast when he heard the creak of the keeperspring and her call, Boy?

He was down the gully recovering the rifle when she called, I won’t shoot you. Boy?

He kept on going. She kept on calling Boy fainter and fainter with his progress, and finally he couldn’t hear her anymore.

He followed Little Buffalo out of the Harrikin and by midafternoon he was near a road. He could hear an occasional car drone by on the flatlands, and when he began to hear them downshifting to second he knew he was near the hills leading away from the river. He veered right across a sandbar of silt and gravel. There was a thick fishy smell in the air and in stagnant backwater pools there were rotting carp discarded from someone’s trotline.

The sandbar ended and he was in a brake of wild cane grown with tangles of wild grapevines and it was heavy going. When it ended it ended so abruptly he stepped through it like an actor making a curtain call in an untended field and he could see the roadway and a fence winding along beside it on the other side.

The day had warmed pleasantly and the sky when he glanced upward at it was cloudless and very blue. He knew vaguely but not precisely where he was and he knew Patton’s store was somewhere about. He crossed the fence and came out on the blacktop swinging the rifle along by his side. The only car that passed passed oblivious of him, for he’d crouched in a dry gully watching cautiously through a curtain of dry pigweed and then he came out and went on.

Within a mile he could see the hills where the roads converged, and he could make out the gaspumps in front of the store. The field to the right was given over to an enormous graveyard for wrecked automobiles or those deceased from natural causes, and he crossed through the barbed-wire fence and followed a footpath worn between the rows of cars. Perverse sampling of Detroit’s wares. Old partsrobbed Hudsons and DeSotos and Studebakers. A black Buick Roadmaster that seemed to have been dropped from some enormous height, so caved and buckled was it. Discarded emptycarton death had come in.

At the store he prowled the aisles studying the shelves, trying to decide what to take. He selected tinned Vienna sausages and pork and beans. Little packages of crackers. He bought thick bars of Hershey chocolate and a small tin of snuff just for the tin to keep matches in, and he bought matches. As an afterthought in consideration of bad weather, he bought a lined pair of cotton gloves and a woolen Navy watchcap.

The storekeep was totting all this up on a brown paper bag. Lastly Tyler took a dripping Coke from the icewater in the dopebox and set it on the wooden counter.

I make it four dollars and a nickel. Be a penny more if you aim to take the bottle with you.

I almost forgot. I need a box of. 22 long rifles.

The storekeep fetched up the ammunition from beneath the counter. Looks like you might be headin into the Harrikin huntin.

I was thinking about it.

Best be careful less you’re used to it. I got lost once in there diggin sang and like to never come out. Went in with the sun shinin and it darkened up and come up a cloud and I didn’t know east from west. Barely knowed up from down. They tell you moss grows on the north side of trees, but, hell, back in there it was growin all the way around em. I walked till I thought I’d drop and finally wound up over in the corner of Lawrence County. Not a bit over twenty-five miles from where I thought I was at. And glad to be there, what I mean. Glad to be anywhere it was houses and folks. Be four-eighty with the shells.

Tyler handed him a five, pocketed the change. Your name wouldn’t be Tyler by any chance, would it?

He thought about it a minute. What the hell. His fame seemed to be preceding him somehow. Yes, he said.

Thought it might be. Granville Sutter said you’d be in. Told what you looked like. Said tell you he’d see you on the road somewheres.

Thanks, Tyler said. There was a point of cold ice at the nape of his neck, as if someone had touched him gently there with the point of an icepick. When was he in?

Not morn an hour ago. You hurry you might catch him. Or he might be waitin on you. You goin in the Harrikin, Granville’s a good un to go with. He knows it, or ort to, much as he’s laid out in there hidin from the law.

Well. Thanks for telling me. I’d better be getting on.

Come back, the storekeep said.

The boy passed through the wrecked cars, his purchases in a tow sack slung over his shoulder. Sutter from behind a crumpled Lincoln watched him go. Down the blued length of rifle barrel. He laid a cheek against the smooth walnut. Peered into the scope and aligned the crosshairs behind Tyler’s left ear. Tyler seemed very close, Sutter felt he could almost see into the skull and read the thoughts there. Sunlight in the soft blond stubble on Tyler’s cheeks.

Bang, he said softly.

Something akin to disappointment touched him. He hadn’t thought it would be this easy, had expected more of a contest than the sorry showing Tyler had made. He wanted Tyler to think he was going to make it. To be giddy with victory, the money within grasp, Ackerman’s Field a few feet away. Sutter still couldn’t believe Tyler’s nerve: that he could think he could burn Granville Sutter’s house for no more than the price of amatch and then go about his business with impunity.

He was at war with himself. A part of him wanted to just kill him now and have done with it. On the other side of the scale, he had nothing else to do and no home to go to, and he was looking any day for more papers to come down. Son of a bitches in courthouses whose sole function was to prepare and serve papers with his name affixed to them.

A sense of the power he held over Tyler washed over him. He was ever the gambler. Fuck it, he decided. He lowered the rifle and just watched Tyler go. Eating his candy bar. Drinking his dope.

I’ll get you where folks ain’t so thick, he said. If I got you once, I can damn sure get you again. Who knows, I may even let you walk again. If it ain’t out of my reach. Like the cat told the mouse.

All day Tyler moved in the woods and all day the winds blew. He moved in a steady shifting of the depths of leaves that roiled and lifted and spun in whirlwinds and all he could hear was the rushing in the trees above him as if he moved through some convergence of all the world’s winds.

The perpetual winds grated on his nerves and he hoped they would abate with nightfall but they did not. He went on bearing what he judged was northeast well into the night by what moonlight there was and he moved through a world that was eerie and strange all black shadow and silver light. When he wearied he slept in a stumphole covered with dry leaves and even in his dreams he listened to the creaking of the branches bowering him and he dreamed stormtossed shipson perilous seas. He awoke once and the wind blew still, and he could hear the soft clashing of dry leaves and from somewhere in the night the faroff and faint chimes of belled goats or cattle, and he drew comfort that beyond all this dark there was somewhere a world of lights and men.

In his hushed world of locked doors and drawn shades Breece went dragging the radio across the hardwood floor. Its feet left little skidmarks on the waxed oak. This radio was a huge wooden Crosley console he could barely get his arms around and it was heavier than he’d expected. He ended up with a shoulder against it sliding it toward the double door that opened onto what had become the heart of Breece’s home, what he considered the business end of the embalming business, the parlor that held his worktable and pumps and chemicals and all the tools of his trade.

In other more social days Breece had told folks he listened to symphonies and concertos but in truth he had become addicted to a series of soap operas that divided his afternoons into fifteen minute increments. Our Gal Sunday, Young Widder Brown, Stella Dallas. Pepper Young’s Family. Tales of women jerked from obscurity into improbable adventures. Young girls from tiny Colorado mining towns who married rich and titled Englishmen, backstage wives who wondered in their more fatalistic moments if there was romance and happiness at the age of thirty-five, and beyond.

This was a baffling world that had become as tactile and real as his day-to-day existence. Yet a comforting limbo where it took forever for anything to be resolved, a vast slowmoving pageantry of incremental crisis, tales of folk who never developed an immunity to amnesia so that they caught it with bewildering regularity, who were constantly being framed and standing trial for murder, folks whose very identities seemed in constant flux because other folks were always stealing their identities and pretending to be them. Doppelgangers posing as wastrel scions of wealthy families rumored long lost in the Mateo Grosso were always turning up for the reading of the wills. Homespun philosophers ruminated and spat and shuffled and passed on shopworn homilies to descendents who didn’t want to hear them anyway and were black sheep forever wandering away from the flock.

He propped the doors wide with a hassock and a magazine rack and dragged the radio onto the tiled floor of the workroom. He stood for a moment breathing hard and perspiring almost audibly. He’d had a thought for one of the plastic tabletop radios that would have been more transportable but he’d tried one in the store and didn’t care for the tinny tone of it and thought of it as vastly inferior to the rich bass pronouncements and organ music that rolled authoritatively through the velvetcovered speakers of the Crosley. The Crosley’s words had the gravity of carved stone handed down ceremoniously from the mountain and a solemnity that dwarfed the tentative whinings of the tabletops. Anyway this room more and more was becoming his Badger’s den and he kept moving more of his favorite things into it until it had become living room and bedroom and above all his refuge from the world and its puzzling doings that transpired just outside his walls.

He was no more than inside the room before he halted his radio ministrations and closed the doors behind him. This doorhad a heavy lock that clicked to in an oiled reassuring manner and a solid deadbolt that he trusted and immediately shoved home. He felt suddenly lighter, cares lifted from him, he felt he could waltz the radio across the room to the wallplug, and humming to himself he slid it across the tile and plugged it in.

He turned it on and wound the dial around for WLAC and when he heard the organ theme music he turned his attention to the girl.

She lay on the table, her arms alongside her torso, hands open and palms up. Reclining so in her enforced and outraged placidity she looked like something you’d offer up from an altar for a dark god’s consideration.

He hadn’t decided where to keep her. His first thought had been to store her in his most expensive Eternalrest casket and keep her nearby but to Breece eternity was a relative term and he perhaps more than most men was aware of the perishability of the flesh. Already signs of her inherited mortality had been showing up and he’d been hard put to keep them at bay.

What am I going to do with you? he asked her.

She just lay with her sunken eyes and the teasing smirk of her painted hoyden’s face with its lacquered cupid’s bow mouth. He took up a spray bottle filled with glycerin and rosewater and misted her face so that it glowed as if it had been touched by the faintest of morning dew. The air smelled like spring, like butterflies and fresh green leaves. We’ll get you all fixed up, he told her. He stood looking down at her with his chin cupped in a palm and his face furrowed in an attitude of deep concentration. He’d read books on the ancient Egyptian embalmers and necromancers he considered part of his ancestry and already some of her more perishable organsresided in cambric jars awaiting resurrection and with her more delicate female organs he was experimenting with a more pliable and permanent contrivance of plastic and rubber.

Hush now, he told her. Stella Dallas is coming on.

He sat in an armchair listening. His face flickered like roiled waters, reflecting the emotions of the tale, the movement of the drama. Things had been building for days to a crisis stage. Stella and her daughter Lolly were in New York. Lolly had married a rich New Yorker from high society and Stella and her daughter were visiting Lolly’s inlaws. Then someone had stolen a priceless Egyptian mummy from a museum and framed Stella for the theft. This created all sorts of interfamilial discord and now Lolly’s mother-in-law was trying to get Stella jailed and prosecuted.

But Mommy, Lolly said, surely Mrs. Templeton can’t believe you stole her precious mummy.

Someone began to pound on the double doors and Breece’s world shifted instantaneously from the New York world of plundered museums to the workroom of his funeral parlor. He looked wildly about. The reassuring austerity of a room painted battleship gray, gray enameled appurtenances and equipment. Yet the pounding went on.

Breece didn’t get much walk-in trade but the door opening onto the street was left unlocked during the day so that folks could drop in and make their burial insurance payments or arrange funerals for their dead relatives. But now someone not easily discouraged had wandered in and actually begun to pound on his private door.

Lately he’d begun to let the business slide. He was even thinking about letting it go entirely and going away somewhere with the girl. Let them bury their own dead or let the dead rot and stink above ground until it sucked the carrion crows out of the trees like songbirds. Let all those freed souls burrow toward Hell on their own or scamper up ropeladders dropped from Heaven.

The pounding went on. Hey. Hey, a voice began to call. Hey undertaker man. Hey undertaker man.

Oh God, Breece thought. It’s Granville Sutter.

He leapt up and shut off the radio. Oh Lolly, sometimes I just don’t know about people, Stella was saying. He draped a sheet he kept handy over the girl and looked about to see if there were clues left about to snare him. No, there was nothing out of place. He unlocked the door and shouldered Sutter aside. Sutter was trying to see over Breece into the room but Breece managed to close the door and lock it behind him.

What are you up to, undertaker man?

What?

What are you up to? You’re sweatin and you’re red as a beet. You look like a kid his daddy caught him jackin off out behind the barn. What are you up to in there?

I was working.

Workin my ass. Workin some kind of devil’s business with that Tyler girl’d be my guess.

Poor old Mrs. Hull died. I’m preparing her for burial.

That’s a damned shame, Sutter said. About old Mrs. Hull. Although if there’s a Mrs. Hull back there or ever was it’d come as a big surprise to me.

What are you doing here?

We had talked about money.

Oh. Yes, I’d forgotten. Well, I picked it up and it’s in myoffice. Just walk this way.

They crossed the room, Sutter behind and miming Breece’s ducklike waddle. Breece went behind a desk and opened a drawer. He took out a manilla envelope and laid it before Sutter. This is half, he said. Everything is just the way we discussed it.

Sutter withdrew from the envelope a thick sheaf of bills. He licked a thumb and began to count bills onto another stack. He licked his thumb once for each fresh bill and he moved his lips as he counted.

Impatience flickered across Breece’s face. The bank counted it and they were satisfied, he said. I counted it and I was satisfied. It’s seventyfive hundred dollars.

Sutter stopped counting. He looked up. You know, Breece, he said, one of the five or six thousand things I don’t like about you is that you think you’re smart. You think because you went to a college in Memphis and learned how to puncture folk’s insides with Pop-Cola bottles you can run a number on me. Forget that. Put that thought away and don’t look at it no more. Now the bank counted and they were satisfied. You counted and you were satisfied. That’s a load off my mind, that you all were satisfied. But since it’s my money, how about if I count it my damn self? I like to be satisfied as well as the next man.

Breece made a tiny gesture of dismissal. Count by all means, he said. If you don’t trust me.

There’s damn small question about that. I don’t trust you worth a shit. And I pity the fool who does.

He went back to counting the small bills. Breece watched him. Lick the thumb, stack the bill, move the lips. Lick the thumb. Breece looked away, out the window. An old grayhaired lady was coming slowly up the sidewalk. Hobbling laboriously along on a walker. Every now and then she’d halt and lean on the walker to rest, her mouth open and gasping for oxygen like a fish suddenly jerked from water to air. Then when she’d caught her breath she’d come on. Breece thought for a fey moment she’d had some premonition and come to sit on his doorstep and wait.

At length Sutter seemed satisfied. He folded the money once and shoved it into a jean pocket and rose to go. Well I’m burnin daylight, he said. I got places to be.

Have you made any progress?

It depends on what you mean by progress. You’ve seen the result of some of that progress and I expect I could smell her on your fingers if I was a mind to. That playpretty I sent you special delivered in a hearse. That wasn’t supposed to be. That dead girl. If anybody was goin to be dead it was supposed to be that mouthy houseburnin brother of hers. Anyway this was supposed to be all about the pictures. Just get a stack of pictures and bring em to you. It went south too quick for me to stop and that dead playpretty is fixin to cost you some more money.

What do you mean?

Maybe I couldn’t have her talking. Maybe she had a little breath in her and I had to suck it out. Maybe her neck wasn’t twisted just right and I had to retwist it. Maybe I didn’t have as much time as I needed to set that wreck up in a way the law would buy. Or go on buyin. Anyway it’ll all show up on the bill.

Sutter’s air of uncertainty emboldened Breece. Seventy-five hundred dollars seems to buy an awful lot of maybes, he said carefully. I’d like a little more certainty. I explained to you that it’s crucial that I get those pictures back. I’ll get your precious pictures. Maybe when I bring em I’ll bring that boy so you’ll have a matched set of playpretties. Like salt and pepper shakers. How’d that suit you?

Just get those pictures.

Sutter stood up. I’ll leave you and poor old Mrs. Hull to finish your business, he said.

When he’d gone Breece still sat in his office chair. Hands palm down on the desk before him. He could see no way to return to the previous scene of domesticity when he and Corrie had been listening to his stories. Winter light crept across the windowglass. He closed his eyes against the images that assailed them. Something that he’d set in motion shambled toward him. He’d been strenuously winding the spring of a device that would ultimately impale him. He didn’t know what to do. Sutter was going to become more expensive than he could afford and he was going to run his mouth. Perhaps there was someone he could hire to kill Sutter.

He leaned his face into his hands like one stricken by grief. He envisioned a long line of folks set in motion each one stalking the one set in motion previous but he was all out of exonerated murderers and he didn’t know if he could do it himself.

Tyler was wending up a deep hollow that was a funnel for the winds at his back. He moved in a waisthigh maelstrom of blowing leaves and miniature whirlwinds would dart up the hillside in little dervishes as if they had minds if their own. He went past the remains of a whiskey still whose copper had long been plundered and whose barrels showed the axemarks of old violence.

He was following an eerie keening he’d first heard miles back, and he seemed to be nearing its source. At first he’d thought it the wind but it was not the wind. It seemed the highpitched cry of a child or woman but it went on blowing the same mournful note without ceasing or altering, and when he climbed up the mouth of the hollow to higher ground he found it.

The earth here was stony shale and cleft out of the bluelooking limestone was an irregular opening six or eight feet wide. A crude fence had been constructed around it of split rails and old castoff boards wound with barbed wire, but the wood was rotten and insubstantial-looking. Beyond it a stone bluff rose almost vertically and perpendicular to it with a narrow rock doorway between another wall of stone, and studying this Tyler decided the hills must direct the winds and the hollow funnel them across the pit and play it like some mournful harp of the earth.

He approached the opening with caution, stepping across the juryrigged fence and peering down. There was nothing to see. He could hear the keening, but now it seemed to be issuing out of the earth itself, sad and murmurous voices of the damned pleabargaining for their souls. A cold updraft off subterranean waters came like breath from an ancient tomb, and he dreamed inkblack rivers coursing in the stone veins of the earth where chunks of ice black as obsidian clocked through the dark and where whatever arcane creatures lived there were unsighted and at the mercy of the current. He dropped a stone, and it rolled off the sides as it went, fainter and fainter, then nothing, and it went unremarked by the voices that went on and on in their haunting onenote timbre Somewhere he could hear the bells of animals and he studied the poor excuse for a fence then rearranged it as best he could and went toward the narrow arch of stone. He paused and then looked all about and knelt onto the earth. There was a flat circular stone at the floor of the arch, and he pried it free and scratched out a hole in the earth. He took out the tin of pictures and placed them in the cavity and covered them with the stone. He rose and passed through the arch and the hill began to descend and through the trees he could see tended land and a wooden farmhouse leached gray by the weathers.

The house had a shake roof darkening from melting frost and a tall brick chimney whose shadow was told palely in white hoarfrost on the gable opposing. As he watched the house an old man came out and went with a shuffling hobble toward the barn. He watched awhile and saw nothing further, and after a time he eased down through the shadowed morning trees to the house.

By good daylight Bookbinder had fed and watered the goats and turned them into the lot to graze. There were a nanny and her kids missing, and Bookbinder figured to slip down the hollow and find them. These years Bookbinder moved with care and caution. Arthritis had seized his eighty-year-old knees, and on the steeper hillsides he looked not unlike some gaunt puppet jerked along by an inept or careless puppeteer who’d lost interest in him.

There had been predawn cold and a rime of frost, but the sun when it smoked over the horizon burned it away and aftera while the day warmed. A golden haze like Indian summer hung in the air and the old man could feel sweat beginning under the chambray shirt he wore.

He went farther than he’d planned hunting the goats and after a while he crossed out on a roadbed so densely packed by traffic nothing would yet grow there. Idly he followed the road. The sun had ascended and warmed and sweat darkened the back of his shirt between his sharp shoulder blades. He stopped once and with a big Case pocketknife cut himself a walking stick and then he went hobbling on. After fifty yards or so more the roadway ascended, and he could see all there was left of the El Patio Club beerjoint. He went on up an embankment through sere tilted weeds, then the weeds fell away and there was the old parking lot of cracked paving and the four stucco walls still blackened by ancient smoke beyond a row of Lombardy poplars planted like a curious harp of the winds. Past the walls halflost in saplings two privies still faintly marked His and Hers.

The parking lot was encysted with ancient bottlecaps, arcane and extinct brands of beer like words in a foreign language. He hunkered on the crumbling paving and took out a pipe homecarved from briar root and stuffed the bowl with roughcut tobacco. He struck a match on a thumbnail and lit the pipe. He studied the El Patio through the shifting blue smoke.

All so long ago. The old man from his house used to hear the cries of revelry. Love or what passed for it in these regions, old rivalries brought to fruition. The music from their dances, like dispatches from a world he’d forsaken or it him. Cars coming and going at all hours of the night, fullthroated mufflers breaking on the switchback, motors opening up onthe stretch like racehorses getting their second wind. Laughter sharp and brittle as broken glass used to drift down through the trees. Laughter from women now old as he was, or dead, twenty-five forever and ever.

She came easing into the room with her slippers in her hand. The room dark, all the light there was moonlight, oblique and deceptive through the windowglass. When he spoke, he startled her so she dropped a shoe, then she recovered and her hands were at her hair, taking it down.

I thought I told you to stay away from that place.

Well. Maybe you did. I forget just now.

He could smell whiskey in the room. I meant what I said.

It doesn’t matter anyhow. Nobody gets to say what anybody else can do or can’t do. Nobody owns anybody else. They turned the slaves loose a long time ago.

Then she’d come in later and she’d come in later and one night she didn’t come in at all. Like some wild thing he’d tamed and chanced letting loose and lost a little at a time. He awoke stiff and sore in the rocking chair. As cold and bleak a dawn as he’d ever known washing the windows. He never saw her again. She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look. Her name on his tongue was dry as ashes, bitter as quinine.

He knocked the pipe out and stood up and approached the building. A blackened and unshapen ruin. It was here she’dtaken up with Hankins. Here Hankins had sat on the last day of his life drinking boilermakers and getting up his nerve to come up the hollow and get the bedstead or kill him. He hadn’t known it but he was getting up his nerve to die.

He turned away. Old memories had lost the sting of pain and it was the loss of feeling he mourned more than anything else. It was all so long ago and might have been something that happened to somebody else, might have been some old story in a yellowed newspaper.

He went back down into the woods from the other side of the parking lot. There was a footpath here the old man had worn himself down through the years and he followed it through the woods directly opposing the way he’d followed it a lifetime ago in the dead of a Sunday night, leant slightly with the weight of a five-gallon bucket of kerosene, midnight visitor bearing the gift of fire.

He didn’t find the goats that morning and he decided to go out again after dinner. When he got back to the house it was approaching midmorning and there was a thin young man sitting on the edge of his porch idly drawing patterns in the dirt between his feet with a riflestock.

Hidy, the boy said.

The old man hadn’t been surprised in a lot of years and finding company on his front porch didn’t surprise him now.

How do, the old man said. Warmin up some, ain’t it?

Aren’t you Mr. Bookbinder?

I’m Hollis Bookbinder. I ain’t never been Mistered too much. Who might you be?

My name’s Tyler. I heard your goatbells in the night. You got a lot of them?

They’s several. I don’t know exactly how many. Ain’t run acensus on em lately. They a right smart of company.

You seen a man named Granville Sutter come through here?

No. Was I supposed to of?

I don’t know. I just wondered.

Was you huntin him?

No. I’m pretty sure he’s hunting me, though. Do you know him?

I know him well enough to stay wide of him. That’s a right nice rifle you got there.

Thanks. My granddaddy gave it to me.

Winchester lever action with that octagon barrel. You don’t see many of em, but what you do generally shoots true.

The old man had climbed the porch steps, and now he opened the screendoor. I ain’t had the rest of my mornin coffee. How about you?

I didn’t have any at all.

Then I reckon you ready for some. He disappeared into the house, and Tyler could hear the rattle of pans somewhere inside. He looked about. The house was set on the side of a hill, and the yard sloped away into the woods. The shadow of a cloud went across the sunlit treetops like smoke. Tyler couldn’t see as far as he would have liked, and he wondered where Sutter was.

The coffee when the old man brought it in a delicate china cup was opaque and dark and so strong it almost required chewing. The boy sipped it cautiously and watched the line of woods where the sun made moving shadows.

Sutter got it in for ye, has he?

I reckon. He tried to kill me.

It ain’t none of my business, but what did yins have yourfallin out about?

Well. It sort of come up about my sister. We got into it over her. He fell silent and sat staring at the ground, and his face was bleak with some grief he didn’t name.

And you took to the deep pineys. I would of thought this was somethin for the law to handle. I was never one to run overquick to em, but they get paid for protectin folks can’t protect themselves.

I can protect myself. I just don’t want to kill him unless I have to. Besides, I’ve been to the law. They never paid me any mind. Somebody told me there’s a sheriff in Ackerman’s Field supposed to be an honest man. Bellwether. You know him?

I know of him. He’s got the name of bein a pretty straight law. There’s a lot of these laws around here their badge just guarantees they can do their meanness and get away with it.

The cell door clanged hollowly behind him. He followed the jailer down a steep stairwell to a green room where folk sat about drinking coffee and pretending they were working. A deputy unlocked a locker and took out a pocketknife and a wallet and a cigarette lighter and handed them to him.

Next time you want to bust up a bar, do it in somebody else’s county, he said.

Bookbinder was going through his wallet. Now wait a goddamned minute, he said. I had sixty dollars in this billfold.

Everyone was watching him. Bland eyes out of calm faces.

Chief? the deputy said. A heavyset man behind a desk scratched his sandy head. He rummaged about looking for Bookbinder’s papers.

One pocketknife, he read. One Zippo cigarette lighter. One black cowhide wallet. Nothing about contents. You was charged with a public drunk. You sure you had any money left?

I wadn’t drunk. And I know goddamned well I had it.

All right, Mr.-he glanced down at the report-Bookbinder. There must of been some kind of a mistake. Wallace, take him back to his cell till all this confusion’s cleared up.

Let’s go, Wallace said.

Bookbinder didn’t move. He seemed to have been struck by some profound revelation. Wait a minute, he said. I believe I left that money in my other britches.

The chief was watching him. His face relaxed. All right, he said. All cleared up. See how easy that was?

The old man had been silent a time. I never cared much for the law, he finally said. Or the law in this county anyway. They hired one old boy was a deputy and he liked to whup folks with that club he carried. Like to beat a couple of fellers to death, whupped em right up the steps to the hospital. Right near the funeral home. They got on to him about it and it pissed him off. He ask em, what’s the use of bein a law if you can’t beat nobody up?

Could you tell me the best way to get to Ackerman’s Field?

Well. If anybody could, I ort to be able to. I worked them mines back in Overton the biggest part of my life. Now the way I’m goin to tell you ain’t the shortest, but it’s the easiest. You might as well forget any other way, these old roads windand twist and sometimes they just peter out. You try to stay on the roads and you’ll just circle around and run over yourself. Go due east till you hit the railroad tracks. They growed up, but they still there. It’s about twelve or fourteen mile. The tracks run north and south. Go south and you’ll come out right in Ackerman’s Field.

And that’s all there is to it.

The old man set his cup aside and took out his pipe. He grinned. First you got to get to the railroad track, and that ain’t no Sunday drive, specially if you ain’t used to the Harrikin. Likely you’ll come up on Overton. The tracks is right near there.

Overton?

It’s just a bunch of buildins now. Nobody left but the ones in the graveyard, and if they could of left, they’d be long gone, too. When Overton went, it went like a June frost. All it was was a minin town, and when the ore run out she just folded up.

Did you live there?

Off and on. My, that was a rough place then. I was bad to drink then, and I used to spend some time in that crossbar hotel they had. I was in there one night they had me locked up with this nigger. Way in the night there was a terrible commotion. Folks hollerin, tryin to break into the jail. I was unused to folks tryin to break in. Thought it went the other way. They broke down the door and knocked out the sheriff and took his keys. Roughest-lookin bunch of folks I ever run into. Most of em drunker than I was. They had torches, and one of em was carryin a rope. Lord God, I thought. They’re goin to hang me for bein drunk.

But it was the nigger. They drug him out and hung him from a big whiteoak. Turned out it was over a whore. Theyhad this albino whore named Wanda, white as if the sun had never shone on her. Hair the color of seagrass twine, and even her eyes looked white. She charged two dollars, and this nigger offered her five, and somebody caught em together, and she swore up and down he forced her.

What did they do to the whore?

Do? They didn’t do nothin except keep on givin her two dollars. There was a lot of em in Overton back then. The miners worked the mines and the whores worked the miners and the only ones come out on top was the company bosses.

Tyler rose. All this time he had sat on the edge of the porch seemingly poised for imminent departure and now he seemed to have come to some decision. Well, I guess I better get on. I got a long way to go.

Well. Best not rush off in the heat of the day. But I reckon you know your business. I wouldn’t worry too much about Sutter. Likely he’s forgot about you by now and he’s drinkin him a cool one somewheres.

There was a fierce intensity in the boy’s face. No. He’s not forgot. And you better worry about him, too, because he’s headed this way, and he’d just as soon kill you as anybody else. There’s something the matter with him. When he comes here, just tell him where I went. That won’t hurt me, by then I’ll be somewhere else. And whatever you do, don’t start anything with him. I didn’t mean to mix you up in this.

I ain’t tellin him jackshit. And you ain’t mixed me up in nothing. I reckon I can set on my own front porch and drink a cup of coffee with whoever I want to. But if that stuff about Sutter is so, you need to be anywhere else besides the Harrikin. You need to be out where there’s more folks. Witnesses. He won’t do nothin if there’s a bunch of folks around. I got to do it. I believe my best chance is to get to Ackerman’s Field. Get to Bellwether and tell him the whole story. There’s a lawyer there named Schieweiler trying to get Sutter sent off.

Like I said, I reckon you know your business. What I’d do is stay on the edge of the Harrikin, close to the roads, and try to catch a ride. Most anybody would give you a lift into town.

I don’t have time. He’s too close on me, and I can stay away from him better in the woods. What’s that hole down there, back in the woods? Just a big hole in the rocks, makes a whistling racket.

That’s what they call the whistlin well. I don’t know how it makes that racket it does. Kindly a mournful sound, though, ain’t it? I knowed some old boys went down in it one time on a rope ladder. They went down to where a tunnel like branched off the shaft. They went a ways back in the tunnel, but they was leery of the shaft. Said they didn’t make enough rope. Said you’d drop a rock off in the main shaft and just grow old waitin for it to hit. Said they wadn’t no bottom, but common sense’ll tell you everthing’s got a bottom, howsomever far it may be.

Well. I’ll see you, Mr. Bookbinder.

You just remember what I said. Due east. And if you see ary ghost in Overton, ask him does he remember old Hollis Bookbinder.

The day had waned and grown chill before Sutter came. Bookbinder dozed in his rocking chair, an old plaid shawl across his lap, but he slept a cat’s troubled sleep, waking atevery noise.

Yet when Sutter came there was no noise, just some alteration of the atmosphere so that when the old man’s eyes blinked open, Sutter had one foot uplifted in the act of stepping onto the porch, then standing for a moment in awkward indecision, then setting it down in the yard and leaning to stand the scoped rifle against the wall. Beyond him the world had gone sepia with dusk and twilight’s lengthening shadows ran like dark liquid across the packed earth yard to pool in the lower ground of the woods.

Mr. Bookbinder, he said. You recollect me?

The old man nodded. Head clouded by the tatters of some old halfdream. Faint taste of muscadine wine in the back of his mouth.

I’m lookin for a young feller up this way, figured you might of seen him. He was fumbling about his pockets. Withdrew a worn leather wallet and flashed the old man a glimpse of a badge and a card that might have said anything. Or nothing at all. He repocketed it and the old man looked away and when he looked back at Sutter his own face held a look of almost unspeakable contempt.

You seen him?

I don’t know if I have or I ain’t. You got ary picture of him?

No. Course to hell I ain’t got no picture. You don’t need one to make you remember if you’ve seen a young feller wanderin around.

It’s been six or seven by today, Bookbinder said. Some days I get a run on em. I don’t know if I’ve seen the one you’re lookin for or not.

Sutter was silent for a time, his mismatched face an emotionless mask. The air grew faintly menacing. Bookbinderthought the face looked as if while the clay was yet wet God Almighty had laid a hand to either side of it in a sudden fit of anger and altered it slightly to mark him.

Sutter turned his head and spat into the yard. A black kid goat had come round the corner of the house and approached Sutter’s feet. It nuzzled the calf of his leg and he whirled as if he might kick it then thought better of it then abruptly bent to scratch its curly head.

I always been a respecter of age, Mr. Bookbinder, but I ain’t got time for no jokin around here. You seen that badge. I’m a duly sworn constable of the Sixth District, and you got to cooperate with me.

I don’t know if you’re a constable or not, Bookbinder said. But I do know one goddamned thing. You’re not in the Sixth District. You’re goin to have to get further into the Harrikin than this to work that kind of shit. And just say you was a law. That constable shit don’t cut no ice with me. Far as I’m concerned you just a trespasser, and you need to get on down the line to where you’re welcome.

You a mouthy old son of a bitch, Sutter said easily. To have one foot in the grave and the other in a pile of owlshit. You tired of livin or what? His hand came out of his dungaree pocket with the switchblade knife. He thumbed the button. Bright serpent’s tongue of the blade flicking out. With his left hand he grasped the kid’s head. He twisted it upward hard. The goat’s eyes walled in its head and it bleated softly and it made jerky little motions with its feet on the earth.

I reckon a man lives alone puts a lot of store in his animals. I guess you’re right fond of these goats.

They a right smart of company, the old man said again, like a one-size-fits-all answer he kept in stock. This’n acts like a pet. I bet if I cut its throat it’d make you remember where that boy went.

Or it might make me blow a hole in the middle of you a log truck could drive through.

The goat was trying to escape. It and Sutter making abrupt little dancing motions. Be still, goddamn you, he told it. He looked up. You might if you had a gun, he told Bookbinder.

With his left hand the old man moved the shawl. It slid off his lap soundlessly onto the porch. He was holding trained on Sutter an enormous old dragoon revolver, and its hammer was thumbed back.

It so surprised Sutter that he released his grip on the goat. When it jerked away and fled, Sutter looked down at the knife he was holding. It ain’t loaded, he said.

I done a lot of foolish things in my life, Bookbinder said, but I ain’t never threatened to kill a man with a empty pistol.

Piece of shit would likely blow up in your face anyhow, Sutter said. I don’t believe you’ve got the balls to shoot it, let alone kill anybody with it.

The old man slowly moved the barrel away from Sutter and aimed it at a locust fencepost. When the hammer fell the concussion was enormous and the top of the post exploded into fistsize chunks of rotten wood and when Sutter looked back from the post the gun was on him again. The old man was watching him with narrowed eyes.

You just crazy enough to do it, Sutter said. Hellfire. I just wanted to talk to you.

The old man didn’t say anything and the gun didn’t waver. Sutter closed the knife and pocketed it. I aim to get my rifle, he said. I’ll just be on my way.

Just don’t let the barrel point my way, Bookbinder said. Sutter retrieved the rifle. He kept the barrel pointed earthward.

You know I’ll get you for this, he said conversationally. You’re graveyard dead and don’t even know about it yet. I’ll come through your window like a cat some hot night and cut your throat where you lay.

You come ahead, Bookbinder said. And they’ll be scraping bloody pieces of you off the wall with a goddamned putty knife.

Sutter turned and went. At the yard’s edge he hesitated and would say more, but Bookbinder raised the piece and Sutter kept going. The old man didn’t lower the gun until Sutter had vanished into the darkening wood. He laid the gun aside. His hands were shaking and he clamped them between his thighs to still them.

Somewhere deep in the Harrikin Tyler began to come upon curious arrangements of sticks strung from trees, lengths of wild cane wired together in designs strange and oblique, some simple and composed of only a few sections, others intricate three-dimensional compositions, and all alike suspended by tiewire and turning slowly in the air like alien windchimes or hieroglyphs from some prior language no one knew anymore. Like messages left by some otherworldly traveler who’d gone before him and left these signs in invitation or warning. They became more frequent, a veritable forest of them, asymmetrical and random and somehow sinister.

A dead fox strung head downward from a tree by wire threaded behind the tendons in its legs. He looked at it curiously, then went on beneath the great lowering trees with wind in their upper branches and doves calling from some lost hollow, past ancient utility poles tilted and wireless that bore witness to a civilization that had come tentatively and long since gone. In a bower formed by the roots of a liveoak and sleeping in a bed of moss was a child’s doll. It lay in a miniature casket and its cheeks were rouged and shadowed by improbable lashes and upon kneeling to examine it closer he saw woven into the doll’s flaxen locks humanlooking hair of a darker shade and a wood screw had been threaded into the doll’s molded navel. He studied it a time in a kind of wonder without touching it and then he rose and went on.

Some motion drew his eye and he saw a rusted fifty-gallon drum sitting upright beneath a tree and from its concave top a huge great horned owl was watching him. He approached cautiously. The owl watched him with its great liquid eyes and he saw himself twinned and grotesque leaning toward their depths. The owl’s left leg was imprisoned in the clamped jaws of a steel trap and a chain led away over a tree branch where wire secured it. The owl had been trying to escape the trap, for its feathers were bloody, and Tyler could see that the jaws had bitten into the flesh of its leg. The owl closeup looked like some monster from a child’s fever dream but when he reached a tentative hand toward the trap it did not move just watched him blankly and slightly inquisitively and with enormous patience from beneath its great tufted horns.

He tried to open the jaws of the trap with his hands but could not and finally pried them partway with his pocketknife, then inserted a stick and sprung them enough to free the owl. He backed away, expecting it to fly, but it just stood favoring its left leg and watching him back and he went on. He’d gonea few feet when he heard the concussion of its wings and looking up, saw it pass above him with wingspan terrible like some great prehistoric bird that had outlived its time and now was fleeing this one.

He had been following the tracks of an ironrimmed wagon that had in turn been following the spectral roadway along the humped back of a long ridge, then down into bottomland grown with pinoak and poplar and maple. This bottomland was cleft by some stream nameless to him, and it seemed pasthaunted, vibratory with the traces of past habitation as if all that happened here happened still and concurrent with all other events and just out of his sight and hearing. He passed tiny log cabins mouldering down into the earth that might or might not have been slave quarters long ago or the houses of woodsprites or littlefolk and he passed a stone springhouse. A cooling box for milk and butter had been chiseled out of the solid limestone and old waterpipes gone almost entirely to rust were fed here. Turning in the direction the pipes led he saw a gently rising slope grown with cedar and hemlock and beyond and above them the looming bulk of a ruined mansion.

He went up the slope abstractedly, he’d realized he was turned around, had angled too far southeast and was in Lawrence County. This had to be the old Perrie mansion, and he knew it was not in Ackerman County. There were still miles and miles of wild country to go, and miles to backtrack. He looked upward. The dark bulk towered above him, three stories of handmade brick with four columns in front. The earth had settled under one of the end columns and it canted outward at the top. A ruined balcony dangled precariously from disintegrating masonry. He went inside. The roof was gone, lost in the fury of a long-ago storm, he could see a square of mottled sunlight falling down the curving stairway. He turned in a slow pivot, more impressed by this ruined glory than the foxes and rats and nightbirds that called it home now.

He went cautiously up a wide stair to a landing and a great hall with rooms opening off it and windowless apertures through which he could see encroaching trees.

Through a window opening he saw a brick outbuilding and a tiny wooden shanty like a witch’s house in a fable. The shanty was impaled with a length of stovepipe like a stake driven through its heart and a column of blue woodsmoke rose and dissipated. The house was surrounded by an enormous amount of ricked firewood and there was a blackened washpot sitting on its three legs over a smouldering fire. Even as he watched a woman came into view. She was laboring up a deeply washed gully dragging what appeared to be a great bundle of honeysuckle vines.

By the time he had wended his way through the bullbriars and vines that formed the lawn of the cottage, she had reached the yard and dragged the vines onto the porch. She was sitting in a willow rocker catching her breath. A tiny gnomish woman who’d come no higher than his chest, a dried and fragile elf of indeterminate but advanced age who seemed light and delicate as the fluted bones of birds found in the woods. Dressed all in homedyed black like the sole survivor of some obscure sect she’d outlived here in this lost wood, with foxes for lapdogs and whippoorwills nesting in her henhouse. The porch was well corded with heaterwood, you’d think the old woman had had word of an impending winter of profound intensity. Hidy, he said.

How do. Get you a seat there.

Tyler seated himself on the edge of the porch with his back braced against a stanchion. He had not realized how tired he was until he stopped to rest. The porch floor was strewn with soft, curling shavings of hickory.

You been making something?

Handles. You come after one?

He wondered at the degree of emergency that would drive him so far in dire need of a handle. No, he said.

I got em from tack hammer handles all the way up to axe handles.

I don’t reckon I need one.

She had a pile of sticks two feet or so long laid by the rocking chair, and now she took one up. The stick had a fork on its small end, and she looped a length of honeysuckle vine about the fork and commenced winding the vine into a ball.

I guess you come about a potion then.

A potion? What sort of potion?

She shrugged. Whatever kind it is you need. I get calls for all kinds. She studied him acutely. I figure you for a love potion. One to make some little gal look away from the feller she’s with and hook up with you. She cackled dryly, a sound like the rustle of cornhusks. Or look away from you and fix on somebody else. I get calls for both kinds, and I got the herbs and stuff to make em.

Do they work?

Same folks keep comin back.

You got a potion that’ll keep a man from killing you?

Her eyes remarked the gun. Looks to me like you totin around a potion’d do that. I don’t want to kill anybody. I just want to keep from getting killed.

I got hexes that’ll make him hurt so bad he’ll forget he ever saw your face. Tie his guts in a hard knot and draw both ends tight. But you don’t look like you’ve lived long enough to make anybody that mad, though.

I did this fellow.

She looked at whatever it was she was making. She selected a thin brown vine and wrapped the ball then wove the vine through the bottom, then wound the stick and tucked the end under adroitly. She studied it intently as if to see whether it measured up to whatever standard she went by then laid it aside and began another one.

What are you making now?

Cokeberry trees they call em.

Who calls them?

She shrugged. The man I sell em to. He buys all I make for fifteen cents apiece. He sells em somewheres. She gestured vaguely, as to indicate Ackerman’s Field, Nashville, the world at large.

He was studying the thing. If it had a use he couldn’t divine it. What on earth do they do with them?

Now there you got me. Maybe they sets em around to look at. Folks with too much money’ll buy anything. Even hexes. You see all this wood I got? Charlie Peters hauls it to me on a wagon. He thinks I’m a witch put a hex on his wife. She got a cancer. He started bringin me wood to get me to take it off.

Did you?

It’s a little late for that. She died. He keeps on bringin me wood, though, cause he thinks I got one on him.

Why would he think you put a hex on his wife? He shot and killed my dog and she caught a cancer. He seen a connection there I didn’t see. I don’t know, maybe the dog done it. I don’t know the answer to everthing in the world.

Could you do that? Hex somebody?

She glanced at him with her berrybright eyes, then at the wood as if that were answer enough.

All those things made out of cane, hanging from the trees, are they yours?

She nodded. They to confound my enemies. Somebody start in here to do me harm’d never make it through em.

Well, I guess I’m all right then. I made it. He thought about asking her about the doll but then decided not to. What kind of cancer did she have? Charlie Peters’s wife?

Stomach cancer, I heard.

Tell you the truth, I didn’t come after anything. I got turned around in the woods, then I saw the old Perrie place and went up to look at it. I didn’t even know where I was till I saw it.

She laid the cokeberry tree aside and looked at the towering structure. I been here a long while. My other house blowed away. The harrikin picked it up from around me and carried it off somewhere else. Maybe set it down around somebody didn’t have one, I don’t know. The world works in funny ways, I don’t question it. I took that for a sign and found me another one. Comes a harrikin and gets this one, I’ll just find me someplace else. That big house over there they used to have fancy parties. All the high society. Whole yard there growed up in bull nettles used to be a rose garden where the courtin couples’d walk. One night that balcony up yonder was overloaded with folks, and one end of it come out of the brick, and the whole thing swung down like a wheel rollin, and folks was strowed all over like busted dolls with the sawdust leakinout. All them fine parties is done now. I’m still here, though. All them folks in crazyhouses, old folks’ homes, cemeteries.

She sat in a contemplative silence. Summer nights you can still hear them parties. People talkin and laughin far off so faint you can’t make out what they’re sayin. Some warm nights I set out here and listen to their dance music. You believe that?

I didn’t come all this way to call you a liar.

She laid the tree aside and dusted honeysuckle leaves from her dress. Come on in the house, she said. It’s about time for a bite of supper.

They entered a dark and cloistral gloom. More wood here. A raw odor of its curing. All manner of handles stood about where she’d leant them. As if she were driven to make new all the world’s broken tools. A path wound through the wood like a maze and at its end a shadowed leanto kitchen.

He’d thought himself hungry but not so much as he thought. Supper was some type of cold greens boiled without grease or salt and the bread was unleavened as if she held to some vow of abstinence. She watched him while he chewed this tasteless mess in silence.

How come this feller wantin to kill you?

An undertaker hired him to, I reckon.

I’m a old woman but I never knowed undertakin to be so slow they had to kill folks for the business. Folks dyin all the time, it’s the way of the world. Help yourself to them greens there.

Tyler finished and swallowed with an effort and pushed his plate aside a fraction of an inch with a thumb. He hoped she didn’t try forcing the greens on him and she didn’t. She rose and covered the pan with a cloth and set it atop the cookstove, perhaps for another meal.

You want me to tell your fortune?

I reckon not. I’ll just play them like they fall.

Life ain’t no card game. Be forewarned. I’d not charge you. Usually I get a dollar, but yours I’d do for nothin.

I reckon not.

Let me give you the dollar then.

He laughed nervously. How come you want to tell my fortune?

There’s somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s somethin about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil.

Well. You being a witch and all, looks like you’d know.

I would if you wadn’t blockin it out. You’re hidin somethin.

You can’t read people, skim through them like books and lay them aside. All the fortune I need to know is how to get to a road. Can you not tell me how to find the railroad tracks?

There was more wickedness in the world than you thought and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you, ain’t ye?

No. This fella that you sell your vines to, does he pick them up? How do you get to the railroad tracks?

I don’t. There’s a wickedness in this world, and I try to stay clear of it, but this time I think it’s come in the door and set down at my table.

I told you I was just lost.

You’re lost, all right. Now I wonder if I ain’t myself.

He had risen and made ready to go. You could tell me where the road goes.

You said you came in on it. If one way come here and it don’t go but two ways, then the other way must be the one you want. Ain’t that right? I never did anything to you that I know of.

There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.

There’s a man going to be looking for me, Tyler said. If he comes here don’t let him in.

My enemies gives me plenty of leeway to pass, she said. I don’t expect yourn to be any different.

He wound his way back through the dusty maze into the wan winter light. She had followed him to the door as if to ensure that he kept going. He took up the rifle. I’ll see you, he said.

She did not reply, and he wound through the nettles past the dark cathedral where the ghosts held sway and back down the slope into the bottomland.

A gaudy Christmas moon candled up out of the pines and watched Sutter above jagged black carvings of scrimshaw trees. His shadow appeared palely beneath his feet like some faint image developing on a photographic plate. He came out of the hollow following his shadow through the slashes of dreaming trees past the ruined mansion with its enormous keep of hoarded silence until he came upon the toy house with its windows blind save the refracted moon and its weathered walls bleached with silver light. Its dark tin roof seemed the very negation of light.

On the porch with fist upraised to pound on the door he thought he heard the furtive pitterpatter of hasty retreatingfootsteps. Some creature of the night perhaps who’d sensed his presence and struck for deeper timber.

He lowered the poised hand and twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open onto a darkness so profound the house seemed to store nothing save the dark itself. He stepped into the room and vanished, the dark simply took him. He stood invisible beside the framed oblong of moonlight. He stood holding his breath, listening. When he breathed again he could smell the room, stale smoke and kerosene and years of old cookery. The odor of curing wood and tinned mackerel and the sour musty female smell of the old witchwoman herself. Nothing of humanity here, the smell was the smell of some old vixen fox’s lair.

Young Tyler, Sutter called. If you’re here come on out. I just need to talk to you.

Silence. He tilted out a kitchen match and struck it on a thumbnail. Orange light filled the room, objects leapt out at him, shadows reared and subsided about the walls as if Sutter had suddenly unleashed into the room dozens of his darker selves.

There was a kerosene lamp atop an old sewing machine cabinet and he unglobed and lit it. Warm yellow light banished the shadows and the first thing he saw was the ricked wood. Goddamned if you wasn’t expectin a cold spell, he said aloud. His voice sounded harsh and unreal in the silence and it seemed to startle him.

With the light held aloft like a smoking torch he searched the house without expecting to find anyone and his expectations were fulfilled. He peered into cabinets and under beds and he prowled through cardboard boxes. The old witchwoman seemed to possess even less of the world’s goodsthan Sutter did and he deemed himself much the better housekeeper. The back door stood ajar to the night and all there was beyond it were the stygian trees. Long gone ain’t she lucky, he sang softly to himself. She’s a long gone mama from Tennessee. He shook his head and grinned ruefully to himself and turned back to the kitchen.

He found two tins of sardines and half a box of soda crackers. He pocketed the flat tins and tucked the crackers under an arm. He found a pone of cornbread so hard it seemed some sort of weird fossil or a flat cylinder of petrified wood and when he hurled it against the wall it rang like stone and spun onto the floor unbroken. I bet a man could drive a nail with that son of a bitch, he said. He found a little coffee in a tin and he took that and then he went out.

He paused by the ruined mansion and sat on the stone doorstep and popped the key on a tin of the sardines and opened them. He laid sardines side by side on one cracker and topped them with another making dainty little sandwiches. He ate until he’d finished one tin and then he lit a cigarette and sat smoking. Grinning to himself he imagined the old woman fleeing soundless out the back door and running sylphlike and blind into the bowering trees. Up and gone at just the imminence of his footstep, gone before his upraised foot touched the plank floor.

There may be something to this old fortunetellin business after all, he told the night.

After a while he dozed and he dreamed music and distant revelry and the rising and falling cadences of voices and he came instantly awake but he could still hear them. He’d long known this place for haunted but it did not bother him. All those lost voices, those lost shades drifting from room toroom like smoke. He felt he could have entered their conversation without interrupting it, could have fallen easily into their number and gone unnoticed.

When Phelan pushed against the funeral home door it did not open as he’d expected it to and for a moment he just looked at it in perplexity. He pushed again but the door was locked. The few times he’d been here before for the funerals of colleagues and family the door opening onto Walnut Street had always been unlocked during business hours. This permitted public access to the viewing rooms and chapel.

Phelan was wearing his Sunday clothes. Sport coat in a somber plaid and a blue tie loose at the throat and his shoes were shined. He knocked on the door and looked about. Quiet Sunday morning, cold in the air. Down the street a few late worshipers climbed the steps to the Presbyterian church, he caught scraps of subdued children’s laughter the wind brought. Phelan noticed that Breece hadn’t had the leaves raked lately and they lay about the lawn and in a loose windrow against the house. A garbage can had been overturned and the wind had kited papers into the box-elder hedge.

Yes?

The door had opened no more than three inches. Phelan could see a narrow section of Breece’s face and a necktie knotted tight beneath his ponderous chins. Below that a white smock.

My name is Phelan. I want to make an inquiry about Corrie Tyler. The door didn’t open. Perhaps it closed a fraction. What about her?

Phelan didn’t know what to make of this. Well, she’s dead, he said. I assumed there’d be a funeral.

Of course there’ll be a funeral, he said. Arrangements haven’t been finalized.

This time the door definitely moved toward the jamb, the slice of Breece narrowed, just one eye and a section of florid nose with its roadmap tracery of burst capillaries.

Phelan was a respectable schoolteacher who paid his bills and was well-thought-of in the community and was accustomed to being welcomed wherever he went but he wasn’t welcome here. In fact he’d never felt so unwelcome.

Hold on here a minute, he said. I want to talk about these arrangements.

No response. The eye Phelan could see looked distracted, and Phelan felt for a crazy moment that maybe he’d already left and Breece was just impatiently standing there watching where Phelan had been.

I know both of the Tylers and know the young man rather well, a student of mine. Perhaps it’s none of my business, but I’m aware of their financial situation and I doubt there’s any insurance. I’d like to help them in some way. I’d like to know what sort of financial arrangements have been made. I thought I’d pay part of them myself and perhaps take up a collection in the community.

It’s been taken care of.

Taken care of how?

Just don’t worry about it, Mr Phelan. As I said, it’s taken care of, nothing for anyone to pay. Nothing for you to be concerned about. As you said yourself, it’s really none of yourbusiness.

When are the services? I’d like to view the body.

I don’t mean to be indelicate, but the body was badly damaged in the accident. Face crushed and so on. Of course it will be a closed casket ceremony.

Something’s not right here, Phelan said. I’ve spoken with people in the sheriff’s department and been informed that she was unmarked. In fact, a deputy told me that the broken neck was her only injury and that when they arrived on the scene she looked as serene as a child who’d fallen asleep in that field.

I’m a professional, Mr Phelan. Who do you choose to believe? Don’t you think I’d know the condition of a body I’m preparing? At any rate it’s a moot point. The body has been claimed. The body is being transported. By an aunt, I believe. Perhaps there’ll be some sort of memorial service. You could attend that, of course.

I told you I know this family. Known both of them all their lives, I’ve taken an interest in their lives, had both of them as students. There’s no aunt.

Of course there is. From Michigan or somewhere, one of those upnorth states. Good day, Mr Phelan.

This can’t be, Phelan began, but the door had closed with the finality of a coffin lid and he heard the lock tumblers click into place and he was talking to a panel of polished oak.

He knocked and waited but there was only silence from within. After a long while he turned and went down the concrete steps into the wind, hand sliding on the polished steel railing, his face abstracted and uncertain.

He walked on past the cluster of churches. There was singing from within, one hymn segued into another, they wereleaning, leaning on the everlasting arm in the sweet by and by. He went on past Kittrel’s car lot with its plastic pennants snapping in the stiff wind and turned the corner and went on up the street toward the courthouse. He thought he ought to talk to someone in the sheriff’s office but he didn’t know who and he didn’t know what he’d say if he did.

He was standing peering into the showroom of the MVA motor company at a new Ford he couldn’t have told you the color of when a voice spoke behind him.

You shoppin for one of these new Fords, Mr. Phelan?

What? Oh, no, no, I don’t need one, Harris.

Fine looking car.

I was just thinking about something and I’m afraid I forgot what I was doing. I’d been up to the funeral parlor asking about that young Tyler woman. I couldn’t get any satisfaction at all. Fenton Breece was acting very peculiar.

Peculiar? What would have been peculiar was if he’d been actin some other way.

Let’s walk up to the Bellystretcher and talk about this, Phelan said. I don’t know why he’d do it but I believe he was lying to me. No, he was lying to me. I’ve taught school too many years not to know when I’m being lied to.

Well there’s one sure way to tell if Fenton Breece was lyin, Harris said. Did you happen to notice if his mouth was movin?

Light altered and the world was a world seen through smoked glass. The somber light diminished and a small bitter rain began to fall out of a pewter sky. A wind arose and drove before it a cloud of small dark sparrows, bedraggled andhomeless as refugees, fleeing nowhere with thin, lost cries. Sutter was passing through a stand of enormous cedars and when the rain fell harder he took shelter beneath one, hunkered on the coppercolored needles, his weight on the balls of his feet and the upright rifle in its zippered canvas case, just peering out beneath the lowering branches and watching the world go shimmery and ephemeral in the blowing rain.

When water began to course down on him through the matted branches and the windbrought rain to soak him, he rose with resignation and went on down the cedared sedgefield, his gait wooden and stoic and implacable.

In the lee of the hills lay the vestiges of a road and a concrete tiling where a wetweather stream went beneath it. He went down the weedgrown embankment to the rocky gully and into the tiling. He had to stoop slightly to enter it. It was dry inside, and he figured if it rained all night this was as good a place as any to spend it. The floor of the tiling was thickly grown with virid moss, and the place had a damp but not unpleasant smell. He sat with his back to one wall with his feet straddling the center, though no water had yet entered the mouth of the tiling, and ate a candy bar, then sat smoking, watching his spherical vision of rain and trees and stone like a world seen through the dirty lens of a spyglass.

After a while he slept or thought he slept. He dreamed or dreamed he did. Anymore the line between dreams and reality was ambiguous at best. For years he’d felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn’t stay shut of. He’d kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he’d go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway. An old woman stood before the mouth of the tiling peering in. A rawboned, floridfaced woman with graybrennel hair sheared straight across as if by the angry blow of an axe. Fierce little eyes like stokeholes to a red rage flaring behind them. A downturned slit of a mouth as if the workings of the world did not quite go to suit her.

She wore a shapeless old gray dress and a ruffled floursack apron: he remembered when she’d made it. He could see the lethal shape of the butcher knife through the thin, worn cloth of the apron.

She stood watching him intently, her hands clasped behind her back.

You come on home now, the rasp of her voice said. It’s time to come with me.

No, he told her. No, I believe I’ll just hang around here awhile.

Her face didn’t change. I don’t know what ever made you think you had a choice, she said.

He sat in silence listening to the rain in the trees. Raincrows called from some distant fallow cornfield. All those sounds he remembered out of the years of his life he wanted desperately to hold onto, to prove he was, rags of memory like cut flowers pressed in a Bible.

She stepped into the mouth of the tiling, a moving darkness silhouetted against falling dark. Water was running out of her hair and down her face, the thin gray cotton held the bony shapes of her shoulders. A thin trickle of dirty yellow water pooled in the tiling. She squatted in it without seeming to notice. Raw red ankles in a pair of broken-out men’s slippers. A worn and bewenned hand made absentminded pleats in the hem of her dress. Come on, she said. You’ll like it here where I am. You don’t have to do anything except what you want to do. Nobody expects anything from you. There ain’t no rules, and there ain’t no limits to what you can do. Nobody to tell you folks don’t do them things. Nothin binds you except the limits of what your mind can think up. Nobody signs papers, swears out warrants. There’s things done here nobody would write up anyway the ink would run like flamin gas, the paper would catch and burn. I been keepin a eye on you, and it’s time to go right now.

No, he said. I don’t want to.

She stood up. When she spoke, a steely threat had entered her voice. You come on. You go right now of your own free will and I won’t send em after you.

She stepped out of the tiling into the rain, and the dark rain enveloped her, abrupt and revenantial and absolute.

He leapt up to follow her. His head struck the concrete hard and fireworks flared behind his eyelids. He stood clasping his head in both hands. He staggered out into the rain.

Ma? he called into the night. Nightbirds took up the cry mockingly. He called again and there was a thread of fear woven into his voice and the cankeredpenny taste of it in the back of his mouth.

When he opened his mouth to call again she stepped close behind him and clasped a fist in his hair and jerked his head upward and the butcher knife honed to a razor’s sharpness opened a gaping slit in his throat and bright life’s blood darker than claret erupted down his shirtfront.

Lying there sleeping on the mossy concrete, his face jerking with the troubled passage of his dreams, he is provisionally still brother to all humankind. He has strayed far from the ways of men but there has always been a kind of twisted logic to his violence. The things he desired and struggled for made a kind of sense. Revenge, avarice, a thirst for power. The things only dreamed by normal men. Their own secret thoughts made carnate and ambulatory. Silver threads, thin and frayed though they be, hold him yet to the ways of the world. Here in the night they part and the ties give one by one and he falls away like some winged predator into another country, dark and unmapped and turbulent, so that he is finally free from all restraint, lost.

Coming down a long spine of ridge through a forest of dead chestnut Tyler chanced upon a pack of wild dogs or they upon him. They paced him silently from a distance, turning to watch him and check his course, and when he dropped off toward the hollow they adjusted their course simultaneously with his all dogs at once as if they communicated with each other in some manner above or below the comprehension of men. He began to regard them with disquiet and stopped once to check whether the rifle was loaded.

They’d gone wild in the Harrikin. Or their forebears had. These had been born wild as wolves or jackals, and any kind word or touch from man was nothing save a genetic memory if that. They were scruffy, halfstarved and rabidlooking and anymore they were only vaguely dogs.

When he made his rough camp by a stream that night, they were with him still. He’d killed a rabbit and he roasted it over firecoals banked in a circle of stones. He ate and tossedthe bones beyond the circle of firelight where they were contested with snarls and he could see their green eyes moving about like paired fireflies. When the meat was gone and he’d lain down to sleep with his rifle for bunkmate he could see a circle of their eyes drawn about the fire and in his mind he could see them stretched out, chins on paws, warily studying the fire and this strange god they’d adopted. As if they’d wearied of this wild life of freedom and hoped he could give them back what they’d lost of civilization.

He had none to spare and at best a tenuous grip on what remained. Sometime in the night he could hear them howling down the night howl on howl distant then more distant like descending souls crying from the lower keep of Hades and when he broke camp in the morning they were not to be seen.

What amazed him was that Sutter seemed to know where he’d be before the notion even struck him to go there. He had gone up the bluff because it was the highest hill he could see and he thought from there he might be able to see the railroad tracks.

On the near side the hill steepened gradually. Rocky clumps of wild ivy. He had come out of a long fallow field and commenced a leisurely zigzagging ascent, he was seeing country he hadn’t seen before, and he felt like an explorer charting unmapped wilderness. He looked up. Great white outcroppings of limestone like sleeping beasts jutting out of the ivy. At the summit an enormous dome of stone.

He stopped once on a ledge and ate a candy bar. There was a fugitive sun, faint frail warmth. A thin and spectral lightupon this aerie. He sat chewing the chocolate and looking back the way he’d come. A bleak and wintry vista of timbered ridges told in dull and somber tones and a series of staggered horizons fading into nightransparency and no sign at all that he’d ever set foot there. Or that anyone else ever had. In all that he surveyed nothing moved save the mindless ballet of branches in the wind.

A few feet higher up the bluff a cave opened up. Small cave, close ceiling, he must go there on hands and knees. He crawled several feet inside, but it narrowed further into a dark hole he’d have to wriggle through, and he had a thought for whatever might lie beyond, he had no idea what. He peered about. The calcified bones of small luckless animals, a bed of moss and windbrought leaves. Some predator’s lair. On a narrow shelf of rock lay an arrowhead. He took it down in wonder and crawled back into better light to study it. It was perfect and chipped carefully from some pink stone. It held a delicate tracery of pale blue like bloodveins running beneath its surface. The arrowhead was sharp and wickedlooking and he was struck by the singleness of its purpose. It was created to kill and beyond that had no reason for its existence. He wondered at the dark hand that had chipped it so long ago. What had transpired during the clocking of the seasons since the dark hand had laid it on the ledge till his paler hand had retrieved it?

He laid it aside and took off his belt and with his pocketknife sliced a thin thong of cowhide and looped a slipknot about the ears of the arrowhead and tied the amulet about his neck.

As he turned, an angry wasp sang past his head and splatted against the rock. He whirled in surprise at where itstruck the rock and splintered and there were shards of bright metal like bits of molten slag and he could smell the corditelike odor of shattered flint. He was scrambling for cover even before the shot came rolling across the field, going pellmell on elbows and stomach through the ivy, the rifle cradled under his chin, toward a sheltering ledge. A closer shot clipped shreds of ivy and careened off into space.

He couldn’t see anything for a time. Then the light altered with the passage of the clouds and there was just a ghost of movement in the brush across the field, and light winked off glass like a heliograph.

A scope, he breathed. The son of a bitch has got a scope. My ass is gone.

He aimed the rifle and waited. He knew there was no point at all in shooting, he hadn’t the range or the velocity. Sutter knew it, too. He came out of the woods and glanced toward the bluff and angled in an unhurried lope toward a thin finger of timber bisecting the field. At its edge he paused and waved and did a curious maniacal dance. Tyler fired and Sutter waved an arm and stepped into the timber, and a fierce and almost uncontrollable panic arose in Tyler: the timber ran all the way to the base of the bluff, and even now Sutter was probably running tree to tree toward the bottom of the hill.

He scrambled up and went further up the slope, leant in a crouch, his feet sliding in the loose shale, trying to keep as much of the bluff as possible between himself and wherever Sutter was now. Rickrack stone made a makeshift stairway to the summit, an enormous table of windy rock. He’d a mind to go down the other side but what he saw made him lightheaded and almost took his breath away. All the world seemed spread out here in a smoky pastoral dreaminessVast umber fields rolling gracefully away and tangled bluegray forests and far below the treetops the yellowgreen river snaking through the pines. He studied his position critically. There was a ledge jutting out forty or fifty feet below him, and he thought with care he could make that. Beyond it he just didn’t know.

He looked back down the front slope. He couldn’t see Sutter, and somehow that was worse: he could be anywhere, plastered chameleonlike against the stone creeping toward him. He might lie up here and kill Sutter and he might not. He didn’t even know for sure if he could kill him. Sutter might even get close enough to do some killing himself before he even saw him. He kept thinking of the pictures. Whatever happened to him, Sutter would never know where the pictures were.

He crept backward crablike to the edge of the table and turned and peered into the abyss again. A few dwarf cedars grown twisted and tortured by the perpetual wind. The hell with it, he thought. If I got to do it, then I got to do it. With the rifle clutched onehanded he began a hunkered halfslide in a hail of small rocks scuttling away before him toward a halfgrown cedar. When he reached it he paused a moment, clutching it to him and trying not to look at the dizzying landscape below. It was a long way down and he was already seeing the folly of what he’d done but it was too late now to go back. He slid on before he could delay further and the next sapling he grasped came out of the earth roots and all and he was clutching bothhanded at the limestone for purchase with the rifle clattering away somewhere below him. A wristsize pine he managed to grasp held, and he clung to it a moment in giddy relief. He could feel icy sweat creeping down hisribcage and his heart wouldn’t quit pounding. He slid onto the ledge. The rifle had ended cocked stock upward against a boulder and if it was damaged he couldn’t tell by looking.

He couldn’t have known from above but the bluff fell away under the ledge convex for fifteen or twenty feet then dropped vertically to the riverbank and below him were still the tops of trees. He looked down the front side into windy space and the yellow river was clocking along far enough below him that he didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid: he’d taken the chance of falling to his death to get to a place completely bare of cover that he couldn’t get away from.

All he had to do was wait until Sutter appeared on the rim and shoot him. He sat hunkered with the gun in his lap while the day waned. Light gathered in the west above the timbered hills and the sky went red and gold as the rest of the world darkened incrementally as if all the light there was were gathering there and draining off the rim of the world.

He was watching the rim when Sutter appeared: first his hat, then his head and arm and the rifle barrel so quick he wasn’t prepared for it, and a bullet rang on stone so near that splintered rock showered his cheek and he could feel blood. He backpedaled wildly away when Sutter fired again and threw up the rifle toward Sutter and when he tried to squeeze the trigger he could not. The trigger was locked in some manner and he stood staring at it as if it had turned in his hands like a serpent. He looked about in horror: there was nowhere at all to hide. He backed against the bluff for a running start and ran to the ledge and kept running, leaping as far as he could into space, brandishing the impotent rifle aloft, and above him he could hear Sutter’s wild cry elongated anddistorted like a garbled electronic shriek. He turned in midair and there was a graybrown frieze of stone and trees rushing dizzily upward and stark black cedars going shapeless with speed. He hit the water feet first and shot all the way under, turning in the swift current and immediately fighting for the surface. He felt the branches of a submerged tree rake across him and for a moment snare him, then the yellow current sucked him downstream. He was aware of the hot aching in his lungs. He surfaced in an explosion of spray, gasping for air. He was on his back bearing downstream and when he’d wiped the water from his eyes the first thing he saw was the bluff. It was diminishing rapidly but Sutter was silhouetted against the pale sky, fist aloft and dark and motionless as crude sculpture from obsidian. Or yet some baleful god remonstrating with a world he’d created that would not do his bidding.

He drifted downstream as far as he could stand the cold water and where the river shoaled and grew shallow enough he waded out. Like a beast driven to earth by the dogs of hunters he sought deeper woods. From old leached stumps he kicked out of the earth he built an enormous fire and hunkered before it shivering. The fire roared and great showers of sparks went cascading upward but he just piled on more wood. There was a cold measure of comfort in knowing where Sutter was tonight, and unless he was taking the express as Tyler had there was no way he was getting here. Wherever here was. He didn’t even suspect where he was. He was deep in the heart of the Harrikin and he was hopelessly and desperately lost and the walls of the night were drawing in about him.

It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and leave them sightless. The drawer opened on its oiled rollers without a sound. She lay quite composed with her arms at her side. Legs together, eyes open. Breece’d combed and curled her hair in a becoming way she hadn’t worn it in life and at her left temple he’d placed a white gardenia. There was another woven into the darker triangle of her maidenhair, and he studied it critically with the eye of an artist and made some small adjustment. Her mouth was slightly open, and he could see the white line of her teeth. Her pale breasts pooled like flowers of melting wax in the cool blue fluorescence. Sweet gutter angel, just far enough past redemption to make it worth his while.

There had been cuts on her forehead and cheek he’d worked on earlier and now he leant and touched them delicately with a forefinger. He unpocketed from the limegreen smock he wore a tube of tinted cream and carefully daubed the wounds. Studied the effect and wiped away a minuscule amount with a tissue and seemed satisfied.

Within a few minutes he had her dressed in black underwear and a pink evening gown, and he caught her up in his arms and went with her to another room. A great amphitheater of a room with sloping ceilings and dark wooden beams and a hardwood floor of oak pegged with cherry. An orchestra played softly from concealed speakers.

He placed her on the divan with a grunt and stood for a moment breathing hard. He watched her. Her head stayed erect for a moment, held by the divan at the back; then it tiltedforward and lolled loosely sideways. He leant and straightened it, and it lolled the other way, and he stayed it with a pillow.

He seated himself beside her and clasped her hand. For a time they just sat there listening to the music. He chatted away at her, and her face wore a slightly quizzical look, as if she couldn’t quite fathom what he was talking about.

Brandy? he asked her. He got up and from a sideboard brought a bottle of brandy and two snifters. He moved a small table near her knees and set her snifter atop it and sat with his own cupped in his small white hands. After a time he drank it, and then he drank hers as well.

The sourceless music wafted about the room. That’s Mahler, he told her. I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Mahler. His voice gently chided her lack of erudition.

Gustav Mahler was an Austrian composer from around the turn of the century. This is a cycle of songs called the Kindertotenlieder. Translated, that means ‘Songs of Dead Children.’ Don’t you think that’s a nice touch of irony?

He went on lecturing the dead girl for some time about classical music and various composers and then he seemed stricken by some emotion. Overcome perhaps by the music or the brandy or her perfumed presence. The room swam, veered like a warping world with its supports suddenly jerked away. He placed her hand on his thigh and when it slid away replaced it. He already had an arm about her shoulders, and now he dropped a hand to cup her breast. He drew her to him with a stricken urgency and buried his face in the soft white curve of her throat. Across his shoulder the dead girl with her unfocused eyes stared out across the great empty room as if she watched something from across a vast gulf of distance orwas straining to hear some faint and faroff sound.

The clapboard house sat in a clearing surrounded by dense trees. Unlit, silent. A pale moon clocking through ragged clouds wrought his shadow a twisted dwarf beckoning Tyler on. He didn’t know to where. When he came into the yard, the first thing he saw was a German shepherd watchdog chained to a clothesline. The dog was lying at the farthest reach of its tether. Tyler stopped. He stared at the dog in bemused wonder. It was lying in a pool of blood that looked black in the moonlight and its eyes were open and its lips drawn back over its teeth in a perpetual snarl. He stood hesitantly, then glanced toward the dark house and stepped around the dog and up a stoop of stacked rocks and hammered at the door.

Just silence answered him.

I need help, Tyler called.

The voice, when it came, came instantly, muffled but alert. You’ll by God need some shortly if you don’t get off my porch. Get away from that door.

I’m lost. I just need to talk to you a minute.

I was just sittin here thinkin about blowin a hole in my front door with this shotgun. You standin on the steps there, you liable to get hit.

Tyler stepped to the side of the door. Open up a minute.

There was silence within. A flare of dim light. Then a covert stirring.

The door sprang inward as if under the onslaught of enormous winds and an overalled figure stood above him clutching the door in one hand and a doublebarreled shotgun in theother. Tyler could smell kerosene, and behind the man a yellow light dished and wavered in its globe of glass. The man’s face was florid and unshaven and he looked halfdemented. How is it all you crazy son of a bitches always know how to find me? Out of all the people in this round world and half of it covered in trees, why is it you fools keep wanderin up out of the same goddamn woods into my front yard?

Put your gun up. I don’t aim to hurt anybody.

Put up yourn. And I shore can’t say the same about myself.

Tyler glanced down. He’d forgotten the useless rifle. It don’t shoot, he said. I jammed it somehow.

How many of you crazy sons of bitches is it out here?

Tyler considered. Just one, he said.

It’s folks has to work for a livin. Has to sleep. All of us can’t get by runnin crazy in the woods all night long.

Who else was here? Somebody’s killed your watchdog.

No shit.

Granville Sutter’s after me. I think he’s crazy.

You think he’s crazy? I know for a fact he is. I can guarangoddamntee he’s crazy as a shithouse mouse and getting farther into the territories all the time. And it’s a thousand wonders I ain’t layin here dead as my dog is yonder. If Sutter hadn’t of had the sense to stay away from the winders, Fenton Breece would be tyin a necktie around his neck.

He aims to kill me if he can.

You need to get the hell on away from here. As long as you’re somewhere else I’m thinking he’ll be too. I’ve just about had my bait of this crazy mess.

Who are you?

I’m Sandy Barnett. I know who you are. Sutter told me andthat’s all I need to know about you.

I’m trying to get to Sheriff Bellwether. Have you got a car?

I got one but it’s broke. All I got is a team and wagon.

Take me to Ackerman’s Field.

Not likely. I’m a Godfearin man. I ain’t messed up with you two and don’t plan to be. I know for a fact he shot my dog in cold blood, and no tellin what you done. Diggin up graves and everthing else from what he was ravin. And aside from all that I don’t believe this is the night I want blowed off a wagonseat with a 30-06.

Then let me in awhile. I’m about wore out. You want to talk about graverobbing, somebody needs to check out Fenton Breece. He’s crazy, sick somehow, the things he’s doing to dead folks. Open a few graves and you’ll see what I mean.

Tyler could hear him breathing. Wind caught in the glass globe of the lamb and behind Barnett the room seemed to be in motion.

The man did not speak, nor did he move to unblock the door.

All right then. At least show me the way the railroad tracks are.

The man just pointed mutely into the night and when Tyler looked the way he pointed there was only darkness.

That way? Hellfire. That’s the way I came.

I can’t help that. They’ve always been there, and unless they moved em they’re there still. Now head out. And the next man prowls into my yard tonight they goin to have to drag him out.

He stepped backward and the door slammed to in Tyler’s face. A wooden latch fell with a sound of finality. Through the cracks faint yellow light, remote, tantalizing, inaccessible. Tyler turned and trudged back down the stone steps into the yard. The light was blown out and the windows went secret and still and black and there was only the moonlight foreign and oblique. He went on toward the woods. Halfway across the yard he turned.

How far is it?

Nothing.

How far?

The house seemed vacant, some old place with newspapered walls and caving roof he’d stumbled across in the Harrikin long ago.

Tyler seemed suddenly taken by a fit of rage. He was fairly screaming. Goddamn you, he shouted. I never made these crazy sons of bitches. None of it’s my doing. They’re just put here for me to contend with. They’ve killed my sister and tried to kill me, and I don’t even know if she’s buried or not.

He could feel the wet earth of the yard through his jeans. He’d fallen to his knees. He was almost sobbing. As if in prayer or remonstration with whatever gods held dominion over these territories no one wanted. He kept thinking about Corrie but the face that kept coming to mind was her freckled child’s face as if her life had stopped at this innocent point and none of this had yet happened.

He stood for a time waiting for a reply but there was none. Had he been able he’d have brought a bolt of lightning out of the uncaring heavens and blown the house to splinters but as it was it occurred to him what a good target he made in the moonlit clearing and he faded into the woods and struck out for darker timber.

Late in the day he was going through a country showing signs of old commerce. Steep bluffs tended away to treegrown hollows, and the bluffs were riddled with horizontal shafts. Old rusted purposeless machinery like the flung playthings of petulant giants with a bent for the peculiar and the machinery itself in places Tyler couldn’t fathom how it got to and the ferriclooking bluffs hung still with rotted scaffolding dangling into space and everywhere the bright orangebrown rocks and split boulders with their layered centers in subtle gradations of earthtones and old rotting conveyors where the ore had gone and on a flattening of one of the ridges a perfectly round building forty or fifty feet tall built of contoured blocks with the roof caved and serving now as floor and the last few feet at the top gaptoothed and asymmetrical, and it was as inexplicable to him as some druidic configuration of stones ten thousand years old.

He skirted a deep quarry, its sides cannelured by marks where the featherdrill had gone. Far below, blacklooking water pooled in the quarry bottom and as he watched a bobcat drank then highfooted back up the sloping side, boulder to boulder with an almost surreal grace and vanished like some creature wholly of the imagination.

He began to come upon the ruins of shanties and silvergray tinroofed shacks fallen and vinecrept and solitary chimneys like sentries left charged with some watch then forgotten and after a while in a frail stand of sassafras he came upon a desecrated graveyard. He’d heard of a black cemetery in the heart of the Harrikin pillaged by vandals. It was part of local folklore that blacks were buried with whatever of value they possessed and the thought of such chattels as jewelryand gold pocketwatches had drawn those who’d already gone beyond the pale here to initiate their own tawdry resurrections, and Tyler’s own nights with a pick and shovel were not lost upon him. He passed an open grave with sloping rainwashed sides at whose bottom lay a splintered coffin and reflexively he looked away, but there was a glimpse of a yellowed skull and a funeral suit bleached absolutely colorless by the weathers. This world should know better than to leave an old grandfather staring sightless into the sun with nothing of shelter left to keep him from the rain and predators.

He hurried on through thin tilting tablets of stone with their weary redundancy of script, and all there was to sum up these lives was the two dates so told. He stopped at the edge and stared back at this desolatelooking city of the dead. All these hardscrabble honor graduates from the school of hard knocks. Their lives had been drawn so thin it was one continual struggle just to exist and when death came like the one kept promise they’d ever encountered, their graves were pillaged for watches they’d never owned, jewelry they’d never even aspired to owning. The very air was telluric with all these untold stories but there was no tongue left to tell them, no ear to hear them save his own.

He went on. The land was ascending through thinning timber and he had come upon a town. A town whose thoroughfare was grown with brush and saplings and whose wooden sidewalks were rotting. Old buildings tilted and robbed of windows, with doors standing open as if awaiting commerce. Stores with faded signs for Dr. Pepper, Groves Chill Tonic, 666. He went up a high set of steps to a porch that ran the breadth of the building. When he entered the store he flushed a family of pigeons who fled startled through glassless windows. He’d been hungry all day but whatever tinned foodstuffs had been left here had been looted long ago, and all that remained was a cavernous room with broken shelving and a long counter down one side. An ancient cash register had been broken open and cast aside. A few flyspecked bottles of some darkly coagulant cureall patent medicine still remained, and a hardened and moldy set of horseharness hung from a nail driven into the wall. A cool, dank smell of old rains and drifted leaves and animal dens and the subtle composite smell of time itself, the cancerous work of the shifting seasons.

He prowled about looking for some sort of tool to attempt repair on the rifle, but anything at all that would have served a useful purpose seemed to have been removed. Even boards had been ripped from the walls to repair other dwellings, great poplar and chestnut boards of improbable width.

He went out. Shadows lay long and distorted in the waning day. The sun was fleeing west. Such sparse windowglass as remained burned briefly with orange fire. He went past a log building mouldering into the earth; this building’s windows were barred with crisscrossed slabs of hammered iron, and he guessed this must have served as the jail. He thought of Bookbinder. Do you remember old Hollis Bookbinder? he asked the silence. A row of smashed whiskey bottles on a window ledge bore witness to some past hunter’s target practice. He went on past the jail down sloping earth, and in a clearing stood a great whiteoak that drew his eye, for this must be where the black had died for impugning the white whore’s honor. He didn’t see a church or a school or if he did he didn’t recognize them. He kept thinking he’d happen uponthe railroad tracks but he did not.

A rising wind ruffled the carpet of leaves and with the wind at his back he hurried on. He wanted shut of this place with its air of dissolute ruin and its desecrated dead. A host of voices rode the wind, garbled and indistinguishable, all talking at once and all telling him stories he didn’t want to know. Old grievances he couldn’t bear. He came upon a stone building open to the sky built across a stream and within a spring. He raked leaves away and waited for the water to clear and drank and when he raised his face the world had darkened.

The sun had not set but clouds blown in from the west had obscured it and a few drops of rain sang in the leaves. He turned and the rain was swinging across the clearing toward him and what lay beyond it went shimmering and translucent as if it were all being erased from existence.

Just at dusk he came upon an old truck, rusted and motorless, down a hillside cocked against a tree. By some miracle all its glasses remained unstoned and its seats intact and he got in and closed the door against the rain and sat wearily staring out the blurred windshield. After a time his eyes closed and he slept with his head laid back against the back of the seat.

It was full dark when he awoke and he was sore and stiff and moonlight was falling through the windshield. He got out. It was clearing and high above him clouds sped eastward in the keep of some enormous wind. They trailed inkblack medusalike tendrils and the moon shuttled in and out of them and appeared to hurtle eastward but never neared the horizon. He walked with his shadow fading in and out with the passage of clouds until at length the clouds were gone andthe woods began to burn with eerie silver fire.

He went on and he came to feel that he carried the seed of some dread plague that would lay waste to all before him and behind him and that word of his coming had preceded him so that folks dropped whatever tools they were holding and grasped up their children and fled into the woods with doors left ajar and meals left halfeaten on dining tables.

Then he thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.

He went on eastward looking for some high point he might climb and search for a light. When he found one he climbed it and turned, unwilling to believe all this blackness to the four points of the compass, but all lay sleeplocked and dark as if in all this desolate world he moved through he was the first man awaiting others or the last man left mourning those who had gone before.

For what seemed to him hours he had been following the sound of human voices raised in song and faroff imprecations of fervent faith or rage. He kept angling toward it and ultimately came out on a road. Beyond in a muddy clearing a tent and worshipers thronging out into the chill night. Voicescalled each to each. Goodnight, brother. God bless you. See you at the meetin tomorrow night.

He stood uncertainly by the wayside with the rifle which was by now an extension of himself dangling at his side searching countenances in the vague dusk and trying to decide who to ask.

A family passed. A short, slouching man and a bonneted woman, then, in descending order, a darkhaired girl and a teenage boy a year or two younger, then another boy younger still.

The man abruptly stopped, and when he did the woman and children as well as if they had walked into an invisible wall or were in some manner all geared together. The man was studying Tyler’s face intently and leaning forward in the failing light. Boy, he asked, are you washed in the blood?

Tyler shifted his weight on the balls of his feet. Not him, he was thinking. Man follow his directions, no telling where he might wind up.

I don’t reckon, he said.

Say you don’t reckon. That means you ain’t. If you don’t know for sure, then there ain’t no use hemmin and hawin about it.

No, then.

Then what are you even doin here then? This ridge is a place for worshipers tonight. No place here for sinners. No stormcellar here for sinners and backsliders to crawl into.

I just heard the singing and followed it. I’ve been turned around in the woods. I’m lost.

Lost? The face had leant closer yet and wore such a look of beaming benevolence that Tyler had begun to look skittishly about for someone else to ask. Madfolk he had fallenamong here and no safety in numbers such as these. The man had proffered his hand and Tyler shifted the rifle right hand to left and warily shook it. The hand was hot and dry and frantic.

I know all about lost, the benevolent madman was saying. I wrote the book on lost. I was lost myself till Jesus reached down tonight and plucked me out of the slop I was crawlin in and stood me on my own two feet. You can ask Pearl if you doubt what I say.

The bonneted woman was nodding indiscriminate agreement all the while, but the children’s faces watching were just the carefully closed and slightly skeptical faces of children and they told him nothing at all. The darkhaired girl was very pretty, and she was staring at him with a nightransfixed intensity.

Claude was saved tonight, Pearl said. He was a drunkard for twentyodd year, but tonight he give it all up.

I’m just trying to get to Ackerman’s Field, Tyler said. I come from Centre and I’ve been turned around in the woods.

Lord, you’re a long way from home, the man said. But you’re closer to Ackerman’s Field than you are Centre. You must be plumb wore out and about starved to death.

I just need to get to town. I have to see somebody bad. You don’t have a telephone, do you?

Lord, no. They work on wires, don’t they, and they ain’t never run no wires in here.

I can maybe catch a ride into town from here then.

But the man would not have it so. His hand had clamped Tyler’s biceps. His eyes sought Tyler’s eyes with a divine fixity as if righting this lost and doubtful sheep would consolidate his pact with whatever had struck him here this night. You goin with us. You goin to get somethin to eat and a bed to sleep in and you goin into town with us in the mornin. We go of a Saturday. Can’t let you wander around here all night, and it wouldn’t be Christian to leave you to the varmints.

Tyler made to pull away, but this seemed much the lesser of several evils, and at the mention of food his stomach had twisted with an almost painful writhing. He allowed himself to be tugged along toward whatever they were moving to. All the other revelers had gone as finally as if the night had taken them. The trees were steeped in a murky blue negation of light, and above them and the dark blue suggestion of horizon a moon had risen halfobscured by lavender clouds like a pale cataracted eye watching them.

The man talked as they progressed, he had not ceased. This here is Pearl, he said, gesturing toward the woman. These is Drew and Aaron and this here grown girl or thinks she is is Claudelle.

There was an old pickup truck turned into a sideroad. The truck had a flat bed with sideboards cobbled up out of slabs. It had been black but was a black now that remembered nothing of paint and seemed to draw light and suck it out of sight somewhere beneath its surface.

Nobody said anything, but Tyler guessed he was to ride in the back and climbed onto the tailgate. The two boys followed, and the girl would have as well, but the woman grasped her arm and pulled her toward the cab.

The road they followed was bowered so low with branches that they were forever ducking and ended sitting against the cab. As they progressed light to dark, the moonlight made lace filigrees of moving shadow in the truckbed. He rested his head against the cold metal of the cab.

The road spooled palely out behind them and shadow took it and it seemed never to have existed, a road formed by the headlights and diminishing in the red glow of the taillights, beyond that just windy space and nothingness save Sutter trying to devise a way to cross it.

What was you huntin? the biggest boy shouted over the roar of the truck. The younger boy was already asleep against Drew’s shoulder, eyes closed and lashes shadowed on his pale face.

What?

What was you huntin? Squirrels, rabbits, what?

Bears, Tyler said.

The boy glanced at the rifle Tyler clutched. He leaned to spit through the sideboards at the fleeing road and gave Tyler a cold cat’s look. You come armed mighty light for em, he said. Tyler just grinned and didn’t say anything. When the truck ceased they were not before some shotgun shack as he had expected they would be but a substantial farmhouse set in the lee of dark hills. Beyond it other buildings that lay in shadow, the bulk of a barn. He could smell woodsmoke from the fire they’d left. The cab doors sprang open and they got out.

Is Aaron done asleep? the woman called.

I reckon. He’s laid against me ever since we left.

Hand him down here then, Drew.

Claude was striding toward the porch. At its edge he halted. Boy, where’s that wood you was supposed to stack on the porch. There ain’t nary a stick up here.

Drew had scrambled down from the truckbed. I clearlight forgot it, getting ready for meetin and all. You reckon a good kick in the hind end would help you remember? Claude asked, but there was no real force behind his words. He seemed still touched by whatever of brotherhood he’d soaked up at the campmeeting and willing to pass this magnanimity along to those with human failings.

I believe I can remember it without you goin to that trouble, Drew said easily. I’d do it right now, I reckon.

I reckon you will. Take this lost sheep along with you to help. He turned to Tyler. Just follow Drew here. It’s down by the barn.

When they had progressed out of what Drew judged to be hearing distance, he said, He’s the damnedest feller for stackin wood on the porch I ever seen. Specially as long as I’m doin it.

Tyler didn’t say anything. There were no trees to block the moon here and the barnlot lay told in somber shades of black and silver. The wood was corded under a crude shed of old barn tin nailed on poles and Tyler started ricking it up on his arms.

It’s a wheelbar here somewhere. Saves totin it.

The wheelbarrow was a rickety homemade affair of short boards nailed to cedar poles and its wheel had once served a cultivator. The wheel was unsure of its moorings and moved when you pushed the wheelbarrow with a fey drunken whimsy of its own.

Was you sure enough lost?

I sure enough was. Still am.

You wadn’t huntin bear, though. My guess is you was coon huntin and got turned around and lost your dogs. Did they not ever tree?

If they did I didn’t hear them. Boy, you was lucky to get out alive, wanderin around in there at night. I ever get lost in there, I aim to travel in the daytime and lay up at night. There’s all kinds of wells and holes back in there. Mineshafts. I had a uncle, Mama’s brother, Clifford Suggs, he went huntin in there Christmas Day in 1945 and he ain’t come out till yet. They hunted for him no tellin how long and never even found a track. What do you reckon happened to him?

I don’t know.

I bet he’s down one of them shafts. Nothin but bones by now, I bet. Clifford was all right. He was one of my favorite uncles, but still and all, I’m glad it’s him and not me. Think about dyin like that. Fallin off down one of them things and no way out. Layin there hurt and nothin to eat and them walls too steep to climb. Watchin the daylight and birds flyin over and stuff. It just seems to me somebody ought to be watchin things like that.

Do what?

You know, whoever’s in charge of all this. Whoever’s supposed to be watchin things, seeing after em. Pa always gets the religion at these tent meetins, but he misplaces it after a few days. Pa always says His eye is on the sparrow, but I reckon He must of looked away a minute when Clifford stepped off in that hole. Don’t you ever think about things like that?

Not if I can help it, Tyler said. I’m just like everybody else, trying to get by.

You goin to town with us tomorrow?

I sure am. Don’t you think this thing’s about loaded?

Heavier we load it the less trips we got to make. Boy, we’ll have us a time in town. We’ll go to the picture show. You gotany money?

A little. Not much time, though. I need to see a man in Ackerman’s Field, and then I’ve got to figure how to get a ride back to Centre.

It don’t take long to see a picture show. Last time I went it was Lash LaRue, you ever seen him? We’ll find us a couple of them town girls and set up in the balcony and play with their titties, that’s what I’m layin off to do.

Drew glanced toward the house. Lamps had been lit now, and warm yellow squares of light defrayed the dark. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper even though the house and any ear that might be listening lay fifty or sixty yards away.

You ever had any pussy?

Any what? Seems like I’ve heard of it somewhere, but I can’t think what it is.

That’s what a girl-oh, shit. Nobody’s that lost in the woods. You funnin me again, ain’t ye?

Maybe a little.

Anyway, they say these town girls’ll flat put it on ye. We give Pa and them the slip tomorrow, we just might find out. But you better watch Claudelle; she’s boy-crazy.

Say she is?

Shit yes. You not seen the way she’s been watchin you? Like a cat slippin up on a bird. Ma says it’s just her age, but it just looks to me like she’s come into some kind of a heat. Like cows and such does. She’ll light on you like a duck on a junebug. You better watch Pa, though.

Is that right?

It damn sure is. He’s done run off three or four with a gun. What do you think about that? I think if we don’t get this wood to the house he’s going to have one after us.

All right then, let’s go. I just get to talkin and don’t never know when to quit. Out here I ain’t got nobody to talk to.

Claude waved them to table with an expansive arm. The table had been laid, and Tyler’s sweeping eye took in white beans cooked with chunks of ham and a steaming bowl of snowy mashed potatoes and a platter of fried pork chops. Biscuits from the warming closet and what he judged was muscadine jelly and glasses of buttermilk all way round.

It ain’t much, but it beats hickory nuts and a claw hammer, Claude said. Just help yourself, boy.

Tyler didn’t need asking. Drew was already ladling full his plate, and Tyler was eyeing the level of beans in the pot and spearing pork chops with his fork. The sloe-eyed girl was eyeing him from across the table but he had an eye only for the food and was dishing out mashed potatoes and awaiting the pot of beans.

I like a boy not afraid to help hisself, Pearl said.

Then you bound to pure dee love this feller, Claude said. He makes hisself right at home.

I was about starved out, Tyler said.

Who are you anyway, Lost Sheep? You from over around Centre?

I’m a Tyler. We always lived down on Lick Creek.

Lick Creek? You ain’t kin to old Moose Tyler, are you?

That’s what folks always called my daddy.

Claude had laid aside his eating utensils and was staring at Tyler in parodic disbelief. Well, I’ll be doubledipped in shit, he said. Why, boy, I’ve held you on my knee a lot of times. Old Moose Tyler’s boy. You watch your mouth at table, Pearl said. Be baptized at a meetin and come straight home and talk that way at the supper table.

‘Shit’ ain’t takin the name of the Lord our God in vain, Claude said. Or wadn’t the last time I looked.

It’s vulgar talk, Bible or no Bible, and if it don’t say in there not to say it, it ort to.

If this ain’t the beatinest thing, Claude said in wonder. Of all the people to come up out of the woods and wind up at my table. Boy, I knowed your daddy thirty year or more. He used to make as fine a whiskey as ever run down my throat, and I shore was sorry to hear when he passed on. I’ve passed out in your house and slept in your front room more times than once.

And a lot more front rooms, too, Pearl said. Not that it’s anything to brag about. She was watching Tyler intently and he felt his social standing had plummeted precipitously and he was eating incrementally faster as if the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth might suddenly plate and all be jerked from beneath his knife and fork.

Didn’t you have a sister a little older than you? Pretty little brindleheaded thing with big eyes?

Yes.

Where’s she at? Claude grinned. She ain’t lost, too, is she?

Tyler’s jaws had ceased working. He lowered his fork and sat silent for a moment staring at his plate.

She died too, he finally said.

Drew was fiddling with the radio. Twirling the dial from one end of the scale to the other. Garbled bits of laughter, music, soap jingles. Applause. Snippets of lives that were so foreign to them they might have come from another country, another planet.

Leave it in one place, Claude said. Put it on WCKY. They might have the Chuck Wagon Gang.

I ain’t studyin no Chuck Wagon Gang. I’m tryin to find the Long Ranger.

Claude looked up from the Bible he was poring over. Boy, the Lone Ranger ain’t goin to get you into Heaven.

He’d come about as close as the Chuck Wagon Gang, Drew said. But I reckon he must be out of town tonight. I can’t even get the station.

Let me see that thing. Claude dialing. The tailend of a gospel song. A voice came on telling about a miraculous photograph that had cured folks of cancer, arthritis, goiters. Whatever they had. Tumors the size of goose eggs miracled into oblivion, malignancies turned benign. A photograph was taken of a rose garden and when developed it showed the softly glowing figure of Christ the King reaching out toward whoever held the photograph. All free for the asking save postage and handling and a small donation.

Drew rose and went out and pulled the door to on the night. Claude built himself a Bull Durham cigarette and sat with the Bible open on his lap, listening to the voices coming out of the radio, his eyes closed. The woman was not about, and Tyler guessed she’d gone to bed. Somewhere in the house a clock was ticking loudly, he couldn’t tell where.

He looked toward the kitchen and Claudelle was standing in the door watching him. He looked away out the window at the dark and when he looked back the door was empty. After a while he rose and went into the kitchen. A cabinet the lengthof the kitchen held a drysink, and the girl was standing with her back to him washing dishes. Her black hair fell to her waist. At his step the hand holding the dishcloth stopped its motion, and she seemed to be waiting for something. She faced a window, and the lamp mirrored the glass so that Tyler could see himself reaching across her shoulder for the dipper in the water bucket. In the lamplit glass his face looked sharp and predatory. When his arm touched her shoulder, she turned, and when she did they were very close. In the yellow lamplight her face was translucent and poreless as a face carved from marble.

Why don’t you just slip up on a body? she asked.

You heard me coming.

I did not.

We won’t argue about it. You were waiting for me, though.

Waitin for you to do what?

For the first time her eyes met his. They were darkly fringed with lashes and in the lamplight they looked violet in their depths.

I don’t know. This maybe.

He kissed her and she didn’t pull away, but she stiffened, and under his mouth her lips were little girl’s lips, prim and clenched. He cupped a breast, and she made some murmurous sound, and her mouth opened and a hand still wet with soapy water came up to clasp the back of his neck. Her eyes opened and he knew she was watching the doorway across his shoulder, and he could tell by the look on her face the doorway was empty. He dropped a hand to her hip and her pelvis moved involuntarily against him. He slipped the hand between their bodies, and she made some minute adjustment to accommodate it. He cupped her mounded fleshand she went slack and boneless against him. Her legs parted and her tongue was in his mouth for a moment, and she hugged him hard and suddenly pushed him away.

We’d better quit. Daddy’ll be here in a minute.

He’s listening to the radio.

That’s not all he’s listening to, she said.

There’s nothing in here for him to hear.

That’s exactly what I meant.

He released her reluctantly and stepped away from her. He drug a ladderback chair from the table and turned it backward and sat watching her with his arms crossed over the top slat. All right, let’s talk, then.

Okay. You were right, I did want you to come in here. I wanted you to do that, too. I didn’t want to quit.

What part? The kiss, or what?

She reddened. I don’t know. All of it. The kiss. I never kissed a boy before.

He grinned. Me neither.

A caramelcolored dog had roused itself from the corner where it slept. It looked about for the girl, then trotted over and lay back down with its chin on her foot and lay watching Tyler warily.

Why on earth is that dog wearing earrings?

Ain’t that somethin? Claudelle said. I saw this movie star in a book. She was holdin this dog that looked just like Carmie and it was wearin a pair of earrings. I bought these at the dimestore, and Drew pierced her ears for me with a needle.

Well, that’s the first one I’ve ever seen.

It’s only the second one I’ve heard tell of.

Claudelle.

She jumped. What, Daddy?

Wind up them dishes and get in the bed.

All right, Daddy.

Right now.

Where am I supposed to sleep? Tyler whispered.

In the front room, I guess. On the couch. It’s all there is.

All right. When everybody’s asleep, come in there with me.

Do what?

Come in there with me when they’re asleep.

Why would I do that?

Because you want to, Tyler said. Because I want you to. We can sit in there and talk.

She grinned. What else’ll we do?

Nothing you don’t want to.

I will if I can, she said. If I can stay awake till they’re all asleep.

You can if you want to.

You know I want to.

When all the lamps were blown out the darkness was absolute. He lay in the strange room with the mothball-smelling quilt pulled about his chin and listened to the sounds the house made. Being lost at sea would be like this, Tyler thought. In the stormy dark. There were no walls, no ceiling, no floor. No north or south, nothing a compass could affix to. Nothing save the dark and the wind funneling cold down the hollow and flattening itself against whatever contained him against the night. He thought of Sutter, and then he forced Sutter out of his mind and thought of Claudelle. Her eyes so near his own. Dark, wise, woman’s eyes in a child’s face. The taste of her mouth, the clean soapscent of her hair. He was utterly weary, and the womblike comfort of the quilt was like adream. I will wake up in a stumphole with the rain in my face, he thought. Maybe I’ll stay another night, he was thinking drowsily. Or two. The food’s not half bad. I could just move in and they could adopt me. Marry Claudelle. Have a little log cabin in the woods with a trellis for climbing roses. Claude could give us a cow and a hog for a dowry, and we already have a dog that wears earrings.

After a while it began to rain. Winter lightning bloomed and showed him a rainstreaked window. Inkstained Rorschach trees on the move. Beyond the window the night looked purple. The window vanished and thunder came rumbling down the corridors of the night. The rain came in hard, windy gusts, then subsided to a slow, steady winter drizzle, and he wondered where Sutter was. Under boughs of cedar, hidden with the nightbirds clotted about the branches like malefic fruit, driven to earth like the rest of the beasts of this fabled wood. Crouched in a dry spot beneath the caved roof of an abandoned house, malign revenant among other revenants keeping council. Cursing the rain and biding his time. Or maybe he had just trudged on, as impervious to the vagaries of the weather as stone.

He went to sleep thinking about the girl. Shucking her nightgown over her head, the pale secret bloom of her body. The warmth of it laid against him, breasts pooled against his chest.

But it was not Claudelle but Claude himself who shook him awake at some clockless hour. He came awake slowly as if he were rising in muddy yellow water.

Get up.

Just crawl on in here, Tyler said sleepily.

What? Wake the hell up, boy. He awoke instantly then, coming halfupraised in bed, eyes sweeping the room, though there was nothing save dark to see, and the voice came again, and in a drunken rush of relief he realized it was not Sutter but Claude.

What is it?

Get up. It’s mornin.

He looked about. He couldn’t even see a window. It was still raining.

If it’s morning why ain’t it light?

It’s getting light, Claude said inanely.

Where? Tyler wondered.

Claude fell silent though Tyler could hear the steady rasp of his breathing. He seemed to be leant forward in the dark.

What was it you wanted?

You didn’t have a little drink hid out, did ye? Down there by where we picked you up?

No. No, I don’t even drink.

I just thought bein as you was Moose’s boy, you might. I had some, but she’s hid it or poured it out, one. I wisht I knowed which. If it’s poured out, there’s no use lookin, but if it’s just hid, I might find it if I go on lookin.

Well. I don’t know what to tell you. What does she say?

She’s not sayin much one way or another, Claude said.

I thought you quit, anyway.

I did, I did. I just hate havin somethin and not knowin where it’s at. I reckon I’ll go back to bed.

Tyler lay back on the pillow. Footsteps wandered away in the dark.

He went back to sleep to the windy rain and when he awoke again, there was gray light at the window and it was raining still. He didn’t know if the rain or the light or the voiceshad awakened him.

If you ain’t the beat of all I’ve ever seen, Pearl was saying. You take the cake. Baptized one night praisin Jesus and up before daylight huntin whiskey. If that ain’t the beat.

Claude was trying a reasonable tack. The Bible ain’t down on spirits, he said. Why even them old prophets and disciples and suchlike of old was known to take a dram of wine.

They never blowed the grocer money on it, though.

Claude gave up. They would if they had a sourtongued old bitch like you doggin their ever move, he said.

They fell silent save the clatter of pans, the rattle of cutlery. After a while he could smell coffee boiling and this drew him up out of the warm quilts. It had turned colder during the night and he could feel drafts in the room, cold air sucking under the door, tinkling the unglazed windowpanes with soft chimes. He checked under the couch for the rifle, then hunkered before the heater tying his boots. As he straightened and held his hands toward the fire, Claude came through the door with a cup of coffee in his hand. In the cold room the coffee seemed to be smoking.

Get you a cup of coffee.

I believe I will. Turned off cold, ain’t it? Tyler could see his breath in the cold air.

It’ll warm up here directly. It’s that north wind. I ever build another house, I’ll never build it facin north like I did this one. Get you a cup of coffee. It’s done.

He was spooning sugar into a cup when she said, We about out of sugar around here. Best save what’s left for them kids’ oats. I got to get em some breakfast here directly.

He’d had an uplifted spoonful bound for his cup but returned it to the jar. He’d wondered about cream but figuredthat might be rationed too and started with his coffee back to the front room. She was watching him with bitter eyes, her face stony as a banker’s.

What’d I do? he asked, pausing in the doorway.

She didn’t answer for a time. When she did, her voice was a hoarse croak. You got him to thinkin about whiskey again.

Tyler guessed that whiskey was never very far from Claude’s mind but he didn’t say so. If I did I never meant to, he said. He went back into the front room, where Claude was standing with his back to the fire.

We still going to town today?

Sure, it’s Saturday, ain’t it? We got to. We about out of groceries.

She thinks I got you started thinking about liquor.

Don’t pay her no mind. I don’t need it nohow, I’m shut of it. Givin up drinkin and cussin and startin a new life. I just had me one of them white nights where you can’t sleep, and along about three o’clock in the mornin it laid pretty heavy on my mind. I just can’t for the life of me think what she could of done with it. I know she ain’t thowed it away. That woman’s so tight she’ll boil coffee grounds till they fade plumb out.

The front door blew open in a gust of wind and Drew came in. Shut that door, Claude said automatically before the boy was even in the room. It’s got a awful raw breath.

You think it’s raw here, you ought to try it down by the hogpen, Drew said. His cheeks were red and chapped, and his nose was running, and he kept rubbing his hands together to show how cold it was.

When we goin to town? he asked.

I believe we’ll wait till after breakfast.

There was a curtained doorway leading off to a room Tylerhadn’t seen and through this door Claudelle and Aaron came barefoot and sleepyeyed and aligned themselves before the fire. Why is it so cold? she asked.

It’s wintertime, Claude said.

Tyler moved aside to make more room by the heater. Claudelle caught his eye when Claude was looking the other way and shrugged elaborately. I couldn’t, she mouthed.

Don’t you let Aaron touch that hot stovepipe, Claude told her.

It’s ready, Pearl called.

Breakfast was a hasty meal of smoking oatmeal with buttered biscuits and more coffee. Going to town seemed to be on everyone’s mind and there was an undercurrent of restrained excitement. An almost holiday mood that touched everyone save Pearl. Tyler glanced up once from his bowl and she was watching him with something akin to trepidation and he wondered what new offense he had committed. She seemed to have concluded that the sooner they were shut of him the better, but the girl had slipped down in her chair and stretched her legs out and imprisoned Tyler’s ankles between her own. She went on spoonfeeding Aaron oatmeal as if she didn’t know Tyler existed.

Drew finished and pushed his bowl back with a thumb. He drained his coffee cup and set it aside and stood. We best be getting ready, he said. I aim to be there when the show opens. You want me to warm up the truck?

I don’t reckon you’re runnin this operation just yet, Claude said. I’ll say when to get ready. And you ain’t goin to no show.

Am too. You done said.

If he goes, I’m goin, Claudelle said.

I said ain’t nobody goin. Them shows ain’t nothin butshootin and fistfightin and them gals runnin around with their bosoms hangin out.

I ain’t never seen that one, but it sure sounds like a good one, Drew said. You don’t recall the name of it, do you?

You ain’t goin.

Watch me.

At length they were ready. The girl in a blue-and-white-checked calflength dress Tyler knew she thought of as her town dress. Claude in a white shirt buttoned to the chin and suitpants and brogans blacked with shoepolish. Dressed for town Drew looked like a diminutive and amateur pimp. He wore a semitransparent nylon seersucker shirt and trousers baggy at the upper legs and pegged sharply at the cuffs. They were a pale limegreen with contrasting stitching of a darker green.

I ordered these special out of Chicago, the boy said. They come mailorder from a place I seen an advertisement for. The Hep Cat. I dug several fenceposts to get the money to buy them britches. I’m savin up now to get me some of them pointytoed shoes.

Claudelle was studying his hair curiously. It was slicked back stiffly in a grotesque pompadour. What on earth has he got on his hair? she asked rhetorically. She leaned to smell. He was at pushing her away. That boy’s got a double handful of lard on his hair, she said.

Least I ain’t got socks crammed in my brassiere, Drew said viciously. That hadn’t sounded right, and he glanced around to see who’d heard. Or wouldn’t if I was wearin one, he amended hastily.

Boy, that mouth of yourn needs some tendin to, Claude said. And it’s fixin to get it here shortly. You and Lost Sheephere go get that tarpaulin and lash it over them sideboards. Less you wantin to swim to Ackerman’s Field.

You could of come up with this before I got ready, Drew said.

Them slickers is on the back porch.

The yard was already filling with water, here and there islands of higher ground crested with dead yellow grass and the tilted husks of last year’s weeds, and they progressed island to island to the barn. There was a crude ladder nailed beside a crib door and Drew skinned up it. I’ll thow it down to ye, he called. See if you can find any wire anywhere.

Tyler found several footlong pieces bent and hooked through a logchain secured to the ridgepole and dangling a little over headhigh in the hall of the barn. He stared a moment trying to divine its purpose, but if it had one other than the storing of wire he couldn’t divine it. The folded tarp fell heavily in a dirty slipstream of drifting straw and several drownedlooking chickens ruffled their feathers and turned quarreling to study Tyler with jaundiced, unblinking eyes, then turned back and stood humpbacked and disconsolate, watching the rain stream off the edge of the tin roof.

Hellfire, Drew said. We’re goin to get as wet foolin with this damn tarp as we would ridin to town. You can’t get any wetter than wet less you drown.

They trudged out into the rain and unfolded the tarp over the sideboards and pulled it taut and began wiring the eyelets through fence staples driven into the slabs.

We goin to get them town girls? Drew asked.

Bring them on, Tyler grinned. Water was streaming out of his hair and down his face, and he had to be continually wiping it out of his eyes. Drew’s hair had risen in sharp, stiffspikes, and greasylooking gray water ran out of it and beaded like oil on his freckled face.

Damned if we ain’t a pair of drowned chickens, Tyler said.

What the hell. We goin to town.

When they had warmed and approached a semblance of dry and were aligned expectantly in the truckbed the truck would not start. The motor whirled but it would not fire nor hit and after a few moments the strong odor of raw gas came seeping back under the tarpaulin. He’s floodin it, Drew said. You’re floodin it, he called through the sideboards. Claude got out and raised the hood with an attendant squawk of protesting rusty hinges and propped it with a stick and stood peering down into its mysteries. One by one they got out and stood with him watching in commiseration or aiding him with their silent prayers and when he felt the weight of their eyes he turned upon them a confident gaptoothed grin.

Likely it ain’t much, he said. It ain’t never done this before. Likely it’ll hit here in a minute. He shoved his hand into the maze of wires and tubing and wiggled a few things at random. There now, he said professionally. He dusted his hands together. Try it, Drew.

Drew got behind the wheel and whirled the motor a few times. More of the same.

Timin may be a little off, he said. He turned the distributor cap an infinitesimal degree. Now try it.

Come on, Tyler prayed.

Nothing.

Claude turned upon them all his look of beaming benevolence and then back to the motor, staring at it fiercely as if he would brook no more insubordination or yet as if he could by the sheer force of his stronger will raise it from the dead likesome decrepit mechanical Lazarus and set it on the road to Ackerman’s Field.

We’ll just let it rest a minute, he said, his manner suggesting that the truck might be merely tired or had perhaps dozed off.

I ain’t standin out here in the rain like a fool, Claudelle said. I’m goin in the house.

Then get this chap in the dry, Pearl said.

The girl turned walking away and gave Tyler a sloe-eyed look back over her right shoulder. He stood looking at her retreating back and tried to think of an excuse for going back to the house.

More than likely the distributor cap’s just got water inside, he said. If I got a clean, dry rag and dried it out, more than likely she’d crank right up.

Not so much of a fool as he might have liked, the old woman gave him a look transparent with fierce malice, and Claude said, I reckon you been to mechanickin school. The edge of his smile jerked nervously, and his eyes looked harried.

Tyler just stared off to where the woods took the muddy road. The bowed trees stood bent like penitents under the windy rain and through the blowing water the horizon seemed in tumultuous motion, wavering like a horizon seen through fire and it seemed to be receding from him.

Likely it’ll just get well on its own, he said.

Claude ignored him. Nothin else works we can always push it, he said. Get her rollin down this grade and she’ll fire right up like a sewin machine.

This having occurred to him, nothing would do but they must try it right away. With Claude behind the wheel andeveryone else, even the old woman, leant with shoulders to the truck, it began to inch forward through the sucking mud to the slope. Tyler pushed with a kind of fevered desperate hope that the truck would start. He felt that his lungs would burst and funny lights flickered behind his eyes and his feet were slipsliding wildly in the slick gray muck. The truck rolled silently toward the downgrade.

We got her on a downhill run now, boys, Claude yelled. Halfway down the slope he popped the clutch and the truck slewed sideways when the gears meshed and the wheels threw great contemptuous gouts of mud back toward them, but it did not hit, nor did it the next time when he tried where the slope leveled out and where it ultimately ceased, sulking in the roadbed like some illformed creature with a malefic will of its own. When Claude leapt out he slammed the door so hard glass rattled in its panel and he kicked the door with a vicious broganned foot and looked wildly about for some weapon to strike it with.

You goddamned eggsuckin son of a bitch, he told the truck. I ain’t never in my life seen nothin so aggagoddamnvatin.

We ain’t goin, Drew said.

We goin too, Claude said. It’s done got me mad now. Let me think a minute.

I’m goin to the house, Pearl said. She was slathered with mud and anger smouldered and flickered in her eyes. You may as well quit on it. Like you do on everthing else. She started up the slope, skirting the worst of the mud.

Put on a pot of coffee, Claude called after her, but she didn’t say if she would or she wouldn’t.

Claude opened the truck door and sat with his feet on therunningboard. Sheltered so from the rain he began to build a cigarette but when he raised it to his lips to lick the paper water dripped from his hair onto it and he was left with half a shredded paper in each hand and brown flakes of tobacco strewn over his lap. He sat staring at it not in anger but a kind of bemused stoicism, set upon by all things mechanical and now by the very elements themselves, as if whatever god had plucked him from the midst of sinners was sorely testing his newfound faith.

Claude got out of the truck and dusted the tobacco flakes from his trousers. Boys, there ain’t but one thing to do.

Tyler dreaded hearing it, but there seemed no choice. Let’s have it, he said.

We’re goin to have to push her back up the grade and roll her off again. We’ll scotch her and take another bite and work her on up.

Hell, there ain’t no way, Tyler said.

Claude ignored him. Drew, you and Lost Sheep go get some big cuts of that heater wood and tote em down here. I aim to warm my hands and see about that coffee. Yins get the wood down here, come on to the house and warm. I believe it’s turnin colder.

They went lethargically back up the hill to the barn. Tyler could feel his wet clothes chafing his body. He could hear frogs singing somewhere below the barn where a pond might lie. Rain sang on the tin. Drew began stacking wood in his arms.

Don’t overload yourself, Tyler said. There is no earthly way we’re going to get that truck back up the hill.

Drew just shook his head and went on stacking his arm full. So bedraggled and mudslathered and absolutely wet heseemed set up as some cautionary symbol of such depths as human misery can descend to. Tyler was touched by a pity for Drew and a sorrow he couldn’t put a name to.

Hell, cheer up, Drew. There’ll be another day. They’re not goin to run out of town girls.

When they had the wood at the foot of the hill the thought of heat drew them to the house and they found Claude seated on the couch before the fire, his clothes steaming richly from the heat and a quart jar three-quarters full of a colorless liquid clutched in his lap that he stroked absentmindedly like an alien pet and a fey look of distances in his eyes.

She hid it in the picture box under the Bible, he said in answer to an unasked question. You boys ready to try it up the hill?

We about ready to warm, Drew said. We ain’t got no fruitjar. We have to warm from the outside in.

What about that coffee? Tyler said.

She never made none.

Then if we got to do it, let’s do it and get it over with.

Loath to lose the jar again, Claude slung it along in his hand and at the peak of the slope stopped and drank and stood studying the grade intently as if he were figuring angles and degrees of inclination and then went on down the hill.

Drew, you the least. Get you a stick of wood ready and me and Lost Sheep’ll push it as far we can up the grade, and you scotch it. Then we’ll get us another toehold and go again.

They tried, and the truck wouldn’t move. You goin to have to help us, he told Drew. Help us roll it and maybe we can hold it till you throw your block under it.

They locked their feet in the mud and leaned into it. The truck moved two or three feet and then no more. Drew threw awhiteoak cut under the wheel and they released the truck and stood hands on knees breathing hard.

Again. This time no more than a foot. With his breath exploding in his lungs Tyler stood staring up the muddy slope and it seemed to stretch to infinity. He turned toward the woods and the blue horizon lay beckoning like a promise.

One more time, Claude said, but the truck just rocked on its springs and the wheels would not move. No matter how hard they rocked it or lunged against it, it would not roll.

Claude went to his knees in the mud breathing hard. It’s went in gear somehow, he said.

Drew looked. No it ain’t.

It ain’t going anywhere else, either, Tyler said.

Claude began to curse the truck. There on his knees in the mud swearing he seemed like a penitent praying to a god of blasphemy. After a time he ceased but remained sitting in the mud with the rain channeling through his sparse hair and the eggsized bald spot he’d so carefully combed over bared to the elements.

I got to think, he said. I’m not whupped yet. Go in the house and warm. I’ll think of somethin here directly. He raised the bottle aloft to the winter light and drank and set it carefully in the mud, wallowing out a hole with the bottom of the jar to prevent its overturning.

The serried warm gloom of the house. This is the last goddamn time I’m changin clothes today, Drew said. I’ve got me a good mind to just go back to bed and start all over.

When they came back through the curtained doorway to the front room, Claudelle said, Let me try to find you somethin of Daddy’s to put on.

He stood steaming before the fire. There’s no need of it, he said. I’d just get them wet. I’m going back out and see if I can help him do whatever it is he thinks of doing to the truck. Did your mama ever make any coffee?

She just shook her head.

When he’d warmed awhile and judged he’d soaked up enough heat to hold him against the cold he went back out. He met Claude coming up the slope but Claude didn’t speak or otherwise acknowledge his presence. Tyler noticed that the level of liquid in the jar had fallen and Claude seemed to list slightly as he slogged through the mud. For lack of anything better to do Tyler followed him to the barn.

By the time he caught up in the hall of the barn Claude had a bridle slung over his arm and was opening the door to a stall off the strawstrewn hall of the barn. Tyler could hear a heavy stamping behind the door. Here, Stannybogus, Claude was calling into the haysmelling dark. A horse’s head appeared in the widening crack, and when it did Claude grasped its mane with a fist twisted in it, and the horse tossed its head and Tyler could see it was blind in one eye. He shook his head and went back out into the rain and down the hill to the truck. After some time Claude came stumbling down the grade leading the horse and carrying a board in his free hand. He laid aside the board and hitched the horse to the bumper of the truck and took up the slab and turned to wink at Tyler.

When the board slammed the horse’s rump its one good eye walled fearfully and it leapt against the traces with bunched muscles, simultaneously lashing out with its hind legs. Its right hoof caught Claude a glancing blow on the thigh and he collapsed into the mud, thrashing about and trying to rise. The horse had fallen to its knees leaving great raw slashes in the fresh mud and it was frantically trying to regainpurchase before the board could fall again. It veered right and left, rolling its good eye to see then lunged again and for an elongated moment the chains held and it stood straining and vibratory with nervous tremors rippling its hide and when the traces broke it lost its footing and fell again.

From the porch the woman was yelling something the wind stole and Claude was rolling around in the mud clutching his thigh, face contorted in histrionic anguish. Crazed so all over with mud and lightly furred with straw he looked like the luckless victim of some peculiar catastrophe whose survival lay in grave doubt. Graver still, for the woman had left the porch and was approaching with long purposeful strides.

The horse was running in great sliding lopes around the hillside with the singletree randomly banging the ground and each time it did the horse redoubled its speed toward the edge of the woods. They looked good to Tyler too.

I got to get on, Claude, he said. I’ll see you.

Claude just shook his head and wiped his cheek, leaving in the wake of his hand a slash of mud. Boy, I ever need anymore back luck, I aim to look you up and wear you like a charm on a watch fob. You draw misfortune like shit draws flies.

Tyler knelt in the mud before Claude. There’s a man looking for me named Granville Sutter, and he may come here. I just don’t know. If he does, don’t fool with him. Don’t even let him in. He’s crazy.

You bring the son of a bitch on. After the day I’ve had and it not over yet, nobody’s goin to come on my own land and jerk me around.

Tyler rose and went on up the hill. Meeting the woman he gave her a wide berth and she shot him a look of fearful godspeed and he went on to the porch. The girl met him there. She had a folded coat in her arms and a brown paper bag with the top rolled down.

It’s Daddy’s old army coat. Try not to let him see it.

I think he’s got other things on his mind. I guess I better get on.

I guess you had. Mama’s pretty mad. I fixed you a little lunch, some bread and jelly was all I could find. And some coffee. I don’t reckon you’ll have any trouble findin water to make it.

Thanks a lot.

Bring that coat back. It’s Daddy’s old World War coat, and he wouldn’t take nothin for it. You are comin back, ain’t you?

You know I am, he said. Even your mama couldn’t keep me run off.

I just hope you ain’t lyin about it. I wished Daddy hadn’t stayed up all night stumblin around. I wished we’d of done it knowin we’d get caught. I’ve just got a bad feelin I ain’t never goin to see you again.

I’ll turn up.

No, you won’t. Give me somethin of yours to keep.

Do what? He looked about. All there was was the gun.

Anything of yours to remember you by.

He laid the coat and bag down and untied the thong from the arrowhead amulet and handed it to her. She tied it about her throat and tucked the arrowhead into the top of her dress. Her face was touched with an inexplicable sorrow. I don’t even know your first name, she said.

It’s Kenneth.

Well. Bye, Kenneth. Be careful.

You be careful. If a man shows up around here and asksabout me, you head out. If you have to go out a window or whatever. Just stay out of his way.

What in the world are you talkin about?

He picked up the folded coat and the bag and the rifle from against the porch stanchion. It’s a long story and you wouldn’t believe it anyway. Just do what I asked you. He raised a hand in farewell and went back into the rain.

He angled toward the barn and figured to come out of the hollow back onto the roadbed. He had a thought for the tarp, but he could hear angry voices from the vicinity of the truck. When he had the barn between himself and the house, he unfolded the coat. It was emblazoned with the insignia of old wars long won or lost, and when he wrapped it round him there was room enough for a companion had he had one, but it was thick wool and very warm.

He went through the dripping brush skirting a wetweather stream boiling up from a mossy shrine and up a rocky incline and through a curtain of blackjack onto the road. He trudged on. The rain did not abate. The day drew on gray and somber and when dusk fell you could not have told the exact moment it did so. The light just faded by immeasurable increments until ultimately he was walking in darkness.

Sometime in the night he met a horseman. He’d been walking on half asleep, stumbling with a wooden gait, and the horseman was almost upon him before he recognized the sound of steel shoes on the packed earth roadbed. There was a bend in the road ahead and the rider just beyond and without even thinking he veered off down an embankmentand crouched in a thicket of winter huckleberry bushes till the rider should pass. When he passed he passed above him with the sound of steel on stone and the creak of the saddle and Tyler could see the smoking breath of the black horse and the rider pale and indistinct like some underimagined protagonist in a fever dream. Horse and rider diminished into the foggy rain and the mist muffled the slow clop of hoofbeats. There was a sharp pain in his chest and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He exhaled in a pale plume of steam and hunkered there in the winter huckleberries. He was shivering from more than the cold. He fought an almost overpowering urge to flee crazed and directionless into the fog that drifted between the dark boles of the trees. He didn’t know if it was Sutter or not and he didn’t know if it was real or he had dreamed it but he knew that something dread had passed over him in the night and gone on.

He could hear a rush of water toward the hollow that kept increasing in intensity, and he went downhill tree to tree over the slick, soggy leaves. Runoff was massing where the hollow was deepest and he could hear more than see the churning below him, a vague, dark, turbulent motion and thick, creamlike gouts of foam clocking rapidly downstream.

Loath to return to the road just yet lest the horseman double back he clambered on around the hillside, going steadily downhill. The carpet of wet leaves thinned to ultimate stony shale and he could hear his boots on the rocks. His feet felt wooden and strange and he wondered idly if they were frozen. He didn’t know how cold it was but it didn’t seem to matter. It was just cold. The earth flattened and widened here and he was moving through halfgrown cedars that loomed suddenly out of the mist like shrouded ghosts, and the waterwas boiling into a larger body of water and he stopped to get his bearings. He looked up as if to chart from the stars, but the heavens were leaden yet and out of them the ceaseless rain still fell. Some nameless creek on his right but he didn’t know what creek or even which direction it should be flowing. He went on. On his right hand rose an embankment that came out of the fog and continued on too symmetrical to have just happened, and he clambered up its rickrack sides to the summit, where railroad tracks laid on crossties gleamed palely with a wet phosphorescence through the dead weeds grown through them. One way led to town but in the dark he wasn’t sure which. Down the bank on the other side another shadow loomed anomalous out of the more familiar shadows of trees and stone.

He approached cautiously. If it was a house it might be inhabited and folks hereabouts sometimes answered a nighttime summons with a shotgun in hand. It was a house, or at least a building of some kind. A wall with darker rectangles for stonedout windows and a doorless cavity behind a canted stoop. He went in slowly, feeling for missing floorboards with his feet and for the snuffbox of matches with stiff fingers, and whatever tenanted the house this night crossed the floor in nighsoundless scuttling and over the windowsill and into the night. Somewhere in all this dark a startled nightbird rose with a clamor of wings and subsided against a wall with a soft thud. Rose fluttering again.

He dried his hands as best he could on the lining of the coat and lit a match. A low ceiling over his head, loose paper hanging in shreds. On the wall across the ruin of a fireplace. A litter of old newspapers, broken boards. The match went out, and he could hear the rain drumming on the tin roof. Within a half hour he had a cheery fire going in the fireplace and he was crouched before it feeding it broken pieces of boxing he had ripped off a partition wall. The room was lit with a hellish orange light and he had the firebox fairly stuffed to the damper with splintered chestnut before he ceased and he just sat on the hearth for a time basking in the heat. He’d never felt anything better and he hadn’t known such cold as he’d been existed. He’d kept the bag sheltered from the rain as best he could, and now he ate the lunch she’d packed. Thick slabs of yeast bread smeared with butter and jelly. Loose ground coffee in a folded paper tied with floursack ravels. He could smell the coffee through the paper and he had a taste for a cup but he could find no sort of pan about.

When he had eaten he stripped off his clothes and put the steaming coat back on and buttoned it around him. He leant boards against the brick mantle and hung his trousers and shirt to dry. He went on gathering wood for a while until he had a great pile mounded before the hearth. The chestnut burned fiercely hot but it was dry as tinder and there wasn’t much last to it.

He gathered a stack of old newspapers to read and sat as close to the hearth as the heat would permit. An eye to the boards cocked against the mantle, he had to be forever turning his clothes lest they scorch. He chewed a handful of the coffee raw, swallowing the bitter essence, and tried to read, but he was utterly weary, and the stories the papers told were strange and surreal and whole sentences tilted and slid off the page into the fire.

When the clothes were dry he put them on and restoked the fire one last time, and with a stack of newspapers for a pillow and the coat for a blanket he went to sleep. His dream was strange and fevered.

He was on a blasted heath where the trees were sparse and dead. Birds he couldn’t put a name to clustered their bare branches and called mournfully ahead of him and fell silent at his approach, then resumed when he’d passed as if they’d announce his entry into this sepia world of shades. He moved on a thin skift of snow that a sourceless wind kept setting in motion and settling back and all there was was the white snow and the black skeletal trees.

The weary road he traveled wound gently downhill toward a vague depression in the earth and he kept trudging on and after a time he could see another traveler approaching, a black figure seeping across the snowy landscape like a line of ink dripping down the snowy page, and he came to think that across a vast distance he was approaching a mirror image of himself.

When they met they ceased walking without speaking for a time and hunkered in the frozen roadbed to rest. The man took out a sack of Country Gentleman and rolled himself a cigarette with deft economy of motion and offered the tobacco then when it was refused pocketed it.

Then Tyler knew him.

Why, you’re Clifford Suggs, he said. Wait till Claudelle and Drew hear about me running up on you. Drew thinks you were lost down a mineshaft, and they’ve been hunting you for years.

The man exhaled acrid blue smoke from his nostrils. Beneath the felt hatbrim his shadowed face studying Tyler with a kind of distant amusement.

I don’t know who you are or how the story come to you, but you got it turned around backwards. I’m the one been huntin them. They’re the ones that’s gone.

Tyler was studying his shoes where the snow was compressed into a thin sole of transparent ice and between his feet were little curling strands of grass all seized in tubes of ice and when he looked back up the man’s face with the curious illogic of dreams was gone. In its place was a yellowed skull with a few strands of lank dead hair. Within the skull there was furtive movement. He leant to see. A rat’s sharp gray face peered through an eyesocket and all about the eyeholes the bone was chamfered with teethmarks, but the rat would not fit. It withdrew, turning, trying the other eyehole then growing claustrophobic and agitated and turning endless upon itself within the bony confines of the skull but there was no way out.

At some unclocked hour the rain ceased and Sutter was on the move almost immediately, wending his way through the brush which dripped continually in small echoes of rain. He was trying to remember where the house was, and he kept making false starts and recovering and going on, and after a while a wornlooking disc of moon eased out of the broken clouds and hung there like a flare to guide his path.

When he came upon the barn lot it was all shadow and white light and where water stood it gleamed in the moonlight like pooled quicksilver. He stopped here to study the house. It seemed cloaked in sleep. He leant against a stall door to rest and he could hear a horse snuffling in the stable and he could hear the quick disquieted movement of its hooves. It seemed to be turning restlessly about in the stable.

Outside in the barnlot he looked up and the pale moon was directly over him and allencompassing. It appeared to be lowering itself onto the earth and he could make out mountains and ranges of hills and hollows and dark shadowed areas of mystery he judged to be timber and he wondered what manner of beast thrived there and what their lives were like and the need to be there twisted in his heart like an old pain that will not dissipate. As he watched, enormous birds stark and dimensionless as the shadows of birds passed the remote face of the moon, wings beating slow and stately and silent and they were like birds that had once existed but did no more and he could not put a name to them. They were at once familiar and foreign, archetypes from some old childhood dream that was lost to him.

There in the shadows he seemed a darker shadow than those he moved among, some beast composed wholly of the ectoplasm of the night and with some arcane magnetism drawing to itself old angers and discontents and secret and forbidden yearnings freefloating in the humming and electric dark. The sleeping house seemed to be waiting for him, and he went on toward it.

He went on up a muddy grade past an old pickup truck hopelessly mired in the sucking clay, and he didn’t even notice it. He was thinking: You better be here. They better hope you are because whatever happens if you ain’t will be on your head. He crossed onto the porch and began to hammer on the door.

For a time he could hear nothing. He hammered again as if he’d rouse the dead, and there was an abrupt scuttling of claws across the floor and a fierce yip yip yip of a small dog on the other side of the door. The dog was growling and sounded as if it were tearing the door from its hinges and its barking was wellnigh hysterical.

Shut up, you little son of a bitch, he told it. A woman’s muffled voice said, What on earth? Then: Claude. You wake up, Claude. Then silence, but he could imagine the man swinging his legs off the creaking bed and sitting so for a moment and running a hand through sleeptousled hair, then going to the door.

Shut up, a voice told the dog. You the Lost Sheep back? it asked the door.

Yes, Sutter said, as lost a sheep as ever was.

The door opened onto a musky sleepy dark. Somewhere in the room a match flared. He could smell kerosene, stale whiskey breath, taste the residue of old unspent angers. A lamp was lit and adjusted to a dim yellow glow. Shadows flitted about the walls and ceased.

What the hell? Claude said. He added inanely, It’s three o’clock in the mornin, as if perhaps Sutter had merely stopped to inquire the time.

Sutter hadn’t waited to be asked in. He was standing in the center of the front room. His clothes were soaked and reeking and he was dripping water onto the rug. A woman had come in, children, the room seemed to be filling up. A ravenhaired girl restrained the dog then took it up in her arms and clutched it protectively to her breast.

How long’s he been gone?

Who?

That Tyler boy. You tell me what I want to know and I’ll be on my way without anybody gettin hurt.

Just who the goddamn hell do you think you are, mister? You seem to forgot you’re on my property. As a matter of fact, you’re in my house without bein asked at three o’clock in the mornin.

I’m the fellow that’s huntin Tyler, Sutter said. And if youdon’t tell me damn quick where he’s at I’m goin to unbreech you like a shotgun. Now I better hear somethin.

Sutter’s hand had found the knife. Its blade lay against his thigh. A forefinger felt its edge. It winked dully in the light. No one save the woman seemed to notice.

She said, Tell him, Claude.

Shut up. I ain’t tellin him jackshit. And you ain’t neither. I don’t care for the ways this feller’s got. I don’t take orders from ever son of a bitch wanders up out of the woods.

He’s went to Ackerman’s Field, the woman cried.

Claude’s blow was thrown wild but it caught Sutter hard enough to jar him and make blue lights flash behind his eyes. Claude seemed halfdrunk. He was windmilling his arms crazily but a glancing blow jarred Sutter’s jaw and Sutter could taste blood in his mouth. Now Claude was listing to the side like a drunken dancing bear and Sutter just stepped inside the flailing arms and hooked the knife deep and jerked upward in an explosion of blood and putrid gasses so hard Claude’s feet momentarily cleared the floor. When he withdrew the knife Claude stood disemboweled and looking down at himself with stunned incredulity and trying to put himself back together with both bloody hands.

Some sob or strangled cry jerked Sutter’s head around and he stared in momentary confusion. He seemed to have forgotten all these folk. Who they were and where he was and what was his purpose here. They were aligned against the wall like spectators at some perverse bloodsport that had gotten out of hand and when he advanced toward them with the dripping knife he moved upon a wall of stricken eyes.

Well, Granville’s got a bad name, but he never done nothin to me, a man named Tarkinton said. He opened the door of the coalstove to spit, then slammed it to. Fact was I always sort of liked him. You’d not know it by the name he’s got around here, but he didn’t like nothin better than playin a joke on somebody. Me and him was sort of runnin mates when we was young. He hadn’t been in this part of the country long when we took up together. We used to drink a lot of whiskey, run a lot of women. Trouble was he caught most of the women, and I wound up drinkin the whiskey.

He’d do anything, Granville would. He was crazy about tricks. He didn’t like nothin better than to get a big joke on somebody, though even back then they’d get a little out of hand at times. He’d lean a little heavy. He never knowed when to quit. I had this old halfgrown bobcat one time. I got it with the notion of makin a pet out of it, but hell, they wadn’t no pet in it. It was bobcat through and through. It was I reckon born mean and determined to stay that way. I had to keep it chained up, Sam, you remember when I had it.

I finally got tired of feedin and waterin it and it watchin me like it was just waitin for a chance to take my head off, and I told Granville one day, I believe I’ll just turn this son of a bitch aloose. Take it way out in the woods and let it hunt its own feed and water.

Then this idea hit Granville. He had this big old suitcase, and he got a bottle of paregoric or some kind of dope at the drugstore and he fed that bobcat some in a bowl of milk. It never did go plumb out, just got drowsy enough so’s we could get it stuffed down into that suitcase. It was a right tight fit.

He drove out on 48 and pulled off in a logroad and set thatsuitcase in the middle of the highway. We had a pint we was nippin along on, and we laid out in the bushes to see what would happen.

That old bobcat had done come to itself and it was wanting out bad. That suitcase would growl and jump a little ever now and again and finally it fell over on its side. After a while this car come by. It went by the suitcase and stopped and come backin up real slow. Carload of them Beech Creek boys. This old boy named Wymer got out and grabbed it. He was lookin all around, he figured it’d lost off somebody’s truck and they’d be comin back after it. Thought he’d found somethin. He jumped in the car with it, and they hadn’t went fifty feet when the brake lights come on and they locked her down and stopped right dead in the middle of the road and all four doors flew open. All hell broke loose, you never heard such squallin and takin on. They run clean off in the bushes in as many directions as they was folks in that car, and they wadn’t dodgin nothing, they was just ridin over halfgrown saplins and headin out, and you could hear brush pop a quarter mile off.

Directly this here bobcat eased out just as lightfooted and calm as you please. He looked all around and highfooted it toward the Harrikin and that’s the last I ever saw him.

When Tyler reached the first scattered houses of the town a wan sun stood at midmorning over the bare winter trees. A pale band of lighter sky lay above the horizon and the air felt like snow. Where the city limits sign was he halted and sat on a bank watching off toward the spare outposts of commerce as if he were of a mind not to go on. He felt he’d been so longin the Harrikin he’d lost touch with the doings of these more normal folk and the way they’d grouped themselves together here in this outpost with houses leant one atop the other seemed a strange way to live. But at length he unfolded himself and went on, the rifle yoked across his shoulders and forearms dangling.

He was constantly looking about. He was looking for Sutter, and Sutter was the last thing he wanted to see, but he had to look anyway. No one who looked like Sutter and no one with a curious eye for him, and this suited him just fine. He unyoked the rifle and went along swinging it gently at his side.

The first thing he came upon was a restaurant named the Snip, Snap amp; Bite Cafe. Nearly empty. A bald man mopping the counter with a rag. Smells of grease and frying bacon and coffee. His mouth watered.

Hey, you can’t bring that thing in here.

Do what? He blinked and looked down at the rifle. He’d forgotten it.

Sorry, he said. He went back out onto the sidewalk. He looked all about. He felt strangely dislocated, his vision darkened, the edges seemed to burn. There wasn’t anything to do with the gun. He went back in.

It ain’t working right anyway.

Oh, all right. Open the bolt and stand it in the corner there by the hatrack. Just don’t club nobody with it.

He commenced with coffee thick with cream and sugar while sunny-side-up eggs and country ham fried. When they came he finished them clean, chasing down the last bit of runny egg yolk with a triangle of buttered toast. He ordered another side order of toast and pear preserves and morecoffee and a glass of orange juice for his thirst. When he ordered this last and finished it and wiped his mouth with a napkin the counterman was regarding him with something akin to admiration. Tyler himself had begun to feel downright expansive and a warm sense of wellbeing comforted him.

Could I bring you somethin else?

I reckon that ought to do me awhile. How much do I owe you?

He paid and pocketed the change. Where’s Sheriff Bellwether’s office?

In the courthouse basement, less they moved it without tellin me. That’s where it’s always been.

He got the rifle and went out. He looked up and down the street cautiously, like a man sweating in the last card in a poker hand. Ordinary folk going about their business. Their very ordinariness reassured him. The dull day-to-day routine of life seemed suddenly very dear to him, for it was something he had lost. All these rustic folk with their complacent faces seemed to dwell in the happy-ever-after end of a fable. He took a deep breath and held it a moment. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. All he had to do was make it a block and a half to the courthouse. A cripple could do that, a blind man tapping with a cane.

Old men like fragile statuary were already set about the courtyard benches for such faint sun as there was. They looked up expectantly as Tyler approached, as if he might do something interesting to break the monotony that yawned before them, but when he didn’t and just strode purposefully on, their eyes dismissed him and they went back to the nothing they’d been doing before.

The courthouse was a square twostory brick building. Theboy looked up. Windows on the upper floor were barred, and Tyler wished he might see Sutter’s face peering down at him. The words covrt hovse were chiseled into a great concrete lintel set above the double door. He turned the corner and there was an iron railing round a set of concrete stairs descending to the basement.

An old grandmotherlike woman sat on a bench like a sentinel guarding a palace door. She wore an anklelength dress and men’s brogans broken out at the side and a ratty plaid shawl wound about her ample shoulders. She watched him out of the folds of the pokebonnet she wore tied beneath her long chin and from behind dimestore shades with tortoiseshell frames.

He had a hand on the cold metal railing.

She rose at his arrival as if she’d been awaiting him. Sonny boy, she said. Her voice was an ingratiating whine, and it grated on his nerves like a fingernail dragged across a chalkboard.

He turned. Yes, ma’am?

I need a little help, she said. I sure wish you could do me a little favor.

I’d like to but I’m in an awful hurry. Maybe I could when I get done with the sheriff.

He was on the first step. The steel-reinforced glass door lay in shadowed sanctuary.

It ain’t much, she whined. Won’t take you but a minute. I’ll give you a dollar.

Once more he turned. I really can’t. He started down the stairs.

My old man took and died, she said, and I ain’t got nobody to do for me but strangers. It’s awful to be at the mercy ofstrangers.

He stopped.

And me about blind on top of it.

She was just not going to let up. All right, he said. What is it you need done?

Not much for a big strong young man like you, she said. Just load a sack of cowfeed in the trunk of my car for me.

She had turned and was hobbling away. Tall old grandmother with broad humped shoulders. Confident of him now, she didn’t even look back. He followed.

Where is your car?

Down by the tie yard.

They passed under casual eyes that remarked them without interest. The railroad then and a sulfurous pall of coal smoke and tackier houses with black faces pressed against the glass to mark their progress. Old blownout automobiles enshrined on tieblocks while poisonoak crept their rocker panels. Surly watchdogs watched from chains with cartire anchors, and one chained to a clothesline followed them to the end of its tether with the chain skirling on wire then sat on its haunches and watched them go.

I don’t really understand this, the boy said. Would they not load the feed for you where you bought it?

The boy at the store had a bad back, Grandmother said.

Then how the hell did it get to the tieyard? he wondered to himself. He didn’t pursue it, for he had come to suspect the workings of the old woman’s mind. Perhaps his own as well.

The silence between them deepened as the road they trod narrowed to a footpath bowered by winterbare sumac. He and Grandmother walking in a fairytale wood, but a wrong turn has been taken somewhere, for nothing seems rightabout any of this. The very light had altered, darkened as if for an early December dusk. Behind them a car took the railroad crossing fast and its mufflers opened up fullthroated then the siren came on, laying wail on fading wail on the belabored countryside. He wondered if it was Bellwether and he’d missed him. There was a leaden weight on his heart.

The silence seemed interminable. To break it he asked her back, What did your man die of?

She didn’t hesitate. The syph, she said.

The what? He had skipped a step, he’d misunderstood, his ears were failing him.

The syph, she whined. He come down with it and it drug on and turned into the drizzlin shits and he just wasted away.

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.

Why, you’re crazy as hell, he told her.

I got to stop and pee, the old woman in the nightmare snickered. You wouldn’t sneak a peek at a old lady peein, would you?

I’ve got all the craziness I need, Tyler said. Carry yours on somewheres else, and you can load your own damn cowfeed.

They had come to a cleared area where stacks of crossties were drying. Beside a tiestack a black Buick Roadmaster sat cocked outward bound, gleaming in the frail sun, luxurious, profoundly out of place.

Tee hee hee, Grandmother said. Grandmother’s back had begun to shake with uncontainable mirth and she was making sniggering, chortling sounds, and she was trying to stop but she couldn’t. When she turned her face was congested withlaughter. She grasped her sides and burst out laughing, pounding her thighs with her palms. Then instantly the look of revelation on his face seemed to sober her for a hand snaked out and an iron grip clamped his throat and a broganned foot kicked the rifle away. It clattered somewhere behind him. They locked and swayed for a moment in a broken ballet, then she tripped him and fell across him in parodic lechery. Brass knucks slammed his temple hard and the world darkened and tilted on its axis. When it righted itself the face was very close to his own. The tortoiseshell shades hung by one earpiece and the pokebonnet was comically askew.

I got you now, you little son of a bitch, Sutter said.

Tyler tried to twist his face away but Sutter hit him hard in the mouth and Tyler didn’t know anything for a while.

He awoke to a dull throb in his temple and to music. Singing and some rhythmic accompaniment. A jouncing over rutted roads and the roar of an automobile engine.

…and I wound up her little ball of yarn, the voice sang.

A radio then. The Grand Ole Opry perhaps.

It was just two weeks from this I went out to take a piss,

And I found myself a burden of great pain,

For it had been to my mishaps I had caught a dose of claps,

And I’ll never wind that little ball again.

Not The Grand Ole Opry then. The voice went on singing. The song seemed to have an infinite number of verses in an ascending order of obscenity and the voice seemed to know all of them. Not the Grand Ole Opry. Then it all came back to him. He remembered Sutter, and it was Sutter himself singingat the top of his voice with brush slapping the rockerpanels rhythmically. This son of a bitch is driving in the woods, he thought in wonder. His face lay against the cold glass of the window, and he didn’t know how close Sutter was watching him, but he chanced opening one eye and all there was was the dark boles of trees streaking by on both sides of a logroad snaking into deeper timber.

His jaw hurt and an incisor lay on its side in a position it had never been before. It hurt when he worried it with his tongue but he couldn’t stop worrying it. He wondered if Sutter had brought the rifle. If he had more than likely it was in the back seat. Maybe there was a chance he could whirl suddenly and grab the gun and twist the door handle and just jump. There was an even better chance that when he whirled for the gun Sutter would coldcock him with a fist as hard and big as the end of a locust fencepost, and if there was any way around it he didn’t want hit again. Then he remembered the gun didn’t work anyway, and he debated just jumping. He thought when the timber thinned sufficiently he’d make a leap for it and try to land on his feet and just keep on hauling. With an eye toward this, his right hand crept on his right thigh toward where he knew the doorhandle was. An inch, no more. Again. Creepmouse, creepmouse.

Don’t even think about it, Sutter said. Move it agin and I’ll leave you a bloody stub to jack off with.

He knotted his hand into a fist and it just lay on his thigh.

Sutter went back to singing. The wreck on the highway. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. He had a tuneless monotone of a voice and the whipping of the brush did not match this song as well. Where are we going?

Sutter stopped singing. Far enough so’s there ain’t no busybodies around. He resumed singing.

Tyler turned. To his surprise Sutter still wore the gray dress. He had removed the tortoiseshell specs but the bonnet was still there, rakishly askew and tied demurely under his horselike chin.

You ought to get that radio fixed.

We’ll see how smart your mouth is here directly.

At length the road seemed to just vanish, to fade into heavier and heavier timber, but Sutter seemed not to notice. He was driving over wristsize saplings that caused the car to lurch sickeningly and the engine to labor harder, and he drove it until he reached a veritable wall of timber with no give to it. When he cut the switch something gave under the hood with a soft whoosh and a rising curtain of steam enveloped the car. Sutter’s hands were at untying the bonnet.

Where’d you come by that getup?

Sutter studied him. Folks in this world are always just walkin off somewheres else and providin me with what I need. Do you honestly want to know?

Tyler thought about it. No, he said.

I thought not. Now I looked you over pretty good back there at the tieyard. While you was dozed off. You ain’t got no pictures. Now what I want to know is where they are and how we get to em.

Tyler was prodding his tooth with his tongue when it gave with a soft cracking he actually heard inside his skull and his mouth was filling with warm blood. He started to open the door then thought better of it and leant forward and spat a mouthful of blood into the floorboard between his feet. Damn, boy, ain’t you had no raisin? This car probably belongs to a doctor or a lawyer or somethin.

Tyler sat staring at the tooth. A dull anger seized him. He had been run halfway across three counties by some madman he had done nothing to, barely knew, had only heard rumored. Folks who had befriended him were in peril. Perhaps dead. And now the son of a bitch had knocked out a perfectly good tooth, one that would have served him all his days, one that lay worse than useless in a stringy gout of blood. And. And. And a thought that he had been trying to keep stuffed down into the darkness, that kept skittering out playfully and showing glimpses of itself. His sister was dead.

You remember that day in town when me and you had that talk? Sutter asked.

Yes, he said. It seemed a long time ago but it was not. He tried to remember everything about the day. The way the light fell, what his sister had been wearing when he came in that night, what de Vries had said about the roof.

You see how all I warned you’s come to pass? You see how I tried to tell you right. You see what meanness you’ve brought on everbody, and all that’s happened might never have been. It was your choice, and ever bit of it is on your head. There’s people been killed over your stubbornness, and probably more to come. I told you to imagine the worst thing that could happen and it would be.

Tyler didn’t say anything. He was staring past the glass. Where the brush ended a sedgefield tumbled steeply downhill in a stony tapestry toward a hollow so deep and distant it looked blue. Above the horizon a hawk dipped and rose on the updrafts of wind with soundless grace, and he wondered how it would feel to be there, to be watching all this throughthe arrogant yellow eyes of a hawk.

It’s just business to me. Just money. But more money than a man makes in ten years, just handed to me all at once in a paper sack. And the only holdup is you.

I’m not going to give them to you. The only man that’ll get them from me is Bellwether.

You’ll give em to me. Oh, yes. When I’m through with you, you’ll be beggin me to take em. You’ll say, Please, Mr. Sutter, take these nasty things and be done with em. You’ll pray to whatever god it is you hold dear for me to reach out and take em out of your hot little hand. Now get your ass out.

He got out into the cold. A wind with a taste of ice in it was looping up from the hollow, and snowbirds flew among the bare trees foraging.

Fixin to snow, Sutter said, studying the onecolor sky, curious weatherman in grandmother drag. Me and you got to get to them pictures and get the hell out of Dodge before the snow flies.

This last was muffled by the dress being pulled over his head, and this more than anything else showed Tyler the contempt Sutter held him in. The rifle was gone, he was threatless, a small viper with his teeth pulled. He came around the car looking for some form of weapon and not finding one, but Sutter’s arms were pinned by the dress and he leapt upon him flailing with both fists and kicking even before Sutter hit the ground. Sutter was trying to roll away from the kicks and trying to get up and simultaneously trying to get the rest of the dress over his head when Tyler stumbled over a windfall whiteoak branch. Sutter was screaming and cursing in rage as if Tyler was not fighting fair and some obscure code of ethics had been broached. You blindsidin son of a bitch, he was saying when Tyler hit him alongside the head with the length of whiteoak. Chunks of rotten wood flew and Sutter fell sidewise. Tyler hit him again. Sutter’s head was sliding through the collar of the dress like some malevolent demon being born head foremost, and his nose was bleeding. When I get up you’re graveyard dead, he said.

But Tyler would not let him up. By now he was sobbing with rage and frustration and swinging the club as hard as he could. Sutter was on his hands and knees and seemed halfdazed and he kept trying to crawl away but Tyler would not let him. He headed Sutter at the edge of the woods and hit him on the back of the head, and Sutter fell facedown in the leaves and could only rise to his elbows. He had his hands clasped over the back of his head with his elbows still snared in the dress and Tyler was beating him about the fingers and blood was soaking through the hair and running down Sutter’s wrists. The branch broke and he looked about for another then took up the longest section of the one he’d had. Sutter was struggling sluggishly like some gross insect halfcrushed. A passerby would have been given pause by these demented-looking strugglers.

Tyler hit him a time or two and then he ceased and just watched Sutter with a dull loathing. He squatted on the earth with the club across his knees. His breath was ragged in his chest and his lungs hurt. He sat like a laborer at rest from some curious task. Goddamn you, why won’t you die? he asked.

But Sutter would not die. His face was just something you’d unwrap from bloody butcher’s paper and the skin was beaten off his fingers and the backs of his hands, and Tylerrealized sickeningly that he was just going to have to go on and on until Sutter’s head was crushed to bloody jelly and he didn’t have the heart for it. Sutter was just going to keep trying to get up. He had had no doubt that he would be able, given the chance, to cheerfully kill Sutter with whatever fell to hand, and selfanger brought tears of rage to his eyes.

Why won’t you just leave me the hell alone? he asked. Sutter just lay breathing heavily. The whiteoak branch had broken his mouth, and bloody froth bubbled as he breathed.

Maybe by God you’ll lay here and die directly, Tyler said.

He threw the stick away and went around the car and got in under the steering wheel. He sat for a time just staring out through the windshield at the woods. He turned the key and the motor turned over sluggishly but would not hit. He kept on until the starter turned slower and slower and ultimately there was only a dry clicking sound. He turned. The gun wasn’t in the back but there was a folded blanket and he took it up and got out of the car. The day was turning colder and he draped the blanket about his shoulders like a shawl. He struck out the way they’d come but he walked only a few paces before he stopped. The pictures lay the other way, and by now he felt he’d bought and paid for them. He didn’t want to think about how dear the price had been. He went toward deeper timber. It had begun to sleet. The windbrought pellets of ice stung his face and sang off in the leaves like birdshot.

It continued colder and by midafternoon pellets of sleet lay cupped in grails of winter leaves and the ground was beginning to whiten with ice and he moved through the sleet’s softsteady hissing in the trees. He hoped he was bearing southeast toward Bookbinder’s farm but he wondered if he’d been in the Harrikin long enough to have acquired a sense of direction. He suspected that if he possessed a compass it would not point as advertised but at some anomolaic magnetic north of the Harrikin’s own.

He topped out on a hill and some alteration in the sound of the trees fetched him up short. He stopped to listen. He couldn’t hear the sleet anymore. He looked up and great snowflakes were listing out of the heavens, gray against the pale steely gray of the sky, enormous feathers of snow descending from heights he couldn’t reckon, and something of the child he’d been stood in bemused wonder listening to the almostsound in the trees and watching the snow drift down from far and far, falling sheer and plumb in the windless silence.

At the hill’s summit he stopped to rest a moment. Beating folks with treelimbs is heavy work, he thought. Looking back the way he’d come below the hillside a flat valley lay spread out, merging into a row of cedars, then a slope began, already whitening, and he couldn’t believe what he saw. A man was coming down the slope, tiny and dark and furiously animate against the pale field, a dark malevolent stain bleeding down a Currier amp; Ives winterscape. A dark shifting cloud of birds came out of the woods. A cardinal arced from tree to tree like a bright drop of blood.

He went on. After a while the snow was deep enough so that he was leaving tracks but it didn’t seem to matter. He had come to feel that Sutter trailed him by some means that neither of them understood, some curious duality of their natures that enabled Sutter to intercept his thoughts and anticipatehis movements.

By dusk the thickly falling snow had drifted against the dark bottoms of treetrunks and filled shadowy stumpholes and stumps wore hats of pale phosphorescence and he was moving through a world of eerie beauty.

By midafternoon thirty or forty men were grouped loosely about the courthouse steps in Ackerman’s Field. They were armed to the last man. Squirrel rifles, shotguns, old pistols brought home from the wars, many with weaponry that would have been more at home on the walls of an antique shop and weaponry designed to slay beasts long extinct. They carried sacks or lunchbuckets and some of them had thermos bottles of coffee and a search would have yielded up more than a few halfpints of whiskey. They hunkered or milled about in loose groups talking among themselves and chewing and smoking, and there was about them an air of excitement restrained, the air of men setting off on an adventure whose outcome is very much a matter of conjecture.

After a while a man in neatly pressed khakis came out of the courthouse and stood on the top step facing them. The door closed behind him on its pneumatic closer and the man dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. The high sheriff of Ackerman’s Field had pale, nearcolorless eyes and wavy hair going prematurely gray.

Gentlemen, he said.

The door opened and a deputy came out. He as well in khakis. He stood slightly behind Bellwether, and there was something of deference in his manner. We’ve got two trucks with sideboards, Bellwether said. There’s no point in taking more vehicles than necessary. Deputy Garrison and I will go in the county car, and the Holt brothers will bring you all behind us in their trucks. We’ve got a bunch of flashlights in the trucks. Everybody make sure you get a light and make sure it works.

What about the state?

For right now they’re just manning roadblocks. Every road leading out of Ackerman’s Field and every road out of Centre will be secured.

Shit, somebody in the crowd said. Roads ain’t nothin to Granville. He can be in Alabama and never come out of the woods cept to steal somethin to eat.

Where we goin? another man called.

Last place we know for sure he was at was Claude Calvert’s place. That’s where the wagonload of bodies came from. I reckon you all know about that. We can get to there fairly easy with trucks. From there we’ll just have to play it by ear.

It’s a waste of time, the man said. It’s three or four hundred square miles in there. What are we lookin for, clues? Fingerprints? He’s long gone from there.

He may well be, Bellwether said. But all the same it’s got to be done. You understand this is purely a voluntary thing. Nobody has to come don’t want to.

I never said nothin about not goin, the man said, but what about Fenton Breece?

What about him?

What all Sandy told about the way he done them dead folks. About diggin up some graves.

Well, Bellwether said, right now it’s first things first. I meanno disrespect for the dead when I say it’s the live folks I got to worry about right now.

I hear some folks in Centre got that under control, another said and laughed.

Hey, Bellwether, Old Tippydo over in Centre knows the Harrikin better than anybody else. You sent for him?

Bellwether smiled a small smile. I tried, but it didn’t do any good, he said. Tippydo’s done been dead two years, and I couldn’t find a volunteer to go after him.

Sutter quit worrying about keeping to Tyler’s trail for he had divined that he meant to get back to Bookbinder’s. That’s all right, he told himself. Two fish in a barrel ain’t much harder than one fish in a barrel. He was crazed all over with dried blood and his body ached with soreness but he kept pushing himself on through the snow. It was falling harder now and the woods were filling up and it was heavy going, but he knew where he was bound.

Once after dark he stopped to rest and smoke a cigarette, and far off on the hillside he saw a long line of lights moving in a slow curve around the face of the hill. The lights were disembodied and seemingly sourceless. Distant and silent and stately as a wending line of torchbearers making pilgrimage to some obscure god. All in silence as if all this was preordained and speech could neither help nor hinder its outcome. They scattered and regrouped and spread again like a curious ballet of fireflies or St. Elmo’s fire roiled and swirling in the depths of the sea. He watched them for a time in bewilderment then he put out his cigarette in the snow and took uphis rifle and went on.

It was some time before it occurred to Sutter that they were looking for him.

That boy was all right. He was kind of curious turned, but to tell you the truth I sort of liked him. He’d speak to you. Not like some of these young fellers thinks the world didn’t start till the doctor slapped em on the ass.

There is about these old men who have arranged themselves about the coal stove in Patton’s store a curious air of waiting, of time in suspension, as if they had already achieved some remove from the world, the eldest among them awaiting death as calmly as someone waiting on a bus. Beyond them through the plateglass window it is snowing hard and when cars pass to and fro the sound is muted and cloistral and the lights look blurred and unreal, a dream of carlights.

I notice you keep sayin was, another man said. I reckon you done wrote him off, then.

When he run crossways of Sutter I reckon he wrote hisself off. I always thought of that myself as one of the more unpleasant ways you commit suicide.

The old man shook his head. You can say what you want to about him, but if I was able I’d be out there with Bellwether and them scouring the woods.

Leastways some good will come of this. Sutter’s done it this time. The son of a bitch is finally gone way over the line.

A man named Junior Raymer was whittling something unrecognizable but vaguely obscene from soft red cedar. He sat on his upended Coke crate a time studying his creationthen he rose and opened the stove door and tossed it inside. He stirred the fire with the poker and showers of sparks cascaded outward. He spat into them then slammed the door.

Don’t you bet on it, he said. He’s rolled through the cracks before, and he’s fixin to do it again. You mark my words. He’ll be gone like a lost ball in the high weeds.

Talkin about that Tyler boy, the old man said, they must be more to him than meets the eye. Some said that schoolteacher of his worked around and got him a scholarship in a college. Up to Knoxville, they said.

He’ll work, Junior agreed. That’s more than anybody could ever have said about old Moose. Less you count totin sacks of sugar up them hollers back in there. He’d do that. That boy come up hard, him and his sister, too. I used to drink some back when they was little, and I used to lay drunk out there.

Raymer took out a pipe and began to tamp it with roughcut applesmelling tobacco. Someone got up to peer out the window at the snow blanketing the road. The day had waned and the glass had gone a surreal and unearthly gray against whose cold slick surface flakes list and slide with the faintest of ghostsounds and beyond them there is a faint and sourceless fluorescence.

Raymer struck a match on the side of the potbellied heater and lit his pipe. You know, they used to have cockfights in the Harrikin back then. Moose, he fooled with it some. Raised some of them game roosters. Anything there was money in and the work took out of you’d find Moose in it somehow, and don’t nothing draw loafers and lowlifes like a cockfight will. Moose had him one he was real proud of. It was silvercolored and had these little coldlookin eyes like a damn cottonmouthmoccasin. It didn’t look like no chicken I ever seen. It looked like some kind of a weapon.

Anyhow, this boy y’all speakin of was about seven years old. He had this lit old dominecker rooster he raised from a chick. It used to foller him around the way a dog would. That Sunday Moose was about drunk and the boy’s rooster done somethin to piss him off. Messed the porch, I reckon. Young Tyler seen the way things was headin and grabbed that rooster up and hugged it to him. He made to run off, and Moose grabbed him and jerked that rooster away from him. He looked around and spied that silver chicken and set the dominecker down in front of it. He grabbed em and rubbed their heads together, and that game jumped straight up and hung the dominecker through the head and that quick it was deadern hell. It was the beat of anything I ever seen. His own boy’s pet. That boy was takin on and talkin to that dead chicken, and I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that’s better than never. There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it. Moose was the first I cut loose, but I cut him clean and I never went out there no more.

When the phone rang Fenton Breece answered it in tones of sepulchral dignity, but there did not seem to be anyone there or, more properly, anyone with anything to say, for all he could hear was a labored catarrhal breathing. This went on for a few seconds and then there was a mechanical click when the phone was hung up, and he thought, They know I’m here. He was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a burgundy silk lounging robe and matching houseshoes and silverrimmed reading glasses on a cord about his neck. He put aside the funeral director’s journal he’d been reading when the phone interrupted and opened the drawer of the desk and took out a German Luger he’d taken to carrying of late. He laid the weapon on the ink blotter before him and sat studying it: there was something sinister about its symmetry, something lethal in its craftsmanship. Something efficient, but he’d read somewhere the Germans were like that: when the death factories were running fulltilt three shifts a day, they’d had cost efficiency reports on the systematic extinction of the Jewish people figured to the last mark. His father had told him once he’d taken the pistol from an officer in the Luftwaffe, but Breece had always figured he’d just bought it like he did everything else.

Past the window the street was a blur of blowing snow, and a vague anger touched him. He ought to be feeling cozy and Badgerlike with the exquisite feeling of being snowed in and the world snowed out, but he was not. He ought to be sitting before the fire with the Tyler girl against his shoulder and a demitasse of Cognac in his hand and soft music adding ambience to the room, but he was not that either. He was drifting in the icechoked backwaters of paranoia, and he could feel them, cold and black, rising about his upper thighs. He’d been navigating these perilous seas for some time, and every knock was a man in khakis with a warrant in his hand, every phone call the IRS auditing him for the last twenty-five years, every letter in the mailbox a note saying flee, all is discovered. I’ve just got to put it out of my mind, he thought. Either that or I’ve got to do something. He adjusted the reading glasses back on his nose, and he had read two paragraphs when someone began to pound on the front door. He rose. He hesitated and then remembered the slick streets: it’s been a bad wreck, two or three dead, he told himself comfortingly. But he took up the Luger anyway and shoved it into the pocket of his dressing gown before he went to answer the door.

The oak door was latched with a security chain that he left in place, opening the door a scant three inches.

A motley crew indeed. Twelve or fifteen felthatted and overalled men bundled against the cold assembled with the stoop full and more aligned tense and silent about them. Young or old, they all had in common the set anger in their faces and the utter implacability of their manner. Jaws knotted with lumps of chewing tobacco, and they all seemed to be armed, some clutching rifles and others just sticks, and he thought he saw a ballbat or two. The foremost, who seemed the leader, opened his mouth to speak, and for an insane moment Breece thought he might break into song, for save the fierce outrage of their eyes, they looked not unlike perverse and rustic carolers come to herald the yuletide.

He didn’t know from where the strength to speak came, but it did. I’ll be right with you, he said brightly. He smiled, gestured toward the robe. I’m not dressed to receive company.

He slammed the door to and threw the deadbolt and went in an awkward fat man’s run through the foyer and lounge, behind him he heard the impact of shoulders slamming against the door. He went down a hall into the back. He locked that door behind him and ran past gleaming tables bloodgrooved like the sacrificial tables of ancient pagans andpast bizarre tubeappended contraptions like the props to a madman’s dreams and through one last door to the garage bay where the hearse sat waiting. He pushed a red button mounted on the wall and the bay door rose electrically to the snow blowing slantwise in the streetlamps. He climbed hastily into the hearse and cranked the engine and had already rolled four or five feet when he abruptly slammed on the brakes and cut the switch. He pounded his forehead hard with a fist. Sweet Jesus, he said. He clambered back out and went back into the embalming area.

He’d taken to carrying the girl with him to work and driving her home at night, and she was here today. He uncovered her where she napped on the couch and caught her up, half-carrying and half-dragging her toward the hearse. It was hard going for she was slack and lolled loosely and he was breathing hard. Hurry, hurry, he kept telling her. He opened the door on the passenger side and shoved her in. Her head swung bonelessly and she sat erect a moment then her upper torso dropped and she slid onto the steering wheel. The door slammed hard on her ankle. Jesus, baby, he said, contrite. I’m so sorry. He tried to move the foot but each time he moved it it slid back before he could get the door closed.

Goddamn it, he screamed at her. What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I’m in a hurry here? Can’t you do anything for yourself? Can you not do so simple a thing as pick up your foot?

He left with the tires smoking bluely and her ankle still dangling from the door, steering lefthanded and holding her about the shoulders with his right. When the hearse hit the icy pavement it slewed sickeningly broadside but miraculously pointed the way he intended going, and he floored the accelerator and shot past the front of the funeral home. He glanced toward it. They had the door battered down until it hung crazily on one hinge, and their heads all turned as one when he streaked past, and they were running yelling to their cars.

He ran the stop sign at the intersection but he had to brake to make the left turn at the next block and when he did he could see already a faint wash of light approaching through the snow. He kept fumbling for the windshield wipers. He chanced releasing her long enough to steady the wheel with his right hand and turn on the lights and windshield wipers and grab her again before she slid out the flapping door.

Coming off the Centre hill he was going over seventy miles an hour and snow was coming so hard he could barely see the road. Telephone poles were coming like pickets in a fence when the dead girl suddenly folded forward into the steering wheel. When he jerked her back the steering wheel cocked and the hearse went drifting across the ice in a caterwauling of protesting rubber. It went over the embankment in a sudden eerie silence save the small explosions of sumac branches splintering then struck a utility pole. There was a simultaneous sound of splintering pine he felt in his solar plexus and folding wrenching metal and all the glass going and tortured wire pulled tight as a catapult, then the swinging upper half of the utility pole, sharp end first, slammed into and through the hood.

He leapt out into the brush and immediately pitched forward onto the earth. Something was wrong with his left leg, it accordioned somehow beneath him and he could not rise. He crawled around the front through a frozen field of last year’s cornstalks and to the other side and grasped the dead girl andpulled her out into the snow. Already he could see the play of lights and hear men yelling, and the first of them were slamming cardoors and starting down the embankment. Above the hearse two electrical wires were touching and shorting out, and they kept snapping and sending arcs of bright blue fire off into the night. He locked his left elbow about her throat and began to drag her into the frozen field.

Breece had never done much physical work as he had the wherewithal to hire everything done and he’d had no idea crawling brokenlegged across frozen cornrows dragging a dead girl entailed so much physical exertion. Could he have hired this done he would have in a flash but he could not. He made it perhaps forty or fifty feet into the field, not knowing where he was going, for he was fleeing from not to: then the men ran yelling out of the brush into the field.

Breece remembered the gun. He could feel it cold against his belly where the robe twisted beneath him. He released the girl and withdrew the gun and sat holding it uncertainly for a moment, then holding the gun bothhanded he took the barrel tentatively into his mouth. It was smooth and cold but somehow not unpleasant. There was a faint taste of acrid gunpowder, gun oil, old violence.

You stop right there, he told them around the gun barrel. You come any closer and I’ll blow my head off.

They hesitated, more dumbfounded than intimidated: they’d expected to be shot at but here he was crouched in the blowing snow with the pistol in his mouth threatening to do what they’d traveled so hard and fast this night to do themselves.

The foremost man halted before Breece and leant forward with his hands on his overalled knees. He had a florid faceand washedout outraged eyes, and Breece knew he’d seen him somewhere before, perhaps the Bellystretcher. You go ahead, you worthless son of a bitch, the man said. And save me the fifteen cents it would cost to bust a cap on you.

I’ll do it in a second, Breece thought. I’ll count to five and then I’ll do it. Ten.

Abruptly the fat man straightened and kicked the gun viciously away. Breece felt teeth break away in his jaw, felt bits of them on his tongue like shards of broken glass, and when the pistol went it tore out the right corner of his mouth and blood welled and dripped off his chin into the snow.

They’d been trying not to look at the girl but now they had to. Lord God, one of them said. They stood before this strange pair of lovers in a sort of perverse awe, aspirants before some strange god they couldn’t even begin to fathom how to worship.

One of them had retrieved the pistol and inspected it. Hey, a Luger, he said. He shoved it into his hip pocket. What are we goin to do with him? he asked the redfaced man.

Breece was whimpering softly, like a puppy outside a door whimpering in the cold.

Just whatever, the fat man said. Do any fuckin thing you want to as long as I don’t have to touch him.

He knelt before the dead girl and adjusted her upper clothing then pulled the gown down over her naked hips. Jesus Lord, he breathed. There was real pain in his face, and tenderness in his touch.

Two of the men hauled Breece erect and dragged him toward the road like some loathsome weight that must yet be borne. They went into the thick brush and started up the embankment. He turned his neck to see his hearse one lasttime. Gleaming there in the snow there was something surreal and eerily beautiful about it. With the blue fire arcing above it and the splintered cross of pine driven into the motor it looked like some halfmetallic nightmare beast that could only be slain by impalement, sinister, profoundly alien.

Tyler came down a long sloping grade too smooth to have been created by nature. The slopes were grown with the dark bulks of cypress and after a while by the dim glow of the snow he could see that it led to a declivity in the earth, an enormous lunarlike crater filling with snow and scattered about its epicenter the wrecks of abandoned machinery like prehistoric beasts flashfrozen by some bizarre reversal of the earth’s poles. The boom of an enormous longnecked crane rose bleakly into the invisible sky above him and its dangling steel cable seemed at some point to just appear out of nothingness, unknowable like some source of escape lowered to him and could he but climb it he wondered where he’d be, some bowered bedchamber where Rapunzel lay in wait or Jacl’s land where giants smelled blood and spoke in thunder.

He felt absolutely alone, and here in the snowy dark the barrier that keeps back cognizance of events past and future seemed to fade. What had been and harbingers of what was to be lay down like lovers and archaic machinery still belabored a weary earth already under sentence. A vindictive fate stalked him while still in the musky cribs and just beyond the spectrum of his sight an albino whore plied her craft and the very air was electric with old violence, pregnant with more yet to come. He went on through the dreamlike snow passingwithin four upright supports of some towering structure above him that he couldn’t see. He looked up but all there was past the drifting snow was an unshapen bulk black against the paler black of the heavens and he could hear a door clanging shut, metal on metal, then creaking in a wind he could hear but couldn’t feel and slamming to again. An iron ladder began six feet or so from the ground and ascended into the snowy dark and vanished. He stood looking at it as if in consideration. Clasped the bottom rung tentatively, then released it. The hell with that, he said. He pulled the collar of the coat tighter about his throat and went on, skirting a lakelike pool of water gathered in the pit of the crater with a thought for what life might thrive there and on up past an ancient bulldozer halfburied in a rockslide and all these artifacts of prior life. Ascending now and nearing the rim of the crater he began to feel the wind and to hear it in the trees. He looked to the four points of the compass hoping for some lightening of the horizon, but if horizons existed he found no evidence of it. All he could see was billowing white and inkslash boles of trees. He went on, and he seemed to carry with him a tight pocket of fierce wind and whirling snow like some hapless miscreant cursed by the weathers.

All I got to do is stay on a straight path, he thought. Bound to come off this son of a bitch sooner or later. If I don’t freeze first, he added.

He had a real fear of this. His feet already felt wooden and digitless as hooves, and since coming into the wind his ears and nose were stinging, and he felt about the purloined coat for something to wind about his face but there was nothing. So he pulled the woolen collar higher about his face. He thought of old man Bookbinder. The capable air of selfpossession there’d been about him. All he’d found of sanity in these made and hellish territories. He knew it lay southwest and he’d started that way in the light but now he just didn’t know. He wondered what time it was. Then he wondered why it mattered. How far to the edge of this place civilization hadn’t trickled down to yet and how far to daylight.

Sutter was descending into a hollow that seemed to go down forever and he couldn’t even see the bottom of it. When he stopped to rest a minute he was utterly weary. I’ll catch my breath and then I’ll go on and kill the little fucker, he promised himself. He knelt in the snow and rested his back against the smooth trunk of a beech and closed his eyes. He could feel snowflakes matting in his lashes and melting and running down his face like tears.

He must have slept for a dream came to him like an old friend whose face he recognized but could not put a name to.

He dreamed he was in Flint County, Alabama, and it was an early morning in June. He was young. The flesh of his arm was hard and corded with youth, and studying the arm by the warm light of the sun the fine hair there gleamed like thin wires of copper against his tanned flesh.

He was walking down a roadway so thickly accumulate with dust it rose like talcum with his footsteps and subsided into the vines that latticed the sides of the road, and he could smell the evocative scent of honeysuckle.

His father had sent him after the cow and he was driving it back up from the pasture. It walked ahead of him chewing ruminatively and its hide flexed spasmodically from time totime dislodging cowflies.

The road wound to his railfenced yard, and the old log house still sat at the mouth of the hollow, and faint smoke from the breakfast fire, but a woman he didn’t know was hanging out clothes in the backyard. Dark from the hollow bled into the twilight. He drove the cow around the corner of the house, and the woman turned to look at him. She had a clothespin in her mouth and a wing of hair had fallen across her forehead and she blew it out of her eyes. Sutter could not think of anything to say. He did not know the woman and he had no inkling of what she might be doing hanging out wash in his backyard.

What do you want? she asked him after a time.

I just brought the cow, he said. His voice was a rusty and disused croak. He seemed not to have spoken for years.

Well. She seemed confused. We don’t even have a cow, she said. Why’d you bring a cow.

It’s our cow, he said. I brought her to milk. Where they at?

Where’s who at?

Mama and Daddy.

I don’t know no mama and daddy. If you mean mine, they long dead.

No. No, mine. John and Lucy Dell Sutter. We live here.

Not for some time you ain’t. We live here. My man and me. And Lord yes, I’ve heard of John and Lucy Dell Sutter. But they’ve been dead a long time. Years and years ago. Any kids they had would be old and feeble or likely dead theirselves.

This can’t be, Sutter said. Where is he, your man? Maybe he’d know.

He’ll be comin up the road there directly, but he won’t be able to make heads or tails out of such a tale as you’re tellineither.

He went back past the house. His reflection in the window glass sundappled light to dark and back again. It was full dusk now, nightbirds were already calling. He went down the road and it went into thick greenery that shimmered as if it had not achieved total reality, its edges vibrated and faded and reappeared.

After a while the woods began to descend and to darken and a hush fell over the birds and the quality of the light altered. A great sadness touched him. He saw that he was passing bucolic sideroads he had also passed in life that were closed to him now and he saw that had he taken any one of them all this would have been different.

He went on. After a while he could hear a man whistling and then the man himself appeared around a turn in the road, a thin gangling man all garbed in black with a scythe yoked across his shoulders. His face was shadowed by the shroud he affected but there was a dread familiarity about the way he walked Sutter couldn’t put a finger on, and he did not know whether the figure was ghost or antecedent or reflection of himself or harbinger of a doom yet to be.

You would have thought he would die. It would have been so easy. All he had to do was lie there and let the snow cover him and come spring some hunter come across his resting bones, but something in him would not have it so. Something that would not freeze and was contemptuous of the weathers stirred in him hotly and when he tried to open his eyes they were frozen shut. He’d dozed with a hand clamped to eacharmpit for the warmth and he melted the ice in his lashes with warm fingers and made to rise. Snow had fallen upon him and melted and refrozen in a delicate caul of ice and when he rose it splintered in myriad soundless clashes and he brushed it away and went on.

Tyler judged it long past midnight when he finally admitted to himself that he was lost. There was nothing to distinguish left from right, forward from back. The terrain had flattened and he moved through some obscure and nameless bottomland. He thought he might eventually come upon a stream and follow it to either source or destination. At last hills began to rise on each side, and he was in a long, curving hollow, and he began to hear a curious familiar sound: a mournful highpitched keening, sourceless and bansheelike, and he knew instantly where he was. He felt almost faint with relief.

He went on up the hollow, moving more confidently now, seeing in his memory the lay of the land and the oblong fault in the earth and the stone arch with its narrow passageway, his exit from a nightmare. He could almost see the old man’s house in the lee of the hills, gleaming in a grail of sunlight, the shades darkening from melting frost.

In the spinning dervish of snow the curious harp went on playing its eerie onenote song, sides mounding whitely, flakes drifting into the dark abyss, falling and falling he wondered how far. He kicked the snow from the flat stone and lifted it aside and scratched the tobacco tin out of the earth and shoved it into the pocket of the overcoat. He went on into the channel between the rocks, then stopped abruptly and stoodstaring speculatively at the pit. Thinking perhaps of the old man sleeping. Dreaming an old man’s troubled dreams. Let an old man sleep, he thought. Some core of stubbornness hardened in him. You’ve got to play the hand that they deal you. And the ante’s never as high for the other fellow when you shove your coins across nor is the pot as large as when you yourself drag it in. After the last card comes down all you’ve got is yourself.

Working hurriedly, he began to dismantle the makeshift fence. Years seemed to have passed since he’d constructed it. He laid the rotten boards and deadfall branches across the narrow side of the pit six or eight inches apart. When he peered down once the snowflakes were vanishing as if they were being drawn into the black maw of the earth. When he had the opening covered save the dark cracks between the boards, he began to carry great armloads of snowy leaves and brush and spread them carefully and return for more, and all the while the falling snow was obscuring his work and the harp’s voice grew fainter and fainter. Ultimately the hole seemed not to exist, a thin skim of white already covering it. When the harp ceased the world went silent with it save the soft hush of the snowflakes in the trees.

He was satisfied but he kept dragging up more wood and he found the work warmed him. Into the lee of the rocks he dragged treetops and great slabs of lightningstruck whiteoak and thin silver husks of chestnut stumps and windblown branches, mounding it all till he thought he’d rival the old witchwoman at the Perrie place. When he’d dragged all he could find for a considerable circular distance around the chasm, he set about building a fire. Tinder was hard to come by but on the sheltered side of the bluff he pulled handfuls ofwiry, curling grass and such bits of moss as weren’t iced over, and he began to break the fine branches to length. In a natural hollow of the rock he piled tinder and a handful of the smallest sticks then fumbled out his snuffbox of matches and struck one. Cupping the feeble light in his hands he lit the tinder. By the orange glow his face was sharp and intent. The grass caught and burned in bright fluxing wires of fire. He fed it sticks and bits of moss and then larger branches. The fire in its stone bowl dished and wavered in the wind. He piled on more wood and waited for it to catch, crouched before it with his freezing hands outspread like some Neanderthal lost in the almost sexual wonder of heat. The fire rose, then roared and popped with the wind pumping up the hollow like a bellows. The flames fired the bluff orange and ebony shadows writhed across it fleeing windward as souls in torment are said to do and he just hunkered there for a time letting the heat soak into him.

When he’d warmed awhile and felt several degrees more human he got up and piled on wood until he’d relocated this woodpile atop the fire and within an hour he had an enormous bonfire roaring fullthroated up the natural flue of the rocks with showers of sparks cascading upward into the snow like antisnow and a standing tongue of flame burning away in the night like an enormous candle. There was a spreading black circle where the snow was retreating from the fire and he laid a fencepost within it and spread the coat over it as a makeshift but passable sleeping Tyler and went back into the stone arch to wait. There was no room to sit in the narrow passageway but it was relatively dry here and the bluff deflected the wind so ultimately he drowsed in exhaustion neither standing nor sitting, weary body bent to the contoursof the stone.

Perhaps he wasn’t coming. Perhaps he hadn’t even seen the fire, though Tyler didn’t know how that could be. Anyone abroad this night, however doubtful that might be, was going to see this fire. Maybe he had already come to Bookbinder’s. Crept into the old man’s lair and cut his throat where he lay. Perhaps he lay this moment in the old man’s bed, the old man’s goldrimmed glasses astride the blade of his nose and nightcap drawn down about his ears and his body burrowed beneath Bookbinder’s bloodsoaked covers like an enormous mole, a spurious Bookbinder awaiting Tyler’s arrival, teeth locked in a smarmy grin, the better to eat you with.

When Sutter came there was no sound save the wind. No rattling stones, nothing whatsoever to foretell his arrival, the upper body just loomed above the shelf of rock and at first he wasn’t sure there was anyone there, then the wind intensified and the fire flared and Sutter was climbing onto the table of stone slowly, ever so slowly, coming on implacably like the protagonist of a nightmare escaping whatever bonds separate dreams from reality. Hunkered now. Silently taking up the rifle. Coming erect painfully slowly, as if even the popping of kneejoints might awaken the sleeping Tyler. He stood leant forward studying the coat, and then he looked all about. Tyler was thinking the coat did not much resemble a sleeping human. Sutter turned about like a beast to catch whatever scent the night might bring. Rifle at the ready. Some old primal caution seemed in force here, he seemed to divine by some subtle alteration in the terrain or the atmosphere that the glade was just quit by another.

Come on, goddamn you, Tyler thought. Come on up these stairs. Take another drink and just put your foot on the nextstep. The door’s unlocked and this time I’m ready for you.

Sutter looked to the left. To the right. Crouched and with the rifle held before his midsection he stepped forward onto the juryrigged chasm and when he did the earth twisted and went from beneath him like a gallows trapdoor and he flung the rifle, clawing wildly for purchase.

The rifle was gone but Sutter himself seemed to defy gravity or perhaps the depths had decided they wanted no part of him for he clung desperately to a length of pole that had lodged beneath his armpits and his eyes were intent on the lip of the stone nearest him as if nothing else in the world existed. He hung on the pole as if resting until his strength came back. He was opening and closing his mouth in great gulps of icy air. Finally his eyes locked on Tyler’s.

Boy, he said. His breaths were coming in ragged gasps. Tyler could see ice frozen in his hair and eyebrows. Cold, Sutter said. Feathery snowflakes were cascading past him into the earth and they lay in his hair without melting.

Tyler was looking about for a weapon. He took up a length of lumber and stood holding it.

Listen, Sutter said. There’s money in my pocket. Better than seven thousand dollars. You can have it, just let me get over to you where you can give me a hand.

Tyler waited with the board clutched like a ball bat.

She ain’t dead, Sutter said. When them doctors come they brought her to. All she was was knocked out. And if you hadn’t took to the deep pineys we’d of all had a big laugh about it. Likely she ain’t even got a headache by now.

You’re a goddamned liar, Tyler said. She was dead before I left her and Fenton Breece has got her somewhere.

This money’s in my right front pocket. I can feel it burningmy leg. It’s yours if you want it. We can get a lot more out of that crazy undertaker.

He extended a hand, and Tyler stood a moment in indecision. Sutter seemed to sense this lack of resolve and hunched himself along the length of pole.

Tyler suddenly swung the board. It struck Sutter’s outstretched hand so hard Sutter swung like a pendulum, the pole swaying. He shook his head and came on anyway, his eyes closed and face lowered onto his arms to evade the flailing plank. When Sutter finally looked up his eyes looked far away as if whatever lived behind them were shrinking, getting so tiny you could hardly see it, and blood was running into his eyes.

Tyler was halfcrying. He swung the board again and Sutter’s head jerked sidewise and he slipped and caught by his hands with the pole bouncing up and down and Tyler was sobbing raggedly then and beating at just the hands, the flesh peeling away whitely like the flesh of a corpse and the knuckles beaten to shreds of flesh and bone, and finally he threw away the board and kicked the end of the pole dementedly until the pole slipped past the stone edge and tilted and vanished from sight with Sutter’s hands still locked desperately about it.

Tyler stood leaning, peering into the chasm cautiously, halfthinking Sutter might be clinging to the stone walls like a spider, refusing to acknowledge even the laws of gravity and physics but he was not. There was only the mocking dark drawing off the light and snowflakes sifting down into silence.

He began to kick the rest of the lumber and poles into the hole and all the while the pastoral snow was sifting down and when he’d finished the lips of the crevice were alreadywhitening and the earth had resumed its eerie keening.

He sat dully before the fire. He seemed touched by a kind of numbness. He took out the tin of pictures and opened it and sat looking at them dispassionately. He began to feed the pictures to the fire. Halfcrazy he thought the fire might not even take them but it did. Their edges curled and darkened and the perverse images bubbled then burned with little blue flames. He burned them one by one, staring at them as emotionlessly as the camera’s eye had. One by one they went to a pale gray ash that rose on the updrafts, and they were as clean and pure now as the falling snow that obscured them.

A soulless and unpromising dawn had broken before the motley band of volunteers reached the whistling well. Their number was much diminished by laggards and dropouts and they were redeyed and weary and had been wandering hopelessly lost throughout the night and they were scratched from briars and branches and had fallen more times than they cared to think about. Their feet were wet and nighfrozen and their dungarees seized thighhigh with leggings of ice, and few among them were happy.

The fire had burned to a smouldering mound of ash. A driving snow still fell and these folk clambered calfdeep through it to hunker before the smoking ash. Son of a bitch, one of them said. That’s the story of this whole damn mess. You get there right after they left or just before they get there. Who do you reckon it was here?

Bellwether didn’t say anything. He was looking about, but everything save the mounded ash was pristine white withtrackless snow. Bellwether was nonetheless studying the glade as though there were a tale to be told here could he but decipher it. A few bedraggledlooking birds were looking about forlornly for food.

Old man Bookbinder’s place is right down the ridge, the man said. He might of seen somethin.

Maybe, Bellwether said.

Want to go down there and see? Bet it’s warm. And it’s just possible old man Bookbinder might own a coffee pot.

It sounds better than bein poked in the eye with a stick, Bellwether said.

The men rose. Their breath plumed palely. One of them stood looking warily down into the pit. He didn’t get too close. Hell of a thing to be just out here open in the woods, he said. Without a fence around it or nothin. A man could damn sure get his ticket punched he didn’t watch where he was goin.

Bellwether looked down. Yes he could, he said.

Tyler came out of the pines just after good day and went down the slope cautiously for the snow now wore a coat of clear ice and he’d lost count of the times he’d fallen. The woods behind him lay seized in a white surreal glaze, and he’d moved through a continuous gauntlet of tree branches breaking and tops splitting off with sounds like random and sporadic gunfire. Once in the night he’d been on a road and come upon a highvoltage wire trees had broken down. All alone there in the dark the wire was leaping and writhing serpentlike, spitting arcs of blue fire against the fluorescent snow like some forerunning tendril crept up from Hell. There was analien beauty to the dancing blue wire and he gave it a wide berth and went on.

He looked gaunted and thin, the flesh drawn tight over the sharp cheekbones, the eyes just smoky bores in his grim face. He came down the slope sliding cedar to cedar.

When he reached the point where he’d last left the Breece house there was no house there and he stood for a moment in stunned wonder. Secretly he’d have doubted the ability of fire to negate this symbol of copious wealth but the evidence lay all about him. Enormous piles of unidentifiable rubble all cloaked alike in ice. So much. Tens of thousands of fallen bricks and the charred remains of appliances and rising dizzyingly out of the ashes a brick chimney and high in the air the third-floor fireplace hearth suspended like a fireplace for a curious race of giant folk or aerie for the birds to quitclaim. Atop the chimney some dark bird already crouched uncertainly as if it had no other place to be, then lifted itself with slow strokes of the wings and was gone. Tyler looked about. Trees had shrouded the house and the near side of them was blackened and burned away. The shrouding trees looked like the container the fire had come in.

He sat down and laid a hand to the ashes but the ashes as well wore a film of ice. He stood up and made to go but like the bird he seemed to have no other place to be and he squatted in the epicenter of this holocaust like its sole grim survivor and when he’d rested for a time he rose and went on.

When he went out it was a Saturday and he didn’t know how many days had passed since Sutter had taken him for a walkdown by the tie yard nor did he want to sort through these past days to get a count on them. The weather moderated and what snow remained lay in dirty melting skifts. The road too was muddy and he kept skirting the deeper areas of mud with a thought for the new shoes he wore. He carried a tan suitcase and it as well was newlooking and cheap. A pickup went by once but didn’t stop, and Tyler took to the ditch to avoid the tireslung sluice of muddy water. Two large handpainted signs adorned the side of the truck proclaiming jesus jesus, but to Tyler it just looked like some old farmer making his Saturday pilgrimage to town.

Where the dirt road intersected the highway there was a tiny clapboard church bowered with rose briars set back in the corner the roads made and a graveyard with toilers at work, and he saw that the dead were still being replevied from the earth. He glanced once, then turned away, striding on toward the blacktop. Before he reached it a voice halted him.

One old man, two young. The old man watched, and the other two, sons perhaps, flailed at the earth with pick and shovel. It was the old man who’d hailed him and the old man himself coming gingerly through the nettles. One of the younger men stood shovel in hand watching him go and he called Pa once but the old man just went on.

Tyler stood awkwardly holding the suitcase and scanning down the wavering blacktop for traffic.

Ain’t this a hell of a mess? the old man asked. Old man with a caved and ravaged face, illfitting discolored teeth.

What?

All this mess. Granville Sutter killin that family back in the Harrikin and slippin through all them laws to Alabama or wherever. Crazy undertakers buryin men and womentogether and such. Did you ever hear of such crazy goins-on?

Tyler said he never had.

And the son of a bitch still alive in a hospital for lunatics in Memphis. Had a dead girl with him, I heard. Least they finally got her in the ground so’s she can rest. Who knows what all he’s done ain’t come to light yet. Son of a bich layin up eatin three meals a day and sleepin good at night. He ever gets out of that asylum and comes back around here, somebody’ll put him out of his misery. I may do it myself if my health holds up. If I’m gone these boys here will. We diggin up Martha to see if anything’s wrong. We supposed to let the state do it, but the way I see it, it ain’t none of the state’s business.

Tyler turned to look. All these latterday Lazaruses, all these tawdry homemade resurrections. One of the young men fixed him with a cold cat’s look and turned his face and spat then went back to work. Tyler turned to go but the old man knotted his fingers in the fabric of Tyler’s coatsleeve and stayed him.

I think we owe em that, don’t you? All we can do for em. I know I’d hate to meet em up yonder and have to explain why they was done so shoddy. Ain’t that the way you think?

What Tyler really thought was that the dead were so absolutely beyond anything the living might do for them it was almost past comprehension and he had no commitment to meet anyone anywhere. He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker’s keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences.

Yet he said none of this. The old man carried death on his breath like a harbinger of the grave and his grip on Tyler’sarm was fierce and clawlike.

Yes, Tyler said, that’s the way I always thought.

Yet if there was only the three score and ten allotted that seemed to him no small thing and it seemed not unfair. He’d used up little of his and the world was wide and its possibilities infinite and all it took to get there was a highway that was free for the taking.

On the slope the two men had ceased their labors and stood peering into the earth. Pa? one of them called.

Tyler turned away from the sudden pain in the old man’s eyes and pulled gently from his grasp and went on to the crossroads. He thought of the old man looking into a face he’d resigned himself to never seeing again in this world. He set the suitcase in a dry spot and seated himself on it and took off one of his new shoes and sat contemplatively rubbing his heel until faroff down the blacktop there was the sound of tires on macadam then the car itself wavering and ephemeral then gaining solidity in a rush.

A black Buick Roadmaster, he didn’t even have to thumb it. It stopped and sat idling and he took up the suitcase and peered through the windowglass and a curious trick of the light behind him rendered the glass opaque and mirrored so that instead of the driver of the car he saw only his own reflection leaning toward itself. In this altered light it was a new Tyler, older, perhaps wiser, more versed in the reckless ways of a reckless world, as if in some way he had hitched a ride with a more sinister self, ten years down the line.

He opened the door and got in.