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
