He saw what would have to be done if he were going to get his forty-pound bundle up that steep slope now that his rope was gone and prepared to do it. He backed up and then ran at the slope, leaning forward, letting his forward motion carry him as far as it would. He got almost to the top before his feet skidded out from under him on the short, slick grass, and he tossed the canvas roll as far as he could as he came down. It landed almost at the crest of the hill. He scrambled the rest of the way up, looked around again, saw no one, and laid the rolled-up tarp against the fence. Then he went back for the rest of his things.
He gained the top of the hill again, put the gloves on, and piled the flashlight, pick, and shovel next to the tarp. Then he rested, back against the staves of the fence, hands propped on his knees. The new digital watch Rachel had given him for Christmas informed him that it was now 2:01.
He gave himself five minutes to regroup and then tossed the shovel over the fence. He heard it thud in the grass. He tried to stuff the flashlight into his pants, but it just wouldn’t go. He slipped it through two of the iron staves and listened to it roll down the hill, hoping it would not hit a stone and break. He wished he had worn a packsack.
He removed his dispenser of strapping tape from the pocket of his jacket and bound the business-end of the pick to the canvas roll, going around and around, drawing the tape tight over the pick’s metal arms and tight under the canvas. He did this until the tape was gone and then tucked the empty dispenser back in his pocket. He lifted the bundle and hoisted it over the fence (his back screamed in protest; he would pay for this night all the following week, he suspected) and then let it drop, wincing at the soft thud.
Now he swung one leg over the fence, grasped two of the decorative arrow points, and swung his other leg over. He skidded down, digging in at the earth between the staves of the fence with the toes of his shoes, and dropped to the ground.
He made his way down the far side of the hill and felt through the grass. He found the shovel right away-muted as the glow from the streetlights was through the trees, it reflected a faint gleam from the blade. He had a couple of bad moments when he was unable to find the flashlight-how far could it have rolled in this grass? He got down on his hands and knees and felt through the thick plush, his breath and heartbeat loud in his own ears.
At last he spotted it, a thin black shadow some five feet from where he had guessed it would be-like the hill masking the cemetery crypt, the regularity of its shape gave it away. He grabbed it, cupped a hand over its felted lens, and pushed the little rubber nipple that hid the switch. His palm lit up briefly, and he switched the flashlight off. It was okay.
He used his pocketknife to cut the pick free from the canvas roll and took the tools through the grass to the trees. He stood behind the biggest, looking both ways along Mason Street. It was utterly deserted now. He saw only one light on the entire street-a square of yellow-gold in an upstairs room. An insomniac, perhaps, or an invalid.
Moving quickly but not running, Louis stepped out onto the sidewalk. After the dimness of the cemetery, he felt horribly exposed under the streetlights; here he stood, only yards away from Bangor’s second-largest boneyard, a pick, shovel, and flashlight cradled in his arms. If someone saw him now, the inference would be too clear to miss.
He crossed the street rapidly, heels clicking. There was his Civic, only fifty yards down the street. To Louis, it looked like five miles. Sweating, he walked toward it, alert for the sound of an approaching car engine, footfalls other ‘than his own, perhaps the rasp of a window going up.
He got to his Honda, leaned the pick and shovel against the side, and fumbled for his keys. They weren’t there, not in either pocket. Fresh sweat began to break on his face. His heart began to run again, and his teeth were clenched together against the panic that wanted to leap free.
He had lost them, most likely when he had dropped from the tree limb, hit the grave marker with his knee, and rolled over. His keys were lying somewhere in the grass, and if he had had trouble finding his flashlight, how could he hope to recover his keys? It was over. One piece of bad luck and it was over.
Now wait, wait just a goddam minute. Go through your pockets again. Your change is there-and if your change didn’t fall out, your keys didn’t fall out either.
This time he went through his pockets more slowly, removing the change, even turning the pockets themselves inside out.
No keys.
Louis leaned against the car, wondering what to do next. He would have to climb back in, he supposed. Leave his son where he was, take the flashlight, climb back in, and spend the rest of the night in a fruitless hunt for-Light suddenly broke in his tired mind.
He bent down and stared into the Civic. There were his keys dangling from the ignition switch.
A soft grunt escaped him, and then he ran around to the driver’s side, snatched the door open, and took the keys out. In his mind he suddenly heard the authoritative voice of that grim father figure Karl Malden, he of the potato nose and the archaic snap-brim hat: Lock your car. Take your keys. Don’t help a good boy go bad.
He went around to the rear of the Civic and opened the hatchback. He put in the pick, shovel, and flashlight, then slammed it. He had gotten twenty or thirty feet down the sidewalk when he remembered his keys. This time he had left them dangling from the hatchback lock.
Stupid! he railed at himself. If you’re going to be so goddam stupid, you better forget the whole thing!
He went back and got his keys.
He had gotten Gage in his arms and was most of the way back to Mason Street when a dog began to bark somewhere. No-it didn’t just begin to bark. It began to howl, its gruff voice filling the street. Auggggh-R0000! Auggggh-R000000!
He stood behind one of the trees, wondering what could possibly happen next, wondering what to do next. He stood there expecting lights to start going on all up and down the street.
In fact only one light did go on, at the side of a house just opposite where Louis stood in the shadows. A moment later a hoarse voice cried, “Shut up, Fred!”
Auggggh-R000000! Fred responded.
“Shut him up, Scanlon, or I’m calling the police!” someone yelled from the side of the street Louis was on, making him jump, making him realize just how false the illusion of emptiness and desertion was. There were people all around him, hundreds of eyes, and that dog was attacking sleep, his only friend. Goddam you, Fred, he thought. Oh, goddam you.
Fred began another chorus; he got well into the Auggggh, but before he could do more than get started on a good solid R000000, there was a hard whacking sound followed by a series of low whimpers and yips.
Silence followed by the faint slam of a door. The light at the side of Fred’s house stayed on for a moment, then clicked off.
Louis felt strongly inclined to stay in the shadows, to wait; surely it would be better to wait until the ruckus had died down. But time was getting away from him.
He crossed the street with his bundle and walked back down to the Civic, seeing no one at all. Fred held his peace. He clutched his bundle in one hand, got his keys, opened the hatchback.
Gage would not fit.
Louis tried the bundle vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally. The Civic’s back compartment was too small. He could have bent and crushed the bundle in there-Gage would not have minded-but Louis could simply not bring himself to do it.
Come on, come on, come on, let’s get out of here, let’s not push it any further.
But lie stood, nonplussed, out of ideas, the bundle containing his son’s corpse in his arms. Then he heard the sound of an approaching car, and without really thinking at all, he took the bundle around to the passenger side, opened the door, and slipped the bundle into the seat.
He shut the door, ran around to the rear of the Civic, and slammed the hatchback. The car went right through the intersection, and Louis heard the whoop of drunken voices. He got behind the wheel, started his car, and was reaching for the headlight switch when a horrible thought struck him. What if Gage were facing backward, sitting there with those joints at knee and hip bending the wrong way, his sunken eyes looking toward the rear window instead of out through the windshield?
It doesn’t matter, his mind responded with a shrill fury born of exhaustion.
Will you get that through your head? it just doesn’t matter!
But it does. it does matter. It’s Gage in there, not a bundle of towels!
He reached over and gently began to press his hands against the canvas tarpaulin, feeling for the contours underneath. He looked like a blind man trying to determine what a specific object might be. At last he came upon a protuberance that could only be Gage’s nose-facing in the right direction.
Only then could he bring himself to put the Civic in gear and start the twenty-five minute drive back to Ludlow.
52
At one o’clock that morning, Jud Crandall’s telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B amp; A coupling shed with George Chapin and Renй Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey-jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it-while outside a nor’easter blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B amp; A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, these were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around. He was twenty-three, and Norma was very much alive (although in bed now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and Renй Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucks-port who-That was when the phone began to ring and he jerked up in his chair, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, feeling a sour heaviness drop into him like a stone-it was, he thought, all those years between twenty-three and eighty-three, all sixty of them, dropping into him at once. And on the heels of that thought: You been sleepin, boyo. That’s no way to run this railroad…
not tonight.
He got up, holding himself straight against the stiffness that had also settled into his back, and crossed to the phone.
It was Rachel.
“Jud? Has he come home?”
“No,” Jud said. “Rachel, where are you? You sound closer.”
“I am closer,” Rachel said. And although she did sound closer somehow, there was a distant humming on the wire. It was the sound of the wind, somewhere between here and wherever she was. The wind was high tonight. That sound that always made Jud think of dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out. “I’m at the rest area at Biddeford on the Maine Turnpike.”
“Biddeford!”
“I couldn’t stay in Chicago. It was getting to me, too whatever it was that got Ellie, it was getting me too. And you feel it. It’s in your voice.”
“Ayuh.” He picked a Chesterfield out of his pack and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. He popped a wooden match alight and watched it flicker as his hand trembled. His hands hadn’t trembled-not before this nightmare had commenced anyway. Outside, he heard that dark wind gust. It took the house in its hand and shook it.
Power’s growing. I can feel it.
Dim terror in his old bones. It was like spun glass, fine and fragile.
“Jud, please tell me what’s going on!”
He supposed she had a right to know-a need to know. And he supposed he would tell her. Eventually he would tell her the whole story. He would show her the chain that had been forged link by link. Norma’s heart attack, the death of the cat, Louis’s question-has anyone ever buried a person up there?-Cage’s death…
