Ghost Story

swallowed a barrel. Remembering Linda's senseless, inexplicable death made him yearn for drunkenness.

It was time to get back. Shaken by memory-Linda's face had come back to him with utter clarity, claiming him through the nine years since that moment-he turned from the fence and inhaled deeply. Running, not a gallon of ale, was his therapy now. The path through the mile and a half of woods seemed narrower, darker.

Your problem, Lewis, is that you're yellow.

It was the nightmare that had brought back the memories. Sears and John, in those cerements of the grave, with those lifeless faces. Why not Ricky? If the other two living members of the Chowder Society, why not the third?

He was sweating even before he started the run back.

The return path took a long angle off to the left before turning back in the direction of the farmhouse: normally this loafing misdirection was Lewis's favorite part of his morning run. The woods closed in almost immediately, and by the time you had gone fifteen paces you forgot all about the open field at your back. More than any other part of the path, it looked here like the original climax forest: thick oaks and girlish birches fought for root space, tall ferns crowded toward the path. Today he ran it with as little pleasure in it as it was possible for him to feel. All those trees, their number and thickness, were obscurely threatening: running away from the house was like running away from safety. Going over the powdery snow in white air, he pushed himself hard toward the cut back home.

When the sensation first hit him, he ignored it, vowing not to allow himself to be whammied any more than he was already. What had come into his mind was that someone was standing back at the beginning of the return path, just where the first trees stood. He knew that no one could be there: it was impossible that anyone had walked across the field without his noticing. But the sensation persisted; it would not be argued away. His watcher's eyes seemed to follow him, going deeper into the crowded trees. A squadron of crows left the branches of an oak just ahead of him. Normally this would have delighted Lewis, but this time he jumped at their racket and almost fell.

Then the sensation shifted, and became more intense. The person back there was coming after him, staring at him with huge eyes. Frantic, despising himself, Lewis pelted for home without daring to look back. He could feel the eyes watching him until he reached the walkway leading across his back garden from the edge of the woods to his kitchen door.

He ran down the path, his chest raggedly hauling in air, twisted the doorknob, and jumped inside. He slammed the door behind him and went immediately to the window beside it. The path was empty and the only footprints were his. Still Lewis was frightened, looking out to the near edge of his woods. For a moment a traitorous synapse in his brain told him: maybe you should sell out and move into town. But there were no footprints. Nobody could possibly be out there, keeping out of sight in the shelter of the trees-he wouldn't be scared out of the house he needed, forced by his own weakness to trade his splendid comfortable isolation for a crowded discomfort. To this decision, made in a cold kitchen on the first day of snowfall, he would hold.

Lewis put a kettle on the stove, got his coffee pitcher off a shelf, filled the grinder with Blue Mountain beans and held the switch down until they were powder. Oh hell. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of O'Keefe's and after snapping off the cap drank most of it without tasting or swallowing. As the beer hit his stomach, a two-sided thought surprised him. I wish Edward was still alive: I wish John hadn't pushed so hard for his godawful party.

6

'Well, speak up,' said Ricky. 'What is it, trespassers again? We explained our position on that. He must know even if he won that he couldn't make enough on a trespassing suit to pay expenses.'

They were just entering the foothills of the Cayuga Valley, and Ricky was handling the old Buick with great care. The roads were slippery, and though ordinarily he would have had his snow tires put on before making even the eight-mile drive to Elmer Scales's farm, this morning Sears had not given him time. Sears himself, huge in his black hat and black fur-collared winter coat, seemed as conscious of this as Ricky. 'Keep your mind on your driving,' he said. 'There's supposed to be ice on the roads up around Damascus.'

'We're not going to Damascus,' Ricky pointed out.

'Even so.'

'Why didn't you want to use your car?'

'I'm having the snow tires put on this morning.'

Ricky grunted, amused. Sears was in one of his refractory moods, a frequent consequence of a conversation with Elmer Scales. He was one of their oldest and most difficult clients. (Elmer had come to them first at fifteen years of age, with a long and complex list of people he wished to sue. They had never managed to get rid of him, nor had he ever altered his perception of conflict as a situation best addressed by an immediate lawsuit.) A skinny, excitable man with jutting ears and a high-pitched voice, Scales was called 'Our Vergil' by Sears because of his poetry, which he ritually sent off to Catholic magazines and local papers. Ricky understood that the magazines just as ritually sent them back-once Elmer had shown him a file stuffed with rejection slips-but the local newspapers had printed two or three. They were inspirational poems, their imagery drawn from Elmer's life as a farmer: The cows do moo, the lambs do bleat. God's Glory walks in on thundering feet. So did Elmer Scales. He had eight children and an undimmed passion for litigation.

Once or twice a year either partner was summoned out to the Scales farm and Elmer would direct him to a hole in a fence where a hunter or a teenager had cut through his fields: Elmer had often identified these trespassers with his binoculars, and he wanted to sue. They usually managed to talk him out of this, but he always had two or three litigations of other sorts under way. But this time, Ricky suspected, it was more serious than Scales's upsets were normally; he had never before asked-commanded-both partners to come out.

'As you know, Sears,' he said, 'I can drive and think at the same time. I'm doing a very sedate thirty miles an hour. I think you can trust me with whatever has Elmer worked up.'

'Some of his animals died.' Sears said this tight-lipped, implying that his speaking would be likely to result in their going off the road at any minute.

'So why are we going out there? We can't bring them back.'

'He wants us to see them. He called Walter Hardesty too.'

'They didn't just die, then.'

'With Elmer, who knows? Now please concentrate on getting us there safely, Ricky. This experience will be grisly enough as it is.'

Ricky glanced at his partner and for the first time that morning saw how pale Sears's face was. Beneath the smooth skin prominent blue veins swam at intervals into visibility; beneath the young eyes hung gray patches of webbed skin. 'Keep your eyes on the road,' said Sears.

'You look terrible.'

'I don't think Elmer will notice.'

Ricky's eyes were now safely on the narrow country road; this gave him license to speak. 'Did you have a bad night?'

Sears said, 'I think it's beginning to melt.'

As this was a blatant lie, Ricky ignored it. 'Did you?'

'Observant Ricky. Yes, I did.'

'So did I. Stella thinks we should talk about it.'

'Why? Does she have bad nights too?'

'She thinks that talking about it would help.'

'That sounds like a woman. Talking just opens the wounds. Not talking helps to heal them.'

'In that case, it was a mistake to invite Donald Wanderley here.'

Sears grunted in exasperation.

'That was unfair of me,' Ricky said, 'and I'm sorry I said it. But I think we should talk about it for the same reason you think we should invite that boy.'

'He's not a boy. He must be thirty-five. He might be forty.'