He had to see Lewis: he had to talk to Lewis about his mother.
From the bottom of his mind floated the image of himself leaping on Lewis, swinging at him with his fists, battering at the handsome face…
But then came the opposite image of Lewis laughing, Lewis telling him not to worry about anything, that he had not come back from Spain to have affairs with people's mothers.
If Lewis said that, he could tell him about Jim Hardie.
Peter had been hitchhiking for fifteen minutes when a blue car finally pulled over to the side of the road. The middle-aged man behind the wheel leaned sideways and opened the passenger door. 'Where you going, son?' He was a tubby man in a wrinkled gray suit with a green necktie knotted too tightly. Advertising leaflets of some kind littered the back seat. 'Just down the road six or seven miles,' Peter said. 'I'll tell you when we get close.' He got in.
'This is against my principles,' the man said, rolling away.
'Pardon?'
'Against my principles. Hitchhiking is pretty dangerous, especially for good-looking kids like you. I don't think you should do it.'
Peter laughed out loud, startling both the driver and himself.
The man stopped at the end of Lewis's drive, but would not leave without giving him more advice. 'Listen, son. You never know who you're going to meet out on these roads. Could be any kind of pervert.' He grabbed Peter's arm just as the boy was opening the door.
'Promise me you won't do it again. Promise me, son.'
'Okay, I promise,' Peter said.
'The Lord knows you made that promise.' The man released Peter's arm, and the boy scrambled out of the car. 'Hold on, son, wait up. Just a sec.' Peter fidgeted by the side of the car, shifting on his feet, while the man leaned over and picked up one of the leaflets on the back seat. 'This will help you, son. Read it and keep it. It's got an answer in it.'
'An answer?'
'That's right. Show it to your friends.' He handed Peter a cheaply printed pamphlet:
The driver picked up speed on the highway; Peter shoved the little magazine in his pocket and turned around to go up Lewis's drive.
The drive had been pointed out to him, but he had never seen Lewis's house-never seen more of it than the gray peaks which could be glimpsed from the highway. As he began to walk up the drive, these peaks disappeared. The drifted snow had melted, and the drive shone, catching the sun at a hundred mirrorlike points. Seeing the top of the house from the road, Peter had never recognized how far the house sat from the highway, how enclosed it was by trees. When he reached the first curve of the drive, he was able partially to see the house between their trunks, and for the first time he began to question what he was doing.
He came closer. A smaller extension of the drive curved off to the front of the house, which looked as long as a city block. Faceted windows threw back the light. The major section of the drive trailed around the side of the house and ended at a brick courtyard flanked by what looked to Peter like stables-he saw only a corner of these. He could not imagine himself entering such an imposing place: it looked like you could wander a week in it without finding your way out. This evidence of Lewis's separateness, his otherness, put all of Peter's plans in doubt.
Going in there seemed ominously like going into the silent house on Montgomery Street.
Peter walked around to the rear of the building, trying to relate this massive grandeur to what he thought of Lewis. For Peter, who knew nothing of the house's history, it seemed regal: it demanded a different conception of its owner. Still, the rear of the house was better: a door on a brick court, the homely wooden fronts of the stables, this was at a level with which he was more comfortable. He had just noticed the paths leading into the woods when he heard a voice speaking in his mind.
'No,' he whispered.
Peter froze and the voice ceased simultaneously. A car had turned into the drive from the highway. Lewis had come home. Peter thought for a second if he should wait exposed in the courtyard for Lewis to see him as he drove in, and then the car shifted up and was too near the house and he could not bear to see Lewis while the echo of the voice still hung in his mind, and he ran to the side of the stables and crouched down. His mother's station wagon rolled into the courtyard behind the house.
Peter groaned softly, and heard laughter whispering along the painted boards of the old stables.
He flattened himself out on the snow and looked through the gnarled stalks of a rosebush as his mother got out of the station wagon. Her face was drawn, pale with concentrated feeling-a taut angry expression he had never seen. As he watched from beside the stables, she leaned back into the car and tapped the horn twice. Then she straightened up, walked around the front of the car, skirted the puddles on the flat red bricks and went up to the little door in the rear of the house. He thought she would knock, but she dug in her bag for a moment, took out a key and let herself in. He heard her call Lewis's name.
3
Lewis steered the Morgan around a black pool on the rutted drive which led to the back of the cheese factory. This was a bungalow-sized square wooden building Otto had built himself in a valley outside Afton, below a range of wooded hills. Dogs yapped in the kennels to the side of the factory. Lewis parked his car just outside the platform that served as Otto's loading bay, jumped up onto the platform, swung open the metal doors and went into the factory. He inhaled the pervasive odor of curdled milk.
'Lew-iss!' Otto stood in diffuse light on the other side of the little factory surrounded by white machinery, supervising while cheese was poured into round flat wooden molds. As each mold was filled, Otto's son, Karl, took it to the weighing machine, recorded its weight and the mold number, and then stacked it in a corner. Otto said something to Karl and then came across the wooden floor to grasp Lewis's hand. 'How good to see you, my friend. But Lew-iss, you look so got-awful tired! You need some of my homemade schnapps.'
'And you look busy,' Lewis said. 'But I'd be grateful for the schnapps.'
'Busy, don't worry about busy. Karl is handling everything now, I should worry about Karl? He is a good cheesemaker. Almost as good as me.'
Lewis smiled and Otto slapped him on the back and lumbered off to his office, a small enclosure near the loading bay. Otto sank down in his ancient chair behind the desk, making the springs creak; Lewis across the desk from him. 'Now, my friend.' Otto bent over and removed a decanter and two thimble glasses from a drawer. 'Now we have a good drink. To make your cheeks red again.' He tipped liquid from the decanter into the glasses.
The liquor burned Lewis's throat, but tasted like a distillation of massed flowers. 'Delicious.'
'Of course it is delicious. I make it myself. I suppose you brought your gun, Lew-iss?'
Lewis nodded.
'So. I thought you were the kind of friend who comes into my office and drinks my schnapps and eats my beautiful new cheese'-Otto pushed himself out of his chair and went the short distance to a low refrigerator -'but all the time thinks only about going out and shooting something.' He placed a block of cheese veined with wine down before Lewis and cut off sections with his knife. This was one of the specialty cheeses Otto made to sell under his own name; the wheels of cheddar went to a combine. 'Now tell me. Am I right?'
'You're right.'
'I thought so. But it is fine, Lew-iss. I bought a new dog.
The winy cheese was as good as Otto's schnapps. 'Do you think it might be too wet to take a dog out?'
'No, no. Under those big trees it won't be so wet. You and me, we'll find some animal. Maybe even a fox, huh?'
'And you're not afraid of the game warden?'
'No! They run when they see me. They say, uh uh, here is that crazy old German-with a gun yet!'
Listening to Otto Gruebe's buffoonery, sitting in his office with a fresh glass of the powerful brandy and his
