Four Past Midnight

'It's the key to this,' Dave said. 'You may even find it's the key to everything that has troubled you in your life. To your loneliness and your sadness.'

Sam looked at him, startled. Dave smiled.

'Oh yes,' he said. 'You're lonely, you're sad, and you're closed off from other people. You talk a good game, but you don't walk what you talk. Up until today I wasn't nothing to you but Dirty Dave who comes to get your papers once a month, but a man like me sees a lot, Sam. And it takes one to know one.'

'The key to everything,' Sam mused. He wondered if there really were such conveniences, outside of popular novels and movies-of-the-week populated with Brave Psychiatrists and Troubled Patients.

'It's true,' Dave persisted. 'Such things are dreadful in their power, Sam. I don't blame you for not wantin to search for it. But you can, you know, if You want to. You have that choice.'

'Is that something else you learn in AA, Dave?'

He smiled. 'Well, they teach it there,' he said, 'but that's one I guess I always knew.'

Naomi came out onto the porch again. She was smiling and her eyes were sparkling.

'Ain't she some gorgeous?' Dave asked quietly.

'Yes,' Sam said. 'She sure is.' He was clearly aware of two things: that he was falling in love, and that Dave Duncan knew it.

3

'The man took so long checking that I got worried,' she said, 'but we're in luck.'

'Good,' Dave said. 'You two are goin out to see Stan Soames, then. Does the Library still close at eight durin the school year, Sarah?'

'Yes - I'm pretty sure it does.'

'I'll be payin a visit there around five o'clock, then. I'll meet you in back, where the loadin platform is, between eight and nine. Nearer eight would be better - n safer. For Christ's sake, try not to be late.'

'How will we get in?' Sam asked.

'I'll take care of that, don't worry. You just get goin.'

'Maybe we ought to call this guy Soames from here,' Sam said. 'Make sure he's available.'

Dave shook his head. 'Won't do no good. Stan's wife left him for another man four years ago - claimed he was married to his work, which always makes a good excuse for a woman who's got a yen to make a change. There aren't any kids. He'll be out in his field. Go on, now. Daylight's wastin.'

Naomi bent over and kissed Dave's cheek. 'Thank you for telling us,' she said.

'I'm glad I did it. It's made me feel ever so much better.'

Sam started to offer Dave his hand, then thought better of it. He bent over the old man and hugged him.

4

Stan Soames was a tall, rawboned man with angry eyes burning out of a gentle face, a man who already had his summer sunburn although calendar spring had not yet run its first month. Sam and Naomi found him in the field behind his house, just as Dave had told them they would. Seventy yards north of Soames's idling, mud-splashed Rototiller, Sam could see what looked like a dirt road ... but since there was a small airplane with a tarpaulin thrown over it at one end and a windsock fluttering from a rusty pole at the other, he assumed it was the Proverbia Airport's single runway.

'Can't do it,' Soames said. 'I got fifty acres to turn this week and nobody but me to do it. You should have called a couple-three days ahead.'

'It's an emergency,' Naomi said. 'Really, Mr Soames.'

He sighed and spread his arms, as if to encompass his entire farm. 'You want to know what an emergency is?' he asked. 'What the government's doing to farms like this and people like me. That's a dad- ratted emergency. Look, there's a fellow over in Cedar Rapids who might -'

'We don't have time to go to Cedar Rapids,' Sam said. 'Dave told us you'd probably say -'

'Dave?' Stan Soames turned to him with more interest than he had heretofore shown. 'Dave who?'

'Duncan. He told me to say it's time to pay for the baseballs.'

Soames's brows drew down. His hands rolled themselves up into fists, and for just a moment Sam thought the man was going to slug him. Then, abruptly, he laughed and shook his head.

'After all these years, Dave Duncan pops outta the woodwork with his IOU rolled up in his hand! Goddam!'

He began walking toward the Rototiller. He turned his head to them as he did, yelling to make himself heard over the machine's enthusiastic blatting. 'Walk on over to the airplane while I put this goddam thing away! Mind the boggy patch lust on the edge of the runway, or it'll suck your damned shoes off!'

Soames threw the Rototiller into gear. It was hard to tell with all the noise, but Sam thought he was still laughing. 'I thought that drunk old bastard was gonna die before I could quit evens with him!'

He roared past them toward his barn, leaving Sam and Naomi looking at each other.

'What was that all about?' Naomi asked.

'I don't know - Dave wouldn't tell me.' He offered her his arm. 'Madam, will you walk with me?'

She took it. 'Thank you, sir.'

They did their best to skirt the mucky place Stan Soames had told them about, but didn't entirely make it. Naomi's foot went in to the ankle, and the mud pulled her loafer off when she jerked her foot back. Sam bent down, got it, and then swept Naomi into his arms.

'Sam, no!' she cried, startled into laughter. 'You'll break your back!'

'Nope,' he said. 'You're light.'

She was . . . and his head suddenly felt light, too. He carried her up the graded slope of the runway to the airplane and set her on her feet. Naomi's eyes looked up into his with calmness and a sort of luminous clarity. Without thinking, he bent and kissed her. After a moment, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

When he looked at her again, he was slightly out of breath. Naomi was smiling.

'You can call me Sarah anytime you want to,' she said. Sam laughed and kissed her again.

5

Riding in the Navajo behind Stan Soames was like riding piggyback on a pogo stick. They bounced and jounced on uneasy tides of spring air, and Sam thought once or twice that they might cheat Ardelia in a way not even that strange creature could have foreseen: by spreading themselves all over an Iowa cornfield.

Stan Soames didn't seem to be worried, however; he bawled out such hoary old ballads as 'Sweet Sue' and 'The Sidewalks of New York' at the top of his voice as the Navajo lurched toward Des Moines. Naomi was transfixed, peering out of her window at the roads and fields and houses below with her hands cupped to the sides of her face to cut the glare.

At last Sam tapped her on the shoulder. 'You act like you've never flown before!' he yelled over the mosquito-