Black House

Looking out at the whiteness that hides David’s swing and jungle gym, Dale feels a terrible fear leap up his throat, choking him. All at once he can smell Irma Freneau again, that terrible smell of raw spoiled meat. Any sense that his family lives in a protected, magic circle—it may happen to others, but it can never, never happen to us—is gone now. What has replaced it is stark certainty: David is gone. The Fisherman has enticed him out of the house and spirited him away into the fog. Dale can see the grin on the Fisherman’s face. He can see the gloved hand—it’s yellow—covering his son’s mouth but not the bulging, terrified child’s eyes.

Into the fog and out of the known world.

David.

He moves forward across the kitchen on legs that feel boneless as well as nerveless. He puts his wineglass down on the table, the stem landing a-tilt on a crayon, not noticing when it spills and covers David’s half-finished drawing with something that looks horribly like venous blood. He’s out the door, and although he means to yell, his voice comes out in a weak and almost strengthless sigh: “David? . . . Dave?”

For a moment that seems to last a thousand years, there is nothing. Then he hears the soft thud of running feet on damp grass. Blue jeans and a red-striped rugby shirt materialize out of the thickening soup. A moment later he sees his son’s dear, grinning face and mop of yellow hair.

“Dad! Daddy! I was swinging in the fog! It was like being in a cloud!”

Dale snatches him up. There is a bad, blinding impulse to slap the kid across the face, to hurt him for scaring his father so. It passes as quickly as it came. He kisses David instead.

“I know,” he says. “That must have been fun, but it’s time to come in now.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“Because sometimes little boys get lost in the fog,” he says, looking out into the white yard. He can see the patio table, but it is only a ghost; he wouldn’t know what he was looking at if he hadn’t seen it a thousand times. He kisses his son again. “Sometimes little boys get lost,” he repeats.

Oh, we could check in with any number of friends, both old and new. Jack and Fred Marshall have returned from Arden (neither suggested stopping at Gertie’s Kitchen in Centralia when they passed it), and both are now in their otherwise deserted houses. For the balance of the ride back to French Landing, Fred never once let go of his son’s baseball cap, and he has a hand on it even now, as he eats a microwaved TV dinner in his too empty living room and watches Action News Five.

Tonight’s news is mostly about Irma Freneau, of course. Fred picks up the remote when they switch from shaky-cam footage of Ed’s Eats to a taped report from the Holiday Trailer Park. The cameraman has focused on one shabby trailer in particular. A few flowers, brave but doomed, straggle in the dust by the stoop, which consists of three boards laid across two cement blocks. “Here, on the outskirts of French Landing, Irma Freneau’s grieving mother is in seclusion,” says the on-scene correspondent. “One can only imagine this single mother’s feelings tonight.” The reporter is prettier than Wendell Green but exudes much the same aura of glittering, unhealthy excitement.

Fred hits the OFF button on the remote and growls, “Why can’t you leave the poor woman alone?” He looks down at his chipped beef on toast, but he has lost his appetite.

Slowly, he raises Tyler’s hat and puts it on his own head. It doesn’t fit, and Fred for a moment thinks of letting out the plastic band at the back. The idea shocks him. Suppose that was all it took to kill his son? That one simple, deadly modification? The idea strikes him as both ridiculous and utterly inarguable. He supposes that if this keeps up, he’ll soon be as mad as his wife . . . or Sawyer. Trusting Sawyer is as crazy as thinking he might kill his son by changing the size of the boy’s hat . . . and yet he believes in both things. He picks up his fork and begins to eat again, Ty’s Brewers cap sitting on his head like Spanky’s beanie in an old Our Gang one- reeler.

Beezer St. Pierre is sitting on his sofa in his underwear, a book open on his lap (it is, in fact, a book of William Blake’s poems) but unread. Bear Girl’s asleep in the other room, and he’s fighting the urge to bop on down to the Sand Bar and score some crank, his old vice, untouched for going on five years now. Since Amy died, he fights this urge every single day, and lately he wins only by reminding himself that he won’t be able to find the Fisherman—and punish him as he deserves to be punished—if he’s fucked up on devil dust.

Henry Leyden is in his studio with a huge pair of Akai headphones on his head, listening to Warren Vache, John Bunch, and Phil Flanigan dreamboat their way through “I Remember April.” He can smell the fog even through the walls, and to him it smells like the air at Ed’s Eats. Like bad death, in other words. He’s wondering how Jack made out in good old Ward D at French County Lutheran. And he’s thinking about his wife, who lately (especially since the record hop at Maxton’s, although he doesn’t consciously realize this) seems closer than ever. And unquiet.

Yes indeed, all sorts of friends are available for our inspection, but at least one seems to have dropped out of sight. Charles Burnside isn’t in the common room at Maxton’s (where an old episode of Family Ties is currently running on the ancient color TV bolted to the wall), nor in the dining hall, where snacks are available in the early evening, nor in his own room, where the sheets are currently clean (but where the air still smells vaguely of old shit). What about the bathroom? Nope. Thorvald Thorvaldson has stopped in to have a pee and a handwash, but otherwise the place is empty. One oddity: there’s a fuzzy slipper lying on its side in one of the stalls. With its bright black and yellow stripes, it looks like the corpse of a huge dead bumblebee. And yes, it’s the stall second from the left. Burny’s favorite.

Should we look for him? Maybe we should. Maybe not knowing exactly where that rascal is makes us uneasy. Let us slip through the fog, then, silent as a dream, down to lower Chase Street. Here is the Nelson Hotel, its ground floor now submerged in river fog, the ocher stripe marking high water of that ancient flood no more than a whisper of color in the fading light. On one side of it is Wisconsin Shoe, now closed for the day. On the other is Lucky’s Tavern, where an old woman with bowlegs (her name is Bertha Van Dusen, if you care) is currently bent over with her hands planted on her large knees, yarking a bellyful of Kingsland Old-Time Lager into the gutter. She makes sounds like a bad driver grinding a manual transmission. In the doorway of the Nelson Hotel itself sits a patient old mongrel, who will wait until Bertha has gone back into the tavern, then slink over to eat the half- digested cocktail franks floating in the beer. From Lucky’s comes the tired, twanging voice of the late Dick Curless, Ole Country One-Eye, singing about those Hainesville Woods, where there’s a tombstone every mile.

The dog gives a single disinterested growl as we pass him and slip into the Nelson’s lobby, where moth-eaten heads—a wolf, a bear, an elk, and an ancient half-bald bison with a single glass eye—look at empty sofas, empty chairs, the elevator that hasn’t worked since 1994 or so, and the empty registration desk. (Morty Fine, the clerk, is in the office with his feet propped up on an empty file-cabinet drawer, reading People and picking his nose.) The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river—it’s in the pores of the place—but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It’s a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches. This is the kind of