Black House

Ridiculous! Morgan’s son trumpets. Utterly . . . ba-haaa! . . . ridiculous! Next you’ll be telling me there really were men in the sky!

But before Jack can tell his mental version of his old pal that or anything else, another car arrives. This one pulls up beside him. Looking suspiciously out of the driver’s window (the expression is habitual, Jack has found, and means nothing in itself) is Elvena Morton, Henry Leyden’s housekeeper.

“What in the tarnal are you doin’ way down here, Jack Sawyer?” she asks.

He gives her a smile. “Didn’t sleep very well, Mrs. Morton. Thought I’d take a little walk to clear my head.”

“And do you always go walking through the dews and the damps when you want to clear your head?” she asks, casting her eyes down at his jeans, which are wet to the knee and even a bit beyond. “Does that help?”

“I guess I got lost in my own thoughts,” he says.

“I guess you did,” she says. “Get in and I’ll give you a lift most of the way back to your place. Unless, that is, you’ve got a little more head clearing to do.”

Jack has to grin. That’s a good one. Reminds him of his late mother, actually. (When asked by her impatient son what was for dinner and when it would be served, Lily Cavanaugh was apt to say, “Fried farts with onions, wind pudding and air sauce for dessert, come and get it at ha’ past a pickle.”)

“I guess my head’s as clear as I can expect today,” he says, and goes around the front of Mrs. Morton’s old brown Toyota. There’s a brown bag on the passenger seat with leafy stuff poking out of it. Jack moves it to the middle, then sits down.

“I don’t know if the early bird gets the worm,” she says, driving on, “but the early shopper gets the best greens at Roy’s, I can tell you that. Also, I like to get there before the layabouts.”

“Layabouts, Mrs. Morton?”

She gives him her best suspicious look, eyes cutting to the side, right corner of her mouth quirked down as if at the taste of something sour.

“Take up space at the lunch counter and talk about the Fisherman this and the Fisherman that. Who he might be, what he might be—a Swede or a Pole or an Irish—and of course what they’ll do to him when he’s caught, which he would have been long ago if anyone but that nummie-squarehead Dale Gilbertson was in charge of things. So says they. Easy to take charge when you got your ass cozied down on one of Roy Soderholm’s stools, cuppa coffee in one hand and a sinker in the other. So thinks I. Course, half of ’em’s also got the unemployment check in their back pockets, but they won’t talk about that. My father used to say, ‘Show me a man who’s too good to hay in July and I’ll show you a man that won’t turn a hand the rest of the year, neither.’ ”

Jack settles in the passenger bucket, knees against the dash, and watches the road unroll. They’ll be back in no time. His pants are starting to dry and he feels oddly at peace. The nice thing about Elvena Morton is that you don’t have to hold up your end of the conversation, because she is glad to take care of everything. Another Lily-ism occurs to him. Of a very talkative person (Uncle Morgan, for instance), she was apt to say that So-and-so’s tongue was “hung in the middle and running on both ends.”

He grins a little, and raises a casual hand to hide his mouth from Mrs. M. She’d ask him what was so funny, and what would he tell her? That he had just been thinking her tongue was hung in the middle? But it’s also funny how the thoughts and memories are flooding back. Did he just yesterday try to call his mother, forgetting she was dead? That now seems like something he might have done in a different life. Maybe it was a different life. God knows he doesn’t seem like the same man who swung his legs out of bed this morning, wearily, and with a feeling best described as doomish. He feels fully alive for the first time since . . . well, since Dale first brought him out this very same road, he supposes, and showed him the nice little place that had once belonged to Dale’s father.

Elvena Morton, meanwhile, rolls on.

“Although I also admit that I take any excuse to get out of the house when he starts with the Mad Mongoloid,” she says. The Mad Mongoloid is Mrs. Morton’s term for Henry’s Wisconsin Rat persona. Jack nods understanding, not knowing that before many hours are passed, he will be meeting a fellow nicknamed the Mad Hungarian. Life’s little coincidences.

“It’s always early in the morning that he takes it into his head to do the Mad Mongoloid, and I’ve told him, ‘Henry, if you have to scream like that and say awful things and then play that awful music by kids who never should have been let near a tuba, let alone an electrical guitar, why do you do it in the morning when you know it spoils you for the whole day?’ And it does, he gets a headache four times out of every five he pretends to be the Mad Mongoloid and by afternoon he’s lying in his bedroom with an icebag on his poor forehead and not a bite of lunch will he take on those days, neither. Sometimes his supper will be gone when I check the next day—I always leave it in the same place in the refrigerator, unless he tells me he wants to cook himself—but half the time it’s still there and even when it’s gone I think that sometimes he just tips it down the garbage disposer.”

Jack grunts. It’s all he has to do. Her words wash over him and he thinks of how he will put the sneaker in a Baggie, handling it with the fire tongs, and when he turns it over at the police station, the chain of evidence will begin. He’s thinking about how he needs to make sure there’s nothing else in the sneaker box, and check the wrapping paper. He also wants to check those sugar packets. Maybe there’s a restaurant name printed under the bird pictures. It’s a longshot, but—

“And he says, ‘Mrs. M., I can’t help it. Some days I just wake up as the Rat. And although I pay for it later, there’s such joy in it while the fit is on me. Such total joy.’ And I asked him, I said, ‘How can there be joy in music about children wanting to kill their parents and eat fetuses and have sex with animals’—as one of those songs really was about, Jack, I heard it clear as day—‘and all of that?’ I asked him, and he said— Uhhp, here we are.”

They have indeed reached the driveway leading to Henry’s house. A quarter of a mile further along is the roof of Jack’s own place. His Ram pickup twinkles serenely in the driveway. He can’t see his porch, most certainly can’t see the horror that lies upon its boards, waiting for someone to clean it up. To clean it up in the name of decency.

“I could run you all the way up,” she says. “Why don’t I just do that?”

Jack, thinking of the sneaker and the rotten baloney smell hanging around it, smiles, shakes his head, and