He thought he ought to talk to someone in the sheriff’s office but he didn’t know who and he didn’t know what he’d say if he did.
He was standing peering into the showroom of the MVA motor company at a new Ford he couldn’t have told you the color of when a voice spoke behind him.
You shoppin for one of these new Fords, Mr. Phelan?
What? Oh, no, no, I don’t need one, Harris.
Fine looking car.
I was just thinking about something and I’m afraid I forgot what I was doing. I’d been up to the funeral parlor asking about that young Tyler woman. I couldn’t get any satisfaction at all. Fenton Breece was acting very peculiar.
Peculiar? What would have been peculiar was if he’d been actin some other way.
Let’s walk up to the Bellystretcher and talk about this, Phelan said. I don’t know why he’d do it but I believe he was lying to me. No, he was lying to me. I’ve taught school too many years not to know when I’m being lied to.
Well there’s one sure way to tell if Fenton Breece was lyin, Harris said. Did you happen to notice if his mouth was movin?
Light altered and the world was a world seen through smoked glass. The somber light diminished and a small bitter rain began to fall out of a pewter sky. A wind arose and drove before it a cloud of small dark sparrows, bedraggled andhomeless as refugees, fleeing nowhere with thin, lost cries. Sutter was passing through a stand of enormous cedars and when the rain fell harder he took shelter beneath one, hunkered on the coppercolored needles, his weight on the balls of his feet and the upright rifle in its zippered canvas case, just peering out beneath the lowering branches and watching the world go shimmery and ephemeral in the blowing rain.
When water began to course down on him through the matted branches and the windbrought rain to soak him, he rose with resignation and went on down the cedared sedgefield, his gait wooden and stoic and implacable.
In the lee of the hills lay the vestiges of a road and a concrete tiling where a wetweather stream went beneath it. He went down the weedgrown embankment to the rocky gully and into the tiling. He had to stoop slightly to enter it. It was dry inside, and he figured if it rained all night this was as good a place as any to spend it. The floor of the tiling was thickly grown with virid moss, and the place had a damp but not unpleasant smell. He sat with his back to one wall with his feet straddling the center, though no water had yet entered the mouth of the tiling, and ate a candy bar, then sat smoking, watching his spherical vision of rain and trees and stone like a world seen through the dirty lens of a spyglass.
After a while he slept or thought he slept. He dreamed or dreamed he did. Anymore the line between dreams and reality was ambiguous at best. For years he’d felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn’t stay shut of. He’d kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he’d go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway. An old woman stood before the mouth of the tiling peering in. A rawboned, floridfaced woman with graybrennel hair sheared straight across as if by the angry blow of an axe. Fierce little eyes like stokeholes to a red rage flaring behind them. A downturned slit of a mouth as if the workings of the world did not quite go to suit her.
She wore a shapeless old gray dress and a ruffled floursack apron: he remembered when she’d made it. He could see the lethal shape of the butcher knife through the thin, worn cloth of the apron.
She stood watching him intently, her hands clasped behind her back.
You come on home now, the rasp of her voice said. It’s time to come with me.
No, he told her. No, I believe I’ll just hang around here awhile.
Her face didn’t change. I don’t know what ever made you think you had a choice, she said.
He sat in silence listening to the rain in the trees. Raincrows called from some distant fallow cornfield. All those sounds he remembered out of the years of his life he wanted desperately to hold onto, to prove he was, rags of memory like cut flowers pressed in a Bible.
She stepped into the mouth of the tiling, a moving darkness silhouetted against falling dark. Water was running out of her hair and down her face, the thin gray cotton held the bony shapes of her shoulders. A thin trickle of dirty yellow water pooled in the tiling. She squatted in it without seeming to notice. Raw red ankles in a pair of broken-out men’s slippers. A worn and bewenned hand made absentminded pleats in the hem of her dress. Come on, she said. You’ll like it here where I am. You don’t have to do anything except what you want to do. Nobody expects anything from you. There ain’t no rules, and there ain’t no limits to what you can do. Nobody to tell you folks don’t do them things. Nothin binds you except the limits of what your mind can think up. Nobody signs papers, swears out warrants. There’s things done here nobody would write up anyway the ink would run like flamin gas, the paper would catch and burn. I been keepin a eye on you, and it’s time to go right now.
No, he said. I don’t want to.
She stood up. When she spoke, a steely threat had entered her voice. You come on. You go right now of your own free will and I won’t send em after you.
She stepped out of the tiling into the rain, and the dark rain enveloped her, abrupt and revenantial and absolute.
He leapt up to follow her. His head struck the concrete hard and fireworks flared behind his eyelids. He stood clasping his head in both hands. He staggered out into the rain.
Ma? he called into the night. Nightbirds took up the cry mockingly. He called again and there was a thread of fear woven into his voice and the cankeredpenny taste of it in the back of his mouth.
When he opened his mouth to call again she stepped close behind him and clasped a fist in his hair and jerked his head upward and the butcher knife honed to a razor’s sharpness opened a gaping slit in his throat and bright life’s blood darker than claret erupted down his shirtfront.
Lying there sleeping on the mossy concrete, his face jerking with the troubled passage of his dreams, he is provisionally still brother to all humankind. He has strayed far from the ways of men but there has always been a kind of twisted logic to his violence. The things he desired and struggled for made a kind of sense. Revenge, avarice, a thirst for power. The things only dreamed by normal men. Their own secret thoughts made carnate and ambulatory. Silver threads, thin and frayed though they be, hold him yet to the ways of the world. Here in the night they part and the ties give one by one and he falls away like some winged predator into another country, dark and unmapped and turbulent, so that he is finally free from all restraint, lost.
Coming down a long spine of ridge through a forest of dead chestnut Tyler chanced upon a pack of wild dogs or they upon him. They paced him silently from a distance, turning to watch him and check his course, and when he dropped off toward the hollow they adjusted their course simultaneously with his all dogs at once as if they communicated with each other in some manner above or below the comprehension of men. He began to regard them with disquiet and stopped once to check whether the rifle was loaded.
They’d gone wild in the Harrikin. Or their forebears had. These had been born wild as wolves or jackals, and any kind word or touch from man was nothing save a genetic memory if that. They were scruffy, halfstarved and rabidlooking and anymore they were only vaguely dogs.
When he made his rough camp by a stream that night, they were with him still. He’d killed a rabbit and he roasted it over firecoals banked in a circle of stones. He ate and tossedthe bones beyond the circle of firelight where they were contested with snarls and he could see their green eyes moving about like paired fireflies. When the meat was gone and he’d lain down to sleep with his rifle for bunkmate he could see a circle of their eyes drawn about the fire and in his mind he could see them stretched out, chins on paws, warily studying the fire and this strange god they’d adopted. As if they’d wearied of this wild life of freedom and hoped he could give them back what they’d lost of civilization.
He had none to spare and at best a tenuous grip on what remained. Sometime in the night he could hear them howling down the night howl on howl distant then more distant like descending souls crying from the lower keep of Hades and when he broke camp in the morning they were not to be seen.
What amazed him was that Sutter seemed to know where he’d be before the notion even struck him to go there. He had gone up the bluff because it was the highest hill he could see and he thought from there he might be able to see the railroad tracks.
On the near side the hill steepened gradually. Rocky clumps of wild ivy. He had come out of a long fallow field
