“Wild hair up my ass.” He chose not to tell Smoky of the five hundred milligrams of Pellucidar he had taken and which were now coldly ventilating his nervous system like the first day of winter, which this was, seventh winter solstice of Smoky’s married life. The great capsule of Pellucidar had put him on the gad; he had got out the Mercedes, one of the last tangibles of the old Mouse affluence, and driven north till all the gas stations he passed were bankrupt ones; he parked it then in the garage of a deserted house, and, breathing deeply of the dense and moldy air, set off on foot.
The front door closed behind them with a solid sound of brass fittings and a rattle of the oval glass. George Mouse decaped grandly, a gesture that made Lily laugh and that halted Tacey in her headlong rush down the hail to see who had come. Behind her came Daily Alice in a long cardigan, her fists making bulges in the pockets. She ran to kiss George, and he pressing her felt a dizzying and inappropriate rush of chemical lust that made him laugh.
They all turned toward the parlor where yellow lamplight already shone, and saw themselves in the tall hall pier-glass. George stopped them by it, holding a shoulder of each, and studied the images: himself, his cousin, Smoky—and Lily who just then appeared between her mother’s legs. Changed? Well, Smoky had regrown the beard he had started and then amputated when George first knew him. His face looked gaunter, more what George could only call (since the word was just then rushed to him by importunate messenger) more
“Time flies,” he said.
A Definite Hazard
In the parlor, they were all preparing a long shopping list. “Peanut butter,” Mother said, “stamps, iodine, soda-water—lots of it, soap pads, raisins, tooth powder; chutney, chewing gum, candles, George!” She embraced him; Doctor Drinkwater looked up from the list he was making.
“Hello, George,” said Cloud from her corner by the fire. “Don’t forget cigarettes.”
“Paper diapers, the cheap ones,” Daily Alice said. “Matches—Tampax—3-in-One Oil.”
“Oatmeal,” Mother said. “How are your people, George?”
“No oatmeal!” Tacey said.
“Good, good. Mom’s, you know, hanging on.” Mother shook her head. “I haven’t seen Franz for, oh, a year?” He put bills on the drum-table where Doc wrote. “A bottle of gin,” he said.
Doc wrote “gin,” but pushed aside the bills. “Aspirin,” he remembered. “Camphorated oil. Antihistamine.”
“Somebody sick?” George asked.
“Sophie’s got this strange fever,” Daily Alice said. “It comes and goes.”
“Last call,” Doc said, looking up at his wife. She stroked her chin and clucked in an agony of doubt, and at last decided she would have to go too. In the hall, pursued by all of their last-minute needs, he tugged a cap over his head (his hair had gone almost white, like dirty cotton-wool) and put on a pair of pink-framed glasses his license said he had to wear. He picked up a brown envelope of papers he must deal with, announced himself ready, and they all went out onto the porch to see them off.
“I hope they’ll be careful,” Cloud said. “It’s very wet.”
From within the coach-house, they heard a hesitant grinding. Then an expectant silence, followed by a firmer start, and the station wagon backed warily out into the drive, making two soft and delible marks in the wet leaves. George Mouse marveled. Here they all were intently watching nothing more than an old guy very gingerly handling a car. The gears ground and an awed silence fell. George knew of course that it wasn’t every day they got the car out, that it was an occasion, that doubtless Doc had spent the morning wiping cobwebs from the old wood sides and chasing chipmunks away who were thinking of nesting under the apparently immobile seats, and that he now put on the old machine like a suit of armor to go out and do battle in the Great World. Had to hand it to his country cousins. Everybody he knew in the City hitched endlessly about the Car and its depredations; his cousins had never handled this twenty-year-old woodie anyhow but infrequently and with the greatest respect. He laughed, waving goodbye with the rest, imagining Doc out on the road, nervous at first, shushing his wife, changing gears with care; then turning onto the great highway, beginning to enjoy the smooth slipping-by of brown landscape and the sureness of his control, until some monster truck roars by and nearly blows him off the road. The guy’s a definite hazard.
Up on the Hill
He certainly didn’t want, George said, to stay indoors; he’d come up for fresh air and stuff, even if he hadn’t picked the best day for it; so Smoky put on a hat and galoshes, took a stick, and went with him to walk up the Hill.
Drinkwater had tamed the Hill with a footpath, and stone steps where it was steepest, and rustic seats at lookout places, and a stone table at the top where views and lunch could be taken together. “No lunch,” George said. The fine rain had stopped—had halted, it seemed, in mid-fall, and hung, stationary, in the air. They went up the path which circled the tops of trees that grew in the ravines below, George admiring the pattern of silver drops on leaf and twig and Smoky pointing out the odd bird (he had learned the names of many, particularly odd ones).
“No but really,” George said. “How’s it going?”
“Slate junco,” Smoky said. “Good. Good.” He sighed. “It’s just hard when winter comes.”
“God, yes.”
“No, but harder here. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have it any different… You just can’t bear the melancholy, some evenings.” Indeed it seemed to George that Smoky’s eyes might brim with tears. George breathed deeply, glorying in the wetness and the wood. “Yes, it’s bad,” he said happily.
“You’re indoors so much,” Smoky said. “You draw together. And there’s so many people there. You seem to get wound around each other more.”
“In that house? You could lose yourself for days in there. For days.” He remembered an afternoon like this one when he was a kid, when he had come up here for Christmas with the family. While searching for the stash he knew must be somewhere awaiting the great morning, he got lost on the third floor. He went down a strange staircase narrow as a chute, found himself Elsewhere amid strange rooms; draughts made a dusty tapestry in a sitting room breathe with spooky life, his own feet sounded like other’s feet coming toward him. He began to shout after a while, having lost the staircase; found another; lost all restraint when he heard far off Mom Drinkwater calling to him, and ran around shouting and throwing open doors until at last he opened the arched door of what looked like a church, where his two cousins were taking a bath.
They sat on one of Drinkwater’s seats of bent and knobby wood. Through the screen of naked trees they could see across the land a great gray distance. They could just make out the gray back of the Interstate lying coiled and smooth in the next county; they could even hear, at moments, carried on the thick air, the far hum of trucks: the monster breathed. Smoky pointed out a finger or Hydra’s head of it which reached out tentatively through the hills this way, then stopped abruptly. Those bits of yellow, sole brightness on the scene, were sleeping caterpillars—the man-made kind, earth-movers and -shakers. They wouldn’t come any closer; the surveyors and purveyors, contractors and engineers were stalled there, mired, bogged in indecision, and that vestigial limb would never grow bone and muscle to punch through the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Smoky knew it. “Don’t ask me how,” he said.
But George Mouse had been thinking of a scheme whereby all the buildings, mostly empty, on the block his
