committed, then we can really nail him. All we have to do is trace him back to the town where he was working.'
'Tom Pasmore would probably be able to help us with that.'
'I'm not putting any faith in that guy,' he said. 'This is our baby.'
'We'll think about that after we get the notes,' I said. For the rest of the morning, we listened to weather reports on the radio and kept checking the windows. The fog was as thick at ten as it had been at eight, and the radio advised everybody to stay home. There had been half a dozen accidents on the freeways, as well as another five or six minor crashes at intersections. No planes had left Millhaven airport since before midnight, and all incoming flights were being diverted to Milwaukee or Chicago.
John kept jumping up from the couch to take a few steps outside the front door, coming back in to razz me about getting lost.
I was glad he was in a good mood. While he ran in and out, checking to see if we could see far enough to drive, I leafed through 'The Paraphrase of Shem' and 'The Second Treatise of Great Seth.'
'Why are you bothering with that drivel?' John asked.
'I'm hoping to find out,' I said. 'What do you have against it?'
'Gnosticism is a dead end. When people allude to it now, they make it mean anything they want it to mean by turning it into a system of analogies. And the whole point of gnosticism in the first place was that any kind of nonsense you could make up was true because you made it up.'
'I guess that's why I like it,' I said.
He shook his head in cheerful derision. At twelve-thirty we ate lunch. The planes were still sitting on the runways and the announcers hadn't stopped telling people to stay home, but from the kitchen window, we could see nearly halfway to the hemlocks at the back of John's property. 'You won't lose your mind again if I bring that pistol, will you?' John asked me.
'Just don't shoot the old lady next door,' I said.
I turned on the fog lights and pulled out into the street. The stop sign at the end of the block swam up out of the fog in time for me to brake to a halt.
'You can do this, right?' John asked.
Experimentally, I flicked on the headlights, and both the stop sign and the street ahead disappeared into a shimmering gray fog pierced by two useless yellow tunnels. Ransom grunted, and I punched the lights to low beam. At least other people would be able to see us coming.
'Let's hire a leper to walk in front of us, ringing a bell,' Ransom said.
On a normal day, the drive to South Seventh Street took about twenty minutes; John and I got there in a little more than two and a half hours. We made it without accident, though we had two close calls and one miraculous intervention, when a boy on a bicycle suddenly loomed up directly in front of me, no more than two or three feet away. I veered around him and kept driving, my mouth dry and my bowels full of water.
We got out of the car a block away from the house. The fog obscured even the buildings across the sidewalk. 'It's this way,' I said, and led him across the street and down toward Bob Bandolier's old house.
I heard low voices. Hannah and Frank Belknap were sitting on their porch, looking out at nothing. From the sidewalk, I could just make out the porch of the Bandolier place. The Belknaps' voices came through the fog as clearly as voices on a radio that had been dialed low. They were talking about going to northern Wisconsin later in the summer, and Hannah was complaining about having to spend all day in a boat.
'You always catch more fish than I do, you know you do,' Frank said.
'That doesn't mean it's all I want to do,' said Hannah's disembodied voice.
John and I began walking slowly and softly across the lawn, making as little noise as possible.
The side of the house cut off Frank's reply. John and I walked over wet brown grass, keeping close to the building. At the corner we turned into the backyard. At the far end, barely visible in the fog, a low wooden fence with a gate stood along a narrow alley. We came up to the back door, set on a concrete slab a little larger than a welcome mat.
John bent down to look at the lock, whispered, 'No problem,' and hauled the big ball of keys out of his pants pocket. He riffled through them, singled out one, and tried it in the lock. It went a little way in and stopped. He pulled it out, flicked through the keys again, and tried another one that looked identical to the first. That didn't work, either. He turned to me, shrugged and smiled, and singled out another. This one slid into the lock as if it had been made for it. The lock mechanism clicked, and the door opened. John made an after you, Alfonse gesture, and I slid inside behind his back while he turned to close the door behind us.
I knew where everything was. It was the kitchen of the house where I had grown up, a little dusty and battered, but entirely familiar. A rectangular table with a scarred top stood a few feet from the door. In the dim light, I could make out the names BETHY JANEY BILLY scratched into the wood, along with a lot of random squiggles. Ransom took a couple of steps forward on the cracked yellow linoleum. 'What are you waiting for?' he said.
'Decompression,' I said. A section of wallpaper with images of shepherds and shepherdesses holding crooks drooped away from the wall. Someone, probably Bethy, Janey, and Billy, had scribbled over the images, and ancient yellow grease spots spattered the wall behind the little electric stove. An enormous cock and balls, imperfectly covered with a palimpsest of scrawled lines, sprouted from one of the shepherds near the loose seam of wallpaper. The Dumkys had left plenty of signs of their brief residence.
John said, 'You should be used to a life of crime by now,' and walked through the kitchen into the hallway. 'What are there, three or four rooms?'
'Three, not counting the kitchen,' I said. I came into thedark little hallway and put my hand on a doorknob. 'The boy's bedroom would have been here,' I said, and opened the door.
The narrow rectangle of Fee's old bedroom matched mine exactly. There was a narrow bed with a dark green army surplus blanket and a single wooden chair. A small chest of drawers, stained so dark it was almost black, stood against the wall. At the far end, a narrow window exposed a moving layer of fog. I stepped inside, and my heart shrank. John knelt to look under the bed. 'Cooties.' A frieze of stick figures, round suns with rays, and cartoon houses all interconnected by a road map of scribbled lines, covered the walls to the level of my waist. The light blue paint above the graffiti had turned dingy and mottled.
'This Fee kid got away with a lot of crap,' John said.
'The tenants did this,' I said. I went to the bed and pulled down the blanket. There were no sheets, just an ancient buttoned mattress covered in dirty stripes.
John gave me a curious look and began opening the drawers. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Where would he stash the boxes?'
I shook my head and escaped the bedroom. The three windows at the front of the living room were identical to those in my old house, and the whole long rectangular room brought me back to childhood as surely as the bedroom. An air of leftover misery and rage seemed to intensify the musty air. I knew this room—I had
I had placed two tables in front of the windows—the place where our davenport had stood—and there they were, more ornate than I had imagined, but the same height, and of the same dark wood. A telephone sat on the table to the left, beside a worn overstuffed chair—Bob Bandolier's throne. The long couch I had described stood against the far wall, green, not yellow, but with the same curved arms I had described.
