The New Yorker Stories

“Right,” Byron said. “Should I scream, too?”

Tom shivered. The image of Byron screaming frightened him, and for a few seconds he let himself believe that he should call the police. But if he called, what would he say—that someone had asked if his house was for sale and later asked Byron if he’d play with his son?

Tom pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He’d drive across town to see the farmer who’d owned the land, he decided, and find out what he knew about Rickman. He didn’t remember exactly how to get to the farmer’s house, and he couldn’t remember his name. The real-estate agent had pointed out the place, at the top of a hill, the summer he showed Tom the property, so he could call him and find out. But first he was going to make sure that Jo got home safely from the grocery store.

The phone rang, and Byron turned to pick it up.

“Hello?” Byron said. Byron frowned. He avoided Tom’s eyes. Then, just when Tom felt sure that it was Rickman, Byron said, “Nothing much.” A long pause. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m thinking about ornithology.”

It was Byron’s mother.

The real-estate agent remembered him. Tom told him about Rickman. “De de de de, De de de de,” the agent sang—the notes of the theme music from The Twilight Zone. The agent laughed. He told him the farmer whose land he had bought was named Albright. He didn’t have the man’s telephone number, but was sure it was in the directory. It was.

Tom got in the car and drove to the farm. A young woman working in a flower garden stood up and held her trowel up like a torch when his car pulled into the drive. Then she looked surprised that he was a stranger. He introduced himself. She said her name. It turned out she was Mr. Albright’s niece, who had come with her family to watch the place while her aunt and uncle were in New Zealand. She didn’t know anything about the sale of the land; no, nobody else had come around asking. Tom described Rickman anyway. No, she said, she hadn’t seen anyone who looked like that. Over on a side lawn, two Irish setters were barking madly at them. A man—he must have been the woman’s husband—was holding them by their collars. The dogs were going wild, and the young woman obviously wanted to end the conversation. Tom didn’t think about leaving her his telephone number until it was too late, when he was driving away.

That night, he went to another auction, and when he came back to the car one of the back tires was flat. He opened the trunk to get the spare, glad that he had gone to the auction alone, glad that the field was lit up and people were walking around. A little girl about his son’s age came by with her parents. She held a one-armed doll over her head and skipped forward. “I don’t feel cheated. Why should you feel cheated? I bought the whole box for two dollars and I got two metal sieves out of it,” the woman said to the man. He had on a baseball cap and a black tank top and cutoffs, and sandals with soles that curved at the heel and toe like a canoe. He stalked ahead of the woman, box under one arm, and grabbed his dancing daughter by the elbow. “Watch my dolly!” she screamed, as he pulled her along. “That doll’s not worth five cents,” the man said. Tom averted his eyes. He was sweating more than he should, going through the easy maneuvers of changing a tire. There was even a breeze.

They floated the tire in a pan of water at the gas station the next morning, looking for the puncture. Nothing was embedded in the tire; whatever had made the hole wasn’t there. As one big bubble after another rose to the surface, Tom felt a clutch in his throat, as if he himself might be drowning.

He could think of no good reason to tell the officer at the police barracks why Ed Rickman would have singled him out. Maybe Rickman had wanted to build a house on that particular site. The policeman made a fist and rested his mouth against it, his lips in the gully between thumb and finger. Until Tom said that, the policeman had seemed concerned—even a little interested. Then his expression changed. Tom hurried to say that of course he didn’t believe that explanation, because something funny was going on. The cop shook his head. Did that mean no, of course not, or no, he did believe it?

Tom described Rickman, mentioning the discolored tooth. The cop wrote this information down on a small white pad. He drew crosshatches on a corner. The cop did not seem quite as certain as Tom that no one could have a grudge against him or anyone in his family. He asked where they lived in New York, where they worked.

When Tom walked out into the sunlight, he felt a little faint. Of course he had understood, even before the cop said it, that there was nothing the police could do at this point. “Frankly,” the cop had said, “it’s not likely that we’re going to be able to keep a good eye out, in that you’re on a dead-end road. Not a route,” the cop said. “Not a major thoroughfare.” It seemed to be some joke the cop was having with himself.

Driving home, Tom realized that he could give anyone who asked a detailed description of the cop. He had studied every mark on the cop’s face—the little scar (chicken pox?) over one eyebrow, the aquiline nose that narrowed at the tip almost to the shape of a tack. He did not intend to alarm Jo or Byron by telling them where he had been.

Byron had gone fishing again. Jo wanted to make love while Byron was out. Tom knew he couldn’t.

A week passed. Almost two weeks. He and Jo and Byron sat in lawn chairs watching the lightning bugs blink. Byron said he had his eye on one in particular, and he went “Beep-beep, beep-beep” as it blinked. They ate raw peas Jo had gathered in a bowl. He and Jo had a glass of wine. The neighbors’ M.G. passed by. This summer, the neighbors sometimes tapped the horn as they passed. A bird swooped low across the lawn—perhaps a female cardinal. It was a surprise seeing a bird in the twilight like that. It dove into the grass, more like a seagull than a cardinal. It rose up, fluttering, with something in its beak. Jo put her glass on the little table, smiled, and clapped softly.

The bird Byron found dead in the morning was a grackle, not a cardinal. It was lying about ten feet from the picture window, but until Tom examined the bird’s body carefully, he did not decide that probably it had just smacked into the glass by accident.

At Rusty’s, at the end of summer, Tom ran into the cop again. They were both carrying white paper bags with straws sticking out of them. Grease was starting to seep through the bags. Rickman had never reappeared, and Tom felt some embarrassment about having gone to see the cop. He tried not to focus on the tip of the cop’s nose.

“Running into a nut like that, I guess it makes getting back to the city look good,” the cop said.

He’s thinking summer people, Tom decided.

“You have a nice year, now,” the cop said. “Tell your wife I sure do envy her her retirement.”

“Her retirement?” Tom said.