“I followed your signs… and your candy wrappers.”
“Well I be go to hell. Come on in the house. We ought to have a jaw, as my dad was fond of saying. Would your boy drink a Coke?”
“Sure. Wouldn’t you, L—”
He looked around, but Leo was no longer beside him. He was all the way back on the sidewalk and looking down at some cracks in the pavement as if they were of great interest to him.
“Hey, Leo! Want a Coke?”
Leo muttered something Larry couldn’t hear.
“Talk up!” he said, irritated. “What did God give you a voice for? I asked you if you wanted a Coke.”
Barely audible, Leo said: “I think I’ll go see if Nadine-mom’s back.”
“What the hell? We just got here!”
“I want to go back!” Leo said, looking up from the cement. The sun flashed too strongly back from his eyes and Larry thought,
“Just a sec,” he said to Harold.
“Sure,” Harold said, grinning. “Sometimes kids’re shy. I was.”
Larry walked over to Leo and hunkered down, so they would be at eye-level. “What’s the matter, kiddo?”
“I just want to go back,” Leo said, not meeting his gaze. “I want Nadine-mom.”
“Well, you…” He paused helplessly.
“Want to go back.” He looked up briefly at Larry. His eyes flickered over Larry’s shoulder toward where Harold stood in the middle of his lawn. Then down at the cement again. “Please.”
“You don’t like Harold?”
“I don’t know… he’s all right… I just want to go back.”
Larry sighed. “Can you find your way?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. But I sure wish you’d come in and have a Coke with us. I’ve been waiting to meet Harold a long time. You know that, don’t you?”
“Ye-es…”
“And we could walk back together.”
“I’m not going in that house,” Leo hissed, and for a moment he was Joe again, the eyes going blank and savage.
“Okay,” Larry said hastily. He stood up. “Go straight home. I’ll check to see if you did. And stay out of the street.”
“I will.” And suddenly Leo blurted in that small, hissing whisper: “Why don’t you come back with me? Right now? We’ll go together. Please, Larry? Okay?”
“Jeez, Leo, what—”
“Never mind,” Leo said. And before Larry could say anything more, Leo was hurrying away. Larry stood watching him until he was out of sight. Then he turned back to Harold with a troubled frown.
“Say, that’s all right,” Harold said. “Kids are funny.”
“Well, that one sure is, but I guess he’s got a right. He’s been through a lot.”
“I’ll bet he has,” Harold replied, and just for an instant Larry felt distrust, felt that Harold’s quick sympathy for a boy he had never met was as ersatz as powdered eggs.
“Well, come in,” Harold said. “You know, you’re just about my first company. Frannie and Stu have been out a few times, but they hardly count.” His grin became a smile, a slightly sad smile, and Larry felt sudden pity for this boy—because a boy was all he was, really. He was lonely and here stood Larry, same old Larry, never a good word for anyone, judging him on vapors. It wasn’t fair. It was time for him to stop being so goddam mistrustful.
“Glad to,” he answered.
The living room was small but comfortable. “I’m going to put in some new furniture when I get around to it,” Harold said. “Modern. Chrome and leather. As the commercial says, ‘Fuck the budget. I’ve got MasterCard.’”
Larry laughed heartily.
“There are some good glasses in the basement, I’ll just get them. I think I’ll pass on the candy bars, if that’s all right with you—I’m off the sweets, trying to lose weight, but we’ve got to try the wine, this is a special occasion. You came all the way across the country from Maine behind us, huh, and following my—our—signs. That’s really something. You’ll have to tell me all about it. Meanwhile, try that green chair. It’s the best of a bad lot.”
Larry had one final doubtful thought during this outpouring:
Harold left, and Larry sat down in the green chair. He heard a door open and then Harold’s heavy tread descending a flight of stairs. He looked around. Nope, not one of the world’s great living rooms, but with a shag rug and some nice modern furniture, it might be fine. The best feature was the stone fireplace and chimney. Lovely work, carefully done by hand. But there was one loose stone on the hearth. It looked to Larry as if it had come out and had been put back a little carelessly. Leaving it like that would be like leaving one piece out of the jigsaw puzzle or a picture hanging crooked on the wall.
He got up and picked the stone out of the hearth. Harold was still rummaging around downstairs. Larry was about to put it back in when he saw there was a book down in the hole, its front now lightly powdered with rockdust, not enough to obscure the single word stamped there in gold leaf: LEDGER.
Feeling slightly ashamed, as if he had been prying intentionally, he put the rock back in place just as Harold’s footfalls began to ascend the stairs again. This time the fit was perfect, and when Harold came back into the living room with a balloon glass in each hand, Larry was seated in the green chair again.
“I took a minute to rinse them out in the downstairs sink,” Harold said. “They were a bit dusty.”
“They look fine,” Larry said. “Look, I can’t swear that Bordeaux hasn’t gone over. We might be helping ourselves to vinegar.”
“Nothing ventured,” Harold said, grinning, “nothing gained.”
That grin made him feel uncomfortable, and Larry suddenly found himself thinking about the ledger—was it Harold’s, or had it belonged to the house’s previous owner? And if it was Harold’s, what in the world might be written in there?
They cracked the bottle of Bordeaux and found, to their mutual pleasure, that it was just fine. Half an hour later they were both pleasantly squiffed, Harold a little more so than Larry. Even so, Harold’s grin remained; broadened, in fact.
His tongue loosened a bit by wine, Larry said: “Those posters. The big meeting on the eighteenth. How come you didn’t get on that committee, Harold? I would have thought a guy like you would have been a natural.”
Harold’s smile became large, beatific. “Well, I’m awfully young. I suppose they thought I didn’t have experience enough.”
“I think it’s a goddam shame.” But did he? The grin. The dark, barely glimpsed expression of suspicion. Did he? He didn’t know.
“Well, who knows what lies in the future?” Harold said, grinning broadly. “Every dog has its day.”
Larry left around five o’clock. His parting from Harold was friendly; Harold shook his hand, grinned, told him to come back often. But Larry had somehow gotten the feeling that Harold could give a shit if he never came back.
He walked slowly down the cement path to the sidewalk and turned to wave, but Harold had already gone back inside. The door was shut. It had been very cool in the house because the venetian blinds were drawn, and inside that had seemed all right, but standing outside it occurred to him suddenly that it was the only house he’d been inside in Boulder where the blinds and curtains were drawn. But of course, he thought, there were still plenty of houses in Boulder where the shades were drawn. They were the houses of the dead. When they got sick, they had drawn their curtains against the world. They had drawn them and died in privacy, like any animal in its last extremity prefers to do. The living—maybe in subconscious acknowledgment of that fact of death—threw their shutters and their curtains wide.
He had a slight headache from the wine, and he tried to tell himself that the chill he felt came from that, part of a little hangover, righteous punishment administered for guzzling good wine as if it was cheap muscatel. But that wouldn’t quite get it—no, it wouldn’t. He stared up and down the street and thought:
