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by test

  "There's a phone truck parked down the street," I said.

  "A man came by and said to let it ring while they fixed it." She looked up, her face blank.

  "I taught Carl to ride," I said.

  She stood at the sink with her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, wearing an old loose sundress and sandals. She dried a tomato and set it beside two others on the porcelain drainboard beside the sink. Behind her on the stove the potato halves rose and tumbled like the blunt noses of tiny white whales.

  "Supper's almost done," she said.

  It was dusk outside, the sky a deep dark blue, a thin line of pink above the tree line high in the darkening window. The glaring overhead light in the kitchen cast an odd glow on things. It made her skin look weirdly smooth, like a doll's. I looked at my hands. Skin and veins stretched taut over bone and muscle. The phone rang. It rang again. And then it stopped. We stood waiting for it to start again. She stood at the sink looking down. I went over to her and touched her arm. I felt her stiffen. I put my arm across her shoulders and tried to hug her to me.

  "Don't," she said.

  I pulled her closer, but she stiffened.

  "Don't make a scene," she said. "Carl's outside." I looked but didn't see any-

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  one outside the window. Then I saw someone sitting in the fork of the cherry tree, just a silhouette in the failing light. A bike lay on its side in the grass. I looked back at Lanny, let her go. She stared at the tomatoes on the drainboard. I looked again at the figure in the tree. It was hunkered down on a branch. A shape not sharp but vague in the faint light shading darker in almost clocklike moments. With the kitchen light on, through the screen, you couldn't tell who it was.

  "That's not Carl," I said.

  "What?"

  "Carl's riding," I said. "Must be some other boy, spying. Maybe it's Toot's boy." I leaned toward the window. "Go on, now," I called. It sat still. Too small for Toot's boy.

  She looked at it, closed her eyes and rested her palms against the sink.

  "Ben," she said.

  It didn't move at all.

  "What are we going to do about him?" she said.

  I looked at the figure in the tree.

  "Carl?" I called.

  No answer.

  "I don't think it's Carl," I said.

  Lanny shook her head and turned away. The child in the tree had not moved.

  "Carl?" I called out. "Come on in the house."

  It sat very still.

  "Carl," I said louder.

  It was a still, dark statue.

  Out front in the street a clamor clapped up. The members of the Roadhog Club, quick shadows in the deepening dark, rode in a furious circle, slapping their mouths with their hands, woo woo woo woo woo woo woo woo.

  I cut the light to see out through the bay window glass. They broke and curved out of sight. I didn't see Carl. Out back, a soft scrabbling and clatter. When I looked, the tree was empty.

  We stood not saying anything, looking out at the tree.

  Slowly, sounds came back to our ringing ears. The gurgle of the boiling potatoes in the pot. The quiet hum of the refrigerator motor. The flutter and quiet hiss of the stove eye's blue flame. Lanny reached over and turned it off. The flame snuffed out with a little popping sound. She turned off the oven and I heard the jets chuff once, then the metal crackling and ticking.

  She said, "You don't even know your own son," and walked out through the dining room.

  I heard the front screen door open and shut. I heard her lift her voice out in the street and call.

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  Carl? she called. Cah-arl. Carl.

  I was thinking about the time I stole in on Carl asleep and watched him until he seemed some child I didn't know, some beautiful foundling.

  And the nights I lay awake beside Lanny like someone moving through dark space at high speed.

  Cah-arl, she called. Carl?

  Moving away, growing fainter.

  Her calling like a bird song you know by heart but never knew which bird sang it. And you always wish you'd found out. I stood very still and listened to it, feeling disconnected, already gone.

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  Stoner's Room

  by Hubert Whitlow

  "When I die," said Mrs. Winters, addressing her favorite topic as though nothing were wrong, "I want to go out feet first and with eyes closed." She lay prone on the porch swing and accentuated her last four words by tapping her cardboard fan against the red tiles of the floor. She was a short, stumpy woman whose loose, gray hair fluctuated in a diaphanous halo with each wave of her fan.

  "When I die," said her daughter Sue Ann from her rocker, "I just want it to be quick. I don't care which end goes first." Sue Ann was a tall, pale woman with her hair worn in a bun. She looked like she had just been blown up with a tire pump. They both had bathed and powdered and were dressed for bed.

  "You're too young to worry about dying," replied Mrs. Winters with a yawn. "You don't have my weight and blood pressure."

  "I'm thirty-four years old, Mama, and could go at any time. We never know when we will be called." The two women rocked and swung in the dark and watched the fireflies outside the porch screen signal with their splinters of light.

  "Those fireflies look like they are dancing on air, don't they?" said Sue Ann. "Just dancing away. Free as a bird. Just winking and dancing away. I wish I could dance like that."

  "You're too heavy to dance," said Mrs. Winters. "You'd fall and break something. Besides, you're freer than anybody I know. I provide you room and board. I even worry for you. I do nearly everything you need to have done except drive a car, and Mr. Mooney does that." Mr. Mooney drove the local cab. Mrs. Winters paused for a minute, then said, "Now if Mr. Stoner should come, Sue Ann . . ."

  "In the night? He was supposed to have been here at three o'clock!" Sue Ann leaned forward and clutched the arms of her chair until her knuckles bulged white.

  "If he should come," said Mrs. Winters, "if you see him come up the walk, that is, let me know. I don't want him to see me lying down in my nightgown." The nearby campus clock had tolled ten P.M. and no visitors were likely.

  "How will I know him?" said Sue Ann.

  "Just tell me if somebody comes up the walk!" Mrs. Winters barked. Large

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  japonicas and boxwood shrouded the porch from sidewalk passersby, and Mrs. Winters could not see the walk from her swing.

  ''We don't even know what he looks like," whimpered Sue Ann. "Here we are waiting on a strange man in the middle of the night and we don't even know what he looks like." She scratched a knee impulsively.

  "Now don't start your fidgeting," said Mrs. Winters. "If he doesn't come for the summer term, we'll wait for the fall term and start off with a regular student. We don't have to start off with Mr. Stoner."

  "I think I'll start off and catch the next bus to Jacksonville," said Sue Ann. "Help Ella clean her house for a few days while you get Mr. Stoner settled in."

  "Your sister is perfectly capable of cleaning her own house."

  "Do you have any idea what Mr. Stoner is like? I don't know a thing about him, you know. You never let me in on deciding anything."

  "Mr. Stoner is an art student. Art students are different. They are dedicated and mature. Mr. Stoner will make us a good tenantthe first man in the house since your father's death. He'll not be like Mrs. Clinchfield's rooming house crowd next door."

  "It doesn't look to me like he's going to be the first of anything, but if he pays the rent"

  "Oh, he's already paid for the full summer."

  "Oh, dear God," said Sue Ann faintly. She slumped deep into her rocker "Now he'll come for sure."

  "Don't have another one of your fits," said Mrs. Winters. "It's just your blood sugar letting go. Remember the doctor said it was all a matter of chemistry, so come on. Let's play the game. Make that chemistry go to work."

  Rays from the corner streetlamp slipped through the highest rea
ches of the closeting shrubs and settled in feathers of light on the floor. Mrs. Winters leaned forward and studied the pattern of shadows intently. "I see a bird with a topknot," she said.

  "Don't tell the cat, or that's one dead bird," said Sue Ann.

  "Just play the game. Don't worry about the cat."

  "Okay, I'll bet that bird's a cardinal," said Sue Ann, shifting her weight and trying to make out any pattern at all on the mottled tiles.

  "No," said Mrs. Winters, opposite her daughter. "I see something better than that. I see a plate with a shallow bowl."

  Sue Ann leaned forward until her rocker creaked with strain: "Well, I see a funny looking man's hat with a shallow crown."

  "That's because you are looking at my plate upside down."

  "Your eyes are getting bad, Mama. You are looking at the man upside down. See, the head is right . . . under . . . the . . . hat . . ." Sue Ann looked up and peered into the shrubbery. "Oh, Jesus!" she shrieked. She leaped up and bounded into the living room, leaving her rocker in violent, solitary motion. By the time Mrs.

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  Winters had freed herself from the lurching swing, Sue Ann had slammed and bolted the living room door.

  "Sue Ann!" yelled Mrs. Winters. "You've left me behind." She pounded on the door with her fists. "Open up the door and let me in!"

  "That lady really moves fast when she wants to pray," came a voice from the other side of the shrubs. The voice was soft, wispy.

  "That was no prayer. That was a nervous fit," snapped Mrs Winters. She moved to the deepest shadow on the porch and clutched her nightgown close to her body. "What do you want?"

  "I'm Carlyle Stoner. I've come to rent your room." The figure speaking remained hidden behind the shrubs.

  "If your name is Carlyle Stoner, why weren't you here at three o'clock?" asked Mrs. Winters, peering out from her shadow. She shielded her eyes from a narrow beam of light that broke through from the streetlamp.

  "Because my car broke down and I finally had to leave it in Martinsville."

  "But that's only twenty miles away. Why didn't you phone?"

  "Because it's long distance, and I didn't have any money," came the voice. "Nobody would cash my check because it was on a Jacksonville bank. So I walked. My feet got sore from walking, and I had to take off my shoes." There was a pause. "That's why I'm still behind this bush. My feet swelled up and I can't get my shoes back on. I didn't want to meet you in the dark with my shoes off."

  "Open up the door, Sue Ann," called out Mrs. Winters. "It's just Mr. Stoner."

  "How do you know its just Mr. Stoner?" came Sue Ann's muffled voice from within the house.

  "Because his car broke down and his feet got sore walking from Martinsville and he's hiding in the bushes with his shoes off," Mrs. Winters said loudly, then quietly to Mr. Stoner: "She's not a quick judge of character."

  Mrs. Winters and Mr. Stoner talked quietly in the front yard "so the neighbors wouldn't suspect anything funny."

  "There are a few last things to be settled," Mrs. Winters said with her arms crossed over her chest. But essentially her mind was made up. She liked what she saw, even in the speckles of light: his solid, black attire; his Gothic and chalk-like face; his bowler hat now crumpled in his hands; the overlong coat; the baggy trousers. To Mrs. Winters this all bespoke an honest and frugal humbleness. And he was agreeable to her stipulations: thirty-watt bulbs in the ceilings, sixty watts in the one allowed reading lamp, one ten-inch fan, one small radio. No argument. And Mr. Stoner's old Hudson, with one door blue and one door green, would be parked in front of Mrs. Clinchfield's next door when he retrieved it from Martinsville, leaving Mrs. Winters's front curb accessible to more fashionable models.

  "Property values must be guarded," said Mrs. Winters the next noon while

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  the two women ate lunch. She had called Mr. Mooney at the cab stand and had him bring over two Big Macs and a large order of fries in his cab. She was still happy with Mr. Stoner. His amber eyes and awkward strides accentuated his tapered build. "He'll help us save pennies," Mrs. Winters said. "And goodness knows we can use the extra money his rent is giving us."

  "Maybe Mr. Stoner is a phony," suggested Sue Ann as her Coke fizzled tan around the rim of her tumbler "Maybe we should call somebody and check him out."

  "We don't need to call anybody," said Mrs. Winters. She gulped down the last of her own drink and rattled the ice in her glass. "You just don't know how to judge a man of character," she said with a fierce, porcelain grin. A pellet of ice nestled between her dentures.

  "The trouble with you," replied Sue Ann, "is that you don't know the difference between high character and a ten-dollar bill. I just don't think we can count on Mr. Stoner."

  "We can count on you, can't we Mr. Hooper?" Mrs. Winters muttered to their thin and yellow cat as she dropped food into its bowl. The one-eyed animal had a neighborhood reputation for wildness.

  "Well, Mr. Stoner's been here one night, and I'm tired of making up his bed already," said Sue Ann. "I don't like making up the bed for a strange man. I'm a single woman and it isn't right. He's not one of the family."

  "You'll grow to like him, you wait and see," said Mrs. Winters as she cleaned the cat's box. "You just wait and see."

  "I'm still waiting," said Sue Ann the next morning at breakfast. "And I'll tell you one thing. He's as dumb as a turkey." She blew steam from her coffee. "I asked him this morning how he liked his room, and he said it didn't sparkle like a K-Mart's. That's being as dumb as a turkey, and anybody who ties a chifforobe door shut with a belt is as dumb as a turkey."

  "You just don't understand him," said Mrs. Winters as she dropped bacon fat into the cat's bowl. "Maybe he's just stretching his belt. Probably aims to put on weight. I think we should invite him to supper one night just to get acquainted."

  "I hope the two of you have a fine time, Mama," said Sue Ann loudly. "Mr. Mooney can bring over two Big Macs and he and I'll eat out on the grass." Sue Ann marched from the room like she was headed for battle.

  That Friday at six, Mrs. Winters, Sue Ann, and Mr. Stoner gathered in the living room for a little refreshment before supper. Sue Ann stretched carefully for a cheese and cracker from the plate on the coffee table. The pink pantsuit purchased that morning at Belk's fit too tightly, and she felt constrained. "How's your belt coming along, Mr. Stoner?" she asked.

  "Sue Ann," admonished Mrs. Winters quietly.

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  Mr. Stoner looked confused. His head turned from Mrs. Winters to her daughter, then back again. "My belt?" he asked and he felt along the top of his trousers to make sure that everything was all right. He was dressed in his usual black. His hair was parted evenly down the middle and combed straight to each side. Strands lapped over each ear.

  "Forgive Sue Ann," said Mrs. Winters. "She was taken with that beautiful belt you hang over the doors to your chifforobe." She smiled and offered him a second ginger ale. "Sue Ann's the one who cleans your room so nicely each morning," Mrs. Winters added with a coy smile. ''She's a good housekeeper and a good cook, too. A real, unclaimed treasure."