by Stuart Woods
He sat down on the back of the sofa, facing the lake, and fumbled for the shells. Don’t hesitate, don’t think; one move after the other; no pauses. He got two shells into their chambers. Would it take two? Don’t think about it, keep moving right along. He turned the gun around, rested the stock on the floor, and put the barrels into his mouth. Steely, oily taste. He couldn’t reach the triggers and still keep the barrels where they would do the most good. He kicked off a shoe, ripped off a sock, and felt for the triggers with his big toe, trying twice and failing. His legs were too weak; his foot trembled uncontrollably whenever he lifted it from the floor.
He went to the desk and got a pencil, good old number two, yellow job, schoolboy’s friend. Don’t think about school, childhood; he wedged the pencil between his toes, put the barrels back into his mouth, got the toe-held pencil through the trigger guard, and pushed. The pencil slipped sideways, couldn’t be held by the toes. There was a flash of lightning, illuminating everything, making the barrels gleam, huge sticks of licorice protruding from his mouth. Finally, he got the pencil back into the trigger guard, froze it there for a moment, lifted his other foot to the pencil and pushed it against the triggers, hard, with both feet.
Howell thought he wouldn’t hear anything, but it was the loudest noise he had ever heard. He let go of the shotgun, fell over the back of the sofa, and sprawled on the floor. The noise, incredibly, still in his ears. The windows and french doors rattled violently.
Thunder, unbelievable thunder, and he was still alive. Why hadn’t the shotgun gone off?
He struggled to his feet and started around the sofa to find the shotgun; then he stopped. It had gone very quiet. It was pitch dark, but he knew absolutely. There was someone else in the room.
He stood perfectly still, held his breath, and listened. He could hear breathing, and it wasn’t his. He let out the breath as slowly as possible. He opened his mouth and breathed in again. “I know there’s somebody…”
His words turned into an involuntary shout as a blinding-white flash of lightning lit the room for a tiny moment, fixing everything in it in his mind’s eye before winking silently out, leaving him cringing, blinded. He saw it all against the insides of his tightly closed eyelids, the room, the rug, the furniture, and-standing with back not quite turned to him-a child of eleven or twelve, a farm child, in overalls and a blue work shirt, pigtails, a girl, standing at the window, nearly in front of him, eight or ten feet away, ignoring him, gazing out over the lake.
Howell opened his eyes to blind blackness, then jammed them shut again as a roaring explosion of thunder that made the earlier one seem mild assaulted the cabin, violently rattling the windows and the french doors, making him think the glass would go. As he opened his eyes again, another, steadier roar filled the cabin, and, as suddenly as the lightning, the lights came on, causing him to jump and cry out. The child was gone. One of the French doors was open and banging, and water was coming through it. Howell ran to close it, and was soaked by the intensity of the downpour of rain. He put his hands to the glass and looked out over the lake, or where the lake should have been. All he could see was a solid wall of rain, coming down vertically, no wind, the heaviest rain he could remember.
No child should be out in that, he thought, and he started to open the door and look for her, but the density of the rain frightened him, and he hesitated. He backed away from the doors and stood in the middle of the room, wondering whether any roof could take it. For two or three long minutes the rain came down, the sound of it riveting him to the spot. Then it seemed to slacken, and half a minute later, it was no more than an ordinary thundershower.
Howell opened the door and stepped onto the deck, unmindful now of a rain that seemed gentle compared to what had just passed. Brief flashes of lightning illuminated the deck, the lake, and the woods around it. He could not see the girl, and he hoped she was all right. He felt ashamed that he had not gone after her.
He went back into the cabin, took a towel from the still-unpacked linen box and rubbed his face and hair. He cautiously looked into the bedroom and kitchen to be sure he was alone. Every light in the cabin was on, lights he was sure were not burning when he had fallen asleep on the sofa. He picked up the bottle of bourbon and drank directly from it. His heart was still thumping against his chest, and he was breathing so rapidly that he nearly choked on the whiskey. He sat down heavily on the sofa and waited for the warmth of the bourbon. Gradually, his vital signs regained some sort of normality, but he still felt stunned, unable to cope with the image of the child, unwilling to wonder whether he had truly seen her there.
Then he remembered what he had been about before the thunder had interrupted him. He got up and walked around the sofa. The shotgun was gone; so was the box of shells. Had the child taken them? Had she been watching the whole thing, wanting to stop him? He was embarrassed to think that someone had seen him in those circumstances. But why hadn’t the shotgun fired? He remembered, he was certain, the triggers giving way under the weight of his feet on the pencil. The pencil lay at his feet, broken in two. But he was sure the triggers had moved.
Somehow, he didn’t feel cheated; he didn’t want the shotgun back. Something had saved him from that one, mad moment, and he was glad. He walked back around the sofa, got a blanket and a pillow from the linen box, and went about the cabin, turning off lights. He went into the bedroom, stripped off his wet clothes, and threw himself onto the bed, exhausted. In his last moment of wakefulness, he reflected that, a few minutes before, he had hit bottom, and he had bounced.
4
Howell’s response to the hammering was panic; he didn’t know where he was, and when he remembered, he wasn’t sure what had happened during the night. The events seemed curiously remote, and he would have thought he had been dreaming, if he had not remembered everything so clearly. Finally, his muddled brain focused on the front door as the source of the noise, and, cursing, he struggled into a bathrobe and got going, shivering in the damp chill of the uninsulated cabin. It was still raining. He yanked open the door.
A young man stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, rain dripping from his slicker and from his hair. It seemed immediately obvious to Howell that he was probably retarded. His eyes were not coordinated, and he seemed to be looking out across the lake as he spoke to Howell.
“You want some wood?”
The fellow was oddly handsome, Howell thought. His features were regular, chiseled, almost patrician; he had excellent teeth. Only the eyes and a slackness of the jaw made him seem other than normal.
“You want some wood?” he asked again, smiling a little this time, revealing the beautiful teeth. “Mama said you needed some wood.”
Howell looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a battered pickup truck with tarpaulin covering its bed. He finally got the picture; the fellow was selling firewood. Benny Pope had said he couldn’t come until Sunday, and it was only Tuesday. “Yeah, sure,” Howell managed to say, finally. “Just put it right there.” He pointed to the shed next to the stairs.
“Yessir,” the fellow said. He ran to the truck, pulled back the tarp, revealing a random pile of split logs, and began bringing four or five at a time to the shed. It occurred to Howell that he hadn’t asked a price, and he wondered if he would get bitten, but what the hell, he’d burned all the wood he had the night before. When the truck was empty and the shed full, the man tossed a burlap bag of kindling into the shed, waved, and started for the truck again.
“How much do I owe you?” Howell shouted at him.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he yelled back. He got into the truck on the passenger side, and Howell realized that someone else was driving.
Howell was too surprised to shout his thanks until the truck had turned around and was headed up the hill toward the crossroads. A woman was driving, but the truck window was too misted over to get a good look at her. He dashed down to the shed in the rain, grabbed the gunny sack of kindling, and a couple of logs and, stepping ging
erly in his bare feet, ran back up the stairs. He had a fire going and was half way through his first cup of coffee before he remembered what the fellow had said. “Mama said you needed some wood.” Who the hell were the young man, the woman driving him, and, above all, Mama? And how did she know he needed wood? Some friend of Denham White’s, he supposed, who had seen the empty woodshed and was being neighborly. That was all right with him, Howell thought, basking in the glow of the fire. He’d have to call Denham and ask him who the people were so he could thank them. Then, as he warmed his hands, a thought struck him. A few minutes before, when he’d been waked by the fellow at the door, he’d felt terminally hung over; certainly he’d had enough to drink the night before. Now, oddly, he felt perfectly well – no headache, no fuzziness.
The phone rang. As he picked it up, he hoped it wasn’t Elizabeth. It was Denham White. “How you doing, sport?”
“Okay, I guess. The place is nice, Denham. You made it sound like the pits.”
“It’ll do, I guess. You’ll have to lay in some firewood. It can get chilly at night up there.”
“Funny you should mention that.” He told his brother-in-law about the arrival of the wood. “Who are your friends?”
“Beats me. Nobody ever gave me anything up there. I never had much truck with the locals. Weird bunch. They know how to make a buck out of the summer folks, believe me.”
Howell knew how aloof Denham could be with people he considered his social inferiors. He was perfectly capable of not knowing who his neighbors were.
“You meet old man Sutherland, yet?” Denham asked.
“Yeah, right off the bat. Something of a shit, I’d say. He seemed to take an instant dislike to me.”
Denham laughed. “Keen judge of character, Mr. Sutherland. Now, listen, John, I’ve got to go on living with the guy, so don’t piss him off if you can help it, okay? Just stay out of his way.”
“I’m out of everybody’s way up here. You seen Elizabeth?”
“We had dinner last night. She’s okay; in the middle of getting out the Christmas catalogue; that’ll keep her busy for a few weeks.”
“Listen, Denham, something strange happened here last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I… uh, woke up in the middle of a thunderstorm, and there was a girl in the living room.”
“Some people have all the luck.”
“No, listen. It was a young girl, a kid, really. Maybe eleven or twelve.” Howell told Denham everything he could remember. He didn’t mention the shotgun.
Denham didn’t say anything for a moment. “John,” he managed, finally, “how much did you have to drink last night?”
“Well,” Howell replied sheepishly, “I had some wine with dinner and a couple of bourbons, I guess.”
“I guess you had a lot more than a couple, the way you’re talking. Look, why don’t you try to lay off the sauce completely while you’re up there? I expect the work would go a lot faster without bad dreams and hangovers.”
“Yeah, all right, Denham. I don’t need any lectures.” Howell couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Take care, sport, and work hard. Lurton Pitts is used to getting good value for his money.”
They hung up. Howell wondered again who Mama was. Then he had it. It must have been the sheriff, Bo Scully, who sent the wood. He was the only person besides Benny Pope who knew he needed it. Not a bad fellow, Bo Scully. He’d have to buy him a bottle, or something. Maybe Scully would have some idea who the girl was, too.
It rained for four days. Howell ranged about the cabin like a caged cat. He got up late, ate canned and frozen food, read everything he had brought with him, drank too much, got to bed late, and dreamed a dream, always the same dream. Then, when morning came, it was gone. He could not recapture it, but he didn’t think the girl was in it.
He unpacked Pitts’s vaunted word processor and played with it. Howell had never been much for following directions, but after a day or two of snarling at the thing, he had it up and running. After poring through the manual and going through the drills of commands over and over, he began to get the feeling the machine was training him. By the fourth day, all was in readiness. The machine sat, waiting, just as his typewriter had before it. A box of continuous-form paper was fed into the printer; a stack of floppy diskettes waited to record his output; the twelve boxes of recording tape waited next to the tape recorder. Howell threaded the first tape into the machine and pressed a button. The voice of Lurton Pitts came at him just the way Pitts himself had from behind his desk. “Chapter One,” Pitts boomed out. “How I Found God.”
Howell stopped the machine and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. It was the first time in his working life that he had not been able to convince himself that what he was doing was worthwhile, the first time he had tried to write something just for the money. He didn’t like it. He didn’t know if he could do it. He felt the weight of the old depression, the one that came with feeling useless, burnt out. It lay upon him like some heavy, stinking garment whenever he was unexpectedly faced with the prospect that he might really be used up, worthless to anyone.
It held his shoulders slumped, his hands pinned to the arms of his chair; it made him immobile for long minutes, caused nausea to eat at him and sap his energy.
He sat that way for a few moments, and then he felt a sudden warmth. He looked up to see the desk dappled with sunlight. The rain had stopped, and he could see patches of blue between the scudding clouds. His depression lightened a bit; he pushed back from the desk and walked over to the piano. He pushed the pedals, but got no response; he played a few blues chords, wincing at the sour sound. He jumped about a foot as a loud knock came on the door.
Howell leapt to his feet. There had been no visitor to the cabin except the man who had brought the wood, not even any mail. He would be happy to see absolutely anybody. He walked across the room to the door and opened it. A man and a dog stood on the porch, both wet. The man took off his hat to reveal a shock of perfectly white hair; his skin was a bright pink. Howell knew that behind his dark glasses there would be pink eyes; he was an albino. “Good morning to you,” the man said. There was something strangely, strikingly familiar about him, but Howell didn’t know any albinos. And there was something peculiar about the dog. He sat patiently next to his master, panting, his eyes closed. “I’ve come about the piano,” the man said, looking out across the lake. He didn’t seem to want to look at Howell.
“The piano?”
“Don’t you need a piano tuned?” the man asked, still not looking at Howell.
Howell noticed a leather case at the man’s feet. “You’re a piano tuner?”
“That’s right.” The man stood, waiting.
Howell stood, gaping at the man. He had been thinking about asking around for a piano tuner in the town, but he hadn’t done anything about it. Or had he? Had he been that drunk in the afternoons? “Oh,” he said, recovering, “come on in.”
The man picked up his case and stepped into the room, stubbing his toe lightly on the sill. The dog, got up, walked straight past him a few feet, bumped head-on into the sofa, retreated, turned right, knocked over a small pedestal table, reached the hearth, sniffing, flopped down in front of the fire, fell over onto his side, then turned on his back, all four feet in the air, and emitted a long sigh. He seemed to be instantly asleep. Howell stared at him. The dog was blind.
“Didn’t do any damage, did he?” the man asked.
“No,” Howell replied, righting the table.
“Riley will remember where things are. Where’s the piano?”
“Right over there,” Howell replied, pointing. The man didn’t move. Suddenly, Howell realized that he, too, was blind. “Oh, sorry, straight ahead.” He took the man’s elbow, guided him across the room, and placed his hand on the piano.
The albino shucked off his raincoat, put his hat on the piano, sat down, and ran loudly up a C scale with both hands. “Whew! I d
idn’t come a moment too soon, did I?”
Howell laughed. “No, I guess you didn’t. The player mechanism isn’t working, either. Can you do anything about that?”
The man slid back the doors that covered the player roll and felt around with his hands. “Look behind the piano,” he said.
Howell looked between the piano and the wall and saw an electrical cord. He squeezed his hand behind the instrument and plugged it in. Instantly, the ghost of George Gershwin began to play a wildly-out-of-tune “Strike Up the Band”. The albino switched the piano off. “Fixed that in a hurry, didn’t we? That’ll be two hundred dollars.” He laughed.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Howell said.
“Right.”
Howell walked out onto the deck of the cabin, the first time the weather had permitted. The woods around him were heavy with moisture from the days of rain. The lake flashed moments of blue at him as the new sun struck its surface in places. The light was warm on his face. The sounds of sour piano notes turning sweet drifted out from the living room as the albino tightened strings. Occasionally, a whole chord sang out. Howell felt his spirits lifting with the changing weather. It was as if he were being tuned, like the piano. He took a folding canvas deck chair from under the deep eaves and flopped down in it. He felt good for the first time in weeks, maybe months.
As he tuned the piano, the albino began to play little fragments, a few chords, of a tune Howell couldn’t quite pin down and was too drowsy to care much about. It was mixed in with runs and other chords and octaves. Three quarters of an hour later, Howell was stirred from a doze by the sound of tools striking other tools and the clasps of the toolcase being closed. Then, unexpectedly, the albino played a few chords and began to sing, in a high, clear tenor voice: