by Jack Ketchum
The boy was off balance, his other hand fisted, held wide away from his body and though the pain in Ludlow’s arm was sudden and intense he knew nothing was broken nor any muscle sufficiently bruised to hinder him. It had been important to let the boy strike the first blow but now he had to finish quickly.
He came in low as Danny tried to plant his weight equally on both feet again, and hit him just beneath the ribcage. The boy woofed and doubled over. Ludlow slid his bruised arm midway up the length of the bat to raise the boy’s arm further and give himself a second opening and then hit him in the ribs and felt and heard one crack.
The boy screamed and dropped the bat and doubled over to the sidewalk.
Ludlow looked around. Pete had moved away, not toward him, standing with Harold. That was good. He didn’t want to involve them. A woman pushing a baby carriage had stopped and was watching him wide-eyed from half a block away. D. L. Fleury was standing in the door of his drugstore across the street, a customer behind him. Ludlow watched his look of astonishment resolve itself gradually into a wide smile. He guessed that word had got around and D. L. knew all about this.
He kicked the baseball bat away from the boy, heard it ringing in the gutter.
A car passed by.
He leaned down and whispered close into Danny’s ear and saw and smelled mucus and tears.
‘You’ve just been suckered, boy. I’ve got witnesses all over this street who saw that you went at me first, with a weapon. Some of them are old friends of mine. So don’t go trying to make a fuss over this. I just gave you what your father should have given you and wouldn’t. But you damn well had to have it one way or another. It’s not going to bring my dog back but maybe you’ll think twice and maybe you’ll think of me and Red before you let that mean streak out again.’
He nodded to the woman with the baby carriage and then across the street to D. L., who nodded back gravely, and then he went to his truck. He opened the door and turned to Harold and Pete.
‘I think he hurt his ribs a little,’ he said. ‘You’d better give him a hand.’
Driving through the hills up Stirrup Iron Road a small black cat darted out in front of him, chasing a rabbit across the road like a sudden message from the unknown living world and he slammed on the brakes and stopped just inches from the cat’s haunches and then sat trembling in the cab of the truck holding onto the wheel and staring into the tangled mass of scrub where cat and rabbit had disappeared unharmed until his trembling stopped.
He put his truck in gear again and, with far more care, drove on.
Eighteen
Sam Berry’s office smelled of pipe smoke and old books. Outside his second-floor window a wind had come up on the street buffeting and bending the trees, and leaves were blowing but inside the office was silent. He watched Sam tap the dead ashes out of his briar pipe into the metal garbage pail and then turn the bowl over and tap it, hollow-sounding, on the calf of his artificial leg and then turn and tap it into the garbage pail again. Sam smiled and shook his head and began to fill his pipe with tobacco from the hide pouch on his desk.
‘You’re saying this’ll do for you then,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So forget about the lawsuit. It stops here.’
‘That’s right. I don’t see as it would get me anywhere anyway, do you?’
‘Good chance it wouldn’t, no. I told you that right off.’
Sam looked at him and smiled. ‘You been pulling on my good leg so to speak, haven’t you, Av? You never did intend to sue them. You just thought you’d distract me, so I wouldn’t see what was going on.’
‘You’d have tried to talk me out of it.’
‘I would indeed. You know that kid could’ve killed you out there.’
‘My feeling was that people like him don’t usually kill people my size unless they’ve got a gun. Old man or not. The boy’s a hothead. He’s a coward and a bully. I was counting on that.’
‘But this is the end of it now, right?’
‘This is the end of it.’
‘Just so long as it is. You know you were on pretty shaky ground with the law going after him that way.’
‘I know it.’
Berry tamped in the tobacco with the tip of a yellow-stained thumb.
‘You ever eat Chinese, Av?’
‘Not much.’
‘I like it now and then. Moo goo gai pan. Ribs. Egg rolls. I even like the weak tea they serve and the fortune cookie at the end. Only thing is, most times you open up the damn cookie and the fortune’s silly. You know, “Your wishes will be granted.”“You would do well to expand your business now.” That sort of thing. Only once I ever got one that made any sense to me. “Nothing in the world is accomplished without passion,” it said. How about that? In a fortune cookie. I thought it was pretty damn good.’
Ludlow nodded.
‘But I figure passion’s like the wind in the trees out there. Blows hard for a while and feels strong and clean while it’s blowing and maybe it even blows so long and hard that you start living with it. It feels like the wind’s a part of you, like it’s essential, if you know what I mean, something you can hardly imagine life without. But it’s got to pass. So you can get on with things without all the confusion of that wind in your hair.’
He sat back and struck a match and held it to the bowl of pipe.
‘You can’t even light your pipe in a heavy wind,’ he said.
Nineteen
‘Dad? Are you all right? Your voice sounds funny.’
‘I’m tired, hon. Hell, I’m an old man and I’m tired. What can you expect? But don’t you worry about me. I’m fine.’
It was late for her to call. Eleven o’clock. He wondered what had prompted her. She seemed to have no news to speak of.
Just a call, he thought Don’t go attaching any significance to it. It’s nothing.
There was no way she could know what had happened today with the boy.
‘You should get some sleep,’ he said. ‘I should too.’
They said their goodnights.
He went to bed but sleep evaded him. He kept seeing the cat dart out in front of his truck. An event the world had put in motion and of which he was not a part until that very instant when things died or didn’t die according to the nature of their meeting.
According to their collision.
Twenty
The night his store burned down he’d done an unusual thing.
Instead of going home after closing he’d gone to Arnie Grohn’s restaurant and ate Amie’s meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans and then walked two blocks down through the clear warm summer breeze to the Birch Tree Inn.
He sat at the long polished wood bar drinking beer with a dozen strangers or near-strangers, a few of the faces familiar to him but no more than that. He drank three beers over the course of an hour and listened to the laughter of the men and their voices rising over the country songs on the jukebox. It was as though the men were speaking in another language because he could make out none of what they said. He felt a sadness he hadn’t felt since the night he’d told Carrie Donnel about his family and he didn’t know where it came from or what he should do about it The barman was a young man with glasses and sandy hair who spoke with a southern accent which Ludlow could not place exactly. He was polite and friendly and told him that his third beer was on the house. Ludlow thought that even a young man was able to recognize sadness when he was staring pure into the face of it.
He supposed everything was showing now.
When he finished he set the price of the buyback on the bar and thanked the barman. He walked up the street to his truck thinking that in just this single hour the air had started to chill.
When he got to his truck Luke Wallingford was standing in front of it. ‘Jesus, Av,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s out looking for you.’
With three beers in him it did not make sense right away. Wallingford ran his own small hunting lodge and bought trap
s and supplies from him. Why he should be out on the street looking for Ludlow at this hour, or why anybody should, was a mystery.
‘Av,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this. But the store’s burned all to hell. Jesus, Av, I’m sorry.’
It occurred to Ludlow that people kept telling him they were sorry these days.
‘The store? My store?’
‘It’s burned. They’re out there now. Some of us came looking for you and I saw your truck. I mean, all the ammunition you had in there? All that fuel? The store’s a damn disaster. I don’t even know if they’ve got the fire out yet. You want me to drive you over?’
‘I’ll go myself. Thanks, Luke.’
‘I’ll follow you.’
‘All right.’
Driving up the mountain he could see the smoke in the night sky. Then he could smell it through his open window. Cresting the hill, he saw the mars lights and spotlights and warning lights and the fire’s golden yellow glow and then he saw the fire engines and the volunteers at their hoses pouring water in through the broken front window and down onto the roof. The fire was still burning.
He knew most of them. Store-owners and managers, workers, professional men. Ludlow’s own accountant was there. Yet displaced from all contexts familiar to him, here in this place and at this sudden strange activity, they took on the character of men working in a dream. It was a dream of heat and acrid smoke, of darkness and flickering light gleaming in the water on the street, of realms of hell in which he saw once more his wife and son each of them alight with flame.
He felt the same familiar ache at such senseless waste break over him again. To stand and watch what he’d worked for, what Mary had worked for too, destroyed seemed to destroy her yet again. The life he’d known now seemed capable of multiple, even infinite shatterings. What was the loss of the dog but another loss of them, his wife and son? What was the loss of this but the loss of the dog again?
He heard timbers crack and saw a leap of flame and burning cinders pour from the suddenly crumbled roof like a clawing hand set free and reaching far into the pure night air. Water poured through the opening and smoke plumed and billowed.
He turned his back to it and set his hand down on the cold bed of the truck.
Luke Wallingford asked was he all right. He said he was.
‘You’ve got insurance, don’t you?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Thank god for that.’
‘You hear anything?’
‘About what?’
‘About how it got started.’
‘Not yet. I guess they’ll know in time, though.’
‘I guess I already do,’ he said.
Twenty-One
She rolled away from him in the starless night and he reached around her seeking the soft weight of her breast and cupped it in his hand. Her hair smelled of smoke from the blaze. She brought her own hand up to his and held it there.
‘I only see you when something disappears,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘Tell me the truth. You say you can fight for it. But they’re not going to use this story either, are they?’
She sighed. ‘The truth is, no. Probably not.’
‘Nobody died, am I right?’
‘That’s right. Nobody died.’
He felt his heart trip in his chest like a young wolf slamming at the bars of its cage.
‘So. Was this in the nature of a consolation prize?’
‘Jesus, Av. Don’t be small. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘I’m sorry.
‘I know. You were sorry as soon as you said it. Forgiven.’
She squeezed his hand. The breeze blew over them from the window.
‘I’m damned if I know what to do,’ he said. ‘I feel like every time I turn around the world shrinks a little.’
She nodded.
‘You want to know why I’m working up here, Av?’ she said. ‘Up here in the boondocks? For eighteen years my dad was a New York City cop. Rode a prowl car through the upper west side. The safest precinct in Manhattan. Other cops used to kid him about what a cushy assignment he had. But nothing’s cushy if it’s against your nature.
‘After eighteen years and two months my dad had a nervous breakdown. Nothing dramatic. I mean, he didn’t try to eat his pistol or anything like that. My mother just found him sobbing in the living room late one night and she sat with him watching him staring into the dark and sobbing into his hands until morning. And then he wouldn’t go to work again. Said he couldn’t go to work again. He took a job as a night watchman for the Jamaica Savings Bank instead. Scraping away in order to put me through college.
‘But even that seemed to get to him after a year or so. Or maybe it was the city that got to him. Or both, I don’t know. He’d never been out of New York in his life. But my senior year they decided to move up here to Standish because my mother had a sister living here. It was the last time he ever saw a uniform. My father went to work as a clerk in a grocery store and my mother got a job as a waitress in a bar. And the summer I graduated my father had a heart attack and died. He was forty-eight. They’d been up here all of eight months. And then he died.
‘I think my father became a cop because his dad was a cop. I think he drifted into it, not chose it. And it broke him. He was a good man and a kind man but he never knew what he wanted. I think that eventually it killed him.
‘I’m not like that. I was suited for this job from the beginning and I’m good at it. Most of the time I know exactly what I want and where I want to be.’
She turned beneath his arm and pale and still she looked at him.
‘What about you, Av? What do you want? There must be something.’
He thought at first that she was expecting him to say that it was her he wanted. But he looked at her and saw that it was not that, that her question was more serious than that. He thought that she had seen correctly into his aloneness. He had no answer for her, none that he could say. Except one.
‘The truth,’ he said.
Twenty-Two
He dreamt of men and wolves.
He saw them first in moonlight in a clearing in the woods, saw them from a distance, not knowing what they were. Only shapes moving close to the ground, prowling back and forth amid the great oaks.
He approached warily. Heard growling and the snapping of teeth. Closer he saw that they were men, yet not men. Shape-shifters dressed in the bloody pelts of wolves and then the wolves themselves, the one bleeding seamlessly into the other and then back again.
He smelled musk, fur that was damp with rain. Blood. Urine.
They moved in a rough circle, in pairs and alone. On four feet and on two. He pressed tight to a tree and watched as the circle widened, as more seemed to join them out of nowhere. Twenty, thirty of them. More. The moon overhead was bright and full. One passed within three feet of him, this one standing upright and unmindful of its path through the trees, knowing its way exactly, staring up at the moon instead. In its eyes he thought he saw a madness linger and then calm.
How one should follow directly from the other he did not know.
He moved closer, drawn to them, curious. Unafraid, yet still keeping to the trees. And then suddenly they were all around him. A dozen of them standing upright. Wolves now, not men, nothing of the man about them, grey-bellied and hugely muscled with claws sharp as the talons of eagles, jaws wide, ears pointed and pale tongues lolling. He saw that like the other they were staring straight up at the moon.
They glanced at him as with one mind.
And then they turned away.
He looked down at his hands and saw that he was one of them.
He looked up to the moon as they had done. In its flat round surface he saw his own unblinking eye.
He woke. He lay in silent stillness on the bed for a very long time, remembering.
Twenty-Three
In the morning he drove to town to see Tom Bridge-water. It was early and the sheriff’s office
was deserted but for Tom at his coffee machine. He offered Ludlow a cup of coffee and Ludlow declined. They sat down at his desk and he offered him a sugar doughnut and Ludlow declined again. He noticed that Tom didn’t take one for himself either.
‘I dunno,’ Tom said. He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to figure. Maybe it wasn’t them.’
‘No? Who then?’
‘Damned if I know. Listen, Av, they weren’t even in town. We checked. They were out at the house at Cape Elizabeth throwing a big eighteenth birthday party for their kid. The young one, Harold. Couple dozen witnesses and every one of them reliable. Nobody left there all night long.’
‘What about Pete?’
‘He was up there with them for the party, stayed with them overnight’
‘So they hired somebody.’
‘Who did? The boy? Danny? Come on, Av.’
‘The father did.’
‘Why’d he want to do that? Why’d he want to risk that?’
‘I beat his boy.’
‘Yeah, Av. I know.’
He looked at Ludlow disapprovingly. Ludlow didn’t much care.
‘Don’t go doing that again, all right?’
‘What’d you find at the store, Tom?’
‘Gasoline cans. Two of ’em. Somebody torched it, all right. Didn’t even try to cover it up.’
‘And no prints on the cans, right?’
‘Nope.’
‘And nobody saw anything.’
‘Nobody we’ve turned up. We were out on this practically all night.’
‘So who’d want to do that to me? Other than these people? Name somebody.’
‘I don’t know. A man makes enemies. Some crazy customer of yours, didn’t like your service maybe. Some twisted kid who likes to play with fire.’
‘You’re stretching. There’s no such person and you know it.’