by Damon Knight
There were many words he did not know in these books, but he was satisfied to guess at their meaning. When he did look up a word, as often as not he could not find it. The "Handbook for Boys," for instance, advised him to talk frankly to his doctor about masturbation. "If it has happened, don't let it scare you into being blue and ill. If it's a habit, break it for your own peace of mind." But "masturbation" was not in the dictionary. And in "The Count of Monte Cristo," he was puzzled' by the scene when mysterious veiled women seemed to come into the room where the two men were eating hasheesh. He looked up "hasheesh," and found that it was something that made you drunk; but that did not explain the women.
He read the "Handbook for Boys" with close attention, especially the parts about knots and woodcraft. With his yardstick as a guide, he made a six-foot rule marked off in quarters of an inch, and by using this he was able to fill in the blanks in the section on "Personal Measurements":
My height is 5 feet 2 inches Height of my eyes above ground 4 feet 8-1/2 inches My reach up to tip of outstretched fingers 6 feet 6-3/4 inches My reach across, from outstretched fingertips 5 feet 2-1/4 inches Span of my hand, from thumb to little finger 0 feet 8-1/4 inches Length of my foot 0 feet 11 inches Length of my step 1 feet 6 inches
One afternoon, lying on his bed after lunch with the door-flap open, he fell into a doze and dreamed, or half-dreamed, that he was floating invisible over the treetops, down the hill to his own street, moving easily and weightlessly to the kitchen window and then through it like a sound too faint to hear. His mother was sitting at the table with one hand on an open cookbook and the other holding a red-and-white checked napkin against her chin. He whispered, "Mom, I'm all right." She heard him without knowing it. "It's so hard to hear," she said.
"I can't come back now, but don't worry, I'm okay." She wiped her eyes with the napkin, gave a deep sigh, and put the napkin down. She began to read the cookbook.
He went out as he had come in, and found himself drawn unwillingly up the slope to the unfinished house Where Paul had died. He expected to see Paul's body still on the ground, but even the bloody two-by-four was gone. Gene's father and his father's helper were sitting on the sill of the doorway with their hands hanging over their thighs. The fine sawdust that clung to the hairs on their hands was pale orange in the sunlight.
"Dad, I'm sorry," Gene said.
"Takes the heart out of a man," said his father. His mouth twitched. He rubbed his face for a moment, then let his hand fall again.
"Sure is tough on you and the missus," said the other man. "Maybe he's safe somewheres."
"I'm safe," Gene said. "It's all right, Dad, I'm okay."
His father took a deep breath and stood up. "Well -- this isn't getting the job done." He and the other man turned and walked into the house.
Early one morning in October Gene heard gunshots in the woods, and when they continued through the day he realized that the hunting season had begun. He was afraid of being surprised by a hunter, and he stayed in his house in the daytime except for visits to the latrine.
For the next two weeks, in spite of the rain, he continued to hear occasional gunshots; then they stopped, and since it was now the first week of November, he concluded that the season was over. When he ventured out, he found the woods transformed, all their color gone. Tree trunks and branches were black with moisture, every leaf dripping; the ground squelched underfoot. Down the middle of the valley, the little stream had expanded into a sluggish, muddy river, widening in places into a pool black with fallen leaves and debris.
He kept up his calendar, marking off each day in pencil before he went to bed. On weekends he stayed in his house or close to the tree. One Thursday in November, he was returning from a walk when he heard voices down the valley. He climbed the slope hastily and worked his way diagonally up to his house. When he looked at the calendar, he realized that it must be Thanksgiving; he had forgotten about that.
He celebrated with a special meal of all his favorite things: Spam, beef stew, kernel corn, and canned peaches for dessert.
On Christmas Day he cut a little spruce sapling, made a wooden base for it, and decorated it with painted fir cones and acorns. For tinsel he used the foil wrappings from chewing gum, cut into narrow strips.
While the wind howled outside and the snow pattered against his walls, he sang "Silent Night," "O Little Town of Bethlehem," "Old Black Joe," "Git Along, Little Dogie," and a tune whose name he did not know, the, one his father had taught him that summer when they went camping in the desert:
I love the flowers, I love the daffodils. I love the mountains, I love the rolling hills. When all the lights are low, I love the picture show, Boomelay, boomelay, boomelay, boom..
Chapter Four
The disappearance of Gene Anderson was a seven days' wonder in Dog City. In six months even the children had forgotten him. Grownups sometimes said to each other, "Wonder what ever happened to that kid?" The reply was usually, "Guess he'll turn up." After a year it became: "Must be dead by now."
The only ones who did not forget were the Andersons and the Cooleys. Ellen Cooley, whose health never had been strong, grew increasingly despondent after the death of her son. She was not able to care for the house; her sister, Mrs. Williams, had a husband and children of her own to worry about. Cooley hired a woman, Agnes Yount, the widow of a railway telegrapher, to come in by the day, take care of the children and prepare meals. A year after the accident, Ellen seemed to he better, but in January she had a minor automobile accident near the Safeway store: her little Ford struck a car driven by Orville Newcome as Newcome was pulling out of the parking lot, damaging his right-front door and crumpling the fender of the Ford. Ellen Cooley got out of the car and walked away, ignoring Newcome's shouts. She was found hours later walking hatless down by the railroad tracks; she did not seem to know where she was or what had happened. Dr. Phillips treated her for a few days, and when there was no improvement, he sent her to the State Hospital in Salem for observation. When it became obvious that she was not coming home, her sister took the two children in.
Cooley let Mrs. Yount go and stayed on in the house by himself, cooking an occasional meal and washing the dishes every four or five days.
On a Monday in March, he walked into the "Dog River Gazette" office after lunchtime. The two printers looked up incuriously; one of them was sitting at the linotytype keyboard, the other was feeding the job press in the back. There was a smell of ink and hot metal. Cooley knocked on the door of the glass-enclosed office where Desmond Pike sat with his bookkeeper, Miss Knippel. Pike looked up, beckoned him in.
"Yes, Chief? What can we do for you?"
Cooley sat down in the oak chair and put his hat on his knee. "Like to see your subscription list, Mr. Pike."
"The list? What for, may I ask?" Pike was a tall white-haired man with an abrupt manner; he did not like Cooley.
"Police business. I have an idea somebody we're looking for might of took out a subscription under a phony name."
"You don't intend to make any other use of this information?"
"I don't get you."
Pike looked sour. "Show him the card file, would you please, Miss Knippel."
"It isn't up to date. I'm trying to catch up on the ledgers." She pulled out a long file drawer and brought it to the desk. "We file these by expiration, and under each date they're alphabetical."
Cooley leaned forward, fingered the cards. "How do you tell which ones are new?"
"Hard to say. Most folks subscribe for a year, but some for six months, some for two years. Expiration date is what we go by. That's when the subscription runs out." She pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear with a pencil.
"You say this isn't up to date. You got some subscriptions you haven't filed yet?"
Miss Knippel glanced at Pike; he nodded, and she went to the filing cabinet for a folder. Inside were a few letters, each with its envelope attached by a paper clip. Cooley looked through them, got out his notebook and wr
ote slowly. "California," he said. "You get many from there?"
"Folks move away, like to keep up with the hometown paper."
Cooley put the file down and began to turn over the cards at the back of the box. "Canada," he said. "Wyoming. Utah. What about back issues? Any call for them?"
"Once in a while."
"You keep a record of those?"
"Depends. If it's just for a back issue, there wouldn't be any record. But suppose somebody orders a subscription and asks for some back issues at the same time, then you could tell by the card -- the amount would be different." She came around the desk and looked over his shoulder. "Like here, two fifty, that's just a year's subscription. But if it was two sixty-five, say, that'd mean they got an extra paper."
Cooley went through the cards again and made more notes. "Much obliged," he said finally, and stood up.
"Any time, Chief."
"Might take you up on that," Cooley said.
In the spring of his second year in the woods, Gene explored farther north than he had ever done before. At last he came to open fields, saw houses and a line of trees in the distance. It was a disappointment at first to find that his domain was so small; then he began thinking about those houses on the county road. He knew that the "Dog River Gazette" was published on Fridays and mailed to subscribers, and he wanted a copy so badly that he made up his mind to take a risk.
Early one morning he hid in the brush across the road from a cluster of mailboxes. The mail truck arrived about an hour after noon. When it was gone again, he walked across the road. No one was in sight. He found a copy of the newspaper in the first box he opened, along with some letters and a magazine in a paper wrapper. He copied the newspaper and the magazine as well, put the copies in his jacket and hurried home.
There was nothing in the paper about him, or his parents or Chief Cooley, or in fact about anybody he knew. He was tormented by the thought that there might have been something important to him in the issues he had missed, or indeed that there might be something next week or the week after. He made up his mind that he would go back for another paper next week, but the moment he had decided this he became frightened. He had done it once, but how many times more could he do it without being seen?
That night he dreamed that he had his own mailbox in a tree, where every day letters and packages were delivered. He woke up very happy, and his disappointment was acute when he realized that the dream was not real. It was so vivid that in his mind he could see the very tree, an oak like his own but much smaller, and the mailbox, nailed to a plank between two branches, with his name on it in red letters. That much was wrong, he knew; it would have to be some other name.
He remembered the cluster of mailboxes on the county road; they were on a long plank supported by three uprights, and there was room on the plank for several more boxes. Why should he not put his there?
Late that afternoon, carrying tools in a gunny sack, he went to the county road again. Each mailbox was nailed at the sides to a plank which in turn was nailed to the crosspieces. Gene pried one up with a screwdriver, plank and all, put it in his gunny sack and carried it home. In his house, by lantern light, he pried out all the nails and copied both the mailbox and the plank. In the mailbox he found two stamped letters; he copied them too. He carried the original mailbox back through the woods and nailed it up again before dawn.
At home again, he painted in red enamel on the side of his mailbox the name he had chosen, "J. Hawkins." He enlarged. all the nail holes in the plank so that the nails could be tapped in easily. When the paint was dry, he took the mailbox back to the county road and set it up beside the others. His was on the end, and the name was plainly visible.
It was common knowledge around Dog River that Chief Cooley "had it in for" Don Anderson and his wife. At the annual spaghetti feed at the Grange Hall in April, Cooley sat next to Fred Moss and talked to him in an undertone for half an hour. Later that month, when Anderson went out to sign a contract for some remodeling, Moss informed him that he had changed his mind. The same thing happened with another customer in May.
Mr. Beumeler, the Lutheran minister, preached a sermon on forgiveness on the first Sunday in June, taking as his text Matthew 18:21-35, the story of the unjust servant, ending with the verse: "So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses."
As the congregation filed out after the service, Chief Cooley shook the pastor's hand and smiled. "Nice sermon, Reverend," he said.
Early in July, the Ander~ons put their house up for sale and moved to Chehalis, Washington, where Anderson went to work for a builder named Keegan.
Urged by an instinct he could not explain or suppress, Cooley cruised the back roads on weekends and slow afternoons, visiting hunting lodges and remote farms and filling stations uP and down the river. He talked to the rural mail carriers in Dog River, Mosier, Odell, and Dalles City; not much happened out in the country that they did not know.
In August he got a call from Steve Logan, the Route 1 carrier in Dog River. "Say, Tom, you remember yon asked me to keep an eye out for anything peculiar out on my route?"
"Sure do."
"Well, this may not be what you want, but there's something really funny out on Dyer Road. Somebody moved in out there, put up a box, name of Hawkins. Been getting mail regular for three-four months."
"What's funny about that, Steve?"
"Why, nobody out there knows him. I talked to Clyde McFarland and Bill Funsch and old Miz Gambrell, they all live on that road, and they say they never heard of this Hawkins, and there's no place for him to be. Nobody's moved in out there, or built a new house, or a trailer, or nothing."
Cooley put down his cigar carefully. "Tell me whereabouts that is exactly, would you, Steve?" He took down directions on the back of an envelope, nodding. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I'll check into that, Steve, many thanks."
Cooley parked his car on the farm road, just below the crest of the rise, looking down on the county road and the cluster of mailboxes. He watched through binoculars when the mail truck came by, stopped briefly and drove on again. The day was clear and still. An hour passed. Cooley got out and went behind the car to take a piss. When he got back in and raised the binoculars, he saw a flicker of movement back in the trees on the other side of the county road. He stopped breathing. There it came again; now a figure was crossing the road. It was the kid, all right. He went straight to the mailbox at the end of the row, took something out, turned, and walked back. Cooley watched him until he disappeared into the trees.
He knew better than to try to follow the boy's tracks; he would leave footprints of his own and the kid might see them next time. Instead, early the following afternoon, he entered the woods a hundred yards away, climbed a ridge, and followed it back about a quarter of a mile to a basalt outcrop where the trees were thin. He stayed there, drinking coffee laced with rye whisky out of a thermos, until he saw the kid moving through the underbrush. He marked the direction he had come from; when the boy was out of sight, he moved down the ridge another few hundred yards and waited. In ten minutes the boy was back; Cooley watched him out of sight through the trees and then went home.
The next day he took up his station farther away from the road, and the next day farther still, extending his observation points little by little, until on the fourth day he was rewarded: he saw the boy climb the opposite slope and disappear into a thick stand of fir. He watched the ridge-line, visible through the trees, and did not see him emerge.
The next day he was watching when the boy came down from the hillside. As soon as he was out of sight Cooley scrambled down the slope, jumped over the little stream, and climbed the opposite ridge fifty yards away from the point where he had seen the boy appear. Halfway up the hill, he worked back through the trees in the other direction. There it was: a house built of scrap lumber in an old oak tree. In the shadowless light he could see the footholds nailed to the tree-trunk in a zigzag l
ine: they were made of sawed-off pieces of oak branches, most of them with the bark still on; their color and texture was so close to that of the trunk that from a few feet away they would have been unnoticeable.
Cooley drove out to his cousin Jerry's place a few miles outside Odell. Jerry was three years younger than Cooley, a lank; hollow-checked man. They talked on the front porch; it was late in the evening, and Jerry's wife was yelling at the kids in the kitchen.
"Here's the way it looks to me," Cooley said. "When he goes out to get his mail, we move in. When he comes back, I'm up in the tree house waiting for him, and you're behind the bushes. That sound all right?"
"Sure, but why not just be there when he comes out and then nail him? Easy as pie."
"Because if anything goes wrong, either he ducks back into the house and we have to go in after him, or else he's out of the tree and off into the damn woods. If you don't want to do it, tell me."