WHEN CLAUDE CALLED THAT NIGHT all he’d said was that Edgar had left a note on their kitchen table. Claude didn’t know if the kid had stolen a car or what. Most likely he’d hitchhiked home and was hiding in the woods somewhere. The note said he was coming back the next day, so if Glen was going to ask his question like they’d talked about, he needed to get on the stick.
Then he was faced with it: all those times he’d imagined Edgar sitting in the back of the squad car. During the day. In the country. In town. Now it looked like it was going to be out in the country, and at night.
If he acted on it at all. With the opportunity staring him in the face, Glen wasn’t sure it was such a hot idea. Claude had pretty much read his thoughts.
“Sounds kind of dumb now, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Glen admitted. “Oddball thing to do, at least.”
“Well, no one would blame you if you didn’t,” Claude said. “You’re the only one who has to live with it, either way. It’s just, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t see how it could work once he’s home. If you’ve ever seen Trudy when she’s riled up—”
“—oh, yes.”
“Then you know what would happen. When we talked, it seemed like you could just come over and take him, but now I’m thinking we were unrealistic. Could be, if you want a chance to talk with him, this is it.”
Glen admitted he probably was right about that as well.
“So. What do you think, then?” Claude asked.
Glen was quiet for a long time. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No. Just, ‘I ate while you were gone. I’ll be back tomorrow.’ I’m looking at the note right now.”
“What did you tell Trudy?”
“What do you think I told her?”
“Oh. Well, it can’t hurt to take a little drive around, I guess.”
Then Claude hung up and Glen stood, receiver in hand, listening to the off-hook stutter tone begin. He thought about the Prestone trick that Claude had explained, something he’d never heard of, but of course Prestone was almost pure ether. And Glen knew just where there was a supply of true, medical-grade ether. That made him smile, because he liked the idea of one-upping Claude just a little bit. Somewhere along the line, Glen had acquired a beat-up old whiskey flask, a good-sized one with a pull-off top, and he pocketed that now and headed out the door.
He parked the cruiser in the grass around back of the shop, unlocked the side door, and walked past the shrouded furniture and examination tables. He opened the door to the little closet pharmacy. He didn’t have to look around. In his mind’s eye he’d already located what he wanted, up on the top shelf: three tins, sitting in a row, each topped by a squat mushroom-shaped cap. The labels were printed in cream and brown:
Ether Squibb
For Anesthesia U. S. P.
1/4 lb.
POISON
Below that, in broad green script, the words “Copper protected!” were inscribed. Glen was a little surprised Claude hadn’t commented on those little cans the night he’d perused the pharmacy. They were an oddity, for certain, and Claude didn’t miss much. But then, Claude hadn’t grown up a veterinarian’s son. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was seeing.
Glen pulled a can off the shelf and gathered a few other supplies and took them outside, locking the door behind. The stuff was potent—you didn’t want to mess with it indoors unless you had the ventilation equipment roaring, or you could knock yourself into outer space. He pulled the whiskey flask from his back pocket, twisted off the cap, then punctured the mushroom cap on the ether with the cruiser’s ignition key and began pouring the ether into the flask. It dripped and gulped out, silvery clear as water. He set the tin down and widened the hole, but even then, without a funnel, it took a good long time before he was done.
He wasn’t so dumb as to think the whiskey flask wouldn’t leak vapor, but he knew a little trick from his pop. He’d snagged a surgical rubber glove on the way out, and now he stretched it over the neck of the flask and twisted the cap down, pinching the material tight. Then he peeled away the excess until just a little skirt of rubber remained below the cap.
He waved the flask under his nose. The good thing about ether was you could smell right away if it got loose on you. But his improvised rubber glove seal worked fine. Only the faintest whiff came to him, the residue of a single drip, quickly evaporating off the warm metal. A flowery petroleum odor that tingled in the back of his sinuses. He pitched the ether tin into the woods and carried the flask two-fingered to the squad car and set it on the passenger side of the broad front seat.
GLEN KNEW THOSE BACK ROADS pretty well. If he kept an eye out, he thought, he might come across the kid walking along the road or cutting through a field. He could also cruise the roads near their place looking for suspiciously parked vehicles. If it wasn’t a couple of high school kids necking, it might be Edgar, sleeping in a car he’d stolen.
He tried approaching from the south first, but there was no Edgar walking along, no cars parked in any of the dozen little pull-offs that hunters liked to use. At the hill near the Sawtelles’, Glen made a three-point turn and headed back to the highway, then came around from the north. All he saw was Jasper Dillon’s truck, broken down near the old Mellen cemetery, where it had sat for the better part of two weeks. He stopped and shone his flashlight across the dusty bed of the truck and through the window, in case Edgar was using the truck as shelter for the night, but the only thing the cab contained was a greasy toolbox and two crushed packages of Marlboros. He walked back to the squad car and pulled away. Then he was coming up on the Sawtelles’ yard, close enough to see the light at the top of their orchard. He parked about fifty yards back from where the woods cleared, pocketed the flask, a couple of rags and a flashlight, and set off.
Keeping to the far side of the gravel road, he walked the length of the yard. A dog was running loose, circling the barn in silence. Before it could spot him, he turned and cut down along the fence line north of the house. When he reached the back of their garden he found a little path worn into the woods. In the open, the late moon had given plenty of light, but once in the woods Glen had to flick the slider up on the flashlight and swing the beam to and fro across the tangle of night-black foliage to see where he was going.
Within thirty yards he knew it was pointless. If Edgar were holed up in the woods, Glen would never walk up on him with a flashlight. Maybe if he was sound asleep with a fire blazing. But why would he do that if he planned to come back the next day? Why not just walk in, save himself the trouble? And even supposing he was in those woods, the Sawtelle place was, what, ninety acres, a hundred? Glen could search for a week in broad daylight and never find him.
He turned and retraced his route. When he reached the road again, he stood looking at the house. Either he’s in that barn, Glen thought, or he’s miles from here. And there was no way of getting into the barn without the dogs raising Cain. It wasn’t going to work.
He crunched along the gravel toward the squad car. Something told him he shouldn’t drive past the Sawtelle place, having already taken so much trouble to avoid it. With the headlights off, he pulled another three-point turn and headed toward Mellen. Maybe he would patrol a few more back roads on the way home.
The moon was bright. The underbrush leaned into the road, green and hypnotic as it flowed past the high beams; red-lanterned eyes looked back from the tangle just often enough to break the pattern, keep him alert. Only after his breath came easier did he realize he’d been panting. To stop, he forced himself to sigh.
When he reached the blacktop, the cruiser picked up enough speed to level out the potholes and float along through the night. Tendrils of fog drifted palely across the road, condensing on the windshield like a kind of dream writing that he let accumulate and then erased with a swipe of the wiper blades. All of that put him at ease. After a while he couldn’t help but glance into his rearview mirror.
With great earnestness, almost bashfully, Gl
en let himself ask his question, out loud, one last time.
Edgar
H E TRACKED THE MORNING KENNEL ROUTINE BY SOUND FROM his hiding place, high in the mow. The August sun beat against the barn roof and the atmosphere near the rafters squeezed beads of sweat from his skin. To pass the time, he counted the points of the roofing nails hammered through the new planking and thought how in days past he had instead counted bright pinholes through the roofing boards. Light seeped around the edges of the mow door, filling the space with a dilute, perpetual dawn. By midmorning his mother had worked the two pups, then the six-month-olds and the yearlings, and rotated back to the pups. Edgar could close his eyes and hear her cajoling them in a low, even voice, see her crazywalk the little ones, ask for retrieves of the others, always testing, proofing, asking what it meant and didn’t mean to stay, watch, recall, follow. He drifted into a half-sleep suffused by those sounds, as if he himself had grown to envelop the mow and the barn and the yard. There was the slap of the porch door as Claude went inside. The twinning ring of the telephones both below and in the kitchen. The jays bickering among the ripening apples. A car idling along the road, gravel crunching under its tires as it passed the tree line by the garden.
Near noon there was a restrained clomp of feet on the mow steps, but he didn’t fully wake until the vestibule door had already swung open. He flattened himself into the hollow in the bales, sweat streaming from his face. There was a long silence. Then the door closed and there were descending footsteps. Below, the sliding gates banged shut to lock out the dogs while Claude cleaned the pens. Edgar sat up and drank from the coffee can, resisting his body’s plea to pour the water over his face. After a while he crawled to where the roofing boards converged with the walls in the corner and rose on his knees and released a stream of urine and watched it disappear into the straw.
When he could no longer endure the heat and cramped quarters, he clambered down the staggered cliff of bales through strata of cooling air, his legs trembling for fear of making noise and from being broiled so long. As soon as he touched the floor, he sank onto a bale. In the rafters above, like a great trapped beast, he could feel the heat he had escaped, waiting for him, and he sucked gulps of the cool, habitable air into his lungs and let his blood cool and the sweat dry on his skin. But before a minute had passed, he grew convinced that he had betrayed his presence somehow, that Claude must be standing below, looking at the ceiling and listening.
Just until sunset, he told himself.
He drew a slick forearm across his face and climbed back into the furnace.
IN THE AFTERNOON THE vestibule door opened and Claude walked into the open space at the front of the mow.
“Edgar?” he said, softly. Then, after a long pause, “Edgar?”
Edgar pressed himself into the hollow in the bales and held his breath. When the pounding in his head was too much to bear, he allowed himself an exhalation so measured he thought he might suffocate. There were footsteps on straw. A tremor shook the stack of bales. Something heavy thumped to the floor. The bales shook again, and there was another thump. For one protracted moment Edgar was sure Claude had begun tearing down the monolith of straw to get at him.
The shaking and thumping continued in a steady rhythm. Though there was barely enough room between the bales and the rafters, Edgar wormed his way forward. Claude was working by the long western wall, his head five or six feet below Edgar’s. He wore a pair of canvas work gloves and he was dragging out bale after bale and letting them tumble to the floor. It wasn’t easy—the bales were stacked one pair lengthwise over another crosswise so that no column could shear away. He’d already opened a semicircular cavity, deeper at the bottom than at the top, and his shirt was dark with sweat halfway down his back. Edgar could hear him gasping in the heat. When thirty or forty bales lay on the floor, he stopped and pulled the gloves off his hands and picked up a hammer from the floor and knelt in the cavity he’d created, half concealed from Edgar. There was the screech of a nail pulled from dry wood and a board clattering. Claude leaned back and rubbed his hands together as if reconsidering, then fetched his work gloves and put them on and shot his fingers together to seat them.
The thought crossed Edgar’s mind to pitch a bale down. Forty or fifty pounds of densely packed straw, dropped from that height, could knock Claude flat. But what would that accomplish? He wouldn’t stay down. Besides, Claude was already glancing uneasily toward the vestibule door; in such cramped quarters, long before Edgar could wrestle a bale to the edge and tip it over, Claude would hear and look up.
Then Claude was backing away from the bales. He set something small and glinting on the floor. A bottle, an old-time bottle, with a crude blob of glass for a stopper and a ribbon around the neck with black markings. Claude stood looking at it, as mesmerized as Edgar. Then he moved the bottle against the mow wall with a gloved hand and thrashed up a pile of loose straw to cover it. He began to restack the bales. Edgar retreated. Shortly, there were footsteps on the mow floor, the click of the vestibule door latch, and more footsteps on the stairs. Edgar waited for the sound of Claude’s boots on the driveway, but all he heard was his mother’s voice as she encouraged the pups in the yard. He elbowed forward. Claude hadn’t bothered to wrestle the topmost bales into place. Near the floor, the stacks bulged from the otherwise neat stair step of yellow. Where Claude had momentarily covered the bottle in straw, Edgar now saw only a stretch of bare planking.
He tipped the coffee can to his mouth and then climbed down, his body oily with sweat. He dragged away the bales Claude had moved. The wood plank was splintered where the nails had been pulled. He pressed the point of Henry’s jackknife into the crack and pried it up. He didn’t know what he expected to find. The hole was dry and empty, like the one he’d found the night before, though deeper. It could easily accommodate the bottle Claude had set aside—the bottle that had not been a figment of his imagination. Or of Ida Paine’s.
It existed. He’d seen it, in daylight, if only for a moment.
He walked to the front wall and cracked open the mow door and pressed one eye to the gap, blinking against the midday brilliance. Fresh air poured across his face, hot from the August sun but soothingly cool after what he’d endured in the rafters. The mow door was hinged on the side nearest the house and he could see only downfield, where grasshoppers leapt like firecrackers ignited under the rays of the run.
Then Claude’s footsteps sounded on the gravel. The truck started, idled alongside the barn, and stopped again. Edgar’s mother called the pups. She would not keep them out for long in the heat, he thought. He listened for a moment, then shut the mow door and walked to the top of the stairs.
Trudy
W HEN TRUDY REACHED THE SHADE OF THE BARN, SHE TURNED and knelt and recalled the pups, then coaxed them down the long concrete aisle. They were too old to be sleeping in the whelping pens, but keeping four-month-olds there during the heat of August wasn’t all bad. Pups that age still had a hard time regulating their body temperature, and didn’t always have the sense to get out of the sun. The whelping rooms, sealed from the outside, were often the coolest part of the kennel.
She was latching their pen door when she felt his arms around her. She let out a brief pip of a cry before a hand clamped over her mouth and another was thrust in front of her face, fingerspelling like lightning.
Quiet. Only sign. Okay?
She nodded. He let go and stepped back and she turned to look at Edgar.
He stood holding a finger to his lips. His cheekbones jutted from his face and the line of his jaw swept so sharply toward his throat that he seemed to be made all of sinew and bone. His hair lay matted and sun-browned across his forehead and his ragged clothes reeked as though he’d spent days in the barn. But his eyes were startlingly, almost preternaturally, clear, looking steadily at her from a face lined by tracks of sweat cut through dirt. The sight of him raced ahead of her thoughts, condensing only afterward into distinct, namable feelings, as if her mind w
ere accommodating too slowly the flash of a bright light: overwhelming relief, knowing her son was safe; fury, for his punishingly long absence; bewilderment at his appearance, which spoke of a long, harrowing journey. Before she could distill any of those thoughts into words, he was looking past her, through the whelping room door and into the main kennel.
Where’s Claude? he signed.
He’s changing the oil in the truck. Where have you been? Are you okay?
He reached over and pulled the door closed.
I wasn’t going to come back. I almost didn’t.
But why? I signaled for you the very next morning. I told them you ran because you were upset after what happened to your father.
They were looking for me.
Of course they were. You were a runaway. But it’s all right now. I told them it was an accident. She paused and corrected herself. It was an accident.
Did you find my note?
What note?
You were gone when I got here last night. I left a note on the table.
There was no note.
Claude found it, then.
She had to think for a minute about what that meant.
I need you to do something, he signed.
Just come to the house. Don’t go away again.
If you do this, I promise to stay. But I need one night out here, alone. After dark I need you to keep Claude in the house, no matter what.
Why?
Because he’s hiding something here.
Claude?
Yes.
What would he hide?
He stared at her, as though trying to divine something.
What? What is it?
Have you seen him?
Claude?
No. In the rain. Have you seen him?
She blinked. She didn’t know what Edgar was talking about. She shook her head. All this time she had imagined him coming back and everything being okay, but instead Almondine was gone and here was Edgar and he was obviously not okay. Not okay at all. He was starved and crazed.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Page 52