"No. Not a few minutes ago."
She looked silently at me. Her look of bemusement changed to one of quick confusion; she said, "Sure I was." She straightened, crossed the room, showed me the photographs. "This," she explained, "was taken when I was ten or eleven." She pointed to the boy beside her. "His name was Timothy." She handed me the photograph. "Keep it, Jack. I want you to have it."
I shrugged. "But I have you, Erika."
"Of course you do, but take it, anyway. Please." I took it. She seemed pleased. She showed me another one: "And this is me with my mother . . ."
CHAPTER TEN
The following morning I had to go into the cellar once more, blow dryer in hand, because the pipes leading to the kitchen faucets had frozen again. They freeze easily if the temperature dips into the teens or lower—the foundation directly in front of them is cracked, allowing cold air to focus on them.
Though it was easy to figure out which pipes were frozen, getting to them was another matter entirely. They're at the far end of a long, two-foot-tall crawl space which has a dirt floor and a ceiling that's alive with insects and spiders. The whole area smells strongly of sewage, too. (I vowed to have that smell checked out when I first went into the crawl space, but I never did.) And there were no lights in the crawl space, so it was necessary to creep along on my elbows and knees, a flashlight in one hand, blow dryer in the other—attached to a thirty-foot-long extension cord—while I tried hard not to bang my head on the joists above.
When I got to the frozen pipes, I could see daylight through the inch-wide crack in the foundation. I could see, too, that someone was on the other side of the foundation, looking in.
I said, "Hello," surprised not only because I'd found someone looking at me but because I'd actually said hello to him.
He said "Hello" to me. His voice was a high tenor and very friendly.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"What?" he said.
I repeated, louder, "What are you doing?"
He answered, "I don't know."
This bothered me. I said nothing for a few moments because I could think of nothing to say. At last I asked him, "Who are you?"
He didn't answer.
"Could you tell me who you are?" I shouted.
From within the house I heard Erika yell, "What'd you say, Jack?"
I turned my face to the ceiling of the crawl space. "Nothing," I yelled. "Stay in the house, Erika!" I turned back to the crack in the foundation. I saw that more of the light coming through was obscured. "What are you doing?" I said to the man there.
"I'm sticking my fingers in," he answered.
"Don't do that," I said, paused, went on, "Why are you doing that?"
"I don't know," he answered.
"Don't stick your fingers in there," I said again, and turned to the ceiling of the crawl space. "Erika, stay in the house. Lock the doors."
The man outside the foundation said, "I can't get them out." He didn't sound bothered or upset. He was merely making a statement of fact. "My fingers are stuck."
"Please," I said loudly, "get your fingers out of there."
He said nothing.
"What did you stick your fingers in there for in the first place?"
Nothing.
"Are you still there?" I asked. It was a stupid question. I could see clearly enough that he was there.
"Yes," he said.
"Will you wait there?"
"I don't know."
"I'm asking you to wait there. Please."
He said nothing.
I watched him. I could see little—the suggestion of an eye, some dark skin, the center of a pair of dark, full lips, and beyond him, the trunk of our crab apple tree. At last I said, "Wait there. I'm coming out. Please wait there."
"I don't know," he said.
I started backing out of the crawl space. From within the house, Erika called, "What's wrong, Jack? Is something wrong?"
"Stay inside, Erika!" I yelled.
"Jack, I think there's someone outside the house!"
"Stay inside, damnit!" I was halfway back to the cellar proper now, and Erika's voice was growing indistinct. "Erika?" I yelled.
She yelled back. I couldn't understand her. I yelled, "Erika, call the police!" I heard nothing from her.
I was at the cellar door now. I pulled it open, ran up the short flight of stone steps, looked to my left, where the man should have been. I saw no one.
Erika appeared seconds later. She looked quizzically at me.
"Jack, there was someone out here. There was a man out here."
"Yes," I said, "I talked to him."
I found some footprints in the mud near the crack in the foundation and I followed them to where the underbrush took over a hundred feet west of the house. I pushed into the underbrush, hollered, "Is anyone there?" I waited a moment, then added, "Are you there?" But I got no response, and when I turned to go back to the house, I found that Erika was just behind me.
"Jack," she said, "when you were in the cellar, did you tell me to call the police?"
I nodded. "Yes. I did."
"I thought so." She gestured vaguely toward the road far in front of the house and said, as if embarrassed, "They told me they'd be here in five minutes."
The cop who came was named Larry Whipple. He was dressed in overalls and an orange hunting jacket, and he explained that he never wore "that dumb police uniform" unless he had to, and since it was his day off—"But I still monitor the calls, you know"—he figured he didn't have to.
He was a big man, just on the unhealthy side of chubby. He had a long, full face, a short black beard and mustache, and small, wide-set eyes. He was in his late forties, I guessed. His black hair was thinning severely.
I showed him into the kitchen, asked him to sit down. He pulled a chair out, sat, got a notepad from one pocket of his hunting jacket and a pencil from another. "So, what seems to be the problem here?" He licked the end of the pencil, held it poised against a page of the notepad. I got the clear idea that he wasn't terribly bright.
"The problem is," I began and sat down across from him, "trespassers."
He wrote it in the notepad. It took him a while; he seemed to have trouble with the spelling. Finally, he looked up, grinned, looked down again, underlined the word, looked up once more, grinned yet again. He had very straight, white teeth. "What sorts of trespassers, Mr. Harris?"
"What sorts?" I asked. Erika came and sat down between us at the circular table. "I don't understand."
"Well." He held his hand up and touched the index finger of his right hand to the fingers of his left. "There's Number One: your hunting trespasser, and they're thicker than flies on cow shit. Then there's Two: your basic hiking type; you know, some asshole from the city, wants to walk in the woods and can't read signs. Then there's Number Three: the squatter type."
"The squatter type?" Erika asked.
Whipple nodded sagely. "Only a few a those, and I can name most of 'em, but I don't think you got any or I'd know about it." He paused, scribbled something on the notepad, continued, "In fact, we got a whole mess a squatters down south of Cohocton, near the Ononda Creek. They built shacks, maybe thirty of 'em, it's kind of a little community, you know, a little village, and we call it the Oxbow, I don't know why." He stopped again. "But it wouldn't be none of those people 'cuz they pretty much stay right where they are, 'specially this time a the year 'cuz it's not real warm yet, you know. What kind you got? You think it was a hunter?"
I shook my head. "No. I don't think so. I don't think he was carrying a gun."
"Uh-huh." He gestured to indicate the outdoors. "I saw all your No Hunting signs, and I guess you got the right to put 'em up, but you ain't gonna make no friends that way 'cuz we all—most of us, anyway—we all hunt, we been huntin' most our lives, practically—"
"That's neither here nor there, is it?" Erika broke in.
"Huh?" he said, obviously confused.
"Our No Hunting signs aren't what's at issue, right?" I
said.
He shrugged. "I guess not."
"The man who was trespassing is the issue," Erika said. "That's why we called you."
Larry Whipple nodded slowly. "Yes. That's right. That's why I'm here." He smiled broadly. "So tell me about him."
"About the trespasser?"
His smile broadened even further. "Yes, Mr. Harris, about the trespasser."
"Okay," I said, feeling suddenly defensive and ill-at-ease, "I'll tell you about him." But I could tell him precious little, of course, only that the man was dark-skinned, but not black, and that his eyes were probably dark, that he'd gotten his fingers stuck in the crack in the foundation, and that he hadn't waited around, though I'd asked him to. Larry Whipple thought this was funny. "These trespassers usually don't do precisely what you tell them to do, Mr. Harris," he said, chuckling. Then he stood, stuck his notepad into the pocket of his hunting jacket, and said, at the door, "No, it's okay, I'll see myself out," though neither of us had stood. Then he left.
I turned to Erika. She had a look of puzzlement on her face. I said to her, "Erika, what in the hell do you suppose that was all about?"
She shrugged. "I guess he didn't want to help us, Jack."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We went into Cohocton several evenings later. Neither of us wanted to cook that night, and since we both enjoyed a submarine sandwich that was made well—mine with lots of mayonnaise, oil, and cheese, and Erika's with several inches of onions over lean meat—we decided to go to a place called Jack's Subs and Pizza. It was at the north end of Cohocton's main street, past three of the five hardware stores in town, a drugstore, Buckles, Boots & Buttons, a used clothing store, the First National Bank of Cohocton, a Laundromat, an "Art Gallery" that exhibited the works of local artists almost exclusively (some of whom were quite good, though there were the usual frowning clowns, aged barns, and stylized owls), a privately owned IGA store, the Cohocton Diner, and the Cohocton Hotel, a rambling Victorian monstrosity that had been renovated fifty years earlier to give its cavernous interior a gaudy art-deco look.
As usual in the evening, Cohocton was all but deserted. A few battered pickup trucks were parked on Main Street, one in front of the bank, two in front of C. R. Boring Hardware. A thin, aged man I had come to know only as Knebel, pronounced "neeble," was out walking his old, fat German Shepherd, Hans.
I stopped in front of Jack's Pizza and Subs; Erika and I got out of the car. I nodded at Knebel, who was across the street; he nodded back, brought Hans up short on the leash. "Shit," I whispered, because I realized that Knebel wanted to talk. He liked to talk. He lived alone, in a grim, two-room apartment behind the Middletown Tavern, on North Main Street, and had no living relatives or close friends. That was why, I'd been told, he latched onto newcomers and chewed their ears off.
He crossed the street, Hans in tow. In the middle of the street the dog decided to sit down; he coaxed it with a few soothing words and pats on the head and the dog got going.
"Hi, Knebel," I called.
Erika, beside me, asked, "Who's he?"
I turned to her, whispered, "No one. I won't be long. Why don't you go in and get the subs?"
She shrugged, said "Sure," and went inside.
Knebel finished crossing the street and stuck his hand out to me. I took it. "Hi, Knebel," I said again.
"Jack," he said, "it's good to see you." He nodded at the sub shop. "Getting some subs?" I nodded.
"Give the little woman some time off, eh?" He nodded in agreement with himself. He was a painfully thin man, with a full head of bright white hair, a large skull, big, flat eyes, and a broad mouth; he reminded me of a huge, white lollypop that's had a face painted on it. He nodded again, still in agreement with himself, and added, "It's a good way to keep 'em in line, Jack."
"I don't think that way, Knebel," I said, and was surprised that it sounded like an apology.
"Uh-huh." He nudged my arm with his elbow. "Don't stick around too long in town tonight, Jack."
This took me by surprise. "Sorry?" I said.
"We've got some trouble here tonight." He nodded, again in self-agreement.
"I don't understand. What kind of trouble?"
He turned, patted the German Shepherd's head, turned back to me. "I'm not sure. I saw some things." He stopped.
"What kind of things?" I coaxed.
"People," he answered, and gestured with his arm toward the Laundromat, several hundred feet away on the other side of the street. "There," he went on, and nodded at the Cohocton Hotel, on our side of the street and a block further down from the Laundromat. "There, too."
I felt a smile start on my lips; I suppressed it. "What's the significance, Knebel?" I asked.
"People," he repeated with emphasis, "standing by themselves, Jack. In the dark." He paused meaningfully, then repeated, "People standing by themselves, in the dark."
"Doing what?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"And?"
"That's it." He looked confused. "Isn't it enough?" I didn't know what to say. I shrugged.
"This is a little town," he said.
"Yes, it is."
"I know everyone. And they know me. You want significance? That's the significance."
Erika appeared from the sub shop, a white sandwich bag in each hand. She stopped halfway down the steps and looked confusedly at me. "I think he should have marked these, Jack," she said. "I don't know which one's yours."
"The greasy one," I said.
Knebel said, nodding at Erika, "So you get her home and safe quick's you can, okay?"
I sighed. "I'll do that, Knebel."
"I'd say that'd be the best thing tonight, Jack." He nodded in self-agreement, tugged on the German Shepherd's leash, and walked stiffly off, toward North Main Street.
Tall walnut and maple trees crowded both sides of the narrow road from Cohocton to the house, and on this night, the smell of wood smoke—from houses that used wood stoves—was heavy and unpleasant, in spots nearly like a fog. No one walked this road at night—not, I think, because it was dangerous but because the people who lived in the area drove if they had someplace to go.
That evening, when we were still a mile or so from home, Erika said, "I could stay here a long time, Jack." I heard something deeply meaningful in her voice, and something tense, too, as if she were afraid of what she was saying.
"Me, too," I said.
I felt her hand on mine on the steering wheel, and I glanced at it, surprised. When I looked up, I saw a deer running along the right-hand side of the road about fifty yards ahead of the car. I had already learned that the deer ran in groups, of three or four—if one got caught in the glare of headlights, the chances were very good that another, and another, and another would quickly follow. So I hit the brakes. "Hold on!" I said to Erika, and found suddenly that the car was facing the right side of the road, its high beams hard on the trees there. I cursed, let off the brakes; the car straightened. I pumped the brakes, brought the car to a halt, took a breath, studied the road ahead. The deer I'd braked for was a good hundred yards off now. As I watched, it angled sharply to the left, across the road, and was gone. Another deer appeared seconds later, then another.
Erika said, "I saw someone standing next to the road, Jack."
I glanced at her. "Oh?"
She nodded; she was looking straight ahead. "Yes, when the car skidded."
I glanced back through the rear window and saw the deep red glow of the brake lights on darkness, nothing else. I put the car in park, took my foot off the brake, saw the gray suggestion of sky, a black horizon. I noticed the smell of the wood smoke, too, and it got me thinking about house fires and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Erika said, "But he belongs here."
"Does he?"
She nodded again.
I asked, "He lives here, Erika?"
"Sure," she answered.
I put the car in drive, touched the accelerator; the car moved very slowly forward—the deer had spooked me
and I was being extra cautious. I said, "How do you know all that, Erika?"
"Because I've seen him before."
I caught the suggestion of movement a hundred feet ahead, near the side of the road, and I slowed the car to a crawl.
"Where?" I asked.
"Near the house," she answered. "The other morning. When you were in the cellar."
I glanced quickly at her. "You're kidding." I glanced back. The thing at the side of the road appeared; it was a big raccoon. It ambled several feet into the road, got caught in the full glare of the headlights, loped back to the shoulder, and hesitated there, as if agitated by the presence of the car.
"No," Erika said. "It was the same man. He was wearing the same clothes."
The raccoon got up on its haunches, then down on all fours, and scooted across the road. I said to Erika, "You never told me you knew what the man was wearing. That's important stuff."
She shook her head. "No, it isn't, Jack. He belongs here."
I sighed. "Are you saying we've got goofy neighbors, Erika?"
"I thought you knew we had goofy neighbors, Jack." I heard wry amusement in her voice and realized that it signaled a clear change in her tone. "Everybody's got goofy neighbors," she declared. "I'm sure that we're someone's goofy neighbors."
"Uh-huh," I said, "sure we are," and I pushed the accelerator halfway to the floor. The car shot forward, giving me a little rush of excitement. "The hell with the damned deer," I muttered.
"And the hell with goofy neighbors!" Erika said aloud. "I'm hungry!"
She has a strange sense of humor. It's unpredictable, a little perverse, and she delights in the absurd. She has a Kliban poster in the music room. It shows a barrel-bodied, huge-headed pen-and-ink cat with a shit-eating grin on its mouth, and a scrawny mouse under its paw. "Love to eat them mousies," the cat's saying; "bite they little heads off."
When she got the poster, she explained simply—"That cat's honest." She grinned lopsidely. "I like honesty."
CHAPTER TWELVE
I found myself back in Granada several days later. I'm uncertain what drew me there, because it was a strange and depressing place and it made me more than a little uncomfortable (the same way, I remembered, that I'd felt when I visited France five years earlier and didn't speak the language, like being blind and in a room whose dimensions are unknown).
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