"For God's sake, I've tried easing it out."
"No, you ain't. Just relax."
I tried to relax.
He said, "Relax, Mr. Harris!"
I relaxed.
"Let the mud do what it wants to do, Mr. Harris. It'll relax, too—you wait and see."
I said nothing. I didn't like the idea that I was receiving Good Country Wisdom from a near-idiot who'd shot a woman because he'd mistaken her for a woodchuck.
After a minute the mud did relax, and I slowly pulled my foot from it. I asked him again, "Where's the woman you shot?"
"Across the road," he answered. "In the gully." He started down the driveway again. I followed.
We found no woman. We found a spot where the outline in the wet grass was distinctly human, and the hunter said, pointing at it, "She was right here, on her stomach, Mr. Harris." There was no particular emphasis in his voice. "And her back was a real mess, 'cuz that's where I shot her. And she was wearing a dress. She was. She was wearing a long white chess. And her hair was real dark, down past the middle of her back. I cut some of it off with the shotgun pellets, "—this seemed to bother him a little; he sighed, hesitated, then went on—"and some of it was pushed into her back, where the wound was, you know, and she had her face into the ground, straight into it. You think of dead people, Mr. Harris, and you think their faces are turned this way or that, don'tcha? Sure. Hers wasn't. It was flat into the ground. And her arms were straight out and they were curved just a tad, like she was gonna hug someone. I think her name was Elizabeth. I seen her before. In Cohocton. I think I seen her at the tree-sitting festival. You go to that? Neat, huh? And I think some guy called her Elizabeth. Course I could be all wrong. I could be wrong about the whole thing, I guess. Maybe she wasn't dead, but, Gawd, she did have a awful big hole in her back—"
I broke in, finally. "We have to call the police."
He looked confusedly at me. "What police?"
"The Cohocton Police."
"We ain't got no police, Mr. Harris. We got a deputy sheriff and his name is Larry Whipple."
"Shit," I whispered. I leaned over, fingered the area where the woman's body had been. "There's no blood," I said.
The hunter said, "Well, there wouldn't be, would there, 'cuz she was lying on her stomach, you know—"
"Don't be an idiot. Of course there'd be blood. I'd smell it." The sun came out then, and its light hid the outline of the woman's body.
The hunter said, "You'd smell the blood?" I glanced around at him; a small, amused smile was on his face. "Wouldja now, Mr. Harris?" he added.
I shook my head, straightened. "I don't know. Maybe." Then I saw Martin's house, the house at the middle of the mountain that the snowmobilers had been going to several weeks earlier. I nodded at it. "Do you see that house?" I said.
The hunter looked. "Yeah I see it."
"And would you say that this"—I nodded at the ground—"is the property of the people who own that house?"
"Maybe."
"Then why didn't you go up there and talk to them? Why'd you come to me?"
He smiled again, a flat, long-suffering kind of smile. "Because they're crazy, Mr. Harris."
Larry Whipple offered his hand. I took it and let go of it almost immediately. "How you doing today, Mr. Harris?" he said. "John here tells me you've got some trouble again."
I shook my head. We were in the library; I noticed that John's muddy footprints were tracked across the Oriental rug, and I decided I'd try and vacuum it before Erika got home. John's shotgun was standing up in a far corner, near Erika's desk. "No, I haven't got any trouble at all," I said. "John's got the trouble." I went over to the shotgun, picked it up, held it horizontally in front of my belly. "Apparently, he's shot someone."
"Has he?" Whipple said, and turned to John, who was standing very quietly near the front door. He and Whipple had had a conference of sorts before coming into the house. "Who'd you shoot this time, John?" he said.
"He's shot other people?" I asked incredulously.
Whipple chuckled. He was dressed in the same clothes he was dressed in the first time I saw him—an orange hunting jacket, red flannel shirt, overalls, hiking boots—but this time he had a pistol strapped to his waist. "No, Mr. Harris, John's never shot a soul." He touched his temple. "John's not all there. John wants to shoot someone, you understand, but he doesn't know how to load his shotgun." He held his hand out to me. I gave him John's shotgun. He broke it open at the breach and held it up for me to see. "Empty," he said. "It's always empty." He closed the shotgun and gave it to John, who took it gladly and said, "Thanks, Larry. I was just having some fun, Larry," and the two of them excused themselves, went to Larry's car—a battered, decade-old Impala—and drove off.
A couple of minutes later I was back at the spot John had taken me to, and trying hard to find the outline of the woman's body in the matted grass. But the sun was out and I saw little. I looked about. The gully was shallow enough that my head stuck above its upper edges. Beyond it, to the east was the road, and three hundred feet east of that, our house. To the west the land lay flat for a good two or three hundred feet—there were fields of quack grass, an occasional cattail, some wild grape—and then angled very sharply upwards to the high hill where Martin's house was. For the first time, I could see this house very clearly. It was quite large, made of cedar logs, and had apparently been built on what appeared to be a small man-made plateau. The path leading to it was visible where it met the house; pine trees obscured the rest of it.
Smoke was drifting lazily up out of one of the house's two chimneys—at opposite ends of the severely sloping red-tiled roof—and I imagined that I could hear rock music playing, though very faintly.
I heard, from behind me, "We're not as crazy as they are, Mr. Harris." I turned quickly, surprised. Martin was standing just at the road's edge, with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket.
I blurted, "A woman was shot here today."
"Uh-huh," the man said, and grinned knowledgeably. "Did John tell you that?"
"Yes.''
"John's not very bright, Mr. Harris."
"So I was told."
"John has been known to lie on occasion."
"I'm not sure he was lying, Mr. Martin."
"And you may be right." Another smile. "How's your wife doing these days, Mr. Harris?"
I shook my head. "What has any of this to do with Erika?"
"That's her name? Erika?"
"Yes."
"That's a beautiful name. And this has quite a lot to do with her. I'm sorry." A pause. He went on, "Do you love her, Mr. Harris?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"Yes," he cut in, "naturally, you love her. And since you love her, you want to . . . hold on to her. Isn't that true?"
"I don't understand you, Mr. Martin."
"Just Martin. And of course you don't understand me." He looked down at his feet, stooped over, scooped up a handful of snow. He held it out on his open hand. "Try, Mr. Harris, to hold onto this." He let the snow drop. "It's the same sort of thing." He turned, and walked quickly north on the road, toward the path to his house. I called to him repeatedly—"Where are you going? This is important. Hey, come back here!"—but he ignored me.
When we'd been married not quite two years, Erika and I went to the funeral of my Aunt Lillian. Aunt Lillian had been in her late sixties and for the last two decades of her life had been incapacitated by one major illness after another—diabetes, encephalitis, acute arthritis. It was cancer that killed her.
She was a very cheerful, bright woman, an optimist to her last day, when, apparently knowing that the cancer had caught up with her, she looked at my mother, who was her younger sister, and said, smiling, "No more illness. Just the fresh air."
I repeated this story to Erika when we were driving to the funeral. She appeared to have little reaction beyond a small sigh and a nod of the head. But when we got to the funeral, she went ahead of me to the casket, touched it, and
whispered, "Yes. You're right."
I probably should have told Erika about John and Larry Whipple and Martin, but I never did. It's the same old story. I was trying to protect her, although I knew the chances were good that she'd be able to handle the thing I was hiding from her. But I did hide it from her. I took her to a movie in Canandaigua—thirty miles east of Cohocton—a movie which we both hated, then out for a snack at a place called The Eatery, which had stark pretensions to elegance, and we hated that, too, and when we got home, at half past twelve, we found that the house had been vandalized.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I didn't call Larry Whipple. I called the Dansville substation of the New York State Police and was told that an investigator would be sent over immediately. Erika and I tallied up the damage while we waited. We found that there was damage in each room; some of it was minor—graffiti on the bedroom wall read GREETINGS! in big, red block letters above the bed—and some of it was vicious; in the laundry room, a floor lamp had been taken apart and the pole used to put a dozen deep, wide gouges in all four walls. In the library, Erika's cherry desk had been smashed with an axe taken from the garage—the axe was left leaning in the corner where I'd put John's shotgun—and in the kitchen, the electric stove had been crudely rigged to the sink, so that someone turning on the stove and then going to use the faucets would get a hell of a shock. Or that was apparently the intention. It was so very crudely done that it would never have worked.
Erika and I wandered about in a kind of daze from room to room, taking in the damage. A grandfather's clock I'd spent nearly a month building from a kit had had its guts torn out, though the cabinet was left untouched. Graffiti—in the same red block letters that were used in the bedroom—were everywhere; some of the graffiti read simply, Hi! or WE'RE HERE! or, in the downstairs powder room, WE'RE HERE NOW! (to which I responded at a whisper, "Yes, I can see that!"), and in the dining room, the word CEILING had been written, predictably, on the ceiling. "He's a comedian," I said to Erika. She said nothing.
The investigator from the Dansville State Police substation didn't arrive until a little past 1:30. He was a short, slightly built black man with a head full of tight curls, and he was wearing a black suit and vest. He looked very much like he'd just come from a wedding. His name was Mansfield Barnes, and the first thing he said to us was, "Do you folks have any pets?"
Erika said, "We have a cat. Well, we had two cats, one ran away—"
"And do you know where the remaining cat is?" Barnes interrupted.
"No," I said.
"Find the cat, please," Barnes said.
"Sure," I said, and went looking for Orphan. I looked in the living room first, and then in the library, and then behind the buffet in the dining room, which had gone untouched by the vandalism. I called for him: "Orphan, come here, Orphan!" and kept it up as I walked into the kitchen, Erika and Barnes following. I heard Erika say, behind him, "How is the cat important?"
"We've had some problems with vandalism in Danville," Barnes explained, "and I'm afraid that household pets have been the chief target—"
I cut in, "No. There he is." Orphan was in the kitchen, behind the table, eating.
Erika asked, "Jack, what's he eating?"
I moved closer to the cat. It had one paw on the belly of a dead raccoon. The raccoon's head was tilted at right angles to its body, and its body moved in rhythm with the cat's long, slow licking movements. As the cat licked, it purred in great contentment.
"My God," I said, "they fed the cat."
And Mansfield Barnes said, "This is not what's been happening in Dansville at all, not at all."
I took the raccoon far into the woods behind the house and buried it as deep as I could—which, because the ground was still hard, wasn't very deep at all. One of its black feet stuck up above the grave.
Then, with the aid of a flashlight, I made my way back to the house.
I went in through the kitchen door, called, "Erika, where are you?" I got no answer and went into the dining room, where I called for her again. She'd begun to put the house in order. The piano, which had been tilted on end, had been righted—with Mansfield Barnes's help, I supposed—and the pine dining table—the word HELLO had been scratched into the middle of it in the same big block letters—had a clean white tablecloth over it.
"Erika?" I called, and when I still got no answer I called again, louder, "Erika, where the hell are you?"
Mansfield Barnes called from upstairs, "Here, Mr. Harris. In the bedroom. In the master bedroom. Could you please come up?"
I went quickly up the stairs, looked into the master bedroom, saw no one. "Where are you?" I called. "In the closet, Jack," Erika called back.
I went to the closet—it was a huge walk-in closet with a high ceiling and an entire wall's worth of built-in drawers; I'd joked with Erika once that it would make a nifty guest bedroom for some of our in-laws. Mansfield Barnes and Erika were at the center of it, the bare, wall-mounted light fixture switched on, their gaze on the ceiling overhead. I looked up, too. Written in big, red block letters there were the words AND WE'RE STILL HERE!
"Real comedians," I said, and Mansfield Barnes said simply: "Uh-huh, they're everywhere."
"We've got to shellac the entire ceiling, don't we, Jack?" Erika said much later, in bed. The beginnings of daylight were visible through the windows. The curtains had been torn down by the vandals and now lay in a heap on the bedroom floor.
"I don't know if it's shellac we have to use, Erika. That tile"—the ceilings throughout the house had been done in porous, beige acoustical tile—"will soak up paint like a sponge, I know. But I'm not sure that shellac would do the trick because then we'd have the problem of painting over the shellac, and I've done that and you get into all kinds of moisture problems—"
"You could ask at the hardware store, Jack. I'm sure there's some sort of sealant you can buy." Her words were slow, very measured, but I could hear tension in them, and something else, too—resolve, I realized, and I thought, incorrectly, that it was a resolve to put the house in order as quickly as possible. She continued, "We certainly can't leave it the way it is."
"It'd be unique," I said.
"Yeah," she said, "unique." She paused briefly, continued, "Why'd they write that stuff all over the house, Jack?"
"Just your basic creative vandal, I suppose. He knew what would scare us."
"He scared the hell out of me."
"He scared me, too, Erika."
A minute's silence, then: "Where'd you bury that raccoon, Jack?"
"Out back," I answered. "Way out back. And deep. Good and deep."
"Uh-huh." She was whispering now, low and tight. "Don't lie to me, Jack. I don't like it. The ground's still hard, so how deep could you have buried it?"
"Deep enough."
"I hope so. I don't want to trip over it in the spring; that wouldn't make my day."
"You won't."
She said nothing.
I said, "God, I'm sorry this happened, Erika." Still nothing.
"You going to sleep?"
"No.
"Oh. You can't sleep, huh?"
"Eventually I will." A pause. "Jack?" She sounded troubled.
"Yes?"
"Is something wrong?"
I chuckled a small, false chuckle. "Is something wrong?!" I said sarcastically. "Here, her house gets vandalized, her belongings destroyed—"
"It doesn't matter, Jack. Really, it doesn't matter at all. I just wanted you to know something. I wanted to tell you that what I've learned about love, what I know about love, Jack . . ." She seemed tongue-tied. "I wanted you to know that I love you. Whatever you think that means, whatever you think love means, it's what I mean."
I said nothing. She sounded intensely earnest, confused, a little sad.
She added, "We'll be here, at this house, Jack—you and I will be at this house for a good long time. I know that."
"Yes," I said. "I know that, too, Erika. That's what I want."
&nbs
p; "I feel like I'm drifting, Jack."
"Drifting?" I knew that she'd used the word before when she was talking about herself, but I couldn't remember in what context.
"I feel . . . apart—" She sounded very confused now.
"Erika, my God, what's wrong?"
"There's nothing wrong." She sounded convinced of that. I wished that the light was on so I could read her face. "Could you do me a favor, Jack?"
"Sure." I put my hand on the top of hers, got no reaction. "Name it."
"Fix the curtains."
"You mean right now?"
"Yes. If you don't mind. You can jerry-rig them. I'll help you." She was pleading with me. "We can stick the rods up and throw the curtains over them. We can use blankets, if that's easier. It's too light in here." It wasn't light at all. "It's too close to morning, Jack. I won't be able to sleep." She still was pleading. "I need the dark. I'm sorry. I need the dark."
"Sure, Erika." I got out of the bed and, alone, spent the next half hour putting the curtains up. When I got back into bed, she was asleep. I leaned over and kissed her cheek. "I love you, too," I said. "I love you a lot," and from what I could see of her face, I supposed that she smiled as she slept, which made me feel better than I'd felt in a long time.
I woke several hours later. I heard talking in the house. I heard talking from the room below, which is the library, from the guest room, from the big open room, from the house itself, as if the walls were talking.
I could make out no words. I could hear only the sense of the words, a sense of quiet urgency, the way a doctor speaks to a woman giving birth.
I did not wake Erika to hear it. It lasted only a few seconds.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Our memories do sustain us. They give the present a backdrop, scenery, substance; they tell us who we are and what we're becoming, and if what we're becoming is worth anything at all.
Our memories sing to us, too. And caress us. And chill us, hurt us, make us numb, so that we sit for hours quietly, unmoving and unchanging because that will put time off, and the moments will not happen.
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