In the end Tommi had to manage for herself. Both women stared in bewilderment at him. “Why, Arnold,” said Emma, “whatever happened to you?”
He had virtually collapsed against the wall, exhausted by his effort, lungs heaving. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. What makes you think anything happened?” He needed another thirty seconds before he could get out the rest of it: “I was just jogging.”
Arnold Whitaker was the proprietor and chief clerk at the Lock ‘n’ Bolt, Fort Moxie’s hardware store. He was in his mid-thirties, a man of modest proportions and unremarkable features. He tended to be self-effacing, had never been known to offend anyone, and was generally mindful of the civilities: he held doors for women, told jokes only on himself, and spoke in carefully-modulated tones. No one had ever heard Arnold raise his voice.
His customers thought of him as solid and dependable, in the way that a good wrench and good bolts are solid and dependable. Nothing fancy in his makeup, no slick housing or plugboard wiring; just good, plain metal, carved to specification, and used within the parameters of the instruction manual.
Arnold was a bachelor. He lived upstairs over the hardware store in a spartan two-bedroom apartment. The furniture clashed: the rattan table undermined the spirit of his rolltop desk; the seductive effect of the black fur-covered sofa was utterly destroyed by the conservative gold-brown wingback armchair. Arnold had acquired most of his furnishings at sales in Fargo and Grand Forks. His clothing also reflected a tendency to put considerations of budget over those of taste. Indeed, it might be said that Arnold’s propensity for discounts reflected a natural tendency to avoid anything in life for which he might have to pay full value.
He owned a good television, fifty-seven inches wide with ultra HD resolution and wraparound sound. He spent a lot of time watching TV, and he’d gotten the price he wanted last President’s Day. A high-priced discontinued stereo dominated the living room. Walls throughout the apartment had been converted into bookshelves, and they were filled with hardware catalogs and paperback techno-thrillers.
He slept in the middle room, which was dominated by a double bed that was seldom made up, and an ugly bureau missing several handles. (He was looking for a good replacement.) A smaller television and a VCR were set in one corner, and a rubber plant in another. A picture of a former girlfriend whom he had not seen in years stood atop the bureau.
The back room looked out over the northwestern quarter of Fort Moxie. Houses in the border town were widely separated, even behind the commercial section. Lots were seldom smaller than a half-acre. Few streetlights burned back there, and consequently the area got thoroughly dark at night. Which was why Arnold had chosen his rear window to set up his telescope.
The telescope was perhaps the one thing Arnold owned that he had bought at retail. It was an Orion 10014 SkyQuest 2080 with a rolling base and a navigation knob. It gave him spectacular views of the moon, and of Jupiter and Saturn, especially on cold winter nights when the air seemed to crystallize, and the molecules and dust crackled and fell to earth, exposing the hearts of the great planets.
Arnold’s secret ambition, one that he had never shared with anyone, was to find an incoming comet. To be there first, and to break the news. Comet Whitaker.
His neighbors knew about the telescope, and they assigned its existence to some minor idiosyncracy, the exception to the general steady flow of Arnold’s life.
Arnold, by the way, was liked by almost everyone. He did not give rise to passions: no one in Fort Moxie drifted off to sleep dreaming of him. And no one could recall ever having become really angry with him. He was just there, a presence downtown, reliable, polite, as much a part of the town as the post office or route 11 or the wind screen. What people liked most about him (though probably no one could have put it in words) was that Arnold really enjoyed hardware. Hammers and chisels, their polished wood stocks gleaming, the metal heads bright and clean, delighted him. He handled jacks and screwdrivers and boxes of tacks and lighting fixtures with obvious affection. Even his younger customers made the connection between Arnold’s solid, dependable lifestyle, and the nuts and bolts of his trade.
On the evening of the incident in the tree belt, which was the first unplanned occurrence in Arnold’s life since he’d fallen out of a canoe in ’08, he returned to the store in a state of considerable disarray. He locked both downstairs doors and checked all the windows, a routine he didn’t always follow in crime-free Fort Moxie. And he retreated upstairs to the back room, where he sat a long time beside the telescope, watching darkness approach across the distant tree line.
He never doubted that he had in fact heard his name out there. Arnold was far too solid, too stable, to question his senses. He did not believe it was a prank, did not see how a prank could have been executed.
But what, then, was it? In the good hard light of his room, he could dismiss the supernatural. But what remained? Was it possible that some trick of the wind, some unlikely chance pattern of branches and air currents and temperatures had produced a sound so close to “Arnold” that his mind had filled in the rest?
For almost an hour, he sat with his chin propped against his hands, staring through the window at the distant treetops.
Later, he went out to dinner, down to Clint’s. That was a treat, but tonight he felt entitled. He wanted people around him.
The usual routine was that Arnold opened up at nine. He had two part-time employees: Janet Hasting, a housewife who relieved him at lunchtime; and Dean Walloughby, a teenager who came in at three. If things were quiet, Arnold worked on his inventory, or his taxes, and made the trip to the bank. They closed at five. Dean went home, and Arnold went jogging.
But today, the day after the incident Arnold had begun to think of as The Encounter, complete with capitals, he had a decision to make. He enjoyed running. He especially enjoyed the solitude of the tree belt, and running against the wind off the prairie. He liked the clean rock-and-water smell of the Red River, and the far-off sound of airhorns on I-29. It was just after Labor Day, and Fort Moxie’s short summer was fading fast. He did not like to lose what little good weather was left, especially to an aberration, a trick of the senses.
Arnold had been unnerved by the experience. He trembled at the prospect of going there again, understood he could keep away and no one would ever know he had given in to his fear. He might wonder for a time what had actually happened, but he knew that eventually he would assign the event to an active imagination.
That seemed like the safer course.
Yes. He would stay clear. No point tempting fate. Why ask for trouble? This afternoon, he would confine himself to running in town. Getting near the end of the season anyway. And having made his decision, he welcomed Janet Hasting in at eleven, and went to lunch shortly after with a clear conscience.
Arnold said hello to the small crowd of regulars in Clint’s, and drew up a chair beside Floyd Rickett, who was dismembering a BLT. Floyd was tall, gray, sharp-nosed, pinched-looking, well-pressed in his postal uniform. He harbored strong opinions, and an unflappable sense of the importance of his own time. Cut to the bottom line, he was fond of saying, jabbing with the three middle fingers of his right hand. Floyd did a great deal of jabbing: He jabbed his way into conversations, jabbed through political opposition down at the club (where he was recording secretary), jabbed through lines and crowds. Life is short. No time to waste. Cut to the bottom line. At the post office, he specialized in sorting out problems caused by the general public. Floyd tolerated no sloppy wrapping, no barely-legible handwriting, no failure to add the proper zip code.
“You look upset,” he said, targeting Arnold.
Arnold sat down and shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“I don’t think so.” Jab. “Your color’s not good.” Jab. “And you’re avoiding eye contact.” Slice.
Arnold immediately tried to look directly into his eyes. But it was too late. “Something odd happened to me yesterday.”
Botto
m line. “What?” Floyd leaned forward with interest. Odd occurrences, especially of the sort that could drain the equanimity from as solid a citizen as Arnold Whitaker, were rare in Fort Moxie.
“I don’t know how to explain this, exactly.” Arnold looked up as Aggie came over to take his order. When she had gone, he repeated his observation.
“Just get to the point,” said Floyd.
“I was jogging in the wind screen yesterday. I go up there every day, after I close up.”
Floyd shifted his weight.
“I heard a voice,” Arnold said.
Floyd took another bite out of his BLT, chewed, and frowned when nothing more was forthcoming. “I give up,” he said at last. “Who was it?”
“There wasn’t anyone there.”
“Must have been somebody. There was somebody behind a tree.”
“No.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“It wasn’t a voice like yours or mine. What I mean is, that it wasn’t a person’s voice at all.”
Floyd frowned. “What other kinds of voices are there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. What did it say?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Just my name.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yes.”
Floyd tilted his head, smiled, and finished his iced tea. “Got to go,” he said. He had recognized that this was a conversation without a bottom line. No need to waste time on it. “Listen, Arnold, what you heard was an echo. Or the wind. Wind plays funny tricks sometimes.” He patted his lips with his napkin. “Maybe you need to take a few days off.”
Arnold went back to the store, and reconsidered his decision to stay away from the wind screen. He could not allow himself to be frightened off from something he really enjoyed doing. Especially when he had no explanation to offer, even to himself. By two o’clock, he had decided to confront whatever might be lurking (and that was the word that kept coming to mind) in the trees. And damn the consequences. But over the next hour, the forces of caution stormed back and retook the hill.
He considered inviting Dean, his part-timer, to go with him. But how would he explain the request? And anyway the kid was in terrible shape, and would only slow him down if a quick exit became necessary.
By the end of the business day, he had changed his mind several times, and finally settled on a compromise: He would stay out of the trees, but he would run as close to them as he could, while remaining on the streets.
His usual regimen, after locking up and changing into his sweat suit, was to drive down and park at the Historical Center, then run back along Bannister Avenue through town, and connect with the jogging path on the west side. Then he would follow it around the northern perimeter of Fort Moxie, passing the site of The Encounter, and eventually come out at the Historical Center. The route was about five miles long. He never actually ran that distance, couldn’t run that far, but he used a combination of jogging and walking. And sometimes he stopped altogether. Frequently did so, in fact. All in all, he might need anywhere from an hour and a quarter to two hours to complete the course.
Today would be different. He left his car in the garage and started out along Bannister, cruising past the post office and the bank and the Prairie Schooner Bar and Mike’s Supermarket and the Intown Video Store. But, instead of continuing all the way out to the western side, he turned north at Fifth Street, cutting across the leaf-strewn grounds of the Thomas Jefferson Elementary School.
Directly ahead, about six blocks, he could see the line of elms and boxwoods. The treetops rolled in a brisk prairie wind. They looked harmless enough. They also looked deep: when he’d been a boy, Arnold’s imagination had delighted in turning the narrow belt of trees into thick woods. That childhood Fort Moxie had been a redoubt carved out of a vast forest, rather than a lonely outpost on the prairie.
He left the school behind, cruised past homes and the bake shop and the North Star Apartments. Two blocks up from Bannister, he passed Floyd’s house. It was a pale green immaculately-kept two-story frame, with an enclosed front porch. Two box elders grew in a spacious, freshly-raked front yard. (The leaves had been bagged, and lined a side wall.) Broad manicured hedges marked its boundaries. A carefully-arranged assortment of bushes implied the owner’s almost obsessive taste for symmetry and order. The evening newspaper, the Grand Forks Herald, lay folded in the middle of the lawn.
Floyd’s red Nissan was parked in the driveway. And the man himself appeared at the door, waved to Arnold, and strolled out to pick up his newspaper.
Arnold waved back.
“Look out for the thing in the woods,” he called, as Arnold passed.
Shouldn’t have said anything. Arnold increased his pace slightly, felt his cheeks grow warm.
He was now approaching the Fort Moxie Library.
The library was the town’s pride. The taxpayers had supported a bond issue, an architect from Bismarck had designed the structure to resemble a Greek temple, and contributions of both books and money kept the institution well-funded.
The Greek temple commanded the top of a rise surrounded by lawns which had just begun to turn brown. Two elms, a flagpole, a statue of a cavalry soldier (from the days when the town was really a fort), and a few woodland iris and honeysuckle bushes contributed to a sense of disconnectedness from the world outside. The library was a time warp, located in a town that did not even have a police officer. It was part Hellenic, part 1910. A pebbled walkway, lined with green benches, curved through the grounds. The benches were occupied by teenagers, or by older residents enjoying the late summer days. And one, the one directly in front of the temple, facing it, held a stranger, a young woman Arnold had never seen before. She was, as he was quick to note, as his breath left him and he ran off the side of the curb, a woman of surpassing beauty.
It would have been an exaggeration to say that Arnold never had luck with women. There had been a few in his life, perhaps a half-dozen who had bedded down with him, and even one or two who might have gone to the altar with him. But none of these, in the full blaze of daylight, were able to fire his boilers, so to speak. The women who might have been capable of doing that always frightened him, and so they inevitably ended on someone else’s arm while Arnold kept his fragile ego intact. He could say, to his shame, that no truly beautiful woman had ever rejected him.
The woman on the bench was truly beautiful.
She had liquid green eyes, and red-blond hair cut shoulder length. When she moved, the hair swirled and caught the light. Her features were finely-chiseled, aristocratic in the finest sense, illuminated by an inner energy that drove Arnold’s blood pressure well into the danger zone. Her expression suggested quite clearly that she would be unapproachable.
A book lay open on her lap, and a worn imitation-leather briefcase had fallen over at her feet. She was conservatively dressed in a light brown blouse and a dark bronze skirt.
Needless to say, it would never have occurred to Arnold to alter course, to venture a hello, or even a wave as he went by. Rather, he simply continued on, watching as best he could until he had crossed Patcher Street, and the beautiful young woman passed from sight behind Kaz Johansen’s yellow frame house.
Fifth Street just more or less stopped, went to dirt, and played out along a block where several houses were currently under construction, where only Al Conway actually lived. Arnold passed Al’s place, and continued to the end of the street.
There was an empty lot back there, beyond the construction, covered with thick grass and dead leaves. The lot mounted gradually into the wind screen. Arnold slowed, but did not stop. He felt proud of the fact that he was confronting his fears. He wondered whether the issue had ever been in doubt as he picked his way across uneven ground, moved up the short slope, and entered the trees.
The stated purpose of the tree belts is to protect towns from the winds that whip the prairie. During the previous spring, a poet who had c
ome from St. Louis to speak at the library had said the real reason for windscreens had nothing to do with the wind; it was that it hurt people to look at all that emptiness, all the way to the horizon, so they grew walls around themselves. The poet, Arnold guessed, had never been in Fort Moxie during the winter.
The narrow belt of woodland was very quiet.
He slowed to a walk. The wind moved softly through the upper branches, through patterns of sunlight. His fears had eased: The wood felt unthreatening and peaceful. The incident of the day before seemed unreal and very far away. These trees were his. Nothing frightening could move among them.
He picked up his pace. The jogging path came in from the left, and he eased onto it. The air was cool and invigorating, but it harbored the first suggestions of the long winter to come.
He thought about calling out to the voice. Challenging it. Hey, Voice. I’m back. But he hadn’t recovered that much of his courage. The forest moved around him. Branches swung, insects whispered in bushes, and the sounds of his passing echoed back at him.
The river appeared, off to the northeast. He was drawing close to the spot where The Encounter had occurred.
Arnold slowed down, moving at a deliberate pace, saving his energy. The path was moving now to the far side of the trees, the outside of the screen, where it continued while the river angled in. The black boulder loomed ahead.
He stopped.
The wind drew at him, pulled at his clothes, rippled across the grass.
“Are you here?” he asked, very softly, not entirely sure he had mouthed the words at all.
The branches creaked and sighed.
The river flowed.
A Voice in the Night Page 31