John Dawes, the neighbor across the street, watches with military binoculars, can’t figure out for the life of him why the Spanish-looking butler would play catch with the strange bachelor, both of them laughing, only one of them soaked with sweat when they go back into the house.
It isn’t the strangest thing he’s seen at 4700 Willow Fork Road, though.
Not by half.
• • •
Dusk is coming on.
Andrew’s fingers are yellow with turmeric and his squash soup is boiling when the phone chimes again.
He knows what it says.
Anneke Zautke
Dog tell, og tell.
Let Go, Let God.
Elvis has left the building.
Out of nowhere he cries.
For his dead policeman father.
For his dead user mentor.
But also for Anneke, who’ll have to learn for herself how hard it is when the second parent goes. How real it gets when you’re sweating down into the cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill and the Salvation Army. When the other parent isn’t there to tell you stories from before you were born. When you go in the attic and the plastic tchotchkes crumble in your hand, and you sob like a bitch when you realize your mom saved a little bundle of report cards from third and fourth grade because they said something nice about her kid.
About you.
And that those cards waited in that peeling old folder for your adult hand to fish them out and throw them away because there’s just nobody else in this world who’ll ever give a damn about them again.
Maybe you really and finally grow up when you see the wall behind the last box of mysteries and it’s just a wall.
Your wall now.
50
Andrew drives with the foreknowledge that he will see at least one deer, which has nothing to do with magic; these farm-mottled woods are teeming with them, and they fling themselves across the roads with such abandon that wise drivers scan the margins of the trees. Their once-balletic bodies lie strewn from here to Buffalo, and if more of them are visible on the great deer-killing buzz saw that is Interstate 81, that’s only because the highway department cuts the grass there. Here in the sticks they tumble into ditches choked with greenery, hidden from the eyes of motorists, but advertising their spoiling perfume every few miles to those who go on foot or bicycle or in the slow, open tractors that beetle along between farms.
Andrew is not beetling tonight.
He has opened up the Mustang’s 302 and it roars like something hungry, like something that has been waiting too long to run.
It is the day after Karl’s death, two days before his funeral, and Karl’s daughter is drunk. She has a lapful of her dad’s PBR and a bottle of Tullamore Dew between her feet, and she has turned the volume knob up almost as high as it goes. One of the classic rock stations; Andrew switches between them at every commercial, so he rarely knows which one he’s listening to. Whichever one it is, “From the Beginning” plays so loudly Andrew has to shout to speak to Anneke.
“Look!” he says, pointing across the road to his left, where a doe stands so still she might be made of felt, her eyes blazing coke-bottle green in the headlights, a tiara of fireflies winking about her head. Anneke does not look, just hangs her heavy shag of hair down and does her best to sing along with the radio. Ignorance of a song’s lyrics is not proving to be an impediment to Anneke tonight.
Andrew readies his hand above the horn and readies his foot for braking, but the doe does not stir, and, as always with her kind, he wonders afterward if he has really seen her.
Now he relaxes.
He has seen his nightly deer.
Anneke is watching the road now.
Andrew is tempted to do that naughty thing he used to do quite often in the days before sobriety—the very thing he had been doing when he wrecked the ’65.
Yes, let’s do this.
When he sees that the road is empty of traffic both coming and going, he slows to twenty miles per hour. He cuts his headlights now so they can see the ballet of fireflies where they twinkle in the low places on the farms to right and left.
Showing off.
Anneke loves it, smiles with her cheeks shining, her eyes big like the eyes of a little girl at the circus. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer still pours from the speakers, unaccompanied now. How beautiful the fireflies are, a small galaxy of them signaling to one another as the last violet light fails above them.
“Exquisite,” he breathes, unheard under the music, then pulls his lights back on.
“More!” she shouts. “Encore!”
Instead he speeds again, and she honks the Mustang’s horn, then howls from the window like a wolf.
• • •
At the bluffs.
The whispering of the surf makes him think of the thing that came from the water at him in a dream.
Not a dream.
You were flying without your body and you almost didn’t make it back.
But he loves these bluffs and so does Anneke and he’ll be damned if he’ll let some bloated nasty in a sunken ship keep him away. The ship’s far out, and the Russian’s cabin is a good mile away.
They’re safe.
The two witches, master and apprentice, are alone.
The two recovering alcoholics, one holding on, one in full relapse, are alone.
The grieving daughter and her best friend are alone.
And kissing.
When they arrived he spread an Indian throw over the high grass and they both comically rolled on it to flatten it out; it’s still lumpy beneath them, but they want to be off the main trail in case some other celebrants arrive. The Sterling Renaissance festival is opening soon and musicians, actors, and vendors wander out here in the summer months to sing, drink, and couple. Oswegian teenagers also frequent these bluffs, breaking into parked cars, smoking pot, drinking hooch. But now nothing stirs but the lake and the breeze. Andrew and Anneke lie together, cocooned in their small, grassy cell.
Hidden.
Occult, in the original and medical meaning of the word.
And kissing.
They had barely spoken on the walk from the car, just trudged out here, hopped the rusted guardrail, hiked the rise that, by daylight, gives on the lake and the little promontory one dare not walk now. They had just gotten the blanket down when her mouth was on his, hot and boozy.
And the kissing was good.
Is good.
She fumbles for his belt, and, to his utter surprise, he stops her, playing goalie like a good Catholic girl.
She stops, squints her bleary eyes at him.
“Don’t you want this?”
He sees that she’s crying.
“I’m just afraid you don’t want this.”
“You’re wrong.”
Her strong hands on his belt again, more insistent; she unbuckles it. He scooches back away from her.
“Are you fucking serious?” she says, wristing a tear out from under her eye.
“Anneke, you’re plastered.”
“So?”
“You’ll regret this, that’s all.”
She pushes him down.
Holy shit, is she actually stronger than me?
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But regret?”
She’s too drunk to say the words she wants to say, but shakes her head. He gets it. Anneke doesn’t do regret, or at least she tells herself that enough that it has become her mantra. If she were in Game of Thrones, her household words would be, “Yes, I did do that. And fuck you.”
“I need this,” she says.
She’s straddling his hips now, towering over him, the horns of the moon behind her and an embarrassment of stars about her like a fay court, bearing witness to her need and to her primacy in this.
My
father is dead and you’re going to help me fuck some of it away. Just that first little bit of it. Because when the tribe shrinks by one, the sons and daughters go into the fields and make increase.
This won’t be Papillon.
She’s not laughing with him now.
She’s fearsome.
Will this bring the raven down?
“Do you love me?”
Her silhouette nods.
“Brother. Not husband. But we’re doing this tonight.”
She bends down, a tear falling ridiculously into his nostril, but this is still not funny, and she grabs two fistfuls of his inky hair, painfully, the hair at the temples. She kisses him softly, though, wetly, until the tension leaves his body. He feels it in the crotch now, that first twitch, and she feels it, too.
Off him now, and down with his pants.
She has never put her mouth to him before, perhaps never to a man before; she doesn’t entirely know what she’s doing, hurts him a little, but it doesn’t matter.
It feels to Andrew like that warm, wet contact point between them is the geographical center of all creation.
This is so unlike Althea—he feels this; his heart is as warm as the marrow of a roast lamb’s bone, melting like that, and she could beak under his sternum and lick it right out of him.
They both know it’s going to happen.
And it does.
Urgently.
Quickly.
She barely gets her jeans off.
He spends around her navel, in it, abundantly like a twenty-year-old, and gasps as he does.
She clenches her teeth to keep from sobbing, not with pleasure, he’s sure she didn’t come, but with grief and thwarted love and mortality and gratitude for this little bit of warmth, this sliver of divinity, and she holds him, her wet belly hitching.
He knows he’ll hear the sound a second before he does, and it seems so clichéd and awful and obvious that he’s angry at whatever passes for God that he should have to hear it, that the gears should move so predictably and so intractably toward sorrow.
Always sorrow.
A raven in the trees.
Kwaaar!
He tries to tell himself it’s a crow, and maybe it is.
He only hears it once.
And he isn’t sure.
51
Noisy crows in the trees greet Jim Coyle, former professor of comparative religions at Cornell University, as he clambers out of his Toyota. He arms up his modest bag of groceries—important not to overshop when you’re about to leave a place—and heads for the cabin.
He has mostly enjoyed his half-summer on Lake Ontario. The landlady lives in Pennsylvania, does all her business by mail and over the Internet; nobody disturbs him out here, and he is halfway through with his manuscript, working title The God Mechanism: Making Friends with Death. He’s ahead of schedule and still has most of his advance in the bank.
The time away from his wife has been restorative, too. The system they’ve used since her son moved out is simple: When we need space, someone leaves. When we miss each other, we reunite. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Use Protection” rule has, at least on his end, been vestigial since he turned sixty—he just doesn’t care about all the wrestling and sweating anymore, and has no feelings approaching jealousy regarding Nancy. He half hopes someone is paying attention to her that way—she’s still aesthetically attractive enough—as long as she doesn’t give him permanent walking papers; he would really miss her, even if he doesn’t easily respond to her below the waist these days. Truth be told, he feels guilty about his apathy in that department. Hormone therapy has occurred to him, but it would undoubtedly involve testosterone, and testosterone is his prime suspect in the case of his assholish youth. Interrogating girlfriends about past lovers, obsessing over sophomores and freshmen and sometimes bedding them, getting in loud fights on pay phones, it was all a ridiculous storm of ego from which he was glad to feel himself emerging in middle age. He began balding young; he purses his lips, remembering how carefully he used to hide his patchy tonsure in the days before baseball caps were cool for adults.
Nancy had been good for him—sane, unromantic, cerebral. Easy to laugh, slow to anger. An early music professor. Unsure she wanted to marry at all, but finally consenting on a trip to Chicago when he asked her on the Navy Pier Ferris wheel after a live taping of the NPR show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
If only he still wanted her.
That way.
“You know who I do want that way,” he mumbles into his elbow-crooked reusable Pick & Save grocery bag (plastic is not okay) while he fumbles his key at the lock, “that Russian tea cake who moved into Dragomirov’s place, that’s who.”
The crows yap at him.
He unsacks whole-wheat linguine, alla vodka pasta sauce, cold-pressed olive oil, half a gallon of organic skim milk, and a half dozen other items one might expect a health-and-environment-conscious upper-middle-class intellectual to unsack, smirking at his own bourgeois habits as he cabinets and refrigerates his goods.
“Not my fault,” he tells nobody. “I ate enough beanie wienies and mac and cheese growing up. I get artisanal Tuscan boules if I want them.”
But back to the niece of the unfortunate Mr. Dragomirov.
That mole on her cheek drives him to distraction—a classic beauty mark worthy of Marie Antoinette—and she has the firmest body he’s seen on someone her age who wasn’t a movie star or aerobics instructor. He half imagined she had smiled at him that way, but knows better than to embarrass himself. She’s way out of his bald, myopic, professor-bearded league, no matter how well-stocked his cabernet shelf may be or how close he came to beating her brilliant uncle in chess. All right, he wasn’t actually close to beating him, not once in their half dozen games, but he made him think.
Now that the locust swarm of Russians has dispersed, she seems to be on her own. Good riddance to that horde, too. He actually caught one of them, a man the color of ashy leather wearing socks and sandals, standing in his yard, swaying drunk, blatantly pissing on his basil plants.
But it was a funeral, after all.
Too bad about Dragomirov.
A likable fellow.
With an eminently likable niece.
Who enjoys swimming in the lake.
It has occurred to him to offer his services as guide, maybe take her to the McIntyre Bluffs for one of the world’s second-best sunsets, but he knows that she’ll be laughing inside, even if she treats him politely.
No, he’ll steer wide of that Charybdis, and count himself lucky to return to his pragmatic Penelope and her excellent collection of viola da gamba CDs.
As he muses on these things, he plucks a sweater from the back of a chair.
Cold in here.
Isn’t it July?
He thinks about checking the air conditioner to see if he left it on, remembers that there isn’t one. It’s just cold. This makes him feel a spasm of anxiety—just one cold summer day arms his über-Republican lich of a dad (eighty-eight and still shoots trap) with enough anti-global-warming jokes to last through a whole snowless winter and an Easter in T-shirts.
But it’s warm outside.
Isn’t it?
He walks outside again, and feels sunshine on his face, feels the pleasantly warm lakeside air. A little cool in the shade, but downright cold in his house. He walks around the side of the house now, crows a-caw behind him, and sees that there’s something odd about his bedroom window. It takes him a moment to register what it is.
Condensation?
Water has beaded on the panes, trickles down in rivulets.
His bedroom window is sweating like a Pepsi can on a picnic.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he says, heading back into the dark mouth of the cabin’s front door. He goes to his bedroom, finds the door to that shut. He n
ever shuts interior doors.
He grabs the knob.
Cold.
Ice cold.
And locked.
He never locks interior doors.
It occurs to him to call the police, and then he chuckles at his own cowardice.
Hello, officer? Yes, I’d like to report a suspicious locking and a temperature anomaly. Is there a squad car in the vicinity? With a thermos of hot cocoa and a trauma counselor?
He goes outside again.
The crows are quiet.
He glances at their tree, thinking they’ll be gone, but they aren’t gone. They’re just quiet. And watching him.
He looks at his Toyota.
Just get in it and go—something’s wrong.
Hi, Nancy. I left all my clothes and books and my computer in the cabin because my room was cold and locked and birds were looking at me.
I know, but it’s the WAY they were looking at me.
He looks at the crows again.
Still watching him.
Get stuffed, birds.
Jim gives in to a juvenile impulse and flips the branch gallery off.
He walks across the yard now and looks at the window.
He can’t quite see inside his bedroom for the condensation.
He uses his sweatered elbow to wipe a pane dry, looks in.
Someone’s in there!
His heart skips a beat, then hammers.
A strange man is sitting on his bed, reading something.
A strange, feral man in a filthy T-shirt.
Is that my manuscript?
He calms down a bit—people who read aren’t dangerous.
He knocks on the window.
The young man turns around.
Wild-bearded, black haired. Wild-eyed, too. Probably one of the damned Russians. Not the one who pissed on the basil, though. That one had a potbelly and this one is skinny. Emaciated, even. The front of the T-shirt is visible now.
Pac-Man?
The man smiles at him, but it’s not friendly.
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