by Gil Brewer
“That’s all.”
He vanished behind the curtain. I took out my wallet and looked at the money, seven hundred and thirty dollars, saved from all the jobs. Then he returned and told me the price. I paid him and he went back there again. He returned with the correct change, laid it on the counter.
“Thanks,” I said.
He kept staring at me. Then his lips tightened and his face began to pale.
“You bastard!” he said.
He turned and ran back behind the curtain. I heard a car pass swiftly on the road outside. I found an empty carton, packed the stuff, and went out to the coupé.
I sat there in the car, staring at the store, but seeing nothing. The lights went out and somebody slammed the front door and locked it. I could hear the engine in Willy Watts’ tow-truck creaking as the night chilled down.
The house you were born in can change with the carpentry of years. Mine had not. The trees had grown some and the grounds were a weary tangle of vines, tall weeds, saplings, and torn wire fence. The gate by the road was down. I drove the car into the drive, thrust it deeply into crackling piles of brush and got out the flashlight.
There was no moon yet.
I turned and looked off across the valley toward the hillside where the Gunther farm was. Dimly, lights showed far over there. Suddenly the trees and the flow of land became painfully familiar. The house itself up there, with Lois inside. Memory was like warm rain.
I moved toward the tree-shadowed house. It was two-storied, large, and no one had lived here for nearly seven years. My heels clacked on a single exposed flag in the grass-choked front walk, then I was in damp matted leaves and weeds again. The porch steps were intact, and I stood there and smelled the cold emptiness of the house and blinked the flash on the boarded front door, thinking, How crazy can you get?
Something came bounding and ramming around the side of the house, took the porch railing at a clawing leap and started to growl. It was a large hound.
There was a lot of brown and white and much ear and paw and tongue, and we made friends under the flashlight. Then I tore the boards off the front door and we went on inside for a quick inspection.
It was dusty and large and even with the old furniture—very empty. Yet it was familiar. This house had been one of the things that drew me back; it was steeped in memories.
We came into the kitchen. I was trying the old pump at the zinc sink when I heard the car turn into the drive.
The hound lolled his tongue, head cocked, panting.
Feet scraped on the front porch.
“Al?” a woman called.
I stopped in the archway leading to the living room. I recognized the voice immediately and I could not believe it, didn’t want to believe it.
“Al, come out here, for goodness’ sake!”
I stood there blinking the light on and off. The abrupt anger that was inside me now was so savage I couldn’t think beyond it.
High heels scattered through the vestibule, scuffed and turned, then came toward me into the living room, groping. I put the light in her eyes as she moved toward me and I wished it was white fire. She held one hand up to shield her eyes and began laughing, pointing at me with that one hand up to shield her eyes. Her laughter cascaded in wild echoes through the house and the hound ran panting to her feet.
“Shut up, Noraine!”
My voice echoed and mingled with her laughter.
“I heard you were here, Al. It’s about time, too.”
I went into the living room, feeling crazy as hell, with a wild undercurrent of disbelief. If I’d stood there another moment, I would have struck her. I went over to a straight chair by the fieldstone fireplace and sat down. I shined the light on the floor and the hound came over and sniffed at the trembling bright white circle of light.
“Say something, Al. Can’t you ask me how come I’m here?” She laughed and I felt sick. The hound went out onto the front porch and I heard him ramming through the side yard.
“Al?”
“All right.”
“They said you were back. It’s all over town, like a brush fire.”
“Shut up!”
I looked at her and she was smiling at me with that same old smile.
“Let’s get out of here, Al. It’s creepy. Dirty, too.”
“How did you get here?”
“On a bus.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. I’m staying at White’s boarding house, just off Main Street.” She came over to me and tapped my shoulder. I could smell the clean perfume and the touch of her hand was very familiar.
“Why, Noraine—why?”
“You know the answer to that. To wait for you. I lost you—and then I remembered all those times when you were drinking. How you’d talk about this place, and I knew you had to come here. You couldn’t help it. So I came.” She hesitated, her tone softening. “I’d almost given up—it’s been a long time, Al.”
I listened to her breathing and sensed her impatience.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to my place.”
She was hoping.
“We’re not going anywhere together, Noraine. You should know that by now.”
She did not speak. I glanced at her again. The fine thick hair and the nose like a gentle ski-slide and the watchful eyes. The long, shapely body under a dark floppy coat. The collar was buttoned high up under her chin and she stood there on one high-heeled foot, rubbing the calf of her leg with the other foot. She looked cold. I hoped she was freezing.
“I’ve met the Gunthers,” she said, and there was a light lilt to her voice, the gentle warning. “Sam Gunther, and his son, Weyman. A real character, that Weyman—writes sermons for the preacher, twenty dollars apiece.”
“That so?”
“Yes. Weyman frightens me, sort of. They seem to have lots of money, the Gunthers. Sam’s really quite a guy. Then there’s the daughter, you know. Lois?”
“Lois.”
“I walk with Lois almost every day.”
“I see.”
“Al,” she said, “I’m not going to leave you alone, understand? We’re going to be right again. We’re together again, and that’s that.”
I stood up slowly, watching her.
“Al, this town’s scared about your coming like this. They hate you—they really hate you.” She shook her head slightly, her tone serious. “Al, why did you come back here—why?”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said, and for a moment she was the Noraine that had meant so much to me, lonely and pursued in the midst of her own pursuing. “I only know I had to come back.”
TWO
The house creaked and now rain fell outside in the deep grass. She did not move; her lips were slightly parted, hair thickly curling along her cheeks, her body hunched under the coat.
She looked down, sighed deeply, turned away, then stood there with her back turned. I held the beam of the flashlight on the floor and reflected light paled the room, the old furniture, the fallen draperies.
“Noraine,” I said, “go away. Go to a place where people know you and settle down.”
“Where are you going to stay?” she asked.
“Right here.”
She turned and looked at me. “What about us?”
I just looked at her.
“Al—you don’t belong here. Don’t you know that?”
“No.”
“You’re crowding something that doesn’t exist,” she said. “You’re pushing too hard—you always did.”
“Will you leave me alone?” I said.
“Sure.” She turned and walked over to the hall, little spurts of dust rising from the carpet under her heels.
She paused and looked back at me, not smiling. “I’m not leaving town, if that’s what you mean. I’m staying, Al—” She turned quickly and disappeared down the hall. I heard her open the door and cross the front porch, go down the steps into the yard. In a little while a car’s engine started and drov
e away.
The hound returned, flapping into the room, and I dubbed him “Bunk” for no particular reason. Between us, we got most of the dust off the leather couch in the small room across the hall where my father used to sit and scheme. I brought in the lamp and filled it, lit it and put the blankets on the couch. Then I turned the lamp out and took my shoes off and stretched out.
It was cold. Tomorrow I would fix the stove.
You could hear the mice in the walls.
Bunk was running up and down the upstairs hall in the dark, snuffling.
“… him hanging by a rope to that old deer horns you shot when you were thirteen when he give you hell for it. The vaults was empty. Sheriff Prouty cut him down … the vaults was empty …”
Morning was autumn again. Traces of frost lay pooled, patching whitely across the meadows to the woods and the hills. In the pale-blue sky, the sun was a glare of hard burning. On both sides of the valley, up the hills, wide and jagged scars, where too much timber had been felled, showed cruelly in the daylight. Somebody’s cornfield over there had been gouged man-deep, house-wide in three places, by erosion.
Bunk insisted on coming to breakfast with me. I ate at the diner amid a grand silence.
I wanted to get some supplies, some glass for a couple of broken windows at the house, and some tools—hammer, nails, broom—to clean the place up.
I started toward the general store, then decided I’d better see Kirk Hartmann, if he still existed. Kirk was a country lawyer who had once been a friend.
I drove down past the sawmill to the acreage of pine with the sprawling log house set far back from the road. Kirk was standing in the front yard smoking his pipe, staring straight up into the sky. The house had four additions on it and I knew Kirk had built them himself. He had not changed much, though there was a slight paunch that hadn’t been there eight years before.
I parked the car and walked across the drainage ditch by the roadside on a springy plank set there for that purpose.
“Hi, Kirk.”
He did not move, waiting with that complete indifference to anything unusual that was a part of him. Possibly if his house that he had laboriously constructed of hand-hewn logs over a period of fifteen or more years abruptly exploded skyhigh, Kirk would simply stand there smoking his pipe and lazily say, “Now, I wonder what could have caused that?”
“Those flying saucers,” he said.
“What?”
“I say, those flying saucers. I don’t know, Al—but I keep watching.”
“I see.”
He pointed his pipe at the sky. “Five times I swear I’ve seen them. Got every book about ‘em. Damned interesting.”
“You believe in them?”
“Probably not. But it’s fun.” He sucked on his pipe, grimaced and spat and knocked the pipe out against the trunk of a tall pine. He was a big man with a lazy attitude that was utterly false. He looked too lazy to walk ten feet, his eyes hooded, broad flat lips seldom moving. His hair was black and straight and he was wearing brown tweed trousers and an old ragged blue cardigan.
“I was up in Cross Glen,” he said. “Poking around. Hell of a field of iron pyrites up there. Anyway, saw one of ‘em and I got a picture of it. Coming straight across the valley.”
“Saw what?”
“Flying saucer. I sent it to the paper in Westfield. Guy came out, damned near drove me crazy—he’d made friends with considerable of Martian pilots, you see?” He shook his head. “I just keep an eye out, now—no more camera.”
“Well-”
“Have you seen Lois?”
“No.”
“Let’s go inside.”
He began walking, a long-legged lounge that seemed to get nowhere, only he covered ground like a Tennessee walking horse.
“Had breakfast?”
I told him I had stopped at the diner.
We were nearly to the front door. He suddenly bellowed. “Sally! Put on the coffee pot!”
Bunk, who had been ranging in pastureland across the road, suddenly appeared, coming toward us on the bias, nose down, tail up, a little mad.
“Cat,” Kirk said. “Your hound?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“After one of the cats.”
Bunk sniffed a circle around Hartmann, then lit a shuck for a grove of cedar beyond the far side of the house. We went on inside. The rooms were large, sprawling, the furniture low and large and heavy and sat in. Books were everywhere, on tables, shelves, the floor. A baby’s playpen was at the dining-room entrance, piles of toys scattered around it on the floor.
Four kids, ranging in age from perhaps four to seven, ran helling through the house and out the front door.
“Sally? Coffee?”
“There’s some left from breakfast. All right to warm it?”
“You know better than that. Sally—come here.”
I was suddenly uncomfortable. I heard her come swiftly through a hallway from the kitchen by the stairs. She halted by the newel post, frowned at us, looked at me and brushed a lock of damp brown hair from her right eye. She was carrying a dish towel, wearing a brown skirt and white blouse, a tiny white apron over the skirt.
“Hello, Sally.”
She said nothing, then swallowed and smiled. She was much heavier than when I had last seen her. She had that look of bed and childbirth. Her mouth was loosely sensual and she was long past the stage of caring about small things. Kirk had met her in Riverton before the war, married her the same week. It had been said that she had traveled the circuit when Kirk found her, made her an honest woman. But these were Pine Springs whispers.
Finally she said, “It’s Al Harper, isn’t it?”
“Sally!” Kirk bellowed. “Get that coffee!”
“It just kind of hit me, I guess,” she said. “I’m sorry, Al. I’m glad to see you’re back.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You look fine, Sally.”
Kirk’s voice was mildly accusative. “All right. Go get the coffee, Sally. We’ll try it from the beginning next time Al stops by.”
He stepped over to her, whacked her on the behind, and gave her a shove toward the kitchen. As she vanished, he lounged across the room and slumped in a leather armchair by a ceiling-high wall bookcase.
“Startled her,” he said. “How’s it going, Al?”
“All right.”
“Anybody thrown anything at you yet?”
“Just looks and a few words.”
He shrugged, dug out his pipe, loaded it, lit up, and sat there smoking, his eyes slightly bitter.
“They’d like to cut your heart out, Al.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re his son.”
I went over to a chair across from Kirk and slumped down. I hadn’t known it was going to be like this, yet now that I did know, it was as if it could have been no other way.
“What did you come back here for?”
“I don’t exactly know, Kirk.”
“You know, all right.”
We sat there a moment, not speaking.
I said, “The bank vault was empty. Could there be any chance that—?”
“No,” he interrupted. “I know what you’re thinking. You want to talk about it? I mean, plainly?”
I nodded.
“Well, I checked on murder, Al. That’s what you mean. I was there when old Prouty cut him down. I checked the rope carefully. I checked the—well, the throat, Al. It was legitimate suicide.”
“I see.”
“It took you long enough to come back here and ask about that.”
I didn’t say anything. Sally came in with a tray, coffee pot, two mugs. She set the tray on the small table at her husband’s elbow, glanced at me with a tight smile, then left. Kirk poured steaming black coffee into the large mugs, handed me one.
“What I thought, too, Al. Murder. Somebody finally got fed up enough to do away with old Cy.” He watched me closely as he spoke. “I was wrong.”
“Well, that�
�s that, then.”
“Maybe.”
“How do you mean?”
He shrugged, blew steam off the coffee and drank some. “Your father put the rope around his neck. He tied the knot, a good one, by the way. Then he stood on his own desk chair and tied the rope to the antlers on the wall. He booted the chair—clear across the room.”
“How much had there been in the vault, Kirk?”
He set his mug down and peered at me from beneath heavy black brows. “Two hundred and twenty-three thousand, something.” His voice changed to slight excitement. “Al, it caused havoc! You’ll never be able to imagine.”
I suddenly did not want to hear. I didn’t want to hear it, but I sat there listening and the picture he drew was bad.
“The bank failed,” he said. “Think of it! Here in this little farming town! A bank failure—panic. There wasn’t a thing left in the vault but a few negotiable bonds, and a couple sacks of coin. Pennies, mostly. The bank wasn’t insured by the F.D.I.C. It was organized before that came into effect, and your old man stayed clean of it. He had his reasons. Those that your father hadn’t skinned out of their money and homes and land, one way or another, were suddenly as flat as everybody else.” He paused, watching me closely.
“Go on,” I said.
“You’ve been away a long time,” he said, frowning. “You’ve forgotten how the people here live, what they believe, what kind of folks they are. They’re good people, Al—but he nearly killed them. Did kill a couple.”
“What?”
He sat back. “Try and imagine. Everybody hated him. He practically owned the town. He milked everybody. But those he hadn’t kept their money in his bank.” He shrugged. “Banks are safe nowadays, you know? Banks don’t fail any more. But this one did and it was hell, I tell you. Van Parker, the old man, he’d been saving every cent—skimping for years to put his adopted son through medical school. Van always said his son was never going to live in Pine Springs. When he heard the bank had failed, he came down and stood there staring at the vault. Everybody was yelling and hollering. They smashed the windows, tore the doors off the bank building—Van just turned and walked out to his flivver. He got it started and took it down the street wide open. Well, Mrs. Longwell had built a stone wall along the front of her property. Wall was seven feet high and about three deep, made of boulders and stones and rocks off her back acreage she was clearing. Van got that flivver flying and he ran it smash into the wall, head on. Aimed right at it. He went through the windshield, cut his throat, smashed his head. The wall fell on him and the flivver.”
