Summer of Night

  The Old Man tried to call J. P. Congden through much of Monday, but the man was never home. Duane stood in the doorway and eavesdropped that afternoon when Constable Barney drove up with a complaint.

  "Well, Darren," Barney had said to the Old Man, "J. P."s telling everybody that you killed his dog.”

  The Old Man had shown his teeth. "The goddamn dog was attacking my boy. It was a big stupid Doberman with a microscopic little brain about the size of Congden's dick."

  Barney shuffled his hat in his hands, running his fingers along the slick sweatband. "J. P. says that the dog was inside his house. That he found its body in the house. That somebody broke in and killed it."

  The Old Man spat in the dust. "Goddamn it, you know that's as much of a lie as most of J. P. Congden's traffic arrests. That dog was inside when we knocked. Then when my boy and I came back around the shed after looking at Art's Cadillac… which by all rights shouldn't be there, you know. It's illegal for a third party to buy a wrecked vehicle before the accident's completely investigated. Anyway, the dog jumped "Duane after we went into the backyard, which means that piss-ant Congden let it out knowing that it would attack us."

  Barney looked the Old Man in the eye. "You don't have any evidence of that, do you?"

  The Old Man laughed. "Why did he send you after me? Does Congden have evidence that I was the one who killed that Doberman?"

  "He said that the neighbors saw you."

  "Bullshit. Mrs. Dumont lives next to Congden and she's blind. The only other folks on that block that'd know me is Miz Jensen, and she's up in Oak Hill with her boy, Jimmy. Besides, I had a legal right to be on that property. Congden illegally impounded my brother's car and then tore the doors off it so the true nature of his accident wouldn't be revealed.”

  Barney set his hat on his head and tugged at the bill of it. "What are you talking about, Darren?"

  "I'm talking about two missing doors on the driver's side of that Cadillac that hold evidence of the accident. Red paint. Red paint like the paint on the truck that tried to run my boy down a week ago today."

  Barney removed a notebook from his pocket, wrote in it with a stubby pencil, and looked up. "Did you notify Sheriff Conway?”You're goddamned right I called him," said the Old Man. He was agitated, rubbing his cheeks. He had shaved that morning and the absence of stubble there seemed to disconcert him. "He said he'd 'look into it." I told him he'd damn well better look into it, that I was going to file charges against him as well as Congden if they didn't carry out a thorough investigation."

  "So you think there was a second vehicle?"

  The Old Man glanced back at Duane standing in the doorway. "I know that my brother didn't drive that Cadillac into the bridge at seventy miles an hour on his own," he said to Constable Barney. "Art was a damned fool about obeying speed limits, even out on shitty roads like Jubilee College Road. No, somebody ran him off the road."

  Barney walked back to his car. "I'll call Conway and tell him I'm checking into it as well."

  Behind the screen door, Duane blinked. The town constable had no part in investigating deaths on county highways. What he was doing was a favor, pure and simple.

  "Meanwhile," said the constable, "I'll tell our justice of the peace that his neighbors must have been mistaken. Perhaps the'dog died of natural causes. The mean sonofabitch has gone after me a few times." He extended his hand to the Old Man. "I'm damned sorry about Art, Darren."

  Surprised, the Old Man shook the constable's hand. Duane stepped out and stood next to his father while they watched the car recede down the long drive. Duane thought that if he turned to look at his father right then, he would find tears in the Old Man's eyes for the first time since the accident. He did not turn to look.

  That evening they went to Uncle Art's home to get a suit to take into the Peoria mortuary the next morning.

  "Damn fool thing," muttered the Old Man as they drove the four miles in the pickup. "They're not going to show him off, just incinerate him and the coffin. Art might as well be nude for all it matters to him or us."

  Duane recognized the grumbling as the sign of another day without alcohol as much as grief or general bad temper. The Old Man was nearing a record for the past couple of years.

  This trip was what Duane had been waiting for. He hadn't wanted to make a big deal out of searching for signs of whatever book Uncle Art had found and was bringing over to share when he was killed, but he knew the Old Man would have to go over there before the funeral.

  It was dark when they arrived. Uncle Art lived in a small white farmhouse set back several hundred yards from the road. He leased the house from the family who still farmed the surrounding fields-set in beans this summer-and only the vegetable garden behind the house was Uncle Art's handiwork. The Old Man looked at the garden a moment before they went in the back door, and Duane knew that he was thinking about how they'd have to come over and tend it. In a few weeks they'd be eating the tomatoes that Uncle Art loved so much.

  The house wasn't locked. Duane blinked and adjusted his glasses as he entered, feeling the grief and sense of loss strike him anew. He realized that it was the scent of Uncle Art's pipe tobacco in the still, trapped air. In that second Duane realized how temporary life was, how fleeting any person's presence was: a few books, the scent of tobacco that a person would never enjoy again, a few clothes that would be used by others, the inevitable snapshots, legal papers, and correspondence that would mean so much less to someone else. A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.

  "I'll be just a minute," said the Old Man, almost whispering for a reason neither understood but both obeyed. "You can stay in here." They had walked through the kitchen into the darker 'study."

  Duane snapped on a light and nodded. The Old Man disappeared into the bedroom. Duane heard the closet door being opened.

  Uncle Art's house was small: only a kitchen, a 'study' converted from the unused dining room, a living room barely big enough to hold a BarcaLounger, many bookshelves, two armchairs on either side of a table with a chessboard-Duane recognized the game he and Uncle Art had been playing three weekends earlier-and a large console television set. The small bedroom was the last room. The front door opened onto a small cement porch that looked out on about two acres of yard. No visitors ever entered or left by the front door, but Duane knew that Uncle Art had enjoyed sitting on the front porch in the evening, smoking his pipe and looking out north over the fields. One could hear traffic on Jubilee College Road easily enough, but the cars were not visible because of the hillside.

  Duane shook himself out of his reverie and tried to concentrate. Uncle Art once had mentioned that he kept a journal-had kept one every year since 1941. Duane thought that whatever book he had mentioned on the phone was gone-ta ken by Congden or whoever-but there might be some mention of it.

  He clicked on the lamp on Art's cluttered desk. The dining room had been the biggest room in the house, and the" study" was floor-to-ceiling bookcases holding mostly hardcover editions and more low shelves in the center of the room on either side of the huge door Art had used as his desk.

  The desk held bills, the telephone, stacks of correspondence which Duane only flicked through, clippings of chess columns from Chicago and New York papers, magazines, cartoons from The New Yorker, a framed photograph of Art's second wife, another frame holding a drawing by da Vinci of a helicopter-like machine, a jar of marbles, another jar of red licorice-Duane had raided that jar for as long as he could remember-and scraps of paper holding old shopping lists, lists of fellow union members from the Caterpillar plant, lists of Nobel Prize winners, and a myriad of other things. No journal.

  The desk had no drawers. Duane looked around the room. He could hear the Old Man going through drawers in the bedroom, probably finding underwear and socks. It would only take
another minute.

  Where would Uncle Art keep a journal? Duane wondered if it was in the bedroom. No, Art wouldn't write in bed. He'd fill his daily entry here, at his work desk. Only there was no book here. No drawers.

  Books. Duane sat in the old captain's chair, feeling how the varnish had been worn away by his uncle's arms. He would write in the journal every day. Probably every evening, sitting here. Duane extended his left hand. Uncle Art was left-handed.

  One of the low bookshelves near the left trestle-base of the big door of a desk was within reach. It was actually a double shelf, with books facing outward and others-more than a dozen untitled volumes-facing inward, almost invisible in the darkness under the desk. Duane pulled one of the books out: leatherbound; heavy, quality paper; about five hundred pages. There was no printing within, only a tight script written with an old-fashioned pen. The script filled each page and was not only illegible, it was unreadable. Literally.

  Duane spread the volume open and leaned closer under the lamp, adjusting his glasses as he did so. The entries were not in English. The tightly scrawled pages looked as if they had been written in some hybrid of Hindi or Arabic, a solid wall of scribbles, loops, arabesques, and squiggles. There were no separate words; the lines were one inseparable, indecipherable tangle of unknown symbols. But at the top of each column of text there were numbers, and these were uncoded. Duane looked at the top of this page and read 19.3.57.

  Duane knew that Uncle Art had often said that Europe's-and most of the world's-way of writing the date with the day, then the month, then the year, made more sense than the American way. "Littlest to biggest," he'd said to his nephew when Duane was six. "Makes a hell of a lot more sense that way." Duane had always agreed. He was looking at his uncle's journal entry for March 19, 1957.

  He set the book back, pulled out the one set farthest to the left. The one easiest to reach. The first page of scribbles read 1.1.60. The last page, unfinished, lay under a heading of 11.6.60. Uncle Art had not made an-entry on Sunday morning, but he had written in his journal on Saturday evening.

  "All set?" The Old Man was standing in the doorway, holding a suit still in the dry cleaner's cellophane, with Uncle Art's old gym bag in the other hand. He stepped into the circle of light near the desk and nodded at the book which Duane had instinctively closed. "Is that what Art was bringing you?"

  Duane hesitated only a second. "I think so."

  "Bring it along then." The Old Man went out through the kitchen.

  Duane turned out the light, stood thinking about the other eighteen years of personal thoughts held in the volumes under the desk, and wondered if he was doing the wrong thing. Obviously the journals were in some sort of personal code. But Duane was good at breaking codes. If he broke this code, he would be reading things that Uncle Art had not meant for his eyes, or any eyes, to see.

  But he wanted me to know what he found. He sounded excited about it. Serious, but excited. And perhaps a little scared.

  Duane took a breath and lifted the heavy book, sensing his uncle's presence all around him now in the smell of tobacco, the familiar mustiness of the hundreds and hundreds of books, the scent of leather on the cover, even the slight, pleasant scent of his uncle's perspiration-the clean smell of a work-ingman's sweat.

  It was very dark in the room now. The sense of Uncle Art's presence was a bit unnerving, as if the ghost of the man were standing there behind Duane, urging him to take the book, urging him to sit down there now, turn on the light, and read it with the spirit leaning over him. Duane half expected a cold touch of a hand on his neck.

  Walking, not hurrying, Duane went out through the kitchen to join his father in the truck.

  Dale and Lawrence had played ball all day despite the threatening clouds and cloying humidity, and by dinnertime they were saturated with dirt that had turned to mud where their sweat had run in rivulets. Their mother saw them coming out the kitchen window and made them stand in the back stairway and strip to their Jockey shorts before she'd let them enter. Dale got the job of carrying the clothes down to the back room of the basement where the washing machine sat.

  Dale hated the basement. It was the one part of their big old house that made him nervous. It was OK in the summer when he almost never had to come down here, but in the winter it was his job to come down every evening after dinner and shovel coal into the hopper.

  The stairs to the basement were each at least two feet high, made for someone with a greater-than-human stride. The huge concrete stairs wound to the left as they went down between the outside and kitchen walls, and the effect was that the basement seemed much farther down than it should be. Dungeon stairs, Lawrence called them.

  The naked bulb at the top of the stairs shed almost no light down here where the corridor ran back to the furnace. There was another light beyond the furnace, but it had to be turned on by a hanging cord, as did the one in the coal bin. Dale glanced to his right at the opening to the coal bin as he passed it. It was not a door, really, just a four-foot opening in the wall, stepping up to the higher level of the bin. From floor to ceiling, it was only five feet in the little room and Dale knew how hard it was for his father to crouch in there and shovel coal. The hopper, door now closed, angled from the corridor to the bin so that one shoveled down into its waiting maw. Behind the hopper, seeming to fill the end of the short corridor where Dale now stood, was the ancient furnace itself: a huge and scabrous hulk of metal with its tentacles of pipe running every which direction.

  What Dale hated most about the coal bin on those winter nights when he had to shovel down here wasn't the work-although he had calluses on his hands through the winter-or the coal-dust taste that lingered in the back of his mouth even after he brushed his teeth; no, it was the crawlspace at the back of the bin.

  The far wall ran about three feet from the cement floor and ended just a couple of feet below the ceiling, revealing a dirt and stone floor, waterpipes, and a glimpse of cobwebs. Dale knew that the space ran under much of the room that his father used as an office when he was home and continued on under the huge front porch. He could hear mice and larger rodents scurrying in there when he was shoveling coal, and one cold night he had turned quickly to see small, red eyes staring out at him.

  Dale's parents often complimented him on how diligently he filled the hopper, how quickly he worked. For Dale, those twenty or so minutes every winter night were the worst part of his day, and he was willing to work at breakneck speed just to get the damned hopper filled and to get out. He loved it when the coal bin had just been filled and he had only to stand near the hopper and shovel. Later in the month, when the coal was reduced to a low heap in the far corner, he had to walk the width of the bin, lift the load, carry it nine feet across the room, and dump it in, with his back to the crawlspace.

  Not shoveling coal was one of the reasons Dale loved summer. One glance now told him that there was only a tiny heap of black anthracite in the far corner. Light from the top of the stairs barely cast a glow in the bin; the crawlspace was utter blackness.

  Dale found the first light cord, blinked in the sudden glare, went around the mass of furnace into the second room-used for nothing but holding the furnace, passed through the third room where his dad had a workbench with only a smattering of tools, and curved right again into the far room where his mother kept the washer and dryer.

  His father had said that it was a bitch to get those machines down here, and that if and when they moved, the washer and dryer stayed. Dale believed him; he remembered his dad, the delivery guys from Sears, Mr. Somerset, and two other neighbor men wrestling with those machines for well over an hour. This back room had no windows-none of the basement rooms did-and the light cord dangled in the center. Near the south wall, a circular pit with a three-foot diameter seemed to drop into darkness. It was the huge sump pump that kept water out of a downstairs set too deep for the local water table. Still, the basement had flooded four times in the four and half years they'd lived here, and Dale's dad
once had to wade back here in water over two feet deep to fix the pump.

  Dale tossed the filthy clothes onto the top of the washing machine, tugged the light out as he passed, and moved quickly-back room to workroom, workroom to furnace room, furnace room to corridor-not looking into the coal bin this time-then the ten giant steps up and around to the top step. It was so cool and damp in the basement that it came as a shock to feel the clammy air through the back screen door and to see the soft twilight above Grumbacher's house to the west.

  Dale padded quickly through the kitchen, embarrassed to be wearing just his underpants. Lawrence was already splashing in the tub and making submarine attack noises. Luckily, Dale's mom was out on the front porch, so he half-skated down the hallway in his bare feet, ran up the stairs, circled the landing, and went into his room to get his robe before his mom came back in. He lay on his bed with the little reading lamp on, skimming through an old copy of Astounding Science Fiction until it was his turn to take a bath.

  Once alone downstairs, in his quiet and lighted corner of the basement, it took Duane McBride less than five minutes to crack the code.

  Uncle Art's journal looked as if it had been kept in Hindi, but it was simple English. There weren't even any transpositions. Of course, it helped that Duane had shared his uncle's fascination with Leonardo da Vinci.

  The Renaissance genius had kept his own diary in a simple code: writing reversed so that it could be read in a mirror. Duane brought a hand mirror over to his worktable and there was the entry in English, running from right to left. Uncle Art had ran the words together so that the code would not be too obvious; he'd also connected the letters at the top, which gave the line of print its oddly Arabic or Vedic look. Instead of periods, he'd used a symbol which looked like a reversed capital F with two dots before it. A reversed F with one dot was a comma.