When the phone rang Fenton Breece answered it in tones of sepulchral dignity, but there did not seem to be anyone there or, more properly, anyone with anything to say, for all he could hear was a labored catarrhal breathing. This went on for a few seconds and then there was a mechanical click when the phone was hung up, and he thought, They know I’m here. He was sitting at his desk. He was wearing a burgundy silk lounging robe and matching houseshoes and silverrimmed reading glasses on a cord about his neck. He put aside the funeral director’s journal he’d been reading when the phone interrupted and opened the drawer of the desk and took out a German Luger he’d taken to carrying of late. He laid the weapon on the ink blotter before him and sat studying it: there was something sinister about its symmetry, something lethal in its craftsmanship. Something efficient, but he’d read somewhere the Germans were like that: when the death factories were running fulltilt three shifts a day, they’d had cost efficiency reports on the systematic extinction of the Jewish people figured to the last mark. His father had told him once he’d taken the pistol from an officer in the Luftwaffe, but Breece had always figured he’d just bought it like he did everything else.
Past the window the street was a blur of blowing snow, and a vague anger touched him. He ought to be feeling cozy and Badgerlike with the exquisite feeling of being snowed in and the world snowed out, but he was not. He ought to be sitting before the fire with the Tyler girl against his shoulder and a demitasse of Cognac in his hand and soft music adding ambience to the room, but he was not that either. He was drifting in the icechoked backwaters of paranoia, and he could feel them, cold and black, rising about his upper thighs. He’d been navigating these perilous seas for some time, and every knock was a man in khakis with a warrant in his hand, every phone call the IRS auditing him for the last twenty-five years, every letter in the mailbox a note saying flee, all is discovered. I’ve just got to put it out of my mind, he thought. Either that or I’ve got to do something. He adjusted the reading glasses back on his nose, and he had read two paragraphs when someone began to pound on the front door. He rose. He hesitated and then remembered the slick streets: it’s been a bad wreck, two or three dead, he told himself comfortingly. But he took up the Luger anyway and shoved it into the pocket of his dressing gown before he went to answer the door.
The oak door was latched with a security chain that he left in place, opening the door a scant three inches.
A motley crew indeed. Twelve or fifteen felthatted and overalled men bundled against the cold assembled with the stoop full and more aligned tense and silent about them. Young or old, they all had in common the set anger in their faces and the utter implacability of their manner. Jaws knotted with lumps of chewing tobacco, and they all seemed to be armed, some clutching rifles and others just sticks, and he thought he saw a ballbat or two. The foremost, who seemed the leader, opened his mouth to speak, and for an insane moment Breece thought he might break into song, for save the fierce outrage of their eyes, they looked not unlike perverse and rustic carolers come to herald the yuletide.
He didn’t know from where the strength to speak came, but it did. I’ll be right with you, he said brightly. He smiled, gestured toward the robe. I’m not dressed to receive company.
He slammed the door to and threw the deadbolt and went in an awkward fat man’s run through the foyer and lounge, behind him he heard the impact of shoulders slamming against the door. He went down a hall into the back. He locked that door behind him and ran past gleaming tables bloodgrooved like the sacrificial tables of ancient pagans andpast bizarre tubeappended contraptions like the props to a madman’s dreams and through one last door to the garage bay where the hearse sat waiting. He pushed a red button mounted on the wall and the bay door rose electrically to the snow blowing slantwise in the streetlamps. He climbed hastily into the hearse and cranked the engine and had already rolled four or five feet when he abruptly slammed on the brakes and cut the switch. He pounded his forehead hard with a fist. Sweet Jesus, he said. He clambered back out and went back into the embalming area.
He’d taken to carrying the girl with him to work and driving her home at night, and she was here today. He uncovered her where she napped on the couch and caught her up, half-carrying and half-dragging her toward the hearse. It was hard going for she was slack and lolled loosely and he was breathing hard. Hurry, hurry, he kept telling her. He opened the door on the passenger side and shoved her in. Her head swung bonelessly and she sat erect a moment then her upper torso dropped and she slid onto the steering wheel. The door slammed hard on her ankle. Jesus, baby, he said, contrite. I’m so sorry. He tried to move the foot but each time he moved it it slid back before he could get the door closed.
Goddamn it, he screamed at her. What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I’m in a hurry here? Can’t you do anything for yourself? Can you not do so simple a thing as pick up your foot?
He left with the tires smoking bluely and her ankle still dangling from the door, steering lefthanded and holding her about the shoulders with his right. When the hearse hit the icy pavement it slewed sickeningly broadside but miraculously pointed the way he intended going, and he floored the accelerator and shot past the front of the funeral home. He glanced toward it. They had the door battered down until it hung crazily on one hinge, and their heads all turned as one when he streaked past, and they were running yelling to their cars.
He ran the stop sign at the intersection but he had to brake to make the left turn at the next block and when he did he could see already a faint wash of light approaching through the snow. He kept fumbling for the windshield wipers. He chanced releasing her long enough to steady the wheel with his right hand and turn on the lights and windshield wipers and grab her again before she slid out the flapping door.
Coming off the Centre hill he was going over seventy miles an hour and snow was coming so hard he could barely see the road. Telephone poles were coming like pickets in a fence when the dead girl suddenly folded forward into the steering wheel. When he jerked her back the steering wheel cocked and the hearse went drifting across the ice in a caterwauling of protesting rubber. It went over the embankment in a sudden eerie silence save the small explosions of sumac branches splintering then struck a utility pole. There was a simultaneous sound of splintering pine he felt in his solar plexus and folding wrenching metal and all the glass going and tortured wire pulled tight as a catapult, then the swinging upper half of the utility pole, sharp end first, slammed into and through the hood.
He leapt out into the brush and immediately pitched forward onto the earth. Something was wrong with his left leg, it accordioned somehow beneath him and he could not rise. He crawled around the front through a frozen field of last year’s cornstalks and to the other side and grasped the dead girl andpulled her out into the snow. Already he could see the play of lights and hear men yelling, and the first of them were slamming cardoors and starting down the embankment. Above the hearse two electrical wires were touching and shorting out, and they kept snapping and sending arcs of bright blue fire off into the night. He locked his left elbow about her throat and began to drag her into the frozen field.
Breece had never done much physical work as he had the wherewithal to hire everything done and he’d had no idea crawling brokenlegged across frozen cornrows dragging a dead girl entailed so much physical exertion. Could he have hired this done he would have in a flash but he could not. He made it perhaps forty or fifty feet into the field, not knowing where he was going, for he was fleeing from not to: then the men ran yelling out of the brush into the field.
Breece remembered the gun. He could feel it cold against his belly where the robe twisted beneath him. He released the girl and withdrew the gun and sat holding it uncertainly for a moment, then holding the gun bothhanded he took the barrel tentatively into his mouth. It was smooth and cold but somehow not unpleasant. There was a faint taste of acrid gunpowder, gun oil, old violence.
You stop right there, he to
ld them around the gun barrel. You come any closer and I’ll blow my head off.
They hesitated, more dumbfounded than intimidated: they’d expected to be shot at but here he was crouched in the blowing snow with the pistol in his mouth threatening to do what they’d traveled so hard and fast this night to do themselves.
The foremost man halted before Breece and leant forward with his hands on his overalled knees. He had a florid faceand washedout outraged eyes, and Breece knew he’d seen him somewhere before, perhaps the Bellystretcher. You go ahead, you worthless son of a bitch, the man said. And save me the fifteen cents it would cost to bust a cap on you.
I’ll do it in a second, Breece thought. I’ll count to five and then I’ll do it. Ten.
Abruptly the fat man straightened and kicked the gun viciously away. Breece felt teeth break away in his jaw, felt bits of them on his tongue like shards of broken glass, and when the pistol went it tore out the right corner of his mouth and blood welled and dripped off his chin into the snow.
They’d been trying not to look at the girl but now they had to. Lord God, one of them said. They stood before this strange pair of lovers in a sort of perverse awe, aspirants before some strange god they couldn’t even begin to fathom how to worship.
One of them had retrieved the pistol and inspected it. Hey, a Luger, he said. He shoved it into his hip pocket. What are we goin to do with him? he asked the redfaced man.
Breece was whimpering softly, like a puppy outside a door whimpering in the cold.
Just whatever, the fat man said. Do any fuckin thing you want to as long as I don’t have to touch him.
He knelt before the dead girl and adjusted her upper clothing then pulled the gown down over her naked hips. Jesus Lord, he breathed. There was real pain in his face, and tenderness in his touch.
Two of the men hauled Breece erect and dragged him toward the road like some loathsome weight that must yet be borne. They went into the thick brush and started up the embankment. He turned his neck to see his hearse one lasttime. Gleaming there in the snow there was something surreal and eerily beautiful about it. With the blue fire arcing above it and the splintered cross of pine driven into the motor it looked like some halfmetallic nightmare beast that could only be slain by impalement, sinister, profoundly alien.
Tyler came down a long sloping grade too smooth to have been created by nature. The slopes were grown with the dark bulks of cypress and after a while by the dim glow of the snow he could see that it led to a declivity in the earth, an enormous lunarlike crater filling with snow and scattered about its epicenter the wrecks of abandoned machinery like prehistoric beasts flashfrozen by some bizarre reversal of the earth’s poles. The boom of an enormous longnecked crane rose bleakly into the invisible sky above him and its dangling steel cable seemed at some point to just appear out of nothingness, unknowable like some source of escape lowered to him and could he but climb it he wondered where he’d be, some bowered bedchamber where Rapunzel lay in wait or Jacl’s land where giants smelled blood and spoke in thunder.
He felt absolutely alone, and here in the snowy dark the barrier that keeps back cognizance of events past and future seemed to fade. What had been and harbingers of what was to be lay down like lovers and archaic machinery still belabored a weary earth already under sentence. A vindictive fate stalked him while still in the musky cribs and just beyond the spectrum of his sight an albino whore plied her craft and the very air was electric with old violence, pregnant with more yet to come. He went on through the dreamlike snow passingwithin four upright supports of some towering structure above him that he couldn’t see. He looked up but all there was past the drifting snow was an unshapen bulk black against the paler black of the heavens and he could hear a door clanging shut, metal on metal, then creaking in a wind he could hear but couldn’t feel and slamming to again. An iron ladder began six feet or so from the ground and ascended into the snowy dark and vanished. He stood looking at it as if in consideration. Clasped the bottom rung tentatively, then released it. The hell with that, he said. He pulled the collar of the coat tighter about his throat and went on, skirting a lakelike pool of water gathered in the pit of the crater with a thought for what life might thrive there and on up past an ancient bulldozer halfburied in a rockslide and all these artifacts of prior life. Ascending now and nearing the rim of the crater he began to feel the wind and to hear it in the trees. He looked to the four points of the compass hoping for some lightening of the horizon, but if horizons existed he found no evidence of it. All he could see was billowing white and inkslash boles of trees. He went on, and he seemed to carry with him a tight pocket of fierce wind and whirling snow like some hapless miscreant cursed by the weathers.
All I got to do is stay on a straight path, he thought. Bound to come off this son of a bitch sooner or later. If I don’t freeze first, he added.
He had a real fear of this. His feet already felt wooden and digitless as hooves, and since coming into the wind his ears and nose were stinging, and he felt about the purloined coat for something to wind about his face but there was nothing. So he pulled the woolen collar higher about his face. He thought of old man Bookbinder. The capable air of selfpossession there’d been about him. All he’d found of sanity in these made and hellish territories. He knew it lay southwest and he’d started that way in the light but now he just didn’t know. He wondered what time it was. Then he wondered why it mattered. How far to the edge of this place civilization hadn’t trickled down to yet and how far to daylight.
Sutter was descending into a hollow that seemed to go down forever and he couldn’t even see the bottom of it. When he stopped to rest a minute he was utterly weary. I’ll catch my breath and then I’ll go on and kill the little fucker, he promised himself. He knelt in the snow and rested his back against the smooth trunk of a beech and closed his eyes. He could feel snowflakes matting in his lashes and melting and running down his face like tears.
He must have slept for a dream came to him like an old friend whose face he recognized but could not put a name to.
He dreamed he was in Flint County, Alabama, and it was an early morning in June. He was young. The flesh of his arm was hard and corded with youth, and studying the arm by the warm light of the sun the fine hair there gleamed like thin wires of copper against his tanned flesh.
He was walking down a roadway so thickly accumulate with dust it rose like talcum with his footsteps and subsided into the vines that latticed the sides of the road, and he could smell the evocative scent of honeysuckle.
His father had sent him after the cow and he was driving it back up from the pasture. It walked ahead of him chewing ruminatively and its hide flexed spasmodically from time totime dislodging cowflies.
The road wound to his railfenced yard, and the old log house still sat at the mouth of the hollow, and faint smoke from the breakfast fire, but a woman he didn’t know was hanging out clothes in the backyard. Dark from the hollow bled into the twilight. He drove the cow around the corner of the house, and the woman turned to look at him. She had a clothespin in her mouth and a wing of hair had fallen across her forehead and she blew it out of her eyes. Sutter could not think of anything to say. He did not know the woman and he had no inkling of what she might be doing hanging out wash in his backyard.
What do you want? she asked him after a time.
I just brought the cow, he said. His voice was a rusty and disused croak. He seemed not to have spoken for years.
Well. She seemed confused. We don’t even have a cow, she said. Why’d you bring a cow.
It’s our cow, he said. I brought her to milk. Where they at?
Where’s who at?
Mama and Daddy.
I don’t know no mama and daddy. If you mean mine, they long dead.
No. No, mine. John and Lucy Dell Sutter. We live here.
Not for some time you ain’t. We live here. My man and me. And Lord yes, I’ve heard of John and Lucy Dell Sutter. But they’ve been dead a long time.
Years and years ago. Any kids they had would be old and feeble or likely dead theirselves.
This can’t be, Sutter said. Where is he, your man? Maybe he’d know.
He’ll be comin up the road there directly, but he won’t be able to make heads or tails out of such a tale as you’re tellineither.
He went back past the house. His reflection in the window glass sundappled light to dark and back again. It was full dusk now, nightbirds were already calling. He went down the road and it went into thick greenery that shimmered as if it had not achieved total reality, its edges vibrated and faded and reappeared.
After a while the woods began to descend and to darken and a hush fell over the birds and the quality of the light altered. A great sadness touched him. He saw that he was passing bucolic sideroads he had also passed in life that were closed to him now and he saw that had he taken any one of them all this would have been different.
He went on. After a while he could hear a man whistling and then the man himself appeared around a turn in the road, a thin gangling man all garbed in black with a scythe yoked across his shoulders. His face was shadowed by the shroud he affected but there was a dread familiarity about the way he walked Sutter couldn’t put a finger on, and he did not know whether the figure was ghost or antecedent or reflection of himself or harbinger of a doom yet to be.
You would have thought he would die. It would have been so easy. All he had to do was lie there and let the snow cover him and come spring some hunter come across his resting bones, but something in him would not have it so. Something that would not freeze and was contemptuous of the weathers stirred in him hotly and when he tried to open his eyes they were frozen shut. He’d dozed with a hand clamped to eacharmpit for the warmth and he melted the ice in his lashes with warm fingers and made to rise. Snow had fallen upon him and melted and refrozen in a delicate caul of ice and when he rose it splintered in myriad soundless clashes and he brushed it away and went on.