"So? You've kicked around,” he retorted. “Never anything long. Right?"
"I worked as a lineman for a whole year,” she said. “In Idaho. I'll never forget the procedures. I could recite them now."
"You mean a telephone person? Shimmying up those poles?"
"Well, a cherry picker, actually, mostly. But yes. The hard hat. The tool belt. You know."
"So did that alter your social life? Being a hard hat?"
"Well. You know there's men—I don't think a big number—that have a thing about a woman in a tool belt. Don't ask me why."
"Really."
"When I say, ‘Don't ask me why,’ that doesn't mean I've got no idea."
"Aha. Yes.” He could see her, in fact, and didn't need an explanation: her narrow wide-set hips in creased jeans, brown arms, wristwatch, the heavy belt.
When it was too dark and too cold to sit at the table, they rose together, and almost as though they'd had a date to do so, they went (in the little chartreuse Bobcat she was driving that day) to the Sandbox, a cousin establishment to the Morpheus Arms, where she chose a dark corner far from the bar and the pool table. A hangout for the guys from the dealership just down the road, it appeared, and maybe others she might not want to run into, but still the place she chose to be; where Pierce (this was what he remembered on entering the dim sweet-sour-smelling place) had heard or seen Rose Ryder speak in tongues as a country western band played and brayed. Or he'd thought she had. It seemed certain to him now that she had not, which made less difference than he felt it ought to.
"I fell in with bad magicians,” he told Roo, when she wanted to know the story.
"Oh really."
"They claimed to have power over death. That if you believed in them you wouldn't die. You might look dead and rot in the grave but somehow you'd get up again alive and well when the time came."
"In Heaven."
"No. Not somewhere else. Here. Right here. In the Faraways, say; only the Faraways made better just for you. And then never die again."
"Sounds good."
"It was terrifying."
She studied him. “Are you afraid of death?"
"I don't know that I am. I mean it doesn't frighten me to think about it. Or name it anyway."
"But these people frightened you by talking about it."
"Yes.” He felt the dread or danger again; it was a beast that accompanied him, rousing now and then at a soul-noise it heard. And as it roused he knew also and certainly what he had not known before this iteration—that he would not ever understand the reasons for it, his dread, not if he lived to a hundred, and that in this unknowing lay the way he would at last be done with it: he would forget it, as the worst dream is forgotten, the awful force of its logic in dreamland finally canceled by its illogic in this land. Only the story of it left. “And you?” he said. “Are you?"
"I'm sort of afraid. More like tense, sometimes. It seems like it'll be a kind of test—you know, a big final. Everything points to it. You want to get it right."
"How would you do that?"
"Probably not a lot you can do then. At that moment. Especially if you like get hit by a truck. It would be the things you'd done all along."
"Like a final grade."
"But one you give yourself. I mean nobody's taking attendance. I don't think."
"And then?” Pierce asked.
"Then?"
"Afterward."
She turned her bottle's end against the napkin on which it rested, which caused the paper to fold neatly around the bottle in a rose shape: it was a habit he himself had. “Here's what I think. Well, think's too much to say. I feel like if there is some part of you—of me—that goes on after, then it has to somehow in life get up enough velocity to get off, right then. At that moment. To get away."
"Escape velocity,” Pierce said.
"And you get that by what you do in life. You build it up.” She drank. “That's all."
* * * *
Later she brought him back to the motel and stayed at the wheel, motor running, while he got out, which seemed to be a clear enough signal, but just as he gestured goodbye—So hey, okay—she offered to borrow a truck to carry away from the house in Littleville his belongings. Next day or whenever. He accepted. The larger furniture he thought could take its chances with the Winterhalters for a while; he wanted only to take away the life he had led, in case they grew vindictive, held it all hostage, put new locks on the doors, forbade it to him. When she called on the appointed day to get directions, he asked her please not to actually come into the house if that was okay; he made sure to drive over first, and when the little panel truck appeared, rolling like a bear down the rutted driveway, he had already put into boxes and bags all the books, the papers, the clothes and household goods, unavailing regrets, mysteries, bonds, tools, greatcoats, galoshes, grammarye, medicines, shames, hooks and eyes. It had all shrunk or shriveled into a list of nouns, inanimate, abstract, but he was still knee-deep in it. So much, so much.
"I asked you to just wait."
She stood leaning in the jamb looking in. “Smells in here,” she said.
"I'll be ready in a second. I'll just toss this last stuff in. You don't need to help or."
She had picked an old Polaroid camera out of a box, chuckled over it. “Man,” she said, but he didn't respond. It went back in its box, with other less patent things, a fancy carved black picture frame, empty, an open bottle of green liqueur. Who keeps such stuff—?
"What in holy hell is that?” she said mildly, ready to be amused by the collapsing scenery of his past, as squalid and as interesting as anybody's, and at Pierce's discomfiture amid it.
"It's a mask."
"It's a horsie. No, a donkey."
"Yes."
"You're leaving it?"
"Not only that."
"It looks like some kid made it."
"Yes."
"Is that the book?” She meant the masses of paper he was stuffing in a padded bag, one in which Winnie in Florida had mailed him a birthday sweater. “So called?"
"Some of it."
When it was all out, he shut the little house's door, and then went back to shut it again when it opened behind him, tempting him to re-enter. The deathless daffodils were now almost out in the yard, braving the cold. On the crest of the pale lawns, up on the big house's verandah above, there appeared the two Winterhalters, the erect and the stooped, one's hand lifted as though to say Hello, or Halt.
They trucked the cartons and bags and an ancient duffel and the lamps and rattling boxes of kitchenware down to a warehouse at the end of a muddy lane in Stonykill, put it all behind a wooden door like a stable's and padlocked it. Later Pierce lost the ticket and forgot the name of this place, and later still, the storage bills not reaching him at his changing addresses, the stuff was all thrown out and ended up in a landfill beneath tons of other similar but different things for future archaeologists to find. Now and then in aftertimes Pierce would suddenly remember some item, book or charm or trinket, that he had once owned, but by then the world (his) was accumulating new things, not only material things, at such a rate that he could hardly remember them from morning to evening, much less the artifacts of a past age that no longer had a substantial claim on actuality at all.
* * * *
It was a cold, retarded spring in the county, bitter and dispiriting rain in April and a thick snow in the first week of May that fell on the unfolding, near-full-grown leaves and the tulips and lilacs, breaking many limbs with its sodden embarrassed weight. We all felt chastened and hurt, as though it were our fault, or as though we were the object of it. Then it melted and the damage done was covered in green again, and everyone felt less in the wrong: that's what Roo said.