He got up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. Time he went to bed, time he stopped hashing over these old, hurtful memories. He was not going to spend the rest of his life blaming himself for Vicky’s death. He had only been an accessory before the fact, after all. And the rest of his life might not be that long, either. The action on Irv Manders’s porch hadn’t been lost on Andy McGee. They had meant to waste him. It was only Charlie they wanted now.
He went to bed, and after a while he slept. His dreams were not easy ones. Over and over he saw that trench of fire running across the beaten dirt of the dooryard, saw it divide to make a fairy-ring around the chopping block, saw the chickens going up like living incendiaries. In the dream, he felt the heat capsule around him, building and building.
She said she wasn’t going to make fires anymore.
And maybe that was best.
Outside, the old October moon shone down on Tashmore Pond on Bradford, New Hampshire, across the water, and on the rest of New England. To the south, it shone down on Longmont, Virginia.
4
Sometimes Andy McGee had feelings-hunches of extraordinary vividness. Ever since the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall. He didn’t know if the hunches were a low-grade sort of precognition or not, but he had learned to trust them when he got them.
Around noon on that August day in 1980, he got a bad one.
It began during lunch in the Buckeye Room, the faculty lounge on the top floor of the Union building. He could even pinpoint the exact moment. He had been having creamed chicken on rice with Ev O'Brian, Bill Wallace, and Don Grabowski, all in the English Department. Good friends, all of them. And as usual, someone had brought along a Polish joke for Don, who collected them. It had been Ev’s joke, something about being able to tell a Polish ladder from a regular one because the Polish ladder had the word STOP lettered on the top rung. All of them were laughing when a small, very calm voice spoke up in Andy’s mind.
(something’s wrong at home)
That was all. That was enough. It began to build up almost the same way that his headaches built up when he overused the push and tipped himself over. Only this wasn’t a head thing; all his emotions seemed to be tangling themselves up, almost lazily, as if they were yarn and some bad-tempered cat had been let loose along the runs of his nervous system to play with them and snarl them up.
He stopped feeling good. The creamed chicken lost whatever marginal appeal it had had to begin with. His stomach began to flutter, and his heart was beating rapidly, as if he had just had a bad scare. And then the fingers of his right hand began abruptly to throb, as if he had got them jammed in a door.
Abruptly he stood up. Cold sweat was breaking on his forehead.
“Look, I don’t feel so good,” he said. “Can you take my one o'clock, Bill?”
“Those aspiring poets? Sure. No problem. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Something I ate, maybe.”
“You look sort of pale,” Don Grabowski said. “You ought to cruise over to the infirmary, Andy.”
“I may do that,” Andy said.
He left, but with no intention whatever of going to the infirmary. It was quarter past twelve, the late summer campus drowsing through the last week of the final summer session. He raised a hand to Ev,
Bill, and Don as he hurried out. He had not seen any of them since that day.
He stopped on the Union’s lower level, let himself into a telephone booth, and called home. There was no answer. No real reason why there should have been; with Charlie at the Dugans, Vicky could have been out shopping, having her hair done, she could have been over at Tammy Upmore’s house or even having lunch with Eileen Bacon. Nevertheless, his nerves cranked up another notch. They were nearly screaming now.
He left the Union building and half walked, half ran to the station wagon, which was in the Prince Hall parking lot. He drove across town to Lakeland. His driving was jerky and poor. He jumped lights, tailgated, and came close to knocking a hippie of his ten-speed Olympia. The hippie gave him the finger. Andy barely noticed. His heart was trip hammering now. He felt as if he had taken a hit of speed.
They lived on Conifer Place-in Lakeland, as in so many suburban developments built in the fifties, most of the streets seemed named for trees or shrubs. In the midday August heat, the street seemed queerly deserted. It only added to his feeling that something bad had happened. The street looked wider with so few cars parked along the curbs. Even the few kids playing here and there could not dispel that strange feeling of desertion; most of them were eating lunch or over at the playground. Mrs. Flynn from Laurel Lane walked past with a bag of groceries in a wheeled caddy, her paunch as round and tight as a soccer ball under her avocado-colored stretch pants. All up and down the street, lawn sprinklers twirled lazily, fanning water onto the grass and rainbows into the air.
Andy drove the offside wheels of the wagon up over the curb and then slammed on the brakes hard enough to lock his seatbelt momentarily and to make the wagon’s nose dip toward the pavement. He turned off the engine with the gearshift still in Drive, something he never did, and went up the cracked cement walk that he kept meaning to patch and somehow never seemed to get around to. His heels clacked meaninglessly. He noticed that the venetian blind over the big living-room picture window (mural window, the realtor who had sold them the house called it, here ya gotcha basic mural window) was drawn, giving the house a closed, secretive aspect he didn’t like. Did she usually pull the blind? To keep as much of the summer heat out as possible, maybe? He didn’t know. He realised there were a great many things he didn’t know about her life when he was away.
He reached for the doorknob, but it didn’t turn; it only slipped through his fingers. Did she lock the door when he was gone? He didn’t believe it. That wasn’t Vicky. His worry-no, it was terror now increased. And yet there was one moment (which he would never admit to himself later), one small moment when he felt nothing but an urge to turn away from that locked door. Just hightail it. Never mind Vicky, or Charlie, or the weak justifications that would come later.
Just run.
Instead, he groped in his pocket for his keys.
In his nervousness he dropped them and had to bend to pick them up-car keys, the key to the east wing of Prince Hall, the blackish key that unlocked the chain he put across Granther’s road at the end of each summer visit. Keys had a funny way of accumulating.
He plucked his housekey from the bunch and unlocked the door. He went in and shut it behind him. The light in the living room was a low, sick yellow. It was hot. And still. Oh God it was so still.
“Vicky?”
No answer. And all that no answer meant was that she wasn’t here. She had put on her boogie shoes, as she liked to say, and had gone marketing or visiting. Except that she wasn’t doing either of those things. He felt sure of it. And his hand, his right hand… why were the fingers throbbing so?
“Vicky!”
He went into the kitchen. There was a small Formica table out there with three chairs. He and Vicky and Charlie usually ate their breakfast in the kitchen. One of the chairs now lay on its side like a dead dog. The salt shaker had overturned and salt was spilled across the table’s surface. Without thinking about what he was doing, Andy pinched some of it between the thumb and first finger of his left hand and tossed it back over his shoulder, muttering under his breath, as both his father and his Granther had done before him, “Salt salt malt malt bad luck stay away.”
There was a pot of soup on the Hotpoint. It was cold. The empty soup can stood on the counter. Lunch for one. But where was she? “Vicky!” he hollered down the stairs. Dark down there. The laundry room and the family room, which ran the length of the house. No answer.