Sunday night I came miserably awake near two o’clock, smelled the air like a forest animal, and got downstairs in time to turn off the gas cocks, on the stove. The recurrence seemed to prove that the cause was a simple mechanical failure, if one that could have had fatal results. What had awakened me, and therefore saved me, was the ringing of the telephone. I had once told Alison that if I got one of “those” calls at night, I would not answer it. But after twisting the handles on the stove and shoving open a window to admit the cool meadow air, I was in the perfect mood for handling Onion Breath. “Stinking skulking creeping weasel,” I pronounced into the phone, “crawling cowardly weak crippled ugly snake.” Incapable of syntax but with a good stock of adjectives, I went on until he (she) hung up. I could not then return to bed and that dominating nightmare. The kitchen was very cold; I waved newspapers to dispel the gas, and closed the window. After wrapping a blanket from the downstairs bedroom around my shoulders, I returned, to the kitchen, lit a kerosene lamp and a cigarette, and combined some further elements of the Alison-environment, gin, vermouth, twist of lemon peel, ice. Her drink, with which I had been dosing myself nightly. Wrapped in the blanket, I sipped the martini and sat in one of the kitchen chairs near the telephone. I wanted another call.
Half an hour later, when the person might have judged me to have returned to sleep (I thought), the telephone rang again. I let it trill three, then four times, then twice more, hearing the noise of the bell spread through the cold farmhouse. Finally I raised my arm and detached the receiver and rose to speak into the horn. But instead of breathing I heard what I had heard once before, a whuffling, beating noise, inhuman, like wings thrashing in the air, and the receiver was as cold as the sweating glass of my martini and I was unable to utter a word, my tongue would not move. I dropped the icy receiver and wrapped the blanket tightly around myself and went upstairs to lie on the bed. The next night, as I have said, following the day which was the first turning point, I entered the same drifting guilt-ridden dream, but I had no anonymous calls, from either living or dead.
On the day — Monday — which marked my slide into knowledge and was the interregnum between these two awful nights, I came down from my work for lunch and asked a stony-faced Tuta Sunderson how to turn off the gas before it reached the stove. She became even more disapproving, and gruntingly bent over the range and pointed an obese finger down at the pipe descending from the wall. “It’s on this pipe. What for?”
“So I can turn it off at night.”
“Ain’t fooling me,” she muttered, or I thought she did, while she turned away to jam her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. More audibly, she said, “Made a big stir in church yesterday.”
“I wasn’t there to notice. I trust things went well without me.” I bit into a hamburger and discovered that I had no appetite. My relationship with Tuta Sunderson had degenerated into a parody of my marriage.
“You afraid of what the pastor was saying?”
“As I recall he made a very sweet comment about my suit,” I said.
As she began to lump herself toward the door, I said, “Wait. What do you know about a boy named Zack? He lives somewhere in Arden, I think. Tall and skinny, with an Elvis Presley hairdo. Alison’s boyfriend. He calls her ‘Ally.’ “
“I don’t know that boy. If you’re going to waste good food, get out of the kitchen so I can do my work.”
“Good God,” I said, and left the table to stand on the porch. That cold breath of spirit which could only be felt on these twenty square yards was strongly present, and I knew with a certainty for once filled not with joy but resignation that Alison would appear on the date she had set twenty years before. Her release would be mine, I told myself. Only later did I recognize that when Tuta Sunderson said that she did not know that boy, she meant not that the boy was a stranger to her, but that she knew him well and detested him.
Yet if my release were to be total there were things I needed to know, and a series of bangs and clatters from the long aluminum rectangle of the pole barn suggested an opportunity for learning them. I left Tuta Sunderson’s complaining voice behind me and stepped off the porch and began to walk through the sunshine toward the path.
The noises increased as I drew nearer, and eventually the sound of Duane grunting with effort joined them. I threaded through the litter of rusting parts and junked equipment at the pole barn’s front end and walked onto the packed powdery brown dust which is the barn’s only floor. Under the high tented metal roof, Duane was working in semi-dark, slamming a wrench on the base of a tractor’s gearshift. His peaked cap had been thrown off earlier, and lay in the dust near his boots.
“Duane,” I said.
He could not hear. The deafness may have been as much internal as caused by the terrific banging clatter he was making, for his face was set into that frustrated angry mask common to men who are singlemindedly, impatiently, making a botch of a job.
I said it again, and his head twisted toward me. As I stepped toward him, he turned his face away silently and went back to banging on the base of the gearshift.
“Duane, I have to talk with you.”
“Get out of here. Just get the hell out.” He still would not look at me. The hammering with the wrench became more frenzied.
I continued to come toward him. His arm was a blur, and the noise echoed against the metal walls. “God damn,” he breathed after I had taken a half-dozen steps, “I got the son of a bitch off.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The goddamned gearbox, if you really wanna know,” he said, scowling at me. His tan shirt was stained irregularly with perspiration and a black smear of grease bisected his forehead at the white line where his cap stuck. “It’s jammed in first, and on these old Ms you gotta go in from the top here and slide a couple of plates around to get the slots lined up, see, but what the hell am I talking about this with you for anyhow? You wouldn’t know a gearbox if you saw it outside of Shakespeare.”
“Probably not.”
“Anyhow, on this one here, I have to take off the whole shift mechanism because everything’s rusted shut, but in order to do that, you have to get the nuts off first, see?”
“I think so.”
“And then I’ll probably find out the battery’s dead anyhow, and my jumper cables got burned to shit the last time I used them on the pickup and the plastic melted all over the terminals, so it probably won’t work anyhow.”
“But at least you got the nuts off.”
“Yeah. So why don’t you go break up some more furniture or something and leave me work?” He jumped up on the side of the tractor and began to twiddle the burring on the wrench down to the size of the nut.
“I have to talk with you about some things.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about. After that act of yours in church, nobody around here has anything to talk with you about.” He glared down at me. “At least not for the present.”
I stood and watched as he removed the troublesome nut, dropped it on a greasy sheet of newspaper by the tractor’s rear wheels, and, grunting on the seat, lifted the shift levers and an attached plate up out of the body of the machine. Then he bent down and knelt before the seat. “Shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s all grease in there, and I can’t see the slots, that’s what’s wrong.” His pudgy face revolved toward me again. “And after I fix this damn thing, the same thing will happen next week, and I’ll have to do it all over again.” He began to scrape oily sludge out with the point of a long screwdriver. “Shouldn’t even be grease like that in here.” He impatiently took a rag from the hip pocket of his coveralls and began to work it around in the hole he had opened up.