Miller reached home about five, staggered into the shower. He was nearly blind with fatigue, eaten up with a vague sense of betrayal, though of whom or what (prudence?) he couldn’t remember, and drunk as a skunk to boot. “Let us all learn,” he said aloud in the shower, raising Montaigne from the dead, “from stupidity.” His next station was the bed, but, fallen there, he found that the room leaned and turned, and remorse troubled his imaginings. He decided he must be hungry, went to the kitchen to check the refrigerator. Not much there. Punched open a can of beer. Hair of the dog. Cockroach skittered out from under the refrigerator. He jumped to stamp on it and spilled the beer, got squashed cockroach all over the sole of his foot. “Do not despair,” he said drunkenly to the roach as he scraped it off on the edge of a cardboard box used as a wastebasket, “for our Lord Jesus has changed the shape of death.” He thought about maybe frying some bacon for a sandwich, but the fryingpan reeked of onions he’d burned in it several nights ago. So he had a peanut butter sandwich. Again. On stale goddamn bread. Took it to bed with him. He sank, forgetting everything, awoke moments later with a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich and an earful of telephone alarm. Nauseous, he crawled across the bed, dragged it off the hook. “The number you have just dialed has been disconnected—”
“You’re home.” It was Lou Jones. Something in the tone said that Jones had been calling for some time.
“West or east, home’s a beast.” Miller hung up, took a bite of sandwich. The phone rang again. He tried to figure out what the bastard’s angle might be. He picked it up: “Jones—”
“They’ve found some maybe live ones.”
“What!” Miller stirred, propped himself on an elbow. “Have they got them up?”
“Not yet, but they know where they are. Found a T-shirt tacked up with six names on it and arrows drawn.”
“What’s the matter they can’t—”
“Big fall in the way. They figure it must have come down after they bratticed themselves off.”
“Do they know who—”
“Well, besides Lee Cravens,” Jones said wryly, hesitating a moment to allow the blade to twist, “there’s Ely Collins, Mario Juliano, Paul Minicucci, Guido Pontormo, and Michael Strelchuk.”
Miller slumped back into the pillows. Oh man. “I’ll be out.”
4
The veterinarian Dr. Wylie Norton sat in the kitchen in his pajamas, sipping coffee and milk and waiting for Sunday to dawn. Upstairs, his wife Eleanor slept fitfully. Perhaps none in all West Condon had escaped suffering this raw January weekend, but this was little consolation to Wylie, who had hardly slept and saw worse times ahead. Others, after all, would sooner or later adjust, but not Eleanor. Therein lay her greatness, to be sure, yet … Wylie sighed and sipped. He hoped only that, whatever happened, they would not have to move again. They had had to change towns eight times now in the past fifteen years, and the frequency seemed to be accelerating. They had left Carlyle to come here to West Condon just a year ago, and they had only been in Carlyle fourteen months before that. Just long enough for him to get a small practice established, begin paying off debts, then — knock! knock! — the inevitable committee.
He had just dozed off in front of the television when they came to their door in Carlyle one year ago, and for a woozy moment he hadn’t even been able to remember, staring at the men under his porch light, what town he was in. There had been four of them, their pale mordant faces puddled blackly under the dull bulb. He had invited them in, but they had hesitated, frowned at one another. Eleanor had stepped up behind him, and knowing all too well why they were there, had asked, “What is it, Wylie?”
“These gentlemen …”
“What we got to say won’t take no time, Norton,” one of the men had said. A big man, over six feet tall, with a heavy stomach underbelted, wearing a sport coat with wide lapels, green checked shirt buttoned at the collar, and peering baggily down at them: Mr. Wild, young Larry’s father. A man much like this one had once blackened Wylie’s eye in another town, claiming a similar offense.
“In plain talk, we want you two to get out of Carlyle,” another had piped up, a man named Loomis who owned three beagles that he whipped with gun butts, or so Wylie who had had to treat them after had been convinced. Though much shorter, he had stood behind Mr. Wild, and all you could see were his little red wet eyes and thin blond eyebrows over the big man’s padded shoulder.
“I don’t rightly understand, fellows,” Wylie had said, drawling a little like he had learned to do, showing that he was just a quiet peaceful man … and he was. “We’ve always tried to be—”
“Norton,” Mr. Wild had said bluntly, “you know why.”
Wylie had turned to face his wife, becoming, as it were, their intercessor. “Eleanor …” She had stood pale but erect. The others perhaps had seen only the defiance. Wylie had seen the pain, the fortitude draining away, the higher she lifted her chin.
“But who are you gentlemen?” she had asked. “What is your authority?” A mere delaying tactic. They always had a way, ultimately. She had placed one hand on Wylie’s shoulder, and he had stood firm to support her.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Norton,” a third man had said, a man whom Wylie had recognized as the owner of one of the town drugstores, tall fellow with rimless glasses, a “mercurial” type, as Eleanor would say, oval and merchantlike in the face. “We are not a what you call, ah, legal body, Mrs. Norton, as I am sure you can appreciate.” He had chuckled abruptly, continuing soberly: “We are only you might say interested citizens of this — interested citizens and parents of this community. We have, well, we have been requested by our, ah, our good neighbors to speak briefly if you don’t mind for a few moments with you. Mrs. Norton, frankly, we — that is, all of us, have been frankly asking — have repeatedly asked you to terminate your, ah, your activities as regards all the — as regards the youth of Carlyle, and you have nevertheless persisted. Now, in view of—”
“We’re asking you two to get out of town!” Mr. Loomis had snapped.
“Now, now, take it easy, Loomis,” the druggist had scolded. “Dr. and Mrs. Norton are, that is, they are reasonable people. I am sure that we can be too.”
The short man had grunted, glaring schoolboyishly at the druggist. Mr. Wild had peered down on them all and had said, “I think they get the picture.”
The druggist, while apparently engaged in observing a lone unseasonal gnat knocking at the bulb overhead, had then coughed and dropped the phrase “certain, ah, medical procedures, which might be taken,” and Wylie, turning to Eleanor briefly, had seen that her fight was over. “All right, gentlemen,” he had said, looking at each of them in turn, though only Mr. Wild had returned his gaze. “We liked Carlyle. But we’ll go.”
And so they’d disposed of everything again, everything but what they could pack into the small luggage trailer he had wisely picked up at a country auction about five years before, and had driven out of Carlyle. Young Larry Wild, one of Eleanor’s pupils, had dropped by before they left, the only one in town to do so, admitting that he’d had to sneak away from home, his father having promised him a stiff belting if he turned up at the Nortons’. But he didn’t care, he’d said, he’d wanted to tell them how unfair it was and how he’d always believe in her and in Domiron and in all she had taught him, and that he’d practice all the exercises faithfully. He had showed them then, shyly, a word his hand had written the night before. It was SADNESS, but he’d said he didn’t really know for sure if it came from some other aspect of intensity or not. He had admitted that he felt like he had thought the word before writing it. Eleanor had encouraged the boy to continue to try, but to obey his parents whenever possible and to love the Good. She’d counseled him not to worry too much about his message, sometimes the spirits from other aspects of intensity did act through thoughts instead of, or prior to, writing, and Wylie had admitted he’d not even gotten that far. “Let thoughts pass through your mind,” Eleanor had said to the boy, quoting one of her own favorite messages, one Wylie had heard countless times, “like fluffs of dandelion afloat on an errant breeze, like migrating birds, like purposeless foam appearing and disappearing, but let your mind dwell on none of them. The surface must be barren, the page white, the water placid, the room of the mind empty.” Larry had helped with the last part of the loading, had walked them out to the car to say good-bye. He’d said it didn’t matter if people did see him, they would all find out someday anyway, wouldn’t they?