I stepped outside, let the cold air penetrate my scalp. I inhaled deep enough to bend me over. I stared at a movie poster until I settled my breathing. It was for tomorrow’s movie, North by Northwest, and it depicted Cary Grant running through a cornfield from an evil crop duster bent on snuffing him out.
Ahead, under the marquee, a few insider traders stood smoking. And standing with them, discussing the NASDAQ index, was Eggers.
I approached the boy, put a hand on his shoulder.
“What are you still doing here?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Eggers said. “I just thought… I kind of figured I might hang out with you for a while.”
I had some big issues going on. This was my personal/leisure time. The last thing I needed was some grad student glomming on to me. I let my eyes dart to a distant point in the prison, as if some important business were calling me there. I exhaled with impatience, but Eggers didn’t seem to get the hint.
“I’ve got things to do,” I told him. “I’ve got places to be.”
“Oh, sure, sure,” Eggers said. “I understand, completely.”
Yet he made no move to leave.
“Is there some special circumstance?” I asked. “I mean, is something wrong?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just — I don’t have a lodge anymore. I don’t have anyplace to go.”
I slid my hands into the overalls. “Normally, sure, I’d love to. But I’m in prison here. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
He gave his normal Eggers smile, as if to say this was the answer he’d been expecting.
“Sure,” Eggers said. “Sure.”
“Any other time,” I said. “Believe me.”
“No biggie,” Eggers said. “Forget I asked, okay? I never even asked.” He took a couple of steps backward into the snow. There was a hitch of pain in the way he turned. This was the second time in how many nights that we’d parted this way, and it was awful watching him walk away again. It was truly pathetic. The kid seriously needed a few sessions with the counselors over in the psych department.
I was no professional, but I called out to him: “Wait. I suppose there’s no harm in just walking together.”
Eggers stopped.
I gave a throwaway gesture. “I mean, there’d have to be a couple of ground rules.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“I’ve got some thinking to do,” I said. “I can’t very well do that with someone yakking in my ear.”
“Are you saying — no talking?”
I shrugged.
Eggers shoved his hands into his parka and looked around, as if he were debating it. He must have thought he’d look spineless to agree to such a condition, at least too quickly. Really, though, it was a pretty generous offer.
“I guess I can live with that,” Eggers said.
“Great, then,” I said. “Let’s start hanging out.”
“So — does it start now?” Eggers asked.
“What?”
“The no-talking thing.”
“You don’t have to say it like that,” I said. “It’s just, you know, there are special circumstances here.”
Eggers didn’t say anything.
“I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
Eggers was quiet.
Nothing, I could tell, would get him to talk now.
“Come on,” I said, and began walking uphill, toward the top of campus. Eggers fell in beside me, the hood of his poncho pulled close around his face, and together we strolled past the old engineering building, a structure whose ivy had died and peeled away, though the trellises had left a ghostly, darker imprint on the walls. When the breeze swept by, you expected the ivy to shimmer, but it was no longer there. Eggers walked with me, crunching through a runner of fresh powder just off the sidewalk. Ahead, the snow-burdened branches of Douglas firs hung low and oscillating in the wind. As we passed, they tried to grab our ankles with their blind, groping limbs.
We neared the old campus broadcasting tower, galvanized with ice, and then there was the gymnasium, the repertory theater, and, at the top of the hill, the dome of the 1923 hand-crank Rawlins telescope. Eggers insisted on walking in my blind spot, silently pacing off my periphery, as if riding some invisible bow wave. In the corner of my eye, I’d catch a glimpse of his plodding booties, or the steamy grunt of his breath whenever he stumbled over a buried tree root. I’d be walking along, and just when I forgot about Eggers, there’d be a flash of shaggy fur beside me, or the ruffle of his game bag as it bounced with his hip. Yulia was coming, and what I needed was a plan. How could I concentrate with a Clovis hounding me?
Yet it was as if he weren’t completely there, either. Whenever I looked over, Eggers’ face was lost in his dark hood. Whenever I said “Eggers,” Eggers made no response, as if he didn’t even speak my language. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that Keno was cresting a hill with me, retracing ancient steps above a long-ago hunting valley. I knew this was Eggers pacing me, and not Keno. I knew Eggers was just acting withdrawn, giving me the silent treatment out of spite. And I wasn’t even hoping for an answer when I stopped and asked him:
“Is she really going to come?”
Eggers stopped. Crossing his arms to ward off the cold, he faced me, though I couldn’t make out his eyes behind all that fur. The whole campus was bordered by a sleepy, upper-middle-class neighborhood, and across the street were rows of brick houses, bought by people who thought they’d spend their golden years adjacent to the culture and vitality of a university. Some of these homeowners might have included the donors whose names were sandblasted off the buildings. Somewhere, buried between the sidewalk and that street, separating me from those normal families, was a cable that would sound an alarm if I crossed it.
“What other unseen things dictate our lives?” I asked him.
Eggers offered no opinion.
A simple step, I thought. I was one step away from how other people lived.
I considered again these sleepy houses. Frozen garden hoses were coiled stiff around spigots. The raised red ears of mailboxes stood suspicious and alert. The smoke from dark chimneys lifted, billowy and content, then, just above the evergreens, just out of view, raced away east. Somehow it was easier to believe in the hidden alarm than in the possibility that those homes were filled with families who were whole and happy.
I asked, “Is there really a buried cable?”
All that mattered, I supposed, was that we believed there was.
Then Eggers lifted a hand. He turned, slowly and strangely, as if guided by an unseen hand, toward the dark prison buildings. He took one step in their direction, but stopped. He peeled back his hood and cocked an ear.
Out there was a scampering sound in the snow.
From the darkness, a rocking figure began to emerge, long and trailing. Then it came clear: racing toward us was a team of six Pomeranians, harnessed in tiny leather traces, bounding through the snow. Chests plowing the powder, their little heads loped above pumping torsos, while the patter of white breath rose in fits. I looked around for Gerry and his kids, but they were nowhere to be seen. The Pomeranian named McQueen was in the lead — I’d recognize the snitty cock of his ears anywhere — and as they passed us, heading in and out of the prison lights, I could see they were pulling an empty wooden sled the size of a breakfast tray. Gerry had said he was going to increase his sales sixfold, and now it was clear that he was selling dogs by the team, probably working a buy-six, get-a-sled-free angle.
I turned to Eggers. “Love,” I said. “Do you know it? Is it all they say it is?”
He regarded me. “I’m the protégé,” Eggers said. “I’m the one learning from you.”
The sound of the skids diminished, and the little sled slipped away, the dogs answering the call of an unseen driver who mushed them on with his ghostly voice.